Will Morrisey Reviews

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish: The Decline of Mercy in Public Life. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

 

Contemporary politicians commend their compassion to voters’ attention, but mercy has disappeared from the public vocabulary. Tuckness and Parrish summon considerable learning to describe the changing status and, indeed definitions of mercy in philosophic and theological thought. The moral and political philosophers of Western antiquity found no inherent tension between justice and mercy; they subsumed both under the rule of reason, which required the prudential exercise of equality in the application of law and restraint to such passions as anger and pity. However, Christian thinkers (particularly in the West) have attended to the revelations of a Creator-God separated from and radically superior to the nature God made, doing so in the political context of human monarchs charged with imitating that God without enjoying God’s all-encompassing wisdom. For Christians, justice and mercy, both esteemed, rested uneasily together. Discounting God, modern philosophers (idealist and utilitarian alike) have endorsed the impersonal, egalitarian, and legalistic rule of the modern state. This leaves room for justice, now conceived of as equal individual rights, but makes acts of mercy seem arbitrary, perhaps unjust.

The authors begin with Jesus’ words in Matthew’s Gospel, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” ‘We moderns’ no longer do, so much; as the authors (somewhat unmercifully) remark, presidents and governors typically issue pardons just before leaving office, lest they themselves suffer revenge at the polls. We regard mercy and justice as contradictory. “The lenient judge, the forgiving creditor, the merciful benefactor, or the loving parent”: These are our models of mercy, all implying a quality “more lenient than the external standard of justice dictates.” This opens it to the unsparing criticisms of Nietzsche—that mercy amounts to softness, weakness, to nothing more than the timid resentment of the weak as they look at the strong, the leveling urge of the democrat, himself only a secularized Christian. Earlier, more measured, but still stinging objections to mercy may be found in both Kant and Bentham, ordinarily viewed as philosophic opposites; however, both register the moral underpinnings of the modern state, with an “increasing emphasis on equality, impartiality, and the legal constraint of discretion,” which “made it significantly harder for public officials to view their role as analogous to that of a judge, father, creditor, or benefactor.”

“Modern objections to mercy take the particular shape they do because of contingent aspects of the development of these concepts in the Christian West.” Illustrating this contrast, the book’s first section addresses “moral and religious traditions that developed separately from those of the modern West,” traditions that “show the breadth of possible understandings of justice and mercy.” The traditions selected are Buddhism, Islam, and Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Buddhists define mercy as a form of benevolence or compassion, but not in contradistinction to justice. Theravada Buddhism posits no god who chooses between justice and mercy; more, “in Theravada Buddhism there is no obligation on anyone, including human beings, to make sure people get their just deserts,” since “Karma can take care of itself.” The Buddhist practitioner aims not at meting out justice but to escape the cycle of karma and rebirth altogether; he pities the evildoer because such a person has already punished himself by doing wrong, foolishly opening himself to karmic retribution in this life and/or his next life. This is why rulers, whose allotted role in life, effectively as agents of karma, includes punishing wrongdoers, find themselves in a position inferior to that of monks. “Buddhism directs kings to use political power appropriately while also questioning the validity of the political enterprise as a whole.”

Mahayana Buddhism changes Theravada doctrines respecting mercy in two ways. First, Mayahana Buddhism commends actions aiming at the good of others more than actions aimed at improving one’s own future reincarnation. “People who show compassion to others as a means to achieving their own enlightenment are less praiseworthy than those who are willing to put off Nirvana for themselves so that they can help others enter into that state.” Second, Mayahana Buddhism directs its adherents’ attention to the particular character and needs of the person so helped. Rulers should direct punishment at “restraining evil,” preferably “without actually having to use violence.” Murderers might be banished, not killed or tortured; thus “the kingdom is safe” but without the exercise of cruelty and bloodshed. This integrates mercy into the operation of justice; in no way does mercy “deviat[e] from the demands of justice.” “Helping people avoid the consequences of their actions in the next life is consistently regarded as praiseworthy rather than unjust.”

Although Islam sharply differs from Buddhism in positing a single, personal god—”the supremacy of Allah’s will is the starting point”—it concurs with Buddhism in denying any distinction between justice and mercy. The first Sura of the Qu’aran refers to Allah as “Most Merciful,” by which it means foremost of all forgiving. The founder of the now-dominant Ash’arite school of Islam, Abū al-Hasan al-Ash’arī, “claimed that God’s will becomes obligatory only through revelation and denied that reason stipulates anything as rationally necessary.” This being so, God’s Will or Plan—known to us only insofar as God reveals it, but no more than that—must prevail, and God’s Will manifests full justice in both punishment and forgiveness. According to Qu’aranic revelation, offenses against God must be punished as prescribed, lest the punisher defy God’s Will; offenses against a human being may be forgiven by the injured party, who will be rewarded for his mercy by Allah. If I show mercy, I am following Allah’s example; Allah is pleased. “By contrast, in most Western legal systems the decision to prosecute lies in the hands of the state for both types of offenses”; “those most harmed are not those who make the decision to grant mercy.” In contemporary Iran, however, the state doesn’t pardon offenses because it is not the injured party, but the family of (for example) a murder victim may grant a pardon and spare the murderer from the death penalty the state otherwise would have inflicted.

Orthodox Christianity puts mercy very near the center of God’s character, but mercy encompasses “God’s kindness and blessing”—God’s agapic love for His creatures. Jesus’ death on the Cross signifies not so much “that a debt is paid or that a punishment due another is endured, but simply that death and the devil have been defeated.” Forgiveness of sin manifests agape; Jesus’ suffered as our companion in suffering, not as our Savior. Similarly, when a Christian acts mercifully he imitates Jesus, “a loving and compassionate benefactor.” Orthodox Christianity associates mercy “as much with a good done to the righteous as with mitigation of punishment to the wicked.” It “frame[s] the exercise of political mercy in terms of Christian love rather than a setting aside of justice,” which belongs “to God and God alone.” Punishment “aim[s] at the good of others, both the criminal and the victim.” In contrast with this, and with Buddhism and Islam, “Western-influenced philosophical and political traditions draw on a strain of Christianity that includes… the sense that the moral universe is constituted by absolute and independent requirements of justice, which are at least partly retributive in character and which in some sense even God cannot simply supersede or suspend.” Thus “the decline of public mercy tracks more with the decline of Christianity in public life in the west than with its ascendancy.”

What is more, the West itself did not always dichotomize justice and mercy. “The ancients generally understood retribution as ‘paying back’ and thus as a necessary means of vindicating honor,” “not by reference to an independent standard of justice.” Merciful treatment meant “treating an offender more leniently than one otherwise would have, rather than as one should have.” In the Iliad, for example, the Argives make war on Troy to avenge the honor of Patroclus, whose wife the Trojans stole, and the honor of the Argive dead, killed by Trojan hands. Achilles’ rages at the dishonor suffered by his friend and his city. Similarly, the antagonists in the debate over punishing the inhabitants of Melos, recounted by Thucydides, turns on the question not of mercy and justice, but mercy and empire. Cleon argues that mercy must not apply to offenders who act deliberate, and that pity, sentiment, and indulgence are “fatal to empire”; in his counterargument Diodotus doesn’t appeal to justice but to the same requirements of imperial rule, maintaining that harsh punishment of the Mitylenians would alienate other poleis within the Athenian empire.

Plato, who assuredly does have Socrates uphold a standard of justice as distinct from personal vengeance, uses that standard to limit the passion of anger, elevating reason over all emotion, including pity. Here, however, equity supplements justice when circumstances mitigate the offense. Similarly, for Aristotle “virtue is not an emotion, and thus neither pity nor anger is a virtue in and of itself.” Pity comes in when considering the work of rhetoricians and poets, where its deployment serves to persuade, not truly to justify. As for benefaction, Aristotle associates it with the virtues of liberality and magnanimity, not with pity, compassion, or mercy. The great-souled man does not forgive injuries but overlooks them, out of the unshakable strength of his character. As in Plato, in courts of justice equity replaces or at least moderates anger and pity. As Aristotle puts it, “forgiveness is judgment which discriminates what is equitable an does so correctly,” that is, in light of mitigating circumstances. Practical reasoning, prudence, rules.

In Rome as in Athens, “the rationales for showing mercy… were primarily instrumental.” To spare the conquered enemy made sense as part of imperial policy. What is more, when Roman imperialism came under the regime of monarchy, clemency seemed a brake on such unshared power, a bulwark against “a return of the terrors of abused power that haunted Rome’s history through the story of the Tarquins and their monarchical excesses.” Julius Caesar valorized clemency—so much so that Cicero criticized him sparing his future assassins, Brutus and Cassius: “His clemency was his undoing, but for which nothing of the sort could have happened to him.” Cicero nonetheless praised clemency in a monarch, while dispraising it in republics, where we act “not on our own behalf but rather on behalf of the republic.” Even Seneca, no Platonist, concurred with Plato in giving “the only reasons for punishing crimes committed by one subject against another [as] the forward-looking reasons of rehabilitation, deterrence, and public safety,” not vengeance. For him, mercy has nothing to do with pity but serves rather as a means of limiting the rage for a justice defined as requital. What’s “surprising to the contemporary reader is that Seneca’s criterion for mercy is not pity or compassion but equity and the good.” In general, “most of the classical debate concerns the proper place within politics of two emotions, anger and pity, compared with the proper role of reason.”

“With the introduction of Christianity, by contrast, mercy takes on a central role moral importance,” and with the conversion of the emperor Constantine some four centuries after Jesus lived, it took on political importance, too. Tuckness and Parrish recall that Christians translated the Hebrew word hesed as agape in Greek, clementia (leniency) and misericordia (pity) in Latin, mercy in King James English. For early Christians, “Christ’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection functioned mainly as an example of the nature and extent of God’s love and the response required to overcome sin”—the response being understood as a ransom payment. Beginning with Cyril, however, Christians questioned whether God could be said to owe anything at all to Satan; Augustine firmly rejected such a notion, understanding the crucifixion as Christ’s triumph over the devil (as would Orthodox Christians continue to do, after the Great Schism). Only Jesus could do this because, being sinless, “Christ alone among human being did not owe his death as a punishment.” After the Fall, human beings deserved to suffer Satan’s rule but Satan “did not himself have any claim of right or desert over human beings,” having plotted their ruin against God’s intention. In describing God as angry with man, Augustine explained, His Scripture means “nothing but just retribution” for our own injustice toward Him.

But why then does God supply mercy to some of us but not to others? To some extent Augustine anticipates Muhammad’s answer, that God’s “judgments are not arbitrary but they are impenetrable to human reason and will be made plain only in eternity.” Meanwhile, we must content ourselves with thinking that God permits evil “to help display goodness, by showing it, as it were, in relief.” If God were to universalize compassion, “then God would save Satan as well”; “eternal punishment is not excessive because we underestimate the gravity of sin.” Put otherwise, ‘reality’ is ‘about’ God, not us. Indeed, the ultimate reality is God, Who originated all else and rules it. “The good, for Augustine, is not about feelings of pleasure or pain”; it is “the achievement of God’s purposes.” The grief of the damned “is the one way remaining open to them to honor what is truly good.” This teaching differs from Muhammad’s teaching in offering a reason for God’s will, while avoiding the assumption that God Himself refers to some standard of justice ‘prior to’ Himself, either in precedence or in time.

In terms of the rule of humans over humans, “the motive of love is the crucial factor for deciding when to punish and when to show mercy.” Augustine “begins to blur the distinction between clementia and misericordia, “mercy as leniency and mercy as compassionate benefaction.” Depending on the circumstances, a ruler might inflict punishment lovingly, or mercy—mercy being “the proper balance of concern for the offender and concern for the larger public.” Mercy as compassionate benefaction, however, is always good. Further, and again unlike classical philosophers, Augustine distinguishes the role of the Church from the role of the government. The Church properly pleads for leniency whereas “the government’s task is to determine whether leniency is in the best interest of all.” Such a moderating influence proves helpful because although rulers may have the same motive as God—justice—they won’t have God’s knowledge of human motives, “including their own.” Rulers therefore should concentrate their minds on “maintaining order.” For its part, the clergy may go beyond pleading for leniency and ask for mitigation of or even forbearance from punishment, keeping (in Augustine’s words) “Christian gentleness in view” even while acknowledging that if punishment prevents future crimes it is merciful. As with karma in Hinduism, God eventually will exact retribution; mercy may move the guilty to repent; and mercy demonstrates the relative insignificance of the temporal realm as compared with the eternal. Agapic love extends to the guilty as well as the innocent, and in this way distinguishes itself from anything seen in the classical philosophers. This is why “for most of the subsequent Christian tradition, mercy came to be seen as praiseworthy by definition,” a virtue instead of a sentiment.

Augustine’s thought comports with empire and monarchy. “The various metaphors for mercy fit together much more coherently in public life if one assumes the existence of a king, prince, or magistrate who stands, so to speak, in the place of God as the ultimate judge, creditor, benefactor, and father of the people.” It is Anselm who brings out a tension between justice and mercy. “Whereas early Christianity had emphasized the cross as the place where God defeated Satan, Anselm transformed it into the crucible where a wrathful God would be satisfied with nothing less than payment in full from humanity,” a debt paid by Jesus as “humanity incarnate” in accordance with what theologians now call the doctrine of “mandatory satisfaction.” According to it, “the wrong done to God’s honor through human sin was so great that it would be unjust for God to simply forgive it”—an argument reminiscent of the Homeric heroes respecting themselves. “God to act rightly must uphold his own honor,” “because the order of the universe is harmed if God’s honor is not upheld.” In his book Why God Became Man Anselm asks why God acted through the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ, instead of (for example) simply forgiving us. Earlier theologians’ ‘ransom’ hypothesis won’t do, as it implies Satan had rights God needed to respect.

Anselm begins by observing that human beings owe honor to God as their Creator, either voluntarily “through an obedient will” or involuntarily “through punishment.” For obedience to be perfect “it must proceed from right motives,” not merely because we expect rewards and/or fear punishments. “Any departure from this [perfect] moral standard incurs an infinite debt, which human beings cannot repay because even perfect future obedience is not more than is owed and, therefore does not generate any surplus merit” which might cover the original debt. Yet God also “wills that human beings be saved,” an intention that sets up a difficult paradox. “The heart of the paradox is that one of Adam’s race must somehow make the payment for Adam’s race, yet none of Adam’s race can possibly accrue merit as a mere creature, and a sinful creature at that. Christ, however, because he never sinned, and yet was tempted to sin and so accrued merit for his obedience, could through his divine nature offer something to God on behalf of humanity that was not already owed, namely a willingness to die innocently to restore God’s honor.” On the Cross, “something miraculous happened apart from which God’s mercy could not have been justly extended to human beings.”

Peter Abelard objected to Anselm’s argument as follows: “If Jesus had to die to make satisfaction for sins… what satisfaction is left for the evil of the crucifixion itself, the worst sin of all?” To demand the blood of an innocent person is “cruel and wicked.” Abelard explains mercy not in terms of mandatory satisfaction or of ransom, but (recurring to the early Fathers) in terms of agape.  By becoming human and dying “in our place,” Jesus “more fully bound us to Himself by love,” making Himself the supreme example of how we ourselves should act in loving gratitude to Him. “This love Christ inspires in us is what ultimately saves us”; Paul’s teaching that Christians are saved by faith means, in Abelard’s words, “the love which comes from our faith in our salvation through Jesus Christ” induces us to repent our sins and atone for them, thus making us deserving of God’s mercy.

The greatest of the Christian theologians, Thomas Aquinas, does not claim that we can deserve God’s mercy. He recurs to Anselm’s understanding, but with a nuance that relieves it of Abelard’s objection and at the same time alleviates Anselm’s paradox. Aquinas defines mercy as misericordia or sympathetic aid to those in need. He extends this to the realm of divine judgment and forgiveness of sins by observing that God the Father gave his Son to pay the debt humanity incurred, and will continue to incur. The evil of the crucifixion was God’s willed self-sacrifice. Thus, and contra Anselm, “mercy does not contradict justice but instead goes beyond it.” Some other means of forgiveness would be equally just, but “less fitting” because “less merciful.” Only those who “continue to turn away from God incur a debt of eternal punishment.” As did Anselm, Aquinas understood God “to be both creditor and benefactor.”

When it comes to this understanding of mercy, the Protestants did not protest, either in theological or political terms. Regarding the latter, Martin Luther retained the Augustinian distinction between the functions of the political authority and those of the Church, even as he redefined that body itself. As with Anselm, “divine justice and divine mercy are inherently in tension with one another and can be reconciled by divine provision alone.” Calvin, who leans toward the Muslim view of God respecting the “voluntarist” notion that “God’s will is wholly unfettered” by any standard beyond itself, nonetheless concurs with Aquinas in maintaining (as he writes) that God “might have redeemed us by a single word, or by a mere act of his will, if He had not thought it better to do otherwise for our own benefit, that, by not sparing his own well-beloved Son, he might testify in his person how much he cares for our salvation.” As for human rulers, for both Luther and Calvin they are agents of God’s righteous anger but (as in the earlier theologians) only in the general sense of hating the sin while loving the sinner.

Modern political philosophy took over the Anselmian distinction between justice and mercy. Initially, modern (that is, ‘Machiavellian’) philosophers attempted to adapt natural right to a doctrine that asserted a human right and capacity to conquer nature. That is, one element of nature, man, would work to master its the rest of nature, bring it under its control. Tuckness and Parrish begin their account with the theologian Socinus, who denied the doctrine of original sin on the grounds that the sins of the father could be should not be ‘inherited’ by his child; in addition, Socinians usually rejected the existence of eternal punishment as unreasonable. On the proverbial other side of the coin, mercy also became equally suspect—seeming too arbitrary to conform to any rational standard of conduct; Socinus insists on a reasonable Christianity. The modern natural right philosophers added to this individualism and rationalism a right to self-preservation, which entitled a starving person to demand assistance or to seize the food he needed. “To the extent that justice could replace mercy as the basis for meeting the needs of the poor, it became even easier for mercy and justice to be seen as alternatives.”

Hugo Grotius eschewed reasonable Christianity by placing God above any and all laws. God in the universe occupies the same position as a father in a family and a king in a state, distributing punishment and pardon as a matter of prerogative. Being transcendent, God has no reason to require payment of a debt or to forgive one because He “cannot be harmed by human beings and thus cannot be a victim.” God judges and punishes and pardons in this supreme, sovereign authority. As for human rulers, Grotius distinguishes between debts and crimes. “Forgiving debts… remains fundamentally distinct from forgiving punishments, because a creditor ‘has the freest power of decision’ with respect to whether or not his debt is collected”; liberality is not leniency or clemency. A creditor and a debtor have a private relationship, and the creditor may demand or forgive repayment at his discretion. Not so, a criminal offense, which involves a threat to the good order of the community in addition to personal injury. Further still, Grotius understands the good order of the community to require rulers to attend understand justice and mercy in “a purely forward-looking” manner: Will their actions correct, restore, restrain, and deter those break the law and those who might think of breaking the law? He rules out revenge, except for God. This shifts human choices regarding mercy into a rational, non-arbitrary framework. And even God rules on “forward-looking ground in order to save human beings,” as “Jesus dies on the cross not because retributive justice demands it but because the future preservation of (eternal) law and order does.”

Muhammad-like, the resolutely materialist Thomas Hobbes considers God’s mercy as determined solely by His will—”the utterly unconstrained freedom of God to exact whatever punishment he wishes”—not by considerations of honor or justice. Hobbes quickly begins to undermine belief in the existence of God itself, denying that “Hell” could mean anything other than everlasting death, not torment, and thus weakening his reader’s fear of God, which is assuredly not the beginning of wisdom in an atheist’s estimation. Punishment by the human rulers makes sense as an incentive to their subjects’ obedience; fear of the monarch replaces fear of God as the beginning of Hobbesian wisdom. Revenge is wrong because “it contributes to the unraveling of a fragile peace” in civil society, the violation of which threatens the fundamental natural right of self-preservation. Revenge is mere vainglory. “Punishment is the essence of sovereignty for Hobbes”; concurring with Machiavelli’s valorization of lo stato, Hobbes “participates in the gradual shift across early modern Europe toward viewing crime primarily not as a conflict between two private parties, but rather between the criminal and the state.” The spirited, ‘aristocratic’ jealousy for one’s honor erodes, given this “radically egalitarian undercurrent.” The state, with its monarchic regime, respects “impartiality of judgment” not respect of high-born persons, all in pursuit of its purpose of guarding the right of self-preservation for each individual person within it. This limits mercy, inasmuch as crimes against an individual must not be “remitted at the discretion of the victim,” anymore, only at the discretion of the sovereign, who, as in Grotius, bears responsibility for the good order of the commonwealth. “The crime is really against the commonwealth, not the victim.” The sovereign’s discretion rests “not on anger or just desert, but instead on the desire to procure peace for the people.”

Locke affirms the need for the modern state and for a strong executive while recognizing that a centralized ruling apparatus controlled by one man might easily endanger the rights it aims to secure. In the law of nature as well as the law in a rightly-ordered civil society, executive power punishes crime to restrain those who violate natural rights, prevent such offenses in the first place, and imposing reparations upon offenders. As in Grotius and Hobbes, punishment ‘looks forward,’ not backward, eschewing retribution. As in Hobbes, Lockean prerogative enables executives to set the written law aside “in cases where the public good demands it,” thus permitting but also restricting mercy to such cases. A misuse of the prerogative power justifies the right of the people to revolution—another restriction on it. Arbitrary action is “a core violation of natural right.” As the author of a treatise opposing the model of patriarchy for human rulers outside the family, Locke denies the ruler any “claim that crimes create debts owed primarily to the king as creditor.” As in Hobbes, the offense is against the sovereign—in Locke’s view, the people.

Generally, the early modern political philosophers begin “a transition away from virtues and toward rights as the paramount ethical category, particularly in the realm of law and politics.” This begins to push mercy as misericordia in the direction of public provision for the poor instead of private charity. Consistent with Machiavelli’s doctrine, mercy becomes a “tool, alongside punishment, that could be used to procure the public good.” Mercy becomes instrumental, not intrinsically good. This tracks “growing controversy and skepticism about traditional Christian doctrines,” with a concurrent tendency (again Machiavellian) to argue “from politics back to theology rather than vice versa,” with politics “defined through natural reason,” said to be “much more securely known than the justice of God.” Finally, “by the end of the seventeenth century… the rising importance of equality as an organizing principle for public life had led the modern natural rights theorists to begin looking for alternatives to mercy that could be formulated in terms of right and clear rules enforceable by the state, rather than voluntary acts of individual virtue”—a clear instance of moving from personal rule of God and monarchs to the impersonal rule of lo stato.

Natural right itself came under attack by philosophers who denied that right could be derived from nature at all, that ‘ought’ can issue from ‘is.’ This denial, seen explicitly in the writings of David Hume, inclined many philosophers toward deriving right from utility. In endorsing mercy, Hume himself justified it as useful. Unlike the subsequent utilitarians, however, Hume leavens utility with moral sentiment, particularly benevolence and sympathy, influencing Adam Smith most immediately but also Kant and other ‘deontological’ or ‘idealist’ philosophers. He also insists on an equality principle, namely, equal treatment under the law, which will have substantial ramifications for the status of mercy in public life. All of these themes enter into both of those main lines of subsequent jurisprudential thought, for “while it is tempting to understand utilitarianism by contrasting it with a nonconsequentialist theory like Kant’s, such a move obscures what these theories have in common,” namely, “a shared commitment to equality and impartiality that manifests itself when the topic turns to punishment.”

Cesare Bonesana-Beccaria follows Hume’s utilitarian line. He formulated the phrase which translates into English as “the greatest happiness of the greatest number,” which Jeremy Bentham would popularize. To achieve this end, Beccaria insists on equal punishments for equal crimes—”a major departure from past penal practices,” wherein the several social classes were treated as meriting unequal treatment by right of their very inequality. This raises problems for the practice of mercy in such legal cases, inasmuch as the just and prudent exercise of mercy, or even its trans-just exercise in some theories, requires attention to the particular details of the case at hand; all cases are not created equal. Crucially, Beccaria does not dispense with mercy altogether but calls for its integration into the legal code itself. In a Beccarian legal regime, the judge will apply the law with egalitarian severity, but the laws themselves will be mild, lenient. “Beccaria wants leniency through law rather than through executive or judicial discretion”—laws, for example, against torture and the death penalty. Whereas “mercy is local and specific and therefore seemingly arbitrary… leniency can be achieved by rewriting universally applicable laws with less severe penalties. A judge might well exercise mercy, but only if burdened by a code that is insufficiently Beccarian.

Such impartiality and universalizability enters into the ‘deontological’ moral theories leading up to and culminating in the writings of Immanuel Kant. That is, both utilitarianism and deontology or idealism partake of the egalitarianism formalized in Hobbes’s philosophy. Such British theorists as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price follow up on Hume’s lead but attempt to make it compatible with Christianity, intending “to harmonize traditional Christian ethical precepts with arguments that could be supported by reason alone,” especially reasoning based upon the egalitarian foundation of impartiality—as in the Christian description of God as no respecter of persons, that is, of social status. Impartiality, as we have seen, militates against mercy in judging, as does the age-old commitment to retributive punishment. Price combines both.

The much more influential and impressive philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, gives equal treatment under the law a natural foundation with his idea of the general will, which “links the impartiality of the law with the equality of citizens,” a thought that suggests both Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator” and Kant’s “categorical imperative.” While Rousseau emphasizes the moral centrality of compassion, but denies that compassion ought to be applied to a guilty man. However, in the state of nature man’s innate compassion makes him “a complete stranger to any form of sadism or cruelty,” vices of civil society not of human nature as such. With Machiavelli, Rousseau cautions that compassion in civil society must be limited, lest it degenerate into weakness. And because the egalitarian general will ought to pervade civil society, political mercy becomes dubious.

Smith, “like Hume, affirmed sentiment as the basis for moral judgments, yet he rejected the idea that our moral judgments do no more than track social usefulness”; what is more, Smith is no subjectivist, arguing that “our sentiments are moral if they correspond the sentiments of an impartial spectator,” who “serv[es] the same function that God served in more voluntarist divine command theories.” In a court of law, the judge “stands in for the impartial spectator,” “retain[ing] the capacity to pass judgment on specific acts, taking account of all contextual features, rather than simply selecting rules that must be applied regardless of context.” (Although the authors don’t mention it, this conforms with Smith’s skepticism about the impersonal, modern state, which he famously wants to as small as possible, in order to discourage it from curtailing market freedom.) He anticipates Kant insofar as his impartial spectator looks like a ‘personal’ version of the categorical imperative, but his very personalism also separates him from Kant and from statist German thinkers generally; also unlike Kant, he shares with Bentham an interest in the “forward-looking” understanding of justice and mercy, aiming at balancing them for the good of civil society.

Without God “to ensure that offenders received their just deserts through temporal punishments,” retributive justice falls “on human shoulders, bringing human mercy into decisive tension with the demands of human retributive justice.” Bentham and Kant see this as clearly as any Enlightenment philosophe. Bentham secularizes the universalism of agape, recasting it as benevolence. In so doing, utilitarians “tended to leave the language of mercy behind,” rejecting it as too particularistic, too much a matter of discretion. As in Christianity, the poor must be succored, but “mercy and charity envision an uncertain dependence of the poor on the rich.” Better far to avoid such arbitrary exercise of power; the atheist Bentham condemns God as “at best capricious and at worst mad,” a tyrant exercising terrifying, unlimited power. Punishment must not be eternal but swift, sure, unrelenting, but brief—except for ‘sure,’ many of the things divine punishment is not. In effect, Bentham generalizes Beccaria’s theory of crime and punishment, making of it “a method applicable to all moral questions whatsoever”; all moral reasoning should aim at “promot[ing] positive future consequences” by prevention and deterrence. “Positive” means maximizing happiness and minimizing pain for the greatest number of persons. Mercy must be systematically ruled out of public judgment because it makes justice uncertain. “Whereas for Machiavelli a few acts of spectacular cruelty could restore order, for Bentham only a clear and consistently applies rule avoids the cruel results mercy might unintentionally engender.” Of course, as the authors note, if empirical results showed that this proved ineffective, that “severe but uncertain punishment” deterred crime more effectively, “the utilitarian calculus would come out the other way.” That notwithstanding, Bentham (followed in recent years by Ronald Dworkin) regards strict impartiality as the indispensable fixed rule of justice. Private charity and mercy must therefore be replaced by legislating support for the poor. At most, private mercy can only find a place if it can be shown to “promote temporal well-being.”

The universalizing egalitarianism of modern thought generally pervades not only utilitarianism but Kantianism. Kant puts retribution squarely at the center of his moral practice, even as he puts the categorical imperative at the center of his moral theory. While utterly rejecting Benthamite regard for happiness as the end of human activity and thought, he therefore arrives at the same conclusion respecting punishment and mercy. If anything, he is more severe than Bentham. In Kant’s words, “The law of punishment is a categorical imperative, and woe to him who crawls through the windings of eudemonism in order to discover something that releases the criminal from punishment or even reduces its amount by the advantages it promises.” The categorical imperative strictly requires equal treatment under itself.

Because “his central ethical commitment is that freedom, not happiness, must be the orienting value for human society,” Kant “requires us to treat others as agents with the capacity to choose their own ends rather than merely as means to our ends”; “punishment is justified because it promotes freedom, not happiness.” The whole system of rewards and punishment, whether theistic as in Christianity or atheistic as in Bentham, “engender[s] a low habit of mind,” and amount to immorality. So much so that for Kant the use of incentives as determinants of moral thought is the original sin, as “the fall of humanity consisted in looking for incentives to do what is right and thus changing their maxim to one where right is done only for the sake of some other purpose.” God Himself must never be conceived as demanding honor or glory.

Specifically, Kant’s insistence on strictly equal treatment comes to sight in his demand that the punishment fit the crime (e.g., the death penalty for all murderers) and that persons who commit the same crime, whatever it may be, receive the same punishment. Private individuals may forgive, but public officials must not precisely because “pity leads the magistrate to protect the rights of some citizens less vigorously than those of others”; “the law [is] an equalizers of individuals who have been made unequal by the perpetrator’s crime.” As the authors observe, Kant secularizes Anselm: “the principles of justice are the same for all rational beings,” divine and human alike; neither Jesus nor anyone else can atone for the sins of another; divine and human justice alike (in Kant’s words)”must be unexceptionable and unrelenting.” Using Christian language, Kant calls the thoroughgoing adoption of a human soul to the standard of the categorical imperative a conversion entailing “the death of the old man” (the eudaemonic man) by “the crucifying of the flesh”; the “new human being” then suffers “simply for the sake of the good.” But “instead of Jesus making satisfaction for the sinner, in Kant’s theory the sinner makes satisfaction for himself by becoming a new being with a disposition like that of Jesus, punishing the self as a means of converting to the sought-after new disposition.”

“Kantian retributivism and Benthamite utilitarianism emerge as parallel, albeit partial, attempts to answer the question: How can the administration of punishment be made rational rather than arbitrary?… For both thinkers, the rational is the opposite of the arbitrary, and to avoid arbitrariness, punishment needs to constitute a kind of science”—for Kant, an a priori or ‘idealist’ science, for Bentham and empirical one. “In both cases they see their theory as a rational advance over arbitrary rule” and a “foundational commitment to equality understood as impartiality.”

Tuckness and Parrish largely skip over the historicist revolution in philosophy, devoting only a few pages to Hegel, satisfied that he doesn’t depart from the utilitarian and ‘idealist’ moral framework of his immediate predecessors to any very significant extent. They turn instead to the philosophic situation today, identifying three “main characteristics of mercy” shared by nearly all serious writers on mercy. These are the unequal status of the parties involved; the bestowal of benefit or mitigation of harm; and discretionary power. Discretionary power has proven the most controversial one, although inequality troubles democratically-inclined thinkers.

Christianity fully and readily integrates all these characteristics because it understands God as a father, benefactor, creditor, and judge. Absent the perfect and personal God, both inequality and discretionary power become troublesome. Thus Locke seeks to moderate the monarch’s absolute power by subjecting prerogative to legislative review. Beginning with Anselm, Christianity also introduced its own difficulty by distinguishing mercy from justice; in abandoning Christianity, modern political philosophy then needed to wrestle with the esteem for mercy Christian culture left behind. Rousseauian compassion and other agape-substitutes proliferate.

Where does this leave us now? The authors argue that “mercy can still be regarded as a plausible virtue in contemporary public life.” They examine four contemporary objections to mercy. The first is the complaint that mercy implies subjection to the arbitrary will of him who grants it. An arbitrary action might be random, inscrutable, uncontestable (i.e., one has no right to contest it), irrevocable, discretionary (i.e., without reference to some standing rule) and/or unjustifiable. Locke answers this objection by proposing the rule of law but recognizing that law needs to be interpreted and applied, and this must involve discretion. Further, lawmaking itself as well as its executive and judicial application can be constrained by institutional safeguards, as the American Founders, following Locke, demonstrated. Too-rigid application of a legal standard might itself become arbitrary, and no less so than the “particularistic decisions” of the old patriarchs. “The claim that mercy permits discretion and is therefore arbitrary rests on a truncated notion of both arbitrariness and mercy. It takes discretion to be the whole of the arbitrary, and thus fails to recognize ways in which laws can sometimes be more arbitrary than particularistic decisions are.”

For example, a rigid adherence to contemporary standards of human rights would have prevented South Africans from implementing their Truth and Reconciliation Committee in the aftermath of the abolition of apartheid. The “hard choices at stake in moments of great national harm requiring great national healing… may well depend on cultivating a willingness to forgive by those whose forgiveness we have no right to demand, toward those who have no right to expect it.” This will offend Kantian sensibilities, a distinction must be drawn between particular justice in every case and the overall conditions necessary to establish a just political regime.

The opposite danger, recognized by such otherwise antithetical thinkers as Augustine and Rousseau, is that “the indulgence of wrongdoing by a few may constitute cruelty to the rest.” This problem of “moral hazard” requires the exercise of still another moral virtue, prudence. For this reason, Plato and Aristotle, those adepts of phronesis, tug at the shirtsleeves of all subsequent moralists.

Finally, the retributivist theories (of which Kant’s system serves as the most influential contemporary example) oppose mercy because it treats people better than impartially applied justice would allow. The authors meet this “mercy paradox”—essentially the contradiction between two goods—by commending “epistemic humility,” a philosophy professor’s way of saying we don’t know all we need to know every single time, and we may not know all we need to know at any time. “Our moral intuitions about desert should not always be taken as decisive, and that consequently acting against those intuitions will not necessarily prove unjust.” The exercise of discretion remains an ineluctable fact of moral choice, public and private; freedom is a necessity, whether we are comfortable with it or not. “Disentangling our conceptions of mercy” by describing them in the manner Tuckness and Parrish have done “should at least drive us to admit the limits of our knowledge about what each person truly deserves, such that our guesses about desert need not always be fully determinative in our political and legal decisions.” They take one final deep breath and add, “This will not be easy.” Not only the classical philosophers but God Himself acknowledged this, as seen on the Cross. It is time the moderns saw it, too, and this just and merciful book should help.