Published in Cogitations, Summer 1984.

 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the exiled Colombian novelist, won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature and delivered the customary acceptance speech in December of that year. In it, he quoted “my master, William Faulkner,” who told the Stockholm audience in his 1950 Nobel address, “I decline to accept the end of man.” “I would feel unworthy of standing in his place that was his,”Garcia Marquez said, “if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize 32 years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility” the power “to annihilate, a hundred times over… the totality of all living beings that have ever drawn breath on this planet of misfortune.” In the face of mass death Garcia Marquez nonetheless “feel[s] entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of…a new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.” In this, he probably intends to echo Faulkner’s celebrated avowal, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”

The echo is a faint one, a distortion of the original voice. In 1950, William Faulkner already understood what Garcia Marquez understands about nuclear weapons. He said, “Our tragedy today is a general and physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” But Faulkner did not feel entitled to oppose the nightmare of nuclear war with the dream of utopia. He did not reply to a mass dilemma with a mass-answer.

Instead, he addressed an individual “the young man or woman writing today.” He urged this writer to remember one thing and forget another. Do not forget, he said, “the human heart in conflict with itself”; it “alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.” But do forget something else: the writer “Must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.” Man will not only endure but prevail “because he has a soul,” a soul capable of apprehending these universal truths. He has that soul now. Human beings do not have to wait for some future utopia for love to “prove true” and “happiness to [be] possible.”

But Garcia Marquez did not want his audience to think that. For an ideological passion rules him, not so much old verities and truths of the heart. It emerges slowly and incompletely from his baroque chambers of oratory. But it does emerge.

Garcia Marquez titled his speech “The Solitude of Latin America.” This solitude arose, he said, because, to the European mind, and perhaps to anyone’s, the reality of Latin America “resembles a venture into fantasy,” even “madness.” In years past, for example, a Mexican dictator “held a magnificent funeral for the right leg he had lost in the so-called Pastry War.” Today, the region has seen thousands of deaths and over a million exiles caused by Rightist governments. “[W]e have had to ask little of our imagination, for our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable. This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.”

Garcia Marquez lists the criminal governments: Paraguay, Argentina, Somozist Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay. Not Cuba, however, which has produced more than its share of the dead and the exiled in the last 25 years. Not Sandinist Nicaragua. Not leftist terrorism. Garcia Marquez–shall we say?–forgot them.

But not entirely. To end Latin American solitude, Europeans should “see us in [their] own past,” which is no less bloody and bizarre. “Why not think,” Garcia Marquez asked, “that the social justice sought by progressive Europeans for their own countries cannot also be a goal for Latin America, with different methods for dissimilar conditions?” He was not so crude as to describe those methods, asking only that Europeans not forget “the fruitful excesses of their youth.”

Surely they should not. Nor should we forget that we shall know a tree by its fruits. Garcia Marquez evidently prefers that we not look too hard at the fruits of the Latin American Left’s fruitful excesses. Judge our Rightist past and present according to its mad reality, he advises; understand our Leftist present and future according to its utopian promises.

In speaking propaganda to the mass of Europeans, Garcia Marquez ‘forgot’ what Faulkner wanted individuals to remember: the human soul, here and now, permanently. The soul would be inconvenient for Garcia Marquez to remember. It would dim his pretentious vision of utopias built by “by different methods for different conditions.” It would muffle his appeal to the fear of violent death, which he hopes will make his audience go along with the scam. Garcia Marquez will deceive only those who cannot forget the baseness of fear because they never learned that the basest of all things is to be afraid.

Jaffa, Harry V., ed.: Statesmanship: Essays in Honor of Sir Winston Churchill. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1981.

Thompson, Kenneth W.: Winston Churchill’s World View: Statesmanship and Power. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983.

 

The oldest and best written constitution, the United States Constitution, will continue to receive careful study as long as regimes of liberty survive. It is a commonplace to say that American institutions work so well that they nearly obviate the need for statesmen. For many political scientists, studying American institutions has seemed a more serious task than studying American politicians.

It is also commonplace to admit that even the United States needs statesmanship on occasion. Englishmen, favored with one of the oldest and best unwritten constitutions, found a statesman in their midst near the beginning of the last century. It took them nearly four decades to decide what to do with him, and even then they had second thoughts. Americans might do no better, given the chance. Perhaps we need to study statesmanship with as much care as we study institutions. Harry V. Jaffa and Kenneth W. Thompson evidently think so.

Jaffa addresses political scientists in his collection’s first essay, titled “On the Necessity of a Scholarship of the Politics of Freedom.” The “politics of freedom” may not seem to relate directly to the practice of statecraft; it sounds as if it concerns the activities of ordinary citizens or ordinary politicians. It does, but as Jaffa also shows, it is by studying the practice of statecraft by great politicians, statesmen, that we most directly confront the issue of freedom. The denigration of statesmanship bespeaks “certain false opinions concerning the nature of man,” particularly the denial of “man’s metaphysical freedom” seen in the Bible, wherein God endows His creature with the capacity to obey or to disobey, and in the classics, which define human beings as rational and political. Too many classes in modern psychology, by contrast, “are courses in mini-tyranny, in which self-respect, as well as respect for others, is undermined” by teachings based on determinism, “the ground of despotism.” Determinism reduces happiness to ‘subjectivity,’ makes it a matter of feelings; but if that is all happiness is, and if “people who think they are free and equal think they are happier than those who think they are unfree and unequal, then the first priority of all public policy must be to make people think that they are free and equal”—the strategy of tyrannies ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’ With the refinement of genetic engineering, such tyrannies will perfect a political science whereby the engineers (conveniently exempting themselves from the strictures of determinism) shape docile herds to serve them.

Before the advent of any such exacting sociobiological science, the vehicle for determinism in politics had been the doctrine of historicism—the claim that ‘History,’ defined as the course of events, operates according to the sort of strict and knowable laws physicists have discovered. The example of Churchill defies historicism. Churchill exemplified the statesman who, empowered to take extraordinary action, shows to what extent a human being can act freely in politics in defense of freedom for his fellow citizens. “As a writer no less than as a maker of history, Churchill understood, as few who have either written or made history have done, the difference between wisdom in and wisdom after the event.” We can see this difference only if we “make clear what is known, and what could be known, by those called upon to act.” A wise action may or may not end well; “there is genuine indeterminacy in the nature of things”—an indeterminacy caused above all by the partial freedom of human beings who deliberate and choose their course of action, within the constraining circumstances of place, men, and materiel.

Churchill’s official biographer, Martin Gilbert, argues that Churchill’s character enabled him to think realistically about that most harshly ‘deterministic’ human thing, war. From the outset of his career, Churchill ranked character above intelligence as the foundation of a political life. If a politician works at steadying his own nerves, not only will he more likely be honest but he will better represent the British people themselves. In 1901, he wrote that the British do not panic. “The London clubs may hum with excitement, the political wire pullers may be perfectly frantic, the Stock Exchange may be in hysterics, but old John Bull is a very stolid person,” one whom the government should take into its confidence. The motto Churchill put at the beginning of his memoir of the Second World War—”In War, Resolution; In Defeat, Defiance; In Victory, Magnanimity; In Peace, Goodwill” was first suggested by him to a French town in 1919, which had asked him to write an inscription for its war memorial. Noting that the suggestion was rejected at the time, Gilbert observes that “Magnanimity in victory was not a theme popular in France, or indeed in Britain, in 1919.” But magnanimity or greatness of soul, the virtue that enables one not so much to forgive an injury as to absorb it and refuse to return it (a fine thing in victory, if not in war itself), opens the only sure way to peace in the aftermath of war. As to war itself, Gilbert refutes the charge made against Churchill both during his lifetime and afterward, that he was a warmonger keening for conflict. On the contrary, from well before the First World War and throughout the controversies to follow, Churchill regarded the prospect of any European war with what might be described as unflinching aversion: Such a war would be ruinous, but only firm preparation for war stood a chance of preserving the peace. Both the lesson of unfearful preparedness and of magnanimity in victory finally sank in to the minds of British and commercial-republican politicians generally after the second cataclysm.

Jaffa returns to examine Churchill’s character and its relation to the question of freedom in the next essay.  “A world made by tides and tendencies, and not by wisdom and virtue, is a world [Churchill] repudiates. He does not really say that it does not exist; on the contrary, he finds that is the kind of world which, in ever increasing measure, we find ourselves inhabiting. But he does not accept it; he will not accept it.” Churchill “asserts… categorically the absolute disjunction of modern scientific progress and intrinsic human well-being.” Scientific progress does not and cannot address the virtues that alone conduce to freedom; it reduces the idea of human well-being to material conditions, whether they be comfort, pleasure, or the social level which eases our feelings of envy by eliminating the enviable. “Human beings rise above the level of beasts, above all because they accept responsibility for their actions. They are responsible, not for the success or failure of those actions, but for their goodness or badness.” Modern science measures success by progress in “plac[ing] the future wholly within [the] power” of human beings; for it, nothing succeeds like success. This leads to the destructive utopianism of modern tyrannies ‘Left’ and ‘Right,’ but also the stultifying uniformity of bureaucratic rule unrelieved by statesmanship, which weighs chance and necessity against the courageous and prudent actions of those who take responsibility for their political community. “To end human error and human evil, by employing collective foreknowledge implies, not perfecting the human condition but ending it, by returning it to the primeval condition that preceded Creation.” This explains the abysmal failure of Marxism, the attempt to combine science and politics to remake human nature. It also explains the failure of the commercial republics in the past 100 years or so, whose ‘behavioral scientists’ undermine the virtues needed to maintain commerce and republicanism by denying the existence of human freedom. Both Marxist and behaviorists would have us attain desired ends as it were automatically. But “virtue would not be virtue if its ends were always gained.”

Churchill learned some of this from reading things close to hand in his England: the dramas of Shakespeare. In “On War and Legitimacy in Shakespeare’s Henry V,” Marlo Lewis, Jr. writes on the only Shakespearean play in which “war pervade[s] every scene and touch[es] every character”—a play which thus spoke directly to a statesman whose public life encompassed the two great wars of the twentieth century and several smaller ones. As for legitimacy, Churchill attempted not only to defend but to re-found the British regime in opposition to certain manifestations of modern ideology, particularly the modern tyrannies. What is “the nexus between war and legitimacy”? After all, the means of attaining the power needed to found a regime are not usually the means of obtaining legitimacy, lawful authority. At the same time, legitimacy, “the right to be obeyed,” is itself “a source of power” and, conversely, power often inclines the unspirited and powerless toward believing the possessor of power legitimate.

Religious as well as political implications abound here, and Lewis discusses them with admirable shrewdness. Recalling the character of Richard II, who deposed and murdered a legitimate king in the “mistaken belief that divine appointment [made] him self-sufficient”—itself a contradiction, inasmuch as divine appointment, if real, would make him radically dependent upon the Lord of Lords—Richard careened toward tyranny and eventual destruction. This tension may be seen in the troubled relations between Church and State, generally: Even as political men often seize power but want legitimacy, churchmen stand for legitimacy but want the power to defend their property. In Henry V, a king and a churchman attempt to solve these complementary problems by prosecuting and sanctioning an unjust foreign war, the better to unify England’s new regime and to assure the place of the Church within it—a place that includes Church property, the security of which depends upon State protection just as much as the legitimacy of the State depends upon the divine sanction the Church alone interprets. But if the Church will sanction a foreign war, the king will refrain from seizing Church lands. Henry thus chooses oppression of France over oppression of the English Church. “The playwright seems to suggest that one very effective way of establishing trust and mutual forbearance among the members of one’s own group is by implicating them in a common crime against outsiders.” Lewis notes that “every generation is new” and a “profound sense of civic obligation disappears unless the kind of experience which originally produced it is recreated.” One might consider the profound usefulness to the British regime of Churchill’s warlike actions, although it would be wrong to call his wars unjust.

Be that as it may, even after the unifying, unjust yet legitimating war, “princes cannot relax,” lest they become “complacent and predictable,” “easy target[s] for a lean and tough adversary.” They must renew the regime “through the kind of extra-legal, extra-moral action by which it originally disestablished the previous legitimate power”; in this sense, “man is compelled to sin.” Lewis’s rather Machiavellian Shakespeare finds Biblical teachings useful but ultimately dangerous. “England’s conquest and annexation of France proved disastrous to her real interests”—a disaster caused by the tendency of the Christian doctrine of providence “to divorce foreign policy from any conception of the public good which can be ascertained through the give and take of political debate.” Appeals to divine providence not only increase State dependence upon the Church (which can be counterbalanced by the State’s power over Church property, as the Tudors had demonstrated) but incline men to interpret victory in war as a sign of divine approval; “faith in providence leads to worship of success.” This gives clever and ambitious usurpers a useful cloak for their daggers, inasmuch as their success will find approval among the pious people who “believe in the providential character” of that success. Lewis wittily concludes, “If the absence of providence makes continual refounding necessary, the belief in providence makes it possible.” This belief is good news for the bad, bad news for the legitimate (more precisely legitimized) prince.

In the opinion of many of our contemporaries, the closest Churchill came to advocating unjust wars was in his long and vigorous defense of the British Empire. Kirk Emmert shows how this defense contributed to the statesman’s perennial task of refounding. Although “torn between his commitment to virtue and his commitment to liberty and to the democratic regime of liberty”—that is, between commitments to the classical and the modern—Churchill “finally preferred aristocratic virtue to democratic freedom.” Emmert affirms that Churchill scarcely neglected the material advantages of empire, including the extension of tariff-free markets around the world and the spur imperialism gave to British naval power, both of which ensured great-power status for a small, island country. Nor does he ignore Lewis’s point, that (in Emmert’s words) “successful empires must act in much the same way as a tyrant.” But unlike the conquest of France, the imperial conquests Churchill defended were conquests of uncivilized peoples—uncivilized not in the sense of lacking richly textured and ancient cultures but in the sense of lacking the advantages of modernity itself, from such simple but vital matters as sanitation and hygiene to well-organized governments ruling by discussion, not force alone, by covenants faithfully honored, by respect for soldiers, and by hatred of causing human suffering. A “limited and civilizing empire,” not self-aggrandizing conquest, develops the distinctively human virtues in both rulers and ruled. Although in ancient times virtue required the small polis, in modernity, with its “mass society,” “only imperial powers are of sufficient magnitude to provide scope for the most splendid and demanding forms of moral and human excellence. Only at the head of an extensive empire can the truly great-souled man have his day. Without empire, ‘rightly understood,’ democracy might not warrant the devotion of a Churchill. Perhaps worse, it might not even produce one. In reply to anti-imperialists, Churchill maintained (again in Emmert’s words) that “the right to liberty is subordinate to the obligation to improve; the right to self-government is derivative from the ability to govern one’s self properly.” Governing one’s self properly requires “a coherent political community” with members who moderate their physical and thumotic desires sufficiently to enable reasonable moral judgments to guide them. Churchill had also absorbed a teaching of Locke, namely, that the commerce civilization entails redirects the passions for war and religious fanaticism toward peaceful pursuits; the British Empire required religious toleration within its borders. These are all sobering duties imposed upon imperial rulers by themselves, and very much in accordance with Jaffa’s observations on Churchill’s morality of responsibility. “By requiring for its continued existence a high level of moral and civic virtue from some, and to a lesser degree from all, of its citizens, and by giving the public stamp of approval to these men and to the virtues they embodied, the Empire kept alive for the general citizenry a fuller view of human excellence than would have otherwise survived in a modern mass society.” Thus “empire civilizes democracy” itself.

The military policies Churchill pursued in defense of the Empire and its home island exemplified this civilizing intent very directly by subordinating military strategy to civil (which is to say political) aims. Wayne C. Thompson and Jeffrey D. Wallin each contributes an essay showing the way Churchill did this, with Thompson focusing on the army and Wallin on the navy. In this, Thompson remarks, Churchill followed the example of his great, much older German contemporary, Otto von Bismarck (and before him, the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz) who, though scarcely republicans, insisted on war as an instrument limited by political objectives. Faced with the derangement of German politics after the fall of Bismarck and vastly increased military control of the regime, Churchill steadfastly reminded his countrymen, many of them enthusiasts of arms control treaties, that “armaments are in most cases primarily a reflection of or response to existing tensions.” “I have always been against the Pacifists during the quarrel and against the Jingoes at its close,” Churchill said.

For his part, Wallin explains and defends Churchill’s earliest severe setback, the failure of his plan to end the First World War by launching a naval expedition through the Strait of the Dardanelles, preparatory to attacking Germany from the south and thereby breaking the deadlock on the Western front. “The real issue” facing British military planners was “the political-strategic one of where to deploy the naval resources of the realm.” In general, naval officers didn’t want to use their forces in an offensive operation, regarding an impregnable defense of the island and the shipping lanes that supplied it as their preeminent task. They had no relish for deploying substantial forces at so considerable a distance. If there were to be any naval attack on Germany at all, it should aim at the north of Germany, a shorter distance. The expedition failed because the navy allowed their prophecy of doom to become self-fulfilling by undertaking it with inadequate firepower. Churchill was blamed for the failure because he was not only the chief advocate of the plan but political expendable.

The book’s focus next shifts to Great Britain’s domestic policies in the decade before the war. Steven A. Maaranen presents and assesses the ideological assumptions behind the foreign policy of the British Left. Although British conservatives deserve and receive much of the blame for the government’s lethargic and cowardly response to Hitler throughout most of the 1930s, a mixture of fear and utopian hope—what Maaranen too generously calls “the political and philosophic thought of the Left”—contributed its share to the disaster. One must say that although Churchillian imperialism might school men in courage and moderation, evidently the actual British imperialism failed to produce a sufficient number of Churchillian imperialists of any ideological stripe. The essay proves informative, inasmuch as so many of these political figures are quite understandably forgotten now, although the ‘type’ persists, and not only in Britain. In the minds of British leftists, ideology replaced balance-of-power and “national interest calculations” when debating foreign policy. “The desire to make actual a utopian order—the ‘new world order’ as they called it—helped give direction to British foreign policy development during the 1930s.” By abolishing the old world order, founded on capitalism, “a fundamental transformation of human nature” would result, enabling all nations to disarm and live in peace with one another. The wish being the father of the policy, the British Left displayed an “unwillingness even to consider any course other than international settlement,” especially since they sincerely believed that the historical march towards socialism to be the inevitable result of irresistible economic forces.

But as fascism persisted and expanded more rapidly than democratic socialism, socialists split between pacifists and those who saw the need to resist the Right with force. The experience of the Spanish Civil War and the Popular Front coalition with Communist Party militants tipped much of the British Left against pacifism, although some stalwarts remained true to the original vision. Maaranen profiles three prominent figures: James Maxton, George Lansbury, and Stafford Cripps. “Essentially Marxist, in its somewhat softened British-socialist version,” Maxton’s ideological stance led him to conceive of foreign relations in apolitical terms; he held nations and states to be “but one aspect of the dialectic between classes which transcends territorial boundaries.” He hoped the class struggle could proceed non-violently, but events overtook his dreams, as the regimes of Germany and Italy proved more dangerous than capitalism. Somewhat contradictorily, he continued to claim that the victory of Nazi Germany in a European war would be no worse for mankind than the victory of the republics. George Lansbury, a Christian-Socialist pacifist, supposed that “man, through the omnipotence of modern science, could [now] do for himself what hitherto he had asked God to do for him.” He remained a strict pacifist to the end of his life. Cripps distinguished himself from the utopians by refusing to assume that theory and practice can be fully reconciled. Means really are subordinate to ends, and therefore governments must at times choose means (for example, war) that are less desirable than the end pursued (for example, peace). Cripps failing is primarily that he chose an impossible objective for which to work; he sought “the final solution to the political problem” in socialism, even as he recommended prudent and moderate means for getting there. Maaranen surveys these several failures and concludes that “the utopianism of modern ideology, with regard either to means or ends, theory or practice, destroys men of goodwill no less than those who are evil.”

Churchill made war on Germany and allied his country with France, Soviet Russia, and the United States. The remaining essays concern statesmanship relating to Churchill’s allies. Angelo M. Codevilla considers Charles de Gaulle, rightly defining “the primordial problem of modern politics” as “how to cause men who are immediately and primarily interested in their own preservation and gratification to subordinate themselves to a common purpose and, if called upon, to give their lives in its pursuit.” De Gaulle undertook to overcome this problem by an appeal to French patriotism. Oddly, he does not much consider de Gaulle’s relations with Churchill during the war, which consisted of an alliance often rocked by disputes over what de Gaulle considered as British encroachments on French colonial territories (and what Churchill, for his part, considered as necessary military incursions aimed not at British self-aggrandizement but at pursuing German forces in the Middle East). Codevilla focuses instead on de Gaulle’s actions as president of the Fifth Republic, which he founded in 1958. He describes de Gaulle’s adroit, harsh dealings with French colonists in Algeria, but without noticing that de Gaulle’s insistence on French self-government would have been inconsistent with continued French imperial rule over other peoples. Codevilla also criticizes the centerpiece of de Gaulle’s domestic policy, “participation,” which he confuses with crony capitalism, although dirigiste economic development was only one element of it, and not the most important one. “The de Gaulle Republic was simply not engaged in any enterprise of the kind which once brought joy and tears, and nurtured love of country, in the hearts of young men,” as it had in de Gaulle himself, in his own youth. Presumably,  Codevilla means French imperialism and its mission civilisatrice. This criticism ignores the atmosphere of anti-patriotism fostered in the French universities by such leftist ideologues as Jean-Paul Sartre and his circle, culminating in the riots of 1968. De Gaulle faced them down, but his 1969 referendum, which would have enhanced “participation” on the political front by giving the provinces more power in the central government, failed at the polls; de Gaulle, who had threatened to resign if the referendum vote went wrong, proved a man of his word and did just that. The essay’s final section is marred when Codevilla mistranslates a Gaullist description of Soviet communism, misattributes a question on life’s meaning to de Gaulle (Malraux asks it, de Gaulle only repeated it), and misinterprets a Gaullist statement on modern individualism, making it appear to be an endorsement of modern individualism.

Edward J. Erler approaches another wartime ally, the Soviet Union, through the lens of its greatest critic, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, praised by Jaffa earlier in the volume as Churchill’s worthy successor, not in statecraft but in literature. If the Roman Catholicism of Thomas Aquinas may be described as a combination of Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy, the Orthodox Christian thinkers often combine Christianity with Platonism, or Neo-Platonism. Problems arise in Russia when Russians forget Platonic irony, what Erler calls “Plato’s cosmic humor.” Karl Marx’s “German gravity” precluded any but the heaviest, polemical use of irony, and “the world has paid a terrible price for this singular lack of humor,” quite apart from the grim atheism Marxism brought with it. Solzhenitsyn sees brutality as “a necessary and inexpungable ingredient of an ideology which attempts to translate theory directly into practice.” The philosophy which “has as its core some notion of progressive history” has served as “the greatest cause of dehumanization that has ever existed.” It undermines both the universal human tendency to love one’s own country and the idea of a human nature that exists in every country, and is also loveable. Russian Orthodoxy in Solzhenitsyn’s understanding avoided the problems seen in the England of Henry V and of George Lansbury, a Christianity whose “universal perspective forces a nation to be outward looking and self-forgetting.” By contrast, “Russian Orthodoxy from the beginning assimilated the formalism of Russian tradition in such a way that Christianity strengthened, rather than weakened, that tradition.” Marxist ideology, as universalistic as Christianity but lacking the Christian distinction between what is possible on earth and what is possible in Heaven, led to a tyranny far worse than anything seen during the England of Henry’s time. “The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses”—at home, at least—”because they had no ideology.” For Russia, Solzhenitsyn recommends not liberal republicanism, which had lost its way in moral relativism and hedonism, but initially a regime of authoritarianism limited by law, turning inward in spiritual and moral renewal, then followed by gradual liberalization and democratization, but always guided by Russian Orthodox Christianity. “Orthodoxy is the antithesis of ideology.” In the decades since Erler wrote this essay, Russia has seen the rise of Vladimir Putin, who gives lip service to a strategy along these lines, although he has also left room for considerable doubt about whether he balances his Russian nationalism with a serious commitment to Russian Christianity.

In the two concluding essays, Jaffa returns to consider Churchill’s relations with his other great wartime ally, the United States. The first addresses the longstanding charge that Churchill deliberately allowed the American ship Lusitania to enter an area patrolled by German submarines, which attacked and sank it, bringing the Americans one step closer to entering the war on the British side. Jaffa’s refutation exemplifies the principles of Churchillian historiography Jaffa commended in his introductory essay. He uses the conspiracy theories to illustrate a more general point: “The detraction of the great has become a passion for those who cannot suffer greatness, and will not have it believed.” Such envy may be, “to a degree, an unavoidable perversion of the principle that all men are created equal,” but “the cause of democratic freedom cannot survive unless it is opposed and checked.” In his second essay Jaffa praises Franklin D. Roosevelt for “maneuvering the Japanese into firing the first shot” at the United States in 1941, thus embroiling Americans in a just war they did not want to enter. “[T]his was his finest hour.”

This amounts to saying that Roosevelt had a geopolitical strategy and implemented it shrewdly. Throughout his long career, Churchill never lacked a strategy. In his book, Kenneth W. Thompson relates Churchill’s several strategies to his overall understanding of the way the world works—no easy task, in view of the sheer volume of Churchill’s writings and the scope and multitude of his actions. In considering the question of why so many wanted peace but got war, Churchill famously said, “They had no plan.”

Thompson finds today’s opinions about peace and war disorderly, a jumble of improvisation, naïve empiricism (“piling facts on facts”), and equally naïve utopianism. The concatenation of these opinions yields such trivial dualities as ‘optimism’ vs. ‘pessimism,’ ‘moralism’ vs. ‘cynicism,’ and ‘internationalism’ vs. ‘isolationism.’ In contrast, Churchill understood that “the essence of politics requires men to choose goals and objectives which are fragmented and limited”—”lesser evils.” “Only in pure thought can policies and actions remain uncorrupted.” Courage and practical wisdom animated both Churchill’s character and what Thompson calls Churchill’s “philosophy.” The immediate purpose of Churchill’s courage and practical wisdom was the quest for British security and power; British security and power resisted tyranny, preserved British manners, customs, laws, and traditions which were, on balance, quite good in light of the attainable characteristics of human nature. In his resistance to utopian fantasies, Churchill understood political life generally and statesmanship particularly “in the tradition of the British philosopher Edmund Burke.”

Burkean statesmanship has achieved its justifiable fame for its noble failures. Thompson seems to blame mass politics for this; democracy has defeated aristocracy. “The great, good-hearted and collectively shrewd” democratic citizenry “can succeed in distinguishing the truth only with immense difficulty.” The realistic statesman must therefore cast his policies “in moralistic molds,” an effort he will find “demeaning” “in a certain sense.” Patriotism is the usual sentiment evoked by such statesmen. Yet Thompson chooses as his example of Churchill’s noble failure the proposal to attack Nazi Germany through the Balkans, what he called “the soft underbelly of Europe.” Not democratic citizens as a whole but democratic citizens resisted this proposal, which reminded them of the failed Dardanelles expedition of the First World War. Thompson thus suggests that certain politicians obstruct statesmen more than ordinary citizens do.

Thompson therefore would educate future politicians to aspire to, or at least defer to, statesmanship. They first must know what it is, and recognize it when they see it. Politicians have failed to do either one because they persist in imagining “the bright signs of inevitable progress” in “repeated tragedies, conflicts, and failures.” Modern science, at best an “essentially… amoral or neutral force” in Churchill’s estimation, mesmerized almost all of his contemporaries. “Democracy and science, which had been heralded as solutions to war, have increased its intensity and ferocity.” “[F]or Churchill war constituted the ultimate human problem,” a problem modern ideologists exacerbate while trying to solve.

Unlike Jaffa, Thompson proceeds not further into philosophy but to Churchill’s statecraft and to the advice we may derive from it. Two examples will suffice. Far from quailing at the prospect of nuclear holocaust, Churchill rightly judged nuclear weapons as reducing the risk of another world war. In 1950 (as the Korean War raged) he told Parliament, “There never was a time when the deterrents against war”—meaning war among the major powers—”were so strong.” And on postwar European geopolitics Churchill observed, also in 1950: “It is indeed a melancholy thought that nothing preserves Europe from an overwhelming military except the devastating resources of the United States in this awful [thermonuclear] weapon. That is the present time the sole deterrent against… Communist invasion. No wonder the Communists would like to ban in in the name of peace.” By reminding us of this trenchant statement, Thompson may cause us to reflect that just as a philosopher begins with wonder, the statesman must encourage citizens to deliberate on circumstances and then say, “no wonder.”

 

 

William G. Andrews: Presidential Government in Gaullist France: A Study in Executive-Legislative Relations 1958-1974. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Originally published in the American Political Science Review, Volume 77, Number 4, December 1983.

 

Mesmerized by de Gaulle, one forgets the French. Even more easily, one forgets their elected representatives in the National Assembly. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was caught between a laugh and a gasp at “the Emperor of the French” who combined traits of Louis XIV, Napoleon I, and “a little of Napoleon III, as regards the management of a so-called Parliament” [Macmillan: Pointing the Way, New York: Harper and Row, 1972, 427]. Interpreting Gaullism as an elective monarchy retains its popularity (as well as a generous measure of inaccuracy) even today.

Andrews would “correct the exaggerated perception of executive dominance that has marked so much of the literature” on executive-legislative elations in Gaullist France. Scholarly in the best sense, his book qualifies rather than assaults received opinion.

The first and best of the book’s three parts concerns Gaullist institutions as described in the 1958 constitution and as used during the de Gaulle and Pompidou administrations. Recognizing that de Gaulle’s founding of the Fifth Republic did not stop immediately after the ink dried, Andrews shows how the document appeared more favorable to parliamentarism than the regime was in practice. He wants to prove the constitution “solidly parliamentary in design” (vii); at most he proves that if it was parliamentary it was not solidly parliamentary. But in doing so, he shows better than anyone—including de Gaulle himself—the subtlety of de Gaulle’s statesmanship during the early years of the regime, a statesmanship that combined largely meaningless, private assurances to parliamentary elites with careful public avoidance of the word ‘parliamentary.’ If the book fails here, it is a failure more instructive than many another book’s banal success.

The second part concerns law. In it, Andrews would prove that “constitutional provisions designed to transfer authority from the more parliamentary to the presidential components of the system had relatively little effect” (101). De Gaulle had no need to override or evade the national Assembly’s legislative power because he had a Gaullist majority there. Andrews concedes that during the period of “full powers” de Gaulle imposed laws “that virtually revolutionized French life” (131); he also concedes that the prospect of a return to such unmitigated Gaullist authority might well have moderated the parliamentarians. When Andrews writes that “Parliament was relatively restrained, not by necessity but by choice, not by oppression but by common interest and general accord with the Executive” (154-155), he regards such behavior as evidence of increased cohesiveness in French society. But he is also describing a well-designed regime with an executive branch ruled by a prudent statesman.

The third part concerns the relation of French “politics” to French “society,” with some considerations of the political and the social in “democratic” regimes generally. Andrews rightly observes that the political regime of democracy—particularly a democracy that protects individual liberty—by definition allows society to control the government. He suggests that, under democracy, a relatively cohesive society will usually comport with a strong executive, whereas a relatively fragmented society will usually comport with parliamentarism. He contends that society under democracy dominates not only any written constitution but statesmen as well—even a de Gaulle. But perhaps Gaullist republicanism, less monarchic than Macmillan charged, partakes of democracy less than Andrews says it does. Debates over ‘society’ versus ‘politics’ often tend toward circularity; this one might be straightened by an attempt to imagine the French, and France, without de Gaulle.

Andrews prefers more verifiable thoughts than that. In pursuing them, he has gathered useful information that had been scattered, discussing it soberly and with care. His book will be a guidepost for those who set out “in search of France”—which, de Gaulle insisted, is not to be confused with the French.