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    Epidemic of Fear

    by

    Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Virus in the Age of Madness. Steven B. Kennedy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

     

     

    What shocked Bernard-Henri Lévy about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 “was not the pandemic” itself—influenza pandemics also killed millions, in the last century—but “the very strange way we reacted this time around,” the way much of mankind succumbed to an “epidemic of fear”—indeed, to “the First World Fear.” “The entire planet—rich and poor alike, those with the resources to resist and those without—pounced on the idea of an unprecedented pandemic poised to eradicate the human race.” Not the physical-medical crisis but the attendant moral-political crisis disturbs him. Borrowing the language of Foucault, Lévy finds the chill of the “medical gaze,” which treats persons as bodies takes the hospital as a model for society itself, far graver than the fever caused by the virus.

    An experienced ‘public intellectual,’ Lévy’s rhetorical approach can only be admired. Speaking primarily as a man of the Left to the Left, he repeatedly denounces U.S. President Donald Trump (“impossible and unhinged,” “irresponsible,” “hapless,” a man “trampling the Constitution,” “pulling dirty tricks,” and “light[ing] America on fire”—somewhere between Richard Nixon and a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse). This will surely inoculate him against criticism from that flank, and much-needed that prophylactic is, because the argument he advances puts him far closer to Trump than it does to Trump’s opponent in the presidential election campaign. Lévy gives former Vice President Joseph Biden a kindly and shrewd pat on the shoulder, saying he’s conducted his campaign “with courage and a level head,” while consistently departing from the Democrat’s masked-up public persona and his clamp-down approach to civil-social discipline. 

    With Trump, Lévy knows that the world of medical research, like all parts of the academic world, “is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield, a free-for-all no less messy than the one Immanuel Kant bemoaned in metaphysics.” (Well, admittedly, Trump would omit the learned references, but he’s been saying the same thing.) Like Trump, Lévy “know[s] that listening to the ones who know, if we are indeed talking about scientists, is tantamount to listening to a nonstop quarrel and, if the listeners is a government, to inviting Fireworks and Chaos to sit at the king’s table.” “The emperor has no clothes, even if he is a physician. Especially if he is a physician.” Because would-be physician-emperors would rule the political communities the way they rule their wards and operating rooms. “There is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action.” Unfortunately, “the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse,” as seen in the last century, when hygienics became eugenics.

    Plato’s Socrates saw the problem, Lévy notes. In the Statesman, the interlocutors consider “passing on the physician the responsibility for leading the human flock if the divine pastor drops the ball.” After all, the physician will see “the structural analogy between the animal body and the civic body,” with the head serving as ruler of the one, the “leader” serving as ruler of the other; “the same word, epimeleia…designates the care owed to the first and the administration at work in the second.” Yet Socrates finally demurs. “Politics, he says, is an art that, since the retreat of the gods, deals with a chaotic, changing world, swept by storms and rudderless.” “Difficult times” cause for “citizens-guardians possessing the audacity and strength to think through, carve into stone, and proclaim legal ‘codes.'” Masters of the art of the deal, the politikoi exhibit not only Trumplike smarts but Trumplike decision and determination, evidently even to the point of issuing executive orders. Physicians “might well have extended the health emergency until hell froze over,” but, as we all know and as Lévy shrewdly passes over in silence, Trump has wanted to ‘open up the economy.’ Like Trump, and, belatedly, like French President Emmanuel Macron, it is best to heed “the Platonic recommendation to rely, simply, on the Republic”—not so much raw public opinion but public opinion as refined and enlarged by the people’s representatives. “The republican authorities have grasped that, though the physicians are real heroes in one essential arena, they are neither God the Father nor the archons of a city in the grip of a new plague.” Despite “public opinion,” which “clearly wanted to see medicine calling the shots” (at least in France), one really must avoid “an incestuous union of the political and medical powers, a union that would have been not only incestuous but fatal for both partners, according to Foucault” and not only Foucault, given the irony with which Socrates treats his own proposal to make philosophers kings. Can there be any doubt that President Trump would respond to a proposal to make kings of philosophers, or of physicians, with anything other than a mocking ‘tweet’?

    Having shrewdly put himself on Trump’s side while maintaining his bona fides with his audience, Lévy devotes many more of his pages to criticisms of, well, his audience. He skewers those who find ‘good’ in the pandemic, which has left our great cities so peaceful and clean and provides a convenient tool for political agitators. “‘A warning’ from nature, said one, demanding a transition to a world less destructive of biodiversity. ‘An ultimatum,’ said another, from a mistreated Gaia whose patience had worn thin. And, from all of them, servility with respect to the virus” or, perhaps more precisely, a demand for servility with respect to their own proposed policies. Having come to prominence as a firm critic of Communist tyranny during the Cold War, author of the seminal Barbarism with a Human Face at a time when much of the French Left in particular and the European Left generally sought to appease it, Lévy sees in the calls to suspend the ‘world economy’ nothing better than “the old Marxist refrain of the final crisis of capitalism in her morning-after guise of collapsology, or one of the children’s diseases of socialism updated as disasterism.” These socialist “profiteers of the virus” look for a scapegoat, finding it (as usual) in capitalism. Lévy prefers prudence. “To the extent possible, we had to calculate the numbers of lives saved by shutting down the world and compare it with the number imperiled by the shutdown.” It is, after all, “important not to be intimidated by the ultimately false opposition between ‘life’ and ‘the economy,’ but to compare the cost, in lives, of the spread of the virus with the cost of the self-induced coma triggered in a plan that was transformed suddenly into a laboratory for a radical political experiment.” “The only way” to do that “was to launch a major democratic debate and to get into detail, not about diverting utopias concerning the world after, but about the concrete measures to be implemented here and now in the world during.” 

    “This was the first time we had ever seen all of the critical minds in the far-left galaxy applaud a state of emergency.” (True enough in the West, perhaps, although in Russia, in China, and in many other places under Communist rule, states of emergency were routinized, excusing the extermination of innumerable “harmful insects,” as Lenin unsentimentally put it.) “All of my life I have fought against the trap of secular religiosity,” even as his distinguished predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville had done, contemplating the Hegelians, Marxists, and race theorists of his own time. 

    When “confronted with obscurantism with a scientific face,” one should recall “two things.” First, “viruses are dumb; they are blind; they are not here to tell us their stories or to relay the stories of humanity’s bad shepherds”; hence “there is no ‘good use,’ no ‘societal lesson,’ no last judgment’ to be expected from a pandemic.” Second, medical questions and their implications for policy are “much murkier than we have been led to believe over the past few months.” Such questions and implications necessarily address not only the body but the human soul. And we are no longer so adept at considering matters of the soul as we once were.

    For example, those who have welcomed the peace and quiet of pandemic life will quote Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Yes, but for Pascal quietude “was not an indulgence but a struggle.” Hobbies and yoga sessions were not what he had in mind. Following Paul the Apostle, Pascal said, “The self is hateful,” no many how many times one may chant ‘OM’ in search of serenity. Navel-gazing complacency is “indecent in the extreme,” insulting “to those who did not have a home to stay in” and affirming no real spiritual insights but instead orchestrating “a philharmonic of trivialities, minor pleasures, and drumrolls of well-tempered narcissism.” Such a pseudo-spiritual of epicureanism “flew in the face of Greek wisdom, which, from Aristotle on, held that man was a political animal.” It ignored that decidedly introverted ‘modern,’ René Descartes, who touched base with the moment of his cogito ergo sum only in order to fortify the “zest for the sciences, for medicine, for ethics… for intellectual speculation, for friendship, and for the world.” And it dismissed the ‘postmodern’ Edmund Husserl, who insisted that “consciousness is always conscious of something, that existence is rooted in intentionality, and that what is interesting about a given subject is not what he is but what he does and, in doing what he does, how he inhabits the world, shapes it, takes from it, and gives to it.” ‘Social distancing’? “Shaking hands was a fine gesture of civility,” a “sign of republican solidarity promoted by the American Revolution, the spirit of democracy,” and even the “peace-loving Quakers,” whom George Washington deemed useful American citizens, even if they refused to defend the republic in war. 

    Neither genuinely philosophic nor genuinely political, our quietists fare no better under the gaze informed by Scripture. “Prophecy is inherently an act of exposure to another intelligence, and even a radically different one, since it is God’s.” The prophet “step[s] outside” of himself. He calls his people to do the same, to leave the comfortable servility of Egypt, to risk everything in a land God has promised for them. The example of prophecy has marked Jews ever since. “A liberal, universalist, humanist Jew” will “experience confinement with oneself only as a regrettably temporary state, one that, if it were to endure, would be starkly contrary to his vocation, which is to move toward his fellow men.” The Orthodox Jew, for his part, must “acquire a master, because there is no shaping of the self without a searing exposure to one who knows more than you”; “study is done in pairs, as philosophy was for Plato.” Torah study is war, and war is more than a tempest in the teapot of the ‘self.’ Contra Sartre, “hell is not other people, but the self,” confined as it is in its resentments, its envies, its sour isolation. The Muharal of Prague went even further, teaching that “hell is the body,” a trap for the spirit longing for freedom, a thing of “opaque matter” under “the sway of medical power.” On that note of Jewish neo-Platonism, Lévy deplores the oversight of the French, who took to hoarding food when news of the pandemic first appeared. “Few seemed shocked, at least in France, that books were not considered basic necessities,” that bodily nourishment seemed more important to a republican citizenry than “nourishment for the mind and the soul.”

    The closing of churches and synagogues, museums and parks “and other sites of lay meditation in which humanity satisfies its uncountable noncommercializable spiritual needs” followed from the same mindset. “The sight of a sovereign Pope, heir to John Paul II’s ‘Be not afraid’ and a veteran practitioner of the eminently Catholic ritual of the blessing of the sick and afflicted in the slums of Buenos Aires, distancing himself from the flock, communicating only through the internet ordering that fonts of holy water be emptied, and performing the stations of the cross in the courtyard of the basilica facing an empty St. Peter’s Square” erased “the Jewish image of the Messiah waiting among the scrofulous beggars outside the gates of Rome” and forgets “Jesus’s healing of the leper.” Charles de Gaulle proved himself a better Catholic than the pope when visiting Tahiti in 1956, two years before assuming the presidency of the republic. Lévy remembers a news clip he saw as a child: De Gaulle’s “limousine is blocked by a procession of lepers. He gets out, shakes their hands, holds a child in his arms, hugs the organizer of the strange demonstration, says nothing, and continues on his way.”

    Not only has the response of governments to the virus further abridged citizens’ liberty by collecting still more personal data “that everyone knows can be put to bad uses,” but “living in a perpetual state of alert and suspicion” undermines trust among those citizens, the trust that enables them to associate with one another, to resist government encroachments, to sustain republican regimes. This is “a life terrified of itself, gone to ground in its Kafkaesque burrow, which has become a penal colony,” a life “in which one accepts, with enthusiasm or resignation the transformation of the welfare state into the surveillance state,” already far advanced in communist China, with Europe not too far behind. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the ‘panopticon’ of the surveillance state.” This can only cause “a profound break… with all the wisdom of the world, notably but by no means exclusively Jewish,” which says “that a life is not a life if it is merely life.” Books are basic necessities, and the Book of Books joins with the books of the philosophers in telling us “that humanity is never identity in and for itself, never reducible to itself,” but thrives “only if…it leaves the confinement that is life in its native state.” In Biblical terms, to bow down before the virus is idolatry, worship of the Baal of the twenty-first century. Under that dispensation, the lion will indeed lie down with the lamb—on “an animal farm” ruled by tyrants underneath the figurehead king of terrors, the newly-crowned virus.

    Idolatry means worship of man-made things. “Ironclad egoism” undergirds “COVID-inspired moralism.” Even the Left, perhaps especially the Left, should understand that the policies in place in most countries hardly conduce to greater civil-social and political equality. The Islamic State, Erdogan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China all have taken the distraction caused by the virus as an opportunity to enhance their own powers at home and abroad. America withdraws from the world, leaving it to the likes of them. The enemies of the United States, “which are the enemies of freedom, are crashing through the world as if America no longer counts for anything, carries no weight, no longer exists.” Without the United States, “the globalization of the twenty-first century will be Chinese or will not happen at all.” 

    Against that harsh prospect, Lévy looks not to Karl Marx or Carl Schmitt but to the “somber but committed souls who had fought the beast with bare hands” in the Spanish Civil War—the American Ernest Hemingway, France’s André Malraux. “They were, in our eyes, the most admirable of men because they were both present in the world and present in words, combining the art of the fighter with that of the poet.” They “gave us the weapons and the tools not to remake [the world], but to repair it,” resisting “the twin villainy of accepting the status quo and pretending to ‘cure’ it.” “It was under their hand that we went to Biafra, to the Vietnamese boat people, to Bangladesh”—as Malraux himself had wanted to do, at the end of his life. 

    Lévy is right to take the engagé intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s as his forebears. Neither quite a philosopher nor quite a Talmudist, he is nonetheless a real ‘intellectual,’ familiar to Americans since Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the British since Thomas Carlyle—a lay preacher, a rhetorician who does not aim merely at self-aggrandizement, smart enough but too honorable for sophistry, although primed for oratorical exaggeration when hammering a point home. Unlike so many among his contemporaries, he has never been gulled by ideology—the characteristic deformation professionelle of his kind. He artfully both courts and resists chattering-class fashions, while in the end standing firmly for the rights inherent in human beings, rights we owe (to give it an old-fashioned formulation) to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

     

     

     

     

    Whose Declaration?

    by

    Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.

     

     

    The Declaration of Independence tells its readers who is doing the declaring: “We… the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,” acting “by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies.” In practice, this meant that political independence of those united states from the British Empire was asserted by citizens, mostly white and male, acting however on behalf of the women, children, and indeed the slaves who lived in their households. Notoriously, it was the case that the equal unalienable rights that formed the moral basis of the newly-claimed sovereignty of that people were not reflected in the civil-social institutions and laws the people had enacted. Therefore, Professor Allen argues, “we cannot have freedom” in full “without equality.” Just as a people, in asserting its sovereignty, “assume[s] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” that same natural equality ought to prevail among individuals living within the same civil society. The civil conditions by which such equality will be secured won’t be the same as the conditions prevailing under the law of nations, inasmuch as no one American, and no group of Americans, enjoys the same degree of sovereignty over himself that an independent people enjoys. Americans live under one regime; the United States lives under no regime, and indeed asserts exactly that in the face of the British monarch.

    Both political liberty and civic equality engage not only the natural rights of human beings but their natural capacities or powers, preeminently the distinctively human capacity of speech. The Declaration of Independence amounts to ‘nothing but words.’ The words needed backing by physical force. But the words justified the use of that force. More, they animated the founding of the regime that would replace the British regime, after Americans won the independence they had asserted. Language and force: “The achievement of political equality,” which must be earned, and is seldom simply bestowed, “requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

    This is where the ‘our-ness’ of “our Declaration” comes in. Americans declared their independence on the basis of their equal natural rights a long time ago. Since then, many Americans have denied the existence of those rights. Such defenders of slavery as John C. Calhoun charged that every sentence of the Declaration’s opening paragraphs were falsehoods, based upon a wrong understanding of human nature. To this day, conservatives who prefer not to conserve the Declaration look to tradition, not the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, as the source of moral and political right. On the ‘Left,’ a panoply of thinkers has denied the principles of the Founders as retrograde, perhaps useful for the time but now superseded by historical progress. Marxists regard natural rights as excrescences of the ruling bourgeois class, but the much more numerous (and moderate) ‘Progressives’ of various stripes also regard such rights as obsolete relics of a time gone by.

    It is a leading merit of Allen’s study to vindicate the Declaration from its critics but especially from its critics on the ‘Left.’ She wants all Americans to reclaim the Declaration for themselves. To do so, she must convince advocates of economic, social, and political equality that the Declaration speaks for them, too, and that they can and should speak up for it. What “individual citizens” need in order to defend their natural equality is a degree of political equality that enables them to gain “sufficient control over their lives to protect themselves from domination”—to be able to secure their natural rights from those who would violate them. Since no one individual can do this on his own, citizens will need to talk with one another, reaffirm and sometimes reform their political institutions and laws, looking to the Declaration for the unchanging standards against which all such practical efforts should be judged.

    How to make the Declaration “ours,” so many years after its original ‘owners’ wrote and enacted it? Read it slowly, Allen recommends. Only after understanding it can one know what its authors, with their command of language, wanted to talk their fellow-citizens into. She sees that the beginning of that understanding, the beginning of wisdom respecting the Declaration, is to see that it is a syllogism, a “logical argument” that you will be rightly talked into, once you’ve seen the rational necessity, and consequent moral necessity, of that argument. She identifies the logictextbook the Signers likely had studied, Isaac Watts’s Logic; or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth with a Variety of rules to Guard against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, which went through twenty editions beginning in 1724.

    Logical arguments reach out to the interlocutors of those who make such arguments. Since the Declaration was declared by a few on behalf of many, not by one voice issuing a decree, because it was “written by a group” even though Thomas Jefferson was its principal draftsman, the argument itself was refined in dialogue, as if one of the Socratic inquiries we can now read had not been written by Plato or Xenophon, but had really occurred among acting politicians. Allen calls the Declaration the product of “the collective mind” of the Founders and indeed of Americans, which is how Jefferson himself described it in his old age. Meanwhile, the mind of the British, represented in the mind of their sovereign, George III, had firmly closed itself against rational argument. By late summer of 1775 it was clear that “there would be no reconciliation, no effort to solve differences through negotiation rather than military compulsion.” Force, not reason, would prevail; hence the celebrated phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” To minds that are closed, even self-evident truths seem sophistical. Such closed minds incline to impose their opinions with force rather than arguing for them with words, but habits of unreason readily lead to unintended consequences. One means by which the Crown intended to force Americans to obey was to offer freedom to slaves and indentured servants in Virginia, if they “joined the British military” to put down the rebels. “This proclamation instantaneously radicalized Virginia’s slaveholding elite,” proving that the fight for natural equality can benefit from surprising allies. 

    This suggests that the British regime was not only close-minded ‘in theory’—refusing to acknowledge equality of natural rights—but rationally deficient ‘in practice,’ imprudent. Not so, the Americans. Far from throwing themselves into a war for independence without considering the consequences if they won, they deliberated on the political means by which they could secure their rights after independence was achieved. John Adams outlined a model for the forms of government the united states might take. This included separation of powers, representation or republicanism, and bicameral legislatures. “Adams’s purpose in providing such a concrete script [was] to allay anticipated fears about the difficulty of setting up new governments in conditions” of what he called “sudden emergency.” “Pulling down tyrannies,” he wrote, requires “erecting Such new Fabricks” as may be “best calculated to promote [the] Happiness” of each former colony, and of their union as a whole. As early as 1776 Adams drafted a preamble that each colony could attach to their new constitutions. 

    As for the Declaration itself, Congress edited Jefferson’s draft, reducing it “by about 25 percent.” In deference to the powerful plantation slaveholders whose support they needed, they omitted Jefferson’s vehement denunciation of slavery, while retaining the fundamental argument that puts slavery on trial for its life. They also removed a flowery passage describing the colonists as unrequited lovers of the British, although they more chastely continued to call the British their “brethren.” The added phrases acknowledging God—the “Supreme Judge of the World,” a world ruled by “divine Providence”—much to doubting Thomas Jefferson’s discomfiture. Even the calligraphers got into the act, capitalizing “GOD,” “CREATOR,” and “DIVINE PROVIDENCE” in the final document. “The monumental achievement of Thomas Jefferson is, ultimately, to have produced a first draft—and a general argumentative structure—that, through its philosophical integrity and unquestionable brilliance, could surive such intense committee work and bear this much demand for agreement. But the authorship of the document belongs to all those who participated in the conversations leading up to the decision to declare independence and to all those who wrangled over the consensual statement of justification.” And so “when we sit down to read the Declaration, it is their argument that we read, not Jefferson’s alone.” “The art of democratic writing,” the product of the art of democratic thinking—democratic in the sense of argued over, then consented to—is something that “we must learn to appreciate” if our public discourse is not to degenerate into a verbal war of all against all, vehement assertion against vehement assertion, in which no reason need apply. What is now the Declaration’s most controversial omission, “the language criticizing slavery,” demonstrates that “when groups of people write texts together, some choices are always made on the basis of votes, not truth. There will be compromises.” Without such compromises, the war for independence will never be won, and if somehow won, cannot secure the rights it was fought to secure, or frame the governments needed to perpetuate their security.

    The Declaration is “an ordinary memo,” Allen writes, a document announcing a change and giving reasons for it. In so saying, she intends to make the Declaration seem ‘approachable’ to contemporary readers, but of course the Declaration isn’t a memo. It is what it says it is: a formal and indeed legal document appealing to the law of nations, similar to a declaration of war. In her attempt to ‘democratize’ the Declaration, she even goes so far as to claim that “we are all equal in having the capacity to judge relations among facts, principles, and courses of action,” equal in “being political creatures.” On the contrary, we are not equal in the capacity to judge (except in the sense that any sane person has such a capacity, even if not to the same degree); we are by nature political creatures, although again not all to the same degree, and some scarcely at all, content with being told what to do).

    Allen returns to firmer ground in observing that the Declaration proceeds in four steps: “declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses”—the “candid world,” unbiased—then “declaring independence, and making pledges.” As a “unanimous” Declaration of the American Congress, it gives voice to many representatives but with one soul—as she cogently remarks, unus or ‘one’ and anima or ‘soul.’ Soul implies not only mind but life; “this comes through in the link between the words anima and ‘animal.'” Through their representatives, through the nucleus of their future republican regime, Americans have formed a group “committ[ing] its energies fully to a common goal.” Another way to say this is to recall that the Declaration says that governments derive their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed.” “This country was born in talk,” and not just any kind of talk but rational talk, a syllogism; consent means rational assent, not mere ‘going along.’ Consent is needed because human beings are equally human, that is, born with the capacity to reason, if not to the same degree and obviously not with the same willingness to exercise that capacity on a regular basis.

    In its rational character, “the Declaration is nothing less than a very short introduction to political philosophy,” raising questions of what it is to live well along with the practical question of whether we are in fact living well. And it begins to answer these questions by raising the question of what it means to be “created equal.” Allen rightly denies that in invoking equality the Signers mean ‘sameness.’ She identifies five “facets” of their idea of equality: a condition in which no party dominates another; “equal access to the tools of government”; “egalitarian approaches to the development of collective intelligence,” by which she means moral and civic education; “egalitarian practices of reciprocity” or the ruling-and-being ruled relations Aristotle identifies as the characteristic of a sound marriage; and finally “shar[ed] ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world”—that is, the intention to exercise the tools of government to which every citizen has access. All of these facets of civic equality derive from the natural equality human beings have, equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The link between human nature and civil society is moral necessity—in this case, the necessity of dissolving the political bands that have connected Americans to the English. That moral necessity in turn derives from the logical contradiction between the equality of Americans and Englishmen by nature and the British regime’s refusal to secure the natural rights which both peoples equally share. Moral necessity impels them to turn to national “self-government” in lieu of the failed imperial government, to equal status as a sovereign people, not yet equal to the great British Empire in power (as Allen puts it) but “equal as a power,” as a sovereign people among a world of other equally sovereign peoples.

    Allen pauses to remark that the phrase, “separate and equal station among the Powers of the earth,” which the Signers declare, was later distorted and misused by the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. In that ruling, the Court declared racial segregation constitutional if accommodations on railroad lines, restaurants, and so on were “separate but equal.” “Whereas the colonists sought an external separation, the segregationists—a cross-class alliance of white-power advocates—sought separation internally.” Of course, such separation never really mean equality but rather the opposite: racial domination, “to keep many people subjected and dependent.” Given this correct analysis, it is not quite right to say that “the Declaration provided tools for liberating some and dominating others”; it is more accurate to say that later Americans used the materials of which the Declaration’s “tools”—its words—could be reshaped and repurposed for evil.

    As Creator, God endows all human beings with certain unalienable rights. The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God also entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, if (given their circumstances) moral necessity commands them to assert that station. As a law of nature and of nature’s God, moral necessity is as necessary as the law of gravity, although not quite in the same way. It is indeed felt in “the natural instinct to survive,” as Allen says, but a mere instinct implies no right; to claim that it does would be to run afoul of David Hume’s famous distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Rather, “the source of rights” is the nature of human beings ‘in full.’ Whether created by God or not, a good human being must fulfill its nature as such, just as a good horse or a good cornstalk is one that fulfills its nature. There are, of course, those who do not want human beings to fulfill their nature but rather to bend their fellows to serve those who dominate them, to turn those so dominated into beings less than what they are by nature. They want most human beings to be bad examples of human nature. In so desiring, they make themselves into bad examples of human nature, inasmuch as it is ‘self-evident,’ a matter of definition, that any being which is less than what it is by nature is a bad human being, and to desire the bad for others must therefore be a bad desire.

    As Allen puts it, “Successful self-government is a success for nature, because it expands the flourishing of one set of natural creatures, human beings. Because all human beings desire to survive and flourish, they all struggle to interpret the events of their social worlds in order to ascertain whether things are going well or ill for them and their communities and to ascertain whether they need to change course.” Each person has “the potential to be a reasonable judge” (emphasis added)—a “moral sense,” as Jefferson would say, following the doctrine of the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. To realize this potential, each citizen must “grasp the importance of self-knowledge” and strive to achieve it. This is the Socratic lesson at the heart of the Declaration.

    If so, then the human capacity of judgment entails the use of government to secure natural rights, inasmuch as one people might be considerably less willing to secure those rights for another people, as the British regime has demonstrated. The capacity so to use government requires a capacity readily to acknowledge certain truths about human beings. Hence the language, “self-evident.” Allen lists the truths the Signers consider to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that those rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments have been instituted among men, based on the consent of the governed to secure those rights; that when governments fail to secure those rights, the people have the right to change their government and instituted a new government, “laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This is more than a list of truths, Allen observes; it is a syllogism. It is a syllogism that George III preferred not to acknowledge. Even Jefferson himself did not fully act on it, inasmuch as he failed to emancipate all of his slaves. But failure to acknowledge, or in acknowledging but failing to act upon, a logical argument does not invalidate the argument. No ad hominem argument refutes a syllogism unless the syllogism is about the nature or the behavior of a person. The major premises of the Declaration syllogism concern human beings as a species, not any one person. As Allen restates it, the syllogism is: (1) All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; (2) Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights; (3) all people have a right to whatever is necessary to secure what they have a right to; (4) all people have a right to a properly constituted government. This provides a standard by which persons and their action may be judged; it assumes nothing about the person or persons making the argument. Mao Zedong could say as much (although he did not); to counter-argue that Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant would be to say something true but irrelevant to the question of whether the argument is sound.

    If equal unalienable rights are endowed by our Creator, who or what created human beings? This also raises Hume’s ‘is-ought’ question. “Why is it… that we possess our powers of mind, body, and spirit, which enable us to live, be free, and pursue happiness by means of politics, as a matter of right?” The Declaration leaves room for its readers to define the term ‘Creator’; Jefferson and Franklin evidently defined it differently than did that eminent Presbyterian co-signer, John Witherspoon. The fact that we must judge good and bad, the fact that no one can be ‘non-judgmental’ in any strong sense of the term, self-evidently or logically requires some ultimate source of right, whether that source is nature, or God, or some combination of the two. This puts the axe to Humean conventionalism, the claim that the real source of right can be custom or prevailing opinion, inasmuch as existing customs and opinions may be demonstrated to be bad for the human beings who practice and hold them. It does not put the axe to the later philosophic doctrine of historicism, which defines ‘God’ as Hegel does, as an ‘Absolute Spirit’ that unfolds dialectically through the course of human events. It does provide the beginning of an answer to historicism, but that is another matter.

    So much for the theory of the Declaration. The Signers were not philosophers following their argument in all its implications but politicians with a practical intent. There is theoretical reasoning; there is also practical or prudential reasoning, equally obedient to the principle of non-contradiction. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” What Allen calls the Signers’ “spirit of prudence” points them to “the third facet of equality,” the “need to build a collective intelligence” through moral and civic education, an intelligence that enables a people to analyze “how the present connects to the future”—that is, how to counteract the tyrannical designs of a George III with plans for effective self-government. 

    The Declaration’s invocation of prudence leads immediately to the minor premises of the syllogism, the list of charges against the monarch and the English Parliament. One highly useful step in educating oneself in political prudence is to learn how to recognize tyrannical designs. Given our ignorance of others’ thoughts, we can only identify a tyrannical design by a set of actions that fits a pattern. When the Declaration describes “the history of the present King of Great Britain” as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” it means just such a pattern, a story or narrative of events. The prudence of the Signers comes out, as Allen remarks, not only in their recognition of this telltale pattern but in the timing of their counter-actions. They didn’t wait until the would-be tyrant had got his rule cinched in—a rule that contradicted both the natural rights of all human beings and the constitutional rights of Englishmen. 

    The list of eighteen grievances itself has a pattern, moving from bad to worse to worst. “King George has begun to make war on the colonists,” and in a way that violates the rules of just war as set down in the law of nations. “He is an aggressor,” violating the laws of jus bellum, and his means of war, which the Signers compare to the tactics among the Indian nations and tribes that are savage, violate the laws of jus in bello. Oddly, Allen cites the “multitude of New Offices” the king has imposed on the colonies, but she misses its significance. An example of these offices, as she points out, was the American Board of Customs Commissioners, “whose members were to live in the colonies and regulate everything that had to do with trade and tax.” These and other such measures were part of his attempt, in collaboration with Parliament, to consolidate British rule before, during and especially after the war is over (a war he obviously expected to win). A multitude of new offices bespeaks the institutional structure of the centralized modern state; George III and Parliament intended to extend the central state’s tentacles into the American colonies. Anticipating Tocqueville and many others, the Signers see such statism as the prime instrument of tyranny in the modern world. Limiting immigration is another such tactic. As Allen remarks, the Americans disliked this because it stunted their economic growth (“societies under the thumb of tyrants do not grow prosperous”); it is also true that tyrants don’t want large populations of restless colonists who might reach the ‘critical mass’ that would make their revolution successful.

    As a syllogism, the Declaration teaches those who follow it. “The Declaration teaches people how to do the very thing that it argues that everyone has the capacity to do, namely, make political judgments.” Political judgments, recall, are judgments made in common, reflecting the reciprocal ruling-and-being-ruled fellow citizens exercise. In this sense the Declaration leads its readers “to a very deep understanding of human equality.” “When we read the Declaration, we watch political judgment in action,” as the Signers first lay down the standards of right human conduct, then measure the conduct of the British regime against those standards, find it contradictory to it, and announce a timely action in response to it. Allen suggests that the Declaration “tests its own hypothesis” with respect to the capacity of Americans at least, and maybe all people as well. “If all people can read or listen to it and understand how political judgment works in the Declaration beyond the Declaration itself—which is to say, regardless of whether they have gone to school, or how much history they have learned—then the Declaration is right about human equality.” If so, so. This may be carrying the principles of natural right rather too far into optimism about their likelihood of practice. But Allen is undoubtedly right to think that those who carry those principles to the people can and did find a wider audience of persons who did indeed understand those principles, and did indeed have the capacity to apply them in practice, than tyrants, oligarchs, and demagogues have typically thought possible or desirable. And this capacity can be strengthened by educators.

    She also sees clearly that the portrait of a tyrant provides a sort of photographic negative of what good government looks like. Good governments take actions exactly the opposite of those undertaken by the British. Good governments will respect the rule of law, the orderly transaction of legislative business, and the actions of an independent judiciary; it will govern by popular consent, not by bureaucracy and armies; it will not wage unjust war against its own citizens or foment violent factional strife among them but instead strive to keep a civil peace. 

    This being so, “what are we to make of the fact that the signers, who formally declared a commitment to equality, also protected slavery and ruthlessly sought to deracinate, if not exterminate, Native Americans?” To this, Allen replies that many of the Founders did indeed work to end slavery, putting it on the road to extinction in many of the states. It isn’t as easy to do things like that as it may seem, from a distance of two centuries. “In order to germinate and come alive in the world, ideas have to function as rules for action.” They must move from the head to the heart, from thought to habit. That requires step-by-step planning and consistent implementation of the progression of steps—setting out the future course of events, then taking each step along that course. “By the time the colonists affirmed the Declaration of Independence, they had already for over a century been scripting for themselves the set of actions that could bring the ideal of equality to life among themselves.” They had “built specific new habits for interacting with each other at the same time that they were developing general ideas about political equality,” but had not done so with respect to “interacting with slaves or Native Americans.” To be sure, some did: Quakers and their ‘secularist’ ally, Benjamin Franklin worked for the education of free black children in Pennsylvania; the Washington administration sought to change the regimes of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ in the deep South. But such projects proved too limited and desultory; in the case of Washington’s policy, the people of Georgia moved to push the Indians out, anyway, and succeeded. “Ideas don’t change actions on their own. Our desires matter too. This, finally, is why a shadow of tragedy trails our Declaration,” a trail of tears that became a river, and then a flood less than a century later. The troubled waters have yet to recede, entirely, to this day—another reason to read the Declaration of Independence, slowly.

    Allen turns to the Americans’ attempts to persuade the king. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” only “to be answered by repeated injury” by him, a man therefore “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” The capitalization of “We” was added by the printer but was not removed by the Signers when they reviewed his work. Allen makes much of this, saying that “it’s as if the Declaration is telling a story about how ‘We, the people’ was born.” Given the Declaration’s clear indication that Americans were already a people before their separation from the political bands that connected them to the English, it is more as if they are saying that We, the people have come to political maturity, that we are ready for self-government and indeed insist on it. We are reasonable, in theory and in practice; the British regime is not. We have developed “habits of reciprocity,” as Allen nicely puts it. The king, habituated to rule with no back-talk, has not. The colonists understand “the kind of equality that needs to be in play in relations between people in order for freedom to obtain,” relations that are political in Aristotle’s sense. The connection between genuinely political relations and reason is that both presuppose dialogue and dialectic, reciprocity, not one-way commands. There will come a time, after such deliberation, when commands are issued; otherwise, there is no rule, no government. Allen identifies the two times the phrase “We hold” occurs in the Declaration. First, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”; we, as a people who have engaged in political conference, in rational dialogue, have made our decision and we will stick to it. Second, we hold our “British brethren,” along with “the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends”; again, we have decided, together. Against any extra-logical, ad hominem questions about “the rectitude of our intentions,” they simply refer the matter to the Supreme Judge of the World, who alone can discern rectitude or the lack of it. They are willing to be judged by their fellow men in the same way they have judged their fellow men, by their actions directed at building “a political order that puts [the] recognition of human equality front and center.” And so they have been judged, although judgments have varied, ever since. 

    “All adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school.” To do so “would prepare us all for citizenship” by “learn[ing] the democratic arts.” 

     

     

    ‘Regime,’ Defined

    by

    Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: The Centrality of the Regime to Political Science. Warsaw: Wydawnicra Universytetu Warsawskiego, 2016.

     

    This is exactly the kind of book that has long needed to be written, a book correcting the tendency of political scientists to reduce politics to sub-political categories—race, class, and gender being only the latest iteration of the practice. In so doing, political scientists have supposed it more scientific to make political science apolitical, confusing the political with mere partisanship. It is as if America’s civil-social egalitarianism—its democracy, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word—has inclined students of politics to such atomizing reductionism. Bates stoutly refuses to go along, aiming to restore the classical idea of the regime to its rightful place in political thought.

    I look forward to a second edition. The excellencies of this one are vitiated by a few missteps; they are easily corrected. Meanwhile, the first edition is well worth inclusion in the reading list of any introductory university course in political science.

    Bates begins by rightly distinguishing the modern state—that modern invention of Machiavelli, who intended it as an instrument for his projected conquest of ‘Fortuna’ and of nature—from the longstanding polis or ‘city-state.’ He goes too far, however, in contending that Machiavelli’s lo stato actually replaces the regime. He contends that the fundamental contrast isn’t between the state and the polis but between the state and the regime. The modern state, according to its philosophic progenitors, amounts to an act of human will aiming at a unified whole; this is indeed no regime. The modern state aims at being a “truly one united whole” having a supposed ‘general will.’ True enough, but it would be much better to say that Machiavelli himself distinguishes two regimes in the modern state—principalities and republics, rule of the one and rule of the many—and that his silence about regimes of the few, of aristocrats and of oligarchs, bespeaks his intention to centralize political communities, to get rid of those intermediary rulers through whom the regimes, the rulers, of ancient city-states and empires, along with those who tried to rule the more recent feudal ‘states,’ had needed to filter their authority in order to govern the people.

    This has meant that all modern states have needed bureaucracies of some sort, agents of the regime of those states, and that bureaucrats’ loyalties to the regime are often suspect, as they maneuver themselves into a position of quasi-independence within the states. In so doing, bureaucrats become elements of the regimes of modern states, a status that has bedeviled presidents and prime ministers but also tyrants and despots—making bureaucracy a regime problem that cuts across all regimes in modernity.

    How did political communities begin? After all, there remain places in the world in which extended families or clans count for more than any association of families, and even well-established modern states often see important family networks achieving predominance. Bates agrees with Aristotle in considering the family or household to differ from the polis in kind and not merely in size, the polis being the most authoritative form of association among humans. Oddly, he claims that Aristotle’s Politics never shows “how or why the polis became authoritative,” although Aristotle clearly describes the inadequacy of the family to the task of achieving a self-sufficient human life. But in foreclosing an (as it were) intra-Aristotelian account of political authority, he turns to an excellent and older source, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy; in this he cogently follows the scholarship of Heinrich Meier, who sees the political significance of the Greeks’ shift from worshipping the gods of the Underworld to the worship of the Olympians. “As Meier contends, the discovery of the political occurs when political life through community derived decisions override family/kinship derived decision processes.”

    In the first play, the Agamemnon, the great military leader of their Greeks, returning to his city, Argos, after defeating the Trojans, brings home “many great prizes,” not the least being Cassandra, a Trojan princess. His wife, Clytemnestra, has proven no less unfaithful, forming a erotic-political alliance with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s “political enemy.” She justifies her animosity in view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, whom he made an offering to the gods as a means of winning their aid in the war. Clytemnestra murders her husband and king in revenge, enabling Aegisthus to accede to the throne. The citizens of Argos—really the subjects of the usurping royal couple—can think of nothing more than to wait for Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, “to remove the newly imposed tyranny.” “Although the citizens can easily rise up and kill both murderers, they lack the authority or sanction” to do so. Only the son has divine sanction to take vengeance on his father’s killers. “The city of Argos is thus reduced to the household of Agamemnon, where only the head of the household has authority to pursue policy”—ruled, as it is, under the authority of the gods of the Underworld, the Furies, the gods of families.

    Orestes does return, and does kill his mother and stepfather, on command from the Olympian god, Apollo. The goddess Athena calls a jury trial of Orestes, and persuades the Furies, who would otherwise continue the family revenge-cycle, to integrate themselves into a new political order. The Furies pursue Orestes because he killed his mother, whereas his mother merely killed her husband, no blood relative. (This is the significance of the Biblical injunction, that a woman shall leave her parents upon wedding her husband, and they “shall be one flesh”—constitute a new ‘blood tie.’)  “The household bonds, expressed as kin loyalty, force one to a cycle of revenge, in order to right wrongs done to the family. There is no end to vengeance and no peace. The desire for peace, which is needed for the fulfillment of human happiness (eudaimonia), entails that one rise above one’s own—kin ties—to some other claim that is more authoritative. This other claim is that of the polis.” “Human beings must associate with more than their own kin in order to live well.” “The old gods are aligned with the household and the new gods are aligned with the city”; if human beings intend to live well, they must change their gods—or rather add some who are capable of making peace with the old gods. Human beings must become citizens.

    The old gods don’t surrender easily. They hate the city, partly because they denigrate speech. “They will not let any mere words dictate to them,” the building-blocks of the law by which the city will be ruled, or rather through which the new gods will rule in the better interest of the citizens. More, the Furies are too powerful to be forced into line. Apollo unwisely uses words in an attempt to “exclude, reject, or spurn the Furies,” who are far too spirited to bow to the contempt of the Olympians. But Athena “offers them a new and more important role to play in the new dispensation. She offers them beauty and a role in defending the political community, whereas Apollo merely desires their downfall.” Bates calls this “an appeal to the vanity of the Furies,” but it is really an appeal to their thumos, their spiritedness. For Aristotle, it is well to notice, the bond between husband and wife is political, based on oaths, on choice, not merely on ‘biology’—generation or ‘blood.’ 

    With respect to the political, Bates observes, Aeschylus identifies two cities with two different regimes. Argos is an elected kingship, Athens “some form of limited democracy.” Once elected, an Argive king passes on his title to his son. In murdering her husband and installing her lover as the monarch, Clytemnestra changes the Argive regime to tyranny. “It is tyrannical in that it both violates the law, nomos, of succession of the title of king from father to son and is rule over unwilling subjects.” That is, under the Argive regime “it is too easy to confuse the household of the king with the city”; “the inaction of the citizens of Argos and their awaiting Orestes to set things right shows that in Argos there is no distinction between household and city,” and that the lack of this distinction inclines the citizens (really subjects) to passivity. Political assassination is really anti-political, striking at the household—in which bond between husband and wife constitutes the one, limited, political dimension of life—and “also at the basis of all non-violent human association,” and “therefore the possibility of human flourishing—happiness.” The rule of sheer force emulates not the political, consensual, husband-wife bond in the family, nor the kingly rule of parents over children—rightly aimed at the good of the children. The rule of force emulates rather the rule of master over slave, a form of rule performed for the good of the master not the slave, the familial equivalent of despotism in the city. And tyranny is even worse than despotism, lacking even legal status and “treating persons as though they are merely slaves.”

    This last formulation is odd. Are slaves not persons? Persons treated as if they are not persons, but machines, to be sure, but by nature persons nonetheless. Aristotle does of course identify a human category of ‘natural slaves,’ those whose best work is not self-directed because they are incapable of reasoning and need to be commanded by those who are capable. Aristotle suggests that such persons are fewer in number than one might want to think, if one is a master of slaves. Bates’s later critique of Abraham Lincoln should probably be considered in this light.

    “If Argos were truly a city, the citizens themselves could have set affairs right and avoided the fate of Orestes. But Argos is not a city and the chorus are not citizens, rather they are subjects of the household and are totally without authority in this matter. This is why after Orestes takes vengeance on the murderers, the dramatic action must leave Argos and go to Athens.” That is the setting of the final play in Aeschylus’ trilogy.

    The Athenian regime is a form of the rule of ‘the many.’ Even the goddess Athena “defers to the city.” Being the goddess of reason, Athena will not challenge the Furies directly. “In originally agreeing to having Athena hear the case, the Furies submitted their case to be judged by a deity who was a third party, not directly involved in the case. however, by deferring the authority of the case to the city, Athena defers divine sanction to political sanction. Or she establishes the legitimacy of decisions by the political body concerning such matters, whereas before these matters were contained within the moral realm of the household.” Athena casts her vote in favor of Orestes, indicating that marriage, which is political, trumps parenthood, which is ‘blood.’ For their part, the Furies will redirect their thumotic energy toward defending the city; unlike Apollo, Athena understands that “the political community as such needs the power of the Furies so that the city is able to defend itself”; “the alliance of the Furies to the city is intended to strengthen the city as the source of human fulfillment,” moderating the love of one’s own by widening it to the city, the home of speech, which recognizes marriage instead of parenthood as the fundamental familial bond because it is oath-based, not blood-based. Like Socrates, Aeschylus sees that the other extreme claim, that speech alone suffices to constitute the city, will not do. “Coercion or force is to be understood in this particular context, as the exercise of law,” putting teeth into the mouth that speaks. Accordingly, the Furies must “be tamed and managed rather than eradicated.” What Nietzsche would call the Apollonian must be supplemented not so much by the Dionysian but by the Furious, all under the rule of the reasonable, which reasonably sees its own limitations. 

    Under this dispensation, justice no longer means vengeance but the rule of law. The city, with its laws and juries, “will indeed do what the Furies did—right wrongs and protect the family.” But it won’t right wrongs “with the same ruthless and destructive manner of the Furies,” which leads to an endless cycle of retaliation. “Rather, the justice of the city will be a compromise between the peace, which is an essential precondition for human happiness, and the demands that wrongs be righted and those who commit them be punished.” The terms of this compromise mean that “not all acts of injustice will be sought out and punished; rather, only those that threaten to destroy the peace or happiness of the human association.” To go further “would be irrational and harmful to the greater human good,” destroying many good things “to remove one single evil.” “Moderation is now to be the qualifier of justice.” 

    Aristotle ranks moderation among the principal virtues, and it is to “the continuing significance of Aristotle for social and political science” that Bates now turns. Often criticized for having ignored the empire under which he lived and concentrating his attention on the Greek poleis, by now subordinate to Macedonia, Aristotle in fact did no such thing. As a citizen of Stagira living as a resident foreigner in Athens, Aristotle had to watch his step when it came to commenting on contemporary politics. Further, his emphasis on the polis has a heuristic purpose. It is in the small polis, not the big, sprawling, polyglot, multi-city empires that the regime is most clearly visible. The empires of his time had regimes—monarchies of one sort or another—but except for the annual exaction of tribute, one’s city didn’t much feel the pinch of rule. Day-to-day governance continued to occur within the city; that was what mattered in the lives of imperial citizen-subjects.

    The regime or politeia “is something separate and distinct from the polis but gives shape and direction to the polis.” Bates links its definition to Aristotle’s four ’causes’: in its material character, every regime has institutions and offices; in its formal character, it “looks different” from other regimes; its efficient cause is the ruling body or politeuma of the city; its teleological or final cause is its view of justice or right. This may be a bit too schematic. Aristotle identifies four dimensions of a regime: its politeia strictly speaking, its form or institutional structure; its ruling body or politeuma; its way of life or Bíos ti; and its end, its purpose, its telos. Its ‘formal’ cause therefore is its institutional structure; its ‘material’ cause is its ruling body; its ‘efficient’ cause or archē is its founding. The way of life relates to the purpose as the means to an end. 

    “The politeia is that which orders all the parts that constitutes the given political community” or polis. “Therefore, no politeia, no political community.” He proceeds to summarize Aristotle’s quantitative and qualitative criteria for regime classification: the one, the few, and the many; good and bad. These result in six basic regime types or species; although Bates says that Aristotle subtly undermines this simple classification, it is more accurate to say that he refines it, identifying ‘subspecies’ within each type. Bates carefully distinguishes Aristotelian from Hobbesian political science. “Contra the teaching of Hobbes and the modern teaching that follows from his understanding of government representing the whole body politic as such, and not merely a ruling part, Aristotle’s teaching about the nature of political rule is that a part of the political community acts on behalf of the whole (either for its own sake or for the common benefit).” Each polis has parts, especially the few who are rich and the many who are poor, each typically advocating a regime, including a way of life, which serves its own interest, both claiming to serve the interests of the whole. Political rule itself “is divided on the basis of functions suited to each political community: deliberating, deciding, implementing what’s been decided, and adjudication of legal cases arising as a result of those decisions and acts of implementation—law being “relative to the type of politeia.” Regimes change, but there is no fixed cycle of regimes, as propounded by Plato’s Socrates (probably for heuristic purposes) and more literally by Polybius. Regimes change because no one regime, even the good ones, will lack enemies who scheme against it. But this doesn’t make politics a futile endeavor. Far from it. “In contrast” to such modern utopians as Karl Marx, “Aristotle’s writings suggest the attempts to overcome politics or escape from it would fail, or end in despotism.”

    Why was Aristotle’s understanding of politics as regime-centered brushed aside by later political philosophers? Imperialism challenged the value of political rule itself. Although the polis superseded the clan and the tribe, as Aeschylus shows, the empires overwhelmed many poleis with sheer military force, and ruled the cities despotically (if often desultorily) after their conquests. “Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader.” As in Argos, a family rules an empire; politics strictly speaking, ruling and being ruled mutually, finds little or no purchase. Following Aristotle, the Roman empire emerged from a republican regime, the res publica. The first, republican, Roman empire “incorporat[ed] local elites into Roman citizens,” but the regime changed in typical fashion, as anti-republican factions arose within it. Once consolidated under Augustus, the empire “was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) Caesar, Kaiser, tzar; (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen… the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex.” Finally, after Augustus died the later monarchs dropped the pretense of republicanism altogether, calling themselves imperators or emperors—issuers of commands, imperatives, the edicts of one-way rule, not of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. With no serious regime rival or rivals, Roman political thought began to neglect the regime question, and it began to fade from political science altogether.

    By the Middle Ages it is no longer clear that thinkers knew Aristotle’s Politics, at all. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers got their sense of regimes from Plato and Polybius, and thus never had the Aristotelian inclination to deliberate openly over the character of regimes. Further, the Christian doctrine of the separation of sacred from secular government understandably preoccupied the best minds. It was therefore not until Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century that Aristotelian regime theory was recovered, but necessarily in a ‘Christianized’ manner; Thomas “does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and made compatible with Christian teachings.” For example, in following Aristotle’s argument that the rule of a good king is desirable but improbable, given “the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle,” particularly its instability, Thomas goes on to say that the kingly rule of God will solve that problem, once God returns earth, then transforms the cosmos itself, making a new heaven and a new earth. Aristotle might have doubted that promise, had he lived to hear it.

    Starting with Machiavelli and his “modern concept of the state,” political science moved even farther from Aristotelianism. Machiavelli “does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it.” By this, Bates means that the moderns understand lo stato as “a product of will,” whether it be the will of the founding prince or the “collective will” of the individuals who form that state according to a ‘social contract.’ Because willed, the modern state “must have a unitary character,” inasmuch as a divided or schizophrenic will cannot be “good or healthy,” as will. The ruling institutions or forms of the modern state “are merely tools that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will,” in contrast to “the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle—where the political community composed of the fundamental parts—the household and other communities—give [the political community] body.” In the polis, unlike the modern state, these “many discrete parts” enjoy “commonality” thanks to “their shared life together, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life together.” But for Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers, the political community “is not by nature but is instead a humanly made construct.” For Hobbes, the ‘body politic’ that is Mighty Leviathan amounts to “a metaphor” for the relationship between the monarch and his realm; the sovereign isn’t any one, existing monarch but “the embodied will” that authorizes the existence of the political community. Hence the emphasis on the will in Rousseauian and Kantian ethics and politics, and eventually the shift away not only from natural right, not only from such natural-rights substitutes as Rousseau’s general will and Kant’s categorical imperative, but to the elaboration of historical right in Hegel, in whose writings “the modern state reaches its intellectual peak” as an entirely impersonal instantiation of the impersonal ‘Absolute Spirit,’ a being that encompasses natural even humanly willed right, explaining all of these theories as moments in its own unfolding.

    If the modern state is a willed construct of the individuals who consent to it, then the substantial political bodies in the world no longer consist of families and intrastate factions but of the states themselves, which pit their wills against one another in a war of all against all. Since sovereign wills refuse to relinquish their sovereignty while at the same time wishing for the peace that the polis afforded when it subordinated the families and their Furies, “the establishment of modern international law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.” Such writers as Grotius, who applies Aristotelian natural right to international relations, and Vattel, who applies Lockean natural right to them, attempt to moderate the Hobbesian state of international war. Such conceptions were challenged, however, when historicist notions of nation-states, “cultural and racial/ethnic” constructions “that people cannot control” because they are the result of laws of historical development, replaced the ‘willfulness’ of social-contract theory. Bates wrongly charges Abraham Lincoln with fostering this notion in America; he is on firmer ground in assigning the responsibility to the Progressives and, it might be added, the Social Darwinists before them, their ontological if not socio-economic twins. 

    The managers of political science’s “behavioral revolution” in the twentieth century found even Hobbesian materialism insufficiently materialist, with its willed social contract. “The scientific pretensions of later moderns as well as their materialism and reductionism led to a reaction against the willing agency of the modern Hobbesian state”; for them, real science tracks “the various impersonal forces of mass society acting and interacting with each other through the various institutionalism that historically emerged in each socio-ethnic grouping.” Eschewing all ‘qualitative’ claims as unscientific ‘value judgments,’ behaviorists retain his numerical regime criterion (one, few, many) and then calculate the level of measurable political ‘participation’ in relation to the numerical criterion. As democrats, they often betray a tendency to prefer the rule of the few, with high participation levels, as “rule for the common advantage,” but they aspire to ‘value-free political science.’ More recently, political scientist with such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol have added an institutional dimension, concentrating their attention on the state, which they consider an independent variable in political outcomes, rather like an Aristotelian formal cause. “But when we look at much of the regime analysis of those who came to champion the ‘Return to the State,’ all too often they employed many of the same overly democrat5ic and pluralistic assumptions” of the behaviorists. For them, ‘democracy’ “no longer is to be considered a form of regime, but rather as a universal human political form that all human communities should strive to achieve.” With great effort, today’s political scientists have scrambled back to quasi-Hegelian statism without the ontology that justifies it. 

    None of these modern forms of political science is genuinely political. Instead of beginning with the household, with its already-political relationship of husband and wife and its grounding in real human associations aimed at achieving the real human end of eudemonia or “liv[ing] fully as a human being,” modern political science begins with individuals. It is atomistic or, at best, atomistic within a structuralist framework. By contrast, Aristotelian political science “does not understand the political community as a unitary composite that must be homogenized and centralized.” Rather, for Aristotle, “the regime is fundamental to a political community because it is that which holds it together as a whole; a whole composed of discrete parts.” This is the reality of political life, Aristotle’s therefore the truer science.

    The problem is that modern states have regimes, too. It makes a difference to me if I live in contemporary France or Germany, in a commercial republic, or in contemporary China, an oligarchy. A second edition of this book should correct the argument in light of that obvious fact, thereby showing that Aristotelian regime theory ‘works’ for modern states as well as for city-states.