Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000.

 

Tocqueville’s Democracy in America likely rates as the ‘canonical’ work of political philosophy most esteemed by professional political scientists today. One often encounters those who have never read Aristotle’s Politics or Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and Marx remains a much-controverted figure, but Tocqueville enjoys a privileged place.

He does have his critics, however. They tend to be captious. Following are the principal objections to his book, with replies.

1. Tocqueville doesn’t understand the American founding, which was intended to secure the unalienable, natural rights to equality—equality of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Tocqueville isn’t concerned with the American political founding as such, although he does devote substantial attention to the Constitution, offering what amounts to a good summary of The Federalist, a book seldom read in Europe, then or now. The ‘founding’ Tocqueville wants to understand is the founding of democracy in America—the establishment of a civil society in which there are no titled aristocrats, like himself, a society of civic equals—not equality of natural rights but “equality of conditions” (Introduction, p.3). Equality is the “primary fact,” “the generative fact” that influences American laws, the “maxims” of those who govern, and “the particular habits [of] the governed” (Introduction, p.3). The “social state” has “become democratic” (Introduction, p.9).

He wants to understand this because the aristocracies are in decline everywhere, but aristocrats continue to trouble European civic life. “A great democratic revolution is taking place among us,” among Europeans, and there are those “who hope to stop it” (Introduction, p.3, emphasis added). Europeans need to understand that “Equality can be established in civil society and not reign in the political world,” that political freedom can be lost under such conditions (II.ii.1). Political freedom is harder to maintain than civil-social equality. Without a strong aristocratic class located between central government and peoples, the regime choice now becomes that between “democratic freedom,” republicanism, and “the tyranny of the Ceasars,” “the unlimited power of one alone” (I.ii.9).  Tocqueville seeks to persuade his fellow aristocrats not to resist democracy but to guide it: “To instruct democracy, if possible to reanimate its beliefs, to purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true interests for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day” (Introduction, p.7). “The organization and establishment of democracies among Christians is the great political problem of our time” (I.ii.9). While Americans “furnish useful lessons in this,” Tocqueville’s adjuration has nothing to do with the American political founding, which Tocqueville admires; it is directed to Europeans, the French first of all.

This democratic or egalitarian civil society might support any number of regimes—rule of one, few or many, good or bad. The political history of France up to Tocqueville’s time, and of France and Europe for a century and a half, and of Europe again today, shows the urgency of his enterprise. “There is no question of reconstructing an aristocratic society, but of making freedom issue from the bosom of the democratic society in which god makes us live” (II.iv.7).

“I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there an image of democracy itself, of its penchants, its character, its prejudices, its passions. I wanted to become acquainted with it if only to know at least what we [Europeans] ought to hope or to fear from it, ” given the advance of democracy in Europe (Introduction, p.13). The failure to see that the democracy considered in Democracy in America is civil-social equality and neither a natural right nor a form of government is, one might say, the primary error, the generative error, that readily leads to a host of cognate errors. 

2. But the very feature you point to, Tocqueville’s emphasis on civil-social equality, denigrates the political, and especially denigrates the work of statesmen and of citizens generally because it focuses on the ‘given’ fact of the advance of that equality, downplaying the importance of the conscious, prudent choices made by political actors. That is, Tocqueville isn’t primarily a political scientist at all, despite his call for “a new political science for a world altogether new” (Introduction, 7). Unlike Publius in The Federalist, and despite his own extensive political career, he is really a mere sociologist, attempting to explain political life by attending to sub-political causes.

The fact that Tocqueville devotes one of his longest chapters to “The Federal Constitution of the United States” (I.i.8) should be sufficient to impress the contrary opinion upon even the dullest sensibilities. There, Tocqueville vigorously explicates and applauds the republican institutions designed by the Framers.

He also praises the jury system that long predated the founding. Juries are where the sovereign people meet law and “the idea of right,” here defined as “political virtue” or “duties toward society” which combat “individual selfishness” (I.ii.8). Juries put the people in contact with an “aristocracy” consonant with democracy: lawyers and judges, who teach them the nuances of law and how to apply the law.

But even earlier than that, one might notice his treatment of the importance of estate law. “I am astonished,” the exclaims, “that ancient and modern writers have not attributed to estate laws a greater influence on the course of human affairs. These laws belong, it is true, to the civil order; but they ought to be placed at the head of all political institutions, for they have an incredible influence on the social state of peoples, of which political laws are only the expression.” That is why “the legislator regulates the estates of citizen once and he rests for centuries; motion having been given to his work, he can withdraw his hand from it; the machine acts by its own force and is directed as if by itself toward a goal indicated in advance”—by the legislator. Estate law makes the difference between an aristocratic and a democratic civil society. (I.i.3). And, of course, it is to be noted that the Framers of the United States Constitution outlawed primogeniture, thereby preventing the kind of aristocracy then seen in Europe from arising in America. More generally, American legislators “oppose the idea of rights to sentiments of envy” (I.ii.9: “Would Laws on Mores Suffice to Maintain Democratic Institutions Elsewhere Than in America?”). 

The purpose of carefully describing and explaining democracy in civil society to Europeans is precisely to give them the basis for prudent and just legislation under modern conditions. Such democratic “penchants” as unpolitical “individualism” and statist centralization—the latter especially dangerous if animated by “the science of despotism,” which consists in satisfying the material desires of the people (II.iv.4)—are “not invincible”; “my principal goal in writing this book has been to combat them” (II.iv.3). “The whole art of the legislator consists in discerning well and in advance these natural inclinations of human societies in order to know when one must aid the efforts of citizens and when it would rather be necessary to slow them down. For these obligations differ according to the times. Only the goal toward which the human race should always tend is unmoving; the means of getting it there vary constantly.” (II.ii.15). 

3. But what exactly is that “goal”? Here, Tocqueville fails to acknowledge the importance of unalienable natural rights, fails even to mention the Declaration of Independence in this very long book, fails to understand the Founders’ moral conception of the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as rational. By failing to mention the Declaration of Independence, he takes no cognizance of the rightful goal of government, which is to secure unalienable natural rights for the citizens within a civil society.

It is true that Tocqueville never mentions the Declaration; he has no reason or need to do so, and some reason not to. The aristocratic statesmen of Europe in his day had seen enough of such declarations, particularly the French declaration of “The Rights of Man and the Citizen,” which had instigated a fair amount of violence against, well, aristocrats only a few decades earlier. 

But that is hardly to say that Tocqueville denies the existence of unalienable natural rights or provides no sense of what the “goal,” the purpose, the telos of the human race should “tend.” “I conceive a society…in which all, regarding the law as their work, would love and submit to it without trouble”—in the Declaration’s language, government by the consent of the governed; a society “in which the authority of government is respected as necessary, not divine, and love one would bear for a head of state would not be a passion, but a reasoned and tranquil sentiment. Each having rights and being assured of preserving his rights, a manly confidence and a sort of reciprocal condescension between the classes would be established, as far from haughtiness as from baseness. The people, instructed in their true interests, would understand that to profit from society’s benefits, one must submit to its burdens. The free association of citizens could then replace the individual power of nobles, and the state would be sheltered from both tyranny and license.” (Introduction, 8-9). 

That is, Tocqueville shares with Aristotle an understanding of the indispensable effect political life, ruling and being ruled in turn, produces in the cultivation of human nature. In political activity, “sentiments and ideas renew themselves, the heart is enlarged, and the human mind is developed only by the reciprocal action of men upon one another” (II.ii.5). At the same time, political right, the freedom to form political associations, is not the same as natural right; natural right begins with the recognition that men and women everywhere are of the same species (II.iii.1). Accordingly, “What one calls a republic in the United States is the tranquil reign of the majority…. But the majority itself is not all-powerful. Above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason; in the political world, acquired rights”—both of these “barriers” to tyranny recognized by the majority (I.ii.10: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). The exception to this is slavery, an instance of “the order of nature reversed” that was begun by Christians in the 16th century and imported to America in the 17th century (I.ii.10: “Position that the Black Race Occupies in the United States”). And even in “the America of the South, nature, sometimes recovering its rights, comes to establish equality between whites and blacks” (ibid.). Overall, however, Americans “believe that at birth each has received the ability to govern himself”; this ability owes its “moral authority” to “universal reason” among human beings by nature and its political power to “the universality of citizens” as distinguished from subjects (I.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”).

4. Tocqueville fails to recognize the Founders’ conception of morality, (e.g., the natural right to liberty) as rational, instead attributing morality to religion and liberty to the realm of political contestation. 

This again confuses the social manifestations of morality and liberty with their substantive content. In America, everything is not permitted “in the interest of society” (I.ii.9: “Indirect Influence the Religious Beliefs exert on Political Society in the United States”). Tocqueville finds religion to be the social guarantor and social source of morality and of rights, especially in democratic conditions. And it is necessary for political freedom. “How could society fail to perish if, while the political bond is relaxed, the moral bond is not tightened? And what makes a people master of itself if has not submitted to God?” (ibid.). He does not claim that morality and rights have no content beyond moeurs, only that moeurs embody morality and rights. As to rationality, Tocqueville maintains that “There are no great men without virtue; without respect for rights, there is no great people: one can almost say that there is no society; for, what is a union of rational and intelligent beings among whom force is the sole bond?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in America.” Emphasis added.). Further, “the means of inculcating in men the idea of rights and of making it, so to speak, fall upon their senses” is “to give the peaceful exercise of certain rights to all of them” (ibid.). That is, first, the idea of rights is distinct from making that idea ‘sensible’ to them; there is no reason to assume that the idea itself is irrational; second, religion is not the sole source of making rights felt and respected. Political life as Aristotle defined it, ruling and being ruled, also does that. While some of the harsh religious laws enacted by the Puritans “bring shame to the human mind,” more generally in America, the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom “advance in accord and seem to lend each other a mutual support,” whereby “religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man” and freedom “considers religion as the safeguard of moeurs; and moeurs as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration” (I.i.2). And this is quite natural: “Religion is…only a particular form of hope, and it is as natural to the human heart as hope itself,” “one of the constituent principles of human nature” (I.ii.9: “On the Principal Causes That Make Religion Powerful in America”). The “taste for the infinite and the love of what is immortal” form part of human nature itself (II.ii.12). Further, religion rightly understood has rational content. “It submits the truths of the other world to individual reason” (I.ii.9: “On Republican Institutions in the United States”). Consequently, “one ordinarily sees even in the midst of [Americans’] zeal something so tranquil, so methodical, so calculated, that it seems to be reason much more than heart that leads them to the altar”—a Pascalian wager essayed by persons who for the most part have never read Pascal (ibid.). 

The tensions among equality and “human freedom” and religion exists not in America but in Europe. “Christianity, which has rendered all men equal before God, will not be loath to see all citizens equal before the law. But by a strange concurrence of events, religion finds itself enlisted for the moment among the powers democracy is overturning” because in France the republican revolutionaries were animated by Enlightenment rationalism, their monarchist and aristocratic enemies by traditional Catholic piety. Tocqueville would correct both sides. The non-religious and often irreligious “partisans of freedom” understand freedom as “the origin of the noblest virtues” and “the source of the greatest goods,” but they need to “call religion to their aid” for two reasons: “the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of moeurs“; and moeurs cannot be “founded without [religious] beliefs.” Tocqueville aims at an alliance between ‘secularists’ and the pious for freedom—reversing the coalitions seen in the French Revolution. (Introduction, 10-12). Against the materialism of the Enlightenment philosophes who inspired the French revolutionaries, Tocqueville insists that “the soul must remain great and strong, if only to be able from time to time to put its force and its greatness in the service of the body” (II.ii.16); paradoxically, if you want the benefits materialists promise, you had better not become a materialist yourself. Along with political freedom, religion “is the most precious bequest of aristocratic ages,” directing the egalitarian souls ‘upward’ under conditions that pull them ‘sideward’ and ‘downward.’

5. Because he fails to recognize equal natural rights, he only envisions a possible civil war between the white and black races in America, not between non-slaveholding and slaveholding whites.

This ignores the fact that the American Civil War did in fact mobilize black troops against the whites of the Confederacy. It also ignores the fact that Tocqueville does not consider wars within confederal democracies such as the United States to be civil wars but “only disguised foreign wars,” given the power of the state governments in confederacies (II.iii.26). Accordingly, “the only case in which a civil war could arise” in America “is one in which the army, being divided, one part would raise the standard of revolt and the other would remain faithful” (ibid.). And of course this is exactly what happened, as seen in the tragic case of General Robert E. Lee, among others. But more tellingly still, although Tocqueville doesn’t predict the American Civil War, he does predict disunion, due to the difference of moeurs between North and South—a difference he attributes to the effect of the presence of large numbers of slaves in the South on Southern slaveholders, whom he regards as examples of aristocracy within democracy (II.ii.10: “What Are the Chances That the American Union Will Last?”). And disunion did happen, if not de jure (as Lincoln insisted) then de facto, for four years.

6. Since Americans’ “destiny” is “singular” in that “they have taken from the English aristocracy the idea of individual rights and the taste for local freedoms” (II.iv.4), this means that he supposes that they derive the substance of those rights from a civil-social class.

This is an illogical inference. If, to oversimplify, one were to say that the American Founders took their ideas of rights from Hobbes and (even more) from Locke, would that not then mean that they took them from philosophers who lived in an aristocratic society, albeit one that was increasingly ’embourgeoised’? Yet, that has nothing to do with whether or not this conception of rights is right. Nor does Tocqueville suggest any such thing.

On the contrary. Tocqueville does indeed devote a section to “the idea of rights in the United States.” In it, he writes, “The idea of right is nothing other than the idea of virtue introduced into the political world. It is with the idea of rights that men have defined what license and tyranny are,” and idea by which men are “enlightened.” The right to property, for example, comes to be felt when the child who takes from others learns that others can take from him; politically, in America each individual owns property, and so does not advocate the expropriation of wealth from those who own more property than he. That is, rights are rational ideas, ideas of enlightened men, but that doesn’t mean that they will be respected simply because they are rational. (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”).

In modern, ‘democratic’ times, religion and morality will not serve as adequate sources of the respect for rights. “Do you not see that religions are weakening and that the divine notion of rights is disappearing? Do you not find that moeurs are being altered, and that with them the moral notion of rights is being effaced?” This is happening because religious “beliefs” now “give way to reasoning,” moral sentiments to “calculation.” “If in the midst of that universal disturbance you do not come to bind the idea of rights to the personal interest that offers itself as the only immobile point in the human heart, what will then remain to you go govern the world, except fear?” (I.ii.6: “On the Idea of Rights in the United States”). This is exactly what Publius inclines to say. That is, the ‘rational choice calculations‘ of individuals living in democratized and increasingly ‘secularized’ societies must be directed by prudent legislation aimed at securing rights. Neither Publius nor Tocqueville does it implies that rights are products of self-interest, any more than they are the products of religious beliefs or of moral sentiments.

Finally, while the Americans “took” the idea of individual rights—i.e., civil and political rights—and the taste for local freedoms from the aristocrats, they have transformed them into “that bourgeois and democratic freedom of which the history of the world had still not offered a complete picture” (I.i.2). The settlers were smallholders, not grandees. As to natural rights, Tocqueville quotes John Winthrop,” himself paraphrasing Aristotle, who wrote that “Liberty is not to do what you want: it must be good and just”—not only “civil” but “moral” (ibid.). From this has arisen (now glancing at one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters) a “natural aristocracy that flows from enlightenment and virtue” (ibid.). 

7. Tocqueville speaks of rights as if they were given by human beings to one another, not by the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And so, he writes, “I know only two manners of making equality reign in the political world: rights must be given to each citizen or to no one” (I.i.3).

Here, Tocqueville explicitly refers to the right to equality in politics, which he does not regard as divinely ordained, as he does not believe in ‘divine right’ of kings or of anyone else. He addresses a problem endemic to politics as conducted in democratic/egalitarian civil societies. In them, the passion for equality is stronger than the passion for liberty. The passion for liberty can be either “manly and legitimate” or “depraved,” dragging everyone down to the proverbial lowest common denominator. Political “absolutism”—in France, during the later decades of Old-Regime monarchism and more recently under the rule of Napoleon I—brought the people to “equality in servitude.” Even “inequality in freedom,” seen in feudalism, is preferable to that. Equality in freedom is better than both, but “when citizens are all nearly equal, it becomes difficult for them to defend their independence against the aggressions of power,” since they are no longer shielded from the centralized modern state by the aristocrats. (I.i.3). [1] To avoid this danger, Tocqueville famously proposes the substitution of civic associations for the now-vanished feudal estates.

8. Tocqueville followed Rousseau in rejecting natural law, regarding all general ideas as false and attributing the equality principle not to nature but to Christianity, as when he writes that “it was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal” (II.i.3). Insofar as he admits ‘generality’ into his argument, he endorses Rousseau’s General Will, not natural right or natural law.

The quotation itself suffices to show that Tocqueville regards Christianity as having made the equality principle understood, not that Christianity somehow invented it. He mentions this in reference to the doctrine of natural slavery, best known from a passage in Aristotle’s Politics. “The most profound and vast geniuses of Rome and Greece were never able to arrive at the idea, so general but at the same time so simple, of the similarity of men and of the equal right to freedom that each bears from birth” (II.i.3). But if human beings as a species bear an equal right to freedom from birth, then that can be nothing other than a natural right. Christianity impressed this truth upon Europeans when Europe was aristocratic and therefore disinclined to perceive it; it was the entering wedge of the principle of equality, leading over the centuries to the social condition of equality, as seen in Tocqueville’s history of France (Introduction, 3-6).

The claim that Tocqueville adheres to Rousseau’s doctrine of the General Will is based on an out-of-context misreading. The reference to “the sovereignty of the human race” comes in his discussion of majority tyranny. “I regard as impious and detestable the maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything”—the maxim soon to be advanced in America by Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. “Nonetheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of the majority. Am I contradicting myself?” Obviously not, since might, “power,” is not right, but Tocqueville puts it differently: “A general law exists that has been made or at least adopted not only by the majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. This law is justice,” which “forms the boundary of each people’s right.” “Therefore, when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I do not deny to the majority the right to command; I only appeal from the majority of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.” (I.ii.7). No competent student of political philosophy can fail to see that Tocqueville here refers to the law of nations. The law of nations is not the same as the law of nature but it in no way contradicts that law; in fact, it can and did incorporate it, as seen in what was then the most important recent treatise on the subject, Emer de Vattel’s The Law of Nations, subtitled Or, Principles of the Law of Nature, Applied to the Conduct and Affairs by Nations and Sovereigns, with Three Early Essays on the Origin and Nature of Natural Law and on Luxury, originally published in 1776. As Tocqueville observes, “only God can be omnipotent without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power” (I.ii.7).

Tocqueville makes this even more explicit in his chapter “On Honor in the United States and in Democratic Societies.” “The human race,” he writes, “feels permanent and general needs that have given birth to moral laws; all men have naturally attached in all places and all times the idea of blame and of shame to the nonobservance of them. Evading them they have called to do evil, submitting to them, to do good.” Evil “penchants” are “condemnable in the eyes of the general reason and the universal conscience of the human race,” although some of these might be condemned “only feebly” in a given civil society under certain circumstances; in the United States, “the love of wealth” is necessary in order “to transform the vast uninhabited continent” that Americans have come to possess (II.iii.18). This is only to recognize the adjustment of naturally derived moral laws to the variety of human conditions, as Aristotle commends in the Nicomachean Ethics.

9. Worse, Tocqueville doubts the truth of natural equality because he is a nominalist who rejects such a “general idea.” “God does not ponder the human race in general”; being omniscient, He “has no need of general ideas,” unlike mere humans. In reality, Tocqueville continues, “there are no beings in nature exactly alike”; ergo, there are no “identical facts” and “no rules generally applicable to several objects at once.” We humans are left with our “incomplete notions.” (II.i.3).

As Tocqueville good-humoredly acknowledges, his very “use of the word equality in an absolute sense” exemplifies this necessary human intellectual practice (II.i.16). The habit is especially strong among those who live in democratic conditions, partly because there really are more similarities among individuals in such societies. But this does not commit him to nominalism; it simply cautions his readers to pay attention to details, not to lose sight of individuals. There is a crucial political as well as a philosophic reason to do so: sweeping generalizations in political life can lead to tyranny. “To force all men to march in the same march, toward the same object—that is a human idea. To introduce an infinite variety into actions, but to combine them in a manner so that all these actions lead us by a thousand diverse ways toward the accomplishment of one great design—that is a divine idea” (Appendix XXIV, p.703).

10. If not a nominalist, then Tocqueville is a historicist, a sort of democratized Hegelian, propounding a claim that social equality is part of an inevitable ‘march of history.’ 

In his correspondence, Tocqueville mentioned Hegelians he had met in Germany, remarking shortly, “I detested the Hegelians.” [2] Hegelianism is a form of pantheism, and in the Democracy Tocqueville decries that doctrine. “Among the different systems with whose aid philosophy seeks to explain the universe, pantheism appears to me one of the most appropriate to seduce the human mind in democratic centuries; all who remain enamored of the genuine greatness of man should unite in combat against it” (II.i.8). In the same chapter, Tocqueville criticizes the immoderate perfectionism that democratic souls to which human souls in democracy so often succumb. Pantheism plus perfectionism equal historicism incline the soul of man under democracy to such historicist doctrines as ‘Progressivism,’ which Tocqueville’s discussion anticipates. Tocqueville also rejects the materialist historicism of Artur de Gobineau, with whom he engaged in extensive correspondence. [3]

Far from being a historicist, Tocqueville regards historicism as a danger endemic to democratic conditions, as seen in his critique of “historians who live in democratic times,” who “take away from peoples themselves the ability to modify their own fate…subject[ing] them either to an inflexible providence or to a sort of blind fatality” (II.i.20). “It is not enough for them to show how the facts have come about; they also take pleasure in making one see that it could not have happened otherwise” (ibid.). Aristocratic historians, by contrast, “particularly those of antiquity,” make it seem “that to become master of his fate and to govern those like him, a man has only to know how to subdue himself,” to subject his passions to his reason (ibid.). But while “historians of antiquity instruct on how to command, those of our day teach hardly anything than how to obey”; “if this doctrine of fatality, which has so many attractions for those who write history in democratic times, passed from writers to their readers, thus penetrating the entire mass of citizens and taking hold of the public mind, one can foresee that it would so paralyze the movement of the new societies and reduce Christians to Turks” (ibid.). Already incline to materialism, democrats “are only too inclined to doubt free will because each of them feels himself limited on all sides by his weakness,” pressured by a ‘mass’ society of equals, no longer the ‘vertical’ pressure from aristocrats above them but the ‘horizontal’ pressure of fellow democrats around them. Against this, one must “willingly grant force and independence to men united in a social body,” in civil and political associations, as “it is a question of elevating souls and not completing their prostration” (ibid.). 

The charge of historicism leveled against Tocqueville usually arises in response to his passages in the Introduction, emphasizing the “providential” advance of democracy since Jesus of Nazareth laid down the principle of the equality of men under God. By Providence, Tocqueville means “a thousand circumstances independent of the will of man” (I.ii.9: “On the Accidental or Providential Causes Contributing to the Maintenance of a Democratic Republic in the United States”). In America, such circumstances include the absence of formidable neighbors, the absence of a large capital city, ancestors who imported the “love of equality and freedom” to these shores, and the sheer size of the continent, which makes “nature itself” work “for the people” by giving them places from which to escape from the rule of any aristocratic class that might form ‘back East’ (ibid.). But he immediately observes that these “providential” causes are not politically decisive; French Canada, also an egalitarian civil society, rests under monarchy. 

Democracy has replaced aristocracy not because ‘History’ so dictates but because it is more natural. “One can change human institutions, but not men” (II.iii.13)—an observation that contradicts the Rousseauian doctrine of the malleability of human nature taken up soon thereafter by historicists. “The manners of aristocracy placed beautiful illusions over human nature,” illusions that could not withstand the slow workings of reality (II.iii.14), but “the constitution of man” is “everywhere the same” (II.iii.17). This goes right down to the most fundamental distinction among humans, the distinction between male and female: “The reason of one is as sure as the other, and her intelligence as clear” as his (II.ii.12).

 

In sum, to understand the American founding, the founding of a republic on a democratic civil-social base, one must go to the writings of the statesmen who effected it. They explained themselves, thoroughly and often eloquently. To understand democracy as a civil-social condition, its causes and effects, its advantages and its dangers, one must consult Tocqueville.

 

 

 

Notes

1. See also II.ii.1: “Why Democratic Peoples Show a More Ardent and More Lasting Love for Equality Than for Freedom.”
2. In a letter to Francisque de Corcelle from Bonn dated July 22, 1854, Tocqueville elaborates: “You are, of course, aware of the part played by philosophy during the past fifty years in Germany, and especially by the school of Hegel. He was protected, as, no doubt, you know, by the ruling powers, because his doctrines asserted that, in a political sense, all established facts ought to be submitted to as legitimate; and that the very circumstance of their existence was sufficient to make obedience to them a duty. This doctrine gave rise at length to the anti-Christian and anti-spiritual schools, which have been endeavoring to pervert Germany for the last twenty years, especially for the last ten; and finally to the socialist philosophy, which had so great a share in producing the confusion of 1848. Hegel exacted submission to the ancient established powers of his own time; which he held to be legitimate, not only from existence, but from their origin. His scholars wished to establish powers of another kind, which became, according to their views, equally legitimate and binding. This did not suit the official protectors of Hegel. Yet from this Pandora’s box [i.e., “this sensual and socialist philosophy’] have escaped all sorts of moral diseases from which the [German] people is still suffering.” That is, not only does Tocqueville detest Hegelianism, he also clearly sees that materialist historicism that derives from it (Marx being the preeminent example), as well as the denial of political liberty regimes established on the principles of historicism attempt to legitimate.
3. Alexis de Tocqueville: Correspondence with Gobineau. John Lukacs, editor and translator: The European Revolution and Correspondence with Gobineau. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959.

 

John W. Danford: Wittgenstein and Political Philosophy: A Reexamination of the Foundations of Social Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

 

For more than a century, doubts have arisen about modern science, despite its extraordinary achievements of discovery and invention. The conquest of nature has not uniformly relieved man’s estate, as Francis Bacon promised. Empowering man, it has not emended man himself, that mixed bag of a creature. And even if undertaken with good intentions, any such emendation might worsen him. Somehow, modern science is ‘missing something.’ And it isn’t simply a matter of the results of the enterprise. Its philosophic foundations give some philosophers pause, as seen in Edmond Husserl’s starkly titled The Crisis of the European Sciences. While, as Danford writes, “the reality which science presents is said to be the only reality,” is it? Social science in particular is open to question. Eschewing ‘value judgments,’ it “loses its connection with the prescientific world,” and to lose that connection “is precisely to lose its meaning for us.” Husserl remarks that modern science’s empiricism leads not to truth—now deemed a ‘metaphysical prejudice’—but to approximation or even mere acceptability. Such a culture-bound science stands “but a short step from…radical nihilism,” the claim that scientific theories “are actually creations of the human will.” Husserl wants to give an account of the whole, of that which transcends the empeiria. Danford rejects transcendental phenomenology as “a mysterious project,” seeking instead to look at the philosophic origins of modern science, especially modern political science, to see if they withstand scrutiny. 

“The monopolistic attitude toward knowledge which characterizes modern scientific method…emerged in the great intellectual revolution of the 17th century,” when Thomas Hobbes “proclaimed himself the founder of political science qua science.” Hobbes claims that “what is required to make knowledge scientific is nothing more than attention to method.” Previous political philosophers had emphasized the centrality of practical wisdom, prudence, to political life. The best elaboration of ‘ancient’ political science may be found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics. Hobbes, Bacon’s most brilliant disciple, argued that analysis followed by systematic construction held much more real promise than unmethodical deliberation, however intelligent and upright its practitioners might be (but seldom were). Here is where Wittgenstein comes in. “Hobbes’s rejection of Aristotle is the very portion of Hobbes’s thought about which Wittgenstein’s philosophy raises questions,” specifically on the topic of language, which Hobbes and his own disciple, John Locke, address extensively. “According to Wittgenstein’s account, we must conclude that Hobbes and Locke were mistaken in their understanding of language,” and if so, they were also mistaken about “the proper method for political science.”

What, then “distinguishes modern science from early rationalism,” the rationalism of philosophers prior to Hobbes and his mentor, Francis Bacon? Hobbes writes that previous philosophers had “strangled” science “with snares of words.” Such philosophers as Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas came only to uncertain conclusions; because uncertain, their philosophic doctrines led to subversive, disputatious, uncivil discourse, theoretically and practically unsatisfactory. Despite their vaunted reasonableness, philosophers have divided into factions, never achieving the wisdom they claim to love and seek, what Hobbes calls “the perfect knowledge of the truth in all matters whatsoever.” In this quest, geometers have done much better, having produced indisputable knowledge. Geometric knowledge is anything but high-flown, metaphysical, its theorems being based on ‘low’ or self-evident axioms that no one can disagree with, and its aim being not some beauteous vision but utility—the construction of buildings, roads, dams. Hobbes would make political science similarly low, self-evident, useful, based on sense perception and memory, by which means they can discover facts. The “experience of fact” is low but solid, indeed; we share it with the “brutes.” 

By contrast, prudence is merely “conjecture from experience,” uncertain. There are two kinds of knowledge: “knowledge original” or sense-knowledge and “knowledge of the truth of propositions,” which is science proper. Both are experiential, but science consists of “the experience men have of the proper use of names.” Truth is a true proposition, the human way of knowing. The truth of propositions, propositions rightly conceived in the brain of the proposer, distinguishes human knowledge from brutish knowledge. Science requires language; it is more than the purely phenomenal knowledge of brutes. Humanly understood evidence “always involves language.” A parrot speaks but forms no conception of what it is speaking; it might repeat a proposition, but it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. When it does know, it expresses itself not in language but in shrieks.

But if words are “arbitrary marks or signs, which ‘stand for’ our thoughts,” then one could use the wrong word to express a thought. Further, how can we know if “the thought which we use a word to signify is the same as someone else’s”? Truth cannot be “merely private or subjective” if science is to be a real thing, but how “to guarantee that words have meanings which are objective”? “Hobbes never, to our knowledge, satisfactorily resolves this problem.” Locke and Wittgenstein number among those who make the attempt.

Having reached this aporia, Danford turns to Hobbes’s critique of classical political philosophy. As noted, the “ancients'” offer only prudential knowledge, which in modern scientific terms isn’t really knowledge at all, being grounded on opinions, which are always dubious. Hobbes wants political truths based on a priori, necessary premisses, analogous to his social contract, the foundation upon which his political architecture rests. Philosophers thus need to agree upon these foundational definitions before they build their ‘republics’ or regimes. Philosophy aims at knowledge of causes. Modern scientific knowledge requires analysis, breaking down the thing you are examining into its “elements” (a term borrowed from Euclid). Elements consist not only of physical parts, right down to atoms, but such features as shape, motion, and visibility. That is, real science is founded upon an analogy to the only sure science hitherto conceived, geometry. We “understand the ‘wholes’ of geometry (squares, triangles, pentagons), because we see how they are constructed from, or can be reduced to, simple ‘parts.'” Admittedly, all science, including geometry, “rests on a foundation which is assumed or unprovable.” In Euclid, these are definitions, postulates, and axioms. Definitions, for example, “are not proven: what we mean by ‘square’ is explained by a definition, but that squares exist and what the properties of squares are, are what geometry demonstrates”; “the definitions require only to be understood,” whereas “the propositions must be demonstrated or proven.” Similarly, the postulates are “the assumptions necessary to the practice of geometry but in themselves unprovable” (e.g., all right angles are equal) and axioms or “the rules of logic.” “Within its own subject matter, geometry is absolutely certain because we construct, in full view and from principles accepted by all (who practice geometry), the propositions concerning the nature of triangles, circles, rectangles, and so on,” principles not arbitrary but based on empirical observation from which the propositions are ‘abstracted.’ Abstraction means to get the universal and necessary “out of the particular and unnecessary” or “accidental.” 

That works when we ‘do geometry.’ But can politics be treated that way—analyzed, broken down into simple elements? Hobbes answers with a characteristically resounding ‘yes’: individuals are the elements of political life, and they are composed of two basic impulses: appetite and aversion, motion toward and motion away. Political science rests on these elements, and definitions of them are the “first principles” of demonstration in political science, “the keystone of Hobbes’s epistemological archway.” That is, definition comes between analysis or “resolution” and constructive deduction, synthesis or “composition.” “The resolutive-compositive method itself is closely connected with an understanding of language according to which unambiguous definitions are in principle possible and which permit us to give a clear account of the nature of anything.” Under this method, words ‘stand for’ unambiguous concepts. Geometry issues in physics, physics in psychology, psychology in political science. [1] “Forthright and unidealistic observation of the political world, according to Hobbes, quickly teaches one that the central fact of politics is competition and the struggle of each individual to further his own interests.” Hobbes claims no originality in making that claim but he goes further, analyzing bodies politic into “individual, atomic men, each motivated by his own passions”; political motives are reducible “to a few simple passions.”  Viewed scientifically, without passion, these impassioned individuals may be sorted into the law-abiding and the law-breaking; law itself is only the “command of him or them that have coercive power.” The purpose of the political body is peaceful enjoyment of desired objects, avoidance of feared objects; desired objects are acquired by one means, power,” but in order to acquire desired objects and enjoy them, one needs to set self-preservation as the first goal of all individuals and bodies politic. Otherwise, bodies politics will dissolve into the “terrible state of nature,” that war of all against all, in which no law prevents the violent collision of the atomic men. A well-ordered body politic will channel the “permanent struggle for power” into “the peaceful struggle for power in the form of wealth,” which assuages man’s primal aversion, his fear of violent death.

Hobbes does not intend his account of the state of nature and the social contract that (precariously) puts an end to it as a ‘history lesson.’ “He is attempting to ‘reform’ language by showing what political terms can legitimately mean, what they necessarily mean”—showing that the word ‘justice’ rightly, necessarily means law-abidingness, not some grand ‘republic’ of the soul or of the polis. Not only previous philosophy but especially religion “prevented the rational development of language,” which Hobbes now undertakes to free from such “phantasms of the mind.” Hobbes’s quest for certitude may respond as much to Paul the Apostle’s derision of philosophers as “always seeking, never finding.” He more than implies that Christians, like the ancient philosophers, are at most certain about mere mental phantasms.

But if the geometrical/analytic method sets down definitions that are impossible to prove, definitions nonetheless necessary “in order, quite simply, to do science, how are we to understand the relation of science to the world?” The reason that Socrates’ regime (for example) is unlikely, perhaps impossible, to be realized in practice is that it ‘abstracts from’ concrete reality, even as the philosopher claims that his regime in speech is, in some sense, more true than concrete reality. Hobbes counters: the theoretical political science he practices against the political science of ‘the ancients’ “can be practical only because it orders, simplifies, abstracts, and so makes the world manageable.” In this, it resembles “the new natural science, which was based on a new understanding of that relationship between theoretical purity and practical utility.” Indeed, political philosophy actually can be more scientific than natural science because political institutions are constructed in accordance with the blueprint of the social contract. Bacon understands scientific experiments to torture nature in order to force her to reveal her secrets, but torture doesn’t always yield true confession; “we know only what we construct,” and in politics we construct things out of language: laws, states, monarchs—all of them man-made phenomena. Language itself is an invention. “It is the invention of language which permits man access to knowledge properly speaking,” to the framing of propositions. “By carefully observing human nature and history, and reducing it to the essential elements which must always have been present, we can reconstruct the situation in which the first terms of political discourse were needed and thus invented.” On that solid foundation, we can then erect a body politic (an “artificial man,” as Hobbes calls it) which really does secure our desire for self-preservation and the peaceful enjoyment of our desires that sustained self-preservation and the lawful competition for wealth make possible. 

Another problem then appears. If “the meanings of the political terms are the result of human construction,” if the world consists of many peoples with different languages, are such political terms as ‘justice’ not “merely conventional, with different meanings at different times” and places? And if that is so, Hobbesian political science itself “may be of only limited validity,” “historical” not natural. “Hobbes rejects the historicist conclusion, because he believes that meanings necessarily emerge in the same way everywhere because of man’s permanent nature.” Eventually, Rousseau would challenge that belief, and the apparently stable bedrock of modern natural right would erode. What, then, can modern natural rights philosophers say about language that will defend their foundational definitions, their use of language?

“Hobbes’s understanding of the possibility of a political science, including the resolutive-compositive method and the understanding of propositions, is connected with a particular attitude toward common speech. Behind that, in turn, lies a certain understanding of the nature of language,” to which Danford now turns. Hobbes claims to be “the first to see clearly the relation between language or words on the one hand and knowledge or science on the other.” Language, he asserts (in his characteristically anti-Biblical fashion) is a human invention, a too, a code invented to send messages. Words are first of all marks for remembrance, invented by an individual; they then become signs, signifying the same thing to more than one person, signs of human conceptions of things, not directly of the things themselves, arbitrary on both their individual and social manifestations. The conceptual character of language, the deployment of such universal terms as ‘Man,’ makes it likely that words may be equivocal. Hobbes isn’t clear on where we get our conceptions, but he does want to understand them, to clarify them, to make our agreements as to their meaning (crucially, when making an indispensable social contract) certain, reliable, understood by everyone. He never quite gets there.

Enter John Locke, with his conception of “simple ideas” or sense-impressions, which precede language in human understanding. The simple ideas are “the bedrock of our mental processes.” What makes them reliable is that the human mind is “entirely passive” in receiving them; they are the unanalyzable elements of experience, which consists of them and our reflections upon them. How can we communicate our experiences to others in order to frame a civil society? Words abstract from, represent, experience; “language is impossible without abstraction,” but since “the general ideas are the same for everyone,” communicating them from one person to another is possible. (One remarks, in passing, the homology between words that represent things and persons who ‘represent’ others in the body politic.) This abstraction distinguishes man from brutes, “permit[ting] men to think and speak.” “Only the fact that the mind is passive in receiving simple ideas guarantees that men share the same ideas simply.” Such complex ideas as “social” and “contract” are composed of simple ideas. Complex ideas can occur naturally in the mind, from outside the mind, via observation of things in the world—Locke calls these “substances”—or from within the mind itself, which can put simple ideas together “by its own power”—Locke calls these “mixed modes.” Against Aristotle, then, framing a definition, making someone else understand by a word what the word stands for, is analytic, an act of breaking down complex ideas into their simple elements, using simple language for simple ideas. 

Consequently, “our knowledge of the physical or natural world will necessarily be less perfect than our knowledge of the human world simply because the real essence of that natural world is inaccessible to us,” our knowledge of it approximate. Nature is best understood in terms of simple ideas, not in terms of arbitrary “mixed modes,” which admit of the combination of simple ideas of different kinds, human conventions. Human conventions, being self-generated, are quite understandable but less necessarily true to our own nature, arbitrary. Locke includes such ideas as incest, parricide, and justice as examples of such ideas, a classification which calls into question Biblical certainties, it must be remarked. “How is it, then, that Locke is also the most famous and influential theorist of natural law?”

Lockean natural law as it pertains to human beings consists of moral certainties. Because moral terms are entirely human (not divine, given from outside the human mind) and therefore understandable, we are “capable of a true moral science, of complete and perfect knowledge of moral matters and moral principles,” a systematic demonstrative science of morality and politics “more certain than natural philosophy.” But which of these laws, these mixed-mode complex ideas, can be shown to be free of arbitrariness? “It is reasonable to suspect that Locke could not have failed to grasp the relativist implications of this view of language. Nevertheless he, like Hobbes, rejected them,” going ahead with deriving “principles of natural right from the facts of the state of nature.” He would “discover in human nature a standard which tells us what the minimum content of moral and political terms should be,” joining Hobbes “in the claim that the starting point for this enterprise cannot be what men say in common speech.” Rather, the philosopher must “look directly at the nature of human beings uncomplicated by their beliefs and opinions about why they do what they do,” before they construct their mixed-mode complex ideas for their convenience. Convenience, utility, not the conventional words, is the window that permits him to look at human nature, unimpeded because “what is useful is connected with what one needs.” Find out what men really need by analyzing their words and you can construct a sound morality for them based upon “an empirical study of human psychology.” Obviously, “although Locke departs from Hobbes in the content of his political philosophy, his method—the approach of imagining the construction of society from the elements themselves, and ignoring what men say—is identical with Hobbes’s resolutive-compositive method” and “deriv[ing] all moral and political principles from one primary natural law,” a law discovered by the use of that method.

As does Hobbes, Locke attributes the failure of previous philosophers to find this method and to achieve these results not to ‘original sin’ but to an original misconception. “Men did not understand themselves or their true needs” because “their vision was obscured above all by their pride,” particularly in their belief that God initially provided for them, continues to provide for them, watch over them. In reality, men are needy; Locke’s state of nature is not Hobbes’s state of war, but it is a state of scarcity, neediness. All very well, but for one noticeable thing: the evidently conjectural character of any ‘state of nature’—Hobbes’s, Locke’s, Rousseau’s—lands modern philosophers back into the philosophic factionalism Hobbes deplores. It seems that both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ philosophy incur relativism, the first because there was an ‘outer’ standard of morality, the nature of which philosophers did not agree upon, the second because there was an ‘inner’ standard of morality, the nature of which philosophers did not agree upon.  Yet, “if Hobbes and Locke were unsuccessful in their hope, they nevertheless took the decisive step of establishing the split between the natural world and the world of human constructs on an epistemological footing,” a footing “inextricably linked with a certain understanding of the way language works.”

Danford describes and advantage the ‘ancients’ enjoy over the moderns. Their aporia are more promising of at least some tentative resolutions because “they understood there to be more kinds of knowledge than Hobbes accepts.” If knowledge comes in different kinds, it may not be certain, nor may it aspire to certainty, but it covers more ground, comprehends more, in both senses of the term. In thinking about justice, for example, they begin “not by denying common speech or what men say, but by considering various ordinary opinions about it, opinions reflecting a variety of situations in which justice is relevant.” Here is no “geometric certainty,” but here is no unrealistic expectation of geometric certainty masquerading as tough-minded realism. The problem with the ‘ancients,’ however, is that they provide no “systematic account of language” to go along with Aristotle’s comprehensive account of the kinds of knowledge. Hence Danford’s interest in Wittgenstein, who does give such an account without succumbing to the linguistic and epistemological simplism of Hobbes and Locke.

Initially, Wittgenstein held the Hobbes-Locke position, that words stand for things, representing objects. But he eventually concluded that the evocation of images is only one thing that language does. A word may also signify, point to a use. To say ‘No!’ is not to conjure up a mental picture of an object; words are not only “symbols in a communications code.” For example, if I call out “Slab!” I may mean ‘Bring me a slab!’ or ‘I want a slab!’ “Words function in numerous ways, often combining with activity in what Wittgenstein calls “language games.” Speaking, using language, is a human activity; his term, ‘game,’ does not imply ‘fun and games,’ although it includes fun and games. Language is often, even usually, undertaken with serious intent. Contra Hobbes and Locke, the multiple uses of language are not in themselves confusing; it is rather the reduction of language to “the method of science” that confuses us. “Wittgenstein tries to show why the reductionist method of natural science is not appropriate to the understanding of language: reducing language to a small number of ‘simples,’ or to one model, inevitably causes us to misunderstand it.” 

“Learning words means learning how to use them.” Learning a language, however, “means learning how to play many different language games, in which words are used in different ways,” for the purpose or purposes of those games. “Understanding a word, we may say, is like understanding a lever in the cab of a locomotive: fully understanding it requires in a sense an understanding of the whole mechanism, that is, of what the mechanism is for.” Understanding the whole “entails understanding what that human activity is, what it for, why it is played.” Human action is teleological, as Aristotle maintains. Unlike other teleological motions, such as plant growth, it involves speech, reason; at the same time, human speech differs from Hobbes’s parrot but also differs from Hobbes’s man, who has no good way to think of purposes outside of his own passions, his subjective desires and aversions. “It makes no sense to speak absolutely of the simple parts of something” because a word has no meaning outside “the language games it is used in,” games that are purposive. And so, for some purposes, in analyzing a chair I might consider it as composes of “pieces of wood and screw,” while for another purpose I might analyze it in terms of “the atoms which make up the materials themselves.” In each case, what you think of as the ‘real’ table “depends on what you are going to do” and the purpose you pursue in doing it.

In a political community, the meaning of the word ‘justice’ requires knowledge of the purposes of the political community. “In considering the vast range of political phenomena, from taxes to trials, our judgment proceeds not from the fact that they share or lack some simple element of ‘just-ness,’ but rather from their relationship to the goals we understand our political community to aim at.” Goals: “the whole,” political or other, “may be heterogeneous and not reducible” to its parts.

If there’s “no ‘core’ meaning common to all its forms,” how, then, to define language itself? That there is no clear-cut definition of the kind Hobbes and Locke seek may be seen in the notion of ‘games.’ “The activities we call games”—poker, chess, baseball, sometimes politics—are “related to each other not in any single way” to which they can be reduced and defined “but as members of a family, each of whom resembles others in some ways, but not in all.” Wittgenstein offers the metaphor of a thread, “the overlapping of many fibers.” Is such a blurred concept really a concept? Yes, in the same way as an indistinct photography a picture of a person. For some purposes (the obscuring of blemishes, for example), one might prefer the indistinct photo. Exactness, certainty isn’t always a solution; sometimes, it’s a problem. When considering what a game is, “we cannot really say what a concept means,” but then that doesn’t mean I don’t know it. I can know how a clarinet sounds without being able to say how it sounds. “Our knowledge is in many cases an inarticulable knowledge,” or only a partially articulable one. Ask not only ‘what’ the word means but how you learned its meaning because “an understanding of how human beings learn to participate in this activity will shed light on the activity itself.” Parents don’t teach their children the rules of grammar first; “as children, we learn by hearing words used by those around us, and used in the language games or contexts in which the words are customary.” The word by itself doesn’t tell you the substance of what it is. “The grammar of a word might be said to include all the various expressions win which we can use of the word, and the situations in which these are suitable”—not “simply a verbal matter,” but one that “encompasses situations, contexts, and activities in the world.” That is, in addition to an Aristotle-like teleology, language also registers an Aristotle-like attention to circumstances, an attention on full display in the Nicomachean Ethics. 

Why is this ‘grammatology’ not merely arbitrary, conventional, vulnerable to the same criticism leveled at the ‘moderns’? Wittgenstein does in fact say that our concepts “are natural, at least to some degree.” That is because language games and grammar “are grounded in or based on characteristic ways we human beings have of living and acting together, characteristics of human beings simply.” They are “natural conventions,” since by nature we may not settle upon any one language, grammar, or set of language games but that by nature we do settle on some language, grammar, or set of language games. Conventional, yes; arbitrary, no. Language registers natural human feelings—happiness, anger, pain, all of which “are indeed built into our grammar. More, these things are “based on natural characteristics of human life on this planet, on our forms of life.” Human life has a nature, heterogeneous but not reducible to its parts. As Wittgenstein puts it, there is no “agreement in opinions”—like regimes, languages differ—but “in forms of life.” “The grammatical conventions, the language, are grounded in form of life which human being share, which are somehow natural to them.” Ways of life are patterns of action, not patterns of images. “The crucial notion here is that these activities are not reducible to something simpler; the terms that we use in a language game are not necessarily constructed out of simpler elements.” The sharp, modern distinction between human nature, reduced to, say, fear of violent death, and mind-entangling conventions (beauty, truth) gives way in Wittgenstein to ways of life that must be understood on their “own terms.” Wittgenstein would “inquire into the relations among our forms of life without necessarily seeking to reduce complicated ones to more simple or basic ones.” How, then, might we rank these forms of life—very roughly, these regimes? Within a given regime, such ranking would take place with a view to the purpose of the regime. Within a language game, such ranking would take place with a view to the purpose of the game. But is it possible to rank one regime in relation to another, one game in relation to another? Or does Wittgenstein give us only a more sophisticated form of relativism, leading once again to nihilism? 

Danford suggests that “conceived in the above terms,” the modernity of Hobbes, Locke, and even of Wittgenstein, “the project of understanding justice is indeed hopeless.” “Once certainty is made the criterion of science, it is difficult to see how there can be a science of a practical matter such as politics.” Aristotle and Plato argue against certainty as the criterion of science, or at least of all science, and thus leave space for a workable science of politics. “Once certainty is made the criterion of science, it is difficult to see how there can be a science of a practical matter such as politics,” a difficulty Hobbes “circumvents” by “replacing the distinction between theoretical and practical sciences with the distinction between theoretical sciences and applied sciences” in an attempt to treat political purposes—for example, securing peace—as “no different from the application of geometry to solve a surveyor’s problem of measurement.” Science serves practice; the purpose of knowledge is power; political science seeks peace, seeks to conquer the state of nature, which is a state of war.” But “in order to be useful, a science must be indisputable”; in needs the authoritative certainty commanded by religion, and in order to vindicate that certainty it must bring the peace Christianity merely promises. It hasn’t, and that raises uncertainty about the utility of Hobbesian political science.

But it may be that the ‘ancients’ have a better way, if not a way that satisfies the human longing for certitude. Danford begins with “the place of classical social science” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In Aristotelian science, theoretical reason concerns matters of truth and falsity, while practical reasoning concerns matters of good and bad action. Aristotle elaborates five kinds of knowledge. Science, epistemē, concerns things that are necessarily so; it is teachable, either by induction (reasoning from particulars to universals) or, more strictly speaking, by deduction, syllogism. Because a syllogism cannot question its own ‘first principles,” a truth or truths that must be held as self-evident for the sake of making logical deductions, one also needs nous, intelligence, which discovers the first principles, the archai, of science. Sophia or theoretical wisdom understands both first principles and the results of science, beginnings and ‘ends’ or purposes. Art, technē, concerns the means to those ends; it is productive but neither discover first principles nor make logical deductions from them nor judge the worth of what it produces. Practical wisdom, phronēsis, which concerns action, involves deliberating about obtaining the good and the advantageous; it knows particulars, not principles. Being more vulnerable to the extremes of pleasure and pain than the other forms of knowledge, it should be associated with moderation, sophrosynē. A person of practical wisdom and moderation will practice these virtues, perhaps along with others, without necessarily knowing why they are virtues, an inquiry that requires theoretical wisdom. Practical wisdom points to political science and is most likely to be found among men and women of experience, not the young. Whereas science is teachable, political science is not; “it is not a science in the strict sense.” It differs from theoretical wisdom, too, in that theoretical wisdom concerns itself with the nature, including human nature, as such. Political science, which comprehends practical wisdom but is not restricted to it; it “not only explains what things are good for human beings, but also seeks to explain why, thus bridging the gap between an autonomous virtue which can be practiced by the man of prudence without knowing why, and the realm of philosophy which requires an account of everything that is.”

What, then, is the source of virtue? There are two types of virtue. The “lower sort” is “natural virtue,” a “kind of unthinking disposition to be virtuous, which is found even in children, but which is liable to be harmful if it is not combined with ‘intelligence’ (nous).” “Virtue in the full sense,” on the other hand, “has intelligence”; it knows the first principles and the ends of action. “The good which results from the ‘blind natural virtue is a matter of accident; virtue in the full sense requires the sight of intelligence, part of the rational faculty.” “It is a product of right reason (orthos logos); it is the true knowledge of what is good for human beings.” Political science, then, is architectonic. It directs human action, including the quest for scientific knowledge, toward good purposes, since “theoretical knowledge about virtue is a reliable goal in itself.” By contrast, Hobbes doubts that the higher virtues are really virtues at all, that they tend toward irresolvable disputes, war, and that it is the “lower sort” of virtue alone can deliver peace. While Aristotle finds human reason to be “at home in the world,” Hobbes finds it “in an alien world of matter and motion,” that it therefore it “can know for certain only what it constructs.” Aristotle considers dialectic, the rational examination of contradictory opinions, as the way to discover first principles, whereas Hobbes considers “resolution,” analysis, to be that way. Aristotle maintains that “wholes are not understandable strictly by understanding parts.” Further, “on Aristotle’s account, ‘opinions generally held’ (common speech) are necessarily the starting point for any inquiry,” Hobbes “insists that one who begins from ‘vulgar discourse’ or common speech will never reach the truth.” For Aristotle, definitions are the goals, the results of dialectical examination of common speech; for Hobbes, definitions are to be found in the axioms of the proof. Aristotelian dialectic “seeks a perspicuous understanding rather than a reductive understanding because it is not based on the idea that knowledge can only be secured by reconstructing the combinations of ideas which are added together to make a concept.” Accordingly, political science, knowledge of politics, will seldom if ever achieve the certainty Hobbes would have its practitioners strive for. Live with it. “We must…consider the possibility that the surface of things is the reality with which a truly political science must deal,” that “our access to the phenomena of the human world must necessarily be through an understanding of them which is contained in the way we think and speak about them.” It is true that Aristotle offers no “critique of language” and that Wittgenstein wrote nothing on political science. All the more reason, Danford suggests, to see whether Wittgenstein’s un-Hobbesian language-based ‘epistemology’ can supplement Aristotelian political science.

Before attempting to do that, Danford considers “the method of classical political science,” the means of inquiry into the nature of human things, especially the nature of virtue or excellence (aretē), exemplified by Plato’s Socrates in the Meno, “an encounter between a great teacher and an unteachable man.” [2] The name “Meno” derives from the Greek word for memory; if you know everything you need to know already, what need do you have for learning? When asked what virtue is, he replies with a mere list of virtues. Socrates sets up a contrast by pretending to have a poor memory, wondering how Meno’s listed virtues fit together and how they might fit into “a larger whole, which in the largest sense is our whole experience, our world.”  For this, he posits his famous theory of the Ideas or Forms. “Nothing seems further from the spirit of Wittgenstein than the Platonic doctrine of the Forms, at least on the conventional understanding of Plato.” Apparently, he contends, as his Socrates does here, “that to understand something like human excellence is to isolate and contemplate the essence underlying all particular manifestations,” although, as Danford remarks, in the dialogues he wrote Plato “never has his Socrates offer a clear definition of human excellence.” It may be “that Plato was himself aware of the issue Hobbes charged the classics with ignoring, the issue of method.” 

Under the pressure of the ‘Socratic method,’ dialectic, Socrates forces Meno “to see the inadequacy of his original approach”; he “takes refuge in a certain idea of scientific method,” geometry, even as Hobbes would do, albeit far more impressively. Socrates “appears to prefer an approach which sticks as closely as possible to ordinary nontechnical meanings,” which are heterogeneous, contradictory and susceptible to dialectical treatment, which is consistent with the idea that “the whole is heterogeneous,” not reducible to Hobbesian elements and therefore not understandable by the analytic method. Dialectic proceeds not by breaking things down but by discovering coherence, connections among the heterogeneous parts, discovering what makes them a whole, despite and often because of their heterogeneity. Dialectical argument, desirous of truth (“erotic”) and friendly, contrasts with something that looks very much like it: eristic argument, spirited and antagonistic, a bit like Hobbes’s state of nature but in speech only. These two ways of arguing from opinions find favor among two different characters, persons of two different “moral outlooks.” Meno sees no distinction between the noble, the spirited-antagonistic, and the good. Plato’s dialogue illustrates that character and philosophic inquiry are related: “what one thinks excellence or virtue is depends to a great extent on what one’s conception of knowledge is” and what one’s conception of knowledge is, along with how one attempts to inquire after it, depends to great extent on what one’s character is. “We are compelled to wonder whether Meno’s preoccupation with wealth, honor, and power as the goals does not somehow go along with what he will directly reveal to be his deeper conception of knowledge, which is that it does not exist,” with “a radical skepticism.” Similarly, Hobbes (following Machiavelli) “argues that since men cannot agree on any goals except avoiding the evil of violent death, all men seek power (in the form of wealth, or honor, because power allows them to pursue any good”; “skepticism about the goals most men claim to believe in…seems to be the natural accompaniment to both an unrestrained selfishness and a cynicism about our ability ever to know anything beyond the ‘truths’ which are ‘operational’ (what is true is what works).”

Socrates’ character leads him in a different direction. Originally, Meno had objected, eristically, to Socrates’ definition of human excellence because it used undefined terms. He demanded a scientific-geometric definition. The problem is that “there is no starting place for such an inquiry which will not be open to the objection of undefined terms.” Socrates thus prefers not to begin with a clear definition but “to proceed somewhat tentatively, ascending by means of connections from ignorance to a more comprehensive understanding.” His theory of latent knowledge, of anamnesis, which he claims to prove by his comic dialogue with the slave boy, who is supposed to have known geometry all along, ends in pointing to an irrational number, a number that is alogoi or unsayable. That is, the apparent certainty of geometric thought can lead to a certain uncertainty. This conversation is “an analog of the problem of defining excellence; in that case too, perhaps, no clear ‘answer ‘ is to be found, but something like an answer can be pointed to.”

Anamnesis or “recollection,” a “method of philosophizing about the human things,” requires questioning, repeated questioning, “many times” and in “many ways” about “the thing under investigation.” Danford remembers Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophic problems “are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.” Like the irrational number, virtue or excellence is something we may not be able to define but nonetheless “feel we ‘somehow’ know.” “Wittgenstein suggests that knowledge is, in a way, contained in our language.” Plato’s Socrates begins with opinions, contradictory definitions of words, subjects them to dialectic and thereby eliminating the false opinions, the ones that cannot withstand logical scrutiny. “In some sense knowledge emerges in the process of inquiry and is revealed only to the active participant in the dialogue.” Meno is unteachable because he doesn’t really want to participate; he wants to be told, definitively, what virtue is. He is intellectually lazy. He doesn’t want to put things together, “to discover the whole by discovering how things fit together or by finding the place of each thing in the whole.” “The grammar of our language is the Wittgensteinian parallel to Socrates’ understanding of the relationship among the human phenomena.”

Virtue cannot be taught in any straightforward way. If it could be, Pericles could have taught it to his sons, as he did horseback riding. There are no teachers of virtue, and even the sophists, whom Meno admires, disagree among themselves about its teachability. How, then, is virtue related to knowledge? Scientific definitions in this realm “are open to a decisive objection,” namely, that “they distort the phenomena we seek to know about.” “Socrates’ method, to the extent to which it may be called scientific, is more like the sort of argument ‘by hypothesis.'” “We are not wholly ignorant” of the nature of virtue; “the dialogue has partly uncovered the outlines of human excellence, its eidos, or shape.” It may be seen in the ordinary man, the average citizen, while also in “the excellence of the leader, or best human being.” This latter form of excellence, at its apex, finds its embodiment in the philosopher, who “somehow combines wisdom and justice on an entirely new basis” than that of the citizen’s decent opinions, “a basis connected with the erotic, but noncompetitive,” non-eristic, “social character of the philosophic life rather than with the noble ambition of the life a statesman,” who embodies citizen virtue so long as virtue remains on the level of citizenship, within the polis. These “two poles of aretē are not simply different; they cannot be separated.” Rather, “each informs the other, and together they constitute the thing we call excellence; that grammar of this concept points in two partially contradictory directions is a result not of our failure to analyze it far enough, but of the nature of human language and human life simply.” Wittgenstein wants to understand “the grammar of a thing,” and this resembles “what Plato means by giving an account of a thing,” to “reveal the place of something in the whole, or to see ‘what kind of a thing anything is.'” Hobbes is right that this knowledge is uncertain. But when it comes to political things, it may be the best we can do.

Danford begins the conclusion to his book by asking himself, quite reasonably, whether these similarities between Plato, Aristotle, and Wittgenstein really amount to much. He begins with Plato and Aristotle, who, quite famously, do not agree with one another on a lot of things. For starters, Aristotle has more respect for “the natural appearance of phenomena” than Plato is, looking for “the fullest possible articulation of [each phenomenon] as we ordinarily understand it, “more inclined to leave complexity where complexity appears, and less inclined to pursue apparent contradictions.” This may be example of Aristotle’s prudence, his ‘politic’ philosophy: “He allows the simply good man to stand on his own ground without reasons.” The two classical philosophers nonetheless agree that certainty is “unnecessary, not to say impossible, in political science inquiry.” Like Hobbes, they eschew eristics but unlike Hobbes they distinguish it from genuine philosophic dialectic, which can lead not to war but to concurrence, albeit tentative. The tentativeness, the zetetic character, of classical philosophy reflects its erotic character. Hobbes finds the only justification of philosophy in its utility, which requires certainty, whereas the classics “understand that men may pursue the inquiry for its own sake,” erotically not thumotically. A philosopher might employ eristics in defense of philosophy—knowing, as Socrates knows, that he may thereby sacrifice his life for the sake of philosophy’s life. But he prefers friendly dialectic.

Danford has described the affinities between Plato and Wittgenstein, so he now turns to their disagreements. When it comes to language, “Wittgenstein is more tolerant of ordinary usage than Plato,” who exhibits “a certain impatience with the common opinions about meanings which he,” or rather his Socrates, “elicits from interlocutors at the beginning of a dialogue.” Both philosophers seek to draw out “contradictory implications” in ordinary speech, but Plato inclines more to remedy these defects, or perhaps to clarify our way of speaking, whereas Wittgenstein thinks that “language is ‘in order as it is.'” Once contradictions are uncovered, Wittgenstein has little more to do. He is not “just interested in language, or in words” because language “comprises also the circumstances of their use, the world in which the words appear, as it were.” This suggests that Wittgenstein might be quite interested in political philosophy insofar as it identifies regimes as substantial parts of those circumstances, as seen in Aristotle and, among moderns, Montesquieu and Tocqueville. Plato’s Socrates, however, wants to look not only at regimes but to look for the best regime, the regime according to nature, beyond conventions. For Plato, “politics and political orders [regimes] demand the attention of philosophy if philosophy is to survive,” even if philosophy cannot really be useful, as Hobbes wants it to be. “The philosophy of classical thinkers was public-spirited out of necessity.” For Wittgenstein, living in modern England, and for many American philosophy professors, the danger to philosophy seemed to have “disappeared”; “the private side of philosophy has emerged as the most important.” A moderate Hobbesianism, the Hobbesianism of John Locke, established its regime tolerably well. The regime conflicts that began elsewhere but at the same time—Lenin’s regime, Hitler’s regime—and the modern project of the conquest of nature itself have put this confidence into question. Today, ‘Lockean liberalism’ continues to attract formidable enemies, foreign and domestic.

For Wittgenstein, “there may not exist any natural horizon to which we can ascend by means of philosophy.” It’s caves, all the way down. At best, “philosophic inquiry can be concerned only with coming to understand better one’s own linguistic cave; and thus political philosophy, which is the name for the enterprise of comparison, is no longer a possibility.” Danford doesn’t go that far, calling rather for political scientists to “moderate our habitual skepticism about knowledge not secured by scientific method.” What Wittgenstein provides is warrant “to question what has to many of us seemed unquestionable, namely, that the only knowledge one should be willing to stand behind is scientific knowledge in the strict sense” and to avoid the reduction of political motives to safety, income, deference, the will to power, or some other apparently but not really all-explanatory theme. Sweeping generalizations won’t do. “While we do not have sufficient grounds to reject the side taken” in the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, Wittgenstein does give us “cause to reconsider the entire controversy.” 

 

Notes

1. The resemblance of the political science of Harold Lasswell, once of the most influential members of the American Political Science Association in the twentieth century, to the political science of Hobbes, has been carefully observed and described by Robert H. Horwitz: “Scientific Propaganda: Harold D. Lasswell.” In Herbert J. Storing, ed.: Essays on the Scientific Study of Politics. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962.
2. See “Teaching Virtue” on this website, under the category, “Philosophers.”

 

Pierre Manent: Montaigne: Life Without Law. Paul Seaton translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020 [2014]. 

 

By design congenial and elusive, Montaigne invites everyone into his book, whether as characters or as readers. The resulting confusion begs for clarification; the French political philosopher Pierre Manent carefully traces the principal twists and turns of Montaigne’s argument. [1]

After his introduction, Manent divides his book into four parts, nine chapters, thirty-three sections. Thirty-three is no insignificant number in Christian thought; its significance for Montaigne’s Essais will become evident in Manent’s exegesis. Part One is titled, “The War of Human Beings”; Part Two, “The Powers of the Word”; Part Three, “The Mysteries of Custom”; Part Four, “Life Without Law.” Thomas Hobbes would later claim that life without law must be war, but Montaigne demurs in advance, moving from death-dealing war to peaceful, life-preserving liberty through his claims about verbal power and the complexities of customs. 

Manent begins where he is, in Europe, currently in the grips of a “malaise,” namely, “lost confidence in our own powers.” This loss of confidence has arisen because although now “in a profound peace, in complete liberty, in a prosperity that is still enviable,” Europeans don’t know what to do with themselves. Having relieved man’s precarious state in nature, having becoming more or less masters and possessors of nature, having won the freedom to pursue happiness, having “aimed at changing the very order of human things” in reality, not imagination, radically reforming human life in politics, religion, and “the order of knowledge,” Europeans cannot even account for how they did those things, let alone what they should do next.

Manent identifies the sources of this transformation of human life in a reform of Christianity, Protestantism, and a reform of philosophy, Machiavellianism. The Protestant Reformation collapsed the distance between God and man by the doctrine of sola Scriptura, the insistence of understanding the Bible directly by each Christian, unmediated by the interpretation by Catholic Church theologians, members of a priestly class, “human intermediaries who confiscate or disfigure” Scriptural truth. Calvin held the truths of Scripture to be self-evident, writing that “Scripture shows no less evidence of its truth than black or white do of their colors, or sweet or bitter things of their taste.” He intends this as a liberation, a liberation from ‘priestcraft.’ “Faith in the saving God fins its certification in the certainty of the believer’s personal salvation.” This isn’t liberation for liberation’s sake but liberation for salvation’s sake; man’s soul thinks God’s word directly. In philosophy, Machiavelli does this too, with his modern ‘state’ (lo Stato), which cuts out the aristocrats of the feudal state, leaving the people either ruled directly by one man, the prince, or electing its representatives to rule on its behalf, again without intermediaries. In effecting this transformation, Machiavelli “undertakes to bring to light what he calls the effectual truth of political things, what one could call the art or logic of action when it is not shackled or falsified by any word, Christian or other.”  Thus, “while Luther and Calvin aim to suppress the obstacles that are placed between Christians and the Word of God,” a transformation of the regime of God, His Church, “Machiavelli aims to suppress the obstacles placed between the prince, or the political agent, and the founding, or refounding, action that Europe needs.” Both decry what Manent calls the “play” seen in Catholicism, by which he means not frolic but indeterminacy caused by a regime “formed of elements that need one another,” a sort of tensile structure with no “incontestable foundation”—or, perhaps more precisely, since the Catholic Church emphasizes Peter as the rock upon which Christ founded His Church, with Christ evidently the Rock upon which that rock itself rests, a set of institutional “elements” that prevent the hard surface of rule from abrading those it rules.

The difficulty in modernity comes when the Rock of Christ, interpreted by individual Christians, grinds against those Christians, or is used by Christians to grind one another; it also comes when lo Stato grinds against its subjects, as in absolute monarchy, or is used by citizens to grind one another, as in republican factionalism. Without intermediary men and institutions to soften, to moderate, the exigencies of rule, modern life leaves moderns with the stark choice of submission or rebellion. Modern words and modern actions, intended to be coordinated, seldom are. “We have never arrived at finding a stable formula, a stable arrangement, of separation and union between words and actions,” as “our effort to overcome the Catholic disorder” has never “allowed us to find repose in an assured order and a lasting equilibrium.” We don’t exactly live in a condition of permanent revolution,” as Machiavelli’s modern state could sometimes serve as a protective carapace for Protestant and Catholic civil society, but that carapace in fact consists of men and the institutions men have made, not the sturdy elements of a tortoise shell; lo Stato protects, when it protects, by acting, and its actions can be made to serve the States’ men instead of the persons they are charged to protect. 

What is more, the modern dichotomy between State and civil society can easily generate many who are neither politically ambitious nor religiously devout. “How are those going to go about their lives, who, lacking political ambition and little concerned with piety, nonetheless have to lead their lives?” What can Machiavelli say to those uninterested in “the salvation of the city”? What can Calvin say to those uninterested in the salvation of their soul? Other than what they do say, which in both cases is merely exhortative, commands to wake up and smell the coffee? Who would, or could, “extend the reforming gesture” of modernity “to embrace the anecdotes of ordinary life and the little secrets of private life”? Manent has the answer: Michel de Montaigne, “a reformer no less audacious than Machiavelli or Calvin,” but decidedly less forthright in his manner.

To help his readers, especially his European readers, understand themselves, Manent proceeds understandably. “The War of Human Beings” consists of two chapters: “To Save One’s Life” (an activity even war-ready General Patton commended to his troops) and “To Compare Oneself,” an activity that very often leads to strife, if not necessarily to war. “The Powers of the Word” also consists of two chapters: “From Rhetoric to Literature,” which compares and contrasts ancient writing to Montaignian writing, and “The Word and Death,” which compares and the Word, the Word of God, with its teaching about death, to Montaigne’s teaching about death. “The Mysteries of Customs” consists of three chapters: the central chapter of the book, “A New World,” showing how, in Montaigne’s estimation, the European discovery of America required a change in philosophy, “Commanded Reason,” on a new kind of reasoning, one that eschews lawgiving as command, and “Three Conditions of Human Beings,” a classification of the elements of human society with which Montaigne replaces Plato’s three classes in the Republic. “Life Without Laws” consists of two chapters: “Governed Human Beings,” human beings under the sway of “commanded” reason, and “Nature and Truth,” which turn out not to be simply the same thing. 

In his first chapter, addressing the difficulty of saving one’s life under conditions of war (and indeed, Montaigne’s Europe then writhed in uncompromising religio-political wars between Catholics and Protestants), Montaigne diagnoses the malaise very much in the way Machiavelli does, as a split between words and actions, between “supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.” Both would “break with the fatal idealizing tendency of the human word.” Unlike Machiavelli, however, who seldom writes of himself, Montaigne looks to his own soul or ‘self,’ inviting his readers to do the same, in locating the cause of the malaise. Machiavelli wants to tell his readers how to think and what to do; courteous, civil, frank Montaigne prefers to attract. One can indeed save oneself, but sometimes safety may result from acts of vengeance, audaciously and even fiercely made, and sometimes from acts of submission to those who have us at their mercy, a submission that may arouse their compassion. If “opposed forms of behavior can have the same effect, then there is “uncertainty and fluidity” in “human motives”; the “play” between causes and effects recalls the play in the Catholic Church regime, but as readily without as with the Church. There are, then, two “motives” for human action ‘in play’ in human life: pride and compassion, the sentiment of “strong souls,” “proud souls,” and the sentiment of “women, children, and the ‘vulgar,'” the commoners. Although this resembles Hegel’s master-slave dichotomy, Manent is careful to remark that “there is no dialectic” between them, and therefore no “satisfying or reassuring synthesis” to be had. These “two dispositions” persist, “prevent[ing] them from arriving regularly or surely at their ends.” Man, Montaigne writes in his inimitable phrasing, is “an undulating object.” His problem is that his mind seeks to find a permanent resolution to his permanent, uneasy “condition.” “The human mind spontaneously, naturally, necessarily wants to engrave where there are only fleeting lines, uncertain forms, and unforeseeable metamorphoses.” They want to reform the modes and orders of human life, then fix those reforms in place. Better to leave some play, and for this reason Montaigne inclines toward republicanism more than monarchy, without attempting imprudently to revolutionize politically the monarchies of his time. That would be too direct, too unsubtle, insufficiently attentive to the effectual truth of things.

“At the same time as he makes his first republican declarations, Montaigne begins to consider the question of death.” What is the connection? One might hastily recall that the death of one monarch can readily result in a crisis of succession, a crisis in the regime, whereas the death of one’s elected representative brings only a new election, a new representative freely chosen by those he will contribute to governing. But Montaigne doesn’t intend to stay on the level of politics. Gravediggers go beneath the surface, and so will he, considering death itself. Death takes each individual “out[side] of being,” he writes with “no communication with what is,” as Lucretius, “the great materialistic poet,” affirms. The moment of death, the act of dying is a sort of trial, “the ultimate essay which recapitulates life” because “in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending”; your soul can face its severance from being with steadfastness or not. If the republican regime expresses “human pride,” self-confidence of the people in their ability to rule themselves, death tries that pride in the individual rather than in that collection of individuals which constitutes a people. Later on, Montaigne will eulogize his friend, the proud republican Étienne de La Boétie, who died prematurely. As “for himself,” Montaigne “only proposes to die ‘quietly and insensibly,'” humbly within the civil society of the modern state, without fanfare. At the same time, he is a republican, if not for the proud reasons of most republicans. In the trial of death, “the day of judgment, it is death that is judge and master. There is no other.” But what of God, the supreme Judge? The problem is that to meet death with pride is futile; the prideful, futile response to impending death is anger; anger is the passion of monarchic presumption, which in its pride would take its vengeance against Fortune itself; the ultimate monarch, God, results from “the unruliness of our mind.” Partisans of monarchy expect the monarch to stave off their deaths. That isn’t going to happen, permanently; in the face of death, we are all republicans, all equal not in the eyes of a monarchic god but in the conditions of leveling nature. Prideful republicanism is a contradiction in terms. Montaigne is a new kind of republican. 

He is a republican who, like ordinary, unambitious and not-so-pious folk prefers to “retreat in view of repose,” abandoning public life as a judge to become “the spectator of his own mind,” writing a new kind of book that reports the results of that spectating with “frankness,” quite unlike “contemporaries depraved by the vice of dissimulation,” including self-deception, and thereby able “to attain an unprecedented degree of candor and truth about oneself, and thus about human life.” The humble, unambitious, unassuming private man thus entertains a supreme intellectual and literary ambition, answering “the question that, in short, is the first question of philosophy, the question of nature,” not only or even primarily by looking ‘out’ at other men (although he will do that, and in extraordinarily wide-ranging manner) but at himself. “How does our nature, reduced to its own forces, arrive at the degree of being, or rather of movement, that renders it happy?” Montaigne’s introspection discovers a being happily open to accident, to “chance occasions,” which are “the grace [!] that actualizes, completes, and perfects his nature”; “I find myself more by chance encounters than by searching my judgment.” Such passivity requires a certain mental attitude, one suggested by the title of his essay, “That the taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them.” Greek philosophers commended the “perfection” of human nature in body and soul, bringing the nature of individual and polis to its natural telos, purpose, ‘end.’ Christians would open our souls to divine grace, our nature having been “wounded by sin” against God. For his part, “Montaigne envisages neither perfection nor healing, only a ‘relief.'” Nor will this be Bacon’s way of relieving man’s estate through active experimentation, torturing Nature to compel her to reveal her secrets. “For Montaigne, nature is not an enemy to defeat,” nor is Fortuna such an enemy, as she is for Machiavelli; nature is “a friend whose gentle and persuasive voice one needs to know how to listen to,” even as Fortuna’s buffetings reveal the nature of oneself.

Not war but caution should inform our dealings with nature and other accidental forces. After all, the set of opinions that prevail in the civil society into which accident has thrown us can take us so far as to induce us to sacrifice life itself. Opinion gives the soul its form, its determination, and the multiplicity of opinions works on the plasticity of the soul, which has the “capacity to take on a thousand forms, a thousand attitudes, a thousand folds.” This is true of our opinion of death, which is what makes death feared. The opinion of St. Augustine, for example, who teaches that “nothing makes death an evil, except what follows it,” makes of death more than it is, “the movement of an instant.” This republican would refrain from shouting, ‘Liberty or death!’ Beginning with the Apostle Paul, Christians have distrusted philosophy, but Montaigne writes that “we do not escape philosophy by stressing immoderately the sharpness of pain and the weakness of man.” “To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne proclaims in the title of Book I, chapter 20, which Manent calls his “Marseillaise of the philosopher.” Montaigne there identifies “the three great parameters” of human life wherein lies “the problem of human life.” They are virtue, pleasure, and death. Death is unavoidable; those who give it no thought (and many do not) are stupid and blind. That being so, Montaigne writes, “let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it,” first by meditating upon it beforehand, realizing that since life has an exit you can live it with “interior freedom,” freedom of mind from that indubitable physical necessity. Enjoy life with “soft tranquility,” quailing not at the prospect of losing it. Whereas the ancient philosophers had said, with King Lear, the ripeness is all, the Montaignian philosopher says, with Hamlet, the readiness is all. “We must always be booted and ready to go.” As for Christianity, which also commends readiness while promising ripeness in the life to come after death, the problem is that “the relationship to others, the concern for others, places us in their dependence, and it is because we see ourselves by their eyes that our own life appears to us as a ‘whole’ susceptible of being lost, and this loss then as a terrible misfortune,” one that only God can succor. Better to stay “entirely in oneself, “delivered from that reflection which causes us to consider our being from the outside,” from the opinions of others, including the opinions of those who tell us that God’s opinion, the ultimate, the final opinion, must rule us. Life is “something that by its nature must be lost,” Montaigne observes. “To the alternative between the disdain for death” of the ancients “and the fear of death” of the Christians, “Montaigne substitutes an adhesion to one’s own being that is so serious and affectionate that death comes to lose itself, quite amicably, in a life that is naturally ‘losable.'” Neither disdain nor fear but nonchalance, that is the answer to Hamlet’s future question about being and not-being. Nature itself prepares us for our own natural ‘end.’ Sickness “makes us lose the taste for life and thus detaches us from it,” as does the gradual decline attendant upon old age. “Neither a trial,” as for Socrates, “nor a punishment,” as for Christians, death “is a part of you.” 

Since death is but a moment, with only non-being to follow, how shall one live? Human beings tend to live in a state of war, but not usually the violent war that Hobbes fears, making of violent death a hobgoblin that replaces the demons of Hell. Here as in the face of death, imagination too often rules; “Most people live under the empire of the imagination,” especially “in religious matters” and in “sexual matters.” (“How many men owe their sexual fiascos to the vehemence of their imagination!”) Imagination’s empire is even “stronger than nature,” at least in any given moment, producing or conquering male impotence, for example. But what are its real limits. What imaginings are true? Which ones are possibly true? Imaginings can be doubted, so much so that “on the one hand [man] belies, or pretends to believe, everything,” even things counter to nature, miracles; “on the other, [man] believes almost nothing.” The Bible presents itself as a history, just as Plutarch presents his “parallel lives.” What is Montaigne’s “epistemology of history,” his means of separating true accounts from false?

Histories, he contends, are best written by “eyewitnesses,” but especially eyewitnesses who were in command of the action, the ones who exhibit the prudence a surviving commander must have had. Such men were “not rare in pagan antiquity” (Xenophon, Thucydides, Julius Caesar, others), but “the moderns do not have the equivalent” of such men. In bringing the examples of past and present men and women into his book, in writing history, but as an eyewitness mostly to himself, Montaigne “initially receives all the testimonies, all the exempla, without any effort at discrimination.” That is, he acts as the judge he had been, taking testimony. He can claim to be an impartial judge because he has lived “the life of a man whose actions do not merit being recounted, the life of a man whose only ambition is to live advisedly.” Writing history “not only requires the fidelity of witnesses but also the freedom of judgments,” which “depends on the person of the historian” and “the political regime” in which he lives. Montaigne’s judgments manifestly diverge from the prevalent, authorized opinions of his regime, but “he also knows that there is no common life,” no regime, no state, “without authoritative opinions.” His frankness about himself accordingly will not be matched by frankness about his opinions, his judgments, of others. That is, to write good history, one must be among the very few judicious men of his generation, living in a regime that is also rare, a “republic” that is less democratic than aristocratic. “The modern scientific method, as it were, democratizes historical knowledge—anyone can write history as long as he follows the rules of method.” But Montaigne is no Cartesian, among the moderns; in his eyes, technique can never substitute for sound judgment. Good judgment in turn requires sober introspection and observation, enabling the historian to “grasp in the system of human motives the one or ones that are pertinent to the case under consideration,” a task impossible “without going through the gamut of motives that are not only present, but active, in our own soul.” And this is a reciprocal process: “it is the effort of others, living or dead, that we penetrate further into our own motives.” “To write history, to read history, is to compare oneself.”

More generally, Montaigne regards comparison as “the most visible mainspring or affect of human beings, and, at the same time, the most secret.” We compare ourselves with other individuals, our social class with other classes, and not only consciously so. The sentiments aroused by these comparisons—including “love, hate, admiration, disdain, envy”—are seldom simple. They mix. And we also compare ourselves to ourselves, in our happiness and our misery, our “elevation and abasement.” “It is the hesitation, or oscillation, between the love and hatred of others, on one hand, and the elevation and abasement of self, on the other, that is at the source of our action and of that continuous interior movement that we call ‘life.'” Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel all see this, but not as Montaigne does. Pascal finds sinful pride and the self-hatred that can lead to humility, with the grace of God, the hatred of our enemies transfigured by grace to agape; Hobbes finds in our comparisons with others only a war of all against all; Rousseau finds in civil society only pernicious comparisons; Hegel finds the dialectic of master and slave. Montaigne “does not aim at a peace accomplished in another city, or another world,” by the grace of Christ; he “does not envisage the construction of a new political instrument capable of imposing peace on proud and quarrelsome human beings”; he does not recommend arranging political institutions, including education, aimed at reducing “as much as possible the role of imitation and admiration in the formation of the soul”; and, as mentioned, he does not envisage the dialectical overcoming of the human condition in the course of history. Against all of these future rivals, “Montaigne not only accepts the human encounter but desires and seeks it,” with “an open face,” with good-humored frankness. He is the French charmer among philosophers. “With Montaigne, admiration is the desire to admire and, inseparably, the desire to be a friend.” He is the most congenial of moderns.

He can offer himself to others because he guards his frankness by carefully separating admiration and imitation. We tend to attempt to imitate those we admire. Montaigne never does, and so spares himself from the pangs of love and the resentment envy engenders. “Montaigne experiences no desire to become other than he is”; by his account, “he simply developed according to nature, which is to say his nature” to become “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!” Although “comparison is the soul of the Essays,” he remains “so calm and confident in his own form that he considers the other forms of life with a gaze that is free of all rivalry,” whether viewing the way of life of Alcibiades or a Capuchin friar. He thereby gives himself the freedom to admire both. Socrates, who “teaches us to walk ‘with a gentle and ordinary step,'” ready to converse with anyone, ‘high’ or ‘low,’ about anything, ‘high’ or ‘low,’ is “the man who is most worthy of being known.” Socrates’ practice of dialogue becomes Montaigne’s practice of “conférance” or “verbal jousting,” whether ‘in person’ or while reading. This, too, is a form of comparison, with the risks attendant upon comparison. “The wellsprings of war, in any case of quarreling and enmity, are here put at the service of the search for truth, but one always risks being carried away by anger, embracing the quarrel for its own sake, and abandoning oneself to hostility while forgetting the truth.” With his lively sense of sin, Pascal denies that such a thing can be, that human beings can “quiet” their “self-love” long enough to seek truth by their own powers. They need the more radical “healing” only God can gracefully provide. Montaigne denies that there can be any such healing, or that there needs to be. Whether in religion or philosophy, there is no use of standards set too high for human achievement. Christian repentance as commended by Pacal makes a futile comparison, a comparison of “the life that is really led with a better life that it images,” substituting the latter from the former. But the “master form” of each individual never really overcomes itself, whatever Christians may believe of themselves and their God. This is Montaigne’s decidedly un-Pascalian version of humility.

There is more. Christian humility and repentance, “the complete healing of evil,” would entail “the destruction of our nature.” Transformed by the grace of the Christian God, we would no longer be ourselves, our master forms having been shattered. “To propose a human life delivered from evil is to give oneself a task that is not only impossible to fulfill but finally is more corrupting than truly reforming” because us draws us away from what we can do to ameliorate our destructive passions by ‘inspiring’ us to chase rainbows. What goes for Christianity, Manent adds, also goes for Rousseau; Montaigne would have viewed the malign effects of Rousseau on the Jacobins with unsurprise. For himself, he prefers to excuse himself and others rather than to accuse them, prefers “the laughing humor” of Democritus to the “tears” of Heraclitus (or of Jesus, or of Rousseau). “Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.” Why not admit that, and laugh together? Why not, in Montaigne’s words, “serve life according to itself,” rather than according to any ideal, any god, beyond human life? “What, in truth, is nonchalance, if not an effort, made at each instant, to prefer our life, or our being, to ourselves,” those selves that succumb to the charms of “the high aims of philosophy and theology,” aims that only “stir up the human presumption of which they themselves are the expression”? 

Reasoned expression is one of “the powers of the word,” the title of Manent’s Part Two. “The task that Montaigne gave himself of ‘serving life according to itself’ requires a new instrument, that is, a new word, or a new modality of the word.” In a word, he will replace poetry (its tragedy imitating “the actions of persons of high worth, its comedy imitating “the actions of persons who are inferior to us”) with down-to-earth prose, the kind of writing that looks you straight in the eye. He will replace ancient rhetoric—praising, blaming, defending, condemning rhetoric—whose supreme practitioner in antiquity was Cicero, with “the modern word,” the “literary word.” Cicero talks too much, mistakes his words for actions, lacking good judgment, that indispensable Montaignian virtue. For a rhetorician to assume that his saying something will somehow make it so manifests not prudence but vanity. [2] The smart Roman republican was terse Cato. Even Caesar, a man of “pestilential ambition” who wrecked the republic, is to be preferred over Cicero, a man of “ambitious vanity.” “Rhetorical inflation measures the corruption of republics.” [3] Montaigne would advance the republican cause, discreetly, in monarchic modern Europe, by writing a work of “literature,” “the contrary of eloquence.” “He defines himself as one who says the most in the fewest words,” an extraordinary claim from the author of such a long book, unless that author has some very extraordinary thoughts to hint at. “Montaigne describes himself as the antitype of Cicero, as the one who is capable of saying the most things without saying a word,” one who “disdain[s] to speak in order to provoke his reader to think and, eventually, to speak”; after all, the true republican citizen thinks and speaks for himself, stands intellectually and morally on his own two feet, unassisted by patrons, unbowed by mobs. Hitherto, republicanism has exhibited mostly vanity: “So many words for so few actions!” It cries out for ‘executive’ correction and is exceedingly fortunate on those rare occasions when it gets a Cato instead of a Caesar, a de Gaulle instead of a Napoleon (whether the First or, more commonly, the Third). “The Essays deliver republican candor from the folds and the heaviness of the toga.” 

Cicero talked too much because he “was torn between action,” which says nothing, “and philosophy,” which says much, even if at times by speaking or writing no words in ways that draw others into thought. “Cicero brings to his retirement the manners of the orator, while he brings to the forum…the erudition and subtleties of philosophy, or the man of leisure.” His private letters read like orations, his public speeches like treatises. A man who attempts to convey philosophic teachings to unphilosophic minds may well end up going on and on and on, explaining. Montaigne’s public word, published as essays, as attempts at understanding, “cuts every tie with the eloquent word of the forum” with its humorous self-examination and self-mockery. In this, he recurs somewhat to the Socratic commendation of self-knowledge, the knowledge “essential to the knowledge of the subject of his study, which is man.” Man’s nature, however, does not open itself to sweeping, general statements, to ‘ideas,’ to Platonic ‘forms’ about ‘Man.’ Each individual man has his own “natural form.” Manent judges this “intention,” “project,” “design” of Montaigne to be “unique.” The unique individual man offers his readers a unique book, a book in which he claims not exactly to be good in the grand sense but rather to be human—excusable and, as our own contemporaries say, ‘relatable.’ Unlike Socrates, who learns about himself by talking with others, or a Christian, who learns about himself by talking with God, Montaigne learns about himself directly, through introspection. “I roll about in myself.” If modernity distinguishes itself from all that went before it by its individualism, Montaigne is about as modern as it gets. For him, “philosophy is nothing more than the attestation of the experience the individual nature makes of itself.” The individual’s master form can only be distorted by reference to a general form, the idea of human nature, or of the perfect Person, the holy God. Since “his ideas draw their force from Montaigne’s nature,” not from themselves, and not from nature ‘at large,” they “cannot be the support of a vigorous dialectical procedure,” as in Socrates or Xenophon. Montaigne distrusts dialectic; like rhetoricians, dialecticians talk too much, fail to get to the core of the matter—which really is matter, and therefore unamenable to understanding by abstraction, with ideas. “The human world contains an opacity impenetrable to reason.”

On politics, then, it makes sense that he “develops his social and political thought most completely” in a chapter titled “Of Vanity,” which Manent treats in the nineteenth, central, of his thirty-three sections. No imagined republics for Montaigne, any more than for Machiavelli, with whom he shares the judgment that “the dialectical quest for ‘the best form of society,’ or the best republic or principality, is a vain exercise that does not aid us in orienting ourselves and acting judiciously in the political order.” Necessity is properly the mother of human invention, and especially of that political invention, the modern state. But Machiavelli wrote in a world in which there were no real modern states; accordingly, he “calls for a redoubling of hope and activity” in order to achieve such states, political conditions in which men ‘of’ the state, statesmen, will no longer be distracted by chimerical ideals. Montaigne, who wrote in a Europe in which the modern state now loomed large, “resolutely chose passivity.” The philosopher now needs to mull things over in the privacy of his mind, requires independence from the forces of custom that assault that mind from ‘outside’ itself. 

This mind is not, however and decidedly, a crabbed, closed-in thing. It is accompanied by what Montaigne calls a “generous heart.” Manent now undertakes his own exercise of comparison, setting génerosité next to Aristotle’s megalopsychia. Greatness of soul, magnanimity, “contains a claim of superiority, which is translated in the resolution to speak the truth despite opinion.” The great-souled man is frank in the way of the ancients, the public way, at best the way of vigorous civic action; “magnanimity is an eminent virtue of the acting man,” the citizen. But while the magnanimous man speaks and acts, Montaigne’s generous man judges and speaks. By subtracting from generosity “everything that concerns action and the honors due to noble actions,” which the magnanimous man forthrightly claims, “Montaigne profoundly changes the notion of magnanimity.” The generous man aims not at the goodness that excels that of all others but at the goodness that is humanness, the goodness according to which each unique individual, with his own “master form,” may be judged, humanely. Montaigne inaugurates a moral atmosphere in which we judge not “according to the opposition between good and evil, good and bad, but according to the opposition between human and inhuman.” To err is human and so is to forgive; one need not repent, being ‘only human,’ but one does need to be human rather than angry, presumptuous, cruel. One cannot repent and expect forgiveness for inhumanity; it is “inexcusable.” For the commission of inhumanity, the judging word is irrevocable.

Whether for the Socratic philosopher or the Christian, the word of judgment becomes final upon death. For Socrates, “death appears as an accidental interruption of the conversation concerning wisdom.” Wisdom, and the dialogue concerning it, philosophy, will continue after Socrates the man dies. And although as a Christian, Pascal denies that “a simply theoretical life” is anything more than “an illusion of pride,” his “wager” shows that he retains the Socratic insistence on the attainability of eternity, an even greater eternity than the questionable, self-questioning eternity of philosophic life. Since God either is or is not, and “reason cannot decide” which, “you must wager,” since not-wagering is itself a wager, a wager “that God is not.” The only reasonable wager is to bet that God is, inasmuch as if you’re right you win big or at worst lose nothing and if you lose you lose big. Cheerful Socrates, Pascal sees, “ignores the full range of possibilities,” ignores the possibility of an afterlife that is “infinitely unhappy.” 

Montaigne also chooses, according to his own ineluctable natural form. (Calvin would call this “predestination,” except that Montaigne does not think that an omnipotent and all-wise God planned it. If he did meet God in the afterlife, he would simply claim his sin was venial, impossible for him not to commit.) Montaigne proposes a third kind of life, a “natural” life “which does not know the fear of death because death does not even come to its awareness,” rather as a peasant who has never been preached to might think, or as an animal thinks, having no “faculty of imagining or inferring death.” That is, he opposes the fear of death neither by reasoning nor by faithfulness but by “experience.” In life, we only have analogies with death: injury, old age (a sort of gradual, creeping death), and unconsciousness (Montaigne once fell off his horse and hit his head, even as Rousseau got knocked unconscious by a Great Dane). Such bouleversements never change your “natural form.” Unconsciousness, for example, only renders us entirely passive, whereas to “convert,” to turn the soul around to philosophy or to religion requires activity. Montaigne “tells us that he has not been the witness of any conversion that seemed real or effective to him.” Converts “forget that they have a master form that will always end by prevailing.” They will always revert to what they are, passively, by nature and not by choice. To be sure, “there is an enjoyment on the plane of humanity which requires, as such, effort, attention, vigilance,” a “voluntary undoing of human ties, which are necessarily bonds of anxiety.” Contra Aristotle, there is “a science of the individual,” a “new science, the science of the subject.” But it teaches that passivity, not activity, is at the core of each of us, that we may therefore safely await death as life’s inevitable finale. On the deepest level of human life, you can indeed, must indeed, ‘not choose.’ The man on horseback commands; in falling off his horse, Montaigne relinquished command, relinquished the kind of active reason that commands.

As Montaigne has already remarked, judgment often finds itself impeded. Manent turns in Part Three to “The Mysteries of Custom,” beginning with his fifth, central chapter, “A New World.” Most immediately, the New World for Montaigne’s Europeans was the Americas, discovered by modern Europeans only recently. If we moderns now “distrust the great pagan actions, as well as Christian repentance, preferring to “maintain ourselves on the plane of humanity,” “what would a humanity that was neither pagan nor Christian look like, or resemble?” On the one hand, it is a humane humanity, guided by each individual’s introspection. But it is also a humanity that knows the results not only of introspection but of exploration, not only of passivity but of activity that has brought new knowledge to light, knowledge unknown to the ancient philosophers and even to the Romans and to the Christians who took over their supposedly universal empire. The philosophic and religious ‘idealisms’ he has criticized based their generalizations on a too-narrow set of observations, observations confined to the customs of Europe, parts of Asia and of Africa. As a result, their universalisms weren’t really universal. And even within the small ‘universe’ of Europe, they had not seen some of the most malign effects of customs.

Since pagan antiquity and the time in which Christ and His Apostles lived, Christendom has seen horrific religio-political wars,” bringing on “an experience of human vices, in particular of cruelty and dissimulation, an experience of the corrupting and murderous power of opinion carried away by presumption” of which both pagans and the early Christians were blissfully ignorant. This experience has “directly attacked the credibility of the Christian religion,” the religion of love and peace. And with the discovery and conquest of the New World, Europeans have discovered a fruitful, kind nature, a nature better even than the Atlantis conceived by Plato. Montaigne describes this New World in one of his most famous chapters, “Of Cannibals.” In the New World, no one needs to desire because all the things human beings need are within his easy grasp, plucked from nature like a juicy mango from a low-hanging branch. There is nothing much to do, to make or organize: no arts, sciences, families, social groups, political organizations. Not only does this defy the teachings of philosophers, it obviates philosophy itself, the highest desire of them all, the desire to find wisdom. “What will later be called historical reality, or historical facts, here begin to be experienced as being ‘stronger’ than philosophy, as henceforth being superior to it in authority, as finally constituting the highest authority, the sole incontestable.” As for human nature, what politics, what logos, O Aristotle? The people of the New World “do not address one another to deliberate, judge, or command”; they only hunt or fish or dance. Nor do they pray. As Montaigne writes, “their whole ethical science contains only these two articles: resoluteness in war and affection for their wives.” Wars arise not out of greed (they already have all the material goods they want) but honor. They would be Spartan timocrats, except that they exhibit none of the underlying cupidity and lubricity of the Spartans, no erotic jealousy. In Platonic terms, the cannibals are governed by thumos, a thumos that does not need to be governed in its turn. But why recur to Platonic terms? In the New World, there is only this one regime, not the several posited by political philosophers; and to say that there is only one regime is tantamount to saying there is no regime, no reason for political classification and comparison, and therefore no such thing as a field of ‘comparative politics.’ Such persons “do not need to be governed by the word in the city,” as there is no city, no civitas, but only families. “The life of the cannibals never becomes greater than itself,” with families becoming tribes, tribes becoming poleis, as in Aristotle’s account. “It escapes this marvelous yet dangerous transformation because it is a life essentially without speech.” 

Montaigne never supposes that he as an individual, or Europeans in their states, can imitate the cannibals. Admiration, yes, but imitation would only lead to further perversities, even as the imitatio Christi has only led to the worst violence and hatred. Nor can Machiavelli’s canny orchestration of violence and hatred save us. Rather, attend to Montaigne’s word, not those of God or of earlier, mistaken men, who did not understand themselves because they hadn’t adequately looked into themselves. His Essays “will inventory the infinite diversity of the world,” now known in its entirety for the first time, “and judge all things” according to the new science of the self, supplemented by the new discoveries of the New World and the new discoveries of political modernity. 

That is, reason has sought to command, very prematurely at best. What is needed, and what already exists, is “commanded reason” instead of the commanding sort. Custom commands, “gentle as a newborn calf” in its ‘soft power’ over human minds, “harsh like a furious tyrant” when openly flouted (as philosophers, so notably Socrates, have learned by experience, not by theorizing). “The installation of custom is the taking power of a tyrant.” Indeed, custom “can do more than the most furious tyrant” because “it has power even over our senses, thus the way the world appears to us,” as well as over our souls in matters great and small. “It is under the unifying pressure of custom that the world appears to us as such, as the world and our world.” In a sense, then “all customs are equally rational” in that there is always some reason for them; people “can give reasons for all their usages.” But the customs themselves are not determined by reason; “reason is always at work, but it never commands.” Customs make regimes, not the other way around. In this, Montaigne departs sharply from classical political philosophy. “In the immense list of customs that he draws up, political institutions are pretty much lost in the midst of the familial and sexual mores that give the list its color and savor and the customs concerning so-called indifferent things.” This is why Montaigne writes, “Nations brought up to liberty and to ruling themselves consider any other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature,” even as “those who are accustomed to monarchy do the same.” [4] And since custom is tyrannical and universal, “tyranny is customary to man”; “the trait of human nature that renders him malleable by custom renders him docile to tyranny.” Republican liberty comes about by accident, “an exception to the tyranny of custom that is inseparably the custom of tyranny.” Human nature is ambivalent, attracted at once to liberty and to servitude, or, as Machiavelli has it, the desire for liberty becomes the desire for domination, once liberty has been won—and quite possibly, all along. What can make republican liberty no longer an accident, as it was in antiquity, or a nonentity, as it was in almost all of modern Europe? Montesquieu “began to organize his Essays” even as his friend La Boétie wrote his direct “appeal to an immense and impossible action.” 

Montaigne judges that effective action must be indirect, that the call to it must not be clarion. “Liberation from the yoke of custom will be principally, if not exclusively interior,” contained first within his own mind but then, through a long, subtly argued book, literature read in private, concerned in large measure to discussion of private customs, customs regulating sexual and familial moeurs, “he formulates his most pressing appeal to shake off the yoke of custom.” On his side, he finds the “tension between the natural docility of human beings vis-à-vis custom and the need or natural movement of the human mind which cannot rest until it finally finds a reason or a valid foundation.” It is by an appeal to the restlessness of reason that he will quietly weaken that natural docility, while carefully avoiding the philosophers’ tendency to put reason at the service of command, to become philosopher-kings or lawgivers. He prefers to relegate politics, government, to a position subordinate to civil society, to customs. And he may well think that customs do in fact predominate, over government and its laws; for Montaigne, political science is no architectonic art, as it is for Aristotle. It is more effective to insinuate oneself into the customs of men, as the customs both rule and prove vulnerable to change, thanks to human docility and restlessness.

Montaigne marshals his astonishing array of diverse customs from around the world, but especially from the new world, initially to show that self-assured Europeans are provincials, that everyone everywhere is a provincial. Diversity, not unity, characterizes the human ways of life. In our language, Montaigne undertakes to ‘relativize’ custom, the convictions custom has ingrained in the men and women of Christendom. But he won’t leave it at that, in the manner of today’s ‘social science.’ While anticipating what Manent calls “the nonpolitical sciences of man,” Montaigne seeks rule, albeit a new sort of rule. The Romans commanded, persecuting Christians; Christians worked beneath the Roman monarchic regime, but also issued commands and eventually won political power, continuing to command but now with physical force. Montaigne will imitate the early Christians in working beneath the modern monarchies, but he will refrain from commanding. He has no pulpit to pound and wants none.

The central chapter of the Essays, titled “Of Vain Subtleties,” acknowledges the weaknesses of such indirection while vindicating its strength by considering “the relationship of the society in which he lives and its customs.” He identifies three “conditions” of human beings: the ignorant, the sages, and those he calls the “half breeds.” Each relates to custom in a way different from the others. Peasants are ignorant, simply. “Lacking curiosity and instruction, they ‘believe simply and live under the laws,’ in reverence and obedience” and they patiently endure what accident, which they take to be God’s rewards and punishments; consequently, they make good Christians, Montaigne notes. The sages, theological scholars, study Scripture assiduously, but their vast learning ends in another sort of ignorance, “the mysterious and divine secret of our Ecclesiastical polity.” They, too, resign themselves to God’s mysterious ‘ways,’ His regime. (The ancient philosophers do this, too, but their notion of the divine is nature.) “Between the two extremes,” there are the men of the “middle condition,” who “perceive evils, feel them, and cannot endure them.” While they “despise the ignorance and incuriosity of simple minds who make such good Christians,” they have not achieved the serene, contemplative religious conviction of the sages. The restlessness of these half-breed “in understandable, but dangerous” because they would overthrow evils without thinking things through. They “trouble the world” as “irritable and clever members of society who feel very vividly the ills that affect them and society,” as “their quick but superficial minds quickly grasp the weak points in reigning opinions and customs.” They form a party or faction dedicated to reform, “the party of critique.” Because they “have reason on their side,” they may well win their battle, but then what? “How, by mere critique, the simple negation of custom, can one ever arrive at a point of view from which reason can command,” “ever order a human association worthy of being desired for itself”? The answer is, it can’t. The party of critique yields fermentation, “permanent critique and reform”; having overthrown the natural law esteemed in European tradition, long-established customed, it will take historical law as the basis for command in an “effort to bring the interminable process of commanded reason, of weak reason, of critical reason, under the legitimate power of commanding reason, strong reason, reason that is not only critical but in some way affirmative, capable again of discerning and naming its good and its end.”

Montaigne hardly intends to replace one form of dogmatism with another. “In this chapter, which, I repeat, is at the exact center of the entire work, Montaigne establishes with great precision the place that he occupies, or that he gives himself, in this world of custom divided according to the three ‘conditions’ of men.” He classifies himself among the half breeds, but as one who has learned “not to involve himself in any reform whatsoever.” He remains nonchalant, unheated by reforming zeal. He sticks, seemingly, to ordering his own life, “to order it humanly,” to “give oneself a custom.” At the same time, he invites his readers to think about doing that, too, to find and live according to their own natural forms. “If Montaigne wanted to teach, the Essays would teach us the paradoxical art of giving us as a form of life a ‘pliable and supple’ custom, of imitating in ourselves the diversity of human customs, of actively appropriating the plasticity of nature, and finally of finding the form of our life in the detachment from all form.” This is “life without law,” Manent’s title for his Fourth Part and for the book itself.

The ancient philosophers, understanding nature as idea or form, a coherent, rational structure, sought to con-form themselves to it. Montaigne, who denies their physics and metaphysics “aims to install himself in passage, or modification,” moving “from the received form to the detachment from all form.” He endorses Socratic eroticism but eschews its putative end, “the beautiful or the noble.” This might be a feasible project for one’s private life, but it “cannot guide or regulate collective life,” which “must necessarily take on and maintain a form” preserved by “the force of law.” “The truth of things” is elusive, but laws must “ignore uncertainty and doubt.” “The treatment of political law presents a quite particular difficulty for Montaigne.” 

Plato met this problem with his teaching on the noble lie, the concoction of such myths as autochthony, the story that the people of the city sprang from the very ground on which the city lies. [5] That’s not for Montaigne. Indeed, “we have difficulty imagining what the city” organized in accordance with the obedience to the laws that he commends “would look like,” since he does not aim at legislating. In following Montaigne, Europeans have held reason “to be incapable of discerning the human good, the good that counts for man a man.” With Montaigne, they want to avoid war, especially civil war, and especially civil war animated by uncompromisable religious convictions. But “how is one to obey for every long a law that no longer claims to be just” in a world that has “no criterion for determining with a minimum of assurance if the law is just or unjust”?

“Modern political philosophy, however, will find a way out.” That way is consent. “The just order, or the order of the only possible justice, is an order in which we ourselves establish the law a law, we ourselves posit the law as law.” Such law “is valid independently of every objective or rational criterion of justice,” perhaps because our consent expresses the “natural form” of each individual who partners in what later would be called the ‘social contract.’ Such a law “will not command, properly speaking, thus separating itself from the ancient law.” We now will obey a law that obeys us, obeys “the rights of man” in “representative government.” “The law obeys the without-law.” Our law oversees “a life without law,” a life of “free movement”—movement being what life and all of nature actually do. “The new law aims to produce the conditions of free movement,” the condition now called liberalism, liberty-ism. “The without-reason and with-law which law and reason obey ultimately reside in the rights of the individual,” which “belong to the individual before he has begun to speak or to establish any relationship whatsoever.” Manent thinks Montaigne would be “very surprised” at this outcome, but it evidently derives the new ‘natural right’ from his claim about each individual’s ineluctable “natural form.”

The question of the basis of right is the question that bedevils Montaigne’s Europe. Manent concludes his book with an exegesis of Montaigne’s longest essay, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” A Thomist, Sebond had given a copy of his book, Theoligia naturalis, to Montaigne’s father during the time when Luther’s innovations were spreading. Sebond intended his book to act as an antidote to those innovations. In an unusually bold display of frankness, Montaigne points to what Machiavelli would call the effectual truth of religiosity in Europe. As Manent paraphrases him, “We do not actually believe…we do not have the faith, we do not adhere to God by faith.” By your works you shall know them, and the supposed Christians of today exhibit little justice, charity, or goodness. We rather live in “a human world in which the specifically religious motives, in appearance omnipresent and all-powerful, are in reality impotent, and, as it were, nonexistent” evidence of “a truth of the human condition in which religion does not have an intrinsic content or density; only being a mode or mask of natural passions.” And as for rationality, it isn’t much stronger in humans than in animals, and indeed “there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man.” Do not then preen yourselves, my fellows, on either your piety or your rationality. In so arguing, “Montaigne deprives us of any motive, and forestalls all attempts, to confuse man with the divine,” whether it is the God or gods of the religions or the grand nature envisioned by the philosophers.

The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” nonetheless resembles Plato’s Apology in one way: it defends philosophy. But it does so on very different grounds than those on which Plato’s Socrates stands. Montaigne presents “the history of philosophy, but a history that for him is living and alive, because the teachings that he going to consider are in his eyes always actual possibilities of the soul.” He identifies three “types” of philosophy. First, there are the philosophers “who thought they found the truth”—Aristotelians, Epicureans, Stoics. There are the Academics, such Platonists as Carneades, “who despaired of finding it,” taking Socrates’ protestation that he knows only that he does not know to the opposite extreme from those they regarded as dogmatists. And there were the Skeptics, most notably Pyrrho, who argue that we cannot even know that we do not know, philosophers “who simply suspend all judgment,” disputing mildly, contradicting others gently, and taking no offense when contradicted. Montaigne sides with the Pyrrhonists. In a sudden show of religiosity, Montaigne describes the right-minded, Pyrrhonist philosopher as “a blank tablet prepared to take from the finger of God such forms as he shall be pleased to engrave on it.” One notices that not only did this give John Locke his ruling metaphor for the human mind as such, but that the referent to “he” could refer to God or the Pyrrhonist. Montaigne then proceeds to rescue some of the dogmatists and Academics, whom he suspects of advancing their doctrines in order to “dissimulate their genuine thought.” “I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pythagoras gave us their Atoms, their Ideas, and their Numbers as good coin of the realm”; they only wrote such things “for the needs of society,” “so as not to breed disorder in people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their country.” As Manent puts it, “The divergences between the schools bear les upon the truth than on utility.” 

Turning again to Christianity, Montaigne presents the God of the Bible as anything but jealous. He cites the controversial contemporary poet Pierre de Ronsard, who praises not so much the Son but the sun, which shines its light on everyone, not only on the chosen. This veers strongly in the direction of paganism, “a religion that worships the impartial planets, the moon and the sun, which are no respecters of persons, in particular treating equally the faithful of the three revealed religions.” Nor is this enough, as he goes on to indicate “what is perhaps a contradiction, and in any case a difficulty, in the religious attitude as such,” which “posits and at the same time cancels an infinite distance between the human condition and the divine condition,” elevating divinity “above all human things” yet “provid[ing] access to it.” In effect, this “bring[s] the divine back into the circle of human interests, sometimes the most degrading human interests,” attributing human passions to the divine—notably jealousy and love—in what Montaigne calls “a marvelous intoxication of the human understanding.” Such an intoxication deranges our minds, making them believe that the Christian promises of life after death, which includes a radical “reform and change” of what Montaigne has identified as the “natural form” of each individual, would make us no longer ourselves. And as to the rewards of Heaven and the punishments of Hell promised by many religions, the “rewards are unjust, because the good actions are produced by the gods,” not by actual human power, and “the punishments are unjust, because it was in the power of the gods to prevent bad actions.” Moreover, how can either eternal reward or punishment be considered proportionate in response to “so short a life” as is allotted to man? Finally, regarding Christianity itself, “the redemption of the guilty by the innocent is essentially contrary to justice,” a remark that speaks to “the very center of Christianity,” which Montaigne places “in the middle of the ‘Apology.'” He tops it all off by quoting Lucretius, no friend of religion, who exclaims, “So many grievous crimes religion has inspired!” In sum, “‘physics’ excludes the rewards and punishments of another life; moral doctrine excludes redemption and penance.” 

For all his critique of reason, in his arguments against religion “Montaigne does not cease to positively invoke the strength of reason.” Reason’s strength, however, shows itself in Pyrrhonian criticism, not in establishing positive doctrines. There are, for example, no “parts” of the soul, as adumbrated in Plato’s Republic, only “movements of the soul” which his Socrates presents as if they were parts. If, as he writes, “My morals are natural,” unformed by doctrines religious or philosophic, then they must undulate; even his status as a philosopher was “unpremeditated and accidental.” And that, of course, is his own “apology” or defense: Can you blame a man for something not only unplanned but not even the product of negligence? Philosophy happened to embody itself “in the particularity, the individuality, of Montaigne.” Undulating nature acts a bit like the grace of God, but without God’s intentionality. What Manent calls “the luminous secret of the Essays” may be seen in his refusal to “present his particular life to us so that we would feel authorized to do the same after him; he gives us the touchstone for all the essays that man can make of his faculties,” philosophy being only one among many. 

It is only in this latter sense that Montaigne commends himself to our emulation. I am myself, he confesses to us; imitate me not by imitating me but by recognizing your own “natural form” and living in concord with it, and with the natural forms of others. Montaigne announces that his period of gestation in his mother’s womb lasted eleven months. Manent comments, “I will not decide if he is speaking in good faith or, if he is not, why. Perhaps this miraculous gestation announced the birth of a nature without parallel.” Hence Manent’s division of his book in thirty-three sections, the age attained by Jesus? If so, Montaigne is not necessarily an anti-Christ, but he surely is an un-Christ. Christ Himself says, “He who is not with Me is against me.” Montaigne replies, ‘Well, yes and no.’ He surely seeks no Christlike martyrdom, writing, “It is a great rashness to ruin yourself in order to ruin another.” Does that include ruining Satan? (It surely includes Satan’s own actions.) And what if you ruin yourself to save another, even to save all others? Montaigne evidently entertains no such ambition for himself. Montaigne “never departs from his master form.” In so behaving, he writes “the most Machiavellian passage in the Essays, one in which he ascribes repentance and penitence to “laxity of soul,” a laxity “which makes us see evils as God’s punishments, and which makes us docile to the magistrate.”

Manent permits himself to doubt that Montaignian life without law is so genuinely human, or humane, as the philosopher supposes. Life without law, life without shame, the lives of the eminent philosophers as portrayed by Diogenes Laertius, still “makes us blush.” “Despite rather systematic efforts,” up to and including our own time, “we have not arrived at banishing all modesty or shame.” If experience is to be our guide, as Montaigne urges, “our experience rather confirms Augustine’s judgments” of those philosophers, not Montaigne’s judgments. Manent concludes more sympathetically regarding Montaigne’s warnings against “the illusion of governing ourselves and of commanding all of nature and even being,” although he may very well take that to be a vindication of divinity, not of the individual’s “natural form.”

 

Notes

1. He was preceded in a detailed and comprehensive way by David L. Schaefer: The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
2. In the Bible, God’s Word speaks his Creation into existence. At very least, Montaigne implies that human beings are not God.
3. See “An Age of Inflation,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
4. Notice that Montaigne accepts Machiavelli’s much-simplified regime classification: two regimes, monarchies/principalities and republics, not (for example) the five regimes described by Plato in the Republic or the six described by Aristotle in the Politics. That is why he refers to the “aristocratic republic” as distinguished from the “democratic republic”; instead of being distinct regimes, they are only subdivisions of one regime. Notice also that the one dichotomous regime division in Aristotle is the division between good and bad regimes, a distinction Montaigne deprecates.
5. Such is the actual claim made today by the Lakota Sioux, who claim rightful rule over the Black Hills of South Dakota (which they in fact conquered from previous occupiers) on exactly this basis. Platonism is not dead!