Daniel T. Rodgers: Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence. New York: Basic Books, 1988.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, June 14,1988.

 

“Logocracy,” not republic or democracy, was Washington Irving’s word for the American regime. Daniel T. Rodgers agrees; our “political culture” coheres by virtue of words that bind, words that “legitimize the outward frame of politics, creating those pictures in our heads which make the structures of authority tolerable and understandable.”

This view of politics, called realistic by its adherents, reduces the meaning of words to their use. Because it denies the existence of any stable ideas to which used and abused words might refer, this school refuses to think that politics can be about anything other than power, fundamentally.

Principles? Mere “abstractions.” Even historians who try to posit “paradigms,” those weak imitation-ideas invented by science historian Thomas Kuhn, commit the “fallacy of misplaced coherence.” “We have been too conflict-ridden a church to have a creed.” Contested, not self-evident truths are what Rodgers wants us to see as we look at the American past. He takes his keyword “keywords” from a British neo-Marxist, ideologically congenial.

Having said that, one also should say that Rodgers doesn’t let his dogmatic skepticism carry him too far into misology and propaganda. Although biased against such “abstractions” as natural rights and Christianity, he does see some of the picture; almost poignantly, he wishes for something his epistemology will not let him have—a public realm where citizens can deliberate meaningfully.

He selects his “keywords” with studious avoidance of the word ‘equality,’ the most ‘key’ of words in any regime where citizenship extends to everyone. In so doing he fails to consider not only the core of the American regime but the theoretical core of its most virulent competitors, his fellow Marxists.

Rodgers begins instead with utility, “one of the glittering words of the Enlightenment.” One might expect Americans to find a doctrine centering on practicality appealing, but utilitarianism, the reduction of human life to the quest for pleasure and the avoidance of pain, failed to win many admirers here. Americans were too afflicted by the “hunger for abstractions”—specifically, Christianity, the Word that does not take kindly to the utilitarian notion of words as mere tools.

The God who created all men equal endowed them with certain unalienable rights; “natural rights” is Rodgers’ second target for deconstruction. Natural-rights talk amounts to thinking “utopianly,” he claims, circularly confirming his argument by dismissing the Declaration of Independence as “a legally impotent document” unconnected to the Constitution. He describes the conflicts leading to the Civil War as “the elevation of practical claims into the higher stuff of rights”—a thesis that explains everything except Abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, and the war itself.

Turning from the Declaration to the Constitution, Rodgers discusses “the People” who speak in the Preamble through their representatives. Who are the People? A “democracy of white adult males,” Rodgers answers, overlooking the way those whites killed each other over black slavery, and eventually shared their power with women because they venerated those ‘abstractions,’ God and natural rights.

Rodgers prefers to identify Christianity with conservative reaction to the natural rights doctrine and to the Revolution, appeals to which reached something of an extreme with Jacksonian democracy. He does not see that ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ argued over different aspects of the same ideas, both sides appealing to Christian faith and natural rights philosophy, at times exaggerating their claims beyond what the Constitution legitimates. This is the normal working of republican politics. Surface conflict masks a deeper coherence, and when that conflict gets past the surface, the republic risks civil war, a real conflict over real ideas.

Rodgers’ own ideology prevents him from taking the American revolutionary and civil wars seriously. But the post-Civil War period, with its Gilded-Age conservatism and its equally gilt-edged antagonist, Progressivism, deserves less serious treatment, which Rodgers eagerly provides. On the ‘Right,’ judicial review as exercised by the Supreme Court of the day often did not so much defend the Constitution as a body of civil law in defense of natural rights as it undermined natural rights with legal positivism, the doctrine which claims that rights and laws are what lawmakers, most emphatically and indeed preeminently including judges, say they are.

Meanwhile, on the ‘Left,’ the newly-founded political science profession did what it could to strip away such ‘unscientific’ fripperies as the social contract, unalienable rights, and government by consent. Rodgers catches Professor Woodrow Wilson calling Thomas Jefferson’s writings “false and artificial,” indeed “un-American.” Thanks to the professors, God and natural right gave way to ‘History’ in the minds of American elites. This situation persists to this day among social-science academics and their students in the courts and the media.

‘History’ itself has changed noticeably in the century since its popularization by American scholars. At first ‘idealist’/Hegelian, it turned empirical after the First World War knocked the stuffing out of things lofty and Germanic. It ran into the arms of two other Germans, Max Weber and (almost unmentioned here) Karl Marx. Despite this, Rodgers admits “the ineradicability of rights talk, despite repeated efforts to root it out.” It’s almost enough to make you think such rights self-evident.

What we have here is a book of six chapters, two of them worth reading. And that, in the eccentric arithmetic of book reviewing, is not half-bad.

Barbara W. Tuchman: The First Salute. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.

Originally published in the Washington Times, October 10, 1988.

 

Underneath it all—beneath her success as a popular historian, beneath her liberalism à la mode, even beneath her status as a woman who established herself as a scholar before feminism came along to help—Barbara W. Tuchman is rather an old-fashioned woman, and very much an old-fashioned scholar. Sufficiently ‘left’ to steady the tremulous consciences of haut bourgeois philanthropists, never ‘left’ enough to offend at table—with less independence, she might have been Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

One can do worse than to be old-fashioned. Mrs. Tuchman still practices narrative history—not history ‘from below,’ not feminist history, not ‘postmodernist’ history, not any of the inferior sorts of history that forget the plot in search of Significance. Mrs. Tuchman does her research, tells her story, and stops before page 350.

She tells how the United States won the independence declared in July 1776. “The first salute” means the cannon salute received that November by the American ship Andrew Doria as it sailed into harbor at St. Eustatius in the Dutch West Indies, delivering a copy of the Declaration to Governor Johannes de Graaf. His was the first foreign government to recognize American independence, thereby recognizing a new kind of sovereignty, one based upon the consent of the governed. Governor de Graaf himself declared his intellectual if not political independence that day, as The Hague did not officially recognize the new nation.

De Graaf simply followed his own and his island’s interests. “The richest port in the Caribbean,” the St. Eustatius Dutch cared not so much for political liberty as for commerce, and thereby served liberty anyway. Edmund Burke said that the “proprietors” of St. Eustatius “had, in the spirit of commerce, made it an emporium for all the world.” Other Englishmen took a less indulgent line. With understandable sourness, Sir Joseph Yorke, ambassador to the Netherlands, complained that “the Americans would have had to abandon their revolution if they had not been aided by Dutch greed.”

While Dutch trading interests favored the Americans, the oligarchs at The Hague opposed them, ineffectually. The Dutch genius for commerce had no political counterpart; a maze of governmental subdivisions defeated any attempt at forceful action. The spiritedness of the people declined. America’s ambassador there, John Adams, said, “They seem afraid of every thing.” A series of military defeats at British hands (including the loss of St. Eustatius in 1781) eventually caused the dissolution of the Dutch Republic some twenty years later. The American Founders saw how commerce and republican liberty needed each other, and how both needed effective military defense, if they were to endure.

France made the error opposite to the Dutch error: It had republican politics without the spirit of commerce. The French never supplemented their military and political genius with much commercial genius. They were nonetheless rich, owing to their conquests. Tuchman describes the military and financial assistance (motivated no more by the love of liberty than were the Dutch of St. Eustatius) that made the Revolution successful.

Mrs. Tuchman devotes much of the book to accounts of naval and land battles. On these, she is well-informed, and also quite funny. This is not feminist history, but it is feminine history, animated by distaste for masculine combativeness coupled with a perfect contempt for men who fight badly. She deplores military men generally but falls in love with one in particular: the British admiral, Sir George Brydges Rodney, “a man of unforgiving character and vigorous action” who conquered St. Eustatius and plundered it, showing particular hostility toward Jewish residents, whom he robbed and then exiled.

And yet, and yet: Sir George “was frankly beautiful,” with a “youthful appearance and seductive face,” “a strong sensual mouth,” and (the lady is undone, her prose with her) a “stunning head.” Sir George makes Mrs. Tuchman quite the schoolgirl again, and one can only feel relief that she lives at safe remove from this British bad boy.

In moments of less transport, and as the book goes on, Mrs. Tuchman evokes other ages of woman. In her middle-aged moods, she has some catty fun at the expense of barbarities persisting into the Age of Enlightenment—particularly the British Admiralty’s forty-year delay in stocking lime juice aboard ships, after learning that citrus prevents scurvy. Across the centuries, she briskly proposes reforms in ship design and sailor hygiene. That time-tested English attribute, complacency, finds no quiet pub safe from Mrs. Tuchman’s improving ire.

Mellowing in later chapters, she offers readers some grandmotherly aphorisms. Even “the best laid plans,” she advises us, will “disintegrate… if human agency proves deficient.” “Pessimism is a primary source of passivity.” And “revolutions produce other men, not new men.” She frets over Sir George’s gout; they are growing old together.

You know how the story comes out, the Americans winning and all. It’s worth reading, nonetheless, for humor intended and not, and for the substantial work that went into writing it. Mrs. Tuchman remains an honest, professional popularizer of history who does her share of original research, and if you can’t stand her quirks then you just don’t like women enough.

James Monroe: The People the Sovereigns. Cumberland: James River Press, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, October 26, 1988.

 

“Other republics have failed,” James Monroe writes. Their governments were defective; their societies could not sustain liberty. “Do like causes exist here?” Occasionally, there is justice in accident; Monroe never finished the book he started in 1830, in answer to that question.

“The last voice of the Revolutionary generation,” as Russell Kirk calls Monroe in a graceful introduction, may have fallen silent too soon, but what we still can hear means more than any random hundred books on the American founding published by political ‘scientists’ in our generation, and more than any thousand speeches by the strutting popinjays who style themselves ‘public servants’ or ‘journalists.’ An experienced, thoughtful statesman who personally witnessed not only the American but the French revolution, Monroe understands the theory and practice of republicanism, its prospects and dangers.

Monroe loves political liberty with a fervor most Americans now associate mostly with recent refugees from tyranny. In effect, he was one, having served in the Revolutionary War against the British Empire during one of its especially rigorous attempts at centralizing power in London. “Our Revolution forms the most important epoch in the history of mankind,” for “it has introduced a system of new governments better calculated to secure to the people the blessings of liberty, and under circumstances more favorable to success, than any which the world ever knew before.” The regime of liberty “promises to promote… essentially the happiness of mankind,” hitherto made miserable by tyrannies of the one, the few, and the many.

“In treating of government, we must treat of man.” Monroe understands human nature as James Madison did: good enough to deserve liberty, bad enough to abuse it if men’s passions are not channeled by sound institutions and by protected property rights, not restrained by the enlightened intellect and morality that cultivate a spirit of independence. Both good government and a civilized society are indispensable to republican regimes.

A well-ordered republic entrusts sovereignty to the people, government to their elected representatives. Monroe argues strongly that popular sovereignty must remain distinct and complementary. Regimes that give direct governmental powers to the people as a whole—’participatory democracy,’ as the old New Left called it—result in “every species of abuse” and the “certain overthrow” of the government and of popular sovereignty itself.

Conversely, a government that does not separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers will abuse popular sovereignty and return the people to despotism. This holds even for an elected body in which all powers are concentrated; “the result, if not so prompt, will, nevertheless, be equally fatal.” In a rare instance of naivete and absence of foresight, Monroe anticipates no judicial usurpation, fearing only the legislative and executive branches. In The Federalist, Publius calls the judiciary “the least dangerous branch,” and Monroe carries the thought a bit too far.

Monroe served as the American representative to France in the aftermath of Robespierre’s reign of terror. “The government was in effect united with the sovereignty in the people, and all power, legislative, executive, and judicial, concentrated in them.” The moderates who followed Robespierre might have succeeded, had not the military leaders who defended the French Republic from foreign attack won uncritical popular approbation. Napoleon rose, and the Republic fell, a victim to its lack of separation between popular sovereignty and government on the one hand, and separation of governmental powers on the other.

Monroe carefully contrasts the American republic with the ancient mixed regimes, also called republics—part monarchic, part aristocratic, part democratic—described by Aristotle, and also with the modern mixed regimes prescribed by Locke and Montesquieu. He faults Aristotle for failing to show how civic virtue can find institutional expression; virtue alone he regards as a “visionary basis” for government. Aristotle’s own attention to ruling forms or institutions more than suggests that he know that; his greater emphasis on virtue may instead reflect the prevalence of poleis or city-states in his part of the ancient world—small places where citizens knew one another and could keep an eye on their neighbors. Modern states are too big for so much of that. They still need virtues to survive, but they can depend upon them less.

He applauds Locke and Montesquieu for their basic principles, and for their clear understanding of the separation of powers, but finds little merit in their enthusiasm for the mixed regime of Great Britain. Monroe prefers a government republican in all its branches, contending that elements antagonistic in principle finally will not cohere. Faction ruins ‘mixed’ regimes.

Civic education nearly disappeared from American high schools in the 1960s. Faced with civic illiteracy, the interest of educators has renewed. Written in the plain language of the 1830s, The People the Sovereigns would likely befuddle today’s students and most of their teachers. Nonetheless, an intelligent summary of its contents, written in a style easily understandable now, would serve as an excellent primer in American government—far superior to the drivel distributed in recent years to teachers and students alike ignorant of the purposes and principles of American republicanism.