Daniel J. Mahoney: De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Democracy. Westport: Praeger, 1996.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 25, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

 

Unlike so many things in political life, commercial republicanism delivers on its promises. Splendid but exhausting, the martial aristocracies and monarchies that dominated Europe into the nineteenth century finally collapsed into the arms of the people, who confidently asserted that they could do better. Locke, Montesquieu, and the other great republicans looked forward to a world in which commerce and representative government would stanch the flow of blood and treasure caused by rulers who would find quarrel in a straw, when honor’s at the stake.

The republicans were right. Commercial republics don’t fight—amongst themselves. They have attracted the warlike attentions of those who mistake their peaceableness for weakness. As a result, two centuries are strewn with the wreckage of regimes that underestimated the productive/economic power that to some extent makes up for the unsteady military virtues of those republics.

What theorists could not fully anticipate was the dissatisfaction commercial republics would generate among their own most ambitious citizens. For some human beings all the time, and for most some of the time, peace and prosperity do not suffice. What the ancient Greeks called thumos—the spirited part of the soul, the part that gets angry, makes us courageous or rash, faithful or blindly loyal—does not rest content in a commercial republican regime. Thumos wants not only liberty but heroism, conspicuous preferment instead of conspicuous consumption, the ways of the lion and the eagle. Thumotic souls pose a profound political and spiritual problem at any time, but never more than here and now, in our ’embourgeoisified’ modern times.

No statesman understood this better than Charles de Gaulle. As a young military officer in the years between the world wars, de Gaulle saw thumos pushed to the point of madness in neighboring Germany, while deploring, at serious cost to his own career, the poor-spirited response of his countrymen, including a military elite rotted with complacency and cowardice. After the war, he opposed the shallow, bureaucratized internationalism of the new-republican, ‘Wilsonian’ United States and its Euro-sycophants. He faced down President Roosevelt, whose envisioned postwar order did not include any very independent Frenchmen. Throughout, de Gaulle proclaimed and embodied the virtues of political life and civil society—self-government—against the dehumanizing forces of technocracy and consumerism. National sovereignty conceived as patriotism, not reactive ‘nationalism,’ remained his political guide throughout; what looks like a Catholic-Christian Stoicism remained his moral compass.

Daniel J. Mahoney’s scholarship allies itself with civic virtue in a world not conspicuously receptive to it. In his previous book, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, Mahoney displayed a rare ability to take ample, rich materials and concentrate them into their essence, saying thing at once helpful to the novice and illuminating to the specialist. He has now written the best first book to read on Charles de Gaulle’s political thought. Those fascinated by his account will want to go on to Jean Lacouture’s generous biography, Stanley Hoffmann’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s, André Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (both published in ampler versions as parts of Les Temps du Limbes), perhaps to Jean Dutourd’s novel, The Springtime of Life. Above all, they will turn to the writings of the statesman himself, who wrote six books and several volumes of speeches.

The man of character, de Gaulle teaches, is a born protector. Without abandoning his critical independence, Mahoney guards de Gaulle’s memory against a variety of cavils advanced in the spirit of smallness of soul: that he was a mystic or a Bonapartist, a crypto-fascist or a communist sympathizer, a Machiavellian, a Nietzschean, or a man of Weberian ‘charisma.’ None of the above, Mahoney firmly reminds us, but what can one expect from the denizens of an academic demi-culture who have forgotten Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man? Realist who know nothing of the realities, de Gaulle and Mahoney say of them, rightly.

Mahoney emphasizes de Gaulle’s indebtedness to a real culture, a cultivation afforded by the France of de Gaulle’s youth, with its fruitful if acrimonious tensions among Roman Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment ‘German’ ideology. He had integrated the classical elements of French culture into his heart and mind: In retirement, de Gaulle came upon a grandson trying to read Cicero in the Latin. After glancing at the passage, de Gaulle raised his eyes and recited the passage from memory. Looking down at the astonished boy, he intoned, “You should read Livy. He is much more grand.“  Although the exact character of de Gaulle’s religious convictions remains obscure—as it had to, given his political intention to unite the French—Mahoney shows beyond dispute that de Gaulle understood France as part of the Europe that had been Christendom, and worth defending for the sake of the virtues Christendom cultivated. As Mahoney writes, de Gaulle combined a “Catholic recognition of moral boundaries and political limits and classical commitment to a life of honor.” “His was a moralized ambition“: De Gaulle himself uses the striking formulation, “the good prince,” who aims to re-found republicanism in the modern world.

De Gaulle “wanted to keep democracy and greatness together,” Mahoney writes. No narrow democrat or egalitarian, de Gaulle saw what France lost when the Old Regime fell: moderation and the genuine courage moderation enforces. A century and a half of too much and too little ensued. This was true even in the two parliamentary republican regimes de Gaulle saw in the France of his lifetime, which favored too many play-acting talkers, too few real defenders of the country. In founding the more balanced regime of the Fifth Republic, with the strong executive the French needed, de Gaulle re-endowed French politics with stability, without sacrificing (Gaullists would say, by enhancing) genuine popular sovereignty. In aspiring to inculcate habits of civic participation in his countrymen, de Gaulle left them a legacy of resistance not only to the ‘hard’ tyrannies of fascism and communism, but to what Tocqueville had called the ‘soft despotism’ of bureaucracy and merely economic life, a legacy that might well be taken up by citizens who want to remain citizens and not subjects, in any country. At the same time, he firmly reminded the French that not everything is political, that political life, to be made worthy of participation, must subordinate itself to civilization and even to “a certain conception of man.” As Mahoney shows, that conception owes more to Charles Péguy than it does to Friedrich Nietzsche.

“L’Europe des patries”: De Gaulle opposed European integration precisely upon the grounds of civilization and of human nature—which, to be truly itself, must take responsibility, must govern itself. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand were good Europeans because they were Italian, German, and French. The real Europe is Latinity filtered through the vernaculars, the languages by which the peoples govern themselves. The Gaullist voice is largely absent from “the present European conversation,” Mahoney observes; “his partisanship for the greatness of Europe and a Europe of nations does not seriously inspire our contemporaries,” who too often associate nationalism with its racialist deformations of the last two centuries. “Nonetheless, de Gaulle himself, and his vision of a Europe of nations stand as permanent reminders of the political and even spiritual qualities without which any future Europe could only call itself impoverished.”

Perhaps most significantly, de Gaulle’s life and writing show how a thumotic soul, the soul of a man or woman of character, might strengthen republicanism instead of subverting it, transcending the sterile adversarianism of modern elites, tending as they do to manipulation and tyranny, rule or ruin. Daniel Mahoney is a new kind of American scholar, one who views grandeur without malice, envy, or derision, one who can see de Gaulle.

Commercial republics recognize popular sovereignty. In order to avoid majority tyranny, popular sovereignty requires theoretical and practical constraints. In America, natural right provides theoretical constraints on popular sovereignty, whereas institutions—political and social—provide the primary practical constraints.

Every sovereign has his courtiers, and the people have theirs. A courtier would rule the country by manipulating the sovereign. In republics, this means that ‘representatives’—some elected, some self-appointed—must be watched. Modern republics afford an opportunity to do this by making the people more ‘philosophic’ (in the Socratic sense) than they might otherwise be: They know themselves better than do the people in the regimes that permit less liberty, less association, and their representatives—be they sincere or manipulative—also know them better. This is where sociology comes in.

Much of modern sociology suffers from a theoretical problem; Dewey’s thought exemplifies it. Dewey concurs with the late-modern abandonment of natural right as the standard for morality, then gropes for some way to avoid the potential consequences of that abandonment. Dewey’s answer—pragmatism or experimentalism yoked to progressivism—will not do, as it can only hope that its practitioners will be humane. (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment said this of pragmatism’s precursor, utilitarianism: Why not murder the vile old woman? This suggests that there is no humane praxis without some humane theoria, except by happy accident, such as English restraint.

Still, ‘pragmatism’ in the sense of practical reasoning or phronēsis—pragmatism without the ‘ism’—is indispensable to sociology, which might otherwise descend into social-science technicism and its barbaric jargon. Prudent sociologists spend less time dogmatizing about ‘models,’ more time in considering how a regime might adapt to the real circumstances in which it attempts to exercise its rule. For example, newly-founded commercial republics will need to consider the institutions that have worked in the longer-standing republics, including the United States, but with an attitude of careful selection, not imitation. Republicanism requires deliberation in common, and deliberation isn’t following a recipe. One knew the American attempt to bring republicanism to Iraq would be troubled when soldiers tried to apply the lessons contained in what they jocularly called ‘democracy in a box’—essentially a list of institutions and rules.

One example of this may be seen by considering church-state relations in Poland after its liberation from the Soviet bloc. The American solution to the problem of independence from imperial rule is well-known. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but do not react to their blossoming with a Maoist harvesting machine. George Washington’s letters to a variety of American religious congregants give expression to this principle. As Harry V. Jaffa observed, Washington is the first head of state to say to all religious practitioners: Your freedom here is not a privilege, granted by a generous state, but a civil right securing a natural right. In practice, this policy works more easily in America than in some other places, because there has been a variety of sects here, from an early date.

Poland presents a different social circumstance. The Polish Catholic Church has inclined Poles to define themselves against their formidable neighbors: Protestant, then fascist, Prussia; Orthodox, then communist, Russia. Polish Catholicism became fervently ‘national’ or patriotic in part because the state, even when Catholic, was so often controlled by foreigners. In Poland, modernity and nationalism do not necessarily cohere; modern liberalism might look like a watered-down recapitulation of some ‘scientific socialism,’ ‘Right’ or ‘Left.’ At the same time, traditional Catholic thought is not individualist, and therefore does not give modern liberalism a ready foothold. In continental Europe, liberalism is often associated with the sharp-tongued anti-clericalism of Voltaire, which, when not simply atheistic, might as well be in the eyes of most serious Polish Catholics.

Enter Adam Michnik, whose essay “The Church and the Left” shows that an anti-dogmatic secularist with civic courage can open a dialogue with the Church in what is, unlike America, very nearly a one-church country. Michnik begins by recognizing that secularism is not guarantee against dogmatism. Poland recently freed itself from a rigid secular ‘monism’—or, more accurately, from a decadent secular monism whose adherents had long lacked any real faith in their own ideology. Neither secularism by itself nor religiosity by itself offers any guarantee against tyranny.

What is needed is a prudent selection of those tendencies within both secularism and Catholicism that comport with the republican regime that is the only practical safeguard against tyranny—and therefore against both fanatical anti-secularism and fanatical anti-clericalism—in modern times. This selection must, at the same time, not ‘relativize’ its principles to republicanism, make principles merely instrumental to a particular political form. The form exists for the sake of the principles, not vice-versa.

In the Roman Catholic tradition, Michnik sees (following Kolakowski) that Constantinianism is not the only way, that the tension between God and Caesar, sacred and profane, “is a permanent feature of the Church in the world”—and also, one might add, a feature the Church draws directly from the New Testament. This distinction should give Polish Catholics pause when there is any attempt to enact a program involving some Hegelian synthesis of sacred and profane. As for secularists, they should recognize by now that the several atheist Hegelianisms in politics have led to disastrous results wherever they have been tried. Marxism is but the most conspicuous example; Michnik provides a remarkable instance of this when he catches a Party flack praising “the worship of work, rationalism, and practical know-how.”

If commercial republicanism depends upon some notion of natural right, the catholicism of Polish Catholicism—”a song for all voices from the highest to the lowest, a wisdom that does not have to change itself into stupidity at any level of awareness,” in the words of Witold Gombrowicz—can comport with the universalism undergirding any particular republican regime, without requiring the sacrifizio d’intellectio feared by secularist intellectuals. Any genuine Christianity will eschew unlimited popular sovereignty on the grounds that Christ comes to judge the nations, not to cheer them on. As for his fellow-secularists, Michnik adjures them to distinguish between the “relativism” that is “a spiritual search” and “the relativism of the nihilist, which is moral capitulation.” Michnik proposes not Voltaireanism but Kantianism, which does indeed present a secularist version of Biblical morality. (Michnik’s is, however, a comic, mocking Kantianism, not tonally similar to the dutiful earnestness of The Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals. In American terms, Michnik is Ben Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson or John Adams.) Kantianism provides a set of decent, secular standards for criticizing secularists. Michnik might have added that there is also a tradition of Christian self-criticism, as seen in the Apostle Paul’s letters inveighing against “lukewarm” church congregations, and indeed in Jesus’ attacks on the practices of His time and place.

Michnik is a man in search of dialectical partners. In the France of an earlier generation, the Catholics to talk with would have included Maritain and de Gaulle. In Poland, I do not know who there is. I visited only once, as an odd sort of tourist.

Meanwhile, back in America, it is noteworthy that the American Founders included serious Christians (John Jay, for example) and serious non-Christians (Franklin, Jefferson). Collaboration between secularists and the religious today appears more difficult and rare, although perhaps this is only an illusion fostered by partisan disputes. Consensus between the two ‘sides’ requires some common set of principles: once, natural rights; later, several progressivist eschatons. The latter are no longer so plausible as they once were, even to ambitious political men. Even to ‘intellectuals.’

Andrei Sinyavsky [“Abram Tertz”]: Strolls with Pushkin. Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Originally published in The Rumson Reporter, August 1994.

 

Andrei Sinyavsky rivals Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as Russia’s most eminent living writer, although Solzhenitsyn is far better known in the United States. Like Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavksy spent time in a Soviet jail (for “anti-Soviet agitation”) and in exile. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, he is that rare bird, a Russian liberal democrat. He often uses the pen name “Abram Tertz”—camouflage he assumed under the Soviet regime.

Aleksandr Pushkin, more or less unanimously acclaimed as the Russian poet of the nineteenth century, had his own run-ins with the political authorities of the day, suffering the humiliating semi-protection of Czar Nicholas. Pushkin died in a duel wherein he had the good fortune to be shot by a foreigner, thereby arousing strong patriotic passions in his countrymen, passions that have attached themselves to his name ever since. From the Christian Czarist Fyodor Dostoevsky to propagandists in the pay of the Comintern, Russians routinely appropriate Pushkin for their (cross-)purposes.

In writing on Pushkin, Sinyavsky continues this tradition and addresses two principal themes, relevant both to Pushkin’s circumstance and his own. What constitutes freedom in Russia? What constitutes Russianness?

As Catharine Theimer Nepomnyashchy writes in her informative introduction, Synyavsky’s Strolls with Pushkin continues his closing speech at his 1966 trial. She notes that Pushkin, a political dissident, a probable atheist, a devotee of French culture who had an ancestor who was an Abyssinian prince, does not at first appear to be a prime candidate for First Icon of Russian Literature. But such is the freedom of artistic plasticity that he has become that, in the hands of writers who would have loathed him in life.

Sinyavsky wants to save Pushkin from the hands of self-serving political cultists. Sinyavsky doesn’t want to worship Pushkin; he wants to stroll with him, an activity Pushkin himself would have much preferred to gestures of adoration. Strolling is leisurely, convivial, free—everything Russian politics so notoriously is not. Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is “an elusive and ubiquitous No Man”—that is to say, a comic Odysseus, not a tragic Achilles. “Lightness is the first thing,” the “condition of creativity”; Pushkin “turned lolling about into a matter of principle.” (Work is the opiate of the masses: You can’t subvert Marxism-Leninism more radically than that. Hence Sinyavsky’s funny line in a 1959 essay, What Is Soviet Realism?: “There is nothing to be done”—a dig at Lenin’s famous pamphlet, What Is to Be Done?). Flighty, womanizing, frivolous, Pushkin “touched on forbidden topics and secret subjects with free and easy grace.” He is the antidote to heavy, Russian sober-sidedness, from Dostoevsky/Solzhenitsyn in literature to Lenin/Stalin/Brezhnev in politics.

Sinyavsky’s Pushkin is an anti-Machiavelli. For all his lightness of touch, Machiavelli proposed a grim project, the conquest of Fortune by means of tyrannical princes and contentious republicans unassisted by God. Villainy, Sinyavsky writes, “originates in vain attempts to correct fate arbitrarily, to impose the principle of envy on fate through blood and deception,” force and fraud. “The free man strolls,” Pushkin said, he does not seek domination. Pushkin is a Russian Epicurean.

The problem with too-serious people, Sinyavsky argues, is that they have too damn many purposes or, worse still, one overriding one. In order to free himself from the tyranny of other people’s purposes, Sinyavsky’s Pushkin advances no cause, imposes no goals and indeed proposes none. He writes about nothing or, what is the same thing, about everything that is a trifle. Life is flux, but orderly flux—the change of seasons more than the shuffling or clash of atoms. Pushkin “became a poet the way some people become tramps,” with no grand project in view, “prefer[ring] solitude under shady bows to heroic deeds,” living the life of the “parasite and renegade.” “Pushkin all his life remained a lycée student,” hanging out with the guys and chasing girls. “Parasite” and “renegade” have been standard terms of abuse under the Soviet regime, as in “social parasites” (the bourgeoisie and its sympathizers, real or alleged) and “the renegade Trotsky,” targeted for murder by agents of Joseph Stalin, Man of Steel.

Sinyavsky’s book is delightful (although, predictably and perhaps even designedly, it gives Solzhenitsyn indigestion). It also poses a (pardon the word) serious problem with respect to Russian liberalism.

“Pushkin was the first civilian to attract attention to himself in Russian literature. A civilian in the fullest sense of the word, not a diplomat, not a secretary, a nobody. A goldbricker. A deadbeat. But he made more noise than any military man.” True, but a private noisemaker is likely to be heard and thus no longer private. Nor is he yet a citizen. A poet produces forms, makes something, and therefore implicates himself in the practice of ruling—if only indirectly, by influencing the cultural atmosphere—whether he wants to or not. “The poet is a czar,” Sinyavsky’s Pushkin recognizes. Poetry is a “despot.” It ordains. Religion traditional serves as a frame for governments, a subject for poetry; in a secularized society art becomes a substitute for religion.

Yet Sinyavsky doesn’t want art to rule. He wants it to stroll, he wants it as an expression of freedom. He needs to set Pushkin free of all his cultists, but also needs to set him free of Sinyavsky. He wants freedom from the tyranny of all purposes. His policy amounts to a comprehensive détente or relaxation, in the hope that vigilant despots will also relax, loosen their Machiavellian grip on their subjects. His kind of declaration of independence might not provoke a war for independence in which his side would be defenseless against the Soviet regime.

This may be possible for Rousseau, in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, precisely because he is solitary, outside of civil society. But take a convivial stroll with someone, even so free a spirit as Pushkin, and a destination will creep in, rules of engagement will be formulated. Solitary freedom will inevitably give way to civil liberty.

Without an idea of civil liberty, Russian liberalism does not know how to govern. Which is why Russian liberals will always be an endangered species.

It may be that Sinyavsky wants first to help Russians recover the experience of freedom simply, before going on to think about civil liberty and republican government. It is not easy to see, however, that he can get there from here.