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.

 

John Gray: Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 2000.

This review was published in the Washington Times, November 14, 2000.

 

According to John Gray, the two-facedness of liberalism consists in its endorsement of two ideals that sharply conflict in our (post)modern world. Liberals have sought a “rational consensus on the best way of life,” typically, the regime of commercial republicanism or, more ambitiously, democratic socialism. Liberals have also claimed that “human beings can flourish in many ways of life,” that disparate religious and ethnic groups can learn to coexist peacefully under the liberal political order.

Gray rejects the liberal claim that rational consensus on commercial-republican or any other set of political, economic, social, or cultural foundation can be sustained. That is because no consensus on such matters is rationally derivable. The claim made not only by liberals but by political philosophers from Socrates onward—that there is an ideal political regime, obtainable at least in theory, as a standard by which to judge lesser regimes, if not in practice-must be abandoned as chimerical.

Instead of one ideal, reason discovers “many forms of life in which humans can thrive.” At best, philosophers can help their fellow-citizens to formulate a peaceful modus vivendi wherein these forms will survive without jostling each other too violently.

Gray also rejects the charge that he preaches moral relativism or some other nihilism. To endorse a plurality of goods or “values” is not to claim that they are all equal, and that moral choices are therefore arbitrary. “The good is independent of our perspectives on it, but it is not the same for all.” The good plays out differently for persons and peoples differently circumstanced; “justice does not always speak with one voice.” Courage, prudence, and justice, for example, indispensably comprise any good human life, but may result in radically different ways of life, and rightly.

Gray aims his best philosophic shots at the utilitarian and neo-Kantian schools of liberalism which have prevailed in American academic circles in recent decades, properly accusing them of entertaining rationally baseless, parochial assumptions about the character of the human good. John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and other over-publicized theorists take a deserved drubbing at his hands, although it must be noticed that they have been drubbed before, early and often, without much effect on their status as the scholars scholars love to cite.

Gray’s “modus vivendi” stance exhibits two problems, one practical/political, the other theoretical/philosophic. Practically, any modus vivendi, any way of life, needs to defend itself against enemies who want to destroy and supplant it. Would anyone fight for “values-pluralism”? Or would it not rather incline the vivendists down a slipper slope of complacency towards tyranny?

Gray himself exhibits such a tendency when, in comparing the United States to Castro-era Cuba, he remarks that a boy like the would-be expatriate Elian Gonzalez could get a better education in Havana than in certain big-city school districts in America. Really? Given the character of tyranny, how much can Gray or anyone else know about Cuban schools? We can know some of the trash Castro stuffed into the heads of his putatively very literate subjects, as Castro broadcast it widely; it did not argue powerfully for the merits of Cuban education under communism. If the world is believed to dress mostly in shades of gray, will not tolerant, peace-loving vivendists not go politically color-blind, at their own peril?

The theoretical problem is worse still. Gray praises those who worked to end slavery in the last century. “When the proscribed slavery, abolitionists made persons and chattels incomparably valuable”—that is, they made it impossible to treat persons as objects for sale. But in so outlawing slavery, did they in some literal sense make human beings morally unsalable? Or did they rather end a legal and social practice that had been wrong all along, because human nature does not as a rule flourish in slavery? In other words, Gray neglects the philosophic question of natural right, the moral foundation of American commercial republicanism. In this, he is as parochial in his Britishness as Rawls is in his (contemporary, academic) Americanness.

That the acknowledgement of natural right in politics need not result in irrational intolerance or dogmatism, but can nonetheless stiffen political backbones against tyranny, can be seen not so much in the philosophers of the past two-and-a-half centuries as in the political thought of such men as Washington, Madison, and Lincoln, who combined adherence to principle with a profound capacity for prudential reasoning. Gray seeks in some way to replace philosophically-informed prudence with a sophisticated doctrine of pacifism. This is simultaneously to load doctrine with too much weight to bear in practice, while undercutting clear-cut principles that men and women can defend.

The Apology and the Crito present the reader with a contradiction and a paradox. The contradiction is that Socrates advocates resistance to political authority in one dialogue, obedience in the other. The paradox is that Socrates advocates resistance in public, before the Athenian jury, whereas he advocates obedience in the privacy of his jail cell in a one-on-one conversation with an old friend.

The contradiction is easy to resolve. Socrates advocates resistance to public authority for ones like himself, for philosophers. If the soldiers at Gettysburg died so that the nation might live, Socrates at Athens died so that philosophy may live. He provokes the Athenians to kill him so that the philosopher as a human type will be admired and defended as a man of courage and not merely as an ‘intellectual’ by spirited and influential men who may have their own reasons for resisting the sway of public opinion. such men may come to identify with philosophers, offer them protection.

Crito is just such a man—wealthy, politically connected, a born ‘fixer.’ What he is not is a philosopher. (When the Hollywood movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck heard that Ronald Reagan wanted to run for governor of California, he protested, “No, no! Not Ronald Reagan as governor! Ronald Reagan as the governor’s best friend!” Crito is, or at least wants to be, the philosopher’s best friend. A man lacking philosophic wisdom may still admire the philosopher’s wit, justice, and courage.) Socrates does not want wealthy citizens like Crito to get into the habit of evading the law. On the contrary, Socrates’ argument in the Apology depends upon his own refusal to evade the law or the punishment attached to it. If Socrates were to consent to Crito’s plan, his words before the Athenians would ring hollow: For once, the ironic smile would play on the lips of the Athenians and not on the lips of Socrates. the Athenians would be victorious over philosophy if they were cheated out of killing the philosopher.

In solving the apparent contradiction between the dialogues one also removes the paradox. Socrates defies public authority by refusing to stop philosophizing; he provokes the death sentence that will make him, as the type of the philosopher, immortal by insolently asking for a reward for his philosophizing. (He then offers to ‘negotiate down’ to the payment of a trivial fine.) “The unexamined life is not worth living” is the final insult to the Athenians: Your lives are not worth living without me, the one who examines you, the one who prevents you from drifting off into the dreamy sleep of the quotidian. “I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live.” Dying life—philosophizing is practice of how to die—is preferable to living death—thoughtless, impassioned, mistaken.

The philosophic quest, animated by the eros for the good, renders Socrates unshakable. But what might render a decent non-philosopher like Crito unshakable, even as he fulfills his role as a friend and ally of philosophers? No public opinion, which will tolerate, then condemn, then regrets its condemnation of Socrates. Crito should rather be attached to the laws, as well as to a philosopher who abides by the laws. True, the laws themselves depend upon public opinion and its mood swings, but if enough citizens can be persuaded to revere them, public opinion itself will become less fickle. If the rich and well-connected become ‘conservative’ not only inasmuch as they seek to conserve their wealth but seek to conserve the laws, their conservatism will provide ballast for a ship too much buffeted by demagogic winds, by the tyranny of the majority as incited by malicious rhetoricians. If he rich instead decide, as Crito initially has decided, to regard the man wronged by the city as free to retaliate, then the rich will undermine the city, seek to rule it on their own terms. Their contempt for the law will infect the people, and violent factional strife—leaving peaceful philosophers maximally exposed to suspicion on both sides—will roil the city forever. This is the criticism Publius makes of ancient democracies. And so Socrates pretends that the laws are his parents—surely, as Peter Ahrensdorf notes, the most extreme form of ‘conventionalism,’ so extreme as to be deliberately parodistic of conventionalism. [1]  Philosophically-minded reads will see the joke. Crito will not, and that is all to the good, both for him and for the Athenians. In this, Socrates earns his title as not only a wise man but a just one.

Thomas Hobbes presents a different, sterner, and seemingly more doctrinaire view. The difference may be accounted for in terms of philosophy—his different account of nature—and in terms of politics—specifically, the advent of Christianity and its collision with secular rulership.

Far from being orderly, nature as a whole exhibits dissociation (Leviathan I. 13). Nature is atomistic. By nature, human beings war with one another, like colliding atoms. But the atoms themselves do have a certain discernible order, a structure of passions with the fear of violent death as its capstone, but also the desire for the things hat make life commodious and the hope to attain those things. Therefore, each atom obeys nineteen natural laws: among these Hobbes lists the inclination to seek peace and follow it; to defends its own existence by all available means; to seek peace by establishing “justice,” i.e., contractual agreements to recognize the “rights” of (more accurately, desires for) life, liberty, and the property that makes life and liberty sustainable.

The establishment of an effective contract for peace, with security for each one, requires that some power be instituted with sufficient capacity to enforce that security—else “every man will, and lawfully rely on his own strength and art” (Leviathan II. 17). Therefore, no right to revolution exists. For the sake of civic peace, the sovereign must be the soul judge of the actions and desires of the subjects. To challenge the power of the sovereign is to return to the dissociational nature of all objects above the ‘atomic’ level, and so to threaten the existence of the ‘atoms,’ the members of the civil society themselves. “Sovereign power is not so hurtful as the want of it” (II. 18). Civil obedience is absolute: “Nothing that the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on any pretence soever, can properly be called injustice, or injury” (II. 21); only if the sovereign fails to protect his subject, plunging the subject back into the natural war of all against all, will the subject’s obligation to his sovereign dissolve.

Hobbes lists fifteen “infirmities” of commonwealths leading to what we now call a ‘failed state.’ Central to the list is the imitation of foreign nations (II. 29), perhaps because a false prophet is one who teaches “any other religion than that which is already established” (III. 32); Jesus apparently did not do so, as Hobbes observes that He expounded the Mosaic Law (III. 42). However, Pauline Christianity, based upon Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to all nations, clearly does violate Hobbes’s rule. Evangelizing Christianity, which at bottom recognizes no nations, denying the distinction between Greek and Jew, has introduced dangerous novelties wherever it has gone. This can be seen more concretely in Behemoth, Hobbes’s dialogue on the English civil wars, “the many shiftings of the supreme authority” which occurred between 1640 and 1659. [2]

In Hobbes’s telling, seditious factions caused these bloody wars. Presbyterian ministers, Catholics, and the various ‘dissenting’ sects (central to the list being the Fifth-Monarchy men, who envisioned the imminent return of the Christ to earth); liberally-educated parliamentarians infatuated with classical republicanism; businessmen enamored of a foreign nation, commerce-minded Netherlands; the poor, avid of money; and the people, “ignorant of their duty” to obey the sovereign: all these groups, some averse to one another, fired the ambition to rebel against the monarchy and the established Church of England (Behemoth, 4). Because “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people,” heterodoxy is civic poison (16). “The Universities have been to this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans” (40), serving as “the core of the rebellion” (58). Is it not an outrage that a man “will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself?” (63)  This spiritual effort he could very well keep to himself, without disturbing the public peace. The privatization of religion divides and conquers all religion, except for the civil religion of the State, the doctrines of which are identical to the will of the sovereign. (In this matter as in others, Hobbes wastes little sympathy. To kill 1,000 Presbyterian ministers would be a “great massacre,” but the “killing of 100,000” in a civil war ignited by ministers “is the greater” [95].) “[C]onverse with these divinity-disputers as long as you will, you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affair, either of war or peace” (144). Better to keep them as private men.

Where does this leave the philosopher? Philosophy and divinity both yield “the advancement of the professors,” which Hobbes associates with the priestly caste throughout history. True philosophy “can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from the obedience due to the sovereign power” (96). In this, Hobbes adopts the teaching of the Crito with Socrates’ self-defense or apologia subtracted. But what of the defense of philosophy, given the fact that Hobbes is so evidently a philosopher?

For this one must turn to A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Given the character of law as command and of philosophy as reasoning, law and philosophy might seem to be at odds, the philosopher’s supposedly unquestioning obedience to the laws of the sovereign open to question. But Hobbesian reason differs in nature from that of the common lawyers, even as it differs in character from the reason of Aristotelian philosophers, with their emphasis on prudence, an inclination the lawyers attempt to emulate. Hobbesian reason rests on ratio—that is, on proportion, on geometric certitude. Ancient philosophers suffered from “a want of method”: “there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the definitions, or explications, of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used in geometry: whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable” (Leviathan I. 5). To treat all reason as if it were mathematics brings Cartesianism to Hobbes’s famous discovery of Euclid.

Hobbesian reason can partake of the authority of law, can in fact revise existing laws, because it alone cannot be questioned—unlike the flickering light of prudence, now seen to be unphilosophic, a thing of mere experience and not of true reasoning at all. It might be added that the certainty afforded by ‘mathematized’ reasoning applied to all of human life, the assurance of those confident of having received divine revelation finds a rival. Hobbes carefully suggests, through the person of the philosopher in the Dialogue, that the sovereign king is actually subservient to the public safety, and thus open to criticism by the true reason based on the true axiom of nature, self-preservation.

The Hobbesian political philosopher differs from the Socratic not so much in his apparent teaching of conformity to the law, but in instantiating a new kind of  philosopher-king, a man who makes rigorous deductions from right axioms. The philosopher-king is no ironic construct as seen in Plato’s Republic, who ends by lording it over a population of children, but a man who holds the scientifically-irrefutable keys to the real political kingdom, whose reasonings are commands because they are accurate deductions from right axioms.

The strength of the Socratic approach is its flexibility, the way in which it can adopt philosophy to concrete circumstances, and so to enable philosophy to survive in a world that is never philosophic. The Socratic approach as dramatized by Plato exhibits the prudence so often not found among the ranks of the highly intelligent.

The weakness of the Socratic approach, at least if kept within the fairly restricted horizon of Apology-Crito, is its apparent inability to say what might be done to remedy the defects of a very bad regime. In that case, mere law-abidingness is not enough. For such considerations, one must turn to the Statesman, or perhaps to the regime analysis in Book IX of the Republic.

The strength of the Hobbesian approach is that it cuts the chatter. The seditious chatter of the Christian universities and parliaments of his time and place resembled in its virulence the seditious chatter of mosques and madrassas in our own century; the rule of such absolute monarchs as the Atatürk of Turkey, Shah of Iran, the Nasserites of Egypt, Hussein of Iraq, all their regimes replaced, all might well be preferred to the fanatics who have founded new regimes in those countries. And regarding philosophy, Hobbes distinguishes dialogue from chatter, rather as Socrates distinguishes philosophy from sophistry and rhetoric. Hobbes invites ‘intellectuals’ to a repast of humility, without requiring them to humble themselves to God.

The weakness of Hobbes’s approach is in its confidence in geometric reasoning, particularly as it might be applied to politics. Push prudential reasoning aside as irrational is imprudent, and might well undermine the very discretion Hobbes himself commends. Although Hobbes assures us that no monarch is “so inhuman” as to command a son to murder his own father (51), both prudential reasoning and experience strongly suggest otherwise. There is no real-world evidence that geometrizing despotism would remain benevolent, as distinguished from a more liberal, though far from conflict-free republican regime. There Locke was right to break with Hobbes. Whether le sage Locke would have broken with him under the circumstances Hobbes faced in England, circumstances prevailing in many parts of the world today, is a matter to be gauged by prudence, not geometry.

 

Notes

1. Peter J. Ahrensdorf: The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo. Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1995, 171.
2. Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.