Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.

 

Following Machiavelli’s adjuration to dominate Fortuna, Francis Bacon proposed the conquest of nature “for the relief of man’s estate,” an estate that his follower, Thomas Hobbes, would describe as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If, roughly speaking, the first step in this conquest was precise navigation, the second industrialism, the third electrification, the fourth the discovery and harnessing (more or less) of nuclear energy, the fifth information technology, then Conquest of Nature 6.0 is “gene editing,” the power to alter the genetic composition of living organisms. Eventually, this power will be used “to change the genome of our own species in ways that are hereditable, forever altering the genetic composition of humankind”—thereby “direct[ing] the evolution of our own species.” On the seventh ‘day,’ humanity will rest, inasmuch as human nature itself will become something else.

This is why so many of us hope for divine intervention, unconvinced as we are that ‘something else’ will necessarily be better. But to the book at hand….

Doudna and Sternberg are biochemists, and readers will see that they must be contemporary scientists of some sort when they read this sentence: “What will we, a fractious species whose members can’t agree on much, choose to do with this awesome power?” The answer is that the question is ill-formed: As a species, we won’t decide anything; there is no United States of the World to make such a decision. Decisions (plural) will be made by the regimes ruling the various countries whose scientists know how to do such things. The scientist’s classification of human beings as a species, while profoundly important, tells us little about how members of that species deliberate, choose, and act because modern science does not conceive of human beings as their distinguished predecessor, Aristotle, did: as political animals. It may be that modern scientists prefer some form of ‘species-being’ to be apolitical, not only ruled by persons wielding the ‘science of administration’ but by scientists wielding the power to transform fundamentally rulers and ruled alike. The authors here see that as a problem, but they see no solution beyond appealing to scientists worldwide to decelerate the research. It may well be that there is no solution; real politics, conducted under real regimes with real differences of opinion regarding what human nature is and what should be done with it, will permit no ‘global’ solution.

Until now, “the Homo sapiens genome has been shaped by the twin forces of random mutation and natural selection.” With the discovery of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick in 1953, biologists saw that living organisms have their own “secret language” or code, which “provides instructions to produce a particular protein inside the cell.” Ribonucleic acid (RNA) serves as the biochemical Apollo in this process, “transform[ing] the instructions contained in DNA into proteins.” “RNA acts as messenger, ferrying information from the nucleus, where the DNA is stored, to the outer regions of the cell, where proteins get produced.” “This overall flow of genetic information—from DNA to RNA to protein—is known as the central dogma of molecular biology, and it is the language used to communicate and express life.” The year 2001 saw not a space odyssey but the completion of an odyssey into the interior of human life, as scientists finished the Human Genome Project, which provided a comprehensive map of the genetic structure of our species.

Initially, scientists conceived of this knowledge as the pathway to the discovery of cures for hard-to-treat diseases and improved food sources. Doudna and Sternberg offer a clear account of advances in the field since the millennium, which have been substantial. Doudna has been a pioneer in the latest technology that enables the manipulation of genes, CRISPR, or “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” “Clustered” means that certain ‘letters’ of DNA exist only in one part of the chromosome within a cell. The ‘letters’ are arrayed in a uniform pattern which is “nearly the same when read in either direction, just like a palindrome such as ‘senile felines.'” “I had never heard of DNA repeating itself with this kind of precision and uniformity, where every repetition was truly identical and always separated from its neighbor by a similarly sized, random spacer sequence,” Doudna recalls. If “every cell had a different CRISPR array due to the unique sequences interspaced between the repeats,” whereas “every other part of the DNA was nearly identical in each of these cells,” then the “CRISPRs were probably the fastest-evolving region in the genome,” the part of the cell that enabled the cell “to change or adapt quickly in response to something the cells encountered in their environment.” In a bacterium, for example, this rapid-response capacity enables the organism “to fight off viruses,” those banes of microbial existence, with “a warrior protein” that can “seek and destroy viral DNA.” They, and viruses, can also become immune to human-designed attacks by antibiotic and antiviral medications.

Thus in the space of fewer than two decades, microbiology “had advanced from a loose collection of interesting but inconclusive studies to a broad, unified theory about the inner workings of a microbial adaptive immune system.” If so, then in principle “the genome would become as malleable as a piece of literary prose at the mercy of an editor’s red pen.” This goes beyond mere editing to “genome engineering, a reflection of the supreme mastery that scientists held over genetic material inside living cells.” Scientists can now mutate cells or “destroy a gene’s ability to produce a functional protein”; they call the latter effect a “gene knockout,” a shutoff of the gene’s natural function. “Think of the cell as the largest symphony in the world, made up of more than twenty thousand different instruments. In a healthy, normal-functioning cell, the various symphonic voices are perfectly balanced; in malignant cancer cells or infected cells, the balance is disrupted, with some instruments playing too loud and others too soft.” But who or what is nature’s equivalent of Oscar Levant, playing all the instruments? Now, potentially, the microbiologists or biochemists, if “armed with the complete CRISPR toolkit.” “It often feels like the genome-engineering applications made possible by CRISPR are limited only by our collective imagination.” But, as someone famously asked, what do mean by ‘us’? After all, witty Oscar was also a bit daft. Who rules? And what for?

As Tocqueville would have predicted, given its “low cost and ease of use,” this technology will become democratized, making a “once-esoteric practice into a hobby or a craft, just like home-brewing beer”—which, the thirsty authors hasten to add, is already being done with the CRISPR “toolkit.” “The democratization of CRISPR will accelerate the process of research and development,” in turn “lead[ing] to uses of this technology that people are not yet prepared for,” “whose effects can’t be contained within the lab.” “With our mastery over the code of life comes a level of responsibility for which we, as individuals and as a species, are woefully unprepared.” ‘We’ will continue to be woefully unprepared if ‘we’ think of ourselves as individuals and species, and not also as regimes and states.

Doudna and Sternberg quite sensibly observe that human beings have exerted influence over the “evolutionary process” of organisms for centuries by artificial selection or breeding, as distinguished from natural selection. The roil over ‘genetically-altered’ foods does indeed seem a fuss over not much, since human beings have been doing it for a long time. The authors cite Luther Burbank’s 1901 statement averring that natural species are “as plastic in our hands as clay in the hands of the potter or colors on the artist’s canvas, and can readily be molded into more beautiful forms and colors than any painter or sculptor can ever hope to bring forth.” Almost all foods have been so altered, obscuring the distinction between natural and unnatural. In this sense, gene editing only offers a much more precise way of effecting such alterations. Such alterations might be far from benign, inasmuch as “there’s no way to guarantee that this incredibly powerful tool won’t wind up in the hands of people who have no compunction about using gene drives to cause harm,” devising ‘gene bombs’ “to target the human microbiome or major food sources.”

Accordingly, the authors distinguish between two types of cells that can be ‘edited.’ Somatic cells are specific to an individual organism; gene editing might cure my genetically-induced disease (or, in the wrong hands, cause one). Their good or bad effects are limited to the organism whose cells are altered. Germ cells are “any cells whose genome can be inherited by subsequent generations.” Figuring out how to alter germ cells is harder than figuring out how to alter somatic cells, but it promises a much more elegant solution to the problem of disease, as “reversing a disease-causing mutation in a single human germ cell is much simpler than trying to do the same thing inside some of the fitty trillion somatic cells that make up a human body.” The task will be to get CRISPR into the body of the patient, “to the tissue where the disease is exerting its greatest effect”; scientists are working on that. But this only ratchets up the urgency of the ethical-political questions arising from the invention of this power. “Whether we’ll ever have the intellectual and moral capacity to guide our own genetic destiny is an open question.” Making “heritable changes to the human genome” should be resisted, the authors recommend, although it must be observed that their recommendation has not been followed. After all, why would the Chinese communist regime, in principle committed to the manipulation of human ‘evolution’ through political-economic revolution, wielding mass-slaughter of peasants as one of its weapons, halt at the use of a biological tool which offers a much less crude way of achieving the desired outcomes? Why not enforce communal equality by designing human beings capable of no other life than one of communal equality?

Somewhat comically, the authors’ principal worry seems to be that such a prospect might hurt the scientists, “set[ting] many members of the public against this fledgling technology despite its enormous potential for good.” As they more or less acknowledge, given the character of their regime, the Chinese rulers do not need to worry so much about public opinion, and so have directed their scientists to forge ahead. American intelligence agencies have already listed genome editing “as one of the six weapons of mass destruction and proliferation that nation-states might try to develop, at great risk to America.” Leave it to the spooks to think politically, when the scientists would rather not.

What of religion as a source of possible constraints? The authors make short work of it. Religious “perspectives vary widely.” Christians often “regard the embryo as a person from conception,” while Jews and Muslims don’t. Since the human embryo is the most obvious site for germ-cell manipulation, such discrepancies could bring religious warfare back with higher-tech swords and scimitars.

Hemming and hawing somewhat, the authors begin to wonder, is it really a problem at all, however? There may be no principled constraints on such research. For example, “The argument that germline editing is somehow unnatural doesn’t carry much weight”; the distinction between natural and unnatural they judge “a false dichotomy, and if it prevents us from alleviating human suffering, it’s also a dangerous one.” (One might add that if, on the other hand, germline editing might elevate the status of some at the expense of the human suffering of others, that result might be dangerous, too.) Or what if (again, as Tocqueville would suggest) germline editing would elevate the status of some by alleviating the suffering of others—by anesthetizing them into a condition of dronelike docility without dronelike laziness? (“Timid and industrious herd animals,” in Tocqueville’s phrase.) The authors scramble to distinguish gene editing from eugenics, which has rightly taken on such a bad odor in recent decades, but what is gene editing but a more precise and reliable form of eugenics, a word that describes the aspirations of gene editors more accurately than any term gene editors have devised?

More radically, is the dichotomy between natural and unnatural false? In urging that it is, the authors ask if a coral reef, which is natural, really differs in any meaningful way from a “megalopolis like Tokyo,” a thing usually considered unnatural. The example is more complex than it seems, if human beings are by their nature political animals. If so, then in some respects Tokyo must be natural inasmuch as it’s a ‘polis,’ however ‘megalo’ it may be. The reason one balks at the claim is that the coral reef has no customs or conventions; it must be what it is, given the nature of the animals that built it. There is no such necessity about a megalopolis; whatever their size, political communities mix human nature—identifiably the same, everywhere—with habits, opinions, institutions that vary considerably from place to place, time to time. It makes sense to ask if a given political community is good for the human beings who inhabit it; it doesn’t make sense to ask if a given coral reef is good for the beings that inhabit it, unless some exogenous force—pollution, for example—has damaged it.

The authors finally approach the question of political regimes in the last ten pages of their book. They raise the question of justice. How would we edit genes “equitably—that is, in a way that improves human health across the board, not just in certain groups”? In the future, “people with more money” might “live healthier and longer lives thanks to their privileged sets of genes” and not merely because they can afford better health care. But, like all matters of distributive justice, the issue will be settled by the character of the regime in which it arises. This is why the authors raise a smile when they claim that “governments are simply not going to begin forcing parents to edit their children’s genes.” Really? Why not? Governments have been known to kill people because their genes were defective, or supposed to be. Why not wield the micro-scalpel instead of the truncheon?

And then there is the matter of foreign policy, which the authors do not neglect to remark. “Any prohibitions on germline gene editing in the United States would effectively cede leadership in this area to other nations—something Americans are arguably already doing with our existing bans on federal funding for germline editing,” which one suspects to be their primary concern in all of this. Indeed, “once a game-changing technology is unleashed on the world, it is impossible to contain it.” They end the book with a whine about how non-scientists don’t trust scientists, anymore. By the same token, one wonders why they trust their fellow scientists, especially those in the pay of foreign and hostile governments.

Are there natural limits to human efforts to manipulate natural limits? Evidently there are some, as seen in the use, and the non-use, of nuclear weapons. A technology that threatens to obliterate me if I use it to obliterate you, because you might use it against me in your dying moments, has yet to be used against any country that maintains a nuclear arsenal that might survive nuclear attack. Deterrence works. Similarly, although regimes might attempt to breed supermen, even enhance them with artificial intelligence and other powers, it seems unlikely that any regime would design such a ‘race’ of warriors without taking firm precautions against their rebellion. The main threat would be a regime that intends to transform the rulers themselves into such warriors, a regime animated by some notion of trans-humanity. Such regimes have already existed, but they’ve never had such powerful technological means at their disposal.

 

Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Reexamining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève. Albany: State University Press of New York, 2016.

 

Looking at his colleagues on the faculty of the University of Chicago and elsewhere in academia in the aftermath of the Second World War, refugee scholar Leo Strauss raised an embarrassing question: How was it that political scientists had failed to recognize tyranny when they saw it arise during the years between the world wars? Most immediately, he observed, Max Weber’s insistence that social scientists separate ‘facts’ from ‘values’ prevented these impressively-trained academics from identifying what anyone should want to know first of all about any ruler, namely, does this ruler take it as his right and even his duty to kill and imprison law-abiding citizens? To study political regimes as if they are bacteria in a petri dish isn’t really science; it is a professional deformation. Genuine understanding of political life would need to come from somewhere other than social science as conceived by Strauss’s contemporaries. Famously, he looked far behind them, to the political philosophers of Greek antiquity, as better guides to understanding politics than even the most celebrated ‘hard-nosed realists’ among ‘the moderns’: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx.

Today, as the living memory of Nazism dies with the generation that saw it, and after the collapse of Nazism’s great rival in tyranny, the Soviet Union, the need to identify tyranny, and to distinguish it from other forms of one-man rule—constitutional mo0narchy, absolute monarchy, military dictatorship and the like—remains with us. The contributors to this volume address a debate that took place between Strauss and the Paris-based émigré philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and admirer not merely of tyranny but of Stalinism, whose lectures on Hegel in the years before the war had influenced a generation of French intellectuals. Although some of them (most notably Raymond Aron) rejected the arguments for the necessity of statism and tyranny in advancing ‘History,’ others (Maurice Merleau-Ponty perhaps most vehemently) adopted and even radicalized what they heard from the Master.

What is tyranny? When we hear tyrants, and even ordinary politicians in democracies invoke ‘historical progress’ or ‘change’ as their slogans, what are they really talking about?

To understand tyranny in the modern world, Strauss engaged in a sly but serious provocation: He commended study of a long-forgotten short dialogue written by Xenophon—then as now hardly a staple of university syllabi, even in ‘Classics’ departments, let alone in social-science classrooms. Xenophon’s Hiero, subtitled On Tyranny, recounts an imaginary dialogue between the eponymous Syracusan tyrant and the poet Simonides of Cleos, a rival of Pindar whose practice of demanding money for his poems and whose reputation for wisdom made him into a sort of proto-Sophistic wise man in the eyes of later generations. In 1948 Strauss published a translation of the dialogue along with his own detailed and subtle interpretation; more than a straightforward exegesis, Strauss’s essay raised the issue of the relation between ancient or ‘classical’ and modern tyranny. He sent the book to his friend Kojève, who agreed to review it, and also agreed to have the dialogue, Strauss’s commentary, his review, and Strauss’s rejoinder published in a new edition, which appeared in 1954.

Xenophon’s Simonides opens the dialogue by asking Hiero how the tyrannical life and private life differ in terms of pleasures and pains—Hiero having followed both of these ways of life, whereas Simonides has never lived as a tyrant. Frequently (and perhaps rhetorically) swearing by Zeus, Hiero maintains that his physical pleasures are now weaker than they were when he was a private man because they are satiated by easy and repeated gratification. As for the gentler pleasures, the tyrant’s life is a lonely one; in loving he never knows if his love is truly returned, and he can trust no one, not even his family. A tyrant must fear the decent and brave, the wise (presumably including Simonides), and the just. At the central point of the dialogue, Hiero avers that even killing one’s suspected enemies cannot relieve the tyrant’s condition. “When, because of their fear, they do away with such men, who is left for them to use except the unjust, the incontinent, and the slavish?” Far from being capable of helping his friends and mastering his enemies, the tyrant finds that his friends fear him and his enemies are too numerous to master. But if he killed them all, he would have no one left to rule.

No stranger to rhetoric himself, Simnonides comes to the rescue of this poor tyrant in distress. Hiero, he intones, I know how you can rule and still be loved. First (and in this the ‘classical’ thinker anticipates Machiavelli) reward farmers, importers, and inventors a person who benefit the polis. Command your mercenaries to guard not only your own person but all your subjects. Finally, spend your money for the public good. “If you prove superior to your friends in beneficence, your enemies will be utterly unable to resist you” and, “while being happy, you will not be envied for being happy.” On that cheery note the dialogue ends; the tyrant rewards the poet with silence. Historians do tell us that Hiero did not have him killed.

In Strauss’s reading, the Hiero provides modern thinkers with a window into the thought of the classical philosophers on the now-misunderstood but crucial problem of tyranny, and on political life generally. Behind the fact-value distinction of Max Weber lies not simply an approach to social science but a philosophical doctrine, the doctrine or family of doctrines Strauss calls “historicism.” For all his talk about ‘ideals,’ Weber assumed that ideals are culturally determined; cultures arise, grow, then wither; that is to say, they are fundamentally ‘historical’—beings transformed in the course of time. While academic historians understand the term ‘historicism’ to mean simply to ‘contextualize’ the actions, thoughts, and persons of the past, showing how contemporary events relate to one another, Strauss offers a philosophic definition. Historicism in this sense means that “the foundations of human thought are laid by specific experiences which are not, as  matter of principal, coeval with human thought as such”; every human thought is ‘relative to’ the historical time-frame in which it is conceived, and it has no necessary validity beyond that time-frame.

The moral and political result of historicist thinking proved catastrophic in the generation immediately following Weber’s for while the ancient Greeks in fact identified and described tyranny, in the eyes of Strauss’s contemporaries that definition had little or no relevance to our own time and place. Similarly, while those Greeks in fact made certain value judgements about tyranny as so defined, their values were not our values. We can have little or nothing to learn from Plato, Aristotle, or Xenophon, even if our antiquarians may enjoy learning about them.

Assuming that the classical description and judgment of tyranny no longer had anything to teach us; assuming that the very notion of a ‘value-laden’ political science couldn’t be scientific at all because ‘values’ lie outside the boundaries of the knowable, and endure as mere sentimental reflections of the factual conditions of a given time and place; inclined to suppose that tyranny itself need no longer concern them, because humanity had moved on, progressing beyond such a thing, twentieth-century historicists failed adequately to assess such men as Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. More these new tyrants formed ambitions well beyond those of someone like Hiero or even Alexander the Great; armed with historicist doctrines, the new tyrants sought a “perpetual and universal tyranny” over not only human actions but human thoughts. Historicism itself advances this “collectivization of thought” because it enables tyrants to claim that their rule will enact the most ‘progressive,’ the most ‘advanced’ ideas of this historical time-frame.

To put this in terms of the history of political philosophy, Plato’s Socrates maintains that a philosopher can ascend from the convention opinions of his polis and begin to understand the nature (including the human nature) obscured by those opinions. The way to do this is through dialectic or the clash of opinions sorted out by reasoning—that is, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. As Socrates repeatedly shows, conventional opinions rationally examined will turn up many incoherencies; although dialectical conversations may embarrass and even infuriate non-philosophers who cherish their opinions, they enable the philosopher to progress toward a clearer and more accurate understanding of the natural order or cosmos. By contrast, historicists locate dialectic not in conversations among individuals engaged in rational discussion but in the collisions of masses of people—social classes, nations, even civilizations—struggling for dominance over time. This reconceived dialectic lends itself precisely to the “collectivization” of thought seen in modern tyrannies.

Strauss argues that in order to learn from the classics we will need to re-learn how to learn from them. Strauss subjects Xenophon’s Hiero to intense and detailed scrutiny with a view not to understanding it as an expression of its ‘time,’ relativizing it in relation to a putative ‘march of History,’ but rather to understanding it on its own terms. He intends to teach his readers how to read a philosophic dialogue as its author intended it to be read. In addition to improving our strictly ‘historical’ understanding of the classics (how, he asks, can we claim to understand the past unless we see what the people who lived then were trying to do?), in addition to helping us to identify tyranny when we see it, whenever it arises, study of philosophizing as presented in the form of a dialogue requires us to think not only theoretically but practically. By this Strauss means that to understand the dialectical subtleties of even the simplest philosophic dialogue we will need not only to understand the arguments of the participants but also the conversational situation in which they meet, the significance not only of their words but their actions, and indeed their silences—exactly what we all do when we engage in our own conversations. The dialogue form as a literary genre (not unlike a novel by, as Strauss suggests, Jane Austen) makes us think prudentially. Philosophic treatises typically don’t invite us to do that, but we should, especially when thinking about politics.

In considering the concluding speech of the Hiero in light of this careful way of reading, Strauss comes too doubt that it is right to hold out hope for the benefactor-tyrant Simonides extols. Such a tyrant will scarcely be immune from envy. Hiero’s problem isn’t that he hasn’t found the right techniques of tyrannical rule but that he wants his subjects to love him. Simonides’ wisdom, as seen in his own way of life, consists in wanting not love but honor, and that from a few understanding friends and not from everybody. While the tyrant makes himself dependent upon ‘the many,’ Simonides enjoys relative self-sufficiency. His pains are few because his needs are so modest; The tyrant needs a city; the wise man “may live as a stranger” in Syracuse or any polis. Simonides moved freely from his native Cleos to Athens to Syracuse, while Hiero stayed tied to one place. Even “the best city”—whether ruled by a beneficent tyrant or a virtuous citizenry—remains “morally and intellectually on a lower plane than the best individual.” And respecting the pleasures enjoyed by individuals, the “highest pleasure” is experienced by him who tracks his own “progress in wisdom and virtue,” even as he acknowledges that “no man can be simply wise.” Although no individual can be simply wise, no polis can be wise at all, and the tyrant in his self-imposed neediness cannot make it so.

Kojève rises to the challenge with a brilliant critique of Strauss’s argument, a critique now made available to us in a translation of the original, unedited version as an appendix to the Burns-Frost collection. He agrees that the problems of tyranny identified by Xenophon “are still ours,” but he rejects the classical ciritique of tyranny and the natural-right theory underlying it. Simonides errs in practical terms because he fails to tell Hiero any specific steps he should take to implement the reforms he urges. Further, and contra Strauss, although the reforms may have been impractical at the time, they are commonplaces of modern statism. Strauss “cannot admit that what was ‘true’ for Xenophon could be ‘false’ for us.” In these initial comments Kojève already hints at his deeper objections to Strauss and the classics: They fail to combine or ‘synthesize’ theory and practice in the manner attempted by Hegel and Marx.

Simonides also errs in defining honor as the province of “real men,” whom Kojève supposes to be aristocrats. We moderns now know that labor can be a source of pride and joy; therefore, everyone from a tyrants to a street sweeper can gain satisfaction from a job well done. Hegel has taught us that we can synthesize honor and labor, Master and Slave, thought and action. Hiero’s dilemma has been fully explained by Hegel as “the tragedy of the Master” in the pre-modern world, but the dialectic of History removed this tragedy long ago. As Hegel also teaches us, Xenophon gets the tragedy wrong in the first place; the tyrant doesn’t really want love, he (and his subjects) want recognition. They will get that, but only at the end of History in the universal and homogeneous state—universal because it extends throughout the world, homogeneous because it it all find equal recognition for their work. This state is “the goal and outcome of the collective labor of all and of each”; in this Kojève hints at the Marxian cast of his Hegelianism.

As for Strauss, Kojève maintains that he misunderstands the condition of philosophy. Insofar as History has ended we can and must abandon philo-sophy—literally the love of wisdom—because wisdom itself has been attained. The philosopher-king gives way to the Wise Man-King, recognized by all and therefore obeyed without coercion. In fact, at the end of History, only “administrative questions” remain, so the Wise Man may be able to retire completely as the (non-Hegelian but Marxist_ “classless society” takes shape. “The tyrant who here initiates the real political movement toward homogeneity followed the teaching of the intellectual who deliberately transformed the ideal of the philosopher so that it might cease to be a ‘utopian ideal'”—an ideal which Hegel prematurely claimed to have been brought about by the Napoleonic Empire For “intellectual” read “Marx”; for “the tyrant” read “Stalin.” So long as History hasn’t instantiated the universal and homogeneous State, the philosopher must exercise his human freedom by actively negating the ‘given’ social and political order, supporting the “Tyrant-Philosopher” who aims to bring it to fruition.

Kojève also departs in an important way from Hegel ‘ontologically.’ Hegel posits the existence of the “Absolute Spirit.” The Absolute Spirit differs sharply from the Biblical Holy Spirit in two ways: it isn’t holy, separate from ‘Creation’; and it isn’t a Person but a form of energy which converts itself into matter but remains immanent in matter as well as in all human thought and action. Kojève excludes matter or nature from the historical dialectic, which for him consists only in man’s progressive attempts to master brute nature. That is to say, Kojève retains the modern and particularly the Kantian esteem for human freedom, which in strictly Hegelian (and of course in materialist-Marxian)thought cannot exist. Aided by intellectuals, the Philosopher-Tyrant’s task is to hasten human progress; this supports the historicist ontology which asserts that Being is not eternal (the “theistic conception of Truth,” whether Biblical or classical) but rather that Being is Becoming (the stance of “radical Hegelian atheism”). Being will continue to ‘become’ or change until it reaches its end, its culmination, as this exclusively human reality “creates itself over time.”

Because human reality creates itself over time, Kojève argues, Strauss is entirely wrong to endorse the classical philosophers’ attempt to ascend from the Cave of political conventions to the sunlight of Nature by don’t of the logical efforts of the individual philosopher. No mere individual, not even the philosopher, can perceive the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth until the collective human advancement that is History has reached its final, grand synthesis, wherein all contradictions disappear into the universality and homogeneity of the World State. This is philosophically necessary because, absent that State, the philosopher cannot know with certainty that he is not mad, or that he and his circle of philosophic friends are not prejudiced.

How will philosophers (and the rest of us) knw that History really progresses dialectically, and how will we know that it has reached its culmination? In other words, how do we know that this grand Kantian-Hegelian-Marxist narrative is not simply the grandest of grand illusions, a spectacular, all-encompassing instance of the madness of crowds? The criterion of truth, Kojève explains, remains the one discovered by Machiavelli and systematized by Bacon: experimental manipulation. We know if a bridge is well-constructed if it doesn’t collapse; we confirm our anthropological theories by building  state that doesn’t collapse, putting ideas into practice, synthesizing what earlier philosophers separated into ‘rationalism’ and ’empiricism.’ Machiavelli’s notion of “effectual truth,” which he held out against the classics’ contemplation of nature, will allow the Wise Man at the end of History to contemplate the completed Whole, but in the meantime philosophers should not and cannot afford such a luxury. Until History ends, philosophers must not behold but negate, experiment, build and rebuild. The dialectic of History is properly not a verbal argument; it is “played out on the historical plane of active social life where one argues by acts of Work (against Nature) and of Struggle (against men).”

Given this unity of theory and practice, “There is therefore [contra Strauss and the classics] in principle no difference whatsoever between the statesman and the philosopher; both seek recognition and both act with a view to deserving it.” The “consistent atheist” “replaces
God… by Society (the State) and History.” Instead of glimpsing the holy Creator-god’s Last Judgment in the Book of Revelation, we now say ‘Let History judge,’ and we will need a new ‘Bible’ or comprehensive account of the whole, which will be possible to write only after History has ended. Kojève was still working on it at the time of his death.

Reading Kojève’s essay, one is tempted to think, ‘They don’t write book reviews like that, anymore.’ But they didn’t then, either, and Strauss was delighted; “Kojève belongs to the very few who know how to think and who love to think.” Citing not only Xenophon but also Empedocles and Plato in his rejoinder, Strauss begins by observing that “the possibility of a science that issues in the conquest of nature and the possibility of the popularization of philosophy or science” were both known to the classics. He proceeds to answer Kojève’s critique point by point.

On the complaint that Simonides doesn’t tell Hiero exactly how to enact the reforms he proposes, Strauss replies that “the criticism may be said to be based on an insufficient appreciation of the value of utopias”—outlines of “the best social order.” Xenophon regards such an outline as a standard, but rarely if ever an achievable one. Truly to reform a tyranny would be to get rid of it altogether, to shift eh power wielded by the tyrant’s mercenaries to the citizens, who would no longer be tyrannized. Xenophon more modestly suggests one specific step Hiero might take, to abandon his participation in the Olympian and Pythian games—this, on the grounds that a tyrant should not lower himself to compete against private men—and to redirect his energies toward competing against  his fellow rulers in foreign cities in making his citizens happier than theirs. Strauss pointedly observes that Stalin hasn’t done this, as evidenced by his secret police and labor camps.

On the criticism that Xenophon fails to synthesize honor and work, as Hegel does, Strauss remarks that the classics regarded neither honor nor work as the highest good; after all, a criminal might take pride in a job well done. If the ‘ancient’/aristocratic love of honor and the ‘Protestant’/bourgeois esteem for work, synthesized, produce modern tyranny, then we have “effect[ed] the miracle of producing an amazingly lax morality out of two moralities both of which made very strict demands on self-restraint”: “Neither Biblical nor classical morality encourages all statesmen to try to extend their authority over all men in order to achieve universal recognition.” Hegel as understood by Kojève gives us not a higher morality but Hobbes’s Leviathan on steroids, and modern leviathans were big enough, already. Under conditions of modern statism, we are usually better off with “liberal or constitutional democracy.” A universal empire ruled by a tyrant who is unlikely to be either philosophic or wise will exacerbate, not cure, the ills of modernity.

Regarding Kojève’s argument that only History can judge if a philosopher is mad or prejudiced, Strauss replies that “the mass party,” the engine of political life in the modern state, is even worse than “snobbish silence or whispering” within a coterie of philosophic friends because it inclines to crush dissenting voices, including philosophic whispers. In Strauss’s estimation, Kojève asks too much of both individual philosophers and History when he demands “subjective certainty” of human thought. “Philosophy in the original meaning of the term is nothing but knowledge of one’s ignorance.” This is the closest we can get, humanly speaking, to certain knowledge, inasmuch as “one cannot know what one does not know without knowing that one does not know.” Beyond that, philosophy entails only “genuine awareness” of “the fundamental and comprehensive problems,” about which the philosopher will form reasonable and revisable views, “neither dogmatic nor skeptic” but “zetetic”—from the Greek zētēo, meaning “seeking” or “inquiring.” In this view, both dogmatism and skepticism wall themselves away from the continued quest for wisdom; “zetetic” philosophy continues to love wisdom, to pursue it without fainting.

On Kojève’s Hegelian insistence that tyrants seek not love but honor, and philosophers do, too, Strauss rejoins, “the classics identified satisfaction with happiness.” Because “no one can find solid happiness in what he knows to be paltry and ephemeral,” genuine human satisfaction can only occur when a man “looks up in search for the eternal order.” The political man, however, attaches himself to perishable human being; he needs them to need him, and to feel that they do. Like a mother who loves her child, he love them because they are ‘his own’ subjects, not in a genuine spirit of self-sacrifice, as Kojève (actually following Hiero’s rhetorical self-portrait) claims. Insofar as the philosopher does attach himself to his fellow human beings—talking with them in the marketplace, for example—he acknowledges first of all that he is human, more self-sufficient than anyone else to be sure, but no god. He therefore will interest himself in the laws and customs of the marketplace, he frequents, which in turn requires him to consider the regime of the polis in which that marketplace is located. For this reason, he may advise the ruler or rulers, with the care exemplified by Xenophon’s Simonides. Finally, “of all perishable things known to us, those which reflect [the eternal order] most, or which are most akin to that order, are the souls of men”; accordingly, the philosopher will delight at the ‘sight’ of a well-ordered sou. He will want to gather such souls around him, and to help “the young whos souls are by nature fitted for it” to “acquire good order of their souls” by the practice of philosophizing. This also directs his attention to the regime, which may or may not leave philosophers to pursue this task in peace. In doing so he seeks not ‘recognition’ but progress in the direction of wisdom; ‘recognition’ by the subjects of a universal and homogeneous state, even if achievable, would only mean you have succeeded in impressing large number of folks who don’t really understand what you’re talking about. That is a formula for distraction, not intellectual certitude.

Strauss further argues that  the universal and homogeneous state will not even succeed in its own terms, because in it men (indeed “real men”) will arise to negate the tyranny, whether it be that of the wise man or the administrative drones he leaves in his wake. And if the universal and homogeneous state actually did succeed, eradicating not only all existing real men but preventing their existence in tall future times, we would not have fully human men but the Last Man mocked by Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—who, insofar as he thinks of the eternal order merely asks idly, not really wanting to know, “What is a star?” And then turns to People magazine for the answer—or rather to the National Enquirer, wherein the motto, “Inquiring minds want to know,” takes on a decidedly non-skeptical cast.

Thus, Strauss concludes, Kojève is right to think “the coming of the universal and homogeneous state will be the end of philosophy on earth.” It will also entail an inhuman universal tyranny. he is only wrong in calling this good.

Each of the nine scholars contributing essays to Philosophy, History, and Tyranny calls attention to a different and illuminating dimension of the Strauss-Kojève debate. Timothy W. Burns begins with an excellent account of what might be described as the not-easily-seen philosophic background of the debate, beginning with the thought of Martin Heidegger, philosopher and Nazi, whose writings both men had studied with great care before the world war. Among the intellectual forebears of modern tyranny present in their debate, Marx stands out more clearly, but Kojève had also supplemented Hegelianism with Heidegger’s ‘existential’ preoccupation with death; that is, not only Hegel but Heidegger addressed the Hobbesian fear of death. Strauss saw Kojève was defending Hegelian rationalism from the long line of anti-rationalist thinkers—Schelling, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, culminating with Heidegger. He did this by showing how the fear of death could be incorporated within Hegelianism in the figure of the Slave who overcomes the fear of death in his struggle with the Master. To argue that was to redeem Hegelianism from the charge that Hegel had failed to ascend from philosophy to wisdom, that the Absolute Spirit hadn’t put an end to History because Nietzsche, or Heidegger, had refuted him. Burns learnedly situates the principal figures of ‘historical’ thought in this internecine debate—both the true historicists, who posit an end of History, and the historical relativists who posit ‘folk minds’ which clash or cooperate with one another in an endless struggle. Burns can then clarify Strauss’s achievement in rejecting this massive and pervasive habit of ‘historical thinking’ and turning instead to the classics and to nature—not incidentally defending the original understanding of the philosophic way of life, which all of the historical thinkers challenged, whether from the standpoint of Hegelian absolutism or cultural relativism.

Having situated the Strauss-Kojève debate in the history of philosophy, Burns saves his most philosophic insight for the conclusion. Although Strauss comes across as the man of greater moral sobriety, Kojève, for all his modern/Machiavellian esteem for a certain form of tyranny nonetheless remains much more in the grip of moralism. By contending that reason itself cannot transcend ‘the city’ but rather evolves with it into the all-comprehending condition of universality and homogeneity, Kojève does not fully achieve the understanding of the classical philosophers, who ascended from the cave to noetic glimpses of nature. The justice of the philosopher is not the same as the justice of the polis because the latter form of justice is attenuated by the need for self-defense in war the justice of the wise tyrant in the universal and homogeneous state will be similarly attenuated by the need either to maintain his rule against manly challenges or to debase the entire population into ‘Last Men’ unworthy of his attention. This is why Socrates held misology, the hatred of reasoned argument, to be a vice even worse than sins against the morality of the polis. In the philosopher, whose way of life is least compromised by the compromised morality of the polis and its laws, because he organizes his life around reasoning, and thereby approaches justice (initially by asking what it is) more nearly than the statesman, let alone the modern tyrant.

Murray S. Y. Bessette provides the philosophic background of Kojève’s reply to Strauss, well complementing Burns’s essay. In his lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, delivered between 1933 and 1939 and published after the war, Kojève enunciated the principal themes of all his subsequent work. Here is where we see why he so forcefully refutes Simonides’ charge that Hiero could be motivated by a desire to be loved. Love is natural; humans share it with animals. Its frustration does move man to action, to freely negate the given, and thus acts as a counterbalance to passive contemplation. But unlike recognition, love is for someone—human or divine. “While human, [it] is not humanizing” because it lacks the capacity to make us want to overcome our animal nature, to overcome the fear of those who dominate us by mastering the fear for the safety of our bodies, readying our spirits for rational thought and action. Contra Aristotle, there is no such person as a natural slave because slavery occurs accidentally, through the bad luck of having encountered someone stronger or smarter or tougher than you are. You will end your slavery only when you see a good opportunity to challenge his rule, when the slave can “reasonably risk [his life] with a belief in the possibility of victory.” This opportunity comes as the slave works, through his work, inasmuch as even servile labor requires him to master his desires in order to do his job. Underneath the ruling gaze of the mastery, the slave husbands the spiritual resources needed for the “final Fight” to overthrow him. Although I have said “him,” the struggle isn’t limited to male adults but encompasses women and even children; although initially incapable of winning a fight for recognition, the latter will achieve recognition not only through iducation but through the “socialist Society” which will take over parenting from individual parents. “The abolition of the final human Master inaugurates the birth of the Master state,” the entity which “replaces the biblical God as the guarantor of the truth of wisdom.” All being satisfied with their status of equal recognition within this state, none will aspire to rebel against what one might call the Last Master. Bessette thus makes it easier to see why Kojève so dislikes Aristotle’s definition of virtue as the metrion or ‘mean’ between two extremes. Without the starker conflict between good and evil, without the clash of moral and political opposites, no dialectic; without dialectic, no History and no end of History. Aristotelian balance between extr4emes only slows this dialectic, clogging History’s flow.

The conflict between good and evil recalls the world as understood in the Bible. Daniel E. Burns remarks that no commentator has properly appreciated the role of Biblical thought in Kojève’s thought, a role Kojève himself obscures by insisting upon his atheism. he begins with that bête noir of Biblical thought, Epicureanism, a form of ancient atheism which Kojève classifies as actually theistic because it believes Being to be eternal, not changing. All those who believe this need to posit some version of intuitive cognition, whether by natural reasoning or divine revelation, and no such thinker can distinguish himself from madmen and false prophets, who are equally certain of their putative insights. The Socratic circle of philosophic friends doesn’t overcome this problem because for every Socrates there might be one or more Jim Joneses or Charles Mansons—malicious crackpots who gather disciples around them. As for Socrates himself, his move to the marketplace was a step in the right direction, but only the all-encompassing ‘marketplace’ of the universal and homogeneous state can settle the problem of cognition once and for all. That is, the Biblical ‘end time,’ wherein God will reign over a new Heaven and a new Earth, far more closely represents the end of History than anything ‘theists’ believe. The End of History is the “Christian idea” secularized —made rational and real. The religious paraphernalia that went with that idea will then “be more than refuted; it would be outlived.” Kojève charges that Strauss and his classics simply cannot account for the Biblical vision, which will become true by dint of human thought and effort, without the assistance of a personal God.

Burns writes that Strauss “does agree that Hegel’s political philosophy is part of an effort to respond to a challenge that the Bible poses to the enterprise of philosophy as such,” an effort that began with Machiavelli in opposition to such philosophers as Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas, who sought to integrate Biblical and classical-philosophic teachings. The modern-philosophic effort responds to the Biblical challenge, which holds the certainties of divine revelation over the head of classical zeteticism (“always searching, never finding,” in the Apostle Paul’s scornful estimation), by positing the sure knowledge of making. the human maker proves to himself and everyone else that he understands the efficient causes of production in the real world. If these productions satisfy him and others, why speculate further on human ends? Strauss responds to the modern project first by noting that the classics did in fact understand that technological innovation could be encouraged, but advised against it as dangerous to any regime and its laws, which require the respectful obedience that only stability can foster. “There are natural limits preventing the full success of the Machiavellian project.” which sacrifices the moderation underpinning self-knowledge, without which human beings have no wisdom at all. The limitlessness promised by the technological mastery of chance and of nature destroys, and was intended by Machiavelli to destroy, the sense of limits, of legal restraint, that non-philosophers find in piety and philosophers find in rational inquiry. In addition, Strauss simply does not share Kojève’s “revolt against the idea that the history of the world has no ‘meaning.'” Strauss finds meaning in nature, not history.

The next two essays, by Nasser Behnegar and Bryan-Paul Frost, take opposite sides in the debate, with Behnegar arguing on behalf of Strauss and Frost making the case for Kojève. On the matter of utopia, Behnegar notes Struass’s criticism of the modern utopias: In order to make ideals seem realizable, they lower the standards set by the classics. And in regard to Strauss’s reminder to Kojève that Simonides does in fact offer Hiero a practical step to take—to avoid competing in the chariot races in Pan-Hellenic competitions—he brings to light the important fact that such contests were religious festivals; “victory in them was tantamount to receiving Zeus’s or Apollo’s approval.” This suggests that Simonides was warning Hiero against delegitimizing his own authority if he happened to lose. Bot the critique of utopias and the warning against risking apparent divine disfavor point to Strauss’s deeper critique of Hegelianism: It “combines the rule of the philosophers with an egalitarian political order that emerges through the power of emancipated passions.” The modern philosophic quest for epistemological certainty in some respects reflects the need to appeal to ‘the people,’ who are not likely to rule themselves by the zetetic skepticism that  philosophers practice. Philosophers and citizens both care about human things, but the kind of care which animates them differs in kind, not in degree; what is right for one is wrong for the other, and Hegelianism can never overcome that. Nor can the statesman-tyrant synthesize these two kinds of caring in his own soul; rulers care for citizens (or subjects) first of all because they are ‘their own,’ as a mother loves her child, but also as instruments of their own ambitions. As for the people themselves, they in turn would use rulers—for protection and for the promotion of their prosperity generally. In this polis of necessarily somewhat ‘low’ concerns, the philosopher will work the apertures, fish for young potential philosophers in the unstill waters of the marketplace, needing toleration rom his fellow-citizens but not any excessively ordered, Spartan-lie regime that would shut him down. “The coming of Kojève’s regime will be the end of philosophy on earth, not because the quest for wisdom will be replaced by wisdom but because the quest for wisdom will be successfully suppressed”; meanwhile, “the politicization of philosophy runs the danger of infecting the philosopher with the vice of the political man.”

Frost’s essay, literally the central essay of the book, provides a spirited defense of Kojève. Frost cites Hegel’s denial that we can know nature as certainly as we can know the human things which are verified by virtue of their social-historical success. This is why the social criterion of recognition and especially of mutual recognition looms so large for historicists; nature, like the God of the Bible, hides behind clouds of unknowing, but when we’re being treated with contempt we know it. Strauss cannot really know if nature is eternal and unchanging or a being of Heraclitean flux, but he can readily judge if a man like Kojève respects him. And not only Strauss: “Contrary to Strauss, Kojève does not think ‘the masses’ are utterly incompetent judges” even of the philosopher’s opinions, insofar as these opinions remain in the realm of social and political life. We all know when we’re being hosed. And if philosophy is the quest for wisdom and not wisdom itself, how does Strauss know that the masses are incompetent judges? How does he know that philosophy is the best way of life? Or (again given the criterion of certainty) how does he know anything? “Philosophy would be futile if it did not culminate in wisdom itself.” Inasmuch as Strauss himself admits that the classical philosopher cannot prove his claim that the well-ordered souls that please him are really more akin to the eternal order than chaotic souls are, where does that leave him?

As for the universal and homogeneous state, is it so very bad? Modern men do in fact accept a substantial state already, empowered to care for them, watching over them like a vigilant mother. Universalized, such a state would prevent the scourge of war, “offer[ing] the prospect of peace, prosperity, and security.” “Are these such terrible things to enjoy, and might they not be worth the purchase price, even on Strauss’s own terms?” Under modern conditions, what better alternative has Strauss to offer? Frost ends on a not e of what might be described as liberal Kojèvism: “As for whether one might argue that Kojève himself won the debate outright, would it be too brash to say that only Time (=History = Being = Truth) will tell?” Surely not too brash, this argument might well prove perhaps both too historicist for Strauss and too uncertain and indecisive for Kojève. For a reply to Frost, one might turn not so much to Strauss but to Tocqueville and his critique of “soft despotism.”

Neither Strauss nor Kojève supposed the debate to have been settled in their published exchange, as they continued to correspond for years. Mark Jo. Lutz ably summarizes their continued dialogue. Interpretation here proves especially helpful because the two men wrote not for general readers but as (so to speak) one philosopher to another; when they weren’t talking about the logistics of a projected but never-to-be meeting with conversation, a high degree of abstruseness prevailed, especially on Kojève’s side of the correspondence. Lutz remarks that Strauss describes “the desire to converse with other philosophers” as “natural,” “a spontaneous, recurring, and lasting feature of philosophic life,” and not at all indicative of a need for recognition.

Kojève objects to any Platonic dualism founded on a mathematized physics on the one hand and an understanding of the human soul on the other; for his part, Strauss complains that Kojève has set up his own dualism by failing to account (as Hegel himself tried to do) for nature, and simply setting it aside to concentrate his attention on History. Strauss continues to reject the several historicisms of Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, while Kojève upholds a mixture of these. Moreover, “Kojève assumes the ideas are concepts”—realizable ideals—”and that Plato is interested only in concepts and not in the soul” On the contrary, Platonic ideals are not ‘realizable’ at all, the ‘ideal’ polis of the Republic is intended ironically, and Plato’s Socrates sees into the soul of every person he knows, including himself. To Strauss’s criticism that Hegel’s project won’t satisfy anyone but the Last Man, Kojève cheerfully agrees that “in the universal and homogeneous state the great majority of people, whom he characterizes as ‘animals’ or ‘automata,’ will become easily satisfied by simple gratifications such as sports, art, and eroticism” for them, there will be no need for spirituality and its negations at the end of History, and that will prevent any popularly-based revolutions. As for the elites, the philosophers will eventually “acquire wisdom and become ‘gods,'” while “the recognition-hungry tyrants” will administer the greater machine that rules all the lesser automata. In other words, to Strauss’s civic concerns Kojève answers with a shrug of the shoulders; the end of History will become the much-sought-after eternal order, and that will be that. He continues to regard nature as necessitarian, radically unfree, as well as unteleological , which makes ‘natural right’ an oxymoron; in this he resembles a historicist Hume in maintaining that no ‘Ought’ can be derived from the natural ‘Is.’

In response, Strauss denies that the citizen-morality of (for example) a Polemarchus in Plato’s Republic is truly just; it is a matter of convention. In view of the self-contradictory character of convention as revealed by dialectical conversations, one cannot derive an ‘Ought’ directly from such an all-too-human ‘Is.’ this notwithstanding, the philosopher must take citizen-morality seriously, understanding it “on its own terms” rather than rushing to reduce it to class interests or other history-bound circumstances. The universal existence of citizen-morality of one sort or another tells us things about human nature, and nature is the object of the philosopher’s inquiry. Looking at historical circumstances to explain citizen-morality will misdirect the philosopher’s mind from glimpsing reflections of nature in conventions. Serious thinking about citizen-morality will also lead the philosopher to think about the guarantors of that morality, the gods of the polis, and thereby lead him to the question of “what the gods are and thus into the question whether there is an eternal order or realm of necessity or whether there is a ruling intelligence that can alter the prevailing order at will.” “Historical thinking’ is the wrong way into these questions because it is a closed system, with the proverbial ‘turtles’ (in this case, historical events) ‘all the way down. ‘

This brings Strauss to a consideration of the ‘Idea’ in Plato. By nature, each living being has an identifiable character; as Strauss puts it, this character aims at “the end of the individual being belonging to the class” of which it is a member; “in this sense” the end or purpose pursued by the individual “transcends” the individual, as seen in ‘the animal’s desire for procreation or for the perpetuation of the class.” Human nature, the idea of the human aims at a “complex” end “because man is both simply a part of the whole (like the lion or the worm) and that unique part of the whole which is open to the whole.” The quest for justice, for the natural end, the naturally right way of life for man, goes beyond the perfection of individual humans. But as citizens we do not see the implications of that. In Lutz’s words, “Our concern for justice can appear to be our complete end, but it cannot perfect us, either because it is not necessarily accompanied by wisdom about the whole or because our concern with justice can stand in the way of the desire to know the truth about the whole.” The idea of man as situated within the natural order of which he can be a knowing (if not all-knowing) part requires us to wonder about the Good, the good of the whole natural order.

At this point, readers of the collection will have ventured quite far from the initial concern with tyranny and what Strauss regarded as the incapacity of contemporary political scientists to understand it. In one of the finest essays in the volume, Waller R. Newell brings us back to earth, without forgetting the larger philosophic questions raised by our life on earth, in modern states.

Kojève insists on a politics, indeed a metaphysics of sharp dualities—of good and evil, Master and Slave, of historical dialectic. Newell observes that Strauss to some degree plays along with this, insisting that we must choose between philosophy and political liberty on the one hand and the rule of modern tyrants in a World State which would snuff out philosophy on earth. Strauss offers no “middle range,” instead making it sound as if “the independence of the philosophic life is the only certain defense against tyranny, particularly the modern version of tyranny.” It seems as if Strauss concurs with Kojève’s claim that wisdom can be divorced from moderation, that the wisdom of the classics is in some sense continuous with the wisdom of the moderns and their immoderate pursuit of the conquest of nature by means of science or knowledge. Newell demurs, arguing that, just as Strauss contends each Platonic dialogue leaves out some important feature seen in other dialogues, with only the full corpus of Platonic writings constituting the whole of his thought, so too Strauss’s commentary on the Hiero and his exchange with Kojève afford only a partial glimpse into his understanding of political philosophy.

For starters, Strauss sees that “Kojève-Hegel is not necessarily simply Hegel.” Kojève’s Hegel does not encompass Hegel’s own account of the “sacred restraints” the classical philosophers saw as animating and moderating the polis. Socrates in the Republic makes the radical claims that the philosopher’s study of “the Idea of the Good” generates practical as well as theoretical wisdom and that civic education, not only philosophy, “offers an account of a well-ordered soul that is at best indirectly connected to philosophizing and should function as an independent source of psychological immunity in the citizenry, or among the ‘gentlemen’ to the temptation to tyrannize.” But in his exchange with Kojève, Newell argues, Strauss downplays this latter account, centering on classical politics not classical civic education as the antidote to modern tyranny. Buy if there really is an eternal natural order, including a persistent human nature, can the universal, homogeneous state really threaten to end philosophy on earth?

In his other writings, Strauss points to Platonic psychology as evidence against the fearful Hobbesian struggle for self-preservation and honor, later seen in historicism as the struggle for recognition leading to self-preservation in a permanently self-preserving World State. Love, not fear, much less Heidegger’s existential anxiety, more truly animates the human soul. Strauss knew Xenophon’s Hiero, but he also knew Plato’s Symposium, with the Ladder of Love that stretches between animals and gods. For human beings ‘in themselves,’ abstracted from the whole, love of wisdom also mediates “between the charms of excessive homogeneity (typified by mathematics) and excessive heterogeneity (the realm of statecraft and education)”. Philosophy, “graced by nature’s grace,” as Strauss rather un-Biblically puts it, accounts for each of these realms of human thought while refusing to succumb to the “charms” of either. In contesting modern tyranny on the grounds as it were of a dialogue by Xenophon, who “presents a comparatively sharper divide between the philosophic life and the city” than Plato does, Strauss meets Kojève on grounds closer to Kojève’s own thought than he might otherwise do. He is taking a worthwhile risk, but it is a risk because things finally cannot be left on the grounds of such sharp dualism.

Newell also tries to rescue Hegel from Kojève’s Hegel, although in some of this he probably goes too far, and farther than Strauss would go. The real Hegel understands that “the God of Abraham unfolds historically in time, changing nature and  human nature,” in this resembling the activity of the world itself as conceived by historicists—most prominently Hegel, who writes of “the self-actualization of God in History.” The problem here is that the God of Abraham doesn’t “unfold” over time, the way Hegel’s ‘God’ or Absolute Spirit does. The God of Abraham creates the universe ex nihilo, not by unfolding Himself dialectically; insofar as He changes nature and human nature, He punishes human beings in response to their disobedience and redeems them through an infusion of His (not nature’s) grace. God isn’t embodied in His creation, immanent; as Newell rightly observes, Hegel’s Christianity “may have been a kind of deism or pantheism.” But this means it isn’t Christian. So in saying that “For Strauss… Hegel’s philosophy is not, as Kojève asserts, atheistic,” Newell misses Strauss’s understanding of the distinctions between Jerusalem and Athens, the grace of grace of God and the grace of nature, and also Kojève’s special use of ‘atheism’ to mean the denial that Being is stable or fundamentally changeless. Strauss’s esteem for Hegel’s recovery of the classics, which Newell rightly highlights, was always tempered by his equal recognition that Hegel did not understand the classics s they understood themselves, and that this would not do.

This notwithstanding, Newell is surely right to say that “Kojève’s Hegel” differs from “Hegel’s Hegel” by making the Master-Slave dialectic central to the dialectic of History simply. Hegel is more political and less individualistic-moral because the locus of human history manifests itself in the political evolution of polis to empire to modern state to (eventually) world-state. To concentrate on the Master-Slave dialectic is to make Hegel more consonant with Marx than he really is; Kojève “combines the reductionist materialism of Marx”—particularly the class struggle of capitalists and workers, the modern masters and slaves—”with the historical and cultural breadth of Hegel,” adding Heideggerian-existential ‘nothingness’ as the negation that drives the historical process. For Kojève, unlike either Hegel or Heidegger, “the progress of history is purely anthropocentric.” Newell astutely observes Kojève’s resemblance to Fichte, “the ultimate proponent of man’s untrammeled will to conquer and reshape nature,” and it would be a dull reader who doesn’t delight in his line, “As Fichte was to Jacobinism, so might we say Kojève was to Stalinism.”

What is more, Newell is right again to conclude by observing that the real Hegel detested Jacobinism and surely would have detested Stalinism even more. His universal and homogeneous state was an attempt to combine bureaucracy with parliamentarianism, with a monarch who simply ‘signs off’ on legislation produced by the legislature. Tocqueville didn’t think this synthesis fully possible or desirable, and I think he was right, but it is quite far from it to the mass-murdering Man of Steel. “Kojève was an unconditional friend of Soviet communism, while Strauss was a conditional friend of liberal democracy.” “Strauss’s focus on the centrality of the regime therefore serves more than ever to remind us that in the modern world freedom can only be exercised in the modern nation-state with its individual liberties and representative political institutions, and that all political movements claiming to be able to create ‘global’ peace and justice are at best naïve and at worst open the door to aspiring universal tyrannies.”

While Hegel figures explicitly in the debate, Richard L. Velkley considers the unspoken presence of Martin Heidegger, the subject of Strauss’s allusion in the final paragraph of his “Restatement,” where he says, “We [i.e., he and Kojève] have seen that those who lacked the courage to face the issue of Tyranny, who therefore [here quoting Livy] ‘mad themselves obsequiously subservient while lording it over others,’ were forced to evade the issue of Being as well, precisely because they did nothing but talk about Being”—this last phrase glancing at Heidegger’s best-known book, Being and Time. Heidegger, Strauss implies, made his peace with the Nazis in part because he failed to engage in political philosophy, attempting to jump directly into ‘ontological’ contemplation without first attending to the opinions of citizens who have already arrived at answers about the gods and the cosmos. Some of those opinions may have dark consequences for philosophy along with every other aspect of human life; Heidegger didn’t consider that, but even (the Stalinist) Kojève is ready to do that.

Velkley recalls that Strauss had high respect for Heidegger in many ways, calling him “the only great thinker of our time,” the one whose profound etymologically-based interpretations of Greek philosophy had enabled Strauss and others to see “the roots of the [philosophic] tradition as they are,” and to wonder about “the most elementary premises whose validity is presupposed by philosophy.” Moreover, Heidegger’s original contribution to modern philosophy was impossible to overlook; in his thought, Strauss wrote, “modern thought reaches its culmination, its highest self-consciousness, in the most radical historicism, i.e., in explicitly condemning to oblivion the notion of eternity.” Kojève felt no less indebted. Heidegger corrected Hegel by refusing any attempt to bring nature into the realm of History, replacing Hegelian monism (the Absolute Spirit) with the dualism Kant had initiated. Heidegger also corrected Marxist materialism, vindicating human freedom—again, following Kant. As Velkley remarks, Kojève didn’t follow Heidegger into an affirmation of the nation-state, an affirmation which, coupled with radical historicism, inclined Heidegger to sympathy with the malevolent tyranny of the Right. Velkley offers a clear and helpful overview of Kojève’s desired synthesis (never effected to his own satisfaction) of these philosophers, which combined Hegelian dialectic, culminating in the ‘end of history,’ when explaining the human world, Platonic geometry for understanding the structure of the cosmos, Aristotelian teleology for understanding biology, and Kantianism to explain the dynamics, the movement of the cosmos. Overall, “Kojève nonetheless continued to insist that Hegel ended the evolution of philosophy by transforming philosophy into a System of Knowledge.”

The editors give the last word to James H. Nichols, the author of Alexandre Kojève: Philosophy at the End of History. He picks up the theme of his book here, outlining Kojève’s never-finished attempt to formulate a thoroughgoing update of Hegel’s system. “How could one show that history had ended?” In this, he goes deeper into Kojève’s thought than Kojève himself does in his critique of Strauss, relying on arguments taken from the lectures on Hegel and the correspondence. To demonstrate History’s conclusion, one needed to establish the “circularity” of philosophic thought. By this Hegel and Kojève mean that a thinker will begin with a question—for example, ‘What am I?’—and then follow “a logically necessary series of answers and questions” that wind back to the original question. When, in Kojève’s words, “it is clear that all possible questions-answers have been exhausted,” that “a total answer has been obtained,” that each answer fits logically into the whole of knowledge, then the end of history has occurred. And indeed, in Kojève’s argument, as Nichols puts it, “Hegel’s whole encyclopedic system of knowledge shows that all previous philosophical arguments find their necessary place in the definitive systematic wisdom that gives an adequate account of, and thus ends, the evolution of philosophy.” what was left for Kojève to do was to complete “the considerable philosophic work yet to be done to complete the [in-principle completed] system.”

Nichols holds out the tantalizing prospect that Kojève’s Hegelianism had a touch of “Socratic irony” to it; after all, unlike Hegel, he regards nature as “in a decisive sense mysterious to us,” better approached through mathematics than through discourse, and therefore not easily integrated into any logos or ‘Word,’ Hegelian or other. A famous recent attempt to complete or supplement Hegel by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (the title of which shows an awareness both of Kojève’s argument and Strauss’s critique), goes even farther. To the best of my knowledge, Nichols is the only one of the seemingly innumerable commentators on that book who has notices the way Fukuyama subsumes Hegel’s grand narrative into “a Platonic conception of the nature of the human soul”; Fukuyama locates “the fight for recognition” in human nature, specifically, Socrates’ description of “thymos or spiritedness,” which he distinguishes from reason or logos and also from the bodily appetites. (As a side note, I can report that several years ago I asked Fukuyama about his ‘Platonism,’ and he affirmed it.)

As for Strauss, he answered Kojève’s defense of the Hegelian system in his actions as well as his arguments. Nichols recalls his own encounter with Strauss in a classroom, only a few years before Strauss died. After discussing his own work on Plato’s Euthydemus, a dialogue which addresses the question of the possibility of philosophy and how it might be distinguished from sophistry, Strauss told the class about Kojève’s contrasting approach. In his own thought and life, Strauss treated these questions as open, still alive—thus indicating that the circle of human thought has not yet closed.

 

 

Marcus Tullius Cicero: On the Republic and On the Laws. David Fott translation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Timothy W. Caspar: Recovering the Ancient View of Founding: A Commentary on Cicero’s De Legibus. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

 

Plato teaches that founding and preserving cities best tests manly virtue; Cicero teaches that founding and preserving “new political orders” approaches most closely the “will of the gods” (C 1). Cicero thus may be said to elevate political founding and political life generally, an esteem he extends to the philosophic status of political speech and thought. In so elevating and esteeming, “Cicero has laid down a challenge, not just for his own time, but for all times, and so to us: He challenges us to confront the teachings of the philosophers, to understand the ideas and truths within them that may be applicable to all times and places” (C 2). In issuing this challenge he risked his reputation among Romans, who inclined to displays of manly virtue but preferred to leave Plato and his ilk firmly to one side as Greek, all-too-Greek.

The old Romans are not alone. Modern scholarship also has mostly left Cicero aside, though not because it honors manliness. Our scholars deny coherence to Cicero’s political works, labeling him a would-be Stoic and then sniffing that the real Stoics scarcely esteemed politics at all, considering political life little more than unworthy playing to the crowd. But why indeed worry about Cicero’s philosophic incompetence, some scholars ask, since he was nothing more than a product of his times, more or less intellectually irrelevant ever since?

Timothy W. Caspar answers these charges and dismissals them the only way one can: by showing that Cicero’s De Legibus withstands close reading, that “seek[ing] to understand him as he understood himself” (C 13) by attending carefully to what he writes will uncover his originality and profundity as a thinker, one deeply engaged with the Platonic dialogues whose titles of his own political dialogues echo. Cicero maintained that the best possible Roman republic consisted of a ‘mixed’ regime, one featuring a balance between rich and poor, the few and the many. Can it be said that thinking about ancient political regimes and their ‘founding’ has no contemporary political interest? As Caspar remarks, “If government in Cicero’s day is characterized more and more by the rule of those who seek individual preeminence at the expense of the public good, then the constitution is no longer mixed, and a refounding, guided by political philosophy, is needed to restore it to proper balance” (C 3). Do we know how to recognize and address such problems better than he did?

Caspar establishes that the parallel between the titles of the Platonic and the Ciceronian dialogues point not only to similarities but to important contrasts between the two thinkers. Cicero’s De Legibus “seeks to legislate for the best regime outlined by the lead interlocutor of the De Re Publica, the legendary Roman statesman Scipio” (C 20), while Plato’s Laws does not aim at legislating for the best regime outlined in the Republic. Nowhere in Cicero do we find a proposal for communism of wives and property, as in Plato’s Republic. Even more tellingly, Marcus explicitly and repeatedly states that his intention differs from that of Plato. By titling his book not The Laws but Of the Laws, Cicero might mean laws in general, the laws of Rome, and/or the Laws of Plato. Caspar will show that all three meanings pertain. Further, and more like the Phaedrus than the Republic or the Laws, the arguments and actions of De Legibus occur outside any city; the characters are friends (the Greek is no ‘Stranger,’ as in the Laws, and indeed he isn’t the main character). The main character is also a poet. Could he be the philosophic poet Socrates wishes for in the Republic?

De Legibus consists of a dialogue with three Roman interlocutors: a Hellenophile, Titus Pomponius Atticus, and two brothers, Quintus Tullius Cicero and Marcus Tullius Cicero, himself the author of the dialogue. The first words, spoken by Titus, refer to the setting, a “sacred grove” in Arpinum, Cicero’s ancestral home—that is, outside the great city of Rome. (Caspar notes that these first words also contrast with the Laws, which begins not with a sanctified, humanly planted grove but with a direct invocation of a god.) The grove’s landmark oak tree has been memorialized in Marcus’ epic poem, the Marius. In answer to Titus’ question, brother Quintus replies that this oak does indeed still stand in the grove, adding with a touch of fraternal pride that the ‘oak’ in the poem will outlast the oak in the grove because it “has been planted by an intellect” (L I.1); “many other things in many places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2). Life in nature is short, art is long, as another Roman poet wrote. The work of intellect lodges itself in the minds of others, many far removed in time and distance from the natural object the intellect “plants” in those other minds. To Titus’ perhaps friendly jibe that in so saying Quintus is “favoring [him]self by praising your brother” (L I.2), Quintus does not deny the charge but abstracts from any self-interest by saying that whether or not he has indulged in self-praise by family association, the longstanding character of poetic imagery, as against the shorter longevity of natural objects, may be seen in Titus’ native Greece as well, where it’s highly unlikely (for example) that a palm tree in Delos today is really the same one mentioned by Homer. “And many other things in many other places remain longer in remembrance than they could exist in nature” (L I.2).

Titus concedes the point, but turns to the poem’s author to ask if he really did “plant this oak tree” by intellect only, or did it (and the other actions in the poem) really exist (L I.3)? Like his brother, Marcus responds by pointing back to his questioner’s own beloved Greece, asking two rhetorical questions: Did Romulus really deify Proculus Iulius there, and did the North Wind really carry off Orithyia? Titus answers that these are ancient stories, but Marcus’ poem depicts recent events, not only within the memory but within the living memory of Marcus himself. Swearing by Hercules (and availing himself of the law-court imagery familiar to readers of Plato’s dialogues featuring Socrates), Marcus counter-charges any and all those who would accuse him of fabricating stories with ignorance of the difference between the kind of truth to be demanded of a poet and the kind required of a witness at trial. Brother Quintus understands this as a distinction between history and poetry, and Marcus concurs, saying that the measure of history (including the testimony of trial witnesses) is truth, while the measure of poetry is delight. What is more, historians themselves do not confine themselves to literal truth, as seen in the writings of that Greek, Herodotus.

Well, in that case, Titus returns, given the fact that “history is absent from our literature”—”as I very often hear from you”—will you not write such a history of Rome (L I.6)? Although Quintus chimes in with the proposal that this history encompass Rome’s beginnings, Titus prefers a memoir, something pertaining to events Marcus remembers firsthand—presumably to avoid mere speculation into events that now live on only in poems, delightful but not ‘literally’ truthful. Marcus resists the proposal in either form, pleading lack of the sustained leisure necessary to accomplish such a task. He awaits his old-age exemption from public service, when he can undertake “the pleasing, honorable task of a not lazy old age” (L I.10), a task some of us do indeed take up, if afforded the opportunity.

Caspar takes up this discussion of poetry, which resembles the critique of poets and poetry Socrates makes in the Republic. The poetic standard, delight or, as Caspar translates, pleasure, might imitate the good, “but is never the good itself”; indeed, it may imitate the good falsely, misleading its readers as it “shapes and forms and directs the evidence of the senses” (C 24). Founders of political regimes must attend carefully to poetry, reforming it and those who make it, lest they undermine citizens’ understanding of the good. (Even a cursory ‘remembrance’ of changes in popular American ‘poetry,’ including drama, shows how this undermining can occur.) Poetry broadly conceived to include political speech and even laws—human ‘making,’ generally—will prove both dangerous and indispensable to human, political, life. In contrast with poetry, and especially dangerous poetry, Marcus “attempt[s] to turn the student of Plato’s Laws away from contemplation of the heavens or the idea of the good to contemplation of nature”—”away from the heavens and towards the earth” (C 26). If so, Marcus wants his reader to perform a philosophic ‘turn’ somewhat related to the famous ‘turn’ of Plato’s Socrates. Initially, however, Marcus aims at a turn from the divine and heavenly toward earthly nature, whereas Socrates turned from the study of heavenly nature to human nature..

Caspar translates the Latin ingenio not as ‘intellect’ but as imagination or genius. He might regard Fott’s translation as too ‘rationalist’; in any event, he may be pointing us to an ambiguity in language that can lead to a confusion between reason and imagination, two related but distinct capacities of the human mind. By sharply distinguishing the real oak from the word-formed image-oak in the poem, Quintus wittingly or not severs the connection “between nature and the imagination or mind of man,” leaving poetry (and therefore poets or makers generally) “free to conquer nature,” free to persuade citizens “of almost anything”—rather in anticipation of Machiavelli, but in speech instead of deed, and so even more like the Greek and Roman rhetoricians and sophists (C 27). While acknowledging the power of poetry, Marcus (sometime poet and no mean orator, himself) wants nothing to do with severing truth and nature, or with holding the standard of delight or pleasure alone as dispositive when it comes to framing that higher ‘poetry’ of law. “Cicero means to anchor his future legislation in the nature that is the source of all justice,” “to remind his readers that politics cannot transcend nature,” that human nature sets limits to the realization of human imaginings (C 27). In this, Cicero presents in earnest what Plato may be said to present ironically. In both cases, these thinkers ask their readers to ask of poets not so much to present facts or ‘literal’ truths but to indicate “abiding truths,” truths about human nature that deserve to be lodged in the memories of citizens (C 29). In opening the discussion of history versus poetry, Titus “has done Marcus, and us, a favor: He provided the necessary opening for Marcus to demonstrate the importance of poetry to the laws and to the regime, as well as made it possible to indicate the insufficiency of poetry alone or unguided as the foundation of a just regime” (C 30). And that goes for the literary genre of history, too. What laws will govern both poetry and history? His interlocutors know what kind of poetry Marcus writes; they rightly want to know what kind of history he would write, even if he hasn’t the time actually to write it. This requires the interlocutors to make their own philosophic ‘turn,’ from poetry and history to law and politics, “and eventually to the laws that will make Scipio’s republic possible” (C 33).

Titus knows that Marcus has already studied the law. Given his reluctance to undertake a historical investigation, would he converse about that? Even as “your dear, famous Plato did” (L I.13)? Why, yes, Marcus replies, perhaps having been waiting for just this opportunity. We will need to understand five things in order to discover “the source of laws and right” (L I.16): What nature has granted to a human being; how many of the best things the human mind can encompass; what service we have been born for and brought into light to perform and accomplish; what the connection is among human beings; and what natural fellowship there is among human beings. That is: human nature, the limits of the human mind; the purposes human beings have by nature; what human beings have in common; what human friendship is. As Titus immediately sees, Marcus isn’t interested primarily in the conventional laws of Rome but in drawing the discipline of law from “within the profoundest philosophy,” which Marcus then defines as an investigation of “universal right and laws,” which derive from “human nature” (L I.17). “Ignorance of the law” in this sense” conduces to “more lawsuits than knowledge of it” (L I.18); sharp lawyers may chase ambulances, but ignorant citizens violate underlying right and laws themselves. “The beginning of right should be drawn from law,” a “force of nature” inherent in “the mind and reason of the prudent man” (L I.19). Inasmuch as not all men are prudent, “it will be necessary to speak popularly and to call that a law which, when written, consecrates what it wants by either ordering [or forbidding] as the crowd calls it.” But let us three friends “take the beginning of establishing right from the highest law”; “all laws should be tailored” to fit “the form of republic that Scipio taught to be the best,” namely, the mixed regime (L I.19-20). Marcus thus explicitly links De Legibus to De Re Publica, and shows that he regards human nature as political, in need of a regime or political order consistent with the uniquely human characteristic as the only animate being which “has a share in reason and reflection,” a capacity which, when “grown up and fully developed… is rightly named wisdom” (L I.22-23).

As Caspar remarks, “Marcus’s law will represent the intersection of philosophy and politics on the highest level” (C 34). Not Socratic philosopher-kings ruling boys ten years and younger but mature men will rule in his preferred regime. In establishing his independence from Plato’s dialogue, “he encourages us to think for ourselves, just as he does” (C 36). In thinking about justice and true law as “connected to man through nature, through human nature,” Marcus reveals why he “had resisted Quintus’s earlier attempt to sever nature from poetry” (C 37). Poetry comes from poets; poets are human; humans have a nature. If that nature provides the standard of justice and true law, then “poetry will be judged by true law in terms of how closely it adheres to this nature,” and not by how much pleasure it gives us (C 37). In rejecting Titus’ Epicurean standard for poetry, Marcus will not run to the opposite, Stoic standard, which defines human nature as if men had no bodies (as Socrates does, albeit ironically). It is true that Marcus initially proposes a definition of natural law that approaches the Stoic level of abstraction in order, Caspar suggests “to woo his interlocutors” (C 37), one of whom is indeed an Epicurean and the other a Roman gentleman-aristocrat with the Epicurean leanings aristocrats too often come to display. But he will soon bring them down to earth without losing them to conventionalism or to sophistry. “Atticus and Quintus must be led to see the importance of politics for philosophy—and philosophy for politics” (C 40).

“Human law in a just republic necessarily struggles to align itself with natural law, all the time” (C 39), and for this struggle to proceed with success one must not sever one from the other any more than one must sever poetry from nature. His interlocutors are so inclined. Therefore, Marcus’ “entire speech in the first book [of De Legibus] could be understood as an artful attempt at promoting what is to come in the two later books” (C 40). He starts with philosophic teachings propounded by Plato and Aristotle: To define a thing, to say what it is, one must begin with its beginning because its beginning “has within it” its end or purpose, just as (we now know) DNA has within it the body it can become. “If we understand the principia, we can understand the natura, and ultimately the telos” (C 41). He then initially proposes a high-toned definition of law as the highest reason, taking care to attribute this definition to previous thinkers. Initially defining law as the “highest reason,” he quickly identifies this not as theoretical reason but as practical, prudential reason, the kind of reason that guides an already virtuous soul to the good ends it seeks (C 41). But what are those ends? Two kinds of justice, he offers, again following Aristotle: equity or distributive justice, “giving each his own” in proportion to his desert (C 42); and the justice of choosing or commutative justice, providing accurate restitution for goods received or for actions taken, whether good or bad. Justice needs codification, writtenness, a sort of ’embodiment,’ so that all citizens can learn it, not only ‘the few.’ In this mindfulness of the needs of all citizens, Marcus nods to the requirements of Scipio’s mixed regime, with its element of popular participation and consent. “Law that will be useful to actual regimes must take account of the fact that no republic is composed entirely of philosophers or Stoic sages or prudent human beings” (these may be three different types of men); this understanding links the three books of De Legibus together in a manner overlooked by those scholars who charge the dialogue with incoherence (C 44). Very roughly speaking, Book I is to Books II and III what the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the United States Constitution are to the Constitution itself, although one should hasten to add that Book I is more thoroughly a work of philosophy than the Preamble and more comprehensively so than the Declaration.

Very well, then. Who is the prudent man? How will we know him when we see him? How much authority should be consent to give him? How shall philosophy and political life relate to one another?

Caspar will return to these questions, with Cicero, but first he remarks a difference between the treatment of reason in the two dialogues. In De Re Publica law is “right reason congruent with nature”; in De Legibus law is “highest reason” “rooted in nature” (C 45-46). One natural law, two definitions: How so? Because the discussants differ. De Re Publica features a long discussion among “preeminent Roman political gentlemen”; De Legibus features a much shorter discussion among “three good friends, two of them brothers,” one of them a Greek not a Roman, “about the best laws for that republic” (C 46). In one sense, the intimacy of the latter discussion would incline it to be more philosophic, and it is in one way. Because the men legislate for a whole people, the leader of the discussion, Marcus, must bring his philosophically-inclined friends to philosophize politically, to take account of all kinds of human beings, not only ‘the few.’ The “right reason” of De Re Publica can indeed guide “gentlemen who may not necessarily need the formal sanctions of the law,” but “highest reason” in De Legibus “guides a republic that includes gentlemen and non-gentlemen”—a down-to-earth mixed-regime republic that can also appeal to philosophers and non-philosophers, whether or not they are gentlemen, by giving all men a standard to ‘look up to’ (C 46). “All segments of the republic may share in reverence for a law that is highest and also right” (46), and as firmly rooted in nature as the noblest oak in the sacred grove. To speak in ‘modern’ terms, “right reason” in the wrong minds might lead to Kantianism or, to speak in ‘ancient’ terms, to a Platonism without Socratic/Platonic irony. In either case, the danger of apolitical idealism or worse, political idealism, must be confronted and faced down. “Instead of attempting to lay down the best laws simply, for a republic that is ultimately guided by philosophers,” the interlocutors of De Legibus “will seek to legislate for the best republic that is ruled by prudent gentlemen or statesmen who adhere to the natural law” (C 48). “Nature and natural law replace the ideas, above all the idea of the good, as the political standard which this republican regime will look” (C 48). Marcus does this both to bring philosophers and would-be philosophers down to earth, for both political and philosophic reasons, and to give ‘the many’ a standard inherent in the immediately visible order of the nature they see, hear, feel, smell, and taste all around them. “Morals must be firmly planted in the minds of citizens, and the legislator must not rely on the sanction of written laws alone” (C 48), indispensable though they are.

This will require the right kind of civil religion. Marcus challenges Titus’ Epicurean assumption that “the gods are indifferent to human beings” (C 49). Addressing him not by his patrimonial name, “Pomponius,” perhaps as a reminder of fatherly authority, he induces him “to concede that nature is ruled by force, nature, reason, power, mind, or command of the immortal gods” (C49). This Titus consents to do, adding good-naturedly that he does so because the noise of the rushing river and chirping birds will prevent his Epicurean colleagues from hearing his admission. Marcus thereby reveals his political-philosophic strategy: “lay[ing] down laws for a republic that includes various schools of philosophy” (C 49). To do so, he needs “some common moral ground [as] a bedrock principle for political happiness” (C 49). Whereas Plato’s Athenian Stranger needed no such consent, finally pointing back to the rule of philosopher-kings, with its rule of reason founded on the doctrine of ideas ‘abstracted’ from concrete nature, unimpeded by the political influence of philosophic factions, Cicero’s Rome did feature such factions. The philosophic factions of Athens impeded philosophy by attempting to understand nature by gazing directly at the cosmos, ignoring human opinions. The philosophic factions of Rome impeded not only philosophy but politics itself, by attempting to justify withdrawal from politics not only on intellectual but on moral grounds. “Marcus softens Atticus and convinces him that his project is an attempted recreation of the Platonic enterprise,” an enterprise Titus reveres as a Greek as well as a philosopher or would-be philosopher, even as his philosophic school has deviated from that enterprise (C 52). “Natural law is the solution for gentlemen under siege by bad”—that is, “apolitical and dogmatic”—”philosophy, and it serves as a common ground upon which they might agree politically” even as they remain in disputation philosophically (C 52).

In civil-religious terms, while the Athenian Stranger posits an active, providential god who punishes those who violate his laws, Cicero can speak of what the American Founders called the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Instead of the Stranger’s “rule of intelligence in the form of law,” leading to “the rule of philosopher-kings,” natural law “finds its home first and foremost in the ‘mind and reason of the prudent man,'” that is, in real human beings mindful of their themselves and their fellow human beings as naturally embodied beings (C 54). “Cicero praises and defends the political over the philosophical life, in a book devoted to guiding prudent gentlemen and teaching them about the best republic, of which De Legibus is the sequel” (C 56). He divides the remainder of Book I into three main parts whose topics are the origins of justice, a defense of natural as opposed to conventional justice, and “an encomium to philosophy” (C 56).

Marcus can now meld philosophy and civil religion: “The primary fellowship of human beings with god involves reason,” including “right reason,” which is law; hence “we should consider human beings to be united with gods by law” and right (L I.23). “The whole universe should be thought to be one in common between gods and human beings,” and it has been so since the origin of the human species (L I.23). Although he had refused the task of undertaking a historical account of Rome, and especially of its origins, Marcus does not hesitate to go much farther back in time here, past the origin of Rome to the origin of the human species itself—a clear indication that he offers his friends another poem or mythos. “In the perpetual celestial courses [and] revolution there emerged a sort of ripeness for planting the human race,” whose original members had their souls “implanted by god” (L I.24). This gave humans “a blood relation or a family or a lineage between us and the heavenly beings,” accounting for the fact that “out of so many species there is no animal besides the human being that has any notion of god” (L I.24). Man “recognizes god because he, so to speak, recollects whence he arose” (L I.25). Recollection or remembrance is the province of poetry, readers will recall, and the image of planting in the new poem ‘recalls’ the image of the Marian oak in Marcus’ earlier poem. Ciceronian theology blurs the distinction between the divine and the human by making both natural, evidently originating in nature. The arts also have a natural origin, as “countless arts have been discovered through the teaching of nature, which reason imitated in order to attain skillfully the things necessary for life” (L I.26). The human mind, senses, and body all fit together, and because they do human beings can perfect their ‘given’ capacities, developing speech (“the greatest matchmaker of human fellowship”) and reason (L I.26-27). Cicero develops his account of oratory or rhetoric elsewhere, but, as Caspar remarks, “This whole work is an exercise in the rhetoric of the natural law statesman in action” (C 60).

By making human beings one species, nature has made us fundamentally equal; Marcus goes so far as to claim that all human beings enjoy the same capacity to learn. This has moral and political implications: “There is no one of any nation who cannot arrive at virtue when he has found a leader” (L I.30). As in virtue, so in vice: “In depravities there is [also] a remarkable similarity in the human race,” lured as we are by “pleasure, which, although it is an enticement to disgrace, has a sort of similarity to a natural good” (L. I.31). Fundamentally, however, “we have been made by nature to participate in right, one with another, and to share it among all persons”; right “is by nature,” having “been given to all persons” because “reason has been given to all persons” (L I.33). Law is “right reason in ordering and forbidding” (L I.33). Morally, this entails not self-sacrifice (Marcus warns against separating advantage from right) but cherishing oneself “no more than he does the other person,” in light of the natural equality of all members of the human species (L I.34).

Caspar distinguishes between “Cicero’s supreme god” and the “creator God of Genesis” (C 58).  “Cicero’s supreme god seems to be bound by reason and nature,” whereas the Biblical God, “by contrast, is mysterious, all-powerful, and fundamentally unapproachable,” and, as Creator, precedes the “heavens and the earth” as well as man (C 58). One might quibble that God isn’t entirely mysterious (He reveals Himself in His Bible) or fundamentally unapproachable (properly addressed, He answers prayers and may even change His mind when a prophet disputes with Him). But as Creator, indeed, he is not merely “Nature’s God.” Cicero’s civil-religious poetry enables him, as Caspar writes, quietly to depart from thoughts about the gods in “turn[ing] to mankind’s common nature as the basis for justice” and “mov[ing] away from the community of men and gods to the community of human beings” in his warning against the lure of pleasure, including the pleasure of wrongly-intended poetry (C 61). Many of Rome’s philosophic schools may thrive in the mixed-regime republic, but Epicureans, who make pleasure and pain their standard of justice instead of the natural law, are invited to remain in their private gardens until such time as they return to their Socratic/Platonic origin. Still, as Caspar observes, the Ciceronian republic will make no attempt to suppress the schools, as “there is something about [them] that reflects human nature itself” (C 66), something in us that (like apolitical Epicureans) would rather stay out of the assembly hall and the council chamber, walk away from the disputations of political life. Pleasure may not register what’s distinctively human in human nature, but it is natural, and “the regime will not concern itself with stamping out every bad opinion,” instead allowing such an opinion “to survive so long as it does not interfere with the day to day operations of politics, or cause too many people to abandon their loyalty to the regime” (C 66). When asked by Titus to adjudicate a dispute between the Academic school of philosophy, who taught that virtue is honorable, and the school of Zeno, who taught that nothing is good except what is honorable, Marcus dismisses the dispute as ‘academic’ in our sense—merely verbal. As Caspar suggests, he doesn’t want to agitate dogmatic quarrels but to diminish them for the sake of the mixed regime. Another way to say this is that Marcus sees the mixed regime indeed as a mixture of somewhat contradictory elements—the few and the many, Platonists and Stoics, but these elements must find some foundational principle or principles on which they concur. Those who reject the moral foundation of the regime will be excluded or at least (as we would say) ‘marginalized,’ precisely because they reject the natural law.

Marcus now singles out classical conventionalism (the doctrine “that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples” [L I.42]) for an extended critique. “Right is uniform; human fellowship has been bound by it, and one law has established it,” namely the law of right reason in commanding and prohibiting, which readily understandable by all men, not only philosophers (L I.42). Nature inclines us “to cherish human beings,” and fear therefore need not be the motive for respecting the law. (This distinguishes Ciceronian natural law not only from classical conventionalism but from Biblical law, which teaches that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.) Human law cannot “make right out of wrong” (L I.43). Even when we misuse the term “virtue” to describe a tree or a horse (true virtue is “fully developed reason” [L I.43]), we still understand that this goodness inheres in their nature, not in opinion. Further, we consent to honor virtuous persons and dishonor the vicious; not only reason but spiritedness, the ‘aristocratic’ characteristic par excellence, if guided by reason, recognizes natural law. Good character remains steadfast precisely because logical consistency guides such a soul, lending itself to resolution. Bad character, governed by changeable passions, often proves unreliable, unsteady. There can be constancy in bad character too, if the soul chooses selfish advantage or pleasure as its guiding star; a narrowly utilitarian soul might be rational ‘in the retail,’ if not ‘in the wholesale.’ The difference is that the genuinely rational soul finds rational means to the rational end of fully-developed humanness, whereas the utilitarian soul finds rational means to the satisfaction of the appetites.

Quintus evidently has learned something. He no longer denigrates nature in order to exalt human artfulness. “The matter is such that the highest good is to live from nature,” he summarizes, “that is, to take great enjoyment [from] virtue in a moderate, suitable life—or to follow nature and to live by its law, so to speak—that is, to omit no act (however great it may be in itself) that may attain the things that nature demands—because this is likewise worthwhile, to live in accordance with virtue as if it were a law” (L I.56). Marcus immediately reinforces this speech with a Socratic lesson: The god Apollo teaches us that “we should know ourselves” (L I.58). “He who knows himself will think first that he has something divine and that his own intellect within himself is like a sort of consecrated image”; he will have “wisdom as [his] leader,” “discern[ing] that he is a good man and that for this very reason he is going to be happy,” having “entered the fellowship of affection with his own,” including the gods and his fellow virtuous and prudent men and citizens (L I.59-60). Knowing now that “he has been born for political fellowship,” he will prove ready to make “precise argument” and more, he “may rule peoples, stabilize laws, chastise the wicked, protect the good,” and generally conduct himself not as a philosopher-king but as prudent citizen whose “parent and educator” is no longer merely his father but practical wisdom (L I.60).

Caspar deepens the reader’s understanding of these passages by emphasizing the way in which Marcus has moved his gentlemanly aspirants to philosophy away from their apolitical, Epicurean tendency to detach themselves from politics. By bringing in the virtue of honorableness, which the equally apolitical Stoics esteem as a merely moral virtue, he shows them “that to be honorable means to be political” (C 84). Whether Epicurean or Stoic, “the friendship of the wise, though perhaps possible, aims too high and is therefore insufficient as a general organizing principle for politics in a natural law regime” (C 67). And is therefore not really wise. Justice “must be useful to the republic, to cities, and to the people, and therefore rooted in a nature all human beings share” (C 67). He “set[s] up a political standard that does not require perfected wisdom to achieve” (C 68), one perceived by conscience, a “concept Marcus mentions for the first time” here (C 67), an ‘internalized’ form of the aristocrat’s honor. While appealing to the high-toned principle of divine reason, indeed to Socratic self-knowledge, Marcus also praises constancy, honorableness and moderation, more common but nonetheless indispensable virtues which one need not be a philosopher to achieve. Not the sapientes or wise man but the viri boni or good man embodies the standard of “a community of wisdom” that remains within the reach of a real city (C 71). “Marcus seeks to cultivate a genuine attachment in the hearts and minds of the nobility of this republic to what is just, and indeed to all the virtues, because they are good and honorable in and of themselves” (C 71); this combination of self-respecting but not selfless virtue with the love of one’s own regime in one’s own city depends on “the ideal of virtue [becoming] a standard to which the wise and the non-wise can both aspire” (C 72).

Philosophers seek souls capable of someday philosophizing. Cicero would also turn philosophers to the task of teaching those will never philosophize, but who can reason well about practical matters before his political community, who knows enough about nature to follow its guidance and to situate his own community within the natural world. Caspar finds it “most striking” that Cicero would “return, philosophically and politically, to Socrates” (C 76), initially by conversing with his friends Socratically, bringing them in to the enterprise of founding a regime in which thoughtful men will avoid dogmatic, ‘ideological’ thinking and remain mindful of the virtues needed for a more nearly just community that will be more than a ‘city in speech.’ The laws proposed in De Legibus will “stand as legislation for the best regime outlined in De Re Publica” (C 80). “He seeks to revitalize or perhaps even re-found republican government in Rome, or, if that is not possible, to provide a model for future founders of natural law republics” by “first bring[ing] about the re-birth of a politically relevant and healthy philosophy to guide the return to republicanism, and then keep that republican train on its tracks after the founding is complete” (C 84).

Accordingly, Marcus must bring his friends to consider the laws of religion and of magistracy. Caspar introduces the subsequent two books of De Legibus by showing how they both relate to and differ from the first. While the thoroughly prudent political philosopher might rule with no need for written law, virtuous gentlemen will need a ‘framework’ provided by “a handbook on natural law” (C 95). The laws that follow “are not positive laws for an actual regime in the here and now, but laws dictated by nature” (C 95), itself more ancient, more ‘time-honored,’ than the oldest families of Rome. “Cicero intend[s] his law code to serve as a standard and refuge to which all human founders of regimes might repair, but which they might never actually achieve” (C 97). By writing an (as it were) popular book instead of a philosophic treatise on natural law, he sets out perform the task Plato attempted in his Laws, but in a much briefer, thus more serviceable form. In addition, codifying the natural law, writing it down, putting some meat on its bones, brings Marcus and his friends firmly down to earth, after the sometimes rarified discussion of Book I. Marcus goes so far as to lead the discussants physically to an island in the Fibrenus, where “nature dominates” (L II.2)—in Caspar’s words, “his favorite spot in his beloved place of birth” (C 98). The idea of home, both as a specific place that is preeminently ‘your own’ and also a place within the natural order, should conduce to a move to the concrete, the specific, the familiar and the familial; Caspar suggests that Marcus thereby “compels his interlocutors to think, among other things, of the Greek myth of autochthony, which teaches that the people of a particular city or country are literally born from the very earth in which they live” (C 104). Such a thought does indeed bring one down to earth, although Marcus’ “new and improved definition of citizenship” (C 104) won’t go quite that far down. Nor will he go so far ‘up’ as Plato’s Athenian Stranger does. Unlike Plato’s Laws, which begins with the word theos, god, “Cicero does not begin with the god simply, but with god as manifested in nature, in a natural spot, in a wooded grove dedicated to his ancestors or the gods of the family, in which we presume could be found the tombs of those ancestors who have become gods” (C 100). Not the god, now, but a god, one “connected to him personally, to his family, and to all those members of his family who have come before him” will animate one pole of the subsequent conversation (C 100). The intimate connection between the divine and the natural remains, but in ever more practical form. A solid bond between man and the gods, man and nature, must be specific to that man, and to his city; only such a bond can “support and maintain the notion of natural justice” in the real world (C 101). Caspar observes, “Man’s relationship with the gods is important, but necessarily secondary or supportive in nature… not from the point of view of the eternal concerns of religion, but from the point of view of politics, the concerns of this entire dialogue” (C 101). Further contrasting De Legibus with Plato’s Laws, Caspar finds that Plato’s interlocutors walk not along a river but “uphill to the cave of Zeus”; the only river that appears in Plato’s dialogue is imaginary, a river in speech, representing “swift-flowing and swirling philosophical arguments about theology, the gods, and the priority of soul to body” (C 102). But Marcus continues to avoid the cold, fast-flowing river of philosophic dispute, as they’ve already agreed to return to the Socratic roots of political philosophy. Accordingly, the tranquil island in the river represents an oasis in which the legislators can view political society from outside, impartially, and indeed naturally, not from the sanctuary of the supreme god.

All city-dwellers have two fatherlands: their place of birth and the place where they were received, after leaving home to come to the city, “one by nature the other by citizenship” (L II.5). This second citizenship leaves the pleasures of one’s birthplace behind, based as it is “on the reason of man,” not on sentiment. At home, the natural law may mix too easily with powerful emotions. As Caspar puts it, “Rome—Scipio’s best (and mixed)regime—must replace the place of birth as the primary object of reverence and affection for its citizens” (C 106). Marcus makes clear that that this is not a simple distinction between nature and convention, however, recalling that “law was not thought out be human intellects; it is not some resolution of peoples, but something eternal that rules the whole universe through the wisdom of commanding and prohibiting,” the “mind of god compelling or forbidding all things by reason” (L II.8). This “concern with the eternal or the unlimited,” Caspar writes, “serves to place politics within certain boundaries that it may never cross” (C 106). “The human nature that grounds the best republic is both universal and particular” (C 107).

At the urging of Quintus, Marcus has thus returned to the topic of “the force and nature of law” (L II.8). “The divine mind is the highest law, so too when it is in man, it has been fully developed in the mind of the wise man” (L II.11). As Caspar remarks, the prudent man of Book I, associated with philosophy, retreats and the wise man, associated with religion, now appears. “Cicero seeks popular sanction for his republic and laws,” even as he continues “what is in effect a steady and inexorable rationalization of Roman religion” (C 112). Philosophers and even gentlemen will not need such strong stuff as religious laws, and they may live with the understanding that one never fully reaches the wisdom one loves while depending on their strength of soul to provide moral reinforcement to the natural law, but ‘the many’ demand firmer things that, standards more ‘exterior’ to their souls, including “lawgiver Jupiter, a belief popularized and reinforced by the poets,” as well as “conventional human punishment” (C 113). “This is, after all, the mixed regime of Scipio; it is not the rule of the wise over the wise” (C 117). Marcus “gradually” and carefully “confuses the distinction between nature and god” (C 115), making “a subtle but perceptible shift from the god as supreme toward the equality of god and the natural force that sanctions all laws as just or unjust” (C 116). The coming-back-to-earth of Book II requires both the acknowledgement of the need for piety in a mixed-regime republic and a retained measure of the natural law.

To respect philosophers, gentlemen, and the many in one regime requires rhetoric, persuasion, not compulsion by force and threats. A sound legal code needs a preface or preamble, invoking the divine origin of the laws along with the teaching that the gods “behave very well toward the human race” (L II.15). “For what is truer,” Marcus offers, “than that no one may properly be so foolishly arrogant as to think that reason and a mind are in himself but not in the heaven and the universe?” (L II.16) Who does not perceive “the order of the stars, the alternations of day and night, the balance of the seasons, the things produced for our enjoyment”? (L II.16). Another way to put this would be to say that the principle of reason, the principle of non-contradiction, inheres not only in human logos but in the orderliness of the cosmos where, just as in the human mind, there can be no round squares. As Caspar writes, “even the best kind of law requires persuasion to be effective” (C 117) and the human refusal to acknowledge even the self-evident truths of natural law—a refusal made by tyrants great and petty, singular and numerous, alike—ranges from the philosophic schools to the corner tavern. True, failure to acknowledge natural law will lead to punishment, eventually, but the eventual may take a long time. “True opinions [are] more readily accepted by citizens in a regime that believes in active and involved gods” (C 120), prudently invoked in the preamble to the body of the laws.

The body of the laws itself should be succinct. Marcus doesn’t propose a full code of law for a particular city, but offers “natural law legislation,” which “cannot be fixed to any particular time in human history,’ in any particular place, for any particular people (C 122). “Though the laws for the best regime have always existed, because laws dictated by nature are eternal and unchanging, they must be constantly adapted to the fluctuating affairs of human life” (C 122), to that ever-flowing, Heraclitean river of circumstances which the river on which the island stands may also invoke. “The laws of De Legibus are valid as actual laws only for the naturally best regime of De Re Publica, a reformed Roman republic that never truly existed” (C 122). Those natural laws offer a standard for those laying down “actual laws” (C 122), but they will not be actual laws for actual regimes that are not the naturally best one—that is, for every other regime. And indeed these future legislators themselves will need their founding law codes to be succinct, as “no founding legislator could ever know every particular need or situation that might arise, nor should he be expected to” (C 123).

Marcus’ religious laws reinforce the natural law and the natural law regime. The gods shall be approached with purity, piety, and with no attempts at material sacrifice, lest wealthy citizens imagine that they are not equal before the gods with all other citizens. What is more, human beings will not avenge violations of this law: “If anyone does otherwise, the god himself will be the avenger” (L II.19). Marcus immediately removes any suggestion of public religious indifference, however, by stipulating that “No one shall have gods separately, neither new nor foreign, unless those gods have been publicly adopted” (L II.19); in the real Rome, it would be centuries before Christianity received full official sanction. Worship of the ancestral family gods shall remain undisturbed, as shall such deified heroes as Hercules and Aesculapius. Also, personified virtues (Mind, Virtue, Piety, Trust) shall be worshipped as “those things on account of which ascent to heaven is given to a human being” (L II.19). Whether in the households or in the public square, Marcus aims at valorizing those human capacities that conduce to a steadfast citizenry. Linking families to the city, Marcus adjures households to “learn from public priests,” especially with respect to restraint or moderation in performing religious rites. The priestly class itself shall consist of two kinds, one in charge of the public rites and ceremonies, the other “interpret[ing] the strange announcements of prophets and seers whom the senate and the people approve” (L II.21). Such practices as augury and divination shall be carefully ruled, inasmuch as they can cause the souls of citizens to be pervaded with hope or fear. In Caspar’s words, describing this central and “by far the longest” section of the religious laws (C 124), “only  a standard of reason, or of what is in conformity with nature, could limit the types and therefore the number of gods permissible at Rome, and only if it becomes the standard to which all good priests should repair” (C 125). No “nocturnal sacrifices by women” (L II.21)—that is Bacchanalian rites—shall be allowed, but (Marcus being no killjoy) the laws shall “direct the joy of the people” with public games combined with ceremonies honoring the gods (LII. 22). Violations of the public laws of religion shall indeed be enforced by human beings, although the emphasis remains on example, not punishment. Public religious observance governed by the priests “holds together the republic”—reinforcing the social and political bonds necessary in any regime—”for the people always to be in need of the judgment and authority of the aristocrats” (L II.30); the mixed regime will have a strong aristocratic element, one that rules by as it were reaching into the souls of the many, moderating and steadying them for republican citizenship. “The augurs,” Caspar observes, “ostensibly religious functionaries, in fact hold the greatest political power in the republic, greatest in the sense that no political action may be carried out without their approval” (C 128). Justice, the aim or telos of the regime remains paramount, but the augurs are among the indispensable means to this end.

Caspar rightly points to the way Marcus ‘naturalizes’ the republic’s civil religion. Marcus preserves respect for “the rites of families and fathers” because “antiquity most nearly approaches the gods,” and religion must always be treated “as if it were handed down by the gods” (L II.27). And citizens worship the deified virtues in temples “so that those who have those things (and all good men have them) may think that the gods themselves have been placed in their souls” (L II.28), a thought that anticipates the Christian teaching on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. For Cicero, nature is the oldest thing of all; as Caspar puts it, “the best thing will now become the oldest thing,” not only in fact but in the minds of the citizens, “as other ancestral, though irrational, practices are gradually forgotten” (C 126). This rationally guided forgetfulness “recognizes the necessity of accounting for man’s concern with the eternal” (C 130). In terms of the struggles among the philosophic schools, Cicero “seeks to reclaim religion and divination from the Stoics,” whose understanding of both remains stubbornly and worrisomely apolitical (C 131). And what goes for the rites in the republican regime also goes for music, a theme familiar to readers of Plato. “Children must learn a moderate music, sanctioned by gods, that supports the laws”; “if the gods cease to care about the music of the regime, the regime cannot control what it is or will become,” and the poets who make music use it as yet another form of their rhetoric (C 135). Marcus wants a moderate and just republicanism, not what he calls “theatocracy” with its “lawless and shameless freedom” (C 136). And even as those who appeal to the ‘low’ in human nature deserve restraint, in another way so do those who appeal to the ‘high.’ While “it is the duty of every gentleman in the natural law regime” to defend “the goddess of wisdom, or wisdom itself,” too often such gentlemen hold themselves to be morally superior magnanimous men and/or wise men; with an orientation toward the gods, unimpeachably superior even to gentlemen in both morals and intellect, gentlemanly pride will be “tamed by this truly mixed regime,” with its firm religious practices (C 137). At the same time, “religion is to be the domain of authority (auctoritate) alone, an authority that affirms and supports this mixed, natural law regime” (C 141). For example, Marcus limits gravesites to lands than cannot take cultivation, to places where “the nature of the field can produce so much that it may receive the bodies of the dead without damage to the living” (L II.67). The earth belongs to the living.

“Book II begins and ends in death or with a concern for death, and thus a concern for the eternal soul” (C 143). Cicero thus acknowledges “the ultimate concerns of [the citizens of the justice regime] and regulate[s] the line between life and death,” connecting “the good of the republic with the concern its citizens have for immortality and for their souls” (C 143). The influential gentlemen desire both immortal glory and justice, and the regime aims at inducing them to rule justly “for the sake of the very best kind of immortality: a deathless eternity accompanied by a lasting reputation of justice among the living,” a civic deification of the very best souls (C 143). These gentlemen will not forget the warlike virtues of Romulus, but neither will they neglect the lessons of lawgiver Numa, who established the virtues of peace, virtues “that make the long life for the republic possible: religion and mildness or mercy (clementia). Without virtues of peace, warlike aristocrats will defeat their foreign enemies but then turn on one another in civil wars. In all this, nature “remains the highest standard of this regime, and religion serves that end.” (C 145) Religion is nonetheless central to the dialogue because in a natural-law republic care for the souls of all citizens, not only philosophers, takes precedent, prepares for, right reception of the natural law and of magistrates guided by it. “What is left unsaid”—that a Rome “founded first on the laws of religion or the priority of the soul” might not “have had to resort to war and conquest at its founding”—comes closer to nature than did the historical practice of the actual Rome, which put the political regime first in time  (C 164).

In Book III Marcus addresses the matter of magistracies or political offices. Plato of course treats them extensively, and the Greek Titus avers that “You may never praise him either too strongly or too often” (L III.1). While complimenting his (decreasingly) Epicurean friend (who has “attained that very difficult alliance of seriousness with humaneness” [L III.1]), Marcus will continue to adhere to Scipio’s natural-law, mixed-regime republic as distinguished from the rule of philosopher-kings guided by the idea of the good. Still, Marcus must be quietly pleased that his friend shows signs, as Caspar puts it, of consenting to just that regime, a regime in which the rare and politically unrealistic motive of the quest for wisdom and the good will be replaced by the more common but politically realistic motive of the love of praise or honor. “Praise is needed in this kind of regime, a regime that has as its citizens those who are not necessarily philosophers and who may not be able to see the idea of the good, but who are still good men” (C 163). It turns out that some Epicureans are not immune to such salutary rhetorical blandishments. Those who are not can “keep to their gardens” (C 163).

Magistrates rule, being ruled by the laws: “It can truly be said that a magistrate is a speaking law, and a law is a silent magistrate” (L III.2). To give voice to the silent natural law, the magistrate must acknowledge the rule of the earth by the universe in which it is situated, and the rule of the universe by “the god” (L III.2). Having turned from the religious institutions to the magisterial institutions, Marcus leaves Jupiter and the other gods behind, now mentioning only “the god” (along with that “divine man,” Plato, who, it will be recalled, provides the rhetorical reference point for Marcus’ intended political reconciliation of the philosophic schools). The kingly rule of “the god” over the universe initially found its human imitators in the ancient monarchic regimes, but this proved politically unrealistic in Rome. (It might be noted that ancient Israel presents us with the opposite picture: a personal, kingly God who founded a republic for His people, who eventually came to prefer a monarchic regime. As in Israel, the power of the magistrate is a part of the divine power, but unlike Moses, Marcus does not conceive of “the god” as personal, or as a Creator.) What is more, Marcus prefers mixed-regime republicanism to monarchy, on Aristotelian grounds: “It is proper both for him who obeys to hope that he will command at some time, and for him who commands to think that in a brief time he will have to obey” (L III.5)—a restatement of Aristotle’s definition of the political life appropriate for the political animal, man, a life consisting of ruling and being ruled in turn. As Caspar notes, if a regime can balance ruling and being-ruled it will achieve “political moderation,” the virtue “that Cicero sets up as the standard for virtue in individuals” (C 167).  “The regime is held together by the magistracies and those who are in charge, and from their arrangements”—that is, the formal or institutional dimension of the regime—”the type of each regime may be understood” (L III.12).

Accordingly, the first of the laws pertaining to the magistracy requires justice of the laws themselves and moderation of the citizens who obey them, including the magistrates, who are subject to the peoples’ “right to appeal” their decisions (L III.6). There will be no right to appeal military decisions in wartime, however, although the regime’s military arm will be constrained in other ways, as Marcus will outline in due course; what we would call civilian control of the military shall prevail. Indeed, the most authoritative institution of the regime will be the senate, charged with “keep[ing] these magistrates just and guid[ing] the whole republic” (C 173). The somewhat ‘privileged’ character of wartime military authority obtains because “the highest law” is “the safety of the people” (L III.8). By “highest” Marcus cannot mean noblest or even most just but rather supremely necessary; in this as elsewhere, Marcus brings his interlocutors down to earth. As Caspar puts it, “when the very safety of the republic is at stake, there is no higher law”; “if the republic is destroyed, no other laws, no matter how lofty, will matter” (C 174).

Of all the magisterial offices Marcus proposes, the most controversial one by far proves to be the tribunate, whose members served as a check on the necessary but dangerous kingly powers of the consuls. Aristocratic Quintus denounces the Tribunate as an instrument of popular misrule, among whose offenses being its attacks on Marcus (L III. 19-22). Marcus naturally agrees that “the power of the tribunes of the plebeians is too great,” but immediately points to the worse alternative: “The violence of the people, however, is much more ferocious, much more ardent” (L III.23). This is why the Tribunate was founded in the first place. Cicero reminds Quintus (and not incidentally appeals to patriarchal authority while doing so), “When the Fathers conceded this power to the plebeians, the weapons fell, the sedition was extinguished, a compromise was found so that the less important men thought that they were equalized to the leading men” and as a result “make no struggles concerning their own right,” anymore (L III.24). At the same time, aristocratic control of the auspices has “often repressed an unjust urge of the people” (L III.27), so the influence flows both ways. Similarly, although senators are elected by popular vote, once elected these men, eminent in virtue no matter what social class they come from, moderate aristocrats and plebeians alike. Indeed, the senate will be “the linchpin of this whole system of government” (C 184). It is therefore utterly indispensable that “the highest men of the city” be educated to virtue, as the example of their way of life sets “the customs of cities” even more powerfully than “changes in musicians’ songs” (L III.32). In this he departs from “our dear Plato”; having established Plato as the common ground among the philosophic schools, and between the schools and the aristocrats, he can now adroitly bring both to listen to distinctively Ciceronian thoughts—politically speaking, the mixed regime (C 178-179). In such a regime, “those who are not in the ruling class will not be willing slaves to that ruling class,” but will “have a say in rule” (C 186).

Caspar remarks that whereas many philosophers tend toward apolitical theorizing at the expense of the city and, ultimately, themselves, Quintus the aristocrat inclines toward a political purism, wishfully thinking that those ‘born to rule’ could do so without any polluting interference from the lower orders. He supposes that “political strife itself is unnatural and somehow a perfect kind of politics is possible here on earth,” a “perfectly polished world of aristocratic rule” (C 182). Marcus would bring him to understand that “just government includes both the necessary and the good”; “the choice in politics is never between two perfect options, or even between one perfect and one imperfect option, but rather between two less than perfect options” (C 183). And when Titus bestirs himself to side with Quintus, he inadvertently “reveals a capacity for anger or indignation, a political trait that shows us why he is the kind of Epicurean who can be brought into Marcus’s best republic” (C 184). Tellingly, both men “urge Marcus to finish his laws,” revealing that “they are learning how to accept a political regime that is less than perfect” (C 184).

This provides Marcus with an opportunity to discuss the popular election of the senators, an obvious pressure point in the argument with his two friends. In the United States, open voting—the practice of compelling voters to announce their choices verbally at the polls instead of filling out a secret ballot—would prove an instrument first of gentry influence over their neighbors and then of political bosses’ influence over party members. The Romans knew that, too, and Quintus argues for open voting. Secret ballots take away aristocrats’ authority; “a hiding place should not have been given to the people in a ballot which could conceal a vicious vote while respectable men were ignorant of what each man felt” (L III.34). Titus concurs: “The best regime” will be found “in the power of the best men” (L. III.37). Marcus proposes a compromise: secret ballots for plebeians coupled with the aristocrats’ right to inspect the ballots, so that they can’t be blind-sided. Marcus additionally observes, quite sensibly, that most plebeians side with the aristocrats, anyway, out of respect; a secret ballot will enable them to do so, without ‘peer pressure’ from demagogues of class solidarity. Appealing rhetorically to his high-toned friends, he announces that “my law gives the appearance of freedom; the authority of respectable men is retained; a cause of contention is eliminated” (L III.39).

Caspar summarizes: “A republic in which the senate holds the authority (auctoritas) and the people have the power (potestas) will be moderate and harmonious” (C 185). Such a natural-law republic is possible but unlikely, inasmuch as find men of sufficient virtue to command the respect of the people “will be very difficult and will require a ‘certain education and training'”—”an education in the natural law” which will provide “knowledge of nature and its laws, which are at the heart of this most just and mixed regime” (C 185). This will be easier to do than establishing a regime of philosopher-kings, but not by much. “This entire oration is in some sense directed at these best men. Marcus attempts to educate these potential leaders de re publica and de legibus, because all depends on them.” (C 186). In this, Cicero does follow Plato’s example. Inasmuch as Plato’s Laws quietly directs readers back to the Republic, so too does the education seen as necessary in De Legibus “seems to require a return to De Re Publica, to a study of the great statesmen therein described” (C 187)—to De Re Publica, which “sits in the center of Cicero’s catalogue of works that he gives us in the De Divinatione” (C 187).

Each senator shall attend sessions faithfully, speak in turn, and speak “with measure, that is, not endlessly” (L III.40). And he ought to know what he’s talking about, “know the republic”—how many and what kind of soldiers it has, its financial resources, its allies and tributaries, its laws and treaties, its legal procedures, and “the ancestors’ precedents” (L III.41). As for the people, the principal duty is to refrain from violence, given their representation in the Tribunate and their power to elect the senators. As for the lawmaking powers themselves, there shall be no laws against “private men,” i. e. individuals, as the laws should afford equal protection to all (L III.42); any judgment imposing exile on an individual should only be rendered by “the greatest assembly of the people” (L III.44). The dialogue ends with a requested (by Titus) and promised (by Marcus) the need for officials who guard the official records of the laws. Without such a safeguard, the magistrates “are as wise as their clerks want them to be” (L III. 48). Truer words were never spoken.

Caspar emphasizes that Cicero, in so instituting this aristocratic senate within his natural-law republic, “keeps it truly political,” balancing aristocratic and popular rule (C 189). “He refuses to allow the solution of the problem of just government to fall prey to noble pride, and in so doing he keeps a window open for political philosophy to advise this regime” (C 189). Marcus’s “standard is one of knowledge, not wealth, birth, or social standing” (C 189). However, this standard will apply most immediately to the gentlemen who rule; unlike Plato’s regime, Cicero’s regime will be ruled by “good men” who “seek to know the natural law and who fear the highest kind of punishment such a law might inflict: the knowledge of wrongdoing that torments the best kind of conscience in the best kind of soul” (C 195). In the end, what seems to be a more ‘realistic’ regime than Plato’s may be even harder to found in fact; “there is no rarer thing to find or discover among men than a perfected orator” of the sort Cicero envisions as the founder of his regime (C 204). Indeed: Are great statesmen any more numerous than great philosophers?