Dominique Schnapper: The Democratic Spirit of Law. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 53, Number 6, November/December 2016. Republished with permission.

 

Montesquieu directed his attention to the spirit of the laws, considering what he called “the principles of government” underlying legal codes. The principle of republican government is “virtue,” by which he meant love of the laws, love of country, and a preference of public to private interest. By democracy, as distinct from republicanism, Montesquieu’s close reader Tocqueville meant a social condition, equality—defined not as the absence of social classes or of gradations of wealth but as the absence of aristocracy, a class entitled by birth to rule. This social condition in turn engenders habits of mind and heart that incline citizens toward “self-interest rightly understood”—but also toward “virtuous materialism”—the pursuit of material pleasures in a small way. Without the spectacular excesses of aristocratic corruption, virtuous materialism enervates souls, leads them away from public life, from virtue in Montesquieu’s sense.

Tocqueville famously considers the importance of civil society as a bulwark against the overbearing government of modern, centralized states and also as a counterweight to materialistic individualism. As a sociologist, Dominque Schnapper continues this legacy; while making use of the empirical studies produced by her colleagues, she eschews the sharp dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values’ that so many of them have posited in their attempts to be scientific. While Tocqueville regarded democratic or egalitarian society (whether under republican or despotic government) as the bedrock of modern political life, Schnapper sees discontent with democracy. Some discontented democrats charge democracy with being insufficiently democratic (typically with respect to race, class, and gender) or with being too democratic, too vulgar and pedestrian or ‘bourgeois.’ More deeply, other critics point to tensions or contradictions generated by the democratic way of life itself—what she calls “democratic dynamics.” Like Tocqueville, who urged upon his fellow aristocrats an intention to guide and moderate democracy against its own excesses, Schnapper both describes and warns.

She starts with Tocqueville’s observation that an egalitarian society will often derive what social cohesion it has from consent—”not on any outside structure religious or dynastic, but on the community of free and equal citizens” who join in “an abstract political society that by means of citizenship transcends the roots and specific loyalties of its members.” Having done so, those loyalties don’t go away, although they are attenuated. Over time, again as Tocqueville predicted, the modern state would take over many of the functions performed by churches and lords of the manor. The risk is that Homo democraticus begins as a citizen but ends as a “beneficiary”—a passive recipient of state-provided support. Moreover, as an ever-more-demanding client of the state, the democrat begins to lose not only civic relations with others but social relations, too. People feel as if they don’t need one another, anymore, and stop “shar[ing] common values and a common conception of the world.” This leads to the condition Schnapper calls “extreme” democracy; it is a long way from Montesquieu’s republican virtue. Such societies can no longer cohere at all, for long.

Democrats thus succumb to “the temptation of the unlimited.” Whereas Adam Smith remarked that the desires of human beings are infinite and their means limited—hence the need for “political economy”—Schnapper extends this observation to all dimensions of political life. She distinguishes “autonomy”—the virtue of the deliberative citizen—from “independence”—radical self-sufficiency that finds no standard of conduct beyond the individual’s will. (I would have reversed these terms, probably because as an American I associate “independence” with our Declaration thereof, a document which firmly upholds standards of conduct and exemplifies deliberative citizenship. But let’s respect the author’s Frenchness.) “If the individual subscribes only to his own caprice and for his own short-term interest, he will overturn the objective trust that constitutes a basic given of all societal life.” The rule of law and political institutions—broadly defined not only as ruling structures but as a way of life—can only decline into confusion. At the same time dependence on the state increases. As this new way of life engrains itself in the minds and hearts of democrats, it redefines the family into an unstable grouping headed by merely consenting adults, which in turn generates single-parent households among those who choose no longer to consent to initial union.

The democrat “is obliged to be himself, to assert his freedom by his personal action—a paradoxical imposition indeed,” and one reminiscent of Rousseau’s famous phrase, “forced to be free.” Without any transcendent standard to guide him, but with all around him equally self-assertive, the democrat finds himself mired in “the feeling of his inadequacy, emptiness and compulsion.”

Fueling this radical egalitarianism or “independence,” modern science promises not only the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate but the conquest of human nature for—what? The conquest of human nature requires the conquest of natural right along with it. The abandonment of human nature as a moral standard yields moral and intellectual instability, as “the democratic individual wavers between the ancient dream of eternal life through science and the catastrophism that, while asserting science’s omnipotence, reverses the idea of nineteenth century triumphant science.” The “transhuman” demi-god fears perishing in some apocalypse, whether “nuclear” or climatological. And even while he lives, he is miserable, as technology and capitalism combine to accelerate life beyond the limits of the democrats’ social nature, which requires the slow growth of mutual trust for the sake establishing and maintaining civic and political association.

Proceeding from liberty to license, the democrat’s critical habit begins to challenge not only prevailing norms but “the very idea of norms.” He goes from divine right to natural right to historical right to a radical historicism that questions the very existence of right. Even the fundamental sociobiological fact of reproduction begins to quail before the will of “the democratic individual,” who “chooses his or her partner freely”—that is, without reference to norms. Similarly, the act of eating means, as a well-know American fast-food chain so winningly puts it, having it your way, and with 24-hour drive-thru service at that. Cholesterol having accumulated, the democrat will die ‘with dignity,’ after which his self-designed funeral will be followed by remembrances designed by his survivors.

The social act of transmitting moral and political standards from one generation to the next—the problem Abraham Lincoln considered in his Lyceum Address—cannot function adequately under the regime of extreme democracy, either. Here is where a life lived in France proves highly instructive, given the French-republican insistence, bordering on obsession, with forming citizens by means of education. Under liberal democracy, “The School transformed the members of a small community belonging to a limited world into citizens.” But, having been loaded also with the economic demand for vocational training, French schools have bent themselves out of shape, ill-fitted to combat new, rival communications technologies that challenge their monopoly on French culture and civisme. How will French culture survive if contradictory cultural norms can be ‘ordered up’ by students, like the hamburgers, they consume? When children can ‘outvote’ adults regarding their own education, has egalitarianism not gone a bit far? And how will political representation—that is, republicanism—survive in an extreme democracy, the logic of which is to govern itself by lot, as Aristotle had seen more than two millennia back? In rejecting deliberative intermediaries between his will and governmental decision, will the democrat enhance democracy or only empower the state, his chosen instrument for the delivery of the goods and services he demands? But contradictorily, if the state is a mere instrument, far from the mighty and authoritative being Hegel imagined, then the more that is demanded of it the less it will be obeyed.

Equality in the public realm drives the quest for individual distinction into the private realm. Simultaneously, in asserting themselves, these individuals make demands on the public realm, on the state, which in turn invites the state to become “a negotiator or a manager, organizing collaboration between structures outside itself,” thereby blurring the “boundaries between public and private.” This only begins the process of erasing distinctions National boundaries, the sexes, public and private, high and low culture, moral and immoral, even living and inanimate, all mix together not in a grand historical synthesis but in an overheated social stew. Because “there is no real thought without distinctions” extreme democracy makes Tocqueville’s gentle remark that democracy “does not favor ‘slow and deep thought'” a gross understatement.

Socially, this character of “indistinction” shows itself in Tocqueville’s well-known description of “individualism,” by which he meant the narrowing of one’s relationships to a small circle of relatives and friends. Its symbol today is the burka, which “demonstrates the rejection of participation in exchanges among all.” While making herself anonymous, so indistinct as to be invisible, the burka-wearer sets herself apart from all around her, isolated from all. This radical effect of equality contradicts equality, inasmuch as “the hidden woman can see others who cannot see her,” challenging the “reciprocity of social bonds” or, as one might say even more explicitly, social equality itself.

The final reduction caused by egalitarianism’s indistinction amounts to nihilism. “A society is defined by a conception of the world that gives meaning, by their organization and hierarchy to the important facts of human experience: birth, filiation, marriage, alliance, death.” But a ‘post-ethnic,’ ‘post-rational,’ ‘post-mortal,’ and ‘post-human’ democracy “in which biological or inherited distinctions might be overcome,” a society in which “the reflexivity of all social norms” leads democrats to attempt to construct lives “solely by people’s will” will veer toward the absurd. In it, we read seriously proposals for giving political rights to the great apes—and indeed why stop with them?

As a social scientist, Schnapper bravely seeks to rescue the discipline from such excesses. Whereas anthropology has made cultural relativism the sine qua non of research—studying such phenomena as ritual torture and cannibalism with calm rather than revulsion—anthropology does not entail absolute relativism, the denial that torture and cannibalism are morally wrong. Cultural relativism as a (so to speak) research technique is one thing, but its extension to the realm of moral judgment quite another. Schnapper recalls the question her father, Raymond Aron, posed to Claude Levi-Strauss: “Are universal judgments on moral behavior incompatible with cultural relativism?” Many have begun to treat them as if they are, and not only professional anthropologists. Against this trend, Schnapper recalls “the classical criticism of skepticism: there is a logical contradiction in the very idea of absolute relativism,” namely, that “in asserting a doctrine, the relativist implies that it is true, that therefore truth exists.” “Like all scientists, the ethnologist believes that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that the progress of scientific knowledge is, in itself, human progress.” But obviously, “if relativism, no longer relative but absolute, were to dominate the intellectual and moral conception of democratic individuals, which would then be founded on the indistinction of intellectual orders, there would no longer exist any difference between justice and equality, the analysis of society and political involvement, facts observed (even if they are always philosophically developed by the researcher) and value judgments.” This would make it impermissible to do what everyone must do, inasmuch as “normativity is part of the human condition,” and “one cannot think and understand the world, one cannot wish to act on it, without value judgments.” It would be to lay down a prohibition against all prohibitions, permitting only the impermissible. The dynamics of democracy would exhaust democracy.

Schapper undertakes to counter this radical skepticism or nihilism dialectically, with a critique of universalized criticism, a critique of critique. She begins by observing that any critique must not only compare a particular society to its own principles (invariably finding it, and sometimes them, wanting) but also to other real, particular societies. It is then hard to avoid noticing that “we lie in the safest societies of human history” and “also the freest, most tolerant, and most prosperous.” Complaints about the rise of super-rich ‘one percenters’ and the decline of the middle classes beg for a touch of anthropological dispassion, if not relativism: “The notion that upward mobility was stronger in the past is a myth.” Anxieties about status divergence have grown because our “ambitions have grown.” The working classes have declined as a percentage of the population not because they have dropped into a Marxian lumpenproletariat but because the many have risen into the middle classes, and especially the managerial classes; the social prophet who saw the future that worked wasn’t Marx, it was James Burnham. Statistical studies claiming to show that the numbers of the poor have increased get those numbers by defining poverty upward. But “the poor in 2012 are objectively less poor than those of 1970.”

“Homo democraticus enjoys freedoms unknown to members of other societies,” even if “the possibility of exercising those freedoms remains unequally distributed.” The real crisis in democracy is a crisis of honor, not material well-being or personal freedom. Economic globalization places working-class men and women “in objective competition with poorly paid workers of poorer societies,” removing the dignity of having a ‘trade’ or a ‘craft.’ The democratic society which honors those who, as the saying goes, ‘reinvent themselves’ as needed or as desired humiliates the single mother that same society has also produced. Not only the prosperous but also the smarter and more ambition reap the benefits. Although Schnapper writes two years before the American presidential primary elections of 2016, it’s easy to see how the condition she describes leaves our political parties vulnerable not only to the appeal of a socialist like Bernie Sanders but also Donald Trump, who avers that the least intelligent among us are also “the most loyal ones.” Thank you, my liege, you are the only one who respects me.

The humiliation of the outsider looking in also animates the enemy of Mr. Trump’s followers, the immigrant. Immigrants and especially their children, “socialized in a democratic society” assert “democratic claims for equal treatment.” “They are democracy’s children,” but “they have not absorbed [democracy’s] obligations and do not know the codes for living together.” Like all disappointed lovers, they turn to reviling the beloved, at times to the point of murderousness. Resentment resists mere social welfare, which differs from old charity precisely by lacking caritas. The state cannot match its godlike providence with godlike love, the love that turns humiliation into just and honorable humility. Welfare states can feed the bodies but not the souls of its dependents; it is scientific/impersonal, and so cannot heal wounded honor. There can be no Department of Plausible Respect—at least not in a government animated by the principles of social science. “By a tragic ruse of history, the society created to ensure equal dignity for all human beings and their emancipation could become the society of humiliation.”

“Democracy is not the society of contempt; it is a society dominated by the gap between the democratic individual’s unlimited aspiration to be fully recognized” in his “individuality unlike any other, and the reality of inevitably asymmetrical social relations.” To save his honor, the democrat recurs to “superstitions and conspiracy theories.” Because we live in a radically democratized society, many feel they are ruled by the Wizard of Oz.

Following her great forebears Tocqueville and Montesquieu, has Schnapper presented us in the end with yet another tale of historical inevitability, based on the dialectical march of the Absolute Spirit or of class warfare or racial conflict, but on an iron logic of democratization? Schnapper thinks not: “Democracies are not fated to be lost because collective destiny is never fated in advance.” Like the real Montesquieu and the real Tocqueville, she urges not resignation but deliberation. When democrats begin to think about their problems, they are no longer simply democratic, and (very much like her father) she makes thinking attractive.

 

Thomas Sowell: Intellectuals and Society. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 47, Number 6, November/December 2010.

 

The respected conservative economist Thomas Sowell writes too gracefully and, well, economically to offer a more precise title for this book, such as Modern Intellectuals and Modern Democratic Regimes. But that’s his topic.

By “intellect” Sowell means “the capacity to grasp and manipulate complex ideas.” Intellect forms only part of “intelligence,” a term encompassing “judgment and care in selecting relevant explanatory facts and in establishing empirical tests of any theory that emerges.” A bright college sophomore’s intellect ought to metamorphose into intelligence by the time he starts his doctoral dissertation. He probably has a way to go before he achieves “wisdom”—”the rarest quality of all,” combining intelligence with experience and self-discipline. With wisdom he will understand the limitations of his “own experience and of reason itself.” If, however, our sophomore goes wrong he may come to use his capacity to manipulate ideas cynically, in which case he will turn out a sophist or, if gifted with oratorical flair, a demagogue. Quite as likely he may let his wishes be horses, in which case he will be a fairly typical specimen of the intellectual in modern democracy.

“Intellectuals” grasp and manipulate complex ideas. Their work “begins and ends with ideas”; they produce ideas instead of material goods (an economist would usually say ‘widgets’) or actions (‘services’ in econo-speak). Being “intellectuals,” “Adam Smith never ran a business, and Karl Marx never administered a gulag.” The concrete objects intellectuals do produce—manuscripts—serve merely as vehicles for their primary products.

The “penumbra” surrounding intellectuals consists of purveyors of the ideas intellectuals produce: teachers, journalists, social activists, political aides, judges’ clerks. Along with intellectuals themselves, these comprise the “intelligentsia.” Although Sowell claims that “the demand for public intellectuals is largely manufactured by themselves,” this strikes me as improbable. Human beings have wanted explanations of the world for a long time. (The Bible will serve as empirical evidence of this, and I can see social-scientific heads nodding in nearly universal agreement with my methodology.) What is more, rulers have usually wanted justifications of their rule. Intellectuals aspire to the functions of the ancient prophet, priest, or sage. Sowell is right to say that widespread literacy and education generally, along with mass media—all features of the regime of modern democracy—have increased the audience for intellectual services. Modern bureaucracies—impersonal, scientistic if not exactly scientific—also augment demand. Both the characteristic modern regimes—democratic republicanism and democratic despotism—and the characteristic modern political organization—the Machiavellian/Hobbesian centralized state—afford intellectuals heady opportunities for prestige and authority.

The associations of intellectuals with ruling, with political life, leads to difficulties well known to Socrates and his enemies. But these difficulties take a new direction in modern regimes because modern regimes valorize ideas, abstractions, more than they esteem such personal relationships as reverence and deference. Unlike material products and services, Sowell, observes, “no external test” can validate an ideational product. This leaves the producers of ideas vulnerable to circularity of thought or even to outright solecism. The conservative politician Newt Gingrich has decried the fact that social democrats persist in their socialism despite socialism’s real-world failures; Sowell would answer that real-world failure does not exactly disporove an idea in the mind of him who lovingly holds it. Like Brooklyn Dodgers fans of old, the intellectual can always recur to his battle-cry, “Wait till next year.”

Insulated politically by the freedom of speech and academic freedom of modern liberal democracy, intellectuals fortify their never-say-die persistence with the social and political armature of status. At best tenured and at least unmolested by outraged bearers of hemlock, intellectuals form a sort of aristocracy within democracy. With that measure of the acerb he has cultivated over the years, Sowell calls them “the anointed.” Their heads drip with the soothing balm of security from serious harm, no matter what they say or write, and no matter what they say or write about one another. This confidence easily overextends to the habit of ranging outside their field of knowledge, as literary critics pronounce on the latest war and sociologists ‘deconstruct’ literature. (I exempt my fellow political scientists from this stricture, inasmuch as Aristotle rightly describes politics as the architectonic art, but I hesitate to claim that Sowell would concur.)

Intellectuals thus test the limits of human knowledge but have few if any empirical constraints on that test. Given the obvious limits of human knowledge, however, “the population at large may have vastly more total knowledge” than the new aristocrats. This becomes clear when intellectuals propose, and bureaucrats attempt, the governance of vast economic markets characteristic of the revenue-hungry modern state. No amount of rational planning can match the massive, daily, empirical operations of a relatively free market, with its “innumerable features on which no given individual can possibly be expert.” Should this not put practical limits on the rule of intellectuals through the bureaucracies and bureaucrats that adopt and adapt their ideas?

Unfortunately not, Sowell observes. “Modern, expansive government—the centralized, administrative state—”tends to magnify the influence of the intelligentsia, since government as a decision-making institution means essentially legislators, judges, executives and bureaucrats, non of whom is constrained to stay within the area of their own competence in making decisions.” Although the American Founders took care to separate and balance the powers of the central government and also to establish a federal state that would keep most governing decisions in municipalities, counties, and states, the centralizing state-builders of the twentieth century—beginning with the Progressives and continued by the New Dealers and their progeny—deliberately compromised these institutional/structural boundaries in the name of attaining desired economic and social goals. Animated by “a vision of themselves as a self-anointed vanguard, leading toward that better world”—”a huge investment of ego in a particular set of opinions”—members of the intellectual-political complex effectively re-founded the American regime. What had been a commercial and federal republic now incorporates a permanent if non-hereditary aristocracy. Unlike the aristocrats of feudalism, the new aristocrats inhabit a centralized state dedicated both to leveling all other social groups and to dividing those groups into newly-invented social categories—famously, ‘race,’ ‘class,’ and ‘gender’—the better to rule the new ‘multicultural’ society.

Sowell substantiates his critique with chapters describing the arguments the new aristocrats make in defense of their claims to rule. He groups these arguments into five policy areas: economics, social relations, the information and opinion industries (the media, academia), law, and foreign relations (particularly as they relate to war).

Not surprisingly, one of Sowell’s most trenchant chapters addresses intellectuals’ characteristic economic fallacies. For example, intellectuals make much of the widening income gap between rich and poor, a Marxist theme that renews itself periodically, lending weight to calls for the political authority to redress injustice. True in itself, this claim ignores the fact that the actual members of the several economic classes constantly change, as does the relative prosperity of all classes. So, for example, a 22-year-old college graduate may begin her working life as a low-income worker, but likely will not remain one for more than a few years. “Low-income” is itself a relative term, as the poor of 2010 in the United States enjoy better lives than the poor of 1960.

These facts notwithstanding, the ‘income gap’ performs usefully when described as a social problem that cries out for a solution. As one might expect, the solution does not involve the workings of a free market so much as economic and social planning conceived by the intellectuals and carried out by the intelligentsia—neo-aristocrats armed by intellect supplemented with compassion. To the question, ‘So what?’ Sowell replies: “The crucial distinction between market transactions and collective decision-making is that in the market people are rewarded according to the value of their goods and services to those particular individuals who receive those goods and services, and who have every incentive to seek alternative sources, so as to minimize their costs, just as sellers of goods and services have every incentive to seek the highest bids for what they have to offer. But collective decision-making by third parties allows those third parties to superimpose their preferences on others at no cost to themselves, and to become the arbiters of other people’s economic fate without accountability for the consequences.”

Planners in a government bureaucracy differ from planners in a corporate bureaucracy because they have far less responsibility for ‘making the payroll’; if the government’s numbers don’t add up, they raise taxes, inflate the currency, blame the banks. Insulated from the consequences of their actions more than their counterparts in the market, they need not know, and may not want to know, how difficult running a business is.

As an economist, Sowell has always avoided that simplistic abstraction, Homo economicus. He unfailingly points to social customs, habits of mind and heart that shape the economic choices of individuals. This makes him alert to the repercussions of the intellectuals’ “social vision,” as he calls it. Following a line of thought as old as the Enlightenment, intellectuals assume the malleability of social customs and institutions. Born free but everywhere in chains, with no intractable natural flaws or original sins, mankind can and should break their mind-forged manacles. Social visionaries “are in a sense defending their very souls” as perfectible by the reform of social institutions, a reform movement they step up to lead.

Accurate so far as it goes, Sowell’s account of social visionaries overlooks the historicism of social visionaries ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ Rousseau’s teaching on the malleability of society and indeed of human nature itself served as a mere prelude to the relocation of moral and political authority from God and nature to the ‘march of history,’ which such thinkers as Hegel and Marx took to be a course of dialectical progress toward a perfected end state. This usefully allowed the intelligentsia to define as ‘reactionary’ any one and any thing that impeded progress, as defined and guided by the progressives—i.e., themselves. Because he overlooks this major refinement of the intellectuals’ line of attack, Sowell can praise Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose supposed realism and pragmatism merely underwrite yet another exercise in the social-historicist construction of truth. Sowell writes, “The exceptional facility of intellectuals with abstractions does not eliminate the difference between those abstractions and the real world.” True enough, but that’s the problem historicism, whether in ‘idealist’ or ‘realist’ mode, was designed to solve, and failed to solve. Historicism attempts to make the real ideal and the ideal real; might is right, and vice-versa. On this, there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Holmes and someone like Woodrow Wilson, and a world of difference between either of them and Washington or Lincoln.

Sowell puts his most important chapter squarely in the middle of the book. Apparently a discussion of the intellectuals’ doings in academia and the media, it really addresses the fundamental problem of epistemology. No mean analyst of statistics, Sowell shows how the intellectuals avoid serious criticism of their projects by “filtering out information contrary to their conception of how the world is or ought to be.” Sometimes this gets done crudely, as when Stalinist or Maoist genocides simply proceed unreported. More subtly, an intellectual might select statistics that support his argument and ignore the others, as when numbers on violent crime are manipulated to ‘prove’ that gun control cuts homicide rates. On the verbal level, re-labeling can sanitize a soiled term; thus did self-described ‘progressives’ start calling themselves ‘liberals’ in the 1920s, when Wilsonianism lost its luster, then went back to being ‘progressives’ in the early 2000s, after ‘liberalism’ got loaded, courtesy of conservative radio talk show hosts.

Sowell remarks the limits of such manipulation of knowledge. The truth cannot be subjective, he observes, or else no one would survive very long. Yes, a goldfinch perceives reality differently than humans do, but members of both species demonstrably make mistakes due to misperception of their surroundings. The principle of radical subjectivism, supporting moral and cultural relativism, must be wrong.

Sophistry impedes perception of reality (for humans, at any rate). Media and academic deployment of melodrama, conspiracy theories, and ‘just-so’ stories—appeals to satisfying but delusive emotions—supply the energy for what might otherwise strike most people as rather dry theories cooked up by geeky scribblers and policy wonks. The true appeal of historicist progressivism (one might add) is the universal lure of the happy ending at the end of all our hardships and sorrows.

In the modern world intellectuals claimed the law as their domain early on. Sowell argues that when judges stop saying ‘what the law is’ in the sense of saying what the language of the law in front of them meant to the lawmakers, and when they start saying what the law is in the sense of making the law themselves, they effectively contravene the Constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. By becoming legislators they make the characteristic modern-intellectuals’ move: “going beyond one’s expertise.” Following a number of scholars, Sowell takes note of such phrases as “the elastic Constitution” (Wilson) and “the living Constitution” (Roscoe Pound)—wide roadways through which many a pseudo-interpretive truck may be driven. Such formulations serve “the sociological jurist”: the member of “a progressive and enlightened caste whose conceptions are in advance of the public and whose leadership is bringing popular thought to a higher level,” as Pound put it in 1907. Judges so styled look to effect a result instead of applying the law to a case. Having no training in social analysis, they frequently get their sociology wrong, too.

War is a topic quite far from the expertise of an economist. Unlike many economists in the liberal camp—liberal in the Bright-and-Cobden sense, not in the progressives’—Sowell looks at war with a steady gaze, never supposing that peaceful economic competition will entirely replace it. He makes good sport of deflating the unthinking rhetorical antics of many pacifist intellectuals. In his two chapters on intellectuals’ pronouncements on war, Sowell does best when he avails himself of the writings of a statesman long experienced in war: Winston Churchill. Using Churchill as his guide, he recalls the follies of the 1930s intellectuals who, mixing their fears with hope, called Hitler a moderate while espousing a doctrinaire pacifism that the Nazi leader never professed to share. Sowell also does well on the Vietnam War, relying in large measure on the writings of Korean War veteran and experienced war correspondent Peter Braestrup. He goes off the rails on the First World War, precisely because he does not consult his favorite Churchill or (to give but one example) Charles de Gaulle’s brilliant and pity first book, The Enemy’s House Divided. As a result, he criticizes Wilson for entering the war at all, arguing that the “ostensible cause” of Wilson’s action, German submarine attacks on American shipping, served merely as a cloak for that inveterate intellectual’s “ideological aggrandizement.”

Sowell’s argument here is worth unpacking, and refuting, in more detail, not the least for its illustration of one of his own principal theses—the danger of intellectuals ranging beyond their area of expertise—but mostly because he misses a subtler dimension of the intellectuals’ influence upon the intelligentsia, a dimension that adds resonance to his own insights. The Germans, he begins, sank passenger ships with Americans on board. “But these were ships entering a war zone in which both the British and the Germans were maintaining naval blockades, the former with surface ships and the latter with submarines—and each with the intention of denying the other both war materiel and food.” The Lusitania “was, years later, revealed to have been secretly carrying military supplies.” Further, submarines simply cannot “give warnings and pauses to let crews and passengers disembark before sinking passenger ships.” To Sowell, the fault lies not with the Germans in deploying a class of warships utterly wrong for the task assigned them, but with Wilson, for asserting “a right of Americans to sail safely into blockaded ports during wartime.” But maybe he wanted to court murderous attack in order to fight to make the world safe for democracy.

As I have often asked myself while contemplating a large pizza, where to begin? The war supplies in question, listed on the ship’s manifest and therefore no remarkable secret at all, consisted mostly of rifle ammunition and other items allowed under U. S. law at the time. American statesmen had claimed the right to undertake neutral shipping in wartime since the founding. If the Germans had wanted to exercise the right to block military supplies to their enemies, they needed to deploy the surface ships that would have enabled them to board and inspect the ships of the neutral powers. If they lacked such ships, they had two decent options: to forego the blockade, treating it as a handicap in fighting that particular war; or, better still, to refuse to fight the war in the first place, to avoid signaling Austria to move against Serbia. That would have saved everyone, including Wilson, a great deal of trouble.

As Churchill and de Gaulle show, the German military commanders and civilian rulers understood that unrestrained submarine warfare—attacks on commercial vessels—could very well bring the Americans into the war. Wilson got in only after some two years of such attacks—the Lusitania having been sunk in 1915; during those two year, the Germans themselves ratcheted the submarine attacks up and down, as the internal debate raged—a debate fundamentally centered on the character of the German regime itself, and in particular whether it would be ruled by civilians or soldiers. Wilson described his reluctance to make war not in ideological terms but in light of his memories of the Civil War; his father, a Presbyterian pastor, had opened his churchyard in Augusta for use as a field hospital, and the boy saw the wounded soldiers there. There were very few Americans who did not regard the repeated German depredations, taken together, as a casus belli. Wilson didn’t lead public opinion this time, he followed it. As far as making the world safe for democracy went, Wilson merely responded to one of the principal war aims of the German militarists, namely, to make the world unsafe for democracy. This had been the aim of the Holy Alliance powers in the previous century, as well. The fact that those militarists tried again, two decades later, speaks not against the war but against the peace settlement—Churchill’s point in his great book, The Aftermath.

As de Gaulle shows, it was not so much Wilson but the Germans who were in the thrall of ideology during the war. Considering the military chieftains who finally ruled Germany, de Gaulle writes, “Perhaps one finds in their proceedings the imprint of the theories of Nietzsche on the Elite and the Superman”—theories valorizing “the will to power, the taste for risk, the contempt for others that one sees in Zarathustra, who appeared to these impassioned ambitieux as the ideal to which they should aspire.” In his excellent introduction to his English translation of de Gaulle’s book, Robert Eden explains that Nietzsche did not give the German warriors a doctrine—one might search a long time for a usable war plan in the philosopher’s writings—but rather generated a climate of opinion and sentiment that made such rashness as they exhibited seem admirable, a sign of vitality, a path to domination, to nobility. Reading Nietzsche, breathing in the moral atmosphere Nietzsche and his intellectual epigoni fostered, a generation of spirited warriors learned not to moderate and discipline their spiritedness but to let it run free—disastrously, for themselves, their country, and for Europe. An instance of intellectuals’ unwisdom, indeed.

One thus concludes that Sowell is often right even when he is wrong—that is, more right than he knows. And he very well knows the most important thing about his life’s work: In the end he is an economist who looks beyond the often-dismal science to an economy of the spirit.

‘Utopia’ means ‘no place’ as well as ‘good place,’ so founding one outside book would require giving no place, negating the airy nothingness of imagination. If you can dream it, you can do it, utopians say. Realists reply, Why so? and utopians answer, Why not? The problem with the question, ‘Why not?’ is its openness; an evil man can pose it as easily as good one. One should deal circumspectly with utopians.

Nathaniel Hawthorne prefaces The Blithedale Romance circumspectly, with a ‘cover’ story. [1] Although Blithedale (‘Happy Valley’) resembles the Brook Farm commune founded in Roxbury, Massachusetts in 1840, Hawthorne professedly does not intend “to illustrate a theory, or elicit a conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to socialism” (633). Hawthorne invites his readers to think undogmatically about a political dogma. He claims a purely literary reason for selecting this no-place for his setting. An “American romancer” needs “an atmosphere of strange enchantment” not easily found in his matter-of-fact commercial republic. Brook Farm/Blithedale was just such a place, “essentially a day-dream, and not yet a fact”—”an available foothold between fiction and reality” (674). By so characterizing the Roxbury utopia, Hawthorne quietly puts its founders (himself included) in their place, while saying nothing to provoke ideological antagonism. To thoughtful readers he uncovers himself as a politic man.

His apologia leads such readers to wonder, Why be a “romancer” at all? Why not be novelist who stays closer to hard facts? Or a journalist, or an essayist? the author selects the genre, not the other way around. Hawthorne wrote in a variety of genres. Why choose this one?

To write astringently about Brook Farm in 1852, a decade or so after living there, would have exposed Hawthorne to hazards akin to the political speaker who engages in ‘personalities.’ Moreover, although Brook Farm had faded away by 1852, reform politics had strengthened, at least in New England; abolitionism, women’s rights, pacifism, and prohibition (of alcohol and even tobacco, a crop harvested by slaves) all had their fervent champions, many of whom endorsed all of those reforms more or less at once. The collision of romanticism with American politics would precipitate such controversy as might end in violence. A head-on critique, a polemic or word-war, would only exacerbate tensions. A prudent man might prefer indirection. A sort of romance novel—with its vivid characters, men who aspire to heroism, ladies with mysterious pasts, love repressed and expressed—might neutralize romantic toxins with romantic and mock-romantic anti-toxins. A romance after all will hold the attention of romantic souls first of all; a certain sort of romance might cure them of romantic excesses. Can there be a prudent romance?

Finally, does political life itself not have a touch of romance in it, even in the sobersided commercial republic? He would rule by ballots rather than bullets needs to tell a story about himself in order to get elected; he needs to become Old Tippecanoe, Dr. New Deal, or the Man from Hope. Even the regime of enlightened self-interest runs also on stirring fictions and semi-fictions that make an election seem more than the usual rat race. Hawthorne in his preface shows himself both politic with respect to his circumstances nd understanding with respect to American politics, indeed politics generally.

He divides his romance into twenty-nine chapters, narrated by a man whose name, Miles Coverdale, incorporates covering or masking. Scholars have noticed that a dale or valley symbolizes the human heart in Hawthorne’s fiction; Mr. Covered-heart will tell us about the no-place of Happy Heart, in a romance by a writer with a cover story. As for “Miles,” it suggests distance; Coverdale characteristically distances himself, does not fully participate in life real or utopian, in order to see clearly, and to consider what he sees. His watchfulness adds nothing to his popularity, to his political effectiveness in a democratic society, but it does make him a more plausible than any whole-souledly political actor would be.

Inasmuch as the word ‘utopia’ invites one to think about place, one may group the chapters here according to the place in which the narrator resides. Coverdale walks miles back and forth between Boston and Blithedale. The first and final chapters complement one another; each is set in the city. The second and fourth chapter groups (chapters 2-15 and chapters 24-28) describe the narrator’s stays in the countryside commune. The central group of chapters see Coverdale in the city. The city, Boston, means politics and commerce; the country commune founds itself on principles opposed to American commercial republicanism, albeit not entirely opposed to all American impulses, particularly in New England: Many critics have noticed in the Blithedalers the American Puritan and even American Enlightenment urge to secede from a corrupt old world and start anew. [3] Americans need to distinguish among secessions. Some are reasonable, some merely passion-driven, factitious.

The first chapter, “Old Moodie,” contrasts with the last chapter, “Miles Coverdale’s Confession.” Each title points to a man. Old Moodie, an eccentric partly masked by an eye-patch, accosts the bachelor-poet Coverdale, whom Moodie knows to be ready to take up residence at Blithedale. Old Moodie almost but not quite asks Coverdale to do him “a very great favor,” unspecified, then reconsiders and demurs. His secret, a story of love gone very wrong, counterbalances the self-uncovering of Coverdale’s own futile love in chapter 29. Like politics, so often fueled by libido dominandi, romantic love lends itself to covering, to stratagem, to subterfuge. Aristotle sees that the love of man and woman can yield a family, then link with other families to form clans, tribes, villages, and finally the political community. Modern romantic love complicates the very foundation of political life by democratizing it, so to speak. By making marriage a love-match, it introduces the complexities of the lovers’ assent, and consequently their passions, into the very foundations of the city, where before the young had done their fathers’ bidding in sustaining the family founded by distant ancestors. Coverdale himself seems to have no family. Not only has he no wife or children, he seems not to have parents or relations of any sort. He is a man without connections, if not qualities. If Coverdale is young man so to speak without parents, Old Moodie will turn out to be a father so to speak without children, a man who sired but did not really father two daughters who find themselves living together for the first time at Blithedale. Blithedale is indeed utopia, a no-place populated in part not by fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, but by ‘consenting adults’ whose real families are nowhere to be seen. [4] They are social atoms who suppose themselves to oppose commercial republicanism with communitarianism, the “blithe tones of brotherhood” (641), but in fact exaggerate or caricature its individualism. Blithedale is, as one chapter title calls it, “a modern Arcadia,” and thus no Arcadia at all.

Blithedale as No-Place
The first group of chapters, set in Blithedale, find Coverdale’s attention quickly focused on two women and one man. [5] Zenobia’s name and nature belie the ostensible egalitarianism of communitarianism conceived democratically. “Zenobia” is a pen name, “a sort of mask” (637), for a feminist literary lioness with “something imperial” about her: “However humble looked her new philosophy, [she] had as much native pride as any queen would have known what to do with” (642-643). She’s taken her name from the third-century queen of Palmyra, whom we meet in Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [6] Such spiritedness by nature precludes social and political equality from the start. Such a one must rule, ruin, or be ruined. At the founding of paradisiacal Blithedale, she is both Eve (646-647) and Pandora (652), unwittingly bringing evils. [7] That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia, the type of an Oriental despot, poses a problem that Blithedale utopianism cannot cure, one that the great commercial republic itself can only ‘kill.’ That commercial-republican America can produce a Zenobia also suggests the limits even carefully-designed political institutions and the way of life they reinforce can have over some human souls—bad news for good-place aspirations.

The other woman, young and wan, is carried in out of the snowstorm half-frozen. Eventually discovered as Zenobia’s half-sister, offspring of Old Moodie’s second marriage, Priscilla arrives masked or veiled as it were, wrapped in a cloak against the cold. Anything but imperial, she attaches herself to Zenobia, seeking and needing protection and just rule. A natural rank-order establishes itself on the first day of Coverdale’s stay at Blithedale.

The man, Hollingsworth (his worth will indeed finally sound hollow, not holy, when tested), tends Coverdale patiently when the poetaster takes ill, less out of compassion than to attach an ally by the cords of obligation. The only Blithedalian to ask a blessing in prayer, he prays not for the successful founding of Blithedale. Hollingworth subverts the commune even more radically than Zenobia does, coming to it not as a citizen but as a revolutionary under cover. Hollingsworth wants to turn Blithedale into the site of a reformatory for criminals, and in his monomaniacal reformism he cares for Coverdale “only for the ulterior purpose of making me a proselyte to his views” (681). He seeks co-conspirators for a bloodless coup d’état, a revolution to replace the revolutionary experiment the others have consented to undertake. Declaiming vehemently against the French socialist Fourier, who would build socialism upon selfishness (677), he mistakes his own “terrible egoism” for “an angel of God” (679). Hollingworth had worked as a blacksmith; Hephaestus numbered among the gods Zeus charged with the creation of Pandora. Hephaestus is a sort of father to Pandora. Blithedale’s Pandora, Zenobia, and her half-sister both fall in love with Hollingsworth. Their love for a superficially strong megalomaniac derives from their real father’s failure to father.

Sickness (and by implication death) takes some of the blitheness out of the dale. Imagery of cold and marble prefigure death at Blithedale (664). Coverdale’s suggestion to build a cemetery gets brushed aside; the residents of Happy Valley want no part of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Sickness and death put natural limits on utopia. So does work. After recovering from his illness, Coverdale quickly finds that the community needs a sort of foreign policy, a way of competing economically with the city (649). A true no-place—the just city of Plato’s Republic, for example—need not worry about foreigners, but this no-place is placed, and so must. To compete, it needs workers, not poets or feminist tractarian-orators, and Coverdale does work, hard, experiencing for the first time, he later sees, “the curse of Adam’s posterity” (688-689). In any real place, a life balancing work and leisure proves nearly impossible. The curse of Adam’s posterity is here in the new Paradise; merely communalizing labor does nothing to lift that curse. Blithedale’s egalitarianism precludes even the very limited leisure seen in Socrates’ utopia, restricted to the philosopher-kings and compromised even for them because they must take the time to rule their inferiors. there will never be a ‘synthesis’ of democracy nd utopia. The cure for the ills of utopianism is not more democracy.

Modern science gives intellectual and even some moral authority to the modern commercial republic, assisting citizen in their quest for the conquest of nature in order to procure self-preservation and comfort. But the Promethean technology that enables citizens to dispense with slaves has yet to enable commercial republicans to work less hard, although they do work less with their bodies. For all its rhetoric of Enlightenment, modern science covers a heart that beats for power, not liberty. In Boston, Coverdale had seen an exhibition of clairvoyance—forward-seeing, literally pro-methean—starring The Veiled Lady, a covered, mysterious figure whom Coverdale calls “one of the earliest that had indicated the birth of a new science, or the revival of an old humbug” (635). In replacing the authority of God (in Enlightenment terms, priestcraft) with the authority of science, we must still ask: Is the latest modern marvel a produce of science or of quackery, real knowledge or clever sham? [8]  The Veiled Lady’s partner is a Professor Westervelt (‘Western-world’), a Satanic mesmerist who later slithers into mock-Edenic Blithedale, confiding truths and lies. The main truths: that Hollingsworth cares less for Zenobia than for the money she can donate to his projected reformatory (this, to Coverdale); that Priscilla is the Veiled Lady and Zenobia’s half-sister (this, to his ex-lover, Zenobia). The main lie: his very being, which uses truth cynically, to rule or, failing that, to ruin. Westervelt lives in the shadow-world of the Enlightenment project, seeing that if science can conquer nature the appearance of science, a mask of scientism, can gull citizens to consent to tyranny. Both sisters, without the natural protection of a fatherly father, have at different times succumbed to Westervelt’s half-real, half-fraudulent charms—modest Priscilla to the charm of his mesmerism, the erotic and spirited Zenobia to the charms of his body. Mesmerism combines a sort of science with a sort of rhetoric; Westervelt’s personal beauty is artificially enhanced with false teeth and fancy clothes.

As for the fourth character, the narrator himself, in the first set of Blithedale chapters he reveals more than he knows. Coverdale reveals himself as a modern and democratized man, a being of denatured manliness, “a devoted epicure of [his] own emotions” (760). Of his Blithedale foray he rightly says, near the outset, “the greatest obstacle to being heroic”—to being a man in full—”is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove oneself a fool; the truest wisdom is to resist the doubt; the profoundest wisdom is to know when it ought to be resisted, and when obeyed” (640). Just so, especially in a political enterprise, especially an enterprise of political reform, and most especially in the most radical enterprise of political reform, the founding of a new political community. In this highest politics, heroism, the finest spiritedness, combines with prudence or practical wisdom to form the statesman-founder or the preserver of some good founding. Coverdale finds such wisdom, but only retrospectively. Although attracted, he could not, “under any circumstances, have fallen in love with Zenobia” (672), as a real man might have done; he reads the George Sand romances she gives him without discernible effect. He dislikes his own sex (men are such brutes, he muses [695]); he contends that the best aspect of a man’s soul is seen when womanly caring shines through (667); he says that he wishes he could be ruled by women instead of men. But the two sisters he cares for at Blithedale love the blow-hard but at least superficially manly Hollingsworth, armed with the “necromancy” of rhetoric (741)—when they are not in the thrall of that other magician, Westervelt. Coverdale lacks even the modest degree of manliness that would attract a woman sufficiently to want to rule him. He can neither rule nor be ruled, and so lacks both characteristics of the Aristotelian citizen.

Covering himself, he quite literally observes others from all angles; from below, when listening to Hollingsworth’s harangues delivered atop a large rock; from above, when in an apartment in town, looking into the windows across the street, or in a leafy bower in the woods at Blithedale. He acts effectively only in slavish work, never in political rule. Coverdale has one strength, born of passivity; he can resist the machinations of stronger men. He instantly spots Westervelt as an evil mountebank, and sees through Hollingsworth, too, not so quickly. In the book’s central chapter, “A Crisis,” he resists Hollingsworth’s offer of subordinate partnership in the criminal-reformatory scheme. He is just strong enough to say no, if never strong enough to say yes. Zenobia, so very wrong so often and even wicked in one thing, foretells Coverdale’s fate in her story of a young man, Theodore (literally and ironically, ‘Gift-from-God’), offered the choice of loving the Veiled Lady without seeing her unveiled or unveiling her first but forbidden from having her and longing forever for her face. Coverdale can resist evil, but lacks the manliness to love erotically or Christianly/agapically, which is always, in this world, to love sight-unseen (776-777). Zenobia (‘Gift-from-Zeus’) does see into the covered heart of Mr. Gift-from-God, and judges him not to be God’s gift to women.

Coverdale’s refusal does precipitate a crisis. If Hollingsworth can have no male followers (however minimally manly), only women, he has only one half of what he needs as a founder. His enterprise because no other men will join it, not even weak ones. If the romance ended here, the romancer would have a novella satirizing modern reformers. But Hawthorne will dig deeper.

 

Return to the City

In the central set of chapters Coverdale recounts his time back in the city, after his break with Hollingsworth leaves his bonds with the sisters weakened. Before leaving Blithedale, he visits the communal pigsty, “to take leave of the swine!” (757). In Plato’s Republic, one of Socrates’ young interlocutors pushes his partners to new philosophic heights by dismissing Socrates’ first formulation of the just city as a mere city of pigs, a place where only the most ordinary needs of the body are to be satisfied, while the boldest, most spirited eroticism will starve. Blithedale’s real city of pigs is populated by “greasy citizens” who are “almost stifled and buried alive, in their corporeal substance.” “Peeping at me, an instant, out of their small, red, hardly perceptible eyes”—no visionary madness, here—”they dropt asleep again; yet not so far asleep but that their unctuous bliss was still present to them, betwixt dream and reality” (757-758). In the preface Hawthorne had called Brook Farm itself both daydream and fact, fiction and reality. For Hawthorne as for Plato, the best practical utopians are pigs, who suffer none of the heart-burnings of people.

Going to the countryside means returning to nature, and Hawthorne uses the four natural elements (fire, water, earth, and air) as images throughout. Coverdale returns to the city but discovers for the first time that nature is there, too: sky, rain, fruit trees, grapevines, wind, birds, and a solitary predatory cat. And a human family, the only unbroken one in the novel. The city is natural for human beings; romanticism is mistaken in its naturalism. “‘I bless God for these good folks,’ thought I to myself—’I have not seen a prettier piece of nature, in all my summer in the country…. I will pay them a little more attention, by-and-by'” (764). If he ever does, he doesn’t tell us; that doesn’t prevent us from remembering them. He next sees a dove in a rainstorm, yet does not think of the Covenant, and its promise of a world that will never be destroyed again, by God or man.

Against the persistent strength of nature, human beings in this group of chapters set their art. The first of these artists is the wealthy Zenobia, whom Coverdale spies in her apartment with Priscilla and Westervelt. In town, Zenobia dresses according to her status, transforming herself “into a work of art” (775). Offended by her cold treatment, Coverdale induces her to blush and then to pale by mentioning Hollingsworth, who, he remarks, likely prefers the more pliant of the sisters. Zenobia sees this, too, and attempts to rid herself of her rival by shunting her back to Westervelt, who puts her on exhibit again as the Veiled Lady. Here socialism, scientism, and charlatanry converge explicitly. Westervelt speaks to his audience of marks about “a new era that was dawning upon the world; a near that would link soul to soul, and the present life to what we call futurity, with a closeness that should finally convert both worlds into one great, mutually conscious brotherhood” (806). In this New Age of what Coverdale calls with deliberate paradox “mystical sensuality,” men believe that not only nature but human nature, the human soul, are infinitely malleable (804), stuff for the scientistic and synthetic forging of a new Heaven and a new Earth. This is the utopianism of the evil ‘Why not?’ Coverdale witnesses the mesmeric exploitation of Priscilla for a second time, but does nothing; it is Hollingsworth, who has actively pursued her back to town, who has the strength to call out to her and break the spell. More precisely, the hypnosis fails less by virtue of Hollingsworth’s own strength of character (he is really only reclaiming a lost disciple) as by virtue of the strength of Priscilla’s agapic love for him. The real enchantment of selfless love defeats false enchantment in this true, that is, anti-Romantic, romance.

Zenobia’s betrayal of her sister and Westervelt’s pseudo-mystical, scientistic spell would never have occurred had it not been for the failure of Old Moodie as husband and father. His prideful confession is central to this central, city-centered chapter group. Coverdale finds him in a saloon, after noticing that the same wine that brings joy elsewhere in the world brings a sort of death-in-life drunkenness to the commercial-republican descendants of Puritan New England. Still, as in Plato’s Laws, nature finally exerts its power over regime differences, dissolving some conventional restraints. Wine gets old men talking here, as it did in ancient Greece. Moodie tells his story, the story of a rich man named Fauntleroy (‘Boy-King’) who, basking in the “unnatural light” of his gold and wanting to stay rich, committed a crime, was discovered, and fled; unable to take his punishment like a man, he left his noble wife to die and his beautiful daughter “worse than orphaned” (791-792). With “no adequate control” from any parent, “her character was left to shape itself,” its passions leading the way to the rule of Westervelt. Moodie saw her years later, feeling not shame but pride at “the brilliant child of my prosperity” (800). “In Zenobia, I live again!” (799), his vanity renewed. Soon forgotten—”being a mere image, an optical delusion, crated by the sunshine of prosperity” (792), he had by then remarried, choosing this time a poor seamstress, who bore him another daughter before dying. Like the Emperor Gallienus, the moody old ex-king invites rebellion. Old Moodie is a sort of King Midas, his “fatality” determined by his love of gold, “being to behold whatever he touched dissolve” (793). [9]  And through Moodie Westervelt also came to rule Priscilla. Moodie had caused Priscilla to be brought to Blithedale in order to bring her under Zenobia’s protection (had he, like his elder daughter, finally come to be disenchanted by the charlatan?), hoping that Zenobia would treat her as a sister. But he had long ago destroyed the natural foundations of any sisterly feelings, which would depend upon a shared childhood. What the family could not supply, the watery communitarianism of Blithedale could not begin to replace. Just the opposite: The two sisters became rivals in love, the more powerful betraying the weaker by returning her to a man she knew might destroy Priscilla’s soul.

 

Justice Without Communitarianism

The third group of chapters returns Coverdale to Blithedale, where Hollingsworth, Priscilla, and Zenobia have also come, after the defeat of Westervelt. Coverdale quickly learns that defeating Satan once does not defeat him once and for all, or even for long. The Blithedalers enjoy a masquerade: Dressed in costumes that mix antiquity (the goddess Diana, Arcadian shepherd) with early America (Puritans, shakers, Indians, a witch), and modern America (“a negro of the Jim Crow order,” a Kentucky woodsman), they dance to a fiddler dressed as the Devil (814-815). New-Age Blithedale contains human types that span the history of the West, and so is not entirely new. [10]  All in play—but all linking the Blithedale project imagistically with the more sinister devil and play-actor, Westervelt. Earlier, Westervelt had only lurked on the edges of Blithedale; now, his symbolic equivalent plays the tune to which the communitarians dance. They laugh at each other’s costumes, and Coverdale—concealed and watching, as usual—betrays his presence by laughing, too. The Blithedalers merrily chase him. Escaping, he stumbles over mossed-over logs left by some previous owner, decades before. After tripping over these hard facts produced by nature and a hard-working man, Coverdale wanders off to find his three erstwhile friends, engaged in a real showdown.

Utopians seek justice. In real communities, justice is the aim of the courts. With characteristic drama, Zenobia announces, “I have been on trial for my life,” and Hollingsworth does look the part of the Puritan judge trying a witch, with Priscilla “the pale victim” of witchcraft. Costumed as the Oriental princess for whom she named herself, Zenobia appears “dethroned” (818-819). Appealing her case to a higher authority, God, she counter-accuses Hollingsworth of selfish manipulation. They are right about each other, and God will indeed judge them both. Hollingsworth leaves with Priscilla, who is rejected by her sister in the end because Zenobia cannot humble herself to ask forgiveness for injury. In any event, Priscilla loves Hollingsworth more, needing him and owing him more, and better able to give him what he will need after he gets what he deserves. She is the real human judge, the only one animated by Christian love, and she renders the right decision.

For her part, Zenobia draws a moral—the wrong one. Men always triumph over women on “the battlefield of life” because a woman’s breast has no breastplate, and “the whole universe” makes “common cause against the woman who swerves one hair’s-breath, out of the beaten path”; in so swerving, the woman herself “goes all astray and never sees the world in its true aspect afterwards” (827). In her Epicurean ambition to swerve like one of the philosopher’s atoms, Zenobia succeeds only in confusing herself. Her feminist/reformist self-pity illustrates the truth Zenobia mixes with it. She then denies that Priscilla will be a better wife for Hollingsworth than she could have been; judging by appearances (as she had done in her liaison with the handsome Westervelt, and as an attractive person is especially likely to do), she mistakenly claims that Priscilla is too weak to sustain the marriage. She leaves Coverdale with a final lie. “Sick to death with playing at philanthropy and progress” in “a foolish dream,” she will convert to Catholicism and go “behind the black veil” (830)—in imitative opposition to Priscilla and the silvery veil she wore in the mesmerism shows. In reality, Zenobia has chosen the black veil of suicide; she walks into the water, quenching the fire of her spirit, to the end playing the tragic heroine of a romance novel, a romance Hawthorne undercuts by describing the grisly scene of the recovery of her corpse. [11]  In death she defeats Westervelt—at the funeral he laments, “she is beyond my reach”—and Hollinsworth, who will spend the remainder of his life overcome by guilt for his crime—he, who had intended to reform criminals. But in so triumphing she destroys herself. Only Priscilla really triumphs, now the “guardian” of her broken beloved, whose presence nonetheless protects her in the society of her day better than Zenobia could have done. When Coverdale next sees the couple, Priscilla shows “a veiled happiness in her fair and quiet countenance” (843-844)—veiled, because she cares for an emotional invalid, but true, because agapic love is true. Nature also wins: “While Zenobia lived, Nature was proud of her, and directed all eyes upon that radiant presence, as her fairest handiwork. Zenobia perished. Will not Nature shed a tear? Ah, no! She adopts the calamity at once into her system,” growing grass on the beauty’s grave (845). Nature’s water quenched nature’s fire. The airy, still small voice of the one unselfish human soul in the story and the powerful, silent workings of nature quietly and justly prevail over earthly play-acting and self-importance.

 

Coverdale Uncovered

“I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!” (585). Coverdale’s confession, his unmasking of his own nature, constitutes the book’s last words and confirms Zenobia’s parable about the need to love unselfishly and sight-unseen. Coverdale can perform neither of the principle duties of a citizen: He cannot form a family; he cannot summon the energy to fight in a good cause. [12]  He has the strength to tell a story truly, and no more. Some scholars have called him an unreliable narrator, but he is actually quite reliable at that. It is as a man and a citizen that he cannot be relied upon.

Hawthorne writes no ‘postface’ to balance his preface. He leaves that to his readers. In a way, he also leaves some notes toward one, consisting of his other contemporaneous writings and citizen activities. Some decades ago, American literary scholars debated whether books like The Blithedale Romance ought to be read in their ‘historical context’ or as works with an integrity of their own, apart from the circumstances in which they were written. Both sides were right. To understand the pith of The Blithedale Romance, one needs know little more of Brook Farm and of America than Hawthorne says in the preface, which isn’t much. Utopianism is perennial, and so is a just critique of utopianism. This notwithstanding, it amplifies the understanding of any work of art to look beyond it, to consider the possible political purposes of its author in practice as well as ‘in theory.’ Would it not be good to see if a book that commends prudence as a moral and political good actually tended to serve the ends intended?

Hawthorne’s lifetime coincided with the ever-sharpening factionalism which lead to civil war. [13]  The compromises that had helped to hold the Union together for decades began to unravel as the Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the issue of slavery in the American West. The Democratic Party tried to close regional divisions within itself and within the country at large by nominating Hawthorne’s college friend, Franklin Pierce, for the presidency. A New Hampshireman, Pierce exemplified the political ‘Doughface’—the Northern man with Southern principles who opposed abolitionism as destructive of the American constitutional union. A loyal Democrat, Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of Pierce. Whigs jibed, Hawthorne has given us another romance, and in a way he had. But he intended his Life of Franklin Pierce to complement Blithedale as a cognate act of prudence. [14]

A “man of the people, but whose natural qualities inevitably made him a leader among them,” Pierce had learned patriotism from his father and religion from his mother (83). His father had opposed the “questionable, if not treasonable” disunionism of the High Federalists during the Madison Administration. As a boy, Pierce had listened to his father talking politics with “homely, native eloquence” (84). At Bowdoin College Pierce joined “the progressive or democratic” rather than the “respectable conservative” student party (87). In political life ever since he has remained a firm Jacksonian, detesting governmental centralization as much as disunion. Thus he had never “shun[ned] the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory,” namely, abolitionism (105). Pierce saw that anti-slavery agitation would tear “to pieces the Constitution”; “the evil would be certain, while the good was, at best, a contingency” (163). More likely, abolition of slavery would result in “the ruin of two races which now dwelt in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf” (164). “The theorist may take that view [abolitionism] in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity—who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained—will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative.” (163) Slavery is an evil, but it is “one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivance, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream” (166).

“[G]reat moral reform” occurs not by dint of human will and intellect,” and even when human “progress” effects such reform, it leaves some other “evil or wrong on the path behind it” (166). All of this mixes prudence and romance in much the same proportions as Blithedale does; unfortunately, unlike even a prudent romance, political analysis must do more than illustrate moral truths, although it ought not ignore them. The complacent portrait of amicable master-slave relations and the prophesied ease with which the evil of slavery would dissolve are probably intended as artful romantic tranquilizers for overwrought reformers, but they are utopian-all-too-utopian.

In falsifying these romantic claims, the Civil War shook Hawthorne. Ten years after the publication of Blithedale and the Life, he published one of his last essays, “Chiefly About War Matters,” published in 1862 [15]. He masked himself with the pen name, “A Peaceable Man” and decried the likelihood that domestic politics would be populated by military heroes for the next half-century (one bullet-headed president will succeed another in the Presidential chair”) (367). True to his unionism, he condemned secession as treason.

He rightly predicted that “whoever may be benefitted by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes… who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms” (387). He condemns John Brown (“Nobody was ever more justly hanged”) because such utter lack of prudence alone deserves the most severe requital (397-398), while admitting that “my Yankee heart stirred triumphantly” when he saw the conversion of the fortress Brown had stormed into a prison for rebels (398). The prisoners themselves are men of a type unknown to Northerners; having lived in isolation and illiteracy under the rule of plantation grandees, these peasants had not “the remotest comprehension of what they had been fighting for” (400).

The weakest section of the essay unfortunately forms its centerpiece: Hawthorne’s portrait of Abraham Lincoln. The “essential representative of all the Yankees” is ungainly, kind, naturally if not conventionally dignified, and yes, honest (374-379). Of the stated purpose of Lincoln—to defend the Union in war in order to preserve the Constitution in defense of the natural rights of enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—Hawthorne betrays not the slightest comprehension. He awards more unmixed praise to General George McClellan, the Democratic Party general who would run against Lincoln two years later. By then Hawthorne would be dead, and with him much of the generation that had attempted to invent ways of preserving the Union in peace, mixing realism and self-deception.

If, finally, Hawthorne lacked both the firmness in defense of principle and the practical wisdom of Lincoln, if his prudential critique of utopianism lacks an adequate philosophic dimension to go with its attractive and understated Christianity, that reservation suggests that he was no Shakespeare. ‘Being no Shakespeare’ is a widely-held deficiency among writers, hard to hold against one. ‘Being no Lincoln’ as a political man is also no rarity. The Blithedale Romance remains a fine American antidote to the utopianism some Americans fall into when their patience with their country finally runs out.

 

Notes

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Blithedale Romance. In Millicent Bell, ed.: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels (New York: The Library of America, 1983). All subsequent citations in text. For the best textual exegesis of the novel, one that is especially alert to Hawthorne’s use of symbolism, see Hyatt H. Waggoner: Hawthorne: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).
2. “[T]he humorous sketch of his companions in the custom house”—which Hawthorne published some time before writing the Blithedale Romance—”had called down upon Hawthorne’s head a storm of vilification. Consequently… he wanted to take every precaution to make clear that he was not copying actual people.” See F. O. Matthiessen: American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (London: Oxford University Press, 1972 [1941], 266).
3. See for example A. N. Kaul: “The Blithedale Romance,” in A. N. Kaul, ed.: Hawthorne: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966, 155. Founded by a Unitarian minister, Brook Farm aspired to a sort of secularized or at least non-sectarian community, imitating the structure of the highly sectarian and entirely unsecular communitarian aspirations of the American Puritans. See also George Parsons Lathrop: A Study of Hawthorne (New York: AMS Press, 1969 [1876], 181-190) and Hubert H. Hoeltje: Inward City: The Mind and Heart of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Durham: Duke University Press, 1962).
4. “We had very young people among us, it is true,—downy lads, rosy girls in their first teens, and children of all heights above one’s knee [i.e., no infants at all], but these had chiefly been sent hither for education, which it was one of the objects and methods of our institution to supply” (685-686). Few families ventured upon the utopian project.
5. Some critics have complained that Hawthorne’s portrait of the commune fails because it centers on four characters only. But that is Hawthorne’s point: Human beings naturally settle into cliques of families and friends. Founders of stable political communities recognize that and build upon it. Mis-founded communities, including utopias, do not, and fail.
6. Zenobia was one of several provincial rulers who rebelled during the irregular reign of the Emperor Gellienus in the third century A. D. Mild and indolent, with outbursts of cruelty, Gellienus failed adequately to defend the Empire—something of a parallel, as it happens, to the father of Hawthorne’s Zenobia, as will transpire. Zenobia, “queen of Palmyra and the East,” claimed Cleopatra as an ancestor, equaling her in beauty and surpassing her in chastity and valor (Gibbon: Decline and Fall, I.xi). A woman of “superior genius [who] broke through the servile indolence impoed on her sex by the climate and manners of Asia (I.xi) (its political life proverbial in the West for its luxury, ‘effeminacy,’ and consequent susceptibility to despotism), the heroic Zenobia’s “manly understanding,” her “incomparable prudence and fortitude,” refined by her considerable learning, entitled her to rule. It did not entitle her to rebel, in the estimation of the Romans, and the Emperor Aurelian crushed her army, captured her, fettered her with gold, and exhibited her in a triumph at Rome. In the end, her courage faltered and she “ignominiously purchased life by the sacrifice of her fame and her friends,” blaming her rebellion on her political allies (I.xi). Ancient Palmyra was a place of commerce and arts; its queen’s luxury, spiritedness, treachery, and enslavement in gilded chains prefigures the character and history of her fictional American counterpart.
7. ‘Zenobia’ means ‘gift of Zeus,’ and Pandora was indeed Zeus’ ‘gift’ to human beings. The story of that unpleasant gift forms part of a story of the gods themselves, which for the Greeks was a story of failed fatherhood. The first gods are the offspring of Father Heaven and Mother Earth. Father Heaven hates his own offspring, confining them; in revenge his son Chronos castrates him. Zeus is a new god, an Olympian, who defeats his father Chronos and ends the times when fellowship existed between the gods and men. Zeus founds an oligarchy if not a tyranny in the cosmos. In order to subordinate men, Zeus hid labor-saving fire from them, because leisure provides men with the opportunity to think and thus to rule or challenge the rule of the gods. In the familiar myth, Prometheus—a brother of Chronos and therefore an enemy of the Olympians—steals fire and gives it to men; Zeus retaliates not by injuring Prometheus, whom he did not fear, but men, bidding the blacksmith-god Hephaestus and other Olympians to create the beautiful Pandora, like Hawthorne’s Zenobia a master of rhetoric with a taste for finery in clothing. ‘Pandora’ means ‘all-gifted,’ the one who has been given everything; she in turn will give not good but evils (Hesiod: Works and Days, ll. 42-105). Pandora is the first woman, the Eve of Greek myth, a bringer of evil to men, that is, to males, tormenting them if they marry and leaving them without support of family if they refuse to marry (Hesiod: Theogeny, ll. 585-612). The parallels to Hawthorne’s Zenobia and her two ‘countries,’ Blithedale and America, are clear: the father who gives wealth to the daughter but inculcates no good habits in her, the founding and refounding of political communities that repeat the tensions between fathers and children down through the generations. There is one twist to the Greek myth: Hawthorne has the father, Old Moodie, deliver not Pandora but his other daughter, Priscilla, to Blithedale. In a sense Priscilla  opens a box of evils, leading to the effective destruction of the community, but it is the evil in Zenobia she ‘opens.’ Hawthorne would never simply blame any being or force external to men for evil, knowing that men supply their own evils out of their not-so-blithe hearts.
8. Hawthorne set down a solid foundation stone for his own marriage in writing to his fiancée on the new ‘spiritualism’: “The view which I take of the matter is caused by no want of faith in mysteries, but from a deep reverence of the soul…. Keep the imagination sane.” (Cited in Matthiessen, op. cit., 205). Keeping the imagination sane is the purpose of Hawthornian romance. In a more directly political way, Hawthorne also wrote, in 1844, that the American Revolution “did not, like that of France, go so deep as to disturb the common sense of the country.” (“A Book of Autographs,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters [Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900, 344]).
9. Kaul says that Old Moodie’s story “might be called The Parable of the American,” a riches-to-rags saga of a man who lives in the two American nations of rich and poor (Kaul, op. cit., 59). If anything, this is a reverse parable, a reverse Horatio Alger plot designed before the invention of Horatio Alger, just as Hawthorne’s Blithedale is a refutation of Marxist utopianism before Marx. Neither capitalism nor socialism wins Hawthorne’s wholehearted allegiance.
10. In Matthiessen’s words, “Unlike virtually all the other spokesmen of the day, [Hawthorne] could never feel that America was a new world…. Even at Brook Farm, he  had not been able to share in the declaration that the new age was the dawn of untried possibilities” (op. cit., 322).
11. A real Catholic, Orestes Brownson, wrote in a contemporary review that Hawthorne erred in having Zenobia commit suicide: “Women of her large experience and   free principles never kill themselves for disappointed affection” (Review, Brownson’s Literary Quarterly, October 1852; quoted in J. Donald Crowley, ed.: Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1970, 266). Here Brownson is too much the realist, ignoring the genre Hawthorne has chosen.   Zenobia must die, because in romances justice must triumph.
12. “Were there any cause, in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man’s dying for, and which my death would benefit, then—provided, however, the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble—methinks I might be bold to offer up my life” (847).
13. The best account of Hawthorne’s politics is Lawrence Sargent Hall: Hawthorne: Critic of Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944). Hall skillfully links Hawthorne’s writings with his political activities, including his tenure in the American consulate in London during the Pierce Administration.
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne: Life of Franklin Pierce, in Miscellanies: Biographical and Other Sketches and Letters (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900). All citations in text. On the Whiggish jibe, see Matthiessen op. cit., 316-317.
15. Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Chiefly About War Matters,” in Miscellanies, op. cit.  All citations in text.