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.

Daniel J. Mahoney: Bertrand de Jouvenel: The Conservative Liberal and the Illusions of Modernity. Wilmington: ISI Books, 2005.

Originally published in Perspectives on Political Science, Volume 35, Number 2, Spring 2006.

 

Academic political theorists often act as if they aspire to nothing so much as a regular column on the op-ed page of the New York Times. They long for influence, if not for themselves then for their concepts. Bertrand de Jouvenel took the more sensible path: that from journalism—the observation of men and their actions—to the professoriate. He saw the real things first. And the real thing he saw was worth thinking about: Europe, torn between weak republics and powerful tyrannies, descending into its second cataclysmic war in twenty-five years.

In this succinct essay, Daniel J. Mahoney continues his ever-widening exploration of the religio-political question in modernity. To his previous studies of Raymond Aron, the secularized Jews, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian Orthodox believer, and Charles de Gaulle—who perhaps was thinking of himself when he spoke to Malraux of men “whose Christian faith was dim but who were, nonetheless, not Voltaireans”—Mahoney now adds a firm and (mostly) judicious Roman Catholic.

By “conservative liberal,” Mahoney means a thinker sensitive to the merits of economic and political freedom in the world of statist power and democratized peoples, a thinker who nonetheless recalls the virtues of the old aristocracies and considers how those virtues might be preserved, not only for their own sake but for the sake of pulling ‘moderns’ back from their own excesses. Thus, Aron, among Jouvenel’s contemporaries; Constant, Tocqueville, and Guizot from the previous century; Rousseau and Montesquieu from the century before that; and Aquinas and Aristotle more distantly, were Jouvenel’s philosophic companions.

To prepare himself to learn from such men, Jouvenel had to think himself out of the progressivism of his youth, with its attempt to replace statesmanlike prudence with secular prophecy and moral and political authority with power. Witnessing two decades of “totalizing” politics followed by half a decade of “total war” brought Jouvenel to “a profound appreciation of the ‘givenness’ of things,” to a preference for the gardener over the engineer.

“All of Jouvenel’s work returns to this central question: Can the indispensable notion of the common good be freed from those corollaries (i.e., smallness, homogeneity, resistance to innovation and foreign ideas, insistence on the community’s immutability in order to maintain its harmony) in which classical political philosophy enframed it?” Like Constant, Jouvenel criticized attempts to make the big states of modernity too much like the small, closed societies of antiquity; unlike Constant, Jouvenel rested his critique finally on spiritual grounds, on “his Christian recognition of the essential quality of persons as children of God and his personal adherence to the universal human community that is the Roman Catholic Church.” Modern rationalists—even the libertarians among them—”do not appreciate” that “human liberty depends on an acceptance of regulative principles beyond the power of the human will to alter,” principles to which “the wise man [in Jouvenel’s words] knows himself for debtor.” Under modern conditions, more than any others, men in political communities need to orient themselves toward things bigger and higher than the states they have made for themselves. Without such an orientation, men not only “immanentize the eschaton,” they eschatonize the imminent—both moves landing them in quite the mess.

In this book, as before, Mahoney shows himself unmatched among his generation of political scientists in his ability to introduce a thinker to new readers while illuminating him for old readers. Having suffered neglect for decades, Jouvenel reappears as one of those rare, sober spirits who can watch politics and think at the same time.

Carnes Lord: The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 41, Number 5, July/August 2004.

 

“What leaders need to know now”: Carnes Lord can deploy that subtitle justly, unlike most of us. As a translator of Aristotle he brings a clear eye; as national security adviser for two presidents he brings a practiced hand. Knowing by the eye—by seeing, by noēsis—bespeaks the ardent moderation of classical philosophy. Knowing by the hand—by grasping, by making—bespeaks the calculating immoderation of Machiavelli, the inventor of modern states in which “leaders” exercise their several crafts. Lord asks us to wonder, “What is it exactly that politicians today must know in order to lead effectively?” (xiii)

With its judicious combination of theoretical and practical insight, The Modern Prince also engages us in a subtle dialogue between the spirits of Aristotle and of Machiavelli. One might well deplore the seductions of the Florentine’s caress, shun the violence of his fist, but that pampering and destroying hand has framed the political world we live in, and Aristotle himself adjures us to heed carefully the circumstances within which we act. Those circumstances include triumphant but shaky constitutional democracies, the products of statesmen who sought to make Machiavellianism decent. Their successors face indecent Machiavellian statists of Eurasia and indecent anti-statists professing Islam.

Can the statesmen of constitutional democracies defeat these enemies? Lord’s twenty-six chapters parallel those of The Prince. In the first ten, he considers the political circumstances leaders now must know: both the institutional structures of modern states and the elites that inhabit those structures—or, as Aristotle would say, the politeia and the politeuma of the Machiavellian political association. After a trenchant chapter on the purposes “states and their leaders pursue” (xvi), Lord discusses the instruments statesmen can deploy to achieve those purposes. Two chapters each on managing decisions, managing advice, and on the character of rulership itself complete the volume.

The spirit of Machiavelli artfully effects the liberation of acquisitiveness, in opposition to the Aristotelian economy that subordinated acquisition to the just, prudent, and moderate distribution of the goods acquired. As the egalitarian spirit of acquisition pervaded the world, large forces arose, satisfying the desire to acquire but also threatening princely rule. Do Machiavellians lose the very control they seek, buffeted by immense powers—bureaucracies public and private, interest groups, technologies, boom-and-bust economic cycles, social democratization—beyond human control? Does Machiavellianism ruin itself more surely than did the crucified God Machiavelli mocked as an unarmed (and therefore ineffectual) prophet?

Not quite. The contemporary world has seen a few statesmen who achieved their purposes—Reagan in the United States, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. But were they Machiavellians, “leaders” committed to the progressive mastery of nature and of other men? Ruling conceived as leadership, as visionary, secular-prophetic adventure, usually ends in a statist monumentalism whose bourgeois-bureaucratic regulations tie new creators down. Between charisma and rational-legalism, however, prudential statecraft, “the virtue of political leaders,” (28), can find its place, the place taken by such men as Truman, Eisenhower, Churchill, Disraeli, and Salisbury. Machiavelli’s world discovers a need for the Aristotelianism its founder discarded.

Aristotle points citizens to regimes, those sets of authoritative offices and persons fostering an ethos and a way of life that serve the citizens’ understanding of what a good life is. To identify a regime, to classify it according to Aristotelian political science, requires knowledge not only of ruling institutions but of social and economic ways of life that entwine with politics. “Statesmen must be conscious of the vulnerability of the regimes they lead” (46)—especially, in the modern, social-egalitarian world Tocqueville saw and foresaw, the vulnerabilities of democracy. Aristotle and Tocqueville concur (against John Dewey) that the cure for democracy’s ills is not always ‘more democracy.’

Democracies soon find their own elites; in an egalitarian and acquisitive society both cream and scum rise to the top. With Aristotle, Lord denies what Machiavelli affirms, that all elites are alike self-interested. He nonetheless takes Machiavelli’s point, that the modern “prince” or executive must take care to establish independence from many of the elites, all the more so since modern elites, in part by grace of Machiavelli, have received no adequate “moral, religious, and civic education” (58). One need not Machiavellianize to see Edvard Shevardnaze’s use of Russian troops to establish a regime in Georgia as an ill-judged declaration of dependence.

The most profound dependence, man’s dependence upon God, attracts Machiavelli’s scorn. Lord notes that Machiavelli uses prophetic religion civically, dismantling and/or controlling churchly and aristocratic elites, and so dissolving princely dependence upon them, leaving only a centralized political association of the prince and his dependent people—the modern state, as elaborated by Machiavelli’s disciple, Hobbes, and solemnized at Westphalia. But “the soundness of Machiavelli’s analysis of founders ultimately rests on his depreciation of the rule of law” (67)—an observation the great Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero made, two generations before. Limiting, moderating, quasi-aristocratic (as Tocqueville saw), the rule of law can make the new state decent, untyrannical. Machiavelli instead reduces “good laws” to “good arms.”

Granting, with Machiavelli, that “strong leadership is essential to the founding of states and regimes” (69), Lord notices that legal-institutional attempts to limit executive powers after the found have foundered. Even constitutional democracies have tended toward princeliness, over time, as democratization or egalitarianism ‘progressively’ takes hold in them—America being a telling example. The strength of ‘the people’ makes the prince’s apparent weakness—as popular ‘servant’—a real strength. This yields, effectively, monarchism, as other government offices increasingly fall under executive sway, “at the expense of the liberal constitutionalist solution to Machiavelli’s challenge—and perhaps the very idea of republican government” (85).

If progressivism loosened the American regimes from its moderating constitutionalist moorings, has some other modern regime fared better? Contemporary Japan seems to promise democracy without executive power, but Lord argues that General MacArthur’s founding largely replaced a dangerous military bureaucracy with a benign civilian one, “retain[ing] much of the psychology though not the outward trappings of a pre-modern aristocracy, with its strong sense of honor and face that is typical of such societies” (94). This aristocracy resisted the efforts of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka in the 1970s, who attempted a Machiavellian founding: “Tanaka managed only to corrupt the old order, not to institute the new” (95).

Gaullist France and contemporary Singapore represent the real trend in democracies, toward strengthening executives, even in the direction of autocracy. “[D]e Gaulle is a striking example of the lasting impact a founding leader can have not only on the institutions of a regime [its politeia] but on its defining spirit or culture [or ethos]” (98). Lord seems to agree with Jean-François Revel’s judgment that Gaullism without de Gaulle has settled into a placid authoritarianism punctuated by social disorder—a thing distant (as Lord might have added) from de Gaulle’s stated intention, a revived ‘spirit of the city’ or civic participation among the French, in both towns and workplaces.

Lord prefers Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore. Yew’s regime opposes “so-called Asian values to what it regards as the excessively individualistic and rights-oriented outlook of Anglo-American political thought,” without sacrificing the economic benefits of capitalism (101). Yew’s executive eschews the strong executive powers of Machiavellianism; its negative or veto power prevents the corruption and cronyism that characterizes other south Asian regimes. The executive “has no emergency powers and is explicitly denies any rule in decision making on defense or security matters”—a feature suggesting a country unthreatened by war, up to now. One may wonder how well it will defend itself in the future.

A regime’s ruling body, its structures, and its way of life are means to ends. Practicing statesmen, “preoccupied most of the time with questions of means,” “trouble themselves little over questions of ends” (106). But “lack of clarity about goals…can sometimes have unfortunate consequences” (106). Security against foreign adversaries, “at least a modicum of justice and domestic peace,” and economic prosperity all comport with the modern project (106). Prestige and honor recall older aristocratic politics; in democracies, these inhere in nationality, and sometimes even in transnational efforts, such as Churchill’s union of English-speaking peoples. The current war on international terrorist organizations, Lord observes, will entail both national and transnational efforts, with both individuals and countries sometimes risking their immediate security and comfort.

For its fulfillment, this combination of Machiavellian and Aristotelian ends requires prudent selection of the right means, to which difficult consideration Lord devotes nine chapters. In so selecting, the statesman must consider the numerous constraints on his actions imposed by elites, the ethos of his regime, and such geopolitical matters as his country’s geographic position in the world and the character of its friends and enemies. “The strategist Sun Tzu’s maxim that victory goes to those who know the enemy and know themselves is in this perspective a profound and enduring truth” never to forget (115).

The “principal instruments of statecraft today” (115) include administration, law, education and culture, economics, diplomacy, force, intelligence, and “communication” (verbal and symbolic). “The day-to-day management of the machinery of administration is the single most important thing governments do most of the time” (116), the kind of ruling perhaps most closely associated with the modern state. Unlike the church bureaucracy it mimics, modern bureaucracy proceeds by impersonal rules; in democracies, it must be ‘meritocratic’ not aristocratic. Somewhat insulated from social and political control, bureaucracy requires careful executive management; Lord commends the statesmanship of President Eisenhower, who reorganized the White House staff and met regularly with its key elements.

Machiavelli claims that good arms make good laws. Lord amends this: good laws “presuppose the existence of princes who establish the state structures that make them possible” (126). A “tool both of state formation and of regime management,” law “can serve to consolidate the authority not only of the state but of particular elements within it” (126). With regard to American circumstances today, Lord criticizes the legal positivism now prevalent in the courts, which blurs “the distinction between law and arbitrary compulsion” (132), inviting judges to ‘Machiavellianize’ the law. He subtly suggests that the time may someday be ripe for another try at Roosevelt-style court-packing to achieve in-Rooseveltian ends.

A less jagged instrument, economics, the focus of so much modern acquisition, raises the problem of managing economists, who, “like the soothsayers of ancient times,” claim “to be the sole guardians of a kind of secret” (and even prophetic) “lore” (142). Managing them involves disenthralling oneself from their metaphysique—a materialist individualism that assumes politicians exist merely to ‘aggregate’ preferences of individuals in accordance with misnamed ‘public choice’ theory (actually a dismissal of distinctively public things, denying the foundation of genuine choice). The political disaster of post-Soviet Russian economic statecraft exemplifies such dogma. Lord numbers this among “the great failures of contemporary statecraft” (147).

Diplomacy and force, complementary instruments, present complementary problems of management, inasmuch as both diplomats and soldiers operate in foreign countries, often beyond the direct control of responsible statesmen. “The vice of great diplomatists is the belief that they alone are capable of keeping in hand and manipulating the various strands of national policy” (156). War, too, is “an act of policy” (163), an “intensely political phenomenon” (162) that has sometimes precipitated political revolutions, requiring statesmen to cultivate an attitude of respectful questioning of expert assumptions. “World War I is perhaps the most compelling example of the dangers of excessive civilian deference to military commanders” (163).

Intelligence gathering and communications—today, Machiavelli might say ‘information’ and ‘disinformation’—also require statesmanlike management. Intelligence networks pose special problems, as spies tend toward disloyalty and dishonesty. Different regimes take different approaches to spy management; the United States allows spy agencies substantial autonomy in exchange “for formal deference to civilian authority and noninterference in the policy process” (173). Rhetoric cannot so be devolved, but the art of rhetoric—political argument, as distinguished from parades of images and striking assertions—has declined, a decline Lord traces to Machiavelli’s critique of Renaissance humanism. Among recent presidents, only Reagan understood and demonstrated rhetoric’s political potential.

Having considered the ends of political life and the means of achieving them, Lord moves to strategy, the coordination of means with ends. Strategy is a plan of action, applying means to achieve ends, and it “presupposes an adversary” (194). Here statesmen come into their own. Only they can even begin to coordinate the efforts of all government agencies into a coherent plan. Therefore, so-called crisis management should become the residue of strategic design.

This is so, not for the Machiavellian reason that Fortuna can be controlled, but for the Aristotelian reason that Fortuna’s whims are anticipated by those who keep a weather eye. Good advice matters, not mere decisiveness. In Machiavellianism “caution, calculation, and moderation are displaced by enterprise, energy, and daring” because “princes cannot afford” moderation in a world “more easily shaped to human purposes than hitherto believed” (208). For Aristotle and America’s Founders, by contrast, “deliberation is the core of political judgment” (210). “To emphasize the role of deliberation in decision making is to acknowledge the centrality of reasoning to the exercise of leadership” (210).

Deliberation implies a certain subtlety or indirection. Although mass-media ‘communications’ may tempt statesmen to lead public opinion, and although at times such spectacles make sense, most governing in complex, bureaucratic modern states involves bargaining and also what Fred I. Greenstein taught his fellow political scientists to call “hidden-hand” leadership, a description of President Eisenhower’s ruling praxis. The use of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a lightning rod of international anti-communism, while the equally anti-communist Eisenhower spoke of ‘detente’ and ‘atoms for peace,’ exemplifies hidden-handedness. Modern statesmen must learn to use both opinion leadership and hidden-handedness in deliberate coordination.

Statesmanship “depends on the times” (201), not because statesmen must submit to large historical forces inexorably driving us all to the ‘end of history’ but because Fortuna spins the wheel. No science, including social science, can control that spin. Each “strategic setting” or circumstance (222) requires a governing response that fits it. Times of peace—the 1990s, for America—require statesmen to sustain “military preparedness, counter isolationist sentiment, and resist tendencies toward complacency and corruption” (222). Times of “protracted conflict”—the Cold War, the war on terrorists—require leaders “to reconcile the appearance of peace or normality with the reality of struggle and the need to stabilize public opinion for the long haul” (222).

With (and against) Machiavelli, Lord ends with “an exhortation to preserve democracy”—not only Italy—”from the barbarians” (225). Islamist terrorists, the “obvious barbarians at the gates of the new Rome of Western liberalism,” should not obscure the likelihood of continued “great power conflict,” most likely with China (226), which now resembles a giant, leftish version of Wilhelmine Germany. Further, commerce means porous borders, with immigration now a cultural-political weapon of choice. “Contemporary elites,” enthralled by ‘multiculturalism,’ “are at once too critical and too complacent in their attitudes” toward the regime of commercial republicanism “under which they live and prosper” (227). Pick-and-choose postmodernism won’t work.

This executive summary hints at the richness of Lord’s argument. Emphatically, I point readers to his footnotes, effectively a syllabus of readings on each dimension of statecraft. What leaders need to know now includes many studies published in the last decade, sound case studies on key contemporary regimes. Leaders also need to know two books that have remained ‘recent’ for centuries, the Politics and The Prince. (One might add a book in-between old and new, Paul Eidelberg’s A Discourse on Statesmanship.) a graduate program might well design a two- or three-year program of study around Lord’s fine book—an institute for statesmanship, perhaps?