Catherine H. Zuckert: Natural Right and the American Imagination. Savage, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990.

 

The title Natural Right and the American Imagination recalls Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. It is risky to invite comparison to a formidable book. In this instance, the risk was worth taking. Although there might be a numbskull or two led to imagine that Professor Zuckert is attempting to rival Strauss—the vainest personalities unfailingly impute vanity to others—she is right to draw attention to Strauss’s book and to invite, not a comparison, but a parallel consideration of her book and his.

By writing of natural right and history, Strauss intends to question the conventional opinion of our time: that we have a ‘time,’ that all of life, including human life and thought, is ‘historical’—that is, relative to whatever ‘epoch’ it occurs in. Strauss not only refers his readers to the older teaching of natural right transcending times and places. He further tells readers that if they want truly to ‘think historically,’ to be faithful to the historical record, they must read the books of the past without presuming to pigeonhole them into readymade categories: the glory that was Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the Dark Ages, the rosy dawn of Enlightenment, and so on. A genuine historian wants to know what the author of any book was trying to do. The only way to discover that is to put first things first, to pay attention to the details of the arrangement of the words in front of your nose. There is no ‘method,’ no royal road of reading, only a patient familiarizing with the boulevards and back alleys of the city in which you’ve chosen to take up intellectual residence, for a time.

This seemingly modest argument brought down on Strauss a farrago of fear and loathing, when it did not simply cause him to be ignored or dismissed as a crank. Strauss paid much attention to the dangers of the philosophic life precisely because he anticipated and then experienced them—if, in his later years, only in those mild forms seen in commercial republics.

By contrast, Professor Zuckert’s book has won considerable praise. She reads very much the way Strauss read, directing her intellectual energies to the books at hand. Yet there are no reviewer-denunciations of her, no charges that she is some sort of Professor Moriarity of philosophic crime. The book has earned wide respect.

The solution to this mystery may be found in reflecting not upon the way Professor Zuckert reads, but upon the way she writes. In her preface she asserts that the American novelists she will examine concurred in seeing the “need for a peculiarly democratic kind of literary political thinker” (ix). Professor Zuckert appears to be a peculiarly democratic, peculiarly American kind of literary-political critic; she appears so by writing as if she is one. Strauss does not write that way. No American democrat, he does not mention America, or the imagination, in any book-title of his. Strauss is ineluctably foreign. Zuckert comes across as one of us.

Americans recur perhaps too quickly to fundamentals, having the example of the Declaration of Independence always before them. A “recurrent theme” of the American novel, Zuckert writes, is “the hero who withdraws from civil society to live in nature” (1). As did the American Founders, these re-founders “almost immediately establish new kinds of social relations” on “the grounds on which a just community might be founded” (1). Because recurrence to the foundations of America in some sense constitutes thoughtful Americans, “one can become an American” (6, emphasis added): learn a civic catechism, convert. And a citizen can become a statesman in his own right, conceive an architectonic project, even if the intent is fidelity not rebellion. In “trying to reshape” American ways, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner engaged in a “form of political leadership” (7). Zuckert chooses the word “leadership,” not statesmanship–a measure of her rhetorical skill. Her audience consists of feminist and historicist literary academics. ‘Statesmanship’ says ‘male,’ stasis, permanent things. “Leadership” says ‘progressive,’ ‘historical,’ with equal opportunity for all.

The details of Zuckert’s argument may best be understood by following her example and studying her book alongside not only Strauss but also the books she discusses. (For an excellent summary, see Diana Schaub’s review in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume XIX, Number 1, 105-110.) Consider, for the moment, a simple list. Zuckert begins her overview of these novelists with a Rousseauan (Cooper), followed by an anti-Rousseauan careful not to fall back into Calvinism (Hawthorne), a democratic tragedian who stands closer to Shakespeare than to any philosopher (Melville), a satirist who writes like a  Benjamin Franklin reared in the South (Twain), an American ‘Heideggerian’ (Hemingway), and a Bergsonian historicist (Faulkner). That is, Zuckert begins with a novelist influenced by a proto-historicist and ends with two historicists, one a scourge of tradition and the second a tender of it. At least three of her novelists reject the founding principles of the American republic. Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain are, each in his own way, more nearly compatible with ‘American’ principles than are Cooper, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Zuckert thus forces her thoughtful reader to consider political principles that cannot be ‘synthesized’ or made into a unified ‘tradition.’ Natural right and history, indeed.

In her ninth and final chapter, Zuckert argues as follows: The founders instituted a government in order to secure the unalienable, God-endowed “natural rights” of the American people (242). Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness number among these rights, which are self-evident. However, the worth of human life itself, and therefore the worth of the right to it, are not self-evident, even if our possession of that right is. “[T]he things that make human life worthwhile are not externally visible” (242). “If the goodness of human life is not externally visible, American political institutions ultimately must be founded in an appreciation of the inner beauty of an ordinary person” (242)—that is, one who has been “created equal” with respect to his unalienable rights, as the Declaration styles it, but may be lacking in any obvious beauties. However, the beauty of such a one “cannot be described historically or analyzed theoretically”; “it can only be revealed through the work of a literary artist” (242). “Because such revelations are explicitly fictional, their political and philosophical import has generally been ignored. Should contemporary readers become more aware of the ontological and epistemological limitations not merely of ‘science’ but of discursive reason more generally, however, they might—as Martin Heidegger has argued—come to see the way in which poetic ‘fiction’ not only can but also does shape communal human existence.” (242)  Accordingly, some of the American novelists have had recourse to European philosophers in attempting to correct alleged flaws in the American regime.

Zuckert takes this last fact as an invitation not to literary criticism or even literary theory, but as an invitation to political philosophy. That this is not an obvious, or shall we say self-evident, step may be seen in the fact that so many scholars who devote themselves to the study of American novelists do not take it. Yet many of these same scholars admire Zuckert’s book.

How can this be?

Contemporary American literary academics might best be characterized as Heideggerians of egalitarianism. Gone are the traces of Nietzsche’s steep, rigorous order of rank. Retained are the historicizing and the poeticizing, the radical critique of reason and (it must be said) the severely intolerant politicizing. By the grace of egalitarianism or unself-conscious democratism, this is a politicizing from the ‘Left.’

Zuckert charms this nest of vipers. To make goodness desirable one must reveal it as beautiful, because beauty isn’t skin-deep. To discover beauty in human goodness may require a making-visible, a poesis, as both Plato and Aristotle teach. But Zuckert does not point to them. She points to Heidegger, whose notions of poeticizing differ radically from those of Plato and Aristotle. Between those philosophers and Heidegger arises the popularization of the concept of creation. This is a concept the Declaration declares, but the Founders declare nothing about human creation, only divine creation.

The worth of human life—its inner truth and greatness, to appropriate a fine phrase infamously used by Heidegger—is not ocularly self-evident, externally visible. This leaves open the possibility that it may be self-evident noetically, to the mind’s eye. Poetry as understood and ‘corrected’ by Plato and Aristotle depends upon some such perception. Poesis depends upon noesis. This is why it is so intelligent to make the central chapter of a book on American novelists the chapter on the Shakespearean, Melville.

These facts, presented to a candid world, will guide Zuckert’s thoughtful readers toward political philosophy and toward a more serious understanding of literature. Just as Strauss shows that a genuine historical understanding will find certain thinkers to have transcended ‘history’ as conceived as a pattern of events or a ‘time,’ so Zuckert shows that an understanding of natural right as a philosophically discoverable idea is required to reach a genuine literary understanding of certain novelists. The genuine literary understanding will see the novelists as they saw themselves, entailing, among other things, a clear understanding of their poesis. To understand the American imagination (and its popular cousin, the American dream), you need to understand natural right. Without naming names, Zuckert gently but firmly guides her readers toward the most ‘poetic’ of the political philosophers—Plato, Aristotle (in the Poetics), Lucretius, Boethius, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Nietzsche—and the most philosophic of poets—Dante, Shakespeare—all the while sounding as if she might be a neo-Heideggerian, ‘one of us’ literary-critical types. She is of course well aware that noesis or intellectual intuition sets a strict limit on historicism, preventing it from becoming radical or Heideggerian. At the same time, she agrees with Heidegger that analytical and discursive reasoning are inadequate for the task of perceiving or understanding either the beautiful or the good. Hence the value of appreciating poesis, even if it is quite dangerous to appreciate it too much. She knows that in order to understand natural right, you don’t need to understand, or even to have heard of, the American imagination. Still, to arrive at such an understanding of natural right, the American imagination is an excellent place to start.

Zuckert also knows that a large portion of the audience she addresses is none too candid, none too thoughtful. She will not arouse those who slumber dogmatically, those who elevate their narcolepsy to the level of ‘principle’ and from that dubious vantage point proclaim themselves self-conscious. She may awaken others from their dogmatic slumber, those others who dreamily see that there is no reconciling all her novelists, or all the philosophers she invites her readers to read. Let those alert to the principle of non-contradiction follow its lead to new perceptions.

Guenter Lewy: Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1988.

 

This book should have been written by a pacifist. That it was not, that many pacifists will indignantly say American or its ‘military-industrial complex’ suffers the real “moral crisis,” confirms Guenter Lewy’s thesis: The major American pacifist organizations have become politicized. That is, they tend to put justice, (mis)conceived as egalitarianism, ahead of nonviolence and reconciliation. In their own way, key pacifist organizers now agree with political conservatives who insist that justice must precede genuine peace—although of course the two sides define ‘justice’ quite differently. Today’s pacifists not only define justice as partisan socialists do (and indeed may earlier pacifists were socialists) but they go on to define the conditions of justice as Marxist socialists do, accepting revolutionary war as the inevitable precursor of social justice, itself said to be the necessary precursor of peace.

Lewy examines the four major pacifist organizations in the United States: the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Friends Service Committee, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and the War Resisters League—all founded during or in the aftermath of the First World War. In the 1930s, at the very height of the Popular Front coalition of the ‘Left’ against fascism, these organizations rejected collaboration with communists; as Dorothy Detzer of WILPF said in 1937, communists lacked a “basis of moral integrity,” making honest partnership impossible. Pacifists had learned this not by theorizing but by experience. communists wanted to use pacifists for decidedly un-pacific ends. Some fifteen years before Senator Joseph McCarthy undertook to instruct Americans on the evils of communism, and only ten years before the Democratic Party split over the issue, pacifists well understood the Machiavellian arts of the Communist Party, and conscientiously resisted them.

But by the 1960s pacifist sentiments on collaboration began to change. Although Soviet power had increased in the previous three decades, and Soviet tactics in international politics remained unchanged, Stalin himself was gone. A new generation of pacifist organizers associated anti-communism less with a principled response to the nature of communism itself and more with America’s ‘McCarthyite’ reaction to it, a reaction portrayed as part paranoiac, part unscrupulous. United States participation in the Vietnam War stirred fear and anger sufficient to distort perceptions of the American regime itself. Increasingly, the American ‘Left,’ including pacifists, believed America to be the focus of evil in the modern world.

None of these factors logically need entail the abandonment of nonviolence. Judging from Lewy’s evidence, however, pacifists began to endorse a distorted Gandhianism. Gandhi had taught that the moral superiority of courage, even the battlefield courage that kills, to cowardly submission. American pacifists injected a dose of moral relativism and subjectivism to this, claiming that Vietnamese communists and other leftists revolutionaries had the right to resist injustice violently so long as they “believe in violence,” in the words of one organizer. The Gandhian moral hierarchy collapsed, and soon violent means were said to justify revolutionary ends. While Gandhi himself had collaborated with communists from a position of moral and political strength, American pacifists went adrift. What Liberation editor David Dellinger called “the violence of the victims” won sympathy from persons who in effect began to advocate pacifism for the democracies (“so-called,” many organizers insisted) and revolutionary war for communists (often described, wishfully, as agrarian nationalists).

In order to retain a pacifist shape to their activities, organizers redefined violence. ‘Revolutionary’ violence, a mere reaction to oppression, they described as “qualitatively different” from “the violence of the status quo”—which might not be literally violent at all, but rather was a synonym for injustice defined as socio-economic equality.

As Lewy acknowledges, traditionally pacifists have no simply condemned wars but have distinguished lesser evils from greater. He does not fully acknowledge how far back this tradition extends. Such early Church Fathers as Origen prayed for the victory of Roman armies, while forbidding warfare by Christians. The criteria for deciding which army to pray for, were supplied by the classical jus war doctrine, not yet ‘baptized’ by Augustine.

The moral crisis of American pacifism might better be restated as follows. After the just war doctrine was integrated into Christianity by Catholic and Protestant theologians, pacifist Christians got into the habit of refuting that doctrine in an unqualified way. By the twentieth century, many began almost ritually to condemn both sides in any war. Since the early nineteenth century, pacifists have become more politically active; prayerful martyrdom gave way to partisan organizing. The successes of Gandhi in South Africa and India whetted these political ambitions. And thanks to ‘totalitarian’ tyranny, political life itself became more ‘religious,’ if in a blasphemous way. Thus pacifists’ need for a prudential means of evaluating political actions radically increased, even as they abandoned traditional philosophic and moral guidance. In particular, they abandoned the right-to-revolution criteria set down in the Declaration of Independence, criteria firmly based upon God-endowed natural rights.

Political life being what it is, this vacuum had to be filled. Pacifists eventually seized upon the ‘soft’ Marxism of the ‘Sixties New Left, then the harder Marxism of ‘liberation theology,’ to provide the needed criteria of judgment. Lewy is not alone in regarding this as an impoverishment of pacifism—politically, intellectually, and spiritually.

Lewy claims that “when the pacifist’s conscience does not allow him to support policies that utilize force or the threat of force, the proper course for him is to remain silent.” This recommendation strikes me as more utopian than much of what pacifists say, and moreover wrong. Pacifists should remain faithful to their witness, in public. Christians in particular are not know for silence but for courageous speech.

The real questions for pacifists are: Have their organizations remained faithful to the pacifist witness” Does some form of Marxism really offer the best criteria for judging the wars pacifists may not engage in, but must nonetheless judge? Finally, are there pacifists with the moral and civic courage not merely to raise these issues, and to engage in quiet, intra-organization debate, but to form a new organization altogether? A pacifist organization sensitive to the principles of God-endowed natural rights underlying the United States Constitution, the document that gives pacifists the political protections enjoyed in no Marxist regime anywhere, might in time have a better effect here and abroad than any other. A distinctively American pacifism is the only truly Gandhian response to Gandhi, who always insisted that each individual and nation work toward peace  within its own tradition.

In that even, some day this book may yet be written by a pacifist.

In July 1990, Red Bank, New Jersey political activist William Davis wrote a letter to the editor of The Register, a daily newspaper published in nearby Shrewsbury, New Jersey. Davis commented on a decision by Howard E. Cook, a Gwinnett County, Georgia judge who ruled that state law banning the wearing of masks intended for purposes of intimidation or criminality (in this instance, the mask worn by Ku Klux Klan members) was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Davis called the decision “resoundingly correct,” an act adhering to “the dictates of the law”—a Constitution that originally held “certain folks to be only a little more than half human.”

My reply, dated August 8, 1990, rebutted Mr. Davis’s argument.

 

In his justifiable indignation at the Ku Klux Klan, Mr. William Davis of Red Bank has misstated the principle and intentions of the Framers of the United States Constitution.

The Georgia judge who ruled that Klan members have a First Amendment right to wear their ludicrous costumes (including masks to conceal their identities) was not necessarily “following the dictates of the law,” as Mr. Davis supposes. The prohibition, “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble”—even if this may be applied to legislation drafted by municipal and state lawmakers—does not shield dress-up racists preaching sedition. There are three reasons to question the judge’s reading of the First Amendment, and the regrettable body of legal opinion upon which his decision is based.

First, costuming isn’t speech. Alothough judges who prefer writing laws to interpreting them now chatter about ‘freedom of expression’ and ‘symbolic speech,’ you won’t find those formulas in the writings of the Framers. They said “speech”—not “fashion statements.” To the Framers, clothes most emphatically did not make the man. God and nature do, and reasoned speech is the unmistakable sign of that handiwork.

Second, freedom of speech is a civil liberty; that is, it partakes no only of liberty, but of civility. Freedom isn’t license, as a rather libertarian British educator [A. S. Neill] used to say. All forms of Constitutionally protected speech are civil. Constitutionally unprotected speech, speech fundamentally subversive of civil society, includes terroristic threats, obscenity, disruptions of public meetings, and so on. (It’s too bad that the American Civil Liberties Union exalts liberty while forgetting the civility that makes it possible, and thus mistakes what ‘American’ means.) The Klan’s history of terrorism clearly falls outside the limits of civil society.

Third, as Mr. Davis correctly observes, “the Klan has always regarded” certain ethnic and religious groups, including African-Americans, Jews, and Roman Catholics, “as subhuman beings.” But Davis misses the legal implication of this. Klan bigotry subverts each of the stated purposes of the Constitution: “to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Klan bigotry also contradicts the underlying principle of the Constitution set down in the Declaration of Independence: “that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” The Ku Klux Klan is a subversive organization practicing sedition speech, verbal and ‘symbolic.’ A proper understanding of the Constitution would permit legislators to outlaw such organizations as the Ku Klux Klan. Whether or not to act on such Constitutional permission should be a matter governed by prudential calculation of the likely results, not judicial interference.

Mr. Davis thus fails to see the resources our Constitution provides to Americans who oppose racist politics. Part of the problem is his uncritical acceptance of a polemical thrust made by James Baldwin and others who claim that the Framers regarded the slave (in Davis’ words) as “only a little more than half human” or (as Baldwin put it) as “three-fifths of a man.” Were this true, the Framers would rank only a cut or two above the Klan in overall intelligence and humanity. Fortunately, the interpretation is a falsehood amply refuted by an examination of the Constitution itself. Unfortunately, this falsehood still enjoys currency among people who should know better.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution as originally written apportions representatives and direct taxes among the states according to a population formula “determined by adding the whole number of free persons,” including bonded apprentices, excluding “Indians not taxed,” and including “three-fifths of the [population of] all other persons”—i.e., slaves. The formula was written this way because representatives of [predominantly] free states objected to the additional representatives slave state would have acquired, had the full slave population of those states been included. The slaveholders, obviously, wanted their slaves counted as if they were full citizens, as this would have maximized the power of the slaveholding states in Congress.

It is, of course, the lasting shame of the slaveholders that they perpetuated slavery, and the lasting misfortune of the United States that the slaveholders had the power to make their ‘peculiar institution’ last as long as it did. But the sentiments of the majority of the Framers should not be obscured. In his Address at Cooper Union, New York City, on February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln showed that only two of the 39 signers of the United States Constitution ever acted to forbid Congressional prohibition of slavery in the federal territories—a prohibition understood by pro-slavery and anti-slavery partisans alike as fatal in the long run to slavery everywhere in the Union. The Framers deliberately left intact the very engine that could dismantle slavery. During the founding period, many of the most prominent slaveholders in the South (e.g., George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) sought feasible ways to put slavery on the road to extinction. Although the slaveholders denied it, the Constitution itself as written (and, most emphatically, not as distorted by the majority of the Supreme Court in its infamous Dred Scott decision) proved the supreme instrument of slavery’s extinction, in the hands of a great statesman guided by the principles of the Declaration, even as the Framers were.

Pro-slavery passions hardened in the 19th century, partly as a reaction to the denunciations of radical abolitionists, partly as a response to slavery’s increased economic benefits to slaveholders after the invention of the cotton gin, and partly in the wake of nationalist and racist ideologies spawned not in American, but in continental Europe. None of these phenomena may fairly be traced to the principles of the American Founders. The commercial-republican regime embodied in the Constitution works toward the abolition of tyranny in all its forms, and under all its masks.

Mr. Davis concludes, “The Klan should wear their masks not as a First Amendment right, but as a sentence.” Agreed. But he should add that this sentence would be Constitutionally sound if preceded by the Klansmen’s arrest, unmasking, and trial by juries supervised by judges who understand Constitutional principles.

 

2018 Note: Judge Cook’s ruling was reversed later that year by the Georgia Supreme Court in State v. Miller (1990).