Will Morrisey Reviews

Essay written in September 1991.

2018 Note: President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court on July 1, 1991. He had previously served on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In effect, he underwent two hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. In the first set of hearings, Thomas was questioned closely by senators who did not share his strict-constructionist approach to Constitutional interpretation, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts being one of his leading critics. After these initial hearings were concluded, allegations of sexual harassment of a co-worker at two of Thomas’s previous jobs in the federal bureaucracy were leaked from an FBI report. This caused the Committee to reconvene and call his accuser as a witness, along with Thomas himself, in a dramatic quasi-trial. The ‘case’ boiled down to his word against hers; absent anything more substantial than hearsay evidence, Thomas’s nomination was confirmed. This essay was written before the second set of hearings, when the issue was the more conventional question of how a Supreme Court Justice should ‘read’ the Constitution.

 

In nominating Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court, President Bush has chosen the right controversy. The polemics of Mr. Thomas’s critics may serve to highlight the real issue that this nomination raises: Whether or not American courts will defend the fundamental principles of United States Constitutional law.

Opposition to Thomas has centered on his refusal, as Chairman of the federal Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, to promote group quotas in hiring. By so refusing, Thomas stood on firm Constitutional ground. During his tenure, the EEOC has sought to protect the rights of individuals, not groups, because Thomas understands that only the protection of individual rights can enable a people to govern themselves.

Individuals can govern themselves only as reasonable citizens—that is, as individuals participating with other individuals in a political community. Orwell’s word “groupthink” points to the obvious fact that groups do not, cannot really think at all. Without reasoned thought, without public deliberation as distinguished from demagoguery, no real self-government can occur. The American regime of representative government by the consent of the governed makes no sense unless we accept the Founders’ understanding of it: A means for governing the factional passions political life inevitably provokes by rewarding reasonable deliberation.

Judge Thomas’s principles differ sharply from those of nineteenth-century individualism. That individualism tended to dissolve into mere self-assertion, making reason the calculation of personal advantage. Thomas avoids this libertarianism in exactly the same way the Framers of the Constitution did, on the unalienable rights enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Unlike a legion of contemporary law school professors, Thomas affirms that all human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and that the Constitution establishes a government whose sole purpose is to protect those rights by the means summarized in its Preamble, elaborated in its main text, and refined in its amendments.

To understand the vitriolic attacks on Thomas, we must appreciate the extent to which today’s interest groups, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (but mostly ‘Left’) have abandoned those Constitutional principles. What libertarians claim for the individual—unrestricted sovereignty with no real moral limitations—’leaders’ now claim for the groups they claim to represent. Whether this is a business lobby demanding preferential treatment or some association based on ethnic or social criteria, these ‘leaders’ reduce the concept of rights to desires. To them, ‘We have the right to what we want,’ really means, ‘What’s right is what we want,’ or even more simply, ‘We want what we want.’ This sort of thing deserves the name of socialist libertarianism, which is as much a contradiction in terms as “groupthink.” It uses the Constitution to further some goal-of-the-moment, while undermining the reasoned deliberation and natural law upon which the Constitution depends.

Unfortunately, this spirit of unthinking assertion pervades not only the interest groups but the government. Judges and legal scholars step forward rather to eagerly to claim that the law is what judges say it is, that the Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is. Today’s ideologies compete to replace the principles of the American founding. The first casualty is the rule of law. Judges and interest groups reinforce each other’s power.

Clarence Thomas will refuse to play the interest groups’ game. They know that. They fear it. They fight to block his appointment.

To the best of my knowledge, for all the multiplication of political opinions, for all the ramping up of ideological passions, twentieth-century thinkers have yet to discover a single new political principle. The political significance of this century has been almost exclusively practical. We have witnessed a struggle between those animated by ideas popularized in the eighteenth century—particularly representative government respecting the unalienable rights of individuals—and mass ‘movements’ inaugurated in the nineteenth century, led by men and women who spurned natural law for ‘History,’ exalting some group (be it a race, a nation, or a class) over the rest of humanity—always, supposedly, for the good of humanity. Since the 1940s we have learned one simple thing from our many afflictions: The eighteenth-century men were right. They drew nearer to the truth than the men of the nineteenth century did. Philosophically there has been no progress, least of all in ‘Progressivism.’ In our military victory over rightist tyranny in the 1940s, and in our political and economic victory over leftist tyranny today, we have seen the vindication of the principles of justice in practice. As a result, the most formidable enemies of representative government and the rule of law today are home-grown.

Clarence Thomas defends the truths propounded by the American Founders, truths not relative to the Founders’ time and place but true for all times and for all places human beings live. His opponents merely update the errors of nineteenth-century ideologues. Because this struggle is not over, because one battleground is and will remain the American courtroom, and because we need judges who know how to be warriors for the rule of law, the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court deserves confirmation by the United States Senate.

James W. Ceaser: Liberal Democracy and Political Science. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 19, Number 3, Spring 1992. Republished with permission.

 

Liberal constitutionalism makes an independent and institutionalized political science possible. If liberal constitutionalism is the only such regime, political scientists cannot sensibly pretend to neutrality with respect to its perpetuation. To preserve their own independence, they must not forget the political grounds of independence.

There are several ways to forget this. Since the late nineteenth century many political scientists have aspired to free their work from ‘values,’ which they believed ‘subjective’ and ‘culturally relative.’ This ‘value-free’ political science remains embedded in academia, but many of its practitioners now retire unreplaced by like-minded scholars. The younger political scientists are frankly ‘normative.’ Coming in many varieties—neo-Marxists and feminists may be the most numerous—almost all may be described fairly as socialists or left-liberals. From their ranks come academic politicians who caucus for ‘a new political science.’ Armed with the slogan, ‘Everything is political,’ they commit themselves, and attempt to commit the universities, to partisan ’causes.’ In reaction to this partisanship, the more traditional scholars deplore what they call the ‘politicization’ of the university and call for the continued academic freedom to be uncommitted. Their effort deserves admiration; given the atmosphere on some campuses, it is even courageous. But traditionalists remain vulnerable to the partisans’ pet terrier of an argument: There’s no such thing as an apolitical university; you cannot not choose; you’re either doing something to liberate students from the insidious tentacles of banality that discipline the bourgeois order, or you’re not. The old ‘Left’ used to dismiss all others as ‘objectively pro-fascist’; the new ‘Left’ does much the same thing while avoiding objectivist or scientistic language. This makes new-left agitation no less strident than its predecessor, but gives it a decidedly more moralistic sound. Traditionalists try to explain that there’s more to life than Manichean action and polemic calling itself ‘theory,’ but they finally resemble the political candidate who decries his opponent’s stand as ‘simplistic.’ You know he’s going to lose. Perhaps real life will come to his rescue eventually. And perhaps academic traditionalists will be remembered as honorable Catos of pedagogy by some embattled minority of the future. Perhaps that minority will win, if fortune does not favor some new enthusiasm.

“I have been struck by how many of the criticisms of liberal democracy made today in the name of justice have lost connection with a systematic treatment of political systems” or regimes, writes James W. Ceaser. “It is political philosophy, without political science” (4). Fascinated by change, by metaphors of flow, resentful of structure (when was the last time you heard the word ‘rigid’ used descriptively, not pejoratively?), political scientists moralize without recourse to regime theory. The protection afforded by liberal democracy lulls its beneficiaries into undue optimism; protectedness comes to seem a given, something easily preserved even if the structure of liberalism gets kicked down. Ceaser seeks to interest political scientists in what had been the core of their own science, emphasizing, perhaps tactfully, not so much the need of political scientists for liberal democracy as the need of liberal democracy for political science of a certain kind.

Beginning with the basics, Ceaser describes American liberal democracy as the combination of two “sets of ideas” supposed “incompatible” by political writers before Americans combined them (8-9). Constitutionalism—the protection of rights, limited and deliberative government—had seemed to depend upon the social foundation provided by the great estates, as argued in the writings of such philosophers as Locke and Montesquieu and of such statesmen as John Adams and Gouverneur Morris. By contrast, popular rule or democracy “emerged from a different tradition”: “It hearkened back to democratic republics such as Athens and Florence although the modern variant added the crucial idea of equality of people founded in natural rights” (9). Constitutionalists feared that demagogues would overthrow a democratic constitutionalism in the name of democracy; democrats feared that pretended constitutionalists would corrupt the government and finally the people themselves, destroying the citizen virtue upon which decent government depends. The Founders solved this problem by devising a constitutionalism “founded on the principle of natural equality”—”the revolutionary idea that certain basic rights attached in principle equally to all individuals” (13). The practical principle of representation, not direct or ‘participatory’ democracy, defends the theoretical principle of natural equal rights by reinforcing the rule of law and deliberation instead of the rule of force and passion.

Ceaser agrees with such scholars as Thomas G. West and David Epstein, who argue that The Federalist does address the need for citizen virtue and civic education. But he notes that The Federalist does not contain “anything remotely approaching a systematic exploration of the question of citizenship” (15, italics added). For this, scholars turn to other writings of the Founders. The Federalist concerns primarily the American national government, and not government as such. Alexis de Tocqueville, “the first major political philosopher, inside or outside of America, to actually observe and study liberal democracy,” and also “one of the select group of major theorists who can be called a ‘friend’ of this regime” (16), concerns himself with understanding how American mores interact with American institutions and laws on the local and state, as well as the national level. “The mores that support liberal democracy are… not always either simply liberal or simply republican. Nor are the methods for inculcating its mores always derivative from either republican or liberal [constitutional] models. The analysis of liberal democracy, where it does not require a new vocabulary altogether, calls for a more careful use of liberal or republican terms in order to avoid confusing one part with the whole.” (18) Although some scholars (Richard Hofstadter, Martin Diamond in some of his writings) describe liberal democracy as “a kind of self-regulating equilibrium,” Ceaser leans toward the axiom hat the price of liberty is eternal vigilance or “constant superintendence” (19-20). Certain mores must be cultivated in order to maintain liberal democracy, even if this cultivation does not involve the “extraordinary efforts in character formation” seen in the small, ‘virtuous republics’ of the Antifederalists (22).

The complex, compound character of liberal democracies requires more “political knowledge” on the part of the citizens than other regimes (22). Further, the dual nature of this compound tends to produce educated citizens who prefer one element of the regime over the other. We are usually either ‘liberals’ (now called ‘conservatives’) or ‘democrats’ (now called ‘liberals’). Partisan infighting “leaves little time or energy for investigating the question of the needs of liberal democracy as a whole” (23). Liberal democracy elevates its opponents “to the very highest positions of honor in the intellectual world” because such persons do “speak passionately for one of the regime’s own basic principles” (23, italics added). Ideology may be defined as the inflation of one principle into a system; Ceaser candidly writes that he does not want “to turn political science into an ideological instrument” but rather to turn political science away from such misuse without turning it toward the illusion of ‘value-free’ political science 24-25). A non-ideological but principled political science can be a friend of liberal democracy—independent and critical without being destructive of the regime upon which an independent scholarly endeavor depends.

Tocqueville shows how this can be done. He is “‘our’ political philosopher,” despite being a Frenchman: the philosopher of our circumstance, who understands the choices that circumstance presents between despotisms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ and liberal democracy; the philosopher of our regime, “the political theorist par excellence of liberal democracy”: the philosopher of our nation, who wrote about Americans in order to describe liberal democracy (26). Oddly, Tocqueville has “few adherents,” remaining “the coffee-table philosopher of American political science; he is displayed in polite company” (28). Ceaser puts Tocqueville to work, “explor[ing] Tocqueville’s understanding of the underlying character or structure of liberal democracy and of the role he envisaged for political science within this regime” (29). Beginning with the form of our government, Tocqueville finds the realistic alternatives for American to be democratic tyranny and democratic liberty. Because the citizens themselves are at liberty to define the happiness they pursue, and because they are fallible, serious mistakes in theory and practice can be made. Citizens can choose ‘soft’ despotism in the pursuit not of natural rights but of equal conditions and entitlements. Religious and educational institutions can be captured by this materialist egalitarianism. Political scientists can resist or assist this tendency; they can resist it by “tak[ing] care that the idea of explanation that governs their conception of knowledge does not diminish people’s belief in the freedom they possess” (32). Political scientists should express causality in ‘if/then’ terms, enabling citizens to see that likely consequences of proposed policies without bringing them to some form of fatalism.

Fatalism or determinism tempts intellectuals in liberal democracy because they see beyond the formal division of government and politics from society (religion, culture, economics); they see that while society has been ‘depoliticized’ in the direct sense, it nonetheless has important political implications and consequences. Intellectuals often react to this by attempting to ‘lay bare’ the realities of “bourgeois society,’ showing how society ‘determines’ the political structures. Tocqueville also considers “the legal or formal separation between the public and the private realms” to be secondary and derivative.” But he “does not take the step of dismissing the formal liberal principle as merely fictitious or as a cover for some more sinister design,” as Marx would do, a few years later. In this he practices “the kind of political science practiced by Aristotle and Montesquieu” (34). Both government and society rest on “a deeper foundation” (33), a “prior and more fundamental arrangement” (34), a “certain political culture” 36). “Real freedom requires an actual power in society to resist the state and a will among the citizens to limit government and protect rights. The power and will do not miraculously appear as a consequence of the mere act of assertion of an abstract principle; they must be promoted. How to achieve the human qualities and the social arrangements that work over time to support the formal principle of limited government is one of the major questions for political science” (35-36)  Political science, Ceaser argues, should be part of the “tutelary power” of the political culture, “inserting itself into the society on the strength of an appeal to reason” (37), an appeal directly primarily to those who actually govern society, set the tone of society—not only or even mostly public officials, but also clergy, poets, scientists, and others. “To the extent that political science is unable” to do this, “other modes of thinking” will (39). These modes of thinking most likely will not lead to an adequate understanding of liberal democracy. Tocquevillian political science does: “Political science as an enterprise working on behalf of liberal democracy seeks to induce the leaders of each major area of the society to consider the relationship of their activity to maintaining the regime; political science is a perpetual gadfly for liberal democracy. As a part of liberal education, it aims to inculcate a way of reasoning that makes students conscious of the connections of private activities to the maintenance of a regime. As a research or academic enterprise, it seeks to supply some of the general answers to this question, or at any rate to set an agenda for their discussion in different contexts.” (39-40)  Just as Aristotle and Montesquieu could accurately describe various regimes while thoughtfully preferring some to others, so Tocqueville can describe the existing and potential forms democracy can take in the modern world, preferring liberal democracy to the others.

Ceaser next considers traditional political science in contrast to twentieth-century political science. Twentieth-century political science calls the act of exerting power “the irreducible unit of politics” in the family, the social organization, and the state (42). Traditional political science refuses to concentrate its attention primarily on efficient and material causes; it concerns itself more with formal and final causes—with regimes, and particularly (for Aristotle) the best regime. In addition to considering the best regime, the traditional political scientist studies three interrelated subjects: historical sociology (the analysis of “place”: the character of a people, its stage of development); general political science (analysis of regime types and of what maintains or undermines them); and analysis of specific regimes in a specific context (e.g., American politics, Iranian politics).

Historical sociology concerns a people’s physical environment, its mores (the “most important” factor [45]), its laws and institutions, and its history or formative experiences. Taken together, these constitute “the dominant reality a legislator faces in a given situation”; as such it “does not fully bind human action” (46). “Proceeding with due regard for the genius [of a nation] is a major part of political prudence, and it in turn has an important bearing on political ethics” (47). Although Montesquieu “at times comes close to suggesting a total, autonomous science of development” of nations, with no room for genuine freedom (219, n.25), Tocqueville does not go so far. Tocqueville’s view more nearly resembles that of Charles de Gaulle, who speaks of a statesman who “realized all the possible in taking his part in the inevitable” (La France et son armée [Paris: Librairie Plon, 1938], 57).

General political science concerns regimes, those ways “of ordering a society expressed in terms of who rules, according to what end or principle, and dominated by what sentiment or passion” (52). More ‘abstract’ and more “elusive” than historical sociology (53), general political science does not predict so much as it enables its students to understand “the full range of possibilities” in political life (56). “The effort to maintain any regime involves discovering and cultivating, not the specificities toward which it inclines—for these are often what leads to its destruction or degradation—but the specificities that promote it. Liberal democracy, as one of the more complex and heterogeneous regimes, can benefit from drawing on a number of regime principles. It has something important to learn from the calm and orderly calculations of interest of modern commercial liberalism, the virtue or communitarianism of small republics, and the sense of individual pride of European aristocracy.” (56)

Particular political science, the study of alternative regimes in a specific place, today suffers distortion. The over-appreciation of applied historical sociology and the depreciation of general political science makes it impossible to abstract lessons from the past, to generalize intelligently. ‘Abstract’ becomes a sort of curse-word. Extreme particularism is all history and no real theory; most recently its ‘theory’ is a ‘hermeneutics’ of ‘deconstruction’ that “stress[es] the idea of [cultural] differences just when the differences are becoming less pronounced, at least in the West” (64). By refusing to take abstractions seriously, ‘hermeneutics’ undermines prudence and makes it impossible to understand concrete changes clearly. Radical historicism makes real history incomprehensible to historians and citizens alike. The world become impossible to understand or to change. History takes the direction opposite to that expected and desired by historicists. The many schools of twentieth-century political science—behaviorism, ‘rational choice,’ the ‘new normativism,’ etc.—fail to “maintain liberal democracy” (93) because they share the usual historicist emphasis on change instead of structure, relativism instead of stable moral and political principles. Even those political philosophers who give some appearance of taking rights seriously end in moral relativism and political irrelevance. (On John Rawls and Robert Nozick Ceaser remarks tersely, their “books are all about justice, but hardly ever about real political regimes” (96). He might add that finally they aren’t about real justice either, only preferences and assertion or ‘values’.) When you ignore regimes and assert your will, you end in utopianism. Traditional political scientists, judging policies by each regime’s human nature, understand that “what sustains a regime will not in every instance be the same as what promotes human development” simply (98). Therefore, “the maintenance of political regimes”—themselves necessary for human survival and development—”exacts a price in the world of moral concerns” (99). This moral realism does not appeal to the self-assertive utopians among contemporary historicists. But because regime types are not “arbitrary constructs” (104)—utopians wish they were—contemporary political scientists “have retreated… deeply into the ivory tower” (106), eschewing the traditional interest in training students for practical careers” and instead “reproducing political scientists” (107). Robert Dahl’s work exemplifies the ‘new normativism.’ In his hands, this becomes a “project of creative myth-making in which standards from outside the American political tradition are smuggle in and elevated to the highest status” (118, 122). Brushing institutions aside, Dahl hopes for “a progressive growth in consciousness to the point at which we can transcend conflict by embracing the warmer unit of a more egalitarian order”—”a flight from the realism of the greatest part of our tradition and a rejection of the sterner qualities of the human spirit that have helped to build and sustain our constitutional republic” (141-142)

Tocqueville contended that America had so far “met the challenges of the modern age not despite, but in large measure because of, the minimal influence of contemporary doctrines of political thought and the absence of intellectuals to spread them” (144). The doctrines of rationalism and traditionalism, associated in Tocqueville’s day with the French Revolution and the writings of Edmund Burke, respectively, both undermined the conviction that human beings can effectively deliberate and choose with respect to public policies. But there was an exceptionally important choice to make: “not between the old order and democracy but between democratic despotisms and liberal democracies” (153). “Traditionalists had led the way in identifying and exposing the homogenizing and despotic tendencies of modern philosophic thought. Tocqueville accepted their critique, but he rejected their ultimate standards and doubted the efficacy of their methods for combating philosophe ideas. Unlike the traditionalists, Tocqueville upheld theoretical reason at the same time that he attacked the reason of his contemporaries, and he defended the intellect at the same time that he attacked the modern intellectual. His critique of rationalism was thus carried out in a different spirit and with a different aim than that found in traditionalist thought.” (156) Because “political structure and institutions do far less in the way of embodying specific ideas or beliefs than they do in forming mental habits”—”the character or way of thinking that prevails in society”—Tocqueville promoted a political science that would work not through some new ideology (thinking from general ideas to the particulars) but from particular policies and local institutions up to general ideas and national institutions (157). Political participation on the local level, “within the citizens’ own experience,” rewards “the mode of reasoning of the pragmatic form of rationalism” (161-162). Such activity will develop “a sense of their power to defend their rights”; Tocqueville’s “final standard is not the natural in the organic sense, but rather nature and natural right as discovered by human reflection on the world”—first of all in its particulars—”and its possibilities” (162). This evidently “combine[s] the concerns of the Federalist and the antifederalist (and Jeffersonian) traditions in American political thought” (164). Tocqueville also combined “rationalist liberalism” with the “traditional religion” without which “despair and paralysis” or “dangerous pseudo-religions” (especially “the mind-set of the modern intellectual revolutionary… who infused politics with repressed spiritual feelings”) would take hold (166-167). He insisted that genuine religion could coexist with a humbled rationalism—or better,  reason that no longer contorts itself into an ‘ism.’

Entering its third century, the American regime now has a powerful intelligentsia; communications media are more centralized (though probably less so than they were ten or twenty years ago); jurisprudence “has become a battlefield on which various philosophical schools contend” and, “in the name of promoting rights” through an activist judiciary, government exercises “far-reaching authority in society” (172). With “the collapse of any meaningful doctrine of federalism” American national government commands centralized power unprecedented in our history (173). Doctrines of historical inevitability, most recently a “new historicism” that praises liberal democracy only to undermine it unintentionally, posit a “fatalism” that “erodes liberal democracy’s foundation in the view that human actions can make a difference” (175). [1] Of these dangers, Ceaser particularly deplores the assaults on the United States Constitution made by scholars and judges who are in various ways disciples of Woodrow Wilson, the American statesman who combined Hegelianism and democracy. Ceaser describes the advantages of traditional American constitutionalism, ably defending it against partisans of parliamentarian abrogation of the balance of powers. In doing so, Ceaser gives his readers an example of a Tocquevillian political science at work in the service of an Aristotelian sense of justice.

In Liberal Democracy and Political Science James W. Ceaser speaks as a political scientist to political scientists, showing how civic education can also form part of a liberal education in modernity. It is a book of uncommon clarity and common sense for a profession in need of both.

 

Note

1. Specifically, Ceaser offers  telling and succinct critique of Francis Fukuyama’s article “The End of History?” (The National Interest, Number 16 [Summer 1989], 3-18). In addition to his criticism of the fatalism supposed by Fukuyama, Ceaser observes that Fukuyama “obscures the fundamental choice for modern times that Tocqueville presented between a regime of political liberty and a new kind of regime (a soft despotism) in which people might believe themselves free, but in which in reality they would have abandoned the conditions in society that would promote significant human action” (Ceaser, 175).