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?

Pierre Manent: Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Bénédicte Delorme-Montini. Translated by Ralph Hancock. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2015.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 42, Number 2, Winter 2016. Republished with permission.

 

At the end of his essay, “Progress or Return?” Leo Strauss writes, “No one can be both a philosopher and a theologian, nor, for that matter some possibility which transcends the conflict between philosophy and theology, or pretends to be a synthesis of both. But every one of us can and ought to be either one or the other, the philosopher open to the challenge of theology or the theologian open to the challenge of philosophy,” [1] In this series of interview, Pierre Manent comes before us as a thinker who does attempt to hold these rival ways of life in balance within himself, yet without attempting the “synthesis” Strauss criticizes.

As Daniel J. Mahoney observes in his excellent introduction, Manent describes his life’s intention as the desire to understand “what is” (1). To this Socratic ambition he adds the distinctive Socratic turn: “the political order is what truly gives human life its form”(2). But, contra current fashion, not everything is political. The political is the starting point for philosophizing, not its animating principle. To conceive of politics as merely the quest for and exercise of ‘power,’ and then to conceive of Being itself as will to power, turned twentieth-century politics toward unprecedented forms of tyranny. At least one of the century’s greatest philosophers, Heidegger, went along for that disastrous ride. Manent recalls how France emerged from an earlier exercise of political terror (generated by the Jacobin “murder machine,” as Chateaubriand called it) “with the capacity for a marvelous literature, a splendid poetry, and for the analysis of modern society and of modern politics characterized by a precision an elegance and the scope that we have admired since the rediscovery of Benjamin Constant Guizot, and Tocqueville” (7). As the politically monarchic, socially aristocratic Ancien Régime declined, this “liberal political science of democratic society” gave the French both political and intellectual breathing space. Politically, it showed how democratic societies might defend natural rights, including the rights to liberty, under the conditions of modern social egalitarianism and statism. Intellectually, these new societies worked toward a possible settlement of the theological-political controversies that had raced Europe throughout the early centuries of modernity. Such a recovery from the worse-than-Jacobin tyrannies of the past century can occur, Manent hopes, if the politics of the ancients, rooted in the compact, highly “politicized” society seen in the polis and the politics of the moderns, rooted in the expansive society seen in the state, can both be understood, can be brought together, “in a histoire raisonné based upon this single hypothesis: man is a political animal. To lay out our whole history starting from our political nature that is what I would like to show and to make comprehensible” (9). Such a nonhistoricist history would overcome the implausible, not-really-rational, unrealistic historical narratives that have prevailed in the past two centuries.

If Socratic philosophy is a way of life, then it makes sense to give an account of the life of the one who philosophizes. Manent’s interviewer thus begins by eliciting an account of Manent’s life as a thinker. Karl Marx was the tutelary deity of the Manent household when Manent began to think of political things during the American occupation of France at the end of the Second World War. “One hardly met anyone of the right” in his “homogeneous milieu” (16). This changed at the lycée, that well-established republican institution in which French youth came together not as Communists or Catholics, democrats or monarchists, but as citizens—young citizens who, moreover, shared the arduous experience of really learning French, Latin, Greek, and mathematics, “the four dragons that had to be conquered” (17). In particular, “the French language was the bond that held together all the subjects”; even the math teacher’s classes “were always French classes,” exercises in the precise use of words, not only of numbers (18).

It was at the lycée that Manent encountered the dialectical contradiction to his father’s Marxism in the person of Louis Jugnet, a Thomist in the line of Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson. “The first thing he taught me is that there is much to be known in the subject of religion” (20). “My approach to religion was through speculative theology, and not through piety” (21). Manent counts himself fortunate for having encountered, early in life, teachers who recognized his intellectual needs and proclivities and put them ahead of indoctrination. Crucially, it was the Catholic Jugnet who guided Manent to the Jewish Raymond Aron, and thereby to a conception of the political, understood as a realm of thought related to but independent of philosophy and religion. Manent found the Sorbonne itself to be a place where a politics of the radical Left existed side-by-side with philosophic studies of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, among others; only in Aron’s classes could he “find a way to unite my intellectual and my political interests” (25), which by now included (thanks to Juget) a serious interest in religion dismissed by his classmates. “The more the academic philosophy became mechanical, technical, and systematic, the more political passions fermented, became focused, and heated up beneath the surface. They exploded in 1968” (26). The explosion never singed Manent, who found himself “indifferent” to the intellectual and political fashions of the period (29). To put it in American terms, he was the kid who heard the Rolling Stones but found that he preferred Sinatra.

Given his theological interests, “I was looking for a reference point beyond politics,” but Aron, “the perfect gentleman,” “experienced no need of transcendence” (39). Perceiving the needs of the young person before him, Aron pointed Manent to Strauss—specifically, to Natural Right and History. The rediscovery of classical natural right seen there convinced Manent of the freedom of the human mind—its essential freedom from its own social setting. Strauss’s recovery in modernity of “the ancients” showed Manent that human beings are not “socially determined” beings, slaves to the thoughts and passions of their own time and place. Strauss also showed Manent that the Thomist tradition that he’d encountered with Jugnet inclined to depreciate politics; its treatment of Aristotle confined itself to the Nicomachean Ethics and Book I of the Politics. Such an approach scants Aristotle’s distinctive contribution to the study of politics, his classification of political societies in terms of their regimes. Reading Strauss enabled Manent to connect his moral concerns with his intention to understand politics—to connect Jugnet and Aron.

Manent nonetheless did not follow Strauss all the way, did not become a ‘Straussian.’ “I have never really succeeded in making sense” of Strauss’s portrait of “the philosopher” (49), which Manent takes to mean a human being whose intellectual ascent raises him above human society itself, one whose noetic perception of the Good replaces the interest in the human things—to politics understood as the quest for justice. To Strauss’s Platonic Socrates, political life is the philosopher’s gateway to this otherworldly way of life, a gateway to be left behind. Manent wants to linger at the gateway. But unlike the moderns, Manent doesn’t deny the existence of the transcendent, the existence of the Good. He affirms that “there are…’higher things’ than man” (50). However, he finds “more humanity” in “the religious person.” Although does not explain why this is so, it may be because the religious person (or perhaps the religious person centered in Biblical revelation rather than, say, Buddhist meditation) understands human persons in light of the divine Person—that is, in terms of a love of God that equally commands love of neighbor. But Manent himself leaves this uncertain.

In his conversations with Strauss’s most famous student (and ardent Francophile) Allan Bloom, Manent confirmed his sense that the philosopher as Strauss conceives him finally does not love family or country so much as nature. Still, Bloom showed that the philosopher loves human nature, seeking philosophic friends—chatting with Manent’s young daughters, for example, to find out if they were souls “capable of philosophy” (56), capable of someday joining Bloom in the philosophic quest. At least physically, Socrates did linger at the gateway; Socratic self-knowledge in this sociable understanding the philosophic way of life, the philosophic regime, amounts not to knowledge of the self as an “incommunicable or incomparable particularity” but as “discerning how human motives, the motives common to all human beings, are configured in one’s own soul” and then putting that soul in such order as to “hold oneself in the world” in such a way as to discard the false signals every society sends to those who live within it and to fulfill human nature, the nature that (in Aristotle’s phrase) “wants to know”—to know what is (58-59).

And so, Manent tells his interlocutor, “I am in a triangle: politics, philosophy, religion. I have never been able to settle one of those poles”—Aron, Strauss, or Jugnet (and behind him Maritain and Aquinas). “There are thus three human attitudes, each of which claims a complete devotion that I cannot or will not grant to any of them because the two others also appeal to me” (59-60). In this he finds himself to be quite French: “one thing that distinguishes France is that there are among us quite a number of individuals who have produced considerable work that cannot be classified according to the standard academic categories” (68).

In the book’s central section, Manent outlines the substance of his histoire raisonné. In doing so, he clarifies a distinction many political scientists (even those schooled by the writings of Plato and Aristotle) often miss: the distinction between two ways of classifying political communities, namely, regimes and what Manent calls political orders. The classic texts elaborate the first classification. The second was known to ‘the ancients’ but not formally analyzed by the Greeks; it is a classification based upon the size of a political community combined with its degree of governmental centralization. In antiquity, the polis was small but centralized. Benjamin Constant’s well-known definition of “the liberty of the ancients,” which consisted of direct citizen participation in governing activities, derives from the obvious fact that in a small place there’s no easy way to escape political authority. To be free in a small community is to share in its governance. Ancient empires, by contrast, were huge but decentralized, often consisting of a sort of protection racket: I have conquered you but I will let you live if you guarantee to pay tribute to me and remain a loyal ally; otherwise, you may govern yourselves with your own customs and laws so long as they interfere in now way with my interests. A polis or an empire might have any of the several regimes, but is not itself defined solely by its regime.

Manent focuses on two major transformations of these political orders. The first kind consisted of the transition from polis to empire, effected in Greece by Alexander and then in Rome by ambitious citizens of Rome itself. Both left the technological underpinning of existing regimes more or less as they had been. The second transformation consisted of the Machiavellian reconstitution of the feudal order which Manent regards as mostly inchoate, as much a disorder as an order) into the modern state, a new political order much bigger than a polis but much more centralized than any ancient empire. Under the guiding spirit of Machiavelli, “Europeans decided to do something new, something absolutely unprecedented, which appeared as the modern, which they called modern and by which the distinguished themselves or separated themselves form everything previous”—”an enterprise that progressively rose in power before winning over all of Europe and finally the whole world” (86). This transformation did challenge the theological underpinnings of existing regimes and of the existing political demi-order. Hegel and his epigones have told this story before, but in writing history as a reflection of human nature, indeed of man as a political animal, Manent rejects the historicists’ claim that human nature is rather an instantiation of ‘History’—whether that be understood as the self-unfolding of the Absolute Spirit or the materialist dialectics of class or of race. For Manent as for Strauss, man is emphatically not a historical being at his core; a genuine history of human beings must take account of that.

Under conditions of modern statism, human beings have vindicated their political nature by demanding their rights—rights tied “to the individual human being.” By nature, man is a rights-bearing animal and the modern state should be designed to secure those rights. That is, “the very notion of right presupposes society and relation because the very definition of right is to organize society and the relations among its members” in a certain way. Rights as “we moderns” conceive them inhere in each of us but we need political society, including the formidable and potentially overbearing modern state, for their security. “That is a problem, isn’t it?” (90-91).

This leads Manent to Tocqueville, who addressed this problem in the most cogent way seen in Europe Unlike Aron (and, it should be added, unlike almost all American scholars) Manent sees that Democracy in America is first and foremost what its title says it is: a book about democracy—defined as a pervasive social egalitarianism or absence of aristocracy—as it existed in American when Tocqueville saw it, and not primarily a book about America. America matters to Tocqueville because it is as democratic in its social structure as Europe and the rest of the world is fast becoming. It is what our contemporaries in academia call a case study. But it’s democracy that he wants to understand, and how Americans have governed themselves under democratic conditions.

In focusing on Tocqueville’s interest in democracy Manent initially mistakes Tocqueville for a historicist, saying that he resembles Marx and Nietzsche in their historical determinism even as he differs from them in his description of what the laws of history are and what they will produce at “the end of history” (98). But under the salutary prodding of his interlocutor, he soon recalls that even under the leveling conditions of democracy “the aristocratic parts of the soul”—by which he means the spirited part, the part that demands its rights, fights for them, sometimes to the point of regretting that we have only one life to give to our country—will not suffer “complete disappearance” (103). And of course Tocqueville himself explicitly denies that he regards the dystopian vision of a human herd ruled by mild despots as something inevitable, averring that he has written his book precisely in order to resist such an outcome. Manent actually continues Tocqueville’s task, very much against historical determinists: “the problem I face is… to hold together Tocqueville’s analysis of democracy’s power to carry us toward ever greater equality, and the recognition of the eternal play between the few and the many” (105).

The ancient political orders, polis and empire, developed as it were naturally or spontaneously, “in the absence of any prior idea or conception,” such as Machiavelli’s asserted uncovering of “the effectual truth” of human life against the Platonic ideas and Aristotelian teleology. The ancient political orders predated philosophy; the modern state came out of a set of philosophic claims. (Insofar as rulers of the modern state have failed to understand religion insofar as they allow themselves to be animated by what Strauss calls antitheological ire, they reflect philosophic doctrines that mismanage their relation to religion.) As the modern philosophic project was elaborated, the language of modern science attempted to capture “the effectual truth” with language unmoored from “the ordinary language of political life” (110)—again a point first given careful attention by Strauss. Manent says that as a result of this increasingly abstract, modern-scientific (and therefore) un-commonsensical account of politics, “most of the knowledge that society has had of itself [in modernity] has come through literature. It suffices to mention Balzac” (111). But with the continued augmentation of the modern state and the pervasiveness of its technocratic language within common speech, “confidence in the power of meaningful speech in literary speech, has largely dissipated, and such speech has almost entirely ceased to be a political institution, at least in France, at least since the beginning of the 1960s” (111). Politics, the life of citizens ruling one another, declines in in the face of administrative rule, a form of rule that lacks the reciprocity, the character of ruling and being ruled, seen in political life rightly understood.

To understand the transition from one political order to another, Manent returns to two periods when this happened namely, the transition of Rome from a polis to an empire and then to the transition of Europe from the feudal demi-order to the modern state. He regards Cicero as the much-neglected thinker who attempted to understand Rome’s transition and to guide it. “Cicero was truly the first to confront the political problem of the West, that of the viability of the city, that of the ‘exit’ from the city, and that of the passage from the city to another political form” (112). Having learned regime theory from the Greeks, knowing from it that Rome’s republican regime suited it so long as it remained a polis but came under increasing strain as the city acquired an empire, Cicero tried to preserve political (and thus fully human) life in this new circumstance, one that “was no longer essentially civic” (112). First, he “defined the magistrate as one who ‘bore the public person,'” although “the notion of a public person was unknown in the Greek city”; second, “he defined the function of the political order as that of protecting property”; and finally he “insist[ed] on the individual form of each person, on his particularity, distinguishing between the common nature of humanity and the nature proper to a person and inviting each person to follow, not only nature in general (as prescribed by classical Greek philosophy), but especially his nature” (113). The first of these steps relocates political life primarily in the ruling offices; the second and third steps tend toward protecting citizens who are no longer fully citizens under conditions of political giantism.

Manent regards Cicero’s attempt as indispensable but insufficient because it could not preserve “what Machiavelli will call the vivere civile or the vivere politico” (114). Cicero “gathered most intelligently and wisely all the usable elements of the pagan political tradition and transformed them, but still without being able to give them an operational form” (114). For centuries to come, this was the best philosophers and theologians could do. The political order—whether the Roman empire or the later, smaller entities resulting from its dissolution—became increasingly indeterminate, as did the regimes associated with those successive orders. We’ve given this post-Roman demi-order the name ‘feudalism.’ In effect, Manent shows the need for the establishment of Machiavelli’s state but finds that it need not result in the bifurcation of loyalties resulting from dual allegiance to the City of God and the City of Man but rather in the imperial project of Rome, which began before Christianity appeared. This account of political history follows from Manent’s underlying claim: “The cause of history is humanity’s political nature” (116). The centuries-long “Ciceronian moment”—from Julius Caesar to Machiavelli from ‘Rome’ to ‘Florence’—amounted to an arduous quest to satisfy “the need or desire of human beings to be governed and, preferably to be well-governed or not too badly governed” (116). The moderns “sought and found order”; only once that had been found, in the modern state, could the regime question then be seriously addressed (118). For more or less opposite theological reasons, Machiavelli in philosophy and the Reformation in theology both sought in the modern state a protective shield against feudal civil disorder and its weakness in war. Both of these anti-feudal stances require nations to got with states—Machiavelli, with his famous call for the rise of Italy, the Lutherans with their pan-Germanism, both against the church which aspired to Catholicism, universalism.

Under the aegis of the state, social activity accelerated. Weber was mistaken: It wasn’t Protestantism and its ‘ethic’ that spawned capitalism but statism that protected Protestantism and fostered capitalism, the goose that laid golden eggs for the state, provided that the state protected the acquisitive and individualistic social activity that the Catholic Church had bridled. “As you see,” Manet tells his interviewer, “I am careful to proceed in such a way that historical causality is always tied to non-historical causality, that is to say, to something that simply belongs to the human condition” (124). European republicanism moved from a nostalgia for Cato the Younger, whose suicide marked the death of the republicanism of the polis, to the friendship of Montaigne and La Boétie, an embryonic civil-social association that affirms “virile human nature”—a republicanism consistent with individualism, a “regime of self-affirmation for human beings” (127). “It is impossible not to encounter the limits of political judgment when one political form transforms into another, when a regime that was good but corrupt gives place to one that is not as good but in a way necessary, and when the very principles of human order have become uncertain”; “the radical character of the modern enterprise was, in part, the price that finally had to be paid to leave behind [the] alienating legacy” of Rome—alienating because it required one to choose between Cato’s republican suicide and the self-deification of Caesarism (129).

That enterprise now may have reached its limits, in which case we are in for another “Ciceronian moment.” In Europe and, increasingly, around the world, the characteristic modern identity, citizenship in a nation, has weakened: One might now conceive of oneself as “at once Breton, French, European, and a citizen of the world” (146). “American protection and dominance” have made this possible, up until now, but not good or sustainable. Europeans prefer not to admit that ‘globalization’ needs to rest on some foundation, which turns out to be Westernization, which turns out to be unpalatable to, for example, Chinese and Muslim people. Because “humanity does not constitute a political body”—being “incapable of self-government”—and because “the religion of humanity” or secular humanism which accompanies globalization doesn’t command the elementary characteristic of any religion (the ability to bind souls to one another by a set of enforceable laws), “the European area will soon be the space of powerful recompositions of common life, and we do not know what form these recompositions will take” (147). “We are talking about something deeper than a revolution, because a revolution involves only a change of regime” (147); Manent hopes for a political form that draws from “the old nation and the old religion” (148), but he does not try to “play Cicero”—to suggest what that form might be. Such fashionable proposals as democratization and globalization he judges too nearly empty of content to be of much real use, although they have preoccupied academic discussants: “I do not know whether what Marx called ‘the world becoming philosophical’ has been good for the world, but there is no doubt that it has not been good for philosophy” (154). The ‘postmodern’ philosophies or ideologies that have superseded Marxism offer only “identity politics” without a firm identity; they will lose steam as we succumb to a “bad mixture of sentimental humanitarianism and unchained competition” (159).

In order to begin to draw upon the old nations and the old religion, Manent seeks to define the old religion by distinguishing it from the new one, the religion of humanity. That is, he returns to what Strauss calls the theological-political question. He remarks the difference between compassion and charity. Compassion consists of identifying oneself “with the suffering other” and (perhaps discreetly) sighing in relief that one is not the sufferer (160). Compassion amounts to the sentimental side of egalitarianism or the belief that we are all the same. “Charity is altogether different,” “a virtue that man cannot acquire or produce by his own strength” (161). “Charity is the love of God, the love by which God loves mankind and, first of all, the love by which God loves himself in the Trinitarian communion”; “something is charitable if it partakes, by God’s grace, in God’s love” (161). It is inegalitarian, an expression of condescension in the old, laudatory sense of the term, a sense that has disappeared precisely as egalitarianism has advanced. Jane Austen could still say “condescending” in a laudatory tone, but for us it is an affront. “Charity has nothing to do with the return to the self that belongs to the very life of the feeling of sameness because charity involves neither identification with the suffering other nor the satisfied and pleasant feeling of not suffering oneself” (161). Christians love God and love their neighbor “as the image of God,” inasmuch as “only God is truly loveable” (161). Humanitarianism (to say nothing of romanticism) does not apply. Mother Teresa wants not only to save your body but also and preeminently wants to become the human agent of the divine love that will save your soul, if you will let it.

For this reason Manent doubts that Tocqueville is correct to ascribe the beginning of modern democracy or egalitarianism to Christianity. “I have never yet found anything in the Gospels that resembles democratic equality or the principles of the philosophy of human rights” (164). “The very meaning of Christian equality resides in God and relates to the other world, and the very meaning of democratic equality relates to this world!” he exclaims. To ‘secularize’ Christianity is to de-Christianize it, inasmuch as the very notion of a Christ, a Savior, implies a radically superior Being. (To be fair to Tocqueville, this may be what he meant to convey in describing Christianity as a precious legacy of the aristocracy; after all, a divine revelation that includes the idea of the equality of all men under God is both ‘aristocratic’—or perhaps monarchic—in origin, even as it posits equality among human beings.) In any event, Manent observes that the centuries in which Christianity provided Europeans with their spiritual orientation “accommodated themselves very well to immense differences of rank and of fortune,” reinforced as they were by the Pauline injunction to obey the powers that be. It was the Enlightenment that pushed Europeans to democratize their societies.

And yet, as before, Manent relents, noticing that Christianity did prepare European souls for the seeds of egalitarianism in two ways. Although it did not at first “demand the abolition of slavery,” Christianity did undermine “the spirit of pagan warfare,” specifically the practice of “massacring the men and… reducing the women and children to slavery” (165). Christianity diminished the supply of slaves and thus served egalitarianism. More significantly, Christianity equalizes “access to truth” by teaching a truth that is “absolutely the same for the shepherd and the theologian” (167).

Christianity also induced Europeans to understand liberty in a new way by giving it a new (so to speak) ontological dimension, namely, free will. “One might even say that the notion of free will is, at bottom a Christian notion”—the “series of free responses that each individual addresses to the divine initiative” (168). Conscience, “an eternal capacity of judgment” (168), differs from (for example) Antigone’s love of family and provides a strong moral foundation for resistance to the encroachments of political authority upon the integrity of the person. But conscience as conceived by Christians isn’t a natural or human right, as the moderns say. Conscience is the self-alignment of the human soul toward God’s will. But a right derives “from man’s simple humanity and not from his final purpose in God” (170). For the early moderns, a right was natural, not fundamentally covenantal. It was Calvinism, not Roman Catholicism or Lutheranism, that associated conscience “with modern freedom and with confidence in one’s own strength” (171). It was Calvinism that combined freedom of conscience and modern freedom with respect for the rule of law. In so describing the theological-political strengths of the West, Manent also shows how he began his journey in a Marxist family and, after encountering Catholicism in Jugnet, political prudence in Aron, and political philosophy in Strauss and Bloom, he has come in the end to an appreciation of the Huguenots.

Nor does his political incorrectness end there. Manent does not hesitate to ascribe “a certain superiority” to the West over other civilizations. “Our civilization’s exploration of human possibilities is more complete than in other civilizations,” although this strength “obviously does not exempt us from the vices, defects, and weaknesses associated with the human condition” and also “exposes us to certain risks to which other civilizations are not exposed or are less exposed” (172). The aspiration to break with customs, with the law of ancestors, makes the West at once more likely to discover nature and at the same time assume the risky responsibility of mastering it. And if “the Greeks are the first to expose their nakedness and… take pride in it, in this capacity to show one’s nakedness” or nature, the Israelites upheld another kind of universalism, the universalism of a people who acted under the command to be a light for the nations (174-175). Taken together, Athens and Jerusalem both exhibit the capacity to acknowledge the universal without erasing or attempting to erase the particular, the political, the city. If man’s nature is political, and if God’s laws themselves imply a political regime, then human beings are not doomed to lives of tribal warfare on one hand or of a weak and unsustainable humanitarianism on the other.

“I believe this confidence in the strength of the soul is the great power of the West, the pagan West as well as the Christian West. Of course, the soul’s philosophic adventure and the religious adventure are quite distinct, but the human source is the same” (184). “In this sense, Christian-democratic America sums up and recapitulates these transformations of the soul that gave the soul this confidence in its own strength” (186). But the European Union, by contrast, “is not political; it does not mediate [between universal and particular]; it blends in its own eyes with humanity as it moves toward unification” (187). Except that the expected historical movement or progress isn’t really there, and can never be, given the political nature of human beings.

Although Manent does not attempt to envision a new political order for Europe, the book ends with his account of the kind of political science that might enable Europeans to frame one. It is Aristotelian. Contemporary political science suffers from two principal flaws: it “is not really political, but rather social”—reducing political life to sub-political components—and it is animated by a “philosophy that is not really practical, that is, that does not quite know what to do with the question, ‘what is to be done?'” (197). (A question, it should be noted, Manent learned during his Marxist upbringing: Lenin raised it, and, whatever one may think of him, he did raise a perfectly sensible question.) But Aristotle’s purpose “is to clarify the deliberations of citizens, no matter the city to which they belong, in order to improve their political regime, whatever the type of regime” (198). This is “a science of action in general,” “capable of determining what concrete action the acting human being should produce, and therefore a general action or an action in conformity with some general rule, but a determinate action appropriate to the characteristics of the agent and the circumstances of the action” (199). By sundering ‘facts’ from ‘values,’ deliberation from purpose, modern social science has rendered human life incoherent, insofar as human beings take such science as authoritative.

Having praised Christianity for its discovery of the conscience and of a certain kind of human equality, Manent proceeds to criticize it for “endanger[ing] the political framework of human life by requiring human beings to love their enemies” (205). This disruption of the natural understanding of politics disrupted the philosophic understanding of human action by pointing the intellect toward unmediated or apolitical ‘humanity’ and also by so altering the intellect’s sense of human events that it comes to think of itself as historical the intellect BC and AD, as it were. That is, the notion of God’s providential intervention into the flow of human events outside the framework of a particular political regime, Israel, takes a step toward the familiar historicisms of modernity. These tend to undermine the freedoms of the ancients, the Christians, and the moderns. It is therefore in some respects just as well that the modern West now meet resistance, inasmuch as resistance calls forth the ‘ancient’ virtues of courage, justice, moderation, and wisdom that modern social science neglects but that remain necessary to fulfilling human nature.