François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand: Essai Politique, Historique, et Morale, sur les Revolutions Anciennes et Modernes considerées dans leurs Rapports avec la Revolution Française de nos Jours. London: J. Deboffe et al., 1797.

François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand:  An Historical, Political, and Moral Essay on Revolutions, Ancient and Modern.  Miami: HardPress, 2019. Originally translated anonymously by “an English lady” and published by Henry Colburn, London, 1815.

Heinrich Meier: “Why Is Political Philosophy?” In Meier: Political Philosophy and the Challenge of Revealed Religion. Robert Berman translation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Chapter One.

 

Note: The English translator abridges the French edition, cutting more than 100 pages and combining parts of chapters into one; this reduces the number of chapters from Chateaubriand’s 138 to 52. Chateaubriand divided his book into two parts, the first on the revolution that overthrew the Athenian monarchy, replacing it with a democracy, and the second on the revolution effected by Philip of Macedon and Alexander the Great. Part I has 71 chapters, Part II has 57. The translator ignores these divisions. Accordingly, I have at times cited sentences from the French that do not appear in the translation; I have also changed the occasional English word in the translation to make it more faithful to the French. The parenthetical page references place the French edition first, the English second; where there is no reference to the English, it wasn’t translated.

The book is the first of a projected two-volume work. The second volume, Études our Discours Historiques sur la Chute de L’Empire Romain, la Naissance et le Progrès de Christianisme, et l’Invasion des Barbares was published in 1831.

 

 

Meier begins his chapter with Aristophanes’ Clouds, which satirizes pre-Socratic philosophy. Philosophy takes nature as its object of inquiry. But it lacks self-knowledge; philosophers make themselves absurd even as they claim to hold their studies to the standard of reason. For this reason, philosophers cannot defend themselves, or philosophy itself, against ridicule or worse, persecution. Nor can philosophers offer a rational justification their way of life. Even Socrates so lacks self-knowledge that he never mentions the soul at any time in the play. 

Meier takes Aristophanes’ play as a warning, but a friendly warning, to the philosophers. Socrates himself took note, becoming what we now consider Socratic, no longer the ‘pre-Socratic’ Socrates but a philosopher who turned his soul around, not away from philosophy but toward political philosophy. Political philosophy still inquires into nature, but it no longer overlooks human nature, which comes to sight in the polis, in the political community. As a way of life distinct from the way of life, the regime, of the polis, philosophy must offer a political defense of itself if it is to continue within the framework of human life. More, the philosophic way of life must justify itself philosophically, rationally, and that justification must survive the scrutiny of philosophers themselves. In taking its first subject as human nature, human nature situated in the political community, and in defending itself both before the bar of the polis and the inquiry of philosophers, philosophy will bring philosophers to the self-knowledge they had hitherto lacked. 

This means that the polis has done philosophers and their way of life a signal if unintended favor. By its ridicule, even by its persecution, it has spurred philosophic minds to attain more of the wisdom that they love. It has pushed them not only to greater prudence or practical wisdom but to greater sophia, theoretical wisdom, a better understanding of nature. 

The blessing does not come unmixed. Like philosophy, the polis seeks the right, the good, the best way to live. Athens or Sparta? The United States of America or the People’s Republic of China? And it seeks self-understanding; it wants ‘I am an Athenian’ or ‘I am a Spartan’ to mean something. The polis in antiquity differs from philosophy because it bases itself not on natural reason but on divine revelation, laws said to have been revealed to its founder by the gods. The philosophic way of life, the way of unreserved questioning, departs from the political way of life (no matter what the regime), departs from the sway of opinion, from authority, tradition, faith—things not be questioned but to be defended unhesitatingly although not thoughtlessly, and with civic courage, ‘the courage of one’s convictions.’ The philosophic way moderates the passions for the sake of a sort of intellectual mania. The political way moderates the passions for the sake of prudent discourse on what course of action the polis should follow, and for the sake of ‘manning up’ in order to act decisively and vigorously in pursuing that course. The philosophic way of life looks to nature as its standard and to reason as its means of knowing nature better; the political way of life looks to God or the gods as its standard and to revelation, especially revealed law, as its means of knowing God better, of getting closer to Him.

In its perennial challenge to philosophy, the political way of life thus proves indispensable to philosophers by spurring them to become and stay fully philosophic, self-knowing inquirers into human nature, and from that to nature as a whole. As Meier writes, “political philosophy is the part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is in question.” One then wonders, is philosophy also indispensable to the political theology of the polis? Is it in any way indispensable to faith in revelation, or is it the enemy of revelation? Does philosophic questioning of revelation strengthen the self-understanding of the pious, or merely corrupt them by tossing them into doubt’s boundless sea? Meier does not address that side of the matter in this chapter. In Christianity, an apostle of which warned against the vanity of philosophy—vain because it always seeks but never finds—the philosophic way of life appears wrong, simply. Nonetheless, if (as another apostle puts it) in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God, then God evidently proceeds ‘logically,’ never violating the principle of self-contradiction. A God who never contradicts Himself is a God one may trust, have faith in. The core activity of philosophers, rational thought, might find some divine support, even as the commitment to revelation insists on limiting the always-tentative results of reasoned inquiry by the things revelation asserts: hence theology an inquiry into the logic, the reason, of God. Political theology inquires into that reason insofar as it pertains to ruling and to being ruled, never forgetting that the prophets themselves argue with God, and sometimes persuade Him. God even questions Himself, as when His Son asks His Father, “Why have Thou forsaken Me?”

In his Essay, Chateaubriand presents himself as a philosopher, a philosopher in exile from his country. He was not, however, exiled by his fellow citizens for philosophizing; he fled the French revolutionaries because they had killed several in his family, giving him clear cause to fear for his own life. In England for the past four years, he has no friend to console him and no one to listen to him. “Solitaries live in their hearts,” surviving “on their own substance” like hibernating animals (iv). The heart is the seat of morality; a solitary philosopher will rely on the resources of his character. Being a philosopher, he will also think about morality, inquire into it. In this inquiry, he overcomes his solitude with the society of ideas: In “opposing philosophy to philosophy, reason to reason, principle to principle…I have only exposed the doubts of an honnête homme” (v). In Rousseauian solitude he engages philosophers, theologians, and political men dialectically, while remaining an aristocrat, a man of professed honor, accustomed to the responsibilities of rule. He is, moreover, a man “who would be useful to my fellows, so that they may begin to judge for themselves” the philosophers, theologians, and political men; he would strengthen their minds and hearts for that task (iv). In dedicating his book to “all the parties” in France, and perhaps more broadly in philosophy, theology, and politics generally, he stands, as a political philosopher does, to one side of impassioned partisans, but as one who desires the good for all of them.

“Solitaries live in their hearts.” A Frenchman could not write that sentence in France in the 1790s without thinking of Rousseau, especially as Rousseau presents himself in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. As it happens, Meier holds up Rousseau as an exemplary specimen of the political philosopher in modernity (the other is Nietzsche)—a thinker who, precisely in his account of his solitary reveries, never loses sight of the political, the topic of his Discourses and his Social Contract. Among the thoughts Chateaubriand will suggest to his readers is the Rousseau’s most ‘solitary’ writings and his most political writings must be brought into dialogue with one another, and that the revolutionaries have misunderstood the snatches of conversation they’ve overheard.

In the main body of the text, his first words are, “Who am I?” (3,1) Chateaubriand explains who he is, discloses his self-knowledge, by ‘objectifying’ himself, by describing himself in the third person. “He,” he tells us, began as a ‘pre-Socratic,’ having been “born with an ardent passion for the sciences,” “devot[ing] to them the labors of [my] youth” (3,1). He has long “been consumed by a thirst for knowledge,” by the philosophic mania, the philosophic eros (3,1). And he took the Socratic ‘turn,’ experienced the Socratic ‘conversion,’ before his forced exile, having “torn himself away from the enjoyments of fortune”—his aristocratic privileges—to “go beyond the seas, to contemplate the greatest spectacle which can be offered to the eye of the philosopher, to meditate on free man in a state of nature and in society, placed near each other on the same soil” (3,1). He alludes to his travels in America in 1791, where he met both Amerindians and newly-independent Americans, some of them in very civil society indeed, including a dinner with President Washington. Meier too compares philosophic inquiry to a voyage, and the image of breaking away from the traditions, the customs, the beliefs of one’s country has long been associated with such inquiry. Now in exile, in a forced separation from French traditions, customs, and beliefs, he has learned, “in the daily experience of adversity,” to “estimate the prejudices of life” (3,1). Not only the voluntary but the involuntary voyage, not only the beautiful and longed-for but the sublime, the work of overcoming, may serve the philosophic way of life. 

He returns to writing in the first person, to matters of his soul. In England, in “the situation in which I am placed,” he looks at things not with an impassioned and prejudiced but a “tranquil eye”; he finds his exile to be “favorable to truth” (4,2). “Without desires and without fear as I am, I no longer indulge in the chimeras of felicity, and mankind can inflict on me no greater evils than I experience” (4,2). He compares “misfortune” to a mountain in a torrid climate; climbing it, “you see nothing before you except barren rocks,” but at the summit “you perceive the heavens above your head and the kingdom of Kashmir at your feet” (4,2): The nature of the pre-Socratics and the political nature of human life, both visible to the political philosopher.

“This observation, which at the first glance may appear somewhat too personal, is nevertheless indispensable” (5,2). Indispensable, because the political philosopher begins with persons, including himself, but also because the philosopher must be politic: He must lessen the reader’s “unfortunate distrust, which puts us on our guard against an author’s opinions (5,2)”. Not being a god, being at most an all-too-human imitation of the self-sacrificing God, Christ, he cannot command that trust. But he can request it. The reader “in his turn [should] make some sacrifice to me.” “O you, who read me, banish your passions for a moment, while you peruse this dissertation on the greatest questions which can occupy the attention of mankind (5,2)”. Think along with me. “If you sometimes feel your blood take fire, shut the book and wait till your heart beats calmly before you begin to read again (5,2-3)”. In return, Rousseau-like, “I promise that my sentiments shall proceed from a heart as devoid of prejudice as an human heart can be” and a mind that “will always reason upon principles (6,3)”. I sincerely intend to be “useful” to you (6,3). “I am not a writer of any sect, and I can easily conceive that there are very honest people whose opinions differ from mine” (8n.4n.).” Perhaps true wisdom consists in being not without principles, but without fixed opinions” (8n.,4n.)—to be, as ancient philosophers would say, zetetic.

Having pled for a fair hearing, he proceeds to outline the plan of his book, a plan consisting of six points. First, “what revolutions have heretofore occurred in the governments of mankind,” what was “the state of society” in which they occurred, and “what has been the influence of those revolutions on the age in which they occurred, and on the ages which have succeeded”? (6,3) Second, are there any revolutions among these which, “from the spirit, moeurs, and the lights of the time, can be compared with the French one”? (6,3) Third, “what were the primitive causes”—the origin, the archē—of “this revolution, and those which effected its sudden development”? (7,4). In this, Chateaubriand’s later readers will see not only the political philosophers prior to him but also ahead, to his cousin by marriage Alexis de Tocqueville, whose The Old Regime and the Revolution remarks the importance of the interaction between governments and civil societies in modern states, which are no longer the small, tightly organized poleis of antiquity, where political philosophy first came to sight.

Fourth “What is now the government of France,” in 1797, “is it founded on true principles,” and will it endure? (7). Fifth, if the current regime of France does endure, what effect will it have on the nations and the other governments of Europe? Finally, if the regime is destroyed, what effect will that have? While “much has been written on the French revolution, yet each faction having been satisfied by decrying its rival, the subject is still as new as it had never been discussed” (7,4). Above the partisans–Republicans, Constitutionalists, Girondists, Royalists, and yes, his fellow emigrés— there is the philosophic judge. The political philosopher is indispensable because “the period of individual felicities is past,” as “the little ambition and confined interest of a single man sink into nothingness before the general ambition of nations and the interest of the human race” (8,4). In this age of democratization, egalitarianism, political mass movements which might be likened to shifts in the earth’s techtonic plates, you can no longer “hope to escape the calamities of the present age by retired moeurs and the obscurity of your life” (8,4); Epicureanism is no longer an option. Now, “friend is torn from friend, and the retreat of the sage resounds with the fall of thrones” (8,5). With no friendship, the possibility of the kind and just dialectic of the political philosopher may become possible only with his readers; with no friendship, there can also be no political life, no trust among citizens. “We are sailing along an unknown coast, in the midst of darkness and the storm” (8,5). Nonetheless, “with the torch of past revolutions in our hand, we shall boldly enter into the darkness of future ones” (8,9).

We are undertaking this sailing, philosophers and citizens alike. “Every one,” not only philosophers, “therefore has a personal interest in considering these questions with me, because his existence depends upon them” (8,5). “My subject is a chart which must be studied while in danger,” the danger of European man in 1797, as the Jacobin Terror subsides but wars continue on the Continent and, as it will happen, Napoleon is to come (8,5). Only with such study can “the sagacious pilot ascertain the point we have left, the place in which we are, and the one to which we are steering, so that in case of shipwreck we may save ourselves on some island where the tempest cannot assail us” (9,5). That island “is a conscience without reproach” (9,5) We will know ourselves, and know ourselves to have done our part. It is impossible not to see in this Tocqueville’s work, sixty years later, and beyond it the still worse terrors of the century which followed him, and quite possibly of our own century, as well.

Chateaubriand supplements his account of his plan with an account of his method. “A deficiency in method is the general fault of political works, though there is no subject which requires more order and clarity” (10,5). His own method has five features: an examination of “the remote and  immediate causes of each revolution”; the “historical and political parties” involved in each; “the state of moeurs and sciences” in each nation, and “such as were generally prevalent among the human race at the moment of each revolution”; the causes “which extended or confined” the influence of the revolution; and the similarity or difference between that revolution and the French Revolution, “in order thereby to form a common focus, to which all the scattered rays of morality, history and politics may converge” (10,5-6). The modern, French Revolution will serve as the touchstone for each revolution analyzed in terms of its origins, the factions that contended within it, the hearts and minds of the nation revolutionized and of humanity generally, and its influence on other nations.

What is a revolution? It is a regime change, that is, “a total change in the government of a nation, whether from a monarchical to republican, or republican to monarchic” regime (10,6). In true revolutions, moreover, “the spirit of the peoples changes,” not only the government. “Indeed, if the spirit of the people does not change, what does it matter if they were agitated for a few moments in their misery, and that their name, or that of their master, is changed?” (11) By focusing our attention on regimes and regime change, the study of revolution, Chateaubriand insists, as political philosophers since Socrates have done, that his inquiry has paramount importance philosophically. “If the greatest subject be that from which the greatest number of natural truths may be deduced; and if by summing up historical truths we are led to a solution of the problem of man, was there ever an object more worthy of philosophy than the plan laid down for this work?” (13,8) Boldly, he claims “I will conduct the reader by a path of philosophy hitherto untrodden, in which I promise him important discoveries and new views of mankind” (14-15,9). Yet he remains not only Socratic in thinking of politics but in his ‘zeteticism.’ “By my title of an Essay”—that is, an attempt, an effort, in the spirit not only of the ancient, Socrates, but of the modern, Montaigne—I “have publicly avowed my inability; but I shall be sufficiently gratified in having pointed out the road to those of superior genius” (13,8-9). A road Tocqueville did not neglect to take.

Before turning to the revolutions of ancient Greece, Chateaubriand briefly considers human ‘pre-history.’ The Amerindians Columbus saw were “far from being in a state of nature” (15,10); they were, however, for the most part stuck in barbarism. Nor had they made much progress by the time Chateaubriand arrived. Why? “Nature has denied them flocks and herds of cattle, those first legislators of mankind”; those nations and tribes that had attained civilization lived “precisely in those districts in which there was a species of domesticated animal” (15n.,10n.). Herders learn to rule by ruling animals. In the forests of North America there was no space for pastureland. From the Fertile Crescent to Egypt to Greece, human beings could learn to rule, could achieve civilization.

He excludes Asia from his consideration. The Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, who “built their power on the ruin of each other,” conquered then lost great empires under tyrannical regimes (24,14). “Let the crimes of tyrants and the misfortunes of slaves sleep in equal obscurity and oblivion.” Greece was where republics developed and maintained themselves for a long time, “a most interesting subject for the consideration of the philosopher” (25,14). “If the causes of their establishment had been transmitted to us by history, we might be able to obtain the solution of the famous political problem: What is the original convention of society?” (26,15) Chateaubriand rejects Rousseau’s solution—a social contract founded upon the general will. “To establish this train of reasoning, must we not suppose an association already existing? Would a vagrant savage, taken from his deserts, to whom the doctrine of mine and thine is unknown, pass all at once from natural to civil liberty?” (27,15) No: the notion of liberty understood in terms of justice and property is too abstract for a creature that, as in Rousseau, lacks speech and reason. 

Primitive man first organized under monarchy, as “not one of the savage hordes, which has been found upon the globe, existed under a popular government” (28,16). It may be that these hordes “almost immediately tired” of their kings and called for “some valiant or sagacious citizen,” some lawgiving founder, to address the problem (28,16). Either way, how did they begin to conceive of civil, as distinguished from natural, liberty? It wasn’t “public opinion” that overthrew the regimes of Homeric Greece; only royalty itself could have abolished royalty (30,18). Why? The monarchic regimes were unstable. The order of succession was easily violated, and as a consequence, monarchs lost their power to “the spirit of the rich,” a usurping and factitious spirit (33,19). “It is a feature common to all revolutions, in the republican sense, that they have rarely begun on the part of the people (33,19). “It has always been the nobility, who, in proportion to their wealth and influence, first attacked the sovereign power,” whether out of envy, resentment of corruption in high places, libido dominandi, or the Fate of the tragedians which blinds monarchs to their own good (33,19). 

After that first, oligarchic, revolution, “the people, oppressed by their new master, soon repent of having seated a multitude of tyrants in the place of one legitimate king” (33,19). Under these circumstances, “the people eject them as a disgraceful faction, and the state is changed into a republic, or returns to monarchy, according to its moral feeling” (34,19-20). In addition, and consistent with his claim that kings themselves undermined monarchy, a king established the Amphictyonic Council, which consisted of “deputies of the people,” an institution “calculated to generate the idea of republican forms among the nations which it represented” and giving that idea an institutional ‘space’ in which to gather authority (34,20). But “the great and real reason” for revolution in Greece was that Greek poleis “never were real monarchies” in the first place (35,21). Chateaubriand promises an explanation of this claim in a later volume. 

Whatever its causes, the effects of the republican revolution “was far from producing happiness to Greece,” resulting rather in “a state of anarchy” wherein the well-organized ‘few’ soon regained rule of the disorganized ‘many’ (37,22). “Sparta alone” had in Lycurgus a man who combined the qualities of “a revolutionist and a legislator,” enabling his country to enjoy “the fruits of its new constitution” immediately (37,22). For their part, the Athenians “habituated themselves by degrees to popular government, passing slowly from a monarchy to a republic,” avoiding the miseries of most Greek poleis while never attaining the stability of the Spartan regime (38,23). Their regime was always “a mixture of truth and error” (38,23). Theirs was the polis that most resembled modern France, “liv[ing] in a perpetual state of trouble,” with “excessive” “antipathy between the rich and poor” (39,23-24). Modernity has, if anything, made this worse. “In this age of philanthropy we have declaimed too much against fortune. The poor of every state are infinitely more dangerous than the rich, and often less valuable members of society.” (39,24)

Democracy in Athens, as in France, led to overreaction. In Athens Draco, “an inexorable philosopher, was fixed upon to frame laws for humanity” (39,24). But “he considered passions as crimes; and equally punished, with the utmost severity, the weak and the wicked; by which he appeared to pass sentence of death upon the human race” (39,24). Such “sanguinary laws, like the fatal decrees of Robespierre, were favorable to insurrection” (40,24). As in France, “this reign of terror passed away; but it left behind it relaxation and weakness” (40,24). Unlike France, however, the Athenians turned to the gods, who “filled the consciences of the people with dread” (40,25). “So necessary is religion to man!” (40,25) Chateaubriand exclaims; the atheism of France has resulted in a much worse outcome. The Greeks turned to “a sage named Epimenides,” who wisely “built temples to the gods, offered sacrifices to them, and poured the balm of religion into the secret recesses of the heart” (41,25). “He did not treat as superstitious what tends to diminish the number of our miseries; he knew that the popular statute, and the obscure penates, which console the unfortunate, were more useful to humanity than the volume of the philosopher, who knows not how to wipe away a tear” (41,25). The “philosopher” Draco, like Robespierre and the Enlightenment philosophes who inspired him, foolishly rejected religion, overlooking the heart’s portion of the human soul. They didn’t understand human nature, and thus failed to be adequately philosophic. 

It took Solon to design more lasting political institutions. Chateaubriand concurs with Aristotle and Montesquieu in considering mixed regimes to be “the best”; “man, in a state of society, is himself a complex being, and to a multitude of passions there should be a multitude of restraints” (43,26). Athens “really possessed what France pretended to have acquired in our days—the most democratic constitution that ever existed among any people,” wherein the people assembled as a body to frame their own laws. France, a modern state, can do no such thing (43,26); accordingly, it has had, at best, representative governments, never a democracy. But this pretended democracy, in reinforcing its pretense, divided the property of the rich and paid money the people owed to usurers. Solon resisted demands to partition property equally but did remit all debts. Neither policy was strictly just, but Solon’s policy enabled landed wealth to survive even as it injured monied wealth, and that, Chateaubriand judges, shows the superiority of antiquity over modernity, of the more moderate habits of the landed wealthy who often dominated ancient poleis the limitless desire for acquisition money beckons men to satisfy in the modern states.

Chateaubriand moves from the political to the moral dimensions of the revolutions in Athens and in France. “Purity appeared at Athens to be indispensable in the women, who were to give virtuous citizens to the state, and divorce was only permitted on very rigid conditions” (44,26). Under the republican regime in France, however, a woman “who wantonly offered her person to husband after husband” was somehow deemed no “less likely to prove an excellent mother” (44,26). As for the men, in Solon’s democracy they were judged unfit for public office and even “the benefits of the temple” if they exhibited “depravity of morals” (44-45,27). “The magistrate, who appears before the people in a state of intoxication, shall be instantly put to death” under Athenian law (45,27). “These decrees were undoubtedly not made for France, or what would have become of the whole constituent assembly on the night of the 4th of August, 1789?” (45,27-28) when the legislators abolished feudalism by eliminating the seigneurial rights of the nobility and the tithes of the Catholic Church. There could be no mixed regime, after that, and therefore no political check on the passions of the people. “The French, who are fanatics in their admiration of antiquity, seem to have borrowed all its vices without any of its virtues,” “naturalizing among them[selves] the devastations and murders of Rome and Athens, without attaining the grandeur of those republics,” thereby imitating “the tyrants, who, to embellish their country, caused the ruins and tombs of Greece to be transported thither,” in anticipation of Hitler’s pillages 150 years later (45,28).

Solon exiled himself after founding the new regime, to see if Athenians could keep their new democracy, govern themselves without the guidance of their local sage. The factions promptly returned, factions Chateaubriand compares with those of revolutionary France. There was the Mountain party, which “wished for pure democracy”—the “Jacobins of Athens” (48,29). There was the Valley party, oligarchs who called themselves aristocrats. And there was the Coast party, consisting of merchants who did business by trading throughout the Mediterranean; they wanted a mixed regime; “they acted the part of the Moderés” during the French Revolution (48,30). “Thus Athens was nearly in the same situation as republican France” (49,30). Even the two ‘moderate’ parties had similar leaders—not really moderate so much as persons (as Chateaubriand nicely puts it) “remarkable for the versatility of their principles,” who quarreled with the other party leaders and eventually sank “into obscurity beneath historical notice” (52,32). “Such is commonly the fate of men without character” (52,32).

Upon his return, Solon found that “each person was a faction unto himself, and though all agreed in hating the last constitution, all differed from each other as to the mode of régime to be substituted for it”—exactly like the French during and long after their republican revolution (54,33). Mistaking the “patriotic exterior” of the democratic leader for his nature, Solon favored Pisistratus, who went to the length of inflicting injuries upon himself in order to inflame popular passions in his favor and then, “having disarmed the citizens,” seized military power and “reigned over Athens with full power, unrestricted by republican principles” (55-56,35). “A democracy no longer exists when a military force is active in the interior of a state,” as for example when a Napoleon arises (55,35).. Indeed, as with Napoleon, so with Pisistratus: “Victory will always be on the side of the popular party, when it is directed by a man of genius; because this faction possesses an influence above others through the brutal energy of the multitude, to whom virtue has no charm, and guilt no remorse” (57,35). Unfortunately for the tyrant, “success does not insure happiness,” as Pisistratus was driven out by rivals, then recalled (57,35). “The storms, which roar around tyrants, twice forced Pisistratus from his throne, and he was twice restored by the people” (57,35). He managed to survive, passing his sovereignty to his two sons, exiling both the moderates and the self-styled aristocrats—even as the French revolutionaries drove out men of Chateaubriand’s class. One of his sons, Hippias, turned bloodthirsty, and some of the democrats who were not killed in this latest purge jointed the moderates and oligarchs in exile. “But they were more fortunate than the French emigrants” who fled Robespierre’s Terror, “for they carried their riches with them, and consequently, in the estimation of the world, their virtues” (61,37). Joining together, the Athenian exiles obtained military assistance form Sparta. Predictably, the Lacedaemonians tried to take Athens for themselves; failing this, they also failed at restoring Hippias, who then turned to the Persian general and satrap Artaphernes, whose assault only served to consolidate Athenian democracy. These events parallel the wars undertaken against the French republic by European monarchs unified the otherwise factitious French. With his older contemporary James Madison, Chateaubriand sees that republican liberty is to faction what fire is to air. Athenian democrats and French republicans could only escape faction through war, but sustained war would make military forces active not only outside but within the country, whether an ancient polis or a modern state. And army officers threaten republicanism.

Why was each Athenian a faction unto himself? It isn’t only a matter of the moral condition of Athenians, or even of Greeks. It is a matter of human nature. “The thirst for liberty and for tyranny are mixed together in the heart of man by the hand of nature: independence for oneself, slavery for all the others, is the devise—the watchword, the motto—”of the human type” (63). In Platonic terms, thumos or spiritedness, the part of the soul that so-to-speak lies between logos or reason and epithumia or appetites, can become the servant of reason, the means by which reason rules the appetites, or the servant of the appetites, the means by which they rule reason, turning it into a means of calculation for self-interested acquisition. Spiritedness ruled by practical reason, prudence, finds its exercise in political rule, in the measured pursuit of justice. Spiritedness ruled by the appetites turns slavish among the weak-spirited, tyrannical among those of stronger spirit. 

The Lacedaemonian regime founded by Lycurgus differed from that of Athens because it more thoroughly reflected the design of the lawgiver, not the mere “turn of affairs” (65,39). Further that founder was “the greatest genius that has existed” (65,39), in Chateaubriand’s estimation, a man “ignorant of nothing which could affect mankind,” a political genius rivaled only by Newton, the genius of natural philosophy (67n.,41n.). When the Jacobins imitated his laws, they failed to consider that “what was possible in a small nation, not yet far removed from the state of nature” cannot be “equally practicable in an ancient kingdom, containing twenty-five millions of inhabitants” (66,40). Each of these differences is decisive. “The Lacedaemonians possessed the immorality of a nation existing without civil forms—an immorality rather to be called a disorder than real corruption” (66,40). It retained its “vigorous coarseness” but now had institutions to give that energy a more just direction (66,40). The French, by contrast, were “legally immoral,” that is, accustomed to living under laws that were themselves corrupting (66,40). “In this case the woof is worn, and when you attempt to stretch the cloth, it tears in every part.” Thus “the most sublime constitution of one community may be execrable in another” (66-67,40-41). 

With respect to morality, Lycurgus “left his countrymen their gods, their kings, and their popular assemblies,” all long established (69,42). “He did not cause all the chords of the human heart to vibrate by imprudently attacking every establishment,” nor did he “undertake his labors amidst the disturbances of war, which engender every sort of illiberality” (69,42). Nor did he “murder the citizens in order to convince them that his new laws were efficacious; he even behaved kindly to those, who carried their hatred of his innovations so far as to strike him” (69-70,43); Aristotle would have called him a great-souled, a magnanimous man. The Jacobins legislated as if human nature were infinitely malleable. “The grand basis of their doctrine was the famous system of perfection,” the ideology which claims “that mankind will one day arrive at a purity of government and morals, now unknown,” a purity all the more needed, given the “inequalities of fortune, the differences of opinion, the sentiments as to religion” that stood in the way of French democratization (71-72,44). Since the moral condition of the French was far more corrupt than that of the Lacedaemonians, this would have required a vast renovation, indeed. And they attempted this even as France was beset by the armies of European monarchs.

“The Jacobins possessed minds rarified by the fire of republican enthusiasm, and they may be said to have been reduced, by their purifying scrutinies, to the quintessence of infamy,” combining “at the same time a degree of energy which was completely without example, and an extent of crimes, which all those of history, put together, can scarcely equal” (74,46). By “purifying scrutinies” Chateaubriand means the forced exile by the Jacobins of all members of their own party “suspected of moderation or humanity” and the guillotining of members of all the other parties (74,46). The Terror forced citizens into the Army of the Republic, where “the courage natural to the French, the inconstancy and the enthusiasm of which they are occasionally susceptible,” the pay, the food, the women, and the wine afforded victorious soldiers made many an ordinary man “become a hero” and, against expectations, repel the onslaughts of the paid soldiers of the monarchies (77,48). The Jacobins “created armies of enchantment” organized in the modern way, deadly to all comers (77,48).

But ultimately deadly to the French themselves. “The people, now hearing of nothing but conspiracies, invasion, and treason, were afraid of their own friends, and fancying themselves upon a mine which was ready to burst beneath them, sunk into a state of torpid terror,” as “the Jacobins had foreseen (82,51).The “unfortunate confounded people” were supposed by the Jacobins to have been reduced to clay, pliable in the hands of their rulers (82,51). “A republican,” the Jacobins taught, “ought to have neither love, nor fidelity, nor respect, except for his country”; children went to military schools, “where hatred and abhorrence of all other governments were instilled into their minds”—whereby “all the morality of Lycurgus was evidently perverted and molded” to the purposes of the Jacobin regime (83,52). Chateaubriand emphasizes that all of this was undertaken by adherents of the “speculative views and abstract doctrines” of “the men of letters,” many of whom Jacobin party members themselves, “endeavor[ing] to bring back the manners of antiquity into modern Europe” (86,54). But the French, in their love of the arts, their immoderation (oscillating between over-refinement and restlessness in peaceful times, savagery “during political troubles”), a people “floating like a vessel without ballast at the will of their impetuous passions,” more nearly resembled not the Lacedaemonians but the Athenians (94,59). 

What should the literary Jacobins have learned from the Greeks? Starting with the poems of the remotest age, the Jacobins could have learned liberty, including martial enthusiasm, from Homer; from Hesiod they could have imbibed “a tendency to bring mankind back to nature” (101,63). From both of these poets they would have learned “there is no real revolution, unless it is effect in the heart”—the lesson of poetry, not natural philosophy, one ignored by natural philosophers of antiquity and ‘rationalist’ philosophes of modernity (101,64). The political philosophers of antiquity “soften the rigor of wisdom by imparting to it the embellishments of the Muses” (101,64). In modernity “the English have had the honor of being the first in applying poetry to useful subjects,” as seen, for example, in Shakespeare but not only in Shakespeare (101,64). From the ancient Greek “middle ages” the Jacobins could have learned the value not “of the greatest liberty” but of energy, not of poetic beauty but of moral sublimity (104,64-65). Here, Draco (in measured doses) would become a healthy tonic, even as Rousseau’s Emile has done for modern times. Neither Draco’s laws nor Rousseau’s education can safely be taken literally; Chateaubriand reports smiling at naïve French mothers who would use Rousseau’s book as a guide to the education of their children, rightly suggesting that he never intended it as such. But sublimity can balance beauty in a ‘mixed’ regime of the soul. 

Solon’s Athens, like the France of the eighteenth century, saw “one of the greatest revolutions in the human mind,” in which “all the seeds of the sciences, which had been so long fermenting in Greece, burst forth together” in the tragedy of Thespis, the comedy of Susarion, Aesop’s fables, Cadmus’ history, Thales’ astronomy, Simonides’ grammar (106,66). Architecture and statuary flourished, too, “but philosophy and politics more particularly soared to a height before unknown,” as they did in Europe with Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, who “imparted to modern nations ideas of liberty” (107,66). In France, however, the Jacobins combined Spartan militarism with Athenian democracy, a virulent mixture, a ‘mixed regime’ badly mixed. Whereas Aristotle and Montesquieu understood that different peoples needed different regimes, regimes adapted to their national ethos and circumstances; and whereas they understood humanity (in Montesquieu’s words) “more fitted for a medium than for extremes”; and whereas Rousseau himself wrote that “the best mode of government” varies with the “conditions of nations”; the Jacobins ignored the central practical insight of their putative philosophic mentor (139,90). In Chateaubriand’s Plutarch-like search for parallel lives, he for parallels between ancients and moderns rather than Greeks and Romans (although for Plutarch the Romans were the moderns), he compares Rousseau with Heraclitus: self-taught, “ow[ing] everything to the vigor of his own genius”; accused of “pride and misanthropy”; and therefore persecuted for decrying the depravity of his contemporaries (144,93-94).

Summarizing the results of his inquiry so far, Chateaubriand distinguishes morality from philosophy. In this section of his book, he takes his bearings more and more from Rousseau, claiming that “we lose in sentiment what we gain in science” (212,135). By this he means two things. First, insofar as the philosophy of the ancients looked ‘out’ at the world, it inclined toward metaphysics; “the souls of the ancients liked to plunge into the infinite void” (212,135). When modern souls look ‘out,’ they are “are circumscribed by their knowledge” (212,135). Second, insofar as the philosophy of the ancients looked inward, they considered morality. “Morals, taken in their absolute meaning, are our obedience or disobedience to that internal feeling which points out to us honesty and dishonesty, which induces us to do one thing and avoid another (147,96). Moderns scarcely look inward at all. Politics isn’t a sentiment but an art, “that prodigious art”—that architectonic art, Aristotle calls it—by which “a whole nation exists, though the individuals composing it differ widely as to morals in many instances” (147-48,96). In their moral and political admonitions, too, the ancient Greeks differed sharply from the modern French. The Greek sages wanted man “to deduce his happiness from the recesses of his own soul” (148,96). The French philosophes have viewed man “with reference to his civil connections, and have attempted to make him levy his pleasures as a tax on the rest of the community” (148,96-97). This makes human nature into a work of art, but no thing of beauty. The Greek sages said, “Respect the Gods, and know yourself” (148,97). The philosophes taught, “Purchase what society has to offer at the lowest price you can, and sell yourself at the highest” (148,97). It is Greek theism against modern atheism, Greek morality against modern “policy” (149,97). The Greeks “said to the people, Be virtuous and you will be free” (149,97). The moderns “called to them, Be free and you will be virtuous” (149,97). “Greece, with such principles, became a republic, and attained happiness; but what have we attained by the opposite philosophy?” (149,97) For the Greeks, “being still a moral people, and having passed from a monarchy to a republic by long years of trial, were likely to gain advantages by their revolution, of which the French could entertain no hope” (152,99). In Greece, “the spirit of liberty refined the age which gave it birth, and raised succeeding generations to a height that no other people has been able to reach” (152,99). Not so, the French.

The two revolutions did have one similarity, a largely deleterious effect on other nations. Chateaubriand first describes the moral and political condition of the nations of the ancient world around and near the Mediterranean during the time of the “republican revolution” in Greece (151,98). Egyptian theocracy and slavery, the first regime to teach the “fundamental principle of all morality,” the immortality of the soul (161,104), but also the first to institutionalize the life of the mind in its great libraries, resisted political change thanks to the rigidity of their class structure, “which imparts such empire to custom” and empowers the rule of priests, that is the rule of the fear of death, that moral foundation of despotism and anathema of moral and political liberty (164,106). Carthage, the England of antiquity, was already a republic, and a commercial one at that. But, also like England, it was a mixed republic; unlike England, its legislature consisted of the people “assembled en masse,” as is possible in a polis (174,113). “Both these governments proved excellent; the first at Carthage in a simple poor community, the other in England among a great, cultivated, and wealthy people (174,113)” As maritime peoples, both gained experience and skill in both commerce and war—giving them a distinct advantage over purely commercial and purely military peoples. As a result of these geopolitical features, Carthage and England alike resisted the influence of the democratic-republican revolutions of their time. Citizens occupied by commercial pursuits “have little time to embarrass themselves with political reveries” (215,136). “Where the arm is at work, the mind is in repose” (215,136). Chateaubriand places the chapter comparing Carthage and England in the center of Part I.

The more thoroughly martial spirit of Rome similarly shielded it from “the verbose politics of Attica” (229,146). “The citizen, accustomed to exercise himself in the Field of Mars, to obey the laws and fear the gods, never went into the schools of demagogues, to hear them vociferate about the rights of man, and the means of overturning their country,” and Roman magistrates “took care that the youth should not be corrupted by useless knowledge” (230,146). This enabled Rome to oppose its republicanism against Greek republicanism, its liberty against Greek liberty. 

The ancient Scythians exemplified the primitive herdsmen Chateaubriand regards as the forerunners of civilization. “The Scythian, reposing in the shade of the valley, saw his young family and flocks sporting round him,” and “the gratification of his heart” was friendship with his fellows (250,159). “A thousand delights are the lot of uncorrupted man” (251,159). Chateaubriand had seen such men among the Amerindians of the Canadian woods, “this favorite of nature, who feels much and thinks little, who has no reasoning faculty beyond his wants, and who arrives at the results of philosophy like an infant, through his gambols and sleep” (251,159). They are not solitary, like Rousseau’s natural men, but neither are they restless and agitated, as we civilized ones are. In modernity, their closest analogues are the Swiss. But the Scythians “were shepherds, and cherished liberty for her own sake,” while the Swiss were “agriculturists, and loved her for the sake of their property,” thus “advanc[ing] a step nearer to civil vices” (256,163). The Greek revolution corrupted the Scythians, for “there is no asylum against the danger of opinions,” which “traverse seas, penetrate into deserts, and agitate nations from one extremity of the earth to another” (258,164-65). The ideas of republican Greece “found their way into the forests of Scythia, and destroyed its happiness,” thanks to the “philosopher” Anacharsis, who journeyed to Athens and brought back the ideas then bruited about there (260,166). With this, “Scythia saw men arise among her inhabitants, who thinking themselves better than their fellow-creatures, moralized at the expense of the latter,” sundering the bonds of untroubled friendship founded upon social equality and a shared way of life. In one of his most Rousseauian moments, Chateaubriand laments, “The Scythians, disgusted with their innocence, drank the poison of civil life” (263,167). Their “simplicity, justice, truth, and happiness all disappeared” (263,168). In exchange, Athens employed their men as military guards, much as French kings “so long surrounded themselves with the brave peasantry of Switzerland” (263,168). 

Chateaubriand likens ancient Macedonia to modern Prussia; they share the spirit of war and “above all policy,” “changing sides according to times and circumstances, lulling their neighbors into security with treaties, and invading their countries directly afterwards” (270-71,173). In Macedonia, “the politic Alexander” waited until the Greeks and the Persians “exhausted themselves by disastrous wars” before conquering both (271,173). Tyre and Holland represent the opposite, commercial spirit—maritime countries, neglectful of belles lettres (“a mercantile spirit contracts the soul,” as “he who busies himself with a ledger seldom opens a philosophical treatise,” although admittedly Tyre had its Moschus, Holland its Erasmus and Grotius) (279,178). Commercial nations trade in commodities; they are as faithless as devotees of “policy,” but in a different mode. During wars and revolutions alike, Tyre’s “frigid merchants continued to import and export, from one country to another, the superfluities of nations, without embarrassing themselves as to the idle systems by which other nations were tormented” (282,180). The occasional philosopher who arises in such nations may even prove useful to it, as “during revolutions, opinions are the only commodities which find a ready sale” (283,180-81).

The modern parallel to ancient Persia is “Germany,” the Holy Roman Empire. Both regimes are monarchies whose rulers claim sacerdotal authority and rule over empires “composed of different parts” (292,185). Both held their heterogeneous population together with military force (especially cavalry, which covers long distances rapidly) and measured toleration of diverse religions. The Holy Roman Empire had no slaves but it did have peasants; “the feudal regime oppressed the German laborer nearly in the same way that the slavery of Persia disheartened the subject of the great king” (293,186). The principal difference between these regimes “consists in their morals” (293,186). Unlike the Catholic priests of “Germany,” the priests of the main Persian religion worshipped nature, excelling in astronomy and “the science of magic” or astrology—that is, the attempt to divine the workings of nature, particularly with regard to seeing into the future (312,201). Chateaubriand pauses to remark that “if you wish to predict the future, consider the past. It is a sure datum which will never deceive you, if you proceed upon one principle—morality” (314,202). Historical research that attends primarily to the moral spirit, the ethos, of peoples rather than the stars is the true ‘astrology.’

In both regimes, longstanding corruption—another means of ruling heterogeneous peoples—left them susceptible to revolutionary fervor, in different ways. “The influence of the republican revolution of Greece upon Persia was direct, prompt, and terrible” (314,201-02). With its very different moral spirit, its Catholic Christianity, the Holy Roman Empire quickly learned principles of military organization, strategy, and tactics from revolutionary France, but eschewed its political system. However, the systematic efforts at secularization undertaken by Emperor Joseph II, a modern ‘enlightened despot’ who attempted to bend Catholicism to imperial purposes by reducing the number of clergy and banning many of the Catholic orders, provoked resistance in the Austrian Netherlands, whose people “offered themselves an easy prey to the French” revolutionaries (318,204).

The military results of the consequent wars differed because Persia fought a one-front war against revolutionary Greece, whereas the Holy Roman Empire fought France and Turkey at the same time. But there was a moral difference, as well. “The ordinary motive for wars is so despicable, and the account of a battle, in which twenty thousand ferocious monsters mangled each other for the gratification of a single man’s passions, is disgusting and fatiguing; but, when citizens are seen charging a horde of conquerors, with chains or political annihilation by dismemberment on one side, and liberty and a rescued country on the other; if any grand spectacle was ever worthy of attracting the attention of mankind, it is surely this” (357,231). Nonetheless, “the poor and innocent Greeks,” defending “their sons, fathers, gods and country,” fought justly; “the French, destitute of morality, and loaded with revolutionary guilt, by no means supply the same affecting picture” (357,231). Unfortunately, both nations “lost their virtues in the same field that they gained the laurels of victory,” as “from this moment an ambition to make conquests and a love of gain succeeded to the enthusiasm of liberty” (362,235). The Peloponnesian War would ruin Greece; the revolutionary wars would weaken France and turn it away from republicanism. The thrill of victory, even in a just war, can tip the thumotic part of the human soul toward tyranny, away from liberty.

Geopolitically, the French Revolution occurred in an environment consisting of nations with monarchic regimes. “The more heterogeneous the matter of which bodies are formed that come into collision, the more rapid is the inflammation; hence it is natural to expect that the revolutionary movements of France would, in their effects, infinitely surpass those produced by the disturbances in [ancient] Greece, “where nearly all countries were republics already,” and the revolution consisted of changing them into democracies (368,240). This is why, in the ancient world, “the greatest concussion” occurred in Persia, “because it was there that the republican principles caused the most violent shock” (369,240). This leads Chateaubriand to a different, related but crucial claim. The ancient democratic republics maintained themselves on the backs of slaves; only citizens freed from mundane, banal work by slaves could enjoy the leisure needed for serious public deliberations. “It is indeed impossible to comprehend upon what principle a true democracy can be established without slaves,” and this is why “our modern systems” in Europe, without slaves, serfs, or even the kind of peasantry seen on feudal estates, “exclude all republics among us” (369,241). The United States of his time of course did have slaves, and so, in Chateaubriand’s eyes, might sustain democratic republicanism. “I am astonished that the French, who so closely copied antiquity, did not reduce the nations whom they conquered, to slavery,” the “only method of obtaining what is called civil liberty” (369,241). It should be remarked that both the Americans and the French founded republican regimes on natural rights, which oppose slavery; the Americans, in terms of Chateaubriand’s analysis, had the good sense to make exceptions to their moral foundation, while the French, professing “universal fraternity,” which “was not the sterling coin of high antiquity,” made no exceptions to that foundation and failed as a consequence (370,242). 

Overall, nonetheless, the underlying result was identical: moral corruption. What a nation “gain[s] in knowledge” it loses “in morals” (372,243). Here again, Chateaubriand shows his Rousseauian side. Morality and knowledge “seem so disposed by nature, that the one is always corrupted in proportion to the increase of the other, as if this balance were destined to prevent perfection among mankind”—making those counsels of perfection that the French revolutionaries whispered to themselves so pernicious (372-73,243). “The question of happiness remains…the same for modern for ancient nations, because it is only to be found in purity of soul” (373,244). Enlightened minds do nothing to enlighten hearts. “Who shall teach us, by words or science, the secret of altering the nature of the soul, and rooting out the vexations which choke it up? If man, in spite of philosophy, be condemned to live with his desires, he will for ever be a slave, forever the man of those adverse times which are the past, of those lamentable days which are present, and those future ages of misery which are coming on” (373,244). The political consequence of this is counter-revolutionary. “If the heart cannot attain perfection, if morality remains corrupt in spite of knowledge, adieu to a universal republic, adieu to the fraternity of nations, a general peace, and the brilliant phantom of durable happiness on earth” (373-74,244). Counsels of perfection make sense only if the Spirit is Holy, and then only under a new Heaven on a new Earth, created by the all-powerful, all-wise God not Man, who is neither all-powerful nor all-wise. Thus even in antiquity the effect of the republican revolution in Greece upon Persia “caused the nations, subjected to that empire, to rise from the impetus of public opinion,” spurring the rulers to react by undertaking “a disastrous war, which caused the lives of millions, without mankind gaining more happiness or more liberty,” as even Greek republican victory in that war corrupted the victors and ultimately left them prey to another emperor, Alexander (377,246). 

Chateaubriand briefly assesses the effects of the Greek revolution on nations from the Iberians and Celts in the west to Tyre in the East, finding that “this revolution which was all virtue, all true liberty, produced nothing but evil to every country except Rome and Great[er] Greece” (i.e. the Greek colonies in Italy) (380,249). “What! when a nation becomes independent, must it be at the expense of the rest of mankind? Must the reaction of good be evil?” (380,249) Very often so. “If the Greeks, in the time of Aristides, only brought evils on the human race by breaking their chains, what can be reasonably expected (the system of perfection put apart) from the influence of the French revolution? Could anyone possibly believe that the world was thereby to become virtuous and free?” (380,249) Modern Europe, take note.

Worse, freedom understood as civil liberty probably does not exist, Chateaubriand maintains.  Civil liberty requires rule, politics, but genuine liberty is moral, primarily a matter of the heart. Without a society in which good hearts prevail, civil liberty would be impossible, but in what societies do good hearts prevail? Mostly in pre-civilized societies. Therefore, civil society corrupts hearts, disposes of good, free hearts. Civil society is too rational, too liable to philosophizing, for its own good. And even those very yet-uncorrupted hearts are unreliable. “Did not social man begin by being the child of nature? Is it the latter then to whom we must refer?” (384,250) Consider, then, human nature. Human nature is never at peace. There is “a vague restlessness peculiar to our hearts, which makes us equally tired of happiness or misery.” This “secret reason” or hidden cause of revolutions “will urge us from one revolution to another, even to the end of time” (383-84,250). [1] Where does this natural restlessness of man come from? “Perhaps from the consciousness of another life, perhaps from a secret aspiring towards divinity” (384,250). However that might be, “it exists in all nations,” civilized and uncivilized alike (384,250). “It is increased by bad morals”—worsened by civilizational advance, especially science—and “then overturns empires” (384,250-51). Given France’s “condition as to morality in the year 1789,” “could we escape the most terrible destruction?” (384,251) Add to this France’s political debility—its weak monarch, weak or wicked ministers who were frequently changed, and the Court’s corrupt hangers-on (flatterers, mistresses, intriguers), these ephemerids, these “creatures of he moment [who] hastened to drain the blood of the miserable, and soon ell, to be succeeded by another generation of insects as fugitive and voracious as the first,” and catastrophe was inevitable (385,252). 

The revolutionaries proceeded to make moral conditions even worse. “Celibacy was become common, even among the lower classes of society. These isolated men, who were in consequence egotists, tried to fill up the chasm in their own lives by disturbing the families of others.” (386,252) Those who headed the families that did exist “adopted ideas at least as destructive to society”: parents “unwilling to sacrifice the comforts of life” produced few children, “and this self-love was clothed with the garb of philosophy” (386,252). Thus “cast out of the law of nature by the moeurs of his age,” the Frenchman “wrapped himself in hardened egotism, which destroyed virtue to its very root” (387,253). And then, “after losing happiness in his world, the philosophic executioners,” the Enlightenment philosophes, “deprived him of the hope of a better life” (387,253). Without family, without God, “devoured by an empty and solitary heart, which had never felt another heart beat against it, can we be astonished that the Frenchman was ready to embrace the first phantom which a new universe opened to him?” (389,253) This phantom was the ghost of antiquity, populated by the shades of Athens and Sparta crying “Liberty!” “The head of the Parisian Clown was covered with the cap of the Lacedaemonian citizen. All corrupted, all vicious as he was, the grand virtues of the Lacedaemonian were forced upon the little Frenchman, and he was constrained to play the character of Pantaloon in the eyes of Europe, attired in this masquerade dress of Harlequin” (389,254). With the illusion of democracy among a people fit only for monarchy, the “famous philosophers, who believed in the existence of civil liberty,” “furiously destroyed” all before them, using the mobs of Parisian rabble as their weapons (389,255). 

“What is wholesome or one nation, is seldom the same for another” (389,255). “To pretend to establish republics, in spite of every obstacle, is an absurdity in most people, and a wickedness in man” (389-90,255).

What remedy, then? Paradoxically, the cure for wrongly applied science is science rightly applied. There is no return from civilization, and human nature in its restlessness would not prevent its reestablishment, even if there were. “Let the sciences,” then, “those daughters of heaven, fill up the fatal void” (391,257). “The stillness of the night invites thee…. Search, in the paths of Newton, the secret laws by which these globes of fire proudly pursue their course across the azure sky of if the divinity inspire thy soul, meditate in adoration upon that incomprehensible Being, who fills with his immensity this boundless space” (392,257). [2] Consider the stars not as Persian priests did, vainly attempting to mix science with politics, but as a Newtonian physicist or as a Christian. (Newton himself was both.) And if this is too grand, “equally praise-worthy and less profound occupations” beckon; follow Rousseau, “observe the peaceful genera in the most charming pursuit that nature affords,” “the soft sympathies and loves” in the plant kingdom, where there is no ambition but only a tranquility waiting to be imparted to the restless human souls that study it (392,257). 

This may be sound advice for exiles who have no hope of quick return to their country, but Chateaubriand has already established the importance of political philosophy, so the advice has its limits. In search of a path forward for citizens, he returns to the “second revolution” of ancient Greece, the regime changes from republics to monarchy, the change begun by Philip of Macedon and consolidated by his son, Alexander (397,258). “The more we advance towards the times of corruption, knowledge and despotism, the more we shall discover our own times and morals,” the society consisting of “great ladies and little men, philosophers and tyrants” (397,258). In this parallel, the regime of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens “strongly resembled the state of France during the reign of the Convention”: “surrounded by spies and traitors, the citizens were afraid of communicating with each other,” as brothers could no longer trust brothers, “the friend was mute in the company of his friend, and the science of terror reigned through the desolated city” (403,262-63). Athenians finally rebelled, calling the general, Alcibiades, back from exile, but when a government has “surrounded itself with the military” it is “a certain sign of ruin and tyranny”; “we almost fancy that we are reading the history of our own time” (407,266). This dilemma, Chateaubriand maintains, issued in both cases from the principle of popular sovereignty.

“The people is a child; give it a coral hung with bells, and if you do not explain the cause, it will break the plaything to discover how the sound is produced” (409,267). Therefore, ‘in the abstract,’ the people must be enlightened, it must understand the workings of its government. But “must we conclude that what is logically true to its full extent is sure to be salutary in its application?” (409,268) That is, are ‘abstract’ or ‘theoretical’ truths directly applicable in practice? Chateaubriand denies it. “There are abstract truths, which would be absurd if we were to reduce them into practice” (409,268). Popular sovereignty is such an abstract truth; “the people has the power of choosing its own government” and thus of changing its government, by which he means its regime (409-10,268). However, this power “place[s] it at the mercy of factious persons without number, who exist only in confusion,” persons who aim to maneuver the people into self-induced slavery by “persuad[ing] it that its constitution of the moment is the worst of all” (410,268). Unmitigated popular sovereignty, the abstract truth brought into practice without qualification, may make honor, fidelity, “and morality itself” seem to be “mere folly” by assuming that “we have the incontestable right to violate them” (410,269). This makes politics into a sphere in which the moral principles that should rule private behavior have no purchase in the public realm. “Are there then two virtues, the one appertaining to man, the other to nations?” (410,269) Virtue for the one, virtù for the other? “I theoretically believe in the principle of the sovereignty for the people, but to this I add that if it be rigorously put in practice, it would be much better for the human race to return to a savage state, and run naked through the woods” (412,270). Americans will recognize in this the argument of Madison in Federalist 10 and of Lincoln against Douglas.

In Athens, the head of the Thirty Tyrants regime was Critias, “a philosopher and disciple of Socrates,” an “atheist in principle, bloodthirsty and tyrannical from inclination,” the Marat of Greek antiquity (413,270). If a natural or pre-Socratic philosopher fails to philosophize adequately, a thoroughly politicized ‘philosopher,’ no matter how sensible his teacher, will turn into what later would be called an ideologue—in this case, one armed with dangerous powers. With his colleague, Theramenes, a more talented and supple politician—his French analogue was the Abbé Sieyès—these “monsters” disarmed the citizens and deputized “three thousand brigands” as ‘republican guards,’ thereby consigning “the rest of the people…into terror and nothingness” (413,271). The regime paid its henchmen with wealth confiscated from the rich, whose cries of outraged were silenced by executioners. “Athens was only one vast tomb, inhabited by terror and silence,” as its rulers “studied the countenances of their victims, seeking for virtue and candor in this fine organ of truth, as a judge tries to discover the hidden guilt of a culprit” (414-15,272), just as in Paris during the 1790s and during the twenty-first century in Beijing—its rulers enjoying the supplemental advantage of ‘facial recognition technology.’

Relative moderates within the regime itself were soon purged. These included Theramenes. “No citizen, Socrates excepted, had the temerity to oppose the measures of the Thirty” (422,278); Chateaubriand retains the distinction between the natural philosopher, the political philosopher, and the political ideologue who claims to philosophize. The many Athenian exiles, like the many French exiles, allied with foreign regimes (Sparta for the Athenians) and expelled the Thirty Tyrants. Yet the French exiles are vilified. True, one group “fought for democracy and the other for monarchy,” but the underlying question is the question of justice, and of what kind of regime will deliver it better in the existing circumstances (428,282-83). The exiled Athenian democrats fought for a regime which, though deeply flawed, was more just than the regime of the Thirty Tyrants; the exiled French monarchists fight for a regime which, though deeply flawed, was more just than the regime of the Jacobins. Further, Chateaubriand insists, exiles should not be lumped together for praise or condemnation as if they were a homogeneous body; like all human groups, there are gradations of virtue among them. To speak otherwise “reminds us of the portrait of the Chinese and negroes, all good or all infamous” in the eyes of prejudiced partisans (429,283).

How, then, did the Macedonian conquerors enter the picture? To account for this, Chateaubriand must consider yet another polis in which philosophy was misused. Syracuse had a monarchic regime. Its new king, Dionysius the Younger, had recently succeeded his father, a usurper who had “exterminated his enemies” but who “rendered his yoke supportable” for the balance of his subjects, by which means he ruled for nearly four decades (435,288). Unfortunately, the cheerful young prince’s uncle, Dion, was a philosopher who mistakenly supposed that the pleasant but mediocre youth might be turned into a philosopher-king. He “put a thousand ill-digested ideas into the young man’s head,” unhinging Dionysius’ moral gateway, a barrier none too imposing to begin with (438,290). But “a man of superior mind is too much inclined to suppose that others possess the qualities which he feels inherent in himself, and continues to communicate his ideas without perceiving that he is not understood. It is absolutely necessary that a man of genius should make a sacrifice to folly” (439,290-91).

Compounding his error, Dion induced the monarch to invite Plato to Sicily, and “the court was soon transformed into an academy,” wherein the king “argued about the best and worst species of government,” much to the confusion of His Majesty and to the irritation of the soldiers, who “cared little for the world of ideas” (439,291). While compromising his political authority, Dionysius also found the austerity of “philosophic virtue” a bit much (439,291). Since “the desires of monarchs are absolute wants,” and the desires of this monarch oscillated between the political and the philosophic ways of life, he only reinforced the impression that ‘philosopher-king’ is a contradiction in terms. In one of his moods, he exiled Dion; in another, he recalled him. Dion launched a naval expedition against Syracuse, defeating the tyrant. But “division prevailed in the city” and it all ended in catastrophe, with Dion dead and Dionysius reinstated (444,294).

Dion had attempted to found a Platonic republic in Sicily, “perhaps the only time [in antiquity] that an attempt was made to frame the government of a nation on principles purely abstract” (447n.,297n.). (“The French wished to do the same in our days; but neither Dion nor the theorists of France succeeded, because the morals of their respective nations were corrupted.”) (447n.,297n.) It was the political philosopher, Plato, the author of the book in which the ‘ideal republic’ is founded by Socrates and his interlocutors in speech, who “understood the nature of his contemporaries better than Dion did, and predicted that he would only produce evil without being eventually successful” (447,297). “The attempt to bestow republican liberty on a people devoid of virtue, is an absurdity. You lead them from misfortune to misfortune, and tyranny to tyranny, without procuring them independence.” (447-48,297) Chateaubriand concurs with the genuinely political philosophers in understanding “that there exists a peculiar government, which is natural, as it were, to each age of a nation; perfect liberty for savages, a royal republic for the pastoral times, democracy in the age of social virtues, aristocracy when morals are relaxed, monarchy in the age of luxury, and despotism in that of corruption” (448 ,297). A founder who misreads the ethos of the people for whom he acts “throws it into agitation with effecting [his] object, and sooner or later it returns to the regime which suits it, by the mere force of circumstances” (448,298). Ideas have consequences—in Chateaubriand’s formulation, “from certain principles ensue certain consequences”—and “from certain morals” certain governments follow. To ignore this is to commit a political crime, whether from misfeasance or from malfeasance. “Tyrants are the punishment of guilty revolutions” (448,298) As for the modern French, “we have been raising ourselves on tiptoe for the purpose of imitating the giants of Greece, but we shall never be otherwise than dwarfs” (451,299-300).

Once again overthrown, Dionysius fled to Corinth, then to Macedonia, where the monarch, Philip II, treated him kindly. He ended as an impoverished priest, begging alms. His contemporary parallel in Europe is France’s exiled “legitimate sovereign” of the Bourbon line, “now wandering through Europe at the mercy of mankind” (457,304). “Should the day arrive when Europe is converted into a democracy, the last of the dethroned monarchs will be as unfortunate as Dionysius” (458,304). This reflection leads Chateaubriand to consider how exiles should conduct themselves. “An unhappy man is an object of curiosity,” less often compassion (465,309). The “first rule” he should follow “is to conceal his tears,” since “who can be interested by an account of his disasters?” (465,310) Second, he should “isolate[e] himself entirely,” inasmuch as “society lays it down as a maxim, that he who is distressed is culpable” (465-66,310). Third, he should exhibit “unbending pride,” for “pride is the virtue of misfortune” (466,310). [3] When ruling as a king or an aristocrat, “you should undervalue what you are,” cultivate humility; but as an exile “you should be proud of what you have been,” “avail[ing] yourself of it as a buckler against the scorn attached to the unfortunate” and “summoning the dignity of human nature,” lest “others should forget it” when dealing with you (466,310-11). But Stoic self-rule and aristocratic pride are not enough. Read the Gospel, that supreme source of consolation, with its message of “pity, tolerance, sweet indulgence, and still sweeter hope” (467,311). And work, but only in accordance with your nature. Never renounce the faculties of your soul by accepting task that are beneath you. A noble exile “would rather die of hunger, than procure the necessities of life,” although “it is not everyone who will understand this” (469,312-13). Finally, get out of the city from time to time. Visit nature. In the forest the exile “will find peaceful associates, who are, like him, in search of silence and obscurity,” and who will “kindly admit him into their republic,” even if he has been exiled by the republican regime of his homeland’s sovereign people (471,314). “A life with nature for our companion is truly gratifying” (471,314). In exile, Chateaubriand recurs to the nature that was his first interest, his pre-Socratic way of life. Yet he will live that life not as a Socratic but as the political philosopher he has become. “After the loss of our friends, if we do not sink under affliction, the heart has recourse to itself; it forms the project of excluding every other sentiment, and living entirely upon recollection” (471-72,314). Those recollections will include instructive, even self-instructive scenes of public life, and these will give substance to any writings he may care to direct to his former friends and fellow citizens, from exile. In this way he agrees with Rousseau, “recommend[ing] the study of botany as proper to calm the soul, by turning the eyes of the unhappy sufferer from the passions of mankind to the innocent race of plants” (472-73,315). Recalling the Apostle Paul’s admonition, the adjures the exile to avoid “the vanity of philosophy,” although he clearly does not consider philosophy itself vain (476,319). 

What of Chateaubriand’s own memories? He ties them firmly to political history and to French politics, proving that his exile is no epicurean act of withdrawal into some garden. He begins by recalling the Spartan king, Lysander, who had defeated the Thirty Tyrants and carried off Athenian gold and silver. By so doing, “he introduced the vices” of Athens to his own country: “Simplicity of manners was soon reckoned vulgarity; frugality was deemed folly, and honesty nonsense” (477,319). An oligarchy arose, “and the Spartans, among whom such an equality of rank and fortune had hitherto prevailed, were divided into a vile band of slaves and masters” (477,319). Eventually, a new king, Agis, attempted to “reestablish the laws and morals of ancient Laconia,” but he was betrayed by one of the newly-rich oligarchs and was killed, along with his mother and grandmother (477,319). This reminds Chateaubriand of the death of Louis XVI, who also had attempted to introduce reforms in the years before the French Revolution, with similar results. The memory of Louis in turn recalls the person of his defender, Guillaume-Chrétien Lamoignon de Malesherbes. An accomplished attorney, Malesherbes was a longtime friend of the Chateaubriand family; his granddaughter married into it, cementing the alliance.  “In the midst of courtly corruption,” he “had combined with elevated rank the integrity of heart and courage of a patriot” (495-96n.,333-34n.). So much so, that when the rest of the courtiers had fled Versailles, abandoning the king to his captors, Malesherbes courageously volunteered to serve as his attorney at trial. An advocate of religious and political tolerance (he opposed persecution of Protestants and urged liberalization of censorship of political writings), Malesherbes had also been a friend of Rousseau, the putative inspirer of the revolutionaries. That didn’t stop the revolutionaries from executing the elderly nobleman, along with his daughter, granddaughter, and grandson, “amidst the acclamations of an ungrateful people, whose distresses he had so often commiserated” (495,333). 

By this he refers to Malesherbes’ efforts on the part of those unjustly imprisoned in the Bastille prison. “He alone refused to adopt the vices of the great,” and remained one of the very few men at the royal court “whom J. J. Rousseau sincerely loved”—a “patriot at court, a naturalist at Malesherbes [his ancestral home], and a philosopher at Paris” (498n.,335n.). 

Both Agis and Louis “were full of love for their people; both fell from a wish of bringing back their subjects to liberty and virtue; both mistook the morals of their age” (500,338). Their leading vices were “the spirit of system” in Agis, who attempted reforms more thoroughgoing than the corrupted Spartans would tolerate, and “want of decision” in Louis, who belonged in private life, having no natural disposition for the exercise of executive authority (501,338). The long-term results of these upheavals spelled subjection for Greece. As for France, the revolution may have had little lasting influence in its own times, but it will be copied re-attempted, later one, and “will, perhaps, on some future day, overthrow all Europe” (507,343). In this, we know, Chateaubriand proved more nearly correct than he would have wished.

These important excurses completed, Chateaubriand picks up the thread of the second revolution in ancient Greece, the exploitation of Greek disorder by Macedonia. King Philip II “is the father of that modern policy, which consists in creating disturbances for the purpose of reaping the fruits, and…he equally gave birth to the system, now practiced, of spreading corruption in order to extend dominion” (509,344). In his dealings with the Greeks he “threw away the mask as soon as he felt strong”; “the Greeks then awoke, but it was too late” (509,345). He defeated Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea in 338; his assassination elevated his son, Alexander, to the throne. “If the age of Alexander differs from ours in historical respects, they more nearly resemble each other on the side of morality,” as “it was then that there arose, as in our days, a host of philosophers, who called in question God, the universe, and themselves” (510,345). This confluence of despotic empire and intellectual ferment “proves that to arrive at independence it is not sufficient to reason scientifically upon virtue, but necessary to love this virtue; and it proves that all the moralists in the universe cannot impart to us a relish for it once we have lost it” (510-11,346). Indeed, “the enlightened ages have always been the ages of slavery” (511,346). 

The Greek philosophers of that time, “like ours, were at open war with their own age,” foolishly attempting “to accelerate the course of events” by advancing their own opinions (520,351). “Bodies politic, when left to themselves, have their natural metamorphoses like Chrysalids” (521,351). Their healthy maturation takes time, finally “bursting through the walls of its prison, and displaying two brilliant wings,” on which it “flies to the fields of liberty” (521,351). But “ill-judged artificial warmth” applied in an attempt to hasten their emergence will only kill the organism, leaving “nothing but a dead body of hideous form” (521,351). Of the moderns, Hobbes “maintain[ed] opinions most destructive to society”—that “authority, not truth, constitutes the principle of law,” and that “the state of nature is a state of war, and that happiness consists in a perpetual transition from desire to desire” (533,354). Descartes denied all certain truth but Cogito ergo sum. Other moderns were less pernicious. Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is “one of the finest monuments of human genius”; Machiavelli, Bodin, and Grotius “revived politics in Europe”—a mixed blessing insofar as “politics” means a policy of what would later be called Realpolitik (534-35,355-56). But “the French concussion did not proceed from this or that man, from this or that book” (537n.,357n.). Rather, it originated in the revival and advance of those twins, “knowledge and corruption” (547n.,357n.). The Encyclopedists or Enlightenment philosophes typified this spirit, a spirit of destruction redeemed by inadequate and at times nonexistent plans for reform. 

Against the philosophes Chateaubriand places Rousseau, author of the Emile, which he ranks among the “five books in the world which are worthy of perusal” (554,371) Chateaubriand endorses Rousseau’s assertion in the Emile: “Every thing is right when it leaves the hands of the Creator; every thing degenerates in the hands of man” (548,366). The development of reason is the key part of that degeneration and, as Chateaubriand notices, since “it requires all the force of reason to comprehend God,” “God is therefore never mentioned” to the child, Emile, in his early education (548,367). He is rather “immediately exposed to the influence of necessity, the only law of life” (548,367). Even after he reaches the age of reason, Emile hears the teaching—more precisely the “confession”—of the Savoyard Vicar, in which the Vicar “proves the existence of the Great Being not by metaphysical reasonings but by the sentiment he finds in his heart” (552). The sanction for the heart’s sentiments, the only foundation for morality, comes from the most comprehensive sentiment. This teaching comports with the character of Emile: “Emile is man par excellence, for he is the man of nature. His heat knows no prejudices. Free, courageous, beneficent, having all the virtues without pretense, if he has a fault it is being isolated in the world, and in living like a giant in our small societies: (553). His isolation ameliorated by his love of pure-hearted Sophie. The natural man finds himself in experiencing philo-sophia.

“Such is the famous work which precipitated our Revolution” (553).  What is more, Rousseau predicted that revolution and more, “the horrors with which it would be accomplished” (451n.,369n.). “How could such a republican as Rousseau have formed such an idea, if he had not known what sort of people would effect the revolution in France?” (451n.,369n) It is because the revolutionaries reached for a philosopher’s fine-patterned fabric with clenched fists. The Emile‘s “chief fault is that it is written for only a small number of readers,” readers who perceive its irony: “It would be utterly impossible to educate a young man upon a system, which requires a combination of objects and people that are not to be found”; it is “the sage” who “must regard this production of Rousseau as a treasure,” revealing, as it does “the unsophisticated man of nature” to Rousseau’s “degenerate contemporaries” (554,371). [4] The revolutionaries never noticed any of that, any more than the well-intentioned ladies who took the Emile as a manual for early childhood education.

Among those degenerate contemporaries, Chateaubriand counts the ones he calls, with irony of his own, “our philosophers” (558,374). Pernicious as their doctrines were, morally pernicious as much of philosophy and especially sophistry can be, the Greeks were “distinguished by the chastity and purity of their morals”—their military courage, contempt for pleasure, and frugality (558,374). Modern philosophers write books about war, about morals, about politics, but they’ve never ventured on to any battlefield, never “taken any part” in government, and “share in all the vices of the world” even as they denounce them (558,374). This has given them one philosophic advantage: “by living more in the world, and according to its customs, than the ancients, [they] have been able better to depict society, and the secret springs of human action” (560,376). The moderns do not unduly ennoble human nature; their very lowness enables them to understand how degenerate men have become. This also gives them “more rapid influence on their contemporaries than the books of Plato and Aristotle”; “we find that a shorter time elapsed between the subversion of principles in France and the reign of the Encyclopedists, than between the same subversion of principles in Greece and the triumph of the sophists” (561,376).

This leads to a more general question. “How does philosophy act on mankind?” (561,376). The Greek republics changed into tyrannies. The “legislating philosophers of Athens” preferred monarchy to republicanism (563,378). (He is probably thinking of Plato’s philosopher-kings and Aristotle’s listing of kingship among the good regimes, theoretically the best regime, in the Politics.) “Why? Because they had felt the inconveniences of a popular one,” particularly the persecution of philosophers thereby (563,378). Or rather, “they did not possess the monarchical one”; they themselves did not rule as philosopher-kings (563,378). “The state in which we live always appears to us the very worst,” and the innate restlessness of man generates “a thousand little contemptible passions, which we do not dare to confess even to ourselves,” which “continually urge us to hate and blame the institutions of our country” (563,378). Chief among those passions are “interest, pride, and envy.” “This is the secret of revolutions” (564,378). 

The Greek philosophers were right to praise monarchy, inasmuch as the people “were too far corrupted,” too civilized, “to admit of a democratic constitution” (564,378). By contrast, when Rousseau and others “sounded the republican trumpet, Europe was reposing under monarchical government” (564,379). There it should have remained, given its “corrupt morals,” precluding the possibility that any of “the forms of democracy” might endure (565,379-80). 

Given the intimate connection of religion and politics, Chateaubriand turns to a consideration of religion, a discussion in which he directs his reader to the often-pernicious effect of philosophy on “the religious ideas of the people.” (592,380). “There is one God,” he begins, “the invisible architect of this universe” (567-68). The polytheism of antiquity derives from “the penchant of human nature for superstition” (572). Philosophy questioned and weakened it; Christianity ended it.

Christianity advanced rapidly throughout the Roman Empire because it “exalted the humble,” beckoning to “the poor classes,” ‘the many who are poor’ (580). By then, paganism had spawned the vices of such emperors as Nero and Caligula. Most important, Christian evangelists converted the barbarians who brought chaos to the empire. The barbarians were creatures of imagination, not reason, and Christian preachers spoke to them with the vivid and unforgettable imagery of the Cross. Further, as “all civil authority dissolved, the priests alone could protect the peoples,” offering them membership in the Church, the only civil society remaining (587). “Amidst these storms, the priests grew more and more powerful, having succeeded in organizing themselves in an almost unshakable system” (588).    

“It was after the reign of Charlemagne and the division of his empire that Christianity attained its highest point of grandeur,” with the Crusades and flourish of chivalry (588). This was, not incidentally, the Europe in which aristocrats ruled civil society, and kings were only the first among aristocrats. Christianity began to decline “when the different sects, which it engendered, had the same effect on Christianity that the philosophical schools of Greece had on Polytheism; they weakened the whole sacerdotal system” (592,381). This decline accelerated with the vices of the popes, who began to resemble some of the later emperors, and whose ways were imitated by many of the lesser clergy. Renaissance secularism and Reformation enthusiasm combined to destroy the unified Christendom of western Europe.

Because it was itself a religious movement, a thing of the heart even more than of the mind, the Reformation capped this moral collapse, this crisis of the heart in European man. It began when “a monk,” Martin Luther, “chose to think it wrong that the Pope had not granted to his order, rather than another, the commission to sell indulgences in Germany. Let us weep for human nature”—torn, as he has observed, between the desire for independence and the desire for tyranny (595,385) Schism followed schism, enabling philosophers to infect citizens and subjects with skepticism. And “when men begin to be skeptics in religion, they begin also to have political doubts,” because “when the soul demands to be free, the body shares its wish” and nature overrides spirituality (592,380).

The Counter-Reformation allayed “the storms raised by the Reformation,” but by then the Vatican had “lost the grandeur of its walls, and its timberwork was mutilated by its own thunderbolts, which the fury of the tempest had forced back against it” (598,385). Royal and papal violence “only irritated mankind,” shipping up the passion for liberty still further without adequately preparing souls to live at liberty (598,385). Knowledge or science “seconded this disposition to hate what had caused so many evils. In matters of faith there are no bounds; for the moment that we cease to believe anything, we shall soon cease to believe everything,” as seen in the writings of Rabelais and Montaigne, Hobbes and Spinoza (599,386). When, under the reign of Louis XV, the Encyclopedists formed the Société des gens de lettres, “only two great persons refused to become members of it, J. J. Rousseau and Montesquieu,” the only true philosophers of the time (602,388). They saw that “the true spirit of the Encyclopedists was a persecuting fury and intolerance of opinions, which aimed at destroying all other systems than their own, and even preventing the freedom of thought” (602-03,388-89). The Encyclopedists raged “against what they called l’Infame, or the Christian religion, which they had resolved to exterminate” (603,389).

In the correspondence among these men, including “the despot Frederick” of Prussia, “we see with amazement, philosophers casting off the cloak, in which they had disguised themselves to the eye of the world,” and the monarch “throwing away the royal mask” (603,389). All treated “morality as a fable…talking freely to his brother philosophers of liberty, while he reserved slavery for his stupid people” (603,389). This is astonishing because a monarch undermined “the basis of regal power,” and also because an “atheistic sect were miserable reasoners upon affairs of state,” foolishly exposing their Machiavellianism to public view (604,389). Meanwhile, alone among his philosophic contemporaries, Rousseau defended God, although Chateaubriand does express reservations about the Confessions of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar, which Rousseau carefully folded into the pages of the Emile.  Chateaubriand does not excuse Rousseau or Montesquieu for “unfortunately” having begun “to enlighten the minds of men, who had lost that energy and purity of soul essential towards making a good use of the truth” (604,390). 

By the end of the Old Regime, the royal court, “blind to the progress of a vast monarchy towards that abyss, in which we have seen it swallowed, plunged deeper than ever into vice and despotism,” its “monarch lulled to repose in the lap of pleasure, corrupt courtiers, weak or wicked ministers, the people losing their morality, the philosophers partly undermining religion and partly the state, the nobles either ignorant or contaminated by the vices of the times, the ecclesiastics a disgrace to their order at Paris, and full of prejudices in the country” (605-06,391-92). The Revolution knocked down the rotten structure, but its protagonists were no less corrupt but utterly lacking in the prudence experience in politics can exercise to prevent the worst excesses of violence. 

Chateaubriand considers the ancient political philosophers as superior to the moderns in their prudence, that moral virtue which the moderns incline to reduce to mere calculation of self-interest. Plato and Aristotle were more ‘politic’—content “to publish their novel dogmas without directly attacking the religion of that country, whereas Voltaire and d’Alembert, without enunciating other opinions, declaimed against the cult of their fatherlands” (607). “In this, they were much more immoral than the Sectarians of Athens” (607). After summarizing the Encyclopedists’ critique of Biblical religion—the familiar claims of contradictions within the Bible itself, which spawned the many schismatic sects in the early centuries of Church history; the complaints about the hierarchical structure of Catholicism and its discipline; the satires jibing at Christianity’s supposed affinities to paganism—Chateaubriand states his objection to “the unbelievers” (621). He makes no effort to meet them on their own ground, to refute their arguments. Consistent with Rousseau’s teaching, he appeals not to their heads but to their hearts. “You overthrow the religion of your country, you plunge the people into impiety, and you propose no other palladium of morality [to take Christianity’s place]. Cease this cruel philosophy; do not steal from the unfortunate his last hope. What matters if it is an illusion, if this illusion relieves a part of the burden of existence; if it keeps watch during the long nights at his bedside, solitary and soaked with tears; if finally it renders the final service of friendship in closing the eyes of she who, alone and abandoned, vanished into death?” (621).

As for the priests that bring hope and comfort to the human heart, those of antiquity exhibited “a spirit somewhat different from those of our age” (622). Chateaubriand discusses the spirit of paganism and that of Christianity in both republican and monarchic regimes. In ancient republics “the interest of the priests inclined to the side of liberty” (622). Many modern priests also do. More, in both ancient and modern republics priests were persecuted, in antiquity by the Sophists and in modern France by the philosophes. But in France, unlike in antiquity, “the philosophy of the Bastille” prevailed; atheism had force on its side, and used it.

In antiquity, also, priests, like all regimes, were not centrally organized. They could pose no danger to liberty, except, at most, in local circumstances. The Roman Catholic Church did pose such a danger because it was centrally organized. As for the priests themselves, those seen in the ancient republics were virtuous, unlike those in the French Republic. This notwithstanding, and “all things considered, priests are necessary for morality, and excellent in a republic; they cause no evil, and can cause much good” (625).

Monarchies are a different matter. “But if the priestly spirit can be salutary in a republic, it becomes terrible in a despotic state; because it serves as rear-guard for the tyrant, it renders slavery legitimate and sacred in the eyes of the people” (625). In antiquity this effect was conspicuous in Persia and Egypt. “Their spirit was composed equally of fanaticism and intolerance” (625). Unlike modern priests, they held secret doctrines, revealing only exoteric teachings to the people. Also unlike modern priests, they cultivated scientific studies, especially (as he has already noted) astronomy.

In modern monarchies, “the dominant spirit of the priesthood is egoism”; with no wife or children, the priest is “rarely a good citizen” (627) in those regimes. He shares the spirit of fanaticism with his ancient counterpart, but this takes a more entrepreneurial cast, as, “like merchants in their shops,” modern priests hawk their wares (628).  As an organized body modern priests, like members of other clubs and brotherhood, “put their hatreds in common, and almost never their loves” (628). In France, Chateaubriand allows, the lower clergy, working close to the people, are often beneficial.

If Christianity continues to decline, what religion will replace it? Chateaubriand outlines two hypothetical futures. The first might be described as Kantian: the nations will unite under one government “in a state of inalterable happiness” (651). Given the previous 650 pages, one may confidently say he thinks this unlikely. (I am not alone in this assessment. On the copy of the book I read, a previous reader had written in the margin next to this passage, “CHIMÈRE!”) On the other hand, le Vicomte continues, it may be that after a long period of revolutions, civil wars, and anarchy the nations will “return by force to barbarism,” leaving minds and hearts ready for a conversion analogous to that experienced by the barbarians evangelized by Christians after the fall of Rome. This would be consistent with the findings presented in his study, which he proceeds to summarize in his final chapter.

“Most of the circumstances, which are pointed out as new in the French Revolution, are here shown to have almost literally occurred in ancient Greece” (654-55,394). This indicates the limits of human nature. “Man is so feeble in his means and genius, as only to be capable of incessant repetition,” moving “in a cycle,” not progressing morally or politically (655,394). This discovery should have a beneficial moral effect. “Every man, who is persuaded that there is nothing new in history, loses a relish for innovation”—that is, moral and political innovation (656,395). The “enthusiasm” for such innovation “proceeds from ignorance; remove the latter, and the former will be extinguished” (656,395). There being no going back from civilization, and no taking back of the very real scientific progress, the cure for the corruption caused by ‘enlightenment’ is more knowledge, knowledge of a certain kind. It is indispensable to know that the “moral situation of the people” is more important than its “political condition”; that situation provides “the key which opens the secret-book of fate” (657,395). Morals “are the center round which political worlds revolve” (658,396). Morality is a matter of the heart, not the head. “The heart judges of good and evil; the head [judges] of effects, and the connection which exists between one circumstance and another” (658,396). “Virtue, therefore, emanates from the heart, and the sciences proceed from the head,” and “virtue is conscience heard and obeyed” whereas “science is enlightened nature” (658,396-97). The political consequence of this is that “liberty, the daughter of martial Virtue, cannot exist unless nourished at the bosom of Morality” (658,397). Liberty so understood may be seen in Sparta, where the “free man” was in fact ruled by “some hoary-headed leader”—a leader who, if he detected any “soft pity” infecting the soul of any citizen under his command, compelled him “to murder some lowly innocent slave, in the field which this unfortunate creature was laboriously tilling for his master,” a murder required to toughen the soul of the citizen required to commit it (662,397).

But what of liberty in Athens? it was severely restricted, as well, by modern standards, albeit differently than in Sparta. Athenians could participate in ruling the polis only if he met a property requirement; if he fell into debt “he was sold as a slave” (662,398). And “a good rhetorician could cause Socrates to be poisoned today, and Phocion to be banished tomorrow” (662,398). Chateaubriand tartly remarks, “I should like to know, therefore, how many sorts of political liberty there are,” given not only the differences in the restrictions placed on it not only in Sparta and Athens but in “all the other little cities of Greece” (662,398). 

He ends with an exhortation. “Let us be men, that is to say, free”—that is, “to despise the prejudices of birth and riches, while we honor virtuous indigence,” “impart[ing] energy to our souls, and elevation to our ideas,” displaying “dignity of character,” “brav[ing] poverty,” “smil[ing] at death like true Christians” (664,398). We can do this only if we “begin by withdrawing our attachment to human institutions, be they of what nature they may” (664,398). No one political regime fits all peoples, and our political choices should learn from ancient and modern history how to match regimes to peoples.

The divergence of moeurs and of regimes underlines Chateaubriand’s underlying, and quite Rousseauian conviction, that the state of society is not the state of nature. “Oh, man of nature, it is you alone who make me glory in being a man” (667). You alone are dependent neither on a royal court nor a “popular Tiger” (667). You need to obey no person; nature is your temple. True liberty is living in nature. This state, however, can never be recovered by most men, and only occasionally by philosophers. Thanks in part to his exile and the solitude he has gained by it, he has enjoyed glimpses of nature. “One closes [this] book in a disposition of soul calmer and more apt to find the truths and the errors of this work,” a “mixture inevitable in human nature.” “Given the dimness of my lights,” this disposition of soul “makes me more susceptible to another”—another light. Judging from his subsequent book, The Genius of Christianity, this seems to be the light of the Gospel. [5]

If, as Meier writes, political philosophy is the part of philosophy in which the whole of philosophy is questioned, then Chateaubriand has written a work of political philosophy. And it took an impressive degree of philosophic autarchia or self-sufficiency for a French aristocrat in exile, mourning the murders of family members, to consider the French Revolution philosophically. He does so by taking “a path of philosophy hitherto untrodden,” seeking human nature in historical research into politics while never succumbing to ‘historicism,’ to historical relativism, always remembering to revisit nature as it exists with no human beings in it, except the philosopher himself. He finds human nature not to be malleable, as Rousseau claims, because its spiritedness divides between the thirst for liberty and the thirst for tyranny, a factionalism that brings restlessness both to the human soul and to political life. Man will never be fully satisfied, even in happiness. 

Because human souls are by nature restless, the course of human events can never result in progress, whether gradual or ‘dialectical.’ Historical research rightly undertaken discovers not overall progress or decline but the moral spirit, the ethos, of peoples, the habits of their hearts, the ways of life human nature has been habituated to follow by its circumstances natural and conventional. As for the course of events, if it has a pattern is it cyclical, as nature yields barbarism, barbarism to civilization, civilization to decadence and back to barbarism. Science, the product of civilization, too often opposes morality, the head against the heart. This happens in antiquity, with the natural philosophers, and in modernity, with its incoherent combination of natural philosophy and politics, yielding ‘ideology’ and then violent revolution. 

To recover, Chateaubriand advises, modern ‘intellectuals’ must reform both their heads and their hearts. In terms of the life of the mind, they must return to genuinely political philosophy, recovering the virtue of prudence and seeing it for what it is, the indispensable virtue of both citizens and of philosophers, philosophers who must understand their own nature as the ‘epistemological’ starting point of their inquiries into nature tout court. In terms of the heart, of morality, they must bring themselves to see that true compassion for the people they claim to champion against their oppressors must never overturn Christianity, the religion which, along with Judaism, puts both humility and charity at the center of moral life.

 

Notes

1. See Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, Volume II, Part ii, chapter 3.
2. Pascal finds the vast, empty spaces discovered by modern scientists terrifying because they seem to mean that nothingness overwhelms being, meaninglessness meaning. Chateaubriand sees the vastness but considers it, as it were, metaphysically full.
3. That admirer of Chateaubriand, Charles de Gaulle, adopted this posture vis-à-vis the English and the French during his exile from France, also on English soil, during World War II. He did not neglect to remain in this posture, even when he returned to French soil, first in North Africa, then in France itself after D-Day, and years later, as the president of the Fifth Republic.
4. Chateaubriand does not see, or at least does not remark upon, the equally ironic presentation of Plato’s ‘ideal republic’ in the Republic, preferring to call the dialogue an attempt “to spiritualize terrestrial beings”—an act of “philosophic blasphemy,” with its proposal to destroy families by holding women and children in common. He traces this enormity in Plato’s thought to “the delirium of his virtue.” (543,361-62)
5. Chateaubriand appends a final chapter, an account of a night spent with an Amerindian family in Canada. “These men of nature”—a “nature savage and sublime”—offer him a hospitality characteristic of the men of antiquity. He writes a blessing: “May you live a long time in your precious independence, your beautiful solitude.” That is, the life of natural man is familial and social, not political; his soul is sublime, not beautiful (as it must be, if human beings are by nature divided between the thirst for liberty and the thirst for tyranny), but they live within a larger nature that is beautiful, lending a certain balance to their lives. Chateaubriand would offer a more extensive account of this life in his 1801 novella, Atala.

 

Delba Winthrop: Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This review was first published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 5, September-October 2019.

 

“That democracy is the best, not to mention the only legitimate, form of government is undoubtedly the most vigorously asserted and least examined political opinion of our day.” So the late Delba Winthrop wrote in 1974 in a manuscript published in 2019, more than a decade after her untimely death. She was right then, and she is right now, at least in the West, although the regimes of today’s China and Russia no longer trouble to call themselves democracies. A philosopher will interrogate holders of unexamined opinions, having judged the unexamined life not worth living. In so doing, Winthrop consults that eminent questioner of regime partisans, Aristotle.

Aristotle finds democrats valorizing freedom, which they define as “living as one wishes.” Knowing that such a life requires government protection against those who would constrain them, democrats agree “to rule and be ruled, so far as is necessary, equally with other men who similarly do not wish to be ruled.” This puts democrats in a dilemma: What kind of rule results from the rule of those who want no-rule? If the principle of strict numerical equality—of ‘one person, one vote’—animates the democratic regime, will this not result in the tyranny of the majority, that is, in un-freedom for the minority? More, is living as one wishes good?

The question of goodness raises the further question of whether a numerical, a quantitative, criterion suffices for understanding politics. Can each person within a given political community, a political union or ‘whole,’ be understood adequately as equal to every other? “The democrat’s opinion about what a whole city is depends upon his opinion about what a whole man is.” More generally (a philosopher will ask), what do we mean when we speak of a “whole,” political or other? What’s the relation of the parts to a whole, especially if the parts composing that whole are dissimilar? Whether we look at political communities or at nature, how far does any analysis based on arithmetic, with its principle of “numerical equality,” really get us? “The difficulty with political democracy and the demotic principle of justice is that man seems to differ qualitatively from the beings he counts”; that is, man’s very assertion of his freedom distinguishes him from other elements in nature. “Democracy needs philosophy” and, lest it commit this characteristic democratic mistake when it contemplates the whole, the cosmos, philosophy may need to think seriously not only about democracy but about politics tout court—about all the possible forms political life may take.

Winthrop accordingly considers Book III of Aristotle’s Politics with both philosophic acuity and political astuteness. Book III presents “Aristotle’s comprehensive judgment on democracy,” without neglecting the regimes ruled by one or few. Book III is the core of the book. Winthrop has written a book at the core of the book that arguably forms the core of political science as subsequently understood for a very long time, if not all time.

In reviewing her book, one confronts a perhaps unique problem. What’s likely to remain the best ‘review’ has already been published in the book itself. In the Foreword, Winthrop’s husband, Harvey Mansfield, models what a marriage of true minds must be. His account of her argument will not be surpassed or even equaled, at least here. On the ‘plus’ side, it may be allowed that this fact exemplifies the distinction between numerical equality and equality of quality, making inferior reviews illustrative, if hardly indispensable.

Aristotle’s Politics takes the form of a treatise. It was Leo Strauss who described it as something more than that—as a kind of dialogue, a dialogue between a democrat and an oligarch. Most of Strauss’s readers have taken him to mean simply that ever-equitable Aristotle lays out the strongest arguments for both regimes. Winthrop proposes a more challenging possibility: Aristotle not only puts the democrat and the oligarch into a debate with one another, but he addresses parts of his own argument to democrats and oligarchs, in turn. What looks like a treatise ‘works’ like a set of speeches or interchanges between a philosopher and two kinds of citizen, partisans of two different, indeed rival, regimes. The Politics is Socratic at its heart.

Winthrop finds in the book’s “several arguments” “two educations”: the education of a “political man” who “learns what manliness is and what about himself is worth taking seriously” by learning “about philosophy,” if not necessarily to philosophize; and the education of “a philosopher, a would-be knower of the whole of nature,” who learns that politics “is far more important than he had thought.” “Both educations culminate in a teaching about the human soul and about one might surmise about politics and all things in the light of that knowledge.” Book I of the Politics describes politics in terms of sub-political things, particularly the family. Book II approaches politics in terms of trans-political aspirations, the ‘ideal’ or utopian regimes proposed by men we would not call ‘ideologues.’ Book III brings us to real politics, to arguments over regimes that exist in practice.

What is a citizen? Citizens then and now want to know. A democrat calls a citizen “one who partakes without restriction of time in jury and assembly membership,” judgment and rule. An oligarch, however, insists that the regime or form of rule matters; exactly who is entitled to judge and to rule varies from city to city. Meanwhile, rhetoricians like Gorgias object that the relevant criterion for citizenship is a teachable skill, adroit speech. The philosopher, Aristotle, counters that speech needs to be use “to understand speech,” to bring the speeches of democrats, oligarchs, and rhetoricians to the bar of logic and thereby to assess their rival claims to rule.

The philosophic quest confronts a problem when considering politics: If the city consists preeminently in its regime, not in its population or its physical features, the philosopher must think about something invisible, not a physical object. At the same time, both speeches and regimes address physical objects, from lands and waterways to human bodies. The citizen “is part of the whole that should reveal the whole”; in establishing a regime, citizens participate in the “first cause,” the archē, of the city. But they also generate a form of rule. The pre-Socratic “natural philosophers” who reduced nature to a single, simple material first cause (fire, water) think like democrats; Plato’s Socrates, with his theory of the forms, thinks like an oligarch anxious to distinguish himself from the rabble; Gorgias the rhetorician wants to treat the city and citizenship as artifacts, objects to be made and manipulated. Aristotle aims at a more comprehensive understanding of politics, and with it a more comprehensive understanding of nature. In addition to material, formal, and efficient causes, he wants to understand the telos of the city, and of all things—the ‘end’ or purpose. If one’s regimes inflects the citizens’ understanding of nature, of being, of all reality, then the philosopher, who lives in a city with a particular regime, must understand the (as it were) epistemological limitations or prejudices the regime imposes. And if, therefore, “one can only understand natural beings and natural wholes by looking at them in the light of what one can know about political beings and political wholes,” then “the philosopher would have to take politics very seriously indeed.”

Taking politics seriously means, among other things, understanding what ruling, what governing, is. Rulers legislate and enforce, but before that they must decide, and before that they must think, deliberate. As it’s better to think well than badly taking politics seriously means above all to think well not theoretically but practically, that is, prudently. To think prudently about ruling one must take account not only of citizens’ physical needs but of their demands for honor (often mixed in with demands for justice)—of their spiritedness. Prudence, however, also points to theory, given its tendency to ‘pull back’ from the spirited demands of citizens and to consider what is good for the city and the citizens comprising it. Prudence leads to thought about what ‘the good’ is, of what human nature, is, beyond the goods posited by a given city with a given regime. This suggests that there is a regime beyond the regimes of cities, the regime “comprised of Aristotle and his reader, who, in working to make the spoken clear, makes [that regime] manifest” to those who think along with Aristotle’s arguments.

Aristotle identifies three dimensions of the city’s regime: the “ruling body,” that is, the persons who rule the city; the purpose for which “the city is put together” or “the benefit in common”; and the “forms of rule,” the institutions by which the rulers rule. If “by nature the human being is a political animal,” as Aristotle famously asserts, then both democrats and oligarchs are mistaken in defining their self-interest as “their own physical well-being.” But are they mistaken? Are human beings naturally political? “Aristotle must compare men to other natural beings in order to determine what, if anything, in man’s nature makes him political.” Unlike modern political philosophers, who posit a ‘state of nature’ or ‘original position’ and derive political right from it, Aristotle examines the nature of political rule itself, identifying two kinds: one that claims to rule by “doing services” for the ruled (this might be either democratic or despotic in form); the other that claims to rule in accordance with some idea of the good, in particular the good of the ruled. The first kind of rule focuses on what human beings want, the other on what they should have and be. Both kinds of rule, but especially the second, requires some claim about human nature, and even the nature of “the whole of being” in which human nature exists.

One impediment to understanding politics and human nature is self-interest; the other is the abstraction from self-interest seen in the natural-science attempt to understand politics via mathematics, to “count bodies and then abstract from the bodies to understand the very numbers buy which they count.” But such a scientist cannot explain by means of his science why he undertakes to understand human things scientifically. As Socrates would remark, he lacks self-knowledge. The scientist cannot explain the freedom he exercised to choose the scientific way of life by means of the science he judges authoritative. But “the city exists not for life only, but more for the good life,” and science conceived mathematically cannot distinguish better form worse. “Who,” Aristotle asks, “ought to be sovereign in the city?” Mathematics cannot tell us.

“Virtue or justice is necessary…to overcome the natural preference of each man for what is useful to himself, especially if he deems unsharable wealth most useful.” The lawgivers of the city therefore assert “a common good that is the greatest good for each political being qua political being,” namely “the good for life for the sake of the complete and self-sufficient life,” which individuals and families cannot secure without forming cities with other individuals and families. To do this, they must agree upon or at least accept some way of life; the way of life is the fourth element of what a regime is. Such agreement proves difficult because the human soul consists not only of reason and the desires but thumos, meaning spirit, anger, willfulness. The many who are poor, the tyrannical ‘one,’ the virtuous, or the wealthy, or the respectable ‘few,’ the “one most serious” (that is, the genuine philosopher), and even the impersonal law—all but the latter two often succumb to the promptings of thumos. Even the law, which seems entirely dispassionate, must originate from some ruling body, some real person or person, likely gripped by this ruling passion this passion for ruling.

The democratic regimes which seem so attractive today because they appeal to the bodily desires for peace and prosperity betray the same decidedly un-bodily bent. But if thumos fuels the ambition to rule, and if thumos forms a permanent part of human nature, then “political being is being.” This does not mean tyranny is natural; “free men differ from beasts not by lording it over others”—who has not seen animals seeking dominance over others?—but “by ruling themselves.” Here philosophy, and philosophers, come in, but only if they are “political philosophers,” not “natural philosophers,” ‘pre-Socratics’ who fail to understand the political character of human nature. Before teaching political men, a philosopher needs to learn “from the political man to understand himself as a man who asserts the freedom that nature requires him to assert,” including the freedom to philosophize. That is, before embarking on philosophizing, which seeks to understand nature by reason not by mere assertion, the philosopher must understand the nature of assertion, which he can learn best from that most skilled of asserters, the political man.

Where does this leave ‘our’ regime, “the mixture of regimes that we now call liberal democracy”? It leaves them in need of political philosophy, by which Aristotle most emphatically does not mean what we have come to call ‘ideology,’ some doctrine designed to prescribe a code of belief and conduct. A citizen “intends to be part of a whole that encompasses the fullest human possibilities,” but to achieve those possibilities he must choose and act. Given the “multiplicity, variety, and unity” of a human being as man and as citizen—we are many in number, various in our regimes, one as a species—we need the guidance of philosophy in our quest to find a standard of conduct both sufficiently firm and sufficiently capacious to accommodate both our nature and our circumstances. As for philosophers, they need to become ‘politic’ if they intend to avoid the hostility of citizens offended by their heterodox opinions, but they also need to philosophize about politics in their attempt to understand the whole, the cosmos in which political animals live and form one part. Philosophers, for example, need to understand that ideas are not the whole; sheer physical force, never far from the surface in politics, must never be gainsaid. Speech may be the distinctive human characteristic, but neither human nature but the whole of nature is all talk. ‘Being’ itself is a mixed regime.

Therefore, “the first principle of politics is not dependent upon theoretical natural science,” whose simplicity misses the heterogeneity of things. Such science especially misses the complexities of the human soul, as seen in the perplexities seen in the attempt to establish a science called ‘psychology.’ At the same time, given the need of citizens to assert, given the fact that human assertiveness leads to politics itself, how can philosophers, men who wonder, who question everything navigate political life without disrupting it for the worse and getting themselves killed by spirited, manly men (whether pious or not) in the chaos the philosophers induce?

Rightly understood, “political philosophy does not quash manliness; it educates it.” By engaging ‘manly’ citizens in speech about what ends, what purposes, citizens should pursue, philosophers meet those citizens in precisely the realm citizens share with philosophers as human beings. “What all men share in varying degrees with each other and with Aristotle’s nature or god is speech or reason.” This education or ‘drawing out’ of citizens won’t make philosophers out of them, but if the philosopher takes care not to offend citizen assertiveness or manliness, it may point them in the direction of a way of life that does credit to their humanness.

Is there “a science of human excellence,” which could guide educators in this task? No political science that conceives of itself as a science of the passions, an ’empirical’ science of bodies, can do so. “Nature or chance sets limits, and one’s political”—and educational—aspiration “must therefore be moderate, but one must assert oneself and take public virtue seriously.” To take public virtue seriously, as an educator, is to take kings seriously—not necessarily as rulers in the ordinary sense, but as examples of what a political man should be, with particular attention to his capacity as a wise judge. The science of human excellence—one might call it the royal science or royal way—presents young men with examples of what a good man is. The image of the good king gives the young someone whose character, not merely whose position, they might aspire to, engaging their consent in a quest to become noble, rather than trying to ‘teach’ nobility, impose it from outside—an approach no spirited youth would hesitate to resist. “What is needed in order to give a public defense of man’s politics is to give a plausible account of a natural rule by which thumos, which is necessary for the rule of bodies, is exercised in a nontyrannical way,” by “imposing forms upon themselves.” Nature consists not only of matter but of forms; that spirited young would-be ruler needs the example, the ‘form,’ of the wise king to be set before him, the king whose soul mirrors the symmetries of nature. It is one thing to establish the existence of natural right rationally by philosophizing. The philosopher Aristotle has learned enough about human nature to know that reasoning will not suffice, that the heart itself, thumos, must be prepared to open itself to the rule of reason.

“The standard for political justice is known only with reference to man’s necessity to reason about political or human excellence.” Political philosophy is that measure,” derivative “not from either natural science or theology, but from a consideration of what man reasonably cares to reason about”—first and foremost, his own soul. “Philosophy as substance is more a way of life than a corpus of dogma,” just as statesman is more law-making and prudential response to changing circumstances than it is simple law-abidingness. Aristotle’s “political intention seems to have been to make politics friendly to philosophy by demonstrating the friendship of philosophy to politics,” “win[ning] the trust necessary to treat his patient by giving the best possible defense of democracy, which is at the same time a proposal for its improvement.” 

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: The Centrality of the Regime to Political Science. Warsaw: Wydawnicra Universytetu Warsawskiego, 2016.

 

This is exactly the kind of book that has long needed to be written, a book correcting the tendency of political scientists to reduce politics to sub-political categories—race, class, and gender being only the latest iteration of the practice. In so doing, political scientists have supposed it more scientific to make political science apolitical, confusing the political with mere partisanship. It is as if America’s civil-social egalitarianism—its democracy, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word—has inclined students of politics to such atomizing reductionism. Bates stoutly refuses to go along, aiming to restore the classical idea of the regime to its rightful place in political thought.

I look forward to a second edition. The excellencies of this one are vitiated by a few missteps; they are easily corrected. Meanwhile, the first edition is well worth inclusion in the reading list of any introductory university course in political science.

Bates begins by rightly distinguishing the modern state—that modern invention of Machiavelli, who intended it as an instrument for his projected conquest of ‘Fortuna’ and of nature—from the longstanding polis or ‘city-state.’ He goes too far, however, in contending that Machiavelli’s lo stato actually replaces the regime. He contends that the fundamental contrast isn’t between the state and the polis but between the state and the regime. The modern state, according to its philosophic progenitors, amounts to an act of human will aiming at a unified whole; this is indeed no regime. The modern state aims at being a “truly one united whole” having a supposed ‘general will.’ True enough, but it would be much better to say that Machiavelli himself distinguishes two regimes in the modern state—principalities and republics, rule of the one and rule of the many—and that his silence about regimes of the few, of aristocrats and of oligarchs, bespeaks his intention to centralize political communities, to get rid of those intermediary rulers through whom the regimes, the rulers, of ancient city-states and empires, along with those who tried to rule the more recent feudal ‘states,’ had needed to filter their authority in order to govern the people.

This has meant that all modern states have needed bureaucracies of some sort, agents of the regime of those states, and that bureaucrats’ loyalties to the regime are often suspect, as they maneuver themselves into a position of quasi-independence within the states. In so doing, bureaucrats become elements of the regimes of modern states, a status that has bedeviled presidents and prime ministers but also tyrants and despots—making bureaucracy a regime problem that cuts across all regimes in modernity.

How did political communities begin? After all, there remain places in the world in which extended families or clans count for more than any association of families, and even well-established modern states often see important family networks achieving predominance. Bates agrees with Aristotle in considering the family or household to differ from the polis in kind and not merely in size, the polis being the most authoritative form of association among humans. Oddly, he claims that Aristotle’s Politics never shows “how or why the polis became authoritative,” although Aristotle clearly describes the inadequacy of the family to the task of achieving a self-sufficient human life. But in foreclosing an (as it were) intra-Aristotelian account of political authority, he turns to an excellent and older source, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy; in this he cogently follows the scholarship of Heinrich Meier, who sees the political significance of the Greeks’ shift from worshipping the gods of the Underworld to the worship of the Olympians. “As Meier contends, the discovery of the political occurs when political life through community derived decisions override family/kinship derived decision processes.”

In the first play, the Agamemnon, the great military leader of their Greeks, returning to his city, Argos, after defeating the Trojans, brings home “many great prizes,” not the least being Cassandra, a Trojan princess. His wife, Clytemnestra, has proven no less unfaithful, forming a erotic-political alliance with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s “political enemy.” She justifies her animosity in view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, whom he made an offering to the gods as a means of winning their aid in the war. Clytemnestra murders her husband and king in revenge, enabling Aegisthus to accede to the throne. The citizens of Argos—really the subjects of the usurping royal couple—can think of nothing more than to wait for Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, “to remove the newly imposed tyranny.” “Although the citizens can easily rise up and kill both murderers, they lack the authority or sanction” to do so. Only the son has divine sanction to take vengeance on his father’s killers. “The city of Argos is thus reduced to the household of Agamemnon, where only the head of the household has authority to pursue policy”—ruled, as it is, under the authority of the gods of the Underworld, the Furies, the gods of families.

Orestes does return, and does kill his mother and stepfather, on command from the Olympian god, Apollo. The goddess Athena calls a jury trial of Orestes, and persuades the Furies, who would otherwise continue the family revenge-cycle, to integrate themselves into a new political order. The Furies pursue Orestes because he killed his mother, whereas his mother merely killed her husband, no blood relative. (This is the significance of the Biblical injunction, that a woman shall leave her parents upon wedding her husband, and they “shall be one flesh”—constitute a new ‘blood tie.’)  “The household bonds, expressed as kin loyalty, force one to a cycle of revenge, in order to right wrongs done to the family. There is no end to vengeance and no peace. The desire for peace, which is needed for the fulfillment of human happiness (eudaimonia), entails that one rise above one’s own—kin ties—to some other claim that is more authoritative. This other claim is that of the polis.” “Human beings must associate with more than their own kin in order to live well.” “The old gods are aligned with the household and the new gods are aligned with the city”; if human beings intend to live well, they must change their gods—or rather add some who are capable of making peace with the old gods. Human beings must become citizens.

The old gods don’t surrender easily. They hate the city, partly because they denigrate speech. “They will not let any mere words dictate to them,” the building-blocks of the law by which the city will be ruled, or rather through which the new gods will rule in the better interest of the citizens. More, the Furies are too powerful to be forced into line. Apollo unwisely uses words in an attempt to “exclude, reject, or spurn the Furies,” who are far too spirited to bow to the contempt of the Olympians. But Athena “offers them a new and more important role to play in the new dispensation. She offers them beauty and a role in defending the political community, whereas Apollo merely desires their downfall.” Bates calls this “an appeal to the vanity of the Furies,” but it is really an appeal to their thumos, their spiritedness. For Aristotle, it is well to notice, the bond between husband and wife is political, based on oaths, on choice, not merely on ‘biology’—generation or ‘blood.’ 

With respect to the political, Bates observes, Aeschylus identifies two cities with two different regimes. Argos is an elected kingship, Athens “some form of limited democracy.” Once elected, an Argive king passes on his title to his son. In murdering her husband and installing her lover as the monarch, Clytemnestra changes the Argive regime to tyranny. “It is tyrannical in that it both violates the law, nomos, of succession of the title of king from father to son and is rule over unwilling subjects.” That is, under the Argive regime “it is too easy to confuse the household of the king with the city”; “the inaction of the citizens of Argos and their awaiting Orestes to set things right shows that in Argos there is no distinction between household and city,” and that the lack of this distinction inclines the citizens (really subjects) to passivity. Political assassination is really anti-political, striking at the household—in which bond between husband and wife constitutes the one, limited, political dimension of life—and “also at the basis of all non-violent human association,” and “therefore the possibility of human flourishing—happiness.” The rule of sheer force emulates not the political, consensual, husband-wife bond in the family, nor the kingly rule of parents over children—rightly aimed at the good of the children. The rule of force emulates rather the rule of master over slave, a form of rule performed for the good of the master not the slave, the familial equivalent of despotism in the city. And tyranny is even worse than despotism, lacking even legal status and “treating persons as though they are merely slaves.”

This last formulation is odd. Are slaves not persons? Persons treated as if they are not persons, but machines, to be sure, but by nature persons nonetheless. Aristotle does of course identify a human category of ‘natural slaves,’ those whose best work is not self-directed because they are incapable of reasoning and need to be commanded by those who are capable. Aristotle suggests that such persons are fewer in number than one might want to think, if one is a master of slaves. Bates’s later critique of Abraham Lincoln should probably be considered in this light.

“If Argos were truly a city, the citizens themselves could have set affairs right and avoided the fate of Orestes. But Argos is not a city and the chorus are not citizens, rather they are subjects of the household and are totally without authority in this matter. This is why after Orestes takes vengeance on the murderers, the dramatic action must leave Argos and go to Athens.” That is the setting of the final play in Aeschylus’ trilogy.

The Athenian regime is a form of the rule of ‘the many.’ Even the goddess Athena “defers to the city.” Being the goddess of reason, Athena will not challenge the Furies directly. “In originally agreeing to having Athena hear the case, the Furies submitted their case to be judged by a deity who was a third party, not directly involved in the case. however, by deferring the authority of the case to the city, Athena defers divine sanction to political sanction. Or she establishes the legitimacy of decisions by the political body concerning such matters, whereas before these matters were contained within the moral realm of the household.” Athena casts her vote in favor of Orestes, indicating that marriage, which is political, trumps parenthood, which is ‘blood.’ For their part, the Furies will redirect their thumotic energy toward defending the city; unlike Apollo, Athena understands that “the political community as such needs the power of the Furies so that the city is able to defend itself”; “the alliance of the Furies to the city is intended to strengthen the city as the source of human fulfillment,” moderating the love of one’s own by widening it to the city, the home of speech, which recognizes marriage instead of parenthood as the fundamental familial bond because it is oath-based, not blood-based. Like Socrates, Aeschylus sees that the other extreme claim, that speech alone suffices to constitute the city, will not do. “Coercion or force is to be understood in this particular context, as the exercise of law,” putting teeth into the mouth that speaks. Accordingly, the Furies must “be tamed and managed rather than eradicated.” What Nietzsche would call the Apollonian must be supplemented not so much by the Dionysian but by the Furious, all under the rule of the reasonable, which reasonably sees its own limitations. 

Under this dispensation, justice no longer means vengeance but the rule of law. The city, with its laws and juries, “will indeed do what the Furies did—right wrongs and protect the family.” But it won’t right wrongs “with the same ruthless and destructive manner of the Furies,” which leads to an endless cycle of retaliation. “Rather, the justice of the city will be a compromise between the peace, which is an essential precondition for human happiness, and the demands that wrongs be righted and those who commit them be punished.” The terms of this compromise mean that “not all acts of injustice will be sought out and punished; rather, only those that threaten to destroy the peace or happiness of the human association.” To go further “would be irrational and harmful to the greater human good,” destroying many good things “to remove one single evil.” “Moderation is now to be the qualifier of justice.” 

Aristotle ranks moderation among the principal virtues, and it is to “the continuing significance of Aristotle for social and political science” that Bates now turns. Often criticized for having ignored the empire under which he lived and concentrating his attention on the Greek poleis, by now subordinate to Macedonia, Aristotle in fact did no such thing. As a citizen of Stagira living as a resident foreigner in Athens, Aristotle had to watch his step when it came to commenting on contemporary politics. Further, his emphasis on the polis has a heuristic purpose. It is in the small polis, not the big, sprawling, polyglot, multi-city empires that the regime is most clearly visible. The empires of his time had regimes—monarchies of one sort or another—but except for the annual exaction of tribute, one’s city didn’t much feel the pinch of rule. Day-to-day governance continued to occur within the city; that was what mattered in the lives of imperial citizen-subjects.

The regime or politeia “is something separate and distinct from the polis but gives shape and direction to the polis.” Bates links its definition to Aristotle’s four ’causes’: in its material character, every regime has institutions and offices; in its formal character, it “looks different” from other regimes; its efficient cause is the ruling body or politeuma of the city; its teleological or final cause is its view of justice or right. This may be a bit too schematic. Aristotle identifies four dimensions of a regime: its politeia strictly speaking, its form or institutional structure; its ruling body or politeuma; its way of life or Bíos ti; and its end, its purpose, its telos. Its ‘formal’ cause therefore is its institutional structure; its ‘material’ cause is its ruling body; its ‘efficient’ cause or archē is its founding. The way of life relates to the purpose as the means to an end. 

“The politeia is that which orders all the parts that constitutes the given political community” or polis. “Therefore, no politeia, no political community.” He proceeds to summarize Aristotle’s quantitative and qualitative criteria for regime classification: the one, the few, and the many; good and bad. These result in six basic regime types or species; although Bates says that Aristotle subtly undermines this simple classification, it is more accurate to say that he refines it, identifying ‘subspecies’ within each type. Bates carefully distinguishes Aristotelian from Hobbesian political science. “Contra the teaching of Hobbes and the modern teaching that follows from his understanding of government representing the whole body politic as such, and not merely a ruling part, Aristotle’s teaching about the nature of political rule is that a part of the political community acts on behalf of the whole (either for its own sake or for the common benefit).” Each polis has parts, especially the few who are rich and the many who are poor, each typically advocating a regime, including a way of life, which serves its own interest, both claiming to serve the interests of the whole. Political rule itself “is divided on the basis of functions suited to each political community: deliberating, deciding, implementing what’s been decided, and adjudication of legal cases arising as a result of those decisions and acts of implementation—law being “relative to the type of politeia.” Regimes change, but there is no fixed cycle of regimes, as propounded by Plato’s Socrates (probably for heuristic purposes) and more literally by Polybius. Regimes change because no one regime, even the good ones, will lack enemies who scheme against it. But this doesn’t make politics a futile endeavor. Far from it. “In contrast” to such modern utopians as Karl Marx, “Aristotle’s writings suggest the attempts to overcome politics or escape from it would fail, or end in despotism.”

Why was Aristotle’s understanding of politics as regime-centered brushed aside by later political philosophers? Imperialism challenged the value of political rule itself. Although the polis superseded the clan and the tribe, as Aeschylus shows, the empires overwhelmed many poleis with sheer military force, and ruled the cities despotically (if often desultorily) after their conquests. “Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader.” As in Argos, a family rules an empire; politics strictly speaking, ruling and being ruled mutually, finds little or no purchase. Following Aristotle, the Roman empire emerged from a republican regime, the res publica. The first, republican, Roman empire “incorporat[ed] local elites into Roman citizens,” but the regime changed in typical fashion, as anti-republican factions arose within it. Once consolidated under Augustus, the empire “was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) Caesar, Kaiser, tzar; (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen… the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex.” Finally, after Augustus died the later monarchs dropped the pretense of republicanism altogether, calling themselves imperators or emperors—issuers of commands, imperatives, the edicts of one-way rule, not of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. With no serious regime rival or rivals, Roman political thought began to neglect the regime question, and it began to fade from political science altogether.

By the Middle Ages it is no longer clear that thinkers knew Aristotle’s Politics, at all. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers got their sense of regimes from Plato and Polybius, and thus never had the Aristotelian inclination to deliberate openly over the character of regimes. Further, the Christian doctrine of the separation of sacred from secular government understandably preoccupied the best minds. It was therefore not until Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century that Aristotelian regime theory was recovered, but necessarily in a ‘Christianized’ manner; Thomas “does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and made compatible with Christian teachings.” For example, in following Aristotle’s argument that the rule of a good king is desirable but improbable, given “the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle,” particularly its instability, Thomas goes on to say that the kingly rule of God will solve that problem, once God returns earth, then transforms the cosmos itself, making a new heaven and a new earth. Aristotle might have doubted that promise, had he lived to hear it.

Starting with Machiavelli and his “modern concept of the state,” political science moved even farther from Aristotelianism. Machiavelli “does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it.” By this, Bates means that the moderns understand lo stato as “a product of will,” whether it be the will of the founding prince or the “collective will” of the individuals who form that state according to a ‘social contract.’ Because willed, the modern state “must have a unitary character,” inasmuch as a divided or schizophrenic will cannot be “good or healthy,” as will. The ruling institutions or forms of the modern state “are merely tools that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will,” in contrast to “the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle—where the political community composed of the fundamental parts—the household and other communities—give [the political community] body.” In the polis, unlike the modern state, these “many discrete parts” enjoy “commonality” thanks to “their shared life together, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life together.” But for Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers, the political community “is not by nature but is instead a humanly made construct.” For Hobbes, the ‘body politic’ that is Mighty Leviathan amounts to “a metaphor” for the relationship between the monarch and his realm; the sovereign isn’t any one, existing monarch but “the embodied will” that authorizes the existence of the political community. Hence the emphasis on the will in Rousseauian and Kantian ethics and politics, and eventually the shift away not only from natural right, not only from such natural-rights substitutes as Rousseau’s general will and Kant’s categorical imperative, but to the elaboration of historical right in Hegel, in whose writings “the modern state reaches its intellectual peak” as an entirely impersonal instantiation of the impersonal ‘Absolute Spirit,’ a being that encompasses natural even humanly willed right, explaining all of these theories as moments in its own unfolding.

If the modern state is a willed construct of the individuals who consent to it, then the substantial political bodies in the world no longer consist of families and intrastate factions but of the states themselves, which pit their wills against one another in a war of all against all. Since sovereign wills refuse to relinquish their sovereignty while at the same time wishing for the peace that the polis afforded when it subordinated the families and their Furies, “the establishment of modern international law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.” Such writers as Grotius, who applies Aristotelian natural right to international relations, and Vattel, who applies Lockean natural right to them, attempt to moderate the Hobbesian state of international war. Such conceptions were challenged, however, when historicist notions of nation-states, “cultural and racial/ethnic” constructions “that people cannot control” because they are the result of laws of historical development, replaced the ‘willfulness’ of social-contract theory. Bates wrongly charges Abraham Lincoln with fostering this notion in America; he is on firmer ground in assigning the responsibility to the Progressives and, it might be added, the Social Darwinists before them, their ontological if not socio-economic twins. 

The managers of political science’s “behavioral revolution” in the twentieth century found even Hobbesian materialism insufficiently materialist, with its willed social contract. “The scientific pretensions of later moderns as well as their materialism and reductionism led to a reaction against the willing agency of the modern Hobbesian state”; for them, real science tracks “the various impersonal forces of mass society acting and interacting with each other through the various institutionalism that historically emerged in each socio-ethnic grouping.” Eschewing all ‘qualitative’ claims as unscientific ‘value judgments,’ behaviorists retain his numerical regime criterion (one, few, many) and then calculate the level of measurable political ‘participation’ in relation to the numerical criterion. As democrats, they often betray a tendency to prefer the rule of the few, with high participation levels, as “rule for the common advantage,” but they aspire to ‘value-free political science.’ More recently, political scientist with such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol have added an institutional dimension, concentrating their attention on the state, which they consider an independent variable in political outcomes, rather like an Aristotelian formal cause. “But when we look at much of the regime analysis of those who came to champion the ‘Return to the State,’ all too often they employed many of the same overly democrat5ic and pluralistic assumptions” of the behaviorists. For them, ‘democracy’ “no longer is to be considered a form of regime, but rather as a universal human political form that all human communities should strive to achieve.” With great effort, today’s political scientists have scrambled back to quasi-Hegelian statism without the ontology that justifies it. 

None of these modern forms of political science is genuinely political. Instead of beginning with the household, with its already-political relationship of husband and wife and its grounding in real human associations aimed at achieving the real human end of eudemonia or “liv[ing] fully as a human being,” modern political science begins with individuals. It is atomistic or, at best, atomistic within a structuralist framework. By contrast, Aristotelian political science “does not understand the political community as a unitary composite that must be homogenized and centralized.” Rather, for Aristotle, “the regime is fundamental to a political community because it is that which holds it together as a whole; a whole composed of discrete parts.” This is the reality of political life, Aristotle’s therefore the truer science.

The problem is that modern states have regimes, too. It makes a difference to me if I live in contemporary France or Germany, in a commercial republic, or in contemporary China, an oligarchy. A second edition of this book should correct the argument in light of that obvious fact, thereby showing that Aristotelian regime theory ‘works’ for modern states as well as for city-states.