Christopher Coker: Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

 

Coker takes his title from Rousseau’s complaint about theories of ‘just war’ as philosophers have argued them. (“Barbarous philosopher! Come and read us your book on the field of battle.”) His self-described “big claim” is that, far from being barbarians, philosophers “invented” war, by which he doesn’t really mean they invented it but that they “discovered and clarified” its “nature,” distinguishing limited, rule-governed, purposeful conflict from “warfare” or the unlimited conflict of all against all, driven by passions. “A product of reason,” war aims at security, liberty, and justice. However, in line with au courant ‘postmodernism,’ he claims that for Aristotle and other Greeks “reason itself was in essence political.” That is, he denies the Socratic claim that philosophy consists of an ascent from the cave. “Plato was the product of his age. We cannot escape the times in which we live.” He takes his cue instead from the pragmatist Richard Rorty, who argues that “contexts provided by theories are tools for effecting change.” That is to say, reason doesn’t escape the cave, it builds the cave. Neither nature nor ‘History’ provides meaning to war. Everything is political.

Coker divides his book into nineteen chapters, the first three being introductory. The following sixteen chapters are organized in seven groups, in each of which he addresses a central question raised by a philosopher:
1. Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? (Heraclitus, chapters 4-7).
2. Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? (Aristotle, chapters 8-10).
3. Why are mercenaries, many of whom are often professional fighters, so distrusted? (Machiavelli, chapter 11).
4. Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? (Hobbes, chapters 12-13).
5. Why should we do nothing in war that compromises peace? (Kant, chapters 14-15).
6. Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? (Marx, chapters 16-18).
7. Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? (Heisenberg, chapter 19).
Coker does not limit himself to these philosophers, but ranges widely over the major figures of political-philosophic thought. His sweeping and paradoxical formulations—at times it’s rather as if the brightest English schoolboy in his form has been nipping at the bottle of Nietzsche his elders hid in the cupboard—will worry or annoy scholars who prefer more careful textual analyses. (For example, he tells us early on that Rousseau “believed that human beings were, by nature, sociable and peaceful.” Well, no: Rousseau believes that human beings are by nature peaceful because they are asocial.) Better to read his book exactly as his subtitle suggests: as a series of reflections or meditations on themes found in those texts.

Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? Heraclitus regards the cosmos itself as warlike, distinguishing its flux from sheer chaos, even as philosophers will come to distinguish war from warfare. Flux is constant, but it has a certain discernible order, not to be confused with Hegelian teleology and its ‘cunning of reason’ or immanent dialectical progress toward the ‘end of History.’ Thucydides is closer to the mark, teaching that war is “violent” but also a “teacher.” One thing it teaches is complexity; when a polis goes to war it may anticipate one outcome but it will very often get another. “What the Athenians learned about themselves from the disaster was their almost limitless capacity for self-deception”—or, at least, that’s what Thucydides tried to teach them. War also teaches tragedy, that even heroes have their flaws, issuing in fatal misjudgments leading to unmerited or disproportionate punishment. Both of these points being true, war also teaches that “the quest for security can result in even greater insecurity” or what writers today now call ‘imperial overstretch’—famously, the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition.

Coker supposes that Plato’s philosophic task was reformist: “to ensure that the social discord that the war had produced within Athens and that had led to Socrates’ death should never break out again.” This means that initially he takes Plato’s Socrates without irony; to Coker, the elaborate education Socrates lays out in the Republic is seriously intended to be implemented in Athens. He is right about one thing, that Socrates teaches “war is not the be-all and the end-all of life; it is not the highest good, or the highest human calling.” Philosophy is. But although he soon and rightly comes around to remarking that the ‘ideal’ regime Socrates describes is part of “a thought-experiment,” he doesn’t understand the dialogue as a defense of the philosophic life, objecting that “the role of reason” as a ruler cannot work because “human beings are not always principled, or consistent—they have an emotional life.” Indeed so: which is why the Athenians executed Socrates and then regretted it. But Coker, following Rorty, supposes that the democratic regime of Athens had nothing to do with the rule of passion. On the contrary, “it just so happens that democracies tend” to keep “the passions in check” and “different principle in balance” “better than most other political systems” because “they channel them in more creative ways.” This is to confuse Athenian democracy with Madisonian republicanism, a confusion Madison himself did not share.

Coker does better with the Ion, a shorter and simpler dialogue. In that dialogue, Socrates encounters a rhapsode, a memorizer and singer of poems, and argues that the Iliad had “locked the Greeks into” a “perpetual song,” seducing them into “fighting war by the wish to imitate the exploits of Achilles and Hector.” He rejects Ion’s claim to divine inspiration, a point that Coker makes but then blurs by claiming that Plato objects to artists because “they tend to refashion [reality] to suit the aesthetic demands of their own art.” ‘Aesthetic’ isn’t a Platonic term, however. It is squarely the claim to revelation poets make that Plato’s Socrates objects to; Plato’s dialogues are themselves works of art, so that can’t be the underlying problem. Coker goes on to make a pitch for art as evocative of “empathy,” a Rousseauian notion. This, I guess, is how Coker answers his first question, why war and peace are so hard to distinguish. With the right kind of war (there is no right kind of warfare) as depicted by the right kind of poetry or art, we can become empathetic, and therefore less inclined to warfare. He rejects philosophic dialectic as the way to do this because human beings are too emotional to be ruled by reason.

Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? Aristotle answers that “the only merit of war…is to yield a political result.” This is the purpose of statecraft, to establish reasonable or prudent measures to achieve political purposes. (While Coker denies the capacity of reason to achieve theoretical truths, in his pragmatism he proves friendlier to ‘practical reason,’ a sort of reasoning that can stay ‘inside’ the cave. He goes so far as to assert that “our humanity” itself consists “in the use of reason in action.”) “Strategy is the military realization of statecraft.” If it is not so understood, war will become a way of life unto itself, as it has with the Spartans. “But what does it profit a society to win a war if it goes on toe lose the peace that its victory secures?” He praises Tacitus and Clausewitz for continuing and elaborating Aristotle’s insight. This sets up a polemic against the United States, which (he alleges) yields itself to “an incipient desire to destroy what it cannot redeem.” Fortunately, “the American empire is aging fast,” although “there is life in it yet,” and therefore folly and danger, in which its allies (read Coker’s Britain) often make themselves complicit. He concludes his discussion of the relation of war to politics by very sensibly concurring with Augustine that “peace is never final” or perpetual on this earth, prior to the intervention of God, although the momentum of this thought leads him into a foolish account of the Americans’ regime change in Japan subsequent to victory in the Second World War.

Why are mercenaries so distrusted? Coker claims that Machiavelli takes his cue from Renaissance artists’ discovery of perspectivism, which “introduced the world to the  metaphysical as well as artistic idea of the vanishing point beyond which the world ceases to exist, because it is beyond the reach of our senses.” Such a misunderstanding of perspective could only result from an underlying, radical cognitive subjectivism, however, and Machiavelli is no cognitive subjectivist. The world is very real, indeed; the point is to master it. Coker does get that, remarking Machiavelli’s encouragement of “unlimited” human ambition (an encouragement more than a little rhetorical, since it makes princes into disciples of the prince of princes, Machiavelli). He also claims that Machiavelli teaches that “it is human beings who give the world the form it possesses”: not exactly, but he does urge them to try to reform what they are given. Although he claims that for Machiavelli “human desire is infinite because it lacks a definite object,” he somehow elides Machiavelli and Plato, despite the theory of the ideas or forms, especially the idea of the good, all of which put limits on human desire. This gets him to an endorsement of Quentin Skinner’s misinterpretation of Machiavelli as a civic republican, no friend of princes at all, but this misinterpretation at least enables him to say why mercenaries are distrusted: They are not good civic republicans, and indeed pose a threat to republican regimes.

Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? Here he comes to Hobbes. For reasons best known to himself, he makes Hobbes into a philosopher of “historical consciousness,” not a defender of a theory of natural rights. most urgently the right to life. Coker rejects Hobbes’s state-of-nature theory, the notion of nature as a condition of war and indeed (in Coker’s vocabulary) warfare, saying that such a condition isn’t perpetual, only sporadic, in “hunter-gatherer” societies. But Hobbes doesn’t need to claim that there are no periods of peace or rest in such societies, only that they enjoy no security from the threat of the outbreak of warfare. Coker’s real purpose here is to emphasize “the fact that we politicize war” (emphasis in original) in three ways: by lending it “social substitutability,” that is, by redirecting feuding among families to the larger stage of society, thereby diluting motives of personal vengeance; by organizing it, introducing division of labor, fixed walls and ramparts, and logistical planning to the practice of warfare, thus making it into war; and by reducing the percentage of the adult population killed in warfare. In modern times, death tolls rise usually when a regime converts war into something more like warfare, often using it as a cloak for genocide. Changing warfare into war by politicizing it has been a very good thing, and, Coker argues, the more broadly a given population is politicized (as in a democracy) the more limited wars will be. This leaves out a crucial element of the so-called democratic peace theory, namely, that it isn’t republicanism alone (or commerce alone, as capitalists like to say) that prevents war but commercial republicanism—and then only among commercial republics. This is Montesquieu’s argument, but Coker’s chapter on Montesquieu never quite gets to it.

Coker invokes Kant and Hegel to help him explain why we should do nothing in war that compromises peace. He finds Kant too rationalistic and the categorical imperative too absolute to be of much use in thinking about war. In doing so he loses the sense of war as “an ethical activity.” He does retain Kant’s insistence that “we should respect our enemies,” i.e., treat them as human beings, as ‘ends’ not as ‘means.’ “Once you externalize violence onto the ‘other,’ every tool and tactic becomes justified including torture.” Coker prefers Hegel, who keeps war and soldiering within ethical bounds, especially those associated with honor, “the immaterial things that define our humanity and which define our ground of freedom”—a thought he invests with considerable ontological freight in claiming that ‘History’ “mov[es] from the ‘realm of necessity’ into the realm of freedom'” precisely through this overcoming of material instinct, especially the fear of violent death central to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. Coker also endorses Hegel’s valorization of social cooperation via war; war “teach[es] us the contingency of life,” that “history does not come to an end when we die.” If so, then in war men learn to cooperate with one another, sacrifice themselves for one another and for the larger and higher entity, the State, which will survive after they do, and which itself will (even in its own mortality) contribute to the dialectical progress of ‘History.’ Finally, Coker writes that Hegel finds the meaning of human life in this “collective sacrifice”: “History becomes a mythical court of appeal which ante-dates all historicity and demands that every event should be understood as being in accord or not with a human destiny. Destiny is a cultural construction.” Coker thus attempts to make Hegel into a sort of post-modern; to do so he must ignore the Absolute Spirit, which unfolds rationally, according to the laws of (Hegelian) logic, and is no “cultural construction” although it does effect such construction.

Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? Coker asks Marx, Heidegger, Engels, and Nietzsche. He finds Marx not quite up to the task, as Marx was “a better political economist than he was a philosopher” (a point disputed by those of us who maintain he was equally bad at being both). In this, Coker betrays his roots in British logical positivism, complaining that Marx “imported into philosophy quite unsubstantiated and unsustainable moral factors which told his readers what to aim for”; the distinction between rational, philosophic thinking (logic, ‘metaphysics’ generally) and supposedly emotional, sub-rational moral and political assertion comes to us from A. J. Ayer and his brethren. Nonetheless, “Marx’s genius was to recognize that it is in the nature of war we are what we build“; on these grounds, Marx is a genius insofar as he can be bent to the purposes of postmodernist constructivism. Accordingly, Heidegger is the real hero when it comes to distinguishing military technology from the merely ‘technological.’ The ‘technological’ is the merely instrumental, but the ‘essence’ of technology “is how it changes our relationship with the world as well as our relationship to ourselves.” “We are the technology we use”—a sobering thought for tappers on computer keyboards. Again, associating morality with emotion, Coker associates human purposes with use, with what we do, and with how we feel about what we do. Or, as Friedrich Engels claims, “we produce ourselves through labor.” This fits Nietzsche better than it does Engels, who was as much an aspiring scientist as anyone who ever put pen to paper. Nietzsche’s warrior “finds his humanity in war.” Military technology serves not commodious self-preservation of the body but self-sacrificing spiritedness extending, ultimately, beyond even the nation to “an imagined community larger than the nation—the human community,” to the liberation of the oppressed of that “community.” Speaking of imagination, it takes a lot of it to press Nietzsche into the service of the liberation of ‘the many,’ those long-eared, braying ones whom Nietzsche would see ruled by the “planetary aristocracy.”

And finally: Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? For this Coker turns to a scientist, Werner Heisenberg. “Whenever philosophers have claimed access to the truth (whenever they have attempted like Marx to turn philosophy into a science) the outcome has ended in disaster.” Heisenberg comes in handy, here, because for him science itself ends not in knowledge but in uncertainty: the Indeterminacy Principle. According to it, “there are no fixed things, no fully specifiable entities”; causes have no predictable effects, and this is especially true (beyond the realm of subatomic particles/waves) in war, which so easily turns to warfare. “The chance element is inherent in the nature of the quantum system” and does not arise “merely from our limited grasp of all the variables that affect the system.” In modern physics, “energy” is the equivalent of “fire” in Heraclitus. Philosophers have failed to see this because they never get out of the cave, remaining bound by “cultural bias,” time-boundedness, “personal idiosyncrasy,” and the warlikeness or polemicism of (Western) philosophy. Then again, postmodernist pragmatism may well be equally bound by the egalitarianism that the Nietzsche it abuses would have deplored, but I wax polemical and so shrink back, chastened by the dangers of playing with fire. I will venture so far as to suggest that particle/wave theory may not get us very far in understanding chemistry, biology, morality, politics, or indeed much of physics, which remains steadfastly Newtonian in its larger and more concrete manifestations.

Mary Ann Glendon: The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 49, Number 4, November/December 2009.

 

The forum here is the public forum, the tower is the ivory tower. The publishers have not served Professor Glendon well with that subtitle; her argument has little or nothing to do with imagining the world. Quite the contrary: Almost unfailingly, she points her readers to the real world. She wants them to think about the relationship of the life of politics to the life of the mind, “the political and active way of life” as distinguished from that “which is divorced from all external things,” as Aristotle puts it in Book VII of the Politics. She addresses her argument particularly to the intelligent young, whom she has met and taught at Harvard Law School for some years. And it is for them that this book will prove most valuable. Most of the persons she considers have attracted much commentary, and she offers few novel interpretations. Combining biography with textual analysis, she draws from her examples sober and (one hopes) sobering lessons for smart and ambitious individuals drawn to the alluring role of ‘public intellectual.’ Glendon sits them down and tells them plainly, “the qualities that make a first-rate thinker are not the same as those required for success in statesmanship.” And if you think you have both sets of qualities, consider the fates of the very few who did. The melancholy truth is that you and your country might be better off if you just become a lawyer.

Taking ‘the ancients’ first, she begins with the instructively inauspicious life of Plato, himself ever mindful of the execution of Socrates by Athenian democrats. Plato’s timely twenty-year sojourn to a variety of cities undoubtedly enriched his political thought, but none of his three journeys to Syracuse ended well, despite (or maybe because of) his attempts to improve the regimes there. Upon returning to Athens, he “finally concluded that there are times when circumstances are so unfavorable that the only reasonable course for a wise man is to ‘keep quiet and offer up prayers for his own welfare and for that of his country.'” Plato devoted these last years to composing the Laws, in which “the ultimate concern” turns out to be forming good citizens—presumably, citizens who might incline toward leaving philosophers in peace. In turn, philosophers will also leave citizens in peace, aspiring not to the status of lawgiver except in the indirect manner of teaching the future lawgivers. Upon being asked, at the end of this longest Platonic dialogue, to join with his politician-friends in the founding of a new city, the Athenian Stranger maintains “a resonating silence”—the political science of politic silence. Glendon cheerfully suggests that this means the Stranger wants them to proceed by themselves from now on, which is one way to put it.

With his long experience at the highest level of Roman politics, Cicero cuts a politically more impressive figure than Socrates or Plato; his life ended as badly as Socrates’ did, but his accomplishments up until that time bespeak genuine statesmanship. Glendon admires Cicero’s understanding of political limits—not for him the grand project of re-making a regime at one pass—married to a courageous fidelity to justice; “he never abandoned his efforts to preserve republican principles from the encroachment of dictatorship on the one hand and mob rule on the other.” At the same time, he proved an eloquent defender of philosophy; his Hortensius set Augustine on a thoughtful path. These virtues came together in his defense of natural law: a restatement of natural right in terms clear enough for the defense of such right in civil societies by means of civil laws.

This Roman respect for law disappeared in the chaos that descended in the West following Rome’s debacle, but found a home in the Eastern Empire, where Justinian I and his legal adviser, Tribonian, systematized the Roman texts, producing the several magisterial legal works of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The Justinian laws clearly defined such extra-legal concepts as justice and prudence, simultaneously tying them to particular laws establishing “natural reason” among “all human beings” under those laws. lost for centuries after the Eastern Empire collapsed in its turn, the Justinian Corpus continues to form “the base from which all of today’s civil law systems emerged.” It might be added that Justinian and his team of scholars incorporated the way of life of a prophetic religion into a system of law founded on reason—no mean feat, and one attempted with less long-lasting success elsewhere.

Glendon’s next triptych of thinkers consists of the early moderns: Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. With a woman’s sure eye, she questions not only Machiavelli’s virtue (he “assert[ed], rather than prov[ed], the inadequacy of classical and, by implication, biblical thought”) and his piety (he said on his deathbed that Heaven would bore him), but also his manliness. She recalls Plato’s Seventh Letter: “Plato’s counsel was that [advisers to princes] should never pander to power”; those who do “I should consider unmanly.” Having inserted this knife, Glendon gives it a firm twist: “One wonders whether Machiavelli, il Machia, ever measured himself by Plato’s standards of manliness.”

To assert rather than prove the inadequacy of classical thought is to deny reason’s right to rule the human soul. Following Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes made reason the scout or servant of the passions. This instrumental and deductive reason, modeled on geometry, collided with the English common law tradition as articulated by the great jurist Edward Coke—enemy of Francis Bacon, Hobbes’s mentor. The legal reasoning praised by Coke was not deductive but dialectical; its “recursive self-scrutiny” enabled the English to set limits to arbitrary power—as seen most famously in the Magna Carta but also centuries later in Coke’s own career, during the course of which he defied James I in the name of Parliamentary prerogatives. “Squarely at odds with practically everything that Edward Coke had stood for,” Hobbes limited monarchic power only by the sovereignty of the people, who retained their right to self-preservation. The centrality of self-preservation in Hobbes perhaps underscores the unmanliness Glendon detects in the Machiavellian spirit.

Her third ‘modern,’ John Locke, led “a life Machiavelli would have envied, except for the absence of wenching and carousing,” as a friend of the great organizer of the Whig party, Lord Shaftesbury. A man of caution if not of Hobbesian timidity, Locke shared exile with his patron when the Catholic James II ascended to the throne, returning to England after the Glorious Revolution and publishing several of his seminal works a year later. He found a new patron, Lord Somers, and gained recognition as “the intellectual leader of the Whigs.” Such Lockean principles as the right to free religious practice, government by consent, and property eventually “penetrated American legal consciousness,” where they remain to this day to the extent that subsequent waves of philosophic revision haven’t eroded them. Glendon finds it puzzling that Locke established these principles upon natural rights rather than the “ancient ‘rights of Englishmen'”; in this she may underestimate what Locke owed to Hobbes, and therefore to Machiavelli. Perhaps the ease to which one may underestimate the Hobbesianism of Locke accounts in part for the truth of Glendon’s remark, “Few scholars or statesmen…have bridged the worlds of forum and tower as successfully as he, or with such lasting influence.”

Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville compose Glendon’s third group. All of them resist—in different ways—the Lockean settlement. She agrees with historian Paul Johnson in calling Rousseau “the very archetype” of “the secular intellectual who emerged in the eighteenth century to fill the vacuum left by the decline of clerical influence.” At the same time, Rousseau broke with his older contemporaries, the Philosophes, denying that the Renaissance and Enlightenment restoration of the classical liberal arts and sciences had improved the mores of Europeans, denying that property was a natural right, and further denying that human beings are naturally endowed with reason—thereby “striking at the very heart of the Enlightenment project.” Secularizing the Christian principle of charity or compassion by reducing it to a sentiment, Rousseau provided “a shaky foundation on which to build a just society” because “compassion, unlike charity, is not a virtue acquired by self-discipline and habitual practice. It is only a feeling and a fleeting one at that.” Although Rousseau did not lack patrons (or more accurately matrons), the link between his life and the politics of his time and of all subsequent times so far has rather been the way in which his brilliant catch-phrases (usually removed from his carefully-designed philosophic architecture) have influenced demagogues and have been deployed by them. The mood of impassioned self-indulgence that permeates so much of the life of our contemporary democracies seems to follow Rousseau, although Rousseau would be among the first to denounce us were he alive to see the spectacle we have made of ourselves.

The political philosopher of this group that Glendon admires learned the rudiments of prudence from the Catholics and Quakers who educated him in a country where non-Anglicans still felt the sting of bigotry; “children had to be taught caution at an early age,” and so Edmund Burke was taught. Unlike Rousseau, whose writings valorized sincerity, Burke commended “economy of truth.” “It is a sort of temperance,” he observed, “by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.” He took up membership in Locke’s party, the Whigs, becoming “the chief theoretician, strategist” of a section of the party opposed to King George III’s over-exercise of executive power. In this capacity, exercised not behind the scenes but while serving in Parliament, Burke attempted to conciliate the dispute between Great Britain and her American colonies, supported free trade, opposed the oppressive regime of the East India Company (Glendon compares Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings to Cicero’s prosecution of Verres), and, most memorably, predicted that the French Revolution—still in its relatively moderate phase—would descend first into terror and then into despotism under “some popular general.” “No one since Cicero had been at once so gifted in politics, and so grounded in philosophy”; by no coincidence, both men also grounded themselves in the constitutional law of a decent regime.

Tocqueville made himself a public man in a country that had no immediate or even near-term prospects for such a regime, despite his best efforts to persuade his countrymen to move in that direction. Glendon blames Tocqueville’s failure on his fragile health, mediocre oratorical skills, and overall lack of “leadership qualities”-—he was no Burke—but she credits him for opposing the arbitrary and hidebound rule of the Bourbons. She sees that France was a mess that only time, disasters, and great statesmanship would ameliorate, a nation in which two kinds of monarchists, republicans, socialists, and the Bonapartists who eventually prevailed in Tocqueville’s lifetime bubbled in a political stew of rancor, suspicion, and contempt. Tocqueville “confronted the problem facing any politician who refuses to accept party discipline or follow a party line: How could he maintain his independence without rendering himself isolated and ineffective?” He couldn’t. In his defense, could anyone have done so, under those circumstances? In fact, no one did.

Not only France but the West generally headed for ruinous times. Max Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the human-rights collaborators Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik form Glendon’s final constellation. Weber is well-suited to her theme, having written lectures squarely on it: “Science as a Vocation” in 1917 and “Politics as Vocation” in 1919. Weber described the increased specialization of life in Europe; this meant that “most scholars today could expect to spend their entire academic lives working within rather narrow confines” and therefore not directly confronting the problem of the forum and the tower. Weber went farther: Science as such has nothing much to say to politicians, beyond advice on technical matters. Scientists contemplate ‘facts’; politicians invoke ‘values.’ Scientists are not therefore amoral, however. On the contrary, the scholar who knows himself as a scholar fulfills the duty of responsibility for that vocation, that role within the modern state. Like Socrates, he “finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life.” Yet not quite like Socrates: Glendon’s Weber makes no mention of philosophic eros. In keeping with his regime, Weber spent the Great War as a director of military hospitals. But he was no mere product of the regime; he remarked that Bismarck, for all his greatness, had fatally damaged the give-and-take of any genuinely political life in Germany and he wisely urged Germany to make peace at the end of 1915, seeing that the militarists’ infatuation with submarine warfare would only draw the United States into the war. He was that rare European who did not underestimate the military prowess of the Americans. After the war, he deplored the victors’ draconian program of severe reparations and attempted to strengthen republicanism in his work on the ill-fated (because ill-designed) Weimar Constitution. Perhaps predictably, given his esteem of science, including contemporary political science, he hoped to make German civil servants into a political class. But given his underlying dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values,’ he could not find a way to avoid the unstable political dichotomy for ‘scientific’ administration on the one hand and ‘charismatic’ leadership on the other. Glendon admires Weber’s stern admonition to develop a “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” and his commendation of “the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.” One might add: Given his mistaken premises, he had no way of discovering a way for Germans to measure up to such realities outwardly.

Oliver Wendell Holmes is Glendon’s first and only American ‘public intellectual.’ Perhaps because she omits consideration of earlier American specimens of the breed—the American founding period did not lack them—she misses the radical character of Holmes’s thought. When Holmes argues that the life of the law is not logic but experience she sees that he opposes not only Kant, not only Blackstone, but also Coke—very much in the name of an updated Hobbesianism. That is, Holmes’s invocation of experience finally amounts to the rule of force over the law; Glendon quite rightly asserts that “legal realism, pragmatism, sociological jurisprudence, the law-and-economy movement, and the various schools of critical legal theory are all little more than elaborations of themes memorably articulated by Holmes.” His rejection of “human rights” as the foundation for law and for any regime featuring the rule of law stems not, however, from Hobbes—who, after all, did not claim a natural human right to self-preservation—but to historicism, which allows statesmen to posit ‘ideals’ to be ‘actualized’ in the future but only at the cost of validating those ideals solely from the fact of that actualization. That is, historicism solves Weber’s ‘facts and values’ dilemma by synthesizing facts and values. That this can be a hard moral and intellectual price to pay may be seen from the careers of the tyrants who appeared after Holmes and his generation passed away.

Charles Malik served as a Lebanese delegate to the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945. Impressed by his mastery of languages, his government had persuaded him to take leave from his position as a philosophy professor. They also saw his popularity with both Muslim and Christian students and may have liked his previous American connection; he had taken a degree from Harvard under the tutelage of Alfred North Whitehead. Upon arriving at the conference, Malike learned that the smaller countries wanted to include a declaration of human rights in the U. N. Charter. They succeeded in establishing a Human Rights Commission, which became active two years later under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt. A distinguished committee including Julian Huxley, E. H. Carr, Richard McKeon, René Cassin, Jacques Maritain, and Malike undertook what one might have supposed to haven the fruitless task of compiling a list of rights recognized across national, regime, and civilizational borders. The trick turned out to be the avoidance of any discussion of he basis of the rights; the good Catholic Maritain quipped, “We agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks why.” Communist delegates balked at the inclusion of individual rights against the states but here Mrs. Roosevelt brought them around by saying that the rights could be achieved by a variety of methods. Malik added a bit of Whiteheadian ‘process’ philosophy to bridge the gulf between individual and group rights. One may guess that Comrade Stalin weighed the propaganda value of going along with Third-World aspirations—however regrettably bourgeois they may have been—along with the amplitude of the language about means and ends (why quarrel about how to break the egg that goes into the omelet?) and gave the thing his wolf-print of approval: the sort of ideological popular-front strategy that would soon issue, he trusted, in the Socialist Tomorrow predetermined by History’s iron laws, as laid bare by Marx and Lenin. Be this as it may have been, Glendon contentedly concludes that “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights—like the Justinian Corpus Juris Civilis, the Code Napoleon, and the United States Constitution—stands as a monument of what can be achieved through creative collaboration between statespersons and scholars,” and that “Eleanor Roosevelt pioneered a mode of leadership that was highly effective in a multicultural and multidisciplinary setting.”

This book can teach ambitious young persons—whether studying law, politics, or literature—in at least two ways. First, it gives them some notion of the history of political philosophy, which they may not have received in the confusion of contemporary undergraduate education. While lifting their minds toward the heights, the book equally insists on keeping feet on the ground. Most of her heroes failed to achieve their ends, and a noticeable percentage of them died trying.

Biancamaria Fontana: Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the ‘Essais.’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

 

Far from being politically detached or disengaged from the political life of his country, Montaigne worked in his provincial parliament (albeit not in its main assembly) and served at both the Parisian court of Henry III of Valois and the provincial court of Henry of Navarre, the future king. He spent four years as Mayor of Bordeaux during a period of civil unrest. France itself found itself torn by civil wars of religion throughout his lifetime, reason enough for his famed guardedness in writing. The certainty and indeed fanaticism of partisans and the confusion of authorities alike pointed him toward skepticism concerning all claims to rule. Biancamaria Fontana, a historian at the University of Lausanne, nonetheless defends Montaigne from suspicions of religious unbelief. She does notice divergences from Christian teachings: denial of original sin in view of the “plasticity” of “human nature”; adherence to Christian sentiments but not to articles of faith; appreciation for the “exotic kaleidoscope of human practices,” suggesting that “conscience” contains little “science” or knowledge; the suspicion that laws derive more from custom than from God; and Montaigne’s inclination to equate belief with opinion. Fontana equally defends Montaigne against charges of Machiavellianism, rightly considering him less openly audacious than the Florentine. I am reminded of young Henry Adams, who recalls asking the old political fixer Thurlow Weed, “Is no political man to be trusted?” Weed mused, “I never encourage a young man to begin by thinking so.” Fontana may be said to encourage new readers of the Essais not to begin by thinking Montaigne Machiavellian.

She begins by observing that Montaigne aims at redirecting his readers away from “abstract schemes and models” in politics and towards a consideration of “the complexity and instability of human circumstances.” Is it not wiser to stay closer to the experiences and sentiments of ordinary and practical people, “rather than addressing them”—indeed one another—”from above”? Appeals to the ‘above’ enable clever men to “commit crimes under the pretense of serving justice or religion, insulting their victims with their hypocrisy and arrogance”—’adding insult to injury,’ as we might say. “If he was an attentive reader of the City of God, and if he brought into the Essais echoes of its tragic vision of humanity, Montaigne placed his own analysis on rather different ground.” Indeed: But what was it?

Preliminarily, Fontana proposes that Montaigne grounded his thought on himself. “Against the tide of debased, deceitful discourse, the author of the Essais was determined to speak ‘by his own universal being,’ not ‘as a grammarian, poet, or jurisconsult but as Michel de Montaigne’; the expression of a personal viewpoint, divested of any technical authority, would alone prove truly universal,” universally understood and felt. Montaigne humbly presents himself as the least authoritative man, as a man nonetheless speaking to other men from and to what is common to them all. Which is to say that he humbly presents himself as the Universal Man, as distinct from God Who Became Man, and from men who claim to speak for that God.

Fontana divides her book into six chapters on six topics: laws, virtue, toleration, opinion (particularly conscience), trust (particularly political legitimacy), and politics. “The practice of the law representing Montaigne’s main public activity,” as his subcommittee work in the Bordeaux Assembly centered on litigation—what we today would call administrative law. He criticizes French law as “a judicial monstrosity,” an incoherent combination of Roman law, feudal custom, and kingly edicts, too numerous to be understood yet never enough to cover every case, and all further confused by a “vertiginous accumulation of interpretations and commentaries” by jurists. With the rule of law so profoundly compromised, corruption and sectarian cruelty took hold, sparking and fueling the civil wars. Tradition, long-established custom, offered no help in a country in which the Reformation decried existing customs as tainted, while Catholics denounced the Reformers as damnable heretics. At the same time, customs will always be with us; human beings need regular habits, some accepted way of life, even if the ways of life in one country differs sharply from those in another. To top matters off, appeals to a higher, divine law will also fail, inasmuch as “human beings had simply no access to a certain knowledge of the law of God and could never reach an agreement about its content.” At best, the law of God might enter through the individual conscience, whereby men “recogniz[e] instinctively when some obvious instance of injustice, abuse, or cruelty had occurred.” This too had evidently proved a weak reed, easily bent by passions secular and religious.

What then of virtue, an appeal to character? Augustine’s critique of “pagan” virtue, and Machiavelli’s invitation to transform Roman virtus into his commended virtù had left men without any clear, rational standard of morality. Montaigne doubted Augustine’s emphatic critique of classical virtue as refuted by the Biblical teaching on original sin, but he also saw substantial evidence before his eyes that any valorization of the military virtues, as seen either in Rome or, in a more sinister way in Machiavelli would not strengthen but weaken societies pervaded by its spirit. “People became fatalistic, careless of danger, indifferent to the sufferings of others as well as to their own, insensitive to cruelty”; in Montaigne’s words, with such an ethos “any opinion is strong enough to make men espouse it at the price of life.” Accordingly, Montaigne “pursued an emphatically unheroic, modern ideal of ‘ordinary’ virtue.” In Fontana’s estimation this amounts to a peaceable form of Christianity, although underneath this piety there may be a peaceable form of Machiavellianism. On that point, David Lewis Schaefer’s careful exegesis of the Essais in his The Political Philosophy of Montaigne remains persuasive.

Whether a tamed Christianity or a tamed Machiavellianism animates Montaigne’s soul, that soul does strive to tame other souls in addition to itself. One sees this in what Fontana aptly calls his “politics of toleration,” and specifically in the essay “Of Freedom of Conscience,” “set at the center of the text, in the middle of Book II.” In what some readers may see as a sobering feature, and others as a sly one, Montaigne constructs his argument “around a single historical figure, the Roman emperor Julian, known as ‘the Apostate,'” in the process “turning this traditional enemy of Christianity into a classical hero and a great tragic figure.” Fontana also notices that Montaigne doesn’t openly call for religious pluralism, quite understandably regarding religious contention dangerous to civic peace. Instead, he confines himself to castigating cruel treatment of heretics and to questioning the self-righteous certitude of those who practice such treatment. The political circumstances of sixteenth-century France differed radically from those of, say, 1920s America; H. L. Mencken and Clarence Darrow would not have survived. Montaigne was preeminently a ‘survivor.’

In treating matters of conscience generally, Fontana describes Montaigne’s Julian as a “heroic figure”—”a reborn Alexander the Great without the Macedonian’s drinking habits,” “the incarnation of a classical ideal that had sadly disappeared from the modern world.” One recalls Machiavelli’s similar use of ‘ancient’ figures for his own ‘modern’ purposes.  Among those ‘modern’ purposes for Montaigne was his support of his patron Henry of Navarre, a man of very dubious faith in the eyes of French Catholics, for the French throne. A professing Protestant, Henry faced a problem: “If he chose to recant in order to take up his crown, the king was exposed to the risk of becoming ‘a state Catholic,’ while an opportunistic conversion would turn him into an atheist, with no particular attachment to any religion.” Henry successfully rose to this challenge by exercising a decidedly Montaignian skill, namely, obfuscation, “blurr[ing] in his statement some aspects of the Catholic doctrine he found especially unconvincing, such as the cult of saints and the existence of purgatory.” With Henry, “Catholic” meant “catholic” or universal, and not so much identification of Catholicism with “the Church of Rome.”

As philosophers will do, Montaigne deepened his analysis of a political dilemma into a consideration of “the puzzling nature of belief” itself. In the longest essai, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne denies that faith derives from “human reasons and discourses” but from “irrational, ultimately superhuman motivations.” This sounds like the work of the Holy Spirit. But Montaigne distinguishes the superhuman dimension of faith from its “imperfect human dimension,” which consists of “a package of myths, norms, and practices that defined a specific culture”; thus, “one was a Christian in the same way in which one happened to be German or from Périgord, by an accident of birth.” In “this anthropological dimension,” Christianity “was just like any other religion.” In this sense “Montaigne used opinion and croyance as synonymous.” Politically speaking, questions of faith have no spiritual dimension at all, but remain in the realm of eminently fallible but formidable public opinion. Opinion is neither rational nor spiritual but a matter of passion, imagination, and habit; “the content of opinion was generally arbitrary.” Given that, as Fontana finely phrases it, Montaigne thought that “Christianity had already accumulated a sufficient number of martyrs and did not need to add to an already impressive score.”

Faith suggests trust and, politically considered, trust constitutes the bulk of legitimacy or lawfulness. In this way Fontana recurs to the theme of her opening chapter, having guided the reader to a more thoughtful understanding of the foundation of law. Montaigne raises a rather high standard, when it comes to trust generally. “If an authoritative Christian writer like Saint Augustine described a miraculous event…supporting his narrative with the testimony of two learned bishops, one should perhaps suspend one’s judgment before dismissing the whole story as simply incredible.” He starts with distrust, hedging trust with a doubtful “perhaps,” thereby leaving the authority of the “authoritative Christian writer” in question.

In political societies, Machiavelli had argued that force crucially supplements trust or fidelity. Again, Montaigne holds back, given the malign effects of force seen in the French civil wars. He blames the recourse to violence on prior “corruption of public discourse,” on “the Machiavellian tradition” commending the use of “deceit and mendacity as suitable instruments of governance.” Similarly, violations of the rule of law lead societies to violence by destroying public trust. Despite his apparent support for monarchy, Montaigne then argues that the very position of the monarch, ruling alone, has proved “morally disabling,” inasmuch as they seldom experience any of “the essential components of a good moral education,” namely, “the sincere appraisal of their conduct and the confrontation, on a ground of equality, with the abilities and views of others.” Flattery corrupts them, from childhood on. He therefore applauds his patron Henry IV, who invited an assembly of notables at Rouen to give him their counsels, vowing to trust them. Even if Henry didn’t quite “transform the nature of the French monarchy” by such gestures, Montaigne “believed him at least capable of performing convincingly enough in this novel role of monarch ruling by popular consent.” One is left wondering if this is not really a Machiavellian adjustment of Machiavellianism misused.

Use and misuse are matters of practice, not theory, and Fontana concludes her book with a discussion of Montaigne as a practitioner of politics, or more precisely Montaigne’s reflections upon the practice of politics. Given the weakness of human reason in political life and men’s inability “to act consistently according to God’s law”—in other words the political inadequacy of both reason and revelation—the Machiavellian attempt to conquer fortune must be scaled back. It is not clear, even on Fontana’s account, that this means that the attempt must be abandoned altogether. If “mediocrity” must replace “grandeur,” and yet Aristotelian “mediocrity”—the location of virtue in the middle of extremes, with courage (for example) amounting to a “mean” between cowardice and rashness—also seems unattainably rational, what then? By Fontana’s accounting, Montaigne recommends that the prince turn not to God but to a wise advisor. And what might such a man look like? How will the prince know him when he meets him?

He will be “someone of middling condition, independent and satisfied with his own status,” a man who “would have nothing to lose from telling the truth, and nothing to gain from concealing it,” a man with connections “with ordinary people,” not only the elites. A man not unlike Michel de Montaigne, as he presents himself in the Essais, one is inclined to think. No fideist, no rationalist, but a man of experience. In America, two centuries later, Benjamin Franklin listened and learned.

Fontana avers that “Montaigne’s work shows a stern attachment to basic Christian principles such as individual responsibility, freedom, charity, and mercy, an attachment that is indicative of the writer’s moral disposition, even if it can tell us little about the precise nature of his religious beliefs”—such as, for example, whether he attached himself to Jesus as the Christ. “What was truly original about Montaigne’s contribution was not his defense of Christian values (or possibly of some unorthodox version of these), but the tension the Essais masterfully established between the values themselves, and their practical enforcement in the context of existing human societies.” In terms of the practice, the experience Fontana recognizes as Montaigne’s test for truth, “The Essais gradually but effectively dismantled the view that the legislation of human societies had its foundation in natural law; they also utterly destroyed the credibility of the claim that Christian states, and Christian rulers, were the guardians and enforcers of a divine order on earth.” There might still be natural law and/or a divine order, but no one quite knows what they are, if anyone ever did.