Will Morrisey Reviews

Judith N. Shklar: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

 

Early modern political philosophers often avail themselves of ‘natural-rights’ theories, in part to counter ‘divine-right’ theories. Divine right was associated with two serious problems: despotism, Catholic and Protestant; bitter religious warfare, civil and international. With modern natural rights theories in hand, along with republican institutional proposals, philosophers such as Locke and Montesquieu sought to tame uncompromising passions and to channel human energies into the peaceful bays of commerce and civility.

This ’embourgeoisement’ of the world succeeded all too well, in the estimation of some later moderns. From the ‘Left’ came Rousseau’s strictures against this demi-citizen, demi-man, the bourgeois; from the ‘Right’ came Burke’s fulminations against sophisters, bankers, and atheists. A rich variety of Germans—Idealists, Hegelians, Marxists, Nietzscheans—sought to revive the spirited or ‘thumotic’ passions in modern man, much as, centuries earlier, Machiavelli had sought to re-masculinize a world made ‘effeminate’ by Christianity.

The American Founding displays a fascinating mixture of ‘bourgeois’ and ‘thumotic’ elements. This is modern natural right, all right: equality defined as the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness reminds one decidedly of Locke, as do many other phrases in the Declaration of Independence. However, the Declaration’s peroration invokes spiritedness, as the Signers mutually pledge to each other their lives, fortunes, and “sacred honor.” That has an aristocratic ring, not a bourgeois clatter. In its subsequent history, the regime the Founders founded has often deceived its more thumotic enemies—the war-horses of the Confederacy, the fascists and communists of the next century—who supposed that no commercial republic would stand and fight. This bourgeois regime cultivates some unbourgeois passions on the side, and did so, at least in its first century without the aid of the ‘Germans,’ and their thumotic critique of natural right.

Judith N. Shklar’s succinct and graceful essay well captures this dual character of American citizenship, although at the price of apparent theoretical confusion. [1] She explains American citizenship by turns in Hegelian and natural-rights terms, that is, in terms that are theoretically opposed. A Hegelian will explain citizenship as the outcome of a historical dialectic seen in the master-slave relationship; a natural-rights thinker will explain citizenship in terms of consent and contract founded on certain natural principles—i.e., principles discovered by unaided human reason, not by divine grace or by some illumination or ‘consciousness-raising’ experience issuing from concrete historical situations unavailable to previous thinkers.

To say this is not to claim that theoretical difficulties necessarily play out directly in practice. A theoretical error may not make a bad citizen. In fact, it better not: we all make so many of them. Publius’ argument in the tenth Federalist shows that even persons intent on being bad citizens can be governed with the help of well-designed institutions. Surely such a regime can survive well-intentioned mistakes of an ‘academic’ sort, as well. As in religion, so in theory, it often matters not if my neighbor believes in one god or twenty, so long as he neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. It is true that mistakes in political theory may result in practical catastrophe—as when John C. Calhoun asserts that the phrase “all men are created equal” is “a self-evident lie”—because while one may ‘bracket’ religion from politics it is hard to bracket a theory about politics from politics. But not all such errors are damaging.

Further, I am not at all sure that Shklar is mistaken. The theoretical contradiction or tension in her essay may be more apparent than real. She may deliberately set it in place. I shall leave the possibility open. In order to highlight both the tension and the question of its deliberateness, I shall pay some attention to the way Shklar unfolds her argument. Her essay seems to me very carefully crafted, deserving every benefit of the doubt when it comes to apparent contradictions.

 

Shklar on Natural Right

Slightly more than one-third of the way through her essay on American citizenship, Shklar for the first time explicitly mention the natural-rights foundation of American republicanism, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. [1] Her earlier references to “the promise of equal political right contained in the Declaration of Independence” (13) to “an unacknowledged ideology of equal political rights” (28) are ambiguous and somewhat misleading. The Declaration does not mention equal political rights at all, much less promise them.

The only promise made in the Declaration occurs in the final paragraph. The representatives of the United States “pledge to each other”—not to the people they represent or to the “candid World” they address in the name of the people—”our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” for “the support of this Declaration.” This is not an egalitarian promise. Although “lives” and “fortunes” have an egalitarian sound—everyone has one of each—as noted above “sacred Honor” has a decidedly thumotic/spirited, even aristocratic ring. While Hegel may be right to think that everyone seeks ‘recognition,’ it is not to be supposed that every person holds honor sacred.

The Signers of the Declaration never conjoin the terms “equal” and “equality” with “political.” “Political” first comes to sight in the first sentence: “political bands… have connected” one people with another, Americans with English. It is in dissolving these bands that Americans assume “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” among the “Powers of the earth.” Equality exists by nature and by God, not necessarily by politics. Natural right and political arrangements are distinguishable.

The lapidary sentences immediately following reaffirm this. All men are created equal, that is, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. People constitute governments, engage in foundational political activity, in order to secure these unalienable or natural rights; unalienable rights are natural, and precisely because they exist not by grace of consent, assent, or politicking of any kind. Governments derive their just powers, those that secure natural rights, by consent. This can only mean that consent is not mere assent, but rather agreement consistent with unalienable rights—rational agreement, agreement that takes cognizance of the self-evident. [2]  To give an example from everyday life, if some fellow in a bar approaches a woman of republican virtue with the proposition, ‘I want to be your love-slave,’ she is entitled to remind him that his desire is inconsistent with rational or consensual behavior rightly understood. Consenting adults—at least in the chaste and sober language of the Declaration—do not attempt to contradict their very natures by attempting to alienate the unalienable. Such attempt are either slavish or tyrannical, minor or major variant of King George III and his “design to reduce [the People] under absolute Despotism.” Equal political or civil rights may or may not conduce to the security of equal natural or unalienable rights. The former must always be tested in the light of the latter, not confused with them. Such confusion (as in the contemporary phrase, ‘human rights’) may weaken the standard by making it contingent on consent or even mere assent.

Shklar’s initial imprecise phrasing directly bears on an important point concerning the structure of government, particularly republican government. Several of the charges on which the Americans indict their king (and, sotto voce, their parliament) refer to government by law and representative government: e.g., the attempt to get Americans to “relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature”; the calling together of legislative bodies “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records”; the repeated dissolving of colonial legislature and foot-dragging on permitting their reelection; and, most famously, “imposing taxes on us without our Consent.” No taxation without direct (rather than ‘virtual’ representation)—indeed, representation itself—is not on the face of it a matter of equal political right. Representation requires the (usually temporary) elevation of certain citizens above others, in order to constitute a government. Representation does not necessarily proceed according to the principle, ‘one person, one vote,’ or even ‘one citizen, one vote.’ Even direct representation can be decidedly inegalitarian. Further, as an instrument of government, representation partakes of the inegalitarianism of all government, which involves telling people what to do. As Publius writes, “In administering a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself” (The Federalist, No. 51). Republican or representative government is still government, even if government of, by, and for the people. Lincoln’s formulation is a touch vague with respect to which among the people will be doing the actual governing at any given time, although his actions as president, particularly as Commander in Chief, were anything but vague with respect to the perennial political question, ‘Who’s in charge, here?’ The Signers of the Declaration and the Framers of the Constitution are not at all vague on this point. Both documents clearly identify the governing actor: the Congress versus king and parliament in one instance, and the several branches of government in the other. Once you step out of the ‘state of nature,’ you’ve left behind the situation in which no one has the right to tell you what to do. It will be a rare, indeed hitherto uninvented, political constitution that somehow arranges for thoroughgoing political equality.

Shklar emphatically rights her careless phrasing, as noted above, and additionally makes a sound observation on the relation of natural rights theory to republican practice. “No historically significant form of government or of citizenship is in principle incompatible with the exclusion of large groups of people, but natural-rights theory makes it very difficult to find good reasons for excluding anyone from full citizenship in a modern regime” (37). She cautions that “only after long and painful struggles, the inherent logic of American representative democracy, based on political equality, did prevail” (38). It is important to see that by “political equality” she means, first and foremost, voting rights, which are civil and not natural rights, but are civil rights designed to secure natural rights. It is moreover eminently arguable that equal voting rights are extremely useful political security for equal natural rights. But not all equal political right are necessarily so conducive, as the tenth Federalist argues, with its well-known strictures on “pure democracy.”

In this matter Shklar echoes Abraham Lincoln. In the words of his friend and law partner, William Herndon, “Again he said and said often… that, though the Declaration of Independence at that time, 1858, was not just yet a practiced fact here in all circumstances, and yet that it was a grand truth set up as a standard, an ideal standard, it may be, but to be ever worked for, struggled for, and approached….” [3]  According to Herndon, Lincoln was thinking of slavery and its eventual abolition, which also serves as the centerpiece of Shklar’s essay, even more than the civil condition of women, manual workers, and foreign nationals. It is to Shklar’s rhetorical approach that I now turn, picking up her argument from the beginning.

Slavery, the Acid Test

Shklar considers a habitual but nonetheless pertinent complaint against the American Founders—that these apostles of natural equality tolerated slavery and a considerable degree of civic exclusion of persons not enslaved. She shows how and why that is and is not a just criticism. In her introduction she points to sociology, history, and law, not to natural right. In one sense this is appropriate and necessary: If natural right is distinct from civil right, then citizenship belongs in the realm not of nature but of “human events” (to use the Declaration’s phrase) and human consent. To be born within a given territory may or may not confer citizenship; obviously, this natural event acquires civil right or privilege only through human legislation. Slaves are born, but they are not born civilly free. Similarly, the right to keep the fruits of one’s labors, a natural right, may or may not enjoy civil protection. Shklar’s rhetoric proceeds effectively by citing, if not stirring, the thumotic or spirited passions; she speaks initially not of natural right but of “civic dignity” (3), the demand for respect—what Charles Taylor, following Hegel, calls “recognition.” Indeed, even her emphasis on “the promise of equal political rights” evokes the thumotic, as anyone who has witnessed the moral indignation of a child (‘But, you promised!) will attest. Consistent with her ‘thumotizing’ strategy, Shklar emphasizes social standing among the four meanings of citizenship (social standing, nationality/membership, participation, and “ideal republican citizenship” (3). She goes so far as to agree unqualifiedly with Aristotle that a change of regime changes you as a citizen without changing your nature, at least your physical nature; the same person could live through the Third, Fourth, and Fifth French republics, as well as the Vichy regime, with no physical change beyond the wear and tear of years (8). This claim overlooks the problem that a Jewish citizen of the Third Republic might not physically survive into the Fourth; regime changes can kill you. Thus in her introduction Shkalr abstracts from or downplays the natural consequences of politics. By so ‘abstracting,’ she wants to avoid another sort of abstraction the theoretical abstraction from the ‘historical,’ that is, from economic, social, and political conditions (see p. 9). American citizenship has changed since 1787, at least in the sense that a far wider portion of the population enjoys citizenship rights. Shklar wants to show how this happened, but she does not make her position clear at the beginning. It is not at first clear whether she means to argue that “democratic ideology”—which can exclude from citizenship as well as include—is somehow at tension with itself, that the Founders’ principles were therefore inadequate, or whether she simply means that there was a mismatch between theory and practice, that “a profoundly democratic society… was actively and purposely false to its own vaunted principles” (14).

Her first glance at this question is not encouraging. She claims that “the value of citizenship was derived primarily from its denial to slaves, to some white men, and to all women” (16, emphasis added). The most authoritative statement on the value of citizenship, the Declaration of Independence, disproves this. The value of citizenship was primarily derived from the assertion of self-evident natural rights, and secondarily from the denial of those rights by means of seriously compromising the civil rights of the American people as a whole, among whose numbers the freeborn white men who signed the Declaration were conspicuous examples. The Declaration makes no mention of slavery; as is well known, Jefferson wanted to charge the king with imposing the institution of chattel slavery on the colonies, but even his proposed language did not compare the conditions of slaves to the condition of subjects. This is not to deny that such comparisons were made—George Washington made one [4]—but it is to deny that the ‘negative’ derivation was primary.

“What gave citizenship as [social] standing its historical significance is not that it was denied for so long to so many, but that this exclusion occurred in a republic that was so overtly committed to political equality”—not exactly so, as discussed above—”and whose citizens believed that theirs was a free and fair society” (17)—again not so, else Lincoln would not have won the presidency, nor would anti-slavery arguments have gained sympathetic hearing from the beginning, as seen in the writings of Washington, Jefferson, and other prominent members of the founding generation. Nor would arguments for voting rights for manual workers, women, and freemen have obtained any purchase in the nineteenth century, had Americans who enjoyed full citizenship believed that theirs was a free and fair society, simply. Nor would slave manumission have occurred throughout the northern states. These objections notwithstanding, Shklar’s rhetorical approach has the great merit of bringing early Americans into the reader’s imagination as real men and women in real circumstances: “The word slavery used to express fears of oppression in a country where slaves were constantly before one’s eyes or at least are a living presence has a different meaning from its use as merely a figure of speech” (22-23)—as in the writings of many English Whigs.

Self-Government, Political and Economic

After the introduction, Shklar divides the remainder of the essay into two sections, “Voting” and “Earning.” That is, she discusses citizenship in the modern commercial republic first in accordance with its republicanism, then in accordance with its commercialism. (If you prefer ‘liberal democracy’ to ‘commercial republicanism,’ she may be said to discuss citizenship first in terms of democracy, then in terms of liberalism—the latter first in the older and then in the newer sense of the word.) She continues her ‘historicizing’ strategy at the beginning of “Voting,” where she claims that Americans fought hard to get the right to vote and then often failed to exercise that right because citizenship was a matter of social standing defined negatively as ‘I-am-not-a-slave.’ Once won, voting rights are not seen primarily as a positive means of asserting rights, she argues; consequently, the right often rests in peace, unexercised. This explanation depends upon her not-quite-just dismissal of Aristotelian citizenship (ruling and being ruled) as “citizenship for members of a master class” (29) or “participatory aristocracy” (30). In fact, Aristotle advocates the expansion of the middle class as ballast for the typical ancient regime of many poor and few rich. Her dismissal of citizenship as ruling and being ruled is also not quite just to the Americans. With her equation (following the formulation of a North Carolina judge) of U. S. citizenship law and English common law (33-34), she misses the interplay between representative government and popular sovereignty—the American equivalent of ruling and being ruled. As James Monroe, following Madison, discusses at length in his book The People the Sovereigns, the American regime is not constructed along any (ancient) Greek, Roman, or (modern) English or Dutch model. Only the people, not the government, are sovereign, constrained only by natural right—i.e., by their own nature, as distinct from their passions-of-the-moment. The people are self-governing, in the sense that they are sovereign. they rule directly when they vote, serve on juries, run a business or organize a labor union. They are in turn governed by their law-making, law-enforcing, law-applying representatives, who come from them and must abide by the same laws they, as governors, make, enforce, and interpret. If the people are sovereign, ultimately limited in their action only by natural right, and if human beings are free to act against natural right, this means that majority tyranny is a serious possibility, as the Founders, Lincoln, and Tocqueville all recognized. These statesmen also agreed on the basic features of the solution to this potential problem: republican institutions that work to slow down popular passions, refining and enlarging the public views; a complex civil society providing ‘mediating institutions’ between the individual citizens and the government; a virtuous citizenry. (This last item is prominent in the much-misrepresented Madison, whose ‘institutionalism’ is intended as an —auxiliary precaution. [5]  The Americans may be said to use non-Aristotelian means to achieve at least one Aristotelian end: moderation. They need such means because their circumstance differs from Aristotle’s. They live in a modern state, not an ancient polis.

It is now—not a moment too soon—that Shklar corrects her course and cites the American regime’s natural right foundations. She proceeds through a good account of voting rights as civil protectors of natural rights, although she occasionally slips and confuses the two. (For example, “It is only citizenship perceived as a natural right that bears a promise of equal political standing in a democracy” (57). Not exactly: it is the equal political standing in terms of voting rights that mightily helps to secure the natural rights that citizenship, membership in a civic order, is intended to secure.) Perhaps the polemical highlight of her account is her criticism of nineteenth-century feminists for abandoning natural rights arguments in favor of such “notably undemocratic paths to progress” as Social Darwinism, health and hygiene-oriented reform, and the Social Gospel (60-61). This “evolutionary historicism” (88), ‘Left’ or ‘Right,’ typically requires a revolutionary or at least evolutionary vanguard, supremely ambitious personalities who do not merely refine and enlarge the public views but redefine and transform them. Such individuals have tended to appeal not to prudential reason (how can we best secure natural rights?) but to the thumotic passions that the American constitution is designed to moderate.

In “Earning,” Shklar describes the way independent work has embodied a (tamed) spiritedness. This account, with its sharp refutation of Weber (91), deserves praise, although it should be noted that the Jacksonians were only elaborating the labor theory of value propounded much earlier by John Locke. [6]  She must mean that the work ethic was “forged” in practice in Jacksonian America (65). She also errs (again because she is thinking in sociological terms) in claiming that the economic portion of the public sphere, unlike the political portion, is “entirely unequal” (64). This is not even exactly true in terms of income levels; about two-thirds of American families fall into the ‘middle class’ range of household incomes, although the increases at the lower and upper ends of the income scale in the past fifty years are significant—especially the increases at the upper end. On the legal as distinguished from the socioeconomic level, the natural right to keep what you earn is in fact equally protected by civil laws, except of course that the incomes of the wealthy are taxed (with representation) at rates higher than others. (Lest one shed an idle tear for the wealthy, it may be noted that they also enjoy more exemptions and better accountants; more pertinently, they also enjoy more money at the end of the day.) This means that, overall, the American intention to break with European society, “for centuries separated into three orders: those who pray, those who fight, and those who labor” (69), has been largely successful in practice and in theory. America is successfully bourgeois. As always, practice doesn’t measure up to theory, but if Americans don’t always enjoy the economic independence of the Jeffersonian yeoman, they often act as if they do. Shklar’s proposed “right to work” not as a “primary human right” but as a civil right “derived from the requirements of local citizenship” (100)—defended on the grounds that one must earn in order to be a full citizen in terms of social standing—is an important attempt to re-yeomanize contemporary workers to the greatest extent possible. Like any such proposal, this one will be subject to the exigencies of politics, inasmuch as civil rights are alienable, tradeable, compromisable, and generally subject (as the Declaration states) to prudence, to be deliberated on by legislators, executives, judges, and other citizens.

The Ambiguity of Modern Liberal Theory

On the level of ‘pure’ political theory, modern liberalism often involves not-quite-plausible attempts to reconstruct natural right or, rather, to gain the benefits of natural right without actually endorsing it. These attempts often amount to elaborations of the Kantian project, exemplified recently in the writings of John Rawls. Rawls’s “original position” argument, which assumes that no one operating behind the “veil of ignorance” will have the guts to roll the dice and say, ‘Give me tyranny or give me slavery, because to my soul equality is worst of all,’ requires a rational will with no rational object or subject (older writers would say ‘soul,), and hence leaves itself vulnerable to Allan Bloom’s joke, that Rawls has given us a first philosophy for the Last Man. Shklar, no less liberal than Rawls, proceeds more concretely and probably more wisely, calling attention to the real conditions of citizenship and to the natural rights to be secured by citizens for themselves and for one another.

The difficulties with proceeding as Shklar does—perhaps for reasonable rhetorical purposes—have been canvassed. In sum, they involve a failure to recognize the subtlety of the interplay between theory and practice. Specifically, Shklar does not clearly account for the way in which practical reasoning or prudence must guard the discovery of theoretical reasoning, natural right. The Declaration states this matter explicitly and The Federalist shows the operation of prudential reasoning for that purpose on every page. Shklar often seems to assume that equal natural rights will best be guarded by equal civil rights, at least with respect to voting and earning. This comes, first, from her ‘Hegelian’ contention that recognition, rather than natural right, opens the door to understanding human equality and, second, from the (democratic, not Hegelian) corollary, that equal recognition, embodied in equal political rights, is the antidote for the tensions generated by unequal recognition. If it were true that equal natural rights are best guarded by equal civil rights, there could be no natural rights argument for civil inequality. But there is, and it is an argument concerning one of the most extreme cases of the denial of natural rights, slavery—the centerpiece of Shklar’s argument.

Jefferson often receives a polemical bruising over the apparent contradiction between slaveholding and natural equality. Jefferson himself was of course fully aware of the problem, and attempted to devise various schemes for slavery’s gradual abolition. This was not simply a matter of finding a practical formula; any practical formula also raised a serious theoretical issue. Government that guards natural rights is government by consent, that is, rational assent. Government by consent in practice entails popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty, while often consistent with consent, is not always consistent with consent; the majority may vote to oppress the minority in an exercise of passion or prejudice. Theoretically, there is no problem; a majority vote to violate the natural rights of the minority is not genuinely consensual, not consistent with the self-evidence of natural rights. But what if the majority vote to violate the natural rights of the minority does have a serious rational element? That is, what if the attempt to vindicate the natural rights of the minority would involve a serious threat to the natural rights of the majority?

This might seem impossible, but Jefferson did not think so. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson discusses a proposal for emancipating slaves born after a certain time, after they have reached their majority and have been educated at public expense. These young ex-slaves would be emancipated, but they would not be made citizens of Virginia; they would be sent out as colonists to settle elsewhere. “It will probably be asked,” Jefferson writes, “Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State, and thus save the expense of supplying by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep-seated prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions, which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” [7]  Citizenship exists to secure natural rights. But if the expansion of citizenship is likely to endanger natural rights even more than the refusal of such expansion will do, citizenship should not be expanded. Such predictions are a matter of prudential judgment. (In fact, the emancipation of slaves did not lead to the extermination of any race in America, although deep-rooted prejudices of whites and bitter recollections by blacks have indeed divided us into parties and produced convulsions). Not only does natural equality not translate easily into civic equality in practice, as Shklar knows, but it need not invariably translate justly into civic equality, either. The quest for inclusion can run afoul of the quest for justice, although, as Shklar cautions, you need a very good argument to offer proof ‘how so.’ Such an argument requires practical reasoning and the test of experience, and will in the end be probabilistic not demonstrative, undogmatic not ‘thumotic.’ It is both the merit and the problem of liberalism that it tames but also democratizes the thumotic—a point, however, which takes us away from Shklar, toward Francis Fukuyama and Perry Anderson. The tension seen in Shklar’s argument instances the difficulties in attempting to synthesize the American Founders’ understanding of natural right with the Hegelian ‘politics of recognition.’

Conclusion

Liberalism is a species of political rationalism. Liberalism’s viability depends crucially upon the kind of reason that the rationalist employs when thinking about politics. Political rationalism can involve deductive/demonstrative reason, practical or prudential reason, dialectical reason, or all of these in a variety of combinations.

For example, Hobbesian political rationalism gives heavy emphasis to deductive/demonstrative reasoning, following from Hobbes famous ‘discover’ of Euclidean geometry in middle age. Hobbes uses demonstrative reasoning not only to establish the first principles of natural right but for constructive purposes. His monarch is a ‘first principle’ or ‘prince’ from whom all subsidiary powers are derived. Hegel and Marx, by contrast, emphasize the use of dialectical reasoning for purposes of political and social deconstruction and reconstruction. The result oddly resembles that of Hobbes, at least in the sense that the practical result of each theory has been monarchy.

The American Founders use demonstrative reason in order to establish the first principles and theoretical corollaries of natural right. John Marshall also uses it for legal purposes, to deduce implied powers from stated constitutional principles (McCullough v. Maryland). They use dialectical reasoning for its classical purpose of persuasion, but never in an attempt to establish ‘laws of history.’ (They do not even use the term ‘history’ to refer to what they call in the Declaration “the course of human events.) They use neither demonstrative nor dialectical reason primarily for the purpose of political construction or deliberation. For that, they use prudential reason.

It may be that Shklar, too, finally uses the dialectical reasoning of the Hegelian ‘politics of recognition’ for persuasive purposes. It may be that the foundation for her, too, is natural right and the prudential defense thereof. But this is not clear. The rhetorical advantage in not making it clear is to get a fair hearing for natural right from scholars who eschew it, to introduce what to them is a bitter food in a palatable, if mushy, mixture. The disadvantage is that she elides a serious schism in American political history and in political philosophy itself, a schism that confuses politicians and ordinary citizens to this day, and has civic consequences, immediate and potential.

On the one hand, Shklar’s tendency to conflate equal natural right and equal political right misapplies deductive reason to a practical problem. This is likely to lead to a doctrinaire approach to politics, and to a consequent disillusionment when recalcitrant reality fails to bend obediently to the results of the rational deduction. This, it seems to me, is most likely in Shklar’s approach to political economy, where any locally-enforced ‘right to work’ might tend to inhibit the social mobility needed in a large-scale commercial economy. If I have a civil right to a job in the town I live in, will not local labor surpluses be perpetuated, and the labor needs of other localities be starved thereby? Such prudential questions must be raised and answered before a new civil right is established. If not, economic dislocation and political frustration will likely result.

On the other hand, Shklar’s evocation of a democratized Hegelianism or ‘politics of recognition,’ with its use of dialectical reason for purposes of political construction, resembles, albeit in a very mild form, the moves made by well-known American progressives in the late nineteenth century, moves that issued in the characteristic political themes of the twentieth century: the call for ‘leadership,’ the denial that the Constitution provides an adequate framework for government in the modern world, the establishment of large bureaucracies on the state and national levels, and so on. These themes have had important civic consequences, particularly with respect to the matter of self-government in the sense of civic participation, as many writers ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have observed. It could not have been Shklar’s judgment to dig into these matters too deeply, in this brief essay. She is surely aware of them, which is why I’ve been so insistent in leaving open the possibility that she evokes the democratized version of Hegelian dialectic for reasons having to do with the original, persuasive, use of dialectic.

 

Endnotes

1. Judith N. Shklar: American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 13. All subsequent page references to the text.
2. For a fine use of the distinction between consent and assent, see the statement by the labor union leader, p. 21.
3. Emanuel Hertz, ed.: The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William Herndon (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1940), p. 407.
4. On the Boston Tea Party, Washington wrote, “We must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition, that can be heaped upon us, till custom and use shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway” (Letter to Bryan Fairfax, August 24, 1774, in John C. Kirkpatrick, ed.: The Writings of George Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1931), Volume III, p. 242.
5. See James Monroe: The People the Sovereigns, Being a Comparison of the Government of the United States with Those of the Republics Which Have Existed Before, with the Causes of their Decadence and Fall (Cumberland: James River Press, 1987). See, for example, pages 5, 12-13, 31-36 (on the contrast with the first French Republic); 41-55 (on ancient Greek ‘city-states,’ generally); 68-69 (on modern Britain); 80-102 (ancient Athens). For Madison’s ‘comparative regime’ analysis, see The Federalist #63. For Madison on “auxiliary precautions,” see The Federalist #51.
6. See John Locke: An Essay Concerning the True Original, State, and End of Civil Government, sections 32-51.
7. Thomas Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, Question XIII (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), pp. 131-132.