Ali A. Allawi: T.: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Originally published in the Claremont Review of Books. Fall 2009.

 

Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people?”—or an army, the general added. What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are knowable “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux observed, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle replied, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by “Mao” (meaning some combination of Chinese nationalism and communism) and “to some degree” by “Nasser” (that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism). De Gaulle offered a correction. “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, when the two men conversed, would not shift the new current or guide it. But Islam—dismissed, disparaged religiosity—might do so. As an army officer, de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “have not made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the undercurrent even then?

Ali A. Allawi sees the direct the now-surfaced current has taken. In The Crisis of Islamic Civilization he wants to understand how and why “the spirit of Islam” has declined and whether it might be revived. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed the tyrant Saddam Hussein, Allawi found not liberation there but sectarian murder and corruption. After serving as minister of defense and minister of finance in the new governments, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, he wants to understand how and why the current passes—specifically with respect to the decline of he takes to be the genuine “spirit of Islam”—and how that decline might be reversed. He attends to Islam as a set of religious beliefs and as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility, wondering whether “a modern society, with all its complexities, institutions and tensions” can “be built on the vision of the divine.”

In the decades since de Gaulle and Malraux spoke, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called ‘political’ Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abul A’ala Maududi to being the lifeblood of real regimes and real revolutionary movements. By ‘political’ Allawi means the kind of rule Machiavelli’s prince practices: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity for the benefit of the prince. But according to Allawi, Islamic civilization—that sense of balance, of proportion, “between the individual and the collective” and “between this-worldliness and other-worldliness”—has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.”

For Muslims, the modern West lacks genuine civilization, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success. Much of the modern East, with Japan in the lead, now pursues such success, too—albeit corporately, not individualistically. West and East alike conjure the impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces of markets and technologies, and succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?”) Allawi argues that the followers of Allah underestimate the modern West, assuming that they have little or nothing to learn from the adherents to imperfect religions. One may nonetheless think that Muslims correctly judge the atheist currents of the new Western irreligion, consonant with Machiavellianism, for being against the ummah, the body of believers. In particular, Western modernity substitutes Machiavelli’s invention, the centralized and acquisitive modern state, for the tribes and loosely confederated empires of Muhammad’s day, for the ummah, and for the European feudal societies that the armies of the ummah so often conquered.

In response to Western moral relativism and politique statism, Muslims pray but they also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states…claim, one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists that Islam is the only religion that might go beyond a mere critique of modernity to reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing modernity’s benefits, most notably the discovery of modern science. But he does not go so far as to deem this likely.

Allawi describes how Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad, “nearly always…coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”—and, it might be added, rule by Muslims over non-Muslims. The believers held that the Islamic world flourished according to divine right and with divine aid, morally and politically. With respect to morality, the Koran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts to individual souls, who cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, as reflected in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consisted of several elements. The first was empire, but of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort. Governmental functions included the administration of sharia law and military defense as well as “expansion and conquest.” Kingship was the characteristic Muslim regime, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key” to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, although the project was undertaken most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. “Political” Islam arose even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Abd al-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of modernism and Islamism—to which Allawi adds Western imperialism—”by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural and psychological unity of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam—both severed from the faith’s spiritual roots—more or less guaranteed Muslims’ political weakness from then until now.

Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed both secularism and the non-spiritual, legalistic, and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam” and a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”; Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld a civil-associational strategy against statism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabi, who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms, as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

Israel’s stunning victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes behind those armies. The enrichment of the Saudis, and thereby of the Wahhabis, in the 1970s, along with the 1979 Iranian revolution brought political Islam to power in core Islamic states. Allawi argues that this was too little, too late. Scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Koran, had lost much of its original meaning, as many words took on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. (For example, in modern Arabic deen means religion; in Koranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life —the regime—of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity.) The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions—secularism, historicism—far removed from Islam learning. As for the madrassas, insofar as they teach political Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined,” legal-literalist Islam. This is the Islam of the Wahhabists and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connection with the classical schools of law,” which had been “moderate, restrained and subtle in their decisions,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding,” Allawi writes. “All its vitality, originality and appositeness fades away, turning it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

Allawi defends a version of Islam that accommodates the variety of Islamic sects as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the 11th-century theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who made arguments similar to those of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the theological-political question required no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully, but rather an acknowledgment o a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike. Within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shia Muslims to hold high offices under the (Sunni) Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabists and Salafists. “The closing of the Islamic mind,” he avers, “at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

He suggests that if Muslims had glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance, they might have followed a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the maturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islam’s civilization by European powers.” Absent this imperialism, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” “its own version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” He finds a basis for Islamic self-government in “a short but decisive Quranic verse [Koran 42:38]”: “[The Muslims’] communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to the “entire community; in effect, across the entire adult population,” not merely tribal elders or adult males. In this he might be said to register two other Tocquevillian themes, those of social democratization and political republicanism.

Would such a “civilized” politics include non-Muslims in the ruling body? Allawi does not say if “accommodation” means shared rule. He inclines to brush aside non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of westerners.” But in places like Southeast Asia, he asserts, Muslim conquests were mostly not conquests at all but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” And dhimmitude—the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes—was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

This description of peaceable, accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring if it were more believable. From its beginning, Islam came to sight as a fighting faith. It combined the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always been imperial in its ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible; but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it a great deal less.

Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so, but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve such a strategy as a temporary measure, would he deem ‘live and let live’ a godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural law which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern human rights derive from Western convention or “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”—a violation of Islamic law, which permits conversion to Islam but never from Islam. This means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is—negotiable, a stance impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, and not easy to reconcile with either the Hebrew or the Christian Bible.

Allawi assures his readers that Islam is the only major religion that rules no major state—or “core state,” to use Samuel Huntington’s term—and therefore harbors no new empire. Perhaps so, but hasn’t that made terrorism all the more attractive to radical Islamists? Neither the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, nor the attempted attack on the White House could make America collapse, but they were to say the least vigorous attempts in that direction, and part of a larger war of attrition against the United States and, in principle, all regimes radical Islamists anathematize—a fair number, as it happens. Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, but the two do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts. He doesn’t help his case by insisting that “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself.”

These criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well. He strikes me as a successor to the sober, moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to ‘privatize’ religion, to reduce its authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively ‘privatized’ himself within the ummah? Can his  form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home—except in exile? Is he finally, despite his longings, most nearly at home in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jews, and Quaker so long as they “demean themselves as good citizens”?

Michael Mann: Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 42, Number 3, May/June 2006.

 

As an antidote to that most ‘Machiavellian’ of Machiavelli’s inventions, the State, early liberals and their Marxist enemies alike looked to civil society. Resistance to statist tyranny can come—will come—’from below,’ whether in the form of markets, as in Adam Smith, civil associations, as in Tocqueville, or a triumphant working class, as in Marx. But what if the elements in civil society turn deliberately uncivil, scorning peaceful economic competition, local self-government, and working-class solidarity for the stern virtues (and vices) of paramilitary nationalism? The social egalitarianism undergirding the modern state might then yield a new, self-made aristocracy, crueler yet than the industrial elites Tocqueville feared. And further, what might cause modern life to take such a turn?

Before publishing this book, political sociologist Michael Mann already stood apart from most of his peers as a scholar of statism. His monumental study The Sources of Social Power offers a comparative account of political societies ancient and modern, replacing simplistic ‘base-superstructure’ models of sociopolitical causation with what might be visualized as a quintuple helix: the consideration of economic, military, political, and ideational institutions and movements, along with statesmanship or ‘leadership’ as independent variables which, taken together, bring political communities to liberty or tyranny. Although Mann’s acceptance of ‘power’ as his analytical touchstone tends to elide qualitative distinctions—the characteristic blind spot of the modern social scientist–the subtlety of his understanding of power proves highly instructive, despite this self-inflicted professional deformation.

The Sources had one other deficiency. Mann wrote too much of it in that most unfortunate of dialects, sociologese. I am delighted to report that Fascists exhibits few traces of such lingo; this time, Mann writes sturdy English, jargon-free.

He begins by saying what fascism was, and who the fascists were. To the characteristic nation-statism of modern political thought fascism added a paramilitarism aimed not merely at seizing control of the modern state and defending the nation but at the purification of the nation. “Fascism saw itself as a crusade. Fascists did not view evil as a universal tendency of human nature. Fascists, like some Marxists, believed that evil was embedded in particular social institutions and so could be shed. The nation was perfectible if organic and cleansed,” and thus unified, fraternal.

In principle and practice fascists despised peacefulness, moderation, and the commercial way of life. Marxism and marxisante critics nonetheless tax them with that adjective of maximum insult, ‘bourgeois.’ Not so, Mann remarks: Fascism “drew support from all classes,” as befits an ideology that “ultimately confounds material interest theories.”

This does not imply that fascism arose in no particular social context, however. The period between the world wars, with its economic depression and its rapid political and social democratization saw the prolongation of the crisis of authority for existing aristocratic and haute-bourgeois classes. “They overreacted, reaching for the gun too abruptly, too early,” reaching ‘down’ for military support among armed factions in civil society—that is, to generations of young men whose teachers had taught the superiority of progress over tradition. A general “crisis of liberalism’—first war, then depression—might have caused fascism to engulf all of Europe, but Italy, Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Romania were the ones that succumbed. Why?

In those countries, modern or democratized liberalism had not established itself before modern or democratic nationalism did. Aristocrats could ‘manage’ the transition from old to new regime on the basis of liberalism—as they did in Britain, Tocqueville’s model. Aristocrats could and did become captains of industry, in alliance with commercial middle classes. After the militarizing and state-building debacle of the Great War, followed by the advance of democracy in the war’s aftermath, commercial republicanism endured in places where constitutionalism had been established before 1900 and where that constitutionalism had more or less de-politicized religion (whether Catholicism or Protestantism).

Such regimes flourished in northwestern Europe. In the Latin/Mediterranean and Slavic/Central and Central European region (except Czechoslovakia), political liberalism had enjoyed no such stable establishment before the war. This geographic division of regimes cut through Germany, where Prussia had come to dominate the liberal southwest and the free-trade port cities of the north; it also cut through France, where eventually the Vichy regime enjoyed much support in the south and the Resistance centered in the north. Social egalitarianism could become paramilitary in these illiberal settings. It became so to such an extent as to form the social basis for founding new regimes after defeat in war discredited the milder authoritarianism of the pre-war regimes. In Germany, divided ideationally among liberalism, socialism, and authoritarianism, it took the additional shock of economic depression to tip things over.

To recur to Tocqueville’s terms, then, social democratization before and after the Great War was a universal feature of modernity; in Europe, the Great War and the Great Depression were also universal. The difference between a commercial-republican outcome and a fascist outcome derived from the success or failure of the institutional dimension of Tocquevillian political science—particularly the establishment of some parliamentary control over militaries and the settlement of church-state questions. In Mann’s words, “Institutionalized liberal states successfully rode out the crisis.”

Just as many ‘mainline’ Christian churches in the northwest wedded themselves to democratizing ideologies of ‘progress,’ churches in southern, eastern, and central Europe attempted “not to reject modernism but to resacralize it”—only theirs was a progressivism that scorned democracy. Not only churches, but military academies, universities, and high schools circulated extreme nationalist and paramilitary convictions in illiberal regimes before and after the Great War. Wilsonian efforts to liberalize such sentiments found themselves overmatched. (One might add that Wilsonianism itself, a mild species of progressivism that had abandoned the natural-rights constitutionalism of the American Founders, might have difficulty in principle when answering progressivisms of the ‘Left’ and ‘Right.’)

The handful of fascist states precludes any thoroughgoing comparative analysis; Mann hence turns to case studies, beginning with Italy. Refusing to claim that he understands fascists better than they understood themselves, he wisely lets their writings tell him what they were about.

A unique coalescence of nationalism and working-class politics made Italian fascism possible. In a way, Garibaldi had done his work too well. Italian nationalists shared working-class hostility to the Italian state, equally regarding that state “as a sham, its conservative and liberal parliamentarians representing only the rich,” not the nation. For their part, many labor organizers preferred syndicalist inclusion to Marxist division, “incorporating all productive occupations into the proletariat” and so opening the way for the claim that ‘proletariat’ and ‘nation’ meant much the same thing. Far from ‘reactionary,’ Italian fascism shared ‘futurist’ enthusiasms for technocratic-industrial society, unified by the military élan of former soldiers (“trench power,” as the Duce called it) and the youths who wished they had been soldiers. Fascism was a movement of older and younger brothers. In this line, Mann finds what may be the quintessential Mussolini quotation: “Democracy has deprived the life of the people of ‘style’: that is, a line of conduct, the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical: in sum, all that counts in the life of the masses. We play the lyre on all its strings: from violence to religion, from art to politics.”

Organizationally, fascists arranged themselves along military lines into units or sqadristi. “They caged and coerced their members into an enjoyable life of violence.” “Keeping morality and violence harnessed together was fascism’s perennial problem”—one readily solved, it seems, by invocations of warrior spirit. Martial virtues, long associated with aristocracy, democratized themselves during the mass movements of the Great War, a move prepared by the ideologists of the nineteenth century who had deplored the spiritlessness of mass embourgeoisement. But whereas such concerns produced in the United States nothing much more alarming than Teddy Roosevelt, in countries which looked at embourgeoisement as a foreign phenomenon, one that had yet to establish a strong presence socially and in political institutions, there was no moderating counterbalance to militant passions.

Unlike the Marxist ‘Left,’ fascists did not aim their violence at the Italian state. Rightly judging it both weak and sympathetic to communism, fascists never antagonized the state’s military or police divisions. Fascists also found ways to accommodate the Vatican, which also worried about Marxism, that competing Internationale. Under such circumstances, the proletarians folded. “Fascists had not conquered power. Rather, they had pushed close to it and done deals with nonfascist elites.”

Rejecting Hitler’s radical racism, Mussolini’s statism “sought not to urge factional differences but to envelop them all in a loose corporatism.” The fascist state in Italy did not lack pluralism. With a slightly malicious glance at Robert Dahl, one is tempted to call Italian fascism interest-group liberalism without the liberalism.

Germany and Hitler took the truly sinister turn, not only by identifying nationalism with biological racism but by linking national salvation from that racism so entirely to the person and the actions of the tyrant-leader, the supposed embodiment and guide of the race. With the Nazis, ‘civil-social association’ and ‘diversity’—today invoked as sure antidotes to excessive statism—proved useful tools for tyranny: “Germany had…a very strong civil society, and Nazis were at its hear,” organizing within labor unions, Protestant churches, social clubs, student fraternities, in addition to forming their own party cells. Employing both bullets and ballots, Nazis both intimidated and appealed to elites (properly) worried about communism. More, “workers were no less attracted to Nazism than were other classes”; Hitler divided the communists’ intended socio-economic base. Although the Great Depression proved an opportunity for a quick takeover, the necessary preparation had been completed by 1928, Germany’s “economic high point” of the decade. Capitalists themselves, however, mostly opposed the Nazis, who found more help among young army officers. Mann concludes that German democracy, unlike its better-established counterparts elsewhere, had “not yet institutionalized its rules of the game as the only rules in town”: The regime question remained very much alive in the minds of many Germans, “tired of class politics and German national weakness.”

The features of the Italian and German fascisms cannot be taken simply as characteristic of fascism. Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian, and Spanish fascisms serve as additional case studies for Mann, who devotes substantial chapters to each, finding important local differences. In all these countries, nonetheless, “fascism was a product of a sudden, half-baked attempt at liberalization” amid social and ideational crises in the aftermath of a major war. Fascists “offered solutions to the four economic, military, political, and ideological crises of early twentieth-century modernity,” namely, the class struggles and boom-and-bust cycles of capitalism (to which they responded with corporatism), the ethos of mass warfare (appeal to with paramilitary élan), popular sovereignty (mass rallies, before and after that last competitive election), and the conflict between Enlightenment rationalism and Romanticism (which antagonists they attempted to synthesize). “We may not like any of their four solutions, but we must take them seriously. Fascists were and remain part of the dark side of modernity.”

Mann concludes with an incisive glance at fascist-like movements in the early twenty-first century. Although they share the “nationalist xenophobia” of the fascists, European rightists do not propose to end democracy. They voice anti-statist sentiments derived from modern liberalism and, most tellingly, they don’t really want to fight. The ethos of the commercial-republican regimes has done its work, so far.

Elsewhere, in places where commercial republicanism rules less pervasively, or not at all, fascism seems more likely. Mann acknowledges that some Hindus and more Muslims display fascist tendencies, but of course without the secularism of the real thing—cold comfort to their victims, but fascism was never the only murderous ideology in the world. Mann finds Russia a more likely candidate, except for the after-effects of generations of anti-fascist rhetoric there. He does not consider China, which displays elements of nationalism/racialism, militarism, statism, and capitalism which make it look rather like a giant version of Wilhelmine Germany. Might the Chinese be one major military defeat away from a fascist movement?

With Fascists, Michael Mann confirms his reputation as one of the finest political sociologists of his generation.

Originally published in The Political Science Reviewer, Volume XXXIII (2004).

 

 

In Memory of Leo Raditsa

 

Ancient Rome and Modern America: A Comparative Study of Morals and Manners. No translator listed. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914. [ARM]

Between the Old World and the New: A Moral and Philosophical Contrast. A. Cecil Curtis translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914. [BOWN]

Characters and Events of Roman History From Caesar to Nero. Frances Lance Ferrero translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909. [CE]

Europe’s Fatal Hour. No translator listed. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1918. [EFH]

Four Years of Fascism. E. W. Dickes translation. Westminster: P. S. King and Son, Ltd., 1924. [FYF]

The Gamble: Bonaparte in Italy, 1796-1797. Bertha Pritchard and Lily C. Freeman translation. New York: Walker and Company, 1961. [G]

The Greatness and Decline of Rome. Five volumes. Alfred E. Zimmern and J. J. Chaytor translation. Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1971. Originally published in Milan, 1901-07. [GDR]

The Life of Caesar. Alfred E. Zimmern translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1933. [LC]

Militarism: A Contribution to the Peace Crusade. No translator listed. Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1903. Originally published in Milan, 1898. [M]

Problems of Peace: From the Holy Alliance to the League of Nations. No translator listed. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1919. [PPe]

The Principles of Power: The Great Political Crises of History. Theodore R. Jaeckel translation. New York: Arno Press, 1971. Translation originally published in New York in 1942. [PPo]

The Reconstruction of Europe: Talleyrand and the Congress of Vienna, 1814-1815. No translator listed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1963. Originally published in Paris, 1940. [RE]

The Ruin of the Ancient Civilization and the Triumph of Christianity: With Some Considerations of Conditions in the Europe of Today. Hon. Lady Whitehead translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921. [RAC]

The Two French Revolutions, 1789-1796. Samuel J. Hurwitz translation. New York: Basic Books, 1968. [TFR]

The Unity of the World. Howard Coxe translation. New York: Boni and Boni, 1930. [UW]

The Women of the Caesars. Christian Gauss translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. [WC]

Words to the Deaf: An Historian Contemplates His Age. Ben Ray Redman translation. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. [WD]

 

Guglielmo Ferrero (1871-1942), Italian historian, culture critic, and novelist, dedicated his life to the diagnosis of two modern phenomena: the new civilization of “quantity,” which acknowledged no limits to the scope of human desires, and the new tyranny, “totalitarianism,” which acknowledged no limits to the scope of the tyrant’s ambitions.

The intellectual culmination of these two aspects of modernity could be found, he argued, in German culture. “In philosophy, law, ethics, history, in every branch of learning indeed, the German mind has, especially during the last two centuries, steadily confounded principles and definitions, demolished traditions, confused good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false, in order to give a freer rein to passions and interests…. It appealed to the tendencies of an age which would submit to no discipline but that imposed by work and the state and aspired in everything else, in art and private morals, in religion and family life, in business, and pleasure alike, to an ever increasing measure of liberty” (EFH 208-209). That is, the very Kultur that makes so much of freedom—as against materialism, Anglo-Americanism, and the commercial bourgeoisie—itself only exaggerated the worst tendencies of modern life.

Against this obscurantist trend, Ferrero sided with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophers who might be described as moderate rationalists: Montesquieu, Vattel, Constant, Guizot, and perhaps (although he does not mention him) Tocqueville. Among political figures, Ferrero praised the American republicans (in contrast to the French); the story of how French politicians abandoned French political thought illuminates this contrast. Among cultures, he patriotically but not chauvinistically preferred the Latins, with their “endeavor to define principles exactly, to prevent their being confused with one another, and consequently to lay down accurate and certain laws” (EFH 208). Behind these virtues of Latin culture stands a Greek philosopher, Aristotle, “the philosopher of limitation and order par excellence” (EFH 176), who in ethics advocated the center between extremes and in politics defended the civic life of the polis against the sprawling empires of the East. The old, aristocratic republic of ancient Rome represented Aristotelianism in practice.

In this essay I shall offer an overview of Ferrero’s historical writings, with particular emphasis on his lifelong opposition to tyranny in the name of a measured—what he came to call a legitimate—republicanism. I have divided the essay into two main parts, corresponding to what I regard as the two complementary phases of Ferrero’s career. Prior to the First World War, after a youthful orientation toward positivism, Ferrero concentrated his attention on the character of “quantitative” civilization and its implications for modern life. He found in ancient Rome an example—the example—of the effect of “quantifying” a previously “qualitative” political society. Indeed, his study of Roman antiquity led him away from his initial assumptions in favor of positivism and progressivism, by showing him the virtue of moderation, and the significance of that virtue.

The war swept away the monarchies, the last vestiges of the old regimes that still upheld “quality” or limits. In their place arose not only democracies but also such novel tyrannies as Lenin’s Russia and Mussolini’s Italy. Ferrero’s sharp critique of Fascism in the 1920s made him increasingly unwelcome in his own country, where he was eventually placed under house arrest, and in 1930 he prudently accepted an appointment at the University of Geneva. He remained in Switzerland for the rest of his life, now directing students and readers to the French Revolution and Bonapartism as the germs of the most menacing modern political disorder. His Geneva lectures, held on Thursday afternoon every week from 1931 to 1942, filled the biggest hall at the university with listeners who well knew that they were hearing not only the research of a master historian but the diagnosis of Europe’s heightening political fever of militarism and tyranny.

Because Ferrero’s work is now so little known in the United States—though there was a time when Charles Beard could introduce him as a man who needed no introduction to American readers—my task here is descriptive, not critical. Good essays could be written on Ferrero’s critical reception here and elsewhere, on the accuracy of his historical judgments on ancient Rome and republican France, and on his works of fiction (he published half a dozen novels). But those essays are not this essay.

 

Introduction: Ancient and Modern

In 1898, Ferrero wrote, “We are on the eve of a terrible [war] which will transform Europe into a huge battlefield” (M 11). But victory in that war would not go to the countries most steeped in militarism. “[T]he State which proves strongest in war is that in which morals and life at ordinary times are the furthest removed from the cruelty, egoism, and violence which during war became the normal conditions of life and action” (M 15). The commercial republics, not the monarchies, would come to dominate Europe and the world: “If men are wise, the age of Pax Christiana can now be inaugurated, of longer duration and more glorious than Pax Augusta“; this “fresh chapter” in European and American civilization will be “an unheroic chapter”—bourgeois to the core—but “let us earnestly hope, a less lugubrious and less bloody chapter” (M).

As evidence of the military superiority of commercial republicanism over old-regime militarism, Ferrero pointed to the Spanish-American War. With “calm resolution,” America waged “a truly cheerful war” against Spain (M 35). “The mercantile American Government, composed entirely of bourgeoisie, presided over by a former tradesman (President William McKinley), knew how to prepare for conflict, to measure the forces necessary, and to deal the blow with certainty at the proper moment.” The Spanish government, despite its “military character and tradition,” was powerless (M 37).

Spanish society was “formed, not on principles of liberty, but of protection.” The Spanish state protects a favored few, excluding the many from the opportunity to enjoy just reward for labor. Hence “the ideal of every Spanish middle-class youth” is “to be an official at Madrid, to work little… to go to bed late, get up late in the morning, go to business late, and leave it early without having done much work” (M 39). In war, Spanish policy made soldiers fight by “placing them between two dangers, of which war is the lesser, and of keeping up their failing courage with the fear of punishment and the threat of the penal code for deserters and cowards” (M 44). There were no happy warriors among the troops of Spain. In attempting to accommodate and direct the rising middle classes, old-regime Spain produced only lazy employees of the central state and spiritless soldiers.

American society was formed on liberty. The educational system was not designed to exclude people from employment. “Let him who can do a thing well step forward and do it, no one will question where he learnt it: such is the degree required of the American engineer, barrister, clerk, or employee” (M 19). The American can change careers many times; “he is never a victim of the tyranny of a choice made once for all his whole life, often whilst still immature; and he rarely finds himself in either of those two situations so ruinous to the middle classes in Europe, more especially in the Latin countries: the absolute uncertainty of success, and the utter despair of ever recovering from sudden ruin” (M 19). And so in war: If the “larger portion” of a people “lives normally under such good material, moral, and intellectual conditions, that it can rapidly adapt itself to the situation of war by a conscious effort of will directed by a moral motive,” then those people are likely to win their wars (M 45). Far from being nations of shopkeepers, vulnerable to the disciplined militarists of Realpolitik, commercial republics fight to win, and do.

The American advantage over Spain is the advantage of the modern over the ancient. By “modern” and “ancient,” Ferrero does not denote temporal categories. Ancient Rome displayed “modern” features—resistance to patriarchy, for example (GDR II.216); modern Turkey was quite “ancient” in its ideal of “a quiet life of absolute repose, idleness comforted by coffee and tobacco,” its delight in leisured simplicity (M 139). The “one great defect” of all ancient societies, whether nomadic or semi-nomadic tribes, military empires, mercantile towns, or commercial-agrarian polities, was “the difficulty they had in finding new productive employment for accumulated capital, a condition of things which was partly the cause and partly the effect of the unlaborious habits of the population” (M 96). Except for mining, which employed slaves, there was no major industry that coordinated large numbers of workers outside their homes. “If some fine morning an ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, or Greek, were suddenly reanimated in Oxford Street, preserving recollections of the world in which he lived, at the sight of so many people hurrying in the same direction he would imagine that something extraordinary was happening in London: a catastrophe a festival, a procession, the return of some victorious king. It would never occur to him that all this bustle was a daily occurrence, representing the urgent desire and need of numbers to reach in time their day’s work, which rarely lasts less than six or seven hours” (M 99). In antiquity, wealth was not so much invested as displayed.

Pericles’ Athens “was probably not worth one parish of London for wealth, and yet its temples and public monuments were full of gold and silver-plated statues” (M 110). Capital stagnated and land accumulated in a few hands. The way to raise capital (and to acquire new land) was not by industry but by war; Alexander the Great forced capital to circulate from the East back to Greece; “stimulat[ing] the energy, the inventive genius, and the greed of innumerable Greeks” (124) in the only way the ancients knew how to do it. The warrior was the capitalist of the ancient world (M 132). War both builds and destroys civilization, giving antiquity its “tragic grandeur”: “Its greatest monuments have only reached us in a ruined state” (M 134).

Modern life channels the “spirit of conquest” into business, making trade rather like “a species of tempered war.” Modern business is “an elaborate machinery which in part serves the purpose indicated by the economist”—organizing exchange of goods and dividing labor efficiently—and “in part serves to enable certain classes and nations to rule over other classes and other nations—in short, taking the place and function filed by armies in the past” (M 296).

Ancient writers deplored what they called corruption. The Roman aristocracy, bulwark of the republic, gradually sank in “the mania for luxury and the appetite for pleasure” (CE 17). Today, by contrast, much of what the ancients call corruption is termed progress; desires are liberated and their satisfaction democratized (CE 26). Ancient egoism is modern individualism. Civic spirit has declined, “children are not wanted,” “men prefer to live in accord with those in power, ignoring their vices, rather than openly opposing them,” and “public events do not interest unless they include a personal advantage” (CE 28). Laughing at “the timid prudence of our forefathers,” moderns make it “a duty for each one to spend, to enjoy, to waste as much as he can, without any disturbing thought as to the ultimate consequences of what he does” (CE 35). The only true discipline in the modern world comes not from governments or religions but from work itself. “In compensation for the liberty granted him in everything else,” modern civilization demands from its men “a rapidity, a punctuality, an intensity, and a passivity of obedience to his work, such as no other epoch has ever dreamed of being able to exact from lazy human nature” (ARMA 10, 205, 121-214). Vulcan wins Venus back from Mars (BOWN Part III, chapter 2).

But modernity presents a paradox. Having liberated all the desires, moderns no longer know which ones to satisfy. Embracing quantity instead of quality, inchoate desire instead of stable criteria of judgment, modern men “must resign ourselves to living in a new Tower of Babel, in the midst of a confusion of tongues. The aesthetic, intellectual, and moral confusion of our times is the price nature exacts for the treasures which she is obliged to resign into our power” (ARMA 14). As always for Ferrero, it is one thing to conquer, another to govern. The technological conquest of nature means that moderns have turned the desire to know away from disinterested love of truth, intellectual curiosity, and toward the service of impatient, contradictory desires. “Even scientists nowadays want to see their discoveries turned into money” (ARMA 172). If work is our only discipline, money is our only authority; the distinction between freeborn citizen and slave disappears, replaced by the distinction between rich and poor (ARMA 106-108). In this new social conflict, the confused upper and middle classes suffer the disadvantage of rulers who do not know what they rule for, a dilemma the aristocratic slaveholders of antiquity seldom faced.

In the years before the First World War, then, Ferrero concerned himself with the question of how commercial republican civilization—the “American” or “New World” civilization whose triumph over the old monarchies he foresaw—could be saved from “a sort of opulent barbarism” (ARMA 129). The American idea of progress, spreading rapidly in Europe, especially in “nations like Germany”—which combined the old aristocratic militarism/monarchism and the new commercialism and industrialism in an ominous way—apparently led to the universalization of King Midas’ dilemma, whereby the sovereigns are surrounded by riches they cannot enjoy, in what another writer later would call the joyless quest for joy (ARMA 131, 145). In this circumstance, Marxism is a symptom of the problem, not its solution; the “civilization of machinery” had appeared at firs to be “a death-blow to the working classes, a godsend to the upper classes,” but a century later “we find this civilization giving complete satisfaction only to the workmen, because it contents the workmen only from the double point of view of quantity and quality”; the upper classes have immense wealth but no idea how to enjoy it (ARMA 194-195; see also BOWN 236). Worse, “in this unbridled and limitless chase after money and enjoyment… the spirit of charity is obscured; and men’s minds become accustomed to a hardness and brutality which may perhaps one day startle the world in a disagreeable and terrible way” (ARMA 217).

Given this critique of both “ancient” and “modern,” Ferrero must reject any nostalgia for the past—”we are not incline to abjure railways and telegraphs” or “to run the risk of famine, which was such an ever-present one to the civilizations of the past” (ARMA 172). Europeans must learn that the age of limitless desires has in fact limits, namely, the absence of deliberation, of taste, of discernment, of fine art, real religion, and disinterested study. Quantity and quality cannot be maximized simultaneously (BOWN 273). That is the first lesson, for modern man, in the ancient school of limits, of moderation.

It was to reinforce this lesson of moderation that Ferrero turned to the exposition of Roman history. Prior to the First World War, his major historical work centered on Rome, and particularly on the first Caesars. After the war, with the old monarchies gone and the new tyrannies of fascism and communism having commenced, he turned to the French Revolution and Bonapartism as the best lenses for understanding modernity. He died before the commercial republics had defeated the new tyrannies, although (as we’ve seen) this would not have surprised him. His pre-war Roman books thus in some respects speak to our circumstance today, after the defeat of the Soviet empire, even more directly than his later books do.

 

Ancient Rome

Republicanism and Caesarism. Ferrero regards Rome as a universal and eternal city in the sense that it presents “all the essential phenomena of social life”; “every new age has only to choose that part which most resembles it, to find its own self” (CE 242-243; see also GDR I. v). Ferrero takes aim at the German historian Theodor Mommsen, who conceived of Roman history as the conflict between republicanism and monarchism, applauding the triumph of the Caesars. Repelled by the French Revolution, Mommsen looked to Caesarism as a model for putting the republican genius, or demon, back in the bottle. Against Mommsen, whose interests Ferrero describes as “purely political,” Ferrero undertakes a “psychological and moral account of the Romans.” He means not a Freudian or other analytic approach but an assessment of the political intentions of Roman statesmen. He also explicitly rejects the accounts of economic determinists (GDR I. v-vi; CE v).

Ferrero refutes Mommsen’s claim that the Caesars were monarchists out to revolutionize a dying republic. The Caesars were, rather, dictators not unlike those of the Latin America of Ferrero’s time—men arising from republics in crisis. The Caesars did not replace the central Roman institution, the Senate, which continued to govern the Empire well into the first century A. D. (ARMA 35; RAC 13). Equally, Ferrero refutes the claims of modern republican historians who, seizing upon “the absurd tales told by Suetonius and Tacitus about the family of the Caesars, through preconceived hate for the monarchy,” blacken the reputation of Caesarism, even as Mommsen whitewashed it. The real accomplishment of the Caesars was not to end the republic, for good or evil; it was to take possession of Gaul, and thus unwittingly to inaugurate Europe as a civilization (GDR V. iii-iv; CE 72-73).

Ferrero particularly commends the study of Roman history to Americans, north and south. “Ancient Rome ought to live daily in the mind of the new social classes that lead onward,” lest they too end as victims of barbarism. As heirs of republicanism, they must understand republicanism’s weaknesses and strengths (CE 258-259, 263-264). They must understand, as Mommsen does not, the profoundly unbureaucratic character of republicanism, including the republicanism of the Caesars; Caesar Augustus, for example, several times liquidated the Empire’s debt out of his own pocket (ARMA 26, 29, 31; GDR II. 80). Roman studies can refine Anglo-Saxon and German minds, and especially those minds that will rule their nations, with the civilized influence of Latinity (CE vi-vii, 256-257). More important, the study of Roman history can “train the men who govern nations to discern more clearly than may be possible from their own environments the truth underlying the legends.” Legends do not come down to us from “the dawn of history.” On the contrary, they are always being spun. “A great man of state is distinguished from a mediocre by his greater ability to divine the real in his world of action beneath its superfice of confused legends; by his greater ability to discriminate in everything that is true from what is merely apparently true, in the prestige of states and institutions, in the force of parties, in the energy attributed to certain men, in the purposes claimed by parties and men, often different from their designs” (CE 65-67). By challenging partisan accounts, ancient and modern, Ferrero sets his reader on the way to combining learning and statesmanship. By pointing to the unintended consequences of the most herculean feats of the most prominent statesmen, Ferrero also shows his reader, the future statesman, that a certain humility should go with learning and rulership. The Machiavellian fantasy of mastering Fortuna ought to be resisted; “the wheel of destiny turns by a mysterious law, alike for families and for peoples: those in high position may fall; those in low, may rise.” This, he evidently thinks, is an especially wholesome notion with which to impress Americans, who will lead the empire of commercial republicanism (CE 98-99).

The Roman republicanism that Julius Caesar sought to save, not destroy, had its social basis in a patriarchal aristocracy. The modern, individualist notion of matrimony and family as supports for personal happiness was “alien to the Roman mind, which conceived of these from an essentially political and social point of view.” Aristocratic Roman matrons supported their own social position and their husbands’ political careers by administering the household—the center of the ancient economy—and by adding their dowers to the household budget. The self-sufficiency of that household gave aristocrats the economic independence upon which political independence rested. In such a structure, marriage was scarcely to be entrusted to “passion mobile as the sea,” but to the prudential judgment of parents. (WC 15, 31-32; ARMA 68). The household’s day-to-day ruler, the matron, “a free-born woman of irreproachable habits, could live with a man only in the capacity of his legitimate wife. A marriage ceremony did not make a marriage; virtue did. A dissolute woman was by law a concubine; no ceremony could make her anything more than that” (ARMA 73-74). More than an economic unit, the aristocratic family was also a school, specifically, a military school in which a father served as “the firs military instructor of his sons,” and undertook “the duty of making good soldiers out of them.” Such early instruction made the aristocracy the indispensable source of military officers for the Roman Empire, which of course began early in the life of the republican regime. “In short, the ancient family was a sort of political society. Its members were bound to support each other in difficult and dangerous contingencies,” and also in everyday contingencies. The virtue of both partners was at a premium because the ancient world was a dangerous place (ARMA 66). (The “woman question” in modernity looks quite different because modern, democratic principles require equality under the law, and because modern society no longer centers economic or military life in the household. Ferrero has no objection to the modern liberation of women, but cautions that women will need to take greater responsibilities in order to balance their increased personal freedom. The worst of both worlds would be the liberation of women into a world of hedonism, where women would wield power only so long as their beauty lasted [WC 40-41].)

By Caesar’s time the Roman aristocracy had declined. The title of Ferrero’s major book on Rome, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, echoes Montesquieu’s The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decadence. Ferrero agrees with his great liberal predecessor that Roman republicanism declined because empire corrupted the aristocrats. “Rome, like a great spider, was sucking blood from the provinces”—war and its trophies being the only way known to the ancients for major infusions of income. The rich turned increasingly to “the passion for amusing and good feeding,” infecting the whole community with it (GDR I. 140). The Caesars found a polity still largely republican, yet tending socially toward monarchy, a polity racked by contradictory desires for virtue and vice. The republic still possessed considerable vitality. Above all, the discipline of the Roman constitution, and the reverence Romans felt toward it, and its “impersonal authority of law and custom,” remained—weaker than it had been, but still strong (GDR I. 5-6, 327; III. 18; CE 136-137). “It was during this slow decomposition of the military, agricultural, and aristocratic society, which began after Rome had won the supreme power in the Mediterranean, and through the working of the forces of commerce and capitalism, that Roman Imperialism, as we know now know it, was called into being” (GDR I. 43). Ferrero compares this process to that undergone by England and France in the nineteenth century, northern Italy and Germany since 1848, and the United States between the founding and the Civil War (GDR I. 344-345). The first attempt to counteract increased influence of the middle class and the equestrian order by the re-establishment of aristocracy-based republicanism was that of Sulla, who succeeded in establishing, briefly, not a new version of the old constitution, or an expanded empire, but “simply a gigantic system of police” (GDR I. 116), a system that could not outlive him.

Julius Caesar, then, confronted an aristocracy that had assumed most of the characteristics of an oligarchy. As a student of Aristotle’s writings, he hoped to establish a mixed regime, balancing monarchic, aristocratic, oligarchic, and democratic elements. Caesar’s marriage to Pompeia, a woman of the old nobility, was likely intended to balance his own early democratic leanings (GDR I. 219). This attempt to found a mixed regime failed. Insofar as he succeeded, Julius resembled a Tammany Hall boss, not an Aristotelian statesman, distributing bread to the poor in exchange for political support (GDR I. 250; 348-349; II. 307). Because the so-to-speak ’embourgeoisement’ of Rome had nothing of modern industrialism about it—neither the organization nor the technology—”the struggle of man against man was far more powerful than the struggle of man against nature,” a point best seen in the fact that the immigrant workers of antiquity were slaves and freedmen forced to come to Rome (GDR II. 38-39, 41-43, 57). Great as a general and a writer, Julius “failed to become a great statesman” because, “in a democracy bitten with the mad passion for power, riches, and self-indulgence, a man who stands aloof from these temptations may live very happily in retirement and write books upon philosophy,” “but he must not stray into the hazardous paths of politics” (GDR II. 344). Mixed-regime Rome had ‘democratized’ too much to be brought back into balance. Thus a book that appears to be an attempt to guide young scholars into the life of politics in fact warns them against doing so in such a time as the twentieth century. It would take a different, not nearly so literate or ‘intellectual’ type to rule Rome.

Antony and Cleopatra. Julius Caesar had moved to the East in the last years of his life, eyeing the empire of Parthia. The road to Parthia led through Egypt and its queen. After the assassination of Julius, Antony and Octavianus vied for dominance. With his principal rival in Rome, Antony had to do two things: marry Octavia, his rival’s sister, so as to assure the Roman troops that he desired peace, and to center his activities in Egypt, that is to say, in his alliance with Cleopatra—all the continuation of the Julian strategy. Ferrero dismisses the legend of a grand passion, on either side of the affair. “There is in our way of thinking a vein of romanticism wanting in the ancient mind. We see in love a certain forgetfulness of ourselves, a certain blindness of egoism and the more material passions, a kind of power of self-abnegation, which, inasmuch as it is conscious, confers a certain nobility and dignity; therefore we are indulgent to mistakes and follies committed for the sake of passion, while the ancients were very severe.” It was “not a passion of love” that led Antony to Cleopatra but “a political scheme well thought out” (GDR III. 255-256; CE 42, 46, 52). He needed the treasure of the Ptolemies in order to conquer Persia GDR IV. 3). He married Cleopatra, without divorcing Octavia; brother Octavianus “was disturbed not so much by the insult to his sister as by the increase of power which the marriage would bring to his brother-in-law” (GDR IV. 8-9). For her part, Cleopatra wanted to marry Antony in order to destroy domestic opposition to her rule, as the Ptolemaic monarchy, the last surviving dynasty founded by Alexander’s generals, was now weak. With Antony as king, she would “save Egypt from the fate of the other Mediterranean peoples, the fate of servitude to Rome” (GDR III. 240). These dovetailing strategies failed not because they were conceived in some paroxysm of erotic transport, but because they failed to reckon with the fundamentally patriotic and republican-imperial sentiments of the Roman army, which wanted nothing from Egypt (or any other foreign country) but subordination and treasure (CE 60).

The war between Antony and Octavianus “was not, as historians have stated, a struggle for monarchical power at Rome, but was to consolidate or to destroy the new Egyptian empire; it was not a war of Octavianus against Antony, but of Cleopatra against Rome.” The policy of Antony and Cleopatra foundered on the contradictory political need both to restore the republic and to introduce Eastern monarchism. When the couple arrived in Rome, it was a “genuine aristocrat of the old stock,” Domitius Ahenobarbus, who told Antony to send the Egyptian packing. “Antony was defeated in this supreme struggle, not by the valor of his adversary or by his own defective [military] strategy or tactics, but by the hopeless inconsistency of his double-faced policy, which, while professing to be republican and Roman, was actually Egyptian and monarchical” (GDR IV. 74-77, 103). The story of the fatal attraction between Antony and Cleopatra was invented by the poet Horace, friend of Octavianus, as “an anti-feminist legend, intended to reinforce in the state the power of the masculine principle,” that is, a leading principle of republicanism. It exempted the Roman, Antony, from the culpability of genuine betrayal of his country by explaining his actions in terms of seduction (GDR IV. 61-63).

Augustus. Octavianus began his public career as a tyrant, “the abomination of Italy,” which explains why the Romans tolerated Antony’s antics in Egypt for so long. But Octavianus’ depredations were only “the temporary aberrations of a weak character, exposed to overwhelming danger and crushed by over-burdening responsibility.” He reformed himself, becoming, if not “heroic in adversity,” at least “prudent in prosperity” (GDR III. 33-34, 249). “For fifty years historians have incessantly repeated that Augustus had secretly worked with unswerving persistency throughout his life to concentrate power in his own hands…and to use the old republican forms…as a venture for the new monarchy which he was secretly and powerfully fashioning. The legend is ridiculous…” (GDR III. 146). Octavianus adopted a traditionalist policy, first in order to gather support against Antony, but then, after Antony’s defeat, to foster the stability to which Octavianus’ fundamentally timorous disposition inclined him. Victory at Actium brought Egyptian wealth into Roman coffers, without the need to ‘easternize’ Rome; under such circumstances, conservatism made sense. Public opinion favored aristocracy, not the eastern-style despotism that Rome had just averted. There was no democratic sentiment “as known to us” in Rome, as “every leader of the popular party was a noble of the old stock,” and their call on behalf of the people was for land and money, not democratic equality. The aristocrats faced a different problem: exhaustion after years of civil war. What was need was what moderns would call a strong executive or president, and that was the office that Octavianus undertook to fill under the title of Caesar Augustus. That was an office commended earlier by no less a republican than Cicero, the enemy of Julius Caesar. “The whole course of ancient history proves the tenacity and depth of republican ideas and traditions in the little Greek or Italian republics,” without the memory of which “European history would have been a counterpart of Oriental history, a monotonous succession of despotisms, rising one upon the ruins of another.” For four decades, August would attempt to restrain luxury, restore piety and traditional morality, and revive the aristocracy. “[A]ware that imperial pride and republican jealousy were two sentiments struggling within the nation,” he did what most cautious politicians would do: He temporized (GDR IV. 80, 123-141, 152).

The tension between the mores of Roman republicanism and those of Egyptian monarchy became increasingly acute. Egyptian wealth came with all the refinements of the Alexandrian/Greek culture, the very opposite of old Roman simplicity. The Roman aristocrats lived in homes profoundly different from those of their ancestors; “their furniture costly, their paintings of the loves of Venus and of Bacchus often sensual and obscene; was it possible that such houses could become the holy precincts of that old patriarchal system, with its austere duties and occupations, which everybody professed anxiety to reconstruct? Prosperity also fed the popularity of Augustus, and the people got into the habit of calling for his increased empowerment whenever an emergency arose: Popularity was “a danger yet more serious and constant than conspiracy.” Thumos weakened, eros strengthened (GDR IV. 169, 192, 194, 201-202, 207, 233, 255).

As the aristocracy gradually “lost all capacity for government,” a “great puritan movement” sought to restore the old virtues. Augustus sponsored a series of reforms intended to restore patriarchal authority, the most notable being the lex de adulteries, whereby a husband could kill an adulterous wife, daughter, and their lovers; more, anyone else might accuse adulterers in the law courts, in which case the penalty upon being found guilty was banishment. Ferrero notes that this was “a piece of class legislation” aimed not at the poor but at the rich. Ovid’s Amores is an attack on such laws, which in practice led to much scandal without noticeably improving aristocratic conduct (GDR IV. 216, 219; V. 55, 68-73, 159-160). Fifteen years into his rule, August turned to foreign wars as an alternative attempt to reinvigorate the aristocracy. “Campaigns in Germany,” he reasoned, “would be an excellent cure for the softness of the new generation, and the most potent antidote to the erotic poison with which Ovid was corrupting the young nobility.” This policy foundered in its turn on the problem of governance. Barbarians could be conquered, but to rule them after conquest required precisely the vanishing virtues of the aristocrats, who much preferred to remain at home and at ease. It was increasingly difficult to turn out a quorum for Senate meetings in Rome, let alone to fire ambition for a foreign post among the young noble. “Augustus remonstrated in vain” (GDR V. 131, 133, 161-162, 204).

Augustus’ own household hardly mirrored the desired virtues. Daughter Julia “introduced a new spirit into Roman female society, which had hitherto been represented by the consistent austerity of [her mother] Livia; and worldliness, luxury, pleasure, frivolity, sensuality and skepticism now became the order of the day.” Her adulteries presented Augustus with “the alternative of destroying his daughter or of compromising his whole lifework and reputation by a monstrous scandal”; in the event, he had her exiled. But the project of preserving republicanism had clearly failed. “He left behind him a hybrid system, the vagueness and confusion of which would have puzzled the most expert of politicians; the republic had degenerated, the monarchy had been strangled at birth, the aristocracy was in its dotage and the democracy was helpless” (GDR V. 247-248, 266, 332-333).

All this notwithstanding, Ferrero calmly remarks, “the government of Augustus was generally beneficial.” The imperial government was nothing like a modern state—”invading, omnipotent, omnipresent.” Rome acted vigorously to preserve its empire, its supremacy, from enemies internal and external, and to exploit its supremacy for its own benefit. But “for the rest, [Rome] let every people live as best pleased it.” For two centuries, “Rome continued in Orient and Occident to suppress bureaucracies, to dismiss or reduce armies, to close royal palaces, to limit the power of priestly castes or republican oligarchies, substituting for all these complicated organizations a proconsul with some dozens of vicegerent secretaries and attendants.” The Romans did not build states, they “devoured” them, leaving in their place a “regime of free exchange,” with low taxes, more often at peace in the past. “The government of Augustus, in its anxiety to avoid friction, allowed individuals to work the lands, the forests and the mines of the republic as they pleased.” The cost of peace and prosperity—in Ferrero there is always a cost for every good—was the decline of intellectual life in the East; corruption is usually a two-way street. As Roman virtue unbent, Eastern culture became “embourgeoised” (CE 212-217, 221; GDR V. 333-338, 347).

Thus, even in decline, Roman republicanism and its empire staved off monarchism for decades. Historians like Mommsen, “who sneer at the obstinate republicanism of the Romans, and regard the republic of Augustus as nothing more than a fiction,” fail to consider the stakes. Romans regarded their polity as a res publica, owned by right by the Roman people, not as the property of a dynastic line. Finally submerged beneath civic indifference, this Roman spirit nonetheless endured long enough so that it could be recovered during the Renaissance in a Europe made possible by Augustus’ early defense of Rome against Egypt and his later treaty with the Parthians, which abandoned the policy of far eastern conquest undertaken by Alexander the Great, gave Rome freedom of action in Europe and kept the Parthians out of the Mediterranean (GDR V. 34, 349-351).

Mommsen wants to be on the side of the winners. Eventually, in Rome, the monarchist-dynasts won. Ferrero nonetheless defends resistance to “destiny.” Had Augustus and other Romans not resisted the “mysticism and the monarchy of divine right,” Europe—if such an entity existed at all—would have resembled Asia, “carry[ing] the yoke of semidivine absolutism.” “There is nothing more useful in life than resistance, though apparently futile”; those who resist “always succeed in imposing a part of themselves on the victorious power, and the result is always better than a complete and unantagonized victory of the opposing force” (CE 225-226). “Augustus and Tiberius were deceived. They wished to reanimate what was doomed…. They are the last representatives of the policy initiated by the Scipios and not the initiators of the policy that created the bureaucratic Empire of Diocletian; yet this is exactly their glory. They were right to be wrong” (CE 226). In 1970, not long before he died, Charles de Gaulle defended his refusal to acquiesce in the Soviet conquest of Poland after the Second World War, a conquest France could do nothing to prevent. “History lasts a long time,” he said. He was exercising the right to be wrong.

Ferrero hereby qualifies his earlier attacks on statesmanly hubris. Statesmen do not control events. They should therefore consider themselves and their actions with due humility. Machiavelli is mistaken to imagine that Fortuna might be mastered. But neither should Fortuna be worshipped, because even the winners must compromise, and history lasts a long time.

The Need for Limits. In his writings prior to the Great War, Ferrero begins with the problem of militarism—more broadly, the problem of thumos. “War took birth in a primitive and violent exaltation of the desire for emotion”—not for mere life, but for life lived intensely, a desire that moves toward the quest to feel stronger than any other man or thing. Although this flame scarcely burns in most of us, “in all countries and in all ages there has existed a small minority of men in whom this desire was a violent passion, who wished to live a life more than humanly intense, almost, I might say, the life of several men” (M55-57). This passion is no relic of a lost age of Achilles. In modern times it may even be seen in the unlikely realm of aesthetics. In a book-length dialogue written just before the war, Ferrero has one character ask another why it is that, given the subjectivity of aesthetic judgments (a subjectivity admitted by most moderns), we nevertheless want everyone else to admire what we admire. The answer is amour-propre—political, national, religious, intellectual. Judgments about beauty and ugliness finally “depend on force,” and we want to exercise force; we want to rule, and some of us will rule or ruin (BOWN 71-75).

“Nothing is more difficult to man than moderation.” The difficulty of moderation inheres in the act of line-drawing. Every limit we set for ourselves is arbitrary, questionable, surpassable. And yet these imaginary lines are also indispensable to guide ourselves, to avoid a tumble into either lassitude or frenetic confusion. The unrestrained exercise of power yields the impotence of disorientation. Conventions are only conventions, but the need for conventions is as natural as a rock. “Absolute liberty is for the mind what a vacuum is for the bird: it cannot fly in it” (M 20; BOWN 166, 281, 296; ARMA 236).

Human resistance to destiny, what Ferrero commends in the early Caesars, works in exactly this way. “Destiny” sets limits; there are in human life forces that overwhelm all human intentions and efforts. These forces limit those efforts. But the efforts also limit them. Human life itself is a matter of these reciprocal limitations (BOWN 328-331).

The conflict of the pre-war years was not, as Nietzsche would have it, between Dionysus and Apollo, but between Vulcan and Apollo. Productive fire empowered the human desire for supreme liberty and power, deranging needed limits. To re-establish them, one needs the virtues that follow from the indisputable demonstration that good compete, that to take one desired object will diminish our access to another (BOWN 346-348, 378). Ferrero’s history of Rome illustrates this. In preserving Rome by writing its history, in attempting to get closer to the truth than Mommsen had done, a historian can show the need for limits both in the pages of his books and by example.

 

The New Tyrannies

The Great War as Regime Event. The Great War started because the civilization of quantity, in its peculiar German manifestation, overmastered the civilization of quality in Europe. This ‘quantification’ also accounted for the scale and the savagery of the war. Even more important for the future of Europe, the war demolished the old monarchies, thus adding political disorder to the moral disorder that began the war and was intensified by it.

In 1918 Ferrero asked the question that would haunt many intellectuals in the 1940s: Why did Germany, “a country with so many philosophers and scholars,” nonetheless start a war without limits (EFH 31)? He concluded that Germany had attempted to combine the “ancient” and the “modern” in a uniquely insidious way: It retained monarchism, but animated monarchy with the spirit of statism and of thumos—the unmoderated exaltation of courage and patriotism. Germany “had brought to greater perfection than any other nation [the] conception of progress which reconciles the idea of destruction with that of creation by affirming boldly that a people must strive to be great in peace and war alike, and that it is no less meritorious and glorious for it to force other nations to submit to its will than for it to conquer nature and to wrest her secrets from her” (EFH 224-225). As a result, a strict political discipline served moral and intellectual anarchy—a sense of limitlessness, “frenzied pride” or unfettered ambition (EFH 31). “A durable Empire cannot be built upon valor, unity, and passionate or even fanatic love of country alone; commons sense, a clear intuition of what is or is not possible, and a sense of proportion is equally essential, and in these qualities the modern German is conspicuously lacking” (EFH 36).

Ferrero finds this tendency to overcome contradictions by sheer, willed ‘synthesis’ of opposites in the highest reaches of German thought. While supposing themselves rationalists of a new sort, Kant and Hegel conceal the incoherence of their thought by the pompous obscurity of their prose. Their project leads in practice not to the peaceful ‘end of history,’ whether republican or monarchic, but to a war of all against all, a sort of phantasmagoria of “deconstruction”: “If thought insists upon being, as it were, its own jumping off place and on formulating afresh each day the axioms from which it proposes to start on its task of reconstructing the world from top to bottom, beauty, truth and morals will necessarily cease to be anything but a noisy game of sophisms in which each player, by an arbitrary change of principles, is at liberty to uphold the most contradictory theories—a game in which the final victory is won by those theories which are most flattering to the dominant passions.” In such a culture, or Kultur, ideas serve not as limits to action but as “spurs to the ruling passions” (EFH 34). The most sovereign of the ruling passions being the passion to rule, the libido dominandi will finally order all the other passions—political discipline, called the highest form of freedom, will prevail—but at the expense of a loss of the sense of reality, of limits, of contradiction. The philosophies of almighty ‘synthesis’ or ‘Absolute Spirit’ incline toward the exaltation of victory: “There is a philosophy prevalent today which glories in awarding the crown of merit to whatever succeeds, finding in the fait accompli its own implicit justification,” instead of taking as its standard what ought to have prevailed (FYF xiii). This “philosophy fit for slaves” encourages a spirit of tyrannical conquest, ending in the nation’s self-destruction when the limited reality it seeks to overmaster proves recalcitrant to its boundless ambitions. What begins as an apparent quest for freedom ends in a submission to a supposed fatality. None of this is genuinely rational, in part because it abandons a prudent respect for conventional limits—an abandonment that the modern turn in philosophy effected, even as it liberated the desire for acquisition form the economics and politics of moderation.

The ‘German’ atmosphere of European life contributed to the postwar rise of Italian Fascism. The only possible source of political authority in a post-monarchic and post-aristocratic world is popular sovereignty. “Now that the great machine of the Congress of Vienna”—the European system of monarchies—”has been destroyed, the peoples have no choice but to govern themselves; a harder thing than submitting to government from above, but for the future an inevitable task” (FYF 112; see also PPo 240). But when the people come to power in a civilization that has lost all sense of limits, they cannot know what they want. To be politically effective, popular sovereignty needs to devise means of expressing itself, that is, to rank its desires coherently. Without any traditions of self-government, a newly self-governing people might seize upon the expedient of a dictator-demagogue who appeals to the ruling passions of the moment in order to consolidate ‘totalizing’ rule over a people disoriented by modern limitlessness (UW 64-65; PPo viii, 172-173; WD 15). Such dictators quickly become tyrants, violating the core idea of popular sovereignty, which, to be truly popular, must respect the right of minority opposition while allowing the majority to govern without illegal subversion (RE 350; PPo 177-178). The French Revolution saw the first modern example of the self-destruction of popular sovereignty so misconceived.

The French Revolution and the Debacle of Bonapartism. The French Revolution asserted the sovereignty of the people, but popular sovereignty is not as simple in practice as it is in principle. “Who were the people? How could their true will be recognized? Through what channels could it express itself?” (RAC 188). The people seized power, destroying the legal system of monarchism. The destruction of stable convention, of legality, made the ruling republicans fearful; their fear made them intolerant of opposition; their intolerance led them to coercion of the opposition, culminating in the political use of fear, the Terror, in order to assuage their fear. The sovereign people thus acted in an increasingly ‘statist’ manner, but without the lawfulness of the (formerly) settled monarchy (G x, 246-252). The 18th Fructidor—”liberty imposed by force,” “the Revolution seeking safety in suicide” (G 264-265)—led eventually to the 18th Brumaire, which “was not the work of Bonaparte but was carried out by part of the Directory” (RE 10; G 288-289). “Napoleon was a product of the Revolution; the fundamental secret of his whole policy, like that of the Revolution, was fear” (RE 10). Like the Directory, and equally without the reassurance of stable legality, Bonaparte “was afraid of everything: real and imaginary plots being organized, or about to be organized, to assassinate or depose him; discontent; criticisms; resistance provoked by his acts; the responsibilities which he had to assume” (RE 11). In mentality and method he anticipated every twentieth-century tyrant.

The Revolution did not adequately apply the principle of popular sovereignty because it could not. “The majority of Frenchmen, in ’89, had never heard of the general will or the sovereignty of the nation; they were still attached to the monarchy, the Church, the past, unaware of their sovereignty and unwilling to exercise it” (PPo 102). Ferrero does not excoriate the French revolutionaries quite as neo-Burkeans do, decrying the terrible simplification of ‘abstract’ thinking. Rather, he argues that without a system of legal right to secure them, assertions of natural right raise suspicion, fear, and resistance—which in turn provoke suspicion, fear, and repression by the revolutionaries (TFR 117, 143, 184, 189). “Marat could suffer when he saw a dog being tortured because he was not afraid of the dog. When he was demanding 20,000 heads, he was a man crazed by fear” (PPo 100-101). Behind libido dominandi, fear shivers. “Fear is the original sin of life” (G297), Ferrero goes so far as to say. Rousseau has it exactly wrong: You cannot be forced to be free, because force depends upon, and inspires, the fear that is the antithesis of liberty. The revolution of 1789, intended to be the liberation of the French people along the measured likes of eighteenth-century rationalism, issued ten years later in “the first totalitarian government in Europe” (TFR 138). In the United States and, eventually, in several places elsewhere, popular sovereignty led to no such result, because constructive legalism set limits on destructive fear and force (TFR 5-9, 27, 55). Another way to say this is that the Americans never abandoned prudential reasoning; Rousseau, although attempt to overcome the fear-ridden monarchist liberalism of Hobbes, based in its turn on the fear-ridden libido dominandi liberated by Machiavelli and conceptualized by Descartes—cannot overcome modern political philosophy. And Rousseauian liberty in turn points ahead to the Germans.

“Self-government cannot be improvised in a few months in a country accustomed for centuries to centralized monarchical rule” (TFR 62). Local governments in France simply “did not know how to proceed,” never having governed anything, before—this, in contrast to the Americans (TFR 62, 65, 70). “The principle of democratic legitimacy, which should have justified [the French Assembly’s] right to govern, did not do so because this principle was not recognized by the majority of the nation.” In the earliest days of the Revolution, Mirabeau had warned his colleagues in the Estates-General of precisely this dilemma. But the revolutionaries were too young, too inexperienced in government, too impassioned to listen (PPo 78-80; TFR 68). And so “it took twenty-five years and oceans of blood to rebuild what six weeks had sufficed to destroy,” namely, the sense of legal limits without which tyranny takes over (PPo 85).

With such shaky support at home, the fearful revolutionaries had recourse to a longstanding strategy of statists, commended by Machiavelli: Attempt to unify the country, to avoid civil war, by provoking a foreign war, perhaps out of fear of being attacked (TFR 38, 89-90, 107). Here too they contradicted their own (initial) theory. The eighteenth-century political philosophers had devised rules of limited war. The law of nations as they conceived it was “a body of wise and humane rules, designed to prevent abuses of force in relations between states, which do more harm to the states committing them than to those upon whom they are committed.” Underlying these rules, given careful expression by Vattel, was Montesquieu’s “precept for all civilized people: that in peace men should do each other the greatest possible good and in war the least possible harm” (RE 109; see also G 33-35). Instead of Vattel and Montesquieu, the revolutionaries embraced the ideas of the military strategist Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte de Guibert, whose 1773 Essai general de tactiques advocated the synthesis of speed and mass, with emphasis on speed. Sheer energy, Guibert argued, could overcome slow-moving mass; speed doubles the force of mass. Guibert advocated a sort of kinetic Neoplatonism, in which thumos—but now on the move, not spirit governed by stable forms—attempts not merely to rule matter but to transcend or conquer it. But, as Ferrero writes, “although spirit is the master of matter, it is bound to matter as a sort of dependent superior.” “Spirit had slowly to relearn this eternal and simple truth”—one that Plato’s Socrates had taught by means of the gentle war of dialectic—”through new and terrible experiences” (G 88-89). The spirit of unlimited war had to rediscover, by experience, the limits of war—finally by the revolutionary government’s inability to make peace when it needed peace (TFR 224-225).

Ferrero takes Napoleon’s 1795 invasion of Italy as an exemplary case. The putative reason for the campaign was to establish France’s “natural borders,” a typical limit-concept of eighteenth-century thinkers. But the revolutionaries soon decided that “to conquer the natural limits it was necessary to go outside them,” to enter Lombardy, a territory outside any claimed border of France (G 5). although “for a century the campaign in Italy has been described as if it had arisen solely in the mind of Bonaparte, the genius who alone could have conceived this marvelous plan,” Bonaparte “was imply carrying out in an energetic and competent way the plans, advice, and orders that arrived from Paris (G 10, 153-154). Such border-crossings or limits-passing Ferreo calls instances of l’aventura, the spirit of adventure. L’aventura is “the force that impels man, at the same time impatient and reluctant, to leave the present and look for something better elsewhere in time and space” (G 31). Disciplined, l’aventura can yield real progress; undisciplined, it becomes romanticism, dreaminess. Undisciplined and put into action, it becomes tyranny at home and the derangement of the balance of power abroad (G 58, 60, 62).

In Italy Bonaparte first experimented with the ruling tactics he would employ later in France. Endorse popular sovereignty while depriving the people of “the instruments essential to sovereignty—the right of opposition and freedom of suffrage.” To shore up his illegitimate rule, he descended into a “mania for self-advertisement,” “conduct[ing] the entire press like an orchestra and mak[ing] it into a gigantic gramophone that every day played the same record for his subjects and his enemies that he was infallible and invincible.” His administration became “a machine able to manufacture enthusiasm,” organizing “mass movements into a state monopoly, taking them away from the parties” (PPo 196-200)—Guibertism applied to politics. “Revolutionary government, desiring to pass itself off as the expression of the free and sincere will of the people, must camouflage its despotism by a parody of freedom which renders its despotism ever more tolerable,” provoking a counter-revolution as surely as the excessive statism of the French monarchy had provoked the popular revolution (PPo 205).

What can be relearned from this adventure, Caesar Augustus had already known: It is one thing to conquer, another to rule. The Directory had wanted Napoleon to use Italy as a secure base for an attack on the real enemy, the Germans. But how to rule, how to make peace with, a revolutionized people? Bonaparte could conquer parts of Italy, he could revolutionize governments there, he could exercise what Ferrero calls the physics of force. But he could not manage the “metaphysics” of force—the unpredictable consequences of conquest and revolution themselves (G 107). “Just as the invincible army was going to spring upon Germany, the base of operations, northern Italy, slipped from under its feet and disappeared, dragging with her into the void, the general dissolution of Italian society, provoked by invasion, conquest and warfare without rules” (G 222). “The dynamics of events was stronger than prudence,” once the prudential rules of limited war were despised (G 185-186, 241-242). The reign of illusion continued, as Napoleon’s abortive invasion of Germany led to the bipartite treaty with the Court of Vienna, the secret provisions of which promised Austria control of the Republic of Venice, “the most beautiful, the most civilized, the most splendid region of Europe”; “the Revolution of the Court of Vienna had come to an understanding to eliminate Venice and to make the world believe that the peace concluded at the expense of Venice had been dictated to the monarchy of the Hapsburgs by the Revolution” (G 203-207). The regime of fear, abetted by the old monarchy, had ruined a regime of civilization, that is, a regime that had overcome fear by the cultivation of established customs and laws (G 247-248).

Napoleon’s “agitated career” ended with the delusion of his own mind. His intuitive and impulsive character found its perfect expression in battlefield improvisation, at which he had no equal. But war, “by diverting his mind to a thousand different objects,” prevented him from developing his capacity for political creation “by continuous effort, which alone creates the enduring in politics and art.” His victories simultaneously inflated his pride. “Napoleon does not represent that victorious force of will and human genius which subject and dominate reality within the limits of reason, but the moral weakness of genius which knows not how to resist the folly of pride, and squanders all its energy to satisfy this weakness. He is a monstrosity rather than an example of human greatness, his power consisted principally in extravagances and violence” (M 180, 189). His belief, at the end of his life, that France needed a new aristocracy, only betrayed his ignorance of the social and political possibilities of a civilization now given over to popular sovereignty (M 178). His fall showed the world “how weak were the governments created by the Revolution and the Empire”—”vigorous and enterprising” to be sure, but lacking the stability that legitimacy alone can bring. “Children of their own efforts”—Machiavellian princes who acquire territories by the force of their own arms, alone—they “fell before the first breath of misfortune” (PPe 26). The ensuing cult of Napoleon, still alive in Ferrero’s days, tended by Emil Ludwig and other historical popularizers, appeals to the domination fantasies of mediocrities (M 197). Such fantasies are dangerous when new would-be demagogue-tyrants arise, appealing to them.

Talleyrand: The Constructive Statesman. Bonaparte’s defeat in 1814 called forth the constructive statesmanship of the Congress of Vienna—more specifically, the constructive statesmanship of Talleyand. Talleyrand understood that the imbalance of the European state system owed its existence to imbalances within the states themselves. International disorder issued from regime problems, not ‘international-relations’ problems, which were symptomatic only. “In order to reconstitute Europe as a balanced system of states living in peace, it was first of all necessary to restore legitimate governments to all the states, that is, governments founded on principles—monarchic or republican, aristocratic or democratic—which are sincerely accepted by the peoples and faithfully respected by the governments” (RE vii). Europe went up in flames because irreconcilable regime conflicts arose between republics and monarchies, conflicts too hastily adjudicated by force, which further shook stability by intensifying fear. “Force of arms is transitory, whereas hatred lives on,” Talleyrand wrote (RE 23). Europe needed not some self-contradictory Hegelian ‘synthesis’ of historical forces, effected by the Absolute Spirit on horseback, but a rational principle, applicable both to regimes internally and to their external relations, which could stabilize European political societies and the European state system. This principle was legitimacy.

Legitimacy is not simply a matter of longstanding tradition, Burkean prescription, organicism. With Aristotle, Ferrero recognizes the need for deliberation, for reasoning, in legislation. On the other hand, although legitimacy is a human construct it does have a natural foundation—in the character of the deliberating statesman. Further, because human beings by nature have freedom, there can be no social science in the same sense as seen in the physical sciences, no formula for the legislating politician to apply, because no deterministic principles are there to be exploited. In other words, Talleyrand avoided most of the errors on nineteenth-century political life: the traditionalism of the ‘Right,’ which gave too little play to human beings as rational animals; the historical relativism, ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ which denied the existence of human nature altogether; and the increasingly radical positivism, tending toward a rationalist historicism of the ‘Left,’ which expected large socioeconomic forces in effect to take the place of political deliberation, now dismissed as a mere ‘epiphenomenon.’

Ferrero’s Talleyrand also saw that human nature is not simply or entirely free. It has limits—the body, for example, and the requirement of social life that each individual be able to predict, to a considerable degree and while allowing for human freedom—as to how his equally free-willed citizens will act. Hence the need, not for predictive social science, but for law. A statesman is he whose intellectual and moral qualities enable him to legislate for free yet constrained humanity. These qualities are rare. To be effective, laws must be imposed, but they cannot only be imposed; consent is indispensable, and not only in republics. “Moral order is achieved through the self-regulation of each individual conscience, an extremely difficult operation, because, in spite of advice and example, violations of the rules are easily justifiable” (RE 34). Statesmen find a way to put the government into self-governing, really to limit human desire, by bringing intelligence or logos into coordination with courage, or moderated thumos (RE 36). “Self-discipline is the highest form of the constructive mind” (RE 341). Talleyrand saw that “government does not have the right to command because it is strong,” but that it must have the strength to command because it has the right to do so, a right seen philosophically in its justice but seen by non-philosophers in its legitimacy, its lawfulness. “Strength is not the parent, but the servant of the right to command” (RE 51).

Although commercial republicans suspect that only a world of commercial republics can achieve a lasting peace, the Europe of Talleyrand’s day had no serious prospect of such sweeping regime changes—as the disorders of 1848 would prove. It would take two world wars (three, counting the Cold War) to bring all the countries of Europe into more or less the same regime, with the noticeable exception of Russia. The principle of legitimacy, like Aristotelian regime theory, has the attraction of being regime-sensitive without being regime-specific. “Monarchies as well as republics, aristocracies as well as democracies, may be legitimate or illegitimate, according as the principles of law, which justifies power in each of these forms of government, is accepted or refused by those who obey, respected or violated by those who have the right to command” (RE 54). The French Republic, like all revolutionary governments, began without legitimacy. Its founders made the mistake of continuing the revolutionary tactics instead of moving toward winning the legitimacy they needed. The statesmanship of Talleyrand sought to reestablish legitimacy in the existing regimes of Europe. In France, this meant the restoration of the monarchy, but on a new foundation. Divine right no longer had exclusive claim to legitimacy, no longer had the consent of the French (RE 143). Monarchy could rule only in conjunction with elected assemblies, a point Louis XVIII understood, to is credit (RE 58-59, 136-137). As in France, so throughout Europe. Legitimacy in the nineteenth century required a mixture of monarchy and republicanism, under the rule of law. Such legitimacy would enable rulers to rule. It would also enable them to govern interstate relations by mostly nonviolent means. Such principles, though conventional, “limited and reversible, are sacred because they are rational crystallizations of a deep feeling of justice and humanity which alone is strong enough to check the most dangerous abuses of force” and thus to constitute, to some degree, the law of nations (RE 272-273, 333-334). Talleyrand aimed to revive the moderate, Aristotelian mixed regime in modernity, in France, if not throughout the continent.

The Struggle between Legitimacy and Tyranny. The qualified restoration of monarchy—really the restoration of legitimacy—at the Congress of Vienna featured certain grave weaknesses. The attempt to renew even a limited version of divine right failed. The settlement removed the traditional role for the aristocrats, depriving them of any right to rule but also thereby freeing them from obligations either to the middle class or the working class. Aristocrats therefore attached themselves even more firmly to the monarchic courts. That is, the social group which had served as an intermediary social form between the centralizing state and the ‘commoners’ shifted its allegiance decisively to the state. This provoked educated middle classes to form parties, secret societies, and other groups intended to discredit monarchic authority altogether, which would undermine the system of the Congress of Vienna (PPe 31-35). As for the parties of the Left, they “launched an armed revolt against the sovereignty of the people, because it was too conservative,” signifying that “they were the champions of popular sovereignty only on condition that the sovereign people voted for their programs, for their doctrines, and for them” (PPo 120). The revolutions and reactions of 1848-49 registered the underlying instability of the Congress system (PPe 90-91, 107).

Bismarck exploited the “incoherent and inconclusive agitation into which the Continent had fallen after 1848” (PPe 139). Bismarck sought to end disorder within Germany partly by a constructive and statesmanlike project of “social progress,” co-opting the Left, but unfortunately used the Machiavellian means of military force as his main tool (PPe 145; M 275-278). Worse, as the result of his success against a weakened France, “even Republics and Democracies were now to seek in Prussia models for certain institutions, such as universal and compulsory military service and education” (PPe 173, 210-211; see also WD 66). Predictably (on Ferrerian grounds), this led to “the vicious cycle of the German peace,” consisting of “the unlimited rivalry of armaments which was a new phenomenon in history after 1870” (PPe 193). Industrialism added iron to the fires of militarism. In Germany, with its separate military class and its strong but ill-defined ambition to become an imperial power, this conjuncture was especially menacing (PPe 203; M 284-285), resulting finally in the Great War and the disorder leading to the rise of modern or ‘totalitarian’ tyranny. The regime question returned in a far more toxic form.

The New Tyrannies and the Conditions of Legitimacy. As seen in the discussion of Rome, a dictator is a republican magistrate. Dictators such as the early Caesars did not save the Roman republic by virtue of personal heroism; in the case of Augustus, there was no heroism at all (LC 9-12). The republican dictator saves the regime by prudential rule, not by military fireworks. The new so-called dictators of the twentieth century were really tyrants, entirely illegitimate usurpers who ruled by force and fraud (WD 16, 142-143). In Italy, “Mussolini experienced what Bonaparte experienced in 1800 and what every usurper experiences; he was overcome by fear and was unable to form even a quasi-legitimate government; he was obliged to form a revolutionary government” (PPo 275).

Like Bonaparte, and Bonaparte’s fellow revolutionaries, Mussolini’s fear caused him to lay claim to the authority of popular sovereignty while stifling opposition, invoking instead “the divine right of fists” (TFR 214; RE viii; FYF 128). Essentially the same circumstance obtained in Lenin’s Russia. Animated by the false doctrine of dialectical and historical materialism and determinism (PPo 298-300; WD 110-111; UW 140-142), the Bolsheviks swept aside legality, mislabeling it “bourgeois,” and then “replaced the court of the czars [while] retain[ing] its absolute power combined with the right to exterminate all adversaries” (PW 39). the long-range effect of the Great War and the rise of Bolshevism in Russia had been the weakening of the Orthodox Church and the consequent strengthening of Islam, of which the Church had been the “most redoubtable enemy” (WD 153). In each case, disruption of an existing legal system fosters a climate of fear within the political society. Force and the abuse of force in the overthrow and attempted consolidation of the new regime intensifies the fear, bringing about “a morbid excess of energy” as the new rulers frantically seek security (TFR 150-151). The modern state, already too strong, builds up ever more formidable instruments of domination. This in the end undercuts the romantic illusions of the tyrant and his admirers, as the bureaucracy of the state impedes the will of the tyrant (FYF 131). “What [the modern state] lacks is not force, but wisdom, dignity, moderation, justice, moral elevation and, consequently, prestige and authority” (WD 74).

The “revolutionary spirit of the nineteenth century,” played out in the twentieth, “is right when it states that principles of legitimacy are limited, conventional, instable, extremely vulnerable to reason.” But that spirit “is wrong and shows ignorance of [the] world which it periodically devastates, when it confuses these principles with all the other fragile conventions of a civilized society” (PPo 27). These conventional, therefore changeable, but indispensable principles “establish the right to govern and the duty to obey”—ineluctable conditions of human life, because they alone can halt the escalation of fear (PPo 40-41). A regime wins legitimacy, that is, consent, not only in time, by habituation, but by governmental acts that win popular approval—the maintenance of order, prosperity, defense (PPo 141). Legitimacy was never discovered by the ancients, although Rome enjoyed it without fully knowing what it was (PPo 278); in this, Ferrero goes beyond Aristotelianism, which spoke not of the several legitimate regimes but of the several just regimes. Legitimacy became a consciously appreciated principle only with Christianity. Although one might expect Ferrero to point here to Christianity’s need to establish itself as continuous with Jewish law, Ferrero instead looks at marriage; by making marriage a sacrament, “Christianity stabilized the family sufficiently so that a rule of succession for the dynasties could be permanently established” (PPo 148). In non-Western societies, not legitimacy or succession but the deification of the monarch had been invoked; some of these regimes solved the problem of mutual fear between government and subjects by means of “ultramystical philosophies and religions” such as Hinduism, which consoles subjects by denying the reality of the physical world (PPo 279). But in Christendom divine right entailed no divinization, and so no necessary despotism.

Monarchic legitimacy, so conceived, foundered on the problem of virtue. In a legitimate monarchy, “the more weak, incapable, and mediocre the sovereign, the more complete, affirmative, and unreserved must be the official admiration” (PPo 153). Legitimate monarchies too often exposed their noble lie to the charge that the lie protected the ignoble. But at their best, and even at their most ordinary, such regimes protected the people and won popular respect (PPo 54).

Republican legitimacy can also founder on the same problem of virtue. “What guaranty can the sovereign people give that they will be able to choose capable delegates” (PPo 170)? Republics benefit from the monarchies’ priority in time; having proven their own competence dubious, monarchs must mute their complaints about republicanism as “the cult of incompetence,” as Émile Faguet called it. But in order to avoid the increasing danger of elites that reject both forms of legitimacy, Ferrero’s readers are invited to consider ways in which institutions of popular sovereignty might be designed to strengthen rather than undermine consent, “to make it certain that the profound and permanent will of the people will always triumph over its fleeting and capricious will” (UW 91-92, emphasis in original). This leads Ferrero, as it had the American Founders, to the defense of representative government. Without mentioning James Madison, Ferrero calls for institutional safeguards that will give a popularly-based government “time for reflection and self-comprehension” (UW 94)—what Madison’s Publius had called the refinement and enlargement of the public views by representative legislators in deliberative assembly. Also like Madison, Ferrero prefers large and heterogeneous republics; “a radical idea is never acceptable to any but a homogeneous minority; before it can dominate the state, the homogeneous minority must seize control unaided” (UW 192-193).

What group or groups within modern European political societies would advance these sane, but then uncommon, view? Before 1789 the Church had provided an independent moral force (UW 179), and some forty years after Ferrero’s death it would begin to do so again, helping to bring down the decadent empire of Soviet Russia. But in most of Ferrero’s Europe, intellectuals had no independent authority, having tied themselves to the secular state; this is why intellectuals, even socialists, ended by siding with their own nations during the First World War, nationalism having probed to be the obverse of statism except in the hopelessly multi-national, doomed Austrian Empire. In the immediate sense, in the world that prevailed at the end of Ferrero’s life in 1942, the United States, a power outside Europe, would intervene military and then politically, in order to end the European regime impasse. The United States showed the world how to establish legitimacy in a society without hereditary orders. It had also seen itself immensely strengthened but also seriously threatened by the development of “quantitative” civilization (RE xii).

Overall, Ferrero predicted, “we are moving towards a world without directing centers, a world divided into a large number of states, great and small, each of which will exist for its own sake, submitting less and less to the political influence of its neighbors” (UW 56). Republics, particularly, will respond only to financial and intellectual influence; the more republics there are, the less any one country will dominate the others. A certain cosmopolitanism will prevail, as “the world of tomorrow will belong to no ruler” (UW 59) Ferrero published that sentence in 1930, and while bids for world dominance have continued to intrude themselves ever since, his prediction has yet to be falsified.

Conclusion: A Historian in Full. After Ferrero’s death, in the middle of the last war for world domination, the eminent novelist Ignazio Silone remembered the historian’s prediction of the First World War. “In the general optimism” that prevailed in Europe before that war, Ferrero’s “warnings rang like those of a hysterical Cassandra, and he was mocked and derided, especially by his compatriots, but it was not long before events confirmed his words.” The war Ferrero predicted happened. The civilization of quantity did overwhelm the civilization of quality, with results more horrific than even Ferrero foresaw.

Yet Silone criticized Ferrero, with the optimism characteristic of the mid-century Marxists. If Ferrero admittedly had proved a prophet, he was the ineffectual “unarmed prophet” Machiavelli scorns. “Ferrero died in exile, but if truth be told, even in Italy he was already an exile. All his life Ferrero was alone. It can almost be said he was a man born in exile, a man of a bygone age,” an eighteenth-century moralist adrift in the twentieth century. “He lived his life in the closed circle of his dreams.” After all, had not the Communist Party made itself “the new prince” (as Silone’s fellow-Marxist compatriot Antonio Gramsci had styled it), the ruler of the future?

How could a vindicated prophet nonetheless live in a dream world of his own devising? Did he prophesy at random and just get lucky? No: Silone offered an orthodox Marxist explanation. Ferrero’s analysis of the contradictions of modernity, as far as it went, remained on the surface of political life. Ferrero considered only the “superstructure,” not the deeper, socioeconomic infrastructure, of modern life. He missed “the Living” in modernity—the proletarians and other oppressed groups, who one day would rise to conquer the ossified bourgeoisie. “The aristocratic Ferrero” could not see this, ending instead as “the poet of conservative anguish in an epoch of transition.” With his “horror of everything new,” he shrank from life itself; foreseeing the night well enough, he could not foresee the dawn. As a last vestige of a dying class, Ferrero was attuned to decline like a compass to the lodestar, but his intellect pointed only there.

Decades later, it is Silone rather than Ferrero who looks like a museum piece, at least with respect to political-historical prophecy. (Silone’s novels remain, as bread and wine to readers now as then.) Ferrero’s ‘superstructural’ analysis holds up better than Silone’s Marxist profundity. What has the best scholarship on the Left done in recent years, if not, as the saying goes, ‘bring the State back in,’ renew interest both in political institutions and also in political actors, statesmen (the latter under the bloodless term, ‘agency,’ inasmuch as social-scientism dies hard)?  Marx, even Marx’s admirers now agree, is not enough; one needs Weber too, and perhaps much more. Ferrero’s interest in cultural studies also resonates with current interests on the Left, and has the advantage of answering in advance fashionable theories of ‘deconstructionism’ and ‘multiculturalism.’ Deconstruction will not help democrats, Ferrero teaches; it will only disorient them. And whatever multiculturalism may portend, there is nothing in it to upset capitalism, as markets seek breadth, not constraint, even if they do impose their own sort of constraint or ‘market disciplines,’ variously condemned or praised as ‘bourgeois virtues.’

Silone erred in charging that Ferrero feared everything new. Ferrero saw and explained why ‘modernity’ had defeated ‘antiquity.’ He only insisted—and this is a very big ‘only’—that modernity not push its powerful passions too far, insisted that moderns seek to set limits on themselves, ensuring that self-government really govern the self. Otherwise, the freedom of modernity might end in the self-immolation of modernity.

Ferrero practiced his own preachment. He feared for modernity while recognizing fear (or at least fear of men) as the original sin against human life, giving rise to tyranny. He therefore tempered his fear with resistance, resistance to the civilization of quantity, resistance to modern tyranny—a resistance that brought him to live his last decade outside his country. Here Silone is also mistaken, in saying that Ferrero was alone: Alone among his scholarly peers, perhaps—although perhaps not even there, as he had intellectual friends in Switzerland, at Mount Pelerin—but his family was with him, too, and there are hints here and there in his writings that these bonds remained strong. He also had some good students. In the end, many who were with him Switzerland would live on in commercial republics, after the new tyrants, who had lived in dream worlds of domination, died in defeat, their memories detested.

Ferrero writes well-rounded histories, exemplifying in scholarship the balance he commends to political men and to his fellow intellectuals. He coordinates psychological portraiture—ranging from his analyses of the motives of politicians to his somewhat sweeping but still telling critiques of the mindsets encouraged by various philosophic doctrines—with economic conditions, social mores, military events, and political institutions. Except for polemical purposes, it is useless to try to pin such conventional labels as ‘Right’ or ‘Left’ on him. It is fair to call him a liberal, but even those liberals who now call themselves ‘classical liberals’ seldom esteem Aristotle for the reasons Aristotle might have sought to be esteemed.

In the contest between quality and quantity, Ferrero saw the limits of his own authority. “The historian, the moralist, the philosopher, are not authorized to assert that man ought to prefer perfection to power,” he wrote. “Man will be free in the future to resolve the problem as he has in the past, in deciding for one or other of the alternatives. But what the historian, the moralist and the philosopher can, and ought to, say is that it is impossible to want both the two at once; and to seek to increase indefinitely, at the same time, those two good things” (EFH 80). This is true now and always for human beings, as “the blessings of life are mutually allied to one another in different ways; and…if one wishes to enjoy a blessing beyond a certain degree, one must renounce the other which formed its limit” (EFH 66). And so, for example, the desire for ever greater and more intense pleasures, the desire for quantity, may lead to a war of conquest, a war that requires, what, if not the return of the sumptuary laws of antiquity, in the form of rationing, food and fuel stamps, lights out at dusk? And after victory, the tax bill will come due, requiring more work and less free time, including the habit of leisureless vacations.

Ferrero’s lucid writings show surface and depths, and how they mutually shape one another. His lucidity proceeds from his ardent moderation, giving him the rare gift of right predictions, in which the wish is never the father of the thought.