Dante Alighieri: Monarchy. Prue Shaw translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

 

The author of the Divine Comedy practiced politics. As Prue Shaw writes in her incisive introduction, in the 1290s and early 1300s he served among the six priors who ruled Florence and as an ambassador on a mission to the vulpine Pope Boniface VIII, “whose aggressive and duplicitous intervention in the affairs of Dante’s native city threatened its independence and stability.” It was while serving on that mission that a rival faction within his Guelf Party, acting in alliance with the pope, falsely accused Dante of corruption and had him “condemned to death at the stake should he ever return.” Dante the political thinker profited from the exile of Dante the politician, as he now began extensive travels throughout Italy, “observing at first hand the devastating effects of factional intrigue and papal meddling in temporal affairs”; in effect, exile induced him to study what academics today call ‘comparative politics’ in addition to concentrating his mind on what political philosophers call ‘the theologico-political question.’ Shaw remarks that there is some tension between these tasks, as the Monarchy dwells mostly on the latter at the expense of the former. Dante asks his reader to think primarily about first principles; he is no Montaigne or Tocqueville. As she observes, Dante mentions historians in passing while “the poets are quoted verbatim.”

Shaw additionally calls attention to an important structural feature of the book. “In each book the most important argument is placed right at the center, physical centrality reflecting intellectual weight and cogency.” Indeed, “the treatise may have been planned by Dante around a numerical model, the mathematical shaping and ordering principles which underlie reality itself built into the very structure of the text,” with the tripartite division “echo[ing] not only the structure of the Trinity but also that of the syllogism (three terms, one argument; three propositions, one conclusion.” 

Book One consists of sixteen sections. In the first section he appeals to “Higher Nature,” nature in the mind of the First Mover—the idea of nature which precedes the creation of nature itself. Dante’s stated intention parallels, on the human level, the universality of Higher Nature: “I wish not just to put forth buds but to bear fruit for the benefit of all, and to reveal truths that have not been attempted by others” (I.i). [1] Specifically, “among the truths which are hidden and useful, a knowledge of temporal monarchy is both extremely useful and most inaccessible”; “no one has attempted to elucidate it” because it does not lead “directly to material gain” (I.i). In so doing, Dante seeks not material gain but “glory”—trusting, however, “not so much in my own powers as in the light of that giver who [in the words of I Corinthians] ‘giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not'” (I.i). To counterbalance the universal power of the Papacy, then, Dante will propose a universal temporal monarchy, taking care to invoke the same source of wisdom the pope claims to tap.

Dante means “temporal” literally. The secular emperor would have authority over things “measured by time” (I.ii). Is such a universal monarchy “necessary to the well-being of the world”? (I.ii). When the ancient Romans ordained such an emperor, did they act “by right”? (I.ii). And does the monarch’s authority “derive directly from God or from someone else,” such as the pope? (I.ii). Finally, what is the first principle of Dante’s inquiry?

He addresses the last question first, distinguishing between things beyond human control, about which we can only theorize, and things concerning which we can both theorize and act. Following Aristotle, he remarks that we theorize about things within human control “not for the sake of theory,” not only to satisfy our wonder, but to take action (I.ii). Political actions number among those things human beings control; this treatise therefore aims at action, primarily. Action aims at end, a telos. “Whatever constitutes the purpose of the whole of human society (if there is such a purpose) will be here the first principle” (I.ii).

All human things have a purpose. The parts of the human body serve the purpose of the “whole person”; similarly, households, tribes, cities, kingdoms, and “the whole of mankind” have purposes (I.iii). “In the intention of its creator qua creator the essential nature of any created being is not an ultimate end in itself; the end is rather the activity which is proper to that nature” (I.iii). The activity “specific to humanity as a whole” is to strive for “the highest potentiality of mankind,” the fulfillment of its nature (I.iii). This follows from the definition of human beings as rational animals; “the highest potentiality of mankind is his intellectual potentiality or faculty,” and “since that potentiality cannot be fully actualized all at once in any one individual or in any one of the particular social groupings enumerated above, there must needs be a vast number of individual people in the human race, through whom the whole of this potentiality can be realized” (I.iii). This activity isn’t limited to the perception of “universal ideas or classes,” to theoretical activity, but to particulars, to matters of “doing and making,” actions “regulated by political judgment, and its products, which are shaped by practical skill” (I.iii). All of these practical arts “are subordinate to thinking as the best activity for which the Primal Goodness brought mankind into existence,” and is consistent with Aristotle’s “statement in the Politics that ‘men of vigorous intellect naturally rule over others'” (I.iii)—a statement Aristotle doesn’t explicitly make in the Politics, as Shaw duly notes, but which is more or less in line with his definition of the best form of kingship.

Aristotle refers, however, to a just king ruling over a polis, not a universal monarch. There is no notion of a universal monarch in Aristotle, despite the attempts of Alexander the Great, whom he is said to have taught. Aristotle locates human flourishing in particular regimes ruling particular (and fairly small) sovereign political communities. It isn’t clear that he would regard a world empire (if feasible) as genuinely political at all, and therefore as genuinely conducive to the flourishing of a rational and political animal. Between Aristotle and Dante, Christianity has intervened, and especially the Christian church or assembly, then ruled by its monarch, the pope. If politics strictly speaking consists of ruling and being ruled, of reciprocity, then Dante evidently responds to the advent of Christianity, the universal assembly of God ruled on earth by one monarch, by proposing a parallel monarchy aimed at restoring the reciprocity of political life on the much grander scale now envisioned by the Catholic Church. The Church’s monarch and the temporal monarch would recapitulate the relationship of the husband and the wife in Aristotle’s understanding of the household, who share rule, ruling reciprocally—the definition of political rule proper. [2]

In practical terms, then, if “the activity proper to mankind considered as a whole is constantly to actualize the full intellectual potential of humanity, primarily through thought and secondarily through action (as a function and extension of thought)” then the aim of this “almost divine” activity is “the calm or tranquility of peace,” the “universal peace [which] is the best of those things which are ordained for our human happiness,” as exemplified by the Christian blessing, “Peace be with you” (I.iv). This is because peace follows from the activity of the intellect, the human power which aims at what Aristotle identifies as the human end, eudaimonia or happiness. [3]

Having established the first principle of his inquiry, Dante recurs the first of his questions: Is temporal monarchy necessary for the well-being of the world? It is: “When a number of things are ordered to a single end, one of them must guide or direct, and the others be guided or directed” (I.v). In the individual person this is the intellectual faculty, reason; in the family it is the pater familias; in the city it is its politeuma, its ruling body; in a kingdom it is its king (as a kingdom divided against itself will not stand); in the world it must be an emperor. In Aristotle, a ruling body might be one, few, or many, and any of these might be good or bad. Considering the papacy, a monarchy with universal claims, Dante prefers a temporal monarch as its counterpart. He argues that “as a part stands in relation to the whole, so the order in a part stands to the order in the whole. A part stands in relation to the whole as to its end and perfection: therefore the order in a part stands to the order in the whole as to its end and perfection” (I.vi). Since “the goodness of the order in a part does not exceed the goodness of the order in the whole, but rather the reverse,” a regime ordered by a “single entity” is better than one ordered by a multitude of entities. Therefore, all kingdoms “must be ordered to one ruler or one rule, that is to be a monarch or monarchy.” (I.vi) This goes also for the universal monarchy’s relation to the whole universe, under “its ruler, who is God and Monarch” (I.vii).

“It is God’s intention that every created thing should show forth His likeness in so far as its own nature can receive it” (I.viii). Man was created in God’s image, and indeed “the whole universe is simply an imprint of divine goodness” (viii). so mankind is in a good (indeed, ideal) state when, to the extent that its nature allows, it resembles God. But mankind most closely resembles God when it is most a unity, since the true measure of unity is in him alone”; politically, this means “mankind is most like God when it is ruled by one ruler, and consequently is most in harmony with God’s intention,” (I.viii), obeying a single source of motion in accordance with a single law.

Practically speaking, the several kings who rule the several kingdoms will stay at peace only if they have a common judge to settle disputes. “The world is ordered in the best possible way when justice is at its strongest in it,” and “justice is at its strongest only under a monarch” (I.xi). But what if the universal monarch is not perfectly just, as he is indeed unlikely to be, given his flawed human nature? “Justice,” Dante admits near the center of Book One, “is sometimes impeded in the will; for where the will is not entirely free of all greed, even if justice is present, nonetheless it is not entirely present in the splendor of its purity” (I.xi). Nonetheless, justice is also “sometimes impeded by power,” or rather the lack of it; therefore, “justice is at its strongest in the world when it resides in a subject who has in the highest degree possible the will and the power to act,” and this occurs only when justice “is located in the monarch alone” (I.xi). Dante understandably places his radical proposal for a universal emperor, his acknowledgment of its hazardous character, and his reason for proposing it nonetheless, in the center of Book One.

But again, what if the powerful world monarch is unjust? Dante begins his answer by observing that “the thing most opposed to justice is greed,” which “easily leads men’s minds astray” (I.xi). But “where there is nothing which can be coveted, it is impossible for greed to exist, for emotions cannot exist where their objects have been destroyed” (I.xi). Being both universal and the ruler, the universal monarch would have nothing to covet, “for his jurisdiction is bounded only by the ocean”—unlike all other rulers, “who sovereignty extends only as far as the neighboring kingdom” (I.xi). Therefore, only the universal monarch can be “the purest embodiment of justice” (I.xi). 

But will he be such an embodiment? Quite possibly so, in Dante’s judgment, because not only will the universal monarch covet nothing, his status will make his charity or “rightly ordered love” stronger (I.xi). “Greed, scorning the intrinsic nature of man, seeks other things; whereas love, scorning all other things, seeks God and man, and hence the true good of man”; “the monarch more than all other men should feel rightly ordered love” (I.xi). Why? Because “the closer any loved object is to the lover the more it is loved; but men are closer to the monarch than to other princes; therefore they are more loved by him, or ought to be” (I.xi). Why are men closer to the monarch than to other princes, especially since the other princes rule more ‘locally’? Because “the more universal a cause is, the more truly it is a cause, because the lower is not a cause except by virtue of the higher”; “the more truly a cause is a cause, the more it loves its own effect, since this love follows from the cause as such. Therefore since the monarch is the most universal cause among mortals that men should live the good life (for the other rulers are a cause only by virtue of him), it follows that the good of mankind is dear to him above all else.” (I.xi). That is, although subordinate monarchs are closer to their own people, the universal monarch is closer to mankind as a whole, loves mankind as a whole more than the others are likely to do.

In addition to justice, freedom also conduces to human flourishing, if freedom is defined rightly not as doing what one wants but as doing what accords to reason, the distinctively human characteristic. “Free will is free judgment in matters of volition,” and judgment links “perception and appetition” inasmuch as “first a thing is perceived, then it is judged to be good or evil, and finally the person who judges pursues it or shuns it” (I.xii). Freedom means judgment’s freedom from desire; “that is why the lower animals cannot have free will, because their judgments are always pre-empted by desire” (I.xii). This “principle of all our freedom” is “the greatest gift given by God to human nature…since by virtue of it we become happy here as men” and “become happy elsewhere as gods” (I.xii). On earth, the fullest freedom can exist only under a monarch, since “only then are perverted forms of government (i.e. democracies, oligarchies and tyrannies), which force mankind into slavery, set right,” and “only then do kings, aristocrats (known as the great and the good), and those zealous for the freedom of the people govern justly” (I.xii). Themselves unfree, slaves to their desires, the rulers of perverted regimes enslave those they rule; the “just forms of government aim as freedom, i.e. that men should exist for their own sake” (I.xii). 

This gives a clearer picture of what regime Dante intends. The universal monarch or temporal emperor will serve as an arbiter over a set of regimes that may include not only kingdoms but aristocracies and mixed regimes (‘republics’), as seen in Aristotle’s classification of regime types. As the arbiter among this set of just regimes, the emperor “is to be considered without doubt the servant of all men,” and “mankind living under a monarch is in its ideal state” (I.xii). “The person who is himself capable of being best disposed to rule is capable of disposing others best, for in every action the primary aims  of the agent, whether it acts because its nature compels it to or as a matter of free choice, is to reproduce its own likeness” (I.xiii). For the reasons already stated—justice and judgment—the monarch is the ruler “best disposed for ruling” (I.xiii). Additionally, a monarch is (as we would now say) more efficient; “what can be brought about by a single agent is better done by a single agent than by more than one,” as he will do nothing “unnecessary and pointless” (I.xiv). Dante is quick to say that “this is not to be taken to mean that trivial decisions in every locality can be made directly by him,” for (as Montesquieu would insist, centuries later) “nations, kingdoms and cities have characteristics of the own, which need to be governed by different laws” (I.xiv). Rather, “mankind is to be ruled by [the emperor] in those matters which are common to all men and of relevance to all, and is to be guided towards peace by a common law” received “from him by individual rulers, just as the practical intellect, in order to proceed to action, receives the major premise appropriate to its own particular case, and then proceeds to the action in question” (I.xiv). The emperor is the guardian of these “universal principles” (I.xiv).

In ruling this way, the emperor comports with not merely a natural but a metaphysical principle. “Being, unity, and goodness are related in a sequence”: “Being naturally comes before unity, and unity before goodness; perfect being is perfect unity, and perfect unity is perfect goodness” (I.xv). As “in every species of thing the best is that which is perfectly one,” unity “seems to be the root of what it is to be good, and plurality the root of what it is to be evil,” and sin is nothing other than to spurn unity and move towards plurality” (I.xv). In this, Dante substitutes Aristotelian metaphysics for Aristotelian politics, inasmuch as he ignores Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s ‘ideal’ regime—that it strives for a too-simple unity, reducing “a theme to a single beat.” Hence Aristotle’s preference in practice for the mixed regime, even if a virtuous king would be best if he is truly superior in justice and judgment to all others in the polis. Dante may acknowledge this in writing “the whole of mankind in its ideal state depends on the unity which is in men’s wills,” a unity which “cannot be unless there is one will which controls and directs all the others towards one goal, since the wills of mortals require guidance on account of the seductive pleasures of youth” (I.xv, italics added). 

Dante’s relative optimism concerning the universal monarchy derives in part from “a remarkable historical fact” which Aristotle could not see (I.xvi). The Son of God chose as his moment for His life on earth the time of world peace “under the immortal Augustus, when a perfect monarchy existed” (I.xvi). The Apostle Paul “called that most happy state ‘the fullness of time,'” a seamless garment eventually “rent by the talent of cupidity” (I.xvi). Against the pope, who might otherwise portray himself as the universal monarch, Dante holds up the temporal empire of ancient Rome. This raises at least two obvious difficulties. Although Christ came to earth during the reign of Augustus, it was a Roman ruler who signed off on His crucifixion; further, as Dante here acknowledges, the monarchic regime in the Empire soon corrupted itself, ruled as often by tyrants as by kings. It is to the question concerning the rightfulness of Roman rule—the second question he had posed at the outset of his treatise—that Dante turns in Book Two.

When he first studied the history of the Empire, Dante confesses, “I thought that they had attained their supremacy not by right but only by force of arms” (II.i.). “But when I penetrated with my mind’s eye to the heart of the matter and understood through unmistakable signs that this was the work of divine providence,” he came to “cry out in defense of that glorious people and of Caesar,” supplanting St. Augustine’s mockery of Rome with “natural love” (II.i). That “the Roman empire is founded on right” is “revealed not only by the light of human reason but also by the radiance of divine authority,” and “when these two are in agreement, heaven and earth must of necessity both give their assent” (II.i).

What evidence can be adduced to show the providential character of the worldwide rule of Augustus? Dante again has recourse to a metaphysical first principle. Nature first exists in “the mind of the first mover, who is God”; it is then “in the heavens, as in the instrument by means of which the image of eternal goodness is set forth in fluctuating matter” (II.ii). As a fluctuating substance, matter lacks the perfection of the divine and heavenly forms; “whatever flaws there are in earthly things are flaws due to the material of which they are constituted, and are no part of the intention of God the creator and the heavens” (II.ii). All that is good in matter derives come from God and the heavens; “the right is willed by God as being something which is in him,” that is “divine will is right itself” (II.ii). Nothing not in harmony with divine will can be right, including all things in “human society” (II.ii). When looking for evidence of divine Providence, we cannot peer into God’s mind (even less than we can read other human minds), but we can understand His intentions through the things he has made, as the Apostle Paul says in his letter to the Romans.

“It was by right, not by usurping,” that the Romans became the ‘monarch’ or sole ruler “over all men” (II.iii). We know this, first, because “it is appropriate that the noblest race should rule over all the others,” and the Romans were the noblest “race” or nation (II.iii). “Men become noble through virtue,” and the founder of Rome, Aeneas—that “supremely victorious and supremely dutiful father”—gained his nobility—his justice, his piety, his greatness in war—by a “double confluence of blood” (II.iii). His ancestors were noble and so were his wives. His first wife, Creusa, daughter of Priam of Troy, represented Asia; his second wife, Dido the Carthaginian, represented Africa; his third wife, Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, represented “Italy the most noble region of Europe” (II.iii). “Who will fail to recognize divine predestination in all of this?” (II.iii).

Second, one can see Providence in the miraculous events that sustained Rome in its advance toward world rulership. The shield that fell from heaven into Rome as Numa Pompilius sacrificed to the gods; the geese warning the Romans about the Gauls’ night attack; the hailstorm that deterred Hannibal’s troops from taking Rome—all these events and many others evidence the intervention of God’s will, showing that “he who ordained all things from eternity in harmonious order” had ordained these acts, too, “as testimony” (II.iii). 

Third, “whoever has the good of the community as his goal has the achievement of right as his goal,” right being “a relationship between one individual and another in respect of things and people,” preserving human society (II.iv). Right aims at the common good, and right laws “bind men together for mutual benefit” (II.iv). “Therefore if the Romans had the good of the community as their goal, it will be true to say that the achievement of right was their goal” (II.iv). That was indeed their goal, for they “cherish[ed] universal peace and freedom” for the benefit not only of themselves but mankind as a whole (II.iv). As Cicero testified, Rome conquered not so much for the sake of ruling the world as for the sake of protecting it, as seen in the lives of such public-spirited Romans as Cincinnatus, Fabritius, Camillus, the first Brutus, Mutius, Cato, and the Deciii. Although it is possible to attain a right end by evil means, this is only an accident; to have attained the right end of world peace consistently, over many centuries, by evil means is unlikely or impossible. Overall, the intentions of the Roman statesmen who guided Rome to triumph must have been noble.

Dante reserves the fourth proof of the rightness of Roman rule for the central chapter of Book Two. There, he argues that “it is right to preserve what nature has ordained, for nature in the measures it takes is no less provident than man”; indeed (and contra the ‘moderns,’ beginning with Machiavelli) nature is prior to man in goodness (II.vi). “Nature orders things according to their capacities, and this taking into account of their capacities is the basis of right established by nature in the created world” (II.vi). Dante never claims that ‘history’ or the course of events ordained the Roman Empire. Rather, “the Roman people were ordained by nature to rule,” a claim proven by the way nature works (II.vi). “Just as a craftsman would never achieve artistic perfection if he aimed only at the final form and paid no need to the means by which that form was to be achieved, so too nature would fail if it aimed only at the universal form of divine likeness in the universe, yet neglected the means to achieve it; but nature is never less than perfect, since it is the work of divine intelligence,” willing “all the means through which it achieves the fulfilling of its intention” (II.vi). Aristotle sees that nature is teleological, “always act[ing] with an end in view”; nature achieves this through the celestial powers of the planets, the geographical features of the earth, and the “vast number of people [it] fit[s] to different functions” (II.vi). “This is why we see that not just certain individuals, but certain peoples are born fitted to rule, and certain others to be ruled and to serve, as Aristotle affirms in the Politics” (II.vi). What Aristotle affirms in the Politics in fact refers only to individual human beings, not peoples; Dante actually follows a “prophetic prediction to Aeneas” reported by Virgil (II.vi). This is to say that in the central chapter of the central book of his treatise, Dante makes his claim justifying Roman rule dependent upon the testimony of a fellow poet, whom he takes (and he was far from alone in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in doing so) as a true prophet and not a mere fabricator of myths or repeater of them. It is almost needless to say that Dante took up the Virgilian mantle in his own poetry, and so has every reason to admire, conspicuously, the prophetic powers of a great poet.

Regarding prophecy, Dante distinguishes two ways of discovering “divine judgment in earthly affairs,” namely, faith and reason (II.vii). By reason (for example) man can discover God’s judgment that “a man should sacrifice himself to save his country” because he thereby sacrifices “a lesser good for a greater” (II.vii). By God’s Word alone, however can man discover God’s judgment that a human being can only be saved by faith, “no matter how perfectly endowed he might be in the moral and intellectual virtues in respect both of his character and his behavior” (II.vii). The only other source by which God’s judgment may be discerned is “special grace”—either “by a spontaneous act of God, or by God in response to prayer” (II.vii). Spontaneous acts of God may be either a direct message from God or a sign. One may test the veracity of what one takes as an act of special grace in two ways: by lot or by contest. Contests may be conflicts, as in a prize fight, wherein “the contestants may obstruct each other,” or they may be competitions, as in a race, where no such obstruction is permitted (II.vii). The Romans “won the race to rule the world” and therefore did so by divine decree (II.viii). It may be recalled that nineteenth-century Europeans engaged in what the contestants called ‘the race for empire’ or ‘the scramble for empire,’ sometimes with a similar rationale.

“Furthermore, whatever is acquired through trial by combat is acquired by right,” as trial by combat occurs when “human judgment” fails and all other means of settlement have been exhausted (II.ix). “The contenders or champions enter the arena by mutual agreement, and not out of hatred, nor out of live, but solely out a passionate concern for justice…in the name of God,” as in the contest between David and Goliath (II.ix). Similarly, the Romans achieved world empire “through trial by combat” (II.ix).

Although Dante has alluded to St. Augustine’s critique of the Roman Empire and indeed of all worldly regimes, he now explicitly answers “those who style themselves ardent defenders of the Christian faith who most of all have ‘raged’ and ‘meditated vain things’ against Roman authority” (II.x). Such persons “have no pity for Christ’s poor,” whom the Church has neglected to help, instead funneling relatives to the relatives of churchmen (II.x). More important, “if the Roman empire was not based on right, Christ by his birth assented to an injustice”; but Christ chose to be born of his Virgin Mother under an edict emanating from Roman authority, so that the son of God made man might be enrolled as a man in that unique census of the human race,” an edict that likely “came by divine inspiration through Caesar” (II.x). The Roman Empire finally disintegrated only when the Emperor Constantine, “weakened by his own pious intentions,” split it into two sections, East and West (II.xi).

Having thus vindicated the right of Rome to rule the world—at least to his own satisfaction—Dante addresses his third and final question: Would the authority of the Roman emperor he wants to see restored derive his authority directly from God or from some intermediary, such as the pope? He bases his answer on a principle he has already asserted, that “what is contrary to nature’s intention is against God’s will” (III.ii). What kind of men oppose Dante’s proposal? First, there are the churchmen, who “perhaps” oppose it “out of zealous concern and not out of pride” (III.iii). Second, there are those “whose stubborn greed has extinguished the light of reason,” sons of the devil who “profess themselves to be sons of the church,” men who tacitly deny the first principles Dante has enunciated (III.iii). Finally, there are the decretalists, men “ignorant and lacking in any philosophical or theological training,” who base their stance strictly on papal decrees, “stubbornly insist[ing] that the traditions of the church are the foundations of faith,” ignoring the fact that some Scriptures preceded the founding of the Church (III.iii). They too are “slaves to their own greed,” men “incapable of seeing first principles” (III.iii).

All of these persons “assert that the authority of the empire is dependent on the authority of the church,” as the light of the moon reflects the light of the sun (III.iv). “The whole force of their argument rests on this claim,” which Dante rejects as “completely untenable” (III.iv). Dante supposes that the moon produces some of its own light, and even if it does not do so, the spiritual realm and the temporal realm are not analogous to the sun and the moon, inasmuch as “the temporal realm does not owe it existence to the spiritual realm, nor its power (which is its authority, and not even its function in an absolute sense” (II.iv). The spiritual realm directs man toward his eternal salvation; the temporal realm directs man toward happiness on earth. At most, the temporal power may receive a blessing from the spiritual realm, through the pope. But he should not rule it.

Dante next refutes five Scripture-based arguments for papal supremacy. The first draws from Genesis 29. Jacob’s sons, Levi and Judah, are said to prefigure the priestly and temporal powers, respectively; since Levi was the eldest and took precedence over Judah, so too should the Church take precedence over the empire. But seniority doesn’t necessarily imply authority, Dante observes, noting that within the Roman Catholic hierarchy itself there are bishops “younger than their archdeacons” (III.v).

The second argument points to God’s command to Samuel to remove King Saul (I Samuel). “From this they argue that just as he, as God’s vicar, had the authority to give and take away temporal power and transfer it to someone else, so now too God’s vicar, the head of the universal church, has the authority to give and to take away and even to transfer of temporal power, from which it would undoubtedly follow that imperial authority would be dependent in the way they claim” (III.vi). Dante answers by denying that Samuel was God’s vicar; he was only “a special emissary for a particular purpose” (III.vi). Whereas a vicar is authorized to “take action by applying the law or using his own discretion in matters of which his lord knows nothing,” an emissary has no such authority (III.vi).

Proponents of papal supremacy also point to the homage paid by the Magi to the infant Jesus, again drawing an analogy between Jesus and God’s vicar. But “Peter’s successor is not the equivalent of divine authority at least as regards the workings of nature, for he could not make earth rise nor fire descend by virtue of the office entrusted to him” (III.vii). By nature, even God’s vicar cannot take away what belongs to another man, innately. In the language of later thinkers, some property is unalienable; “no one can give away what does not belong to him” (III.vii). “The creation of a prince is not dependent on a prince”; consequently, “no prince can appoint a vicar to take his place who is equivalent to him in all things” (III.vii). A temporal prince cannot renounce his authority to a spiritual power.

What about Jesus’ substantial grant of authority to Peter, that “whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven”? Dante grants that this is true, but only within the constraints of previously established divine law. Peter wasn’t entitled to alter the Ten Commandments, for example. Also, Jesus refers to “the office of the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” not to the office of the temporal ruler (III.viii). [4]

Finally, Dante must address the ‘two swords’ doctrine, based on an incident recorded in the Gospel of Luke. “This too must be answered by demolishing the allegorical interpretation on which they base their argument” (III.ix). Contra the apologists for papal supremacy, the two swords do not represent the papacy and the emperor. Jesus was rather commanding his disciples to purchase the means by which they could defend themselves against “the persecution and contempt they would face” after His departure (III.ix)—weapons He had forbade them to wield while He was still with them. Jesus added that if each apostle could not afford a sword, two swords would suffice for their defense.

Moving from Biblical exegesis to the current circumstance of the Church, Dante turns to the Donation of Constantine. This critique occupies the center of Book Three. Constantine had no authority to give the “seat of empire,” Rome “along with many other imperial privileges,” to the papacy, “nor was the church in a position to accept them” (III.x). As “can easily be seen from the first part of this treatise,” the purpose of the emperor “is to hold mankind in obedience to a single will” (III.x). This he failed to do. “Just as the church has its foundation, so too the empire has its own,” and to divide it “would be to destroy it—for the empire consists precisely in the unity of universal monarchy” (III.x). The empire is both temporally and logically prior to any given emperor; “from this it is clear that the emperor, precisely as emperor, cannot change it, because he derives from it the fact that he is what he is” (III.x). And, given that the Church’s kingdom is not of this world, it may not legitimately receive the empire or any part of it, regardless of what an emperor might attempt to do.

In addition to the scriptural and ‘historical’ arguments, papal supremacists make an “argument based on reason,” albeit one falsely reasoned (III.xii). Since “all things belonging to a single species are referred to one thing which is the measure for all things which belong to that species”; and since “all men belong to the same species”; “therefore they are to be referred to one man as their common measure”; furthermore, “since the supreme Pontiff and the emperor are men…it must be possible to refer them to a single man,” and “since the pope must not be referred to any other man” the pope must be the measure of the emperor (III.xii). Dante agrees that all men belong to the same species and therefore “should be referred to a single measure for that species” (III.xii). He rejects the conclusion, however, as an instance of the accidental fallacy. “It is one thing to be a man, another thing to be an emperor,” a father, a master, or a pope (III.xii). A man is a man because he has the “substantial form” of a man; a man is an emperor, a master, or a pope because he happens to be one “by virtue of certain relationships” to certain roles or offices (III.xii). Popes and emperors are equally men, but that has no bearing on their offices, or on the relationship of their offices to each other.

Dante then advances his own arguments based on reasoning, first on reasoning from Scripture. Repeating that the Roman Empire predated the Church, he observes that Jesus accepted punishment at the hands of the imperial authority. “If Caesar had not at that time had authority to judge temporal matters, Christ would not have submitted to this” (III.xiii). Indeed—and reversing the papalists’ argument—if they do not recognize the legitimacy of the Emperor over temporal matters, how could they accept his Donation? “It is foolish to think that God would wish that something should be received which he has forbidden should be offered” (III.xiii).

Moreover, the Church is “not an effect of nature”; therefore, it could not have authority over the emperor according to natural law (III.xiv). Nor did the Church receive such authority by divine law, so it could not have derived such power ‘from itself,’ as it were. “The church’s nature is the form of the church,” and “the ‘form’ of the church is simply the life of Christ, including both his words and deeds”—His life being “the model and exemplar for the church militant (III.xv). But Christ enounced the kingdom of the world.

Dante ends his treatise by addressing his third question, Does the emperor derive his authority directly from God? He begins by observing the dual nature of human beings. Among all creatures, “man alone is the link between corruptible and incorruptible things,” by which he means that man alone consists of body and soul, the corruptible/mortal and the incorruptible/immortal (III.xvi). “Since every nature is ordered towards its own ultimate goal, it follows that man’s goal is twofold” (III.xvi). As a mortal being “in this life”—on earth, “this threshing-floor of mortals”—his goal or telos is happiness, which “consists in the exercise of our own powers” in this life (III.xvi). As an immortal being, his goal is eternal happiness, “which consists in the enjoyment of the vision of God” in the “heavenly paradise” (III.xvi). These two goals “must be reached by different means”: through “the teachings of philosophy, provided that we follow them putting into practice the moral and intellectual virtues”; and “through spiritual teachings which transcend human reason, provided that we follow them putting into practice the theological virtues, i.e., faith, hope and charity” (III.xvi). Reason, through the philosophers, teaches us insofar as we are a combination of body and soul; the Holy Spirit, “through the prophets and sacred writers” and above all “through Jesus Christ the Son of God” and his disciples,” teaches us insofar as we are souls encumbered by now-natural “human greed” (III.xvi). “It is for this reason that man had need of two guides corresponding to this twofold goal,” namely, “the supreme Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life in conformity with revealed truth, and the emperor, to guide mankind to temporal happiness in conformity with the teachings of philosophy” (III.xvi).

“Their understanding clouded by the fog of greed,” papal supremacists covet earthly dominion in addition to spiritual dominion (III.xvi). Dante is happy to point this out to them, and to his other readers. “The disposition of this world is the result of the disposition inherent in the circling heavens”; good order in this world requires “useful teachings concerning freedom and peace…applied appropriately to times and places” (III.xvi). Hence the necessity of providing “a protector to be made by Him who takes in at a glance the whole disposition of the heavens” (III.xvi). Only God can choose and confirm the one to take on this responsibility, since He alone “has none above Him” (III.xvi). Insofar as they choose rightly, the human electors of the emperor merely proclaim God’s providence. Insofar as they may “disagree among themselves,” their “understanding [is] clouded by the fog of greed,” which causes them to “fail to perceive what God’s dispensation is” (III.xvi).

Dante’s Monarchia seeks to recapture political rule as Aristotle understood it in the profoundly un-Aristotelian circumstance of a prophetic religion with universalist claims as it sought to dominate the city-states of Italy and the feudal conditions prevailing in Europe. This daunting task did not succeed. Machiavelli, whose ‘prince’ would replace Dante’s ‘monarch,’ took the world in a different direction, though not necessarily a better one.

 

Note

1. Whether by accident or by design, Dante overlooks Marsilius of Padua and his The Defender of the Peace. He is nonetheless arguably very cognizant of Marsilius, who was punished for his efforts at limiting papal power by excommunication. Of Monarchy may be considered an effort at engaging in a dialogue with Marsilius.
2. Marsilius, by contrast, suggests that the Roman papacy should not be universal, nor should the Roman emperor. In this, he anticipates Machiavelli, albeit without Machiavelli’s radical attempt to reconfigure human life by mastering ‘Fortuna.’
3. In his emphasis on peace as the end of human political society, he echoes Marsilius, while differing with him with respect to the means to that end.
4. In this and much else, Dante follows Marsilius quite closely.

 

 

Murray N. Rothbard: The Ethics of Liberty. New York: New York University Press, 2002 [1980].

 

No mere libertarian, the late Murray N. Rothbard stands as the most intelligent defender of anarcho-capitalism—as sharply distinguished from anarcho-communalism, the supposed end-time of several forms of socialism. The anarchism of anarcho-capitalism rests on individual liberty; the anarchism of anarcho-communalism rests on radical equality.

“All of my work has revolved around the central question of human liberty,” Rothbard writes. Here he aims to justify “a totally stateless and therefore purely free (or anarchistic) market economy.” For this, “value-free analysis or economics or utilitarianism” won’t suffice. It is a task for “political philosophy” not political economy. The task begins with the individual, with the figure of Robinson Crusoe, alone on an island, seeking his own good. Unlike an economic analysis, which would analyze Crusoe’s “conditions and actions” in order to find the basics of material survival and comfort, Rothbard considers the celebrated islander to establish the “concepts” of “natural-rights morality.” “The Crusoe model enables one to analyze the actions of man vis-à-vis the external world around him, before the complications of interpersonal relations are considered.” On this foundation, he will seek to understand those complications, which include property and law.

Natural rights inhere in natural law. Rothbard concurs with “the Thomistic tradition” insofar as it teaches that “natural law is ethical as well as physical law; and the instrument by which man apprehends such law is his reason—not faith, or intuition, or grace, revelation, or anything else.” With Thomas, Rothbard affirms that man has a nature: “if apples and stones and roses each have their specific natures, is man the only entity, the only being, that cannot have one? And if man does have a nature, why cannot it too be open to rational observation and reflection?” Ethics stems from this rationally discernible human nature. “The natural-law ethic states that goodness or badness can be determined by what fulfills or thwarts what is best for man’s nature”—a principle defended by Thomas and before him, Aristotle.

David Hume famously objected to deriving right from nature. Nature is, Hume allowed, but how am I to deduce rationally an ‘ought’ from that ‘is’? If I cannot, then either nature as a whole nor any part of it, including human nature, provides a rational standard for ethics. What we call ‘right’ is only a ruling passion or set of passions. Morality is therefore ‘subjective’ not ‘objective.’ But Hume in fact saw that human well-being and happiness requires society, Rothbard counters. Moreover, social order cannot exist unless human beings know what it is and under what conditions it can effect their safety and happiness. In society, conditions must include security for persons and property, that is, for what is called ‘justice.’ Justice is therefore rationally discernible and necessarily governs the passions, which tell us nothing about what is concerning safety and happiness. Hume himself admits this when he writes that “nature provides a remedy in the judgment and understanding for what is irregular and incommodious in the affections.”

Discoverable by reason, natural law is universal among human beings because they have a nature. Natural law “holds the existing status quo, which might grossly violate natural law, up to the unsparing and unyielding light of reason.” The legal principles of a society derive either from “traditional custom,” nor from the will of the rulers, nor from rational recognition of the natural law. These distinctions may be found in Plato and Aristotle. Lord Acton corrected them, seeing “the deep flaw” in “their conception of natural law political philosophy,” namely, their identification of “politics and morals,” which led them “to place the supreme social moral agent in the State,” that is, as ruling apparatus of any political community. Plato and Aristotle also failed to distinguish morality not only from politics but from religion, which was intertwined with the ancient ‘state.’ “Acton added that the Stoics developed the correct, non-state principles of natural law political philosophy, which were then revived in the modern period by Grotius and his followers.” 

“The great failing of natural-law theory—from Plato and Aristotle to the Thomists and down to Leo Strauss and his followers in the present day—is to have been profoundly statist rather than individualist.” Aristotle was right to call man a social animal, of being whose “nature is best fitted for social cooperation.” He was wrong to posit “a virtual identification of ‘society’ and ‘the State,’ and thence to the State as the major locus of virtuous action.” It took John Locke to correct this error by “transform[ing] classical natural law into a theory grounded on methodological individualism,” on “the individual as the unity of action, as the entity who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts.” From this Locke derives the idea of property as inherent first of all in one’s own person, a person who then mixes his labor with external, natural objects in order to establish private property. As James Madison wrote, man has a right in his property and a property in his rights. Although Locke’s pioneering version of correct natural-rights theory “was riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies,” these were removed by later thinkers, especially Herbert Spencer and Lysander Spooner. This firm distinction between individual and society, between “personal ethics” and “political philosophy,” between “a man’s right and the morality or immorality of his exercise of that right, narrows the scope of political philosophy proper to “the proper or improper exercise of physical violence in human relations,” inasmuch as “it is a man’s right to do whatever he wishes with his person.” 

Rothbard errs in claiming that Aristotle described man simply as a social animal. On the contrary, he described him as a political animal. That man is a political animal, he argued, may be seen in the fact that human beings originate in families, small or ‘extended,’ and that families exercise three forms of rule within themselves. There is the command-and-obey form of rule seen in the relations between parents and children, exercised for the good of the children; the command-and-obey form of rule seen in the relations of freemen and slaves, exercised for the good of the freemen; and there is the reciprocal rule of husband and wife, which he defines as political rule strictly speaking—rule involving discussion and therefore open to practical reasoning. The fact that Rothbard gets Aristotle wrong is an exegetical point, trivial with respect to ethics, but the important point is that Aristotle is right. The elements of what Rothbard calls “the state” already exist in the family, and the family is indispensable to human survival and flourishing, the ends of Rothbardian ethics as well as the ethics of Aristotle and of Thomas. Human beings are naturally political beings, not merely social and certainly not ‘individualist’ in Rothbard’s sense.

This error, whether deliberate/rhetorical or inadvertent, vitiates Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism on its foundation. One sees this as he turns to “a Crusoe social philosophy.” On the island, Crusoe enjoys “the primordial fact of his own consciousness and his own body,” along with “the natural world around him.” Lacking an animal’s “innate instinctual knowledge impelling him into the proper paths for the satisfaction of his needs and desires,” he understands that he must learn to find those paths. Because his island isn’t Eden, he needs to work, to ‘mix his labor’ with “the nature given resources and transform them into useful objects, shapes, and places most useful to him—so that he can satisfy his wants.” Clearly, no human being has ever lived this way, except for those removed by choice, by force, or by accident from family, tribe, or political community. Even Adam in Eden was quickly supplied with Eve because God judged that it was not good for the man to be alone. Alternatively, if one prefers the evolutionists’ account, the first biologically human being must have lived in a family, and quite likely a tribe, of proto-humans, where ruling and being ruled prevailed. Crusoe’s circumstance is in fact radically unnatural. In Aristotle’s more realistic account, families and extended families—already exercising political and other forms of rule— deal with scarcity by allying with other families, by extending political and other forms of rule to others.

On Crusoe’s island, man “must produce before he can consume, and so that he may consume.” In a family, this is true only of adults and older children; infants and toddlers do very little to mix their labor rationally with the world around them. Indeed, the only ‘labor’ an infant performs is sucking, and that is instinctual, animal-like, indistinguishable from the behavior of any other young mammal. However, as Rothbard and Aristotle both acknowledge, human nature quickly develops its innate capacity to reason and therefore to labor in the Rothbard-Lockean sense. 

Reason teaches “the way things work in the world, i.e., the natures of the various specific entities and classes of entities that the man finds in existence; in short, he learns the natural laws of the way things behave in the world.” At the same time, “he learns about his own nature, about the sort of events and actions that will make him happy or unhappy”—his natural ends or purposes. His mind can then ‘mix’ with external matter, using mental and physical energy to reshape matter “into ways to sustain and advance his wants and his life”; that is, he learns means by which he can achieve his ends.

“The individual man, in introspecting the fact of his own consciousness, also discovers the primordial natural fact of his freedom: his freedom to choose, his freedom to use or not use his reason about any given subject. In short, the natural fact of his ‘free will.'” Further, by experiencing his mind’s natural “command over his body and its actions” he discovers “his natural ownership over his self.” This means that he can also distinguish between his natural freedom and his natural powers. “Man is free to adopt values and to choose his actions; but this does not at all mean that he may violate natural laws with impunity,” to do things beyond his natural capacities. He can’t fly, although he may learn to reshape external objects in ways that will enable him to be flown and to control the direction of the flight.

Here Rothbard departs from Aristotle and the classics generally, entering into the realm of Rousseauian thought. Notice that he takes freedom to be unalienable; the only natural limits to free action are power, which is not a moral category, and the prohibition of impinging on anyone else’s unalienable freedom. Aristotle would reply that human beings are not at all entitled to choose their own “values”—language absent from his philosophy. There are moral limits on human choices themselves, and those limits are imposed by the nature of the human soul, which, like the human body, can have good or bad characteristics, make good or bad choices respecting its well-being. Rothbard tacitly denies the human soul, tellingly referring to ownership over the “self.” That is, contra Rothbard, even a human being isolated on an island has moral obligations with respect to the ends he chooses, and not only physical limitations, quite apart from whether there are any other people around, and even quite apart from whether God is watching him.

Before elaborating on the effect of social relations on the protection of unalienable rights, Rothbard addresses economic relations. Production is necessary to man’s “prosperity and survival, but so also is exchange.” When the man Friday comes onto the scene, Crusoe might enter into a relation whereby he supplies fish and Friday supplies wheat. “This great gain for both men is made possible by two primordial facts of nature—natural laws—on which all of economic theory is based: (a) the great variety of skills and interests among individual persons; and (b) the variety of natural resources in geographic land areas.” Different individuals, working on different kinds of land (or, for that matter, the sea), will enable exchanges to multiply far beyond the capacities of any individual or small set of individuals. Although most immediately these persons are exchanging material goods, more precisely they are exchanging “not the commodities themselves, but the rights to ownership of them,” having already acquired those rights by ‘mixing’ their labor with the elements of nature to produce them. This also goes for the person who hires others to work for him. “The capitalist, far from somehow depriving the laborer of his rightful ownership of the product, makes possible a payment to the laborer considerable in advance of the sale of the product,” and indeed “saves the laborer from the risk that the product might not be sold at a profit, or that he might even suffer losses.” Labor service is itself a commodity; the powers of my body and mind, which are my property, are purchased by my employer. As long as I consent to this sale, including its terms and conditions, I am not his slave. “A person’s labor service is alienable, but his will is not.” “A man can naturally expend his labor currently for someone else’s benefit, but he cannot transfer himself, even if he wished, into another man’s capital good. For he cannot rid himself of his own will, which may change in future years and repudiate the current arrangement.” 

This contrasts with Aristotle’s understanding of natural slavery (a point Crusoe’s inventor, Daniel Defoe, did not overlook when he introduced Friday to Crusoe). Aristotle sees that some human beings exercise their wills badly. Their nature lacks the capacity for rational action, either through some innate incapacity or an inveterate vice or set of vices. They do not make choices in Rothbard’s sense; they are ruled by their passions or by their instincts. They ought to be enslaved—nowadays, typically, in jails (in New Hampshire, for example, they are employed making license plates with the legend, “Live Free or Die,” which may be considered an attempt at moral instruction on the road to rehabilitation). 

Rothbard thus bases social life on economic relations; economic relations maximize freedom, largely ignoring the question of whether what I freely choose is good. “The free market is necessarily embedded in a larger free society,” which includes property rights. “the regime of pure liberty…may be described as a society where no ownership titles are ‘distributed,’ where, in short, no man’s property in his person or in tangibles is molested violated, or interfered with by anyone else.” “This means that absolute freedom, in the social sense, can be enjoyed, not only by an isolated Crusoe but by every man in any society, not matter how complex or advanced”—in “a milieu of civilization, harmony, sociability, and enormously greater productivity through exchanges of property with his fellow men.” Rousseau rightly claims that men are born free, and Rothbard adds they “need never be in chains.” This sounds utopian, and it is, as will be seen soon enough.

“The society of absolute self-ownership for all rests on the primordial fact of natural self-ownership by every man, and on the fact that each man may only live and prosper as he exercises his natural freedom of choice, adopts values, learns how to achieve the, etc.” Any diminution of this freedom “violates his nature,” as the “aggressor interposes violence to thwart the natural course of a man’s freely adopted ideas and values, and…thwart[s] his actions based upon such values.” By valorizing freedom over other dimensions of human nature, Rothbard overlooks that a chosen “value” might be bad—as in Milton’s Satan’s classic formulation, “Evil be thou my good.” There is enough truth in what Rothbard says—to develop virtues, one must exercise and habituate the human soul, strengthening it to freely choose good things—to give it considerable surface plausibility. That is the the only kind of plausibility it has.

Regarding the cultivation of the outer world, Rothbard takes Locke’s view. I rightly own only so much land as I can mix my labor with. A Columbus could not claim ownership of a continent, even if it had been unoccupied. Neither he nor any other man can create matter; “what he does is to take nature-given matter and transform it by means of his ideas and labor energy.” “There are only two paths for man to acquire property and wealth: production or coercive expropriation.” The way of production is the way of economics; the way of coercion is political and indeed “parasitical.” Once again, Rothbard narrows ‘politics’ to considerations of power and one-way or ‘command’ rule. Aristotle knows better, acknowledging that ruling itself is as much a part of human nature as choice or freedom, and that what in the family he calls ‘marital’ rule, ruling and being ruled reciprocally, very much involves prudential reasoning. So does the parent-child relationship. Rothbard’s formulation enables him to wave politics away as pure evil. To Rothbard, all “political” rule is coercive, all coercion slavery. He reduces the three forms of ruling seen in the household as Aristotle describes it to one, and the worst one at that.

This gross simplification (mis)informs Rothbard’s conception of criminal law. “A criminal is anyone who initiates violence against another man and his property: anyone who uses the coercive ‘political means’ for the acquisition of goods and services,” a point which he considers as “the very heart of the entire problem of liberty, property, and violence in society.” Any property that has been acquired by means of coercion has been stolen; all property is private, including government property or territory ruled by a sovereign, since “there is no entity called ‘government'” but “only people forming themselves into groups called ‘governments’ and acting in a ‘governmental’ manner.” Any ‘government’ that uses coercion is criminal. ‘Political liberty’ must then be a contradiction in terms. This leads Rothbard to his well-known claim (radicalizing Bastiat) that all taxation is theft. All of this depends upon his false assumption that politics, including some forms of coercion, is unnatural to human beings, an assumption that flows from his mistaken claim a human individual in exercising rational choice can select whatever ‘values’ he wants.

Such mistakes don’t prevent Rothbard from seeing some things clearly and indeed astutely. For example, when the United States government defeated the Confederacy and ended slavery, Reconstruction or regime change in the former slave states failed because while “the bodies of the oppressed were freed…the property which they had worked and eminently deserved to own, remained in the hands of their former oppressors. With the economic power thus remaining in their hands, the former lords soon found themselves virtual masters once more of what were now free tenants or farm laborers.” Just so: the slaveowners had initiated unjust violence against the slaves; the United States government had employed, but not initiated, violent coercion on the slaveowners’ regime, but their just war to a substantial extent gone to waste because they failed to ‘win the peace’ by respecting the property rights of the slaves, rights exercised when they mixed their labor on the cotton and tobacco fields of the South. Rothbard wisely rejects pacifism, arguing that “defensive violence” may be used, although only “against an actual or directly threatened invasion of a person’s property,” including his life; such a threat may include intimidation (the threat of physical violence) and fraud, which is a form of theft. 

What coercion may not attempt, in Rothbard’s view, is “mak[ing] people moral by use of legal violence”—as, for example, sumptuary laws. And violence must be (as it is in both just war theory and in most theories of justice generally) proportional to the crime. A storekeeper has no right “to kill a lad as punishment for snatching a piece of his bubble gum.” Rather, “the criminal, or the invader, loses his own right to the extent that he has deprived another man of his.” An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but not a life for an eye or a tooth. You are indeed entitled to ‘take the law into your own hands,’ but the law you wield must be the rational, natural law, not unbridled vengeance. In a “purely free-market society,” one ordinarily need not do so, however, but rather in effect hire others—police, judges—to exact justice on his behalf. Because one isn’t allowed, according to Rothbard, to make people moral coercively, the notion of criminal rehabilitation is off the table. Jails aren’t ‘penitentiaries.’ They may be the sites where some criminals repent, but their repentance and reformation is neither here nor there; only justly proportionate punishment matters. It is of course significant that Rothbard justifies third-party law enforcement and judging as “convenient.” The notion that third-parties acting as police and judges, ‘hired’ not by individuals but by—you may pardon the expression, although Rothbard wouldn’t—political societies might serve to prevent highly prejudicial defense of natural rights.

Rothbard gets around to the family only midway through the book, admitting that children pose a “difficult case” for his theory. Beginning with “the prenatal child,” he asserts an absolute right to abortion. “Every woman has the absolute right to her own body,” absolute “dominion” over it “and everything within it,” so long as her body isn’t deployed in a way to injure anyone else. But Rothbard includes the fetus (suddenly no longer a “prenatal child”) among those things. This ignores the fundamental distinction between something in a woman’s body because it is part of her body—the organs—or in it because it will soon be integrated into her body—food, drink—and a ‘fetus’ or prenatal child, which is neither one of her organs nor her last meal. “Should the mother decide that she does not want the fetus there any longer, then the fetus becomes a parasitic ‘invader of her person, and the mother has the perfect right to expel this invader from her domain. Abortion should be looked upon, not as ‘murder’ of a living person, but as the expulsion of an unwanted invader from the mother’s body.”

But why? Only if one’s freely-chosen wants or desires are morally authoritative, dispositive. Rothbard claims that even if the fetus is a human being, no human beings have “the right to to be coercive parasites within the body of an unwilling human host.” Such an argument violates Rothbard’s own principle of proportionality. The parasitism of a human being, or of any being, within a human body would only be capitally punishable if its parasitism demonstrably threatened the life of its host. The parasitism of a prenatal human ordinarily does no such thing.

Families generally come into Rothbard’s view as property. The mother has “trustee-ownership of her children, an ownership limited only by the illegality of aggressing against their persons and by their absolute right to run away or to leave home at any time.” Parents may “sell their trustee-rights in children to anyone who wished to buy them at any mutually agreed price.” This makes sense—if one ignores the good of the child and the natural rule of parents over children for the good of the children. It exemplifies (to say the least) the narrowly economistic, anarcho-capitalist illusions upon which Rothbard grounds his theory.

Beyond family life, Rothbardian societies would have no public streets, only privately-owned ones, whose owners could exclude anyone they didn’t want from using them. There can be no libel laws, inasmuch as my knowledge of your shameful conduct is my property, and so may be disseminated by me without restriction. Further, I can blackmail you, if you don’t want me to ‘go public’ with that knowledge, as “both parties benefit from the exchange.”  Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with bribery, except when the service you purchase is one that I have previously contracted with my employer to perform only on the terms my employer and I have agreed upon in our contract of employment. 

This leads Rothbard to a consideration of political life itself, which he predictably stages as “the State versus Liberty.” Although “the State” does perform “many important and necessary functions, that does not mean that only the State can perform them. It may be that the State can be abolished and other institutions or practices can do them as well or better.” As it stands, the State enjoys a “crucial monopoly,” namely, “control of the use of violence,” including “the all-important power to extract its revenue by coercion.” All other transfers of income are voluntary, by sale or by gift; the state taxes, and “taxation is theft, purely and simply, even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match.” If the State attempted to operate on the basis of sales and gifts, it would never receive “anything comparable to the current vast revenues” it now exacts.

Rothbard denies the relevance of political regimes in this matter. Taxation is theft regardless of whether a country is ruled by one, few, or many. Democracies are nothing more than majority tyrannies. “The fact that a majority might support or condone an act of theft does not diminish the criminal essence of the act or its grave injustice,” any more than Jews murdered by their fellow Germans, most of whom had come to support the Nazis, went to the gas chambers voluntarily. Taxation under republican regimes, governed by representative, is even less a matter of consent than under straight majority rule. In fact, voting doesn’t even usually establish majority rule, since voter turnout rarely amounts to a majority of the adult population. If coercion is itself unjust, then political rule of any kind is unjust.

Here is where Rothbard departs from libertarians, or at least from most libertarians, who understand government as a form of contract. Such libertarians “hold the contract itself to be an absolute, and therefore maintain that any voluntary contract whatever must be legally enforceable in the free society.” But a contract “should only be enforceable when the failure to fulfill it is an implicit theft of property,” that is, “where title to property has already been transferred.” A mere promise to transfer my title of ownership to any alienable form of property that belongs to me is unenforceable by law, although it is usually the moral thing to do. “It is not and cannot be the function of law (i.e., legal violence) in a libertarian system to enforce morality.”

Further, no one can transfer an unalienable right at all—very much including the natural right of liberty. Therefore, all social contract theories are illegitimate. “Setting aside the historical problem of whether such a social contract ever took place, it should be evident that the social contract, whether it be the Hobbesian surrender of all one’s rights, the Lockean surrender of the right of self-defense, or any other, was a mere promise of future behavior (future will) and in no way surrendered title to alienable property. Certainly no past promise can bind later generations, let alone the actual maker of the promise.” As for unalienable property rights, such as liberty, they are by definition non-transferrable. 

Here Rothbard misreads Locke. No one who joins a social-contract civil society gives away the right to self-defense. If I am attacked, my attacker puts himself outside of the social contract; I don’t need to call 911. I am entitled to fight back. As for liberty, Locke explicitly argues that he who would deprive me of my liberty could, if he wished, take away my life also. I am therefore entitled to fight assaults on my liberty on the same grounds as I may fight assaults on my life. This is precisely the argument that Rothbard, following Lysander Spooner, aims at all governments. Taxation implies a command enforceable by violence—your money or your life, or more likely your liberty or your life. The same goes for conscription. I should (and in principle do) retain the right to fight back against any act that threatens my life by denying my liberty, including acts by governments. The difference between Rothbard and Locke consists in Locke’s argument for what might be described as primary and secondary levels of consent. In Locke, my explicit or implicit consent to live within a given civil society entails a primary obligation to abide by the terms of its social contract. If I disagree with a given command issued by the government, I am free to resist or to leave. If I resist in ways that conform to the legal terms of the contract, I should not be punished. If I resist in ways that do not so conform, then I have placed myself in a state of war with the society. That works the other way around, too. A government might act in such a way that puts itself at war with its citizens (if it is a republic) or its subjects (if it is ruled by one or a few). That was the argument of the American colonists in declaring their independence from the British regime.

Rothbard claims that the only reason that governments get away with their criminal activities is through control over education and communications. They control their subjects’ bodies because they control their minds. The State grants money, power and prestige to “intellectuals” who otherwise would find an exceedingly small market for their services. “Thus, the State is a coercive criminal organization that subsists by a regularized large-scale system of taxation-theft, and which gets away with it by engineering the support of the majority (not, again, of everyone) through securing an alliance with a group of opinion-molding intellectuals whom it rewards with a share in its power and pelf.” And the State backs up both its physical coercion and its mind control by asserting sovereignty over territory as well as bodies and minds. Ultimately, only “the force of habit” enables “State rule”—a certain supine acquiescence fortified with fear and propaganda.

If his is true, what practical options does Rothbard condone? If I really believe that taxation (and/or conscription) is unjust in principle, I could leave the civil society and find myself a spot where the tax cops can’t find me. I could, as Rothbard says, vote for candidates who intend to “reduce or get rid of State power.” I could lie to the State, which Rothbard regards as “morally legitimate.” Or I could refuse to pay taxes or to report for military duty, becoming a conscientious objector. Or, I could engage in violent rebellion, taking care to observe the Rothbardian principle of proportionality. What I cannot do is to receive the benefits of civil society and expect to pay nothing for them.

Rothbard also faults libertarians for supposing limited government and laissez faire to be possible. This is a “Utopia,” he claims. “Surely the bloody record of States throughout history should have demonstrated that any power, once granted or acquired, will be used and therefore abused. Power corrupts….” For some reason, Rothbard overlooks whether his anarcho-capitalist notion might be at least as utopian. Anticipating this criticism, he cites the example of “non-state institutions,” such as tribal custom, common-law judges and courts, mercantile courts, and admiralty law enforced by shippers. In Ireland before Cromwell, there was no State, only institutions upholding “customary rules were not haphazard or arbitrary, but consciously rooted in natural law, discoverable by man’s reason.” Grant all that and the difficulty remains: What happens when Cromwell arrives? 

 

 

 

 

K.J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare. Oxford: George Ronald, 1953.

 

“Shakespeare’s plays seem, at first sight, to reveal a mind remarkable for its imagination than for its logic.” In Spalding’s time, academic philosophy in the Anglophone world had become dominated by logicians, most of them logical positivists. By that standard, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as a philosopher. “Shakespeare may seem at first sight to have few of the characteristics of the philosopher. Yet poets and artists may be philosophers—philosophers at times more sensitive to the truth of things than those who endeavor to express it by reason and argument.” Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Nietzsche: though rare, such philosophers yield nothing in eminence to their more prosaic counterparts. Looking only at Plato, is dialogue not a sort of play? (Plato found a rival in Aristophanes, who recognized a competitor when he saw one.) And are dialogues not arguments? If so, they lend themselves to philosophy at least as readily as a treatise.

In some respects, Spalding has in mind the idea of the ‘natural philosopher,’ particularly the physician, who seeks not only to diagnose but to cure the patient before him. By his time, what had been called natural philosophy had been in large measure divorced from philosophy, having been reclassified as ‘science’ or knowledge, distinct from ‘philosophy’ or love of wisdom. Logical positivism was in some respects a response to this narrowing of the meaning of philosophy; in that sense, it registered not only a shift in the self-understanding of philosophers but a regime change in the universities in which most philosophers were employed. That is, academic philosophers were practicing politics, some of them without knowing it.

In Spalding’s, and Shakespeare’s, more capacious understanding of philosophy, the natural philosopher or, more precisely, the political philosopher who inquires into nature, may act as a kind of physician, both diagnostician and even, in rare circumstances, caregiver to patients, although more usually this task will be attempted by a ruler. The patient might be a person or a polity: “Presenting in different plays different maladies of men and of the State, [Shakespeare] likewise presents in them some physician with the task of alleviating or healing them.” This suggests that Shakespeare might partake not only of natural but of political philosophy in the Platonic-Socratic line. “Like the scientist confronted by the Chance of Nature, Shakespeare’s…rational spirit” attempts “rather to resolve his perplexities than to remain their victim.” Spalding treats the plays as a sort of philosophic ascent whereby Shakespeare “came to himself” as a philosopher.

As in Plato’s Symposium and elsewhere, the ascent originates in a sort of erotic longing. “Love looks and longs for beauty’s immortality.” For Socrates as for Shakespeare, the ladder of ascent goes beyond the natural philosophy of the early philosophers, through the human element of opinion, subjected to logical scrutiny, toward the ideas, beyond material physis. And if “the beauty of a thing of Nature touched the heart of Shakespeare”—as it does in his early poem, Venus and Adonis—”the beauty of a human mind touched it more deeply,” setting him on the trajectory that culminated in The Tempest, in the figure of Prospero. “Mind knows itself and all things; bodies know neither themselves nor other things.” As recorded in Sonnet 69, Shakespeare became intent on “seeing farther than the eye hath shown.”

In that ascent, however, it is easy to leave the realm of human opinion behind. “Like Nature, man presents a riddle to the mind. Reason looks for the perfection of either, but experience discovers imperfections in both. In this quarrel reason wins the final word,” for “as the scientist looks for a rational order in the seeming disorder of the natural world, so the moral philosopher looks for one in the seemingly disordered and chaotic life of man.” Yet while the some of the interlocutors in Plato’s Republic seek justice and find it ‘in the abstract,’ bringing actual poleis into line with the ‘ideal’ politeia, the ‘city in speech,’ this proves unlikely or impossible. Taking Plato’s point, Aristotle recalls reformers to sobriety, proposing remedies to political problems seen in the light of practical, not theoretical, reasoning. Spalding maintains that his tension between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’ gives Shakespearean drama its drama. And for Shakespeare there is an added difficulty. “An Aristotle has the privilege of writing what he thinks. But Shakespeare had need to consider at once his partners, his actors and the pleasure of the public”; he “might find it impracticable to utter truths plain to himself but strange to the multitude, and not less strange, perhaps, to a Kempe or a Burbage.” Spalding has rediscovered the necessity of exoteric writing.

He begins, therefore, with the plays that consider the question of “social man” and the immediate difficulties of his own country, with its clashes of opinion, its factions.  In his dramas on Henry VI and Richard III, Shakespeare “seems to be studying the social nature of man as revealed in the political chronicles of Halle and Holinshed,” who show “a people that had been for generations in irrational conflict with itself.” From Margaret in 1 Henry VI to the tyrant Richard, rulers love themselves more than their people and seek to bend the law to their wills. The Taming of the Shrew turns a tyrannical woman into a butt of comedy in a battle of the sexes, that primal natural duality, while The Two Gentlemen of Verona sets two friends, one a model of inconstancy, Proteus, against a model of fidelity, Valentine, subjecting the changeling to firm, comic correction. “For a moment Shakespeare seems to smile at a world restored to its reason, and to the peace and beauty natural to it.”

For a more lasting solution, Shakespeare must turn to politics, particularly to statesmanship. Spalding cites lines from The Taming of the Shrew: 

Only, good master, while we do admire

This virtue, and this moral discipline,

Let’s be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray; 

Or so devote to Aristotle’s checks

As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured.”  [I.i.25-28]  ?????

Spalding remarks, “Ovid united with Aristotle might be a medicine of a kind to keep men close to the world; while Aristotle united with Ovid might possibly keep men virtuous in it.” More, “a man of this temper might presently become a Statesman and, like Aristotle’s ‘Phronimos,’ find in his care for man the natural purpose of his existence.” At a minimum, erotic love is nature’s guarantee of the perpetuation of the human species; in politics, it guarantees the perpetuation of the polity; in the life of the mind, it guarantees the perpetuation of philosophy. Eros is not a noticeable theme among logical positivists; Spalding would recall academic philosophy to self-understanding, or possibly to a new understanding.

The need to mate Ovidian love with Aristotelian virtue forms the theme of the comic drama of Love’s Labour’s Lost.  There, “Shakespeare seems to be studying with a good deal of humor the laborings of minds capable of giving birth in their time to the politic being he is looking for,” as the king of Navarre sets himself “at war with his own affections” and those of his courtiers by proposing to turn his Court into “a little Academe”—a Platonic school or ‘republic’—consisting of men who will cloister themselves away from worldly desires for three years in an effort to make themselves, if not Philosopher-Kings, at least Scholar-Kings. The arrival of four ladies from the French Court puts a comic stop to their fantasy, and the ensuing drama issues in a reconception of love, now understood not as a fatal temptation to be countered by an austere life devoted to the liberal arts or by the frivolous eroticism for which the French Court was (in)famous, but for an Aristotelian ‘mean’ or center in the practice of love itself. Called back to the responsibilities of Court life after the death of her father, the King, the princess imposes a lighter sentence on the suitors than the Navarrian king had ordained: one year of mourning followed by marriages if the Navarrians behave themselves in the meantime. “By leaving the world these gallants of Navarre were thus to return to it men sobered, constant, of service” both to Navarre and to France. 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not immediately call statesmanship to mind. But Spalding rightly argues that it should. Once again, Shakespeare presents the problem of misplaced loving among rulers—not only among humans by day but among the fairy regime which rules the countryside at night. Fairy King Oberon cures his queen, Titania, of her jealousy with an herbal remedy; among the young aristocrats, the loves of the two young couples are deranged by the same potion, misapplied by Oberon’s mischievous servant, Puck, whose work eventually gets undone by his master. Families being the foundation of polities, in both the human and the fairy regimes right order is restored, showing that it is not only the intensity of eros that can cause disaster but its direction. Moderation, hitting ‘the mean,’ is indispensable, but so the right choice of one’s beloved.

But “to ‘cleanse the foul body of the infected world,’ dreams must give way to sterner Reality, and a Man take the place of the King of the Fairies as the physician of human disorders.” In Richard II, “England, ‘bound in with the triumphant sea’…has become “‘a drooping country’ with a ‘broken wing.'” A less rationalist version of the Navarrian king, Richard wastes his time in a world of imagination, “charming to poets and ladies” but useless in a statesman. “Divine as Heaven’s gift of a crown may be, it cannot weigh with a man’s own [practical] wisdom in the rule of a people; and a wise man without that gift is of more service to a State than a fool with it.” Such a man is Henry Bolingbroke, “an uncrowned physician of more promise than Richard,” a man ready to act “like the good gardener” who will “laboriously lop ‘superfluous’ branches ‘that bearing boughs may live'”—first of all by disposing of Richard. It remained for his son, Henry V, to exemplify “the reason-serving ‘phronimos’ of Aristotle, “Free from gross passion or of mirth or anger, / Constant in spirit, not swerving with the blood….” Julius Caesar is Henry’s counterpart in ancient Rome, “a man whose practical wisdom had by its sole might combined and sustained the far-flung fabric of a universal empire,” “possess[ing] the distinctive character of Plato’s ‘Philosopher-King’ and of the rational ‘Monarchos’ of Aristotle.” At the same time, his supposed divinity (he was “worshipped by the many”) was pure fantasy, as the assassins’ knives proved. “Sore for his high flight above them, [the conspirators’] eager envy sought to bring the eagle laughably to the ground,” and as they sought so did they find.

The limitations of human effort, the ungodlike character of men, appears most clearly in Twelfth Night. Here, Shakespeare “seems to be more seriously concerned with a mysterious world ruled neither by man’s wisdom nor Heaven’s Providence, but rather by untutorable Time and Fate and Fortune. The men and women that now appear on his stage are alike inclined to disallow the efficacy of the human will in the affairs of the world.” This time, there is no “resolute ‘physician’ of men,” no wise statesman to save the day, or the regime. “The best Statesmen may be in the sick world of humanity as the best of physicians in an uncontrollable pestilence of nature; and the wise man may look rather to retire from the world, like Jacques, than, like Caesar, to meddle uselessly with it.” Here Hamlet begins, with a prince who cannot decide what to do. Yet Hamlet proves himself “a rare being in the world,” as “men of ‘practical wisdom’ are more often to be found in it than ‘Kings of infinite space'”—self-divinizing, imperial rulers of Rome. 

Women too can prove themselves to be wise rulers, as seen in All’s Well That Ends Well. In that comedy, an impoverished physician’s daughter first cures a desperately ill king of his physical affliction, then cures the man the king selects for her husband of his folly in rejecting her. She does this not with a love potion devised by her late father but by means of her own smarts, tricking her wayward husband into bed with her and thereby making him see in her a worthy wife—a realization that confirms the king’s authority by vindicating his command. For Shakespeare, the real aristocracy is what Aristotle said it was: the rule of the best, not the rule of the snobs. “Such a will as Helena’s might be conceived to remedy, not alone the ills of lovers, but the wider-spreading evils of a human society, and in Measure for Measure Shakespeare accords to the Statesman the untrammeled powers of will of a Helena.” The statesman in question, the Duke of Vienna, finds himself about to be overwhelmed with the “envy, folly, and mistaken” of the people. Instead of “the swift decision of a Caesar,” Duke Vincentio practices patience, exiling himself from his corrupt city for fourteen years, allowing the corruption to “boil and bubble till it o’errun the stew.” Only then did he intervene to reform Vienna. That this can in fact be done was demonstrated by Charles de Gaulle, who retired from politics in the late 1940s, watched as the Fourth Republic foundered to the point of capsizing, then reappeared in Paris to found the Fifth Republic.

Patience conspicuously numbers among the Christian virtues, not so much among ‘the ancients,’ although moderation is its foundation. In Christianity itself, the foundation of patience is agape, “man’s forgiving love for man.” If practiced, this would indeed cleanse the foul body of the infected world. The problem is that it isn’t. “In the course of his reflections,” Shakespeare “discovered physicians of differing capacities: some able, who have helped lame men to their feet; others incompetent, who have aggravated rather than allayed their troubles.” Dovelike innocence, love, and patience must be supplemented with serpentine prudence, or all is lost but good intentions, with which the road to Hell is proverbially paved. “Human beings rarely raise themselves by their sole efforts; or become ‘devils to themselves’ without the help of other men.” “Like Socratic ‘midwives,’ such agents may bring to birth in a man beauties as unknown to himself as to his neighbors; or, like evil nurses, deforming passions subversive of the human reason natural and proper to him.” There are Vincentios among us; there are also Iagos. Spalding finds the tragedy of King Lear in his lack of self-knowledge, which issues in rage when his beloved youngest daughter tells him the truth about her love for her, without flattery. In his dying despair before her corpse, “Life showed death’s shining secrets at the last in visions unrevealed to eyes less martyred”—the flicker of life he alone claims to see in her. Insight into a life after death or pitiable illusion? Shakespeare does not tell us, perhaps because he does not know any more than we do.

Spalding chooses to read it as insight, if not exactly as Christian insight. “Men find themselves, it seems, rather in an immortal world than in the world of mankind; and learn to smile at last only as their hearts break.” “The human world, for reason’s rational foresight, must look a natural Paradise”—as Miranda sees, when she sees men other than her father for the first time. “But unreason, displanting it, may seem at times rather to have made a wild of it.” This notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the “the best of earthly Statesmen may fail of his purposes,” the “purposes of Heaven, and of the ‘mortal officers'” cited in Pericles Prince of Tyre as inspired by the “will” of Heaven, “are not finally to be thwarted.” “The fingers of the powers above do tune / The harmony of this peace.” (Cymbeline V.v.466). Shakespeare has “presented a world which, freed from human tragedy, must find, through Heaven’s directing power, the ultimate felicity Heaven destines for it.” 

“Yet the reason of the philosopher is not easily satisfied; and the best of answers may provoke at times the worst of questions. Content with his new world, Shakespeare could still continue to question it,” wondering “why its Providence had admitted an evil to cure” in the first place. Here The Tempest‘s Prospero, not Lear or any of the tragic heroes, has the last of Shakespeare’s many words. “It is for man’s ultimate benefit that Heaven has admitted evil into the world. In making ‘uneasy’ man’s attainment of his rational nature evil is destined to reinforce and invigorate it.” Or rather Spalding’s Shakespeare gives himself his last words on the matter in Sonnet 119: 

         O benefit of ill! Now I find true

That better is by evil still made better;

And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,

Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.

      So I return rebuked to my content,

      And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

By “Heaven” does Spalding mean “God”? He leaves that, too, open, following Shakespeare.

Since Spalding published his study, numerous writers have followed him in scrutinizing Shakespeare philosophically, although they have never dominated academic Shakespeare studies any more than Spalding did in his day. Allan Bloom, Harry V. Jaffa, Paul Cantor, Michael Platt, have all concurred with Seth Benardete’s conviction that Shakespeare could have written philosophic dialogues along the lines of Plato. And that he did, in his own way.