Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 1

Transcript
September 11, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Let me start today by asking the question, "what is political
philosophy?" Custom dictates that I say something about the subject matter of this
course at its outset. This in some ways might seem a case of putting the cart before the
horse, or the cart before the course maybe, because how can you say, how can we say
what political philosophy is in advance of doing it? Anyway, let me try to say
something that might be useful.
In one sense, you could say political philosophy is simply a branch or what we call a
subfield of the field of political science. Yes, all right. It exists alongside of other areas
of political inquiry like American government, comparative politics, and international
relations. Yet in another sense, political philosophy is something much different than
simply a subfield; it seems to be the oldest and most fundamental part of political
science. Its purpose is to lay bare, as it were, the fundamental problems, the
fundamental concepts and categories which frame the study of politics. In this respect it
seems to me much less like just a branch of political science than the foundation of the
entire discipline.
The study of political philosophy often begins as this course will do also, with the study
of the great books or some of the great books of our field. Political philosophy is the
oldest of the social sciences, and it can boast a wealth of heavy hitters from Plato and
Aristotle to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, and so on. You might
say that the best way to learn what political philosophy is, is simply to study and read
the works of those who have shaped the field--yes, right? But to do that is, I recognize,
not without dangers, often severe dangers of its own. Why study just these thinkers and
not others? Is not any so-called list of great thinkers or great texts likely to be simply
arbitrary and tell us more about what such a list excludes than what it includes?
Furthermore, it would seem that the study of the great books or great thinkers of the past
can easily degenerate into a kind of antiquarianism, into a sort of pedantry. We find
ourselves easily intimidated by a list of famous names and end up not thinking for
ourselves. Furthermore, doesn't the study of old books, often very old books, risk
overlooking the issues facing us today? What can Aristotle or Hobbes tells us about the
world of globalization, of terrorism, of ethnic conflict and the like? Doesn't political
science make any progress? After all, economists no longer read Adam Smith. I hesitate
to... I don't hesitate to say that you will never read Adam Smith in an economics course
here at Yale, and it is very unlikely that you will read Freud in your psychology classes.
So why then does political science, apparently uniquely among the social sciences,
continue to study Aristotle, Locke and other old books?
These are all real questions, and I raise them now myself because they are questions I
want you to be thinking about as you do your reading and work through this course. I
want you to remain alive to them throughout the semester. Yes? Okay. One reason I
want to suggest that we continue to read these books is not because political science
makes no progress, or that we are somehow uniquely fixated on an ancient past, but
because these works provide us with the most basic questions that continue to guide our
field. We continue to ask the same questions that were asked by Plato, Machiavelli,
Hobbes, and others. We may not accept their answers and it's very likely that we do not,
but their questions are often put with a kind of unrivaled clarity and insight. The fact is
that there are still people in the world, many people, who regard themselves as
Aristotelians, Thomists, Lockeans, Kantians, even the occasional Marxist can still be
found in Ivy League universities. These doctrines have not simply been refuted, or
replaced, or historically superceded; they remain in many ways constitutive of our most
basis outlooks and attitudes. They are very much alive with us today, right. So political
philosophy is not just some kind of strange historical appendage attached to the trunk of
political science; it is constitutive of its deepest problems.
If you doubt the importance of the study of political ideas for politics, consider the
works of a famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, everyone's heard of him. Keynes
wrote in 1935. "The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are
right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly
understood....Practical men," Keynes continues, practical men "who believe themselves
to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some
defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their
frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back" [The General Theory of
Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 24]. So this course will be devoted to the
study of those "academic scribblers" who have written books that continue to impress
and create the forms of authority with which we are familiar. But one thing we should
not do, right, one thing we should not do is to approach these works as if they provide,
somehow, answers, ready-made answers to the problems of today. Only we can provide
answers to our problems. Rather, the great works provide us, so to speak, with a
repository of fundamental or permanent questions that political scientists still continue
to rely on in their work. The great thinkers are great not because they've created some
set of museum pieces that can be catalogued, admired, and then safely ignored like a
kind of antiquities gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; but rather because they
have defined the problems that all later thinkers and scholars have had to use in order to
make sense of their world at all. Again, we still think in terms of the basic concepts and
categories that were created for us long ago. Okay?
So one thing you will quickly note is that there are no permanent answers in a study of
political philosophy. A famous mathematician once said, "Every question must have a
correct answer, for every question one answer." That itself is an eminently contestable
proposition. Among the great thinkers there is profound disagreement over the answers
to even the most fundamental questions concerning justice, concerning rights,
concerning liberty. In political philosophy, it is never a sufficient answer to answer a
question with a statement "because Plato says so," or "because Nietzsche says so."
There are no final authorities in that respect in philosophy because even the greatest
thinkers disagree profoundly with one another over their answers, and it is precisely this
disagreement with one another that makes it possible for us, the readers today, to enter
into their conversation. We are called upon first to read and listen, and then to judge
"who's right?" [and] "how do we know?" The only way to decide is not to defer to
authority, whoever's authority, but to rely on our own powers of reason and judgment,
in other words the freedom of the human mind to determine for us what seems right or
best. Okay?
But what are these problems that I'm referring to? What are these problems that
constitute the subject matter of the study of politics? What are the questions that
political scientists try to answer? Such a list may be long, but not infinitely so. Among
the oldest and still most fundamental questions are: what is justice? What are the goals
of a decent society? How should a citizen be educated? Why should I obey the law, and
what are the limits, if any, to my obligation? What constitutes the ground of human
dignity? Is it freedom? Is it virtue? Is it love, is it friendship? And of course, the all
important question, even though political philosophers and political scientists rarely
pronounce it, namely, quid sit deus, what is God? Does he exist? And what does that
imply for our obligations as human beings and citizens? Those are some of the most
basic and fundamental problems of the study of politics, but you might say, where does
one enter this debate? Which questions and which thinkers should one pick up for
oneself?
Perhaps the oldest and most fundamental question that I wish to examine in the course
of this semester is the question: what is a regime? What are regimes? What are regime
politics? The term "regime" is a familiar one. We often hear today about shaping
regimes or about changing regimes, but what is a regime? How many kinds are there?
How are they defined? What holds them together, and what causes them to fall apart? Is
there a single best regime? Those are the questions I want us to consider. The concept of
the regime is perhaps the oldest and most fundamental of political ideas. It goes back to
Plato and even before him. In fact, the title of the book that you will be reading part of
for this semester, Plato's Republic, is actually a translation of the Greek word politea
that means constitution or regime. The Republic is a book about the regime and all later
political philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, and that means that it must provide
a series of variations, so to speak, on Plato's conception of the best regime. But what is a
regime? Broadly speaking, a regime indicates a form of government, whether it is ruled
by the one, a few, the many, or as more common, some mixture, a combination of these
three ruling powers. The regime is defined in the first instance by how people are
governed and how public offices are distributed by election, by birth, by lot, by
outstanding personal qualities and achievements, and what constitutes a people's rights
and responsibilities. The regime again refers above all to a form of government. The
political world does not present itself as simply an infinite variety of different shapes. It
is structured and ordered into a few basic regime types. In this, I take it to be one of the
most important propositions and insights of political science. Right? So far?
But there is a corollary to this insight. The regime is always something particular. It
stands in a relation of opposition to other regime types, and as a consequence the
possibility of conflict, of tension, and war is built in to the very structure of politics.
Regimes are necessarily partisan, that is to say they instill certain loyalties and passions
in the same way that one may feel partisanship to the New York Yankees or the Boston
Red Sox, or to Yale over all rival colleges and institutions, right? Fierce loyalty,
partisanship: it is inseparable from the character of regime politics. These passionate
attachments are not merely something that take place, you might, say between different
regimes, but even within them, as different parties and groups with loyalties and
attachments contend for power, for honor, and for interest. Henry Adams once cynically
reflected that politics is simply the "organization of hatreds," and there is more than a
grain of truth to this, right, although he did not say that it was also an attempt to channel
and redirect those hatreds and animosities towards something like a common good. This
raises the question whether it is possible to transform politics, to replace enmity and
factional conflict with friendship, to replace conflict with harmony? Today it is the hope
of many people, both here and abroad, that we might even overcome, might even
transcend the basic structure of regime politics altogether and organize our world
around global norms of justice and international law. Is such a thing possible? It can't be
ruled out, but such a world, I would note--let's just say a world administered by
international courts of law, by judges and judicial tribunals--would no longer be a
political world. Politics only takes place within the context of the particular. It is only
possible within the structure of the regime itself.
But a regime is more than simply a set of formal structures and institutions, okay? It
consists of the entire way of life, the moral and religious practices, the habits, customs,
and sentiments that make a people what they are. The regime constitutes an ethos, that
is to say a distinctive character, that nurtures distinctive human types. Every regime
shapes a common character, a common character type with distinctive traits and
qualities. So the study of regime politics is in part a study of the distinctive national
character types that constitutes a citizen body. To take an example of what I mean,
when Tocqueville studied the American regime or the democratic regime, properly
speaking, in Democracy in America, he started first with our formal political institutions
as enumerated in the Constitution, such things as the separation of powers, the division
between state and federal government and so on, but then went on to look at such
informal practices as American manners and morals, our tendency to form small civic
associations, our peculiar moralism and religious life, our defensiveness about
democracy and so on. All of these intellectual and moral customs and habits helped to
constitute the democratic regime. And this regime--in this sense the regime describes
the character or tone of a society. What a society finds most praiseworthy, what it looks
up to, okay? You can't understand a regime unless you understand, so to speak, what it
stands for, what a people stand for, what they look up to as well as its, again, its
structure of institutions and rights and privileges.
This raises a further set of questions that we will consider over the term. How are
regimes founded, the founding of regimes? What brings them into being and sustains
them over time? For thinkers like Tocqueville, for example, regimes are embedded in
the deep structures of human history that have determined over long centuries the shape
of our political institutions and the way we think about them. Yet other voices within
the tradition--Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau come to mind--believed that regimes can be
self-consciously founded through deliberate acts of great statesmen or founding fathers
as we might call them. These statesmen--Machiavelli for example refers to Romulus,
Moses, Cyrus, as the founders that he looks to; we might think of men like Washington,
Jefferson, Adams and the like--are shapers of peoples and institutions. The very first of
the Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton even begins by posing this question in the
starkest terms. "It has been frequently remarked," Hamilton writes, "that it seems to
have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to
decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of
establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever
destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force." There we see
Hamilton asking the basic question about the founding of political institutions: are they
created, as he puts it, by "reflection and choice," that is to say by a deliberate act of
statecraft and conscious human intelligence, or are regimes always the product of
accident, circumstance, custom, and history?
But the idea that regimes may be created or founded by a set of deliberate acts raises a
further question that we will study, and is inseparable from the study of regimes. N'est
pas? Who is a statesman? What is a statesman? Again, one of the oldest questions of
political science, very rarely asked by the political science of today that is very skeptical
of the language of statesmanship. In its oldest sense, political science simply was a
science of statecraft. It was addressed to statesman or potential statesmen charged with
steering the ship of state. What are the qualities necessary for sound statesmanship?
How does statecraft differ from other kinds of activities? Must a good statesman, as
Plato believed for example, be a philosopher versed in poetry, mathematics, and
metaphysics? Or is statesmanship, as Aristotle believed, a purely practical skill
requiring judgment based on deliberation and experience? Is a streak of cruelty and a
willingness to act immorally necessary for statecraft, as Machiavelli infamously argued?
Must the statesman be capable of literally transforming human nature, as Rousseau
maintains, or is the sovereign a more or less faceless bureaucrat in manner of a modern
CEO, as, for example, someone like Hobbes seems to have believed? All of our texts
that we will read--the Republic, the Politics, the Prince, the Social Contract--have
different views on the qualities of statecraft and what are those qualities necessary to
found and maintain states that we will be considering.
All of this, in a way, is another way of saying, or at least implying, okay, that political
philosophy is an imminently practical discipline, a practical field. Its purpose is not
simply contemplation, its purpose is not reflection alone: it is advice giving. None of the
people we will study this semester were cloistered scholars detached from the world,
although this is a very common prejudice against political philosophy, that it is
somehow uniquely sort of "pie in the sky" and detached from the world. But the great
thinkers were very far from being just, so to speak, detached intellectuals. Plato
undertook three long and dangerous voyages to Sicily in order to advise the King
Dionysius. Aristotle famously was a tutor of Alexander the Great. Machiavelli spent a
large part of his career in the foreign service of his native Florence, and wrote as an
advisor to the Medici. Hobbes was the tutor to a royal household who followed the King
into exile during the English Civil War. And Locke was associated with the Shaftsbury
Circle who also was forced into exile after being accused of plotting against the English
King. Rousseau had no official political connections, but he signed his name always
Jean Jacques Rousseau, "citizen of Geneva," and was approached to write constitutions
for Poland and for the island of Corsica. And Tocqueville was a member of the French
National Assembly whose experience of American democracy deeply affected the way
he saw the future of Europe. So the great political thinkers were typically engaged in the
politics of their times and help in that way to provide us, okay, with models for how we
might think about ours.
But this goes in a slightly different direction as well. Not only is this study of the
regime, as we've seen, as I've just tried to indicate, rooted in, in many ways, the
practical experience of the thinkers we'll be looking at; but the study of regime politics
either implicitly or explicitly raises a question that goes beyond the boundary of any
given society. A regime, as I've said, constitutes a people's way of life, what they
believe makes their life worth living, or to put it again slightly differently, what a people
stand for. Although we are most familiar with the character of a modern democratic
regime such as ours, the study of political philosophy is in many ways a kind of
immersion into what we might call today comparative politics; that is to say it opens up
to us the variety of regimes, each with its own distinctive set of claims or principles,
each vying and potentially in conflict with all the others, okay? Underlying this
cacophony of regimes is the question always, which of these regimes is best? What has
or ought to have a claim on our loyalty and rational consent?
Political philosophy is always guided by the question of the best regime. But what is the
best regime? Even to raise such a question seems to pose insuperable obstacles. Isn't
that a completely subjective judgment, what one thinks is the best regime? How could
one begin such a study? Is the best regime, as the ancients tended to believe, Plato,
Aristotle, and others, is it an aristocratic republic in which only the few best habitually
rule; or is the best regime as the moderns believe, a democratic republic where in
principle political office is open to all by virtue of their membership in society alone?
Will the best regime be a small closed society that through generations has made a
supreme sacrifice towards self-perfection? Think of that. Or will the best regime be a
large cosmopolitan order embracing all human beings, perhaps even a kind of universal
League of Nations consisting of all free and equal men and women?
Whatever form the best regime takes, however, it will always favor a certain kind of
human being with a certain set of character traits. Is that type the common man, is it
found in democracies; those of acquired taste and money, as in aristocracies; the
warrior; or even the priest, as in theocracies? No, no question that I can think of can be
more fundamental. And this finally raises the question of the relation between the best
regime or the good regime, and what we could say are actually existing regimes,
regimes that we are all familiar with. What function does the best regime play in
political science? How does it guide our actions here and now? This issue received a
kind of classic formulation in Aristotle's distinction of what he called the good human
being and the good citizen. For the good citizen--we'll read this chapter later on in the
Politics--for the good citizen you could say patriotism is enough, to uphold and defend
the laws of your own country simply because they are your own is both necessary and
sufficient. Such a view of citizen virtue runs into the obvious objection that the good
citizen of one regime will be at odds with the good citizen of another: a good citizen of
contemporary Iran will not be the same as the good citizen of contemporary America.
But the good citizen, Aristotle goes on to say, is not the same as the good human being,
right? Where the good citizen is relative to the regime, you might say regime-specific,
the good human being, so he believes, is good everywhere. The good human being
loves what is good simply, not because it is his own, but because it is good. Some sense
of this was demonstrated in Abraham Lincoln's judgment about Henry Clay, an early
idol of Lincoln's. Lincoln wrote of Clay, "He loved his country," he said, "partly
because it was his own country"--partly because it was his own country--;"but mainly
because it was a free country." His point, I think, is that Clay exhibited, at least on
Lincoln's telling, something of the philosopher, what he loved was an idea, the idea of
freedom. That idea was not the property of one particular country, but it was
constitutive of any good society. The good human being, it would seem, would be a
philosopher, or at least would have something philosophical about him or her, and who
may only be fully at home in the best regime. But of course the best regime lacks
actuality. We all know that. It has never existed. The best regime embodies a supreme
paradox, it would seem. It is superior in some ways to all actual regimes, but it has no
concrete existence anywhere. This makes it difficult, you could say and this is
Aristotle's point, I think, this makes it difficult for the philosopher to be a good citizen
of any actual regime. Philosophy will never feel fully or truly at home in any particular
society. The philosopher can never be truly loyal to anyone or anything but what is best.
Think of that: it raises a question about issues of love, loyalty, and friendship.
This tension, of course, between the best regime and any actual regime is the space that
makes political philosophy possible. In the best regime, if we were to inhabit such,
political philosophy would be unnecessary or redundant. It would wither away. Political
philosophy exists and only exists in that... call it "zone of indeterminacy" between the
"is" and the "ought," between the actual and the ideal. This is why political philosophy
is always and necessarily a potentially disturbing undertaking. Those who embark on
the quest for knowledge of the best regime may not return the same people that they
were before. You may return with very different loyalties and allegiances than you had
in the beginning. But there is some compensation for this, I think. The ancients had a
beautiful word, or at least the Greeks had a beautiful word, for this quest, for this desire
for knowledge of the best regime. They called it eros, or love, right? The quest for
knowledge of the best regime must necessarily be accompanied, sustained, and elevated
by eros. You may not have realized it when you walked in to this class today, but the
study of political philosophy may be the highest tribute we pay to love. Think of that.
And while you're thinking about it you can start reading Plato's Apology for Socrates
which we will discuss for class on Wednesday. Okay? It's nice to see you back, and
have a very good but thoughtful September 11
th
.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 2
Transcript
September 13, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Today we start with Plato, Plato's Apology of Socrates. This is
the best introductory text to the study of Political Philosophy. Why? Let me give you
two reasons. First, it shows Socrates, the reputed founder of our discipline, the founder
of Political Science, and I will say a little bit more about that later on today, explaining
himself and justifying himself, justifying his way of life before a jury of his peers. It
shows Socrates speaking in a public forum, defending the utility of philosophy for
political life. And, secondly, the Apology demonstrates also the vulnerability of political
philosophy in its relation to the city, in its relation to political power. The Apology puts
on trial not merely a particular individual, Socrates, but puts on trial the very idea of
philosophy. From its very beginnings, philosophy and the city, philosophy and political
life, have stood in a sort of tension with one another. Socrates is charged, as we will see,
by the city for corrupting the youth and impiety toward the Gods, right? In other words,
he's accused of treason, a high capital offense. No other work of which I am aware helps
us better think through the conflict. I would even say, the necessary and inevitable
conflict, between the freedom of the mind and the requirements of political life. Are
these two things, are these two goods as it were, freedom of mind and political life, are
they compatible or are they necessarily at odds with one another? That seems to me to
be, in some ways, the fundamental question that the Apology asks us to consider. Okay?
Now for generations, the Apology has stood out as a symbol for the violation of free
expression. It sets the case for the individual committed to the examined life over and
against a bigoted and prejudiced multitude. The clearest statement of this view of, again,
the individual set against the mob in some ways, is found in a work of a very famous
civil libertarian of the nineteenth century, a man named John Stuart Mill. In his famous
tract called simply On Liberty, Mill wrote, "Mankind can hardly be too often reminded
that there was once a man named Socrates between whom and the legal authorities of
his time there took place a memorable collision." Over and again, and Mill is a kind of a
famous case of this, Socrates has been described as a martyr for freedom of speech and
he has been somewhat extravagantly compared at various times to Jesus, to Galileo, to
Sir Thomas More and has been used as a role model for thinkers and political activists
from Henry David Thoreau, to Gandhi, to Martin Luther King. So, Socrates has become
a very central symbol of political resistance and resistance to political power, and, of the
dangers to the individual of unchecked rule.
But, this reading of the Apology as you might say, is a kind of brief for freedom of
expression and a warning against the dangers of censorship and persecution. Although
this has been enormously influential over the centuries, at least over the last century and
a half, you have to ask yourself: is this the reading that Plato intended? Did Plato want
us to read the dialogue this way? As a teacher of mine used to say, "You read Plato your
way, I'll read him his way." But, how did Plato intend this dialogue to be understood?
Note that Socrates never defends himself by reference to the doctrine of unlimited free
speech. He doesn't make that claim. He doesn't make the claim about the general utility
of freedom or unlimited speech. Rather, he maintains as he puts it near the end of the
defense speech, that the examined life is alone worth living. Only those, in other words,
engaged in the continual struggle to clarify their thinking, to remove sources of
contradiction and incoherence, only those people can be said to live worthwhile lives.
"The unexamined life is not worth living." Socrates confidently, defiantly asserts to his
listeners, to his audience. Nothing else matters for him.
His, in other words seems to be a highly personal, in many ways, highly individual
quest for self perfection and not a doctrine about the value of freedom of speech in
general. But, even though you might say, Socrates seems to be engaged in, again, this
highly personal quest for self perfection, there is something, which one can't avoid,
deeply political about the Apology and about his teaching. At the heart of the dialogue
or at the heart of this speech rather is a quarrel, a quarrel with his accusers over the
question, never stated directly perhaps, but over the question of who has the right to
educate future citizens and statesmen of the city of Athens. Socrates' defense speech,
like every platonic dialogue, is ultimately a dialogue about education. Who has the right
to teach, who has the right to educate? This is in many ways for Socrates the
fundamental political question of all times. It is the question of really who governs or
maybe put another way, who should govern, who ought to govern.
Remember also that the city that brought Socrates to trial was not just any city, it was a
peculiar kind of city, it was Athens. And Athens was, until only fairly recent times in
human history, the most famous democracy that ever existed. I say fairly recent times
until, you know, the American democracy. But it was, until at least the eighteenth or
nineteenth century, the most famous democracy that ever existed. The speech of
Socrates before the jury is perhaps the most famous attempt to put democracy itself on
trial. It is not merely Socrates who is on trial. Socrates intends to put the democracy of
Athens itself on trial. Not only does the Apology force Socrates to defend himself before
the city of Athens, but Socrates puts the city of Athens on trial and makes it defend
itself before the high court of philosophy. So, the ensuing debate within the dialogue
can be read as a struggle again over who has title to rule. Is it the people? Is it the court
of Athens, the dmos, to use the Greek word for "the people," or is it Socrates the
philosopher-king who should be vested with ultimate political authority? That is, of
course, the quest and it's taken up in a very vivid way, much more explicit way in the
Republic, but it runs throughout the Apology and you can't really understand the
Apology unless you see that this is the question that Socrates is posing throughout.
So, I have some names put on the board and some dates, because I want to talk a little
bit about the political context of this dialogue. One can of course read, there's nothing
wrong with reading the Apology, again, as a kind of enduring symbol of the plight of
the, you might say, the just individual confronted with an unjust mob, or an unjust
political rule. It's, again, a question that Plato takes up in the Republic when a character
in the book named Glaucon who happens to be, as it were, the brother of Plato, asks
Socrates if it is actually better to be just or simply to have the reputation for justice?
And Socrates says it is better to be just, even if that results in persecution and death. But
the trial is not, again, just an enduring symbol of justice versus injustice, it is an actual
historical event that takes place in a particular moment of political time and this bears, I
think, decisively on how we come to understand the case both for and against Socrates.
Let me talk a little bit about that context. The trial of Socrates takes place in the year
399 and all of these refer to before the common era, 399. Some of you will know that
that trial follows very quickly upon the heals of the famous Peloponnesian War. This
was the war related by Socrates' slightly older contemporary, a man named Thucydides
who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War, a war that took place between the two
great powers of the Greek world between the Spartans and their allies and Athens and
its allies. The Athens that fought this war against Sparta was an Athens at the height of
its political power and prestige under the leadership of its first citizen Pericles, whose
name is also up there at the very top. Under Pericles, Athens had built the famous
Acropolis. It had established Athens as a mighty and redoubtable naval power and it
created an unprecedented level of artistic and cultural life, even today known simply as
Periclean Athens.
But Athens was also something completely unprecedented in the world, it was a
democracy. And, again, even today the expression "Athenian democracy" connotes an
ideal of the most complete form of democratic government that has ever existed. "We
are the school of Hellas." This is what Pericles boasts to his listeners in the famous
funeral oration told by Thucydides. "We throw our city open to the world and never
exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning and observing, even though the
eyes of an enemy may profit from our liberality," Pericles boasts once again. The
question maybe you want to ask about this is how could the world's first freest and most
open society sentence to death a man who spoke freely about his own ignorance and
professed to care for nothing so much as virtue and human excellence? Now, at the
outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Socrates was just under 40 years of age. And, we
learned from the speech that Socrates himself served in the military and served in
defense of his country. The war, the Peloponnesian War, was fought as you can see over
a considerable length of time, on and off for almost a period of 30 years and was
concluded in the year 404 with the defeat of Athens, the installing of a pro-Spartan
oligarchy, a pro-Spartan regime known simply as the Thirty Tyrants who ruled Athens
for a year. The next year, 403, the Tyrants, The Thirty as they were called, were driven
out and a democratic government was once again reestablished in Athens.
Just three years later, three men named Anytus, Meletus and Lycos, all of whom had
been part of the democratic resistance movement against the Spartan oligarchy, brought
charges against Socrates. The charges against him were: corrupting the young and
disbelieving in the Gods that the city believes in. So, you can see that the charges were
brought by people who were themselves, again, part of a democratic resistance
movement and the names of Anytus and Meletus as you've read, you know, appear in
the speech itself. So, the charges brought against Socrates did not simply grow out of
thin air. Maybe we should rephrase the question. Not why did the Athenians bring
Socrates to trial? But, why did they permit him to carry on his practice of challenging
the law and the authority of the law for as long as they did? Okay? Add to this the fact
that when Socrates was brought to trial again, the democracy had only recently been
reestablished but that many friends and former students of Socrates had been
themselves implicated in the rule of the hated Thirty Tyrants.
Among the members of The Thirty was a man named Critias, and there's actually a
platonic dialogue named after him, a man named Critias, who was a relative of Plato's
and another man named Charmides whose name is also the title of a platonic dialogue,
Charmides who is Plato's uncle. Plato himself, he tells us much later in life in his
famous Seventh Letter, Plato himself was invited by his relatives to help to form a part
of the government of The Thirty and later Plato said, "That so abhorrent did they
become that they made the older democracy look like the Golden Age." So, the point
I'm suggesting is that many of Socrates' students and associates, including Plato himself,
had some connection with this oligarchical government that had ruled Athens for a brief
time. And, Socrates was himself not above suspicion. We often, don't we even today
yes, we often judge teachers by their students, by the company they keep, yes, don't we?
No one is above suspicion. Socrates himself had been a close associate of a man named
Alcibiades, probably the most prominent Athenian in the generation after Pericles.
Alcibiades was the man who engineered the disastrous Sicilian expedition and later
ended his life as a defector going to Sparta. His complex relationship with Socrates is,
by the way, recounted in the drunken speech that Alcibiades gives in Plato's dialogue,
Symposium.
So, you can see that the trial of Socrates, the little speech that you have read, takes place
in the shadow of military defeat, of resistance, of conspiracy and betrayal. Socrates was
70 years old at the time of the trial. So, this was a highly charged political environment.
Far more volatile than for example the kind of partisan quarrels we see today in our
republic, I hope. Okay? So, let me talk about the accusations, let me move from the
political context of the speech to the accusations. And, I say accusations because there,
as you read, if you read closely you will see there were actually two sets of accusations
leveled against Socrates. Early in the speech Socrates claims that his current accusers
Anytus and Meletus, again, the democratic resistance fighters, the charges they have
brought against him are themselves the descendants of an earlier generation of accusers
who were responsible for, he claims, maligning and creating an unfavorable prejudice
against Socrates. "These charges are not new," he tells the jury, and many members of
the jury, he says, will have formed an unfavorable opinion about him. This was the day
before there were intense forms of jury selection, where they would ask people: "Do
you have a view of the case?" Many of the jurors would have known Socrates, or
certainly would have heard of him and, he says, would have had already an unfavorable
opinion formed about him by this earlier generation of accusers.
Reference he makes to a comic poet, yes, a comic poet, an unequivocal reference to the
playwright Aristophanes, whose name I have put up on the board. Aristophanes is the
one who created the original or the initial prejudice against Socrates. What was that
prejudice that Aristophanes, this comic poet, had created? The allusion to Aristophanes
and the comic poet is a part of what Plato calls in Book X of the Republic, the old
quarrel between philosophy and poetry. This quarrel is a staple of Plato's dialogues, is a
central theme, not only of the Symposium in which Aristophanes and Socrates are
actually shown at the same dinner table with one another. But, it is also a key feature of
the Republic which we will be reading in a week, where Socrates offers an elaborate
proposal for the censorship and control of poetry, if it is to be made compatible with the
demands of political justice. In fact, in a way you cannot understand the Republic unless
you understand the poetic backdrop to it and Socrates' long standing engagement with
the poetic tradition and this back and forth between himself and the man he calls this
comic poet.
The core of this quarrel between the philosopher and the poet, between Socrates and
Aristophanes is not just an aesthetic judgment or it is not simply an aesthetic quarrel it
is, again, deeply political or at least has something very political about it. It gets to the
essence of the question of who is best equipped to educate future generations of citizens
and civic leaders. Are the philosophers or are the poets, you might say, the true
legislators for mankind, if you want to use Shelley's dictum? Which one legislates for
mankind at the time of Socrates? The Greeks already had a century's long tradition of
poetic education, going back centuries to the time of Homer and Hesiod that set out
certain exemplary models of heroic virtue and civic life. The Homeric epics were to the
Greek world what the Bible is to our world that is to say, in some respects the ultimate
authority, regarding the way of the Gods, their relation to the world and the type of
virtues appropriate to human beings. The virtues endorsed by the poetic tradition of
which Aristophanes is the great representative here, the great inheritor and
representative, the virtues of this tradition were the virtues of a warrior culture, of war-
like peoples and men at war. These were the qualities that had guided the Greeks for
centuries and contributed to their rise to power. It contributed to Athens' as well as
Sparta's rise to greatness from a small dispersed people, to a great world power and,
again, allowed them to achieve a level of artistic, intellectual and political
accomplishment akin to Renaissance Florence, Elizabethan England and Thirties
Weimar.
So, what is at stake in this quarrel between Socrates and the poetic tradition that he
alludes to? First, Socrates' manner of teaching is markedly different from the poets,
right? Does anyone know here the opening line of the Iliad? Homer's Iliad, does anyone
know the first line? Anyone remember that from high school? "Sing Goddess the wrath
of Achilles," right? "Sing Goddess the wrath of Achilles." The poets are oracular, right?
They call on Gods and Goddesses to inspire them with song, to fill them with
inspiration to tell stories of people with super-human strength and courage and anger.
By contrast, you could say, the method of Socrates is not oracular. It is not story telling;
it is conversational, it is argumentative, if you want to use the word he applies to it, it is
dialectical. Socrates makes arguments and he wants others to engage with him, to
discover which argument can best withstand the test of rational scrutiny and debate.
There are no arguments in Homer's Iliad or Odyssey. You hear strong and compelling
stories but no arguments. Socrates makes, in other words, continual questioning and not
the telling of stories and the recitation of verses, the essence of this new political
education. He questions the methods of teaching of the poets.
But, secondly, again, Homer and the poets sing the virtues of men at war. Socrates
wants to replace the warrior citizen with a new kind of citizen, a whole new set, you
might say, of citizen virtues. The new Socratic citizen, let's call him that for a moment,
the new Socratic citizen may have some features in common with the older Homeric
warrior. But, Socrates ultimately wants to replace military combat with a new kind of,
you might call it, verbal facility, verbal combat, in which again the person with the best
argument is declared to be victorious. The person with the best argument, let the best
argument prevail. The famed Socratic method of argumentation is basically all that
remains of the older pre-Socratic culture of struggle and combat. The new Socratic
citizen is to be trained in the art of argument and dialectic, and we will talk a little later
about what that means. So, it is a challenger to the poets and all they stand for, the
century-long tradition of poetic education that Socrates asserts himself, that Socrates
presents himself. The Apology shows Socrates as offering a new model of citizenship, a
new kind of citizen.
His challenge to the poets is in a way the basis for the resentment that is built up against
him, in that Aristophanes and what he calls the earlier accusers have brought to bear. In
fact, you might say, so seriously was Socrates taken by Aristophanes and the poets, that
Aristophanes devoted an entire play, he wrote an entire play, about Socrates called the
Clouds, devoted to debunking and ridicule Socrates' profession of learning.
Aristophanes' play sometimes is even included in certain editions of the book you're
reading, like this one, it has the edition of Aristophanes' Clouds in it, along with the
Apology and Crito. The existence of that play shows to all of us just how seriously
Socrates was taken by the greatest of his contemporaries and Aristophanes was, along
with Sophocles and Euripides and others, among the greatest of the Greek playwrights.
The mockery, you might say, mockery of Socrates, remains one of the sincerest forms
of flattery; they took him very seriously.
Let me just say something about the Clouds, this comic play, this satire on Socrates,
because it is part of that initial accusation that Socrates says is leveled against him.
Here, Aristophanes presents Socrates as an investigator, and this is part of the first
charge, remember an investigator of the things aloft and the things under the earth and
who makes the weaker argument the stronger. That's the argument that Socrates says
Aristophanes brings against him. In this play, Socrates is presented as the head, the
leader, the director of what we might think of as the first think tank known to human
history. It's called in the play itself the Phrontisterion which means, or is sometimes
translated as the Thinkery or the Thinketeria or simply a kind of think tank where
fathers, Athenian fathers, bring their sons to be indoctrinated into the mysteries of
Socratic wisdom. And in the play Socrates is shown hovering, flying above the stage in
a basket in order to be able to better observe the clouds, the things aloft, right? But, also
in many ways symbolizing Socrates', at least on the Aristophanes' account, Socrates'
detachment from the things down here on earth, the things that concern his fellow
citizens. Socrates is a kind of what in German people would call Luftmensch. He's a
man up in the air, you know, he's so detached, he doesn't have his feet on the ground.
And Socrates is shown not only mocking the Gods in doing this, but he is shown by
Aristophanes to teach incest and to teach all of the things that violate every decent,
human taboo--incest, the beating of one's parents, all these kinds of things. Socrates is
presented as exhibiting kind of a corrosive skepticism which is at the core of
Aristophanes' charge against him. To make a long story short, the play concludes with
Socrates' think tank being burned to the ground by a disgruntled disciple. An object
lesson for all later professors, I would say, who teach nonsense [chuckles]. Right? Don't
get any ideas. Take a match to the department. So, how accurate is that picture of
Socrates, the man who investigates the things aloft and the things under the ground?
The Clouds was written in 423 when Socrates was in his mid-forties and the
Aristophanic Socrates is essentially what we call a natural philosopher. Again,
investigating the things aloft, under the ground. He is what we would call today a
scientist, a natural scientist. But, this seems quite removed, doesn't it, from the Socrates
who is brought up on charges of corrupting the young and the impiety.
In the Apology and here is where Socrates actually tells the story, very important in the
course of this speech; he provides a kind of intellectual biography of an incident that
occurred long before the trial and set him on a very different path. He recalls the story,
don't you remember, of a man named Charephon, a friend of his, who had gone to the
Delphic Oracle, who had gone to Oracle of Delphi, and asked if there was anyone wiser
than Socrates and was told there was not. Socrates tells us that when he was told this he
expressed disbelief in the Oracle. He didn't believe it and in order to disprove the
Oracle's statement, he says he began a lifelong quest to find someone wiser than
himself. A quest, in the course of which lead him to interrogate the politicians, the
poets, the craftsmen, all people reputed to be knowledgeable, and his conversations lead
him to ask questions, not about natural scientific phenomena, but questions about the
virtues, as he tells us, the virtues of a human being and a citizen, what we would call
today perhaps moral and political questions.
That incident that Socrates tells here represents what one could call the famous Socratic
turn, Socrates' second sailing so to speak. It represents the moment in the life of
Socrates where he turns away from the investigation of natural phenomena to the study
of the human and political things, the moral and political things. The Delphic story for
what it's worth marks a major turning point in Socrates' intellectual biography. The
move from the younger, we could call him, Aristophanic Socrates, the Socrates who,
again, investigates the things aloft and under the earth, to the later, what we could call
platonic Socrates. The founder of political science, Socrates is the founder of our
discipline who asks about the virtues of moral and political life. Socrates' account of this
turn, this major turn in his life and career, leaves a lot of questions unanswered, that
maybe even occurred to you as you were reading this dialogue, reading this speech.
Why does he turn away from the investigation of natural phenomena to the study of
human and political things? The Delphic Oracle is interpreted by Socrates, at least to
command engaging with others in philosophical conversation. Why does he interpret it
this way? Why does this seem the proper interpretation to engage in these kinds of
conversations?
It is this Socrates who is brought up on charges of corruption and impiety, yet none of
this quite answers the question of what is the nature of Socrates' crime. What did he do?
What did corruption and impiety mean? To try to answer those questions we would
have to look a little bit at what is meant by this new kind of Socratic citizen. Who is this
citizen? The charges brought against Socrates by Anytus and Meletus we see are not the
same exactly as those brought against him by Aristophanes, the comic poet. Anytus and
Meletus talk about impiety and corruption, not investigating the things aloft and making
the weaker argument the stronger. What do these terms mean? Impiety and corruption,
in what sense are these civic offenses? What could impiety have meant to his audience
and his contemporaries? At a minimum, we would think the charge of impiety suggests
disrespect of the gods. Impiety need not be the same thing as atheism, although Meletus
confuses the two, but it does suggest irreverence even blasphemy toward the things that
a society cares most deeply about. Yes? To be impious is to disrespect those things a
person or a society cares most deeply about. When people today, for example, refer to
flag burning as a desecration, as desecrating the flag they are speaking the language of
impiety, right. They are speaking the language of some kind of religious or quasi-
religious desecration. Meletus, whose name in Greek actually means care, accuses
Socrates of not caring properly for the things that his fellow citizens care about. So, the
question is: "What does Socrates care about"? What does he care about?
Consider the following: every society, which we know, operates within the medium of
belief or faith of some kind. Take our founding documents, the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution, all men are created equal, that we are endowed with
inalienable rights that all legitimate government grows out of consent and the like.
These beliefs form something like a kind of national creed, you might say, American,
national creed, what it means to be an American and not someone else. Yet, how many
people could give a kind of reasoned account of what makes these beliefs true, or what
grounds these beliefs? Most of us, most of the time, hold these beliefs as a matter of
faith, as a matter of belief, because we have learned about them from childhood,
because they were written by Thomas Jefferson or some other reputed high authority.
To question those beliefs would seem to exhibit a kind of lack of civic faith, faith in our
ruling opinions. In short you might say a lack of civic piety or respect.
Socrates clearly believes that piety or faith is the natural condition of the citizen. Every
society, no matter of what kind requires a kind of faith in its ruling principles, in its
fundamental beliefs. But belief seems to be threatened from at least two sources. One is
simple disbelief or unbelief, a kind of rejection of ruling opinion simply because you
don't like it. You know, when you see the bumper sticker on the car "Question
Authority," this kind of rejection of ruling opinion. But the other source of conflict with
ruling opinion is from philosophy. Philosophy is not the same thing as simple disbelief
or rejection, but the two can be easily confused. Philosophy grows out of a desire to
replace opinion with knowledge, opinion or belief with reason. For philosophy, it is not
enough simply to hold a belief on faith, but one must be able to give a rational account,
a reasoned account for one's belief, its goal again is to replace civic faith with rational
knowledge. And, therefore, philosophy is necessarily at odds with belief and with this
kind of civic faith. The citizen may accept certain beliefs on faith because he or she is
attached to a particular kind of political order or regime. But, for the philosopher this is
never enough. The philosopher seeks to judge those beliefs in the light of true standards,
in the light of what is always and everywhere true as a quest for knowledge.
There is a necessary and inevitable tension between philosophy and belief, or to put it
another way, between philosophy and the civic pieties that hold the city together. From
this point of view, I want to say, was Socrates guilty of impiety? On the face of it, the
answer to that seems yes. Socrates does not care about the same thing his fellow citizens
care about. His opening words to the jury seem to convey this, "I," he says, "am simply
foreign to the manner of speech here." This seems to be a statement of his alienation or
disaffection from the concerns of his fellow Athenians. I know nothing about what you
do or what you care about. Yet it certainly doesn't seem right to say that Socrates does
not care at all. He claims to care deeply, perhaps more deeply than anyone has ever
cared around him, before or since. And among the things he cares deeply about, he says,
is this calling to do nothing as he says "To do nothing but persuade you, both younger
and older, not to care for bodies and money, but, how your soul will be in the best
possible condition." That concern with the state of one's soul, he tells the jury, has lead
him not only to impoverish himself, but to turn himself away from the public business,
from the things that concern the city to the pursuit of private virtue.
And, here are the words of his that I want to leave you with today from section 31d of
the Apology. Socrates writes, "This is what opposes my political activity. And, its
opposition seems to me to be all together noble for know well, men of Athens, if I had
long ago attempted to be politically active I would long ago have perished and I would
benefited neither you nor myself. Now do not be vexed with me when I speak the truth.
For there is no human being who will preserve his life if he genuinely opposes either
you or any other multitude and prevents many unjust and unlawful things from
happening in the city." Rather, he says, "if someone who really fights for justice is
going to preserve himself even for a short time, it is necessary for him to lead a private,
rather than a public life." Think about that, if someone who really fights for justice is
going to preserve himself, it is necessary for him to lead a private, not a public life.
How are we to understand Socrates' claim that the pursuit of justice requires him to turn
away from public to private life? What is this new kind of citizen, again, concerned with
this kind of private virtue, this concern for the virtue of one's soul? That's the question I
want us to consider again for next week as we finish the Apology and move our way up
to the Crito. Okay? We'll do that for next week.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 3
Transcript
September 18, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Okay I want to begin with a question today, I have a question
for you; well you've been reading the Apology, you've now read the--you've read the
Apology and the Crito; you've had a little chance to think about these works. I'd just like
to do a piece of survey research, how many of you, just a show of hands is all I need;
how many of you believe Socrates is innocent and should be acquitted? Okay and how
many of you believe he is guilty and more or less got what he deserved? Higher please,
okay. Not exactly the same proportion, I think, somewhat a greater number believe in
his innocence than in the Athenian jury obviously. But let me just ask you in the brown
shirt, just curious, why do you think he is innocent and should be acquitted?
Student: Well I felt that he [inaudible] and it seemed to me that the [inaudible] more on
personal views [inaudible] and not exactly by concrete charges.
Professor Steven Smith: And I noticed you had your, yes why do you believe he was
guilty and got what he deserved?
Student: [Inaudible] what is just isn't somehow [inaudible] what is just is what society
agrees [inaudible] and I mean he was going against people who had the authority to
define words like in [inaudible] what is just is what society says is just and society says
[inaudible].
Professor Steven Smith: Okay so as Lincoln once said, both of you can't be right,
neither of you may be right, but both of you can't be right. So this is a question that I
want to continue today, to consider what the trial of Socrates means and I want to begin
by going back to a problem or a paradox that I ended the class with last time. That is to
say that Socrates proposes, right, a new conception of what it is to be a citizen, he
opposes, we have seen, the traditional, you might say Homeric conception, of the
citizen, certain notions of citizen loyalty and patriotism, created, shaped by the poetic
tradition going back to Homer. He wants to replace that with a new kind of, I want to
call it rational citizenship, philosophical citizenship. A view of citizenship that, again,
relies on one's own powers of independent reason and judgment and argument and in
the course of defending this point of view, Socrates says, in an interesting passage, that
he has spent his entire life pursuing private matters rather than public ones and has
deliberately avoided public issues, issues of politics and that raises a question. How can
a citizen, how can this new kind of citizenship that he is proposing, how can any kind of
citizenship be devoted just to private matters and not public?
Citizenship seems to require even the public sphere, the public realm. What does
Socrates mean when he says his way of life has been devoted almost exclusively to
private rather than to public matters? Well, the first thing we might think about is
whether that's entirely true, whether he's being entirely candid with his audience; after
all, the kind of investigations, the kind of interrogations that he has been pursuing since
going to the Delphic Oracle and then following at least his interpretation of its mandate,
these investigations of the politicians, the poets, the craftsman and the like. He says
these have been carried out in public, he has gone around in the market and in the open
and in the public forum questioning, interrogating and obviously making a variety of
people look foolish. So this is hardly simply a private question or a private way of life
but perhaps he means simply that by pursuing a private life that again he's going to rely
almost exclusively on his own individual powers of reason and judgment, not to defer or
rely on such public goods as custom, as authority, as tradition, things of this sort. But I
think Socrates means more than that, more than simply he wishes to rely on the powers
of private individual judgment.
When he says that his way of life has been private, he means that he has pursued a
policy of, let's call it "the principled abstinence from public life." Socrates is a great
abstainer, he has abstained from participation in the collective actions of the city,
actions that he believes could only entail a complicity in acts of public injustice. His
own motto, if you want to ascribe him a motto, seems to be a variety of the Hippocratic
Oath, you know, that doctors are famous for: "do no harm." And to do no harm he has
required of himself a kind of principled abstention from public life. If George Bush
described himself not long ago as the decider, you might call Socrates the abstainer. But
what does he mean by or what do I mean by referring to his policies of abstention from
political life? Do you remember he gives a couple of examples of this sort? One of
them, remember, concerned his refusal to join in the judgment to condemn and execute
the ten Athenian generals who had failed to collect the corpses, the bodies, of the men
lost in a particular battle during the Peloponnesian War? This was a mark of great
shame and disgrace. This was an actual event. There was a kind of judgment of
collective guilt and they were all executed there, the leaders, the generals of this
particular battle and Socrates tells how he refused to engage in that kind of--to join the
court in the judgment of their collective guilt, a true incident.
And the second story you remember from your reading of the book was his telling,
reminding the jury how he refused to participate. He was ordered by the Thirty, the
hated Tyranny of the Thirty, he was ordered to assist in the arrest of a man known as
Leon of Salamis, an arrest that would have and did in fact lead to Leon's execution and
Socrates tells how he at considerable risk to himself refused to participate in the arrest
of this man. In both of these cases, I take it, Socrates' point is that his own individual
moral integrity stands as a kind of litmus test, you might say, for whether to engage or
disengage from political life. "I was the sort of man," he tells the jury, "I was the sort of
man who never conceded anything to anyone contrary to what is just," no doubt also
reminding them of his, again, his refusal to bow to the Thirty Tyrants in the case of
Leon of Salamis. But this raises, I think, the central or a central point about Socratic
citizenship or Socrates' view of citizenship, this kind of principled disobedience to the
law, something like Thoreau's model of civil disobedience. Does this policy of
principled disobedience, you might say vindicate or indict Socrates of the charge of
corruption and impiety that has been brought against him? Can a citizen he affirms, I
will ask though, can a citizen put his own conscience above the law as Socrates seems
to do? This is a problem that we will see considerably later in the term that vexes a very
important political thinker by the name of Hobbes about whether an individual can
somehow put their own sense of conscience or moral integrity even above the law.
What would a community of Socratic citizens look like, each one picking and choosing,
you might say, the laws or the rules to obey or to follow or not to follow. Socrates is so
concerned, it seems, with his individual, his private moral integrity that he says in a
sense to the city of Athens, to the court, to the Athens, to the Assembly or the courts
that he will not dirty his hands with public life and again this is a question that we will
see later on that Machiavelli takes very seriously--the question of whether or not
politics, political life requires one to dirty one's hands in the world. What kind of citizen
is it, is he or she who abstains from, maybe even rejects, the harsh necessities,
requirements of political life? Socrates seems to be in some respects an example of what
Hegel in the nineteenth century described as a beautiful soul, you know, someone who
and he used that term ironically I should say, someone who puts their own private moral
incorruptibility above all else and we all probably know or have read about people like
this.
How does Socrates answer these charges of, in a way being not just an abstainer but he
kept putting his own private moral conscience or integrity over and above the law? He
tries to defend his point of view by arguing in a famous passage that his policy of
abstinence actually carries important benefits to the city. He brings with it important
benefits and in the passage that I'm referring to, he defines himself as a gadfly, everyone
will remember that, the gadfly who improves the quality of life in the city. In section
30d, Socrates writes, let me read the passage. "So I, men of Athens are now too far from
making a defense speech on my own behalf, I do it rather," he says, " on your behalf.
What I say, I say for you," he appears to say, "so that you do not do something wrong
concerning the gift of the god," referring to himself, "the gift of the god by voting to
condemn me. For if you kill me," he continues, "you will not easily discover another of
my sort who even if it is rather ridiculous to say so, has simply been set upon the city by
the god as though upon a great and well-born horse who is rather sluggish because of
his great size and needs to be awakened by some gadfly. Just so in fact the god seems to
me to have set me upon the city as someone of this sort. I awaken and persuade and
reproach each one of you and I do not stop settling down everywhere upon you the
whole day." So here we have the example of Socrates telling us not only declaring
himself to be the gift of the god who is brought but he is a great benefactor of the city,
that his example of the man, of individual moral conscience, brings with it great, as it
were, public benefits. It is not on his behalf, he tells the audience, but yours, his fellow
citizens' that he does what he does.
"You may not like me," he says to the jury, "but I am good for you and furthermore he
claims in this what can only be described as sort of quasi-religious language that he has
no choice in the matter. This is not something he has chosen to do. He is, as he says a
gift from the god, he has been commanded, he argues, to do this. "Men of Athens," he
says, "I will obey the god rather than you and as long as I breathe and am able to do so,
I will certainly not stop philosophizing." He seems to envelope himself and his way of
life with a kind of religious imagery, the Delphic Oracle, the gift of the god image, he
envelopes his conception of citizenship within this religious language and this will or
should lead any reader of the Apology and any reader of Plato to ask an important
question about Socrates' use of this language. We will see it again in different ways in
the Republic. Is he sincere in saying this, in making this point or his he somehow being
ironical in his use of the religious tone or the religious register? He is, after all, on trial
for his life, for the charge of impiety. Would it not seem that in order to rebut the charge
of impiety that he would use or adopt a kind of religious language that would resonate
with the jury and rebut the accusation, perhaps even suggesting that he is the truly
religious and pious one and not the ones like Anytus and Meletus who are bringing
charges against him?
Socrates seems, or could be seen, to be speaking not just ironically but provocatively in
describing himself as a gift of the god. In a sense, you might ask what could be more
ludicrous, Socrates declaring himself or anyone declaring themselves to be a gift of the
divine. But, right, who would make such a claim? But in another respect he seems to
take the divine calling very seriously, right, I mean does he not? It was only when the
Delphic Oracle replied to Charephon, he tells that story, that no one was wiser than
Socrates, that Socrates undertook this second sailing as it were, his turn away from the
investigation of purely natural phenomena to the study of the world of moral virtue and
justice. He repeatedly maintains that the path he has taken is not of his own choosing
but the result of a divine command. He is under some kind of divine edict and it is
precisely his devotion to this divine command, to this particular kind of calling that has
led him to neglect his worldly affairs. He reminds, at various points, the audience of his
extreme poverty, his neglect of his family and his obligations to his wife and children as
well as to suffer the disgrace and the abuse that is directed against him by various public
figures, he tells us. All of this is the result of his devotion to the divine command. He
presents himself, in other words, as a human being of unparalleled piety and devotion
who will risk life itself rather than quit the post that has been given to him. It's a very
tall order that he claims for himself.
Do we believe him in this respect, I mean an important question, do we believe him
again, is he being sincere in this or is he using this as it were a kind of rhetoric with
which to envelope himself? What is this peculiar kind of piety that he claims to
practice? In many ways, in replying to the jury's verdict in the request that he cease
philosophizing, Socrates explains himself in the following terms. Let me just quote one
other passage briefly from the second speech that he gives to the jury after his
conviction. "It is hardest of all to persuade you, to persuade some of you about this," he
says, about his way of life. "For if I say that this is to disobey the god and because of
this it is impossible to keep quiet, you will not be persuaded by me on the grounds that I
am being ironic. And on the other hand," he says, "if I say that this even happens to be a
very great good for a human being that is to make speeches every day about virtue and
that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will still less be
persuaded by me." In other words, what he seems to be saying in that passage at around
37c and d is that he realizes he is on the horns of a dilemma.
On the one hand, he says, his reference to a divine mission, he explicitly says there, will
be taken by his audience as being just another instance of Socratic irony and insincerity.
But, he says, if he tries to persuade people of the goodness and the justice of his way of
life on simply rational grounds alone, to persuade them that the examined life alone is
worth living, he says he will not be believed. So, what you might say is a Socratic
citizen to do, he will either be accused of being ironic and not be believed or he will
simply be disbelieved if he attempts to defend himself on rational or philosophical
grounds. That raises the question, I think, that I began the class with today. Should
Socrates be tolerated, would a good society tolerate Socrates? This is the question raised
by this dialogue in the Crito as well. How far should freedom of speech and that is to
say speech that borders on, even verges into, civic impiety, how far should such speech
be tolerated? It's been an assumption of readers of Plato over the years that the trial of
Socrates, that the execution of Socrates, presents the case for the fullest liberty or
freedom of thought in discussion in the evils or the dangers to a society of trying to
persecute or suppress freedom of speech. But is this right, in other words, is that really
Plato's teaching?
Among the things Socrates says he cares deeply about is his calling, as he puts it, to do
nothing but persuade you both younger and older not to care for your bodies and money
but how your soul will be in the best possible condition. How are we to understand this
case about toleration and freedom of speech? The Apology presents Socrates right as
presenting the most intransigent case for the philosopher as a radical critic or questioner
of society. Socrates demands that the Athenians change not simply this or that aspect of
their policy but he demands nothing less than a drastic, I would even say revolutionary,
change in Athenian civic life, in Athenian civic culture. He tells his fellows citizens,
right, that their lives are not worth living, only the examined life is worth living and you
are not living examined lives therefore your life cannot possibly have any value to it.
Even when presented with the option to cease philosophizing, he refuses to do so on the
ground that, again, he is acting under a command, divine command and cannot do
otherwise.
Is Plato asking us to regard Socrates as a man of high principle, standing up for what he
believes in the face of death or as a kind of revolutionary agitator who cannot and
should not be tolerated by a society whose basic laws and values he will not accept? To
some degree, I am inclined to answer that both of those questions have something to
them. Maybe the answer, or an answer, to this question is revealed in the Crito, the
companion dialogue, the companion speech that goes along with the Apology, although
it typically gets much less attention than the Apology. In part, because I think the
dialogue presents, as it were, the city's case, the case of the city against Socrates, I mean
to consider some of the following. If the Apology presents the philosopher's case against
the city, Socrates' case against the city, the Crito presents the city's case against the
philosopher. Here, Socrates makes the case against himself, you might say he makes the
case against himself better than his accusers in the courtroom did. So in the Apology, the
speech between Socrates and the laws that form, as it were the kind of central action of
the dialogue, presents the case that Meletus and Anytus should have made against him.
While the Apology seems to denigrate the political life as requiring complicity in
injustice and Socrates says he will have no part of laws or policies that entail injustice,
the Crito makes the case for the dignity of the laws, the dignity or majesty of the city
and its laws. While the Apology defends, again, a politics of principled abstinence or
disobedience to the political life, the Crito makes the most complete and far-reaching
case for obligation and obedience to the law that has perhaps ever been made. So how
do we reconcile, if we can, these two apparently contradictory points of view in these
two dialogues?
These two dialogues, it should be evident, I mean, differ not only in content but in their
dramatic context. Just consider, again, some of the following. The Apology is a speech
given before a large and largely anonymous audience of over 500 persons, the
Assembly, the Court. We see Socrates addressing, the only time in any platonic
dialogue, an audience of this size. The Crito, on the other hand, is a conversation
between Socrates and a single individual, only one person. The Apology takes place in
the Court of Athens, the most public of settings, while the Crito occurs within the
darkness and confinement of a prison cell. The Apology shows Socrates defending
himself and his life as a gift of the god that most truly benefits the city but in the Crito,
we see him bow down to the authority of the laws that he seems to have previously
rejected and finally if the Apology presents Socrates as the first martyr for philosophy,
the first person to die for the cause of philosophy, the Crito shows Socrates' trial and
sentence as a case of justice delivered. These huge contrasts, again, they force us to ask
a question, what is Plato doing in presenting these two very different points of view,
what is his point in presenting these two works with two such sharply contrasting
perspectives on the relation of Socrates to the city? Was Plato confused, was he
contradicting himself, was he--what was he doing? Big question. I hope I have time to
answer it.
So let's look into the Crito just a little bit. Crito is named for a friend and disciple of
Socrates who at the outset of the dialogue is sitting as a watchful guardian over his
mentor. He urges Socrates to allow him to help him escape. The jailers have been bribed
and escape would be made easy but rather than trying to convince Crito directly,
Socrates creates a dialogue; actually, you might say a dialogue within the larger
dialogue, a dialogue between himself and the laws of Athens where he puts forward the
case against escape, that is to say the case against disobedience to the law and the
argument could be summarized as follows. No state can exist without rules. The first
rule of any state is the rule that citizens are not free to set aside the rules, to choose
among them which ones to obey and to disobey. To engage in civil disobedience of any
kind is not only to call this or that rule into question but it is to call into question the
very nature of law, the very question of the rules. To question or disobey the law is
tantamount to destroying the authority of the law. The breaking of so much as a single
law constitutes the essence of anarchy, constitutes the essence of lawlessness, it is a far-
reaching argument for obedience to the law. The breaking of even a single law calls into
question the authority of law as such. It's a very powerful argument that, in a way,
Socrates makes against himself, putting that speech in the mouth of the laws. But he
goes even further than this. The citizen, he says, owes his very existence to the laws. We
are what we are because of the power and authority of the laws, the customs, the
traditions, the culture that has shaped us. The laws, he says, have begat us and the use of
the term "begat" in our translation is clearly intended to resonate with something you
might say we might think of as something biblical about it. The citizen is, in a word,
created, begat by the laws themselves, they exercise a kind of paternal authority over us
such that disobedience to any law constitutes an act of impiety or disrespect of the
oldest things around us. The laws are not only like our parents, they are like our
ancestors, the founding fathers, as we might say, who are owed respect and piety.
In many ways, the Crito, in some respect, is the platonic dialogue about piety. Socrates
seems to accept here entirely the authority of the law; he does not offer arguments for
non compliance as he does in the Apology, so what happened all of a sudden to
Socrates, the apostle of civil disobedience, Socrates the apostle of principled abstention?
He accepts entirely, or the laws force him to accept entirely, the covenant that every
citizen has with the laws that binds them to absolute obedience. The question is, why
does Socrates exhibit such proud defiance and independence of the laws in the Apology,
and such total, even kind of mouse-like, acquiescence to the laws in the Crito? What
happened to him, I mean why does he all of a sudden become so humble and
acquiescent? What happened to his language about being the gift of the god? Well,
that's something I want you to think about and maybe I'm sure you'll want to talk about
in your sections, but let me propose something like the following to answer or at least to
respond to this paradox, this question.
The Apology and the Crito represent a tension, they represent even a conflict between
two more or less permanent and irreconcilable moral codes. The one represented by
Socrates regards reason, that is to say, the sovereign reason of the individual as the
highest possible authority. It is the philosopher's reliance on his own reason that frees
him from the dangerous authority of the state and safeguards the individual from
complicity in the injustice and evils that seem to be a necessary part of political life.
Here is Socrates, the principled abstainer, but the other moral code is represented by the
speech of the laws where it is the laws of the community, its oldest and deepest beliefs
and institutions, its constitution, its regime as we would say, its politea, that are
fundamentally obligatory on the individual and even take priority over the individual.
The one point of view takes the philosophic life, the examined life, to be the one most
worth living; the other takes the political life, the life of the citizen engaged in the
business of deliberating, legislating, making war and peace as the highest calling for a
human being. These constitute two irreconcilable alternatives, two different callings, so
to speak, and any attempt, I think, to reconcile or to synthesize these two can only lead
to a deep injustice to each.
Plato seems to believe that each of us must choose somehow, must choose between one
or the other of these two contenders for the most serious and worthwhile way of life.
Which do we take, which is the matter of ultimate concern or care for us? Which? But
we cannot have both and I think that distinction to some degree captures the differences
set out when I asked at the beginning of the class about who believes Socrates is
innocent and should be acquitted and who believes he is guilty and should be
condemned between a philosophical and a political point of view. And, in a sense, one
could say maybe this is not Plato's last word, I mean why does Socrates choose to stay
and drink the hemlock? After all, if he is committed fundamentally to the principles of
his own reason, still why should he care that much about the laws of the city, why not
let Crito help him escape and go to Crete where he can drink the good wine of Crete and
enjoy his old age? And in fact, Plato wrote another dialogue, his largest dialogue, a
book called The Laws, where you see a man simply designated as the Athenian stranger
living in Crete and carrying on a conversation with representatives of that society and
that might be, although he is not identified as Socrates, it is sometimes thought here is
the kind of speech or discussion Socrates would be having, had he escaped. But it gets
back to the question, are the reasons Socrates gives Crito for refusing to escape, the
reasons he puts in the mouth of the laws of the city of Athens, are those Socrates' true
reasons? Does Socrates believe that speech that he constructs between himself and the
laws or is it simply a fiction that he creates for the sake of relieving his friend of the
guilt he evidently feels for being unable to help Socrates?
Crito is, of course, very concerned with what people will think of him if it becomes
known that he has somehow not helped Socrates to escape. Is that speech for the law,
with the laws, really intended for the benefit of Crito, rather than an expression of
Socrates' deepest opinions about the questions of obligation and obedience? Is he, in
that speech, bestowing as it were a kind of justice to Crito to reconcile him to the laws
of the city and to give him reasons, you might say rational considerations, for continued
obedience to the law? In many ways that would seem to make a certain sense of the
apparent discrepancy between these two dialogues. It demonstrates not only Socrates'
sense of his superiority to the laws of Athens. In the first speech of the Apology, he
defies the city to put him to death by expressing indifference to death and then in the
Crito, he very much expresses that indifference to death by refusing to allow Crito to let
him escape. Socrates seems to remain, even until the end, very much a kind of law unto
himself while at the same time, again, providing Crito and others like him an example
of rational and dignified obedience to the law.
When we look at the death of Socrates, do we think of it as a tragedy, as a moral
tragedy, a just man sentenced to death by an unjust law? I don't think so. Far from it.
Socrates' death at the age of 70 was intended by him as an act of philosophical
martyrdom that would allow future philosophy to be favorably recognized as a source of
courage and justice. In one of his later letters, Plato refers to his depiction of Socrates,
as he says his attempt to render Socrates young and beautiful, that is he consciously set
out to beautify Socrates, presenting a man, fearless before death, refusing to participate
in any active injustice while dispensing wisdom and justice to those who will listen. We
don't know the real Socrates, all we know of Socrates is what we read in Plato and
Aristophanes and a small number of others who have sketched various different pictures
of him. But Plato's Socrates is necessarily poles apart from Aristophanes' Socrates
depiction of him as a sort of sophist who makes the weaker argument the stronger.
Plato's dialogues, the Apology as well as the Republic and the Crito are in the broadest
sense of the term, an attempt not only to answer the charge against Aristophanes but
also defend the cause of philosophy as something of value and merit. Where does that
leave us today? What are we to make of all this? We, who live in a very different kind
of world from that of, you know, fourth-century Athens, what can we learn from the
example of Socrates? Most of us like most of you earlier, find ourselves instinctively
taking the side of Socrates against the city of Athens. Those who might defend the city
of Athens against Socrates, those who believe in the value of civic piety are very few
among us. Perhaps only those of you who might come from a small town in the south or
from certain areas of Brooklyn would understand something about the supreme value of
piety as a way of life. We, by and large, tend to accept the picture of Socrates as a
victim of injustice. We overlook, we conveniently overlook a number of facts about
him, his hostility to democracy, we'll see that in the Republic but we've seen it already
to some degree in the Apology. His claim that the lives of his fellow citizens are not
worth living and his claim that his way of life has been commanded by a god that no
one else has ever heard or seen. None of these seem to make any difference to us and
yet I think they should.
Given Socrates' claims, ask yourself what would a responsible body of citizens have
done, how should they have acted? One answer might be to extend greater toleration to
civil dissidents like Socrates. Individuals of heterodox belief but whose own views may
stimulate others to question and think for themselves, all to the good, Milton, John
Locke, people like Voltaire argued something like this. But is that to do justice to
Socrates?
The one thing that Plato does not argue is that Socrates should simply be tolerated. To
tolerate his teaching would seem to trivialize it in some sense, to render it harmless. The
Athenians at least pay Socrates the tribute of taking him seriously, which is exactly why
he is on trial. The Athenians refuse to tolerate Socrates because they know he is not
harmless, that he poses a challenge, a fundamental challenge to their way of life and all
that they hold to be noble and worthwhile. Socrates is not harmless because of his own
professed ability to attract followers, a few today, a few more tomorrow. Who knows?
To tolerate Socrates would be to say to him that we care little for our way of life and
that we are willing to let you challenge it and impugn it every day. Is that good, is that
right? The trial of Socrates asks us to think about the limits of toleration, what views, if
any, do we find simply intolerable? Is a healthy society one that is literally open to
every point of view, freedom of speech is naturally a cherished good, is it the supreme
good? Should it trump all other goods or does toleration reach a point when it ceases to
be toleration and becomes in fact a kind of soft nihilism that can extend liberty to
everything precisely because it takes nothing very seriously. And by nihilism, I mean
the view that every preference, however squalid, base or sordid, must be regarded as the
legitimate equal of every other. Is this really tolerance or is it rather a form of moral
decay that has simply decided to abandon the search for truth and standards of
judgment? There's a danger, I think, that endless tolerance leads to intellectual passivity
and the kind of uncritical acceptance of all points of view. Well so much for that. What
I want to do, I see we're running out of time, is if you could think about it, maybe hold
that thought in your mind once in a while between now and Wednesday and on
Wednesday, we will begin reading what is arguably, some people believe, the most
important book ever written, Plato's Republic. See you on Wednesday.
[end of transcript]

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Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 4
Transcript
September 20, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: There is one person in here, I don't know who it is, and you
will not know who it is yet, but there is one person in here for whom the reading of
Plato's Republic will be the most important intellectual experience you have at Yale. It
is a book that one of you will go back to time and time again and it will stick with you
forever. What I would like you to do is to remember this and four years from now, when
most of you are ready to graduate, if that one person in here would email me and let me
know who it is, okay? Maybe it will be you. Maybe? Possibly. Or you. Okay. This is the
book that started it all. The Apology, the Crito, these are warm-ups to the big theme, to
the big book, the Republic. Every other book in this political science that has since been
written, beginning with Aristotle's Politics and moving on to the present day is, in one
way or another, an answer, a response to Plato's Republic. It started the whole thing.
The first and most obvious thing to say about the Republic is that it is a long book. Not
the longest book you will ever read, but long enough. In fact, in part, because of this, we
are only reading approximately half the book, the first five books, to be more specific.
The first five books that deal with and culminate in the best city, Plato's ideal city, what
he calls Kallipolis, the just city, the beautiful city, ruled by philosopher-kings. The
second half of the book turns in somewhat different, certainly equally important
directions, but would take us much more time than the time we have allotted to deal
with. So you will read that on your own. You can take another course, what have you.
The Republic is a very perplexing book, you will find out. Its meaning will not be
evident to you on a first reading. It may not be clear to you on a tenth reading, unless
you approach it with the proper questions and the proper frame of mind.
So let's start by asking a simple question. What is the Republic about? What does this
book deal with? This is a question that has perplexed and divided readers of Plato
almost from the beginning. Is it a book about justice, as the subtitle of the book
suggests? Is it a book about what we today might call moral psychology and the right
ordering of the human soul, which is a prominent theme addressed in this work? Is it a
book about the power of poetry and myth, what we would call the whole domain of
culture to shape souls and to shape our societies? Or is it a book about metaphysics and
the ultimate structure of being, as certainly many of the later books of the Republic
suggest? The theory of the forms, the image of the divided line and so on and so on. Of
course, it is about all of these things and several others as well. But at least at the
beginning, when we approach the book, we should stay on its surface, not dig at least
initially too deeply.
As one of the great readers of Plato of the last century once said, "Only the surface of
things reveals the essence of things." The surface of the Republic reveals that it is a
dialogue. It is a conversation. We should approach the book, in other words, not as we
might a treatise, but as we might approach a work of literature or drama. It is a work
comparable in scope to other literary masterworks--Hamlet, Don Quixote, War and
Peace, others you might think of. As a conversation, as a dialogue, it is something the
author wants us to join, to take part in. We are invited to be not merely passive
onlookers of this conversation, but active participants in that dialogue that takes place in
this book over the course of a single evening. Perhaps the best way to read this book is
to read it aloud, as you might with a play, to yourself or with your friends.
Let's go a little further. The Republic is also a utopia, a word that Plato does not use,
was not coined until many, many centuries later by Sir Thomas More. But Plato's book
is a utopia. It is a kind of extreme. He presents an extreme vision of politics. He
presents an extreme vision of the polis. The guiding thread of the book is the
correspondence, and we will look at this in some length and you will discuss it in your
sections, no doubt. The guiding thread of the book is the correspondence, the symmetry
between the parts of the city and the parts of the soul. Discord within the city, just as
discord within the soul, is regarded as the greatest evil. The aim of the Republic is to
establish a harmonious city, based on a conception of justice that, so to speak,
harmonizes the individual and society, how to achieve that. The best city would
necessarily be one that seeks to produce the best or highest type of individual. Plato's
famous answer to this is that this city--any city--will never be free of conflict, will never
be free of factional strife until, in his famous formula, kings become philosophers and
philosophers become kings.
The Republic asks us to consider seriously, what would a city look like ruled by
philosophers? In this respect, it would seem to be the sort of perfect bookend to the
Apology. Remember, the Apology viewed the dangers posed to philosophy and the
philosopher and the philosophical life from the city. The Republic asks us, what would a
city be like if it were ruled by Socrates or someone like him? What would it be like for
philosophers to rule? Such a city would require, so Socrates tells us throughout the
opening books, the severe censorship of poetry and theology, the abolition of private
property and the family, at least among the guardian class of the city, and the use of
selected lies and myths, what would today probably be called ideology or propaganda,
as tools of political rule. It would seem that far from utopia, the Republic represents a
radical dystopia, a satire, in some sense, of the best polity. In fact, much of modern
political science is directed against Plato's legacy. The modern state, as we have come
to understand it, is based upon the separation of civil society from governing authority.
The entire domain of what we call private life separated from the state. But Plato's
Republic recognizes no such separation or no such independence for a private sphere.
For this reason, Plato has often been cast as a kind of harbinger of the modern
totalitarian state.
A famous professor at a distant university was said to have begun his lectures on the
Republic by saying, "Now we will consider Plato, the fascist." This was, in fact, the
view popularized by one of the most influential books about Plato written in the last
century, a book written by a Viennese migr by the name of Karl Popper, who in
the very early 1950s, right at the height of the Cold War and of course the end of the
conclusion of the Second World War, wrote a book called The Open Society and Its
Enemies. He wanted to know what were the causes or who was responsible for the
experiences of totalitarianism, both in Stalin's Russia and in Hitler's Germany. In the
course of this inquiry, he concluded that not only Hegel and Marx were important in
that particular genealogy, but this went back to Plato as well, Plato principally. Plato,
who Popper accuses in a passionate, albeit not very well written book, accuses Plato of
being the first to establish a kind of totalitarian dictatorship. Is that true?
Plato's Republic is, we will discover as you read, a republic of a very special kind. It is
not a regime like ours devoted to maximizing individual liberties, but it is one that puts
the education of its citizens, the education of its members, as its highest duty. The
Republic, like the Greek polis, was a kind of tutelary association. Its principal good, its
principal goal, was the education of citizens for positions of public leadership and high
political responsibilities. It is always worthwhile to remember that Plato was, above all,
a teacher. He was the founder of the first university, the Academy, the Platonic
Academy, where we will find out later Aristotle came to study, among many others--
Aristotle being but the most famous. Plato was the founder of this school. This, in turn,
spawned other philosophical schools throughout the Greek world and later, the Roman
world. With the demise of Rome, in the early Christian centuries, these philosophical
academies, these philosophical schools, were absorbed into the medieval monasteries.
These, in turn, became the basis of the first European universities in places like
Bologna, Paris, Oxford.
These were, in turn, later transplanted to the New World and established in towns like
Cambridge and, of course, New Haven. We can say today that this university is a direct
ancestor of the platonic republic of Plato's Academy. We are all here the heirs of Plato.
Think of that. Without Plato, no Yale. We would not be here today. I think that is a fact.
Just ponder that for a moment. In fact, let me even say a little more about this. The
institutional and educational requirements of Plato's Republic share many features with
a place like Yale. For example, in both the Platonic Kallipolis, the just city, as well as
this place, men and women--men and women--are selected at a relatively early age
because of their capacities for leadership, for courage, for self-discipline, and
responsibility. They spend several years living together, eating together in common
mess halls, exercising together, and studying together, of course, far from the oversight
of their parents. The best of them are winnowed out to pursue further study and
eventually assume positions of public leadership and responsibility. Throughout all of
this, they are subjected to a course of rigorous study and physical training that will lead
them to adopt prominent positions in the military and other branches of public service.
Does this sound at all familiar to you? It should. Let me put it another way. If Plato is a
fascist, what does that make you? Plato, of course, is an extremist. He pushes his ideas
to their most radical conclusions. That's what it is to be a philosopher. But he is also
defining a kind of school. He regards the Politea or the Republic, because that is the
original Greek title of the book, Politea or regime. He regards the politea as a school
whose chief goal is preparation for guidance and leadership of a community.
If you don't believe me about this, maybe you will consider the words of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, one of the great readers of Plato's Republic. Rousseau wrote in his Emile, "To
get a good idea of public education," he says, "read Plato's Republic. It is not a political
treatise, as those who merely judge books by their title think, but it is the finest, most
beautiful work on education ever written." Rousseau. So, there we go. Let's now peek
into the book itself. Just peek. We won't go too far. Let's start with the first line. Who
remembers what the first line is? Oh, come on. You should know this. You're looking at
the book. You're cheating. "I went down to the Piraeus." I went down to the Piraeus.
Why does Plato begin with this line? There's a story that I heard. I'm not sure if it's
altogether true, but it's a good story, at least, about the famous German philosopher
Martin Heidegger, who said that on his first teaching of the Republic, he went through
the whole book, taught the whole book in one seminar, one semester. The last time he
taught it, the final time he taught it, he never got beyond the first sentence, "I went
down to the Piraeus." What does it mean? Why does he begin with this? "I went down,"
a going down. The Greek word for this is catabasis. "I had made a descent."
There is a book by a famous contemporary to Plato. It's a man named Xenophon, who
wrote a book called the Anabasis. The anabasis means a going up, an ascent. But Plato
begins this dialogue with this stigma. "I went down." The descent to the Piraeus. It is
clearly modeled on Odysseus' descent to Hades in the Odyssey. In fact, the work is a
kind of philosophical odyssey that both imitates Homer, but also anticipates other great
odysseys of the human mind, works by those like Cervantes or Joyce. The book is full,
you will see, of a number of descents and ascents. The most famous climb upward,
although we will not actually read these parts for this class, concerns the climb to the
divided line, the famous image of the divided line in Book VI, and the ascent to the
world of the imperishable forms. Then, in the last book of the Republic, Book X, there
is, once again, a descent to the underworld, to the world of Hades. The work is not, in a
sense, written simply as a sort of timeless philosophical treatise, but as a dramatic
dialogue with a setting, a cast of characters and a firm location in time and place.
Let's say a little more about that time and place already indicated in the sentence, "I
went down to the Piraeus." Plato was born in 427, which is four years after the
commencement of the Peloponnesian War. He was a young man of 23 when the
democracy in Athens was defeated. He was only 28 when the restored democracy
executed his friend and teacher, Socrates, in 399. Almost immediately after the trial of
Socrates, Plato left Athens and traveled extensively throughout the Greek world. Upon
his return, he established this school at Athens he called the Academy, for the training
of philosophers, statesmen, and legislators. Plato lived a long time. He lived until the
age of 80. Except for two expeditions to Sicily, where he went at the request of
Dionysius to help try to establish a philosophical kingship in Syracuse, he remained in
Athens teaching and writing. The Republic belongs to that period of Plato's work after
his return to Athens, after the execution of Socrates.
The dominant feature of Plato's political theory, David Grene, a great reader of Plato,
has said is "the root and branch character of the change it advocates and existing
institutions." Plato's desire for a kind of radical makeover, of Athenian and Greek
political institutions and cultures, grew out of his experience of political defeat and
despair. The utopianism of the book is, in many ways, the reverse side of the sense of
profound disillusionment that he felt at the actual experience of the Athenian polis. This
was not only true of his experience at home, but of his failed efforts to turn Dionysius'
kingship in Sicily into a successful example of philosophical rule. In fact, we have--and
I want to read to you in just a moment--a lengthy transcript of Plato's own account of
why he came to write the Republic. One thing, of course, you note in the Republic, is
that Plato is nowhere present. He is not a participant in his own dialogue. He is the
author, but not the participant.
We don't know precisely what Plato thought, but we are helped, at least, by a kind of
intellectual autobiography that he wrote and that we still have, in what is conventionally
referred to as The Seventh Letter. Plato wrote a series of letters that we have. People
have argued over the authenticity of them, although I think by now it is established that
they are his. In the most famous of these letters, the lengthy seventh one, he gives us,
again, something of an autobiography and tells us a little bit about why he came to write
this book. Isn't this amazing that 2,000-2,500 years ago, we still have the letters of the
man who wrote this book? Let me read to you what Plato says about how he came to
write this book. "When I was a young man," he said--and this is written as he is very
old. "When I was a young man, I felt as yet many young men do. I felt at the very
moment I attained my majority I should engage in public affairs. And there came my
way an opportunity that I want to tell you about. The democratic constitution, then
loudly decried by many people, was abolished. And the leaders of the revolution set
themselves up as a government of 30 men with supreme authority."
He's referring to the Tyranny of the Thirty that existed after the Athenian defeat. "Some
of these men [some of the members of the Thirty], you must understand, were relatives
of mine and well known to me. And what is more, they actually invited me at once to
join them, as though politics and I were a fit match. I was very young then and it is not
surprising that I felt as I did. I thought that the city was then living a kind of life which
was unjust and that they would bend it to a just one and so administer it more justly. So
I eagerly watched to see what they would do. And you must know, as I looked on, I saw
those men in a short time make the former democracy look like a golden age."
He is referring to his relatives, men like Critias and Charmides, who turned Athenian
politics into a tyranny and, which he says, makes the "democracy look like a golden
age." Let me continue in Plato's words. "I looked at this, you see, and at the men who
were in politics, at the laws and customs. And the more I looked and the older I grew,
the more difficult it seemed to me to administer political affairs justly. For you cannot
do so without friends and comrades you can trust. In such men it was not easy to find.
For the city, you see, no longer lived in the fashion and ways of our fathers. Eager as I
had once been to go into politics, as I look at these things and saw everything taking any
course at all with no direction or management, I ended up feeling dizzy. I did not
abandon my interest in politics to discover how it might be bettered in other respects,
and I was perpetually awaiting my opportunity. But at last, I saw that as far as all states
now existing are concerned, they are all badly governed. For the condition of their laws
is bad almost past cure, except for some miraculous accident. So I was compelled to
say, in praising true philosophy, that it was from it alone that was able to discern any
justice. And so I said that the nations of the world will never cease from trouble until
either the true breed of philosophers shall come to political office or until that of the
rulers shall, by some divine law, take the pursuit of philosophy."
There you see in that wonderful and a kind of probing self-examination of his early
motives and expectations, you see the disillusionment of the older Plato looking on
what the Tyranny had done. But also looking at the states, the nations of his time, seeing
their management, seeing their decay and conflict and saying and suggesting that no
justice will ever be expected until, as he says at the end, kings become philosophers and
philosophers kings, a direct reference to the Republic. This little autobiography, goes on
at considerably greater length, I should say. But this provides a kind of introduction, as
it were, to the Republic. We have in Plato's own words here, the way he viewed politics
and his reasons for his political philosophy. Yet, in many respects, if the Republic was
the result of comprehensive despair and disillusionment with the prospects of reform,
the dialogue itself points back to an earlier moment in Plato's life and the life of the city
of Athens. This remarkable letter was written when Plato was very old, approximately
50 years after the trial and execution of Socrates. But the action of the Republic takes
place long before the defeat of Athens, before the rise of the Thirty and the execution of
Athens [correction: should have said Socrates]. It refers to that period that Plato says in
the letter looked like "a golden age, when many things seemed possible." That brings us
back to the opening, the descent to the Piraeus. The action of the dialogue begins at the
Piraeus, the port city of Athens, somewhere around the year 411, during what was
called the Peace of Nicias, that is to say, the peace that endured a kind of respite, truce
that was established during the fighting between Sparta and Athens. At the very
beginning of the dialogue, we see Socrates and his friend Glaucon. What are they
doing? What are they doing? Do you remember? What are they doing at the very
beginning?
Student: [indaudible]
Professor Steven Smith: Where?
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Steven Smith: Right. Let me put it a slightly--yes, they are walking back to
Athens from the Piraeus. But maybe to put it a slightly different way, they're trolling the
waterfront. What is the Piraeus? It is the harbor of Athens. What do you expect from
harbors? What are harbor cities like? What do you find down at harbors?
Student: [inaudible]
Professor Steven Smith: Water, yeah. They're seedy, aren't they? You find various
kinds of disreputable and maybe unseemly things going on there. We are forced to ask
ourselves: What are Socrates and Glaucon doing there? Why are they there together?
What are they doing? What do they expect to find? These seem to be questions that
immediately come to mind. We learn shortly afterwards that they have taken this
descent to the Piraeus to view a festival, a kind of carnival. It sounds like something one
might expect to see in a Fellini film. A kind of carnival, a carnivale, a Mardi Gras,
where a festival is going on. What's more, a new goddess is being introduced into the
pantheon of deities. This seems to suggest that--referring back to the Apology, that it is
not Socrates, but the Athenians who innovate, who create and introduce new deities.
Socrates remarks that the Thracians, the display of the Thracians, put on a good show,
showing that his own perspective is not simply bound by that of a city. It suggests, from
the beginning, a kind of loftiness and impartiality of perspective characteristic of the
philosopher, but not necessarily the citizen.
On their way back from this festival, from this carnival, on their way back they're
accosted, you remember. They're accosted by a slave who's been sent on by
Polemarchus and his friends and who orders Socrates and Glaucon to wait.
"Polemarchus orders you to wait," the slave says. He orders you to wait. He is coming
up behind you. Just wait. "Of course we'll wait," Glaucon replies. When Polemarchus
and his friends arrive, we find that his friends include Adeimantus, who is Glaucon's
brother and Niceratus, who is the son of Nicias, the general who has just brokered the
peace that they are now enjoying. That's the famous Peace of Nicias. They challenge
Socrates. "Stay with us or prove stronger." Stay with us or prove stronger. "Could we
not persuade you?" Socrates asked. "Could we not persuade you to let us go?" "Not if
we won't listen," Polemarchus says. Instead, they reach a compromise. But Socrates and
Glaucon come with Polemarchus and the others to the home of Polemarchus' father,
where dinner will be provided for them, and later, a return to the festival where there
will be a horseback race. "It seems," Glaucon says, "we must stay." And Socrates
concurs.
Why does the book begin with this, let's say, opening gambit? Is it simply a ruse to get
the reader's attention in some sense or to rope you in with some promise of what's to
follow? Already from the very opening lines we see in this a clue to the theme that is
going to follow. Who has the title to rule? Is it Polemarchus and his friends who claim
to rule by strength of numbers? "Can we persuade you?" "Not if we don't listen," he
says. Or Socrates and Glaucon, who hope to rule by the powers of reason, speech, and
argument? Can we convince you? Can we persuade you? Can democracy that expresses
the will of the majority, the will of the greater number be rendered compatible with the
needs of philosophy and the claims to respect only reason and a better argument? That
seems to be the question already posed in this opening scene. Can a compromise be
reached between the two? Can the strength of numbers, as well as respect for reason and
a better argument be, in some sense, harmonized? Can they be brought together? Is the
just city, perhaps, that Socrates will later consider, a combination of these two--of both
force and persuasion? That will be something left to see. But I think you can see the big
themes of the book already very present in the opening scene of the dialogue. The first
book is really a kind of preamble to everything that follows. Okay? Are you with me so
far on this?
Let's talk a little bit about the participants in this dialogue. It is a dialogue. It has a fairly
large number of characters, although only a relatively few number of them speak in the
book. Yet, it's something very important, as we would want to know in any play or
novel or movie. We want to note something about the particular people who inhabit this
dinner party that Socrates and Glaucon have been promised. Who are they and what do
they represent? There is Cephalus, who we will see very quickly, the father of
Polemarchus and whose home they are attending. The venerable paterfamilias, the
venerable father of the family. Polemarchus, his son, a solid patriot who defends not
only his father's honor, but that of his friends and fellow citizens. We will also see
Thrasymachus, a cynical intellectual who rivals Socrates as an educator of future
leaders and statesmen. Of course, it is the exchange between Socrates and
Thrasymachus that is one of the most famous moments of the book.
There is, in the first set of dialogues, a distinct hierarchy of characters, you might say,
who we see later on express those distinctive features of the soul and the city. Cephalus,
we learn, has spent his life in the acquisitive arts. That is to say, he's a businessman.
He's been concerned with satisfying the needs of his body and making money. He
represents what will later be called in the Republic the appetitive part of the soul, the
appetites. Polemarchus, whose name actually means "warlord." Think of that. The
warlord is preoccupied with questions of honor and loyalty. He tells us, to get a little bit
ahead of ourselves, that justice is helping your friends and harming your enemies. He
seems to represent what Plato or Socrates will later call the spirited part of the soul,
something that we want to return to. Thrasymachus, a visiting sophist, seeks to teach
and educate, anticipating what the Republic will call the rational soul, the rational part
of the soul.
Each of these figures, in many ways, prefigure the relatively superior natures of those
who come later in the dialogue. The two brothers, Glaucon and Adeimantus, whose
exchange with Socrates occupies, for the most part, the rest of the dialogue from Book
Two onward, the two brothers who, incidentally, are the brothers of Plato. I should say,
to my knowledge, we know nothing more about Glaucon and Adeimantus from history,
but Plato put them into his dialogue. They will always be remembered as the two
brothers in the dialogue. Again, they seem to represent something quite different. Bear
this in mind as you are reading the book, because it is easy to kind of forget who's
talking and what they represent. Adeimantus is, we will find, the kind of hedonistic and
pleasure-seeking brother. Glaucon, whose name means something like "gleaming",
"shining," is the fierce and war-like of the two brothers. Of course, there is the
philosophically-minded Socrates. Again, each of them seems to represent, in a superior
way, the key components of the human soul, the appetitive, the war-like or spirited, and
the rational. Together, these figures form a kind of microcosm of humanity. Each of the
participants in the dialogue represents one of the specific classes or groups that will
eventually occupy the just city to which Plato or Socrates gives the name Kallipolis, the
beautiful city. Alright?
In the five minutes or so that remain, let's just talk for a moment about the first
conversation with the head of the family, Cephalus. We don't need to look at this at
great length. You can, I'm sure in your sections, you might want to talk about the
arguments a little more specifically that are used in these first three sets of conversations
between Cephalus, Polemarchus, and Thrasymachus. The question, more importantly--
the question, I don't know that it's more importantly, but the question that I want us to
examine a little bit here in the time remaining is what, again, these characters represent.
Cephalus, as his name implies, Cephalus. What does that mean? Do you know? Head,
yes, Cephalus, head, the head of the household, but also clearly the claims of age, of
tradition, of family.
At the beginning of the dialogue when Polemarchus brought his friends back to the
house, we see the aged father, Cephalus. He is just returning from prayer. He has just
returned from performing certain acts of ritual sacrifice. He greets Socrates, in many
ways, as a long, lost friend. Perhaps you have had this experience yourself, always a
slightly uncomfortable one. When you bring a group of your friends back to your house,
you're expecting to have a good time, and your grandparent is there and says, "Oh, it's
so good to see a bunch of young people. I want to talk with you." It's always a slightly
uncomfortable moment, you might say. We all have experienced this kind of thing.
Everybody knows it from either end. I'm not a grandparent, thank god. But I feel the
same thing often when my son brings his friends, maybe that I've known for a long
time. "Oh, how are you doing?" and they want to get away. Socrates does something
rather abrupt. "Tell me, Cephalus, what's it like to be so old?" "What is it like to be like
you?" "Do you still feel the need for sex?" Can you imagine saying that to someone's
grandfather? It gives you a little idea of the character of Socrates. Cephalus is so happy.
"Oh, thank god I'm past that," he says. "Thank god I no longer feel this erotic desire. At
my old age, I can spend my time--" "When I was a young man, that's all I did. I was
thinking about sex all the time and when I wasn't thinking about that, I was making
money. But now I've had my fill of both and I can spend my later years, the twilight of
my life, turning to the things about the gods, performing sacrifices commanded by the
gods."
Why does Plato begin this way? Well, Cephalus is, as should be clear, the very
embodiment of the conventional, in both senses of that term. He's not a bad man, by any
means. But he is a thoroughly unreflective one. In attacking Cephalus as he does,
Socrates attacks the embodiment of conventional opinion, the Nomos supporting the
city. Note the way Socrates manipulates the dialogue, the conversation. Cephalus says
that the pious man, the just man practices justice by sacrificing to the gods. Socrates
turns that into the statement that justice means paying your debts and returning what is
owed to you. Cephalus, in an easygoing manner, agrees and then Socrates says, "What
would you think about returning a weapon that you had borrowed from a friend or
someone who was in a very depressed"--we might say a depressed "frame of mind.
Would that be just? How do you explain that? Would you do that if justice means
paying your debts and giving back to each what is owed?" At that moment, Cephalus
excuses himself from the dialogue and says, rather abruptly, "I have to go out and
continue my sacrifices in the garden." Socrates, in other words, has broken the bond of
tradition and traditional authority that holds the ancient city and the ancient family
together. Cephalus is banished from the dialogue. Tradition is banished and we never
hear another word about it for the next 400 or so pages. That's the way Socrates begins
this dialogue, or that's the way Plato has Socrates begin it. We'll look a little more at
some of these in our class for next time and then move into the characters of
Adeimantus and Glaucon. Anyway, start your reading. Continue your reading. Your
sections are going on this week, so enjoy yourselves.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 5
Transcript
September 25, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Today Republic, Act 2. And what I want to do is continue
with the account of the various figures, various persons who populate, who inhabit this
dialogue, and who they are, what they represent, and how they contribute to the
argument and the structure of the work as a whole.
Last time, and I won't repeat this, last time we talked briefly at the end of class about
Cephalus, and Socrates' treatment of Cephalus, the embodiment
[personification]
of
convention, the embodiment of Athenian opinion in the way in which Socrates as it
were chases
[pursue]
Cephalus out of the dialogue, out of the conversation. We never hear
from him again. And the speakers are able, presumably, to pursue the audacious
arguments that will appear in the rest of the book without the oversight
[forgotten-missed]
of
the head of the household, the embodiment of conventional opinion.
And Socrates next pursues this discussion with the son of Cephalus, Polemarchus, the
man who first had Socrates approached on the Piraeus. Polemarchus is described as the
heir of the argument as well as the, to be sure, the heir of the family fortune.
Polemarchus is what the Greeks would call a "gentlemen." Let us just say he is a person
willing to stand up for and defend his family and friends. I don't mean necessarily by a
"gentlemen" somebody who holds the door for others, or so on, but somebody who
stands up for his family and friends in the way that he does.
Unlike his father however, Polemarchus shows himself concerned not just with the
needs of the body as Cephalus represented, but Polemarchus is concerned to defend the
honor and safety of the polis. He accepts the view that justice is giving to each what is
owed, but he interprets this to mean that justice means doing good to your friends and
harm to your enemies. Justice, we might say, is a kind of loyalty, it is a kind of loyalty
that we feel to members of a family, to members of our team, to fellow students of a
residential college, and the kind of loyalty we feel to a place like Yale as opposed to all
other places. That is to say, Polemarchus understands justice as a kind of patriotic
sentiment that citizens of one city or one polis feel for one another in opposition to all
other places. Justice is devotion to one's own. And one's own is the good for
Polemarchus. One's own is the just.
But Socrates challenges Polemarchus on the grounds that loyalty to a group, any group,
cannot be a virtue in itself, and he trips Polemarchus up with a very, in many ways,
familiar Socratic argument "Do we ever make mistakes?" he asks Polemarchus. "Isn't
the distinction between friend and enemy based on a kind of knowledge, on a perception
of who is your friend and who is your enemy? Have we ever mistaken a friend for
enemy?" The answer seems to be, "Of course we have." We all know people who we
thought to be our friends but we found out that they were talking behind our backs, or
that they were operating to deceive us in some way or another. Of course, it's happened
to everyone.
"So how can we say that justice means helping friends and harming enemies," Socrates
asks, "when we may not even be sure who our friends and our enemies really are? Why
should citizens of one state, namely one's own have any moral priority over the citizens
of another state when, again, we don't know them and we may well be mistaken in our
assumption that they are enemies or friends? Isn't, in other words such an unreflective
attachment to one's own bound to result in injustice to others? Socrates seems to be
asking Polemarchus.
Once again, in many ways, we see Socrates dissolving the bonds of the familiar. At no
other point in the Republic, I think, do we see so clearly the tension between
philosophical reflectiveness on the one hand in the sense of camaraderie, mutuality and
esprit de corps necessary for political life on the other. Socrates seems to dissolve those
bonds of familiarity, loyalty and attachment that we all have by saying to Polemarchus,
"How do we know, how do we really know the distinction between friend and enemy?"
But Polemarchus seems to believe that a city can survive only with a vivid sense of
what it is. Of what we might say, what it stands for, and an equally vivid sense of what
it is not, and who are its enemies. Isn't this essential for the survival of any state, of any
city? To know who its friends and enemies are? Who its challenges are? Socrates'
disillusion of that very framework, challenges, it seems to me, the very possibility of
political life by questioning the question or the distinction between friend and enemy.
Although Polemarchus, like his father, is reduced to silence, it is notable that his
argument is not defeated. Later in the Republic you will see, not that much later even,
Socrates will argue that the best city may be characterized by peace and harmony at
home, but this will never be so for relations between states. This is why even the best
city, even Kallipolis will require, as he spends a great deal of time discussing, will
require a warrior class, a class of what he calls "auxiliaries." War and the preparation
for war is an intrinsic part of even the most just city. Even the Platonic just city will
have to cultivate warrior citizens who are prepared to risk life in battle for the sake of
their own city.
So in many ways, it seems that Polemarchus' argument, while apparently refuted in
Book I, is rehabilitated and re-emerges in its own way later in the dialogue. And we
might want to think about this because it is an argument that is very important to
contemporary twentieth century--important twentieth- century political theorist by the
name of Schmitt who made the distinction between what he called the friend and the
enemy, you remember, are central to his understanding of politics. This is an argument
that comes from Polemarchus in Book I of the Republic.
Polemarchus is dispatched in one way or another, and this creates the opportunity for
the longest and in many ways most memorable exchange in Book I, and perhaps even
the Republic as a whole, the exchange with Thrasymachus who represents a far more
difficult challenge in his own way than either of the first two speakers. In many ways,
because Thrasymachus could be seen as Socrates' alter-ego in some way, his sort of evil
twin
[identical]
.
He is, how to put it? He is the Doctor Moriarty to Socrates' Sherlock Holmes. You
know, the evil doppelganger in some way.
Thrasymachus' is a rival of Socrates in many respects; he also like Socrates is a teacher
clearly. He is an educator. He claims to have a certain kind of knowledge of what justice
is, and claims to be able to teach it to others. He is teaching a kind of, we will find out, a
kind of hard-headed realism that expresses disgust at Polemarchus' talk about loyalty
and friendship and the like. "Justice," he asserts, "is the interest of the stronger." Every
polity of which we know is based upon a distinction between the rulers and the ruled.
Justice consists of the rules, that is to say, that are made by and for the benefits of the
ruling class. Justice is nothing more or less right than what benefits the rulers, the rulers
who determine the laws of justice.
Thrasymachus is, of course even for us today, a familiar kind of person. He is the
intellectual who enjoys bringing, you might say, the harsh
[severe]
and unremitting
[infatigable]
facts about human nature to light, who enjoys dispelling illusions and pretty
beliefs. He's the one who probably would be the first to tell you there is no Santa Claus.
He is that kind of hard-boiled realist.
No matter how much we may dislike him in some ways, one has to admit also there
maybe a grain, if not more than a grain of truth in what he seems to be saying. And what
he seems to be saying is this: we are beings who are first and foremost dominated by a
desire for power. This is what distinguishes, you might say, the true man, the real man,
the alpha male you might say, from the slave. Power and domination are all we truly
care
[be concerned]
about. And when we get later in this semester to Thomas Hobbes,
remember Thrasymachus. I'll just say that for now. Remember Thrasymachus when we
get to Hobbes. Power and domination are all we care about.
And what is true of individuals is also true for collective entities, collective nouns like
states and cities. Every polity seeks its own advantage against others, making relations
between states a condition of unremitting war of all against all. In the language, if I can
switch to the language of modern economics, one could say that for Thrasymachus
politics is a zero-sum game. There are winners and there are losers, and the more
someone wins that means the more someone else will lose. And the rules of justice are
simply the laws set up by the winners of the game to protect and to promote their own
interests. It didn't take Karl Marx to invent, or to discover that insight, that the rules of
justice are simply the rules of the ruling class. That comes straight out
[sin rodeos]
of
Thrasymachus, Book I of the Republic.
Well, how to respond? And again, Socrates challenges Thrasymachus with a variation
of the argument that he used against Polemarchus. That is to say "Do we ever make
mistakes?" That is to say, it is not self-evident, or it is not always intuitively obvious
what our interests are. If justice is truly in the interests of the stronger, doesn't that
require some kind of knowledge, some kind of reflection on the part of those in power
to know what is really and truly in their interest? People make mistakes and it is very
possible to make a mistake about your own interests. And of course, Thrasymachus has
to acknowledge this, of course the rulers make mistakes, and he tries to invent an
argument that if a ruler makes a mistake, he's not really a true ruler. The true ruler is the
person who both acts on his own interest and of course knows what those interests are.
But the point that he admits is all, in a sense, that Socrates needs; justice is not power
alone, justice requires knowledge. Justice requires reflection. And that is of course at the
core of the famous Socratic thesis, that all virtue is a form of knowledge, all the virtues
require knowledge and reflection at their basis.
But much of the exchange with Thrasymachus turns on the problem of what kind of
knowledge justice involves, and justice is a kind of knowledge. If justice equals self-
interest and self-interest requires knowledge, well what kind of knowledge is that?
Thrasymachus contends that justice consists of the art of convincing people to obey the
rules that are really in the interests of others, the interests of their rulers. Justice, in other
words, for Thrasymachus is a kind of sucker's game; obeying the rules that really
benefit others largely because we fear the consequences of injustice. Justice is really
something only respected by the weak who are fearful of the consequences of injustice.
Again, the true ruler, in some ways, is one, Thrasymachus believes, who has the
courage to act unjustly for his own interest. "The true ruler," he says "is one who is like
a shepherd
[pastor]
with a flock, but he rules not for the benefit of the flock but, of course,
for his own interests, the good of the shepherd." Justice, like all knowledge, is really a
form, again, of self-interest.
And so one can ask, "Is Thrasymachus wrong to believe this?" And I realize I'm moving
over this very quickly, but is Thrasymachus wrong to believe that?
Socrates wins the argument in Book I with a kind of, you might even say, sleight
[skill
ability]
of hand. Both he and Thrasymachus believe that justice is a virtue, but Socrates
says, "What kind of virtue is it to deceive
[engaar]
and fleece
[esquilar]
other people?"
Thrasymachus is forced to admit that the just person is a fool, Thrasymachus believes,
is a fool for obeying laws that are not beneficial to him. But the best life, Thrasymachus
believes, it doing maximum injustice to others, doing whatever you like. And with that
realization, we see a very dramatic moment in Book I, even in the book as a whole.
Thrasymachus blushes
[ponerse colorado]
. He blushes when he realized that he has been
defending the claim not that justice is a virtue, but that justice is something that is really
a form of weakness. Thrasymachus himself seems to be embarrassed by his defense of
the tyrannical life, of the unjust life.
The suggestion Plato seems to be making by making Thrasymachus blush is, despite all
of his tough
[harsh]
talk, that he's not as tough as he appears to be, as he wants to think of
himself to be. He's shamed by the fact that he has been defending injustice and the
tyrannical way of life. And so it appears, the three conversations end, Book I ends with
uncertainty about what justice is. We have had three views of Cephalus, Polemarchus,
and Thrasymachus. They have all been refuted, but no clear alternative seems to have
emerged. Certainly Socrates has not really proposed an alternative to Thrasymachus in
his exchange with him; he has only, as it were, forced Thrasymachus to see that the
logic of his ideas, the logic of his argument that justice is in the interest of the stronger,
is a defense of tyranny, and is a defense of the unjust way of life.
So all of Book I is really a kind of warm up for what follows in the rest of the book. We
find out presumably what justice is. Until that point, we have no reason to really give up
on our current existing ideas about what justice is. And this is where the two most
important figures of the Republic begin to make their voices heard. Those are Glaucon
and Adeimantus.
Glaucon tells Socrates that he is dissatisfied with the refutation of Thrasymachus, and
so should we. Thrasymachus has been shamed, he has been forced to see where the
logic of his argument takes him, but that is not the same thing as being refuted.
Thrasymachus is really, as it turns out, a kind of girly-man who is ashamed to be seen
defending the unjust life. "But why should we be ashamed
[avergonzado]
to praise
[elogiar]

injustice?" Glaucon challenges Socrates. "It's not enough to show that justice is wrong,"
Glaucon says. "What we need is to hear why justice is good," or more precisely to hear
justice praised for itself. "Is there, in your opinion," Glaucon asks Socrates, "a kind of
good that we would choose because we delight in it for its own sake?" 358A. Is there a
kind of good that we delight
[pleasure]
in for its own sake? And this is where the rubber
hits the road.
Who is Glaucon? Glaucon and Adeimantus are the brothers of Plato, and other than
their appearance in this book, there is no historical record left about them. But Plato has
given us enough. In the first place, they are young aristocrats, and Glaucon's desire to
hear justice praised for its own sake indicates something about his scale of values. It
would be vulgar, he believes, to speak of justice, or any virtue in terms of material
rewards or consequences. He does not need to hear justice praised for its benefit, he's
indifferent to the consequences. Rather, he claims that he wants to hear justice defended
the way that no one has ever defended it before. The brothers desire to hear justice
praised for itself alone, and that seems to be expressive of their own freedom from
mercenary motives and incentives. It reveals to us something about their idealism and a
certain kind of loftiness of soul.
And certainly the brothers, we find out, are not slouches. They are not slouches at all.
Although it is easy to remember that later in the dialogue most of their contribution
seems to be of the form of "Yes Socrates, no Socrates," they seem to be rather passive
interlocutors. Their early challenges to Socrates show them to be potential philosophers.
That is to say the kind of persons who might one day rule the city.
Of the two, Glaucon seems to be the superior. He is described as the most courageous,
which in that context means the most manly, the most virile, and later Socrates admits
that he has always been full of wonder at the nature of the two brothers. And at 368a, he
cites a line of poetry, you'll remember, written about them for their distinction in battle,
they have been in war, they have been tested in war obviously.
They are also, and we see this from their relationship between one another, and the way
they speak to one another, they are also highly competitive, super achievers. A little bit
like some of you perhaps. There is quite a bit of jousting between them that you need to
be attentive too. And each proposes to Socrates a test that he will have to pass in order
to prove the value of justice and the just life.
Glaucon goes on to rehabilitate the argument of Thrasymachus in many ways, in a more
vivid and a more expressive way than Thrasymachus did himself. Glaucon tells a story,
you'll remember, a story that he modifies from the historian Herodotus, a story about a
man named Gyges who possessed a magic ring that conferred on him the power of
invisibility.
Who has not wondered what we would do if we had this power, the power of
invisibility? Gyges, in Glaucon's retelling of the story, Gyges uses this ring to murder
the king and to sleep with his wife, and to set himself up as king. What would you do if
you had this power, the power of this magic ring, where you could commit any crime,
indulge any vice, commit any outrage and be sure you could always get away with it?
Why if you could do that would you wish to be just at the same time, or wish to be just
instead of that? This is the challenge that Glaucon poses to Socrates. Why would
someone with absolute power and complete immunity to punishment, why would they
prefer justice to injustice? "Tell me that Socrates," Glaucon asks. "If justice truly is
something praiseworthy for itself alone, then Socrates should be able to provide an
answer that will satisfy Glaucon's retelling of the story of Gyges, that is certainly a very
tall order.
And that is where the brother, Adeimantus, joins in. Adeimantus has a somewhat
different set of concerns. He has heard justice praised his whole life from parents and
from poets and from other authorities, but for the most part, he has only heard justice
praised again for the benefits justice confers both in this life and the next. Honesty is the
best policy, we've heard Cephalus being concerned about returning to others what you
owe as a way of pleasing the gods in the afterlife, and Adeimantus rightly takes this
kind of argument to mean that justice is simply a virtue for the weak, the lame and the
unadventurous, if you were only concerned with the consequences. A real man does not
fear the consequences of injustice. Rather, Adeimantus' concern, and he gives a very
revealing image of what he takes justice to be, is with an image of self-guardianship, or
self-control. He tells us at 367a that each would be his own god. In other words, we
should not care what people say about us, but we should be prepared to develop
qualities of self-containment, autonomy and independence from the influence that
others can exercise over us. "How can I develop those qualities of self-guardianship or
self-control?" he asks Socrates.
And who has not felt that way before? The two brothers desire to hear justice praised for
itself, Glaucon, and to live freely and independently, Adeimantus. And that shows to
some degree I think, their own sense of alienation from their own society. Or if I can put
the case for them slightly anachronistically, these are two sons of the upper bourgeois
who feel degraded by the mendacity and hypocrisy of the world they see around them.
And anyway, what person with any sensitivity to greatness has not felt this way at one
time or another?
The two are open to persuasion, to consider alternatives, perhaps even radical
alternatives, to the society that has nurtured them. They are, to put it another way
perhaps, not only potential rulers and potential philosophers, they may also be potential
revolutionaries, and the remainder of the book is addressed to them and of course
people like them.
But the speeches of Glaucon and Adeimantus, you might say the circle around Socrates
is effectively closed. He knows he will not be returning to Athens that evening, and he
proposes to the two brothers and those listening to the conversation a kind of thought
experiment that he hopes will work magic on the two. "Let us propose," he says, "to
watch a city coming into being in speech." Let us create a city in speech. "It is easier,"
he says, "not to view justice microscopically in an individual, but rather let's view
justice as it were through a magnifying glass." Let's view justice in the large sense. Let
us view justice in a city in order to help us understand what it is in an individual.
And this idea that the city is essentially analogous to the soul, that the city is like the
soul, is the central metaphor around which the entire Republic is constructed. It seems
to be presented entirely innocuously, no one in the dialogue objects to it, yet everything
else follows from this idea that the city, the polis, is in the central respect like an
individual, like the soul of an individual.
What is Socrates trying to do here, and what is that metaphor, that central metaphor,
what function does it serve within the work? To state the obvious, Socrates introduces
this analogy to help the brothers better understand what justice is for an individual soul.
The governance of the soul, Adeimantus' standard of self-control, must be like the
governance of a city in some decisive respects. But in what respects? How is a city like
a soul and in what respect is self-governance, the control of one's passions and
appetites, in what respect is self-control like the governance of a collective body?
Consider the following example: when we say that so and so is typically American, or
typically Taiwanese for example, we mean that that person expresses certain traits of
character and behavior that are broadly representative in some way of the cross section
of their countrymen. Is this a useful way to think? More specifically, what does it mean
to say that an individual can be seen as magnified in his or her country, or that one's
country is simply the collective expression of certain individual traits of character? That
seems to be what Socrates is suggesting. Right, that's what he's getting at.
One way of thinking about the metaphor of city and soul together is to think of it as a
particular kind of causal hypothesis, about the formation of both individual character
and political institutions. In this reading of the city/soul analogy as a kind of causal
relation, maintains the view that as individuals we both shape and determine the
character of our societies, and that those societies in term shape and determine
individual character. The city and soul analogy could be seen then as an attempt to
understand how societies reproduce themselves, and how they shape citizens who again
in turn shape the societies in which they inhabit.
That seems to be one way of making sense of the city/soul hypothesis, but again it
doesn't seem to answer the question in what way are cities and individuals alike. To take
the American case for example, does it mean that something like the presidency, the
congress and the court can be discerned within the soul of every American citizen? That
would be absurd to think that obviously. I mean, I think that would be absurd. Maybe
you want to argue it and we could have a discussion, but it might mean that American
democracy, or democracy of any kind, helps to produce a particular kind of democratic
soul. Just like, you might say, the old regime in France, the old aristocratic society
existing before the revolution, tended to produce a very different kind of soul, a very
different kind of individual. Every regime will produce a distinctive kind of individual,
and this individual will come to embody the dominant character traits of the particular
regime.
The remainder of the Republic is, again, devoted to crafting the regime that will produce
a distinctive kind of human character, and that of course is why the book is a utopia.
There has never been a regime in history that was so single-mindedly devoted to the end
of producing that rarest and most difficult species of humanity called simply
philosopher.
So, city and soul. That leads to our next topic that I want to pursue for the remainder of
the class, the reform of poetry and the arts.
Socrates' city speech proceeds through several stages. The first stage proposed by
Adeimantus is the simple city, what he calls the city of utmost necessity. That is a city
limited to the satisfaction of certain basic needs. The primitive or simple city, the city of
utmost necessity, again it expresses the nature of Adeimantus' own soul, there is a kind
of noble simplicity in him that treats subjects as bodies or creatures of limited appetites.
The simple city is little more than a combination of households designed for the sake of
securing one's existence.
And at this point, and you can hear his brother chastising him, at this point Glaucon
retorts that it seems as if Adeimantus has created a city only fit for pigs, a city of pigs.
Are we only such that we want to feed at a common trough? Is there nothing more to
politics than that? And Glaucon says, "Where are the luxuries? Where are the relishes,"
he asks. "Where are the things that make up a city?" And hereto Glaucon's city
expresses his own tastes and his own soul. The war-like Glaucon would preside over
what Socrates calls a feverish city, one that institutionalizes honors, competitions and
above all war. If Adeimantus, again, expresses the appetitive part of the soul, Glaucon
represents the quality that Plato calls spiritedness, or thumos in Greek.
Spiritedness is the central, psychological quality of the Republic. The entire thrust of the
book is devoted to the taming of spiritedness, and to the control of spiritedness.
Spiritedness is that quality of soul that is most closely associated with the desires for
honors, fame and prestige. It is a higher order psychological quality. It seeks distinction,
the desire to be first in the race of life and lead us to seek to dominate others. We all
know people of this sort, do we not? And we all to some degree embody this quality in
ourselves. It is the quality that we associate with being a kind of alpha personality. This
is the issue for Socrates, how to channel this wild and untamed passion of spirit or heart,
how to channel this to some kind of common good. Can it be done? How can we begin
the domestication of the spirited Glaucon? The rest of the book is to some degree about
taming, asking the question whether Glaucon can be tamed.
And it is here that Socrates turns to his first and perhaps even his most controversial
proposal for the establishment of the just city. "The creation of the just city can only
begin," he says, "with the control of music, poetry and the arts." And this is where
Plato's image as an educator drives. The first order of business for the founder of a city,
any city, is the oversight of education. And his proposals for the reform of poetry,
especially Homeric poetry, represent clearly a radical departure from Greek educational
practices and beliefs. Why is this so important for Socrates? Ask yourself, if you were
founding a city, where would you begin?
Socrates' argument seems to be something like this: it is from the poets and I mean that
in the broadest sense of the term, myth makers, storytellers, artist, musicians, today we
might say film and television producers, it is from these people that we receive our
earliest and most vivid impressions of heroes and villains, gods and the afterlife. These
stories, the stories we hear from earliest childhood on, shape us in some very
meaningful sense for the rest of our lives. And the Homeric epics were of course for the
Greeks what the Bible was for us. Maybe even is in some communities. The names of
Achilles, Priam, Hector, Odysseus, Ajax, these would have been just as familiar and
important to the contemporaries of Plato as the names of Abraham, Isaac, Joshua and
Jesus are for us.
Plato's critique of Homeric poetry in the Republic is two-fold; it is both theological and
political. Maybe you might even say following Spinoza, that this is the core of Plato's
theological political treatise here. The theological critique is that Homer simply depicts
the gods as false, as fickle, and inconstant. He presents them as beings who are
unworthy of our worship. More importantly, the Homeric heroes are said to be bad role
models for those who follow them, they are shown to be intemperate in sex, overly fond
of money, into these vices Socrates adds cruelty and disregard for the dead bodies of
one's opponents. The Homeric heroes are ignorant and passionate men full of blind
anger and desire for retribution. How could such figures possibly serve as good role
models for citizens of a just city?
And Socrates' answer is, of course, the predation of poetry and the arts in Books II and
III. He wants to deprive poets of their power to enchant, and something Socrates admits
in the tenth book of the Republic, to which he himself has been highly susceptible to the
enchantment of the poets. We need to deprive, again, the poets, the song makers, the
lyricists, the musicians, the mythmakers, the storytellers, all of them, the power to
enchant us. And in place of the pedagogical power of poetry, Socrates proposes to
install philosophy in its place. As a result, the poets will have to be expelled from this
city. Imagine that. Sophocles will be expelled from the just city that Socrates wants to
create.
This always raises the question that you will discuss in your section, whether or not
Socrates' censorship of poetry and the arts is an indication of his totalitarian impulses.
This is the part of the Republic most likely to call up our own first amendment instincts.
"Who are you, Socrates," we are inclined to ask, "to tell us what we can read here and
listen to?" And furthermore, Socrates seems to be saying not that the Kallipolis will
have no poetry and music, it will simply be Socratic poetry and music.
And there's another question which you would no doubt be concerned to discuss,
namely what would such Socratically purified music and poetry look like? What would
it sound like? I don't know that I have an answer to this, but perhaps the Republic as a
whole is itself a piece of this Socratic poetry that will substitute for the Homeric kind.
But it's important to remember that the question of education and the question of the
reform and censorship and the control of poetry is introduced in the context of taming
the war-like passions of Glaucon and others like him. The question of censorship and
the telling of lies is introduced, in other words, as a question of military necessity,
controlling the guards or the auxiliaries of the city, its warrior class.
Nothing is said here about the education of farmers, artisans, merchants, laborers, the
economic class. Maybe, to speak bluntly, Socrates just doesn't care that much about
them. It's okay what they listen too. Nor has anything really been said up to this point
about the education of the philosopher. His interest here is in the creation of a tight, and
highly disciplined cadre of young warriors who will protect the city much as watchdogs
protect their own home. That is to say, recalling Polemarchus, those who are good to
friends and bark and growl at strangers. Such individuals will subordinate their own
desires and pleasures to the group, and live a life by a strict code of honor.
We have to ask: are Socrates' proposals unrealistic? Are they undesirable? Or are they
desirable? They are not undesirable if you believe as he does that even the best city
must provide provisions for war, and therefore a warrior's life, a soldier's life, will
require harsh privation in terms of material rewards and benefits as well as a willingness
to sacrifice for others.
It would seem far from being unrealistic, Socrates engages what we might call maybe a
kind of Socratic realism. Far more unrealistic would be the belief of those who argue,
and I'm thinking here of names like Immanuel Kant and others from the eighteenth and
nineteenth century, that one day we can abolish war altogether, and therefore abolish the
passions that give rise to conflict and war. So far Plato believes, is a passionate or
spirited aspect of nature remains strong so long will be necessary to educate the warriors
of society who defend it.
So on that I'm going to end today and next time we will talk about justice, the
philosophers and Plato's discovery of America.
[end of transcript]

Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 6
Transcript
September 27, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Today I have the impossible task of finishing the parts of the
Republic that I have assigned for the class. And in the past sometimes, I've assigned a
full two weeks to the Republic, which would be four lectures, but because I wanted to
do some other things with the course as well, I had to cut the Republic by one lecture,
and now I'm paying for that today. So I'm going to try to rush through, unfortunately, a
number of the major themes regarding the creation of the just city, the creation of
Kallipolis and then try to end the class by talking about, as I like to do for every thinker,
what does in this case, what does Plato, what are his views on modern America. What
does Plato say to us today?
But I want to start with what is one of the grand themes of the Republic, it is indicated
in Book II by Adeimantus' speech about self-control. It is introduced further by the
claims of Socrates to control, to censor, to control the poetry and the arts of the city.
And this is the big theme of what one might call "the control of the passions." This is
the theme of every great moralist from Spinoza to Kant to Freud. How do we control the
passions? And it is certainly a large theme of Plato's theory of justice in the Republic.
Every great moral philosopher has a strategy for helping us submit our passions to some
kind of control, to some kind of supervening moral power. And again, recall this is the
theme raised at the beginning of Book II by Adeimantus, who puts forward an idea of
self-control, or what he calls self-guardianship as his goal. How can we protect
ourselves from the passion for injustice? And one of the things Socrates emphasizes is
that the most powerful of those passions, the most powerful passion is that Socratic
passion that he calls thumos, or what our translator has as spiritedness, anger, maybe
what biblical translators call heart, having a big heart, having thumos and all of that
implies. This is for Plato, the political passion par excellence. It is a kind of fiery love of
fame, love of distinction that leads men and women of a certain type to pursue their
ambitions in public life, in the public space. It is clearly connected this notion of
spiritedness or this thumotic quality to our capacities for heroism and for self-sacrifice.
But it is also connected to our desires for domination and the desire to exercise tyranny
over others. Thumos has a kind of dual component to it. It can lead us to a sense of kind
of righteous
[think morally correct]
indignation and anger at the sight of injustice, but it can
also lead us in a rather contradictory way to desire to dominate and tyrannize over
others. This is the quality that Socrates regards as being possessed by every great
political leader and statesman, but it is also clearly a quality possessed by every tyrant.
And the question posed by the Republic, in many ways, the question around which the
book as a whole gravitates, is whether this thumotic quality can be controlled. Can it be
re-directed, can it be re-channeled in the service of the public good? Socrates introduces
the problem of thumos by a story, a particularly vivid story that I hope you all
remember, where in Book IV he tells the story about Leontius at the walls.
"Leontius," he writes, "was proceeding from the Piraeus outside the north wall when he
perceived corpses lying near the public executioner. At the same time, he desired to see
them. He wanted to see this grotesque sight, these dead bodies lying there. And to the
contrary, he felt disgust and turned himself away and for a while he battled with himself
and hid his face. But eventually overpowered by desire, he forced his eyes open and
rushing towards the corpses said 'see you damn wretches, take your fill of this beautiful
sight'" 439c. That story that Socrates tells here is not one of reason controlling the
passions, but rather one of intense internal conflict that Leontius felt. We see his
conflicting emotions both to see and not to see, a sense that he wished to observe and
yet he is at, in some ways, at war with himself, knowing to gawk, to stare at this sight.
There's something shameful about it and he felt shame. One example I particularly like
of this was suggested last year, I think, by Justin Zaremby who said it's the emotion we
all feel when we're driving down the highway
[major road:autopista]
, right, and we see a car
crash
[collide violently]
or we go by a wreck
[chatarra]
and everybody slows down, right, they all
want to see. What are they hoping
[desire]
to see? Well, they want to see blood, they want
to see if there's a body, they want to see how much damage has been caused. And we've
all been in this, where we know that it's shameful to look at this, just drive on, as
Socrates would say "mind your own business," and yet at the same time we feel, even
against our will, compelled to look and think about that.
And think about that and this case of Leontius the next time you, for those of you who
have driver's licenses, are next driving on the highway and see something like that. It is
the thumos that is the cause of--that should be the cause of your shame at slowing down
to look. Sometimes we can't help but slow down because everybody is slowed down in
front of us, we have no choice. But anyway, that incident, that story that Socrates relates
is connected to the fact that Leontius is a certain kind of man. He regards himself as
proud, independent, someone who wants to be in control of his emotions but isn't. He is
a soul at war with himself, and potentially therefore, at war with others. And what the
Republic tries to do is to offer us strategies, maybe we might even call it a therapy, for
dealing with thumos, for submitting it to the control of reason and helping us to achieve
some level of balance, of self-control and moderation. And these are the qualities taken
together that Socrates calls justice, that can only be achieved when reason is in control
of the appetites and desires. Again, a question the book asks is whether that ideal of
justice can be used as a model for politics. Can it serve as a model for justice in the
city?
This connection he has established between justice in the city and justice in the soul,
what are the therapies or strategies for solving injustice in the soul or imbalance of some
kind in the soul? Can those be transferred or translated in some way to public justice, to
political justice, justice in the polis? Right? You with me on that so far? So, on the basis
of this, Socrates proposes how to proceed with the construction of Kallipolis, and he
does so through what he calls three waves. There are three waves, three waves of
reform, so to speak, that will contribute to the creation of the city. The first of these
waves is, you remember, the restrictions on private property, even the abolition of
private property. The second, the abolition of the family, and the third wave being the
establishment of the philosopher kings. Each of these waves is regarded as in some way
necessary for the proper construction of a just city. And I'm not going to speak about all
of them, but I do want to speak a little bit about, because it has particular relevance for
us, his proposals for the co-education of men and women that is a great part of his plan,
especially related to the abolition of the family, that men and women be educated in the
same way, right.
The core of Socrates' proposal for equal education is presented in a context that he
knows to be or suggests will be laughable. It will certainly be seen that way, he
suggests, by Glaucon and Adeimantus. There is no job, he states, that cannot be
performed equally well by both men and women. Is Socrates a feminist? Gender
differences, he says, are no more relevant when it comes to positions of political rule
than is the distinction between being bald and being hairy. Socrates is not saying that
men and women are the same in every respect, he says, but equal with respect to
competing for any job at all. There will be no glass ceilings in Kallipolis. The first, in
many ways, great defender, the first great champion of the emancipation of women
from the household. But this proposal comes at certain costs, he tells us. The proposal
for a level playing field demands, of course, equal education.
And here he says that men and women, being submitted to the same regime, will mean,
among other things, that they will compete with one another in co-educational
gymnasia. They will compete with each other in the nude because that is the way
Greeks exercised. They will compete naked in co-educational gymnasia, think of that.
Furthermore, their marriages and their procreations will be, he tells us, for the sake of
the city. There is nothing like romantic love among the members of the guardian class.
Sexual relations will be intended purely for the sake of reproduction and unwanted
fetuses will be aborted. The only exception to this prohibition is for members of the
guardian class who are beyond the age of reproduction, he tells us, and they, he says,
can have sex if they're still able, with anyone they like. A kind of version of recreational
sex as a reward for a lifetime of self-control. Child-bearing may be inevitable for
women but the rearing of the child will be the responsibility of the community or at
least a class of guardians and common daycare centers. A sort of variation of Hillary
Clinton's book that "it takes a village to raise a child," comes right out of Plato
apparently. No child should know their biological parents and no parent should know
their child. The purpose of this scheme being to eliminate senses of mine and me, to
promote a kind of common sense of esprit de corps among the members of the guardian
class, "a community of pleasure and pain," Socrates calls it at 464a. What we are
creating is a community of pleasure and pain. I will feel your pains, and of course you
will feel mine.
The objections to Socrates, are of course, you know, raised as early as by Aristotle
himself, in the very next generation. How can we care for things, how can we truly care
for things that are common? We learn to care for things that are closest to us, that are in
some way our own. We can only show proper love and concern for things that are ours,
not things that are common. Common ownership, Aristotle argues, will mean a sort of
common neglect. Children will not be raised better by putting them under the common
care of guardians or in daycares but they will be equally neglected. But it is in this, and
you can think about that, about whether that's true or not, but it is in the same context of
his treatment of men and women that something else often goes unnoticed and that is
Socrates' efforts to rewrite the laws of war, because of course the guardians are being
trained and educated to be guards, to be warriors, to be members of a military class.
[15:15]
In the first place, he tells us, children must be taught the art of war. This must be the
beginning of their education, Socrates says, making the children spectators of war.
Children will be taken, he seems to suggest, to battles and to sites of where fighting is
going on, to be spectators for them to become used to and habituated to seeing war and
what everything that goes on. Not only is expulsion from the ranks of the guardians
penalty for cowardice, but Socrates suggests there should be, listen to this, "erotic
rewards for those who excel in bravery." Erotic rewards for excellence in bravery.
Consider the following remarkable proposal at 468c, "and I add to the laws of war,"
Socrates writes, "that as long as they, the guardians, are on campaign, no one whom he
wants to kiss should be permitted to refuse. So that if a man happens to love someone,
either male of female, he would be more eager to win the rewards of valor." That is to
say as a reward for bravery, exhibited bravery, the hero should be allowed to kiss
anyone they like while they are on patrol, male or female. A particularly puritanical
editor of Plato from the twentieth century writes in a footnote to that passage, "this is
almost the only passage in Plato that one would wish to blot out," his sensibilities were
offended by this notion. But I wonder what kind of, if this might even make a powerful
incentive for military recruitment today. What do you think? Well, think about it. I don't
know.
So, at long last, we move from the education of the guards to justice. What is justice,
we've been questioning asking ourselves throughout this book in which Plato has been,
Socrates has been teasing us with. At long last we come to this thing. The platonic idea
of justice concerns harmony, he tells us, both harmony in the city and harmony in the
soul. We learn that the two are actually homologous in some way. Justice is defined as
what binds the city together and makes it one. Or he puts it another way, consists of
everyone and everything performing those functions for which they are best equipped.
Each of the other citizens, Socrates says, must be brought to that which naturally suits
him, which naturally suits him, one man, one job, he says. So that each man practicing
his own which is one, will not become many but one. Thus you see, he says, the whole
city will naturally grow up together.
Justice seems to mean adhering to the principal, justice in the city, adhering to the
principal of division of labor. One man, one job, everyone doing or performing the task
that naturally fits or suits them. One can, of course, as you've already imagined, raise
several objections to this view and again Aristotle seems to take the lead. Plato's
excessive emphasis on unity would seem to destroy the natural diversity of human
beings that make up a city. Is there one and only one thing that each person does best?
And if so, who could decide this? Would such a plan of justice not be overly coercive in
forcing people into predefined social roles? Shouldn't individuals be free to choose for
themselves their own plans of life wherever it may take them? But however that may be,
Plato believes he has found in the formula of one man, one job, a certain foundation for
political justice. That is to say, the three parts of the cities, workers, auxiliaries,
guardians, each of them all work together and each by minding their own business, that
is doing their own job, out of this a certain kind of peace and harmony will prevail. And
since the city, you remember, is simply the soul at large, the three classes of the city
merely express the three parts of the soul.
The soul is just, he tells us, when the appetites, spiritedness, and reason cooperate with
reason, ruling, spirit and appetite, just as in the polis, the philosopher-king rules the
warriors and the workers. The result, he tells us, is a kind of balance of the parts of the
whole, right. Justice is a kind of harmony in which the three parts of the city and the
three parts of the soul are direct expressions of one another. But that formula forces us
to return to the original Socratic question about the harmony of the soul and the city. Is
the structure of a city identical to the structure of a soul? Are they really identical? Well,
maybe, maybe not. For example, every individual consists of three parts, of appetite,
spirit, and reason. Yet each of us will be confined it seems to only one task in the social
hierarchy. I assume what Socrates means by that is though each individual will, each of
us, embody all three features of soul, appetite, spirit, and reason, only one of these will
be the dominate trait in each of us. Some of us will be dominantly appetitive
personalities, others will be dominantly spirited and so on. But even still when we think
of it, if I am a member of the money making class, I am still more than simply a bundle
of desires and appetites, just as a member of the warrior class would be clearly more
than mere thumos or mere spiritedness. So, to confine the individual, it seems, to one
and only one sphere of life would seem to do an injustice to the internal psychological
complexity that makes each of us who we are.
Let's examine that problem from a slightly different point of view. Socrates tells us
repeatedly that justice in the city consists of each member, each citizen fulfilling his
task in the social division of labor, in the social hierarchy. But this seems to be a very
far cry, does it not, from the kind of justice he talks about in the soul that consists in
what we might think of as sort of rational autonomy or self-control where reason
controls the passions and the appetites. In fact, the vast majority of citizens in even the
platonically just city will not necessarily have platonically just souls. The harmony and
self-discipline of the city will not be due, it seems, to each and every member of the city
but rather will rely on the guardian class, that special class of philosopher kings who
will rule, let it be recalled, through selective lies, myths, and other various kinds of
deception. So how can it be the case if at all, that you could have a just city, that is to
say a city where everyone is performing their own task, they're following the division of
labor, and yet very few of those members will have, so to speak, platonically just souls,
that is to say, souls dominated by a kind of self-control or self-guardianship? That
would certainly not be true of the members of the artisan class or the military class for
that reason.
So the question, that question is posed, that objection is posed by Adeimantus, you
remember, at the beginning of Book IV. "What would your apology be Socrates,"
Adeimantus says, "if it were objected that you're hardly making these men happy, these
people just," he says at 419a. Adeimantus is concerned that Socrates is being unfair to
the auxiliaries and the guardians, giving them all the responsibilities but none of the
rewards, none of the pleasures that would seem to be the reward of responsibility. How
can a citizen of Kallipolis live a just or happy life if he or she is deprived of most of the
goods or pleasures that we seek? Socrates gives a rather lame response. In founding the
city, he says, we are not looking to the exceptional happiness of any one individual or
any group but rather to the city as a whole. And Adeimantus appears to accept that
response, oh yes, I forgot we are concerned with the happiness, the justice of the whole.
But his question is still one that lingers and one that Plato includes for a purpose.
What about, how can you have a platonically just city if most people in it, certainly
most people of the auxiliary class are deprived of the pleasures and the goods that we
desire? It's a question that lingers and one might wonder whether Socrates ever
successfully answers that question. He silences Adeimantus in some way as he silences
Thrasymachus earlier; that is not always to say that their objections have been
answered. And that leads, as it were, to the third and final wave of paradox of the
Kallipolis which is the famous proposal for the philosopher-king. What is Plato without
the philosopher-king? What is the Republic without the philosopher-king? Unless the
philosophers rule as kings or those now called kings, genuinely philosophize, there will
be no rest from the ills for the cities, he says, right? Socrates presents this proposal,
again, as outlandish. He says he expects to be drowned in laughter. And this has led
some readers to suggest that the proposal for philosophers' kings is ironical. That it is
intended as a kind of joke to, in many ways, discredit the idea of the just city or at least
to indicate its extreme implausibility.
The question is why does Socrates regard philosophic kingship as required for
Kallipolis, for the just city? Let me say, I am by no means convinced that the idea for
the philosopher-king is an impossibility or is intended as a kind of absurdity. Plato
himself, remember, made a number of trips to Sicily to serve as the advisor to a king
there, Dionysius, and all of these missions failed and left him deeply dispirited. The
ambition in some ways to unite philosophy and politics has been a recurring dream of
political philosophy ever since Plato. Socrates says he will be drowned in laughter but
many other people have taken this dream or this aspiration very seriously. Consider one
thinker, and I will, I'm going to read you a short passage and I'm going to come back to
this again later in the semester, from Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, chapter 31 of
Leviathan, where Hobbes gives us a very personal statement about his intention in
writing this book.
Hobbes wrote, "I am at the point of believing that my labors will be as useless as the
commonwealth of Plato." He seems to be rather despairing about whether this book is
actually going to have any affect. "I'm in the point of believing it will be as useless as
the commonwealth of Plato," for he also is of the opinion that it is impossible for the
disorders of state and change of government by civil war ever to be taken away until
sovereigns be philosophers. But after admitting his despair about the possibility of
realizing his ideas and practice, Hobbes continues as follows, "I recover some hope," he
says, "that one time or other, this writing of mine may still fall into the hands of a
sovereign who will consider himself without the help of any interested or envious
interpreter. And by the exercise of entire sovereignty in protecting the public teaching of
it, convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice." So there you have
Hobbes talking about his own book, expecting or at least hoping it will fall into the
hands of a sovereign who one day, again, without envious or self-interested interpreters
may, may one day become a practical source of guidance for statecraft. Here it is
Hobbes taking Plato's suggestion very seriously, and we see this again very much in the
history of political philosophy in thinkers like Rousseau, or Marx, or Nietzsche, or
Machiavelli all of whom sought to gain the ear of political leaders and convert their
ideas into some kind of practice.
But most of the objections to Plato's particular form of the philosophic kingship really
are centered on the practicality of his idea. And beyond this, there is the problem with
the very cogency of the idea itself. Consider the following, can philosophy and politics
actually be united? It would seem that the needs of philosophy are quite different from
the demands or requirements of political rule. Can you imagine Socrates willingly
giving up one of his conversations for the tedious business of legislation and public
administration? Can one imagine that? The philosopher is described by Plato as
someone with knowledge of the eternal forms, lying behind or beyond the many
particulars. But just how does that kind of knowledge help us deal with the constant ebb
and flow of political life? It seems not enough that the philosopher have knowledge of
the forms but this knowledge has to be supplemented by experience, by judgment and
by a kind of practical rationality. Was Plato simply unaware of this, I can't believe that.
I don't believe that. So the question is, what kind of unity was he expecting of
philosophy and politics?
Anyway, philosophers are not purely thinking machines but they are also human beings
composed of reason, spiritedness, and appetite. Will not even philosophers, one might
ask, given the possibility of absolute power be tempted to abuse their positions? Maybe,
maybe not, who knows. So these are the questions, these are at least among the
questions that Socrates or Plato, the author of the book, deliberately poses for us to
consider. So what is the doctrine of the philosopher-king intended to prove? Must the
massive effort to construct the city in speech in order to understand justice in the soul?
Is it a philosophical possibility? Does he hold it out as a real possibility or must it be
considered a failure in some way or that if the dialogue does end in failure what can we
learn from that? Those are questions I want you to consider.
But for now, what I want to do is talk about Plato's democracy and ours. What does
Plato teach us about our own regime? Could Plato have imagined such a regime? I think
in many ways he can and he did. In one sense, the Republic, and I've given some
indications of this today, seems to be the most anti-democratic book ever written. Its
defense of philosophic kingship is itself a direct repudiation of Athenian democracy. Its
conception of justice, minding one's own business, is a rejection of the democratic belief
that citizens have sufficient knowledge to participate in the offices of government. To
be sure, Athenian democracy is not American democracy. Plato thought of democracy
as a kind of rule by the many that he associated with the unrestricted freedom to do
everything that one likes. This seems in many ways to be quite far from the American
democracy based on constitutional government, systems of checks and balances,
protection of individual rights, and so on. The differences between Athens and
Washington seem to be very far. And yet, in many ways, Socrates diagnoses very
powerfully an important condition of modern democratic life with which we are all
familiar.
Consider this passage in Book VIII of the Republic that I encourage you to read but is
not on your assigned list. Socrates writes in Book VIII, 561c, "speaking of the
democratic soul, the democratic man, he also lives along day by day gratifying the
desire that occurs to him, at one time, drinking and listening to the flute." Today we
have different kinds of music to substitute for the flute but you get the point. Drinking
and listening to the flute, at another time downing water and dieting, now practicing
gymnastics and again idling and neglecting everything, and sometimes spending his
time as though he were occupied with philosophizing. Often, he engages in politics and
jumping up, says and does whatever chances to come to his mind. And if he ever
admires any soldiers, he turns in that direction. And if money-makers in that one and
there is neither order nor necessity in this life but calling this life sweet, free, and
blessed, he follows it throughout. Is that image of life at all familiar to us? Doing
anything you like, it seems to be the opposite of the platonic understanding of justice as
each one doing a special function or fulfilling or doing a special craft. Just doing
whatever you like and calling that sweet, free, and blessed throughout.
This account should be instantly recognizable as the state of modern democracy in some
ways. There exists, as Plato and Socrates clearly understand, a very real tendency within
democracy to identify the good human being, the good man with, you might say, the
good sport, the regular guy, the cooperative fellow, you know, someone who goes along
and gets along with others. By educating citizens to cooperate with each other in a
friendly manner, democracy seems, so Plato is suggesting, they stand in danger of
devaluing people who are prepared to stand alone, of rugged individualists who will go
down with the ship if need be. It is precisely this kind of creeping conformism, this kind
of easy going toleration, this sort of soft nihilism that democracies tend to foster in
which not only Plato, but modern thinkers like Emmerson, and Tocqueville, and Mill,
John Stewart Mill, very much warned about.
What bothers Socrates most about our democracy is a certain kind of instability, its
tendency to be pulled between extremes of anarchy, between lawlessness and tyranny. It
is in this section of the Republic, Adeimantus asks, won't we with Aeschylus say
whatever comes to our lips? Won't we say with Aeschylus whatever comes to our lips?
The idea of having the liberty to say whatever comes to our lips sounds to Plato like a
kind of blasphemy. The view that nothing is shameful, that everything should be
permitted, to say whatever comes to our lips There is a kind of license that comes
from the denial of any restraints on our desires or a kind of relativistic belief that all
desires are equal and all should be permitted. Plato's views on democracy were not all
negative, to be sure. He wasn't only a critic of democracy. It was, after all, a democracy
that produced Socrates and allowed him to philosophize freely until his seventieth year.
Would this have been permitted in any other city of the ancient world? And he surely
would not be allowed to philosophize in many cities and countries today.
Remember the letter that Plato wrote near the end of his life, when he compares the
democracy to a golden age, at least in comparison to what went after. Plato here seems
to agree with Winston Churchill that democracy is the worst regime except for all the
others. It's the worst that's been tried except for everything else. So what is the function
of Kallipolis, this perfect, this beautiful city? What purpose does it serve? The
philosopher-king, he tells us, may be an object of hope or wish but Plato realizes that
this possibility is not really to be expected. The philosophic city is introduced as a
metaphor to help us understand the education of the soul. The reform of politics may
not be within our power but the exercise of self-control always is. The first
responsibility of the individual who wishes to engage in political reform is to reform
themselves. All reform seems to begin at home. And we see this very vividly when we
look at so many politicians today in public scolds who teach us and who are hectoring
us about living a certain way of life, living a certain, living according to their likes and
then we will find out of course something very shameful about them. I'm thinking of a
couple of people in particular, I won't mention any names in the public sphere. Plato's
judgment seems to be "you need to reform yourself before you can think about
reforming others." This is a point that is often lost in the Republic, that it is first of all a
work on the reform of the soul.
That is not to say at all that it teaches withdrawal from political responsibilities, it does
not. Philosophy and certainly Socratic philosophy requires friends, comrades,
conversations. It is not something that can simply be pursued in isolation. Socrates
understands that those who want to reform others must reform themselves, but many
who've tried to imitate him have been less careful. It is easy to confuse, as many people
have done, the Republic, with a recipe for tyranny. The twentieth century, and even the
beginnings of our own, is littered with the corpses of those who have set themselves up
as philosopher-kings, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Khamenei, to name just some of the
most obvious. But these men are not philosophers. Their professions to justice are just
that, they are professions or pretensions expressing their vanity and their ambition.
For Plato, philosophy was in the first instance, a therapy for our passions in a way of
setting limits to our desires. And this is precisely the opposite of the tyrant who Plato
describes as a person of limitless desires who lacks the most rudimentary kind of
governance, namely self-control. The difference between the philosopher and the tyrant
illustrate two very different conceptions of philosophy. For some, philosophy represents
a form of liberation from confusion, from unruly passions and prejudices, from
incoherence. Again, a therapy of the soul that brings peace and contentment and a kind
of justice. And yet for others, philosophy is the source of the desire to dominate. It is the
basis of tyranny in the great age of ideologies through which we are still passing.
The question is that both tendencies are at work within philosophy and how do we
encourage one side but not the other. As that great philosopher Karl Marx once asked,
"Who will educate the educators?" It's the wisest thing he ever said. Who will educate
the educators, who do we turn to for help? There is obviously no magic solution to this
question but the best answer I know of is Socrates. He showed people how to live, and
just as importantly, he showed them how to die. He lived and died not like most people
but better, and even his most vehement critics will admit to that. Thank you very much.
I'll see you next Wednesday, and we'll start Aristotle.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 7
Transcript
October 4, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: I've always been told that any serious introduction to political
philosophy has to start with a big piece of Plato. We've made some effort to do that.
Now, we have to move on. So we move to Plato's son, his adopted son, in a manner of
speaking, Aristotle. There's a story about the life of Aristotle. It goes something like
this. Aristotle was born. He spent his life thinking and then he died. There is, obviously,
more to his life than that. But, to some degree, this captures some of the way in which
Aristotle has been perceived over the centuries. That is to say, the ultimate philosopher.
Aristotle was born in the year 384, 15 years after the trial of Socrates. He was born in
the northern part of Greece, in a city called Stagira, which is part of what is now called
Macedonia. It was called that then. When he was about your age, when he was 17 or
thereabouts, maybe slightly younger than many of you, he was sent by his father to do
what you are doing. He was sent by his father to go to college. He was sent to Athens to
study at The Academy, the first university, spoke about and established by Plato. Unlike
most of you, Aristotle did not spend four years at the Platonic Academy. He remained
attached to it for the next 20, until the death of Plato. After the death of Plato, perhaps
because of the choice of successors to The Academy, Aristotle left Athens, first for Asia
Minor and then to return to his home in Macedonia where he had been summoned by
King Phillip to establish a school for the children of the Macedonian ruling class. It was
here that Aristotle met and taught Phillip's son. Who was Phillip of Macedonia's son?
Student: Alexander.
Professor Steven Smith: Alexander. You all remember the recent movie of a year or
two ago about Troy with Colin Farrell about Alexander. Who played Aristotle in that
film, do you remember?
Student: Anthony Hopkins.
Professor Steven Smith: Anthony Hopkins, excellent. Was it Anthony Hopkins? I have
in my notes here it was Christopher Plummer. I'll have to check. I'll have to Google that
when I go home. Maybe you're right. I have a feeling it was Anthony Hopkins.
Whoever, he was an excellent Aristotle, didn't have a large enough part in the film. In
any case, Aristotle returned to Athens later on and established a school of his own, a
rival to the Platonic Academy that he called the Lyceum. There is a story that near the
end of his life, Aristotle was himself brought up on capital charges, as was Socrates, due
to another wave of hostility to philosophy. But rather unlike Socrates, rather in staying
to drink the hemlock, Aristotle left Athens and was reported to have said he did not
wish to see the Athenians sin against philosophy for a second time. I'll go back to that
story in a minute, because I think it's very revealing about Aristotle.
In any way, this story helps to underscore some important differences between Plato
and Aristotle. At one level, you might say there is an important difference in style that
you will see almost immediately. Unlike his intellectual godfather, Socrates, who wrote
nothing but conversed endlessly, and unlike his own teacher, Plato, who wrote
imitations of those endless Socratic conversations, Aristotle wrote disciplined and
thematic treatises on virtually every topic, from biology to ethics to metaphysics to
literary criticism and politics. One can assume safely that Aristotle would have received
tenure in any number of departments at Yale, whereas Socrates could not have applied
to have been a teaching assistant. These differences conceal others.
For Plato, it would seem, the study of politics was always bound up with deeply
philosophical and speculative questions, questions of metaphysics, questions of the
structure of the cosmos. What is the soul? What is the soul about? Aristotle appears
from the beginning to look more like what we would think of as a political scientist. He
collected constitutions, 158 of them in all, from throughout the ancient world. He was
the first to give some kind of conceptual rigor to the vocabulary of political life. Above
all, Aristotle's works, like the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, were explicitly
intended as works of political instruction, political education. They seem to be designed
less to recruit philosophers and potential philosophers than to shape and educate citizens
and future statesmen. His works seem less theoretical in the sense of constructing
abstract models of political life than advice-giving, in the sense of serving as a sort of
civic-minded arbiter of public disputes.
Unlike Socrates, who famously in his image in Book VII of the Republic, compared
political life to a cave, and unlike the Apology where Socrates tells his fellow citizens
that their lives, because unexamined, are not worth living, Aristotle takes seriously the
dignity of the city and showed the way that philosophy might be useful to citizens and
statesmen. Yet, for all of this, one might say there is still a profound enigma
surrounding Aristotle's political works. To put it simply, one could simply ask, what
were the politics of Aristotle's Politics? What were Aristotle's own political beliefs?
Aristotle lived at the virtual cusp of the world of the autonomous city-state of the Greek
polis. Within his own lifetime, Aristotle would see Athens, Sparta, and the other great
cities of Greece swallowed up by the great Macedonian Empire to the north. What we
think of as the golden age of Greece was virtually at an end during the lifetime of
Aristotle. Other Greek thinkers of his time, notably a man named Demosthenes, wrote a
series of speeches called Philippics, anti-Phillip, to the north to warn his contemporaries
about the dangers posed to Athens from the imperial ambitions of Macedon. But
Phillip's [correction: meant to say Demosthenes'] warnings came too late. Again, the
autonomous Greek polis that Plato and Glaucon, Adeimantus and others would have
known came to an end.
What did Aristotle think of these changes? What did he think was going on? He is
silent. Aristotle's extreme reluctance, his hesitance to speak to the issues of his time, are
perhaps the result of his foreignness to Athens. He was not an Athenian. Therefore, he
lacked the protection of Athenian citizenship. At the same time, you might think his
reticence, his reluctance to speak in his own voice may have also been a response to the
fate of Socrates and the politically endangered situation of philosophy. Yet, for a man as
notoriously secretive and reluctant as Aristotle, his works acquired over the centuries
virtual canonical status. He became an authority, really one could say the authority on
virtually everything. For Thomas Aquinas, who wrote in the thirteenth century,
Aristotle was referred to, by Aquinas, simply as "the philosopher." There was no reason
even to say his name. He was simply The Philosopher. For the great Jewish medieval
philosopher, Moses Maimonides, Aristotle was called by him "the Master of those who
know." Think of that, "the master of those who know."
For centuries, Aristotle's authority seemed to go virtually unchallenged. Are you with
me? Yet, the authority of Aristotle obviously no longer has quite the power that it once
did. The attack began not all that long ago, really only as late as the seventeenth
century. A man, who we will read later this semester, named Thomas Hobbes, was one
who led the pack, led the charge. In the forty-sixth chapter of Leviathan, a chapter we
will read later, Hobbes wrote, "I believe that scarce anything can be more repugnant to
government than much of what Aristotle has said in his Politics, nor more ignorantly
than a great part of his Ethics." Think of that "nothing more repugnant to
government than what Aristotle wrote in his Politics."
Naturally, all thinkers, to some degree, have read Aristotle through their own lenses.
Aquinas read Aristotle as a defender of monarchy. Dante, in his book, De Monarchia on
monarchy, saw Aristotle as giving credence to the idea of a universal monarchy under
the leadership of a Christian prince. But Hobbes saw Aristotle quite differently. For
Hobbes, Aristotle taught the dangerous doctrine of republican government that was seen
to be practiced particularly during the Cromwellian Period in England, during the civil
war. Aristotle's doctrine that man is a political animal, Hobbes believed, could only
result and did result, in fact, in regicide, the murder of kings. There are certainly echoes
of this reading of Aristotle as a teacher of participatory republican government in the
later writings of democratic thinkers from Tocqueville to Hannah Arendt.
Anyway, this returns us to the enigma of Aristotle. Who was this strange and elusive
man whose writings seem to have been enlisted both for the support of monarchy and
for republics, even for a universal monarchy and a smaller participatory democratic kind
of government? Who was this man and how to understand his writings? The best place
to start is, of course, with his views stated in the opening pages of the Politics on the
naturalness of the city. His claim that man is, by nature, the political animal. That's his
famous claim. What does that mean--we are the political animal. Aristotle states his
reasons succinctly, maybe too succinctly.
On the third page of the Politics where he remarks that every city or every polis exists
by nature, and he goes on to infer from this that man is what he calls the zoon politikon,
the political animal, the polis animal. His reasoning here, brief as it is, is worth
following. Let me just quote him. "That man" he says "is much more a political animal
than any kind of bee or herd animal is clear." Why is it clear? "For we assert," he says,
"nature does nothing in vain and man alone among the animals has speech. While other
species," he notes, "may have voice, may have sounds and be able to distinguish
pleasure and pain, speech"--logos is his word for it. Man has logos--reason or speech.
The word can mean either.-- "is more than the ability simply to distinguish pleasure and
pain." He goes on. "But logos," he writes, "serves to reveal the advantageous and the
harmful. And hence," he writes, "the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as
compared to other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad, just and
unjust and other things." In other words, he seems to be saying that it is speech or
reason, logos, that is able to both distinguish and create certain moral categories, certain
important moral categories that we live by--the advantageous, the harmful, the just and
unjust, and things of this sort that constitute, as he says, a family and a polis.
But that's Aristotle. In what sense, we could ask ourselves and I think you probably will
be asking in your sections, in what sense is the city by nature? In what sense are we
political animals by nature? Aristotle appears to give two different accounts in the
opening pages of the book that you might pay attention to. In the literal opening, he
gives what looks like a kind of natural history of the polis. He seems there to be a kind
of anthropologist writing a natural history. The polis is natural in the sense that it has
grown out of smaller and lesser forms of human association. First comes the family,
then an association of families in a tribe, then a further association in a village, and then
you might say an association of villages that create a polis or a city. The polis is natural
in the sense that it is an outgrowth, the most developed form of human association, in
the way that one used to see in natural history museums, these kind of biological charts
of human development from these lesser forms of life all the way up to civilization in
some way. That is part of Aristotle's argument. But there is a second sense for him and,
in some ways, a more important sense in which he says the polis is by nature. It is
natural.
The city is natural in that it allows human beings to achieve and perfect what he calls
their telos. That is to say their end, their purpose. We are political animals, he says,
because participation in the life of the city is necessary for the achievement of human
excellence, for the achievement of our well-being. A person who is without a city, he
says, who is apolis--without a city--must either be a beast or a god. That is to say, below
humanity or above it. Our political nature is our essential characteristic. Because only
by participating in political life do we achieve, can we acquire the excellences or the
virtues, as he says, that make us what we are, that fulfill our telos or fulfill our
perfection. When Aristotle says that man is a political animal by nature, he is doing
more than simply asserting just a truism or just some platitude. In many ways he is
advancing a philosophic postulate of great scope and power, although the full
development of the thesis is only left deeply embedded. He doesn't fully develop it in
this work or in saying.
He isn't saying that man is political by nature. Note that he is not saying, although he is
sometimes taken to be saying this, that he is not saying that there is some kind of
biologically implanted desire or impulse that we have or share that leads us to engage in
political life. That is to say we do not, he wants to say, engage in politics. To say it's
natural for us to do so is not to say we engage in political life spontaneously and avidly,
as you might say spiders spin webs or ants build anthills. He is not a kind of socio-
biologist of politics, although he sometimes appears this way when he says that man is a
political animal. In some ways, to the contrary. He says man is political not because we
have some biological impulse or instinct that drives us to participate in politics, but, he
says, because we are possessed of the power of speech. It is speech that makes us
political. Speech or reason in many was far from determining our behavior in some kind
of deterministic biological sense, speech or reason gives us a kind of freedom, latitude,
an area of discretion in our behavior not available to other species. It is a reason or
speech, not instinct, that makes us political.
But then the question is, for Aristotle, the question he poses for us is: What is the
connection between logos, the capacity for speech of rationality, and politics? How are
these two combined? Why does one lead to or entail the other? In many ways, he's not
making a causal claim so much. He's not saying that it is because we are rational
creatures possessed of the power of speech that causes us to engage in politics. He has
more of an argument of the kind that this attribute of logos actually entails political life.
He makes his argument, I think, because logos entails two fundamentally human
attributes. First, the power to know, you could say. The power to know is our ability to
recognize, by sight, members of the same polis or city. It is, above all, speech that in a
way, ties us to others of our kind. That we share not just the capacity for language in the
way a linguist might assert, but that we share a certain common moral language. It is
this sharing of certain common conceptions of the just and unjust that make a city. It is
the capacity to know and to recognize others who share this language with us that is the
first sense in which logos entails politics.
But reason or logos entails more than this capacity. It also entails for Aristotle,
interestingly, the power of love. We love those with whom we are most intimately
related and who are most immediately present and visible to us. In many ways, Aristotle
believes our social and political nature is not the result of calculation, as we will see in
Hobbes, Locke, and other social contract theorists, but such things as love, affection,
friendship, and sympathy are the grounds of political life and are rooted in our logos. It
is speech that allows a sharing in these qualities that make us fully human.
But to say, of course, that man is political by nature is not just to say that we become
fully human by participating with others in a city. It means more than this. The form of
association that leads to our perfection is necessarily something particularistic. The city
is always a particular city. It is always this or that particular city. The polis, as Aristotle
as well as Plato clearly understand, is a small society, what could be called today a
closed society. A society that leads to our perfection that leads us to complete and
perfect our telos must be held together by bonds of trust, of friendship, of camaraderie.
A society based simply on the mutual calculation of interests could not be a real
political society for Aristotle. We cannot trust all people, Aristotle seems to say. Trust
can only be extended to a fairly small circle of friends and fellow citizens. Only a small
city, small enough to be governed by relations of trust, can be political, in Aristotle's
sense of the term. The alternative to the city, the empire, can only be ruled despotically.
There can be no relations of trust in a large, imperial despotism.
It follows, in one sense, that when Aristotle says that man is by nature a political animal
and the city is by nature, the city can never be a universal state. It can never be
something that incorporates all of humankind. It can never be a kind of cosmopolis, a
world state or even a league of states or nations. The universal state will never allow for
or does not allow for the kind of self-perfection that a small, self-governing polis will
have. The city, as Aristotle understands, will always exist in a world with other cities or
other states, based on different principles that might be hostile to one's own. That is to
say not even the best city on Aristotle's account can afford to be without a foreign
policy. A good citizen of a democracy will not be the good citizen of another kind of
regime. Partisanship and loyalty to one's own way of life are required by a healthy city.
To put the argument in terms that Polemarchus, from Plato's Republic would have
known, friend and enemy are natural and ineradicable categories of political life. Just as
we cannot be friends with all persons, so the city cannot be friends with all other cities
or the state with all other states. War and the virtues necessary for war are as natural to
the city as are the virtues of friendship, trust, and camaraderie that are also necessary.
Note that in the opening pages of the book, Aristotle doesn't say anything yet about
what kind of city or regime is best. All he tells us is that we are the polis animal by
nature and that to achieve our ends, it will be necessary to live in a polis. But what kind
of polis? How should it be governed? By the one, the few, the many, or some
combination of these three categories? At this point we know only the most general
features of what a polis is. It must be small enough to be governed by a common
language of justice. It is not enough merely to speak the same words, but in a sense,
citizens must have certain common experiences, certain common memory and
experience that shape a city and the people. The large polyglot, multiethnic
communities of today would not, on Aristotle's account, allow for sufficient mutual trust
and friendship to count as a healthy political community. So Aristotle seems to be
offering, in some respects, a kind of criticism of the kind of states with which we are
most familiar. Think about that when you have your sections or when you talk about
this text with your friends. What is Aristotle saying about us?
The citizens of such a city can only reach their telos or perfection through participating
in the offices, in the ruling offices of a city. Again, a large cosmopolitan state may allow
each individual the freedom to live as he or she likes, but this is not freedom as Aristotle
understands it. Freedom only comes through the exercise of political responsibility,
which means responsibility for and oversight of one's fellow citizens and the common
good. It follows, for him, that freedom does not mean living as we like, but freedom is
informed by a certain sense of restraint and awareness that not all things are permitted,
that the good society will be one that promotes a sense of moderation, restraint and self-
control, self-governance, as Adeimantus says, that are inseparable from the experience
of freedom. In many ways Aristotle there offers, as does Plato, a certain kind of critique
of the modern or even the ancient democratic theory of freedom, which is living as one
likes.
You can see these opening pages of the book, dense argument being condensed in very
deep ways, carry a great deal of freight. There's a lot in there that needs to be unpacked.
I've only tried to do a little of that here with you today, to go over what Aristotle is
suggesting in this idea of man, the polis animal. Whatever we may think about this
view, whether we like it or don't like it or whatever your view might be, you must also
confront another famous, more like infamous, doctrine that is also very much a part of
Book I. I refer to his arguments for the naturalness of slavery. Aristotle tells us that
slavery is natural. The naturalness of slavery is said to follow from the belief that
inequality, inequality is the basic rule between human beings. Aristotle and Thomas
Jefferson seem to disagree over the basic fact of human experience, whether it's equality
or inequality. If this is true, Aristotle's Politics seems to stand condemned as the most
antidemocratic book ever written. Is that true? Aristotle's claim about naturalness seems
to require, as he told us, slavery, the categorical distinction of humanity into masters
and slaves. How to understand that?
Again, Aristotle's argument is deeply compact and will be easily misunderstood if you
only read it once. It will just as likely be misunderstood if you read it three, four, five,
or ten times, if you are not attentive to what he's saying. You must learn to read closely.
What was Aristotle saying? In the first place, it's important that we avoid, I think, two
equally unhelpful ways of responding to this. The first, which one finds among many
modern-day commentators, many kind of neo-Aristotelians, we might call them, is to
simply avert our eyes from the harsh, unappealing aspects of Aristotle's thought and
proceed as if he never actually said or meant such things. We need to avoid the
temptation, in many ways understandable as it might be, to airbrush or sanitize
Aristotle, to make him seem more politically correct for modern readers. Yet, we should
also avoid the second, equally powerful temptation, which is to reject Aristotle out of
hand, because his views do not correspond with our own.
The question is what did Aristotle mean by slavery? Who or what did he think was the
slave by nature? Until we understand what he meant, we have no reason to either accept
or reject his argument. The first point worth noting about this, is that Aristotle did not
simply assume slavery was natural, because it was practiced virtually everywhere in the
ancient world. You will notice that he frames his analysis in the form of a debate. He
says at the outset of his argument, "There are some," he says, indicating this is an
opinion held by many people. "There are some who believe that slavery is natural,
because ruling and being ruled is a pervasive distinction that one sees all societies
practice." But he says, "Others believe that the distinction between master and slave is
not natural, but is based on force or coercion." Even in Aristotle's time, it appears
slavery was a controversial institution and elicited very different kinds of opinions and
responses.
Here is one of those moments when Aristotle, as I indicated earlier, seems most
maddeningly open-minded. He's willing to entertain arguments, both for and against the
debate. Aristotle agrees with those who deny that slavery is justified by war or
conquest. Wars, he remarks, are not always just. So, those who are captured in war,
cannot be assumed to be justly or naturally enslaved. Similarly, he denies that slavery is
always or only appropriate for non-Greeks. There are no, he is saying, racial or ethnic
characteristics that distinguish the natural slave from the natural master. In a stunning
admission, he says--listen to this--that "while nature may intend to distinguish the free
man from the slave," he says, "the opposite often results. Nature often misses the mark,"
he says. Now we seem to be completely confused. If slavery is natural, and if nature
intends to distinguish the slave from the free, the free from the unfree, how can nature
miss the mark? How can the opposite often result? I mention this because such
complications should alert the careful reader. We're trying to read carefully. What is
Aristotle doing in making this seem so complicated?
At the same time, Aristotle agrees with those who defend the thesis of natural slavery.
His defense seems to run something like this. Slavery is natural because we cannot rule
ourselves without the restraint of the passions. Self-rule means self-restraint. Restraint
or self-control is necessary for freedom or self-government. What is true, he seems to
suggest, about the restraint over one's passions and desires is true of restraint and
control over others, just as he appears to be saying there is a kind of hierarchy within
the soul, restraint of the passion. So does that psychological hierarchy translate itself
into a kind of social hierarchy between different kinds of people? The natural hierarchy,
then, seems to be a sort of hierarchy of intelligence or at least a hierarchy of the rational.
"How did this come to be?" Aristotle asks. How is it that some people came to acquire
this capacity for rational self-control that is necessary for freedom and others seem to
lack it? How did that come to be? Is this hierarchy, again, a genetic quality? Is it
something we're born with? Is it something that is implanted in us by nature in that
sense, or is that distinction something that is created by nurture and education, what we
would call today maybe socialization? If the latter, if this hierarchy of intelligence or
this hierarchy of the rational is the result of upbringing, then how can slavery be
defended as natural? Doesn't Aristotle call man the rational animal, the being with
logos, suggesting that all human beings have a desire for knowledge and the desire to
cultivate their minds and live as free persons. Isn't there a kind of egalitarianism, so to
speak, built in to the conception of rational animal and political animal?
He begins his Metaphysics, his great book the Metaphysics, with the famous opening
statement, "All men have a desire to know." If we all have a desire to know, doesn't this
connote something universal, that all should be free, that all should participate in ruling
and being ruled as citizens of a city? Yet, at the same time, Aristotle seems to regard
education as the preserve of the few. The kind of discipline and self-restraint necessary
for an educated mind appears, for him, to be unequally divided among human beings. It
follows, I think, that the regime according to nature, that is to say the best regime,
would be what we might think of as an aristocracy of the educated, an aristocracy of
education and training, an aristocratic republic of some sort where an educated elite
governs for the good of all. Aristotle's republic, and I use that term to remind you of
Plato as well, is devoted to cultivating a high level of citizen virtue where this means
those qualities of mind and heart necessary for self-government. These qualities, he
believes, are the preserve of the few, of a minority capable of sharing in the
administration of justice and in the offices of a city. It seems to be a very elite teaching.
Would you agree? Unappealing to us, perhaps, for that reason, very contrary to our
intuitions and the way we have been brought up. Yes? You'll agree with me.
But before we dismiss Aristotle's account as insufferably inegalitarian and elitist, we
have to ask a difficult question, not just of Aristotle, but more importantly of ourselves.
What else is Yale, but an elite institution intended to educate, morally and intellectually,
potential members of a leadership class? Think about that. Can anyone get into Yale?
Do we have an open admissions policy for all who want to come here? Hardly. Does it
not require those qualities of self-control, discipline, and restraint necessary to achieve
success here? I will leave aside, for the moment, what happens on Friday and Saturday
nights. Is it any coincidence that graduates from this university and a handful of others
not unlike it find themselves in high positions of government, of business, of law, and
the academy? Is it unfair or unreasonable to describe this class, as Aristotle might, as a
natural aristocracy? I leave you with this question to think about. Before we reject
Aristotle as an antidemocratic elitist, take a look at yourselves. So are you, or you
wouldn't be sitting here today. Think about that and I'll see you next week.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 8
Transcript
October 9, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Okay, where are we? Today, we're going to study--I'm going
to talk about Aristotle's--you might call it Aristotle's comparative politics and focusing
on the idea of the regime. This is the theme that you remember in the opening day I said
was really the central concept or the leading thread of this course and it's in books III
through VI of Aristotle's Politics that he develops his idea of the regime and regime
politics. Book I, that we spoke about last time, really in a way tells us something about
the--you might say almost the metaphysics of Aristotle's politics. Today Aristotle
speaks more empirically, more politically about what a regime is. His idea of regime
politea, again, the same word, the same word that was used for the title of Plato's
Republic is the centerpiece of Aristotle's politics literally. It occupies the theme of the
middle three books, books III through VI.
These books are difficult in many ways; they're complicated. They're not everybody's
favorite part of the book, but they are my favorite part because it tells us more precisely
than anywhere else how Aristotle understands the nature of politics and that after all is
what we are most interested in. A regime refers to both the formal enumeration of rights
and duties within a community, but it also addresses something closer to what we would
call the way of life or the culture of a people. Their distinctive customs, manners, laws,
habits, moral dispositions and sentiments, and Aristotle's constitutional theorizing
begins by asking a simple question. What is the identity of a city? What gives it its
identity and enduring existence over time? His answer is the regime; the regime is what
gives a people and a city its identity.
Aristotle distinguishes between what he calls the matter and the form of the regime. Let
me examine both of these in turn. The matter, the substance, the material basis of a
regime concerns its citizen body. That is to say the character of those who constitute a
city and here he rejects a number of alternatives for what constitutes a citizen body. He
rejects the idea that the city is defined simply by a group of people who inhabit a
common territory, the same space as it were. The identity of a polis he writes is not
constituted by its walls. That is to say, it is not constituted by geography alone, and
similarly, he rejects the idea that a regime can be understood as a defensive alliance
against invasion by others. In our terms, for example, NATO would not be a regime, a
purely military or defensive alliance. Finally, he denies the possibility that a regime
exists that whenever a number of people come together to establish commercial
relations with one another, organizations like NAFTA, or the WTO, the World Trade
Organization do not a regime make. A regime cannot be understood simply as a
commercial alliance.
What is a regime then? It is evident Aristotle said, is that a city is not a partnership in a
location or for the sake of not committing injustice against one another, or for
transacting business, so what is a citizen body? The citizens who constitute a regime, he
tells us, do more than occupy the common space but are held together, according to
Aristotle, by bonds of common affection. It is affection, loyalty and friendship that
make up a regime. This sort of thing he says, this political partnership is the work of
affection, philia is his word, is the work of affection. "Affection is the intentional choice
of living together." 1280a, if anyone's interested. "It is the intentional choice of living
together." Friendship, he writes, "is the greatest of good things for cities, for when
people feel affection for each other they are less likely to fall into conflict." But what
kind of friendship is he talking about? Is it the kind of friendship that you feel for your
best friend, or for your parents or siblings? What kind of a friendship are these bonds of
affection, that he says hold the city together and that make it a regime?
Political friendships, he tells us, are not the kind of thing that require us to forego our
own individual identities in a way that one might find in passionate relations of love,
right? Rather, they presuppose relations, that is to say political relations, not between
lovers or even best friends of some kind, but between civic partners who may in fact be
intensely rivalrous and competitive with one another for positions of political office and
honor. Civic friendship, civic philia is in other words not without a strong element of
what might be thought of as sibling rivalry in which each citizen strives to outdo the
others for the sake of the civic good. Many of you have siblings and know a little bit
about what sibling rivalry is like. Siblings, as everyone knows, may be the best of
friends, but this does not exclude strong elements of competition, rivalry, and even
conflict for the attention of the parents, and fellow citizens, for Aristotle, are like
siblings, each competing with one another for the esteem, the affection, and the
recognition of the city that serves for them as a kind of surrogate parent. That is the way
that Aristotle understands a civic body, a citizen body.
So that when he says that citizens are held together by ties of common affection he
means something very specific. The civic bond is more than an aggregate of mere self-
interest or rational calculation as was going to be defended by someone like Thomas
Hobbes or by most of today's modern economists who believe that society can be
understood simply as a series of rational transactions between buyers and sellers of
different goods and that can be modeled along some kind of game theoretic lines.
Aristotle denies this, explicitly denies this. He seems to have known something about
the modern economic theory of society long before modern economics was even
developed. But again, when Aristotle speaks of the kinds of affection that hold a citizen
body together, he does not mean anything like the bonds of personal intimacy that
characterize private friendships. What he means, when speaking about civic affection, is
more like the bonds of loyalty, camaraderie that hold together members of a team or a
club. These are more than, again, ties of mutual convenience. They require loyalty,
trust, what social scientists today sometimes call social capital, that successful societies
require social capital. A distinguished political scientist at another university, I will not
mention its name here, at another university, has spoken about the importance of social
capital or trust as a sort of basic relation, the basic component of a healthy democracy.
Aristotle knew that, he didn't use a kind of ugly social scientific word like social capital;
rather he spoke about civic friendship and philia.
The political partnership he says must therefore be regarded as being for the sake of
noble actions and not just for the sake of living together. The city, as he likes to say or
the regime exists not merely for the sake of life but for what he understands to be the
good life, the life of friendship, the life of again, competitive relations for positions of
honor and office. So we can say that a regime is in the first instance constituted by its
citizen body. Citizens are those who share a common way of life. The citizen in an
unqualified sense, Aristotle writes, is defined by no other thing so much as sharing in
decision and office. Or, as he puts it a little bit later, whoever is entitled to participate in
an office involving deliberation or decision-making is a citizen of the city. Listen to the
words he uses there in describing a citizen. A citizen is one who takes sharing in
decision and office, who participates in deliberation and decision-making. A citizen is
one therefore who not only enjoys the protection of the law, is not merely you might say
a passive beneficiary of the protection of society and its laws, but is one who takes a
share in shaping the laws and who participates in political rule and deliberation.
Aristotle even notes, you probably observe, that his definition of the citizen, he says, is
most appropriate to citizens of democracy, where in his famous formulation everyone
knows how to rule and be ruled in turn. It is this reflection and the character of the
citizen that leads him to wonder whether the good citizen and the good human being are
one and the same. Can a person be both, as it were, a good man, a good person and a
good citizen? Famous discussion in Aristotle's book; Aristotle's answer to this is
perhaps deliberately obscure. The good citizen, he tells, us is still relative to the regime.
That is to say, the good citizen of the democracy would not necessarily be the same
person, or the same kind of person as the good citizen of a monarchy or an aristocracy.
Citizen virtue is relative, or we might say, regime relative. Only in the best regime, he
says, will the good citizen and the good human being be the same. But what is the best
regime? At least at this point he has not told us. The point he's trying to make is there
are several kinds of regimes and therefore several kinds of citizenship appropriate to
them. Each regime is constituted by its matter, that is to say, by its citizen body as we've
been talking about, but also now by its form, by its formal structures. That is to say
every regime will also be a set of institutions and formal structures that give shape to its
citizens. Regimes or constitutions you might say are forms, or formalities that determine
how power is shared and distributed among citizens. Every regime is an answer,
consciously or not, to the oldest political question of all, who governs? Who should
govern? Every regime is an answer to that question because every regime sets forward a
way of distributing, formally distributing powers and distributing offices among its
citizen body.
So we move now from the matter of the regime, as to what constitutes its citizens and
its citizen body, to the question of the form of the regime, its forms, its formalities, its
structures and institutions you might say. Entirely too much of modern political science
is focused on simply the forms and formalities of political life, not enough, in my
opinion, with questions of the citizen body and what makes, what constitutes, the
character or the virtue in Aristotle's terms of its citizens. But nevertheless, Aristotle
gives extraordinary importance and attention to the forms or formalities that make up a
regime. What does he mean by that?
Aristotle defines the strictly formal criteria of a politea twice in his politics and I'm sure
you noted both times where they appeared? Yes. Book III, chapter 6, famous definition:
"The regime," he says, "is an arrangement of a city with respect to its offices,
particularly the one who has the authority over all matters. For what has authority in the
city is everywhere that governing body, and the governing body is the regime." The
regime is an arrangement of a city, he says, with respect to its offices and every city will
have a governing body, that governing body being a regime. The second definition
appears at the beginning of Book IV, chapter 1. "For a regime," he writes, "is an
arrangement in cities connected with offices, establishing the manner in which they
have been distributed, what the authoritative element of the regime is, and what the end
of the partnership is in each case, a similar but slightly different definition of what
constitutes the formal structure of regime politics."
But from these two definitions appearing in book III, chapter 6 and Book IV, chapter 1
we learn a number of important things. First, is to repeat, a regime concerns the manner
in which power is divided or distributed in a community. This is what Aristotle means
when he uses the phrase, "an arrangement of a city with respect to its offices." In other
words, every regime will be based on some kind of judgment of how power should be
distributed to the one, to the few or the many to use the Aristotelian categories of
political rule or some mixture of those three classes that constitute every city. In every
regime one of these groups, he says, will be the dominant class, will be the dominant
body, the ruling body, as he says, in that definition and that ruling body will in turn, he
says, define the nature of the regime. But Aristotle tells us something more than this.
A regime, his regime typology is, to say, his division of power, his division of regimes
and to the rule of the one, the few and the many is based not only on how powers are
distributed in a purely factual way, he also distinguishes between regimes that are well
ordered, well governed, and those that are corrupt. What does he mean in terms of this
distinction? Aristotle's distinction seems to be not only empirical, again, based on the
factual distribution of powers. It seems to have a--what we might call today a normative
component to it, it makes a distinction or a judgment between the well-ordered and the
deviant regimes, the corrupt regimes. On the one side, he tells us, the well ordered
regimes are monarchy, aristocracy and what he calls polity, rule of the one, the few, and
the many, and on the corrupt side he calls, he describes them as tyranny, oligarchy and
democracy also ruled by the one, the few, and the many. But what criteria, we want to
know, does he use to distinguish between these, as it were, six-fold classification of
regimes? How does he distinguish the well-ordered regimes from the corrupt regimes?
Here is where Aristotle's analysis gets, in some ways, maddeningly tricky because in
many ways, of his general reluctance, to condemn any regime out of hand. If you were
to read more than I had assigned for you in class, if you were to read throughout,
through all of Book VI for example, you would find Aristotle not only giving advice to
Democrats and democracies and other regimes on how to preserve themselves, you
would find a lengthy description of how tyrants should moderate, or how tyrants learn
to preserve and defend their own regime. It seems as if, it seems almost as if, living
before the incarnation of pure evil in the twentieth century with the rise of modern
totalitarianisms, that Aristotle seemed to think that no regime was so bad, no regime
was so devoid of goodness that its preservation was not worth at least some effort, think
of that. Rather, in many ways, he provides reasoned arguments for the strengths and
weaknesses of several different regime types.
Let's consider the one that's closest to our own, democracy, let's consider what Aristotle
has to tell us about that regime. In fact, it would be an interesting question for people to
consider, to know how would Aristotle confront or what would his analysis be if a
regime like Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, the Iran of Khomeini, regimes that are
clearly tyrannies but do they even go beyond in some way, the tyrannies that Aristotle
spoke about and what kind of advice, what would he have to say about them? Anyway
let's think about democracy.
Interestingly, we find Aristotle defending democracy on the grounds that it may contain
collectively greater wisdom than a regime ruled by the one or the few. In Book III,
chapter 11, for example, he writes, "For because they are many," that is to say the
citizen body, the ruling body of the democracy, "each can have a part of virtue and
prudence and on their uniting together, and on their joining together he says, "the
multitude with its many feet and hands and having many senses becomes," he writes,
"like a single human being, and so also with respect to character and mind." Think of
that, the people in a democracy he says, "coming together, uniting together, become like
a single human being with many hands and feet," and he says, "with greater character
and mind." We even hear more than any single individual, and then, in the same text,
we also hear Aristotle praising the practice of ostracism, that is to say exiling, banishing
those individuals deemed to be pre-eminent in any particular virtue or quality.
He makes a similar point in Book III, chapter 15, in describing the process of
democratic deliberation as a superior means of arriving at decisions. He compares it to a
potluck dinner; any one of them, he says, that is to say any one of the citizens, taken
singly is perhaps inferior in comparison to the best. But the city is made up of many
persons, just as a feast to which many contribute is finer, is better, than a single and
simple one and on this account a crowd also judges many matters better than a single
person. Furthermore, what is many, he says, is more incorruptible like a greater amount
of water than many is more incorruptible than the few. So he gives there a powerful
argument in defense of democracy, like a potluck dinner; each individual cook may not
be as good as the best chef but many taken together will provide many more dishes and
many more variety, for a variety of tastes than does a single chef.
He says, furthermore, a crowd, the many, is more incorruptible than the few. Less light
incorruptible, here, I take it in a kind of ordinary sense of the term, less susceptible to
bribery, you can't bribe a lot of people in the way that you can a single individual. Are
Aristotle's views on democracy correct here in his analysis? Do in fact many chefs make
for a better dinner than a single chef? Well, I don't know, would you rather have dinner
at the Union League with one chef, a master chef or would you rather have dinner with
a bunch of your friends each providing some piece of the dinner? Well, it's an
interesting argument; it's open to debate anyway. Yet at the same time, is Aristotle seen
defending democracy, providing reason and many sensible arguments for democratic
regimes?
You find him, in the same section of the book, providing a defense of kingship and the
rule of the one. In Book III, chapter 16, he considers the case of the king who acts in all
things according to his own will. Sounds like a kind of absolute monarch of some kind;
this is the part of Aristotle's politics that seems closest in a way to the idea of a platonic
philosopher-king, a king who rules without law and rules for the good of all, simply on
the basis of his own superiority. Aristotle coins a term for this kind of king overall, he
calls it the pambasileia, baseleia being the Greek word for king, like the name Basil, it's
the Greek word for king and pan meaning universal, pambasileia, the universal king,
the king of all.
Aristotle does not rule out the possibility of such a person emerging, a person of, what
he calls excessive virtue, almost hyperbolic excellence, he says, who stands so far above
the rest as to deserve to be the natural ruler overall. But how, we want to know, does
Aristotle reconcile his account of the term baseleia, the king of overall, with his earlier
emphasis upon democratic deliberation and shared rule, the citizen, recall, is one who
takes turn ruling and being ruled in turn.
When readers look at Aristotle's account of kingship and particularly this notion of the
pambasileia, the king overall, this suggestion must at least occur that there is a hidden
Alexandrian or Macedonian streak to Aristotle's political thinking that owes more to his
native Macedon than to his adopted Athens, the idea of universal kingship. Think of
Alexander the Great later on, and in fact, in one of my favorite passages in the book,
which you will read for next time, I cannot resist quoting already a passage from Book
VII, and near the end of the book, Book VII, chapter 7, where Aristotle writes as
follows. He writes, "The nations in cold locations, particularly in Europe, are filled with
spiritedness." There is that platonic word again, thumos, are filled with thumos, "but
lacking in discursive thought," lacking in the deliberative element in other words.
Hence, they remain free because they're thumotic, but they lack political governance.
"Those in Asia, on the other hand," he writes, thinking probably here of Persia, places
like Egypt and Persia, "have souls endowed with discursive thought but lack
spiritedness, lack thumos, hence they remain ruled and enslaved."
But then he goes on to say, "The stock of Greeks share in both, just as it holds," he says,
"the middle in terms of location. For it," that is to say the Greeks, "are both spirited, are
both thumotic and endowed with deliberative thought, and hence, remained free and
governed itself in the best manner." "And," he writes and he concludes, "at the same
time is capable of ruling all should it obtain a single regime." That these Greeks are
capable of ruling all, he says, all, who is all? What does he mean by the all here? The
Greeks? The rest of the world? Should our--are capable of attaining it seems a single
hegemony, a single regime, are if in fact, circumstances developed. So here is a passage
in which Aristotle clearly seems to be pointing to the possibility of a kind of universal
monarchy under Greek rule, at least as a possibility.
This passage I read at length, is important for a number of reasons, let me just try to
explain. In the first place, it provides us with crucial information about Aristotle's
thinking about the relations of impulse and reason, of thumos and reason, as you might
say the determinants of human behavior or the crucial pet term in that passage is this,
again this platonic term spiritedness which is both a cause of the human desire to rule
and at the same time a cause of our desire to resist the domination of others. It is the
unique source of human assertiveness and aggressiveness, as well as the source of
resistance to the aggression of others. It's a very important psychological concept in
understanding politics. And second, the passage tells us something about certain
additional factors. Extra, in many ways, extra-political factors such as climate and
geography as components in the development of political society. Apparently, quality
such as thumos and reason, thumos and deliberation, are not distributed equally and
universally. He says, he distinguishes, between the people's of the north, he calls them
the Europeans, spirited and war-like but lacking thumos; those of Persia and Egypt
containing highly developed forms of intellectual knowledge, no doubt thinking about
the development of things like science and mathematics in Egypt but lacking this
quality of thumos which is so important for self-government, for self-rule. These are,
one might think about this, these things, he says, are at least in part determined by
certain kinds of natural or geographic and climatic qualities.
A modern reader of this passage that comes to mind is Montesquieu, in his famous
book, the Spirit of the Laws, with its emphasis upon the way in which geography and
climate, and environment become in part determinants of the kind of political culture
and political behavior exhibited by different peoples. Finally, this passage tells us that
under the right circumstances, at least Aristotle suggests, the Greeks could exercise a
kind of universal rule, if they chose. He does not rule out this possibility. Perhaps it
testifies to his view that there are different kinds of regimes that may be appropriate to
different kinds of situations, to different situations. There is no one-size-fits-all model
of political life, but good regimes may come in a variety of forms. There seems to be at
least built in to Aristotle's account of politics, a certain flexibility, a certain latitude of
discretion that in some passages even seems to border on a kind of relativism.
But nevertheless, Aristotle understands that a person, this pambasileia, this person of
superlative virtue is not really to be expected. Politics is really a matter of dealing with
less than best circumstances which is perhaps one reason why Aristotle gives relatively
little attention to the structure of the best regime. Such a regime, which I do want to talk
about Wednesday is something to be wished for, but is not for practical purposes
something to which he devotes a great deal of time. Most regimes, and for the most part,
will be very imperfect mixtures of the few and the many, the rich and the poor. Most
regimes, for the most part, most politics for the most part, will be struggles between
what he calls oligarchies and democracies, rule by the rich oligarchies, ruled by the poor
democracies. In that respect, Aristotle seems to add an economic or sociological
category to the fundamentally political categories of few and many. The few are not
simply defined quantitatively but they are defined, as it were, also sociologically. The
rich, the poor, again defined as, the many and defined by him as the poor. It was not,
you have to see when you read these passages, it was not Karl Marx but rather it was
Aristotle who first identified the importance of what we would call class struggle, in
politics. Every regime is in many ways a competition between classes. But where he
differs from Marx, is not that he believes that the fundamental form of competition
between classes is not just for resources, it is not a struggle over who controls what
Marx calls the means of production, it is a struggle over positions of honor, of status
and position, of positions of rule. Struggle is, in short, political struggle not economic
struggle. Every regime, he believes, will be in some ways a site of contestation with
competing claims to justice, with competing claims to political rule for who ought to
rule. There is, in other words, not only a partisanship between regimes, but partisanship
within regimes, where citizens are activated, different groups of citizens, different
classes of citizens are activated by rivalrous and competing understandings of justice
and the good.
The democratic faction, he tells us, believes because all are equal in some respects, they
should be equal in all respects. The oligarchs, he tells us, because people are unequal in
some respects, they should be unequal in all respects. For Aristotle the point and
purpose of political science is to mediate the causes of faction, to help causes of faction
that lead to revolution and civil war. Aristotle's statesman, Aristotle's statecraft, his
political science, is a form of political mediation, how to bring peace to conflict ridden
situations. It is always surprising to me that many people think that Aristotle ignored or
has no real theory of political conflict when it seems to me conflict is built in to the very
structure of his understanding of a regime. And again, not just conflict between rival
regimes but conflict built into the nature of what we would call domestic politics,
different classes contending with different conceptions of justice and how can the
political scientist bring peace, bring moderation to these deeply conflict ridden
situations?
Aristotle proposes--how does he propose to do this? He proposes a couple of remedies
to offset the potentially warlike struggle between various factions. And the most
important of these remedies is the rule of law. "Law insures," he says, "the equal
treatment of all citizens and prevents arbitrary rule at the hands of the one, the few, or
the many." Law establishes what he says is a kind of impartiality for law, he says, is
impartiality. "One who asks the law to rule," he says, in Book III, chapter 16, "is held to
be asking God and intellect alone to rule while one who asks man, asks the beast. Desire
is a thing of this sort, and spiritedness," he writes again, "thumos, spiritedness perverts
rulers and the best men, hence law is intellect without appetite. Even the best men," he
says, "can be perverted by spiritedness. Law is the best hedge we have against the
domination of partiality and desire." But this is not the end of the story. In fact, it is only
the beginning. Aristotle raises the question, a very important question, whether the rule
of law is to be referred to the rule of the best, the best individual.
Typically again, he seems to answer the question from two different points of view,
giving each perspective its due, its justice. He begins in many ways by appearing to
defend Plato's view about the rule of the best individual. "The best regime," he says, "is
not one based on written law." Law, and his reason seems to be something like this, law
is at best a clumsy instrument, a clumsy tool because laws only deal with general
matters and cannot deal with particular concrete situations. Furthermore, law seems to
bind the hands of the statesmen and legislators who always have to be responding to
new and unforeseen circumstances and yet at the same time Aristotle makes the case for
law. The judgment of an individual, no matter how wise, is more corruptible whether
due to passion or interest, or simply the fallibility of human reason than is law. He
notes, as a practical matter, no one individual can oversee all things. Only a third party,
in this case law, is capable of judging adequately. Again, he seems to give reasons and
good reasons for both cases.
So he, but he moves to question, should law be changed? Is law changeable? If so, how?
And once again, he puts forward different arguments; in Book II, chapter 8, he
compares law to other arts and sciences and suggests why sciences such as medicine
and has exhibited progress, this should be true for law. The antiquity of a law alone is
no justification for its usage. Aristotle seems to reject, you might say, Burkean
conservatism long before the time. Antiquity or tradition alone is no justification, yet at
the same time he seems to recognize that changes in law, even when the result is
improvement, are dangerous. He writes, "It is a bad thing to habituate people to reckless
dissolution of laws. The city will not be benefited as much from changing law as it will
be harmed through being habituated to disobey the rulers." In other words he's saying,
lawfulness, like every other virtue, is a habit, it is a habit of behavior, and the habit of
destroying, disobeying even an unjust law will make people altogether lawless.
This emphasis upon law is a constraint on human behavior. In many ways seems to
introduce a strong element of conventionalism in Aristotle's thought. This is the view
that justice is determined by laws, by customs, by traditions, that it is conventions,
nomos in the broadest sense of the term that constitutes justice. As I indicated, there's
also seems to be a certain degree of relativism associated with this since conventions
vary from society to society. The standards of justice will seem to, again, be regime
dependent and this seems to be entirely consistent with parts of Aristotle's anthropology.
After all, if we are political animals by nature, then the standards of justice must derive
from politics, a right that transcends society cannot be a right natural to man.
Yet Aristotle's conception of our political nature seems to require standards of justice
that are natural or right for us. Rule of law presupposes that there is a form of justice or
right natural to us. But what is the Aristotelian standard of natural right or natural
justice? Aristotle makes a surprising assertion; unfortunately, it's an assertion in a book
you're not reading. A book, the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, chapter 7, he says there
that, " all natural right is mutable or changeable, all standards of natural justice are
changeable." And by this he means that natural right is revealed not in general
propositions or universal maxims, as for example, Immanuel Kant would argue later on,
but in the concrete decisions of a community or its leaders about what is right or wrong.
Natural right is mutable because different circumstances will require different kinds of
decisions. So does this mean then that for Aristotle there are no universally valid
standards of justice or right? That all that ends in circumstances that justice, like the
good citizen is, as it were, regime dependent? Is this not to fall into the boundless field
of Machiavelianism that declares right and wrong to be entirely relative to
circumstance, context dependent, is that what Aristotle is saying? Not at all.
Aristotle emphasizes the mutable character of natural right in part to preserve the
latitude, the freedom of action required by the statesmen. Every statesman must
confront new and sometimes extreme situations that require inventiveness and creative
action. And in such situations where the very survival of the community may be at
stake, we might call these emergency situations, the conscientious statesmen must be
able to respond appropriately. Nine-eleven [reference to the attacks on the United States
on September 11, 2001] for example, a moral law that refused to allow the statesmen to
protect the community in times of crisis would not be a principle of natural right, it
would be a suicide note. To a considerable degree Aristotle, Aristotelian standards of
natural right reside in the specific decisions, the concrete decisions of the ablest states;
these cannot be determined in advance but must be allowed to emerge in response to
new, and again, different and unforeseen situations. What is naturally right, what is right
by nature in peace time, will not be the same as what is naturally right or right by nature
in times of war. What is right in normal situations will not be the same as what is right
in states of emergency. The statesmen in the Aristotelian sense is the one who seeks to
return as quickly and efficiently as possible to the normal situation. This is what
distinguishes Aristotle from Machiavelli, and all those later thinkers who take their
bearings from Machiavelli. I'm thinking of thinkers like Hobbes, like Carl Schmitt, and
Max Weber in the twentieth century. All of these thinkers take their bearings from the
extreme situation, situations of civil war, of social collapse, of national crisis. The
Aristotelian statesman will not be unduly affected by the occasional need to depart from
the norm, whether this means this is spent in the case, to take an American case, the
suspension of habeas Corpus, as Abraham Lincoln did in the, during the Civil War, or
the regrettable need to engage in domestic espionage. But in any case, the Aristotelian
statesman's goal will be restoration of the conditions of constitutional government and
rule of law as quickly and again as efficiently as possible. On that grim note, I think I'll
let you go and we will conclude Aristotle next time.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 9
Transcript
October 11, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: I want to begin today with concluding Aristotle, part three.
Before I do, however, could I just ask the people--yes, thank you so much. And your
neighbor, too? Would you mind? Thank you so much. Just out of respect to Mr.
Aristotle. It's mister to you.
I want to talk today about Aristotle's discovery of America. This will probably come as
a surprise to some of you that Aristotle discovered America, but I will get to that in a
minute. In many ways for Aristotle, as it is for every student of politics, the most
serious, the most difficult issue one confronts is the problem of faction. How to control
for factions. How to control for conflict between factions. That is the issue addressed
especially in Books IV and V of the Politics, where Aristotle goes on to describe by the
term polity, the regime that he believes most successfully controls for the theme of
faction. The essential feature of this regime, the polity, which in fact he gives the name
politea, the generic Greek word for regime. The polity is the regime that represents, for
Aristotle, a mixture of the principles of oligarchy and democracy. Therefore, he says,
avoids dominance by either extreme.
By combining elements, as it were, of the few and the many, polity is characterized by
the dominance of the middle class, the middle group. The middle class, he says, is able
to achieve the confidence of both extreme parties where at least it is sufficiently
numerous to avoid the problems of class struggle and factional conflict. "Where the
middling element is great," Aristotle writes, "factional conflict and splits over the nature
of regimes occur least of all." So Aristotle, in a way, has discovered long before James
Madison's famous article in Federalist Number 10, the remedy for the control and
containment, so to speak, of faction. You remember, many of you if not all of you who
have read the Tenth Federalist Paper, that Madison outlines a scheme for an extended
republic, he says, where numerous factions, in many ways, check and balance one
another, compete with one another and therefore, avoid the dominance of a single
faction leading to the kind of tyranny of the majority, the tyranny of the majority class.
Aristotle's proposal for a mixture of oligarchy and democracy seems, in many ways, to
anticipate, 2,000 years before the fact, Madison's call for a government where powers
must be separated and where, he says in Federalist Number 51, ambition must be made
to counteract ambition in order to avoid, in other words, the extremes of both tyranny
and civil war. The inevitable conclusion that I reach and I believe any sensible reader of
Aristotle would reach is that Aristotle, in fact, discovered the American Constitution
1,500 or 2,000 years before it was written. This may seem surprising to you, since of
course Aristotle lived long before. But that may simply be our own prejudice to think
that my friend at the CUNY Graduate Center, Peter Simpson, has argued in a paper that
I found quite convincing, that Aristotle had, in fact, discovered the American
Constitution. I say, it may simply be our prejudice that he didn't.
Aristotle writes, in Book II of the Politics that the world is eternal and everything in it
has been discovered. The earth experiences, he says, certain periodic destructions and
cataclysms, civilizations are reduced to barbarism only to recover and grow again. If
this theory, you might say, of sort of cataclysmic change is true, we cannot rule out the
possibility that a constitution like ours or even identical to ours existed at some point in
the ancient past, in the far distant past that Aristotle knew about. Do you think that's
possible? Well, why not? But Aristotle's mixed constitution differs from ours still in
certain important respects. Aristotle understands the mixed constitution as a balance of
classes--the one, the few, and the many. He doesn't so much insist, as you will see in
your reading, on the actual separation of functions of government, putting them into
separate hands. It is enough for him, he says, if each class shares in some aspect of the
governing power. But that leads to a further difference.
We tend to think of the separation of powers doctrine as necessary for the security and
liberty of the individual, don't we? We usually think of individual freedom and security
as the purpose of the separation of power. It is when political functions become
concentrated into the hands of, again, the too few hands that we risk arbitrary
government and the endangerment to the liberty of the individual. But for Aristotle, it is
not the liberty of the individual so much as the functioning or functional well-being of
the city that is the highest priority. Individual freedom may be, at best, a desirable
byproduct of the Aristotelian mixed regime, but individual freedom is not its defining or
principle goal. For anyone interested in this difference, I suggest you contrast or
compare Aristotle's account of mixed government to Book XI of Montesquieu's Spirit of
the Laws or to some of the central Federalist papers to see the way in which Mr.
Aristotle revised, in some ways, the wisdom of Madison. You could compare them in
some way that I think would be valuable.
Not only did Aristotle understand the importance of the separation of powers doctrine
and the kind of balance of factions as a way of controlling conflict and struggle, but he
also understood the importance of property and private property and commerce for a
flourishing republic. We didn't really pause to talk much about this, but in Book II, you
remember, he criticizes at considerable length Plato's Republic for the excessive unity it
demands of its citizens. Socrates demands for common ownership of property, at least
among the auxiliary class. But Aristotle claims that the city is not naturally one. That is
to say, a certain diversity is necessary to make up a city. Where all property is held in
common, it is more likely to suffer from common neglect than it is from common
ownership. He clearly understands, in many ways, the virtues of private property and of
commerce. It is evident, Aristotle writes, that as it becomes increasingly one, as it
becomes increasingly unified--the city--it will no longer be a city. A city is, in its
nature, a multitude. As it becomes more of a unity, it will be like a household instead of
a polis and a human being instead of a household. There we see in Book II, Aristotle
offering his criticism of the claims for the sort of excessive unification of centralization,
concentration of property.
Yet, despite his awareness of the importance of commerce and the importance of
property, the aim of the city, he tells us, is not wealth, is not the production of wealth. In
that way it would be useful to make a contrast between Aristotle and someone like
Adam Smith, the great author of The Wealth of Nations. If wealth were the purpose of
politics, Aristotle writes, the Phoenicians, you might say, in the ancient world--the
Phoenicians were the commercial people par excellence--the Phoenicians would be the
best regime. But he denies that. Aristotle could never endorse the view stated by a
famous American president that the business of America is business. The political
partnership, he says, must be regarded for the sake of noble acts performed well.
Wealth, property, he tells us, exists for the sake of virtue, not virtue for the sake of
wealth.
Just as Aristotle would have been critical of the American tendency to regard
government as for the sake of business or for the sake of the economy, he also criticized
beforehand the American tendency to organize into clubs, what we call political parties
which exacerbate rather than control political conflict. These political clubs or parties
use their influence to incense the populous, using their power to whip up dangerous
passions that tend to make American politicians closer to demagogues than to
statesmen. He would also regard the peculiar American practice of elections, rather than
the Greek practice of appointing political offices by lot. He would regard elections as
merely exacerbating the tendency to demagoguery, where each person seeking office
plays shamelessly to the mob, promising all manner of things that they know they will
not and cannot deliver. Think of almost anybody you like. Furthermore, while the
American regime in many ways is, in principle, open to all and prides itself on a belief
in equality, no doubt Aristotle would remark that its offices are, in fact, open only to the
rich and to leaders who can acquire the support of the rich, making it rather an oligarchy
in the guise of a republic. So Aristotle was not without his own critique of the American
constitution and American political culture.
There is, obviously, much in the American regime that Aristotle would have found
admirable, even though it does not conform to his idea of the best regime, which is the
subject of the last two books of the Politics, Book VII and VIII. Aristotle is very
sketchy here about the structure, the institutional structure, the make-up of the best
regime, acknowledging the best regime is one where the best men rule. That is to say, it
is a kind of aristocracy or an aristocratic republic. I want to talk about this regime a little
bit now, what Aristotle understands to be the requirements or the fulfillments, the
necessities, of this aristocratic republic.
In these parts of the Politics, Aristotle offers a serious challenge to existing Greek
traditions and patterns of political education. Every bit, in many ways, is far reaching as
Plato's Republic. In the first place, he tells us the purpose of the best regime, the purpose
of Aristotle's Republic is directed not to war, but in fact to peace. The citizen of the best
regime, he says, must be able to sustain war if duty requires, but only for the sake of
peace and leisure. Again, a critique not only of Sparta, but also of Athens and its
imperialistic ambitions. Second, Aristotle understands the purpose of leisure when he
says the end of the regime is peace and the purpose of peace is leisure. He doesn't
understand by leisure simply relaxation, enjoying your private moments, enjoying your
vacation time. Leisure does not simply mean rest or inactivity, but leisure is necessary
for education or what he sometimes calls by the term philosophy.
By philosophy, he seems to suggest not so much the capacity for abstract or speculative
thought, but rather a kind of liberal education that he regards to be the preserve of what
he calls by the term the megalopsychos, literally, the great-souled person or the great-
souled man. Mega, megalo, being our terms for great and psychos, related to our word
psyche, soul. The great-souled person, the great-souled man, the gentleman is, in many
ways, for Aristotle, the ideal recipient of this form of education, of liberal education and
also, in some respect, the ideal or perfect audience or readership of the book itself. We
can begin to see it is clear how Aristotle's best regime differs from Plato's intransigent
demand for the rule of philosopher-kings. The megalopsychos, the gentleman, whatever
else he is, is not a philosopher in the strict sense.
Sociologically, Aristotle makes clear that the megalopsychos, unlike the philosopher, is
a person of some inherited wealth, chiefly landed property, but whose way of life will
be urban. He will be a member of what we might call the urban patriciate. In the
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides us with a vivid list of the psychological and
even physical characteristics that such a person must possess, this megalopsychos. Such
a person, he says, exhibits a sort of lofty detachment to the more or less petty things that
weigh most of us down. Aristotle tells us he is slow to act, unless something of great
importance is at stake. He repays favor with interest so as not to be under any
obligations to others. The gentleman, he says, speaks his mind without fear or favor,
somewhat like the New York Times, because to dissemble would be beneath him. He
may occasionally hurt others, but this is not done out of deliberate cruelty. In addition,
Aristotle tells us such a person will possess beautiful but useless things, suggesting the
possession not only of wealth, but of a kind of cultivated aesthetic sense. As if that
weren't enough, Aristotle tells us that the megalopsychos walks slowly, because to hurry
is undignified, is tall and speaks with a deep voice. Very clear about who, again, the
ideal statesman or reader, potential statesman the reader of this book would be. Most
importantly, you might say, what distinguishes the gentleman as a class from the
philosophers is a certain kind of knowledge or practical intelligence. The gentleman
may lack the speculative intelligence of a Socrates, but he will possess that quality of
practical rationality, of practical judgment necessary for the administration of affairs.
Aristotle calls this kind of knowledge, this kind of practical judgment, he calls it by the
term phronimos, that I have on the blackboard. The person who possesses it is the
phronimos, a person of practical judgment. Again, a term that captures something of our
meaning of common sense, practical wisdom, the capacity for judging, the capacity for
judgment, which is not the same thing, obviously, as speculative or philosophic
intelligence. The phronimos is the person who is able to grasp the fitting or the
appropriate, the appropriate thing to do out of the complex arrangements that make up
any situation. Above all, such a person embodies that special quality of insight and
discrimination that distinguishes him or her from people, again, of more theoretical or
speculative cast of mind.
How is this quality of phronimos, of judgment, of practical wisdom, of horse sense, how
is it acquired? Aristotle tells us that this kind of knowledge is a kind of knowledge most
appropriate to politics. Again, it is neither--and he wants to be clear about this--it is
neither the theoretic knowledge aimed simply at abstract truths, nor is it the productive
knowledge, what he calls techne, the productive knowledge used in the manufacture of
useful artifacts. What is it, then? It is a knowledge of how to act where the purpose of
action is acting well. You might say it is less a body of true propositions than a shrewd
sense of know-how or political savvy. This kind of knowledge entails judgment and
deliberation, the deliberative skill or the deliberative art. We only deliberate, Aristotle
says, over things where there is some choice. We deliberate with an eye to preservation
or change, to making something better or to preserve it from becoming worse. This kind
of knowledge will be the art or craft of the statesman concerned above all with what to
do in a specific situation. It is the skill possessed by the greatest statesmen, you might
say, the fathers of the constitutions, as it were, who create the permanent framework in
which allows later and lesser figures to handle change. This is the kind of political skill
and wisdom, again, possessed of the founders of cities, the legislative founders of
regimes.
Aristotle's Politics is a book about the kind of knowledge requisite for that kind of skill.
This quality of practical judgment phronimos, practical wisdom, was developed, I think,
in a beautiful essay, without any explicit reference to Aristotle, by the English political
philosopher Isaiah Berlin. Anyone here ever heard of Isaiah Berlin? Not one of you?
Famous, famous English philosopher, died a number of years ago in the late 90s.
This, I hope, will be an inspiration to--you should read Isaiah Berlin. In any case, he
wrote a wonderful essay called Political Judgment. In it he asks, "What is the
intellectual quality that successful statesmen possess that distinguishes their knowledge
from all other forms of rationality and knowledge?" He writes as follows. I'm going to
quote him.
"The quality that I am attempting to describe is that special understanding of public life,
which successful statesmen have, whether they are wicked or virtuous. That which
Bismark had or Talleyrand or Franklin Roosevelt or, for that matter, men such as
Cavour or Disraeli, Gladstone or Ataturk in common with the great psychological
novelists, and something which is conspicuously lacking in men of more purely
theoretical genius, such as Newton or Einstein or Bertrand Russell or even Freud."
So there, too, like Aristotle, he distinguishes a kind of practical skill possessed by the
greatest minds, political minds at least, and says it's quite different and from what he
calls the great psychological novelists, from that possessed of the greatest philosophers
and scientists. "What are we to call this capacity?" Berlin continues. He writes, again, as
follows.
"Practical reason, perhaps is a sense of what will work and what will not. It is a capacity
for synthesis rather than analysis, for knowledge in the sense in which trainers know
their animals or parents their children or conductors their orchestras, as opposed to that
in which chemists know the contents of their test tubes or mathematicians know the
rules their symbols obey. Those who lack this quality of practical wisdom, whatever
other qualities they may possess, no matter how clever, learned, imaginative, kind,
noble, attractive, gifted in other ways they may be, are correctly regarded as politically
inept."
There, Berlin tells us something about the character of this political knowledge that
Aristotle describes as phronimos. Again, how is this knowledge acquired? Are we just
born with it? Do some people just have it or is it a product of experience? Aristotle
doesn't say, but I think the answer is clearly some of both. It is a quality, as I agree with
Berlin, possessed by some of the great psychological novelists. I mention the names of
Tolstoy, Henry James, and perhaps the greatest of all, Jane Austen, if you want to know
a novelist who employs this great skill of judgment, discrimination and practical reason.
It is also a virtue of great statesmen. Principally, Berlin mentions Bismark, Disraeli,
Franklin Roosevelt. I would also add the names of Pericles, Lincoln, and Churchill.
Read their works. Study their histories. They provide a virtual education in statecraft, in
how to negotiate affairs in precisely the way Aristotle would have us do. That leads me
to the larger question, you might say, which is posed throughout Aristotle's work as a
whole. What is Aristotle's political science? What is it for? What is he attempting to do?
Already you could say to ask this question is to state a claim. Does Aristotle have a
political science, a science of politics? Again, if so, what is it about? To begin to answer
this question, you might say even begin to think about it in the right way, requires that
we stand back from Aristotle's text for a while and ask some fundamental questions
about it. What does Aristotle mean by the political? What is the goal or purpose of the
study of politics, and what is distinctive about Aristotle's approach to the study of
political things?
Today, the term "political science" stands for one among a number of different
disciplines that we call collectively the social sciences. This not only includes political
science, but economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, among others. Each of
these disciplines seeks to give us a handle on a distinctive set of human actions and
interactions. Economics deals with the transactions involving the production and
distribution of wealth, sociology with the transaction governing status and class,
anthropology with the domain of culture, and so on.
What is it that political science studies and what is its relation to the other disciplines?
The core of political science, at least according to Aristotle and to this degree I'm very
much an Aristotelian, what distinguishes it from all other studies is the concept of the
regime, of the politea. The regime, for him, is not one branch of human activity among
others, it is the fundamental principle or ordering principle that makes all the others
even possible. This is why Aristotle does not regard the study of politics as one social
science among others. It is rather what he calls the master science that determines the
rank and place of all the others within the polity. His study of the regime, that is to say
the underlying constitutional principles that govern each order is what distinguishes
Aristotle from the other social scientists. When you came into this class in the beginning
of the semester, you may have thought you were just signing up for a class in political
science. You did not know, perhaps, that you were coming in to study what he calls "the
master science," the science of sciences," in some respects.
It is that priority that Aristotle attributes to the regime that I think is what distinguishes
his kind of political science from that of today. Today, you might say political scientists
and social scientists, they're more modest in ascribing priority to any particular branch
of knowledge. With, I should say, the possible exception of the economists, who often
will believe that economic motives and transactions provide the key to all possible
human behaviors. Who knows, maybe they're right, but Aristotle would deny it. For
Aristotle, however, politics has a priority to all the others, because as he has argued,
man is the political animal. To be a political animal means first to possess speech or
reason that allows us to participate in a community or a way of life governed by shared
standards of justice and injustice. Aristotle's political science presupposes, in other
words, a certain conception of human beings as linguistic animals who are capable not
only of living together--so do a range of other species--but rather sharing in the
arrangements of rule. It is our logos, our reason that makes a community possible and
also expresses or creates, you could say, a certain latitude or indeterminacy in how our
behavior distinguishes us from other species. It is precisely, he believes, this latitude
that makes political communities not only sites of agreement over shared standards, but
also, as he says, sites of moral contestation over justice and injustice. Politics is about
conflict and conflicts over justice. To be a political animal, for him, is to engage or to be
engaged in this ongoing conversation and debate over the very nature of justice, to
refuse to participate in that conversation, to declare oneself an outsider to it, he says, is
either to be below humanity or above it. To be human is to be part of that conversation.
The centrality Aristotle ascribes to politics forces us to consider another question,
namely what is the purpose of this study? Why do we engage in it? At first glance, this
seems to be overwhelmingly obvious--to gain more knowledge. But knowledge of what
and for what? Most people today are attracted to the study of politics because they are
interested in things they've read about in newspapers or seen on TV. Things like
elections, political leaders and parties, different causes to which they may feel some
attraction, interested in wars and revolutions that they see or have heard about. It is to
learn more about these things that we come to the study of politics. It's as true now as it
was in the time of Aristotle.
Aristotle certainly recognized that the accumulation of political knowledge, you might
say the gathering of data, the organization of facts, is very important. Books III, IV, V
of the Politics shows the empirical side of Aristotle's politics. Again, let me just pose
the question. What is this knowledge for? What does Aristotle intend to do with it or
want us to do with it? Politics, political science, he tells us in the Ethics again, is not a
theoretical subject in the matter of physics or metaphysics or mathematics. That is to
say, its purpose is not knowledge for its own sake. However important the study of
politics may be, it exists not for the sake of knowledge, but for action, as he tells us, for
praxis, is his word for action. Political science exists for the sake of the human good and
the opening sentence of the Politics confirms this. He says, we see, everyone does
everything for the sake of some apparent good. All action, all human behavior is aimed
at achieving some type of good, is all aimed at action. All political action aims at
preservation or change. When we act, we seek to preserve or to change. All political
action, you might say, is guided by the idea of better or worse. It implies a standard of
better and worse and this implies some idea of the good by which we judge.
So it follows, at least Aristotle believes so, that the study of politics is not, again, for the
sake of knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge that serves the regime. It helps to
make it better or prevent it from becoming worse. Its goal is not just to know more, but
to know how and this requires not only theoretic acumen, but political judgment and the
kind of practical knowledge that Aristotle discusses at length. This quality of practical
judgment and reflection is, again, somehow unique to the political art or the political
skill Aristotle tells us. It is the ability not only to keep the ship of state afloat, but allows
the greatest statesmen to guide the ship, to steer it safely to port, that is to say the kind
of knowledge needed by the statesmen. Aristotle's political science, then, is ultimately
the supreme science of statecraft, a term that again we don't hear much about--statecraft
or statesmanship. It's regarded perhaps by today's political science as too value laden,
too subjective to speak of statesmanship or statecraft. This, too again, is a word that
carries distinctive and strong connotations. Who is a statesman? What are the attributes
of the statesman? I've spoken a little about the attributes that Aristotle believes are
essential to the megalopsychos, the greatest of the statesmen. This will be quite
different, for example, from the qualities we will see beginning on Friday and next
week that Machiavelli and later Hobbes or Locke, believe are necessary for the great
founders or statesmen. Plato and Aristotle give their own vision--the philosopher-king,
the great-souled man or megalopsychos.
But the statesman, again, to the highest degree is the founder of regimes, laws, and
institutions. They provide the constitutional framework within which we, later figures,
operate. So if Aristotle's political science is an education for statesmanship, you might
say what are its methods? What are its distinctive methods? How do we educate a
statesman? How do we educate potential statesmen? What are its methods? This is a
question asked, you might say, of every mature science. It is possession of a method
that distinguishes a mature science from simply a jumble of facts, hearsay, inspired
guesses, or a random collection of insights and observations. Without a distinctive
method for obtaining and organizing knowledge, we are all just groping in the dark.
So what is the distinctive method of Aristotle's Politics? To some degree, Aristotle
refuses to play the methodologist's game. In a well-known passage from the Ethics, he
says that our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of its
subject. If it achieves clarity within the limits of its subject. In other words, he seems to
be saying it is wrong to demand methodological purity in a subject like politics where
there is always great variety and unpredictability. It is the mark, he says, of an educated
person, presumably a liberally educated person, not to demand more precision than the
subject matter allows. But that formulation seems, in many ways, to be question
begging. How much precision does the subject allow? How do we know? There will
always, he suggests, appear to be something ad hoc about the methods used in the study
of politics. We will have to let the method fit the subject, rather than demanding the
subject matter fit a kind of apriori method. To insist on that kind of methodological
purity, he implies, would be to impose a false sense of unity, a false sense of certainty
or absoluteness on the study of politics, which is variable and contingent and always
subject to flux and change.
Even while Aristotle may deny that there is a single method appropriate to the study of
politics, he proposes a set of common questions that political scientists have to address.
He lays out these questions at the very beginning of the fourth book of the Politics. He
lists four such questions. The political scientist, he says, must have a grasp of the best
regime, given the most favorable circumstances. Second, he tells us, the political
scientist must consider what kind of regime will be best under less than optimal
circumstances. Third, the political scientist must have some knowledge of how to render
any regime, no matter how imperfect it may be, more stable and coherent. Finally, the
political scientist must know something about the techniques of reform and persuasion,
what we might call the area of political rhetoric by which existing regimes can be
brought closer to the best. Taken together, these four questions are intended to guide
inquiry, to shape and direct inquiry. They are not intended to yield sure or certain
results, but to guide and inform statesmen and citizens in the business of decision-
making.
Bearing in mind that political science is a practical science, a science of judgment, a
science aimed at directing action under specific circumstances and situations, it is
important, Aristotle finally suggests, that the language of political science express the
common sense or ordinary language of political actors. There is virtually no jargon in
Aristotle's Politics. Aristotle's political science stays entirely within the orbit of ordinary
speech. Such language does not claim to be scientifically purged of ambiguity, but
rather adopts standards of proof appropriate to people in debates and assemblies, in
courts of law, in council rooms and the like. The language of Aristotelian political
science is the language of man, the political animal. You will never hear him speaking
in terms of dependent or independent variables. You will never hear him using technical
jargon, artificially imported into the science of politics or the study of politics from the
outside.
What most distinguishes Aristotle is that his language is addressed emphatically to
citizens and statesmen, not to other political scientists or philosophers. It has a public
orientation. It is publicly directed. It is public spirited. It is concerned with the common
good. Contrast that with today's political science. Today, it seems, political scientists are
more concerned with advancing the abstract truths of science and claims about creating
a methodologically rigorous and pure science of politics, where Aristotle is more
concerned with the regime. Modern political science, in many ways, claims to stand
above or apart from the regime, to be objective, to be disinterested, as if it were viewing
human affairs from a distant planet. Aristotle takes his stand from within politics and
the regime of which he is a part. Of course, we all know contemporary political
scientists are not neutral. They frequently insert their views, values we call them, value
judgments we call them. They insert them into their discussions. These values are
regarded by them as purely subjective, again, their own value judgment so to speak, and
not strictly speaking a part of the science of politics.
But we all know, do we not, that most contemporary political scientists tend to be
liberals. Their values are liberal values. This raises a question. Whether the relation
between contemporary political science and liberalism is merely accidental or whether
there is some intrinsic, some necessary connection between them. One might do well to
ponder which political science is really more scientific--Aristotle's, which is explicitly
and necessarily evaluative and that offers advice and exhortation to the statesmen and
citizens about how to care for their regime, or contemporary political science that claims
to be neutral and nonpartisan, but which smuggles its values and preferences in always
through the back door. On this very partisan note I conclude. On Friday, let me just
remind you, Il Principe. We'll study Machiavelli.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 10
Transcript
October 13, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Because it's a makeup class, we'll do something a little
special. We're going to show a clip from a movie that I think is particularly appropriate.
As we get into it, I'll tell you why. It's about a five-minute segment from the film called
The Third Man. Has anyone ever seen it? Okay, maybe more than I thought. Just to set
up the scene, for those of you have seen it and more for those of you who haven't, this is
a film that was made in 1948 called The Third Man from a Graham Greene short story.
It takes place in post World War II Vienna. And the clip we're going to see is the most
famous part of the movie. It takes place of a conversation between two old friends. One
of them, played by Orson Welles, is in a black market racket in Vienna and is making a
living doing something very bad in the black market. In this scene, he's trying to
convince an old school friend of his, played by Joseph Cotten, to join this thing. I
should say the Orson Welles character has also faked his death, so no one except his
immediate conspirators knows he's still alive. I should have said that. He's faked his
death and here he has a scene with his old school friend, played by Joseph Cotten, and
he's trying to convince him to come into his black market racket. So here comes The
Third Man.
Be good. We may watch the whole movie. Good scene. It's good because I think it
conveys something of the flavor of Machiavelli's thought in Italy for 30 years under the
Borgias. This is Machiavelli's time. Blood shed and murder and Leonardo da Vinci and
the Renais sance. Under Switzerland for 500 years, peace and democracy. What did it
produce? The cuckoo clock. I'm going to talk about that in a moment.
I want to begin by talking about who was Machiavelli. How do we read The Prince?
Machiavelli was a Florentine. To know that is to know virtually everything you need to
know about him. I'm exaggerating but I do so to make a point. Florence was a republic.
It was a city-state. And Machiavelli spent a good deal of his adult life in the service of
the republic. Living in Florence, the center of the Renaissance at the height of the
Renais sance, Machiavelli wished to do for politics what his contemporaries, like
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, had done for art and sculpture. In other words, he
hoped to revive in some way the spirit of the ancients of antiquity, but to modify it in
the lights of his own experience. As he puts it in the dedication of his most famous
book, he writes that this book The Prince "is a product of long experience with modern
things and a continuous reading of the ancient ones." In Machiavelli, we have what we
have come to call "modernity," given its first and most powerful expres sion.
But Machiavelli was not an ordinary Florentine. He grew up under the rule of the
Medici. That is to say, the first family of Florence, and lived to see them deposed by a
Dominican friar by the name of Savonarola. Savonarola attempted to impose a kind of
theocracy in Florence, a sort of Christian republic of virtue. But the Florentines, being
what they were, rejected this idea and the rule of Savonarola was short-lived. In its
place, a republic was re-established where Machiavelli occupied the office of secretary
to the second chancery, a kind of diplomatic post which he held for 14 years from 1498
to 1512. After the fall of the republic and the return of the Medici to princely rule there,
Machiavelli was exiled from the city, from politics to a small estate that he owned on
the out skirts of the city. You can visit it today. It was here, from a place of political
exile, that he wrote his major works--The Prince, the Discourses on Livy, and The Art of
War. It was from here, also, that he wrote voluminous letters to friends seeking
knowledge about politics. Machiavelli was a kind of political junkie, you could say, in
things happening in Italy and else where.
In one of these letters, a famous letter to his friend, a man named Francesco Vettori, he
describes how he came to write his most famous book. I want to read a passage from
that letter. It is also, I should say, on the basis of this letter, which is why I ask people
from time to time to remove their caps in the class room, from the House of Study. This
is the way Machiavelli approached study. "When evening comes,"--he writes, "When
evening comes, I return to my house and go to my study. At the door, I take off my
clothes of the day covered with muck and dirt and I put on my regal and courtly
garments. And decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where
received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for.
There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reasons for their actions
and they, in their humanity, reply to me. And for the space of four hours every night, I
feel no boredom. I forget every pain. I do not fear poverty and death does not frighten
me. I deliver myself entirely unto them. And because Dante says that to have
understood without retention does not make knowledge, I have noted what capital I
have made from their conversations and have composed a little work on principalities,
where I delve as deeply as I can into reflections on this subject, debating what a
principality is, of what kinds they are, how they are acquired, how they are maintained,
and why they are lost.
So there, Machiavelli gives us a sense of the seriousness with which he approached his
subject, how he studied, and what it was he came to write. Let me just say from the
beginning, The Prince is a deceptive book. What else would we expect from the name
of a man that has become synonymous with deception? It is a work, The Prince, that
everybody has heard of, perhaps has some preconception about. I was checking the web
yesterday and I found a new book about Machiavelli, which none of these every fail to
surprise me. This one is called The Suit: a Machiavellian Guide to Men's Fashion.
Check it out. Who knows? Machiavelli's name is everywhere. It is applied to
everything, from corporate executives now to men's fashion. Everybody knows or
thinks they know what his work is about. His name, again, is synonymous with
deception, treachery, cunning, deceit. Just look at the cover of your book. Look at his
face. Look at his smile, really more of a smirk. He seems to be saying, "I know
something you don't know." The difficulty with reading Machiavelli today is that we all
think we already know what he knows and that is false.
Machiavelli was a revolutionary. In the preface to his largest book, the Discourses on
Livy, he compares himself to Christopher Columbus for his discovery of what he calls
"new modes and orders." What Columbus had done for geography, Machiavelli claims
he will do for politics. That is to say, discover an entirely new continent, a new world,
so to speak, the new world of Machiavelli. Machiavelli's new world, his new modes and
orders, will require, clearly, a displacement of the earlier one, of the previous one. And
Machiavelli wrote, of course, the dominant form of political organization was the
empire or, to speak more precisely, the Christian empire. The Holy Roman Empire, as it
was known in the time of Machiavelli, was the successor to the ancient Roman state, the
older Roman Empire. Both of these empires had aspired to a kind of universality. And
this universality was given expression in Dante's famous treatise, De Monarchia, of
monarchy, that set out a model for a universal Christian state, based on the unity and
oneness of the human race under a Christian ruler. Machiavelli rejected this idea of the
empire and harked back, instead, to the model of republican Rome. And there is much
in his writing that recalls the sort of extraordinary virtues and capacities of the citizens
of the ancient republican city-state. But you might say just as Machiavelli broke with
the dominant model of Christian universalism, so too did he reject the ancient model of
the small, autonomous republican state. He makes this clear in a famous passage at the
beginning of chapter 15 of The Prince. And I just want to read that passage, as well.
Here, Machiavelli says, "I depart from the orders of others. I depart from their modes,"
he says. "But since it is my intent to write something useful to whoever understands it, it
has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of things than to the
imagination of it. And many have imagined," --one thinks here of Plato, perhaps, but
also to Christianity--"Many have imagined republics and principalities that have never
been seen or known to exist in truth. For it is far from how one lives to how one should
live. That he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather
than his preservation."
In other words, no Platonic cities in speech. No Augustinian cities of God. We will only
look, he says, to the effectual truth of things. The effectual truth of the matter, not the
imagination of it or the utopia of it. That passage is often taken to be, the beginning of
chapter 15, the essence of Machiavelli and realism, a kind of Realpolitik, as it were. His
appeal from the "ought" to the "is," to take one's bearings again, from the effectual truth
of things. This seems to be, in many ways, the essence of his teaching. To be sure,
Machiavelli focuses on key aspects of political reality which are often ignored by
thinkers like Plato and Aristotle. Murders, conspiracies, coup d'tat, these are the
kinds of political phenomena he is interested. He seems to be more interested in the
evils that human beings do than the goods to which they aspire. You might even say that
Machiavelli takes delight in demonstrating, much to our chagrin, the space between our
lofty intentions and the actual consequences of our deeds.
Yet, it would seem to me there is more to Machiavelli than the term "realism" connotes,
although that is certainly important. In this passage, Machiavelli announces his break,
indeed his repudiation of all those who have come before, all those who have come
before. He both replaces and yet reconfigures according to his own lights, elements
from both the Christian empire and the Roman republic, to create a new form of
political organization distinctly his own. What we might call today the modern state.
Machiavelli is the founder, the discoverer, the inventor of the modern state. This
modern, secular, sovereign state was refined and developed in the decades and centuries
after Machiavelli in the writing of Hobbes, of Locke, of Rousseau, to say nothing of
contemporary twentieth-century writers from both the right and the left--Max Weber,
Karl Schmidt, to a man, an Italian philosopher named Antonio Gramsci, who was the
author of a book interestingly called The Modern Prince, based on Machiavelli himself.
Machiavelli's state itself has universalist ambitions, in many ways, much like its
Christian and Roman predecessors. But this is a state, he believes, that has now been
liberated or emancipated from Christian and classical conceptions of virtue. The
management of affairs is left to those people who he calls princes, which in the
Machiavellian usage designates a new kind of political founder or leader endowed with
a new species of ambition, love of glory, and elements of prophetic authority that we
might call charisma.
But just what was the nature of the revolution contemplated by our founder,
Machiavelli, the founder of modern political science? Consider, just for a moment, the
title and dedication of the book. The Prince appears, on its surface, to be a most
conventional work. It presents itself in the long tradition of what has come to be called
the mirror of princes. Books that give a kind of guide to the dos and don'ts of princely
behavior. Fair enough. It seems to go back a long, long time. And the appearance of
conventionality is supported by the opening words of the book in his dedicatory letter.
The first words or first line out of his mouth or the first lines are "it is customary," he
says. It is a work intended to ingratiate himself to Lorenzo de Medici, the man to whom
the work is dedicated, a customary prince, a traditional prince who has just regained his
power. But look again.
Consider the structure of the first three chapters. "All states, all dominions that have
held and do hold empire over man are either republics or principalities," he says in the
opening sentence of chapter 1. Having distinguished two, and only two, kinds of
regimes, republics and principalities, as the only ones worth mentioning, he goes on to
distinguish two kinds of principalities. There are hereditary principalities, like those
currently run by Lorenzo, which acquire their authority through tradition and hereditary
bloodlines. Then he says there are new princes and new principalities. Machiavelli then
asserts that his book will deal only with principalities, leaving, he says, the discussion of
republics for elsewhere, what one assumes his Discourses of Livy, which he was already
writing by this time. But then Machiavelli goes on to tell the reader that the exclusive
subject of this book will be the new prince. In other words, not Lorenzo at all, but
precisely princes who have or will achieve their authority through their own guile, their
own force, or their own virt, to use the famous Machiavellian term that I want to talk
about later.
The true, in other words, recipient of this book must be necessarily the potential prince.
That is to say, someone with sufficient political audacity to create their own authority,
who has not simply received it from the past, but to create their own authority. Maybe
one could even say Machiavelli's prince is, in a way, the first truly self-made man. So
what, then, is the character of this new prince and how does he differ from more
conventional modes of political authority? In one of the most famous chapters of the
book, chapter 6, entitled, "Of New Principalities that are Acquired Through One's Own
Arms and Virtue," there is that word again, virt, one's own arms and virtue,
Machiavelli discusses the character of the modern prince, the new prince. "A prudent
man," he writes, "should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men and imitate
those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it
at least is in the odor of it." We at least come within, you might say, sniffing distance of
their greatness. "One should do," he says, "what archers do when attempting to reach a
distant target, namely, aim your bow high, knowing that the force of gravity will bring
the arrow down." In other words, set your sights high, knowing you will probably fall
short.
"So who are the greatest examples," he says, "of princely rule that the prudent man"--
interesting choice of words, "the prudent man"--"should imitate?" And here,
Machiavelli gives a list of those heroic founders of peoples and states--Moses, Cyrus,
Romulus, Theseus, and so on. "As one examines their actions and lives," he writes, "one
does not see that they had anything else from fortune than the opportunity which gave
them the matter enabling them to introduce any form they please. Notice in that
sentence, he uses those Aristotelian terms, "form" and "matter" that we spoke about in
relation to the Aristotelian regime. "They had nothing else from fortune," he says, again,
"than the opportunity," the occasion, that "gave them the matter enabling them to
introduce any form they please." In short, Machiavelli claims these were founders who
created, in a way, ex nihilo, out of nothing. They only had the occasion in a kind of
formless matter upon which they could adopt and impose any form they took. And they
had, of course, the strength of mind, as well as the audacity and cunning, to take
advantage of this situation. Such opportunities, he writes, such occasions, made these
men successful. And their excellent virtue enabled the opportunity to be recognized.
Hence, their fatherlands were ennobled by it and they became prosperous. They took
advantage of their opportunity, seized their opportunity and imposed their own form
upon it.
And it is here that Machiavelli introduces his famous distinction between armed and
unarmed prophets. "All the armed prophets," he says, "conquered and the unarmed were
ruined." This seems to be and is, clearly, a kind of classic statement of sheer
Machiavellian power politics. "All politics grows out of the barrel of a gun," as a
famous twentieth-century Machiavellian once put it. The armed prophets conquer, the
unarmed lose. But there seems to be more to it than this. Machiavelli compares the
prince to a prophet. Why does he use that language? What is a prophet? The most
obvious answer is a person to whom God speaks. Machiavelli's armed prophets may not
be religious figures and they are not necessarily recipients of divine knowledge, but
they seem to be, at least on his account, people of exceptional personal qualities that
allow them to bring laws, to be law bringers, lawgivers, shapers of institutions and also
reformers of opinions that govern our lives. Machiavelli's armed prophet is more than
just a gangster, like Orson Welles in that part. He is a teacher and a kind of educator as
well. You might even think in your class, in your sections, how or in what ways does
Machiavelli's armed prophet differ in important ways both from Plato's philosopher
king, as well as Aristotle's notion of the megalopsychos as the sort of magnanimous
statesman. Although this kind of talk about "armed prophets always win" is
characteristic of Machiavelli, he likes this kind of tough talk. He clearly recognizes that
there are clear exceptions to his rule about armed prophets. Who comes to mind most
vividly? Who, in other words, is not present in Machiavelli's list of great prophets that
one should imitate?
Student: Jesus.
Professor Steven Smith: Yes. Most obvious, perhaps, certainly to his contemporaries,
Jesus, who triumphed through words and teaching alone. He had no troops. He had no
arms. He established a religion, first a sect, you might say, then a religion, then
eventually an empire, the Holy Roman Empire, that was established in the name of that
teaching. Words may well be a powerful weapon, as powerful as a gun. Then you might
say, "What is Machiavelli himself?" Who is Machiavelli but an archetypal, unarmed
prophet? He has no troops. He has no territory. He controls no real estate. He's been
banished, yet he is clearly attempting to conquer, comparing himself to Columbus, to
conquer in large part through the transformation of our understanding of good and evil,
of virtue and vice. In other words, to make people obey you, you must first make them
believe you. Machiavelli's prophetic prince, in other words, must have some of the
qualities of a philosopher, as well as a religious reformer trying to reshape and remold
human opinion, especially opinion over, as we said, good and evil, just and unjust.
What does this reformation, so to speak, or transformation consist of? We might even
call this Machiavelli in the garden of good and evil, midnight in the garden of good and
evil for Machiavelli. One point often attributed about Machiavelli is that he introduced a
new kind of immoralism into politics. In that famous chapter, chapter 15, he says he sets
out to teach the prince how not to be good. A striking formulation. He will teach the
prince how not to be good. And in perhaps the most important book on Machiavelli ever
written, the author of that book declared Machiavelli to be a teacher of evil. You might
want to think about that. A teacher of evil. Is that what Machiavelli was? Questions of
good and bad, virtue and vice, appear on virtually every page of The Prince. He is not
simply a teacher of political pragmatism, of how to adjust means to fit the ends. He
seems to be offering nothing short of a comprehensive revolution, transformation. If
you want to use the Nietzschean language, "transvaluation" of our most basic
vocabulary about good and evil.
Machiavelli doesn't reject the idea of the good. Rather, he redefines it. He is continually
speaking, and in fact I would suggest on virtually every page of the book, he is
continually speaking the language of virtue. His word "virt," which a word that
retains the Latin word for the word "man," vir, wir, man, and virt, a word that is
perhaps best translated or, by our word, "manliness." What distinguishes Machiavelli's
use of this language of virt, manliness, is that he seeks to locate it in certain extreme
situations, such as political foundings, changes of regimes, wars, both of domestic and
foreign kinds. What distinguishes Machiavelli from his predecessors, in many ways, is
his attempt to take the extraordinary situation, the extreme situation, again, the extremes
of political founding, conspiracies, wars, coups, as the normal situation and then makes
morality fit that extreme. His examples are typically drawn from situations of human
beings or polities in extremes where the very survival or independence of a society is at
stake. In those situations, you might say, and only in those situations, is it permissible to
violate the precepts of ordinary morality. In those situations one must learn, as he says,
how not to be good, to have to violate the conventions and cannons of ordinary
morality. Machiavelli takes his bearings from these extreme states of emergency and in
his own way, seeks to normalize them, to present them as the normal condition of
politics.
Machiavelli's preference for these extreme situations expresses his belief that only in
moments of great crisis, where the very existence of a state is at risk, does human nature
truly reveal itself. We finally or fully understand what people are only in the most
extreme situations. The paradox that, you might say, runs throughout all of
Machiavelli's morality is that the very possibility of virtue grows out of and, in fact, is
even dependent upon the context of chaos, violence, and disorder that always threatens
the political world. Think of it. Think of many of our great political models or heroes.
What would the Duke of Marlborough have been without Louis XIV? What would
Washington have been without George III? What would Lincoln have been without the
slave interest? What would Churchill have been without Hitler? In other words, his
point is that good is only possible because of the prior existence of bad. Good is
founded upon evil. And even the greatest goods, the founding and preservation of cities,
often require murder. What was Romulus' murder of Remus or Cain's murder of Abel,
but the kind of murder that founded, at the basis of the founding of cities and
civilizations?
One thinks, in a way, of Welles' line in The Third Man when he looks down from above
and says, "If I gave you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped moving, would you
really tell me to keep my money?" It requires, for Machiavelli, the founding of regimes
requires that kind of cold and cruel calculation. Of course, it's being used in the movie
just to support a criminal enterprise, not the founding of a city. We might investigate
that as well. But Machiavelli does not deny that in ordinary terms, in what we might call
times of normal politics, the ordinary rules of justice prevail. He also shows, however,
that normal politics is, itself, dependent upon extraordinary politics, periods of crisis,
anarchy, instability, revolution, where the normal rules of the game are suspended. It is
in these times, you might say, when individuals of extraordinary virtue and capacity,
prophetic qualities, as he calls it in chapter 6, are most likely to emerge. While the
Aristotelian statesmen, just to make a contrast for a moment, is most likely to value
stability and the means necessary to achieving it, the Machiavellian prince seeks war,
because it is only, again, in the most extreme situations that one can prosper and be
prosperous. Think about the lines again from the movie. "For 30 years under the
Borgias, violence, murder, terror, bloodshed. But what did it produce? Greatness of an
unprecedented type. Stability, democracy, brotherly love, peace. What does that
produce? Mediocrity, the cuckoo clock." There might be a little more of Nietzsche
suggested in that, than Machiavelli, but I think the Machiavellian overtones are very
evident.
Consider just the following. Every child, every one of you, every one of us was brought
up to know that one must never do wrong, even if good consequences are seen to
follow. It is never right to give bad examples to others, even if one expects good to
come from it. Yet, Machiavelli breaks these rules about not giving bad examples. Virtue
is not associated with the classical conceptions of moderation, of justice, of self-control
over the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Virtue means for him a kind of
manly self-assertion, audacity, ruthlessness, a reliance on one's own arms and calculated
use of cruelty to achieve one's ends. The model of Machiavellian virt is the
Renaissance statesman, in general, Cesare Borgia. It's very interesting that Orson
Welles made a movie, not so often seen today, about Cesare Borgia.
I want to leave you with reading one passage from The Prince, chapter 7, in which
Machiavelli illustrates the kind of virt Cesare represented and that he wants to
recommend for those who follow him. "Once the duke," that's Cesare himself--"Once
the duke had taken over the Romana," an area outside of Florence, "he found it had been
commanded by impotent lords who had been readier to despoil their subjects than to
correct them and had given their subjects matter for disunion, not union. So Cesare put
there," he says "Messer Ramiro d'Orco, a cruel and ready man to whom he gave the
fullest power." So Cesare set up as a lieutenant of his to impose order on this area and to
whom he delegated the fullest responsibility. "In short time," he goes on, "Ramiro
reduced it to peace and unity with the very greatest reputation for himself. Then the
duke judged that such excessive authority was not necessary, because he feared it might
become hateful and he set up a sort of a civil court in the middle of the province with
the most excellent president where each city had its advocate. And because he knew that
the past rigors had generated some hatred for Ramiro, to purge the spirits of that people
and to gain them entirely to himself, he wishes to show that if any cruelty had been
committed, this had not come from him, from Cesare, but from the harsh nature of his
minister. And having seized this opportunity," that language, seized the occasion, seized
this opportunity, "he had emplaced one morning in the piazza in two pieces, with a
piece of wood and a bloody knife beside him. He had him cut in two. The bloody knife
and piece of wood beside him. "The ferocity of this spectacle," Machiavelli concludes,
"left the people at once satisfied and stupefied." That, of course, is Machiavelli's virt,
princely virtue, what you do to leave the people satisfied and stupefied. What we might
call today shock and awe. Okay, next week we'll continue this learned man.
[end of transcript]

Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 11
Transcript
October 16, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Last time, I ended by talking about Machiavelli as both a
revolutionary in many ways and a reformer of the moral vocabulary about virtue and
vice, good and evil. Machiavelli seeks to replace, to transpose an older vocabulary
associated both with Plato and certainly, perhaps more importantly, with biblical
sources, wants to transform altogether the language of virtue, to give it a new kind of
meaning, to change it from either Platonic or Christian otherworldliness to a greater
sense of worldly power. Virtue is, for him, or to use his term again, virt is related with
manliness, with force, with power. He tells us, in chapter 25 of The Prince, the ethic of
the prince must be one of audacity and even more audacity and that famous and very
volatile image he uses, fortune is a woman and you must know how- the prince must
know how to conquer the woman, must be used through policies of force, brutality,
audacity. This is the language of Machiavelli. Virtue is associated with the quest for
worldly glory, with ambition, with the desire to achieve success, and that's what I want
to talk about at greater length today. I want to talk about what in the political and
philosophical literature about this is called the problem of "dirty hands." And if you
want to join the political game, you must be prepared to get your hands dirty, and what
Machiavelli means by that, how he comes to this problem.
In order, he argues, to effect a transformation of European morality, it is, in other words,
to teach the prince, as he says in chapter 15, how not to be good, you have to go to the
source of the morality. You have to go to the source of morality. To affect the maxims,
to affect the standards that govern our lives, it is necessary to go to the source of those
standards and those maxims and that can only be found in religion. Oddly, it seems in
some ways, religion does not seem to be a major theme of The Prince. In a memorable
passage from chapter 18, Machiavelli advises the prince always to cultivate the
appearance of religion. The prince, he writes, should appear all mercy, all faith, all
honesty, all humanity and all religion, he writes, adding nothing is more necessary to
appear to have this last quality. The point is clear. The appearance of religion, by which
he clearly means Christianity, is good while the actual practice of it is harmful. Think
about the way in which that transforms what Plato says about justice in his answer to
Glaucon in Book II of the Republic whereor Thrasymachuswhere they both say it
is more important, is it not more important to have the appearance of being just than the
reality of it? And here, you see Machiavelli in a way adding his voice to that chorus. It
is much better to have the appearance than the reality of religion.
But in order to understand or to discover the core of Machiavelli's teachings about
religion, I have to make a slight detour away from The Prince and to his Discourses on
Livy and in maybe the most important chapter of that book, Book II, chapter 2, called
"Concerning the Kinds of People the Romans had to Fight and how Obstinately they
Defended their Freedom," a long title for a chapter to be sure, but here Machiavelli
develops a powerful contrast between two opposed and mutually incompatible moral
codes, the Christian and the pagan. "If one asks oneself," Machiavelli writes, "If one
asks oneself how it came about that people of old," in olden--in the ancient world, "were
more fond of liberty than we are today, I think the answer," he says, "is due to the same
cause that makes men today less bold than they used to be," less bold, "and this is due I
think to the difference between our education and that of bygone days."
So what precisely is the difference that Machiavelli refers to here between our education
and the education of bygone days that makes people or that made people in the ancient
world more fond of liberty, as he says, than those of our contemporaries or
Machiavelli's contemporaries? Machiavelli's emphasis here on education, particularly
moral and religious education, is the key difference between the ancient times and his
own. These two different ages, he believes, advanced two very different systems of
moral and religious education, one based on pagan worldliness and the other based on
Christian innocence. And it is that conflict, as it were, between what we might call
worldliness and innocence that is the core of Machiavelli's moral code. Let me quote
Machiavelli's passage from the Discourses at some length because I think it's very
revealing: "Our religion," he writes, obviously thinking of the Catholic Christianity of
his time. "Our religion," he writes, "has glorified humble and contemplative men,
monks, priests, humble and contemplative men, rather than men of action. It is assigned
as man's highest good humility, abnegation, and contempt for mundane things," whereas
the other, that is to say the ancient moral code, "whereas the other identified it with
magnanimity, bodily strength, and everything that conduces to make men very bold.
And if our religion," he says, "demands that in you there be strength what it asks for is
the strength to suffer rather than to do bold things." In other words, he says Christian
strength, the strength of the Christian, is the strength to suffer, thinking of Jesus on the
Cross rather than to, as he puts it, do bold things.
And it is not for Machiavelli simply the existence of these two different moralities that
is at stake. By softening morals, he believes, by making us gentler, Christianity has had
some deeply perverse effects upon politics, so he claims. This pattern of life,
Machiavelli continues, appears to have made the world weak and to have handed it over
to the prey of the wicked. This pattern of life, this pattern of education, of moral
education, introduced by the Bible and scripture and Christianity, has made the world
weak. In other words, by teaching humility, self-abnegation, purity of heart, Christianity
has made it difficult to develop qualities necessary for the defense of political liberty.
Christianity has made the world weak or, if you want to use his again highly charged
word for that, it has made the world effeminate. Machiavelli would no doubt be taken
up against some board of offense today for using such a term but that's his language.
What can I say? This is why he concludes there are fewer republics today than in the
time of the ancients because we do not have the same love of freedom that they did.
Now Machiavelli's explicit referencing of the ancient civil religions, the ancient civil
theology, is a direct tribute to the role of Numa, N-u-m-a, in Livy's famous History of
the Roman Republic. Justin, who is an authority on this text, can tell you more about it
if you like, but in the opening books of Livy, he tells the story of how Rome was
founded by Romulus, who had murdered his brother, Remus, but after this it required a
second founding and the second founding was the work of a man named Numa, who,
Livy writes, determined that Rome, which had originally been established through force
of arms, should be reestablished through justice, laws and proper observances, in other
words, religion. In order to complete the founding of the city, it was necessary to
establish its gods and ensure proper respect for the law. Numa was the bringer of the
Roman legal codes respecting religion, proper observances and the like.
But Machiavelli uses Livy and in the story about Rome's second founding to bring
home an important lesson about the utility of religion. "Religion," he tells the reader, "is
not to be evaluated by its truth content but for its consequences for society." But the
story of Numa or his use of that story tell us more than just a lesson about the social
utility of religion. At the time of the founding of Rome, Machiavelli writes, religion was
necessary to temper and control the warlike character of the Romans. Religion had to
bring a softening effect upon against the violent and bestial character of the early
Romans. But for us today, Machiavelli writes, religion has to serve the opposite
purpose. It must instill something of a fighting spirit into people who have lost their
instinct to resist encroachments on their liberty. In many ways, this is the deeper
meaning of Machiavelli's slogan, "one's own arms." He uses in a variety of passages the
formula that a good republic depends upon one's own arms and laws and in a deeper
sense this idea of "one's own arms" means developing the capacities to resist
encroachments on your freedom. The prince, in other words, has to use religion to
encourage his subjects to rely upon their own arms rather than on divine promises and
that again is the teaching of his retelling of the story of David and Goliath, the biblical
story of David and Goliath, in chapter 13 of The Prince.
You remember how Machiavelli retells and also rewrites that story. He writes the story
saying that David went armed, went into battle with Goliath armed only, he says, with a
sling and a knife, and those of you who know the story and checked against the biblical
account of the story know that David only went into battle against Goliath armed with
Saul's armor and his sling. Machiavelli gives him a knife. Where did this come from?
Why does he add this? His subtle alteration of the biblical story is hugely revealing. Its
moral seems to be "trust in God's promises, yes, but bring a knife just in case." It's like
the old joke about the fighter who went in to the ring and before going in to the ring and
he asked the priest to pray for him. He said, "I'll pray for him but if he can punch it'll
help." In a small respect, that's Machiavelli. Machiavelli sensed that his own country
was deeply deficient in these martial virtues, necessary to reassert greatness and this
was a theme of a lengthy poem he wrote. Yes. You're surprised. Yes, Machiavelli wrote
poetry and plays. His play, The Mandragola, is still performed, but he wrote an
interesting poem, a lengthy poem called Ambizione, ambition, something like Platonic
thumos, which lamented his countrymen's lack of civic spirit and their need to be
reeducated in the art of war. I only want to read a small section to you from that poem:
"If you perchance are tempted to accuse nature, if Italy, so wary and wounded, does not
produce hard and bellicose people, this I say is not sufficient to erase our cowardice for
education can supplement where nature is deficient. Stern education made Italy bloom
in ancient days and made her rise and conquer the entire world and for herself make
room. But now she lives, if tears can be called life, beneath the ruins and unhappy fate
that she has reaped from her long lack of strife. But now she lives, if tears can be called
life, beneath the ruins and unhappy fate that she has reaped from her long lack of strife."
And just from this little section of the poem, you can see that the theme of a new kind of
education and only that can remedy nature's defects, as Machiavelli calls them. It is this
lack of strife, this long lack of strife, that makes people weak. People are weakened by
prolonged peace and they are made strong, fierce and independent through war. Only by
hardening themselves, he says, will it be possible for Italy, as he puts it, "to rise and
conquer the entire world, in ancient days again and made her rise and conquer the entire
world and for herself make room." His point seems to be this. If you want liberty, you
have to know how not to be good, at least as Christianity has defined goodness. The
Christian virtue of humility, turning the other cheek, forgiveness of sins, must be
rejected if you want to do good as opposed to just being good. You have to learn, in
other words, how to get your hands dirty. Between the innocence of the Christian and
the worldliness of Machiavelli's new morality, there can be no reconciliation. These are
just two incompatible moral positions that Machiavelli states but he goes further than
this.
The safety and security enjoyed by the innocents, our freedom to live blameless lives
and to have untroubled sleep, depends upon the prince's clear-eyed and even ruthless
use of power. The true statesman, the true prince for Machiavelli, must be prepared to
mix a love of the common good, a love of his own people, with a streak of cruelty that
is often regarded as essential for a great ruler in general, another part of knowing how
not to be good, knowing when and how to use cruelty or what Machiavelli tellingly
calls "cruelty well used." When it's well used, it's a virtue. This is simply another
example of how moral goodness grows out of and even requires a context of moral evil.
Machiavelli's advice to you is clear. If you cannot accept the responsibilities of political
life, if you cannot afford to get your hands dirty, if you cannot accept the harsh
necessities that may require cruelty, deceit and even murder, then get out of the way,
then this is not for you. Don't seem to impose, don't seek to impose your own high-
minded innocence, sometimes called justice, your own high-minded innocence on the
requirements of statecraft because it will only lead to ruin. In the modern era, the
presidency of Jimmy Carter, for example, is usually taken as exhibit A of the confusion
between Christian humanitarianism and the necessities of reason of state. If you can't do
the tough thing, if you can't do the harsh thing, Machiavelli says, then stay out of
politics and don't attempt to impose your high-minded morality on the state.
As I said at the beginning, in the philosophical literature, this has become known as the
problem of dirty hands so named after a famous play written by the French philosopher
Jean-Paul Sartre. The problem of dirty hands refers to the conflict of duties, again
conflict of moralities between the harsh requirements of politics and the equally
demanding desire for moral purity, to keep the world at a distance. Machiavelli doesn't
deny that there is something deeply admirable about the desire to remain morally pure,
morally decent, morally innocent, but he just wants to say this is a very different
morality from the morality of politics. In Sartre's play, the action takes place in a
fictional eastern European country during World War II, probably something like
Yugoslavia, where a communist resistance fighter reproaches an idealistic young recruit
to the resistance who is resisting or is balking at the order to carry out a political
assassination. "Why did you join us?" the communist resistance fighter asks. "Purity is
an idea for the yogi or the monk. Do you think anyone can govern innocently?" "Do you
think anyone can govern innocently," the phrase taken of course from Saint-Just, one of
the leaders of the Jacobin Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. What do you
think politics is, a game of moral purity?
The same kind of conflict is really very much at the core of the great political fiction of
John le Carre, the great novelist of the Cold War and so on, and in his great, one of his
early political thrillers, a book called The Spy who Came in from the Cold, he depicts
there a British agent who was working undercover and who at the same time is carrying
on a love affair with an idealistic young English librarian who has joined the communist
party. In this case, she, the communist, is the idealistic one. She's joined the party
because she believes it will aid the cause of nuclear disarmament and will bring
international peace and when Lemas, the spy, reveals to her that he is a spy, he tells her
his view of what politics is, the nature of politics. "There's only one law in the game,"
Lemas says, "the expediency of temporary alliances. Who do you think spies are,
priests, saints, martyrs? They're squalid little men, fools, queers, sadists, drunkards,
people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they
sit like monks weighing up right and wrong?"
So both of these cases, the Sartre case, the John le Carre case, in a way are interesting
but they're also sort of cases of what I think of as faux Machiavellianism, kind of
intellectuals engaging in tough talk to show that they have really lost their innocence,
which is the sort of intellectual equivalent of losing your virginity, showing you're not
really innocent about the world. Machiavelli of course likes to play that game and it
suggests that the world is divided between the weak and the strong, between the realists
who see things the way they are and the idealists who require the comfort of moral
illusions. Yes, Machiavelli sometimes seems to corroborate this point of view. Does he
not say that armed prophets always win, the unarmed prophets lose? Did he not say that
he wrote to reveal the effectual truth of things and not just what people have imagined
the case to be? Yet it seems inconceivable that Machiavelli wrote an entire book simply
to prove the obvious, that is to say that the strong will always crush the weak and that
politics is left to those who leave their scruples at the door. The question is, was
Machiavelli really that kind of Machiavellian?
Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian? Let's see. What kind of government did Machiavelli
think best? As he indicates at the beginning of The Prince, there are two kinds of
regimes: there are principalities and republics. But each of these regimes, he says, is
based on certain contrasting dispositions or what he calls humors, umori, humors. "In
every society," he writes, this is chapter 9 of The Prince, "two diverse humors are found
from which this arise, that the people desire neither to be commanded nor oppressed by
the great and the great desire to command and oppress the people." These are the two
great political psychological dispositions, the popular desire not to be oppressed and the
disposition of what he calls the great to command and oppress. Machiavelli uses these
two psychological and even in some ways quasi-medical terms, humors, to designate
two classes of people on which every society is based.
His theory of the humors in chapter 9 seems in some ways to be reminiscent of Plato's
account of the three classes of the soul or the three parts of the soul with one vivid
exception. "Each class of the city," he says, "is bound or determined by a humor but
neither humor is anchored in reason or rationality." Every state is divided into two
classes expressing these two qualities, these two psychological qualities, the grandi, the
rich and powerful who wish to dominate, and the popolo, the common people who wish
merely to be left alone, who wish neither to rule nor be ruled. Now, one might expect
that the author of a book entitled The Prince would favor the great, would favor the
grandi, those who desire to rule. Are not these aristocratic goals of honor and glory
precisely what Machiavelli seems to be advocating? Yet in many ways, Machiavelli
proceeds to deprecate the virtues of the nobility, perhaps to our surprise. The ends of the
people, the ends, the purposes of the people, is more decent than that of the great since
the great want to oppress and the people want not to be oppressed, he says. His advice is
that the prince should seek to build his power base on the people rather than on the
nobles. Because of their ambition for power, the nobles will always be a threat to the
prince and, in an interesting reversal of the Platonic and Aristotelian conception of
politics, it is the nobles here who are said to be the more fickle and unpredictable and
the people are more constant and reliable. Remember in the Platonic and Aristotelian
view of politics the democracy, the rule of the people, the demos, was always criticized
for it being fickle and unstable and subject to whim and passion and so on. Here,
Machiavelli tells us it is the great who are subject to this kind of inconstancy and the
people are more reliable. The worst, he writes, that a prince can expect from a hostile
people is to be abandoned by them but from the great, when they are hostile, he must
fear not only being abandoned but also that they may move against him. The grandi are
more dangerous and fickle.
So the main business of government consists in knowing how to control the elites
because they are always a potential source of conflict and ambition. The prince must
know how to chasten the ambition, to humble the pride, as it were, of the great and
powerful, and this, we will see as early as Wednesday, becomes a major theme in the
philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, humbling or chastening the pride of the few. The rule of
the prince or sovereign requires the ability to control the ambition and to do so through
selective policies of executions, of public accusations and political trials. Remember the
example that we read at the end of class on Friday, I believe from chapter 7, the
example of Cesare Borgia and Remirro d'Orco and how his execution, his bloody
execution, left the people, Machiavelli says, stupefied and satisfied? Here is a perfect
example of how to control the ambitions of the nobles and to win the people to your
side. So Machiavelli's prince, while not exactly a democrat, recognizes the essential
decency of the people and the need to keep their faith. And by decency he seems to
mean their absence of ambition, the absence of the desire to dominate and control. But
this kind of decency is not the same as goodness for there is also a tendency on the part
of the people to descend into what Machiavelli calls idleness or license.
The desire not to oppress others may be decent but at the same time the people have to
be taught or educated how to defend their liberty. Fifteen hundred years of Christianity,
he says, have left people weak, have left the people weak without their capacities to
exercise political responsibility and the resources to defend themselves from attack. So
just as princes must know how to control the ambitions of the multitude, how to control
the ambitions of the nobles--excuse me--they, the princes, must know how to strengthen
the desires of the common people. Some readers of The Prince, even some very astute
readers of The Prince, have thought that Machiavelli's work is really, or Machiavelli's
prince, is really a kind of democrat in disguise and that the prince is intended precisely
to alert the people to the dangers of a usurpatory prince. This is for example what the
great seventeenth-century political philosopher Spinoza believed about Machiavelli. In
his book called, simply called, The Political Treatise, Spinoza wrote: "Machiavelli
wished to show how careful a people should be before entrusting its welfare to a single
prince. I am led," Spinoza continues, "to this opinion concerning that most far-seeing
man because it is known that he was favorable to liberty." That's Spinoza on
Machiavelli, because "he was favorable to liberty" and that the book, he says, is kind of
a satire on princely rule. Or, if you don't believe Spinoza, if you don't believe his
authority is sufficient, consider someone who you'll be reading in a couple of weeks,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from the Social Contract. "Machiavelli was an honorable man
and a good citizen," Rousseau says, "an honorable man and a good citizen who, being
attached to the House of Medici, was forced, during the oppression of his homeland, to
disguise his love of freedom." So, The Prince was written in a way that disguised the
real teaching of the book, which is the love of freedom and presumably the freedom of
the people, something of the type that Rousseau himself spoke about. Maybe these
comments go too far. Maybe they are exaggerations and I think to some degree they are
but it's revealing that both of these very serious readers of Machiavelli took him to be an
apostle of freedom. Spinoza taking him, taking his book to be a warning to the people
about the dangers of princely rule, Rousseau believing that he had deliberately disguised
his love of freedom because he had to appeal to the tyrannical nature of the Medici
family. In either case, they regard him as surreptitiously taking the side of the people
against the nobles.
In any case, whatever one makes of those examples, Machiavelli seems to be
challenging important aspects of the classical conceptions that we've been talking about
up to this point. In the classical republic, for the ancient republic of Plato and Aristotle,
these republics were ruled by nobilities, gentlemen possessed of wealth and leisure, who
were therefore capable of forming sound political judgment, who will dominate, while
in Machiavelli's state it is the people who are going to be the dominant social and
political power. Machiavelli wants to redirect power to some degree away from the
nobles and toward the people. One wants to know why, why does he want to do that? In
the first place, he judges the people to be more reliable, as he tells us, than the great.
Once the people have been taught to value their liberty, have learned to oppose
encroachments on their freedom, to be fierce and vigilant watchdogs rather than humble
and subservient underlings, they will serve as a reliable basis for the greatness and
power of a state. With the people on his side, the prince is more likely to achieve his
goals of a robust civil life for his people and eternal glory for himself.
And, as Machiavelli likes to say, the prince must know how to adapt to the times. What
is true for princes is no less true for advisers to princes like Machiavelli himself. One
must know the times and character of a people. In the ancient republic, it may have been
necessary to find and impose restraints on the passions of the demos but in the modern
world, he says, where republics have become a thing of the past, the people need to be
taught how to value their liberty above all else. The most excellent princes of the past
were those like Moses, he tells us, who brought tables of law and prepared people for
self-government. It is fitting and proper that The Prince concludes, the last chapter,
chapter 26, concludes with a patriotic call to his countrymen to emancipate themselves
and liberate Italy from foreign invaders.
So what did Machiavelli achieve? What were his actual accomplishments? Did he
accomplish all he set out to do, to rewrite or to write a new moral code for political life,
to found a new political continent, as he speaks about, to found new modes and orders
along the lines of Columbus? Did he achieve this? First of all, one should not and
cannot underestimate his unprecedented break with both classical and biblical antiquity.
More than anyone else before him, and perhaps more than anyone else since, he sought
to liberate politics from ecclesiastical control. The new prince, as we've seen, must
know how to use religion but needs to learn how not to be used by religion, must not
become a dupe of the religious. He must know how to use religious passions and
sentiments but not be used by them.
Politics must become a purely worldly affair. It should not be limited or constrained by
any transcendent standards or moral laws that do not derive from politics itself, whether
a law of God or some kind of transcendent moral order or code. Machiavelli's warning,
we might say today, to the religious right, or his critique of the religious right, cannot
make politics conform to transcendent moral law. But not only did Machiavelli bring a
new worldliness to politics, he also introduced a new kind of populism, you might say.
Plato and Aristotle imagined aristocratic republics that would invest power in an
aristocracy of education and virtue. Machiavelli deliberately seeks to enlist the power of
the people against aristocracies of education and virtue. He is a kind of proto-democrat
almost who sought to re-create, not through accident and chance, but through planning
and design a new kind of republic in the modern world. The republic that Machiavelli
imagined, and it's interesting while he tells us he's only going to the effectual truth of
things and not the imagination of it, nevertheless Machiavelli does himself imagine a
new kind of regime, a new kind of republic in the modern world that would not be a city
at peace but would be a city at war. It would be armed and expansive. Machiavelli's
republic feeds on conflict, on war and conquest. It is aggressive and imperialistic.
Does it sound familiar? Is it us? In fact, if you look at a brilliant article I think in this
week's New Republic by Robert Kagan called "Cowboy Nation," Kagan demonstrates I
think with a great deal of conviction that the American republic from its onset has been
expansive, aggressive, imperialistic, from the conquest of the territories, the
expropriation of the native Americans, the acquisition of Louisiana, wars of liberation
against Mexico and Spain and so on, well into the twentieth and now the twenty first
century, an aggressive, expansive, imperialistic republic. That, he says, has been our
history and what it should say, what it doesn't quite say I think, is that it has been this
history not because it is American but because it is a republic, because of its regime
type, its regime character. That kind of behavior seems perhaps to be built in to the
natures of republic. It was Machiavelli's admiration for the politics, what someone once
called the lupine politics, the wolf-like politics, of republican Rome that led him to
understand that all social and moral goods have been established by morally
questionable means. Have we become or have we always been Machiavelli's republic,
Machiavelli's desire? Think about that when you're in your sections or writing your
papers and you will get those paper topics on Wednesday, by the way. And finally,
Machiavelli is the author of a new amoral realism. "By whatever means necessary" I
think is his motto or should be his motto, "by whatever means necessary," and oddly he
claims to be merely stating out loud, merely stating aloud what all writers have known
all along.
It is necessary, he says, for the prince to know well how to use the beast and the man, he
writes. "This role," he says, "was taught covertly by ancient writers. It was taught
covertly by ancient writers," he says in chapter 18. The idea then that Machiavelli is
doing no more than saying openly and overtly what ancient writers had wrapped in
parable and enigma and myth says something about Machiavelli's new political science.
What was previously taught only subtly and in private will now be taught openly and in
public. What was once available only to a few, will now be available to all. Perhaps
more than anything else, Machiavelli's new openness, his readiness to challenge
received authority, and his willingness to consider authority as self-created, as self-
made rather than bestowed by either nature or grace, is what fundamentally constitutes
his modernity. So I'm going to leave it on that note and on Wednesday we will begin the
study of one of Machiavelli's greatest and most profound disciples in the modern world,
a man by the name of Thomas Hobbes.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 12
Transcript
October 18, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: O.K., today, what a joy. What a joy! We start Hobbes. And he
is one of the great treats. Thomas Hobbes was the author of the first and, I believe,
undoubtedly the greatest, work of political theory written in the English language. He
was a master of English style and prose, and his work ranks among the very greatest in
this or any other language. Leviathan is to prose what Milton's Paradise Lost is to epic
poetry. Think about that. Hobbes was in many ways a perfect foil for Machiavelli. He
played the part of Doctor Watson to Machiavelli's Sherlock Holmes. Hobbes, in other
words, carried out what Machiavelli had helped him make possible. Machiavelli, you
remember, claimed to have discovered a new continent, new modes and orders. It was
Hobbes who helped to make this new continent habitable. Machiavelli, you might say,
cleared the brush. He was the Lewis and Clarke or the Columbus. Hobbes built the
houses and institutions. Hobbes provided us with the definitive language in which even
today we continue to speak about the modern state.
However, and this is what I want to emphasize throughout our reading of Hobbes, he
has always been something of a paradox to his readers. On the one hand, you will find
Hobbes the most articulate defender of political absolutism. Hobbes in the Hobbesian
doctrine of sovereignty, or the Hobbesian sovereign, to have a complete monopoly of
power within his given territory. In fact, the famous frontispiece of the book, which is
reproduced in your edition, although it is not altogether very clear. It is not a very good
reproduction, the famous frontispiece to the original 1651 edition of Leviathan depicts
the Leviathan, depicts the state, the sovereign, holding a sword in one hand and the
scepter in the other, and the various institutions of the civilian and churchly
ecclesiastical authority on each side. The sovereign holds total power over all the
institutions of civilian and ecclesiastical life, holding sway over a kind of peaceable
kingdom. Add to this, to the doctrine of indivisible sovereign power, Hobbes' insistence
that the sovereign exercise complete control over the churches, over the university
curricula, and over what books and opinions can be read and taught. He seems to be the
perfect model of absolutism and of absolute government.
You have to consider also the following. Hobbes insists on the fundamental equality of
human beings, who he says are endowed with certain natural and inalienable rights. He
maintains the state is a product of a covenant or a compact, a contract of a sort, between
individuals, and that the sovereign owes his authority to the will or the consent of those
he governs, and finally that the sovereign is authorized only to protect the interests of
the governed by maintaining civil peace and security. From this point of view, it would
seem that Hobbes helps to establish the language of what we might think of as the
liberal opposition to absolutism. And this paradox was noted even in Hobbes' own time.
Was he a defender of royalism and the power of the king, or was he a defender or an
opponent of royalism? I mean, in many ways, to be sure, Hobbes was a product of his
time, and what else could he be? But Hobbes lived at a time when the modern system of
European states, even as we understand them today, was just beginning to emerge.
Three years before the publication of Leviathan, 1651, the signing of the Treaty of
Westphalia, famous peace treaty, brought an end to more than a century of religious war
that had been ignited by the Protestant Reformation. The Treaty of Westphalia officially
put an end to the 30 Years War, but more than that it ratified two decisive features that
would be given powerful expression by Hobbes. First, the Treaty declared that the
individual sovereign state would henceforth become the highest level of authority; you
might say, putting an end once and for all to the universalist claims of the Holy Roman
Empire. Each state was to be sovereign and to have its own authority. And secondly,
that the head of each state would have the right to determine the religion of the state,
again thus putting an end to the claims of a single universalist church. This is what the
Treaty of Westphalia put into practice and, among other things, what Hobbes attempted
to express in theory in his book: the autonomy and authority of the sovereign and the
sovereign's power to establish what religious doctrine or what, even more broadly, what
opinions are to be taught and held within a community, within a state.
Who was Hobbes? Let me say a word about him. Hobbes was born in 1588, the year
that the English naval forces drove back the invasion of the famous Spanish Armada.
He grew up in the waning years, the last years, of the Elizabethan era, and he was a boy
when Shakespeare's most famous plays were first performed. Hobbes, like many of you,
was a gifted student, and he went to college. His father, who was a local pastor from the
southwest of England, sent him to Oxford, although he went at the age of 14. And after
he graduated, he entered the service of an aristocratic family, the Cavandish family,
where he became a private tutor to their son. His first book was a translation of
Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, which he completed in 1629;
Thucydides, the great historian of the Peloponnesian War, who we mentioned before
when we talked about Plato.
Hobbes was a gifted classical scholar. He spent a considerable amount of time on the
European continent with his young tutee, Mr. Cavandish. And while he spent time in
Europe, he met Galileo and Rene Descartes. It was during the 1640s, the period that
initiated the great civil wars in England, and the execution of the king, Charles I, that
Hobbes left England to live in France, while the fighting went on. He left England with
many of the royal families, the aristocratic families, who were threatened by the
republican armies organized by Cromwell and that had executed the King. In fact, the
three justices, the three judges, who were in charge of the judicial trial of Charles I,
King Charles, the one who lost his head, those three judges later found a home where?
In New Haven. They came to New Haven, the three judges, Judge Whaley, Goff, and
Dixwell. Does that sound familiar? Yes. New Haven was in part started by, founded by,
members of the, you might say, the republican opposition to royalty and to the English
king. And any way, Hobbes, however, was deeply distressed by the outbreak of war,
and he spent a great deal of time reflecting on the causes of war and political disorder.
His first treatise, a book called De Cive, or De Cive, depending on how you pronounce
it, On the Citizen, was published in 1642, and it was a kind of draft version of Leviathan
that was published almost a decade later, again in 1651. Hobbes returned to England the
same year of the book's publication, and spent most of the rest of his long life,
Leviathan was written well into his 60s. He was 63 when it was published. He spent the
rest of his long life working on scientific and political problems. He wrote a history of
the English Civil Wars, called Behemoth, which remains a classic of the analysis of the
causes of social conflict. And as if this were not enough, near the very end of his life, he
returned to his classical studies translating all of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. He died in
1679 at the age of 91.
From the various portraits and descriptions of Hobbes, we can tell he was a man of
considerable charm, and I wish that in the book we had had his picture, a reproduction
of his portrait, on it. But I just want to read one brief passage from his biographer, a
man named John Aubrey, who knew him. It was written during Hobbes' lifetime.
Aubrey wrote about Hobbes: "He had a good eye and that of hazel color, which was full
of life and spirit, even to the last. When he was earnest in discourse, these shone, as it
were, a bright- as if a bright live coal within it. He had two kinds of looks. When he
laughed, was witty, in a merry humor, one could scarce sees his eyes, and by and by,
when he was serious and positive, he opened his eyes round. He was six foot high and
something better." So that was very tall in the seventeenth century. "He was six foot
high and very better. He had read much, if one considers his long life, but his
contemplation was much more than his reading. He was want to say that if he had read
as much as other men, he should have known no more than other men." So his point was
he had read a lot, but what was most important was his thinking. If he had read as much,
he would know as little. Gives you a little sense of Hobbes' spirit, his humor, the wry
wit that becomes apparent on almost every page of this book, but you have to be a
careful reader.
Hobbes was deeply controversial, as you might suspect, during his lifetime. Leviathan
was excoriated by almost every reader of the text. To the churchmen, he was a godless
atheist. To the republicans, he was tainted with monarchy, or monarchism. And to the
monarchists, he was a dangerous skeptic and free thinker. Hobbes, again, along with
Machiavelli, was one of the great architects of the modern state. And to some degree, he
even seems to speak, he seems even more characteristically modern than Machiavelli. I
mean, consider just some of the following. Machiavelli speaks of the prince, while
Hobbes speaks of the sovereign, that is a kind of impersonal or in Hobbes' language,
artificial power created out of a contract. Hobbes' method seems scientific. It seems
formal and analytical in contrast to Machiavelli's combination of historical commentary
and reflection drawn from personal experience. While Hobbes, excuse me, while
Machiavelli often spoke of the sublime cruelty of men like Scipio and Hannibal,
Hobbes speaks the more pedestrian language, the language of power-politics, where the
goal is not glory and honor, but self-preservation. And Machiavelli's emphasis upon
arms is considerably attenuated by Hobbes' emphasis on laws. Hobbes, in other words,
tried to render acceptable, tried to render palatable, what Machiavelli had done by
providing a more precise and more legal and institutional framework for the modern
state.
So let's think a little bit about what it was that Hobbes was attempting to accomplish.
Hobbes, like Machiavelli, was an innovator, and he was self-consciously aware of his
innovations. And like Machiavelli, who said in the fifteenth chapter of The Prince that
he would be the first to examine the effectual truth of things, as opposed to the
imaginings of them, Hobbes wrote that civil science, that is what he called political
science, civil science, was no older than my book De Cive. Modern political science, he
said, began with this book of 1642. What did he think of as his novelty? What was new?
What was revolutionary about, or innovative, about Hobbes' political science? Hobbes
clearly saw himself, in many respects, as founding a political science modeled along
that of the early founders of the scientific revolution. Galileo, I have already indicated
that Hobbes had met, William Harvey, Rene Descartes; a handful of others who were
part of what we think of as the modern scientific revolutionaries. And like these other
revolutionaries who had overthrown, you might say, the Aristotelian paradigm in
natural science, Hobbes set out to undermine the authority of Aristotle in civil science,
in political and moral science. Hobbes set himself up as the great anti-Aristotle, the
great opposition to Aristotle.
Consider just the following passage from Leviathan with one of my favorite titles from
the book, a chapter called "Of Darkness from Vain Philosophy and Fabulous
Traditions." In that chapter, chapter 46, Hobbes writes: "There is nothing so absurd that
the old philosophers have not some of them maintained. And I believe that scarce
anything could be more absurdly said in natural philosophy than that which is now
called Aristotle's Metaphysics, nor more repugnant to government than much that he
had said in his Politics, nor more ignorantly than a great part of his Ethics." So there,
you see Hobbes laying down a challenge. What was it that he claimed to find so absurd,
repugnant and ignorant in Aristotle? Why did he--what did he--what was he trying to
un-throne, dethrone in Aristotle? Hobbes is typically concerned with the foundations of
this new science, getting the building blocks right from the beginning. The opening
chapters of Leviathan, which I have only assigned a few, but the opening chapters
present a kind of political physics where human beings are reduced to body and the
body is further reduced to so much matter and motion. Human beings can be reduced to
their movable parts much like a machine. "What is life?" he asks, rhetorically in the
introduction. "What is life but a motion of the limbs? What is the heart but a spring, or
reason but a means of calculating pleasures and pains." He sets out to give a deliberately
and thoroughly materialistic and non-teleological physics of human nature. In fact, a
French disciple of Hobbes in the next century, a man named La Mettrie, wrote a treatise
very much following in the lines of Hobbes called L'Homme Machine, or literally, Man
a Machine. This is the way Hobbes' new science of politics appears to begin, and that
new beginning is intended to offer in many ways a comprehensive alternative to
Aristotle's physics, or Aristotle's politics.
Aristotle, remember, argues that all action is goal-directed, is goal-oriented. All actions
aim at preservation or change, at making something better or preventing it from
becoming worse. Hobbes believed, on the other hand, that the overriding human fact,
the overriding motivation of human behavior, is largely negative, not the desire to do
good, but the desire to avoid some evil. Aristotle, for Hobbes, had simply seen the
world through the wrong end of the telescope. For Aristotle, human beings have a goal
or a telos, which is to live a life in community with others for the sake of human
flourishing. But for Hobbes, we enter into society not in order to fulfill or perfect our
rational nature, but rather to avoid the greatest evil, namely death or fear of death, at the
hands of others. Politics, for him, is less a matter of prudential decisions of better and
worse, than it is, you might say, an existential decision of choosing life or death. For
Hobbes, in many ways, as for Machiavelli, it is the extreme situation of life and death,
of chaos and war, that come to serve as the norm for politics and political decision-
making, fundamental alternative or challenge to Aristotle.
And furthermore, Hobbes not only criticized, you might say, the foundations, the
motivational and psychological foundations, of Aristotle's theory of politics and human
nature, he blamed the influence of Aristotle for much of the civil conflict of his age.
Aristotle, who was increasingly being embraced by civic republicans in England of his
time had been brought up, according to Hobbes, on Aristotle's teaching that man is by
nature a political animal. This was, again, the thesis of the classical republicans
according to which we are only fully human, or we only become fully human, when we
are engaged in political life, in ruling ourselves by laws of our own making. This was a
doctrine that Hobbes attributes to many of the teaching, much of the teaching at the
universities of his age. And it is precisely this desire to be self-governing, you might say
to rule directly, to have a direct part in political rule, that Hobbes saw as one of the great
root causes of civil war. And his answer to Aristotle and to the classical republicans of
his age, was his famous doctrine of what we might call "indirect government," or what
perhaps would be more familiar to us by the term "representative government." The
sovereign is not, for Hobbes, the people or some faction of the people ruling directly in
their collective capacity. The sovereign is, for Hobbes, the artificially reconstructed will
of the people in the person of their representative. The sovereign representative acts,
you might say, like a filter for the wills and passions of the people. The sovereign is not
the direct expression of my will or your will, but rather an abstraction from my natural
desire to rule myself. In other words, instead of seeking to participate directly in
political rule, Hobbes wants us to abstain from politics by agreeing to be ruled by this
artificial man, as he calls it, this artificial person or representative that he gives the name
"the sovereign."
"For by art", he says in the introduction, "For by art is created that great Leviathan
called a commonwealth or a state, which is but an artificial man, though of greater
stature and strength than the natural for whose protection and defense it was intended."
The sovereign, he says, or Leviathan, this great artificial man, the sovereign is
something more like what we would call today an office, rather than a person, as when
we speak of the executive as an office. And it is simply the person who inhabits the
office, although that might be somewhat questionable in some of our recent executive
decisions. But for Hobbes, Hobbes creates this office of a political called the sovereign.
Now, his language in that sentence that I just read from the introduction, "For by art",
again, "is created that great Leviathan called a commonwealth or a state." When Hobbes
uses the term "art" there, "For by art is created," that term is deeply revealing of his
purpose. Again, for Aristotle, by contrast, art presupposes nature. Or in other words,
nature precedes art. Nature supplies the standards, the materials, the models, for all the
later arts, the city being by nature, man by nature, nature provides the standard. Nature
precedes art and human artifice or human making. But for Hobbes, think of this by
contrast, art does not so much imitate nature, rather art can create a new kind of nature,
an artificial nature, an artificial person, as it were. Through art, again, is created the
great Leviathan. Through art properly understood and by "art," of course, I mean
something like human making, human ingenuity, human artfulness, through art we can
begin not just to imitate, but we can transform nature, make it into something of our
own choosing.
"Art" here is not to be understood also as the antithesis of science, as when we speak of
the arts and the sciences. Rather, science is the highest form of art. Science is the
highest kind of human making. Science, or what Hobbes simply calls by the name
"reason," is simply the fullest expression of human artfulness. "Reason," he says in
chapter 5, "reason is not a sense and memory born with us, reason is not born with us,
nor gotten by experience only," he says, "but is attained by industry, first in the act
imposing of names and secondly, by getting a good and orderly method." Think of those
terms. "Reason," and again, he uses this synonymously with other terms, like science or
art, is not simply born with us. It is not simply a genetic endowment, nor is it simply the
product of experience, which Hobbes calls by the name "prudence." But rather reason,
he says, is attained by industry, by work, and it is developed first, he says, by the
imposing of names on things, the correct names on things, and second by getting a good
and orderly method of study. Reason consists in the imposition of a method for the
conquest of nature. By science, Hobbes tells us, he means the knowledge of
consequences, and especially, he goes on to say, "when we see how anything comes
about, upon what causes and by what manner, when like causes come into our power,
we can see how to make it produce like effect." We can see how to make it produce like
effects. Reason, science, art is the capacity to transform nature by making it, imposing
on it, a method that will produce like effects after similar consequences. There is, in
other words, a kind of a radically transformative view of reason and knowledge and
science, political science, civil science, running throughout Hobbes' work. Reason is not
about simple observation, but rather, it is about making, production, or as he says,
"making like consequences produce the desired effects."
We can have a science of politics, Hobbes believes. We can have a civil science,
because politics is a matter of human making, of human doing, of human goings on. We
can know the political world. We can create a science of politics because we make it. It
is something constructed by us. Hobbes' goal here, as it were, is to liberate knowledge,
to liberate science from subservience or dependence upon nature or by chance, by
fortuna, by turning science into a tool for remaking nature to fit our needs, to impose
our needs or satisfy our needs through our science. Art, and especially the political art,
is a matter of reordering nature, even human nature, first according to Hobbes, by
resolving it into its most elementary units, and then by reconstructing it so that it will
produce the desired results, much like a physicist in a laboratory might. This is Hobbes'
answer to Machiavelli's famous call in chapter 25 to master fortuna, to master chance or
luck, fortune. But you might say, Hobbes goes further than Machiavelli. Machiavelli
said in that famous chapter 25, that the prince, if he is lucky, will master fortuna about
half the time, only about 50% of the time. The rest of human action, the rest of
statecraft, will be really left to chance, luck, contingency, circumstances. Hobbes
believes that armed with the proper method, with the proper art, or scientific doctrine,
that we might eventually become the masters and possessors of nature. And I use that
term "masters and possessors of nature," a term not of Hobbes' making, but of Descartes
from the sixth part of the Discourse on Method, because I think it perfectly expresses
Hobbes' aspirations, not only to create a science of politics, but to create a kind of
immortal commonwealth, which is based on science and therefore based on the proper
civil science, and therefore will be impervious to fluctuation, decay, and war and
conflict, which all other previous societies have experienced.
You can begin to see, in other words, in Hobbes' brief introduction to his book, as well
as the opening chapters, you can really see the immensely transformative and really
revolutionary spirit underlying this amazing, amazing book. So where do we go from
here? We turn from methodology and science to politics. What is Hobbes' great
question? What was important when reading, starting out with a new book, asking
yourself, what question is the author trying to answer? What is the question? And it is
not always easy to answer, because sometimes they do not always make their deepest or
most fundamental questions altogether clear. In the case of Leviathan, I would suggest
to you, Hobbes' central question is, what makes authority possible? What is the source
of authority? And you might say, what renders it legitimate? Maybe the question is,
what makes legitimate authority possible? This is still a huge question for us when we
think about nation building and building new states, how to create a legitimate
authority. Obviously, there is a tremendous issue with this in Iraq today. People there
and here struggle with what would constitute a legitimate authority. Perhaps we should
airlift copies of Leviathan to them, because that is the issue that Hobbes is
fundamentally concerned with. His question goes further. How can individuals who are
biologically autonomous, who judge and see matters very differently from one another,
who can never be sure whether they trust one another, how can such individuals accept
a common authority? And, again, that is not just what constitutes authority, but what
makes authority legitimate. That remains not only the fundamental question for Hobbes,
but for the entire, at least for the entire social contract tradition that he helped to
establish.
You might say, of course the question, what renders authority legitimate, is only
possible, or is only raised when authority is in question. That is to say, when the rules
governing authority have broken down in times of crisis, and that was certainly true in
Hobbes' time, a time of civil war and crisis. What renders authority legitimate or
respectable? And to answer that question, Hobbes tells a story. He tells a story about
something he calls "the state of nature," a term he did not invent, but with which his
name will always and forever be associated, the idea of the state of nature. "The state of
nature" is not a gift of grace or a state of grace from which we have fallen, as in the
biblical account of Eden, nor is the state of nature a political condition, as maintained in
some sense by Aristotle, when he says the polis is by nature. The state of nature for
Hobbes is a condition of conflict and war. And by a "state of nature" he means, or by a
state of war, he means a condition where there is no recognized authority in his
language to keep us in awe, no authority to awe us. Such a condition, a state of war,
may mean a condition of open warfare, but not necessarily. It can signify battle, but
Hobbes says it can also signify the will to contend, simply the desire or the will to
engage in conflict, renders something like a state of nature. A state of war can include,
in other words, what we might call a "cold war," two hostile sides looking at each other
across a barrier of some type, not clear or not certain what the other will do.
So the state of nature is not necessarily a condition of actual fighting, but what he calls a
"known disposition to fight." If you are known or believed to be willing to fight, you are
in a state of war. It is a condition for Hobbes of maximum insecurity where in his
famous formula "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Perhaps he should have
said fortunately short. This is the natural condition, the state of nature, the state of war
that Hobbes attributes to, again, the fundamental fact of human nature. Now, his claim
that the state of nature is the condition that we are naturally--the state of war, rather, is a
condition that we are naturally in, is to say, among other things, that nature does not
unite us in peace, in harmony, in friendship, or in solidarity. If nature is a norm, it does
not, again, mandate or incline us to peace, friendship and solidarity with others. Only
human art or science or art, human contrivance, can bring about peace. Conflict and war
are primary. Peace is derivative. In other words, for Hobbes, authority and relations of
authority do not arise naturally among us, but are rather, again, like civil science itself,
the product of contrivance or art. So the question for us remains, which deeply
challenged readers in Hobbes' own time, what makes Hobbes' story, as I am calling it,
his story about the state of nature being a condition of war, what makes it plausible?
What makes it believable as an account of, again, the condition we are naturally in?
Why should we believe Hobbes' story and not some other story? I just want to say a
word about that before closing.
From one point of view, reading Hobbes, his account of the state of nature seems to
derive from his physics of motion and rest, in the opening chapters of Leviathan. He
begins the work, you remember, with an account of human nature, account of human
psychology, as a product of sense and experience. We are bodies in motion, and who
cannot help but obey the law or the physics of attraction and repulsion. We are bodies in
constant motion. He seems, in other words, to have a kind of materialistic psychology in
which human behavior exhibits the same, as it were, mechanical tendencies as billiard
balls that can be understood as obeying, again, geometric or causal processes of cause
and effect. Right? The state of nature is not seen by him as an actual historical condition
in some ways, although he occasionally will refer to what we might think of as
anthropological evidence to support his views on the state of nature. But the state of
nature, for him, is rather a kind of thought experiment after the manner of experimental
science. It is a kind of thought experiment. It consists of taking human beings who are
members of families, of estates, of kingdoms, and so on, dissolving these social
relations into their fundamental units, namely the abstract individuals, and then
imagining, again, in the manner of a chemist or a physicist, how these basic units would
hypothetically interact with one another, again almost like the properties of chemical
substances in some ways. How would we behave in this kind of thought experiment?
That would be one way of reading that Hobbes seems to, wants us to think about the
state of nature as akin to a scientific experiment. Hobbes is the, again, the great founder
of what we might call, among others, is the experimental method in social and political
science. And there is a reason, perhaps a reason for this, too. And I will end just on this
note.
When Hobbes was a young man, he worked as a private secretary for a short time, a
private secretary to another very famous Englishman by the name of Francis Bacon, the
great founder of what we think of as the experimental method, the method of trial and
error, of experience and experiment, and arguably Hobbes was influenced in many ways
by Bacon's own philosophy of experience and experiment. And Hobbes took Bacon's
method in some ways applying it to politics, tried to imagine, again, the natural
condition of human beings, and what we are by nature, by a process of abstraction, and
abstracting all of the relations and properties that we have acquired over history,
through custom, through experience, stripping those away like the layers of an onion,
and putting us almost, as it were, in an experimental test tube or under a microscope,
seeing how we would under those conditions react and behave with one another. I will
leave it at that, although I will start next week by showing how that view of Hobbes is
only at best partially correct. So anyway, have a wonderful weekend with your parents
here, and I will see you next week.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 13
Transcript
October 23, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Where else are we? Today we're going to continue the state of
nature, Hobbes' most famous discovery, his most famous metaphor, his most famous
concept. At the end of class last time, I tried to identify Hobbes' central problem, is the
problem of authority, what makes authority possible, what makes authority legitimate,
and in order to answer that question, I suggested, he created this idea, this metaphor
again, of a state of nature, a state in which he says we are naturally in. Hobbes' state of
nature is virtually the opposite of Aristotle's conception of the natural end or the natural
telos of man. It does not consist of our perfection, a condition of our perfection as
Aristotle believed, but for Hobbes the state of nature is something like the condition of
human life in the absence of authority, in the absence of anyone to impose rules, order,
law on us. What would human beings be like in such a condition, a condition of the type
that he imagined maintains in periods of crisis, civil war of the kind that was true of
England in the 1640s? And I suggested at the end of last time that in many ways
Hobbes' idea of the state of nature can be understood in a sense as an extension of his
scientific methodology set out in the opening chapters of the book. Let's imagine, as he
says, human beings as if they were in a sort of laboratory test tube. Let's strip human
beings of all their social ties and customs and traditions. Let's see what they would be
like in abstraction from all of the social and political relationships which they enjoy and
see how they would interact with one another almost as chemical properties.
And you can see Hobbes working along that line but I would say this as it were
scientific or proto-scientific conception of the state of nature is not the whole answer to
this story because underlying Hobbes' conception of the state of nature is a powerful
moral conception, a moral idea of the human being, and that's what I want to talk a little
bit about today. Hobbes is a moralist, which seems odd in some ways. How could grim
and dour old Thomas Hobbes be regarded as a moralist or someone with a moral
conception of human nature and the human condition? But that's what I want to suggest
to you today. The term, in a sense in which we might better characterize his conception
of the state of nature, is one of individuality. Hobbes shows us what it is to exercise the
qualities of moral agency; that is, to say to do for ourselves rather than to have things
done for us or for you. Hobbes introduced into our moral language the idiom of
individuality. And this concept, the concept of what it is to be an individual, a moral
agent, isn't really--is really not older than or at least not much older than the seventeenth
century. Until the Renaissance or not much later, people considered themselves
primarily not as individuals but as members, members of a particular family, of a caste,
of a guild, of a particular religious order, of a city or so on. The idea that one is first of
all a self with an "I," an ego, would have been regarded as unintelligible and even as
late as the nineteenth century Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America says,
"individualism is a recent expression arising from a new idea." That idea appeared new
to Tocqueville as late as the nineteenth century and this idea of the individual, I want to
suggest, is at least in part and maybe in large part traceable back to Hobbes.
What is Hobbes' individual? Hobbes conceived us through a process of abstraction from
the web of attachments in which we find ourselves. We are beings, he argues again in
the opening chapters, whose fundamental characteristics as human beings are willing
and choosing. We are beings for whom the exercise of the will is a preeminent feature
and much of our happiness as human beings depends upon our capacity to exercise our
will and our ability for choice. Life for Hobbes is an exercise in continual willing and
continual choosing that may be temporarily interrupted but can never come to an end
except with the end of life itself. Hobbes' individuality or individualism is closely
connected to this conception of a human being or human well-being as success in the
competition for the goods of life. "Continual success," he writes in chapter 6, "continual
success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth is what is
called happiness or felicity. Our well being depends on our ability to achieve the objects
of our desires, the objects of our choices, for there is no such thing," he continues, "as
perpetual tranquility of mind, no such thing as perpetual tranquility, while we live here,
because life itself is but motion and can never be without desire nor without fear no
more than without sense." These are the characteristics of human life, sense, fear and
desire, continual desire for one thing after another, and for Hobbes this fact is not
simply a physical or factual description of human behavior but it is a moral condition
because we are each of us bundles of activity and initiative, of likes and dislikes, of
desires and aversions. Life for Hobbes is competition or struggle not just over scarce
resources, although that might be part of the struggle, but for honors, for anything else
that a person might value or esteem.
Hobbes is fascinated and, is again like Montaigne and a number of others, he is
fascinated with the diversity, the sheer diversity, multiplicity of human desires. What
leads one person to laughter, leads another person to tears, what leads one person to
piety and prayer, leads another person to ridicule and so on and so on. Even moral
terms, Hobbes says, terms like "good" and "evil," he says are expressions of our
individual likes and dislikes. We like something, he says, not because it is good but we
call something good because we like it and the same with other moral qualities and
attributes. They are expressions for him of our psychological states and aspirations and
it is this individualism that is the ground of the general competition that we all
experience for the objects of our desires that he says the--or from this he infers that the
natural condition is one of competition, of struggle, of enmity and of war. In a famous
passage from chapter 11 he posits, as he puts it, "a general inclination of all mankind, a
perpetual and restless desire of power after power that ceaseth only in death." This is, as
he puts it, "a general inclination of all mankind," this constant restlessness and motion
and expression of our individuality and what I have been calling Hobbes' individualism
is connected, in fact even is underwritten by another attribute that is central to Hobbes.
It is his skepticism. Like many of the great early modern philosophers, Montaigne,
Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes was obsessed with the question about what can I know or,
maybe put a different way, what am I entitled to believe, and there are many passages in
Leviathan that testify to Hobbes' fundamentally skeptical view of knowledge. Right? He
is a skeptic not because he believes that we can have no foundations for our beliefs
whatever but he is a skeptic in the sense that there can be no, on his view, transcendent
or nonhuman foundations for our beliefs. We cannot be certain, he thinks, of the
ultimate foundations of our knowledge and this explains, you may have wondered about
this, this explains the importance he attributes to such things as naming and attaching
correct definitions to things. For reason, he writes in a famous passage, "for reason is
nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting the consequences of general names
agreed upon."
Knowledge, in other words, is for Hobbes a human construction and it is always subject
to what human beings can be made to agree upon and that skeptical view of knowledge
or at least skeptical view of the foundation of knowledge has far reaching consequences
for him. If all knowledge, according to Hobbes, ultimately rests on agreement about
shared terms, he infers from that that our reason, our rationality, has no share in what
Plato or Aristotle would have called the divine Noos, the divine intelligence. Our reason
has within it no spark of divinity. Our reason does not testify to some kind of inner
voice of conscience or anything that would purport to give it some kind of indubitable
foundation. Such certainty as we have about anything is for Hobbes always provisional,
discovered on the basis of experience and subject to continual revision in the light of
further experience, and that again experiential conception of knowledge. That kind of
skepticism about the foundations of knowledge has further implications for Hobbes'
views on such things as religion and religious toleration.
"There are no signs or fruit of religion," he says, "but in man only," he says in chapter
12. That is to say, the causes of religion can be traced back and are rooted in the
restlessness of the human mind in its search for causes. And it is because, he says, we
are born ignorant of causes, we are ignorant of the causes of things, that we are led to
search out beginnings and origins and this leads us ultimately, he says, to posit the
existence of God who is, so to speak, the first cause of all things. Hobbes does not,
despite this kind of rationalistic view of religion and his view that religion has its origin
again in the restlessness of the human mind, Hobbes doesn't deny the possibility of
revelation or some kind of direct communication of God to us. But what he does deny is
that anyone who has claimed to receive such a revelation, he denies that any such
person has the right to impose that view on anyone else because nobody else can
correctly have the means to verify a person's claim to revelation. No one can impose
their claim of revealed knowledge on another. Does this make Hobbes an atheist, as
many would have maintained in his day? No. It makes him a skeptic about revealed
religion. So it is because of this individualism and skepticism, a view of life as willing
and choosing, that there are in the state of nature so to speak no standards to adjudicate
conflicts, that the central issue of politics arises, namely what makes authority possible,
how are people who are biologically individually constituted, so to speak, how can any
of them ever--any of us ever be capable of obeying common rules or having moral
obligations to one another? How is that possible, Hobbes continues to ask in a manner
of speaking on almost every page of the book. But before answering that question,
consider a little further Hobbes' account of the state of nature and what makes it seem
like a plausible starting point to answer the question of what makes authority possible.
To say that the state of nature consists primarily of individuals with again diverse likes,
dislikes, beliefs, opinions and the like is not to say that the state of nature is a state of
isolation, as it sometimes attributed to him. People in the state of nature may have
regular and continual contact with one another. It is just that their relations are
unregulated. They are unregulated by law; they are unregulated by authority. The state
of nature is simply a kind of condition of maximum insecurity, an unregulated market
with no common laws or rules to sustain it. The emphasis on the individual is just
another way of saying, again unlike Aristotle, that no one has natural authority over
anyone else. Relations of authority exist only by, so to speak, the consent or the will of
the governed. And the fact that relations in the state of nature are unregulated for him
makes it--it's synonymous with making it a condition of war, of "all against all," in his
famous formulation. Now, you might look at that formulation, the state of war is one
against--of all against all and you might say that such a condition of civil war, of
maximum insecurity, of the total breakdown of condition of rules and laws is if
anything the state of the exception. How often does that really occur in our experience
in human life? But Hobbes, like Machiavelli, as we saw, likes to take the exceptional
situation and turn it into the norm. It becomes the normal condition, state of security,
insecurity, fear, conflict and the like.
This is not to say, again, that the state of nature for Hobbes is one of permanent
fighting. But it is one of permanent fear and distrust and he asks his readersthere are
so many wonderful passages in this book, this just happens to be one of my particular
favorites, he asks his readers if you don't believe me, again think of his skepticism, don't
believe me, he says, check your own experience and see if I'm not right. And this is
what he writes. "Let him, the reader, therefore ask himself," Hobbes writes, "when
taking a journey he arms himself and seeks to go well accompanied. When going to
sleep, he locks his doors even when in his house, and even when in his house he locks
his chests and this, when he knows, he says, there be laws and public officers armed to
avenge all injuries shall be done to him. What opinion, Hobbes asks, he has of his
fellow subjects when he rides armed? What does that say about your thinking about
your fellow citizens when you arm yourselves going for a trip, of his fellow citizens
when he locks his doors at night or of his children and servants when he locks his
chests? Does he not therefore as much accuse mankind by his action as I do by my
words?" You can see the mischievousness of Hobbes in that delightful passage. What
about you, he says, and this is not in some kind of state of nature. This is in a
completely fully functioning society when you go armed, when you lock your doors,
when you lock your chests at night, don't your actions and your experience simply
confirm what I'm saying? And this tells us another thing about the state of nature which
it is easy to forget. The state of nature, at least for Hobbes, is not some kind of primitive
anthropological datum that we find by going back in time somehow. Rousseau will
speak about it more this way. For Hobbes, the state of nature exists, he says, whenever
authority is not enforced. The state of nature fully continues, in many ways, oddly even
in civil society, he says, whenever we have reason to believe that our lives or our
properties or ourselves are not secure. In fact, we can never be fully free of the fear and
of the anxiety and uncertainty of the state of nature, even within to some degree of fully
constituted civil society.
The only exception to this of course in Hobbes' account of the state of nature when he
says "don't you lock your doors at night" are of course Yale students living here on
campus who are so trusting that they never lock their doors at night in the entryways
and so on and then of course are always stunned to find when something is stolen from
them, how could this be? And I tell them lock your doors but they still don't believe me.
Maybe you'll now believe Hobbes if you don't believe me. So the state of nature, it's a
state of insecurity, it's a state of conflict. How do we get out of it? This is of course the
huge issue that Hobbes asks for the rest of--for much of the book. What do we do to get
out of this state of nature to enter a condition of civil society and civilized life? How do
I give up my right to do whatever is in my power to secure my person or my
possessions, when I have no expectation, you might say, that others around me are
prepared to do so as well? This is sort of a classic example of what economists and
other people like them call the prisoner's dilemma. Why should I act in such a way if I
have no expectation or reasonable expectation that those around me will reciprocate?
Hobbes' members of a state of nature seem to be in a classic prisoner's dilemma
problem. Maybe we can say, we could say or Hobbes could say, that laying down our
right to do all things in seeking peace with others is the rational thing to do in the
condition of nature. We are all rational actors and therefore it is rational for us to seek
and to desire peace, but note that that is exactly what Hobbes does not say, he does not
say this. Far from having a sort of rational actor model of politics, he operates with an
irrational actor model. He assumes that it is not reason but our passions that are the
dominant force of human psychology, our desires, our aversions, our passions. And
although I have said that Hobbes has emphasized the diversity of our passions there are
still two main passions that he feels universally dominate human nature and these two
passions are pride and fear. Pride and fear, these are the Hobbesian equivalents of the
two great--what Machiavelli called humors you remember, the two humors of the two
great social classes, the desires of the rich and powerful as it were to rule over others
and the desire of the weak not to be ruled. Machiavelli called those the two umori, the
two humors. And Hobbes similarly works with a kind of model. He's a great political
psychologist, the two great passions of pride and fear. Pride, he says, is the passion for
preeminence, the desire to be first and also to be seen to be first in the great race of life.
Prideful people, he tells us, are those overflowing with confidence about their own
abilities to succeed and we all know people like this, don't we, like Yale students?
They're all overflowing with confidence, kind of alpha types. Machiavelli might call
them sort of manly men who are fully confident about their abilities.
And yet Hobbes is a great debunker of human pride. Pride is equivalent to what he calls
vanity or vainglory. It is a kind of exaggerated confidence in one's own power and
ability. It is pride, the desire to lord it over others and to have one's superiority
acknowledged by others, that is the great problem for Hobbes to be averted. But if pride
for him is one of his great universal passions so is its opposite, fear. Hobbes makes the
fear of death that may come to us at any time in the state of nature, perhaps he
exaggerates this, by making it appear that the state of nature is a kind of existential
condition in which death can come to you at almost any moment. But there is more to
fear than this, simply fear of death, although Hobbes emphasizes and dramatically
perhaps overemphasizes this. Fear is not just the desire to avoid death but to avoid
losing, you might say again, in the great race of life, to avoid losing and to be seen as a
loser. It is the desire to avoid the shame of being seen by others as losing out somehow.
There is a social quality clearly to both of these passions, pride and fear, one again the
desire to have one's preeminence esteemed by others, fear, the desire to avoid shame
and dishonor.
How we are seen by others is a crucial cardinal part of Hobbes' moral psychology and
each of us, he says, contain. These do not simply represent two classes of individuals,
two classes of persons. Each of us contains these two warring, you might say, elements
within us, both self-assertion and fear of the consequence of self-assertion. The question
is for Hobbes, how do we tame these passions? It is most of all pride that Hobbes wants
to tame and of course the very title of his book, Leviathan, he tell us later on comes
from what? Do you remember? Where does it come from? Who remembers? Passage
from what? Job, Book of Job, where he refers to Leviathan as king of the children of
pride. The book is based on a biblical metaphor about overcoming or subduing pride.
As the great Marsellus Wallace says in the film Pulp Fiction, pride never helps, it only
hurts, if you remember that magnificent speech. Fear, Hobbes says, is the passion to
reckon on, is the passion to be reckoned on. It is fear, not reason, that leads us to
abandon the state of nature and sue for peace. The passions that incline men to peace,
Hobbes writes, are fear of death. This is not to say that Hobbes believes fear to be the
naturally stronger of the two passions; in fact, far from it. There are many people
certainly even around us who Hobbes believes do not fear death as they should, the
proud aristocrat who prefers death before dishonor, the religious zealot prepared to
sacrifice his life and of course those of others in order to achieve the rewards of heaven
and of course just the risk taking individual who seeks to climb Mount Everest just for
the honor and esteem involved. And it is part of the broader educational or pedagogic
function of Leviathan to help us see, Hobbes thinks, the dangers of pride and the
advantages of peace. Properly directed, fear leads to peace. Fear is the basis, even of
what Hobbes calls the various laws of nature, that lead us to civil society. The laws of
nature for Hobbes are described as a precept or a general rule of reason that every man
ought to endeavor peace and it is out of fear that we begin to reason and see the
advantages of society; reason is dependent upon the passions, upon fear. The first and
most fundamental law of nature, he says, is to seek peace and follow it.
Not only should one seek peace but we have an obligation, he says, to lay down our
arms, to lay down our right to all things on the condition that others around us are
prepared to do so as well. And Hobbes goes on to enumerate 19 laws of nature, I won't
go into all of them, 19 laws of nature that constitute a kind of framework for
establishing civil society. These laws he even compares as his equivalent of the Golden
Rule which he states in the negative: Do not do unto others what you would not have
them do unto you. Here is Hobbes' rewriting of the Golden Rule in terms of these laws
of nature but these raise a question for us as readers of Hobbes. Right? Don't they?
What is the status of the laws of nature? What is the moral status, if any, of these laws?
Hobbes, as we see, sometimes writes as a sort of scientist or proto-scientist for whom
nature and one supposes the laws of nature operate with the same kind of necessity as
the laws of physical attraction. That's how he often writes about human behavior, that
we obey the same laws of physical attraction as do any other bodies that we might
choose to describe. They describe how bodies in motion always and necessarily behave,
these laws of nature.
And yet at the same time, Hobbes writes as a moralist for whom the laws of nature, he
calls "precepts of reason" or general rules according to which we are forbidden to do
anything destructive of life." In this sense, the laws of nature, as he describes them,
appear to be moral laws with moral commands, commands you not to do anything that
is destructive of life, your own or that of others, and these moral laws, in this sense, we
have presumably the freedom to obey them or disobey them. If they acted with a kind of
mechanical necessity or even geometric necessity, they could not possibly be moral
laws in that way. They can only be moral if there is some semblance of human choice or
will expressed in the relationship, our ability to do otherwise. So these laws of nature,
seek peace and so on, do not simply seem to be descriptive of how people do behave.
They seem to be prescriptive of how people ought to behave and this Hobbes even
suggests at the end of chapter 15 when he writes about the laws of nature, "these
dictates of reason men used to call by the name laws' but improperly for they are
conclusions or theorems according to what conduces to the conversation of mankind."
These used to be called laws of nature, he says, but improperly. So if they are only
improperly laws of nature why does Hobbes continue to use the term? Why does he use
this terminology of "laws of nature"? In a sense, this might simply be Hobbes' way of
paying homage to the ancient tradition of natural law going back to the medieval
scholastics, to the stoics, and perhaps even beyond them. The natural laws for Hobbes
are not divine commands or ordinances, he says, but they are rules of practical reason
figured out by us as the optimal means of securing our well-being. These laws of nature,
as he describes them, do not issue categorical commands so much as sort of
hypothetical rules. If you want X, do Y; if you want peace, here are the means to it. And
he calls these laws, these 19 laws of nature, the true and only moral philosophy. So you
can see in that passage Hobbes takes himself to be a moralist writing within the great
tradition of moral philosophy. These laws of nature are for him the true and only moral
philosophy.
Well, this brings me to some criticisms or at least some questions about Hobbes'
conception of the laws of nature. What are we to make of these laws, as I've asked
before? In one sense, there seems to be a genuine moral content to Hobbes' laws of
nature which can be reduced to a single formula: Seek peace above all other goods.
Hobbes, more than anyone else, wants us to value the virtues of civility. Those, you
might say, summed up in a word are what the 19 laws of nature command. The civility
entails the virtues of peace, equity, fairness, playing by the rules. Peace is for Hobbes a
moral good and the virtues are those qualities of behavior that tend to peace and vices
are those that lead to war. Consider the disadvantages of war and the benefits of peace.
Here is what Hobbes writes. "In such a condition, that is the state of nature, there is no
place for industry because the fruit thereof is uncertain and consequently no culture of
the earth, no navigation nor building nor instruments of moving and removing things as
require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts,
no letters, no society and which is worst of all continual fear and danger of violent
death." This is again the sort of existential condition in which Hobbes wants to put us in
the state of nature and all the benefits he lists there, he enumerates, that are denied to us
in such a condition, again no knowledge, no geography, no cultivation of the earth, no
navigation or building. All of these things are the fruits of peace, he tells us.
But at this point, a careful reader such as all of yourselves no doubt, would no doubt be
suggesting, I've gone too far in suggesting or calling Hobbes a moral philosopher whose
motto in a way could be summed up in the phrase "Give peace a chance." Is that what
Hobbes believed? Why is the peace the highest good anyway? Why not justice? Why
not honor? Why not piety? Why not the examined life? What makes peace so good for
Hobbes? Well, I've given a number of have quoted him on a number of reasons but
one suggestion might be that it is not so much peace alone that Hobbes cherishes as life.
Peace is a means to life. Every creature, he says, has a built-in desire to preserve itself,
to persevere in its own existence, to continue in its own steady state you might say, and
to resist invasion or encroachment by others. We are all endowed, he says, with a kind
of natural right to life and the desire to preserve oneself is not just a biological fact,
although it is also that, it is for him a moral right, it is a moral entitlement, every being
has a fundamental right to its own life. We not only have a right to our lives but to do
whatever we regard as needful to protect our lives.
And again, this is not simply a brute fact of nature. It is a moral entitlement for Hobbes,
the source of human worth and dignity. But now you will suggest, I've really gone too
far, attributing to Hobbes a doctrine of human dignity that one might expect to find in a
philosopher like Kant or someone else. Didn't Hobbes cynically write in chapter 10,
"the value or worth of a man is of all things his price," what price we will fetch in the
marketplace no doubt, the value or worth of a man is his price, a phrase incidentally
quoted by Karl Marx to indicate the sheer heartlessness of the kind of the bourgeoisie
society that Hobbes was hoping to bring about. And doesn't Hobbes' materialism and his
sort of mechanistic theory of nature seem to detract from any inherent worth of the
individual? There seems to be something to that and yet Hobbes certainly regards life as
a precious good, perhaps the most precious good of all, and he writes with a lively sense
of how fragile and endangered life is.
The work as a whole can be seen as an effort to dispel what he believes to be false
beliefs, false doctrines and beliefs, that disguise the truth from us, truth about the value
of life; for example, beliefs about the afterlife and all beliefs that detract from an
appreciation for the value of life as it is. This provides the moral basis of what I would
call Hobbes' humanitarianism and yet that humanitarianism seems to raise further
problems. Doesn't Hobbes or does Hobbes' attempt to instill in us, the readers of his
book, his attempt to instill in us an appreciation for life and the value of life, does this
simultaneously create an aversion to risk, an extreme fear of conflict and challenge or
disorder? You could say is this constant fear that Hobbes harps on fear of death and the
value of life, to put it rather rudely, is this not another word for cowardice? Does
Hobbes' emphasis on the preservation of life as the supreme moral value, does this turn
his mighty Leviathan into a kind of commonwealth of cowards? Where Aristotle made
the courage of men in combat a central virtue of his ethics, Hobbes pointedly omits
courage from his list of the moral virtues. At one point, he even suggests that courage is
really just a species of rashness and his example of courage comes from duels and duel
fighting which he says will be always honorable but are unlawful. "For duels," he says,
"are many times effects of courage and the ground of courage is always strength or skill
though for the most part," he says, "they be effects of rash speaking and the fear of
dishonor in one or both of the combatants." In other words, courage for him again is a
form of vanity or pride, the desire not to appear less than another. It is a form of
rashness, he says.
And that suspicion is further carried out in Hobbes' very interesting treatment of
military conscription which he talks about in chapter 21. There he describes battle, as he
says, "a mutual running away" to armies confronting one another he describes as a
mutual running away, and furthermore he says when it comes to conscription there
should be allowance made for those that he calls "men of natural timorousness,"
cowards in other words. A man that has commanded as a soldier, Hobbes writes, to
fight against the enemy though his sovereign has the right enough to punish his refusal
with death may nevertheless, Hobbes writes, in many cases refuse without injustice as
when he substituteth a sufficient solider in his place. In other words, Hobbes' view of
this is why do the fighting yourself, if you can get someone else to do it for you? There
is no intrinsic virtue in courage or battle, if you can get somebody else to do the job for
you, a sort of perfect description, I think, of our volunteer army, how we pay people to
do this difficult and dangerous work for us. But the question is, can even a Hobbesian
society, one which insists on rules and so on, can a Hobbesian society do entirely
without--
[cellphone interrupts class]
Professor Steven Smith: Anyway, can a Hobbesian society do without what we might
call them the manly virtues, the civic virtues, pride, love of honor that Hobbes seems to
condemn? Consider the case of Ralph Esposito. Who is Ralph Esposito, you ask? His
name is not in the index of Hobbes' book but Mr. Esposito is a New York City fireman
who came to Branford College to be a Master's Tea guest not long after 9/11 and at
length he discussed there people like himself who daily risk their lives running into
building burning--burning buildings to rescue total strangers. Why do people do this? Is
it because some people have a kind of built in sense of thumos, that wonderful Platonic
term, pride, courage, love of risk that no society, not even a Hobbesian one, can do
without? Even Hobbes' society presumably cannot do without a fire department or a
police department; yet, if one were to follow Hobbes' risk averse psychology, if one
were to follow the 19 laws of nature that advise us to seek peace and to avoid conflict,
why would anyone ever become a fireman, a soldier, a risk taker, a policeman of any
sort? Why would anyone ever risk one's life for one's country or a cause just to help
other people, people that we don't know and probably will never know? Even in the
passage that I cited earlier, where Hobbes describes the benefits of civil society, he
speaks of activities like navigation, exploration and industry. Presumably, these are
activities that are all engaged in risk taking behavior of one kind or another that seem
not to be able to be explained by Hobbes' law of nature alone. So the question I want to
leave you with today and that I want to pick up again on Wednesday is, in the end, what
do societies require more of? Do they require more of Hobbes' men of natural
timorousness or do they require more Ralph Espositos? And on that we'll finish up
Hobbes on Wednesday.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 14
Transcript
October 25, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Okay, good morning. I'm going to show another movie today
but not until a little bit later in the class. We'll get it. We'll get there. Don't worry! It
doesn't fit until the last part of the class. But today, I want to talk about sovereignty.
There are two great concepts that come out of Hobbes that you have to remember. One
is the state of nature and the other is sovereignty. I spoke a bit about the first one
yesterday or Monday rather. Today, I want to talk about Hobbes' theory of the sovereign
state, the creation of the sovereign. Hobbes refers to the sovereign as a mortal god, as
his answer to the problems of the state of nature, the state, the condition of life being
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And it is only the creation of the sovereign for
Hobbes, endowed or possessed with absolute power, that is sufficient to put an end to
the condition of perpetual uncertainty, anxiety and unrest that is the case of the natural
condition.
Let me talk for a while about some of the formal features of Hobbes' sovereign power,
of the Hobbesian state. In the first place, what I want to impress upon you is that the
sovereign is for Hobbes less a person than it is or he is an office. The sovereign is
described by Hobbes as an artificial person by which he means the sovereign is the
creation of the contract or the covenant that brought this office into being. The
sovereign does not exist by nature but rather, Hobbes tells us again, the sovereignty is
the product of art or science. It is the product, the creation of the people or of what we
might call, in Jeffersonian language, it is the product of the consent of the governed.
The sovereign and, again, this is crucial, is for Hobbes, the representative of the people.
He is the sovereign representative. It is the people who endow the sovereign with the
authority to represent them on their behalf. And, in that respect, Hobbes' sovereign has
many of the features or characteristics that we come to associate with what we call
modern executive power or executive authority. When Louis XIV of France famously
said L'tat c'est moi. "I am the state," he was expressing a peculiarly pre-modern in
that way conception of the state; that is to say, he regarded the state as in some ways his
personal property. "I am the state. The state am I."
But this is very different from Hobbes' sovereign. The state for Hobbes is not the
possession of the sovereign. Rather, the sovereign does not own the state. He is
appointed or authorized to secure for the people the, in many ways, limited ends of
peace and security. He has much the same function and to some degree much of the
same personality as what we would call a modern day CEO, that is to say there is a kind
of anonymity and impersonality about the sovereign. I mean, unless you're in the Yale
entrepreneurial society who can name the CEOs of many companies? And the answer is
you probably can't. They are for the most part relatively anonymous individuals unless,
you know, they get into trouble like Ken Lay or someone like that or do something
amazing like Bill Gates. For the most part, they are rather impersonal and anonymous
and that is in many ways the characteristic of Hobbes' sovereign. Hobbes' theory of the
sovereign, interestingly, contains within itself elements of both secular absolutism and,
in some ways, modern liberalism and it is the tension between these two that I want to
bring out in my discussion here.
The power of the sovereign, Hobbes continually insists, must be unlimited. Yet, at the
same time, he tells us that the sovereign is the creation of the people whom he
represents or it represents. Although Hobbes is widely taken to be a defender of
monarchical absolutism, you will note, in your readings, that he displays a kind of
studied neutrality over actually what form the sovereign should take. He only insists
that sovereign power remain absolute and undivided whether it belongs to a single
person, a few, or the many. And among the powers that the sovereign, he insists, must
control are, for example, laws concerning property, the right of declaring war and peace,
what we would call foreign policy, rules of justice concerning life and death, which is to
say criminal law, and, of course, the right to determine what books and ideas are
permissible, that is to say the right of censorship. In a sense, the core of Hobbes' theory
of sovereignty can be boiled down to the statement that the sovereign and only the
sovereign is the source of law. The law is what the sovereign says it is. Does that sound
in any way familiar from what we have read this term? Anyone? Sound familiar?
Thrasymachus? Do you remember that name, Book I of the Republic? Justice is what
the stronger say it is. Hobbes tells us that the law is what the sovereign commands.
This is sometimes known as the doctrine of legal positivism, which is to say that law is
the command of the sovereign, a sort of command theory of law. And, again, that seems
to point back to Thrasymachus' point of view in the first book of the Republic. There is
for Hobbes, as for Thrasymachus, no higher court of appeal than the will or the word of
the sovereign, no transcendent law, no divine law, no source of authority outside
sovereign command. And sovereign is appointed for Hobbes to be much like an umpire
in a baseball or a football game, to set the rules of the game. But the Hobbesian
sovereign, unlike umpires, are not just the enforcers of the rules or the interpreters of the
rules, the sovereign is also the creator, the shaper and maker of the rules. And Hobbes
draws from this the startling conclusion, in many ways the infamous conclusion that the
sovereign can never act unjustly. The sovereign can never act unjustly, why? Because
the sovereign is the source of law and the sovereign is the source of the rules of justice.
Therefore, Hobbes concludes, he can never act unjustly. And he supports this example
by a deeply perverse and amusing, I have to say, reading from a biblical story, do you
remember this? He refers to the story of David and Uriah. Everybody will remember
that story from Sunday school or from Hebrew school or whatever. Does anyone
remember that David was the king at that time? He was the king of Israel and he
coveted Uriah's wife Bathsheba. He wanted to sleep with Bathsheba, so what did he do?
He had Uriah killed so he could sleep with her. And Hobbes reasons from this story that
while David's action may have sinned against God, he did no injustice to Uriah, imagine
that. I think Uriah might have had a different point of view about this. He did no
injustice to Uriah because, as the lawful sovereign, he could do any, not just anything he
liked but whatever he did was set by the rules of the law. And when Hobbes tells that
story, which he mentions a couple of times in the book, one can only imagine he must
have had a kind of wry grin on his face when he wrote that out. In fact, next semester
I'm teaching an entire course devoted to Hobbes' critique of religion in which this will,
among other things, figure prominently.
But Hobbes' teaching about law is, in some ways, less Draconian than it might first
appear. He makes clear that law is what the sovereign says it is. There can be no such
thing as an unjust law, he infers, again, because the sovereign is the source of all justice.
But he does distinguish, he tells us, between a just law and a good law. All laws are by
definition just, he tells us, but it doesn't follow that all laws are by definition good. "A
good law," he says in chapter 30, "is that which is needful for the good of the people." A
good law is needful for the good of the people. But then one asks, what are the criteria
by which we determine the good of the people? How is this determined? And Hobbes
makes clear that the sovereign is not invested with the authority to exercise a kind of
absolute control over everything that people do. The purpose of law, Hobbes tell us, is
not so much to control but to facilitate. Consider just the following passage from
chapter 30, section 21. Hobbes writes: "For the use of laws, which are but rules
authorized," he says, "is not to bind the people from all voluntary actions. It is not to
bind them from voluntary actions but to direct and keep them in such motion as not to
hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion as hedges are
set not to stop travelers but to keep them on their way."
This is the force or purpose of law to set rules, to keep people, as he puts it, on their
way, a law that is intended simply to constrain and control for its own sake, Hobbes
says, cannot be a good law. The purpose of a good law is to facilitate human agency in
some ways. And I think, again, that too is central to Hobbes' theory of the sovereign. Its
purpose is to facilitate, not simply to control and inhibit. But the power to control or the
power of law for Hobbes also very much applies and here is one of his most
controversial doctrines. It must certainly apply to matters of opinion to what we would
call today First Amendment issues. This is something that Hobbes insists upon. "For the
actions of men," he says, "proceed from their opinions. Actions proceed from opinions.
And in the well governing of opinions consisteth the well governing of men's actions."
So, if we are going to govern or regulate human behavior, we have to begin by
regulating opinion. And it follows from this, Hobbes believes, that the sovereign has the
right to decide what opinions, what books, what ideas are conducive to peace and which
ones aim simply to stir up war and discontent? And these comments of Hobbes' about
the sovereign's power to control opinions are directed at two principal institutions, the
Church and, guess what the other one is, the university. Both of these for Hobbes he
considers to be locus, the focus of or centers of seditious opinion that require to remain
under sovereign control.
By the churches, Hobbes is speaking of the reformed church but, in particular, he is
concerned with those radical puritan sects of the type that later came and founded
America, these radical sects that elevate matters of conscience and private belief over
and above the law, that is to say arrogating to themselves, to the rights of conscience
and the private belief, the powers to judge the sovereign. It was these dissenting
Protestants, it was these dissenting sects, that formed the rank and file of Cromwell's
armies during the Civil War in England. They formed the rank and file of the republican
armies in England against the rule of the king. And, Hobbes tell us he would banish all
doctrines that profess to make the individual or the sect, more importantly in some ways
the sect, the judge of the sovereign. It is only in the state of nature, he tells us, that
individuals have the right to determine just and unjust, right and wrong for themselves.
Once we enter society, once we engage or conclude the social compact, we transfer our
power to do this to the sovereign to determine these matters for us.
And just as important as the radical churches and the reformed sects is for Hobbes the
university and its curriculum. In particular, Hobbes faults the universities for teaching
what, for teaching the radical doctrines of Aristotleanism in the seventeenth century.
Aristotle in this period was the source of modern republican ideas, ideas about self
government, ideas about in some ways what we might call direct democracy or
participatory democracy, people who believe that the only legitimate form of
government is one where Aristotle says citizens take turns ruling and being ruled in
turn. It was, above all, the influence of the classics, Aristotle and Cicero in particular,
that Hobbes regards as an important cause for the recent civil war and the regicide of
Charles I. Consider the following passage that he writes: "As to rebellion against
monarchy, one of the most frequent causes is the reading of the books of policy and
history of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Reading of those books leads people to rebel
against monarchy, for which young men like yourselves," he says, or young women too,
"for which young men and all others that are unprovided by the antidote of solid
reason," who are susceptible that is to reading these stories and reading these books,
"receive a strong and delightful impression of the great exploits of war." "From reading
of such books," Hobbes continues, "men have undertaken to kill their kings because the
Greek and Latin writers in their books and discourses of policy make it lawful and
laudable for any man to do so provided before he do it he call him a tyrant."
That's what you learn, Hobbes believes, from the reading of Aristotle and the Greeks
and Romans, regicide, that the only legitimate form of government is a republic and that
it is a lawful and even it's your duty to kill your king. Of course, before doing so, he
says, "you must call him first a tyrant." It's a wonderful passage. And this is so
interesting, I think, not only because of its humor and Hobbes' in many ways
characteristic exaggerations, but because it shows how much emphasis Hobbes puts on
the reform of opinion, the reform of ideas, in many ways like Machiavelli and like Plato
too before him, Hobbes regards himself as an educator of princes, an educator and a
transformer, a reformer of ideas. There is a kind of internal irony here I think because
Hobbes sometimes writes as if, as we've seen, as if human beings are nothing more than
complex machines that mechanically obey the laws of attraction and repulsion. But he
also obviously writes that we are beings with will and purpose who are uniquely guided
by opinions, ideas, and doctrines and it is in many ways the first business of the
sovereign to act as a moral reformer of ideas. Hobbes realizes this is a difficult and
uphill task that he has set for himself.
And, in a rare moment of sort of personal self-reflection or self-reference, he notes
somewhat drolly that the novelty of his ideas will make it difficult for them to find an
audience. "I am at the point of believing, he says, "that my labor will be as useless as
the commonwealth of Plato," he says in a moment of sort of uncharacteristic despair,
"will be as useless as the commonwealth of Plato." "For Plato" he says "also is of the
opinion that it is impossible for the disorders of the state ever to be taken away until
sovereigns be philosophers." And while, in many ways, initially despairing of the
possibility of finding a sort of friendly reception or audience for his work, Hobbes then
goes on in a more optimistic note to observe that his book is considerably simpler and
easier to read than Plato's. Again, you might have a discussion about that over which is
the easier one. But, Hobbes believes it is simpler and easier and therefore more likely to
catch the ear of a sympathetic prince. "I recover some hope," he says. "I recover some
hope that one time or other this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign
who will consider it for himself, for it is short and I think clear." Well, we might
question that. He says it's a short book and "I think clear" he writes. Well, it's complex
and long. But nevertheless, perhaps hoping that his advertising it in this way will gain
the ear of a sovereign and that "without the help" he continues, "of any interested or
envious interpreter and by the exercise of entire sovereignty in protecting the public
teaching of it convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice," the very end
of chapter 31, "will convert this truth of speculation into the utility of practice."
So, Hobbes clearly believes or thinks that this will be a useful book for a sovereign to
read and hoping it will gain the ear of a sympathetic sovereign or potential sovereign.
Hobbes may, I think, overestimate or maybe I really should say underestimate the
difficulty of the book but he returns to this again at the very end of Leviathan. "The
universities" he says there, where he talks again a little bit about the audience for the
book, "the universities," he says, " are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine. The
universities are the fountains of civil and moral doctrine and have the obligation to teach
the correct doctrine of rights and duties." And this means for Hobbes, first of all,
adopting his book as the authoritative teaching on moral and political doctrine in the
universities. This should be the required textbook of political science of political
teaching in the universities to replace the older textbook, i.e. Aristotle's Politics.
"Therefore," he says, "I think it may be profitably printed and more profitably taught in
the universities," he confidently asserts. "The ideal audience for the book," he says
"should be the preachers, the gentry, the lawyers, men of affairs, who drawing such
water as they find from the book can use it," he says, "to sprinkle the same both from
the pulpit and from their conversation upon the people." This is how he sees it, that it
should be taught from the pulpit. It should be taught from the universities and from this
conversation will be sprinkled upon the people. Hobbes' hope, like that of all the great
political philosophers, was to be a kind of legislator for mankind. This again is a book
with epic, epic ambition.
Let me mention, I've emphasized in many ways the absolutist and authoritarian side of
Hobbes' teaching. Let me talk about something that might sound oxymoronic. Let me
call it for the moment Hobbesian liberalism. Hobbes enjoys describing the sovereign in
the most absolute and extreme terms. Sovereign is to have supreme command over life
and death, war and peace, what is to be taught and heard. And yet, in many ways, this
Hobbesian sovereign aims to allow for ample room for individual liberty. And he even
sets some limits on the legitimate use of sovereign power. For all of his tough talk,
Hobbes takes justice and the rule of law very seriously, far more seriously than, for
example, does Machiavelli. At one time in the book or at one point he maintains that a
person cannot be made to accuse themselves without the assurance of pardon. You can't
be forced to accuse yourself, what we could call the Fifth Amendment. You cannot be
forced to accuse yourself. Similarly, he says, a wife or a parent cannot be coerced to
accuse a loved one. And, in a similar point, he maintains that punishment can never be
used as an instrument of revenge but only for what he calls the correction or what we
would call the rehabilitation of the offender.
Add to the above Hobbes' repeated insistence that law serve as an instrument for
achieving social equality. In a chapter called, "Of the Office of the Sovereign
Representative," Hobbes argues that justice be equally administered to all classes of
people, rich, as well as poor, equal application of justice. He maintains further the titles
of nobility are of value only for the benefits they confer on those of lesser rank or
they're not useful at all. Equal justice, he tells us, requires equal taxation policy and he
seems to be proposing a kind of consumption tax so that the rich, who consume more
will have to pay their fair share. And he argues that indigent citizens, who are unable to
provide for themselves, should not be forced to rely simply upon the private charity of
individuals but should be maintained at public expense. He seems, in this way, to
anticipate what we might think of as the modern welfare state that public assistance be
provided, and the poor, not simply depend on the private goodwill of the others.
But most importantly, I think, is to go back to the importance given to the individual in
Hobbes' philosophy. Hobbes derives the very power of the sovereign from the natural
right of each individual to do as they like in the state of nature. And it follows, I think,
that the purpose of the sovereign is really to safeguard the natural right of each
individual but to regulate this right so that it becomes consistent with the right of others
and not simply again a kind of open war against all. What is significant about this, I
think, is the priority that Hobbes gives to rights over duties. This, in many ways
arguably, makes him the founding father or maybe we should say godfather of modern
liberalism, the importance given to rights over duties, of the individual over in many
ways the collective or common good.
And I think this is expressed in Hobbes' novel and in many ways altogether
unprecedented teaching about liberty in chapter 21, a very famous and important
chapter. And here he distinguishes the liberty of, what he calls the liberty of the
ancients, or what he doesn't exactly call but I'll call the liberty of the ancients and the
liberty of the moderns. The ancients, he believes, operated with a defective
understanding of human freedom. For the ancients, liberty meant living in a self-
governing republic, living in a republic in which everyone again took some share in the
ruling offices. Liberty, in other words, for the ancients was not just a property of the
individual. It was an attribute of the regime of which one was a member. "The
Athenians and the Romans," he says, "were free, that is they were free commonwealths,
not that any particular man had the liberty to resist his own representative but that his
representative had the liberty to resist or invade other people." In other words, liberty
for the ancients was a collective good, the liberty, as he says, to resist or invade other
people. It was a property of the commonwealth not of the individuals who inhabited it.
But that sense of collective liberty, the freedom to resist or invade is, in fact, even
opposed to the modern idea of liberty that Hobbes proposes. And by liberty Hobbes
means something that sounds very familiar to us. Liberty means the absence of
constraints or impediments to action. We are free to the extent that we can act in an
unimpeded manner. And, it follows from him that political liberty means the freedom to
act where the law is silent, as he says. Think of that, that where the law is silent, we
have the freedom to do or not to do as we choose, very important to the way we think of
liberty today in a modern and you might say liberal democracy.
Hobbes' sovereign is more likely to allow citizens a zone of private liberty where they
are free to act as they choose than in the classical republic where there is a kind of
coerced participation in collective affairs or in political deliberation. And Hobbes here
takes a dig at the defenders of the view, in his own day, that only the citizens of a
republic can be free. "There is written," he says, "on the turrets of the city of Lucca"
and let me just ask before I continue this passage, anybody here in Pearson College? So,
you will know the Dean Mr. Amerigo, yeah, your dean? Your dean is from the city of
Lucca. Ask him if this is true when you see him. "There is written on the turrets of the
city of Lucca in great characters, meaning great letters, that this day the word libertas,
libertas is written on the walls of the turrets of the city of Lucca." Let's find out if that's
still true. "Yet, no man," Hobbes continues, "can thence infer that a particular man has
more liberty or immunity from the service of the commonwealth there than in
Constantinople, the city of the Caliphs, the Caliphate. Living in a republic alone doesn't
guarantee you more freedom. He says, freedom in that interesting passage, freedom here
requires, as he puts it, immunity, "immunity from service." A regime is to be judged for
Hobbes on how much private liberty, how much immunity it grants each of its citizens,
an idea of individual liberty in many ways unknown and unprecedented in the modern
world. And, in this respect, one can say that Hobbes has some connection to the creation
of what we think of as the modern liberal state with its conception of private freedom as
immunity from forced participation or forced participation in politics, very different
from the ancients. So what does this all mean?
Let me talk about what Hobbes has to say for us today, we who have in many ways
become Hobbes' children. Hobbes gives us the definitive language of the modern state.
Yet, he remains in many ways as contested for us as he was in his own time. For many
today, Hobbes' conception of the Leviathan state is synonymous with anti-liberal
absolutism. And yet for others, he opened the door to John Locke and the liberal theory
of government. He taught the priority of rights over duties and he argued that the
sovereign should serve the lowly interest or the lowly ends of providing peace and
security, leaving it to individuals to determine for themselves how best to live their
lives. Nonetheless, the liberty that subjects enjoy in Hobbes' plan falls in that area that
he says the sovereign omits to regulate. Hobbes does not praise vigilance in defense of
liberty and he denounces all efforts to resist the government. At best, one could say
Hobbes is a kind of part-time liberal at best.
But Hobbes is best when he is providing us with, in many ways, the moral and
psychological language in which we think about government and the state. The state is a
product of a psychological struggle between the contending passions of pride and fear.
Fear, you will remember is associated with the desire for security, order, rationality, and
peace. Pride is connected with the love of glory, honor, recognition and ambition. All
the goods of civilization, Hobbes tells us, stem from our ability to control pride. The
very title of the book comes from this wonderful biblical passage from Job where
Leviathan is described as king of the children of pride. And the 19 laws of nature that
Hobbes develops in his book really are there simply to enumerate or instruct us about
the virtues of sociability and civility, especially directed against the sin of pride or
hubris. So, the modern state, as we know it and still have it, in many ways grew out of
the Hobbesian desire for security and the fear of death that can only be achieved at the
expense of the desire for honor and glory. The Hobbesian state was intended to secure
the conditions of life, even a highly civilized and cultivated life but one calculated in
terms of self-interest and risk avoidance. Hobbes wants us to be fearful and to avoid
dangerous courses of action that are inflamed by beliefs in honor, ambition, and the like.
The Hobbesian fearful man is not likely to become someone who risks life for liberty,
for honor, or for a cause. He's more likely to be someone who plays by the rules, avoids
dangers, and bets on the sure thing. The Hobbesian citizen is not likely to be a risk
taker, like a George Washington or an Andrew Carnegie. He is more likely to think like
an actuary or a CPA or an insurance agent, always calculating the odds and finding
ways to cover the damages. Later political theorists, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Nietzsche would even develop a word for Hobbesian man. They would call him
somewhat contemptuously the bourgeois.
But nevertheless, Hobbes was remarkably successful in converting us to his point of
view. The type of individual he tried to create, careful, self-interested, risk averse, this
has become the dominant ethos of our civilization, has it not? We even have entire
disciplines like economics and psychology and I dare even say modern political science
that reinforced this view of human nature. We have all become, whether we choose to
admit it or not, Hobbesians. And yet at the same time, and here is the paradox I think,
even a Hobbesian society cannot entirely exist without some individuals who are
willing to risk life and limb either for the sake of honor, for self-respect or even just
from the sheer joy that comes from risk itself. Remember my example on Monday of
Ralph Esposito. Why do people become firemen, policemen, soldiers, freedom fighters,
all activities that cannot be explained in terms of self-interest alone? Will not even a
Hobbesian society again require fire departments? And where will people come from
that, if they all follow the psychology of fear and self-interest that Hobbes wants to
instill in us? Hobbes regards these passions, what Plato called by the word thumos.
Hobbes regarded these passions in many ways as barbaric, as uncivilized and warlike
and to some degree he was right.
But even the Hobbesian state, Hobbes admits himself, the Hobbesian state lives in the
midst of a Hobbesian world; that is to say, the world of international relations is for
Hobbes simply the state of nature at large. The Hobbesian state will always exist in a
world of hostile other states, unregulated by some kind of higher law. States stand to
one another on the world stage as individuals do in the condition of nature; that is to
say, potential enemies with no higher authority by which to adjudicate their conflicts.
And in such a world, even a sovereign state will be endangered either from other states
or from groups and individuals devoted to terror and destruction. Think of September
11, 2001. This is a problem that a profound political scientist by the name of Pierre
Hassner, a French student of international politics, has described as the dialectic of the
bourgeois and the barbarian, a struggle that is to say between the modern Hobbesian
state with its largely pacified and satisfied citizen bodies and those pre-modern states or
maybe in some ways even post-modern states that are prepared to use the instruments of
violence, terror and suicide bombings to achieve their goals. A Hobbesian state,
paradoxically, still requires from its citizens, men and women prepared to fight to risk
everything in the defense of their way of life. But the Hobbesian point, the paradox
being that the Hobbesian bourgeois cannot entirely dispense with the barbarian, even in
its own midst. Can Hobbes explain this paradox? He seems to avoid it.
This problem has been brought out I think brilliantly in a recent book by a man named
James Bowman, a book called Honor: a History. He wrote a history of honor. And here
he points out that while affairs of honor, as they are quaintly called, have largely
disappeared from advanced societies but honor still remains a consuming passion in
many parts of the world today including for him most importantly the Middle East.
Honor, in most societies, is thought to be not merely a personal quality, something like
medieval chivalry but is above all group honor, the honor that surrounds the family, the
extended clan, or the religious sect. An assault on one is an assault on all. This helps us
to explain, for instance, why in so many cultures the concept of saving face is so
important, even if to most modern Americans it seems relatively trivial. And one reason
Bowman believes this is that we have such a difficult time in understanding other
peoples and other cultures is that the very idea of defending one's honor has largely
been devalued in the modern west. We tend to look at human behavior as a matter of
providing rational incentives for human action while most people, in fact, are driven by
a need for esteem and a desire to avoid humiliation.
I remember, for example, during the Vietnam War when Richard Nixon spoke about
achieving peace with honor, and this was largely mocked as a kind of ludicrous idea.
Honor to so many of us sounds quaint, like an honor code or the Boy Scouts' code or
something like that or something primitive, some kind of primitive ethic which we
therefore don't really understand. We don't often see that it was in large parts Hobbes'
efforts to discredit this kind of warrior virtue, this kind of virtue of honor that is so
much a part of cultures that is also responsible for our current blindness.
And that brings me to my final point about our Hobbesian civilization that conceals
from us a very uncomfortable truth. Peace, the peace, security, and safety, what we
might call our bourgeois freedoms that we enjoy, rest on the fact, on the uncomfortable
fact, that there are still people who are willing to risk their lives for the sake of higher
goals like honor or duty. Is that irrational for them to do so? Hobbes would believe it is.
I think he would say yes. It doesn't make sense from a purely Hobbesian point of view
that encourages us to think like rational actors interested mainly in safety and beating
the odds. Hobbes, in many ways, finds himself in the position of the young military
lawyer played in the following movie clip I'm going to show you.
Professor Steven Smith: Okay, is the point made? The point is made. Then I will not
even provide any further commentary. I only apologize that for some reason I couldn't
get the picture.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 15
Transcript
October 30, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: It's so nice to see you again on this gorgeous autumn day.
And we had a wonderful, wonderful weekend, didn't we? Yes, we did. Okay, today, I
want us to begin we move ahead. We're moving ahead. Today we begin with Mr.
John Locke. For the next three classes, Mr. Locke. It is hard to believe that a little book
like this, in this not terribly distinguished edition, mind you, but nevertheless, in this
edition of just over a hundred pages, that a book of this length could have such world
shaping effects. If anyone would ever doubt the importance of ideas, political ideas, in
history, I would only say to you to consult the history and the influence of John Locke.
Remarkable. I want to talk today a little bit about Mr. Locke. John Locke is, for our
purposes today, I mean, there are many reasons why one would read him in different
kinds of classes, but for our purposes, John Locke gives the modern state, the
expression that is most familiar to us. His writings seem to have been so completely
absorbed and adopted by Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of
Independence that Locke seems to have become virtually a kind of honorary founding
father, as it were, of America.
Among other things, John Locke advocates the natural liberty and equality of human
beings, our natural rights to such things as life, liberty, and what he calls "estate" or
property, the idea that government, at least legitimate government, is government by
consent, that legitimate government is necessarily limited and limited government
constituted by a separation of powers, and that when governments become repressive or
that when governments become abusive of natural rights, that the people have a right to
revolution. In addition to this, John Locke was a famous advocate of religious
toleration. His name is forever linked with our ideas today of what we might call liberal
or constitutional democracy. He gives the modern constitutional state, again, its
definitive and, in many ways, most familiar expression.
Yet, Locke did not arise ex nihilo, nor did anyone. Locke's writings come from
somewhere and from some source. They were prepared, in many ways, in part by
Machiavelli, who had died approximately a century before Locke's birth. But more
importantly, by another English writer, or by an English writer with whom we have
spent some time, namely Mr. Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes took Machiavelli's idea
of The Prince and, in effect, turned it into a theory or doctrine of sovereignty. The
Hobbesian sovereign is at the basis of our ideas of impersonal, or what we might call
representative, government. He transforms princely rule, Hobbes does, into an office
called the sovereign. And this office is, for Hobbes, the creation of a social contract, or
covenant, as he calls it, responsible to the agents or persons who have created the
contract. Hobbes had taught that the sovereign is representative of the people who create
his office in order to ensure peace, justice, and order. Without the power of the
sovereign, we would find ourselves in a condition of nature, a state of nature, a term
coined by Hobbes to indicate a world without civil authority or at least with only weak
civil authority, unable to enforce common rules and laws. Hobbes gave voice to the
doctrine of secular absolutism, one that invests the sovereign with absolute power to do
whatever is necessary to ensure, again, the rule of law, justice, and political stability.
And out of these rather harsh and formidable premises, Locke created a different, what
we would think of as a more liberal constitutional theory of the state, while being still,
in many ways, very dependent on the premises that Hobbes, again, modifying
Machiavelli, had undertaken. Locke set out a process of domestication. He set out to
tame or to domesticate Hobbes's fierce or harsh theory of absolute government, which
had found few defenders in his own day. Locke's most important work of political
theory, of political philosophy, is his Two Treatises of Civil Government, of which we
are only reading the second. The book we have before us is often simply referred to as
the Second Treatise, but you will probably have suspected, I think, that the Second
Treatise was preceded by a first treatise. The First Treatise is much longer than the
Second Treatise, and it was an elaborate and painstaking, one could almost say
deconstruction, of the theory of the divine right of kings, which in his era, had received
expression by a man named Robert Filmer, whose name appears, I think occasionally,
in the Second Treatise. Filmer had written a book called Patriarcha, and the Patriarcha
had argued that all political authority derives from the grant of authority that God had
given to Adam, and therefore, that all legitimate authority has divine right behind it.
Locke's First Treatise is a very important, but also, I have to say, extremely tedious
work, and you should be grateful that I am not assigning it to you. But it's a very
interesting book, in its own right, of in many ways, biblical criticism and exposition.
But it's only in the Second Treatise that Locke set out to set out his own positive theory
of government, as it were. This book was written, we now believe, shortly before the
famous Whig Revolution of 1688, and in it, Locke sets out his theory of parliamentary
supremacy, rule of law, and constitutional government. To put it maybe slightly oddly,
Locke was in his day, to some degree, what Aristotle was to his. The Second Treatise is
intended as a practical book. It was a book addressed not so much to the philosophers of
his age, but to Englishmen, written to them in the everyday language of their time. He
wrote to capture, in a way, the common sense of his time, although this is not to say
Locke was not, at the same time, a deeply controversial figure. Locke had the ability,
and it's a very desirable ability, to take, in many ways, radical or even revolutionary
ideas and express them in a kind of language that makes people believe that this is what
they had thought all along. And that is, to some degree, the genius of the Second
Treatise. In many ways, that is easier for us, because Locke's language has become, for
us, the kind of I would almost say common sense, or shorthand language, for the way
we think about politics. And it was, again, a mark of his genius to be able to create that
language and give it a stamp that seemed to make people believe that this is what they
had simply been thinking all along.
Locke was himself a deeply political man, but he was also, at the same time, as I've just
been hinting, perhaps, a very reticent one. He lived in a period of intense religious and
political conflict. He was just a boy in school when a king, Charles I, was executed and
he was an adult when another king, James II, was overthrown and forced into exile. He
was a younger contemporary of Hobbes, but he lived in a period of immense civil
conflict and war. Locke spent many years at Oxford, where he was both a student and a
fellow, and he was suspected, throughout much of his time there, of harboring radical
political sympathies, but he was so cautious and careful in expressing them that after
many years, even those closest to him were unclear as to what his opinions were. The
master of Locke's own residential college at Oxford, Balliol College, described Mr.
Locke as the "master of taciturnity," a master of taciturnity because he could not
discover, through questioning and so on, Locke's opinions on religious and political
matters. Just think of it. There used to be a very wonderful bust of Locke in the lobby of
the British Arts Centre and I used to recommend to students, when they were down in
that part of campus, to stop in and look at his face, because as with Machiavelli and
others, the face is very revealing. And I used to ask people to see do you detect in here
the sense of the master of taciturnity that his college master had discussed?
Locke was a private secretary and a physician to a man named Anthony Ashley Cooper,
later known as Lord Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had a circle, the Shaftesbury Circle, of
political followers who were opponents of the monarchy and who were forced into exile
in 1683. Locke followed them into exile. He spent several years in Holland in 1683
before returning to England, again, shortly before the Whig Revolution, where his book,
the Second Treatise, was published and where he lived until his death in 1704. Just two
years ago, in fact, Yale, at the Beinecke Library, held a major conference in
commemoration of the 300th anniversary of the death of Mr. Locke. So those are a few
things about his contributions and his context.
I want to begin today the substantive part of this talk by focusing on the theme that, in
many ways, forms the central core of Locke's political doctrine, his Theory of Natural
Law. This is a term that has come up from time to time. There is no modern thinker that
I'm aware of who makes natural law as important to his doctrine as does Locke. The
best way to observe the working, or to reconstruct the working, of natural law is to
follow a procedure that we have seen before; to think about what is the condition of
nature, the state of nature, where we can see the natural law in its operative form. The
state of nature, for Locke, in many ways, as for Hobbes, is not a condition of ruling and
being ruled, as it is for Aristotle. The state of nature is not a political condition. Locke
describes the state of nature as a condition of perfect freedom. While Aristotle said that
we were, by nature, members of a family, a polis, a moral community of some kind,
bound by ties of civic or family obligation, Locke understands, by the state of nature, a
condition without civil authority or civil obligations. The state of nature is not, for him,
an historical condition, although he does occasionally refer to the vast tracts of North
America as suggesting a condition of nature, but the state of nature is a kind of thought
experiment.
What does human nature like in the absence of authority? The state of nature, Locke
suggests to us, is not an amoral condition, as it was for Hobbes. It is not simply a
condition of war, of all against all. The state of nature, he tells us, is in fact a moral
condition. It is governed by a moral law, or a natural law, that dictates peace and
sociability. There is a moral law of nature that determines that no one should harm
another person in their life, liberty, or possessions. This natural law, Locke affirms,
"willeth the peace and preservation of all mankind." So the natural condition, for Locke,
is a moral state, one in which a natural law, again, dictates the peace and preservation. It
is not a war of all against all. Locke's natural law, in some ways, seems like a very
traditional form of moral law, familiar to readers of his time; readers who would have
been familiar with the natural law tradition, going back to Cicero, the Roman Stoics, St.
Thomas Aquinas, and in Locke's own day, an important Anglican divine by the name of
Richard Hooker.
Locke's theory of moral law, or natural law, sounds comforting and traditional, and to
some degree, it is. All civil authority has its foundation in a law of reason that is
knowable, by virtue of our rational capacities alone. The law of nature declares,
according to Locke, that we are, in his famous term, the "workmanship of one
omnipotent and infinitely wise maker." And as products of divine workmanship, we
ought never to harm anyone in their lives, liberties, or possessions. Locke, again, seems
to effortlessly weave together the Stoic tradition of natural law with these Christian
ideas of divine workmanship into one seamless whole. You can see the way in which
Locke's rhetoric here, in his writing, brings together different strands of the
philosophical and theological tradition, weaving them together in a kind of effortless
whole almost. Do not be simply seduced by this. Why do I say that? Because even
within the same paragraphs, Locke's natural law, the law that, again, mandates or
dictates "peace and preservation of all mankind," turns into a right of self-preservation.
From the beginning, you have to say, it is not altogether clear even whether the natural
law is a theory of moral duty, duties that we have to preserve other's duties and
obligations, or whether it is a theory of natural rights that mandates that the highest
priority be given to individual self-preservation and whatever is necessary to achieve the
preservation of the individual. The state of nature is a condition without civil authority.
The law of nature, in other words, has no person or office to oversee its enforcement or
its application. So this state of nature that he once describes, or early describes in the
book is a condition of peace and mutual distrust, quickly degenerates into a condition of
civil war, or of war, where every individual serves as the judge, jury, and executioner of
the natural law. The state of nature quickly becomes a Hobbesian condition of
essentially every man for himself. Consider the following passage in section 11 of the
Second Treatise. "The damnified person," Locke writes--someone who has been
mistreated in the condition of nature--the "damnified person," who has been injured or
mistreated, "has this power of appropriating to himself the goods or services of the
offender by the right of self-preservation, as every man has a power to punish the crime
to prevent it being committed again, by the right he has of preserving all mankind, and
doing all reasonable things he can in order to that end." In other words, if you have been
wronged, or feel you have been wronged, in the state of nature, you have, according to
the natural law, for Locke, the right to, as he puts it, appropriate to yourself the goods or
services of the offender. And you have that--to take from them their goods, their
property, their services in some way, whatever you feel appropriate as, again, the person
who has suffered some kind of wrong. Every person becomes, as it were, judge and
executioner of the law of nature.
The fundamental law of nature, Locke says here, is the right of self-preservation. And
this states that each person is empowered to do, again, whatever is in his power, to
preserve him or herself. Again, consider the following in section 16: "And one may
destroy a man who makes war upon him." May destroy another who makes war upon
you. "Or has discovered an enmity to his being, for the same reason that he may kill a
wolf or a lion," because such men "are not under the ties of the common law of reason."
They "have no other rule but that of force and violence," so also, they may be treated as
beasts of prey, "those dangerous or noxious creatures that will be sure to destroy him
whenever he falls into their power." Listen to that language. From an original moral
condition, where we are under a natural law not to harm others, a law to preserve and
protect the well-being of others of our kind, we have become like lions and wolves to
each other, beasts of prey and other noxious creatures. What is the state of nature, but,
in the words of Dorothy Gale, "lions, tigers, and bears, oh my!" This is what we are to
one another.
This is what I've come to think of as Locke's bestiary, and in fact, the Second Treatise is
rife with language of comparing human beings and our behavior to animals. He speaks
about lions and wolves. Elsewhere he speaks about polecats and skunks and foxes. If, in
fact, we are all beings, as he says, created under a natural law, we seem to quickly
degenerate into almost bestial behavior. Beasts of prey, far from being cooperative and
peace seeking creatures. The very freedom that such beings as ourselves enjoy in a state
of nature leads us to abuse that freedom and, in turn, requires or is at the basis of the
need for civil government. However, in the meantime, the question that any reader of
the Second Treatise has to ask of themselves--and I hope you've put this forward in your
sections to one another--is whether the natural condition, as Locke understands it, is one
overseen by a moral law of justifying or sanctifying peace and security, or whether
Locke's state of nature is simply a thinly veiled description, a thinly papered-over
description, of the Hobbesian war of all against all. Was Locke simply Hobbes, in some
way, in sheep's clothing? Remember his famous taciturnity.
Locke seems to be speaking two very different languages, in other words, one of
traditional natural law that holds out duties to others as primary and the other, in some
ways, a modern Hobbesian conception of natural rights that maintains the priority of
right and each individual's right to self-preservation. Is Locke, in other words--and this
is perhaps more of an historical than a theoretical question--is Locke a member of the
ancient, in some ways, Ciceronian and Thomistic tradition of natural law or a modern
Hobbesian? Do his politics derive from a theological conception of divine workmanship
or an ultimately, you might say, naturalistic conception or account of the human
passions and the struggle for survival? Do his priorities go to duties or to rights? Or is
Locke simply confused? Is he confusing two different languages or is he being
intentionally ambiguous in his account?
A recent book, by a well-known scholar of Locke has argued, I think quite powerfully
in some ways, that Locke's idea of equality in the state of nature specifically relies upon
a certain kind of Christian theological context of argument. Locke's statement in
paragraph four of the Second Treatise, his statement that "there being nothing more
evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the
same advantages of Nature, should also be equal to one another." That Locke's
statement that creatures of the same species and rank should be equal to one another,
this is said to rely upon and depend upon a very specific religious argument. What it
means to belong to a species and why belonging to the same species confers a special
rank or dignity on each of its members only makes sense, according to this recent
interpretation, if you believe or if it is believed that the species in question has a
specifically moral relation to God. The question, I think, is whether Locke's idea of
equality in the state of nature, or his idea of the moral law in the state of nature, relies
upon this belief, or whether it can be inferred from such things as the basic principles of
freedom, whether this can be inferred, as it were, from purely non theological,
naturalistic premises or grounds.
Locke, to be short, is silent in the Second Treatise about the theological foundations of
his position. There are no discussions of important theological figures, such as Jesus or
St. Paul or the New Testament, at least in the Second Treatise; he discusses these issues
at length elsewhere. These may be, in some way, thought of as background
considerations, but the question remains, I think, for us whether these are deeply
embedded in Locke's arguments about divine workmanship or whether or not that
language of divine workmanship simply serves as a kind of window dressing, again, for
a purely secular naturalistic theory of human nature and political authority. Very
important issue, I think, in coming to understand Locke and indirectly, very important
for how we come to think of the American regime because--I'll just say, simply as a
kind of footnote to what I've been saying--if Locke is thought of in some ways, as his
doctrine as being, in some ways, at the founding principles of the American regime, the
Declaration of Independence most notably, it becomes very important. It becomes part
of a contemporary public argument whether those foundations owe their authority to
some kind of theological doctrine, as Jefferson calls it in the opening of the
Declaration, "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," seems in some way to have
Lockean overtones to it. Do our founding documents imply a theology of some kind,
"the Laws of Nature and Nature's God," or are those principles, again, purely of a
naturalistic secular kind that can do without theology altogether?
That is an argument, a kind of scholarly and academic argument, to be sure, but it spills
over into many of our public debates over the role or place of religion in public life,
whenever we talk about issues of the appropriateness of issues like school prayer or
should the Ten Commandments be publicly displayed in courthouses or in other public
places? Or if you want to take another famous Jeffersonian position, is there a kind of
absolute firewall, a wall of separation, between religion and the state? These issues that
we very much work on today and think about are, you can see, deeply embedded in how
we think about Locke and those opening sections of the Second Treatise dealing with
natural law and the state of nature. So you can see, again, how these ideas penetrate
deeply into the marrow of our public or political culture. Are we so different? Have we
become so different? Will people living three-hundred years from now think of us as so
different, and our public debates so different, from those that animated the public issues
in the time of John Locke? Maybe not. Maybe we aren't that different. So enough for
contemporary. Let me go back to Mr. Locke.
The core of Locke's theory of natural law in the state of nature is arguably lodged in his
account of property, chapter 5 of the Second Treatise. If you remember anything about
Locke after this class, remember chapter 5. It is, by all accounts--maybe chapter 19 as
well, "The Theory of Revolution," but chapter 5, account of property; certainly, in many
ways, one of the most characteristic doctrines of Lockean political thought. Locke's
view of human nature is that we are very much the property-acquiring animal. Aristotle
had said we were political by nature; Locke says we are property-acquiring beings. Our
claims to property derive from our work. The fact that we have expended our labor, our
work, on something gives us a title to it. Labor confers value and is the source of all
values. The state of nature is a condition, he tells us, of communal ownership, what Karl
Marx would have called "primitive communism." The state of nature is given to all men
in common, Locke says. Parts of it become private property only when we add our labor
to something. Let me read a famous formula from sections 27 and 28. "Every man,"
Locke says, "has property in his person: this no body has any right to but himself." We
all, in other words, come into the world with a certain private property, property in our
person. No one else has a right to that. "The labour of his body," Locke continues, "and
the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his for labour being the unquestionable
property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what is once joined to, at
least where there is enough, as good left in common for others." "That labour," Locke
says, "puts a distinction between him and the common: that added something to them
more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they become his private
right." So we have moved here, in this one paragraph, from the state of nature, which he
says is common to all, to a condition of rudimentary private property, which we have in
our body, our person, which he says also includes the labor of the body and the work of
the hands, how we expend our activity. That labor, he says, which puts something
between us and the common, becomes the source of ownership of things around us, and
that ownership then, in turn, becomes a right. So they become, he concludes there, his
private right, the source of a right to property.
The natural law, as Locke seems to be saying, dictates a right to private property and it
is to secure that right that governments are ultimately established. In a striking
formulation, Locke tells us that the world was created in order to be cultivated and
improved. Those who work to improve and develop nature, who add to nature through
the labor of their body and the work of their hands, those who develop and improve
nature are the true benefactors of humanity, of humankind. "God gave the world to men
in common," he says, section 34, "God gave the world to men in common, but since He
gave it to them for their benefit and the greatest conveniences of life that they were
capable to draw from it," he writes; the world was given for our convenience, he says, to
be drawn from, "it cannot be supposed He meant it should always remain common and
uncultivated." And then he adds, "He gave it to the use of the industrious and the
rational and not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious." God
gave the world for our improvement of it and therefore, He gave it to the industrious
and the rational. Locke seems to suggest in that very phrase that the state will be a
commercial state, that the Lockean republic or the Lockean state will be a commercial
republic. Think of that.
Ancient political theory, Plato, Aristotle, regarded commerce, regarded property, as in
many ways subordinate to the life of a citizen. Plato would have instituted a kind of
communism of property among the guardians of his Kalipolis. Aristotle thought of the
necessity of private property, but simply as a means to allow a few of those citizens, to
engage in political life. Economy, you might say, was always subordinate to the polity.
Locke turns this ancient and medieval doctrine, as well, on its head in many ways. The
world belongs to the industrious and the rational, those who, through their own efforts,
through their labor and work, increase and enhance the plenty of all. It is only a
relatively short step from John Locke to Adam Smith, in that respect, the great author of
The Wealth of Nations, again, just under a century after Locke's Second Treatise. For
Locke--and let me just go on a little more about this--there are no natural limits to
property acquisition. And this is, in a way, the essential point. The introduction of
money or coinage into the state of nature, an issue I'm not going to talk much about
here, but that becomes an important moment in his chapter 5 in his account of the state
of nature, the introduction of money makes unlimited capital accumulation not only
possible, but even a kind of moral duty. It becomes our duty to enhance and work upon
the raw materials of the natural world around us. By enriching ourselves, we
unintentionally work for the benefit of others.
Consider the following remarkable sentence: "A king of a large and fruitful territory in
America," he says, "feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day labourer in England."
Because, of course, our work, Locke thinks, has enhanced the plenty of all in some way.
The creation of a general plenty, the common wealth--and think of the way in which the
revealing use of that term "common wealth," the wealth of all--is due, in many ways, to
the emancipation of labor from the previous kinds of moral and political restrictions
imposed upon it by the ancient philosophical, as well as religious, traditions. Labor
becomes, for Locke, his source of all value and our title to common ownership and in a
remarkable rhetorical series of shifts, he makes not nature, but rather human labor and
acquisition the source of property and of unlimited material possessions.
He begins this chapter, chapter 5, with the assertion, think about it, that "God hath given
the world to men in common," once again suggesting that the original state is one of
common ownership. He then suggests that every person is the owner of their own
bodies and that one acquires a title to things through labor that we have mixed with that
common world. But what starts as a very, very modest title to the objects that we have
worked on, his example is something as simple as picking apples from a tree, the act of
picking gives us a title to the apple, that very simple or rudimentary form of property
soon turns into a full scale explanation of the rise of property and a kind of market
economy in the state of nature. "Labor accounts," he tells us, "for ten times the amount
of value that is provided by nature alone," he says at section 37. Our labor enhances the
value of nature ten times. But he then goes on to add very quickly, "I have here rated the
improved land very low in making its product but as one to ten when it is much nearer a
hundred to one." Our labor advances things a hundred-fold. Shortly later, in section 43,
he says that the value of anything is improved a thousand-fold due to labor.
Again, what began as a fairly rudimentary discussion of the origins of private property
at the beginning of chapter 5, limited by the extent of our use and spoilage, has, by the
end of that same chapter, you might say, morphed into an account of large scale
ownership with considerable inequalities of wealth and possession. By the end of
chapter 5, there appears to be almost a direct link between Locke's dynamic theory of
property in chapter 5 and James Madison's famous statement in Federalist No. 10. As
Madison says, "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property is
the first object of Government." Seems a very Lockean proposition in The Federalist.
Locke gives, in other words, to commerce, to money-making, to acquisitiveness, a kind
of pride of place and a sort of moral status, you might even call it, that it never enjoyed
in the ancient and medieval worlds. The new politics of the Lockean state will no longer
be concerned with glory, honor, thumos, virtue, but Lockean politics will be sober, will
be pedestrian, it will be hedonistic, without sublimity or joy. Locke is the author of the
doctrine that commerce softens manners, that it makes us less warlike, that it makes us
civilized, something that reaches its, you might say, highest expression in the twentieth
chapter or the twentieth book of Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. Commerce does not
require us, for Locke, to spill blood or risk life. It is solid, reliable, thoroughly middle
class in some ways. Locke is, again, the great author of the idea that the task of
government is to protect not just the rights of property, but the right to acquire and build
upon the property that we already own. So I want to end on this note and begin on
Wednesday talking a little bit about what we might call John Locke and the spirit of
capitalism.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 16
Transcript
November 1, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Today we want to begin with Mr. Locke, Part II. And I said,
at the end of class last time, I want to speak a little bit about Locke and let's just call it
the spirit of capitalism. And then I want to move into the issue of government by
consent, along with the idea of natural law, perhaps one of Locke's clearly central,
perhaps most significant contribution to political philosophy, the Doctrine of Consent.
And various problems I wanted to examine with you today, associated with consent and
what it means to consent to government.
But the first five chapters of the Second Treatise, if you take them as a unit, and I think
they should be, they tell us a story. Locke presents us, so to speak, with a kind of
philosophical anthropology that takes us through the state of nature, the state of war, the
creation of private property. And in the fifth chapter particularly, Locke begins as I
mentioned last time with, you might say, with the original condition of nature which
forms a kind of primitive communism to the creation of property through the labor of
one's body and the work of one's hands. And by the end of the fifth chapter, we have the
creation of really a kind of full-scale, sophisticated market economy replete with
various inequalities, perhaps even some large-scale inequalities of wealth and property,
all within the state of nature. How did this occur and most importantly for Locke, what
makes this legitimate? What legitimizes this transition, so to speak, from the original
state of nature governed by nothing more than the law of nature to the emergence of
property and in a way, a kind of market economy?
In many ways, what Locke is doing in the first five chapters of the Second Treatise is
re-telling or maybe better re-writing the account of human beginnings that had
originally belonged to scripture. He tells the story of how human beings finding
themselves in a condition of nature with no one or no authority to adjudicate their
disputes and governed only by a natural law, how they are, nevertheless, able to create
and enjoy the use of property created and acquired through their labor and work. Man,
he tells us in these opening chapters, is a property-acquiring animal, the acquisitive
animal, even in the state of nature where there is again nothing but the natural law to
govern human associations and relations with one another. But the problem with the
state of nature for Locke and as to some degree it was for Hobbes as well, is its
instability, with no civil authority to umpire disputes, especially disputes over property.
The peaceful enjoyment and the further acquisition of property, the fruits of one's labor,
are continually threatened by war and by conflict. How can we ever be secure in our
person or property with no enforcement agency to resolve breaches of the peace, where
everybody is, so to speak, again, the judge and jury and executioner of the natural law?
The need for government arises out of the real need to resolve conflicts or disputes over
property rights. In many respects, this sounds like a very familiar idea that government
exists for the sake of the protection of property rights. It's sort of kind of a cardinal
doctrine of what I suppose we would call today libertarianism, the philosophy of
libertarianism, so important in a lot of American thought.
Locke is, in many ways, the first writer of my familiarity who claims that--these are his
words--"the great and chief end of man's uniting into commonwealth is the protection of
their property." No one prior to Locke, at least to my knowledge, I think, had ever said
in quite such a bold and straightforward way that the purpose of politics was the
protection of property rights. And by property, Locke doesn't mean simply objects
around us that we have turned into property; but property is rooted, he tells us, first and
foremost in our persons, in our bodies. We all begin the life with a certain rudimentary
property if only in ourselves. Property, for him, implies more than simply real estate,
but everything that encompasses our lives, liberties, and possessions. These are all
property in the original, and in many ways, most revealing sense of the term "property,"
that is to say things proper to us. But Locke continually emphasizes to us the
uncertainty of the state of nature because "life there," he says, "is full of fears and
continual dangers that lead us to civil association."
But think, in a way, how different Locke's account of the transition from the state of
nature to the civil state is from Hobbes'. In many ways, again, as I said, Locke tries to
modify, domesticate, ameliorate Hobbes' harsh teachings. Hobbes had emphasized the
absolute fearfulness of the state of nature. The state of nature was, for Hobbes, a kind of
state of existential dread, absolute fearfulness. For Locke, however, it is a condition
continually beset by unease and anxiety; to use the word he often uses, inconveniences.
The state of nature is one that consists of continual inconveniences. It is our unease, our
restlessness that is not only a spur to our labor, but is rather the cause of our insecurities
that we have in the state of nature. What is it about Locke, what is it about his account?
I don't mean what is it about him in some psychological, personal, or biographical
sense, but what is it in his writing that leads him to emphasize the restlessness,
uneasiness, and you might say perpetually anxious character of human beings in the
state of nature? Do we ever hear Plato or Aristotle discussing the fearful or anxious or
restless character of human psychology? I think not. Was this simply a function of
Locke's nervous disposition? Was the fact that he was simply prone to reticence and a
kind of fearfulness in the same way that Hobbes himself said? Or does Locke's
emphasis on the uneasiness of our condition in the natural condition really represent the
qualities of a new class, the new commercial classes as it were seeking to establish their
legitimacy?
Locke's Second Treatise in many respects is a work of middle class or as the Marxist
would like to say, perhaps the bourgeois ascendancy. When Locke writes, as he does,
that the world is intended for the use of the industrious and the rational, who was he
talking about there? Who are the industrious and the rational? He is speaking about a
new middle class ethos whose title to rule rests not on heredity or on tradition; he is not
referring to a customary ruling class, a class whose title to rule comes from its claims to
nobility. But he's referring to people whose title to rule or potential title to rule rests on
their capacities for hard work, thrift, and opportunity. As a former student of mine who
took this class once said, Locke's Second Treatise could well be called the Capitalist
Manifesto, or the Anti-Communist Manifesto maybe, one could put it.
But is Lockeanism simply Machiavelli with a human face? Put it that way. Isn't the rule
of The Prince in Machiavelli the rule of a new leader, a new authority in some sense
who operates outside the parameters of traditional authority? Isn't Lockeanism like
Machiavelli in some way the ethic of the self-made man with all of the insecurities and
anxieties, restlessness that being self-made represents? Does Lockeanism represent in
some ways the tranquilization of Machiavelli, turning Machiavelli's fierce warlike ethic,
the ethic of conquest and domination to, in fact, the ethic of work and as it were, the
conquest and domination of nature through labor and our hard work? Is this, again,
simply Machiavellianism with a human face? But in any way, I think, or what I want to
suggest is that Locke's political philosophy gives expression to what the great German
sociologist Max Weber, you know him, yes, Weber? You read him in Intro Sociology,
no? Okay, well, you will. Weber, his famous book called The Protestant Ethic and the
Spirit of Capitalism, 1904, great work, classic work.
In that work, Weber argued that the capitalist ethic made a high duty, a moral duty,
turned it into a moral calling, a religious calling, the duty of limitless accumulation of
capital and this was, in Weber's terms, the outgrowth of the Puritan and Calvinist
movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Weber it was the Protestant
reformation that had taken root in the countries of Northern Europe and particularly
where the roots of this capitalistic ethos first developed and again adopted a wholly new
moral attitude to such things as property, property acquisition and moneymaking.
Previously, these things had been deemed to be morally dubious, shunted aside, there's
something shameful about this. You can certainly see this in the classical writings,
political philosophy that we did. For these early moderns, capital accumulation became
a kind of high calling and moral duty. God gave the world to the rational and the
industrious, not, he says, to the quarrelsome and contentious; not, that is, to those
prideful aristocrats who seek to struggle for domination and power over one another.
What Locke brings into being is, again, a wholly new and revolutionary moral attitude
towards property and property acquisition that again finds its expression, great
expression a century later with Adam Smith. And, of course, from Adam Smith we have
the whole world of modern economics. So, how many of you are potential economics
majors in here? I bet more than one. Without John Locke, there would be no modern
discipline called economics because he was the one, again, a century before Smith and
the rise of the school of political economy, who made the first and decisive move which
was to, in many ways, make respectable and even more than respectable, turn into a
high moral calling and dignity the acquisition of property and turn government, turn
politics into a tool for the protection of property and property rights. That is the
significance in many ways of what Locke has done. I want to talk, probably not today
but next Monday, on some of the in many ways the pros and cons of this immense
moral transformation regarding property and economics that Locke has helped to bring
into being.
But for the rest of today, what I want to focus on is Locke's idea of consent, the idea that
the origin of all government, or at least all legitimate government is said to derive from
consent, the consent of the governed, an idea that was implicit in some respects in
Hobbes' theory of the covenant that creates the sovereign, to which Locke gives, in
many ways, much greater pride of place. In chapter 8 of the Second Treatise, Locke
gives us there, he provides us with a kind of hypothetical reconstruction of the origin of
society, of all societies. He writes in section 95, "The only way whereby anyone divests
himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society, is by agreeing with
all others to join and unite in a community for their comfortable, safe, and peaceful
living." Locke tells us there is something about the legitimate ends of society, the ends
that civil society serves, comfortable, safe, and peaceful living. And he goes on to
affirm that whenever a sufficient number of people have consented to make a single
community, and I quote him again, "they are thereby presently incorporated and make
one body politic," they make one body politic, "wherein the majority have a right to act
and conclude for the rest."
That short statement, section 95 of chapter 8, seems to make maybe the first and most
powerful case for democracy. On the basis of that statement, a famous Yale professor of
at least a couple of generations ago, wrote an extremely important book that made John
Locke into a majority rule Democrat. He said in that book that Locke's philosophy
provides the faith of the majority rule Democrat, largely focusing on sections 95, 96 as
sort of the key to Locke's political teaching in the Second Treatise. Does anybody know
the name of that man who wrote that book, by any chance? Famous Yale Political
Scientist, back a while ago. Nobody remembers Willmoore Kendall's book on Locke?
You know it, yes, you were shaking your head. No, you don't? Okay, whatever. It's not
important. Not important. I just mention it in passing. But consider the following
sentence, again, also that seems to add to this claim. "For when any number of men by
the consent of every individual make a community, they have thereby made that
community one body with a power to act as one body which is only by the will and
determination of the majority."
What are we to make of this assertion and in many ways, continued assertion, that in
any community, we are ruled by the majority? To be sure, that idea would have come as
an immense surprise, no doubt, to the King of England to learn that his rule was
justified by the consent of the governed, or if you had done something like crossed the
English Channel and go to the France of Louis XIV of this period, Louis XIV who
famously said L'tat c'est moi, "I am the state," no doubt would have been very
surprised and probably found laughable the idea that his legitimacy came from the
consent of his subjects. Who had ever thought such a thing, that government derives
from the consent of the majority? Is Locke, in saying that, denying the legitimacy of all
government, all governments that do not derive from the consent of the majority? Is he,
on the basis of this, truly a kind of majority rule Democrat? Does he undercut, for
example, something like Aristotle's argument, who had seen any number of forms of
government as equally legitimate in many ways, so long as they are moderate and ruled
by law? Or is Locke saying, again, that there is only one form of government, one,
again, legitimate or just form of government, government by the majority? That's what
he appears here to be saying. I mention the sense appears, Locke is a slippery fish. He's
a slippery writer. He has a tendency to take back with one hand what he gives with the
other, doesn't he?
The agreement to make one community, as he calls it however, is not the same thing
exactly as establishing a form of government. In many ways, choosing to have a
government, which is what Locke is talking about here in these relevant sections--95
and 96 and so on-- choosing to have a government to be one people, so to speak, is in
many ways an act prior to electing any particular form of government to rule you. The
Second Treatise, in some way, specifies only that governments derive their just power
from the consent of the governed. It does not seem to say very explicitly about what
form of government people might wish to consent to. In many ways, the Second
Treatise, one wants to say, is even rather neutral to forms of government. The only form
of government that seems to be absolutely ruled out on Locke's account is some kind of
absolute monarchy. We cannot cede our rights entirely to another individual. But he
seems to be relatively open to whatever it is people may wish to consent to. The act of
consent alone does not create a government. It is merely an act to form a society. In
many ways, he accepts Pope's famous dictum, Alexander Pope's famous dictum: "...for
forms of government let fools contest, whate're is best administered is best." In other
words, you have the best thing that administers government that protects your rights to
property and what form it is, whether it's monarchic, aristocratic, republican or
whatever, is not so important. What is important, and for Locke about the only thing
that is important, is that that form of government receive the consent of the governed.
And, of course, people don't necessarily have to consent to democracy. If Locke is
democratic in that way, it is only because he's democratic in a sense that government
derives the authority from consent. It does not necessarily have to be democratical in
form in that respect. But it is this idea of consent--and you will no doubt talk about this
in your sections-- it is this idea of government as being by consent that has so much
insinuated itself-- I'm not sure that's the right word -- but has so much formed in many
ways the cornerstone of the American regime and American political thought, in many
ways, even more, I would suggest, than his doctrine of property and property rights.
Locke's Doctrine of Consent is what captured the imagination of the American
founders. When Jefferson wrote about the ends of government, he said the ends of
government are to protect life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He seems to have
modified Locke's statement about life, liberty, and estate. Why did he do that? We could
talk about that and of course, what is meant by the pursuit of happiness certainly is
intended to entail, among other things, the acquisition of property. But Jefferson in
some ways sort of elevates Locke's language, Lockean language; it is not simply
focused on property but the pursuit of happiness in many ways however construed
consistent with the rights of others.
But it is Locke's language of consent that just powers of governments derive from
consent that seems to have most inspired Jefferson and the founders. And through that
doctrine it, of course, had a huge effect on America's greatest second founder, Abraham
Lincoln. Consider the following passage from Lincoln. This is Lincoln in 1854 in his
first major speech, first most important speech, sometimes called the Peoria Speech,
where he was already debating Stephan A. Douglas. It was for the Senate campaign in
Illinois, appropriate in our time of the year, where they were then arguing, as they
would again for the presidential campaign, argue over slavery and here is what Lincoln
writes: "When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he
governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government, that
is despotism," Lincoln says. "My ancient faith," no doubt thinking about the
Declaration and Jefferson's ideals, "My ancient faith teaches me that there can be no
moral right with one man making a slave of another." "What I do say," Lincoln
continues here, "is that no man is good enough to govern another without that other's
consent." "This," he concludes, "is the leading principle, the sheet anchor of American
republicanism." So there is Abraham Lincoln referring to the Doctrine of Consent by
which he says that no man is good enough to govern another without that other's
consent, calling this the leading principle or the sheet anchor of American
republicanism.
That statement, as I was suggesting a moment ago, is part of his debate with Douglas
over the issue of slavery and it, in many ways, cut to the core of the meaning of consent.
Douglas also, in some respects, tried to derive his views from an idea of consent. What
Douglas said was that, regarding slavery, he said he didn't care, it was a matter of
indifference to him, whether people of a particular state or a territory wanted slavery or
didn't want it. Whatever they wanted, that is to say whatever the majority consented to,
was all right with him. He might prefer it not to be but again, it was what people
consented to, what the majority wanted that would decide the matter. Lincoln, however,
had said that the Doctrine of Consent is not simply a kind of blank check, that the
Doctrine of Consent still implied a set of moral limits or restraints on what a people
might consent to. Consent was inconsistent with slavery, he said, because again, no one
can rule another without that other person's consent. And in many ways that crucial
debate, so fundamental to American history and politics, grows out of a kind of internal
problem within Locke's Doctrine of Consent, namely that problem is, what form of
government does it make sense for a majority of people to consent to. Does
government, in other words, by consent mean government by whatever the majority
wants, could be a kind tyranny of the majority, whatever they want? Or does
government by consent entail, again, certain limits and restraints on what majorities can
do? What guarantees does Locke provide, you might ask, that government by consent
will be informed consent or rational consent?
Can people simply consent to anything, to be ruled by any means? This is obviously not
an idle or a purely theoretical question since popular majorities we know in the world
today, popular majorities can choose, on the basis of whim, will, or some other kind of
arbitrary passion. Unless there seems to be some set of moral restraints on what
individuals or majorities can consent to, what is to prevent a majority from acting just as
despotically or just as arbitrarily as a king or any absolute power? That was the question
that Lincoln was raising in his argument against Douglas and his claims about consent.
But this question of restraints or limits on what a people can consent to leads to another
question about the Doctrine of Consent. How is consent conferred? We are citizens of
the oldest democracy in the world, most of us, I guess; maybe not everybody but most
people in this room are citizens of the oldest democracy in the world. Did anyone ask
you for your consent or me, considerably older? Did anyone ask for my consent? The
idea of giving consent to a form of government implies something active, an emphatic
voice but has anyone since the first generation of founders who ratified the Constitution
ever been asked or required to give their consent to it?
You might ask what is Locke's answer to this problem and it is a problem that he is
aware of and struggles with in that important chapter. His answer turns out to be
something quite different from our views about citizenship and who is a citizen and how
is the consent of the citizen conferred on government. In section 118 he writes, "A child
is born a subject of no country or government." In other words, he's saying citizenship is
not conferred by birth; just being born in a place does not make you a citizen of it as
doctrine that we hold. "Every person," Locke continues, "is born free and equal in many
ways in a kind of state of nature under the authority only of their parents. What
government that person may choose to obey is not a matter of birth, but of choice." And
again, Locke seems to be making some kind of active principle of choice or decision, a
principle of citizenship and the conferring of consent. And it is only, he says, that when
a child reaches what he calls the age of discretion--18 or 21 or something like that--that
one is obligated to choose, do some sign or mark of agreement to accept the authority of
government. Locke is not altogether clear about how such a sign or a mark is to be
given. One suspects from what he is saying, he maybe referring to some kind of oath or
some kind of pledge, or some kind of civil ceremony where one vows or pledges with
one's word the acceptance of the form of the state. "Nothing can make any man so,"
Locke writes, that is to say an actual citizen of a state. "Nothing can make any man so,
but his actually entering into it by positive agreement, an express promise and
compact," he says at section 122. By express promise and compact, "such an express
promise or agreement leaves one," he says, "perpetually and indispensably obliged to be
and remain unalterably a subject of it," that is to the state. So once you give your word
or agreement, Locke says, you are perpetually and indispensably obligated to that state.
That's how seriously Locke takes this idea of consent. It's something that can only be
entered into at the age of discretion. It must be given consciously, fully, rationally,
presumably in some kind of ceremony and once given, your consent to the form of
government remains, as he says, perpetual. You are bound unalterably, as he puts it.
There's no such thing as taking it back. It shows you how important Locke puts on the
word, the oath, or some kind of civil agreement. One's word is one's bond.
To give voice or consent to government is not an act to be entered into lightly, he says,
or implies but it is a kind of lifetime commitment and it also shows us how different
Locke's view of the citizen is from ours. In other words, it would seem, for Locke, the
only people who are full citizens in our country would be people who have given their
active consent and the only people who have given their active consent are people who
have undergone what we interestingly call a kind of a naturalization process. Is anyone
here a naturalized citizen, as we call it? Has anyone ever been to a naturalization
process? No, nobody? It's administered by a judge and you swear allegiance to the new
country? You presumably shed your obligations to your previous country. You swear
your allegiance to this one. That seems to be the kind of thing Locke appears to be
talking about and it's interesting that, again, the only people in our society, in our
country, who would be full citizens would be naturalized citizens. Again, birth alone
does not confer on you citizenship of any particular country.
But what does that mean for the rest of us, those who have not given their active
consent? Locke is aware that not everyone gives their active consent. That's why he
introduces another idea for how consent may be given. He talks about what he calls tacit
consent. There are those maybe who have not sworn allegiance or given a civil oath but
who nevertheless can be said to have given their tacit consent to the form of government
and its laws. But how do we give tacit consent? Tacit consent is a strange word because
consent implies something active and open, where tacit, think of Locke's taciturnity;
tacit implies something closed or concealed. How is tacit consent given? That's a
problem you can see Locke working on. To some degree, he says, anyone who simply
enjoys the protection of the law, the security of property and person under the law can
be said to have given their tacit consent. They give it, so to speak, ex silentio. Even their
silence confers consent. But how do we really know? You could say, how do we know
that silence confers tacit consent and silence is not simply silence? An example I think
of, for example, if you go to a wedding ceremony, or I guess in some wedding
ceremonies, the justice or the minister, whoever, says--what is the phrase about whoever
hold your peace? If anybody has any question about this ceremony, speak now or
forever hold your peace and of course everybody--except in the movies, of course--
everybody's always silent. Nobody says it so their consent, their tacit consent is given;
their silence from their silence to that question, their tacit consent is given. But again,
that would be one way but again, how do we know when silence confers tacit consent or
silence is simply that, silence? It's an issue that Locke struggles with and to be sure
never fully, or I think satisfactorily, resolves. Maybe you will resolve it. Maybe you will
resolve it in your next paper, if you have the opportunity to write about consent and the
difference between the expressed and tacit forms for citizenship. Also, the question
being--which Locke alludes to but does not fully or does not quite answer-- is there any
difference in privileges, in civil privileges between citizens how have given their
expressed consent and those who have only been said to tacitly consent to the form of
government? Does he suggest that one class of citizens has greater rights or greater
responsibilities than the other? You might look into that question too and see if you
think Locke suggests any differences on that.
To go back and just kind of begin to wrap this up for the day, Locke does not appear to
endorse any particular form of government in the Second Treatise. The task of forming
the government will fall to the decision of the majority but again, what form the
majority will decide remains, to some degree, an open question. What gives Locke or
Lockeanism its distinctive tone, its distinctive voice is the claim that whatever kind of
government a majority decides upon, it must be one that limits the power of the
sovereign. You cannot--and in this respect, I think Locke is far closer to Lincoln than he
was to Stephan A. Douglas -- consent does not simply mean consent to arbitrary rule; it
does not mean consent for the power of the sovereign to do anything. Locke's theory of
constitutional government is a theory of restrained government, of constitutional
restraints, of rule by law. Locke gives, in many ways, the importance of law and
constitutional restraint; what we would today call, I suppose, limited government. He
gives this far greater expression, far more powerful expression than any of his
predecessors; certainly not Hobbes, who had attributed absolute power to government
or even to Aristotle who, in many ways, shares some resemblances with Locke, but
even Aristotle had severe doubts about rule of law.
Locke is absolutely confident that limited government, restraints on power--whether
that power be from the one, the few or the many--restraints on power is the only kind of
government that can be trusted to protect rights. And in one of the few jokes that
appears in the Second Treatise -- you might have missed it because Locke is a subtle
jokester; he's not like Machiavelli or Plato. Locke is a very understated jokester; he was
an Englishman after all. He writes in section 93, referring to Hobbes, but you'll also see
his wonderful animal references. He writes: "If men quitting the state of nature entered
into society, they agreed that all of them but one should be under the restraint of laws,"
thinking about Hobbes' Leviathan. "But that he should still retain all the liberty of the
state of nature increased with power and made licentious by impunity." He goes on to
say, "This is to think that men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what mischiefs
be done to them by polecats and foxes but are content, nay think it safety to be devoured
by lions," the lion being the Leviathan sovereign; whereas in the Lockean state of
nature, human beings are like polecats and foxes. They're noxious creatures, he says, but
they're not truly dangerous to you and when one leaves the state of nature to enter civil
society, one is certainly not doing so to empower a sovereign with lion-like powers over
you, as he says. Who would do this? It's better to have some kind of theory of restrained
government, a limited government to do this for you.
I'm going to end on this note. What I want to do on Monday, when I wrap up Locke, is
to continue with his doctrine of limited government because it turns out there is a very
important exception to it. There is a kind of escape clause and I would encourage you as
you read it to pay particular attention to chapter 14 of the Second Treatise, his chapter
on what he calls prerogative power, the doctrine that has very, very important and grave
implications for our politics today. It's a very important chapter and I want us to
continue this and then talk a little bit about the pros and cons of Lockean political
philosophy.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 17
Transcript
November 6, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: I want to look at two sets of issues. I want to in, a way,
conclude my interpretation, my reading of the Second Treatise, by focusing on the role
of executive power in Locke's theory of government, Locke's theory of the
constitutional state, particularly focusing on the role of the executive, vis-a-vis the
legislative branch of government, and then I want to turn a little more speculatively to
thinking about Locke and the American regime and the current state of political
philosophy, modern contemporary American political philosophy. But let me start first
by going back and sticking with the Second Treatise by talking a little bit about the role
of legislative and executive power.
The last time, I think, I was concluding by arguing that Locke doesn't endorse
necessarily one particular form of government from any other. He is an advocate of
what we have come to call limited government, of constitutional government. There is
that important passage where he ridicules the Hobbesian sovereign as a lion and tells us
we did not enter into the social compact to be devoured by lions. He says, the form of
government must be limited although he's relatively open or at least non-committal,
agnostic you might say, as to what particular form that government may take. One
feature of this form of government that he thinks is very important, is that it must in
some sense embody a separation of powers, powers must be made to check one another,
what he calls in the book the subordination of powers. This is Locke's doctrine and you
will see it there. We often associate it with Montesquieu or sometimes with the
federalist authors but, in fact, Locke himself is a strong advocate of what he calls the
subordination or separation of powers, not exactly the same as we'll see between our
understanding of executive legislative and judicial, but nevertheless a separation
nonetheless.
However, in the first instance, Locke emphasizes and in fact he continually affirms
nevertheless the primacy of legislative authority. In England, in the England at his time
and even today, that means a doctrine of what is called parliamentary supremacy but he
says that the first and fundamental positive law of all constitutions is in establishing that
of the legislative power. The first act, after the completion of the social contract, he
says, is establishing the legislative power. It is the lawmaking authority of government
that is supreme, he wishes to emphasize. This seems to push Locke, you might, say
more in the small d' democratic direction. It is not so much executive power, the
power of a prince, but rather the legislature, the parliament that is supreme. There is
nothing more important, in Locke's theory of constitutional government, than the
existence of what he continually refers to as settled or known laws, settled laws that
serve against arbitrary rule. In many ways, the purpose of government for Locke is
much less to offset the dangers of returning to an anarchic state of nature as it was for
Hobbes than to prevent the possibility of the emergence of tyrannical or despotic power,
tyrannical or despotic sovereign, and of course, Locke's writing is very much bound up
with the big and major constitutional crisis of his time leading to the overthrow and
expulsion of a king, James II.
Yet in many ways, even though Locke is the great advocate of legislative supremacy, he
obviously cannot and does not wish to dispense altogether with the role of executive
power. He often treats the executive, whether that be in the form of a prince, a monarch
or perhaps even a body in a cabinet of chief officers as it were. He treats them often
simply as if they were an agent of the legislative or of the legislature. The purpose of the
executive, he sometimes seems to write, is merely that of carrying out the will of the
legislature. In Locke's language, "the executive power is ministerial and subordinate to
the legislature," section 153, I believe. The executive, again, on some aspects of Locke's
writing seems to be little more than a cipher in comparison to the doctrine of legislative
supremacy.
And yet, Locke here is not altogether consistent, one has to say, because he understands
in every community there is a need for a distinctive branch of government dealing with
matters of war and peace. Locke calls this the federative power. Every community, he
says, like Hobbes, is to every other community what every individual is to every other
individual in the state of nature and a distinctive federative or war-making power within
the government is necessary for dealing with matters of international conflict, conflict
between states. And in a remarkable passage, Locke notes that this power, he says,
cannot be bound by antecedent standing positive laws but it must be left to, quote, "the
prudence and wisdom of those whose hands it is in to be managed for the public good."
In other words, Locke seems to suggest that this particular kind, this branch of
government, this federative branch which falls to some degree under the executive, must
have a certain latitude even apart from the law that relies, he says, on the prudence and
wisdom of those whose hands it is in to manage it for the public good.
In other words, matters of war and peace cannot be left to the legislature or to standing
laws, as he calls them, alone but requires the intervention of strong leaders, what he
calls in an absolutely stunning passage god-like princes, section--if you don't believe
me, section 166. Locke's reference here to god-like princes seems to recall Machiavelli
in many ways, Machiavelli's talk of armed prophets. It is necessary, in extreme
situations, for such princes to call on their prerogative power. It is impossible, Locke
writes, to foresee and so by laws to provide for all the accidents and necessities that may
concern the public and that during, in other words, contingencies or emergency
situations the executive must be empowered with this prerogative power to act for the
good of the community. For this reason it seems, the executive is not simply a tool or an
agent of the legislature but he says, again, must have the power to act according to
discretion, that is to say, according to his own discretion for the public good without the
prescription of law, those are Locke's own words. How to balance his argument for
constitutional government and legislative supremacy with this doctrine of prerogative
power and what seems to be a kind of power of what he calls in no uncertain term the
god-like princes and their need to exercise this power? Locke's prerogative is, in many
ways, the result of simply the inability of law to foresee all possible circumstances, all
possible contingencies. That's an argument that goes as far back as Aristotle, we've
seen.
Our inability to make rules that can apply to all possible events, makes it necessary to
leave some discretionary power in the hands of the executive to act for the public safety.
One of the examples that Locke gives of the use of this power is in fact a domestic, not
an international issue, which is to say, in the case of a fire in a city it is sometimes
necessary, he says, in his day for the fire department to tear down the house of an
innocent person to prevent the fire from spreading to other houses. This is acting for the
public good of the community, even while in some ways it's clearly a violation of rights
of property and so on. He understands this as a piece of prerogative power acting for the
public good. In fact, the example is not so far fetched. Think today for example about
arguments we have today. Even in Connecticut, there's a big argument going on about
the right of what's called "eminent domain," the right of the government to absorb or to
take over private properties whenever, usually for things like schools or airports but also
for general improvement when it is thought it will enhance the public good. There's a
big debate going on right now out in New London and in Brooklyn also with the
argument about the creation of some civic center, some sports arena that will require the
demolition of certain neighborhood houses. And there's a big debate about this eminent
domain. What is that, but in a way Locke's example of prerogative power, acting, doing
something that is somehow said to be for the public good but that represents some kind
of extra constitutional power?
But the question for Locke, as for any constitutional lawyer, is what are the limits of
this prerogative power? What check, if any, is there on this power to prevent their
abuse? Well, Locke doesn't exactly say. Yes. Right. He doesn't exactly say. He raises
this question to be sure, of fundamental importance for constitutional government. Does
executive authority, he asked us, extend to all things even or especially in times of war?
Think about the debates that are going on now about detainees at Guantanamo or the
issues of domestic spying when it comes to issues of the war on terror. Are these
examples of prerogative power, that is to say, the executive acting outside the limits or
the bounds of constitutional authority for the sake of protecting the public good or are
these examples of kind of political absolutism? Is the invocation of this power, in some
ways, going down the slippery slope to despotism and absolutism? I will leave it to you
or your sections to try to discuss these matters but Locke himself praises those who he
calls the wisest and best princes of England as being those who have exercised the
largest prerogative on behalf of the public good. This is beginning to sound more and
more in respects like Machiavelli than the advocate of, again, limited government. This
power comes into play, he says, especially during times of national crisis or emergency
when it is necessary to act for the public safety in some ways. And again, this seems to
have special resonance for us today as we face issues like states of emergency and states
of exception. There are in fact political theorists, one name comes to mind, a twentieth-
century German legal philosopher by the name of Carl Schmitt who argued that the
state of emergency or the exceptional situation is the essence of politics and that the
person or body who has the power to declare the exception is none other than the
sovereign. So from Schmitt's point of view you might say this idea of prerogative is a
kind of extra constitutional power that the statesman must of necessity utilize when
ordinary constitutional operations, like the rule of law, prove to be inadequate.
But consider another example if you like, that prerogative power, about prerogative
powers that maybe granted by the Constitution. Consider Lincoln's famous suspension
of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Lincoln, interestingly, did not take this
extraordinary step by appealing to an extra-constitutional power that obtains in times of
crisis. Rather, Lincoln argued quite forcefully that this sort of prerogative power is
already deeply embedded within the structure of constitutional government. He cites the
Constitution when it came to the suspension of habeas corpus. The Constitution writes,
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended unless when in cases
of rebellion or invasion the public safety requires it." In other words, the Constitution
itself seems to allow for this extraordinary kind of action at least in cases of rebellion or
invasion when it says the public safety requires it. The Constitution seems to embody
within itself, our constitution that is, this Lockean power of prerogative that comes into
effect or can be legitimately exercised in times of rebellion or invasion.
Are we living in that kind of age now, not rebellion perhaps but invasion? Well, think
about that again. Are these arguments applicable to our situation today, in some sense,
when it comes to debates about the extent of executive power to embark on these
extraordinary measures? And yet at the same time, Locke is aware clearly of the
potential abuse of this kind of prerogative. He asks, who will judge, who can judge
whether the discretion of the executive is being used for the public safety or the public
good or whether it is simply a kind of usurpation of power? In these moments of high
constitutional crisis between conflicting powers of government, in such cases, Locke
says there shall be no judge on earth. He says the people have no other remedy in this
but to appeal to Heaven. This is in section 168. How much is contained in that term
"appeal to Heaven?" What does Locke mean in terms of high constitutional crisis when
he says there is no judge on earth, the people must appeal to Heaven? Does that mean
they should fall down on their knees and begin to pray, what they should do? Unlikely.
By an appeal to Heaven, Locke means the people's right to dissolve their government.
He raises this question at the very end of the book. When a conflict between the people
or their representatives and the executive becomes so great that the very conditions of
social trust have been dissolved, who will be judge? And he answers emphatically: the
people will be judge. Locke affirms here a right of revolution. An appeal to Heaven, or
what he calls an appeal to Heaven really refers to an appeal to arms, to rebellion, and
the need to create a new social covenant. Locke, you can see, is attempting to hold
together a belief in the sanctity of law and the necessity for prerogative that may
sometimes have to circumvent the rules of law. Are these two doctrines incompatible? I
think in many respects or at least in some respects they are. Can the prerogative power
of the executive be in a way constitutionalized so that it does not threaten the liberty of
its own citizens? Locke alerts us to this timeless as well as this very timely problem.
One of the best sources for thinking about many of these constitutional issues today,
regarding privacy rights and other kinds of citizen rights, can be found in, I would say
the last five chapters or so of Locke's Second Treatise. I can't think of a better source.
So in the end Locke's appeal to Heaven or Locke says the people have an appeal to
Heaven, that is to say an appeal to arms, an appeal to revolution, suggests that at the end
of the day Locke was a revolutionary but I would say also a sort of cautious and
moderate one, if this is not a complete contradiction in terms. I won't go through chapter
19, the famous chapter on revolution in full, to talk about the conditions under which he
believed the people can rightfully appeal to Heaven, as it were, but Locke's doctrine of
consent and legislative supremacy, this should make him in many ways a hero to
Democrats, to radical Democrats. His beliefs about limited government, the rights of
property should make him a hero to in some ways constitutional conservatives and even
libertarians. In the end, I think Locke was neither or both. Like all of the great thinkers
in some ways, he defines--he defies, excuse me, simple classification but there is no
doubt that Locke gave the modern constitutional state its definitive form of expression.
And the problems of our state, the problems, the legal, the constitutional and political
problems that we experience are very much problems rooted in the philosophy of John
Locke and are unthinkable without the influence of Locke.
So that takes me to a theme that I want to talk about for a little while, which is Locke's
America, John Locke's America. No one who reads Locke, even superficially, and I
would not accuse anyone here of being a superficial reader, after all, but no one can fail
to be impressed by the harmony, in many ways, between Locke's writings and those of
the American Republic that he helped to found. His conception of natural law, rights,
government by consent, the right to revolution and all are all part of the cornerstone of
our founding documents. To some degree, as I've just been suggesting, a judgment on
America is very much a judgment on the philosophy of Locke and vice versa. In many
ways, if anyone is, I think Locke has the title to be considered America's philosopher-
king. So how should we think of Locke after more or less three centuries of consistent
Lockean rule? How should we think of Locke? For many years and for many people,
even today, the affinity, the affiliation between Locke and America has been regarded in
a largely although not wholly, largely positive light. For many historians and political
theorists, our stability, our system of limited government, our market economy has been
the result of a sort of broad consensus over Lockean principles, over Lockean first
principles.
But for many other readers of American history, this relationship has been seen as more
problematic. In the 1950s, a book written by a famous political theorist and historian,
named Louis Hartz, a book called The Liberal Tradition in America, complained of
America's, what he called "irrational Lockeanism." That was Hartz's line, that was
Hartz's quote, "irrational Lockeanism," by which he meant a kind of closed commitment
to Lockean principles and ideals that shut off all other political alternatives and
possibilities. Hartz was someone very much interested in the question, as many political
theorists have been since, why has there been no socialism in America, why did
America not evolve or develop along European lines with social democratic parties and
socialist parties like the English Labor Party and other kinds of labor movements. And
Hartz's argument was that we were sort of arrested in this Lockean phase of
development, what he called our irrational Lockeanism that closed off in many ways
other principles. And for still other thinkers, more or less on the left, Locke legitimized
what was called an ethic of what was called "possessive individualism," particularly
Locke's focus on property and the rights of private property that focuses entirely on
market relations or puts the market values ahead of all other things. And for still others,
in many ways more recently, thinkers of a more sort of communitarian direction or bent,
Locke's emphasis upon rights and the protection, that government should protect natural
or certain unalienable rights, suggests a purely or overly legalistic conception of politics
that has no language for talking about the common good, the public good or other sort
of collective goods or benefit.
So my point is that Locke's influence has not been altogether accepted by everyone.
There has been much ground for criticism of this peculiar affinity between Lockeanism
and America. But today, I would say that Locke's theory of liberalism or Locke's theory
of limited government, constitutional government, is confronted by another alternative
that, in many ways, has deep roots in the very tradition which Locke himself---the very
liberal tradition in many ways of which Locke himself is the founder. And I am
referring, in particular, to a book that many of you will read at some point in your Yale
experience, a book, widely read and widely acclaimed book by a recently deceased
political philosopher by the name of John Rawls who wrote a book in 1973 called A
Theory of Justice. In many ways, Rawls' book was an attempt to update the liberal
theory of the state. He invokes the idea of a state of nature, an original condition, as he
calls it, a theory of rights although he does so in many ways through the techniques of
contemporary philosophy and game theory and Rawls' book is probably the single most
important contribution to Anglo-American political philosophy in the last generation. It
is a book that situates itself within the liberal tradition beginning with Locke, developed
by people like Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill in which Rawls himself hoped to, in
many ways, bring to completion in his book. A theory of justice, as he calls it, stands or
falls on its theory of rights from which all else is derived.
And what I want to do for a few minutes is to contrast Rawls' general theory, so
powerful and influential today, from that of John Locke's, the original founder of the
liberal theory of the state, and see how they have diverged. Consider the following
propositions, if you will. Here is John Locke, section 27 of the Second Treatise. "Every
man has property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself and where
there is property," he writes, "there can be justice and injustice." Here is John Rawls,
one of the opening pages of his Theory of Justice. "Each person," Rawls writes,
"possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a
whole cannot override. For this reason," he continues, "justice denies that the loss of
freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared to others." Okay. So far, so
good, in other words. Both of them present their theories of justice as justified in terms
of the liberal principles of equality, freedom and the sanctity of the individual and
individual rights. Both regard the purpose of government, in many ways, as securing the
conditions of justice as deriving from the consent, or the informed consent, of the
governed but both it seems to me go on to differ profoundly about the source of rights
and therefore the role that government has in securing the conditions of justice. Let me
explain a little bit more what I mean.
For Locke, going back to chapter 5 of the Second Treatise, rights derived from a theory
of self-ownership. According to his view, you will remember, everybody has a property
in his or her own person. That is to say, no one has a claim on our bodies other than
ourselves. It is on the rock of self-ownership, the fact that we have property in
ourselves, it is on the rock of self-ownership that Locke builds his edifice of natural
rights, justice, and limited government. To put it in a slightly different way perhaps, a
person has an identity, what we might call today a moral personality or an identity by
the fact that we alone are responsible for making ourselves. He uses this metaphor of the
work of the body and the labor of our hands but we are literally the products of our own
making. We create ourselves through our activity and our most characteristic activity is
our work. Locke's fundamental doctrine is that the world is the product of our own free
creativity, not nature but the self, the individual is the source of all value for Locke. It is
this self, the I, the me, the ego that is the unique source of rights and the task of
government is to secure the conditions of our property in the broadest sense of the term,
namely, everything that is proper to us.
Now, using that as a sort of shorthand, contrast this to Rawls' idea. Rawls adds to his
idea of justice something that he calls the "difference principle," the DP as it's
sometimes referred to in the literature on Rawls. What is the difference principle? This
principle maintains that our natural endowments, our talents, our abilities, our family
backgrounds, our history, our unique histories, our place, so to speak, in the social
hierarchy, all of these things are from a moral point of view something completely
arbitrary. None of these are ours in any strong sense of the term. They do not belong to
us but are the result of a more or less kind of random or arbitrary genetic lottery or
social lottery of which I or you happen to be the unique beneficiaries. The result of this,
in other words, is that no longer can I be regarded as the sole proprietor of my assets or
the unique recipient of the advantages or disadvantages I may accrue from them.
Fortune, luck, Machiavellian fortuna, in that way, is utterly arbitrary and therefore,
Rawls concludes, I should not be regarded as the possessor but merely the recipient of
what talents, capacities and abilities that I may, again, purely arbitrarily happen to
possess.
So what does that mean in terms of social policy or theory of government? The result of
Rawls' difference principle and its fundamental difference with that of John Locke
could not be more striking from this point of view. The Lockean theory of justice,
broadly speaking, supports a meritocracy sometimes referred to as "equality of
opportunity," that is, what a person does with his or her natural assets belongs
exclusively to them, the right to rise or fall belongs exclusively to them. No one has the
moral right to interfere with the products of our labor, the products of--which may also
include not just in a primitive sense what we do with our hands and bodies but what we
do with our intelligence and our natural endowments. For Rawls, again, on the other
hand, our endowments are never really our own to begin with. They are part of a
common or collective possession to be shared by society as a whole, the capacities of
hard work, ambition, intelligence and just good luck that, for example, got you to a
place like Yale, on Rawls' account, do not really belong to you or at least the fruits of
those ambitions and intelligence and good luck do not belong to you.
Again they are somewhat arbitrary as a result of upbringing and genetics. They're not
yours or mine, in any strong sense of the term, but rather, a collective possession that
can be or should be the fruits of which distributed to society as a whole. Consider the
following passage from Rawls. "The difference principle," he writes, "represents in
effect an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and
to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be." Your intelligence
or your drive or your endowments are, again, what he calls a collective asset. Think
about that. And it is this conception of common assets that underwrites Rawls' theory of
distributive justice and the welfare state, just as Locke's theory of self-ownership
justifies his conception of limited government in the constitutional state. According to
Rawls, again, justice requires that social arrangements be structured for the benefits of
the least advantaged in the genetic lottery of society. His thought experiment that he
calls "the original condition" specifies that nobody would know in advance in this
condition what their particular endowment intellectually, in many other ways, would be.
Therefore, every individual would, in contracting with the whole, would agree to share
equally in the benefits of this, as it were, genetic lottery. So redistributing our common
assets does not violate, on Rawls' account, the sanctity of the individual because again
the fruits of our labor were never really ours to begin with. Unlike Locke, whose theory
of self-ownership provides a moral justification for the individual, for the self, for our
moral personality, Rawls' difference principle maintains that we never again belong to
ourselves at all. We never really have ownership in ourselves but are always part of a
larger social "we," a social collective, a collective consciousness whose common assets
can be redistributed for the benefit of the whole.
Locke and Rawls, the point I'm trying to make is, they represent two radically different
visions of the liberal state, one broadly libertarian, the other broadly welfarist, one
emphasizing liberty, the other emphasizing equality. Interestingly, again, this transition,
this evolution represents a change which has gone on within in many ways the liberal
tradition itself. Unlike some of these other critics, Rawls does not come to be claiming
from a tradition outside of liberalism but to be developing certain arguments from
within the liberal tradition and yet has moved in a way clearly very different from its
Lockean formulation. Both of these views, again, they begin from common premises
but move in very different directions. Locke's theory of self-ownership regards the
political community in largely negative terms as protecting our antecedent individual
selves and individual rights. Rawls' theory of common assets regards the community in
a far more positive sense as taking an active role in reshaping and redistributing the
products of our individual endeavors for the common interests. The question for you,
just like the question for any of us, is which of these two views is more valid or which
of the two strikes you as more powerful or plausible?
My own view, and I loathe to editorialize, but my own view is far closer to American
theory, to Locke's theory, which I think--than Rawls'. The Declaration of Independence,
the charter of American liberty, states that each individual is endowed with unalienable
rights among which are life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. The very indeterminacy of
the last phrase, the pursuit of happiness, with its emphasis upon the individual's right to
determine happiness for themselves, suggests a form of government that allows for
ample diversity for our natural talents and abilities and although the Declaration
certainly intends that the establishment of justice is one of the first tasks of government,
nowhere does it imply that this requires the wholesale redistribution of our individual
goods and assets. And second, although Rawls is clearly attractive, excuse me, Rawls is
clearly attentive to the moral ills of inequality and we will turn to that problem
emphatically on Wednesday when we look at Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Essay on
Inequality. There has never been a more powerful, passionate and persuasive critic of
the ills of inequality than Jean-Jacques Rousseau but while Rawls is certainly attentive
to the moral ills of inequality, he seems very nave about the mechanisms, the actual
political mechanisms, by which inequalities will be rectified. Rawls wants government
to work for the benefit of the least advantaged but this will require the extensive and
often arbitrary use of judicial power to determine who has a right to what, far in excess
of the powers of the court. The result would be, I think if we follow Rawls' teachings to
their letter, the result would be not a class of philosopher-kings, but rather a class of
chief justices endowed with the power to rearrange and redistribute our collective assets
for the sake of achieving the maximum degree of social equality. It is no surprise that
the warmest reception that Rawls' writing gets today is in the schools of law, is in the
law schools where he has had an enormous influence on shaping the education of the
current and the next generation of lawyers, judges and possibly chief justices who may
be looking to again, looking not to the Constitution but to Rawls' theory of justice as a
litmus or a tool for bringing about social redistribution.
So, I leave you on that sobering note but a return to Locke such as it is, even if such a
return were possible, is by no means a panacea to what ails us. I am not suggesting for a
moment that Locke is some kind of cure all. Some historians, let me just mention again,
Louis Hartz was but the most famous, treat America as a nation uniquely built upon
Lockean foundations. America, he believed, remained something of a Lockean remnant-
-a Lockean, yeah, remnant, fossil in some ways, in a world increasingly governed by
more radical forms of modernity. In fact, it has been our sort of stubborn Lockeanism
that has, in many ways, prevented the kinds of extreme ideological polarization and
conflict that one sees throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But
Locke's effort to build a kind of modern republican government on the low but solid
foundations of self-interest and self-ownership and the desire for comfortable
preservation could not help but generate its own forms of dissatisfaction.
Can a regime, dedicated to the pursuit of happiness or to the protection of property ever
satisfy the deepest longings of the human soul? Can a regime, devoted to the rational
accumulation of property answer those higher order needs or higher order virtues, like
honor, nobility and sacrifice? Can a regime, devoted to the avoidance of pain,
discomfort and anxiety, produce anything more than contemporary forms of
Epicureanism and Nihilism? In any case, I'm suggesting no more than any other land
could America insulate itself from the great heights as well as the great depths of later
forms of modernity. America, as a former teacher of mine once said, is the land where
the many facets, the many faces of modernity are working themselves out. We are but a
moment in the kind of comprehensive self-dissatisfaction that is modernity so that a
return to Lockeanism, in many ways, is not so much a cure for the pathologies of
modernity. I would suggest that those pathologies are themselves already rooted in the
pathologies of Locke. I will end on that sober note and encourage you to take
Rousseau's advice about loving one's country seriously on Tuesday.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 18
Transcript
November 8, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: I hope that everybody followed Rousseau's advice and
yesterday exercised your rights as citizens of a free state. We hope so. I begin today
with an apology and that is for the particular edition that you're using for this section of
the class on Rousseau. This is the only edition that I've assigned in the course that I
don't like. Why did I assign it? Because I want us to read the Second Discourse, the
Discourse on Inequality and the Social Contract and this is the only edition that I could
find where they are both in the same volume and I don't have to assign two separate
books. So, in order to keep your costs down, I bit the bullet and assigned a translation in
an edition I don't particularly care for. A far superior edition is found in this. This is one
of the two volumes, the Cambridge Bluebook series as it's called, edited and translated
by Gourevitch. If anybody wants to do more advanced work in Rousseau, you will no
doubt get this edition, better translations, better notes and so on, of the Second
Discourse and The Social Contract and for anybody who's interested, I've decided
because Rousseau has become so important to me, that next year I will be offering an
undergraduate seminar entirely devoted to Rousseau. He's one of the handful of writers,
of political philosophers, to whom one could, in all justice, devote an entire semester to
his writings and that's what I want to do next year. So if any of you should get the bug,
the Rousseau bug, next year we'll do Rousseau in many more texts, in detail. So with
that having been said, I'm going to talk today about a remarkable, remarkable human
being and writer.
It's a very common way of entering the thought of Rousseau to see him as a critic of
liberalism, of the kind of property owning, rights-based society given expression by
John Locke and I will talk about that a little bit later. But to see Rousseau as a critic of
Lockean liberalism would be I think very shortsighted and very unfair. Rousseau was a
product not of liberal society but rather of the ancien rgime, the old regime in
France. Rousseau was born in 1712. It was two years before the death of the famous
Sun King, Louis XIV, a man who symbolized the age of absolutism, and he died in
1778 approximately a decade before the outbreak of the French Revolution. His life, in
other words, was lived entirely within the waning decades, the waning years of the age
of absolutism in France and in continental Europe. Rousseau was deeply aware that he
lived in an age of transition but what precisely would come after he was by no means
clear. He wrote, as you will see, with the passion and the intensity of someone who fully
expected to be instrumental in the coming of a new historical and political epoch and
indeed he was. Rousseau was Swiss. He was not French. He was a Swiss. He signed
many of his most important words simply citoyen de Gneve, a citizen of Geneva, after
the city where he was born. He was the son of an artisan who abandoned his family after
a falling out with the local authorities and the young Rousseau was apprenticed to an
engraver but he left Geneva; he fled Geneva for good at the age of 16. For the following
16 years, Rousseau lived a kind of vagabond varied life doing many different things,
working as a music instructor and a transcriber. He was the secretary to the French
Ambassador in the city of Venice and he was also the lover of a wealthy woman many
years his senior.
After moving to Paris in 1744, Rousseau spent several years eking out a living, sort of
on the margins of the Parisian literary scene until 1750 when he published his first,
although quite brief major essay, a work called The Discourse on the Arts and the
Sciences, which catapulted him to literary fame. That work made his name so it was--it
came to be called the First Discourse. That work was followed five years later in 1755
by the work we will be reading starting today, The Discourse on the Origins of
Inequality, often simply called the Second Discourse, and that work was followed later
on in 1762 with the Social Contract and also the same year that Rousseau published his
major massive work on political education called mile or On Education, both in
1762. During this period, Rousseau fathered five children. He abandoned all of them to
an orphanage. He did so with a common-law wife with whom he lived and during this
times the writings I've mentioned are only a small portion although a very important
portion of the writings which he lived. He was also the author of a very large novel,
Heloise, The New Heloise, La Nouvelle Heloise, which was a bestseller in his time and
it was a kind of philosophical novel that helped- that explored many of his ideas. He
was the composer of an opera, Le Devin du Village, that was performed at the court of
Louis XV.
He also wrote several very important and interesting volumes of autobiography, the
most--the best known of which is simply called Confessions after the work of Saint
Augustine of the title--a book of the same name and he also wrote another volume of
autobiography in a dialog form called Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques in which he
divides himself up into two different people, Rousseau and Jean Jacques, in a kind of
internal interrogation of himself. Rousseau wrote in many and varied genres and his
work spans the entire gamut of philosophical, literary and political themes. He was also
the writer of different constitutional projects. He was consulted by heads of state in his
period and wrote constitutions for Poland and for the small island country of Corsica
which he said in the Social Contract was the only place in Europe that one might expect
great things and of course he was right as anybody knows, a generation or two later the
famous Corsican, yes, who put an endWho am I talking about? Napoleon, of course.
You might say he was right. He helped to substitute the general's will for the general
will but that was Rousseau.
People have been very baffled by exactly the nature of Rousseau's contributions. What
did he believe? What did he stand for? What do his writings represent? Was he a
revolutionary whose work helped to inspire the radical phases of the French
Revolution? Just remember, for example, you've probably all heard the famous opening
sentence of the Social Contract, "man is born free but is everywhere in chains," his
appeal to the severe political ethics of ancient Sparta and Rome as well as his belief that
the people, in their collective capacity, are the only legitimate source of sovereignty. All
of these seemed to pave the way for the revolutionary politics of the late eighteenth
century and up into our own time. So is Rousseau a kind of incendiary and
revolutionary or did his writings seek to release us altogether from the bonds of society
as he appears to do in the Second Discourse, in the Discourse on Inequality? In this
work, Rousseau seems to lay the basis for the kind of romantic individualism that would
be associated with people like Wordsworth in England or Henry David Thoreau in
America. Rousseau's direct appeals to Nature as well as his celebration of the simplicity
of peasant life and rural life seemed to open the door later on to writers like Tolstoy as
well as to various kinds of social experiments in rural communal utopianism such as, for
example, the Israeli kibbutz movement, which is in its own way a direct descendant of
Rousseau.
So my suggestion is Rousseau's writings are varied and his influence has been manifold,
to say the least. He both helps to bring to fruition and completion the political and
intellectual movement that we know as the Enlightenment. He brings this to its highest
phase of perfection, in many ways, and at the same time he was a severe critic of the
Enlightenment. He was a close friend and associate of men like Diderot, who was the
general editor of the Encyclopedia, the great French contribution to the age of the
Enlightenment, and yet he excoriated the progress of the arts and the sciences and
worried about their effect on the moral life of communities. He was a writer who wore
different hats. He defended what he called the savage, sauvage, against the civilized
man. He took the side of the poor and the dispossessed against the elites and he adopted
the posture of the loyal son and citizen of Geneva against the sophisticated Parisian
intellectuals of his time. So who was Rousseau and what did he stand for? That's what I
want us to begin to try to find out a little about today.
The Second Discourse, the Discourse on Inequality, is in the eyes of many readers
Rousseau's greatest work. I'm not sure if that's true but many people believe it is. It is
what writers in the eighteenth century called a conjectural history. It is, that is to say, a
kind of philosophical history, really that is to say a philosophical reconstruction of
history, but not of what actually happened in the past. It's not a history of facts and dates
but it is a history Rousseau believes of what had to have happened for, in a way, human
beings to evolve to their current condition. Rousseau begins the work by comparing the
effects of history on us to the statue of Glaucus that he says the winds and storms had so
disfigured that it scarcely looked like a human being at all. This is what history and time
has done to us. It has so affected and transformed human nature that if we want to
understand what human nature really is, he argues, it is necessary to reconstruct it
through a kind of thought experiment.
Rousseau compares the Second--Oh, God. Oh, dear. All right. Rousseau--Bad to laugh
at your own jokes. He compares the Second Discourse to an experiment like those
undertaken by physicists and cosmologists in his own day who speculate about the
origins of the universe in the same way that he is speculating about the original
condition of human nature. That is to say, there is no empirical or physical evidence to
draw on to understand how the world was actually framed. We can only make, he says,
intelligent guesses, certain inferences or conjectures based on the evidence that we find
around us. And so Rousseau remarks, in one of the most arresting passages from his
book, and Rousseau was a man known for writing arresting paradoxical and ingenious
sentences, he writes, "let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, let us put all
the facts aside for they have no bearing on the case. The investigation that may be
undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths," he says,
"but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings." In other words, what he's saying
is that the history that he intends to unfold is an experiment much like, again, that
undertaken by geologists who try to infer the development of plant or animal life from
the existence of certain fossil remains or skeletal remains.
And yet, at the same time, while Rousseau speaks of his work as tentative,
experimental, conjectural, he has only hazarded some guesses, he writes, you cannot
help but be struck by the certain tone of confidence with which he presents his findings.
In particular, he discusses and rejects quite emphatically the investigations of his
predecessors both ancient and modern. "The philosophers," he writes, "who have
examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state
of nature but none of them has reached it," Rousseau says. He believes that he alone has
finally, as it were, struck gold. "Oh, man," he exclaims, "oh, man, whatever country you
may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen. Here is your history as I have
thought to read it, not in the books of your fellow men who are liars but in nature who
never lies." That's a remarkable sentence. For the first time, Rousseau says, human
nature will be revealed and the history of civil society explained to us. Listen. Here is
your history, as I have read it, not through other books but through nature, he says, that
seems to speak directly to me or to which I have an insight.
So what is the state of nature, a term that we've been looking at in Hobbes and Locke?
What is it that Rousseau thinks he has found that that eluded his predecessors? In many
ways we have already seen, I've already suggested. Rousseau follows in the footsteps of
his great predecessors, particularly Hobbes and Locke, in attempting to understand the
original condition by referring to this hypothetical or conjectural state of nature. In
many ways, he praises and follows Hobbes and Locke in doing this but suggests that
they never really took the problem of nature seriously enough. What does it mean,
Rousseau seems to ask us, to take nature, human nature, the state of nature, what does it
mean to take nature seriously? Again to understand it, to understand human nature, what
it originally is, is to conduct a sort of thought experiment where we peel away almost
like the layers of an onion, everything that we have acquired through the influence of
time, of history, of custom and tradition, in order to discover what is naturally there. So
when Hobbes tells us or when he attributes to natural man certain warlike propensities,
Rousseau figures that this cannot be right.
War and the passions that give rise to war can only come into being once we are in
society. The state of war is really simply the state of society. This cannot be told for
natural man because the natural conditions had no social relationships of this sort and
you might say his statement was ditto for John Locke. When Locke attributes to us in
the state of nature certain qualities of rationality, of industry, of acquisitiveness. These
too, Rousseau complains, are only qualities that we can acquire in the light of society.
Property entails social relations between persons, relations of justice and injustice, and
man in a state of nature is not a social animal. So it is clear for Rousseau that human
nature is something infinitely more remote and strange than any of his predecessors had
ever imagined. What was the condition of natural man? Rousseau's captivated readers,
in his time and since, by showing that the original condition of human nature was far
more like an animal than anything identifiably or recognizably human. Rousseau takes
great delight in animalizing human nature, animalizing us.
When Aristotle said that man is the rational being because we possess speech or logos
Rousseau says "wrong again." Language is dependent upon society and could only have
developed over literally thousands of generations and cannot be a property of natural
man. Human nature is little different from animal nature and, in many ways, Rousseau
delights inyou can see this in his footnotes in particularin investigating stories
about orangutans and other species that he believes, in many ways, are our distant
ancestors. You might say, a century before Darwin, Rousseau could just have easily
entitled his second discourse On the Origins of the Species. In many ways, the whole
science of evolutionary biology is already, in many ways, implicit here and yet for all of
our features, our common features with other species, Rousseau specifies two qualities
that set us apart. The first is the quality of freedom or what he calls free agency although
he understands this in a very specific way. Let me read a relevant or crucial passage. "In
any animal," Rousseau writes, "in any animal I see nothing but an ingenious machine to
which nature has given senses in order for it to renew its strength and to protect itself to
a certain point from all that tends to disturb it. I am aware of precisely the same thing in
the human machine." In other words, he says animals are just simply little machines that
operate by mechanical or physical impulses and needs and desires and the same is true,
he says, in the human machine with this difference, "that nature alone does everything
in the operations of an animal whereas man contributes as a free agent to his own
operations."
What does he mean there in saying that man is a free agent? This idea of free agency in
many ways sounds similar, and indeed it is similar, to Hobbes and Locke, both of whom
who said freedom of will, some kind of freedom is a characteristic of natural man or
natural pre social man. But Rousseau seems to add to this something different. Freedom
for Hobbes or Locke simply means the freedom to choose to do this or that, the freedom
to exercise the will and not to be interfered with by others around us. Rousseau also
believes that but in many ways he adds something else to it. He connects freedom, in
this same passage, to what he calls the phenomenon or the quality, the faculty of
perfectibility, perfectibilit. What does he mean in connecting freedom with what he
calls perfectibility? Perfectibility, for Rousseau, suggests an openness, a sort of virtually
unlimited openness to change. We are the species who not only have the freedom to do
this or that but we are the species who have the freedom, as it were, to become this or
that. And it is our very openness to change that accounts for our mutability over time.
As a species, in other words, we are you might say, uniquely undetermined, meaning
that our nature is not confined in advance to what it may become; rather, our nature, for
Rousseau, is uniquely suited to alter and transform itself as circumstances change and as
we adapt and adopt to new and unforeseen situations. Perfectibility for Rousseau is not
so much a feature of the individual as it is of the species.
And again, whereas Hobbes or Locke assumed that human nature itself remained more
or less constant in the transition from what they called the state of nature to the civil
state, Rousseau believed that human nature has undergone manifold revolutions as he
called it over the source of time. What we are at any one phase of human history or
human evolution will be very, very different from what we are at any other particular
phase. And it is this what he calls distinctive and unlimited faculty that he says is also
the source of all of our misfortunes. So when he says that we are characterized by
freedom and associates freedom with perfectibility, he doesn't necessarily mean by
"perfectibility" that which perfects us. He also says it is that which is at the source of
our miseries and our discontents. In many ways, if you wanted to give this book another
title I've already suggested one for it, The Origin of the Species. It could just as well
have been called more than a century before Freud, Civilization and its Discontents,
which is many ways Freud's attempt to rewrite Rousseau's account of the evolution of
the human species. But Rousseau notes, in this same part, that freedom or perfectibility
is not our sole natural characteristic although it is responsible, in some way, for almost
everything that we have become. Everything that we have become is due to this
openness to change.
In addition to perfectibility and freedom is the quality that Rousseau calls piti, or
pity, compassion, and here is, in a sense, Rousseau at his most characteristic. You could
say, here is Rousseau, the founder of Romanticism. Man is not the rational animal, the
thinking being, the being with logos, but we are the sensitive creature. Rousseau finds
all kinds of evidence for assuming that compassion is part of our original nature. He
notes, in other species, a reluctance to witness the pain or suffering of another of its own
kind, how an animal will not wish to walk near a dead member of its own species. That
seems to indicate to Rousseau, even in the other species, a kind of natural core of
compassion or pity. The fact that we cry at the misfortunes of others who have nothing
to do with us is evidence of our original sensitivity. Do we not enjoy crying in movies?
Has someone in here ever cried in a movie? Yeah, I thought we all have. Even at people
or objects that don't exist. Did we not feel pity for King Kong when we saw that movie?
Did we not feel pity for a fictional creature that could not exist but yet whose fate
somehow affected us in some way? And Rousseau completely understands this. In
giving man tears, Rousseau writes, nature bears witness that she gave the human race
the softest of hearts.
Man is a sensitive creature, so much so that Rousseau finds evidence in this for what he
believes is our natural goodness. The natural goodness of man in the state of nature is to
some degree borne out by this quality of pity or compassion that we even share with
other species. Why does Rousseau emphasize this quality? Because it is deeply
important to him. You might say long before Dr. Phil and thousands of other self-help
gurus and self-help manuals, Rousseau taught us to get in touch with our feelings.
While natural man may be compassionate and kind, however, that sentiment, he tells us,
is easily overpowered by more powerful passions once we enter society, once we
become civilized or socialized. We cease, once we are in society, to care about others
and we become calculating and mercenary in other motives. Selfishness and egoism are
in fact reinforced for him by the development of reason. Reason, he writes, is what
engenders egoism and reflection strengthens it. The development of rationality, he
thinks, simply hastens our corruption by the assisting in the development of different
vices and the task of the Second Discourse, at least its rhetorical task, is in many ways
to recover our natural selves, compassionate, gentle, kind, from the artificial, corrupt
and calculating selves we have all become in civil society. And who can't read that in
Rousseau without realizing that there is a significant germ of truth in what he says?
Did Rousseau believe it possible then or desirable to return to the state of nature, to
return to some kind of prelapsarian condition before the beginnings of civil society? He
is frequently read as saying this. When Voltaire wrote--read, rather, the Second
Discourse, he said, "never has so much intelligence been expended in the attempt to
turn us back into brutes" and that is clever but it's not really right. Voltaire surely knew
that 150 years before Rousseau, there was a French writer by the name of Montaigne,
Michel de Montaigne, who had written an important essay called On Cannibals in
which he described Indian tribes off the coast of Brazil whom he praised against the true
savagery and barbarism of their European conquers. When he calls that essay, that
famous essay, Michel called--Montaigne calls it Of Cannibals, it is an open question of
who the cannibals are. Are they the natives of the Brazilian coast or are they again the
European conquerors? And Montaigne, like Rousseau but a century or more before,
praised, in many ways, the qualities and the capacities of these sauvage that he
discovered and contrasted them to the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Europeans of his own
day. Rousseau was deeply influenced by this particular essay and it's a short essay and I
would suggest at some point when you have a chance you read it.
But in any case, Rousseau makes it plain that a return to the state of nature or some kind
of pre-social or pre-civil state is no longer an option for civilized beings. In one of the
footnotes, and I encourage you to read the footnote, very important footnotes in his
book, Rousseau writes, "What then? Must we destroy societies, annihilate thine and
mine and return to live in the forests with the bears? A conclusion," he writes, "in the
style of my adversaries, which I prefer to anticipate rather than to leave to them the
shame of drawing." And, he says, in other words no, we can't do that. A return to the
state of nature is impossible for us for the same reason it would be like returning a
domestic animal back to the wild. They and we have simply lost our instinct for self-
preservation. It has been dulled by continual association and dependence on others. We
would not last a single day. So if a return to nature is impossible, the only alternative in
some way is to remain in society. But before we can learn how to live in society,
Rousseau wants to tell the story of how it is man became civilized so to speak, how the
transition from nature to culture or from nature to society in fact occurred.
In one sense, Rousseau's account of this story can be given in a single word: Property.
The first sentence of Part II of the Discourse reads as follows: "The first person who
having enclosed a piece of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found
people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society." Locke
would certainly agree, in some respects, but Rousseau continues as follows. "What
crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been
spared had someone pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow
men do not listen to this impostor. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth
belong to all and the earth to no one." There you see, in a germ, in many ways, his
repudiation of Locke. Rousseau was not a communist although this sounds very much
in some respects like Karl Marx. He was not a communist. He did not feel it was either
again possible or desirable to do away with private property or to collectivize property
in the manner of a Plato or a Marx but there is no one of whom I am aware who is a
more acute observer of the ills of class and the effects of private property than
Rousseau. He believed that there was something deeply wrong with the conception of
government as the protector of private property that intervenes as little as necessary
with the affairs of individuals leaving them simply free to pursue life, liberty and estate
as they would see fit. Rousseau, in many ways, points back to an older, you might say
classical conception of government of the ancient polis and ancient republic, one for
which politics had the task, among other things, of supervising the pursuit and
acquisition of property, mitigating the harshest effects of economic inequalities. And a
single sentence from Rousseau's first discourse, The Discourse on the Arts and
Sciences, in many ways, says it all. "Ancient politicians," he wrote, "spoke only about
morals and virtues. Ours speak only of commerce and money." That was Rousseau's
complaint, no talk any longer of civic virtue and citizenship.
Locke's view, recall from just a couple of days ago, is that the emancipation of
acquisition makes everyone better. In Locke's famous formula, a day laborer in England
is housed, clothed and fed better than a king of the Americas. And Rousseau believed
that from a strictly, you might say, economic point of view there is certainly a lot of
truth to this. But he also realized that from the economic point of view or that the
economic point of view barely began to scratch the surface of things. Rousseau is far
more impressed, you might say, by the proud dignity and independence of the native
American king than with all the luxuries and conveniences that have made European
kings and even some European day laborers soft and dependent, in his word. Rousseau
was deeply impressed, and again you see this in his footnotes, with the kind of
inassimilable character of native peoples, Icelanders, Greenlanders, Hottentots, he
writes, all of their refusal to assimilate in many ways to European religion and custom.
They prefer their "personal independence," he writes, "to the comforts and luxuries of
modern civilization."
Consider the following passage, which is one of the passages I love in this book that
comes from his footnotes. He says, "savages have often been brought to Paris, London
and other cities. People have been eager to display our luxury, our wealth and all our
most useful and curious arts to them. None of this has ever excited in them anything but
a stupid admiration without the least stirring of covetousness. I recall, among others, the
story of a chief of some North Americans who was brought to the court of England
about 30 years ago," he writes. "A thousand things were made to pass before his eyes in
an attempt to give him some present that could please him but nothing was found about
which he seemed to care. Our weapons seemed heavy and cumbersome to him. Our
shoes hurt his feet. Our clothes restricted him. He rejected everything. Finally, it was
noticed that having taken a wool blanket, he seemed to take some pleasure in wrapping
it around his shoulders. You will agree at least,' someone immediately said to him,
on the usefulness of this furnishing.' Yes,' he replies, this seems to be nearly as
good as an animal skin.' However," Rousseau says, "he would not have said that had he
worn both of them in the rain." And there's kind of Rousseau's sense of the virtue, again.
The proud independence, of the native of the sauvage, as he calls him, to the decadence,
the corruptness, the softness of the modern European.
Rousseau's assertion that market economies and the governments that protect them do in
a sense make all people better off and yet despite this fact he realized that market
economies also introduced vast inequalities between human beings and this is a trade
off that Rousseau seemed unwilling to make or wished to make even though I would
have to say most Americans seem fairly happy with this trade off perhaps because we
have--we either are or have become kind of natural Lockeans but that, again, is a
bargain or a tradeoff that Rousseau was at least unwilling to accept. He was not only
impressed with what was gained by the progress of civilization but more impressed, so
to speak, by what was lost. Its inequalities increase, we are forced to become greedy,
calculating, acquisitive, again our natural pity or compassion is easily overcome by
these more powerful passions. What becomes of our original goodness and natural
decency? Natural man, for Rousseau, thought of himself but only of himself whereas
civilized man is forced to think of others but we do only in a calculating and mercenary
way, thinking of them as means to our own ends. Even the social bond itself, even the
social contract, is simply an agreement among business partners, so to speak, the most
bourgeois of institutions, the contract. The fact is Rousseau believes under modern
conditions natural man is transformed into a bourgeois. Rousseau is one of the first to
use that term in quite that way.
Locke's rational and industrious man was, for Rousseau, simply the calculating
bourgeois and unlike the natural man, who thinks only of himself, or of the classical
citizen of Rome or Sparta, who thinks only of the common good and his public duties,
the bourgeois inhabits a kind of halfway house, neither capable of original or
spontaneous goodness nor of political heroism or self-sacrifice. In short, our modern
people have become kind of nullities, nowhere men, nowhere man, you might say, in
the title of the Beatles' song. How did that happen? How did we become put in this
situation? I have suggested one answer or Rousseau suggests one answer, the
development of property. But that's only part of the story and what I want to do for next
week is tell another very important, in some respects even more important, part of that
story of how we have become the way we are. So anyway, have a good weekend. Go to
the football game and we're going to win against Princeton.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 19
Transcript
November 13, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Good morning. My name is Borat. Anyone see the movie yet?
Yeah, I saw it over the weekend. Had to cheer myself up a little bit after Saturday
afternoon but there's still another week to go. Still time.
Good morning. I want to talk today about my favorite part of the Second Discourse, a
book that never grows old, that never fails to produce. Last time, in talking about
Rousseau's account of the origins of inequality, I focused on a famous passage in which
Rousseau claims it was the establishment of private property that was the true formation
of civil society and the beginnings of inequality and all of the subsequent miseries of the
human race that he wants to describe. But in fact, that's not really true. Rousseau
himself knows it's not quite true. If Rousseau were only interested in issues of class and
economic inequality, there would be very little difference between him and materialist
theorists of society like Karl Marx although Marx was in fact a very appreciative reader
of Rousseau and got most of his best lines against capitalist society from him.
Nevertheless, Rousseau understands that even for institutions like property and civil
society to be possible there must be huge and important developments that go on or take
place even prior to this, moral and psychological transformations of human beings. And
it is for Rousseau far more what we might call "the moral and psychological injuries of
inequality" than the material aspects of the phenomenon that is of concern to him.
Rousseau very much takes the side of the poor and the dispossessed but it isn't property,
or it isn't poverty rather, that really rouses Rousseau's anger as it is the attitudes and
beliefs shaped by inequalities and of wealth and power. It is Rousseau the moral
psychologist where his voice truly comes out. In many ways, Rousseau like Plato finds
his voice when discussing the various complexities of the human soul.
So what is the chief villain in Rousseau's Second Discourse and his account of the
beginnings in development of inequality? Real inequality begins in a faculty or a
disposition that is in fact in most editions of the book rendered simply by the French
term because it is really untranslatable into English. It is amour-propre, the first term I
put on the board, which is the first and most durable cause of inequality for Rousseau.
Amour-propre, again, is an untranslatable word but in many ways is related to a range
of psychological characteristics such as pride, vanity, conceit. In the translation that you
have, I believe, the translator refers to it as egocentrism, a kind of ugly modern
psychologistic term I think but better and more accurately, evocatively translated by
terms like vanity and conceit or pride. Amour-propre for Rousseau only arises in society
and is the true cause, he believes, for our discontents. And in a lengthy footnote that I
hope you checked--in a lengthy footnote, he distinguishes amour-propre from another
disposition that he calls amour de soi-meme, a sort of self-love. How are these
distinguished? He says in that note: "We must not confuse amour-propre with love of
oneself. These are two passions very different by virtue of their nature and their
effects." Love of oneself, amour de soi-meme, "Love of oneself is a natural sentiment,"
he writes, "which moves every animal to be vigilant in its own preservation and which
directed in many by reason and modified by pity produces humanity and virtue." So
there is a kind of self-love, he says, that is at the root of our desire to preserve ourself, to
be strong in our self-preservation, and to resist the invasion or encroachment by others.
But then, he goes on to say amour-propre is an entirely different kind of passion or
sentiment. "Amour-propre is merely a sentiment that is relative," he says, "artificial and
born in society which moves each individual to value himself more than anyone else,
which inspired in men all the evils they cause one another and which is the true source
of honor." Listen to that last expression. "Amour-propre," he says, "is what moves every
individual to value" him--or herself--"more than any other, which inspires all of the
evils in society and," he says, "is the true source of honor, both evil and honor, the
desire to be recognized and esteemed by others." How can this passion of amour-propre
be responsible for these two very different sort of competing effects? How did this
sentiment arise first of all? How did it come about and I suppose fundamentally and
more importantly, what can or should be done about it?
For Hobbes, recall, and this idea of pride, vanity, what Hobbes called vainglory, you
remember, a very important part of Hobbes' political and moral psychology in
Leviathan, pride is seen as something natural to us, Hobbes writes, you remember, it is
part of our natural--pride is part of our natural desire to dominate over others, but for
Rousseau by contrast amour-propre is something that could only come about after the
state of nature, a state that Hobbes, you remember, had called solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short, after the state of nature had already begun to give way to society.
Hobbes' account for Rousseau is incoherent. If the natural state is truly solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short, what would it mean in such a state to feel pride or vanity that
requires human sociability and requires the esteem of others and somehow the gaze or
the look of others? How could pride have arisen in a state of nature which on Hobbes'
own account is solitary? Rousseau uses Hobbes in a way to prove his own point, that
amour-propre, vanity, is not a natural sentiment but, as he says in that passage I just
read, a sentiment that is relative and artificial, could only have come into being once we
enter society in some ways.
But how did that happen? Rousseau speculates about this and, again, this is part of his
hypothetical or conjectural history. He speculates that amour-propre began to arise and
develop as soon as people began to gather around a hut or a tree and to look at one
another, as soon as we became conscious of the gaze of another, and it is from that gaze,
from the look or gaze of another, that the passion of vanity was born. Listen to the way
in which he speculates how this arose. "Each one," he says, "began to look at the others
and to want to be looked at himself and public esteem had a value. The one who sang or
danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest, the most adroit or the most eloquent
became the most highly regarded and this was the first step toward inequality and at the
same time toward vice. From these first preferences were born vanity and contempt on
the one hand and shame and envy on the other and the fermentation caused by this new
leavens eventually produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence." So the rise
of this passion to be seen, to be seen to be best at something, produced in many--for
many people again, as he puts it, pride and vanity from some shame and envy on the
part of others and from this fatal compound grew tendencies that were, as he says, fatal
to our happiness and innocence, and Rousseau, I think is very much onto something
here.
Amour-propre is presented in the passage I just read and throughout much of the Second
Discourse in largely negative terms but it is also related to something positive, in many
ways, for the development of humanity in society, the desire felt by all people once we
enter society, to be accorded some kind of recognition or respect by those around us.
That too is a part of amour-propre, the desire to be seen and recognized and respected.
The desire for recognition, he says, is at the root of our sense of justice and underlying
this, I think, is the intuition powerful and in many ways I think deeply true, that our
feelings, beliefs, opinions and attitudes be acknowledged and respected by others
around us, that we matter in some way. When we feel that our opinions are slighted,
when others do not recognize our worth, we feel angry about this and this need for
recognition, which is part of this passion of amour-propre, is for Rousseau also a
cornerstone of justice but it is also, as he says, at the same time the demand for
recognition can easily become cruel and violent as we demand this from others.
Consider again just the following. I want to read one other passage from the same part
of the text. He writes: "As soon as men had begun mutually to value one another and the
idea of esteem was formed in their minds, each one claimed to have a right to it, each
one claimed to have a right to esteem or recognition, and it no longer possible," he
writes, "for anyone to be lacking it with impunity. From this came the first duties of
civility even among savages and from this every voluntary wrong became an outrage.
Every time someone was harmed or injured, it became an outrage because along with
the harm that resulted from the injury," he says, "the offended party saw in it contempt
for his person, which often was more insufferable than the harm itself." Think about the
psychology, the moral psychology that Rousseau is invoking here in his talk about harm
and injury. It's not the physical aspect of the harm that bothers him. It is the sort of
contempt that is implied or entailed in the act of injury. Hence, he goes on to say, "each
man punished the contempt shown him in a matter proportionate to the esteem in which
he held himself. Acts of revenge became terrible and men became bloodthirsty and
cruel." That is to say, amour-propre and society gave rise to the state of war. Does this
sound familiar? I think it should.
I was trying to think of some example that might fit this and one I came up with when I
was thinking about this earlier--consider a story that was much in the news. I forget if it
was last spring or last summer sometime. The Danish cartoon controversy. Do you
remember that, about the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad and the outrage and the
protests, often violent, that occurred about that? To some degree, Rousseau might argue,
the protests were about disrespectful cartoons of the prophet but he would argue, I
suspect, that the deeper cause seemed to be that the protesters believed was disrespect
being shown to them, to their beliefs, to what it is they held sacred in some sense. It is
their beliefs that were being disrespected and were the cause of the protests. Amour-
propre, as Rousseau I think himself recognizes, is this very volatile passion. It contains
the desire to be respected again and acknowledged that is at the root of justice and virtue
and yet at the same time this passion, as we know, is easily manipulable by those who
wish to convince others that their basic entitlements or views are not being respected.
To some degree, I think, Rousseau would believe the protesters over those cartoons had
a point.
Their views were not being respected and to which you might say a Lockean or a liberal
formulation of the problem or response would be, "Well, so what?" The task of
government, according to Locke or the liberal view, is to ensure the security of person
and property, to protect you from harm and of course to provide you the freedom to
practice what religion you like, consistent with the freedom of others to do so too. It is
not the business of government to ensure that your beliefs are being respected. This was
clearly the view, for example, of the Danish newspaper editors that published the
cartoon as well as the Danish prime minister who refused to apologize for this on the
ground again that the government's job is not to impose a gag order on what can and
cannot be said on the grounds that some people might find it offensive. This is a
respectable, sort of liberal line of thought going from Locke to John Stuart Mill, and
yet, while I am inclined to agree very much with that point of view, there is something
powerful and true about what Rousseau has to say about it, about this kind of issue.
Lockean liberal thought was addressed in many ways to people who had experienced
the crucible of civil war, a century of religious conflict and were looking for a way to
settle their religious and political differences. Toleration in many ways is a liberal virtue
because it requires us to distinguish between beliefs that we may take with the utmost
seriousness in private life and yet nevertheless bracket them in some way once we enter
the public world. This, in many ways, is the peculiar liberal virtue of self-restraint or
self-denial, that we refuse to allow our own moral point of view to, in many ways,
dominate in the public space. But it is one thing, you might say, to tolerate other views
and another thing to accord them respect and esteem. That seems to be something very
different from what Locke talked about. To tolerate simply means not to persecute, to
leave alone, while respect for something requires that we esteem it. You might ask
yourself, "Must we esteem and respect values and points of view that we do not share?"
This seems very different, again, from the sort of liberal understanding of toleration that
means only extending acceptance to views again that are very different from our own. It
doesn't require us to, as it were, censor, self-censor, our own views on the ground that
they may be--our views may be in some ways disrespectful or hurtful to others.
This is a vast topic. I've sort of used the opportunity to sort of move away from
Rousseau a little bit but his point is I think that amour-propre, the desire to be
esteemed, recognized, and to have your values and points of view esteemed by those
around you is in fact a violent and uncontrollable passion. It is the passion very much
like Plato's thumos, spiritedness, back in the Republic. It is a passion that makes us burn
with anger over perceived slights and makes us also risk our lives and endanger the
lives of others to rectify what we believe to be acts of injustice. Like Plato, in many
ways, Rousseau wants to know whether amour-propre is purely a negative passion or
disposition or whether, like thumos, whether it can be redirected, in some way, to
achieve social goods and social benefits. All of this is entailed in that short discussion of
amour-propre in the Second Discourse. So much of Rousseau's subsequent account of
civilization and its discontents grows out of this peculiar psychological disposition and
passion.
So let's talk a little bit more about civilization and its discontents. In Woody Allen's
movie, Annie Hall, you might recall a scene in which he says there are two kinds of
people. They're the horrible and the miserable. The horrible are those who have suffered
some kind of personal tragedy, a disfigurement of some kind, who are facing a terminal
illness. The miserable is everybody else. Rousseau wants us to be miserable. He wants
us to feel just how bad things are, how bad we are, how bad off we are. The only
exception to this general human misery is, as he tells us at one point, kind of early
primitive society. These societies described by him, not quite the state of nature to be
sure, maintained a kind of middling position between the pure state of nature and the
development of modern conditions. He says these were the happiest and most durable
societies and the best for man. It was primitive man, not the pure savage of the state of
nature, where Rousseau finds a happy equilibrium between our powers and our needs
that he says is the recipe for happiness, bringing our powers and our needs into
equilibrium, but the end of that happy state came with two inventions, two discoveries:
agriculture and metallurgy.
With agriculture came, here we see the division of land, the division of property, and the
subsequent inequalities that came with it. With metallurgy came the art of war and
conquest. With these two developments, he tells us, humanity entered a new stage, one
where laws and political institutions became necessary to adjudicate conflicts over
rights, and the establishment of governments that this entailed rather than bringing
peace, as it would for Hobbes or Locke, the establishment of governments had the effect
simply of sanctioning the existing inequalities that had begun to develop. For Rousseau,
there is something deeply shocking and deeply troubling about the assertion that men
who were once free and equal are so easily, as it were, led to consent to the inequalities
of property and to rule by the stronger, which government brings into being. The social
contract, as he presents it in the Second Discourse, is really a kind of swindle. The
establishment of government is a kind of swindle that the rich and the powerful use to
control the poor and the dispossessed. Again, rather than instituting justice, this compact
merely legitimizes past usurpations. Government is a con game that the rich play upon
the poor. Political power simply helps to legitimize economic inequalities.
Governments, he tells us, may operate by consent but the consent they are granted is
based on falsehoods and lies. How else can one explain why the rich live lives that are
so much freer, so much easier, so much more open to enjoyment, than the poor? That is
Rousseau's real critique and real question.
And it is the establishment of government that is the last link in the chain of Rousseau's
conjectural history, the last and most painful, in many ways, legitimation of the
inequalities that have been created after our emergence from the natural condition. But
what, again, is most painful to Rousseau is the emergence of a new kind of human being
that this stage of civilization has been brought into--that this state of civilization has
brought into being. And Rousseau is the first, I think, to use that term so powerfully,
which became used very much in the next two centuries, the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie is Rousseau's invention and most striking about this human type for him is
the necessity to appear to be one thing where actually being something else. Go back
again to think of the way in which Plato or Socrates uses that distinction between
seeming and being when he talks about the just man in Book II of the Republic,
someone who seems to be and someone who is just. It is this tension between the two
that is so central to Rousseau's account of what he calls the bourgeoisie. "Being
something and appearing to be something," he says, "become two different things and
from this distinction there arose grand ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices
that follow in their wake."
And in the penultimate paragraph of the Second Discourse Rousseau describes the
dilemma of the bourgeoisie in the following way. He says, "The savage lives within
himself. The man accustomed to the ways of society, the bourgeoisie, is always outside
of himself and knows only how to live in the opinions of others and it is, as it were,
from their judgment alone that he draws the sentiment of his own existence." Think of
that sentence. It comes from the next to the last paragraph of the book, that in society
we only live through the opinions of others, through the gaze of others, through what
others think of us. We are constantly our own sentiment of existence, he says. Our own
sentiment of self and existent comes entirely from the judgment, as he puts it, of those
around us.
The bourgeoisie, in other words, is someone who lives in and through the opinions, the
good opinions, of others, who thinks only of himself when he is with other people and
only of other people when he is by himself. Such a person is duplicitous, hypocritical,
and false. This is why this is the true, you might say, discontent of civilization. This is
what our perpetual restlessness and reflectiveness have made of us. Goaded on
perpetually by amour-propre, this is the particular misery that civilization has
bequeathed us. So the question at the end of the book is what to do about this and here,
in many ways, one has to say the Second Discourse falls short. The book ends on a note
of utmost despair. It offers no positive answer to cure the problem of civilization but
only hints at best at two possible solutions. One is suggested, you will recall, by the
letter to the City of Geneva which, in a sense, prefaces the book. Perhaps the closest
approximation to the early state of primitive society lauded by Rousseau are the small,
isolated rural republics like Geneva in its own way where a kind of simple patriotism
and love of country have not been completely overwhelmed by the agitations of amour-
propre. Only, he says, in a well-tempered democracy like Geneva is it possible for
citizens still to enjoy some of the equality of the natural man. Democracy for him, this
kind of simple rural democracy like that of Geneva, is the social condition that most
closely approximates the equality of the state of nature and that of course is a theme that
Rousseau will take up powerfully in his book the Social Contract.
But Rousseau offers another hint to the solution of the problem of civilization, what to
do about it. How can we restore happiness in the midst of society? The Second
Discourse leaves us to believe that all society is a state of bondage and alienation from
nature, from our true being. We have lost our true humanity that he describes in the state
of nature, our state of--our capacities for pity and compassion and the like, and the
answer to the problem of society is, in many ways, to return to the root of society and
this root of society is not just the need for self-preservation but a kind of primordial, as
he calls it in that passage I read a minute ago, sentiment of existence, the sentiment of
our own existence. By giving oneself over to this feeling of existence without a thought
for the future, without care or fear, the individual somehow psychologically returns to
the natural state. Only a very few people, Rousseau writes, he being one of them of
course--only a very few people are capable of finding their way back to nature. The type
of human being who can find their way back to the sort of pure sentiment of existence is
not going to be a philosopher, is not going to be a person of high order reflection like
Socrates, but will more likely be an artist or a poet. He is one of those rare aristocrats of
nature, you might say. His claim to superiority is not based on a higher understanding
but a superior sensitivity, less on wisdom than on compassion. Rousseau believed
himself to be one of these people. Maybe you also are one of them. Yes? But it requires
you, in some way, to distance yourself severely and psychologically from all of the
possibilities of society, to return inward, and it was that inward journey that Rousseau
took and that he writes about so powerfully in his Confessions and his final book, The
Reveries, where you find the Rousseau, founder of the romantic disposition that you get
again in writers in America like Thoreau and others who look inward and return to
nature in some way, their natural self as opposed to society.
But the Second Discourse leaves us, to be sure, with a paradox. The progress of
civilization is responsible for all of our miseries. Yes, it is society's fault. It's not your
fault. It's society's, he wants to tell us, and yet he also leaves us with no real apparent
way out. He denies that we can, as a practical solution, return to simpler, more natural
forms of political association but how then do we resolve the problem that he leaves us
with? And his answer to it, his political answer to it, his most famous political answer to
it is contained in his book, yes, called the Social Contract, Du Contrat Social, published
in 1762, seven years after the Second Discourse. Here he attempts to give one such
answer, and I mentioned one such answer because it is not his only or final answer, but
one such answer to the problems of inequality and, again, the injuries of amour-propre.
The Social Contract begins with one of the most famous sentences in all of the history
of political philosophy, "man is born free and is everywhere in chains." Always begin
your essays with a good, strong sentence like that. Rousseau knew this. He knew
something about how to write. The phrase seems to be perfectly in keeping with the
Second Discourse. In the state of nature, we are born free, equal and independent. Only
in society do we become weak, dependent, and enslaved. It is what follows after that
sentence in a way that is the shocker. How did this take--how did this change take place,
Rousseau asks. I do not know. What can render it legitimate? I believe I can answer this
question. What can render it legitimate and by the "it" I take it he means the chains as
in--that states man is born free and is everywhere in chains. In the Second Discourse, he
had attempted to completely delegitimize the bonds of society, saying how the Social
Contract and the creation of government was nothing but, in many ways, a sophisticated
swindle. Now in the Social Contract, he asks the question, "What can give these chains
or bonds moral legitimacy?" He says I believe I can answer that. Has Rousseau simply
undergone a massive change of heart in the seven years between these two books? I
don't think so but I think these are--this is part of his--one of his answers to this
fundamental question. But before going into the details of this, let's consider some of
the differences between these two very powerful books. Right?
The Second Discourse, the discourse on inequality, presents itself as a hypothetical or
conjectural history of human development from the state of nature to the civil condition.
It is written in a vivid language, which is why it is always- it is often considered one of
Rousseau's most powerful pieces of writing, a vivid language drawing on in many ways
the biological sciences of his day and newly discovered knowledge of animal species
like orangutans and other kinds of anthropological investigations of the Caribs and
North American peoples, a very vivid work. The Social Contract, by contrast, is written
in a dry, even a kind of bloodless language of a lawyer. It is very much written in the
genre of a legal document. Its subtitle is The Principles of Political Right. It is a work of
considerable philosophical abstraction whose leading concepts are abstractions like the
social contract, the general will, and so on. The book, he tells us in short preface, was
originally part of a longer investigation of politics which has since been--which he says
has since been lost. Also, the Social Contract presents itself in many ways as a utopia,
an ideal city, in some respects an answer to the Calipolis of Plato's Republic and yet this
is also--this seems to be not quite true.
The work begins, even before the famous sentence about man being born free, the work
is prefaced with a statement that could have come directly out of Machiavelli's Prince.
"Taking men as they are and laws as they might be," Rousseau says, "I will try in this
inquiry to bring together what right permits with what interest prescribes." Taking men
as they are You remember the fifteenth chapter of The Prince. Let us look at the
effectual truth of things, not what is imagined to be but the way people actually are. Let
us take men as they are, Rousseau says, following Machiavelli. He will not begin, he
tells us, by making any heroic assumptions about human nature, no metaphysical flights
of fancy, but rather stay on the low but solid ground of recognized fact. What does he
mean by this and what are these facts of human nature, men as they are, he says, that
Rousseau claims to describe in the Social Contract? And here we get to the basic
premise of the book. The basic premise, I think, from which the entire Social Contract
unfolds is the claim that man is born free. All subsequent relations of hierarchy,
obligation and authority are the result not of nature but of agreement or convention.
Society and the moral ties that constitute it are conventional, you might say, by
agreement, all the way down. There is nothing natural about any of the social contract.
And from this basis of man as a free agent, that we are born free, Rousseau attempts to
work out a system of justice.
The Principles of Political Right, again is the subtitle, suggests that are appropriate to
human beings conceived as free agents responsible to themselves alone. But how do
you do that? How can you do that? Rousseau's political philosophy begins, at least he
believes I think, with the realistic or even empirical assumption that each individual has
a deep rooted interest in securing the conditions of their own liberty. The state of nature
and the social contract presuppose individuals who are in competition with others and
each attempting, as it were, to secure the conditions for their own liberty. He does not
presuppose altruism on the part of any human being or any other kind of self-other
regarding characteristics, what I called a moment ago heroic assumptions. He doesn't
make the assumption that we act for the interests of others. We are selfishly concerned
with our own freedom and the best means of preserving it and protecting it. Each of us
has a desire to preserve his or her own freedom and that social order will be rational or
just, that allows us to preserve that freedom. The problem, of course, is that in the state
of nature the desire to preserve my freedom comes into conflict with the selfish desire
of everybody else to preserve their freedom. The state of nature quickly becomes a state
of war based on conflicting desires and conflicting again means of liberty preservation.
So how do we preserve our liberty without lapsing into anarchy, that is the state of war?
This is the question that the Social Contract sets out to answer and to which his
formulation, his famous formulation of what he calls the general will, is the solution.
I'm going to end on that note today and Wednesday I want to talk about the general will
and how Rousseau sees it as a sort of collective answer to the problem of the securing of
individual liberty. So meditate on that if you like for the next day.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 20
Transcript
November 15, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: There's so much to say and so little time. Today, I want to
talk about the general will, Rousseau's most important contribution to political science
and I will also want to talk about the legacies of Rousseau and what he's meant for the
world that he did so much to shape. But I want to start first with the general will which
is his answer to the problems of civilization or the political problem of the Second
Discourse that we talked about last week, the problems of inequality, the problem of
amour-propre, the problem of our general discontent. Social contract is his answer to
the problem of natural freedom. This is so, in a way, because for Rousseau nature, he
tells us, provides no standards or guidelines for determining who should rule. Unlike
Aristotle, man is not here a political animal, and notice that when Rousseau speaks of
the social contract in the general will as the foundation of all legitimate authority, he
means, literally, that all standards of justice and right have their origins in the will in
this unique human property of the will or free agency. It is this liberation of the will
from all transcendent sources or standards, whether those be found in nature, in custom,
in revelation, in any other source. The liberation of the will from all of these sources
that is the true, as it were, center of gravity of Rousseau's philosophy. It is a world that
begins to emphasize the primacy and the priority of the will, a moral point of view that I
want to indicate a little later, finds its, in many ways, very powerful expression in the
philosophy of Immanuel Kant.
But given Rousseau's, let's call it libertarian conception of human nature, his description
of the actual mechanism of the social contract may come as something of a surprise to
us. The problem, to which the formula of the general will is the answer, is stated
succinctly by Rousseau in Book I, chapter 6 of the Social Contract. "Find a form of
association," he writes, "which defends and protects with all the common force, the
person and goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with
all obeys only himself and remains as free as before." This, he calls, the fundamental
problem for which the social contract is the solution. That statement, a famous
statement, Book I, chapter 6, really contains two parts that merit close attention.
The first part says--the first part of that clause says that the aim of the contract is to
protect and defend with the common force the goods and person of each member. So
far, think of that, this is entirely consistent with Locke's claim or even Hobbes' claim
that the purpose of society is to protect the security or the life, liberty, and estate of each
of its members. Yet, Rousseau adds to this Lockean or liberal clause you might say, a
second and more distinctly Rousseauian claim, namely, that the contract must ensure
not only the conditions for mutual protection and the preservation of self and property,
but rather also that in uniting with one another, he says, each person obeys only himself
and then he says, "remains as free as they were before." But how is this possible, we
want to know. Isn't the essence of the social contract that we give up some part of our
natural freedom to guarantee mutual peace and security? How can we remain as free as
we were before, and as he says, obey only our--that the participant obey only himself.
That is the paradox, in many ways, or the fundamental problem, as he calls it, to which
his contract is a solution. Rousseau provides an answer as follows; he says, "Properly
understood these clauses are all reducible to one. Namely," he says, "the total alienation
of each associate together with all of his rights to the entire community." The total
alienation of each associate with all of his rights to the entire community. And those
two phrases, "total alienation" and "entire community" are obviously central here. In the
first place, all persons must give themselves entirely over to the social contract to ensure
that the terms of the agreement are equal for all. The total alienation clause as it were, is
Rousseau's manner of ensuring that the terms of the contract are the same for everyone.
But secondly, when we alienate ourselves, it is crucial, he says, that this be done or
given to the entire community, for only then he wants to argue, is the individual
beholden not to any private will or any private association, or to some other person but
to the general will, the will of the entire community.
The social contract is the foundation of the general will which is, for Rousseau, the only
legitimate sovereign. Not kings, not parliaments, not representative assemblies, not
presidents, but the general will of the entire community is the only general sovereign,
the doctrine of the famous doctrine of what we call the sovereignty of the people or
popular sovereignty. Since everyone combines to make up this will, when we give
ourselves over to it entirely, he wants to argue, we do nothing more then obey
ourselves. The sovereign, in other words, is not some distinct third party that is created
by the contract, but rather the sovereign is simply the people as a whole acting in its
collective capacity, the people in their collective capacity. Now, you might suggest that
there is something deeply amiss here. That is to say, from a highly individualistic set of
premises where each person is concerned only in the state of nature, or in the pre-
contract tradition, only with the protection of their lives, persons and property,
Rousseau seems to be leading us to a highly regimented and collectivized conclusion,
where the individual has given over virtually his or her entire being to the will of the
community. In what way does this render us as free as we were before? In what way do
we remain free and obey only ourselves? That seems to be the problem. Is Rousseau's
formula for the general will, a recipe or a formula for freedom, or is it a recipe for the
tyranny of the majority of the type later analyzed by Tocqueville that we'll be seeing
after the break?
Rousseau wants to say, paradoxically, only through this total alienation do we remain
free. Why is this? Why is this? Because he wants to argue no one is dependent upon the
will of another. The people established through their act a new kind of sovereign, the
general will, which he says is not strictly speaking the sum total, the additive total of the
individual wills or the individual parts, but is more like the general interest or the
rational will, if you want to use that kind of Kantian formulation, the rational will of a
community. Since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will, when we obey its
laws we do, he wants to say, no more than obey ourselves. Rousseau describes this new
kind of freedom that we achieve under the general will. He wants to say that this brings
about, in some ways, a radical transformation of human nature in itself. The freedom of
the citizen under the general will is not the freedom of the state of nature, it's not the
freedom to do anything we like, anything that our will and power allows us to do, but it
is a new kind of freedom that he calls moral freedom, a freedom to do what the law
commands.
The passage from the state of nature, he writes, to the civil state, the passage from the
state of nature to the civil state produces a remarkable change in man. For it substitutes
justice for instinct in his behavior and gives his actions a moral quality that they
previously lacked. And Rousseau continues that statement as follows. "What man loses
through the social contract is his natural liberty and unmitigated right to everything that
tempts him and he can acquire. What he gains is civil liberty and proprietary ownership
of all he possesses, but--and here I think is the crucial argument or the crucial clause,
but he writes--to the preceding acquisitions," that is to say civil liberty, "could be added
the acquisition of moral liberty which alone," he says, "makes man truly the master of
himself. For it to be driven by appetite alone is slavery and obedience to the law one has
prescribed for oneself is freedom." That is a remarkable statement. "Obedience to the
law that one prescribes for oneself is freedom." That is moral liberty, which is only
created and possible through the social contract, and the implications of this, the moral
and political implications of that statement are massive. It is here, in many ways, where
Rousseau departs most powerfully, most dramatically from his early modern
predecessors.
Consider the following. For Hobbes and Locke, liberty meant that sphere of human
conduct which is unregulated by the law. Remember chapter 21 of Leviathan, where
Hobbes says, "where the law is silent" praetermitted in his term, "where the law is
silent, the citizen is free to do what ever he or she chooses to do." Freedom begins, so to
speak, where the law is silent. But for Rousseau, law is the very beginning of our
freedom. Where the law is silent, we may have a kind of natural freedom, but our moral
freedom, we are free to the extent that we are participants in the laws that we in turn
obey. Freedom means acting in conformity with self-imposed law. A radically different
understanding of what freedom consists and it seems underlying the difference between,
one could say Hobbes and Locke on the one side, and Rousseau on the other; it's a
difference between two very different conceptions of liberty. One might call them
liberal and republican respectively, small "r" republican of course or democratic even, if
you like. For liberals, following in the tradition of Hobbes and Locke, again, freedom
has always meant a sphere of privacy where the law does not intrude or where other
people do not intrude. This is why the separation of the public and the private sphere
has always been so sacred to liberals, because only in the private sphere, only in that
area of civil society where the state does not intrude is the individual really and truly
free. But for the republican theory of liberty of which Rousseau is a most powerful
modern exponent, this separation of public and private is only an exercise in what might
be thought of as private selfishness. The task is rather to create a community where the
individual and the public interest are not in conflict with one another, where the
individual does not think of him or herself as a being apart from the social body. This is
the freedom of the citizen, for Rousseau, who takes an active role in the determination
of the laws of one's own community.
Rousseau's purpose in saying this and in writing this seems to be to bring back to life a
concept that he believes has been dormant, had laid dormant for centuries and that
concept is the citizen. The last people who really knew what a citizen meant, he says,
were the Romans. In a footnote, again to Book I, chapter 6, he indicates to what degree
the true meaning of citizen has been lost on modern subjects. "Most modern men," he
writes, "mistake a town for a city, and a bourgeois for a citizen." Think of that. Most
mistake a bourgeois for a citizen. The modern world furnishes almost no examples of
what a citizen is, and this is why it is necessary for Rousseau to return to the histories of
antiquity, especially Rome and Sparta to find models of citizenship. Only in these
societies can one find the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common good, a
kind of patriotic devotion upon which citizenship is founded. If I could take perhaps
Rousseau's most memorable example of the true citizen it comes from an example he
lifts from the Roman writer, Plutarch that he uses in the opening pages of his book, The
mile, which I hope you will have a chance to read at some other time.
Here, he tells an unforgettable story for anybody who ever reads mile. "A Spartan
woman," he writes, "had five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle," had
five sons in the army and was awaiting news of the battle. "A helot, slave arrives
trembling she asks him for news. Your five sons were killed,' the helot replies.
Base slave, did I ask you this?' We won the victory,' he says. The mother runs to
the temple and gives thanks to the gods." Here, for Rousseau, was the ancient citizen.
An example that is both terrible and sublime, which of course he wants it to be, he
intends it to be. There is the example of what the true citizen is. The question, when you
consider this possibility, is whether Rousseau's idea of the freedom of the citizen,
freedom to live under self-imposed law, leads to a higher form of nobility, higher than
the kind of low minded pursuit of one's self-interest as Rousseau wants. He wants to
dignify politics again by leading to a higher form of nobility or does it result in a new
kind of despotism, the despotism of law, the despotism of obedience to the general will
and of course underlying that sinister reading of Rousseau is the famous or maybe
infamous statement that not only that the general will is the source of freedom, but that
anyone who obeys, who refuses to obey, the general will may be in his famous
formulation, may be forced to be free. That anyone who disobeys it and being chastised
or can be, as it were, forced to be free. Recall that this is a conception of freedom which,
again, is almost the opposite of that of what we might again call the liberal tradition. A
view, which, and again in a slightly paradoxical way, was given, a very powerful
formulation by Hobbes. I want to read a passage that I read a couple of weeks ago from
Hobbes which I think stands as a striking contrast to that of Rousseau's.
Again, in chapter 21 of Leviathan Hobbes writes, "The Athenians and the Romans were
free, that is, they were free commonwealths. Not that any particular men had liberty to
resist their own representatives, but their representatives had the liberty to resist or
invade other people." Hobbes clearly says that the ancient freedom was the freedom of
the collective; it wasn't the freedom of the individual. "The freedom of the authorities,"
as he says, "to resist or invade other people." There is written, on the turrets of the city
of Lucca, remember that, in the great characters at this day the word libertas and yet, he
goes on to say, "no man can thence infer that a particular man has more liberty or
immunity from service to the commonwealth there than in Constantinople." That is to
say, freedom for Hobbes consists of, as he puts it, immunity from service, immunity
from service and for this reason there is no reason to believe that anyone is freer in the
republican city of Lucca, which has libertas on the wall than in Constantinople. That
seems to, already a 100 or so years before Rousseau, suggest a powerful alternative to
his view of freedom.
Hobbes' point, like Rousseau's, is extreme and that in many ways is the power of these
two views. Hobbes' view of freedom is immunity from service, Rousseau's view is that
freedom consists, you might say, only in service. Our freedom starts where the law
begins. Again, at the basis of this are two radically different views of the role of
political participation in lawmaking. For Rousseau, again, laws are legitimate only if
everyone has a direct share in making them. It doesn't mean we all agree with the
outcome but only if we have some kind of share or voice in making them. For Hobbes,
for Locke, for the authors of the federalist papers, on the other hand, the direct
involvement of the citizen in lawmaking is clearly a subordinate or a secondary good.
Legislation is better handled by persons chosen from the electorate who are, so to speak,
the agents or representatives of the people. This was what the federalist authors argued
was the great advance of modern political science, the doctrine of representation. What
is far more important for the federalist authors, as well as for Locke, Hobbes and that
tradition is that laws be generally known, that they be applied by impartial judges,
rather than they be the direct expression of the general will. In many ways underlying
the, again, liberal conception of law is a certain distrust of the collective wisdom or the
collective sovereignty of the people. It is too cumbersome, in many ways, and also too
dangerous a mechanism to call people together to decide on matters over public
concern. This is better left according to this tradition to representatives. Rousseau
obviously could not disagree more. One could say that Rousseau makes heroic and
unreasonable assumptions about human nature. Why do we want to gather together
constantly or often to decide, to deliberate, and to debate over questions of public
concern? Most people, it's hard enough just to get most people, as we know, to go out to
vote, why do we want to engage in endless debate of something like a college council
meeting trying to discuss what to do, whether to buy or not a new set of dumbbells for
the weight room. This is a debate that will go on for hours and hours and maybe even
weeks. Don't people simply want to be left alone? Rousseau, again, he seems in some
way, to make unreasonable assumptions about human nature and our capacity to engage
in debate.
But Rousseau will tell you he is not being idealistic at all. He is starting from the
assumption of men as they are, he says. Unless everyone he wants to say is engaged in
the process of legislation, there is no way for you know that the laws will be an
expression of your will rather than simply the private will or corporate will of some
individual or intermediary body. You will find yourself in a condition of dependence
and slavery on the will of others. And what is really at issue for Rousseau is freedom
from dependence on some faction, some interest, or some association that we have
come to call today interest groups, in some way. Rousseau's appeal is not to our
altruism, but rather, to our selfishness, in some way. Our desire, our private or selfish
desire to preserve our freedom and resist the willful domination of others upon it. So
far, this all, in many ways, is very abstract and Rousseau deliberately sets out his plan
for the general will in a highly abstract and semi-technical language.
But he turns to questions particularly in Book III about how is the general will actually
applied. How is it applied? Here Rousseau is far more specific sociologically and so on
about the conditions under which the general will, or a general will, can come about. In
the first place, the general will can only operate in small states, much like the size of an
ancient republic. In one place, one particularly notable place in the social contract, he
says, only the island country of Corsica is today a place where the general will might be
established. The modern nation-state, as we have come to think of it, is far too large and
diffuse to determine the general will. Such a state, such large states will necessarily
entail considerable degrees of social inequality of wealth, of status and with such
inequalities, there can be no general will. Finally, or in addition, such a state where the
general will is operative would be one that would have to, in some sense, eschew the
temptations of commerce and luxury for these bring with them, again, large scale
inequalities. His ideal city seems to be a kind of agrarian democracy, a small-scale
agrarian society.
Yet, at the same time, we might get the impression that only a direct democracy would
satisfy Rousseau's requirements for the general will and yet we find out this is not quite
the case. In Book III, which I hope you will look at with some care, he shows surprising
flexibility about the forms of government that may be appropriate to different physical
and different climates and different topographies and so on. In the chapter on
democracy, he remarks even, "were there a people of God's that would govern itself
democratically," and then he adds, "so perfect a government is not suited to men." So he
is skeptical about the possibility of a direct democracy and by that he means a
democracy not only where the people legislate, bring, create law but where they are in
charge also with the administration of law as well, the execution or enforcement of the
law. He is very skeptical about that kind of democracy. Again, democracies are only
possible under very, very special unique circumstances; otherwise, aristocracy,
monarchy, some kind of even mixed government is possible or even desirable.
He insists on the separation of powers for much the same reasons that one finds in
Locke. The people who make the law should not be charged with, responsible for
executing and enforcing them, and throughout this part of the book Rousseau seems to
be in dialogue with an unnamed rival whom he sometimes simply refers to as a famous
author. That author is of course, Montesquieu, the author of The Spirit of the Laws. That
came out in 1755 and Montesquieu was, of course, famous for arguing that different
forms of government must be tailored to different climates, different geographies,
different circumstances. In many ways, in Book III, Rousseau seems to indicate or to
introduce a very, very almost un-Rousseauian emphasis on prudence, moderation,
flexibility that seems at odds with the dogmatic claims of the first two books with its
emphasis upon the absolute inviolability of sovereignty. But most important for
Rousseau, it is important that legislative authority, in whatever kind of constitution and
under whatever kind of government, that legislative authority is only, is always held by
the people in their collective capacity. This is why, in a very powerful chapter, Book III,
chapter 15, Rousseau rejects altogether the legitimacy of representative government.
That passage or that chapter could be taken already as a kind of repudiation, not just of
Locke, Locke's theory of the representative but also twenty years or so before the fact of
the federalist argument for representation.
"Sovereignty," he says, "can never be delegated." Sovereignty can never be represented,
it can only be expressed. The general will can never be delegated to someone else. If
you do that, if you delegate the authority for making law you are, he wants to say, on
the first step down the road to tyranny because you give someone else, some partial
body or association the power to make law over you. The lawmaking function can only
legitimately be held by the people themselves. I'm going to skip over a bunch of stuff
that has to do, very interestingly, I hope you can discuss it in your sections perhaps,
with Rousseau's account of the legislator, the extraordinary individual who was
responsible at the beginnings of regimes, for shaping the general, for molding a people
and for, as it were, giving the general will a kind of shape and distinctive direction, and
I'm also going to skip, for our purposes, the very interesting discussion of civil theology,
which occupies the theme, the very last chapter of the book, Book IV, chapter 8, where
Rousseau talks about the way in which a civil religion must be tailored to bring about
love and obedience to the general will. It was that chapter, I should say, that more than
anything else led to the books being burned and banned in Geneva and other places and
for its powerful attack on Christianity in that chapter. I'm going to pass over that for the
time being to look at the legacies of Rousseau and to talk about what--and I just
deliberately use that word in the plural--the legacies of Rousseau, because there is
virtually no part of modern life, political, cultural, intellectual, moral that does not in
some sense bear the stamp or fingerprints of Jean-Jacque Rousseau.
Rousseau's description of the legislator, the kind of political founder creating a people,
was for many, in many ways, the closely connected with the French Revolution and
particularly the claim of the revolutionaries to create a new nation, a new people, a new
sovereign, a new popular sovereign in France. Consider the following words of the
famous revolutionary Robespierre in his homage to Rousseau written in 1791. Divine
man, this is Robespierre, "Divine man you taught me to know myself. While I was still
young, you made me appreciate the dignity of my nature and reflect upon the great
principles of the social order. The old edifice is crumbling, the portico of the new
edifice is rising up on its ruins and thanks to you I have brought my stone to it. Receive
my homage, as weak as it is, it must be please you. I wish to follow your venerable
footsteps, happy if in the perilous career that an unprecedented revolution just opened
up before us. I remain constantly faithful to the inspirations that I found in your text."
People might tell you that the writings of Rousseau had no influence on the French
Revolution, that the French Revolution was brought about by bread crises and economic
problems and so on; absolute baloney. The writings of Rousseau had this powerful
influence on the idea of creating a new people and a new nation. Yet, despite what
appears to be a utopian and impractical in his politics, again, Rousseau had a profound
influence on the politics of his era. He was approached during his lifetime to write
constitutions for Poland and for Corsica, and of course that was the island where a
generation later a man named Napoleon Bonaparte was born who attempted to, you
might say in some way, extend Rousseau's teaching, not just to France but to all of
Europe at the point of a gun to bring democracy to all of Europe at the point of a gun.
Does that sound familiar at all in any way related to events going on now? Where we
have a new kind of Bonapartism, perhaps.
In many ways, although Rousseau's attack on representative government would seem to
put him strongly at odds with the American Constitution, his glorification of the rural
republic based on equality, moral simplicity, skepticism of commerce and luxury, this
was to be re-echoed in the writings of Jefferson, with his ideal of a nation of small
Yeoman farmers and certainly any reader of Tocqueville's depiction in celebration of
the independent townships of New England. Tocqueville's account of this was directly
dependent on his reading of Rousseau, the small-scale experiment in direct democracy
that Tocqueville saw was a real world example of a kind of politics governed by the
general will. And when you read those early chapters from Tocqueville's democracy in
America about the New England township you will very much see Tocqueville looking
at America through the lenses that were in some ways crafted or shaped by Rousseau.
That influence was palpable on a whole host of later nineteenth-century writers. Like
Tolstoy, for instance, whose celebration of Russian peasant life was inspired by
Rousseau and through Tolstoy, Rousseau influenced the establishment of the Israeli
kibbutz movement that was also founded by Russian Jews who had been influenced by
Tolstoy, so you have a sort of self-reinforcing cycle of influence. These, you might say,
small rural socialistic experiments in communal living exhibit the same kind of equality,
self-government devotion to the common good that Rousseau helped people imagine
might be possible. Yet, Rousseau's influence was not limited to politics. If he was a
divine man, as Robespierre called him, he was no less so to Immanuel Kant, who
claimed that it was his reading of Rousseau that led him to learn respect for the dignity
and the rights of man; that's what Kant said. He called Rousseau "the Newton of the
moral universal." Kant's entire philosophy and I hope you also have a chance to read
Kant's critique of practical reason in some later philosophy course, Kant's entire moral
philosophy is a kind of deepened and radicalized Rousseauianism where what Rousseau
called the general will is transmuted into what Kant calls the rational will and the
categorical imperative.
It was not the least of Rousseau's legacies that after his death he became a hero both to
the revolution and to the counter-revolution, both to a revival of Roman-style
republicanism as well as to Romanticism, or if I can use the words of great
Rousseauian, Jane Austin, he became both an advocate of sense and sensibility.
Emerson, Thoreau, American transcendentalism with its worship of nature and its
protests against the kind of deadening and corrupting influence of society, all of these
people were the direct heirs of Rousseau. Rousseau's last work, a book called The
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, set the stage for later American classics like Walden
Pond and generations of nature writers that have come after it and imitated it. Only by
turning away from the noise and business of society can one return to what precedes
society, to the feeling of existence, to the feeling of or sweetness of mere existence, to
the sentiment of existence, the le sentiment de soi, as Rousseau calls it, the sentiment of
the self. There is a kind of union that he celebrates with nature that puts the solitary, the
solitary walker either above humanity or below it. That type of man foreshadowed by
Rousseau, the solitary is no longer a philosopher in any sense that we would understand.
It might be better understood as an artist or a visionary. He can claim a privileged place
in society because such a person regards him or herself as the conscience of that society.
His claim to privilege is based on a heightened moral sensitivity rather than his wisdom
or his rationality, and it is this kind of radical individualism, the radical detachment of
the solitary from the interests of society that is perhaps Rousseau's deepest and most
enduring legacy for us today. So, on that note I wish you a good break. I hope you have
a lot of turkey to eat and you come back well rested and most, most, most importantly
we come back with a win over that evil empire to our north. Thank you very much.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 21
Transcript
November 27, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: I want to begin by talking a little about what is the question or
what is the problem to which this immense book of which you're reading, I don't know,
a couple of hundred pages maximum--What is the problem with which this huge book is
concerned? It's always an important question to ask when you begin a new book. What
question is the author trying to ask or what problem is he trying to deal with? Let me try
to set up Tocqueville's problem in the following way.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ideas of freedom and equality seemed to
walk confidently hand in hand. Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, who we've been reading, all
believed that in the state of nature, remember, we were all born free and equal. As long
as the enemy appeared to be the entrenched hierarchies of power and privilege of the
old regime, of the old monarchical societies, freedom and equality were taken to be
mutually reinforcing aspects of the emerging democratic order. But it was not until the
beginning of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the democracies or proto-
democracies of Europe and the new world, that political philosophers, political thinkers
began to wonder whether freedom and equality did not in fact pull in different
directions. Tocqueville in particular, although you could add the names like Benjamin
Constant or John Stuart Mill, but Tocqueville in particular saw the new democratic
societies as creating new forms of social power, new types of rule that represented, in
some ways, organized threats to human liberty. What were these new forms of social
power? These were, for Tocqueville, the new middle class or what we might call
bourgeois democracies, the new middle class democracies emerging in countries like
France, England and of course the United States.
And the problem for Tocqueville or his question, as it was for Locke and others before
him, was how to mitigate the effects of political power. How does one control or
mitigate for political power? Yes? Right? You can see that. Locke's answer, you recall,
to this problem was to divide and separate the powers, separated powers, a theme
clearly taken up and endorsed by the American constitutional framers. But Tocqueville
was less certain that this kind of institutional device, so to speak, of checks and balances
or separated powers, could be an effective or truly effective check in a democratic age
where you might say the people as a whole had become king. He was less certain that
institutional remedies alone could work. While 75 years before Tocqueville wrote
Democracy in America, Rousseau had taken up the doctrine of popular sovereignty to
be an ideal to be worked for, taking men as they are and laws as they might be. He
looked to the doctrine of popular sovereignty as something that could be. But
Tocqueville, again writing approximately 75 years after Rousseau, saw this doctrine,
this doctrine of popular sovereignty that, for mid eighteenth-century Frenchmen had
looked like a far flung utopian ideal, for Tocqueville this ideal had become an altogether
political reality that had taken shape in the backwoods of Jacksonian America. Consider
just the following passage from the Democracy. "In the United States," Tocqueville
writes, "the dogma," he says, he calls it the dogma, "of the sovereignty of the people is
not an isolated doctrine that is joined neither to habits nor to the sum of dominant ideas.
On the contrary," he says, "one can view it as the last link in a chain of opinions that
envelops the Anglo American world as a whole." And he goes on to say that extended to
the entirety of the nation it becomes, it, this opinion, becomes the dogma of the
sovereignty of the people.
So here you have Tocqueville's view that this Rousseauian concept of popular
sovereignty has become an existent reality. And for Tocqueville, there was no reason to
believe that the new democratic states emerging, again, in America and in Europe, these
new democratic states, ruled by the people--there was no reason to believe that they will
be more just or less arbitrary than any other previous kind of regime. For Tocqueville
no one, no person or body of persons, can be safely entrusted with political power and
the united power of the people, the united sovereignty of the people, is no more for him
a reliable guarantor of freedom than any other kind of regime. So the problem of
politics, you might say, in age of democracy, is the problem of how to control the
sovereignty of the people. For Rousseau, you remember, that was never really seriously
a problem. The general will, he says, cannot err, the people when they are ruling in their
collective capacities cannot be wrong but Tocqueville was less certain about this,
whether or not the people, in their collective capacity as sovereign, are an infallible
guide.
The question is, what can be done about that? In aristocratic ages, you might say, the
answer was simple. Tocqueville believed that in aristocratic times there were always
countervailing centers of power. Kings, no matter how powerful, always had to contend
with fractious and warlike nobilities but, again, who or what can exercise that
countervailing power in a world where the people in their collective capacity have, to
repeat, become the king? Who or what has the power to check the popular will or the
general will? This is the problem, how to check democratic power. This is the problem
that Tocqueville's new political science, what he boasts in the introduction to the book,
is a new political science for a world itself quite new. This is the problem that he sets
out to answer. And to this extent I would also say we, are all Tocqueville's children. We
are all disciples of Tocqueville insofar as our political science continues to deal with the
problem of the guidance and control of democratic government, how to, you might say,
combine popular government with political wisdom. How to do that remains a problem,
you might say, akin to squaring the circle but it remains the fundamental problem for
democracies, how to combine popular rule with political wisdom. That was really what
Tocqueville was concerned about.
But before going on, let me ask, who was Alexis de Tocqueville? Let me tell you
something about him. Tocqueville was born in 1805 into a Norman family from the
north of France, from Normandy, with an ancient lineage. The Tocqueville estate still
stands today and is owned still in the hands of members of the Tocqueville family. I
know because I visited it a couple of summers ago and met his heirs although they are
not actually the heirs of him directly. Tocqueville and his wife had no children. They
belonged to one of the brothers' side of the family but absolutely charming people,
exactly what you'd think French aristocrats would be like, all charm and grace,
wonderful hosts. And Tocqueville was deeply attached to his ancestral home. In a letter
from 1828, one of my favorite Tocqueville letters, he wrote to a friend, "Here I am,"
after returning from a trip abroad, a trip away, "Here I am, finally at Tocqueville,"
referring to the home simply by the family name. "I am finally at Tocqueville in my
family's old, broken down ruin. At a league's distance I can see the harbor where
William the Conqueror set sail for England. I am surrounded by Normans whose names
figure among the conquerors. All of this I have to confess tickles my heart."
So he comes from a line of people who trace their ancestry back to the Norman
conquest and have been in that part of France for centuries. In fact, the Tocqueville
home is a short drive away from the Normandy beach where the big D Day invasion
took place during World War II. It's a miracle that the home still survives. Tocqueville's
parents had been arrested during the French Revolution and were held in prison for
almost a year and only the fall of Robespierre in 1794 saved them from execution. The
young Tocqueville was born under the Napoleonic dynasty and spent his formative
years, his adolescence and his school years, under the most conservative, if not to say
reactionary, circles of post revolutionary France. Tocqueville studied law in Paris and
during this time he made the acquaintance and friendship of another young aristocrat by
the name of Gustave de Beaumont. And in 1830, for reasons that are not altogether
clear, when he was 25 or so, in 1830, the two men received a commission from the new
government of Louis Philippe, King Louis Philippe, to go to the United States to study
the prison system there.
The trip to the U.S. was occasioned by a grant you, might say, a fellowship, to study the
American prison system. Tocqueville's journey to America, which has been extensively
documented, lasted for just under a year from May 1831 to February 1832, and during
that time he traveled as far north as New England, south to New Orleans. Yes, he was in
New Orleans and went to the outer banks of Lake Michigan. The result of this visit was
of course the two large volumes that he called Democracy in America, Democratie en
Amerique. The first volume appeared five years, four years or so after his trip, in 1835
when its author was only 30 years old. The second volume appeared five years later in
1840 and both of those volumes are contained within the single volume that you have.
Tocqueville's trip has been much studied and much admired. Even just in very recent
times, a French philosopher, by the name of Bernard Henri Levy, came over, didn't
exactly follow Tocqueville's journey but traveled throughout America, a kind of
Frenchman's guide, a sort of Borat's America almost, going to Las Vegas and
evangelical churches and all of this stuff, and wrote a very interesting book called
American Vertigo. The most charitable thing I can remark is that he was no Tocqueville
but, leaving that aside, it was an admirable effort.
Democracy in America, to put it simply, is the most important work about democracy
that you will ever read. To compound the irony, the most famous book on American
democracy was written by a French aristocrat who might have been deeply foreign, if
not hostile to the manners, customs, habits of a democratic society. And from the time
of its first publication in 1835, the book was hailed as a masterpiece. John Stuart Mill
called the book a masterpiece that has at once, he says, taken its rank among the most
remarkable productions of our time. Tocqueville has come to take his side, his place
alongside of Washington, Jefferson and Madison almost as if he were an honorary
American. And, as if this were not enough, a recent translation of the book was recently
inducted into the prestigious Library of America series which seems to put the stamp of
naturalization on a book written in French for Frenchmen and yet it is part of the
prestigious Library of America. As Tocqueville might have said, go figure. I don't know
how to say that in French actually.
But there is a textbook image of Tocqueville according to which he came to America as
a kind of blank slate and the experience of American democracy had a profoundly
transformative influence over the young aristocrat. But nothing I would suggest to you
could be further from the truth. In a letter to his best friend, a man named Louis de
Kergolay, whose home, whose estate is actually directly next door to the Tocqueville
estate--In a letter to Tocqueville written just before the publication of the first volume of
the Democracy in 1835, Tocqueville describes his purpose in writing his book in these
terms. Let me read from his letter. Tocqueville writes, "It is not without having carefully
reflected that I decided to write the book I am just now publishing. I do not hide from
myself what is annoying in my position. It is bound to attract active sympathy from no
one. Some will find that at bottom I do not like democracy and am severe toward it but
others will think I favor its development immoderately. It would be most fortunate for
me if the book were not read and that is a piece of good fortune that may perhaps soon
come to pass. I know all that but here is my response. Nearly 10 years ago, I was
already thinking about part of the things that I have just now set forth. I was in America
only to become clear on this point. The penitentiary system was a pretext."
So two points, I think, bear comment about this remarkable statement of his purpose to
his friend Kergolay. First is that Tocqueville indicates that his idea for the book had
already, as he says, begun to germinate five years before his trip to America. He says
the penitentiary system, the penitentiary project for which he was sent over, was only a
pretext, he said. He already had begun to speculate on these things, he says, 10 years
before his trip. Now, if you do the math, when you consider that he was 30 years old in
1835 when the book's first volume was published and he said he was speculating on
these things already 10 years before, it would seem that the germ of the idea for the
book, the germ idea, the germ cell for the book, had occurred to Tocqueville when he
was only 20 years old, that is to say about the age that most of you are here. And he
went to America only to confirm what he had begun to suspect when he was at the age
of a contemporary undergraduate. Think of that. Get your idea now. Get it quickly.
Then maybe you can write a famous book by the time you are 30. I have to tell you it is
way, way beyond that stage for me. Hobbes, however, did not write his masterpiece
until he was 63 so there's still hope for some of us.
Nevertheless, the second point I would make about that letter is that it is also clear that
Tocqueville was writing his book not for the benefit of Americans, who you will
discover he thought had little taste for philosophy, but for Frenchmen. In particular, he
was hoping to persuade his fellow countrymen, who were still devoted to the restoration
of the monarchy, that the democratic social revolution that he had witnessed in America
represented also the future of France. If John Locke had said in his Second Treatise,
when Locke had said "in the beginning all the world was America," Tocqueville's point
appears to be in the future all of the world will be America. His attitude towards what
he saw or what we would perhaps call today Americanization, democratization--his
attitude towards this was one of skepticism mixed with fear. "I confess," he writes, "that
in America I saw more than America. I sought there an image of democracy itself or its
penchants, its characters, its prejudices, its passions. I wanted to become acquainted
with it if only to know at least what we ought to hope or fear from it." And that sentence
is so typical of Tocqueville, the way he piles on the descriptive labels, "its penchants, its
character, its prejudices, its passions."
So there are embedded in that two questions, two you might say subordinate clauses or
two sub questions that Tocqueville set out to answer. The first concerns the gradual
replacement of the ancien rgime, that is to say, the French term for the old,
aristocratic order based on privileges, hierarchy, deference and inequality, with a new
democratic society based on equality. How did this happen and what brought it about,
this immense social and political transformation from the old regime, from an age of
inequality to an increasing age of equality, a huge example of what we might call today
regime change or regime transformation? And the second--How did that happen? And
the second not perhaps explicitly asked question, but nevertheless a question on
virtually every page of Tocqueville's book, concerns the difference between the form
democracy has taken in America and the form it took in France during their
revolutionary period. Why, Tocqueville asks, has American democracy been relatively
gentle or mild? Those are two characteristic Tocquevillian terms. Why has American
democracy been what we might call today a liberal democracy and why did democracy
in France veer dangerously close towards terror and despotism during its revolution?
That was the second question Tocqueville set out to answer. Tocqueville believed it to
be virtually a providential fact of history that societies were becoming increasingly
democratic, increasingly egalitarian, we might say. What is not certain, you could say,
is what form democracy will take. Whether democracy will be compatible with liberty
or whether it will issue into a new kind of despotism remains a question that only the
statesmen of the future will be able to answer. And from these two questions, "how did
this transformation occur" and "what form will democracy take in the future," from
these two questions, we can see that Tocqueville wrote his book as a political educator,
that Tocqueville takes his place along with people like Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and
the others as a great political educator. He was more than a mere chronicler of American
manners and customs but rather was an educator of future European statesmen hoping
to steer their countries between the shoals of revolution and reaction.
How did Tocqueville attempt to accomplish this? Let me try to talk for a moment about
what he hoped to teach because you have to admire the book and have to understand it
as an immense handbook, almost as it were of the education of a democratic statesman,
slightly larger than Machiavelli's Prince perhaps but nevertheless a handbook for state
craft nonetheless. What did he hope to teach? Near the end of the introduction, and I pay
special attention to that fascinating introduction to the book--I don't mean the
translator's introduction. I mean Tocqueville's own introduction. Near the end of the
introduction, he writes the following sentence. "I think those who want to regard it,
namely his book, who want to regard it closely will find in the entire work a mother
thought that, so to speak, links all the parts, a mother thought. His word, term is an
ide mere, a mother idea. What is this mother idea or mother thought to which he
refers there? And the most likely candidate for its central idea is the idea of equality.
The opening sentence of the book reads: "Among the new objects that attracted my
attention during my stay in the United States, none struck my eye more vividly than the
equality of conditions. The equality of conditions. What does he mean by that phrase?
What is meant by "equality" here? Note, in the first instance, that Tocqueville speaks of
equality as a social condition, an equality of conditions, not a form of government per
se. This is in part an expression of what you might think of as Tocqueville's sociological
imagination. Equality of conditions precedes democratic government. Equality of
conditions, you might say, is the cause from which democratic governments arise.
Equality of conditions were planted both in Europe and in America long before
democratic governments arose in either place. Democratic governments are only as old-
-at least in France and America, democratic governments are only as old as the
American or French revolutions but equality of conditions had been prepared by deep
rooted historical processes that began long before the dawn of the modern age. So
equality of conditions refers to a social fact, not a form of government, and which
precede democratic government by long periods of time. And in the introduction to his
book, again, Tocqueville gives a brief, I would say very brief, history of equality, taking
it as far back to the heart of the medieval world, some 700 years he says. Unlike Hobbes
or Rousseau, he does not invoke a state of nature as a way of grounding equality.
In fact, for Tocqueville what Hobbes and Rousseau believed that we are by nature free
and equal and only over time they believed were social hierarchies and inequalities
introduced, Tocqueville argues exactly the opposite point of view. The historical
process, so to speak, has been moving away from inequality and towards greater and
greater equality of social conditions. The historical process, at least as Tocqueville
traces it out here, has been a process of gradual equalization of social conditions. His
equality is something like an historical force, something that has been working itself out
in history over a vast stretch of time, and he often writes as if equality is not just one
fact among others but is what he calls a generative fact from which everything else
derives. "As I studied America more and more," he writes, "I saw in the equality of
conditions the generative fact from which each particular fact seems to issue," he says in
the second paragraph of his introduction, "the generative fact from which each
particular fact seemed to issue."
Tocqueville writes here about equality as an historical fact that has come to acquire an
almost providential force over time. And he uses this term "providence" here several
times throughout the introduction. He uses that term not so much to describe God, as
one might think, but rather to describe a sort of universal historical process that is
working itself out, so to speak, even against the intentions of individual social and
political actors. The gradual spread of the conditions of equality, he believes, has two
characters or two characteristics of providence. It is universal, he says, and it always
escapes the power of the individual to control. If Machiavelli believed we can control
fortuna, we can control providence or chance half the time, Tocqueville seems to
believe that the process of equality always escapes the powers of human control. It is
the very power of equality that makes it seem to be an irresistible force. Rather than the
product of the modern age alone, again, Tocqueville shows how the steady emergence
of equality of conditions has been the central dynamic of European history over several
hundreds of years. He frames the book within you might say a very large-scale sort of
philosophy of history in which democracy, equality, and the gradual equalization of
social conditions are the sort of central motifs.
So it is in order to understand that process that Tocqueville turns to America of the
1830s. "There is only one country in the world," he says, "where the great social
revolution I am speaking of seems nearly to have attained its natural limits," one
country where this social revolution, the democratic transformations from the old
aristocratic order to the new democratic age, seems to have reached its natural limits,
and that country is of course the United States. In this context, I think, it is very
revealing that he chose to call his book Democracy in America and not simply
American democracy. Think about that choice of title for a moment. His point, I take it,
is that it's not that democracy is a peculiarly American phenomenon, far from it. His
point is, when he's describing democracy in America, here is the form that the
democratic revolution has taken in America. What form it will take elsewhere or it may
take elsewhere is by no means predetermined. Democracy is not a settled or fixed
condition. It is something more like a process and when we think of the way we speak
today when we talk about democratization, the process of democratization, you can see
that democracy seems to be less a settled or fixed or determinate kind of regime than a
kind of process. It has the quality that Rousseau referred to in the Second Discourse as
perfectibilit, perfectibility, that is to say an almost infinite elasticity and openness to
change.
Again, it is less a determinate political or social order than a continual work in progress
and that is the way Tocqueville looks at America, in some ways, or looks at the future
of democracy when he says, "I look at the place where it seems to have attained its
natural limit" but what form it may take elsewhere is by no means to say that the form it
takes in America is the form it will take anywhere else." Democracy is the regime that
seems to be almost infinitely elastic in terms of its possibilities and this I think is a
profound and astute observation about the nature of democratic government. We do not
know where the process of democratization will end any more today than we did in
Tocqueville's time or that Tocqueville knew. It is a matter for statecraft and leadership
and political thought. Again, will future democracies be liberal and freedom loving or
will they be harsh and rebarbative? That is a question that we are now seeing very
upfront and close in various parts of the world today that are undergoing their own very
tempestuous transitions to democracy as we will say and it remains very much an open
question, what form those democracies will take. That question is at least as important
for us, if not more so, than it was for Tocqueville.
What Tocqueville is sure about, however, is that the fate of America is in some way the
fate of Europe and maybe for that matter the fate of the rest of the world. "It appears to
me," he says, "beyond doubt that sooner or later we shall arrive like the Americans at an
almost complete equality of conditions." He says, in the introduction, that we shall
arrive, speaking to his French audience, a shocking statement again to members of his
class and of his family background, that sooner or later we too will arrive at this
complete equality. He seems to ask the reader, "Do you like what you see, what I
describe? What form democracy will take elsewhere will be very much dependent upon
circumstance and statesmanship." Again, his is an attempt to educate statesmen for the
future.
Let me say a few words, and I will not finish this today but we'll take it up--continue
this a bit on Wednesday, about what were the characteristics of American democracy,
what constitutes, as it were, democracy American style as Tocqueville understood it,
given that, again, democracy has no single determinate form but is characterized by a
considerable degree of elasticity and openness, what are the features that are
constitutive of American democracy. Condensing a vast amount of material from--
especially from volume one of Democracy, there are three features that I want to
emphasize about the unique characteristics of American democracy that lead to, again,
making it mild, gentle or what we might call a liberal democracy. These are: local
government, civil associations, and what Tocqueville calls the spirit of religion, and I
want to talk about each of these three in turn. I'll only probably talk about the first one
here, local government, one of the parts of Tocqueville's book for which he is most
famous.
The first and, in many respects, most fundamental feature of American democracy is the
importance that Tocqueville attributes to local government and local institutions, the
importance of localism, local democracies, and you might say, the spirit that emanates
from it is the spirit--is the key to the whole. The cradle of democracy is to be found in
what Tocqueville calls the commune or what in our translation is called the township,
the township democracy. "It is nonetheless in the township," he writes, "that the force of
free peoples resides. The institutions of a township are to freedom what primary schools
are to science. They put it within the reach of the people." Does that sound at all
familiar? I think it should, in some respects. Tocqueville's description of the New
England township, put within the reach of all the people, clearly demonstrates the
influence on Tocqueville of Rousseau's account of the general will in the Social
Contract. Right? It is the people organizing, legislating, and deliberating over their
common interests that is the core of liberty. Tocqueville very much views the American
experience of local democracy through the lenses shaped or crafted by Rousseau and
this is hardly fortuitous. In a famous letter to his friend Kergolay, Tocqueville admits
that Rousseau was one of three writers with whom he spent some time every day. He
read Rousseau every day, the other two, Montesquieu and Pascal, but it was Rousseau
more than any other figure who, again, helped him understand the democratic
experience and particularly this experience of the township.
Yet, in some ways, Rousseau--Tocqueville combines Rousseau--his reading of the
township, his Rousseauian reading of the township, with a kind of Aristotelian twist.
The township, he writes, he continues in that same passage, is the sole association that
is so much in nature, he says, that everywhere men are gathered, a township forms of
itself. That term "in nature," it is the sole association so much in nature, should alert you
to a kind of Aristotelianism in what Tocqueville is saying. The township is here said to
be a product of nature. It eludes, he writes, the effort of man. The township exists by
nature but its existence is far from being guaranteed. It is fragile and it is uncertain. It is
continually threatened by invasions, not necessarily by foreign powers but from larger
forms of government, state and federal government. The township is continually
threatened by federal and national authority. And Tocqueville adds, with a definite hint
of Rousseau, that the more enlightened the people are, the more difficult it is for them to
retain the spirit of the township. Think of that. The more enlightened they are. The
township relies on a certain kind of spirit of local sturdy and steady habits, not
necessarily enlightened opinion. That spirit of local freedom, again, goes hand in hand
with a kind of rustic, even primitive manners and customs that clearly Rousseau would
have admired and for this reason he laments that the spirit of the township no longer
exists in Europe where the process of political centralization and the progress of
enlightenment have virtually destroyed the conditions for local self-government. I'm
going to end on that note and Wednesday we're going to show a little movie again, a
little piece from a movie about--just a very, very short clip which will illustrate the
theme of civil associations in democracy and we'll go on to talk about religion and then
some other parts of Rousseau. Well, welcome back. It's nice to see you all here.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 22
Transcript
November 29, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Last time, I believe I said I wanted to discuss three features
that Tocqueville regarded as central to American democracy. That is not to say they
were central to the democratic experience, but they are central features of the American
democratic experience and to what degree these can be or could possibly be translated
to other contexts in other emerging democracies remains very much an open question.
But of these three features, the first I talked a little bit about on Monday is the
importance of local government, the township as it's translated in this edition, what
Tocqueville calls the "commune," the community, community spirit, local government.
In some way, connected to what he calls later in the book "the spirit of the city," using
"the city" here in the context of the ancient sense of polis, l'esprit de cit, a kind of
polis-like character in these small New England townships, very important, Tocqueville
believes, for the sustaining a democratic country and a democratic society.
But the second, and probably the aspect of Tocqueville's account of democratic America
that has received the most attention at least recently, is the aspect of what he calls
throughout the book "civil association," civic association. It is what one might think of
as intermediary groups, voluntary groups, civic organizations of all kinds that
Tocqueville is immensely impressed with and which he turns into one of the central
pillars of the democratic experience. He writes that, "in democratic countries," one of
the most famous sentences from the book, "In democratic countries, the science of
association," he says, "is the mother science. The progress of all the others depends on
the progress of that one." And it is through uniting and joining together in common
endeavors, he believes, that people develop a taste for liberty, a taste for freedom. "In
America," if I can just quote him again, "In America, I encountered all sorts of
associations, of which, I confess, I had no idea and I often admired the infinite art with
which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts
of many men to get them to advance it freely." Struck by the immense variety and
multiplicity and sheer number of these various kinds of civic association.
It is important to see, perhaps, this is one area in which Tocqueville seems to most
clearly depart from Rousseau, at least the Rousseau of the Social Contract after having
said last time that his account of local democracy, township democracy owes so much
to Rousseau's account of the general will. But remember that Rousseau in the Social
Contract, would inveigh against, warned against what he called "partial associations,"
partial associations like interest groups of various kinds that had the tendency to
frustrate the general will, that stand, as it were, between the individual and the general
will. But Tocqueville, on the other hand, regards these kinds of voluntary associations,
associations of all sorts as precisely the place where we learn habits of initiative,
cooperation and responsibility with others. By taking care of our own interests or the
interests of our association, we learn to take care of the interests of others. "Sentiments
and ideas renew themselves," Tocqueville writes. "The heart is enlarged and the human
mind is developed." So you can see from a passage like that how much weight he puts
on these civic associations. "The heart is enlarged. The mind is developed." It is through
these associations, PTAs, churches, synagogues and other civil bodies and associations
that institutions are formed that can both resist in its way the power of centralized
authority, central government. But they are also, as it were, the locus, the seedbed where
citizens learn to become democratic citizens.
It is very much important for Tocqueville that these associations, the absence of which
he felt very acutely in France, which had already become a highly centralized society. It
was these intermediary, voluntary associations that stand between the individual and
central authority, the authority of the national government, which is what makes them,
of course, so important for him. This argument about the importance of civic
association--I say it has become, in a way, the most talked about passage or part of the
book in recent years--is due in large part to the influence of political scientist, Robert
Putnam, a man who teaches at another university, a book called Bowling Alone. You've
probably maybe heard of that. Here, Putnam speaks about what he calls "human
capital," what Tocqueville, in less social scientific jargon, calls "habits of the heart,"
mores, habits of the mind and heart. But Putnam argues that it is this social capital that
is developed through civic association and his chief example, as the title of the book and
the article from which it draws suggest, is that the bowling league is a kind of model of
civic association. Particularly, he is concerned with the decline of these associations in
contemporary American life. Hence the title of the book, Bowling Alone.
The fact that Tocqueville himself describes these civic associations as the product of art
suggests that, that is to say, that they are not natural. They are not somehow the result of
some kind of instinctual behavior on us. Joining with others in voluntary associations is
a learned activity. It is something that requires a certain kind of culture and is a learned
activity. It is something also, it is an art, it's a skill, it is a craft that can also be lost. His
argument is that more and more people are, so to speak, choosing to "bowl alone,"
something that shows an alarming tendency towards isolation and the subsequent kind
of depletion almost of our civic capacities. The question is, taking Tocqueville to the
present, have our capacities for joining with others been eroded by the forces of modern
politics and technology? Are, in fact, we becoming more and more a nation of solitaries
and couch potatoes? [Professor Smith talks to crew.] These are some of the serious
questions and there is a big literature that has grown up around it. Some of this literature
finds Putnam's conclusions to be overdrawn, that he exaggerates the influence of these
associations or the decline of these associations. [Professor Smith talks to crew.]

In fact, our civic state is not as bad off as he suggests. But what I want to do, suggest
today, and this is where we're going to show a film and Jude's going to help me, just a
couple of clips, is that there is a serious question, I think, in my mind, whether bowling
leagues are a proper model for a democratic association. Now, one can say, and using
the title "Bowling Alone" that Putnam is just speaking metaphorically, that he doesn't
mean bowling leagues. He's just using it as a metaphor. But let's take him at his word
and let's find out if bowling leagues are, in fact, the ideal transmitter for democratic
mores and values. I want to take an example from a movie of which I'm very fond by
the Coen brothers called The Big Lebowski, which is a movie about a bowling league, or
at least three gentlemen who take their bowling and their bowling league very seriously.
The three of them are "The Dude," who is a stoned hippie, "Walter," who's kind of a
whacked out Vietnam vet and "Donny," who's a lost waif. They are very, very
concerned with getting into the finals, into the bowling tournament. In their way stands
a man named Jesus Quintana who happens also to be a sex offender. I want to show a
couple of clips from this movie and I should warn you that there is some very bad
language being used here. So if you think that is going to be offensive to you, you
should leave. It won't take more than about four minutes or so. We're going to show a
couple of clips about the ethos of men bowling.
[Movie clip shown]
Professor Steven Smith: One more.
[Movie clip shown]
Professor Steven Smith: Obviously, it goes to show that civic association alone is not
enough to create democratic citizens. Again, otherwise, "Smokey" and "The Dude" and
"Walter" would be a perfect example of democratic citizens. Tocqueville focuses on a
third, another leg of the stool of democratic life and that is what he calls the "spirit of
religion." Central, again, as the third and maybe a very important prop of the American
democratic experience. "On my arrival in the United States," he observes, "It was the
religious aspect of the country that struck my eye first." Very impressed with that. Like
other European visitors to the United States, both then as well as now, Tocqueville was
deeply struck with how democracy and religion seem to walk hand-in-hand with each
other, precisely the opposite of what has occurred in Europe where religion and
democracy or religion and equality were long on a collision course.
What made the American encounter with democratic life unique? That is one of
Tocqueville's big questions. In the first instance, you could say, or as Tocqueville notes
that America is primarily a puritan democracy. "I see the whole destiny of America
contained in the first puritan who landed on its shores," he says, "like the whole human
race in the first man." Our experience was determined in crucial ways by early
Puritanism. America was created by people with strong religious beliefs and habits who
brought to the New World a suspicion of government and a strong desire for
independence. This has been the foundation of the separation of church and state that
has done so much both for religious and political liberty. Tocqueville drew from this
two very important consequences, I think, about religious life in America.
The first is that the thesis propounded by the great philosophers of the Enlightenment of
the eighteenth century and still advanced in many, you might say, enlightened quarters
today, that religion will disappear with the advance of modernity. As modernity
advances, religious life will disappear. I suppose in the twentieth century, Max Weber
gave voice most prominently to that point of view that would be a process of
secularization within modernity and a sort of gradual withering away of religious belief.
Tocqueville shows that to be demonstrably false, that religion will not simply disappear
as modernity moves forward and that the Enlightenment and its contemporary heirs,
theorists of development and modernization and so on have been all together wrong
about their confident predictions about the decline and withering away of religious faith.
Secondly, Tocqueville takes it to be a terrible mistake to try to eliminate religion or to
secularize society all together. This is, in fact, probably a more controversial, a very
controversial claim. It was his belief, and again, perhaps here he's influenced by
Rousseau in the chapter on civil religion at the end of the Social Contract that free
societies rest on public morality and that morality cannot be effective without religion.
It may be true that individuals can derive moral guidance from reason alone, but
societies can't. The danger of attempting to eliminate religion from public life is that the
need or desire to believe will therefore be transferred to other and far more dangerous
outlooks. "Despotism," he says, "can do without faith, but freedom cannot." A very
arresting sentence. "Despotism can do without faith, but freedom cannot." "Religion is
more necessary in a republic and in a democratic country than any other," he says.
But why is religion necessary to a republic? Why does democracy require religion?
Here, Tocqueville gives a variety of answers. One persistent theme running throughout
his book as a whole is that only religion can resist the tendency toward materialism and
a kind of low self-interest that he believes is intrinsic to democratic ages and societies.
"The principal business of religion," he frequently writes, "is to purify, is to regulate, is
to restrain the kind of ardent desire for well-being and particularly, material well-being
that becomes particularly prominent during ages of equality." That's one reason. But
secondly or in addition, Tocqueville operates, I find, with a very interesting, I might
even call it a metaphysic of faith that regards religious belief as a necessary component
for human action. "When religion is destroyed in a people," this is Tocqueville. "When
religion is destroyed in a people, doubt takes hold of the higher portion of the intellect
and half paralyzes all the others." When religion is destroyed, doubt takes over. It has a
kind of a paralyzing effect on the will and our capacity for action. This paralysis of the
will, this inability to act is a condition that later writers would choose to call "nihilism."
Faith is a necessary component for our belief that we are free agents and not simply the
play-thing of blind forces and random causes, so to speak. Our beliefs about freedom
and the dignity of the individual are inseparable for him from religious faith and it is
unlikely that these beliefs about the dignity of the individual can survive without
religion. Just to take a contemporary example of that, think about the debates we have
had over such things as cloning and the sense that many people have that the dignity of
the individual, which is often connected with a kind of religious belief, sanctity of life,
the dignity of the individual is somehow deeply violated by these advances of sort of
scientific technology. Religion remains a crucial prop for our beliefs about human
dignity. No more powerful challenge to the Enlightenment's faith in science and
scientific progress can be found than in Tocqueville.
One final issues remains, I would say. Tocqueville often writes, and I would say this is
the dominant tone of his writing on religion. He often writes as if religion is only
valuable or valuable primarily for the social function it serves. This is certainly
consistent with lots of things he says about religion. He's only concerned about religion
for its social and political consequences rather than from the deeper truths of religious
belief. "I view religion," he says, "only from a purely human point of view," he says.
He's only looking for its affect on society. But I would ask, how accurate is that
statement, or does it describe or characterize all of Tocqueville's views about religion? I
think not. Let me just say why for a minute. I think that sort of sociological or
functionalist reading of religion, that he's interested in it only for its social affect, is only
part of Tocqueville's very complex attitude towards this subject. Maybe you'll have a
chance to talk about this in your section. Maybe you'll have an opportunity to write
about it at some other time. But remember that Tocqueville was not only a student of
Rousseau.
As he said in that letter to Louis de Kergolay that I mentioned last time, his other two
great sources of inspiration were Montesquieu and a seventeenth-century French
philosopher named Blaise Pascal. Pascal was a religious philosopher, who more than
any other, emphasized the emptiness of knowledge without faith. Man may be the
rational animal, but reason is somehow unable to plumb or reason is unable to grasp the
unfathomable depths of the universe. In one of his most famous statements, Pascal said,
"A vapor," a drop of water is enough to kill him, speaking of us, humans. "A drop of
water is enough to kill us. Man is a reed, a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a
thinking reed." We are weak. We think, but it is our weakness. It is our dependence,
sense of dependence that struck Pascal. Tocqueville, you can find this in several
passages throughout the Democracy. Tocqueville, I think discovered in Pascal a sense
of kind of existential emptiness, an incompleteness of life that cannot be explained in
terms of reason alone. There is also, he felt, something deeply hubristic about the way
in which conditions of equality foster this idea of rational self-sufficiency.
Tocqueville's purpose, in many ways, was to limit reason to make room for faith, and
this is one of my favorite passages. Let me just read a sentence or two. "The short space
of 60 years," he writes, almost as an aside. "The short space of 60 years will never
confine the whole imagination of man. The incomplete joys of this world will never
suffice for his heart." Incomplete joys of this world will never suffice for his heart. In
other words, there is something we desire beyond the here and now that only faith and
can supply. The soul exhibits a kind of longing, a desire for eternity and a kind of
disgust with the world and the limits of physical existence. "Religion," he goes on, "is
only a particular form of hope and it as natural to the human heart as hope itself. Only
by a kind of aberration of the intellect and with the aid of a sort of moral violence
exercised on their own nature do men stray from religious belief. An invincible
inclination leads them back to religion. Disbelief is an accident. Faith alone is the
permanent state of humanity." If anyone's interested, that's on page 284. But no one can
possibly read that section and come away from Tocqueville by thinking he had only a
kind of functionalist, sociological view of religion, concerned with its effects on human
behavior and society. Disbelief is an accident. Faith is the permanent condition of
humanity and only through a kind of moral violence, through moral violence can
religious faith be eliminated.
I think these passages show a much deeper, almost metaphysical dimension to
Tocqueville's thought. It shows him to be, like Plato in many ways, of enormous
psychological depth and subtlety and insight. But these are the three features, or three of
the features, I think the three central features that remain for him crucial to democracy:
local government, civil association and what he calls the spirit of religion. Yet,
obviously, all is not well. All is far from being well. Too often, way too often we read
Democracy in America as it if were simply a celebration of the democratic experience in
America. It is not. Tocqueville, among other things, is deeply worried about the
potential, I mentioned briefly about this last time, the potential of a democratic tyranny.
Why is there a belief or why would one believe that the democratic government alone
will eliminate various forms of arbitrary rule in tyrannical government? In fact, it might
create new forms of tyranny, democratic tyranny of which previous societies had been,
perhaps, unaware. This is an issue that he treats twice in two important parts in his
work; one in Volume 1, the other in Volume 2. I'm going to talk for a little bit today
about his account of tyranny of the majority in Volume 1 and I'm going to save the rest
of the discussion for next week when he talks about what he calls "democratic
despotism" in the second part of Democracy in America.
In Volume 1, he treats what he calls the "tyranny of the majority" largely in terms, you
might say, that are derived or inherited from Aristotle and even the authors of The
Federalist Papers. As you remember in Aristotle's Politics, Aristotle associated
democracy with the rule of the many. "Rule of the many," for all kinds of purposes,
generally means rule of the poor and rule of the poor for their own interest. The danger
with democracy for Aristotle was that it still represented the tyranny of one class of
society over the society of a whole, the largest class ruling in its interests over the
minority. Democracy for the ancients was always a form of class struggle between the
rich and the poor. That was, in many respects, the way in which democracy came to be
viewed even by The Federalist's authors who came up with their own solution to the
problem of democracy or what they called "republican government." The problem of
republican government was this problem of, you might say, majority faction and their
answer to the problem of majority faction was in Madison's term, "to enlarge the orbit
of government," to make societies and polities much larger in order not to try to
eliminate faction, but to increase them. By increasing the number of factions, you
decrease the possibility that any one of them will be able to represent or exercise a kind
of permanent majority control, a kind of permanent tyranny of the majority. The greater
the number of factions, the less likelihood that any one of them will be able to exercise
despotic power over national politics.
This is a question that Tocqueville returns to or turns to in that very important chapter
from book one called "The omnipotence of the majority in the United States and its
Effects," which is, in many respects, a response or provides his reading and critique of
the classical or traditional theory of democratic tyranny. The U.S. constitution, he talks
about, has enshrined the majority in its own Preamble--"We, the People." It has
enshrined the majority even as it has sought to limit the powers of the people. Although
Tocqueville devotes a great deal of attention in Volume 1-- we're not really reading
these sections, I don't think they're all that important for our purposes--he spends a great
deal of attention simply sort of describing the makeup of the federal constitution, the
structure of the Houses of government and so on. One has to say he is far less impressed
than Madison or the Federalist authors were, that the problem of majority faction has
been solved in America. Again, the Federalist authors, following Locke and
Montesquieu, believed all that was necessary was separation of powers, a system of
representation, a system of checks and balances, that this could serve as an effective
check on majority rule.
But Tocqueville was less certain of that. He was less certain that these, as it were,
institutional devices alone could check what he calls the "empire of the majority." The
empire of the majority, a term that he uses that clearly has kind of theological
connotations, denoting a kind of divine omnipotence, that the people have come to be
the ultimate or final authority. Rather than regarding, as it were, the people in
Madisonian terms simply as a kind of ongoing shifting coalition of interests,
Tocqueville regarded the majority in democratic societies, the power of the majority, as
unlimited and unstoppable. Legal guarantees of minority rights, he thought, were
unlikely to be ineffective in the face of mobilized public opinion. Why does Tocqueville
believe that, or what led him to express such skepticism about even American
democracy's inability to check the prospect of democratic tyranny? In part, I think,
Tocqueville's answer was that majority tyranny was inseparable from the threats of
revolutionary violence and particularly charismatic demagogues and military leaders
like Napoleon in France and America's counterpart to Napoleon, Andrew Jackson.
Napoleon was in France, the man capable of mobilizing the masses into fits of patriotic
zeal and to carry on war. Jacksonianism, for him, simply looked like an American form
of Bonapartism, a military commander riding to political power on the wings of popular
support. More than anything else, Tocqueville feared militarism combined with a kind
of unlimited patriotic fervor. It is in these respects you can begin to see some of the less
ennobling features of the democratic experience and the more ominous possibilities of
democratic rule.
The power of the majority, he says, makes itself feared especially through the
dominance of the legislature. He believed, we could talk about whether this belief is still
valid or true, he believed that the most, again, that democracy tends towards a
dominance of the legislatures where the people's voice makes its will most clearly
known. By having short elections or short cycles every two years in the House of
Representatives, it was a way of making sure that the legislatures, the House, the
Houses, are very close to public opinion and public control. He sees this as a dangerous
thing, this kind of legislative dominance that he sees is one form in the way in which the
tyranny of the majority expresses itself. But the most important and the most
memorable aspects of tyranny of the majority have less to do with these institutional
forms, you might, say. It has to do with the way in which the empire--again, I'll use his
term-- the empire of the majority makes itself felt in the realm of thought and opinion,
the influence of the majority over thought. In an always startling passage from the book,
Tocqueville remarks, "I know of no other country where, in general, less independence
of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America." There's no country
where there is less independence of mind and freedom of discussion.
He is, I suspect, overstating the case, but his argument here is that the dangers to
freedom of thought in a democracy do not come from the threat of an inquisition. They
do not come from something like that, but they are exercised in more subtle forms of
exclusion and ostracism. Tocqueville is, perhaps, in that passage, one of the first and
most perceptive analysts of what today might be called the power of political
correctness, to control and to eliminate certain kinds of ideas and opinions from being
thought. It is the fear of ostracism, in some sense, the fear of being socially ostracized
through which the majority exercises its control. Tocqueville's statement here is, of
course, that persecution can take many forms under a democratic people, from the
cruelest to the most mild. He gives various examples of the crueler forms of the way in
which the majority have expressed itself. In a lengthy footnote to the book, for example,
in some of these parts, he gives two examples; one in which during the War of 1812, he
says there were some anti-war journalists in Baltimore--maybe you read that passage--
who were taken out. Their newspaper press was burnt down and I think they were hung,
he says. This is a way in which mob mentality took over. He also uses the example of
the way in which black voters in the state of Pennsylvania, and he focuses on this
particularly, have been disenfranchised. He mentions Pennsylvania in particular because
Pennsylvania is a Quaker state, that is to say a state where one would have thought
liberal opinion towards questions of racial justice would have been most advanced.
Even there, he says, the majority constrained African American voters from, free blacks,
from voting.
So these are ways in which, again, some overt and cruel and persecutory, others milder
and through the form of ostracism that he wants to say that democratic sovereignty can
exercise itself. "Chains and executions are the coarse instruments," he writes, "that
tyranny formerly employed. But in our day, civilization has perfected despotism itself,
which seemed to have nothing more to learn." We have perfected despotism, he says.
"Under the absolute government of one man, despotism struck crudely at the body so to
reach the soul," no doubt thinking about the Inquisition and things like this in Spain and
in parts of Catholic Europe. He writes, "and the soul escaping from those blows rose
gloriously above it. But," he goes, "in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in
this way. It leaves the body alone and goes directly for the soul." Well, there's a wealth
of commentary you might think about when you read that passage that's implied there.
Oh, God. The time's moving so quickly. There's so much more. So that, for Tocqueville,
is one of the other sides of the democratic experience. Again, I want to return to a piece
of that on Wednesday, next week rather, Monday, because I think you will see in
Volume 2, Tocqueville has something of a change of heart. He doesn't become more
optimistic. In fact, he becomes far more pessimistic about this. But there's certainly a
change of tone in what Tocqueville has to say about the potentiality of majority tyranny.
Well, we had so much fun watching the movie, I didn't get a chance--There's a little
more I wanted to say, but this seems like a good note to break on. I'll try to finish
whatever I can with Tocqueville on Monday and Wednesday I'm going to try to wrap
things up and tell you what you should be thinking about. So anyway, enjoy yourselves
and I'll see you next week.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 23
Transcript
December 4, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Well, today I'm going to finish Tocqueville or, to put it a
different way, I'm going to say what I can about Tocqueville in 50 minutes, which is
hardly finishing him. In fact, we've hardly begun but I want to talk about two things,
two aspects of the book today, again, which will again only scratch the surface, and
those two topics are the following. I want to talk about--a little bit about the moral and
psychological components or features of the democratic state, which is largely the
subject matter of Volume 2 of the Democracy and I also want to speak about the role of
statesmanship. I mentioned earlier the issue of Tocqueville as educator, as a kind of
political educator, and I want to talk today, end up today by talking a little bit about how
he understands the role of the democratic statesman.
But the first part--first subject is largely, again, the subject matter of Volume 2. Volume
1 of the Democracy, as you've probably noticed, focuses mainly, not exclusively to be
sure but mainly on what I suppose we would call "the social and political institutions of
democratic society," the institutional development of the democratic state. Volume 2
focuses much more on, so to call it, the moral and psychological components of the
democratic individual. Tocqueville here shows himself more concerned with the
internal develops, again, the moral and psychological determinants of democratic
character, what is it to have a democratic soul, so to speak. That, I think, is
Tocqueville's concern in the second volume, which in many ways, at least to my way of
reading it, makes Volume 2 a sort of philosophically richer discussion than Volume 1,
precisely because it focuses on what has the democratic social state done to us, how has
it transformed us as individuals, how has it shaped us as individuals. These were, in
many ways, Tocqueville's deepest problems and in this part of the book he shows
himself to be a kind of moral psychologist of the democratic soul, very much along the
same lines as we saw in Plato for example in Volume 8 of the Republic where Plato
speaks about the different kinds of individuals, the different kinds of souls that are
appropriate and have been shaped by different kinds of regimes.
But I'd like to start with--I want to focus on three aspects, spend a little time on three of
the components, aspects, psychological components of the democratic individual, and
those in no particular order I want to discuss as compassion, what this translation has as
restiveness, and self-interest. Taken together, I think, these three terms or these three
concepts constitute, as it were, the sort of moral scope of the democratic state. In
describing these character traits, Tocqueville is providing us with a kind of moral
phenomenology, and excuse please a rather pretentious term, kind of moral
phenomenology of democratic life, one in which we are invited to look and ask whether
we see ourselves in this description and whether we like what it is we see.
The first of these features that I want to focus on, the most important moral effect in
some respects the democracy has had on its citizen, is for Tocqueville the constant
tendency to make us gentler towards one another. This is an old eighteenth-century
theme, to make us more compassionate, to make us gentler in our manners, habits,
morals with one another. This is an old problem. Montesquieu, Tocqueville's great
eighteenth-century precursor--Montesquieu had argued in the Spirit of the Laws,
L'esprit des Lois, that it was commerce that instituted a kind of softening effects on
manners and morals, moving us or taking us from a kind of warlike, aristocratic ethic to
one of gentler manners and morals, and Montesquieu had attributed this largely to the
influence of commerce. Rousseau, you will remember, in the Second Discourse, the
Discourse on Inequality, made piti or compassion, a repugnance to view the
suffering of others, as a fundamental feature of natural man. Compassion, for Rousseau,
remained a kind of remnant of our natural goodness, the fact that we can still cry or
sympathize or empathize, as we might say, with the plight of others even with the
growth of noisier and more powerful passions. This sort of capacity for sympathy or
compassion remains even in civilized life a kind of remnant of our natural goodness.
But for Tocqueville, this feature of compassion is not so much a feature of natural man
as it was for Rousseau but it is for democratic life, a democratic social life. It is not
nature but democracy that has rendered us gentler and led to the softening of morals and
manners. What does Tocqueville mean by that, when he says, "life in democracy has
become gentler"? In a very powerful chapter called "How Mores Become Milder as
Conditions are Equalized," here he describes some of the moral and psychological
consequences of the transition from the age of aristocracy to one of democracy. Under
aristocratic times, he says, in aristocratic ages, individuals inhabited a world apart where
members of one class or one tribe may have been similar to one another but they
regarded themselves as being fundamentally different from the members of all other
social classes or tribes. This did not so much render people cruel but it did render them
indifferent to the pain and suffering of others outside their group. Under democracy,
however, he says, where all are equal, all of us tend to think and feel in nearly the same
manner. We no longer make or imagine these kinds of distinctions. The moral
imagination, so called, of the democratic citizen, is able to transport itself into the
positions of others more easily than individuals living in aristocratic times. All become
alike or at least all are projected or perceived as being alike in our range of emotions,
sensibilities, capacities for moral sympathies. As people become more like one another,
Tocqueville says, they show themselves reciprocally compassionate regarding their
miseries and the laws of nations become milder, the laws of nations become milder,
they show themselves reciprocally compassionate to one another.
That transformation of one of the key ethics of social life for Tocqueville has had
profound effects on us. It has certainly made people gentler and more civil to one
another. Such things, he tells us, as torture, deliberate cruelty, sort of spectacles of pain
and humiliation that were once so much a part of everyday life have largely been
eliminated from the world. I say largely, not entirely to be sure. We more readily
identify ourselves with the pain or suffering of people possibly in very different parts of
the world, world parts that we've never seen and may never visit. Consider, for example,
our response to the victims of the tsunami in Indonesia or the genocide in Darfur. All of
these events affecting people in places, again, where we may never go nevertheless
seem to have a claim on our moral sympathies. President Bill Clinton profoundly
captured this sense of enlarged moral sympathy when he told his audiences, "I feel your
pain." Remember? I don't know. You probably won't remember that but you've
probably heard the expression. It seems to show a kind of enlargement of the moral
sympathies, being able to put oneself in the position of others who one doesn't know
and may never meet. This is all a part of what Tocqueville understands, the softening of
morals under a democratic way of life.
And Tocqueville clearly regards this, in many ways, as a moral progress of sorts in our
unwillingness to tolerate policies of deliberate cruelty in his statement, perhaps
premature, that Americans of all the people in the world have succeeded or almost
succeeded in abolishing the death penalty, not quite true but nevertheless maybe more
truer than it is now. In democratic centuries, he says, men--but all of this compassion--
here is--but here is the problem. All of this compassion comes still at a price. In
democratic centuries, he writes, men rarely devote themselves to one another but they
show a general compassion for all members of the human species. They rarely, he says,
devote themselves to one another. This sort of generalized sympathy is genuine but soft.
My ability to feel your pain does not really require me to do much about it.
Compassion, you might say, turns out to be a rather easy virtue. It suggests sensitivity
and openness. It implies caring without being judgmental. It is not entirely relativistic
but it certainly refrains from imposing one's own moral judgments and way of life upon
others.
Does Tocqueville believe that democratic peoples are in dangers of becoming too soft,
too morally sensitive, too incapable of exhibiting the kind of harsher, what we might
call more aristocratic virtues of nobility, of self-sacrifice, of love of honor that formed
the moral code of previous times? Well, the answer to that question is yes, he surely did
believe that was becoming the case. Compassion is for Tocqueville in many ways an
admirable sentiment and again it is one likely to expand our rage of moral sympathies
but there is something called a kind of misplaced compassion that Tocqueville is very
fearful about. Compassion is a virtue but it carries with us--with it, like every virtue, its
own particular forms of misuse, for example, when compassion becomes a standard by
which to express our forms of moral superiority to others. Consider the following. To be
accused today, particularly in places like college campuses, to be accused of
insensitivity to others, to some kind of moral insensitivity, is among many of us
considered one of the worst moral crimes imaginable. We must all care or at least we
must all pretend as if we care, yes, or must be seen to care about the plight of others
much worse off than ourselves and the result of this, and I think this is Tocqueville's
point, seems to be to create new moral hierarchies of compassion where one's
superiority is demonstrated by our heightened sensitivity and feeling for others.
And it is precisely this kind of misplaced compassion, asking the question who is the
most sensitive among us, a very Rousseauian type question, this kind of misplaced
compassion that is, I think, one of the psychological determinants of what we would call
today "political correctness," obviously a term Tocqueville does not use, but you might
think of the way in which the language of pity, compassion, sensitivity, has so much
shaped our moral vocabulary, ways of thinking about ourselves and judging others. If
you don't believe me, watch almost any daytime afternoon show like Oprah or any of
these other shows and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about and of course you've all
seen these shows, I think many more times than I have but nevertheless--compassion.
This is the first or one feature of democratic social life but it is not the only one. It is
connected or at least it exists alongside another.
At the core also of the psychological life of modern democratic citizens, Tocqueville
writes, is a profound sense of uneasiness, of anxiety, that Tocqueville calls by the
French term inquietude, a word that maybe is difficult to translate into English,
inquietude, anxiety. In earlier translation, this was called restlessness. In this particular
translation, you have restiveness to indicate the sort of perpetually dissatisfied character
of the democratic soul. In many ways, the democratic soul, like democracy itself, is
never complete. It is always a work in progress. And this feeling of perpetual
restlessness for Tocqueville is tied to the desire for well-being and by that he means
particularly material well-being. It is the desire for happiness measured largely in terms
of material happiness that is the dominant drive of the democratic soul. In many ways,
Tocqueville brings to his analysis of democratic restiveness--you can see in it
something of the aristocrat's disdain for the acquisition of you might say mere material
goods for which most of us have to work so hard to acquire.
Perhaps more than anything else this is what perplexes Tocqueville about democracy.
Democracy meant for him predominantly a kind of middle class way of life, bourgeois
life made up of people who are constantly in pursuit of some obscure object of their
own desires. Consider the following passage, one of my favorite from the entire book,
from a chapter entitled, "Why the Americans Show Themselves so Restive in the Midst
of their Well-Being." Let me read it at some length. "In the United States," he says, "a
man carefully builds a dwelling in which to pass his declining years and sells it while
the roof is being laid. He plants a garden and he rents it out just as he was going to taste
its fruits. He clears a field and he leaves it to others to care for the harvesting. He
embraces a profession and quits it. He settles in a place from which he departs soon
after so as to take his changing desires elsewhere. Should his private affairs give him
some respite, he immediately plunges into the whirlwind of politics and when, toward
the end of a year filled with some leisure still remains to him, he carries his restive
curiosity here and there within the vast limits of the United States, carrying his restive
curiosity wherever he may go. He will thus go 500 leagues in a day in order better to
distract himself from his happiness." What a wonderful phrase, "to distract himself from
his happiness. Death finally comes and it stops him before he has grown weary of this
useless pursuit of complete felicity that always flees from him."
Does that passage sound like anything we may have read here? Does it not sound as if it
is modeled almost exactly after Plato's description of the democratic soul in Book VIII
of the Republic, a person who is constantly moving, constantly restless, constantly
unable to concentrate or to bear down on the one or very few things that give life a
sense of wholeness and meaning and integrity? Here is the democratic man, restive in
the midst of well-being, constantly moving ahead or moving to, as he says, distract
himself from his own happiness. Tocqueville writes here, it seems, with a kind of
disdain for a life understood as a constant and, in his view, self-defeating pursuit of
happiness. The desire for well-being you might say becomes the right--almost the right
of the democrat and the more one desires happiness the more it eludes our grasp. In the
sentence just after the passage I just read, Tocqueville says, "One is at first astonished to
contemplate the singular agitation displayed by so many happy men in the midst of their
abundance."
And you can sense Tocqueville's irony in his use of the term "so many happy," the
distractions, the agitation, complete agitation displayed, he says, by so many happy
individuals in the midst of their abundance. There's a world of social commentary
condensed into those sentences. His combination of words like "agitation" and
"abundance" in the same--again in the same context as the pursuit of happiness indicates
for him that this way of life is more likely to bring frustration and anxiety than it is to
bring us satisfaction and repose. And he traces this continual restlessness back to what
seems to be for the democratic social--for the democratic individual the virtual
obligation to be happy. I would ask you in this context if you have some time to read
Darrin McMahon's wonderful new book on A History of Happiness to give you a little
bit of an indication of the way this term has been used throughout its history and the
way in which in many ways the obligation to pursue happiness, to restiveness, that kind
of restiveness, is the source of so much, as he puts it, singular--the singular melancholy,
he says, that the inhabitants of democratic lands often display amid their abundance.
Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness have become what one person once called a kind
of joyless quest for joy and this is the second feature, this restless or restive character of
democracy.
And finally, the third feature of democratic psychology that I want to focus on is this
idea of self-interest or self-interest well understood as Tocqueville calls it. This is a
doctrine with which everybody is familiar from courses on moral psychology, on
utilitarianism, to modern courses on--from--in economics and game theory and other
things where the term "self-interest" is regarded almost as sort of a talismanic--has
almost talismanic properties of explaining all kinds of human behavior. But Tocqueville
means something very specific by self-interest or self-interest well understood. It is in
one sense the kind of, you might say, everyday utilitarianism, not in any strict of the
term, with which we are instinctively familiar when we hear or are told things like
honesty is the best policy and things like this. It seems simple and obvious enough but it
in fact is a very complex and difficult history.
By the time that Tocqueville wrote these chapters in the Democracy, theories of self-
interest had long been a kind of staple of European moral philosophy going back to the
seventeenth century at least, going back to people like Hobbes and others. The question
is what work does this idea, this concept, of self-interest rightly understood do for
Tocqueville? In the first place, he understands it somewhat differently than, I think, we
would. When we hear the term "self-interest," we are likely to think of it as opposed to
or to think of its antonym as indicating some kind of altruism. While interest or self-
interest is thought of as inherently self-regarding, altruism or something like that is an
other regarded--an other regarding disposition, regarding the welfare, well-being of
others. But when Tocqueville talks about self-interest, self-interested behavior was put
forward by him as a kind of comprehensive antonym to behavior motivated by vanity,
by honor and, above all, by the concept of glory, terms, remember, thinking--going back
to Hobbes in some way and Hobbes' concern to replace ideas of vanity, vainglory and
pride with a notion of fear of death, a kind of self-interested behavior.
While glory was for Tocqueville and others associated with war and warlike pursuits,
interest, self-interest, was invariably associated with commerce and peaceful
competition. In contrast, in other words, to the aristocratic concern with fame and
honor, interest was regarded--self-interest was regarded as a relatively peaceful or
harmless disposition leading us to cooperate with one another for the sake of common
ends. The pursuit of self-interest has a kind of unmistakably democratic and egalitarian
impulse behind. The pursuit of self-interest is something literally everyone is able to
follow even while such things as honor and glory seem to be by nature unequally
available to different people. And into this debate between an ethic of honor and glory
and an ethic of self-interest or self-interest rightly understood enters Tocqueville and his
Democracy in America. He begins his chapter called, "How the Americans Combat
Individualism by the Doctrine of Self-Interest Rightly Understood," with the following
sentence, with the following observation.
He writes, "When the world was led by a few wealthy and powerful individuals, these
liked to form for themselves. They liked to form for themselves a sublime idea of the
duties of man. They were pleased to profess that it is glorious to forget oneself and that
it is fitting to do good without self-interest like God Himself. This was the official
doctrine of the time in matters of morality, speaking of aristocratic ages. I doubt that
men," he says, "were more virtuous in aristocratic centuries than in others but it is
certain that the beauties of virtue were constantly spoken of. Only in secret," he
concludes, "did men study its utility." You might think about that passage perhaps in
section but note that Tocqueville adds to the concept of self-interest this idea or this
modifier of well understood. What does this add? What is he intending that to say? Self-
interest well understood is not the same thing as egoism or what Rousseau called
amour-proper, for example. It is not the desire simply to be talked about, to be looked
at, to be first in the race of life in that way. Rather, self-interest is connected, and self-
interest well understood is connected to this passion for well-being and the desire to
improve one's conditions that remained for Tocqueville a very important wellspring of
human actions. But it is important to remember that these are not the only desires or
these are not the only motives for action.
Tocqueville probably is distinguished from many social scientists today by suggesting
that self-interest well understood is not some kind of universal determinant of human
behavior. It is not something universal. It is a product of a particular social state, a
particular, we might say, the democratic social state. He is not in this sense a kind of
moral or psychological reductionist who wants to see one cause of human behavior
across all centuries and all climates. He is not saying that all behavior is self-interested.
In fact, in that very chapter on self-interest rightly understood you will remember--you
may remember, you probably don't remember, that he quotes in a footnote an essay by
Montaigne, a name that I've mentioned before, an essay by Montaigne called Of Glory
to remind the reader that the desire for fame and honor will always contend with the
desire for well-being and happiness. And in many ways, these are two conflicting
motives of human behavior.
What did he believe that this ethic of self-interest well understood would bring about?
Again, like compassion, the doctrine of self-interest has done much to sort of soften the
harsher features of the aristocratic ethics, of warlike--of the warlike nobility. Self-
interest well understood is a kind of antidote to an ethic of fame and glory and yet you
can see throughout Volume 2 especially how Tocqueville laments the decline of this
older aristocratic codes of honor and chivalry. By contrast, the doctrine of self-interest
well understood is not lofty, he says, but it is clear and sure. It has characteristics of
reliability and predictability. It is not itself a virtue, he says, but it can form people who
are, and these are this terms, regulated, temperate, moderate, foresighted, masters of
themselves, regulated, temperate, moderate, farsighted. What does that sound like?
Think about that. What kind of person is this and what has it created? These are the
virtues of the democratic republic. Again, these may not be heroic or extraordinary
qualities but they do have the virtue of being within the range of everyone. But is such a
code or is such a moral code desirable for itself? That's something that Tocqueville
leaves a little bit up in the air. Of all philosophical theories, as he calls it, the doctrine of
self-interest rightly understood is, he says, the most appropriate to the needs of men in
our time. Think about that judgment: It is the most appropriate to the needs of men in
our time. It doesn't seem to suggest that this is either universal or necessarily that it is
the best. It is simply the best adapted to the needs of our time, to our level of humanity,
to where we are now, and again there is a implicit- to be sure an implicit kind of critique
suggested in those--in that phrase that you might think about as you read or as you go
back to that important chapter on self-interest and its role in, again, the shaping of the
modern democratic individual.
So these three characteristics, compassion--What was the other one? What?
Restlessness, yes. Well, good. I'm-- Yes. Yeah. I can't even remember what I'm talking
about. Restlessness and self-interest. I was just--I was quizzing you. I was just checking.
It doesn't have anything to do with short-term memory loss. These are what has shaped
us and Tocqueville holds this up as a kind of portrait in a democratic individual and also
of course primarily to--not so much to the democratic individual but to his readers back
in France and saying this seems to be the future shape of humanity, of democratic
humanity. We need both to adapt to it in some ways. We have to both recognize that
this is what's coming and adapt to it but we also have to be to some degree wary of what
is coming and what kind of people we may create out of ourselves, what may be
created.
And this brings me to the theme that I mentioned at the beginning about democratic
statecraft, democratic education. What is the role of the statesman in a democratic age?
How should one adapt as well as try to guide these features? Democracy in America is a
work of political education, a supreme work of political education addressed to leaders
or potential leaders not only for Tocqueville's time, but for the future. The possibilities
of statecraft are, as they are always, dependent on what we understand politics and
political science to be. What is it? In the introduction to the book, in one of those
characteristically epigrammatic sentences and you should be attuned to these,
Tocqueville often likes to give these one sentence paragraphs to highlight an idea, to
really make it stand out. I don't recommend it for you but for him he takes one sentence
and can make it--turns it into a paragraph. He talks about this book. He says, "Is a new
political science for a world altogether new." That statement has to jump out at you off
the page. What is this new political science? A new political science, again, in some
ways following Machiavelli who departs from the ancients but perhaps also from his
modern predecessors too like Machiavelli and Hobbes or Locke and Rousseau. What is
the distinguishing feature of the political science for a new democratic age, for a world
altogether new?
Tocqueville's new political science, let me suggest to you, is based on a novel and
profound understanding of the relationship between history or historical forces and
human agency, between individual power- individual powers or agency and historical
forces. Let me try to explain what I mean by that. As any reader of the Democracy
quickly notes, even from the opening pages of the book, Tocqueville attributes a kind of
providential power to history. The immense, centuries-long progress or transition from
the aristocratic to the democratic era seems to be, as he describes it, almost an act of
divine providence, almost of divine will. He warns his readers that it is a mistake, it is
self-defeating to try to resist or to turn back this movement. This would be futile. It
would not only be futile. He even suggests it would be impious, it would be in some
ways to go against the will of God, as if the hand of God were behind this immense
historical progress or process. Tocqueville no doubt deliberately overstates that
argument but he does so, I think, in order to make a serious and profound point.
Our politics are deeply embedded within long structures of human history that we can
do little to alter and escape. We seem to be deeply embedded, we as individuals, deeply
embedded within these structures. This is, to use a term that modern political scientists
often use to describe this, it is an argument from what is often called path dependency,
that we are again deeply embedded within historical processes, tendencies, paths of
development that we can do little to resist or control. And in many ways Tocqueville
often--you will find Tocqueville often writing as if he is some kind of historical or
sociological determinist allowing little room for individual initiative or agency. Words
like "fate," "destiny," "tendency" are frequently used throughout the book to underscore
the limits of political action. It would even be an interesting experiment to go through
the book, page by page, and find how many examples of those kinds of words,
"tendency," "fate," "destiny," these kind of deterministic words that suggest irresistible
movements, movement of history, how many times he uses these and in what context.
And he frequently offers predictions throughout the book on the basis of what he
regards to be underlying historical and social trends. You can hardly read a page of the
book, sometimes not even a paragraph, without finding in it some kind of prediction
based on these trends. Again, I would ask you if you have time go through the book.
You don't have time this semester. Maybe it'll be a great senior essay later on, to go
through the book and find examples, as many as you can of again predictions that
Tocqueville makes on the basis of these historical--these--this claim about historical
forces. And much of this seems to deny, taken literally, much of this would seem to
deny the role of independent human initiative or statecraft in history. Consider the
following passage from pages 154 and 155 of your translation. Here is what Tocqueville
writes about the statesman. He says, "Sometimes after a thousand efforts the legislator
succeeds in exerting an indirect influence on the destiny of nations and then one
celebrates his genius whereas often the geographical position of the country about
which he can do nothing, a social state that was created without his concurrence, mores
and ideas of whose origin he is ignorant, a point of departure unknown to him, in part
irresistible movements to society against which he struggles in vain and which carry
him along in turn."
There you go. He gives us a list of all of the different determinants of human
surrounding conditions, geography, mores, social position. These, he says, impart an
irresistible movements to society. There is that kind of deterministic language again
against which he, the statesman, can do nothing and yet he begins this--he begins that
little statement by saying that after a thousand efforts he succeeds in exerting an indirect
influence on the destiny of nations and then he is celebrated as a great genius. You can
see Tocqueville's irony and what appears to be downplaying the abilities or the role of
the legislator, the statesman, to effect change of any significant kind. I don't like to be
political but one might wonder what our President would have made of that had he read
that passage or thought about it or those around him had thought about it a couple of
years ago before our current miseries began.
Anyway, this passage almost seems to be mocking the claims of Machiavelli or
Rousseau who saw the ability of a new prince or a legislator to found peoples and
institutions. Tocqueville seems to regard that the legislator can do relatively little on his
own but is strongly hemmed in by a host of factors, geography, social customs,
morality, again, over which one can do little. The legislator is more like a ship's captain
dependent on the external circumstances that control the fate of the ship and he even
goes on to say the legislator resembles a man who plots his course in the middle of the
ocean. Thus, he can direct the vessel that carries him but he cannot change its structure,
create winds or prevent the ocean from rising under his feet. All of this seems to be on
the side of those historical features that limit what we can do. Yet, if Tocqueville often
writes as if the statesman is hemmed in by these kinds of circumstances, he also, and
you see this especially throughout Volume 2, strongly opposes all systems, all
intellectual or philosophical systems of historical determinism, that deny to us the
power of human agency. While he sometimes writes to shame or to humble the
pretensions of human greatness, he is just as concerned about the tendency, in fact the
very dangerous tendency toward self-abnegation that denies the role of the individual in
politics and history.
He often writes as if it is the peculiarity of democratic times when all peoples are
considered equal and therefore all of us considered equally powerless to effect or
change anything. And again, I would ask who has not felt this way at some time, maybe
all the time, that with all of us being, again, more or less equal no one seems to have the
power, a kind of singular power, to effect any great social change. There is one
wonderful chapter among others but I'll just mention one. Look at the chapter, and I
can't recall offhand the exact number of the chapter, but the one called "On Historians,"
on the role of historians in democratic and aristocratic times, and how he shows us that
in aristocratic ages--he's thinking particularly of the ancient world--historians attributed
to extraordinary individuals all the power to affect nations and change nations but in
democratic times, in modern times, we tend to think of historians, one might also take
his term "historian" to include social science as well. We tend to project systems which
deny the power, the unique power of the individual. We are all products of vast, you
might say, historical or causal circumstances over which the individual has no control.
Think of the way in which Marxism, again, denies the power of the individual, Freudian
analysis sees all of our desires and motives as determined by forces over which we have
little control, all kinds of economic theories of development, again, which see us all
acting under certain kind of uniform rules of human behavior. Where is the room for the
individual? That chapter is a wonderful illustration of Tocqueville's general point.
So what is then his teaching and, more specifically, what is his advice for the statecraft
of the future? And it seems by the end of the book Tocqueville is walking on a very
narrow tightrope. He wishes to convince his contemporaries that the democratic age is
upon us, that the transition from aristocracy to democracy is irreversible, that it cannot
be resisted, and that what he calls the democratic revolution is an accomplished fact,
and yet at the same time he wants to instruct us that what form democracy will take in
the future will very much depend on will, on intelligence, on what he sometimes calls
enlightenment, and especially on individual human agency, what form democracy will
take. Democracy may be inevitable. Equality, the age of equality, may be inevitable but
democracy is not of all one piece. It depends not just on impersonal historical forces but
on what you might call "the active virtue and intelligence of individuals" ranging from
self-interest rightly understood to honor and ambition.
Democracy can still take many forms and whether it will favor liberty or be favorable to
liberty or to some kind of collectivism is for him very much an open question, what
form democracy will take. And Tocqueville returns to this theme, his very, very
important theme, in the last, very last paragraph of his book. "I am not unaware," he
tells his readers, "that several of my contemporaries have thought that peoples are never
masters of themselves here below. There is little we can do. And that they necessarily
obey I do not know which insurmountable and unintelligent force born of previous
events, the race, the soil or the climate." "Those," he says, "are false and cowardly
doctrines that can never produce anything but weak men and pusillanimous nations."
That is to say, these doctrines of historical determinism have an actual effect on people.
It makes us weak. It makes us cowardly. It makes us--it makes entire societies and it
enervates entire society and yet he continues, "Providence has not created the entire race
entirely independent or perfectly enslaved. It traces it is true," he is speaking about
providence. "It traces, it is true, a fatal circle around each man that he cannot leave but
within this vast limits man is powerful and free, so too, he says, with people.
Tocqueville leaves us, in other words, not with a solution but rather with a paradox or I
would say a challenge for us to consider. We are determined but not altogether so. The
statesman must know how to navigate the shoals between historical, social and cultural
forces over which we have no say and those matters of institutional design and moral
suasion that are still within our power to effect. Politics, as intelligent people have
always known, which is not to say all people to be sure but as intelligent people have
known, is a medium that takes place within language. It is a matter of providing people
with the linguistic and the rhetorical abilities both to construct their pasts and to imagine
their futures. It is language, going back to Aristotle, it is logos, it is language that gives
us a latitude, an ability to adapt to changing circumstances and to create new ones.
Tocqueville provides us living in a democratic age with the language to shape the future
of democratic societies. What we do with that language, how we apply it to new
circumstances and conditions that Tocqueville could never have imagined, will be of
course entirely up to us. And on that note I have to end Tocqueville and Wednesday I'll
see you for our last class and I'm going to talk about where we go from there.
[end of transcript]
Introduction to Political Philosophy: Lecture 24
Transcript
December 6, 2006 << back
Professor Steven Smith: Anyway, today, the last class, I had on the syllabus, I think it
was called globalization and political theory or something to that effect and I guess
since writing that I've changed the theme of this final lecture a bit and I want to talk
about defending politics or in defense of politics. And I'll try to explain what I mean by
that as kind of a wrap up and exhortation for this last class.
In 1962, an English political scientist and journalist by the name of Bernard Crick wrote
a short and very polemical and influential little book called In Defense of Politics, and
by politics Crick meant a distinctive type of human activity where conflicts of interests
among groups are adjudicated by discussion, persuasion and debate rather than by force
or by fraud. A political society, as Crick understood it, is one where individuals and
groups played by certain agreed upon rules that will determine how conflicts of interests
are to be decided. Crick called this little book--very lively and still definitely worth
reading--he called his book In Defense of Politics because he regarded the proper
understanding of politics as being distorted by certain currents of thought and practice
in his own day among which were for example the highly ideological style of politics
found for example in the Soviet Union and its client state, the kinds of nationalist
politics emerging in the developing world, and even in some aspects of the conservative
politics of contemporary Britain of his time where that meant a kind of unreflective
deference to customs and tradition. I think today it's important to try to reprise Crick's
plea for a defense of politics although in a slightly different way.
Politics again, as Crick understood it, is something that takes place within a certain
territorially defined unit called a "state." This may seem almost too obvious to bear
repeating. For centuries what is called the res publica has been regarded as the proper
locus of the citizens' loyalty. It was thought to be the task of political philosophy or
political science in its original sense to teach or to give reasons for the love of one's own
country. Classical political philosophy regarded patriotism as an ennobling sentiment.
Consider just a few of the following passages that I asked Justin to put on the board
from Cicero, from Burke, from Machiavelli, from Rousseau, and from Lincoln, writers
from the ancient and the modern world from many different countries and times. All
make important expressions, some more extreme than others like Machiavelli's--what
else would one expect from an extremist like Machiavelli's--to simpler and more
dignified statements like that of Burke or Lincoln but anyway, all expressing the view
that politics has something to do with providing reasons for the love of country.
Today, however, the idea of patriotism, at least among philosophers, seems to have
fallen upon hard times. This isn't to say that patriotism, as a phenomenon of political
life, is likely to disappear. To the contrary. Go drive 20 miles or so outside of any urban
area and one is likely to see flags being waved, bumper stickers on cars proclaiming the
driver's love of country, country music stations playing music that tells us to support our
troops and keep driving our SUVs, all signs of American patriotism to be sure. But the
issue seems quite different in universities and in educated circles, you might say, where
patriotism has come to appear to be a morally questionable phenomenon. Tell someone
at any Ivy League university that you are interested in patriotism and you will be treated
as if you have just expressed a kind of interest in child pornography. Raise the issue and
one is likely to hear very quickly repeated Samuel Johnson's famous barb that patriotism
is the last refuge of a scoundrel or you might even hear, if the person's read a little bit
more, E.M. Forster's famous statement that if he had to choose whether to betray his
friend or his country that he, Forster, wished he had the courage to betray his country.
Forster, the famous English novelist, author of Howards End and other important books,
Forster presents the choice between friendship over country, of private over public
goods, as a kind of tragic and even noble decision that one has to make. But Forster, in
some respect, has given us, I would suggest, a false dilemma. Loyalty is a moral habit
just as betrayal is a moral vice. People who practice one are less likely to indulge in the
other. Consider the following example. A few years after Forster made his statement at
Cambridge, I believe, three young Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s by the names
of Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess, I don't know if those are names that
are familiar to people here any longer but they were very, very famous names at one
point, they chose to betray their own country. That is to say they acted for many years
as Soviet agents and for years passed on vital secrets, English secrets, to Moscow, as
they all ascended up the ladder of British intelligence services until they were finally
exposed in the 1950s. And it was not long after they were exposed and they had all fled
to Moscow that they began to betray one another. Loyalty it seems, like betrayal, is not
a bus that one can simply get off at will. Rather, people who betray others in one area of
life are likely to do so as well in others.
So Forster has given us a false choice between choosing friendship over country or
country over friendship and as with most matters, I think it probably makes greater
sense to examine the problem through the lenses of Aristotle who tells us everything we
need to know about most questions. In the Nicomachean Ethic, Aristotle taught us that
all virtues, that is to say, all excellences of mind and heart, are best understood as a
mean along a continuum of excess and deficiency. It is a matter of finding a balance, the
proper balance, between extremes. So it might be useful to regard patriotism in this
light. If patriotism is a virtue, and I ask the question "if it is," it would be important to
see it as a midpoint between two contending extremes, two contending vices. What are
these vices, you might say, that obscure from us the meaning of--the proper meaning of
the political today? On one side, you could say, the excess of patriotism is a kind of
nationalistic zeal that holds absolute attachment to one's country and one's way of life as
unconditionally good. This is the kind of loyalty expressed in sentiments like, "My
country right or wrong," but was given powerful expression, perhaps the most powerful
expression, in a short book- another short book in this case by a German legal
philosopher of the early twentieth century named Carl Schmitt.
Carl Schmitt wrote a short book called The Concept of the Political in 1921 and here
Schmitt drew extensively on Hobbes but rather to defend a view of the political, but
rather than tying the state of war, Hobbes' state of war, to a pre-political state of nature,
Schmitt saw war and also which includes the preparation for war, as the inescapable
condition of human life, of political life. Man, he believed, is the dangerous animal
because we can kill one another and individuals, and more importantly groups of
individuals, stand to one another in a virtually continual state of conflict and war.
Schmitt believed Hobbes was right in many crucial respects but where he fell down was
in believing that the social contract could create a sovereign state that would put an end
to war. Quite the contrary, he thought. The inescapable political fact is therefore the
distinction between what he called friend and enemy, those who are with us and those
who are against us. To misunderstand that distinction, distinction that goes all the way
back to Polemarchus' view in the Republic, where he talks about justice being doing
good to friends and harm to enemies but might obviously go on much deeper or further
than that.
For Schmitt, that distinction was central to what he called the political. The political, he
says, and he uses that word as a noun, we tend to think of political largely in its
adjectival form, but in Germany you can often use it as a noun as well. The political, he
wrote, is the most intense and extreme antagonism, becomes that much more political
the closer it approaches to the extreme point, that of the friend, enemy grouping, he
says. Friend and enemy are the inescapable categories through which we experience
what he calls the political. Life consists of that fundamental distinction. Athens and
Sparta, Red Sox and Yankees, Harvard and Yale--These are fundamental groupings,
enemies, friends and enemies. All humanitarian appeals, he believed, appeals to the
concept of human rights, to free trade or so on, all of these are, as it were, attempts to
avoid the fundamental fact of conflict and the need for a politics of group solidarity. The
politics of the future, he hoped, would be determined by those who have the courage to
recognize this fundamental distinction and to act upon it.
At the other end, however, of the continuum of excess and deficiency, the defect, you
might say, of patriotism comes to light as a kind of today what we might call
transpolitical cosmopolitanism. Present day cosmopolitanism is, to a very large degree,
a product of another German philosopher named Immanuel Kant writing at the end of
the eighteenth century. Kant stressed, on the other hand, that our moral duties and
obligations respect no national or political or other kinds of parochial boundaries,
whatever boundaries such as race, class, ethnicity, political loyalty, and the like. On this
view, on Kant's view, that is, we owe no greater moral obligations to fellow citizens
than to any other human beings on the face of the planet. Citizenship--if I can use
language that is not exactly Kant's own, but is largely sort of identified with a kind of
Kantian move in philosophy--citizenship is simply an arbitrary fact conferred on
individuals through the accident of birth. But since birthright citizenship is an artifact of
what you might call a pure sort of genetic lottery, there are no moral or special
obligations attached to it. The Kantian emphasis on universality, that is to say that there
is a moral law that can be universalized and held to be true for all human beings,
stressed for Kant that we are all parts of what he called a kingdom of ends, a universal
kingdom of ends where every individual is due equal moral value and respect because
simply of their humanity alone.
That idea of a cosmopolitan ethic of humanity, Kant believed, could only be realized in
a republican form of government, today what we might call a democracy, or, to speak
more precisely, what Kant believed it could only hold true in a confederation of
republics overseen or ruled by international law. Kant was perhaps, I don't know if he
was the first, but he gave the first, he gave the most powerful early expression to the
idea of a league of nations, a league of nations that would put an end to war altogether
between states for the sake of achieving what he called perpetual peace, the title of a
famous essay of his. Hobbes and Locke, he believed, were wrong in attributing
sovereignty, absolute sovereignty, to the individual nation state. For Kant, the state, the
individual state, is merely a kind of developmental stage along the path to a world
republic, a world republic of states organized around the idea of international law and
peace. Only in, he believed, a league of republics would peace among the nations finally
be realized and would individuals be able to treat one another as ends rather than means.
If you want just some indication of how influential Kant's view has been, you can think
that his idea of an international league of nations came to fruition over a century after
his life in Woodrow Wilson's famous 14 Points issued after the first world war and
elaborated more fully in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, all
of which bear the unmistakable imprint of Immanuel Kant.
Now, neither of these views, let me argue, either of these views, Schmitt's or Kant's,
really captures the nature of the political. Let me start adequately so at least. Let me
start with--return to Schmitt again. Schmitt's view is rooted, I believe, in a very
important human truth, namely, the world is a dangerous, in fact, very dangerous place,
like in many ways Hobbes or Machiavelli, Schmitt takes the extreme situation, that is to
say, the situation of war and mobilization for war, and turns it into the norm, turns it
into the normal situation. An extreme situation is one where the very survival, in fact,
the very independence of a society, is at stake and for Schmitt every situation is
potentially a life and death struggle against a kind of existential enemy where one must
decide to choose up sides between friends and enemy. Politics, for him, is a kind of
endless struggle for power guided by national self-interest alone. And yet, it would
seem to me, a politics of unremitting war and preparation for war would be, have to be,
self-defeating even in Schmitt's own terms. For example, why should the struggle
between friend and enemy be exclusively what we might call an interstate rivalry?
Wouldn't competition between individuals and groups just as easily become a feature of
domestic politics as well? Why is war something that takes place exclusively between
states rather than within them, as the logic of bitter rivalry and competition and friend
and enemy cuts all the way down, so to speak?
The logic of Schmitt's argument, at least as I understand it, points not only to war
between states but ongoing civil war and civil conflicts within states, between rival
groups expressing their own desire for power and their own loyalty to their individual
groups. The result of this logic of conflict, it seems to me, would be the negation of
politics, that is to say the destruction of the sovereign state as the locus of political
power. Why should, again, the choice of friend and enemy be a choice between states
rather than individuals. But let me then turn to Kant's view, cosmopolitanism, because if
the effect of Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy is to make politics identical
with war, the effect of Kantian cosmopolitanism is to confuse politics with morality.
Kant and his present day followers wish to transcend the sovereign state and replace it
with known international rules of justice. If Schmitt believed that man is the dangerous
animal, Kant believed man is simply the rule following animal. But Kant's desire, it
seems to me, to transcend the state with a kind of international forum, is both nave
and anti-political. If Hobbes was right when he said that covenants without the sword
are but words, the question is who will enforce these international norms of justice?
Kant's conception of a kind of global justice is to wish a world without states, a world
without boundaries, a world, in short, without politics. International bodies like the
United Nations have been notoriously ineffective in curbing or restraining the
aggressive behavior of states and international courts of justice like that in the Hague
have been highly selective in what they choose to condemn. It would seem that reliance
on such bodies would have the further disadvantage of uprooting people from their
traditions, from their local arrangements that most people find as a source of reverence
or awe. There seems to be little room for reverence for the sacred, in the cosmopolitan
ideal. The logic of this view, the logic of Kant's view for perpetual peace, necessarily
leads to a world state, world government. Even Kant admitted that a world state would
be what he called a soulless despotism. He was opposed to the idea of a world state, but
the logic of his argument leads him inescapably in that view, in that vein. The idea
underlying perpetual peace is that human life as such, human life independent that is of
the kind of life one leads, is an absolute good. Such an idea, I think, can only lead in the
long run to moral decay, that is to say, to a kind of inability or unwillingness to dedicate
one's life to ideals, to the relatively few things that give life wholeness and meaning.
The cosmopolitan state would be--the world state would be the home of what Nietzsche
called the last man, a world where nothing really matters, where there is nothing really
of importance left to do, a world of entertainments, a world of fun, a world void of
moral seriousness.
So these two extremes, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, are today the two doctrines or
tendencies that tend to obscure the true nature of the political. Each of these extremes
contains at best a part of the truth, a partial truth. The nationalist is surely correct in
some respect, to see that politics is always a matter of the particular, particular states,
particular nations, particular peoples and traditions. For the nationalist, the particular
stands for something infinitely higher and more noble than the cosmopolitan or the
universal. We enter the world as members of a particular family, in a particular
neighborhood, in a particular state, in a particular part of the country and so on. We are
a composite of particularities and these attachments, these particularities, are not
something extraneous or accidental to our identities. They are what make us who we
are. The demand that we give up our particular identities and assume a kind of
cosmopolitan point of view would be the same thing to ask us, at least those who are
native English speakers, to give up speaking English and adopt Esperanto, the artificial
false language. I would ask, who was the Shakespeare or Milton of Esperanto? In other
words, everything great derives from something rooted and particular. This is the
morality of what you might call common ties.
But there is also some truth on the cosmopolitan side, on the other hand. Are we simply
determined or condemned by the accident of birth to live by the traditions of the
particular nation in which we happen to have been born? Doesn't this deny what seems
to be highest in us, that is to say our capacity for choice, to detach ourselves from our
surroundings, to determine for ourselves how we will live and who we will be? This
idea of choice, of being able to choose for oneself, is, I think, at the bottom of our
experience of human dignity. We experience our moral worth as human beings through
our ability to choose how we will live, with whom to live, and under what conditions.
This kind of ideal, this cosmopolitan ethic, has the virtue of allowing us to stand outside
of our particular situation and view ourselves from, what you might call, the standpoint
of the disinterested spectator, from a higher or more general point of view. And clearly,
such a morality gives us a kind of critical distance or vantage point on how we can
judge ourselves and our society. From this point of view, our local and particular
attachment to family, friends, fellow citizens, again carries no overwhelming moral
weight. We must view them as we would view anyone or anything else, disinterestedly,
objectively, and this one might call the morality of cosmopolitanism.
Each of these ethics, the ethic of communal ties, the ethic of cosmopolitan
individualism, express, again, an important piece of the truth of politics although neither
is alone complete in itself. How to combine them or what should we do? In many
respects, I think these two ethics, these two forms of ethos, are very much combined
already in the American regime and how the American way of life should be properly
understood. Consider the following. American regime is the first truly modern nation,
that is to say, a nation founded upon the principles of modern philosophy. Our founding
document, the Charter of American Liberties, the Declaration of Independence, is
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. It is fair to say that the
American regime requires more than loyalty, that is to say it requires understanding, it
requires understanding of that founding principle or that proposition, and the various
texts and debates in which that proposition was later articulated as well as the range of
responses and alternatives to it. To believe for example, as you all now know, to believe
that "all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights" requires us to
consider the opposite proposition contained in books like Plato's Republic or Aristotle's
Politics that believe that human beings are not equal and that the best regime is one
governed by a philosophical aristocracy.
So to consider our regime means in some ways to consider it in the light of these
universal alternatives. But ours is also a regime that contains elements of both the
universal and the particular. Again, the American regime is one founded on what
Jefferson called "a self-evident truth," the truth that there are certain unalienable rights,
that these principles are not simply true for Americans but believed to be good for all
human beings, always and everywhere. Consider Tom Paine in The Rights of Man
where Paine writes, "The independence of America was accompanied by a revolution in
the principles and practice of government, government founded on a moral theory," he
says, "on the indefeasible hereditary rights of man that is now revolving from west to
east." In other words, far from suggesting a traditional form of communal morality,
American politics, as Paine suggests there, requires a commitment to the highest, most
universal moral principles. That seems to be the cosmopolitan dimension upon which
the very nature of the American regime rests.
But the question does not end there. The principles of Jefferson and Paine once again
did not arise sui generis. Anyone knows Jefferson's principles about equality and rights
have their profound source in the philosophy of John Locke and particularly in his
Second Treatise of Government. Recall that Locke occupies a central moment in the
development of the modern state and his new idea of a kind of industrious and rational
citizen. Locke's philosophy emerged not only in conversation with the other great
founders of modernity like Machiavelli and Hobbes but, in some important sense, it
emerged in opposition to the tradition of the classical republic whose greatest
representatives were Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius. It would seem then, in other
words, to be an American citizen in the fullest sense of the term requires an immersion
in the philosophical tradition because only in America, of all the countries in the world I
believe, does the philosophical tradition remain most deeply and truly alive. And yet at
the same time, the American regime requires an understanding and appreciation not
only for a set of abstract philosophical ideas and debates but for a constitution, its
history and a distinctive way of life. A regime is obviously more than a catalog of
philosophical doctrines and abstract propositions but is embedded within a particular set
of moral, legal, political, constitutional practices that give it color and distinguish it
from all others.
A proper understanding of the particular regime requires today, or requires at any time,
an immersion in history, not only philosophy but in history, and I mean by history not
social history, economic history or even cultural history, but history in the proper sense
of the term, that is political history. Political history presupposes the centrality of
politics, of how the constitution of any society and its most fundamental laws shape the
character and choices of its citizen body. Political history concerns the struggle of
individuals and groups for power. It concerns the political uses of power or, maybe to
speak a little more clearly, of the two great ends to which power can be put, namely
freedom and empire. Political philosophy is related to political history. In fact, political
history or political philosophy presuppose one another in the same way or in the same
relation of the universal to the particular. While the political philosopher studies the
principles, the underlying principles of the regime, the political historian examines the
way those principles have been applied in practice. While the philosopher is concerned
with the best regime, the regime that is best according to unchanging principles, the
historian is concerned with what is best for a particular people at a particular time and
place, Athenians, Frenchmen, Americans and so on. And this is what the greatest
political historians, Thucydides, Theodor Mommsen, Lord Macaulay, Henry Adams,
this is what they have done. They have examined how different regimes, both express
but also depart from fundamental principles. When Adams, for example, examines in
painstaking detail the acquisition of the Louisiana Territory under the Jefferson
administration, he does so always against the backdrop of Jeffersonian ideals about
democracy and limited government.
But that leads us to the final question that I want to end with, is the proper
understanding and appreciation of the political is not something we inherit but
obviously something we must be taught. Like anything that must be taught, it requires
teachers. But where are such teachers to be found at least today? It would seem only
very rarely in universities and rarer still in departments of history, political science or
economics. Excuse my polemic. Modern professors of history, for example, often
appear to teach everything but a proper respect for tradition. One would get the
impression from many classes that America alone among the nations of the world is
responsible for racism, homophobia, the despoliation of the planet and every other
moral evil that one can imagine. In my own field, political science, that once designated
the skill or art possessed by the most excellent statesmen or politician, civic education
has been replaced by something called "game theory" that regards politics as a
marketplace where individual preferences are formed and utilities are maximized.
Rather than teaching students to think of themselves as citizens as these members--
individuals did, the new political science treats us as something called rational actors
who exercise our preferences, but the question is, what should we have a preference for,
how should rational choice be exercised? On these questions, that is to say the most
fundamental questions, our political science is sadly silent. It has nothing to offer and
nothing to say.
By reducing all politics to choice and all choice to preference, the new political science
is forced to accord legitimacy to every preference however vile, base or indecent it may
be. That kind of value neutrality towards preferences is akin to the philosophic
disposition that we know as nihilism, that is to say the belief that our deepest principles
and convictions are nothing more than blind preferences. So the purpose of political
science is not to stand above or outside the political community as an entomologist
observing the ant behavior but rather to serve as a civic-minded arbiter and guardian of
disputes in order to restore peace and stability to conflict ridden situations. We are in
danger today of losing touch with those questions and those insights that are the original
motivation for understanding politics. In place of these questions has arisen a kind of
narrow-minded focus on methodology often at the expense of the life and death issues
that make up the substance of the political.
So I end with this question. Where should the study of political science be now? You
have sat through 13 weeks of an introductory course. Where do you go from here? To
ask a question posed brilliantly by Karl Marx, he asked, "Who will educate the
educators?" the best question he ever asked. How can we begin a comprehensive
reeducation of today's political science? The only answer and the best answer I can give
you today is simply to read old books. These are our best teachers in a world where real
teachers are in short supply. In addition to what you have read here, I would include
front and center in your future reading books like Plato's Laws, Machiavelli's
Discourses on Livy, and Montesquieu's incomparable Spirit of the Laws, and of course,
The Federalist Papers. To read these books in the spirit in which they were written is to
acquire an education in political responsibility. This, of course, or these should be
supplemented by a study of the deeds and writings of the most important American
statesmen from Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln through Wilson and Roosevelt. And these,
in turn, should be supported by the study of our leading jurisprudential thinkers from
Marshall, Holmes, Brandeis, and Frankfurter. And finally, this should be completed by
an examination of the most important statesmen and leaders from world history from
around the world, from Pericles to Churchill. Once you have completed those readings,
once you have done that, and I would say only when you have done that, can you say
that you are living up to the highest offices of a Yale student aptly summarized on the
memorial gate outside of Branford College which says, "For God, For Country, and For
Yale." Thank you for your time and patience over this semester and good luck to you in
the future.
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