Mary Ann Glendon: The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 49, Number 4, November/December 2009.
The forum here is the public forum, the tower is the ivory tower. The publishers have not served Professor Glendon well with that subtitle; her argument has little or nothing to do with imagining the world. Quite the contrary: Almost unfailingly, she points her readers to the real world. She wants them to think about the relationship of the life of politics to the life of the mind, “the political and active way of life” as distinguished from that “which is divorced from all external things,” as Aristotle puts it in Book VII of the Politics. She addresses her argument particularly to the intelligent young, whom she has met and taught at Harvard Law School for some years. And it is for them that this book will prove most valuable. Most of the persons she considers have attracted much commentary, and she offers few novel interpretations. Combining biography with textual analysis, she draws from her examples sober and (one hopes) sobering lessons for smart and ambitious individuals drawn to the alluring role of ‘public intellectual.’ Glendon sits them down and tells them plainly, “the qualities that make a first-rate thinker are not the same as those required for success in statesmanship.” And if you think you have both sets of qualities, consider the fates of the very few who did. The melancholy truth is that you and your country might be better off if you just become a lawyer.
Taking ‘the ancients’ first, she begins with the instructively inauspicious life of Plato, himself ever mindful of the execution of Socrates by Athenian democrats. Plato’s timely twenty-year sojourn to a variety of cities undoubtedly enriched his political thought, but none of his three journeys to Syracuse ended well, despite (or maybe because of) his attempts to improve the regimes there. Upon returning to Athens, he “finally concluded that there are times when circumstances are so unfavorable that the only reasonable course for a wise man is to ‘keep quiet and offer up prayers for his own welfare and for that of his country.'” Plato devoted these last years to composing the Laws, in which “the ultimate concern” turns out to be forming good citizens—presumably, citizens who might incline toward leaving philosophers in peace. In turn, philosophers will also leave citizens in peace, aspiring not to the status of lawgiver except in the indirect manner of teaching the future lawgivers. Upon being asked, at the end of this longest Platonic dialogue, to join with his politician-friends in the founding of a new city, the Athenian Stranger maintains “a resonating silence”—the political science of politic silence. Glendon cheerfully suggests that this means the Stranger wants them to proceed by themselves from now on, which is one way to put it.
With his long experience at the highest level of Roman politics, Cicero cuts a politically more impressive figure than Socrates or Plato; his life ended as badly as Socrates’ did, but his accomplishments up until that time bespeak genuine statesmanship. Glendon admires Cicero’s understanding of political limits—not for him the grand project of re-making a regime at one pass—married to a courageous fidelity to justice; “he never abandoned his efforts to preserve republican principles from the encroachment of dictatorship on the one hand and mob rule on the other.” At the same time, he proved an eloquent defender of philosophy; his Hortensius set Augustine on a thoughtful path. These virtues came together in his defense of natural law: a restatement of natural right in terms clear enough for the defense of such right in civil societies by means of civil laws.
This Roman respect for law disappeared in the chaos that descended in the West following Rome’s debacle, but found a home in the Eastern Empire, where Justinian I and his legal adviser, Tribonian, systematized the Roman texts, producing the several magisterial legal works of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The Justinian laws clearly defined such extra-legal concepts as justice and prudence, simultaneously tying them to particular laws establishing “natural reason” among “all human beings” under those laws. lost for centuries after the Eastern Empire collapsed in its turn, the Justinian Corpus continues to form “the base from which all of today’s civil law systems emerged.” It might be added that Justinian and his team of scholars incorporated the way of life of a prophetic religion into a system of law founded on reason—no mean feat, and one attempted with less long-lasting success elsewhere.
Glendon’s next triptych of thinkers consists of the early moderns: Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. With a woman’s sure eye, she questions not only Machiavelli’s virtue (he “assert[ed], rather than prov[ed], the inadequacy of classical and, by implication, biblical thought”) and his piety (he said on his deathbed that Heaven would bore him), but also his manliness. She recalls Plato’s Seventh Letter: “Plato’s counsel was that [advisers to princes] should never pander to power”; those who do “I should consider unmanly.” Having inserted this knife, Glendon gives it a firm twist: “One wonders whether Machiavelli, il Machia, ever measured himself by Plato’s standards of manliness.”
To assert rather than prove the inadequacy of classical thought is to deny reason’s right to rule the human soul. Following Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes made reason the scout or servant of the passions. This instrumental and deductive reason, modeled on geometry, collided with the English common law tradition as articulated by the great jurist Edward Coke—enemy of Francis Bacon, Hobbes’s mentor. The legal reasoning praised by Coke was not deductive but dialectical; its “recursive self-scrutiny” enabled the English to set limits to arbitrary power—as seen most famously in the Magna Carta but also centuries later in Coke’s own career, during the course of which he defied James I in the name of Parliamentary prerogatives. “Squarely at odds with practically everything that Edward Coke had stood for,” Hobbes limited monarchic power only by the sovereignty of the people, who retained their right to self-preservation. The centrality of self-preservation in Hobbes perhaps underscores the unmanliness Glendon detects in the Machiavellian spirit.
Her third ‘modern,’ John Locke, led “a life Machiavelli would have envied, except for the absence of wenching and carousing,” as a friend of the great organizer of the Whig party, Lord Shaftesbury. A man of caution if not of Hobbesian timidity, Locke shared exile with his patron when the Catholic James II ascended to the throne, returning to England after the Glorious Revolution and publishing several of his seminal works a year later. He found a new patron, Lord Somers, and gained recognition as “the intellectual leader of the Whigs.” Such Lockean principles as the right to free religious practice, government by consent, and property eventually “penetrated American legal consciousness,” where they remain to this day to the extent that subsequent waves of philosophic revision haven’t eroded them. Glendon finds it puzzling that Locke established these principles upon natural rights rather than the “ancient ‘rights of Englishmen'”; in this she may underestimate what Locke owed to Hobbes, and therefore to Machiavelli. Perhaps the ease to which one may underestimate the Hobbesianism of Locke accounts in part for the truth of Glendon’s remark, “Few scholars or statesmen…have bridged the worlds of forum and tower as successfully as he, or with such lasting influence.”
Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville compose Glendon’s third group. All of them resist—in different ways—the Lockean settlement. She agrees with historian Paul Johnson in calling Rousseau “the very archetype” of “the secular intellectual who emerged in the eighteenth century to fill the vacuum left by the decline of clerical influence.” At the same time, Rousseau broke with his older contemporaries, the Philosophes, denying that the Renaissance and Enlightenment restoration of the classical liberal arts and sciences had improved the mores of Europeans, denying that property was a natural right, and further denying that human beings are naturally endowed with reason—thereby “striking at the very heart of the Enlightenment project.” Secularizing the Christian principle of charity or compassion by reducing it to a sentiment, Rousseau provided “a shaky foundation on which to build a just society” because “compassion, unlike charity, is not a virtue acquired by self-discipline and habitual practice. It is only a feeling and a fleeting one at that.” Although Rousseau did not lack patrons (or more accurately matrons), the link between his life and the politics of his time and of all subsequent times so far has rather been the way in which his brilliant catch-phrases (usually removed from his carefully-designed philosophic architecture) have influenced demagogues and have been deployed by them. The mood of impassioned self-indulgence that permeates so much of the life of our contemporary democracies seems to follow Rousseau, although Rousseau would be among the first to denounce us were he alive to see the spectacle we have made of ourselves.
The political philosopher of this group that Glendon admires learned the rudiments of prudence from the Catholics and Quakers who educated him in a country where non-Anglicans still felt the sting of bigotry; “children had to be taught caution at an early age,” and so Edmund Burke was taught. Unlike Rousseau, whose writings valorized sincerity, Burke commended “economy of truth.” “It is a sort of temperance,” he observed, “by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.” He took up membership in Locke’s party, the Whigs, becoming “the chief theoretician, strategist” of a section of the party opposed to King George III’s over-exercise of executive power. In this capacity, exercised not behind the scenes but while serving in Parliament, Burke attempted to conciliate the dispute between Great Britain and her American colonies, supported free trade, opposed the oppressive regime of the East India Company (Glendon compares Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings to Cicero’s prosecution of Verres), and, most memorably, predicted that the French Revolution—still in its relatively moderate phase—would descend first into terror and then into despotism under “some popular general.” “No one since Cicero had been at once so gifted in politics, and so grounded in philosophy”; by no coincidence, both men also grounded themselves in the constitutional law of a decent regime.
Tocqueville made himself a public man in a country that had no immediate or even near-term prospects for such a regime, despite his best efforts to persuade his countrymen to move in that direction. Glendon blames Tocqueville’s failure on his fragile health, mediocre oratorical skills, and overall lack of “leadership qualities”-—he was no Burke—but she credits him for opposing the arbitrary and hidebound rule of the Bourbons. She sees that France was a mess that only time, disasters, and great statesmanship would ameliorate, a nation in which two kinds of monarchists, republicans, socialists, and the Bonapartists who eventually prevailed in Tocqueville’s lifetime bubbled in a political stew of rancor, suspicion, and contempt. Tocqueville “confronted the problem facing any politician who refuses to accept party discipline or follow a party line: How could he maintain his independence without rendering himself isolated and ineffective?” He couldn’t. In his defense, could anyone have done so, under those circumstances? In fact, no one did.
Not only France but the West generally headed for ruinous times. Max Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the human-rights collaborators Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik form Glendon’s final constellation. Weber is well-suited to her theme, having written lectures squarely on it: “Science as a Vocation” in 1917 and “Politics as Vocation” in 1919. Weber described the increased specialization of life in Europe; this meant that “most scholars today could expect to spend their entire academic lives working within rather narrow confines” and therefore not directly confronting the problem of the forum and the tower. Weber went farther: Science as such has nothing much to say to politicians, beyond advice on technical matters. Scientists contemplate ‘facts’; politicians invoke ‘values.’ Scientists are not therefore amoral, however. On the contrary, the scholar who knows himself as a scholar fulfills the duty of responsibility for that vocation, that role within the modern state. Like Socrates, he “finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life.” Yet not quite like Socrates: Glendon’s Weber makes no mention of philosophic eros. In keeping with his regime, Weber spent the Great War as a director of military hospitals. But he was no mere product of the regime; he remarked that Bismarck, for all his greatness, had fatally damaged the give-and-take of any genuinely political life in Germany and he wisely urged Germany to make peace at the end of 1915, seeing that the militarists’ infatuation with submarine warfare would only draw the United States into the war. He was that rare European who did not underestimate the military prowess of the Americans. After the war, he deplored the victors’ draconian program of severe reparations and attempted to strengthen republicanism in his work on the ill-fated (because ill-designed) Weimar Constitution. Perhaps predictably, given his esteem of science, including contemporary political science, he hoped to make German civil servants into a political class. But given his underlying dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values,’ he could not find a way to avoid the unstable political dichotomy for ‘scientific’ administration on the one hand and ‘charismatic’ leadership on the other. Glendon admires Weber’s stern admonition to develop a “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” and his commendation of “the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.” One might add: Given his mistaken premises, he had no way of discovering a way for Germans to measure up to such realities outwardly.
Oliver Wendell Holmes is Glendon’s first and only American ‘public intellectual.’ Perhaps because she omits consideration of earlier American specimens of the breed—the American founding period did not lack them—she misses the radical character of Holmes’s thought. When Holmes argues that the life of the law is not logic but experience she sees that he opposes not only Kant, not only Blackstone, but also Coke—very much in the name of an updated Hobbesianism. That is, Holmes’s invocation of experience finally amounts to the rule of force over the law; Glendon quite rightly asserts that “legal realism, pragmatism, sociological jurisprudence, the law-and-economy movement, and the various schools of critical legal theory are all little more than elaborations of themes memorably articulated by Holmes.” His rejection of “human rights” as the foundation for law and for any regime featuring the rule of law stems not, however, from Hobbes—who, after all, did not claim a natural human right to self-preservation—but to historicism, which allows statesmen to posit ‘ideals’ to be ‘actualized’ in the future but only at the cost of validating those ideals solely from the fact of that actualization. That is, historicism solves Weber’s ‘facts and values’ dilemma by synthesizing facts and values. That this can be a hard moral and intellectual price to pay may be seen from the careers of the tyrants who appeared after Holmes and his generation passed away.
Charles Malik served as a Lebanese delegate to the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945. Impressed by his mastery of languages, his government had persuaded him to take leave from his position as a philosophy professor. They also saw his popularity with both Muslim and Christian students and may have liked his previous American connection; he had taken a degree from Harvard under the tutelage of Alfred North Whitehead. Upon arriving at the conference, Malike learned that the smaller countries wanted to include a declaration of human rights in the U. N. Charter. They succeeded in establishing a Human Rights Commission, which became active two years later under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt. A distinguished committee including Julian Huxley, E. H. Carr, Richard McKeon, René Cassin, Jacques Maritain, and Malike undertook what one might have supposed to haven the fruitless task of compiling a list of rights recognized across national, regime, and civilizational borders. The trick turned out to be the avoidance of any discussion of he basis of the rights; the good Catholic Maritain quipped, “We agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks why.” Communist delegates balked at the inclusion of individual rights against the states but here Mrs. Roosevelt brought them around by saying that the rights could be achieved by a variety of methods. Malik added a bit of Whiteheadian ‘process’ philosophy to bridge the gulf between individual and group rights. One may guess that Comrade Stalin weighed the propaganda value of going along with Third-World aspirations—however regrettably bourgeois they may have been—along with the amplitude of the language about means and ends (why quarrel about how to break the egg that goes into the omelet?) and gave the thing his wolf-print of approval: the sort of ideological popular-front strategy that would soon issue, he trusted, in the Socialist Tomorrow predetermined by History’s iron laws, as laid bare by Marx and Lenin. Be this as it may have been, Glendon contentedly concludes that “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights—like the Justinian Corpus Juris Civilis, the Code Napoleon, and the United States Constitution—stands as a monument of what can be achieved through creative collaboration between statespersons and scholars,” and that “Eleanor Roosevelt pioneered a mode of leadership that was highly effective in a multicultural and multidisciplinary setting.”
This book can teach ambitious young persons—whether studying law, politics, or literature—in at least two ways. First, it gives them some notion of the history of political philosophy, which they may not have received in the confusion of contemporary undergraduate education. While lifting their minds toward the heights, the book equally insists on keeping feet on the ground. Most of her heroes failed to achieve their ends, and a noticeable percentage of them died trying.
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