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    The Cold War: Causes and Effects

    by

    Gaddis, John Lewis: Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

    Leffler, Melvyn P.: A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

    Marable, Manning: Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction of Black America, 1945-1990. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984.

     

    The ‘Cold War’ pitting the United States and its allies against the Soviet Union and its allies and satellites disputed the same territory—the world itself—in circumstances that made a ‘hot’ war too dangerous for either side to undertake. The Cold War profoundly influenced American politics in the two decades after it began helping to consolidate the New Deal state in many ways—not least by giving the Republican Party a major stake in that state. Although the Cold War consolidated the New Deal state, it eventually weakened the Democratic Party’s dominance in the regime which founded that state. The Democratic Party overextended U. S. power in southeast Asia, alienating many of the children of builders of the New Deal state.

    I. Cold War Causes
    There were four kinds of causes of the Cold War. In descending order of generality, they were: ideas, postwar historical circumstances, strategy, and particular events and judgments ‘on the spot.’ The Cold War instances what Melvyn Leffler calls the classical security dilemma, in which every move I make to enhance my security threatens or seems to threaten yours, and vice-versa. The rival regimes had many reasons to regard each other as threats, starting with the ideas that animated those regimes. Americans and Soviets both had a sharper interest in political ideas than many other peoples—both nations’ mindsets were the opposite of the British inclination toward ‘muddling through.’ Heresy hunting had characterized both regimes from their beginning. Both regimes also tended toward a view of ideational enemies as conspirers, and therefore shared strong motives for policies of pre-emption. The Marxist-Leninist suspicions of the international bourgeoisie need no rehearsal; as for Americans, their Declaration of Independence decries not only despotism but a design to reduce Americans to slavery. Inasmuch as Marxism-Leninism targets the international bourgeoisie, and America had been a leading commercial republican regime, rivalry was inevitable. In 1919, with the invasion of the Soviet Union by an alliance of commercial republics, the rivalry briefly became an actual war.

    Rivalry does not, however, necessarily mean war, hot or cold, and this early, weak effort at strangling the baby Bolshevism in its cradle quickly subsided. To ideational rivalry geopolitical strategic considerations were added, twenty-five years later. Governing elites on both sides had studied Halford Mackinder’s writings. [1] Mackinder’s view of the world as a “closed system” (with Germany and Russia struggling for domination of the “Heartland” of the “World Island” and of the “crossroads” of that island around Suez) clearly called for an international politics of global power projection. In 1919, Mackinder himself warned that Bolshevism would end either in world anarchy or world tyranny (203); in 1943 he wrote, more moderately, that if the Soviet Union emerged from the war “as conqueror of Germany, she must rank as the greatest land power of the globe,” and as the “power in the strategically strongest defensive position” (272-273). Leffler describes the American response to the Soviet in Mackinderian terms: “No one could dispute that in the heartland of Eurasia a brutal totalitarian state existed with the capacity to take advantage of the manifold opportunities presented by the postwar world” (497). Soviet ideology and Mackinderian strategy coalesced in the Soviet imposition or encouragement of Communist and pro-Communist regimes wherever feasible, with non-Communist allies as a second-best choice. For their part, beginning in the 1940s, U. S. policymakers “never doubted that U. S. security interests existed almost everywhere” (Leffler 180). Like the Soviets, Americans preferred to deal with regimes of their own kind, but had no hesitation in seeking support of non-republican regimes–military dictatorships in Latin America, monarchies in the Middle East—when no republicans seemed likely to rule.

    The worldwide character of the conflict was accentuated by the Europeans’ need for the productive power of their colonies, which “appeared better able to close the [postwar] dollar gap than did European countries themselves” (Leffler 164). This gave the Soviets a weakness to target, and they revived Lenin’s anti-imperialist rhetoric, applying it vigorously to everyone but themselves. Americans had a more difficult problem. They had to resist the strengthening of European imperialism, fearing a return to pre-war mercantilism and economic autarky (Leffler 35). Free trade or worldwide capitalism required an anti-imperial policy. But the newly independent nations must also be kept from the Soviet orbit, and the Europeans must find some way to prosper economically without their colonies, lest even they become gulls to Soviet blandishments.

    I shall examine how these strategies played out at the beginning of the Cold War on each side, starting with the Soviets.

    a. Soviet Actions and Reactions
    The Soviets formulated an imperial network of more-or-less subservient local Communist parties, using them to undermine non-communists regimes by whatever means Moscow deemed useful (Gaddis 42). Playing from an unusual position which combined military and political extension with military weakness owing to the devastation of the world war, Stalin moved to consolidate power in eastern and central Europe. Leffler contends that he “acted defensively” (186); it is worth noting that for Stalin, acting defensively meant purges and militarily-enforced domination of what were quickly described as the Soviets’ ‘satellite states.’ Stalin was indeed cautious beyond his own (noticeably expanded) sphere; that is very likely because he was quite weak beyond his own sphere. Leffler observes that the Communist parties in France and Italy wanted not immediately to overthrow but to reenter postwar governments; again, this is a function of weakness, Gramscianism being Marxism weakly endowed. De Gaulle, for one, was hardly deceived by Maurice Thorez’s seeming meekness. For their own part, the Soviets overplayed their hand in demanding war reparations in the form of products from the Ruhr Valley, products Germany and Europe generally needed for economic and political stabilization. As usual, Soviet demands for ‘justice’ dovetailed nicely with grand policy considerations, doubtless yet another instance of the Marxist claim to synthesize theory and practice.

    In Asia, the Soviets feared that the U. S. presence in china threatened the Trans-Siberian railroad and the eastern Soviet Union generally (Leffler 88). Stalin exploited such themes of encirclement and foreign hostility, and was “not interested in striking a deal” on nuclear weapons” (Leffler 115). With whatever mixture of fear and cynicism, the Soviets did little to assuage American feats of their aggressiveness in these key years immediately after the war. Their actions alarmed U. S. planners, and also fed back into U. S. domestic politics, where Republicans were rhetorically alert to any signs of Democratic appeasement—understandably so, in view of the New Dealers’ participation in the Popular Front movement of the mid-1930s. Republicans did not immediately grasp the need for backing up their rhetoric with serious actions in terms of military spending and the end of their longstanding isolationism.

    b. American Policy Initiatives
    From their position of strength, Americans quickly seized the initiative in the Cold War. Stalin had every reason to play for time. Therefore the Americans had every reason not to.

    President Truman was a genuine democrat, and therefore anti-Stalinist at heart. His foreign policy advisers had already made a Mackinderian analysis of European politics in 1940, determining that Axis domination of Eurasia would jeopardize political and economic liberty in the United States. FDR foresaw the danger of tyranny in the United States in response to the pressures exerted by a Nazified Europe (Leffler 22). New Dealers understood that foreign policy had serious national security and regime implications (Leffler 24).

    It was simple enough to apply this basic insight to the prospect of a Europe dominated by ‘totalitarians’ or tyrants of the Left, now that the internationalist/imperialist Right had been crushed. George F. Kennan, the most influential strategist on the National Security Council, had a more complex, pluralistic view of the world than Mackinder, identifying several world military-industrial “power centers.” However, he saw that the Soviet Union was the only one of these hostile to the United States, so the conclusions he drew were similar to Mackinder’s (Gaddis 57). In 1945, U. S. officials did not worry much about an immediate Soviet threat, nor were they initially very concerned with Soviet ideology, supposing that they might be able to cut deals with Stalin. But by 1946, Clark Clifford and George Elsey did begin to see the political heft of Soviet ideology—an analysis Leffler decries as too stark, while in effect admitting that it nonetheless WAS the analysis these men made, and therefore influential (133). At least as pertinently, Americans feared Soviet trade and military agreements in Europe, which would issue in permanent political advantage to the Soviets—who, it should never be forgotten, were in Europe, with a permanent physical presence the United States (obviously) could not match. In Asia, American fears mirrored those of the Soviets—again with the added problem that America is not physically located in Asia, whereas the Soviet Union was. Americans feared Soviet consolidation of power in Manchuria, northern China, and Korea, which would have been similar to Japanese hegemony in East Asia in the 1930s (Leffler 124).

    In April 1945, Secretary of State Averill Harriman told Truman that the Soviets were ambitious but weak. The United States, he proposed, should take advantage of its financial superiority to stop further Soviet advances, starting with a threat to withdraw offers of financial aid if the soviet tried to dominate central Europe (Leffler 31). The Soviets proved more formidable opponents than Harriman supposed, refusing to be bought off. The Americans adopted a strategy of military containment (a true man of the State Department, Kennan wanted only diplomatic and political containment) coupled with efforts at political divide-and-conquer (Gaddis 70). they hoped to widen incipient divisions among Communist parties.

    Truman found a bipolar world rhetorically easier to explain and defend to the public than the more complex story of intersecting forces of ideas, nationality, economics, and political ambition. A variety of events helped him: the soviet detonation of an atomic bomb, which ended America’s short-lived reliance on nuclear weapons to ensure unquestioned military superiority; the Alger Hiss trial and other reports of Soviet espionage; the British financial crisis, which sobered any lingering expectations in London of an enduring empire; Communist moves in Asia, particularly in China and Korea. All these things focused public attention on the Soviet threat. The replacement of Kennan with Paul Nitze at the NSC sharpened the hawkish profile of the Administration. Even the American Communists (apart from Hiss) inadvertently made Truman’s case for him. Their earlier Popular Front strategy, viewed retrospectively, played into fears of infiltration and espionage. David Plotke observes that only some U. S. Communists actually engaged in subversion, and that this was not sufficient reason to punish the whole organization. This overlooks the impossibility of knowing that, at the time, and of knowing how well-placed Communists were. Moreover, with fears of Nazi ‘fifth columnists’ and slogans such as ‘Loose lips sink ships’ still fresh in the public memory, and ‘No more Pearl Harbors’ a phrase to conjure with, Plotke’s cool assessment was unlikely to gain traction, regardless of its accuracy or inaccuracy.

    The Marshall Plan to aid in the economic reconstruction of Europe appealed to European democratic socialists like Bevin of Great Britain, who wanted money to support his substantial domestic political agenda. NATO appealed to continental Europeans, who wanted a real, flesh-and-blood U. S. stake in European affairs, and needed strong, effective military support, lest their nations prefer to attempt some neutralist, ‘Third Way’ strategy. The Cold War, and the institutional supports that would lead to victory in it, were well in place.

    II. Cold War Domestic Effects

    The Cold War consolidated the New Deal in many ways. The strengthening of existing agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the establishment of a new cluster of ‘alphabet soup’ agencies—managing not only economic matters but foreign-policy, military, and national-security matters, as well—further concentrated political power and authority in Washington. Postwar America looks much more like a European state than even FDR’s America did.

    Federal budgets increased, and their proportions altered. A bureaucracy devoted almost exclusively to domestic issues was no longer possible, and various groups within the bureaucracy had to compete for tax revenues. So did domestic constituencies. The now-familiar fights between domestic-oriented interest groups and (often newly-created) military-oriented interest groups became institutionalized.

    The overall international economic strategy designed in part to fight the Soviets had immense domestic economic benefits. It is hard to suppose that the affluence of the next twenty years could have been possible without the release of pent-up European demand for American goods, and the means to pay for them provided by U. S. policy. Free trade enabled the United States to exploit its considerable postwar advantages: an intact and recently-expanded industrial base, a distribution network, a talent for advertising and publicity. These international economic policies might have occurred without the Cold War, but the Cold War made their implementation more urgent, and won support from interest groups that might otherwise have opposed or at least not supported them.

    Consumerism, which had enjoyed a brief heyday in the 1920s. returned with this new affluence. Critics on the Left suspected the passivity of citizens living with worries about nuclear war contributed to an atmosphere of hedonism and privacy—the reconstitution of the home. Whatever its cause, the ‘consumerist’ mindset would be jarred by occasional spasms of activism, later on. Either way, the interruption and trivialization of what had been normal self-government in America—the America of courthouse and town hall—that the Depression and the world war had allowed New Dealers to effect, now became regularized. Consumer comforts even became part of the American appeal, nationally and internationally, against communism; not only Nixon’s ‘Kitchen Debate’ with Khruschev highlighted this; more lastingly, powerful glimpses of affluence purveyed by Hollywood on television and in the movies, exported worldwide, took on a political dimension that they might have lacked in other circumstances (May 158).

    The Cold War also reinforced the old Progressive theme, the rule of the expert. The prestige of science and technology, enhanced by federal subsidies of science education, assured a steadier supply of ‘technocrats’ than America had seen before. The government also increased its investment in technology generally, with major domestic economic benefits resulting from ‘spinoffs’ from military research. There was a debate over whether such indirect investments in domestically-usable technology were actually cost-effective—it suffices to remember the name of Sidney Lens on the Left, and of a phalanx of libertarian economists—but the investments and the spinoffs did occur.

    Manning Marable argues that the Cold War delayed the civil rights struggle for about a decade by inducing the purge of Communists who had been key workers in civil rights organizations in the 1940s. The Communists were distrusted by middle-class black leaders for seeming to have “placed the Soviet Union’s survival above the battle for black equality” (Marable 20). The heavily polemical tone of Marable’s article raises suspicions, and one might reply, with equal polemical brio, that resistance to Soviet tyranny was indispensable to defending civil rights for anyone, of any race. Returning to settled fact, the Cold War didn’t delay the civil rights movement for long (if it did) and when it reappeared it could no longer plausibly be accused of serious communist ties, although of course that didn’t stop such accusations from being leveled.

    With the Cold War, foreign policy issues became for the first time consistent topics of political debate. Failure in managing a major Cold War issue had electoral consequences, as seen in the fictitious ‘missile gap’ of 1960 and, increasingly, the Vietnam War. McCarthyism had its day, raising issues of loyalty and legality that remained long after the junior senator from Wisconsin self-destructed with a well-timed push from Eisenhower. McCarthyism had a larger political significance; it was the first attack on the New Deal political order ‘from below.’ Although unsuccessful, it proved that such attacks were possible.

    Isolationism—of American from the world, of Americans from world issues—was defeated. A variant of Mackinderism triumphed, not least in the Republican Party, which, after initial hesitations, became at least as ‘internationalist’ as the Democrats, and, ultimately, with far greater political profit. The Republicans could never ‘outbid’ Democrats on domestic issues on the national level. But they could outbid them on military issues and, beginning with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, it began to do so consistently and with increasing success. This ‘global’ perspective of Mackinderism would have profound effects not only on military and diplomatic policies, and not only on domestic policy, but also as preparation for the ‘environmentalist’ movement, which takes up Mackinder’s globalism, most probably without knowing it, for very different purposes.

    The Cold War also contributed to one of the bitterest conflicts of the 1960s, the conflict engendered by the ‘New Left’ student movement. Combined with an ill-judged war on the Mackinderian periphery, conscription at first fulfilled Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of a more regimented population well adapted to industrial and corporate life. But by the latter half of the ‘Sixties, what C. Wright Mills called “liberal corporatism” spurred a rebellion whose effects have endured. The revolt against technology and bureaucracy, weakening the New Deal ethos itself, would have lost much of its urgency without the apocalyptic context of the Cold War. The Democratic Party’s political order alienated many of the sons and daughters of its progenitors. I am tempted to say that the students wanted to be good Whigs, but—having been educated by New Dealers—they didn’t quite know how. And although the anti-technological and anti-bureaucratic animus of the New Left has subsided with the end of the Cold War, the New-Left ideology has permeated much of the education system and probably has altered the course of technological and even bureaucratic efforts themselves. Before the New Left, the term ‘personal computer’ would have seemed self-contradictory, but along with portable telephones, on-demand entertainment delivery systems, and individualized services of all kinds, technology and bureaucracy have been made to seem, as the saying goes, ‘user-friendly.’

    The Cold War thus consolidated the New Deal state but to some degree undermined the New Deal political order. The Cold War raised the stakes in American political life. More lives were at stake, with the proliferation of nuclear weapons; more dollars were at stake, with ever-increasing federal budgets. Decades after the Cold War’s conclusion, Americans still seem not quite sure what to do without it.

    Aristotelian Physics

    by

    David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

     

    A much-ridiculed Victorian lady hoped that Darwin’s theory of evolution was untrue, or, if true, that would not become generally known. As a matter of principle our contemporaries assume that what is true ought always to be made known, that generally-known truth is an unmitigated good, at least in the long run. this assumption has had many consequences, some trivial (you and I probably know more about the British royal family than is entirely healthy), some good (we also know more about health), some catastrophic. In the last category I count false opinions disseminated as if they were true, Marxist dialectic and Nazi race theory being two conspicuous examples. The Victorian lady had a point. She may not have understood science, but she knew something about civilized society.

    In line with the Enlightenment project, we moderns have been taught to dismiss Aristotle’s physics as a teaching one or two steps beyond superstition. Can anyone today imagine that the moon is alive, or that the human species is eternal? Does anyone still suppose that the earth is the center of the universe, or that a moving body is trying to get to its ‘natural place’?

    David Bolotin agrees that these Aristotelian teachings are now risible on their face. But he denies that Aristotle believed them any more than we do. To follow Bolotin’s argument is not only to overcome one’s superficial impression of Aristotelian science but to reflect upon the character of science—’ancient’ and ‘modern’—in its uneasy relations with the political orders. If ‘science’ means knowledge, more specifically the knowledge of nature, then science does not easily fit into the City of God or the City of Man. If science doesn’t easily ‘fit in,’ if it is vulnerable to misuse and abuse, it needs a defense, an apologia. The Enlightenment exaltation of science was intended to make science invulnerable to attack by giving it some of the authority of the old religious establishments. In view of the attempts at ‘deconstructing’ science in the academy today, and in view of the dangers of the abuse of science and the popularity of pseudoscience, a more cautious stance might be in order.

    The defense science has received in the past three centuries has been in a sense far too effective. The rhetoric of Enlightenment tends toward religious fervor without religious consolation, the churchy sort of atheism on display in such unlovely personalities as H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell. When the quest for certitude pushes into scientific terrain—as it must, if science bears heavy public responsibility—the explorer takes on a pilgrim’s confidence about the destination. He is therefore quite likely to lose his way in a quest where the perplexities are the markers on the road map. Not only does excessive certitude infect science with unscientific dogmatism, it degrades the social and political forms within which any orderly inquiry must proceed.

    Aristotle approaches both nature and political life more cautiously than his critics do. For example, when he addresses the problem of how things come into being, he avoids the extreme of poetic accounts on the one hand and of reductionism on the other. To endorse the poetic account in its extreme form—that beings come out of nothing—would be to call into question the existence of nature itself as an object of sustained inquiry. Why study something that is radically contingent upon the many and conflicting wills of the Hesiodian gods? But to attribute beings to an atomized or otherwise inchoate natural substrate would be no improvement; chaotic matter is no better subject of knowledge than warring gods. Aristotle accordingly teaches that form and substance cohere, generating individual beings. He does not believe he knows how this generation occurs. If modern physics (for example) leads physicists back to a ‘Big Bang.’ they tacitly admit that the earliest act of coming-into-being destroyed the conditions of its own occurrence. The remaining evidence of the character of those conditions may well be compromised, indeterminate to scientists.

    In considering Zeno’s paradox—if any distance consists of infinitely divisible parts, how can any object traverse that distance?—Aristotle similarly demarcates a space for natural science between religion and mathematics, those twin spheres of certitude. The certitude of religiosity depends on revelation of divine thoughts and actions, which unassisted human reason cannot fathom; the certitude of mathematics depends on abstraction, which unassisted human reason fathoms readily but which the stuff of nature does not resemble. (Thus statistics, the set of modern mathematical techniques designed to describe empirical reality, is probabilistic not apodictic.) Aristotle insists on the foundation of natural science in the perception of individual beings. Neither the infinity of religion nor the infinities of geometric abstractions can account fully for natural objects ‘on their own terms’—as one natural being, man, looks at another. Zeno’s paradox conflates mathematics and science. So, in its own way, does modern political science, starting with Hobbes. A natural scientist need to live with an ‘infinity’ which is really synonymous with indeterminacy. Political men cannot be so relaxed, and so had better not be, or pretend to be, so scientific.

    With acute attention to textual detail—the empeiria of reading—Bolotin shows how Aristotle navigates what might be called a ‘second sailing’ for natural science. Unlike the first sailing, the inquiries of previous natural philosophers, this one can avoid the Scylla of political ire and the Charbydis of apolitical folly. Aristotle himself did not entirely avoid Scylla; he had to leave Athens at the right moment in order to avoid reliving the fate of Socrates. But his writings eventually became eminently respectable, in tandem with the biblical religions as understood by thinkers who knew how to think on two tracks. In Bolotin’s words, Aristotle “regarded the task of natural science to be articulation of the manifest character—understood as the true being—of the given world, a world whose ultimate roots he did not think that this science could ever discover.” Thoughtful religious people and prudent scientists alike should be able to live with that formulation, and for centuries many of them did. The symbiosis of religion and natural science may be fruitful; much that is important in modern science and mathematics has resulted in the study of change, a study that a Bible-centered civilization is more likely to care about than was ancient Greece or Rome. But the synthesis of religion and natural science has issued in impressive displays of evil and folly. Bolotin’s Aristotle help to keep the categories straight.

    De Gaulle’s Statesmanship Rightly Understood

    by

    Daniel J. Mahoney: De Gaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Democracy. Westport: Praeger, 1996.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 25, Number 2, Winter 1997. Republished with permission.

     

    Unlike so many things in political life, commercial republicanism delivers on its promises. Splendid but exhausting, the martial aristocracies and monarchies that dominated Europe into the nineteenth century finally collapsed into the arms of the people, who confidently asserted that they could do better. Locke, Montesquieu, and the other great republicans looked forward to a world in which commerce and representative government would stanch the flow of blood and treasure caused by rulers who would find quarrel in a straw, when honor’s at the stake.

    The republicans were right. Commercial republics don’t fight—amongst themselves. They have attracted the warlike attentions of those who mistake their peaceableness for weakness. As a result, two centuries are strewn with the wreckage of regimes that underestimated the productive/economic power that to some extent makes up for the unsteady military virtues of those republics.

    What theorists could not fully anticipate was the dissatisfaction commercial republics would generate among their own most ambitious citizens. For some human beings all the time, and for most some of the time, peace and prosperity do not suffice. What the ancient Greeks called thumos—the spirited part of the soul, the part that gets angry, makes us courageous or rash, faithful or blindly loyal—does not rest content in a commercial republican regime. Thumos wants not only liberty but heroism, conspicuous preferment instead of conspicuous consumption, the ways of the lion and the eagle. Thumotic souls pose a profound political and spiritual problem at any time, but never more than here and now, in our ’embourgeoisified’ modern times.

    No statesman understood this better than Charles de Gaulle. As a young military officer in the years between the world wars, de Gaulle saw thumos pushed to the point of madness in neighboring Germany, while deploring, at serious cost to his own career, the poor-spirited response of his countrymen, including a military elite rotted with complacency and cowardice. After the war, he opposed the shallow, bureaucratized internationalism of the new-republican, ‘Wilsonian’ United States and its Euro-sycophants. He faced down President Roosevelt, whose envisioned postwar order did not include any very independent Frenchmen. Throughout, de Gaulle proclaimed and embodied the virtues of political life and civil society—self-government—against the dehumanizing forces of technocracy and consumerism. National sovereignty conceived as patriotism, not reactive ‘nationalism,’ remained his political guide throughout; what looks like a Catholic-Christian Stoicism remained his moral compass.

    Daniel J. Mahoney’s scholarship allies itself with civic virtue in a world not conspicuously receptive to it. In his previous book, The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron, Mahoney displayed a rare ability to take ample, rich materials and concentrate them into their essence, saying thing at once helpful to the novice and illuminating to the specialist. He has now written the best first book to read on Charles de Gaulle’s political thought. Those fascinated by his account will want to go on to Jean Lacouture’s generous biography, Stanley Hoffmann’s Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s, André Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs and Felled Oaks (both published in ampler versions as parts of Les Temps du Limbes), perhaps to Jean Dutourd’s novel, The Springtime of Life. Above all, they will turn to the writings of the statesman himself, who wrote six books and several volumes of speeches.

    The man of character, de Gaulle teaches, is a born protector. Without abandoning his critical independence, Mahoney guards de Gaulle’s memory against a variety of cavils advanced in the spirit of smallness of soul: that he was a mystic or a Bonapartist, a crypto-fascist or a communist sympathizer, a Machiavellian, a Nietzschean, or a man of Weberian ‘charisma.’ None of the above, Mahoney firmly reminds us, but what can one expect from the denizens of an academic demi-culture who have forgotten Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man? Realist who know nothing of the realities, de Gaulle and Mahoney say of them, rightly.

    Mahoney emphasizes de Gaulle’s indebtedness to a real culture, a cultivation afforded by the France of de Gaulle’s youth, with its fruitful if acrimonious tensions among Roman Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and post-Enlightenment ‘German’ ideology. He had integrated the classical elements of French culture into his heart and mind: In retirement, de Gaulle came upon a grandson trying to read Cicero in the Latin. After glancing at the passage, de Gaulle raised his eyes and recited the passage from memory. Looking down at the astonished boy, he intoned, “You should read Livy. He is much more grand.“  Although the exact character of de Gaulle’s religious convictions remains obscure—as it had to, given his political intention to unite the French—Mahoney shows beyond dispute that de Gaulle understood France as part of the Europe that had been Christendom, and worth defending for the sake of the virtues Christendom cultivated. As Mahoney writes, de Gaulle combined a “Catholic recognition of moral boundaries and political limits and classical commitment to a life of honor.” “His was a moralized ambition“: De Gaulle himself uses the striking formulation, “the good prince,” who aims to re-found republicanism in the modern world.

    De Gaulle “wanted to keep democracy and greatness together,” Mahoney writes. No narrow democrat or egalitarian, de Gaulle saw what France lost when the Old Regime fell: moderation and the genuine courage moderation enforces. A century and a half of too much and too little ensued. This was true even in the two parliamentary republican regimes de Gaulle saw in the France of his lifetime, which favored too many play-acting talkers, too few real defenders of the country. In founding the more balanced regime of the Fifth Republic, with the strong executive the French needed, de Gaulle re-endowed French politics with stability, without sacrificing (Gaullists would say, by enhancing) genuine popular sovereignty. In aspiring to inculcate habits of civic participation in his countrymen, de Gaulle left them a legacy of resistance not only to the ‘hard’ tyrannies of fascism and communism, but to what Tocqueville had called the ‘soft despotism’ of bureaucracy and merely economic life, a legacy that might well be taken up by citizens who want to remain citizens and not subjects, in any country. At the same time, he firmly reminded the French that not everything is political, that political life, to be made worthy of participation, must subordinate itself to civilization and even to “a certain conception of man.” As Mahoney shows, that conception owes more to Charles Péguy than it does to Friedrich Nietzsche.

    “L’Europe des patries”: De Gaulle opposed European integration precisely upon the grounds of civilization and of human nature—which, to be truly itself, must take responsibility, must govern itself. Dante, Goethe, and Chateaubriand were good Europeans because they were Italian, German, and French. The real Europe is Latinity filtered through the vernaculars, the languages by which the peoples govern themselves. The Gaullist voice is largely absent from “the present European conversation,” Mahoney observes; “his partisanship for the greatness of Europe and a Europe of nations does not seriously inspire our contemporaries,” who too often associate nationalism with its racialist deformations of the last two centuries. “Nonetheless, de Gaulle himself, and his vision of a Europe of nations stand as permanent reminders of the political and even spiritual qualities without which any future Europe could only call itself impoverished.”

    Perhaps most significantly, de Gaulle’s life and writing show how a thumotic soul, the soul of a man or woman of character, might strengthen republicanism instead of subverting it, transcending the sterile adversarianism of modern elites, tending as they do to manipulation and tyranny, rule or ruin. Daniel Mahoney is a new kind of American scholar, one who views grandeur without malice, envy, or derision, one who can see de Gaulle.