To be a prince is to be principal, to be the one. To be a prince is also to be a principle, to embody the architectonic idea, forming and originating. ‘Principle’ and ‘prince’ in Greek are archē and archēgos. In the New Testament, Jesus is the Archegos, the Prince of Peace, both the one or the ruler and the principle of human life and salvation. Machiavelli-as-prince seeks to acquire the worldwide empire of the Prince of Peace.

To hold on to what you acquire, you must know the truth, feeling rather than merely hearing or seeing. But you cannot feel—much less hear or see—everything. You depend to some degree upon people who say they tell you what you need to know. Can you trust them? Might they not do to you what you did to the fool you deposed? Or, absent supreme ambition, might they not tell you what they believe you want to hear, instead of the effectual truth you need to know? John Adams makes observation into an argument for republicanism. Monarchy, the rule of the one, lends itself to excessive secrecy; the monarch cannot know his own enemies. Republics require men to state their opinions as a part of their quest for authority. Everyone knows his friends and his enemies. Republicanism thus rewards the “manly mind,” open in its loves and hates. [1]

Machiavelli prescribes a different remedy: As a prudent man, seek prudent advisers. To maintain a decent fear for your person, teach them to speak only when spoken to. But speak with them often. Make them fear not telling you the truth more than they fear deceiving you. (In Machiavelli, too, fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom—but it is wisdom at the service of the lord.) After thorough discussion, deliberate alone, decide alone, and execute swiftly, leaving no doubt of your resolve in the minds of other even as you leave plenty of doubt concerning what you have resolved. In counsel as in all things, the prince must fight with his own arms. “A prince who is not wise by himself cannot be counselled well.” The prince is alone. To really rule, he must really know; to really know, he must in the end create all things.

How, then, can a prince ever know he does not delude himself? If the effectual truth is the truth he effects, if he disciplines himself to turn his affects into effects, his thoughts into plots—if, when he writes, he supplant the master-plot of the Bible with his own vast ‘history’—then he has, to say the least, minimized the problem.

Or has he maximized it? If I dream of being Napoleon and then become Napoleon, how do I know that I am not still dreaming? For that, do I need a method? Bacon says: experiment. Descartes says: mathematize according to the ‘new math’ that grasps the new truth, the dynamic calculus that replaces static geometry and arithmetic’s tortoise-like plodding after change. Replace the faithful certainties of the Bible-believer with the palpable certainties of creative modern science, whereby theory and practice, thinking and making, fuse. Alone, Godlike, you know what you make. ‘I think, therefore I am’ is monotheism in it atheist formulation. Certainty replaces the wonder of the old philosophers. What Nietzsche will call the will to power, Descartes calls the master passion of technē. This form-giving and methodical or form-taking passion orders the private ‘soul’ or self and the public ‘soul’ or regime; the latter will be ‘enlightened,’ that is, founded according to the technocratic fusion of philosophy and the city, the fusion Socrates reject in disputing Protagoras.

For the public, any doubts concerning the prince’s ambition will be assuaged by enjoyment of the fruits of the tree of technique, whose roots extract and transform the minerals of the earth. As for the prince himself, doubt is no longer an affect but an effect, a technique for testing, feeling, nature—the better to caress or annihilate, to use, her parts. Descartes bids his techno-princes to wipe out their natural trust in the senses upon which Socrates began his philosophizing. What if God is the God of the Gnostics, an Evil Genius who comprehensively deceives his creatures? Then the very evidence of our senses is no longer trustworthy: Only the ‘I think, therefore I am’ is trustworthy. The unspeakable name of the Biblical God becomes the self-asserted identity of the thinking human self, the architectonic, auto-nomous or self-legislated act of world-creation that is the one sure way of world-ruling.

But how does the human ‘self,’ alone, indeed how does God, alone, know that it, that He, thinks sanely? Having learned from the Bible to put the highest emphasis on faith and certainty, and having been tempted to aspire to supreme creativity and power, modern philosophers find that human beings nonetheless have difficulty in making everything over in their own image. What if the core of Machiavellian ambition is itself the core of a delusion? What if power fantasies are the supreme human delusions? Solid empiricism—the Lockean attempt to re-ground Machiavellian certitude in the Socratic trust in sense perception by call sense perception ‘self-evident’—yields Humean doubt about precisely the things Machiavellians need most to master: cause and effect. Kant therefore begins anew, abandoning empiricism as a dead end.

He abandons empiricism in order to save empeiria. The distinction between phenomena and noumena, nature and freedom, science/understanding and morality, Newton and Rousseau, is in one sense precisely the attempt to ‘save the phenomena,’ and therefore to save empiricism from itself. Cause-and-effect is not an empirical phenomenon—there Hume was right—but a prior concept that frames our sense-data. Space and time are two more such concepts, indispensable for channeling the sensual stream to the human understanding. Noumenal limits make phenomena intelligible. Without such conceptual constraints, life would be what some narrative histories seem to make it: one damn thing after another.

At the same time, the concept of the noumenal saves human freedom from materialist determinism. Here is Kant’s link to Rousseau and, indirectly, to Machiavelli. The noumenal frees the mind from externals, from things. In the noumenal realm reason can perfect itself in autonomy—giving itself its own laws, it universalizable maxims. This noumenal, rational, moral law then feeds back into the phenomenal/natural world, in a variation of the Machiavellian fusion of theory and practice—effectively a predominance of autonomous human practice over ‘theory’ or the understanding of the determined, ‘Newtonian’ world.

This result is paradoxical because on its face (phenomenally, so to speak) Kantian morality seems the very opposite of Machiavellianism. “Let justice prevail though the world perish for it” lacks that Florentine tang. In establishing human autonomy, Kant follows Rousseau in trying to make Machiavellianism sincere. Kant revives the Socratic teaching about “the lie of the soul,” but then appeals, quite un-Socratically, to the thumotic passions of honor and contempt, along with the thumotic principle of “human dignity,” to extend the prohibition against lying to social relations. Kant also advances a quasi-Aristotelian argument: Speech is distinctively human; the purpose of speech is communication; lying impedes communication and thereby contradicts human dignity, making oneself the mere appearance of a human being rather than the noumenon of a human being. Lying means that one uses oneself, one’s own speech, as a means to an end—as Machiavelli commends.

The noumenal character of human being is humanly accessible, unlike the noumenal in external nature. This is so on Cartesian grounds. We really can know ourselves as we are ‘from the inside.’ That is why the noumenal is freedom for man. Kantian self-reflection yields the same urge to conquer nature that Machiavellian self-reflection does. But Kant additionally claims to discover a universalizable law commanding human beings to treat one another as ends, not as means. Kant wants the will to power, but only if its truth is honest, sincere. Noumenality limits itself by the principle of non-contradiction. As for Realpolitik, it allows the moral man to behave well and get what he wants, too. Let ‘history’—determined, phenomenal ‘history’—do the Machiavellian dirty work.

Nietzsche returns to a more nearly pure Machiavellianism, while never abandoning the ‘German’ inclination to make Machiavelli noble. He begins “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” with Lutheran sternness, condemning philosophic pride in reason as a form of human self-flattery. Like Descartes, he criticizes the senses. But he involves himself in a serious difficulty. If senses “nowhere lead to truth” but “are content to receive stimuli,” by what agency can Nietzsche say “are”? Not by reason, puffed up as it is with pride. Not by introspection, as in Descartes: “What does man know about himself?” If what is called truth comes into existence by way of social contract, by convention, then by what agency does Nietzsche perceive chaos, that tiger within the human soul? How does Nietzsche know that nerve stimuli transform into images, then into sounds, in an ever-falsifying chain of metaphors?

Further, if metaphors then become concepts, equating unequal things, why is that a problem? Do I need to be as good at playing basketball as Michael Jordan to be described truthfully as a basketball player? (If so, what does it mean to say ‘National Basketball Association’?) Is there any serious problem in saying that two leaves are oak leaves, or leaves, even though they are not in all respects identical or ‘equal’?

There is something other than an ‘argument’ going on. Nietzsche condemns epistemological egalitarianism in order to escape Kant’s universalizability criterion, which sets noumenal limits on noumenal freedom. Nietzsche condemns ‘truth’ in order to promote creativity or art, in which limits on freedom are thumotically not rationally willed. Hence the use and abuse of history, which recalls Machiavelli’s advice not to be but to use. To Nietzsche as for Machiavelli, the noumenally human is the will to power. But in Nietzsche even more than Machiavelli (who retain the wily fox) the will to power glories in its arbitrariness. Nietzsche too wants to be salvific creator-god, or perhaps, more modestly, the destroying ‘anti-Christ’ who will clear the way for the real creators. Perhaps the latter role makes him less cautious in principle–that is, as a prince—than the principal modern Prince, who wants to rule, not only ruin.

NOTE

1. John Adams: A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, in Charles Francis Adams, ed.: The Works of John Adams, Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851, IV. 289.

Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political. New York: Verso, 1993.
John Exdell: “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Democracy.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24 (1994) 441-464.

 

Chantal Mouffe and John Exdell offer contrasting, though equally vigorous, critiques of John Rawls’s political liberalism from the ‘Left.’ In some respects the unintended dialogue between themselves is more illuminating than either of their dialogues with Rawls.

Exdell brings Rawls before the bar of feminism, arguing that political liberalism fails to join the battle against “the fundamentalist values of the religious right” with sufficient force. Rawls apparently consigns those “values” to the private realm, ruling them out of public discourse. Not good enough, Exdell rejoins: “To achieve justice for women, liberals must abandon the search for a legitimating consensus and take sides in what may be the most impassioned cultural and political struggle of our time.” What goes on in families, houses of worship, and workplaces affects what goes on in the public sphere in a thousand ways.

Perhaps Rawlsian liberals will altogether refuse to intervene in private life, or perhaps they will intervene but only in ways legitimized by public discourse. Insofar as they do interfere, Exdell contends, liberals will encourage secularization, making themselves anathema to fundamentalists. Thus, given the authoritative character of the public sphere, particularly its governance of public schools, the liberal state will threaten the religiosity of the children of many fundamentalists. At the same time, these interventions will likely be too flaccid to satisfy feminists. Neither side will rest content with the relativism (or, to put it more cautiously, the self-limitation) of Rawlsian liberalism, and therefore will work to undermine it as the agent of peaceful pluralism.

Feminists demand regime change—specifically, “a form of democratic socialism” in which “the state can provide much of the material and educational resources” to reconstruct social institutions. These resources will include sex education, abortion rights backed by abortion provision, and “various measures to alter the balance of power between husbands and wives.” The means by which democratic socialism will arrive at decisions concerning such provision will not be based upon liberal-democratic (even if ‘progressive’) pluralist “consensus” à la Rawls. “The quest for legitimacy through consensus cannot be undertaken without betraying core liberal commitments to equality and self-determination for women.” Because Rawls’s ideology cannot secure these types of equality and self-determination, liberal democracy must give way to social democracy.

I am calling Exdell’s position ‘neo-Hobbesian.’ By Hobbesian I mean the use of state power to enforce equality and to impose opinions. In his characteristic tough-mindedness, Hobbes sees that social life constantly generates inegalitarian institutions; churches and other associations are breeding grounds for authoritarianism. The Hobbesian monarch to some degree recreates natural equality by re-atomizing society: All members of civil society will be equal before the One who is unequal, the One who will use his power to enforce equal conditions on all others. (In this enterprise, atomizing economic competition will replace polarizing religious contention.) At the same time, Hobbesian civil society avoids the poverty, nastiness, brutishness, and shortness of life in the state of natural equality by imposing ‘equality’—i.e., sameness—of opinions on his subjects.

By ‘neo’-Hobbesian I mean whatever it is that Exdell may mean by a statism that is social-democratic while at the same time ‘orthodox’ with respect to feminism. I am not sure exactly what that means, inasmuch as Exdell gives his readers no guidance. Monarchy need not apply, I trust, but some form of statism is involved. This state might or might not be overbearing; for example, it might use such mild means as tax incentives to foster family restructuring. Even so, tax incentives imply a tax code; a tax code implies tax lawyers to write the code and then spin through the revolving door to the ‘private sector’ in order to manipulate the code. This implies a certain priesthood, a certain inequality. Also, a state powerful enough to enforce a far-ranging tax code will likely gather inertia for any number of purposes, none of them unqualifiedly egalitarian. And of course the socialist side of social democracy must regulate and/or nationalize the means of production, again empowering the state apparatus. If the social-democratic state reaches into the household itself, as Exdell proposes, then it will need even more power at its disposal.

That is, the softer Hobbesianism gets the more it collapses into the arms of John Locke (‘liberal’ democracy). The softer Exdell’s neo-Hobbesian social democracy gets, the more it will look like Rawls’s liberal state, in practice if not in theory. The ‘harder’ it gets, it will end by out-Hobbesing Hobbes.

None of this will muffle Mouffe, who wants to get out from under liberalism, the Hobbes-Locke-Kant axis, altogether. Mouffe endorses Rawlsian pluralism, “the end of a substantive idea of the good life.” But she goes further. Do not recognize pluralism as a mere fact of modern life, she urges. View it rather as “constitutive at the conceptual level of the very nature of modern democracy.” That is, get rid of such overarching principles as natural right or the categorical imperative altogether and replace them with pluralism, plurality or ‘diversity’ as the principle of the regime. Liberalism from Locke onwards has wanted to preserve a balance between liberty and equality. Following Derrida, Mouffe wants for the first time to fuse liberty and equality by recognizing that equality must involve the perpetual deconstruction of all inegalitarian institutions. This sounds very much like Trotsky’s notion of the ‘permanent revolution,’ but apparently without the statism, apparently by starting with ‘the withering away of the state.’ Subordinating power relations can only be demolished freely, and the typical liberal problem of governing for equality can only be solved, by denying ‘essentialism’ and recognizing that “everything is constructed as difference.” Power is not an external relation among pre-constituted ‘atoms’ (as in Hobbes). Power constitutes the ‘atoms’ or identities themselves. E = MC, squared. Not Hobbesian or Lockean peace (a “dangerous utopia of reconciliation,” vulnerable to inegalitarian ossification) but Heraclitean conflict and flux can alone bring genuine equality or “democratic determinacy.” Professor Heidegger, meet the New Left.

Mouffe’s position might appear to lead toward the same goal as certain forms of ‘conservatism.’ Conservatism is obviously an empty term, its content dependent upon what a given ‘conservative’ wants to conserve. Throne and altar? The ‘free market’? The New Deal? There are at least two kinds of contemporary ‘conservatism that would oppose Exdell. Libertarianism of the sort defined by Murray Rothbard and Richard Epstein puts a premium not on equality but on liberty. It opposes inequality only insofar as it impinges upon personal liberty, and is particularly concerned with economic liberty. A second ‘conservatism,’ the small-government or Jeffersonian type espoused by such writers as the late M. E. Bradford and Thomas Fleming, would regard Exdell as the latest version of Herbert Croly—or maybe, horror of horrors, Abraham Lincoln—urging Hamiltonian means at the service of Jeffersonian ends. Sorry, they would say, but you can’t get to Monticello by way of Pennsylvania Avenue any more than you can get there by way of Wall Street. To these ‘conservatives,’ Mouffe would reply: smallness does not preclude inequality. It may only make it more concentrated and intense.

Even as Exdell does not say much about social-democratic statism, Mouffe does not say much about how the deconstructionist society would hold together—remain a society. It appears that Mouffe harkens to Derrida, who harkens to Heidegger, who harkens to Heraclitus. Mouffe and Derrida say that flux is not an invitation to authoritarianism, as Heraclitus and Heidegger evidently suppose, but the only ground (more accurately, anti-ground, anti-foundation) for radical equality. To which Hobbes would reply: ‘Congratulations. You have converted civil society into the state of nature, in which no human being will want to stay for long. Welcome back into my web, the tensile structure of egalitarian statism.’

Charles Taylor et al.: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

 

At the conclusion of his essay, “The Politics of Recognition,” Charles Taylor proposes a modest, decent neo-Burkeanism. The demand for cultural recognition can be prevented from sliding down the slope of relativism—a slide that would destroy the rationale for recognition itself—if liberal democrats view longstanding ‘cultures’ as likely to have respectable aspects, even if these are “accompanied by much that we have to abhor and reject” (72-73) in order to remain liberals and democrats. The “ultimate horizon” (73) or ‘end of history’ (when we can finally judge the worth of all cultures) has yet to be worked out. But we can make the provisional determination: The sheer fact of long-term survival suggests that a given ‘culture’ has or at least has had some real ‘strengths’ or virtues. Dialogue with its adherents should be fruitful; their cultural destruction might well be a loss not only to them but to members of the dominant culture. Taylor thus advocates a generous and prudent probabilism.

To this, the prominent feminist Susan Wolf responds in her “Comment” on Taylor’s argument: Women have long been recognized, all right, but this recognition has too often been restrictive or injurious to them (and, presumably, to self-deluded men as well). An appeal to the ‘long-standingness’ of a tradition cannot tell us which durable aspects of the tradition deserve abolition, and which deserve retention. What if the long-standing culture is compounded of a long series of abuses and usurpations?

Wolf is right, although the reason she is right cannot be found in her essay. In saying that non-recognition involves “insults and damage” (80), she too easily conflates insult and damage. Was the insulting gadfly Socrates damaging to Athenians—or beneficial? For surely feminism would insult and damage—indeed dismantle—any ‘culture’ of misogyny or patriarchy. If feminists say, ‘Destroying misogyny is good for the misogynist,’ that the best thing you can do for a pagtriarch is to depose him, in order to justify their claim they need some criterion not to be found in misogyny as such. To argue, as Wolf does at the end of her essay (84-85), that our own ‘culture’ will have hidden resources—that patriarchy (for example) will have aspects (e.g., the care for and protection of women) usable in a critique of patriarchy—may well be true. But it only gets us back to something like Taylor’s inter-cultural dialogue. Critique presupposes criteria. By what criteria can one launch a critique of a ‘culture’?

Wolf’s criticism of Taylor is right because Taylor refuses two themes Rousseau keeps apart: the citizen and the human being, the city and nature. I take this argument not in order to ‘catch’ Taylor in a misinterpretation of Rousseau, but in order to make the substantive point: Rousseau (and Hegel after him) see the problem of recognition more clearly than Taylor does.

As Taylor observes, Rousseau sets up the master/slave image, the import of which is a logical conclusion: I cannot ‘have’ the dignity I seek if I depend upon you for it. To be really ‘had,’ a thing must be inherent, either in the person, in the relationship with the ‘other,’ or both. Rousseau has at least two solutions to this master/slave dilemma. One is the political community described in the social contract, wherein man in ‘the state of nature’ exchanges natural for civil rights. In this model, equal respect is precisely social and therefore artificial; it is ‘built in’ by the Legislator. Taylor sees this quite clearly (48-49). The other solution is that of the Reveries. But the philosopher is no citizen. He is a solitary walker. Despite his very considerable degree of ‘culture,’ he remains—or rather becomes natural, in but not of whatever society he strolls through. His self-respect is ‘built in’ by his dialectical return to nature, to reason—his personal overcoming of ‘cultural’ detritus.

Taylor wants to combine these incommensurables. Whereas Rousseau requires the philosophic legislator of the social contract to disappear, Taylor wants something like a continual philosophic self-legislation within the political community. This assumes what Rousseau denies: that philosophers can somehow not only stay inside the political community but achieve that degree of prestige within it that would enable them to become legislators-in-residence.

One coherent way to do what Taylor wants to do, to marry tradition and Enlightenment, is to abandon democracy and make the Hegelian move: At the top of the political community will be not a philosopher-king but a monarch-sage (no mere wisdom-lover but a wise man). This is possible only if ‘history’ has ended, the slaughter-bench wiped clean and stored out of sight. But Taylor regards this aspect of Hegelianism as arrogant; multiculturalism in Taylor’s view demonstrates that ‘history’ is not over, at least insofar as ‘history’ has combined multiculturalism with democracy. The egalitarianism as much as the pluralism of modern democracy precludes any strong Hegelianism.

And so Taylor is stuck in a sort of nice guy’s muddle. Wolf is right: As a philosopher, Taylor is English-all-too-English, or perhaps Canadian-all-too-Canadian. To argue that liberal democracies should “weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and opt sometimes in favor of the latter” (61) leaves the reader with no philosophic criterion for critique (or for affirmation). What is the scale upon which one is to do the weighing? Taylor’s neo-Hegelianism (more accurately, his democratic Burkeanism) leaves the philosopher, the ‘natural’ or reasoning person, without either the authority to legislate or the freedom to ‘walk.’ Taylor must make liberalism an “organic outgrowth of Christianity” (62), not a product of the collision (understood personally by Rousseau) of Christianity and modern philosophy. This not only distorts the history any historicist must rely upon, but it leaves citizen and philosopher alike adrift. There is too little dialectic in Taylorian ‘dialogue’ because he fails to separate dialectical reasoning form politics with Rousseauian rigor. He ends by reinventing (in academic life) Rousseau’s bourgeois: neither fully man nor wholeheartedly citizen. [1] If liberalism, as an allegedly organic outgrowth of Christianity, is a “fighting creed,” Taylor’s liberalism will leave the citizen-soldier unsure of what he or she is fighting for. [2]

Taylor’s paradigm is not devoid of all defenses against Wolf’s criticism, although they will not likely hold. The best move might be to make political and social egalitarianism the explicit criterion by which he will assess, reject, and appropriate ‘cultural’ traditions, mirroring one aspect of the Constant/Tocqueville response to Burke’s critique of the French revolutionaries. That is, he could say that democracy is still inevitable in the modern world.

A cautious way to make Taylorian traditionalism consistent with feminism would be to argue for an egalitarian version of the division of labor. Tradition requires men to hunt, women to gather, and, more recently, for men to bring home the bacon and women to cook it. Applying the egalitarian principle, societies would reward these activities equally. Married couples would enter a family benefit system, whereby all income is legally required to go into a joint account, with benefits, pensions, and other disbursements requiring consent of both parties. Such reforms would work better in economic life than in political life, where rights for women cannot be described as longstanding and participation cannot be compartmentalized so easily. There, Taylor would need to argue that the logic of longstanding democratic traditions requires women’s equal political rights. Moreover, even on the economic level such laws would miss the point of ‘second-wave’ feminism, which is about equal opportunity, not only equal economic rewards.

More radically, he democratic principle of equality could be used as a sociopolitical version of Ockham’s razor, cutting out those parts of tradition that are patriarchal, allowing those parts of tradition that are egalitarian to grow unimpeded. An advantage of ‘radicalized’ Taylorian feminism over some other forms of feminism would be an opportunity to retain ‘masculinism,’ i.e., whatever practices from the patriarchic tradition that still serve democratic purposes. Such an approach could (for example) seek ways of counteracting the feminization of poverty caused by gutter Rousseaus who walk away from households. The dismantling of patriarchy need not mean the destruction of fatherhood and its responsibilities. And of course (under the terms of egalitarianism) reciprocity in fatherly benefits (such as time with children) would go along with the responsibilities.

The danger of radicalized Taylorism would be the danger of pulling pieces out of any tradition. Can the virtues of a ‘culture’ survive the elimination of its defects? At some point, such pruning might damage the ‘organic’ tree of Taylorian traditionalism. The more any abstract criterion (such as equality) dominates, the less ‘organic’ things get.

In some sense, then, Wolf’s challenge looks sound. In Taylor’s defense it could be said, one could do worse, much worse, than to be ‘English.’ One can surely ‘think’ better, philosophize better than English dons do. Can one also do better, have a better politics than the politics of quiet, decent Canada? Looking around the world, one might say, ‘Maybe, but not everywhere and always.’

 

Notes

1. A concrete example of this error may be seen in Taylor’s discussion of Frantz Fanon (69). Taylor treats Fanon as a spokesman for the ‘Third World,’ thereby ignoring Fanon’s forthright Marxism-Leninism, with its clear set of criteria for judging any tradition. There is obviously nothing more ‘Western,’ more a part of modern rationalism, than Marxism; it is anything but an outgrowth of any tradition or traditions indigenous to the ‘Third World.’
2. In contrast, Wolf has the merit of insisting on knowing exactly what she’s fighting for. But although she knows what she believes, she does not indicate how she might attain a characteristic philosopher’s insight: that she knows she doesn’t know. She does not begin to think of a way of living the philosophic life in a democratic regime.