Commercial republics recognize popular sovereignty. In order to avoid majority tyranny, popular sovereignty requires theoretical and practical constraints. In America, natural right provides theoretical constraints on popular sovereignty, whereas institutions—political and social—provide the primary practical constraints.
Every sovereign has his courtiers, and the people have theirs. A courtier would rule the country by manipulating the sovereign. In republics, this means that ‘representatives’—some elected, some self-appointed—must be watched. Modern republics afford an opportunity to do this by making the people more ‘philosophic’ (in the Socratic sense) than they might otherwise be: They know themselves better than do the people in the regimes that permit less liberty, less association, and their representatives—be they sincere or manipulative—also know them better. This is where sociology comes in.
Much of modern sociology suffers from a theoretical problem; Dewey’s thought exemplifies it. Dewey concurs with the late-modern abandonment of natural right as the standard for morality, then gropes for some way to avoid the potential consequences of that abandonment. Dewey’s answer—pragmatism or experimentalism yoked to progressivism—will not do, as it can only hope that its practitioners will be humane. (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment said this of pragmatism’s precursor, utilitarianism: Why not murder the vile old woman? This suggests that there is no humane praxis without some humane theoria, except by happy accident, such as English restraint.
Still, ‘pragmatism’ in the sense of practical reasoning or phronēsis—pragmatism without the ‘ism’—is indispensable to sociology, which might otherwise descend into social-science technicism and its barbaric jargon. Prudent sociologists spend less time dogmatizing about ‘models,’ more time in considering how a regime might adapt to the real circumstances in which it attempts to exercise its rule. For example, newly-founded commercial republics will need to consider the institutions that have worked in the longer-standing republics, including the United States, but with an attitude of careful selection, not imitation. Republicanism requires deliberation in common, and deliberation isn’t following a recipe. One knew the American attempt to bring republicanism to Iraq would be troubled when soldiers tried to apply the lessons contained in what they jocularly called ‘democracy in a box’—essentially a list of institutions and rules.
One example of this may be seen by considering church-state relations in Poland after its liberation from the Soviet bloc. The American solution to the problem of independence from imperial rule is well-known. Let a thousand flowers bloom, but do not react to their blossoming with a Maoist harvesting machine. George Washington’s letters to a variety of American religious congregants give expression to this principle. As Harry V. Jaffa observed, Washington is the first head of state to say to all religious practitioners: Your freedom here is not a privilege, granted by a generous state, but a civil right securing a natural right. In practice, this policy works more easily in America than in some other places, because there has been a variety of sects here, from an early date.
Poland presents a different social circumstance. The Polish Catholic Church has inclined Poles to define themselves against their formidable neighbors: Protestant, then fascist, Prussia; Orthodox, then communist, Russia. Polish Catholicism became fervently ‘national’ or patriotic in part because the state, even when Catholic, was so often controlled by foreigners. In Poland, modernity and nationalism do not necessarily cohere; modern liberalism might look like a watered-down recapitulation of some ‘scientific socialism,’ ‘Right’ or ‘Left.’ At the same time, traditional Catholic thought is not individualist, and therefore does not give modern liberalism a ready foothold. In continental Europe, liberalism is often associated with the sharp-tongued anti-clericalism of Voltaire, which, when not simply atheistic, might as well be in the eyes of most serious Polish Catholics.
Enter Adam Michnik, whose essay “The Church and the Left” shows that an anti-dogmatic secularist with civic courage can open a dialogue with the Church in what is, unlike America, very nearly a one-church country. Michnik begins by recognizing that secularism is not guarantee against dogmatism. Poland recently freed itself from a rigid secular ‘monism’—or, more accurately, from a decadent secular monism whose adherents had long lacked any real faith in their own ideology. Neither secularism by itself nor religiosity by itself offers any guarantee against tyranny.
What is needed is a prudent selection of those tendencies within both secularism and Catholicism that comport with the republican regime that is the only practical safeguard against tyranny—and therefore against both fanatical anti-secularism and fanatical anti-clericalism—in modern times. This selection must, at the same time, not ‘relativize’ its principles to republicanism, make principles merely instrumental to a particular political form. The form exists for the sake of the principles, not vice-versa.
In the Roman Catholic tradition, Michnik sees (following Kolakowski) that Constantinianism is not the only way, that the tension between God and Caesar, sacred and profane, “is a permanent feature of the Church in the world”—and also, one might add, a feature the Church draws directly from the New Testament. This distinction should give Polish Catholics pause when there is any attempt to enact a program involving some Hegelian synthesis of sacred and profane. As for secularists, they should recognize by now that the several atheist Hegelianisms in politics have led to disastrous results wherever they have been tried. Marxism is but the most conspicuous example; Michnik provides a remarkable instance of this when he catches a Party flack praising “the worship of work, rationalism, and practical know-how.”
If commercial republicanism depends upon some notion of natural right, the catholicism of Polish Catholicism—”a song for all voices from the highest to the lowest, a wisdom that does not have to change itself into stupidity at any level of awareness,” in the words of Witold Gombrowicz—can comport with the universalism undergirding any particular republican regime, without requiring the sacrifizio d’intellectio feared by secularist intellectuals. Any genuine Christianity will eschew unlimited popular sovereignty on the grounds that Christ comes to judge the nations, not to cheer them on. As for his fellow-secularists, Michnik adjures them to distinguish between the “relativism” that is “a spiritual search” and “the relativism of the nihilist, which is moral capitulation.” Michnik proposes not Voltaireanism but Kantianism, which does indeed present a secularist version of Biblical morality. (Michnik’s is, however, a comic, mocking Kantianism, not tonally similar to the dutiful earnestness of The Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals. In American terms, Michnik is Ben Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson or John Adams.) Kantianism provides a set of decent, secular standards for criticizing secularists. Michnik might have added that there is also a tradition of Christian self-criticism, as seen in the Apostle Paul’s letters inveighing against “lukewarm” church congregations, and indeed in Jesus’ attacks on the practices of His time and place.
Michnik is a man in search of dialectical partners. In the France of an earlier generation, the Catholics to talk with would have included Maritain and de Gaulle. In Poland, I do not know who there is. I visited only once, as an odd sort of tourist.
Meanwhile, back in America, it is noteworthy that the American Founders included serious Christians (John Jay, for example) and serious non-Christians (Franklin, Jefferson). Collaboration between secularists and the religious today appears more difficult and rare, although perhaps this is only an illusion fostered by partisan disputes. Consensus between the two ‘sides’ requires some common set of principles: once, natural rights; later, several progressivist eschatons. The latter are no longer so plausible as they once were, even to ambitious political men. Even to ‘intellectuals.’
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