Seth Benardete: The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Winter 2001-2002, Volume 29, Number 2. Republished with permission.

 

Philosophy asks questions of tradition, then spins traditions of its own. A ‘philosophic tradition’ must be some tradition that builds questions of itself, and of tradition generally, into itself. One such tradition interrogates the Odyssey, seeking philosophy in Homer’s poetry. Few modern philosophers have taken up this tradition, such philosophers having judged the learning needed to do so unnecessary to the philosophic quest as they conceive it. Seth Benardete has acquired that learning, and with it the strength to follow the tradition. He departs from modern philosophers, renewing an old voyage.

His book, as the phrase goes, resists summary. But it encourages insight, and listing some insights Benardete offers may invite consideration of his argument. He recalls the acknowledged wisdom of poets and philosophers and asks readers to wonder if and how philosophic wisdom differs from poetic. Does the rational dialectic of argument differ fundamentally from the “poetic dialectic” of speech and action, or plot (xiii)?

1. “Whereas the Iliad begins with the names of Achilles and his father,” the Odyssey begins with a man in whom anonymity is coupled with knowledge, a much-traveled man separated from “father and fatherland” (3). Odysseus defeats the Cyclopes by calling himself “No One,” and by using his mind, the least ‘rooted,’ the most anonymous human characteristic.

In doing so, and yet also in so doing as part of a voyage back to his fatherland, back to his ‘roots,’ Odysseus radically alters the conditions of his rule of the fatherland, the rule he had won by revolution or “natural right” (4). Before his voyage, he ruled by natural right but had not used his mind to understand natural right. “[W]hat was originally an accidental coincidence of power and wisdom will have to be replaced by the conscious effort to put them together; but the terrible consequences of that effort” (the slaying of the suitors) “would seems to deny the desirability of their coincidence. Homer seems to have reflected on the Platonic possibility of philosopher-kings…” (4). The Olympian gods are the ones who overthrew their fathers, the cosmic gods, and Odysseus imitated them. Associated always with the Olympians (while his men remain pious, worshipping the Sun), Odysseus understands the world as nature not cosmos, understands political rule as founded upon natural right not paternity, and rules accordingly.

Any monarchy must concern itself with succession. A natural right monarchy, one that sees mere paternity as inadequate, presents its ruler with a problem beyond the usual worry that the legitimate heir to the throne may prove a dunce. The people of Ithaca, are restless, understandably; the brothers and cousins of Penelope’s importunate suitors had been led to violent death by her husband the king. The Olympian gods of natural right instruct Odysseus on how to found a new regime in the “postheroic world” in which son Telemachus must live, an iron age ruled by Athena or mind (13). Telemachus consults Athena but imprudently “blurts out” her “private advice” in front of the suitors (14-15), a failure that puts his own natural right to rule into question. “The Odyssey is remarkable for the light touch with which Athena guides the course of events” (15); for the ancients there is no very tight connection between the rule of reason and the slaughterbench of ‘history’ (that is to say, there is no ‘history’ conceived as a dialectical course of events). This is so, even if Athena occasionally commends the use of the slaughterbench to rulers.

2. In the Odyssey the person who most closely resembles a historicist is Nestor, who believes human events to be explicable in terms of “a strict theodicy” or moral tale in which everything that happens happens because wise and just gods cause it 919). Those slaughtered are rightly slaughtered; only the good survive. Nestor is no poet; his speeches lack both simile and dialogue. Simile and dialogue bring duality in, and with it moral ambiguity. Poetic dialectic yields no grand synthetic end and raises questions more insistently than it sets down answers. Poetry brings with it “a perspective beyond good and evil,” at least in any narrow or ‘moralizing’ sense of the phrase (21). The Nestorian account leads in the end not to piety but to the disappearance of the gods, who are relativized to certain places and time.

Duality also inheres in the distinction between appearance and reality, a distinction that would bedevil the thinkers of the Enlightenment, who said they wanted to bring reality to the surface and make it publicly authoritative. But the harshness of reality would make its publicity a source of endless vengeance, or of despairing listlessness; political life, impossible without memory, is only possible if memory is limited by wise forgetfulness, as when Helen drug men, making them “forget their malignant thoughts and sorrows” (27). By selecting some memories and covering others, poetry in its doubleness acts like the drug mixed by the beautiful, Argus-eyed, transpolitical Helen. Founders must plan thoughtfully like gods and the best poets; they must also understand that the plans and even the planning, the work of the mind, also affect (at worst infect) the workings of the heart or spirit (thumos). “Helen seems to have all the traits of the poet, from the coolness with which Homer depicts the most terrible things to his mimetic capacity to make things appear in all their vividness and his insight into the hiddenness of things” (29). But Homer’s Odysseus excels even her; unlike her, he “seems never to have fallen under the spell of Aphrodite” and so exhibits a strong moral character. Why then does he choose mortality instead of godly immortality?

3. Odysseus’ choice of mortality occurs during his stay with Calypso, a stay that the wise Athena (not Aphodite) arranges so that the natural softening of democratic resentments in Ithaca may take place, and King Odysseus’ potential successor, Telemachus, may mature—both in the course of nature, over time. In choosing mortality, Odysseus rejects the mindlessness of paradise, where “there seems to be no place for man” (35). It is a wise choice, especially given the suspicion that Calypso’s offer was empty, and Odysseus would have been killed, not deified, had he accept it (37).

This non-choice points to the frustration of life, the anger of thwarted desires that cause minds to ‘double’ by ‘talking to themselves,’ or to the gods. ‘Odysseus’ may be a pun on odussamenos, the anger of someone against someone else. At the founding stage of his new regime, the natural-right rule of the angry but not mindless man will be terror (34). If the gods withdraw, human reliance on mind and force intensifies, but so do human self-opacity and the need for caution and questioning.

4. After a long stay with Calypso, Odysseus has a short stay with the Phaeacians, who live in a sort of human paradise “without pain or suffering” (47). Having chosen the human, Odysseus will induce the Phaeacians to make the same choice. Odysseus is the humanist evangel. A human life, in its doubleness, longs for the reconciliation of legal right with natural right. This can be done, but only at the expense of eros (59), and therefore it cannot be done satisfactorily, once and for all.

5. Centrally, Homer goes along with human duality by having Odysseus tell his own story, at the prompting of King Alcinous (“Brain”) of the Phaeacians. In telling his story, Odysseus’ “morally neutral curiosity” is on display, along with his considerable moral virtues. The two come together in Odysseus’ willingness “to run risks for knowledge” (69). Participating in the siege of Troy, an act of dubious justice, Odysseus wants to know more about the conflicting ways of men, and so voyages. “There are forms of the verb ‘to wander’ (alaomai) that are indistinguishable from ‘true’ (alethes)” (72). From the orderly but cannibalistic, insular, and doltish Cyclopes he learns that “law and order can be apart” (72). Odysseus outwits them, using the universal-anonymous mind, which at the crucial moment overmasters Odysseus’ anger. From his disastrous encounters with incestuous Aeolus and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians he begins to see the natural limitations of the rule of the mind, namely, the bodily and the democratic.

These adventures and misadventures prepare him for the education he received from Hermes, “the peak of the Odyssey” (84). After committing his first act of justice that does not serve himself (embarking on the rescue of his men from Circe) Odysseus sees the revelation of Hermes, who not only tells him about, but shows him the nature of the moly, a plant which protects him against the witch’s spells. Knowledge of nature “lets Odysseus share in the knowledge of the gods without his having to share in their being” (85). “[T]he gods’ power arises from the knowledge” of the nature of things, especially of human beings. The human body is the true home of the human mind: This discovery reconciles the question of the rootless mind with the longing for home, for rootedness. The moly has both flower and root; it is two and it is one. “It now seems that Homer was the first, as far as we know, to have come to an understanding of this philosophic principle, to which he gave the name ‘nature.’ The experiences that had to precede its discovery are the measure of the difficulty of its discovery.” (87)  Odysseus’ odyssey represents the philosophic quest. The philosopher is both human, an embodied mind, and divine, insofar as the knows himself (as an embodied mind). The philosophic life suggests “a humanity that, though it belongs to man as man, is not open to every man, since what he is necessarily he is not necessarily unless he knows that that is what he is necessarily. Without that knowledge he can be enchanted and made subject to perfect rule.” (87)

How then could a philosopher live (as he must, given human limitations) among fellow men who are not philosophic? Unphilosophic men “must have a version of the knowledge of what constitutes man” (88). That knowledge is the story of Hades, which teaches all men that soul and body are separable, and that mindlessness is to be feared. Hades is “a lawful equivalent of Odysseus’ knowledge of his nature” (88).

Odysseus’ knowledge requires moral virtue before and after he receives it. Human being, anthopos, is intelligible and invisible; manliness and womanliness are visible, bodily, necessary. Odysseus must resist the temptation of Circe; “there is in man some capacity to resist, a strength of soul or whatever we choose to call it, that can be lost or diminished regardless of knowledge” (89). This thumotic virtue encompasses not only self-control but sympathy for other men, the unphilosophic ones; political life remains necessary for the philosopher, and that life includes a measure of piety. The suitors ignore the wisdom that begins with the fear of Hades, and this is the real reason why they must be so forcefully punished, for the good of both philosopher and city. Ithacans need to be re-minded. The philosopher, for his part, needs to learn that he can know, but not know all, that he can resist but not finally defeat evil, and that he can persuade, but only to a point. Self, gods, and other men “stand in his way” (100). He must in this sense “submit to his fate” (100).

6. The limited freedom Odysseus enjoys may be seen in his lies. Upon returning home, he would rule, but ruling after the experience of philosophic noēsis differs from ruling before it. Odysseus will soon push off for another voyage, a second sailing. To leave his kingdom safely “in the hands of his son” (104), he must employ both force and fraud. Having employed them, getting out of town will be both the philosophic and the politic move to make. Force and fraud combine in the killing of the suitors, which is not merely a punishment but an exemplary punishment “designed to illustrate the principle, ‘Fear the gods and the future indignation of men'” (106). Liars, including poets, can philosophize and side with the gods.

7. Once the gods “have completed their withdrawal” (120), eyewitnesses of divinity will give way to prophets who hear the divine choice. Such hearsay, at least in Telemachus, “seems to be nothing but his own thoughts” (117). The noetic experience will become more internalized in the twilight world, the iron age.

The twilight of the gods and heroes also brings democracy. Telemachus will rule the future Ithaca, but will share power with Eumaeus and even a cowherd.

As for Odysseus, his political character comes to dominate his philosophic character. Homer takes care to show “how closely anger can pose as reason” (126), distinguishing the bow from the lyre, and both from the liar. The anger built into Odysseus’ name comes to the surface in the end. Philosophy does not always ‘take,’ even after one experiences it. Philosophy is for the rarest natures; perhaps one should not suppose oneself a philosopher.

8. Penelope’s weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud enchants the suitors, distracting them from their most prudent political course, which would have been to form an oligarchy and ignore the woman. Responsible for the deaths of so many Ithacan men, Odysseus will kill most of the remaining ones who are spirited. The soft-spirited survivors will feel guilty, because one of Odysseus’ allies tells them that the gods favor Odysseus and punish them for failing to oppose the suitors through Odysseus. Guilt enables the gods to withdraw, to become invisible; guilt ‘works’ only with the base. All others must be killed, if they have rejected the gods. It might be noted that in coming generations, new spirited ones will arise. Regimes change, therefore, Men will need Homeric wisdom until there are no men.

9. The Enlightenment wanted to substitute knowledge for belief. The final episodes of the Odyssey might seem to support that project. Odysseus stands revealed as himself at last, and he rules. The consignment of the souls of the heroic world to Hades also seems consonant with the Enlightenment, with whatever would be the ancient-world equivalent of embourgeoisement. The Enlightenment made much of recognition, and in this Hegel, the philosopher who wanted a political world animated by mutual recognition, is its culmination. The end of the Odyssey seems full of acts of recognition, and of the restoration of authority founded upon recognition.

Benardete looks more closely, however. He sees that Odysseus grants Penelope little or no recognition for her sagacity, and indeed “from the first book on she is pushed aside in favor of the son she fostered and protected” (150). Odysseus teases his old father, who cannot seriously be expected to recognize his son after twenty year of wear and tear on both of them. In so doing, “Odysseus aims at two things at once, which he believes to be somehow connected: he wants Laertes to know him as he is, but he does not want Laertes to know him if he does not genuinely miss him. Only if his grief is real should he recognize the real Odysseus. These are competing demands unless the standard is doglike devotion; but no human being can be like Argus, and Laertes fails the test of loyalty with knowledge. Loyalty and knowledge are as far apart from one another as the unquestioned is from the result of questioning, or as Odysseus the homeward-bound is from Odysseus the wanderer. The entire Odyssey seems to have strained from the start to assert their togetherness in Odysseus, who first chose memory and then professed to represent the anonymity of mind.” (152)  Odysseus’ “destiny is to establish belief and not knowledge.” (152)  He is poetic-dialectical proof of the impossibility of political enlightenment, of straightforward anti-traditionalism. The rationalist dialectics of Hegel and Marx are taller tales than Homer’s. With a dialectic both rational and poetic, Benardete shows here that one may reject the dialectic of Enlightenment without falling into anti-philosophic obscurantism.

 

Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson: Democracy and Disagreement. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Jürgen Habermas: Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. William Rehg translation. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996.

 

Modern liberalism comes to sight as a critique of the ‘old regime’ of throne and altar. Such philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu view monarchist state-building—’theorized’ (as academics now like to say) in England by Hobbes and Filmer, in France by Bodin and Bossuet—as an actual or potential threat to the natural rights of life and liberty. Liberalism undertakes to establish regimes conducing to civil and international peace in a Europe prone to factionalism and warfare. In this project, modern liberalism has in large measure succeeded in the sense that liberal-democratic (more precisely commercial-republican) regimes, once established, do in fact avoid wars with one another.

From the beginning, liberalism has been attacked on two fronts. Christians have suspected liberalism of atheism, of leaving no place, or only a subordinate, private place, for spiritual concerns that should be paramount in the mind of every person. The largely forgotten polemical exchanges between Locke and a number of English divines–exchanges marked by Locke’s seemingly endless repertoire of evasion and his opponents’ mounting frustration and asperity—exemplify this tension. Many not-so-Christian thinkers have felt something of the same annoyance, and the list of them is long, including Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. They may not care much for spirituality, but spiritedness, high-heartedness, those aspects of the human soul not satisfied by the peaceful exchange of goods and service—these they do esteem, and they rebuke liberalism for its studied neglect of them (even when, as does Marx, they reject the very notion of the human soul). For its non-religious critics, liberalism is just too damned peaceful; it borders on complacency.

“Deliberative democracy” is another episode in this long-running drama of liberalism and its critics’ discontents. Unlike many of their predecessors, deliberative-democratic theorists take great care not to undermine democratic institutions; indeed, they seek to strengthen them, to make them more democratic without dissolving them into some form of libertarian political minimalism.

At least since James Madison, liberalism has allocated considerable public space for interest groups. In Democracy and Disagreement, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson object to the degree to which interest-group bargaining has taken over the public sphere. Connected to this decidedly unspirited development is the concomitant takeover of public decision-making by courts. Interest-group bargaining and courtroom argument both push ordinary citizens to one side, making them feel like guests in their own house. Popular sovereignty itself risks atrophy.

A merely spirited/contentious public discourse will not do, however. To avoid a public sphere dominated by angry wrangling, Gutmann and Thompson propose terms of the regulation of “public reason” based on what amounts to a tacit social contract: Each participant in shall make claims on terms acceptable in principle by the other citizen-participants in public discourse. So, for example, if as a Hindu one deplores the consumption of meat, I must refrain from arguing for the relevant sumptuary laws on terms acceptable only to my fellow Hindus—the spiritual need to escape the Wheel, the reincarnative benefits accruing to asceticism, etc. Rather, one must appeal to principles held by all or at least almost all of my fellow citizens, most of whom (in most countries) are not Hindus. Therefore, I might argue that meat-eating is a health hazard comparable to air pollution; that meat-eating causes air pollution by increasing the population of cattle, which generate environmentally-dangerous bovine emissions. And so on. I am still free to urge my fellow citizens to convert to Hinduism, but not as part of the debate on public policy. In ordinary political life, this way of arguing does in fact frequently prevail, anyway; Gutmann and Thompson would elevate it to a rule.

Discourse guided by this rule serves reciprocity in two ways. First, it is reasonable in the sense that it appeals to the rules of logic and of evidence familiar in Western societies for centuries. Those rules are available to any person of ordinary intelligence; practically speaking, they exclude very few citizens. Second, the rule of “public reason” excludes appeal to any authority, religious or otherwise, whose conclusions are, in the authors’ term, “impervious” to the rules of logic and of evidence. This reciprocity is extended as far as possible to include and empower ordinary citizens. In their striking phrase, reciprocity exemplifies “civic magnanimity”; that is to say, Aristotle’s great-souled or magnanimous man, dismissed by Bertrand Russell as undemocratic, can return in a democratic form as a male or female citizen whose mind and heart are large enough to respect, speak, and listen to all his/her co-participants in civic life.

Critics of deliberative democracy have argued in several ways. Some take a Realpolitik view: Politics is a matter of power, not chatter. A revolution is not a garden party; nor is a party caucus or a session of Congress. Even a garden party isn’t a garden party, but a space for contending ambitions and passions, however trivial. This objection, which in its best form is as old as Socrates’ strictures against sophists and rhetoricians, need not seriously injure the Gutmann/Thompson argument, which could easily incorporate the role of ‘power’ in political life without giving ground on the need to wield power reasonably.

More radically, some critics challenge the notion of reasonableness itself. What is ‘reasonable’? Is it not usually a narrow notion of what makes sense to the one who calls himself reasonable? Further, what’s so great about being reasonable, assuming that one could be? Should a Christian want to be reasonable, or to be saved? If a Christian says that it is reasonable to want to be saved from the eternal consequences of sin, and the only way to be saved is to accept Jesus Christ as one’s personal savior, is that not reasonable? It may be that the one thing most needful to any rational person is something supposedly “impervious” to “public reason.” If so, what good is “public reason”?

To this, deliberative democrats might reply: Public reason is good only for those tasks governments should undertake, as representatives of the (diverse) public: building and policing highways, collecting trash, providing for the common (physical) defense of the community, and so on. This would be to fall back to modern liberalism and its concept of the minimal state. Alternatively, deliberative democrats could say that anti-deliberative, or anti-rationalist democrats cannot defend democracy itself, except by sheer assertion. Why should a politics of sheer self-assertion satisfy itself within the tidy confines of democracy?

If seen as a complement to other normal political activities such as decision, command, and coercion, deliberative democracy as conceived by Gutmann and Thompson might strengthen democratic-republican practices to some degree. However, there is some danger that it might end in recapitulating the Stephen Douglas argument for popular sovereignty. Although Gutman and Thompson would recoil in horror from this suggestion, how would they meet Douglas’s argument, that one should not care whether slavery is voted up or down, so long as ‘everybody’—in Douglas’s day, white male citizens, in our day, non-jailed adult citizens—gets the chance to debate and to vote? Lincoln’s opposing argument, based on the natural-rights-based syllogism of the Declaration of Independence, attempts to mark off certain things from public interference, regardless of the size and passion of that ‘public.’ Whether natural rights can withstand philosophic scrutiny is of course a long argument, but, given the racial history of this and nearly every other country, natural rights enjoy a certain perennial saliency, whatever philosophers may say about them.

Jürgen Habermas advances a much more theoretically elaborate account of deliberative democracy. The “public reason” of the American theorists becomes “communicative action,” animated by “procedural reason,” but it is equally an attempt to solve the problem of how to organize politically the multiple, conflicting ‘worldviews’ found in modern, pluralist democracies, without imposing yet another ‘metaphysical’ system à la Kant or Hegel. In Habermas’s opinion, “if philosophy simply keeps its concepts clear it can uncover a surprising degree at a metalevel,” anyway, without Hegel’s all-synthesizing teleological dialect (xxxix). this will be true not only despite of but because there is no “higher” or “deeper reality to which we could appeal” than our own “linguistically structured forms of life” (xli). Nor does this linguistic web imply conservativism by reinforcing a sort of neo-Burkean ‘cultural’ politics; revolutionary politics can occur without the appeal to Hegelian or Marxist dialectic or to the older foundation of natural right, and, moreover, it can avoid the worst coercions of tyrants Left and Right by appealing to reasonable consensus. Epistemologically and even politically, the philosophy of Charles Pierce replaces those of Plato and Hegel. Perhaps most interestingly, it does so without entirely abandoning an appeal to nature. To speak at all requires certain “idealizations,” such as the use of words themselves (whose meanings must be held in common if they are to work at all), and also the connection of utterances “with context-transcending validity claims” (4). This is not the strong “transcendental necessity” of natural law, nor is it the argument of Aristotle, which links the use of human language to an account of the telos of human nature. Rather, “a set of unavoidable idealizations forms the counterfactual basis of an actual practice of reaching understanding, a practice that can critically turn against its own results and thus transcend itself” (4) (emphasis in original).

What this begins to resemble is a supersophicated Lockeanism, i.e., a linguistic form of the labor theory of value whereby the tension between ‘facts’ and ‘values’ or “facticity” and “validity” “must be marked off by the participants’ own efforts” (17) (emphasis added), as they engage in discourse as speakers and listeners in the public sphere. This collective linguistic work generates the “binding energies of language”—that is, authority, the combination of power and justice ‘authored’ by the political community. At the same time, the authority so generated isn’t ‘authoritarian’; no public case is ever closed in a public sphere founded upon discursiveness. Habermas would thus meet a major objection to the Enlightenment project: that rigorous reasoning and the rhetorical need for democratic consent is a circle that can never be squared, that Enlightenment rationalism must perforce degenerate into just another myth, just another throne and altar to which and on which sacrifices must ever be made.

Impracticable, you say? Fortunately, the “lifeworld” of any society provides “the backing of a massive background consensus” (22) that makes coherent “communicative action” feasible and stable; that is, supersophisticated Lockeanism eschews as naïve the tabula rasa of real Lockeanism, along with its contemporary moral-political analogue, the “original position” posited by John Rawls. With the pragmatists, Habermas would turn liberalism on its head, putting discourse first and ‘founding’ (whether epistemological or political) last. “Reason is embodied solely in the formal-pragmatic conditions that facilitate deliberative politics, so that we need not confront reason as an alien authority residing somewhere beyond political communication” (285). Habermas hopes finally to redeem the Enlightenment project of fusing rationality and practical action or power. To do so, he jettisons the various epistemological foundations of Enlightenment philosophy and the opposing foundations of post-Enlightenment historicism.

Habermas meets the criticism that discourse theory is mere chatter, incapable of facing up to the fact of coercion in politics, by distinguishing morality from law. Free moral discourse and coercive law must “interpenetrate” in order to “develop into a system of rights” (128). While this does meet the Realpolitik objection, it is open to another, namely, logical circularity: “When citizens interpret the system of rights in a manner congruent with their situation, they merely explicate the performative meaning of precisely the enterprise they took up as soon as they to decided to legitimately regulate their common life through positive law” (129). But if “democracy” is the standing assumption behind all “discourse,” will it not be vulnerable precisely to its deadliest enemies, who reject the “underlying consensus” itself? Is not the apparently dialogical, pluralistic universe of communicative action not monological at the start, a refusal to ascend from the cave of democratic conventions—a refusal that, not so paradoxically, leaves that cave vulnerable to intruders from the outside?

What Habermas needs is an argument which squarely confronts the fact not only of competing groups within democracies but of competing regimes in international politics. The vindication of human discourse can lead to the vindication of human rights only through this ‘state of nature.’ That this need not mean a return to modern liberalism may be seen by recalling Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the fact of human speech, the plurality of human regimes, and the distinction between the reciprocity of political rule and the denial of reciprocity seen in tyranny.

Modern liberalism is vulnerable to the epistemological critiques of Habermas and many others. The attempt to overcome religious conventionalism led to such mistaken moves as the Cartesian ego and the Lockean tabula; the quest for the discovery of human nature introspectively left philosophers in a reductionist dilemma. Hegel’s attempt to escape that dilemma by means of synthesizing dialectic made matters worse by firing ‘totalizing’ ambitions. The Socratic approach, starting with ‘discourse’ no less than does Habermas but employing dialectic rather than introspection to get at nature, is likely to produce better results, especially since Socrates, like Aristotle, does not hesitate to address the regime question.

 

Sheldon S. Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds: The Making of a Political and Theoretical Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Originally published in The Washington Times, November 4, 2001.

 

Comprehensive, fascinating, seemingly diffuse, Alexis de Tocqueville’s writings have long needed a guide both philosophically informed and philosophically-tempered. Ideologues and partisans ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have mined them for insights, or at least for usable quotations. Sheldon S. Wolin does not entirely abandon his own ideological predispositions, which remain New-Leftish. But he is too intelligent and honest not to push beyond political-sectarian bickering, and his book results from the need to see Tocqueville in the manner Tocqueville tried to see the politics of his time—whole, and without blinders. It is a need many of us share, as Tocqueville remains one of those writers who can teach us as if he were our wiser contemporary.

As a man of the ‘Left,’ Wolin wrestles his way to Tocqueville through the usual heavyweights and middleweights—Marx first of all, Foucault, Derrida—with a chivalrous gesture or two for feminists. Though a bit tedious for we who are not habitués of that arena, this wrestling has honed Wolin’s reflexes even as it’s inflicted some scars. The Left reads so many bad books, taking so many too seriously. Wolin reads, and invites his political friends to read, a really great writer for a change.

Politician and political theorist, Tocqueville lived between the old “world” or social order of aristocracy and the new social order of democracy. Aristocrats such as Tocqueville had been bred to rule, to be political men; democrats Tocqueville observed and worked with had been bred for middle-class lives of family and business. The human soul—or at least some souls, in every generation—wants more than hearth, home, and money; it craves the wider scope of public accomplishment. Tocqueville’s soul could not fit into bourgeois life. He saw that even the richest country could not afford to ignore such souls, which, if unsatisfied and ignored by a merely pragmatic majority, might overturn decent life in order to strike at banality.

Democracy consists of social equality, the stern hierarchy of the aristocratic world having declined. This occurred through the slow action of human nature itself, which finally lets excessively artificial distinctions rot. The number of natural aristocrats generated in any generation is too small, the distribution of them too scattered, to rule effectively without merely conventional props. Even by Aristotle’s time, just kingship, the dominance of one naturally superior man, had been made obsolete by the natural advance of civilization among the Greeks. A similar civilizational growth, spurred initially by Christianity, had rendered aristocracy precarious by Tocqueville’s time.

But increased social equality does not guarantee a republican political regime. As Tocqueville saw and foresaw, socially equal persons with no vigilance or spine might readily succumb not so much to the harsh tyranny of a Napoleon (thought they had done that, too) but to the soft tyranny of social-welfare bureaucrats who use weak-willed parliamentarians as camouflage for a political science conceived as a sort of engineering instead of the exercise of prudence and justice. This new ‘science of administration’ imposes a political practice to match: homogenizing and minutely controlling, and finally not so much political as despotic.

To defend a political life for whole-souled human beings in the modern world, Tocqueville looks away from scientistic materialism and toward political forms and practices that engage citizens in deliberation and spirited participation in the public sphere. He finds such forms first in small places—township halls and political clubhouses, churches and taverns—wherever citizens meet to talk and to learn from each other. He finds such practice also in the high politics among democratizing nation-states. He finds it in his special project: persuading a weakening aristocracy to accept democracy, aiming to refine and enlarge its way of life.

Wolin is especially alert when showing how Tocqueville’s experience in French politics in the tumultuous yet somehow tedious and small-souled milieu of the second quarter of the nineteenth century illustrated his theories while disappointing his hopes. With much reluctant huffing, Wolin brings himself to admit that socialism did have the potential for despotism that Tocqueville saw in it. And, moving to a more congenial target, Wolin has no trouble at all in acknowledging the fecklessness of the bourgeois parliamentarians of the day: “The lack of political intelligence and moral courage at critical times was not due to the accident that feckless politicians happened to be in power but to an atrophied political sensibility that was a direct consequence of a long process of depoliticization.” Wolin does not go so far as to suggest that social democratization and “depoliticization” easily mesh, inasmuch as the demos inclines somewhat toward comfortable self-preservation and not so much to the rigors of citizenship, but he might. Without a specifically political or aristocratic class in place, crises still occur, but without an adequate core of strong-souled men to respond. As for Tocqueville, he died on the eve of the American Civil War; he might have explained Lincoln, that natural yet also self-made aristocrat, as an anomaly, but he would have had a harder time explaining the soldiers who fought on both sides. If human nature has produced democracy, human nature has also at times produced formidable defenders of democracy from the ranks of commoners.

In striving to give us Tocqueville whole, and in doing so better than any one writer in English, Wolin puts us so far in his debt that any criticism seems as small-souled as the political hacks who fumbled their way through French history between the Revolution of ’89 and de Gaulle’s founding of the Fifth Republic. But even this splendid book has its flaws, and they happen to be instructive.

Chief among them is Wolin’s failure to appreciate the Aristotelian dimension of Tocqueville’s political science. He sees that “Tocqueville’s new [political] science” has “numerous points of contact” with Aristotle’s ‘old’ political science, but he does not see one of the most crucial of those points. In calling Tocqueville’s criticisms of democracy “anti-democratic,” Wolin misses what Aristotle and Tocqueville both teach: Any regime that attempts to solve its problems by purifying itself will destroy itself in the end. This goes for both the oligarchy whose rulers assume that they will strengthen themselves by subordinating the poor ever more rigorously and the democrats who tell themselves that the cure for the ills of democracy is ‘more democracy.’ To strengthen a democratic republic a legislator might fuse some undemocratic elements into it, an alloy being tougher than any pure metal. Like so many of the ‘Left,’ Wolin sees this when it comes to the virtues of social diversity but doesn’t see it when it comes to institution-building, that is, hierarchy or rule.

To misunderstand, ignore, or reject this insight leads to a certain impatience with, an insufficient appreciation of, the statesmanship of the American Founders. The Founders are just too undemocratic for Wolinian sensibilities. He goes so far as to claim that they advocated what Aristotle called a ‘mixed regime’—an attempted balance of democratic and oligarchic classes in the structure of the government. There is something to this, as Paul Eidelberg argued several decades back, in his The Philosophy of the American Constitution. But of course the America of 1787 lacked the class structure Aristotle saw; if they founded a mixed regime, it was one in which the people at large formed the social basis of every branch of government, including the Supreme Court. The Founders remained dedicated to popular sovereignty, striving to make their democratic republic just by establishing such ‘undemocratic’ devices as an independent and unelected judiciary, an executive who could act with firmness and dispatch without consulting the legislature, and a Senate that represented large and small states equally. Tocqueville acknowledged these devices and admired their intention and design, recognizing their limitations in light of the sectional rivalries that intensified throughout his life, as he watched from Europe, sadly. He scarcely would have blamed the impending (and temporary) disruption of the Founders’ Union on an insufficient esteem for democracy. If anything, the war bespoke insufficient esteem for the natural-rights political theory the Founders sought to put into action in the government they framed. Natural rights affirmed popular sovereignty while limiting majoritarian presumptions. Ever-wider political ‘participation’ alone cannot adequately reinforce democratic republicanism.