John Gray: Two Faces of Liberalism. New York: The New Press, 2000.

This review was published in the Washington Times, November 14, 2000.

 

According to John Gray, the two-facedness of liberalism consists in its endorsement of two ideals that sharply conflict in our (post)modern world. Liberals have sought a “rational consensus on the best way of life,” typically, the regime of commercial republicanism or, more ambitiously, democratic socialism. Liberals have also claimed that “human beings can flourish in many ways of life,” that disparate religious and ethnic groups can learn to coexist peacefully under the liberal political order.

Gray rejects the liberal claim that rational consensus on commercial-republican or any other set of political, economic, social, or cultural foundation can be sustained. That is because no consensus on such matters is rationally derivable. The claim made not only by liberals but by political philosophers from Socrates onward—that there is an ideal political regime, obtainable at least in theory, as a standard by which to judge lesser regimes, if not in practice-must be abandoned as chimerical.

Instead of one ideal, reason discovers “many forms of life in which humans can thrive.” At best, philosophers can help their fellow-citizens to formulate a peaceful modus vivendi wherein these forms will survive without jostling each other too violently.

Gray also rejects the charge that he preaches moral relativism or some other nihilism. To endorse a plurality of goods or “values” is not to claim that they are all equal, and that moral choices are therefore arbitrary. “The good is independent of our perspectives on it, but it is not the same for all.” The good plays out differently for persons and peoples differently circumstanced; “justice does not always speak with one voice.” Courage, prudence, and justice, for example, indispensably comprise any good human life, but may result in radically different ways of life, and rightly.

Gray aims his best philosophic shots at the utilitarian and neo-Kantian schools of liberalism which have prevailed in American academic circles in recent decades, properly accusing them of entertaining rationally baseless, parochial assumptions about the character of the human good. John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and other over-publicized theorists take a deserved drubbing at his hands, although it must be noticed that they have been drubbed before, early and often, without much effect on their status as the scholars scholars love to cite.

Gray’s “modus vivendi” stance exhibits two problems, one practical/political, the other theoretical/philosophic. Practically, any modus vivendi, any way of life, needs to defend itself against enemies who want to destroy and supplant it. Would anyone fight for “values-pluralism”? Or would it not rather incline the vivendists down a slipper slope of complacency towards tyranny?

Gray himself exhibits such a tendency when, in comparing the United States to Castro-era Cuba, he remarks that a boy like the would-be expatriate Elian Gonzalez could get a better education in Havana than in certain big-city school districts in America. Really? Given the character of tyranny, how much can Gray or anyone else know about Cuban schools? We can know some of the trash Castro stuffed into the heads of his putatively very literate subjects, as Castro broadcast it widely; it did not argue powerfully for the merits of Cuban education under communism. If the world is believed to dress mostly in shades of gray, will not tolerant, peace-loving vivendists not go politically color-blind, at their own peril?

The theoretical problem is worse still. Gray praises those who worked to end slavery in the last century. “When the proscribed slavery, abolitionists made persons and chattels incomparably valuable”—that is, they made it impossible to treat persons as objects for sale. But in so outlawing slavery, did they in some literal sense make human beings morally unsalable? Or did they rather end a legal and social practice that had been wrong all along, because human nature does not as a rule flourish in slavery? In other words, Gray neglects the philosophic question of natural right, the moral foundation of American commercial republicanism. In this, he is as parochial in his Britishness as Rawls is in his (contemporary, academic) Americanness.

That the acknowledgement of natural right in politics need not result in irrational intolerance or dogmatism, but can nonetheless stiffen political backbones against tyranny, can be seen not so much in the philosophers of the past two-and-a-half centuries as in the political thought of such men as Washington, Madison, and Lincoln, who combined adherence to principle with a profound capacity for prudential reasoning. Gray seeks in some way to replace philosophically-informed prudence with a sophisticated doctrine of pacifism. This is simultaneously to load doctrine with too much weight to bear in practice, while undercutting clear-cut principles that men and women can defend.

The Apology and the Crito present the reader with a contradiction and a paradox. The contradiction is that Socrates advocates resistance to political authority in one dialogue, obedience in the other. The paradox is that Socrates advocates resistance in public, before the Athenian jury, whereas he advocates obedience in the privacy of his jail cell in a one-on-one conversation with an old friend.

The contradiction is easy to resolve. Socrates advocates resistance to public authority for ones like himself, for philosophers. If the soldiers at Gettysburg died so that the nation might live, Socrates at Athens died so that philosophy may live. He provokes the Athenians to kill him so that the philosopher as a human type will be admired and defended as a man of courage and not merely as an ‘intellectual’ by spirited and influential men who may have their own reasons for resisting the sway of public opinion. such men may come to identify with philosophers, offer them protection.

Crito is just such a man—wealthy, politically connected, a born ‘fixer.’ What he is not is a philosopher. (When the Hollywood movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck heard that Ronald Reagan wanted to run for governor of California, he protested, “No, no! Not Ronald Reagan as governor! Ronald Reagan as the governor’s best friend!” Crito is, or at least wants to be, the philosopher’s best friend. A man lacking philosophic wisdom may still admire the philosopher’s wit, justice, and courage.) Socrates does not want wealthy citizens like Crito to get into the habit of evading the law. On the contrary, Socrates’ argument in the Apology depends upon his own refusal to evade the law or the punishment attached to it. If Socrates were to consent to Crito’s plan, his words before the Athenians would ring hollow: For once, the ironic smile would play on the lips of the Athenians and not on the lips of Socrates. the Athenians would be victorious over philosophy if they were cheated out of killing the philosopher.

In solving the apparent contradiction between the dialogues one also removes the paradox. Socrates defies public authority by refusing to stop philosophizing; he provokes the death sentence that will make him, as the type of the philosopher, immortal by insolently asking for a reward for his philosophizing. (He then offers to ‘negotiate down’ to the payment of a trivial fine.) “The unexamined life is not worth living” is the final insult to the Athenians: Your lives are not worth living without me, the one who examines you, the one who prevents you from drifting off into the dreamy sleep of the quotidian. “I would rather die having spoken in my manner, than speak in your manner and live.” Dying life—philosophizing is practice of how to die—is preferable to living death—thoughtless, impassioned, mistaken.

The philosophic quest, animated by the eros for the good, renders Socrates unshakable. But what might render a decent non-philosopher like Crito unshakable, even as he fulfills his role as a friend and ally of philosophers? No public opinion, which will tolerate, then condemn, then regrets its condemnation of Socrates. Crito should rather be attached to the laws, as well as to a philosopher who abides by the laws. True, the laws themselves depend upon public opinion and its mood swings, but if enough citizens can be persuaded to revere them, public opinion itself will become less fickle. If the rich and well-connected become ‘conservative’ not only inasmuch as they seek to conserve their wealth but seek to conserve the laws, their conservatism will provide ballast for a ship too much buffeted by demagogic winds, by the tyranny of the majority as incited by malicious rhetoricians. If he rich instead decide, as Crito initially has decided, to regard the man wronged by the city as free to retaliate, then the rich will undermine the city, seek to rule it on their own terms. Their contempt for the law will infect the people, and violent factional strife—leaving peaceful philosophers maximally exposed to suspicion on both sides—will roil the city forever. This is the criticism Publius makes of ancient democracies. And so Socrates pretends that the laws are his parents—surely, as Peter Ahrensdorf notes, the most extreme form of ‘conventionalism,’ so extreme as to be deliberately parodistic of conventionalism. [1]  Philosophically-minded reads will see the joke. Crito will not, and that is all to the good, both for him and for the Athenians. In this, Socrates earns his title as not only a wise man but a just one.

Thomas Hobbes presents a different, sterner, and seemingly more doctrinaire view. The difference may be accounted for in terms of philosophy—his different account of nature—and in terms of politics—specifically, the advent of Christianity and its collision with secular rulership.

Far from being orderly, nature as a whole exhibits dissociation (Leviathan I. 13). Nature is atomistic. By nature, human beings war with one another, like colliding atoms. But the atoms themselves do have a certain discernible order, a structure of passions with the fear of violent death as its capstone, but also the desire for the things hat make life commodious and the hope to attain those things. Therefore, each atom obeys nineteen natural laws: among these Hobbes lists the inclination to seek peace and follow it; to defends its own existence by all available means; to seek peace by establishing “justice,” i.e., contractual agreements to recognize the “rights” of (more accurately, desires for) life, liberty, and the property that makes life and liberty sustainable.

The establishment of an effective contract for peace, with security for each one, requires that some power be instituted with sufficient capacity to enforce that security—else “every man will, and lawfully rely on his own strength and art” (Leviathan II. 17). Therefore, no right to revolution exists. For the sake of civic peace, the sovereign must be the soul judge of the actions and desires of the subjects. To challenge the power of the sovereign is to return to the dissociational nature of all objects above the ‘atomic’ level, and so to threaten the existence of the ‘atoms,’ the members of the civil society themselves. “Sovereign power is not so hurtful as the want of it” (II. 18). Civil obedience is absolute: “Nothing that the sovereign representative can do to a subject, on any pretence soever, can properly be called injustice, or injury” (II. 21); only if the sovereign fails to protect his subject, plunging the subject back into the natural war of all against all, will the subject’s obligation to his sovereign dissolve.

Hobbes lists fifteen “infirmities” of commonwealths leading to what we now call a ‘failed state.’ Central to the list is the imitation of foreign nations (II. 29), perhaps because a false prophet is one who teaches “any other religion than that which is already established” (III. 32); Jesus apparently did not do so, as Hobbes observes that He expounded the Mosaic Law (III. 42). However, Pauline Christianity, based upon Jesus’ command to take the Gospel to all nations, clearly does violate Hobbes’s rule. Evangelizing Christianity, which at bottom recognizes no nations, denying the distinction between Greek and Jew, has introduced dangerous novelties wherever it has gone. This can be seen more concretely in Behemoth, Hobbes’s dialogue on the English civil wars, “the many shiftings of the supreme authority” which occurred between 1640 and 1659. [2]

In Hobbes’s telling, seditious factions caused these bloody wars. Presbyterian ministers, Catholics, and the various ‘dissenting’ sects (central to the list being the Fifth-Monarchy men, who envisioned the imminent return of the Christ to earth); liberally-educated parliamentarians infatuated with classical republicanism; businessmen enamored of a foreign nation, commerce-minded Netherlands; the poor, avid of money; and the people, “ignorant of their duty” to obey the sovereign: all these groups, some averse to one another, fired the ambition to rebel against the monarchy and the established Church of England (Behemoth, 4). Because “the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people,” heterodoxy is civic poison (16). “The Universities have been to this nation as the wooden horse was to the Trojans” (40), serving as “the core of the rebellion” (58). Is it not an outrage that a man “will trouble himself and fall out with his neighbors for the saving of my soul, or the soul of any other than himself?” (63)  This spiritual effort he could very well keep to himself, without disturbing the public peace. The privatization of religion divides and conquers all religion, except for the civil religion of the State, the doctrines of which are identical to the will of the sovereign. (In this matter as in others, Hobbes wastes little sympathy. To kill 1,000 Presbyterian ministers would be a “great massacre,” but the “killing of 100,000” in a civil war ignited by ministers “is the greater” [95].) “[C]onverse with these divinity-disputers as long as you will, you will hardly find one in a hundred discreet enough to be employed in any great affair, either of war or peace” (144). Better to keep them as private men.

Where does this leave the philosopher? Philosophy and divinity both yield “the advancement of the professors,” which Hobbes associates with the priestly caste throughout history. True philosophy “can never appear propitious to ambition, or to an exemption from the obedience due to the sovereign power” (96). In this, Hobbes adopts the teaching of the Crito with Socrates’ self-defense or apologia subtracted. But what of the defense of philosophy, given the fact that Hobbes is so evidently a philosopher?

For this one must turn to A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and a Student of the Common Laws of England. Given the character of law as command and of philosophy as reasoning, law and philosophy might seem to be at odds, the philosopher’s supposedly unquestioning obedience to the laws of the sovereign open to question. But Hobbesian reason differs in nature from that of the common lawyers, even as it differs in character from the reason of Aristotelian philosophers, with their emphasis on prudence, an inclination the lawyers attempt to emulate. Hobbesian reason rests on ratio—that is, on proportion, on geometric certitude. Ancient philosophers suffered from “a want of method”: “there is not one of them that begins his ratiocination from the definitions, or explications, of the names they are to use; which is a method that hath been used in geometry: whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable” (Leviathan I. 5). To treat all reason as if it were mathematics brings Cartesianism to Hobbes’s famous discovery of Euclid.

Hobbesian reason can partake of the authority of law, can in fact revise existing laws, because it alone cannot be questioned—unlike the flickering light of prudence, now seen to be unphilosophic, a thing of mere experience and not of true reasoning at all. It might be added that the certainty afforded by ‘mathematized’ reasoning applied to all of human life, the assurance of those confident of having received divine revelation finds a rival. Hobbes carefully suggests, through the person of the philosopher in the Dialogue, that the sovereign king is actually subservient to the public safety, and thus open to criticism by the true reason based on the true axiom of nature, self-preservation.

The Hobbesian political philosopher differs from the Socratic not so much in his apparent teaching of conformity to the law, but in instantiating a new kind of  philosopher-king, a man who makes rigorous deductions from right axioms. The philosopher-king is no ironic construct as seen in Plato’s Republic, who ends by lording it over a population of children, but a man who holds the scientifically-irrefutable keys to the real political kingdom, whose reasonings are commands because they are accurate deductions from right axioms.

The strength of the Socratic approach is its flexibility, the way in which it can adopt philosophy to concrete circumstances, and so to enable philosophy to survive in a world that is never philosophic. The Socratic approach as dramatized by Plato exhibits the prudence so often not found among the ranks of the highly intelligent.

The weakness of the Socratic approach, at least if kept within the fairly restricted horizon of Apology-Crito, is its apparent inability to say what might be done to remedy the defects of a very bad regime. In that case, mere law-abidingness is not enough. For such considerations, one must turn to the Statesman, or perhaps to the regime analysis in Book IX of the Republic.

The strength of the Hobbesian approach is that it cuts the chatter. The seditious chatter of the Christian universities and parliaments of his time and place resembled in its virulence the seditious chatter of mosques and madrassas in our own century; the rule of such absolute monarchs as the Atatürk of Turkey, Shah of Iran, the Nasserites of Egypt, Hussein of Iraq, all their regimes replaced, all might well be preferred to the fanatics who have founded new regimes in those countries. And regarding philosophy, Hobbes distinguishes dialogue from chatter, rather as Socrates distinguishes philosophy from sophistry and rhetoric. Hobbes invites ‘intellectuals’ to a repast of humility, without requiring them to humble themselves to God.

The weakness of Hobbes’s approach is in its confidence in geometric reasoning, particularly as it might be applied to politics. Push prudential reasoning aside as irrational is imprudent, and might well undermine the very discretion Hobbes himself commends. Although Hobbes assures us that no monarch is “so inhuman” as to command a son to murder his own father (51), both prudential reasoning and experience strongly suggest otherwise. There is no real-world evidence that geometrizing despotism would remain benevolent, as distinguished from a more liberal, though far from conflict-free republican regime. There Locke was right to break with Hobbes. Whether le sage Locke would have broken with him under the circumstances Hobbes faced in England, circumstances prevailing in many parts of the world today, is a matter to be gauged by prudence, not geometry.

 

Notes

1. Peter J. Ahrensdorf: The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato’s Phaedo. Albany: State University of New York Pres, 1995, 171.
2. Thomas Hobbes: Behemoth. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

 

Karl Marx shares the materialist assumptions of the more optimistic forms of pre-Kantian modern liberalism. He lists these in The Holy Family. They are: “the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education [i.e., the malleability of human nature], the decisive importance of industry [i.e., the labor theory of value], the justification of enjoyment [i.e., hedonism],” along with empiricism. Hobbes and Locke would demur on the allegation of natural goodness and intellectual equality, although not on egalitarianism generally, but they endorse all the other items. And, as the example of some of the philosophes shows, liberalism comes in a sunny, human-perfectibility form as well as its drizzly, British Isles one. The British liberals, with Marx, also make “enlightened interest” the “principle of all morality”; they demur, however, on the claim of natural human sociality (although another good ‘liberal,’ Thomas Jefferson, would not).

Marxism shares with modern liberalism the overall pattern of the modern philosophic project, particularly as seen in Bacon. Marx himself acknowledges this. Bacon is “the real ancestor” of “English materialism and all modern experimental science.” His disciple Hobbes makes “power and freedom” identical (The Holy Family; see also Capital III. 7). Enlightenment is part of this pattern, or project. Marx sees himself as carrying forward the Enlightenment task, to “unmask human self-alienation.” As do most of the principal modern philosophers, Marx regards human beings as self-created, creating through their own labor, aimed at the conquest of nature. The struggle with nature, seen in “the labor process,” is “the necessary condition for affecting exchange of matter between men and nature; it is the everlasting, nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase” (Capital III. 7).

Marx shares the egalitarianism of earlier moderns. With respect to the character of human wants, the lures which impel men to strive against outer nature, it “makes no difference” whether wants “spring from the stomach or from fantasy” (Capital I. 7). This equalization of human wants, in such sharp contrast with, for example, Aristotelian hierarchy, is identifical to the arguments seen in Smith and Mandeville (that “honest, clear-headed man” [Capital VII. 25]). The same goes for Marx’s labor theory of value, which is already in Locke: All kinds of labor are equal, a point, Marx claims, that Aristotle ‘fails’ to see.

Progress, in this view, consists of the progressive appropriation of the matter of outer nature for the purposes of inner nature–to be sure, no less material than outer nature, but organized humanly. The progress from the state of nature to civil society and eventually, after centuries of despotism, to political democracy has the same general direction as Marxist dialectic.

This said, there is modernity and then there is modernity; modernity comes in a several (often mutually rivaling) varieties. The results of Marxism in practice—by Marxism’s own standards, the crucial test—cannot allow anyone to leave things at comparisons. The contrasts between Marxian and ‘liberal’ regimes have been noticeable, even after Marxian regimes ‘liberalize.’

While Marx applauds the philosophic work of modern materialism so far, he also criticizes it, along with the political regimes it has spawned. Marx allows that the Enlightenment has unmasked human self-alienation in its “holy forms,” crushing the ‘infamy’ that is religion, but it has actually fostered alienation in its “unholy forms,” possessive individualism and capitalism. (See “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.”)  Locke is the best of all previous materialists, but his materialism centers on the individual, objectivist, remaining at best civil-social. Marxian materialism, centers on “sensuous human activity,” praxis; comprehensively social, it includes politics (Theses on Feurbach). Liberals start with the state of nature, but in real history the individual comes last, and is a social product (Critique of Political Economy, Introduction). The modern, liberal state is merely “an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state.” Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, too, thinking of the middle class. Liberals did not say it. Marx complains that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. (See “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State.”)

Like other moderns who are not liberals, Marx wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world. The Communist Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ or spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. The liberal regimes don’t go far enough, offering only formal, political, epiphenomenal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based upon the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations. Money externalizes a social practice, labor, such that the laborer looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about; human means are aimed at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a decidedly unholy world-spirit, ever changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, ‘dialectical’ move in human history, which is the story of the self-creation of human beings through labor. Self-creation makes man the free and universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his collective, not merely individualistic will. Freedom is power. “The principle of politics is will.”

Marx’s celebration of sociality over individuality causes him to sound rather like Aristotle, or any modern pope, on the topic of usury (Capital II. 4). Capital is even worse; describing it, Marx invokes Bram Stoker-like images of gothic horror: “Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Capital II. 4). And so Marx sharply departs from liberalism not only by proposing a variant form of the labor theory of value but in his application of that theory. With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and therefore potentially far more powerful. The universal suffrage wrought by liberalism is not panacea, but it “possessed the incomparably higher” (if quite unintended) “merit of unchaining the class struggle,” of bringing “the real people” (as distinguished from the middle class alone) onstage for the first time (Class Struggles in France). The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, announced first in 1848 (the first shot in a world war of classes) will soon be at hand (Critique of the Gotha Program). Increasingly conscious of its own power and of the ways of power, the international proletariat will expropriate the expropriators of the products of its labor, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—an instrument of class domination.

Looking at the most liberal of the liberal regimes, that of the United States, Marx insists that merely political emancipation seen there will not do, even for settling the problem of religious conflict. To abolish religion entirely—part of the radical Enlightenment project—and thus to find a final solution to the problem of religious differences, one must also abolish private property, that is, “the right of self-interest” and the division of labor. Only when labor unifies in a far more profound unity than any seen in the federalism of the ‘United’ States, will the State transcend particular religions to become “a universality” (“On the Jewish Question”). The maintenance of the civil society of private individuals seen in liberal religious toleration, which means continued toleration of religion, means men still treat each other as means. Marx instead wants the advent of “species being,” the extension of conscious life that distinguishes the human species from other animal species (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) to replace liberal “security” (as per Hobbes and Locke), that “guarantee of egoism” to continued preservation of itself. “The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing those elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism” (“On the Jewish Question”). ‘Judaism’ is Marx’s synecdoche for the money society of liberalism, whose devotees worship money as value-giver. But this god is false, “the alienated essence of man’s labor and life.”

This critique of liberalism, as Marx makes clear in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is a ‘materialized’ form of Hegelian dialectic, “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and productive principle,” seen in the historical alternation of “alienation and transcendence.” It is Marx’s neo-Hegelianism that accounts for both his similarity to, and his divergence from, modern liberal philosophers. Hegel of course subsumes all previous philosophic doctrines into his own system on the basis of his omnivorous, all-synthesizing dialectical ‘Absolute Spirit,’ the self-mastery of which consummates a vast process of which Bacon’s ‘conquest of nature’ afforded an early glimmering. The Baconian, Hobbesian, Lockean, French-philosophe, and even Kantian elements of Marx (the latter seen in his indignation of the use of human beings as means, not ends), make sense in terms of this Hegelian character of his thought.

Why then has Marxism in practice resulted in so much tyranny, with the further result that Marxism itself has been largely discredited? Hegel and Marx are among those who have attempted to lift liberalism from its deliberate occupation of the low but solid ground. What makes liberalism so difficult to lift?

Another anti-liberal philosopher, Nietzsche, famously predicts that national war, not class war, will characterize the future of the world, because the will to power will endure. But Marx says much the same thing about power, if his comments on labor as Baconian conquest are remembered; yet Nietzsche got the form that the will to power would take correct, as Marx did not. Marx rejects Nietzsche’s prediction in advance with the rhetorical question, “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot has been invented?” Marx fails to see that the answer is ‘yes.’

The thumotic man, the warrior spirit, remains alive in the modern world, both as a physical warrior and as a mind-warrior. Marx himself is one of the latter, explicitly linking philosophy to the project of changing the world, not just understanding it. He fails to see that political men think the same way, and they have armies at their disposal. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, weakly grasps politics, which he dismisses as epiphenomenal. Modern liberalism gives less scope for politics than the ancients did, splitting it off from civil society and therefore from economic life, but the milder politics that resulted did not dismiss political men as anachronisms, limiting their revulsion to tyrants (whom Aristotle doesn’t classify as genuinely political men at all). Tyrannical souls will rage against the liberal regimes, adopting such thumotic ideologies as Communism and its structural twin, Fascism, but they have been outnumbered and, so far, outgunned by the productive power of the bourgeois order. Marx does not anticipate that his philosophy and the rhetoric he deploys to advance it will attract the kind of men very likely to oppose liberalism too thumotically, too unintelligently.

The excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx himself one sees an intense conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict which, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos. Marx too-hastily eschews all natural-right philosophy in his angry critiques of a particular kind of natural right, modern liberal natural right. This lack of a moderating standard of conduct led to a series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose but their chains. On the contrary, millions lost their lives or were fastened in chains. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class the way religionists often think of themselves, and as Hegel thought of himself: as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class destined to carry humanity to glory. But whereas religionists teach the God-bearing nation that God is the heaviest burden, the strictest lawgiver, the gravest imposer of responsibilities, Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, rather than laws untouched by what human beings think or do. What realism? What law?

Marx writes, “All mythology subdues, controls, and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and you need institutions so arranged as to check him from doing as he will if, in a fit of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, he inclines to violate that standard. More thumotic, and less genuinely scientific than it knows, Marxism fails on both counts, in theory and in practice. Liberalism does not, always.