Frank S. Meyer: The Moulding of Communists: The Training of the Communist Cadre. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1961.

 

Born in 1909, Frank S. Meyer worked as a member of the Communist Party USA throughout the 1930s until his departure in 1945. Turning against Marxist ideology he became a major influence on postwar conservatism, an ally of William F. Buckley, Jr. and regular contributor to National Review. His book rests firmly on his experience in ‘The Party.’

Communists, he observes, cannot be understood by assuming that they think and feel as others do. “Reality looks different” to them because they have not merely been instructed but molded, their souls reoriented by the Party regime to which they have pledged allegiance, a regime animated by a “secular and messianic quasi-religion” instituted not merely to understand the world but to change it, as Marx adjured. Lenin followed in this line, in effect saying, “Give me an organization of professional revolutionaries and I can transform the world.” As with any regime, the Party aims at producing a certain human “type,” in this case the “one Communist type,” a dedicated member of a cadre, that is, the political equivalent of battle-hardened soldiers around whom the mass of men can form. And as in any political regime, the cadre member may not be one of the apparent rulers. “Cadre Communists can be found in apparently the humblest of positions when there is a reason for their activities at that level”: “a dramatic spy or a policy-subverter in a high government post, a world-renowned writer or speaker or a Communist trade-union leader with great public prestige and power, may be little more than an office boy to obscure and unknown men with no formal position in or out of the Communist Party.”

The cadre man has strictly subordinated his individuality, emotions, and will to an intellect “totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism,” a doctrine that defines freedom as “the recognition of necessity”—recognition of History’s inexorable ‘dialectical’ advance toward communism through the rule of the Party commanding a state structured on socialist lines. Socialism is the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat,’ the urban, industrial working class, itself ruled by its ‘leaders,’ who constitute the ‘vanguard’ of the proletariat. In the words of Josef Stalin, “It is not given to all to withstand the stress and storm that accompanies membership in such a Party.” To gain admission to a cadre, one must exhibit absolute devotion to the cause of the ‘working class’ as embodied in the Party along with an ability to persuade oneself that he is maintaining “close contact with the masses” when “in actual fact, most of those who constitute the cadre have very little contact with the masses.” From there, a process of “Bolshevik hardening” or “Bolshevik discipline” commences, preparing cadre members to become “the forerunners of the ‘man of a new type,'” capable of committing such acts as “organiz[ing] a movement of Asian coolies under circumstances of incredible terror and deprivation or direct[ing] a system of slave camps which systematically dehumanizes and destroys millions upon millions of helpless people.” 

Thanks to this hardening, this discipline, “fine and devoted human beings can become conscious agents of organized evil.” The Party “considers every moment of life material for the process of molding its members.” Cadre leaders carefully observe, analyze, and criticize members’ “intellectual and psychological personality traits, operating at all times, at every moment of personal as well as political life” to reaffirm and strengthen their “consciousness” that the historical dialectic is inexorable, the Party infallible. Marxism demands “the unity of theory and practice,” that “all activity be considered as a school and all schooling as a continuation of activity.” Lenin himself went to considerable lengths in advancing this claim, writing a treatise on epistemology, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, which purports to demonstrate that the mind is nothing more than a particular organization of matter, a constellation capable (again, if properly hardened and disciplined) of understanding the operational patterns of all other organizations of matter—especially the organization of society along the lines of class, an organization animated by class struggle.

“Social interactions have for the Communist the scientifically predictable character of Newtonian physical reactions” and, like other objects studied by modern science, are “manipulable.” Modern science “implies not knowledge for the sake of knowing but knowledge for control.” A Communist must not only know socio-economic and political events, but he must also know (in Lenin’s famous phrase) what is to be done in response to them. He gains that knowledge from the Party leaders, the master-scientists. Marx and Lenin themselves satisfied this requirement by writing polemics. Even their most nearly ‘theoretical’ works (Capital, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) “are full of polemics”; “their essential inspiration is polemical,” the atheist equivalent of the Christian’s spiritual warfare. “Thought for thought’s sake or for the sake of pure knowledge is, from the Marxist-Leninist viewpoint, not merely sterile; in the last analysis it is impossible.” 

This claim in turn justifies the use of social pressure “as an irreplaceable tool of training.” Social pressure “forces to the surface, out into the open where they can be handled, all he psychological and intellectual contents of the personality which must be remade—ideas, habits, prejudices, attitudes” in weekly sessions of “criticism and self-criticism”—again, in imitation of some Christian Church, the institution of the Confessional. This is the deployment of the “dialectic” to the human personality—not, however, in the one-on-one individual Church confession or Freudian psychoanalysis (individuality is too ‘bourgeois’) but in a group session ruled by the cadre leader. Eventually, “the evolving Communist begins to apply this same method to himself,” a thoroughgoing habituation presented as a means of ever-increasing ‘consciousness.’ “Whether externally applied or internally generated, however, this questioning, probing testing process maintains a pressure upon the personality which transforms the solidity of the previous intellectual outlook and psychic set into a state of flux in which it can be remolded.”

Admittedly, “the emotions present something of a problem.” They cannot simply be eliminated or reliably repressed. In the end, however, most of them “are susceptible of being channeled in directions of value to the Party.” With careful observation, supervision, and pressure, such powerful feelings as “filial devotion, love, or friendship” can be transferred to the Party, its Leader, and Party ‘comrades.’ Meyer offers the example of shame. This must not “exist in connection with [the cadre member’s] subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party,” but it should surely prevail when a Party member exhibits any deviation from “his subordination to the decisions and discipline of the Party.”

None of this implies that Communists regard Marxist-Leninist ideas the way they regard the ideas of other systems of thought—as mere ‘superstructures’ concealing the material interests of one’s class. “The assignment of a secondary role to [the Communist’s] consciously held theoretical outlook can lead to serious misunderstanding of the Communist personality as well as to disastrous misjudgment of the power of Communism” because “for the Communist, life takes place in terms of the categories of Marxism-Leninism as surely as the normal eye sees in terms of color or the monochromatic in lights and shades,” providing him with “certainties and clarities which fit with precision into the well-ordered patter of his total outlook.” And so, “the Communist leader will not hesitate to tell a physicist that the principle of indeterminacy represents unclear thinking and imperfect science, or to instruct the novelist in the principles of his craft.” Conversely, the true Communist who is a physicist or a novelist will take such strictures “more seriously than he would those of leaders in his own profession.” And if he encounters anything that doesn’t fit into the system? Dismiss it as yet another of the “unsubstantial vaporings” emitted from the swamp of human illusion. You already have, or someday can have, the answer “to every meaningful question” (emphasis added). Whatever cannot be understood in terms of Marxist-Leninist science does not really exist and deserves no serious inquiry.

In this, Marxism-Leninism resembles other modern materialisms and positivisms, also animated the Machiavellian “concept of thought and life as control.” But unlike the competing ‘bourgeois’ doctrines, Marxism-Leninism maintains that “control over existence is not simply a goal of thought but its essential being.” It is also unlike those doctrines because for Marxism-Leninism “theory is not reducible to practice, but indissolubly united with it in a relationship where neither exists without the other, where each determines the other, permitting independent validity neither to abstract theory nor to empirical practice” in “a strange marriage of rationalism and empiricism.”

In line with this epistemology, the central moral question for the Communist is not ‘What is the Good?’ or (assuredly) not ‘What would Jesus do?’ but “Will this act help or hurt the revolution—the Party?” Morality implies freedom, choice. Sure enough, according to the Party, the Marxist is “truly free” because he recognizes the dialectical necessity that is History and accepts it. “It is this recognition and acceptance…not the physical fact of being a proletarian, which gives freedom and power.” ‘Freedom’ means freedom from ‘bourgeois’ morality and from any consideration not “strictly derived from strategical and tactical considerations.” “In every situation [the Communist] must ask himself: ‘What is the objective situation, what forces do we have, what allies can be won, what is the first thing to be done, what mechanisms are available or can be created?”

Struggles with one’s ‘conscience,’ with childhood trauma, or with any of an individual’s “inner personal struggles” betoken only “distorted reflections of social reality.” Religious self-examination and psychoanalysis are equally bogus. While Marxism “cannot deny the biological antecedents of society,” it takes the Faustian view of them: In the beginning was not the Word; in the beginning was the act—not, it should be needless to say, the act of God but the act of man. “Man qua man is neither the result of a creative act of God nor of the process of evolution. He comes into being as a result of his own act,” the act of producing “their means of subsistence”—labor. Labor is the source of all value because such production is what makes man man. 

Pack up your troubles, then. Get busy with agitation and propaganda as fused with “activity.” By itself, action is merely “reformist,” unrevolutionary because it lacks the ideational guidance propagated by the Party. Communists distinguish agitation from propaganda: agitation aims at the masses, unifying them emotionally behind the useful ’cause’ of the moment; propaganda raises the consciousness of “the riper elements” of the masses, through “more restrained argument affecting the understanding.” But by themselves, agitation and propaganda are “sectarian,” incapable of “produc[ing] substantial results, because ideas can only move the recipient when they are unified in his experience with practice.” 

How to begin? Begin with your friends and acquaintances. “Everyone with whom the Communist is in contact is, at a greater or less remove, a potential recruit,” preferably someone of whom he has “thorough knowledge.” “His approach moves from the particular to the general, starting with the already accepted beliefs, the attitudes, and the personal problems of the individual concerned; he introduces the Party position slowly and gradually, step by step, as a development which seems to arise naturally from analysis of that person’s own problems.” Writings, discussion groups, classes organized by the Party all come later and are “ancillary to the central technique of personal discussion.” A final invitation to join the Party depends upon the circumstances prevailing in the regime in which the Party operates. If secrecy is necessary, the Party will be more cautious than it needs to be in most ‘bourgeois democracies,’ most of the time.

The moment of the invitation is “the crucial moment” in the process because this is when the person targeted is likely to balk. The danger is not merely that of losing the potential recruit. “Those lost at this point can become almost as inimical to the Party as ex-Communists” or, if they continue to hover on the margin as “useful but cynical and critical sympathizers,” the Party’s time and efforts have been squandered. “Therefore, at this stage extraordinary efforts are made by the Party to assist the recruiter.” Call in the “leading Party members…to help personally in conversation and discussion”; use such “emotional methods” as participation in mass meetings and inclusion in “social events with Party and fellow-traveling dignitaries.” (You’ve seen Jane Fonda in the movies, but would you like to meet her?) 

“In my years in the Party, I had considerable experience both with direct recruits of my own and as a Party leader called in to assist with others’ recruits.” Meyer learned that “the final block” against joining the Party “seem[ed] to have forms as multifarious as human character and experience.” A reluctant or critical spouse; a personal dispute with a Party member; moral qualms; worries about the possible impact of Party membership on one’s career prospects or the prospects of one’s children: “Whatever the problem might be, there is almost certain to be a problem.” It is up to the recruiter and his Party associates to find a path to persuasion.

The Party also must find a path in the larger sense, the path to the future. “Communist leadership…is up against a continuing contradiction between two incompatible goals: the building of a mass Party and the molding of an iron Party.” These goals, then, are in a dialectical relationship. Under some circumstances, the Party will spread its net widely; under others, “smaller, but better” becomes the slogan and the Party undertakes to purge itself of dross or at least to pressure its members into stricter conformity with the Party ‘line.’ Between 1936 and 1941, the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Party turnover reached about eighty percent in the CPUSA. While mass recruitment is a desideratum, “the primary aim is the creation of a steeled cadre, flexible enough to take any tactically desired stand on current questions, accreting strength as it moves through opposite and contradictory campaigns and feeds upon generation after generation of the rank and file of the formal Parties.” Acceptance of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, after years of vituperation against fascism, requires exactly the sort of discipline the Party needs at its core. Weaklings need not stay. The lukewarm must be spit out of its mouth. Or, shifting the metaphor, “the Communist examines an individual very much as a carpenter examines a piece of lumber.” 

As for the piece of lumber itself, it finds itself in “a world of trans-valued values.” Persons “never suspected of being Communists” turn out to be just that. Some supposedly Very Important Person will be dressed down by a seemingly “more or less insignificant figure.” The Communist has taken an oath “to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious Socialism,” to “remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” Although Marxism lays claim to the final form of rationality, of science, the actual appeal is more to the spirited element of the soul, to thumos rather than logos: “duty, responsibility, and the privilege of being one of those who have elected for History.” Or, to lower the tone, it is an appeal to that part of men and women that wants to ‘know the score,’ wants to be on the inside, not on the outside, “dragged by events.” In exchange for this privilege (and to be sure, there is as much snobbery attached to Party membership as there is to membership in a ‘country club’) , one must accept the Communist Party as “the be-all and the end-all of life, the center of all human purpose,” rightfully demanding of him “no partial segment of his life but all of his life.” 

“The whole of Communist training…drives towards the acceptance of the revolution as the end to which all things and all persons must be strictly subordinated as means.” For example, Party recruits need indoctrination, and dialectic rules the Communist schoolroom “through a guided discussion directed toward a predetermined end”—that is, in imitation of the way ‘History’ itself works, according to Marxism. “Conflicts, tensions, and their resolutions are the very stuff of the transformation of traditional man into Communist man.”  As the more senior Party member, the teacher-leader is always correct, putting forth “not their personal opinions, their judgments…but their scientific analysis.” This, again, is how all the Party meetings work, not only the ones that take place in classrooms; the leader “will utilize his superior command of dialectics” to assert his unquestionable authority. For those that waver, the Party reserves sessions of “criticism and self-criticism.” While “the first time the neophyte is himself subject to ‘self-criticism,’ it is probably the most painful thing that has ever happened to him,” but that is the point: toughen up. The compensation for such humiliation comes with “feeling the power of the Party, a power with which he identifies himself,” as a small cadre of Party members “carry out plans which have been worked out in detail beforehand,” successfully bending a much larger organization—say, a teachers’ union—to commit itself to the Party line without knowing it. 

Training of Party members within a cadre is “qualitatively different from pre-cadre training in one important respect: the decisive role of self-imposition of pressure.” To be sure, “external” pressures are still there, “but the force of the Communist ethos has been absorbed into the personality itself.” “A Communist is still not ‘tested’ until his will has become fused with the will of the Party.” The test comes when a cadre member deviates, however slightly, from Party commands and practices, any “clash between personal judgment and Party judgment.” For example, if the Party line abruptly reverses course, you will follow the new course. “To reverse one’s self before other human beings, Party or non-Party, without losing one’s self-respect, necessitates full inner acceptance of the rightfulness and power of the Party,” the “god of a godless world.” “Only by a god can such acceptance be demanded and only to a god can it be given without the utter destruction of self-respect.” Meyer had met several of the Party luminaries of the day—CPUSA chairman Earl Browder, French Communist Party chairman Maurice Thorez, East Germany Party General Secretary Walter Ulbrich of East Germany and Bulgarian Communist and erstwhile General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov. He reports that each regarded himself as being in “a state of tutelage” to his superiors. Such men take “what anywhere else would be regarded as unmitigated abuse,” subjecting subordinates to the same, “as necessary,” all “with extraordinary little of the emotions of abasement or resentment, on the one hand, or aggressive ego-satisfaction, on the other.” To do less is to succumb to “subjectivity,” the thoroughgoing Communist’s “cardinal sin.” “To put anything before the Party is subjectivity.” Thus, the true Communist “can only be understood if we understand the end to which he is devoted as the compass is drawn to the magnetic pole: the conquest of the world for Communism.”

True enough, the Party is “in actuality the creature of the rulers of the Soviet Union.” But the rulers of the Soviet Union are held up as the leaders of the Party, not of the regime of Russia’s nation-state. “The faith triumphant, the Soviet Union, is…but an aspect of the faith. It is the faith, whole and entire, Communism, the Party, which inspires the Communist’s universe and is the object of his devotion.” Tyranny, the Gulag, purges of Party members, mass murder of ‘class enemies,’ aggressive war against other states, “even Khruschev’s exposure of Stalin and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956” are only “necessary casualties of the historical process, unfortunate but unavoidable” features of the dialectic. “Emotionally they simply are not real, even when [the Communist] has actually seen horrors with his own eyes. Facts that do not fit the theoretical outlook of Marxism-Leninism have only a shadowy existence,” since “reality rests only in the doctrines of Communism and the institution of the Party.” Such men are products of “the extirpation of every remnant of philosophical, moral, aesthetic principle or instinct natural to the human being, and the substitution of the principles and instincts of the Communist world-view.” It is the final conquest of nature, of human nature itself. 

It is easy to assume that Meyer’s book is a well-informed, vigorously argued ‘period piece,’ consigned to irrelevancy by the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is true that the center of the worldwide Communist movement is no longer Moscow. But it still has a center, does it not?

 

 

 

William Shakespeare: The Comedy of Errors.

 

This lecture was written for the Sixth Annual Will’n in Weslaco Festival, South Texas College, Weslaco, Texas, April 8, 2025.

 

“Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.”

John Locke: An Essay on Civil Government. Book II, Chapter xviii, Section 202.

 

“Laughter springs from the lawless part of our nature, and is purifying insofar as there is a natural and unschooled goodness in the human heart.”

Agnes Repplier: In Pursuit of Laughter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1936.

 

The Comedy of Errors presents these themes of law and laughter, of law and nature. What are the tensions between these two pairs? Can they be reconciled?

We know that this play was performed a part of Christmastime celebration at Gray’s Inn, which was one of the four Inns of Court in London. the inns were professional associations for lawyers and judges which also served as la schools. Part of the seasonal fund was the election of a Lord of Misrule, typically a student whose reign was mercifully brief and whose powers were prudently limited. The strictness of the rule of law and of lawyers relaxed for the holiday celebrating the birth of Christ, Redeemer of souls guilty before the Law of God.

The Comedy of Errors is perfect for such an occasion and it’s not untimely in today’s circumstances, either. Students still take over some elite university campuses, and they are nothing if not lords of misrule when they do.

Not only that, but in the play there’s a trade war going on.

It would be a comedy of error on my part if I tried to summarize Shakespeare’s wild and twisty plot, and that would take the fun out of watching the play. But I do want to show how the play, for all the laughs, brings out some serious points about law, about ruling and misruling, and especially about how, in ruling, we can weigh evidence and testimony in order to make just and wise judgements  in the face of confusion: the face of confusion often being what we see all around us, and also when we look in the mirror.

Although I won’t attempt a plot summary, I will pay particular attention to the play’s first scene and its last scene.

So: What’s so funny about the law? Judging from the play’s first scene, nothing at all. The law is serious, and it can turn deadly. Syracuse and Ephesus began as city-states—as sovereign in their day as the United Sates, Mexico, and Canada are today. Each was a major commercial country—Syracuse, a Sicilian city founded by Greeks from the city-state of Corinth, eventually served as a trading link between Eastern and Western Christendom.

By the time of the actions depicted in the play, Christianity evidently has been introduced, however, which means that these cities are now under imperial rule—probably of Rome, since the Duke of Ephesus, Solinus, has a Roman name. The Apostle Paul evangelized in Syracuse and of course his Letter to the Ephesians when those cities were part of the Roman Empire.

Neither secular empire nor the sacred empire of the Church stops these cities from acting like sovereign states, however, at least when it comes to trade. And their trade war isn’t just a matter of reciprocal tariffs, either; Ephesus has banned Syracusans from the country, in response to harsh penalties enacted by the Duke of Syracuse on Ephesian merchants. Illegal interlopers from Syracuse must pay a heavy fine or pay the ultimate penalty of death. City states generally took citizenship, and therefore ‘foreignness,’ more seriously than many do today and when they fought a trade war, they played for keeps. You won’t find much talk about ‘globalization’ among the ancient Greeks and Romans, or among the European states of Shakespeare’s time, for that matter. Shakespeare’s Ephesus makes its own laws regarding trade, and indeed the old empires allowed subject nations a considerable degree of self-rule.

Where does law, severe or mild, come from? To take a prominent example, Moses receives the laws of Israel from God, the supreme Ruler. The ancient city-states often supposed that their laws were divinely ordained, with each city having its own protecting and oftentimes lawgiving deity: for both Ephesus and Syracuse, it was Artemis—Diana, in the Roman pantheon. Now, in Christendom, they still have women as patron, or should I say matron, saints: Agatha for Sicily, Hermione for Ephesus, both associated with the power of healing. With the coming of Christianity, then, they exchanged the goddess of the hunt for saints of health.

Secular regimes also derive their laws from rulers—that is, from the regime of the country. Regimes consist of four components: rulers (one, few, or many, good or bad); the ruling offices the rulers occupy; the way of life governed by those rulers and ruling offices; there is, finally, the purpose or purposes that the rulers, ruling offices, and way of life aim at. As mentioned, the purpose of the Ephesian and the Syracusan regimes is commercial prosperity, and they achieved it.

Law isn’t supposed to be funny, and in the play’s first scene it doesn’t look like it will be. This comedy begins as if it will be a tragedy. In Shakespeare generally, comedy and tragedy are on a knife’ edge; one might easily turn into the other, and in most of his plays the genres are mixed, often with comic and tragic scenes interspersed. Solinus, the name of the Duke of Ephesus, means ‘solitary one’; he rules as a monarch. In the ancient world and up to and including Shakespeare’s time, monarchs were not primarily what we think of today. While they were ‘commanders in chief’ in wartime, in peacetime they were not primarily ‘executives’ but judges. That’s why to this day we speak of a ‘king’s court.’ We encounter Solinus in his role as a judge in a legal case.

Aegeon is a merchant from Syracuse, arrested under the Ephesian law banning Syracusans. Since he’s obviously guilty as charged, he throws himself on the mercy of the court, telling a tragic story of family separation. Decades earlier, he and his wife, Aemilia, had twin sons for whom he purchased twin slaves when they were all in their infancy. A few years later, the family suffered shipwreck in a storm. Father, one son and his slave were rescued by one ship; his wife, one son and his slave were rescued by another, taking them to different cities, the destination of each unknown to the other. Upon reaching adulthood, the son and slave who remained with Aegeon went on a mission to find their lost brothers and never returned. Aegeon embarked on what has been a five-year mission to find them, coming to Ephesus only as a last desperate resort.

The law he has violated is a convention—not a divine or natural but a man-made thing—enacted by the Ephesian regime, which intends to defend its commerce, its way of life aimed at the purpose of citizens’ prosperity—arguably, a natural human purpose. By contrast, the purpose of Aegeon’s mission has no conventional content; it is entirely natural: to reunite his family. We see its natural character in the fact that it’s a search that has proceeded through many countries, many regimes with many sets of legal conventions. In Aristotle’s book, the Politics, families are the building blocks of political communities, of city-states, giving them a natural foundation. Thus, the legal conventions of Ephesus now collide with human nature in a legal case. Right at the beginning of his play, Shakespeare has the full attention of those lawyers, judges, and law students of Gray’s Inn, who are responsible for cases at trial under English common law within the English regime, which is also a monarchy, one that is part of Christendom but recently had separated from Roman Catholic Christendom in an act of sovereignty taken by the father of the current monarch, Elizabeth I.

Duke Solinus keeps to the letter of the law: he tells Aegeon to raise money to pay the fine in 24 hours or suffer death by beheading. The Duke’s argument in justifying his sternness—his tragic judgment, if you will—may seem tyrannical to us in modern America, but it is crucial to understand that we are looking at it through the lens of our own regime, a democratic and commercial republic, where we are often encouraged to ‘Question authority.’ That isn’t the traditional way of understanding law or of understanding the rulers who make and enforce the law, either in the ancient world or in Christendom. The Apostle Paul famously tells his missionaries to respect the ruler, who “wields not the sword in vain”—a ruler who was then a pagan, and sometimes a persecutor of Christians. The difference between our moral sensibility and that of other regimes suggests that our judgments are crucially influenced by the regime we live in.

It therefore takes an effort for us to consider the argument the Duke make in the case of a foreign merchant who has knowingly or unknowingly violated Ephesian law, for an understandable natural purpose. He doesn’t blame Aegeon’s plight on Aegeon, but on “the fates”—the winds that caused the shipwreck, the initial cause in the sequence of events that brought him to this trial. Solinus tells the defendant, “We may pity, though not pardon thee.” Why not?

Because the law is the law, and the regime behind that law (“my crown, my oath”—notice, an obligation—and indeed “my dignity and my “honor”) require that the regime’s laws be respected, that the laws be taken seriously and not ‘comically. Laws laxly enforced become laws ‘in name only,” comical, things of derision. What we call the rule of law is really the rule of men and women who follow the law, a set of laws made by God or by human beings, but in either case necessarily ‘solemnized,’ obeyed. And even ‘we democrats’ know that. We know that there come circumstances in every regime when legal justice can no longer be tempered by mercy, or the regime will collapse in a crisis of dishonor, of disrespect, of comedy. Satire is an engine of such disrespect. As the Bible says, God is not to be mocked. Shakespeare audience of legal authorities, of dignitaries, expect citizens to stand up when the judge enters the courtroom. Even democratic America’s Judge Judy, no stranger to comedy, expects and demands that.

Another way to put it is that Solinus is a monarch, but he is a constitutional monarch. He is not a lawless tyrant. John Locke could not find fault with him, in that regard. I emphasize this so that you’ll see the themes of the play clearly, as Shakespeare sets them up from the outset, themes that must be understood in the way they were understood by learned and intelligent ‘men of the law’ in the English regime of his time.

But just as the convention of law has a sort of nature to it, a serious and potentially tragic nature, just as it sets limit on comedy, and especially on mockery, legal convention also has its limits. Law and respect for law are necessary to the regime, but their consequences may contradict justice when it governs what lawyers call ‘a hard case’—a case that the legislators who framed the law did not, could not, anticipate. Can such tragic consequences of legal reasoning be averted by comedy—that is, by the kind of natural reasoning that, first, recognizes how circumstances alter cases—what jurists call ‘equity’—and second, that the circumstances that Solinus and Aegeon both understand are not all the circumstances of the case he has adjudicated?

Laws govern both city-states and the households within them; there is tariff and criminal law; there is also marital law. In Ephesus, the city-state law is violated by the arrival of Aegeon; the marital law i challenged, if not intentionally violated, by the arrival of the twins from Syracuse. Their arrival also challenges criminal law, as it relates to commerce, as seen in the errors surrounding the gold chain that the goldsmith, Angelo, mistakenly gives to the Syracusan Antipholus, because he confuses him with his Ephesian twin—a circumstance to which I shall return.

With reasoning beyond the strictures of the law, comedy begins—the chance for a happy ending. A monarch/judge needs first to know the law; second, he needs to know the facts of the case, the real evidence; he finally needs to make a reasoned judgment base on that law and those facts, which really provide the circumstances of the case. A sound judgment doesn’t ‘print out’ a good result, lie a photocopier attached to a computer. A sound judgment takes practical reasoning in addition to legal reasoning, which deduces guilt or innocence from the letter of the law. Notice that these three steps constitute an ascent, an ascent from convention, from law, to the nature of the actions taken by the accused and the accuser, and finally to the exercise of natural, prudential reason, which is the distinctive characteristic of human nature and the basis of right judgment, not only in law courts but in our lives, generally.

This is comic, not tragic because tragedies end like Hamlet, with dead bodies on the floor, including the bodies of persons who didn’t deserve to die, whereas comedies end happily, whether it is in marriage (as they often do in Shakespeare) or in the philosophic death of Socrates 9who contentedly dies so that philosophy may live on, or in the Divine Comedy of Dane, where God’s judgments are understood to be both just and merciful. God’s judgments are always right because God knows the true identity of those He judges. Human judges are less reliable, and they need to understand that. They need ways of discovering the true identities of those accused and of their accusers who appear before the court.

The Comedy of Errors therefore proceeds more philosophically than religiously, by reason not by divine revelation. It proceeds a bit like an argument in a Platonic dialogue—an argument, however, in actions, with errors made and opinions exposed as incorrect by means of human sense perception and human reasoning—both fallible.

First, let’s take a look at sense perception. Both slave twins are named “Dromio.” ‘Dromio’ means ‘path’ or ‘way. The slavish path to knowledge, its way of knowing, is by sense perception. We see this especially in Act III, Scene 1, where Ephesian Dromio, having earlier suffered a beating from Syracusan Antipholus, replies to his real master’s denial of having struck him, “I know what I know.” When it comes to knowledge, his physical experience, his sense perceptions, cannot give way to his master’s authority. And he’s right: He was beaten, only wrong in mistaking his master for his master’s identical twin. His simplest sense, touch, which registers bodily pain and pleasure, gave him part of the truth, even as another sense perception, from sight, deceived him.

In one sense, the senses are always right he really did get beaten, and he really did see a man who looked exactly like his master. Sight is a higher sense than touch. Touch perceives only parts of things, out of their ‘context,’ their surroundings. Sight gives us a picture, often a bigger picture, than touch can do. Also, we can rely on sight more readily to reveal the identities of one another, the inner ‘regimes,’ so to speak, the souls and the purposes souls pursue, motives. Sight perceives facial expressions, ‘body language’; the eyes are the ‘windows of the soul’ both for looking out and for looking in. But physical sight of course cannot fully disclose a soul. The senses need to be supplemented with reasoning about the evidence presented to the human mind by the senses. That is a task preeminently for rulers, not slaves. Slaves are tasked with obedience, rulers with responsibility.

The path of natural reasoning runs roughly because the human mind easily misconstrues the facts, the evidence that bodily senses bring before it to judge. That is how masters can mistake rational actions of other masters and slaves as irrational. Rational Luciana (her name means ‘light’) mistakes Syracusan Antipholus for Ephesian Antipholus, who is unhappily married to her sister. When the Syracusan truthfully denies that he is married and, having fallen in love at first sight, proposes marriage to her, she doesn’t fall back on her senses as her source of knowledge (as in “I know what I know”) but arrives at a seemingly reasonable explanation of the contradiction: Antipholus must have gone mad; he must have lost his reason. Her error is to reason from a false premise.

Another way in which the human mind deceives itself is to interpret sense-evidence through the soul’s passions. Luciana’s sister, Adriana (which means ‘dark’) is near madness, herself, maddened by jealousy. Jealousy darkens her mind. Passions, such as jealousy, impede reasoning, distorting the mind’s judgement of the evidence the senses place before it. Both lucid Luciana and mind-darkened Adriana contribute to the derangement of their household, the first by reasoning from false premises, the second by abandoning reason altogether.

Superstition is yet another impediment to reasoning. On several occasions, those who mistake the identity of one twin for another assume that they are witnessing sorcery, witchcraft, deviltry, demonic possession. This evokes not the passion of jealousy but the passion of fear. Ephesus had a reputation for such supernatural things, and the Apostle Paul takes them with supreme seriousness Shakespeare presents the as still another source of error, as illusory, indeed delusory, opinions purporting to explain the naturally occurring actions of natural persons by supernatural influences. This is no small point, especially when made before lawyers, judges, and law students. Witch trials were not unknown in Shakespeare’s Europe, and his Puritan countrymen would bring the practice to New England, not many years later. Shakespeare suggests to men of the law: Are you quite sure of the evidence? Such errors derange city-states, as fear leads either to cowardice or to rage, passions, and thus to injustice, ruinous to good regimes, and conducive to tyranny. His comedy implies a limit to the law, a rational limit.

To put it in terms of the play, the double duality of two sets of twins embodies the dualities of the world in which we make judgments, a world of appearance and reality, passions and reason, misrule and good rule, tragedy and comedy. It is very easy to mistake one element of those pairs for its opposite. Shakespeare’s well-known and sometimes criticized fondness for puns, for words with double meanings, exemplifies this in the very way he uses language. In fact, the Greek word for ‘speech,’ logos, means both speech and reason. Speech, words, can clarify or confuse our reasoning.

Given this duality of human perception, reasoning, speech, how to avoid tragedy, how to obtain a comic—that is, happy, reasonable ending, a just verdict in trials but more broadly, good judgment in the life you live?

Act Five begins with the apparent violation of the city’s law pertaining to commerce. Angelo the goldsmith is assuring his creditor that he, Angelo, will soon receive payment for the gold chain he sold to Ephesian Antipholus, a man of “most reverend reputation.” He doesn’t really believe that Antipholus deserves such a reputation, or such reverence, however. He thought he’d delivered the chain, but he gave it to the wrong Antipholus. When he later demanded payment from Ephesian Antipholus, that estimable gentleman denied having receive the chain; Angelo had him arrested. He’s only buying time with his creditor. Now, he sees Syracusan Antipholus, who is wearing the chain, and he’s duly outraged at the apparent injustice, lying, double-dealing.

Before Angelo or his creditor can do anything, Adriana enters the scene. She misidentifies this Antipholus as her husband and demands that he and his slave be bound and returned home. Deeming them all mad, the Syracusans flee from both sets of accusers to the sanctuary of a nearby priory.

Th Abbess of the priory arrives and questions Adriana, concluding that she has driven her husband mad. “The venom clamors of a jealous woman / Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth.” Unquiet meals, she explains, lead to indigestion and fire in the stomach causes madness. That is, regardless of her religious status, the Abbess understands matters in terms of nature not of demonic possession. She refuses to release her supposed husband to her, ruling that she’ll bring him back to sanity herself, an intention consistent with Ephesus’s matron saint. For her part, Adriana can only think that she’s lost her husband to another woman, after all!

When Solinus and Aegeon walk past, on their way to the latter’s beheading, Adriana, at Luciana’s urging, begs the Duke’s intervention. Evidently, a mere execution can await the resolution of her dilemma. He agrees to negotiate with the Abbess—given the independence of Church authority from secular authority, he cannot simply command her, but his stated reason for initiating an informal judicial inquiry on the spot is his respect for Antipholus’ wartime service to Ephesus.

At this point, the real Ephesian Antipholus and Dromio charge in, this Antipholus demanding justice against his wife on the grounds that she has locked him out of his house. Adriana, who saw the man she supposed to be her husband escape into the priory, and now at the end of what wit she has, recurs to superstition, imagining that he must have the power to move invisibly, saying, it is all “past thought of human reason.” She has, in her own way, reached the same modest conclusion Socrates reached about himself: Unlike Dromio, who says he knows what he knows, she knows that she does not know. The supremely self-assured accuser has reached her own ‘teachable moment.’ 

For moment, Aegeon seems doomed to die, Ephesian Antipholus and Adriana doomed to divorce, and Angelo can’t know what to do about his gold chain. Public justice, domestic justice, and commercial justice are all on that knife edge ready to fall into tragedy. To the Duke, they all seem mad.

The most helpless person tries to save the day. Aegeon identifies Ephesian Antipholus, whom he hasn’t actually seen in more than two decades, as his son—easily enough, of course, since he is identical to his other son, whom he last saw only five years ago. Since this Antipholus cannot know his father, everyone takes the old man to be senile. But when Syracusan Antipholus emerges from the priory with his slave, the confusion quickly resolves. Now, everyone’s sense of sight finally perceives the whole picture, and they can reason rightly, from correct premises. And finally, when the Abbess is revealed as Aemilia, Aegeon’s long-lost wife, the family is reunited. In legal terms, they have been “made whole.” Nature and law now coincide. Aemilia means ‘rival,’ and the Abbess has indeed rivaled her daughter-in-law, but in a satisfactory way with a just result: each Antipholus is restored to his father and to the right women: Ephesian Antipholus to his wife and mother, Syracusan Antipholus to his mother, with a real prospect of getting a rational wife for himself. The original married couple are together, with both their sons and their slaves restored to them and to one another.

Domestic justice has been served. But what of political justice, criminal and commercial? The case of the gold chain will be no problem, but the criminal case is more difficult. The Duke pardons Aegeon. Before, he had steadfastly enforced the rule of law. What has changed? Surely not the law; surely not the fact that Aegeon has violated it.

Solinus now has corroborating evidence that Aegeon’s story is true, but he believed him initially, anyway. The law is still the law. But now he knows that Aegeon’s Ephesian son is not only the merchant respected and even loved throughout the city, a man to whom he owes a debt of gratitude for his military service to the city and its regime, but he also knows that the debt Ephesian Antipholus has asked him to repay by prosecuting Adriana can now be discharged by pardoning the man now known to be his father. And he also knows that his prisoner is the husband of the eminently respectable Abbess of the priory, a person he is unlikely to wish to offend.

“Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail / Of you, my sons,” Aemilia tells them. “Travail” is a synonym for labor, for giving birth, and thirty-three is the traditional estimate of the number of years Jesus lived on earth. Her sons do indeed seem born again, to her. As for the two Dromios, whose mother sold them into slavery, they now celebrate not a miracle but their natural equality: “We came into this world like brother and brother, / And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before the other.” Birth order, a product fate or chance, is irrelevant to justice.

What can a playwright, a man of no high social standing in Elizabethan England, teach a distinguished gathering at Gray’ Inn? Since the men of the law are on holiday, this may be what we now call a ‘teachable moment.’ Shakespeare builds on the fact that English lawyers had won the separation of the common law from the Church’s canon law, centuries earlier. But that boundary needs to be guarded by its inheritor, his audience. Do not, he suggests, assume that witches and demons are the cause of apparently irrational behavior. And even down-to-earth sense perception is not unimpeachable evidence, and a physiological/’scientific’ diagnosis of madness may prove mistaken. The Comedy of Errors sees a family and a city saved from hasty judgments based on false or incomplete premises. The monarch-judge and his subjects learn the true premise the Socratic way as enacted, as set in motion by actors on stage: by testing the various conflicting stories they hear and by finding the rationally coherent overall story that accounts for each piece of each person’s narrative—the comprehensive argument that encompasses all the others in a non-contradictory way. That is comedy’s happy ending, the triumph of reason over unreason. The true Christmastide Lord of Misrule at Gray’s Inn is William Shakespeare.

 

Ann Hartle: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022.

 

Looking at what Montaigne famously called “the human condition” as it is now, Ann Hartle finds the “post-modern, post-Christian Western world” characterized both by “unprecedented personal freedom,” which the philosopher would have liked, and “deep cultural division,” which he saw in the world of his own time and sought to remedy. This suggests that the establishment of personal freedom does not guarantee civil peace. And in fact, “with the deepening of cultural differences, civility has deteriorated alarmingly.” Montaigne means civility to be “the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the modern Western world,” although the idea and practice itself “goes back as far as ancient Rome.” Why has it “disappeared” from so much of our public and private life? 

At one point, it appeared. Civility as a constellation of virtues, including “promise keeping, generosity, compassion forgiveness, trust, toleration, openness, sincerity, self-disclosure, and similar qualities,” amounts to a set of social virtues—as in the phrase, ‘civil society.’ Civil society exists under the carapace of the modern, centralized state; ‘liberal’ states protect civil society and its virtues, often held to derive from the rights of individuals (as members of that society and/or as natural persons), whereas ‘totalitarian’ states attempt to extend their rule into every aspect of civil society—often at the expense of civility and indeed the lives of individuals, no longer citizens but subjects. This is why the decline of civility in the modern world, under the modern state, worries people, even as the roughened edges of what remains of civil-social life disturbs them.

“How and when does this modern notion of civility come on the scene?” Hartle traces its origin to the Reformation, which “destroyed the unity of Christendom, rejecting the authority of tradition,” although it received its first articulation in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, no Protestant and indeed no Christian. Montaigne picks up the pieces, as it were, of shattered Christendom, fashioning a “new order,” a “transformation of and alternative to both classical and Christian types,” that is, the two elements of Thomist Christianity, traditional Roman Catholicism. Montaigne proposes himself “as an example or type of a new moral character,” an example that evidently proved “an attractive possibility to his contemporaries.” This possibility entailed a turning away from the aristocratic standard of honor, of publicly recognized military and political virtue, along with a turn toward the substitution of compassion for Christian agape. He urges his contemporaries, especially his fellow gentlemen, towards a way of life that esteems and guards privacy, protecting individuals from intrusive question of religious faith from religio-political authorities and protecting what had been Christendom from wars sparked by the ambitions of honor-loving aristocrats. It is noteworthy that three centuries after Montaigne, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville would still be addressing the question, ‘What shall we do with the titled aristocrats?’ That is because Montaigne’s project is a solution to one problem (religio-political strife) that brings another problem with it: civil societies guarantee a form of liberty or freedom that “comes from doing away with the orientation to the divine that is essential to the tradition” from which Montaigne has composed his ‘construct.’ “Civility is built on the ruins of the very civilization that alone can give it life.”

Following the tripartite definition of a “project” seen in Rémi Brague’s The Kingdom of Man, Hartle orders her book into three sets of chapters. The modern project implies a “new beginning,” a rejection of the past; “the idea of the autonomy of the acting subject,” now severed or freed from the tradition; and a pathway designed to assure the project’s future completion. The tradition Montaigne aims to replace, which the “violent civil and religious conflict” of his time had called into question, was “the direction of human being to the divine,” a direction only a few can achieve fully. As a consequence, those with the leisure to direct themselves toward religious meditation and action, philosophic contemplation, and political rule will require political communities in which the many engage in “servile occupations” that support the way of life of the few. “Montaigne wants to replace that foundation with a philosophical foundation for equality and freedom,” which will require “the transformation of philosophy itself” as “his first and most fundamental task.” What Montaigne calls “detachment” of himself from himself, from the “natural man,” this act of “reflection” or “philosophical self-consciousness,” bring a denial that nature has a purpose, a telos. The philosopher, now a detached observer, must now exercise “judgment,” no longer the comparison of himself to a natural standard, which Montaigne denies, but to form the set of “accidents” that has been called “nature” into a shape serving an end “determined by the human will.” This is what Machiavelli had called the mastery of Fortuna, what Bacon would soon be calling the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Montaigne’s “New Adam, then, is not the created being who stands in wondering contemplation of the world and its Creator, but the judge who orders all things in accordance with his will.” In this new order, “the good” becomes “value,” that is, “the good in relation to man.” “All things are now revalued according to the standard of man as man, not according to the standard of the tradition, nature, and the divine.” In the present, Montaigne’s new beginning issues in what was later called liberalism, a society in which “the individual is free to seek the satisfaction of his particularity,” a society that functions in accordance with the new beginning that denies any common good inherent in nature. If, as Montaigne writes, “the greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” then this knowledge, once achieved, will undergird civility, a smiling acceptance of one’s fellow self-belonging, equal individuals. The “greatness” of aristocrats “has been transformed from the public display of noble deeds to the hiddenness of self-possession.” For its part, “civility replaces the social bond of the tradition in the absence of the possibility of moral community.” Civility makes possible the enactment of a central liberal political principle, “equality under the law.” This is the pathway toward the fully civil society, in which what Montaigne calls the “sociable wisdom” of the new philosophers, of whom Montaigne is the first.

Accordingly, Hartle begins with the philosophic, religious, and social-political condition of pre-Reformation Europe, with its “interweaving of the sacred and the social” forming “a very strong social bond” seen in “the divine liturgy, in the celebration of the Eucharist, where the loftiest theologian was at one with the last educated laborer.” This is why Tocqueville could say that democracy—defined as social equality—became widespread only with the advent of Christianity. To be sure, well-defined social hierarchy remained; the theologian would return to his study, to his life of theorizing, the laborer to the scaffolding, to his life of practice. But each was equal before God, and that was the important thing. It was the important thing because Thomism, combining Christian faith with Aristotelian philosophy, understood the purpose of human life as the perfection of human nature, a perfection which each person would strive for, within his place in the social hierarchy. “The worth of [human] activities does not depend upon human choice but on their intrinsic worth within the natural order.” Because the capacity to reason distinguishes human beings from other animals, the life of reason, the theoretical life, fulfils the potentialities of human nature most completely. “Philosophy is free because it is useless,” unlike the many practical arts; “that is, it serves no end outside itself.” Pace, Karl Marx: “The philosopher does not want to change the world but simply to understand it in its first causes.” “Leisure is the receptive attitude of the mind toward being, and contemplation is the act in which the world is brought into the mind: the mind becomes what it knows.” Because God is the first of all causes, theology is the queen of the sciences, of the philosophic ways of knowing. Even the pre-Christian Aristotle “held that philosophy, the highest human activity, is in some sense divine.” Religious tradition “does not limit or restrict philosophical questioning” but rather “preserves wonder and mystery, for it hands down a truth that is not limited by the human mind,” recognizing “the mysterious character of the world.”

Thomist Christianity adds the theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—to the moral virtues—courage, moderation, prudence, and justice. In ethical life, again as seen both in Aristotle and the Bible, all of the virtues “benefit the city as a whole,” not only the virtuous individual; noble rather than servile, they register human beings as bodies and souls together, neither simply animalistic nor purely divine. “The classical philosopher sees himself within the cosmos and within the city.”  As a human being, as a rational animal, he depends upon the “continuity between the human senses,” which we share with animals, and “the knowledge that the philosopher seeks.” As for the citizens who are not philosophers, “the coherence of the political community depends upon the recognition of what is higher and better than the political struggle over rule; that is, it depends upon religion and philosophy.” 

Montaigne, following Machiavelli, demurs. “He sees the tradition as the mask covering over a much different reality, the mastery of the weak by the strong,” as “the idea of the common good” amounts only to what he calls a “pretext of reason” to ‘justify’ “the dominion of masters over slaves.” Also with Machiavelli, he charges that philosophy and religion alike are powerless to prevent this exploitation. “Modern philosophy is ashamed of the weakness of premodern philosophy, dismissing the leisure it commends as mere idleness, the topic of one of Montaigne’s essays. “Montaigne makes leisure appear frivolous and vain,” mere “play.” Leisured men don’t really contemplate the divine; they only amuse themselves with imponderables, doing nothing to bring the justice they tout into the world as it exists. “When Montaigne retires to his study to write his essays, he makes a new world. He overcomes the foundational distinction between actions that are ends in themselves and actions that produce effects by transforming the philosophic act itself into the act of philosophical invention that brings the new world into being.” He anticipates Marx, aiming “to change the world, to master nature, not simply to know it,” by “becom[ing] free in a radically new way,” detached from nature and tradition” by means of “self-consciousness”—a notion not to be found in premodern or ‘ancient’ philosophy. Self-consciousness brings us to see “that we are Christians because we happen to have been born in a country where Christianity was in practice” and that the conscience (the Christian predecessor of consciousness) amounts only to the rule of local customs over our souls. In his essay, “Of Custom,” Montaigne announces his disgust at the flimsy foundation of custom. The title Montaigne chooses for his book is exact: rather than bowing to custom, the philosopher must “essay himself,” rid himself of “this violent prejudice of custom,” tearing away “this mask” in order to restore himself to “a much surer status,” the acknowledgment of himself as himself, cleansed of the spiritual tattoos inked onto his mind by philosophic and religious doctrine. “Reflection is always the mind returning to itself.” In observing the “wanderings” and “flutterings” of his own mind, Montaigne sees that it must be “brought under control” by deliberately forgetting what it has been taught by tradition and what nature itself has imposed upon it. He begins to engage in a new form of knowledge, “a new science, the science of the subject.” The subject he sees in this act of detachment is puny, in need of reordering not of conformity to the inadequate natural order. “When the mind forgets itself as formed by the tradition, it becomes conscious of itself as the origin of philosophy, its own act.” It frees itself, “generates itself” as a phenomenon separate from nature: this is the philosopher’s freedom, “his own act, the act of becoming self-conscious.” The philosopher thus astonishes himself; astonishment at this act of self-generation, this freedom from nature and God, replaces the traditional philosophers’ wonder at nature and God. Having ‘made’ himself, he has no reason to wonder, inasmuch as “we do not wonder at what [we] produce,” having produced it ourselves; we are instead astonished that we didn’t set out to do any such thing. Montaigne is “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher, the man who happens to be the philosopher, in whom and through whom philosophy becomes conscious of itself.”  

No longer will human beings find equality in their equality before God, which is an equality whereby “we are all slaves,” slaves to tradition, powerless. “Reflection originates in dissatisfaction and shame over our powerlessness: reflection is rebellion against God’s omnipotence, and this rebellion is human freedom,” the “original sin” whereby “the natural human self can be annihilated, not by divine grace but by the human will.” “Montaigne is the new Adam, the first man, the new man, not created by God, but brought into being by his own power.” This, Hartle observes, is the origin of “the so-called mind-body problem of modern philosophy.” Aristotle finds the origin of human knowledge in the senses, “proceed[ing] through memory and experience to the arts and finally the sciences”; “the soul is the ‘form’ of the body and is not separable from the body.” Not so for Montaigne, whose radical detachment of the mind, tasked with observing nature, primarily human nature, rejects the idea that the philosopher “remains a participant in nature,” philosophy being “the highest perfection and fulfilment of human nature,” ” a participation in the divine activity of thought thinking thought.” By separating “the philosopher from the natural man,” Montaigne no longer participates, “as the philosopher, in the natural hierarchy” but denies such a hierarchy, judging it a pernicious myth. “The philosopher, removed from the hierarchy, stands before the pieces, which are now in no essential order,” malleable, ready for reordering in accordance with “the choices of the human will.” As for Machiavelli, “the freedom of the philosopher [is] to impose a new order upon human beings and the human world,” standing “in a relationship to nature of mastery and judgment, not of participation and contemplation.” This “makes modern science possible.” The modern scientific experiment is itself an ‘essay’—an attempt, a project, a trial, a test. The modern mind no longer measures itself by being but subjects being to itself, “to the human will.” “Judgment looks at the contents of the mind in light of what it wants,” and it wants “not man as he is but a new man,” a man who replaces God as the lord of nature, having freed himself from the illusion of natural ends, freed to bring “the new out of the mind itself.” In the words of Machiavelli, this is the ‘effectual’ truth.” [1] With modern philosophy in hand, man need no longer be ashamed of himself before God, nature, or himself. “Man is no longer the being who stands in wonder and awe before the created world and its Creator. He is now the self-creating being who, standing in astonishment of what he himself brings into being, declares it to be good.”

With “the replacement of contemplation by judgment,” natural, divinely ordained hierarchy disappears, since “ranking now comes from man himself.” “Values are relative to the human will; the good ‘in itself’ is not.” This begs the obvious question: “How does he know what the good of man is without an ‘external’ standard, without the standard of something higher than man?” How do men know “how to enjoy our own being rightly”? The answer is that Montaigne “can claim that his judgments are true because he has no self-esteem” while he nonetheless loves himself. By self-esteem he means “the desire to rise above the human,” as seen in the Homeric phrase, “godlike Achilles” and in the Biblical teaching that the perfect Man is actually God. Self-esteem is what causes the traditional distinctions between theory and practice, leisurely rule and servile work, master and slave, the saved and the damned—distinctions that lead to war. By abandoning the self-esteem of previous philosophers, Montaigne can no longer justly be accused of self-interest, by others or by himself. He is perfectly “willing to appear weak and common,” even though he is neither. The high subjects itself “to the low, the strong to the weak,” in an “overturning of the Aristotelian order.” The new civic order, held together by civility, imitates the old order by “setting up a nonhuman authority to which all can submit on equal terms,” but it departs from that order by its origin in human beings. The rule of reason, representative government, the rule of law, freedom of the individual “to pursue the good as he sees fit”: all these are human artifacts that prevent one set of humans to master another. This form of rule is human but impersonal, whereas the old form of rule claimed to be inhuman, originating in God and nature, but was in fact both human and personal, tyrannical. There was no consent of the governed, only the false consent of those duped by the smarter and the stronger. Hence (and here Hartle cites Benjamin Constant on the difference between ancient and modern politics), “the principle of ancient constitutions is the regime,” whereas “the principle of modern constitution is representation,” which is “the separation of rule from human beings.” “There is no place for honor or glory in simply doing the will of others”; ergo, “the principle of representation takes the honor out of rule,” deflating the claim to rule by honor-loving aristocrats. 

Hartle is skeptical. “The price of this freedom is the submission of all to the absolute power of the new monstrous and unnatural master,” the modern state, which Nietzsche calls a “cold monster.” The state wields “absolute power,” at best permitting civil society its realm of freedom, of privacy, the way of life Montaigne portrays in the Essays as his own way of life. In civil society, men pursue what they all have in common, not the ‘high’ aims of aristocrats but the ‘low’ aims of workers. Philosophers conceal their own decidedly ‘high’ activities behind the privacy granted to all individuals in civil society. In his relations with his fellow citizens, the new, Montaignian philosopher is Mr. Nice Guy. [2] Civil society may be “the association of equals” but it is not by that token a community—an association of persons gathered under ruling persons, a ruling person, much less a ruling Person. In his self-love, absent of self-esteem, Montaigne models the life of an independent man. There is no personal rule and there is no overarching common good. Montaigne urges, “Let each one seek the good in his particularity.” Much of his particular good will be ‘in common’ in the sense that everyone needs to survive physically, and everyone wants to enjoy ‘personal freedom.’ Otherwise, you are free to live happily on your own, belonging to yourself—not to God, not to the polis.

“Civility is the way in which individuals who belong to themselves conduct themselves toward each other in civil society.” Hartle identifies “authenticity” as the current-day term for self-ownership. In exchange for preserving his authenticity, for the freedom to make himself “to be what he wants to be,” “his own project,” each member of civil society enables all others to preserve theirs by speaking and acting civilly towards them. No quest for “recognition or honor from those among whom he lives” occurs because none is needed or wanted. Hegel understands this, calling “the right of subjective freedom” the “pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.” He ascribes the origin of this right to Christianity, although Montaigne obviously disagrees, ascribing it rather to himself, with a nod to Machiavelli. As for an actual Christian, one recalls Paul the Apostle: “For none of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. For if we live, we live to the Lord, an if we die, we die to the Lord. So then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s (Romans 14:7-8).

On the contrary, saith Montaigne: “There is no one who, if he listens to himself, does not discover in himself a form all his own, a master form” (“Of Repentance”). This precludes evangelizing in the Christian manner. “Because I feel myself tied down to one form, I do not oblige everybody to espouse it, as all others do” (“Of Cato the Younger”). In so saying, Hartle remarks, “Montaigne has freed himself from the common error of presumption,” judging “each man as he is in himself, not by the common measure of form and final cause.” While the ancients said, “Strength rejoices in the challenge,” members of Montaigne’s civil society find their principal virtue in le règlement, which Hartle translates as moderation but which has a strong suggestion of lawfulness, consistent with Montaigne’s valorization of the rule of law. Although the man with a “self-ordered soul” may appear weak “because there is no struggle or difficulty in his actions,” he has a hidden strength, an inner strength that comes from having identified and followed his own natural form. He naturally feels passions but he governs them readily by identifying them at their beginning, when “all things are weak,” gives vent to them, blows off their still-unimpressive steam, and diverts any vicious passion into some other, milder, passion; he thus needs no rational mastery over them, no self-rule in the classical sense, because he has dealt with them as soon as they appear. That is, Montaigne’s civility ‘goes all the way down’ to the management of the soul. Civility is much more effective than the attempt to reform, the attempt to “correct the world’s moeurs by new opinions,” as the Protestants were doing, an approach that “reform[s] the superficial vices” while leaving “the essential ones” intact. “Authenticity means just being what you are, not what you should be” according to someone else’s opinion. Discovering the possibility of living authentically was difficult; Montaigne himself needed to clear his soul of centuries of what he took to be intellectual and moral slag. Once discovered and suggested to others, authenticity becomes much easier—indeed, life becomes a matter of “Montaigne’s famous nonchalance.”

“The Essays are the first act of self-conscious civility,” which “is the bond among those who do not need each other for the good life.” Taking “the fragments of the shattered world of classical-Christian civilization” and giving them “a coherent philosophical foundation,” Montaigne carefully uses materials that are “already familiar” to his readers in order not to argue for this new way of life but to provide what a later writer would call a sentimental education “at the deepest level of unreflect moeurs.” “Civility is the moral character that keeps society depoliticized,” that limits politics, the realm Montaigne, agreeing with Machiavelli, takes to be a struggle for mastery in which opinions are deployed as weapons against the weak-minded. The tutor of the young gentleman will “form the will of his pupil to be a very loyal, very affectionate, and very courageous servant of his prince, but not to attach himself to that prince by private obligation, an attachment that impairs one’s freedom.” Like Montaigne, he will be a mediator, trusted by all factions even if (necessarily) attached to one of them. “Montaigne does not allow his entire will to be possessed and commanded by his service to his prince: he is a man of integrity, and he belongs to himself.” While Machiavelli recommends eliminating ‘the great’ violently, leaving no one between prince and people, Montaigne would eliminate them nonviolently or, more precisely, not exactly eliminate them but transform them into persons who no longer aspire to greatness, to mastery. As for the people, they will be freed by “freeing the realm of work and labor from its hiddenness and shame and freeing the worker and the laborer from his subjection to the requirements of the common good within the hierarchical structure of the tradition, so that each is free to pursue the go in his own way,” albeit under the impersonal “new master,” the state. Civil society will be free because free from political struggle, “the conflict between masters and slaves, strong and weak.” The social bond is no longer a shared purpose but loyalty to one another, under law, a law crucially supplemented by civility, which “covers interactions where the law does not reach.”

And what of those who are neither princes, gentleman-aristocrats, nor ‘of the people’? What of the philosophers? “Philosophy is barely visible in the Essays.” (What current-day professor of philosophy would recognize Montaigne as a philosopher?) “Philosophy must be hidden as merely unpremeditated and accidental, as sociable wisdom, because nothing can appear to be higher than the prince and because the philosopher must participate in society as an equal.” Not Aristotle’s serious leisure accompanied by prudent political counsel but “play,” the “play of possibility, the freedom of the mind to bring the new out of the old” animates him. Playfulness or sociable wisdom, the mask of civility, disguises “the philosopher’s natural superiority.” Nothing must jar with the civility of civil society, lest “the natural conflict between masters and slaves” recur. 

Montaigne’s project enjoyed considerable success, although not nearly as much as he and his fellow ‘liberals’ would have liked. Increasingly, civil societies in even the liberalized modern states have repoliticized. Liberalism’s old enemies—monarchism, church establishment, titled aristocracy—have declined, only to be replaced by ‘ideologies’—communism, fascism, progressivism. “Ideology is an attempt to reconstitute a coherent whole to replace the tradition in which man is ordered to the divine”—typically called ‘ideals.’ “Ideals are not naturally given ends.” Rather, “ideals are creations of philosophy” (and that’s being kind). Without “natural limits,” they lend themselves to “becoming and change,” to what one ideologue called “perpetual revolution.” In the United States, presidential candidates have even campaigned on the one-word slogan, “Change,” without bothering to specify what change they had in mind, aside from replacing the incumbent with themselves. Ideology is ‘totalizing’: it “radiates into every sphere of life…replac[ing] religion and rul[ing] over philosophy and even family life.” Ideologues enact restrictions on political speech, lest someone else get a word in edgewise. They also police speech in the classroom and throughout university campuses; “there is perhaps no other institution that has become more thoroughly politicized than the university.” This defeats the “defining purpose” of the university: “to pursue truth,” whether or not that pursuit, or the truths discovered offend someone.  “Current intellectual trends would have us believe that there is no such thing as truth and that ‘everything is political’—the political being defined as the exercise of the will to power.

Clearly, Montaigne would want to short-circuit any such thing, just as he would stifle unwholesome passions in their cradle. But he does define politics as the exercise of the will to power, and that is the source of the problem. Whereas Aristotle defines politics as ruling and being ruled in turn, reciprocity in rule; whereas the medieval universities instantiated the balance between faith and reason, Church and state, Montaigne precludes that dimension of what Hartle has called “the tradition.” He depends on civility to pervade, and to continue to pervade, social life, including education. 

Hartle argues that as “a human philosophical invention,” civility only conceals the will to power. Not only modern politics but modern civil society is saturated by the will to power, the ambition to master nature, “the mastery that belongs to God alone.” This is why “civility has to fail.” It “originates in the destruction of the very conditions that make it possible,” or, more exactly, it erodes the shards of tradition Montaigne put together to make it. “The suppression of honor and religion results in the disappearance of any public acknowledgement of the necessity of the higher things.” If my “natural form” happens to be that of a tyrant, and I can find a sufficient number of followers whose “natural forms” happen to be slavish, I can invent an ideology to justify my ambition to seize power.

 As a faithful Roman Catholic, Hartle blames the Reformation and the early modern philosophers for the rejection of tradition, for failing to foresee that their projects would end in the eventual rejection of Protestantism and early modern philosophy, too. She remains aware that the tradition had its own problems: “It might be objected that religion is not the social bond that remains above politics but rather the cause of political conflict,” inasmuch as Machiavellianism and Protestantism both reacted against serious deficiencies within Christendom. To this, she replies that the Church was, and is, already “a multicultural society and arguably the only possible multicultural society” because (unlike Islam or the secular ideologies) it was founded as a movement of evangelism, not enforced domination. She concedes that Thomism, blending as it does Christianity with Aristotelianism, could no longer persuade even the devoutly Christian Pascal, who “broke with the Aristotelian hold on metaphysics, science, and politics” as firmly as Montaigne and Descartes. “Pascal’s view of politics is indebted not to Aristotle or Aquinas but to Saint Augustine.”

But is Augustinian political thought adequate? To be sure, it clearly distinguishes the City of God from the City of Man. But does it give an adequate account of the City of Man?

As Pierre Manent sees, “Pascal sees clearly the social, emotional, and intellectual constituents of the modern revolution being put in place.” Unlike Montaigne, he finds a place for Christian guidance in modern life, distinguishing between those Christians “who aim to make the political laws as conformed as possible to the teachings of Christianity as they understand them” and those “who leave the political order free to organize itself according to its nature, and honor it as such, instead of disdaining it.” But Pascal shares with Montaigne (and Augustine) “a conception of law and of custom that regards human beings as commanded or governed, and not as commanding or governing.” In their corrupted, postlapsarian nature, human beings “want to govern,” driven by libido dominandi, with the few and the many striving to defeat one another. With Montaigne, he considers the arguments each side makes in its own favor to be mere rationalizations. Thus “the human legislator is incapable of reaching the root of injustice”—original sin, seen especially in “self-love”—and “human laws cannot do more, as it were, than scratch the surface of our injustice.” Pascal concurs with Aristotle’s call for a ‘mixed regime,’ one that balances the wealthy few and the many poor, but he denies that either side has any reasonable claim to rule, whereas Aristotle affirms that both sides do. “From a certain date,” Manent observes, “Europeans abandoned every idea of a universal criterion of human actions, of a natural law or natural justice capable of guiding the legislator.,” holding human reason “incapable of discerning the human good, the good that counts for man a man.”  [3] Neither Montaigne nor Pascal can give much assistance, there.

 

Notes

1. See “Machiavelli’s ‘Effectual Truth'” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
2. See “Mr. Nice Guy” on this website under the category, “Philosophers.”
3. Pierre Manent: Life Without Law. Paul Seaton translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020, pp.166-175, 234 n.15.