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    British Imperialism and Its Critics

    by

    Gregory Claeys: Imperial Skeptics: British Critics of Empire, 1850-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

    Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2011.

     

    In his 1917 essay Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, V. I. Lenin highlighted a then-recent study by the British economist J. A. Hobson. No Marxist (as Lenin immediately observed), Hobson nonetheless shared the Marxian assumption that economic interests largely determined political behavior, including empire building. Given the wide distribution of Lenin’s book, Hobson’s name often stands alone at ‘the beginning of the end’ of British imperialism. Not all the names of earlier anti-imperialist writers have been forgotten, but the fact of their anti-imperialism often has been. Claeys provides a much fuller and more finely textured account of anti-imperialism in British political thought than any previously available. He concludes too trendily, ascribing to his thought “the foundational ideals of modern identity politics” (290); what he has found turns out to be more interesting than that.

    European imperialism found justification in Christian evangelism—Catholic and Protestant—whose advocates viewed with suspicion “indolent savages” who “committed the crime of living in an environment where little effort sufficed to attain a sufficiency” (13). For this violation of the curse of Adam (somewhat redolent of the atmosphere prevailing in a university faculty), “millions were enslaved and worked to death,” Claeys tartly observes. Imperialism also found justification in modern natural right as integrated into the philosophic accounts of the law of nations. Emer de Vattel, for example, argued that peoples who refuse to cultivate the soil and instead live by plunder “fail in their duty to themselves, injure their neighbors, and deserve to be exterminated like wild beasts of prey.” Other, more pacific peoples who merely tend flocks, hunt animals, and gather edibles injure no persons but do “occupy more land than they would have need of under a system of honest labor, and they may not complain if other more industrious Nations, too confined at home, should come and occupy their lands” (17). Theodore Roosevelt could not have said it more concisely—nor, as you might imagine, did he. Both writers were following John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. Critics of this argument (including Diderot, Kant, and Herder) found no influential readership in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

    The first important British anti-imperialists came not from the natural-rights or the Continental protohistoricist schools but from the liberal utilitarians Richard Cobden and John Bright—free traders (today we would call them libertarians) who rejected all intervention in the domestic concerns of foreign countries as ultimately unprofitable. But the main intellectual influence on British anti-imperialism came from Auguste Comte the founder of positivism, who derived his ideas from his “spiritual master,” Nicolas de Condorcet. As is well known, Condorcet stands at the pivot of the transition of European Enlightenment thought from natural right (by then in its Rousseauan form) to historicism; anticipating human progress toward humanistic universalism, Condorcet comes off rather as a Hegel without the massive and intricate historical/ontological dialectic. Comte elaborated a new social science, inventing the term “sociology” for it; ruled by industrialists, “including engineers and scientists,” Comtean social science called for an initial dictatorship not of the proletariat but of the scientists, to be followed by a degree of democratization as the masses relinquished their old religion for an altruistic “Religion of Humanity”—guided, to be sure, by a new priesthood “living in colleges, and trained in science, but without celibacy,” and teaching the altruistic creed. “Live for others” (48-50). For his British readers, anti-imperialism followed from this humanitarianism. Wedded to the evolutionist-historicist thought of Darwin, positivism optimistically assumed that no coercion would be needed to aid the march of progress; therefore, both balance-of-power geopolitics and imperialism wasted time and resources (including lives) while encouraging retrograde selfishness and atavism. Positivism began to become popularized in Great Britain in the late 1840s, at the time of Chartism at home and other revolutionary stirrings on the Continent.

    Perhaps on the grounds of a humanist/universalist sympathy for which nothing human was foreign, British positivists inclined toward praising the religions of the conquered. Wilfrid Scawen Blunt celebrated Islam, hoping that Africans would convert to it as a means of avoiding absorption into Europe (37); consistent with the Religion of Humanity, Blunt stipulated that Islam modernize its teachings on slavery, marriage, concubinage, and divorce (40). Blunt, Richard Congreve—a lapsed Aristotelian teaching at Oxford—and Frederic Harrison also praised Hinduism and even showed distinct sympathies for Irish Home Rule. The most influential of the British positivists, Harrison likely turned against imperialism in reaction to “the bombardment in 1863 of Kagoshima in Japan, where a city of 100,000 persons was destroyed in reprisal for the murder of one Briton” (84). Oddly, Harrison blamed Christianity for this atrocity—claiming that “on the Christian theory, the Japanese are absolutely inferior to Christian Britons, whereas “on the human theory [i.e., positivism] they are relatively our equals, occasionally our superiors, and essentially our brothers” (85). Evidently none too conversant with Christian theology, Harrison more soberly blamed the massacre on “the devilish antipathies of race” and the imperial ambitions of British aristocrats “pandering to the English merchant” (86).

    Comte envisioned a world organized as a federation of small states. “The state had to be relatively small, akin to the Greek polis or perhaps Holland” (97-98). Modern nation-states and the empires they built launched the masses of the world’s people to subordination, squalor, and death. “Little-Englandism” followed from this. Little England would combine compact size with modern industry; like all of its sister statelets around the world, it would confederate peacefully under the “spiritual direction” of the Religion of Humanity (100). This vision could readily accommodate the socialism that gained intellectual adherents in the later nineteenth century. The following century proved disappointing to such visions; Claeys bravely contends that “the Positivists had not failed Humanity; humanity had failed the Positivists” (114). One might say that humanity had failed Humanity, as it so often does; reportedly, God has been no less disappointed.

    As a social and political movement positivism “did not survive its second generation of leaders” (118). Prussian militarism and the arrival of the United States as an increasingly well-armed world power, along with the new, harsher creed of Social Darwinism, all dampened the spirits of positivists. But a portion of positivism lived on in socialism—an influence much attenuated by the sympathy for imperialism among the British working classes and by the Marxian argument that imperialism represented a necessary historical advance over sack-of-potatoes peasant societies. Still, imperialism itself, modernizing force though it may be, was slated for destruction along with the capitalism that directed it. William Morris’s famous utopian-socialist prose poem News from Nowhere embellished Little-Englandism with a synthesis of modern egalitarianism and medieval charm. But many of the Fabian socialists, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and the Webbs, judged imperialism indispensable to efficiency, civil service, and the advance of internationalism. Such Independent Labour Party luminaries as Ramsay MacDonald and Keir Hardie eventually endorsed “not anti-imperialism but an alternative imperialism” “based on assumptions, if not of British superiority then at least of a British genius for administration that was of benefit to the colonized” (201). “Many socialists thus moved relatively easily towards a position of seeing the empire as a potential socialist commonwealth, capable of extending the benefits of socialist civilization to the less developed regions of the world” (227).

    J. A. Hobson took a middling position. He concurred with both capitalist and later socialist thinkers (and ultimately with Vattel, against Comte) that “if a nation or the government of a nation holding possession of a piece of territory refuses to utilize fully its resources or to permit others to do so or otherwise makes itself a nuisance to its neighbors, or to the international public, the sacred rights of nationality ought not to protect it from coercion imposed on behalf of the general good of nations” (243). “These peoples have no natural or inalienable right to withhold the natural resources of their country from the outside world, and they cannot develop them without the assistance of that outside world” (258). He rejected, however, the imperial claim to a right to run over national claims altogether in great-power rivalry in the late nineteenth century’s ‘scramble for empire.’ In this, he sided with the Comtian Little-Englanders. With the socialists, he insisted that the social and economic inequalities of capitalist societies drove such societies outward in search of wider markets and more wealth. Unlike most Fabian socialists he did not accept a radically internationalist program for the internationally-needed development of weaker, nonmodern societies. In this, “he adopted the standard Positivist party line respecting nationalism, namely that a balanced and unchauvinistic patriotism was a natural focal point for human affection and identity” (261).

    “Natural” turns out to be a pregnant word. Beyond the notion of “Humanity,” Hobson saw the need of a “spirit of religion [that] must transcend humanity, seeking a One which is higher and holier” (279). This One turns out not to be God, except perhaps in Spinoza’s sense; it is nature. “It had been Positivism’s failure to include nature, save as a contribution toward the progress of humanity, that was responsible in part for the slight hold Comte and his disciples attained” (280). Hobson called for “a recognition of nature as the larger and higher value” (280). Driven out with a pitchfork, nature returned—if only in a form more evocative of the mystical forms of our contemporary ‘environmentalism’ than of natural right, ancient or modern.

    ‘World Politics’

    by

    Mary Ann Glendon: The Forum and the Tower: How Scholars and Politicians Have Imagined the World, from Plato to Eleanor Roosevelt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 49, Number 4, November/December 2009.

     

    The forum here is the public forum, the tower is the ivory tower. The publishers have not served Professor Glendon well with that subtitle; her argument has little or nothing to do with imagining the world. Quite the contrary: Almost unfailingly, she points her readers to the real world. She wants them to think about the relationship of the life of politics to the life of the mind, “the political and active way of life” as distinguished from that “which is divorced from all external things,” as Aristotle puts it in Book VII of the Politics. She addresses her argument particularly to the intelligent young, whom she has met and taught at Harvard Law School for some years. And it is for them that this book will prove most valuable. Most of the persons she considers have attracted much commentary, and she offers few novel interpretations. Combining biography with textual analysis, she draws from her examples sober and (one hopes) sobering lessons for smart and ambitious individuals drawn to the alluring role of ‘public intellectual.’ Glendon sits them down and tells them plainly, “the qualities that make a first-rate thinker are not the same as those required for success in statesmanship.” And if you think you have both sets of qualities, consider the fates of the very few who did. The melancholy truth is that you and your country might be better off if you just become a lawyer.

    Taking ‘the ancients’ first, she begins with the instructively inauspicious life of Plato, himself ever mindful of the execution of Socrates by Athenian democrats. Plato’s timely twenty-year sojourn to a variety of cities undoubtedly enriched his political thought, but none of his three journeys to Syracuse ended well, despite (or maybe because of) his attempts to improve the regimes there. Upon returning to Athens, he “finally concluded that there are times when circumstances are so unfavorable that the only reasonable course for a wise man is to ‘keep quiet and offer up prayers for his own welfare and for that of his country.'” Plato devoted these last years to composing the Laws, in which “the ultimate concern” turns out to be forming good citizens—presumably, citizens who might incline toward leaving philosophers in peace. In turn, philosophers will also leave citizens in peace, aspiring not to the status of lawgiver except in the indirect manner of teaching the future lawgivers. Upon being asked, at the end of this longest Platonic dialogue, to join with his politician-friends in the founding of a new city, the Athenian Stranger maintains “a resonating silence”—the political science of politic silence. Glendon cheerfully suggests that this means the Stranger wants them to proceed by themselves from now on, which is one way to put it.

    With his long experience at the highest level of Roman politics, Cicero cuts a politically more impressive figure than Socrates or Plato; his life ended as badly as Socrates’ did, but his accomplishments up until that time bespeak genuine statesmanship. Glendon admires Cicero’s understanding of political limits—not for him the grand project of re-making a regime at one pass—married to a courageous fidelity to justice; “he never abandoned his efforts to preserve republican principles from the encroachment of dictatorship on the one hand and mob rule on the other.” At the same time, he proved an eloquent defender of philosophy; his Hortensius set Augustine on a thoughtful path. These virtues came together in his defense of natural law: a restatement of natural right in terms clear enough for the defense of such right in civil societies by means of civil laws.

    This Roman respect for law disappeared in the chaos that descended in the West following Rome’s debacle, but found a home in the Eastern Empire, where Justinian I and his legal adviser, Tribonian, systematized the Roman texts, producing the several magisterial legal works of the Corpus Juris Civilis. The Justinian laws clearly defined such extra-legal concepts as justice and prudence, simultaneously tying them to particular laws establishing “natural reason” among “all human beings” under those laws. lost for centuries after the Eastern Empire collapsed in its turn, the Justinian Corpus continues to form “the base from which all of today’s civil law systems emerged.” It might be added that Justinian and his team of scholars incorporated the way of life of a prophetic religion into a system of law founded on reason—no mean feat, and one attempted with less long-lasting success elsewhere.

    Glendon’s next triptych of thinkers consists of the early moderns: Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. With a woman’s sure eye, she questions not only Machiavelli’s virtue (he “assert[ed], rather than prov[ed], the inadequacy of classical and, by implication, biblical thought”) and his piety (he said on his deathbed that Heaven would bore him), but also his manliness. She recalls Plato’s Seventh Letter: “Plato’s counsel was that [advisers to princes] should never pander to power”; those who do “I should consider unmanly.” Having inserted this knife, Glendon gives it a firm twist: “One wonders whether Machiavelli, il Machia, ever measured himself by Plato’s standards of manliness.”

    To assert rather than prove the inadequacy of classical thought is to deny reason’s right to rule the human soul. Following Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes made reason the scout or servant of the passions. This instrumental and deductive reason, modeled on geometry, collided with the English common law tradition as articulated by the great jurist Edward Coke—enemy of Francis Bacon, Hobbes’s mentor. The legal reasoning praised by Coke was not deductive but dialectical; its “recursive self-scrutiny” enabled the English to set limits to arbitrary power—as seen most famously in the Magna Carta but also centuries later in Coke’s own career, during the course of which he defied James I in the name of Parliamentary prerogatives. “Squarely at odds with practically everything that Edward Coke had stood for,” Hobbes limited monarchic power only by the sovereignty of the people, who retained their right to self-preservation. The centrality of self-preservation in Hobbes perhaps underscores the unmanliness Glendon detects in the Machiavellian spirit.

    Her third ‘modern,’ John Locke, led “a life Machiavelli would have envied, except for the absence of wenching and carousing,” as a friend of the great organizer of the Whig party, Lord Shaftesbury. A man of caution if not of Hobbesian timidity, Locke shared exile with his patron when the Catholic James II ascended to the throne, returning to England after the Glorious Revolution and publishing several of his seminal works a year later. He found a new patron, Lord Somers, and gained recognition as “the intellectual leader of the Whigs.” Such Lockean principles as the right to free religious practice, government by consent, and property eventually “penetrated American legal consciousness,” where they remain to this day to the extent that subsequent waves of philosophic revision haven’t eroded them. Glendon finds it puzzling that Locke established these principles upon natural rights rather than the “ancient ‘rights of Englishmen'”; in this she may underestimate what Locke owed to Hobbes, and therefore to Machiavelli. Perhaps the ease to which one may underestimate the Hobbesianism of Locke accounts in part for the truth of Glendon’s remark, “Few scholars or statesmen…have bridged the worlds of forum and tower as successfully as he, or with such lasting influence.”

    Rousseau, Burke, and Tocqueville compose Glendon’s third group. All of them resist—in different ways—the Lockean settlement. She agrees with historian Paul Johnson in calling Rousseau “the very archetype” of “the secular intellectual who emerged in the eighteenth century to fill the vacuum left by the decline of clerical influence.” At the same time, Rousseau broke with his older contemporaries, the Philosophes, denying that the Renaissance and Enlightenment restoration of the classical liberal arts and sciences had improved the mores of Europeans, denying that property was a natural right, and further denying that human beings are naturally endowed with reason—thereby “striking at the very heart of the Enlightenment project.” Secularizing the Christian principle of charity or compassion by reducing it to a sentiment, Rousseau provided “a shaky foundation on which to build a just society” because “compassion, unlike charity, is not a virtue acquired by self-discipline and habitual practice. It is only a feeling and a fleeting one at that.” Although Rousseau did not lack patrons (or more accurately matrons), the link between his life and the politics of his time and of all subsequent times so far has rather been the way in which his brilliant catch-phrases (usually removed from his carefully-designed philosophic architecture) have influenced demagogues and have been deployed by them. The mood of impassioned self-indulgence that permeates so much of the life of our contemporary democracies seems to follow Rousseau, although Rousseau would be among the first to denounce us were he alive to see the spectacle we have made of ourselves.

    The political philosopher of this group that Glendon admires learned the rudiments of prudence from the Catholics and Quakers who educated him in a country where non-Anglicans still felt the sting of bigotry; “children had to be taught caution at an early age,” and so Edmund Burke was taught. Unlike Rousseau, whose writings valorized sincerity, Burke commended “economy of truth.” “It is a sort of temperance,” he observed, “by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.” He took up membership in Locke’s party, the Whigs, becoming “the chief theoretician, strategist” of a section of the party opposed to King George III’s over-exercise of executive power. In this capacity, exercised not behind the scenes but while serving in Parliament, Burke attempted to conciliate the dispute between Great Britain and her American colonies, supported free trade, opposed the oppressive regime of the East India Company (Glendon compares Burke’s indictment of Warren Hastings to Cicero’s prosecution of Verres), and, most memorably, predicted that the French Revolution—still in its relatively moderate phase—would descend first into terror and then into despotism under “some popular general.” “No one since Cicero had been at once so gifted in politics, and so grounded in philosophy”; by no coincidence, both men also grounded themselves in the constitutional law of a decent regime.

    Tocqueville made himself a public man in a country that had no immediate or even near-term prospects for such a regime, despite his best efforts to persuade his countrymen to move in that direction. Glendon blames Tocqueville’s failure on his fragile health, mediocre oratorical skills, and overall lack of “leadership qualities”-—he was no Burke—but she credits him for opposing the arbitrary and hidebound rule of the Bourbons. She sees that France was a mess that only time, disasters, and great statesmanship would ameliorate, a nation in which two kinds of monarchists, republicans, socialists, and the Bonapartists who eventually prevailed in Tocqueville’s lifetime bubbled in a political stew of rancor, suspicion, and contempt. Tocqueville “confronted the problem facing any politician who refuses to accept party discipline or follow a party line: How could he maintain his independence without rendering himself isolated and ineffective?” He couldn’t. In his defense, could anyone have done so, under those circumstances? In fact, no one did.

    Not only France but the West generally headed for ruinous times. Max Weber, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the human-rights collaborators Eleanor Roosevelt and Charles Malik form Glendon’s final constellation. Weber is well-suited to her theme, having written lectures squarely on it: “Science as a Vocation” in 1917 and “Politics as Vocation” in 1919. Weber described the increased specialization of life in Europe; this meant that “most scholars today could expect to spend their entire academic lives working within rather narrow confines” and therefore not directly confronting the problem of the forum and the tower. Weber went farther: Science as such has nothing much to say to politicians, beyond advice on technical matters. Scientists contemplate ‘facts’; politicians invoke ‘values.’ Scientists are not therefore amoral, however. On the contrary, the scholar who knows himself as a scholar fulfills the duty of responsibility for that vocation, that role within the modern state. Like Socrates, he “finds and obeys the demon who holds the fibers of his very life.” Yet not quite like Socrates: Glendon’s Weber makes no mention of philosophic eros. In keeping with his regime, Weber spent the Great War as a director of military hospitals. But he was no mere product of the regime; he remarked that Bismarck, for all his greatness, had fatally damaged the give-and-take of any genuinely political life in Germany and he wisely urged Germany to make peace at the end of 1915, seeing that the militarists’ infatuation with submarine warfare would only draw the United States into the war. He was that rare European who did not underestimate the military prowess of the Americans. After the war, he deplored the victors’ draconian program of severe reparations and attempted to strengthen republicanism in his work on the ill-fated (because ill-designed) Weimar Constitution. Perhaps predictably, given his esteem of science, including contemporary political science, he hoped to make German civil servants into a political class. But given his underlying dichotomy of ‘facts’ and ‘values,’ he could not find a way to avoid the unstable political dichotomy for ‘scientific’ administration on the one hand and ‘charismatic’ leadership on the other. Glendon admires Weber’s stern admonition to develop a “trained relentlessness in viewing the realities of life” and his commendation of “the ability to face such realities and to measure up to them inwardly.” One might add: Given his mistaken premises, he had no way of discovering a way for Germans to measure up to such realities outwardly.

    Oliver Wendell Holmes is Glendon’s first and only American ‘public intellectual.’ Perhaps because she omits consideration of earlier American specimens of the breed—the American founding period did not lack them—she misses the radical character of Holmes’s thought. When Holmes argues that the life of the law is not logic but experience she sees that he opposes not only Kant, not only Blackstone, but also Coke—very much in the name of an updated Hobbesianism. That is, Holmes’s invocation of experience finally amounts to the rule of force over the law; Glendon quite rightly asserts that “legal realism, pragmatism, sociological jurisprudence, the law-and-economy movement, and the various schools of critical legal theory are all little more than elaborations of themes memorably articulated by Holmes.” His rejection of “human rights” as the foundation for law and for any regime featuring the rule of law stems not, however, from Hobbes—who, after all, did not claim a natural human right to self-preservation—but to historicism, which allows statesmen to posit ‘ideals’ to be ‘actualized’ in the future but only at the cost of validating those ideals solely from the fact of that actualization. That is, historicism solves Weber’s ‘facts and values’ dilemma by synthesizing facts and values. That this can be a hard moral and intellectual price to pay may be seen from the careers of the tyrants who appeared after Holmes and his generation passed away.

    Charles Malik served as a Lebanese delegate to the first meeting of the United Nations in San Francisco in April 1945. Impressed by his mastery of languages, his government had persuaded him to take leave from his position as a philosophy professor. They also saw his popularity with both Muslim and Christian students and may have liked his previous American connection; he had taken a degree from Harvard under the tutelage of Alfred North Whitehead. Upon arriving at the conference, Malike learned that the smaller countries wanted to include a declaration of human rights in the U. N. Charter. They succeeded in establishing a Human Rights Commission, which became active two years later under the chairmanship of Eleanor Roosevelt. A distinguished committee including Julian Huxley, E. H. Carr, Richard McKeon, René Cassin, Jacques Maritain, and Malike undertook what one might have supposed to haven the fruitless task of compiling a list of rights recognized across national, regime, and civilizational borders. The trick turned out to be the avoidance of any discussion of he basis of the rights; the good Catholic Maritain quipped, “We agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks why.” Communist delegates balked at the inclusion of individual rights against the states but here Mrs. Roosevelt brought them around by saying that the rights could be achieved by a variety of methods. Malik added a bit of Whiteheadian ‘process’ philosophy to bridge the gulf between individual and group rights. One may guess that Comrade Stalin weighed the propaganda value of going along with Third-World aspirations—however regrettably bourgeois they may have been—along with the amplitude of the language about means and ends (why quarrel about how to break the egg that goes into the omelet?) and gave the thing his wolf-print of approval: the sort of ideological popular-front strategy that would soon issue, he trusted, in the Socialist Tomorrow predetermined by History’s iron laws, as laid bare by Marx and Lenin. Be this as it may have been, Glendon contentedly concludes that “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights—like the Justinian Corpus Juris Civilis, the Code Napoleon, and the United States Constitution—stands as a monument of what can be achieved through creative collaboration between statespersons and scholars,” and that “Eleanor Roosevelt pioneered a mode of leadership that was highly effective in a multicultural and multidisciplinary setting.”

    This book can teach ambitious young persons—whether studying law, politics, or literature—in at least two ways. First, it gives them some notion of the history of political philosophy, which they may not have received in the confusion of contemporary undergraduate education. While lifting their minds toward the heights, the book equally insists on keeping feet on the ground. Most of her heroes failed to achieve their ends, and a noticeable percentage of them died trying.

    America’s Constitution as Regime

    by

    James Ceaser: Designing a Polity: America’s Constitution in Theory and Practice. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 2011.

    Originally published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 48, Number 3, Fall 2011.

     

    Inasmuch as ‘science’ means knowledge, and knowledge (at least since Adam’s day) begins with naming things, James Ceaser’s first observation may startle. “The modern discipline of political science lacks a single, commonly accepted term to designate the central object of political inquiry.” Political scientists look at “how a society is arranged or shaped with a view to who governs and how power is allocated, for what basic purposes, and to generate what general way of life.” But they name this political thing variously: regime, constitution, for of government, political system, polity. Ceaser chooses ‘polity,’ closer to the Greek word politeia and used by the American Founders.

    The problem is even more extensive than Ceaser says. Political philosophers since Socrates have classified the object of their inquiry according to the polity or regime; they also classify political societies in terms of size, centralization, and homogeneity. For example, a polis or ‘city-state’—small and sufficiently centralized to see all of its rulers able to deliberate together in one place—will likely behave in some ways quite unlike an empire—typically, large and sprawling, exacting tribute from its colonies and often heterogeneous provinces but allowing them substantial self-government. Both polis and empire will differ from a feudal political society—larger and less decentralized than a polis, usually smaller and more homogeneous than an empire. Then there is an international community of believers—a church or an ummah; such an organization obviously rules, obviously has a polity/regime, and can be so extensive as to aspire to catholicity, but its true capital city is nowhere on earth, and it may have no specific earthly capital, either. And all of these differ from the modern state: large and centralized, usually aiming at a high degree of linguistic homogeneity. What is the name for this classification? ‘State,’ perhaps—except that lo stato is the term Machiavelli chooses for his large and centralized modern state, designed to replace the polis, the feudal order, and especially the Church as the principal sources of political authority. The Americans founded a polity/regime of democratic and commercial republicanism. They founded a political society intended to avoid the overbearing, Machiavellian stato (seen in George III’s tax collectors sent to “eat out our substance,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it) but still capable of mustering the military and economic strength to resist the modern imperial states and the hostile non-modern Amerindian poleis that surrounded them. The confederation they instituted consisted of a central government with authority that reach in and through the provinces or ‘states’ but in carefully limited, enumerated ways, always leaving some of the self-governing characteristics of townships and countries (the closest thing in modernity to poleis) intact and indeed lively.

    More, yet: The polity/regime and (let’s just say) the state are distinct but related. Every polis, empire, feudal society, spiritual order, or modern state will have its polity/regime. But conversely, the form of state may bear upon the regime. For example, the modern state typically comes equipped with a bureaucracy that conveys political commands from center to periphery. If a modern state is a republic, ruled by popularly-elected representatives, it will also have a class of unelected officials or bureaucrats, putatively under the control of the elected officials but in fact quite often constituting a sort of oligarchy or (in aspiration, at least) aristocracy—the few who are the best at taking civil service exams. That is, a modern state will likely become something like what Aristotle called a mixed regime; monarchic, oligarchic, or republican on the one hand, aristocratic/’meritocratic’ on the other. We have no name whatever for the political entity that results from the combination of regime/polity and state. (Here, I’ll go first. Call it a ‘political order.’ But I stand ready to yield to a nomenclature proposed by Professor Ceaser, or maybe Samuel Huntington, or some other distinguished person who ranks higher in the American Political Science Association than I do—a large category, indeed.) At any rate, the Americans combined a political order justly called ‘liberal’—one founded on natural equality and political liberty aiming at the safety and happiness of citizens.

    Ceaser’s concentration on the polity/regime turns out to illuminate a lot of the American political experience. Very occasionally his relative neglect of the category of ‘stateliness’ causes him to miss a turn in the road, but this highly instructive book the paths not taken do not make all the difference—just a bit of one, here and there.

    He designs the ‘polity’ of his own book in four parts or branches of government: first, political foundations—considerations on the theoretical claims to authority made by rulers and would-be rulers; second, more specifically, the relation of the American Founders to political science, which purports to know things useful to the design of polities that can achieve the rulers’ purposes; third, and even more specifically, the question of modern political conservatism, which seeks to preserve or (as the young Lincoln puts it) perpetuate the polity of the Founders; and finally, the way of life of the American regime under the baleful scrutiny of its enemies, those animated by various forms of Anti-Americanism. Because he begins his section on political foundationalism with a chapter on the doctrine of political non-foundationalism—by its very nature a critique of founding and of founders—Ceaser has carefully prepared his reader for the theme of anti-Americanism he addresses in the conclusion.

    The notion of political foundations has found many critics in recent years, famously including John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Derrida. These non-foundationalists veil a radical project beneath such somniferous words as pragmatism and, well, non-foundationalism; they seek “a change in the character of the people” of the societies they examine. “A foundation is a first principle that explains or justifies a general political orientation”; this might be ‘historical’ (a tradition and/or a vision of the future), natural (as in natural right or rights), or religious/faithful (a body of doctrine understood to be divine revelation). Significant, often lethal, conflicts can arise when political orders with different foundations confront one another, but all share a practice of appealing to foundations. Ceaser gives a fine, condensed account of the several major political foundations proposed and fought over by Americans since the Founders established a regime on the foundation of “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” combining natural-right and religious principles. Although both traditionalist and progressive historical foundationalists have had important advocated in America since the nineteenth century, Ceaser shows that John Dewey introduced a “foundationless” account of “true democracy” that anticipated the work of many of our contemporary anti-foundationalists. (Indeed, Rorty for one explicitly acknowledges his debt to Dewey.) However, later anti-foundationalists often depart from Dewey in rejecting the notion of progress for historical relativism. This leads to a contradiction. “Although non-foundationalists formally reject the Philosophy of History as a meta-narrative, many seem very close to having embraced something like it in fact” as, in their account, “History culminates in non-foundationalism” or “postmodernism.” They are thus unwilling “to entertain the possibility of a new period of thought,” namely, “a post-modern era,” which would lead them to an infinite regress or, more alarmingly still, and infinite progress that could not say why it was progressive.

    Ceaser offers “several reasons to doubt the wisdom of embracing” political non-foundationalism. The distinction between foundationalism and non-foundationalism doesn’t tell us what we want to know politically; it makes no distinction “between free societies and regimes of authority.” Indeed, some of the most celebrated non-foundationalists—Heidegger, Jünger, Foucault—have endorsed tyrannies. Further, non-foundationalism presents itself as a solution to the problems of war and oppression; this “extravagant ‘narrative of hope’ would seem to have little to separate it from what used to be called Philosophy of History,” that is, a form of foundationalism. Non-foundationalists give little guidance for concrete political action, their writings being largely untouched by any extensive knowledge of history. The whole enterprise smacks of the lecture hall and the academic press—more likely to bore than to mobilize. It might be added that for all their claims to reject metaphysical realism, non-foundationalists have exhibited a remarkably acute perception of the politics of academia itself, sparing no efforts and achieving notable successes in advancing their careers and those of their students.

    By contrast, Tocqueville brings political experience and deep familiarity with political philosophy to his discussion of the American regime. But while the Founders resorted to Montesquieu for assistance in thinking about ruling institutions (especially the commercial republican regime and the confederal state), Tocqueville seems to follow him into a skepticism about the status of natural right and into the beginning of a turn toward “customary history” as both explanation and justification of political action. In proposing the “two-founding thesis”—that the Puritan founders of New England mattered as much politically as the American Founders in Philadelphia—Tocqueville joined Montesquieu in his attempt “to alter the way in which political philosophy entered into and influenced political life.” The two-founding thesis diminishes the status of the Founders as founders, emphasizes “mores” or habits of mind and heart at the expense of the prudential framing of ruling institutions, and questions the importance of the ‘abstract’ doctrine of natural rights. On this last point Ceaser generally follows the argument of Thomas G. West: “Misunderstanding the American Founding,” (Ken Masugi, ed.: Interpreting Tocqueville’s Democracy in America [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, Publishers, 1991], 155-177), perhaps worrying that appeals to abstract right might often tend to inflame citizens (Europeans and Americans) in ways too much like the spirit of Paris of the 1790s. By adopting Montesquieu’s “Gothic thesis” of the origin of political liberty in tribal Germany, Tocqueville based rights on history not nature and nature’s God. Insofar as Montesquieu and Tocqueville appeal to nature they understand nature as the organic development of a seed of praxis rather than an enduring principle or standard of conduct. It should be added, however, that Tocqueville sees the weakness of liberty precisely in connection with its tribal-Gothic origin. The Indians of the New World who resemble the German tribes described by Tacitus, remind him of European aristocrats: freedom-loving but doomed. To maintain political liberty under egalitarian social conditions (what Tocqueville calls “democracy”) Gothicism will not suffice (Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America, I. ii. 10).

    Ceaser’s brilliant and subtle account of the Montesquieu-Tocqueville connection and its application to America does not quite capture all of what Tocqueville intended to do. Tocqueville wants to understand not republicanism so much as democracy; he wants to understand America insofar as it provides the best contemporary example of democracy. By democracy Tocqueville does not mean a polity or a state; he means a social condition characterized by equality. Tocqueville’s first if not final concern, social equality, does not originate in natural right but ultimately in a particular religion, Christianity. And yet Christianity, like “all religions,” does depend “upon one of the constituent principles of human nature,” namely, the hope that springs eternal in every soul. The natural equality of human beings insofar as they are all of the same species, with certain fundamental characteristics in common, was understood by ancient philosophers, but it took Christianity to reveal this equality to non-philosophers, a revelation that undermined social inequality in the long run. In no way does this point about social and political causation make Tocqueville deny the authority of natural right; he makes this as clear as can be in his subsequent study, The Old Regime and the Revolution, in which he explicitly endorses the abstract principles of the Revolution while deploring the lack of political judgment and moderation that animated the politically inexperienced French revolutionaries—quite in contrast to the Americans, who had been governing themselves for generations. But one need not leave the pages of the Democracy to find a defense of natural right in Tocqueville’s denunciation of slavery: “When I see the order of nature reversed, when I hear humanity crying and struggling in vain under the laws, I avow that I cannot find the indignation to stigmatize the men of our day, authors of these outrages” (Tocqueville, I. ii. 10). Tocqueville immediately goes on to write, “I gather my hatred against those who, after more than a thousand years of equality, introduced slavery into the world once again”—certain Christians, as it happens. Thus the Christian Church introduced both social equality and reintroduced slavery, perhaps paralleling its insistence on seeing men as equal before God but properly so as God’s servants. This ambivalent character of the equality Christianity reveals to Christians points to the political ambivalence of social equality, which may issue in republicanism or despotism.

    Far from denigrating natural right, Tocqueville wants to protect it by showing how modern, egalitarian societies might go in two main political directions—the republicanism of America or the despotism of Russia. He then shows how citizens and especially statesmen might incline their societies toward the republicanism that protects natural rights instead of the despotism that denies them. With respect to statism, too, Tocqueville also defends the confederalism of the Americans against the centralism of the French, who failed to revolutionize the political centralization their monarchs had established even as they killed the Bourbon king. Tocqueville makes these criticisms of the French in defense of the political life, the life of ruling and of being ruled, of deliberation and civic association, which is the only way of life that reliably obtains the natural rights of human beings who are citizens. While in America the republican regime means “the tranquil reign of the majority,” the majority “is not all powerful”; “above it in the moral world are humanity, justice, and reason,” in “the political world, acquired rights”—both of these “two barriers” recognized by the majority (Tocqueville I. ii. 10).

    The nature of human beings who are citizens may be said to be central to the political philosophy of Leo Strauss the final topic of Ceaser’s discussion of political foundations. In the past three decades or so, a parade of ignorant and tendentious mediocrities have attempted to paint Strauss as a one-man axis of evil in the academic and political world, a malign maypole around whom a troubling assortment of scholarly demons and malicious fairies called ‘Straussians’ do their dance macabre. This exercise of pyrotechnic demagoguery, which reached the boiling point in a neo-McCarthyite attempt to ferret out alleged Straussians in the administration of that prominent devotee of natural right, George W. Bush, obviously exemplified the postmodernist talent for emitting rhetorical smokescreens for tactical advantage in academic and bureaucratic infighting. Ceaser wastes little time with the sharp- but short-toothed critics of Strauss, instead pointing to Strauss’s achievement: “the revival of the concept of natural right,” which has been “the greatest and most unexpected change in American political thought since the 1950s.” Strauss regretted that America had lost “belief in its original foundation”—this, not out of forgetfulness but by the design of thinkers like John Dewey, the philosopher of pragmatism at the service of historical progress toward greater and greater economic, social, and political democracy. Dewey rejected nature as the standard of morality, along with god as the creator of that standard, in the names of egalitarianism and individualism. As Ceaser slyly observes (in an essay full of witty formulations) “Dewey was one of the patriarchs of non-foundationalism,” although his progressivism precluded the apparent relativism of the later doctrine. Against Dewey and his epigoni, Strauss’s “great offense against the American academic establishment of his day was not his rejection of science, but, on the contrary, his insistence that any affirmation of the doctrine of natural rights be preceded by a genuinely scientific investigation into the possibility of the theoretical concepts of nature and of natural right. For this act of intellectual impertinence, some have never forgiven him.”

    As the Declaration encapsulates the Founders’ understanding of natural rights, the result of their theoretical reasoning, the Constitution embodies their understanding of political science, their practical reasoning. The institutional design or architecture of their regime aims at securing the natural rights invoked in the Declaration. In the second part of his book Ceaser clarifies that design. In designing the ruling institutions of the regime the Founders exercised their reason but also gave both scope and restraint to the spirited part of their souls, and of the souls of their countrymen. The love of fame—ruling passion of the noblest minds—”fundamentally an aristocratic passion” aligned more with ruling than with being ruled, both elevates and endangers a republican polity. Ceaser calls particular attention to the Founders’ refusal to misapply natural science to political life—the sort of thing that both Hamilton and Jefferson (for once in hearty agreement) rejected in the writings of Buffon.

    The Federalist insists that “a science of politics cannot start ‘beneath politics'”; it does so at the expense of reductionism. The very regime-building of the Founders proposes in effect an experiment: Can the Americans, residing in the New World—supposedly inferior by nature to the Old, according to Buffon—actually establish “a viable and just republican constitution powerful enough to defend itself”? If so, the scientist Buffon must revise his theory. And in providing that proof, the Founders involve not only themselves but their posterity in a test of honor. The experiment will explain the low in terms of the high; it will inject a dose of Jefferson’s natural aristocracy into the democracy and will do so in favor of the conviction that human beings can act according to reflection and choice, not accident and force—”the dangerous thesis that power decides truth.” Inasmuch as natural science would soon be transformed into natural history and from thence into the ‘philosophy of History’ (Condorcet had already initiated this move), the Founders’ regime established itself in time to confront the regimes of the twentieth century that took the slogan ‘Might makes right’ to the worst depths—the basest reductionism disguised as progress.

    A much milder form of progressivism came into political science and American politic in the person of Woodrow Wilson, who took the Founders’ constitutional executive and made him, much more ambitiously, a popular leader who would stretch what he called “the elastic Constitution” to fit what he regarded as an ever-growing, ever-more-moral nation. He would lead that nation with words, his presidency later to be described as “the rhetorical presidency.” Condensing the argument of his excellent book, Presidential Selection: Theory and Practice (Princeton University Press, 1979), Ceaser recounts the history of presidential selection as it was transformed from the Founders’ original intention to the familiar contest between political parties that dominated the American nineteenth century. As in the previous study, Martin Van Buren emerges as the key political scientist here, designing a party system that would permit democracy with a minimum of demagoguery. By “plac[ing] the individual candidate ‘above’ the party,” Wilson and the Progressives replaced the older party system with a system that put a premium on demagoguery literally understood—leading (agagos) the people (demos)—and putting the statesman (politicos) at a marked disadvantage. The statesman’s rhetoric differs from the demagogue’s; “it will seek, as a rule, to calm rather than excite, to conciliate rather than divide, and to instruct rather than flatter.” Ceaser recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Statesman’s Manual, in which the renowned poet of English Romanticism “offered the Bible as the best source for understanding” what he called “the elements of public prudence” by contrasting genuine prophets with the false ones, which Coleridge names “demagogues.” Perhaps glancing at Tocqueville and the “two foundings” thesis, Tocqueville adds that the New England Puritan republics “displayed elements of enthusiasm” that might raise suspicions of demagoguery. (For a careful account of the theologico-political background of Puritan political thought, see Eric Nelson: The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010]). Some of the publicists of the Enlightenment, Ceaser notes, did much the same thing.

    Ceaser contrasts this with the statesmanship commended by Socrates and especially Aristotle, who regarded rhetoric as properly a part of political science. The rhetorician must always consider his political situation, Aristotle teaches, vey much in consonance with his insistence on the importance of situation or circumstance in ethical thought. Here Ceaser’s concentration on regimes rather than states leads to a minor glitch. “The greatest changes in the rhetorical situation over the ages…have probably owed more to shifts in the size and nature of political regimes and to revolutions in communications technology than to deliberate efforts to redefine the science of rhetoric,” he writes. But of course a polity or regime, being the constellation of rulers, ruling forms, a ruling way of life, and ruling purpose(s), cannot have a size. He means that states—and with them what I’ve arbitrarily called political orders—have changed, as part of the philosophic ‘regime change’ inaugurated by Machiavelli in his ambition to dominate the bitch-goddess, Fortuna. Ceaser concludes with helpful suggestions on how contemporary rhetoricians might recover the prudent and measured statesmanship Wilson and his epigones have discarded, holding up Lincoln—  who in his great effort to complete the work of the Founders, displayed a rhetoric that could stir a people to thoughtfulness as well as action a rhetoric of constitutionalism and of natural right.

    Along with relations between presidents and the people, the Constitution requires relations between presidents and Congress. Here the struggles began in the Washington Administration, pitting the president and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton against their erstwhile ally in constitutionalism, Congressman James Madison. While glad to relocate executive power outside of the legislature (as the Articles of Confederation had done), Madison nonetheless wanted to restrict its exercise to actions derived strictly from legislative acts—the execution of law, and no more. The administration insisted on more discretion than that—as seen, for example, in Washington’s Neutrality Act, which Madison regarded as a usurpation of a logical corollary to Congress’s power to declare war. In practice, President Jefferson would end-run the Madisonian principle he shared by ignoring it (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase, which he judged unconstitutional but necessary) and by the cultivation of personal influence over Congressmen. The Washingtonian understanding was taken up by another former general, Andrew Jackson, and then transformed by Wilson—who coolly argued that Madison was right but asserted that the old Constitution no longer applied and that the whole issue demonstrated why it could not longer apply in the fast-paced contemporary world.

    The political conservativism of our own day defines itself against exactly this Wilsonian doctrine of historical progress; Ceaser addresses the question of what conservatism should try to conserve in Part Three. It is well known that there is little agreement here. “Much of the unity that exists among conservatives stems from their shared antipathy to liberalism” as redefined by Progressives—which is to say that ‘the conservative movement’ is a coalition, “more heterogeneous than liberalism.” One anti-liberal heart pumps lifeblood into four conservative heads: traditionalism (as exemplified by the late Russell Kirk and Samuel Huntington), neo-conservativism (more rationalistic than traditionalism), libertarianism (the old liberalism of Cobden and Bright, living in exile among what to it often seem strange bedfellows) and the religious right (founded upon a Biblical faith largely brushed aside by a Progressivism that has followed the secularist Dewey more than the Christian Wilson, in its spiritual orientation). Ceaser argues trenchantly that “conservativism can fulfill the role of being the philosophy of a governing party only if its four heads are properly arranged,” with traditionalism and libertarianism best deployed as matrices for the critique of specific liberal policies and with neo-conservatism and the religious right “charting new courses to steer the nation in the international environment and setting a moral compass.” To cooperate with one another, however, neo-conservatives and the religious right will both need to rediscover the harmonizing sentiments and thoughts of the Founders, the consonance of natural right with revelation seen in the fact that the principal author of the Declaration of Independence belonged to no orthodox religious denomination.

    All of these conservatives respect the statesman who last and perhaps best reconciled these conservatives, Ronald Reagan. In considering him, conservatives will again meet their shared political rival, progressive liberalism, whose publicists would dismiss Reagan as a dolt and credit Mikhail Gorbachev with the peaceful resolution of the Cold War.

    If the anti-foundationalists attack the American polity in academia, anti-Americans attack it in the real world anti-foundationalists affect not to believe in. The two stances do not necessarily conflict; even as moral and cultural relativism have found use as weapons against traditional beliefs but were seldom deployed against the beliefs of the intellectuals who deployed them, so one rarely sees deconstructionism turned against the politics of postmodernism.

    Much anti-Americanism has had nothing to do with postmodernism, however. Foreign politicians often “find it helpful to divert attention from difficult situations or from their own failures by blaming the results of America,” and anti-American resentment comes readily to hand. Ceaser calls this “natural” anti-Americanism. “Theoretical” anti-Americanism has a longer history and is more interesting. “America has become a symbol for something to be despised on philosophical grounds.” Conservative Romantics first plowed this fertile patch: de Maistre, Nicolaus Landau (“the German Byron”), and Heinrich Heine, who called America “the pig-pen of freedom.” For them, America combined the revolutionary dangers of French republicanism with a bourgeois vulgarity all its own. On the ‘Left,’ Condorcet and (needless to say) Marx found in America a convenient symbol of capitalism; on the far ‘Right,’ Nietzsche proved seminal, as his disciple Arthur Moeller coined the term Amerikanertum or Americanness to describe the mechanistic domination of nature for human exploitation—”die Technik” or “technologism.”

    In the 1930s, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger “established the framework for contemporary anti-Americanism by transforming the theme of technologism into a fully theoretical or metaphysical view.” Both contended that, while commercial America and Bolshevik Russia embodied technocratic mediocrity, Europe (and particularly Germany) could redeem the human soul against its deadly and deadening enemy, the machine. Heidegger even foresaw and welcomed a ‘Left’ appropriation of his thought to be initiated by a “dialogue” with Marxism. Ceaser observes, “Heidegger’s ideas proved sufficiently protean that with a bit of tinkering they could easily be adopted by the Left,” as the postwar careers of Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexander Kojève, and many others so fully demonstrated. Having been outrun, so to speak, in the race of modernity, European intellectuals could now claim to have moved beyond the modern project itself. Whereas the alliance between America and the republics of Europe defeated the fascism endorsed by Heidegger and the communism supported by Sartre and Kojève, postmodernism might finally sunder that alliance and leave the West vulnerable to its remaining enemies, who remain numerous, various, and more immediately dangerous than the dilettantes of academia.

    Throughout his long and prolific career, James Ceaser has brought a ready wit and literary grace to political science, a discipline seldom oversupplied with either. Designing a Polity asks political scientists to think along with the American Founders—to think about politics politically instead of reducing it to the play of sub-political forces. He shows how thinking about politics changes for the better if the thinker does not make reductionist or deconstructionist assumptions. That’s why the Founders could design the polity they left for posterity, and that’s how to understand, continue, and at times reform their work.