Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth, or The Long Parliament.  Stephen Holmes, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

 

Conceived in large part for war, the modern state extracted revenues from the people it ruled with greater ease than had been possible for the feudal state. Whether under a regime of the one, the few, or the many, centralization of ruling institutions enhances the authority to defend, to attack, and to tax. England in the seventeenth century was no different, but in its case the regime struggle between the one and the few, seemingly ended by the Tudors, reappeared in the form of a struggle between monarch and Parliament, with both sides appealing to the many for support. 

The “Long Parliament”—long because it began in 1640 and dissolved twenty years later—followed the “Short Parliament,” which lasted a mere three weeks, itself following an eleven-year period when Parliament didn’t convene at all. Charles I summoned Parliament to vote on funding for a war against recalcitrant Scots. When Parliament refused to cooperate unless grievances about royal abuses of power were address, the king unhesitatingly sent the gentlemen home. The reason the Long Parliament was able to be so, well, long was that members had stipulated that it could only be dissolved if they agreed to it. 

Length of tenure did not assure stability of government. On the contrary, this Parliament saw civil war in England, as Oliver Cromwell seized power and executed Charles, whose son then laid claim to the throne. Charles II lost the war and spent nine years in exile along with many royalists, including Mr. Hobbes. He returned to rule in 1660. 

Why did British politics take this catastrophic turn? What caused the “Behemoth” of the Long Parliament to rear its head, bringing down Job-like affliction upon the English? Hobbes thought he knew. As Stephen Holmes writes in his excellent introduction, “the causes of the upheaval were not economic and legal, as James Harrington had argued in Oceana (1656), but rather psychological and ideological. Civil war broke out because key actors were bewitched by irrational passions and tragically misled by doctrinal errors.” Moreover, in Hobbes’s view, the best defense against the behemoths of this world isn’t God, as the Bible would have it, but “leviathan,” the modern state whose portrait he’d drawn in the midst of the troubles. 

In his Epistle Dedicatory to his fellow royalist and religious skeptic Sir Henry Bennet, Baron of Arlington, Hobbes explains that his book consists of four dialogues. The first dialogue identifies “the seed” of the “memorable civil war” along with “certain opinions in divinity and politics.” The second dialogue describes “the growth” of the war “in declarations, remonstrances, and other writings between the King and Parliament published.” The third and fourth dialogues provide “a very short epitome of the war itself,” drawn from James Heath’s Chronicle of the Late Intestine War (1661). [1]

Dialogue I consists of a conversation between “A,” a witness to the war, and “B,” a younger man who wants to learn about it, seeking to know “the relation of the actions you then saw, and of their causes, pretensions, justice, order, artifice, and event.” “A” considers the war a peak of injustice and folly, the product of hypocrisy and self-conceit. “The people were corrupted generally, and disobedient persons esteemed the best patriots,” despite the merits of King Charles I, a man who lacked “no virtue, either of body or mind.” The people “would have taken either side for pay or plunder,” but the king’s treasury was low, and his enemies had money. But there was more at work than material inducement. The corruption extended to the people’s minds. Hobbes identifies seven types of seducers: Presbyterian ministers; Catholics; advocates of religious liberty (Independents, Anabaptists, Fifth-Monarchy men, Quakers, and miscellaneous smaller sects); liberally-educated republican parliamentarians; urban businessmen (admirers of the commercial Dutch Republic); the poor (who welcomed war as a means of advancement); and the self-seducing people themselves, “ignorant of their duty,” with “no rule of equity.” The central group on the list of religious libertarians, the Fifth-Monarchy men, “held that Christ’s was at this time to begin upon the earth.” The central group on the overall list is the ‘classical republicans.’ That is, “A” hints that the key enemies of Great Britain’s Anglican and monarchist modern state were ‘apocalyptics’ or revolutionaries religious and secular.

He nonetheless begins his more detailed analysis with the second group, the Catholics, who were eager to restore the authority of Rome that English monarchs had overthrown in the previous century. That authority was founded on a particular interpretation of Scripture, to which the Church added the claim that the Pope serves as God’s representative on earth. Pointing out the “great difference between a subject and a disciple, and between teaching and commanding,” “B”—rather in the future spirit of Voltaire, proving that there can be an apostolic succession among atheists, too—suggests that in claiming the role of “supreme judge concerning lawfulness of marriage,” including “the hereditary succession of kings,” the pope has established “a monopoly of women,” the reverse image of Plato’s community of wives in the Republic. In further claiming the right to absolve subjects of their duties and oaths to their lawful sovereigns by proclaiming those sovereigns heretics, the pope establishes “two kingdoms in one and the same nation and no man [is] able to know which of his masters he must obey.” For his part, “A” prefers to “obey that master that had the right of making laws and of inflicting punishments.” If the pope were to counter-argue that he wields both a king’s right to kill the body and God’s right to kill a soul by means of excommunication, “A” replies that the “disobedience to the king’s law is sin and to die unrepentant of sin is also to be damned”—leaving his readers, and his sovereign, damned if they do and damned if they don’t. And that is precisely his point: What is called heresy is rightly considered as no more than “a private opinion,” since if transferred to the public sphere it leads to a flat contradiction.

Heresy consists of a challenge to “the power spiritual,” “A” continues. When “B,” a good Protestant, asks, “who can tell what is declared by the Scriptures, which every man is allowed to read and interpret for himself?” “A” answers that the four Church Councils (those at Nicaea, Macedonius, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, respectively) “had no obligatory force but from the authority of the Emperor.” The Emperor Constantine was never told that his conversion to Christianity made him subject to Pope Sylvester; either the pope claimed no legislative power over secular monarchs at that time or he committed an act of “foul play” by failing to disclose his alleged authority. Moreover, a Catholic “friar” in Peru had his king, Atabalipa, “murdered” for refusing to consent to the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—rather forcefully attesting to Church acquiescence to secular authority. The popes only began their encroachments on that authority when Rome was overrun by barbarians and the people no longer so much feared the Emperors, who lived “far off at Constantinople” and could not come to their aid. It was “the negligence of the Emperors” which allowed the clergy, not letting a good crisis go to waste, to insinuate into the people the opinion that the pope and his subordinates had the true power.

“B” then preaches out of the text of Leviathan: God “gives all the kingdoms of the world, which nevertheless proceed from the consent of the people, either for fear or hope.” The Pope doesn’t bestow kingdoms upon kings, on behalf of God; on the contrary, “the Popes themselves received the Papacy from the Emperors”—that is, the “donation” of Rome to the popes came from the Emperor Constantine after his conversion. 

Recurring to the theme of the papal monopoly of women, “A” declaims against the doctrine of priestly celibacy. Under this law, either a king may not be a clergyman, which cuts him off from “a great part of the reverence due to him from the most religious part of his subjects,” or he will enter the church and sacrifice his right to sire lawful heirs to his throne. Either way, “in any controversy between him and the Pope…his people would be against him,” and so (to continue the implied analogy to Plato’s Republic) he would also lose the support of the ‘guardian’ class of his kingdom, as the pope gets “a great many lusty bachelors at his service.” By turning many among every kingdom’s warrior spirits into spiritual warriors, the pope empowers himself and weakens the secular monarchs. “B” concurs. A “Christian king, or state,” even if well provisioned in money and arms, will have difficulty recruiting soldiers in a Catholic country, “for their subjects will hardly be drawn into the field and fight with courage against their consciences.” Let’s not go so far, cynical “A” rejoins. After all, “there are but few whose consciences are so tender as to refuse money when they want it.” The real danger comes when “the Pope,” exercising his own considerable powers of the purse, “gives power to one king to invade another.” For Hobbes, material causes are the proverbial bottom line of human conduct.

For his part, “B” continues to insist on the malign effects of claims made by spiritual powers. The power of absolution of sins, supplementing the previously mentioned power of damnation, coupled with the alleged power of transubstantiating material things into spiritual things, “would have an effect on me”—if he believed it—to “make me think them gods, and to stand in awe of them as of God himself, if he were visibly present.” As private men, preaching friars in the pope’s spiritual army can “call the people together, and make orations to them frequently…without first making the state acquainted” with what they are doing and what they are saying. “A” is less concerned about what doctrines the friars tell the people to believe as the person whom they are telling the people to believe. “For the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people.” With the preaching friars, the pope takes hold of the terms of the social contract. “The end which the Pope had in multiplying sermons, was no other but to prop and enlarge his own authority over all Christian Kings and States.” The infection has spread even to the universities, and therefore to the few and not only the many, by the Thomistic blend of Aristotelian philosophy with Catholic-Christian doctrine. The “great books of school-divinity” are incomprehensible even to their authors. Oxford University began under the auspices of the pope. Q.E.D., in the view of Hobbes, who as a philosopher opposed Aristotle’s teleological understanding of nature as vigorously as he opposed Catholic Christianity.

And not only Catholic Christianity. The toleration of Christian preaching without state supervision is a feature of Christianity itself. Before Constantine, the Roman emperors kept a suspicious eye on Christian preachers, persecuting them for any political heresies they might commit. In England, Henry VIII prudently ‘updated’ this policy by making Christianity a civil religion, founding the Anglican Church for that purpose. 

But, given the well-designed sway of clergy over the few and the many alike, did Henry manage that? In England, a scandal among the Catholic clergy turned the opinion of “the gentry and men of good education” against them; since these men were in Parliament, the people inclined to support them. Meanwhile, Lutheranism had advanced in England and—centrally, and keeping with Hobbesian materialism—revenues from Catholic institutions were sent by the king to “eminent gentlemen in every county,” confirming their support. Henry VIII didn’t hesitate to use force against his enemies, punishing the opposition quickly and severely. Finally, invasion from abroad by Catholic forces was impossible because Spanish and French forces were fighting each other. “A” maintains that other European monarchs recognized the “cheat” of the Papacy but let the pope’s “power continue, every one hoping to make use of it, when there should be cause, against his neighbor.”

Lutheranism proved only the beginning. Although, like Moses, the pope set himself up as the sole interpreter of God, after the Bible was translated into the “vulgar languages,” “every man became a judge of religion, and an interpreter of the Scriptures to himself.” Although this proved useful against the pope, “A” (tacitly criticizing young “B”), mislikes it, as it gave rise to another set of seducers and corrupters of the people, the Presbyterians. They became powerful with “the concurrence of a great many gentlemen” who, having studied “the glorious histories and the sententious politics of the ancient popular governments of the Greeks and Romans,” became partisans of “a popular government in the civil state.” They took on the role of the earlier preaching friars, this time haranguing the people in favor of democracy. They exploited anti-Catholic sentiments, inveighing against sin—especially sexual desire, thereby bringing “young men into desperation and to think themselves damned.” This enabled them to assume the role of confessors and guides, again in imitation of the Catholic clergy, and again with the effect of enhancing their moral and political authority. In this instance, however, the Presbyterian republicans served not merely as spiritual ‘guardians’ but enlisted a real military auxiliary into their armies. In sum, “if craft be wisdom,” the dissident Parliamentarians “were wise enough.” The source of their craft has been the universities. “The Universities have been to this nation, as the wooden horse was to the Trojans.”

How so? At the universities, young gentlemen read the works of Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus, “whom any ingenious reader, not knowing it was the design, would judge to have been two of the most egregious blockheads in the world, so obscure and senseless are their writings,” which can “serve only to astonish the multitude of ignorant men.” As for Aristotle, the universities’ staple, “none of the ancient philosophers’ writing are comparable” to his “for their aptness to puzzle and entangle men with words, and to breed disputation.” Theology is the bastard child of religion and philosophy of the verbal sort. “I like not the design of drawing religion into an art, whereas it ought to be a law; and though not the same in all countries, yet in every country indisputable.” Disputation in matters of religion provides a lever for political democratization and thus for republicanism against monarchy. through study of Greek and Latin, Englishmen discovered “the democratical principles of Aristotle and Cicero, and from the love of their eloquence fell in love with their politics.” “A” judges Aristotle’s ethics especially objectionable, based as it is on the doctrine of the mean between extremes. “It is not the Much or Little that make an action virtuous, but the cause; nor Much or Little that makes an action vicious, but its being uncomformable to the laws in such men as are subject to the law, or its being conformable to equity or charity in all men whatsoever.” Indeed, “the virtue of a subject is comprehended wholly in obedience to the laws of the commonwealth.” This sounds like classical conventionalism, but “A” has something else in mind—his own, decidedly un-Aristotelian version of natural law. Obedience to the law is justice and equity “which is the law of nature.” That is, obedience to the law is natural, even if the laws one obeys are conventional. Such obedience is also prudent, inasmuch as it avoids punishment. Obedience to the law preserves your life; self-preservation is the first law of nature.

If obedience is the virtue of a subject, what are the virtues of the sovereign, the one who ordains and enforces the law? They are maintenance of peace at home and resistance to foreign enemies—again, things conducive to self-preservation—fortitude, frugality, and liberality. The central virtue of the sovereign, fortitude, most clearly distinguishes him from his subjects, inasmuch for the private man who is not a soldier “the less they dare, the better it is for the commonwealth and themselves.” By contrast, for the sovereign fortitude serves both the commonwealth’s preservation and his own. Frugality and liberality might seem contradictory, except that frugality is a virtue the sovereign exercises in order to preserve the commonwealth’s resources and perhaps to avoid popular resentment, whereas liberality is a virtue he exercises in relation to his officials because it induces them to diligence on his and the commonwealth’s behalf while helping to assure their fidelity to both. “In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth”; the material motives of self-preservation and material gain, not the spiritual or the philosophic causes of religious and university-bred men, are the only pathways to peace and prosperity. Thus, the “great virtues” of Henry VII and Henry VIII should be joined: Henry VII ruled at a time in which there was not “much noise of the people” to trouble him as he “fill[ed] his coffers”; Henry VIII practiced “an early severity” in his reign, crushing his religious opponent, the Catholic Church, in his realm. “Without the former”—revenues—force “cannot be exercised.” The impressive exercise of the latter material cause depends upon the former material cause.

Therefore, religion rightly understood is “the law of the commonwealth.” In a sense, the pope is right. Human beings indeed must receive their religious precepts and laws from human beings. Hobbes instead disputes whether the pope and his priests should rule any commonwealth beyond Rome, which was given to them by an emperor. “There is no nation in the world, whose religion is not established, and receives not its authority form the laws of that nation” because “men can never by their own wisdom come to the knowledge of what god hath spoken and commanded to be observed, nor be obliged to obey the laws whose author they know not.” The only question is, “when there is question of his duty to God and the King, to rely upon the preaching of his fellow-subjects or of a stranger, or upon the voice of the law?”

What if a king commands “anything that is against Scripture, that is, contrary to the command of God”? If subjects are entitled to make such a judgment, “to be judge of the meaning of the Scripture,” then “it is impossible that the life of any King, or the peace of any Christian Kingdom, can be long secure,” as this doctrine “divides a kingdom within itself,” a condition in which (as the Bible itself teaches) it cannot stand. Nor can Quakers exempt themselves from their obligation to obey the law. There is no such thing as passive disobedience. “Every law is a command to do, or to forbear: neither of these is fulfilled by suffering.” Moreover, these same individuals, Christian pacifists, would not accept a death penalty carried out on themselves. “Do you not see,” “A” asks, “that all men, when they are led to execution, are both bound and guarded, and would break loose if they could, and get away?” “A” evidently finds the examples of Socrates and Jesus, of the philosopher and the Man-God, unimpressive. 

It is now clear why “A” began his discussion of English factions with the Catholics. As a Protestant, “B” readily accepted a criticism of papal authority. But his Protestant assumption, that every person has the right conscientiously to interpret Scripture, needed correction; “A” waited carefully to bring that out. “B” is not yet convinced, asking, What if a tyrant commanded me to execute my own father? “A” pretends that no king or even a tyrant is “so inhuman.” A king, in particular, rules by law. The law is general, not specific; as a subject, you are bound to obey it “unless you depart the kingdom after the publication of the law, and before the condemnation of your father.” 

Since the universities sit at “the core of the rebellion” against the English monarchy, they are dangerous to the commonwealth. They “nevertheless are not to be cast away, but to be better disciplined,” required to teach that “the civil laws are god’s laws.” Religion should surely be taught, but rightly—as “a quiet waiting for the coming again of our blessed Savior, and in the meantime a resolution to obey the King’s laws.” There must be no “mingling our religion with points of natural philosophy.” “B” concurs. This is the only way toward “lasting peace” among the English.

In Dialogue II, the interlocutors turn more specifically to the actions of Parliament against the King, the object of “B’s” initial inquiry. “A” recounts that members of Parliament falsely charged that the King intended to reintroduce Catholicism to England. (Suspicions had arisen because the Queen was Catholic and because the Archbishop of Canterbury sympathized with ‘liberal’ Protestants whom Calvinists regarded as forerunners of a move towards Rome.) “A” has no interest in suppressing Catholic belief itself: “A state can constrain obedience, but convince no error, nor alter the minds of them that believe they have the better reason. Suppression of doctrine does but unite and exasperate, that is, increase both the malice and power of them that have already believed.” In fact, “I confess I know very few controversies among Christians, of points necessary to salvation. They are the questions of authority and power over the Church, or of profit, or of honor to Churchmen, that for the most part raise all the controversies.” Power, money, and pride (recall that mighty Leviathan is “king of the proud”) motivate men in political controversies, not spiritual concerns. “For what man is he, that will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself?”

In these matters, the practice if not the philosophy of the ancients ranks above the practice of Christians. Greek and Latin “heathens were not at all behind us in point of virtue and moral duties, notwithstanding that we have had much preaching, and they none at all.” The heathens had a ceremony-centered civil religion, not a doctrine-centered dissenting one, or more than one. England needs more “discreet and ancient men” in the pulpits. And in Parliament. “Impudence in democratical assemblies does almost all that’s done; ’tis the goddess of rhetoric, and carries proof with it.” There, urban businessmen wield considerable influence, but “London, you know, has a great bely, but no palate nor taste of right and wrong.” The private business seen in the great centers of commerce requires only “diligence and natural wit,” whereas “for the government of a commonwealth, neither wit, nor prudence, nor diligence, is enough, without infallible rules and the true science of equity and justice.” Since those rules and that science are not followed anywhere, sedition has afflicted all “the greatest commonwealths,” not only England.

If the teaching of Leviathan were heeded, the people would obey their monarch and England would be at peace. “Ambition can do little without hands, and few hands it would have, if the common people were as diligently instructed in the true principles of their duty, as they are terrified and amazed by preachers, with fruitless and dangerous doctrines concerning the nature of man’s will”—debates over predestination versus freedom, for example—and “many other philosophical points that tend not at all to the salvation of their souls in the world to come, nor to their ease in this life, but only to the directions towards the clergy of that duty which they ought to perform to the King.” The parliamentarians want no such thing, desiring instead “the whole and absolute sovereignty, and to change the monarchical government into an oligarchy” consisting of themselves, soi-disant republicans. Since “there can be no government where there is more than one sovereign,” no mixed-regime republic can sustain itself; it is a matter of force, as “he that hath the power of levying and commanding the soldiers, has all other rights of sovereignty which he shall please to claim.” Ergo, as “B” puts it, the rule of Parliament amounts to “tyranny over the King,” a tyranny that parliamentarians eventually will extend over the people after the king, their protector, no longer controls the regular troops or the militia. Truly, “the legislative power (and indeed all power possible) is contained in the power of the militia,” the armed populace. He who rules it rules the country.

“A” approves of the younger man’s logical conclusion to “A’s” analysis. “You see what a heap of evils [Parliament] have raised to make a show of ill-government to the people,” following with a “catalogue of those good things they had done for the King and the Kingdom”—this, not only a reply to “B” but a reply, more than a century in advance, to the argument of the American Declaration of Independence. And for their part, English Presbyterians, “with pretended sanctity,” made “the King and his party odious to the people.” While on the right course, “B” as yet doesn’t know the half of it, not having “observed the world long enough to see all that’s ill.” Perhaps spurred to show what he has observed, “B” deplores the “two factions” which “trouble the commonwealth” over no more than their “opinions, that is, about who has the most learning; as if their learning ought to be the rule of governing all the world.” This is only vanity, as what they have learned “is called divinity” but in reality consists of “almost nothing” but “matter of philosophy.” “I do not think they pretend to speak with God and know his will by any other way than reading the Scriptures, which we also do.” “A” steps in with a correction. “Some of them do…give themselves out for prophets by extraordinary inspiration,” although you are right to say that most base their claim to authority only on “their breeding in the Universities, and knowledge there gotten of the Latin tongue, and some also of the Greek and Hebrew tongues, wherein the Scripture was written,” along with “their knowledge of natural philosophy”—which, as “A” will soon remark, is no knowledge at all.

This learning, “A” continues, yields only “the advancement of the professors,” who aspire to the power priests have wielded throughout history—the Druids, the Persian Magi, the priests of Egypt, Israel, and other nations in the Near East, the fakirs of India, and the priests of Ethiopia, who enjoyed the power to order the death of their kings. Empowered priests are dangerous. What are the republican revolutionaries of England, if not regicides? “Our late King, the best King perhaps that ever was, you know, was murdered, having been persecuted by war, at the incitement of Presbyterian ministers, who are therefore guilty of the death of all that fell in that war.” To kill 1,000 of those ministers would have been “a great massacre; but the killing of 100,000 [in the Civil War] is a greater.” As for the would-be priests, the professors, “their divinity was nothing but idolatry; and their philosophy…very little; and that part abused in astrology and fortune-telling.” True science isn’t the Aristotelianism of the dons but the experimentalism of Francis Bacon. True philosophy “can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from [scientists’] obedience to the sovereign power.” [2]

This is why the contradictory claims to power of King and Parliament have led to civil war. Having depended upon the armies it commanded, and hence upon the generals who commanded the armies, Parliament became hostage to the greatest of those generals, Oliver Cromwell, who set himself up as de facto ruler of Great Britain, effectively destroying the prospects for the republicanism parliamentarians said they wanted and the oligarchy they really intended.

In Dialogue III Hobbes attacks the Aristotelian solution to the political problem, the mixed regime. England can never be a “mixed monarchy” because “the supreme power must always be absolute, whether it be in the King or in the Parliament.” Not only were the “seditious blockheads” (called ‘Roundheads’), men “more fond of change than either of their peace or profit,” at fault, but even the King’s counsellors imagined that supreme power can be shared. This illusion “weakened their endeavor to procure [the King] an absolute victory in the war.” But as “B” remarks, “a civil war never ends by treaty, without the sacrifice of those who were on both sides the sharpest”—possibly including the 1,000 Presbyterian ministers “A” had mentioned. The King’s counsellors were “in love with mixarchy,” which, far from being the best practicable regime, as Aristotle claims, amounts in practice to “nothing else but pure anarchy.” “There could be no peace” under such a “divided power.” 

True, “there cannot be a better title for war, than the defense of a man’s own right. But the people, at that time, thought nothing lawful for the King to do, for which there was not some statute made by Parliament.” Parliamentarians justified what “A” regards as a warrantless assertion of authority with a “university quibble,” pretending “that the King was always virtually in the two Houses of Parliament; making a distinction between his person natural and politic; which made their impudence greater, besides the folly of it.”

In this, they had the backing not only of religious dissenters but of the urban business classes, ever resentful of the taxes they pay to fight the King’s wars, since “their only glory [is] to grow excessively rich by the wisdom of buying and selling” by “making poor people sell their labor to them at their own prices.” Although “the first encouragers of the rebellion,” merchants were also “the first to repent” when the King’s army flexed its muscles at their expense.” Deluded by the expectation of security in property rights, merchants are “blind” to “the very thought of plundering”; they fail to understand that property rights rest on force, in practice. Merchants suppose themselves smart and realistic, and they are, when it comes to merchandise. When it comes to politics and war, not so much. He who has the gold makes the rules, but only until he who has the guns takes the gold away.

But the King committed a military blunder, delaying his move against Parliament in order to lay siege to rebellious Gloucester and thereby giving Parliament time to raise new levies. After the King’s capture, the duplicitous Oliver Cromwell, a man ambitious “to proceed as far as [policy] and fortune would carry him,” “contrive[d] how to mutiny the army against the Parliament” by circulating the lie that Parliament intended to disband the army and cheat the soldiers out of their pay. This led to nearly a decade of tyranny. 

Young “B” adduces lessons from these observations. Monarchs should put regime security first, their own rivalries second. It is foolish for foreign princes to aid rebels in another country in an attempt to weaken a rival monarch, “especially when [the rebels] rebel against monarchy itself.” Monarchs should fight each other only after combining against republican revolutionaries. As for republican clergymen, whose “interpretation of a verse in the Hebrew, Greek, or Latin Bible is oftentimes the cause of civil war and the deposing and assassination of God’s anointed,” “you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affairs either of war or peace.” Their kingdom really is in Heaven, and they should leave earthly kingdoms to those who know how to rule them. Finally, “the common people know nothing of right or wrong by their own meditation; they must therefore be taught the grounds of their duty, and the reasons why calamaties ever follow disobedience to their lawful sovereigns.”

A man of some piety, “B” observes that “the original of all laws was in the people,” under God. “A” steps in immediately: the people, “by consent and oaths, have long ago put the supreme power of the nation into the hands of their kings, for them and their heirs.” Admittedly, Parliament represents the people for some purposes, such as receiving petitions for popular grievances, but “not to make a grievance of the King’s power.” What is more, Parliament legitimately meets only when the King calls them; “nor is it to be imagined that he calls a Parliament to depose him.” All the more criminal was Parliament’s execution in 1648, after the King rightly denied their authority to try him at all. The “vices,” the “crimes,” and the “follies” of the majority in the Long Parliament, failures “than which none greater can be found in the world,” thus ruined English life for a generation. Presbyterian MPs and ministers displayed the vices, namely, “irreligion, hypocrisy, avarice and cruelty”; the Presbyterians joined with the Independents or dissenting sects in the crimes of “blaspheming and killing God’s anointed”; the Presbyterians again joined with the Lords in folly, the latter in failing “to see that the by the taking away of the King’s power they lost withal their own privileges.” The lawyers ignorantly overlooked the fact that “the laws of the land were made by the King, to oblige his subjects to peace and justice, and not to oblige himself that made them.” “Lastly and generally, all men are fools which pull down anything which does them good, before they have set up something better in its place.”

Well, not quite lastly. What these men did set up was a “democracy with an army” without considering that the army they authorized was controlled by Oliver Cromwell, who soon acted to “pull [the democracy] down.” What can one expect of “those fine men, which out of their reading of Tully, Seneca, or other anti-monarchics, think themselves sufficient politics, and show their discontent when they are not called to the management of the state, and turn from one side to another upon every neglect they fancy from the King or his enemies”? Such were the founders of the Commonwealth of England regime.

After Parliament put Charles I to death, Cromwell purged it of any members who might have opposed his rule. Dialogue IV begins with an account of the resulting “Rump Parliament.” “A” recalls that a true Parliament includes King, Lords, and Commons,” but this one included only the Commons, and only a few of them. Thus redefined, Parliament’s notion of liberty was a sort of political libertinism, assuming “leave to do what they list[ed]” and so “to abuse the people.” This could hardly surprise any sensible man: “How likely then are they to uphold the fundamental laws, that had murdered him who as by themselves so often acknowledged for their lawful sovereign?” Their lawful sovereign, Charles II, resisted Cromwell until 1651, when he fled to Paris, taking the core of his loyalists with him.

“What silly things are the common sort of people,” “B” exclaims, “to be cozened as they were so grossly!” “A” has a rhetorical question ready in answer: “What sort of people, as to this matter, are not of the common sort?” That is, even “the craftiest knaves of the Rump were no wiser than the rest whom they cozened”; they believed their own jive, thinking the “things which they imposed upon the generality were just and reasonable.” Surely no one “can be a good subject to monarchy, whose principles are taken from the enemies of monarchy, such as were Cicero, Seneca, Cato, and other politicians of Rome, and Aristotle of Athens, who seldom speak of kings but as wolves and other ravenous beasts?” They do so because real political understanding comes not from “a good natural wit” but from the science of politics, “built upon sure and clear principles” and “learned from deep and careful study, or from masters that have deeply studied it”—surely not Aristotle, who was no real scientist, even if styled ‘the master of those who know’ by a Romish theologian—but Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan. Hobbes had no readers in this Parliament, who might “find out those rules of justice, and the necessary connexion of justice and peace”—which is indeed a principal lesson of Hobbes’s book.

The members of the Rump Parliament took their principles instead from Presbyterian ministers, who wanted ‘popular’ rule so that they could rule Great Britain through their harangues from the pulpit. “B” asks, “What have we then gotten by our deliverance from the Pope’s tyranny, if these petty men succeed in the place of it, that have nothing in them that can be beneficial to the public, except their silence”—precisely the benefice they preferred not to bestow? What Parliamentarians of the Rump mean by a “commonwealth” or “Free State” was only “that neither this king, nor any king, nor any single person, but only…they themselves would be the people’s masters.” Once so empowered they “gave one another money and estates, out the the lands and goods of the loyal party”—the monarchists.

Given England’s disorder, Irish and Scots rebels made their move and the Dutch attempted to seize an advantage on the seas. These wars only served further to empower Cromwell. In Ireland, “with extraordinary diligence and horrid executions, in less than a twelvemonth that he stayed there, subdued in a manner the whole nation; having killed or exterminated a great part of them, and leaving his son-in-law Ireton to subdue the rest,” a task only interrupted by his death by the plague. “This was one step more towards Cromwell’s exaltation to the throne.” In Scotland, Cromwell won again, if only thanks to blunders by Scottish generals. After the Dutch War in 1652, Cromwell had the obedience of all military forces in England, Scotland, and Ireland, Cromwell disbanded the Rump Parliament, founding the Protectorate regime, that is, his own absolute rule. That is, Cromwell ‘called a Parliament, and gave it the supreme power, with condition that they should give it to him. Was this not witty?”

This regime survived until Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son, Richard, succeeded him, but his irresolution and lack of military reputation soon caused him to be cast aside. “I believe it is the desire of most men to bear rule; but few of them know what title one has to it more than another, beside the right of the sword.” Richard Cromwell didn’t earn the latter and so couldn’t take advantage of the people’s natural desire for peace. Nor could any of the others. “A” lists what “B” calls “the many shiftings of the supreme authority” in England between 1640 and 1659. In 1660, after the majority of members in the Long Parliament failed re-election, the new Parliament recalled the exiled Charles II from France. Charles prudently stipulated that he would in future be authorized to call up the militia without Parliament’s approval. If the people know only the right of the sword but lack the virtù to wield it without a commander, the King had better make sure of them by holding their arms firmly in obedience to himself.

 

 

 

Note

1. Heath was another royalist, author also of a highly critical book on Oliver Cromwell. He is credited with founding the ‘Court’ party, which eventually became the Tory Party.
2. “Appear” is a judicious word choice, inasmuch as Baconian science aims at the mastery of nature for the relief of man’s estate. See Bacon’s quasi-utopian Bensalem, discussed on this website.

Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995.

 

By “minorities,” Kymlicka means, primarily, national minorities, that is groups “whose homeland has been incorporated into the boundaries of a larger state, through conquest, colonization, or federation.” Such incorporation has often been solemnized by treaty. With 600 “living language groups” spread out over the then-existing 184 independent states, and with increased tension between many of those minority groups and the states that ruled them, Kymlicka contends that “finding morally defensible and politically viable answers to these issues is the greatest challenge facing democracies today,” seeing that “since the end of the Cold War” (a few years prior to his writing), “ethno-cultural conflicts have become the most common source of political violence in the world, and they show no sign of abating.” This was also true in the earlier part of the twentieth century, when the treaties governing minority populations proved “inadequate.” On the one hand, “a minority was only ensured protection from discrimination and oppression if there was a ‘kin state’ nearby which took an interest in it”; Jews in Europe were out of luck. But even “where such kin states did exist, they often used treaty provisions as grounds for invading or intervening in weaker countries,” as Nazi Germany did in Poland and Czechoslovakia.

After the Second World War, “it was clear that a different approach to minority rights was needed,” and liberals turned to “human rights” as their new formula, causing the newly formed United Nations to replace the League of Nations’ references to ethnic and national minority rights with its Universal Declaration of Human Rights. After all, they reasoned, the agony of religious warfare in Europe ended when regimes began to acknowledge the existence of natural rights of life, liberty, and property, protecting them by separating churches and states and guaranteeing individuals’ right to religious freedom. In the revised liberal view, “ethnic identity, like religion, is something which people should be free to express in their private life, but which is not the concern of the state.” 

The problem was that human rights, whether conceived as natural or ‘historical,’ do not tell us much about “some of the most important and controversial questions relating to cultural minorities,” including the languages used in public institutions, education funding, representation in public offices, federalism, voting rights, and entitlement to natural resources. “The problem is not that traditional human rights doctrines give us the wrong answer to these questions. It is rather that they often give us no answer at all.”

“A liberal theory of minority rights…must explain how minority rights coexist with human rights, and how minority rights are limited by principles of individual liberty, democracy, and social justice.” Kymlicka had already taken up this challenge in his previous book, but this one is much better written because less ‘academic.’ He spends a lot less time contending rival liberal theorists, which has the effect of clearing things of jargon.

Although there are many forms of “cultural pluralism,” the main ones are national minorities—once self-governing, still territorially concentrated cultures incorporated (voluntarily or involuntarily) into a larger state—and ethnic groups—often immigrants (voluntary or involuntary, as in the case of American slavery), territorially dispersed, who seek not self-government as a people but self-government within the political institutions of the state. Kymlicka calls states with national minorities “multination states,” states with ethnic minorities “polyethnic states.” Some states are both multinational and polyethnic—for example, the United States. A “culture” is a defining element of a “nation” or “people,” along with a distinct language and a shared history. Indeed, as Kymlicka announces, he will use the terms “culture,” “nation,” and “people” as synonymous, defined as “an intergenerational community, more or less institutionally complete, occupying a given territory or homeland, sharing a distinct language and history.” In the United States, such incorporated nations as the several Amerindian groups, Puerto Ricans, Hawaiians, Chamorros, and the original Chicanos (those incorporated after the Mexican War of 1846-48) often acquired “a special political status”—reservations for the Indians, commonwealth status for Puerto Rico, protectorate status for Guam—and/or special economic status—e.g., land use rights for native Hawaiians, some Indian tribes, and Chamorros—and/or linguistic status—equal status in schools, courts, and other governmental entities, as for Hawaiians and Chamorros. To grant such special rights has made little difference in the country as a whole, since “most of these groups are relatively small and geographically isolated,” a “fraction of the overall American population.” 

Multination states need not be disunited; such citizens may “view themselves for some purposes as a single people,” as in Switzerland. Kymlicka thus distinguishes between patriotism, “the feeling of allegiance to a state,” from “national identity, the sense of membership in a national group.” He goes so far as to claim that national groups “feel allegiance to the larger state only because the larger state recognizes and respects their distinct national existence.” On the contrary, it is quite likely that the larger state also provides a free trade zone for all groups and provides much stronger military defense than any single group could muster alone. These benefits in turn reinforce the patriotism that derives from a shared history. That is, the history of a national minority ‘taken in itself’ often overlaps with the history of a national minority living within a multinational state, as for example the Navajo and Lakota code talkers, who secured U. S. army messages against German codebreakers in two world wars.

The immigration that produces polyethnic states has been addressed quite differently at different times. In the United States, Canada, and Australia, for example, “prior to the 1960s, immigrants were expected to shed their distinctive heritage and assimilate entirely to existing cultural norms.” This was “seen as essential for political stability, and was further rationalized through ethnocentric denigration of other cultures”—the last point being Kymlicka’s rather solemn riff on G. K. Chesterton’s observation that wherever you go in the world, foreigners are seen as funny. Political stability, indeed: citizens in all three countries understood that many immigrants came from countries where republican regimes had never existed, that immigrants often brought anti-republican ideologies and habits of mind and heart with them, a point Kymlicka doesn’t trouble himself to emphasize. At any rate, “beginning in the 1970s, under pressure from immigrant groups”—who quickly learned to ‘work’ the republican regimes even as they did not entirely respect them—each of the “Anglo” countries “rejected the assimilationist model, and adopted” what Kymlicka is pleased to call “a more tolerant and pluralistic policy which allows and indeed encourages immigrants to maintain various aspects of their ethnic heritage.” Many of these policies were politically trivial—respecting the immigrants’ “food, dress”—and some not always so—religion. “In rejecting assimilation,” such immigrant groups did not usually attempt “to set up a parallel society, as is typically demanded by national minorities,” although this has been done in the past—quite notably by English-speaking colonists in North America and elsewhere, Spanish colonists in Puerto Rico, French colonists in Quebec. “It is an essential feature of colonization, as distinct from individual emigration, that it aims to create an institutionally complete society.” 

Kymlicka aims at “mak[ing] a more tolerant and inclusive democracy” regarding the national minorities—civic nations as distinguished from ethnic nations—as the argument for equal inclusion of ethnic groups has been made by many other advocates of liberal democracy. This must raise the issue of regime—specifically, of what a “democracy” is and what justifies it. 

Liberal-democratic republics typically offer three types of group-differentiated rights. First, they attempt to secure protection of the civil and political rights of individuals. Kymlicka rejects as “profoundly mistaken” the claims of “various critics of liberalism,” ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ who argue “that the liberal focus on individual rights reflects an atomistic, materialistic, instrumental, or conflictual view of human relationships.” In fact, “individual rights can be and typically are used to sustain a wide range of social relationships,” as Tocqueville saw when he described Americans as master of the art of association. Second, such regimes also offer several kinds of group-specific rights, various forms of self-government without full sovereignty. These include federalism, which leads to well-known difficulties in balancing “centralization and decentralization,” and reservations, which may include higher levels of self-government than seen in states (in the U.S.) or provinces (in Canada). Indian reservations today “are becoming, in effect, a third order of government, with a collection of powers that is carved out of both federal and state-provincial jurisdictions.” Regarding federalism, the United States and Canada differ, as Americans made “a deliberate decision” not “to use federalism to accommodate the self-government rights of national minorities,” whereas Canada established Quebec as just such an accommodation. While the American approach “has tended to make national minorities in the United States more vulnerable,” lacking as they do “the same constitutional protection as states’ rights,” it also provides “greater flexibility in redefining those powers so as to suit the needs and interests of each minority” within a given state.

The second form of group-differentiated rights in liberal-democratic republics are polyethnic rights: self-expression of cultural norms and customs, educational accommodations, public funding for ethnic associations, museums, and festivals, and exemptions from certain laws. These aren’t truly group rights, however, as they aim at “help[ing] ethnic groups and religious minorities express their cultural particularity and pride without it hampering their success in the economic and political institutions of the dominant society.” They are often intended to break down social prejudices against such minorities, again enhancing full civic and political participation for them as equal citizens in practice, not only ‘in theory.’ 

“Special representation rights” are the third form of group-differentiated rights. These are much more controversial than the others. Such rights would entitle minorities to reserved seats in state-provincial and/or national legislatures. Kymlicka considers them “a form of political ‘affirmative action,'” whereby republics would remedy “some systemic disadvantage in the political process which makes it impossible for the group’s views and interests to be effectively represented,” sometimes to the point of considering this “a corollary of self-government.” In this second, stronger rationale, representation would be offered not as a temporary, remedial measure (as ‘affirmative action’ was once advertised to be) but as a permanent institutional feature of the regime. As Kymlicka remarks, there is no reason in principle why such representation would not extend to the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court or (one might add) to the executive, in national and state/provincial bureaucracies. 

What justifies such arrangements, beyond an intention to appease obstreperous constituents? “A liberal democracy’s most basic commitment is to the freedom and equality of its individual citizens.” If so, “then how can liberals accept the demand for group-differentiated rights by ethnic and national minorities?” Because, although “it is natural to assume that collective rights are rights exercised by collectivities, as opposed to rights exercised by individuals, and that the former conflict with the latter,” such “assumptions do not apply to many forms of group-differentiated citizenship.” 

Kymlicka begins by distinguishing two kinds of claims made by national and ethnic groups: those made by the group “against its own members,” restricting internal dissent in order to protect the group from instability; and those made “against the larger society” in order to protect the group against decisions made by that society. Internal restrictions, external protections. All groups, qua group, impose restrictions on their members, whether the group in question is a country or a bridge club. “All governments expect and sometimes require a minimal level of civic responsibility and participation from their citizens.”

Some groups go further, going beyond restrictions needed to uphold freedom and equality and compelling members “to attend a particular church or to follow traditional gender roles”—restricting what Kymlicka calls “basic civil and political liberties,” although he doesn’t pause to explain why traditional gender roles violate basic civil and political liberties. [1] As always, he is particularly concerned with restrictions on the right of group members “to question and revise traditional authorities and practices.” In the United States, for example, Amerindian tribal councils were long exempt from penalties against violating the Bill of Rights, and even after the 1968 Indian Civil Rights Act, a tribal member may not usually appeal an alleged violation to the United States Supreme Court. The tribes have argued that their regimes do respect government by consent but achieve it in ways unlike those stipulated in the American regime. Kymlicka evidently agrees, although he draws the line on Pueblo restrictions on religious liberty, again on the grounds of protecting the right to dissent. 

Some groups might also deploy external protections in a way that violates freedom and equality, as white South Africans did with apartheid. “However, external protections need not create such injustice” because special representation rights, land claims, or language rights to a minority need not, and often does not, put [the minority group] in a position to dominate other groups.” Indeed, such external protections may “promote fairness between groups.” For this, Kymlicka deems it especially important to protect land rights, as “struggles over land are the single largest cause of ethnic conflict in the world.” Since “history has shown” that the power “to establish reserves where the land is held in common and/or in trust, and cannot be alienated without the consent of the community,” is “the most effective way to protect indigenous communities from” external economic and political power, he endorses such restrictions on individual property rights within minority national communities. 

Kymlicka thus establishes that individual rights will always be compromised when individuals become members of groups, and that some individual rights must be restricted if the group intends effectively to defend ‘core’ individual rights. My individual right to liberty may be restricted if I threaten your life. So far, this is standard liberalism. The question then becomes, what is the hierarchy of rights? Which should be sacrificed in order to protect the others?

Kymlicka first turns to the history of liberalism, showing that “for most of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the rights of national minorities were continually discussed and debate by the great liberal statesmen and theorists of the age,” although they often disagreed with one another about what those rights should be. Wilhelm von Humboldt and Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, argued that “the promotion of individuality and the development of human personality is intimately tied up with membership in one’s national group, in part because of the role of language and culture in enabling choice.” [2] This form of liberalism opposed imperialism, or at least any form of imperialism that failed “to grant political powers to the constituent nations within” the empire. Some, like Mill, further argued that liberalism itself required nation-states, since without a shared “sense of political allegiance” buttressed by a “common nationality,” people will be reluctant to grant civil and political liberties to their fellow citizens. 

Kymlicka doesn’t like the sound of that. Mill, he charges, was being “ethnocentric,” if not racist. Others who argued in his way really were racists. “The great nations were seen as civilized, and as the carriers of historical development.” By contrast, the smaller nationalities were considered “primitive and stagnant, and incapable of social or cultural development.” Historicism, then, is fine with Kymlicka as long as it undergirds equality and liberty, bad when it doesn’t. In fact, he observes, “other liberals” such as Lord Acton, “argued the opposite position, that true liberty was only possible in a multination state” because the several nationalities check and balance one another while effectively resisting overbearing centralized power. English liberals in particular “were constantly confronted with the fact that liberal institutions which worked in England did not work in multination states,” as “many English liberal institutions were as much English as liberal,” “only appropriate for a (relatively) ethnically and racially homogeneous society such as England.” The question would then be, how can the liberal principles of equality and liberty be secured in practice in any particular civil society? [3] This leads Kymlicka to call for “truly international mechanisms for protecting national minorities that do not rely on the destabilizing threat of intervention by kin states,” as he was seeing in the 1990s, when “Hungary declared itself the protector of ethnic Hungarians in Slovakia and Romania” and “leaders in Russia and Serbia” made similar pronouncements regarding “ethnic Russians in the Baltics and ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and Croatia.” He also admits that internationalism failed when institutionalized under the League of Nations and does not show why the United Nations would do better. 

Nor have socialists done any better than liberals. As historicists, they too have endorsed notions of historical evolutionism whereby some nations are deemed ‘progressive,’ others ‘backward.’ But Kymlicka applauds socialism’s more recent iterations “Whereas Marx thought that bigger was better, many socialists (and environmentalists) now think that small is beautiful,” since “certain kinds of community and collective action are only possible in small groups.” However, “this is not necessarily the case,” for “decentralization only meets the needs of national minorities if it increases the capacity of the group for self-government.” A small governmental unit might still leave a minority group in the minority, without defense against those who control the local government.

Moreover, in practice “socialists have often appealed to cultural identity where this was helpful in gaining or maintaining power.” In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party made such appeals for tactical reasons, “support[ing] nationalist movements in non-Communist countries in the hope of destabilizing Western countries or Western allies in the Third World.” Within the Soviet Union itself, Lenin cheerfully granted language rights to minorities, so long as those languages were used to convey socialist propaganda. For him and for his successor, Josef Stalin, national identity “was simply an empty vessel that could be filled up with Communist content.” 

Given these theoretical and practical complications, Kymlicka needs to clear a theoretical path toward clarifying the relation between individual rights and national rights. He now moves “to show that minority rights are not only consistent with individual freedom, but can actually promote it.” He will argue that “the liberal value of freedom of choice has certain cultural preconditions, and hence issues of cultural membership must be incorporated into liberal principles.”

Although the term ‘culture’ “has been used to cover all manner of groups, from teenage gangs to global civilization,” he will use it to mean “societal culture,” that is, “a culture which provides its members with meaningful ways of life across the full range of human activities, including social, educational, religious, recreational, and economic life, encompassing both public and private spheres.” Usually “territorially concentrated and based on a shared language,” but often dwarfed by majority societal cultures around them wielding the resources of the centralized modern state, minority cultures now need institutional embodiment in “schools, media, economy, government, etc.” That is, what Kymlicka calls societal cultures are really what Aristotle calls regimes, which consist of rulers, ruling offices or institutions, ways of life, and purposes the rulers, ruling offices, and ways of life aim at securing. What these regimes lack, however, is full self-government or sovereignty.

They have been eclipsed by “the process of modernization.” Statesmen typically want “a common culture, including a standardized language, embodied in common economic, political, and educational institutions” fostering patriotism (including citizens’ or subjects’ willingness “to make sacrifices for each other”) and (if those states are republics) “equality of opportunity,” often in commercial markets with no internal trade barriers. Such a regime has in fact prevailed in the United States, which has “integrated an extraordinary number of people from very different backgrounds into a common culture,” with only “a relatively small number of minority cultures.” By the third generation, immigrant families find that “learning the mother tongue” of their grandparents “is not unlike learning a foreign language.” With the spirit of liberalism, modern states, especially those with republican regimes, enable citizens to “choose their own plan of life,” so long as their choices remain within the legal framework. “It is only through having access to a societal culture that people have access to a range of meaningful options” respecting their life plans. 

But is such individual choice “tied to membership in one’s own culture”? If a person has “a deep bond” with his own culture, should immigrant groups “be given the rights and resources necessary to recreate their own societal cultures”? And “what if a culture is organized so as to preclude individual choice”? Kymlicka claims, dubiously, that to refuse to enable such persistent cultural bonding “treats the loss of one’s culture as similar to the loss of one’s job.” But of course liberal societies put few if any restrictions on changing one’s job because changing one’s job in no way threatens social solidarity and may well enhance social prosperity. While it is undoubtedly true that “people’s self-respect is bound up with the esteem in which their national group is held,” given Kymlicka’s tacit acknowledgment that a societal culture is really a regime, why should the dominant regime not insist on some substantial degree of conformity to its principles and practices? This is especially true of immigrants, who have placed themselves under the authority of the regime voluntarily. It is somewhat less true for refugees, if their presence is temporary—as it often turns out not to be. As for what Kymlicka calls national minorities, the question would be: To what extent will their self-government interfere with the regime of the state? It is true that large modern states are not small city-states, and so can tolerate a greater degree of divergence from the regime, especially if the national minorities are small, with enclaves not located on geostrategic chokepoints. The question remains, what degree? And what kind of principles and practices are tolerable? 

To these questions, Kymlicka replies that “the aim of liberals should not be to dissolve non-liberal nations, but rather to liberalize them,” an ambition which “may not always be possible,” although sometimes it is: “it is worth remembering that all existing liberal nations had illiberal pasts, and their liberalization required a prolonged period of institutional reform.” And no regime or “societal culture” will likely allow immigrants to colonize it. Kymlicka remarks that “liberals want a societal culture that is rich and diverse, and much of the richness of a culture comes from the way it has appropriated the fruits of other cultures.” This, presumably, on the grounds that “richness” and diversity offer a widened palette of life-plan choices for the citizens. 

What about the exigencies of justice? Every regime will enforce some idea of justice. To what extent can numerous and diverse cultures co-exist, and even enhance one another, without interfering with that idea. “Protecting one person’s cultural membership has costs for other people and other interests, and we need to determine when these trade-offs are justified.”

Kymlicka argues against those liberals who say that “a system of universal individual rights already accommodates cultural differences, by allowing each person the freedom to associate with others in the pursuit of shared religious or ethnic practices.” If a given way of life is perceived to be valuable, it “will have no difficulty attracting adherents,” and to give extra political heft to a minority national culture will place an unjust burden on those footing the bill with money or votes. Kymlicka charges that this view “is not only mistaken, but actually incoherent,” since “the state unavoidably promotes certain cultural identities, and thereby disadvantages others.” But so what?

He answers this question in four ways. The “equality argument” holds that “some groups are unfairly disadvantaged in the cultural market-place, and political recognition and support rectify this disadvantage.” This, on the basis of “the importance of cultural membership.” “External protections” will “ensure that members of the minority have the same opportunity to live and work in their own culture as members of the majority.” Members of the majority regime “cannot reasonably ask people” to sacrifice what remains of their own regimes. To be sure, “this equality-based argument will only endorse special rights for national minorities if there actually is a disadvantage with respect to cultural membership, and if the rights actually serve to rectify the disadvantage.” For example, “one could imagine a point where the amount of land reserved for indigenous peoples would not be necessary to provide reasonable external protections, but rather would simply provide unequal opportunities to them.” To protect the minority nation’s language, Kymlicka advocates government subsidy of education in that language, lest it become extinct; presumably, he would also insist on schooling in the dominant language, without which shared citizenship in the larger regime would be impeded. On the basis of the “equality argument,” a “fair way to recognize languages, draw boundaries, and distribute powers” consists of “ensuring that all national groups have the opportunity to maintain themselves as a distinct culture, if they so choose,” leaving decisions about which particular aspects” of that culture “are worth maintaining and developing” to “the choices of individual members,” whose right to do that will be ensured against the intentions of the minority regime if it denies the right itself.

Kymlica’s second answer rests on history. “What are the terms under which two or more peoples decided to become partners?” An existing treaty might be unfair in the light of liberalism. For example, “if the members of the national minority never gave the federal government the authority to govern them in certain areas, the federal government is unlikely to accept responsibility for funding minority self-government.” Generally, arguments drawn from the history of intergroup relations will not suffice because circumstances change and treaties may need to be renegotiated accordingly.

His third answer is the ‘value of cultural diversity’ argument, made earlier. Whereas the equality argument and the argument from history “appeal to the obligations of the majority, this third argument appeals to the interests of the majority,” defending “rights in terms of self-interest not justice.” In addition to the aforementioned appeals to the benefits of cultural richness and diversity, an example of this kind of argument is the claim that “traditional lifestyles provide a model of a sustainable relationship to the environment.” Such arguments may be persuasive, “but it is not clear that any of these values by themselves can justify majority rights” [emphasis added], because “the benefits of diversity to the majority are spread thinly and widely whereas the costs for particular members of the majority are quite high”: “unilingual anglophones residing in Quebec or Puerto Rico are unlikely to get government employment or publicly funded education in English.” Like the historical argument, then, the ‘cultural diversity’ argument will prove good as a supplement to the “equality argument,” but not as the primary argument for national rights or ethnic rights. 

Finally, there is an argument based on an analogy with states. Liberals recognize that for the time being the world will consist of sovereign states with the right to ‘self-determination’ or self-government, and indeed sovereign self-government, often (as liberal internationalists will insist) within the framework of international law. Kymlicka maintains that “the right of states to determine who has citizenship rests on the same principles which justify group-differentiated citizenship within states and that accepting the former leads logically to the latter.” Even under liberalism, which makes so much of individuals’ rights, “not everyone can become a citizen, even if they are willing to swear allegiance to liberal principles.” While “some critics have argued that liberals cannot justify this restriction, and that the logic of liberalism requires open borders” under conditions other than a threat to the public order, this does not hold if liberalism remains “indifferent to people’s cultural membership and national identity.” As earlier remarked, in England, English rights and liberal rights have often mingled in ways the English would not care to disentangle. While this must be so, it is also true that Kymlicka scants the firm liberal insistence on social contract, sometimes formal but often (as in England and Canada) unwritten but nonetheless elaborated in a set of statutes and court decisions, changeable with changing circumstances.

Kymlicka quite sensibly writes, “There is no simple formula for deciding exactly what rights should be accorded to which groups.” Given these “unavoidable indeterminacies,” and given “the complexity of the interests, principles and historical circumstances at stake,” these matters “must be resolved politically, by good-faith negotiations and the give and take of democratic politics.” But, of course, this raises another set of questions concerning the institutional structure of democratic politics—issues such as redistricting, guaranteed representation, and proportional representation. While “the middle-class white men who dominate politics in most Western democracies are not demographically representative of the population at large, they are the elected representatives of the population at large,” often enjoying “widespread electoral support from minority and disadvantaged groups.” It isn’t at all certain that “people can only be fully ‘represented’ by someone who shares their gender, class, occupation, ethnicity, language, etc.” Oddly, Kymlicka never mentions ‘ideology’ or political doctrine as a criterion for ‘being represented. Yet what is more bound up with the idea of rights, individual or ‘groupish,’ than political doctrine? He does see that “the argument that members of one group cannot understand the interests of other groups” would “undermine the possibility of group membership as well,” since every group has a range of subgroups. “The principle of mirror representation seems to undermine the very possibility of representation itself”: under its terms, “How can anyone represent anyone else?” It also undermines the principle of democracy, since majorities are achievable but unanimity nearly impossible. Therefore, the only form of group representation he endorses is a temporary form, similar to affirmative action, intended to redress injustices entrenched in the past. He does not say how such a form of representation would not itself likely become entrenched, therefore (eventually) unjust. Generally, then, “the right of self-government is a right against the authority of the federal government, not a right to share in that authority,” as (for example) to guarantee Indians seats in the legislature might simply mean that they would have gained the right to be outvoted, particularly with regard to the issues of federalism, the degree of central government control over their own communities, that they are most anxious to guard.

To put it another way, if one wants to know what groups should be represented in the national legislature (or in any other branch of government), one would need to know if they experience “systemic disadvantage in the political process” and whether they have a reasonable claim to self-government, based on the ideas of justice sketched earlier. But if you add up the “oppressed groups” in the United States—women, ethnic, national, and sexual minorities, among others—they add up to 80 percent of the population. Why would they not begin to oppress the remaining 20 percent? While group representation “is not inherently illiberal or undemocratic,” it raises “difficult questions.”

And what if “the demands of some groups exceed what liberalism can accept”? Liberalism may not require one regime, but it cannot tolerate all regimes. Kymlicka has already articulate “two fundamental limitations on minority rights”: requirements by minority cultures “to restrict the basic civil or political liberties” of “their own members”; in terms of what he’s called “external protections,” “liberal justice cannot accept any such rights which enable one group to oppress or exploit other groups,” as in slavery, apartheid, or segregation. “In short, a liberal view requires freedom within the minority group, and equality between the minority and majority groups.” Groups that attempt to push past these limits may do so because to accept them “might imply that the internal structure of their community should be reorganized according to liberal standards of democracy and individual freedom”—it might indeed imply regime change. It isn’t only that such resistance would “limit the freedom of individual members within the group to revise traditional practices,” as Kymlicka points out; it would actually require the group to “revise” those practices. 

Some might say means that “to find room for minority rights within liberal theory…requires qualifying these rights in such a way that they no longer correspond to the real aims of minority groups.” (I would be among those who say so.) “Is the insistence on respect for individual rights not a new version of the old ethnocentrism, found in Mill and Marx, which sets the (liberal) majority culture”—in the case of Marx, it must be said, a decidedly illiberal minority culture, the culture of communist parties—as “the standard to which minorities must adhere”? Only if liberalism is ethnocentric, one might well reply. While modern liberalism unquestionably originated in Europe, under conditions of modern statism, does that make it ethnocentric in principle, to its core? Not really, as the many non-European liberal regimes attest. 

What Kymlicka wants to get at is that there are forms of toleration which are not liberal. In the past, they have centered on ‘culture’ in the original sense—on cult, on religion. For example, the longstanding Ottoman Empire permitted Muslims, Christians, and Jews to practice their religions more or less in peace, without requiring them to abstain from severe restrictions on individual liberties within each of those groups. “This system was generally humane, tolerant of group differences, and remarkably stable,” if not liberal, not respecting individual freedom of conscience, allowing intra-group repression of heterodoxy. The Ottoman state amounted to “a federation of theocracies.” Locke, Kant, and Mill would not approve, and Marxian atheists would shrink from it in horror and indignation. 

“So it is not enough to say that liberals believe in toleration. The question is, what sort of toleration?” If “liberal tolerance protects the right of individuals to dissent from their group, as well as the right of groups not to be persecuted by the state,” then liberalism requires a regime with a state apparatus sufficiently powerful to reach into ethnic and even national minority communities to protect dissenters but sufficiently gentle not to injure religionists who do not persecute their own dissenters. But what if non-liberal minorities “want internal restrictions that take precedence over individual rights”? Should the liberal regimes act to prevent this? That is, “does a third party have the right to impose liberal principles on another society” by coercive measures? If so, to what extent? 

“Many nineteenth-century liberals, including John Stuart Mill,” went so far as to say that “liberal states were justified in colonizing foreign countries in order to teach them liberal principles.” Although most “contemporary liberals” have “abandoned this doctrine as both imprudent and illegitimate,” depending instead upon such nonviolent methods as “education, persuasion, and financial incentives,” they continue to hold coercion legitimate in dealing national minorities. Kymlicka objects. “Both foreign states and national minorities form distinct political communities, with their own claims to self-government.” To the obvious question—So what?—he can only sputter about aggression, paternalism, colonialism, while worrying that “these attempts often backfire.” Indeed, they often do, but that is no principled objection. He is surely right to say that “liberal institutions can only really work if liberal beliefs have been internalized by the members of the self-governing society, be it an independent country or a national minority,” but that only begs the question of how that might more effectively be accomplished.

As for Kymlicka, he holds out the hope of negotiations. Given the fact that “members of some minority cultures reject liberalism,” representatives of “the liberal majority will have to sit down with the members of the national minority, and find a way of living together,” carefully identifying what the “views” of the illiberal minority are and seeking some modus vivendi on the basis of any shared opinions that may exist. He hopes that gradually, over time, the illiberal minority will liberalize and, in the meantime, with their right to self-government respected, their liberalization will be ‘from within,’ not imposed. That sort of approach might work with a national minority that posed no serious threat to the liberal regime of the surrounding state. There would surely be times when civil war might quite rightly result, however, and the policy gives little or no help when confronting formidable illiberal regimes ruling foreign states. 

Will “group-differentiated minority rights” lead to disunity in a country, ruin a liberal regime? Whereas “the impulse underlying representation rights” for minorities “is inclusion, not separation,” such inclusion is on the basis of separation. Although “there is strikingly little evidence that immigrants pose any sort of threat to the unity or stability of a country,” and indeed subsequent generations of immigrants are often ardent patriots, national minorities “pose a more serious challenge to the integrative function of citizenship.” Such minorities may claim “that there is more than one political community” within the larger state, and that the state “cannot be assumed to take precedence over the authority of the constituent national communities.” Kymlicka acknowledges that “it seems unlikely that according self-government rights to a national minority can serve an integrative function.” Such rights instead “give rise to a sort of dual citizenship, and to potential conflicts about which community citizens identify with most deeply”; indeed, “there seems to be no natural stopping point to the demands for increasing self-government.” The dilemma is that “imposing common citizenship on minorities which view themselves as distinct nations or people is likely to increase conflict in a multination state.” Both liberal and Communist states have failed in wielding their substantial powers to change the “national consciousness” of minorities within their empires. “Since claims to self-government are here to stay, we have no choice but to try to accommodate them,” and, he maintains, “self-government arrangements diminish the likelihood of violent conflict,” especially since outright secession only establishes a national state on or within the borders of the larger state, with all the attendant dangers that implies.

Some liberals, including Rawls, have hoped to establish good relations among such different ‘cultures’ or regimes on the foundation of “a shared conception of justice.” But, as Kymlicka observes, “shared values are not sufficient for social unity.” Sweden and Norway share ‘values,’ but they have no interest whatsoever in uniting into one country. [4] What’s required for political union “seems to be the idea of a shared identity“—a “commonality of history, language, and maybe religion,” and especially “pride in certain historical achievements,” such as the American founding. Since “in many multination states history is a source of resentment and division between national groups, not a source of pride,” this may prove a dead end. Why would American Indians, or indeed most ethnic minorities in America, feel pride in the American founding, an achievement largely of English colonists? 

There is, then, no “generalized” solution to the problem. “A country founded on ‘deep diversity’ is unlikely to stay together unless people value deep diversity itself, and want to live in a country with diverse forms of cultural and political membership.” And “even this is not always sufficient.” Rather, members of the several national groups “must value…the particular ethnic groups and national cultures with whom they currently share the country.” But on the basis of what? There must be a shared “patriotism” felt for the overall state, but “liberal theory has not yet succeeded in clarifying the nature” of this sentiment. With that admission, Kymlicka ends his book.

Patriotism is a form of the love of one’s own, a sentiment seen most naturally in the love of parents for their children and the love of everyone for most if not all of their property. Before the Rawlsian liberalism of recent decades, and before the historicist liberalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Americans grounded their regime on natural rights. Being natural, those rights respected love of one’s own without sacralizing it. The regime they founded was intended to secure those rights. They hoped to see the establishment of similar commercial-republican regimes, especially in America’s geopolitical ‘neighborhood,’ the New World. In the more remote areas of the Americas, they were content to promote regime change and to undermine European empires diplomatically, as when President Jefferson sent a copy of the Declaration of Independence to Brazil, carried by a young Brazilian acquaintance of his. In the nearer areas, Americans did not hesitate to conquer the peoples living under rival regimes, most notably those of the Amerindians and (some of) the Mexicans. They also changed, or attempted to change, the regimes of the conquered peoples, with mixed results. When it became clear that the states in the southern section of the country preferred oligarchic regimes based on substantial slave populations to American republicanism, a brutal civil war resulted. What natural rights-based republicanism lent to the ‘American mind’ was clarity not only on the level of reason or theory but on the level of sentiment. In the 1850s, Abraham Lincoln could tell his fellow citizens that he had never felt a political sentiment that did not derive from the Declaration of Independence. Knowing that the Southern oligarchs no longer shared that sentiment, he then could make prudential choices determining what to do about it. As is well known, the defeated Southern oligarchs held out for a century after the war, hamstringing the new regime of natural rights imposed by the Unionist republicans who very imperfectly imposed that regime upon them. But the regime won out, in the end and, in the meantime, Southerners fought loyally in two world wars, on the side of the hated ‘Yankees.’ They did so, knowing and feeling that the regimes they were fighting were worse than the American regime they were living in, and that (somewhat more ‘concretely’) they disliked German submarines sinking American merchant ships, some of whose sailors were Southerners as well as Americans. Shared enemies help, too, and enemies tend to be regime enemies, if your regime is a commercial republic.

 

Notes

1. He may not think it necessary to defend his claim because he rejects natural right as the foundation of individual rights, although he might conceivably deny that natural right precludes civil laws against homosexual activity. 
2. Humboldt and Mazzini, it should be remarked, were historicist—Hegelian or neo-Hegelian—liberals, who eschewed natural-right liberalism. Kymlicka’s own pointed ignoring of natural-right liberalism suggests that he prefers to avoid the complications that liberalism would pose for his own project.
3. According to Kymlicka, “American liberals” in this period mostly ignored the issue. He evidently doesn’t know about the successful efforts of the Washington Administration to effect regime change among the Five Civilized Tribes of the American southeast, efforts spoiled by whites in Georgia who went ahead and encroached upon Indian land rights, eventually leading to the catastrophic “Trail of Tears.” Efforts to settle the boundaries of Indian territories in part by settling the Indians into agricultural ways of life continued nonetheless, with very mixed success, depending in large measure on whether the lands reserved for the tribes were conducive to agriculture.
4. Kymlicka leaves unremarked the fact that while the ‘values’ shared by Swedes and Norwegians don’t lead to political unification of the two nations, they do conduce to peace between them. 

Sallust: The War with Catiline. Loeb Classical Library.

 

Born in 86 B.C., Sallust became a member of the Roman Senate in his late twenties, then a tribune of the plebs a few years later. He therefore can be said to have had first-hand dealings with both the ‘few’ and the ‘many’ at an early age. No aristocrat, initially he seems to have inclined in favor of the plebs, a preference that may have contributed to his expulsion from the Senate for alleged corruption—the sort of crime which, had it been acted against universally, might have severely depopulated the Senate of his time. In the civil war that ensued a few years later, he sided with Julius Caesar—that noteworthy example of the rule of the ‘one’ who wins power by appealing to the many—obtaining an appointment as government of Numidia; for his pains, he was again charged with corruption, although this time his patron got him off the hook. He retired in 44 B.C., and in the ten years remaining to him he composed a substantial body of work, of which The War with Catiline and The War of Jugurtha survive extant. His five-volume history of Rome is lost.

Why history? Sallust begins his book on the Catilinian conspiracy with a defense of historiography, a defense intended particularly for Romans, who at that time had written so much less of it than the Greeks. “All human beings”—the one, the few, and the many—who “are keen to surpass other animals had best strive with all their vigor not to pass through life unnoticed, like cattle, which nature has fashioned bent over and subservient to their stomachs.” Unlike animals, “all our vitality” resides in both soul and body, with the godlike soul properly ruling the beast-like body. “Therefore, it seems to me more right to seek renown, that we should employ the resources of intellect than of bodily strength, and since the life we enjoy is itself brief, to make the memory of ourselves as lasting as possible.” The best way to do that is to cultivate “manly virtue,” a “shining and lasting possession,” unlike “riches or beauty,” the renown for which doesn’t last. 

Sallust thus begins his history with a justification of the life of the mind in ‘thumotic’ or aristocratic terms. For Plato’s Socrates, thumos rules the bodily appetites; while they love physical pleasures and fear pain, thumos or spiritedness loves honor and fame, detesting the way bodily appetites drag human beings down to the level of brutes. Logos or reason, in turn, rightly rules thumos, and through it the appetites. Hence the ‘philosopher-king’—king, at least, of his own soul, ruling it in accordance with reason, the distinctively human characteristic. Sallust, however, makes an appeal to the honor-lovers, the aristocrats or patricians: If you want fame, if you seek renown, if you would achieve something like godlike immortality, use your souls to achieve manly virtue. Unlike Socrates, Sallust puts the mind to the service of honor-loving spiritedness. Or, perhaps, that is his argument in justifying his own way of life, his own life of the mind, his historiography, to patricians, to men who scorn mere words and seek glory in great actions.

He knows that the thumotic few have long debated the priority of soul to body or body to soul. “For a long time, there was a big dispute among mortals whether military sucess depends more on bodily strength or strength of soul.” It is true that both are needed to win battles, and the renown such victory brings. “In the beginning,” kings—for “that was the first title of rule on earth”—chose between the two ways of life, “some training their intellect and others their body.” At that time, a third choice. covetousness, wasn’t seriously considered by such men. “But after Cyrus in Asia and in Greece the Lacedaemonians and the Athenians began to subdue cities and nations, to suppose the lust for dominion a pretext for war, to consider the greatest empire the greatest glory, then finally men learned from perilous enterprises that qualities of intellect can accomplish the most.”

Sallust makes several noteworthy observations in that sentence. The first kings confined their rule to poleis, to city-states. There, the question of strength of soul, and especially of the intellect, versus strength of body really was a question; city-states are small, and a man of exceptional physical strength, surrounded by friends or kinsmen nearly his equal in prowess might well rule the merely intelligent, as anyone who has experienced a high school gym class has learned. Ruling a vast empire is another matter; physical force doesn’t travel well, at least under the conditions prevailing in the ancient world, without long-range weapons. (And even such weapons require intelligence to design.) Second, the discovery of the superiority of mind to bodily strength in the pursuit of imperial rule and fame occurred both in Asia and in Europe; it was a ‘cross-cultural’ discovery, not limited to any one civilization but a discovery about human nature—one made, moreover, not by philosophers but by the rulers themselves and their subjects, proven in action, not in thought. The human mind proved itself in practice, not in the theory at which it excels more obviously. Finally, “covetousness” found its first expression not in commerce but in conquest and in ruling. It was not first of all a matter of ‘economics.’

With this discovery, however, a new question or problem came to sight. Manly excellence of soul works well in war, as the great empire builders demonstrated. Surprisingly, it works less well in peace. If it did, “you would not see rule passing from hand to hand and everything in turmoil and confusion.” You would not see empires break up, rebellious provinces, palace revolutions, factions fighting each other in the streets. It is true that “rule is easily retained by the qualities by which it was first won”; a prudent emperor readily maintains his authority. But those very qualities decline with that very sustained imperial rule. As years wear on, “sloth has usurped the place of hard work, and lawlessness and insolence have superseded self-restraint and justice.” With this, “the fortune of princes changes with their character,” as men of real virtue overthrow their complacent superiors. 

This is true not only in politics but in agriculture, navigation, and architecture. Success in those endeavors also “depends invariably upon manly virtue.” There, too, however, “many mortals, being slaves to appetite and sleep,” slaves to the bodily appetites, “have passed through life untaught and untrained,” living ways of life “contrary to Nature’s intent,” wherein “the body [is] a source of pleasure, the soul a burden.” Such men are “on a par” with one another in life and in death,” since “no record is made of either,” no fame distinguishes them or raises them above animals. They have achieved equality, but it is an equality of obscurity, of slavish subservience to their own mediocrity. “In the very truth, that man alone lives and makes the most of life, it seems to me, who devotes himself to some occupation, seeking fame for a glorious deed or a noble career.” Nature provides many paths to the same end, using the human characteristic closest to the gods, the power of the mind, to win the fame that constitutes the closest men get to divine immortality.

Here the practice of history arises. “It is glorious to serve the Republic well by deeds; even to serve her by words is a thing by no means absurd; one may become famous in peace as well as in war.” That is, the peace of empire need not bring sloth in its train, nor factitiousness. For “both those who have acted and those also who have written about the acts of others receive praise.” The poet Homer, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius have won fame for themselves with their words by preserving the fame of doers in those words. Rome has had no such historian, before Sallust. In Rome, “by no means equal renown attends the narrator and the doer of deeds, nevertheless the writing of history is an especially difficult task: first, because the style and diction must be equal to the deeds recorded”—as with poetry, art should imitate nature—and also “because such criticism as you make of others’ faults are thought by most men to be due to malice and envy.” With the artistic challenge, the historian faces a moral challenge, not unlike that faced by the man of action, whose every move is prey to malicious and envious rivals. Further, men notoriously believe only what they want to believe, and what they believe they measure by their own capacities. “While everyone is quite ready to believe you when you tell of things which he thinks he could easily do himself, everything beyond that he regards as fictitious, if not false”—a lesson Thucydides had taught, centuries before. Whether you praise great men of action or blame them, you will endure much the same egalitarian animosity, the same growling of men who remain too near the level of beasts, as those you write about must endure. Sallust thus moves to win the sympathy of the few, the men who look down on those who teach, who work with words, instead of doing. 

He turns to autobiography to increase this sympathy. As a young man, he entered public life, finding “many obstacles, or instead of modesty, incorruptibility, and honesty, shamelessness, bribery, and rapacity held sway,” captivating his ambitious young soul, in “my youthful weakness.” He went along to get along. He exited public life into enforced leisure. But “it was not my intention to waste [that] precious leisure in indolence and sloth,” the bane of peace, “nor yet to turn to farming,” like Cincinnatus, or to hunting—which he deems “slavish employments.” “On the contrary, I decided to return to an undertaking and pursuit from which the harmful craving for advancement had held me back, and to write of the deeds of the Roman people, selecting such portions as seemed to me worthy of record.” With a soul “free from hope, and fear, and partisanship,” he has chosen to write on the conspiracy of Catiline,” a history that deserves “special notice because of the novelty of the crime and of the danger arising from it.” History well written might change the course of events in his country, if citizens understand the way of tyrants, the unnatural way of their nature. 

What was his nature, his character? A patrician, Lucius Catiline “had great vigor both of soul and body, but an evil and depraved intellect.” Sallust makes no attempt to account for the origin of that nature. It may be that some tyrants are born, not made. However it may have been with Catiline, “from youth up, he reveled in civil wars, murder, pillage and political dissension, and amid those he spent his early manhood.” “His soul was reckless, cunning, treacherous, capable of any form of pretense or concealment,” and he put it to use in a life of covetousness, but not the covetousness of a Cyrus or a Pericles. Like Aristotle’s tyrant, he bent his ambition toward gain for himself, not for his country, a country that already ruled the world, with nothing more to covet. A man of “violent passions,” he threw away his own property while seizing the property of others; “he possessed a certain amount of eloquence, but little discretion.” His was the wrongly ordered soul par excellence, one that “ever craved the excessive, the incredible, the impossible.”

He saw the dictatorship of Lucius Sulla in the years 83 to 79 B.C. The Romans appointed dictators in times of emergency. “Seized with a great passion of seizing control of the republic,” Catiline understood that he could “make himself supreme” only if another crisis occurred. He couldn’t wait for one to occur by chance, however. Indebted by his own extravagance, vulnerable to prosecution for his crimes, his “fierce soul” was “spurred on, also, by the corrupt public morals, which were being ruined by two great evils of opposite character, luxury and avarice”—public parallels to his own private vices—he needed to foment such a crisis as soon as he could.

Sallust here pauses to explain how “the public morals” of Rome had “ceased to be the noblest and best,” in accordance with “the institutions of our forefathers in peace and in war,” and thanks to the way those men “governed the republic” within the framework of those institutions, only now to “become the worst and most infamous” of countries, one in which a Catiline might arise. The city of Rome was founded by the Trojans, who arrived in an Italy populated by native, “rustic” folk who had no laws of government, living “free and unrestrained.” Although different in race, language, and way of life, these people “were merged into one with incredible facility,” thanks to its founding lawgivers. But the very prosperity of Rome, as it grew “in population, civilization, and territory,” fostered envy in the surrounding peoples, who “put [the Romans] to the test of war.” Their friends in Italy for the most part looked the other way, forcing the Romans into self-reliance. They “defended their liberty, their country, and their parents by arms,” becoming a powerful military republic. Their victories enabled them to turn to their erstwhile allies and political friends from a position of strength, “establish[ing] friendly relations” with them “rather by conferring than by accepting favors,” in liberty not dependency.

The regime, “founded on law,” was a monarchy in name, an aristocracy in fact. The patricians were elders, called “Fathers,” their bodies “enfeebled by age,” their intellects “fortified with wisdom” at the service not of themselves but of “the welfare of the republic.” That is, even before embarking on empire, they had already answered the question emperors had settled, the question of whether the soul’s intellect or the body should be authoritative in human life. When the monarchic element of the regime so strengthened as to overbear the few, establishing tyranny, in 509 B.C. the patricians wisely “altered their form of rule,” changed the regime, by appointing two consuls with one-year terms, thereby checking and balancing what would later be called ‘executive’ power while ensuring that no one man or combination of two men could become ensconced in power over the Senate. This again shows the importance of the human mind; the bicephalous executive was designed to “prevent men’s minds from growing insolent through unlimited authority.”

This reform affected the spirit of the whole population, not only the spirit of the one and the few. “Every man began to distinguish himself and to put his native talents forward.” The Roman regime now brought out what Sallust has called the best of human nature in all its citizens. The Romans used their minds to strive for fame. Although in perpetual danger from its enemies, the Romans’ “civitas, once liberty was won, waxed incredibly strong and great in a remarkably short time, such was the desire for glory that had arrived on the scene.” Its young men consented to the “vigorous discipline” of army life, learning and practicing the “soldier’s duties” enabling them to endure “the hardships of war.” For such men, “valor mastered all obstacles.” Their “greatest struggle for glory” came not from their battles with foreigners but “with one another,” as each strove to surpass the others in striking down enemies, in performing feats of military prowess. “This they considered riches, this fair fame and high nobility:” “this fame they coveted.” They sought “only such riches as could be gained honorably,” their aim being “unbounded renown” not luxury.

And it is precisely in this that Rome has suffered. The goddess Fortuna “rules everywhere.” One expects Sallust to write that the strong Roman people found themselves overmatched by her, and for the historian to draw from this a lesson of humility. Not at all. Fortuna worked against Rome not in ordaining its downfall but by exercising her capacity to “make all events famous or obscure according to her pleasure rather than in accordance with the truth.” The Athenians performed “great and glorious deeds,” but the fame of those deeds surpasses their true worth “because” Fortuna would have it so. “Athens produced writers of exceptional talent” to laud them, men of “great intellect” who more than matched the deeds with “words of praise.” “The Roman people never had that advantage, since their most prudent men were always engaged with affairs; no one employed his intellect apart from his body; the best citizen preferred action to words and thought that his own brave deeds should be lauded by others rather than that theirs should recounted by him.” (Julius Caesar would become the exception to this rule.) Not only should Romans not denigrate their historians, but they should also understand that the fame they seek can last only in their words.

In the Rome Sallust admires, the one whose history he would write, “good morals were cultivated at home and in the field…thanks not so much to laws as to nature,” the nature cultivated by the regime, animated by its spirit. Romans reserved their quarrels for their enemies, as “citizen vied with citizen only for the prize of merit.” With respect to money, “they were lavish in their offerings to the gods, frugal in the home, loyal to their friends,” exhibiting “boldness in warfare and justice when peace came.” In war, they observed the mean between extremes, exacting punishment on a soldier for attacking contrary to orders or for leaving the field of battle too reluctantly when so ordered. Thumos, yes, but thumos in right measure. When at peace, “they ruled by kindness rather than fear, and when wronged preferred forgiveness to vengeance,” centuries before Christianity would adjure them to do so. ‘Kind’ also means ‘nature.’ 

It was only “when our country had grown great through toil and the practice of justice” that Fortuna “began to grow be savage and to bring confusion into all our affairs.” The regime of military republicanism needs adversaries to continue in the spirit of courage, moderation, and justice. Under the austere conditions of danger, “leisure and wealth” were desirable, but under the conditions of world empire they were “a burden and a curse.” Longterm rest imperils the regime of active warrior-citizens by turning their ambition toward wealth and rule not over foreigners but over one another. Avarice ruins honor, integrity, and “all the other noble qualities,” replacing the virtues of the few with insolence, cruelty, impiety—the thumotic impulses gone wrong. Romans began “to set a price on everything.” They began to conceal their corrupt natures from one another, pretenders to the virtues they once openly displayed, showing “a good front rather than a good heart.” They surreptitiously, each in his own heart, raised not the battle standard of Rome but “the standard of self-interest.” 

Because their ethos had been a warrior ethos, their souls initially “were activated less by avarice than by ambition.” But after the rule of Lucius Sulla had “brought everything to a bad end from a good beginning, all men began to rob and pillage.” This occurred not only through his bad example, bringing out the selfishness which had by now risen dangerously near the surface of Roman souls, but because he corrupted the army. Having led it to Asia, to lands ruled by despots wallowing in luxury, he secured the loyalty of his soldiers to himself, not to Rome, but “allow[ing] it a luxury and license foreign to our ancestral customs”; “those charming and voluptuous lands…easily demoralized the warlike spirit of his soldiers.” The most active and austere segment of the Roman people “learned to indulge in women and drink, to admire statues, paintings,” stealing exquisite vases from private houses and public places, pillaging shrines, and “desecrat[ing] everything, both sacred and profane.” If “prosperity tries the souls of even the wise,” why would it not ruin the souls of soldiers? This is how Sulla made an army of Rome his own private army.

These men returned to Rome with their trophies and, worse, their newfound vices. “As soon as riches came to be held in honor,” mingling with ambition and the desire for glory and for rule, virtue no longer became a source of honor among honor-lovers. “Luxury and greed, united with insolence, took possession of our young manhood,” those the would-be tyrant needs to boost himself into power. Their ancestors had “adorned the shrines of the gods with piety,” not gold leaf; they had adorned their homes with glory, having taken nothing from the vanquished but “the license of doing harm” to Rome. They lived mindfully, doing honor to their human nature. “The men of today, on the contrary, basest of creatures,” no longer fully human, “with supreme wickedness are robbing our allies”—not only their vanquished enemies—of “all that those most courageous men in the hour of victory had left them; they act as though the only way to rule were to wrong.” They have destroyed friendship among themselves and with Rome’s allies, weakening Rome both internally and abroad.

In the new Rome, men level mountains and extend their villas on jetties into the seas, abusing nature and squandering money for the gratification of their own pleasure. “Men played the woman, women offered their chastity for sale.” Driven by such “self-indulgence,” young men ran themselves into debt, turning to crime to pay the bills. 

“In a city so great and so corrupt Catiline found it a very easy matter to surround himself, as by a bodyguard, with troops of criminals and reprobates of every kind.” What Sulla had done in Asia Catiline did in Rome, militarizing vice. A self-ruling republic requires a self-ruling citizenry, but the would-be tyrant wanted neither. This is why “most of all Catiline sought the intimacy of young men,” as “their souls, still pliable as they were and unstable, were without difficulty ensnared by his deceits.” After “carefully studying the passion which burned in each, according to his time of life, he found harlots for some or brought dogs and horses for others,” thus “mak[ing] the dependent and loyal to himself,” borrowing the technique from Sulla. Dependency on ‘the one’ replaced self-governing liberty among the many and the few in the rising generation.

Catiline himself seems to have needed no such seduction. “Even in youth [he] had many shameful debaucheries,” notably with a woman named Aurelia Orestilla, “in whom no good man ever commended anything save her beauty,” as Sallust finely phrases the matter. In order to clear his way into her household, Catiline murdered her stepson. Sallust suggests that Catiline may have hastened his political conspiracy because “his guilt-stained soul, at odds with gods and men, could find rest neither waking nor sleeping so cruelly did conscience ravage his overwrought mind.” That is, the tyrannical mind, impassioned by the prospect of physical pleasure but then tormented by what remains of its true nature, drives itself insane. “His very glance showed the madman.”

To blood his young hounds, he kept them busy with crimes, including murder, preferring “to be vicious and cruel rather than to allow their hands and souls to grow weak with lack of practice.” This is the perversion of martial discipline, impossible without an ethos of military discipline to pervert. This is how the military republic can be re-founded as a tyranny. Catiline now needed only the opportunity, the circumstances in which he could make his move with a chance of success.

He made that decision, however, not in liberty but out of necessity. Both he and the veterans of Sulla’s campaign he counted on for backing were deeply in debt, thanks to their extravagances. There being no foreign lands for them to conquer, they could only plunder Rome itself, becoming “eager for civil war.” The great general Pompey was in Syria and would not be able to return in time to counter the planned coup. Most of the senators suspected nothing, except those who were in on the plot. “All was tranquil and secure; this was a straightforward opportunity for Catiline.” One of the few great men of the time, Marcus Licinius Crassus, may have been in on it, too. Rival of Pompey, “he was willing to see anyone’s power grow in opposition to the power of his rival, fully believing meanwhile that if the conspiracy should be successful, he would easily be the principal man among them.” Catiline would then prove a useful tool, easily discarded if broken in the work.

Catiline first attempted to murder his way to power. In 66 B.C., after having been charged with extortion and prevented from standing for the consulship because he hadn’t met the deadline for announcing his candidacy, he and his co-conspirator Publius Autronius met with “a reckless young noble,” Gnaeus Piso, who proposed that they arrange for the murder of the two newly elected consuls and several of the senators. Then Catiline and Autronius could seize the consulships, sending Piso to grab two Spanish provinces ruled by Rome. “Had Catiline not been over-hasty in giving the signal to his accomplices in front of the senate-house, on that day the most dreadful crime since the founding of the city of Rome would have been perpetrated.” But thanks to one of his own vices, impatience, Catiline ruined the scheme by calling for action before a sufficient number of conspirators had assembled to carry it out effectively. Curiously, Piso’s ‘punishment’ consisted of being sent off to Spain with military powers; the senators wanted to get him away from them and to use him as a counterbalance to Pompey, now in Spain and himself feared by the senators. Piso was murdered there, perhaps by “the barbarians” there or by some “old and devoted retainers of Pompey.” Thus ended the first Catiline conspiracy.

As yet uncharged with any crime against the government—evidently, he had covered his tracks—Catiline addressed his co-conspirators, whom he lauds as “brave and faithful to me.” He tells them that his soul therefore “has had the courage to set on foot a mighty and glorious enterprise.” This recalls Sallust’s teaching, that the soul should rule the body for the sake of honor. Catiline, too, understands this, in his own perverse way. Indeed, “I perceive that you and I hold the same view of what is good and bad; for agreement in likes and dislikes—this, and this only us what constitutes firm friendship.” Just so, but one must consider the like-mindedness he invokes. It consists of fear (consider “under what conditions we shall live if we do not take steps to emancipate ourselves”); a desire for liberty that is really license (emancipation from debts brought on by their own extravagance); resentment (we, the “energetic, [the] able” have been reduced to the status of “the common herd,” ruled “a few powerful men” who control a vast empire); libido dominandi (we are the ones who would be “the objects of fear” for our current rulers, were they subservient to us); impatience (“How long will you endure this, O bravest of men?”); hope (“victory is within our grasp”); contempt (“we are in the prime of life,” but they are in a condition of “utter dotage”); spiritedness in the cause of justice defined in terms of envy (“what mortal with the spirit of a man can endure that our tyrants should abound in riches?”); desperation (we have nothing to lose); ‘wokeness’ (“Awake then!”); pride (“use me as your leader or as a soldier in the ranks,” as “my soul and my body shall be at your service”); and shame (surely, I do not “delude myself and you are content to be slaves rather than to rule”). He takes the vices of his like-minded, like-impassioned followers and ascribes them to their enemies, right down to the claim that the ‘exploitive’ few who rule Rome cannot even rule the riches they have amassed—exactly the fault of Sulla’s ‘Asianized’ soldiers.

Catilinean like-mindedness lacks mindfulness, except insofar that it ‘awakens’ or brings to consciousness a perfect storm of passions, supposedly in service of his confederates but designed to render them subservient to himself. A tyrant would rule for himself, but he cannot rule by himself. He needs allies, the more impassioned the better. Stooping to conquer their minds, he perorates, “Use me either as your leader or as a soldier in the ranks”—small chance of that—either way, “my soul and my body shall be at your service.” Sallust has presented exactly the kind of speech an aspiring tyrant would make. If you hear a man speak like this, he tells his fellow Romans, understand his real nature and his means of persuasion. He hasn’t yet the power to enforce; he must begin with persuasion. He uses his own mind to reinforce the passions of his followers, attaching them to himself even as the Roman generals had already begun to attach their soldiers to themselves, not to Rome. A military republic cannot easily or quickly be redirected into commercial republicanism, but its military republican virtues he had described at the beginning of his book can be perverted toward license and tyranny, redefining liberty as the fulfillment of libido dominandi, introducing the harshest spirit of imperialism inflicted on followers into Roman politics itself.

The men wanted to know how all of this could be done. Catiline answered by telling them what they need to do to achieve “the prizes of victory.” These included (he assured them) the abolition of debts, the proscription of the current authorities, secular and religious, and “plunder.” After “heaping maledictions upon all good citizens,” he demonstrated his intimate knowledge of each man, praising them by name and reminding each of his particular interest in the enterprise, whether it was escape from poverty or prosecution, or the fulfillment of hitherto thwarted ambition. “When he saw that the souls of all were aroused, he dismissed the meeting.” He may or may not have sealed their allegiance by having them drink a concoction compounded of human blood and wine—themselves agents of heatedness— although Sallust admits he has “too little” evidence to confirm that this actually happened. Whether factual or not, the story makes sense in that it bespeaks a new, decidedly uncivil religion in Rome, replacing the old religion of Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus. The purpose of these “solemn rites” was to render each conspirator “more faithful” to the others, sharing “the guilty knowledge”—the content of minds—of “so dreadful a deed.” By refusing to insist on the truth of this detail, Sallust himself exemplifies the way a true, rational mind thinks, inviting a sober form of faith in his readers, trust in his own reliability as a historian.

The problem with conspiring with evil men is that one or more of them may lack even the modest degree of virtue required to keep his mouth shut. Quintus Curius, “a man of no mean birth but guilty of many shameful crimes” and expelled from the Senate for them, preened himself in the presence of his mistress, Fulvia, who retained some traces of the old Roman patriotism. Having “had no thought of concealing such a peril to her country,” she gossiped about the conspiracy to “a number of people,” while concealing the name of her lover. The senators became sufficiently alarmed to bestow the consulate upon Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose ancestors had achieved no office distinguished enough to cause him to merit such an honor under ordinary circumstances. “But when danger came, jealousy and pride fell into the background.”

Despite Cicero’s election, “Catiline’s frenzy did not abate.” He stashed arms “at strategic points throughout Italy”; borrowed still more money and sent it to one of his allies, Manlius, who would command troops in the planned civil war. He appealed to slaves in Rome, avid for emancipation, to prepare to set fires in Rome—the imagery of fire, again—at the appointed moment. He enlisted the assistance of Sempronia, a woman “who had often committed many crimes of masculine daring”—but nonetheless refined, “able to play the lyre and dance more skillfully than a virtuous woman need do.” “There was nothing which she held so cheap as modesty and chastity,” “her lust [being] so ardent that she pursued men more often than she was pursued by them,” but she “could write verses, raise a laugh, and use language which was modest, or tender, or wanton,” being possessed of “a high degree of wit and charm.” She, too, enjoyed a sort of life of the mind.

With such friends in his train, Catiline spent the year scheming against Cicero, “who, however, did not lack the craft and address to escape” the traps set for him. Indeed, Cicero induced blabbermouth Curius to reveal Catiline’s plot. He also took the precaution of agreeing to offer his consular colleague, Antonius, a richer province than the one he had received as a reward for winning high office. Cicero also prudently “provided himself with a bodyguard of friends and dependents.” Sallust’s Cicero understands politics, ‘low’ as well as ‘high’; he isn’t Shakespeare’s windbag. When Catiline attempted to gain election to the consulship the following year, he lost.

Having failed in Roman politics, politics in the capital city, Catiline moved to activate his military strategy with the provinces. He sent Gaius Manlius, Septimus of Camerinum, and Gaius Julius, among others, to various parts of the empire to prepare for civil war. He would soon turn to them because a plot to murder Cicero failed, thanks again to Curius’ timely warning. [1] Gaius Manlius was particularly successful in gathering support for rebellion because the Etrurians he rallied had been abused by Sulla during his governorship of the colony. In this case, the many had just complaints. (Not to be uncatholic in his recruitment, he also enlisted local “brigands” in the cause.) When Cicero reported these stirrings to the senators, they voted him emergency powers as dictator. 

The thirty-first, central section of The War with Catiline recounts the reaction of the now-corrupt Romans to their peril. In the earlier centuries of the republic, shared danger had reinforced self-discipline and noble rivalry in service of fame and the public good. Now, “in place of extreme gaiety and frivolity, the fruit of long-continued peace, there was sudden and general gloom.” “The women, too, whom the greatness of our country had hitherto shielded from the terrors of war, were in a pitiful state of anxiety, raised suppliant hands to heaven”—suddenly remembering Roman pietas —bewailed “the fate of their little children, asked continual questions, trembled at everything, and throwing aside haughtiness and self-indulgence, despaired of themselves and their country.” 

In response to Cicero’s condemnation of him in the Senate [2], Catiline denied everything, asserting that he ought to be believed because he, a man of high birth, could not possibly benefit from revolution in Rome, whereas Cicero, whom he lyingly described as a resident alien, was suspect. The senators were hearing none of that and shouted him down. Invoking the imagery of fire Sallust has attributed to Catiline throughout, the accused man, “in a transport of fury,” screamed “Since I am cornered by my enemies and driven to desperation, I will put out the fire which consumes me by general devastation.” His hope of fighting passion-fire quite literally with fire in the streets were frustrated when the slaves he had engaged to set fires throughout the city were prevented from doing so by watchmen deployed by Cicero, who knew about this tactic from his interviews with Curius. 

Catiline fled Rome, instructing those followers remaining in the city “to make ready murder, arson, and other deeds of war” within the city, preparatory for his own return at the head of a rebel army. His ally, Manlius, wrote to a loyal Roman general, who had been sent into the provinces to quell the rebellious forces, invoking the gods and men alike as witnesses to their grievances. We are crushed by debts imposed “by the violence and cruelty of the moneylenders”; there is precedence for the forgiveness of debts by senatorial decree. “We ask neither for power nor for riches, the usual causes of wars and strife among mortals, but only for liberty, which no true man gives up except with his life.” With no little effrontery, he concluded with a plea to the general “to restore the protection of the law.” For his part, the general could only reply that if the rebels had any request to make of the Senate, they must disarm themselves “and set out for Rome as suppliants.”

Catiline deployed the same rhetorical appeal on behalf of the many in a letter to the Senator Quintus Catulus. No longer denying that he had rebelled, he instead argued for the “justice” of his rebellion. “Provoked by wrongs and slights, since I had been robbed of the fruits of my industrious labor”—true enough, as his criminal plots had come to ruin—I “followed my usual custom and took up the general cause of the unfortunate.” A true social justice warrior, he has “adopted measures which are honorable enough considering my situation.”

These measures, Sallust informs us, included arming the provincial populace Manlius had roused to revolt, joining Manlius in his camp, taking care to bring with him “the fasces and other emblems of authority”—actions that earned him and his chief accomplice designation as “enemies of the state” by the Senate, which decreed that the consul Antonius bring an army against him while Cicero remained to keep watch over Rome itself. “At that time,” Sallust remarks, “the rule of the Roman people, it seems to me, was by far the most pitiable. Although the whole world, the rising to the setting of the sun, had been subdued by arms and was obedient to Rome, although at home there was peace and wealth, which mortals deem the foremost blessings, nevertheless, there were citizens who from sheer perversity set out to destroy themselves and the state.” Lamentably, no one stepped forward to desert Catiline’s conspiracy, symptomatic of “a disease of such intensity as the plague which had infected the souls of many of our citizens.” “Eagerness for change,” animated by envy of wealthy men, hatred of everything old and of “their own lot” as spendthrift debtors who had “squandered their patrimony in disgraceful living,” animated the souls of men with as little respect for the republic” as “they had for themselves.”

Worse, the disease infected even hitherto respectable citizens. Previously, during the consulship of Pompey and Crassus, “the greater part of the nobles strove with all their might, ostensibly on behalf of the senate but really for their own aggrandizement. For, to tell the truth in a few words, after that time, whoever disturbed the state under the guise of honorable slogans—some as though defending the rights of the people, others so that the senate’s influence might be dominant—under pretense of the public good, each in reality strove for his own power.” Neither the party of the few nor the party of the many “showed moderation in their strife; both parties used victory ruthlessly.” When the pretended populist, Gnaeus Pompey, was sent to wage war overseas, “the strength of the plebians lessened” for a time, but once this new prospect of revolution came to view, “the old contest aroused their passions once again.” Sallust’s remark about the self-interest of both the few and the many should be kept in mind as he proceeds to recount the actions and words of the Romans.

Catiline’s ally, Lentulus, continued his recruitment of “anyone he thought ripe for revolution by disposition or fortune.” Among these he counted the Allobroges, a Gallic people, debt-burdened and, being Gallic, “by nature prone to war.” He detailed a man named Publius Umbrenus to approach their envoys in Rome. The envoys were receptive but cautious. They engaged in what our contemporaries would call a process of rational choice utility maximization: recognizing the superior power of the Republic, they saw a chance to gain rewards from Rome “in place of [the] unsure hope” of success with the conspirators. Through the Roman noble who served as their patron in the city, they informed Cicero of the plot.

Cicero then conspired against the conspirators. Pretend to join them, he advised; that way, their guilt will be brought “out into the open” and there will be evidence sufficient to convict them in the eyes of the senators. This they did, and the plotters moved their plans ahead. Once Catiline arrived near Rome with his army of provincials, they would publicly charge Cicero with fomenting civil war. Their people in Rome would then set fire to “twelve strategic points in the city” in the hope that the “ensuing confusion” make it easier to attack Cicero and other key senators. Additionally, the restive sons of aristocratic families “were to kill their fathers.” All of this would make Rome vulnerable to attack by Catiline’s waiting forces.

Duped by Cicero’s counterplot, the conspirators were arraigned before the Senate. Cicero was ambivalent about the matter, “rejoic[ing] in the knowledge that the disclosure of the plot had snatched the republic from peril” but worried because main conspirators were “citizens of such high standing.” “He believed that their punishment would produce trouble for him personally, that failure to punish them would be ruinous to the republic.” He chose the patriotic course and the in the event, the senators judged them guilty. As for the plebeians, they proved fickle, changing from their “desire for revolution” to denouncing Catiline and praising Cicero. Sallust takes the disclosure of the plan for arson as decisive to them, since fires would burn their own property.

Part of Cicero’s apprehension proved valid. A witness came forward, claiming that the exceptionally wealthy and powerful Crassus was part of the conspiracy. This was too much for some of the senators to believe, and the ones who did believe the man kept silent because they were in debt to Crassus. As for Crassus himself, he blamed Cicero, claiming that he had induced the witness to perjure himself. The enmity of Crassus would indeed produce trouble for Cicero, later on.  

Subordinates of the convicted conspirator Lentulus attempted to “rouse workmen and slaves in the neighborhoods of Rome to rescue him from custody, while others sought out leaders of mobs who had made it a practice to cause public disturbances for a price.” When Cicero learned of this, he convened the Senate in order to hasten the determination of the punishment of all the main conspirators. Consul-elect Decimus Junius Silanus arose to argue for a harsh punishment. Caesar opposed this, delivering a carefully worded speech, reasonable on its face if perhaps self-serving under the surface. 

He began with an appeal to the rule of the rational part of the soul over the passions. “All men who deliberate upon difficult questions,” he told his colleagues (in what then was the world’s greatest deliberative body) “had best be devoid of hatred, friendship, anger, and pity,” since affects hamper the soul’s attempt to “discern the truth.” What kind of reasoning, then? “No one has ever served at the same time his passions and his best interests.” Sallust has already told his readers that Romans by that time inclined toward conceiving of their best interests as their self-interest. Caesar gives two examples of such “bad decisions [made] under the influence of wrath or pity”: in the Macedonian war, Rome was deserted by the Rhodians, its putative allies, yet “our ancestors let them go unpunished so that no one might say that war had been undertaken more because of the wealth of the Rhodians than their misconduct”; in the Punic wars, despite “many abominable deeds” done to Romans by the Carthaginians “never did likewise when they had the opportunity,” but maintained their “dignity” against strict justice. Both of these claims undergird an appeal to the Romans’ honor, their reputation, not their virtue. Further, Caesar overlooks the punishment that was imposed upon the Rhodians, who were deprived of their territories on a strategic mercantile territory in Asia Minor. The “best interests” of Rome, then, evidently require ranking dignity over the virtues.

In this case, Caesar continued, we should again prefer our “good name” to righteous indignation. “What is the aim of that eloquence” which denounces the conspirators by invoking “the horrors of war”? We senators hold “great power” (magno imperio); men such as us hold a “lofty station” visible to “all mortals,” unlike the many. With the eyes of all upon us, we enjoy “the least freedom of action” of any class of men because we are judged more harshly. “That which is called wrath” among ordinary men is termed haughtiness and cruelty in persons having power.” While admitting that rage at the Catiline treason is just, inflicting a just punishment will provoke just such a claim; people will remember the punishment more vividly than they remember the crime because “most mortals remember the recent past.” Therefore, just punishment of the conspirators is “contrary to the best interests of our republic,” which (Caesar seemed to know) the senators incline to mingle with their own “best interests.” And it is not even just, as death will relieve the malefactors of the “grief and wretchedness” of life in confinement.

Not one for oversubtlety, Caesar invoked “the immortal gods” in opposing Silanus’ proposal. Setting the “bad precedent” of capital punishment for treason will invite our successors to turn the tables on us. Covetous men will accuse and convict innocents because they want to acquire their houses. To be sure, “I fear nothing of this kind in Marcus Tullius or in these circumstances, but in a great polity there are many and various geniuses”; some consul in the future, given the near-dictatorial power Cicero wields, may have “no limit” to his actions and no one to “restrain him.” He concluded his speech by proposing the exile of the conspirators from the city, the confiscation of their assets, and their imprisonment in several towns throughout Italy. 

This speech persuaded the senators, until Marcus Porcius Cato (‘Cato the Younger’) spoke. “My judgment is very different,” he began, bluntly. Our first concern should be to guard the city against the remaining conspirators, not to consult with one another regarding the punishments appropriate for those we now have in custody. Without the city, which remains in danger, there will be no capacity to judge or to punish. With sharp irony, he “call[ed] upon you, who have always valued your houses, villas, statues, and painting more highly than the nation”: If you want to remain free “from disturbance for indulging your pleasures, wake up at last, and lay hold of “the reins of government.” Caesar’s invocations of the wrongs of Rome’s allies or are wealth” stray from the point, which is, “our liberty and our lives are in doubt.” I, Cato, “have often deplored the luxury and avarice of our citizens,” thereby making enemies. But that was when we were prosperous and could afford such complacency. “Now, however, at issue is not the question whether our ethics are good or bad, nor how great or magnificent the empire of the Roman people is, but whether all this, of whatever sort it appears to be, is going to be ours or belong to the enemy along with rule over our very lives.” Knowing the less than noble character of the patricians of his time, Cato concentrated their minds on the low but solid ground of survival, while at the same time shaming them in their decadence.

He then made a critical point about language. “In these circumstances, does someone mention to me clemency and compassion? To be sure, we have long since lost the true names for things.” The right use of words requires moral as well as intellectual rigor. “It is precisely because squandering the goods of others is called generosity, and recklessness in wrongdoing is called courage, that the republic has been placed in a crisis.” If it is “the fashion of the time” to be “liberal at the expense of our allies” and “merciful to robbers of the treasury,” at least do not be “prodigal of our blood, and in sparing a few scoundrels bring ruin upon all good men.”

In Caesar’s appeal to self-interest in the guise of prudence, Cato recognized an unstated atheism. When Caesar said that a life in prison is worse than death, he tacitly denied “the tales which are told concerning the inhabitants of Underworld.” As for his proposal to disperse the prisoners to prisons throughout Italy, this would only risk their rescue by their fellow plotters or by hired mobs; indeed, such audacity has “greater strength where the resources to resist it are weaker.” Caesar’s advice is therefore “utterly worthless, if Caesar fears danger from the conspirators”; moreover, “if amid such universal dread he alone is not afraid, there is all the more reason for me to fear for your sake and my own,” implying that the alternative to Caesar’s overconfidence is a secret alliance with the conspirators. Not only Caesar’s atheism but the scope of his ambition may lurk beneath the surface of his rhetoric. Better to deter the conspirators who remain at large by vigorous action, for “if they detect even a little weakness on your part, they will all fiercely make their presence immediately felt.” The real source of our ancestors’ greatness was not in arms or even their dignity but in their nobility, seen in their industriousness at home, their just rule abroad, and “in counsel a soul liberated from the enslavement of misdeed and of passion.” With us, including Caesar, our intellects and our language fail us because our character has failed, as we live in “extravagance and greed, public poverty and private opulence, lauding wealth and pursuing idleness,” and for that reason making no distinction “between good men and bad,” a moral relativism that frees “ambition [to] appropriate all the prizes of merit.” No philosophy is needed to understand this, and so Cato exclaims “No wonder!” No need for Socratic dialectic, here. “Each of you takes counsel separately for his own personal interests”—instead of truly deliberating in common for the public good—and “when you are slaves to pleasure in your homes and to money or influence here, this gives impetus to an attack upon the defenseless republic.” Hypocrisy of words, words bent away from the shape of truth, results from hypocrisy of character.

Nor will piety do, if misunderstood. True, “the immortal gods,” invoked by Caesar, “have often saved this republic in moments of extreme danger.” But the gods don’t respond to “vows” or to “womanish entreaties.” The gods help those who help themselves “by means of watchfulness, vigorous action, and good counsel.” But “when you surrender yourself to sloth and cowardice, it is vain to call upon the gods; they are offended and hostile.” Thus “in the days of our forefathers” a general commanded that his son be executed after the young man, in a display of “immoderate valor,” “fought against the enemy contrary to orders.” In light of that, “do you hesitate what punishment to inflict upon the most ruthless traitors?” No: punish them “after the manner of our forefathers.” And so the senators did. 

At this point Sallust intervenes to deliver judgments in his own voice. “Now, for my own part, while reading and hearing of the many illustrious deeds of the Roman people at home and in war, on land and sea, a desire happened to stir in me to give thought to what factor in particular had made possible such great exploits,” whereby “a handful of men had done battle with vast enemy legions,” waging war against “powerful kings” with “small resources,” enduring “the cruelty of Fortune.” The Greeks had been more eloquent; the Gauls had won more “martial glory.” What was it, then, that made Rome great? “It became clear to me after much deliberation that many things were in motion and that all had been accomplished by the distinguished courage of a few of the citizens, and that as a result of this, poverty had triumphed over riches, and small numbers over a multitude. But after the civitas was corrupted by luxury and sloth, the republic still sustained the vices of generals and magistrates by its very magnitude, and just as the vigor of parents is exhausted by childbearing, so many storms had exhausted Roman virtue, and there was no one great in virtue remaining in Rome.” 

This defense of the virtue of the few, of aristocracy, inclines toward Cato’s side of the argument. However, Sallust immediately adds that “within my own memory there were two men of towering virtue, though of opposite character, Marcus Cato and Gaius Caesar.” They were “almost equal” in ancestry, age, and eloquence, equal in “greatness of soul and in renown,” but “each of a different sort. “Caesar was considered great because of his benefactions and lavish generosity, Cato for the uprightness of his life.” Consequently, liberal Caesar provided “refuge for the unfortunate,” severe Cato “destruction for the wicked.” In peace, Caesar worked hard, remained vigilant and often “devoted himself to the affairs of his friends at the neglect of his own,” but he really desired “a major command, an army, a new war in which his merit might be able to shine forth.” Cato instead “cultivated moderation, decorum, and above all sternness,” vying not “in riches with the rich, nor in factitiousness with the factious but with the strong in virtue, with the moderate in moderation, with the innocent in integrity. He preferred to be, rather merely to seem, virtuous,” and “hence the less he sought renown, the more it overtook him.” It is well known that in his youth Sallust allied himself with Caesar. Having retired from political life, he now offers the verdict of his mature judgment.

Cicero ordered preparations for the execution of the conspirators. Lentulus thereby “found an end of his life befitting his character and his deeds,” as did the others. As for Catiline, still backed by his ally, Manlius, and two legions of poorly armed troops outside Rome, he first attempted to retreat over the mountains into Transalpine Gaul. The Romans cut off that route with three legions already on guard in the Picene district; meanwhile, troops under Antonius’ command pursued him from Rome. Trapped, with no choices but surrender or defiance, he chose defiance, exhorting his men in a speech blaming Lentulus’ failure to foment sufficient disorder in Rome for their plight and invoking their “brave and ready soul.” “We must hew a path with iron “to win “riches, honor, glory, and on top of that, liberty and your native land.” Our enemies only “fight on behalf of the power of a few men.” Coming as it does after Sallust’s praise of aristocratic virtue, this description of a ‘populist’ or ‘democratic’ argument shows that Sallust’s history takes up Aristotle’s theme of the claims to rule by the few and the many, in this case a ‘few’ that has largely declined from true aristocracy, the ‘rule of the best,’ to oligarchy, the rule of the merely rich. Catiline hopes that he can inspire the many to rise up to the virtues of the few who ruled Rome in generations past. So far, however, he has failed to triumph precisely because the many have declined in virtue as badly as the few. He would fortify their remaining aspirations to virtue and their desire for material and political goods with the claim of necessity: “In battle the greatest danger always threatens those who show the greatest fear; boldness serves as a rampart.” And so, “your soul, youth, and valor encourage me, not to mention necessity, which makes even the timid brave.” 

In the battle, Catiline’s men faced off against the seasoned professional troops led by Marcus Petreius, Antonius’ deputy commander who was pressed into battlefield leadership by his boss, who was suffering gout. Both sides fought courageously. “When Catiline saw that his troops had been routed and that he had been left with a few comrades, mindful of his birth and his former standing, he plunged into the thickest of the enemy and while fighting there was run through.” None of his men had retreated, as “all had fallen with wounds in front.” No freeborn citizen was taken prisoner. The Roman army “had gained no joyful or bloodless victory,” as “all the most resolute had either fallen in the battle or come away with severe wounds.” Therefore, the surviving victors were “affected with exaltation and mourning, lamentation and gladness.”

The regime of the few rich thus preserved itself, not because its troops were any more courageous than the regime’s enemies but because they were better armed and more experienced in battle. A commander with better resources, appealing to the many, might have prevailed. Eventually, Caesar did. Cato won the debate, Caesar the empire.

 

Note

1. Not that Cataline gave up his hopes of murdering Cicero, the one man in Rome who as “a serious obstacle to his plans,” as a man of genuine virtue.
2. Cicero: “First Oration against Catiline.” In this brilliant speech, Cicero not only presents the evidence against Catiline and his confederates but recommends a course of action superior to the ones proposed by Caesar, some years later. Cicero urges the Senate not to jail the conspirators, as Caesar would advocate, but to expel Catiline from Rome, along with the other conspirators, let them concentrate their forces outside the city, then deploy the superior Roman legions to crush them.