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?
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