NOTE: The “Contents” section of the site menu lists all articles, divided into six categories (“Bible Notes,” “Philosophers,” “American Politics,” “Nations,” “Manners and Morals,” and “Remembrances”). The articles are arranged in the chronological order of their posting. This Table of Contents lists the articles in the “Philosophers” section in the order in which they may be read as if they were chapters in a book.

 

PHILOSOPHERS

1. Where Does Political Life Come From?

Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (1988).

 

2. The Nature of Politics

Mark Blitz: Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena (2021).

 

3. ‘Regime’ Defined

Clifford Angell Bates: the Centrality of the Regime in Political Science (2016).

 

4. Benardete on the Odyssey

Seth Benardete: The Bow and the Lyre: A Platonic Reading of the Odyssey (1997).

 

5. Philosophy, A Way of Life

Pierre Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. (1995).

 

6. Plato—Short, Sweet, and Aporetic

Thomas L. Pangle, ed.: The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Dialogues (1987).

 

7. Why Philosophy? Socrates’ End

 

8. Socrates’ Trial, Misjudged

I. F. Stone: The Trial of Socrates (1988).

 

9. Plato’s Phaedo, I

Plato: Phaedo. David Gallup translation. (1985).

Kenneth Dorter: Plato’s Phaedo: An Interpretation (1982).

 

10. Plato’s Phaedo, II

Ronna Burger: The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth (1984).

 

11. Plato’s Phaedrus

Plato: Phaedrus. James H. Nichols, Jr., translation. (1998).

Ronna Burger: Plato’s “Phaedrus”: A Defense of the Philosophic Art of Writing (1980).

Charles Griswold: Self-Knowledge in Plato’s Phaedrus (1986).

 

12. Plato’s Gorgias

Plato: Gorgias. James H. Nichols translation. (1998).

Devin Stauffer: The Unity of Plato’s Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice, and the Philosophic Life. (2006).

 

13. Plato’s Gorgias: The Recovery of Socratic Virtue

Nalin Ranasinghe: Socrates in the Underworld: On Plato’s Gorgias (2009).

 

14. Socrates and the Sophist

Plato: Greater Hippias. Harold N. Foster translation. (1967).

Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues. (2009). Chapter 4, section iv: “The Sophist’s Inability to Say What Is Noble.”

 

15. Benardete on Plato’s Philebus

Seth Benardete: Tragedy and Comedy of Life (1993).

 

16. Teaching Virtue?

Plato: Meno. George Anastaplo and Laurence Berns translation. (2004).

Jacob Klein: A Commentary on Plato’s Meno. (1965).

 

17. Fifteen Truths and a Noble Lie

Plato: Republic. Allan Bloom translation. (1987).

 

18. The Philosopher-King: A Contradiction in Terms?

Plato: Republic. Allan Bloom translation. (1987).

 

19. After Philosophy: Socrates Interruptus

Plato: Republic. Allan Bloom translation. (1987).

 

20. Plato’s Republic

John F. Wilson: The Politics of Moderation (1984).

 

21. Socrates versus Athens

Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (1987).

 

22. Socrates in the City

Mary P. Nichols: Socrates and the Political Community: An Ancient Debate (1987).

 

23. Thirty-Nine Reasons for Reading Benardete on Plato’s Republic

Seth Benardete: Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic (1989).

 

24. Plato’s Protagoras

Patrick J. Coby: Socrates and the Sophistic Enlightenment: A Commentary on Plato’s Commentary (1987).

 

25. Defending Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Ficino’s Metamorphic Retrieval of Plato’s Symposium

Marsilio Ficino: Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (1985).

 

26. Plato’s Politic Practice: Plato’s “Letters,” I-IV

Ariel Helfer, editor and translator: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenge of the Philosophic Life. (2023).

 

27. What Is Politic About Platonic Political Philosophy? Plato’s “Letters,” V-XIII

Ariel Helfer, editor and translator: Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenge of the Philosophic Life (2023).

 

28. Aristotelian Physics

David Bolotin: An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing. (1997).

 

29. Moderation, All the Way Down

Stephen G. Salkever: Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian Political Philosophy (1990).

Aristotle: De Anima. C. D. C. Reeves translation. (2017).

Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima. Kenholm Foster and Silvester Humphries translation. (1994).

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan Collins translation. (2011).

Aristotle: Politics. Carnes Lord translation. (2013).

 

30. Aristotle’s Graceful Ethics

Mary P. Nichols: Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the “Nicomachean Ethics.” (2023).

 

31. Learning from Aristotle

Mary P. Nichols: Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (1996).

Clifford Angell Bates: Aristotle’s “Best Regime”: Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (2003).

Susan Collins: Aristotle and the Recovery of Statesmanship (2006).

 

32. What Good Is Democracy?

Delba Winthrop: Aristotle and Political Science (2019).

 

33. Aristotle’s Rhetoric

Aristotle: Rhetoric. Joe Sachs translation. (1988).

Larry Arnhart: Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric” (1981).

 

34. Aristotle on Rhetoric

Aristotle: On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. George A. Kennedy translation. (1991).

Aristotle: Rhetoric. Joe Sachs translation. (1991).

Larry Arnhart: Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric” (1981).

 

35. Averroës’ Commentaries on Aristotle

Charles E. Butterworth, ed.: Averroës’ Three Short Commentaries on Aristotle’s “Topics,” “Rhetoric,” and “Poetics.” (1977).

 

36. Aristotle on Education

Carnes Lord: Education and Culture in the Political Thought of Aristotle. (1982).

 

37. Aristotle and “The Moderns”

Aristide Tessitore, ed.: Aristotle and Modern Politics: The Persistence of Political Philosophy (2002).

 

38. Thucydides and Political Liberty

Mary P. Nichols: Thucydides and the Pursuit of Freedom (2015).

 

39. Socratic Half-Lives: How Philosophic Were the Philosophers of the Schools”

Diogenes Laertius: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers (1959).

 

40: Seneca: The Governance of Anger

Seneca: Moral Essays. John W. Basore translation. (1958).

 

41. Seneca on Anger: A Second Look

Seneca: “To Novatus on Anger.” In Moral and Political Essays. John M. Cooper and J.F. Procopé translation. (1995).

 

42. Seneca on Philosophy and the Liberal Arts

Seneca: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Richard M. Gummere translation. (1961).

 

43. Natural Rights and Political Philosophy

Ann Ward and Lee Ward, eds.: Natural Rights and Political Philosophy (2013).

 

44. Ciceronian Ethics

Marcus Tullius Cicero: On Obligations. P. G. Walsh translation. (2008).

 

45. Cicero’s Defense of Politics

Marcus Tullius Cicero: On the Republic and On the Laws. David Fott translation. (2014).

 

46. Recovering Cicero

Marcus Tullius Cicero: On the Republic and On the Laws. David Fott translation. (2014).

Timothy W. Caspar: Recovering the Ancient View of the Founding: A Commentary on Cicero’s De Legibus. (2011).

 

47. Those Incoherent Philosophers

Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Ghazāli: The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Michael E. Marmura translation. (2014).

 

48. Who Is the Teacher?

Augustine of Hippo: The Teacher: A Dialogue between Augustine and his son Adeodatus. In Augustine: Earlier Writings. Edited and translated by John H. S. Burleigh. (1953).

 

49. Aquinas on Teachers and Teaching

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Question on Truth. Question 11, Articles 1 and 2 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation (1998).

 

50. Taught by an Angel? Aquinas on the Hierarchical Character of Christian Education

Thomas Aquinas: On the Teacher, Disputed Questions on Truth. Question 11, Articles 3 and 4 of Questiones Disputatae de Veritate. Ralph McInerny translation (1998).

 

51. Dante on Monarchy

Dante Alighieri: Monarchy. Prue Shaw translation (1998).

 

52. Dante’s Heterodoxy

Ernest L. Fortin: Dissidence et Philosophie au Moyen Age (1981).

 

53. The Political Spirit

Catherine H. Zuckert, ed.: Understanding the Political Spirit: Philosophical Investigations from Socrates to Nietzsche. (1988).

 

54. Machiavelli in Florence

Miles J. Unger: Machiavelli: A Biography. (2011).

Heinrich Meier: “The Renewal and the Challenge of Revealed Religion: On the Intention of Leo Strauss’s Thoughts on Machiavelli.” In Political Philosophy and Revealed Religion. Robert Berman translation. (2017).

 

55. Is Machiavelli Machiavellian”

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. translation. (1985).

Leo Strauss: Thoughts on Machiavelli (1969).

 

56. Flattery and Philosophy

Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. translation. (1985).

 

57. What Is “Effectual Truth”?

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: Creating the Modern World (2023).

 

58. What Is the Executive Power?

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (1989).

 

59. Mansfield on Machiavelli on Livy

Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.: Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (1989).

 

60. The Dialogue between Machiavelli and Shakespeare

Michael Platt: Mighty Opposites: Machiavelli and Shakespeare Match Wits. (2022).

 

61. Machiavelli Today?

Carnes Lord: The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now (2003).

 

62. Bodin’s Secrets.

Jean Bodin: Colloquium of the Seven about the Secrets of the Sublime. Marion Leathers Daniels Kuntz translation. (1975).

 

63. Mr. Nice Guy: On the First Book of Montaigne’s Essays

 

64. Montaigne Concludes His Argument: The Essays, Book Three

 

65. Montaigne’s Politics

Biancamaria Fontana: Montaigne’s Politics: Authority and Governance in the “Essais” (2008).

 

66. Taming Our Shrewishness

William Shakespeare: The Taming of the Shrew.

 

67. Shakespeare and His Roman Plays

Paul A. Cantor: Shakespeare’s Rome: Republic and Empire (1976).

Michael Platt: Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare (1983).

Jan H. Blits: The End of the Ancient Republic: Essays on Julius Caesar (1982).

 

68. The Philosophy of Hamlet’s Tragicall Historie

William Shakespeare: Hamlet.

 

69. Shakespearean Philosophy?

K.J. Spalding: The Philosophy of Shakespeare (1953).

 

70. The “New Atlantis”: Utopia or Dystopia?

Francis Bacon: The New Atlantis.

Kimberly Hurd Hale: Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in the Foundation of Modern Political Thought. (2013).

 

71. Liberalism and Reason

J. E. Parsons, Jr.: Essays in Political Philosophy (1982).

 

72. The Character of Modern Republicanism

Ralph Lerner: Revolutions Revisited: Two Faces of the Politics of the Enlightenment (1994).

Thomas L. Pangle: The Spirit of Modern Republicanism (1988).

Lorraine Smith Pangle and Thomas L. Pangle: The Ennobling of Democracy (1991).

Michael Zuckert: Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (1994).

 

73. Political Authority: Resistance and Obedience, Socrates and Hobbes.

 

74. Hobbes on “The Long Parliament”

Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth, or the Long Parliament. (1990 edition).

 

75. Locke Questions the Law of Nature

John Locke: Questions Concerning the Law of Nature (1990 edition).

 

76. Locke on the Moral and Political Implications of Modern Science

Steven Forde: Locke, Science, and Politics (2013).

 

77. Spinoza and Modern Liberalism

Douglas J. Den Uyl: Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy (1983).

 

78. Montesquieu’s Erotic Liberalism

Diana J. Schaub: Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1995).

 

7. What Is Vico Trying to Accomplish?

Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature or Nations. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch translation. Book I. (1994).

 

80. Seeking Wisdom: Vico’s Philology

Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature or Nations. Book II: “Poetic Wisdom.”

 

81. Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature or Nations. Books III, IV, and V.

 

82. Adam Smith, Moralist

Richard F. Teichgraeber, III: “Free Trade” and Moral Philosophy: Rethinking the Sources of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1987).

 

83. Chastellux on “Public Happiness” in the Ancient World

François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux: Agriculture and Population: The Truest Proofs of the Welfare of the People. Volume I. (1792).

 

84. Chastellux on “Public Happiness” in the Modern World: Defense of Enlightenment

François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux: Agriculture and Population: The Truest Proofs of the Welfare of the People. Volume II. (1792).

 

85. Education for Kingship: Eros Rightly Understood

François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Book I-VI.

 

86. Education for Kingship: Founding the Best Regime

François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Books VII-XI.

 

87. Telemachus at War, Preparing for Peace

François de Selignac de la Mothe-Fénelon: Telemachus, Son of Ulysses. Books XII-XVIII.

 

88. Discontented Moderns

 

89. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. In Victory Gourevitch, ed.: Rousseau: The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings. (1997)

 

90. Inequality, That Vexed Question

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse which won the Prize of the Academy of Dijon in the Year 1750.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men.

Marc F. Plattner: Rousseau’s State of Nature (1979).

Walter Scheidel: The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twentieth Century (2017).

 

91. Rousseau’s Social Contract

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract.

Hilail Gildin: Rousseau’s Social Contract: The Design of the Argument (1983).

 

92. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education. Allan Bloom translation (1979).

 

93. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: Early Childhood

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book II.

 

94. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: The Mature Child

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book III.

 

95. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: Sexuality and Compassion

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book IV.

 

96. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: The Savoyard Vicar

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book IV.

 

97. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: Emile in Civil Society

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book IV.

 

98. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: The Wisdom of Taste

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book V.

 

99. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: Sophie

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book V.

 

100. Some Notes Concerning Rousseau’s Thoughts on Education: Comparative Politics and Natural Right within Civil Society

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Emile or, On Education, Book V.

 

101. Rousseau’s Confessions

Ann Hartle: The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions: A Reply to St. Augustine (1986).

 

102. Rousseau’s Solitary Walker

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Charles E. Butterworth translation. (1979).

 

103. Rousseau: Nature or History?

Asher Horowitz: Rousseau: Nature and History (1987).

 

104. Is Kant a Historicist?

H.S. Reis, ed.: Kant: Political Writings. (1991).

Immanuel Kant: “Idea for a Univeral History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.”

_____. “The Contest of Faculties: A Renewed Attempt to Answer the Question: ‘Is the Human Race Continually Improving?'”

_____. “Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History.

 

105. Perpetual Peace

Immanuel Kant:  Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1991).

 

106. Chateaubriand and Political Philosophy

François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand: Essai Politique, Historique, et Morale, sur les Révolutions Anciennes et Modernes considerées dans leurs Rapports avec la Révolutions Française de nos Jours (1797).

 

107. Chateaubriand’s Critique of Rousseau’s State of Nature

François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand: Atala/René. Irving Putter translation. (1997).

 

108. Hegel: Philosophy Historicized

 

109. Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”: Introduction

G.W.F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Introduction

 

110. Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”: The Oriental World

G.W.F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History,Part One.

 

111. Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”: The Greek World

G.W.F Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Part Two.

 

112. Hegel’s “Philosophy of History”: The Roman World

G.W.F. Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of History, The Germanic World.

 

113. Strauss’s Critique of Hegel

Leo Strauss: On Hegel (2019).

 

114. Historicity and Reason: Two Studies

Richard J. Bernstein: Beyond Subjectivism and Relativism (1983).

Stanley Rosen: G. W. F. Hegel: An Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (1974).

 

115. How to Read Tocqueville’s The Old Regime and the French Revolution

Alexis de Tocqueville: L’Ancient Regime et la Révolution (n.d.)

Alexis de Tocqueville: The Old Regime and the French Revolution. Arthur Goldhammer translation. (2011).

 

116. Tocqueville Companion

Cheryl B. Welch, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville (2006).

 

117. Tocqueville the Mediator

Sheldon S. Wolin: Tocqueville Between Two Worlds (2000).

 

118. Tocqueville on Liberty and Democracy

Michael Hereth: Alexis de Tocqueville: Threats of Freedom in America (1986).

 

119. Mill’s Liberalism

Bernard Semmel: John Stuart Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (1984).

 

120. Emerson: Intellectual or Philosopher?

 

121. Melville’s Billy Budd

Thomas J. Scorza: In the Time Before Steamships: Billy Budd, the Limits of Politics, and Modernity (1980).

 

122. Marxism: Where Does It Go Wrong?

 

123. Dewey: Growth and Its Problems

 

124. Dewey’s Defense of “Liberalism”

John Dewey: Liberalism and Social Action (1935).

 

125. The Effects of the Philosophy of Freedom on Modern Tyranny

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Chapters 1-2. (2022).

 

126. The Critique of Rationalism in the Philosophy of Freedom.

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Chapters 3-4. (2022).

 

127. Heidegger’s Consequences

Waller R. Newell: Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger. Chapter 5. (2022).

Michael Millerman: Beginning with Heidegger: Strauss, Rorty, Derrida, Dugin, and the Philosophic Constitution of the Political. (2020).

 

128. Voegelin, Hitler, and the Germans

Eric Voegelin: Hitler and the Germans (1999).

 

129. Liberal Education at Mid-Century

Mark Van Doren: Liberal Education (1943).

 

130. Benda’s Dubious “Clerks”

Julien Benda: The Betrayal of the Clerks. Richard Aldington translation. (1959 edition).

 

131. Benda “Buried Alive”

Julien Benda: Exercise d’un Enterré Vif (1946).

 

132. De Jouvenel’s Conservative Liberalism

Daniel J. Mahoney: Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity (2005).

 

133. Voegelin the Revolutionary

Ellis Sandoz: The Voegelinian Revolution (1982).

 

134. Strauss on Political Philosophy

Hilail Gildin, ed.: An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss (1989).

Thomas L. Pangle, ed.: The Rebirth of Classical Rationalism: An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss (1982).

 

135. Adventures in Inquiry: Leo Strauss’s Quest

Carlo Altini: Philosophy as Stranger Wisdom: A Leo Strauss Intellectual Biography. (2022).

 

136. Tyranny and Philosophy

Timothy W. Burns and Bryan-Paul Frost, eds.: Philosophy, History, and Tyranny: Re-examining the Debate between Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève (2016).

 

137. Strauss’s Critique of Heidegger

Timothy W. Burns: Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education (2021).

 

138. Political Philosophy Now

Glenn Elmers: The Narrow Passage: Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy. (2023).

 

139. Do Liberal Democracies Serve Any Purpose?

Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, eds.: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (1988).

 

140. Strauss on Reason and Revelation

Susan Orr: Jerusalem and Athens (1995).

 

141. The ‘Young Strauss’: A Critique from the ‘Left’

Bruno Quélennec: Retour dans la caverne: Philosophie politique et religion chez le jeune Leo Strauss (2018).

 

142. Sartre and the “Last Man”

 

143. Beauvoir’s Politics

Simone de Beauvoir: The Second Sex. H. M. Parshley translation (1964 edition).

Sonia Kruks: Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity (2012).

 

144. Dialogue Against Ideology: Raymond Aron’s Political Science

Nathan Orlando: Raymond Aron and His Dialogues in an Age of Ideologies. (2023).

 

145. The Goodness of Banality

 

146. What Is Analytic Philosophy?

Stephen Schwartz: A Brief History of Analytic Philosophy: From Russell to Rawls. West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2012.

 

147. Is Logic ‘About’ Anything?

Henry B. Veatch: Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy (1969).

 

148. Logic and Ethics: Is There a Connection?

Henry B. Veatch: Realism and Nominalism (1954).

Henry B. Veatch: Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962).

 

149. Anarcho-Capitalism Refuted

Murray N. Rothbard: The Ethics of Liberty (1980).

 

150. Singer’s Critique of Sociobiology

Peter Singer: The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (1981).

 

151. Two Critiques of Nihilism

Alasdair McIntyre: After Virtue (1981).

Stanley Rosen: Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay (1969).

 

152. ‘Postmoderns’ Deconstructed

Stanley Corngold: The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory (1986).

 

153. ‘Postmodernism’ as Disguised Modernism

Stanley Rosen: Hermeneutics and Politics (1987).

Leo Strauss: On Tyranny (2013 edition).

 

154. Origins of the ‘New Left’

George Friedman: The Political Philosophy of the Frankfurt School (1981).

 

155. This Is Not an Essay: Critiques of Rawls from the ‘Left’

Chantal Mouffe: The Return of the Political (1993).

John Exdell: “Feminism, Fundamentalism, and Liberal Democracy” (1994).

 

156. Derrida and ‘Deconstruction’

Jacques Derrida: “History of the Lie” (2002).

Hannah Arendt: “Lying in Politics” (1972).

 

157. Michel Foucault v. Nancy Fraser: Dueling Aphorisms

Paul Rabinow, ed.: The Foucault Reader (1984).

Nancy Fraser: “Foucault on Modern Power” (1981).

 

158. Liberal Multiculturalism: Kymlicka’s Case

Will Kymlicka: Liberalism, Community, and Culture. (1989).

 

159. Liberal Multiculturalism, II

Will Kymlicka: Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights. (1995).

 

160. ‘Deliberative Democracy’

Amy Guttmann and Dennis Thompson: Democracy and Disagreement (1996).

Jürgen Habermas: Between Facts and Norms (1996).

 

161. Political ‘Identitarianism’

Amy Guttmann: Identity in Democracy. (2003).

 

162. ‘Postmodern’ Happiness

Ross Abbinett: Politics of Happiness (2013).

 

163. How Some of Our Contemporaries Aspire to the Philosophic Life

 

164. Delimiting Philosophy

Stanley Rosen: The Limits of Analysis (1980).

Bernard Williams: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).

 

165. Imagination, Reconsidered

Eva T. H. Brann: The World of the Imagination (1991).

 

166. How Can One Govern the Doubleness of Thought?

Hilary Putnam: Truth and History (1981).

 

167. A Question of Integrity: Wolgast’s Critique of Rawls

John Rawls: Political Liberalism (1996).

Elizabeth H. Wolgast: “The Demands of Public Reason” (1994).

 

168. Taylor’s “Politics of Recognition”

Charles Taylor et al.: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition (1994).

 

169. Strengthening Social Contract Theory?

Jeffrey Reiman: Justice and Moral Philosophy (1992).

 

170. Liberalism’s “Two Faces”

John Gray: Two Faces of Liberalism (2000).

 

171. Marxism in Crisis

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Chapters 1-2. (2014).

 

172. Political Theory for a Postmodernist ‘Left’

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe: Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Chapters 3-4. (2014).

 

173. What is Beauty?

Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1968).

Roger Scruton: Beauty (2009).

 

174. Scruton Sums Up

Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley: Conversations with Roger Scruton (2016).

 

175. Wise Contemporaries: Roger Scruton and Pierre Manent

Daniel J. Mahoney: Recovering Politics, Civilization, and the Soul (2022).

 

176.  Mobbed by Consent

 

177. Manent on Thinking Politically

Pierre Manent: Seeing Things Politically. Ralph Hancock translation. (2015).

 

178. Natural Law and the Rights of Men

Pierre Manent: La Loi Naturelle et les Droits des Hommes (2018).

 

179. Pacifism and Just War

Jenny Teichman: Pacifism and Just War: A Study in Applied Philosophy (1987).

 

180. Can the Use of Nuclear Weapons Be Moral?

Joseph P. Martino: A Fighting Chance: The Moral Use of Nuclear Weapons (1988).

 

181. Peace Seeking in the Western Tradition

James Turner Johnson: The Quest for Peace (1987).

 

182. Pacifism’s Moral Crisis

Guenter Lewy: Peace and Revolution: The Moral Crisis of American Pacifism (1988).

 

183. Philosophy and Just War

Christopher Coker: Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg (2010).

 

184. The Morality of Nuclear Deterrence

Jonathan Shell: The Fate of the Earth (1982).

Nigel Blake and Kay Pole, eds.: Objections to Nuclear Defence (1984).

 

185. Is International Law Tyrannical?

Chantal Delsol: Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law (2008).

 

186. Mercy

Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish: The Decline of Mercy in Public Life (2014).

 

187. What Are Persons Worth?

James Franklin: The Worth of Person: The Foundation of Ethics  (2022).

 

188. Re-Politicizing Political Theory

Jeremy Waldron: Political Political Theory (2016).

 

189. Reconstituting Natural Philosophy

Nicholas Maxwell: In Praise of Natural Philosophy: A Revolution for Thought and Life (2017).

 

190. Conquest of Nature 6.0

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel Sternberg: A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution (2018).

 

191. The Encounters of Seth Benardete

Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Part One.

 

192. The Reflections of Seth Benardete

Seth Benardete: Encounters and Reflections: Conversations with Seth Benardete. Part Two.

Roger Scruton and Mark Dooley: Conversations with Roger Scruton. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 54, Number 5, September/October 2017. Republished with permission.

 

In Felled Oaks: Conversations with DeGaulle, André Malraux called the founder of the Fifth Republic “the last great man France haunted.” On his gravestone, Roger Scruton wants the inscription, “The Last Englishman, Organist at this Church.” Statesman and Frenchman, philosopher and Englishman, each man warrants a valedictory dialogue with a writer who understands him, a testament to what they attempted to achieve for the civil life of his country. And despite claims that nationality must fade, it may be that ‘globalization’ hasn’t had the last word, after all, that intellect and patriotism may yet endure against the leveling forces of democracy wrongly understood.

Scruton has found an excellent collaborator in Mark Dooley, author of one book on Scruton and editor of another, and himself a former teacher of moral philosophy. Dooley wisely prompts Scruton into a dialogue on his life and works which develops as a sustained argument about the relationship fo morality to esthetics and of both to a decent civic order. With Burke, Scruton rejects any posture of abstractedness from the place where he stands, even as he reflects on considerations that go far beyond any one place. He builds a critique of the misplaced abstraction that social science often finds hard to resist. Recounting the story of his parents’ wartime courtship (he was born in 1944), Scruton says, “They fell in love not only with each other, but with the banks of the Thames”: Two persons, one place, commingling with love, form the image of the kind of philosophy Socrates practiced. Scruton may also be as much the last Socratic as the last Englishman—or, to think more optimistically, the most recent one.

For Socrates, love understood as the erotic quest for wisdom, animates reason, or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction. Scruton’s early studies consisted of a good dose of science, the modern citadel of rationalism, but also literature and music. Crucially, his first memorable English teacher was a student of the great scholar F. R. Leavis, who understood the study of literature to be “a form of judgment and not… a form of enjoyment.” Similarly, among the composers whose works he first heard, it was Mendelssohn, and the contrapuntal development of his Hebrides Overture, “which made it clear that music is a kind of argument from premise to conclusion and not just something to be enjoyed.” From the awakening of his intellectual life, Scruton sought to understand the core of things by means of reason; unlike his contemporaries in the 1960s, he never valorized the passions. Resisting his relentlessly practical parents, he decided “that the only really useful subjects are studies of the useless”—otherwise known as liberal education.

Although he learned Greek and Latin (see ‘uselessness,’ above), his main philosophic preoccupations were the moderns, initially Bertrand Russell, Nietzsche, and Sartre. He did not become so intoxicated by their prose as to sacrifice his own perspective for theirs. Watching a paraplegic bookseller struggling with a pile of books, he “sensed how wrong Nietzsche was about pity, since what I felt was admiration too.” Even as he studied the fashionable analytic philosophers at Cambridge—finding a lasting benefit in their insistence at being no respecters of persons but of men and women who tested any philosopher’s argument they encountered—he never succumbed to fashion. His distinctive philosophic achievement turned out to be to start with the moderns, and indeed many of his older contemporaries, then think his way towards ideas first discovered by the ancients. While continuing to esteem (for example) Hegel, he ‘edits’ the doctrines of the moderns with the same scrupulous intelligence with which he crafts his own prose, taking the sensible parts and discarding the nonsense. Closer to home, in reading Aristotle, he found him to be “doing exactly the same thing as Wittgenstein,” only a lot earlier. T. S. Eliot’s tailor told the American scholar Hugh Kenner, “A remarkable man, Mr. Eliot. Never quite too much.” In these well-judged selections, Scruton exercises a similar wholesomely enthusiastic restraint in thinking about the thinkers he has studied. This comports with the place he began his philosophic scholarship: like literature and music, Cambridge University itself “had once stood for something, had indeed stood in judgment on the national culture.”

Take science, the most prestigious activity of national culture in postwar Britain. Can it judge, or should it instead be judged? “Science begins when we ask the question ‘Why?’ It leads us from the observed event to the laws which govern it, and onward to more general laws. But where does the process end?” It ends when science reaches the necessary limit of its inquiry, namely, “why the series of causes exists,” why the world exists in the first place. In bringing us back as far as the Big Bang, science perforce leaves “something else to be explained, namely, the ‘initial conditions’ which then obtained”: how was it that “this great event was about to erupt into being”? “A positivist would dismiss such a question as meaningless. So too would many scientists. But if the only grounds for doing so is that science cannot answer it, then the response is self-serving.” What goes for the limits of scientific naturalism also goes for the question of what good science, or any other human endeavor, much less the cosmos itself, may serve: Science cannot tell us what science is for, or whether its aims are justifiable.

Philosophy, by contrast, has usually done just that. Postwar British philosophy was dominated by the analytical school, as practice by A. J. Ayer and others. Analytic philosophy “implanted in me a sense of the distinction between real thinking and fake thinking,” his choice of esthetics for his topic of postgraduate research “help[ed] me to synthesize my interest in philosophy with those artistic aspirations that I was still clinging to.” The university’s lecturer on esthetics, Michael Tanner, made esthetics into “a kind of door out of analytic philosophy into the true life of the mind”—a thing that can not only analyze but synthesize and envision.

Hegel, for example, “had an extraordinary synthetic mind,” but characteristically Scruton took from that mind exactly what his own mind sought, and no more. Hegel’s most remarkable philosophic achievement was to develop a new ontology centered in historicism. He argued that ‘History,’ defined by him as the course of events in which the Absolute Spirit is immanent in all things, thoughts, and actions, unfolds itself dialectically, that is, in accordance with a new kind of logic (provided by Hegel himself) in which apparent contradictions are synthesized to produce new modes and orders of human life. The laws of ‘History’ make the course of events predictable; even the laws of nature are historical, a matter of evolution or development. but Hegelian metaphysics left Scruton cold. “That’s the annoying part of him.” What Scruton took from Hegel was rather the moral principle of recognition —effectively the moral importance of honor, in the face of the materialist philosophies of Hobbes and Locke—and the understanding of art as a “moment of consciousness” or self-understanding, which the artist fixes in his creation. “I had set myself the task of doing in the language of analytical philosophy what Hegel had done—which was to put art into the center of philosophy and to say why it is significant.” The logical/ontological notion of ‘History’ as a sort of vast dialectical argument embodied in action gives way to something much less grand, but also less liable to abuse by ‘totalizing’ political thinkers like Marx, Heidegger, and Kojève, apologists for tyranny.

Avowing that “my political convictions are very Hegelian,” Scruton means that they take history as a source of a kind of experiential or experimental truth-seeking, rather than taking ‘History’ as an instantiation of the march of progress toward a predictable culmination, namely, the fully unfolded Absolute Spirit. He remains an Englishman in his politics even as he strives to understand the nature common to England and every other place. In his study of the English common law (he passed the Bar but never practiced) he found not so much a venerable tradition as a way of practical reasoning and “a process of discovery—an “attempt to understand the human world” which “both uncovered and endorsed the impartial justice whereby the English people ordered their lives.” He had prepared an intellectual setting in which he could eschew just about every moral and intellectual fad of the subsequent four decades.

Hence his well-known ‘conservatism,’ which should be taken quite literally as a will to conserve combined with a habit of reasoned judgment about what to conserve and what to relinquish. Like so many British thinkers (most famously, Edmund Burke), he began to find his way politically in response to the antics of the Europeans on the Continent, particularly French and Italian antics. Grounded in experience but rejecting historicism, Scruton witnessed the events of 1968 France and the pervasive influence of Marxism in the Italian universities with revulsion. He especially disliked “those hippies”—the hostel-hopping Americans were the most annoying—whose revolutionary credentials more or less began and ended with resentment of their parents. He immediately saw the contrast between their street theater and the genuine (and genuinely risky) resistance offered by the dissidents under the Communist regimes of central and eastern Europe. Western intellectuals who failed to understand the malign character of those tyrannical oligarchies only served to weaken the societies which sheltered them. “The best thing that Derrida ever did was to get arrested in Prague.” Deconstruct that!

Deconstruction is the analytical impulse of modern philosophy gone wild. It lands its practitioners in an inescapable cycle of claimed victimhood, the demand for recognition, and then some new form of domination. The only way to escape is to recur not to analysis, which offers no purpose, or to Hegelianism tout court, which offers as its end a worldwide statism, but to the intellectual love that animated classical philosophy and to the personal and civic forms of friendship which moderns crave yet fear, habituated as they are to the charms of an administrative state that (in the West) rules them with blandishments, not truncheons.

Scruton’s various philosophic forays consist of attempts to rekindle consideration of love and friendship, to bring them back to the center of philosophy and citizenship as examples of human freedom. His studies of architecture appropriate the Hegelian idea of designing buildings that consist of “the outward realization of the inner life,” an attempt “to set free choice in stone.” It wasn’t the Blitz that ruined London, it was the squalid architecture that replaced the rubble with concrete monstrosities. This wasn’t really architecture at all but engineering—part of a vast attempt at social engineering that expressed a “contempt for man and God,” a depersonalization and de-civilizing of citizens in the name of egalitarianism. Similarly, in his writings on human sexuality, Scruton sees in the ‘Sixties ideology of sexual liberation another failed attempt at leveling—perforce self-contradictory, inasmuch as in any liberation the strongest will rise to the top (in this case the beautiful at the expense of “the unattractive or the helpless”). “Properly construed, sexual desire is an interpersonal relation, which focuses on the self-conscious subject.” To misinterpret sexuality in terms of power, as Foucault did, bespeaks “a serious intellectual defect.”

The social consequences of making science into scientism, of failing to see the ontological and moral limits of scientific knowledge, produces “an emerging human type which doesn’t take risks, which doesn’t go out to the other and which doesn’t form attachments on account of never having been attached as a child.” This “society of reduced humans, who are just bodies,” may still reproduce itself; “a child may be created, as a random by-product of their sexual pleasures,” then “left at the doorstep of the state, so ensuring that it too will grow up as a stranger in a world of the estranged.”

For Scruton, recovery begins with the least bureaucratic practice there is: hunting. Bureaucrats hate hunting, and typically try to regulate it out of existence on the basis of the radically egalitarian argument that men have no right to shoot animals. Hunting resists such false compassion by forming a “collective enterprise in which three species [human beings, horses, and dogs] are giving each other support” quite literally in pursuit of a common object, namely, an animal that either threatens or feeds the human being. Hunting leads the human mind to consider the distinctions among the species that the human mind by nature identifies; hunting sets you straight about equality and inequality, identity and difference.

So does farming, which requires the farmer to acknowledge and understand “the relation between man and nature as one of mutual dependence,” pointing him toward that stewardship of the land that the God of Genesis endows. In Hegelian terms, farming opens a way of understanding oneself as human, as the being which finds itself responsible for the world beyond itself. Nor is this all work and no playfulness, inasmuch as some farms produce grapes, which can be turned into wine. Here Scruton follows not Hegel of beer-gulping Germany but Plato’s Socrates; wine “enable[s] us to step out of the urgencies of daily life into some more relaxed arena”—Socrates would call it a symposium—”where we can encounter people in another mood.” Conversely, “the absence of wine in Saudi Arabia is one reason why it has stayed so solidly locked in its joyless sterility.” Wine even illustrates a philosophic principle, the Kantian distinction of a thing as an object as distinguished from the thing ‘in itself’: “Drink that glass of wine and compare your knowledge of it after you’ve absorbed it with your knowledge of it before.”

Beyond these material indications of love and friendship, whether social, civil-social, or convivially philosophic, Scruton calls his readers to consideration of music and religion. If science can lead us back to origins without being able to explain them, and forward to purposes without being able to tell us what they are, but then denies the significance of such ‘transcendental’ concerns, music turns us toward, not away from them. “Music is like a language, but it isn’t impeded in the some way that language is by the need for conceptualization and answerability to truth conditions. So it naturally becomes a symbol of the thing that wants to be said but cannot be said.” The problem then becomes “whether you can distinguish those things which are mere projections from those things which are, as Wordsworth would put it, intimations of the beyond or of the mysterious reality of the world.” Music sensitizes minds to things undreamt of by science, although not necessarily by philosophy, as philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche illustrate. By “putting meaning into things”—via custom and artistic creation—human beings are not arbitrarily imposing meaning on a meaningless flux; “we build meaning into our experiences, but we can only do so if they already have the valency that makes this possible.” Just as science brings us back to the origins of the universe (the Bible calls it Creation) without finally being able to explain them, artistic creation presupposes some underlying and also ‘transcendental’ reality upon which creation works and toward which it aspires.

If so, this makes religion philosophically respectable. But “that, of course, doesn’t mean the doctrines are true.” The same conversion (the Greek word thus translated means the ‘turning around’ of the soul, its reorientation away from the idols of the cave and toward the light) that religions speak of, Plato’s Socrates also speaks of. Whereas Locke “described philosophy as the ‘handmaiden of the sciences,'” Plato (and Aristotle) think it’s the other way around; the erotic quest for truth, the drive in us to know, makes us want to know more than what science can teach. “I’ve always thought of philosophy in the old Platonic way as the attempt to find a comprehensive picture of what we are, of where we are and of how we care.” Religion arises from that same quest. Both philosophy understood Platonically and religion vindicate science while guarding us against scientism.

Scruton illustrates this by considering the science of brain chemistry. Scientistic as distinguished from scientific thought “takes hold of the embryonic scientific theory about the workings of the nervous system and uses it to re-describe the questions of consciousness and human action”; “all we think, feel and do” get explained (or explained away) in terms of synapses. But analysis of synaptic activity does not show why it is (as Kant observed) “that we are distinguished from every other item in the universe by our ability to say ‘I’.” If my pain nerves jangle, I still say ‘I am in pain.’ In this as in cosmology and morality, science takes us a long way, but not all the way to what we want to know. “But if it’s a question asked from beyond the limit of science, then it immediately takes on a theological character and the question is whether there is such a thing as a theological answer. And that is where philosophy kicks in.”

How so? For most people, religion “fills in the gaps that science leaves open.” Those “living a religious life are, in a sense, completed in a way that they wouldn’t be if they just lived according to the nihilistic worldview that our culture advocates.” The untruth of nihilism manifests itself in the evident point that we exist, that there must be something rather than nothing. Religions tell us why.

Do they speak truly? They cannot all speak truly in their entirety because religions contradict one another. “Religion brings [believers] nearer to the truth about their condition than they would otherwise be,” but “they don’t think this through philosophically.” By contrast, a philosopher finds “concealed truth within” the religions. Scruton points to Averroes as a philosopher who does this, and he might easily go back further to Origen or indeed before Christianity to Plato’s Socrates. There are “two parallel routes to the thing we call ‘religion’: there has to be the religion of the philosopher, and the religion of the ordinary faithful.” Famously, Socrates insists on the need for self-knowledge; Scruton (thinking of Kierkegaard, not Socrates) finds “that the grounds of all religious belief are within the self, and that religion contains the set of stories that encapsulate our self-understanding.” But Kierkegaard, unlike Socrates, retreated into subjectivity. “That is what I would call a philosophical failure, a retreat from truth rather than an encounter with it. You have to accept that truth is objectivity and not subjectivity.” Why?

Here is where analytic philosophy usefully intercedes. “We know from Frege and Tarski that truth is connected with reference, that reference is connected to identity and that identity determines our ontological commitments. Ultimately, therefore, you cannot avoid the scientific realist worldview: it is simply a consequence of logical thinking.” And, it might be added, logical thinking or the principle of non-contradiction is inescapable: The same thing cannot perform or endure opposites at the same time, in the same part, and in relation to the same thing. You can think of something that is black and white; you can even think of something that is grey, a mixture of those opposites, but you cannot even conceive of something ‘blackwhite,’ any more than you conceive of or point to a square circle. You cannot even honestly claim to ‘have faith’ in the existence of a square circle, because you don’t know what you’re talking about. Thinking about Christianity, then, a philosopher would think logically about the Trinity. Without being able to pin down what the Bible means by it, he can at least clear up some confusions about it, and might even discover something profound in it.

Logical thinking, the dialectic seen in and exemplified by the Platonic dialogue, also enables a philosopher to compare and contrast different religions. The polyphony of Christian music (perhaps a result of the ‘social’ or Trinitarian character of the Christian God?) contrasts with Islamic culture. “There is little real music coming out of the Islamic world” because “there is no polyphony in Islam. The culture is saying only one thing, a huge unison which constantly fragments and can restore itself only by violence.” Islamic law builds no institutions, no authoritative pathways to channel human activities away from violence. “Sharia law… is addressed to the individual and it says ‘this is how you must live'”; it does not really show how to live a life in common with other lives. Abraham and Jesus talk to God the Father, but you don’t talk, or at any rate talk back, question, Allah. Recall Scruton’s understanding of the common law as a social or dialogic, and also experiential quest, for understanding justice and you will see why he wants to be remembered as the last Englishman and the organist at his own church.

Mark Dooley’s conversation with Roger Scruton thus accomplishes two highly valuable things. It provides and overview of Scruton’s philosophic quest showing how its elements cohere; better still, it cordially invites us to read his books, arousing the intellectual desire to do such work which animated the souls of the old philosophers.

John Dewey: Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

 

John Dewey has won no palms for literary excellence. The skilled writer and dubious historian Richard Hofstadter ripostes: “His style is suggestive of the cannonading of distant armies: one concludes that something portentous is going on at a remote and inaccessible distance, but one cannot determine just what it is.”

True, but Dewey nonetheless ranks as a master of rhetoric, something for which he has received little credit. Arguably the most influential American Progressive of his day, he identified his audience and spoke to it persuasively in language that compelled it, if no one else. He won the allegiance of American educators, who went on to remake the American public school system in his ideological image. Hofstadter goes on to say that Dewey’s “great influence as an educational spokesman may have derived in part from the very inaccessibility of his exact meanings.” There was much more to it than that, although it is unquestionably true that Dewey’s rhetoric owed much of its effectiveness to the fact that it rarely ‘sounded’ like rhetoric.

He seldom needed his rhetorical skills more than in 1935, when not only his educational system but the entire regime of American liberalism as he had redefined and shaped it faced deadly threats. Fascists and communists vied for the control of Europe, and the United States, center of the worldwide economic depression, could hardly claim invulnerability to their militancy. “The center cannot hold,” the poet Yeats had claimed, and to many it looked that way. American Progressives (renamed ‘liberals’ by themselves) had allied themselves with socialists and communists in imitation of Europe’s Popular Front coalitions—a risky and even desperate measure, given the decidedly illiberal character of some of their partners. Dewey published Liberalism and Social Action in this menacing atmosphere. He titles the first chapter “The History of Liberalism”; in it, he proves an extraordinarily shrewd orator of the printed word, deftly slanting his narrative description of liberalism to make the story come out right, justifying his liberalism in the minds of his followers at exactly the moment they lacked such tonic.

He begins by steadying liberals with memories of past victory. “Liberalism has long been accustomed to onslaughts proceeding from those who oppose social change.” As he need not explain, liberals have steadily overcome those onslaughts, for two and a half centuries. Today, however, fiercer challengers loom. Unlike conservatives, these challengers also want social change. Without naming them, he describes their assault as three-pronged: in term of its scope, the changes they propose are “drastic,” not gradual; in terms of timing, they demand immediate change; and with respect to their methods, they require violence. Although one might expect Dewey to single out the radical Right as they main challenger, he chooses examples of arguments made by the radical Left, by the communists: liberals say they sympathize with the workers but when push comes to shove they side with the “masters of capitalism”; they profess radical opinions “in private” but never act upon them for fear of losing social standing with those masters. Mealy-mouthed and cowardly, they deserve contempt, not a position of leadership at History’s cutting edge.

Dewey thus puts his strongest criticism of his allies in the mouths of his, and their, opponents. He wants to make liberals indignant at the way they are caricatured. Crucially, and presciently, he sees that the radical Left poses the worse threat to liberalism than the radical Right. Things didn’t look that way to most people in 1935, but Dewey saw farther, and as a result he wasn’t discredited when the Right lost the coming world war and conservatives rounded on those liberals who’d band-wagoned with the communists in the Thirties.

And there is another adversary, now only in potential, but worrisome nonetheless. It is the very democracy ‘progressive’ liberalism had valorized. “Popular sentiment, especially in this country, is subject to rapid changes of fashion.” In Europe already, liberalism no longer enjoys the prestige it had, only two decades ago. “Three of the great nations of Europe”—Russia, Germany, Italy—”have summarily suppressed the civil liberties for which liberalism valiantly strove, and in few countries of the Continent are they maintained with vigor.” Indeed: and within a few years, only Switzerland would remain in the liberal camp. More, “it is well known that everything for which liberalism stands is put in peril in times of war”; he is thinking of conscription, restrictions on freedom of speech, and other governmental actions familiar to Americans who remembered the Great War and its aftermath. (Of course he could never anticipate how President Roosevelt would use the next war as an opportunity to consolidate the gains of liberalism, as seen in the “Four Freedoms” speech; Dewey wasn’t the only rhetorical and strategic genius among American liberals at that time.) “The belief spreads,” he warns, “that liberalism flourishes only in times of fair social weather,” and if popular sentiment turns against liberals (as it had in the Twenties), this time the setback might last a long time.

Amidst this perfect storm of confusion, Dewey will urge intellectual clarity and strength of purpose, and to achieve the first (prerequisite to the second) he must begin by an act a philosopher will have mastered: the act of definition. The act of definition will work rhetorically, however, only if the philosopher exhibits skill in the art of definition, and in this case the portentous and all-inclusive cloudiness Hoftstadter scorned will not do. Socrates, that master of the ‘What is?’ question, shows the way: What is liberalism? What elements “of permanent value” does it have? How can these “values” be “maintained and developed”—he must avoid any hint of ‘conservativism,’ of the rear-guard defensive action—”in the conditions the world now faces.” Although he obviously knows how he will answer these questions, he pretends he does not, inviting his readers to think along with him: “I have wanted to find out whether it is possible for a person to continue, honestly and intelligently, to be a liberal, and if the answer be in the affirmative”—the suspense won’t kill us—”what kind of liberal faith should be asserted today.” With a becoming show of modesty, he allows “I do not suppose that I am the only one who has put such questions to himself,” and, knowing that most liberals will want to remain liberal, to confirm their long-held convictions, and also having prepared the ground, he can now unfold his argument with confidence.

He essays a bit of legerdemain that will prove characteristic. “The natural beginning of the inquiry in which we are engaged is consideration of the origin and past development of liberalism.” That is, the “natural” way to start isn’t natural but historical. He can say this because for more than a century philosophers and their intellectual followers had conceived of all reality, very much including nature, as historical. Historicism enables Dewey to shape his argument by bringing some historical facts to the foreground, leaving others in the background. “The conclusion reached from a brief survey of history,” which he will unfold in the balance of the chapter, is that “liberalism has had a chequered career”—it has made its mistakes, he humbly submits—”and that it has meant in practice things so different as to be opposed to one another.” Dewey is justly known as having insisted on a pragmatic and experimental liberalism, unlike the ‘idealistic’ liberalism of Woodrow Wilson and many of the early Progressives, although aiming at the same goals. Consistent with this, he will define liberalism in its succession of theories, basing these theories on practice and not finally on ideas.

Hence the emphasis on use: “The use of the words liberal and liberalism to denote a particular social philosophy does not appear to occur earlier than the first decade of the nineteenth century.” He grants himself an anachronistic exception in tracing liberalism to John Locke, whom he brackets neatly into a historical period as “the philosopher of the ‘glorious revolution’ of 1688.” Locke teaches what the Declaration of Independence asserts: Rights “belong to individuals prior to political organization of social relations,” and these natural rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; they also include property, which an individual rightly acquires by labor. Further, if a government violates rights, individuals separately or in groups may justly resist or revolutionize it. The need to exercise the right to revolution will subside to a considerable extent if governments practice religious toleration—itself a practical recognition of individuals’ natural right to their own opinions.

Dewey initially criticizes Locke more for the effect of his thought than for its content. His liberalism “bequeathed to later social thought a rigid doctrine of natural rights inherent in individuals themselves independent of social organization,” owing to his “semi-theological and semi-metaphysical conception of natural law as supreme over positive law,” a “new version of the old idea that natural law is the counterpart of reason, being disclosed by the natural light with which man is endowed.” Dewey the historicist demurs, but not immediately on the theoretical level. He instead criticizes the doctrine that natural rights inhere in individuals, and thus, somehow, “oppose social action” because they establish “the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority.” Further, this philosophy skews the meaning of reason itself. As a supposedly “inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another,” it was “not sustained and developed because of these relations.” All of this made natural-rights thinkers regard government as “the great enemy of individual liberty,” positing “a natural antagonism between ruled.” “Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea that government might and should be an instrument for securing and extending the liberties of individuals.”

As Dewey must know, this is nonsense. The theory of inherent or natural rights possessed by individuals in no way inhibited social organization. Indeed, Locke claims that it led to social organization, inasmuch as human beings living alone or in families formed civil societies in order to secure their rights. As for the Americans, the rights cited in the Declaration of Independence hardly prevented them from forming civil associations (as documented by Tocqueville but as seen in the colonial settlements before the Revolution and in the ‘committees of correspondence’ which organized it). As for governments as distinct from civil associations, the Locke and the Declaration assert, as Dewey himself recognizes, that they exist in order to secure natural rights. Government can defend or attack the natural rights of individuals, and the object of Locke and the American Founders was to see to it that it defended them. Their emphasis on government as an enemy of liberty made sense, given the threat of the regime of absolute monarchy, prevalent in Europe and practiced by the British monarch in the North American colonies at the time.

As for reason, Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education clearly shows that it needed development through social relations, first of all in the home. Such founding-generation Americans as Noah Webster extended this teaching to public schools without in any way compromising the idea that reason is a natural endowment of human individuals as such.

So what is Dewey up to? As a historicist, he claims that reason and political life—indeed, nature itself—all remain subject to change over time. In human life, changes in ideas and in social and political life typically result from underlying changes in the material conditions of human life at a given point in time. And so he writes that for Locke, living in England at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, property could be understood as a matter individual possession, but with the rise of industrialism in the following century “industry and commerce were sufficiently advanced in Great Britain so that interest centered in production of wealth, rather than in its possession.” The English then redefined “freedom” as “the use and investment of capital and the right of laborers to move about and seek new modes of employment—claims denied by the common law that came down from semi-feudal conditions.” True enough, but not denied by Locke, whose Dialogue between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England provides a refutation of the common law and a vindication of individual natural rights, very much against the semi-feudal conditions which had survived until that time. Far from being a “transformation of earlier liberalism,” the assertion of the liberty to invest and to work amounted to an application of it.

Similarly, respecting reason, Dewey claims that it too was transformed, thanks to Adam Smith’s capitalism-inspired notion of the “Invisible Hand:” the spontaneous organization of markets under conditions of minimal government interference does a better job than any attempt at rational planning of political economy could do. Again, true, but it does not follow that Smith provides “a radically new significance to the earlier conception of reason”; on the contrary, he applies ordinary rules of logic to a new social condition, a condition in which social relations under the modern state and its far bigger and more intricate political economy has discovered its own practical limits. According to Dewey, under rapidly-developed capitalism “natural laws lost their remote moral meaning” and were instead “identified with the laws of free industrial production and free commercial exchange.” But the reason that philosophers began to deny the moral meaning of natural laws came not from capitalist development but from David Hume, who asked how right can derive from a nature conceived as entirely material and purposeless. Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, along with Kant’s categorical imperative and Bentham’s utilitarianism, all responded to a philosophic critique of modern natural right, not socio-economic change.

With this distortion of actual history in the service of his theory of historicism and his intention to put government to the service of social change, Dewey turns to Jeremy Bentham, the thinker to whom he devotes the greatest attention. Like Smith, Bentham begins with psychology. But instead of a theory of moral sentiments he simplifies human response to a matter of the desire for pleasure and the aversion to pain, “the sole forces that govern human action.” Whereas Locke had concentrated his rhetorical efforts at liberalizing the English gentry class, “the constant expansion of manufacturing and trade” which Locke himself had promoted “put the force of a powerful class interests behind the new,” Benthamite, “version of liberalism,” which Bentham named utilitarianism. Dewey’s historical relativism leads him to associate such intellectual movements with social classes, but not in any simple way. Utilitarians detached themselves “from the immediate interests of the market place”; this “emancipation enabled them to detect and make articulate the nascent movements of their time—a function that defines the genuine work of the intellectual class at any period.” Unlike a Socratic philosopher, unlike any natural-rights philosopher ‘ancient’ or ‘modern,’ the philosopher of history aspires not to ascend from the Cave of popular opinion but to identify the flow of those opinions through the river of that cave, which may or may not someday ascend into the daylight. The Utilitarians “might have been as voices crying in the wilderness if what they taught had not coincided with the interests of a class that was constantly rising in prestige and power.” The philosopher not only identifies the nascent movements of his time, he contrives to ride them. His detachment is the detachment of a captain on a ship in the underground river of time.

This begs the question: What class was constantly rising in prestige and power in the first half of the twentieth century, in Dewey’s America? Which class interest does his teaching aim to ride and guide? None other than the professional classes: teachers, administrators, and lawyers. If Bentham taught the commercial and industrial classes, and Marx chose the proletariat as the vehicle for revolution, Dewey chooses the ‘white-collar’ men as the rising class of his time and place. As it happened he chose very shrewdly. They, far more than the ‘blue-collar’ men of the Marxists and socialists generally, proved to be those who came to rule in the America and Europe of his century. Compared with Marx, Dewey proved the superior historicist. Despite the seemingly bad prospects for liberalism in 1935, he remained confident in his analysis, and moved to steady the nerves of his progressive-liberal allies.

Dewey admires Bentham because utilitarianism “transferred attention from the well-being already possessed by individuals to one they might attain if there were a radical change in social institutions.” Although, like Smith, he preferred a limited state, “there was nothing in his fundamental doctrine that stood in the way of using the power of government to create, constructively and positively, new institutions if and when it should appear that the latter would contribute more effectively to the well-being of individuals.” Indeed: utility is as utility does. But notice the subtle misinterpretation. Dewey pretends that natural rights, inherent in individuals, somehow preclude government efforts to effect the “well-being” of individuals. The Declaration of Independence contrarily asserts that “the People”—not simply individuals—may “institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” A natural-rights theory of politics can aim at the well-being of individuals and of peoples just as readily as a theory founded on the utilitarian calculus of Bentham or the historicist calculus of Dewey.

Dewey knows that, but letting his readers know it would not serve his rhetorical purpose. What does serve that purpose is to observe a new use of practical reason encouraged by Bentham, the practice of social experimentation. He quotes Bentham with approval: We should “extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral,” trying one reform and then, if it fails, another. Dewey finds Bentham’s actions consistent with his words. “History shows no mind more fertile than [Bentham’s] in invention of legal and administrative devices,” and his followers enabled the progressive democratization of British society and politics via the three great reform acts of the nineteenth century to avoid both violent political revolution and administrative disorder. In answer to the question of liberalism’s vulnerability in 1935 to violent revolutionary challenges, Dewey harkens to Bentham, whose followers in principle met the same kind of challenge a century before. “Liberalism is not compelled by anything in its own nature to be impotent save for minor reforms. Bentham’s influence is proof that liberalism can be a power in bringing about radical social changes: provided it combine capacity for bold and comprehensive social invention with detailed study of particulars and with courage in action.” What is more, these radical social changes need no tyrant-leaders to effect them: “I think there is something significant for the liberalism of today and tomorrow to be found in the fact that his group did not consist in any large measure of politicians, legislators or public officials” at all. Liberals today and tomorrow, like the utilitarian liberals of yesterday, can develop their “program” “outside of the immediate realm of governmental action,” galvanizing “public attention, before direct political action of a thoroughgoing liberal sort.” This developmental or historicist strategy can yield far more reliable results than any ‘top-down,’ immediately governmental strategy can do, and thus surpass and outlast the violent tyrannies.

Unlike Lockeian, Smithian, and (Dewey might have as well added) Kantian liberalism, Benthamite liberalism judges “all organized action” by its consequences. Although utilitarianism is not historicism, it shares that principle with historicism. Following Hume, Bentham argued that “natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological historical zoology. Men do not obey laws because they think these laws are in accord with a scheme of natural rights. They obey because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the consequences of obeying are upon the whole better than the consequences of disobeying…. Not natural rights but consequences in the lives of individuals are the criterion and measure of policy and judgment.” Dewey first denies that rights inhere in nature, following Bentham, who follows Hume. He next shifts the reader’s attention not to the origin of rights but to the human motive that induce us to obey any assertion of rights at all. In this, Bentham serves as a model. What Dewey’s historicist liberalism will alter is utilitarianism’s continued focus on the individual. He will more thoroughly ‘historicize’ liberalism by ‘socializing’ it—by making it a matter of socio-economic change defined and to some extent guided by the rising professional class, now instructed by (it is almost needless to say) Dewey himself, and his followers, primarily in the education system.

For America, alas, “had no Bentham.” As a consequence, the influence of “the school of Locke” “lasted much longer in the United States” than it did in Europe. But while “the ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve their own careers,” the American frontier is long closed. In the old America, “the gospel of self-help and private initiative was practiced so spontaneously that it needed no special intellectual support,” anyway. Dewey carefully overlooks Tocqueville’s account of civil associations, which arose as it were spontaneously in the ‘Lockeian’ America. He must overlook that account, because it shows that Locke’s principles give plenty of room for social action and self-government, up to and including natural-rights republicanism on the national level. Dewey would like to confine that characteristically American form of social action to an irrecoverable agrarian past, to relativize it to a certain set of historical conditions that will never exist again.

Dewey will lead the way, in part by following Bentham. “Great Britain, largely under Benthamite influence, built up an ordered civil service independent of political party control,” and reinforcing “the supremacy of national over local interests.” Like Dewey, Bentham “urged a great extension of public education and of action in behalf of public health” upon his people. Such “collectivist legislative policies gained in force for at least a generation after the [eighteen-] sixties.” This movement “greatly weakened the notion that Reason is a remote majestic power that discloses ultimate truth,” instead “render[ing] it an agency in investigation of concrete situations and in projection of measures for their betterment”—i.e., epistemological pragmatism. Dewey’s liberal progressivism will remain on the ground level, precisely to ensure real progress via experiment not speculative fancies.

Nonetheless, utilitarianism alone does not supply the rhetorical ‘lift’ needed for any reform movement. Here, in an especially ironic instance of History’s cunning (not entirely unlike Smith’s Invisible Hand, but even more like Hegelian dialectic), English conservatives made an unwitting contribution. Pushing against utilitarianism and industrialism in a last and ultimately failing attempt to defend aristocratic sensibilities, Tories fostered the Romantic movement; combined with middle-class humanitarianism and “evangelical piety,” they revived an older definition of ‘liberal’ as generous, open-handed—a “generosity of outlook,” of “liberty of belief and action.” Under the influence of this redefinition, “gradually a change came over the spirit and meaning of liberalism,” which disassociated itself with economic laisser faire and instead became “associated with the use of governmental action for aid to those at economic disadvantage and for alleviation of their conditions.” American Progressives followed in this line. Dewey recalls the firm anti-industrial spirit of the English Romantic poets, calling it part of “a powerful counterpoise to the anti-historic interest of the Benthamite school.” A synthesis occurred. “The leading scientific interest of the nineteenth century came to be history, including evolution within the scope of history.” John Stuart Mill, the greatest of the second-generation Utilitarians, provided the link between Bentham and the Romantics, turning to the poets after realizing that even the success of all his useful reform efforts would leave him emotionally dead.

English philosophers soon made this implicitly or potentially Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic manifest, led by the Oxford University philosophy professor Thomas Hill Green. Green took “the organic idealism that originated in Germany,” itself a “reaction against the basic philosophy of individualistic liberalism and individualistic empiricism,” and aimed it against “the atomistic philosophy that had developed under the alleged empiricism of the earlier liberal school.” English Hegelians could now answer Hume’s refutation of modern natural right by not merely by abandoning natural right but by substituting ‘History’ for it. “Criticizing piece by piece almost every item of the theory of mind, knowledge and society that had grown out of the teachings of Locke… they asserted that relations constitute the reality  of nature, of mind and of society” while nonetheless retaining “the ideals of liberalism.” They redefined individual liberty not in terms of natural rights possessed by individuals but as rights inherent in social relations. Far from being mere conventions, far from resting on self-interested pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain, moral claims and social relations as the new liberals conceived them stood on “unshakeable objective foundations in the very structure of things.” “For the relations that constitute the essential nature of things are… the expression of an objective Reason and Spirit that sustains nature and the human mind,” qualities of “an ultimate cosmic mind” or, as Hegel calls it, the Absolute Spirit.

The political result is equally Hegelian. “The state is a moral organism, of which the government is one organ,” itself “but one organ among many of the Spirit and Will that holds all things together and makes human beings members of one another.” Under this system, the individual realizes himself by participating in “the common intelligence and sharing the common purpose as it works for the common good.” The state can then be conceived not so much as an instrument for securing innate rights of individuals as “the means of voluntary self-realization”—no longer the menacing potential oppressor of the individual but his ally in true liberation. As in Hegel, the state clears away obstacles to individuals “coming to consciousness of themselves for what they are,” a negative task supplemented by the positive effort “to promote the cause of public education.” The new freedom of the individual is no possession but “something to be achieved” as a part of this comprehensive historical process. Liberals who understand this today, in 1935, can “resolve the crisis” of liberalism “and emerge as a compact, aggressive force” against tyrannies Right and Left. Fortified by Dewey’s tonic, liberals can again exhibit the courage their enemies accuse them of lacking.

Dewey’s wish was fulfilled, more immediately by the pragmatic-yet-idealist progressive-liberal American president, aided by one of those old-fashioned, Romantic Tories, Winston Churchill, and also, more dangerously, by one of the tyrants, Josef Stalin. These Allies did indeed form, if not a compact, surely a massive and aggressive force against the fascist tyrannies. In the longer term, Dewey’s pragmatic liberalism, already well-established in the public school system, outlasted the remaining extremist tyranny, which ossified and finally collapsed less than four decades after Stalin’s death. In recent decades, however, Dewey’s liberalism has itself declined, as the administrative state staffed by ‘his’ rising professional class has proved not so instrumental to liberty—whether defined as natural, as utilitarian, or as a matter of self-realization—as Dewey claimed it would be. Less than a century since Dewey wrote, his liberal regimes face challenges from illiberally organized states, both secular and even (he would have been astonished) religious. And they face challenges from within themselves.

However this may go, Dewey surely deserves more credit than he deserves as what Wilson had called an “opinion leader.” He wasn’t the oratorical leader the young Wilson had in mind, and came to exemplify. Dewey, a master of written rhetoric, sought to influence only a part of public opinion directly, and for a long time. But he had identified the decisive part, the opinion of the opinion-makers. As a result, his project has endured for almost 90 years since Dewey published his book. ‘Postmodern’ thinkers of a still ‘newer’ Left now imperil the house that Dewey built, and a variety of ‘conservatives’ have criticized its architecture, but they haven’t toppled it yet.