Chantal Delsol: Unjust Justice: Against the Tyranny of International Law. Paul Seaton translation. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society. Volume 45, Number 4, July/August 2009.

 

What certain European elites and their imitators call justice isn’t really just. According to them, justice consists of a set of legal rights enforced by the International Criminal Court in a world in which wars have become reclassified as ‘police actions.’ A world constabulary gathers up miscreants in order to bring them up on charges before said august tribunal of humane technocrats.

Chantal Delsol understands the attraction of this arrangement to her fellow Europeans. In the past century tyrants in Europe required of their subjects the sacrifice of Isaac, for isn’t the redemption of humanity in acts of class warfare or racial cleansing worth the blood? To prove one’s faith in Lenin or Hitler one needed only to violate moral law and the conscience that perceived it. “The murderous character of the twentieth century emerged from the contest between faith and morality, with faith winning out all too often” (xvi).

Under these circumstances, eliminated by mid-century but re-imagined for the remainder of it by those who lived in the shadow of nuclear weapons, Europeans understandably seek to “establish institutions of international justice” out of “a desire to make ethics or morality everywhere supreme over obedience to a leader or a system,” false gods who will not stay Abraham’s raised hand. Understandable, yes; coherent, no. Delsol unsparingly observes that rules imply ruling, and thus rulers. Permanent international courts and police forces require a de facto international government. The “new version of international law and justice” requires a world government enforcing the laws and saying what justice is. “But does universal justice exist? At what price does one establish it?” (xix)

Such philosophers as Grotius and Vattel presented the old version of international law and justice. This consisted partly of natural right—rights inhering in human beings as such—discovered and argued for by those philosophers; it also consisted partly of international customs and conventions asserted, negotiated, agreed upon by self-governed societies or states. The old international law resulted, therefore, from politics in the strict sense.

By politics in the strict sense Delsol has Aristotle in mind, and it is one of Delsol’s conspicuous merits as a political philosopher that Aristotle is never far from her mind. To see what she’s thinking, recall the account of the kinds of rule Aristotle describes at the beginning of the Politics. Human families exhibit three kinds of rule: the rule of masters over slaves; the rule of parents over children; and the mutual or reciprocal rule between husbands and wives. Although masterly and parental rule differ sharply because the first benefits ruler more than ruled, whereas the second properly benefits the children who are ruled, both center on command and obedience. Even in those benighted antique times before feminism’s blessed advent, marital rule proceeded by reciprocity, discussion, compromise—in “ruling and being ruled.” Among the several regime possibilities available to citizens in the polis, the politeia or “mixed regime” best addresses the political problem, as it takes this lesson from the family and brings it to public life. The mixed regime requires the few who are rich and the many who are poor to talk with one another before deciding on policy, to treat one another as human beings, as beings capable of reasoning and speech.

The old international law did this, too. Without establishing a world government or regime, international law established a civilized framework for talking and even for fighting. Each state retained its self-rule and therefore (so to speak) its moral integrity. The old international law provided some degree of justice—rough justice, to be sure, itself often violated. But its proponents understood politics and appreciated the place of political life as the architecture of any genuinely human life. The Bible teaches this, too; God lets His prophets talk back, and sometimes He changes His mind after they do.

The new international law, by contrast, finds its model not in the family or the polis or even in the ancient empires (which permitted, largely because they had to, considerable scope for provincial self-government). The new international law finds its model in the modern state. As conceived by Machiavelli, elaborated by Hobbes, and organized by the likes of Henry VIII and Cardinal Richelieu, the rulers of the state incline toward ‘commanding’ rule not political rule, administration not discussion. That the state is not entirely a bad thing may be seen in some societies where it does not exist—Iraq after the years right after the fall of Saddam Hussein, effected by the arrival of Americans who wanted to change the regime without quite appreciating what a regime is. That the state too often can be malign may be seen where it looms all too large—Iraq before Saddam fell, before Americans had arrived. The grandeur and misery of the modern state is the theme of Tocqueville, another of Delsol’s familiars. Tocqueville would preserve politics within statism, as did the American Founders before him; hence Tocqueville’s praise of the American solution, which he calls governmental centralization without administrative centralization, and which James Madison calls extended and federal republicanism.

Although it seems that any international law must cut across states, dilute their sovereignty, this does not necessarily mean that the ‘statist’ model disappears altogether. Advocates of the new international law would “establish a worldwide reign of justice by means of global tribunals, without any possibility of appeal” (5). These advocates prefer not to admit (perhaps even to themselves, although I doubt that) that their project does not transcend the perennial questions of states and regimes but reproduces it on a grand scale. To make this form of legalism work internationally, lawgivers and judges will be necessary. The new internationalists claim that the characteristic feature of modern statism, the princely executive, will no longer tyrannize. But while the rule of the few (namely the lawyers) worries one less than the rule of the tyrannical one, might it not institute the other kind of despotism Tocqueville fears, “soft” despotism? Soft despotism would relieve human beings of politics, relieve them not of their humanity, which endures, but of the exercise of their humanity, the full expression of our nature as homo rationalis et civilis. 

Political reason and civility differ from scientific reason and administration. To think again of the family, one ordinarily prefers the intimacy of talk between husband and wife to the therapeutic interventions of the marriage counselor; the counselor knows more about marriage, but the husband and wife know more about their marriage, about one another. In politics, “do we have to castigate the Cambodians, if they decide not to prosecute Pol Pot’s thugs?” (23). Maybe the larger justice of a reconciled society will benefit Cambodians more than exact justice done to each person. This is not moral relativism; it is prudence, and prudence serves justice at least as well as law, which characteristically requires that one size fits all Such unreasonable rationality obliges us to attempt unjust justice. “In order to make [the search for a world state] go away, human beings—all of them—will have to be truly reasonable, and not merely rational” (36).

“It is therefore rather curious to observe Europeans declaim against the Manicheanism of the United States” (41). Not only is the pot calling the kettle black, but the kettle, with its Wilsonian soot removed, turns out not to have been black. The Founders wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” They did not imagine that George III saw those truths so clearly; nor did they suppose that Europeans could exchange their kings and parliaments overnight. The Americans said that governments derived their just powers from the consent of those the laws govern. Delsol observes: “Every positive law is rooted in a culture. Therefore, in order to have a world law there must be a world culture. There is no such thing. (49)  By “world culture” internationalists mean the Davos culture, Samuel P. Huntington’s phrase for the mindset of the ‘globalist’ business executives, politicians, and academics convened annually by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The world is not ready for the rule of such men because the world has yet no taste for their wine, their brie. Delsol recalls Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s regime of philosophers; such a regime would reduce a theme to a single beat. One might add, George Soros is no philosopher-king.

This does not commit Delsol, foolishly, to a rejection of the idea of just war, or of the policy of regime change imposed a peace settlement after such a war. “Contrary to what one might first think, the Americans’ treatment of Iraq—their invasion of Iraq—is more defensible than what Westerners did to Serbia.” Americans judged the Iraqi regime dangerous to themselves. Europeans judged the Milosevic tyranny dangerous not to themselves but to Serbians, yet “conducted a police operation aimed at the elimination of a criminal” (69). Milosevic was a criminal amongst Serbians, not amongst Europeans generally.

In her preceding book, The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century, Delsol identified a contradiction at the core of contemporary European thought. Against genocide, tyranny, and war, Europeans wanted to uphold human dignity and rights. But against the hyper-Enlightenment ideologies of scientific socialism and race science they deployed a radical skepticism that denied the existence of the modern ‘self’ that had murdered, tyrannized, and made war. They denied the self without returning to the older notion of the soul. Without a soul, or at least a self, in what does human dignity and rights inhere? Europeans fell into soft nihilism, materialism, and pantheism—what Tocqueville had identified as the perils of social democracy when it abandons belief in anything above democrats. But, as she argues in Unjust Justice, “it really is great hubris to believe that a human law or institution”—particularly one constructed from such dispirited elements as the leveling impulse provides—”could be so universal and so perfect that no one confronted by it could appeal to a higher law” (95). Tocqueville predicted that social democracy could end in either of two regimes, republicanism or despotism. World government would be no republic but a vast web of administration, a “world moral authority,” a Sanhedrin without God or the laws of nature’s God, whose morality would incline toward the low but whose power would brook no contradiction.

Let us say, mirabile dictu, that Europeans converted to Christianity or (in a sense more ambitiously still) to Stoicism. St. Paul and Seneca agree that the human race is one thing, not a set of different species. This ontological unity did not imply political unity—except, in Paul’s understanding under the rule of Jesus Christ under a new heaven and on a new earth. Those who would transform ontological unity into political unity on this old earth commit a category mistake, Delsol argues. To “immanentize a spiritual good” (105) is to replace the Holy Spirit with the Absolute Spirit, as Hegel does; contemporary ‘post-moderns’ would do so even while rejecting the high modernism Hegel exemplifies. And even Hegel, it should be noted, has the sense to see that his world eschaton will never be immanentized through courts, but only on history’s slaughter-bench, war. Today’s internationalists want a peaceful, deductive immanence instead of the dialectical immanence Hegel (and before him, Kant) expected. They hope that humanity has already survived the Kantian/Hegelian slaughter-bench, so active in the first half of the twentieth century. This speaks well for their humanitarianism; it may speak more of their sentimentality.

And if they are right about the slaughter-bench, if the wars of the previous century somehow have already brought us to history’s much-anticipated end? If the world state is just around the corner, anticipated by the current congeries of international institutions, whether economic or civil-social? “We no longer have the excuse of ignorance to think that because it embodies the highest morality a world government will produce a miraculous synthesis of total power and good government” (128).

Cheryl B. Welch, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 35, Number 1, Fall 2007.

Republished with permission.

 

A companion he is. He offers readers his friendship, and increasing numbers have taken him up. Cheryl B. Welch calls the “revival of interest” in Tocqueville’s writings “one of the most surprising intellectual turns of the twentieth century” (1), and it must have been when it began, shortly after the Second World War in the United States, later elsewhere. In the first half of the century Tocqueville resembled the brilliant but eccentric elderly uncle at the family dinner—sometimes fascinating, sometimes tedious, but always living in the past, specifically, in the previous century, when liberal democracy advanced with confidence, its continued progress assured. Nod politely at the kindly old gent, give him a bit of your time; after some decent interval, hand him off to your brother-in-law. The new tyrannies of the twentieth century mocked the liberalism of the nineteenth; the founder of one coined the ominous neologism, ‘totalitarian,’ to describe this enterprise. In ‘geopolitical terms (another neologism for the times), Tocqueville also seemed to have been mistaken. He had expected America and Russia to divide the world, but Germany had proved the real problem, twice (thrice if you were French). No surprise, really: wasn’t Tocqueville’s prediction founded on rather vague, unscientific thinking to begin with? Marxism, race theory, or positivism, themselves products of German scientific rigor, although contradicting each other, at least offered more precision than these French-all-too-French ruminations, combining memorable aperçus with glittering generalities.

Yet then, there it was. By mid-century, the American republic and the Russian despotism did each hold the destinies of half the world in its hands. The unscientific French statesman and man of letters, a titled aristocrat no less, had surpassed the empirical, scientific projectors in the practice of their own professed specialty: accurate prediction. Historians, political scientists, sociologists took notice, began to pay him the highest compliment they knew, namely, calling him one of them. And if the Cold War seemed unwinnable, at least it need not prove futile, so even political liberalism might have a chance on the road to some accommodation between it and state socialism—say, ‘social democracy.’

If he could return to life, the companionable, well-brought-up Tocqueville would likely have taken his newfound popularity very much in stride, welcoming even the most implausible claims to some distant relation, then drawing even his not-very-similar semblables closer to him in thought and sentiment. Politicians and philosophers both appreciate friends, each in their own way; if Tocqueville is both, a political philosopher, then doubly so for him.

Professor Welch has assembled a motley but stimulating group of Tocqueville friends and (intellectual) family relations as contributors to this volume—not only historians, political scientists, and sociologists but literary scholars and translators, and even a specimen of that rare bird, the independent scholar, which Tocqueville also was, in a sense. She arranges the essays into, roughly, five groups of topics: Tocqueville the sociologist; Tocqueville the political philosopher; Tocqueville the literary and scholarly craftsman; Tocqueville the political scientist; and, finally, Tocqueville the literary politician, with his ups and downs in reputation in his native France and America, the future possible homeland, so to speak, of at least half the world. She assures readers that she is no Straussian, and I believe her, inasmuch as she puts the essays on Tocqueville the political philosopher second, not third in order—although a suspicious mind might wonder if Tocqueville the literary and scholarly craftsman might be hiding something. Because Tocqueville put his scholarly talents to the political work of persuading his contemporaries, the centrality of these articles in this volume points to Tocqueville the politician, the one who assured his friend Louis de Kergolay that he suffered from no “reckless enthusiasm for the intellectual life,” but “have always placed action above everything else” (quoted, 170).

Sociologist Seymour Drescher and sociologist/political theorist/historian Jon Elster lead off with accounts of Tocqueville as a social scientist—specifically, a political sociologist. Drescher considers Tocqueville as seen in the titles of his best-known books, Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution: a comparativist. He who knows only France cannot understand the French Revolution, Tocqueville said; therefore, one must journey to America, and also study not only France’s regime-of-the-moment but the regime that antedated all the others, in both instances “viewing from without what one wishes to understand within” (21). Nor did Tocqueville confine himself to the study of two or three countries. “His interest extended across most of the globe: from Russia to Ireland; in the Pacific, from Australia to New Zealand; in Asia, from China to the Ottoman empire; in North Africa, from Egypt to Algeria; in the Western hemisphere, from Canada to South America” (22). Throughout these places he located a common thread. The regimes of aristocracy (seen in its most extreme form in the villages of India) and despotism (from Napoleonic France to the “imbecile and barbarous government” of China) stultified societies (24). Indian decentralization made it vulnerable to British conquest while the caste system in its villages prevented the reward of natural merit. Only a measure of equality can elicit the best in a society as a whole.

Over his relatively short literary career of some twenty years Tocqueville changed his mind about the home of democracy. He began to see that the slave-based aristocracy of the American South might persist, and that the aristocracy of England acted in and among a strong and pious middle class. By the time he wrote The Old Regime and the Revolution in the 1850s, Great Britain, with its dynamic commercial and industrial economy, its political stability with substantial popular self-government, and its world-encompassing empire—all products of a successful transition from an ancient aristocracy to modern social equality—had become his model for sound politics in modernity. And politics was the key: Britain’s “rulers [had] avoided the generic aristocratic tendency to become a ‘caste’ because of the continuous political interaction inherent in its parliamentary and municipal systems” (38). The French aristocrats, by contrast, “had ossified into a caste” because they had taken the poisoned bait of the monarchy, trading political engagement in exchange for exemptions from national taxation and local responsibility (39). They became not an aristo-cracy—a ruling body—but a mere nobility, a social body. But independence from political life has nothing to do with liberty. As Tocqueville observes, “There is nothing less independent than a free citizens” (39); in that sense he was no ‘independent scholar’ at all. Only comparative study, getting the French ‘outside’ themselves, might bring “the rebirth of liberty in France” (42).

The neo-Marxist scholar Jon Elster concerns himself not so much with the lessons Tocqueville draws from his comparative studies as with his account of historical causation. Elster particularly wants to determine the points at which revolution becomes first possible, then probable, then inevitable; revolution’s “preconditions,” “precipitants,” and “triggers,” respectively correspond to Aristotle’s material, formal, and efficient causes, with the final cause having disappeared. Unlike Drescher, Elster cares little for the ‘teleological’ dimension of Tocqueville’s enterprise.

Elster astutely describes the “social psychology” of the French Revolution, as Tocqueville understood it. The aristocracy succumbed to inter-class hostility from two directions. The tax exemptions aroused envy and resentment in the bourgeoisie, who seldom dealt with the aristocrats but ‘looked up’ to them from afar. At the same time, the aristocrats’ “withdrawal” from local administration without a simultaneous withdrawal from the countryside they administered—their political irresponsibility coupled with daily contact with ‘their’ peasants—infuriated those peasants, made them want to physically destroy a class that had descended to parasitism (56).

Elster finds this account of the revolution impressive. He finds Tocqueville’s explanation of the aristocrats’ withdrawal from politics less persuasive; rather than a deliberate attempt by French monarchs to divide and thereby rule the social classes (a claim he judges “far-fetched and undocumented”), he takes the aristocratic exemptions as entirely a capitulation by the king to aristocratic demands—a power play that redounded unintentionally to the loss of aristocratic power and the final ruin of that class, an example of the cunning of history. Elster’s Marxist-historicist tendency also comes out in his discussion of the ‘Tocqueville paradox’: that improved ‘objective’ economic conditions may result in more intense discontent, and hence make revolution more likely. He objects that Tocqueville inconsistently appeals to two kinds of explanations of the paradox. The “synchronic” evidence of the paradox comes from Germany and from France itself; regions where aristocrats continued to perform their administrative responsibilities while peasants enjoyed low levels of personal freedom and suffered high taxes remained more stable than regions in which peasant freedoms were more considerable and taxes were low, but the aristocrats did not really rule (58). The “diachronic” claim holds that “revolutions often occur as one goes from the worse to the better rather than the other way around” (58). But of course it may be that Tocqueville is not a historicist, and therefore does not much care if an explanation is synchronic or diachronic, words that do not appear in his writings.

The next pair of essays, written by political philosophy scholars Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Delba Winthrop, and Pierre Manent, point to Tocqueville not as a sociologist but as a philosophic political scientist—that is, as one who thinks about knowledge in its relation to political life. Mansfield and Winthrop explicate Tocqueville’s assertion that a new political science is needed for a world altogether new. Tocqueville does not follow this “striking statement” with a direct account of political science old or new, leaving the new science “implicit and scattered”—”for good reason” (81). They set out to recover that science, the reason for it, and the reason for Tocqueville’s obliquity in presenting it.

Tocqueville mixes the political science of Aristotle with that of Publius, ‘ancient’ with ‘modern.’ Like Aristotle, he writes as a teacher of democracy, “judge and trainer”; “the political scientist must be occupied with the character of human souls” (83). But (following Madison) he regards the regimes Aristotle called democracies to have been aristocracies, reduces Aristotle’s six regimes to two (following Machiavelli), and “values souls as a liberal would, in contrast to Aristotle” (83). Like Publius, “he regards America as the most modern regime, the arena in which the happiness and liberty of mankind are at stake in a new experiment” (82). But he inclines to see Publius’ sharp distinction between democracy and republicanism as overdrawn; “in America, the power of the people overcomes the republican restraints of representative government owed to modern political science” (82). Modern political science attempted to solve the problem of religious warfare by abandoning political attempts to improve souls and instead centering the attention of political men on issues of “legitimacy”—the origins of society in a social contract, for example. Tocqueville replies that the moderns have succeeded in neglecting the soul without finding a solid foundation for political legitimacy, either. He therefore turns instead not to modern political theory—even to American theory, as enunciated in the Declaration of Independence—but to American political science, which he discovers as decidedly soulful. “He prefers liberalism in practice to liberalism in theory because liberalism in practice is liberalism with soul” (84).

In theory, liberal egalitarianism denigrates human pride. It tends toward pantheism, which dissolves all individual distinctions into cosmic mush, or historicism, which dissolves the efforts of statesmen into sweeping “general causes” (85). “In the practice of democracy, however, democratic citizens show their pride” (85), especially their politicians, often heard to insist vehemently on the greatness not so much of themselves as on that of the people whose votes they want. “The image [of democracy] is there to be seen, but in [Tocqueville’s] political science it is embedded in fact rather than abstracted in a theory. Democracy for him is in America, and America is not merely an example of democracy outside his political science” (85-86).

Even in their Christianity Americans exhibit pride. The human quest for immortality—the noble form of what puling mediocrities today call ‘self-assertion’—manifests human pride, “resemb[ling] what Plato calls thumos, the willingness to risk one’s life in order to protect it, the combination of self-disgust and self-elevation” (86). But unlike the regimes of classical antiquity, in America this very pride sets its own limits, conduces to moderation, precisely because it so thoroughly binds itself to religious teachings, “authoritative ideas” about God, the soul, and human duties (87). The pride of the Christian and the humility of the Christian both limit the sway of modern politics, especially as seen in its characteristic institutional device, the modern state; Christian pride and humility also limit the intellectual sway of materialism, which beckons souls to tyranny as surely as any politically empowered religiosity ever did. The Christianity of the Gospels is “the right kind of religion” (87). The wrong kind of religion is “the religion of Mohammed,” whose doctrine “included political maxims, which involve the church with the state, and scientific theories that interfere with freedom of mind” (87). Tocqueville was quite likely to have known that Islam was Napoleon’s favorite religion. Its “armed prophet” was also much esteemed by Machiavelli, and so while adopting Machiavelli’s simplified, dual regime theory with one hand, Tocqueville restores a moral compass to politics that Machiavelli despised.

Tocqueville worried less about a recrudescence of religious fanaticism than the existing threat of attempted “rational control” of human beings in various forms of benevolent despotism—democratic, administrative, mild—all of them kindly destroyers of man’s self-government because they lead men gently, unawares, without “any sense of being commanded” (89). the immense tutelary power of the state takes away the trouble of thinking and the pain of living, thus re-inventing God as a true anti-Christ—impersonal, unloving, but never punishing, lulling us into dreamless narcolepsy. “Tocqueville’s religion endorses the separation of church and state” the liberals’ institutional response to religious excesses, but “more, it grounds the proud freedom that makes self-government possible” (90). The Christian looks at the modern state and says: I may be a sinner, but I am better than that. Nor does this religion need to be Christian: “Its function, which is not quite the Gospel message, is to protect freedom by allowing the right amount of pride” (91); other religions might learn to do that, too.

“While religion protects pride, it supports politics even more” by deflecting politics from too much insistence on modern liberalism’s central concern, physical self-preservation, and toward the spiritual and the spirited. This again plays up the enterprising and confident Christianity that evangelizes and affirms high hopes for the future as distinguished from the cloistered Christianity of patience and piety.

Democracy needs a political science sympathetic to such religion because the political science finds in the Bios ti of democracy, its way of life, much “to produce weak, soft, timid individuals who cannot see how they can manage,” and so look to the tutelary state for help and guidance (93). Here Tocqueville commends the main institutional benefit of the regime of democracy as seen in America, the local self-government produced by the art or science of association. “For Tocqueville, the desire to associate is not a mere consequence of one’s interest but also a part of one’s nature, though in one’s nature it comes second to one’s interest” (93)—a combination of Aristotle and Publius, indeed. In American human association, like Christianity, also ascends to the level of proper, even noble pride. The American “feels himself glorified in his country’s glory; his interest is not cold and indifferent but rises to patriotic passion” (93). Participation in the larges civic associations, political parties, not unlike church membership, teaches pride by moderating it, habituating party members to prudence (what do we need to do to win this election?) and cooperation (how can I help?).

The politeia or formal structure of the American regime supports the politeuma—the people and their representatives—in making the democratic way of life decent. The American federal form combines centralized government with decentralized administration, the latter ensuring active citizen participation. “In America, a plethora of elections keeps citizens active and prevents the rule of a centralized bureaucracy” (95); unlike Europe, America shows how freedom and order can go together. The New England township shows this spirit of freedom in action, enabling Tocqueville to “explain how authority in a democracy becomes legitimate,” thus answering the question the moderns ask. The citizen of a township “obeys society not because he is inferior to anyone but because he knows that society is useful to him, and that obedience is necessary to society” (96). Why is this not merely a reflection of the theories of Hobbes and Locke? Because the lesson the citizen learns from participating in local self-government comes “from social experience rather than individual imagination”—that is, from envisioning a previous ‘state of nature.’ Citizenship “mixes rights and duties rather than distinguishing them, establishes the authority of ‘selectmen’ rather than a sovereign representative, and results in patriotic strength and independence among the citizens rather than fear and subjection. Here is freedom from the ground up, making weak individuals strong by advancing beyond individual interest to the exercise of pride and ambition when put to work among one’s neighbors. (96)  In this regime, democracy’s small-souled ‘mass man’ becomes a capable, self-governing citizen. Tocqueville’s political science discovers and encourages this human type. “Tocqueville can be said to have desired to restore politics, and therewith greatness, to the political science of liberalism” (96). He does so by locating human greatness in our capacity for self-rule, as individual souls and as members of a ruling body or political community, rather than in the sheer size of majority-rule modern republics, impressive apparently but dangerous morally and politically.

Self-government enables citizens to secure their rights by “obey[ing] without being submissive and command[ing] without being arrogant” (97). That is, self-government makes the theoretical rights of the Declaration of Independence real in practice as well as in speech and reason, exemplifying Aristotle’s understanding of politics as ruling and being ruled in turn. The three innovations of Tocqueville’s new political science for a world altogether new each shows how this can be possible. His concept of “the social state” seems to combine the modern desire to reduce society to pre-political elements with Aristotle’s insistence on the importance of regimes, inasmuch as the two kinds of social state are characterized by the political terms ‘democratic’ and ‘aristocratic.’ “America has a ‘point of departure’—the Puritans—rather than a deliberate founding. A founding is imposed, but a social state causes the society without ruling over it. That is why an aristocracy, which is the rule of a part imposing itself on the whole is less of a social state than is a democracy.” (98)  To this, Aristotle might reply: A democratic public opinion does in fact reflect the imposition of a part, albeit the majority, over the whole, and as for the Puritans, their founding had already occurred, in England, and their presence in America meant that they had lost a regime struggle there. Tocqueville might not altogether disagree with that. Be that as it may, the principal point is that “democracy” in America refers primarily to a social condition of rough equality; the political regime of republicanism makes that society decent, a defender of what Tocqueville calls the natural greatness of man.

The second innovation of Tocqueville’s political science consists in seeing that individuals in democracies are semblables—equal not only in the sense of having rights but in the sense of being alike in seeing themselves as equals. Democracies frustrate Hegelians because ‘the other’ does not exist in them, insofar as they truly are democratic. Those who try to agitate such societies with stories of racial and class conflict will finally lose; not enough of the citizens will quite believe them because, although such conflicts will exist, they will not often predominate. If at some point they do predominate, the majority will defeat them decisively. Although this seems to mean that “aristocracy and democracy are successive eras in history, not constant possibilities for human beings as Aristotle had argued” (100), Mansfield and Winthrop immediately mention that the few still exist in democracies—the intelligent and the rich, for example. They can make little headway by appealing directly to their own virtues as such. There is not enough ‘fewness’ here for a mixed regime, but there does turn out to be an impressive list of aristocratic features in American democracy, enough to save democracy from its characteristic vices. Christian religion is a precious inheritance from aristocracy; local self-government, juries, a free press, the idea of individual rights “are all said to have been brought from aristocratic England,” as were democratic associations, the legal profession, and the Constitution itself (the latter the work of the Federalist and not the democratic party [100-101]). “Tocqueville does not add up these hidden aristocratic elements in American democracy, perhaps because the sum would seem considerable” (101).

The third innovation, the use of prediction, seizes the minds of democrats while elevating them beyond themselves. I venture to guess that no one who has taught Tocqueville’s book in the years since the Second World War has failed to see, and rather enjoy, the effect on Tocqueville’s prediction of a geopolitical confrontation between the Americans and the Russians on those who read it for the first time. (One often can get this effect by reading the passage aloud in the classroom, because some students dependably neglect to read the day’s assignment beforehand, in the throes no doubt of the persistent busyness of democratic life.). Mansfield and Winthrop appreciate the rhetorical power of Tocqueville’s innovation: “Tocqueville wanted the reactionaries of his day to consider democracy irreversible” (102), a product of the Providence partisans of the Holy Alliance professed to respect. By ascribing democracy’s advance to Providence, Tocqueville at the same time avoids the sinister effects of materialist determinism, vindicating sufficient intellectual and moral ‘room’ for the continuance of the spirit of political liberty his political science defends and exemplifies. “His notion of providence preserves human choice, which means that it preserves politics” (102). Democracy in America comes, ultimately, not from England but from Christianity. “It was necessary that Jesus Christ come to earth to make it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal,” Tocqueville writes (quoted 103). It too an individual, albeit a divine individual, to take a general truth that had been insufficiently appreciated and make it generally known, and therefore politically relevant. “The upshot for political scientists is to pay attention to particular facts, not only to general truths, and this lesson is aristocratic in character rather than democratic,” a practice of “immersing oneself in our democratic age and also…rising above it” (103)—in its own way, then, an imitation Christi as well as a philosophic ascent from the cave of public opinion. One might of course wonder at Tocqueville’s understanding of Christianity as aristocratic rather than monarchic. He may mean that the Church is aristocratic, inasmuch as Jesus’ teaching of human equality under God anticipates the European monarchs’ teaching of human equality under themselves—precisely an anti-aristocratic teaching. For this point the reader turns to the second political-philosophic essay in the volume, by Pierre Manent.

In his essay “Tocqueville, Political Philosopher,” Manent points not to Aristotle and Publius but to Aristotle and Montesquieu. His older contemporaries Benjamin Constant and François Guizot each emphasized one feature of Montesquieu—commerce and representative government, respectively—but Tocqueville did not find these adequate (either as descriptions or remedies) for understanding the core of the modern condition: equality of social conditions. In pointing to society, not government (or political-economic life) as modernity’s core, Tocqueville encouraged the invention of sociology. But his sociology does not resemble sociologists as later sociologists developed it. “[T]he overwhelming tendency of sociology itself can fairly be called anti-liberal” (110). If social forces are said to determine politics, and this opinion pervades political life itself, then the politeuma or ruling body of any regime amounts to mere ‘superstructure’—an effect of underlying social causes. “Enveloped in this way by social causes, political liberty loses much of its luster. That is why sociologists are often inclined to be contemptuous of liberalism”; “liberal politics tends to imply a devaluation of the political, which sociology tends to extend and radicalize until liberal politics is destroyed” (110).

By describing modern society as primarily democratic, however, Tocqueville avoids this serious error. “The originality of the definition is immediately apparent: the essential attribute of modern society belongs to the political order or at any rate stems from the language of politics” (111). Society already has politics ‘built into it,’ even as (one might recall) Aristotle’s family has parental, political, and despotic relations built into it. Manent remarks that the already political character of society illuminates Tocqueville’s otherwise dark comment that ancient democracies were really aristocratic. The human type generated by the genuinely democratic or egalitarian way of life “turns his back on grandeur and rejects the very idea of superiority” (114-115). But Athenian democracy ‘shared the ‘agonistic’ inclinations  and ideal of ‘honor’ characteristic of the ‘few’ in the strict sense,” the aristocratic men (115). In seeing societies as (effectively) regimes or at least as demi-regimes, Tocqueville went beyond liberalism and “rediscover[ed] the most fundamental intuition of Plato and Aristotle, which he repeats freely (because he had barely read them) but faithfully—namely, that there exists a close correspondence between the order of the city and the order of the soul” (115).

Nor is the human soul the infinitely malleable or ‘plastic’ thing sociologists and their semblables the anthropologists take it to be. Tocqueville therefore does not encumber himself with the prejudices of ‘value-free’ social science, instead “propos[ing] a very explicit ‘scale of values’ as a guide to human action” (116). That scale, characteristically, centers on the regime question. Insofar as they are democratic, human souls and societies orient themselves toward justice, justice understood as equal rights. Insofar as they are aristocratic, souls and societies orient themselves toward grandeur. “For Tocqueville, as for Aristotle, the perspective of ‘magnanimity'”—grandeur, greatness of soul—”does not coincide with that of ‘justice,’ and sometimes comes into contradiction with it” (117). Human souls and societies alike by their very natures find themselves in conflict, a conflict between reason and spiritedness, ‘democracy’ and ‘aristocracy.’

Modernity complicates this natural conflict by the invention of the modern state. Monarchy is a regime (in Aristotle, a pair of regimes) in which politics strictly speaking—the condition of ruling and being ruled—exists not among men but in the mind of the monarch, which then commands other men ‘in principle’ with no resistance. In practice monarchy invented the state as an instrument to de-politicize societies, to end the political interplay between aristocrats and democrats by replacing aristocrats with the administrative institutions wielded by the monarch and his bureaucrats. Manent puts it somewhat differently: “Democratic society was indeed the ‘original fact,’ the cause, of the democratic life that Tocqueville describes, but that cause was in turn caused by a political institution to which a representation was attached. The political institution was the sovereign, leveling state, the state that produced the ‘plan of equality’; the representation was the idea of equality as human resemblance, with the passion that accompanied it.” (119)  I propose only the slight modification that monarchy was the least ‘political‘ regime, to begin with.

Manent carefully distinguishes equality defined as the original fact of modern society from equality as the generative principle of that society. Social causality for Tocqueville is a fact and condition of modern life, whereas popular sovereignty, the political dimension of that life, consists of a principle. “This second causality is obviously richer and more significant in human terms since it serves to regulate most human actions from within and is inextricably associated with a ‘dogma’—in this instance, an opinion about the human world that possesses incontestable authority” (119). By acknowledging social equality insofar as it is a fact and interrogating it insofar as it is a principle, Tocqueville “reopens the question that our dogmatic passion declared to have been settled in advance. How can we deny the name ‘philosopher’ to the liberal sociologist who leads us out of the social cave?” (120).

The third set of essays show Tocqueville at work in his literary and scholarly craft. Historian James T. Schleifer uses Eduardo Nolla’s critical edition of the Democracy to show how Tocqueville made the book “take shape” (121). In this exercise Schleifer notices something often lost upon the new reader of Tocqueville, overwhelmed with the details. Tocqueville “thought deductively, even syllogistically”; the facts support real arguments, and never get thrown about (122). Such logical rigor underlies the success of Tocquevillian comparativism, and helps him to reject (as his notes show him doing) easy comparisons between modern and ancient conditions. At the same time, Tocqueville emerges clearly as a non-historicist in his rejection of historical relativism. The desire for the arts and sciences, the love of honor, the family, the rule of law, the love of liberty, religiosity: The entirely new world of democracy will not extinguish these perennial human characteristics and practices but will instead channel them “in new ways” (135).

Prolific translator Arthur Goldhammer describes Tocqueville’s literary style as supporting the substance of his thought inasmuch as in both he opposes both the Enlightenment philosophes and their Romanticist rivals. Neither the transparent prose of the Encyclopedists nor the lush and overgrown rhetoric of his uncle Chateaubriand would do, for his purposes. “He wants to influence his contemporaries, and, knowing that many of them will be impatient of any hint of pedantry, he does not wish to burden his prose with exegesis. Often he merely alludes. To the wise, a word is enough…. A certain delicacy is required in dealing with such a text lest subtle references—hints contained in a lexical wisp of syntactic murmur—be obscured. (141)  This leads Goldhammer to an extended and exceedingly subtle critique of what he describes as the Straussian mode of translation, which he regards as leadenly literalist. “Slavish imitation, being mechanical, saps the work’s soul” (151). This reader, for one, rather prefers a fair degree of slavishness in translators, inasmuch as fidelity to a text, being accurate, saves the work’s soul—from the translator. The real solution of course is to learn French, read Tocqueville, and then consult the translations.

French literature scholar Laurence Guellec discusses the Recollections, Tocqueville’s memoir of the revolution of 1848 and the short-lived Second Republic, written to show why France had succumbed to yet another monarchy. She adroitly describes how Tocqueville’s language, “the anti-rhetoric of an autobiographical text” (168), reinforces Tocqueville’s critique of the failure of republican rhetoric, including his own, during the political crises of that time.

The rhetorician attempts to marshal men by marshalling words, Tocqueville said, but that is easier said than done. If democrats love generalities, how can a politician address them when specific policies are what the country needs” “Tocqueville rejected ‘Parnassian’ liberalism,” “refus[ing] to fall back haughtily on pure philosophy,” but neither would he “accommodate to the liberalism of compromise represented by Guizot, Remusat, and Cousin” (173). In Tocqueville’s lifetime, literary, scientific, and political discourses had begun to separate from one another, making intelligible talk among practitioners of different ‘disciplines’ or kinds of thought more difficult even as the immense power of the modern project made such talk indispensable to the survival of free societies. “The history of 1848  became the history of a generalized impropriety of public speech—the very same speech that was supposed to have given form and meaning to the constitutional liberty of which Tocqueville saw himself the harbinger” (182). Straining after the grand passions of 1789, the revolutionaries of 1848 sank into self-parody and cliché. “The constitutional monarchy”—the July Monarchy founded in 1830—”had proved incapable of educating citizens and teaching the French the practical art of political deliberation in accordance with the lessons laid down by Democracy in America” (184). This in turn made the attempt at a new republic farcical. In the wake of the failure of political language (really of prudence) literature went off into the passions of Romanticisms—Hugo, Michelet, Sand, “the novelistic apotheosis of Les Miserables, the book of the People” (184). No room for a Tocqueville in either that literature or that politics.

In the final essay on ‘Tocqueville-at-work,’ independent scholar Robert T. Gannett, Jr., considers the historical research behind The Old Regime and the Revolution. Although he calls his book not a history of the 1789 revolution but a “study” of it, Tocqueville did undertake extensive archival digging before putting pen to paper. Such research documented the long period of gestation that social democratization underwent. Tocqueville emerges as a reverse Burke: Beneath the grand tradition of the old, aristocratic regime the new democracy arose with all the slow, unfolding majesty that the Englishman associated with the days of grandeur. The violent denouement Burke rightly deplored Tocqueville considered accidental, a product of bad choices by the last monarch.

Because statesmanship requires seeing both in the long and the short distances, Tocqueville “went beyond the simple contours of finding and stating historical truth” (197) to identifying tendencies in the course of events that, if shown dramatically to citizen-readers, will alert them to present and future political dangers. “The pervasive hyperactivity of a well-intentioned royal government seeking energetically to preempt all forms of individual initiative by its citizens resonated with Tocqueville’s lifelong theoretical understanding of democracy’s principal threat: soft despotism” (198). Such a warning might serve as a spur to guide citizens not only to a defense of ‘negative freedom’—freedom against state encroachment upon their private affairs—but ‘active liberty’–the freedom to engage in politics. Far from misunderstanding the longue durée as a necessary march to servitude or to freedom, Tocqueville “pursued his archival work with the explicit understanding that free men possessed the ability to shape their destinies” (211). “In The Old Regime, he eschewed both aristocratic history, which privileged the individual actions of a few principal actors, and democratic history, which made great general causes responsible for particular events. Rather he sought to be a historian of a new order, appropriate for the new age of equality, who could comprehend and explain the causes that made possible the “force and independence [of] men united in a social body”…. [A] historian must not just define and interpret the complicated variables affecting the actions of free men. He must also teach them how to be free. (211)  Tocqueville sought a new historiography of statesmanship for a world altogether new.

In the fourth group of essays, political scientists Dana Villa, Melvin Richter, Joshua Mitchell, and Cheryl B. Welch address Tocqueville’s political science as it addresses liberty and fraternity (the other elements of the French revolutionary trio), civil society, and religion. Villa emphasizes the political character of civil society for Tocqueville. Unlike previous French liberals, Tocqueville did not regard civil society as an enclave removed from politics but as the primary place where politics takes place, where citizens learn to govern themselves. Too often, the national state stifles political activity; many liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment unwittingly prepared the way for this by identifying civil society with economic activity or with ‘cultural’ activity (‘the republic of letters’), a ‘sphere’ to be protected from statist intrusions—again, ‘negative liberty.’ Tocqueville trails no one in his disapproval of bureaucratic government, but it is precisely for bureaucracy’s injuries to political life that he detests it most. “If we want to grasp Tocqueville’s idea of civil society, we must conceive it not as a seemingly self-contained realm of mores, habits, and feelings, but rather as a sphere of politically invaluable mediating organizations, a sphere sustained by the ‘free moeurs‘ these organizations help to create and maintain” (224).

Tocqueville identifies three kinds of “associations” that mediate between the individual and the state: permanent, political, and civil. In Europe, permanent associations are the estates of the old regime: aristocratic, bourgeois, peasant. In America, permanent associations of this kind did not exist, at least among the European populations, so the term refers to such “legally established political entities” as townships, cities, and counties where men administer their own public affairs (224). Political associations are political parties and other, typically smaller organizations founded to advance some opinion or policy. Civil associations include commercial and manufacturing companies, churches, and the press—all of which have their own political opinions and interests, which they seldom hesitate to advance. This means that Tocqueville cares “first and foremost” for “the political uses and effects of associational life,” the way they “decentralize administrative and political power” and “enable ordinary citizens to attain a degree of positive political freedom it would otherwise be hard to imagine,” keeping despotism hard and soft “at bay” (225)

Villa’s description of the “permanent” associations of America gives a sense of how Tocqueville found there a way to address Constant’s argument on ‘ancient and modern liberty.’ In his famous 1819 lecture Constant argued that the attempt to introduce the political liberty of the ancient polis into the modern state could lead to nothing but the sort of disaster seen in the French Revolution. At best, moderns must settle for their own form of liberty, the liberty of free social life under a strictly limited modern state, bound by the rule of law. The New England township, “the concrete instantiation of the American principle of popular sovereignty,” amounted to “a Puritan polis” (227)—that is, a piece of the ‘ancient,’ political, self-governing world thriving within the conditions of modernity, protecting modernity from its own statist tendencies by providing a school for citizenship and a stop against both majority tyranny and administrative despotism on any wide scale. To make a man really see the virtue of politics one needs to make him see how his private interests and the general interests of society can coincide, how “to obtain [the] support” of his own interests “he must often lend them his cooperation” (Tocqueville, quoted 230). This is nothing but politics itself, ruling and being ruled in turn, and it can happen regularly for the average citizens only in small associations in which he enjoys real responsibilities. As townships and counties have seen such responsibilities effectively usurped by larger, more bureaucratic governments, political scientists who remain committed to self-governing political life have inclined to concentrate their attention on business/market associations and religious associations as the only refuges from the centralized administration of sovereign states.

Melvin Richter also discusses political liberty as an introduction to Tocqueville’s assessment of the threat to it. Political liberty gives the regime of democratic republicanism its “all-pervasive energy and force,” which “can produce miracles beyond the power of even the most astute despot” (248). Tocqueville reverses the typical modern liberal claim; in his estimation political liberty generates economic liberty, not the other way around. Nothing can replace la vie politique, the “sublime taste” of which no man who has not sampled it can comprehend. (It might be noted that Tocqueville’s use of “sublime,” here, exactly follows the meaning it had for Burke: not beautiful, pleasing, easy, but noble, austere, difficult.) Having lost this taste by 1848, thanks to “the systematic corruption of the legislature by Louis Philippe,” the French of his generation lost themselves in “materialism, political apathy, individualism” (249), which carried over into the listless despotism of the Second Empire.

Despotism means government both arbitrary and absolute. Tocqueville classifies modern despotism into five types: legislative despotism, majority tyranny, Caesarism, democratic/administrative/mild despotism, and imperial/military or Bonapartist despotism. To prevent legislative despotism, he advises, citizens should establish a bicameral legislature. To prevent majority tyranny, the tyranny of public opinion over the individual soul, guard a free press, avoid administrative centralization, and mark out such individual legal rights as due process and jury trials. To prevent Caesarism, the unlimited power of one person, now enhanced by the perfection of techniques of centralized administration, protect local self-government.

Democratic despotism is entirely new. Montesquieu had assumed that despotism would rule by intimidation, by manipulating the fear of force. But democratic despotism’s “distinguishing feature would be the removal of any desire by its subjects for either individual autonomy or the wish to participate in deliberating or determining policies affecting the common good of the polity”—the breeding of “industrious herds of sheep subservient to their bureaucratic shepherds” (256). Once established, such despotism can only collapse, eventually, a victim of its own imbecility. The imperial/military despotism that likely follows it excites souls more, inasmuch as a military despot seldom lacks “what we, in the wake of Max Weber, now call Bonaparte’s charisma” (262). This gives the despot a sort of legitimacy, in the sense that he does enjoy the enthusiastic consent of his people, at least initially As Tocqueville said of Napoleon Bonaparte, “The hero concealed the despot” (quoted 263). He predicted that the Second Empire of his lifetime, like the first, “would be destroyed by an unnecessary war of its own making” (267). All of these permutations of despotism themselves reflect the underlying social condition of egalitarianism, and so fall under the overarching category of democratization.

Under such conditions, what happens to religion, that aristocratic thing? Joshua Mitchell writes that Tocqueville anticipated that “religious experience” in democracy would “become tame and self-referential,” but that it would also “make new forms of religious experience possible” (281). The democrat’s search for something stable amidst the energetic clamor of democratic life, combined with his ‘Cartesian’ taste for clarity and simplicity, will produce a turn toward what later writers named ‘Fundamentalism.’ The democrat will also seek “unmediated and direct” religious experiences, without the mediating forms seen in aristocratic regimes; Mitchell finds this in Tocqueville’s chapter on poetry in the Democracy (286). Finally, the replacement of the idea of a hierarchic nature, eventually throwing “the very idea of nature into question,” favors the Protestant doctrine of original sin, which in its more extreme forms “denied that an intact ‘nature’ survived Adams’s fall” (289-290). All of these tendencies together eventually will redound to the injury of Protestantism, however, “because man cannot long endure the isolation it engenders” (292). The soul will return to Roman Catholicism as a needed anchor in such heavy seas. (For an ampler discussion of these matters Mitchell’s readers should consult Peter A. Lawler’s 1993 study, The Restless Mind: Alexis de Tocqueville on the Origin and Perpetuation of Human Liberty.)

In the last of the four essays on Tocqueville’s political science, Cheryl B. Welch sets for herself the challenge of giving a Tocquevillian account of fraternity, a term Tocqueville “deliberately avoided” as an excrescence of the Jacobinism of the first French Revolution and of the communitarianism sentimental Christians and socialists purveyed in his own time. Tocqueville associated political life with regimes, and therefore with real bonds between citizens, bonds stronger than those forged either by fanatical passion or vague fellow-feeling. The regime of democracy means the rule of equals; “Because equality must have some referent, some dimension on which all are equal,” democracy typically looks to “our common membership in the human race,” or, as Tocqueville puts it, “the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same” (305). Christians have not invented this constitution; they have discovered it and proselytized in its favor, freeing each person “to act as an independent moral agent” (305.

But democracies do not embrace the whole of humanity. The nations that find themselves in conditions of democracy, themselves “historical legacies or constructs” and emphatically not natural groupings, thus find themselves both part of and differentiated from the human race. In another regime this distinction might not trouble souls so much. But Tocqueville “was afflicted with permanent double vision” on its account (309). He tended toward exaggeration of the dangers of racial differences, even and especially in democratic America, where natural human sociality gets “denatured by artificial taboos” that are nonetheless popular. He hoped to avoid the malign effects of racial prejudice in the French Empire, particularly in Algeria. But his efforts to find a way to prevent the problem—especially his recommendation of state-enforced racial intermingling—obviously contradicted his intention to defend political liberty. His own visit to Algeria forced him to “abandon the hope of enforced fraternity between the French and the indigenes.  But this left him with only two choices: the abandonment of the imperial project or the “long-term domination” of the Algerians by the French (322). For instruction on the latter he looked to his usual model, Britain, and its rule of India. He hoped that firm rule wisely managed might make Arabs see mutual interests with the French, but this again contradicted his longstanding claim “that interest alone cannot generate lasting association” (325). “A theorist who sees the growth of unrepresentative state bureaucracies and the usurpations of military despots as among the greatest threats to a culture of freedom, Tocqueville nevertheless proposes to counter the criminal eruptions of democratic xenophobia, exclusionary racism, and retaliatory nationalism with long periods of unaccountable imperial tutelage,” a likely breeding ground for bureaucratization and demagoguery, two principal evils of democracy that alike threaten republicanism (327).

On this, as a supplement to Welch’s sharp-eyed account it might be worthwhile to consider Tocqueville’s geopolitical concerns. French imperialism did not exist in a vacuum; British imperialism might not only provide a source of tips in ruling an empire but also loom as a rival to France. So might other European empires. It might not be an “inability” to “envision voluntary divestment” of imperial rule that held Tocqueville back but real concerns about the results of doing so (324). Americans with their slaves were not the only ones with a wolf by the ears, and the wolves were not only (or, in the case of the Europeans) the principal wolves to be feared. All modern states of the nineteenth century (including the United States, as its citizens marched from one coast to the other, over, around, and through the Amerindians) had to operate in a world of modern empires, and as it happened that turned out to be a dangerous world, if not yet in that century, for Europeans.

The Companion‘s final pair of essays, by French literature professor Françoise Melonio and historian Olivier Zunz, trace the reception of Tocqueville’s books in Europe and the United States, respectively. Melonio links Tocqueville to the line of French moralists beginning with Pascal; Tocqueville deliberately adapts classical and Christian imagery and insights to the new regime of democracy in order “to clear a path for the future legislator—the future French legislator—whose mission is to bring the Revolution to an end and establish a well-regulated democracy” (339). The “entirety of [his] work” reflects “on the management of the democratic transition” (345). Once the Third Republic had established itself the French turned away from Tocqueville. Only the debacle of the 1940s brought them back, led by Raymond Aron. (One might, incidentally, wonder why de Gaulle, who saved French republicanism twice, avoided any serious reference to Tocqueville. Melonio, who does not ask this, nonetheless may provide a clue: Tocqueville thought that “the kings of France had sought only to divide their subjects in order to reign more absolutely, “thereby planting “the seed of the enduring French taste for servitude” [344]. De Gaulle wanted a republic that could defend itself, and therefore a republic with a strong executive, not a dominant parliament. Tocqueville’s critique of monarchy, however accurate, would not have proved a useful text in the Gaullist founding.)

Tocqueville took up the French moralists’ theme of homo viator, man the voyager, the being that lives in perpetual exodus toward or away from the Promised Land. Melonio rightly observes that Tocqueville writes most extensively about the contemporary voyage or crossing to the new world of democracy. But in saying that he “offered a secularized, historicized version” of this story, “because for him the theme of homo viator characterized not so much human experience in general as the historical situation of democratic man” (347), she overlooks the striking passage from chapter 17 of the Democracy‘s second volume, “On some Sources of Poetry in Democratic Nations”: “Man comes from nothing, traverses time, and is going to disappear forever into the bosom of God….” (Democracy in America, Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop translation [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000], 462). She sees that for Tocqueville as for the earlier moralists—and not so much for the pre-Christian Aristotle, one might add—human happiness seems profoundly elusive, anxiety and restlessness chronic. Human beings oscillate between grandeur and misery for this “political Pascal” (348), and Tocqueville hopes to find “the kind of grandeur and happiness that is appropriate” to man in the very act of guiding his fellow men, and especially his fellow citizens, through the wilderness of regime change (348, emphasis added). Although she initially seems to deny that Tocqueville regards human nature as fixed, Melonio soon affirms that the very sublimity (and thus disquietude) of humanity constitutes “the fixed foundation of man’s nature” (Tocqueville, quoted 348-349). Tocqueville “looks beyond all social regimes to their ‘fixed foundation’ in human nature”: “democracy is the regime in which that nature reveals itself in its purest form” (349).

The legislator navigates high seas. He can steer the vessel but not construct it, nor control the ocean. Good steerage requires prudence, which Tocqueville “recovered” from Aristotle (349). Indeed, “for Tocqueville the quality common to all great writers is common sense,” “the art of engaging in conversation with the commonplaces of one’s time” (350). He offers “nothing to encourage romantic effusions of sensibility or imagination,” but rather sought “to tame democratic man” (354). His “literary eloquence, his classical rhetoric, was intended to serve deliberative democracy, the only defense against despotism” (354). The best answer to Enlightenment materialism and rationalism consisted not in Romantic appeals to thumos but to the balance, the moderation, the sanity of the Biblical and classical wellsprings of the West—not because they were traditional but because they were true. In the first half of the twentieth century, these wellsprings dried up.

Olivier Zunz reports the course of Tocqueville’s reception in America in the final essay. Jacksonian Democrats dismissed Tocqueville’s critique of majority tyranny, while New England Whigs found his praise of township government notably insightful, although Whig economist and tariff enthusiast Henry Carey “faulted Tocqueville for attributing [Americans’ well-being] to the democratic principle rather than to Whig economics” (370). The Democracy found more serious readers during the Civil War, which (as Zunz puts it with nice understatement) “highlighted” Tocqueville’s warnings about potential tensions between equality and liberty (374). The young Henry Adams “learned to think de Tocqueville my model” during the war (378). But Americans began to forget him around the same time the French did, and “the Progressives had little use for his work” (379). No surprise, there: the Progressives’ historicist optimism encouraged them to suppose that democracy’s problems would all work out, and that Tocqueville’s warning about administrative despotism would prove senseless.

Tocqueville speaks to Americans and Europeans today because the two great alternatives, democratic republicanism and democratic despotism, ‘America’ and ‘Russia, remain before us. This Companion to the writings of our longtime companion serves him well, and with him, us.

 

Mary P. Nichols: Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 1992.

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: Aristotle’s “Best Regime”: Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law. Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2003.

Susan Collins: Aristotle and the Recovery of Statesmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

 

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 34, Number 2, Spring 2007. Republished with permission.

 

In his 1961 book The City and Man, Leo Strauss urged his readers to turn “toward the political thought of classical antiquity” with “passionate interest” and an “unqualified willingness to learn.” He urged them to do so out of the need felt by thoughtful men to address “the crisis of our time, the crisis of the West” (1).

Strauss pointed to the transformation of modern political philosophy into “ideology” as the “core” of that crisis (2). The West had declined, relatively, inasmuch as the East, still dominated by the regimes founded by Lenin and Mao, rivaled the West in scientific prowess but remained despotic, politically un-‘Western.’ The stubbornness of despotism among otherwise ‘modernized’ peoples defied the universality of the modern Western project, making the West “uncertain of its purpose”; “a society which was accustomed to understand itself in terms of a universal purpose, cannot lose faith in that purpose without becoming completely bewildered” (3).

The purpose of the modern West had been to put “philosophy or science” at “the service of the relief of man’s estate” by enabling man “to become the master and owner of nature through the intellectual conquest of nature.” Such knowing mastery would entail “progress toward greater prosperity,” and therefore the chance for every person to preserve himself and “to develop all his faculties fully in concert with everyone else’s doing the same”: As the young president of the United States would say, around the same time Strauss wrote, a rising tide lifts all the boats. The political consequence of humanity’s “greater freedom and justice”—both conceived in terms of equality—would be “the universal society or the universal state,” a world made “safe for the Western democracies” (4).

Communist tyranny made it “clearer than it had been for some time that no bloody or unbloody change of society can eradicate the evil in man”—thus challenging progressivist egalitarianism—proving that “there cannot be a society which does not have to employ coercive restraint”—thus challenging progressivist libertarianism (5). The political problem remained: Who rules? “The situation resembles the one which existed during the centuries in which Christianity and Islam each raised its universal claim but had to be satisfied with uneasily coexisting with its antagonist” (6).

Yet the modern scientific project could not answer the question Who rules? in any rational way, having lost its confidence in the ability of reason to discern purposes for human beings. At best social science might discover “universal laws of political behavior,” thereby contributing to “the comprehensive enterprise called universal history”—history, which finally would supply the answer to the question of rule (8). But to understand history, one needs to understand the thought of the men of the past, whose efforts at philosophizing moderns, looking back, now take to be mere ideologies, relative to the times and places in which they were framed. “Solid knowledge” of the ideologies of the past “consists primarily in understanding the teachings of the political philosophers as they themselves meant them” (9). One cannot know an ideology as an ideology if he hasn’t “grasp[ed] the original teaching as such”; particularly, one cannot understand classical political philosophy if he holds “a dogmatic assumption whose hidden basis is the belief in human progress or in the rationality of the historical process” (11). Nor should the inquirer make the reverse mistake, imagining that “a fresh understanding of classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use.” The “relative success of modern political philosophy has brought into being a kind of society wholly unknown to the classics,” a society in which the principles of the classics “are not immediately applicable” (11). That is, the cure for modern ideology cannot be to transform the principles of ancient political philosophy into another ideology or set of ideologies.

As Benjamin Constant had argued in “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared With That of the Moderns,” Strauss writes that ideologies had distorted the lens through which political thinkers looked at politics, obscuring “the political things as they are experienced by the citizen or statesman,” the pre-scientific or common-sense understanding upon which any scientific understanding “remains dependent” (11). To gain such understanding, Strauss suggests, the modern student should read Aristotle’s Politics, which presents politics without the presuppositions of modern natural science. Like Constant, Strauss never loses sight of the fact that the existence of the modern state—centralized, with administrative networks extending into local communities—had transformed the political circumstances of life by partly shifting the mental ‘location’ of one’s citizenship from village and Church to nation and capital. Always mindful of the moral weight of circumstances, Aristotle would expect no less from his students.

Ancient observers of politics distinguished nature from convention, the latter consisting of things that exist only because men hold them to be, agree upon so holding them. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Aristotle regarded politics itself as natural for human beings, deriving from the natural human capacity for speech and reasoning. This capacity alone opens the possibility of discovering together common-sense ways of associating with one another. Political philosophy is the highest example of that quest, “the quest for that political order which is best according to nature everywhere, and, we may add [glancing at historical relativism] always” (17). A political philosopher “acts directly as the teacher of indefinitely many legislators or statesmen,” but his pedagogy consists not, absurdly, in attempting to lay down the law to such hard-headed practical men. Instead he “guid[es], in conversation, one or two men who seek the best political order or are about to legislate for a definite community”; “the most fundamental discussion of the Politics includes what is almost a dialogue between the oligarch and the democrat”—representing two principal claimants for political authority, namely, the few and the many (21). What the political philosopher has to say might interest such men because in general all seek not the traditional but the good, and the philosopher has made it his business to seek the good in gazing at the traditional, and thinking about it.

In so gazing and thinking, Aristotle noticed that lawgivers must act cautiously. Law needs obedience, and among real, often impassioned men obedience requires firm habit at least as much as reasoning; reasoning itself will not happen often if the soul has habituated itself to heed its passions. Progress in the arts requires breaking with habit, but improvement in the laws requires continued stability. Strauss refers his reader to the passage in the Politics in which Aristotle remarks, “In general, all seek not the traditional but the good” (1269a2-3); simple traditionalism would have left humanity at the level of its first ancestors, “similar to average or even simpleminded persons” of Aristotle’s time (1269a6). But “the easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself” (1269a23). As Strauss elucidates with a reference to the Metaphysics, the laws embody and reinforce “ancestral opinions,” codify a civil theology. Whereas the earliest tradition allegedly says that “the divine encloses the whole of nature,” in the ancestral opinions of the many this teaching has been made concrete by the teaching that the divine consists of gods who have taken the forms of men or “other animals” (Metaphysics 1074b1-14). Or, in Strauss’s words, “the principle of the whole both wishes and does not wish to be called Zeus,” inasmuch as “the city as a whole is characterized by a specific recalcitrance to reason,” that is, the prevalence of the passions (23). The times are always out of joint because we are.

None of this should encourage the modern project, the openly progressive reform of law and custom guided by an art-science or technology. The problem of slavery illustrates the difficulty of any Enlightenment-like undertaking. A rational person wants to know: Who is a natural slave, a person justly enslaved, and who is not? This question isn’t easy to answer in practice, inasmuch as a slavish soul might dwell inside a strong body and a virtuous soul inside a sickly body. (Looking back on his baseball career, Dizzy Dean once said, “The good Lord blessed me with a strong arm and a weak mind,” complicating the matter still further.) Such lack of ‘transparency’ will make precise rational judgments impossible. Might does not make right, but neither does right make might. To maintain itself in a passionate and warlike world, right must be blended with might, and that is no act of technocracy but of political prudence, not to say divine wisdom.

“Laws are a form of the legislative art, but the legislative art”—itself the highest or architectonic art—”is the highest form of practical wisdom or prudence, the prudence concerned with the common good of a political society, as distinguished from prudence in the primary sense which is concerned with a man’s own good” (24). Like the laws ‘it’ makes, prudence sets limits on human passions and on the arts men devise to satisfy their passions. “To be prudent means to live a good life, and to lead a good life means that one deserves to be one’s own master or that one makes one’s own decisions well”; prudence “is that kind of knowledge which is inseparable from ‘moral virtue,’ i.e. goodness of character,” the “habit of choosing” (24). With perhaps a touch of prudent exaggeration intended to fend off the danger of the wrong kind of fusion of theory with practice seen in historicist doctrines, Strauss maintains that “the sphere ruled by prudence is closed since the principles of prudence—the ends in the light of which prudence guides man—are known independently of theoretical science” (25). Prudential knowledge, knowledge of ‘what to do,’ ranks beneath theoretical knowledge, knowledge of ‘what is’: In a passage from the Nicomachean Ethics cited by Strauss, Aristotle urges that prudence should support theoretical wisdom but not claim superiority over it (1145a7-12).

Theoretical reason will be needed because an ungentlemanly but intelligent man might ask, ‘Why be decent?’ Such men will require a theoretical argument showing “that the practice of the moral virtues is the end of man by nature,” an argument obviously requiring “knowledge of the human soul” (26). But Aristotle generally prefers not to tread this Platonic path, probably seeing that such  a theoretical understanding might be reached by an intellectually powerful man lacking in moral character, and above all lacking in prudence—a higher-level reprise of the ‘natural slave’ problem. As Plato’s Socrates himself teaches, between reason and passions in the human soul, spiritedness or thumos lies; in the city, between the philosopher and the people lies the politician (or, as those living in modernity almost necessarily say, the statesman). The politician, like the philosopher, had better get the theological-political question right, and to teach that politician in a way that will increase the chance of getting it right, the philosopher needs to present “the moral-political sphere” as independent from but “not unqualifiedly closed to theoretical science” (28). In a long series of references drawn from the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, Strauss points to Aristotle’s suggestion that true opinion in the city underlies citizens’ moderation. Framing laws that reinforce true opinion requires practical experience coupled with the study of the several political regimes or ways of life seen in cities; law is “intellect without appetite” if understood in light of such study, experience, opinion, and moderation (28 n. 38).

These thoughts established, in the central paragraphs of his essay Strauss turns to the difference between the ancient city or polis and the modern state. Strauss uses ‘city’ for polis because “the city as Aristotle understands it is essentially an urban society; the core of the city is not the tillers of the soil” (30).  The references to the Politics that Strauss cites gives a somewhat different picture: The physical core of the polis is ‘in town,’ to be sure, but a polis with a democratic regime needs to integrate the outlying farmers. They have no time for frequent assembly meetings and so do not so easily succumb to the rhetoric of demagogic agitators who play to urban mobs. The health of democratic politics, at least, depends on the limitations upon political life set by citizens who are not one hundred percent ‘politicized.’ Strauss captures some of this in writing that the city should “combine civilization with freedom” (30).

In the mind of the modern citizen the equivalent of city is ‘country,’ in the sense of ‘My country, right or wrong.’ But for “the theoretical man” of modernity country means “the unity of state and society.” The modern country distinguishes its ‘state’ from its ‘civil society’ because the West saw a sharp and dangerous controversy arise concerning the purpose of political life, a controversy that eventually drove prudent men to work for a separation of state and society. Looking at the ancient city, Aristotle saw no reason to worry that the ultimate purpose of human life, living well or happiness, would provoke serious disagreement “among sufficiently thoughtful people.” But later—presumably as Christianity spread and then factionalized in Europe, and then Islam did the same in the Near East—no such consensus seemed possible. As the theological-political problem changed, political philosophers invented the state, eventually giving it the more modest and more readily agreeable task of guaranteeing the “conditions of happiness,” assigning the higher reaches of the quest for happiness itself to civil society, where rival religious claims could compete without doing injury to one another (30-31). (Some years ago a Muslim man listened as a Roman Catholic acquaintance of mine deplored the secularization of the American public square, and then chided, “You Americans have privatized religion.”) Strauss observes that “Aristotle knew and rejected a view of the city which seems to foreshadow the modern view of political society and hence the distinction between state and society,” the view that “the purpose of the city is to enable its members to exchange goods and services by protecting them against violence among themselves and from foreigners, without its bein concerned at all with the moral character of its members” (32), a city that concerned itself primarily with what moderns call political economy. Strauss also clearly hints that Aristotle did not find the pursuit of the truest happiness as dangerous as it would become, although the example of Socrates reminded him that that pursuit did have its dangers.

Strauss associates the modern ‘country’ with social egalitarianism, as Tocqueville famously does. In our egalitarian countries we nonetheless adopt rulers or ‘authority figures,’ looking up to those men who display extraordinary abilities while “devot[ing] themselves to the service of the common man” (35). This understandably leads Strauss to say that he “must” write “a few words about Aristotle’s allegedly anti-democratic prejudice.” Partisans of democratic regimes in antiquity staked their claim to authority not on natural rights but on their status a freemen, men legally entitled to live as they like. For practical purposes democracy therefore required election to office by lot instead of by voting, as voting would entail “considerations other than whether the candidate is a free man—especially merit.” Voting brings a sort of aristocracy in with it; “modern democracy would have to be described with a view to its intention from Aristotle’s point of view as a mixture of democracy and aristocracy” (35). (See Paul Eidelberg: The Philosophy of the American Constitution and A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity, for an elaboration of Strauss’s argument. The question as illuminated by Eidelberg becomes this: Is a regime in which citizens vote for their representatives a mixed regime, or is it a democracy with a dash of moderating aristocracy in it?)  No division of state and society need apply, as ancient democracy was “passionately and comprehensively political,” with democrats taking turns ruling and being ruled with no felt need for imposing the restriction on government that modern liberalism prizes (36).

Aristotle knows that “the city tends to be democratic,” given the long-term political advantages the sheer weight of numbers affords. But because ‘the many’ often regard both philosophers and gentlemen with suspicion, and also because Aristotle does not share the modern faith in a “universal enlightenment” harmonizing philosophy and the people, Aristotle looks for ways to mix gentlemen into the regime (36-37). Such careful differentiation mimics nature itself, “an ordered whole consist[ing] of beings of different rank”; “there is a natural harmony between the whole and the human mind” (38, 41). The times are always in joint, too, because we are. A well-ordered regime, product of the prudence of political men who understand their activity as architectonic, reflects a sound understanding of human nature and its place within nature as a whole. “It is not sufficient to say that the theme of the Politics is not the Greek city-state but the polis (the city): the theme of the Politics  is the politeia (the regime), the ‘form’ of a city,” the human components of which form the citizens (collectively, the politeuma) (45). The regime of the city is higher than the components or citizens themselves because the form is higher than the matter; the form is higher than the matter because it is directly connected with the purpose of the polis. Every kind of regime has its own “legitimating principle,” its own “public or political morality” consisting of what the citizens consider just. What justice really is is, of course, the theme of political theory as such: “The guiding question of Aristotle’s Politics is the question of the best regime,” a question Strauss defers to “another occasion” (48-49). (In the next chapter of the City and Man, Strauss turns to Plato’s Republic.) If modern liberalism liberates human beings by freeing them from spiritual despotism—separating state from society, limiting that state to preservation of life, liberty, and property—and by intellectual democratization or enlightenment along with social democratization, Aristotle’s liberalism liberates by freeing the life of the best minds from political ambition, while insisting that those minds remain attentive to the political conditions of the mind. “In asserting that man transcends the city, Aristotle agrees with the liberalism of the modern age. Yet he differs from that liberalism by limiting this transcendence only to the highest in man. Man transcends the city only by pursuing true happiness, not by pursuing happiness however understood,” that is, conventionally understood (49). By ‘immanentizing’ or democratizing the life of the mind, attempting fully to integrate life into politics, as seen particularly in the group of doctrines Strauss calls ‘historicist,’ moderns threw their solution to the theological-political question into crisis. And this circumstance induced Strauss to commend Aristotle and other older writers to the professorial calls that had to some extent replace the classical gentlemen as those most likely to entertain philosophic considerations.

In 1961 few political scientists would have turned toward the political thought of classical antiquity for any other reason than historical curiosity. Decades later, this remains largely true. (A few years ago, I gave a talk that was attended by a prominent political scientist. I wrote the names of Aristotle’s six regimes on the board, and he stared at them for the next fifteen minutes, quite sensibly paying little attention to what I had to say. A few months later, he saw me again: “I read Aristotle’s Politics this summer. It’s really good!” he said, with a look of pleased surprise.) But such complaisant inattention no longer characterizes students of political philosophy, who have turned more and more to Aristotle as they consider the condition of modern liberalism and liberalism’s several rivals. The authors whose books I review here share in this thoughtful trend, and deepen it.

Mary P. Nichols. As the student of one or more of Strauss’s students, Mary P. Nichols came to the study of Aristotle not in an attempt to recover philosophy from ideology but as part of the philosophic quest itself. Strauss had cleared the way for her. And Strauss’s great student, Harry V. Jaffa, had published his seminal essay on Aristotle in the Strauss/Cropsey History of Political Philosophy, a magisterial overview to which Nichols often refers. (Nichols recalls her first experience of philosophic wonder in Joseph Cropsey’s classroom at the University of Chicago; her earlier, political instruction in the virtues of the ‘mixed regime’ or ‘polity’ in Paul Eidelberg’s classroom at Sweet Briar College has not been forgotten, either, as her presentation of Aristotle will reveal.) Having studied Plato and his “serene resignation” in the face of politics, she turned to Aristotle to see whether philosophy might become political in a more constructive way “by engaging in a kind of statesmanship in an attempt to improve political life,” and also to see if philosophers might benefit philosophically from such activity, learn something from it. She found that the philosopher learns from politics “the limits and potentials of human nature,” that the relationship “between the philosopher and the city is a version of that between statesmen and citizens, as they rule and are ruled in turn.” Philosophers learn from politics what it means to say “that human beings are by nature political animals” (vii-viii).

Nichols mentions two responses to the crisis of modern liberalism: one democratic, calling for freedom not through limitation of state power but through political participation, ‘civic republicanism’—a stance she associates with Hannah Arendt, among others; the other aristocratic, praising the moral virtue of elite rule, a stance she associates with Strauss. Whereas civic republican writers call attention to citizens, Straussians call attention to statesmen. Although Straussians praise statesmen they finally see politics “less as a fulfillment of human nature than as a means of fostering the conditions in which the philosophic—and hence apolitical—virtue of the few can flourish” (4). Nichols (and this will prove characteristic) seeks to blend democracy and aristocracy, as it were to marry Arendt and Strauss; her book instantiates in word what (presumably) her classroom teaching instantiates in deed: a mixed regime. (It might be added that both writing and teaching presuppose a certain propensity for monarchy, kingly and/or despotic, but that I trust only adds to the richness of the mixture.) The philosopher-teacher learns from politics by practicing it as well as by thinking about it, “sifting through and modifying the various opinions that human beings might hold” concerning rule, divine and human, and nature, human and cosmic. The city the philosopher studies and contributes to ruling orients itself to body and mind, both in their juncture and their disjuncture; “statesmen must become fully cognizant of the dual origins of the city so that by steering politics between the despotism of body and the despotism of mind they can preserve the political rule without which cities return to their origins and collapse into prepolitical forms”—into beings “who act as if they are beasts and gods” (10). The dualities Nichols identifies and considers throughout her book resolve themselves not in some simple unity or synthesis but in complex union or marriage, partnerships whose principals rule and are ruled in equilibrium and tension, a condition often in need of attentive care.

“Indispensable to Aristotle’s elaboration of statesmanship is the fact that nature rules humanity politically rather than despotically”‘; in Aristotle no deep-down core of fatum finally rules because nature itself amounts to a mixed regime. The very lack of a world state, an ‘end of history,’ bespeaks no “defect in nature” but rather “nature’s gift to humanity of the opportunity for statesmanship and all that it entails” (11)—a thought Charles de Gaulle expressed with more austere, masculine language in praising a statesman of the Ancien Regime: “He realized all the possible in taking his part in the inevitable” (La France et son armée, Paris: Librairie Plon, 1938, 57). “It was to prevent the despotism of community”—pure democracy—”and virtue”—untrammeled priestly and social aristocracy—”that liberalism was first proposed and invented. In spite of its deficiencies, liberalism may yet prove superior to its critics unless they understand—and accept—the mutual dependence of citizens and statesmen” (12).

Nichols proves a genial, sharp-eyed companion in a stroll through political life understood Peripatetically. The first two books of the Politics show what the duality “political animal” means—the blend of mixture of animal survival, necessity, and divine speech, the good life, freedom. In Book I Aristotle points from the origins of the city in biological necessity toward “the freedom implied in politics”; in Book II he points from the freedom of philosophic speculation (what moderns might call utopian idealism) back toward necessity, which human beings forget “only at their peril” (14-15). These necessities themselves present in dual forms in the first element of the city, the family: male and female, parents and children, master and slaves. Families do not ‘grow’ serenely into cities. Families left to themselves might veer toward “unholy and savage deeds with regard to food and sex,” cannibalism and incest (17). For cities to develop, deliberation and choice must occur; “humanity’s overcoming of nature in one sense”—bodily violence—”is thus a means for fulfilling its nature in another”—the affirmation of speech and reason. “Nature in both senses is at the heart of political life,” and this is possible because the human soul “is not a substance separate from the body, but the organization of matter so that the parts of a living being form a whole, and so that it acts in a certain way characteristic of a species” (18, 20). It is also possible because the family has one ‘political’ relationship within it, the partnership of husband and wife. That is to say that the most necessitous of all natural relationships, at least when it comes to maintaining (as distinguished from reproducing) the species, in humans also features the potential for freedom. Lovers also talk, even after marrying. Their talk can bring political rule with it, liberating the family, giving liberating form to brute necessity—articulating nature.

Husbands and wives properly rule and are ruled by one another. “Political rule is partial rule in that it recognized that the ruled is a free and independent being” (29). Political rule can mean rule ‘by turns’ or rule ‘in part’—the Greek en merei itself being ambiguous or ‘mixed.’ Men dare to begin things, and to acquire; women preserve, nurture. Together they can serve “virtue or excellence” in the household, and their “difference is the ground for independence” (29, 32). Nichols puts scholarship in her debt by discovering how Aristotle’s sly references to traditional Greek stories illustrate the prudent limitations womanly thought suggests to male aspiration. As deployed by the prudential, statesmanlike philosopher, addressing his male audience of future politicians, the tradition lays out what Aristotle need only hint at: “Women can teach men a respect for their own, a respect for the given, a respect necessary for the  male activity of acquiring and ruling, which must build on what is given rather than destroy it. Women must teach that life itself is good, not merely its activities. Men, on the other hand, can teach women the value of going beyond the given, the joy of bringing something new into being, something necessary for women to experience if their own nurturing is to be successful, since nurturing fosters change when it fosters growth. Men must teach what the goodness of life owes to human activity.” (32-33)

Aristotle the biologist knows very well that women do bring new things into being, but also knows that they experience this as pain. As members of the household, men transform the meaning of childbirth, making it something more than an excruciating physical necessity. The family provides “the natural foundation” for politics precisely because “each has something to gain from the other, because each can help to make the other’s perspective more complete,” as Aristotle demonstrates by encompassing both perspectives. “The particular perspectives that men and women manifest are embodied in Aristotelian statesmanship; the statesman’s recognition of the integrity of the ruled is a kind of feminine preservation, while his contribution to the political community—his very formation of a political rule—is a kind of masculine acquisition” (33). Childbirth rightly understood implies the other principal function of the family, the education of the children the parents rule. This leads Aristotle to the topics of his second chapter.

Book II moves from Book I’s presentation of the sub-political elements of politics that nonetheless make the city possible, to “the origins of cities in human thought” (35). In the structure of the Politics, I and II represent a mated pair—Book II being the manly one. Book II is a second beginning, one originating in choice, in the opinions human beings form regarding the best way to live, the best regime. “The city is an association of human beings rather than of slaves or animals because its members share lives lived ‘according to choice'” (36). The three ‘utopian’ thinkers Aristotle discusses all set down their ideas of the best regime. Human families do not achieve self-sufficiency (autarchia) by themselves, but neither can human families survive the relentless ‘publicity’ of a community of women and children. Communism exemplifies the danger of thought “when it attempts to simplify a complex association like the city,” and the complex beings who comprise the city, beings consisting of bodies and souls, maleness or femaleness (37). In his apparent communism, Socrates “acts as if reason were free from experience,” makes practice follow reason in its soaring transcendence of the given (40). “Unlike Plato,” that ironist of human possibility, Aristotle can show not only the limits of politics but also “provide a guide to action” (40). Unlike the reformer Hippodamus, who writes like a Socrates free of any irony, hoping that mathematical formulae can perfect real cities, Aristotle knows that law requires the reverence human beings reserve for the old and settled, while avoiding the rigidity of unthinking traditionalism. He shows this concretely by examining three actual cities—Sparta, Crete, and Carthage—identifying their strengths and defects and enabling potential legislators to consider possible reforms.

After this study of pairs, Nichols’s second chapter is the only one devoted to a single chapter of the Politics, Book III, which forms “the core of [Aristotle’s] political science,” his consideration of citizens, regimes, the rule of law, and the various claims to rule made by would-be lawgivers (53). But duality immediately returns as the duality of the city. The duality of the city is the one and the many; “the city must make citizens” of both, “just as it is rooted in both body and soul and aims at both living and living well.” In such a ‘blended’ regime, the many contribute more than their bodies, “for their rule can be justified on the basis of their moral and political virtue.” But “democracy is amorphous” and defines freedom badly, as doing as one likes. The one contributes unity and discipline of thought, firm direction, but tends to forget the body (53, 58). Thus the ‘polity’ or politeia, the only regime called by the generic word ‘regime,’ may be “in some sense the only regime” (63) of the six regimes Aristotle identifies. The regime called polity best reflects the nature of the city itself, “a heterogeneous whole” rightly founded on the principle of justice: equality for equals and inequality for those not equals. All claimants to rule, to the right to set the laws, share “in the different elements that constitute a city” (65). True politicians or rulers of the city plan and direct the “potluck supper” of various human types, a supper that might otherwise be disgusting, indigestibly random (66, 195 n. 20). “The task of statesmanship is to protect the city from the worst side of the many while harnessing their positive contributions” (68). Statesmanlike men will also avoid the rule of the pambasileia, the absolute king whose wise rule would nonetheless effectively destroy the city by making it into a household in which the children never grew up. (Even Zeus divided authority over the cosmos with his brothers Poseidon and Hades; perhaps only a Creator-God could so thoroughly know His creation as to dare to rule it as King of kings, and even that God, the Bible teaches, allows His highest creatures the independence of free will, of limited self-government.) A human Great King “forgets his own vulnerability” (76) as the God of the New Testament does not, being supremely vulnerable and invulnerable at the same time.

In order to balance the untrammeled rule of the many or of the one in earthly cities, prudent founders institute the rule of law. While political rule, lawgiving, acts vigorously, the rule of law restrains actions; they “belong together.” In the well-ordered city “action occurs within the restraints provided by law, although action can modify those restraints from time to time,” providing “flexibility without mere flux.” Unwritten law, custom, “more authoritative” than written law, also remains in its very unwrittennness perhaps “more open to interpretation and change” (78-79). Both the many and the few seek unrestrained rule, the one swearing by the god, the others claiming to be gods among men. ruling without the other, each would destroy the city and themselves. “If they fully saw their resemblance, they might no longer acts as beasts and gods” (81). Human beings are homogeneous qua humans; they all need the city to rule the, need government. Human beings are heterogeneous qua individuals, needing to participate in the rule of the city, not just government but self-government. As individuals, however, they lack autarchia—self-sufficiency or self-rule, a fact that ties them back to the city, wherein they can rule themselves together, as a union.

Because “human beings are not self-sufficient” as individuals, families, tribes, or even social classes, “regimes must be polities” (120). Nichols titles the third and central chapter of her book, “Turning Regimes Into Polities,” discussing books IV, V, and VI of the Politics. Here Aristotle “shows statesmen how to reform their regimes, how to replace despotism with politics” (85). In this, Aristotle diverges from the Socratic account in the Republic, where regime changes seem inevitable. The practical purpose of studying the several regimes is to see how “each regime can be transformed by degrees into a version” of the best practicable regime, the polity, “the  regime that recognizes the heterogeneity of human life, the regime that incorporates the ends of the various elements of the community”; “polity is a potential of all regimes” (88). The polity or ‘regime of all regimes will not hum harmoniously to itself, once founded. “Life is characterized by conflict” not harmony, “and the natural and intellectual virtues emerge in the course of the conflict” (91). Both soldierly courage and the judge’s justice require distancing oneself from conflict even as one engages in it because both require prudent deliberation before decision and action. Further, in a full life one citizen might be both soldier and judge; rejecting the Socratic-communist principle of ‘one man, one job,’ Aristotle recommends a variety of tasks for everyone, again blending different ‘natures’ into one life’s work.

Especially when discussing oligarchies and democracies, Aristotle avoids making sharp regime distinctions, blending them into the ‘polity,’ the regime that mixes the few and the many (95; Politics 1293b32-34). The class of citizens who are neither rich nor poor balance the extremes by blending “certain characteristics that are a virtuous mean between the vices of the rich and poor,” avoiding the despotism of each extreme class, sharing rule and friendship. The ‘polity’ transforms the largest class, the many who are poor, as under it Aristotle need no longer emphasize “the military virtue possessed by the many that was essential to the regime as he first presented it in Book III” but rather its (new-founded) moderation, the virtue of peace (97-98). “Reflecting the complex character of human nature itself, Aristotle recommends that mixtures permeate not simply the whole, but the different parts of the whole” (100). Similarly, even tyranny can be reformed, if the tyrant considers his own best interests.

Nature in Aristotle’s view operates on chance, not necessity. “Chance allows human beings to act, necessity does not. The openness of nature that acts as a limit on knowledge permits choice and statesmanship. For Aristotle, the decline of regimes in a single direction is not inevitable or necessary,” as it seems in Plato’s Republic (112). The fortuitous or chance-ruled nature of nature gives human nature its opening to avoid lives of mere randomness. “Human beings overcome the chaos of chance through the deliberative choices of those options that give permanence to their lives” (119). Human beings’ “very choice of political rule, which shows that nature is not despotic, is the choice to imitate nature itself, for through this choice human beings allow to others the participation that nature allows to themselves” (123).

It makes sense, then, to think that political life itself has limits, a theme to which Nichols turns in the fourth chapter, on the last two books of the Politics. If politics falls under the rule of fate, as the Platonic regime-change story implies, then philosophy, in ascending from the cave that is the city, must culminate in solitary noesis, an apolitical freedom beyond the reach of false opinion. Socrates has no friends—only inferiors in dialectical struggle, and the rare and silent auditor, Plato. But if nature itself is political, and political life not ‘fated,’ then the philosopher might enjoy genuine friendships. “The give and take essential to political rule finds its model in friendship, just as the various regimes Aristotle describes are reflections of different kinds of friendships” (127).

Aristotle sees the danger of political life: Courageous, honor-loving souls might serve the city, but they might veer off into war-loving despotism. If politics were simply masked despotism, the anti-political and a-political philosophers would be right. They aren’t: “Proponents of a theoretical life can remind political advocates that there is a servitude implied in the despotic rule of others. Political advocates, on the other hand, can teach the proponents of theory about the importance of political action to happiness” (130). Those sentences parallel the sentences Nichols wrote about men and women, making the same point, and one should notice that the place of ‘women’ in the first formulation finds its echo in the philosophic life, very much resembling her own.

Nichols also observes that the parallel between political life and the philosophic life breaks down if one considers the relations among cities. Foreign relations are not friendly; “where neighboring peoples are present, the concerns of war intrude into a city’s life” (132), and even if a city won all its wars it would become a universal despot. The philosopher might resemble rather an isolated and self-sufficient city, or the cosmos, except that such an isolato “will not understand himself.” “Political activity provides the opportunity for the self-knowledge that these individuals lack,” teaching “the constraints or limits of human action and therefore the extent to which the political actor depends on others and the community that all share.” The philosopher’s “contemplation is of his own thoughts and activities, built upon the contributions of others and requiring others for their completion”—rather as Strauss found students (among many others) in Joseph Cropsey and Paul Eidelberg, and they in turn found students (among many others) in Nichols. The activity of thought “cannot be separated from the deeds of life, no more than argument itself can be separated from ‘what happens,’ or literally, ‘the deeds.'” Or, as Strauss puts it in one of his book titles, one must consider both the argument and the action of Plato’s Laws (134-135).

These considerations animate Aristotle’s treatment of ‘the best regime.’ Like a philosopher, the best city has a port, an opening to the world, but the port is not central to its being; neither the philosopher nor the best city is a being of mere flux. Like the philosopher, the best city has a foreign policy, but it consists of hegemony or leadership over other cities, not imperialist despotism. Like a philosopher, the best city won’t work too hard; unlike the best democracy, it does not require farmers. The best city prays, but “only for the possible,” guided by prudent, retired statesmen (148). Priests who have been soldiers and citizens in their earlier years incline neither toward fatalism nor fanaticism. And if those persons who are inclined toward fatalism and/or fanaticism learn just enough from philosophers to invent new weapons and tactics, then “it is the task of philosophy, Aristotle says, to investigate new military defenses when new offensive ones are discovered” (149). The best city needs ports and walls, but even more the best city needs the citizen virtues that provide for both commerce and security.

Aristotle thus concludes the Politics with an account of education, whereby citizen virtues are nurtured. Recognizing the many dualities of human nature and life, education “should foster the habits of freedom” and both political and philosophic freedom develop best under conditions of ruling and being ruled, of deliberation consisting of the play of many opinions, and not under conditions when either rule or theoretical wisdom seem reachable by slipping out of the bonds of down-to-earth life. Put another way, both communism and mathematics “override the diversity of which a city is composed” (156). The model of education is music, wherein a theme does not reduce to a single beat. “Politike is both the means to self-knowledge and the activity that best expresses it” (167) But it remains dangerous—lives lost, no perfect justice.

Nichols returns to the crisis of modern thought in her brief final chapter. Early modern thought tends toward fatalism—the materialism of Hobbes, for example—whereas late modern thought tends toward fanaticism—Kantian voluntarism gone mad, so to speak. Strauss might add, modern thought has mixed fatalism and fanaticism to yield ideology—especially the historicist ideologies featuring an unnatural blend of deterministic theory and fanatical practice. Modern thought seems political but is not. “In its complexity Aristotle’s political theory resembles the mixed regime, or the polity, that is its political goal” (175).

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr. Bates draws his readers’ attention to the very peak of Aristotle’s political philosophy, the best regime, and does so ‘up front,’ so to speak, in his book’s title. He calls attention to the angelic heights right away, in a manly and aspiring retort to Nichols, among others

In the very spirit of spiritedness, he dedicates the book to his University of Dallas mentor, the late M. E. Bradford, that most courtly of neo-Confederate gentlemen, “a true defender of the Republic and its Constitution.” Beneath the dedication to Professor Bradford he quotes Allen Tate’s poem, “To the Lacedemonians”—the Confederate war veterans whom Tate knew as a boy and young man in the South—whose regime lost to the Yankees and whose survivors now live in “the country of the damned”—a land of motorcars and trade, of “Life grown sullen and immense” which “lusts after immunity to pain”—having fought for the “flimsy shell” of Union “like swine argue for a rind” (v). Bates thus honors the teachings of the Southern wing of the contemporary American political grouping that proudly calls itself the ‘paleoconservatives,” who call their countrymen away from the life of cities and of governmental centralization, back to agrarianism and local self-government—thereby distinguishing themselves from ‘neoconservatives,’ who have made a sort of peace with many of the characteristic features of modernity.

In commending Aristotle (traditionally called ‘The Philosopher’) to citizens of paleoconservative convictions, Bates does something that Strauss would find intriguing. Bates commends philosophy to men and women who often regard philosophy with suspicion. In paleoconservative circles, philosophy often looms as a menace. Like Strauss, paleoconservatives condemn ideology, but unlike him they often fail to distinguish between it and philosophy. Not unlike Aristophanes, paleoconservatives locate authority in tradition, longstanding custom. The highest tradition centers itself in the words of the Bible. The Bible locates the highest authority in a Person. But philosophers often locate the highest authority in the impersonal—in nature, in ideas, or, as paleoconservatives often abominate it, ‘Rousseauian abstraction.’ Insofar as paleoconservatives have countenanced philosophy, they have most typically admired Edmund Burke, Rousseau’s critic, in whom Strauss finds the beginnings of historicism, the beginnings of the final stage of the crisis of the West. By directing paleoconservatives not so much to the allegedly historicist Burke but to the indisputably philosophic Aristotle—that proponent of natural right not historical right—Bates asks paleoconservatives to reflect upon their convictions in a way to which many are unaccustomed, a way that does not reject a certain kind of reasoning about tradition and therefore does not necessarily subsume human thought within historical narrative.

In so doing, Bates himself breaks with at least one tradition, the scholarly tradition that finds in Aristotle a critic, even if a friendly critic, of democracy. Bates treats the ‘polity’ or ‘mixed regime’ as a myth at least as far as Aristotle’s philosophy is concerned, arguing further that Aristotle regards democracy under the rule of law as the best regime. Bates does students of Aristotle the service of insisting that they examine Aristotle’s regime theory with new eyes, lest the attempt to understand a philosopher ossify into a misleading tradition. Bates breaks with one tradition while upholding tradition and leading traditionalists to reason about tradition. With Strauss, Bates declares himself against the historical relativists who regard Aristotle as irrelevant to modern politics. On the contrary, “his teaching speaks directly to our lives and our political problems,” specifically, the “crisis of self-understanding” of “liberal democracy” (7).

Bates appeals to paleoconservatives by rejecting Strauss—often associated with ‘neoconservatives’—on the question of the literary genre of the Politics. Strauss is mistaken to classify the Politics as a treatise; Voegelin, the conservative historicist, is right to consider it “a series of logoi,” a dialogic work—really “a mixture of two genres,” treatise and dialogue (8). Later, Bates will acknowledge that Strauss finds a dialogue between an oligarch and a democrat to be central to the Politics, so in fact Bates concurs with Strauss’s judgment, but that point comes later on, and could go unnoticed by careless readers. Bates sees Strauss’s argument concerning philosophic exotericism, finds such exotericism in Aristotle, and may even deploy it himself from time to time.

Bates remarks a three-part structure in the Politics, and accordingly divides his own book into three parts. He does not, however, structure his own book thematically in accordance with Aristotle’s three parts, but rather concentrates on the third part. The Politics has “three beginnings”: “the account of the origins of the city” in Book I; “the historical account of the best regimes in theory and practice” in Book II; “the regime model” in Book III. The first two accounts he judges “failures,” and so finds Book III thematically central to the Politics, “the logical center of the whole.” “[L]ike the hub of a wheel…the regime holds together Aristotle’s Politics.” Book III is also “the most theoretical or philosophic of all,” a “highly dialectical book,” a book that allows the reader to “figure out which arguments are better argued and hence persuasive and which are not.” He divides his book into sections addressing three questions: “What is the regime? Which regime is the most choiceworthy? and Should law or man have ultimate authority?” (12-14).

The first section consists of three chapters, one each on the city, the citizen, and the regime, respectively. Bates distinguishes the polis from the modern state. The state is an artifact; its sovereign power derives from the social compact, the “abstracted will” of those who contracted with one another to form a “body politic.” Having once been abstracted or generalized from all the individual wills of the contracting individuals, that unified will takes on a life of its own, so to speak, no longer “the articulated will of any specific ruler.” ‘The state’ becomes ‘sovereign,’ independent of, and often ruling over, the persons who live within the ‘civil society’ beneath it (18-19). The polis, however, or political community, means “a unity of political organization” ruled by a person or persons, in no way abstracted from society (21). Bates disputes Strauss’s claim that the Greek word ‘polis’ adequately corresponds to the English word ‘city’; such a translation would interfere with Bates’s agrarian-democratic stance. Bates thus tips the scales toward considering the quintessential polis to be the best form of democracy in his definition of the polis itself, a position he will argue for later on. He rightly points to Aristotle’s emphasis on the regime as the primary determinant of the identity, the character, of the polis: “A city is defined by the form it takes to reach its preferred end, or telos, and this [form] is understood to be its regime” (26).

The regime defines the citizen, from one polis to another. A citizen participates in a ruling office, but the number and structure of ruling offices depend upon the regime. Thus the regime determines who the citizen is, in any given polis. The polis is “the multitude [plethos] of such persons that is adequate with a view to a self sufficient [autarchic] life” (Aristotle quoted p. 32). Citizen excellence gets its definition from the regime, but ‘excellence’ or arête in accordance with which one is a serious man (andros, not anthropos or human being). A regime change or revolution means a change in the identity of the body of citizens or rulers, and a consequent change in the definition of citizen ‘seriousness’—a change in “the perfect model of a citizen” (42-43, 45).

Bates turns, with Aristotle, to a fuller and more precise definition of ‘regime.’ “[T]he regime is that which gives form (eidos) to the particular political community,” and “impl[ies] a different telos, or end which that regime will hold as its authoritative way of life”; “the form a regime will have will structure the authoritative body within that given political community,” reinforcing “the way of life of those who have authority.” The ends and means of political life involve the “differing understandings of justice” from one regime to another (62). For purposes of clarification, one might say that this definition obviously associates several different but closely related terms with the idea of ‘regime.’ Politeia refers to the structure of ruling offices in the polis; politeuma, often translated as ‘ruling body,’ refers to the persons occupying those offices; bios ti, literally ‘sort of life’ or ‘kind of life,’ usually translated as the ‘way of life’ of the polis, rounds out the definition (see Politics 1295b1). Aristotle explicitly links the politeuma  and the bios ti with the politeia, and this makes sense; the few rich will want and need a different set of ruling offices than the many poor; the structure of ruling offices will lend itself to a particular kind of life in the polis, overall, function following form. Bates observes that no politeuma  or ruling body “perfectly expresses the will of the whole political community,” in Aristotle’s view because Aristotle does not take the polis to be a ‘state,’ allegedly embodying the general or abstract will of the whole population (63). “Responsibility is direct in Aristotle, the ruling body is responsible” (65). The modern state too easily evades such responsibility.

Political life, of whatever kind or way, comes naturally to human beings because they alone perceive not only pleasure and pain but the just and the unjust. Human beings desire not only to live but to live “a complete and self-sufficient life,” aiming at eudaimonia or well-living and not at mere (Hobbesian) peace or survival (68). Life naturally is not solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, or short, but sweet, and the good life sweeter still. Political life strictly speaking resembles the mutual rule seen in marriage.

Bates departs from most accounts of Aristotle’s regime classification: good and bad forms of the rule of the one, of the few, and of the many. Bates regards this twofold (‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’) description as only a preliminary scheme, a scheme that “deconstructs or falls apart both logically and rhetorically” in preparation to a better account (80). At this point, Bates raises the following question about the two regimes called the rule of the multitude. The good regime in which the politeuma is a multitude is the “regime called regime” (as Bates translates it): Literally, “whenever the multitude [plethos] moves toward the common/shared advantage, it is called the name common to all regimes, regime [politeia].” Although it may be hard to see how the multitude could have excellence or virtue as the one or the few might have, they can have military virtue. Bates wonders, “How can the many rule when the military element is authoritative? Clearly, this issue leads to a question concerning ‘the regime called regime.’ If it is a regime in which the military element is authoritative, then ho could it be a form of the rule of the many?” (86). The answer may be seen in two ways. First, the multitude or plethos may or may not be simply identical to the many or hoi polloi. A plethos might include groups in addition to hoi polloi, without ceasing to be classifiable as a regime in which hoi polloi predominate. Second, even if the multitude or the many are not to be distinguished, they might bear arms well, as seen shown by citizens’ militias in many places, at many times. There is no reason to suppose that “the military element” need be the few; even if it were, the few could be blended with the many to form a multitude. A multitude might well be even larger in size than the many. Alternatively, if the distinction between the multitude and the many is finally a distinction without a difference, it would remain true that the many can bear arms while engaging in a morally serious way of life.

Bates rightly observes that the determining feature of an oligarchy is not number or ‘fewness’ but wealth; a regime in which the majority were rich would still be an oligarchy. Democracy is pre-eminently the rule of the poor. Bates also sees, of course, that in most times and places, particularly the ancient world, the rich were almost always few, the many poor, so the association with number is less arbitrary in practice than in principle (89). He further argues that the ‘qualitative’ side of the regime classification shifts from ruling according to the common advantage to ruling with a view toward justice, which rulers then define in a partial way, not in terms of “the whole of justice in its authoritative sense” (Politics 1280b11). All regimes, including the bad ones, make “some limited appeal to justice in their claims to rule”—that is, the ‘good’/’bad’ dichotomy is not as sharp as it initially seems. This strikes me as accurate, although it does not contradict the earlier formulation but rather qualifies it, in a rather Nichols-like way: The good regimes would partake more fully of justice, and thus rule more nearly to the common advantage, than the bad ones. “[T]he remainder of Book 3 is the search for the best regime,” that is, the one most fully just. There are several contenders.

Bates’s section II concerns the “first peak” uncovered by this search for the best regime, namely, “popular rule.” The frontispiece quotes the preamble of the United States Constitution, beginning, “We the People….”

In the fourth chapter Bates considers aristocracy’s claim to being the best regime: Is the rule of the best the best regime” Political life has limits, namely, “the limits of how the best can be applied to accommodate the inherent variability of all those living in a regime” (99). Specifically, does aristocracy mean the rule of the best persons or the rule of those who do what is best for the polis? And although it is said to be the rule of the few, ‘the best’ might not be the few, and doing what is best for the polis might not need be done by the few. “[A]ny regime that rules best can legitimately be called an aristocracy,” so the idea of aristocracy is “no longer useful as a regime type.” If so, this “will make us examine the other regimes” (100-101). This treatments clears aristocracy off the table, summarily, and hurries the reader to the popularly based candidates for ‘best regime,’ the ones Bates prefers to discuss.

The first of these is “the regime called regime,” more often translated as “polity.” Polity is defined in four ways: the correct form of rule by the many; a regime where the people possess military virtue; a democratic regime under law; a ‘mixed regime’ including the rich, the poor, and also the middle class if such a class exists in the polis in question. The actual quote from Politics III.7.4 (the text misprints this as III.17.4) is not a democratic regime under law but “a military multitude.” Bates says that some of these definitions “contradict one another,” and that Aristotle “nowhere clearly presents a final definition for the regime called ‘polity'” (105-106). But if a polity is not a democratic regime under law but a military multitude there are no contradictions in this set of definitions or features. As for there being no “final definition” of a polity, that makes sense in view of its ‘mixed’ or ‘blended’ character. Customarily speaking, the mixed or blended regime tends more toward democracy than it does oligarchy, whereas such regimes that lean more toward oligarchy are called aristocracies (Politics 1294b34-37). Both the best democracy  and the best oligarchy enjoy the rule of law.

On Aristotle’s theme of blending disparate elements, Bates rightly points out that a good regime could only come from two defective regimes (namely, oligarchy and democracy) if those regimes had some good elements; that they “are not merely defective but are only inclined to be defective” (106). He also rightly observes that Aristotle recommends this ‘blending’ strategy to politicians of every regime. He goes too far in claiming that there is really no such regime as the polity and no mixed regime at all in Aristotle. A regime is “the authoritative view of a city concerning the best way of life.” “The idea that a regime can hold as authoritative two opposing view of the best way of life would suggest to the serious student of Aristotle that such a regime would be schizophrenic…and thus undesirable and/or practically impossible” (108-109). He rightly says that “throughout the whole of the Politics the only regime that is consistently described as the rule of the many is called democracy, not ‘the regime called regime,’ but consistency does not rule out exceptions (110; see also 133).

Logically, it makes no sense for Aristotle to use the phrase “regime called regime” unless he means a particular regime. Otherwise, he would only need to say “regime.” On the question of contradiction and blending or mixture, no real epistemological quandary exists. To maintain that black is not white or that round is not square is to affirm the principle of non-contradiction. I cannot show you the shade ‘blackwhite’ or a ’roundsquare’ shape; I cannot even conceive of such things. But this does not mean that I cannot mix black and white, getting shades of gray, or combine round and square shapes into a coherent architectural whole. Similarly, a political architect might combine the claims about justice made by the many poor with the claims about justice made by the few rich—particularly, as Bates has seen, if these views do not so much contradict one another logically as they reflect partial views of justice. Even if no real polis can reflect the whole of justice, this does not preclude its inclusion of much justice—at least, more than either oligarchs or democrats would descry, on their own. To see how this might work ‘operationally,’ to use the jargon of our social-science contemporaries, one must look to the regime as politeia, as an arrangement of ruling offices or institutions, and not so much to the regime as politeuma, a ruling body of persons. Aristotle goes to some lengths to show how political men can arrange institutions and modes of selection of persons to staff those institutions in ways designed to direct oligarchs and democrats into commonly-agreed-upon and moderate policies. A simple example of this (as Strauss observes) is voting. A true democracy does not really select ruling officers at all, but elevates them at random, by lot. Aristotle writes that voting for one or several among a variety of candidates is undemocratic because it brings in questions of merit. Thus a ‘polity’ or ‘blended’ regime might see the many poor voting for candidates who rank among the few rich, or some other such device. This will yield a way or kind of life that blends principles of justice that might otherwise clash and cause civil war. As Nichols and Eidelberg argue, the cosmos itself features a ‘mixed regime,’ thanks to the existence of form. Form both makes contradiction possible and chaos impossible; if one treats one, few, and many as ideas only they will contradict one another in theory and in practice, leading to civil war. But you don’t need to do that.

Bates concludes his chapter on “the regime called regime” with an insightful treatment of the idea of the mixed regime in subsequent political thinkers. He cites Polybius as the first writer truly to discuss the mixed regime or “mixed constitution.” The Roman Empire exemplified the ancient empire as distinguished from the polis. Ancient empires extended over territories as large, and often larger, than those of modern states. An empire that tried to act like a real regime, “shaping the character” of its subjects, would “require massive force and eliminate the diversity of views about the best way of life”; it would be, in a word, a tyranny. “Practical political men, I suggest, during this time understood this well and did not attempt to shape the character of all the subjects under the Empire”; rather, ‘they kept the peace” among the various conquered peoples while “the local authorities continued to form the character of the subject” so long as those authorities did nothing to “threaten the peace or challenge the Empire’s hegemony” (117). Although it should be noticed that the Roman Empire did have its own regimes, changing from republic to kingship and at times to tyranny, Bates accurately describes the non-statist character of ancient imperialism.

He further argues, with respect to the American regime, that the anti-Federalists were right in the long run. They understood that genuine character-forming regimes could only be local, and that the larger entity ought to have been the sort of loose federal structure seen in the Articles of Confederation. “[G]iven the centralizing character of American political life that occurred after the Civil War and has lasted until the present, the concerns expressed by the anti-Federalists have hit home all too well.” This affirms part of the M. E. Bradford/neo-Confederate paleoconservative thought, whose theory of limited government cannot fundamentally distinguish between federal and local governments’ roles in regulating one’s life” (121). Limited government, Bates means to say, ought to prevail in all large-scale political entities, ancient and modern; limited government is not necessary in small-scale political entities because they can be genuinely self-governing—which, as the sixth chapter argues, means democratic in a certain way. “Aristotle presents a teaching not of limited government but of local government, one that aims at unifying a community toward some expressible notion of public happiness understood in terms of the good life for those who live together in the political community” (121). One might instructively compare Bates’s account with that of Joseph Cropsey, “The United States as Regime and the Sources of the American Way of Life” (in Robert H. Horwitz, ed.: The Moral Foundations of the American Republic [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1987). The trouble with saying that the United States has a regime in the Aristotelian sense may derive from features of the modern state, which is neither a polis nor an empire. The separation of state from civil society allows a certain incoherence to enter into the latter, and sometimes into the former, making it harder to talk about regimes. This, one should note, does not make it impossible to do so, inasmuch as most people easily distinguish American republicanism from, say, Nazi tyranny.

Having rejected aristocracy and polity as contenders for the title ‘best regime,’ Bates argues that Aristotle “makes the suggestion that democracy may legitimately be understood as the best regime” (122). “[I]t is not so evident that the actions of the majority against the minority would surely harm or destroy the polis, but it is clear that the actions of a minority against the majority surely would. For who makes up the polis? Is it not the many? Are they not, by definition, the majority?” (136). The answer to these points, based on Aristotle’s account and Bates’s own analysis of it are: (1) insofar as injustice harms the polis, the poor can harm the polis by committing the injustice of “distributing [the things of the wealthy] among themselves” (Politics 1281a15-16); (2) the multitude, consisting mostly of the many who are usually poor, makes up most of the polis; (3) the multitude are indeed by definition the majority of the polis. Therefore, the multitude, particularly if dominated by the many when poor, might well harm the polis.

In Bates’s paraphrase, “while individually [the many] may be inferior to a serious man (spoudaios), together they are better than he” (138). Aristotle himself presents this point less definitively, saying that there is “perhaps…some truth” in it (Politics 1281a41). Oddly, although Bates treats many Aristotelian arguments with due caution, he does not remark the obvious here: While the many might collectively be better than a serious man, they must also and simultaneously be worse than he, and that the first observation in no way contradicts the second. Similarly, while the many collectively pay more to contribute to the needs of the polis than the few, they collectively benefit more from those contributions, and benefit disproportionately as individuals. Finally, if the many deliberate collectively better than the few, this only holds if the people are “unified” (140-141, 145). But clearly the people are seldom unified, except perhaps when it comes to ‘soaking the rich,’ or, as seen in Thucydides, embarking on ventures of imperial conquest—both instances of injustice.

“Aristotle could not openly praise democracy,” given his audience of experience, mature, and moderate men (155). Addressing modern democrats, perhaps Bates cannot openly dispraise democracy. In the brief seventh chapter, concluding Section II, Bates writes, “Democracy is the least vicious of all regimes, not merely the least vicious of the deviant regimes”; “since all the actual regimes must fall short in some way of the pure form (eidos) of the regime, this is indeed high praise” (162). But if men are political animals, being the least vicious regime does not seem high praise for politics, or for the human nature it reflects. Bates will turn to the consideration of original sin in the epilogue.

First he considers the final claimant to the title of best regime, the universal kingship or pambasileia. Section III begins with a quotation from the first book of Samuel, chapter 8, in which the Lord tells his prophet that the Israelites want a king because they have rejected the rule of the Lord. In Bates’s view the universal human king would supplant the law-ruled people. Further, still considering the claims concerning the polity or mixed regime, “I interpret the dispute between the pambasileia and the argument for the mixed regime as an important textual clue for concluding that the interpretation that argues that the ‘mixed regime’ is the best regime is false” (167).

Aristotle asks if it is more advantageous to be ruled by the best man or by the best laws. The dialogic partisan of the best man argues that laws speak generally and therefore cannot address the “particular circumstances” of any actual polis; the partisan of the laws replies that the laws are dispassionate unlike human beings, and therefore the rule of laws is more reasonable. The partisan of the laws silently concedes the argument of the partisan of the best man, but recurs to the origin of the rule of democratic law in the opinion of the many, who not only judge better than any one man can do but are less corruptible than the best man. In this case, however, the claim of the unity of the many also drops to the side; on the contrary, the very lack of unity of the many makes it hard for them to make an impassioned mistake all at the same time, as long as the many are free and law-abiding, careful not to act beyond the law unless the law is silent (173).

On balance, a good multitude—shifting now from ‘the many’—seems more likely than a single preeminently good man. A good multitude would be an aristocracy in the same sense that a rich multitude would be an oligarchy. Such a multitude in fact arose after the multitude ousted the ancient kings, establish political rule in place of masterly rule. “The emergence of political rule results from moving away from the rule of the father in the household, which is the model for kingship, to the rule of equals ruling in turn. The emergence of the regime results from the creation of political rule out of kingship” (178). For “regime,” Aristotle actually says “polis,” but more interestingly Bates contends that this “equalization (a leveling out) of excellence” or virtue results from the advance of the arts or technology. It is not clear what the arts have to do with virtue, however. Bates summarizes: “Acquisition and the prominence of self-interest promote the creation of democracies. Civilization tends toward the development of democracies and nothing but democracies” (179). What Aristotle says is rather more critical and less deterministic: Not merely self-interest but “the base longing for profit” makes it “difficult for a regime other than democracy to arise” (Politics 1286b19-21). And the first regime after kingship is not democracy but oligarchy, followed by tyranny. The very lack of inevitability makes statesmanlike institution-building feasible; the base origins of truly political life make such statesmanship more attractive. The possibility and desirability of political architectonics do not sit well, however, with paleoconservative traditionalism. Paleoconservatives associate political architectonics with ‘social engineering’ and understandable prefer humane tradition to that.

“The prudence of the office holder is to make up for the defect of the laws; however, the office holder’s authority comes from the laws themselves” (184). (But where do the laws come from, if not the regime—in this case the democracy?) The “laws themselves provide solutions” to the admitted “weaknesses” of the laws in three ways. The laws will have “servants and guardians” to judge in the particular cases that arise; “the laws provide for experience”—and thus for prudence in judgment—”in that they are the collective wisdom of a people spread over time”; rule by laws “bids the good of the intellect to rule rather than human passions” (186). Aristotle, however, does not claim collective wisdom for the unwritten laws or customs. He says rather that unwritten laws are more authoritative than written laws and deal with more authoritative matters—presumably, the gods (as Bates soon acknowledges, 189-190). Further, and crucially, Aristotle says of law, “in general, men seek not the traditional but the good” (Politics 1269a2-3), an observation he makes in the middle of his critique of reformers who would change the laws too readily. What is more, custom is also at odds with technological advancement, the ‘progressivism’ of art, which Bates earlier claimed as the origin of social equality and hence political life.

The partisan of the laws additionally argues quite sensibly that “no man can oversee many things” easily. But the many have “many eyes.” They have “more of the qualities heeded for a good judge than an individual has. But the image of a many-handed, many-eyed, many-eared, many-footed being is that of a monster. Yet is this not also the characterization of the powers of a god, a being that is omnipotent?” (191). Indeed so: But beasts and gods (to say nothing of monsters) are not political animals. Where does this leave the argument for democratic politics? Bates’s reader would be rash to assume that Bates does not see this, as he artfully tests their souls for any latent philosophic content.

The search for the best multitude continues, with urgency. A “political multitude” arises from “a military multitude capable of ruling and being ruled in accordance with a law distributing offices on the basis of merit to those who are well off” (Politics 1288a15-17, quoted in 197). It is finally not technical expertise or even prudence that entitles the multitude to rule but “a persuasion by nature” (205). The rule of the superior man cannot achieve the self-evident persuasiveness needed for effective rule. If so, is the rule of the gods, which seems to underlie the  rule of unwritten law, naturally persuasive? It seems rather to be persuasive only to the many who admit its supernatural character, and to the few who find in it a higher order of nature than that immediately visible. If both a god and a law is intellect without passion, then the people must be sure of the divine origin of their unwritten laws for them to obey them. In line with the divinity of the unwritten laws and the superior prudence and moderation of the multitude, Bates claims that “Democrats and democratic regimes tend to have a greater tolerance of philosophers and philosophy—in spite of a democratic regime’s having executed Socrates—than do regimes ruled by the so-called gentlemen” (211 n. 11). He offers no evidence of this, but it does follow his overall argument, exoterically considered.

In the epilogue—decorated with an excerpt from a Robert Frost poem, “A Case for Jefferson,” complaining of a man for whom “the love of country means/Blowing it all to smithereens/And having it all made over new”—Bates emphasizes that it is not the natural law of the philosophers that Aristotle means by the law that should rule in democracies, or any “transpolitical law,” but “democratic law” (213). Thomas Jefferson, that famous defender of natural rights, famously defended the French Revolution on the grounds that even the destructive Terror would leave a France made new and better than it had been under the Old Regime. Bates evidently doubts that, and it is no foolish doubt. Jefferson also argued that natural law or more precisely unalienable rights deserve protection by any regime and its laws, including the (somewhat attenuated) regime of an extended commercial republic, but although Bates quotes the United States Constitution he does not quote the Declaration of Independence.

Bates instead argues that the law that should rule democracies, originating in popular customs, owes its justice not to natural excellence, and perhaps not even to the divinity or divinities its partisans hold up, but to natural fallenness. In this Bates resembles Algernon Sydney, that diagnostician of human fallenness (although no  traditionalist, and not entirely pious). Earlier, he had cited Sidney, along with Hobbes, as philosophers who asserted the underlying democratic character of Aristotelian regime theory. Here he does not invoke Sidney, much less Hobbes, but the straightforwardly Christian C. S. Lewis. “Lewis and Aristotle favor democracy rather than the absolute rule of one man, regardless of how wise he may be, because nature does not clearly distinguish who should rule and who should be ruled. Or, the paraphrase Lewis, no man is evidently fit to rule other men simply by nature” (215). In linking Aristotle to a writer loved by paleoconservatives, Bates does Aristotle his final service. A careful reading of his book by paleoconservatives or anyone else, a reading that tracks his interpretation alongside Aristotle’s argument, should serve both philosophy and politics, well.

Susan Collins. Susan Collins confronts a world in which the crisis of modernity has taken a turn, with a forceful reminder of the virtues of citizenship. The fissure in the modern world having narrowed with the end of the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, the modern project saw a new challenger. Certain Muslims combining determinism and fanaticism in a most religious but partly modern ideology—call it ‘Islamism’—attacked the city of all American cities, New York. (In most scholarly writings ‘Islamism’ refers to what is also called political Islam—an Islam that abandons life under some modern state for active engagement in its governance. Recently, commentators have been using ‘Islamism’ to refer specifically to the most radical forms of ‘political Islam.’ I prefer this usage for the sake of simplicity and because it does not make it seem that political engagement is something new to Islam.) Collins recalls a journalist who had imagined himself a cosmopolitan Manhattanite now calling himself a citizen of the city. What for Strauss in 1961 had seemed mostly a thing of the past, at least in the West—the confrontation with Islam—had resurfaced so violently that dreams of avoiding citizenship, of ‘world citizenship,’ and of subject status under a state that protected individual rights (the dreams of Rousseau, Kant, and Hobbes, respectively) vanished in a renewed appreciation for physical and civic courage. As it happened, an ongoing “remarkable renaissance” of Aristotelian thought among Western political theorists opened the possibility of thinking about the new crisis of the West in a sober way.

Unfortunately, that renaissance has thus far been vitiated by attempts “to marry liberal principles of equality and individual freedom with a more or less Aristotelian sense of community”—not a mixed regime but a mixed-up set of theories. Aristotle’s account of citizenship provides “a source of insight for us precisely because it does not begin from liberal presuppositions” (2). Muslims generally and Islamists in particular see that “the question of the highest human good” remains very much a point of political contention; a reconsideration of Aristotle without the distorting lens of modern liberalism can help us think about that. Moreover, despite the grim prospects ahead, Collins agrees with Nichols that Aristotle’s political philosophy encompasses “a comic vision in the highest sense: a vision, in short, that appreciates both the nobility and the limits of human striving and that in no way despairs of wisdom about human affairs” (5). We may need some of that.

Aristotle recommends approaching politics through the publicly expressed opinions prominent in debates among citizens. In her first chapter Collins discusses the features and limitations of recent attempts to appropriate Aristotle by such contemporary theorists as John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Stephen Macedo, Michael Sandel, and William Galston. She finds some of the engaged in unsuccessful attempts to accept the social condition of ideological diversity while striving for a public order that can hold together. Others recognize the need for civic virtue, but risk sacrificing liberalism in any recognizable modern sense. Liberalism, it seems, can neither do without virtue nor abide it. She catches one scholar writing, “It seems ridiculous to be asked to choose among Jesus, Da Vinci, Caesar, and Socrates,” politely replying that several of these worthies “represent ways of life that reject one another’s fundamental claims” (38). Aristotle provides a better starting point for such inquiry than liberalism does because he acknowledges “the political community’s authoritative and architectonic power as educator” as a fact, and then takes the argument from there. “[M]oral virtue is a matter of intense concern for both the political community and the individual because the happiness of each is at stake,” and these two forms of happiness entwine irrevocably (41). While “most present-day Aristotelians begin by establishing either the political principles in accord with which they define the virtues of a good citizen or the overarching principle of the good from which they derive the virtues of human ‘flourishing,'” Aristotle eschews such abstractions  for a consideration of the actual opinions citizens hold, opinions that partake both of the sentiments of individual persons and the claims held up for their belief by the regime of the city, particularly in its laws (42-44).

While Nichols addresses citizens and statesmen primarily, and Bates primarily addresses the regime, Collins comes to Aristotle through the moral claims of, and on, citizenship. As a result, she begins not with the Politics but with the Nicomachean Ethics. There, Aristotle discusses eleven moral virtues, “the peaks of which are two complete virtues, magnanimity and justice”; Collins devotes the next two chapters to their examination (45). The moral-political virtues ultimately fail “to resolve the tension between virtue’s orientation toward the common good and its independence as an end in its own right”—the problem of the city and man, to coin a phrase. But to think about things that ultimately fail is not itself to fail, a lesson American citizens took away from the Islamist attacks of September 2001, and doubtless will have occasion to re-learn as the war continues.

The set of virtues that culminate in magnanimity have to do with ‘the noble.’ They are courage, moderation, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity itself, and ambition (this last Collins’s term for an unnamed  virtue that consists of reaching out for honor in a way that is neither excessive nor deficient). Although historians often contend that these virtues simply reflect the conventional moral preoccupations of Greek antiquity (and of course Aristotle concedes this at the outset by saying that he begins with opinions), the actual discussion of these virtues often puts him at odds with the conventions of his time and place. For example, piety doesn’t make the list, but the Greeks cared for it so much that the legend of the pious Aeneas reverberated all the way to Rome.

The noble virtues are uncommon; although commended by the laws, they center in the individual soul and impel that soul to transcend the city and its laws in the pursuit of virtue “as an independent end and good,” as “worthy of pursuit for its own sake.” The noble man need not be a happy man. The “link between virtue and the longing for the noble is frequently overlooked by students of the Ethics, yet it is crucial in understanding both the elevation of virtue to its place as an independent end and the tensions within the moral life that result” (52).

Courage, “the portal through which we enter” into the life animated by the quest for nobility, “pertains to fear and confidence,” particularly in regard to the risk of dying, the greatest of fearful things. Fear and confidence arise most acutely when a man risks dying deliberately, as in war; also, one risks death for no small thing but for the city, the well-being of which is nobler and more divine than that of any individual. In one sense, then, the courageous man appears to be selfless; however, “such an individual is willing to suffer death only in an action in which he exercises his own virtue.” The courageous man ultimately devotes himself not to the good of the city but “to virtue itself” (52-54). One might say that the culmination of courage in war shows the tendency of the noble to break the bounds of the city. The city needs warriors in order to defend its independence, its autarchia. But war sends the warrior outside the city, threatens the survival of the city in defeat and even in victory, inasmuch as an all-conquering city would no longer be a polis but a universal empire.

The city inculcates courage by holding out honor to those who act courageously and shame to the cowardly. Nonetheless, the true hero—Aristotle mentions Hector most prominently—takes as his end not the opinions of his fellow citizens but the exercise of the virtue that they esteem but cannot reach themselves. Military and political courage, located between the ignoble extremes of fearfulness and rashness, finally transcends the army and city that honor it.

The next noble virtue, moderation, owes much of its nobility to serving as instrumental to liberality. Like courage, liberality sacrifices one’s own, though not fatally. Unlike courage, liberality sacrifices things that one is not simply born with; even a man of inherited wealth does not come into the world gold-plated. If the goods required for the exercise of liberality need acquiring, the means of their acquisition raise the question of an unlisted virtue, justice. The same goes for the more spectacular sacrifice of one’s own external goods, magnificence.

Counting justice, then, magnanimity or greatness of soul sits squarely in the middle of the eleven moral virtues—”a central place in Aristotle’s treatment of the morally serious life.” “Like the great works of magnificence, the honor that the magnanimous man assigns to his own nobility and goodness (kalogathia) makes magnanimity the ornament (or crown, kosmos) of the virtues” (61). Unlike courage, which puts the body at risk, and unlike liberality and magnificence that sacrifice other material things, magnanimity remains thoroughly a matter of the soul alone, the supreme expression (on the moral plane) of autarchia  and beneficence. Magnanimity “represents the fullest expression of virtue as an independent end.” But as such it finds no example in one great man; Aristotle instead points to Zeus and to the Athenians, suggesting that the magnanimous man might be “in part a fiction rather than a representation of an actual human being.” What shall such a man do, except contemplate “his own great virtue”? Such contemplation occurs, however, entirely in absence of wonder, inasmuch as nothing to the great-souled man is great, aside from himself, whom he already knows (63). (One might ask, does he really know himself at all? Does he know himself if the kosmos in which he lives seems to him less than the kosmos of his own virtue?) Collins again finds, even in this most elevated and comprehensive form of nobility, a lack of concern for justice. The noble man finds himself “in a terrible quandary.” “Obtaining the conditions of his own activity will require deviations from virtue that he could never make up for later.” Even magnanimity “is in part a fiction because it wishes for a self-sufficiency [autarchia] and superiority that abstracts from the demands and concerns of justice” (65).

In the individual, justice may mean either lawfulness or fairness. Justice as lawfulness means “the sum of all the virtues directed toward the good of another”; justice as fairness means “the proper disposition concerning the good things—security, money, and honor—in which all who belong to the political community must share” (68). This confirms the distinction and tension between justice and magnanimity, or self-perfection, which pulls away from the common, the principle of equality upon which citizenship rests. Similarly, justice as lawfulness seeks “both another’s good and our true perfection” (70).

Controversy dogs justice because partisans of different regimes disagree on “what constitutes desert or merit in the distribution of the common goods,” with democrats looking to freedom, oligarchs wealth, aristocrats virtue, and so on (73). ‘Equality’ among citizens will differ from regime to regime because poor and rich, for example, diverge with respect with what is to be distributed equally. While it is true that the specifically political goods, ruling offices, are the same ‘conceptually’ from one regime to another, the number and kind of such offices will differ considerably, and this depends upon the answer a given regime gives to the question of what merit is. Justice “can never be wholly separated from compulsion” because tension must arise between the good of the individual and the good as defined by the regime” (79). A “tension within moral virtue,” seen in “the difference between education with a view to the political community and the education of the good man simply,” will never disappear within the horizon of morality (79-80).

The moral and civic education of a serious man requires the reinforcement provided by the laws, animated by right reason, to which the laws give voice. “It is as the representative of right reason that the law is comprehensive and that Aristotle makes the sweeping claim, so foreign to modern liberal ears, that ‘what the law does not command, it forbids'” (81). Regimes so ordered aim at self-sufficiency or self-rule, not mere living but living well: “The law seeks to preserve the political community, therefore, by preserving the regime, including both the principle of equality underlying the regime and the good life its members hold in common,” and in this the rule of law usually excels the rule of one man, however virtuous (82).

If political life is natural to man, and a good political life typically requires the rule of law, but law in its generality (a consequence of its conventionality?) cannot fully achieve justice as fairness in all circumstances, what then? Aristotle here introduces “the equitable” as a supplement for and correction of legal justice. Equity means those judgments the lawgiver would have rendered had he been present (87).

But this leaves unanswered the question of what justice is simply and universally, inasmuch as to be natural and not conventional, human nature must be everywhere the same. What is “right reason,” this thing that animates the lawgiver? Collins turns to this question midway in her argument.

“Prudence, the Good Citizen, and the Good Life”: The title of the fourth chapter identifies three dimensions of right reason with respect to justice. Prudence comes into the picture most obviously with the need for equity, inasmuch as prudence is what we need to figure out the right thing to do in any circumstance (92). If law alone covered all circumstances, right human conduct would resemble a computer printout. But neither will prudence alone suffice; it does not say what the purpose of our actions should be. “[T]he highest good necessarily includes, if it is not wholly constituted by, wisdom (sophia),” which “has authority” (even) “over moral virtue” (92-93). “[T]he law and moral virtue have been shown to seek a self-sufficiency that they cannot fully attain” (94). The political community answers “the question of the human good” (95), but cannot answer it fully because any political community pretends to a universality that it does not really have. For example, no matter what regime, no matter what political community we belong to, human beings seek friends. The well-known and in some respects deservedly notorious aphorism, ‘If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I’d have the guts to betray my country,’ points to the universality of friendship as a human good, even if it hardly merits any more than them most heavily qualified assent. While the political community remains “the home of the human good” because human beings are naturally political, and membership in some political community therefore constitutes part of their telos, the limitations of all such communities require us to look beyond them in seeking the good for human beings as such (97).

Here Collins arrives at Bates’s principal topic, the regime—finally the best regime. The best regime might satisfy both the universal good for human beings as such, which includes friendship, and the political goods. In the best regime I should never need to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend.

Given the freedom of human beings, inherent in their capacity for speech/reason, the best regime and indeed any regime will not ‘just grow’—whatever traditionalists and also libertarians may say. Political communities and the regimes that give them their distinctive shapes and purposes must be constituted, both prudentially and with regard to some end, preferably an end discovered philosophically—that is, by a soul animated by the love of theoretical or universal wisdom, in this case the human good as such. What is the best, most choiceworthy, human life? Collins examines Aristotle’s comparison of the masterful way of life, the political way of life, and the philosophic way of life—the ‘regimes’ individuals choose for themselves. She agrees with Nichols in taking Aristotle to mean that the way of life of the best regime “is neither wholly political nor wholly philosophic—neither wholly devoted to the city nor separated from it,” but “redirect[s] those most ambitious with regard to virtue to higher and more self-sufficient actions than those to which the political community on its own terms would point,” actions that are first and foremost actions of the mind, dialogues with wisdom-seeking friends (116-117). It might be added that while the masterful way of life and the political way of life both come to light in the family, which eventually links with other families to form tribes, which then link with other tribes to form the polis, the philosophic way of life has no parallel in the family. It fits better with friendship than with the city as such.

Left there, as some combination of the political and philosophic ways of life, the best regime would remain vague. But regimes, being forms, by definition give definition to the political community and to the persons who rule that community. In the best regime all those who should be citizens, are. But even in the best regime the good citizen and the good man are not quite identical, Collins argues, contra most scholars. The good man has complete virtue; the morally serious person has only a portion of that virtue because some virtues aim at things beyond the city, even the best city. The virtues of a ruler are “defined by their usefulness to the regime,” the common advantage, necessarily a limited thing if still a good thing (128). Partisans of each type of regime make claims based on partial ideas of justice, but no one of these claims can attain “the city’s highest and finest end, which is not living but living well” (135). The “correct principle of distribution of ruling offices” must finally be virtue, the aristocrats’ aim (136). But virtue is not the only such claim—freedom, wealth, and other desiderata also amount to just claims to rule, if not the most nearly just claims. The political community’s “composite nature” makes the rule of law attractive as the means by which the variously partially just claims might be arranged; “the inadequacy of this solution, however, is evident in the fact that the law itself is derivative of the regime” (137). Although practically speaking the rule of the many and the rule of the laws can form a safe regime—one that does not make enemies of the many—”no regime can accommodate the common advantage in the full sense: the advantage of the whole city—of every member who contributes to its existence and end—and the advantage of those who, as citizens, merit ruling and being ruled in turn” (141).

As for the pambasileia, “absolute kingship, in which one person has complete authority to act in accord with his own wish, is against nature among those who are equal and similar,” and human beings almost always share too many virtues to make such rule just. and in those places where such a man, and such a people, actually existed” “Aristotle’s ‘kingly’ man, who is a law unto himself, is something of a mystery, but about him we can say at least this much: he is not captured or fully captured within the framework of citizens virtue” (145). As for the philosopher, his life provides a just alternative to the would-be tyrants longing for a pleasure without pain, but Aristotle does not suggest that he can rule in practice.

The noble virtues tend to press beyond the boundaries of the city in a thoughtless way. The good life understood as the philosophic life presses beyond those boundaries precisely through thoughtfulness. A life devoted to thoughtfulness can see politics whole, in all its strengths and limitations, but either it can rule or it cannot. To rule with universal/theoretical wisdom, one needs to be a god. To have a portion of the two wisdoms and to dedicate oneself always to striving for more of both precludes one from ruling the city in any direct way. Both philosopher and city need to find some middle ground, without trying to become that middle ground.

Between the political and theoretical lives Aristotle finds the one “who respects and obeys law yet is not simply in awe of it” (146), citizens whose moral strengths tend less toward the noble and more toward the social virtues—gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness, and wittiness. Praotes or gentleness actually seems more like righteous indignation, a reasonable anger aroused at the sight of real injustice but (here is where gentleness in our sense comes in) ready to forgive. Friendliness looks rather like what Benjamin Franklin calls affability. It differs from friendship actuated by love; “the friendly person is pleasant and approving of others insofar as he does not bring discredit or harm upon himself or his associates; when necessary, he will express his disapproval, even though to do so may cause pain” (149). In the man of gentleness and friendliness we see most clearly the difference between the gentleman and the noble man, that harsher and higher-soaring virtuoso. The truthful or plain-dealing man, the Harry Truman kind of guy, “claims to be nothing more or less than he is”; in him we see most clearly the difference between the gentleman and the philosopher, that ironist who often claims to be less than he is (150). As for the wit, he must take care to attend to his audience and to the unwritten laws of the political community, both of whom he might easily offend. “The law must protect its authority against the power of comedy to mock it.” As even today’s comedians sometimes learn, “the witty human being,” in acting like a pambasileia of the underworld, a law unto himself, might find himself censored or at least censured by his fellow citizens (158). The wit can do some good, nonetheless, by setting limits to the more extravagant claims of the noble, particularly the magnificent and the magnanimous men. The play and rest associated with wittiness “tends away from the full devotion to moral virtue and political life that is the mark of the serious human being,” and also from the laws, which never laugh (160). Such a liberation can prepare the soul for philosophy, and constitutes “a part of moral virtue that points beyond the political life,” distancing the soul from “the high seriousness that political matters, in all their nobility and greatness, demand for themselves” (163). Witty, sociable comedy “comprehends both the nobility and the limits of human striving,” sustaining “the quest for wisdom about human affairs” (165).

Thus refreshed, in her conclusion Collins returns to the crisis of modern liberalism. Because liberalism has now abandoned “the self-evident truths” of the American founding, including “the orthodoxy that the individual is prior to the community,” the “older Aristotelian view that human beings are political animals” might receive a fair hearing from liberals today (167). Collins aims to get Aristotle that hearing, first by observing that liberalism in fact does not evade the problem of virtue. The toleration esteemed by liberals requires certain virtues in practice; the civil and international peace esteemed by liberals also does. Now, as always, “the public elevation of particular virtues infuses them with the weight of community opinion and actively informs the individual’s understanding of a good human being and good action” (171). Such aims as toleration and peace also require justification: Why prefer tolerance to intolerance, peace to war?

Aristotle also denies that one can account for all human action in terms of self-interest. Aristotle sees the distinction between the noble and the good, and distinctions among the many goods. Rational-choice utility maximizers cannot say why Socrates satisfied is better than a pig satisfied, as John Stuart Mill saw; Aristotle can help on that. “Aristotle gives full due to the nobility and greatness of the political life, but he also illuminates the tensions within it. the necessities underpinning the law, the dispute over distributive justice that informs every regime, the limits that this dispute places on the political community’s highest end, and the significance of these limits for both the community and the individual” (177).

Proponents of the various ideologies intend to contribute to the overall modern project as conceived and elaborated by philosophers beginning with Machiavelli. Machiavelli famously instructs the most ambitious men to redirect their gaze from God and nature in order to gain control over things nearer to hand—things previous philosophers had thought beyond human mastery, things Machiavelli invites us to visualize in the figure of Fortuna. Machiavellian philosophy finds its most characteristic latter-day expression in historicism, which contends that the very mastery of Fortuna works itself out as a force immanent in the actions of Fortuna. Strauss wrote a book titled The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws; historicists maintain that action and argument fuse in a ‘lawful’ or regular way, discernible by social scientists and by statesmen called leaders, who know the way the action/argument is going, and bid us to follow them to its destination.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair serves as an honorable and appealing example of such opinion:

“To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and hates superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.

“Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.”

Blair continues, arguing that Islam then found itself superseded by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment movements in the West; historical progress passed it by, leaving it “uncertain, insecure, and on the defensive.” In reaction, some contemporary Muslims have developed “an ideology,” a “reactionary” ideology using terrorism as its instrument. “This is ultimately a battle about modernity”; “we have to show that our values are not Western, still less American or Anglo-Saxon, but values in the common ownership of humanity, universal values that should be the right of the global citizen.” To win this battle, the West must engage it on all fronts, but especially in the real of “values,” which “represent humanity’s progress through the ages.” “Idealism becomes realpolitik.” the return to the real Islam actually betokens a return to progressivism against the new, reactionary Islamism. (Tony Blair: “A Battle for Global Values,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007, 79-90)

Modernity, progress, values, democracy, the synthesis of ideal and real: Woodrow Wilson might have spoken the same way as Blair, had he lived to see Islamism as a major force in the world. Strauss’s recovery of Aristotelian political philosophy has helped to make such talk somewhat less prevalent among academic political theorists, making them look a bit more sensible than professional politicians, extraordinarily enough. As the authors of these three books show, Aristotle requires the student of politics to look at the life of any country as a struggle between claimants for rule, their claims advanced in terms of certain opinions held to be rightly authoritative for the political community. ‘Freedom is good’; ‘the gods are good’; ‘wealth is good’—and therefore the many who are free, those who are godly, the few who are wealthy deserve to rule. Aristotle helps students of politics see that ideologies, including progressivism, really amount to claims to rule; ideology may be novel, an effect of modern philosophy, but in its political function it differs not at all from the disputes of Byzantium, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem. In a crucial sense there has been no progress.

There has also been no return. The prophetic and messianic religions anticipate the direct rule of God over man, again, but under a new heaven and a new earth. On the philosophic side, Burke was right; the glory of Europe really is gone forever, at least in terms of the old, aristocratic regimes. Nor can any Aristotelian really re-invent the polis; we operate within and among the states invented by Machiavelli. Proponents of free-market ‘globalization’ and exponents of worldwide Islamic empire both seek to undermine states, but neither group displays much political sense. Both would like to dispense with politics, even as they so obviously make political claims and take actions that aim at ruling. Aristotle would find them dubious, directing those ambitious to rule to engage in the study and practice of politics to greater sobriety and wit.