Geoffrey Hawthorn: Thucydides on Politics: Back to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

 

The reader may safely ignore the sinking feeling he may get upon reading the subtitle. Although Hawthorn offers a few pages on contemporary international politics, he has written no tendentious, ‘lessons-from-Thucydides’ screed. Much more ambitiously, and fortified by careful study of the text, he sets out to be Thucydides’ Thucydides, tracing the historian’s narrative, probing, judging, guessing, arguing with other scholars and with Thucydides himself, always illuminating. Like his philosophic mentor, Bernard Williams, Hawthorn displays a resolutely English intelligence, venturing no grand theories but bringing out defensible arguments from sensible consideration of details mastered. The result is that rarity, a readable commentary on a classic book, teaching readers how better to think about politics and war in and among communities that seek, somehow, to rule themselves.

What makes politics difficult is the number and complexity of the causes that operate in human life. Explicitly, Thucydides attributes the Pelopponesian War to one main geopolitical cause: Spartans’ fear of the rise of the Athenian empire, backed by its navy. He makes another cause visible, slightly beneath the surface: Two distinct regimes, one oligarchic, the other democratic, distrust one another, each concerned that the other might aid the partisans of its domestic regime rivals. Hawthorn proceeds with caution, however, as Thucydides’ book “has never been easy to read”; a “possession for all time,” its author calls it, but not easily owned by any reader, now or in antiquity.

“Its subject though is clear. It is politics: men (all men) seeking power over others using it to pursue ends that are sometimes clear, sometimes not, never being sure what the outcomes will be.” Thucydides “allows one to see that politics is rarely admirable but always unavoidable, owes less to reason than we might suppose and allows no practical, moral or constitutional closure”; on the other hand, “at no point can it be said that character does not matter.” Contingencies dominate politics and war, and character matters very much indeed if there are no comforting ‘iron laws of History’ to put one’s trust in.

In writing his history, Thucydides’ intention “was almost the opposite of that of his most prominent predecessor, Herodotus,” who seeks to preserve the memory of “the great and wondrous achievements displayed by the Greeks and the barbarians, and especially their reasons for fighting each other,” in the Persian War. In writing what he calls his “inquiry,” Thucydides aims not so much as remembrance as usefulness; the usefulness of his narrative derives from its truthfulness, to the historian’s careful measuring of “the distances between what was thought and said and what transpired.” What is more, “Logoi, the accounts people give, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate, are [themselves] important erga, things done, political acts to be seen as such in the light of others.” Hobbes understood this, remarking that Thucydides’ way of writing “secretly instruct[s] the reader, and more effectually than can possibly be done by precept.” He meant that in presenting both the arguments and the actions, the speeches and the deeds, of the principal statesmen on both sides of the conflict, Thucydides impels his reader toward figuring out the truth of the matter for himself, and so to fortify himself, to take possession of this possession for all time. And given the permanence of human nature and the political life natural to human beings, what has happened in the Peloponnese in the fifth century B.C. “can be expected to happen again or some time in the future,” in “much the same ways,” as Thucydides himself remarks. His alert readers will have readied themselves for that likelihood. Histories too are both logoi and erga.

Thucydides begins his account of the second Peloponnesian War before the first war, which began in 460. After two invasions of Greece by the Persian Empire, repelled by Greek victories at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, Athens formed the Delian League as what we would now call a deterrent against any subsequent Persian ambitions and a defense in case those ambitions re-ignited. The League became the foundation of their own empire, itself founded on the navy it built in defense against the Persians. The Spartans didn’t join the League, their long-term commitment to any alliance effectively prevented by the prospect of a rebellion of the helot class at home. When the Spartans first asked for, and then declined Athenian assistance in putting down such a revolt in the nearby polis at Messenia, the offended Athenians ended the alliance with Sparta; “an open difference first emerged,” Thucydides writes, between the two regimes. The first war lasted from 460 to 445, ending in a treaty which was supposed to last for thirty years. According to its terms, “Sparta was to retain its allies in the Peloponnese and Boeotia and also Megara, all of which were to be self-governing, so long as they did not move to what by this time was coming to be called ‘democracy.'”

The second war began in 431. The worrisome naval dominance of Athens spurred the Spartans to action, but “there was no ultimate necessity to this,” inasmuch as the Athenian navy might not have been built up at all, absent the Persian threat of two generations earlier. Athens engaged in no provocations under the terms of the treaty. “The Spartans would not appear to have had anything, as he puts it, that they could no longer bear; anything material to fear.” Why, then, did it happen?

Distinguishing between aitia (the unspoken but real reason for an action) and prophesis (the reason spoken publicly), Thucydides identifies the Spartans’ fear as the “truest” but least openly stated motive for fighting the second war. Other, publicly stated but subsidiary arguments were the arguments of their allies, especially the Corinthians, who disputed quarreled with Athens and one of its allies over influence in a couple of poleis in the 430s, disputes fueled by the Corinthians’ “pride or honor.” For their part, in the course of these quarrels events took the Athenians “further than they appear to have wanted to go,” as an intendedly deterrent show of naval force escalated. Thucydides and Hawthorn concur that the Athenians were at least “in the right by the terms of the thirty-ear peace” in acting to defend one of its allies against Sparta’s ally, the Corinthians, angered at “the repeated indifference” of Athens and its ally “to their standing and honor as a serious power,” and also somewhat ashamed at “having so openly to depend on Sparta,” a dependence belying their claim to be such a power. But “the true reasons” for the war lay in Sparta.

Sparta’s king, Archidamos, a man “with a reputation for intelligence and moderation,” cautioned that Sparta lacked the naval resources to fight Athens successfully at this time. He called for patient war preparation and an effort at finding more allies. Knowing the character of the Spartan regime, a timocracy or rule of the honorable, he urged them against feeling shame at such a slow and cautious policy, appealing to the honor victory will bring, and observing that the victorious polis “will be the one trained in the hardest schools of necessity.” He lost the rhetorical battle in the assembly of timocrats to an ephor who called decisiveness the “true prudence,’ claiming that the gods were on the side of Sparta and its allies—a ‘prudentialism’ that actually played the Spartans’ love of honor. Nonetheless, in action as distinguished from argument, Sparta sent three separate delegations to Athens, offering peace. It was Pericles, who had established himself as de facto monarch over the Athenian democracy, who persuaded his countrymen to reject the peace offers, correctly observing that Sparta was ill-prepared for war. “A majority of Athenian citizens appear to have been pleased to face war,” as “they believed they had the edge.” We must conclude, then, that “the true reasons” for the war did not lie in Sparta, at least not exclusively. Thucydides and Hawthorn leave this point for the reader to figure out.

Pericles placed his bet on Athenian sea power, demonstrating it by a couple of minor naval operations against poleis the Corinthians had seized from local rulers. It was in the first winter of the war that Pericles delivered his funeral oration praising soldiers fallen that summer in skirmishes, an oration directed at Athenian farmers forced into the city by the Spartan threat and at Athenians displeased at his reluctance to prosecute the war more vigorously. He needed to make both groups more ardent lovers of the Athenian polis, and he did so by an appeal to the kind of honor that fits the regime of democracy, consisting of pride in material strength; the glory of the fallen; the virtues of democracy itself, including law-abidingness and private freedom; courage in foreign policy; and finally by appealing to a sort of prudence congenial to democracy, Athens’ policy of making friends by conferring favors, not receiving them—a practice that weakens one’s friends. The refutation of Pericles came not in words, of which he was the master, but nature, in the form of a plague, which made death inglorious. Pericles nonetheless mounted two expeditions the following summer; “perhaps he simply wanted to get as many soldiers and sailors out of the city he could afford to,” or (again, perhaps) “he was putting on a show to distract discontent.” In any event, he deflected blame from himself, delivering still another speech appealing now to fear: Though self-governing within, Athens acts the tyrant with foreigners; like all tyrants, they may have been wrong to take power but would imperil themselves by letting it go. He ends with an invocation of the glory of Athens, but only as a coda to a grimmer message.

This means that Pericles’ de facto monarchy still rested on the democracy. Pericles “was fighting for his political life.” And he did so successfully, thanks to his extraordinary strengths of character and intelligence in “direct[ing] and where necessary distract[ing] the citizens and control[ling] them.” “No other leader after Pericles managed to dominate the city for so long,” as “they were lesser men.”  The later, famously disastrous, expedition to Sicily, an unnecessary and separate war that was “a mistake to have thought of fighting.” Even this was not enough to bring defeat in the Peloponnesian War, which resulted by subsequent factional infighting. “The defeat was an avoidable disaster”; “Athens, it can be argued, could have won.”

At the beginning of the war, and for years thereafter, neither side could devise a sound strategy for sustaining an attack on the other. Insofar as Pericles arrived at a strategy, it was defensive—to exhaust the invading Spartans on land while commanding the seas. He had no idea as to how Athens might actually defeat Sparta or Corinth. Accordingly, Thucydides presents the several events of the first eighteen years of the war as illustrations of “the circumstance and experience of war in general and its attendant political complications” rather than elements of any grand plan. For example, the 429 Spartan expedition against Plataea, Athens’ ally, “reveals much about the lack of strategic thinking, the problems of distance between the cities and their commanders in the field, and above all, the dangers of relying on allies whose natural first interest was their own.” The Athenian statesmen faced similar imponderables. For himself and his readers, Thucydides evidently commends pondering imponderableness.

The speeches by Athenian statesmen Cleon and Diodotos on the question of whether to slaughter the Mytilenaeans for attempting to break their alliance with Athens and go over to the Spartans affords Thucydides the chance to examine political speech as action. The passions of fear, anger, and hope not only cause men to divide into political factions, they also “cause men to divide within themselves and slide into self-deception.” In their speeches, both statesmen “deliberat[e] on the politics of deliberation,” Cleon concluding that “the delights of oratory cancel common sense” and Diodotos maintaining that the “haste and high emotion” which saturate political debate, coupled with the audience’s assumption that every speaker advances his self-interest, making democratic Athens “the only city so clever that it is impossible to do good here openly and without deceit.” Getting down to reality, however, both men admit that the democracy does not and cannot rule foreign cities democratically; their dispute centers instead on how to conduct such rule under this circumstance. Cleon advocates slaughtering the Mytilenaeans in order to deter other cities from rebelling; Diodotos advocates sparing all but the ringleaders of the rebellion by pretending that most Mytilenaeans are not guilty and by fortifying the pro-Athenian Mytilene faction. “The difference between Cleon and Diodotos was merely that one was afraid of what might follow if Athens did not use extreme force, the other of what might follow if it did.” Sure enough, the Athenian assembly votes for Diodotos’ policy—but not for the prudent reason he had given. “This was war; ambitions were urgent, nerves were on edge and there was anger everywhere…. One can be struck less by the fact that speech was idle than by the fact that men in these circumstances gave time to it at all.” The war between the two alliances ignited civil wars—that is, regime wars—throughout Greece. In Thucydides’ words, “practically the whole Greek world was in turmoil as everywhere there were rival efforts by the leaders of the populace to bring in the Athenians and by the oligarchs to bring in the Spartans.” Atrocities ensued in this struggle for domination, as “reckless audacity,” “daring without logismos,” and the abandonment of moderation ruled men’s souls. Hawthorn supplements this analysis, writing that it was “the disruption of everyday relations” in wartime that made formerly political disputes so poisonous, converting political rivals into “enemies of an intensely personal kind.” “Civil strife inverts values and subverts the semantics of peace,” by which he means that such words as ‘sincerity’ and ‘moderation’ meet contemptuous dismissal, as men combine cynicism and indignation in a way not seen in normal circumstances. He rightly observes that Thucydides nonetheless does not “follow the mischievous sophists of his time” in denying truth altogether. Thucydides “grip on enduring truths of the human condition remains bleakly sure.”

By winter 424-423 the Spartans were “in despair,” the Athenians optimistic in light of what Thucydides calls “their current run of good luck.” He concurs with the Athenian statesmen (including Pericles and Diodotus) who understood that hope is “as dangerous, indeed, as despair.” The gods do not compel human beings to acts of folly, nor do “chains of antecedent causes” (what thinkers latterly call ‘History’). For him Ananke or necessity inheres in being bound by what one believes themselves “to be in their own or someone else’s eyes, compelled by the real or perceived power of others, and impelled by their own.” The now-careless Athenians and the now-hesitant Spartans played out this form of necessity in their conflict over the polis at Megara, on the isthmus connecting Attica to the Peloponnese—a ‘geopolitical chokepoint,’ as we now say. Megara has broken with Athens in 446, but in 424 democrats seized rule there; this notwithstanding, the popular party feared the Athenians, who were hardly ‘democratic’ in dealing with their allies. Athenian and Spartan troops confronted one another, Thucydides himself a commander of the Athenians, Brasidas the Spartan general. Brasidas is one of the few Spartan commanders Thucydides respects; he “could be diplomatic” and “he also moved with speed”—neither trait characteristically Spartan. Brasidas also understood supply chains, targeting the polis at Amphipolos, a major Athenian source for the timber they used for the masts their navy depended upon. Upon receiving a desperate call for assistance from the Athenian general stationed nearby, Thucydides had no way to respond in time. “Necessity now descended on Thucydides,” who went into exile for the next two decades. “Had he not,” Hawthorn remarks, “we might not have the text we do.” Meanwhile, the prudent Brasidas proved a mild conqueror, giving other members of the Athenian empire/alliance good reason to consider switching sides. In effect, Brasidas enacted the kind of proposal Diodotos had proposed to the Athenians themselves. But these poleis underestimated Athenian power and resolve, “preferr[ing] to make their judgments on the basis of wishful thinking rather than prudent foresight,” as Thucydides puts it.

This brings Hawthorn to consider the idea of ‘interest,’ for which no Greek word existed when Thucydides wrote. The Greeks thought rather in terms of a closely connected set of ideas: dunamis or physical power; arche or command; and cratos or rule. Taken together, they amount to aitia or ‘real interest,’ sometimes translated as ‘real reason’ or ‘real purpose,’ a translation Hawthorn rejects as a touch too rationalistic. “The power of Athens’ dominion or ’empire,’ the Athenians had explained in their speech at Sparta (to an audience that would surely have known), enabled them to allay their fears, maintain their honor and pursue their ‘self-interest’ in material gain.” Athenians and men generally must therefore understand where power was (in the authority of custom, law, office, sheer force, even “occasionally in the force of the better argument”), what to use it for (cementing unity at home and among allies, punishing, conquering, deterring, and how to deploy it (alone or in alliance with others). By the year 421, these complex considerations proved so entirely imponderable that both sides agreed to a truce. When it ended the following year, both Cleon and Brasidas were killed in battle, removing the two most effective pro-war statesmen from the principal contending poleis. Athens and Sparta settled on a peace treaty, but their allies, fearing hegemony over themselves would lock into place as a consequent, continued in their restiveness. “For most of the time, political entities in Greece were driven by the wish to rule themselves.” Such a necessity, and such an ‘interest,’ inheres not in the gods or in ‘History’ but in human nature.

“Political anxiety” and “radical uncertainty” ensued. “All believed that whatever their interests were—and to most, beyond their immediate security, these were not clear—they could not be assured of realizing these without an alliance with at least one other state; and then could not be assured that the alliance they made would not excite opposition from yet another and therefore undermine the purpose they had in making it.” Under such circumstances, no clear strategic thinking came forth, anywhere. Emotions ruled in place of either principled or prudential reasoning. However, Thucydides “nowhere indicates that he himself thought of the emotions, feelings, pathe or pathemata as a class,” neither using the word nor even using an especially rich set of words indicating the variety of emotions. He usually restricts himself to fear, hope, and anger, and inclines to conceive of a ‘tight fit’ between what we would analyze as motive (including emotions), intention, and action: “pre-volitional, pre-reflective commitments to one or another state of affairs, commitments that we can discover in what we and others think of how we and they act,” often covered by the Greek word, eros. Hawthorn doubts that these “commitments” “are those that we might feel now or even immediately grasp,” and gives the example of hubris. To us it suggests pride, especially pride flouting divine or human authority. “For fifth-century Greeks, by contrast, hubris was a deliberative act, the direct and amoral practice of demeaning others for the sheer pleasure of doing so.”

As seen, above all, in Alcibiades. “Driven by a restless desire for personal power,” “compulsively competitive and prone to jealousy,” supremely confident, “Alcibiades delights in not merely in defeating his rivals but in humiliating them.” The spirit of Alcibiades pervaded the Athenians generally in their dealings with the polis at Melos, a minor ally of Sparta. If the most celebrated speech in Thucydides remains Pericles’ funeral oration, a call for love of country, for taking ‘pride’ in being an Athenian in the praiseworthy sense we use the term today, the most infamous speech remains the Melian ‘dialogue’ of the year 416, goes far beyond the ‘foreign policy realism’ attributed to it by most scholars today. In fact no ‘realistic’ motive spurred the Athenians to take Melos; “it was not particularly rich” and “had little strategic significance.”  Rather, having lost on land to the Spartans at Mantinea, the Athenians wanted “to demonstrate their superiority in moving at sea” by acting and speaking in a manner “directly insulting to the Spartans.” When the Melians dared to reject the Athenians’ demand of unconditional, they were rewarded by the death of all their men and the enslavement of their women and children. Their ‘point’ (as we would say) was that Sparta could do nothing for them. “It was theater, the demonstration to others and oneself of one’s power to demean and an expression of pleasure in doing so.”

All this noticed, “Not everything in politics in war is necessity, interest, or the thrill of doing down opponents.” There is also “restlessness, a diffuse and unfocused disposition to find something to act against.” Hawthorn regards the Athenians’ ill-fated second expedition against Sicily in 415 as an instance of this; “most of them did not know quite what they had in mind.” Alcibiades fomented such mindlessness, making “his self-flattery theirs.” (“And they were enchanted.”) In the wake of the triumph at Melos, “Athenians were affirming to themselves what Athens could once again be”; they were making Athens great again, to adapt a phrase from the American scene. But in the event they “had propelled themselves to a distant venture the purposes of which had been poorly defined and for which, almost whatever they intended, their own resources were inadequate, local support lacking, the opposition formidable and their leadership uncertain. Only clever tactics and luck could redeem it.” They didn’t, and Alcibiades skipped over to the Spartan side, having decided that Athens must not be allowed to sin even once against demagoguery. And he gave his new sponsors good advice: Defeat the Athenian strategy (it turns out that he could discern one) of encircling Sparta by establishing a military foothold a few miles north of Athens. Meanwhile, in Sicily the Athenians lost and their generals executed. “For the first time, writes Thucydides… the Athenians had in Syracuse come up against a city like their own: a rich and democratically inclined place whose internal divisions they could not exploit.” That, but mostly ill fortune, caused their defeat and humiliation. Moderate General Nicias and vigorous, daring General Demosthenes’ virtues had served Athens well for a decade, but in the new circumstances they failed. Narrowly considered, Alcibiades was right to get out of town. After all, if Fortune’s wheel spun again, “he might return to lead it.”

The Athenian defeat clarified matters. The politics of the war became “simpler than before”:”The Athenians wanted to save themselves and what they could of their dominion, and the Peloponnesians and disaffected parties in Athens’ subject states wanted to end it.” Ever resilient, the Athenians gathered their wits and, for once, submitted to “good discipline in everything,” initially under a board of elders. It didn’t last, but the disaffection with democracy endured. Ever alert, Alcibiades saw that the Athenians might now be persuaded that they needed him, and let it be known that he would obligingly return if an oligarchy replaced the democracy.  The prominent general and politician Phrynicos prudently supposed that Alcibiades cared no more for oligarchy than for democracy, preferring himself to either, and that Athens’ restive allies didn’t care what the regime in Athens was, only that it oppressed them; in a rare, not to say unique event, Alcibiades found himself out-schemed and his return blocked. Nonetheless, in 411 the democracy collapsed, initially replaced by the oligarchic regime of “the 400” (which included Phrynicos), then by “the 5000,” a regime whose exact nature remains unclear (oligarchy? mixed regime?), but which did not include Phrynicos, who had been assassinated in the meantime. However they might be classified, the “new rulers in Athens believed that they faced a simple choice: Athens had either to get support and protection from Persia or to make a new peace and alliance with Sparta.”

Before the new regime could do much more than consolidate, Athens sustained another defeat, worse than the one in Sicily: the loss of Euboea, the breadbasket of their empire, located perilously close to the Piraeus itself. But the Spartans as usual exercised caution and didn’t go for the knockout. Alcibiades, who had defected from Sparta to Persia in 412 was reinstated as a general by the new regime at Athens, helped to organize defenses, and the war continued, although Alcibiades took care not to return to the city itself until 407. Thucydides abruptly ends his history with the events of 411; he died in 404. By then the Peloponnesian forces were about to win the war, having finally achieved superiority over the Athenians at sea—”an ironic end” for the ships-proud regime. Still, and as always, “Thucydides allows one to see” that “things could have gone differently until the very last days.” Reality may constrain, but events march forward in no inevitable course.

Hawthorn situates himself between the stance taken by Jacqueline de Romilly—that the statesmen Thucydides portrays acted according to rational strategies—and that of Hans-Peter Stahl, who claims that the Athenians and human beings generally act according to emotions defying rational understanding. He adopts instead Nietzsche’s view, that thought and action both “are guided by pre-rational commitments,” but that the combination of these three forces “explain what people make happen, which can sometimes be nothing.” Accordingly, Thucydides exhibits a preference for moderation in politics, a resolute search for the best evidence in uncovering what political men did and intended to do, not regardless of what they say but with the knowledge that what they say, however deceptive, itself constitutes a political fact.

War may be, as Thucydides writes, a violent master, but not an all-powerful one. Tyche or fate does not rule absolutely; the Athenians, for example “were not predetermined to be defeated in Sicily.” “Although all events have causes, these are many and varied, and they and their effects often occur in unexpected conjunctions with others… and except when subject to the unassailable power of another, and sometimes even when they are, people are not bound to act in just one way.”

For all of these reasons, “there can be no resolution” in political life “and, for reasons we may never know, Thucydides was saved from any temptation to arrive at one.” He may or may not have deliberately left his book unfinished, but it is right that he did.

 

 

 

Stephen Kotkin: Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

Originally published in Liberty and Law, December 29, 2014.

 

It wouldn’t be fair to have called Bolshevism the death of irony. But it did insist on its exile. In the fall of 1922, V. I. Lenin deported intellectuals—putting them on two vessels jocularly called the Philosophers’ Steamers—for exhibiting such suspicious traits as “knows a foreign language” and, yes, “uses irony.” those with opinions at actual variance with the new regime were interned in labor camps on an island near the White Se. The newly formed State Political Administration (GPU) saw to it that no creeping Socratism would shadow the prospect of radiant tomorrows opened by History’s proletarian vanguard.

As distinct from philosophy, ideology tolerates no questioners, only interrogators. And “ideology was Bolshevik identity,” writes Stephen Kotkin in the first volume of his biography of Stalin. “The documents, whether those made public at the time or kept secret, are absolutely saturated with Marxist-Leninist ways of thinking and vocabulary.” The fights for dominance by and within the Bolshevik Party centered on ideas, for it was ideas that “defin[ed] the revolution going forward” and, in so doing, formed the principal claims to rule in Soviet Russia.

Josef Stalin defeated Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and his other rivals in large measure by mastering Leninism, rather as a fundamentalist preacher asserts his authority by quoting Scripture. Although Lenin himself famously—if only allegedly—expressed deathbed doubts about Stalin’s fitness to be general secretary of the Bolshevik Party, [1] Stalin consolidated his position with the slogan, “Lenin has died—Leninism lives!” In Soviet Russia, the ‘ism’ mattered most.

A man born as Iosif “Soso” Jughashvili who rechristens himself “Stalin,” which means “Man of Steel,” does not likely appreciate irony, much. Born in Gori, Georgia, in 1878 and educated at an Eastern Orthodox theological seminary in nearby Tiflis, such a man would have been as unamused as Queen Victoria was so often reported to be, had he heard that the young American songwriter and pianist Oscar Levant, upon hearing of Stalin’s upbringing, dashed off a tune titled “A Slight Touch of Tiflis.” (A publisher deemed it “hilarious but unprintable” but, this being America, no one shipped Oscar off to the shores of Lake Huron.) The Tiflis scholar proved diligent, a good student and the lead tenor in the school choir, before meeting a Marxist militant who mentored him in dialectical materialism. “In Marxism he found his theory of everything” or, as the man himself soon would put it, “a complete worldview.”

The future Stalin claimed to have joined the Russian Communist Party in 1898—the year that Vladimir Ulyanov, a.k.a. Lenin, did—and yes, studied Machiavelli’s The Prince along with his Marx, Engels, and Renan while working part-time jobs by day and agitating for revolution at night. Lenin, eight years Stalin’s senior, quickly hit upon the political formula that would enable his brand of Marxism to rule a large swath of the earth: “a party of professional revolutionaries”—smaller, more disciplined than the more “inclusive” Mensheviks.

In the social and political chaos soon to come, fanatical discipline would carry the day, not coalition-building. For this criterion Stalin must have looked very good indeed to Lenin: a militant journalist and organizer, all-in for such criminal antics as a 1907 mail-coach heist that landed both men in exile. In 1912, when Lenin formed a 12-member Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, he plucked Jughashvili from the dustbin—the younger man had “no money, no permanent residence, and no profession other than punditry, which was illegal in the forms in which he practiced it.” Kotkin suggests that Lenin appreciated his ally’s status as a then-rare representative of the Caucasus region of the empire. And Soso was grateful. Although, fortunately for himself, he “did little or nothing” for Lenin or the party during the Great War—consigned as he was to internal exile—he became deeply involved in internecine Bolshevik politics when it counted, in 1917 and thereafter, writing some 40 lead articles for the party newspaper, Pravda (or “Truth,” as its anti-ironist publishers called it), consistently taking Lenin’s side.

This volume shows how the Bolshevik Revolution could happen, and how Lenin but especially Stalin consolidated it. Russia’s czarist regime adapted badly to the ‘Tocquevillian’ dimension of modernity—the rise of the people to influence, against the landed aristocrats. The czars had enjoyed an unusual form of absolute monarchy. Unlike, say, the Bourbons, the Romanovs had never needed to contend with a really powerful aristocracy. As a result, Russian aristocrats at the turn of the twentieth century had even less experience in self-government than their French counterparts in 1789. Surprisingly, this absolutist regime had established a fairly weak state, with only four officials per 1,000 subjects in its sprawling domain. What is more, this was no modern, impersonal bureaucracy animated by the ‘science of administration,’ but an old-fashioned apparatus loyal to a person, the czar. In social-science terms, there was no regularization of rule; instead of a state-building monarchy, Russia had a state-limiting one. Because no one person could possibly rule a substantial modern bureaucracy, the czars didn’t want one. Neither did they seek the esteem which the more sensible European monarchs cultivated among their peoples.

Such latter-day reformers as Sergei Witte and Pyotr Stolypin found their efforts undercut by Czar Nicholas II, who understood that “constitutional autocracy was self-defeating”—indeed self-contradictory. Even worse, the regime had no ideational framework to attract the increasingly demanding people. Kotkin observes that in Great Britain and Europe, liberalism preceded the “massified” politics of the twentieth century, whereas Russian Orthodox Christianity—which is about the closest Christianity gets to Nietzsche’s “Platonism for the people”—provided little practical guidance for popular self-government. When the war concentrated masses of young Russian men—previously scattered over a dozen or more time zones—into military organizations that occupied politically sensitive regions near the major cities; when those young men began to yearn for peace after months of getting battered by the Germans; and when not only the czars but the post-czarist Provisional Government (which did not spring from the lower orders but resulted from “a liberal coup”) persisted in fighting the Kaiser’s army, not only the two regimes but the state collapsed.

Amid the chaos, the Bolsheviks had no more popular support than anyone else, but at least they had something democratic-sounding to say in a country where socialism, not liberalism, had won the hearts and minds of just about everyone—including the peasants, attached to their local communes. Lenin and Stalin called for immediate peace and land ownership by peasants. They intended to revoke the latter slogan, but since communalism seemed close enough to communism for popular consumption, their pose worked. While Bolsheviks seized the cities and infiltrated the military, peasants seized the lands of the aristocrats—a vaster if not ultimately more consequential revolution. “Soon enough, the peasant revolution and Bolshevism would collide,” Kotkin writes. But soon was not now—it would arrive too late for the Bolsheviks’ enemies.

Kotkin adds that “Few thought this crazy putsch would last.” Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and their accomplices had no administrative experience, no real military experience, and no knowledge of finance or agriculture. Luckily for them they didn’t need a state, right away; pandemonium was more useful, and the Red Guards were really all they needed to seize state buildings. Bolsheviks did not initially need to win so much as they needed to make their enemies lose. In every case, they encountered rivals even more incompetent than themselves. The Russian-Romanov form of absolutist monarchy had done its work all too well, leaving the whole nation politically inept.

When they did turn to state-building, between 1918 and 1920, the new rulers founded something unique, and uniquely effective in the circumstances. American historians speak of the American state between the Jackson and McKinley administrations at ‘the regime of courts and parties’: the relatively small state apparatus was staffed by lawyers on the judicial side, party regulars on the administrative side. The move for reform consisted of replacing the partisans with professional technocrats—university-trained, tested, tenured. As for the Bolsheviks, they understood that they must deploy at least a modicum of administrative competence to run a state intended to remake human society. But they also needed politically correct ideologues to oversee that remaking. Stalin hit upon the answer: a mass part would provide personnel—the “commissars”—to supervise the technocrats, shadowing them to ensure that the Bolshevik project stayed on track.

The “theory of everything” required an all-encompassing state—even if it would eventually “wither away” after its work was accomplished, as Lenin confidently predicted. But no just any all-encompassing state would do. Stalin needed a state that combined minute, administrative management with the full rigor of ideological vigilance. Although it wouldn’t have been possible to “centralize the whole country himself,” he “could effectively centralize the bosses who were centralizing their own provinces,” bosses personally loyal to him because they owed their jobs to him, initially and on condition of his continuing satisfaction of their obedience. Trotsky did this in the Red Army, too, but Stalin was simply the more politically astute of the two. Comrade Lenin noticed, appointing the Man of Steel to be party secretary just as he, Lenin, was about to suffer the first in a series of incapacitating strokes.

The Georgian also found a solution to the new empire’s national problems: federalism. Stalin “developed the Bolshevik rationale for federalism,” a “way to bind the many peoples into a single integrated state.” Some respect for nationality was necessary because, at a minimum, Marxism-Leninism (like the Bible before it) needed to be translated into vernacular languages. Some degree of self-government made sense. But the party itself would remain strictly centralized an in line with the regime’s ideology. Both national-state and regional-state officials were under the eye, and the gun, of the party. And the party was ruled by its general secretary. To use the Hegelian-Marxist language, this synthesis of party government (with its personalism) and administrative science (with its impersonality, centralization, and federalism), kept the Bolsheviks in power for a long time. And Stalin—not Trotsky, not even Lenin—”emerged as the most significant figure in determining the structure of the Soviet state.”

Anything but the inevitable result of large historical forces (including the world war), the Soviet regime had depended upon the individuals who made it. In one of his many breathtaking but somehow true paradoxes, Kotkin calls Stalin both a sociopath—the very portrait of the paranoiac with real enemies—and “a people person”—the pol who never forgets a name, the tough boss who makes his immediate subordinates feel, to be sure, subordinate but not used or overlooked and who always works harder than anyone else in the office. It is hard to resist the thought that Stalin cared so much about his subordinates and his peoples as a whole that before he was done he murdered a substantial quantity of them. Coldly indifferent, he was not.

Finally, Stalin found a solution, at least in principle, to Russia’s persistent geopolitical problem: its situation on the eastern edge of the vast European Plain, where no real natural borders exist from the Atlantic to the Urals. He used the ideology of worldwide proletarian revolution to justify whatever territorial expansion made sense at the time. Insecure borders? Very well, did the “country of the revolution” not need to be defended? And did its defense not require, finally, the worldwide triumph of a proletariat animated by Marxism-Leninism as interpreted by its vanguard? Russian Orthodoxy was too specific ever to have made such a claim, but dialectical materialism was a universal principle; as the unity of theory and practice, could not the worldwide rule of the party be made real, someday? As prelude to this end, would the capitalists not fall once again to warring among themselves? Although the consummation devoutly to be wished never came, the threat of communist revolution, in the capitalist homeland and also their empires, would keep his enemies off balance for decades, long after his death.

Severe problems remained. By the second half of the 1920s, the United States produced one-third of global industrial output; for example, there were 20 million motorcars in American and 5,500 in the Soviet Union. Admittedly, mobility and independence were never Soviet ideals, but Stalin envied American industrial power nonetheless. He never quite saw that productivity also requires demand, markets—democracy not in the sense of egalitarianism but in the sense of letting people get what they want. Lenin and Stalin’s New Economic Policy, which loosened economic controls somewhat, worked somewhat, but left the regime with the questions of how to get back to the better, purer socialism Marxism required, and of how to bring the landowning peasants to heal.

By 1928, the last year covered in this book, Stalin had found a solution to the “peasant problem” that would turn singularly bloody. He would, in imitation of large-scale American agriculture, get rid of the small communes while at the same preventing private ownership of the resulting big tracts. Such a solution could only be effected by force. As Kotkin observes, “No one else in or near the Bolshevik leadership, Trotsky included, could have stayed the course on such a bloody social-engineering escapade on such a scale.” Falling behind the capitalists in industry and in agriculture, with an army and navy now incapable of fighting any major power, moving from one blunder to another in an attempt to manage the Chinese revolution with a rising Japan to the east and an increasingly worrisome Germany to the west, Stalin knew that one more shock might ruin everything.

But the shock that came saved everything. Stalin expected another intra-capitalist war, but what happened instead was the Great Depression. This cut capitalist productivity down, making the Soviet regime seem viable—perhaps even the solution to all human problems its founders claimed it to be. The 1930s proved a bonanza for the enemies of political and economic liberty, and Stalin shared in that most ominous form of the wealth of nations.

 

Note

1. Kotkin wonders if this fault-finding “Testament,” as it was soon called by Trotsky, came from Lenin or from his widow, whom Stalin had insulted.

 

Delia Popescu: Political Action in Václav Havel’s Thought: The Responsibility of Resistance. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.

Also cited:

POP: Václav Havel: “The Power of the Powerless.” Paul Wilson translation. In Steven Lukes, ed.: The Power of the Powerless, New York: M. E. Sharpe, Inc., 1985.
SM: Václav Havel: Summer Meditations. Paul Wilson translation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
PMP: Václav Havel: Politics as Morality in Practice. Paul Wilson translation. New York: Fromm International, 1998.

 

Václav Havel remains among the most—some might say one of the few—appealing public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Genial, witty, humane, and (mirabile dictu) political successful, he deserves exactly the well-informed an lively treatment he receives from Delia Popescu, who succinctly presents Havel’s critique of modern life and his efforts in thought and action to counteract its toxins.

While unhesitatingly preferring the regime of liberal democracy to those of totalitarianism and its flaccid, spiritless successor, ‘post-totalitarianism,’ Havel also saw what Tocqueville saw: Even relatively decent modern societies tend toward lives of apathy and civil disengagement under the rule of impersonal bureaucracies. The administrative functionalism admired by Hegel bespeaks not the rule of reason but the rule of rationalism—of reason made into a system of rules that overlook the personality of the human beings so ruled. Against this, Havel not only proposed by lived a life in which he built up Czech civil society, urging his fellow non-citizens to take personal responsibility for one another. While protestors in the Western democracies demanded ‘participatory’ democracy, Havel worked for ‘anticipatory’ democracy; “the civic spirit that defeated communism…is also the proper foundation for successful democratic rebuilding” after ‘post-totalitarianism’ collapses.

Popescu maintains that the “dissident thought” in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in the Soviet empire did not merely imitate “liberal theory” but supplemented and even corrected it. Under the weakened or diluted tyranny of the Central and Eastern European regimes—by then really oligarchies, and somewhat sclerotic ones, at that—the oppressiveness of the modern state pervaded the minds and hearts of non-citizens in a way that is more easily ignored in the commercial republics or liberal democracies. Under any modern state, where exactly does my moral responsibility begin and end? In republics, I bear at least the minimal responsibilities of keeping track of public issues and the conduct of officials, of voting in elections, of voicing my thoughts from time to time. But these not-so-demanding activities may give me an alibi (should I choose to use it) for evading more profound responsibilities of civic engagement: standing for office, involving myself in political campaigns, resisting encroachments on citizen self-government by the administrative state. Modern states with under the more heavy-handed rule of ‘post-totalitarian’ oligarchies force one to face matters squarely, and require sterner virtues in order to sustain resistance. Havel understood the regime question in modernity first as a question of moral responsibility but then, both morally and politically, as a question of each person’s way of life. “Havel’s philosophical backbone is the fulfillment of political freedom through an ethical grounding in individual action and citizenship.” Popescu supposes that this transcends political liberalism, without noticing that James Madison was the man who put the term ‘responsibility’ into play in modern politics.

‘Why write?’ Mr. Orwell famously asked. Popescu centers her first chapter on how Havel answered this question. The communist parties disliked any writings that did not reinforce their regimes, requiring of published writers a strict adherence to ‘Socialist Realism,’ which might be described as Balzac on Marxism. Given his politically incorrect social background (his family was bourgeois-all-too-bourgeois), Havel found himself blocked from attending high school; he apprenticed as a carpenter, worked as a lab assistant, all while attending night school and founding a literary discussion group consisting of fellow high-school ‘rejects.’ “Havel had, early on, the experience of living a life within a life, outside the bounds of ‘approved’ society.” Under such conditions, “to write is to consciously act.” And to write not for publication but for circulation among similarly ‘excluded’ fellow writers enhances “a kind of solidaristic experience” among readers and (for a playwright, as Havel was) audiences. Writing groups, ‘underground’ writings and dramatic performances, all become an especially intense form of what Tocqueville called civic association—’civic’ because under such conditions pushing against political exclusion itself becomes a political as well as a moral activity. Czech Communist Party authorities understood this, imprisoning several of the members of Charter 77; the philosopher Jan Patocka died during ‘interrogation.’ While in prison, Havel learned to write “in a complex, encoded fashion,” what Leo Strauss (whom Popescu cites) calls exoteric writing under conditions of “logographic necessity.” This, combined with a Socratic approach of “open-ended questioning” rather than formal defense of a given position, enabled Havel to refine a way of life that challenged a politically oppressive regime without ruining himself or his colleagues. There is, one might say, a secret connection between Socratic questioning and moral responsibility: the desire to ‘get things right,’ to discover the truth of the matter and understand it. In his first speech as president of Czechoslovakia, Havel called for a transfer of this sense of responsibility to a public life that now permitted its open enactment. He hoped that the moral virtues tempered under conditions of despotism could become part of the Czech way of life, its new, republican regime. Popescu calls this “politics as applied ethics”—a political way of life avoiding both utopianism and pragmatism narrowly understood, neither moralistic nor self-centered. He is no ‘post-modern,’ if that means a rejection of intellectual, moral, and political foundations, a rejection of moral standards that transcend praxis. The most accurate term for Havel’s stance is personalism, a body of moral thought which established an honorable history in a century that featured much of the low, dishonorable, and crazed, but which often leaned toward private and social relations at the expense of politics. “Living in truth,” the striking phrase from Havel’s 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” signifies a sort of democratized version of Socratic Platonism: “We all have the capacity to find inner-truth, even on our own, despite oppression and societal atomization. While Plato expected this only of some”—the philosophers, the few who ascend from the ‘cave’ of political myths—”Havel expects it of all.” One might worry about the extent to which such an exacting way of life could become sufficiently widespread to animate a nation.

Havel classifies both modern ‘totalitarianism’ and therefore ‘post-totalitarianism’ as political novelties, regimes peculiar to the modern world and its statism. Older tyrannies were, at least, personal; the regime often passed away when the tyrant and his henchmen did. Totalitarian regimes feature both a state apparatus or bureaucracy and an ‘ideology’ which provides a purpose for the regime’s existence beyond mere libido dominandi. Post-totalitarian rule follows from the founding ideological tyranny, differing from it because the justifying ideology or “secularized religion” (POP 26) has lost its plausibility; rulers and subjects alike merely ‘go through the motions,’ mouthing notions which have become platitudes; “empty ritual over principled action” might as well be its motto—so long as one understands that the principles themselves were malignant. “Post-totalitarianism spares itself the effort of convincing,” satisfying itself with outward obedience. In Havel’s words, “each country [within the Soviet empire] has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the superpower center and totally subordinated to its interests” (POP 24); the result is “automatism” or playacting or “liv[ing] within a lie” (POP 30-31). “The center of power [Moscow] is identical with the center of truth,” as subjects abdicate their own “reason, conscience, and responsibility,” consigning “reason and conscience to a higher authority” (POP 25). The Byzantine Empire is alive but not well, having exchanged Christianity for Marxism-Leninism and then slowly losing its faith in that false-prophetic belief system, as well.

What Marx called ‘false consciousness’—supposedly characteristic of ‘bourgeois’ rule—pervades the half-hearted dictatorship of what now merely pretends to be the proletarian vanguard. Havel’s offers the example of the humble greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t believe it; moreover, the Communist Party rulers don’t, either. They are all just going through the motions, going along to get along; going along to get along is the way of life, part of the regime, of the post-totalitarian state (POP ch. iii). The ‘bourgeois’ equivalent in the commercial-republican regimes is ‘consumerism’ and a loss of civic-mindedness. Apathy pervades East and West alike, a perverse form of ‘globalization.’ In Havel’s words, “It was precisely Europe, and the European West, that provided and frequently forced on the world all that today has become the basis of such power: natural science, rationalism, scientism, the industrial revolution, and also revolution as such, as a fanatical abstraction…to the cult of consumption, the atomic bomb, and Marxism”—all reinforced by bureaucracy.

Although the post-totalitarian regime “gradually loses touch with reality,” its self-invented world of lies has a strength of its own (POP 32); “thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality,” “draw[ing] its strength from theory and becom[ing] entirely dependent on it”—the reverse of the Machiavellian, and Marxist-Leninist expectation that ‘realism’ would prevail in the new, anti-Christian and anti-classical regimes. The “automatism” of the subjects mirrors the ever-increasing automatism of the regime itself, which “select[s] people lacking individual will for the power structure” (POP 34). This means that the Machiavellian virtù of the Lenins, Stalins, and Maos disappears by the second or third generation of rulers, leaving the regime in the not-so-virtuosic hands of a Brezhnev or (in Czechoslovakia) an Alexander Dubcek. “It works only as long as people are willing to live within the lie” (POP 35).

On this point, Popescu carefully integrates Havel’s work as a playwright into her account of his political thought. Dramas lend themselves to Socratic questioning. Under conditions of post-totalitarianism, his plays depict “the necessity to dissimulate, to transgress the boundaries of the authentic self,” which “leads to a crisis of human identity,” a crisis exposing “the weaknesses of human nature that open the door to political manipulation.” “Havel agrees with Rousseau that Reason alone is not enough to lead man and society in the right direction”; one might notice that he agrees with ever-ironic Socrates on this, too, whose reasoning never ossifies into rationalism. Inclining more to Rousseau than Socrates, however, Havel emphasizes the importance of “animal pity” or compassion as a moral necessity animating responsible thought and action. Without it, life itself imitates the art of the theater of the absurd. In that absurdity, enforced by bureaucracies in both republican and post-totalitarian regimes, the individual encounters the systematic attempt to “absorb his individuality by means of “a Socratic dialogue in reverse,” one ending not in noetic insight but in assent to the claims imposed by the ‘cave’ of rationalism. “Above, there is the language of the system, which is standardized, rational, cold. Below is the individual who is alone, without convictions, perplexed.” That language consists of a foolish importation of the language of science into the moral sphere, an attempt to treat concrete conditions of persons as if they could be reduced to universal mathematical formulae. “We are going through a great departure from God that has no parallel in history,” Havel writes; with the acknowledgment of no Person, the identity of all persons comes into question, one in which we end up ‘playing a role.’ “Thoughtlessness seems to emerge as the greatest plight of modernity,” accessory to both totalitarianism and “especially” to post-totalitarianism.

If so, then the antidote to post-totalitarianism is thought. Through his plays and other writings, Havel seeks to tease his readers into thought, taking advantage of the fact that the strength of the post-totalitarian regime is also its weakness, inasmuch as its own automatism causes it to lose the very Machiavellian virtù that its founders exhibited. Thinking holds promise because human beings have consciences, buried though they may be under the mental debris of bad regimes. Conscience links the personal to the political, and indeed to “something universal that unites our moral understanding of the world as human beings.” If the false, historicist dialectic of Marxism-Leninism led many Europeans into this maze, natural or Socratic dialectic can lead them out. Havel’s term for what one discovers as one begins to think is “the Memory of Being.” Popescu links this with “the meaning of history,” but it sounds much more like the Socratic-Platonic idea of mimesis: “The telos of the Memory of Being is…toward the truth,” and this is “a natural human craving,” not an artifact of history. For Havel, unlike the historicists, history isn’t ‘going somewhere,’ progressing under the direction of ‘leaders’ toward an purpose or ‘end of history’ (POP 82); history is a source of experience, an aid to the thoughtful uncovering of the truth. As Havel puts it, “In the post-totalitarian system…living within the truth has more than a mere existential dimension (returning humanity to its inherent nature), or a noetic dimension (revealing reality as it is), or a moral dimension (setting an example for others). It also has an unambiguous political dimension.” (POP 40)

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics by writing “Man wants to know.” As Havel puts it, there is a “human predisposition to truth,” an “openness to truth” that persists despite all efforts to block it. What Havel calls “Living in Truth” initially “de-politicizes” the human soul—clearing out the falsehoods inserted by bad regimes—and then re-politicizes it on the foundation of the new truth-orientation. Havel’s “anti-politics entails a fundamental rethinking of traditional political values which would survive not only post-totalitarianism, but should also be key in the reconstruction of the new democratic society.” Although neither Havel nor Popescu mentions it, this is precisely what the American Founders did in declaring their independence on the basis of an argument premised with self-evident truths. Havel nonetheless sees what the Founders saw, and what Thomas Masaryk, the founder of modern, republican Czechoslovakia after the First World War, also saw: “The only possible starting point for a more dignified national destiny was humanity itself” (POP 61). Charter 77, the civil-social movement Havel helped to organize, cited human rights, not merely national rights, against rule over Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union (POP ch. xvii). Contra Machiavelli, under the post-totalitarian regime, unarmed prophets are the only realistic ones.

“Anti-politics” in Havel’s writings therefore amounts (in part) to an exoteric ruse, a feigned indifference to the post-totalitarian state, which in the “Prague Spring” of 1968 had proven itself both ready and able (with Soviet military assistance) to crush any direct move toward republicanism in Czechoslovakia. But it was more than a ruse, because Havel regarded it a moral foundation for political life in any regime, tyrannical or republican, which featured a stultifying bureaucracy. The antidote to bureaucracy is the reconstruction of a civil society strong enough to resist bureaucratic encroachments and seductions. Just as Tocqueville’s soft-despotic state lulls citizens into complacency, away from citizenship, so “anti-politics” deceives the bureaucracy into thinking that there’s nothing much going on down there. What is going on is the establishment of “a parallel polis” (POP 81). And once the weakened bureaucracy shrinks or collapses, “anti-politics” or civil-society building can continue, re-founding the new regime on the way of life of self-government. Popescu takes care to distinguish Havel’s civil-social approach from Václav Klaus’s economic, market-centered understanding of liberty. Havel rejected “utilitarian motives”—the rational-choice theory underlying both economic markets and weary acceptance of post-totalitarianism—as finally too narrow to satisfy human nature. As Czech prime minister, Klaus wielded more authority within the new Czechoslovakia than did President Havel. In the end, “the Czech state implemented neither Klaus’ unbridled free market nor Havel’s decentralized, civil society driven politics.”

One problem they both faced was that “bureaucracy has internationalized” much more effectively than either modern tyranny or modern republicanism. From political-economic alliances like the European Union to privately-funded NGOs to business corporations, bureaucracies rule much of the modern world, limiting regimes of despots, oligarchs, and (would-be) self-governing citizens alike. The catchword for all of these organizations is ‘progress’: “Progress has primacy over life.” As a result, all modern regimes “capitalize on alienation, fear, the loss of morality, and consumerism”; they will allow us our pleasures, so long as we leave the ruling to them, as Tocqueville had understood. “Atomized, amoral, self-centered individuals create that mass of indifferent, political disengaged people that provides the basis for both totalitarian regimes, early [i.e. Leninist and Hitlerian] and late [i.e. Brezhnevian].” In the republics it isn’t bad, but the trend is bad. “Post-democracy,” meaning post-soft despotism, will only arise if and when “community groups rise as a response to the here and now,” out of public debate. “The goal of an organic society is to give human agency a chance to be reflected in its institutions.” Such societies would be more polis-like than state-like, maximizing face-to-face self-government and minimizing the administrative state. “They would be structures not in the sense of organizations or institutions, but like a community” (POP 93)—more like Marx’s communes, then, than anything Marxism-Leninism has been able to produce.

Popescu doesn’t do much with Havel’s writings after the Czech state-socialist regime fell and he became prime minister. For this one must turn to Summer Meditations (1992) his collection of speeches, The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice (1998). In the Meditations, Havel states that since he was responsible for helping to bring down the old regime, he’s now responsible for helping to govern it. He may have some abilities along those lines, inasmuch as “I seem to get along with people, to be able to reconcile and unite them” (SM xv-xvi), a characteristic that might prove useful in moving Czechoslovakia “from totalitarianism to democracy, from satellitehood to independence, from a centrally directed economy to market economics” (SM xvii). Freedom from the old regime had led not to political liberty but to “an enormous and dazzling explosion of every imaginable human vice” (SM 1)—to what Aristotle described as the false, democratic definition of freedom as doing as you like.’ Politically, this resulted in the rise of demagogy, a “general crisis of civility,” which in turn inspired citizen disgust at their own new regime (SM 3). In other words, the bad character inculcated by the old regime now parades on full display. “Genuine conscience and genuine responsibility are always, in the end, explicable only as an expression of the silent assumption that we are observed ‘from above'” (SM 6), but the old regime preached atheism; whereas in France of the 1780s the Old Regime featured an established church, in Czechoslovakia the old regime had attempted to weaken and co-opt the Catholic Church.

What, then, to do? First, he will continue to insist that morality matters in social life. “People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence” (SM 8-9)—what Tocqueville called self-interest well understood, and what George Washington had called connecting interest to duty, prudence with morality (SM 20). Second, after examining his own conscience, he can try to establish “a kind of elementary companionship and mutual trust” among the people with whom he works (SM 9). Finally, as president he can act so as to show that he follows through on his stated convictions. ‘Power shows the man,’ an ancient Greek said; Havel concurs. Civility matters: “Good taste is more useful here than a post-graduate degree in political science” (SM 11). And the desire to retain one’s independence is no excuse for evading civic engagement: “I once asked a friend of mine, a wonderful man and a wonderful writer, to fill a certain political post. He refused, arguing that someone had to remain independent. I replied that, if everyone said that, it could happen that, in the end, no one would be independent, because there wouldn’t be anyone around to make that independence possible and stand behind it.” (PMP 186) A bit too Kantian to withstand the test of prudential thought, perhaps, but not bad as a piece of persuasion.

This spirit of civility can make the establishment of sound political institutions more likely. At this time, Czechoslovakia had not yet split into two countries, so Havel advocates a federal structure with parliaments representing the Czechs and Slovaks separately, along with an overall bicameral federal parliament. He understands that this won’t be easy, as Slovaks’ historical experience and “way of life” have differed from those of the Czechs (SM 27); Slovaks are especially suspicious of rule, or even of sharing rule, with ‘outsiders,’ very much including Czechs. To reassure them and to give the new Czechoslovakia an institutional structure that respects persons and fosters self-government, Havel conceives of the new regime as “a set of concentric circles, with one’s ‘I’ at the center” (SM 30). The circles radiate out to families, friends and co-workers, the several levels of government, and ultimately to a group of human beings living together in the natural world (SM 31). This is what it means to have a “home” (SM 30-31). Without a recognized doctrine of natural right to appeal to, Havel in effect sets about re-establishing one in the minds of his countrymen (SM 32-33). He intends thereby to deflect the return to nationalism founded not on natural right but on sharp perceived differences among European peoples, the nationalism that led first to the world wars and then to the spurious internationalism of the communist regimes. The sense of “home” he would inculcate amongst Czechs would satisfy the decent yearnings extreme nationalism satisfies indecently by confining the natural human ‘love of one’s own’ to a moral framework that recognizes the humanity they share with their neighbors. In a speech at Oslo in August 1990 he observed, “The miracle of human thought and human reason is bound up with the capacity to generalize” (PMP 61)—to see the ‘tree’ in each tree in the forest. “On the other hand, the ability to generalize is a fragile gift that has to be handled with great care,” lest we make hasty and invidious generalizations about human groups that are not our group. Against this misuse of the human power of abstraction Havel opposes its right use, the ability to seeing the humanity in those ‘other’ groups in their very human powers and qualities, an ability registered by “respect for human rights” (PMP 64) and not only our own national rights.

In the political economy, Havel advocates a free market on the moral grounds that this “means that someone is responsible for everything” (SM 62). “This is the only natural economy, the only kind that makes sense, the only one that can lead to prosperity, because it is the only one that reflects the nature of life itself”—”infinitely mysterious and multiform,” impossible to fit into any comprehensive plan (SM 62). Privatization of state-owned corporations will “take several years,” but so be it (SM 64). What Havel rejects, contra his rival Klaus, is the notion that markets alone will solve Czechoslovakia’s problems. No merely political-economic system will—not the old socialism or the new capitalism, if that capitalism operates on the principle of self-interest unguided by moral principles. “Systems are there to serve people, not the other way around. This is what ideologies always forget.” (SM 71). The state properly regulates economic activity, taking tax monies for education (especially civic education), research and development, old-age pensions, and similar activities that the free market may not consistently support, but as in everything else, Havel understands economic life as properly centered on the human person: “If I produced something, I produced it as a person—that is, a creature with a spirit and a conscious mastery of his own fate. It was the outcome of a decision made by my human ‘I,’ and, to a greater or lesser extent, that ‘I’ had to share in my material production.” (115). Neither liberal nor socialist materialism registers this.

Geopolitically, Havel cites Czechoslovakia’s position on the Great European Plain as the cause of its vulnerability to larger foreign powers, a vulnerability seen in its longtime inclusion in a succession of empires. He hopes that alliances with other Western European countries and the United States, along with eventual change of the Russian regime to commercial republicanism will end this security dilemma, setting European political life on the foundation of “human rights as understood by modern humanity” (98). He doesn’t expect all these pieces to fall into place soon. “In the short time I’ve been active in practical politics, I’ve come to understand that politicians must never be impatient, and that they can never in good conscience say that anything is settled once and for all” (SM 90).

Popescu wonders if Havel believes in God. He must, if his February 1990 speech to the United States Congress reflects his true thoughts. “Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim” (PMP 18), he told America’s elected representatives, who may have found his terminology confusing. Consciousness cannot precede being unless there is a God, and God is a Person. This may not mean the God of the Bible, as seen in his remarks about the “Anthropic Cosmological Principle” and even the absurd “Gaia Hypothesis,” about which he went on at some length during a 1994 speech in Philadelphia (PMP 171-172). But even here he concludes with a reference to the Creator-God of the Declaration of Independence, who “gave man the right to liberty,” a liberty man can realize “only if he does not forget the One who endowed him with it” (PMP 172).