Michael Platt: Mighty Opposites: Machiavelli and Shakespeare Match Wits. Privately published, 2021. First published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy (Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2022).

 

What if playwrights Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and William Shakespeare (1564-161) had met, corresponded, even conversed, thanks to the Florentine’s acquisition of the Makropulos Elixir, mixed by the court alchemist of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II—a potion imagined by still another playwright, Karel Capek (1890-1938), granting those who drink it a long-extended life? And what if Shakespeare wrote an unfinished dialogue based on the encounter, completed by his fellow player and trusted friend Nicholas Tooley? (After all, did not a promising young Plato scholar named Seth Benardete once muse, “Shakespeare could have written dialogues,” to the delight of his teacher, Leo Strauss?) Michael Platt has imagined it so, bringing together “the founder of modern political philosophy” with “the greatest modern poet” in a book animated by the question, can there be a Christian prince?”

The year is 1598. Machiavelli is secretary of state for the “Right, Re-Risen, Roman Republic,” having inspired the unification of northern Italy under a regime that has built itself into a naval power in the Mediterranean. He is on a diplomatic mission in England, perhaps to counter Spain, which still controls the Kingdom of Naples. Always looking to enlist “new captains in his unarmed army,” he also seeks an alliance with Shakespeare, whose writings surpass Machiavelli’s own works (Machiavelli admits to himself) in beauty. “In spiritual warfare nothing is more effectual,” and in his declared war on the regnant form of spirituality, Christianity, “the greatest calumny on life,” Machiavelli can use all the allies he can get. Having read Shakespeare’s Roman plays, he detects, or supposes he detects, a potential officer.

This is to say that Platt indicates the partial fulfillment of Machiavelli’s intention in a sort of afterlife made possible not by God but by medicine, an intention suggested in his books: in place of the risen Christ, the Galilean who defeated the Roman emperors, the Roman res publica will be resurrected, transfigured by the spirit of ‘the prince’—that is to say, the spirit of Machiavelli himself, who is no Cicero, no ‘ancient’ Roman.

Shakespeare replies to Machiavelli’s self-written letter of introduction, pleased with the Florentine’s flattering but true observation that Shakespeare writes both tragedy and comedy. He invites Machiavelli to attend performances of his Richard III and his three plays on Henry VI. He also recommends that Machiavelli read and reread them.

In due course, Machiavelli replies, observing that the English plays complement the Roman plays, with their shared themes of honor and calumny, the violence of political founding, and civil disorder. He is quick to spot a new source of controversy in modern England, “the new division of Christianity” between Catholics and Protestants. He criticizes monarchic regimes because they are dynastic: since “most families are awful to grow up in,” “why give rule of public things to a family,” which only “magnifies vices more than virtues”? It may be that he brings these themes together, with an eye on the ‘family’ seen in the Trinity. “I do see, howbeit faintly, the coming of a better regime,” as the English people exhibit the capacity to discern virtue in their rulers and demand justice when those rulers commit crimes. “Would that their common sense were instituted in a stronger Commons, and if a ruling circle sprang up in it.”

Shakespeare concurs with some of this. “How could I not study disorder? After all, there is so much of it. And it is always waiting to rush in. All it takes is one generation to lose the good times, and then slide on to worse,” although “in the worst of times, when all seems lost, a rebound occurs,” often beginning, as Machiavelli hopes, “with the people” As to Shakespeare’s downplaying of Parliament, he calls Machiavelli’s attention to the theater in which he puts on his plays. It “give[s] the audience the experience of an ideal Parliament in eternal session, in which all the important features of a political situation, together with their connection to everything above and below politics are brought into speech, so that deliberation about the nation, sometimes even about the world, goes on in the mind of the audience, as it should in Parliament, in the Privy Council, in the Monarch, and in the soul of every English man facing his public choices”—more than only a Parliament but a mixed regime, consisting of both aristocrats and commoners, “all drawn together in our Theatre, and by my theatre, all made into one audience, all laughing, weeping, trembling, cheering together, and accordingly understanding,” in what is now nearly a modern commercial ‘nation-state.’ He concludes by wondering if, even with a commercial way of life, men “can live together who do not worship together, as Jew and Christian do not, or at least look up to something beautiful and loft together?” Where Machiavelli envied the beauty of Shakespeare’s literary style, his art, Shakespeare himself considers beauty in nature, and perhaps in God.

In their next exchange of letters, Machiavelli begins by condemning the conspicuously Christian Henry VI, who “wishes to be loved not feared” and is rewarded only with contempt. Indeed, on further consideration, Machiavelli concludes that Henry wants to be loved only by God, remaining indifferent to the love, the hate, and even the contempt of his fellow men, a ruler who “puts himself above politics” even to the extent of restoring titles and estates to his dynastic enemy, Richard Plantagenet. Unfitted for war, Henry never played sports, practiced with weapons, or learned horsemanship; for Machiavelli, ‘horse’ means warfare and, given Richard’s famous battlefield cry, “My kingdom for a horse!”—a line that will reappear for further discussion later—Machiavelli is rehearsing his theme from The Prince that princes of war must replace princes of peace. With “reviling relish,” Machiavelli lists Henry’s many “sins of political omission,” from his failure to defend his (few) political friends (especially his failure to protect his Lord Protector, Duke Humphrey) to his failure as a royal husband to punish his foreign-born queen for her infidelity. “All these omissions add up to omitting to rule,” to leaving rule of human things to the wisdom and power of God and His providence.

Shakespeare largely concurs with this analysis, while cautioning against taking it too far. “I have qualified our contempt” for Henry. He may not know horses, “but surprise, he knows hawking,” a sport that figures in his comedy the Taming of the Shrew, in which “my hawker Petruchio gentles a mature wild female, named Kate, and with the same means” a falconer would use, “deprivation of sleep and meat.” Moreover, Henry “never had the benefit of a father,” only “the image of his great father,” Henry V—in “everyone’s mind for comparison”—and a “nefarious uncle,” the Duke of Bedford, as his tutor. The “ever-widening span” between young Henry’s “sight and his might makes him something like a Fool in court,” seeing and saying things impermissible to others but unable to act, “or even to take care of himself.” Rulers do need toughness, since “not all the anointment in Christendom can change a soul never born to rule.” But Henry does have compassion for his people, and this is what leads to his “one political success,” his quelling of a popular rebellion “through clemency and through the recollection of his father.” Shakespeare adds, tellingly, “No wonder you missed it; clemency is not a trick of the fox.” More, we see that while Machiavelli blames Henry’s incapacity on Christianity, Shakespeare attributes that incapacity to the king’s nature. This allows Shakespeare to judge him with clemency, as Machiavelli does not and will not.

That last rapier thrust induces Machiavelli to pull back, offering a qualification of his own. “Not that too much vice is virtuous,” he cautions, criticizing Henry’s queen, Margaret, for her excessive “spirit of revenge.” After all, “murder must have a purpose,” a political purpose; “she is all fury, no cunning.” But here, too, Shakespeare points to a certain subtlety Machiavelli overlooks. Margaret is “not all revenge.” When Henry banishes her lover, “we see some tenderness in her, however adulterous,” and when her son is stabbed in front of her, “we feel as she feels,” never having “expected to suffer with her.” “Often that happens in my works. Suddenly someone who could have hardened into a profile, even a cartoon, shows another side or feature, or a downright about-face. As you get to know human beings that happens. As you get to know yourself, that happens.” Platt follows Shakespeare’s lead here, even as he has Shakespeare deliver that lesson; just when it seemed that the exchange between the two men might turn into a simple battle of wits, he has Shakespeare offer the childless older man some fatherly advice.

There is a larger moral and political problem that Machiavelli also does not see. If Duke Humphrey attempted to overthrow Henry, “as his wife and you urge,” he would no longer be himself, no longer “the man we rightly…think most fit of all the magnates to be a king.” That is, “he would lose his eligibility in our eyes, and as important, his worthiness in his own eyes.” As Plato’s Socrates argues, “the same virtue that makes a man best for an office excludes him”; the one “most worthy to rule, the philosopher, is least interested in doing so.” A ruler by the apparently natural but actually conventional right of heredity may therefore be preferable to the ruler by the natural right of virtue. After all, so many persons suppose themselves naturally fitter to rule than whoever it is that wears the crown. To make partly invisible, counterfeitable virtue the criterion for ruling in practice would be to invite endless civil disorder. Better that the wise man advise the king, serve as Lord Protector, guarding him against such enemies as Humphrey’s ambitious wife and the ever-conniving Cardinal Winchester. “It is ambition within bound and in service of the good that is to be lauded, not the over-reaching acquisitiveness you urge in recommending Humphrey seize the Crown, or the infinity you desire. That way madness in the soul lies, and chaos in the state.”

After Richard Plantagenet’s son Edward kills Henry’s capable son, also named Edward, on the battlefield, and his ally Gloucester murders Henry (by then Edward’s prisoner in the Tower of London), England is left with a king whose sexual desires lead him into an injudicious marriage. Machiavelli sniffs, “The lust of Edward IV unfitted him to be a prince.” More politic choices had been available. Upon reading this, Shakespeare thinks, “Though in your Prince you warn not to touch the women, in your plays you teach every man to ‘touch’ all he can.” For you, Machiavelli, “neither fortune nor woman can resist man,” but in the world you envision there can be no stable families to uphold the city. “Families start with sight, not touch, with the ardent looks of the young, of Romeo and Juliet.” “Machiavelli in love, impossible.” And so Machiavelli makes the first genuinely political relationship, the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, also impossible. If Machiavelli were ever to watch Romeo and Juliet, “I’m afraid he’d set himself to teach one lover to murder the other, and thus effectually prove that love does no, cannot exist, just as he would prove ideal republics are no guides to better states, and even no measure of extant ones.”

Shakespeare keeps most of these thoughts to himself. In his answering letter, he contents himself with making a different remark, one aimed at moderating his correspondent’s claims. “One consequence of the free will my characters manage to exercise…is that others cannot predict it; even the sagacity of the sage is limited by that reality; that’s a hard fact those who are proud of penetrating hard things do not like to acknowledge.” The news of his Lord Protector’s death first makes King Henry faint. But then his realization of his unintentional responsibility for that death “fills him, for once, with spirit,” a possibility neither his enemies nor the play’s audience anticipate. “My characters are always doing something a bit ‘out of character,’ very much like the men and women I know, like myself.” His point to Machiavelli: conscience does not invariably make cowards of us all. Sometimes it makes some of us courageous. “A sense of guilt is not always a disadvantage, and its absence not always an advantage.” Equally, the attempt to conquer fate, Fortuna, to satisfy an unlimited desire to acquire by somehow getting ‘behind’ one’s character, manipulating it, ‘using’ one’s virtues and vices, makes too much of freedom. Machiavelli, how well do you know yourself? How well do you know other men, whom you are so sure you see right through? And how well do you know Fortuna, whom you expect to master?

Shakespeare thus agrees that Henry and Edward are no fit kings, although for different reasons. What of the tyrant who succeeds them, Edward’s younger brother, Richard III? Machiavelli applauds. “In these Histories so far, I most esteem this man most,” he exclaims, with redundant emphasis. “I positively exult in Richard’s polite employment of Christian scripture and sentiments,” seen in his seduction of Lady Anne, widow of Edward’s son, “right beside her husband’s coffin,” no less. Machiavelli delights in Richard’s “witty expression” of his prideful contempt for his inferiors, phrases Shakespeare turns that are even better than his own clever formulations in The Prince.  Still, he faults Richard for being a bit too open in his blasphemies, a mistake symptomatic of an overall lack of prudence. What is more, “other than gaining the crown, he has no purpose, no plan.” In this, his anti-Christian stance apes the Christian’s inclination to gaze at the lilies of the field, which neither toil nor spin because the joys of the day suffice to him who expects still greater, permanent joys in eternity, needing no plan for that future time, already prepared for him by his Savior. By contrast, Machiavelli does have a plan. While hoping to rid the world of the ‘moderns’ or Christians while radically revising the teachings of the ‘ancients,’ Machiavelli himself would take care to salvage pieces of ancient wisdom, including prudential wisdom, even as he directs them to purposes the ancients did not understand.

Shakespeare takes up the theme of the ancients—specifically, the Romans. “Between us, I do not see Rome, either republic or empire, as wholly superior to our modern Christendom.” Because “the deepest desire of a Roman is to become a statue of himself,” Rome undertook the monumental task of world conquest. Having achieved this, Julius Caesar did indeed “achieve a statuesque immortality.” But “in becoming a god” he lost his humanity. (As Christians would add, a statue-god is an idol, no real god.) To “despise human life” leads to a reduction of the man to a slab of marble or, if still living, a beast. Caesar’s idolatrous divinity contrasts with Christ’s everlasting life, whereby God became human, died, but continued to live and even to rule. Why is this not the superior ideal?

Ideal it may be, but is it true? Machiavelli replies that the reasoning behind the Earl of Warwick’s autopsy of Duke Humphrey, proving that the Lord Protector was murdered (2 Henry VI 3.2.168ff.) should be extended to consideration of claims based on “the body of Christ allegedly crucified and allegedly risen from the dead.” Christians point to miraculous stigmata on their hands, where painters depict nails driven into Christ’s hands, attaching Him to the Cross. But “only nails through the wrists will hold a body to a cross—unless you believe in miracles. So much for all later stigmata! I and Leonardo know if anatomy were queen of the sciences there would be no theology.” Morally, too, Christianity hangs on dubious assumptions. “What a terrible idea, of a God who would punish whole innocent generations for the deeds of their grandfathers, but this God does not exist.” Fortuna, on the other hand, “hard but not interested in retribution,” shows that men “need princes not saviors,” as “men punish themselves” with their crimes of ignorance and the mental weakness induced by false religion. Shakespeare, Machiavelli confidently or perhaps wishfully asserts, rightly teaches the English to “abhor infamy, dare to reason, and be a man.”

“You say things that other men do not say, only do,” Shakespeare observes. Yet what you say is only “part of knowledge.” “Sometimes, even in politics, men do good things, and sometimes, if rarely, they aspire, even in political life, to the lofty good above them, and thus deserve to be remembered, as Good Duke Humphrey, a statesman though he failed, should be.” Your Prince amounts to “the unintended exhibition of your noble soul,” inasmuch as “you aspire to lasting glory, but you do not know yourself”; “I see all your desires in strife, the desire to know the truth, the desire to effect something, and the desire to win immortal fame, all there struggling in you.” Reread your own book and if by that “you come to understand yourself, you would soon be able to order yourself.”

As for the way you would order the world, into large, centralized states, this too will lead to self-contradiction. Before Henry VIII and his successful instantiation of your kind of state in England, a rich man gave to a poor man out of charity, a poor man felt gratitude in return. Now, “those taxed to provide will always feel it is too much, and the poor receiving it will feel it is too little”; with such “resentment in both and humiliation of the receiving poor,” will not your strong state weaken?

When Machiavelli pointedly ignores this “challenge to self-examination,” Shakespeare indignantly writes that the teacher of evil lives on, all right, but in the malign effects of his teachings. Scoundrels “will cite your authority for their low crimes, their base betrayals, and even their savage atrocities.” Exercising his own virtue of prudence, however, he decides not to send this letter and rather to wait for a better opportunity to engage Machiavelli at his core, so to speak, “perhaps face to fact, on a visit to Stratford.”

He instead more cautiously writes to “suggest that much escapes you.” In “grasping for the effectual,” you blind yourself to “noble failures, and complain of fortune, yours and Cesare Borgia’s and you do not know who to marry”—a theme of the Odyssey—”and I doubt you know how to die”—a theme of the Iliad. That is, although Machiavelli writes comedies, tragedies and epics remain beyond his reach. And even his most famous comedy, Mandragola, is “devoid of merriment,” more smutty than funny.

One of the things Machiavelli admits has escaped him is the reason why crafty Richard III lost his crown so soon after he took it. Shakespeare explains. Having murdered the two young princes in the Tower, Richard seeks an heir; hence his intention to marry Edward’s widow. He can conceive only of a father who will guard his heir, perpetuate his family on the throne, not one who might risk his son for the good of his country. But this is what his enemy, Lord Stanley, does, “risking [his] own son for the greater good of England,” as “one of those Romans you admire” would do. Richard dies in the battle that ensues.

More profoundly, Richard fails as a man. “Feared not loved you say. Well, the truth is Richard like every man wishes to be loved.” But “he finds he cannot love himself, only fear himself.” He grew up “with everyone around him, including his mother, interpreting his shape”—his hunchback—as “a mark of God and expecting evil of him, until he does too.” Despite his ridicule of Christianity, he “swears by St. Paul five or six times,” a sign of misery beneath the mockery. He “thinks himself unloved by God, brought into existence to do evil, to be God’s scourge and minister, and yet notwithstanding, damned for being so, damned from birth exactly as some Protestants hold omniscient God to providentially rule this world, electing few, damning the many.” You, Machiavelli, “share his hatred of God, but not how it began in him. He thought God hated him. He hated God for that” and came to “hate himself.” In his last battle “he was seeking death, as an end to his wretched life.” Is your life any less miserable, Machiavelli?

But to send such a letter would be to go too far, too soon. Shakespeare “sends only a trim draft of the letter he’s rushed into.”

In his reply, Machiavelli denies that he recognizes no noble failures. “I recognized Cesare Borgia.” “His failure to unite Italy, at least Northern Italy and Rome, and drive out the barbarians, was the noblest failure of modern times.” It is this failure that I now seek to expunge, as secretary of state of the Right, Re-Risen Roman Republic. As for the devotees of the Risen God, “No fools are more senseless than those who burn with Christian piety; they make no distinction between friend and foe, allow themselves to be deceived, and ignore injuries; they shudder at pleasure, actually find it in fasts, vigils, penances, scourges, and ordeals; in short, they shrink form life, and prefer death. This is insane.” I admire your works, Will, because I find “no good Christians in them,” except for Henry VI, “an utter disaster.” “He who would not hurt a fly, destroys a kingdom.” As for Richard, his pangs of conscience do indeed bring him down, and that is precisely the problem. If he hates himself, who is responsible for that other than his God? Or rather himself, for believing in that God. “Christianity is the cause of  a tyranny as never before on earth,” of tyrants who “must hate every well-formed human being and even hate human life itself. No previous tyrants, wicked as their deeds were, ever did so.” The ancients knew nature; the Christians deny it and in that denial ruin everything they touch.

Shakespeare continues to find Machiavelli’s interpretation of his plays too narrow. It is as if Machiavelli were a latter-day Xenophon, but one who never wrote Socratic dialogues. “Xenophon knew Socrates, Xenophon looked up to Socrates. You’re no Xenophon.” If you were, you would see that Richard’s restless night before his last battle, when he is visited in his dreams by the ghosts of all those he’s murdered, amounts to “a Socratic self-examination.” Machiavelli does not imagine “how a poet might oppose tyranny, working from within, getting the tyrant to confess his misery,” as I hope to do “in a play about the Scottish usurper Macbeth.” Steeling himself to murder the king, Macbeth will tell himself, “To do this deed, I must not know myself.” Do you, Machiavelli, in your intention to murder God, really know yourself? “In hating God you are in some danger of hating the good.” If you have concluded from reading Richard III that I therein prove the lethality of Christian belief, wait until you have read my second English history tetralogy, the one in which I portray Henry IV, Henry V, and Falstaff. I send you the manuscripts and I also invite you to “resume our conversation, but face to face, in Stratford.”

Upon receiving the manuscript, Machiavelli is only the more convinced that he needs to enlist “this vivacious English captain to my cause.” Had Henry V “lived only ten years more,” he writes, “his reputation would have been glorified by additional conquests, his realm enlarged, his hold on it firmer, his son better educated, and the prospect of his son’s rule fairer.” Henry’s very statements against my teachings and my disciples merely indicate his adherence to those teachings and his status among my disciples, since “those who declare themselves Machiavels have not understood the first thing about my teaching.” He is very happy to accept Shakespeare’s invitation to dine.

In their dialogue over dinner, speaking of the second Henriad, Machiavelli continues his complaints about Christianity. When Shakespeare observes that Richard II is the only king in his Histories to compare himself to Christ, Machiavelli repeats his criticism of Henry VI: that that is exactly the problem with him. He chose the wrong model. “Christ was no ruler. All he teaches is how to lose and then be pitiful, passionate, and poetical about it.” This is true of Richard, Shakespeare agrees, “but the question who should rule is not as deep or as deeply engaging as how should we die and dying, live”—the question addressed by Jesus in His crucifixion and resurrection. In his attempt to come to terms with that issue, Richard wins and deserves the audience’s sympathy. Having effectively dismissed both Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as myths, and so passionately that he never notices that the question of death remains real even if Jesus is not, Machiavelli ignores Shakespeare’s argument and continues to speak about ruling. In ruling, “only effectual truths yield benefits,” not poetic images. Richard’s belated Christian maunderings leave the English no choice but to side with Henry Bolingbroke, the future Henry IV, who replaces the Plantagenet line with his own.

He does it by what Shakespeare calls “the deliberately accidental murder of Richard,” an act “inseparable from the justice of the monarchy,” even as Elizabeth I’s beheading of Mary Queen of Scots was inseparable from the justice of her monarchy. Although Richard himself posed no threat to the new dynasty, his adherents did. There are “two goods” which must “be held together, justice and peace,” and “two principles that all rulers must keep together, and all monarchs must keep together, namely, inheritance and virtue.” Shakespeare disagrees with Machiavelli in denying that legitimacy and the authority it lends too power serve merely as covering for power, a fraud that veils force. “Some will remember the piteous and yet desirable passing of the Crown” from Richard to Henry “as an impeachment and removal, some will remember it as an abdication that left the throne unoccupied, and others will remember it as a simple gift from one cousin to another but all will remember that Richard did participate in it. And that makes it somewhat legitimate and will somewhat obstruct any later claims of wrongful usurpation. Ceremonies matter. One might even call them effectual.” As for Richard’s murder, whereas Machiavelli considers Henry responsible for it (the new king complained about the former king in front of a courtier who took the complaint as a command issued in the form of a hint), Shakespeare reminds him that Henry does not “admire himself” for his cousin’s death, “as you do him.”

This brings them to the next, great, Henry. They agree that while spirited Hotspur is a lion, sly Falstaff a fox, Prince Hal is both. By (as Shakespeare puts it, in Machiavelli’s phrase) using the lion and the fox, Hal proves himself the true prince. Yet Shakespeare sees virtues rather than virtù in this: “prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice.” That “smells of Socrates,” Machiavelli sneers, the man whose imagining of republics disabled him from founding a real one. “I hope you don’t carry hemlock with you” to our dinner, Shakespeare replies, in mock alarm. Machiavelli zeroes in: Your Henry is not “quite enough of a lion and a fox, he was not cruel enough.” Had he allowed his father to be killed on the battlefield instead of rescuing him, Prince Hal could have been king five years earlier, “started for France five years earlier,” and then, having conquered and absorbed it, set out for Italy, uniting Europe and ruining the papacy for good.

No, Shakespeare says, “I can hear” Henry V replying to such a suggestion: “What, are we turned Turk, that for our advantage we would see our fathers murdered by our committing omission?” Indeed we should, Machiavelli insists (never the one to overlook a cross-cultural borrowing), “for greatness.” No, again, Shakespeare’s Henry answers: “We doubt that greatness comes without some goodness We know that it does not come from such evil.” Seeing his father in deadly peril, he defends him without hesitation, rightly winning his father’s confidence in his loyalty, at least in the aftermath of the moment. Then and subsequently, Prince Hal proves he can “wait to become king,” although his father begins to doubt it. “Son Hal knows his father better than father Henry IV knows him, his own son.” But this makes your second Henry IV play a bit boring, Machiavelli complains. Shakespeare concedes that this is so. The play is about tired old age, undramatic but natural, a condition sons must eventually deal with, as they consider their fathers. Price Hal will not force nature.

Machiavelli (and his true English captain, Francis Bacon) would. They look for physical means of prolonging physical life—Bacon with his experiments involving the refrigeration of chickens, Machiavelli with his Makropulos potion. Machiavelli tempts Shakespeare by offering him a dose, which Shakespeare declines, saying, “Life would not better without death. Truly, it would no longer be life.” Perpetual life is what would be tiresome. Machiavelli seems not to appreciate the implications of his own atheism; he denies the God Who offers eternal life while still yearning for such a life. To Machiavelli’s temptation, Shakespeare effectively offers a counter-temptation: Have the courage of your own conviction, if those really are your convictions.

The dialogue ends with a consideration of Henry V, a man who overcame temptations. Shakespeare cites Henry’s first soliloquy, which begins with the claim, “I know you all”—Falstaff, Poins, and the rest of his drinking buddies (1 Henry IV, I.2.188-209). This is “plain truth not juvenile excuses.” Henry has “learn[ed] nothing from Falstaff”; he spent time with him because he was biding his own time, waiting to enter the public realm with éclat. Indeed, the Marshall of France and Welsh Fluellen “have some inkling of what henry of England is up to.” And Henry knows something even they, even Machiavelli himself, do not: that “the spirit of the men” wins wars, a spirit animated “not so much by their fear of the prince, but their love of him.” To be sure, like founding, war means blood; there will be winners and losers, and that is not simply a matter of power but of the good in the real world, wherein “seeking some good always sacrifices some other.” If “the beautiful, the true and the good seldom coincide,” then Machiavelli’s attempted use of Shakespeare as a means of lending beauty to his ugly (half) truth amounts to a highly unlikely project, even if, perhaps especially if, Shakespeare were to play along with it.

“Yes,” Machiavelli remarks, “we need to talk of good war, not just war.” Henry, Shakespeare explains, wants to retake France not as a means of reuniting the shards of the Roman Empire but to avoid the evil of civil war in England by redirecting the thoughts and actions of England’s restive aristocrats overseas and to render his foot soldiers obedient. Machiavelli claims that, too, is Machiavellian, but Shakespeare rejoins that civil war is an evil greatly to be avoided, and that steadying troops “in the fact of a fearful adversary”—a danger he faces with them—hardly qualifies as cynicism. Neither “poetic and deluded like Richard II,” nor “malicious and deluded like Richard III,” nor “provoked by injustice like his father, nor by love of fame like Hotspur” (nor, one might add, love of sack like Falstaff), and above all not by acquisition, like you, Machiavelli, Henry’s only possible motivation is duty.

In that case, Machiavelli says, “I don’t understand him.” “Not even Socrates might,” Shakespeare suggests, because Socrates associates political life with convention, mere opinion, which potential philosophers ought to put their strength into overcoming in rational ascent from those borrowed lights. “According to Socrates there is no reason for a philosopher to rule,” and no obligation, either. “To become who you are, you had to fight all opinions.” But Henry is no ‘ancient,’ any more than he is a ‘modern’ or Machiavellian. “He is the inheritor of a potent model of nobility, one unknown to the ancients, princes and philosophers, of the highest serving the low, of an immortal who not only seeks the good of mortals, like Prometheus, but who suffers for them, even unto joining them in death.”

Machiavelli does not like the sound of that. It sounds like Christ to him, and Shakespeare readily admits it—with a proto-Nietzschean turn, at that. “Though Christ refused to rule, and even seemed to leave ruling to the Caesars, still he provided a pattern for rulers. Let them be Caesars, but Caesars with something of the soul of suffering Christ.” Ready to sacrifice themselves for the good of their people. Henry is “the greatest man of deeds I can imagine”; “though I love others more, I admire none more than him”—a “great prince, which we are not, and what is more, he was a greater man” superior to me not in writing, in wit, or in thinking but in the “single-minded active pursuit of the good.”

Shakespeare thus denies Machiavelli’s central claim about Christianity, that it unfits men for rule. Shakespeare claims instead that Christianity can make politics better and politicians more effective. Against this, Machiavelli has one last temptation up his antitheological sleeve. “Shakespeare, you are a great prince, but of shadows. You could be one of nations, peoples, and states, indeed of the world.” “No, it is not for me,” Shakespeare quickly answers. It is not my nature. Unlike Henry VI, Shakespeare can choose what to do with his lie. No royal inheritance burdens him. He bears only a natural inheritance, to which he intends to give full scope. He chosen a life of inquiry undertaken through observing men and women and writing plays about them. Many of those persons say not only rue and false things but true things at odds with one another. In this, his plays resemble the Gospel: “Everyone who arrives sure of something will find something to keep him sure,” as Machiavelli has done, but “only by being alert to contrary truths, might you ever later make your way to unity” by “wrest[ling] like Jacob with the angel.” In the Gospel, “Christ himself is responsible for his bounty and the difficulty arising from it,” with some aphorisms saying one thing—it is “harder for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle” to get into heaven—and others saying the opposite—become like a trusting child, and you will be on the way there. Jesus leaves it to His listeners to bring such things together. Jesus poses His own version of the Socratic challenge to undertake philosophizing. To pose such difficulties to his audience is Shakespeare’s vocation, his imitatio Christi.

Shakespeare has withheld something from the manuscript of Henry V he gave Machiavelli to read. It is Henry’s prayer on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, where he prays first to “the God of Battles” to “steel my soldiers’ hearts,” but then to the Lord, asking forgiveness for his father’s part in Richard II’s death (“I have built / Two chantries, where the sad and solemn priests / Sing still for Richard’s soul” (Henry V, 4.1.285-301). Reading this, Machiavelli storms out, “losing forever the chance not only to enjoy lofty things, but from that coign of vantage, come to know all the low things, which he thought he already knew.” 

 

Cicero: On the Republic. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

 

Written around 54 BC, De re publica (literally, ‘On the Public Thing’) presents readers with a dialogue set some seventy-five years earlier, in the aftermath of a factional struggle in Rome between the many who were poor and the few who were rich. In 134 BC, Tiberius Gracchus, tribune of the plebs, ignored the Senate’s role in lawmaking and redistributed land to the poor. When he sought reelection in order to avoid a charge of treason and the incumbent consul refused to stop him from doing so, some senators and their clients killed him. His brother, Gaius Gracchus, would be murdered also, thirteen years later, eight years after the time of Cicero’s dialogue. This consists of six books, two each for one day; no one now can offer a serious interpretation of it because it survives only in mutilated form. There are things to learn here, nonetheless, beginning with Cicero’s preface to Book I.

Tension between families and ‘the public thing’—polis, empire, modern state—occurs because the political community insists on its authority over families, restricting their liberty, while at the same time meeting the needs of families, not least of which is the need to regulate feuds among families. Cicero follows Aristotle in siding firmly with the political community: “Because the fatherland secures more benefits and is an older parent than he who begot, surely a greater gratitude is owed to it than to a parent” (I. fragment). But a more formidable challenge to the authority of the community arises from certain philosophers who turn their backs on public life. Cicero condemns them as “madmen” who could never help Rome in its wars, including its civil wars (I.1.). Why “madmen”? Because such men behave contra natura. “Nature has given to the human race such a necessity for virtue and such a love of defending the common safety that this force will overcome all allurements of pleasure and leisure,” unless one’s mind is deranged (I.1). That is, the ‘natural philosophers’ irrationally fail to understand human nature, and so do the apolitical moral philosophers—Epicureans and some Stoics. To understand human nature, nearer to us, more accessible to reasoning than the far reaches of the cosmos, one must think carefully about the political thing.

Against the apolitical moralists, Cicero remarks that “it is not enough to have virtue, as if it were some sort of art, unless you use it”; indeed, “virtue depends wholly upon its use” (I.1). The “greatest use” of virtue is “the governance of the city and the completion in fact, not in speech, of the same things as these men shout about in corners” (I.1.). Here, Cicero criticizes not only the apolitical moral philosophers but ‘theorizing’ political philosophers, first and foremost the author of the earlier dialogue titled The Republic. “Philosophers say nothing—at least of what may be said correctly and honorably—that was [not] accomplished and strengthened by those who have configured law [jus] for cities,” those who have established religion as the practice of piety and both the law of nations and the civil law (I.1-2). Without lawgivers, where would justice, fidelity, fairness, a sense of shame, self-control, avoidance of disgrace, desire for praise and for honorableness, courage, if not “from those men who gave form to those things by training and who strengthened some of them by customs and consecrated others by laws”? (I.2). “Therefore, that citizen who compels of all persons, by official command and by penalty of laws, what philosophers by speech can scarcely persuade a few persons [to do], should be given precedence even over the teachers themselves who debate those things,” inasmuch as the lawgivers have put virtue fully to use, making of it more than a topic for leisured speech (I.2). 

Yet Cicero may not be so far from Plato as it seems. In the Republic, Socrates drew thoroughly ‘politicized’ men—Thrasymachus, Glaucon—away from action and into speech. The Athenians of that time were political without being especially thoughtful, lawgivers who had no clear idea of what justice is. Cicero sees a Rome in which philosophers tempt men away from politics altogether, off into Epicurean gardens and the groves of academe. If Socrates needs to save philosophy from politics, Cicero needs to save politics from philosophy. “Let us not listen to the horns sounding the retreat to call back even now those who have already gone ahead” (I.3). Both men aim at moderating if not resolving the old quarrel between politics and philosophy.

Cicero knows the objections to such a political philosophy, the kind of philosophy Plato and Aristotle insisted upon. It is laborious, some will say. And so it is. But this is “a trifling impediment to the vigilant and diligent man” (I.4). It is dangerous. Yes, that too: but such “dread of death” is “disgraceful,” as Socrates himself evidently thought. As for Cicero, even in exile he has “reaped greater joy from respectable men’s longing than grief from wicked men’s joy” (I.8). As Socrates argues in the Crito, “our fatherland has neither given us birth nor educated us according to law without expecting some nourishment, so to speak, from us” (I.8).

The Epicureans, who cite trouble and danger as supposedly sound reasons for their “evasions” of politics, “so that they may more easily take great enjoyment in leisure, should be listened to certainly least of all” (I.9). They denigrate politicians as “worthless men,” futilely attempting to “restrain the raving, uncontrolled attacks of the crowd”; they claim that “the free man” will never stoop to “contending with vile, monstrous adversaries” who wield the weapons of slander and unjust force (I.9). They assure themselves, and their listeners, that they nevertheless stand ready to intervene if the republic faces some grand crisis. On the contrary, Cicero argues, those “who are good, courageous, and endowed with a great mind” should not evade public life, not allow worthless men “to tear the republic to pieces” (I.9). I myself have endured such hardship, he says, without fear of contradiction. And how can such men promise to engage in politics in times of supreme necessity when they shrink from politics in ordinary times? Have we any reason to suppose that they who have never proved themselves in the vicissitudes of everyday public life will—or, if willing, can—stand firm in amidst these storms?

If the later Greek philosophers shirk political responsibilities, Cicero notes that “almost all” of the ancient ‘seven wise men’ of Greece “were engaged at the center of public affairs” (I.12). (All but Thales, a ‘natural philosopher,’ the sort Plato’s Socrates criticized.) For “there is nothing in which human virtue more nearly approaches the majesty of the gods than either founding new cities or preserving ones that are already founded” (I.12). 

Approaching the majesty of the gods is all very well, but what about approaching the truths the gods are said to know, including the truth about the gods? There is no necessary contradiction, here. “I achieved something memorable in managing the republic and a certain ability to expound the meaning [ratio] of political things,” having become “an authority through not only experience but also eagerness for learning and teaching” (I.12). Reasoning about politics, finding the meaning of political things, requires a certain “kind of reasoning that I must introduce” to Rome, even as Plato and Aristotle introduced it to Athens. This kind of reasoning “is neither new nor discovered nor invented by me.” I shall “recall to memory an argument among the most famous and wisest men in our city belonging to a single generation,” a memory given to Cicero and his brother by Publius Rufus Rutilius, who participated in that conversation (I.12). “I think that almost nothing of great importance pertaining to the consideration of political affairs was omitted from it” (I.13).

The principal discussant is Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (“Africanus” in honor of his victorious leadership of Roman armies in Carthage and Numantia). He is at his suburban estate—neither fully in the city nor fully in the countryside, nature as conceived by the natural philosophers. He celebrates the “Latin holidays,” that is, the event marking the alliance between ancient Rome and the Latins, from whom the Roman men had seized women they needed for wives if Rome was to survive (I.14). The Romans quickly made peace with the justly aggrieved Latin rulers; this political marriage of necessity provided a new and stable foundation for Rome, preserving a city that had already been founded; godlike majesty entails godlike prudence or practical reasoning. This proved to be the indispensable alliance, enabling Rome to withstand attacks from rivals and eventually to defeat them and to establish their empire. 

Scipio’s sister’s son has joined him. Unlike his eminent uncle, Quintus Tubero seems a bit lazy. Scipio tells the young man that even now, at leisure, on holiday, he works “in mind” if not in action (I.14). For emphasis, Scipio swears “By Hercules!”—that hero of labor (I.14). Very well, then, Uncle Scipio, if we want to exercise our minds, let’s work out the nature of “the other sun” that was reported recently to the senate (I.15). What is the reason for it? (We now know that when ice crystals reflect the light, the optical illusion of a second sun appears, but to Romans this was still an object of speculation.) As Tubero’s gracious host, Scipio wishes aloud that “we had with us our friend Panaetius, who inquires regularly and most eagerly about these celestial matters” (I.15). Yet to tell the truth, “I do not agree much with our close friend on this kind of thing”; as a Stoic, a philosopher concerned first of all with the ‘cosmopolis,’ the order of the universe, Panaetius “holds such firm conclusions on the sorts of matters we can scarcely guess about that it seems he notices them with his own eyes or handles them distinctly with his own hand. I am still inclined to judge Socrates wiser, who put aside all care of this kind and said either things sought about nature are greater than human reason can achieve or they hold no concern at all for human life” (I.15). 

But why, then, uncle, did Plato himself study not only with Socrates but with the Pythagoreans? In his dialogues, Plato has Socrates speak “in such a way that even when he is debating morals [mos], virtues, and even the republic, he is nonetheless eager to combine numbers, geometry, and harmony in the manner [mos] of Pythagoras”? (I.16). (1) Scipio has his answer ready: Plato “wove together the Socratic wit and subtlety of conversation with Pythagoras’s obscurity and weight in many arts” (I.16). That is, in his own artfully constructed dialogues, Plato combined nature, but more specifically human nature, distinguished by its power of logos, of speech and reason, with mathematically symmetrical art. He thus combined two forms of knowledge in an unmatched portrayal of the philosophic quest and of those who undertake it. 

Romans, take note. Do not hesitate to combine Romanness with Latinity in a more refined, but still political way. Several of them now arrive, ready to enjoy the Latin holiday. Publius Rufus Rutilius, “our authorial source for this conversation” (I.17), appears first, followed by Lucius Furius Philus, who proves to be a man of both moral and intellectual virtue, then Gaius Laelius, a former consul and close friend of Scipio, Spurius Mummius, a favorite of Laelius and fellow Stoic, Gaius Fannius and Quintus Scaevola, both educated young men in their late twenties, thus old enough to be quaestors. A mixture of experienced statesmen steeped in philosophy and young men eager for learning: Scipio invites them to move their conversation to a sunny meadow, closer to nature, placing Laelius in the center of group. Because Laelius is the elder of the two men, in Rome, in the city, Scipio treats him as if he were a father; outside Rome, Laelius treats Scipio “as a god,” in honor of his “glory in war” (I.18). Here, neither in the city at peace nor outside the city in war but just outside the city but now outside the household, they will continue the conversation begun indoors. They are joined at last by the oldest man of them all, Manius Manilius, a “prudent man” under whom Scipio served in Carthage in the 140s and who returned to Rome to serve as consul immediately after that. Scipio seats him next to Laelius.

So, “what conversation did we interrupt?” Laelius wants to know (I.19). Upon being told about the two suns, Laelius wonders if we should not first explore “matters relevant to our homes and the republic” (I.19). Not necessarily, convinced Stoic Philus replies, since our real home is the universe itself, the “domicile” and “fatherland” the gods gave us “in common” (I.19). “Everyone eager for wisdom” should investigate and consider the natural things, which are the true public things, he avers, swearing by Hercules as Laelius had done, presumably ready for such heroic labors (I.19). Laelius relents, “since we are on holiday” (I.20).

Philus proceeds not to discuss the heavens themselves but a model of them, originally designed by Archimedes. In some respects, the artfulness of Archimedes impresses him more than the universe his model depicted: “I judged that there was more talent in that Sicilian than it seemed human nature could provide” (I.22); to Philus, the natural philosopher is as nearly divine as the lawgiver is to Scipio. In both cases, however, it is human nature that is the real wonder. This perhaps inadvertent pointing back to human nature gives Scipio a dialectical opening. He recounts how the owner of the model, who had seized it as war booty, used it to show his soldiers that a solar eclipse was not an evil open concerning the coming battle but a natural event, explicable in human terms by the artifact. The practical use of science “banished the empty superstition and fear from the disturbed men, fear that would sabotage the soldierly courage needed for victory, doing so by reason (I.24-25). Well used, art can serve as an intermediary between reasoning and unreasoning men, for good military and perhaps political purposes. Why else write those artifacts, dialogues?

As it happens, it wasn’t Archimedes but Thales of Miletus, a natural philosopher, who first understood the lunar eclipse. The natural philosopher learned something about the cosmos, our natural home and republic; the artist-philosopher Archimedes built a model of it; the military commander Gallus then put it to moral use against the immoral effect of superstition. Perhaps, then, Scipio in fact sees that the philosophers’ discoveries come before those of lawgivers, but they require artist-philosophers and military statesmen (Gallus also served as a consul) to bring out the nature that matters most to human beings—their own nature. Scipio does not fail to see the implication of philosophic investigation when it comes to the founding of Rome itself. “Although in fact nature snatched away Romulus” during a solar eclipse, “it is said that his virtue carried him off to heaven” (I.25). 

Not that this should make human beings preen themselves on mere glory. “What should someone who has examined these kingdoms of the gods consider splendid in human affairs? Or what is long lasting to someone who knows what is eternal,” one who sees “how small the earth is,” how small the Roman Empire is on the small earth? (I.26). It is not human opinion or even the civil law, but “the common law of nature” which “forbids that anything belongs to anyone except to him who knows how to handle and use it” (I.27). Artifacts modeling the universe, the universe itself insofar as it is within our reach, rightly belong, rightly are the property of, the prudent, the men of practical wisdom. Positions of command and consulships are “necessary things, not things to be desired,” not for profit or glory but for right use (I.27).

In this, “those who, when no one is watching, either speak with themselves or act as if they were present in an assembly of highly educated men, delighting themselves with their discoveries and writings” excel those who speak “in the forum and in a mob” (I.27). “Who can think that anyone is richer than he who lacks nothing that nature requires, or more powerful than he who attains everything he desires, or happier than he who has been free from all disturbance of mind, or of steadier fortune than he who possesses things that (as they say) he can carry away with himself from a shipwreck?” (I.27). The ability to reason is the true sign of human nature.

Laelius deems Scipio to have gone too far in his concessions to natural philosophy. Astronomers gaze at the heavens but don’t watch what’s in front of their feet, stumbling like the philosopher the slave girl laughed at. By Hercules, “I think that the things appearing before our eyes should be inquired about more” (I.31). Ask not why there are two suns, Tubero; ask why there are two senates and (alluding to the restive Gracchi and their followers) “almost two peoples in our republic” (I.31). At the head of the many who are poor, the Gracchi undermined the Rome unified when the Latins were conciliated. Consider that. “Young man, if you will listen to me, do not fear another sun” (I.31). Even if we could understand the cosmos, “we cannot be better or happier because of this knowledge” but we can be better and happier if we have one Rome (I. 32). We should therefore learn “the arts useful the city,” devoting this holiday “above all to conversations most advantageous to the republic” (I. 33). “Let us ask Scipio to explain what he thinks is the best form of the city”—which is none other than Plato’s theme, Socrates’ inquiry in the Republic (33).

Following Aristotle, Scipio calls “the management and administration of a republic” the “greatest art” (I.41). By ‘republic,’ he means a political community, “an assemblage of a multitude” a “‘thing’ of the people,” under a regime of one kind or another—either “one man or certain select men” or “the multitude” (I.42), the many who are poor, called in Rome the “proletarians,” the “child-givers,” men and women who have nothing to give the city but children (II.42). Whether a king, a set of aristocrats, or the people, the ruler or rulers must rule “by a kind of deliberation so that [the city] may be long lasting” (I.41). This deliberation “should always be measured by the cause that gave birth to the city,” the purpose intended by those who founded it, “the bond that first bound human beings among themselves in the fellowship of a republic,” which is what keeps the political union together (I.42). Any of the three regime types might maintain that bond; the one that does, “though it is not perfect,” is nonetheless “tolerable” (I.42). 

Problems will arise because none of the three regimes readily maintains the bond. Even if “no unfairness or greed” corrupts the regime, “in kingdoms the others”—the aristocratic few and the many ‘commoners’—have “too small a part in common justice [ius] and deliberation,” which is what Cicero means by liberty (I.43). In aristocracies, the many are excluded. “And when the people manages all things, although it may be just and moderate, the equality [aequabilitas] itself is unfair [iniquus] because it recognizes no degrees of rank” (I.43). By this, Scipio evidently means that wealth should not be equalized, as democrats incline to attempt; the attempt threatens the aristocrats or oligarchs with demotion in rank, turning them into enemies of the democratic regime. And the attempt to equalize wealth must fail, since “the natural abilities of all person cannot be equal” (I.49)—including, obviously, the natural ability to acquire wealth. Each regime thus tends to exclude or injure some elements of the community and thereby to undermine it, to generate enemies of the regime. This is why there are “cycles” or “revolutions” of regimes in republics. “While it is for the wise man to know them”—a philosopher like Aristotle—it is “for some great citizen and almost divine man, while governing the republic, to foresee those that threaten and to direct its course and keep it in his power” (I.46). That is, the theoretical or philosophic man cannot do what the supremely prudent man can do: not only understand political typology but to use it, rather as Gallus used the philosopher’s knowledge of the cosmos, to defend a real, flawed, but good regime from its weaknesses. To truly preserve a republic, however, it is best not to institute any of the three simple regimes but instead to mix them in such a way as to moderate each element, restraining each from exaggerating its characteristic flaw.

This mixed regime sounds like the one Aristotle describes as the best practicable regime, except that Aristotle doesn’t expect the mixture to consist of good elements. He recommends that two bad regimes, oligarchy and democracy, be combined in such a way so that the few who are rich and the many who are poor can do nothing without cooperating with one another. At this point, however, Laelius cuts short any discussion of exactly what Scipio has in mind with his own idea of a mixed regime by saying that he wants to know which of the three simple regimes Scipio “judge[s] best” (I.46). We don’t know why Laelius insists on this point, as the next two pages of the book have been lost. It might be that he wants to know which element of the three, if any, should be preeminent in the mixed regime; in Rome, the example he has before his eyes, the senate, the institution representing the few, usually enjoyed such preeminence. 

The dialogue as we have it resumes with Scipio remarking that “every republic is such as either the nature or the will of him who rules it” (I.48). It’s a good thing that this portion of the text survives because it states the reason why regimes are crucial to understanding a ‘republic’ or political community. Initially, Scipio considers the democratic republic the best of the simple regimes. It alone provides liberty to the most people, and nothing “can be sweeter than liberty” (I.48). Why so? Because liberty means political rule, ruling and being ruled, and serves as a spur to deliberation. Deliberation exercises the distinctively human characteristic, reason; genuinely political rule or liberty thus brings out human nature to the fullest. In deliberating together, the people frame laws. “Law is a bond of political fellowship”—a shared purpose is indispensable, but it needs reinforcement—and “justice is equality under law”; equality under law in turns enhances the “fellowship of citizens,” making them more likely to deliberate amicably, keeping the political union together (I.49). Since there will never be equality of wealth or of natural abilities, equality in a republic can only be based on legal rights, what the United States Constitution calls equal protection under the laws. “For what is a city if not a fellowship in justice”? (I.49).

When it comes to day-to-day ruling, whatever the regime, “nature has provided not only that the highest men in virtue and mind should”—should—be “in charge of the weaker, but also that the latter should be willing to obey the highest men” (I.51). That is, in exercising their political liberty the people should freely entrust themselves to the men of moral and practical-intellectual virtue. Unfortunately, “the crowd” confuses wealth with virtue while the rich “cling to the title of ‘the best men,'” although “they lack the substance” of true aristocrats, being “full of dishonor and insolent haughtiness” (I.51). Indeed, “there is no more deformed species of a city than that in which the most prosperous men are considered the best” (I.51). This popular error, which may come about because the many who are poor wish they were rich, means that equality under the law, “which free peoples cling to, cannot be preserved” (I.53).

By contrast, “what can be more splendid than virtue governing a republic? Then he who commands others is a slave to no desire; then he has embraced all the things in which he instructs his fellow citizens and to which he summons them; and he does not impose laws on the people that he does not obey himself, but he puts forward his own life as a law for his own citizens” (I.51). If any of the the three simple regimes could find such a ruler or rulers, it would be the best. But they can’t, at least not for long. Which of the simple regimes does Scipio then prefer? Upon reflection, “none of them in itself separately,” as he has said before (I.53). Each has its means of winning consent: “Kings captivate us by affection” (the fascination of today’s Americans with the English monarchy being a case in point); aristocrats captivate us by “judgment” (as Tocqueville much later sees, an aristocracy is a prudent man who never dies); democracies captivate us by “liberty” (I.55). Kings win our hearts; aristocrats win our heads, our ‘better judgment’; democracies should win our heads, too, but democrats seldom keep them, descending instead to following their desires.

Specifically, kings win our hearts through the sentiment of piety. Many nations favor kingship, Scipio observes, “because they think that all gods are ruled by the majesty of one royal [god],” which a human king resembles more than the few or the many (I.56). But if, thanks to the natural philosophy the conversation began by considering, some of us reject the belief that Jupiter rules as “the error of the ignorant,” a matter of hearsay, we should consider the teachings of those who learn by seeing—Thales, Archimedes—who say that “this entire universe [is ruled] by a mind” (I.56). If so, the rightly ordered human soul resembles the rightly ordered cosmos; human nature resembles cosmic nature. Scipio affirms the opinion of “the famous Archytas of Tarentum,” who “rightly regarded anger as a certain sedition of the mind—that is, in opposition to reason” (I.59-60). If the cosmic regime is a kingship, if the rightly ordered soul is, too, and so is the rightly ordered household, then why not the city? Democracy suffices for survival when the republic is “in peace and leisure” (“you may be lascivious while you fear nothing”). But just “as both he who sails when the sea suddenly begins to grow rough and he who is ill with a worsening sickness implore the assistance of one man,” so our people readily obey those same magistrates as if they were royals, when war erupts. In Rome, under such circumstances, the people even consent to the rule of the dictator, safety being “worth more than lust” (I.63). 

What if the dictator prefers not to relinquish his ruler, once the crisis has passed? And even when there is no crisis, “from this uncontrolled or rather monstrous people someone is usually chosen as leader against those leading men,” the aristocrats, “who have already been struck and driven from their place” by the licentious many. The popular leader is typically “someone daring, vile, often impudently hunting those who have deserved well of the republic, someone making presents to the people of both others’ things and its own.” Such men “emerge as tyrants over the same men who brought them forth” (I.68). This is how the liberty of the democratic republic, having declined into licentiousness, leads to tyranny “born from this excessive licentiousness” (I.68). And this kind of thing is true of all the simple regimes; although each has its characteristic excess, “all excesses” in one regime cause it to change into its opposite (I.68). “The form of the republic, as if it were a ball, is seized from kings by tyrants, then from them by leading men or peoples, then from them by either factions or tyrants. The same mode of republic is never maintained very long.” (I.69). 

Although he began by claiming that the democratic republic is best, Scipio finally answers Laelius’ question about the best of the simple regimes the way Aristotle answers it, although not exactly on Aristotelian grounds. “The kingly one excels the others by far” because, as a product of human art, and indeed of the master art, the architectonic art, politics, it rules the same way as the cosmos, the soul, and the family are rightly ruled (I.69). But, as Aristotle maintains, the mixed regime “exel[s] the kingly one itself” (I.69). “It seems good for there to be something preeminent and regal in the republic, for something else to be shared with and assigned to the authority of leading men, for certain things to be saved for the judgment and will of the multitude” (I.69). The mixed regime features the civil equality or liberty “which free men can scarcely be without for very long,” along with “a firmness” that none of the simple types can achieve (I.69). “For there is no cause for a revolution where each man has been firmly placed in his own station and there is nothing beneath him into which he may plunge and sink” (I.70).

By the end of Book I, it is clear why Scipio placed Laelius physically in the center of his dialogic circle. As a prudent, that is to say far-seeing, man, Scipio knew he could depend upon his old friend to keep the discussion down to earth, giving Scipio the chance to show what Socrates showed Plato’s readers—that philosophers must know that, and what, they do not know, and that they do not know as much as they would like to know about the cosmos, although they can know some things. What they can know better, and must know better, given their physical location in a political community or ‘republic,’ is how to use the reason that only takes them so far in their investigations into cosmic nature to better understand what they can come to know a lot about—human nature, its social and political character, and the way in which various regimes deflect and distort the reasoning power of the human mind, the preeminent or ruling power of the philosopher’s mind. If Socrates introduced political philosophy to Athens, Cicero assumes the role of Plato, with Scipio as his Socrates, in Rome, against the Epicureans and Stoics who either retreat to their gardens or imagine themselves swept up even beyond those (Aristophanic) clouds and into the stars. And by demanding, later on, that Scipio reveal which of the simple regimes he prefers, perhaps hoping that Scipio will argue in favor the aristocratic regime that both he and Scipio represent, Laelius gives his friend the opportunity to tie the argument into a knot that only Scipio can unweave, then re-weave into the mixed regime.

Aristotle claims that the mixed regime is the best practicable regime. The proof that it’s practicable is nearby: it is Rome itself. In Book II, the account of the second half of the conversation’s first day, Scipio turns to Rome—specifically, its political history. Whereas Socrates’ city in speech has one man as its real founder, a philosopher who extracts the best regime from his younger interlocutors, Scipio’s practicable regime in an existing, earthly city took much longer to perfect and was the work of many minds over time. This is why it is not only more practicable than the city in speech but superior to other mixed regimes in practice, regimes which had such lone founders as Minos of Crete and Lycurgus of Sparta. Prudent Cato the Elder told Scipio that “there had never been anyone at any time whose intellect had been so excellent that nothing escaped it, and that all the intellects at one time, brought together as one, could not foresee enough to comprehend everything without experience in things and the passage of time” (II.2). It’s as if Cato had read Edmund Burke.

When Romulus founded Rome, he exercised prudence in selecting its location. He avoided the seacoast, which would have made the city vulnerable to quick attacks, vulnerable to the corruption and destabilizing change of customs which a people engaged in maritime trade incline, importing new customs along with merchandise. Too, such citizens wander in search of goods—often luxury goods, the desire for which corrupts them. Scipio cites the example of the Greek islands, which “almost float [in the sea] along with the institutions and customs of [their] citizens” (II.8). True, such places enjoy “great convenience” in the transport of goods, compared with landlocked cities, which suffer from much higher carrying costs (II.9). Romulus’ solution was the same as Aristotle’s (Politics VII.6). He located Rome on a river with access to the sea, where access to it by marauders and traders alike could be controlled. 

Having solved his geopolitical problem, he then addressed his population problem. There were too few Romans, so he invited Sabine “maidens” to a festival, had his young men seize them for wives, then made peace with the understandably indignant Sabine king by sharing rule of their joint territories with him (II.12). (The Sabine king later died, leaving Romulus, who had prudently not provided for joint Roman-Sabine rule into the future, in firm control of the expanded monarchic republic.) To accommodate the few, he founded the senate, adding the authority of “each excellent man” to his own (II.15). He also founded a civil religion with regular use of the auspices, giving prudent rulers a way of (as it were) sanctifying their foresight. In his penal system he used fines, not force, avoiding the sharper forms of resentment toward his policies. “Do you see,” Scipio asks, “that by means of the judgment of one man, not only did a new people arise, but it was already adult and almost of ripe age—not like one left crying in a cradle,” or under a fig tree as, the story goes, Romulus himself had been left (II.21). As a foundling as well as a founder, Romulus was free of the family ties that might have made him suspect to most of the families who joined together to found the ‘republic.’ His death enhanced his legend as much as his birth. Scipio notes that Romulus was deified in an age in which people were no longer as superstitious, no longer as unlearned, as in earlier times. This claim registered a sense that the mind of a great founder participates in the divine mind, the mind that organizes and rules the regime of the cosmos. The founder’s reason is in a sense divine, that is, part of the larger nature, the nature of the natural philosophers, while at the same time practical, reasoning about public things occurring on a real river leading out to a real sea.

Laelius sees what Scipio is doing. “You have begun a new plan of arguing, which is nowhere in the books of the Greeks” (II.21). “That leading man [Plato], to whom no one was superior in writing, took a piece of ground for himself on which he built up a city according to his own choice—admittedly splendid, perhaps, but inappropriate for human life and customs,” a city fit for speech only, a regime in theory never to be brought into practice (II.21). The other political philosophers, if not Aristotle then his followers, the Peripatetics, “have discussed the types and principles of cities without any certain pattern and shape of republic” (II. 22). “You seem about to do both,” crediting the great founders and lawgivers “with what you find instead of fabricating as Socrates does in Plato’s work” while nonetheless “ascrib[ing] to reason those things concerning the site of the city that Romulus established by chance or necessity” (II.22). And unlike the Peripatetics, “you argue not in a roaming speech but about one fixed republic,” Rome (II.22). This is Cicero’s distinct contribution to political philosophy, an examination of one best regime but one that exists in practice. This is why he pretends from the beginning of his discourse that philosophers merely ‘follow’ lawgivers.

Continuing this way of interpreting Roman political history as if it were a collaboration of great minds over the centuries, Scipio announces that “this new people saw what had escaped the Spartan Lycurgus,” who had made the Spartan monarchy hereditary (II.24). “Those rustics of ours”—they are ‘our own,’ and so the republic they advanced deserves the attachment the natural love of one’s own brings to it—saw that “regal virtue and wisdom, not family, ought to be sought,” saw also that the true title to rule is the natural rule of reason, not the natural rule of bodies as points along a ‘royal line’ (II.24-25). The Roman aristocrats even took their next king from the Sabines, not from themselves; they did not love their own in a foolish way. Numa Pomilius saw that Romans “were kindled with eagerness for war because of Romulus’ instruction”—not the least of which was his scheme to seize by force the Sabine maidens (II.25). “He thought they should be turned back from that habit to a slight extent,” moderated (II.25). 

Numa began by dividing among the citizens the lands Romulus had seized in war, teaching them “that by cultivating the fields they could abound in all conveniences without pillaging and booty” (II.26)—the same policies American commercial republicans would attempt, albeit with mixed success, with the warlike Amerindian nations and tribes. He thus gave them the economic foundation for “a love of leisure and peace, through which justice and trust most easily grow strong, and under the protection of which the cultivation of fields and the reaping of their fruits are maximally defended” (II.26). He established new and more elaborate religious rites befitting a people so relieved of warlike temperament and further “softened through religious ceremonies the spirits that were burning with the habit of, and the desire for, making war” (II.26). He designed marketplaces, games, and celebration—peaceful occasions for bringing the people together, away from the brotherhood of military camps. In sum, Numa “restored to humanity and tameness human spirits, which were then monstrous and wild with eagerness for making war,” reigning for thirty-nine years “in utmost peace and concord” (II.27). 

Scipio refutes the legend that Numa was a Pythagorean. As Manilius understands, this betokens the fact that we Romans “are accomplished not in arts that have been imported from overseas but in native, domestic virtues” (II.29), a claim Scipio the philosopher-statesman says nothing to discourage. Indeed, he adds that “many things taken from somewhere else have been done much better by us,” likely including political philosophy (II.30). Prudence, practical wisdom, prevails here, as “the Roman people has been strengthened not by chance but by deliberation and training, yet not when fortune opposes” (II.30). As with the natural cycle of regimes, so with the course of events; prudential deliberation and habituation can meet what fortune dishes out, prevent a bad circumstance from worsening and sometimes reverse things. Scipio is neither a fatalist, like a Greek tragedian, nor a Florentine playwright, like Machiavelli, who supposes he can conquer Fortuna, beat her into submission.

The next king, Tullus Hostilius, excelled at war but also set down a law requiring all wars to be declared and condemning undeclared wars “unjust and impious” (II.31). Declaration of war were to be made by the people, showing “how wisely our kings even then saw that certain things should be granted to the people” (II.31). Scipio emphasizes how Roman political history is as Cato said it was, “not the work of one time or of one man,” but a succession of additions of “good and advantageous things…made with each successive king” (II.37). But he immediately presents a massive qualification to this lesson, already suggested by his earlier warnings about the weakness of kings, their propensity to tyrannize. The last three kings were the Tarquins, each worse than the next, ending with Tarquinius “Superbus”—superb indeed in his murderous tyrannizing. “No animal more horrid, foul, or hated by gods and human beings can be thought of” than a tyrant (II.48).

“At this point,” Scipio teaches, the cycle of regimes “will now come round—the natural motion and revolution of which you must learn to recognize from the beginning” (II.45). “The source of political prudence, with which this entire speech of ours deals, is to see the paths and bends of republics so that when you first know how each thing inclines, you can hold it back or run to meet it first” (II.45). Cicero never endorses anything like modern ‘historicism’ or ‘historical determinism.’ He speaks of natural cycles, not events determined by alleged historical laws, and while these cycles cannot be mastered, they can be foreseen and sometimes redirected by statesmen. And because “the fortune of the people is fragile when it depends on the will or habits of one man,” a sound regime will last longer if more men share rule (II.50). The succession of good kings in Rome amounts to such a regime when it is considered over time as the rule not of one but of several kings.

It was a consul, Publius Valerius, not a king, who prudently fortified the regime of the few that replaced the monarchic republic by giving “moderate liberty to the people” (II.55). Publius was the one who removed the axes symbolizing absolute rule over the people from the rods of the fasces. (A later Roman, Benito Mussolini, took care to replace them.) “Therefore, in those times the senate maintained the republic in this form, so that while the people was free few things were managed by the people, more things were managed through the authority of the senate by plan and by custom, and the consuls held only annual power that was royal in its very type and in its right” (II.56). No vote of the popular assembly could become law or policy unless the senators approved it. Rome had become an aristocratic republic, but one enjoying popular consent. It is true that in “the nature of things” the people began to take “to itself a somewhat greater measure of rights”; “reason was perhaps lacking in this, but the nature of republics itself often overcomes reason” (II.57). At best, a prudent ruler or rulers may direct the people as you and I, Laelius, saw in Africa, when a man would sit on an elephant, “a monstrous, immense beast,” ruling it “by a gentle command or touch” (II.68). It is with elephants and the people as it is in the passions of the soul. “The part of the spirit that is called the mind, bridles and tames not merely one beast or one easy to subdue,” but the many fierce passions (II.68). The prudent man has “almost only one” duty: to “never cease instructing and contemplating himself, that he call others to the emulation of himself, that he show himself to his fellow citizens as a mirror through the brilliance of his spirit and life” (II.69). In this, he can help to harmonize the city “in the agreement of very dissimilar persons through reason moderated by the intermingling of the highest, lowest, and middle orders,” as with the notes in a harmonious song (II.69). This well-ordered mixed regime is “the closest and best bond of safety in every republic,” impossible to sustain without justice, the thing Socrates and his interlocutors searched for in Plato’s Republic (II.69).

Book III apparently contained a conversation on justice conducted at the outset of the second day. Unfortunately, at this point, and for most of the remainder of the six books of Cicero’s On the Republic, the text becomes too fragmentary to understand, except if approached as a series of aphorisms. (Many of the fragments were preserved precisely because subsequent writers who did have the full text in front of them extracted lines that served as concise statements of points they wanted to make in their own books.) 

Philus challenges the natural law theory of justice in two ways. He first cites the variety of “law, institutions, customs, and habits” not only across the nations but “in one city, even in this very one” (III.10). Does this undeniable phenomenon not suggest that justice is merely arbitrary and conventional? “Why shouldn’t a woman have property? why should she be heir to a Vestal Virgin but not to her own mother?” (III.10). He or another critic of natural law then deploys the argument made by Glaucon in Plato’s Republic: If a good man were falsely vilified as a criminal and a vicious man held to be a paragon, and if the good man were tortured and exiled while the bad man honored and heaped with wealth, “who in the world will be so mad as to doubt which man he would prefer to be?” (III.13). More, “what goes for individuals also goes for peoples: no city is so foolish that it does not prefer unjustly commanding to serving justly” (III.13). The analogy is inexact, inasmuch as the good man with the false bad reputation wasn’t merely serving his city but being abused by it; the right way to make the argument would be to say that it is better to command unjustly than to serve unjustly, to be subject to the injustices of an unjust commander. That is, the tortured and exiled man wasn’t serving the city justly, as his fellow citizens didn’t deserve his services. Plato’s Socrates stands firm, saying that a truly just man prefers bodily torture to the ruin of his soul, given the soul’s unquestioned superiority to the body. Aristotle in effect replies to Glaucon’s argument by citing the mitigating force of circumstances. A Christian would agree; Jesus’ torture and death on the Cross were not just but the supreme act of grace.

Scipio apparently prefers a different counterargument. A city ruled unjustly no longer deserves the name, ‘city.’ “Who would call that ‘a “thing” of a people” (that is, a republic) “at the moment when all together were oppressed by cruelty of one man, and there was neither the single bond of right nor the agreement and fellowship of an assemblage, which is a people?” (III.35). For example, Syracuse, “the greatest of the Greeks’ cities and the most beautiful of all” was no genuine republic when Dionysius ruled it (III.35). “Where there is a tyrant, there is not a defective republic…but, as reason now compels, it must be said that there is no republic at all” (III.35). This is true not only of place ruled by a tyrant but one ruled by any faction. It is no longer a political community, a public thing at all, but a thing ruled for the private interests of the one, the few, or the many. It has abandoned its status as a civitas. It no longer features ruling and being ruled, reciprocally; it is no longer a political thing.

In the second half of the dialogue’s second day, Scipio appears to be holding the conventions Philus had cited to the bar of the natural law as it concerns cities. He criticizes several Greek customs: the gymnastic training of youth encourages homosexual behavior; in Sparta, the custom of thievery is wrong and so is the custom of putting prefects in charge of women instead of husbands. Even Plato deserves censure, as he “orders everything to be in common, so that no citizen can say of anything that is special to him or his own” (IV.18). That is, yes, customs do vary from city to city and even in the same city, over time, but the natural law provides the standard for judging them because the natural law begins with a definition of human nature and, by logical deduction, the republics consistent with that nature. Like Socrates, Scipio doesn’t hesitate to censure “wicked, popular men in the republic who were seditious”—demagogues—along with scurrilous poets who defame decent citizens (IV.20b). “We ought to have life set up by the judgments of magistrates and legal rulings, not by the talents of poets, nor ought we listen to a reproach except from a law that one is allowed to respond to and to defend oneself against in a court of law” (IV.20c).

Like Socrates, Cicero would not ban all poets from the city. He prefaces Book V with a quote from the poet Ennius: “The Roman Republic stands upon ancient customs and men” (V.1). There is reason, and thus natural law, in this. “Neither men, unless the city had been so accustomed, nor customs, unless such men had been in charge, could have either founded or held for so long such a commanding republic and one so widely extended” (V.1). The problem with “our generation” of Romans is that, having “received the republic just like an extraordinary picture, but one already fading in the passage of time, not only did we neglect to renew it in the same colors in which it had existed, but we did not even take care of it so as to preserve at least its shape and, so to speak, its outlines” (V.1). Today, the customs are unknown, having “perished for lack of men” (V.1). This has nothing to do with chance, everything to do with “our own vices” (V.1). In the dialogue, now in its third and final day, Scipio reaffirms the natural justice of a city-sustaining custom of ancient Greece, brought to Rome by Numa: “no private man was an umpire or arbitrator of a lawsuit, but everything was accomplished by royal judgments” in the king’s court (V.3). “The long-lasting peace of Numa was the mother of law [ius] and religion in this city,” and peace could last because Numa had written such laws (V.3). Cicero has Scipio recur to his teaching about the priority of lawgivers to philosophers who explicate and statesmen who carry out conventional laws founded upon the natural law, laws shown to be natural by their endurance over time.

This passage provides a gateway to the second half of the dialogue’s last day. The lawgiver is the “guide” of the city, a man of “complete prudence,” the virtue animated by foresight (VI.1). The duty of the citizen is to follow the founding laws, “prepar[ing] himself so that he is always armed against things that upset the form of the city,” that is, its regime (VI.2). By contrast, sedition breaks the citizens apart, spoiling that form. Sedition acts in the city as lusts act in the soul. “Lusts are grave mistresses over thoughts,” “compel[ling] and command[ing] innumerable things” without limit and therefore without form (VI.5). Because lusts “cannot in any way be satisfied or satiated, they impel to every crime those whom they have kindled with their enticements” (VI.5). They render souls, and seditions render cities, formless—one no longer human, the other no longer public things. Nature sets down those limits or laws; lusts and seditions violate nature, ruining human beings and their republics.

Lawgivers or guides who are themselves guided by the natural law desire and deserve “not statues anchored in lead or triumphs with withering laurel leaves, but some more stable and more robust kinds of rewards” (VI.12). This impels Scipio to end this conversation in the same way as Plato’s Socrates did in his Republic, with a story upholding the immortality of the soul. In Socrates’ story, a man named Er dies in battle but returns to life with a report of the afterlife, in which just and unjust souls alike find their proper rewards, choosing their next life in accordance with the way they lived their most recent one. Scipio puts a similar lesson in terms of his own prophetic dream he experienced while in Africa, a dialogue within the dialogue in which he conversed with Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, victor over Hannibal at Zama in the Second Punic War. This first Scipio Africanus served as a priest of Mars and was renowned for his ability to foresee, which some take to be prophetic, others a matter of natural foresight or prudence—a ‘divine’ capacity in one or another sense of the word.

The first Africanus predicts the victory of the second: “you will finish a very great war” (VI.15). You will also return to a Roman republic in turmoil, threatened by exactly the sort of factional misrule that would end Rome as a true republic, the threatened rule of Africanus’ grandson, the populist Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. “Here, Africanus [as that will be the younger man’s title, by then], it will be proper for you to show to your fatherland the light of your mind, talent, and judgment” (VI.16). This you will do, as “the one man with whom the safety of the city rests,” the man who can rightly serve as dictator “to set the republic on firm footing” (VI.16). But only “if you escape the impious hands of your relatives,” the brothers Gracchi (VI.16). Your age, 56, consists of the number eight multiplied by the number seven. In Pythagorean terms, each of those numbers “is held to be complete for different reasons” (VI.16): eight is an auspicious number, seven a number denoting completion, an end. You may reach an auspicious end if you “recognize this: For all those who have preserved, assisted, increased their homeland, there is a certain place marked out in heaven where happy persons enjoy everlasting life. That is to say, nothing that happens on Earth is more welcome to the leading god, who rules the whole universe, than the assemblies and assemblages of human beings united in right, which are called cities.” (VI.17). That is, God loves ‘the political.’ 

“At this point,” Scipio tells his listeners, “I was thoroughly frightened not so much by fear of death as by fear of a plot by my own relatives” (VI.18); sedition within his family, sedition that threatened the Roman republic, concerned him more than his own demise. The death of a person ends the life of an individual, but the destruction of a family or of a republic ends a thing of lasting honor. What of my natural family, my father? Is he here with you, Africanus?

Yes, your relatives, including your father, still live, having “sprung out of the chains of their bodies as if out of prison. What is called life among you is truly death. Don’t you observe your father Paullus coming toward you?” (VI.18). After their tearful reunion, Scipio Aemilianus asks Paullus, if death is the portal to such a blessed life, why continue to live on earth, with its murderous betrayals and ruinous factions? 

Paullus replies, “Until the god, whose sacred zone is everything you have sight of, frees you from the wardens of your body, the entrance to this place cannot be open to you” (VI.19). Under this law, which is the law of nature, the task of human beings is to “protect the globe you see in the middle of this sacred zone, which is called Earth” (VI.19). Given this “human task,” you must remain within your body to protect your family and, even more important, “your fatherland” (VI.20). Therefore, “you must not depart from human life without the order of him by whom your soul has been given to you, so that you will not seem to flee” that god-given, nature-given task (VI.19). Only if you take up that task, “cultivat[ing] justice and piety,” will you walk the “way to heaven and to this assemblage of those who have already lived” (VI.20). Yes, the majesty of the cosmic regime far surpasses that of the Roman Empire, but your duty is to fulfill your task as a father and as a citizen, first.

Scipio not only sees the eight cosmic spheres, the ever-circling domains of the stars and planets, above the immobile ninth sphere, Earth, but he also hears the music of the eight mobile spheres, which consists of seven sounds, as two of them emit he same sound. Eight and seven, again: the cosmic harmony parallels Scipio’s age at this moment. 

The lesson taken from this cosmic view is simple to state, hard to enact. Earth is small, compared to the cosmos as a whole, but it is part of that cosmos. Human ambitions, even in the great Roman Empire, are also small. “What renown can you attain from the conversation of human beings, or what glory can you attain that should be desired?” (VI.24). Fame on Earth is limited in both in both its territorial and temporal extent. “Therefore, if you wish to look on high and consider attentively this seat and eternal home, if you will not give yourself to the conversations of the crowd nor put hope in human rewards for your deeds, virtue itself may properly draw you to true honor through its own enticements” (VI.29). To put human esteem in its rightful place is not to denigrate politics but to understand political life not as a field of vaunting ambition but as a just duty, here and now. Natural philosophers, along with Epicurean and Stoic moralizers, attempt to jump up to Heaven too soon, failing to recognize the place of Earth’s regimes within the cosmic regime, and failing to recognize the place of the regime of Earth within the cosmic regime. Neither ambition nor suicide can be just, given the natural law.

Scipio takes the lesson. “Truly, Africanus, if a lane, so to speak, opens an entrance to the heaven for those who have deserved well of their fatherland, although I have walked in your tracks and those of my father from boyhood and have not lacked your glory, nevertheless, ow that such a reward has been explained, I will exert myself much more vigilantly” (VI.30). Political virtue yields heavenly reward, being consonant with the regime of the cosmos.

Africanus approves. “The mind of each person is each person” (VI.30). In that sense, “you are a god,” inasmuch as the supreme god moves the cosmos even as your mind moves the other parts of your soul and, through them, your body (VI.30). The supreme god is the unmoved mover whose existence Aristotle deduced. Let your mind, your reason, be your unmoved mover. “This is the special nature of the soul” (VI.32). “You should employ it in the best matters! And the best cares are for the safety of the fatherland” (VI.33).

Cicero defends politics by putting it in its place, between the unthinking ambition of tyrants and demagogues, those who believe that ‘everything is political’ on earth, and the unthinking ‘intellectualism’ of many philosophers, who believe that what happens on earth, including politics, is trivial, no concern of an intelligent person. There is a larger, indeed comprehensive order or regime, the regime of nature and its law. In that regime, human politics has its rightful, lawfully delimited place. 

 

Notes

1. The translator helpfully indicates that the Latin mos denotes both manners and morals, rather in the way, more familiar to ‘we moderns’ and readers of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, of the French moeurs.
2. ‘Our’ Scipio is Scipio Aemilianus Africanus, who crushed Carthage once and for all in the Third Punic War. His father was Aemilianus Paullus, but his adopted father was Cornelius Scipio, son of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus; he thus converses with his grandfather-by-adoption as a fellow-victor in a war against Carthage.

 

Will Kymlicka: Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

 

The Canadian political theorist Will Kymlicka intends to articulate a form of liberalism located between radical individualism and communitarianism. The critiques of liberalism offered by Marxists and feminists, as well as those enunciated by such contemporary thinkers as Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor dissatisfy him, but so do the replies to those critiques which liberals have advanced, critiques often denoting “indifference or hostility to the collective rights of minority cultures.” “Liberalism, as a political philosophy, is often viewed as being primarily concerned with the relationship between the individual and the state, and with limiting state intrusions on the liberties of citizens.” Liberals are thus suspicious of rights claims advanced on behalf of collectivities. Kymlicka argues that these two kinds of rights do not necessarily contradict one another and may indeed be brought to reinforce one another.

Is there, then “an interest in cultural membership which requires independent recognition in the theory of justice,” distinct from but not interfering with the rightful interests of individuals? Kymlicka divides his book into three parts, mimicking the thesis-antithesis-synthesis structure of Hegelian logic: liberalism first, then communitarianism, finally “liberalism and cultural membership.” The Hegelian or ‘historicist’ structure of his argument follows its historically-found content, as he restricts his topic to late-modern liberalism, from Mill through Rawls, avoiding discussion of what he relativizes as the “seventeenth-century liberalism” of Locke and the other natural-rights liberals. ‘Nature’ and ‘natural right’ go without a single mention, alluded to only in terms of the epoch in which the modern understanding of nature and of natural right first came to sight.

The “political morality” of late-modern liberals “begins with some basic claims about our interests”: that “our essential interest is in leading a good life,” as distinguished from “leading the life we currently believe to be good”; because we may mistake our best interest, “we deliberate about important decisions in our lives,” not merely attempting to calculate the outcomes of those decisions but wondering if those decisions aim at purposes worth pursuing. Liberals hold that two conditions must be met for “leading a life that is good”: “that we lead our life from the inside,” that is, “in accordance with our beliefs about what gives value to life”; and that “we be free to question those beliefs, to examine them in light of whatever information and examples and arguments our culture can provide.” This suggests a historicist preclusion of examples and arguments outside our culture, whether they be the result of religious conversion or philosophic inquiry, an ‘ascent from the cave.’ Although liberals want individuals to be enabled to “live their lives in accordance with their beliefs about value, without being imprisoned or penalized for unorthodox religious or sexual practices etc.,” therefore putting emphasis on the importance of civil and personal liberties as well as education, for Kymlicka this means “exploring different aspects of our collective cultural heritage,” as there seems to be no getting away from that framework, only for the freedom to live within it.

In alluding to “the theory of justice” seen among contemporary liberals, Kymlicka thinks primarily of John Rawls and his book The Theory of Justice. Rawls rejects ‘ontological’ moral theories—theories grounded in ‘being,’ whether divine or human—in favor of a ‘deontological’ theory, in which he posits what he calls “the original position” of an individual stripped of all attributes. In this, he follows in the line of Kant and his ‘categorical imperative,’ a moral principle requiring no notions of divine presence or human nature. In Rawls’ vocabulary, deontological moral theories give “priority to the right over the good,” since goodness implies a being that can be judged to be a good specimen of its kind and moreover one which makes moral choices aiming at an ‘end’ or purpose consonant with that criterion. Rawls particularly targets utilitarianism, which he regards as just such an ontological and teleological moral theory. But he also rejects socialist, conservative, communitarian, and feminist theories that are structured similarly, albeit commending very different ends than those propounded by, for example, John Stuart Mill.

Kymlicka rejects Rawls’s analysis. “I don’t believe there is a real issue about which of the right and the good is prior.” Those who choose one over the other confuse two things: the definition of people’s essential interests; the principles of distribution “which follow from supposing that each person’s interests matter equally.” Rawls argues that in prioritizing the good over the right, utilitarianism subordinates the individual’s good to the greatest good for the greatest number, which leads “some to be endlessly sacrificed to the good over the right.” Rawls insists on putting limits to such sacrifices, claiming that this can only be done in principle by reserving certain rights of individuals that may not be sacrificed for the sake of the good. 

To this, Kymlicka replies that “the most natural and compelling form of utilitarianism is not teleological, and doesn’t involve any anti-individualistic generalization from the individual to society.” Utilitarianism also applies to individuals, who pursue their own goods; moreover, utilitarians typically “give each person’s interests equal weight,” as “each person’s life matters equally.” Like Rawls, Kymlicka disagrees with the utilitarians, saying that their theory doesn’t account for the “the content of the preferences or the material welfare of the person.” It makes no moral sense to say that a tyrant’s interests should be treated equally with those of a charity worker. (Mill himself recognizes this, writing “Socrates satisfied is better than a pig satisfied,” but on this point Mill is less egalitarian than most of his utilitarian brethren.) This problem notwithstanding, however, utilitarianism “is as ‘deontological’ as any other” theory, fully recognizing “that individuals are distinct persons with their own rightful claims.”

It is true, Kymlicka goes on to remark, that some forms of utilitarianism do seem to prioritize the good over the right, holding that “we count individuals equally only because that maximizes value,” conducing to a good “state of affairs” in society. But this, Kymlicka says, simply means that these forms of utilitarianism aren’t really moral theories at all. With Nietzsche, but without his panache, and assuredly not with his aristocratic conception of the good, such utilitarians go ‘beyond good and evil,’ as “giving equal consideration to people…is a possible by-product of maximizing the good, but it is not the fundamental goal.” “To define the right as the maximization of the good, and to view people simply as a means to the promotion of that good, is not to present an unusual interpretation of the moral point of view. It is to abandon the moral point of view entirely, to take up a non-moral idea instead.”

What, then, is the proper definition of the good, as distinct from the fair distribution of it? Rawls contrasts teleological or “perfectionist” theories with “his own non-perfectionist” theory of the good. Perfectionists begin by identifying “what dispositions and attributes define human perfection,” then regarding “the development of these as our essential interest”; they further “demand that resources should be distributed so as to encourage such development.” Political life makes authoritative choices regarding what a good life is, rewarding and punishing individuals accordingly; “the state has the responsibility to teach its citizens about a virtuous life.” Rawls shrinks from this, contending rather that “our essential interests are harmed by attempts to enforce a particular view of the good life on people” because “he believes that the capacity to examine and revise our plans and projects is important in pursuing our essential interest in leading a good life.” Liberty is a primary good: hence ‘liberalism.’ In Kymlicka’s phrase, “lives have to be led from the inside”; imposing a concept of the good ‘from the outside,’ from the authoritative rulers and ruling offices of the regime, impedes rather than assists the individual in deliberating about the good and especially in acting in the pursuit of it. 

Kymlicka does concur with Rawls on the moral status of liberty—he, too, is a liberal—but demurs when it comes to Rawls’s understanding of his own theory. “Rawls doesn’t favor the distribution of primary goods out of a concern for the right rather than the good. He just has a different account of what our good is,” disagreeing with perfectionists “over how best to define and promote the people’s good.” Therefore, “being an anti-perfectionist does not commit you to accepting ‘deontological’ constraints on the promotion of social welfare.” In holding that “each person’s good should be given equal weight” and that “people’s legitimate entitlements shouldn’t be tied to any particular conception of the good life,” Rawls is on the right track for the wrong reason, as “neither issue concerns the priority of the right or the good.” For Kymlicka, the issue isn’t about the priority of the right or the good but an issue of “responsibility.” Whereas Marxists, in their ‘dialectical’ materialist teleology, reject the claim that human beings are morally responsible for their actions or even their thoughts, which are determined by the interests of their economic class, Rawlsian liberals insist that “people are capable of adjusting their aims, and so are responsible for the formation of their aims and ambitions.” In so doing, some people act to impose unequal costs on others in order to serve their self-(mis)perceived interests. “This fairness argument supposes that I am capable of adjusting my ambitions to the rightful claims of others, and responsible in that sense.” Both Marxists and Rawlsians demand “equal consideration for reach person’s good,” however. The equality principle isn’t the locus of their disagreement. 

Having thus liberated liberalism of its Rawlsian baggage without recurring to, and indeed rejecting, the “perfectionist” standard seen in some forms of natural right theory, Kymlicka takes up the communitarians and their critique of liberalism, as seen especially in the theories of Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. Communitarians charge that “the liberal view of the self,” the thing liberals would liberate, will not do. Kymlicka identifies five arguments communitarians make. According to them, “the liberal view of the self (1) is empty; (2) violates our self-perceptions; (3) ignores our embeddedness in communal practices; (4) ignores the necessity for social confirmation of our individual judgments; and (5) pretends to have an impossible universality or objectivity.” 

Taylor maintains that the liberal self is “empty” because liberalism’s obsession with liberty or freedom denudes the self of any content or aim; “complete freedom,” Taylor writes, is “characterless,” devoid of any “defined purpose, however much this is hidden by such seemingly positive terms as ‘rationality’ or ‘creativity.'” True freedom must be situated within society, as otherwise absolute self-determination can arrive at no determination, unable to “specify any content to our action outside of a situation which sets goals for us, which thus imparts a shape to rationality and provides an inspiration for creativity.” To this, Kymlicka objects that liberals don’t say that freedom is for its own sake, that it is “the most valuable thing in the world,” but that “our projects and tasks…are the most important things in our lives, and it is because they are so important that we should be free to revise and reject them should we come to believe that they are not fulfilling or worthwhile.” Freedom of choice is “a precondition for pursuing those projects and practices that are valued for their own sake.”

Here Kymlicka revises or qualifies his earlier suggestion that our ends, our proposed goods, remain within the horizon of the societies in which we live. Liberals do “insist that we have an ability to detach ourselves from any particular communal practice,” wanting “no particular task [to be] set for us by society” because “no particular cultural practice has authority that is beyond individua judgment and possible rejection.” The “matrix of understandings and alternatives passed down to us by previous generations” offers us “possibilities we can either affirm or reject.” This sounds rather like a sort of Socratism for the people, and more than a bit like Mill. Readers will need to keep the proverbial eye on this claim, which seems to contradict his valorization of ‘culture.’ He clearly doesn’t think any such contradiction exists, and eventually will produce an argument for thinking so.

Kymlicka bundles together the communitarians’ second and third arguments. Michael Sandel denies the liberal claim that “the self is, in an important sense, prior to its ends” because it can revise even its “most deeply held convictions about the nature of the good life.” No so, Sandel argues, because there is no distinction between the self and the ends it forms; our ends in large measure constitute our selves, which we “discover by virtue of our being embedded in some shared social context.” He argues first from an account of human self-perception and then from an account of human social embeddedness. If human beings really possessed a self prior to its ends, they “should, when introspecting, be able to see through our particular ends to an unencumbered self.” But such a Cartesian effort leaves us with little or nothing, as indeed it left Descartes himself. To this, Kymlicka replies as he has done before: “What is central to the liberal view is not that we can perceive a self prior to its ends, but that we understand our selves to be prior to our ends, in the sense that no end or goal is exempt from possible re-examination.” (Oddly, although this sounds much like Karl Popper’s well-known view, Kymlicka never mentions him.) In making ethical choices, we “compar[e] one ‘encumbered'”—socially endowed—self with “another ‘encumbered’ potential self.” It “doesn’t follow” from this “that any particular ends must always be taken as given with the self.” 

This begins to answer the question about Kymlicka’s historicism. It turns out that the self-revisions he identifies do take place within and not (Socratically) above ‘the cave,’ within the matrix of opinions put forward and reinforced by the regime or, as Kymlicka would have it, the ‘culture.’

Having disposed of Sandel’s self-perception argument, Kymlicka turns to his “embedded-self” argument. Sandel needs this argument in order to meet Kymlicka’s refutation of the self-perception argument; he needs to show “that we can’t perceive our self without some specific end or motivation.” When we reflect upon our self, we discover ends already given it by the society in which we are embedded. Yes, Kymlicka again argues, but “no matter how deeply implicated we find ourselves in social practice or tradition, we feel capable of questioning whether the practice is a valuable one.” 

In this connection, Kymlicka makes a telling criticism of communitarians who “say that they wish to replace Kantian Moralitat with Hegelian Sittlichkeit.” That is, they would replace Kant’s ‘deontological’ argument, which bases morality on his ‘categorical imperative’—itself a replacement of such ‘ontological’ moral arguments seen in the Bible and in the ‘ancient’ philosophers—with Hegel’s historicist ontology, which replaces Kant’s deontology without returning to the natural-rights ‘perfectionism’ of (some of) the ‘ancients,’ particularly Aristotle. Kant, one recalls, posits the criterion of ‘universalizability’ as the standard for morality; if a principle cannot be universalized it cannot really be moral. For example, ‘Thou shalt not steal’ is a true moral command not because the God of the Bible says so but because a society in which everyone adhered to it would not survive, whereas a society that commanded the opposite, ‘Thou shalt steal,’ would self-destruct. Hegel points out that, on the contrary, such a principle could indeed be universalized. True, the society would likely destroy itself, but what, on the Kantian grounds of the categorical imperative, is wrong with that? Kant has smuggled in a prior principle, ‘Thou shalt not self-destruct,” which is similarly arbitrary, inasmuch as its opposite, its contradiction, could equally be universalized. 

Kymlicka doesn’t dispute any of that but instead points out that Hegel’s dialectical historicism determines itself “in accordance with universal and rational laws”; societies unfold like syllogisms. “Hegel’s concern wasn’t to replace Moralitat with Sittlichkeit, but rather to give Moralitat some content, which he thought”—rightly—was “lacking in Kant’s formulation of it.” It isn’t at all clear, however, that Sandel and other communitarians subscribe to Hegel’s dialectic. They are indeed replacing Kantianism with something else, but it’s not real Hegelianism.

This leaves such communitarians with a sort of conventionalism. Kymlicka is eager to observe that they “share a more fundamental identity” with Rawlsian liberals: “both accept that the person is prior to her ends.” Although this point “is one for the philosophy of mind, with no direct relevance to political philosophy,” it will enable him to blend the two doctrines into his own ‘cultural’ form of liberalism.

Before doing so, he addresses the two remaining communitarian arguments—that liberals downplay the importance of social confirmation of our judgments and that they claim an objectivity that is impossible to achieve. With respect to social confirmation, communitarians worry that liberals’ “vaunting of ‘free individuality’ will result not in the confident affirmation and pursuit of worthy courses of action but rather in existential uncertainty and anomie.” Try as we may to resist it, “we can’t believe in our judgments unless someone else confirms them for us.” Kymlicka admits that “the spread of individual self-determination has generated more doubt about the value of our projects than before.” He immediately adds, however, that “the liberal view operates through people’s rationality,” generating “confidence in the value of one’s projects by removing any impediments or distortions in the reasoning process involved in making judgments of values.” Communitarians would generate confidence in our projects “via a process which people can’t acknowledge as the grounds of their confidence,” namely, conventions uncritically accepted, ‘givens’ that get shaky as soon as we see them as given by nothing more than prior practice and belief. Why does this assuage existential angst instead of exacerbating it? My peers may confirm my judgments, but why should I take their confirmation, however comforting, as authoritative? They, and I, could be dead wrong, and I know it.

Finally, Richard Rorty denies that liberals can claim objectivity in their judgments. There are “no such things” as what he calls “philosophical metanarratives.” On the contrary, “there are no reasons which aren’t reasons internal to a historical tradition or interpretative community.” Kant and Hegel and Mill and Rawls are all equally wrong, for that reason. What we call rational behavior is, in Rorty’s words, nothing more than “adaptive behavior of a sort which roughly parallels the behavior, in similar circumstances, of the other members of some relevant community.” Rorty takes up Hegel’s historical relativism but denies the dialectical ontology which frames it.

Kymlicka begins his answer to this by observing that even such philosophers as Plato and Kant, the ones “most commonly viewed as endorsing the mountain-top view of philosophy,” begin their philosophizing “on the ground,” in the marketplace (for Plato’s Socrates) or (for Kant) in the university. “Starting from the ground, we are led to philosophy” by thinking, often in dialogue with others. Even Rawls sees that “we start with the shared moral beliefs” of our time and place,” only then “describ[ing] an original position in accordance with those shared beliefs, in order to work out their fuller implications.” If anything (and as one suspects when reading Kymlicka’s initial preview of his argument), Rawlsian liberals are more ‘conventionalist’ than Plato or Kant. Further, Rorty unwarrantedly “claim[s] to know” the limits of practical reasoning and to know them “in advance of the arguments.” But this is only a “dogmatic objection,” not a philosophic one, one arrived at by reasoning.

Having replied to the five main arguments communitarians advance against liberalism, Kymlicka next considers the philosophic systems propounded by two of the most prominent communitarians, Charles Taylor and Karl Marx. Their critiques of liberalism “center not on the liberal idea of the self and its interests, but on the ‘individualistic’ way that liberals seek to promote those interests politically,” allegedly by neglecting “the social preconditions for the effective fulfillment of those interests.”

Taylor claims that even if liberals are “right about our capacity for choice, they ignore the fact that that capacity can only develop in society, in and through relations and interactions with others.” Kymlicka concurs, adding that the academic discipline of sociology “arose as a response to the overemphasis on rational individual choice by liberals.” But how does this effect moral judgment in a political society?

Liberals understand the common good as “the result of a process of combining preferences, all of which are counted equally (if consistent with the principles of justice).” The state should remain neutral with respect to these preferences and their combinations, except when those principles are violated. Otherwise, “in a liberal society the common good is adjusted to fit the pattern of preferences and conceptions of the good held by individuals.” Communitarians, on the contrary, want a society in which “the common good is conceived of as a substantive conception of the good which defines the community’s ‘way of life.'” (This, incidentally, brings them closer to the full articulation of what a regime is, as defined by Aristotle.) In a communitarian society, the common good “provides a standard by which [individuals’] preferences are evaluated”; “the weight given to an individual’s preferences depends on how much she conforms or contributes to that common good,” and the state is not “constrained by the requirement of neutral concern” regarding the promotion of some putative goods and the denigration or even prohibition of others. “Individuals are no longer able to veto the pursuit of these shared ends whenever it violates neutral concern,” although there are some exceptions to this allowed by some communitarians. 

Communitarians sometimes suspect that liberals, too, have a fairly strong notion of the common good, often unconfessed. When they “admit that the capacity for individual choice can only be developed and exercised in a certain sort of society,” and further admit that such a society ought to be “promot[ed] and protect[ed], then they have already accepted a politics of the common good” and, further, that the common good “must be prior to the rights of individuals within that society.” Kymlicka replies that if communitarians define the “politics of the common good” so broadly as this, then state neutrality has been encompassed within the politics of the common good and is not necessarily incompatible with it. Communitarians and liberals turn out both to have a concept of the common good; as he’d argued before, they only differ in the way—one might even say the way of life—to achieve it.

Somewhat more carefully than many communitarians, Taylor argues that liberal neutrality must violate its own neutrality in order to sustain itself. It must discourage “some options about the good life” and encourage other “in order for the political culture to accept the demands of liberal justice.” For example, it must provide some sort of civic education to its citizens, and education that not only lays down such abstract principles as Rawls propounds but also fosters “some recognition and acceptance of principles of the good life.” Rawls and other liberals in his line “would say that a person can and should b free to choose any conception of the good life as long as she doesn’t actively violate the principle of justice, no matter how little that conception itself values freedom or equality.” 

Why does Taylor reject this form of liberalism? For one thing, he is concerned that no political society can maintain itself without the civic participation that liberal politics fails adequately to encourage and to sustain. He ascribes this decline in political activity to the centralization and bureaucratization of the modern state. Kymlicka objects: “I see no empirical or theoretical warrant for claiming that liberalism requires centralization of bureaucratization.” Political participation yes, but political participation need not entail “the communitarian conception of political participation, or of justice.” Kymlicka suspects that Taylor entertains “a romanticized view of earlier communities in which legitimacy was freely given and earned, based on the effective pursuit of shared ends.” But such romanticism withers once one sees that such communities were highly exclusive, rigorously ‘marginalizing’ some if not most groups within them. Nor does liberalism necessarily preclude socialism, as some communitarians assume. Mill “was prepared to call himself a socialist,” and “the two traditions have borrowed from each other throughout their history.” Socialists, and often feminists as well, “correctly point out failures in traditional liberal institutions, but they are often wrong in supposing that these failures express or reflect problems inherent in the liberal conception of the person, or of social justice.” It is rather the case that “these institutions are failing because they don’t express or reflect these liberal ideals.”

Karl Marx, however, utterly despises liberal ideals and indeed idealism generally. He is a determinist and a materialist. However, neither is he a genuine communitarian, Kymlicka argues. According to Marx, at the end of the historical dialectic we will live not under a monarchic and bureaucratic world state but in communities in which we have no set social roles at all, but rather paint or hunt or engage in literary criticism as we please, without confining ourselves to any of those activities in order to sustain ourselves. We won’t derive our sense of ourselves from social ‘givens’ at all. Human beings will freely exercise their “capacity to enjoy the all-sided production of the whole earth” as Marx and Engels aver in their Manifesto. Whereas “communitarians would free people by reinterpreting and strengthening the communal nature of [their] identity-defining roles,” Marx “would free people by eliminating identity-defining roles” altogether.

Kymlicka disagrees with Marx, too. To answer the question, why is such a free life good, Marx answers that it registers the difference human beings exhibit when compared to other animal species, namely, “freely chosen activity.” This is a variation of Aristotle’s argument that the good for any individual depends upon its nature, and species differ from one another. Human beings differ by nature from other species; therefore, the good for human beings must differ from the good for horses, amoebas, chimps. Kymlicka denies the argument because “asking what is best in a human life” is “a question in moral philosophy” not a matter of “biological classification.” “If other animals had exactly the same capacities that Marx discusses, it would do not do harm to his claim about our essential interests,” and “the absence of such animals” provides no “support for his claim.” Kymlicka’s counterargument only holds if Marx’s argument depends exclusively upon mere ‘difference.’ But what if it depends not upon difference but upon nature? Then, Kymlicka would be stuck with Hume’s complaint that no ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is,’ especially if the ‘is’ in question—nature—has no telos, consisting only of matter in morally meaningless motion. The obvious problem is that human nature evidently does enable individuals within our species to form purposes. The question then becomes, is a given purpose so formed good for a being with such a nature? Marx’s problem is that he shares the Machiavellian/Baconian project, the project of modern philosophy and the science it has designed, which aims at conquering chance nature—a task that assumes that there is something in us beyond nature. Marx’s ‘history’ is nothing other than a ‘dialectical’ struggle so to overcome nature, one ruled by historical laws that determine human choices. He replaces nature with ‘history’ in the hope that the course of events determined by class struggle will eventuate in the projected freedom he supposes he foresees under ‘communism.’ 

One sees this in Marx’s “self-realization” argument, to which Kymlicka now turns. Marx says that human labor overcomes ‘the given’; human labor is the engine of “real freedom.” But although “really free working” is self-realizing, “that self-realization is neither the aim nor the end of such work.” “But if this is the story that Marx wishes to stand by, then the idea of species-differentiation has dropped out entirely, and the story isn’t fundamentally different from the liberal story,” which is equally a story about freely pursuing ends we find value in themselves, ‘objectively.’ And, as with liberalism, Marx wants human beings to live in a condition in which they do indeed choose their ends freedom, leading their lives “from the inside,” as Kymlicka likes to say. 

Why, then, does Marx’s theory of justice contradict liberals’ theories of justice? Because Marx, like some utilitarians and all Nietzscheans, doesn’t really have a theory of justice at all. For Marx, human beings will obtain “the social conditions of individual freedom” through the historical dialectic of matter in motion, not by claiming individual rights “within a theory of justice.” Marx charges that capitalism violates the principle of equality because its conception of equality is merely “juridical.” “Marx accepts the principle of moral equality, but denies that it can be spelt out in terms of a system of rights,” legal or moral. Both legal and moral rights are only excrescences of the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Marx ties this to his labor theory of value. Like Locke (the natural-rights “seventeenth-century” liberal Kymlicka pointedly ignores), Marx regards human labor as the activity which transforms a more or less worthless physical nature into things men can actually use for their own benefit. But “right,” Marx insists, “can exist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view).” Juridical justice fails to capture this because it treats all citizens as equal ‘under the law.’ And even this modest and distorted theory of justice overlooks the empirical fact that the judges are agents of the capitalist class, protective of an equal right to property which instantiates inequality of property. He therefore dismisses liberal justice, already untethered from natural right, as “obsolete verbal rubbish.” That goes for ‘deontologists’ like Kant and (in future) Rawls as well as for utilitarian ontologists like Mill. On the contrary, “the good society, communist society, will be beyond justice, not defined or governed by theories of fair shares or equal rights”; “for Marx, justice represents the failure to achieve truly virtuous social institutions, or a truly good community.” Indeed, justice is “epiphenomenal,” dispensable because equality will advance not by means of judges but “by the flow of historical events.” 

Kymlicka objects to Marx because he doesn’t believe that history will eventuate in “a society of equals.” He has no faith in the supposed iron laws of historical dialectic, nor does he find any rational/scientific proof of them in Marx, Hegel, or anyone else. “It is up to us to build unity in the struggle for a society of equals,” and Marx “has given us no reason to believe that justice is more divisive than any other way of rallying people for progressive social change.” He concedes, however, that “Marx had a deeper objection to the very idea of a juridical community,” an objection “he shares with the communitarians.” Both Marx and the communitarians regard justice as remedial, a rebalancing of some defect or excess in the community; they point to a time in which those flaws will have been overcome and justice (so defined) will no longer be needed. They differ because Marx is a materialist while communitarians are ‘idealists.’ Marx anticipates a communist society in which conflicts have disappear because, even though people still pursue different ends, material abundance has achieved a level in which no one need fight over resources to achieve those ends. “Justice is superseded because of abundance.” Even the ‘battle of the sexes’ will cease. Communitarians anticipate communal societies in which human beings no longer entertain “conflicting conceptions of the good”; they expect human opinions to coalesce. For them, “if the community as a whole also had an identity of interests and affective ties, then justice wouldn’t be needed.”

Against these arguments, Kymlicka defends the much-maligned liberal conception of rights. “Rights are desirable because they express an important form of respect and concern for people.” That is, he defends rights not as morally significant principles naturally inherent in human beings but on the more or less Hegelian terms of mutual recognition, although without the master-slave dialectic Hegel grounds it with. If “the expectation of abundance” seen in Marx and the vast reconciliation of opinions hoped for by communitarians are implausible—as Kymlicka evidently (and quite sensibly) thinks they are—then modern states and the social conditions prevailing in them will only bear so much community, ties that bind only loosely. “Therefore, liberal justice seems, for all that communists and communitarians have said against it, a viable political morality for the governing of our political institutions and practices.” Liberal justice, understood in the way Kymlicka will now elaborate, can balance individuality and community in a way he judges superior to those propounded by previous liberals and their critics alike.

He begins by distinguishing two kinds of community: the political community, “within which individuals exercise the rights and responsibilities entailed by the framework of liberal justice’; and “the cultural community, within which individuals form and revise their aims and ambitions.” That is, Kymlicka replaces ‘civil society’ with ‘cultural community’ in order to capture the fact that “the vast majority” of modern states “contain two or more groups who have different cultures.” In North America, many Indian tribes and nations live on reservations—special “political jurisdictions over which Indian communities have certain guaranteed powers and within which non-Indian Americans have restricted mobility, property, and voting rights.” Individual members of these communities are citizens within the larger political community but are so “through membership in one or other of the cultural communities”; “the justification for these measures focuses on their role in allowing minority cultures develop their distinct cultural life, an ability insufficiently protected by ‘universal’ modes of incorporation”—that is, in the “direct relationship to the state” experienced by members of the majority culture. 

This presents a dilemma to liberals, who identify individuals as rights-bearers and insist on equal rights for all. “There seems to be no room within the moral ontology of liberalism for the idea of collective rights,” as “the community has no moral existence or claims of its own.” “Individual and collective rights cannot compete for the same moral space, in liberal theory, since the value of the collective derives from its contribution to the value of individual lives.” 

This is not true of liberalism if ‘liberalism’ includes the doctrine of natural rights as understood by the American Founders. Americans as a group were understood to have rights vis-à-vis other nations, most immediately Great Britain, because as individuals they had consented to form a republican regime. The ‘cultural’ and therefore only quasi-political liberalism of Kymlicka misses the point that a ‘culture’ is a civil society that has lost its sovereignty, whether by conquest or by immigration. Given the derivation of ‘culture’ from ‘cult,’ cultures very often originate in a religion, usually a civil religion; the older the culture, the more likely this is. A ‘culture’ is a way of life with the ‘rulership’ and ‘ruling institutions’ elements of the former regime subordinated to those of another regime. The question really is, then, what rights ought a member of such a cultural minority be afforded within the regime which now rules it? Should its former sovereignty be restored, on the grounds of the liberal conception of rights? Is it entitled to declare its independence from its conqueror? Or should it work out some other modus vivendi?

Kymlicka distinguishes the circumstances faced by American blacks with those faced by American Indians. In the United States, racial segregation “was perceived as a ‘badge of inferiority,'” in the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. But in Canada, the segregation of Indians “has always been viewed as a defense of a highly valued cultural heritage”; it was any attempt at integration that the Indian tribes and nations regarded as a badge of inferiority, an attempt to overbear their ways of life. To survive in their cultural integrity, Indians need coercive restrictions on mobility, residence, and (remaining) political rights “of both Indians and non-Indians. For example, under the reservation system, an Indian may not sell reservation land to a non-Indian; to allow this would dilute and likely ruin the tribal community’s cultural integrity, over time. Similarly, non-Indians who marry Indians are not permitted to vote for representatives on tribal councils. 

“Many liberals treat these measures as obviously unjust, and as simple disguises for the perpetuation of ethnic or racial inequality.” Kymlicka maintains that “there are two kinds of respect for individuals at stake here, both of which have intuitive force.” “If we respect Indians as Indians, that is to say, as members of a distinct cultural community, then we must recognize the importance to them of their cultural heritage, and we must recognize the legitimacy of claims made by them for the protection of that culture.” The notion of equal rights will play out differently in different situations. In the case of the English-Canadians, their right to buy and sell property to an Indian in no way threatens their dominant culture, whereas the opposite is true for Indian-Canadians. To insist on equality of property rights “ignores a potentially devastating problem faced by aboriginal people, but not by English-Canadians—the loss of cultural membership.” At the same time, “if we respect people as Canadians, that is to say as citizens of the common political community, then we must recognize the importance of being able to claim the rights of equal citizenship.” Thus “there is a genuine conflict of intuitions here,” as “people are owed respect as citizens and as members of cultural communities,” neither of which “seems reducible to the other.” 

As a result of this dilemma, many of those sympathetic to Indian claims of self-government defend those claims by criticizing liberalism. They may do so on grounds of moral and cultural relativism: “aboriginal peoples have a different value system” from that of English and French Canadians, “emphasizing group rights rather than individual rights.” Such arguments, however, “don’t explain why minority rights aren’t the first step on the road to apartheid, or what serves to prevent massive violations of individual rights in the name of the group.” After all some of the cultural practices of aboriginal communities in North American included cannibalism and slavery. Other arguments for group rights focus on property rights—the Indians took ownership of the land before British colonizers did—or political rights—at least some of the aboriginal nations never “officially relinquished their sovereignty.” The property rights claim, however, “does not justify permanent special political status” since property rights of one group might be said to give way to claims to “equality of resources for all the citizens of the country.” As for sovereignty, the Indian claims have not “heretofore been explicitly recognized in international law.” 

These difficulties notwithstanding, Kymlicka argues that liberals can formulate a doctrine which can encompass respect for cultural minorities rights without become illiberal. To do so, “we need to show two things: (1) that cultural membership has a more important status in liberal thought than is explicitly recognized” and “(2) that the members of minority cultural communities may face particular kinds of disadvantages with respect to he good of cultural membership, disadvantages whose rectification requires and justifies the provision of minority rights.” “That is, we need to show that membership in a cultural community may be a relevant criterion for distributing the benefits and burdens which are the concern of a liberal theory of justice.” 

In Rawlsian liberalism, such minority cultural rights violate the principle of equality by reserving rights to minorities not in order “to enlarge liberty overall, but to protect cultural membership.” Such overall liberty for all citizens of, say, Canada, enables Canadians “to intelligently decide for ourselves what is valuable in life”—to hold their current religious beliefs, for example, but also to question and to change them. Kymlicka replies that “the range of options” we entertain when so deciding “is determined by our cultural heritage.” If so, the moral claims of Rawlsian liberalism filter through a cultural matrix; they do not, cannot, really transcend it. That matrix, however, may not be the matrix of either a regime or of a ‘cult,’ the religion that has suffused the matrix. Rather, “the processes by which options and choices become significant for us are linguistic and historical processes.” “Our language and history are the media through which we come to an awareness of the options available to us, and their significance,” forming “a precondition of making intelligent judgments about how to lead our lives.” Therefore, “liberals should be concerned with the fate of cultural structures, not because they have some moral status of their own”—the status with which a regime, including a religious regime, would endow them—but “because it’s only through having such a rich and secure cultural structure that people can become aware, in a vivid way, of the options available to them, and intelligently examine their value.” Cultural structures or matrices provide “a context of choice.”

Kymlicka hastens to caution that “fundamentalists” of various sorts may be quite illiberal, demanding on restriction of “freedom of speech, press, religion, sexual practices, etc. of its own members” on the grounds that if these restrictions are not granted “their culture will disintegrate.” This is why Kymlicka insists on ‘interpreting’ culture to mean the much broader categories of language, which can enunciate heterodox opinions, and of history, which changes over time. Kymlickian culture has no real moral content; it is all ‘context,’ with minimal and readily changeable content. “So long as everyone has her fair share of resources and the freedom to live her life as she chooses within her cultural community, then the primary good of cultural membership is properly recognized”—properly, that is, in terms of Rawlsian liberalism. 

What, then, gives culture as defined primarily by shared language and history any moral status as a thing to be respected? While it may be that “enforced assimilation” of a minority culture into a majority culture “can have tragic results” and lead to “miserable failures,” those are practical not theoretical difficulties. And if one evidently will need a language and inevitably have one’s group’s history to serve as a matrix for free choice, why does this mean that my own language and my own group’s history should be preserved? What if my language inadequately expresses the principle of non-contradiction, or if my group’s history is profoundly flawed, foreclosing choices instead of offering them? Why should minority cultures, or majority cultures for that matter, be treated as if ‘created equal’? And if ‘culture’ is treated as if a merely linguistic and historical thing, would members of any culture really seek to defend it? On what grounds, other than neo-Rawlsian liberalism, which might be taken as not so solid? And even to defend cultures so ‘liberally’ defined, the dilemma persists: “Since cultural membership is a primary good, special rights are needed to treat aboriginal people with the respect they are owed as members of a cultural community. But the effect of these special rights is to compromise the fairness of political and economic decision procedures.”

To begin to answer these questions, Kymlicka distinguishes between demands based on “differential choices” and demands based on “unequal circumstances.” For example, “someone who cultivates a taste for expensive wine has no legitimate claim to special public subsidy, since she is responsible for her choice”; her liberty of choice has in no way been infringed if her taste isn’t subsidized.” But “someone who needs expensive medicine due to a natural disability has a legitimate claim to special public subsidy, since she is not responsible for the costs of her disadvantageous circumstances”; she needs the medicine, it is not a mere option. (Notice, by the way, that this argument about liberty in fact depends upon a prior right to life and even to health, a right moreover that imposes a duty upon fellow-citizens to take up its defense. This is the difficulty with the Kantian categorical imperative, as noted above; it typically needs to smuggle in some right that looks rather suspiciously like a natural right in order to buttress its ‘deontological’ claims.)

On these grounds, if an aboriginal people “have chosen an expensive life-style by, say, choosing a way of life that requires a large section of land, valued by many groups in society, to be set apart and left undeveloped, even though the benefits of this only accrue to themselves,” that people “should have to outbid those who plan to use the land more efficiently.” This is a variation on Locke’s argument against the rights of peoples to control lands that could be better used by others—his justification for empire and colonization. Kymlicka probably would not go so far, preferring to deploy the argument as a restriction on aboriginal rights asserted after imperial conquest has happened. That is because “we can defend aboriginal rights as a response, not to shared choices, but to unequal circumstances,” circumstances which have rendered their communities “vulnerable to the decisions of the non-aboriginal majority around them.” Further, when members of the majority community seek to purchase lands owned by aboriginal peoples, they act from choice, not necessity, whereas in demanding the restriction of their right to sell that land, the aborigines respond to what Kymlicka claims is a moral if not a physical need, a right, “to ensure that their cultural structure survives.” This inequality “has nothing to do with the choices of aboriginal people”; it is the circumstance into which they have been thrown. “Special political rights…can correct this inequality by ensuring that aboriginal communities are as secure as non-aboriginal ones.”

Why would aborigines worry about the security of their communities if those community cultures are defined in terms only of language and of history? Kymlicka asserts that “when we take cultural identity seriously, we’ll understand that asking someone to trade off her cultural identity for some amount of money is like expecting someone to trade off her self-respect for some amount of money,” getting money in exchange for “giving up the context within which” the ends which money otherwise helps us to pursue. “It is irrational to expect people to accept that trade-off.” But money doesn’t buy language or history, does it? It buys land and other physical property, and it buys labor. Only if one claims that a group’s historical possession of a piece of land must prove indispensable to the continuation of culture so defined would the argument hold. Thus, Kymlicka remarks that some American Indian groups (he gives the example of the Pueblo) “are essentially theocracies, with an official religion.” While liberalism guards the right to free exercise of religion, that free exercise doesn’t extend to a religious establishment. According to Kymlicka, Pueblo religion would in no way be threatened were Protestant converts from it allowed to remain on the Pueblo reservation. “Meaningful individual choice” must be maintained. More generally, “each person should be able to use and interpret her cultural experiences in her own chosen way. That ability requires that the cultural structure be secured from the disintegrating effects of the choices of people outside the culture, but also requires that each person within the community be free to choose what they see to be the most valuable from the options provided.” But where does Protestantism come from, if not from outside the Pueblo community? 

Kymlicka sees the problem. “What if the Pueblo community really would disintegrate without restricting religious liberty? Would that justify restricting religious liberty? If so, are there any limits on what can be done in the name of protecting cultural membership?” Here, he anticipates compromises based upon the concrete circumstances in the variety of cases. “These are complex issues in which our intuitions are pulled in different directions, and I don’t see how any simple formula could cover all the relevant cases.” He has restated the problem of the relation between theory and practice, and of the relation between laws, which generalize, and cases, which don’t always fit easily into legal categories. 

Kymlicka knows that pre-Rawlsian liberals did in fact take account of “cultural context”— specifically, nationality. “Mill emphasized the importance of ‘the feeling of nationality,’ a feeling which is generated by many causes, of which ‘the strongest of all is identity of political antecedents: the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.'” Later, the League of Nations “managed to secure special political status for minority cultural groups in the multinational countries of Europe.” Today’s liberalism, by contrast, focuses on human rights “to be ensured for every individual qua individual, regardless of her cultural membership,” resulting in the sense that to be treated differently according to one’s “ethnicity or race or group membership” amounts to “a betrayal of the liberal idea.” Kymlicka attributes this shift to the misapplication of the principles applied to the problem of racial segregation in the United States to the problem of minority cultures.

This shows that when Kymlicka defines culture as a shared language and a shared history, he has slid politics back in, with an elegant sleight of hand. But if politics, and therefore regimes, do count as part of one’s cultural heritage, this reintroduces the problem of states within states that he had only apparently disposed of.

What, then, will prevent Kymlicka’s ‘cultural’ liberalism from resulting in political disunity? Given the fact that, according to his estimate, only ten percent of the countries in the world are nation-states in the strict sense of the world, would it not result in a rash of secessionist movements, even civil wars? Not so, he claims. “The result of this conception of individual responsibility”—the individual’s use of the freedom to deliberate upon and choose a way of life within the options offered by his cultural context—is “not to set people against each other, but to tie all citizens in bonds of mutual respect.” Cultural liberalism “will enable various groups of people to freely pursue and advance their shared communal and cultural ends, without penalizing or marginalizing those groups who have different and perhaps conflicting goals.” 

Kymlicka does not say why citizens pursuing conflicting goals will respect one another. If they don’t, why would they remain united? And if they do not remain united, why will the result not be war—civil, if secession is resisted, international if secession succeeds? In other words, why would Hegel’s ‘master-slave dialectic,’ a struggle to the death for recognition, not prevail over the polite, ‘Canadian’ multiculturalism Kymlicka propounds? It begins to seem that liberal multiculturalism is politically incoherent.