Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley: Conversations with Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 5, September/October 2017. Republished with permission.

 

In Felled Oaks: Conversations with DeGaulle, André Malraux called the founder of the Fifth Republic “the last great man France haunted.” On his gravestone, Roger Scruton wants the inscription, “The Last Englishman, Organist at this Church.” Statesman and Frenchman, philosopher and Englishman, each man warrants a valedictory dialogue with a writer who understands him, a testament to what they attempted to achieve for the civil life of his country. And despite claims that nationality must fade, it may be that ‘globalization’ hasn’t had the last word, after all, that intellect and patriotism may yet endure against the leveling forces of democracy wrongly understood.

Scruton has found an excellent collaborator in Mark Dooley, author of one book on Scruton and editor of another, and himself a former teacher of moral philosophy. Dooley wisely prompts Scruton into a dialogue on his life and works which develops as a sustained argument about the relationship fo morality to esthetics and of both to a decent civic order. With Burke, Scruton rejects any posture of abstractedness from the place where he stands, even as he reflects on considerations that go far beyond any one place. He builds a critique of the misplaced abstraction that social science often finds hard to resist. Recounting the story of his parents’ wartime courtship (he was born in 1944), Scruton says, “They fell in love not only with each other, but with the banks of the Thames”: Two persons, one place, commingling with love, form the image of the kind of philosophy Socrates practiced. Scruton may also be as much the last Socratic as the last Englishman—or, to think more optimistically, the most recent one.

For Socrates, love understood as the erotic quest for wisdom, animates reason, or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Scruton’s early studies consisted of a good dose of science, the modern citadel of rationalism, but also literature and music. Crucially, his first memorable English teacher was a student of the great scholar F. R. Leavis, who understood the study of literature to be “a form of judgment and not… a form of enjoyment.” Similarly, among the composers whose works he first heard, it was Mendelssohn, and the contrapuntal development of his Hebrides Overture, “which made it clear that music is a kind of argument from premise to conclusion and not just something to be enjoyed.” From the awakening of his intellectual life, Scruton sought to understand the core of things by means of reason; unlike his contemporaries in the 1960s, he never valorized the passions. Resisting his relentlessly practical parents, he decided “that the only really useful subjects are studies of the useless”—otherwise known as liberal education.

Although he learned Greek and Latin (see ‘uselessness,’ above), his main philosophic preoccupations were the moderns, initially Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He did not become so intoxicated by their prose as to sacrifice his own perspective for theirs. Watching a paraplegic bookseller struggling with a pile of books, he “sensed how wrong Nietzsche was about pity, since what I felt was admiration too.” Even as he studied the fashionable analytic philosophers at Cambridge—finding a lasting benefit in their insistence at being no respecters of persons but of men and women who tested any philosopher’s argument they encountered—he never succumbed to fashion. His distinctive philosophic achievement turned out to be to start with the moderns, and indeed many of his older contemporaries, then think his way towards ideas first discovered by the ancients. While continuing to esteem (for example) Hegel, he ‘edits’ the doctrines of the moderns with the same scrupulous intelligence with which he crafts his own prose, taking the sensible parts and discarding the nonsense. Closer to home, in reading Aristotle, he found him to be “doing exactly the same thing as Wittgenstein,” only a lot earlier. T. S. Eliot’s tailor told the American scholar Hugh Kenner, “A remarkable man, Mr. Eliot. Never quite too much.” In these well-judged selections, Scruton exercises a similar wholesomely enthusiastic restraint in thinking about the thinkers he has studied. This comports with the place he began his philosophic scholarship: like literature and music, Cambridge University itself “had once stood for something, had indeed stood in judgment on the national culture.”

Take science, the most prestigious activity of national culture in postwar Britain. Can it judge, or should it instead be judged? “Science begins when we ask the question ‘Why?’ It leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onward to more general laws. But where does the process end?” It ends when science reaches the necessary limit of its inquiry, namely, “why the series of causes exists,” why the world exists in the first place. In bringing us back as far as the Big Bang, science perforce leaves “something else to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained”: how was it that “this great event was about to erupt into being”? “A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving.” What goes for the limits of scientific naturalism also goes for the question of what good science, or any other human endeavor, much less the cosmos itself, may serve: Science cannot tell us what science is for, or whether its aims are justifiable.

Philosophy, by contrast, has usually done just that. Postwar British philosophy was dominated by the analytical school, as practice by A. J. Ayer and others. Analytic philosophy “implanted in me a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking,” his choice of esthetics for his topic of postgraduate research “help[ed] me to synthesize my interest in philosophy with those artistic aspirations that I was still clinging to.” The university’s lecturer on esthetics, Michael Tanner, made esthetics into “a kind of door out of analytic philosophy into the true life of the mind”—a thing that can not only analyze but synthesize and envision.

Hegel, for example, “had an extraordinary synthetic mind,” but characteristically Scruton took from that mind exactly what his own mind sought, and no more. Hegel’s most remarkable philosophic achievement was to develop a new ontology centered in historicism. He argued that ‘History,’ defined by him as the course of events in which the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things, thoughts, and actions, unfolds itself dialectically, that is, in accordance with a new kind of logic (provided by Hegel himself) in which apparent contradictions are synthesized to produce new modes and orders of human life. The laws of ‘History’ make the course of events predictable; even the laws of nature are historical, a matter of evolution or development. but Hegelian metaphysics left Scruton cold. “That’s the annoying part of him.” What Scruton took from Hegel was rather the moral principle of recognition —effectively the moral importance of honor, in the face of the materialist philosophies of Hobbes and Locke—and the understanding of art as a “moment of consciousness” or self-understanding, which the artist fixes in his creation. “I had set myself the task of doing in the language of analytical philosophy what Hegel had done—which was to put art into the center of philosophy and to say why it is significant.” The logical/ontological notion of ‘History’ as a sort of vast dialectical argument embodied in action gives way to something much less grand, but also less liable to abuse by ‘totalizing’ political thinkers like Marx, Heidegger, and Kojève, apologists for tyranny.

Avowing that “my political convictions are very Hegelian,” Scruton means that they take history as a source of a kind of experiential or experimental truth-seeking, rather than taking ‘History’ as an instantiation of the march of progress toward a predictable culmination, namely, the fully unfolded Absolute Spirit. He remains an Englishman in his politics even as he strives to understand the nature common to England and every other place. In his study of the English common law (he passed the Bar but never practiced) he found not so much a venerable tradition as a way of practical reasoning and “a process of discovery—an “attempt to understand the human world” which “both uncovered and endorsed the impartial justice whereby the English people ordered their lives.” He had prepared an intellectual setting in which he could eschew just about every moral and intellectual fad of the subsequent four decades.

Hence his well-known ‘conservatism,’ which should be taken quite literally as a will to conserve combined with a habit of reasoned judgment about what to conserve and what to relinquish. Like so many British thinkers (most famously, Edmund Burke), he began to find his way politically in response to the antics of the Europeans on the Continent, particularly French and Italian antics. Grounded in experience but rejecting historicism, Scruton witnessed the events of 1968 France and the pervasive influence of Marxism in the Italian universities with revulsion. He especially disliked “those hippies”—the hostel-hopping Americans were the most annoying—whose revolutionary credentials more or less began and ended with resentment of their parents. He immediately saw the contrast between their street theater and the genuine (and genuinely risky) resistance offered by the dissidents under the Communist regimes of central and eastern Europe. Western intellectuals who failed to understand the malign character of those tyrannical oligarchies only served to weaken the societies which sheltered them. “The best thing that Derrida ever did was to get arrested in Prague.” Deconstruct that!

Deconstruction is the analytical impulse of modern philosophy gone wild. It lands its practitioners in an inescapable cycle of claimed victimhood, the demand for recognition, and then some new form of domination. The only way to escape is to recur not to analysis, which offers no purpose, or to Hegelianism tout court, which offers as its end a worldwide statism, but to the intellectual love that animated classical philosophy and to the personal and civic forms of friendship which moderns crave yet fear, habituated as they are to the charms of an administrative state that (in the West) rules them with blandishments, not truncheons.

Scruton’s various philosophic forays consist of attempts to rekindle consideration of love and friendship, to bring them back to the center of philosophy and citizenship as examples of human freedom. His studies of architecture appropriate the Hegelian idea of designing buildings that consist of “the outward realization of the inner life,” an attempt “to set free choice in stone.” It wasn’t the Blitz that ruined London, it was the squalid architecture that replaced the rubble with concrete monstrosities. This wasn’t really architecture at all but engineering—part of a vast attempt at social engineering that expressed a “contempt for man and God,” a depersonalization and de-civilizing of citizens in the name of egalitarianism. Similarly, in his writings on human sexuality, Scruton sees in the ‘Sixties ideology of sexual liberation another failed attempt at leveling—perforce self-contradictory, inasmuch as in any liberation the strongest will rise to the top (in this case the beautiful at the expense of “the unattractive or the helpless”). “Properly construed, sexual desire is an interpersonal relation, which focuses on the self-conscious subject.” To misinterpret sexuality in terms of power, as Foucault did, bespeaks “a serious intellectual defect.”

The social consequences of making science into scientism, of failing to see the ontological and moral limits of scientific knowledge, produces “an emerging human type which doesn’t take risks, which doesn’t go out to the other and which doesn’t form attachments on account of never having been attached as a child.” This “society of reduced humans, who are just bodies,” may still reproduce itself; “a child may be created, as a random by-product of their sexual pleasures,” then “left at the doorstep of the state, so ensuring that it too will grow up as a stranger in a world of the estranged.”

For Scruton, recovery begins with the least bureaucratic practice there is: hunting. Bureaucrats hate hunting, and typically try to regulate it out of existence on the basis of the radically egalitarian argument that men have no right to shoot animals. Hunting resists such false compassion by forming a “collective enterprise in which three species [human beings, horses, and dogs] are giving each other support” quite literally in pursuit of a common object, namely, an animal that either threatens or feeds the human being. Hunting leads the human mind to consider the distinctions among the species that the human mind by nature identifies; hunting sets you straight about equality and inequality, identity and difference.

So does farming, which requires the farmer to acknowledge and understand “the relation between man and nature as one of mutual dependence,” pointing him toward that stewardship of the land that the God of Genesis endows. In Hegelian terms, farming opens a way of understanding oneself as human, as the being which finds itself responsible for the world beyond itself. Nor is this all work and no playfulness, inasmuch as some farms produce grapes, which can be turned into wine. Here Scruton follows not Hegel of beer-gulping Germany but Plato’s Socrates; wine “enable[s] us to step out of the urgencies of daily life into some more relaxed arena”—Socrates would call it a symposium—”where we can encounter people in another mood.” Conversely, “the absence of wine in Saudi Arabia is one reason why it has stayed so solidly locked in its joyless sterility.” Wine even illustrates a philosophic principle, the Kantian distinction of a thing as an object as distinguished from the thing ‘in itself’: “Drink that glass of wine and compare your knowledge of it after you’ve absorbed it with your knowledge of it before.”

Beyond these material indications of love and friendship, whether social, civil-social, or convivially philosophic, Scruton calls his readers to consideration of music and religion. If science can lead us back to origins without being able to explain them, and forward to purposes without being able to tell us what they are, but then denies the significance of such ‘transcendental’ concerns, music turns us toward, not away from them. “Music is like a language, but it isn’t impeded in the some way that language is by the need for conceptualization and answerability to truth conditions. So it naturally becomes a symbol of the thing that wants to be said but cannot be said.” The problem then becomes “whether you can distinguish those things which are mere projections from those things which are, as Wordsworth would put it, intimations of the beyond or of the mysterious reality of the world.” Music sensitizes minds to things undreamt of by science, although not necessarily by philosophy, as philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche illustrate. By “putting meaning into things”—via custom and artistic creation—human beings are not arbitrarily imposing meaning on a meaningless flux; “we build meaning into our experiences, but we can only do so if they already have the valency that makes this possible.” Just as science brings us back to the origins of the universe (the Bible calls it Creation) without finally being able to explain them, artistic creation presupposes some underlying and also ‘transcendental’ reality upon which creation works and toward which it aspires.

If so, this makes religion philosophically respectable. But “that, of course, doesn’t mean the doctrines are true.” The same conversion (the Greek word thus translated means the ‘turning around’ of the soul, its reorientation away from the idols of the cave and toward the light) that religions speak of, Plato’s Socrates also speaks of. Whereas Locke “described philosophy as the ‘handmaiden of the sciences,'” Plato (and Aristotle) think it’s the other way around; the erotic quest for truth, the drive in us to know, makes us want to know more than what science can teach. “I’ve always thought of philosophy in the old Platonic way as the attempt to find a comprehensive picture of what we are, of where we are and of how we care.” Religion arises from that same quest. Both philosophy understood Platonically and religion vindicate science while guarding us against scientism.

Scruton illustrates this by considering the science of brain chemistry. Scientistic as distinguished from scientific thought “takes hold of the embryonic scientific theory about the workings of the nervous system and uses it to re-describe the questions of consciousness and human action”; “all we think, feel and do” get explained (or explained away) in terms of synapses. But analysis of synaptic activity does not show why it is (as Kant observed) “that we are distinguished from every other item in the universe by our ability to say ‘I’.” If my pain nerves jangle, I still say ‘I am in pain.’ In this as in cosmology and morality, science takes us a long way, but not all the way to what we want to know. “But if it’s a question asked from beyond the limit of science, then it immediately takes on a theological character and the question is whether there is such a thing as a theological answer. And that is where philosophy kicks in.”

How so? For most people, religion “fills in the gaps that science leaves open.” Those “living a religious life are, in a sense, completed in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lived according to the nihilistic worldview that our culture advocates.” The untruth of nihilism manifests itself in the evident point that we exist, that there must be something rather than nothing. Religions tell us why.

Do they speak truly? They cannot all speak truly in their entirety because religions contradict one another. “Religion brings [believers] nearer to the truth about their condition than they would otherwise be,” but “they don’t think this through philosophically.” By contrast, a philosopher finds “concealed truth within” the religions. Scruton points to Averroes as a philosopher who does this, and he might easily go back further to Origen or indeed before Christianity to Plato’s Socrates. There are “two parallel routes to the thing we call ‘religion’: there has to be the religion of the philosopher, and the religion of the ordinary faithful.” Famously, Socrates insists on the need for self-knowledge; Scruton (thinking of Kierkegaard, not Socrates) finds “that the grounds of all religious belief are within the self, and that religion contains the set of stories that encapsulate our self-understanding.” But Kierkegaard, unlike Socrates, retreated into subjectivity. “That is what I would call a philosophical failure, a retreat from truth rather than an encounter with it. You have to accept that truth is objectivity and not subjectivity.” Why?

Here is where analytic philosophy usefully intercedes. “We know from Frege and Tarski that truth is connected with reference, that reference is connected to identity and that identity determines our ontological commitments. Ultimately, therefore, you cannot avoid the scientific realist worldview: it is simply a consequence of logical thinking.” And, it might be added, logical thinking or the principle of non-contradiction is inescapable: The same thing cannot perform or endure opposites at the same time, in the same part, and in relation to the same thing. You can think of something that is black and white; you can even think of something that is grey, a mixture of those opposites, but you cannot even conceive of something ‘blackwhite,’ any more than you conceive of or point to a square circle. You cannot even honestly claim to ‘have faith’ in the existence of a square circle, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thinking about Christianity, then, a philosopher would think logically about the Trinity. Without being able to pin down what the Bible means by it, he can at least clear up some confusions about it, and might even discover something profound in it.

Logical thinking, the dialectic seen in and exemplified by the Platonic dialogue, also enables a philosopher to compare and contrast different religions. The polyphony of Christian music (perhaps a result of the ‘social’ or Trinitarian character of the Christian God?) contrasts with Islamic culture. “There is little real music coming out of the Islamic world” because “there is no polyphony in Islam. The culture is saying only one thing, a huge unison which constantly fragments and can restore itself only by violence.” Islamic law builds no institutions, no authoritative pathways to channel human activities away from violence. “Sharia law… is addressed to the individual and it says ‘this is how you must live'”; it does not really show how to live a life in common with other lives. Abraham and Jesus talk to God the Father, but you don’t talk, or at any rate talk back, question, Allah. Recall Scruton’s understanding of the common law as a social or dialogic, and also experiential quest, for understanding justice and you will see why he wants to be remembered as the last Englishman and the organist at his own church.

Mark Dooley’s conversation with Roger Scruton thus accomplishes two highly valuable things. It provides and overview of Scruton’s philosophic quest showing how its elements cohere; better still, it cordially invites us to read his books, arousing the intellectual desire to do such work which animated the souls of the old philosophers.

John Dewey: Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

 

John Dewey has won no palms for literary excellence. The skilled writer and dubious historian Richard Hofstadter ripostes: “His style is suggestive of the cannonading of distant armies: one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance, but one cannot determine just what it is.”

True, but Dewey nonetheless ranks as a master of rhetoric, something for which he has received little credit. Arguably the most influential American Progressive of his day, he identified his audience and spoke to it persuasively in language that compelled it, if no one else. He won the allegiance of American educators, who went on to remake the American public school system in his ideological image. Hofstadter goes on to say that Dewey’s “great influence as an educational spokesman may have derived in part from the very inaccessibility of his exact meanings.” There was much more to it than that, although it is unquestionably true that Dewey’s rhetoric owed much of its effectiveness to the fact that it rarely ‘sounded’ like rhetoric.

He seldom needed his rhetorical skills more than in 1935, when not only his educational system but the entire regime of American liberalism as he had redefined and shaped it faced deadly threats. Fascists and communists vied for the control of Europe, and the United States, center of the worldwide economic depression, could hardly claim invulnerability to their militancy. “The center cannot hold,” the poet Yeats had claimed, and to many it looked that way. American Progressives (renamed ‘liberals’ by themselves) had allied themselves with socialists and communists in imitation of Europe’s Popular Front coalitions—a risky and even desperate measure, given the decidedly illiberal character of some of their partners. Dewey published Liberalism and Social Action in this menacing atmosphere. He titles the first chapter “The History of Liberalism”; in it, he proves an extraordinarily shrewd orator of the printed word, deftly slanting his narrative description of liberalism to make the story come out right, justifying his liberalism in the minds of his followers at exactly the moment they lacked such tonic.

He begins by steadying liberals with memories of past victory. “Liberalism has long been accustomed to onslaughts proceeding from those who oppose social change.” As he need not explain, liberals have steadily overcome those onslaughts, for two and a half centuries. Today, however, fiercer challengers loom. Unlike conservatives, these challengers also want social change. Without naming them, he describes their assault as three-pronged: in term of its scope, the changes they propose are “drastic,” not gradual; in terms of timing, they demand immediate change; and with respect to their methods, they require violence. Although one might expect Dewey to single out the radical Right as they main challenger, he chooses examples of arguments made by the radical Left, by the communists: liberals say they sympathize with the workers but when push comes to shove they side with the “masters of capitalism”; they profess radical opinions “in private” but never act upon them for fear of losing social standing with those masters. Mealy-mouthed and cowardly, they deserve contempt, not a position of leadership at History’s cutting edge.

Dewey thus puts his strongest criticism of his allies in the mouths of his, and their, opponents. He wants to make liberals indignant at the way they are caricatured. Crucially, and presciently, he sees that the radical Left poses the worse threat to liberalism than the radical Right. Things didn’t look that way to most people in 1935, but Dewey saw farther, and as a result he wasn’t discredited when the Right lost the coming world war and conservatives rounded on those liberals who’d band-wagoned with the communists in the Thirties.

And there is another adversary, now only in potential, but worrisome nonetheless. It is the very democracy ‘progressive’ liberalism had valorized. “Popular sentiment, especially in this country, is subject to rapid changes of fashion.” In Europe already, liberalism no longer enjoys the prestige it had, only two decades ago. “Three of the great nations of Europe”—Russia, Germany, Italy—”have summarily suppressed the civil liberties for which liberalism valiantly strove, and in few countries of the Continent are they maintained with vigor.” Indeed: and within a few years, only Switzerland would remain in the liberal camp. More, “it is well known that everything for which liberalism stands is put in peril in times of war”; he is thinking of conscription, restrictions on freedom of speech, and other governmental actions familiar to Americans who remembered the Great War and its aftermath. (Of course he could never anticipate how President Roosevelt would use the next war as an opportunity to consolidate the gains of liberalism, as seen in the “Four Freedoms” speech; Dewey wasn’t the only rhetorical and strategic genius among American liberals at that time.) “The belief spreads,” he warns, “that liberalism flourishes only in times of fair social weather,” and if popular sentiment turns against liberals (as it had in the Twenties), this time the setback might last a long time.

Amidst this perfect storm of confusion, Dewey will urge intellectual clarity and strength of purpose, and to achieve the first (prerequisite to the second) he must begin by an act a philosopher will have mastered: the act of definition. The act of definition will work rhetorically, however, only if the philosopher exhibits skill in the art of definition, and in this case the portentous and all-inclusive cloudiness Hoftstadter scorned will not do. Socrates, that master of the ‘What is?’ question, shows the way: What is liberalism? What elements “of permanent value” does it have? How can these “values” be “maintained and developed”—he must avoid any hint of ‘conservativism,’ of the rear-guard defensive action—”in the conditions the world now faces.” Although he obviously knows how he will answer these questions, he pretends he does not, inviting his readers to think along with him: “I have wanted to find out whether it is possible for a person to continue, honestly and intelligently, to be a liberal, and if the answer be in the affirmative”—the suspense won’t kill us—”what kind of liberal faith should be asserted today.” With a becoming show of modesty, he allows “I do not suppose that I am the only one who has put such questions to himself,” and, knowing that most liberals will want to remain liberal, to confirm their long-held convictions, and also having prepared the ground, he can now unfold his argument with confidence.

He essays a bit of legerdemain that will prove characteristic. “The natural beginning of the inquiry in which we are engaged is consideration of the origin and past development of liberalism.” That is, the “natural” way to start isn’t natural but historical. He can say this because for more than a century philosophers and their intellectual followers had conceived of all reality, very much including nature, as historical. Historicism enables Dewey to shape his argument by bringing some historical facts to the foreground, leaving others in the background. “The conclusion reached from a brief survey of history,” which he will unfold in the balance of the chapter, is that “liberalism has had a chequered career”—it has made its mistakes, he humbly submits—”and that it has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another.” Dewey is justly known as having insisted on a pragmatic and experimental liberalism, unlike the ‘idealistic’ liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and many of the early Progressives, although aiming at the same goals. Consistent with this, he will define liberalism in its succession of theories, basing these theories on practice and not finally on ideas.

Hence the emphasis on use: “The use of the words liberal and liberalism to denote a particular social philosophy does not appear to occur earlier than the first decade of the nineteenth century.” He grants himself an anachronistic exception in tracing liberalism to John Locke, whom he brackets neatly into a historical period as “the philosopher of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688.” Locke teaches what the Declaration of Independence asserts: Rights “belong to individuals prior to political organization of social relations,” and these natural rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; they also include property, which an individual rightly acquires by labor. Further, if a government violates rights, individuals separately or in groups may justly resist or revolutionize it. The need to exercise the right to revolution will subside to a considerable extent if governments practice religious toleration—itself a practical recognition of individuals’ natural right to their own opinions.

Dewey initially criticizes Locke more for the effect of his thought than for its content. His liberalism “bequeathed to later social thought a rigid doctrine of natural rights inherent in individuals themselves independent of social organization,” owing to his “semi-theological and semi-metaphysical conception of natural law as supreme over positive law,” a “new version of the old idea that natural law is the counterpart of reason, being disclosed by the natural light with which man is endowed.” Dewey the historicist demurs, but not immediately on the theoretical level. He instead criticizes the doctrine that natural rights inhere in individuals, and thus, somehow, “oppose social action” because they establish “the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority.” Further, this philosophy skews the meaning of reason itself. As a supposedly “inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another,” it was “not sustained and developed because of these relations.” All of this made natural-rights thinkers regard government as “the great enemy of individual liberty,” positing “a natural antagonism between ruled.” “Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea that government might and should be an instrument for securing and extending the liberties of individuals.”

As Dewey must know, this is nonsense. The theory of inherent or natural rights possessed by individuals in no way inhibited social organization. Indeed, Locke claims that it led to social organization, inasmuch as human beings living alone or in families formed civil societies in order to secure their rights. As for the Americans, the rights cited in the Declaration of Independence hardly prevented them from forming civil associations (as documented by Tocqueville but as seen in the colonial settlements before the Revolution and in the ‘committees of correspondence’ which organized it). As for governments as distinct from civil associations, the Locke and the Declaration assert, as Dewey himself recognizes, that they exist in order to secure natural rights. Government can defend or attack the natural rights of individuals, and the object of Locke and the American Founders was to see to it that it defended them. Their emphasis on government as an enemy of liberty made sense, given the threat of the regime of absolute monarchy, prevalent in Europe and practiced by the British monarch in the North American colonies at the time.

As for reason, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education clearly shows that it needed development through social relations, first of all in the home. Such founding-generation Americans as Noah Webster extended this teaching to public schools without in any way compromising the idea that reason is a natural endowment of human individuals as such.

So what is Dewey up to? As a historicist, he claims that reason and political life—indeed, nature itself—all remain subject to change over time. In human life, changes in ideas and in social and political life typically result from underlying changes in the material conditions of human life at a given point in time. And so he writes that for Locke, living in England at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, property could be understood as a matter individual possession, but with the rise of industrialism in the following century “industry and commerce were sufficiently advanced in Great Britain so that interest centered in production of wealth, rather than in its possession.” The English then redefined “freedom” as “the use and investment of capital and the right of laborers to move about and seek new modes of employment—claims denied by the common law that came down from semi-feudal conditions.” True enough, but not denied by Locke, whose Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England provides a refutation of the common law and a vindication of individual natural rights, very much against the semi-feudal conditions which had survived until that time. Far from being a “transformation of earlier liberalism,” the assertion of the liberty to invest and to work amounted to an application of it.

Similarly, respecting reason, Dewey claims that it too was transformed, thanks to Adam Smith’s capitalism-inspired notion of the “Invisible Hand:” the spontaneous organization of markets under conditions of minimal government interference does a better job than any attempt at rational planning of political economy could do. Again, true, but it does not follow that Smith provides “a radically new significance to the earlier conception of reason”; on the contrary, he applies ordinary rules of logic to a new social condition, a condition in which social relations under the modern state and its far bigger and more intricate political economy has discovered its own practical limits. According to Dewey, under rapidly-developed capitalism “natural laws lost their remote moral meaning” and were instead “identified with the laws of free industrial production and free commercial exchange.” But the reason that philosophers began to deny the moral meaning of natural laws came not from capitalist development but from David Hume, who asked how right can derive from a nature conceived as entirely material and purposeless. Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, along with Kant’s categorical imperative and Bentham’s utilitarianism, all responded to a philosophic critique of modern natural right, not socio-economic change.

With this distortion of actual history in the service of his theory of historicism and his intention to put government to the service of social change, Dewey turns to Jeremy Bentham, the thinker to whom he devotes the greatest attention. Like Smith, Bentham begins with psychology. But instead of a theory of moral sentiments he simplifies human response to a matter of the desire for pleasure and the aversion to pain, “the sole forces that govern human action.” Whereas Locke had concentrated his rhetorical efforts at liberalizing the English gentry class, “the constant expansion of manufacturing and trade” which Locke himself had promoted “put the force of a powerful class interests behind the new,” Benthamite, “version of liberalism,” which Bentham named utilitarianism. Dewey’s historical relativism leads him to associate such intellectual movements with social classes, but not in any simple way. Utilitarians detached themselves “from the immediate interests of the market place”; this “emancipation enabled them to detect and make articulate the nascent movements of their time—a function that defines the genuine work of the intellectual class at any period.” Unlike a Socratic philosopher, unlike any natural-rights philosopher ‘ancient’ or ‘modern,’ the philosopher of history aspires not to ascend from the Cave of popular opinion but to identify the flow of those opinions through the river of that cave, which may or may not someday ascend into the daylight. The Utilitarians “might have been as voices crying in the wilderness if what they taught had not coincided with the interests of a class that was constantly rising in prestige and power.” The philosopher not only identifies the nascent movements of his time, he contrives to ride them. His detachment is the detachment of a captain on a ship in the underground river of time.

This begs the question: What class was constantly rising in prestige and power in the first half of the twentieth century, in Dewey’s America? Which class interest does his teaching aim to ride and guide? None other than the professional classes: teachers, administrators, and lawyers. If Bentham taught the commercial and industrial classes, and Marx chose the proletariat as the vehicle for revolution, Dewey chooses the ‘white-collar’ men as the rising class of his time and place. As it happened he chose very shrewdly. They, far more than the ‘blue-collar’ men of the Marxists and socialists generally, proved to be those who came to rule in the America and Europe of his century. Compared with Marx, Dewey proved the superior historicist. Despite the seemingly bad prospects for liberalism in 1935, he remained confident in his analysis, and moved to steady the nerves of his progressive-liberal allies.

Dewey admires Bentham because utilitarianism “transferred attention from the well-being already possessed by individuals to one they might attain if there were a radical change in social institutions.” Although, like Smith, he preferred a limited state, “there was nothing in his fundamental doctrine that stood in the way of using the power of government to create, constructively and positively, new institutions if and when it should appear that the latter would contribute more effectively to the well-being of individuals.” Indeed: utility is as utility does. But notice the subtle misinterpretation. Dewey pretends that natural rights, inherent in individuals, somehow preclude government efforts to effect the “well-being” of individuals. The Declaration of Independence contrarily asserts that “the People”—not simply individuals—may “institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” A natural-rights theory of politics can aim at the well-being of individuals and of peoples just as readily as a theory founded on the utilitarian calculus of Bentham or the historicist calculus of Dewey.

Dewey knows that, but letting his readers know it would not serve his rhetorical purpose. What does serve that purpose is to observe a new use of practical reason encouraged by Bentham, the practice of social experimentation. He quotes Bentham with approval: We should “extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral,” trying one reform and then, if it fails, another. Dewey finds Bentham’s actions consistent with his words. “History shows no mind more fertile than [Bentham’s] in invention of legal and administrative devices,” and his followers enabled the progressive democratization of British society and politics via the three great reform acts of the nineteenth century to avoid both violent political revolution and administrative disorder. In answer to the question of liberalism’s vulnerability in 1935 to violent revolutionary challenges, Dewey harkens to Bentham, whose followers in principle met the same kind of challenge a century before. “Liberalism is not compelled by anything in its own nature to be impotent save for minor reforms. Bentham’s influence is proof that liberalism can be a power in bringing about radical social changes: provided it combine capacity for bold and comprehensive social invention with detailed study of particulars and with courage in action.” What is more, these radical social changes need no tyrant-leaders to effect them: “I think there is something significant for the liberalism of today and tomorrow to be found in the fact that his group did not consist in any large measure of politicians, legislators or public officials” at all. Liberals today and tomorrow, like the utilitarian liberals of yesterday, can develop their “program” “outside of the immediate realm of governmental action,” galvanizing “public attention, before direct political action of a thoroughgoing liberal sort.” This developmental or historicist strategy can yield far more reliable results than any ‘top-down,’ immediately governmental strategy can do, and thus surpass and outlast the violent tyrannies.

Unlike Lockeian, Smithian, and (Dewey might have as well added) Kantian liberalism, Benthamite liberalism judges “all organized action” by its consequences. Although utilitarianism is not historicism, it shares that principle with historicism. Following Hume, Bentham argued that “natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological historical zoology. Men do not obey laws because they think these laws are in accord with a scheme of natural rights. They obey because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the consequences of obeying are upon the whole better than the consequences of disobeying…. Not natural rights but consequences in the lives of individuals are the criterion and measure of policy and judgment.” Dewey first denies that rights inhere in nature, following Bentham, who follows Hume. He next shifts the reader’s attention not to the origin of rights but to the human motive that induce us to obey any assertion of rights at all. In this, Bentham serves as a model. What Dewey’s historicist liberalism will alter is utilitarianism’s continued focus on the individual. He will more thoroughly ‘historicize’ liberalism by ‘socializing’ it—by making it a matter of socio-economic change defined and to some extent guided by the rising professional class, now instructed by (it is almost needless to say) Dewey himself, and his followers, primarily in the education system.

For America, alas, “had no Bentham.” As a consequence, the influence of “the school of Locke” “lasted much longer in the United States” than it did in Europe. But while “the ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve their own careers,” the American frontier is long closed. In the old America, “the gospel of self-help and private initiative was practiced so spontaneously that it needed no special intellectual support,” anyway. Dewey carefully overlooks Tocqueville’s account of civil associations, which arose as it were spontaneously in the ‘Lockeian’ America. He must overlook that account, because it shows that Locke’s principles give plenty of room for social action and self-government, up to and including natural-rights republicanism on the national level. Dewey would like to confine that characteristically American form of social action to an irrecoverable agrarian past, to relativize it to a certain set of historical conditions that will never exist again.

Dewey will lead the way, in part by following Bentham. “Great Britain, largely under Benthamite influence, built up an ordered civil service independent of political party control,” and reinforcing “the supremacy of national over local interests.” Like Dewey, Bentham “urged a great extension of public education and of action in behalf of public health” upon his people. Such “collectivist legislative policies gained in force for at least a generation after the [eighteen-] sixties.” This movement “greatly weakened the notion that Reason is a remote majestic power that discloses ultimate truth,” instead “render[ing] it an agency in investigation of concrete situations and in projection of measures for their betterment”—i.e., epistemological pragmatism. Dewey’s liberal progressivism will remain on the ground level, precisely to ensure real progress via experiment not speculative fancies.

Nonetheless, utilitarianism alone does not supply the rhetorical ‘lift’ needed for any reform movement. Here, in an especially ironic instance of History’s cunning (not entirely unlike Smith’s Invisible Hand, but even more like Hegelian dialectic), English conservatives made an unwitting contribution. Pushing against utilitarianism and industrialism in a last and ultimately failing attempt to defend aristocratic sensibilities, Tories fostered the Romantic movement; combined with middle-class humanitarianism and “evangelical piety,” they revived an older definition of ‘liberal’ as generous, open-handed—a “generosity of outlook,” of “liberty of belief and action.” Under the influence of this redefinition, “gradually a change came over the spirit and meaning of liberalism,” which disassociated itself with economic laisser faire and instead became “associated with the use of governmental action for aid to those at economic disadvantage and for alleviation of their conditions.” American Progressives followed in this line. Dewey recalls the firm anti-industrial spirit of the English Romantic poets, calling it part of “a powerful counterpoise to the anti-historic interest of the Benthamite school.” A synthesis occurred. “The leading scientific interest of the nineteenth century came to be history, including evolution within the scope of history.” John Stuart Mill, the greatest of the second-generation Utilitarians, provided the link between Bentham and the Romantics, turning to the poets after realizing that even the success of all his useful reform efforts would leave him emotionally dead.

English philosophers soon made this implicitly or potentially Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic manifest, led by the Oxford University philosophy professor Thomas Hill Green. Green took “the organic idealism that originated in Germany,” itself a “reaction against the basic philosophy of individualistic liberalism and individualistic empiricism,” and aimed it against “the atomistic philosophy that had developed under the alleged empiricism of the earlier liberal school.” English Hegelians could now answer Hume’s refutation of modern natural right by not merely by abandoning natural right but by substituting ‘History’ for it. “Criticizing piece by piece almost every item of the theory of mind, knowledge and society that had grown out of the teachings of Locke… they asserted that relations constitute the reality  of nature, of mind and of society” while nonetheless retaining “the ideals of liberalism.” They redefined individual liberty not in terms of natural rights possessed by individuals but as rights inherent in social relations. Far from being mere conventions, far from resting on self-interested pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, moral claims and social relations as the new liberals conceived them stood on “unshakeable objective foundations in the very structure of things.” “For the relations that constitute the essential nature of things are… the expression of an objective Reason and Spirit that sustains nature and the human mind,” qualities of “an ultimate cosmic mind” or, as Hegel calls it, the Absolute Spirit.

The political result is equally Hegelian. “The state is a moral organism, of which the government is one organ,” itself “but one organ among many of the Spirit and Will that holds all things together and makes human beings members of one another.” Under this system, the individual realizes himself by participating in “the common intelligence and sharing the common purpose as it works for the common good.” The state can then be conceived not so much as an instrument for securing innate rights of individuals as “the means of voluntary self-realization”—no longer the menacing potential oppressor of the individual but his ally in true liberation. As in Hegel, the state clears away obstacles to individuals “coming to consciousness of themselves for what they are,” a negative task supplemented by the positive effort “to promote the cause of public education.” The new freedom of the individual is no possession but “something to be achieved” as a part of this comprehensive historical process. Liberals who understand this today, in 1935, can “resolve the crisis” of liberalism “and emerge as a compact, aggressive force” against tyrannies Right and Left. Fortified by Dewey’s tonic, liberals can again exhibit the courage their enemies accuse them of lacking.

Dewey’s wish was fulfilled, more immediately by the pragmatic-yet-idealist progressive-liberal American president, aided by one of those old-fashioned, Romantic Tories, Winston Churchill, and also, more dangerously, by one of the tyrants, Josef Stalin. These Allies did indeed form, if not a compact, surely a massive and aggressive force against the fascist tyrannies. In the longer term, Dewey’s pragmatic liberalism, already well-established in the public school system, outlasted the remaining extremist tyranny, which ossified and finally collapsed less than four decades after Stalin’s death. In recent decades, however, Dewey’s liberalism has itself declined, as the administrative state staffed by ‘his’ rising professional class has proved not so instrumental to liberty—whether defined as natural, as utilitarian, or as a matter of self-realization—as Dewey claimed it would be. Less than a century since Dewey wrote, his liberal regimes face challenges from illiberally organized states, both secular and even (he would have been astonished) religious. And they face challenges from within themselves.

However this may go, Dewey surely deserves more credit than he deserves as what Wilson had called an “opinion leader.” He wasn’t the oratorical leader the young Wilson had in mind, and came to exemplify. Dewey, a master of written rhetoric, sought to influence only a part of public opinion directly, and for a long time. But he had identified the decisive part, the opinion of the opinion-makers. As a result, his project has endured for almost 90 years since Dewey published his book. ‘Postmodern’ thinkers of a still ‘newer’ Left now imperil the house that Dewey built, and a variety of ‘conservatives’ have criticized its architecture, but they haven’t toppled it yet.

Jeremy Waldron: Political Political Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Originally published in Law and Liberty, November 17, 2016. Republished with permission.

 

“Political political theory” is no misprint. That stuttering title well expresses the author’s intention. In the last generation, he observes, “political theory” has become synonymous with considering the moral foundations of political life; the writings of John Rawls and Robert Nozick have framed much of the discussion. ‘Concrete’ their thought is not. By the phrase “political political theory,” Jeremy Waldron signals the need to direct some philosophic attention to the actual operations of political life, particularly the forms, structures, institutions by which we rule ourselves, or are ruled by others. As he rightly remarks, until recently philosophers had thought institutions too important to be left to political scientists.

A Brit who teaches at New York University Law School, Waldron brings a background in the school of analytical philosophy to his task. This school initially needed persuading that politics (rather than epistemology and ontology) called for serious philosophic attention at all. Whatever one may think of Rawls, he does seem to have accomplished that. Waldron takes the next step in bringing the analytical school around to a fuller consideration of politics, while exhibiting the habit of insisting on careful definitions he has learned in it. As we Americans say, he likes to kick the tires on everything, and in that he belongs not only in the analytical school but in the company of philosophers generally. Had tires been invented, Socrates would have taken a whack at them or, better, interrogated their owners about where they thought they were going on them.

Waldron devotes the first as well as the last two chapters in arguing for this turn to “political political philosophy,” using the central chapters to show how to think after one has made the turn. He justifies his proposal fundamentally by arguing that political institutions frame not only the way we act in the public square but also the way we think about moral and political matters; if you think all men are created equal, you will not only design institutions that embody that principle but the principles you design will incline citizens toward that notion. Institutions which channel my actions in a way that requires me to take account of your opinions will make me more likely to take your opinions seriously. I may even begin to take them as intrinsically serious. And once I start taking your opinions seriously, I am well on the way to taking you seriously, too, reinforcing respect for the equality principle of the regime. The profound psychic and intellectual damage done to victims of long-established tyrannies teaches the same lesson: political regimes considered as formal structures matter humanly, and indeed philosophically. Waldron reminds us of Montesquieu’s warning, that “a lack of interest in forms, processes, and structures [typifies] a society en route to a despotic form of government.”

Waldron criticizes that great friend of liberty, Isaiah Berlin, for neglecting institutions. Berlin worried so much about the malign effects of Enlightenment optimism on modern politics that he dismissed the rational design of political institutions as a vain and dangerous aspiration. He failed to consider adequately “the constitutional devices that might be used to uphold the… liberty that interested him.” By contrast, Hannah Arendt appreciated deliberate constitutional design as the “furniture that enables us to sit facing one another in politics, in just the right way”—the way of discussion, the way of politics itself, which Arendt, following Aristotle, understood as ruling and being ruled by turn. Mere assertion of “the Rights of Man” will exhaust itself without institutions that help men and women to secure those rights. By exercising their political liberties, citizens act to secure all the others.

In this, Waldron wants to find a way for human beings to live together in our vast, modern states, in which extraordinarily diverse human groups pursue “competing and incommensurable values.” Waldron mis-describes this ambition to the American Founders, who grounded their thought in natural right. He may do so because he conceives of nature as mere “animality” and thus in-free. On this view (derived perhaps from David Hume’s ‘Is-Ought’ dichotomy, routinely accepted by philosophers in the analytical school), we need “political convention [to] hold ourselves to one another’s equals.” Waldron thus applauds “Arendt’s rejection of all theories of a natural basis for human equality,” which run “the risk of holding that our natural similarities and dissimilarities are the ones that matter, whether they turn out finally to support the notion of equality or not.” But that of course is not at all what the American Founders thought; it is to confuse George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis.

To regard natural rights—rights coincident with human nature as such, and therefore true so long as human beings survive—as the moral foundation of the civil rights which enable citizens to secure those natural rights, and equally to acknowledge, as the Founders did, that human nature is flawed that we often put each other in danger with our ambitions and appetites, is to retain Berlin’s skepticism regarding the wilder Enlightenment notions of human perfectibility while also retaining Arendt’s esteem for institutional forms. It is to reject notions of inevitable social and political progress, the ontology of that large basket of philosophic and political doctrines that turn the study of history into historicism, and the desire for progress into progressivism—ideologies that have resulted in ills ranging from the bureaucratic “soft despotism” described by Tocqueville to some very hard despotisms indeed.

To his credit, Waldron shows little sympathy with the more optimistic doctrines of historical necessity, which have taken hammer blows from philosophers ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger and those contemporary thinkers who attempt (rather optimistically) to domestic their teachings to the ways of modern democracy. This leaves his political thought eminently sane but unclear as to its ground: If genuinely political life is good, on what grounds can he judge it to be so? He wants to avoid taking a stand on this, probably because he knows that his fellow citizens disagree so sharply on precisely these questions of grounding. He wants them to see something in political life for them, as they so diversely and in many instances contradictorily conceive of themselves.

Fundamentals aside, the bulk of the book consists of unfailingly astringent discussions of the most important structural features of modern democratic republics. These include constitutionalism (he rightly insists that constitutions not only limit government but empower it to act authoritatively, that is to say with moral as well as physical strength); separation of powers (which he over-optimistically supposes can be established effectively within the administrative agencies of the modern state, which notoriously combine executive, legislative, and judicial functions); bicameralism (he applauds it, so long as the two legislative houses ‘house’ different ways of representing the sovereign people, each capturing perspectives and opinions the other would overlook); “the principle of loyal opposition” (which provides the politically indispensable habit of not needing to take politics as a ‘zero-sum game,’ the impact of hammer upon nail); and representation (he rivals James Madison in his esteem for it). He considers lawmaking—which, in democratic republics, requires institutions that enjoy the widespread support of citizens with deliberative seriousness, consent of the governed, respect for the losers, formal procedures that minimize “mutual misunderstanding” among “people who have very little else in common,” and majority rule, because “eventually decisions have to be made,” and also because majority rule is the way to decide that preserves respect for the equality of each citizen).

All of this leads to Waldron’s longest and most controversial chapter, a critique of judicial review, which he deems “inappropriate as a mode of final decision-making in a democratic society.” (He regards the prospect of constitutional amendment too dim to be viewed with much seriousness.) To condense radically his carefully-drawn argument, Waldron takes what amounts to the argument of Federalist #84 against a bill of rights and extends it to a critique of judicial review. In one of the most-quoted sentences in that eminently quotable book, Publius affirms “the Constitution is itself, in every rational sense and to every useful purpose, a BILL OF RIGHTS.” No appendages need apply, not only because the key civil rights (including the writ of habeas corpus and the ban on primogeniture) are already included in the body of the Constitution itself, but primarily because the Constitution so structures our political life as to vindicate liberty by forcing ambition (including tyrannical ambition) to counteract ambition, and more, to “refine and enlarge the public views.” If so, Waldron asks, why do we need judges to tell us what the (constitutional) law is? Why can’t we just work it out amongst ourselves? The American Progressives agreed, but unlike Waldron, they imagined that ‘History’ was on their side—which is what makes Waldron interesting, here. He has no ontology, no secularized version of Providence to make everything come out right.

Given the fact that Publius and other framers of the Constitution did endorse judicial review, what does Waldron have? Once again condensing and perforce oversimplifying his intricate and stimulating argument, I draw attention to two points. First, he argues that “tyranny is tyranny” no matter how we get it, but the majority tyranny we fear from a thorough democratization of constitutional judgment is the least bad form; it features “at least one nontyrannical thing about the decision,” namely, that “it was not made in a way that tyrannically excluded certain people from participation as equals”—this, of course assuming that the decision only affects fellow citizens, and not (for example) a slave population or a colony. Waldron here overlooks Tocqueville’s description of the power majoritarian rule exerts on each individual; liberated from social and political pressure from above, men and women in democratic societies find themselves subject to pressure that surrounds them. ‘Horizontal’ pressure replaces ‘vertical,’ ultimately with more malign effects on liberty of minds and hearts.

Additionally, Waldron explicitly assumes that disagreement in democratic societies “is not usually driven by selfish interests.” This assumption Publius most assuredly does not grant. Without succumbing to the ontological optimism of the Progressives, Waldron nonetheless does partake a bit of the Enlightenment optimism that his nemesis, Isaiah Berlin, so vigorously scorned. It is precisely the tendency of majorities—whether well-intentioned but conformist, as in Tocqueville’s America, or ill-intentioned as they often are as Publius understands them—to override reason with passion that forms the core of The Federalist‘s defense of judicial review.

But let’s not end on a sour note. This book deserves careful study, first of all by philosophers, but equally by political scientists and all citizens who enjoy a good argument. And what real citizens, what real philosopher, doesn’t enjoy a good argument?