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.

Kirk Emmert: Winston S. Churchill on Empire. Durham: Carolina Academic Press and the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1989.

 

Winston Churchill claimed, “There is no halfway house for Britain between greatness and ruin” (3). In fact there is; its current proprietor is Margaret Thatcher. Britain has lost and gained: markets replaced colonies; Englishness replaced ‘civilization’; corporations replaced viceroys. If household management or economics has not quite replaced politics, the mold that shaped Churchill has broken. There is no halfway house for a Churchill between greatness and ruin.

Americans think of Churchill as a wartime ally against rightist tyranny and a peacetime ally against leftist tyranny—as a courageous prophet of liberty honored, finally, in his native land. Churchill’s defense of the British Empire strikes Americans as contradictory to this spirit, something to be deplored or at best apologized for. Professor Emmert’s study has the merit of recognizing that Churchill’s “commitment to empire was central” to his political career (xi). Emmert shows that Churchill commitment arose not from mere traditionalism or even from ambition, simply, but from an “aristocratic or Aristotelian” understanding of the demands and responsibilities of political life (xvi).

“True” imperialism develops both “manhood” and commerce in the imperial nation (1)—two qualities not easy to combine. By renouncing its Continental ambitions and building the strongest navy in the world, Britain increased its own security and encouraged limited government in England while freeing the army for overseas conquests. Continental nations expended substantial public revenues on self-defense; the British navy defended the island nation inexpensively, leaving money available for private investment and international commerce. The navy protected British shipping and forcibly opened new markets. Military ‘necessity’ refocused, from national defense to imperial defense. Imperial defense requires expansion, as increased territory increases the scope of security needs. “[W]ar and change, not peace and permanence, are the constant companions of empire” (8). A moderate, civilized empire must “pursue a policy which is difficult to distinguish from that of an aggressive, intentionally expansive nation.” Even a civilized empire “must act in much the same manner as a tyrant” (9). Nor did Churchill try to hide under the cloak of ‘necessity’; he freely observed that the natural desire “to be predominant” fans imperialist ambitions. Civilization “restrains and rechannels these instincts into more pacific activities, but it cannot eliminate or fully control them” (10).

Churchill parted from Machiavelli in upholding an “eternal standard of right and wrong independent of and superior to climate, custom, and caprice” (11), a standard beckoning citizens to honor. Honor is a mean between “narrow self-interest and moralistic excess” (12). “Churchill proposed civilizing empire as the cure to the disease of tyrannizing empire” (13), of which he saw three kinds during his career: the “scientific barbarism” of the Kaiser’s Germany; the “animal form of barbarism” of Bolshevik Russia; and the racist barbarism of Nazi Germany (15). Barbarism begins with human life itself. A pre-political war of “all against all” reflects mankind’s “strong aboriginal propensity to kill” (16). Primitive peoples lack shame and moral indignation, engage in treachery and violence, and cannot reason. They emerge from the most primitive barbarism when, tiring of perpetual insecurity, they establish tyrannies In their credulity, primitive men also give way to “religious fanaticism grounded in a claim of prophetic revelation” (17); this religion impedes civilization’s development by encouraging “degraded sensualism” and by retarding the mental faculties (17). As civilization develops, however, intelligence usually outruns morality, leading once again to barbarism.

Churchill considers courage to be the foundation of civilized or fully human life. Courage is “the first of all human qualities” because it “guarantees all the others” (19). The courage of barbarians is reckless or “wild courage”—passionate, unruly, rash (20). Civilized courage is calm, a sign of self-mastery and endurance. “In the civilized man, Churchill suggests, reason rules the bodily desires and man’s spiritedness. Thus, under stress, the civilized man is persevering, serene, deliberate, self-controlled and proudly self-sufficient” (22). Habituation forms civilized courage; the force of discipline and of circumstances supplement habit. Habit should be reinforced by vanity, the desire to establish a good reputation, but this must not be overemphasized, as it will promote timidity in the face of public disapproval. The sentiment of nobility, whereby “vanity is transformed into justifiable pride” (25), best anchors habitual courage. The moral importance of habituation figures largely in Aristotle, as does the definition of virtue as the mean between two extremes, two vices; and of course the distinction between civilization and barbarism runs through ancient Greece generally.

Churchill recognized that the increasing egalitarianism of modern civilization threatened these Aristotelian virtues. He therefore “stressed increasingly in his speeches and more popular writings the kinship of civilization and freedom or self-government” (25). Attempting to preserve as much of the older moral order as possible, he traced British rights, liberties, and constitutional safeguards to “ancient Greece and Rome” (26); he represented the Roman Empire in Britain as “a golden age for Britain” (9), a time when the British themselves benefited morally and politically from rule by civilized imperialists. The virtues of justice, prudence, moderation or self-government, and goodwill or toleration, along with civilized courage, make individual and political freedom possible; most of these are classical virtues. Christianity too has its place, because “philosophy”—these are Churchill’s words—”cannot convince the bullet” (129, n. 81). Praying and belief in providence may not convince the bullet, either, but they serve as helps to steady the man facing the bullet. “Churchill understood that the morality that guided the [British] Empire and the rest of the civilized West had both classical and Christian roots” (29); although the statesman will conduct himself according to the classical standard of gentlemanly honor, he will also nourish Christianity as “the most politically salutary religion available to modern civilized statesmen” (30). Modern science also needs cultivation; even more it needs restraint. “The first civilization that has indissolvably married human excellence and physical power rather than leaving them to come together occasionally and by chance” (31) must take care that scientific or intellectual development does not overwhelm moral virtues, destroying the conditions of its own existence.”

Emmert discusses Churchill’s view of civilizing empire’s effect on rulers and the ruled. “[A]ll human  beings have an obligation to improve themselves which takes precedence over any rights they might claim to liberty or self-government” (33); primitive contentment is no more fully human than is primitive strife, and both prevent or retard the development of civilization. “The precariousness of [the] natural way to civilization, its long duration, and the likelihood it might miscarry led Churchill to reject it in principle as an alternative to imperial rule” (34). Empire as it were assists nature by “rapidly increasing capital wealth and by expanding human desires” (36), first by encouraging small entrepreneurs, then larger scale commercial projects. At the same time modern civilization’s technology goes beyond assistance to the subjugation of nature for use by man. Capital investment should be limited to avoid exploitation; Churchill preferred a limited state socialism, limited because an excessively powerful local government would overawe the native population and demand independence from the Empire—break the civilizational bonds that alone justify empire. Christian missionaries posed an especially difficult problem; Churchill applauded them only in such places as Uganda, where they cooperated fully with the imperial government.

Altruism and philanthropy should not move imperial rulers. Nor should selfishness. “At its best, empire is not a burden to be endured,” or a tyranny to be exploited, “but an opportunity for individual and national self-improvement” (53). Barbarians have no intrinsic rights; rather, civilized nations owe it to themselves to treat barbarians justly. In this, Churchill found himself opposed by the democrats and state socialists who gained power after the First World War. Democrats reduced politics to economics, “denied that man was a political animal” (55). Socialists sought to politicize the private. Churchill defined politics in two distinct, complementary ways: as a means of collective action to satisfy the individual’s need for security and well-being; as an effort to realize the distinctively human potential for reasoning and reasoned speech. Imperialism satisfied man’s political nature in both senses, immediately for the rulers and ruled with respect to ‘low’ politics, and immediately for rulers, eventually for the ruled with respect to ‘high’ politics. Empire “calls forth certain virtues, and ths a specific type of human being” (63). Its ordinary citizens strengthen their self-respect; its extraordinary citizens fulfill their magnanimity, their great-souledness in the Aristotelian sense. Empire counterbalanced the leveling effects of mass democracy. “[S]ince the maintenance [of Empire] necessitated a considerably greater degree of moral and political virtue from the nation’s foremost citizens, in looking up to these leaders the British citizenry was taught to admire the considerable virtue they embodied” (64). For the foremost citizens themselves, “ruling imperially” afforded the chance to achieve the fullest humanity by engaging in “the fully civilizing activity” (64).

“By the late 1920s, Churchill had concluded that the coming of mass democracy had transformed and degraded British politics” (70). Majoritarianism replaced deliberation and consent, and “the advent of political equality undermined [the] conventional acknowledgements of political authority which in the best cases were indications of natural preeminence and in most cases made mediocrity more serviceable” (71). As technology purveyed mass tastes, politics itself became more ‘technical’ or technocrat; middle and lower classes improved their standard of living but declined in the exercise of civic liberty, prudence, and initiative. In Churchill’s metaphor, the British political system liquefied. Institutions, hierarchy, structure weakened against the ebb and flow of public passions. Churchill attempted to use imperialism as a bulwark against this tide, but as the spirit of party triumphed over the spirit of Parliament, the Empire itself became a bone of political contention. A politics of individual rights and self-interest overcame the politics of honor and “noble self-regard” (81). “[I]t was not possible for long to rule according to ‘new principles’ at home but ‘old principles’ abroad” (85). Churchill gradually came to hope for a British Empire of self-governing dominions, a “voluntary association of like-minded nations” or “English-speaking peoples” (99)—less a political than a cultural empire modeled on Demosthenes’ pan-Hellenism.

The tension in Churchill’s thought between “his acceptance of human equality” and “his admiration for excellence and for the accomplishments of the unequal few” would have disappeared had he “fully embraced on principle or the other.” “This Churchill would not do, probably because he thought that neither in itself reflected the full truth about human nature” (107). The limitations of imperial rule reflect the contradictions of politics itself, limitations and contradiction of politics itself, limitations and contradictions suggesting that political life is not the human life, at least not simply or comprehensively. For Churchill this truth led to an appreciation of the powers of observation and memory called for by painting. Churchill also “noted a certain similarity between a philosopher and the uncivilized” man (37)—both of whom enjoy their leisure and want few things. He called the uncivilized man an “unconscious philosopher” (37). Philosophers might well be grateful to Churchill, and in their own way return his admiration. In opposing tyrannies masquerading as final knowledge about human things, Churchill protected philosophy from lapsing into a state of unconsciousness, that is to say barbarism, perhaps even from a death that would have killed the soul instead of liberating it from the body. And there may be more. Professor Harry V. Jaffa, who contributes an illuminating Foreword to this volume, has spoken of the way the example of Churchill’s statesmanship could inspirit a philosopher’s soul in dark times, leading the philosopher to reconsider the classical philosophers who distinguish political from philosophic life without segregating them. Professor Emmert’s thoughtful scholarship, so profoundly at odds with current academic passions and prejudices, brings Churchill’s example to view, not vividly and partially as his own writings did, but wholly or essentially, delivered from the partisan distortions of his time and ours.