Daniel J. Mahoney: The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. New York: Encounter Books, 2022.
Jon D. Schaff: Abraham Lincoln’s Statesmanship and the Limits of Democracy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019.
In every generation, people commonly deplore the paucity of it. But what is statesmanship? What exactly do people feel their politicians lack?
Daniel J. Mahoney and Jon D. Schaff take up this question. Although both books are historical studies, the authors intend to understand virtues that their readers can profitably think about, because such virtues remain possible today, and are, as always, much needed. In Schaff’s words, “the power of Lincoln’s thought is precisely its continued ability to speak across time to our present situation.” Mahoney ranges widely (one of his favorite words is “capacious”), writing chapters on Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel. Schaff attends to Lincoln alone; the only other politician to whom he devotes his attention is Lincoln’s successful rival in the 1858 Illinois U.S. Senate race, Stephen A. Douglas, who might be described as an extraordinarily gifted non-statesman. Mahoney’s interest in statesman-to-statesman comparison derives from his interest in greatness understood as magnanimity or greatness of soul. Perhaps because Schaff finds ‘greatness’ conceived unmagnanimously by Donald J. Trump entirely distasteful, he concentrates his attention on moderation and prudence, on self-government as the rule of reason in the individual soul and, sometimes, in what he calls “the soul of democracy”—its way of life and its ethos. Contemporary Americans very often define liberty in the way Aristotle identifies as typical of citizens in a democratic regime: ‘doing as one likes.’ Neither Aristotle nor Lincoln regarded that as an adequate definition. “The central argument of this book,” Schaff writes, “is that for free people remain free, they must live within limits,” limits finally imposed on them by themselves. Not easily done: that’s where statesmanship comes in.
Beyond moderation and prudence, Schaff identifies an intellectual or ‘theoretical’ virtue in Lincoln, one that provided him with a standard for political thought and action. “He seemed able to stand both inside and outside democracy at the same time,” understanding and explaining the principles of the Declaration, which reflect human nature as such, while offering “friendly critiques of democracy’s excesses,” the excesses of the regime that aims at securing unalienable natural rights but has the potential for “democratic despotism.” To show this, Schaff accounts for the well-worked ground of Lincoln’s critique of slavery (and of abolitionists) prior to the Civil War and his justification of making war in defense of the Union, but he also calls particular attention to the neglected area of Lincoln’s domestic policies: the protective tariff, the Homestead Act, the National Bank Act, among others. He considers not only Lincoln’s virtues but his policies to “provide lessons to our contemporary readers seeing to find solutions to the stresses put on our political system through such phenomena as the globalization of economics and the rise of a presidency-centered government.” We need to think more seriously about virtue, natural right, and policy because “we cannot assume the continuation of that democracy [Lincoln] sought so nobly to advance”—an assumption Lincoln himself rejected as a young man in his Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum at Springfield, Illinois.
Schaff begins his definition of statesmanship with what one might describe as a ‘Heideggerian’ move. “The idea of statesmanship can be explained via the concept of time.” His point is (thankfully) quite un-Heideggerian, however: whereas the ancients conceived of time cyclically and the moderns have often conceived it linearly, even as an onward-and-upward progression, time in fact “partakes of both of these characteristics, both continuity and change,” fitting the image neither of circle nor line but of spiral. A spiral is a continuous line; in terms of morality and politics, over time we return “to certain fundamentals, enduring ideas, practices, or self-conceptions.” Yet, as Aristotle famously insists, we do so “in the light of new circumstances.” Since “certain foundational ideas or principles recur across time” under new conditions, “a statesman is needed to interpret these foundations anew” or more precisely to adapt them to those practices which are possible under those conditions. “In Lincoln’s case, he needed to explain natural rights, the rule of law, and the role of the presidency to a new generation of Americans whose vision of the founding ideas of the nation was already dimming.” This needs doing because democratic citizens incline to push aside natural rights and constitutionalism in order to be ‘free,’ in order to get what they want. Lincoln aimed at persuading his fellow citizens to live within the limits of the “rule of law, natural rights, powers of government, political economy, and presidential power” as granted by the Constitution—a “political gospel of limitations” animated by “humble expectations” respecting “democratic politics.”
With Aristotle, Schaff understands politics as architectonic, a means of reinforcing certain human characteristics and weakening others. Lincoln would inflect “democracy’s soul,” the character of the average American, the moral atmosphere the nation breathes by exemplifying “the political virtues of prudence and moderation,” by upholding the natural rights citizens would secure through their political institutions, and also by upholding the natural rights those citizens would secure by the form of political economy that best conduces to genuine liberty.
“Two central political ideals that govern the statesman are prudence and moderation, but our contemporary political discourse tends to denigrate or misunderstand these two grand principles,” mistaking pragmatism and even opportunism for prudence mistaking political centrism, splitting the difference between two political parties, as moderation. Aristotle offers a superior definition of prudence: “practical wisdom is right reasoning about good ends.” As for moderation, it consists in intentionally limiting one’s passions and appetites, disciplining their excesses while avoiding their starvation. In politics, this means the recognition and rejection of demagoguery, of speech that either inflames the desires or leaves citizens cringing in fear; it also means recognizing and rejecting ideology, systems of thought that mischaracterize philosophy in the way best stated (and in the end exemplified) by Marx, not as a passion of the head, the erotic longing of the mind for knowledge, but as the head of a passion. The ideological “quest for an unsullied politics is at the heart of the fallacy ‘Voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.’ It is not. It is voting to mitigate an evil, which is good.”
In his Temperance Society Address, for example, “Lincoln warns against the temptation toward denouncing our political opponents as merely evil,” in the “tendency of ideologues,” assuming that we “have nothing to learn from those who disagree” and therefore “dismiss[ing] them with a fair hearing.” The Address “sets out many themes that would dominate his antislavery rhetoric in the 1850s”: the total eradication of the consumption of alcoholic beverages is impossible; “those who do not drink are not morally superior to those who do,” as “abstinence is not usually a sign of virtue but an absence of appetite”; and finally, “before changing the laws the statesman must change public opinion.” Abolitionists of alcohol resembled abolitionists of slavery, inclined to break a law they detested rather than working to change it, and instead imprudently attempting to overleap public opinion instead of persuading fellow citizens—that is, rather than treating them as fellow citizens. Not only immoderate and indeed violent actions, in the manner of a Carrie Nation or a John Brown, but “fiery denunciations,” immoderate speech fails to convince opponents that you “mean them well.” “In this way moderation is the handmaiden to prudence for democratic statesmen. By recognizing the legitimate claims of all, they open more ears to their message, making their own success more likely.”
Regarding slavery, then, moderation “does not necessarily mean a middle ground between abolitionists and the ‘positive good’ school of slavery that had taken hold in the South.” Lincolnian, statesmanlike, moderation “took into account he many competing goods in the American democratic order, of which the natural equality of man is only one.” For example, in the 1844 presidential election an abolitionist third party, the Liberty Party, likely won votes that otherwise would have gone to Henry Clay instead of proslavery James Polk, who promptly supported the admission of Texas to the Union as a slave state. The moderate position consistent with natural right was rather to contain slavery, leaving it alone where it exists but preventing its spread to the territories that will become new states. This policy, he argued, would lead Southerners eventually to discard slavery in order to compete with the more prosperous, genuinely republican, states which recognized the moral and economic benefit of freeing all men to contribute to American prosperity by having them work for themselves, not for a master. “This would allow for the end of slavery without violence and within the confines of Southern constitutional rights.” In a republic, “what is the use of advocating something that not only cannot succeed”—in this case, the immediate abolition of slavery—but “will alienate the majority of one’s constituency”—a prospect no serious republican politician will entertain, given the foundation of the regime not only on the natural rights to life and liberty but to the consent of the governed that those rights imply.
While esteeming moderation in politics, one must take care not to confuse it with the fake moderation propounded by Senator Douglas. Douglas decried Lincoln’s claim that a house divided cannot stand, that the United States could not remain united if half-slave, half-free. He claimed that it could be so maintained if residents in the Western territories settled the matter by a vote, on the basis of popular sovereignty. Lincoln reminded Illinois voters in the 1858 election that popular sovereignty can only be just if the people rule in accordance with the natural rights that their sovereignty aims at securing. “While rhetorically supporting self-government, Douglas was undermining true self-government by declaring himself indifferent as to whether an entire class of men and women could legitimately be bound into slavery.” For Lincoln, slavery could finally be abolished but only if the Union were preserved “as the surest way to bring about the end of slavery.” One might add that the Confederates agreed, which is why they rebelled.
In so arguing, Lincoln did not place himself “above reproach”—and would not, holding as another instance of human equality that no human being is above reproach—but “perceived correctly the competing claims regarding the goal of ending slavery” while making “a good faith effort to adjudicate among those claims.” Had an abolitionist like his future Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase won the presidency, the border states would have left the Union, empowering Confederacy to succeed, frustrating the abolitionist cause once again. In “balanc[ing] legitimate claims”—as, for example, the right of slaves to liberty and the right of the families of slaveholders to rest secure in their lives on their land—the statesman moderates passions on both sides, whether they are self-righteous moral indignation or excessive fear. And in terms of the rule of law, the Constitution did indeed give protection to slavery, but the rule of law itself cannot survive half-obeyed and half-disobeyed. To change the law in the direction of justice in a republican regime, “government must rule by the people’s consent,” eschewing today’s tactic of “crude denunciation.” “Lincoln’s example has never been more essential.”
Moving from the statesmanlike virtues to the principles those virtues should embody and defend, Schaff turns to Lincoln’s defense of natural rights, which he “intended to shape public opinion and rededicate the American people to the proposition of natural rights expounded in the Declaration of Independence.” The Declaration respects consent, respects regimes of popular sovereignty, but uphold “a standard outside of majority rule,” limiting majority rule by that standard. “Lincoln’s advocacy of natural rights was part of a conscious attempt to shape the opinion of the people in the direction of limiting their own rule.” In this, once again Douglas was his most formidable opponent. Schaff explains that Douglas wanted the main east-west rail line to run through Illinois. That was no fault in a man elected to represent Illinois. However, to accomplish this the Northwest Territories would need to be admitted to the Union, territories in which slavery had been prohibited by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. By invoking what he called “the great principle” of popular sovereignty unconstrained by natural right regarding slavery in the territories, he tacitly disposed of natural right in favor of economic prosperity. He did, Schaff concedes have one thing right: Lincoln’s policy of keeping slavery out of the territories could, and in the event did, lead to secession and war. His approach, Douglas contended, would save the Union by keeping the decision on slavery local, not national. In this sense, Douglas in effect argued that “the only equality that mattered was the equality of states,” which is indeed a feature of the constitutional design of the national government. But this didn’t make Douglas the moderate on the speaking platform, the upholder of unqualified popular sovereignty as the middle ground between abolitionism and slaveholding. It made him merely a centrist, a split-the-difference man who jettisoned the moral principle that recognized his own rights as a man. Laws designed by popular sovereignty without regard to human nature and its unalienable rights could be overturned quite readily by the Supreme Court in its infamous Dred Scott decision, which already had denied that a black man had any rights a white man needed to respect—a claim that confuses skin color with human nature.
Lincoln instead held that Douglas’s version of popular sovereignty “taught a dangerous indifference toward natural rights by failing to treat slavery as a wrong,” a tyrannical form of rule that had no right to be extended into territories where it did not exist. In making this argument, he invoked not only the arguments of the Founders, particularly the logical syllogism of the Declaration of Independence, a declaration of the rule of reason against tyranny, but also the authority of the Founders, the veneration for them still felt by Americans. Obviously, today’s efforts to cause Americans to despise the Founders aims at destroying the heartfelt admiration for them that animateded previous generations, while appeals to passion (and not only or even mainly by Mr. Trump and his supporters) erode the practice of deliberation, of practical reasoning in our political life. In advocating unconstrained popular sovereignty, Douglas seemed to believe that original sin had skipped Americans,” who needed no statesmanship because they “needed no improvement.” He would replace monarchic despotic rule, ‘I am the law,’ with the democratic despotic principle, ‘We are the law.’ And without even the pretense of divine right to cover his tracks. “This is the rule of the mob, a majority that confuses justice with whatever the majority wills.”
Political rhetoric, however well-considered and eloquent, cannot gain consent from an unreceptive people. To perpetuate American political institutions and to secure the natural rights of American citizens, Lincoln advanced civic and scientific education. Aside from their rights, another distinctively human characteristic is the capacity to improve the techniques by which he shapes natural objects in order to preserve and enhance human lives. As Schaff writes, beavers “fell trees the same way they have always done, but humans “invent new and better ways of cutting down trees.” Human inventiveness, rightly applied, “enhances human freedom by making man more efficient in his labor,” spending less time making a living and more time living well. This also means that (as Aristotle suggests) slaves could be replaced by machines. But the observation, reflection, and experiment required for discovery require education. “Further, his ability to analyze problems and argument and to cultivate his higher mind and morals makes an educated man more fit for self-government.” Slaveholders kept their slaves illiterate and were none too scrupulous about ensuring public education for poor whites, either. Scientific and civic education must remain together, neither the property of ‘the few.’ Not only can the few rule, aping the habits of the European aristocracy, over a slave plantation, but in subsequent decades a new oligarchy would arise, “mating technology with advanced bureaucracy,” a condition Tocqueville calls as “soft despotism” and what Schaff describes as “the systematic abuse of human dignity in the name of progress.” On the contrary, “all progress must be consistent with the dignity of the human person, as that is a good superior to the goods of comfort and ease.”
In sum, “a Lincolnian approach to rights would take into account prudence and moderation in addition to the appeals to abstract ideas,” discerning “where rights are less applicable or when the application of rights-theory would lead to obvious absurdities,” such as claiming that one has the right to enslave another, prostitute oneself, or addle one’s mind with drugs. Personal dignity and the common good count for something, too, and indeed provide the framework for identifying and understanding rights. Rights limit the authority of government to tell me what to do, but rights are rightly to be defined, limited by the nature of a human being. “When rights-talk is used to argue for autonomy without limit” it is a sure sign that a country lacks “statesmen to teach the people the limits of the limit of natural rights.”
The third pillar of Lincoln’s political architectonics, a set of activities in which virtues and natural-rights principles come together, consists of political economy under a government that gives scope to agricultural, commercial, and industrial activity. For this, Americans need neither the “minimalist state” of the libertarians nor the regulatory state of the Progressives but “a strong and active but limited government.” Lincoln derived his core political-economic policies from Alexander Hamilton, the early advocate of commercial republicanism, import tariffs, public finance, and a vigorous executive. (It has been said that Franklin Roosevelt and the New Dealers pursued Jeffersonian ends—equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—with Hamiltonian means, although Hamilton in fact preferred constitutional means, as the Supreme Court vainly attempted to maintain in the mid-1930s. It is rather than Hamilton pursued those same Jeffersonian ends by Hamiltonian means.)
Henry Clay and his Whig Party carried Hamilton’s policy into the middle of the next century, calling them collectively “The American System.” As the Framers of the Constitution had intended, so the Whigs intended to “link together the large republic,” increasingly threatened by the dispute over slavery, “through economic ties”—the blood that coursed through the veins of Mr. Madison’s anti-Leviathanian “extended republic.” For this, not only a national bank and a protective tariff but also internal improvements (as we now say, infrastructure) would link farmers to industrial workers and the rising urban middle class, moderating the class-hatred factionalism seen in modern states and, indeed, in political communities of any size and antiquity. Lincoln was no agrarian, unlike the Jeffersonians of the past and the Bryanites of the future. He had done legal work for railroads and endorsed the full Whig program, helping to carry it into the new Republican Party.
He also, and surprisingly, when one looks at his non-war policies, practiced the Whig approach to the president’s relations with Congress. Well known for his vigorous prosecution of the Civil War, which “necessitated extreme actions by the chief executive that would normally be unconstitutional,” Lincoln let the legislative branch take the lead on, well, legislation. “Innovative and nationalistic proposals such as the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railroad Act, the Legal Tender Act, and the National Bank Act were enacted by [the Thirty Seventh] Congress and were in perfect harmony with Lincoln’s Hamiltonian and Whig roots.” Congress could enact these laws because Southern agrarians had chosen to stay at home and attempt secession instead of reporting to Congress and voting. Schaff rightly observes that Lincoln’s approach to domestic policy as president belies the claim of many Progressives, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt (during his post-presidential career), Herbert Croley, and such lesser lights as Mario Cuomo and George McGovern, who claim him as their distinguished predecessor. “The main differences between Lincoln and the Progressive concern a belief in the power of centralized government, advocacy of a strong presidency, and a rejection of the founders’ basic political science as inadequate for modern times”—to say nothing of the Progressives’ replacement of natural rights with rights derived from allegedly ever-progressing ‘History.’ Centralized government, yes: but limited by the Constitution. A strong presidency, yes, but primarily in exercising war powers. In view of political science, has the Progressives’ main institutional innovation, the administrative state, improved the security of Americans’ lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? Woodrow Wilson’s “living constitution,” ever evolving away from the limiting, balanced constitution of the Framers, attractive only insofar as he could reject (as he did) “the natural rights foundation of the republic” as “abstract, sentimental, and rationalistic, rather than practical,” more French than American, has undermined the democratic character of the society it purports to enhance by establishing a ‘new class’ of bureaucratic oligarchs, directly wielding both economic and governmental power at the same time.
Unlike Progressive presidents, and even their ‘conservative’ counterparts, Lincoln never pretended that the diverse interests of Americans could find “representation in one man” who styled himself as their ‘leader’ on the ‘cutting edge of History.’ He made no domestic policy statements before his inauguration, “simply referring interrogators to the Republican platform,” and took no public positions on such policy after his inauguration, either. He instituted no permanent bureaucracies and fomented no ‘wars’ on poverty, disease, or drugs—that is, the extension of executive war powers to domestic ills. Would such an approach meet the challenges American face today?
This question brings Schaff to what he calls a “provocative in the best sense” suggestion, that Lincoln evidently neither a libertarian in our contemporary sense nor a socialist in any sense, might have proved sympathetic to the political economy of Distributism, as enunciated in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 tract, Rerum Novarum, and seen in the United States with the initiation of the Catholic Land Movement. Both Lincoln’s notion of free labor and “the distributist vision” combine economic and political theory in a manner that opposes the moral anarchy and oligarchy of undiluted capitalism as well as the oligarchic violation of property rights of socialism. Schaff thus finds “a surprising congruence” between Lincoln and the Pope. As he explains it, Distributism counters the separation of labor from ownership and formal ownership of corporations by stockholders who in fact wield little or no power over corporate policies with an economy of small farms and workshops along with joint ownership of large corporations by “workers of hand and brain.” Under the principle of subsidiarity, whereby self-government begins with families and local associations, and solidarity or the common good, the improvement of the bodies, souls, and property of each citizen, Distributism decentralizes both economic and political life.
How does this compare with what we know about Lincoln’s understanding of political economy? Lincoln’s economic thought was influenced by not only by Hamilton but by contemporary economic theorists Francis Wayland and Henry C. Carey, who asserted the superiority of free labor over slave labor, the “right to rise” in prosperity over the condition of a hireling or (as Marx memorably put it, a ‘wage slave’), and the direction of citizens who do work for wages towards self-employment in small farms and shops they own—a “bulwark against despotism.” It must be said that the last plank in that platform looks more like the economic notions behind Jeffersonian democracy than those underlying Hamiltonian federalism. Lincoln also followed Wayland and Carey in espousing the labor theory of value, maintaining that nature provides only a small percentage of the humanly usable value of any product, with human beings supplying the much larger balance; this theory was first formulated by John Locke (and later abused by Marx); all three men derive their economic thought from a rather un-Catholic thinker. Schaff sees this latter point, noting that the Distributists were explicitly Christian in a way Lincoln was not, and less Lockean-‘individualist,’ too. Still, in arguing for a political economy by saying that “material well-being is good, but not as good as being independent of crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings,” Lincoln and the Distributists concurred. On the question of statesmanlike prudence, however, one might wonder if Lincoln had lived on past 1865, he would have aligned himself with a Catholic social movement. In those years, Catholicism wasn’t as controversial as slavery had been, but it was a largely Protestant country.
Schaff’s argument on Distributism occupies the center of his book. From there, he turns to a more detailed consideration of Lincoln’s more strictly political policies: the claim that he effected a “Second American Revolution,” the genesis of the realignment of American politics from the failure of the Whigs to the longstanding success of the Republicans, and his continued fidelity to the Constitutional prerogatives of Congress.
Schaff argues that contrary to Progressive and indeed Marxist historians like the Beards and many ‘conservative,’ especially Southern ‘Redeemer’ historians alike, Lincoln’s presidency precipitated no revolution in America. After all, the Republican Party took its name from the kind of regime the Founders established, a regime of popular sovereignty under the moral limitation of natural rights and the political limitation of separation of powers, among others. And it organized itself first locally, then nationally, not under the ‘leadership’ of one or a few partisan heroes. Lincoln himself didn’t join the party until 1856, two years after its founding.
The Republicans’ antecedents, the Whigs, themselves organized in opposition to the administration of Andrew Jackson, whom they styled “King Andrew” for what they took to be his overbearing use of executive power—for example, his role in dismantling the second iteration of the national bank and his populist rhetoric. The Whigs soon collided with the rock of slavery, however. Frustrated by the party’s weak stance on that issue, Salmon Chase organized the Free-Soil Party in the late 1840s, which took over the Northwest Territory doctrine of no slavery in the territories. “A free West settled by small farmers would promote the respectability of labor so undermined by the quasi-aristocratic plantation system of the South.” The Compromise of 1850, with its strengthened fugitive slave provisions and its repeal of the Missouri Compromise, put the Free-Soilers on the road to extinction, just as the Kansas-Nebraska Act would prove the beginning of the end of the Whig Party, a few years later. The Democratic Party, controlled by the Southern oligarchs, controlled the regnant American party, but their triumph proved Pyrrhic, as Douglas’s popular sovereignty energized Northern Democrats who wanted to bury the slavery issue without vindicating slavery and the Republican Party organized as a force dedicated to defending the principles of the American regime as the Founders had designed it.
For their part, Republicans saw that opposition to slavery wouldn’t suffice as a campaign issue after the defeat of their first presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, in 1856. They adopted the Whigs’ American system program, which proved timely when the country suffered a recession the following year. When the Democrats opposed homesteading, they lost votes in West, but had the endorsed it they would have lost votes in the South, where the oligarchs wanted assurances that the new territories would admit slaves.
With secession, Republicans had a free hand in implementing their platform. President Lincoln did exert some influence on Congress, ‘jawboning’ members at the White House and writing letters, but for the most part kept hands off. Congress members wrote and introduced the laws, with the Lincoln administration providing information but exerting no real pressure. Lincoln did delegate Treasury Secretary Chase to work with Congress on the Legal Tender and National Bank acts, deploying him much as Washington had done with Hamilton. The difference between Lincoln’s approach and that of Progressive presidents was that Lincoln never spoke publicly about any of the domestic measures he supported. His many speeches concerned secession, the war, and slavery insofar as it could be abolished as a means of winning the war. Nothing could be further from the Wilsonian practice of serving as the nation’s ‘opinion leader.’ Being a natural-rights man, not a progressive-historicist imagining himself on the cutting edge of ‘History,’ Lincoln had no reason to suppose that he needed to overstep his Constitutional duties as the executor, not the framer, of laws. “It is fair to say that Lincoln’s participation and actions in the legislative process were few and judicious,” and he established no substantial White House staff that could have “regularized the president’s legislative and political operations,” as things stand now. He was, in short, “a Whig in the White House,” depending not on an administrative state but on party members to implement his policies.
The party system had its faults, “such as corruption,” but it also “advanced certain goods.” To win elections (and thereby government jobs for their loyalists), party bosses needed to form broad coalitions. These were easily disrupted when a group within the party perceived a threat to some fundamental interest, as seen in the fissures within the Democratic Party in the 1850s, resulting in the electoral debacle of 1860. “A coalition-based system” thus “encouraged moderation,” not only in campaigning but in governing, since the same people who organized and won the election campaign often went into the new government. Following the excellent scholarship of James W. Ceaser, Schall remarks that the candidate-centered political campaigns of today put a premium on raising money from interest groups and on spectacular appeals drawing attention to themselves and to the alleged perfidy of their opponents. When such politicians govern, the show never stops, leading to the atmosphere of perpetual crisis and rhetorical sensationalism we now see. “Lincoln shows us a better way.”
“Lincoln was not a revolutionary statesman of any sort,” but rather a defender of the founding, a true moderate, who ruled by law except in those instances when the supreme law of the land itself, the Constitution, would have been threatened by over-scrupulous adherence to one of its provisions—the famous example being the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in a capital city with a large population of quislings, one of whom eventually murdered him. In non-war matters, he respected Constitutional limits on presidential power. “There is nothing here that could not be defended by the typical American founder.”
“Lincoln’s defense of natural rights and the rule of law and his respect for public opinion showed the profound recognition that to be an advocate of democracy, one must be a moderate advocate.” Democracy untethered from natural rights and the rule of law become majority tyranny; untethered from public opinion, it becomes despotism. “Democracy is only good as long as it serves to protect natural rights.” That is, the statesmanlike virtues of moderation and prudence must be combined with a sound theory of justice. A democratic statesman can do no less.
Daniel J. Mahoney understands statesmanship as a form of human excellence encompassing the classical virtues of moderation, prudence, justice, and courage, but also greatness rightly understood as greatness of soul, magnanimity, and often a touch of genuine philosophizing. Maintaining continuity with Schall’s fine study, I shall begin with Mahoney’s understanding of Lincoln’s statesmanship, then work backward to and forward from that chapter to give an account of the book as a whole.
Democracy or popular sovereignty inclines citizens to “impatience and ingratitude in the best of circumstances,” Mahoney begins, but today’s “highly ideologized climate marked by collective self-loathing and an unremitting desire to repudiate the inheritance of the past, ingratitude becomes inseparable from a vulgar and destructive nihilism.” No matter that George Washington fought bravely in two wars, leading Americans to victory in their war for independence; no matter that he presided over the Constitutional Convention with dignity and skill; no matter that he eschewed any hint of the military dictatorship that King George III cynically expected him to establish, throughout “subordinat[ing] narrow personal ambition to an austere sense of public duty and reptation well earned.” He was a slaveholder—to be sure, a slaveholder who freed his slaves in his Last Will and Testament, setting an example which, if followed by his fellow plantation grandees, would have ended slavery in the United States before a civil war could have been fought over it. Never mind: “The fact that he owned slaves must negate everything else,” according to our contemporaries. This “tyrannical ‘presentism’…drives out both patriotic attachment and a capacity for measured judgment and admiration” in souls burning with “a moralistic rage that owes little or nothing to authentic moral and political judgment.”
Abraham Lincoln, who “would complete the founders’ work by saving a union dedicated to the great proposition of liberty and equality ‘under God,’ defeating a Confederate rebellion dedicated to the indefinite perpetuation of chattel slavery, freeing the slaves, and pointing toward ‘a new birth of freedom,'” nonetheless now comes under polemical fire for allegedly racist remarks he made during his debates with Senator Douglas, remarks which were in fact anything but racist if read with care and in context. Mahoney sees through such nonsense, calling Lincoln “the greatest of our presidents and surely the most philosophically minded,” a statesman who “knew human nature and human right, its limits and possibilities,” thereby becoming “the greatest American defender of natural right and of the requirements of mutual accountability and responsibility of free men under both the political and moral law.” In so doing, he removed any doubt (which should never have arisen in the first place, given the example of Washington) that natural right entails moral duty, that even the elemental right of self-preservation doesn’t obviate “one’s obligation to respect the rights of others.” If, as Aristotle maintains, politics means reciprocity, ruling and being ruled in turn, that political reciprocity requires the moral reciprocity between right and duty.
In this, Lincoln corrected or perhaps clarified the account of natural rights seen in Locke and in the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. At least as he it is usually interpreted, ‘Lockean liberalism’ puts rights first, making duties ancillary to them. It may be argued that Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education exhibits a sufficient degree of Stoicism to call that claim into question, but however one resolves the matter it is the ‘individualist’ dimension of Locke that impresses most readers today and, as Mahoney notes, Locke’s Second Treatise on Government does uphold a right and duty to self-preservation above one’s duty to his “station” in life—which might be guard duty at a military encampment. Jefferson, too, defended slavery, which he loathed, on the grounds of self-preservation, famously explaining that slaveholders “have the wolf by the ears” and dare not let go of their mastership lest freed slaves kill them. On the other hand, Jefferson’s Declaration ends with the signatories pledging to each other of their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor—a decidedly un-‘Lockean’ thought, indeed.
Be this as it may, Lincoln rebalanced any tendency toward simplistic ‘rights-talk’ while rejecting Caesarism. In this, Mahoney sees a comparison to Cicero, the “philosopher-statesman and great-souled man who opposed despotism “in the twilight years of the Roman Republic.” More, Lincoln succeeded in defending his republic.
No less than Schaff, Mahoney finds “prudence at the service of principle…to be the quintessence of morality applicable to the political common good,” and finds Lincoln exemplary in that regard. Without a “due respect to public opinion,” “there could be no movement toward ‘a new birth of freedom,’ only moral posturing and impotent rage” as seen in Abolitionists and slaveholder apologists alike. And the new birth of freedom, freedom for the slaves, accompanied both the preservation of the Union, “one nation,” and the firm acknowledgment of the providential God whose citizens governed themselves “under God.” The young Lincoln began as an atheist, a rationalist, and a fatalist. The mature Lincoln felt the gratitude democrats too often carelessly forget. The young Lincoln knew his own genius, relying on it to carry him ahead; the mature Lincoln saw more than his own, and even more than his nation’s efforts in the vindication of natural right for all Americans which the cataclysmic war, self-sacrificial war had made possible.
Accordingly, with his Second Inaugural Address “Lincoln reached the heights” of “philosophical-minded statesmanship.” “In it, poetry and theology meet philosophy and the highest tasks of statesmanship geared to civic reconciliation without forgetting or eschewing the requirements of natural and divine justice.” If both sides in the Civil War “prayed to the same God and read the same Bible,” shall the victors judge the losers harshly after the war is over? The slaveholders were wrong, and God’s Providence went against them, but now is the time not to judge, lest the victors (some of whom had profited from slavery without owning slaves themselves) render themselves incapable of reconciliation, necessary to preserve the Union and the republican regime dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, for which the war had been fought. “Judge not that we are not judged,” the Biblical judgment that Lincoln quotes in the Second Inaugural, remains in his mind, as it was in the minds of the first Christians, utterly foreign to the “moral relativism or the moral indifference that today goes by the name of ‘nonjudgmentalism.'” “If Lincoln had survived Booth’s assassination attempt, he would have promoted Reconstruction”—regime change in the oligarchic Southern states—with “the same mixture of principle and refined and morally serious practical wisdom that guided his struggle against efforts to extend slavery to new states and territories.”
Was Lincoln, then, a Christian? “Not in any simple sense, perhaps, but certainly in a sublime philosophical sense that is unthinkable without Christianity.” His statesmanship defended not only a political union but a union of “principle and prudence in a manner worthy of classical wisdom,” of Cicero, “while allowing God’s mysterious Providence to guide him in the inner struggles that afflicted his soul”—his “sublime, anguished but charitable soul”— “drawing on the ennobling resources of both reason and revelation.”
Can Americans now “still be trusted to hold on to” the principles Lincoln vindicated and the Union he saved? “Not if we ignore the wisdom of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers who inspired him. The choice is up to us in a union gravely divided once more.”
In Mahoney, we see an understanding of statesmanship, and of Lincoln’s statesmanship, that shares Schaff’s insight into the moral and political necessity of prudence, moderation, justice, and courage. Schaff presents far more of what Lincoln actually did, what policies he pursued in order to secure the Union as a true commercial republic. Mahoney points more to the capstone of classical virtue, magnanimity, and to the spiritual dimension of statesmanship in a democratic but also largely Christian nation—Christianity being, as Tocqueville saw, the mustard seed of modern democratic society. What accounts for Mahoney’s emphasis? He explains his intention in the introduction to his book.
“There is virtue in the gaze of a great man.” So Chateaubriand writes, recalling his dinner with Washington at Mount Vernon. What does he mean?
A great man likely knows himself to be your superior in mind and heart. Yet, being genuinely great, he does not look askance at you, down on you, or with the air of an entomologist studying a beetle. He looks at you as an equal, not in mind or heart but in your personhood, in your rights, in your humanity. He seeks to govern with you, not over you or against you, because his soul is always greater than the authority he wields. His soul is the real basis of his authority, and you can see that in his eyes.
So unlike Napoleon. André Malraux described him as a great mind but a small soul. As Mahoney puts it, “Bonapartre revealed the false allure of greatness shorn of the cardinal virtues” of courage, moderation, prudence, and justice, “first discerned by the ancients and further developed by Christian thought,” virtues that form “the core of genuine political greatness.” The statesmen he studies here exhibit a “rare combination of magnanimity and moderation,” good judgment, and a firm commitment to the good of their political communities.
The American Founders, “inspired by the accounts of political nobility” seen in the works of Cicero and Plutarch, prudently understood, in Madison’s words, that “wise statesmen will not always be at the helm.” Accordingly, they designed “political institutions where ‘power checked power,’ institutions that would make political greatness less necessary if not superfluous.” With the flourishing of democratic or egalitarian minds and hearts within that institutional framework, Americans over time began to succumb to a “doctrinaire egalitarianism or relativism that many today confuse with democracy,” falling into the habit of liking instead of admiring, captious sneering instead of stern judgment. In their fallacious egalitarianism, they misunderstand politics by thinking of it in such subpolitical categories as ‘power’ or ‘race, class, and gender’—categories that prevent them from understanding politics as a distinctly human activity, an exercise in deliberation rather than mere assertion and dominance. “One cannot promote justice on the ‘willful’ premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) premises” because “if one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man,” the negation of “our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.”
With such an unsteady foundation (which includes going so far as to deny that it, or anything else, has any foundation at all), Machiavellian political philosophy and social science “veer incoherently between false realism and an idealism that acknowledges no constraints on the power of the human will to remake human nature and society.” At one moment, we hear calls for ‘transhumanism,’ at another we see the treatment of human beings as if they were beasts—aborting them, manipulating them, murdering them en masse. Aristotle described the person who lived outside the political community as either a god or a beast; to so conceive persons who live inside the political community is to destroy that community.
“What is needed is a return to true realism, to a moral conception of politics that is fully realistic but that also acknowledges that the good, the search for legitimate authority or even the best regime, the exercise of the practical virtues…are as real as, and certainly more ennobling than, the reckless and groundless pursuit of power as an end in itself.” One of Machiavelli’s most eminent philosophic enemies, Cicero still provides in his “thoughts and deeds much ballast or a morally serious and authentically realistic political science that avoids the twin temptations of dogmatism and cynicism.” This needn’t mean “a return to classical politics per se,” which would lead us on a quixotic quest for the dissolution of modern states and the reconstitution of poleis. What we can retrieve from ‘the ancients’ is that “judicious mix of realism and moral aspiration” the classical philosophers commended, exemplified by the statesman. Such men can and have existed in the modern world of large and centralized states, and Mahoney offers six examples: Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Vaclav Havel.
As philosopher and statesman, “Cicero despised the Epicureans, whose reduction of the good to the pleasant encouraged an abdication of moral and political responsibility on the part of the one, the few, and the many”—the components of any political regime—leaving “no reason to be brave or courageous or to make sacrifices for one’s country.” Cicero opposed not only the rule of the appetites in the human soul but also the rule of the spirited, thumotic part, standing instead for civilian rule in Rome, a country that valorized military prowess a bit too much for its own good. “His standard was ‘honestum‘—the fine, the noble, the honorable—at the service of civilized liberty.”
Although “half-classical modern democratic statesmen” such as de Gaulle and Churchill (half-classical because their minds and hearts were decisively inflected by Christian civilization, as well) “embodied important aspects of this Ciceronian ideal,” even as they “lived in an era strikingly different from Cicero’s, an era in which the technological achievement of modern science made new, all-encompassing tyrannies and worldwide wars possible,” while at the same time softening democratic souls with “creature comforts,” making pacifism in the face of such tyrants “a much more powerful temptation” than it had ever been. In the world of our time, “the Ciceronian statesman must spend as much time warning against pacifist illusions as in reminding warrior republics of the ultimate superiority of the urbane virtues to military courage.”
Although Machiavelli charges Christianity, not the modernity he in crucial ways inaugurated, with the folly of pacifism, and even Churchill mistakenly concurred, “there is no evidence that the Prince of Peace espoused pacifism in politics or was providing anything other than the demanding requirements of discipleship form a radically perfectionist or eschatological point of view.” There are indeed “enduring and abiding tensions between classical honor” and “Christian ethics understood as beneficent mercy and at times great forbearance in the face of evil,” but Churchill’s own “mixture of fidelity, forbearance, goodwill, classical honor, and moral realism” proved that the great-souled man need not lack ‘Christian’ virtue, as seen (it should be noted) in the writings of Seneca, who writes not only of magnanimity and the rule of reason over anger but also of mercy and the doing of favors, the human equivalent of grace. For his part, in his De Officiis Cicero “spiritualiz[es] magnanimity,” pointing to “humility and restraint much more than self-assertion or precipitous adventures” as characteristic of the great-souled man.
In forming their understanding of politics, Aristotle and Cicero studied the character and actions of a real statesman, Solon, that mediator between the claims of ‘the few’ and those of ‘the many’—a “just and honorable mediator between the enduring political distinctions,” a task that mimics in politics the moral task of finding the virtuous mean between the vicious extremes in the human soul. “Like Solon, Cicero defended the inviolability of private property against rapacious oligarchs, thieving tyrants, and men of ‘unbalanced soul,'” to use one of Solon’s turns of phrase. This was no defense of oligarchy as a regime, as Cicero himself was a ‘new man’ who had advanced in Roman politics on the strength of his own virtues. Nor was it a denigration of Rome’s “industrious and law-abiding plebeians.” It was an attempt to secure what Aristotle had called the ‘mixed regime,’ a regime designed so that the few who are rich and the many who are poor must cooperate by deliberating together, by ruling and being ruled in turns, identifying the public good as consisting of laws and actions that benefited both ‘sides’ and the political community as a whole. In this, statesmanlike greatness of soul works for political moderation, even as men like Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte despise moderation as mediocrity, a thing beneath their ‘Machiavellian’ virtù.
For a careful examination of what greatness consists of, Mahoney turns first not to his statesmen but to political philosopher Robert K. Faulkner’s 2007 study, The Case for Greatness. Faulkner contrasts Lincoln’s ambition to preserve his country, winning the just esteem of his fellow citizens, with the imperial ambition that fired the souls of Cyrus the Great and Napoleon—the first limited to the defense of justice, the second unlimited and despotic. This serves as an introduction to a careful analysis of Aristotle’s account of the magnanimous man, which the philosopher intends to be read not in isolation but with his account of justice, the common good, the rule of law, patriotism, public spiritedness, and his balanced, ‘mixed’ regime. In Faulkner’s view, “Aristotle moderates the autarchy or self-sufficiency of the great-souled man by tying his greatness to the common good of a fee and civilized polity and to a deeper thoughtfulness about the ends and purposes of human life,” whereby the moral virtue of magnanimity takes its bearings from “the self-knowledge made possible by philosophical reflection.”
Mahoney isn’t quite buying it. Faulkner “goes too far in simply identifying the great-souled man with the public-spirited gentleman-statesman.” The great-souled man isn’t so easy to ‘domesticate’; his insistence on self-sufficiency rests uneasily with Aristotle’s understanding of man as a ‘political animal.’ Such statesmen as Washington, Lincoln, and Churchill filter the coruscant light of magnanimity through the Christian-democratic lens of “common humanity,” along with “Cicero’s republican appropriation of a qualified Stoicism” (a politically aware Stoicism), and “the modern doctrine of the rights of man.” Given these refinements of Aristotle’s portrait, Mahoney prefers to think of a tradition of magnanimity which these later statesmen refined in the circumstances of their own countries and times. “This tradition moderated magnanimity while acknowledging its just and elevating claims.” With that, he turns to the statesmen themselves, beginning with Burke.
In Burke, Mahoney finds prudence, but a noble prudence, aristocratic in the best sense and enlightened by the theoretical wisdom of political philosophy. Mahoney disputes two influential interpretations of Burke: the conservative-romantic picture of a traditionalist denouncer of political rationalism and the Straussian presentation of Burke as the founder of philosophic historicism, a predecessor of Hegel.
Burke was neither the “enemy of human reason” nor an early proponent of historicist rationalism. As he watched the French Revolution careen toward self-destruction on a field of blood, he saw that “any ideological project to remake society de novo” as “the triumph of madness,” of unreason masquerading as enlightened vindication of the rights of man. The French revolutionary conception of rights altogether severed itself from prudential-political reason. Hence Burke’s preference for “the great primeval contract of eternal society,” the centuries old partnership in science, art, and virtue that has actually happened, and may continue, if men are not beguiled by the myth of some original ‘social contract.’ Even in its own devastating civil wars of the 17th century, English liberty survived, uniting conservation of what Western civilization had discovered and built with necessary and well-considered reforms. The French should have followed this example, as the Old Regime deserved reform, not the kind of radical revolution attempted by the revolutionaries, with their “politicized atheism” ginning up what Burke calls a secularized “bigotry of their own.” The Jacobins not only committed regicide, they gloried in it, holding up the bloodied, severed heads of the royal family to jeering crowds. They denied property rights to aristocrats if not to themselves; they even practiced cannibalism, all in an effort to eradicate the religious dimension of French society while retaining the fanaticism of the worst Christians. “The enemy of Britain and the civilized world was not historic France but an ‘armed doctrine’ that had conquered and warred on the France that was an integral part of European and Christian civilization.”
As such, Burke was no moral, cultural, or historical relativist. He adhered to the natural law doctrine, which had been incorporated into the Western tradition but was not itself merely a matter of tradition, if tradition is to be equated with convention. He well-known esteem for prudence or practical wisdom with theoretical wisdom, inasmuch as (in a vintage Mahoneyan aphorism) “prudence needs principle as much as principle needs prudence.” Political reason remains, well, rational. And “tradition is indispensable to political reason precisely because it is a powerful vehicle for passing on the inherited or tried-and-true wisdom of the human race,” not some “‘mystical’ or irrational substitute” either for theoretical or practical reason. Burke is a critic of an all-encompassing political rationalism but never of political reason within its legitimate sphere.”
This makes Burke “the first and greatest critic of the ’emancipation of the will’ from natural and divine superintendence,” the confusion of consent with mere assent. The emancipation of the will can lead to anarchy, including the anarcho-capitalism of radical libertarians, or to an especially lethal form of tyranny, as seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s glorification of Hitler, aptly titled The Triumph of the Will—a catastrophic and short-lived triumph, as it turned out. Despite their ritualistic denunciations of ‘fascism,’ too many self-styled social democrats today assert individual and collective autonomy, willfulness concealed as egalitarianism, “a conceit that enslaves human beings under the pretext of making them gods.”
With their reductionist misunderstanding of human nature, anticipating later reductionisms which came to deny human nature altogether, Burke remained “above all a partisan” of what he called “the unbought grace of life,” life that has never been purchased with either money or political power. Put to the test in practice, Enlightenment rationalism “was not so reasonable after all,” forgetting the moral limits human nature defines for itself precisely by being a nature distinct from the natures of other natural kinds and from nature as a whole, even as it forms part of nature as a whole and limited by it.
Burke thus “remains very much our contemporary,” so long as we understand that he stood in circumstances quite different from our own. He lived in a Europe in transition “from the old regime to the world of modern liberty,” from the rule of titled aristocrats to the rule of the people, democracy. We live in a world in which that transition has been fully effected. Yet the political prudence Burke lauds and once embodied remain indispensable in this new world.
Tocqueville understands the Burkean regime of noble prudence while accepting the circumstances of his own France in his own century, where democracy had triumphed. Identifying equality as the democratic principle, liberty as the aristocratic principle, he argued for “liberty with a modicum of greatness” under democratic conditions. “It is beyond the ability of nations today to prevent conditions from becoming equal,” he wrote, “but it is within their power to decide whether equality will lead them into servitude or liberty, enlightenment or barbarism, prosperity or misery.” To accomplish this, statesmen will need to cut “any remaining links between democracy, rightly understood, and the revolutionary spirit of destruction and negation.”
Thus, during the revolution of 1848 Tocqueville worked “to defend a lawful republic,” the Second Republic, “against both the radical let and the Bonapartist right.” Bonapartism had already failed: Why would its reprise end any differently? As for the socialists, they shared the materialism of their ‘capitalist’ enemies, while intending to deploy the powers of the modern state, much enhanced, to place the French on “a new road to servitude.” A few years later, these efforts, considered calmly, brought him to distinguish the imprudence and injustice of the First Republic, reprised by the socialists of ’48, from the fundamental decency of the Second, which he took to be an attempt to re-enact the moderate early phase of the First, the phase of Lafayette and the still-reasonable republicans who took their principles from Montesquieu, not Rousseau.
Although Tocqueville himself found himself tormented by doubt, having abandoned his Catholic faith at the age of sixteen and becoming a sort of Pascalian without the Bible, “he remained a broadly theistic thinker who repeatedly expressed confidence in the existence and providence of God,” a Being whose will transcends the human will. Beneath that wise and good Being, human beings can reason politically, “more or less content with what he called ‘probabilistic truths,'” truths that deny the overconfident assertion of historical ‘laws’ seen in “various forms of historical and racial determinism.” By their fruits we can know such doctrines, witnessing “their deeply pernicious effects on liberty and the human soul.” As a student of Solzhenitsyn as well as of Tocqueville, Mahoney well knows that in the century after Tocqueville wrote those effects would multiply themselves far beyond anything Tocqueville anticipated. It was anguish enough that the Revolution of 1848 set back his hopes for “moderate regulated liberty disciplined by faith, moeurs, and laws” by “another generation or two,” that is, after the disappearance of, first, the “bourgeois king,” Louis-Philippe, and the Bonapartist Napoleon III. The Third Republic allied with Britain and the United States to defeat the military oligarchy of Kaiser Germany, in the process putting itself on the short slope to disaster in 1940, but in the meantime it had revived something of the political spirit that neither the ‘bourgeois’ principle of enrichissez vous nor the stifling of that spirit under a new Napoleon (who exhibited all of his ‘great’ ancestor’s smallness of soul but none of his military genius) could, or would, encourage.
He saw the best hope for republican liberty under democratic social conditions in the American regime, although he worried about the expansion of slavery in the 1850s, dying the year before the election of Abraham Lincoln. Like Lincoln, he longed for a new birth of freedom, not only in the American republic but someday, somehow, in Europe. Indeed, as Mahoney has designed his book, Lincoln’s statesmanship in many respects concluded the conflict and the dialogue between aristocrats and democrats which Burke and Tocqueville had considered with such care.
In the next century, however, all too many regimes not only failed to orient themselves toward Lincoln’s example of statesmanship and the American Founder’s understanding of natural right as the foundation of republicanism, instead abandoning themselves to the hard tyranny of ‘proletarian socialism’ and ‘national socialism.’ Even the republics seduced themselves with historicist dreams, putting themselves at risk for the “soft despotism” Tocqueville had warned against. In the second half of his book, Mahoney shows how Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel successfully resisted the hard tyrannies without being able much to slow the new oligarchs of the administrative state.
Given the use of terror as an instrument of rule by the modern tyrannies, Churchill fully displayed what Solzhenitsyn calls “the courage to see,” to identify such tyrannies for what they are, as the indispensable virtue preparatory to resisting them and vindicating genuinely political regimes, the natural rights of human beings, and indeed the Western civilization such tyrannies assaulted. “Among twentieth-century statesmen, only de Gaulle shared this admirable lucidity and the determination to resist the inhuman totalitarian temptation on the intellectual, military, political, and spiritual fronts.” [1] Churchill and de Gaulle “still cared for the West as the West, a civilization worth preserving because it alone fully valorized the dignity of human beings who are souls as well as bodies, persons imbued with dignity and not playthings of ideological despotisms that in decisive respects were ‘beyond good and evil.'” Churchill’s defense of the West included a critique of the political Islam he encountered in Sudan in the 1890s, chronicled in the greatest of his early books, The River War. Fanaticism, fatalism, sensualism, and the abuse of women have “affected almost every Islamic land,” even as individual Muslims show courage and loyalty in battle—at times, in those days, as soldiers in the British Empire.
Churchill’s religious convictions resembled Lincoln’s. He began as an atheist, although he was never an “open scoffer” at religion, as Lincoln described his younger self. Neither did he become an orthodox Christian, even broadly defined. Like Lincoln, he came to sense a “Higher Power” or providential force at work in his life, “protecting him from death and injury.” His magnanimity, “a quintessentially and initially pagan virtue, was always accompanied by a sense of mercy, chivalry, duty, fair play, and concern for the ‘humble masses’ in their ‘cottage homes’ that took the hardest edges off of classical pride.” By 1932, in Thoughts and Adventures, he could praise Moses and the Israelites he led as having “grasped and proclaimed the idea of which all the genius of Greece ad all the power of Rome were incapable,” that “there was to be only one God, a universal God, a God of nations, a just God, a God who would punish in another world a wicked man dying rich and prosperous, a God from whose service the good of the humble and weak and the poor was inseparable”—a God, moreover, who saw in each human soul His own image, therefore commanding that each one treat all others with “a modicum of respect, charity, and decency.” “Not even classical paganism at its best—say, Aristotle, Cicero, and the Stoics—could claim that. [2] Such Christian virtues made modern liberty, liberty easily overborne by the modern state, possible. Churchill’s soul, with “its admirable mix of magnanimity and moderation…is unthinkable without the Christianity that Churchill could never bring himself to reject.”
While admiring Churchill, Mahoney considers de Gaulle “perhaps the most impressive statesman-thinker of the twentieth century.” His thought is surely studied less than it should be. [3] From his favorite poet, Charles Péguy, de Gaulle “learned a generous patriotism that tried to bring together the best of France before and after 1789.” With Péguy, he esteemed the warrior-saint Joan of Arc, “who loved God and France with almost equal fervor.” France was worthy of love, having a vocation (in the Christian sense) “to bring liberty, civilization, and enlightenment to humanity.” Although superficial observers, including Franklin Roosevelt, suspected de Gaulle of harboring tyrannical ambitions, he detested the tyrannies of both ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’ Raymond Aron, a man not given to praise, called de Gaulle “an authentically great man,” unlike the tyrant-adventurer, Bonaparte, the risible Boulanger, and the senile Philippe Pétain of the 1940s. Like Washington, General de Gaulle remained a faithful defender of civilian and republican rule. [4]
De Gaulle reconciled his Christian faith with his own vocation, that of the soldier and statesman, because he “believed that the Christian, too, was called to the path of chivalry and personal and political honor,” as indeed the non-Christian Churchill did. More deeply, he found in his younger daughter, Anne, who was afflicted with Down Syndrome, a blessing and a joy—a joy (as Mahoney puts it so beautifully) “in his suffering and in the love it brought forth for Anne.” For her part, whenever Anne became frustrated and upset, if de Gaulle entered the room and sat beside her, she would find stillness, again. She knew her protector was with her.
As de Gaulle wrote, the “the man of character is a born protector,” a “good prince” (this, with a glance at Machiavelli’s prince, who has learned “not to be good”). Like Aristotle’s magnanimous man, the man of character “eschews revenge,” although de Gaulle’s magnanimity extends to “salutary action for the common good” as a means of overcoming vengeful impulse. To this moral virtue de Gaulle added the self-knowledge commended by Socrates: “Rarely has a statesman been so self-conscious about his own nature and motives and about the nature of the political whole (and the human world) in which he operates.” He understood the tension between Christianity and the classical moral political virtues, and perhaps some of the modern vices, likely by consulting his own soul, by the means of his self-knowledge, admitting that “every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.” One will not find “evangelical perfection” in the statesman, he observed. As Mahoney puts it, “de Gaulle “was not bereft of Machiavellian virtù.” He unhesitatingly abandoned the Algerian Harkis, Muslims who had fought with the French against their fellow Muslims in the 1954-62 war of independence when he decided to jettison the colony, which he now judged more trouble than it was worth. [5] But “unlike Aristotle’s magnanimous man, de Gaulle had a gift for seeing greatness in others,” recognizing Churchill and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as his peers among statesmen, and saying of André Malraux’s writings: “Clouds, clouds. But every now and then, a lightning flash.” His friendship with Adenauer (who was granted the unique privilege, for a foreign leader, of dining in de Gaulle’s home in the village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises) served the noble and indispensable political purpose of symbolizing the reconciliation of republican France and republican West Germany, only a bit more than a decade after the liberation of Paris from the Nazis.
Mahoney doesn’t overlook de Gaulle’s errors of judgment. He imagined that Ho Chi Minh, and dedicated Communist, was only a nationalist and more, that Soviet Communism really amounted to an attempt to assert Russian greatness. That is, he inclined somewhat towards taking nationalism as the universal and perennial underlying cause of international poltics. While he correctly anticipated that “Europe would outlast a Communist ideology so at odds with human nature and the wellsprings of European civilization,” he badly misjudged the timing of Bolshevism’s demise, going so far to write to a startled and bemused Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, “Come, let us make Europe together.” His efforts to pry the Communist ideologues who ruled Poland, Hungary, and Romania from the Soviet empire met with no better success. “This was wishful thinking on de Gaulle’s part,” and wishful thinking doesn’t cut it in a statesman. In such prudential matters, Churchill seems to have been wiser, even if Churchill willingly made deals with Stalin, a tyrant whose crimes far surpassed those of the mediocrities in 1960s Eastern Europe.
Despite such lapses, de Gaulle stands as a moral and political eminence of the first rank. So much so that even Henry Kissinger thought of himself as his inferior.
With Czech dissident, then president, Václav Havel, Mahoney completes his set of statesmanly portraits. He cannot be said to surpass Lincoln, who occupies the final place in Mahoney’s first set of three, and Mahoney immediately shows why. Havel “seems to have at least partly bought into the radically ‘individualist’ ethos of the 1960s, at least as regards ‘personal’ morality, “prone” as he was to depression, self-medication, and sexual promiscuity. Although “an intensely spiritual man,” his convictions leaned toward New Age ideology. Despite all that, Havel did think that “everything we do is remembered,” ontologically registered, recorded by “Being”—a thought likely borrowed from the fashionable Existentialism he learned as a student. This “provided cosmic grounds or support for moral responsibility,” carrying him through Czechoslovakia’s Communist years with courage and honor. He never succumbed to the “subjectivism and relativism” which deformed the generation of the 1960s.
Similarly, while worrying that “modern technological civilization did not have the moral resources to sustain itself and undergo a crisis,” lending himself for measured support for radical environmentalists and other ‘counterculture’ activists, he drew the line on the European peace movement, then intent on unilateral nuclear disarmament. While testing the boundaries of common sense, he never stepped to far over the line, “distrust[ing] Russia” and praising “civic activism” as a counterforce to statist bureaucracy, rather in the manner of Tocqueville. He, too, was a political man, one who considered “Being” as a force that “grounds, delimits, animates and directs” life on earth, very much including political life. “To revolt against its requirements and demands, its limits and obligations, is to succumb to arrogance and hubris and inevitably has ‘cruel consequences,'” as seen of course in the Communist regimes. Such “ideological despotism” finally must bow to the authority of the conscience that attends to the order of the cosmos—a Stoic thought from a not-unfailingly Stoic man. In all, as a moralist-statesman without illusion, Havel “exemplifies those intellectual and spiritual qualities integral to human freedom and dignity.”
Mahoney concludes with some thoughts on political conditions today. “We have come face to face with a new logocracy,” that is, “a tyranny founded on the manipulation of language and the forced imposition of ideological clichés with little or no connection to anything real or enduring.” Unlike Schaff, he finds some virtue in that “very imperfect man,” Donald Trump, a patriot who opposed “the culture of repudiation” even as he “lacked the self-discipline, the rhetorical precision, the self-control, and the liberal learning to be a true statesman.” Faults and all, he stood above his enemies, who deploy “a new Manichean racialism,” flirtation with neo-Marxist socialism, and the absurd claim that human beings can will their own ‘gender identity’ into an inane amalgam of clowning and malice—all at a time when China, Russia, Iran, and even North Korea openly threaten the country with destruction.
“Let us return to the heights,” Mahoney writes, not a moment too soon. (“No complications there,” de Gaulle once said.) “Cicero was indisputably right that magnanimity tempered by moderation—noble statesmanship informed by liberal learning, applied political philosophy, and high prudence—is among the best ways of life available to human beings,” along with the lives of philosophic inquiry and religious fidelity. “The choice is ours.”
Note
- Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher of course confronted Soviet communism, but they were too young to have attained office in time to oppose the Axis Powers. One exception to Mahoney’s claim is Harry Truman.
- Perhaps not quite so. See Seneca’s essay, “On Clemency.”
- For the best survey of de Gaulle’s thought, see Daniel J. Mahoney: XXXX
- As Mahoney sees: “Perhaps only Washington rivals him for the austerity, the seeming inaccessibility, of he man behind the public persona,” sharing with de Gaulle “a stoicism, a recititude, that is all too rare in a democratic age,” even if Washington did keep better control of his temper, in good Stoic fashion. For my own part, I read all of de Gaulle’s published writings before reading more than a few of Washington’s. When I came to study Washington’s collected works, some years later, my first impression was “This man is just like de Gaulle.”
- It is noteworthy that de Gaulle’s Christianity comes to light almost exclusively in his private life. His books and speeches bear hardly a trace of it, beyond recognition of Christianity as a central element of French and European civilization. Part of this reticence may be due to de Gaulle’s understanding of the longstanding, sharp divide between Christians and secularists in France, the country he wanted to unite. It may be for this reason that he refused to exacerbate old factions.
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