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    Jeffersonian Empire

    by

    Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson: Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 20, Number 2, Winter 1992-93.

     

    The American regime promotes what the British call ‘pacificism’—not pacifism, the rejection of all war in all circumstances, but pacificism, the intention to establish civil and international peace by peaceful means when possible, by warlike means only when necessary. (Predictably, the delimitation of necessity has proben controversial.) Unlike Rome, even republican Rome, America seeks no military empire. French boys once gazed at the silhouette of Napoleon and murmered, “son ombre m’a guide.” American boys imitate soldiers they see in the movies, as one of the games they usually leave behind; of them one cannot say, as André Malraux said of the French, “There is not one of us who has not conquered Europe in his dreams.”

    The American Founders designed our institutions to nurture pacificism. They saw that war would swell the government, threatening republicanism. They channeled Americans’ ambitions into commerce and politics, anticipating that future ambitions would not exclude the sciences, arts, and letters. Nonetheless, the universalism of American principles—all men are created equal, with unalienable rights—could also lead to a certain messianism, an inclination to intervene militarily on behalf of a self-interest deemed universally wholesome. And worldwide free trade may at times require military defense. While “one part” of Thomas Jefferson’s mind “feared contamination” from the world, the authors write, another “wished genuinely to reform” the world, a task that required some sort of contact with it.

    Jefferson hoped to overturn the regnant doctrine of ‘reason of state’ in international politics. With Machiavelli, his contemporaries in European capitals believed that “The political community’s security, independence, and continuity took precedence over all other interests, private or public. The supremacy of foreign policy, of the state and its necessities over civil life, was the inevitable consequence of this ordering.” (13) Jefferson “rejected the whole apparatus of the modern state that had emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century”—funded debt, executive power, heavy taxation, government-supported manufactures, and a standing military—which he feared as “the very essence of tyrannical government” (16). Still, he did not “renounce the ambitions that normally led to the use of these means”—economic and technological progress, territorial expansion (18). Jefferson wanted the best of both Romes, “both empire and liberty” (20). It is no wonder that Alexander Hamilton, a man with far fewer reservations about modernity, viewed Jefferson with scant patience, or that Jefferson suspected Hamilton of monarchic ambition.

    “‘To conquer without war’—that objective, the French diplomat Turreau observed in 1805, was ‘the first fact’ of Jeffersonian politics” (18). Threats of war, threats of making hostile alliances, and the “peaceable coercion” of domestic commercial legislation designed to help friends and harm enemies were Jefferson’s preferred means. The United States shall, he wrote to Thomas Pinckney, “endeavor so to form our commercial regulations as that justice from other nations shall be heir mechanical result” (19).

    The authors recall Jefferson’s well-known defense of agrarianism, which he supposed would cultivate the virtues and spirit of independence needed for upholding republicanism, and his hostility to manufactures, which he regarded as the foundation of modern despotism. They see that Jefferson understood that agrarianism wedded to ‘progress’ required territorial expansion and free trade. Territorial expansion and the defense of free trade would lead to war, state aggrandizement, and finally despotism. But strict isolationism would require Americans to provide their own manufactures, equally yielding despotism in the long run. Jefferson hoped to break into European markets by threatening to withhold American agricultural produce in “a contest of self-denial,” a nonviolent contest of American virtue with corrupt and corrupting Europe (35-36). The authors notice that this blend of the ‘republican’ principle of virtuous citizen-spirit with the ‘liberal’ preference to avoid war “suggests that the tendency among historians to set these ideas in opposition—at least in the realm of foreign policy—is more misleading than enlightening” (36). They rightly describe Jefferson as “closely identifying the pursuit of the national interest with the vindication of natural right” (62).

    The first and more successful of the two Jefferson administrations secured the Louisiana Purchase, “one of the great political windfalls in American history” (98), giving the United States control of the outlet for the Mississippi River. In doing so, Jefferson evidently violated the strict-construction constitutionalism he had designed his policy of peaceful coercion to defend (94). But at least (one is inclined to add) he strengthened the social and economic conditions of agrarianism, which served as much a means to liberty as his constitutionalism did; the Mississippi River, and indeed the whole Mississippi River system stretching from the upper Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico, runs through the largest area of rich farmland in the world. The authors do not quite convey Jefferson’s dilemma here, which was to coordinate three different means—peaceful coercion, constitutionalism, and agrarianism—in order to obtain the ends of liberty and virtue. That these means might not always be maximized simultaneously, that they might at times conflict, and that the Jeffersonian statesman could reluctantly but in good conscience sacrifice one of them temporarily, deserves full recognition and appreciation. It is not a problem of excessive “moralism,” as the authors claim more than once, but of moral judgment, of the adjustment of rival moral goods. The authors return to sounder criticisms in describing Jefferson’s subsequent attempt to acquire the Florida territories from Spain. The United States had no legal claim to these, and the advance of the claim only irritated Spanish pride. The methods of peaceful coercion failed; with Spain they failed outright, and with France they succeeded only by the accident of Napoleon’s military blunders in both the New World and Europe.

    The second Jefferson administration saw the failure of peaceful coercion in the maritime crisis with Great Britain. Severely threatened by Napoleon’s ambitions, the British undertook the impressment of American seamen and restricted American neutral trade. Jefferson was not merely unsympathetic; he was morally outraged. “The administration’s sense of American power was so extensive and its conception of American rights and interests so unbending that no negotiated settlement with England was possible” (202). Jefferson imposed a net of draconian embargo laws, abridging American rights to jury trial and due process, in an “attempt to find a substitute for war in settling disputes between nations” (205). At the same time, he threatened war; as Gandhi understood a century later, the prospect of violence sets off nonviolence like a dark background does a polish diamond. (Gandhi, however, enjoyed the luxury of brandishing his threat without needing to ready himself to carry it out; he could present himself as the rational alternative to dangerous men.)

    Fortunately, none of this worked. The British rejected American protestations and defeated Napoleon, whose victory would have injured American interests far more radically, establishing a Europe united under despotism, closed to free trade. Jefferson stubbornly insisted on the moral equivalence of Napoleon, “the tyrant of the land,” and Great Britain, “the tyrant of the sea” (245), effectively tilting American policy against the latter. As would occur more than once in the centuries to come, embargo alone did not work. “It was not to be expected that the British political nation, having steeled itself against the hardships of war for many years, would concede the issue in dispute merely from fear of economic distress. It had endured far worse at the hands of an enemy far more powerful, yet its will had not been broken” (223). Moreover, the embargo “could not have been enforced save by a veritable war against the violation of the embargo at home,” a war for which Jeffersonian America was of course unprepared, given its distaste for military establishment. Had Jefferson “publicly recognized that England was in truth engaged in a contest for public liberty and international order,” he could have compromised on the lesser issue of neutrals’ rights (227). Again, this is not so much a failure of “moralism,” as the authors would have it, as a failure to arrive at a reasonable moral judgment given competing moral and political claims.

    “Taken to escape the humiliating alternatives of national humiliation or war, [the embargo] led first to humiliation and ultimately to war”—the War of 1812, fought by the Madison administration. Professors Tucker and Hendrickson show that modernity seeks peace through economics but cannot escape the imperatives (and the charms) of politics. They are less successful in acknowledging that those imperatives and charms are often moral, not mere effects of force, measured by ‘realism.’ Moralism may be unreal, but moral judgment isn’t.

    Leftist Lit-Crit, Revised

    by

    Patrick Colm Hogan: The Politics of Interpretation: Ideology, Professionalism, and the Study of Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

    Originally published in Philosophy and Literature, Volume 15, Number 2, October 1991.

     

    Don Quixote ‘proves’ the existence of his chivalric heroes by imagining their faces. Academia today provides safe haven for many such knights of woeful countenance, unhappy warriors whose political battle-cry, ‘If you can dream it, you can do it!’ echoes harmlessly from distant, unmoved windmills.

    Patrick Colm Hogan seeks a literary criticism guided by political principles “closer to the political concerns of real human life” (viii). He aims not at the ‘deconstruction’ or the ‘construction’ of political-literary ‘theories.’ Poorly disguised assertions of arbitrary will and politically correct attitudinizing fail to impress him. As a man of the ‘Left,’ he sees that the political victory and moral legitimacy of the ‘Left’ require the congruence of its doctrines and insights with the real world. To change the world, one must understand it.

    In Hogan’s view, political criticism should combine evaluation of ideological aims, beliefs, and actions, the examination of how literary works foster these, and an answer to the perennial question, Cui bono?—the examination of what interests or “power relations” the inculcation of a given ideology “might serve” (30). Deconstructionism and some forms of feminist criticism impede these activities by condemning “logical inference and empirical investigation” as “patriarchal and repressive” (31). “A denial of the Principle of Non-Contradiction makes all of one’s claims into dogma, brooking no dispute” (35), ending with the substitution of “intimidation for dialectic” (49). This kind of criticism is political in the worst sense: partisan in tone and substance, coercive in spirit—in a word, tyrannical.

    Against Derrida, Hogan observes that definition need not entail oppressive hierarchies, that “logocentrism” has no necessary historical connection to “phallocentricism.” “Clearly, the ordinary guarded and skeptical methods of rational enquiry—so disparaged by deconstructionists—are far more germane to forging an anti-Leninist and anti-Stalinist left, especially if these are combined with a Kantian ethics which grants to individuals their rights as ends in themselves” (86).

    Against certain varieties of feminism, Hogan questions the attempt to make womanhood prior to a woman’s individuality, as when “women are encouraged not to develop their own capacities, but the putative capacities of their gender-essence” (98). Even as Voltaire twitted earlier philosophers for defining a tree by its ‘treeness,’ Hogan rejects claims that, say, Simone de Beauvoir could be adequately defined or explained by ‘femaleness.’ No empirical or logical evidence sustains such claims, which are little more than the photographic negatives of long-existing stereotypes, valorized to serve the interests or, more accurately to caress the vanity of new photographers.

    To subvert ideologies of domination ‘Right’ and ‘Left,’ Hogan urges empirical and dialectical criticism along with action to “dismantle all those structures which establish or reinforce” ideology, including such institutions as religion, the state, and capitalism (171). In academia this would require “a massive anarchist or libertarian restructuring of the university” (193), including the abolition of such “feudal, guild structures” as academic departments (176). Tenure, tuition, and the exploitation of teaching assistants and part-time instructors would also need to go. He offers amusing remarks about the influence of the commercial ethos on literary scholars, each generation of whom makes work for itself, “creates a demand,” by seizing upon new theories of interpretation. “It all has to be done over!” I heard one literary feminist exult; just so.

    Hogan is a sane man. It is helpful to have his leftist and feminist critique of certain surreal elements of the lit-crit ‘Left.’ I admire his common sense, lucidity, and civic courage. He himself, however, departs from realism from time to time. From the book’s dedication to the Nicaraguan revolutionaries (all too many of whom turned out to be self-serving farceurs) to the concluding pipe dreams about an “Anarchist University,” there is here more than a touch of what Marxists rightly deride as utopian socialism. David Hume’s sound remark on other-worldly men of his day speaks even more pointedly to this-worldly activist-utopians of our own: “A delicate sense of morals, especially when attended with a splenetic temper, is apt to give a man a disgust of the world, and to make him consider the common course of human affairs with too much indignation.”

    Churchill on Empire

    by

    Kirk Emmert: Winston S. Churchill on Empire. Durham: Carolina Academic Press and the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, 1989.

     

    Winston Churchill claimed, “There is no halfway house for Britain between greatness and ruin” (3). In fact there is; its current proprietor is Margaret Thatcher. Britain has lost and gained: markets replaced colonies; Englishness replaced ‘civilization’; corporations replaced viceroys. If household management or economics has not quite replaced politics, the mold that shaped Churchill has broken. There is no halfway house for a Churchill between greatness and ruin.

    Americans think of Churchill as a wartime ally against rightist tyranny and a peacetime ally against leftist tyranny—as a courageous prophet of liberty honored, finally, in his native land. Churchill’s defense of the British Empire strikes Americans as contradictory to this spirit, something to be deplored or at best apologized for. Professor Emmert’s study has the merit of recognizing that Churchill’s “commitment to empire was central” to his political career (xi). Emmert shows that Churchill commitment arose not from mere traditionalism or even from ambition, simply, but from an “aristocratic or Aristotelian” understanding of the demands and responsibilities of political life (xvi).

    “True” imperialism develops both “manhood” and commerce in the imperial nation (1)—two qualities not easy to combine. By renouncing its Continental ambitions and building the strongest navy in the world, Britain increased its own security and encouraged limited government in England while freeing the army for overseas conquests. Continental nations expended substantial public revenues on self-defense; the British navy defended the island nation inexpensively, leaving money available for private investment and international commerce. The navy protected British shipping and forcibly opened new markets. Military ‘necessity’ refocused, from national defense to imperial defense. Imperial defense requires expansion, as increased territory increases the scope of security needs. “[W]ar and change, not peace and permanence, are the constant companions of empire” (8). A moderate, civilized empire must “pursue a policy which is difficult to distinguish from that of an aggressive, intentionally expansive nation.” Even a civilized empire “must act in much the same manner as a tyrant” (9). Nor did Churchill try to hide under the cloak of ‘necessity’; he freely observed that the natural desire “to be predominant” fans imperialist ambitions. Civilization “restrains and rechannels these instincts into more pacific activities, but it cannot eliminate or fully control them” (10).

    Churchill parted from Machiavelli in upholding an “eternal standard of right and wrong independent of and superior to climate, custom, and caprice” (11), a standard beckoning citizens to honor. Honor is a mean between “narrow self-interest and moralistic excess” (12). “Churchill proposed civilizing empire as the cure to the disease of tyrannizing empire” (13), of which he saw three kinds during his career: the “scientific barbarism” of the Kaiser’s Germany; the “animal form of barbarism” of Bolshevik Russia; and the racist barbarism of Nazi Germany (15). Barbarism begins with human life itself. A pre-political war of “all against all” reflects mankind’s “strong aboriginal propensity to kill” (16). Primitive peoples lack shame and moral indignation, engage in treachery and violence, and cannot reason. They emerge from the most primitive barbarism when, tiring of perpetual insecurity, they establish tyrannies In their credulity, primitive men also give way to “religious fanaticism grounded in a claim of prophetic revelation” (17); this religion impedes civilization’s development by encouraging “degraded sensualism” and by retarding the mental faculties (17). As civilization develops, however, intelligence usually outruns morality, leading once again to barbarism.

    Churchill considers courage to be the foundation of civilized or fully human life. Courage is “the first of all human qualities” because it “guarantees all the others” (19). The courage of barbarians is reckless or “wild courage”—passionate, unruly, rash (20). Civilized courage is calm, a sign of self-mastery and endurance. “In the civilized man, Churchill suggests, reason rules the bodily desires and man’s spiritedness. Thus, under stress, the civilized man is persevering, serene, deliberate, self-controlled and proudly self-sufficient” (22). Habituation forms civilized courage; the force of discipline and of circumstances supplement habit. Habit should be reinforced by vanity, the desire to establish a good reputation, but this must not be overemphasized, as it will promote timidity in the face of public disapproval. The sentiment of nobility, whereby “vanity is transformed into justifiable pride” (25), best anchors habitual courage. The moral importance of habituation figures largely in Aristotle, as does the definition of virtue as the mean between two extremes, two vices; and of course the distinction between civilization and barbarism runs through ancient Greece generally.

    Churchill recognized that the increasing egalitarianism of modern civilization threatened these Aristotelian virtues. He therefore “stressed increasingly in his speeches and more popular writings the kinship of civilization and freedom or self-government” (25). Attempting to preserve as much of the older moral order as possible, he traced British rights, liberties, and constitutional safeguards to “ancient Greece and Rome” (26); he represented the Roman Empire in Britain as “a golden age for Britain” (9), a time when the British themselves benefited morally and politically from rule by civilized imperialists. The virtues of justice, prudence, moderation or self-government, and goodwill or toleration, along with civilized courage, make individual and political freedom possible; most of these are classical virtues. Christianity too has its place, because “philosophy”—these are Churchill’s words—”cannot convince the bullet” (129, n. 81). Praying and belief in providence may not convince the bullet, either, but they serve as helps to steady the man facing the bullet. “Churchill understood that the morality that guided the [British] Empire and the rest of the civilized West had both classical and Christian roots” (29); although the statesman will conduct himself according to the classical standard of gentlemanly honor, he will also nourish Christianity as “the most politically salutary religion available to modern civilized statesmen” (30). Modern science also needs cultivation; even more it needs restraint. “The first civilization that has indissolvably married human excellence and physical power rather than leaving them to come together occasionally and by chance” (31) must take care that scientific or intellectual development does not overwhelm moral virtues, destroying the conditions of its own existence.”

    Emmert discusses Churchill’s view of civilizing empire’s effect on rulers and the ruled. “[A]ll human  beings have an obligation to improve themselves which takes precedence over any rights they might claim to liberty or self-government” (33); primitive contentment is no more fully human than is primitive strife, and both prevent or retard the development of civilization. “The precariousness of [the] natural way to civilization, its long duration, and the likelihood it might miscarry led Churchill to reject it in principle as an alternative to imperial rule” (34). Empire as it were assists nature by “rapidly increasing capital wealth and by expanding human desires” (36), first by encouraging small entrepreneurs, then larger scale commercial projects. At the same time modern civilization’s technology goes beyond assistance to the subjugation of nature for use by man. Capital investment should be limited to avoid exploitation; Churchill preferred a limited state socialism, limited because an excessively powerful local government would overawe the native population and demand independence from the Empire—break the civilizational bonds that alone justify empire. Christian missionaries posed an especially difficult problem; Churchill applauded them only in such places as Uganda, where they cooperated fully with the imperial government.

    Altruism and philanthropy should not move imperial rulers. Nor should selfishness. “At its best, empire is not a burden to be endured,” or a tyranny to be exploited, “but an opportunity for individual and national self-improvement” (53). Barbarians have no intrinsic rights; rather, civilized nations owe it to themselves to treat barbarians justly. In this, Churchill found himself opposed by the democrats and state socialists who gained power after the First World War. Democrats reduced politics to economics, “denied that man was a political animal” (55). Socialists sought to politicize the private. Churchill defined politics in two distinct, complementary ways: as a means of collective action to satisfy the individual’s need for security and well-being; as an effort to realize the distinctively human potential for reasoning and reasoned speech. Imperialism satisfied man’s political nature in both senses, immediately for the rulers and ruled with respect to ‘low’ politics, and immediately for rulers, eventually for the ruled with respect to ‘high’ politics. Empire “calls forth certain virtues, and ths a specific type of human being” (63). Its ordinary citizens strengthen their self-respect; its extraordinary citizens fulfill their magnanimity, their great-souledness in the Aristotelian sense. Empire counterbalanced the leveling effects of mass democracy. “[S]ince the maintenance [of Empire] necessitated a considerably greater degree of moral and political virtue from the nation’s foremost citizens, in looking up to these leaders the British citizenry was taught to admire the considerable virtue they embodied” (64). For the foremost citizens themselves, “ruling imperially” afforded the chance to achieve the fullest humanity by engaging in “the fully civilizing activity” (64).

    “By the late 1920s, Churchill had concluded that the coming of mass democracy had transformed and degraded British politics” (70). Majoritarianism replaced deliberation and consent, and “the advent of political equality undermined [the] conventional acknowledgements of political authority which in the best cases were indications of natural preeminence and in most cases made mediocrity more serviceable” (71). As technology purveyed mass tastes, politics itself became more ‘technical’ or technocrat; middle and lower classes improved their standard of living but declined in the exercise of civic liberty, prudence, and initiative. In Churchill’s metaphor, the British political system liquefied. Institutions, hierarchy, structure weakened against the ebb and flow of public passions. Churchill attempted to use imperialism as a bulwark against this tide, but as the spirit of party triumphed over the spirit of Parliament, the Empire itself became a bone of political contention. A politics of individual rights and self-interest overcame the politics of honor and “noble self-regard” (81). “[I]t was not possible for long to rule according to ‘new principles’ at home but ‘old principles’ abroad” (85). Churchill gradually came to hope for a British Empire of self-governing dominions, a “voluntary association of like-minded nations” or “English-speaking peoples” (99)—less a political than a cultural empire modeled on Demosthenes’ pan-Hellenism.

    The tension in Churchill’s thought between “his acceptance of human equality” and “his admiration for excellence and for the accomplishments of the unequal few” would have disappeared had he “fully embraced on principle or the other.” “This Churchill would not do, probably because he thought that neither in itself reflected the full truth about human nature” (107). The limitations of imperial rule reflect the contradictions of politics itself, limitations and contradiction of politics itself, limitations and contradictions suggesting that political life is not the human life, at least not simply or comprehensively. For Churchill this truth led to an appreciation of the powers of observation and memory called for by painting. Churchill also “noted a certain similarity between a philosopher and the uncivilized” man (37)—both of whom enjoy their leisure and want few things. He called the uncivilized man an “unconscious philosopher” (37). Philosophers might well be grateful to Churchill, and in their own way return his admiration. In opposing tyrannies masquerading as final knowledge about human things, Churchill protected philosophy from lapsing into a state of unconsciousness, that is to say barbarism, perhaps even from a death that would have killed the soul instead of liberating it from the body. And there may be more. Professor Harry V. Jaffa, who contributes an illuminating Foreword to this volume, has spoken of the way the example of Churchill’s statesmanship could inspirit a philosopher’s soul in dark times, leading the philosopher to reconsider the classical philosophers who distinguish political from philosophic life without segregating them. Professor Emmert’s thoughtful scholarship, so profoundly at odds with current academic passions and prejudices, brings Churchill’s example to view, not vividly and partially as his own writings did, but wholly or essentially, delivered from the partisan distortions of his time and ours.