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).

 

 

 

Albert Camus: Algerian Chronicles. Arthur Goldhammer translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 51, Number 3, May/June 2014.

 

Americans of a certain age, who cut their literary teeth on the French Existentialists and quasi-Existentialists fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s, recall that Albert Camus began his life as a French colon in Algeria, by then France’s largest colony. Unlike almost all others on the French Left in his generation, Cams could not bring himself to despise French imperialism or to turn his back on his countrymen. His reward (it should be needless to say) was condemnation and shunning by the Left, condemnation by the die-hard Algerian French on the Right, and embarrassed silence amidst his foreign admirers, who continued to read The Stranger and The Fall but seldom got round to discussing their literary hero’s political deviationism. A few years later, Edward Said gave him the thumbs-down sign—more than enough to ward off a generation of academics. That’s why Algerian Chronicles, which appeared in 1958, found its American translator and publisher more than half a century later. Yet the book remains a testimony to both the strength and weakness of the French moraliste tradition Camus stood for. His measured defense of the French colonial effort in Algeria, his refusal of fanaticisms secular and religious, ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ set him apart from almost everyone in his day—perhaps most especially from the Existentialists with whom he was too often classed by taxonomists of ideology. His remains a lonely position amidst the self-described ‘postmodern’ Western Left, the regime-changing Right, the neo-isolationist Left and Right, and of course in the North Africa of the past half-century, where military strongmen vie for dominance with Islamic radicals.

In some ways, however, it is most instructive to situate Camus between the two French statesmen who thought most clearly about Algeria: Alexis de Tocqueville and Charles de Gaulle. Tocqueville wanted to bind Algeria to France; de Gaulle dissolved the bands, but on terms that Tocqueville endorsed in advance. Both combined their classical sense of moderation and justice with the toughest sort of practicality, and saw no real contradiction among these three virtues.

After three centuries of rather loose Ottoman rule, under which it developed a well-deserved reputation for monarchy spiced with assassination and Mediterranean piracy, Algeria fell to the French in 1830. More than 50,000 French colonizers arrived between the conquest and the year of European revolutions, 1848. Far from amounting to a scrum of administrators ruling a mass of restless ‘natives,’ the French put down roots in Algeria, taking the mission civilisatrice seriously. This colonial imperialism entailed racial dominance to be sure, but also the characteristic French tone in politics and in moeurs—a certain humanity to go with the imperial fist, a form of rule in many ways much to be preferred to the Ottoman misrule and Algerian despotism that preceded it.

Initially, Tocqueville doubted that “the French genius” was “very conducive to colonization at all.” [1]  “To have conquered a nation is not enough to be capable of governing it,” he advised his countrymen; “after having destroyed their government, we [have] not given them another.” He set out to understand Algeria and to improve French governance there, never losing sight of either the human need for rule by force and civility. Given the disparate political regimes represented in French politics—from partisans of the Bourbons to socialists, each of which would either rule or take a stab at ruling during Tocqueville’s career—he also hoped that an imperial mission might serve to unite the French. Far from a race-theory quack, he advocated racial amalgamation as a means of intertwining French and ‘native’ families. On the other hand, he had no illusions about somehow uniting French Catholicism with Islam; after reading the Koran he concluded that it would not educate souls conducive to the give-and-take of republican political life. “Polygamy, the sequestration of women, the absence of any public life, a tyrannical and suspicious government that forces one to conceal one’s life and keep all affections within the family”: the very architecture of Algeria and of Muslim civilization reflected regimes that left no room for the public square and its debates.

Recognizing the difference between the mountain-dwelling Kabyles—descendants of Berber tribes—and the valley-dwelling Arabs—the majority of the population—Tocqueville thought that France might rule Algeria by playing the one set of Muslims against the other. Unlike the Arabs, the Kabyles farmed all year round; they merely wished to be left alone, which was fine with Tocqueville, who suspected that France wouldn’t get very far with its project of bringing either of these peoples to French civilization. For their part, the Arabs were semi-nomadic and ruled by military and religious aristocracies—riding, respectively, horses and donkeys. Whereas the Arabs had allied readily with the Ottoman Turks for protection against the neighboring peoples in the region, the French, “having allowed the aristocracy to be reborn” in Algeria after centuries of Ottoman divide-and-rule, must now ally themselves with the Kabyles, subduing them “not with our arms but with our arts”—that is, with the technology that can provide this people with the “material pleasures” that they enjoy. “If their leaders have nothing to fear from our ambition and see that we have simple, clear laws that protect them, it is certain that they will soon fear war more than we ourselves, and that we shall perceive the almost invincible attraction that draws savages toward civilized man at the moment they no longer fear for their liberty. We shall then see the customs and the ideas of the Kabyles alter without their perceiving it, and the barriers that now shut us out of their country will fall by themselves.”

As for the Arabs, a tougher, more ‘Turkish’ sort of ruling would be needed, but—and here is the crucial claim—”religious beliefs are continually losing their vigor and becoming more and more powerless to battle the interests of this world.” Before that happens, “peace with Christians from time to time, and habitual war, such is the natural taste of the populations that surround us.” this is not to suggest that education of the Arabs could be neglected. “It would be a great imprudence” to assume that Islam will die out on its own: “When religious passions exist among a people, men are always found who take it upon themselves to make use of these and to lead them. Allow the natural and regular interpreters of religion to disappear, and you do not suppress religious passions, you merely cede control to fanatics or impostors. It is already known that there are fanatic mendicants, belonging to secret societies, who have enflamed the spirit of the populations in the last insurrection.” Instead, Tocqueville recommended, let the existing religious authorities, the marabouts, come to see the advantages of rapprochement with the colonists.

Even with such rapprochement, “because of the social organization of this people, their tribal organization and nomadic life, something we can do nothing about for a very long time, perhaps ever,” French “domination of the Arabs will be onerous.” Therefore, the French must colonize the valuable coastline (particularly reinforcing the capital, Algiers) and effectively use the Kabyles as a buffer against the Arabs while playing friendly Arab tribes against the others—all the while fighting the Arabs hard whenever they prove rebellious. By fighting the Arabs hard Tocqueville means burning harvests: “If we do not burn harvests in Europe, it is because in general we wage war on governments and not on peoples.” Not so in Algeria, where the French must punish depredations of hostile tribes undertaken against the friendly ones.

Colonization will therefore be indispensable. Families serve as the foundation for political life. Sending soldiers alone won’t do. Moreover, soldiers who spend any considerable time in imperial service “will soon contract habits, ways of thinking and acting, that are very dangerous everywhere, but especially in a free country.” Ever the enemy of bureaucracy, Tocqueville wanted the colonists to exercise a considerable degree of self-government with well-guarded property rights, thereby attracting more of the French to the country. Tocqueville had seen the English demographic conquest of North America, and while he wanted nothing to do with its attendant use of slavery, he did appreciate the weight of numbers.

Despite the difficulties and dangers, “I do not think France can think seriously of leaving Algeria.” Such a departure would make France seem “to be yielding to her own impotence and succumbing to her own lack of courage” in the “eyes of the world.” Geopolitically, the Mediterranean is “the political sea of our times” and Algeria (along with another French colony, Morocco) dominates the southern border of the entrance to the Mediterranean. If France left, another imperial power would take it for that very reason. “If France ever abandons Algeria, it is clear that she could do it only at a moment when she is seen to be undertaking great things in Europe, and not at a time such as our own, when she appears to be falling to the second rank and seems resigned to let the control of European affairs pass into other hands,” Tocqueville wrote in 1841. This would be de Gaulle’s thinking exactly, 120 years later, but with a very different policy to implement it.

For most of those years, the French pursued something like Tocqueville’s strategy—propping up the Kabyles, playing Arab tribe off Arab tribe, controlling the coast. But the nationalism that social democratization fostered—and which Tocqueville famously saw and described—intensified among Arabs, even as “religious passions” remained. Among the French Algerians, a dangerous officer corps did arise, applauded by civilian colonists as their protectors against Arab nationalists and Islamic militants. By the early 1950s civil war began; a few years later, the conflict threatened the French parliamentary regime itself.

Camus stands as an anguished witness to the erosion and collapse of the Tocquevillian—liberal, commercial-republican—hopes for all Algerians, whether of European, Algerian or Berber origin. The Chronicles consists of writings dating from 1939 to 1958, just before de Gaulle returned to power, most immediately to solve the Algerian crisis. “This book is among other things the history of a failure,” the failure not only of the French to rule Algeria well but Camus’s own failure “to inject sobriety into the discussion,” which extremists of several colorations had dominated.

He begins with an explanation of the moral dilemma faced by any decent person who writes about the crisis at all. Not only is there “a peculiar French nastiness, which I do not wish to compound”—a system of the uncompromising regime-partisan politics dating back at least as far as the 1780s—that makes it hard for one citizen to address another; there is also the way in which the use of torture and terror by extremists among French colonists and Arab rebels alike taints any commentary at all, even the most well-intended. For example, “I am afraid that, by retracing the long history of French errors, I am, with no risk to myself, supplying alibis to the criminal madmen who would toss grenades into crowds of innocent people who happen to be my kin…. When one’s family is in immediate danger of death, one might wish that it were a more generous and just family and even feel obliged to make it so, as this book will attest, and yet (make no mistake!) remain in solidarity against the mortal threat, so that the family might at least survive and therefore preserve its opportunity to become more just.” At the same time, “Can a people survive without being reasonably just toward other peoples? France is dying because it has not been able to resolve this dilemma.” “These errors of both the Right and the Left simply define the nihilism of our times.” The just measure between force and civilization had become deranged, in Europe as well as Algeria.

In an essay published before the Second World War, Camus excoriates France’s failure to follow up logically on its own ‘Kabylist’ strategy. By 1839 Kabyle children were reduced to eating thistles, and although “the Kabyles thirst for learning and taste for study have become legendary,” and although they never neglected to include girls as well as boys in their schools, and although the stated long-term French policy was assimilation of the Kabyle and French populations, France still maintained segregated and inferior schools for the Kabyles,. Camus also recommends public works, job training, and a reorganized emigration policy to restore economic prosperity to Kabylia. Politically, this “friendly people” should have been granted self-governing communes “under the supervision of a French administrator,” thus accustoming them to a political life consistent with republicanism—”to gain experience in public affairs” by “establish[ing] a small federative republic in the heart of Kabyle territory.”

In a postwar visit to Algeria, Camus saw “the political awakening of the Muslim masses,” many of whom in Algeria had “spent the last two years fighting for the liberation of France.” By then the policy of assimilation could no longer work, having been resisted before the war primarily by the colonists. The most prominent Arab politician, Ferhat Abbas, nonetheless aspired not to full independence for Algeria but to self-government in confederation with France, under the more than reasonable terms of 50/50 representation of Muslim and French populations in an Algerian assembly. Camus urged French acceptance of this offer.

But a decade later, after the founding of the Algerian National Liberation Front in 1954, Camus was reduced to writing to the Algerian Socialist Aziz Kessous, observing that “we now find ourselves pitted against one another, with each side determined to inflict as much pain as possible on the other, inexpiably.” While France “continues to get nowhere” in its parliamentary debates over the colony, “Algeria is dying”; “impotent moderation continues to serve the extremes, and our history is still an insane dialogue between paralytics and epileptics.” “The policy of assimilation has failed—first because it was never really tried, and second because the Arab people have retained their own character, which is not identical to ours”; now, the choice for French Algeria is “between a marriage of convenience and a deadly marriage of two xenophobias.” Like Tocqueville, Camus never forgets the geopolitical consequence of a simple divorce: Although the Mediterranean is no longer “the political sea of our time,” it remained an important place where the Soviet empire aimed at extending its sway through the vehicle of Nasserism. (He urges the Arabs to say “yes to  an Arab identity in Algeria, no to an Egyptian identity.”) Therefore, “I urge [Arab militants] to distinguish carefully among those [among the French] who support the Algerian cause because they want to see their own country surrender on this as on other fronts and those who demand reparations for the Algerian people because they want France to demonstrate that grandeur is not incompatible with justice.” Camus points not only to “a law of history”—”when the oppressed take up arms in the name of justice, they take a step toward injustice” toward their oppressors—but also “a law of the intellect”—the West once called it the natural law—”which dictates that although one must never cease to demand justice for the oppressed, there are limits beyond which one cannot approve of injustice committed in their name.” “Each side uses the crimes of the other to justify its own. By this logic, the only possible outcome is interminable destruction.”

Camus asks “that both camps commit themselves publicly and simultaneously to a policy of not harming civilian populations, no matter what the circumstances” are (Here, be it noted, he departs from Tocqueville’s harsher policy.) “What is at stake is life itself.” Only on such terms, the protection of civilian lives, can the 1.5 million French colonists, the French in France, and the Muslims (“both Arab and Berber”) find some modus vivendi within political structures that enables each to retain its way of life while resisting the imperialist encroachments of the Soviet-Nasserite alliance. Very much like Tocqueville, Camus rejects the historical determinism which maintains “there is no progress without bloodshed and that the strong advance at the expense of the weak”; “such a fate may yet indeed exist, but men are not required to bow down before it or submit to its laws.” He calls on all parties “to work on behalf of liberty against fatalism”—most immediately, the fatalism of Marxian dialectic.

He acknowledges that “the Arabs claim to belong not to a nation but to a spiritual or temporal Muslim empire.” He rejoins that there is “a no less important Christian empire,” which “no one is proposing to bring…back into temporal history,” whereas “this new Arab imperialism, which Egypt, overestimating its strength, claims to lead and which Russia is using for the moment to challenge the West as part of its global strategy” only serves to aid the attempt “to encircle Europe from the south.” This will do nothing for “the freedom and prosperity of the Arab peoples,” as shown by “the decimation of the Chechens or the Tartars of Crimea, or the destruction of the Arab culture in the formerly Muslim provinces of Daghestan” by the Soviet Union.

Camus wants France to declare “that the era of colonialism is over,” but with stipulations that guard France as well as Algeria. France “refuses to give in to violence, especially in the forms it takes today in Algeria,” because “it refuses in particular to serve the dream of Arab empire at its own expense, at the expense of the European people of Algeria, and, finally, at the expense of world peace.” France instead should offer “a voluntary federal regime” in Algeria, similar to “a Swiss confederation” embracing “several different nationalities.” However, unlike the Swiss cantonal system, in which each group occupies separate regions, Algeria’s ethnic and religious groups are now mingled. Camus endorses a plan proposed by a French-Algerian law professor who recommended dividing the French National Assembly into two sections: the French would elect representatives to rule the French population both in the metropole and overseas under French law; Muslims overseas would govern themselves under Islamic laws “on all matters pertaining to Muslims alone.” A combined assembly would address taxation, budgets, and national defense—i.e., shared concerns. “Contrary to all French custom and to firm biases inherited from the French Revolution, the proposal would create two categories of equal but distinct citizens”—”a sort of revolution against the regime of centralization and abstract individualism created in 1789, which for many reasons should now be seen as the Old Regime.” But “if your goal is to sever Algeria from France, then both will perish.”

This avante-la-lettre multiculturalism did not seem plausible to France’s leading statesman, Charles de Gaulle, who by then readied himself to resume the authority he had quit in 1946. [2]  Nor did he suppose that severing the two countries would cause either to perish. Indeed, “Algeria is costing us more than she is worth to us.” De Gaulle preferred “an Algerian Algeria,” as he put it; “the only question that arises is whether this Algeria will be Algerian against France or in association with her.” Such association would entail preferential trade channels, a common currency, free immigration, but no political linkage as advocated by Camus. Under de Gaulle’s plan, French colonists would choose Algerian citizenship, repatriation, or French citizenship in Algeria, with all rights respected; the latter group, along with any Muslims who chose to retain French citizenship, would do so in a self-governing enclave in Algeria, he stipulated. As for republicanism in Algeria as a whole, that regime “will one day exist, but it has never yet existed” there. Meanwhile, each step toward independence must be taken in the French republican way, by popular referendum in both the metropole and the colony. when the Algerian Arabs attempted to win glory by driving out the French by force of arms, de Gaulle brought the weight of the French military against them and was not defeated; when elements of that military rebelled in the name of continued colonialism, de Gaulle rounded them up. The consequent four years of bloodshed agitated all parties concerned, except de Gaulle, who survived assassination attempts by French-Algerian diehards and pursued the kind of ambitious European geopolitical ends that Tocqueville had said would be the only fitting substitute for empire.

Camus died in an automobile accident in 1960, two years before Algeria achieved independence—a fate that spared him from seeing the destruction of the Algeria he knew and loved. The Algerian state expelled the remaining French colonists and their Muslim allies shortly after independence. (To this day, those Muslim loyalists do not enjoy full citizenship in France.) De Gaulle allowed Algerian perfidy to stand, having freed his hands to continue his foreign policy deigned to establish a republican Europe independent of bot the United States and Soviet Russia, a federal Europe des patries that also preserved the sovereignty of the peoples against the bureaucrats of Brussels. He accomplished the indispensable first step—rapprochement with republican Germany—and the Franco-German partnership forms the bedrock of today’s European Union. But the grander aspects of his design remained elusive, as his fellow European republicans continued to perceive the need for the American alliance and Soviet Russia continued to exercise imperial control over Central and Eastern Europe for another generation. As for the bureaucrats in Brussels, they have had their innings, but the Gaullist esteem for popular sovereignty of nations remains alive and well, too.

Algeria has endured a more or less nationalist, collectivist, and despotic—that is to say Nasserite—regime in the decades since independence, punctuated by a brutal seven-year civil war between the military rulers and the Islamists in the 1990s, leaving over 100,000 dead. The current strongman, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, independent Algeria’s first minister of foreign affairs, has ruled in the years following the ceasefire, cautiously and skillfully liberalizing the regime while maintaining order; Algeria remains what de Gaulle called it, a country that may see republicanism, but has never yet seen it, in large measure because too many well-organized Algerians with guns do not want it. The time for a federal and republican solution in Algeria might have ben the years right after the Second World War, but that was precisely when the French returned to the practices of parliamentary republicanism that had ruined them in the Thirties. In any event, it transpires that the removal of empire does not solve the problems of faction that imperial rule both fomented and pressed down. Algerians today face exactly the same problems in ruling themselves that the French faced when they were ruling them.

By 1958, the political dispute between de Gaulle and Camus may be stated as follows: Camus wanted to preserve the French Algerian and Kabyle communities within the Algeria that was their home, and to which they had as much right as the Arabs. To this end he endorsed a federation with metropolitan France, one that would avoid Nasserism and Soviet imperial encroachment. De Gaulle wanted to accomplish these things, but without federation, which he judged politically impossible, given the strength of both Arab-Algerian nationalism and Islamic fervor. He had other fish to fry: founding a stable republican regime in France, which included a strong executive who would prevent parliamentary paralysis and the construction of a new alliance system, not only within Europe but in competition with both American-capitalist and Russian-communist efforts to penetrate the nations then known as the ‘Third World.’ For the latter, and the grandest of all Gaullist projects, de Gaulle could not be seen to continue an imperial policy for France, although associational ties (mostly economic) with the former colonies in Africa were to be encouraged. De Gaulle was French, Camus French-Algerian.

Each man understood the difference, which indicates a more profound difference between them. In one of the most delightful pieces in this collection, a speech Camus delivered in 1937 titled “The New Mediterranean Culture,” the future Nobel Laureate celebrated “Mediterranean regionalism.” At the time, Mussolini’s Fascist regime pretended to a “Latin” empire in northern Africa. Camus remarked “a confusion between Mediterranean and Latin” owing to the habit of “ascribing to Rome what began in Athens.” Athens embodied “the Western world’s true meaning and vocation”—Athens, with its humanism of the polis, in modernity “the nationalism of sunshine” and not of imperial dominance, a universalism that welcomes a unity of neither force, as under ancient Rome, or of faith, as under the Holy Roman Empire, but of “hope” and of “joy,” which are the very opposite of Roman, German, Austrian “anxiety” and “buttoned up” restraint. The Mediterranean transformed Christian hermeticism and harshness to Catholicism in the original sense of the term, the religion of Francis of Assisi and not of Martin Luther. (“Protestantism, strictly speaking, is Catholicism wrenched from the Mediterranean.”) Islam too has moderated itself as it has moved west, across the convivial, sun-drenched sea. Even the fascism of Rome, noxious though it may be, isn’t the fascism of Berlin. “What Rome took from Greece was not the life but rather the puerile abstraction and reasoning.” He fails to see that it isn’t abstraction that leads to death but life itself; conversely, political life may require killing.”

“The triumphant zest for life, the sense of oppression and boredom, the deserted squares of Spain at noontime, the siesta—that is the true Mediterranean, and it is closer to the East than to the Latin West. North Africa is one of the only regions in which East and West cohabit.” And of course “Mediterranean men need a Mediterranean politics.” That was the ambition of Camus for France, for Algeria, for the world he loved. To mix cultural metaphors, the envisioned politics of Camus had a touch of the Bohemian—that is to say, of the apolitical. And it is the Catholicism of Francis, not of Thomas Aquinas, that Catholic with an Aristotelian sense of the political.

Not so, de Gaulle, that admirer of the Latinity of Rome, albeit a republican Rome far removed politically from the monarchist crankiness of his older contemporary, Charles Maurras. Against the anti-Dreyfusards of his youth, the Pétainists of his middle age, the partisans of Algérie française he defeated in his old age, de Gaulle defended Latin mesure and order,the stern, Stoic virtues of the “man of character,” against what he regarded as German extremism, Russian despotism, American commercialism, and the “heavy dough of the English” temperament. On one memorable occasion, he reminded the Romanians—then in the grim tyrant Ceaucescu’s grip—of the Latin civilization they shared with France, as attested by the very name of their country. For this enterprise, for this re-founding of France and this envisioned reconfiguration of the alliance structures of the world, Mediterranean joie de vivre would not suffice, although it might have its place, somewhere in the far south of France. To his friend and ally André Malraux, he contrasted Roman self-government with “Mediterranean restlessness,” and he thought the French habitually exhibited too little of the former, too much of the latter.

With her characteristic touch of irony, Susan Sontag once called Camus a husband-figure, not a dangerous lover-type. De Gaulle, however, was not only a husband but a father who (like Tocqueville, like all fathers) knew the harsher requirements of ruling. The French regime he founded thus continues to do better than the bankrupt but still talkative Greeks, or the self-lacerating Algerians whom he left in Mediterrania.

 

Notes

1. Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery. Jennifer Pitts editor and translator. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
2. See Charles de Gaulle: Memoirs of Hope, chapter 3 (“Algeria”).Terence Kilmartin translation. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

 

Karuna Mantena: Alibis of Empire: Henry Maine and the End of Liberal Imperialism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

 

Shaken by the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny, the British Parliament abolished the East India Company and transferred rule of India to the Crown. This and similar uprisings induced British imperialists to abandon liberal-utilitarian reformism and to replace it with rule animated by a conservative form of historicism. Undertaking to govern the empire indirectly by managing local customs, the British held fast to their goal of modernizing ‘traditional’ socieites, but now proceeded much more slowly and cautiously—eventually undermining their own claims to rule. “The era of [the British Empire’s] greatest geographic expansion—the period between 1857 and 1914—directly coincided with a phase of liberal retrenchment and the repudiation of central assumptions and imperatives underlying the ‘civilizing mission'” (1).

After serving six years as Law Member in the Viceroy’s Council, Henry Sumner Maine provided the intellectual foundation for indirect rule, and along the way pioneered the disciplines of sociology and anthropology in the English-speaking world. In the United States, Maine is best known for his 1885 book, Popular Government, in which he praises the United States Constitution as (so far) effective measure of prudence moderating a regime founded upon popular sovereignty and criticizes the First Republic of France as lacking such a carefully-designed set of governing institutions. He warns that the combination of ill-designed regimes incorporating a degree of popular sovereignty with a “passion for national dignity” issuing in imperialism (exemplified by the German Empire and the Italian Kingdom) may lead to a valorizing of “military virtue” that will destroy popular sovereignty (as the civil virtue of popular self-government and the military virtue of obedience conflict). Further, one people’s identification of national dignity with imperial rule may well provoke an equally nationalistic passion in the hearts of the peoples they rule, again introducing a destabilizing tension into the regime.

That “sound aristocrat,” “History,” denies that “the multitudes” possess the knowledge required “to be capable of understanding their interest.” Athenian ‘democracy’ contributed to Western civilization because it was really an aristocracy; similarly, modern popular governments will succeed only insofar as they adhere to such quasi-aristocratic institutions as representative government, separation and balance of powers (including an independent judicial system), confidential deliberation in the executive cabinet, and other “securities against surprise or haste.” The democratic “passion for change” or “change for its own sake” endangers popular regimes. Given the power of the people, the state controlled by such a regime will incline toward excessive power, harnessing the techno-scientific conquest of nature to provide popular demands, inflaming appetites at the expense of reasoned self-government. But ‘progress’ is anything but natural; human nature, unchanging or repetitive/cyclical insofar as it exhibits change, cannot flourish under a regime of scientism spurred by popular passion. The scientistic aristocracy of the administrative state lacks the prudence of the older aristocracies. Unlikely to succeed in governing, even if it did it would not likely rule with benevolence.

Mantena’s study of Maine’s theory of imperialism shows these principles applied to the problem of ruling foreign peoples. “Maine’s seminal contribution to imperial policy debates stemmed from his evocative account of the unique dynamics of primitive, ancient societies, of which India was a prime example” (3). To rule such societies required, paradoxically, stepping back from strictly political considerations and to respect the ways in which “native society” must be understood as “apolitical,” a structure “held together by stable bonds of custom and structures of kinship” (3). To put it in Aristotelian terms, these societies were pre-political or tribal; they had not achieved the way of life of the polis. For this reason it was not only pointless but dangerous to attempt to push modern liberal politics upon them, as the native peoples would surely push back, as they had done in the Mutiny. Native religious beliefs, animating kinship relations and tribal life generally, must be understood and respected. “The native was thought to be best ruled through his/her own institutions and structures of authority” (5), that is, by indirect rule, “protect[ing] native society from the traumatic impact of modernity” (7). This new strategy did not imply an abandonment of the intention of the “universalism”—the eventual liberalization of ruled societies—but instead a more careful and (as Maine would say) prudent approach toward that purpose.

A tension immediately developed between universalism and “culturalism,” a strain of thought seen at least as far back as Montesquieu, and continued in various ways by Diderot, Kant, Herder, and some of the Scottish historians (13). Culturalism tended toward historical determinism and away from the very prudential, political rule that leaves room for human “agency” (14-15). Political science loses much of its authority to sociology and anthropology; given the fact that ’empire’ means ‘rule,’ this bodes ill for imperialism because it erodes the self-confidence and self-knowledge of imperialists. But it is likely that Maine understood himself as following not in the line of some determinism but along the way opened by Edmund Burke in his famous speech occasioned by the impeachment trial of India’s first British Governor-General, Warren Hastings, which Mantena calls “the founding political drama of British India” (22), not an instance of historical fatality but “a verdict on the moral basis of future empire in India” (23).

Burke regarded political foundings very much as Machiavelli had done: bloody affairs of “violence, conquest, and usurpation” (23). What redeemed them was what the conquerors did thereafter “to secure stable and lawful governance” (23). In British India, this meant institutional checks on the East India Company, subjecting its rule to Parliamentary oversight aimed at securing the trust and consent of the ruled and aiming at the good of the ruled. Crucially, such rule must respect the traditions of the Indians and not aim at replacing them wholesale with British practices because a people “cannot change their maxims, lives, and opinions” (Burke, quoted p. 24). This is precisely the argument Burke made against the French revolutionaries, who also sought to wipe out centuries of custom in the name of Enlightenment. Such efforts tyrannize more than they reform.

Hastings had classified the many Indian political societies as specimens of “Oriental despotism” (25). On the contrary, Burke “articulated a reverent image of the ancient laws, customs, and institutions of India,” which registered its unique geography, society, and politics (25). Victorious conquerors shouldn’t preen themselves on their military prowess, which hardly reflects superiority to the conquered people ‘across the board.’ The longstanding character of Indian civilization bespoke time-tested qualities which should “evoke a humility and appreciation” for them in the souls of the new rulers.

‘Enlightenment’ intellectuals struck back in the next generation, whose utilitarians had little patience with Burkean traditionalism. James Mill, who worked for the East India Company from 1819 to 1836, wrote a book-length critique of “every claim made on behalf of the achievements of Indian arts, science, philosophy, and government” (26). Measured by the standard of utility, India lagged behind on the march of “social progress” (26); Indians exhibited the traits of indolence, mendacity, and superstition characteristic of peoples long ruled by “political despotism and religious tyranny” (27). It was Great Britain’s imperial responsibility to push them forward. The “infinite malleability of human nature” made this project possible (30).

Evangelical Christian writers also demurred. For Charles Grant, Hinduism was a form of paganism, “despotic in character, maintained by a crafty priestly class,” desperately in need not of the light of the Enlighteners but the light of the Gospel (28). It is “our duty” as Christians “to impart to them knowledge, light, and happiness,” not to “wink at the stupidity which we deem profitable to us” (Grant, quoted p. 28). In the long run, such greed is short-sighted even in its own blinkered terms: trade with civilized men is more profitable than governing savages.

No evangelical Christian, John Stuart Mill also (and famously) opposed the narrowly ‘economistic’ utilitarianism of his father and his father’s colleague, Jeremy Bentham, for a broader form of that doctrine, one that made room for a more capacious understanding of human happiness. Unlike them, he emphasized “the importance of government as one of the great instruments of forming national character” (31). With Burke, he understood that “liberty was not an unqualified benefit in all times and for all peoples,” that prudent political rule must perceive and adjust for the customs and habits of the people ruled (32). Neither the “savage” customs and habits of a people who refuse to obey any commands nor the hidebound customs and habits of those who cannot think for themselves will conduce to ready development toward self-government. Over such peoples, only what Mill called a regime of “vigorous despotism” would do, one aiming at civilizing the subject people in the literal sense of that word: making the civil, amenable to being ruled and to sharing in rule (33). The human capacity for self-government is universal in the sense that it is a natural potential of all peoples—Mill firmly rejected the naturalist racism of Thomas Carlyle—but its actual implementation is not universal. Bridging that gulf is very hard to do, as the several colonial revolts against British imperial rule during Mill’s lifetime so violently illustrated. This debate intensified because it became entwined with the simultaneous British regime debate over democratic republicanism, seen in the controversies surrounding the three major reform acts of the nineteenth century, which gradually widened the franchise to include all classes of Englishmen.

James Fitzjames Stephens spearhead the reaction against Mill’s liberal imperialism, and indeed against liberalism generally. Stephens scored liberalism as too ‘soft’ to rule India effectively; liberals only invited revolt. “Unapologetic authoritarian rule in the colonies” was necessary to maintain the basic conditions of “law and order” needed to prevent social and political chaos. He differed from Mill primarily in insisting that such rule must be permanent, justified by English “virtue, honor, and superiority” over the Indians (41). “Stephen sought to undermine the normative appeal of the goal of self-government more generally. Through the claim that self-government was unfit for India, Stephen hoped to expose its limitations for England as well.” (42)  He denied the existence of fundamental human progress, not simply on the basis of natural right but on a Hobbesian form of natural right: Man is “at heart selfish and unruly and therefore needed to be continuously compelled to live peaceably and morally in society” (42). The more Britain democratized socially, the more such absolute rule would be needed. Absolute rule was not despotism or tyranny because it aimed at the good of the people ruled. But that ‘good’ scarcely allowed them to attempt to govern themselves, a task for which few people can be fitted.

Maine shared much of Stephens’s skepticism about liberal hopes for popular self-government although, as his argument in Popular Government shows, he was not an unqualified ‘absolutist,’ either. He came down somewhere between Mill and Stephens. Nonetheless, “in rendering the moral grounds of empire in more ambivalent terms,” critics of liberalism caused liberalism to lose “a straightforward purpose or substantive agenda” (46), as indeed the Liberal Party itself headed for decline and eventual dissolution. Despite Mill’s best efforts, the sense of the political was never fully established in English liberalism, as the more sociological and anthropological approaches to understanding foreign societies prevailed. One is tempted to suggest that the very democratization esteemed by liberals gave the critics of liberalism an opening for ‘cultural’ arguments intended to show that political republicanism abroad and even at home were unsound, dangerous, illusory. In his seminal study, Ancient Law and Village-Communities in the East and West, Maine criticized the ‘abstract’ modes of liberal thought, insisting that India and other non-modernized colonies could only be governed if rulers understood “the unique logic of primitive society” as seen in its “ancient usage and ancient juridical thought” (51). The encounters of such societies with modernity would dissolve them, promising not improved rule but anarchy, no-rule. This brought Maine to formulate his strategy of “indirect rule” over the colonies.

Mantena carefully distinguishes the new, social-cultural approach to understanding human communities from modern social-contract and classical regime theory. The “idea-typical model of traditional society [was] a central innovation of nineteenth-century social theory” (56). True, both the social-contract philosophers and the regime-centered political philosophers of antiquity clearly distinguished between philosophy and convention. But between them and thinkers like Maine and Emile Durkheim stood Hegel and historicism, of which the early sociologists and anthropologists stand as inheritors, but on the ‘Right’ wing of the family. “Traditional society” as conceived by Maine is “apolitical, dominated by nonrational—customary and kin-based—norms of politics and economics” (58). Such non-rational and apolitical customs and ties decisively influence political forms, not the other way around; in this claim Maine departs from the claims of Aristotle and Hobbes, Locke and Montesquieu would have agreed, who regarded political regimes and state forms as decisive influences on customs and kinship ties. Nor is Maine a Hegelian in the sense of positing a set of dialectical laws of historical progress. Mantena rather points to the reaction against the excesses of the French Revolution seen in the writings of Benjamin Constant, Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, Barthold Georg Niebuhr, and others who distinguished between the traditionalism of ancient societies and the rationalist/contractualist theories of the moderns. Niebuhr identifies the several social structures in ancient societies, as Aristotle had done, but claims that “the ancient state” or polis had no territorial boundaries. (This is implausible, given the importance of (for example) border walls in ancient Athens and elsewhere; Niebuhr unduly downplays the political).

Niebuhr’s scholarship notwithstanding, his argument does anticipate Maine’s critique of the individualism seen in much of modern social contract theory and his insistence on the patriarchal family and status-based kinship ties  as the keys to understanding the ancients. Maine regards this observation as no less scientific than Hegel regards his dialectical laws of ‘History,’ but Maine’s historicism (if one wishes to call it that) does not assume the existence of inevitable progress toward the modern state and an eventual World State. Traditional societies have a ‘logic,’ to be sure, a discernible order, but that logic is not the logic of ‘high-modern’ political philosophy. Nonetheless, in this respect like the Hegelian historicists, Maine denies that this logic was discernible by the ancients themselves, including the philosophers of classical antiquity. Therefore, the ancient philosophers who praised prudent, statesmanlike consideration of regime types, and even Montesquieu, the “founder of modern social science,” had failed to understand the narrow limits in which political deliberation and action operate. As a “historical animal,” man’s “political will” doesn’t amount to all that much. Societies have “an internal coherence and logic that [is] prior to and independent of politics” (72). ‘The social’ “mark[s] the limits of politics” (73), and is exceedingly hard if not impossible to change by means of political reform, including regime change. In antiquity, public law seldom penetrated into the family, which was “imperium in imperio“; its “closest modern analogy” is international law (77).

This is not to suggest that Maine regarded kinship societies as natural. On the contrary, kinship ties was highly artificial, as the practice of adopting adult members of other families had a ‘political’ motivation and obviously nothing to do with natural birth-relations. Adoption and intermarriage enabled patriarchal families to expand, eventually developing into tribes and gentes. It is not clear, however, that Aristotle’s description of how families eventually link together to form tribes, gentes, and eventually poleis really differs from this account, except that Maine understands the ancient family as more or less patriarchic/despotic, whereas Aristotle’s view is considerably more nuanced. Aristotle would regard Maine’s account as applicable rather to the ‘Cyclopean’ families of barbarians, including Greek families of what was ‘antiquity’ in his own day. At any rate, for Maine as distinguished from many historicists, there was no impulsion, dialectical or otherwise, for such traditional societies to evolve into anything else, even a polis. “In contrast to [the] perfectionist and progressive notion of culture, the modern anthropological concept of culture stressed the historicity, plurality, integrative capacity and relativity of cultures understood as bounded wholes, one that saw culture as a determinative shaper of human behavior” (85). If there is a human nature at all, it is seen in an “inherent psychological resistance to change and innovation” (86).

What, then, should imperial rulers do with the British Empire? Although Maine did not expect India to modernize anytime soon, he did recognize that its traditional way of life was disintegrating in contact with modernizers. In his time as Law Member in the British government in India and in his work thereafter he did not suppose that English-all-too-English common law would bear transplantation to the subcontinent—that one tradition could replace another. (For one thing, judge-made law will not survive where there are few or no judges to formulate it.) Instead of England’s unwritten, judge-made common law, he advocated an entirely new, codified system of law, the Indian Penal Code. At the same time, he saw that treating India as a “blank slate for speculate legislative experimentation was a recipe for political disaster” (97). Taking his bearings from the writings of Karl Friedrich von Savigny, eminence of the German Historical School of jurisprudence and critics of the “pure abstract universality” of the Napoleonic Code and other ‘Enlightenment’ law codes, Maine paid attention to the existing customs of the country and proposed culling them for “wholesome and expedient” usages and practices (104). This would give the appearance that the law code was familiar, not some radical revision imposed by foreigners. Modest progress in modernization then would be achieved, first by the very act of writing these things down so that British rulers and Indian subjects could learn them, shifting Indian custom from a non-literate to a literate practice, even while seeming to maintain a strict fidelity to tradition. Second, Maine rejected the assumption that the extant Brahmin legal systems—the products of one of the most rigid aristocratic orders ever established—should provide the materials from which British jurists should select wholesome and expedient laws. On the contrary, the customs of the villages should be combed for this purpose; reaching ‘down’ to the ways of villagers this democratize, and therefore modernize, the laws governing India without causing the society to fall victim to the vices of democratization, so often associated with the lawlessness of majority tyranny. “With the disintegration of any native alternative, legal codes based on rational principles were the better option than the existing state in which English common law was arbitrarily and haphazardly introduced through judicial legislation” (112). But those rational principles were prudential/Burkean, not abstract/utilitarian or abstract/’Enlightenment.’ To this Burkean sensitivity to custom, however, he did not neglect to add a strong dose of Hobbesian state formation. Hobbes, after all, was not simply arguing abstractly, but also responding to an acute practical crisis, religious civil war in England, something not unheard-of on the Indian subcontinent. What he wanted to avoid above all, in India and in Britain was a state that combined Hobbesian absolutism with democratic restlessness, perpetual change, a “never-ending revolution in customs and manners” (117) which would destabilize and even destroy even the most beneficial imperial rule.

In addition to the rule of law, India needed to establish a system of property rights. Like Locke, whose writings he seems either not to have consulted or not to have understood, Maine holds that “property was originally held in common” but over time has become divided, resulting in “forms of individual ownership” (119, and see Locke, Essay Concerning Civil Government, V. 25-26). When Mantena asserts that “Maine’s thesis about the communal origins of rights in property (and of modern conceptions of rights in general) effectively called into question the historical and logical priority of the unitary conception of individual proprietorship” (119), that isn’t quite correct: He was really calling into question the Lockean version of modern natural rights respecting the labor theory of value. Locke emphasizes that property arises from the fact that, first, “every man has a property in his own person,” equal to that of every other man because he is of the same species as every other man; second, when a man removes something from commonly-held nature for his own use, he “hath mixed his Labour” with it, joining it to something already his own, namely, his person. If I fail to gather acorns and prepare them to be edible, the communal property that is nature is of no use to me or anyone else. What Maine asserts, based on his historical research, is that the first step in establishing conventional individually-owned property isn’t taken by an individual but by a kinship-based commune. Individual property arose only after its disentanglement from the conventional communally-owned property (127). Indian society before the British conquest exhibited this communally-owned property; the English were attempting to establish private property rights there.

Maine objects to “unmooring the law of nature from actual legal practices,” as seen in modern natural rights theory (124). But natural law should never be derived from the state of nature, as Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau all do, even as they conceive of the state of nature in somewhat different ways. “For Maine, the important question was less why people began to appropriate things individually, but rather why appropriation or occupancy created a sentiment of respect by society” (125). Locke would answer that human beings formed the social compact because enforcement of the law of nature by individuals secured their life, liberty, and property weakly; Maine might reply by saying that human beings have existed in a social condition from time immemorial, that one would need to recur to the Garden of Eden or whatever its materialist/evolutionary equivalent would be to find human beings existing in an asocial state. In this, Maine registers his main philosophic target, who is not Locke but Rousseau, the thinker he associates with the excesses of the French Revolution. Maine “transformed a speculative/logical account of origins into a historical explanation” (126); in Locke, the law of nature is reason, but not for the historicist Maine, for whom individual rights to property originated in a transition from property conceived as based in kinship/status to property conceived as based on contract. This is especially true of landed property, which “began when larger groups of self-styled kinsmen (the tribe of gens) settled and worked the land collectively” (134); as these villages increased in size, the individual families began to stake out their own plots, on the one hand, and tribal chieftains used military power to stake out their own, vaster, landholdings, on the other. The next step was to make land alienable, inasmuch as family plots initially had been considered sacred soil where one’s family ancestors, deified after death, were buried (as per Fustel’s account). Although moveable property became salable early on, land “was often the last [type of property] to be incorporated into the law of sales” (136). For this, a modern, centralized state was a highly useful instrument for the establishment of rights to alienable property, both for individuals and for rulers in need of revenues. But this is not natural. “The idea that human beings are naturally inclined to sell goods and services at the highest possible price was not a given fact of nature but was made possible only in economic systems where the ideology of the market had taken hold,” system which replaced “the primitive community” (142). Having denied the natural-law or rule-of-reason standard of Locke, Maine can regard kinship, even the Indian caste system, as no more or less natural than contracts and markets.

Crucially, Maine found this movement toward private property to be widespread. He therefore spared no nostalgia (pace Rousseau) for man’s earlier, communal societies. As a historicist, he regarded the “movement” toward private property as “a product of processes of change that were immanent to the social formation,” a “progressive and legitimate development” (137)—immanence (whether in the form of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Marx’s materialist ‘iron laws of history’) being the centerpiece of the historicist understanding of reality. In terms of imperial rule, Maine drew a straightforward conclusion: Yes, Indian practices should be reformed, brought forward toward the protection of private property; but no, these practices must not be reformed too quickly, as Brits had been attempting to do. Such precipitous reform disoriented a traditional society. But at the same time, what was done was done. “We British,” Maine wrote, “should stand even by our mistakes,” which “is better than perpetual meddling” (145). Attempting somehow to reconstitute the now-disrupted social customs of kinship would only make things worse. This was true not only in India but in Ireland and elsewhere throughout the Empire. Neither ‘reaction’ nor over-hasty ‘progress’ would work, only the slow but firm guidance of indirect rule, a policy not of meddling but of muddling—of the time-honored English practice of ‘muddling through.’

Indirect rule amounted to “the insinuation of imperial power in the customary order of native society rather than through its repudiation and transformation” (150). Direct rule governed by the principles of liberalism “had set in motion a process of modernization that overwhelmed the traditional adaptability of native society,” which by the middle of the nineteenth century remained “intact” but “vulnerable” (151). Indirect rule “signaled the intellectual triumph of historicism over the tenets of classical political economy” (152) and, it might be added, over modern natural-right theories in modern universities throughout the West, as seen in the rise of Marxism and various forms of ‘progressivism’ which soon animated political parties from the United States to Russia. Although Mantena does not emphasize the point, Maine evidently understood that he was addressing the religio-political question, which had convulsed European politics would continue to do so in much of the world, including India, for the next century-and-a-half and counting. The caste system of India, which Maine was at pains to describe as not so rigid as most Westerners suppose, was infused with religiosity (157), as Indian Muslims clearly saw. Maine’s historical analysis did not commit him to moral and cultural relativism with respect to native customs, including religious customs. He was rather intent on enabling English rulers to see Indian society in its own terms, and so to “temper the arrogance of imperial power” (159), making it more prudent. Unlike Burke, that other great English advocate of prudential rule, Maine did partake in historicist assumptions leading to “reading differences in institutions as differences in stages in a unilinear trajectory” or evolution (159), although not in the grand dialectical manner of a Hegel or a Marx.

Mantena identifies Alfred C. Lyall as Maine’s “most respected intellectual successor” (165). Having joined the Indian Civil Service in 1856, the year before the Sepoy Mutiny, Lyall enjoyed a long and distinguished career, capped by his appointment to the King’s Privy Council in 1902. Lyall viewed India through a Tocquevillian lens, concerned that the introduction of modern statism would ruin the intermediate institutions and associations Tocqueville understood as necessary bulwarks against centralized despotic rule in democratized modern (and modernizing) societies. Lyall identified the Rajput tribal kingdoms as examples of such a well-articulated socio-political order, “worthy of free men,” as he put it (167). Without such institutions, despotism—whether ‘Oriental’ or Napoleonic, whether of the East or of the West—would prevail in the modern world. “Lyall was especially concerned with the cumulative impact of Western education on the transformation of religious belief,” as native students were educated out of their traditional convictions in English-style schools (168). New and more fanatical religious movements might result, threatening British rule with violent resistance. At the same time, ‘secularized’ Western-style ‘intellectuals’ (one thinks of Jawaharlal Nehru, in the next century) might well turn out to be “vocal critics” of foreign imperialists and “agitators” against their rule while at the same time having no real connection with the vast majority of their countrymen (170-171). This turned out to be somewhat true in India, where the remarkable figure of Mohandas K. Gandhi understood the problem and deliberately managed to connect what he had learned in the English university system with the traditional life of villagers, and far more and sadly true in Africa. There, British indirect rule tolerated local government not by the many or even the few but by local strongmen, establishing a system of “decentralized despotism” inclined both to rebellion against their overlords and refusal of genuine self-government of, by, and for the people in their territories (176).

Mantena criticizes indirect rule because it provided an “alibi” for imperialism by “shift[ing] the burden of imperial legitimation onto native societies” (177). This tended to prolong imperial rule by limiting it to things it could really do, while denying full sovereignty to the colonized peoples. She nonetheless prefers it to direct rule founded upon liberal principles, which she describes as violent in practice if not in theory, precisely because they require forceful implementation against native customs and beliefs. This of course raises the complex question of whether societies animated by those customs and beliefs have benefited from Western modernity, corrosive but also constructive. To begin to answer that question, however, criteria of judgment would be needed, and the various historicisms typically do not do very well in providing such criteria.