Murray N. Rothbard: The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press, 2002 [1980].

 

No mere libertarian, the late Murray N. Rothbard stands as the most intelligent defender of anarcho-capitalism—as sharply distinguished from anarcho-communalism, the supposed end-time of several forms of socialism. The anarchism of anarcho-capitalism rests on individual liberty; the anarchism of anarcho-communalism rests on radical equality.

“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty,” Rothbard writes. Here he aims to justify “a totally stateless and therefore purely free (or anarchistic) market economy.” For this, “value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism” won’t suffice. It is a task for “political philosophy” not political economy. The task begins with the individual, with the figure of Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, seeking his own good. Unlike an economic analysis, which would analyze Crusoe’s “conditions and actions” in order to find the basics of material survival and comfort, Rothbard considers the celebrated islander to establish the “concepts” of “natural-rights morality.” “The Crusoe model enables one to analyze the actions of man vis-à-vis the external world around him, before the complications of interpersonal relations are considered.” On this foundation, he will seek to understand those complications, which include property and law.

Natural rights inhere in natural law. Rothbard concurs with “the Thomistic tradition” insofar as it teaches that “natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason—not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else.” With Thomas, Rothbard affirms that man has a nature: “if apples and stones and roses each have their specific natures, is man the only entity, the only being, that cannot have one? And if man does have a nature, why cannot it too be open to rational observation and reflection?” Ethics stems from this rationally discernible human nature. “The natural-law ethic states that goodness or badness can be determined by what fulfills or thwarts what is best for man’s nature”—a principle defended by Thomas and before him, Aristotle.

David Hume famously objected to deriving right from nature. Nature is, Hume allowed, but how am I to deduce rationally an ‘ought’ from that ‘is’? If I cannot, then either nature as a whole nor any part of it, including human nature, provides a rational standard for ethics. What we call ‘right’ is only a ruling passion or set of passions. Morality is therefore ‘subjective’ not ‘objective.’ But Hume in fact saw that human well-being and happiness requires society, Rothbard counters. Moreover, social order cannot exist unless human beings know what it is and under what conditions it can effect their safety and happiness. In society, conditions must include security for persons and property, that is, for what is called ‘justice.’ Justice is therefore rationally discernible and necessarily governs the passions, which tell us nothing about what is concerning safety and happiness. Hume himself admits this when he writes that “nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.”

Discoverable by reason, natural law is universal among human beings because they have a nature. Natural law “holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason.” The legal principles of a society derive either from “traditional custom,” nor from the will of the rulers, nor from rational recognition of the natural law. These distinctions may be found in Plato and Aristotle. Lord Acton corrected them, seeing “the deep flaw” in “their conception of natural law political philosophy,” namely, their identification of “politics and morals,” which led them “to place the supreme social moral agent in the State,” that is, as ruling apparatus of any political community. Plato and Aristotle also failed to distinguish morality not only from politics but from religion, which was intertwined with the ancient ‘state.’ “Acton added that the Stoics developed the correct, non-state principles of natural law political philosophy, which were then revived in the modern period by Grotius and his followers.” 

“The great failing of natural-law theory—from Plato and Aristotle to the Thomists and down to Leo Strauss and his followers in the present day—is to have been profoundly statist rather than individualist.” Aristotle was right to call man a social animal, of being whose “nature is best fitted for social cooperation.” He was wrong to posit “a virtual identification of ‘society’ and ‘the State,’ and thence to the State as the major locus of virtuous action.” It took John Locke to correct this error by “transform[ing] classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological individualism,” on “the individual as the unity of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts.” From this Locke derives the idea of property as inherent first of all in one’s own person, a person who then mixes his labor with external, natural objects in order to establish private property. As James Madison wrote, man has a right in his property and a property in his rights. Although Locke’s pioneering version of correct natural-rights theory “was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies,” these were removed by later thinkers, especially Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner. This firm distinction between individual and society, between “personal ethics” and “political philosophy,” between “a man’s right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right, narrows the scope of political philosophy proper to “the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations,” inasmuch as “it is a man’s right to do whatever he wishes with his person.” 

Rothbard errs in claiming that Aristotle described man simply as a social animal. On the contrary, he described him as a political animal. That man is a political animal, he argued, may be seen in the fact that human beings originate in families, small or ‘extended,’ and that families exercise three forms of rule within themselves. There is the command-and-obey form of rule seen in the relations between parents and children, exercised for the good of the children; the command-and-obey form of rule seen in the relations of freemen and slaves, exercised for the good of the freemen; and there is the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, which he defines as political rule strictly speaking—rule involving discussion and therefore open to practical reasoning. The fact that Rothbard gets Aristotle wrong is an exegetical point, trivial with respect to ethics, but the important point is that Aristotle is right. The elements of what Rothbard calls “the state” already exist in the family, and the family is indispensable to human survival and flourishing, the ends of Rothbardian ethics as well as the ethics of Aristotle and of Thomas. Human beings are naturally political beings, not merely social and certainly not ‘individualist’ in Rothbard’s sense.

This error, whether deliberate/rhetorical or inadvertent, vitiates Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism on its foundation. One sees this as he turns to “a Crusoe social philosophy.” On the island, Crusoe enjoys “the primordial fact of his own consciousness and his own body,” along with “the natural world around him.” Lacking an animal’s “innate instinctual knowledge impelling him into the proper paths for the satisfaction of his needs and desires,” he understands that he must learn to find those paths. Because his island isn’t Eden, he needs to work, to ‘mix his labor’ with “the nature given resources and transform them into useful objects, shapes, and places most useful to him—so that he can satisfy his wants.” Clearly, no human being has ever lived this way, except for those removed by choice, by force, or by accident from family, tribe, or political community. Even Adam in Eden was quickly supplied with Eve because God judged that it was not good for the man to be alone. Alternatively, if one prefers the evolutionists’ account, the first biologically human being must have lived in a family, and quite likely a tribe, of proto-humans, where ruling and being ruled prevailed. Crusoe’s circumstance is in fact radically unnatural. In Aristotle’s more realistic account, families and extended families—already exercising political and other forms of rule— deal with scarcity by allying with other families, by extending political and other forms of rule to others.

On Crusoe’s island, man “must produce before he can consume, and so that he may consume.” In a family, this is true only of adults and older children; infants and toddlers do very little to mix their labor rationally with the world around them. Indeed, the only ‘labor’ an infant performs is sucking, and that is instinctual, animal-like, indistinguishable from the behavior of any other young mammal. However, as Rothbard and Aristotle both acknowledge, human nature quickly develops its innate capacity to reason and therefore to labor in the Rothbard-Lockean sense. 

Reason teaches “the way things work in the world, i.e., the natures of the various specific entities and classes of entities that the man finds in existence; in short, he learns the natural laws of the way things behave in the world.” At the same time, “he learns about his own nature, about the sort of events and actions that will make him happy or unhappy”—his natural ends or purposes. His mind can then ‘mix’ with external matter, using mental and physical energy to reshape matter “into ways to sustain and advance his wants and his life”; that is, he learns means by which he can achieve his ends.

“The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the primordial natural fact of his freedom: his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not use his reason about any given subject. In short, the natural fact of his ‘free will.'” Further, by experiencing his mind’s natural “command over his body and its actions” he discovers “his natural ownership over his self.” This means that he can also distinguish between his natural freedom and his natural powers. “Man is free to adopt values and to choose his actions; but this does not at all mean that he may violate natural laws with impunity,” to do things beyond his natural capacities. He can’t fly, although he may learn to reshape external objects in ways that will enable him to be flown and to control the direction of the flight.

Here Rothbard departs from Aristotle and the classics generally, entering into the realm of Rousseauian thought. Notice that he takes freedom to be unalienable; the only natural limits to free action are power, which is not a moral category, and the prohibition of impinging on anyone else’s unalienable freedom. Aristotle would reply that human beings are not at all entitled to choose their own “values”—language absent from his philosophy. There are moral limits on human choices themselves, and those limits are imposed by the nature of the human soul, which, like the human body, can have good or bad characteristics, make good or bad choices respecting its well-being. Rothbard tacitly denies the human soul, tellingly referring to ownership over the “self.” That is, contra Rothbard, even a human being isolated on an island has moral obligations with respect to the ends he chooses, and not only physical limitations, quite apart from whether there are any other people around, and even quite apart from whether God is watching him.

Before elaborating on the effect of social relations on the protection of unalienable rights, Rothbard addresses economic relations. Production is necessary to man’s “prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.” When the man Friday comes onto the scene, Crusoe might enter into a relation whereby he supplies fish and Friday supplies wheat. “This great gain for both men is made possible by two primordial facts of nature—natural laws—on which all of economic theory is based: (a) the great variety of skills and interests among individual persons; and (b) the variety of natural resources in geographic land areas.” Different individuals, working on different kinds of land (or, for that matter, the sea), will enable exchanges to multiply far beyond the capacities of any individual or small set of individuals. Although most immediately these persons are exchanging material goods, more precisely they are exchanging “not the commodities themselves, but the rights to ownership of them,” having already acquired those rights by ‘mixing’ their labor with the elements of nature to produce them. This also goes for the person who hires others to work for him. “The capitalist, far from somehow depriving the laborer of his rightful ownership of the product, makes possible a payment to the laborer considerable in advance of the sale of the product,” and indeed “saves the laborer from the risk that the product might not be sold at a profit, or that he might even suffer losses.” Labor service is itself a commodity; the powers of my body and mind, which are my property, are purchased by my employer. As long as I consent to this sale, including its terms and conditions, I am not his slave. “A person’s labor service is alienable, but his will is not.” “A man can naturally expend his labor currently for someone else’s benefit, but he cannot transfer himself, even if he wished, into another man’s capital good. For he cannot rid himself of his own will, which may change in future years and repudiate the current arrangement.” 

This contrasts with Aristotle’s understanding of natural slavery (a point Crusoe’s inventor, Daniel Defoe, did not overlook when he introduced Friday to Crusoe). Aristotle sees that some human beings exercise their wills badly. Their nature lacks the capacity for rational action, either through some innate incapacity or an inveterate vice or set of vices. They do not make choices in Rothbard’s sense; they are ruled by their passions or by their instincts. They ought to be enslaved—nowadays, typically, in jails (in New Hampshire, for example, they are employed making license plates with the legend, “Live Free or Die,” which may be considered an attempt at moral instruction on the road to rehabilitation). 

Rothbard thus bases social life on economic relations; economic relations maximize freedom, largely ignoring the question of whether what I freely choose is good. “The free market is necessarily embedded in a larger free society,” which includes property rights. “the regime of pure liberty…may be described as a society where no ownership titles are ‘distributed,’ where, in short, no man’s property in his person or in tangibles is molested violated, or interfered with by anyone else.” “This means that absolute freedom, in the social sense, can be enjoyed, not only by an isolated Crusoe but by every man in any society, not matter how complex or advanced”—in “a milieu of civilization, harmony, sociability, and enormously greater productivity through exchanges of property with his fellow men.” Rousseau rightly claims that men are born free, and Rothbard adds they “need never be in chains.” This sounds utopian, and it is, as will be seen soon enough.

“The society of absolute self-ownership for all rests on the primordial fact of natural self-ownership by every man, and on the fact that each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice, adopts values, learns how to achieve the, etc.” Any diminution of this freedom “violates his nature,” as the “aggressor interposes violence to thwart the natural course of a man’s freely adopted ideas and values, and…thwart[s] his actions based upon such values.” By valorizing freedom over other dimensions of human nature, Rothbard overlooks that a chosen “value” might be bad—as in Milton’s Satan’s classic formulation, “Evil be thou my good.” There is enough truth in what Rothbard says—to develop virtues, one must exercise and habituate the human soul, strengthening it to freely choose good things—to give it considerable surface plausibility. That is the the only kind of plausibility it has.

Regarding the cultivation of the outer world, Rothbard takes Locke’s view. I rightly own only so much land as I can mix my labor with. A Columbus could not claim ownership of a continent, even if it had been unoccupied. Neither he nor any other man can create matter; “what he does is to take nature-given matter and transform it by means of his ideas and labor energy.” “There are only two paths for man to acquire property and wealth: production or coercive expropriation.” The way of production is the way of economics; the way of coercion is political and indeed “parasitical.” Once again, Rothbard narrows ‘politics’ to considerations of power and one-way or ‘command’ rule. Aristotle knows better, acknowledging that ruling itself is as much a part of human nature as choice or freedom, and that what in the family he calls ‘marital’ rule, ruling and being ruled reciprocally, very much involves prudential reasoning. So does the parent-child relationship. Rothbard’s formulation enables him to wave politics away as pure evil. To Rothbard, all “political” rule is coercive, all coercion slavery. He reduces the three forms of ruling seen in the household as Aristotle describes it to one, and the worst one at that.

This gross simplification (mis)informs Rothbard’s conception of criminal law. “A criminal is anyone who initiates violence against another man and his property: anyone who uses the coercive ‘political means’ for the acquisition of goods and services,” a point which he considers as “the very heart of the entire problem of liberty, property, and violence in society.” Any property that has been acquired by means of coercion has been stolen; all property is private, including government property or territory ruled by a sovereign, since “there is no entity called ‘government'” but “only people forming themselves into groups called ‘governments’ and acting in a ‘governmental’ manner.” Any ‘government’ that uses coercion is criminal. ‘Political liberty’ must then be a contradiction in terms. This leads Rothbard to his well-known claim (radicalizing Bastiat) that all taxation is theft. All of this depends upon his false assumption that politics, including some forms of coercion, is unnatural to human beings, an assumption that flows from his mistaken claim a human individual in exercising rational choice can select whatever ‘values’ he wants.

Such mistakes don’t prevent Rothbard from seeing some things clearly and indeed astutely. For example, when the United States government defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery, Reconstruction or regime change in the former slave states failed because while “the bodies of the oppressed were freed…the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With the economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm laborers.” Just so: the slaveowners had initiated unjust violence against the slaves; the United States government had employed, but not initiated, violent coercion on the slaveowners’ regime, but their just war to a substantial extent gone to waste because they failed to ‘win the peace’ by respecting the property rights of the slaves, rights exercised when they mixed their labor on the cotton and tobacco fields of the South. Rothbard wisely rejects pacifism, arguing that “defensive violence” may be used, although only “against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property,” including his life; such a threat may include intimidation (the threat of physical violence) and fraud, which is a form of theft. 

What coercion may not attempt, in Rothbard’s view, is “mak[ing] people moral by use of legal violence”—as, for example, sumptuary laws. And violence must be (as it is in both just war theory and in most theories of justice generally) proportional to the crime. A storekeeper has no right “to kill a lad as punishment for snatching a piece of his bubble gum.” Rather, “the criminal, or the invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his.” An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but not a life for an eye or a tooth. You are indeed entitled to ‘take the law into your own hands,’ but the law you wield must be the rational, natural law, not unbridled vengeance. In a “purely free-market society,” one ordinarily need not do so, however, but rather in effect hire others—police, judges—to exact justice on his behalf. Because one isn’t allowed, according to Rothbard, to make people moral coercively, the notion of criminal rehabilitation is off the table. Jails aren’t ‘penitentiaries.’ They may be the sites where some criminals repent, but their repentance and reformation is neither here nor there; only justly proportionate punishment matters. It is of course significant that Rothbard justifies third-party law enforcement and judging as “convenient.” The notion that third-parties acting as police and judges, ‘hired’ not by individuals but by—you may pardon the expression, although Rothbard wouldn’t—political societies might serve to prevent highly prejudicial defense of natural rights.

Rothbard gets around to the family only midway through the book, admitting that children pose a “difficult case” for his theory. Beginning with “the prenatal child,” he asserts an absolute right to abortion. “Every woman has the absolute right to her own body,” absolute “dominion” over it “and everything within it,” so long as her body isn’t deployed in a way to injure anyone else. But Rothbard includes the fetus (suddenly no longer a “prenatal child”) among those things. This ignores the fundamental distinction between something in a woman’s body because it is part of her body—the organs—or in it because it will soon be integrated into her body—food, drink—and a ‘fetus’ or prenatal child, which is neither one of her organs nor her last meal. “Should the mother decide that she does not want the fetus there any longer, then the fetus becomes a parasitic ‘invader of her person, and the mother has the perfect right to expel this invader from her domain. Abortion should be looked upon, not as ‘murder’ of a living person, but as the expulsion of an unwanted invader from the mother’s body.”

But why? Only if one’s freely-chosen wants or desires are morally authoritative, dispositive. Rothbard claims that even if the fetus is a human being, no human beings have “the right to to be coercive parasites within the body of an unwilling human host.” Such an argument violates Rothbard’s own principle of proportionality. The parasitism of a human being, or of any being, within a human body would only be capitally punishable if its parasitism demonstrably threatened the life of its host. The parasitism of a prenatal human ordinarily does no such thing.

Families generally come into Rothbard’s view as property. The mother has “trustee-ownership of her children, an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing against their persons and by their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any time.” Parents may “sell their trustee-rights in children to anyone who wished to buy them at any mutually agreed price.” This makes sense—if one ignores the good of the child and the natural rule of parents over children for the good of the children. It exemplifies (to say the least) the narrowly economistic, anarcho-capitalist illusions upon which Rothbard grounds his theory.

Beyond family life, Rothbardian societies would have no public streets, only privately-owned ones, whose owners could exclude anyone they didn’t want from using them. There can be no libel laws, inasmuch as my knowledge of your shameful conduct is my property, and so may be disseminated by me without restriction. Further, I can blackmail you, if you don’t want me to ‘go public’ with that knowledge, as “both parties benefit from the exchange.”  Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with bribery, except when the service you purchase is one that I have previously contracted with my employer to perform only on the terms my employer and I have agreed upon in our contract of employment. 

This leads Rothbard to a consideration of political life itself, which he predictably stages as “the State versus Liberty.” Although “the State” does perform “many important and necessary functions, that does not mean that only the State can perform them. It may be that the State can be abolished and other institutions or practices can do them as well or better.” As it stands, the State enjoys a “crucial monopoly,” namely, “control of the use of violence,” including “the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion.” All other transfers of income are voluntary, by sale or by gift; the state taxes, and “taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match.” If the State attempted to operate on the basis of sales and gifts, it would never receive “anything comparable to the current vast revenues” it now exacts.

Rothbard denies the relevance of political regimes in this matter. Taxation is theft regardless of whether a country is ruled by one, few, or many. Democracies are nothing more than majority tyrannies. “The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice,” any more than Jews murdered by their fellow Germans, most of whom had come to support the Nazis, went to the gas chambers voluntarily. Taxation under republican regimes, governed by representative, is even less a matter of consent than under straight majority rule. In fact, voting doesn’t even usually establish majority rule, since voter turnout rarely amounts to a majority of the adult population. If coercion is itself unjust, then political rule of any kind is unjust.

Here is where Rothbard departs from libertarians, or at least from most libertarians, who understand government as a form of contract. Such libertarians “hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society.” But a contract “should only be enforceable when the failure to fulfill it is an implicit theft of property,” that is, “where title to property has already been transferred.” A mere promise to transfer my title of ownership to any alienable form of property that belongs to me is unenforceable by law, although it is usually the moral thing to do. “It is not and cannot be the function of law (i.e., legal violence) in a libertarian system to enforce morality.”

Further, no one can transfer an unalienable right at all—very much including the natural right of liberty. Therefore, all social contract theories are illegitimate. “Setting aside the historical problem of whether such a social contract ever took place, it should be evident that the social contract, whether it be the Hobbesian surrender of all one’s rights, the Lockean surrender of the right of self-defense, or any other, was a mere promise of future behavior (future will) and in no way surrendered title to alienable property. Certainly no past promise can bind later generations, let alone the actual maker of the promise.” As for unalienable property rights, such as liberty, they are by definition non-transferrable. 

Here Rothbard misreads Locke. No one who joins a social-contract civil society gives away the right to self-defense. If I am attacked, my attacker puts himself outside of the social contract; I don’t need to call 911. I am entitled to fight back. As for liberty, Locke explicitly argues that he who would deprive me of my liberty could, if he wished, take away my life also. I am therefore entitled to fight assaults on my liberty on the same grounds as I may fight assaults on my life. This is precisely the argument that Rothbard, following Lysander Spooner, aims at all governments. Taxation implies a command enforceable by violence—your money or your life, or more likely your liberty or your life. The same goes for conscription. I should (and in principle do) retain the right to fight back against any act that threatens my life by denying my liberty, including acts by governments. The difference between Rothbard and Locke consists in Locke’s argument for what might be described as primary and secondary levels of consent. In Locke, my explicit or implicit consent to live within a given civil society entails a primary obligation to abide by the terms of its social contract. If I disagree with a given command issued by the government, I am free to resist or to leave. If I resist in ways that conform to the legal terms of the contract, I should not be punished. If I resist in ways that do not so conform, then I have placed myself in a state of war with the society. That works the other way around, too. A government might act in such a way that puts itself at war with its citizens (if it is a republic) or its subjects (if it is ruled by one or a few). That was the argument of the American colonists in declaring their independence from the British regime.

Rothbard claims that the only reason that governments get away with their criminal activities is through control over education and communications. They control their subjects’ bodies because they control their minds. The State grants money, power and prestige to “intellectuals” who otherwise would find an exceedingly small market for their services. “Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-molding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf.” And the State backs up both its physical coercion and its mind control by asserting sovereignty over territory as well as bodies and minds. Ultimately, only “the force of habit” enables “State rule”—a certain supine acquiescence fortified with fear and propaganda.

If his is true, what practical options does Rothbard condone? If I really believe that taxation (and/or conscription) is unjust in principle, I could leave the civil society and find myself a spot where the tax cops can’t find me. I could, as Rothbard says, vote for candidates who intend to “reduce or get rid of State power.” I could lie to the State, which Rothbard regards as “morally legitimate.” Or I could refuse to pay taxes or to report for military duty, becoming a conscientious objector. Or, I could engage in violent rebellion, taking care to observe the Rothbardian principle of proportionality. What I cannot do is to receive the benefits of civil society and expect to pay nothing for them.

Rothbard also faults libertarians for supposing limited government and laissez faire to be possible. This is a “Utopia,” he claims. “Surely the bloody record of States throughout history should have demonstrated that any power, once granted or acquired, will be used and therefore abused. Power corrupts….” For some reason, Rothbard overlooks whether his anarcho-capitalist notion might be at least as utopian. Anticipating this criticism, he cites the example of “non-state institutions,” such as tribal custom, common-law judges and courts, mercantile courts, and admiralty law enforced by shippers. In Ireland before Cromwell, there was no State, only institutions upholding “customary rules were not haphazard or arbitrary, but consciously rooted in natural law, discoverable by man’s reason.” Grant all that and the difficulty remains: What happens when Cromwell arrives? 

 

 

 

 

K.J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare. Oxford: George Ronald, 1953.

 

“Shakespeare’s plays seem, at first sight, to reveal a mind remarkable for its imagination than for its logic.” In Spalding’s time, academic philosophy in the Anglophone world had become dominated by logicians, most of them logical positivists. By that standard, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as a philosopher. “Shakespeare may seem at first sight to have few of the characteristics of the philosopher. Yet poets and artists may be philosophers—philosophers at times more sensitive to the truth of things than those who endeavor to express it by reason and argument.” Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Nietzsche: though rare, such philosophers yield nothing in eminence to their more prosaic counterparts. Looking only at Plato, is dialogue not a sort of play? (Plato found a rival in Aristophanes, who recognized a competitor when he saw one.) And are dialogues not arguments? If so, they lend themselves to philosophy at least as readily as a treatise.

In some respects, Spalding has in mind the idea of the ‘natural philosopher,’ particularly the physician, who seeks not only to diagnose but to cure the patient before him. By his time, what had been called natural philosophy had been in large measure divorced from philosophy, having been reclassified as ‘science’ or knowledge, distinct from ‘philosophy’ or love of wisdom. Logical positivism was in some respects a response to this narrowing of the meaning of philosophy; in that sense, it registered not only a shift in the self-understanding of philosophers but a regime change in the universities in which most philosophers were employed. That is, academic philosophers were practicing politics, some of them without knowing it.

In Spalding’s, and Shakespeare’s, more capacious understanding of philosophy, the natural philosopher or, more precisely, the political philosopher who inquires into nature, may act as a kind of physician, both diagnostician and even, in rare circumstances, caregiver to patients, although more usually this task will be attempted by a ruler. The patient might be a person or a polity: “Presenting in different plays different maladies of men and of the State, [Shakespeare] likewise presents in them some physician with the task of alleviating or healing them.” This suggests that Shakespeare might partake not only of natural but of political philosophy in the Platonic-Socratic line. “Like the scientist confronted by the Chance of Nature, Shakespeare’s…rational spirit” attempts “rather to resolve his perplexities than to remain their victim.” Spalding treats the plays as a sort of philosophic ascent whereby Shakespeare “came to himself” as a philosopher.

As in Plato’s Symposium and elsewhere, the ascent originates in a sort of erotic longing. “Love looks and longs for beauty’s immortality.” For Socrates as for Shakespeare, the ladder of ascent goes beyond the natural philosophy of the early philosophers, through the human element of opinion, subjected to logical scrutiny, toward the ideas, beyond material physis. And if “the beauty of a thing of Nature touched the heart of Shakespeare”—as it does in his early poem, Venus and Adonis—”the beauty of a human mind touched it more deeply,” setting him on the trajectory that culminated in The Tempest, in the figure of Prospero. “Mind knows itself and all things; bodies know neither themselves nor other things.” As recorded in Sonnet 69, Shakespeare became intent on “seeing farther than the eye hath shown.”

In that ascent, however, it is easy to leave the realm of human opinion behind. “Like Nature, man presents a riddle to the mind. Reason looks for the perfection of either, but experience discovers imperfections in both. In this quarrel reason wins the final word,” for “as the scientist looks for a rational order in the seeming disorder of the natural world, so the moral philosopher looks for one in the seemingly disordered and chaotic life of man.” Yet while the some of the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic seek justice and find it ‘in the abstract,’ bringing actual poleis into line with the ‘ideal’ politeia, the ‘city in speech,’ this proves unlikely or impossible. Taking Plato’s point, Aristotle recalls reformers to sobriety, proposing remedies to political problems seen in the light of practical, not theoretical, reasoning. Spalding maintains that his tension between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ gives Shakespearean drama its drama. And for Shakespeare there is an added difficulty. “An Aristotle has the privilege of writing what he thinks. But Shakespeare had need to consider at once his partners, his actors and the pleasure of the public”; he “might find it impracticable to utter truths plain to himself but strange to the multitude, and not less strange, perhaps, to a Kempe or a Burbage.” Spalding has rediscovered the necessity of exoteric writing.

He begins, therefore, with the plays that consider the question of “social man” and the immediate difficulties of his own country, with its clashes of opinion, its factions.  In his dramas on Henry VI and Richard III, Shakespeare “seems to be studying the social nature of man as revealed in the political chronicles of Halle and Holinshed,” who show “a people that had been for generations in irrational conflict with itself.” From Margaret in 1 Henry VI to the tyrant Richard, rulers love themselves more than their people and seek to bend the law to their wills. The Taming of the Shrew turns a tyrannical woman into a butt of comedy in a battle of the sexes, that primal natural duality, while The Two Gentlemen of Verona sets two friends, one a model of inconstancy, Proteus, against a model of fidelity, Valentine, subjecting the changeling to firm, comic correction. “For a moment Shakespeare seems to smile at a world restored to its reason, and to the peace and beauty natural to it.”

For a more lasting solution, Shakespeare must turn to politics, particularly to statesmanship. Spalding cites lines from The Taming of the Shrew: 

Only, good master, while we do admire

This virtue, and this moral discipline,

Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray; 

Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured.”  [I.i.25-28]  ?????

Spalding remarks, “Ovid united with Aristotle might be a medicine of a kind to keep men close to the world; while Aristotle united with Ovid might possibly keep men virtuous in it.” More, “a man of this temper might presently become a Statesman and, like Aristotle’s ‘Phronimos,’ find in his care for man the natural purpose of his existence.” At a minimum, erotic love is nature’s guarantee of the perpetuation of the human species; in politics, it guarantees the perpetuation of the polity; in the life of the mind, it guarantees the perpetuation of philosophy. Eros is not a noticeable theme among logical positivists; Spalding would recall academic philosophy to self-understanding, or possibly to a new understanding.

The need to mate Ovidian love with Aristotelian virtue forms the theme of the comic drama of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  There, “Shakespeare seems to be studying with a good deal of humor the laborings of minds capable of giving birth in their time to the politic being he is looking for,” as the king of Navarre sets himself “at war with his own affections” and those of his courtiers by proposing to turn his Court into “a little Academe”—a Platonic school or ‘republic’—consisting of men who will cloister themselves away from worldly desires for three years in an effort to make themselves, if not Philosopher-Kings, at least Scholar-Kings. The arrival of four ladies from the French Court puts a comic stop to their fantasy, and the ensuing drama issues in a reconception of love, now understood not as a fatal temptation to be countered by an austere life devoted to the liberal arts or by the frivolous eroticism for which the French Court was (in)famous, but for an Aristotelian ‘mean’ or center in the practice of love itself. Called back to the responsibilities of Court life after the death of her father, the King, the princess imposes a lighter sentence on the suitors than the Navarrian king had ordained: one year of mourning followed by marriages if the Navarrians behave themselves in the meantime. “By leaving the world these gallants of Navarre were thus to return to it men sobered, constant, of service” both to Navarre and to France. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not immediately call statesmanship to mind. But Spalding rightly argues that it should. Once again, Shakespeare presents the problem of misplaced loving among rulers—not only among humans by day but among the fairy regime which rules the countryside at night. Fairy King Oberon cures his queen, Titania, of her jealousy with an herbal remedy; among the young aristocrats, the loves of the two young couples are deranged by the same potion, misapplied by Oberon’s mischievous servant, Puck, whose work eventually gets undone by his master. Families being the foundation of polities, in both the human and the fairy regimes right order is restored, showing that it is not only the intensity of eros that can cause disaster but its direction. Moderation, hitting ‘the mean,’ is indispensable, but so the right choice of one’s beloved.

But “to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world,’ dreams must give way to sterner Reality, and a Man take the place of the King of the Fairies as the physician of human disorders.” In Richard II, “England, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’…has become “‘a drooping country’ with a ‘broken wing.'” A less rationalist version of the Navarrian king, Richard wastes his time in a world of imagination, “charming to poets and ladies” but useless in a statesman. “Divine as Heaven’s gift of a crown may be, it cannot weigh with a man’s own [practical] wisdom in the rule of a people; and a wise man without that gift is of more service to a State than a fool with it.” Such a man is Henry Bolingbroke, “an uncrowned physician of more promise than Richard,” a man ready to act “like the good gardener” who will “laboriously lop ‘superfluous’ branches ‘that bearing boughs may live'”—first of all by disposing of Richard. It remained for his son, Henry V, to exemplify “the reason-serving ‘phronimos’ of Aristotle, “Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood….” Julius Caesar is Henry’s counterpart in ancient Rome, “a man whose practical wisdom had by its sole might combined and sustained the far-flung fabric of a universal empire,” “possess[ing] the distinctive character of Plato’s ‘Philosopher-King’ and of the rational ‘Monarchos’ of Aristotle.” At the same time, his supposed divinity (he was “worshipped by the many”) was pure fantasy, as the assassins’ knives proved. “Sore for his high flight above them, [the conspirators’] eager envy sought to bring the eagle laughably to the ground,” and as they sought so did they find.

The limitations of human effort, the ungodlike character of men, appears most clearly in Twelfth Night. Here, Shakespeare “seems to be more seriously concerned with a mysterious world ruled neither by man’s wisdom nor Heaven’s Providence, but rather by untutorable Time and Fate and Fortune. The men and women that now appear on his stage are alike inclined to disallow the efficacy of the human will in the affairs of the world.” This time, there is no “resolute ‘physician’ of men,” no wise statesman to save the day, or the regime. “The best Statesmen may be in the sick world of humanity as the best of physicians in an uncontrollable pestilence of nature; and the wise man may look rather to retire from the world, like Jacques, than, like Caesar, to meddle uselessly with it.” Here Hamlet begins, with a prince who cannot decide what to do. Yet Hamlet proves himself “a rare being in the world,” as “men of ‘practical wisdom’ are more often to be found in it than ‘Kings of infinite space'”—self-divinizing, imperial rulers of Rome. 

Women too can prove themselves to be wise rulers, as seen in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that comedy, an impoverished physician’s daughter first cures a desperately ill king of his physical affliction, then cures the man the king selects for her husband of his folly in rejecting her. She does this not with a love potion devised by her late father but by means of her own smarts, tricking her wayward husband into bed with her and thereby making him see in her a worthy wife—a realization that confirms the king’s authority by vindicating his command. For Shakespeare, the real aristocracy is what Aristotle said it was: the rule of the best, not the rule of the snobs. “Such a will as Helena’s might be conceived to remedy, not alone the ills of lovers, but the wider-spreading evils of a human society, and in Measure for Measure Shakespeare accords to the Statesman the untrammeled powers of will of a Helena.” The statesman in question, the Duke of Vienna, finds himself about to be overwhelmed with the “envy, folly, and mistaken” of the people. Instead of “the swift decision of a Caesar,” Duke Vincentio practices patience, exiling himself from his corrupt city for fourteen years, allowing the corruption to “boil and bubble till it o’errun the stew.” Only then did he intervene to reform Vienna. That this can in fact be done was demonstrated by Charles de Gaulle, who retired from politics in the late 1940s, watched as the Fourth Republic foundered to the point of capsizing, then reappeared in Paris to found the Fifth Republic.

Patience conspicuously numbers among the Christian virtues, not so much among ‘the ancients,’ although moderation is its foundation. In Christianity itself, the foundation of patience is agape, “man’s forgiving love for man.” If practiced, this would indeed cleanse the foul body of the infected world. The problem is that it isn’t. “In the course of his reflections,” Shakespeare “discovered physicians of differing capacities: some able, who have helped lame men to their feet; others incompetent, who have aggravated rather than allayed their troubles.” Dovelike innocence, love, and patience must be supplemented with serpentine prudence, or all is lost but good intentions, with which the road to Hell is proverbially paved. “Human beings rarely raise themselves by their sole efforts; or become ‘devils to themselves’ without the help of other men.” “Like Socratic ‘midwives,’ such agents may bring to birth in a man beauties as unknown to himself as to his neighbors; or, like evil nurses, deforming passions subversive of the human reason natural and proper to him.” There are Vincentios among us; there are also Iagos. Spalding finds the tragedy of King Lear in his lack of self-knowledge, which issues in rage when his beloved youngest daughter tells him the truth about her love for her, without flattery. In his dying despair before her corpse, “Life showed death’s shining secrets at the last in visions unrevealed to eyes less martyred”—the flicker of life he alone claims to see in her. Insight into a life after death or pitiable illusion? Shakespeare does not tell us, perhaps because he does not know any more than we do.

Spalding chooses to read it as insight, if not exactly as Christian insight. “Men find themselves, it seems, rather in an immortal world than in the world of mankind; and learn to smile at last only as their hearts break.” “The human world, for reason’s rational foresight, must look a natural Paradise”—as Miranda sees, when she sees men other than her father for the first time. “But unreason, displanting it, may seem at times rather to have made a wild of it.” This notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the “the best of earthly Statesmen may fail of his purposes,” the “purposes of Heaven, and of the ‘mortal officers'” cited in Pericles Prince of Tyre as inspired by the “will” of Heaven, “are not finally to be thwarted.” “The fingers of the powers above do tune / The harmony of this peace.” (Cymbeline V.v.466). Shakespeare has “presented a world which, freed from human tragedy, must find, through Heaven’s directing power, the ultimate felicity Heaven destines for it.” 

“Yet the reason of the philosopher is not easily satisfied; and the best of answers may provoke at times the worst of questions. Content with his new world, Shakespeare could still continue to question it,” wondering “why its Providence had admitted an evil to cure” in the first place. Here The Tempest‘s Prospero, not Lear or any of the tragic heroes, has the last of Shakespeare’s many words. “It is for man’s ultimate benefit that Heaven has admitted evil into the world. In making ‘uneasy’ man’s attainment of his rational nature evil is destined to reinforce and invigorate it.” Or rather Spalding’s Shakespeare gives himself his last words on the matter in Sonnet 119: 

         O benefit of ill! Now I find true

That better is by evil still made better;

And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.

      So I return rebuked to my content,

      And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

By “Heaven” does Spalding mean “God”? He leaves that, too, open, following Shakespeare.

Since Spalding published his study, numerous writers have followed him in scrutinizing Shakespeare philosophically, although they have never dominated academic Shakespeare studies any more than Spalding did in his day. Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, Paul Cantor, Michael Platt, have all concurred with Seth Benardete’s conviction that Shakespeare could have written philosophic dialogues along the lines of Plato. And that he did, in his own way.

 

 

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, son of Ulysses. Patrick Riley translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

 

Telemachus has one virtue Minerva cannot give him: courage. Although she placed him under her aegis of protection, he doesn’t know that she has. After leaving Salente for the war, “he applied himself to gain the affection of the old commanders,” Nestor and Philoctetes (XII.198). Nestor treats him like a son, but Ulysses’ old enemy, Philoctetes has initial reservations before the young man’s moderation (another virtue Minerva can’t bestow) “at last overcame the resentment” (XII.199); he too begins to call Telemachus “my son,” explaining that “virtue, when it is gentle, genuine, modest, and unaffected, at last surmounts everything” (XII.199).

The older man ventures to explain his “violent hatred against Ulysses” (XII.199). Philoctetes had been a companion of Hercules, the monster-slayer who in turn fell victim to Cupid, lacking Telemachus’ moderation. Hercules’ wife punished him for his infidelity by laying out a tunic soaked in the poisonous blood of the Hydra of Lerna. In severe pain, he built a funeral pyre and asked Philoctetes to light it. “I saw him once more through the flames, and he appeared as calm and serene as if he had been partaking with his friends of the mirth and delicacies of a feast, crowned with flowers, and scented with perfumes” (XII.201-02). By the grace of Jupiter, his immortal soul ascended to Olympus to drink nectar and to marry the goddess of youth. In return for the favor of lighting the pyre, Hercules had given Philoctetes arrows dipped in the Hydra’s blood; when, at Troy, the allied kings were advised by the oracle of Apollo that they could not win the war without the arrows of Hercules, they sent word-savvy Ulysses to persuade Philoctetes to bring them. Accidentally poisoned by one of the arrows, Philoctetes “suffered the same excruciating pain as Hercules had undergone”; “the whole army shuddered to see me in such horrible pain, and concluded that it was a punishment inflicted on me by the just gods” (XII.203). His friend, Ulysses, “was the first to abandon me” in his concern for the soldiers’ morale, “preferr[ing] the common interests of Greece and victory to the obligations of private friendship and decorum” (XII.203). But Philoctetes didn’t know Ulysses’ motive at that time, instead taking his action as “the most horrible barbarity, and the blackest treachery” (XII.203). 

The Greeks needed those arrows. Ulysses and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, came to beg for them. Philoctetus refused until Jupiter intervened, commanding him to give them up. Philoctetus survived the poisoning, cured by two sons of Esculapius, the god of medicine. He then returned to Troy, confronting Paris, whose seduction of Helen had triggered the war. “I slew Paris like a timorous fawn,” and Troy itself “was soon lain in ashes,” but “I still retained a great antipathy to the sage Ulysses” which even “his virtue could not overcome.” However, “my acquaintance with his son, who resembles him, and whom I cannot help loving, has softened my heart for the father himself” (XIII.212). Thus Telemachus’ first achievement in a camp of war is an act of peace. At times, as he listened to the story, “he appeared very thoughtful, like one meditating deeply upon the consequences of things” (XIII.212).

The army broke camp, “marching in good order against Adrastus king of the Daunians, who despised the gods, and sought only to deceive mankind” (XIII.214). Telemachus finds it difficult to “manage so many kings who were jealous of one another,” and even his nobility, benevolence, and sincerity didn’t help, unleavened as they were by liberality, “gratitude for the kindnesses done him,” or a “desire to reward merit” (XIII.214). “His mother Penelope, in spite of Mentor, had cherished in him a haughtiness and pride that tarnished all his good qualities” (“he had been flattered by his mother from his infancy”); as a result, he “looked upon himself as of a superior nature to the rest of mankind,” whom he conceived as his divinely appointed servants (XIII.214). (It is conceivable that Fénelon as his own pupil, the future Louis XV, in mind, although the king himself had been over-indulged by his own mother, Anne of Austria, who filled him with her notions of absolutism founded upon the supposed divine right of kings.) “Full of a noble ardor,” Telemachus “could be curbed and governed by Mentor alone,” but Mentor is no longer with him (XIII.215). 

He came into conflict with the Lacedaemonian king, Phalantus, who treated his advice with contempt and ridiculed him in the war council. He fights with Phalantus’ brother, Hippias, a “quarrelsome and brutal” man; thanks to Minerva’s intervention, Telemachus wins” (XIII.216). “With victory, wisdom again took possession of the heart of Telemachus,” regretting “the fault he had committed in thus attacking a brother of one of the allied kings”; he “recollected, with shame and confusion, the sage counsels of Mentor” and “blushed for his victory,” which was undeserved (XIII.217). Accordingly, when attacked in turn by Phalantus, enraged by defeat of his brother, Telemachus “thought of nothing but repairing his fault by showing moderation” after drubbing Phalantus in turn (XIII.217). “He recognized how unjust and unreasonable he was in being carried away; he found something, vain, weak, and low in this measureless and unjust haughtiness of his,” losing “all patience with himself and roar[ing] like a furious lion” (XIII.218). He aspires to moderation but cannot attain it. 

Except in one important respect. Adrastus orders his forces to attack, his timing based on intelligence he had gathered by bribed members of the allied camp, who in their turn had overheard the two garrulous elders, Nestor and Philoctetes, as they discussed their battle plans. Having “from his infancy” habituated himself to concealing his thoughts from his mother’s importunate suitors, Telemachus “knew how to keep a secret,” and did. He warns his elders that “some knowledge of what had passed in council had spread into the camp,” but is ignored: “old age has no pliancy; chained down by inveterate habits, it has no resource against its own defects”; “youth is the only season when a man may hope to combat bad habits”—another likely glance at Bourbons old and young (XIII.218). 

The chief traitor is Eurymachus, “an adventurer who had attached himself to Nestor,” feeding information to Adrastus, from whom he “had received large sums” (XIII.222). In the battle, Adrastus’ troops rout the allies and burnt their camp; even Phalantus “was no longer able to make a stand against the enemy” (XIII.225). Armed by Minerva in the person of Mentor, who had suddenly arrived, Telemachus intervenes. Recalling Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield, Fénelon describes the engravings on Telemachus’ armor: they depicted the triumph of Minerva over Neptune, who had offered the inhabitants of a newly-founded city an olive tree, “emblem of peace and plenty, much to be preferred to the devastation of war,” symbolized by the horse offered by Neptune; for this, the people named their city ‘Athens’ (XIII.225). Other images include a representation of Minerva “giving counsel to Jupiter himself” and aiding Ulysses by giving him the stratagem of the ‘Trojan horse.’ A final engraving showed the goddess Ceres teaching agriculture to savages in Sicily, converting the iron they had used for weapons into plows for tilling the soil. “Even wolves were seen playing among the sheep in their pastures, and the lion and tiger had forgot their fierceness,” frolicking with lambs—all a picture of the “happiness of the golden age” (XIII.226-27).  In this armor, Telemachus displays Minervan wisdom, launching a surprise attack on the Daunians, saving Phalantus from them. The gods allowed Adrastus to escape, since Telemachus needed to “encounter more hardships and disasters, to learn the better how to govern mankind” (XII.228). Visiting the wounded allied troops, Telemachus “could not, without shuddering, and feeling the deepest compassion, behold [them] still alive, and doomed to a lingering, painful death,” looking like sacrificial victims “whose flesh has been burnt upon the altars” (XIII.229). “‘Alas,’ said Telemachus, ‘see what horrible scenes war produces! How great is the blindness and infatuation of wretched mortals! As life is short and miserable, why will they still make it shorter?” (XIII.229). “Man alone, despite his reason, does what animals without reason never did,” preying upon their own species (XIII.229). Kings ought to be “cautious…about engaging in wars,” fighting them only when they are not only just but “necessary for the public good” (XIII230). As he visits the sick and dying, he wins the esteem of the troops for his compassion, for which (no longer the callow, arrogant man he had been) he thanks Minerva. As do his men, who credit the goddess for giving Telemachus ‘the most valuable gifts which the gods can confer upon men,” namely “wisdom, and a heart susceptible of friendship” (XIII.234). As Phalantus recovers from his wounds, he reconciles with Telemachus, who now rules the camp. Even his body has matured, hardened by the exercise of war, manly.

For all his struggles, Telemachus seems no closer to finding his father. At the camp, preoccupied by day with plans for advancing upon and defeating the Daunians, he finds himself haunted at night by dreams of Ulysses in the Elysian Fields. He determines to venture into the Underworld, which courageous mortals may do without dying, as its entrance is in a physical place, Acheruntia, not far from where he is. Minerva prevails upon Pluto “to receive him favorably,” and Jupiter himself intervenes to guarantee his safe passage (XIV.240). 

Once there, he first meets the ghost of a Babylonian king, the very type of an absolute monarch, who confesses that in life “no one dared to contradict me without being immediately punished”; “I pursued pleasures and amusements but never enjoyed tranquility” (XIV.242). “Perpetually agitated by new desires, by hope and fear,” he sought to deaden his heart “by continual dissipation and amusement,” as “the least intrusion of reason, or calm serious reflection, would have been too bitter” (XIV.243). “So saying, the Babylonian wept like a weak man debauched by prosperity, who, by never having experienced adversity, was incapable of supporting it” (XIV.243). 

Telemachus also sees many “impious hypocrites who had pretended to love religion, but in reality made use of it only as a plausible pretext to gratify their ambition, and impose upon credulous men” (XIV.245). Not even children who murdered their parents or wives who murdered their husbands, or traitors “who had betrayed their country and violated every oath” suffered so much as these (XIV.245-46). 

Having thus warned Louis XIV and Bossuet, respectively, Fénelon draws Telemachus’ attention to a good man—a “magnificent, liberal, just, and compassionate” man—who nevertheless would spend eternity in the Underworld because he “charged all [his] virtue to [his] own account and not to the gods, whose gift it was” (XIV.246). More, he practiced virtue “only for the reputation and advantage of it”; “the only divinity you adored was yourself” (XIV.247). “There is no true virtue without love and reverence for the gods, to whom all is due” (XIV.247), and in the Underworld “a divine light reveals the error of [men’s] superficial judgment; for those whom they admired are often condemned; and those whom they condemned, acquitted and justified” (XIV.247). “At these words, the philosopher was struck as with a thunderbolt, and could not support himself: the complacency with which he formerly contemplated his own moderation, fortitude, and generous inclinations, was now changed into despair” (XIV.247). “My wisdom was but folly,” he cries; he knew neither the gods, mankind, or himself (XIV.248). Only now does the philosopher come to Socrates’ understanding, knowing that he knew nothing. 

Returning to kings, Telemachus sees those “condemned for abusing their power,” in contradistinction from the Babylonian king who seems to have done very little but indulge himself (XIV.248). This is the other side of the Louis XIV coin: the man of “excessive vanity,” of hardness toward men, of insensibility to virtue, of “dread of hearing the truth,” of partiality to flatterers and other hangers-on, of pomp and magnificence “supported by oppression and the ruin of their people,” and of military ambition that purchases “a little glory by the blood of their subjects” (XIV.248). And, just as the philosopher was deemed a good man when alive, many kings consigned to the Underworld “were accounted tolerably good when on earth” (XIV.250). The reason for their punishment is their failure to rein in subordinates who committed “enormities…under the sanction of their authority” (XIV.251). Whatever the nature of their failures, bad kings are punished “much more rigorously” than “other guilty men”—so much so that Telemachus deems it “madness, to desire to be a king!” (XIV.251).

But then Telemachus ventures on to the Elysian Fields, where he hopes to find his father. That is where the souls of the few good kings are. “As in Tartarus wicked princes were doomed to a punishment infinitely more rigorous than that of other bad men in private life, so on the other hand good kings enjoyed in the elysian fields a happiness infinitely superior to that of other men who had loved virtue on earth” (XIV.251). They are rewarded with “crowns that never fade,” but “there are only a few kings who have fortitude and resolution to guard against the intoxication of power, and the flattery of so many sycophants, continually endeavoring to excite their passions” (XIV.254). The shade who tells him this is his great-grandfather, Arcesius, who assures him that Ulysses is still alive and father and son will soon be reunited in Ithaca. Arcesius guides Telemachus through the rest of his journey in the Underworld, pointing out the “wise, just, and beneficent” kings, who “are indeed heroes”: Theseus, Ajax, Hector, Agamemnon, Inachus of Argos, and the Egyptian Cecrops (XIV.257-58).

Arcesius also remarks Erycthon and Triptolemus, who give him the occasion for a final lesson, this on political economy. Erycthon invented silver money in order “to facilitate commerce among the isles of Greece” (XIV.259). It did, but it also became (as Erycthon himself foresaw and warned) “an incitement to avarice, ambition, and vanity,” vices which “soften and corrupt manners” and “make you despise agriculture, which is the support of human life, and the source of all its true riches” (XIV.259). Triptolemus, in contrast, “came with a plow in his hand, to make an offer of the gifts of the goddess [Ceres] to all those who should have resolution enough to overcome their natural sloth, and apply themselves vigorously to tillage” (XIV.259-60). In doing so, he “made the Greeks feel the pleasure of owing all their riches to their own labor,” the foundation of civilized life (XIV.260). “Even those fierce savages, that wandered through the forests of Epirus and Etolia, in quest of acorns for their food, became more civilized, and submitted to laws, after they had learned to raise crops of corn and to live on bread” (XIV.260). The preference for agriculture over mercantile commerce carries into Rousseau’s political thought and also that of Thomas Jefferson and some of the other American Founders; the recognition of the civilizing effect of agriculture carries into the political thought of George Washington and his policy respecting the Indians. “Happy would the Greeks have been,” Arcesius teaches, “had they steadfastly adhered to these maxims, so proper to render them powerful, free, happy, and worthy of being so by their genuine virtue. But alas! they begin to admire false riches, by little and little to neglect true wealth, and to degenerate from that marvelous simplicity” (XIV.26). 

Back under the light of the sun and in the allies’ camp, Telemachus learns that a city formally allied with his coalition has now in fact allied with the Daunians, their rulers having been corrupted by Adrastus. Telemachus opposes a plan to seize the city, first, because that would be a violation of their treaty, and second, because the success of the attack would depend upon a traitor in that city, who has offered to open one of its gates to the allied troops. Even if the city rulers have surreptitiously broken our treaty with them, we must not betray our side of the bargain. “If the fear of the gods and the love of virtue do not move you, at least you ought to be influenced by your own interest and reputation,” which would be irretrievably damaged by such a “violation of your oaths of faith” (XV.265). It will even through the alliance itself into question: Why should we trust one another, if we are willing to violate the terms of treaties we make? And if the alliance breaks up, Adrastus and his Daunians will win the war. Nestor concurs, the other kings agree, and the alliance remains strong.

Telemachus goes on to make some additional, equally high-minded, decisions, including his choice to turn over a would-be assassin of Adrastus to Adrastus. The tyrant “shuddered at the thoughts of the danger he had been in, and was quite amazed at the generosity of his enemies; for pure virtue is above the comprehension of bad men” (XV.270). As it happens, Adrastus has little time further to reflect upon virtue. In hand-to-hand battlefield combat with Telemachus, he attempts to kill the young hero after Telemachus had defeated him and offered him mercy. “Adrastus was no sooner dead than the Daunians, far from regretting their defeat and the loss of their chief, rejoiced at their deliverance; offering their hands to the allies, in token of peace and reconciliation” (XIV.280). Adrastus’ son, “whom his father had trained to maxims of dissimulation, injustice, and cruelty, like a coward, basely fled,” only to be stabbed in the back by one of his former slaves (XV.280). This gives Telemachus occasion to lament, “Thus it is that young princes are spoiled by prosperity; the greater their elevation and vivacity are, the farther do they recede from every virtuous principle they may have: and, perhaps, that would now have been my case, had not I thanks to the gods, by the misfortunes I have undergone from my infancy, and the instructions of Mentor, been taught moderation” (XV.280). Immediately aimed at the Bourbon father and Bourbon son, the lesson as well applies to monarchs generally.

By now, Telemachus’ reputation among the kings and soldiers alike has turned completely around. Whereas they once had deemed him gifted but arrogant, they now call him—not to his face but “to one another in private”—the “greatest hero of the age,” a “humane, benevolent…fair and affectionate friend, compassionate, liberal, beneficent, and wholly attached to those whom he is bound to love,” having “entirely shaken off his former haughtiness, indifference, and pride” (XVI.285). He’s offered the kingship by the Daunians but remains steadfast in his intention to return to Ithaca, finding them a worthy king among their own people.

Telemachus then voyages back to Salente, to be welcomed by King Idomeneus and Mentor. “I am content with you,” his governor tells him; “you have, it is true, committed great faults; but they have taught you to know yourself better, and to be more diffident than you were before,” inasmuch as failure so often teaches better than pride-swelling success (XVII.295). Prosperity exiles wisdom. And “is it not true” that your great actions during the war “were suggested and directed by something independent of yourself,” that “Minerva had, as it were, transformed you into something above yourself, to enable you to perform what you have achieved” by “suspend[ing] all your natural defects”? (XVII.295). Indeed.

Telemachus remarks the great improvement of Salente, how “well cultivated” it has become, and “how little magnificence” there remains in it (XVII.294). Like Telemachus on the battlefield and in the Underground, Idomeneus had divine help, Mentor assures him. Monarchs incline to assume “unjust and violent authority” and to introduce luxury, which “corrupts moeurs” (XVII.296). Idomeneus was dethroned at Crete for his absolutism; “it was necessary that the gods should send us hither”—to Salente, where he had fled—to “disabuse him of that blind and excessive power, for which men are altogether unqualified; a kind of miracle was required to open his eyes” (XVII.297). As for luxury, it causes every social class in the city it infects to “live above their rank and income, some from vanity and ostentation, and to display their wealth; others from a false shame, and to hide their poverty” (XVII.297). Under such conditions, “a whole nation goes to wreck; all ranks are confounded” and “wealth is the sole pursuit,” poverty “accounted scandalous” (XVII.297). A pre-revolutionary condition prevails, and its evils can only be remedied “by changing the taste and manners of [the] whole nation” by giv[ing] it new laws” (XVII.298). “But who will undertake it,” Mentor asks, Socratically, “unless it be a king who is a philosopher, and who by setting an example of moderation, may bring contempt on those who love an expensive show, and give a sanction to the manners of the wise, who will be glad to have their decent frugality supported by such authority” (XVII.298).

As for Idomeneus, he is “wise and enlightened,” Mentor allows (having made him so), but “too attentive to details” (XVII.299). In a king, this is a well-intended error. It is, nonetheless, an error. “To form great designs, the mind must be free and composed: it must meditate without restraint, wholly disengaged from the dispatch of thorny matters”; minds “engrossed” with “the affair of the day” slowly lose their ability for prudential reasoning, as they magnify the immediate at the expense of consideration of medium- and long-term consequences (XVII.299). The Idomenean-Mentorian re-founding of Salente resulted from precisely the kind of thinking a wise king needs to do: “forming a sound judgment of affairs…by comparing them all together, and ranging them in a certain order, so as to have sequence and proportion” (XVII.299). And Salente’s laws, institutions, and moeurs can be “only the shadow of what you will do one day in Ithaca, if your virtue responds to your destiny” (XVII.302). 

Telemachus is reluctant to depart, admitting that he’s fallen in love with the king’s daughter, Antiope. “It is not a blind passion like that of which you cured me in the island of Calypso,” but a love based on “taste, esteem, and regard for merit”; in addition to her piety, “what charms me is her silence, her modest reserve, her constant employment…her attention to the economy of her father’s house, since the death of her mother; her contempt of the ornaments of dress, and her forgetting, or even seeming to be ignorant of her beauty” (XVII.302-03). It is as if she were Minerva incarnate, he says to Minerva incarnate. All this notwithstanding, he remains intent on returning to Ithaca; marriage can wait. Mentor approves.

He does hesitate, however, when Idomeneus goes into mourning over the prospect of his departure. Mentor strengthens his resolve. Such compassion is good; “you were born hard and haughty,” but “at last you have become a man, and by the experience of your own misfortunes, you have learned to sympathize with those of others”—and indispensably kingly virtue, as “without such compassion, there is no good nature, virtue, nor capacity for the government of mankind” (XVII.311). Still, compassion “must not be carried to far, nor must an unmanly tenderness be indulged” (XVII.311). He insists that Telemachus tell the king of his continued resolve to return home, which he does, disclosing his intention to marry Antiope, once “I render myself worthy of her” (XVII.314).

Looking ahead not only to his return to Ithaca but to his eventual accession to kingship there, Telemachus confides that while he considers the ability to “discern well the different characters of men, and to employ them according to their talents” crucial to ruling well, “I am at a loss to know” how to acquire such discernment (XVIII.318). Mentor replies, “To know men you must not only study them, but keep their company and deal with them” in speech and action—conversing with them and “test[ing] them” in minor positions to “discover whether they are qualified for higher functions” (XVIII.318). Also, talk about them “with other wise and virtuous men, who have long studied their characters”; just as one learns to distinguish good and bad poets by “the frequent reading of them, and talking of them with those who [have] a taste for poetry, just as you become a good judge of music by “diligent attention to the performances of good musicians,” so you must learn “human nature” by living among human beings (XVIII.318). Along with this practical understanding, however, you need theoretical understanding: “to be able to form a sound judgment of men, you must begin with knowing what they ought to be,” to have a standard of judgment (XVIII.318). “As in taking the dimensions of several bodies there must be a fixed measure, so there must be certain fixed principles by which we must regulate our judgment”; that standard is the purpose of human life, “what ought to be the end proposed in governing” men (XVIII.319). The elements of that standard have already been demonstrated in the course of the novel. They are the virtues of courage, moderation, justice, practical wisdom, compassion, and magnanimity, all conducing to happiness or the fulfillment of human nature. Given the thumotic character of Telemachus, he has especially needed to practice the virtue of patience. “It is in order to teach you patience, my dear Telemachus, that the gods oblige you to practice it so much, and seem to make sport of you, by keeping you continually wandering about in suspense and uncertainty” (XVIII.330)

Here is the task of the “wise prince” (XVIII.321). “It is not enough to find good subjects in a nation; one must also form new ones”—a task Telemachus immediately sees as “a matter of great difficulty” (XVIII.321). Mentor denies it. If you, as king, exert yourself “to search for able and virtuous men, in order to prefer them, you stimulate all who have spirit and talents, so that they exert themselves to the utmost. How many languish in indolence and obscurity, who would become great men, if they were excited by emulation and the hopes of success?” (XVIII.321). In addition, if you advance your subjects “step by step from the lowest to the highest employments” you will by that practice ‘train them up’ under your observation (XVIII.322). This as it were ‘institutionalizes’ the kind of struggle the gods have caused you, Telemachus, to undergo; unlike you, most men won’t be heroes, nor will they need to be, but their virtues can be cultivated in a kingly regime that rewards virtue. Do not imitate tyrants. Do not make your subjects “miserable by your ambition, your ostentation, or imprudence; for if a nation suffers, it is owing to the maladministration of its rulers, whose duty it is to watch over it, and prevent its suffering” (XVIII.323). 

But will ruling this way not make me miserable? Telemachus asks. Under your plan, a king is “the slave of all those whom he seems to command,” devoting himself to their interests, not his own, supplying their needs, serving the state and his subjects (XVIII.323); “he is a slave who has sacrificed his liberty and repose to the happiness and liberty of the public” (XVIII.324). But why should this make unhappy? Mentor answers. In “promoting the good of such a number of people” a king “represents the gods in leading the whole human race to virtue” (XVIII.324). Is there “not glory enough in maintaining the laws,” and in not grasping for the “false glory” vanity desires? (XVIII.324). Although you should expect “the ingratitude of mankind” for your efforts, “If genuine,” virtue “will always attach them to him who will have inspired it” (XVIII.324-325).

“Mentor resolved to put the patience of Telemachus to the last, but severest trial” (XVIII.330). Before allowing him to board the ship that will return him to Ithaca and his father and mother, he proposes a ceremony of sacrifice to Minerva. Telemachus obeys, and Mentor metamorphoses into Minerva. “I am now going to leave you, son of Ulysses; but my wisdom shall never leave you, provided you always retain a due sense of your inability to do anything well without it” (XVIII.333). In regarding prudence or practical wisdom as the most important of the many virtues a good ruler needs to cultivate, Fénelon carries forward in modernity the classical line of moral thought, while inflecting it in some Christian directions.