Steven Forde: Locke, Science, and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 41, Number 2, Fall 2014. Republished with permission.

 

During his lifetime, Leo Strauss enjoyed conversations and correspondence with several philosophic friends who disagreed sharply but intelligently with him. It is nonetheless fair to say that the intelligent scholarly responses to his work—apart from those by men and women who have modeled their work on his own—remain rare. While Strauss has never lacked scholarly critics of serious and even well-nigh deadly intent, they have inclined toward polemics.

How refreshing and instructive to read Professor Forde’s book, which strikes me as exactly the sort of non-Straussian scholarly work that Straussians (and every other stripe of political-philosophy scholar) can study with pleasure. He writes in a good cause, bringing clarity to the writings of John Locke, that philosopher of supreme discretion and even indirection.

By “non-Straussian,” I mean that Forde departs from the main line of Strauss’s account of Locke, namely, that Locke presented himself as a respectable, Christian writer along the lines of “the judicious” Richard Hooker, but in fact took his philosophic bearings from the decidedly un-Christian Thomas Hobbes. Forde dissents, arguing that although Locke considered himself both a philosopher engaged in the modern-scientific project of Francis Bacon—as was Hobbes—and a literary defender of that project, he rejected Hobbesian materialism and founded his version of natural right on a version of divine right—not, to be sure, the divine right of kings, but rather a natural right divine in origin. Further, Locke’s ‘god’ endowed rights to humanity as a whole, not simply or even primarily to individuals; Forde thus challenges or at least qualifies what has come to be called Lockean individualism—a rubric that Strauss, and not only Strauss, endorsed. Forde also dissents from Strauss’s interpretive approach to Locke. He does not regard Locke as a writer with an esoteric teaching protected by an exoteric shell; he contends that Locke’s argument, though convoluted, can be discovered by allowing for different emphases in his different books. Just as Locke contends that the human mind classifies most of the things it encounters according to the use it wants to make of them, so did Locke present his teaching somewhat differently in different books, depending on the purpose he intended each book to serve. Locke’s true teaching is not so much secret or disguised as elaborately nuanced.

In his introduction, Forde identifies as “the foundation” of Locke’s philosophy not individual rights, but natural law “that exists, and can only exist, as divine command” (1). Nature consists of atoms in motion, as Locke’s friend, the chemist Robert Boyle, had maintained, and as Aristotle and the Scholastics, who took their bearings from Aristotle, had denied. Aristotelians understood nature not as a concatenation of atoms, and perhaps not primarily as material at all, but as formal and teleological—to be understood as “ordered into species or kinds” (4), each aiming at a telos or purpose. Locke follows his new-science colleagues by saying that species or forms do not exist in nature at all, but “are pure products of the mind” (5). Applying this claim to human beings, Locke argues that natural right must be completely revised to conform with the epistemology of the new science. The Is/Ought problem, so memorably identified by David Hume, already preoccupies Locke, who offers an answer to it. But his answer cannot be found in its entirety in any one of Locke’s books, which collectively form a sort of network or system, each making its own indispensable contribution to the whole.

Forde’s four substantive chapters address the scientific foundations of Locke’s doctrine, its moral dimensions, its political dimensions, and his teaching on education, respectively. He begins with the Essay concerning Human Understanding. “Locke will essentially wipe away all the traditional forms of knowledge, including moral knowledge”; “the new original of knowledge” will, “perhaps above all,” promise “results that will be useful to mankind (14-15, italics added). In so doing, Locke follows the lead of Francis Bacon, whose empiricism and experimentalism yield “only probable knowledge,” not certainty. But mere probability will not suffice, “in Locke’s own view, for morality,” and “empirical investigation, in any case can never yield moral insight” (17). Before showing how Locke meets this dilemma, Forde steps back to describe the thought of Locke’s relevant antecedents.

Aristotle “had confronted arguments similar to those later made by Baconian empiricists, weighted them, and rejected them” (19). He, too, propounded an “approach to knowledge [that] was resolutely empirical at its root,” an approach deriving from “Socrates’ turn away from airy abstractions to a more common-sense approach to reality, as reflected in ordinary human speech” (19). The empirical matter in question was speech, which leads quickly to consideration of the noun—that is, to ideas or forms, “the patterns or templates for the concrete objects we encounter in experience” (19). The Socratic/Platonic answer to Heraclitus’s claim that all is flux is that all could not be flux because we detect relatively stable entities all around us, entities that moreover can be seen to fall into identifiable kinds or species. “It makes sense to call these patterns ‘forms,’ to reflect the empirical, even visual, roots of the theory” (19). To know nature is to know the forms in which it manifests itself. In distinction to Plato’s Socrates, but not simply in contradiction of him, Aristotle maintained that although “the particulars are prior” to the forms, the forms “have independent being”; although the forms we see in the particulars exist only in those particulars, they serve as causes of the particulars—causes independent of material causes (21-22). Without an appreciation of form, one “cannot account for the order of nature, or for the fact that there is qualitative as well as quantitative change” observable in it (22-23). In particular, one cannot account for the capacity of what we now call organic beings to grow towards aa form, to perfect themselves, to move towards a telos. Things or substances “are compounded of form and matter,” both (24), with form the same in each individual within a species and matter the source of individuation. To know, “we must always begin with sense experience,” but then “get beyond it or behind it, to a grasp of the forms and permanent realities that will alone allow us to understand the world” (25). As the senses receive sensations that detect objects, the mind receives the forms that permit us to understand those objects.

Some of this fits the Biblical account of Adam, charged by God with the task of naming—that is to say, classifying—the objects in the Garden of Eden in accordance with their “kinds.” On the basis of this and other congruities between Scripture and Aristotelianism, Thomas Aquinas achieved his impressive synthesis of the two lines of thought. Although the Bible precludes the Aristotelian claim that the cosmos is eternal, it does allow for the existence of forms, now understood as “creations of God, or more precisely…part of the divine mind or essence” (27). God also implanted in His highest creation, man, both the capacity to do good—syndaresis—and the capacity to fail, willfully and therefore culpably. “Aquinas follows Aristotle and Plato in holding that the forms or species are real entities—all three are ‘realists’ as modern philosophical terminology has it,” considering species or kinds as “templates according to which nature is organized” (28). Led by William of Ockham, the realists’ opponents, the ‘nominalists,’ maintain that forms have no status ‘out there’; they “are concepts by which we organize our experience,” with “no existence outside of our minds” (28). Our only way to perceive the world outside our minds is sense perception of particular objects; therefore, Aristotelian/Thomistic formal causation is unnecessary to understanding nature. If nature is in fact directed by a final cause, Ockham accepts this “only as an article of faith,” not as a result of “natural reason” (30). What replaces the forms for Ockham is the divine will, a will unconstrained by forms, templates; to think otherwise, as Aquinas does, amounts to a sort of sacrilege—the theological equivalent of a restraining order on God’s freedom. “True knowledge such as God has, is knowledge of reach and every particular, in its particularity”—of every sparrow that falls, of every hair on every head (31). The human resort to universals betrays the weakness of our minds, their finitude; while in our feebleness we need such concepts, they do not convey reality as God created it.

This leads Ockham to distinguish between God’s ordinate power and God’s absolute power. “God’s absolute power consists in the fact that he was free to create the world in radically different ways”; but once He decided upon creating this world He manifested his “ordinate” power, “remaining within the ambit of this created order” (33). This is why Ockham himself relies on species (although as mere concepts) to describe the world as God has established it. The world “remains somewhat conditional,” dependent on God’s continued will to keep it the way it is (33). Jewish and Christian faith entails our acknowledgment of this dependency. Moral law is the same way: “In this creation…God has condemned adultery and murder, and commanded love of himself,” but in some other creation He might not have done so. We need divine revelation of His moral law for that reason, inasmuch as we cannot know God’s reason or reasons for setting it down the way He did. However, in considering God’s creation as “grounded in God’s ordinate power,” we may “arrive at some understanding of moral law,” as indeed Aristotle had done, unaided by Scripture (34).

Nominalism will look quite different if God disappears. Forde offers an illuminating account of the background of Locke’s thought in the Baconian project. Bacon took over the nominalists’ empiricism but, “unlike them, indeed in complete opposition to their spirit…conceived a sweeping plan for the mastery of nature by human power, rooted in a new empirical science” (37). The regularities seen in nature derive not from forms but from matter itself, motion, and the laws of matter and motion. Intellectual intuition or noesis supplemented by logical deduction from supposed noetic insights will get us nowhere; empirical observation of particulars, aided by the inductive logic of experiment—torturing nature to reveal her secrets, in Bacon’s phrase—will obtain the only knowledge of nature we can have, which turns out to be enough for the project of mastery. We need to torture nature because nature consists fundamentally of atoms ; not only is an atomistic nature too complex to understand adequately by noetic apprehension of forms (as Ockham understood), but atoms themselves (unlike hairs) are too small to see. Both our minds and our senses are inadequate to understand nature, unaided by the method of torture. to the obvious question—Why are there atoms in the first place?—Bacon replies, simply, that’s the way it is; it is “one of the follies of the human mind to seek an explanation beyond this, a ‘why'” (42). One might as well ask a theologian why God exists. In any philosophic or theological system, there must be some ‘given.’ For Bacon, atoms are as far back as we can get.

Because matter is always in motion, so are forms. What we call kinds or species are the shapes in which atoms now manifest themselves. As in Ockham, natural reality consists of two levels: ordinary or regular, mechanical nature—”nature in its species and activities as we find them today”—and “metaphysical,” nature’s “fundamental and universal laws which constitute forms” (44). God has disappeared from the picture. We will know that we know nature insofar as we can control it; this, not noesis and not divine revelation, is the new source of intellectual certainty for human beings, insofar as we can reach certainty. Such a project will “require the labor of many hands, and many minds” (45)—hence the formation of the Royal Society in England in 1660, the institutionalization of the Baconian project.

Locke’s friend Robert Boyle became a charter member of the Society, and remained one of its most distinguished. Aristotelianism does not—the new scientists maintain that it cannot—tell us “how exactly…form exert[s] its influence” over matter (51). How does the form of the oak actually cause the acorn “to develop properly” (52)? Boyle defends atomism by claiming that the “corpuscles” or atoms can cause forms to exist because they differ in their “texture”—that is, in their size and shape. Form derives from the texture of the corpuscles that combine to make the object; “when an object changes color, or becomes liquid, this is not the supervention of a new Aristotelian form, but merely a change in the body,” a rearrangement of the corpuscles. Crucially, the sizes and shapes of material corpuscles are not Aristotelian forms but “modes of matter”: “modifications of a single underlying material or stuff” with “purely physical or material variations.” “There is no such thing as a change in kind in Boyle’s material nature” (57). Boyle calls nature a “cosmical mechanism” or “great automaton,” with no mind or purpose of its own. Any purpose it has it owes entirely to God. The teleological nature of the Scholastics ‘”verges on pantheism,” and thus on impiety, by making nature “a subaltern deity, carrying out God’s plan” (60).

Two problems arise. First, there is the matter of gravity, which “seems little better than the neo-Aristotelian ‘appetite to fall'” as an explanation for how it is that things do fall when “gravity” is present. To say that a horse is a horse because of its horseness may not help us much, but neither does saying that things fall because it’s grave around here. Forde observes that this problem remains unsolved for modern scientists to this day. Second, there is the persistent problem of accounting for species in terms of corpuscular “modes of matter.” How do atoms get to be differentiated in size and shape? Here Boyle makes an un-Baconian move, bringing God back. “Boyle makes God the first mover” (62)—again, in the manner of Ockham, distinguishing between the ordinary operations of nature and its origin. This frees science from the charge of impiety while freeing scientists to concentrate their minds on the mechanisms of nature as we now experience it. Whereas Bacon accounted for species by a process of natural selection, Boyle simply contends that “in the beginning God created the ‘seeds’ from which the species sprang” (63), imposing the modes upon matter. “An unbaptized Epicurean,” Forde notes, “might accuse Boyle…of taking the easy way out” (64). Be this as it may, Boyle carefully shifts scientific terminology away from speaking of the nature of a thing and toward speaking “of a thing’s ‘constitution’ or ‘individual mechanism'” (66). This causes a further problem, however, when the scientist considers such phenomena as natural disasters or defective specimens or “monsters.” If the existence of these calamities requires us to question the Scholastics’ teleology (does nature really produce nothing in vain?), then do they not also pose questions for Boyle’s providentialism? “Boyle mentions this difficulty, only to say that dealing with it is not part of his present topic. It never seems to have been part of his topic” (67). True to his eschewal of exotericism, Forde suggests that Boyle might argue that calamities arise because the divinely ordered sees or corpuscles “operate from the ground up, as it were,” not through divine supervision, and that this accounts for imperfections and occasional mishaps (68). Locke would propose a more radical solution.

Locke has yet another difficulty to address: the origin of morality. “The theory of forms allowed morality to be built into nature, so to speak, by the same means that the species were built into nature” (69). Subtract the forms as independent causes, and where does that leave morality? Boyle “simply relies on the presumptive validity of Christian morality and the Christian revelation.” “This is the point at which Locke ceased to be guided by him” (70).

Forde turns to Locke’s “moral epistemology” in his second chapter. In the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke argues that “there are no species, in the sense of a class of things brought into being according to a pattern, each of which shares certain ‘essential’ traits by virtue of being a number of that species”; “monsters” are as natural as any other specimen of a putative kind. Species are useful concepts “of our own devising,” but particulars are the only beings that actually exist (73). Neither biological science nor moral science can regard man as a real being—an essence or template to which individual specimens may be compared. Our concepts or categories, including man, depend (in the Baconian way) “on the purposes for which we are making the distinction” between the thing we are thinking about and all the other things we perceive. Analogously, our moral principles are “mixed modes,” “concepts that are not grounded in nature, but, like species concepts…constructs of the mind” more or less useful to whatever our purposes may be (74). Locke posits no innate moral ideas—no syndaresis with or without God. “Locke’s almost macabre fascination with the barbarism that human beings, and indeed entire cultures, have displayed puts a point” on this claim (74-75).

The human mind begins as a tabula rasa, or better, a camera obscura: “a dark room, into which light can enter only through the portals of sense” (75). Without innate ideas and with no way of transcending these sense impressions or “ideas” in the direction of forms, the mind receives only the most elementary signals from outside itself—”hard,” “white,” and so on. “Our entire mental universe, including ideas seemingly far beyond experience, is constructed in camera, as it were, using elements acquired only from (internal and external) experience.” Thus Locke’s empiricism actually maintains that we cannot really know the empeiria directly; “we begin with sensory information, but we do not know how objects stimulate the senses, nor how the senses transmit their reports to our minds.” In this, Locke concurs with both Descartes and Hobbes; “the anti-Aristotelianism of this approach is complete” (76). This does not generate skepticism for Locke because “it is not reasonable, or even psychologically possible, to deny” the existence of external reality (77). Epistemological sensualism comes to its own rescue, one might say. “To one who argues all is a dream, Locke asks derisively whether he would rather dream of being in a dire, or actually be in it.” This does not of course commit Locke to claiming that every sensory report accurately reflects external reality. Locke explains sensory error by first distinguishing between “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Primary qualities—solidity, extension, shape—come to us infallibly through our senses; “our senses reveal to us attributes that really do inhere in objects” (78). Secondary qualities—color, smell, taste—are not intrinsic to the object perceived by vary with our own senses; one person might perceive colors differently than another, for example. Hence the wise monition not to dispute matters of taste. Thus far, Locke follows Boyle.

A further complexity arises in Locke’s distinction between “simple” and “complex” ideas or sense perceptions. Simple ideas, such as yellow, white, hot, cold, soft, hard, bitter, sweet, “merely signify that some external quality is having the effect in question on our senses” (79). Complex ideas, however, are “compounded of simple ideas” and therefore involve the mind in the active arrangement of the impressions it has received. From the simple ideas of brown, hard, rough, and cylindrical, our mind forms the complex idea, tree trunk. Such “bundles of qualities do appear together regularly in our experience; there really are tree trunks,” but “we must not imagine that we will ever have fully adequate ideas of them”—only ideas more or less adequate “to our purposes” (79-80). Our minds “create” them, assembling them out of preexisting materials, calling certain sorts of order out of our perceptions without every fully knowing if we’ve got it right. As we now say, the mind ‘abstracts from’ sensory experience to construct its concepts. To “know” is not to perceive a formal template but “to say that we have grasped something of the different modes in which matter may exist, and the regularities observed by matter in those modes” (82). This is not (yet) ‘postmodernism’ or a form of conventionalism; we are indeed perceiving something, or some things that are out there. We are not creating ex nihilo. And of course reason remains unchallenged; the sense impression white is not the sense impression black. There is no whiteblack in Locke’s world any more than there is in Plato’s or Aristotle’s or Aquinas’s. We may, without contradiction, define man as a rational animal, a political animal, or a featherless biped, but we cannot run it together with donkey—at least, in any non-metaphorical way (85). On the other hand, these species concepts remain only concepts; “those brought under a single species name often differ more among themselves than they do from individuals nominally of another species,” as the example of monstrosities shows (86).

If so, how does Locke found a morality on any of this? [1]  Some of the complex “ideas” assembled from the simple ones are what Locke calls “modes.” Unlike the other kind of complex idea, exemplified by the tree trunk, modes are at three removes from physical reality; the tree trunk is our mental abstraction from a number of simple ideas or sense impressions. A mode refers not to any physical object—they are not ideas of things; “they carry no implication that they correspond to real objects” (87). When forming a simple mode, the mind “conceptualizes modifications of a single idea.” For example, the mind takes the simple idea of motion and modifies it to conceive of sliding, rolling, rising. It takes the simple idea of thought and conceives of memory and contemplation; the simple ideas of pleasure and pain “include live, hatred, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, and many others.” “None of these notions is innate; they are all the product of mind working on the simple ideas of sense.” Mixed modes are “more complex versions of the same mental abstraction and combination,” a combination of two or more simple modes. Wrestling and fencing serve as Locke’s examples: “complex forms of physical activity, the parts of which have no natural connection to one another, whose unity exists only in the term and the mental concept describing it,” concepts “constitut[ing] the activity as a whole” (88). The mixed mode gives the constituent parts “a meaning they do not possess inherently.” Most such activities “exist by convention and not by nature” (89).

“All moral concepts are mixed modes” (88). “Murder” consists of a set of acts that have no intrinsic moral significance; the “moral meaning” of such acts as murder and rape, rescue and liberation, “is given to them, or imposed upon them, only by the application by mind of the moral code.” “After all, has not the line between killing and ‘murder’ been drawn very differently at different times and places?” “Locke draws attention to the immense power that would accrue to one who succeeded in defining or redefining mixed modes for a culture or civilization. It is past doubt that he aspires to play this role himself, with his new understanding of natural law, natural rights, limited government, religious toleration, and the like” (89). One is reminded of Machiavelli’s musings on such great lawgivers as Moses and Romulus, which are not unrelated to his project of mastering Fortuna, a project itself somewhat reminiscent of Bacon’s conquest of nature. But I digress.

Having refused the Aristotelian/Scholastic “leap” from “the empirical world to the realm of forms” (90), Locke also refuses the Cartesian claim that our ideas are innate. He agrees that mathematical ideas are certain, but only because they refer strictly to relations among abstractions and have no empirical content. But—here is the novelty he introduces—this also applies to moral ideas. Far from producing moral relativism, the purely abstract character of moral mixed modes gives the mind the possibility of attaining “ironclad certainty” about them (92). Mathematics and morality are the mental realms of certainty, even as science is the mental realm of empiricism and therefore of nothing more than probability. “Euclid’s geometrical proofs are paradigms of demonstrative knowledge,” but so, Locke writes, is the existence of God—”the only being external to ourselves of whose existence we can be absolutely certain.” Further, God’s commands, the laws of morality, are as non-empirical as God is. If the laws of morality had empirical content, if they were linked in any way to physical nature, “they could not be absolute,” they could not be commands at all (93). Morality would indeed look more like what Aristotle said it was, a matter of prudential reasoning aimed at securing the good—that is, the best possible fulfillment of the natural form of a human being, family, or political community. In recommending Cicero’s De officiis as a moral handbook, Locke does not endorse the ontological foundation of Cicero’s moral philosophy; he endorses the abstract, universal validity of his ideas as abstractions, as “mixed modes” of thought.

All of this raises hard questions about how much such abstractions relate to the world, very much including the world of human relations that morality governs. On some level, morality must engage practice. To better understand Locke on this point, Forde considers the writings of Locke’s contemporary Samuel Pufendorf, whose works Locke recommended in Some Thoughts Concerning Education. What Boyle did with “modes” in the realm of physical science, Pufendorf did in moral philosophy. Certain modes, Pufendorf teaches, “added to physical things or motions, by intelligent beings,” direct us and “secure a certain orderliness and decorum in civilized life” (98). Such modes are not descriptions, as in physical science, but prescriptions, commands, precisely knowable. “Aristotle correctly identified certainty with sciences that proceed deductively from axioms, but incorrectly identified ethics or morality as a field incapable of such precision,” precisely because he founded his morality on human nature and not on modes (100). In Pufendorf, as in the Bible, “all morality takes the form of law, a binding rule that serves as the measure of right and wrong” (100); such law is “the free creation of God, who could have ordained that law differently” (101). God is “the only agent with the capacity, and the authority, to impose moral modes upon humanity in a universally valid way”; this authority comes “not from his overwhelming power, as Hobbes had supposed,” or “from his superior perfection, as Cicero had supposed,” but from human consent or else by some “special service” done by God to human beings. This special service was the act of creation, which put human beings in God’s debt. The relation between moral law and reality runs from God to man; God gave us not only the commands He reveals in His Bible but also the rest of His Creation. We can “devise ways” of “achiev[ing] the goals of peace and civilization” that God has given us by thinking about our experience. Such “empirical observation” gives us “signposts” that point beyond “the empirical realm” that we observe; “nature is an indication of the law God has imposed on us” (103). This is how moral law can nonetheless be described as “natural” law; although modern science has revealed “material nature” to be “morally vacuous,” God must have made our nature such that these signposts are consistent with His moral law. In other words, like Ockham, Pufendorf distinguishes God’s “absolute” power from His “ordinate” power. God could have done things differently, but having done things the way He did, what He did serves as a moral guide for human beings. “Natural reason is sufficient to the task of discovering the moral law” (104), although those favored with having received God’s revelation will be greatly aided in that discovery.

“Locke embraced Pufendorf’s approach to morals in its fundamentals”—morality as one of the mixed modes, the modes of “creations of intellect, which superimposes them on the material world,” an object of “a demonstrative science.” “The resulting theory, as both Pufendorf and Locke emphasize, cannot dispense with divine legislation.” Here Forde dissents from Strauss, Pangle, and Zuckert, who regard “Locke’s appeals to God” as “a rhetorical ploy, cover for a completely secular moral and political theory” (105). “It is only through divine legislation…that Locke can combine his very prominent account of moral concepts as ‘arbitrary’ fixed modes, with his equally prominent account of the moral law as ‘the eternal law and nature of things'” (108). Nonetheless, Forde almost immediately asks, “What is the flawless moral demonstration that the theory of moral modes promises us?” and observes that “notoriously, Locke never provided this demonstration” (108). One might also wonder what Locke means by “divine.”

Man is subject to moral law. By “man” Locke here means a creature, both corporeal and rational. We need say no more because for this particular purpose, the consideration of morality, other features we might include in the concept man (his featherlessness, for example) are irrelevant. But if man is corporeal as well as rational, how can we relate the empirical fact of corporeality to rationality in order to give a coherent account of a law relating the one aspect of man to the other? Forde mentions that in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, Locke addresses this problem in two chapters: “Of Power” (2.21) and “Of Identity” (2.27). There, Locke identifies three senses in which “we speak of a human being”: person, man, and substance. “Substance” is the human being as a material object among others; “man” refers to its shape or form; “person”—the only one of moral significance—means, in Locke’s words, a “thinking intelligent being” with “reason and reflection.” This “self”—which need not be an immortal “soul”—has “consciousness,” without which it could have no moral responsibility, inasmuch as “no one may be held responsible for acts which he is not conscious of having performed” (112). (“It is easy to see how [this rule] applies to the doctrine of original sin,” Forde notes, “as [Locke] does not point out” [113]). “The critical divide between man and beast is not reason per se; it is rather the ability to abstract, to create general terms, and mentally to manipulate those terms” (113). To explain the existence of such a composite being, Locke has recourse to a version of the argument from design. Because “the mechanism of nature, as the new science has uncovered it, is incapable of producing a conscious, ‘cogitative’ being,” “any such beings must therefore be the workmanship of God.” Forde doubts that this proof carries much water; even if it convinced us of God’s existence, it would not prove His (its?) eternality, omnipotence, perfect wisdom, or perfect goodness, “as moral demonstration requires” (115). “At any rate, Locke proceeds with his philosophical project as though it has foundation enough to support it” (116). A cool customer, that Locke.

In addition to moral responsibility, consciousness also entails “self-concern.” Locke posits “no strict dualism between body and soul”; “our bodies are part of our conscious ‘selves.'” Appetites, pleasure and pain stem from our bodies, but like other manifestations of the corporeal they point to “god”—in this case serving as “dispensations of divine wisdom that spur us to perfect ourselves” but which also can “lead us astray” (117). Moral reasoning empowers us to judge and bridle the appetites, guiding us to “true and proper happiness” (118). This mental self-direction is what we mean by our freedom. Unlike Hobbes, Locke regards will and appetite as distinct, because the will can act “in defiance of appetite”; “the essence of moral volition in Locke is the control of appetite by reason.” This sounds much like Aristotle, with this difference: Although in Locke as in Aristotle “happiness is reason’s goal,” for Locke happiness “is compounded of pleasure and pain”; for Aristotle, pleasure and pain amount to what we might now call ‘indicators’ of happiness, not happiness itself. [2]  “Locke sounds quite like Hobbes…when he says that we call ‘good’ what causes us pleasure, ‘evil’ what causes us pain, and that these are different for different individuals” (119). But Locke departs from Hobbes, who puts morality to the service of self-preservation, “the one appetite universally shared” (120). Locke instead looks to the longer term, encouraging us to live with a view to future as well as immediate pleasure and pain. The drunkard allows present pleasure—or at least the relief of present unease—to overcome his knowledge that his overindulgence will ruin his health, causing him pain and even death. Happiness is pleasure, in Locke—his psychology does not make it possible to “foresak[e] appetite for reason”—but pleasure must be understood reasonably, as a sort of lifelong coordination and discipline of the appetites and of their satisfaction (120-121). To be maximized over a lifetime, our pleasures must be calibrated. Locke significantly broadens Hobbesianism.

But does he abandon it? Strauss and his followers deny that he does. Forde regards Locke’s morality as too closely associated with a non-corporeal moral law, and too far beyond the pursuit of self-preservation, to qualify as Hobbesian at its core. Although Locke “concur[s] with the Hobbesian dictum, that the human appetites are neither good nor evil in themselves, until they know a law to judge them”—in this, both philosophers hew closer to the book of Genesis than to Aristotle—Locke “differs with Hobbes on the nature, and perhaps the source, of that law” (123). Locke lists three kinds of law: divine, civil, and reputational—the second of these being what we think of as human legislation, the third being the informal “law” set by public opinion. Although the Questions concerning the Law of Nature and the Essay on Civil Government make much of a “natural law,” “natural law, in the old sense of a law ingrained or embedded in nature, cannot exist for Locke,” any more than it can for Ockham or Pufendorf; what we call natural law is really divine law promulgated by “the light of nature” (124). But, Forde argues, this does not signal a shift from moral law to “individual natural right” 9126), despite the language of the Essay. “Locke nowhere says that he, or anyone, has a ‘right’ to pursue happiness as he sees fit. He, and we, have not so much a right to pursue happiness as a duty to pursue happiness aright”—a duty we can only find in the moral law; “the priority of law to right separates Locke’s philosophy from that of Hobbes” (127). At the same time, although Locke holds up happiness as the human summum bonum, he is no Aristotelian because Aristotelians vainly sought the purpose of human life in human nature rather than on “its true ground, which stems fro mixed modes not devised by nature” but by “divine intelligence” quite “outside of material nature” (132). This teaching also distinguishes Locke from Immanuel Kant, who likewise rejected nature as a moral standard but at the same time rejected happiness as the moral purpose of human life (133). Kant retains the moral law while rejecting eudaimonism, replacing it (and Locke’s “god”) with the categorical imperative, a sort of rule of pure reason.

Forde’s third chapter elaborates on Locke’s understanding of moral law and spells out some of its social and political implications. Far from commanding any narrow self-regard, Locke insists on the importance of “civility,” a virtue praised by a Catholic writer he esteemed, Pierre Nicole. But although for Nicole civility rests squarely upon Christian charity, for Locke things are not so simple. He begins with his version of natural law; “the only comprehensive explanation” of which he places in chapter 2 of the Essay on Civil Government. the natural law, divine in origin, prescribes not “only my own preservation” (as in Hobbes) but “preservation of all mankind.” This law enjoins me “not to harm others” or even myself, and thus serves “the common human good” while reflecting the bedrock “equality” of human beings, no one of whom may be sacrificed for the pleasure of another, and who may only be harmed if he threatens to harm me or other persons (139). This makes self-preservation first of all a duty prescribed by law; the right derives from the duty, and the duty derives “from the common good of mankind rather than the primacy of the individual per se” (140). This principle—the duty to preserve humanity itself—is “the key to understanding much” in Locke’s thought (141). Locke goes so far as to insist that each individual may “punish violations of the natural law on behalf of mankind, whether he is directly affected by the violation or not” (143).

What Forde calls the “communal” character of Lockean natural law manifests itself also in his treatment of the family. The “mutual and reciprocal obligations” of parents and children come not from any social contract “but directly from the laws of nature” (144). Children, for the most part lacking in reason, lack the full moral status of persons; they have no rights that do not derive from parental duty. Forde acutely observes that Locke takes the Genesis command “Be fruitful and multiply” to mean something rather more extensive than Scripture appears to suggest: a general command not only to generate more human beings but to improve the arts and sciences and “conveniences of life.” “This god might be dubbed ‘nature’s god,’ and Locke makes clear, even in the First Treatise—his critique of Robert Filmer’s divine-right based defense of monarchism—”that he is not relying exclusively, or even primarily, on Scripture to discern his intent.” Locke calls reason “the voice of God in” man; “this is true Locke pointedly informs us, whether God ever literally spoke to anyone on this subject or not”—revelation, “in this matter at least,” being “redundant, or perhaps even subject to correction by reason” (146). Forde also observes that “the chapter on family in the [Essay on Civil Government] relies more prominently upon God as legislator than does most of the rest of the work,” that the conventional and limited character of the larger civil society leads him to allow “the figure of the divine legislator to recede into the background” (145). It might be added that this move serves at least two functions: first, it keeps “god”—even the god discerned primarily by reason not revelation—at some remove from politics, where claims about divinity can work against the preservation of mankind by fomenting wars of religion and persecution in God’s name; second, it addresses the problem of the mighty Leviathan, the modern state, empowered to wage war and enforce laws in accordance with the systematic laws of modern science, including the technologies invented under the auspices of that science, but which, by that very power, may threaten the lives and liberties it is intended (by Hobbes most especially) to preserve. In the Lockean state, religious men will tolerate one another and all will be ruled by consent, understood as rational assent.

Similarly, the natural law prohibits spoilage—wasting the natural goods provided to all—and requires charity. Locke’s account of property in chapter 5 of the Essay on Civil Government serves as the locus for those who regard Locke as the most influential philosopher of modern individualism, and Forde agrees that individual rights come to the forefront here. We may accumulate property without limit and have a duty merely to refrain from plundering the possessions of others; we need offer no charity to the needy This contradicts the teaching of the First Treatise, however, which not only enjoins us to exercise charity but gives the needy title to the excess property of others, without even the duty to repay their benefactors at some later time (149-150). The contradiction disappears, however, when one notices that the right to property derives from the right of men to self-preservation; Locke employs the plural form because natural goods originally belong to mankind in common. Private property comes later. “A purely individualist theory would not likely begin this way” (151), inasmuch as the individual property right “is not an absolutely original or fundamental right” but instead arises in order to preserve mankind (151-152). Even our ownership of ourselves stops at the right to kill ourselves—a clear signal that human beings are above all “the property of God” (153). Our property rights, on Forde’s reading, are therefore only use-rights, “absolute within the human sphere, but not absolute simply.” Forde maintains that such an interpretation of individual rights better accounts for the apparent contradictions in Locke’s several writings that the Straussian exotericism/esotericism interpretation does (155).

Forde argues that Locke follows not Hobbes but, to some degree, Aquinas, Grotius, and Pufendorf in these matters, particularly with respect to the existence of common property at the origins of human life and the authorization of private property “by a principle of the common good” derived from the original condition (162). But Locke “makes [private] property more fundamental than it is for his predecessors,” inasmuch as “natural and divine law” established it, not human consent or convention; in a well-known passage, Locke describes how human beings “mixed their labor” with natural objects, thereby not merely acquiring them but acquiring a right to them, by don’t of that effort (163). Further, the state of nature was a state of scarcity—”the original provision was necessarily inadequate”—so human beings needed private property not merely for “social progress, but for human survival” (174). In a fascinating teaching derived partly from Scripture, Locke claims that “God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour” (175). (In Genesis, God does indeed do those two things, but at different times and in different circumstances—one before and one after the humans sinned.) The standard set by the common good remains, but the right of the individual is unalienable—as it is not for Grotius or Pufendorf. As Forde puts it, “God is aware of basic economic principles. He is aware that if the love of money is the root of many evils, it is also the source of general good. In all its honest forms, therefore, he smiles on this love. He knows that the pursuit of one’s own interest is not the expression of a corrupt or fallen nature, but a benign, indeed useful attribute” (176). Accordingly, while the First Treatise recommends charity, the Second Treatise or Essay on Civil Government makes justice a matter of protecting property, broadly defined to include natural rights. he “does not provide us with any systematic account of how ‘justice’ and ‘charity’ relate to one another” (184). “Many Christians of Locke’s day, and for ages past, would be surprised to learn that the biblical injunction ‘be fruitful and multiply’ signifies, among other things, God’s approval of the limitless acquisition of wealth”—with, to be sure, a concomitant moral if not political duty to share the wealth acquired. Locke’s advocacy of religious toleration as a duty (“the chief characteristical mark of the true church”) must have been similarly surprising, Forde ventures to say (196). This underlines the importance of the one “who defines the mixed modes by which others live” and who thereby “sets the moral horizon for them” (197).

The “twin foundational principles” of that horizon are, first, that “personal happiness is the necessary and proper motive of all human beings” and, second, that “the preservation of mankind as a whole imposes moral duties on all” (198). Given the possibility that these imperatives might conflict, Locke “minimiz[es] the demands of duty,” “building politics (and economics) on the broad common ground between private and public interest” (199). To smooth any rough edges that may remain, Locke turns to the education of leading citizens in Some Thoughts concerning Education, the topic of Forde’s final chapter.

The Thoughts makes obedience to the moral law more likely by upholding the “rational control  of the appetites”—what Locke himself calls “the art of stifling [one’s] desires”—as “the essence of virtue” (201). Because infants and small children have yet to acquire that art, parents need to bring them to it. He does not foolishly suppose that this can be accomplished by simple instruction; the way to the head is through the heart—specifically, the part of the heart that desires esteem and dreads disgrace. As Hobbes sees, children love dominion, but esteem and disgrace, appealing to the spirited element of the child’s self, can be used to tame this dangerous propensity to tyranny. The road to the rule of reason runs through “pre-rational habituation” (203). Part of early childhood education will consist of a kindly catechism, holding up the thought of a liberal benevolent God Who seems not to punish the wicked. Indeed, “the word ‘sin’ appears nowhere in this work” (206 n.9). “This simple creed, of course, has nothing that is distinctively Christian” (205). Exceptionally naughty children will be punished by having something of their own taken from them, but most children will respond powerfully to social rewards and punishments. These can be deployed to teach charity, too, particularly by parental compensation of their child when he exhibits liberal and charitable behavior, thus “ensuring that their children always profit by being liberal” (208). This should not be viewed too cynically; Locke is confident that children will soon find pleasure in liberality itself, after which the training wheels of compensation may be removed. “Locke believes that a true liberality, and a true regard for others, will emerge from his education” (209).

True liberality culminates in civility. Civility for Locke means a stance between the selfless love commended in the Gospels and the sort of teaching popularized in the twentieth century by the American writer Dale Carnegie, who taught that an other-regarding attitude pays off. Lockean civility combines the ‘no harm’ principle of justice with toleration and considerateness. Our “pleasure cannot be had unless [our] benevolence is heartfelt”; at the same time, the moral law does aim at pleasure (218). Locke endorses “what could almost be described as an extension of the self to share in the pleasure of others” (219). Although Forde does not say so, this expansion of pleasure to some degree links the individual to the original “god”-ordained condition of commonly held rights, including property rights. Forde emphasizes that Locke understands happiness differently than Aristotle does. In Aristotle, happiness means the full exercise of virtue; “Aristotle famously identified beauty or nobility as the heart of morality, as well as the motive for moral action, but this is not, and cannot be, Locke’s view,” which stays within the bounds of pleasure and pain, reward and punishment (220). What is more, Aristotle grounds his claims about happiness on his “analysis of human nature,” which has a hierarchy; “although Locke’s virtue is also based upon a rational screening of the appetites, and is also designed to lead to happiness, Locke makes no equivalent arguments to bolster his claim” (220). His “epistemological foundations make…an [Aristotelian] appeal to human nature impossible”; appetites are better or worse “only in comparison to a rule”—a “mixed mode”—”imposed from without” (221). This mixed mode, ordained by “god,” rests first of all upon the equality of human beings as human; but again, “human” cannot mean a species in the Aristotelian sense because no such thing can be apprehended noetically, according to Locke’s understanding of human understanding.

Forde concludes with an engaging discussion of the relationship between Locke’s thought and that of Benjamin Franklin, “Locke’s great American disciple” (222). He shows how Franklin adapted Locke’s teachings—most particularly his teachings on education—to American conditions. Whereas Locke’s education centers on the task of inculcating civility in the young gentleman—scion of the English/European gentry class—Franklin writes in a much more egalitarian social and political regime, one in which most children will be educated in public schools, not at home by fathers and private tutors. “It is Franklin who systematically undertakes to educate the poor to industry” (226-227); Franklin also takes a somewhat more lax view of moral self-discipline, and he writes as if more skeptical that human beings can be brought to unselfish charitableness, no matter how carefully habituated they may be. But in his esteem for civility and for works of public service, Franklin joins hands with the philosopher. “Liberalism, as these two authors see it, does not confine itself to a narrow and merely economic understanding of individual self-interest, but opens up to a broader field off sociable human fulfillment” (242).

Strauss’s response to Forde’s criticisms can be at least partly conceived, inasmuch as Strauss himself is fully aware of at least some key points Forde advances, as seen in the section on Locke in Natural Right and History and the chapter on Locke in What Is Political Philosophy? [3].  Scholars influenced by Strauss who have published on Locke—Michael Zuckert, Thomas L. Pangle, Peter Myers, Thomas G. West, and others—may well proffer their own responses. What might also prove instructive would be a study of Locke modeled on Catherine Zuckert’s study of the Platonic dialogues [4], consisting of exegeses of all the key texts showing the relations among them. Such a difficult and massive undertaking would be the work of many years. In the meantime, the serious study of Locke continues to accelerate, especially in the United States and England, where his political as well as his philosophic importance endures.

 

Notes

1. Additionally, remaining on the ‘epistemological’ level, one might wonder why, or at least how, the mind tends to assemble sense impressions into concepts. Locke might have recourse to Boyle’s differently shaped and sized corpuscular “givens” as an explanation of brain function.
2. Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics 1.5, 7; 2.3; 7.11-13.
3. Leo Strauss: Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 202-251; “Locke’s Doctrine of Natural Law,” in What Is Political Philosophy? (Westport: Greenwood, 1973), 197-220.
4. Catherine Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

 

 

Ann Ward and Lee Ward, eds.: Natural Right and Political Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 41, Number 1, Spring 2014. Republished with permission.

 

Early in their careers, Catherine and Michael Zuckert collaborated on an article titled “‘And In Its Wake We Followed’: The Political Wisdom of Mark Twain,” displaying some of the most noteworthy characteristics of their life together: philosophic friendship and an interest in the ways in which political philosophy ‘ancient and modern’ can clarify our understanding of the American regime. In the decades that have followed, Catherine Zuckert has concentrated her attention on the ancients, Michael Zuckert on the moderns and each has kept America in mind. They have never forgotten the terms and conditions of their philosophizing, or what they owe to a country which offers shelter to philosophers.

This festschrift reflects the Zuckerts’ philosophic concerns. Carefully edited by Ann and Lee Ward, who rightly identify natural rights as the principal theme of the Zuckerts’ thought, the volume consists of four sections on four topics: ancient or classical political philosophy; modern political theory; American political thought; politics and literature. The suggestion that philosophy, theory, thought, and literature are distinct kinds of intellectual activity and that natural right might be discerned in each of those activities animates the volume in a manner consistent with the scholarship of the Zuckerts and also that of their teacher, Leo Strauss, in whose wake they have followed.

I. Titled “Classical Natural Right,” part 1 features five essays. These present an illuminating conversation among Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine. At the end of his life Strauss had turned once again to consideration of Xenophon’s writings; in her graceful, instructive essay, “Virtue and Self-Control in Xenophon’s Political Thought,” Lorraine Smith Pangle picks up where Strauss left off. “Socrates is famous for his radical claim that knowledge is the necessary and sufficient cause of virtue” (15). Aristotle “develop[s] a moderate, nuanced version” of that claim in the Nicomachean Ethics (15). But Pangle has doubts about the achievability of a central Aristotelian virtue, moderation, about the likelihood of making “knowledge and desire converge perfectly on what is in every way best.” “I myself have never met such a person,” she notes (16).

This being so, one may need to turn to stronger moral stuff than moderation—namely, self-control or enkrateia. On this topic Xenophon is the master, diverging from Aristotle by “giving the central place to self-control as the foundation of Socratic virtue, as if even the best soul never ceases to be rife with contrary impulses that must be vigilantly opposed” (17). Even the philosopher’s knowledge remains incomplete and therefore not entirely convincing to us at all times. Further, Xenophon (his military background showing?) worries not only about immoderate appetites but immoderate spiritedness—hubris and madness. For Xenophon’s Socrates, then, self-control “is in some ways deeper and more fundamental than moderation,” the “indispensable basis rather than the consequence of wisdom” (18). Without such austerity, the supremely ambitious souls who are the most likely candidates for the philosophic life—young men like Critias and Alcibiades, those “two spectacular failures of Socratic education” (19)—will veer off course once they depart from Socrates’ mesmerizing presence. Such souls love dialectic not as a way to discover truth but as a path to victory and to popularity; their version of ‘the political’ interferes with philosophizing. Unhinged from convention, and especially from law and from piety, they go very wrong indeed. Xenophon concludes that one must train the soul just as one must train the body if one wants to maintain the soul’s health. Indeed, physical fitness itself, “mastery of the body,” stands as ‘the essential foundation for the excellence of the soul” (29) [1].

How can our necessarily incomplete, all-too-human knowledge enable us to know that we are advancing in knowledge—know ourselves better? Virtue is knowledge, but a knowledge “as much experiential as conceptual, and much more active than static”; virtue is a knowledge possessed the way you possess physical fitness and not the way you possess a statue (21). “Knowledge, then, is sovereign in the soul in this strange sense, that when fully present it will prevail, but that without the right disposition and habits insight itself can disappear, and what appeared good before can cease to appear good at all”—as it did when Critias and Alcibiades drifted away from Socrates. “For there is a natural tendency to slip back into thoughtlessness and confusion if one fails to keep striving for clarity” (22). To embark rightly upon the philosophic odyssey and then to stay on course, one needs “both the knowledge that Hermes’ root gives” and “the self-control to resist Circe’s erotic charms” (23). “Our higher and more austere pleasures and interests are forever in danger of being swamped by coarser and easier ones, unless the latter are vigilantly kept in check” (27).

Xenophon doubts that the Aristotelian gentleman can sustain his genial course. “The life that finds a satisfying place for art and history and music and family and wealth and travel and movies and gold and skiing and philosophy, too, may be in the end an illusion” (30-31). Correspondingly, the life of philosophic intoxication, “pursuing with gusto the fine points of logic or physics and pleasantly forgetting to remember that [one] must die” ultimately gets in the way of the philosophic life as surely as “the distraction that takes the form of frenetic pleasure seeking or empire building” (31). The Socratic philosopher, always mindful of death, of his body’s mortality, nonetheless remains calm in that mindfulness. Thus Xenophon can explain Socrates’ courting of the Athenian jury’s condemnation: “If Socrates’ important pleasures are all of the best sort, the pleasure of reaching ever new heights of insight, of handling interlocutors masterfully, of hard exertion and the perception of constant progress, then an old age of relaxation and gradual decline will never, for him, constitute a life worth having” (33). Such a man must be rare; “the complete virtue that is summed up in Socratic moderation remains beyond the reach even of most of Socrates’ most ardent followers” (33). Pangle does not, however, say that she has never met such a person—owing perhaps to having the example of Mister Pangle so often before her. We will turn to his contribution to this volume in due course, in search of further evidence of this possibility.

Pangle shows us why Xenophon’s Socrates, while not simply accepting the gods of the city as the underlying reality of all that is, nonetheless respects the piety that takes its law-abiding morality from the poets’ accounts of them. For the majority of us, fear of the gods is the beginning of the practical or proverbial wisdom we need for lives of decent citizenship; more, it is a salutary companion throughout our lives, keeping us on the straight and narrow path without making us succumb to the fear of merely human beings who would be tyrannical, unfatherly. The Socrates we meet in Plato’s Euthyphro also addresses the matter of piety. Coeditor Ann Ward remarks in her essay that such ‘postmodern’ writers as Richard Rorty and Milan Kundera deny not only the piety of the city but the claim that human beings have any “access to unconditional moral truth” (37). For such thinkers (as for Nietzsche, from whom so much ‘postmodernism’ derives), we have only relative or perspectival truths. While eschewing any claim to direct access to the wisdom of the gods, Plato’s Socrates equally eschews the rejection of the rational quest for justice and the other virtues.

Zealous young Euthyphro wants to prosecute his father for allowing a hired laborer who had murdered one of his fellows to die in a ditch while awaiting an authoritative religious judgment from the local priests on what to do with the man. This negligent homicide—manslaughter by pious dithering—violated the divine law Euthyphro’s father was attempting to uphold. Euthyphro thus acts in the name of piety. He rates the imperatives of the gods above loyalty to his family—even as Jesus of Nazareth would require, in bringing not peace but the sword to family ties. Euthyphro is a moral absolutist, in contrast with his father, who had been a sort of moral relativist, in effect in not necessarily in conviction. In the Euthyphro Socrates attempts to slow the boy down by getting him to think more seriously about what we really know respecting the gods and their commands.

The family depends upon the body—sexual reproduction, birth, and immediate nurture and protection of the infant. Euthyphro “disregards the bodily connections between parent and child that normally give the father authority over the son; he expresses a belief in a radical individualism that facilitates the prosecution of wrongdoers even if they are parents” (39). In effect, Euthyphro believes himself morally superior to his father to such a degree that he may prosecute him as a man less pious and less just than Euthyphro. Euthyphro therefore assumes that he understands what piety and justice are.

Socrates zeroes in on Euthyphro’s implied claim to piety. Socrates moderates Euthyphro’s zeal first by asking him what piety actually means. When Euthyphro tries to define piety by pointing to the way Zeus punished his own father, Kronos, Socrates notes that this is no definition of piety, only a supposed example of it. To Euthyphro’s next attempt—piety is what’s dear to the gods—Socrates notes that the gods disagree amongst themselves; after all, Kronos was a god, and he did not consent to being killed by his son. Euthyphro tries again: Piety is what all the gods love. Socrates then gets to the key question, “Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” If the former, then the idea of piety and the ideas generally are paramount to the will of the gods; if the latter, then “piety is a particular, subjective standard, dependent upon the wills of the gods,” albeit their unanimous agreement (44). Socrates points to the tension “between the love of the good and the love of one’s own”; if piety is an idea, then one needs to define it as such, but if it is the will of the gods then “what the gods really love is their own will” (44). Euthyphro confusedly wants to hold both alternatives at once This has the effect of making him hesitate about going ahead with prosecuting his father—a radical action aiming at an irretrievable action, which would sever the obligation to love one’s own while asserting absolute certainty about the idea of piety. Socrates shows Euthyphro that while the hesitation of Euthyphro’s father had deadly and therefore impious consequences, too much zealotry might also have equally deadly and impious consequences. Socrates persuades Euthyphro that Euthyphro needs more knowledge of the gods in order to act piously.

Euthyphro finally attempts to define piety as a set of actions: tending the gods through sacrifice and prayer. He further claims that such acts preserve families and cities. But obviously the prosecution of his father does not preserve his family and thus in principle fails to uphold his city. This consequent shames Euthyphro because the moral foundation of his accusation was piety. He must admit that morality and piety are not simply ‘spiritual’—to invoke an idea not yet exactly in use in our sense. The physical connections family entails themselves involve us in moral obligations, beginning with the debt we owe to parents, who engendered, protected, and nurtured us before we could fend for ourselves. There is something that might be called natural right. There is of course another tension here: The polis or political community, the “city,” “which regards both fathers and sons as equal citizens and treats criminals equally regardless of their familial status, applies universal standards of justice equally to all” (46). The city both depends upon the families which compose it and reaches inside those families to enforce equality before its laws among individuals. The city acts a bit like a super-Euthyphro, and recalling that the gods are objects of worship in a civil or political religion makes this analogy even more evident. One might even say that the philosopher, Socrates, argues for natural right even as Euthyphro argues for the claims of the city, the polis. This tension between the family’s self-rule and the rule of the city—codependent human needs—can be ameliorated or mediated but never obviated. If so, then political life, precisely at its crucial nexus of the relations between the family and the city, requires moderation and not unthinking piety or zealotry which, if unrestrained, would destroy the natural foundation indispensable for the city’s genesis and sustenance and also violate the natural right the city should sustain. For Socrates, as we know, a more thoughtful life points to philosophy or the love of wisdom, which “engages with and confronts the potential groundlessness of life not simply by seeking to discover and love the gods but also by seeking to discover and love the ideas or the nature of things” (47). The relation between the philosopher and the city also turns out to be rather vexed, as the life of Socrates supremely illustrates.

Pangle and Ward burnish two sides of the Socratic coin—the human need for pious discipline of our unruly passions and the equally urgent human need to resist making piety itself an unruly passion for ruling. The Socratic coin as a whole, the philosophic life, can find itself declared illegal tender in the city in which philosophic dialogues occur. In the third or central essay of part 1, Kevin M. Cherry returns our attention to Aristotle’s proposed answer to these political-philosophic dilemmas by considering Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s Laws. To resolve the crisis described by Xenophon and Plato, do we need to recur to the very Aristotle who seemed, at first sight, perhaps not stern enough, too gentlemanly for the harsh reality of human unruliness? Who has the best formulation of classical natural right?

Cherry suggest (contra Strauss and Thomas L. Pangle) that Aristotle does not equate the Athenian Stranger with Socrates, that “there is a difference between Socrates and the Athenian, a difference that is as philosophic as it is political” (51). Unlike Socrates, and like Xenophon (whom he resembles in sternness), the Stranger has indeed been a foreigner in many places, making himself an observer not only of regimes (one needed not stray far from Athens to witness a variety of them) but also of peoples. Such observations lend themselves to the comparisons needed to distinguish nature from convention. He shares with Aristotle an esteem for the philosophic benefits of political experience. But he departs from Aristotle in the degree of his esteem for piety, going so far as to invoke “a myth about the age of Kronos”—that ill-fated father—”to justify the rule of law” and to assert the gods’ providential care for human beings (52). Although (perhaps because) he regards “the conflict between the various kinds of rule [as] ultimately irreconcilable,” he recommends the mixed regime as the best possible, concurring with Aristotle on the latter point (52). Aristotle hints that the founding of such a regime may prove “less formidable” than the Athenian Stranger believes, however (54). Nature as Aristotle understands it is not as harsh as the Stranger (and Xenophon) contend; the potentially tense, even murderous difference between the generations, for example, can be managed by sending the strong, ambitious young citizens off to military service, “which enables them to acquire the necessary experience of being ruled as well as some familiarity with the advantageous and the just, before they become rulers” (54).

In the Stranger’s judgment, factions threaten the mixed regime more than Aristotle thinks they do; the Stranger has recourse not only to strict piety but to the institutional device of the Nocturnal Council. Intellect or nous can rule the city but only under cover of darkness, as it were. The light of reason might draw dangerous attention to the vulnerable human beings in whom it shines brightest. The intractable factions of even the relatively moderate mixed regime need stronger stuff than the practical wisdom of the ordinary citizens who comprise them. The city needs philosophers, ruling surreptitiously, who not only investigate the nature of virtue but also engage in science—specifically, astronomy or the study of things held to be divine. The Stranger wants the philosopher-rulers to acquire that precise knowledge of the gods Euthyphro lacked and that Socrates may doubt that anyone can have. Cherry recalls Catherine Zuckert’s skepticism about such a research agenda for rulers. [2]  Aristotle too doubts “whether either of these inquiries is necessary or useful for statesmen”; “making people virtuous might not require philosophic knowledge of the virtues” (55) and as for the stars, the fault lies not in them but in ourselves. Theoretical wisdom or sophia does not get us very far in politics, being remotely relevant to its proper concerns and moreover a bad intellectual model: too precise for government work. Philosophers will mislead themselves by their own light if they do not focus it carefully. “Popular views about the soul” suffice “for guiding legislators in their effort to guide citizens to virtue” (56) and, for that matter, to guide parents in ruling the household. The Stranger wants the statesmen of the Nocturnal Council to study the heavens precisely because the unruliness of human passions makes the certainties of science appealing as a potential armature for firm rule, but Aristotle questions whether such knowledge is really as precise as it seems. “Due to their distance from us, our knowledge of the heavenly bodies is, and must remain, uncertain”—a matter of probability, only (57); Aristotle would have looked through Galileo’s telescope, but it is far from certain that he would have abandoned this basic point even then, inasmuch as increased precision may only serve to open new vistas of wonder and perplexity. You cannot rule wisely with theoretical wisdom alone, and nature has provided human beings with parents whose natural right inheres in their prudential care for us when we need it.

The Athenian Stranger regards nature as largely indifferent to human beings; if anything, more evil than good comes at us from it. Hence the need for recourse to myths about the gods and their care for us. Aristotle (with Plato’s Socrates) regards nature as more hospitable to man and therefore as more loveable and therefore also as more conducive to the cohesiveness of human societies. His celebrated Unmoved Mover—the core of nature that “moves other things not by moving itself but by being an object of desire and thought”—does not care for us (59). But we care for it or, more precisely, we desire it and that is enough. “The stability of these things leads to stability throughout the universe,” and this stability, this “regularity of nature, combined with the human ability to deliberate, enables us to make use of what is found in nature for the sake of our self-preservation” and potentially our happiness (6). Strauss puts it this way: “By becoming aware of the dignity of the mind, we realize the true ground of the dignity of man and therewith the goodness of the world, whether we understand it as created or uncreated, which is the home of man because it is the home of the human mind.” [3]

Aristotle inclines to think the Platonic or at least the Athenian Stranger’s understanding of the relation between philosophy and politics too clear-cut or perhaps too direct. “For Aristotle philosophy does serve a purpose in politics,” but only as political philosophy, that is, “the study of what is just, what is equal in the context of the political” (60). As children, we perforce pay attention to our parents, whose marriage consists of a rule different from the rule they exercise over us, and different still from that which they exercise over household slaves. They rule and are ruled by one another, reciprocally. As we grow up, we learn political rule by their example of reasonable, talk-it-out ruling of the household—preparing us for friendship, which prepares us for citizenship and even for the life of philosophizing insofar as that life requires dialectic, reasonable conversation among friends. Philosophy can survive in the city, influencing if not ruling (openly, as in the Republic, secretly, as in the Laws). It can do so because non-philosophers do have partially true opinions about such matters as justice, even if they have no competent knowledge of astrophysics. “Political philosophy need not be the exclusive preserve of a few” (61). In his version of the mixed regime, Aristotle points not merely to the more or less irreconcilable economic bases of class struggle but to the differing but to some extent reconcilable differences of the opinions about justice typically seen in the several classes. There is no need for the Nocturnal Council because a political philosopher can gain a hearing in the public square by “showing each group the partial truth about their opinions as well as the partial truth about their opponents’ opinions” (61), thereby strengthening a mixed regime. Such a conception of the philosophic life will prove better for the city and safer for the philosopher than a secret council that studies the heavens and mythologizes about providence. The Athenian Stranger is no Socrates, in Aristotle’s view; he is Socrates without the “zetetic character” of Socratic philosophizing (62). Or to put it more exactly in accordance with Cherry’s account, the Athenian Stranger confines Socratic zeteticism or inquiry to the secret investigations of the Nocturnal Council, whereas Aristotle, like Socrates, judges that philosophy can and must enter into dialogue with the philosopher’s fellow citizens, if this can be done in a “polite” or “politic” way. This points to Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical wisdom or sophia and practical wisdom or phronesis.

With a defense of Aristotle established at the core of part 1, Aristotle makes his way more grandly into the Wards’ public square in the fourth essay, by Mary P. Nichols. One might, after all, question the philosophic and scholarly merit of the festschrift as a literary genre. Wouldn’t such illuminating but very wide-ranging essays as these best be published in books that explicitly address the topics at hand? For example, why would we not be served better served by the publication of part 1 as a separate volume of essays on classical political philosophy? Nichols answers such questions in her title, “Both Friends and Truth Are Dear.” If philosophizing, and especially Socratic philosophizing, inquires by means of dialogue, by means of testing opinion in open discussion, then friendship of a certain sort aids us in our quest for the wisdom we seek. If friendship and the quest for truth are in this sense inseparable, a festschrift in honor of such friendship, a book showing how such friendship is ‘done,’ may prove as instructive as a collection of essays more narrowly conceived. And in fact this festschrift, like many long-standing friendships, has a theme as well, albeit a very broad one: What then is the relationship to the truth about natural right and political philosophy?

Nichols takes her title from the famous remark of Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics: Although truth and friends are both dear, a philosopher must honor truth most of all. He specifically refers to his friends who introduced the ideas or forms into philosophy—Plato first among these. “Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s ideas here, I argue, is in fact demanded by friendship and the good for human beings” because the Platonic-Socratic argument for the community of wives, children, and property “reduce[s] individuals to the class of which they are members”; yet “without the diversity of goods for which human beings strive and without the distinct contributions made by members of a community, there is no politics in Aristotle’s sense”—namely, reciprocity of rule, “ruling and being ruled,” the characteristic feature of the relationship between husband and wife, that is, of human beings of different sexes (69). By contrast, an ‘ideational’ approach to politics tends to “confuse political science with mathematics” and thus to miss the differentiation of inquiry that the many, differing subjects of inquiry require (71). For Aristotle (and for the Bible) knowing the Pythagorean theory is not the same as knowing your wife. Loving “the good” is admirable, but one needs “to explain the good in a way that does not undermine our experience of what is dear, of what we love” (73). Notice how this argument reprises the dilemma of knowledge in the Euthyphro. Socrates moderates Euthyphro by urging him to consider the idea of the good, not only the will of the gods: Aristotle argues that sometimes the reverse is also true, that one needs to moderate or balance one’s love of the ideas with love of persons—especially if those persons are human, more readily known to us than gods.

Aristotle’s inquiries into ethics and politics themselves exemplify “a kind of political art” (NE 1094b11) in the sense that, despite the form in which they are given (the treatise not the dialogue), they invite the student to contribute to inquiry, to further the inquiry ‘on their own.’ When Thomas Jefferson cited Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, and Sidney as the sources of the Declaration of Independence, Aristotle would have understood this to be an instance both of being ruled and of ruling—that is, an adaptation of philosophic principles to a new circumstance in political practice, not a slavish imitation of those principles taken as if by dictation. The very nature of the ethical virtues requires such an approach, for while the virtues “are not contrary to nature” they do not imprint themselves upon us; they require habituation and thought, mixed together over time to form character (75). “Once our habits take hold and impart character, we can make choices and voluntarily act in conformity with who we are” (76), and this may include a certain independence from family and from city (normally without going so far as Euthyphro). Nichols effectively concurs with Cherry in observing Aristotle’s departure from his friend Plato with respect to the relationship of sophia, “the most precise knowledge of the most exalted things, which exist of necessity and could not be otherwise,” to phronesis or prudence, which “deliberates about the just, the noble, and the good, those things for which we act which do not exist of necessity” (77). Sophia is not self-sufficient, as it seems to be for Plato’s Socrates; prudence serves it “as medicine serves health,” and all of us need to take our medicine because none of us remains perennially healthy. While prudence serves sophia, prudence is what actually rules the just political community, not sophia. There are no philosopher-kings in Aristotle’s political science. Aristotle defines self-sufficiency as “lacking in none of the goods that constitute happiness, including parents, wife, children, friends, and fellow citizens” (77). Self-sufficiency is not for ‘loners.’

Friendship requires self-restraint—respecting one’s friend, ruling and being ruled, reciprocity. “Friends see themselves in each other…not only because they are alike, and share in the same activities, but because they themselves play a part in their friend’s becoming good”; “we see our goodness in the deeds of our friend” (78). Friendship “finds its clearest expression in the relation between a man and a woman in marriage,” a “sharing in the rule appropriate to each” (79). If Aristotle were to answer Xenophon, he might say that the right kind of friendships will ameliorate the incompleteness of our knowledge; our friend supplements what we know with what she knows, what we think with what she thinks. On the more strictly moral side of the ledger, in friendship we find not only justice but equity—that is, an adjustment of the general precept to the particular person and circumstance. “Like Aristotle’s political science itself, equity does not insist on too much precision where justice is concerned” (79). Equity makes sense in friendship and particularly in marriage because men and women differ, grieving and rejoicing in different ways. “The different inclinations that Aristotle attributes to men and women are both necessary for friendship” (80-81). If marriage anchors the family and the family anchors the city, then the Politics must follow the Ethics, by nature. Because friendships of a certain sort can actually make people worse—as when we select companions who confirm our prejudices instead of making us think, ones who gin us up for misbehavior instead of genially moderating our spiritedness—the vigilance of the political community may be indispensable to the task of strengthening our character.

Human intellect is both necessary and dangerous to the city. Although statesmen gain indispensable political experience, and are therefore unlikely to follow ‘intellectuals’ into the clouds, “they cannot give an account of what they do and thereby teach it to others” (82). But the intellectuals or sophists for their part have no experience in politics; their heads remain in those clouds. Plato’s sharp contrast between the real of ideas and the realm of practice reinforces this impasse, Aristotle contends. But if human beings are political animals then their capacity for rule by means of deliberation and of speech must give them a middle ground for thinking not only about ideas but about actions. Reason or thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction might well ‘work’ in practice as well as in theory, although it must recognize the difference between practice and theory in order to think clearly about either. “Aristotle takes Socrates’ turn to the human things one step further—from the speeches or dialogues through which Socrates makes his inquiries with others to the deeds of politics, which he intends to influence” (86). Political animals need political philosophy both in order to know themselves by the light reason shines on their nature and to preserve themselves in the polis; they need the help of a philosophic way of life or regime that wisely coordinates theoretical wisdom with practical needs. Theoretical wisdom discovers these needs by observing and by thinking about the many regimes.

But what of piety, which Xenophon and the Athenian Stranger applaud, and Socrates moderates? The accounts of Aristotle seem to have moved us some distance from it, toward nature and its unmoved but moving core. But what if the ancient philosophers did not know God and therefore did not understand the origin of nature? Alternatively, what if General Xenophon is right to regard human spiritedness as very recalcitrant stuff indeed, often stronger than even citizens’ friendships can overcome? To address these questions, Augustine writes of a new ‘republic,’ the City of God, in his new Republic, The City of God. The Zuckerts teach at Notre Dame University, where such matters can never be entirely obscured, as their colleague Mary M. Keys reminds us in the concluding essay on classical natural right.

The God of the Bible requires a virtue not conspicuous among the ancients generally: humility (anav in the Hebrew). Augustine’s “new account of natural right” elevates humility to an eminent place precisely because it requires piety toward one Creator-God, not a squabbling raft of superhuman meddlers. Humility contrasts with pride—overweening, spirited love of one’s own; humility contrasts with the pride of imperial Rome and with political grandeur generally, which in fact prove “intrinsically enslaving and enfeebling” (98). Humility numbers among the natural virtues because it recognizes human beings as beings created by the only omniscient and omnipotent personal God; conversely, pride ranks as unnatural or vicious because it consists of “a mere creature’s individual or collective usurpation of the place of God” (98). The natural rightness of humility intensifies when this creature recognizes the divine right of humility, and God’s exercise of that right, “the astounding humility of God, known to an extent through nature and most perfectly through revelation” as seen in the life and crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth (98). Paradoxically, the Bible teaches that to be humble is to be Godlike, inasmuch as God himself accepted the humiliation of the cross at the hands of prideful Rome. To humble oneself before this God is to accept a new citizenship in a new empire, namely, the City of God, whose ruler’s status as the omnipotent and all-wise Creator puts him in a position to tyrannize but whose goodness (including his humility) brings him not to ruin but to redeem us, even after our repeated and willful deviations from the way of life of His city.

Augustine seeks “to persuade those who do not yet accept Scripture’s authority of the excellence of humility,” and thereby to induce them to immigrate to the City of God, even as we remain in our lifetimes citizens or subjects in human cities. “Since this is so…Augustine must consider humility to have a foothold, a foundation in human nature, notwithstanding its fallen state” (99). Here Keys may or may not be right, inasmuch as part of God’s humility is His grace, and it is that which seems to turn (for example) the prideful and spirited Paul of Tarsus to him, joltingly. Put differently, Augustine might understand his attempt at persuasion to be workable only if assisted by the work of the Holy Spirit in the mind of the reader. Be this as it may, Keys identifies “the natural epistemic foothold for Augustine’s case for humility” to be misery, “the misery of pride,” which “reach[es] its pinnacle when it claims divine honors and attributes in the service of its insatiable ‘lust for mastery’ (libido dominandi)” (99). Nature teaches the human soul that its love for mastery brings it not happiness or satisfaction but insecurity and frustration And it can teach this lesson to many souls at once, through the course of events, as when warlike Rome itself lost its empire to the peoples it had long dismissed as barbarians. Although the great imperial poet Virgil had urged his fellow-citizens to spare the humble and subdue the proud, Augustine sees in this only a usurpation of “a task of judgment that only God can rightly and equitably fulfill” (100). Rome recognized humility as a virtue and pride as a vice but then proudly imagined that it could uphold the virtue and defeat the vice by its own unaided efforts—or perhaps aided by false gods or demons. In so attempting, it partook of the very vice its most revered poet condemned. Even the height of “Roman moral rectitude and civic harmony”—achieved during “the period between the second and final Punic Wars”—resulted not from genuine natural right but from “fear of foreign invasion”; it evaporated after the destruction of Carthage removed the threat (101). Just as Socratic natural right comes to light in the natural rule of parents over children—their provision for them—so biblical right comes to light in the provision or providence of God. Fear or deep respect for Him is therefore the beginning of practical wisdom.

Pride acts rather as excessive philosophic abstraction acts in Plato according to Aristotle. It severs familial bonds, inclining men toward ruling in a masterly not a political manner. But God is the only just master of man (102-103).

The closest analogue to humility in classical political thought is moderation. Augustine contrasts the prideful man with the humble man. Keys acutely observes that “Augustine inverts Socrates’ dialogic methodology in Plato’s Republic, arguing that virtues and their relation to happiness are easier to identify in a human being’s life than in a political society; so he crafts two human beings in speech” instead of one regime in speech (103). This reorientation from the political to the individual suggests two important points: first, that if the personal and unitary biblical God and not nature is the prime mover and indeed creator of all we see around us, then the Bible accentuates individuality as distinct from the natural species; second, if the one fully just regime is the city of that personal and unitary Creator-God, far superior to even His best creation, then this city of active, creative speech exists not as an ‘ideal type’ unrealizable in the world as it exists, but as a city that exists in literal truth, albeit only as captive and stranger in the dimension of reality that we see around us. Like Socrates’ city, it will never exist in this world, except in circles of friends within this world; it will only exist fully when a new heaven and a new earth are created.

The two human beings or types Augustine presents are the moderate and happy person and the wealthy and feverish person. These have their political equivalents in the City of God and the city of man, or Rome. In classical terms, Roman imperialism instances the “immoderate love of dominion”—amounting to what Augustine famously described as a great robbery. It was the false gods or demons worshiped by Romans who stoked this immoderation; one might add that Zeus killed his father while Jesus obeyed his Father. This means that in God’s city, God’s creation, nature, coincides with obedience to God, and that philosophy and civic piety cohere in a way Socrates correctly did not see in the civil theology of the polis, with its many gods. At the same time, what would come to be called utopianism is avoided insofar as the City of God only exists by God’s own intervention, and will only become universal thanks to His efforts, not ours.

The more sophisticated poets and philosophers of Rome disbelieved the myth of Zeus but substituted pantheism for him—an improvement but not much of one, inasmuch as it failed to purge the Romans of their libido dominandi. The Roman intellectual Varro failed to see that “the true God is not a soul, but the maker and establisher of the soul,” the Creator-God (107). “Had Varro achieved this final philosophic step, a true ethics of humility beginning from the willing recognition of one’s own, one’s polity’s and all human beings’ creaturely status vis-à-vis the divine Creator would have been within his reach and perhaps within all of Rome’s as well” (107). But of course this is the rub: Is seeing the Creator-God really a philosophic step, or is it an insight vouchsafed by the Holy Spirit, for which philosophy can at best be only propaedeutic?

Keys spells out some additional implications of accepting humility as a virtue in the sight of the Creator-God. As “the creatures of an infinitely wise and omnipotent Being,” human beings enjoy their own freedom to make moral choices and humbly to open or proudly to close their souls to the possibility of such a God. “Augustine implies that human dignity and humility can and must go hand in hand if human beings are to achieve full self-knowledge and strive for true justice, and that in their virtuous forms neither of these human attributes is independent of the Creator’s providence” (108). Rome, which was not built in a day, was built in partnership with God; in failing to understand the character of that partnership by failing to know (and actually killing) God-as-Jesus, the Romans “fell victim by degrees to their own pride, making themselves individually and collectively into self-sufficient gods to whose praise their actions were directed” and ruining “the very freedom Rome had begun by seeking to preserve” (109), a freedom and concurrent responsibility God implanted in them when he created them. Humility would have preserved Roman republicanism by opening the Romans to “a love of rightful equality among human beings, to recognition of true merits in others, to willing service, personal and public, on behalf of others, and to extension of one’s natural familial affection and care to include the poor and abandoned of society”—in sum, to make “Roman-ness” into a virtue “embodying at its core what is right according to human nature” (110), the nature of a being created in the image of God but nonetheless created, and therefore not God.

In considering part 1 of the book, one finds that it forms a circle, moving from the moral sternness of Xenophon in the face of the power of human desires and human spiritedness to the loving sternness of Augustine’s Creator-God in the face of that power. In between these two austere but attractive alternatives we find the sober cheer of Aristotle, who commends moderation rather than austerity as the moral foundation of citizenship and of the philosophic life, with political philosophy as the link between them. In all of these thinkers, human beings do have access to the unconditional moral truth, but the paths differ. All do affirm the need for mindfulness of the body, for rule of the passions, for a thoughtful piety but one that demands no more precision in such matters than is possible. In political life, several recommend the mixed regime as the best way of life because it best conduces to the human benefits of ruling and being ruled, reciprocally, by deliberating together. Inasmuch as Catherine Zuckert has concentrated her attention on Plato in both his original and ‘postmodern’ manifestations, at least some of her philosophic friends beckon her to consider still further Aristotle’s insights into classical natural right as well. [4]

Part 1 also beckons readers to consider the challenge that the biblical God issues to the politics and to the political philosophy of the ancients. By His revelation, the God of the Bible gives us knowledge of Himself; while this knowledge is neither comprehensive nor always precise, He does present it as sufficient for citizenship in His city, His regime. Augustine describes that city as captive and stranger in the earthly city. But what if citizens of the City of God somehow—perhaps providentially—gained control of one or more of the cities of man? Would they rule those cities humbly? Or would their worldly success spur their pride, get the better of their humility, and make their piety into a sort of Bible-based Euthyphroism? Would their humility instead make them into biblically oriented versions of Euthyphro’s father, waiting too long for a Messiah and His judgment, fatally neglecting justice in the here-and-now, and thus inviting ruin rather than redemption? Beginning with Machiavelli, modern political philosophers leveled all of these charges against Christians. This brings the book from the terrain of Catherine Zuckert to that of Michael Zuckert, the terrain Strauss calls “modernity.”

II. The editors have arranged the five essays of part 2 to parallel those of part 1. David Lewis Schaefer, author of the best commentary on Montaigne that I know of [5], begins with a careful analysis of Book I, chapters 15-16 of the Essays, showing among other things that Montaigne’s understanding of virtue designedly falls far short of the Xenophontic austerity Lorraine Pangle described in the first essay of Book 1, to say nothing of Augustinian piety. Schaefer leads his readers to see that in these chapters, “beneath a rambling exterior concerned largely with military matters,” Montaigne mounts his own sort of assault, “a philosophic challenge to conventional views of moral responsibility and hence also to the Christian doctrine of free will” that comports with Montaigne’s “broader project of lowering the moral standards against which human beings are judged, in the spirit of Machiavelli’s Prince” (119).

The theme of the two essays is the contrast between courage and cowardice. Chapter 15 teaches that valor has its limits, that one must not stubbornly maintain a military position in violation of “the laws of war.” the commander gets his people killed if he does that. Chapter 16 addresses the opposite theme, cowardice, arguing that the proper punishment for it is not death but shame, inasmuch as cowardice is involuntary. It turns out that the “rules” of war and of peace rest on the rules or laws of nature, but that natural law as manifested in human beings is not a rule of reason but a set of “pre-rational instincts, notably the instinct of self-preservation,” known “through feeling rather than reason” (122). Like the classical natural-rights philosophers, Montaigne considers the question of “the knowability of moral or prudential rules” but concludes, against Aristotle, that there can be an excess of virtue. Montaigne does not think that we can “determine the precise course of action on a particular occasion”—a point Aristotle himself would scarcely deny—but he worries that even the broader standard of prudential reasoning that Aristotle defends will exceed the capacities of most people (122-123). Further, the Christian-Augustinian transformation of classical philosophy—leading to the “frenzy” of martyrdom and the zealotry of persecutors—serves as the only plausible remedy for the Christian combination of piety and self-asserted holiness with the cruelty of Alexander the Great. Machiavelli’s centaur, the man-animal, endangers himself and others far less than the Christian man-god (124).

Still further, the natural standard itself is as inadequate for Montaigne as it is for Machiavelli. Nature has imprinted many errors in us, particularly the inclination to sacrifice the present for some imagined future. Plato’s Socrates calls the desires foolish and inconsistent counselors; Montaigne broadens this to include all of human nature. We are not so much political animals as self-contradictory ones. But instead of pointing to the original sin of man as the reason for our need of divine grace, Montaigne argues that “if nature fills us with erroneous tendencies rather than rules of reason, how far can we be held accountable for departing from the path of virtue?” (125). Rather than making us guilty before God, our follies and vices exculpate us even from blaming one another very much. “Montaigne implies that the very notion of holding people responsible for ‘willing’ to do evil is an incoherent one”—a point Socrates had also raised. But once again, Montaigne takes an old thought in a new direction. In his most obviously challenging essay, the “Apology of Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne rehearses the Socratic line, arguing that “if vice is truly the result of ignorance, then the only appropriate ‘punishment’ that it merits would presumably be an education that remedies that ignorance” (127); but the classical education along Socratic lines has proved itself worse than useless. The classical philosophers delayed education in ethics too long. Instead of commending Aristotelian habituation in virtue prior to such education, Montaigne commends the task of popular enlightenment based upon the principle of what Tocqueville later calls “self-interest rightly understood” (129). This is neither the sort of enlightenment concealed within the Nocturnal Council nor that seen in Aristotelian political philosophy. It is a noticeably lower form of prudential reasoning which can enter the mind of a child and stay. Utility in the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain replaces prudence in the pursuit of the good conceived as the fulfillment of the nature of a rational and political animal, to say nothing of the good conceived as the City of God.

Co-editor Lee Ward’s essay on another philosopher in the Machiavellian line, Benedict Spinoza, stands second in the line of the articles on the moderns, even as Ann Ward’s essay on Plato stands second among the articles on the ancients. There are other parallels. Just as Ann Ward writes on the dangers of overzealous religiosity, Lee Ward writes on chapters 18 and 18 of the Theological-Political Treatise, in which “Spinoza presents his fullest analysis of the intersection of religion and politics,” particularly the regime of theocracy which Euthyphro none-too-thoughtfully espouses with respect to the gods acknowledged in his city.

The regime in question for Spinoza is the Israelite republic. As in ancient Athens, the Israelite regime exhibited connections between democracy and theocracy; theocracy, Spinoza argues, has unexpectedly democratic foundations. A democrat, Spinoza criticizes theocracy for departing “from the democratic standard of excellence”—a surprising critique indeed, reversing the usual assumption that God judges the people, not the other way around (133). Ward lays out the radicalism of this reversal: Spinoza “contrasts the theocratic perspective, which places the human relation to the divine as the central organizing principle of reality with the philosophic or scientific approach to the study of nature, which he identifies as natural right.” Although rooted in democracy because accepted by the people, theocracy has taken a deviant turn, becoming “the most narcissistic and in a sense most unnatural regime because it encourages a false idea about the moral significance of the distinctly human in nature” (133-134).

The Hebrew republic took a wrong turn because its institutions, represented as having  been given by God, separated the priests from the military leaders, who then struggled for supremacy. Contra the classics, the mixed regime is no balanced, stably just regime; in the end there will be no compromising the question, ‘Who rules?’ And the most stable rule can rest only upon the greatest number ruling in its own name. Theocracy obscures this truth by its very claim that the laws came from God, which contradicts the (modern) democratic claim that the laws came from human agreement or the ‘social contract.’ To divinize what is really the rule of the human majority is to subordinate the political community to “mass prejudice,” legally enforced (135). But such pseudo-divinized prejudice interferes with the free scientific inquiry which alone can bring democrats to understand nature better. To this end, Spinoza “offer[s] a rigorously naturalistic product of vivid imagination rather than the superinduction of divine reason” (135). Imagination is no exclusive property of ancient Israelites; all nations have had their prophets. What is more, these imaginings have the effect of dividing and ruling the actual elements of the regime—in this case the priests and the military leaders—leaving both ineffectual, as Machiavelli more than suggests. Ward puts it wryly: “God rules theocracy almost by default as no other political or religious actors can govern on their own” (137). According to Spinoza, the biblical God is the prophets’ way of playing divide-and-rule This is so at least in part because democracy requires rule by consent, whereas theocracy requires rule by habituation, by rituals. If habit no longer has rational content (as it does in Aristotle), then the dichotomy between theocracy and democracy, between priests and military leaders, cannot be resolved. The Spinozist elevation of democracy requires a lowering of one’s estimate of the intellectual and moral capacities of the demos. ‘Enlightenment’ is now possible, but only the modest light generated by the fire of human passions will burn consistently—stoked, to be sure, by the fuel of scientific inquiry, now freed from a superstitious and therefore suspicious citizenry, which it appeases and even pleases with the gadgets that take the place of worry beads.

Spinoza’s nature has no telos. Natural right is coterminous with power, the ‘right’ of big fish to eat smaller fish. Spinoza’s God is nothing but fish-eat-fish nature. “Democracy, then, is the most natural, and hence most God-like regime because at least in principle it most fully collects the power of all the individuals in society.” Society as a whole is the biggest fish there is—except when one such fish confronts a bigger fish, a more powerful political society, in the ocean of the world (138). Natural right “is really just the cumulative effect of natural equality and self-interest” of these agglomerated individuals that form societies; a political society that “secure[s] the loyalty of the subjects or citizens” will more likely win the battle of survival in the world-ocean (139). The Israelite theocracy failed because it did not unite behind this single legitimizing principle but instead attempted to combine government by consent with divine law, the rule of priests with the rule of the people, who then needed the military leaders and eventually a king to secure their self-preservation in the real world. Moses was not a Machiavellian founder; he was insufficiently Machiavellian (151 n.5). He was a “legislator-priest, not a military commander” who “made a serious error by allowing the supreme command position to assume an ad hoc character after his death” (142). Israel had no real prince, although pious Jews and Christians believe otherwise. “God would not have instituted theocracy as it came to be if he had wished the Hebrew ‘state to last longer.’ God at heart is not a theocrat!” (143). After all, if ‘God’ is really the whole of natural mechanisms, why would he be a theocrat in the Mosaic sense? Democracy can secure the loyalty of its subjects or citizens by the means of free scientific inquiry, the new theology of the new, Spinozist god, which will satisfy the passions of those subjects or citizens with ever-increasing efficiency.

This means that divine law has an “essentially historical character”—it comes and it goes—whereas natural right is eternal, as uncreated nature must be. The very eternality and stability of nature make it “in principle accessible to unassisted reason” in a way that protean divine law can never be. Natural law can truly rule because it is universal. It needs no human belief to support it (e.g., revelation) and no human action to support it (e.g., religious ceremonies). It requires only that we know it in order to achieve “true liberty” (which means rational cognizance of natural necessity. It gives human beings as such, and not only Israelites, the rock-solid foundation for self-preservation Moses was a failed Machiavellian because he hoped to found his nation’s regime on an “essentially unscientific” basis. “Unlike democracy, which humbles human pretensions to supersede or seek exemption from natural right, theocracy is a celebration of human pride or vanity which places the whole of nature in an entirely unscientific way at the service of human identity formation through a people’s relation to a providential deity.” Far from being an instance of wise civil religion or of Augustinian humility, “theocracy is a ‘song of myself’ casting nature and the divine in purely supporting roles” (145). Moses lacked not only scientific or theoretical wisdom, he also lacked practical wisdom, producing a defective morality. If God is mechanistic nature, then God cannot issue commandments, only impersonal laws that are really nothing more than blind regularities. Human consent must be consistent with these laws. If a given political community fails to understand them, its members have the natural right to revolution. Men must retain for themselves the “intellectual freedom, especially of freedom of thought and speech,” that enables them to perceive the natural law and act accordingly if their conventions come to obscure it or impede its operation (147). “Freedom is the central organizing principle of Spinoza’s account of the true purpose of the state, and the “‘free state,’ which he associates unmistakably with democracy, enjoys ‘laws founded on sound reason'” (148).

The morally right thing to do, then, is to ‘privatize’ religion, allow it freedom in the minds and hearts of individuals but no civic status. Otherwise, the state that is intended to preserve us will fall prey to uncompromising factions centered on competing and indeed irresolvable religious imaginings. “Far from being the progenitor of modern liberalism, the Hebrew theocracy stands as Spinoza’s exemplar of the root causes of the kind of speculative controversy and theological conflict that so badly marred the Christian states of his time” (150). Hobbes’s attempt to make such a religion into a civic religion must fail because such a religion is in principle unnatural and therefore uncivil in the long run. In this Spinoza also departs from Machiavelli, even while concurring with the Machiavellian and Hobbesian understanding of nature as non-teleological and material.

Although they run parallel with respect to their principal themes, the Euthyphro and the Theological-Political Treatise differ quite strikingly in their treatment of those themes. Both Plato’s Socrates and Spinoza redirect the pious to consideration of nature but Socrates finds in the physical fact of the father-son relationship a moral obligation of the son to the father that must be heeded if the city is to survive. Spinoza finds in nature only a moral obligation of individuals to survive, sometimes at the expense of the weak. This moral individualism plays out politically in Spinoza’s commendation of democracy, the rule of the many who are strongest—a commendation Socrates has every reason to think might not turn out well for individual philosophers, despite Spinoza’s evident esteem for intellectual freedom. But could democracy reform itself, find a way to reconcile its majoritarianism with its need for philosophy? The central essay in part 2 concerns criminal procedures as understood by Montesquieu, procedures that might prevent the trial of some future Socrates or at least produce an outcome less disgraceful to popular rule. Vickie B. Sullivan’s essay parallels the central essay of part 1, inasmuch as both address the question of the rule of law in its relation to the philosopher and the city.

Montesquieu had his own troubles with the political authorities of his day, although these were not democratic or republican. The Spirit of the Laws soon found itself condemned as Spinozist and deistic, eventually winding up on the Papal Index of Forbidden Books (154). More massively, and more obviously than Montaigne and Spinoza, Montesquieu looks at the problem of civic and intellectual liberty as manifested in Machiavelli’s stato—the political community that combines centrally organized rule of the ancient polis with some of the size of the ancient empire. Montesquieu concurs with the judgment of Montaigne on the importance of the criminal procedure, “the most important knowledge for human beings to acquire” (154). For criminal procedure “contributes directly to political liberty,” that “tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security” (154). This shows the difference between political liberty in the modern state (personal security from threat by fellow-citizens and foreigners) and political liberty in the polis (participation in ruling, in the regime). [6]  As one looks at the world nearly three centuries after the publication of Montesquieu’s book, we see numerous instances of the ways in which the lack of such procedure, the arbitrary deprivation of one’s property, liberty, and life, sharply impede human flourishing. Religiosity evidently does not help, inasmuch as “human beings can be inexpressively cruel when dispensing criminal judgments” even as they profess the tenets of Protestantism or Catholicism. Such Euthyphronian, pious cruelty has no warrant, inasmuch as human beings can see only acts, not thoughts. In Montesquieu’s time, “tribunals in Europe [had] failed to maintain this fundamental distinction” but had instead imported “the purposes and methods of the Christian God into human tribunals” (155). By an extraordinary coincidence, Sullivan’s essay has thirty-three paragraphs, a number of some significance in the life of Jesus.

Book 24, chapter 13—the latter the symbolic number of atheism—”contains Montesquieu’s fundamental assessment of Christianity” (157). “Christianity is a seeker of justice, in his estimation, but not of human justice”; “Montesquieu describes Christianity as weaving a web from which there is no escape, not even within the solitude of the believer’s mind” (158-159). consequently, “every thought is actionable” by God (159). But God has so ordained that we have an attorney in His court, no less than His Son, “a great mediator between the judge and the criminal” (159). Christianity judges sternly and it does so down to the most intimate detail of our lives and thoughts, but it also offers forgiveness. Human courts simply cannot ‘get at’ the thoughts of the human beings who come before them. In the seventeenth or central paragraph of the essay, Sullivan lists Montesquieu’s “four general categories of crimes”: crimes against religion, against mores, against tranquility, and against citizens’ security. Only the latter “would call for the application of the strongest punishments including the death penalty” (162). A speech crime against religion—heresy openly espoused, for example—should only be punished by depriving the offender of the earthly benefits of the City of God, such as church membership. “Sacrilege is not a criminal matter” (163). It might be noticed that Montesquieu’s understanding of criminal procedure, if enacted in the thirty-third year of Jesus’ life, would have prevented His crucifixion. One might also notice that this would have prevented His sacrifice for the salvation of souls. Be this as it may, “God’s vengeance must be left to God, Montesquieu teaches” (163), and assuredly not to Machiavelli’s state.

Montesquieu pays particular attention to charges of magic. How can one defend oneself against the charge—still being made when Montesquieu wrote—that he is a magician? Suspicion trumps evidence in such cases. Montesquieu condemns the “biblical approach to thwarting conspiracy” as seen in the Deuteronomic injunction to families to stone their kin who entice them secretly  to betray God (166-167). This of course implicates not only Christians but the ancient Israelites, and exactly parallels the intentions of Euthyphro. No religious barrier to such practices exists; only a reform of criminal procedures themselves can stop them. Montesquieu was not slow to make the same charge against his own accusers, who also “succumb[ed] to the temptation to assume the powers of his divine exemplar and to read thoughts”—a dangerous power to leave in human hands (168).

The modern liberalism of Montaigne and Montesquieu proved effective against religious persecution of heterodox thought and speech by modern states. But does that liberalism go too far in subordinating the spirited elements of the human soul to a non-soulful conception of the soul itself? In privatizing piety and bridling spiritedness, does it make human beings conceive of themselves as lower than they really are? Does psychological materialism miss something about our nature and lead to a debasement of human life, private and public? Hegel seems to have thought so, as did many philosophers, clergymen, and poets of the decades following the Enlightenment. Jeffrey Church’s essay, “Personhood and Ethical Commercial Life: Hegel’s Transformation of Locke,” addresses these questions.

The position of Church’s essay parallels that of Mary P. Nichols’s essay on Aristotelian ethics. Nichols addressed Aristotle’s critique of Plato; Church addresses G. W. F. Hegel’s critique of John Locke, the philosopher Michael Zuckert has attended to most extensively in his scholarly writings. Aristotle wants Plato to come down to earth, a bit; Hegel wants Locke to rise to what he takes to be a higher plane. Both Aristotle and Hegel seek an ethical framework for political life that is neither too high nor too low, but the frameworks they offer may differ more radically than Church suggests.

Church begins by presenting us with another trial of sorts, or at least another set of accusations—those aimed by “Marxists, communitarians, and multiculturalists” against Locke (174). Locke’s accusers charge him with insufficient egalitarianism and excessive individualism; he is no social democrat. While not going so far as contending that Locke marches in solidarity with Keir Hardie or Norman Thomas, Church endorses Michael Zuckert’s insistence that Locke took full cognizance of “the social interactions and political conditions necessary for the shaping of rights-bearing citizens” (174). He rightly identifies Hegel as “the intellectual source of many of these criticisms” of Locke and of early modern liberalism generally, very much including the variants devised by Montaigne, Spinoza, and Montesquieu (175). In Church’s estimation, Hegel’s own debt to Locke is much more substantial than is generally acknowledged, but there is “a crucial difference” in their conceptions of “the nature of the human good”; in Hegel’s view, Locke “fails to grasp the inescapably ethical and political nature of the self and civil society” (175). Church intends to deploy Hegel in his own “moderate critique of Locke’s natural rights liberalism,” a phrase alluding to Zuckert’s scholarship (175).

As Zuckert and Nathan Tarcov have argued [7], Locke “understands full well that as an empirical matter of fact human beings fail to be rational agents if they do not live within the right social and political conditions, with the right sort of education, family life, strong government, stable rule of law, and welfare” (176). For his part, Hegel “appropriates and transforms” some of Locke’s arguments, although Church acknowledges that Hegel actually knew the political philosophy of Locke (as distinguished from his epistemological magnum opus, the Essay concerning Human Understanding) less well than he knew the writings of Locke’s critics, Rousseau, Fichte, and Adam Smith (177, 190 n. 4). Hegel follows Locke in four steps of Locke’s argument. He agrees that humans beings differ from animals because humans possess reason and reflect, enabling them to achieve self-consciousness. This rational self-consciousness distinguishes us “from the rest of nature in that we are (in principle) free from natural determinations,” judging our experience “within a certain normative framework” rather than simply following our instincts (177-178). “Each human being is a ‘person’ in the sense that each of us is an ‘I,’ a subject detachable from every empirical experience, perception, desire, belief” (178). this is the basis of our “abstract” or individual rights, and while there might be some question as to whether the Lockean “I” is quite so detachable from empeiria as Church says, that self is at least recognizable at this level of Hegel’s version of right.

Second, “this ‘I’ is no passive ego receiving deliverances from an external world” but an active force in its own right, “both in thought and action, always already bridging the gap between subject and object,” mixing its labor, and that of the body it partially directs, with external nature. “Labor is that archetypal human activity that transforms the structure of nature such that it comes to resemble the human laborer and serve his needs” (178-179). While both Locke and Hegel “envision education as a kind of shaping of the natural soul to form a more rational, human product,” Hegel “extends this notion to encompass human thought itself in that human beings first approach the world as a place impenetrable to thought and fearsome” but over time develop “human civilization” that understands the world by grasping it and reshaping it (179). It might be added that this is straight out of Machiavelli, who famously elevates the sense of touch over the senses of sight and of hearing. [8]  This leads to the third, moral, feature of Lockean and Hegelian thought, the claim “that the product of our labor is something we are entitled to by natural right” because the human will, as distinct from the wills of animals, “pursues and sets its own ends” (179). By setting our own ends for ourselves, unlike thoughtless animals (and apparently without the commands of a Creator-God) “when we labor on nature…we gain an exclusive right to our own product” (179). As Zuckert puts it, “Human making, not divine making, is the primary moral fact”; we own and to some considerable extent “make” ourselves (180). “Locke argues that the unified identity of a human self over time is not due to some inner kernel of an immortal soul within me but rather is posited by the self that shapes a unified, coherent identity out of one’s memory of the past and one’s intended plans for the future” (180).

Hegel departs from Locke most clearly in the fourth segment of his argument. Privately or individually held property rights are not enough. “For Hegel, subjectivity must be externalized because it is only in an external and public, shared world that anything takes on value or meaning, including my own identity, my projects and purposes” (181). This is the well-known Hegelian concept of recognition, which stems not only from positing a right to my property but from “negating”—that is, differentiating my identity from that of others and then compelling them to acknowledge that identity as equal to their own. Property “serves as an external expression of my identity, the basis on which I can posit my allegiance with and difference from others” (181). This process of affirming and negating itself develops human self-consciousness, as in Hegel’s “dialectic” of master and slave (181-182). All of these dialectical interactions between human beings and external nature, between one human being and others, constitute what Hegel calls civil society. The need for certain virtues to sustain human societies has proved a vexed one, as readers recall from Pangle on Xenophon and Schaefer on Montaigne. “For the early modern theorists from Machiavelli through Locke, we moderns should not rely on such virtue as it requires tremendous sacrifice of individual liberty and hence is unduly demanding and rather rare” (182). Hegel concurs, arguing with Locke and Smith that on the level of civil society the “subjective selfishness” of everyone “turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else”; markets do more than morals can to justify the ways of God to man (183).

Hegel’s general concurrence with Locke ends there, “though it is not clear what Hegel’s criticism of Locke is, since Hegel does not single him out for criticism in his writings” (183). Church does point to Hegel’s criticism of empiricism as a likely source of disagreement, but he does not see any evident connection between that and Locke’s political philosophy. Further, “Locke does appeal to a priori moral considerations based on the structure of the human person” (183). Church rather finds a “fundamental difference” between the two philosophers in their differing conceptions of “the human good” (183). Locke’s rejection of the Aristotelian summum bonum leaves him with a highly individualist picture of human striving: “Each self has a different notion of happiness depending on the confluence of experiences and the manner of the self’s positing of what is salient to its felicity and misery” (184). That is not enough for Hegel because it leaves reason as merely instrumental to a material/empirical conception of happiness; for Locke, “individuals can be better assured of pleasure and a closer approximation of happiness if they can learn better self-control” (185). But for Hegel nature is not distinctively human precisely because it is material, whereas human beings aims not merely at happiness in this sense but at freedom—”activity in accordance with substantive rational ends” (185). Freedom means freedom from such material, animalistic ends, to move beyond ‘selfishness’ conceived in the Lockean manner —that is, in a manner not worthy of a fully human ‘self.’ Mere happiness may find satisfaction in civil society, in the marketplace, but left to itself civil society “expands selfish desires beyond our capacity to fulfill them” and “dehumanizes and mechanizes labor” while undermining “local communities as the source of esteem and recognition” (186). To be human, we need something beyond civil society.

This is the modern state. The associations seen in civil society need to be tied to this larger entity in order to overcome the selfishness of the individuals who compose them. Hegelian liberalism requires statism to develop the distinctively human capacity for self-sacrifice—whether in peaceful associations subordinated to the state or in wars conducted by the state—that alone dialectically transcends the material self of Montaigne, Locke, and their philosophic allies opposed to irrationally self-sacrificing religion.

Church’s analysis goes far toward understanding the distinction between ‘modern liberalism old and new,’ but not far enough. It misses the ontological gulf between Locke and Hegel that Strauss saw so clearly, the difference between natural right, classical and modern, and historicism on the one hand, and the difference between Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, the unfolding of which is ‘history,’ and the Holy Spirit of the Bible, on the other. The Holy Spirit comports with the Creator-God; He is a person, and He is fundamentally separate from created beings. He is providential; he guides the course of events without being ‘in’ them. The Absolute Spirit is immanent in all matter, all energy, and all events. Inhering in all matter, it works itself free of matter by dint of human work and above all self-conscious human thought. This working-free of the immanent Absolute Spirit is the source of right, moral and political. It justifies the existence of the modern state and assures its liberality—its freedom—as it unfolds in time. The Straussian who gives the clearest account of this dimension of Hegel is Stanley Rosen. [9]  His account of Hegelian metaphysics—Hegel’s epistemology and ontology—proves as important to understanding Hegel, and to understanding the difference between natural right and historical right, as a lucid account of Aristotelian teleology, such as that offered by Nichols.

Strauss appears in the very next essay, an illuminating comparison of Strauss and Pope John Paul II by Walter Nicgorski. Just as Keys had presented a Christian answer to classical natural right in the arguments of Augustine, so Nicgorski (another Notre Dame colleague of the Zuckerts) points readers to a Christian response to natural right as presented by perhaps its foremost recent exponents. Considering the Straussian theme of the life of philosophy as distinguished from the life of piety, humble belief, and obedient love, Nicgorski acknowledges the Zuckerts’ demonstration in their book on Strauss [10] that for him the choice of that way of life was no Nietzschean or quasi-Nietzschean “arbitrary act of the will” or “act of faith” but a carefully qualified or “hedged” act of reason (196). If, as Strauss does say, philosophy cannot refute revelation any more than revelation can refute philosophy, the choice of the philosophic way of life informed by classical philosophy is an act of humility in its own right, that is, an acknowledgement of “the evident rational fact” of the philosopher’s ignorance of the ground of being and of his ardent and rational and humble desire to engage in a “quest for knowledge of the most important things” (197). Absent the intervention of the Holy—separate from us, non-immanent—Spirit, what can a serious person do other than attend seriously to the light nature has given us?

Strauss’s critique of historicism, of absolute moments and spirits, rests squarely on this insight and this humility. Strauss urges us to maintain the distinction between reason and revelation because the historicist attempt to blend the two is only (Strauss phrases it) can learn from one another while avoiding the hubristic claim of having achieved wisdom and divinity instead of merely loving them (202). First and foremost, they can learn a salutary sense of the limitations of human strivings, however ardent. “It is here appropriate to be reminded that Strauss’s title for his important and relatively late essay on our topic is ‘Jerusalem and Athens,’ not ‘Jerusalem or Athens'” (203). To the question raised near the beginning of this review—why classical ‘philosophy’ but modern ‘theory’?—Nicgorski replies, “Revelation’s purifying critique of reason keeps it humble and above all from overextending its claims, the claims so characteristic of modern philosophy,” while “within the commitment of faith, reason continues to work and to exalt the human person.” Reason not only assists such faith—clarifying its ideas—”but also calls upon reason to understand more deeply its objects” (205). In adjuring us to love God and neighbor, Jesus of Nazareth holds both truth and friends dear while linking these loves to the laws of God.

III. But can such a relation between those who reason and those who believe—one that does not deny that those who believe also reason and that those who reason also see their reasoning’s limits—find a home in a political regime? The American Founders thought so and set out to prove it. The essays of part 3 address their regime, a perennial theme of the Zuckerts’ writings. Part 3 contains six essays, so there is no central one, but the first essay, by Peter Augustine Lawler, happens to be the central essay of the collection as a whole. This proves an apt element of the book’s design, inasmuch as Lawler delivers a characteristically sharp-eyed and provocative performance that picks up all of the major themes addressed so far while making an argument that diverges sharply from that of the Zuckerts. Because Lawler stands on the ‘faith’ side of the Straussian partnership, not so much the ‘philosophy’ side, both the essay and its placement display the friendly and dialogic liberalism the Zuckerts have commended and practiced. The essay is also mighty entertaining: Lawler moves America from Locke and Protestant Christianity at the beginning to Roman Catholicism toward the end in a deft way that might leave an unwary reader wondering, ‘What just happened, here?’ Professor Lawler is one sly old Georgia possum—that’s what happened. And he has an argument that deserves attention from thoughtful students of the American founding.

The essayists so far have emphasized the turn to individualism in modern political theory. This turns out to be an oddly impersonal individualism, centered on instincts and questioning classical and religious assertions of human moral responsibility. Lawler begins by asserting that “the Lockean conception of personal identity is unsustainable without some positive help from truthfully Christian conceptions of who we are and what we’re supposed to do” (211). In Michael Zuckert’s view, Lawler recalls, Locke argues for a conception of “secular, universalistic, and individualistic” natural rights which “can be known only by a few” as secular (212). The rest of us will rest easy in some form of liberal Christianity, as enunciated in America by the “Lockean Puritans” of the colonial and founding periods or by their descendants, now increasingly remote from purity. Zuckert “recommends those preachers to us, in effect, for following the example of Locke himself, for reconfiguring biblical doctrine in light of what we can know about ourselves through unassisted reason”—most importantly, natural rights. Such beliefs are salutary if not entirely true, inasmuch as “religious impulses and their theological articulation add nothing real to what we are” (212). This makes Christianity not so much a prophetic as a civil religion in America—a religion that supports the regime and no longer sees itself as captive and stranger in it. “But Locke, Zuckert observes, never really solved the problem that natural civil theology is somewhat of an oxymoron” (213). That is, Lawler’s Zuckert maintains that Locke makes Americans “think of themselves less as either citizens or creatures,” “grateful to God or country or as part of wholes beyond themselves,” and more as individuals setting out to improve their human condition. Americans are rather like the Montaignian individuals later described by Tocqueville (213). Their religiosity, neither fully civil nor especially pious, is likely to incline toward pantheism, as indeed the Transcendentalists did, Ralph Waldo Emerson in the lead. It might be added that the Hegelianism from which the Progressives’ brand of historicism was  developed can itself be conceived as a sort of rationalist pantheism; and that Emerson, along with his British counterpart Thomas Carlyle, was instrumental in bringing German philosophic notions to the English-speaking peoples. Be that as it may, “Zuckert dissents from Tocqueville’s view that we Americans owe anything fundamental or deeply true to the Puritans” (214), who, in Zuckert’s formulation, were not really Christian insofar as they were liberal.

Here Lawler demurs. In one respect, he takes the stance among the moderns that Xenophon (or perhaps the Athenian Stranger) takes among the ancients: Human beings need stronger stuff, including some sense of providential divinity, in order to form political communities. This is so, in Lawler’s judgment, quite apart from the desperate human need for the truth of salvation. Tocqueville, Lawler observes, saw not only that Christianity introduced the idea of human equality or universalism into the world in a universalizing or evangelical (‘Catholic’) manner, but also that it introduced the idea of the value of individual liberty, based upon free will. On this he quotes Zuckert quoting Thomas L. Pangle—no religious zealot—as saying that the idea of the sanctity of all individual human beings as such comes from the Bible and not from philosophy classical or modern.

The question seems to be this: If you posit an eternal and impersonal nature as the foundation of all being, how do you derive persons from that? The Lockean (and Cartesian and Montaignian) individual cannot plausibly explain his own origins. How did an impersonal nature somehow work itself up into the Zuckerts, the Pangles, Lawler—into any of us? Only the Creator-God can make persons because the Creator-God (being holy, not immanent) first creates a cosmos where there was nothing and then takes a part of it, forms it into what we recognize as the human shape, and ‘divinizes’ this being by breathing life into it, transforming an ‘it’ into a ‘him’ (216). Thus the ultimate reality of the Bible is the divine individual who endows one of His creatures with an individuality in the image of Himself. This creature is not divinized in the sense of being endowed with the omniscience and omnipotence of his Creator; but he was nonetheless a person, endowed with free will and was, moreover (when victimized by the lying serpent, and about to be made the slave of that demon), redeemed by the Christ and saved for eternal life—itself an act of God’s gracious free will. “We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures, because our nature is now to be both human and divine” (216). This latter formulation may be too exclusively Christian, inasmuch as all those who take the Bible to be true understand the creation of Adam or man as an act of God’s grace and love. But there is no doubt that the mission of the Christ on earth, as he himself combined humanity and divinity in his being, reaffirmed the fundamental “personality” and “individuality” of humanity, as distinct from impersonal nature. [12]

Locke wants to replace the loving, salvific and providential God with “a more reasonable faith in the unprecedented historical future” that can be framed by human beings at work—a “faith in what I can do for myself in a world basically indifferent to my personal being” (217). In the spirit of this labor theory of value, Lockean America is ‘progressive’ not in the historicist sense of the Progressives but in the sense that Americans want to advance the modern project of conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate or condition. While historicists subordinate man not to an impersonal nature but to an impersonal Absolute Spirit (or an Absolute Material Dialectic, as in Marxism or in the proponents of ‘race theory’), Lockean Americans want to insist on their “unique and irreplaceable” personality and the rights inherent in their persons against the actions of governments and against the impersonal technocrats who occupy the offices of the modern state’s bureaucracy (217-218).

This makes Locke a friend of Christianity in his political practice because he rightly attributes to Christianity the principle of separating religion from secular government. That separation recognizes institutionally the spiritual fact that Christian religion “can’t be reduced to natural theology—or a way of expressing the impersonal truth about nature discovered by the philosophers” (219). Such religion understands us as “more than merely or even essentially a citizen or part of nature” (219). “But neither Aristotelians nor Darwinians”—nor Lockeans insofar as they orient themselves toward nature—”can…make sense of the freedom from political/divine law that we all believe human beings to possess. Freedom from political/divine law must be for persona/divine law, for beings who are in some sense created in the image of a personal God” (220, emphasis added). An Augustinian Christianity might envision a best-practicable Christian government in which the secular government subordinated itself to the church, but that would be the opposite of a civil religion ministerial to the secular government, serving the impersonal principles of that government. It is much more feasible that a properly constituted political community would (more modestly) keep the peace and protect religious liberty. Under those circumstances, “the Christian is called to do his duty to his country—without the solace of sharing in its civil religious illusions” (220). The Christian needs to do this because he acknowledges that each human person has a measure of sin in him, and we are morally responsible for the government of that sin in ourselves and in others.

Lawler then goes on to argue in a way that strikes me as mistaken, or perhaps not expressed in the right way. He writes that for Christianity and for Locke, personal property trumps even political liberty, and that for both Christians and for Locke “the form of government…is not to be confused with some Platonic ‘regime.’ The personal Christian alien—in his apolitical, cosmopolitan detachment—is not so different from the Lockean person” (220). This formulation won’t do because, as Augustine phrases it, the Christian lives in the City of God. This city is not truly cosmopolitan—not yet—because it has yet fully to conquer the City of Man, still ruled by Satan and by human beings, whose minds Satan has veiled from their own sinfulness. The personal liberty of the Christian is coterminous with his citizenship in that city or, as Lawler himself affirms, the laws of the personal God. It is a mistake to put the term ‘regime’ in scare quotes (as Lawler does consistently throughout the essay) because the City of God does indeed have a regime in the full Aristotelian and Platonic sense of the word: It has a ruler; it has a politeuma or ruling body on earth and in heaven; it has a way of life; and it has a purpose. The regime is a kingship, very much of the sort that would occur if a god were to come down to earth and justly rule us; the king saves us from the tyrant, Satan, who runs his own regime for now. [13]  Christian freedom means freedom from Satan’s regime but it is very far from being regime-free. The confusion on this point often arises from the fact that the regime of God rules an autarchic community that differs from the polis or city-state, the feudal state, and the modern state—that is, from other, humanly autarchic communities. The City of God most resembles an empire, especially in its universalism in principle and its conquering ways in practice, although of course it is primarily a spiritual rather than a secular empire, aiming at spiritual more than physical conquests, albeit with the aid of secular institutions as seen in, among other things, catholic churches Roman and Orthodox, and evangelical Protestantism. It is, to appropriate Thomas Jefferson’s fine phrase, an empire of liberty—of liberty from Satan’s regimes, so often seen in varying degrees in the City of Man; but in regime terms, it is a kingly empire and not a republican one. It even has some elements of a political regime in Aristotle’s strict sense, inasmuch as God’s prophets have at times talked back to God, and God has sometimes changed His mind in response to their arguments.

Turning now to America, Lawler regards it “at its best” as “a kind of genuine compromise between wholly Lockean and Christian (meaning Puritan, Calvinist, Augustinian, and/or Protestant) views of who we are” (222). He points to Tocqueville’s analysis of the American North and South—the one colonized by “meddlesome political idealists,” the other colonized by “vulgarly self-indulgent, morally indifferent pirates” (223). Both shared one dimension of the Lockean, indeed modern-philosophic individualism that lends itself to entering the social contract “only for his personal convenience”—a formulation Lawler rightly attributes to the Catholic writer Orestes Brownson, not so much Tocqueville or Locke (224). “It’s the individualism or emotional solitude that is the product of that Lockeanism [as described and perhaps caricatured by Brownson] that paves the way to the soft despotism [described by Tocqueville] feared more than any Puritan excess” (224). Similarly, in the spiritual dimension American religion inclined unintentionally toward pantheism, the opposite of individualism. Precisely insofar as they were idealists, inclined toward abstract principles of government and insufficiently attuned to the personalism of true Christianity, “the Puritans weren’t Christian enough!” (224). “The Puritans’ tyrannical idealism came from being inconsistently Christian; their dead-serious political utopianism came from attributing to the state what was properly the job of the church” (224). What America needed, Tocqueville argued, and Lawler agrees, was something between the uncivilized criminality of the Southerners and the sin-criminalizing Puritans. This combination, this “spirit of compromise,” may be seen in the Declaration of Independence (225).

“The Lockean theoretical core of the Declaration is all about inalienable rights and not about the personal God of the Bible,” but “thanks to the insistence of members of Congress who were more under the influence of Christian Calvinism than Jefferson and Franklin, God also became, near the Declaration’s end, providential and judgmental, or present-tense and personal” (225). References to God as a provident judge were inserted at the insistence of the non-Lockean and Christian majority of Congress. Here Lawler has recourse to the Catholic writers R. L. Bruckberger (whose Images of America he describes as “probably the most nuanced or balanced judgment on the significance of our Declaration”) and John Courtney Murray in his We Hold These Truths (226). “The combination of American Lockeanism and American Puritanism/Calvinism”—the latter not Lockeanized by genuine—”produced something like an accidental”—but should a Catholic not say providential?—”American Thomism” (226). With that somewhat Puckish sally, Lawler then concludes, with Tocqueville, that the personality of God, not the impersonality of nature, is what truly “supports the equal right to freedom all human beings have,” uniting “the teaching of Jesus and the teaching of Locke, while both Locke and Jesus distance religious idealism from the requirements of good government”—namely, securing our unalienable rights but not defining them, a task already performed by God when He created us (226). “But it’s still the idealism”—better, the personalist spirituality?—”of Jesus that turns equality into more than a principle of calculation of self-interested consent,” an “undeniable moral proposition”—here glancing at Lincoln?—”that leads us to do good even at the risk of our lives” (226) as witnesses to God’s truth and not to abstract principles of an impersonal nature. Thinking perhaps of Strauss and the Straussians who follow him in concentrating their attention on texts more than the historical contexts in which texts appear, Lawler adds, “Our respect for texts is really our respect for authors and readers, for persons singularly open to the mystery of being, especially our own being” (231). The “natural rights republic” described and commended by Michael Zuckert turns out to be a better thing than nature alone can justify (233)). [14]  Not reason versus revelation but the personal versus the impersonal are the relevant antinomies, Lawler maintains.

This is indeed a fine and friendly (indeed charitable) challenge to Zuckert and to his understanding of the American regime. It depends upon an analysis of the Declaration of Independence that seems to me a touch too dichotomous. Yes, the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God find their literary formulation in books of philosophic inquiry not the Bible, where we meet the providential and judging personal God, on those occasions when we do not meet Him in our life outside books. But recall that in the supposedly Lockean (in Lawler’s secularized or atheistic sense of Lockeanism) body of the Declaration we are told that it is self-evident that all men are created equal in their rights to live, to live at liberty from tyrants, and to pursue their happiness. Laws of nature do not create; they generate. Only a Creator-God creates; the passage from Locke which Jefferson evidently consulted calls men creatures. That such a Creator exists is self-evident only to those His Holy Spirit has instructed, whether they are Christians or not. At best, as Lawler argues, our self-evident personality may reasonably incline to explain ourselves as creatures of a personal God.

The self-evident equality of rights (with which the self-evident Creator has endowed some of His creatures) is a different matter from the character of the Creator. Equality is self-evident not because God has told His creatures about it but because we recognize ourselves as individual members of a certain ‘kind’ or (to use philosophic language) ‘species.’ The logos with which we are endowed expresses the reality that personal nouns (Zuckert, Pangle, Lawler) instance examples of common nouns (human being, citizen). This enables the compromise or common agreement between the pious and the philosophic seen in the American founding and among the Founders. This is not a conceptual problem for the pious, because the Creator creates personal and impersonal things alike and creates man in His image. This means at least two things: the ability to abstract from particulars, and the right to rule other species. God endowed man with the ability not to create the kinds of creatures he sees but to recognize those kinds in the specimens God has created. This does not erase the Platonic-Socratic question of the relation between God and the ideas God has, as might be seen in the very language about man created in the image of God. Lawler contends that we are created “as whole rational and erotic beings; not just thought but love is divine.” [15]  It is a conceptual problem for all philosophers, although less so for the classical philosophers, who contemplate Socrates—who managed both to be the type of the philosopher and irreducibly himself —while holding both truth and friends to be dear, than it is for the modern philosopher-theorists. Various theories have been proposed to solve this problem; whether Lawler is right in his confidence that none of them really can make sense in principle is well beyond the capacities of your reviewer in his Augustinian humility.

III (continued). Perhaps, in keeping with the American combination of individuality with civility, the remainder of the essayists in part 3 consider American statesmen, those who have best exemplified these traits among us. One matter not yet fully addressed in the volume but raised by Church and Lawler concerns the degree to which the moderns generally and Americans specifically should be classed as advocates of a ‘politics of progress,’ and what this means in terms of the distinction between modern natural right and historicism. Jean Yarbrough’s essay on Thomas Jefferson has the merit of making the strongest possible case for Jefferson as a progressive in the historicist sense before rejecting that case. In doing so, she illuminates this important distinction, pertinent especially to those who follow in the wake of Strauss.

While living in France, Jefferson read Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot’s 1750 lecture Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of the Human Mind. Turgot identifies three stages of civilization (hunting, pastoral, and agricultural), and “viewed this movement from one stage to another in terms of progress and perfectibility”—and inevitable progress at that—”spurred largely by natural causes, with only a thin religious veneer” (236). Jefferson himself saw these stages of human development in North America, with the American Indians of the Rocky Mountains as the hunters, the American frontiersmen as the pastoralists, and the Atlantic seaboard as the home of the farmers. This is not historicism, however; progress rather comes from human nature fulfilling itself in time In some contrast to this, Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published in 1795, takes Rousseau’s refusal to set a limit to human perfectibility in at least a proto-historicist direction, adumbrated ten stages of human history that were to culminate in a sort of end of history in the near future featuring “the true perfection of mankind” (238). Both of the French thinkers reject biblical providence; whereas Rousseau resists notions of progress, Condorcet replaces providence with a more or less historicized account of natural human development.

Jefferson concurred with Condorcet’s belief that the human mind “is perfectible to a degree of which we cannot as yet form any conception” (239). Not only what we now call the ‘hard’ sciences but also religion and progress will see substantial progress. Human perfectibility, while not infinite, was indefinite—hard to measure in advance. As his remarks on his proposed curriculum for the University of Virginia indicate, he hoped to “engraft ‘a new man on the native stock'” (243). But the notion of engrafting, taken from Jefferson’s beloved science of agronomy, suggests that perfectibility remains in the realm of nature. While Jefferson famously rejected reverence for the ancestral, he never endorsed, or even noticed, Hegel’s notion of the Absolute Spirit, and even more famously deplored the European statism that Hegel took to be the instantiation of that Spirit. The actual Progressives who became prominent in American political life a century after Jefferson’s presidency—Herbert Croly is Yarbrough’s prime example—did indeed embrace historicism in its Hegelian-statist form, reproving Jefferson for his “suspicion of national power, combined with his attachment to equal rights,” which “encouraged excessive individualism, mediocrity, and drift” rather than progress (248). “Even John Dewey, one of the few Progressives who admired Jefferson, regarded his attachment to natural rights as essentially outmoded” (248). Progressivism “would have required [Jefferson] to sacrifice his belief in natural rights, the one permanent principle on his political horizon” (249).

Moving from the natural-rights principles of the Declaration of Independence to the formal regime of the United States Constitution, David Nichols credits Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania with a crucial role in the framing of the institution that secure Americans’ natural rights. Morris did so in part because he exhibited the prudence Aristotle commends in citizens and in statesmen above all, knowing how to shift with the currents of the debates at the Constitutional Convention, remaining flexible on details while “always [keeping] his ultimate goals in mind, changing positions on particular issues in light of how those decisions would shift into a larger whole” (254). That larger whole or purpose consisted of “an effective, and essentially popular, national government” to replace the ineffectual federalism of the Articles of Confederation, which in his judgment had failed to secure those rights (256). Although he did not want to do away with the states, Morris did expect the federal government to be the principal guarantor of popular rights. He unsuccessfully opposed giving state legislatures the power to appoint U. S. senators.

Although Morris admired the mixed regime seen from Xenophon’s writings to the Great Britain of his own day, he not only saw but applauded America’s lack of hereditary monarchy and hereditary aristocracy, “essential elements” of that regime (256). He did intend to secure the rights of property and often referred to the upper social and economic echelons of American life as aristocratic, but he never believed that any class enjoyed a special title to rule. He expected oligarchy to lodge itself in the legislature—a prescient insight—but “hoped that the office of the presidency would be a crucial check on this tendency,” holding the Union together both by defending it against internal and external threats, and by checking and balancing “the interests of the wealthy” in the Congress (257). And even this oligarchy would hold wealth derived primarily from fluid commercial activity, not from the land ownership that in Morris’s view tends to maintain the same wealthy families in control of a political society for generations at a time. The president, the only official who “could speak for the nation as whole,” animated by that love of fame so dear to the philosopher David Hume and to Alexander Hamilton, would provide the United States with a non-monarchic antidote to the Parliamentary oligarchies seen in Great Britain and soon to be seen in the United States (265). “In removing the election of the present from the hands of the legislature and placing it in the hands of popular election, Morris achieved his most significant victory at the Convention” (267).

Crucial to understanding Morris’s liberalism was his argument against slavery. He took issue with one of Rousseau’s most memorable definitions of liberty: the liberty enjoyed by men in “the savage state” (268), from which it follows that in entering civilization by first demarcating private property men donned the chains of slaves. On the contrary, Morris argues, civilized liberty requires property, property “based on the enjoyment of the fruits of one’s labor rather than the protection of inherited property” (268)—property as conceived by John Locke. “Morris believed”—with James Madison, it might be added—”that the closest thing to a traditional aristocracy in the United States was to be found in the plantation slavery of the South,” where the right to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor was so emphatically denied to the African slaves. On the floor of the Constitutional Convention, he did not hesitate publicly to denounce slavery as “a nefarious institution,” “the curse of heaven on the states where it prevails,” and “the most prominent feature in the aristocratic countenance of the proposed Constitution,” inasmuch as “the vassalage of the poor has ever been the favorite offspring of Aristocracy” (269). “It is liberal individualism rather than aristocracy or a defense of [landed] property that is the guiding principle of Morris’s political thought” (270). At the same time, Morris did eschew the extreme individualism based on personal property rights seen in the Benthamites, who anticipated the formulations of the libertarians of later centuries. Such “citizens of the world, as they call themselves,” are not to be trusted; “economic calculation is no substituted for a love of one’s own country,” which “must supplement rational self-interest as the basis for politics” (270). Rational-choice calculation of narrowly economic utilitarianism cannot even support the material prosperity it prizes because “the free market he was championing required the support of a powerful government” (270) that extended republicanism over a large territory which would make that free market big enough to generate substantial wealth. Accordingly, whereas the Constitution’s Preamble as originally drafted began “We the people of the states…” and went on to list each one, Morris’s draft, the final one, beings “We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union….” Morris “makes it clear that the Constitution creates a government of the people, not of the states, and moreover emphasizes that we are already one nation” (271)—a point not lost on Abraham Lincoln in the desperate years of the 1850s and 1860s. And beyond Lincoln, anticipating the controversies of our own time, Morris “would remind conservatives that the national government has played an indispensable role in protecting the rights of individuals, just as he would remind liberals that the greatest conflict in human history has not been between property rights and human rights but between tyranny and freedom” (273).

While part 3 has no one central essay, the two essays at its center—Nichols’s on Morris and David Alvis’s “The Presidency and the Constitutional Convention of 1787″—form a pair both with respect to friendship and to truth, inasmuch as Nichols was Alvis’s teacher at Fordham University and both essays bring new insights to certain dimensions of the framing of the U. S. Constitution and its Framers. In this they parallel the central essays of parts 1 and 2—essays on Plato’s Laws and Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws —the latter obviously consulted by the Framers. Both examine the place of the presidency, the office in the constitutional union that most affords scope for statesmanship in the most conspicuous manner. Thus while the center of part 3 is bicephalous, it focuses on the constitutional branch that is most nearly ‘one,’ and does so in two minds working in the complementary way that both philosophic and religious life beckon us to. Alvis intends to show how the Framers sought “to make the practice of democratic principles compatible with the doctrine of natural rights” via that office (278). The president is in one sense alone, but in fact he too has friends and teachers—the Framers and his constitutionally elected predecessors.

Commentators now often think of the Electoral College as an arcane institution, somehow obsolete and undemocratic, but Alvis elaborates on Nichols’s remark that it actually was intended to bring the presidency closer to the sovereign people by removing the president’s selection from the legislature. Under the Articles of Confederation, there was no separate executive branch, executive powers being exercised by committees of Congress. By contrast delegate Roger Sherman of Connecticut favored a “weak and dependent executive” in the new government, an institution identical to the executives seen in the existing state constitutions. Understandably so: “Sherman probably still held the strong antipathy of the revolutionary generation to anything that smacked of monarchy” (283). Edmund Randolph of Virginia wanted an independently elected but still weak executive—weak because plural, an executive committee or cabinet. Nichols observes that Morris helped James Wilson of Pennsylvania to win approval for what we got: a strong, unitary, and independent executive. An American executive branch must comport with the regime, because “in republican government strength and independence could be legitimated only by popular election” (286).

Although Madison’s argument for the extended republic is well known, the president’s function in securing the national union is sometimes neglected. Alvis remarks Morris’s insistence that only a vigorous president could “utilize the extent of the country rather than be hindered by it” (289). Not only could the executive use the size of the American territory and population to suppress local rebellions and repel foreign invasions, but he could also use his veto power to prevent the enactment of legislation that favored one part of the country over another, whether a region or a class—particularly, he remarked, “legislative tyranny against the Great & the wealthy” (290). Although Alvis may go too far in saying that a strong, popularly elected executive “could serve the positive function of supplying leadership for the government as a whole” (290)—this more closely resembles Woodrow Wilson’s notions, not James Wilson’s—he is right to praise the Framers for “arriv[ing] at something genuinely new in the history of mankind: a solution to the modern ‘desideratum’ of finding a government both capable of controlling the governed and capable of controlling itself” (293). The right we share equally as individual human beings find their institutional support in the Framers’ invention of prudence: an office for one person but not one person alone—one person working sometimes in collaboration with the other elected branch of government, sometimes in opposition to it. If not intended as a platform for cutting-edge-of-history leadership, it does provide a platform for republican statesmanship.

As the Founders and Tocqueville and Americans generally have known, we find our statesmen not only in public offices but in the self-governing civil association that American liberty encourages. The next essay takes up the theme of friendship, seen in Mary P. Nichols’s essay, with the theme of modernity’s need for such an account of civil life, seen in Church’s essay. It might be said that the civil-social aspect of the American regime aims to solve the problem posed by its (semi)philosophic core; a problem that Hegelian historicism does not solve. Diana J. Schaub discovers the practical wisdom of an outstanding example of such civic statesmanship exercised by a man effectively denied national elective office because his natural and civil rights were unofficially but effectively contravened. Booker T. Washington concentrated his statesmanlike character on pursuing a long and distinguished career as an educator and orator, modeling his speeches on those of Lincoln, whose Gettysburg Address he especially esteemed. Those familiar with Schaub’s scholarship know that she is at her best with a text in front of her, and the text she chooses among Washington’s is his “Address on Abraham Lincoln,” delivered to the Republican Club of New York in 1909. The circumstances surrounding the address were troublesome; anti-black race riots had occurred in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois, several months earlier. Washington saw from this that liberating slaves in the South might be thought a fine thing to do but living with freemen in the North could bring out the worst in whites.

Washington knew that Lincoln himself had considered the challenge mob violence poses to republican self-government in his 1838 “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum” in Springfield. He follows Lincoln in commending law-abidingness to all Americans, pointing to the patience and self-control that underlie the lawful spirit. Schaub remarks that in commending the law-abiding virtues Lincoln held up the example of George Washington, whose name “the fatherless Booker had chosen…as his surname when he first attended school” (306). In a way, Abraham Lincoln and Booker T. Washington both chose the father of their country as their own father. Washington had a fraternal bond with the statesman who ‘freed the slaves.’

Schaub presents an outline of Washington’s address, showing how carefully crafted it is as it moves from the prayer of a slave to oaths of freedom via meditations on American citizenship or civic brotherhood, on what that citizenship means to all human beings, and on Lincoln as the great example of it. To Washington, the murdered Lincoln remained alive to this day, influencing “American civilization” with still-read words and with remembered words and deeds that invite us to exercise the virtue he exhibited respecting George Washington: gratitude. Lincoln was grateful to George Washington for his modeling of the same virtue Lincoln modeled for Booker T. Washington, the “inner freedom” that makes “outer freedom” or physical freedom civil instead of violent. Such “spiritual freedom is ever vigilant, denying malice entrance” (309). Such malice might be occasioned by resentment at Southerners who started the Civil War, or by white bigots who had proven themselves unworthy of Lincoln’s legacy, indeed unworthy of their own fathers, many of whom had fought in the Union armies. Schaub emphasizes this latter point: “Despite the misrepresentations of those who labeled him an ‘accommodationist,’ [Washington] was a statesman of considerable moral audacity,” “extending sympathy to whites from a position of moral superiority over them.” “It is for the white,” he writes, “to save himself from his degradation that I plead” (310). In his emphasis on self-control Washington resembles Xenophon; in his agapic good-will he resembles Augustine.

Washington’s statesmanlike ambition had still greater breadth. Appealing, as Lincoln had done, to the universal character of the argument of the Declaration of Independence, Washington asserts that in vindicating the principles of equal rights for all men, Lincoln “reestablished the dignity of man as man” (311). Washington seldom used the word ‘equality’ himself—in his day it signified civic not natural equality, a step that white America for the most part was morally unready to take with respect to their black fellow-citizens. But Washington deployed Lincoln’s example as a way of preparing the minds of whites for exactly that step. “Lincoln’s and Washington’s respective strategies might be understood as an instance of rhetorical chiasmus: the white statesman appealed to natural equality in order to further the ultimate aim of physical liberty for the slaves, whereas the black statesman appealed to spiritual liberty in order to further the ultimate and unstated aim of civic equality” (311-312). To this moral virtue Washington characteristically added an intellectual one, the enlightenment of the soul. “He who goes through life with his eyes closed against all that is good in another race is weakened and circumscribed,” Washington said, adding, “The world is fast learning that one man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him” (312). Like Lincoln and George Washington before him, Booker T. Washington never neglected to associate moral right with “elevated self-interest” (312). His speech on Lincoln moves “from Lincoln’s statesmanship to his saintliness (or in more Aristotelian terms, from Lincoln as a good citizen/ruler to Lincoln as a good man)” (313).

Looking at both the physically freed former slaves and their descendants but also at the millions around the world who had not yet been physically freed at all, Washington observed that freedom “in the broadest and highest sense, has never been a bequest; it has been a conquest” (314). In this he picks up Hegel’s theme of battling to the death for recognition, but without espousing Hegel’s historicism, which conceals its own threats to freedom. For this not only patience but also courage are the needed virtues—principally moral courage. Such conquest over one’s own fears and then over one’s enemies can occur because, paradoxically, “a soul sovereign over itself can subordinate self to others.” It can avail itself of something Hegel prizes—self-sacrifice—while ignoring Hegelian ontology. Such self-sacrifice most emphatically includes Southern whites, namely, those like Robert E. Lee and John B. Gordon who acquiesced in battlefield defeat with a magnanimity that matched that of Lincoln in his moments of victory. In this, Schaub observes, “Washington throws down the gauntlet”—a gesture not to be despised by Southern aristocrats—”challenging the proponents of white pride to be chivalrous and to disdain fear” and accusing “the vicious breed of white supremacists of cowardice” (315). The respectable or proud pity of Washington outfaces the pitiless, weak pride of the bigots.

Although grateful to Lincoln, Washington (like Lincoln) never expected gratitude toward himself. Faced with derision by racist whites and also by black intellectuals like W. E. B. DuBois, Washington expressed his own more measured and prudent form of racial pride in noting that unlike whites, American blacks have never betrayed their country. They have kept true to the fraternal spirit of the citizen while standing up for their natural rights as human beings. American blacks “have it in their power”—their own power, not a power granted to them—”to manifest the highest possibilities of citizenship and humanity” (319). Schaub ends with the hope that in time Washington too will be recognized by all Americans for his statesmanship and moral virtue.

Moral virtue was the central concern of Theodore Roosevelt as man and citizen—a point Kirk Emmert sees more clearly than almost any other student of politics and statesmanship. [16]  Roosevelt’s literary output may have exceed Booker T. Washington’s and, like Washington, he regarded writing as an indispensable tool of statecraft in the republican regime; in his essay on the much-controverted question of the relation between Roosevelt’s statesmanship and American constitutionalism, Emmert remarks that “his books promote the political understanding and moral character that, he argues, are the necessary foundation of a healthy constitutional democracy” (322-323). As Lawler might predict, he wrote about individuals, and Emmert considers his biographies of Oliver Cromwell, Thomas Hart Benton, and Gouverneur Morris. Then as now, people read biographies much more readily than they do treatise; such books enabled Roosevelt better to address “thoughtful citizens by presenting specific opportunities to illustrate the complex nature of statesmanship and its problematic existence in a popular government,” showing them “the moral and intellectual excellence and failings” of eminent statesmen “embedded in their political context” (323). “Repeatedly, Roosevelt stresses the moral qualities of the leaders he discusses, in particular, their courage, moderation, and public-spiritedness” (323).

Of these three, Roosevelt most admires Morris. Morris began as the over-spirited man that Cromwell and Benton remained throughout their lives, but as a witness to the French Revolution he saw firsthand the dangers of such excess. Roosevelt also compares Cromwell’s 1648 revolution unfavorably to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, observing that the revolutionaries of 1688 had learned from the bad examples of 1648 the virtues of prudence, moderation, and the spirit of compromise, rejecting utopianism and founding a regime that could endure in the real world. Such men as Cromwell and Benton exhibit the virtues not so much of the civilized man as of the frontiersman: Warlike and brave, they remain good examples, to some degree, to the somewhat effete types who inhabit long-settled lands—for example, Roosevelt’s own Manhattan of the late nineteenth century. Such readers will find in these portraits nourishment “to sustain and reawaken spiritedness in the American soul” (327). This will remain necessary because Roosevelt knows that the frontier is still out there, to be seen not so much in Texas or the Badlands but in the collisions between the ever more powerful nation-states, now fortified with mass armies wielding weapons of unprecedented range and deadliness. Right will need enforcement by might, and might itself requires a sort of rightness or virtue to be sustained (335). “Adapting successfully to the world as it is should be understood as an energizing opportunity, not a regretful, perhaps even degrading necessity” (327-328). In wartime, under conditions of popular rule, stoicism only goes so far. Senator Benton understood that, and Roosevelt admires him for it. “Perhaps the tension between assertive courage and moderation cannot be overcome, but it is reduced by Roosevelt’s explicit effort to limit his support for national expansion to the unique historical circumstances present in mid-nineteenth century America: no clear individual or national titles to a vast expanse of largely unpopulated or unsettled land” (328)—the argument Locke had made two centuries earlier.

Roosevelt finds prudence necessary above all in the act of founding a new regime. Cromwell and the Puritans had “excellent” moral principles, but in attempting to irrigate a society with them in undiluted form they fell short of the Christian and Aristotelian moral standard of prudence. Morris and the American Founders did not fall short of that standard. Abstractly considered, they would have done well to require the abolition of slavery, but “if the Abolitionists had carried the day, the Constitution would not have been ratified, Lincoln would not have been elected, and slavery would have been perpetuated” (330). Passions, self-righteousness, but above all “an extreme form of reason itself”—”abstract, speculative reason”—threaten any genuinely moral political action (331). Like Burke and Tocqueville, Roosevelt saw this threat in the secular French Revolution as well as in the Christianly-intended Puritan Revolution in England. Like them, he sees that the Puritan and French revolutionaries lacked the practical wisdom often gained by political experience. Further, Emmert gently suggests, “Might the school of political experience teach that while common sense is indispensable, it is not sufficient, that the statesman needs some kind of political wisdom or more general knowledge to supplement common sense?” (331). For that, Roosevelt recommends the study of “political forms”—”constitutional understanding in the broader sense” (333). “Roosevelt’s account of statesmanship has general application—all statesmen must be courageous and have good judgment—but his discussion is also constitution- or regime-specific” (334).

Prudential statesmanship in behalf of republicanism requires a sober assessment of a nation’s existing fitness for self-government, ‘fitness’ being defined as “enlightenment, common sense, and morality” (336). And even a people fit for self-government will seldom find statesmen who exhibit the highest character. In Roosevelt’s judgment, the United States has seen only two such men: Washington and Lincoln. In holding them up for the consideration of his fellow-citizens, and also by asking his countrymen to think seriously about such worthy if lesser figures as Cromwell, Morris, and Benton, Roosevelt offered a political education to self-governing Americans, each generation of whom must learn from such examples. “Roosevelt’s biographies are meant to assist the American people to identify and elevate” statesmen worthy of a self-governing people (340). Paralleling the final essays of parts 1 and 2, Emmert shows that the moral principles laid down in the Bible need not issue in the political fanaticism of religious or pretended-religious bigotry. Religio-political extremism can be controlled without jettisoning moral seriousness.

The essays in this section on the American regime thus elaborate on a (thus far) successful attempt to find a political solution to the perennial questions raised in the sections on classical and modern political philosophy: the relationship of Creator to creation (including the rights endowed to the human species within that creation by that Creator); the tension, which can be vivifying, not destructive, between Jerusalem and Athens; the conflict between natural right and historicism; the relationship of philosophy as the love of wisdom, the quest for truth to the need for philosophic friendships and indeed of all human beings for friendships as seen in the families and civil associations we form. The capacity of the American regime to balance these several goods cannot fail to impress a candid world. But it is also evident that in Roosevelt we see a man who consistently champions a set of classical and biblical moral principles on philosophic and religious foundations that include many sometimes contradictory elements. The making of a regime implies a certain art—the architectonic art, as Aristotle teaches. This art needs the guidance of principles and/or persons. It is to the master-makers, the poets, that the book now turns.

IV. Histories show statesmen adjusting principles to practice; so do the other literary genres. Along with philosophy and history, poetry (understood broadly to include plays and novels) can inquire into politics in a statesmanlike and sometimes even a philosophic way. Arlene W. Saxonhouse begins part 4 with the essay “Euripides’ Democratic Critique of Democratic Athens”—a title suggesting that the most effective criticisms of a given regime may well come from those sympathetic to its principles, those who call upon their fellow-citizens to live up to the virtues they share with their friends. Recalling that the first essays of parts 1, 2, and 3 concerned Christianity and if, as Tocqueville argues, Christianity brought the principle of equality back into the world, an essay on ancient Athenian democracy will show us a regime foreshadowing Christian civilization.

If Christianity requires care for the poor, democracy means that the poor take care of themselves. Euripides democratized tragedy by bringing the poor onstage and making aristocrats seem no better than commoners—a move at least as controversial in ancient Athens as it was in 1950s America, when Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman appeared. Aristophanes has thoughtful fun with this in the Frogs, in which Dionysus judges a debate between Aeschylus and Euripides as they compete for the position of the tragedian’s chair in Hades (348). Euripides claims to have been the civic educator of the Athenian democracy, teaching the people “to think to see, to understand”—not to mention “to scheme” and “to see the bad in others” (353). Such a bringing down to earth of “the few” affirms the democratic regime’s “principle of equality” (353), a principle with both a moral and a realistic dimension. Democrats contend that the poor are just as good as the rich; they also contend that the rich are made of the same human stuff as the poor, feeling the same sentiments, thinking the same thoughts. Euripides is Hemingway to Aeschylus’ F. Scott Fitzgerald; the rich are different from you and me only because they have more money. Euripides “forces his audience to confront the challenges of democratic equality” by showing them that even egalitarians need to distinguish between “the high and the low” (354). Equality, egalitarians should understand, has limits. For example, in the Electra, “Euripides dismantles the aristocratic world of wealth and the bloodlines of those ‘shining bright enough’ where wives kill their husbands and kings cruelly abuse the children of their wives” (355). Electra sees that a humble farmer exhibits a character nearer to that of the gods than does any of the gentlefolk. But this means that democrats must acknowledge the merit of such character—the worship-worthiness of gods—and also must learn to discern it in a regime dedicated to the proposition that one cannot use external markings (of dress, of domicile) to identify fellow citizens worthy of trust. Even the aristocrats who understand this point in principle—Electra herself, Orestes—”still find themselves attached to, indeed bound by, the old symbols” (357). Democracy is much harder than it looks, both for the aristocrats and oligarchs who must adjust to it and for the democrats who find themselves charged with the new responsibility of self-government. This does indeed recall Tocqueville’s paradoxical reminder that democratizing Christianity is a precious legacy of aristocratic regimes, when men would accept a revelation ‘from on high’ without the corrosive egalitarian spirit that can bedevil democracies, turning them to pantheism in religions and to soft despotism in politics.

Moreover, there will always be those like Eteocles in the Phoenician Women. Eteocles calls “doing injustice beautiful,” appealing to inequality not by the way of moralizing he despises but by valorizing his own tyrannical ambitions (359). The proto-Machiavellian call to see men as they are may inspire such souls to see themselves as they are: insatiably ambitious, eager to reject all moral principles said to come down from ‘on high’ in order to aggrandize themselves. The tribe of the lion and the eagle conjured by Lincoln have an insatiable appetite for democratic sheep and their lambs. Euripides thus “uncovers some of the unpleasant consequences and inherent contradictions that surface with the rejection of the heroic past”—consequences also seen in Alcibiades and similar men who appear in both Plato’s philosophic dialogues and Thucydides’ history, rejecting equality and nobility. “Euripides’ plays do not answer these challenges, but through the power of his works he forces us to confront difficult truths about our politics,” a politics that attempts “to incorporate principles of equality” (359). Alcibiades anticipates Tocqueville’s nemesis, the eagle Napoleon.

The next essayist considers one of the most notorious examples of such a man, one who rose to power atop the dead bodies of what Montesquieu would later call aristocratic republicans. Timothy Spiekerman discusses Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s portrayal of the conspiracy whereby republican aristocrats Brutus and Cassius assassinated the assassin of Roman republicanism but failed to restore the old regime, the republic. Spiekerman recommends thinking of the conspiracy in an anti-historicist way: What if it had succeeded? This opens up the possibility that the republic regime itself might return, and perhaps that every regime is a permanent possibility, something to be watched for, prepared for or guarded against, as circumstances change.

The circumstances in Rome included a populace greedy for ever more wealth and imperial expansion and a set of military leaders with political ambitions backed by soldiers loyal to their leaders and not to the regime—a political condition seen in many times and places. Shakespeare’s “account of the republic’s demise shares more of the ambiguity and nuance of Plutarch than the decisive clarity of Machiavelli” (364)—more of classical prudence than of modern theory. Although critical of the fickle and turbulent Roman people, whose republican virtues have faltered, Shakespeare does not necessarily give them up as politically hopeless. Rather, he blames the republican conspirators for three mistakes: not killing Antony along with Caesar; allowing a public funeral for Caesar (“with Marc Antony as the featured speaker!”); and botching the timing of engagement on the Philippi battlefield (366). The causes of these mistakes are Brutus’ moral delicacy and intellectualism and, “most important,” the superstition of both Brutus and Cassius. the noble Brutus lends moral stature to the conspiracy; Cassius lends prudence, but Antony is the one who gets the corrupt people to lend him their ears, and he had to be stopped from doing that, for the conspirators to succeed. Brutus fails because he underestimates Antony’s rhetorical and military skills, and also because “no one contemplates killing Octavius, who proves to be the most dangerous and effective politician in Rome” (367). From these misjudgments, to the suicides of Cassius and of Brutus, the conspirators’ “failure is in some sense self-inflicted” (369). Shakespeare differs from his predecessor, Euripides, in wanting not only to educate ‘the many’ but also to educate ‘the few’ with respect to defending ‘the many’ in a republican regime.

Charles de Gaulle once described a Roman Stoic as “superstitious, like all atheists” [17]. And so Spiekerman sees both the conspirators and their victim: “Caesar, Brutus, and Cassius share an interesting quality: all are highly rational men who eventually become superstitious” (370). The conspirators associate reason with republicanism and unreason with “tyrannical ambition,” but “this neat formula does not hold up” as the conspirators “succumb to superstition” and Octavius “will prove a model of cool rationality” (371). The ‘modern’ character in Shakespeare whom the conspirators most resemble is Hamlet; they “think too much” (376) and their guilty consciences make hesitators if not cowards of them. Had Brutus “cared less about reading philosophy deep into the night, he might not have fallen asleep and dreamed that Caesar was haunting him” (377). Men of action who speculate too intensely about “providence or cosmic necessity”—either one—may miss their chance (378). They resemble the apolitical pre-Socratic philosopher who stumbled into a ditch; even a slave-girl knows better. Not only does Shakespeare propose no Nocturnal Council, he “seems to want us to question the power of providence or fate” (379). In addition, he raises doubts about the legitimacy of the absolute monarchies seen in the Europe of his own time. “By subtly comparing Caesar’s death to Christ’s, adding ten wounds to the twenty-three reported by Plutarch and so alluding to Christ’s age at his death,” Shakespeare may not only suggest that the spirit of Caesar will live on, as Christ’s did, but that “the supernatural powers which legitimate absolute monarchy in modern Europe” may be “dependent on beliefs that are subject to doubt” (379). Shakespeare’s critique of fumbling republicans implies no praise of self-deluded monarchs.

To doubt such beliefs and to ridicule such delusions very much forms the core of Cervantes’s Don Quixote as read by Thomas L. Pangle in the central essay of part 4. To doubt such beliefs under the Spanish regime of Cervantes’s time could bring difficulties to the author of such a book; accordingly, Cervantes calls himself the “father” of the book in the sense that he compiled it; the supposed actual author is an Arab historian—or is he a “Mohammadan philosopher”?—whose work has been translated into Spanish (386). What is more, the “historian” criticizes his two main characters, “the crazy knight,” Don Quixote, and “his babbling squire,” Sancho Panza (386-387). Expertly peeling back these various fatherhoods and identities, Pangle leads us to see that the “philosopher” in question must be an Averroist, that is, one who denies that God created the universe, affirming instead that we live in an “eternally cyclical universe” (387). But why, Pangle asks, would such a philosopher expend effort and care telling the tale of a madman in order to parody the books of chivalry on which the madman models his funny life” “What is it that the books of chivalry represent?” (388).

“In the vision by which Don Quixote guides his life,” Pangle explains, “there is a continuum from the books of chivalry back to both classical antiquity and, above all, the Bible, conceived as itself the preeminent and original book of chivalry (with Catholicism considered part of this chivalry)” (389). Just as Saints Paul, George, Martin, and James were great spiritual warriors, so Don Quixote conceives of himself as a great physical warrior, although Sancho—Jeeves to the Don’s Bertie—”gratifies his master by judging that Don Quixote ‘would make a better preacher than a knight-errant'” (389). According to Don Quixote, the universal peace on earth promised in the New Testament can only occur through conquest of the earth “by Christian men of war” such as himself (390). Thus the undoing of force in the City of Man “requires the most extreme use of force”—the project of “Christian imperialism” upon which Spain had embarked (390). To see this might induce one to abandon such imperialism as fantastic, but it only pricks the Don forever forward, even as it pricked forward Mohammad, a prophet whom certain ‘Mohammadan’ philosophers might be said to have disbelieved. “Don Quixote is a noble, intelligent, highly imaginative and articulate but fanatically moralistic and pious gentleman who has become inebriated to the point of insanity by the idea of devoting his life to the imperial religious heroism and chaste love he finds commanded by sacred Scripture tinctured by classical moral philosophy” (390). At one level, them, Cervantes slightly undermines the great political project of the greatest modern state of his time, in which he happened to reside.

More radically, and more dangerously, Don Quixote consists of “a preposterously exaggerated but safely revealing representation of how the great monotheistic religions, taken together, appear to ‘a philosopher'” (391). Most especially, the philosopher will wonder at the pious belief “in all-encompassing particular providence” (391). He will contrast such providence with Fortuna, “viewed as heaven’s rival,” Pangle observes, in a citation that happens to be listed in the seventh of his thirteen footnotes (391). In answer to the biblical assertion of the existence of a personal Creator-God, “Cervantes depicts or explores, in comic and unforgettable fashion, what it means to try to live conceiving of reality after having jettisoned, in the name of belief in divine omnipotence, the notion of natural necessity” (392). What it means is an epistemological infinite regress: The more often the Creator-God intervenes in His world through His providence, the more unreal His creation becomes; Quixote “sees the given world as in large part a cover for a dramatically mysterious reality in which superhuman agents engage in a struggle of good and evil, into which are drawn the saints and religious heroes” (392). Quixote’s lady-love, Dulcinea, “the supreme test” of his faith-based understanding of the world and his place in it, the “divinity to whom [he] offers prayers and from whom he experiences intimate inspiration,” may be described by Sancho as a “coarse peasant girl” whom he’s known for years, but to Quixote this only means that Sancho is the victim of enchantment “that makes her appear so” (392).

Underlining the parallel not so much to Mary but to Jesus Himself, Pangle writes, “Don Quixote cannot unwavering maintain this faith in the independent status and unchanging essence of the incarnate divinity. Precisely because divinity as Dulcinia is so intimately involved with his human existence and suffering, Don Quixote is driven to conceiving of his divine Dulcinea as having been in herself at least temporarily, ‘enchanted, offended, changed, altered, transformed’ by his wizard-enemies; Don Quixote is driven to conceive of his divinity as having undergone a degradation from which she herself actually suffers” (394-395). And even Quixote’s seemingly bottomless well of belief runs dry on occasion, as when he “confesses” that Dulcinea’s divinity is a product of his imagination: “the ‘fiery light of faith’ manifests itself as sometimes flickering” (394).

Who can Cervantes hold up against such an antic being? In a speech tinctured with enough commonsense realism to make Pangle suspect Cervantes himself may have taken it seriously, Quixote praises a way of life different from his own, “the life of a judge devoted not to war (or to Quixotic ‘peace’) but to justice,” exemplified by an actual judge in the Spanish colony of Mexico who briefly turns up in the book. “Could Cervantes be inviting us to imagine, as exemplary of true manly virtue, a well-orchestrated synthesis of Sancho and Don Quixote, elevating the former and bringing down to earth the latter—a ruler who combined legislative and judicial common sense with warrior courage and a nonfanatic capacity for devotion to ruling?” (397). And the synthesizer? “In the prologue to the second volume Cervantes identifies himself as, not a warrior-ruler, but a warrior-poet” (397). Cervantes conceives of Don Quixote as a sort of therapeutic counter-toxin to the hallucinogenic Bible and its derivative chivalric substances. Against Lawler’s argument, then, Pangle would wonder how—if the ultimate reality is an omniscient, omnipotent Person who cares providentially about each of us—we humans could possibly distinguish the genuine revelations and other interventions of our Creator from our own imaginings, especially those spurred perhaps by our all-too-human follies and passions. If we do not stick with the reasonable inductions and deductions from what our inner Sancho knows, will we not mistake congenial and elevating delusions for the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and rampage through the world as fools and knaves in consequence? Sancho too is a sort of conscience. Logos with a capital L must heed logos with a small l. Lawler might argue in reply that this is exactly what reason great and small both do by starting with the human person and reasoning from there, avoiding world-conquering imperial quests in the calm conviction that God already owns and rules the world He created. Once Lawler sees that this is a regime animated by agape and not a cosmopolitanism ruled by eros his argument will also confound Machiavelli’s opposite complaint—that Christianity fails by being insufficiently political.

Edith Wharton’s gentry-class New Yorkers of the 1870s inhabit a decidedly down-to-earth place but are no less constrained in thought and behavior—under the regime of the U. S. Constitution, no less—than Inquisition-era Spaniards. Or, as she puts it, their customs rule them as despotically as “the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of [their] forefathers thousands of years ago” (402). Christine Dunn Henderson of the Liberty Fund undoubtedly has managed her share of seminars for academics, so the power of social convention can scarcely have been lost on her, and she shows every evidence of being well attuned to the much higher society described in The Age of Innocence—which is anything but academic or Edenic. the “ill-fated love” of the socialites Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska animates a story of “desire thwarted by the protaganists’ loyalty and sense of duty to the moral codes of their society.” In Wharton’s New York, where ingrained conventions “interact with change and with character” (400-401), aristocratic social convention leads her protagonists in a direction resolutely in-Quixotic but hardly less deluded.

“Regimes…are most stable when laws and mores reinforce one another,” but as Tocqueville had argued a few decades before Wharton’s time, and as Wharton also sees, mores exert “greater power [than laws] when laws and mores conflict” (401). Legally, American may be the land of liberty, but socially—not so. At least in its upper classes, mores have become a second nature—so much so that silent hints rule even more surely than speech, and indeed make speech unnecessary for the enforcement of mores (402). the “embodiment of New York convention” is Newland’s wife, May, who “proves remarkably—even stubbornly—content with the world exactly as she knows it,” and remains largely untouched by emotion, ideas, and even experience (405). Niceness is her byword, shared by all those of her class. “She is a construct,” but “not a self-construct,” not a self-made woman; “she is a creation of society” (405). Creationism thrives in gentry-class New York, but it is a thoroughly human creationism, and one that needs no creative Word to call it into being, ruling quite effectively without much verbiage of any sort, thank you.

Mya’s husband, Mr. Newland, “something of an intellectual who is interested in what lies beyond his narrow world,” has grown a bit restive in this milieu (411). The arrival of Ellen from Europe—today the frisson can only be imagined—”provides him with a concrete object for many of his vague feelings or yearnings” (411). Wharton is too much the realist to let him break free, and in due course Ellen is packed off to the Continent where her outré personality will cause less of a stir. Nonetheless, Wharton also hints—again, Tocqueville-like—that “the mores of New York’s aristocracy are not exempt from gradual modification” (413). Something called the Metropolitan Opera House is planned for the far northerly reaches of Manhattan—the forties—and indeed “the dominance of English surnames over the older Dutch ones…reminds us of change’s inevitability” (413). More important, the democratizing mores of the larger society are even now seeping into this bastion of old-regime Old-Worldism in the New World. We learn that a young lady of dubious parentage will—a couple of decades later, to be sure—find welcome in the New York of her time on the grounds that she is “pretty, amusing, and accomplished” (413). Upon reflection, it is reasonable to wonder if the new New York will be better than the old one. Convention seems to honor itself—aristocratic social privilege, custom for custom’s sake—or to honor nature in its more frivolous and superficial aspects—nature as perceived by democrats. What’s needed is a set of aristocrats who understand what republicanism needs, but no sufficiently thoughtful and steadfast souls seem to be there—except perhaps Wharton herself. Despite living at the same time in the same country, Miss Wharton and Booker T. Washington do not often get compared (much less paired), but each sought to educate the next generation.

The book’s final essay moves readers from considering the gradual erosion of real-world conventions toward considering attempts (one is tempted to call them secular-Quixotic) to sweep all existing conventions aside in another, determinedly revolutionary form of human creationism. Michael Davis understands Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays, The Coast of Utopia, as a (yes) playful and philosophical treatment of “philosophy, political and otherwise” (420-421). Stoppard brings reality to utopia’s coast by bringing real Russian utopians of the nineteenth century—Bakunin, Belinsky, Herzen—to his stage. The dreaming Herzen conjures the self-described discoverer of scientific socialism, Karl Marx, claiming that at the end of History “at last the unity and rationality of history’s purpose will be clear to everyone,” that all seemingly “vicious, mean, and ugly” actions and things “will be understood as a part of a higher reality, a superior morality against which resistance is irrational” (421).

One problem with these dreams is that the dreamer forgets himself, again rather like the philosopher who fell into a ditch while gazing at the heavens. But the circumstances differ: The old philosopher was comical, the butt of a slave-girl’s laughter, while the theorizing of modern utopians brings on “despotic tyranny” (426). Stoppard’s somewhat foolish but sane hero, Herzen, disputes Marx’s vision, saying, “History has no culmination! There is always as much in front as behind. There is no libretto. History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance” (427). But Stoppard draws Herzen realistically, that is, as a man who sees utopia for what it is but cannot quite give it up, returning to it like a drunk to his cozy neighborhood tavern. “Stoppard recognizes that the grandest attempt to articulate this sort of knowledge of the whole”—the whole of the course of events, said to unfold like a logical syllogism—”began with Kant and extended through the tradition of German Idealism and especially Hegel” (429). Their historicism, the secular and putatively rationalist form of providentialism, led its dupes into the tragicomic, monstrous tyrannies of the century to come—to the worst dystopias. Although each of the philosophers in this line attempted to account for the human “self” within History, each remained “curiously blind to the self,” with its quirks and swerves (429)—its individuality, as Lawler calls it. In attempting to find comprehensive laws for Being-as-Time, they failed to do what Socrates had commended and Pangle does recommend: “acknowledge our ignorance” (429). “Stoppard’s affection for his utopians is nothing less than his affection for humanity, for a certain dreaming—idealizing—is at the core of us and places us forever just off the coast of utopia” (430). Stoppard’s utopians forget their own humanity, but Stoppard never does, and never lets his audiences forget it.

The poiēsis or making of these poets consists not only of making plays and novels but of the formation of certain kinds of citizens. Euripides and Shakespeare consider the kinds of citizens that ‘the many’ might be made into—from a howling mob susceptible to tyranny to a politeuma of thoughtful and friendly republicans. They teach that the various regimes that might arise upon an egalitarian social foundation are not evergreen—once founded, always green—but vulnerable. They are nonetheless perennial—sometimes dormant, seemingly dead, but capable of returning when conditions improve. The egalitarians and liberty-loving religion or spiritual regime of Christianity accentuates the need for doctrinal certainty among citizens, putting a certain kind of pressure upon political philosophers who, as philosophers, often must feel satisfied with loving wisdom without much certainty respecting their attainment of it. But at least in Pangle’s hands, Don Quixote illustrates the difficulties Christianity itself confronts respecting certainty. Does my certainty as a Christian make me a madman impervious to contrary evidence? Am I only certain in the depths of error? Pangle attempts to do for Christians what Socrates does for Euthyphro, although, as Lawler demonstrates, the very character of the biblical God puts up much more resistance to such a putative therapeutic.

The combination of Christian creationism and Christian egalitarianism issues in a pair of homely twins: the more or less mindless (unspoken, silently enforced) conservativism seen in Wharton’s aristocrats and the political radicalism and sub-philosophic intellectualism seen in Stoppard’s utopians. The poets thus understand democracy in America as benefited by a prudent republicanism that democrats sustain only with difficulty, and to which aristocrats (who seldom read Tocqueville, at least in Wharton’s New York) can offer no real guidance, only a sort of dumb, rear-guard resistance. These twin human ‘creationisms’ offer no substitute for the divine creationism they imitate so badly. This provides a continued opening for something between conservatism (so understood) and radicalism—namely, liberalism classical and modern, each understood as finding a reasonable accommodation between philosophy and theology in the “natural rights republic.”

Conclusion. What we have here is a festschrift as ‘exceptional’ as the American regime itself—a festschrift that is also a book. The overarching or architectonic theme of the book—natural right and political philosophy—leads the reader into thinking about the kinds of regimes that might sustain the relationship between those two elements in this world. Politically, liberalism gives citizens in the large, centralized modern states an opportunity for self-government—that would otherwise be lost with the disappearance of the polis. When animated by a doctrine of natural rights, as in Locke, liberalism also provides civic space for the cross-cutting regime of the City of God, variously interpreted. Pious citizens of various confessional stripes along with the less pious, may follow their convictions insofar as those comport with natural rights and the civil rights that prudential statesmen assert and defend within a carefully designed framework of ruling institutions. This, too, fosters politics or reciprocal rule and a way of life hospitable to reasoning. Intellectually, that civic life affords an unprecedented degree of freedom of thought. Under the liberal dispensation, both Socrates and Jesus would undoubtedly find the martyrdom they sought, but they would need to be martyred in some other way than they were, inasmuch as liberalism rightly understood makes us understand that both friendship and truth are dear—and indeed sometimes dearly bought, when in need of defense from their enemies.

 

Notes

1. See George Anastaplo on the habits of exercise of his philosophic friend Harry V. Jaffa, in George Anastaplo: The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce (Chicago: Swallow, 1983), 477; in this matter, at least, Jaffa looks Xenophontic, Anastaplo Aristotelian.
2. Citing Catherine H. Zuckert: Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 143-146.
3. Leo Strauss: Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 8.
4. See Catherine H. Zuckert: Postmodern Platos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Plato’s Philosophers, op. cit. On Aristotle, see Catherine H. Zuckert: “Aristotle on the Limits and Satisfactions of Political Life,” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 11, no.2 (May 1983) 185-206, in which one finds the following trenchant sentence: “The concept of ‘regime’ is central to [Aristotle’s] political science, because he understands political order as a compound or articulation of several irreducibly different parts” (188).
5. David Lewis Schaefer: The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
6. See Benjamin Constant: “On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns,” in Biancamaria Fontana, ed.: Benjamin Constant: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 309-328.
7. Nathan Tarcov: Locke’s Education for Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
8. Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince, chapter 18.
9. Stanley Rosen: G. W. F. Hegel: Introduction to the Science of Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
10. Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert: The Truth about Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy and American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
11. Leo Strauss: On Tyranny, rev. ed. ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
12. We see this exclusiveness also in Lawler’s essay “American Nominalism and Our need for the Science of Theology” (First Principles: ISI Web Journal, March 28, 2008), where Judaism is never mentioned. Lawler gives evidence of defending but also extending he doctrine of Catholic personalism, seen in the writings of two recent popes: John Paul II and Benedict XVI—citing, in the latter article, Benedict’s Regensburg lecture, his encyclical on love (Deus Caritas Est), and his essay “Truth and Freedom,” published in The Essential Pope Benedict XVI (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). John Paul’s personalism focuses on morality, arguing that the personality of human beings, derived from their creation by a personal God, implies (in a sort of Christianizing of Kant) that human beings must be treated as ends, not as means. Benedict’s personalism focuses on the social dimension of personality—the relations human beings have with one another and with their Creator. Lawler extends this doctrine by making it an argument for the existence of God Himself, reasoning backward from the self-evident truth that all of us (including scientists) conceive of ourselves as persons, whatever scientists may say to the contrary. This requires us to wonder how our individuality or personhood came about.
13. See David Hume: An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, section III, Part II (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 24; it should be needless to say that Hume immediately dismisses such claims as fanatical.
14. Here it is important to emphasize that the American Founders were much more likely to consult political philosophers and other writers who combined natural-rights doctrines with Protestant Christianity. See, for example, Michael Zuckert’s illuminating chapters on Hugo Grotius in Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 97-149. And, given Zuckert’s demonstration that Locke and the Founders were not Grotians, one should also consider the way in which Locke himself presents himself as a trustworthy Protestant Christian. See Harry V. Jaffa: A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 24, 111-112, 417, 427; among other points, Jaffa sharply distinguishes Locke’s understanding of human nature from that of Rousseau. For an understanding of Locke that differs significantly from those of Zuckert and of Lawler, see Thomas G. West: “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29, no. 2 (2012) 1-50. For the same author’s assessment of Zuckert’s view, see “Nature and Happiness in Locke,” Claremont Review of Books 4, no. 2 (Spring 2004) 54-57; for his assessment of Lawler’s view, see “Locke’s Neglected Teaching on Morality and the Family,” Society 50, no. 5 (2013) 472-476. Contra Lawler and Zuckert, West argues (greatly elaborating on Jaffa) that Locke is much closer to Aristotle than to the moderns. Indeed, in light of the sterner views of Xenophon seen in this volume, one might even say that West’s Locke shares some of the moral iron of the old philosopher-general. It is important to notice that Lawler’s argument about the impersonality of Lockeanism would carry over to an Aristotelian Locke as well, inasmuch as Aristotle’s ‘god’—pure thought thinking itself—asserts the existence of no Creator-Thinker.
15. Lawler, “American Nominalism,” op. cit. Here Lawler runs into a problem that may be of his own making. He understands God’s love—and therefore man’s love, too—as “erotic”; he therefore wonders, “How can it be that such a God is erotic or animated by a passionate sense of incompleteness?” But God’s love isn’t erotic; it is agapic. That is, it isn’t needy but gracious—condescending in the sense still used by Jane Austen. God lovingly—that is, charitably—wills the best for His creation, including the creatures within it that He has created (out of nothing) and formed (out of clay or dust) to be most like himself. What is seen in agape but not in eros is the right to rule: the good ruler wants the best for the ruled. To be created and formed in God’s “image”— tzelem Elohim —is to be capable of naming the kinds or species of plants and animals—i.e., to recognize their forms, the ideas of them, in the many specimens or particulars; to be created and formed in God’s image is also to be capable of ruling that creation, under God; finally, to be created and formed in God’s image implies sociality and generativity—”Male and female He create them”—the basis for the family, which itself becomes the basis of tribes and of political societies. Recall that this parallels Socrates’ argument in the Euthyphro. To take Lawler’s insights and to correct two of them—by seeing that the Christian is not “apolitical” or “cosmopolitan” but a citizen of two regimes (the City of God and his own earthly city) and by changing “eros” for “agape”—one makes Lawler’s claims more coherent and no less rational.
16. For the best scholarly monograph on Roosevelt’s political thought, see Jean Yarbrough: Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). Yarbrough attempts to make the theoretical grounding of Roosevelt’s thought coherent by reading his late turn toward historicism/Progressivism as the culmination of a lifelong intellectual trajectory. For a contrary view, which sees the only true consistency in Roosevelt’s thought on the moral level, see Will Morrisey: The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).
17. André Malraux: Felled Oaks: Conversation with De Gaulle, Terence Kilmartin translation (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971), 44.

 

Christopher Coker: Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.

 

Coker takes his title from Rousseau’s complaint about theories of ‘just war’ as philosophers have argued them. (“Barbarous philosopher! Come and read us your book on the field of battle.”) His self-described “big claim” is that, far from being barbarians, philosophers “invented” war, by which he doesn’t really mean they invented it but that they “discovered and clarified” its “nature,” distinguishing limited, rule-governed, purposeful conflict from “warfare” or the unlimited conflict of all against all, driven by passions. “A product of reason,” war aims at security, liberty, and justice. However, in line with au courant ‘postmodernism,’ he claims that for Aristotle and other Greeks “reason itself was in essence political.” That is, he denies the Socratic claim that philosophy consists of an ascent from the cave. “Plato was the product of his age. We cannot escape the times in which we live.” He takes his cue instead from the pragmatist Richard Rorty, who argues that “contexts provided by theories are tools for effecting change.” That is to say, reason doesn’t escape the cave, it builds the cave. Neither nature nor ‘History’ provides meaning to war. Everything is political.

Coker divides his book into nineteen chapters, the first three being introductory. The following sixteen chapters are organized in seven groups, in each of which he addresses a central question raised by a philosopher:
1. Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? (Heraclitus, chapters 4-7).
2. Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? (Aristotle, chapters 8-10).
3. Why are mercenaries, many of whom are often professional fighters, so distrusted? (Machiavelli, chapter 11).
4. Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? (Hobbes, chapters 12-13).
5. Why should we do nothing in war that compromises peace? (Kant, chapters 14-15).
6. Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? (Marx, chapters 16-18).
7. Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? (Heisenberg, chapter 19).
Coker does not limit himself to these philosophers, but ranges widely over the major figures of political-philosophic thought. His sweeping and paradoxical formulations—at times it’s rather as if the brightest English schoolboy in his form has been nipping at the bottle of Nietzsche his elders hid in the cupboard—will worry or annoy scholars who prefer more careful textual analyses. (For example, he tells us early on that Rousseau “believed that human beings were, by nature, sociable and peaceful.” Well, no: Rousseau believes that human beings are by nature peaceful because they are asocial.) Better to read his book exactly as his subtitle suggests: as a series of reflections or meditations on themes found in those texts.

Why are war and peace so difficult to distinguish? Heraclitus regards the cosmos itself as warlike, distinguishing its flux from sheer chaos, even as philosophers will come to distinguish war from warfare. Flux is constant, but it has a certain discernible order, not to be confused with Hegelian teleology and its ‘cunning of reason’ or immanent dialectical progress toward the ‘end of History.’ Thucydides is closer to the mark, teaching that war is “violent” but also a “teacher.” One thing it teaches is complexity; when a polis goes to war it may anticipate one outcome but it will very often get another. “What the Athenians learned about themselves from the disaster was their almost limitless capacity for self-deception”—or, at least, that’s what Thucydides tried to teach them. War also teaches tragedy, that even heroes have their flaws, issuing in fatal misjudgments leading to unmerited or disproportionate punishment. Both of these points being true, war also teaches that “the quest for security can result in even greater insecurity” or what writers today now call ‘imperial overstretch’—famously, the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition.

Coker supposes that Plato’s philosophic task was reformist: “to ensure that the social discord that the war had produced within Athens and that had led to Socrates’ death should never break out again.” This means that initially he takes Plato’s Socrates without irony; to Coker, the elaborate education Socrates lays out in the Republic is seriously intended to be implemented in Athens. He is right about one thing, that Socrates teaches “war is not the be-all and the end-all of life; it is not the highest good, or the highest human calling.” Philosophy is. But although he soon and rightly comes around to remarking that the ‘ideal’ regime Socrates describes is part of “a thought-experiment,” he doesn’t understand the dialogue as a defense of the philosophic life, objecting that “the role of reason” as a ruler cannot work because “human beings are not always principled, or consistent—they have an emotional life.” Indeed so: which is why the Athenians executed Socrates and then regretted it. But Coker, following Rorty, supposes that the democratic regime of Athens had nothing to do with the rule of passion. On the contrary, “it just so happens that democracies tend” to keep “the passions in check” and “different principle in balance” “better than most other political systems” because “they channel them in more creative ways.” This is to confuse Athenian democracy with Madisonian republicanism, a confusion Madison himself did not share.

Coker does better with the Ion, a shorter and simpler dialogue. In that dialogue, Socrates encounters a rhapsode, a memorizer and singer of poems, and argues that the Iliad had “locked the Greeks into” a “perpetual song,” seducing them into “fighting war by the wish to imitate the exploits of Achilles and Hector.” He rejects Ion’s claim to divine inspiration, a point that Coker makes but then blurs by claiming that Plato objects to artists because “they tend to refashion [reality] to suit the aesthetic demands of their own art.” ‘Aesthetic’ isn’t a Platonic term, however. It is squarely the claim to revelation poets make that Plato’s Socrates objects to; Plato’s dialogues are themselves works of art, so that can’t be the underlying problem. Coker goes on to make a pitch for art as evocative of “empathy,” a Rousseauian notion. This, I guess, is how Coker answers his first question, why war and peace are so hard to distinguish. With the right kind of war (there is no right kind of warfare) as depicted by the right kind of poetry or art, we can become empathetic, and therefore less inclined to warfare. He rejects philosophic dialectic as the way to do this because human beings are too emotional to be ruled by reason.

Why is war not the suspension of politics, but its continuation in a different form? Aristotle answers that “the only merit of war…is to yield a political result.” This is the purpose of statecraft, to establish reasonable or prudent measures to achieve political purposes. (While Coker denies the capacity of reason to achieve theoretical truths, in his pragmatism he proves friendlier to ‘practical reason,’ a sort of reasoning that can stay ‘inside’ the cave. He goes so far as to assert that “our humanity” itself consists “in the use of reason in action.”) “Strategy is the military realization of statecraft.” If it is not so understood, war will become a way of life unto itself, as it has with the Spartans. “But what does it profit a society to win a war if it goes on toe lose the peace that its victory secures?” He praises Tacitus and Clausewitz for continuing and elaborating Aristotle’s insight. This sets up a polemic against the United States, which (he alleges) yields itself to “an incipient desire to destroy what it cannot redeem.” Fortunately, “the American empire is aging fast,” although “there is life in it yet,” and therefore folly and danger, in which its allies (read Coker’s Britain) often make themselves complicit. He concludes his discussion of the relation of war to politics by very sensibly concurring with Augustine that “peace is never final” or perpetual on this earth, prior to the intervention of God, although the momentum of this thought leads him into a foolish account of the Americans’ regime change in Japan subsequent to victory in the Second World War.

Why are mercenaries so distrusted? Coker claims that Machiavelli takes his cue from Renaissance artists’ discovery of perspectivism, which “introduced the world to the  metaphysical as well as artistic idea of the vanishing point beyond which the world ceases to exist, because it is beyond the reach of our senses.” Such a misunderstanding of perspective could only result from an underlying, radical cognitive subjectivism, however, and Machiavelli is no cognitive subjectivist. The world is very real, indeed; the point is to master it. Coker does get that, remarking Machiavelli’s encouragement of “unlimited” human ambition (an encouragement more than a little rhetorical, since it makes princes into disciples of the prince of princes, Machiavelli). He also claims that Machiavelli teaches that “it is human beings who give the world the form it possesses”: not exactly, but he does urge them to try to reform what they are given. Although he claims that for Machiavelli “human desire is infinite because it lacks a definite object,” he somehow elides Machiavelli and Plato, despite the theory of the ideas or forms, especially the idea of the good, all of which put limits on human desire. This gets him to an endorsement of Quentin Skinner’s misinterpretation of Machiavelli as a civic republican, no friend of princes at all, but this misinterpretation at least enables him to say why mercenaries are distrusted: They are not good civic republicans, and indeed pose a threat to republican regimes.

Why is competitiveness positive, and competition not? Here he comes to Hobbes. For reasons best known to himself, he makes Hobbes into a philosopher of “historical consciousness,” not a defender of a theory of natural rights. most urgently the right to life. Coker rejects Hobbes’s state-of-nature theory, the notion of nature as a condition of war and indeed (in Coker’s vocabulary) warfare, saying that such a condition isn’t perpetual, only sporadic, in “hunter-gatherer” societies. But Hobbes doesn’t need to claim that there are no periods of peace or rest in such societies, only that they enjoy no security from the threat of the outbreak of warfare. Coker’s real purpose here is to emphasize “the fact that we politicize war” (emphasis in original) in three ways: by lending it “social substitutability,” that is, by redirecting feuding among families to the larger stage of society, thereby diluting motives of personal vengeance; by organizing it, introducing division of labor, fixed walls and ramparts, and logistical planning to the practice of warfare, thus making it into war; and by reducing the percentage of the adult population killed in warfare. In modern times, death tolls rise usually when a regime converts war into something more like warfare, often using it as a cloak for genocide. Changing warfare into war by politicizing it has been a very good thing, and, Coker argues, the more broadly a given population is politicized (as in a democracy) the more limited wars will be. This leaves out a crucial element of the so-called democratic peace theory, namely, that it isn’t republicanism alone (or commerce alone, as capitalists like to say) that prevents war but commercial republicanism—and then only among commercial republics. This is Montesquieu’s argument, but Coker’s chapter on Montesquieu never quite gets to it.

Coker invokes Kant and Hegel to help him explain why we should do nothing in war that compromises peace. He finds Kant too rationalistic and the categorical imperative too absolute to be of much use in thinking about war. In doing so he loses the sense of war as “an ethical activity.” He does retain Kant’s insistence that “we should respect our enemies,” i.e., treat them as human beings, as ‘ends’ not as ‘means.’ “Once you externalize violence onto the ‘other,’ every tool and tactic becomes justified including torture.” Coker prefers Hegel, who keeps war and soldiering within ethical bounds, especially those associated with honor, “the immaterial things that define our humanity and which define our ground of freedom”—a thought he invests with considerable ontological freight in claiming that ‘History’ “mov[es] from the ‘realm of necessity’ into the realm of freedom'” precisely through this overcoming of material instinct, especially the fear of violent death central to Hobbes’s moral and political philosophy. Coker also endorses Hegel’s valorization of social cooperation via war; war “teach[es] us the contingency of life,” that “history does not come to an end when we die.” If so, then in war men learn to cooperate with one another, sacrifice themselves for one another and for the larger and higher entity, the State, which will survive after they do, and which itself will (even in its own mortality) contribute to the dialectical progress of ‘History.’ Finally, Coker writes that Hegel finds the meaning of human life in this “collective sacrifice”: “History becomes a mythical court of appeal which ante-dates all historicity and demands that every event should be understood as being in accord or not with a human destiny. Destiny is a cultural construction.” Coker thus attempts to make Hegel into a sort of post-modern; to do so he must ignore the Absolute Spirit, which unfolds rationally, according to the laws of (Hegelian) logic, and is no “cultural construction” although it does effect such construction.

Why is the essence of military technology not ‘technological’? Coker asks Marx, Heidegger, Engels, and Nietzsche. He finds Marx not quite up to the task, as Marx was “a better political economist than he was a philosopher” (a point disputed by those of us who maintain he was equally bad at being both). In this, Coker betrays his roots in British logical positivism, complaining that Marx “imported into philosophy quite unsubstantiated and unsustainable moral factors which told his readers what to aim for”; the distinction between rational, philosophic thinking (logic, ‘metaphysics’ generally) and supposedly emotional, sub-rational moral and political assertion comes to us from A. J. Ayer and his brethren. Nonetheless, “Marx’s genius was to recognize that it is in the nature of war we are what we build“; on these grounds, Marx is a genius insofar as he can be bent to the purposes of postmodernist constructivism. Accordingly, Heidegger is the real hero when it comes to distinguishing military technology from the merely ‘technological.’ The ‘technological’ is the merely instrumental, but the ‘essence’ of technology “is how it changes our relationship with the world as well as our relationship to ourselves.” “We are the technology we use”—a sobering thought for tappers on computer keyboards. Again, associating morality with emotion, Coker associates human purposes with use, with what we do, and with how we feel about what we do. Or, as Friedrich Engels claims, “we produce ourselves through labor.” This fits Nietzsche better than it does Engels, who was as much an aspiring scientist as anyone who ever put pen to paper. Nietzsche’s warrior “finds his humanity in war.” Military technology serves not commodious self-preservation of the body but self-sacrificing spiritedness extending, ultimately, beyond even the nation to “an imagined community larger than the nation—the human community,” to the liberation of the oppressed of that “community.” Speaking of imagination, it takes a lot of it to press Nietzsche into the service of the liberation of ‘the many,’ those long-eared, braying ones whom Nietzsche would see ruled by the “planetary aristocracy.”

And finally: Why, despite the rules, is war still an art, not a science? For this Coker turns to a scientist, Werner Heisenberg. “Whenever philosophers have claimed access to the truth (whenever they have attempted like Marx to turn philosophy into a science) the outcome has ended in disaster.” Heisenberg comes in handy, here, because for him science itself ends not in knowledge but in uncertainty: the Indeterminacy Principle. According to it, “there are no fixed things, no fully specifiable entities”; causes have no predictable effects, and this is especially true (beyond the realm of subatomic particles/waves) in war, which so easily turns to warfare. “The chance element is inherent in the nature of the quantum system” and does not arise “merely from our limited grasp of all the variables that affect the system.” In modern physics, “energy” is the equivalent of “fire” in Heraclitus. Philosophers have failed to see this because they never get out of the cave, remaining bound by “cultural bias,” time-boundedness, “personal idiosyncrasy,” and the warlikeness or polemicism of (Western) philosophy. Then again, postmodernist pragmatism may well be equally bound by the egalitarianism that the Nietzsche it abuses would have deplored, but I wax polemical and so shrink back, chastened by the dangers of playing with fire. I will venture so far as to suggest that particle/wave theory may not get us very far in understanding chemistry, biology, morality, politics, or indeed much of physics, which remains steadfastly Newtonian in its larger and more concrete manifestations.