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 HISTORY
OF
POLITICAL
THOUGHT

IMPRINT ACADEMIC
Volume XXVI Issue 1

Spring 2005
 HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
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 HISTORY
OF
POLITICAL
THOUGHT

IMPRINT ACADEMIC
Volume XXVI Issue 1

Spring 2005
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 CONTENTS

How the Sophists Taught Virtue:

Exhortation and Association D.D. Corey

21 Justice, Power and Athenian Imperialism:

An Ideological Moment in Thucydides’ History E. Podoksik

43 The Book that Never Was: Montesquieu’s

Considerations on the Romans in
Historical Context P.A. Rahe

90 Gladstone, Religious Freedom and

Practical Reasoning D.J. Lorenzo

120 What’s in a Name? Republicanism and

Conservatism in France 1871-1879 M. Hawkins

143 Book Reviews

Volume XXVI_ Issue 1

Spring 2005
 The Intellectual Legacy of Michael Oakeshott
Timothy Fuller and Corey Abel (ed.)
This volume brings together a diverse range of perspectives
reflecting the international appeal and multi-disciplinary
interest that Oakeshott now attracts. The essays offer a
variety of approaches to Oakeshott’s thought — testament to
the abiding depth, originality, suggestiveness and complexity
of his writings. The essays include contributions from
well-known Oakeshott scholars along with ample
representation from a new generation. As a collection these
essays challenge Oakeshott’s reputation as merely a ‘critic of
social planning’.
Contributors include Corey Abel, Josiah Lee Auspitz,
_ Debra Candreva, Wendell John Coats Jr., Douglas DenUyl,
George Feaver, Paul Franco, Richard Friedman, Timothy
Fuller, Robert Grant, Eric S. Kos, Leslie Marsh, Kenneth
Minogue, Terry Nardin, Keith Sutherland, Martyn P.
Thompson and Gerhard Wolmarans.

464 pages £30/$58 1-845-400-097 (cloth) Feb. 2004

Michael Oakeshott: Selected Writings, Volume |:

What is History? and other essays

Michael Oakeshott; Luke O'Sullivan (ed.)

What isHistory?
_ and other essays
This new collection of thirty unpublished pieces by Michael
Oakeshott covers every decade of his career, and adds to
his contributions to the philosophy of historical
understanding, politics, education and aesthetics. The
essays are in an informal style that will be accessible to new
readers as well as those already acquainted with
Oakeshott’s works. Early pieces include ‘On the Relations of
Philosophy, Poetry, and Reality, Oakeshott’s comments on
‘The Cambridge School of Political Science’, and a wartime
essay ‘On Peace with Germany’. There are two new essays
on the philosophy of education and ‘What is History?’ is just
one of over half a dozen discussions of the nature of
historical knowledge. Oakeshott’s later sceptical,
‘hermeneutic’, thought is represented by pieces such as ‘The
Emergence of the History of Thought.’ Reviews of books by
Butterfield, Hayek, Voegelin, and Arendt help to place him in
context. ;
‘Essays which are masterpieces of their kind, from a subtle,
Edited by Lake O'Sullivan: unconventional thinker whose insights deserve a wider
audience.’ Jonathan Sumption, Spectator
‘These neglected essays revive some fine flourishes of
Oakeshottiana.’ Peter Coleman, Quadrant
464 pages £30/$58 0-907-845-835 (cloth)
Forthcoming (2006-8) volumes,
Michael Oakeshott, Selected Writings:
Vol. Il, Lectures in the History of Political Thought, (ed. T. Nardin & Luke O'Sullivan) 1845400054
Vol. Ill, The Concept of A Philosophical Jurisprudence: Essays and Reviews 1926-52, 1845400305
Vol. IV, The Vocabulary of A Modern European State: Essays and Reviews 1953-88, 1845400313

imprint-academic.com/idealists
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE:
EXHORTATION AND ASSOCIATION

David D. Corey'

Abstract: The Greek sophists are perhaps most noteworthy in the history of politi-
cal thought for their claim to be able to teach virtue (areté) for pay. Socrates, by
contrast, claimed not to be able to teach virtue, though his method of elenchus or
refutation had a moral-pedagogical dimension that is often said to have rivalled
the pedagogical practices of the sophists. The present study examines the sophistic
pedagogical methods of exhortation and association, and compares these to the
Socratic method of refutation in order to assess their relative effectiveness. The
following three conclusions are reached: that Socratic elenchus was probably
less effective than either exhortation or association as a method of imparting vir-
tue; that Socrates in fact made use of exhortation and association in addition to
elenchus; and, finally, that the sophists’ unique approach to exhortation and
association in particular would have made their methods extremely effective and
worthy of imitation today.

How Virtue is Taught: Refutation, Exhortation and Association

[A]nd I should have called my book The Art of Virtue, because it would
have shown the means and manner of obtaining virtue, which would have
distinguished it from the mere exhortation to be good, that does not instruct
and indicate the means, but is like the apostle’s man of verbal charity, who
only without showing to the naked and hungry how or where they might get
clothes or victuals, exhorted them to be fed and clothed.’

In every mature society the problem of how to impart cherished and essential
civic virtues to succeeding generations 1s a topic of political and philosophical
debate. The problem may be said to have two sides: first, the question of what
virtues ought to be imparted, and, second, the question of how to impart them.
With a few notable exceptions, the long tradition of political-philosophical
discourse on this topic from antiquity to the present has focused almost exclu-
sively on the first of these questions to the neglect of the second. Why should
this be so? The answer is fairly obvious. The first question has proven so very
difficult to answer — to answer, that is, in a way that is not question-begging
from a philosophical point of view — that to tackle the second question, while
the first remains unresolved, seems somehow foolhardy or presumptuous. If
this is true (and I do not doubt that it is), then the present study may be
regarded as an exercise in foolhardiness and presumption, for its aim is
I Department of Political Science, Baylor University, PO Box 97276, Waco, TX
76798-7276, USA. Email: David_D_Corey @Baylor.edu
2 Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (New York, 1996), pp. 70-1; the Biblical refer-
ence is to James 2:15, 16.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

2 DD ACORE

precisely to raise the question of how political virtues can and have been
taught. In order to think about this topic fruitfully and concretely, I propose
to examine the pedagogical methods of the Greek sophists, whose singular
boast it was to be more capable than anyone else of imparting political vir-
tue.* The sophists’ principal methods were two in number: ‘exhortation’ and
‘association’, and I wish to consider each of these in turn. To do so, I shall
set these methods against the backdrop of another ancient method of impart-
ing virtue, the well-known and oft-evoked Socratic method of elenchus or
refutation.
It is true, of course, that Socrates (according to Plato and Xenophon)
never claimed to be able to teach virtue; indeed, he emphatically denied he
could teach it. But it is also true, according to both these disciples, that Soc-
rates did in fact teach virtue (political and non-political virtues alike), and
did so as well as, if not better than, any of the sophists.* So for the purposes
of this essay, I shall set Socrates’ own disavowals aside and consider what
Socrates in fact appears to have done. The reason I think it important to
examine the Socratic and sophistic methods together is that Socratic
elenchus, with its power to identify and strip away unexamined beliefs, is so
often hailed by commentators today as the best method of imparting politi-
cal virtue.” Yet when Socratic and sophistic methods are examined side-
by-side the matter seems more complicated. As it turns out — and this will
constitute the argument of the pages that follow — the sophistic methods
have some advantages over Socratic elenchus for certain types of virtue and
certain types of students, and thus Socrates himself makes use of these
methods on occasions where they are appropriate. This has never to my
knowledge been adequately stressed in the scholarly literature on Socrates
or the sophists.°

3 See C.J. Rowe, ‘Plato on the Sophists as Teachers of Virtue’, History of Political
Thought, IV (3) (1983), pp. 409-27.
4 On Socrates’ denial that he is a teacher, see Plato, Apology, 19d—20c; Meno, 70b;
Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.11.2—3; 1.11.8; for his students’ counter-claim that he could
teach, see Xenophon, Memorabilia, L.iii.1, l.iv.1; and compare Plato, Euthydemus,
278d—282d and 288c—293a.
> Consider, for example, M. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense
of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp. 15-49, 257-92; see also
Hannah Arendt, “Philosophy and Politics’, Social Research, 57 (1) (1990), pp. 73-103;
and Hannah Arendt, ‘Thinking and Moral Considerations’, Social Research 38 (3)
(1971), pp. 417-46.
© For a good discussion of Socratic elenchus in general, see most recently Does Soc-
rates Have a Method?, ed. G. Scott (University Park, PA, 2002), with references. On the
sophistic methods of imparting virtue, see the brief discussion of W.K.C. Guthrie, The
Sophists (Cambridge, 1971), pp. 250-60; and G.B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement
(Cambridge, 1981), pp. 131-8.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 3

Socratic Refutation

The practice of refuting interlocutors by means of a question-and-answer

style of conversation was not a Socratic invention,’ but Socrates was
apparently the first person to make use of the technique in the field of moral
education. Socratic elenchus is sometimes presented today as a strictly philo-
sophical method, one intended for the pursuit of philosophical truth but nor
for moral education. However, Plato’s Apology leaves little doubt that such
accounts are too narrowly construed. For when Socrates describes for his
jurors the way he would examine and refute everyone in Athens, rich and
poor, young and old alike, it is clear that his refutations serve a partially moral
purpose. His aim was to show that ‘human wisdom is worth little or nothing’,*
that people think they know about virtue when they do not,’ and that people
value unimportant things too highly.'° Socrates indeed believes, or at least says
he believes, that ‘no greater good has arisen for you in the city than my service
to the god’, and this service is none other than that of refuting the ‘supposedly
wise’.'!
There is another description of Socratic refutation in Plato’s late dialogue,
the Sophist, that also reveals its moral-educative function. The Eleatic Stranger
in that dialogue describes several methods of teaching virtue, when he comes
to what he calls a method of kathartiké, or purification. This Socratic method
consists of cross-examining (dierdtdsin) a person who thinks he is saying
something reasonable, but whose opinions are in fact various and inconsis-
tent. The opinions are then collected together in conversation, placed side by
side, and shown to conflict.'* This is said to have the following effect:

The people who see this [i.e. that their opinions are self-conflicting] get
angry at themselves, and become calmer toward others. They lose their i1n-
flated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way, and no loss is pleasanter
to hear or has a more long lasting effect on them. [Just as] doctors who work
on the body think it can’t benefit from food that’s offered to it until what’s
7 The invention of dialectical refutation is variously ascribed to Zeno of Elea (Aris-
totle, fr. 65, in Avistotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta, ed. V. Rose (Stuttgart,
1886)) or to the sophist Protagoras (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers, 1X.51).
8 Plato, Apology, 23a.
° Ibid., 29e.
10 Tbid., 30a.
'l Ibid.
12 Plato, Sophist, 230b4—8. It is important to bear in mind that this is but one Platonic
account of Socratic elenchus. A sizable literature has developed around the question of
what, exactly, the elenchtic method entails in various Platonic dialogues. See especially
R. Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic (Oxford, 1953), pp. 7-19; G. Vlastos, ‘The
Socratic Elenchus’, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 1, ed. Julia Annas
(Oxford, 1983), pp. 27-58; and H. Benson, “The Dissolution of the Problem of the
Elenchus’ ,in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Vol. 13, ed. C.C.W. Taylor (Oxford,
1995), pp. 45-112.
4 D.D. COREY

interfering with it from inside is removed, so too the purifiers of the soul...
likewise think the soul will not benefit from the teachings [mathématén]
that are offered to it until someone shames it by refuting [elenchdén],
removes the opinions that interfere with learning, and exhibits it cleansed.'*
Here refutation is presented as a preparation for moral instruction, as opposed
to a substantive teaching.'* But it stands, nevertheless, as a part of moral edu-
cation in general. For besides the fact that the success of positive teachings
depends precisely on the readiness of the soul that refutation brings about,
being refuted also nurtures specific moral qualities: gentleness, modesty and a
realistic sense of what one knows. There can be little doubt that Socrates
regarded and employed refutation as a way of leading his interlocutors from a
worse to a better moral state.
The more one thinks about it, however, the more Socratic refutation seems
a rather odd way of imparting political virtue. For one thing, it tends to make
people angry more often than it makes them gentle, as is evident enough from
the mere fact of Socrates’ trial. For when the question comes up at the trial
why so many people around Athens are angry with Socrates, Socrates himself
points to simply one thing: his practice of refutation. Thus Socrates recounts
in the Apology how he became hated (apéxthomén) first by the politicians
when he refuted their false claims to wisdom; how the poets and craftsmen
came to hate him in the same way;’° and, finally, how certain youths tried to
imitate his refutations by refuting others in a Socratic manner, generating
even more widespread hatred of Socrates.'® Far from rendering people ‘gen-
tler’ (as the quotation from the Sophist suggests), Socrates’ practice of refuta-
tion appears to have systematically turned people against him. Indeed it seems
to have produced anything but a positive moral effect.
Some people, of course, did respond positively to being refuted. In Plato’s
Laches, for example, the character Nicias professes to find pleasure in the
experience.'’ But even in such cases as this, one must wonder how long last-
ing the moral effect really was.'® In the Symposium, Alcibiades (who claims to
find Socratic refutation humbling and edifying) offers the following worri-
some reflection: ‘I know perfectly well that I cannot prove Socrates wrong
when he tells me what I should do, yet the moment I leave his side, I go back to

13 Plato, Sophist, 230b8—d3, trans. N. White (with minor alterations), in Plato: Com-
plete Works, ed. J. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1997).
'4 Tn practice, however, Socratic refutation often involves positive moral teachings,
as was noted by Vlastos, ‘The Socratic Elenchus’, p. 44, n. 47.
'S Plato, Apology, 21el.
16 Tbid., 23c8-9.
'7 Plato, Laches, 188a6-188c3.
18 On this question, see Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, pp. 17-18; and A. Nehamas,
“What did Socrates Teach and to Whom did he Teach it?’, in Virtues of Authenticity
(Princeton, 1999), p. 71.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 5

my old ways: I cave in to my desire to please the crowd’.'® Thus it may well be
true, as Friedrich Nietzsche once famously put it, that ‘nothing is easier to
expunge than the effect of a dialectician’.*° Certainly many of Socrates’ inter-
locutors appear temporarily silenced or dumbstruck by refutation, but not
really persuaded. One thinks especially of Thrasymachus in the Republic,
Callicles in the Gorgias, or Hippias in the Hippias Minor. In a recent treat-
ment of this question, Alexander Nehamas lists no fewer than ten interlocu-
tors who walk away from Socratic refutation unmoved.”!
All these considerations taken together suggest that refutation should be
used very judiciously if it is going to be used at all. In the Apology, Socrates
announces his willingness to refute ‘anybody, young or old, citizen or for-
eigner’.”” But even Plato seems to have reservations about this policy. For in
the Republic, he has a much more cautious Socrates warn Glaucon that “Those
with whom one shares arguments should possess orderly and stable natures,
not as is done nowadays in sharing them with whoever chances by and comes
to it without being suited for it’.”* Furthermore, the Socrates whom Plato pres-
ents in the Republic fully acknowledges that refutation can be morally harm-
ful. People who learn to refute may ‘fall quickly into a profound disbelief of
what they formerly believed, and thus become, along with the whole activity
of philosophy the objects of slander among the rest of men’. Such cautionary
remarks underscore Plato’s awareness that refutation is not a method of moral
instruction for just anyone. Plato thus retains it within the overall educational
scheme set out in the Republic only after placing careful (and notably un-
Socratic) restrictions on its use.”

Exhortation

A more traditional approach to teaching virtue is the method of exhortation, a

method which the sophists carefully refined and routinely employed. An
exhortation is simply a speech that inspires its audience to live virtuously; but

'9 Plato, Symposium, 216b; trans. A. Nehamas and P. Woodruff in Plato: Complete
Works.
20 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (New York, 1990),
p. 42.
21 Nehamas, ‘What did Socrates Teach and to Whom did he Teach it?’, p. 70.
22 Plato, Apology, 30a3-4.
23 Plato, Republic, 539d, trans. A. Bloom, The Republic of Plato (New York, 1968);
cf. Euthydemus 304a.
24 Plato, Republic, 539c, trans. Bloom.
25 Among other prerequisites for learning dialectic, of which refutation is a part, Soc-
rates in the Republic (537d) requires that the pupil be at least thirty years of age and sub-
jected to a battery of carefully designed tests.
6 DD, COREY.

the sophists had a rather special way of doing this.*° They worked their exhor-
tations into beautiful, mythical stories about gods and heroes, virtues and
vices, and thus managed to make them extremely compelling. In Plato’s dia-
logue, Hippias Major, the sophist Hippias makes reference to an exhortation
he has recently delivered in Sparta concerning the noble practices (kalén
epitédeumatén) which young men ought to engage in.”’ Hippias embeds his ex-
hortation into a story that is set just after the fall of Troy. He has Neoptolemus,
the son of Achilles, ask the wise old Nestor “what practices a person should
take up during his youth in order to win the highest respect’. Nestor then pro-
pounds (hupotithémi) to his young admirer ‘a great number of excellent rules
of life’.** Unfortunately, we do not know what these excellent rules of life
were, since the content of the exhortation has not come down to us. But to
judge from Plato’s overall portrayal of Hippias in this dialogue, the ‘rules of
life’ could have been nothing other than traditional moral values. For Hippias
was allowed to deliver this exhortation in Sparta; and the Spartans, as Hippias
himself makes clear,” would not tolerate unconventional teachings.*”
Another sophistic exhortation is Prodicus’ education of Hercules at the
crossroads by Areté, or virtue personified.*’ Here Hercules is made to stand
for everyman as he faces the fundamental decision of his life: the choice
between virtue and vice. In ornate style, Prodicus portrays Vice as a deceptive
harlot, Areté as a genuinely attractive counsellor of wisdom. In a speech to
Hercules as ontologically profound as it is morally instructive, Areté is made
to refute the ‘easy life’ promised by vice:
I will not deceive you by a pleasant prelude: I will rather tell you truly the
things that are [ta onta], as the gods have ordained them. For of all things
good and fair, the gods give nothing to man without work and care. If you

6 The Greek language contains several equivalents to the English verb ‘to exhort’:
parakeleuomai, paramutheomai, protrep6 and, in a qualified sense, epideiknumi (from
which derives the noun epideixis); an epideixis is literally a ‘showing’ or ‘display’, and
its ostensible purpose in the hands of the sophists was to display their own intellectual
and rhetorical abilities and to entice prospective students; but sophistic epideixeis often
did much more than this; they often presented full-fledged moral exhortations aimed at
inspiring audiences to practice virtue. While not all epideixeis had this moral-hortatory
component, several of the most famous ones did. One might therefore think of an
epideixis as a ‘display’ not only of the sophists’ talents, but also (in many cases) of the life
of virtue as well.
27 Plato, Hippias Major, 286a.
28 Ibid., 286b, my translation.
29 Tbid., 284b.
30 Hippias exhibits his moral conventionality in the Hippias Minor when he refuses
again and again to accept the radical moral theories put forth by Socrates (e.g. to commit
wrongs voluntarily is better than to commit them involuntarily, etc.); see especially
376b7; and see also, P. Woodruff, Plato: Hippias Major (Indianapolis, 1982).
31 Xenophon, Memorabilia, I1.1.21-34.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 7

want the favour of the gods, you must worship the gods; if you desire the
love of friends, you must show kindness to your friends; if you desire to be
honoured by some city, you must assist that city; if you deem it valuable to
be admired by all of Greece for areté, you must strive to do good for
Greece; if you want land to yield you fruits in abundance, you must care for
that land. . . and if you want your body to be strong, you must accustom
your body to be the servant of your mind, and train it with toil and sweat.**
Clearly an exhortation, this speech aims not only at refuting Vice, but also at
recommending specific virtues: piety, friendship, service to one’s city, respect
for elders, temperance, patience and hard work;*’ and as with Hippias’ Nestor
speech, this is done artfully by creating a speech within a speech. The sophist
exhorts his audience to virtue with a narration about how an admirable hero
was once exhorted by a goddess. One finds oneself suddenly and powerfully
removed to a distant world of imagination and unwittingly drawn in to the life
of virtue.
The engagement of the audience’s imagination in both these sophistic
exhortations could not have been accidental. For imagination transforms what
would otherwise be a set of pedantic moral precepts into something much
closer to personal experience.** Another way of describing this, perhaps, is in
terms of ‘narrative distance’. The sophists do not exhort people directly —
they retell legendary exhortations; and if this works anything like the way it
works with novels and films today, the audience will have found itself
unexpectedly and powerfully drawn in.’ Stories disarm while they morally
instruct. They appeal to aesthetic rather than rational impulses.*°

32 bid., 11.1.27-28, my translation.

33 Not all of these virtues appear in the excerpt quoted; see ibid. for the entire speech.
34 Impressed by Prodicus’ speech, and anxious to defend this sophist from ancient as
well as modern attacks, George Grote wrote in Volume 8 of his History of Greece (Lon-
don, 1850), pp. 511-12: “Who is there that has not read the well-known fable called “The
Choice of Hercules”, which is to be found in every book professing to collect impressive
illustrations of elementary morality? Who does not know that its express purpose is, to
kindle the imaginations of youth in favour of a life of labour for noble objects, and against
a life of indulgence?’
35 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, 1984), pp. 211-25, argues that human
actions in general become intelligible only in terms of a ‘narrative’ self-understanding.
In other words, we understand any given action we might take in relation to actions
(either our own or others’) that have preceded and in relation to the stories we hope to
enact. It follows for MacIntyre (and IJ think he is right) that set narratives such as novels,
plays, poems, etc. have a tremendously powerful and emotive effect upon our own con-
duct. The most effective way to teach moral conduct, MacIntyre argues, is through story.
36 As aesthetic appeals to morality, sophistic exhortations are not far removed from
the earlier poetic and literary ways in which virtue was customarily imparted in Greece.
One of the prime venues for such instruction was the symposium, or drinking party, in
which a myrtle branch was passed from guest to guest and poetry of a moral nature
recited; see further, H.I. Marrou, A History of Greek Education in Antiquity, trans.
8 D:D. COREY

Let us now return to Socrates for a moment and note that Socrates appears
to have made use of moral exhortation as well. This fact is often denied, due to
a number of familiar passages of Plato. Certain passages in the Gorgias, for
example, suggest not only that Socrates disliked making speeches, but also
that he would never have tried to address a large audience.*’ His approach was
rather to persuade individuals by securing their personal commitment to spe-
cific moral propositions (a method which, as all good teachers know, becomes
less effective in proportion to the size of the group one addresses). In fact,
Socrates all but says in the Gorgias that it is impossible to teach anything of
importance to a large audience.*®
Moreover, if the Gorgias invokes doubt about Socrates’ ability to exhort
large audiences, the Sophist would have us believe he never exhorted at all.
For exhortation is characterized there as the wrong-headed and ineffective
way of teaching virtue, which Socrates’ art of refutation is specifically
designed to replace.*” The problem with exhortation, according to the Sophist,
is that ‘if someone [i.e. a student] supposes himself wise, he will never be
willing to learn anything about what he thinks he’s [already] clever at’.*°
Thus, the only approach to teaching virtue with any chance of success would
be one that removes false beliefs before attempting to impart new ones —
Socratic elenchus.
However, these passages are misleading. For it is plain from other texts that
Socrates did exhort people with moral speeches; he did address large audi-
ences; and he even (contrary to the impression one gets from the Sophist) used
exhortation successfully as a way of removing people’s false moral beliefs. If
this last feat should seem impossible, it may help to recall that even in
Prodicus’ speech of Areté against Vice, one finds the refutation of specific
moral beliefs — beliefs that Prodicus’ audience may well have harboured
within their souls about the potential utility of vice. True utility, Prodicus
makes clear, comes not from pleasure, luxury or the exploitation ofothers, but
rather from hard work, friendship and the other virtues listed above. Thus it is

G. Lamb (New York, 1956), pp. 70-1. It should be borne in mind that most ofthe great
sophists were also poets.
37 For his dislike of speeches, see Plato, Gorgias, 465e, and recall Socrates’ insis-
tence throughout this and other early dialogues upon dialogomenos (conversation) and
bracheos legein (speaking briefly); for his eschewal of large audiences, see Gorgias,
474a-b, where Socrates tells Polus: ‘I know how to provide one witness for what I say:
the man himself to whom my speech is directed, while I bid the many farewell; and I
know how to put the vote to one man, while I don’t converse with the many either’.
38 Plato, Gorgias, 455a, 476a.
39 Plato, Sophist, 230a—e; the word for exhortation here is paramutheomai.
40 Jhid., 230a, my translation.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 9

quite possible to refute and to exhort at the same time, and Socrates similarly
weaves refutations into his exhortations.”!
One text that refers unmistakably to Socratic exhortations is the Apology,
where Socrates tells his jury that even if they were to threaten his life, he
would still continue to exhort them (parakeleuomai) in the way he always
has.** He then supplies a short example of the kind of exhortations he delivers:
O best of men, you are Athenian, from the city that is best reputed for wis-
dom and strength: are you not ashamed that you care for having as much
money as possible, and reputation, and honor, but that you neither cultivate
nor give thought to prudence, truth, or how your soul will be the best pos-
sible?*°
Besides the fact that this little exhortation aims clearly at removing ‘false’
beliefs by identifying them and juxtaposing them with other, ‘true’, beliefs,
there are several things worth noting. One is that, unlike the sophistic exhorta-
tions just examined, this exhortation is direct: no story is told, no narrative
distance maintained; Socrates simply tells his audience what he thinks. More-
over, Socrates goes much further than the sophists in actually imputing beliefs
to his audience. Prodicus had attacked the arguments of Vice in abstracta,
never for amoment alleging that his audience actually possessed those beliefs
(though they may well have). Socrates by contrast attacks views that he
ascribes explicitly to his audience. Finally, it is important to note the reliance
of Socratic exhortation on both reason (logos) and shame (aidés). The over-
arching question Socrates puts to his audience is whether or not they are
ashamed (aischuné) to be acting and thinking as they do; and (since they
obviously are not) Socrates attempts to shame them by showing them the
41 The secondary literature on Socratic exhortation is surprisingly sparse; this may be
because the passages we have just examined from the Gorgias and Sophist suggest that
Socratic exhortation does not exist; it may also be due to the analytical direction that
much modern scholarship on Socrates has taken in recent years and the fact that Socratic
elenchus lends itself more readily to analytical studies than does exhortation. However
that may be, most accounts of Socratic education neglect the topic entirely; a few excep-
tions are noted below.
42 Plato, Apology, 29d ff.
43 Ibid., 29d-e; this and all subsequent quotations from the Apology are taken from T.
West and G. West, Four Texts on Socrates (Ithaca and London, 1984). T. Irwin, Plato’s
Ethics (Oxford, 1995), p. 19, claims that Socrates in this passage describes not two differ-
ent activities, elenchtic cross-examination and exhortation, but one: ‘the elenchus is
itself a means to persuade people to care about virtue’. But the text does not support this
interpretation. Socrates plainly describes exhortation as the first step of a process that
may potentially have two additional steps: first Socrates exhorts; then, ifsomeone whom
Socrates exhorts comes forward and disputes (amphisbété) him, Socrates then proceeds
to question him (erésomai), scrutinize him (exetasd) and refute him (elenxd) — this is
clearly the method of Socratic refutation discussed above; finally, if the interlocutor then
seems to Socrates not to care about virtue after all, Socrates will throw a reproach upon
him (oneididz6) — a third and final step.
10 DID. COREY

irrationality of their conduct. Thus where sophistic exhortations are essen-

tially aesthetic appeals to virtue, beckoning people to the beauty of a virtuous
life, Socratic exhortations are essentially rational appeals that emphasize the
irrationality and shamefulness of vice. Where the sophists exhort with a posi-
tive example, Socrates exhorts with a negative assault.
All these observations are further borne out in the longest example of
Socratic exhortation we possess, that found in the Cleitophon. The Cleitophon
is a frequently overlooked little dialogue with only two characters, Socrates
and Cleitophon himself.“ In it, Cleitophon makes a long speech arguing that
Socrates is exceptionally good at exhorting (protrepein) people to virtue, but
rather ineffective when it comes to teaching people what virtue entails. The
dialogue then ends before Socrates can respond to this charge. For present
purposes, what is important is not the critique of Socrates, but the description
of Socratic exhortation the dialogue contains. For Cleitophon presents Socra-
tes as ‘the best of all human beings’ at exhorting men to virtue,*° and then
recites an example of a Socratic exhortation he has heard: ‘O mortals, whither
are you borne? Do you not realize that you are doing none of the things that
you should?’ As in the example from the Apology, Socrates begins with an
interrogative designed to evoke shame. Next comes his attempt to make mani-
fest his audience’s irrationality:
You men spare no pains in procuring wealth for yourselves, but you neither
see to it that your sons, to whom you are leaving this wealth, know how to
use it justly, nor do you find them teachers ofjustice . . . But when you see
that you and your children have had a thorough education in grammar, gym-
nastics and music (which you consider to be a complete education in virtue)
and that you still have turned out to be no good at using wealth, how can you
fail to despise our present system of education, and seek those who will res-
cue you from this lack of culture? Yet surely it is this dissonance, this care-
lessness . . . that makes measure and harmony disappear between brother
and brother, city and city, as they oppose each other, clash and fight, inflict-
ing and suffering the utmost horrors at war.”°
Many of the ideas expressed in this exhortation (which runs for nearly ten
more lines) will be familiar from other dialogues. The Apology, Laches and
Meno all portray Socrates reproaching individuals for not seeking teachers of

44 The authorship of the Cleitophon (subtitled “On Exhortation’ (protreptikos)), has

been a matter of scholarly controversy; but as Clifford Orwin notes in his interpretive
essay ‘On the Cleitophon’ ,in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic
Dialogues, ed. T. Pangle (Ithaca, 1987), p. 117: ‘None of the ancient grammarians .. . is
known to have regarded it as suspect, and there are no compelling philological reasons
for assigning it to anyone but Plato’. A fair amount is known about Cleitophon the man,
who makes a brief appearance as a character in the Republic, Book 1, 340a ff; for the his-
torical facts about him, see Orwin, ‘On the Cleitophon’, p. 120.
45 Cleitophon, 410b.
46 Tbid., 407b—d, trans. F. Gonzalez, in Plato: Complete Works.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 11

virtue for themselves or for their children.*’ The Republic famously shows
Socrates’ concern for the close relationship between personal, psychological
imbalance, on the one hand, and large-scale political unrest, on the other. But
here in the Cleitophon these ideas are expressed not to individuals but to all
and sundry, and they are expressed not by means of dialectical refutation but
within the compass of a single, hortatory speech.®
As to the effectiveness of Socratic exhortations, Cleitophon reports that ‘they
are superbly moving [protreptik6tatous], superbly beneficial [6phelimétatous]
and truly such as to awaken us from slumber’ ;*’ and there is no reason to doubt
this report. But, on the other hand, there is good reason to believe that sophis-
tic exhortations would have been even more effective than their Socratic
counterparts. For one thing, sophistic exhortations (as best one can make out
from the few examples that survive) did not depend on eliciting the shame of
their audience; and if we have not learned from Socrates’ exchange with
Callicles in the Gorgias, then we should know from numerous political exper-
iences in the modern world, that shame cannot always be counted upon to
secure a positive moral effect. There are always people who are simply
shameless, who refuse to give in to the appeal.*° Thus sophistic exhortations
appeal not to the shame of vice but to the honour and beauty of virtue.*' This is
a significant difference. These exhortations are essentially positive rather
than negative, imparting a desire for something rather than an aversion from
something. Secondly, the directness of Socratic exhortation combined with its
generally critical tone is likely to make its audience defensive. It is hard to be
open-minded towards instruction when one is under attack. Sophistic exhor-
tations, by contrast, attack nobody in particular. They criticize in a way that is
oblique and easy to hear. Finally, the highly rationalistic style of Socratic
exhortation could have appealed only to a very limited audience. Yet sophis-
tic exhortation with its eloquent language and mythical style must have
appealed to nearly everyone.
These considerations suggest, first, that the method of exhortation, whether
in the sophists’ hands or in Socrates’ hands, was probably a much better

47 Plato, Apology, 20a—b, 24d ff.; Plato, Laches, 185a ff.; Plato, Meno, 91a ff.
48 Protrepein, the word used for ‘exhortation’ throughout this dialogue, means liter-
ally ‘to urge forward’. It may refer either to an exhortation given to a large audience or to
a single individual. In the Euthydemus, as in Xenophon’s Memorabilia, the word refers
to Socrates’ conversations with individuals — on which, see the very thoughtful essay by
D. Roochnik, ‘The Serious Play of Plato’s Euthydemus’, Interpretation: A Journal of
Political Philosophy, 18 (1990-1), pp. 211-32. In the Cleitophon, however, protrepein
appears to refer to speeches Socrates has delivered to a mass audience.
49 Cleitophon, 408c2-4.
50 This is not to say that shame is powerless in all cases. Indeed, the right kind of per-
son can be deeply moved by it. Thus one finds preachers, politicians, parents and mentors
alike appealing at times to shame; but this is not effective for everyone.
5! On the ‘beauty’ of virtue, see especially Plato, Hippias Major, 304a-b.
| InD. COREY

method of imparting political virtue than the dialectical method of refutation,

and, second, that in the sophists’ hands it was probably superbly effective. It
is interesting to note on this score that Socrates was not above resorting to
sophistic exhortations in a pinch. According to Xenophon’s Memorabilia,
Socrates used Prodicus’ ‘Choice of Hercules’ in order to break one of his own
comrades of intemperance.” After several attempts at reasoning with the lad
had failed, Socrates simply recited Prodicus’ exhortation verbatim and allowed
it to speak for itself. The contrast between a reasoned and an aesthetic appeal
to virtue could not be more dramatically illustrated.

Association

Another method of teaching virtue is association, literally a ‘being with’

(suneimi, sungignomai) or ‘living together’ (homile6, prosomiled). Association
was a part of both sophistic and Socratic pedagogy, but there were, of course,
important differences in the way the sophists and Socrates approached this
method: the sophists embraced it openly, charged a fee for it, and promised
great benefits to their pupils in return; Socrates associated for free and prom-
ised nothing.’ Yet, in the final analysis, the evidence suggests that the effect
of Socratic and sophistic association on the pupil was strikingly similar. In
both cases, it appears to have been the most effective method of imparting vir-
tue to one’s students.
Before considering the evidence for this, however, it will serve us well to
recall that association did not begin with Socrates or the sophists, but had a
long aiid emotive history behind it. Association was the method, according to
Homer, that the aged horseman Phoenix had used with Achilles to render him
a great ‘speaker of words and doer of deeds’. It was also the method, accord-
ing to even older legends, used by Chiron, ‘most righteous of the centaurs’, to
train generations of heroes from Asclepius and Jason to Peleus and Achilles.”

52 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.1.21 ff.

53 The contrast can be seen sharply at Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.5—8; see further
D. Corey, ‘The Case Against Teaching Virtue for Pay: Socrates and the Sophists’, His-
tory of Political Thought, XXIUI (2) (2002), pp. 189-210.
54 Homer, Iliad, 9.438-43; see further F. Beck, Greek Education: 450-350 B.C.
(New York, 1964), pp. 55-66, esp. pp. 60-1: “The method he [Phoenix] adopted was that
of individual tuition, working through the close association of pupil and tutor. In con-
junction with oral instruction on modes of conduct, the pupil also learns by imitating his
teacher in all their joint activities. The relationship has a strong emotional basis — “with
my heart’s love” — as Phoenix reminds him [Achilles], and this bond of affection
between teacher and pupil facilitates the learning process.’
>> Chiron is supposed to have lived with his pupils in the woods off mount Pelion for
periods of up to twenty years in order to impart to them his superhuman skills in hunting,
healing and warfare; these legends are referred to rather cryptically in Homer (lliad
4.219; 11.832; 16.143) and in Hesiod (fr. 49 and 96); but the richest source is Pindar; see
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 13

Over time these mythical examples of association came to represent for the
noble families of Greece something of an ideal pattern to be copied. An entire
literary genre developed around the sorts of ‘sayings’ or advice a tutor might
supply to his charge. Hesiod’s Works and Days, Theognis’ famous ‘Sayings
to Cyrnus’, and Isocrates’ speech Ad Nicoclem are all part of this tradition.”°
But while ‘sayings’ were certainly an important component of the close rela-
tionship between teacher and student, association was not just a matter of pre-
cept. Indeed, it was primarily a matter of personal example, as is clear from
Theognis’ ‘Sayings to Cyrnus’:
I shall give you some good advice, Cyrnus, of the sort that I myself learned
from the good men [t6n agathén] when I was but a child . . . Associate
[prosomilei] not with bad men, but always cling to the virtuous. Drink, eat,
and sit with the great and powerful and take delight in their company; for
from noble men you will learn noble ways, but if you mingle with the bad
you will lose what sense you have. Understand these things and associate
[homilee] with the good, and someday you will say that Iam a good coun-
selor to my friends.”’
The idea that virtue might simply rub off, as it were, by prolonged contact
with virtuous people became, by the fifth century, an axiom of aristocratic
culture.
Of course, it might be argued that what one finds here is not so much a
‘method’ of teaching virtue at all; for there is a certain vagueness and mystery
about the whole business. Yet there is real insight here as well. As Aristotle
would later argue in the Ethics, virtue is as much a matter ofpractice and habit
as it is a matter of knowledge to be verbally communicated. Verbal maxims,
rules of thumb, discussions about actions, and exhilarating exhortations all
have to do with the transmission of virtue, but these do not constitute virtue in
and of themselves, nor does the mastery of them make one virtuous. Associa-
tion, on the other hand, by supplying not only ‘advice’ but also visible exam-
ples of virtue in practice, has a significant advantage over merely verbal
methods like exhortation.**

especially Pythian Odes, II], 1V.102 ff., and [X.29 ff.; and Nemean Ode, II1.43-8, IV.60;
see further Beck, Greek Education, pp. 49-51.
56 A few fragments survive of a very early ‘Sayings of Chiron’ (Chirénos hypothékai),
a didactic poem in the epic style attributed by the ancients (wrongly) to Hesiod; on the
genre of ‘sayings’ (hypothékai) in general, see the illuminating remarks of W. Jaeger,
Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, Vol. I, trans. G. Highet (Oxford, 1939), pp. 194
and 462 n.16.
57 Elegy A, 27-39; my translation, from the Greek text of T. Hudson-Williams, The
Elegies of Theognis and Other Elegies Included in the Theognidean Sylloge: A Revised
Text (London, 1909).
58 The advantage is noted, of course, by Aristotle in the Ethics, as by many modern
students of moral and political pedagogy as well.
14 D.D: COREY

It was one of the major strengths of the sophists’ pedagogical approach that
they recognized the value of association. Protagoras, Prodicus and Hippias all
used this method extensively.” As to what sophistic association entailed
exactly, perhaps it will be best to address this first in a general way, and then
more specifically. Generally speaking, sophistic association involved either
parents entrusting (paradidomi) their children, or else a young man entrusting
himself, to the long-term care of a sophist, with the expectation that the soph-
ist would render his pupil ‘better’ (beltious), in both a moral and practical
sense of the word. The opening scenes of the Protagoras supply the best
example of this.
The noble lad Hippocrates, excited by the news that Protagoras is in Ath-
ens, and eager to ‘associate with him’ at all costs,°' rouses Socrates out of bed
before dawn to discuss the matter. A typically sceptical Socrates suggests that
they go to see Protagoras and question him about the potential benefits of
associating with him. When they catch up with Protagoras, they find him sur-
rounded by a group of students, many of them foreigners who have obviously
left their own cities to associate with the great sophist on his travels. Socrates
approaches the sophist, only to find him a bit cautious at first: “A man has to
be careful’, Protagoras warns, ‘when he visits powerful cities as a foreigner
and induces the most promising young men to forsake associations with oth-
ers — relatives, acquaintances, older or younger . . . on the grounds that by
association with him they will become better [beltious]’.© Eventually, how-
ever, Protagoras is persuaded to explain just what Hippocrates can look for-
ward to if he does associate with him: ‘Young man, if you come with me, your
gain will be this — the very day you associate with me you will go home a
better man [beltion], and the same for the next day; and each day you will
make progress toward a better state’.©
One would be right to wonder at this point (as Socrates does) what exactly
this ‘betterment’ is supposed to entail. But here we reach a level of specificity
where the various sophists begin to diverge. For Protagoras, becoming ‘better’
meant that Hippocrates would learn prudence (euboulia), not only in his pri-
vate affairs — how best to manage his household — but also in public
affairs — how to realize his maximum potential in political speech and
action.™ Association must have lent itself particularly well to such instruction.

5° See Plato, Apology, 19e-20a; and Plato, Hippias Major, 282a-c.

60 See also Plato, Hippias Major, 283e; and Plato, Laches, 186a-e.
6! Plato, Protagoras, 313b.
6? [bid., 316c5—d1; this and subsequent quotations from the Protagoras and Meno are
taken from Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, trans.
W.K.C. Guthrie (Princeton, 1980).
63 [bid., 318a.
64 Tbid., 318e5—319a2. This is very similar to what Phoenix is said to have taught
Achilles (see above). For an interesting defence of the importance of euboulia as a com-
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 15

After all, Protagoras himself possessed these virtues.® Therefore, he could

simply exhibit them in practice. But, at the same time, it provided extended
opportunities for him to engage his students in exercises that he could moni-
tor.°° Other sophists certainly had different notions of ‘betterment’ in mind
and went about imparting it in different ways. Hippias seems to have equated
betterment with self-sufficiency (autarkeia), and thus immersed his students
in myriad technical studies from arithmetic and geometry to astronomy and
music.®’
But the specific ‘techniques’ that fall under the heading of association are
not as important as the method in general. There were many such techniques,
and they tended — it must be admitted — to have a somewhat pseudo-scientific
air. One senses this, for example, in Aristophanes’ Clouds, where Strepsiades —
who merely wishes to learn the art of rhetoric so that he can elude his credi-
tors — 1s shown how to measure the footsteps of a flea in melted wax and
made to endure a lot of ‘useless’ talk about geometry, astronomy and geogra-
phy. Hippias is similarly ridiculed in the Protagoras for dragging his students
through a host of specialized material instead of simply teaching them what
they came to learn.® In general, the sophists were probably anxious to justify
their high fees by appearing to have reduced the whole matter of teaching vir-
tue to the hard and fast rules of a techné. But the real power of their method
did not lie in such techniques. What was especially important was simply that
the sophists spent long hours with their pupils and allowed their own moral,
political and intellectual qualities to shine forth.” They supplied a paradigm,

ponent of moral-political education, see P. Woodruff, ‘Socratic Education’, in Philoso-

phers on Education: Historical Perspectives, ed. A. Rorty (London, 1998), p. 26.
65 See further, n. 69 below.
66 Protagoras required his students to analyse moral poetry and to stage formal
debates; on his use of poetry, see Plato, Protagoras, 339a; on his staging of debates, see
Diogenes Laertius, [X.52 = H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
(Ziirich, 1989), 80 Al (cited hereafter as ‘DK’).
67 On autarkeia, see Suidas, under ‘Hippias of Elis’ = DK 86 A1; on Hippias’ teach-
ing of arithmetic, etc., see Plato, Protagoras, 315c, 318e.
68 See Plato, Protagoras, 318e.
69 Numerous accounts attest to the sophists’ exceptional talents at statecraft. Gorgias
first came to Athens in 427 not to teach but to secure emergency military relief from Ath-
ens for his native city of Leontini, which was at war with Syracuse. In other words, he
came as a diplomat, and he reportedly spoke before the Athenian Assembly with such
persuasiveness and novelty of style that the Athenians were bedazzled and agreed to an
alliance (DK 82 A4). The sophist Hippias probably arrived in Athens sometime after
423, at which time he was the leading diplomatic representative ofhis native Elis (DK 86
A2.5). Plato has Hippias say in the Hippias Major (28 1a—b) that he rarely has time to visit
Athens because ‘whenever Elis needs to conduct some affairs with one of the cities, she
always comes to me first among her citizens and chooses me as ambassador [presbeutén],
Since she regards me as the most qualified judge and messenger of the pronouncements
of each city’ (my translation). As for Protagoras, his abilities were at least impressive
16 D.D. COREY

as it were, for their students to imitate and gave them time to practice virtue
under expert guidance.” If specific techniques were involved, such as analys-
ing poems and staging debates, these probably did no harm —- they may have
even been edifying — but it was really the mere fact of associating more than
the techniques employed in the process that would have accounted for the
method’s effectiveness.”
Of course, association is by no means a perfect method of teaching virtue,
and Plato’s Socrates is particularly wont to point up the problems. If associa-
tion were so effective, for example, then why do the sons of so many great and
virtuous people turn out worthless? This is a question Socrates asks repeat-
edly.’ Certainly if teaching were as simple as associating, virtuous parents
would have more success at imparting their own virtue to their sons. Or if par-
ents happened to be too busy with affairs of state, they might simply hand
their sons over to someone who is not so busy, and thus everyone would learn
virtue. But this is of course not what happens. Moreover, certain other people
(Socrates included) turn out to be extremely virtuous even though they have
not associated with anyone in particular. Thus Socrates remarks rather comi-
cally in the Laches that he has yearned for an enriching association with the
sophists since his youth, but has never had the money to pay for it.” Yet he is
so virtuous that Nicias and Laches — two distinguished Athenian generals —
approach him for pedagogical advice concerning their own sons. Such anom-
alies as these lead Socrates to wonder whether virtue is really a matter of
teaching at all.

enough for Pericles to choose him alone to compose laws for the Athenian colony of
Thurii in 443 (DK 80 A1). Such testimonies confirm that the fifth-century sophists actu-
ally practised the forms of statecraft that they claimed to be able to teach.
7° Atleast two fragments attest to Protagoras’ emphasis on the importance of practice
in education: ‘Education requires natural endowment (phuseds) and practice (askéseds)’
(DK 80 B3); and *Techné is nothing without practice (meletés) and practice nothing with-
out techné’ (DK 80 B10).
71 In his essay ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’, in Rationalism
in Politics, pp. 488-541, Oakeshott quotes a passage from the reflections of an Eton mas-
ter (William Cory) who clearly grasped the essence of education by association: ‘At
school you are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts
under criticism . . . You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts and
habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a
moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another
person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indi-
cating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of
accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, discrimina-
tion, for mental courage and mental soberness. And above all you go to a great school for
self-knowledge.’
72 See e.g., Plato, Protagoras, 320a—b; Plato, Meno, 94a-e.
73 Plato, Laches, 186c.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE Ly

Moreover, there is the problem of the role of wisdom in virtuous conduct.

The method of association seems to assume that virtue is just a set of prac-
tices one picks up by observing virtuous people. But this is far too simplis-
tic. For the same practices that are considered courageous in one situation
may turn out to be foolish in another; and the practice of forgiveness may
lead to political peace or to political disaster, depending upon the circum-
stances. Thus being virtuous is not simply a matter of practical rules; and
what seems to determine the whole matter — to decide whether one is acting
virtuously or viciously — is not the mastery of practice but of thought. Vir-
tue thus seems to boil down to some kind of wisdom. But what is this wis-
dom? This is the question that Socrates famously asks and, for his part,
never satisfactorily answers; and Socrates’ inability to answer this question,
or to find someone who could, is what leads him to assume a posture of igno-
rance with respect to virtue and to deny adamantly that he at least is able to
teach it.
But while Socrates’ scepticism regarding the whole enterprise of teaching
virtue serves to remind us that neither association nor any other method is per-
fectly effective, his scepticism also seems to go too far. Indeed, like so many
examples of extreme scepticism, Socrates’ own doubt about virtue is contra-
dicted by the practices of the man himself. Socrates was, by almost all
accounts, and in nearly every traditional sense of the word, an extremely vir-
tuous man. Laches praises him for his military bravery in the Athenian retreat
at Delium: ‘If others had been willing to behave in the same manner’, Laches
declares ‘our city would be safe and we would not then have suffered a disas-
ter of that kind’ .”* Plato and Xenophon alike attest to his consistently excellent
conduct: Socrates did not fear death; he exercised self-control over his pas-
sions; he did not covet wealth; he endured extreme conditions of hot and cold
weather; he was pious; obedient to the law; and so on. Thus while his words
may have been sceptical, Socrates’ conduct was never that of someone who
was confused about virtue. Indeed, he was in every sense, according to
Xenophon, a kalos k’agathos, a noble and good man.
More importantly, Socrates was also able to teach these virtues to many of
his students. Here the testimony of Xenophon is indispensable.” For in his
Memorabilia, Xenophon rejects the charge that his teacher was a corruptor of
youth and refutes the criticism expressed in the Cleitophon (see above, p. 10)
that while Socrates could exhort men to virtue he could not actually make

74 Plato, Laches, 181b, trans. R. Sprague in Plato: Complete Works.

75 Xenophon’s testimony about Socrates is sometimes discounted by contemporary
scholars, but this largely unjustified prejudice is beginning to swing the other way. See
especially J.M. Cooper’s powerful essay, ‘Notes on Xenophon’s Socrates’, in Reason
and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory, ed. J.M. Cooper
(Princeton, 1999), pp. 3-28.
18 Dy CORR

them virtuous.’° The way Xenophon refutes both these charges is precisely to
point to Socrates’ practice of association. Consider the following passages.
I find that all teachers show [deiknuntas] their disciples [tois manthanousi]
how they themselves practice what they teach, and lead them on by speech.
And I know that it was so with Socrates: he showed [deiknunta] his associ-
ates [fois sunousi] that he himself was kalos k’agathos and conversed most
nobly about virtue and other things concerning men.”’
Criton was a true associate [homilétés] of Socrates, as were Chaerophon,
Chaerecrates, Hermogenes, Simmias, Cebes, Phaedondas, and others who
associated with him [hoi ekein6é sunésan] not that they might shine in the
courts or the assembly, but that they might become kalos k’agathos, and be
able to do their duty by house and household, and relatives and friends and
city and citizens. Of these not one, in his youth or old age, did evil or
incurred censure.’®
No less amazing is it to me that some believed the charge brought against
Socrates of corrupting the youth. In the first place, apart from what I have
said, in control of his own passions and appetites he was the strictest of men;
further, in endurance of cold and heat and every kind of toil he was most
resolute; and besides, his needs were so schooled to moderation that having
very little he was yet very content. Such was his own character: how then
can he have led others into impiety, crime, gluttony, lust or sloth? On the
contrary, he cured these vices in many by putting into them a desire for vir-
tue and by giving them confidence that self-discipline would make thein
kaloi k’agathoi. To be sure, he at no time promised to be a teacher of this;
but, by letting his own light shine, he made his followers [tous diatribontas|
hope that they, by imitating him, would become such as he was.”
Other passages could easily be cited. But these passages already make clear
that Socrates used the method of association to lead a number of young men to
virtue. Xenophon is convinced of this. For, in the first place, Socrates was
manifestly a kalos k’agathos himself and his very character gave his associ-
ates hope that they too could become kalos k’agathos. Moreover, Socrates
managed to ‘show’ his associates what virtue looked like in practice and, by
‘letting his own light shine’, gave his students a paradigm that they could imi-
tate. This describes the method of association perfectly. Thus while Socrates
may have expressed extreme doubts about the possibility of teaching virtue,
these doubts were not borne out in practice. He was defacto a teacher of virtue
whether he liked it or not.

76 Xenophon seems to know the Cleitophon, or else the ideas that it expresses, very
well; hence, Memorabilia, 1.4.1, refers to people who ‘think that although [Socrates] was
consummate in exhorting men to virtue, he was an incompetent guide to it’.
77 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.17.
78 Tbid., 1.2.48.
79 Ibid., 1.2.14.
 HOW THE SOPHISTS TAUGHT VIRTUE 19

Finally, it is necessary to underscore the striking similarity between the

way Xenophon describes Socrates’ ability to teach virtue by association and
the way the sophists describe their own ability. What Socrates was able to
teach his associates, according to Xenophon, was how ‘to do their duty by
house and household, and relatives and friends and city and citizens’, which
closely resemble the claims Protagoras makes to Hippocrates above about
what students should expect to learn from a sophist. Socrates ‘always made
his associates [sungignomenous] better men [beltious] before he parted with
them’, Xenophon insists,*’ which is practically identical to Protagoras’ prom-
ise to Hippocrates above.*! Thus, again, in practice the Socratic and sophistic
approaches to association do not appear to be all that different. They both ren-
der pupils better by setting an example for them to imitate and they both seem
to do this very effectively.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this study has been to consider the principal methods by
which the sophists fulfilled their claim to be ‘teachers of virtue’; and both the
methods here considered — exhortation and association — appear to have
been reasonable and highly effective. Whatever may or may not be question-
able about the substance ofthe sophists’ teachings, their method would seem
to be beyond reproach. Moreover, there are at least two conclusions to be
drawn from considering sophistic and Socratic pedagogical approaches side-
by-side. First, it would be fair to say that Socrates, not the sophists, was the
pedagogical radical. The method of elenchus had probably never been used as
a method of moral instruction prior to Socrates’ adaptation of it for that pur-
pose, and it clearly has drawbacks: it tends to make people angry; it tends to
silence people without really persuading them; and its effect (even when it
succeeds) is often short-lived. Secondly, it appears that Socrates was not as
radical in practice as he was in theory, for he shared certain practices with the
sophists. This, in itself, is an important point that has not been adequately
stressed in the secondary literature on Socratic pedagogy. Socrates used not
only the elenchus, but also exhortation and association as a means of making
80 Tbid., 1.2.61; my italics.
81 Tt is telling to observe how Xenophon accounts for the problem of Critias and
Alcibiades, both of whom associated with Socrates but turned out to be complete scoun-
drels. The problem was not, according to Xenophon, that their association with Socrates
was ineffective, but rather that there wasn’t enough of it. Citing Theognis approvingly,
Xenophon reminds his readers that ‘the society of honest men is a training in are?é, but
the society of bad men is virtue’s undoing’ (ibid., 1.2.20). Thus virtue requires constant
practice and long periods of association. ‘Just as poetry is forgotten unless it is often
repeated, so instruction, when no longer heeded, fades from the mind’ (ibid.). What is
interesting about this is that it favours a sophistic view over a Socratic one. Socrates
believed that ‘to know the good is to do the good’, that no one can commit a crime who
‘knows’ what virtue is. It was the sophists who insisted on the importance of practice.
20 De CORBY

people ‘better’. But Socrates did not only employ these methods, he employed
them to such good effect that they tended to outshine his own method of
elenchus. Thus when Xenophon wants to prove to his readers that Socrates
could indeed teach virtue, he refers not to the elenchus, but to protreptien and
to suneimi, to exhortation and association as Socrates’ most powerful instru-
ments. When Socrates was at his best at teaching virtue, he was employing
well-known sophistic, not Socratic, methods.
A final reflection: just as there is a noticeable disjunction between what
Socrates said about teaching virtue and what he actually did, so too is there
an interesting disjunction of sorts among modern-day defences of Socratic
method. For we admirers of Socrates tend to glorify the elenchtic method
while dismissing the common-sense methods of exhortation and association.
Yet in practice we tend (just as Socrates tended) to fall back upon and rely
upon these very common-sense methods when it matters most. A reconsidera-
tion of our beliefs about teaching virtue seems to be called for, and such
reconsideration will ultimately, I believe, point towards a re-evaluation of
sophistic political pedagogy.

David. D. Corey BAYLOR UNIVERISTY

 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM:
AN IDEOLOGICAL MOMENT IN THUCYDIDES’ HISTORY’

Efraim Podoksik’

Abstract: Thucydides is often seen as a detached observer of international affairs

who perceived political life mainly in terms of power struggle. This article argues,
however, that this interpretation is one-sided and that it ignores those moments in
Thucydides’ work which reveal his preoccupation with considerations of justice and
morality. Drawing on the findings of a number of scholars who have shown that
Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war is strongly biased towards the Athe-
nian side, this article argues that the grounds of this bias should be sought not in
Thucydides’ ‘realism’, but in his attachment to the ideal of Athens as a virtuous and
just city. Consequently, his criticism of Athenian policies after Pericles refers not only
to mistakes in political judgment, but also to the abandonment of that ideal.

I
Many commentators on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War will-
ingly admit that this work is written from the Athenian perspective and that it
contains a strong pro-Athenian bias. Thucydides is perceived as being sympa-
thetic to the project of Athenian imperialism in general and to the
personality of Pericles, symbolizing this project, in particular.’ Very few
scholars would agree today with a categorical statement by Leo Strauss that
Thucydides’ praise of Pericles ‘is perfectly compatible with preferring Sparta
to Pericles and his Athens’.* A pro-Athenian bias is too obvious in the asser-
tions and, more importantly, in the omissions of the Greek historian.
P.A. Brunt may have been somewhat right when suggesting that Thucydides’
object was not to whitewash Athens..® It is certainly true that Thucydides can
be extremely harsh about the Athenians, especially in those episodes where
no measure of whitewashing would help, such as the destruction of Melos.

! The author would like to thank Geoff Bowe, Duncan Chesney, Eric Nelson and two
referees for their helpful comments.
2 Dept. of Political Science, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusa-
lem 91905, Israel. Email: E.Podoksik.99 @cantab.net
3 ‘It is at once clear that he greatly admired both the policies of Pericles and the united
democracy which Pericles represented and that, to his mind, the chief cause of Athens
ultimate defeat was not the strength of Sparta but the rise of faction in Athens herself and
the ensuing abandonment of Pericles’ temperate policies by his more radical successors’.
John Finley, Thucydides (Cambridge, MA, 1942), pp. 19-20.
4 Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago, 1964), p. 152.
5 P.A. Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought (Oxford, 1993), p. 2.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

yi E. PODOKSIK

But even Brunt is led to suggest that Thucydides ‘must have partly shared the
belief that imperialism wasjustified by the glory that accrued to Athens’.°
Other commentators are less cautious. They mention omissions in Thucydides’
narrative which can be interpreted as an attempt to avoid the details less
favourable to Pericles and Athenian imperialism. Thus it is not mentioned that
Pericles was accused of embroiling Athens in the war for some private rea-
sons connected with the charges brought against him.’ Athenian ties with Per-
sia are consistently underplayed.* Furthermore, Athenian aggressiveness is
seen to be minimized even after Athens departs from Pericles’ strategy.” It is
also claimed that the entire narrative is presented in such a way as to make
Spartan Realpolitik responsible for the war.'° All this leads many commenta-
tors to see in Thucydides an Athenian patriot who regards Pericles as an ideal
ruler of Athens."
Yet, despite this widespread recognition of the pro-Athenian sentiment in
Thucydides, there still persists an image of him as a writer who completely
rejects moralistic discourse in favour of adetached analysis of power relation-
ships. Many of those commentators who point to his sympathy with Athens
hasten to present him as an advocate of naked imperialism. Thus George
Cawkwell argues that, essentially, “Thucydides was concerned with power.
The moral was to use it wisely or lose it woefully’.'* According to Brunt,
democracy is commended by Thucydides not for its own sake, but as ‘the
basis of imperial strength’.'? Jacqueline de Romilly stresses the combination
of his alleged patriotism and realism, arguing that he was ‘considering no one
but Athens and nothing but foreign relations’.'*
Now, it would be wrong to deny that Thucydides attributes a crucial signifi-
cance to the role of power in human affairs. However, the claim that ‘purely
moral considerations play no part at all’ in his judgment of Athenian imperial-

6 Ibid., p. 157.
7 Paul Cartledge, ‘The Silent Women of Thucydides: 2.45.2 Re-viewed’, in Nomo-
deiktes, ed. R.M. Rosen and J. Farrell (Ann Arbor, 1993), pp. 125-32, p. 131.
8 George Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War(London, 1997), p. 15.
° Simon Hornblower, ‘Narratology and Narrative Techniques in Thucydides’, in
Greek Historiography, ed. Simon Hornblower (Oxford, 1994), pp. 131-66, p. 146.
10 E. Badian, From Plataea to Potidaea: Studies in the History and the Historiogra-
phy of the Pentecontaetia (Baltimore, 1993), pp. 125-65.
'! John Marincola, Greek Historians (Oxford, 2001), pp. 91-2. On Thucydides as a
‘moderate Solonian democrat’ see Andrew Szegedey-Maszak, ‘Thucydides’ Solonian
Reflections’, in Cultural Poetics in Ancient Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics,
ed. C. Doughtery and L. Kurke (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 201-4.
'2 Cawkwell, Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War, p. 19.
'3 Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought, p. 176.
'4 Jacqueline de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (Oxford, 1963),
p. 103:
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 23

ism’ seems to be premature. Thucydides is more of a moralist than he is usu-

ally perceived to be, though he is a very subtle moralist indeed; or, at least,
one can discern in his History a certain ‘ideology’, an attempt to see the
Peloponnesian war not as a power struggle but as a battle of different ideas
and different ways of life. In this battle Thucydides is not a detached observer
but an engaged contemporary who takes sides and for whom considerations of
right and wrong are highly relevant.
The claim of this article, then, is that Thucydides does not ignore the con-
siderations of justice and morality, nor does he see them as merely means
towards the accumulation of power. Rather, the article argues that there is a
subtle connection between power and morality in Thucydides’ work.'° These
two aspects of political life should never be fully separated, for whenever the
use of power is disentangled from the values associated with it, it turns out to
be self-defeating. In other words, it is claimed here that Thucydides’ sympa-
thy with Athenian imperialism reveals not merely his patriotism but also his
conviction in the justice of this policy. Athenian imperialism is praised not
only because it is Athenian but also because it is praiseworthy. For him, a
good policy is far from being a pure Realpolitik. Rather, it should always be
complemented with the recognition of the inherent value of the policy above
the considerations of expedience.
This is not to suggest that we should get rid of all alternative readings of
Thucydides. History is a complex treatise, and it allows a variety ofinterpreta-
tions. Yet, since it is so common to regard him as a pure theorist of power, it is
worthwhile to reveal the limitations of this view by highlighting a different
aspect of his work which is so often ignored.

II
The ideological element of the narrative, through which the Peloponnesian
war can be understood not only as a struggle for domination but, first and
foremost, as a battle of different sets of values, finds its expression in Pericles’
Funeral Oration (II.35—46).'’ This speech occupies a significant place in
Thucydides’ work. Yet, despite this, it does not easily fit in the narrative’s
'S Ibid., p. 98.
!6 The following opinion of one of the commentators can serve as the starting point
which this article attempts to develop: ‘Some individuals and some communities, by
their moral qualities, are entitled to positions of leadership and power. But power is dan-
gerous and corrupting, and in the wrong hands it quickly leads to immoral behaviour, and
then to civil strife, unjust war and destruction’. M.I. Finley, ‘Thucydides the Moralist’, in
M.I. Finley, Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies (New York, 1968),
pp. 44-57, p. 56.
'7 Hereafter all references and translated quotations from Thucydides are given
according to the Loeb Classical Library edition: Thucydides, History of the
Peloponnesian War, trans. Ch.F. Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1928). References to other
classical works are also to their Loeb editions, unless otherwise specified.
24 E. PODOKSIK

structure. One commentator called the Oration ‘a staggering departure from

[Thucydides’] normal practice’, pointing out that ‘we could have never
expected Book IJ to contain it if it had been lost’.'*
History consists of two main elements: narrative and speeches. Whereas
the narrative is a description of events as they purportedly happened, the
speeches refer to events which are yet to happen. They are concerned with the
advantages and disadvantages of a proposed course of action and of its alter-
native. They unequivocally fit into the genre of rhetoric called ‘deliberative’
by Aristotle.”
Thucydides assigns an important role to speeches in his work, and he edits
them with much care. Most speeches come in pairs, each pair providing a
series of arguments pro and con. Even speeches presented on their own are
supposed to be understood as an argument over a certain political proposal.
Thus, for example, before the third speech of Pericles, Thucydides, who usu-
ally refrains from giving a fair presentation to Pericles’ opponents in Athens,
nevertheless finds it necessary to refer to the criticisms to which this speech
was a response.””
This exaggerated deliberative element of speeches is what so often
attracted those readers happy to find in Thucydides an anti-rhetorician who
made protagonists speak with an admirable restraint and go directly to the
point. Yet funeral oration, as a genre, hardly fits in here. It rather belongs to
the type of epideictic rhetoric, the purpose of which, according to Aristotle, is
not to judge about past or future events but to praise or blame things in the
present.”' Its emphasis on idealization is certainly detrimental to the dry real-
ism of power politics. Therefore, Thucydides’ decision to include the Funeral
Oration in his story is surprising, and this makes Nicole Loraux wonder
whether Thucydides’ History does not reveal, ‘despite itself, despite its
author, a secret fascination for the one, omnipotent City of the epitaphioi’.”
Even a brief glance at the text supports this impression. The description of
the funeral ceremony signifies a departure from the structure of the work. The
Oration does not discuss specific policies and does not concentrate on a singu-
lar occurrence indispensable for our understanding of the course of events.

'8 Christopher Pelling, Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (London, 2000),
pr vio:
19 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, 1358b.
20 ‘They blamed Pericles for having persuaded them to go to war and held him
responsible for the misfortunes which had befallen them, and were eager to come to an
agreement with the Lacedaemonians’ (II.59.2).
2I Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, 1358b. According to George Kennedy, ‘in prac-
tice, as in funeral orations, speakers usually praise past actions but with the intent of cele-
brating timeless virtues and inculcating them as models for the future’ (Aristotle: On
Rhetoric, trans. G.:A. Kennedy (Cxford, 1991), p. 48 n.).
22 Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City
(Cambridge, MA, 1986), p. 290.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 25

Rather, it praises timeless virtues and is delivered in the framework of an estab-

lished ritual which, as we are led to believe, took place on numerous occasions
(1.34.1; 1.47.1). From the standpoint of a dry narrative, this piece of text
seems to be completely unnecessary. Moreover, the irony is that Pericles him-
self underplays the value of rhetoric in the beginning of the Oration, only to
deliver a speech full of rhetorical devices.”
One can suggest that, by including the Oration in book II, Thucydides may
have followed a certain literary logic, as the speech is immediately followed
by the description of the plague. This creates a strong contrast between Peri-
cles’ idealized vision of Athenian life and the tragic reality of the disease with
its devastating effect on the morale of the city. But this reading would mean
that Thucydides abandons his carefully elaborated structure in which
speeches and the narrative exist on two, so to say, parallel tracks, comple-
menting and explaining each other but not coming into a direct relationship. It
would remain unclear why he decides to do this only in respect of the Funeral
Oration.
Struggling with this puzzling feature, commentators have offered various
explanations about how the Funeral Oration could be harmonized with the
overall structure of History. One answer may be that Pericles’ speech is the
counterpart of that of Archidamus (1.80—85), and that its eulogy to Athenian
character contrasts with Archidamus’ praise ofthe distinguishing traits of the
Spartans, such as their ‘in the truest sense intelligent self-control’ (1.84.2); or,
the Funeral Oration can be seen as a response to the description of Athenians
in the speech of the Corinthians (1.68—71).”
However, this explanation seems to be problematic. The Funeral Oration
appears in the text long after the two aforementioned speeches, and it is doubt-
ful whether a reader can immediately feel the supposed connection between
them. One should also keep in mind that the genre of those two speeches is
very different from that of the Funeral Oration. Archidamus does not raise the
question of the Spartan way of life just for its own sake. On the contrary, his
description of the Spartan character is easily accommodated within the entire
speech and within Thucydides’ narrative as a whole. His words are just one of
the arguments in deliberation regarding the future war. The same goes for the
Corinthians who evoke the image of Athens in order to persuade the Spartans
to heed their very specific warnings and complaints. By contrast, the Funeral
Oration is devoid of this deliberative element, and it is also much longer than
23 ‘To me, however, it would have seemed sufficient, when men have proved them-
selves brave by valiant acts, by act only to make manifest the honours we render them...
and not that the valour of many men should be hazarded on one man to be believed or not
according as he spoke well or ill’ (1.35.1). It is interesting to notice that a similar ambi-
guity towards the art of rhetoric can be found in Thomas Hobbes, who was a great
admirer of Thucydides. See Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of
Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996).
24 Marincola, Greek Historians, p. 82.
26 E. PODOKSIK

those two speeches. Furthermore, there are other speeches which play the role
of answer, even if they do not address the question of character.”
Another possible interpretation would be that Thucydides genuinely
describes the speech as actually delivered, without paying too much attention
to its place in the narrative. Thus the Funeral Oration can be interpreted as
Pericles’ response to a specific situation and his attempt to rebuff accusations
against him.”° This interpretation can be a good explanation of the motives of
Pericles in making this speech, or it can support the claim that Thucydides
faithfully reported it. Yet it does not offer an answer as to why it appears in
Thucydides’ work. Whatever his intention, he certainly did not aim at provid-
ing the historical setting for the Funeral Oration. Even if it is true that it was
used by Pericles to counter mounting criticisms against him, there is no word
about this in Thucydides, although he mentions criticisms against Pericles on
other occasions.
Finally, one can suggest that Thucydides’ purpose is to emphasize the dif-
ference in the characters of the two cities as one of the main underlying causes
of the war. Yet, although this explanation can provide some reasons as to why
Thucydides might wish to draw our attention to the Periclean view of Athe-
nian character, it does not by itself account for the emotionally loaded rhetoric
with which this view is presented. In other cases in which speakers refer to
this subject, the emotional element of their speeches is minimized.
Thus none of these explanations seems completely satisfactory. Yet there is
a different answer fully capable of accounting for the uniqueness of the
Periclean speech within the work. It is that Thucydides himself shares the
main ideas ofthe Funeral Oration. This is why he includes this long speech, in
spite of its sharp difference in style from the rest of the text. In other words, it
seems that Thucydides himself subscribes to the Periclean ideal of Athenian
democracy. There is nothing idiosyncratic about this interpretation. In fact,
the impression that Pericles’ speech reflects Thucydides’ ideals may even
seem to be a fairly obvious one and lie at the background of many commentar-
ies to his work. The problem is, however, that this idea is rarely brought to the
surface. The reason for this may be that Thucydides is often approached with
the prejudice that he should be read as a ‘realist’. Therefore, one is tempted to
reject outright any interpretation to the contrary, however straightforward it
may seem, preferring instead to look for other explanations even if they
require many more minor premises and qualifications.
What, then, is the ideal expressed in the Oration? The basic thread running
through the entire speech is praise for the Athenian character perceived in terms
of the combination of devotion and liberality. The Athenians have managed to

25 The Corinthians are answered at length by the Athenian ambassadors, and

Archidamus’ speech is followed by that of Sthenelaidas (I.73-8; I.86).
26 A B. Bosworth, ‘The Historical Context of Thucydides’ Funeral Oration’, Journal
of Hellenic Studies, 120 (2000), pp. 1-16.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM pe

maintain a way of life in which the qualities of elegance, individuality and the
love of beauty complement those of firmness, self-sacrifice and attachment to
the common good, and even serve as their foundation. Athens is a democracy
allowing a wide participation in the city’s affairs, yet it maintains strict legal
equality and respect for the authority of the law. It is brimming with wealth,
yet this wealth is used with moderation and foresight. The city is open to
strangers and well disposed towards its friends, this liberality springing not
from a perception of self-interest but from the Athenian character itself. For,
as Pericles says, ‘we alone confer our benefits without fear of consequences,
not upon a calculation of the advantage we shall gain, but with confidence in
the spirit of liberality which actuates us’ (II.40.5).
This sense ofjustice and liberality is not divorced from the idea of power
and glory. Pericles himself reveals that his intention in the Oration is to ‘set
forth by what sort of training we have come to our political position, and with
what political institutions and as the result of what manner of life our empire
became great...’ (11.36). Yet one should avoid the temptation to reduce
everything in Thucydides to the consideration of power and to claim that Peri-
cles commends Athenian democracy only as a means to obtaining the empire.
Such an interpretation would significantly impoverish the content of the Ora-
tion. Pericles praises Athens for what it is and regards the city’s way of life to
be good for its own sake. It is true that he says the character of his eulogy as
‘no mere boast inspired by the occasion, but actual truth, is attested by the
very power of our city’ (1.41.2). Yet the meaning of this sentence is that this
power is merely a sign of the superiority of Athens and not its end.
Pericles’ perception of the Athenian way of life also combines exclusivity
with universality. On the one hand, he is convinced of the superiority of the
way of life which makes Athens the exceptional city. On the other hand, this
exclusiveness contains a universal element, elevating this city to the position
of the ultimate example for imitation: ‘We live under a form of government
which does not emulate the institutions of our neighbours; on the contrary,
we are ourselves a model which some follow .. .” (II.37.1). It seems that
Athens’ exclusivity, far from making it insular, turns it into ‘the school of
Hellas’ (11.41.1). One can plausibly infer from this that the mission of Athe-
nian imperialism is not only to augment the power of the city but also to dem-
onstrate the superiority of its way of life and then turn it into the way of life of
the entire Hellenic world. It is not a naked power interest which lies at the
heart of Athenian imperialism but the nobleness of its aims.”’ Pericles, there-
fore, offers a synthesis of power and values.** He knows not only how to

27 Cf. Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton, 1994), p. 18.

28 Steven Forde calls it a synthesis of ‘honour and imperialism’ (Steven Forde, The
Ambition to Rule: Alcibiades and the Politics of Imperialism in Thucydides (Ithaca,
1989), pp. 149-50). But the honour, or nobleness, of Athenians is not an egoistic value.
There is a universalistic element in Pericles’ worldview which means that this imperial-
28 E. PODOKSIK

obtain hegemony but also what makes it right to keep it. He is a great states-
man because of his ability to dispose of Athenian power without forgetting
the ideals which lie at the root of this power.
One may object to this assessment of Pericles’ position, arguing that, in his
third speech, Pericles likens the empire to ‘a tyranny, which it may seem
wrong to have assumed, but which certainly it is dangerous to let go’ (II.63.2).
But this single reference to a ‘tyrannical’ empire is not typical of the image of
Pericles in Thucydides’ work. The third speech, unlike the Funeral Oration, is
clearly contextualized, being presented as a response to specific circum-
stances which arose as a result of the distress caused by the plague. It is clear
that Pericles uses this comparison in order to persuade the despairing audi-
ence, and one can hardly see there an expression of Pericles’ own beliefs. Fur-
thermore, the phrase can be easily interpreted as an argument from the
standpoint of his adversaries, as if he wanted to say: ‘even if I grant that we
behave as tyrants, this is an additional reason not to cease our war efforts’.
For Pericles, therefore, Athens is not only the most powerful city in Hellas
but also the most just, and therefore its hegemony, too, is just. This belief is
what constitutes the ‘ideology’ of Athenian imperialism. Thucydides presents
Pericles as the most eloquent speaker for this ideology, yet it is not confined
only to him. Rather, such a view seems to have been widespread among Athe-
nians at the outbreak of the war.
This ideology finds its expression in the speech of the Athenian ambassa-
dors to the Spartan assembly in Book I. In this speech, the Athenians, trying to
persuade the audience not to rush into war with Athens, intend ‘to show how
great [is] the power of their own city ...’ (1.72.1). Yet this is not the only argu-
ment that they employ. In addition, they claim to be attempting ‘to show that
we are rightfully in possession of what we have acquired’ (I.73.1). In other
words, they wish to combat the Corinthian and Spartan claims about justice
with their own perception of the justice of the Athenian cause.
There are two aspects in their justification of the empire. Firstly, the Athe-
nians present the familiar claim that Athens played the leading role in the war
against Persia a few decades earlier, and that historically the empire was
acquired not by force but at the request of the allies. The Athenians admit that
later they were led to employ force to advance the empire, but this was
because the logic of the power struggle would not let them depart from that
course for fear that the allies would go over to Sparta (1.75.4).
If the argument had ended here, their appeal to historical justice could have
been merely a cover for their imperialistic instinct. They would have been
portrayed as saying that the states are engaged in constant competition, and
the more they try to increase their power, the more dangerous it becomes
for them to relinquish it. A similar argument will be later employed by

ism is just, perhaps not in the conventional sense, but in a higher sense of spreading the
Athenian way of life.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 29

Machiavelli in his discussion of the Roman republic.” Indeed, his advocacy

of popular republic was driven mostly by instrumental considerations, as he
realized that only a strong democratic element in the constitution would be
conducive to an imperial project. He regarded the success of such a project to
be the ultimate measure of political glory. Those who attribute to Thucydides
a similar logic simply make him straightforwardly Machiavellian.
Yet the Athenians come up with a second and quite different argument, say-
ing that:
At the same time we thought we were worthy to rule, and used to be
regarded by you also, until you fell to calculating what your interests were
and resorted, as you do now, to the plea of justice — which no one, when
opportunity offered of securing something by main strength, ever yet put
before force and abstained from taking advantage. And they are to be com-
mended who, yielding to the instinct of human nature to rule over others,
have been more observant ofjustice than they might have been, considering
their power. At least, if others should seize our power, they would, we think
exhibit the best proof that we show some moderation (1.76.2—4).
This is a remarkably sophisticated argument in which the Athenians suggest
that the conventional sense ofjustice of the Spartans and Corinthians is actu-
ally not a worthy type ofjustice, indeed perhaps not ajustice at all. It is used
only to conceal self-interest, the true motive of their appeal to justice. The
claims of the Spartans are the outcome of a cold calculation and of their
awareness of being less powerful than the Athenians. Had they been in the
position of an imperial power they would have behaved without any regard to
justice. Therefore, the Athenian sense of justice is superior because the
motives of the Athenians are genuine. By acquiring the empire in the begin-
ning they acted not from calculation but from an impulse of human nature,
and later they managed to behave in moderation even at the peak of their
power.°’ This moderation is their strongest claim forjustice. For it is not sur-
prising if a weaker party appeals to the principles of justice. The true test
comes when, having acquired power, one is able to exercise restraint, for such
restraint would spring not from fear but from nobleness of character. This is
what distinguishes those who are worthy to rule from those who are not. The
Spartans are profoundly unjust precisely because if they had acquired an
empire they would not have behaved as moderately as do the Athenians, and
the Spartans themselves know this.”

29 Niccolé Machiavelli, The Discourses (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 115-23.

30 According to the orators, this moderation finds its expression especially in equality
before law, even with regard to the Athenian tribunals, in which the same laws apply
equally to the Athenians and their allies (1.77.1).
31 ‘Certainly you, should you overthrow us and obtain supremacy, would soon lose
the good will which you have gained through fear of us — if indeed you mean again to
show such temper as you gave a glimpse of at that time when for a little while you had the
30 E. PODOKSIK

This feature of Athens’ rule, however, does not earn it the gratitude of its
subjects. On the contrary, the Athenian domination provokes an even stronger
hatred, for ‘men, it seems, are more resentful of injustice than of violence’
(1.77.4). One can suggest that the allies are unable to appreciate Athenian
moderation because if they really understood it, they would recognize them-
selves to be inferior in spirit to the Athenians. Therefore, their understanding
ofjustice is akin to that of the Spartans. When occasionally they feel them-
selves wronged by the Athenians they feel a stronger grievance than if they
were ruled by a naked force. In other words, the allies see the situation in the
opposite way from the Athenians. Restraint, being for the Athenians the test
of their superiority, is, in the eyes of their allies, an additional reason for
hatred. It turns out, then, that Athenian moderation is not exercised in the
view of possible advantage. It is rather presented as an inherent feature of the
Athenian character, being, to some extent, inconvenient from a purely prag-
matic point of view, as it provokes resentment.
It is not easy to decide how much weight one should assign to this particular
argument of the ambassadors. One could suggest that, far from implying a
full-developed worldview, the claim about moderation is used merely as a
rhetorical device to expose the hypocrisy of their rivals. Yet the approach
lying behind it is the same one as is found in the Funeral Oration. There we
meet a claim which combines an appreciation of power with an appeal to jus-
tice, supported by the notion of an exceptional liberality with which Athenian
rule is exercised. Similarly, in the speech of the Athenian ambassadors, the
possession of power serves as a test of being just, the test which the Athenians
claim to have passed. Therefore, it is not implausible to suggest that a combi-
nation like this lies at the heart of the Athenian ideology, expressing the inner
convictions of its citizens and being articulated by its prominent leaders.

lil
Thucydides, then, might have had much sympathy with this idealized vision
of Athenian hegemony. Yet his work implies an even closer connection
between power andjustice, even if an indirect one. Power is not only the test
ofjustice; in some sense, it can be seen as its prize. When the sense ofjustice
and humanity disappears, the consequence is likely to be the loss of power.
This consequence is never directly caused by political immorality. History
can bejustifiably read as a chain of accidents. Yet this connection is always in
the background of the story; and in this sense, Thucydides’ work can be seen
as a description of a gradual deterioration of the Athenian character which

hegemony against the Persians’ (1.77.6). In the Melian dialogue, the Athenians express
this opinion about Spartans in even plainer terms: ‘of all men with whom we are
acquainted they, most conspicuously, consider what is agreeable to be honourable, and
what is expedient just’ (V.105.3). On the Spartan behaviour see also 1.130.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 31

sowed the seeds of the city’s subsequent ruin, even if this ruin was not com-
pletely predetermined.
Thucydides offers his analysis of the causes of the Athenian catastrophe in
Book II, where he sums up the achievements of Pericles and compares his
policies to those of his successors. Pericles is described as a pragmatic states-
man, one aware of the limits of power, who ‘had told the Athenians that if they
would maintain a defensive policy, attend to their navy, and not seek to extend
their sway during the war, or do anything to imperil the existence of the state,
they would prove superior’ (1I.65.7).
Yet the greatness of Pericles lay not only in his purported moderate prag-
matism. His ‘defensive’ policy was rather a matter of tactics, and Thucydides
is certainly aware of the adventurous element in his personality. Thucydides
himself is disinclined to criticize the drive to enlarge the empire, only ques-
tioning the ‘management’ of this policy. Pericles is praised not for his moder-
ation per se, but because his policies (whether offensive or defensive) were
driven by a real care for the city and the common good. In his assessment of
the Periclean legacy, Thucydides shows that domestic politics are intimately
connected with foreign affairs. Athenians, he says, ‘did not finally succumb
until they had in their private quarrels fallen upon one another and been
brought to ruin’ (11.65.12). That is, the real cause of Athens’ demise is found
in its internal life. One should look carefully at this claim because it entails
something more. The life of the polis is based on a certain respect for the prin-
ciples of justice. Even if one wants to be Machiavellian with regard to foreign
affairs, one cannot automatically transfer this attitude to the realm of domestic
politics. But this means that there is a close link between the considerations of
justice and those of international affairs. The moral health of a city, and espe-
cially of its leaders, is the precondition of its foreign policy succeeding.
Thucydides clearly blames those politicians who neglected the common
good, seeking only their own gain, because ‘they were led by private ambition
and private greed to adopt policies which proved injurious both as to them-
selves and their allies’ (I1.65.7). Thucydides is clearly of the opinion that
injustice ruins a city and, moreover, an unjust imperialism ruins an empire.
Here again Thucydides cannot be seen as a predecessor of Machiavelli.
Rather, he is close to authors such as Cicero and Seneca, who insisted that
only virtuous conduct can be truly beneficial.
What can we say about the failure of Pericles’ successors? It is precisely
that they were seeking power just for its own sake. Yet when power is not
based on higher values it can never be safely kept. Pericles was acting in the
awareness of the basic identity between the private and public interest, and
thereby he managed to attain an uncontested authority. He benefited from that
authority, yet the city benefited with him. Similarly, Athens, in the age of
Pericles, was capable of maintaining its power because it did not perceive
power as its ultimate aim.
32 E. PODOKSIK

The successors of Pericles were completely the opposite. Since they sought
only power, they were never able to identify their own interests with the inter-
ests of the city. As a result, they never managed to attain the power they
desired. Similarly, they put Athens on a course in which power was pursued
only for its own sake, and the ideal behind Athenian imperialism was largely
ignored. This attitude laid the groundwork for their grave mistakes.
In order to show how the Athenian sense of humanity deteriorated over the
course of war and how this deterioration was indirectly connected with Ath-
ens’ future defeat, we should consider a number of key moments in the narra-
tive up to the Sicilian expedition. The first relevant episode is the Mytilenaean
debate, in which the assembly is gathered to revisit its previous decision to put
to death all Mytilenaean men in retribution for their revolt. We are provided
with two speeches. One belongs to Cleon, who argues for the affirmation of
the previous motion and opposes the revocation of the death penalty. The
other belongs to Diodotus who favours reconsidering the decree.
What concerns us in this debate is the already apparent shift of emphasis
towards expediency at the expense of justice and humanity. The Periclean
synthesis of power and morality begins to evaporate. How much of this pic-
ture is an invention of Thucydides is difficult to say. As one can infer from a
remark in the text,” it is likely that some speakers did go beyond the question
of interest and appealed to compassion. Yet Thucydides himself chooses two
speeches whose authors ostensibly claim to be mainly preoccupied with self-
interest.
This is most apparent in the speech of Diodotus, who states that ‘the ques-
tion for us to consider . . . is not what wrong they have done, but what is the
wise course for us’ (III.44.1). It is interesting that the argument of a more
‘compassionate’ side is built around the question of self-interest. In fact, this
can be seen as a rhetorical device, for it is Diodotus who is in need of persuad-
ing the listeners that his position is not influenced by emotions. Moreover,
moral arguments seem to be inserted in a few places in the speech.*’ Neverthe-
less, at least the explicit appeal here is to a judgment in terms of self-interest.
Cleon delivers a more complex speech in which he claims to be combining
the considerations ofjustice and self-interest.** However, this combination is
illusory. Cleon’s understanding ofjustice is very narrow and can be regarded

32 {But on the very next day a feeling of repentance came over them and they began
to reflect that the design which they had formed was cruel and monstrous...’ (111.36.4).
33 See Simon Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, Vol. I (Oxford, 1991),
p. 433.
34 “Tf you take my advice, you will do not only what is just to the Mytilenaeans, but at
the same time what is expedient for us’ (III.40.4). On this point see also Colin Macleod,
‘Reason and Necessity: Thucydides III 9-14, 37-48’, in Colin Macleod, Collected
Essays (Oxford, 1983), pp. 88-102.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM i
fe.

as ‘a simple retributivist view’. It is more reminiscent of the Spartan

conventionalist perception ofjustice. This is clear from his insistence on the
importance of preserving the established laws whatever they are: ‘a state
which has inferior laws that are inviolable is stronger than one whose laws are
good but without authority’ (III.37.3).°° We have seen, however, what the
Athenian ambassadors say about this view in Book I. They regard Spartan
appeals of this kind as nothing other than disguised self-interest; and one need
not go very far in order to find support for a similar assessment of Cleon’s
speech. He starts with an appeal to the Athenians to abandon their normal hab-
its of judgment and not to behave in international affairs according to their
conduct in the city. He draws a strict line separating the justice on which the
city itself is founded and the power on which it maintains its empire, saying:
‘Because your daily life is unaffected by fear and intrigue in your relations to
each other, you have the same attitude towards your allies also...’ (III.37.2).
There are several interesting aspects to this assertion. First, it shows that,
when Athenians claim that they rule over the empire with moderation and
decency, they are not necessarily engaging in empty propaganda.*’ Even if
this claim is controversial, it may have been genuinely shared by many Athe-
nians. Secondly, considering Thucydides’ notorious lack of sympathy with
Cleon, it is likely that Cleon’s call to distinguish between domestic and for-
eign affairs is not approved of by Thucydides. Thirdly, contrary to Pericles,
Cleon considers the exceptional qualities of the Athenian character as impedi-
ments. Athenian adventurism and the love of novelty are reproached here in
the strongest terms, as Cleon charges that ‘you are adepts not only at being
deceived by novel proposals but also at refusing to follow approved advice,
slaves as you are of each new paradox and scorners of what is familiar’
(111.38.5).
It is true that there are many similarities between Cleon’s and Pericles’
speeches. Yet Cleon is presented here rather as an unsophisticated epigone of
Pericles. Compare Cleon’s assertion that the empire the Athenians hold is a
tyranny with the similar Periclean claim, discussed earlier.** What was for
Pericles an occasional rhetorical remark in a moment of need, is for Cleon the
principal political statement. Moreover, ‘his conclusion is that revolts must be

35 Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, p. 423.

36 On the ‘quasi-Spartan’ character of Cleon’s arguments see A.W. Gomme, More
Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), pp. 154-5.
37 See Bosworth’s reference to such claims in ‘The Historical Context of Thucydides’
Funeral Oration’, pp. 12-13.
38 6ti tupavvida éxete tv Gpxtv (Cleon, in II.37.2) vs. a tupavvida yap Hdny
éyete avtyy (Pericles, in 1.63.2). Some editors, however, delete ac. See Thucydides,
History of the Peloponnesian War, p. 370 n. On more parallels and differences see
Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, pp. 425, 431; David Cartwright, A Histori-
cal Commentary on Thucydides (Ann Arbor, 1997), pp. 143-4.
34 E. PODOKSIK

brutally punished, whereas Pericles had left it as a mere fact’.”” At most,

Cleon imitates merely one side of Pericles. All parallels refer only to Pericles’
third speech or oblique oration, yet there is nothing to connect Cleon’s views
and Pericles’ Funeral Oration. Cleon lacks the Periclean vision in which the
pragmatic perception of power is necessarily accompanied by the ideal for the
sake of which this power should be employed. Cleon’s position is similar to
what is described by Thucydides as the Spartan view. For the Spartans, power
is the end of political action, although they clothe their quest for power with a
seemingly opposite rhetoric of narrow justice. Neither the Spartans nor Cleon
appreciate the deeper and more universalistic meaning of justice implied in
the Athenian imperial project.
This interpretation may help us to explain another puzzling moment in
Thucydides and to show why he is so critical of Cleon’s conduct during the
events on Pylos. According to the narrative, Cleon persuades the Athenians to
reject the Spartan pleas for peace and instead to pursue an aggressive policy.
Coming into conflict with ever-cautious Nicias, Cleon criticizes the hesitant
tactics of the Athenians on Pylos, and in the end he pledges to embark with a
fleet to Pylos to defeat the Spartans and to return with their men as prisoners.
He proceeds to do just that, and the result is a surprising overwhelming vic-
tory which significantly improves the strategic position of Athens and creates
conditions for the very favourable peace of 421 BC.
This narrative, however, is accompanied by Thucydides’ unconcealed
hostility towards Cleon, who is depicted as an irresponsible demagogue
ready to employ any means to achieve his own advantage, including slander.
Thucydides suggests that Cleon is afraid of going into battle, and that he does
so only at the instigation of the people. Although Thucydides admits that
Cleon fulfilled his promise, he says that it was ‘mad’ to make it in the first
place (IV.39.3).
Now, an impartial reader may think that Thucydides is being overly unfair,
and that in this episode Cleon was right from the beginning to the end. He was
right to criticize the offer of peace and the hesitation of the Athenians, he was
right in predicting that the Spartans could be easily overcome, and he actually
did what he promised to do.
Explanations for this attitude vary from suspected personal motives and en-
mity between the two men, to Thucydides’ general view of Cleon as a violent,
unsophisticated man whose aggressive policies contradicted the defensive
tactic of Pericles. Yet it seems that, at least in this episode, the discrepancies
between the policies of Cleon and Pericles are exaggerated.“ In fact, Cleon’s
behaviour can be seen as a faithful implementation of Pericles’ own
recommendations. The defensive element of Pericles’ tactic should not be

39 Colin Macleod, ‘Form and Meaning in the Melian Dialogue’, in Macieod, Col-
lected Essays, pp. 52-67, p. 53.
4° Cf. Simon Hornblower, Thucydides (Baltimore, 1987), pp. 55-6.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 35

misperceived beyond its actual proportions. It mainly referred to avoiding a

land battle with the enemy, given the importance that Pericles paid to the
preservation of Athenian naval power. However daring Cleon’s raid might
have been, it did not significantly deviate from the main parameters of the
Periclean policy.*' It did not involve a major land engagement, and Cleon’s
tactic of surprise was quite characteristic of Athenian mobility. As for his
problematic conduct in the assembly, Pericles too may not have been com-
pletely averse to dubious political tactics. Following the first Spartan inva-
sion, he ‘would not convoke a meeting of the assembly or any gathering
whatever . . . moreover he guarded the city, and as far as he could kept it free
from disturbances’ (II.22.1). Commentators are tempted to minimize the sig-
nificance of this paragraph, but there is nothing in it stopping us from suspect-
ing some unconstitutional element in Pericles’ actions. Certainly this point
would have been exploited had History been written by one of Pericles’ en-
emies.”*
In other words, it is difficult to understand Thucydides’ attitude towards
Cleon in this episode, apart from his feelings of personal hostility. The only
interpretation which avoids focusing on biographical details seems to be as
follows: despite the similarities between Pericles’ and Cleon’s policies, there
is a great divergence between the values and motives of the two men. The
problem with Cleon is not that he does something wrong (he does not), but
that he has no proper understanding of the rightness of what he does.** He can
think pragmatically, but he cannot offer an ethical justification of his policies,
and therefore he perceives them only in terms of narrow justice or even in
terms of his own advantage.
This does not mean that, due to this lack of vision, his undertakings will
necessarily fail. Yet, on a deeper level, the inability to substantiate a policy
with a clear vision of the justice and nobleness underlying this policy will
make even his greatest successes precarious in the long run; and we will see

41 Tn his first speech Pericles did not advise the Athenians to remain passive in the
face of future Spartan attacks. Instead he recommended the following course of action:
‘If they march against our territory, we shall sail against theirs; and the devastation of a
part of the Peloponnesus will be quite a different thing from that of the whole of Attica’
(1.143.4).
42 See also less flattering stories about Pericles’ political conduct in Plutarch,
Pericles, 8.4; 14; 28.4; 31-2.
43 A.W. Gomme writes: ‘What was wrong with him [Cleon] was that he had a vulgar
mind .. . It was not his policy that was dangerous — for one thing policy might change; it
was his character, which would not change. In such hands any policy would go wrong.’
(Gomme, More Essays in Greek History and Literature (Oxford, 1962), p. 108.) The
question, however, is what it means to possess a vulgar mind. It seems to me that the vul-
garity of Cleon could be seen as an inability to appreciate the nobleness of the Periclean
ideal because this ideal appealed to values beyond the private advantages of a citizen or
city. We cannot imagine Cleon, as he is described here, delivering the Funeral Oration.
36 E. PODOKSIK

that, as the Athenians fall into the trap of Realpolitik, they will put at risk their
enterprise and even their survival as a city.

IV
We have seen how, in the course of war, the Athenians tried to follow the
practical advice of Pericles, while gradually abandoning the vision that had
driven him. The death of Pericles may have been the crucial factor which led
to this, for the ability to combine universalistic vision with cold pragmatism is
not a very common human feature. Or, this may have been an inevitable out-
come of the war itself, since prolonged combat tends to make people cruel and
cynical.’ Be that as it may, the deterioration of the Athenian moral sensibility
from the time of Pericles’ death is obvious.
Now, the longer the war was waged, the more violent and destructive the
conduct of both sides became. Even when the goals were right, they were pur-
sued mechanistically, devoid of restraint or understanding. For a time, Athe-
nians continued to see their war not only as a power struggle with Sparta but
also as the competition of two different ways of life: conservatism and mili-
tary simplicity on the one hand, versus mobility, openness and sophistication
on the other. The populace of other cities was sympathetic with Athens,
whereas oligarchs, fearing that the rise of Athens would undermine their posi-
tion, tended towards Sparta. Unsurprisingly, both Athens and Sparta tried to
instigate revolutions in other cities, in attempts to impose friendly regimes.
Yet the war blurred the ethical distinction between the two cities. Athenian
democracy was exceptional not on account of the technical aspects of its con-
stitution but by virtue of features such as legal equality, the value of individu-
ality and the cherishing of leisure. For Thucydides, as for Pericles, the
Athenian way of life meant not the rule of majority over the rest but a true
adherence to the civic ideal by all citizens. But when democratic revolutions
were instigated in other cities, what came out of them was merely more dis-
cord and violence. Oligarchic revolutions produced a similar result, but one
would not expect anything better from the Spartans and their supporters. The
democratic rhetoric, then, lost its connection with the ideal driving it, becom-
ing merely an empty justification for anything:
The ordinary acceptation of words in their relation to things was changed as
men thought fit. Reckless audacity came to be regarded as courageous loy-
alty to party, prudent hesitation as specious cowardice, moderation as a
cloak for unmanly weakness, and to be clever in everything was to be
naught in anything (III.82.4).

44 “War . . . is a rough schoolmaster and creates in most people a temper that

matches their condition’ (III.82.2).
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 37

This corruption of the vision of civil virtue would later exact its price from the
Athenians themselves, as twice during the war, after so many years of demo-
cratic life, they would experience oligarchic coups.
Yet the corruption had its impact on foreign policy too. Thus there is the
episode of the revolt at Scione, similar to the Mytilenaean revolt of a few
years earlier. This time, however, the Athenians are less compassionate, and
Cleon succeeds in passing the motion to destroy Scione and put its male
citizens to death (IV.122.6). Whilst the Mytilenaean decree was promptly
revoked the day after its adoption, the decree on Scione was to be faithfully
implemented two years later (V.32.1).
Next there is the story of Melos, in which Athenians attack and destroy a
neutral city which refused to succumb to their hegemony. The famous Melian
dialogue is perceived as the quintessential expression ofthe ‘realist’ doctrine.
The Athenians claim that discussions about justice are relevant only among
the equal, that is, among those who cannot subdue each other by force. If,
however, one side is much weaker than the other, an argument from justice
cannot defeat the logic of power.
Yet one should resist the temptation to regard this dialogue as Thucydides’
credo. Thucydides is not Thrasymachus of Plato’s Republic. There is nothing
in the text to suggest that he likes what the Athenians are saying, and there are
many hints to the contrary. Thucydides narrates the story as if to stress that the
expedition lacked any true strategic significance. Melos is mentioned only
twice in the entire History.”° This story is introduced as something happening
by the way.”° The siege of Melos lasted many months, and the matter must
have certainly been discussed in the assembly, where, most probably, the
decision to kill all the men was taken. We get no mention of this in Thucydides,
unlike the cases of Mytilene and Scione. This would have been looked upon
as an attempt to avoid an inconvenient topic had not Thucydides made a spe-
cial effort to draw our attention to this episode, by presenting a very long and
provocative dialogue. If he had really wanted to whitewash the Athenians, he
would have dealt with this story as briefly as he did with Scione.
It is true that, when taken by itself, this debate presents us with a strong case
for a cynical realism devoid of any facade of piety. Yet, when the dialogue is
considered in the context of the entire work, this impression evaporates some-
what, and the whole scene begins to look like a theatre of the absurd. One
begins to suspect that the Athenians have lost touch with reality. The compari-
son with the Mytilenaean debate highlights this point. In that case, the revolt
of an allied city posed a grave threat to Athens, so that the anger of the Athe-
nians and their intent to inflict a harsh punishment on the Mytilenaeans might
have been justified. Even in the more problematic case of Scione, Thucydides

45 See also Book III (91.1 and 94.2).

46 ‘The next summer Alcibiades sailed to Argos . . . The Athenians also made an
expedition against the island of Melos’ (V.84.1).
38 E. PODOKSIK

sounds quite understanding, stressing that this was a revolt of an ally, and that
it supposedly happened after agreement on an armistice had been reached
(IV.122.6).
In the case of Melos, however, the Athenians face no immediate threat, and
instead of a pragmatic argument we are offered a discussion conducted at a
very high abstract level. The Athenians claim that if Melos, as a weaker party,
gets away with refusing to submit to Athenian rule, this will provoke con-
tempt from other and stronger allies (V.97—99). Yet this claim looks more like
a rationalized prejudice. By that time the war had already lasted about sixteen
years, and the precedent of Melos had not spurred others to fall away from
Athens. It is not clear why anyone would wish to do this just after Athens
defeated Sparta and secured a very favourable truce. Moreover, no one forced
the Athenians to make an expedition to Melos. If they had not undertaken it,
the question of Melos’ compliance would not have arisen to threaten the Athe-
nian reputation. Finally, there was absolutely no pragmatic justification for
the cruelty demonstrated by the Athenians.
Thus, when one bases one’s own judgment merely on the facts presented by
Thucydides himself, one cannot find any pragmatism in the Athenians’ con-
duct. Instead one can note a growing fascination with the very possession of
power, so that power is seen neither as a means to achieve glory or nobility
nor as a test of virtuousness. Rather, it is viewed as a blind force which causes
the stronger to dominate and the weaker to submit, whatever the moral costs.
As aresult, the Athenians are led to commit a completely unnecessary atrocity
which will prove to be a great embarrassment to their future generations.*”
The Melian episode marks a new lower stage in the deterioration of Athe-
nian character. The Athenians come very close to a dangerous line. They
begin to think only in terms of power and flatter themselves with being realis-
tic, while this self-proclaimed realism actually distorts their sense of reality.
The Sicilian expedition is the culmination of this process. Its failure, as
everything in Thucydides, can be understood as a contingent outcome of a
series of errors of judgment. The failure was by no means predetermined, and
Thucydides certainly thinks that the expedition had some chance of success.**
Yet there is another level, one on which the defeat can be understood as a cul-
mination of the process of deterioration and therefore, in a sense, unavoidable.
These two levels of explanation are separate from each other, and therefore
those who prefer to find in Thucydides a pure historical account of events can
simply ignore the deeper meaning of the story. Yet Thucydides certainly
draws some lessons from it. Twice in the work he claims that the main defi-
ciency of the whole project was the choice of enemy. The Syracusans could
fight the Athenians most successfully as ‘they were most similar in character’

47 B.¢. more than thirty years later, Isocrates finds it necessary to look for numerous
excuses for this action. See Panegyrics, 100-2.
48 See 11.65.11.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 39

to them (VIII.96.5). That is, ‘of all the cities with which they [the Athenians]
had gone to war, these alone were at that time similar in character to their own,
democratic in constitution like themselves, and strong in ships, cavalry and
size’ (VII.55.2). In other words, the main mistake of the Athenians was that
they went to war against a democratic city, whereas they ought to have fought
only against oligarchic ones.
At first glance, the argument here is in terms of prudence. What Thucydides
seems to be saying is that it is unwise to go to war against cities of a similar
kind because then one loses one’s usual advantages. Yet, keeping in mind the
other incidents that we discussed, another idea readily comes to mind. The
Sicilian expedition was a departure from Pericles’ vision not because it was
adventurous, but because it did not pursue the right aims. How could Athens
claim to be the school of Hellas and at the same time attack the city which had
learnt most from it? By attacking Syracuse, the Athenians critically under-
mined the ideological element of their project based on the recognition of the
superiority of their way of life.
Alcibiades’ speech in the Athenian assembly in favour of the undertaking
(VI.16—18) is a good testimony to this. Alcibiades is sometimes perceived as
one who represented the truly Athenian sprit of glory and adventurism,
although he may have lacked the moderation and wisdom of Pericles.” In this
sense he seems to be the opposite of the cruel Cleon with his quasi-Spartan
perception ofjustice. In Alcibiades’ claim, that ‘a state which is accustomed
to activity would very quickly be ruined by a change to inactivity’ (VI.18.7),
one can hear very clearly the undercurrents of the vitality of Athenian
character.
Yet at acloser reading, his position turns out to be not so different from that
of Cleon.*’ As has been shown above, Cleon combined the argument from
expedience with that from formal justice. This view of justice was once
exposed by the Athenian ambassadors in their appeal to the Spartan assembly
as a cover for Sparta’s quest for power. But even if this strict formalism in
conduct is taken at its face value, it is no less alien to the spirit of Periclean
imperialism than the pursuit of naked power. For the Athenian ideal was
based not on a strict adherence to existing rules, but on the pursuit of a certain
vision of human character.
Now, however, one can notice the combination of expedience and formal
justice also in Alcibiades’ speech. On the one hand, he argues that the way to
preserve the empire is to hinder its enemies from coming against it and “there
is a danger of coming ourselves under the empire of others, should we not our-
selves hold empire over the other people’ (VI.18.3). Inaction is not an option,
given Athens’ exceptional position as an imperial power. On the other hand,

49 Ror example, Forde, The Ambition to Rule.

5° Colin Macleod, ‘Rhetoric and History’, in Macleod, Collected Essays, pp. 68-87,
p. 81.
40 E. PODOKSIK

this ‘realistic’ assessment is buttressed with an appeal to justice, which in this

case means keeping the word given to allies and defending them: ‘We ought
to assist them, especially as we have actually sworn to do so and may not
object that they did not help us, either’ (VI.18.1). According to Thucydides,
hostilities at Sicily served as the background to the Athenian expedition to
the island. Egestaeans, who had been in alliance with Athens during the
first years of the Peloponnesian war, found themselves in conflict with
Selinuntians and Syracusans who ‘were pressing them hard . . . both by land
and by sea’ (VI.6.2). Egestaeans then came to Athens looking for assistance.
One can certainly say that Athens had an interest to intervene: victory in the
war would bring Athens serious strategic advantages. Yet the Athenians
could also justify the war in terms of assistance to the allies and of defence of
the weaker party, similar to how Spartans could earlier claim that the reason
of their attack against Athens had been the desire to protect the wronged cities
of Hellas. In this sense Alcibiades adopts a kind of Spartan view ofjustice.
Colin Macleod calls his speech ‘brutal’, ‘undemocratic’ and ‘un-Athenian’,
juxtaposing it with that of Cleon, to which he elsewhere also refers as “un-
democratic’ and ‘un-Athenian’.”!
In other words, for Thucydides, attacking a democratic city was not a mat-
ter of necessity but one of choice. It was the natural consequence of the folly
of the Athenians’ fascination with power for power’s sake. By agreeing to the
Sicilian expedition, the Athenians may have remembered what their imperial-
ism was, but they certainly forgot what it was for. Having done so, they put
themselves into a no-win situation. This does not mean that they had no
chance to win the campaign. Thucydides thinks that the plan was realistic and
regards the recall of Alcibiades as the most important error of judgment which
put the entire enterprise at risk.” Yet we should pay attention to the reasons
for the recall. Thucydides claims that, while the ostensible reason was that
Alcibiades was charged with being guilty ‘of profanation with regard to the
mysteries’ (VI.53.1), the real worry about him was the suspicion that he was
plotting against the people (VI.61), and this was in the context of fears about a
possible oligarchic or tyrannical coup (VI.53.3).
Were these fears reasonable? According to Thucydides, the particular sus-
picions ofthat affair were groundless (VI.53.2). Yet was it truly unreasonable
to suspect that Alcibiades was aiming for tyranny? Alcibiades is a compli-
cated figure and not entirely unsympathetic; but even if we accept Brunt’s view
that Alcibiades was one of Thucydides’ main sources, and that Thucydides
magnified the role of Alcibiades and blamed the demos for the disaster,™ the
description of his personality still gives us plenty of reasons to suggest that the
people’s suspicions were not entirely amiss. His dealings with Sparta and

5! Ibid., pp. 75, 81; Macleod, ‘Reason and Necessity’, p. 96.

2? ee V1L61.
53 Brunt, Studies in Greek History and Thought, pp. 17-46.
 JUSTICE, POWER AND ATHENIAN IMPERIALISM 4]

Persia quite clearly showed that he was not scrupulous in the choice of means
when it concerned his own advantage. The people were aware of this side of
his personality, which led them to believe charges which would hardly have
been effective against Pericles. Therefore, if the people were worried that
Alcibiades might attempt to seize power after victory in the war, it was very
logical that they would try to recall him before the end of that war. True, this
recall put at risk the entire operation, but from the standpoint of the people
both choices were bad: either to leave Alcibiades in his position and risk revo-
lution, or to recall him and risk defeat. But this is what happens when one
begins to think only in terms of power and forgets that power is valuable only
as a test of superiority of character. For, even if the Athenians were com-
pletely wrong about Alcibiades, they were already unable to reason differ-
ently. When one becomes a Machiavellian, one suspects the same about
everyone else. Since the Athenians themselves so eloquently explained the
logic of Realpolitik to the Melians, how could they not suspect that someone
would wish to teach them the same lesson in their own city?

Vv
Thus Thucydides’ History can be read as an unfinished story not only of the
ruin of apowerful city but also the ruin of a certain ideal oflife with which this
city was associated. Under Pericles, Athens’ quest for power was synthesized
with an idealistic vision. From his death onwards this synthesis gradually col-
lapsed and international affairs came to be seen as detached from the consid-
erations ofjustice.
On the surface, this was not the cause of the Athenian defeat. Thucydides
the historian is aware of an endless variety in human affairs. Yet our fascina-
tion with the realistic moments in his narrative must not overshadow the fact
that at the most critical episodes his prose becomes passionate and engaged. I
have argued that the Funeral Oration reflects the ideal of Thucydides himself.
He is not an ardent supporter of the radical democracy in which offices are
filled by lot and the demos and the elite are divided into two rival parties, in
the process forgetting about the common good.” Yet his ideal of democracy is
perhaps even deeper than the one espoused by many popular demagogues, for
it refers not to the narrow technicalities of a democratic constitution and par-
ticipation in offices but to the character which moulds this constitution and is,
in turn, being moulded by it. This character could be recognized as excep-
tional to Athens and at the same time as a model deserving emulation in the

54 He calls the Athenian practice under the regime of the Five Thousands, ‘the best gov-
ernment they ever had’ (VIII.97.2). Yet the original text is: atvovtar Ev
moAitevoavtec. Therefore the likely meaning here is not necessarily that they appeared
to have the best constitution, but that they managed the city affairs well, behaving
responsibly and moderately, for example, by sending envoys to Alcibiades and to the
army at Samos (VIII.97.3).
42 E. PODOKSIK

rest of Hellas. In this sense, Athenian democracy and imperialism were

expressions of a certain species of the pan-Hellenic ideal.”
Therefore it would perhaps be wrong to see Thucydides as an adversary of
those Greek philosophers who aimed at vindicating ethical conduct. Certainly
he knew much about the tragic aspect of life. But it seems that he would agree
that there is indeed a connection between justice and happiness orjustice and
greatness. Perhaps this connection is not as straightforward as Socrates some-
times would have us believe. Nevertheless, it lies in the background of human
history, in order to become visible at certain crucial junctions. In this sense,
‘the cunning of reason’ is an idea with which Thucydides could have felt at
home.

Efraim Podoksik HEBREW UNIVERSITY, JERUSALEM

55 This ideal, based on a moderate interpretation of democracy and on the Athenian

hegemony in pursuit of the common good of the Hellenic world, will later be explicitly
articulated by Isocrates. The gulf between Isocrates and Thucydides is not as wide as it
seems, the difference lying rather in the lack of restraint in the rhetoric of Isocrates, who
does not wish to wear a mask of cold realism.
 THE BOOK THAT NEVER WAS:
MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS IN
HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Paul A. Rahe'?

Abstract: On the face of it, Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the

Greatness of the Romans and their Decline would appear to be a work of erudition and
a philosophical history, and as such it has generally been read. It was never, however,
intended to stand alone. It was composed as part of a larger, polemical work, akin in
purpose to the Philosophical Letters of Voltaire, and it should be read in light of the
other components of that work — Montesquieu’s Reflections on Universal Monarchy
in Europe and his Constitution of England. Had Montesquieu not been forced by fear
of the censor to suppress the book he at first intended to publish, we would not now
have difficulty in recognizing his little tract on the Romans as a meditation on the sig-
nificance of the Duke of Marlborough’s victories over Louis XIV in the War of the
Spanish Succession.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion

resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions in the
field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles,
won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of val-
ues, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all
must conform.
Winston S. Churchill

On 13 August 1704, some three hundred years ago, an event took place that is
today little remembered and even more rarely remarked on — though it sig-
nalled the beginning of a political and an ideological transformation that was
no less significant than the one marked in our own time by the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. In the late spring
and summer of that fateful year, two armies made their way from western to
central Europe. The first, led by the Comte de Tallard, Marshal of France,
aimed at upsetting the balance of power in Europe; at establishing Louis
XI1V’s hegemony over the Holy Roman Empire by installing a French nomi-
nee on its throne; and at securing the acquiescence of the Austrians, the Eng-
lish, the Dutch, and every other European power in a Bourbon succession to

' Department of History, University of Tulsa, 600 S. College Avenue, Tulsa, OK

74104-3189, USA. Email: paul-rahe @utulsa.edu
2 Throughout, I cite Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Bréde et de Montesquieu,
(Cuvres complétes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois (Paris, 1949-51), as Pléiade;
Montesquieu, uvres complétes de Montesquieu, ed. André Masson (Paris, 1950-5), as
Nagel; and Montesquieu, @uvres complétes de Montesquieu, ed. Jean Ehrard, Catherine
Volpilhac-Auger, et al. (Oxford, 1998—), as Voltaire Foundation. Unless otherwise indi-
cated, all translations are my own.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005
44 P.A. RAHE

the Spanish throne. The second army, led by John Churchill, then Earl, later
Duke, of Marlborough, with the assistance of Prince Eugene of Savoy, sought
to preserve the existing balance of power, defend Hapsburg control of the
imperial throne, and deprive Louis of his Spanish prize.
At stake, so Louis’s opponents with some reason supposed, was the estab-
lishment of a universal monarchy in Europe and French dominion in the New
World.’ At stake for Englishmen, Scots, Irish Protestants and Britain’s colo-
nists in the Americas were the supremacy of Parliament, the liberties secured
by the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and 1689, the Protestant succession to the
English crown and Protestant hegemony in the British Isles and in much of the
New World. James II, who had been ousted so unceremoniously from the
English throne in 1688, had died in 1701. His Protestant daughter Anne was
queen. But waiting in the wings, ready to claim his birthright when he came of
age, was the French nominee — her fiercely Catholic younger brother James,
known in France as the Chevalier de Saint George.
There was every reason to suppose that Louis would attain for himself and
his heirs the predominance within Europe that had been the object of his ambi-
tion during the entirety of his adult life. After all, on the field of the sword,
France then enjoyed a pre-eminence that no one dared deny. The French had
occasionally been checked, but on no occasion in the preceding one hundred
and fifty years had an army of France suffered a genuinely decisive defeat. It
thus came as a shock when all of Europe learned that the army commanded by
Marlborough and Prince Eugene had annihilated the French force and cap-
tured Marshal Tallard.*
Of course, had the battle of Blenheim been a fluke, had it been a genuine
anomaly, as everyone at first assumed, Louis’s defeat on this particular occa-
sion would not have much mattered. At most, it would have marked a tempo-
rary, if severe, setback for French arms. In the event, however, this great
struggle was but the first of a series of French defeats meted out by armies
captained by Marlborough, and it foreshadowed the series of setbacks that
would bedevil monarchical France as the century wore on. If we are today
astonishingly ill-informed concerning the once famous battles that took place
at Ramiilies, Oudenarde, Lille and Malplaquet in the brief span of years

3 See Franz Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis: Ein politischer Leitbegriff der friihen
Neuzeit (Gottingen, 1988), pp. 107-21, and Steven C.A. Pincus, ‘The English Debate
over Universal Monarchy’, in A Union for Empire: Political Thought and the Union of
1707, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 37-62. Note, in this connection, John
Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties or Europe: David Hume’s Critique of
an English Whig Doctrine’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas
Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 349-73.
4 For the details, see Winston S. Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times (Chicago,
2002), Vol. I, pp. 711-868.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS _ 45

stretching from 1706 to 1709,° it is because we have become accustomed to

resolutely averting our gaze from the fundamental realities of political life. In
the United States, despite the leading role in the world that country long ago
assumed, very few universities devote substantial resources to the study of
armed conflict. Not one history department in twenty even offers a course
focusing on the conduct and consequences of war. Yet Winston Churchill was
surely right when he observed that ‘[b]attles are the principal milestones in
secular history’, when he rejected ‘modern opinion’, which ‘resents this unin-
spiring truth’, and when he criticized ‘historians’ who so ‘often treat the deci-
sions in the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy’. ‘Great
battles’, he insisted, whether ‘won or lost, change the entire course of events,
create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and
in nations, to which all must conform’.°
It is in light of this bold claim that we must read Voltaire’s Philosophical
Letters and Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of
the Romans and their Decline. While it would be a gross exaggeration to say
that, in comparison with the battle of Blenheim, the French Enlightenment
and the French Revolution were little more than after-shocks, there can be no
doubt that Marlborough’s stirring victories over Louis XIV’s France exposed
the weakness of the ancien régime and occasioned the first efforts on the part
of the philosophes to rethink in radical terms Europe’s political trajectory.

After the Fall

Events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union
have a way of altering the terms of public debate. Before 1989, Marxist analy-
sis thrived in and outside the academy not only in the Eastern bloc but even
more so in the West. After 1991, it seemed — even to many of those who had
once been its ardent practitioners — to be hopelessly anachronistic, at best a
quaint relic of an earlier, benighted age, deserving of the species of contempt
that Sir Francis Bacon, Réné Descartes, and the other proponents ofthe scien-
tific revolution in the seventeenth century once reserved for the scholasticism
of the high Middle Ages.
So it was in France after 1713 when the treaty of Utrecht brought an end to
the War of the Spanish Succession. By dint of diplomatic skill and a canny
exploitation of the partisan strife that erupted between Whigs and Tories in
Marlborough’s England, Louis XIV had managed to preserve his kingdom
intact and even to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.’ But this
achievement did not alter the fact that the Sun King’s great project had proved
unattainable. After all, French arms had been unequal to the task that they had

5 See ibid., Vol. Il, pp. 95-627.

© See ibid., p. 381.
7 See ibid., pp. 628-1005.
46 P.A. RAHE

been set, and the new Bourbon king of Spain had been required to renounce all
claims to the French throne. Nor did the brilliance of Louis’s diplomatic coup
disguise the fact that overreaching on his part had bankrupted France and
had very nearly brought down the polity.® A sense of foreboding gripped his
countrymen as they slowly digested what there was to be learned from their
repeated defeats on the field of the sword.
It is no accident that, as a thinker, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet had in France
no real heirs: comprehensive defeat is a solvent not only for Marxism but also
for the species of Christian providentialism that the bishop of Meaux had
deployed in defending the divine right of kings in his Disceurse on Universal
History and his Politics Drawn from the Very Words of Holy Scripture.” Nor
should it seem odd that the Regency — established with all due solemnity
after Louis XIV’s death on 1 September 1715 to govern France until his
five-year-old great-grandson Louis XV should reach adulthood — quite
quickly came to be synonymous with decay.'° It was no longer possible to
thrill to the vision that had informed Louis’s great effort.
Whether Louis XIV ever actually aimed at universal monarchy is in dis-
pute. He never publicly embraced such a goal. When his opponents lodged the
accusation, he denied its truth, and historians today are inclined to the view
that his aims were, in fact, considerably less grand.'' It would, however, be an
error to suppose that the charge levelled at him by his German, English and
Dutch antagonists was a mere slogan of their own invention. They formulated
the claim as a charge in response to its articulation as an aspiration by a figure
at Louis’s own court.'* In 1667, Antoine Aubery, a member of the parlement
of Paris, had published — with formal approval from Louis XIV — a book
articulating and defending the foreign policy which that monarch pursued. It
bore the title Of the Just Pretensions of the King to Empire, and it included a
passage that caught many an eye: praising the king’s marriage to a Spanish
infanta, intimating that this portended a union of the French and the Spanish

8 For a recent description, see Colin Jones, The Great Nation: France from Louis XV
to Napoleon (New York, 2002), pp. 1-35, 52-9.
° Towards the end of Louis’s reign, even Bossuet was inclined to temper his enthusi-
asm for absolute rule: see Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The
Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1980), pp. 251-8.
'0 For an overview of the Regency, see Henri Leclercq, Histoire de la Régence pen-
dant la minorité de Louis XV (3 vols., Paris, 1921-2).
'l Tn this connection, see also John A. Lynn, “A Quest for Glory: The Formation of
Strategy under Louis XIV, 1661-1715’, in The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and
War, ed. Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox and Alvin Bernstein (Cambridge,
1994), pp. 178-204, and J.A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714 (London, 1999).
!2 See Franz Bosbach, ‘Eine franzdsische Universalmonarchie? Deutsche Reaktionen
auf die europdische Politik Ludwigs XIV’, in Vermittlungen: Aspekte der deutsche
franzosischen Beziehungen vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Jochen
Schlobach (Berne, 1992), pp. 53-68.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS 47

thrones, and celebrating the birth of an heir ‘to whom all things seem infal-
libly to promise, in the ages to come, as great an Empire over the sea as over
the land and universal Monarchy’.'*
Though the publication of this tract caused a furore throughout Europe,
helped arouse opposition to the Sun King of France, and thereby landed its
author for a time in the Bastille,'* Aubery was by no means voicing senti-
ments solely his own.'” The idea had been broached decades earlier by
Tommaso Campanella, a long-time champion of Spanish ambitions in this
regard.'® Towards the end of his life, after the prospects of Spain had
dimmed,” this visionary Calabrian friar had cast the horoscope of the ‘won-
der child’ born to Louis XIII, and he had predicted that Louis XIV would
achieve the monarchy of the world.'* Moreover, some three years before the
publication of Aubery’s tract, Jean de Lartigue presented to Louis and to his
two principal ministers, Michel Le Tellier and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a
manuscript entitled “The Second Part of the Policy of the Conquerors’, in
which he articulated at considerable length a case for the king’s adoption of
universal monarchy as his goal.”
Nor was Aubery the last to flatter the House of Bourbon in this fashion. In
1688, two decades after Aubery’s involuntary sojourn in the Bastille, the
grammarian Louis-Augustin Alemand would preface his book on the French
language with a dedicatory letter addressed to the Grand Dauphin, the imme-
diate heir to the French throne, in which he would heap extravagant praise on
the French language, singling it out, first and foremost, as an instrument of
imperial rule:
It is, Monseigneur, with this beautiful & glorious language that Louis the
Great gives laws not only to his own empire but also to Europe entire — so

'3 See Antoine Aubery, Des justes prétensions du Roy sur l’Empire (Paris, 1667),
Dealoo:
'4 See Bosbach, ‘Eine franzosische Universalmonarchie?’, pp. 53-68 (esp. pp. 56-9).
'S The book would not have been published with the privilége du roi had it not met
with the approval of the French king: see Joseph Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis
XIV (Princeton, 1976).
'© See Anthony Pagden, ‘Instruments of Empire: Tommaso Campanella and the Uni-
versal Monarchy of Spain’, in A. Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political
Imagination (New Haven, 1990), pp. 37-63. Note also A. Pagden, Lords ofAll the
World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500-1800 (New Haven,
1995), pp. 29-62.
'7 Tn this connection see John M. Headley, ‘The Demise of Universal Monarchy as a
Meaningful Political Idea’, in /mperium/Empire/Reich: Ein Konzept politischer Herrschaft
im deutsch-britischen Vergleich/An Anglo-German Comparison of a Concept of Rule,
ed. Franz Bosbach and Hermann Hiery (Munich, 1999), pp. 41-58.
!8 See Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of
the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965), pp. 76-9.
'9 See ibid., pp. 116-30.
48 P.A. RAHE

that other sovereigns appear to think it glorious & a matter for serious appli-
cation to learn French solely in order better to understand the wishes of a
prince whom they all recognize as their sovereign judge, and the peoples
themselves, following the example of their princes, study it with a care, an
attentiveness & an expenditure so extraordinary that they abandon for this
purpose country, well-being, parents & all that they possess in the world
that is most dear, expressing by this their recognition that one day they will
be called upon to obey a French monarch. In effect, Monseigneur, whether
due to destiny or reason, the French language has already established some-
thing like a universal monarchy not only over all the other languages but
also over all the nations, where it has gone as if tomark out the places where
our sovereigns shall one day make themselves heard & obeyed.”
Before the battle of Blenheim, the view articulated by Campanella, Lartigue,
Aubery and Alemand constituted the common sense of the matter. But, in
1715, hardly anyone in Paris would have dared to repeat claims so grandiose
and vainglorious. Yet no one at that time had a viable alternative vision to
proffer France.
The regent, Philippe, Duc d’ Orleans, was hard-working and canny, to be
sure, but he was notoriously dissolute, and the plan for managing the
national debt that he concocted with the Scottish adventurer and financier
John Law proved to be a catastrophe, ruining many a Frenchman and ulti-
mately tripling that debt.”! For inspiration, the French could, of course, turn
to Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, the wildly popular mirror of princes penned
for the Duke of Burgundy in the mid-1690s by Francois de Salignac de La
Mothe-Fénélon, in his guise as tutor to that ill-fated prospective heir to the
throne. But practical men, recognizing, as they did, that virtuous kingship is
an object of prayer, not a programme or policy, were for the most part left
unmoved. By 1715, it was perfectly clear to anyone with a discerning eye
that the French monarchy was bankrupt in more ways than one. By the end
of 1720, when John Law’s ‘system’ had collapsed and French banknotes
were worth no more than the paper on which they had been printed, discern-
ment was no longer required.
At this point, young Frenchmen began to look elsewhere for workable
models.” Before the first decade of the eighteenth century, the French had

20 See Louis-Augustin Alemand, Nouvelles observations, ou guerre civile des francois

sur la langue (Paris, 1688), Epistre.
2! See Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford,
1997). More generally, see Jones, The Great Nation, pp. 61-73.
22 Tn this connection, see Robert Shackleton, ‘The Death of Louis XIV and the New
Freedom’, in R. Shackleton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, ed.
David Gilson and Martin Smith (Oxford, 1988), pp. 487-98. The classic work charting
the background to this sudden and dramatic shift in focus is Paul Hazard, La Crise de la
conscience européenne (1680-1715) (Paris, 1935). On the significance of the Regency,
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS 49

demonstrated very little serious interest in England. The execution of

Charles I in 1649 had been noticed, of course, but it had evoked little but
horror; and apart from the decade immediately thereafter — when, for a
time, the Rump Parliament ruled Britain and, then, Oliver Cromwell came
into the ascendancy — England played no very prominent role in the affairs
of Europe or the New World. From the perspective of Louis XIV, the Resto-
ration polity presided over by Charles IJ and his younger brother James in
the period from 1660 to 1688 was a mere pawn — a relatively inconsequen-
tial state virtually begging for manipulation from abroad. Nor was the Sun
King aware of any other reason why the English should deserve attention or
respect. He is said once to have asked an English ambassador whether, in his
country, there had ever been any writers of note. Of Shakespeare and Milton
he had apparently never heard, and he was by no means peculiar in this
regard. When Corneille was sent an English translation of Le Cid, he is said
to have shelved it in his cabinet between the work’s translations into such
barbaric languages as Slavonic and Turkish.** In seventeenth-century
France, England was nothing more than an object for idle curiosity, if even
that. Hardly anyone thought of England, the English, their language, their
literature, their philosophy, their institutions, their mode of conduct, their
accomplishments in science, and their way of seeing the world as proper
objects for rumination.”
After Marlborough’s great victories, however, attitudes changed, and young
Frenchmen of penetrating intelligence thought it necessary to read about and
perhaps even visit the country that put together, funded and led the coalition
that had inflicted on the most magnificent of their kings so signal a defeat.”
The first figure of real note to subject England and the English to close scrutiny
and extended study was an ambitious young poet of bourgeois origin named
Francois-Marie Arouet, whom we know best by his pen-name Voltaire.”

note also Ira O. Wade, The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment (Princeton,
1977), Vol. I: Esprit Philosophique, pp. 87-119.
23 See Cecil Patrick Courtney, ‘Montesquieu and English Liberty’, in Montesquieu’s
Science ofPolitics: Essays on The Spirit of Laws, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A.
Mosher and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham, MD, 2001), pp. 273-90 (at p. 273).
24 See Georges Ascoli, La Grande-Bretagne devant l’opinion francaise au XVII
siécle (Paris, 1930), passim (esp. Vol. I, pp. 255-513, Vol. I, pp. 1-173).
25 See Gabriel Bonno, La Culture et la civilisation britannique devant l’opinion
francaise de la Paix d’ Utrecht aux ‘Lettres philosophiques’ (1713-1734) (Philadelphia,
1948), in Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 38 (1) (1948).
26 See Ira O. Wade, The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (Princeton, 1969),
pp. 147-250. On the character and significance for the French Enlightenment of the
interest that the French developed in the English at this time, see Wade, The Structure
and Form of the French Enlightenment, Vol. 1, pp. 120-71.
50 P.A. RAHE

Francois-Marie Arouet
Voltaire spent two and a half years in England, arriving in May 1726 and
departing abruptly, under suspicious, perhaps legally awkward, circum-
stances, in October or November 1728. His visit was occasioned by a scrape
that he had stumbled into in Paris, where he had insulted a member of the
nobility who had exacted revenge by luring the poet from a dinner party and
having his minions administer to the bourgeois upstart a severe cudgelling.
When word got around that Voltaire intended to challenge the noble master of
his less-exalted assailants to a duel, a lettre de cachet was elicited from the
authorities and the poet was thrown into the Bastille. Ultimately, he was
released on condition that he leave the country, which he did forthwith.
Voltaire had been thinking of visiting England in any case, for he knew that
it would be impossible to publish openly in France his epic La Henriade,
embodying as it did a diatribe against religious persecution, a defence of the
Edict of Nantes, and an oblique but unmistakable attack on the religious pol-
icy of Henry IV’s pious Catholic grandson Louis XIV. In England, while
arranging for the publication of this work in a lavish edition, Voltaire dined
out, circulating among poets — such as Alexander Pope, John Gay and Jona-
than Swift — who were on good terms with his controversial Tory friend
Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Voltaire did not, however, restrict
himself to the circle of the erstwhile Jacobite. He hobnobbed as well with the
Whigs. He arrived in London with an introduction in hand, written to the
Duke of Newcastle, England’s foreign minister, by Horatio Walpole, the Eng-
lish ambassador in Paris and uncle to Bolingbroke’s béte noire, Sir Robert
Walpole. In time, Voltaire met Newcastle and was presented to King George I;
he eventually became acquainted with the prime minister himself, spent con-
siderable time in the company of Walpole’s great friend Lord Hervey, and,
after the publication of his Henriade, dined with George II, then quite recently
crowned.
Nor did Voltaire limit himself to the world of the poets, politicians and
princes. When Sir Isaac Newton died, he attended the funeral and sought out
thereafter the great man’s niece. In the course of his sojourn he also made a
point of calling on and becoming acquainted with the dowager Duchess of
Marlborough, widow to the warrior and statesman who, twenty years before,
had very nearly brought Louis XIV’s France to its knees. Much of the rest of
his time Voltaire devoted to mastering the English language.*’ His accom-
plishment in this last regard was quite remarkable — for, by the time he left
Britain, he had published two essays in English, he had begun writing a play
in that language, and he had composed in vibrant and compelling English
27 See Peter Gay, Voltaire’s Politics: The Poet as Realist (New York, 1965),
pp. 33-48, and Theodore Besterman, Voltaire (Chicago, 3rd ed., 1976), pp. 113-28. For
an earlier, more circumstantial and ultimately less reliable account, see J. Churton Col-
lins, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau in England (London, 1908), pp. 1-116.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS 51

prose more than half of the chapters that would make up his celebrated Letters
concerning the English Nation.”®
This last work deserves attention. When he returned to France, Voltaire set
aside those of its chapters that he had already penned and turned first to his
play Brutus, which he had started in English and now recast in French, and
then to his Histoire de Charles XII. It was not until 1732 that he again took up
his letters on the English, which he dispatched to London in the spring of
1733, more than half of the work in English and the rest in French. It was pub-
lished there, entirely in English, in August of that year to great acclaim, and it
was reprinted again and again in the course of the eighteenth century. A year
later, Voltaire’s English publisher brought out a French edition under the title
Lettres écrites de Londres sur les Anglois. In the meantime, however, Voltaire
in Paris, after adding a chapter on Pascal, had rewritten the rest of the work in
his native language with an eye to its potential audience in France. When it
was Clandestinely published in Rouen under an Amsterdam imprint with the
title Lettres philosophiques in April 1734, it caused a very considerable stir.
To his English audience, Voltaire had offered an elegant satire appreciative of
their virtues but by no means devoid of humour and bite. To his compatriots,
he presented, by way of invidious comparison, a savage critique of the polity
under which they lived. The early-twentieth-century scholar who dubbed it
‘the first bomb thrown at the ancien régime’ was right on the mark.” As the
Marquis de Condorcet would observe in his biography of Voltaire, the Lettres
philosophiques marked in France ‘the epoch of a revolution’. It caused a ‘taste
for English philosophy and literature to be born here’. It induced “us to inter-
est ourselves in the mores, the policy, the commercial outlook of this people’.
It even persuaded the notoriously self-absorbed French to familiarize them-
selves with the English language. Such was the book’s effect.”
This was precisely what Voltaire intended. Some years before, he had
informed his English public that he had been ‘ordered to give an Account of
my Journey into England’. It was, he continued, ‘the true aim’ of such ‘a Rela-
tion to instruct Men, not to gratify their Malice’.
We should be busied chiefly in giving faithful Accounts of all the useful
things and of the extraordinary Persons, whom to know, and to imitate,
would be a Benefit to our Countrymen. A Traveller who writes in that
Spirit, is a Merchant of a noble Kind, who imports into his native Country
28 See Nicholas Cronk, ‘Introduction: Voltaire, an Augustan Author’ and ‘Note on
the Text’, in Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, ed. Nicholas Cronk
(Oxford, 1994), pp. vi-xxxii. In this connection, see Harcourt Brown, “The Composition
of the Letters concerning the English Nation’, in The Age of the Enlightenment: Studies
Presented to Theodore Besterman, ed. W.H. Barber et al. (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 15-34.
29 See Gustave Lanson, Voltaire (Paris, 1906), p. 52.
30 See Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Vie de Voltaire
(1791), in Frangois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, @uvres complétes de Voltaire (Paris,
1817-19), Vol. I, pp. 13-15 (esp. p. 14).
52 P.A.-RAHE

the Arts and Virtues of other Nations. I will leave to others the Care of
describing with Accuracy, Paul’s Church, the Monument, Westminster,
Stonehenge, &c. 1 consider England in another view; it strikes my Eyes as it
is the Land which hath produced a Newton, a Locke, a Tillotson, a Milton, a
Boyle.*'
This is evidently what Voltaire had in mind when, by entitling the French ver-
sion of the completed work as he did, he suggested to his compatriots the
unheard-of notion that England, the English, their language, their literature,
their institutions, their accomplishments in philosophy and science, and their
way of life constituted a subject genuinely worthy of philosophical reflection.

Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques

In the little book he eventually published, Voltaire did pretty much what he
had promised: he introduced his compatriots to Newton, Locke, Tillotson and
Boyle — as well as to Bacon, Shakespeare and Congreve and to Dryden,
Pope, Swift and Addison. But he did much more as well. He devoted the first
seven of the book’s twenty-five letters to religion: gently satirizing the prac-
tices of the Quakers, making that tolerant sect of religious enthusiasts seem
quaint, morally attractive and just a bit mad; mocking the religious and politi-
cal pretensions of the Anglican establishment but hinting broadly that its
clergymen were far less likely than their French counterparts to flaunt an amo-
rous dalliance; savaging the Presbyterians for their fanaticism; and praising
the Socinianism putatively embraced by Newton, Clarke, Locke and Leclerc,
‘the greatest philosophers, as well as the ablest writers of their ages’.** All the
while, he intimated that, in matters of religion, the great virtue of the English
was that their devotion to Mammon rendered them as men of faith decidedly
lukewarm. ‘Go into the Royal-Exchange in London’, says Voltaire. It is a
‘place more venerable than many courts of justice’. There, he asserts,
you will see the representatives of all the nations assembled for the benefit
of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact
together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of
Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Ana-
baptist, and the Anglican depends on the Quaker’s word. At the breaking up
ofthis pacific and free assembly, some withdraw to the synagogue, and oth-
ers to take a glass. This man goes and is baptiz’d in a great tub, in the name
of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. That man has his son’s foreskin cut off,
whilst a sett of Hebrew words (quite unintelligible to him) are mumbled

31 See Besterman, Voltaire, p. 125.

32 See Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Gustave Lanson (Paris, 3rd ed., 1924),
nos. 1-7, Vol. I, pp. 1-87. In the passage quoted here and in those that will be quoted
hereafter, I have attempted to improve on Voltaire’s English original only where, in the
course of translating it into French, he clearly reworked it and made an alteration. See
Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, pp. 9-32.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 53

over his child. Others retire to their churches, and then wait for the inspira-
tion of heaven with their hats on, and all are satisfied.
Voltaire’s compatriots can hardly have missed the significance for Catholic
France of the lesson that in the end he drew: ‘If one religion only were allowed
in England, there would be reason to fear despotism; if there were but two, the
people wou’d cut one another’s throats; but as there are thirty, they all live
happy and in peace.’**
In precisely the same spirit, Voltaire then examined England’s govern-
ment, tacitly juxtaposing it with the absolute monarchy ruling his native
France. Though the English liked to compare themselves with the Romans, he
expressed doubts as to whether this was apt. ‘The Romans’, he observes,
never knew the dreadful folly of religious Wars, an abomination reserv’d
for devout Preachers of patience and humility. Marius and Sylla, Cesar and
Pompey, Anthony and Augustus, did not draw their swords and set the world
in a blaze, merely to determine whether the Flamen should wear his shirt
over his robe, or his robe over his shirt; or whether, for one to take the
augury, the sacred Chickens should eat and drink, or eat only. In the past,
the English reciprocally hang’d one another at their Assizes, and cut one
another to pieces in pitched battles, for quarrels of as trifling a nature.
By his day, however, this had all changed. ‘I don’t perceive the least inclina-
tion in them now’, he wrote, ‘to cut one another’s throats over syllogisms.’ In
fact, he judged eighteenth-century Englishmen far superior to the pagans of
ancient Rome, and, by appropriating for his own use a famous passage from
Fénélon’s Telemachus that the Duc d’Orleans had paraphrased the day he
established his prerogatives as regent, Voltaire implied that the English had
achieved by way of institutions designed to check the power of their kings the
species of ideal kingship that the Duke of Burgundy’s tutor had so heartily
recommended to his young charge.
The fruit of the civil wars at Rome was slavery, and that of the troubles of
England, liberty. The English are the only people upon earth who have been
able to prescribe limits to the power of Kings by resisting them; and who, by
a series of struggles, have at last establish’d that wise Government, where
the Prince is all powerful to do good, and at the same time his hands are tied
against doing wrong; where the Nobles are great without insolence and
Vassals; and where the People share in the government without confusion.
The house of Lords and that of the Commons are the arbiters of the nation,
and the king is the presiding judge [sur-arbitre]. The Romans had no such
balance. The Patricians and Plebeians in Rome were perpetually at vari-
ance, and there was no intermediate Power to reconcile them. The Roman
Senate who were so unjustly, so criminally proud, as not to suffer the Ple-
beians to share with them in any thing, cou’d find no other artifice to keep

33 Cf. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, no. 6, Vol. 1, p. 74, with Letters concerning
the English Nation, p. 30.
54 P.A. RAHE

the latter out of the Administration than by employing them in foreign

wars. They consider’d the Plebeians as a wild beast, whom it behov’d
them to let loose upon their neighbours, for fear they should devour their
masters. Thus the greatest defect in the Government of the Romans rais’d
"em to be Conquerors. By being unhappy at home, they triumph’d over,
and possess’d themselves of the world, till at last their divisions sunk them
to Slavery.
England’s government was not designed, Voltaire insisted,
for so great an éclat nor will its end be so fatal. The English are not fir’d
with the splendid folly of making conquests, but would only prevent their
neighbours from conquering. They are jealous not only of their own Lib-
erty, but of that enjoyed by other nations. The English were exasperated
against Lewis the Fourteenth, for no other reason but because he was ambi-
tious.**
Voltaire was even willing to celebrate the bourgeois character of Eng-
lish society. “As Trade enrich’d the Citizens in England’, he contended,
‘so it contributed to their Freedom, and this Freedom on the other Side
extended their Commerce, whence arose the Grandeur of the State. Trade
rais’d by insensible Degrees the naval Power, which gives the English a
Superiority over the Seas.” Commerce enabled a small island with little in
the way of resources to marshal great fleets and finance great wars. The
role, Voltaire adds, that the island’s commercial classes played in funding
the victories of Marlborough and Prince Eugene ‘raises a just Pride in an
English Merchant, and makes him presume (not without some Reason) to
compare himself to a Roman Citizen’. To those among his compatriots
inclined to treasure aristocratic birth, he throws down an unanswerable
challenge:
I cannot say which is most useful to a Nation; a Lord, well-powder’d, who
knows exactly at what a Clock the King rises and goes to bed; and who gives
himself Airs of Grandeur and State, at the same time that he is acting the
Slave in the Anti-chamber of a Minister; or a Merchant, who enriches his
Country, dispatches Orders from his Compting-House to Surat and Grand
Cairo, and contributes to the Felicity of the World.*°
Needless to say, not everyone in France was as pleased with such bons mots
as was the author of the Lettres philosophiques. Upon first reading the book,
the abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc, who was otherwise on excellent terms with
Voltaire, protested in a letter to a common acquaintance that he was ‘shocked

34 Cf. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, no. 8, Vol. 1, pp. 88-92, with Letters concern-
ing the English Nation, pp. 33-4, and see Frangois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénélon, Les
Aventures de Télémaque, ed. Albert Cahen (Paris, 1922), p. 103, and Jones, The Great
Nation, p. 38.
35 Cf. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, no. 10, Vol. I, pp. 120-2, with Letters
concerning the English Nation, pp. 42-3.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS _ 55

by a tone of contempt which holds sway throughout. This contempt pertains

equally to our nation, to our government, to our ministers, to everything that is
highly respectable — in a word to religion.’ In his little book, he adds, Vol-
taire displays ‘an indecency truly horrible’.*°
The authorities were similarly disposed. Paris had quite recently been in a
great uproar, in part as a consequence of the ongoing struggle between
France’s Jesuits and the Jansenists, and it was not yet certain that the crisis had
passed.*’ Neither party was amused by the antics of a libertine who evidenced
a desire to dance in the ashes of both, and the civil magistrate was then, for
understandable reasons, hyper-sensitive to any criticism that appeared to be
subversive ofthe established order. Within a month of the book’s appearance,
a lettre de cachet had been issued ordering Voltaire’s arrest; his house and
that of his friend Jean Baptiste Nicholas Formont in Rouen had been searched;
the printer had been arrested and the remaining copies of the book had been
confiscated. Soon thereafter, the parlement of Paris denounced the Lettres
philosophiques as ‘scandalous, contrary to religion, good morals and the
respect due to authority’, and it instructed the public hangman to lacerate and
burn the book with all due ceremony in the courtyard of the Palais dejustice,
which he did on 10 June 1734.
Voltaire anticipated the storm. By the time that it broke, he was far away
from Paris in Champagne, near the border of Lorraine, safely and comfortably
ensconced at Cirey, the chateau of his mistress, the Marquise du Chatelet —
where, in a kind of exile, he was to spend the better part of the next fifteen
years.*® As all of this transpired, however, another French visitor to England
looked on with deep concern. He, too, upon his return from London, had writ-
ten an ambitious book modest in its dimensions. He had arranged for its publi-
cation in Holland; and, now that Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques had been
turned over to the public hangman, he wondered whether it was wise to usher
into print some of the more controversial observations that he had very much
wanted to convey.

36 See Letter from I’ abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc to Jean Brouhier on 15 April 1734,
in Voltaire’s Correspondence, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva, 1953-65), Vol. UI,
pp. 224-6 (at pp. 225-6).
37 For the particular context, see B. Robert Kreiser, Miracles, Convulsions, and
Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (Princeton, 1978), passim
(esp. pp. 54-242); Catherine-Laurence Maire, Les convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard:
Miracles, convulsions et prophéties a Paris au XVIII siécle, Collection Archives (Paris,
1985); Daniel Vidal, Miracles et convulsions jansénistes au XVIIe siécle: Le mal et sa
connaissance (Paris, 1987). See also Dale K. Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the
French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791 (New Haven,
1996), pp. 75-134 (esp. pp. 97-100).
38 See Gay, Voltaire’s Politics, pp. 66-8.
56 P.A. RAHE

Charles-Louis de Secondat

Voltaire was a bomb-thrower. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La

Bréde et de Montesquieu, was nothing ofthe kind.” He was trained in the
law, a profession inclined to justify decisions by appealing to precedent,
and he was inclined to be prudent and respectful of the dictates of long
experience. When called upon for advice in crises, such as the one that
threatened French finances at the death of Louis XIV, he tended to opt for
modest reform.*” Montesquieu was not attracted to extremes.
But, of course, Montesquieu was no more a traditionalist inclined to
subject reason to the dead hand of the past than was Voltaire. During the
Regency, some thirteen years before the appearance of the Lettres
philosophiques, at a time when censorship was comparatively lax,*’ he
had published his own philosophical letters — the Lettres persanes —
gently satirizing the foibles of his age, subverting inherited mores,
obliquely criticizing both the Roman Catholic Church and the ambitions
and despotic inclinations of Louis XIV, and intimating to all who cared to
read between the lines that in France the ancien régime was on its last
legs.”
Montesquieu was born in 1689; Voltaire, in 1694. Both had witnessed
the War of the Spanish Succession; both had recognized the significance
of Marlborough’s victories; and both thought it essential to come to an
understanding of the political regime that had so humiliated the nation
into which they had been born. “Germany was made to travel in, Italy to
sojourn in, ...and France to live in’, but England was made ‘to think in’.

39 In this connection, see Robert Shackleton, ‘Allies and Enemies: Voltaire and
Montesquieu’, in Shackleton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, pp. 153-69.
For the setting within which the two men operated, see also R. Shackleton, ‘When Did
the French Philosophes Become a Party?’, in ibid., pp. 447-60.
40 Consider Montesquieu, Mémoire sur les dettes de l’état (1715), in Pléiade, Vol. I,
pp. 66-71, in light of Jean Ehrard, ‘A la découverte des finances publiques: le Mémoire
sur les dettes de l’état’, in Montesquieu, les années de formation (1689-1720), ed.
Catherine Volpilhac-Auger (Oxford, 1999), pp. 127-42, and David W. Carrithers,
‘Montesquieu and the Spirit of French Finance: An Analysis of his Mémoire sur les
dettes de l|’état (1715)’, in Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, ed. David W.
Carrithers and Patrick Coleman (Oxford, 2002), pp. 159-90.
41 For the law of censorship and its practice, see Robert Shackleton, ‘Censure and
Censorship: Impediments to Free Publication in the Age of Enlightenment’, in Shackle-
ton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the French Enlightenment, pp. 405-20.
42 The best introduction to this important work is Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism:
Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (Lanham, MD, 1995). Vol-
taire’s philosophical letters appear to have been intended as a reply to those of
Montesquieu: see Cronk, ‘Introduction: Voltaire, an Augustan Author’, p. xxii, n. 26.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 57

Although the sentiment is attributed to Montesquieu,” the words could just

as easily have been uttered by Voltaire.
Montesquieu was an aristocrat by birth. He traced his lineage to both the
nobility of the sword and that of the robe.** He was anything but a parvenu. As
a writer, he had no special need or desire for the passing applause of his con-
temporaries. His ambitions were, if anything, much grander than those of
Voltaire, and today, at least outside France, he enjoys a reputation far greater
than that accorded his younger rival. Of course, Montesquieu could afford
to be patient, and he generally preferred to be indirect — which is why, in
the spring of 1734, as he contemplated the fate meted out to the Lettres
philosophiques and visited upon its author, his hapless friend in Rouen and
the book’s printer, he chose to censor a volume that he had the previous sum-
mer submitted to his publisher in Amsterdam,” a work for which the type had
already been set.

Montesquieu’s Mysterious Book

Montesquieu arrived in England in November 1729, roughly a year after Vol-
taire’s departure, and he departed early in 1731. His sojourn there was much
shorter than Voltaire’s; he made no great effort fully to master the language
and become an English author; and he made much less of an impression on
those with whom he sojourned than had his more voluble compatriot — but he
did circulate within aristocratic circles, and he paid close attention to every-
thing that he was told.
Montesquieu was well connected. Like Voltaire, he had known Boling-
broke in France. When he set out on his European tour on 5 April 1728, he did
so in the company of the first Earl Waldegrave, Great Britain’s newly
appointed ambassador to the Hapsburg court. On this tour, while in Vienna,
he sought out and conversed at length on a number of occasions with Marl-
borough’s old comrade-in-arms Prince Eugene of Savoy; and when he reached
Venice, he made a point of interviewing John Law, erstwhile controller-
general of the finances of France.
In Hanover, Montesquieu met King George II, and he arrived in England on
the yacht of the Earl of Chesterfield. While in the British Isles, he spent time with
the King and with Queen Caroline, and he put together a collection of French bal-
lads for their son Frederick, the Prince of Wales. He almost certainly met the

43 See [Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert], ‘Eloge de M. le President de Montesquieu’, in

Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, ed. Dénis
Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’ Alembert (Paris, 1751-72; Neufchastel, 1765; Amsterdam,
1776-7; Paris, 1777-80), Vol. V, pp. 11i—xviii (at p. vii).
44 For the significance of this distinction, see Franklin L. Ford, Robe and Sword: The
Regrouping of the French Aristocracy after Louis XIV (Cambridge, 1953).
45 See the Letter from Montesquieu to Lady Hervey on 28 September 1733, in Nagel,
Vol. III, pp. 954-6 (at p. 955).
58 P.A. RAHE

dowager Duchess of Marlborough; he listened carefully when the future Earl of

Bath told stories concerning the deceased Duke; and he befriended the husband
of Marlborough’s eldest daughter, the Duke of Montagu. He also attended Par-
liament and paid close attention to the debates. He read with care Bolingbroke’s
Craftsman, and he perused the periodical press. He was elected to the Royal
Society and inducted into the Free Masons. He used his time well.*°
When he returned to France, Montesquieu retreated to his chateau near
Bordeaux and devoted two years to writing. It was in this period of self-
imposed solitary confinement that he composed his Considerations on the
Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, the work that he
was to publish in Holland in the late spring or early summer of 1734.*’ On the
face of it, this work would appear to have next to nothing to do with his
extended sojourn in England. In its pages, to be sure, if only for comparative
purposes, there is occasional mention of the English and of the government
under which they then lived, but neither the people nor the polity looms
especially large. Montesquieu’s chosen subject was Rome, after all, and for the
most part he stuck to his last.** When viewed in this light alone, Montesquieu’s
Considerations must be judged a minor masterpiece. There is no work on
Roman history of comparable length, written before its author’s time or since,
that is as penetrating.
It remains unclear, however, just why Montesquieu thought it worth his
time to write the book. It has neither a preface nor an introduction to inform us
concerning his intentions; and though it foreshadows in some respects the
themes of his most famous work, The Spirit of Laws, it evidences little to sug-
gest a pertinence to public policy of the sort that was so central to the concerns
that inspired the jatter work. It would be tempting to conclude that in the early
1730s Montesquieu was an antiquarian and a philosophical historian, intent

46 See Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (Oxford, 1961),

pp. 91-145. For an earlier, still useful, if occasionally erroneous, account, see Churton
Collins, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau in England, pp. 117-81. Note also Wade,
The Structure and Form of the French Enlightenment, Vol. 1, pp. 148-60.
47 On the book’s appearance, cf. the Letter from I’ abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc to Jean
Bouhier on 15 April 1734, in Héléne Monod-Cassidy, Un voyageur-philosophe au XVIII’
siécle, l’abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc (Cambridge, 1941), pp. 197-205 (at p. 203), with the
Letter from Le Pére Castel to Montesquieu on 23 April 1734, in Nagel, Vol. III, pp. 962-3;
then see the Letter from Il’abbé Jean-Bernard Le Blanc to Jean Bouhier on 3 June 1734, in
Monod-Cassidy, Un voyageur-philosophe au XVIII’ siécle, pp. 209-11 (at p. 210). The
book was evidently printed well before it was released for sale to the general public.
48 See Michel Baridon, ‘Rome et |’ Angleterre dans les Considérations’ ,in Storia e
ragione: Le Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence di Montesquieu nel 250° della publicazione, ed. Alberto Postigliola (Naples,
1987), pp. 293-309.
49 At one point, as we shall see, Montesquieu started to draft a preface, but he soon
abandoned the enterprise and left the draft incomplete. See ‘Project de préface’, in Vol-
taire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 315-16.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 59

on establishing his reputation within the republic of letters by writing a schol-

arly work on a noble theme.°°
More can, however, be said, for in 1821 the existence of a second work,
known from Montesquieu’s catalogue but thought to be forever lost, was
announced to the world; and seven decades thereafter it finally became avail-
able to the public.*' Entitled Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en
Europe,” this brief essay survived only in printed form. As we learn from a
note in Montesquieu’s own hand placed at the top of the manuscript of yet
another unpublished work, its author had originally had it ‘printed with’ his
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their
Decline. His purpose had evidently been to publish the two together within
the pages of a single volume. In fact, the paper on which his Reflections on
Universal Monarchy in Europe is printed is of the same stock as that used by
Montesquieu’s publisher Desbordes in the first impression of the Consider-
ations. But, as Montesquieu goes on to indicate in his marginal note, certain
‘reasons caused’ him ‘to suppress’ the Reflections. These reasons he does not,
in this particular marginal note, spell out. Elsewhere, however, in a note he
penned on the first page of the printed copy of his Reflections, he is more
forthcoming: he ‘suppressed’ this work, he tells us, ‘for fear that certain pas-
sages would be interpreted ill [de peur qu’on n’interpretat mal quelques
endroits|’.
This was not, however, the end of the matter — for there survives yet
another manuscript of significance for understanding Montesquieu’s inten-
tions in this regard, the so-called Bodmer manuscript, which is written partly
in the hand of Montesquieu and partly in the hand of an amanuensis known to
have worked for him from 1733 or 1734 to 1738 or shortly thereafter.”
Within this manuscript, one finds a set of corrections laid out in preparation

50 This helps to explain why scholars have given it such short shrift: see, for example,
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York, 1966-9), Vol. I: The Rise
of Modern Paganism, p. 50, and Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France,
pp. 393, 396.
5! Jt was first published in Deux opuscules de Montesquieu, ed. Charles de Montesquieu
(Bordeaux, 1891), pp. 11-42.
52 For an overview, see Michel Porret, ‘Introduction’, in Montesquieu, Réflexions
sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, ed. Michel Porret (Geneva, 2000), pp. 7-68.
53 For the dating of the various hands, see Robert Shackleton, “Les secrétaires de
Montesquieu’, in Shackleton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, pp. 65-72,
which originally appeared in French Studies, 8 (1954), pp. 17-27, and was reprinted in
Nagel, Vol. IJ, pp. xxxv—xliii. In connection with the period in which the pertinent
amanuensis was in service, see also R. Shackleton, ‘La genése de /’Esprit des lois’ and
‘L’Esprit des lois: le manuscrit de la Bibliothéque nationale’, in R. Shackleton, Essays on
Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment, pp. 49-63, 85-92, which originally appeared in
Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 52 (1952), pp. 425-38, and in Nagel, Vol. III,
pp. 567-75, respectively; then note Georges Benrekassa, “La version manuscrite’, in
Montesquieu, De |’Esprit des lois: Livres I et XIII (imprimé et manuscrit) (Oxford,
60 P.A. -RAHE

for the publication of anew and improved edition of the Considerations. This
revised version of the Considerations was to contain two additional chapters
not in the original version published in 1734, and these are drawn in their
entirety from the sections of the Reflections most likely to offend. Moreover,
in the manuscript of Montesquieu’s Pensées, there are five entries graced with
marginal notes indicating that they had been inserted in the Considerations —
entries which, in fact, appear nowhere except in the chapters of the Reflec-
tions that Montesquieu attempted to find space for in the projected revision of
his little book on Rome.™*
Nor is this the end of the story. On 10 March 1818, Joseph-Cyrille de
Montesquieu, proprietor of La Bréde, drew up a catalogue of the manuscripts,
left unpublished at his grandfather’s death, that he was sending to England to
his cousin Charles-Louis de Montesquieu. Among the items listed was the
printed version of Montesquieu’s Reflections on Universal Monarchy in
Europe. Also listed was a notebook, apparently no longer extant, with the fol-
lowing inscribed on the cover:
It will be necessary to finish this little treatise on Universal Monarchy and
to cut out of it the articles concerning the mines of Spain that I placed in my
book treating commerce in The Spirit of Laws. 1 will be able to add the trea-
tise to [joindre... a) my Romans or my Spirit of Laws. Within this treatise it
will be possible to enter those things which are the residue of my Romans or
my Spirit of Laws.”
There can, then, be no doubt that Montesquieu originally intended to pub-
lish his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe as a companion piece
and sequel to his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the
Romans and their Decline and that he was dissuaded from doing so not by a
change of opinion concerning their appropriateness for one another but solely
by fear that a publication of the former work would cause him the sort of diffi-
culties that Voltaire had brought on himself when he published his Lettres
philosophiques. Moreover, there is evidence that, in the aftermath of 1734,

1998), pp. XXV—xxxv (at p. xxviii, n. 10, and p. xxxii), and see Rolando Minuti, ‘Introduc-
tion a Spicilége’, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. XIII, pp. 3-80 (esp. pp. 52-3, 68).
54 Cf. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, nos. 271 and 300, in Nagel, Vol. II, pp. 110-12,
128-9, paying particular attention to the notes, with Montesquieu, Réflexions sur la
monarchie universelle en Europe, ed. Francois Weil, V-VI, XX—XXII, in Voltaire Foun-
dation, Vol. II, pp. 344-5, 360-2, and see Patrick Andrivet and Catherine Volpilhac-
Auger, ‘Introduction a Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur décadence’, and Catherine Larrére and Francoise Weil, ‘{ntroduction a Réflexions
sur la monarchie universelle en Europe’, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 3-86
(esp. pp. 6, 41-2), 321-37 (esp. pp. 321-4).
55 See ‘Catalogue des manuscripts envoyés 4 mon cousin en Angleterre’, in Nagel,
Vol. IU, pp. 1575-82 (at p. 1575), which should be read in light of André Masson, ‘Intro-
duction: I. Les Recueils de Notes de Montesquieu’, in Nagel, Vol. II, pp. ix—xxxiii
(esp. pp. Xili-xxi), and Shackleton, Montesquieu, pp. 117-18.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS 61

Montesquieu persisted in wanting to complete the argument of the Consider-

ations with that of the Reflections and that he sought to incorporate much of
the latter work within a revised edition of the former. Indeed, even after the
publication of his Spirit of Laws in 1748, despite the fact that he had inserted
within it a great deal of material drawn from the Reflections,° Montesquieu
expressed yet again a desire to see his little book on the Romans and his short
treatise on universal monarchy published in tandem.
In short, Montesquieu’s Considerations and his Reflections form a single work
and must be addressed as such, for neither can adequately be understood apart
from the other. In fact, when they are read together, as we shall soon see,
Montesquieu’s intentions become, in at least one crucial regard, exceedingly
clear.

Montesquieu’s Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe

‘It is a question worth raising [une question qu’on peut faire], Montesquieu
writes in the very first sentence of his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in
Europe, ‘whether, given the state in which Europe actually subsists, it is pos-
sible for a people to maintain over the other peoples an unceasing superiority,
as the [ancient] Romans did.’ For this question, Montesquieu has a ready
answer — that ‘a thing like this has become morally impossible’, and in sup-
port of this bold and unprecedented conclusion he gives two reasons: first,
‘innovations in the art of war’, such as the introduction of artillery and fire-
arms, ‘have equalized the strength [forces] of all men and consequently that of
all nations’, and, second, ‘the ius gentium has changed, and under today’s
laws war is conducted in such a manner that by bankruptcy it ruins above all
others those who [initially] possess the greatest advantages’.”’
The second reason offered needs explication. In Machiavelli’s Art of War,
when the dialogue’s protagonist, Fabrizio Colonna, laments the decline of
martial virtue in Europe, he traces its disappearance to ancient Rome’s elimi-
nation of the republics that had once flourished there. Europe’s failure to
recover after the fall of the Roman empire he explains partly with regard to the
difficulty involved in restoring something that has been spoiled. Then he
mentions a second, no less salient, cause: ‘the fact that the mode of living
56 See L’Esprit des lois, 1.8.17, 19,21; 2.9.6-7, 13.17; 3.17.6; 4.21.21-2, in Pléiade,
Vol. II, pp. 363-5, 367, 373-5, 470, 529, 642, 645-7, where Montesquieu lifts entire pas-
sages from Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, VU, X, XV—XVII,
XIX-XXII, XXIV, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. , pp. 346-9, 353-9, 360-4, and con-
sider, more generally, L’Esprit des lois, 1.8.17-21; 2.9.6, 9-10.16, 11.19, 13.18;
3.17.3-4, 6, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 363-8, 373-4, 376-92, 428-30, 471, 524-7, where
Montesquieu elaborates on themes first developed in Réflexions sur la monarchie
universelle en Europe, I-VUl, XIV, XVIU-XXII, XXV, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II,
pp. 339-48, 353, 360-2, 364. In this connection, see Porret, ‘Introduction’, pp. 40-2.
57 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe. 1, in Voltaire Foundation,
Vol. II, pp. 339-64 (at pp. 339-40).
62 P.A. RAHE

today, as a consequence of the Christian religion, does not impose the neces-
sity for self-defence that existed in ancient times’. In antiquity, he explains,
men conquered in war were either massacred or were consigned to perpet-
ual enslavement where they led their lives in misery. Then, the towns con-
quered were either destroyed or the inhabitants were driven out, their goods
seized, and, after being sent out, they were dispersed throughout the world.
And so those overcome in war suffered every last misery. Frightened at this
prospect, men kept military training alive and honoured those who were
excellent in it. But today this fear is for the most part lost. Of the conquered,
few are massacred; none are held for long in prison since they are easily
freed. Cities, even if they have rebelled a thousand times, are not elimi-
nated; men are left with their goods so that most of the time what is feared is
a ransom. In consequence, men do not want to subject themselves to
military orders.
This alteration in the rules of war had an additional consequence, of particular
interest to Montesquieu, which Colonna is no less inclined to regret: ‘that
present wars impoverish the lords who are victorious as much as those who
lose — for, if the one loses his state, the other loses his money and his posses-
sions’. In antiquity, he explains, war was for the victors a source of enrich-
ment; in modern times, the costs all too often exceed the gains.°®
The developments within the ius gentium, which Machiavelli’s interlocutor
laments and evidently hopes to reverse, Montesquieu takes as a genuine
achievement, and it is on this basis also that he judges universal monarchy a
moral impossibility. ‘In earlier times’, he explains, ‘one would destroy the
towns that one had captured, one would sell the lands and, far more important,
the inhabitants as well.’
The sacking of a town would pay the wages of an army, and a successful
campaign would enrich a conqueror. At present, we regard such barbarities
with a horror no more than just, and we ruin ourselves by bankruptcy in cap-
turing places which capitulate, which we preserve intact, and which most of
the time we return.

58 Cf. Niccolé Machiavelli, Dell’arte della guerra, 2.302—9, in Machiavelli, Tutte le

opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence, 1971), pp. 332-3, with Machiavelli, Dell’arte della
guerra, 5.93-104, in ibid., pp. 359-60, and see Machiavelli, Istorie fiorentine, 5.1 and
6.1, in ibid., pp. 738-9, 765-6; note Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito
Livio, 2.6, in ibid., pp. 155-6, and then consider the contrast that Machiavelli draws
between the liberality of Cyrus, Caesar and Alexander and the parsimony practised in his
own day by Pope Julius II, Louis XII of France and Ferdinand of Spain: see II principe,
16, in ibid. ,pp. 280-1. To render my citations of Machiavelli more precise, I have added,
in some instances, the paragraph numbers provided in Niccold Machiavelli, Discourses
on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago, 1996), and the sen-
tence numbers provided in Niccold Machiavelli, Art of War, ed. and trans. Christopher
Lynch (Chicago, 2003).
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 63

The Romans carried off to Rome in their triumphs all the wealth of the
nations they conquered. Today victories confer none but sterile laurels.
When a monarch sends an army into enemy country, he sends at the same
time a part of his treasure so that the army can subsist; he enriches the coun-
try he has begun to conquer, and quite often he puts it in a condition to drive
him out.”
Herein lies what Montesquieu regarded as a delightful paradox: in modern
times imperial expansion tends to eliminate the conditions prerequisite for the
imperial venture’s success.
Having listed two reasons why universal monarchy cannot be achieved,
Montesquieu then adds a third — emphasizing that there are ‘particular rea-
sons responsible for the fact that in Europe prosperity cannot be permanent
anywhere, and for the fact that there is a continual variation in [the distribu-
tion of] power, which, in the three other parts of the world, is, so to speak,
fixed’.®° These arguments deserve closer scrutiny as well.
In Montesquieu’s view, Europe differs from the rest of the world in one
crucial particular: ‘at present’, it ‘is responsible for all the commerce in the
universe and for the carrying trade [Navigation] in its entirety’. He is per-
suaded as well that in his own day, at least in Europe, Machiavelli’s famous
dictum has been proven wrong and that money really has become the sinews
of war: that, ‘to the extent to which a state takes a greater or lesser part in com-
merce and the carrying trade, its power necessarily grows or diminishes’. In
consequence, he contends, since war gets in the way of trade, ‘a state which
appears to be victorious abroad ruins itself at home by way of bankruptcy,
while states which remain neutral augment their strength [force]’. It can even
happen that ‘those conquered regain their strength’. In fact, ‘decline [deca-
dence] generally sets in at the time ofthe greatest successes, for these can nei-
ther be achieved nor sustained except by violent means’.°!

5° See Montesquieu, Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, I, in Vol-

taire Foundation, Vol. IJ, p. 340. In the seventeenth century, though the ‘tax’ levied on
those overrun was severe, it was insufficient: see John A. Lynn, “How War Fed War: The
Tax of Violence and Contributions During the Grand Siécle’, Journal of Modern His-
tory, 65 (1993), pp. 286-310.
60 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, Il, in Voltaire Foundation,
Vol. I, p. 341.
6! Cf. Montesquieu, Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, Il, in Vol-
taire Foundation, Vol. II, p. 341, with Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca de Tito
Livio, 2.10, and Dell’arte della guerra, 7.178—9, in Machiavelli, Tutte le opere,
pp. 159-60, 386. In the passage in his notebooks on which Montesquieu drew in formu-
lating this argument, he singled out France, England and Holland as Europe’s commer-
cial powers, arguing that in this capacity they ‘have been the three tyrants of Europe & of
the world’, and citing as evidence ‘the efforts so prodigious’ mounted by ‘these three
powers’ during the War of the Spanish Succession. See Mes pensées, no. 568, in Nagel,
64 P.A. RAHE

Poverty was once an advantage in war. In antiquity, when citizen armies

were predominant, those from wealthy communities “were made up of men
lost to flabbiness, idleness, and pleasure’, and ‘for that reason’ these cities
‘were often destroyed by the armies of neighbours accustomed to a life both
painful and harsh, who were better suited to the war and military exercises of
that time’. In his own day, however, ‘the situation is not the same since no one
group of soldiers, the vilest part of every nation, has a share in luxury greater
than that of any other group, since in military exercises there is no longer need
for the same strength and skill, and since it is now easier to form armies of reg-
ular
In subsequent chapters, Montesquieu reinforces these claims, alluding to
the shift in weaponry from arrows and spears to heavy artillery and firearms,
touching on the motives that divide and paralyse modern monarchies, noting
the relative stability that had taken hold in Europe, pointing to the depth of
fortifications along France’s border with Belgium, suggesting that the growth
in communications attendant on trade denies anyone a lasting technological
advantage, and contrasting the geography of Asia, which is favourable to
empire, with that of Europe, which encourages the establishment of states of
middling size. Along the way, he manages to remind his French readers of
what had happened to their compatriots at Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde
and Lille. It is at this point that he begins a brief survey of the abortive
attempts, from Charlemagne’s day forward, to found a universal monarchy in
Europe on the lines of Rome’s great empire — ending with the projects under-
taken by the Hapsburgs and then, in his own day, by the Bourbons — and he
shows why every one of these enterprises failed.*
It is not difficult to discern why Montesquieu should have judged it impru-
dent to publish his Reflections in tandem with his Considerations. In the sev-
enteenth chapter of the former, with tongue firmly in cheek, he piously denies
the charge levelled by his opponents that Louis XIV had aimed at universal
monarchy, and then he discusses events in a manner suggesting that this had
been Louis’s aim after all. ‘Had he succeeded’, Montesquieu writes, in puta-
tive justification of his disclaimer,

nothing would have been more fatal to Europe, to his subjects of old, to
himself, to his family. Heaven, which knows what is really advantageous,
served him better in his defeats than it would have in victories, and instead
of making him the sole king of Europe, it favoured him more by making him
the most powerful of them all.

Vol. II, pp. 190-1. For the meaning of the French word ‘navigation’ as deployed by
Montesquieu, see L’Esprit des lois, 4.20.6, in Pléiade, Vol. U, pp. 589-90.
62 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, Il, in Voltaire Foundation,
Vol. I, p. 342.
63 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Eurepe, WI-XVIl, in Voltaire
Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 343-59.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS _ 65

Had Louis won the battle of Blenheim, ‘the famous battle in which he met his
first defeat [échec]’, Montesquieu tells us,

the undertaking would have been quite far from achievement, it would have
hardly begun. It would have required a great increase in forces and a great
expansion in frontiers. Germany, which had hardly entered the war except
through the sale of soldiers, would have taken the lead: the North would
have risen; the neutral powers would have taken sides, and his allies would
have changed sides [changé d’interéts].™

What Louis had failed to recognize was that ‘Europe is nothing more
than one nation composed of many’ and that the rise of commerce had
made his rivals for dominion his partners in trade. ‘France and England
have need of the opulence of Poland and Muscovy’, Montesquieu argues,
‘just as one of their provinces has need of the others: and the state, which
believes that it will increase its power as a consequence of financial ruin
visited on another state on its border, ordinarily weakens itself along with
its neighbour.’
The entire thrust of Montesquieu’s argument throughout the Reflections is
that offensive war does much more harm than good to the aggressive state. ‘If
conquest on a grand scale is so difficult, so fruitless [vain], so dangerous’, he
asks, “what can one say of the malady of our own age which dictates that
everywhere one maintain a number of troops disproportionate [desordonné]’
to one’s actual needs? We are not like ‘the Romans’, he notes, ‘who managed
to disarm others in the measure in which they armed themselves’. In modern
Europe, instead,

this malady grows worse and worse [a ses redoublemens}, and it is of neces-
sity contagious, since as soon as one state augments what it calls its forces,
the others of asudden augment theirs, in such a fashion that one gains noth-
ing thereby except the common ruin attendant on insolvency [la ruine com-
mune]. Each monarch keeps on foot all the armies that he would be able to

64. OF Réflexions surlamonarchie universelle en Europe, XVII, in Voltaire Founda-

tion, Vol. I], pp. 358-9, with Mes pensées, nos. 555 and 562, in Nagel, Vol. I, pp. 188-9.
In the first of these two passages, Montesquieu observes, “Had France won the battle of
Hochstidt [the name given the battle of Blenheim by the French], it would not for that
have achieved universal monarchy.’ In the second, which is marked as having been
inserted in his book on the Romans, he adds, ‘I say that it is not true that, had we won the
battle of Hochstiidt, we would have been the masters of Europe. Our frontier would have
been too extended. The Germans would have risen, &, instead of selling soldiers, would
have made the affair their own.’ Note also Mes pensées, no. 617, in Nagel, Vol. I, p. 198,
where Montesquieu contends that Louis XIV’s desire ‘to see his grandson on the throne
of Spain weakened’ his ‘power’. See as well Mes pensées, nos. 239, 375, 557, in Nagel,
Vol. II, pp. 99, 150, 188.
65 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XVII, in Voltaire Foun-
dation, Vol. I, p. 360.
66 P.A.. RAHE

field if the peoples he governed were in danger of being exterminated, and

we confer the name peace on this effort of all against all. Thus Europe is
ruined by bankruptcy in such a fashion that, if three private individuals
were in the situation in which the three most opulent powers in this part of
the world find themselves, they would not have anything on which to live.
Thus we are poor with all the wealth and commerce of the entire universe,
and soon, on account of having soldiers, we shall have nothing but soldiers,
and we will become like the Tartars.
The great princes, not content with buying troops from the lesser ones,
seek on every side to purchase alliances, which is to say: almost always to
waste their money.
The consequence of this situation is the perpetual augmentation of taxes
and that which prevents any remedy to come: they do not depend solely on
their revenues but make war with their capital. It is not unprecedented for
states to mortgage their incomes even in peacetime and to employ, in order
to ruin themselves by bankruptcy, means so extraordinary that the scion of a
good family, though he happens to be thoroughly out of control [le plus
derangé|, could hardly imagine resorting to such measures on his own
behalf.°°

Montesquieu ends his Reflections by drawing a comparison in this regard

between the modern monarchies of Europe and the despotisms of the Orient to
the advantage of the latter. His final sentence, directed at Europe, is a Latin tag
drawn from one of the epistles of Horace: ‘/liacos intra muros peccatur et
extra.’°’ When one looks up the original, one finds that this brief quotation is
part of a larger whole: ‘By treachery, crime and fraud’, it reads, “crimes are
committed both inside the walls of Troy and outside.’®

66 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XXIV, in Voltaire Foun-

dation, Vol. II, pp. 362-3. Cf. Mes pensées, nos. 252-61, in Nagel, Vol. II, pp. 101-5, and
note L’Esprit des lois, 2.13.17; 4.21.21, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 470-1, 644—S. In this con-
nection, see John A. Lynn, ‘The Growth of the French Army during the Seventeenth
Century’, Armed Forces and Society, 6 (1980), pp. 568-85; J.A. Lynn, ‘The Trace
Italienne and the Growth of Armies: The French Case’, Journal of Military History, 55
(1991), pp. 297-330; J.A. Lynn, ‘Recalculating French Army Growth During the Grand
Siécle, 1610-1715’, French Historical Studies, 18 (1994), pp. 881-906; and J.A. Lynn,
‘Forging the Western Army in Seventeenth-Century France’, in The Dynamics of Mili-
tary Revolution, 1300-2050, ed. Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox (Cambridge,
2001), pp. 35-56, along with J.A. Lynn, Giant of the Grand Siécle: The French Army,
1610-1715 (Cambridge, 1998), and Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army
under Louis XIV (Cambridge, 2002). More generally, see Brian M. Downing, The Mili-
tary Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early
Modern Europe (Princeton, 1992).
67 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XXV, in Voltaire Founda-
tion, Vol. I, p. 364.
68 See Horace, Epistulae, 1.2.16, in Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Sermones et epistulae,
ed. John Carew Rolfe (New Rochelle, NY, 1976).
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS _ 67

Although in retrospect Montesquieu denies that he ‘had in view any partic-

ular government in Europe’ and insists that he is expressing ‘reflections perti-
nent to them all’, had he actually published his Reflections on Universal
Monarchy in Europe, everyone would have recognized in the work an angry
diatribe against Louis XIV and everything for which the Sun King of France
had once stood.”

Montesquieu’s Considerations in Context

When considered in light of its intended sequel, Montesquieu’s Considérations
sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence reads like an
extended introduction.”° It was, after all, the image of Roman grandeur that
had fired the ambition of Europe’s greatest monarchs. Had it not been for
6° Note Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XXV, in Voltaire Foun-
dation, Vol. II, p. 364, and see Porret, ‘Introduction’, pp. 11-16, 23-38.
70 | find it astonishing that in the introduction to the one recent English translation of
this work there is no mention of the Reflections at all: see David Lowenthal, ‘Introduc-
tion’, in Montesquieu, Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and
their Decline, trans. David Lowenthal (Ithaca, 1965), pp. 1-20. This is not, however, an
anomaly. Almost nowhere in the scholarship on Montesquieu’s Considerations does
anyone say a word concerning the original design of the book that Montesquieu had
printed in 1733: see, for example, Roger B. Oake, ‘Montesquieu’s Analysis of Roman
History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 16 (1955), pp. 44-59; David Lowenthal, “The
Design of Montesquieu’s Considerations: Considerations on the Causes of the Great-
ness of the Romans and their Decline’, Interpretation, 2 (1970), pp. 144-66; Georges
Benrekassa, La politique et sa mémoire: Le politique et l’historique dans la pensée des
lumiéres (Paris, 1983), pp. 37-89; the essays collected in Storia e ragione; Richard
Myers, ‘Christianity and Politics in Montesquieu’s Greatness and Decline of the
Romans’, Interpretation, 17 (1989-90), pp. 223-38, and R. Myers, ‘Montesquieu on the
Causes of Roman Greatness’, History of Political Thought, XVI (1995), pp. 37-47; and
Douglas Kries, ‘The Displacement of Christian Historiography in Montesquieu’s Book
on the Romans’, in Piety and Humanity: Essays on Religion and Early Modern Political
Philosophy (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 233-58. Though the facts concerning Montesquieu’s
original intentions have been public knowledge for more than a century, I know of no dis-
cussion of their importance for understanding the little book actually published apart
from the brief remarks in Andrivet and Volpilhac-Auger, ‘Introduction a Considérations
sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence’ ,pp. 3-86, and in Larrére
and Weil, ‘Introduction a Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe’, pp. 321-37.
Cf. Shackleton, Montesquieu, pp. 146-70; Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old
Regime (Berkeley, 1976), pp. 140-72, 185-7; Porret, ‘Introduction’, pp. 7-68; and
J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion (Cambridge, 1999-— ), Vol. III: The First Decline
and Fall, pp. 338-60, who make mention of the pertinent facts — the first two opting to
ignore them altogether in interpreting the Considerations; the third interpreting the
Réflexions with only passing reference to the Considérations; and the fourth neglecting
to ponder Montesquieu’s reasons for self-censorship, failing to reflect on the manner in
which the polemical intent so visible in the Reflections informs the Considerations as
well, and attending only to the emphasis both place on the difference that commerce
makes.
68 P.A. RAHE

Caesar’s ruthless exploitation of the revolutionary potential inherent in his

office as an imperator within the imperium Romanum, there never would
have been a monarch who styled himself an emperor, a Kaiser, or tsar.”' In the
European imagination, the idea of universal monarchy was inseparable from a
longing for imperial greatness on the Roman model.” If Montesquieu wished
to find and apply an antidote for ‘the malady’ besetting his own age, if he
wished to defend against Machiavelli’s assault the salutary changes in the ius
gentium that had rendered universal monarchy a moral impossibility, he had
to come to grips with the attraction exerted on his contemporaries by the
example of classical Rome.
Montesquieu fully understood Rome’s allure. He felt this attraction quite
powerfully himself. He had long felt its force. On 18 June 1716, when he
made his intellectual debut at the Academy of Bordeaux, he did so by reading
a paper entitled ‘A Dissertation on the Policy of the Romans in Religion’.”
Thirty-two years later, when he published his Spirit of Laws, he was no less
deeply in thrall. ‘One can never leave the Romans behind’, he wrote therein.
‘So it is that still today, in their capital, one leaves the new palaces to go in
search of the ruins; so it is that the eye which has taken its repose on the
flower-strewn grasslands loves to look at the rocks and mountains.’ In poli-
tics, for Montesquieu, Rome represented the sublime.
Of course, nowhere in the various editions of the Considerations that were
published in French did Montesquieu even intimate that the ruminations con-
tained therein had a present-day political point. Nowhere did he mention
Dante’s De monarchia.”” Nowhere did he explicitly link Roman grandeur

71 See J.S. Richardson, ‘Imperium Romanum: Empire and the Language of Power’,
Journal of Roman Studies, 81 (1991), pp. 1-9.
?2 See Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis, pp. 20-124, and John Robertson, ‘Empire
and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order’, in A Union for
Empire, pp. 3-36 (esp. pp. 6-22). Note, in this connection, John M. Headley, “The Haps-
burg World Empire and the Revivial of Ghibellinism’, Medieval and Renaissance Stud-
ies, 7 (1978), pp. 93-127, and ‘Gattinara, Erasmus, and the Imperial Configurations of
Humanism’, Archiv ftir Reformationsgeschichte, 71 (1980), pp. 64-98, which should be
read in conjunction with Karl Brandi, ‘Dantes Monarchia und die Italienpolitik Mercurino
Gattinaras’, Deutsches Dante-Jahrbuch, 24 (1942), pp. 1-19, and see Pagden, ‘Instru-
ments of Empire: Tommaso Campanella and the Universal Monarchy of Spain’,
pp. 37-63. Note also Pagden, Lords ofAll the World, pp. 11-62. in this connection, see
also Robertson, “Universal Monarchy and the Liberties of Europe: David Hume’s Cri-
tique of an English Whig Doctrine’, pp. 349-73, and Pincus, ‘The English Debate over
Universal Monarchy’, pp. 37-62.
® See Montesquieu, ‘Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion’,
ed. Lorenzo Bianchi, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. VIII, pp. 83-98.
74 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 2.11.13, in Pléiade, Vol. Il, p. 414.
75 Thereisa bilingual edition: see Dante, Monarchia, ed. and trans. Prue Shaw (Cam-
bridge, 1995). See Charles T. Davis, Dante and the Idea of Rome (Oxford, 1957); Ernst
H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 69

with the imperial project launched in Europe by the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V. Nowhere did he touch on the ambitions ofthat great monarch’s son
and heir. Only in the most oblique fashion did he allude to the aims generally
attributed to the Sun King of France.’° In fact, nowhere in that work did he
even resort to the language customarily used in the sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries by admirers and detractors alike to describe the aspira-
tions of Charles V, Philip II and Louis XIV: nowhere did he identify the
Roman empire as a monarchie universelle. Although he owned and had evi-
dently read much of the literature on the subject, both pro and con,”’ assidu-
ously he avoided that loaded term.
Montesquieu had not always been so circumspect. We know that he revised
his Considerations in the spring of 1734, after having had his Jesuit friend
Louis-Bertrand Castel read the page proofs in search of passages that might
offend the authorities,’”* and we know that he continued that year to make fur-
ther adjustments by means of cancels and lists of errata.’”” There is reason to
suspect that, prior to publication, he altered the text also in connection with
his decision to suppress the Reflections on University Monarchy in Europe,
changing the phrasing of the Considerations where it too openly anticipated
the outlook of the more controversial of his two essays. It can hardly be fortui-
tous that, where the first impression of the published version of the Con-
siderations read ‘ce projet d’envahir tout’ and ‘Les Romains parvinrent a
commander a tous les Peuples’, the book’s English translator, who appears to
have been working from the uncorrected or partially corrected page proofs, if

(Princeton, 1957), pp. 451-95; Larry Peterman, ‘An Introduction to Dante’s De Monarchia’,
Intepretation, 3 (1973), pp. 169-90; and L. Peterman, “Dante’s Monarchia and Aris-
totle’s Political Thought’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 10 (1973),
pp. 3-38.
76 These passages come alive only when read in conjunction with the Reflections: see
Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and de leur
décadence, 1, I-VI, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 95, 105, 117, 128, 137.
77 See Porret, ‘Introduction’, pp. 11-16, 23-38 — with particular attention to the
notes.
78 See Louis-Bertrand Castel, L’Homme moral opposé al’homme physique (Toulouse,
1756), pp. 101-2, and consider the Letters from Le Pére Castel to Montesquieu in March,
April and May 1734, in Nagel, Vol. III, pp. 960—7. The last of these letters is especially
revealing with regard to the fears of both men. For further evidence, see Andrivet and
Volpilhac-Auger, ‘Introduction a Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des
Romains et de leur décadence’ ,pp. 36-7.
79 For the details, see Cecil Patrick Courtney, ‘Les éditions des Considérations sur
les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, 1734-1758’, Revue
francaise d’histoire du livre, 102-3 (1999), pp. 57-78 (esp. pp. 57-60), and Andrivet and
Volpilhac-Auger, ‘Introduction 4 Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des
Romains et de leur décadence’, pp. 37-40, 50-5. See also Robert Shackleton, ‘Les
Considérations sur les Romains de Montesquieu: Etude bibliographique’, in Storia e
ragione, pp. 13-19.
70 P.A.. RAHE

not from an earlier manuscript,’ wrote of the ‘Schemes’ responsible for the
‘Advances’ that the Romans made ‘to universal Monarchy’ and had Montes-
quieu remark that ‘[t]he Romans arrived at universal Monarchy’.*' As the
translator’s choice of language in both passages confirms, when Montes-
quieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and
their Decline was originally drafted, it was not intended to stand on its own. It
was designed as part of a larger project — to which his Reflections on Univer-
sal Monarchy in Europe was also intended as a contribution.**
It should not, then, be surprising that from the outset Montesquieu had as
his focus in the Considerations Rome’s imperial achievement. Nor should it
seem odd that he at first thought it sufficient to write a brief account of the

80 At [Montesquieu], Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of

the Romans (London, 1734), pp. 99 and 190, note c, the translation accords with what is
found in the uncorrected first impression: see Montesquieu, Considérations sur les
causes de la grandeur des Romains and de leur décadence, \, XV1, in Voltaire Founda-
tion, Vol. II, pp. 165-6, note c, and 234, note c. But, at [Montesquieu], Reflections on the
Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans, p. 11, note 1, the translator makes
use of the corrected text: see Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur
des Romains and de leur décadence, I, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. I, p. 97, note 1.
81 Cf. [Montesquieu], Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of
the Romans, pp. 153, 194, with Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la gran-
deur des Romains and de leur décadence, XV, XVIII, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. I,
pp. 204, 236.
82 Nor should one regard the latter as an afterthought. The Reflections may well have
been composed before the essay whose argument it was designed to supplement: it was
almost certainly thought through beforehand. Parts of it were, in fact, written in the
1720s, prior to Montesquieu’s travels in Germany, Italy and England. Thus, for example,
Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XV1, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II,
pp. 354-8, is drawn from Considérations sur les richesses de |’Espagne, ed. Pierre Rétat,
in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. VIII, pp. 595-623, as is L’Esprit des lois, 4.21.22, in
Pléiade, Vol. Ul, pp. 645—9 — to which Montesquieu added a note in 1749 (at Pléiade,
Vol. II, p. 645, n. b), specifying that the bnef unpublished work from which it was
derived was written ‘more than twenty years before’. The material evidence confirms
this claim: two versions of the Considérations sur les richesses de |’Espagne survive in
manuscript — one in Montesquieu’s hand, the other partly in his hand and partly in that
of the amanuensis who penned Mes pensées, no. 300 (printed in Nagel, Vol. II,
pp. 128-9), part of which appears in Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe,
VI, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, p. 345. This individual, l’abbé Bottereau-Duval, is
known to have been employed by Montesquieu from 1721 to 1728 and possibly also for a
time after his return from England in 1731 and early 1732: see Andrivet and Volpilhac-
Auger, ‘Introduction a Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur décadence’, p. 6, n. 11, and Catherine Larrére, ‘Introduction 4 Considérations sur
les richesses de |’ Espagne’, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. VIII, pp. 583-94 (esp. p. 583),
which should be read in light of Shackleton, “Les secrétaires de Montesquieu’, pp. 65-72
(esp. pp. 67, 69), and Minuti, ‘Introduction a Spicilége’, pp. 3-80 (esp. pp. 35-6, 50-1,
68). Note, in this connection, Shackleton, “La genése de |’Esprit des lois’, pp. 49-63
(esp. pp. 51-3).
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 71

empire’s origin. It would have been easy to suppose that his Reflections
required nothing more in the way of an introduction. But, as Montesquieu dis-
covered not long after he began, one cannot in so summary a manner do jus-
tice to Rome’s allure.
In a preface that Montesquieu began drafting for his Considerations and
then eventually discarded, he remarked that, when he first undertook the pro-
ject, he had intended nothing more than ‘to write a few pages on the establish-
ment of sole rule by the Romans [la monarchie chez les romains]’, but that he
had strayed from that path. ‘The grandeur of the subject captured me’, he
explained. ‘Unawares [insensiblement], | climbed back to the first period of
the republic, and I descended all the way to the empire’s decline.’ En route, he
investigated ‘the history of the Romans in their laws, in their customs, in their
mode of maintaining order [police], in the letters of individuals, in the treaties
they made with their neighbours, in the mores of the people with whom they
had to deal, in the form of the ancient republics, in the situation in which the
world subsisted before certain discoveries had been made’ — all for the pur-
pose of attempting ‘to explain what happened in the empire by what had hap-
pened in the republic’. His book’s aim was ‘to make sense of that famous
usurpation of the world, which the Romans accomplished’. Their ‘empire’
was not, like that of Alexander the Great, ‘the work of a day’. Nor did it result
from ‘the play of fortune’. It was accomplished in the course of ‘a number of
centuries’ and was ‘a masterpiece of wisdom and conduct’. It was achieved
‘through seven centuries of labour, with a vigour [force] and policy that
remained constant, by means of following the same project in good fortune
and bad, by a combination of causes that always lent themselves to this
design’. In the Considerations, he sought ‘finally to make sense of a thing that
has in history no counterpart at all and that, to all appearances, will have one
never’.®®

An Economy of War
The Considerations begins abruptly with an admonition, contrasting the city
of Rome in its early days with modern cities and suggesting that Rome came
into being for the safeguarding of booty, first of all, then cattle and produce
from the countryside. We are meant to envisage ancient Rome as alien — and

83 One should read Montesquieu, “Project de préface’, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol.

II, pp. 315-16, in light of Andrivet and Volpilhac-Auger, “Introduction a Considérations
sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence’, pp. 6-9, 48, and then
see Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis, pp. 1-19: as the context makes clear, when
Montesquieu speaks of la monarchie — like Dante, the Ghibellines and the Guelfs of an
earlier age — he has in mind empire, not a particular form of government. Later
Montesquieu would come to think better of Alexander: see Catherine Volpilhac-Auger,
‘Montesquieu et l’impérialisme grec: Alexandre ou I’ art de la conquéte’, in Montesquieu
and the Spirit of Modernity, pp. 49-60.
12 PA VRAHE

as warlike in the extreme. Its statesmen were captains, and it was ‘a city with-
out commerce, and nearly without arts’. In consequence, Montesquieu tells
us, ‘pillage was the sole means that individuals had for enriching themselves’.
What distinguished Rome from other, similar communities existing at that
time was its discipline and its systematic approach to the conduct of war.
Booty was collected, then distributed to all who fought; a part of any land con-
quered was set aside for distribution to the Roman poor. The consuls, who led
Rome’s armies, could be honoured with a triumph only if they were victorious
on the field of the sword: no other accomplishments were thought worthy of
the highest honour. Everyone had a compelling motive for the pursuit of war.
At Rome, as a consequence, distinctions were blurred: the practices that
Montesquieu mentions were designed to make it impossible for a citizen there
to tell the difference between the virtues of ‘constancy and valour’ and ‘the
love’ he owed himself, his family, the fatherland, and all that is dearest to
men. Not surprisingly, then, the Romans found themselves in ‘a war eternal
and endlessly violent’.**
In Montesquieu’s judgment, there were two reasons for the Romans’ suc-
cess. To begin with, they looked on ‘war’ as ‘the only art’ and devoted ‘mind
entire and all their thoughts to its perfection’. In the process, they imposed on
themselves burdens and a type of discipline hardly imaginable in modern
times. ‘Never’, writes Montesquieu, ‘has a nation made preparations for war
with so much prudence and conducted it with so much audacity.’*®
In similar fashion, the Roman Senate remained resolute, displaying at all
times ‘the same depth of understanding’, and never allowing Rome’s pros-
perity to occasion on its part a neglect of its responsibilities. While Rome’s
‘armies spread terror everywhere’, its Senate ‘pinned those on the ground
whom it found already crushed’. To this end, the Senate
erected itself as a tribunal to judge all the peoples. At the end of every war, it
decided on the punishments and rewards that each deserved. It took a part of
its territory from a people vanquished in order to confer it on Rome’s allies
and thereby accomplished two things: it attached to Rome kings from
whom it had little to fear and much to hope, and it weakened other kings
from whom it had nothing to hope and everything to fear.
The Romans employed their allies to defeat the foe, then laid them low as
well. When faced with a coalition, they temporized, making a separate peace
with its weakest member. In the midst of war, they put up with injuries of
every sort, waiting silently for a time suited to retribution. When a people

84 See Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and de leur
décadence, ed. Francoise Weil and Cecil Courtney, I, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. UJ,
pp. 89-98, which is a critical edition based on the first impression of the book’s first edi-
tion.
85 See Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and de leur
décadence, II, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 99-104.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 73

crossed them, they punished the nation, not just its leaders, and on their ‘en-
emies’ they inflicted ‘evils inconceivable’. As a consequence, ‘war was rarely
launched against’ the Romans, ‘but always they waged war at the time, in the
manner, and on those convenient’.
Since it was ‘the custom’ of the Romans ‘to speak always as if they were the
masters, the ambassadors they dispatched to peoples who had not yet had a taste
of their power were sure to be mistreated, providing them with a pretext for mak-
ing war anew’. Peace they ‘never made in good faith’, and ‘their treaties were,
strictly speaking, mere suspensions of war: they always put in them terms condu-
cive to the ruin of the state which accepted them’. When the Romans imposed a
peace, it was designed to sow division — to set the members of a royal family
against one another or the factions in a city at odds. When they learned of quarrels
between states, they nearly always intervened, siding with the weaker party.
‘These customs’ were not arrived at by accident. They were, Montesquieu insists,
‘invariable principles, as can easily be seen, for the maxims’ the Romans ‘made
use of against the greatest monarchs were precisely those which they had
employed in the beginning against the little cities that surrounded them’. Theirs
was ‘a slow way of conquering: they defeated a people and contented themselves
with weakening it; they imposed on it conditions that imperceptibly undermined
it; if it recovered, they beat it down once more; and it became a subject without
being able to date the epoch of its subjection’.*° In sum, Rome achieved greatness
because the statecraft practised by the Senate matched in cunning and ruthless-
ness the valour and skill of the generals and soldiers it sent into the field.

Montesquieu and Machiavel

In his Considerations, Montesquieu mentions neither Machiavelli nor
Bossuet, but there can be no doubt that his Rome is modelled on the city
described in the former’s Discourses on Livy and not on its providentialist
depiction in the latter’s Discourse on Universal History. Montesquieu does
not situate Rome in the context of salvation history. His Rome owes its rise to
grandeur not at all to a plan devised by God.*’ Montesquieu’s Rome is a
machine designed for conquest — and nothing more.**®

86 See Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and de leur
décadence, VI, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. I, pp. 130-41.
87 Shackleton, Montesquieu, pp. 157-70, rightly emphasizes Montesquieu’s silence
in this regard: cf. Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle (Paris,
1926), 1.9-11, 3.6-8, pp. 59-108, 353-94. There is, of course, more to this than immedi-
ately meets the eye: see Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime, pp. 167—72; Myers,
‘Christianity and Politics in Montesquieu’s Greatness and Decline of the Romans’,
pp. 223-38, and Kries, ‘The Displacement of Christian Historiography in Montesquieu’s
Book on the Romans’, pp. 233-58.
88 As Etorre Levi-Malvano, Montesquieu and Machiavelli, trans. A.J. Pansini (Kopperl,
TX, 1992), demonstrated in 1912, Montesquieu borrowed heavily from the Discourses
74 P.A. RAHE

As a consequence, in reading Montesquieu’s Considerations, we hear

nothing of the civilizing mission of Rome. Cicero’s analysis of the true great-
ness of the imperial city is simply ignored, and Montesquieu nowhere
quotes Virgil’s celebrated juxtaposition of classical Greece with Rome:
Others will cast with greater delicacy breathing bronze,
So I firmly believe, and draw out from the marble faces that live,
Speak in court with greater force,
Trace the pathways of the heavens with an instrument
And predict the rising of the stars.
You! Roman! Remember to rule the world’s peoples
With imperious command — for these are the arts that will be yours:
To impose the habit of peace,
To spare the conquered, battle the haughty down.”
Montesquieu’s Rome is not a benefactor conferring peace and prosperity: it is
a predator. It achieved ‘the empire of the world’ and made of the Romans
‘masters of the universe’. It “enchained the universe’ and ‘subjected’ it ‘en-
tire’, and in the process it established a ‘universal sovereignty’.’’ But no good
came of it. Its subjects suffered more from its rule, Montesquieu tells us, than
from the horrors of their original conquest.” Like Machiavelli, Montesquieu
intended to write ‘a thing useful for one who understands it’, and he therefore
thought it ‘more profitable’ that he ‘go after the effectual truth of the matter
on Livy tor the Dissertation sur la politique des Romains dans la religion that he read to
the Academy of Bordeaux in 1716 and returned to the same source when he composed
his Considerations. For further evidence, see André Bertiére, ‘Montesquieu, lecteur de
Machiavel’, in Actes du Congrés Montesquieu réuni a Bordeaux du 23 au 26 mai 1955
(Bordeaux, 1956), pp. 141-58, and Robert Shackleton, ‘Montesquieu and Machiavelli:
A Reappraisal’, in Shackleton, Essays on Montesquieu and on the Enlightenment,
pp. 117-31, which first appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, | (1964), pp. 1-13.
and was reprinted in Comparative Literature: Matter and Method, ed. A. Owen Aldridge
(Urbana, IL, 1969), pp. 283-95. There is reason to think that Montesquieu re-read the
Discourses on Livy, this time in Italian, shortly after his return to France from England:
note Spicilége, ed. Rolando Minuti, no. 561, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. XIII, pp. 495-7
(with particular attention to n. 5).
89 See, for example, Marcus Tullius Cicero, De officiis, ed. M. Winterbottom (Oxford,
1994), 2.8.26-7.
90 See Virgil, Aeneid, 6.847—-53, in P. Vergili Maronis, Aeneis, ed. M.J. Pattist
(Groningen, 2nd edn., 1956). This passage should arguably be read, as both Machiavelli
and Montesquieu may have read it, in light of Virgil, Aeneid, 6.893—901. For a provoca-
tive treatment of this passage in light of the book as a whole, see Eve Adler, Vergil’s
Empire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Lanham, MD, 2003). In this connection, note
also Sergio Bertelli, ‘Noterelle Machiavelliane: Un Codice di Lucrezio et di Terenzio’,
Rivista Storica Italiana, 73 (1961), pp. 544-53.
°! See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, V1, 1X, X{l-XII, in Vol-
taire Foundation, Vol. IJ, pp. 139, 154-5, 180, 190.
°2 See Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, VI, in Voltaire Founda-
tion, Vol. II, p. 139.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 75

[andare drieto alla verita effettuale della cosa}’ than that he attend ‘to that
matter as represented in the imagination [che alla imaginazione di essa]’.”* It
is not an accident that at first he intended to call his work Considerations on the
Causes of the Aggrandizement of the Romans and their Decline.”
There is, however, one great difference between Montesquieu and Machia-
velli,” and it is made explicit in a crucial passage within The Spirit of Laws,
which echoes and elaborates on the significance of two earlier passages in the
Considerations that were evidently intended to foreshadow the argument of
the Réflexions. In his Considerations, Montesquieu intimates what he openly
says in the work’s intended sequel: that the species of statecraft successfully
applied by the Romans and both admired and recommended by Machiavelli
has become in modern times utterly obsolete. In the book’s first edition, he
broached the issue towards the end of the first chapter.
The world of that time was not like our world today: the voyages, the con-
quests, commerce, the establishment of great states, the invention of the
postal system, of the compass, of printing — these, along with a certain gen-
eral orderliness and civilization fostered by public administration [une
certaine Police générale], have facilitated communication and established
among us an art called policy [/a Politique]; everyone sees at a glance
everything that is in motion throughout the universe; and if a people dis-
plays a hint of ambition, it immediately arouses in all other peoples both
caution and fear.”°
In the book’s antepenultimate chapter, he traces some of the consequences of
this transformation. ‘Among us’, he observes, ‘it seems to be more difficult
than it was for the ancients to carry out enterprises on a grand scale.’

93 See Machiavelli, Il principe, 15, in Machiavelh, Tutte le opere, p. 280.

°4 Consider the Letter from Montesquieu to Lady Hervey on 28 September 1733, in
Nagel, Vol. IJ, pp. 954-6 (at p. 955), in ight of Andrivet and Volpilhac-Auger, “Intro-
duction a Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence’, p. 40.
95 See Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime, pp. 140-67, who rightly sees in
the Considerations not just an appropriation of Machiavelli but also a thoroughgoing cri-
tique.
96 See Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and
de leur décadence, I, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol, II, p. 95. This passage was dropped
from the edition published in 1748 and was not restored in subsequent editions.
Montesquieu had been thinking about the relationship between communication and poli-
cy since the early 1720s, if not before: note Mes pensées, nos. 8—9, in Nagel, Vol. II, p. 2,
and see Shackleton, ‘La genése de /’Esprit des lois’, pp. 49-63 (esp. pp. 51-2). For the
significance given the word ‘police’ at this time, see Peter France, “Polish, police, polis’,
in P. France, Politeness and its Discontents: Problems in French Classical Culture
(Cambridge, 1992), pp. 53-73, and Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equal-
ity and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton, 1994), pp. 18-23.
76 P.A. RAHE

It is difficult to hide them because communication among the nations 1s

such today that princes have envoys [Ministres] at all the courts and can
find traitors in all the cabinets.
The invention of the postal system causes the news to take wing, so to
speak, and to come in from every quarter.
Given that great enterprises cannot be conducted without money and that
merchants became its masters as a consequence of the invention of letters of
exchange, the affairs of these merchants are always bound up with the
secrets of state, and they neglect nothing [in their quest] to penetrate these.
Variations in the rate of exchange without known cause induce many
people to search out and in the end to find that cause.
The invention of the printing press has placed books in the hands of
everyone; that of engraving has rendered geographical charts commonplace;
and, finally, the establishment of the public prints [Papiers politiques]
gives to everyone a knowledge of the general interest sufficient that they
can all more easily be enlightened concerning what has been done in secret.
Conspiracies within the state have become difficult because, subsequent
to the invention of the postal system, the public has a capacity to learn all
the secrets of individuals [tous les secrets des Particuliers sont dans le
pouvoir du Public}.
Here, Montesquieu abruptly ends his discussion, in a manner appropriate to
the Byzantine setting in which it takes place, with the suggestion that the
emergence of what is now called ‘the public sphere’ makes it more difficult
for conspirators to form designs against a prince without being caught.’ By
drawing up short in this fashion, he whets the appetite of his more discerning
readers and prepares them for his Reflections by causing them to wonder
whether there are not other “enterprises on a grand scale’ that have been ren-
dered ‘more difficult’ by the various revolutions that have taken place.”*

97 See Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and
de leur décadence, XXI, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 263-4. Since the publication
of Jiirgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, 1989), in Ger-
man in 1962, the character of the public sphere in eighteenth-century France has received
considerable scrutiny: see Keith Michael Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opinion under the
Old Regime: Some Reflections’, in Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed.
Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley, 1987), pp. 204—46, which is revised,
expanded and reprinted as K.M. Baker, ‘Public Opinion as a Political Invention’, in K.M.
Baker, /nventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 167-99; Gordon, Citi-
zens without Sovereignty, passim; and James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in
Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge, 2001).
°8 The significance of what had happened was already visible at the time of the
Regency: see Thomas Kaiser, ‘The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Public Opinion, and the
Reconstruction of the French Monarchy’, Journal of Modern History, 55 (1983),
pp. 618-43, and T. Kaiser, ‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-
Century France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit’, Journal of Modern History,
63 (1991), pp. 1-28.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 77

In the parallel passage within his Spirit of Laws, Montesquieu asserts that there
are, indeed, such enterprises, pointing to one particularly important consequence
of the great transformation that has taken place, which he had left it to readers of
the Considerations to sort out for themselves. In making merchants the masters
of money, he explains, the invention ofthe letter of exchange liberated commerce
from political control, and it thereby rendered counter-productive a species of
conspiracy once commonly engaged in by those already in power. “The richest
trader’, he remarks, can no longer be exploited as he had been in the past, for his
expropriation has become difficult, if not impossible, to achieve since he pos-
sesses ‘nothing but invisible goods’, which can ‘be conveyed everywhere and
leave not a trace in any place’. Ever since the establishment of modern banking
by merchants and the unrestricted flow of capital from one country to another,
Montesquieu observes, ‘it has become necessary for princes’ intent on securing
the means to defend and even expand their domain to exercise self-restraint in the
interests of promoting the commerce that enriches the subjects whose consump-
tion and wealth they hope to tax. To be precise, it became necessary for them to
establish the rule of law, to provide for the security of persons and property, and
‘to govern themselves’ in all regards ‘with greater sagacity than they would
themselves have thought possible — since, in the event, great acts of authority
[les grands coups d’autorité] proved to be so maladroit that experience gave rise
to the recognition that only good government [la bonté du gouvernement] brings
prosperity’. He concludes,
We have begun to cure ourselves of Machiavellianism, and we will con-
tinue the cure all the days of our lives. There is now greater need for moder-
ation in councils. Those things which in other times one called coups d’Etat
would today, apart from the horror, be blunders [imprudences]. Happy it is
that men are in a situation in which, though their passions inspire them with
the thought of being rogues, they have an interest in not being such.”
Moderation was Montesquieu’s watchword, as even a cursory glance at his
Considerations will confirm.'°° The extreme measures that thrilled Machia-
velli, Montesquieu could not and would not countenance. His Considerations
is written in such a manner as to attract those inclined to admire Rome: it is
designed at the outset to delight those who find Machiavelli’s Discourses on
Livy seductive. In the end, however, Montesquieu’s aim is to rob Rome of its
allure. In the end, his aim is Machiavelli’s defeat.'°'

99 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 4.21.20, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 640-1.
Montesquieu came to this conclusion concerning the import of the invention of letters of
exchange quite early on: consider Mes pensées, nos. 77 and 280, in Nagel, Vol. I, pp. 24,
119, in light of Shackleton, ‘La genése de l’Esprit des lois’, pp. 49—63 (esp. pp. 51—2).
100 See Walter Kuhfuss, ‘La notion de modération dans les Considérations de
Montesquieu’, in Storia e ragione, pp. 277-92.
101 Cf., however, JH. Whitfield, Machiavelli (New York, 1947), p.114, who con-
tends that it is ‘in Montesquieu’s account that we first find an exposé of Roman conduct
78 P.A. RAHE

To this end, he insists on the significance of a point that Machiavelli had

readily conceded: that the Romans’ loss of liberty was by no means an acci-
dent — that it was a natural consequence of the project of conquest which they
undertook. As Montesquieu puts it: ‘The greatness of the empire destroyed
the republic.’ Rome’s grandeur produced Roman decadence. In subjecting
and enchaining ‘the universe’, in achieving ‘universal sovereignty’, the Romans
subjected and enchained themselves. ‘As long as Rome’s dominion was
restricted to Italy’, Montesquieu explains,
the republic could easily be sustained. Every soldier was equally a citizen;
each consul levied an army, and the other citizens went to war under the
consul who succeeded him; the number of soldiers was not excessive; they
were careful to accept into the militia only those who had enough in the way
of goods to have an interest in the city’s preservation; the Senate exercised
close oversight over the conduct of the generals and prevented thein from
even thinking in a manner contrary to their duty.
Once, however, Rome’s legions crossed the Alps and passed over the sea, the
republic was obliged to post its warriors abroad for extended periods, and
Marius began what soon became a universal practice, enrolling as soldiers all
without distinction — citizens and freedmen, those recorded in the Roman
census as settled, propertied men, those listed as possessing children alone,
and those who were counted solely by head. ‘Little by little’ these soldiers
‘lost the spirit characteristic of citizens’, and “the generals, with armies and
kingdoms at their disposal, sensed their strength and no longer found it possible
to obey’. The interplay between the army and its commander was such that
soldiers ‘began to acknowledge’ the authority of “no one but their general, to
base their hopes entirely on him’, and to think of Rome as something distant
from their concerns. “They were no longer the soldiers of the republic’,
Montesquieu observes, “but those of Sulla, Marius, Pompey, Caesar. Rome
could no longer tell whether the man who headed a provincial army was the
city’s general or its enemy.’ When the Roman people, already by then cor-
rupted by their tribunes, learned how ‘to confer on their favourites’ so ‘formi-
dable’ an ‘authority abroad, all the sagacity of the Senate became useless, and
the republic was lost’.'”

that might easily have served for a copybook for Hitler, with treaties meant to be violated,
the yielding of an adversary at one point merely an earnest for a series of yieldings, trib-
ute imposed to make rulers unpopular, and so forth. Montesquieu thus systematized a
new view of the Romans which Machiavelli in his simplicity never dreamt of.’
102 Cf. Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and
de leur décadence, IX, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. I, pp. 153-6, with Machiavelli,
Discorsi sopra la prima deca did Tito Livio, 1.18.3; 3.8, 16.1—2, 24 (esp. 3.24), which
should be read in light of 1.17.1, 35, 37, 40, 46, 53, 60; 2.20; 3.1; 6.19, 28; 31.4, 34, 49, all
in Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, pp. 101-4, 117-20, 123-5, 128-9, 134-6, 143-4, 176,
195-7, 209-13, 222-3, 231, 234-5, 239, 241-3, 253-4. For a meditation on Machiavelli’s
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 79

In similar fashion, Montesquieu stoutly denied that the ‘dreadful tyranny of

the emperors’ was an anomaly. It ‘stemmed’, he argues,
from the general spirit of the Romans. Because they fell all of a sudden under
an arbitrary government, because there was almost no interval between
their being in command and their servitude, they were not at all prepared for
the transition by a softening of mores. Their ferocious humour remained;
the citizens were treated as they themselves had treated the enemies they
vanquished, and they were governed on the same plan.
It was, he suggests, ‘the continual sight of gladiators in combat’ that had
‘made the Romans’ so ‘ferocious’. ‘Accustomed’, as they were, ‘to making
sport of human nature in the person of their children and their slaves, the
Romans could hardly be cognizant of that virtue which we call humanity’.
Montesquieu asks us to contemplate ‘the spectacle of things human’, and
he invites us to feast our imaginations on the grandeur that had so inspired
Machiavelli. ‘How many wars do we see undertaken in the course of Roman
history’, he asks, “how much blood being shed, how many peoples destroyed,
how many great actions, how many triumphs, how much policy, how much
sagacity, prudence, constancy, and courage!’ But, then, after giving classical
Rome its due, Montesquieu asks us to pause and re-examine, with a more
critical eye, the trajectory of the imperial republic.
But how did this project for invading all end — a project so well formed,
so well sustained, so well completed — except by appeasing the appetite
for contentment [a assouvir le bonheur] of five or six monsters? What!
This senate had caused the disappearance of so many kings only to fall
itself into the most abject enslavement to some of its most unworthy citi-
zens, and to exterminate itself by its own judgments! One builds up one’s
power only to see it the better overthrown! Men work to augment their
power only to see it, fallen into more fortunate hands, deployed against
themselves!!°
Gradually, unobtrusively, Montesquieu weans us from the enticement of
Rome — as our admiration gives way to horror and disgust. Gradually and
unobtrusively, at the same time, he lays the groundwork for the argument
against continental empire that he intended to advance in his Reflections on
Universal Monarchy in Europe.
Together, the Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the
Romans and their Decline and the Reflections constitute Montesquieu’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding — which was, like them, a
ground-clearing operation designed to prepare the way for the construction
of a lasting edifice. Together, they were at one point expected to serve as an
account of the republic’s fall and that of the empire as well, see Pocock, Barbarism and
Religion, Vol. Ill, pp. 208-32.
103 See Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and
de leur décadence, XV, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. I, pp. 199-200, 204.
80 P.A. RAHE

introduction to a third essay, which Montesquieu began drafting in or not

long before 1733 with the intention of publishing it alongside them within
the covers of a single volume.

On the Constitution of England

In the latter part of the eighteenth century, after the appearance of his Spirit of
Laws, Montesquieu’s name came to be synonymous with Anglophilia. James
Madison repeated the common sense of the matter in 1788 when he wrote,
The British constitution was to Montesquieu, what Homer has been to the
didactic writers on epic poetry. As the latter have considered the work of the
immortal Bard, as the perfect model from which the principles and rules of
the epic art were to be drawn, and by which all similar works were to be
judged; so this great political critic appears to have viewed the constitution
of England, as the standard, or to use his own expression, as the mirrour of
political liberty; and to have delivered in the form of elementary truths, the
several characteristic principles of that particular system.'™
Before 1748, however, although penetrating readers of Montesquieu’s Per-
sian Letters and of his Considerations might have thought their author quite
friendly to England, they would have been hard-pressed to come up with evi-
dence suggesting on his part a profound admiration.'” Montesquieu’s later
reputation was, in fact, due to a single, comparatively long chapter that
appeared in the eleventh book of The Spirit of Laws. What virtually no one
knew was that Montesquieu had written this chapter shortly after his return
from England to France, well before he started working on The Spirit of Laws,
quite possibly before he had even conceived of the project. What virtually no
one knew was that he had originally hoped to include it as the conclusion to
the volume in which his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the
Romans and their Decline and his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in
Europe were also slated to appear.
The evidence is compelling. To begin with, we have the testimony of a dis-
interested witness. Not long after Montesquieu’s death, his son delivered a
eulogy on his behalf in which, in passing, he revealed that his father’s ‘book
on the government of England, which had been inserted into The Spirit of
Laws, was composed’ in 1733, long before the publication of that great work,

104 See Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob
E. Cooke (Middletown, CT, 1961), no. 47, pp. 324-5. See also Edmund Burke, An
Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791), in The Writings and Speeches of the Right
Honourable Edmund Burke (Boston, 1901), Vol. IV, pp. 211-12.
'05 In Montesquieu’s published works, there was not a great deal to go on: see Lettres
persanes nos. 101 and 130, in Voltaire Foundation, I, 414-15, 493 (which appear as Let-
tres persanes nos. 104 and 136, in Pléiade, I, 284-5, 336), and consider the passage cited
in note 115, below.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS 81

and that his father had entertained ‘the notion of having it printed with’ his
treatise on ‘the Romans’
.'°°
In addition, there is material evidence. The manuscript of The Spirit of
Laws that Montesquieu dispatched to his publisher does not survive, but in the
Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris one can peruse an earlier version of the text
replete with insertions and revisions in the author’s hand and in the hands of
his various amanuenses.'”’ Robert Shackleton’s pioneering work on Montes-
quieu’s secretaries makes it possible for us to date with some precision the
handiwork of each.'°* Within this particular manuscript, as Shackleton points
out, there are two chapters in a hand earlier than all of the others.’ One of these
two is an extract from a chapter originally composed for inclusion in Montes-
quieu’s Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe.''° The other is a draft
of the longest and most famous chapter of The Spirit of Laws: Montesquieu’ s
‘Constitution of England’.'! Both are largely, if not wholly, in the hand of the
amanuensis who served Montesquieu from 1733 or 1734 until 1738 or shortly
thereafter.''* It was this amanuensis who helped pen the Bodmer manuscript
with its plan for inserting much of the Reflections within the Consider-
ations.''’ In short, there is every reason to suppose that, in the spring of 1734,
when Montesquieu published his Considerations and suppressed the Reflec-
tions, his little ‘book on the government of England’ was ready to hand.

106 See Charles de Secondat, ‘Mémoire pour servir a I’éloge historique de M. de

Montesquieu’, in Louis Vian, Histoire de Montesquieu: Sa vie et ses euvres (Geneva,
1970), pp. 396-407 (at p. 401).
107 Bibliothéque Nationale de France (Paris) n.a.fr. 12832-12836. A critical edition
is being prepared: see Benrekassa, “La version manuscrite’, pp. XXV—XXXVv.
108 See Shackleton, ‘Les secrétaires de Montesquieu’, pp. 65-72.
109 See Shackleton, ‘La genése de l’Esprit des lois’, pp. 49-63; Shackleton, ‘L’ Esprit des
lois: le manuscrit de la Bibliotheque nationale’, pp. 85—92; and Shackleton, Montesquieu,
p. 285.
'10 Cf. Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, VIII, in Voltaire Founda-
tion, Vol. IJ, pp. 346-8, with the slightly truncated version eventually published:
Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.17.6, in Pléiade, Vol. I, p. 529. From this chapter of his
Reflections, Montesquieu later had copied out as well the paragraph that constitutes
L’Esprit des lois, 3.8.19, in Pléiade, Vol. II, p. 365.
'Il See Jean-Jacques Granpré Moliére, La théorie de la constitution Anglaise chez
Montesquieu (Leiden, 1972), pp. 32-44, who reprints the pertinent chapter as ultimately
published, italicizing the parts from the manuscript appearing in the earliest hand. In the
case of this particular chapter, where Montesquieu revised the text of the original draft,
he did so by substituting a fresh page for the one on which the material needing revision
had appeared. It is quite likely that the version ultimately published differed little from
the one originally drafted.
112 See Shackleton, ‘L’Esprit des lois: \e manuscrit de la Bibliotheque nationale’,
pp. 85-92.
113 See Larrére and Weil, ‘Introduction a Réflexions sur la monarchie universelle en
Europe’, pp. 321-4.
82 P:A: RAHE

The two claims advanced by Montesquieu’s son are not only, therefore,
plausible; they constitute a possibility that we would be inclined to entertain
even if he had never suggested it,''* and it is in this light that we need to recon-
sider his Considerations and Reflections. We should not want to imitate the
Romans, and in his Considerations Montesquieu shows us why. Even if for
some perverse reason we wanted to imitate the Romans, he then demonstrates
in his Reflections, we could not succeed. We are left to wonder what alterna-
tive to the policy hitherto followed by states there might, in fact, be, and it is at
this point that Montesquieu for a time intended to direct our attention to the
polity that had recently emerged on the other side of the Channel.
In the first impression of the first edition of his Considerations, before the
authorities in France weighed in and he found himself forced to tone down the
pertinent passage, Montesquieu allowed himself a revealing observation.
After discussing the duties assigned the Roman censor, he remarked that,
prior to Rome’s acquisition of a transalpine and overseas empire, its ‘govern-
ment... was admirable in the fact that, from the time of its birth, its constitu-
tion was such that, either by the spirit of the people, the strength of the Senate,
or the authority of certain magistrates, every abuse of power could always be
corrected’. Then, he asserted that Carthage, Athens and the republics of medi-
eval and modern Italy had failed this test, and he drew the attention of his
readers to what was apparently the only modern analogue to classical Rome,
observing,

The government of England is one of the wisest in Europe, because there

is a body there that examines this government continually and that contin-
ually examines itself; and such are this body’s errors that they not only do
not last long but are useful in giving the nation a spirit of attentiveness. In
a word, a free government, which is to say, a government always agitated,
knows no way in which to sustain itself if itis not by its own laws capable
of self-correction.''

114 Cf. Moliére, La théorie de la constitution Anglaise chez Montesquieu, passim,

who fails to recognize the significance of the fact that the draft of L’Esprit des lois,
2.11.6, is in the same hand as an extract from the missing manuscript of Refléxions sur la
monarchie universelle en Europe.
"15 See Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence, VIII, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 149-52 (esp. p. 152). To the copies
slated for distribution in France, Montesquieu added a sheet of errata, in which he tem-
pered his praise for England considerably, substituting for his highly suggestive claim
that its government “is one of the wisest in Europe’ the much milder observation that it is
‘wiser’ than Carthage, Athens and the republics of modern Italy. Subsequent editions
printed in France followed the version specified in the errata; editions published abroad
followed the language of the original edition. As one would expect, the work’s original
English translator followed the version found in the unexpurgated first impression: see
Montesquieu, Reflections on the Causes of the Grandeur and Declension of the Romans,
p. 84.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 83

In what his son called his ‘book on the government of England’, Montesquieu
set out to show what occasioned this process of self-correction by discussing
in detail the English constitution’s institutionalization of aseparation of pow-
ers and by exploring the consequences for England of the rivalries and ten-
sions that this separation introduces within its government.'!°
When, however, he set for himself this task, it cannot have been the French
philosophe’s intention to stop where, apparently, he did. As we have seen, the
focus of his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and
their Decline and that of his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe
was empire. To finish a work of which they were to form so signal a part,
Montesquieu would have had to discuss at some point the imperial policy
adopted by the English. He would have been required to demonstrate that, by
the very nature of its polity, England was committed to a foreign policy that
was, in modern circumstances, viable in a way that the Roman policy fol-
lowed by the continental powers was not. As it happens, this is one of the
things that he set out to do in the final and concluding chapter of what was, in
the original edition of The Spirit of Laws, the first of its two volumes.'"”
The little essay on the English form of government that Montesquieu
drafted in 1733 focused narrowly on institutions and said next to nothing
about the actual operation of the polity. This, at some point before 1743, he set
out to describe in a second essay aimed at showing the degree in which Eng-
lish mores, manners and character derived from England’s fundamental
laws.''® When one puts the two together, as an enterprising Edinburgh pub-
lisher did in English translation some two years after The Spirit of Laws first
appeared in French,'’” one has an account of eighteenth-century England that
is admittedly less historical and consequently much shorter than Montes-
quieu’s essay on Rome but no less ambitious in aim and equally comprehen-
sive in scope.

The Policy of England

Montesquieu’s two essays on England have a decidedly odd character. They
are not only the longest chapters in The Spirit of Laws; in them their author

!16 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 2.11.6, in Pléiade, Vol. Il, pp. 396-407.
117 See [Montesquieu], De l’Esprit des loix (2 vols., Geneva, 1748), Vol. I,
pp. 499-522.
118 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. I, pp. 574-83. For
the evidence pertinent to the date of composition, see Shackleton, ‘L’Esprit des lois: le
manuscrit de la Bibliothéque nationale’, pp. 85—92 (esp. p. 92). Cf., however, Shackle-
ton, Montesquieu, pp. 295-6.
'19 See [Montesquieu], Two Chapters of a celebrated French work entitled De
l’Esprit des loix, translated into English. One treating of the constitution of England;
another of the character and manners, which result from this Constitution (Edinburgh,
1750).
84 P.A. RAHE

displays a measure of caution and a hesitation uncharacteristic of the tone he

adopts in the work as a whole. In the first of the two, Montesquieu generally
writes forthrightly in the indicative mood, but frequently deploys the verb
‘devoir’ in such a manner as to imply that the institutions which he is describ-
ing should operate in the way indicated but may not, in fact, do so.'” In the
second of these chapters, in the brief chapter at the beginning of The Spirit of
Laws in which he discusses the state of nature'*! and nowhere else in the book,
Montesquieu persistently resorts to the conditional mood — as if to suggest
that, in these chapters, he is exploring possibilities, even probabilities, which
may not, strictly speaking, be real.'” The title of the second of his two essays
on England — ‘How the Laws Can Contribute to the Formation of the Mores,
Manners, and Character of a Nation’ — reinforces this impression. '** It
describes that which stands to reason, not that which always of necessity will
in fact take place.
This seminal chapter falls neatly into four parts — a disquisition on the
species of party conflict likely to arise under the English constitution, a
study of the spirit that would guide such a polity’s conduct abroad, a meditation
on the role that religion would play in the lives of its citizens and an account of
the mores, manners and character that its laws would produce. The first, third
and fourth of these parts have attracted notice,'** but the second and arguably

!20 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 2.11.6, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 396-407.
I? See ibid., 1.1.2, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 235-6. In this connection, see David
Lowenthal, ‘Book I of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws’, American Political Science
Review, 53 (1959), pp. 485-98; Michael Zuckert, ‘Natural Law, Natural Rights, and
Classical Liberalism: On Montesquieu’s Critique of Hobbes’, in Natural Law and Moa-
ern Moral Philosophy, ed. Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul (Cam-
bridge, 2001), pp. 227-51; and Stanley Rosen, ‘Politics and Nature in Montesquieu’, in S.
Rosen, The Elusiveness of the Ordinary: Studies in the Possibility of Philosophy (New
Haven, 2002), pp. 14-53.
!22 In this connection, see Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opinion under the Old
Regime’, pp. 214—21, and ‘Public Opinion as Political Invention’, pp. 173-8.
'23 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol: II, pp. 574-83.
'24 See Thomas L. Pangle, Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary
on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago, 1973), pp. 114-60; Baker, ‘Politics and Public Opin-
ion under the Old Regime’, pp. 214-21, and Baker, ‘Public Opinion as Political Inven-
tion’, pp. 173-8; Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca
Balinski (Princeton, 1994), pp. 53-64; Sharon Krause, “The Spirit of Separate Powers in
Montesquieu’, Review of Politics, 62 (2000), pp. 231-65 (esp. pp. 246-57); Paul A.
Rahe, ‘Forms of Government: Structure, Principle, Object, and Aim’, in Montesquieu’s
Science of Politics, pp. 69-108 (esp. pp. 80-97); Cecil Patrick Courtney, ‘Montesquieu
and English Liberty’, pp. 273-90 (esp. pp. 282-5); Bernard Manin, ‘Montesquieu: La
République et Le Commerce’, Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 42, (3) (2001),
pp. 573-602 (esp. pp. 593-601); and Sharon Krause, “The Uncertain Inevitability of
Decline in Montesquieu’, Political Theory, 30 (2002), pp. 702-27 (esp. pp. 716-19).
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 85

most important part has received little scholarly attention.'” In it, Montes-
quieu demonstrates that England is — or, at least, ought to be — free from
the ‘malady’ that so threatens the powers on the continent with bankruptcy
and ruin. In it, he allows us to comprehend how it is that, in his time, a
well-ordered Carthage, such as England, could defeat Louis XIV’s
ill-ordered French Rome.
Montesquieu does not attribute any special rationality to the English. Given
the character of their constitution, he imagines, they would be ‘always on fire’
and ‘would be more easily conducted by their passions than by reason’, and,
for this reason, he adds, ‘it would be easy for those who govern the nation to
make it undertake enterprises contrary to its real interests’. The chief passion
of the English, the only one which Montesquieu sees fit to mention in this par-
ticular context, would appear to be their fondness for liberty, which, he says,
they ‘love prodigiously because this liberty is genuine [vraie]’. In defending
their freedom, Montesquieu intimates, this people would be no less resolute
than were the citizens of classical Rome. This nation would ‘sacrifice its
goods, its ease, its interests; it would impose on itself imposts quite harsh,
such as the most absolute prince would not dare make his subjects endure’.
Moreover, possessing, as they would, ‘a firm understanding of the necessity
of submitting’ to these taxes, the English ‘would pay them in the well-
founded expectation of not having to pay more; the burden would be heavier
than the sense of burden’ .'”°
In this chapter, Montesquieu refrains from intimating, as he does repeat-
edly elsewhere, that the monarchies on the European continent find it well
nigh impossible to inspire the confidence necessary to enable them to borrow
the great sums of money needed for the conduct of war in modern times.'”’ It
suffices for him pointedly to remark that, given its laws, England should have
little difficulty in sustaining the credit required. It could, after all,

'25 An exception to the rule is John Robertson, ‘Universal Monarchy and the Liber-
ties of Europe’, pp. 364-8, who notices as well the connection between Montesquieu’s
Reflections and the discussion of English foreign policy in this chapter of The Spirit of
Laws.
126 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. II, p. 577.
!27 Note Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et
de leur décadence, III, in Voltaire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 105—6, which should be read
in conjunction with Montesquieu, Mes pensées, nos. 557, 639 and 746, in Nagel, Vol. II,
pp. 188, 201, 222; and Refléxions sur la monarchie universelle en Europe, XXIV, in Vol-
taire Foundation, Vol. II, pp. 362-4, which should be read in light of Mes pensées, nos.
252 and 1345, in Nagel, Vol. II, pp. 101-2, 403-4. Then, see L’Esprit des lois, 2.13.17;
4.20.4—5, 10, in Pléiade, Vol. I, pp. 470, 587-9, 592. For a more recent discussion ofthis
question, see Roland Mousnier, ‘L’évolution des finances publiques en France et en
Angleterre pendant les guerres de la Ligue d’ Augsburg et de la Succession d’Espagne’,
Revue historique, 205 (1951), pp. 1-23.
86 P.A. RAHE

borrow from itself and pay itself as well. It would, then, undertake enter-
prises beyond its natural strength and deploy against its enemies immense
fictional riches, which the confidence it would inspire and the nature of the
government would render real.
For the purpose of preserving its liberty, it would borrow from its sub-
jects; and its subjects, seeing that its credit would be lost if it was con-
quered, would have yet another motive for exerting themselves in defence
of its liberty.'*
England could borrow from its subjects because, under the constitution that
Montesquieu has in mind, its subjects would not, in fact, be subjects at all.
They would be citizens, as Montesquieu quickly acknowledges,'”’ in what he
has already elsewhere described in The Spirit of Laws as ‘arepublic concealed
under the form of a monarchy’;’*’ and, as such, they could see to the payment
of the debts they owed themselves.
Though inclined, like Rome, to defend itself with a resoluteness and a vig-
our that beggar the imagination, this England would by no means be a nation
intent on conquest. If it occupied an island, as it might, 1t would recognize that
‘conquests abroad’ on the continent of Europe or elsewhere would serve only
to ‘weaken it’. If this island were blessed, as also it might be, with good soil,
this nation ‘would have no need for war as a means for enriching itself’. Since
its laws would guarantee that “no citizen would be dependent on another, each
would take his liberty more seriously than the glory reserved for a few citizens
or one’. In consequence, though the soldierly profession might be deemed
useful and would no doubt often be dangerous, its members would be regarded
as ‘persons whose services are burdensome [laborieux] for the nation itself,
and civil status would be accorded greater regard’.
The reason why Montesquieu’s England would in this particular be so
unlike Rome is simple. Situated, as it would be, on an island and blessed with
the farmland and constitution with which it would be blessed, it would quite
naturally be a seat of “peace and liberty’; and, when ‘liberated from destruc-
tive prejudices’, such as those to which the Christian religion sometimes gives
rise, it ‘would be inclined to become commercial’ and to exploit to the limit
the capacity of its ‘workers’ to fashion from its natural resources objects of
‘great price’. It would be inclined to carry on a great trade with those nations
to the south that require its commodities and have much to offer that the

128 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. I], p. 577, which
should be read in conjunction with ibid., 4.22.17-18, in Pléiade, Vol. Il, pp. 672-5.
Montesquieu had not always thought England’s propensity for borrowing an advantage:
cf. Mes pensées, no. 154, in Nagel, Vol. II, p. 49. Nor was he always persuaded that Eng-
land could manage its debt: see Mes pensées, no. 17, in Nagel, Vol. I, pp. 3-4. In his final
judgment, however, Montesquieu was quite perceptive: see John Brewer, The Sinews of
Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (New York, 1989).
129 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. il, p. 577.
130 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 1.5.19, in Pléiade, Vol. I, p. 304.
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 87

English could not provide for themselves; and in flight from the excessive
taxes it would impose, many of its citizens, on the pretext of travel or health,
would seek their fortunes abroad ‘even in the lands of servitude itself’ .'*!
Commerce these Englishmen would conduct as other nations conduct war.
This people would have ‘a prodigious number of petty, particular interests’.
There would be ‘an infinity of ways’ in which it could do and receive harm
[choquer et étre choqué]. ‘It would become sovereignly jealous, and it would
be more distressed by the prosperity of others than it would rejoice at its own.’
Its laws, ‘in other respects gentle and easy, would be so rigid with regard to
commerce and the carrying trade . . . that it would seem to do business with
none but enemies’.'*”
Commerce would, in fact, be dominant in every sphere. ‘Other nations’,
Montesquieu remarks elsewhere, ‘have made their commercial interests give
way to their political interests: this one has always made its political interests
give way to the interests of its commerce.’'* If England, he tells us, were to
send out colonies far and wide, to places such as North America, ‘it would do
so more to extend the reach of its commerce than its sphere of domination’.
With these colonies, in keeping with its aim, it would be generous, conferring
on them ‘its own form of government’, which would bring ‘with it prosperity’
so that ‘one would see great peoples take shape in the forests which they were
sent to inhabit’. Nearer home, to be sure, it would be less forthcoming. If it
subjugated the populace of a neighbouring island, such as Ireland, it might
‘confer on’ this nation ‘its laws’ but then, out of jealousy regarding the
island’s location, the quality of its ports, and the nature of its resources, ‘re-
tain’ this nation ‘in great dependence in such a manner that the citizens there
would be free while the state was itself a slave’. The neighbouring island’s
‘civil government’ might be ‘very good’, but ‘its prosperity would be ren-
dered quite precarious’, for it would be little more than a ‘storeroom for its
master’ .'**
As an island nation, possessed of ‘a great commerce’, Montesquieu’s Eng-
land ‘would have every sort of facility for fielding maritime forces’. Safe-
guarding ‘its liberty would not require that it possess strongholds [places],
fortresses, and armies on land’, but ‘it would have need of an army at sea to
guarantee it against invasion, and its navy would be superior to that of all the

131 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 577-8. To
grasp what Montesquieu has in mind when he speaks ofpréjugé destructeurs, one must
reflect on L’Esprit des lois, Pref.; 2.10.4; 4.20.1-2, 7; 5.25.12-13, in Pléiade, Vol. I,
pp. 219-31, 380-1, 585-6, 590, 745-9.
132 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. II, p. 578, which
should be read in conjunction with L’Esprit des lois, 4.20.12, in Pléiade, Vol. I, p. 593.
133 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 4.20.7, in Pléiade, Vol. II, p. 590.
134 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 578-9.
88 P.A. RAHE

other powers, which, needing to employ their finances for war on land, would
not have enough for war at sea’.
England’s supremacy at sea would not be without effect. “The empire of the
sea has always given those peoples who possessed it a natural pride. Sensing
themselves capable of insulting anyone anywhere’, the English ‘would believe
their power as unlimited as the ocean’, and they would be inclined to exercise
it when circumstances warranted. In consequence, ‘this nation would have a
great influence on the affairs of its neighbours. Because it would not employ
its power for conquest, they would be more inclined to seek its friendship, and
they would fear its hatred more than the inconstancy of its government and its
internal agitation would appear tojustify.’ In consequence, although ‘it would
be the fate of its executive power almost always to be uneasy [inquietée] at
home’, it would nearly always be ‘respected abroad’ .'*
Montesquieu was prepared to concede that this England would some day
fail. ‘As all human things have an end’, he observed in his chapter on the
English constitution, ‘the state of which we speak will lose its liberty, it will
perish. Rome, Lacedaemon, and Carthage have, indeed, perished.’'* But
Montesquieu did not think that England would perish in the foreseeable
future. When an Anglo-Irish admirer, who was busy arranging for the publi-
cation in London of a French edition and an English translation of The Spirit
of Laws, wrote to express dismay at the licentiousness of his own compatriots
and to ask whether the book’s author thought that England was in any imme-
diate danger of succumbing to corruption and of losing its liberty in the pro-
cess,'*’ Montesquieu responded that ‘in Europe the last sigh of liberty will be
heaved by an Englishman’, and he drew the attention of his correspondent to
the intimate connection between English liberty and the independent citizenry
produced and sustained by English commerce.'** Nowhere did Montesquieu
ever suggest that England suffered from a defect comparable to that which
135 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 3.19.27, in Pléiade, Vol. II, pp. 579-80,
which should be read in conjunction with L’ Esprit des lois, 4.20.8, 21.7, in Pléiade, Vol.
II, pp. 590-1, 611. Cf. Montesquieu, Mes pensées, no. 428, in Nagel, Vol. II, p. 163,
where Montesquieu suggests that it should be a “great maxim for France to force England
always to have a land army’ since the fact that it would ‘cost it a great deal of money’
would ‘diminish to that degree its funds for the navy’.
136 See Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, 2.11.6, in Pléiade, Vol. Il, p. 407.
'37 See Letter from William Domville to Montesquieu on 4 June 1749, in Nagel, Vol.
III, pp. 1235-7, which should be read in light of Robert Shackleton, ‘John Nourse and the
London Edition of L’Esprit des Lois’, in Studies in the French Eighteenth Century
Presented to John Lough, ed. D.J. Mossop, G.E. Rodmell and D.B. Wilson (Durham,
1978), pp. 248-59.
138 See Letter from Montesquieu to William Domville on 22 July 1749, in Nagel,
Vol. II, pp. 1244-5. What Montesquieu has in mind is clearer in the notes he made in
anticipation of responding to Domville’s query: consider Mes pensées, no. 1960 (a Mon-
sieur Domville), in Nagel, Vol. II, pp. 592-5, in light of Rahe, ‘Forms of Government:
Structure, Principle, Object, and Aim’, pp. 94-7, and Manin, ‘Montesquieu: La République
 MONTESQUIEU’S CONSIDERATIONS ON THE ROMANS — 89

felled Rome. Nowhere did he contend that the commercial project on which it
had embarked carried within it the seeds of its destruction. Nowhere did he
trace a link between English grandeur and English decadence.
As should by now be clear, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Bréde
et de Montesquieu, had a great deal in common with his countryman Voltaire.
Both put a great deal of effort into pondering the revelation that took place on
13 August 1704 on the battlefield of Blenheim when, contrary to all expecta-
tion, an army marshalled by Great Britain shattered Louis XIV’s dream of
universal monarchy by annihilating the legions deployed by France — and,
after visiting England, the two reached quite similar conclusions. If, in 1734,
circumstances conspired to prevent Montesquieu from spelling out in full
detail the true focus of his critique of the imperial aspirations inspired by
Roman grandeur, if they ruled out his making clear the depth of the admira-
tion he harboured for the peculiar species of commercial republicanism that
had emerged in England in the course of the seventeenth century, they did not
stop him from doing so in the more relaxed political atmosphere of 1748,
when he included within his Spirit of Laws much of the material that he had
suppressed on that earlier date and contrived therein to juxtapose England
with Rome.’ It is in light of what he stopped short of saying in 1734 that we
should read what Montesquieu actually said fourteen years thereafter in the
masterpiece for which he is generally remembered today.'”°

Paul A. Rahe"*' UNIVERSITY OF TULSA

et Le Commerce’, pp. 597-601. See also Donald Desserud, ‘Commerce and Political
Participation in Montesquieu’s Letter to Domville’, History of European Ideas, 25
(1999), pp. 135-51, and Krause, ‘The Uncertain Inevitability of Decline in Montesquieu’,
pp. 716-19.
139 After consulting note 56, above, see Montesquieu, L’ Esprit des lois, 2.11.5—20, in
Pléiade, Vol. I, pp. 396-430.
140 See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? and Other Studies (New York,
1959), pp. 49-50.
141 J am indebted, as always, to James W. Muller of the University of Alaska at
Anchorage, who first steered me to Montesquieu; to my colleague Michael A. Mosher,
in whose company I first read The Spirit of Laws from beginning to end; and to David
W. Carrithers of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, with whom I have had
innumerable conversations concerning the French philosophe. I owe a special debt to
Stuart D. Warner of Roosevelt University, who drew my attention to the eulogy of
Montesquieu delivered by his son and to the manner in which the former persistently uses
the conditional mood in certain chapters of The Spirit of Laws; to Cecil Patrick Courtney
of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who was generous, as always, in sharing with me his
knowledge of things pertinent to Montesquieu; to Diana Schaub and Catherine Larrére,
who encouraged me to pursue this project; to John A. Lynn, who took time out from his
busy schedule to read and comment on a draft of this piece; and to the two anonymous
reviewers for HPT.
 GLADSTONE, RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND PRACTICAL
REASONING'

David J. Lorenzo?

Abstract: W.E. Gladstone’s changing and inconsistent views on religious oaths and
established churches present an intriguing puzzle. This article compares and contrasts
his early and later stances on these topics with the purpose of evaluating the place of
practical judgments in his arguments. This exploration reveals that the prevailing
description of Gladstone’s views, which privileges the role practicality played in his
later support for a more liberal set of policies governing church-state relations, does
not explain the changes and inconsistencies in his position as well as does a descrip-
tion that emphasizes the changes and continuities in his fundamental philosophy. In
conclusion, connections are suggested between this explanation of Gladstone’s views
and theoretical considerations regarding the development of liberal freedoms.

Introduction

W.E. Gladstone’s changing and eclectic positions on issues of religious free-

dom mark the views of a politically active figure who moved from a con-
stricted stance to a mostly, but not completely, liberal outlook on church-state
relations. To examine questions concerning those views is to begin to under-
stand a person important to the complex development of religious freedom in
the Anglo-American world. In particular, how did Gladstone’ later justifica-
tions for removing religious oaths for public office differ from his earlier sup-
port of such oaths? And how could he have led the Parliamentary effort to
disestablish the Church of Ireland in the 1860s and then defended the estab-
lishment of the Church of England almost immediately thereafter?’
In addressing these and related questions, I focus on practical judgments.
What role did they play in Gladstone’s justifications of church-state policies?
Here I define ‘practical judgment’ as did Aristotle, as an act of ‘calculat[ing]
well with respect to some worthwhile end’.* I pursue this course because an
initial reading of Gladstone seems to verify the centrality of practical consid-
erations to his later, more liberal stance. That is, he appears to have justified
an expanded realm of religious freedoms when he turned belatedly to a set of
' This paper was originally presented at the Southwest Political Science Association
Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, in March 2003. My thanks to J. Stephen Phillips, Gary
Watts, Brian Lang and the editors and two anonymous referees of HPT for their com-
ments.
2 Assoc. Professor of Political Science, Jamestown College, Box 6075 College Lane,
Jamestown, ND 58401, USA. Email: lorenzo @jc.edu
3 Here I take disestablishment and the elimination of religious oaths as liberal free-
doms. See Robert Audi, Religious Commitment and Secular Reason (New York, 2000).
4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis, 1962), Bk. VI,
5c, lines 28-9.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING of

practical judgments that highlighted the dangers to church and state resulting
from their mutual ties. But Iargue that while Gladstone’s practical judgments
were important, they played a dependent role in his discussions of religious
freedom, reflecting the changes, continuities and ambiguities of his under-
lying philosophical tenets rather than driving his normative approach. More
important to understanding the differences between the early and later Glad-
stone, as well as the complexities of his later positions, is his dualistic reli-
gious anthropology, his historicism and his acceptance of equal protection. I
conclude by underlining the importance of such philosophical views to an
understanding of Gladstone’s mixed and puzzling stance towards religious
freedom, and then discussing the theoretical implications of that finding for
the development of liberal freedoms.

Understanding Gladstone
Gladstone initially rejected all efforts to sever connections between the Brit-
ish state and the Churches of England and Ireland or to open the political sys-
tem to non-Protestant dissenters. He defended instead the Irish and Anglican
religious establishments, justified the exclusion of Jews and atheists from
office through religious oaths, and only grudgingly accepted Catholic Eman-
cipation. Explanations for why Gladstone later reversed himself on all but the
Anglican establishment usually hold that he came to embrace a practical ori-
entation that cancelled or softened his religious idealism. Analysts point to
Gladstone’s decision in 1843 to support Peel’s policy of providing permanent
government funding to the Irish Catholic seminary at Maynooth as the point at
which he departed from his original idealism in favour of a pragmatic polt
tics.°
The most absolute characterization ofthis kind is in Morley’s biography of
Gladstone, where Morley argues that the practical experience Gladstone
gained in Peel’s cabinet moved him from idealism to a generally pragmatic
orientation on all issues and hence to a gradual, progressive attachment to lib-
erty.° Since Morley’s time, scholars have followed his lead but qualified his
conclusions. Bebbington follows rather closely in arguing that the Maynooth
episode led Gladstone to realize that although his original stance defending a
5 He had earlier resigned from Peel’s cabinet over this question, citing his stated
opposition to multiple establishments. Note that this change removed him from the ranks
of those who opposed government support for multiple religious institutions in Ireland,
but it did not make him less of a supporter of the Irish established church.
6 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (3 vols., New York, 1921),
Vol. I, pp. 270-81. For an assessment of Morley and other biographers, see Deryck
Schreuder, ‘The Making of Mr. Gladstone’s Posthumous Career: The Role of Morley
and Knaplund as “Monumental Masons”, 1903-27’, in The Gladstonian Turn of Mind:
Essays Presented to J.B. Conacher, ed. Bruce Kinzer (Toronto, 1985), pp. 197-243.
Schreuder agrees with Acton and others that Gladstone’s turn to liberalism was incom-
plete, ‘spasmodic’, dualistic, practical and influenced by political environments.
92 D.J. LORENZO

churchly state was ‘the ideal position . . . in the conditions of the mid nine-
teenth century it was impracticable . . . Gladstone’s theory foundered on the
rock of religious pluralism’.’ In a similar vein, while Matthew acknowledges
Gladstone’s changed views on religious diversity, he argues that Gladstone
never abandoned in principle his idealist understanding of the relationship
between the state and religion. He asserts rather that Gladstone came to
regard that understanding as ‘impractical on specifically allied subjects’ and
searched for ways in which ‘aspects of it be made practical by other means’
through moral statesmanship in colonial affairs, trade and international rela-
tions.’ Ramm offers another version of this explanation, arguing that the
Maynooth episode was the beginning of Gladstone’s Aristotelian quest to use
practical reason to approximate his ideal.’
Vidler creates a different variant of this theme, arguing that Gladstone
eventually recognized the impracticality of his early ideas but failed to create
alternatives. Vidler paints Gladstone as pursuing a practical political career
by adopting but not internalizing the liberal spirit of his times, creating an
unacknowledged disjunction between his political practice and his idealistic
beliefs.'° Likewise, Helmstadter argues that Gladstone retained his basic
theory regarding church and state, yet with increasing experience of power
‘became more flexible, more pragmatic, more astutely unpredictable in
manoeuvre’.'' Schreuder holds that Gladstone made practical modifications
to his idealism while retaining a flexible role for the state in promoting moral
progress, thereby creating a method of ‘moral pragmatisin’.'* Stansky, too,
argues that, after Maynooth, Gladstone ‘was now able to become a more
accommodating and practical politician’ while he continued to defend conser-
vative and liberal positions, including both fairness and the belief that ‘the
state was a moral force’.'’ Parry pursues a different line, arguing that Glad-
stone departed from earlier positions on the basis of his anti-Erastian attempt
to defend the Church of England from dissenting members of Parliament who

7 David Bebbington, William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Eng-
land (Grand Rapids, MI, 1993), p. 62.
8 ‘Introduction’, The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H.C.G. Matthew (Oxford, 1974), Vol. 3,
Pp. XXX1, XXxXili, xxxiv; also Vol. 7, p. xxv, and Vol. 9, p. xxv.
9 Agatha Ramm, William Ewart Gladstone (Cardiff, 1989), p. 15.
10 Alec Vidler, The Orb and the Cross: A Normative Study in the Relations of Church
and State with Reference to Gladstone’s Early Writings (London, 1945), pp. 142-50.
11 Richard Helmstadter, ‘Conscience and Politics: Gladstone’s First Book’, in The
Gladstonian Turn of Mind, ed. Kinzer, p. 8.
'2 Deryck Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and the Conscience of the State’ ,in The Conscience
of the Victorian State, ed. Peter Marsh (Syracuse, NY, 1979), pp. 73-134, esp. p. 85.
!3 Peter Stansky, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York, 1979), pp. 38, 42, 45,
LID:
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 95

might abuse the state machinery governing the church.'* Butler similarly
argues that Parliamentary politics led to the practical breakdown of Glad-
stone’s idealist understanding, forcing him to reconstruct his views on a High
Church anti-Erastianism that emphasized freedom for the Church of England
and social justice for everyone.'”
While these explanations are helpful, they do not satisfactorily account for
the differences between the positions Gladstone took earlier and later in his
career on the topics of disestablishment and religious disabilities, nor for the
complexity of his later position on disestablishment. The argument that Glad-
stone retained but did not act on his original views for practical reasons, the
assertion that he retained those views but pursued their realization by prag-
matic means, and the hypothesis that he completely abandoned those views
for a pragmatic approach all privilege the role of practical judgments in ways
that leave important questions unanswered. For example, if Gladstone’s early
work also had ‘utilitarian’ overtones, as Keble and Matthew argue,'® what are
we to make of this continuity if we explain Gladstone’s later changes only by
reference to a turn to practicality? In addition, why should a bare application
of practical reasoning lead him to support the admission of Jews and atheists
to Parliament or to agree to disestablish the Church of Ireland? Would they
not just as easily have brought him, as Morley says of others who pursued the
same goals of political stability and defence of the Anglican establishment, to
support the policies of exclusion and Irish establishment on the practical
grounds that innovations would be too disruptive?'’ And how do we explain
Gladstone’s use of practical reasoning to support elements of religious free-
dom in light of his utilization of it to resist Anglican disestablishment? The
practical qualification of Gladstone’s idealism that Morley, Bebbington,
Matthew, Ramm and Helmstadter identify appears overdrawn, while the
disjunction Vidler discovers does not seem to exist. Butler and Parry mean-
while ground Gladstone’s allegiance to freedom on his anti-Erastianism,
but this explanation is vulnerable to a critique similar to those above. In
particular, if Gladstone supported religious freedom mainly because he

'4 JP. Parry, Democracy and Religion: Gladstone and the Liberal Party, 1867-1875
(Cambridge, 1986), p. 159.
'5 Perry Butler, Gladstone, Church, State and Tractarianism: A Study of his Reli-
gious Ideas and Attitudes, 1809-1859 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 104, 120, 130. John Kenyon
also emphasizes Gladstone’s anti-Erastianism and commitment to religious freedom, as
well as the influence of changing contexts and the need for stability. J. Kenyon, ‘Glad-
stone and the Anglican High Churchman’, in The Gladstonian Turn of Mind, ed. Kinzer,
pp. 43, 57.
16 Keble, as quoted in Butler, Gladstone, pp. 88-9; Matthew, ‘Introduction’, Vol. 3,
Pp. XXVII—XXix.
'7 He glosses the opposition to Irish disestablishment as arguing ‘the operation was
too gigantic in its bearings, too complex in the mass of its detail, to be practicable’.
Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. I, pp. 257-9.
94 D.J. LORENZO

feared the threats the state posed to the church, the logical extension of that
position is the disestablishment of the Church of England, a policy he never
endorsed. Finally, while Stansky and Schreuder may be right in asserting that
Gladstone’s later defence of Anglican establishment involved a persistent
belief in the state’s moral duties in tandem with a commitment to religious
freedom and fairness, their explanation for this dichotomy, which characterizes
his position as a combination of liberalism and atavism, or as a product of a
moral pragmatism, does not clearly specify the grounds for that combination.
I suggest that we best understand Gladstone’s policies by appreciating fully
the background set of understandings he employed to interpret events and
apply practical reasoning to the problems he perceived in church-state rela-
tions. This entails not only looking at Gladstone’s views during the 1840s and
1850s, but also beyond that timeframe to compare his original set of under-
standings to those he employed later in life. When we do, we find that a per-
suasive explanation of Gladstone’s shifts and inconsistencies refers to the
continuities and changes in the elements of the intellectual framework that
focused his practical judgments. In particular, that explanation pays close
attention to his retention of a dualistic religious anthropology (that is, his
description of humans requiring both the freedom to follow their individual
consciences and the teachings of the institutional church to direct their spiritu-
ality), his continued historicism, and his belated acceptance of a principle of
equal protection.

Gladstone’s Original Framework:

The State in its Relations with the Church

Gladstone’s early position was outlined in The State in its Relations with the
Church (SRC).'* There he founded his understanding of church-state rela-
tions on an organic, historical conception of the state. The state is an enlarged
person that gains its identity from history and its purpose from God. Given
this conception, Gladstone emphasized the advantages that accrue to the state
from its association with religion, arguing that while the church can shift for
itself, the state needs the church to inform its conscience.!”
Gladstone grounded his argument on a variety of sources that constituted
for him the ‘universal sense of mankind’. These inciuded Paley, Hooker and
Locke;” scriptural sources; an ethical analysis of the ‘nature of the state’; a
consequentialist argument that religion is necessary for attaining the ‘higher
and lower’ ends of the state; and ‘induction’ — judgments derived from an

18 Gladstone, The State in its Relations with the Church (2 vols., London, 4th edn.,
1841) (hereafter SRC). All references are to this edition.
19 See especially SRC, I, pp. 4—S.
20 He also cites, among others, Coleridge, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Macaulay.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 95

examination of historical materials.*! Gladstone then gave these texts an

Aristotelian veneer, not only borrowing from Aristotle an understanding of
humanity’s social life, but also taking from him the overall philosophical
position of the Politics. Like Aristotle, Gladstone saw the purpose of political
philosophy as understanding how to adapt the concept of the state to the spe-
cific context in which we live.” Gladstone engaged in this analysis by invok-
ing three contextualized conceptions of the relations between church and
state. First he established the ideal form of the relationship, which entailed
describing the state in its perfect form. Next he depicted the best possible state
given human nature. Finally he described church-state relations in contempo-
rary Britain, characterizing them as falling short of the best possible model,
yet sufficiently close to that arrangement to merit defence.

The Ideal and Best Possible States

In establishing the ideal set of relations between church and state, Gladstone
concentrated on the state. It is natural and historical, he argued, not the artifi-
cial product of calculations and compact that Locke depicted. Along with
other natural entities like the family and the individual, the state has a ‘person-
ality’, a ‘conscience’ and potentially a ‘moral agency’. As such it needs ‘a
deliberative regulatory principle’, which, in order to conform to God’s laws,
‘requires the application to it of a conservatory principle of religion’. As a
‘living, active, and moral’ entity, the state has ‘religious responsibilities’ in
addition to those of preserving life and property.** Thus he argued that the
state is and should be a moral agent, contrary to Locke’s understanding of a
government restricted to outer, secular projects.”* This ideal state in Glad-
stone’s conception is in perfect harmony with the moral and religious beliefs
of its citizens. All its citizens accept the state as part of their higher, organic
selves, and all citizens are members of an established church that provides the
state with its religious conscience. In contrast, he deemed a state that supports
a diversity of churches a conventional rather than a natural state, while label-
ling a state that completely severs its relations with religion as incomplete and
an Erastian state a tyranny.”
However, Gladstone acknowledged that an ideal state of this type is not
attainable. ‘The absolute and strictly ideal perfection of this theory .. .’, he
asserted, ‘requires conditions that have never been fully realized in our fallen
state, that is to say, not only unity of religious action in the state, but unity of

21 SRC, I, pp. 36-7.

22 See Ramm, William Ewart Gladstone, pp. 10-11, and Helmstadter, ‘Conscience
and Politics’, pp. 9-17.
23 SRC, I, pp. 45-6, 63-8.
24 Thid., pp. 160-1.
25 Tbid., p. 302.
96 D.J. LORENZO

personal composition with respect to religious profession . . .’.°° Given the

inescapable existence of religious diversity, we are left with the best possible
state as the practical summit of our expectations. This state also supports a
national church and defines its relationship with that church as one of full
‘unity of religious action’, but it nevertheless tolerates an inevitable contin-
gent of religious dissenters.”’ Thus both a full identification between church
and state and religious toleration are its hallmarks.
Why should the best possible state continue to assume a full identification
with one church in a situation marked by religious diversity? Why not do away
with all connections or support all religions equally? Gladstone answered this
objection with a mix of moral, practical and historical references. Morally, as
Schreuder emphasizes, Gladstone argued that maintaining ties with the true
church is a state duty (just as it is a moral duty for the individual), and he
detected that true church in the Church of England.” What is more, a series of
practical reasons established for Gladstone the importance of a close connec-
tion between the state and religion in general. With regard to the needs of even
a limited ‘Lockean’ government, he pointed to the prevention of crime — the
‘terrors of posthumous punishment’ are useful to deterring individuals from
breaking the law. A national religion also teaches the individual beneficial
material lessons involving thrift, productivity and the family. It makes indi-
viduals good people and citizens by ‘destroying that law of self-will and
self-worship’. And a national religion encourages obedience to laws and
‘contentment’ with the rights assigned by the constitution.”
Why a single established church rather than support for all denominations
given the multiplicity of churches and problems with detecting the true
church? Gladstone here turned to practicality and history. He argued on prac-
tical grounds that multiple establishments confuse people and make officials
appear hypocritical by supporting churches not their own. Likewise practical-
ity supports the stable connection with one church. A single, stable connec-
tion, Gladstone argued, reinforces the popular view that the church possesses
a true doctrine, for stability is associated with truth while change is associated
with doubt or error. It also promotes the self-government of the established
church and creates a defence against Erastianism. Meanwhile he argued that
multiple establishments are politically unstable. He pointed to Prussia and
New England as negative examples in this regard and provided a list of
26 SRC, Il, pp. 28223.
27 Ibid., p. 283.
28 Gladstone’s position was that the Church of England was a national apostolic
church that can trace its history unbroken to the primitive church. See SRC, II, pp.
95-122, as well as “The Elizabethan Settlement of Religion’, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the
Church of England’ and ‘The Church Under Henry VII’, in W.E. Gladstone, Later
Gleanings: A New Series of Gleanings of Past Years, Theological and Ecclesiastical
(New York, 1897) (hereafter LG).
29 SRC, I, pp. 173-6.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 97

possible practical reasons for the failure of the New England experiment in
multiple establishments.*°
Gladstone also cited historical evidence to the effect that all nations adopt a
singular national religion. Religious establishment follows national character,
as the histories of the Jews, Romans and Christians all attest. The United
States was no exception, he argued, pointing to the religious ceremonies that
marked the workings of the federal government. But Gladstone contended
that the American brand of official Christianity without establishment was an
extremely precarious and unsatisfactory arrangement. Those who did not want
government-sponsored religion were offended by official displays, forcing
those displays to be theologically broad; and broad religious doctrines,
reminiscent of theism and the philosophical belief in an afterlife that Locke
advocated as a religious test, Gladstone argued, are not sufficient for “forming
the groundwork of a constitution’ from a religious point of view. In a moral
argument that he would later deploy to different effect, he rejected here
attempts to create a watered down ‘official’ Christianity because they divide
religion into parts (belief in God or in an afterlife without any attending theo-
logical or moral doctrines), whereas religion is an organic whole.*!

Views on Toleration

Having dealt with the connection between the state and the true church, Glad-
stone moved on to the second component of his best possible state-toleration.
In doing so he was forced in the 1841 edition of The State in its Relations with
the Church to address the question that preoccupied critics like Macaulay. If
the best possible relationship between church and state entails identification
between the two, how do we escape the traditional penchant for intolerance
and religious coercion found in that model? Gladstone dealt with this question
by dividing it into several parts, defending some uses of state power in reli-
gious affairs while disclaiming others. He rejected the use of force to generate
compliance with a set of religious doctrines or to compel people to disavow
religious views. Persuasion is the only appropriate means for leading people
to God, for spirituality is a matter of choice. Following Locke, he conceded
that the state is incompetent to make judgments that will affect the salvation of
individuals. It can choose and support only institutionally the national reli-
gion that informs the higher life of the state. Like Locke and, more directly,
Bishop Butler, he argued that the choice of correct principles and doctrine 1s a
matter of probabilities, and judgments based on probabilities are not strong
enough to remove the ‘natural freedom’ that God gives humans to gain their

30 Thid., pp. 183-6; SRC, Il, pp. 271-2.

31 SRC, I, pp. 26, 127, 140; SRC, Il, pp. 362-8.
98 D.J. LORENZO

salvation.*” Moreover, like Locke he argued that coercion can be used to sup-
press the truth; that it tends to corrupt those who administer it; that it is not
necessary to safeguard life and property; and that no direct command from
God approves it. Thus the best possible state embraces an established church
but does not require its citizens to belong to it or to espouse a particular
creed.*?
However, Gladstone refused to brand as intolerant or coercive all state
activities that disadvantage persons on religious grounds, just as he refused to
concede that establishment curtails the God-given freedom to choose one’s
path to salvation. He distinguished, for example, between intolerance and the
punishment of blasphemy. Drawing upon a theistically centred account of
persons, he argued that the latter is the legitimate suppression of views that
appeal not to reason but rather to the ‘gross passion’, an appeal that trans-
forms humans from moral beings into brute creatures.** More important, he
defended measures of ‘civil defence’ that prohibit religious views carrying
political or social consequences, such as views which disavow allegiance to a
monarch or which reject all laws governing society. Again with Locke he
argued that the purpose of these regulations was not to coerce adherence to
religious opinions per se, but to eliminate views dangerous to society. These
are matters of expediency and defence. At the same time Gladstone also pro-
vided an extended justification of religious disqualifications. He granted that
objections to intolerance in general also counted against disqualification, but
maintained that their force was diminished in that sphere. As with his civil-
defence argument, he stated that disqualification rested not on the attempt to
coerce people to accept religious doctrines, but rather on the setting of mini-
mum standards for holding political office, which for the best possible state
must include religious components.”
In direct response to the question of persecution, he argued that employing
religious qualifications as a way ofidentifying the church with the state would
not inevitably lead to the persecution of dissenters because it was not in the
interest of the state or church to do so. Relying upon the innate benevolence of
political and clerical officials, he argued that they wished to lead dissenters to
the true religion, not destroy them, and therefore neither a monopoly on politi-
cal power nor the establishment of a church should be considered dangerous
to dissenters who are denied office. In his understanding, one can justify dis-
qualification and establishment while rejecting intolerance both descriptively

32 See ‘Probability as a Guide to Conduct’, in W.E. Gladstone, Gleanings of the Past

Years (7 vols., New York, 1886) (hereafter GPY), Vol. VI, pp. 154-99.
33 SRGeL pp. 310-19; II, p. 255; Letter on Toleration, in Political Writings of John
Locke, ed. D. Wootton (New York, 1993), pp. 394-6.
34 SRC, |, pp: 306-7; 11, pr. 246:
35 SRC, Il, pp. 267-8.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING ss)

and normatively in the British context.*° Thus, while he would have preferred
a stronger set of qualifications in place, Britain’s law restricting officeholders
to those who can take an oath as a Christian was on these grounds ‘moderate’,
‘prudent’ and ‘warrantable’.*’
This discussion of church-state relations, particularly with regard to estab-
lishment, was founded on Gladstone’s original understanding of religious
freedom and toleration and subsequently on his bifurcated religious anthro-
pology. Gladstone consistently argued that religious freedom entails granting
people the right to follow ‘private judgment’ in religious affairs, for people
must find God themselves without coercion. Yet, in a long and detailed dis-
cussion, Gladstone refused to equate ‘private judgment’ with merely follow-
ing one’s ‘individual conscience’. Private judgment genuinely understood, he
argued, is neither one dictated externally by force nor one informed solely by
individual conscience. Institutions also necessarily condition it. As the church
has traditionally held, true private judgment is a faculty informed by the find-
ings of church tribunals, for individuals alone are usually unable fully to grasp
or appreciate Scriptural doctrines. This assertion, one may note, parallelled
his earlier argument that ordinary people are unable to grasp ethical concepts
or follow laws without religious institutions. He summed up this discussion
by observing that if “freedom of assent’ was the greatest gift of the Reforma-
tion, the tendency to privilege the individual conscience in religious affairs
and thus to oppose the doctrinal authority of the established national church
was its ‘besetting sin’.** There was no Miltonian acknowledgment on his part
that the religious freedom he believed essential to true faith could lead one
legitimately to a plurality of religious doctrines because Truth has been scat-
tered, for he argued both that Truth has not been scattered and that ‘private
judgment . . . essentially depends for its right discharge less upon the under-
standing than the conscience’. Nor was there much faith on his part in the
capacity of individuals outside institutions to find their way to true belief and
spiritual knowledge.”
This initial failure to acknowledge either the legitimacy of religious plural-
ism or the possibility of a complete moral individualism led to Gladstone’s
original understanding of toleration as a minimal concept amenable to reli-
gious oaths and an established church. Because he believed that a true under-
standing of religion was dependent upon church authority, and the state had a

36 SRC, I, pp. 325-35. Indeed, he saw the oath of allegiance as a ‘considerable

accommodation’ to Catholics. SRC, I, p. 224.
21 SRC, |; p. 337.
38 SRC, Il, pp. 46-52, 94-5.
39 SRC, II, p. 177; also ‘Ward’s Ideal of a Christian Church’, GPY, V, pp. 138-61.
Richard Shannon describes Gladstone’s own dependence on institutions for moral guid-
ance in R. Shannon, Gladstone: 1809-1865 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984), pp. 113-14, 157.
See also Butler, Gladstone, p. 103.
100 D.J. LORENZO

moral responsibility to support one authority, the early Gladstone adopted the
traditional understanding of toleration that privileged membership in the state
church and granted dissenters mere indulgence. Distinguishing the individ-
ual’s right to choose God freely from the state’s responsibility to tolerate dis-
senters, he specified that in the context of the best possible state, toleration
‘does not imply a recognition of the moral equality of all forms of faith...’ or
of judgments regarding faith. Rather, it means merely removing ‘the biasing
and blinding influences of fear from without’ at the same time the state vigor-
ously fulfils its equally important duty to support the true church. Thus, as a
discriminatory concept, toleration ‘presumes the actual preference of one
[form of faith], and includes the passive sufferance of others’.*° This suffer-
ance did not include equal treatment of religious sects or access to political
power on the part of dissenters. Nor did it include the separation of church and
state.
Gladstone thereby harmonized toleration with religious oaths and an estab-
lished church by relying on the institutional portion of his religious anthropol-
ogy to hedge the sphere of religious liberty he was forced to concede to escape
the charge of intolerance and persecution. He did so by specifying simulta-
neously the need for individual liberty (liberty from outside coercion and
imposed religious uniformity) and the necessity of intertwining the state with
an established church (generated by the state’s need for a conscience, the
state’s duty to support the true religion, and the individual’s need for religious
institutions), arguing that both were required for a fully developed state and
the individual’s exercise of private judgment in spiritual matters. This formu-
lation inevitably led him to condemn states that laxly discharged their reli-
gious duties and to criticize the drive to push toleration to its logical, pluralist
conclusion.”!

History, Contexts and Practical Judgments

The bulk of Volume II of SRC was given over to a historical discussion of

church-state relations in Britain, reflecting both Gladstone’s penchant for
historical analysis and his conceptualization of the state as a historical being.
Here he posed a series of key questions that moulded his early, practical
approach. Was the principle animating the best possible state at work in Brit-
ain? His answer was yes. The English state and church occupied the preferred
middle ground differentiated from a ‘popish’ external control of church and
state, Erastianism and a secular state populated by independent churches. It
contained a state church that drew political and financial support from the
state and commanded the allegiance of a majority of the population but

40 SRC, Il, p. 176.

41 Tbid., pp. 177-8.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 101

remained in control of its doctrine and ceremonies.** Were there problems in

the relations between the established church and the state? Yes, some of
which were amenable to solution, some not. Were the problems so serious as
to require that the connection be abandoned? His answer was no — the best
policy was to defend current structures from further deterioration. As he put
it, emphasizing the contextual difference between Britain and other countries:
We still have ground which is defensible, and which is still worth defend-
ing .. . with political institutions in reality very much more popular than
those of France, to say nothing of Prussia, our country seems to promise at
least a more organized, tenacious, and determined resistance to the efforts
against national religion...”
In his quest to defend current structures, Gladstone addressed first the ques-
tion of toleration. If the best possible state was one typified by toleration, his
historical discussion faithfully recorded its uneven development in Britain
but concluded that the central problems had been solved. Before the Reforma-
tion, he argued, differences of religious opinion were directly repressed, thus
removing an important part of each individual’s ‘moral freedom’.”* But he
attributed problems since the Reformation mostly to contingent factors rather
than to structure, citing as culprits misguided rulers, the tumults created by
religious differences, and external threats. For example, he argued that as the
Reformation became entangled with the efforts of English monarchs to
defend the country against both Puritan-inspired revolts and threats from
Catholic countries and the Papacy, monarchs were forced to define political
allegiance in religious terms. The result was that when Elizabeth and the Stu-
arts dealt with the political problem of religious dissidents, state and religion
were connected by ‘bonds’ that were ‘drawn tighter than either the infirmities
of human nature or the quality of the subject-matter would warrant’, resulting
in the punishment as well as disqualification of religious dissidents.”
The exception was life under the Puritans, which, he asserted, was afflicted
by structural errors. While Cromwell favoured an extensive toleration, the
Puritans in Parliament preferred a coercive tie between church and state. This
unflattering stance Gladstone attributed to Puritan independency. In the pro-
cess of downplaying the institutional church and exalting the state, the Puri-
tans inexorably transferred theological discipline from the ecclesiastical to
the statist realm, resulting in the judicial punishment of dissent. In short, he
argued that independency plus a strong state encourages religious intolerance.
Consistent with this point he disputed Nonconformist claims to a history of
toleration, maintaining that, as compared to the Anglicans, the Puritans used

42 Tbid., pp. 154-8.

43 Tbid., p. 389.
44 Tbid., p. 283.
45 Ibid., p. 21.
102 D.J. LORENZO

coercion to punish theological errors, and used it more extensively, for a lon-
ger period and against more people.”
The second topic Gladstone addressed was that of the ‘unity’ between
church and state. The forces that most consistently promoted toleration, he
admitted, also threatened the ties that bound the state to the church.*’ While
the Restoration reinstated the established church, and the Reformation and
democratization purged the established church of any lingering problems
regarding toleration, democratization also created ‘disorganization’ in the
state’s actions with regard to religion. Moreover, the practical nature of poli-
tics had weakened those ties. The result was a set of relations between church
and state in Britain that was ‘chequered’.** He listed numerous connections
between the state and the Church of England, the defence of which was
becoming difficult. Rising education levels and democratization had de-
creased deference and spread power to dissenters who were hostile to these
connections, making the number of those committed to close church-state
relations smaller and the pool of its opponents larger. Modern beliefs were
also to blame. The belief that political privileges are natural rights had weak-
ened the commitment to linking politics with an established church, while,
more ominously, modern ideas about the value of education had displaced the
value of religion in the minds of citizens.”” But even in the face of such views,
Gladstone argued that existing church-state relations should be vigorously
defended in toto.
As part of that argument, Gladstone explored anti-Erastian grounds for
Anglican disestablishment. While he conceded that the British state had hurt
the Church of England in the past, and that the Church of England could live
without formal ties to the state, he nevertheless rejected arguments for its dis-
establishment. He rebutted the generalization Tocqueville drew from the
American experience, which attributed religious vitality to the separation of
church and state, by maintaining that establishment only harms degraded
churches. Disestablishment itself, he argued, will not necessarily improve
churches. He described the Church of England as a vital church well able to
defend itself and in no need of disestablishment.”° Thus, in a move he later
repeated, he resisted pushing his anti-Erastianism to its logical conclusions by
referring to Anglicanism’s strength.
Finally, Gladstone pointed to two important deviations from the best possi-
ble state that he deplored yet was reluctant to challenge. One was the combi-
nation of the state with both the Church of England and the Church of
Scotland, churches ‘not in Christian Communion with each other’. The other

4 Ibid., pp. 217-22.

47 Tbid., pp. 277-8.
48 Tbid., pp. 257, 279.
49 Ibid., pp. 392-8.
59 Ibid., p. 385.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 103

was the annual provision of state funds to Maynooth College in Ireland to sup-
port the training of Roman Catholic priests. In addition to his theoretical
opposition to such arrangements, Gladstone also viewed dubiously the practi-
cal results they achieved. Yet in both cases he refrained from calling for a
return to more consistent positions. Both commitments, he argued, resulted
from attempts to conciliate the populations of those regions to union with
England and represented important state obligations. While those policies
deviated from the tenets ofthe best possible state and did not necessarily fulfil
their practical aims, he implied that practicality itself demanded their mainte-
nance.”!

Continuities and Changes, 1845-83

If, as Morley and others suggest, experiences spurred Gladstone to change
these early views on the relations between church and state, how did this
change manifest itself in arguments regarding disqualification, establish-
ments and other related topics? I argue that in supporting a variety of mea-
sures that weakened the connection between the British state and religion and
simultaneously defended the Church of England’s status as an established
church, Gladstone both changed and conserved important parts of his original
intellectual framework.
Gladstone’s conversion to selective support of the Church of England’s
establishment was the result of several factors. The first factor was an ongoing
contextual analysis that from the mid 1840s progressively recognized impor-
tant changes in Britain’s environment from earlier in the century. One result
of that analysis was an increased appreciation of and emphasis upon religious
diversity. While he continued to believe that the Church of England was the
true church and longed for Christian unity, by the early 1850s religious diver-
sity in Britain became a factor in his considerations that went well beyond
what he had acknowledged in SRC. ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’ attributed
the beginnings of this greatly enhanced appreciation to his perusal of Irish
census results and his ‘discovery’ in 1850 of the large increase in the number
of Nonconformist places of worship in England. Those beginnings may have
been reinforced by his personal and political contacts with Nonconformists,
and by his continued, albeit diminished, contacts with Henry Manning and
John Newman.”

5! Jbid., pp. 280-305. His position in SRC reflects a change to a less rigid stance.
Compare Letter to H.E. Manning, 2 April 1837, and Letter to H.E. Manning, 23 April
1837, with Letter to James Lord, 8 October 1841, in Correspondence on Church and
Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, ed. D.C. Lathbury (2 vols., New York, 1910),
Vol. II, pp. 29-39, 51-2.
52 For his greater appreciation of religious diversity, see ‘The Courses of Religious
Thought’, GPY, Ill, pp. 102-25, ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, pp. 124, 144,
and ‘The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church’, LG, pp. 289-96.
104 D.J. LORENZO

The other result of this contextual analysis involved his assessment of the
British state. Whereas in SRC Gladstone had assumed that Parliament could
freeze the effect of changes in politics and population, by the mid 1840s he
admitted that those developments had profoundly affected the state, and iden-
tified himself as one of the last supporters of a churchly regime. Britain was in
transition from a natural, organic entity that resembled a ‘family’ in its reli-
gious affairs (as did Austria and Russia) to an entity that resembled a club (as
did the United States and France). Thus he acknowledged that momentum had
shifted in favour of further loosening the ties between church and state.”
The second factor involved changes in his understanding of the practical
effects of the relationship between church and state. In later life Gladstone
exhibited a greater appreciation of the danger the state posed to the church;
thus anti-Erastianism played a larger role in his analysis. But, more tellingly,
he came to accept that those relations could also harm the state, a proposition
he did not entertain in SRC but invoked in the Irish debates.”
The third factor was the cumulative methodological result of the first two:
Gladstone abandoned his ‘best possible state’ analysis both normatively and
descriptively. No longer interested in preserving a churchly state, he began
conceptualizing his understanding of church-state affairs in terms of the nar-
rower goals of maintaining British stability and defending the Church of Eng-
land’s established status. In describing his approach to the latter goal, he
argued in 1847 that those like himself who defended the established church
must be willing ‘to part earlier and more freely and cordially, than heretofore
with some such of her privileges, here and there, as may be more obnoxious

Schreuder in ‘The Role of Morley and Knaplund’, pp. 215-17, and ‘Gladstone and the
Conscience ofthe State’, pp. 103, 106, provides a qualified version ofthis argument. See
also Butler, Gladstone, p. 121, and The Gladstone Diaries, ed. Matthew, Vol. 7, p. xxviii.
Evidence for the influence of personal and political contacts is tentative. For example,
consideration of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill occurred at approximately the same time as
Hope and Manning were leaving Anglicanism (February/March 1851). Also beginning
in 1864, at about the time he began making known his theoretical decision to support a
change in the Irish establishment (‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, p. 129), The
Gladstone Diaries show a considerable number of social, religious and political contacts
with Nonconformists, and an increased attention to Nonconformist views inside and out-
side the House with regard to Parliamentary and party affairs. Compare Matthew’s
observation in The Gladstone Diaries, Vol. 3, p. lv, with Vol. 14 [Index], p. 769. Of
course he was dependent upon Nonconformist votes, as well as Newman, in his struggle
for Irish disestablishment despite the other problems he experienced with both. How-
ever, he was willing to part with them on the question of Anglican disestablishment.
53 Letter to JH. Newman, 19 April 1845, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. I,
pp. 71-4; ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, p. 98.
54 Also ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, p. 151: ‘an Establishment leaning
for support upon the extraneous aid of a State, which becomes discredited with the peo-
ple by the very act of lending it’.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 105

than really valuable . . . and further, not to presume too much to give direc-
tions to the State as to its policy with respect to other religious bodies’.»
As evidenced by the last part of this quotation, a fourth factor was also fun-
damentally important to Gladstone’s change. Gladstone’s abandonment of a
churchly state cleared the way for him to act politically on his increased
appreciation of religious diversity by converting that appreciation into a nor-
mative commitment. His understanding of religious freedom broadened to
include more than the absence of coercion or ‘passive sufferance’ — it now
meant equal protection. This meant that his defence of establishment came to
incorporate an equal consideration of the claims of religiously diverse popu-
lations.*° As he put it during the election of 1865, he rejected policies that
defended the church by ‘maintaining odious distinction against our Roman
Catholic or dissenting fellow-subjects’.*’
But despite the variety of changes listed above, and regardless of his anti-
Erastian doubts and commitment to placing religious orthodoxy above politi-
cal connections, to the end of his life Gladstone maintained his belief that the
British state should support the Church of England in its institutional mission
of fostering the true faith among the populace,”® and it is clear that he would
have continued to support the establishment of the Church of Ireland had it
not failed to convert the Irish, a failure that robbed it of its spiritual legitimacy
and created political instability.°” The fundamental explanation for this stub-
born allegiance to establishment in the face of his recognition of spiritual plu-
ralism, I argue, was Gladstone’s persistent adherence to his original religious
anthropology and to his historicism. While he continued to privilege contexts
to draw distinctions in both time and space as he had done earlier,” and sus-
tained his reliance upon the kinds of practical judgments that mark SRC, these
methodological continuities yielded a variety of results later in his life and
cannot by themselves account for his commitment to religious freedom or to
Anglican establishment, much less to both simultaneously.
The consistency of his substantive views on religious anthropology and
historicism was, in contrast, fundamental to explaining all these positions.

55 Letter to R.J. Phillimore, 24 June 1847, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. II,
pp. 13-14, and ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, pp. 149-S1.
56 For religious equality and the correct analysis of establishments, see ‘A Chapter of
Autobiography’, GPY, VII, pp. 125, 128, 150-1. Butler adopts Gladstone’s term of “so-
cial justice’. See Butler, Gladstone, pp. 120, 130.
57 Quoted in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 54.
58 See ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Church of England’, LG esp. p. 192, and ‘A Chapter
of Autobiography’, GPY
,VU, pp. 146-8.
59 See the Letter to Sir R. Phillimore, 13 February 1865, in Correspondence, ed.
Lathbury, Vol. I, p. 168, and ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, pp. 123-5.
60 ‘Kin Beyond the Sea’, GPY, I, pp. 239-47. ‘The Sixteenth Century Arraigned
Before the Nineteenth’, GPY, III, p. 264, stresses change. See also Schreuder, ‘Gladstone
and the Conscience of the State’, p. 89.
106 DJ; LORENZO

Both the early and late Gladstone depicted humans as requiring freedom from
outside coercion in religious affairs, a depiction that spilled over into his
understanding of equal protection. Likewise, although he came to grant a
greater role to reason in religion,®' he also continued to emphasize that it was
the institutions of the church that allowed people fully and truly to pursue
spiritual lives. The result was that alongside his commitment to religious
freedom and equal protection, he continued to highlight the institutional
nature of the church in its necessary role of preserving religious doctrines and
guiding the spiritual and intellectual lives of individuals and the nation. This
corporatist aspect of his religious anthropology was part of his overall privi-
leging of institutions as key to human development. While he lessened his
emphasis on the state, he consistently viewed institutions like the Church of
England and the universities, with their organizational structures, discipline
and traditions, as essential to preserving knowledge and to serving as the
means to new understandings, acting as ‘great mediating power[s] between
the high and the low, between the old and the new, between speculation and
practice, between authority and freedom’.®* He in turn combined this
anthropological institutionalism with a persistently organic and historical
conceptualization of England. England for Gladstone was always defined as
fundamentally by its history as by its current composition. The institutions
that best discharged their functions for the good of England, he argued, were
those rooted in English history; and since the Church of England was embed-
ded in English history, it had necessary connections with English life.
The continuity of Gladstone’s dualistic religious anthropology linked the
disparate parts of his later discussions of church-state policies. Its individual-
istic side, stressing freedom from coercion, supported his principle of equal
protection in the removal of religious oaths and the Irish establishment, while
its institutional side, combined with his historicism, prevented him from
abandoning the concept of establishment and the Anglican establishment in
particular. Only by reference to this framework, I contend, can we understand
his flexible, contextually sensitive use of practical reasoning in later life to
address questions of church and state.

6! For a good example, see ‘Dawn of Creation and Worship’, LG, pp. 1-39.
62 For an early view, see ‘Blanco White’, GPY, II, p. 40; for later views see ‘The
Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion’, GPY, III, pp. 145-71; ‘The Sixteenth Cen-
tury Arraigned Before the Nineteenth’, GPY, III, pp. 236, 251-4; ‘Robert Elsmere: The
Battle of Belief’, LG, pp. 77-117, passim; ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Church of England’,
LG, p. 205; and ‘The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church’, LG,
p. 309.
63 See ‘Inaugural Address: The Work of Universities’, GPY, VII, pp. 1-14, and
‘Memoir of Dr. Norman McLeod’, GPY, Il, pp. 349-50.
6* See ‘The Sixteenth Century Arraigned before the Nineteenth’, GPY, III, pp.
244-50; “Remarks on the Royal Supremacy’, GPY, V, esp. p. 222, and ‘The Church of
England and Ritualism’, GPY, VI, pp. 159-60.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 107

Gladstone’s Support for Religious Liberty and Disestablishment

To support this explanation, I examine samples of Gladstone’s later argu-
ments supporting equal protection, the removal of religious oaths, and Irish
disestablishment. I then discuss his defence of the Anglican establishment. I
begin by documenting Gladstone’s commitment to a principle of equal
protection.

Religious Liberty and Equal Protection

By 1847 Gladstone began putting his case for eliminating some of the ties
between church and state on both practical grounds (their defence would
backfire on the church and complicate affairs of state) and on the grounds that
the ties themselves violated the principle of religious liberty and denied equal
protection to minority religious groups. In one letter he characterized a
scheme to extend civil privileges to all but Catholics and Unitarians as a move
that ‘grievously violates social justice’.® Likewise he characterized his sup-
port for the removal of Jewish disabilities as reflecting ‘a simple debt which I
think is owed to civil justice . . .’.°° He described attempts by churchmen to
deny privileges to Catholics and lead a campaign in Parliament under the
banner of ‘No Popery’ as an attempt to lock the state into ‘a negative and
repressive policy’.®’ He justified his opposition to the bill against ‘Papal
Aggression’, discussed below, not only on the grounds that it would have the
practical and negative effect of dividing the country; it was also, in his words,
‘politically unjust’.°* Even earlier his ruminations on the Irish Establishment
had been framed in terms of ‘social justice’, as he had asked in 1845 whether
that principle would ‘warrant the permanent maintenance of the Irish Church
as it is’. Later, when writing of the Bradlaugh case, he prefaced his remark
that continued opposition to the seating of Bradlaugh would serve only to
‘weaken reverence for religion’ with an analysis similar to that he used in
favouring the admission of Jews to the House in 1847.” concluding that “it is

65 Letter to R.J. Phillimore, 24 June 1847, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. II,
p. 14.
66 Letter to C.E. Radclyffe, 19 February 1853, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury,
Vol. I, p. 124.
67 LettertoJ.W. Warter, 21 July 1847, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. II, p. 16.
68 Letter to W.F. Hook, 23 June 1851, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. I,
p. 122.
69 Letter to HE. Manning, 6 March 1845, quoted in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury,
Vol. I, p. 149.
1 Hansard, 8 December 1847, cols. 1282-1303.
108 D.J. LORENZO

best to recognize frankly that religious differences are not to entail civil dis-
abilities’.”!
We similarly find that he embraced an understanding of equal protection
that flowed from a full acknowledgment of religious diversity in his Parlia-
mentary objections to the Ecclesiastical Titles Assumptions Act of 1851. This
law forbade the Catholic Church to create ecclesiastical districts and titles that
contained English place names, ostensibly to prevent the papacy from laying
claim to secular authority over England.” In addition to referring to the harm-
ful political consequences of the bill and its boomerang effect on Catholics
who were fighting ultramontanism, Gladstone argued repeatedly that the bill
would infringe upon the ‘principle of religious freedom’ that protects all reli-
gious groups. This principle was constituted by ‘a line that is drawn between
the spiritual and the temporal’ that the state cannot traverse unless a real dan-
ger is imminent. He outlined his principle as follows: ‘[I]f Iunderstand any-
thing of the doctrine of religious liberty . . . it implies that within the scope of
religious action Parliament was not to intrude . . . it is their [religious groups’ ]
absolute right to make rules for the regulation of their religious concerns’.”*
He then characteristically bolstered this with an argument from history
regarding the development of religious liberty, condemning John Hampden
and John Pym in particular for their ‘bitter and ferocious intolerance which in
them became the more powerful because it was directed against the Roman
Catholics alone’.
This last quotation led to further and more explicit invocations of equal
protection. He asserted that the bill would deny Catholics ‘the fullest enjoy-
ment of religious equality’. Arguing that other denominations attached place
names to their religious units, and that the Scottish church was explicitly
excluded from the bill, he pointed out that the bill was aimed only at Catho-
lics, and maintained that Parliament had ‘no right to deny them anything
which you give to any other body or denomination of Christians among us’. ‘I
cannot desire,’ he stated, ‘that an exceptional system of civil privileges or
civil toleration should be created for one class of men, from which others
standing in similar circumstances, are to be excluded’. He ‘protest[ed] . . .
against [the bill’s] unequal application’ and pleaded with the House not to
‘extort’ from the doctrine of royal supremacy a policy that was ‘unfavourable

7! Letter to J.C. Hubbard, 11 June 1881, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury, Vol. I,

Dale:
” ‘Ecclesiastical Titles Assumption Bill’, Adjourned Debate, Hansard, 25 March
1851, cols. 565—96.
7 He also later disapproved of compulsory religious exercises in public schools. See
“The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church’, LG, pp. 298-304, and
Letter to the Rev. Septimus Buss, 13 September 1894, in Correspondence, ed. Lathbury,
Vol. II, p. 148. However, he opposed opening control of Oxford and Cambridge to dis-
senters.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 109

to religious liberty’ or involved ‘a partial and exceptional application to the

case of Roman Catholics’.

Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church of Ireland (1868, 1869)

Gladstone spoke three times in the House in 1868 and 1869 in favour of dis-
establishing the Church of Ireland.’* On all three occasions he relied upon two
lines of argument: that there was a crisis in Irish affairs that had its origins in
the denial of equal protection, and that those origins as well as other elements
distinguished the Church of Ireland from the Church of England in his theory
of establishment. Thus practical judgments were important parts of his argu-
ment for Irish disestablishment, but were refracted through other intellectual
components.
Gladstone prefaced his justifications of Irish disestablishment with exer-
cises in practical judgment that identified Ireland as a place mired in conflict
and crisis and thus as a threat to the stability of the British state. Ireland, he
argued, was in a deplorable condition. Widespread sympathy for the Fenians,
a general estrangement of ordinary Irishmen from Britain, and conflict between
Catholics and Protestants marked the current era. The result was the general
acquiescence of governments of all parties to desperate measures to keep the
peace, including the serial suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act and the use of
the army as an occupying force.
A response to this crisis was needed, he maintained, and Parliament and the
people of the country had agreed that fundamental changes to the Church of
Ireland must be part of it. He portrayed those changes as necessary to avert a
political calamity connected with the chronic problems that afflicted contem-
porary Ireland. The persistent crisis in Irish affairs, he argued, had its origins
in large part in a violation of equal protection the establishment of the
Church of Ireland. That church served only a small proportion of the popula-
tion, the majority of which adhered to a different Christian denomination. Its
support for coercive laws had perverted its spiritual mission and created a
spirit of domination and bigotry. As one of the symbols of the English ascen-
dancy, it kept alive ‘painful and bitter memories’ in the minds of the general
population of Ireland. Thus he argued that disestablishment was morally in
line with admitting Catholics to the franchise and funding Maynooth, policies
that were agreed to not only because they attained the practical goal of reduc-
ing instability but also because they reflected the desire of statesmen like Pitt
to treat equally the various religious groups in Ireland.”
Intimately connected with this argument was Gladstone’s other gambit —
that the history and condition of Ireland and the Church of Ireland made dis-
establishment logical and proper from the standpoint of his theory of

74 Hansard, 30 March 1868, and 1 March and 23 March 1869.

75 For a similar analysis, see ‘A Chapter of Autobiography’, GPY, VII, p. 151.
110 D.J. LORENZO

establishment. While he had acknowledged in SRC historical abuses and the

failure of that church to win converts, his support for Irish establishment there
was firm. He had argued that past errors did not change the truth the church
had to offer, that establishment was necessary to strengthen the political
bonds of the empire, and that the British government knew best in terms of
religion. The result was a romantic analysis of the Church of Ireland’s situa-
tion.’”° Here in contrast he pointed to a changed context that shed a different
light on the history of Ireland and the history and mission of that church. In
this he was careful to distinguish between the history, moral status and practi-
cability of the Church of Ireland and those of the Church of England. Whereas
the latter was deemed ‘good and efficient for its purpose’, the former was not.
It had failed in its mission of converting the Irish to Anglicanism. He argued
that while establishments in general are good things, any particular establish-
ment must be justified ultimately by the fulfilment of its mission — serving
the populace in bringing true religion; and this, he argued, had not occurred.
Departing from the optimistic stance in SRC, he was more deeply influenced
here by a history of failures. He argued that the historical record not only of
the past several hundred years, but also of the last thirty (since the publication
of SRC)” showed that hope for Irish conversion was misplaced. Only when
coercive laws were in force did the nominal adherents of the Church of Ire-
land approach majority status, and this reliance on coercion he rejected as
incompatible with religious freedom (as well as with financial prudence). It
was preferable, he argued, to return to the ecclesiastical situation before the
Civil War, when no Irish church enjoyed establishment or public endowment.
This would not only bring peace to the state, but also, to return to the themes
of differentiation and practicality, free the Church of England from an associ-
ation ‘which politically is odious and dangerous’.
It is important to note on which grounds Gladstone stood in his move to dis-
establish the Church of Ireland. While much of his argument drew on practi-
cal judgments, including assessments of the harm continued establishment
inflicted on the state, important and necessary arguments held that this estab-
lishment caused harm because it violated equal protection, and that the
Church of Ireland did not meet the standards of an established church, includ-
ing the stipulation that church membership be voluntary. At bottom were both
his understanding of equal protection and his conceptualization of an estab-
lished church based on his religious anthropology — it is a true church, sup-
ported by the state, spreading the true religion to a large majority of a willing
populace. Conditions in Ireland, he argued, would not allow the Church of
Ireland to meet that definition; thus the continued existence of its estab-
lishment violated equal protection and created the problems of unrest and

I6-SRE AL pp. 12-17.

77 See Letter to Robert Phillimore, 13 February 1865, quoted in Morley, Life of Glad-
stone, Vol. II, pp. 141-2.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 111

instability. Therefore his understanding of equal protection and religious

anthropology ultimately guided his practical embrace of disestablishment.
His practical reasoning was also ofa kind consistent with his usage in SRC.
In both places he privileged context and history such that his understanding of
practicality was brought to bear through only them. The danger to the state
that he identified with establishment stemmed from important historical cir-
cumstances and was confined to the peculiar conditions of Ireland.

Admission of Atheists to Parliament (1883)

Gladstone became involved in 1883 in the case of Mr Bradlaugh, a professed

atheist elected to sit for Northampton in the House of Commons. Bradlaugh
wished to swear the oath of allegiance necessary to sit in the House, but had
been barred by Parliamentary officials. After several years of legal wrangling,
the government proposed that the Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866 be amended
to allow members to affirm their allegiance without reference to religious
grounds. Opponents argued that such a move was quite different from the
admission of Catholics and Jews into Parliament. It would radically alter the
nature of Parliament by serving to ‘divorce the House from the very elements
of religion’, admit people whose integrity was in question because their con-
sciences were not bound by religious principles, and endanger religion in gen-
eral by the admission of those who sought to ‘damage or destroy the existing
religions of the country’, arguments consciously echoing those Gladstone had
earlier espoused.”®
Gladstone, speaking for the Government as prime minister, defended the
bill first by linking it with the admission of Catholics and Jews to the House.”
In SRC, he had supported religious tests on two grounds: as general require-
ments for office-holding, like property and citizenship requirements, and as
political defences justified by Britain’s experiences. In 1883 he emphasized
the link between toleration and equal protection to reject the general-
requirements argument, and referred to a contextual recognition of equal pro-
tection for Catholics and Jews to discard the civil-defence argument.
Gladstone disposed of the general-requirements argument by abandoning
his previous assertions that religious qualifications were defensible in Eng-
jand because it approximated the best possible state. He now argued that the
previous admission of Catholics and Jews to public office had cut the connec-
tion between religious profession and eligibility to hold office. Eligibility was
currently a matter of liberty, and as such must be equally distributed, not
offered up ‘by halves, by quarters, and by fractions’. His contextualist argu-
ment regarding civil defence began consistently with SRC; he argued that

78 See the speech of Sir H. Drummond Wolff, Hansard, 26 April 1883, cols.
1168-73.
79 Hansard, 26 April 1883, cols. 1174-95.
112 D.J. LORENZO

oaths and religious tests had been introduced only in Elizabeth’s time, and
then with the purpose of ascertaining loyalty to political institutions. But he
now emphasized that loyalty to the state was not an issue. As the state
assumed the loyalty of all people regardless of their religion, a correct reading
of the law was that the state ‘did not interpose barriers against access to
this House’. Toleration meant equal protection and equal rights, with no
distinctions made among Anglicans, Catholics, Jews and atheists. To deny
Bradlaugh admission meant denying this change in context, he argued.”
Gladstone’s other line of argument drew more heavily upon his previous
stance rejecting generic oaths and tests, and included an intricate use of practi-
cal judgments that flowed from his religious anthropology to discard as ‘im-
practical’ a dependence on an oath to defend Christian institutions. In SRC,
Gladstone drew upon the corporatist part of his religious anthropology to
argue that an oath or test that affirmed only an abstract beliefinChristianity or
God was not useful to defending a strong connection between Christianity and
the state, as the definition of such abstract beliefs would be up to each individ-
ual to determine, and such tests tended to divide religion into parts when it is
an organic whole.*' Gladstone asserted likewise here. A requirement to swear
by reference to God does nothing to screen out people hostile to Christianity,
he argued, since not only would it miss atheists who hide their beliefs and
have no qualms in taking the oath, but anti-Christian deists like Voltaire
would be welcomed. Rather than defend the Christian nature of the House, the
only effect of such an oath, Gladstone maintained, was to force sincere athe-
ists to do violence to their consciences in order to enjoy the political rights that
were rightfully theirs. Moreover, he argued that upholding as necessary for
office an abstract belief in God was ‘disparaging to Christianity’ as it ‘di-
vide[s] religion into the dispensible and the indispensible’ whereas all ele-
ments are necessary.”
In these arguments Gladstone worked from the viewpoint he had embraced
since the late 1840s — that since the best possible state was no longer defensible,
the political constraints that arose with such a state were no longer justifiable.
Equal protection was now the norm. He also utilized his appreciation of reli-
gious diversity to establish the primacy of equal protection. While no admirer
of Bradlaugh’s theological views, he held that as a matter of both principle
and contextual judgment Bradlaugh must be admitted, for the British state had
divorced religious affiliation from eligibility for office. This connection
80 Stansky, Gladstone, pp. 144-50, emphasizes Gladstone’s references to rights and
his practicality here.
81 SRC, II, pp. 367-8. Morley’s discussion ofthis speech does not connect the earlier
and later Gladstonian views on this subject. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Glad-
stone, Vol. Il, pp. 19-21.
82 Stansky, Gladstone, pp. 149-51, gives a different gloss. For Gladstone’s later
belief in the unity of religion, see “Robert Elsmere’ and ‘The Place of Heresy and Schism
in the Modern Christian Church’, LG, pp. 77-117, 280-311.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 113

between context and equal protection was therefore one key to his changed
views. The second was a partial continuation from his previous position — the
practical judgment, stemming from his religious anthropology, that generic
religious oaths cannot defend the Christian character of the Parliament. But
where earlier he had used it as an argument for strengthening religious oaths,
he used it here in support of equal protection as an argument against religious
oaths.

Gladstone’s Defence of the Established Church of England (1871, 1873)

While Gladstone’s stance on religious oaths and Irish disestablishment repre-

sented important changes in his outlook, regarding the Church of England he
remained consistently in support of its establishment. He refused on several
occasions to extend to that church his position on the Church of Ireland. That
is not to say that he never pondered whether it might be better off if disestab-
lished. In response to the Gorham Case and Parliamentary attempts to purge it
of ‘ritualism’, he hinted that cutting ties with the state was warranted if the
historical basis of the establishment was illegitimately altered to allow politi-
cal interference in church doctrine. But, as he put it on the latter occasion, ‘My
object and desire has ever been and still is, to keep the Church of England
together, both as a church and as an establishment’.*’ Here I discuss concur-
rently two of Gladstone’s addresses on Anglican disestablishment.
On the heels of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, the Liberal
member for Bradford, Mr Miall, twice introduced motions that the govern-
ment apply the same policy to all established churches in Great Britain, the
first time on the grounds of the ‘social, moral and religious advantage’ that
would accrue to the nation, and the second by reference to the benefits the
established churches would enjoy. Gladstone as prime minister opposed both
motions by drawing upon his contextual method, his historicism and his reli-
gious anthropology.**
In both addresses, Gladstone argued that the orientation of the government
on the question of disestablishment, contrary to some glosses of its policy on
Ireland, was not a matter of abstract principles but of concrete cases. He fol-
lowed no principle of separation of church and state, and he explicitly rejected
the anti-Erastian generalization that disestablishment was helpful to all churches
because he rejected the proposition that establishment ‘in itself is harmful to
religion’. It was the circumstances of establishment that were key to govern-
ment policy. In addressing the question of the Church ofIreland, he maintained,
the government was tending to its peculiar circumstances and concluded that
disestablishment was a matter of ‘social justice’, given that the church was a
83 Quoted in Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. I, p. 502. For his
views on the Gorham Case see ‘Remarks on the Royal Supremacy’, GPY, V, pp.
173-289.
84 Hansard, 9 May 1871, cols. 559-71, and 16 May 1873, cols. 37-49.
114 D.J. LORENZO

foreign imposition, its membership was a minority of its inhabitants, and the
majority of the population wished to see it disestablished. Gladstone underscored
this contextually sensitive application of equal protection to the Irish case, as
he wanted to argue that the Anglican establishment was different on all these
counts and thus its continued establishment did not violate equal protection.
Gladstone made this point in a variety of ways. The most direct way was to
highlight evidence suggesting a majority of the English supported the Church
of England. He argued that, contrary to the claims of Nonconformists, its
membership comprised a majority of the people in the nation. At one point he
asserted that over three-quarters of the population were at least nominal mem-
bers. He also maintained that the nation overwhelmingly rejected the idea of
disestablishment, a position reflected in the views of a majority in the Com-
mons. In contrast to his position on the Bradlaugh controversy, he argued here
that these majorities should be heeded.
To this democratic point he attached a fundamental practical objection. To
forge ahead with such a project, particularly in the face of public opposition,
would be impossible since it would involve a project more complex and diffi-
cult than was the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, a task he said was
the most complicated legislatively and logistically of any the British govern-
ment had ever tackled.** It would require sorting out the complex set of rights
of its members and officers, who numbered in the tens of thousands. The
question of compensation was also daunting: Gladstone cited a figure of
ninety million pounds, an astronomical sum. In these arguments, Gladstone
implied that the English situation was the opposite of the Irish. In Ireland dis-
establishment was complicated despite the fact that it was popular with the
vast majority of the population and was a matter of equal protection. In Eng-
land the proceedings themselves would probably trigger the kind of popular
unrest that Irish disestablishment was meant to forestall because the kind of
religious diversity found in Ireland was absent.
Gladstone’s other arguments defended the Church of England’s vitality,
emphasized its institutional role, and privileged its historical connections
with England. He quoted Dollinger to the effect that its clergy and laypeople
were among the shining lights of Christendom. He also outlined an extensive
array of institutional tasks it performed. It cared for the spiritual needs of those
deadened to religion; it was deeply involved in educational and charitable
works; and, he argued, it was intimately and necessarily involved in the
shaping and enlightening of public opinion in all its facets. It provided impor-
tant connections with other parts of the universal church; it pointed to the
future of Christianity; it defended political freedom; it provided the spiritual
guidance and intellectual resources necessary to resolve conflicts between
science and religion; and it provided a way of reconciling the ancient with

85 Morley only notes this practical point. Morley, The Life of William Ewart Glad-
stone, Vol. II, p. 458.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 115

the modern. In this, he argued, other religious institutions were not ona
par with the Church of England. The role of the latter had been fundamental.
Harkening back to the historical text of SRC, Gladstone argued that the church
was organically intertwined with the history and traditions of England.** In
important ways it represented, characterized, expressed and reflected the
development of the English nation as a whole. It was ‘the growth of the his-
tory and traditions of the country’. As such it was psychologically important
to the vast majority of the English, who had become attached to it through its
thirteen hundred years as the nation’s leading religious institution. Given their
formative role, its religious functions were ‘vital’ to the history and the future
of the nation. ‘Take the Church of England out of the history of England,’ he
argued, ‘and the history of England becomes a chaos, without order, without
life, and without meaning.’
Here Gladstone rejected disestablishment as a principle while referring to
his religious anthropology, contextual differentiations, historical arguments
and practical judgments to argue that in this instance disestablishment was
unnecessary and impractical. There was no need to change the institutional
status quo of the English establishment, he argued, because there was no real
change from the religious homogeneity of the past that would require such an
alteration, nor were there important and recognizably different administrative
problems. Equally important was the fact that the Church of England was
admirably performing the functions he expected of a religious institution, and
performance of those duties made it inseparable from England. To disestab-
lish it would fundamentally change English life and ‘leave nothing behind but
a bleeding and lacerated mass’. In this analysis the Church of England’s
establishment was proper because that legal status did not violate equal pro-
tection. The church continued to provide institutional resources to the major-
ity of the population, the church was intimately connected with the life and
history of the nation, and a majority wished to retain the status quo. Therefore
any calculus, practical or moral, would show that the enormous costs ofdis-
establishment were unjustifiable.

Conclusion

I argue that a primary emphasis on Gladstone’s practicality (or lack thereof)

cannot account for the maze of positions he took on matters of church and
state. While others have rightly argued that practical judgments played a role
in his later decisions to embrace a greater scope of religious freedom and to
question religious establishments, a comparison of his earlier and later views
demonstrates not only that such judgments were present in the thinking of

86 Also ‘The Sixteenth Century Arraigned Before the Nineteenth’, GPY, III, pp.
224-73.
116 D.J. LORENZO

both the young and the mature Gladstone, but also that they did not determine
the views of the latter.
It is necessary to pin down the role practical judgments played in Glad-
stone’s arguments. Probably the most important practical judgment under-
lying his decision to support religious freedoms was the conclusion that a
defence of the ‘best possible state’ was no longer feasible. But while it made
available his decisions to adopt equal protection, oppose religious oaths, and
support disestablishment, no direct line can be drawn from that judgment to
those positions; and that judgment itself was crucially dependent upon his
contextually informed appreciation of religious diversity. More directly,
practical judgments also peppered his arguments on Irish disestablishment
and the admission of Jews and atheists to Parliament. Here, too, my conclu-
sion is that these judgments played a secondary role. They were parasitic upon
other elements of his intellectual framework, particularly his emphasis on
equal protection. In the absence of his commitment to equal protection,
Gladstone would not have conceded that disestablishing the Church ofIreland
was the right response to the Irish troubles, or argued that the Ecclesiastical
Titles Assumption Act was the wrong response to ultramontanism. Without a
prior understanding that sitting in the House was a matter of equal protection,
he also would not have offered the pragmatic argument that opposition to
seating Bradlaugh generated support for atheism.
Another important observation is that Gladstone used practical judgments
both to justify religious freedom and to defend strong ties between church and
state. We see that while he used practical judgments later in life to help justify
a partial dismantling of the state’s ties with churches, such reasoning played a
role in his early justifications of a churchly state when he argued that such a
state enjoys low levels of crime, moral political leaders and a stable constitu-
tional order. Moreover, even after he abandoned his defence of a churchly
state he continued to use practical reasoning to identify insuperable problems
with the project of disestablishing the Church of England.
These observations, I argue, illustrate the importance of Gladstone’ s funda-
mental philosophy, and the dependence of his practical reasoning on that phi-
losophy. We have in Gladstone someone whose philosophical views were not
completely liberal. This was the cause of his mixed positions on issues of reli-
gious freedom, a cause that his practical judgments failed to overcome. Thus
while Gladstone favoured Irish disestablishment on practical as well as moral
grounds and despite rejecting the principle of disestablishment, he also opposed
Anglican disestablishment on practical grounds and because he rejected that
principle. On this point it is important to compare Gladstone’s position on
Anglican disestablishment with his position on the issues of ecclesiastical
titles, the admission of Jews and atheists to Parliament, and Irish disestablish-
ment. This comparison indicates that Gladstone usually supported liberal
freedoms when he yoked practical judgment to a recognition of religious
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 117

diversity, his principle of equal protection, and the parts of his religious
anthropology that emphasized freedom of conscience, while he refused to
support disestablishment when he joined practical judgments to the insti-
tutionalist part of his religious anthropology and his historicist conceptualiza-
tion of Britain.*”
We also see that Gladstone’s historicism and the institutionalist side of his
religious anthropology tended to trump his principle of equal protection. This
is revealed most clearly in the two disestablishment cases, where his analysis
of the connection between the respective churches and the populations they
served was mixed with his historicism and his privileging ofinstitutional reli-
gion. If by 1868 Gladstone was willing to disestablish the Irish church, it was
because he saw it as alien to Ireland and therefore incapable of discharging the
duties of an established church. The claims of the religiously diverse popula-
tion of Ireland and the instability they caused could then come to the fore. But
he never acquiesced to the disestablishment of the Church of England because
he viewed it as intrinsically part of a historical England and continued to
believe it fulfilled the duties of an established church. Those views, along
with arguments connecting that church with the bulk of the English popula-
tion and extolling its vigour, were decisive, leading him to maintain that
establishment posed no equal-protection problems in England even in the face
of the considerable religious diversity he had earlier acknowledged.
To conclude, I sketch the implications of these findings for our understand-
ing of Gladstone and for a consideration of liberal freedoms in general.
Regarding Gladstone, they suggest a closer connection between his philo-
sophical views and his politics than other descriptions sometimes hold. I of
course argue that this examination of Gladstone does not support the explana-
tion, crudely put, that he abandoned his earlier philosophical views on church
and state in favour of political pragmatism. Philosophical elements that were
important to his earlier views lingered in the arguments of the later Gladstone.
But several other observations are also important. One is that Gladstone’s phi-
losophy did importantly change, in the form of his rejection of a churchly
state, his elevation of religious diversity, and his acceptance of equal protec-
tion. Without those changes he would not have acquiesced to the elimination of
religious oaths or to Irish disestablishment. Thus Vidler’s and Helmstadter’s
descriptions of Gladstone as completely retaining his former views also are
not quite right. Nor are Parry and Butler correct in attributing his support for
religious freedom to a change to Tractarian anti-Erastianism. The other obser-
vation is that his later views on establishment in general were significantly
shaped by philosophical continuities, namely his historicism and his dualistic
religious anthropology. Thus if we accept Stansky’s and Schreuder’s argu-
ment that Gladstone’s positions incorporated a mixture of conservatism and

87 Though the institutionalist, organic part of his religious anthropology did play a
role in his opposition to religious oaths in the Bradlaugh case.
118 D.J. LORENZO

progressivism, an explanation for that mixture must refer to these parts of his
core philosophical beliefs.
This examination also bears upon questions pertaining to the roles of prac-
tical reasoning, value pluralism and modus vivendi in the development of lib-
eral freedoms. John Gray and Andrew Murphy have recently argued against
the position that particular philosophical views are necessary to the development
of such goods as religious freedom.* Instead they insist that value pluralism
and a rational, practical modus vivendi are generally sufficient to create a free
society. The conclusions drawn here are suggestive and preliminary, indicat-
ing only on which side of the debate over such issues we should place Glad-
stone’s evidence. With that said, Gladstone’s example not only tends to
confirm the observation that practical reason itself is undirected, as Gutmann
and Thompson argue in approving of Wertheimer’s contention that we must
‘point’ reason to use it to reach liberal goals;*’ it also indicates that a person
can use practical reason flexibly to justify quite different policies (on estab-
lishment, for example) given a dualistic anthropology. Second, Gladstone’s
example suggests that practical judgments tend to justify liberal freedoms
only when they are informed by a philosophical principle (here equal protec-
tion) that points beyond modus vivendi. We see this illustrated by Gladstone’s
changing views on toleration. Early in his career he clung to an understanding
typical of modus vivendi — toleration means sufferance, not equality. Only
when he explicitly embraced the tenet of equal protection did his practical
judgments lead to the vigorous protection of religious dissenters’ political
rights. Thus while practical judgments in a modus vivendi situation may be
useful to the justification of isolated liberal freedoms, in Gladstone’s case
they were not sufficient for that purpose even given his initial recognition in
SRC of the existence of diverse religious groups.
One may also infer from Gladstone’s example that the presence of one or a
few philosophical principles may likewise be insufficient to the development
of a comprehensive set of liberal freedoms. While equal protection appears
necessary to that development, without the support of other liberal views
describing the self and the world its reach appears limited. In this example the
absence of such views led to Gladstone’s later use of historicism and the
institutionalist side of his religious anthropology to trump equal protection
concerns in the matter of the Anglican establishment. So while it appears
88 John Gray, The Two Faces of Liberalism (New York, 2000), and Andrew Murphy,
Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Mod-
ern England and America (University Park, PA, 2001). On the other side of the debate,
see Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue and Community in Liberal
Constitutionalism (Oxford, 1990).
89 A. Gutmann and D. Thompson, ‘Moral Conflict and Political Consensus’, Ethics,
CI (1990), p. 73, and Gutmann, ‘How Limited is Liberal Government’, in Liberalism
Without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar,
ed. B. Yack (Chicago, 1996), p. 67.
 RELIGIOUS FREEDOM & PRACTICAL REASONING 119

unlikely that Gladstone would have supported the abolition of religious oaths
or Irish disestablishment without embracing equal protection, even when he
did embrace it he took ambivalent positions on other issues. From this we may
draw the broad but tentative conclusion that for Gladstone consistently to
have defended a political order characterized by religious freedom and equal
protection, he would have needed to accept a wider array of philosophical
views. In other words, he would have been required to modify the institutional
side of his spiritual anthropology and to change his historical conception of
the English community. If this is the case it again suggests that Murphy and
Gray are mistaken to hold that value pluralism plus practical judgments in a
modus vivendi situation will produce a full set of freedoms.

David J. Lorenzo JAMESTOWN COLLEGE

 WHAT?’S IN A NAME?
REPUBLICANISM AND CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 1871-1879!

Mike Hawkins?

Abstract: This paper focuses on the appropriation of the label ‘conservative’ by

republican politicians and intellectuals during the early years of the French Third
Republic. It is a strategy in need of explanation because until then ‘conservative’ was
used pejoratively by republicans as a synonym for ‘reactionary’ to describe their mon-
archist and clerical adversaries. Adopting the label conservative was an attempt to
change the hearts and minds of the French public, and to secure support for the institu-
tions of the new republic and for the democratic principles upon which they were
founded. The paper analyses a number of senses in which republicans defined them-
selves as ‘true conservatives’: as defenders of the established political order, as repre-
sentatives of a tradition inaugurated by the French Revolution, and as political realists.
The paper concludes by assessing the significance and consequences of adopting this
strategy for republican political thought in France.

Introduction

This paper focuses on the appropriation of the label ‘conservative’ by republi-

can politicians and intellectuals during the founding and consolidation of the
French Third Republic from the election of the National Assembly in Febru-
ary 1871 to the resignation of President MacMahon in January 1879. During
this period the republican leadership insisted that they, not the monarchists or
Bonapartists, were ‘true conservatives’, and described the fledgling republic
as the ‘conservative republic’ in their ultimately successful efforts to win the
support of the electorate.
This appropriation of the term ‘conservative’ by republicans to charac-
terize the new republic and the policies it would pursue has provoked little
comment from most historians of the period. Yet I shall argue that it is a sig-
nificant episode in the development of French republican political theory fora
number of reasons. First, it went against the grain of contemporary usage of
‘conservative’ by both the majority of republicans and their opponents.
Second, this process represented an important reconfiguration of republican
ideology which, third, became part of the republican tradition. The paper is
structured as follows: first there is an account of the relationship between
conservatism and republicanism around 1871, then a brief analysis of the
'T would like to thank the British Academy and the History Research Unit at
Kingston University for jointly funding study leave during which the research for this
paper was undertaken. My thanks also to my colleague Steve Bastow, the editor of HPT
and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I
remain responsible for errors and interpretations.
? School of Social Science, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road, Kirigston on Thames,
Surrey, KT] 2EE. Email: m.hawkins @kingston.ac.uk

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 12]

difficulties inherent in the attempt to legitimate a republic in the 1870s. An

examination of the manner in which conservatism was understood on the
French right is followed by a discussion of republican efforts to re-define their
programme as conservative, exploring the senses in which they used this term
and the extent to which these differed from its deployment by their opponents.
The paper concludes with an evaluation of the efficacy of this strategy and its
significance in the context of French republican thought.

Conservatism and Republicanism

The legitimacy of linking conservatism and republicanism was fiercely
contested by members of the right, who were adamant that they were the rep-
resentatives of genuine conservatism. They certainly had the weight of con-
vention on their side, since for several years they had referred to themselves
collectively as the ‘conservative party’ and, indeed, were so designated by
their republican opponents. The association between the right and conserva-
tism had been cultivated during the Second Empire. To be conservative
implied support for traditional institutions and values and opposition to radi-
cal social and political change, and the term was deemed to be untainted with
the pejorative connotations of ‘reactionary’.
Republicans, in contrast, had sought to establish an identity between reac-
tion and conservatism so as to blight the latter term with the opprobrium
attached to the former. Republicans insisted that they stood for progress and
for the achievements of the French Revolution, whereas their opponents, in
seeking to impede progress, were going against the march of history. Champi-
ons of reason, republicans were searching for a civic morality that could act as
a counterculture to clericalism, and so advocated democracy, civic equality
and free and obligatory primary education.’ For the majority of republicans,
therefore, from the July monarchy until the collapse of the Second Empire, it
would have seemed paradoxical to claim to be both progressive and conserva-
tive. Yet this is precisely what they sought to do in the early years of the Third
Republic.
The association between conservatism and republicanism was proclaimed
by Thiers in his famous Presidential speech to the National Assembly on 13
November 1872:
The Republic exists; it is the legal government of the country; to want
something else would constitute a new Revolution of the kind most of all to

3 Jean Dubois, Le Vocabulaire politique et social en France de 1869 a 1872 (Paris,

1962), pp. 72-3.
4 Katherine Auspitz, The Radical Bourgeoisie: the Ligue d’Ensignement and the Ori-
gins of the Third Republic 1866-1885 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 13, 20 ff. On the forma-
tion of arepublican political culture, and its long gestation during the Second Empire, see
Philip Nord, The Republican Moment: Struggles for Democracy in Nineteenth-Century
France (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1995), ch. 8.
122 M. HAWKINS

be feared. Do not let us waste our time on proclaiming the Republic, but let
us employ our time in giving it the characteristics which are necessary and
desirable.
... The Republic will be conservative or it will not exist.”
In the light of Thiers’ Orleanist background, his insistence on the need for the
new Republic to be conservative is hardly surprising. But the association
between conservatism and republicanism was also being announced by lead-
ing republican intellectuals,° while republican politicians had achieved some
success with this tactic during a round of by-elections to the National Assem-
bly held in July 1871.’ Outlining a programme of reforms in an important
speech in Bordeaux in June 1871, the radical firebrand, Léon Gambetta,
referred to this programme as ‘radical yet truly conservative’.* The following
year, in April 1872, he rejected the accusation that the republican party was
both factious and revolutionary, insisting that ‘it is a party of conservation,
which guarantees the future, and which assures peaceful, legal, progressive
development of all the legitimate consequences of the French Revolution’.”
Here Gambetta reprised themes from the earlier Bordeaux programme
which would be reiterated in subsequent speeches — that republicanism stood
for universal suffrage, for ‘power enlightened by reason’ and the accomplish-
ment of the work commenced by the Revolution. At the same time, he insisted
that the Republic would be conservative, observe the rule of law and maintain
order at home and peace abroad. He criticized the monarchists and reaction-
ary forces in general for wanting to restore a moribund France and for failing

> Adolphe Thiers, cited inJ.P.T. Bury, Gambetta and the Making of the Third Repub-
lic (London, 1973), p. 120. Indeed, as early as March 1871 Thiers had informed republi-
cans in the Assembly that successful national reconstruction would consolidate the
Republic, which would be a reward for their wisdom and forbearance. Cf. Jacques
Chastenet, L’Enfance de la Troisiéme 1870-1879 (Paris, 1952), p. 67.
© Charles Dupont-White, La République conservatrice (Paris, 1872). There is a
detailed discussion of Dupont-White’s political thought in Sudhir Hazareesingh, Jntel-
lectual Founders of the Republic (Oxford, 2001), ch. 2.
7 Chastenet, L’Enfance de la Troisiéme, p. 115. Thiers had noted this success and
prior to his Presidential address had privately expressed the view that the notion of a con-
servative republic would reassure and win over an electorate fearful of instability and
violence. Letter to Casimir-Périer, 7 October 1872, cited in Alan Grubb, The Politics of
Pessimism: Albert de Broglie and Conservative Politics in the Early Third Republic
(Newark and London, 1996), p. 89.
8 Léon Gambetta, Discours et plaidoyers politiques, ed. Joseph Reinach (11 vols.,
Paris, 1880-5), II, p. 34. Gambetta’s biographers have highlighted the importance of this
speech for its linkage of radicalism and conservatism and its anticipation of opportunism.
See Bury, Gambetta, p. 26; Harold Stannard, Gambetta and the Foundation of the Third
Republic (London, 1921), pp. 133-4; see also Jéré6me Grévy, La République des
opportunistes 1870-1885 (Mesnil sur I’ Estrée, 1988), pp. 46-7.
9 Gambetta, Discours, II, p. 258.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 123

to understand ‘these forces, at the same time new and terrible’ of democracy.'®
In September 1872 he baldly asserted: ‘We will support, we will sustain the
conservative Republic up to the limit of our obligations.’"
Other politicians who were subsequently to play leading roles in the
Third Republic made similar claims for the conservative credentials of
republicanism between 1871 and 1872. Paul Bert (who was to become
Minster for Education in Gambetta’s ministry) informed his audience in a
by-election speech in June 1872 that if elected he would fight for the disso-
lution of the Assembly and for the formation of a Constituent Assembly
that would establish a new constitution. He continued: ‘Gentlemen, we are
the republic of laws, we republicans are the governing party, we are the
conservatives.’'* In the same address Bert referred to the republicans as
‘men of order and enemies of revolutions’ though, while praising Thiers
for founding the Republic, Bert also criticized him for failing to champion
a truly democratic programme.”?
After the fall of the Second Empire, the future Prime Minister, Jules Ferry,
looked to Thiers to provide the leadership required for political stability
and the consolidation of the Republic, although Ferry, disillusioned and
depressed by the defeat and the Commune, fluctuated in his belief in the like-
lihood of either. He was also exasperated by Thiers’ wheeling and dealing
with the forces of reaction. In a letter to his brother Charles in December 1871
he bemoaned what he feared to be a turn to the right by Thiers, whom he con-
demned for weakness and irresolution, despite having the opportunity to
‘constitute the conservative party in this country which can save every-
thing’.'* After the Presidential address of November 1872, Ferry praised
Thiers for the timing of his speech and its clear endorsement of the Republic.'°
He rejected its detractors’ allegation that the Republic was opposed by the
majority of ‘interests’ in the nation: ‘The conversions to the conservative
Republic are too numerous, too striking, to allow it to be said that the majority
of interests are against the Republic’.'*
At one level, of course, the linkage of republicanism and conservatism was
a tactic aimed at reassuring key elites that republicanism had eschewed its
revolutionary past. But the republicans had to convince a much wider audi-
ence than this in order to win electoral support. Moreover, it entailed adopting
a label that was contrary to their established use of the term, and seemingly at

10 Ibid., pp. 235-6.

'l Gambetta, Discours, III, p. 82.
'2 Paul Bert, Lecons, discours et conférences (Paris, 1881), p. 153.
'3 Thid., pp. 154, 164.
'4 Jules Ferry, letter to Charles Ferry, 8 December 1871, in Lettres de Jules Ferry,
1846-1893 (Paris, 1914), p. 133.
'5 Ferry, letter to Charles Ferry, 21 November 1872, in ibid., p. 166.
16 Tbid., p. 167.
124 M. HAWKINS

odds with the progressive ideals of French republicanism and its revolutionary
heritage. The febrile condition of French society at the time, reeling from the
shock of military defeat and civil war, certainly made necessary the effort to
legitimate a new form of government, but does not explain why republicans
attempted the hi-jacking of a concept that was part of the ideological appa-
ratus of anti-republicanism. In the remainder of this paper I will attempt an
answer to this question.

Legitimating the Republic

From its proclamation on 4 September 1870, there was nothing inevitable
about the eventual triumph of the Third Republic. The National Assembly
elected in February 1871 comprised some four hundred monarchists but
only one hundred and fifty committed republicans.'’ Certainly the ranks of
the latter were soon to be reinforced as a result of by-election successes, but
the prospect of a royal restoration was a real fear throughout this period,
while the Bonapartists also began to rally from 1872. In the eyes of many
members of the public, the Republic had been besmirched from its inception
by the Commune and its bloody aftermath and the futile policy of continuing
the war with Prussia.'* Peace and recovery were the urgent needs of the
moment and in its brief existence the Republic had seemingly jeopardized
both.
Republicans were also hampered by the difficulty of finding convincing
models of successful republican regimes from either history or the contem-
porary world. The two previous French republics had been brief, precarious,
and the preludes to repression and dictatorship, providing ammunition for
opponents who associated republics with instability and violence. Contem-
porary models were also hard to come by. Switzerland was a small country
and, moreover, a federation, as was the United States, which had recently
fought a civil war in order to maintain its integrity.'” As for the republics of
the classical world and the middle ages, which provided the models for the
republicanism of the eighteenth century, these had been rendered redundant
by the middle of the nineteenth, and though they might still inspire the occa-
sional rhetorical flourish, they could hardly furnish practical guidelines to
the French republican leadership, who were acutely conscious of the

'7 Jean-Michel Gaillard, Jules Ferry (Paris, 1987), p. 245.

'8 Bertrand Taithe, Citizenship and Wars: France in Turmoil 1870-1871 (London,
2001), p. 143.
'9 In a speech in October 1872 Gambetta denied the relevance of the Swiss and
American republics to the French experience (Gambetta, Discours, III, pp. 168-9) and
always insisted that France differed from contemporary republics, and would ‘give the
world the spectacle of a republic without parallel’ (Gambetta, Discours, IX, p. 607; see
also ibid., pp. 346-7, and Grévy, La République des opportunistes, pp. 43, 72-3).
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 125

momentous changes engendered by modernity. There were, then, no obvi-

ous models on which republicans could draw in 1870.”°
In fact, ever since the collapse of the First Empire, republicans had sought
to re-conceptualize and re-define the meaning of republican political culture
in order to accommodate the nation state, mass suffrage and representative
government. These efforts were particularly intense during the Second Empire,
and recent scholarship has drawn attention to the extensive reconfiguration of
republican ideology that took place during this period, particularly during the
1860s.*! But after 4 September 1870 republicans were confronted by the
practicalities of governing in a situation of political and military collapse.
France wanted peace and stability as the elections to the national Assembly
confirmed and, as I have argued above, neither recent circumstances nor past
experience rendered a republic the obvious solution. The champions of repub-
licanism had to struggle on a number of fronts to win hearts and minds and, in
particular, to persuade the French electorate not only oftheir ability to govern,
but also that the constitutional arrangements adopted by the Assembly in 1875
(which were the fruits of compromise and hardly in accordance with the pre-
cepts of republican political theory) would enable them to do so. In short, 1871
to 1879 was a period in which republicans had to establish, both theoretically
and practically, the viability of the Republic. Appropriating the label conser-
vative for their programme was part of this process of legitimation, and a cen-
tral component of their ‘opportunism’. This is captured in the definition of
opportunism offered by the lexicographer, sociologist and politician, Emile
Littré: ‘It is the cohesion of republicans becoming conservative and conserva-
tives becoming republicans that has established the Third Republic.’

The Conservative Coalition

The conservative forces in France during the 1870s were a loose coalition of
factions linked by their opposition to what they regarded as the ‘red’ threat
posed by republicanism rather than by any ideological unity or coherent politi-
cal strategy. On the far right were the legitimists who wanted to restore the
Bourbon monarchy and who tended to be staunch Catholics. The centre right
endorsed a constitutional monarchy complemented by parliamentary institu-
tions, and adopted a more liberal Catholicism than the legitimists. Finally, the
erstwhile supporters of the Empire, who enjoyed an electoral recovery from

20 Pamela M. Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France, 1814-1871

(London, 1995).
21 Nord, The Republican Moment; Sudhir Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen:
The Second Empire and the Emergence of Modern French Democracy (Princeton, NJ,
1998); Les Républicains sous le Second Empire, ed. Léo Hamon (Paris, 1993).
22 Emile Littré, Par quelle conduite la République francaise peut-elle consolider le
succés qu'elle a obténu? (Paris, 1879), p. 14.
126 M. HAWKINS

1872, though comprising a range of positions along the authoritarian—liberal

spectrum, formed an uneasy alliance with the monarchists.
Despite the heterogeneity of this coalition, the great majority of its mem-
bers would probably have agreed that conservatism meant a commitment to
the maintenance of social order and the defence of traditional liberties and key
institutions such as the family, the Church, private property and the army.”
These were all deemed to be threatened by republicans like Gambetta, who
were seen as resolved to eradicate or transform these institutions, and moti-
vated by ideological fervour rather than by a practical knowledge of the reali-
ties of government — which most of the right regarded as the preserve of an
elite.
This perspective is captured in the following extract from the Mémoires of
Count Albert de Broglie, an Orleanist and liberal Catholic who was the unof-
ficial leader and tactician of the parliamentary right. De Broglie insisted that
he was not against a republic, but opposed to republicans as people utterly
unsuited to the exercise of government. The history of France was over-
whelmingly a monarchical history, and hence to be a republican was synony-
mous with being a revolutionary:
The republican party, taken as a whole (apart from a few honourable indi-
viduals), is the centre and the meeting place of all the anti-social passions
which sooner or later make all government impossible. Religion, the army,
the magistracy, the ascendancy of the enlightened and superior classes, any-
thing which represents to any degree moral authority, anything which com-
mands respect, is odious to it. Its political programme contains principles
destructive of any regular order: but the heart of itsmembers is full of senti-
ments which are even more destructive to it.”
A similar set of arguments was advanced in an article advocating constitu-
tional monarchy published in 1869 by the philosopher Ernest Renan. Adopt-
ing an organic and hierarchical model of society in which traditions furnished
continuity with the past while allowing for slow and piecemeal modifications
guided by pragmatic considerations, Renan accused the republican activists
of the French Revolution of proceeding philosophically in matters in which
they should have been guided by history. Armed with the dogmas of the sov-
ereignty of the people and equality, and the view that society was simply an
aggregate of individuals pursuing their personal well-being, both the Revolu-
tionaries and modern republicans were guilty of severing France from her rich
past and impoverishing social life.” Renan grudgingly conceded that univer-
sal suffrage and the belief in the rights of the individual had become too
deeply entrenched to be opposed; however, they should be accommodated in

23 Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, pp. 116-19.

24 Cited in Grubb, The Politics of Pessimism, p. 51.
25 Ernest Renan, ‘La Monarchie constitutionelle en France’, in Geuvres completes,
ed. H. Psichari (10 vols., Paris, 1947-51), I, pp. 481-2, 505.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 127

a representative government headed by a constitutional monarchy acting as a

symbol of continuity rooted in French history.”°
Respect for the past and traditional forms of moral authority, pragmatic
governance informed by a realistic awareness of what was politically possible,
and a hierarchical conception of society comprise the common ground of
conservative ideology at the time, and are clearly discernible in the thinking
of de Broglie and Renan. Both men were resigned to some degree of political
democracy, but wished to constrain it and insulate conservative interests from
its more pernicious effects. In this, de Broglie was very much influenced by
his father, Victor de Broglie. The latter, in his Vues sur la governement de la
France (1860) had argued that all modern governments were faced with the
problem of reconciling order and liberty, stability and progress. He actually
advocated a ‘conservative republic’ as an interim form of government
which would protect conservative interests and prepare the ground for a
monarchical restoration. His son, after the failure of the initiatives to restore
the monarchy in 1873, sought to make this provisional conservative republic a
reality.*’ Thiers, in contrast, saw restoration as impossible and the Republic as
permanent.”*
This comparison with Thiers, however, discloses a complexity concerning
the relationship between conservatism and the parliamentary factions of the
1870s. Thiers was supported by a small group of republicans known as the
centre left, who were avowedly conservative. Emile de Marcére, for example,
regarded a republic as the form of government best suited to modern demo-
cratic conditions, but it had to be combined with the most important of the
rights described in the Declaration of the Rights of Man — liberty, ‘that is to
say the ensemble of absolute and imprescriptable rights which constitute the
human personality’. But this commitment to the right to liberty was wedded to
the indispensable need ‘to respect the traditions of ideas and sentiments that
have been the framework of our national existence, and with which a people
cannot break without perishing’.”? Marcére shared the right’s distrust of
Gambetta because, though the latter spoke of France’s traditions, “he did not
have them in the marrow of his bones’, and his actions deflected France from
this heritage. Under the sway of the erroneous doctrine of positivism, the radi-
cal republicans launched an implacable war ‘against every religious institu-
tion and against Catholicism in particular’
.*”

26 Ibid., pp. 509, 502, 487.

27 For a discussion of Victor de Broglie’s ideas see Grubb, Politics of Pessimism,
pp. 61-4; Hazareesingh, From Subject to Citizen, ch. 3.
28 Grubb, Politics of Pessimism, p. 66.
29 Emile de Marcére, Le Seize mai et la fin du septennat (Paris, 1900), p. 105.
30 Tbid., pp. 280, 281. In his pessimism, distrust of the masses and fear of radicalism
as a threat to the social order, Marcére shared many concerns with Thiers and the
128 M. HAWKINS

Marcére’s political sentiments, then, and the language in which he ex-

pressed them, show clear affinities with those articulated by de Broglie. Con-
servatism was, therefore, not the exclusive property of anti-republicans but
could even be embraced by a small number of convinced republicans. This
situation no doubt made its appropriation by the mainstream republicans seem
less than bizarre, but the latter were committed democrats, opposed to the
political dominance of traditional elites, and firmly anti-clerical. Hence it still
required a very considerable effort for them to make the ‘conservative repub-
lic’ their own, consistent with their ideals and programme.
This was attempted by re-defining three key elements in the right’s concep-
tualization of conservatism: the maintenance of order, the preservation of tra-
dition, and what I refer to as ‘socio-historical realism’. These three elements
are discussed in turn below.

The Maintenance of Order

There was a consensus among the French right that a fundamental task of any
government was to protect key institutions against subversion and to maintain
law and order. They were equally agreed that the republicans constituted a
grave threat to this order due to the principles they espoused and the moral
defects which rendered them unfit to govern.
This position was powerfully articulated during the ‘16 May Crisis’ of
1877. The elections of the previous year had returned a Chamber of Deputies
heavily dominated by republicans. President MacMahon dissolved the Cham-
ber on the grounds that since a government could persist only with the support
of ‘the radical party’ (in which he included the opportunists — Gambetta,
Ferry and their supporters) then it could never be master of its actions. In his
dissolution notice read to the Senate on 16 June 1877, MacMahon declared
his confidence that the rest of France shared his objection to the ‘denaturing’
of her political institutions by the radicals.*’ His Minister of the Interior, de
Fourtou, made explicit the link between opportunism and radicalism, refer-
ring to the former as a ‘hidden radicalism’ engaged in a titanic struggle with
the genuine conservative Republic by chipping away at her basic institu-
tions — army, family, constitution, laws. This amounted to ‘a vast plan of
attack, slow, continuous, progressive, against everything which is a social
force and a conservative guarantee’.** Earlier, the reactionary Comte Albert
de Mun had articulated this accusation into what amounted to a ‘domino
theory’ of radical subversion. The impassioned anti-clericalism of the repub-
licans represented a war against Catholicism: ‘Immediately afterwards it is a
Orleanists. For the views of the latter see Hazarecsingh, From Subject to Citizen,
pp. 188-9.
3! This notice, and many of the ensuing parliamentary exchanges, are reproduced by
Reinach in Gambetta, Discours, VII, pp. 86 ff.
32 Te Fourtou, in Gambetta, Discours, VII, p. 104.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 129

war against God, then, without delay, the negation of simple morality itself
and of those elementary principles which follow from natural law and without
which there is no longer society, state and nation’.**
These were serious allegations, especially given the violence that had
marked the early months of the Republic. Republicans, accordingly, sought to
present themselves and the Republic as an established fact and therefore as the
status quo, maintenance of which was crucial to the preservation of social
order. This was clearly enunciated in Thiers’ address to the Assembly referred
to above, in which he had depicted bloodshed and revolution as the only alter-
natives to the Republic. A similar stance was adopted by Littré. He argued that
it was the Republic which had re-established order, and that to remain conser-
vative ‘it must be prudent, mindful of the diversities among the great people
that it administers, a careful manager of transition, guarantor ofinterests, pro-
tector of the liberty of beliefs and opinions’.**The great shame of France was
her predilection for revolution, which in the current circumstances would
prove not only fatal to the Republic but to the nation itself. ‘Stability’ he
insisted, ‘is the first need, the first security of France’.*?
Republican politicians were likewise adamant that they were the guardians
of social stability rather than the harbingers of upheaval and subversion. We
have already encountered Bert’s assertion that the Republic was a legitimate
regime and that republicans were enemies of revolution. To believe in either
revolution or the coup-d état as effective political methods was akin to believ-
ing in miracles, delusions which he hoped to dispel by providing future citi-
zens with a more scientific education.*° Ferry informed his constituency in
1876 that ‘it is in the constitutional realm that France has need of a resolutely
conservative politics’.*’? Gambetta urged the need for patience and prudence
in politics, where matters could not be changed immediately as if by waving a
magic wand, and where the paramount task was ‘the conservation of the
Republic itself’ .** ‘I know of only one politics, the one that we have followed,
the politics of moderation, politics of concord, politics of reason, politics of
results and . . . politics of opportunity’.
The members ofthe republican leadership thus depicted themselves as gen-
uine conservatives because they supported the existing regime, advocated

33 Albert de Mun, speech in the Chamber of Deputies, 4 May 1977, reproduced in

Gambetta, Discours, V1, p. 359.
34 Emile Littré, Conservation, révolution, positivisme (Paris, 2nd augmented edn.,
1879), p. 122.
35 Littré, Par quelle conduit la République francaise, pp. 7, 9.
36 Bert, Lecons, pp. 401-2.
37 Ferry, Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, ed. Paul Robiquet (7 vols., Paris,
1893-8), I, p. 203.
38 Gambetta, Discours, VI, pp. 162, 169.
3° Ibid, p: 172.
130 M. HAWKINS

patience and prudence in the pursuit of their policies, and were enemies of
rapid change and violent revolution. They certainly shared their monarchist
and Bonapartist opponents’ mistrust of urban revolutionaries, as well as the
desire to protect private property and the family from subversion.*° But the
‘order’ that the republicans wished to defend differed in crucial respects from
the order envisaged by the right. The former were resolved to institute and
protect a parliamentary regime founded on universal male suffrage and the
separation of church and state. This regime not only secured stability, but also
furthered progress by encouraging science and industry and by providing
opportunities for the members of new social strata to enter the political arena.
They were convinced that only a republic could achieve these goals — not a
monarchy, however constitutional, and certainly not the arbitrary despotism
of the Empire. This was why Gambetta could remark: “Myself, I recognise as
conservatives only those who are ready to defend the laws, the Constitution,
the Republic.’*! A republican manifesto issued during the election campaign
of October 1877 accused the supporters of President MacMahon of being
revolutionaries for dreaming of restoring an impossible past, whereas: ‘The
true conservatives are those who, to win over a regime brought about by the
force of circumstances, want to strengthen it.’
The type of conservatism implicit in these arguments is of a procedural
rather than substantive character, i.e. it endorses the status quo rather than
espousing an ideological commitment to specific institutions or values.”
Since the status quo in question was the Republic, its supporters were con-
tending that the right was not really conservative, but reactionary. Yet this
Republic and its constitution were barely established, and additionally were
the fruits of compromise with these very forces of reaction. This meant that
republicans had to look for additional sources of legitimation, involving a
move towards a more substantive ideological focus. Once again, they did so
by adopting another conservative tactic, the appeal to tradition.

40 Though patriarchal in that they saw heading a household as an important compo-

nent of citizenship, republicans were in bitter opposition to the right in regarding female
education as a crucial means of counteracting the influence of the church. See Auspitz,
The Radical Bourgeoisie, pp. 38-46.
41 Gambetta, Discours, V, p. 43. In the words of Sudhir Hazareesingh: ‘There were
(and remain) a number of core questions over which republicans were never prepared to
compromise: the principle of popular sovereignty, the sanctity of democratic institu-
tions, and the notion of civic equality.’ Sudhir Hazareesingh, Political Traditions in
France (Oxford, 1994), p. 96.
42 Cited in Maurice Reclus, Le Seize mai (Paris, 1931), p. 100.
43 | am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing this distinction to my attention.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 131

The Sanctity of Tradition

An important strand in European conservative political thought has been its
support for traditions, established customs, beliefs and institutions which are
considered the repositories of practical wisdom, accumulated experience that
had demonstrated its usefulness over time. These conceptions were invalu-
able to the defence of the monarchical and Catholic culture that was regarded
as synonymous with the nation’s history and grandeur. Republicanism, in
contrast, was depicted as a threat to this culture, predicated on an abstract
rationalism that was dismissive of the past and traditions, and promoting a
democratic levelling and anti-clericalism that threatened to sever France from
its history.
Undoubtedly, many republicans were mistrustful of the appeal to the past
as a source oflegitimation, preferring to rest their case on rationalist premises.
As an earlier republicanism had tersely announced: ‘Our history is not our
code.’ This stance, however, was to be very much revised by the advocates
of the Third Republic.
The oratory of Gambetta is replete with references to the importance of a
republican heritage. In a speech delivered in April 1872 he denied any desire
to denigrate the past achievements of the French monarchy, but this past had
now run its course and, exhausted, it ‘must disappear in order to make way
for a new world that is commencing’.* He later developed this theme by
announcing: ‘It is time to say that republican France also has her tradition that
too many people forget.’*° This tradition derived from the achievements ofthe
Revolution, and Gambetta dismissed his opponents on the right as ‘false con-
servatives’ because they rejected this legacy. “To be a true conservative’, he
argued, ‘it is necessary to be attached to everything which has been founded,
created, by the French Revolution, to everything that has constituted the patri-
mony of French society in this country for nearly a hundred years.’ He went
on to specify what this entailed. “One is conservative when one wants a soci-
ety without privileges such as is organised by the civil Code. One is conserva-
tive when one wants the liberty of conscience that issued from the Declaration
of the Rights of Man.’*’ True conservatives, therefore, subscribed to liberty of
thought and worship and equality before the laws, which secured for all
Frenchmen parity of rights and duties. This was the true heritage of the

44 This was a principle of the constitution of 1791. See Claude Nicolet, L’Idée
républicaine en France (1789-1924): essai d’histoire critique (Paris, 1982), p. 402. Cf.
the assertion of a later republican intellectual, Etienne Vacherot, in his La Démocratie
(1860): ‘History can never be an argument against logic and reason.’ Cited in Les
Fondateurs de la Troisiéme République, ed. Pierre Barral (Paris, 1968), p. 25.
45 Gambetta, Discours, Il, p. 236.
46 Gambetta, Discours, IV, p. 84.
47 Ibid., p. 43. Daniel Halévy had noted the republican desire to conserve certain
achievements ofthe Revolution in his La République des ducs (Paris, 1937), pp. 281-2.
132 M. HAWKINS

Revolution, both a consequence of and a contribution to modernization, and

what made the right reactionary was their rejection of this legacy in the name
of aFrance that no longer existed. Hence: ‘From now on it is necessary that in
the new democracy this title of conservative is uniquely attributed to us.’**
This laying claim to a republican tradition inaugurated by the Revolution
was not confined to Gambetta. In 1877 Jules Ferry described the three organs
of government established by the Constitution of 1875 (Chamber of Deputies,
Senate and Presidency) as the foundations ‘of a conservative Republic, that is
to say, one capable of dealing with time, with tradition, with interests’
.””
Three years later he informed the Senate that modern society had been defini-
tively established in 1789, while the political principles enunciated during
that year, standing as they did above party strife, constituted a civic morality
that epitomized the very soul of France.” In similar vein, Paul Bert main-
tained that the republican programme derived from the Revolution: “Here as
always, we are faithfully obedient to the principles of the French Revolu-
tion.’°' Republicans were charged with the duty of both preserving and con-
tinuing the legacy of the Revolution, which was why educational reform was
so crucial to the republican cause: “The introduction of love for the principles
of 89 in popular education is a law of social defence in the true acceptation of
this word.”
It was precisely this equating of republicanism with a tradition founded by
the French Revolution that permitted the opportunists to achieve the appar-
ently contradictory goal of referring to themselves as both conservative and
progressive. They believed that preserving the heritage of the Revolution
necessitated socio-political reform. Thus Littré branded the Duc de Broglie
and other champions of ‘Moral Order’ ‘pseudo-conservatives’ because they
were incapable of guaranteeing either order or morality.*’ Here again we see
that the order the republicans associated themselves with was of a particular
kind, dating from the French revolution, consolidated by the Third Republic,
and legitimated by the principles of 1789.
In fact, of course, republicans had no monopoly on the Revolutionary
heritage, which was also laid claim to by the Bonapartists and even liberal
monarchists;** and if these were selective in their choice of which aspects of
this legacy to appropriate, the same was true of republicans. The opportunist

48 Gambetta, Discours, IV, p. 45.

49 Ferry, Discours, Il, p. 378.
50 Ferry, Discours, IV, p. 148.
5! Bert, Lecons, p. 366.
52 Tbid., p. 411.
53 Emile Littré, De l’Etablissement de la Troisiéme République (Paris, 1880), p. 295.
°4 Pilbeam, Republicanism in Nineteenth Century France, pp. 19 ff. De Fourtou, dur-
ing the 16 May crisis, informed the Chamber: ‘We are the France of 89 standing against
the France of 93.’ Reported in Gambetta, Discours, VII, p. 106.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 135

leadership was virtually unanimous in its rejection of the Terror and Jacobin-
ism, which earned it the reproval of radicals like Clemenceau, who insisted
that the revolution was a totality which could not be divided into separate
phases.” But in adopting this selective endorsement of the Revolutionary her-
itage, the ground had already been prepared for the opportunists by the
debates occasioned by Edgar Quinet’s earlier repudiation of Jacobinism and
his message that republicans must divest themselves of their revolutionary
and violent legacy if they were to gain sufficient support to establish a viable
regime.*° Hence the construction of a republican tradition which derived from
the Revolution, and the presentation of republicanism as dedicated to the
completion of a programme that was initiated but not completed by this Revo-
lution, were integral to the identity of mainstream republicanism. The oppor-
tunists could define themselves as true conservatives because they were
committed both to the maintenance of order and to a programme of reforms
that was authenticated by this order because implicit in it.
The opportunists were not the first to attempt this synthesis of conservation
and reform. We have already encountered such an effort in the writings of
Victor de Broglie, and other writers were also referring to the work of rulers
as simultaneously conservative and progressive.°’ However, Auguste Comte
had already anticipated this in his Appel aux conservateurs published in 1855.
Although this text signals Comte’s accommodation to the dictatorship of
Napoleon III, it also insisted that the term conservative “incorporated the most
advanced politics’ by combining both order and progress. In this respect, con-
servatism ‘henceforward adopted by republicans freed from the revolutionary
attitude, can indicate the disposition to conserve by ameliorating’.** This for-
mula, well-known to the founders of the Third Republic via the writings of
Littré in particular,” finds its realization in their self-representation as both
conservative and progressive. As with their ‘revisionist’ interpretation of the
Revolution, the opportunists were able to draw upon ideological and concep-
tual developments that had already occurred within the republican camp. But

55 For texts relating to the republican debates over the French Revolution, including
Clemenceau’s thesis that ‘La Révolution frangaise est un bloc’, see Les Fondateurs, ed.
Barrel, pp. 109-16.
56 Nord, Republican Moment, pp. 1-2; Francois Furet, La Gauche et la Révolution au
milieu du XIX siécle: Edgar Quinet et la question du Jacobinism, 1865-1870 (Paris,
1986). Ferry was a participant in this debate, repudiating the Terror and Jacobinism in a
series of articles published in Le Temps early in 1866 and republished in Ferry, Discours,
I, pp. 101-16.
57 Antonin Rondelet, Les limites du suffrage universel (Paris, 1871), p. 56.
58 Auguste Comte, Appel aux conservateurs (Paris, 1855), pp. vi, xiii.
59 Nicolet describes Littré’s conception of ‘la république conservatrice’ as in the
spirit of Comte’s Appel, in Nicolet, L’/dée républicaine, pp. 214—15; see also Nicolet,
‘Jules Ferry et la tradition positiviste’, in Jules Ferry: fondateur de la République, ed.
Francois Furet (Paris, 1985), pp. 38-9; Gaillard, Jules Ferry, p. 137.
134 M. HAWKINS

in doing so, they were going beyond a procedural conservatism conceived as a

pragmatic response to circumstances and were formulating a distinctive theory
of republican governance, as will become even more evident in the following
section.

Socio-Historical Realism

Attention has already been drawn to the right’s declaration of the political
incompetence of the republicans due to their reliance on a disembodied
rationalism and flawed theories of popular sovereignty, which the latter coun-
tered by accusing the right of adhering to an outmoded conception of France.
During the 1870s this position was expanded into a theory of socio-historical
change which in turn provided a rationale for republican political praxis. Here
republicans were drawing on an awareness of history as an inexorable pro-
cess, one that had been shaped by a number of influences, but which they
applied to the exigencies of modern government.”
Central to this theory and praxis was a sense of history as a progressive
movement, of time as a dimension of cumulative change which could be
impeded by reactionaries, but never reversed. As early as 1855 Ferry had pro-
claimed: ‘As in the order of physical things, the progress of the human species
has its inevitable laws.’°' A scientific understanding of these laws enabled the
statesman to identify practical fields of intervention that were in accordance
with the course of history. It was for this reason that schoolchildren should
know and respect their nation’s past, ‘for it is the root and the foundation of
modern France’.®’ A similar belief in laws of historical change underpinned
Bert’s rejection of revolution and the coup-d’ état as valid means of achieving
political objectives. In opposition to such notions ‘science has substituted the
idea of constant progress, of a slow evolution regulated by laws, in the social
and political domain as in the cosmological and geological domain’.®’ This
perspective is summarized in Littré’s statement that: ‘Nothing can force back
modern thought, progressive civilisation, positive science. Humanity has vis-
ibly grown in stature, even on its bad days.’™
The belief in time as an evolution, as the realization of laws of social
change which made progress an irresistible force, was complemented by a
sociological appreciation of the ‘new and terrible’ forces which Gambetta had
perceived emerging from democracy. Modernity brought to the fore new

69 Nicolet cites the influence of the Comtean notion of social evolution and, later,
Darwinian evolutionary theory, as sources of this conception of history, although always
in tension with the universalist strand in French republican thought; Nicolet, L’/dée
républicaine, pp. 21, 37, 211, 294, 437.
6! Ferry, Discours, I, p. 22.
62 Ferry, Discours, VI, p. 524.
63 Bert, Lecons, p. 402.
64 |
ittré, Conservation, révolution, positivisme, p. 90.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 135

social groups which co-existed with older social strata, particularly in the
countryside. The means through which these groups participated in politics
was primarily by voting, which made universal male suffrage a key element in
a modern democratic polity. This was Gambetta’s thesis in a controversial
speech delivered at Bordeaux in September 1872. Here he proclaimed the
existence of a working world to which the future belonged, a new social stra-
tum which would, via the ballot-box, produce a political elite that would be
fully capable of exercising governmental authority.® The following year he
argued that these new strata had emerged, not as a result of revolution, but
through a social and political evolution during which they had acquired the
requisite experience and aptitudes necessary for successful performance in
the political realm.°° Littré had made much the same point when he argued
that a properly constituted democracy would engender a new aristocracy
based upon the possession of talent rather than hereditary title.®
Littré was adamant that democracy had evolved to a point where it had
become irreversible, something to which any political regime had to accom-
modate.®* In all free countries decision-making rested with the majority and in
democracies this took the form of elections based on universal male suf
frage.” Littré admitted that, when under the influence of Comte, he had once
believed that universal suffrage and elected assemblies were artefacts of the
metaphysical state of mind, doomed to disappear when the transitional social
and moral conditions which facilitated their emergence were gradually
eroded. But he had since come to realize that these putatively transitional con-
ditions were in fact deeply rooted in modernity to the extent that universal suf-
frage seemed destined to expand rather than diminish in importance.”° All
authority required legitimation, and the notion of divine right, which had for-
merly furnished this legitimacy, had receded in favour of the principle that the
exercise of governmental authority should derive from the assent of the gov-
erned. This was the axiomatic basis of democracy, and entailed universal
male suffrage. Certainly the tribunal of the polls was not infallible, but it
could be guided by positive philosophy, which could delineate the laws of
social transformation that set the parameters of effective political action.”'
The electoral aftermath of the 16 May crisis had clearly affirmed that univer-
sal male suffrage was the foundation of republican government, and this was
the political order to which republicans were therefore committed. ‘Legality

65 Gambetta, Discours, Il, pp. 101-2.

66 Ibid., p. 365.
67 Littré, Par quelle conduit, pp. 10, 13-14.
68 Littré, De |’Etablissement de la Troisiéme République, p. 167.
6° Tbid., p. 430.
70 Littré, Conservation, révolution, positivisme, p. 64.
71 Tbid., pp. 65-6.
136 M. HAWKINS

and obedience to the sovereign verdict of universal suffrage, here is our

watchword.’”
Gambetta proffered similar arguments as he stumped the countryside
drumming up support for the Republic. He spoke of a ‘political fermentation’
penetrating even the lowest social strata, for whom universal suffrage repre-
sented an ‘irresistible means of emancipation’.’”*During the 16 May crisis he
accused the government of trying to flout the verdict of popular opinion. ‘The
nation is sovereign, and it has solemnly said that it wants the Republic, a wise
republic, a peaceful republic, a progressive republic: give it the Republic.’”*
Jules Ferry had extolled the virtues of universal suffrage from an early
stage in his career. In 1863 he described universal suffrage as ‘a sacred and
sovereign institution’, symbolizing the inevitable progress of justice and
democracy: ‘Universal suffrage is the honour of multitudes, the assurance of
the disinherited, the reconciliation of classes, a legal existence for everyone. It
is in it alone that from now on we must live, hope and believe.’”°
The last sentence in this eulogy entails a considerable act of faith, for
republicans would not always find themselves advantaged by electoral
results, as was to be shown in the imperial plebiscite of 1870 and the elections
to the National Assembly in February 1871, which overwhelmingly favoured
Bonapartists and monarchists respectively. Republican commitment to uni-
versal male suffrage was significant, therefore, particularly during a period
when its legitimacy was still a matter of heated controversy in French pol+
tics.’° But this commitment was not simply to popular sovereignty as a legiti-
mating device, for in addition it established the boundaries of permissible
political action. This is evident in Gambetta’s definition of opportunism as
not promulgating any measure unless confident that it had the support of the
majority of the electorate, since the paramount duty of the statesman was ‘the
conservation of the Republic itself’
.””
This was also Littré’s reasoning. He argued that the bulk of the electorate
was largely rural and Catholic, and consequently hostile to radical change and
social experimentation. On the contrary: ‘Universal suffrage greatly appreci-
ates stability, tranquillity, the regular interaction of businesses and the appli-
cation of the natural and clear consequences which flow from the situation.’
Littré turned this sociological realism against his opponents on both the right

72 Littré, De L’Etablissement de la Troisieme République, p. 413.

73 Gambetta, Discours, I, p. 220.
74 Gambetta, Discours, VII, pa2ie
75 Ferry, Discours, I, p. 92.
76 See Raymond Huard, Le Suffrage universel en France, 1848-1946 (Paris, 1991),
p. 1O1.
77 Gambetta, Discours, VI, p. 169.
78 Littré, Par Quelle conduit, p. 11.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE b37

and the radical left, who claimed to speak for ‘the people’, a category he con-
sidered meaningless given the heterogeneity of French society:
For myself, who wants to remain in reality, |know no other people than the
majority formed from universal suffrage. There I am certain to truly
encounter the whole world, workers, peasants, bourgeois, gentlemen, rural
and urban dwellers, rich and poor, Catholics, Protestants, free thinkers, and
with each casting of a vote, I will truly know what the people want.”
By ensuring that their policies conformed to majoritarian preferences, the
republicans were able to portray themselves not only as democrats guided by
popular opinion, but also as hard-headed realists in pursuit of feasible goals
rather than utopian schemes. Littré insisted that: ‘Conservative politics can
only listen to theory and conform to facts.’*° In the same vein, Gambetta pro-
claimed ‘I am ofa school which, in philosophy as in politics, only recognises
reality and experience’.*' Ferry was subsequently to summarize this strategy
as follows: ‘The duty and the mission of the statesman is to search for and
draw out the average opinion of the country: it is to sound out the wills of uni-
versal suffrage taken in its totality . . .”.*’ For republicans, then, the limits and
possibilities of political action were derived partly from a scientific apprecia-
tion of the course of social evolution and the structure of modern societies,
and partly from an understanding of electoral preferences. It was the posses-
sion of this combination of scientific knowledge and political skill that
grounded the republican conceptualization ofthe ‘true conservative’ as some-
one who was committed to maintaining a socio-political order that was inher-
ently progressive.

Conclusion

The success of the republican strategy of appropriating the title of conserva-

tive was acknowledged by the radical Clemenceau in a speech made in 1880
when he discussed the piecemeal elaboration of the Republic by the oppor-
tunists. They achieved this ‘by placing themselves on the terrain of the fait
accompli and in taking support from a part of the so-called conservative
forces. This is what 1s expressed in the strange formula that had so much
success: conservative Republic.’* Clemenceau’s scorn for this label, and
indeed for the whole strategy of the opportunists, was shared by fellow

79 Littré, De l’Etablissement de la Troisieme République, p. 456.

80 Littré, Conservation, révolution, positivisme, p. 233.
81 Gambetta, Discours, IX, p. 605.
82 Ferry, Discours, VII, p. 9. Ferry sometimes cited Littré when discussing the
boundaries to political action set by electoral preferences, e.g. Ferry, Discours, VII,
pp. 41-2, 155.
83 Georges Clemenceau in Barral, Les Fondateurs, p. 127.
138 M. HAWKINS

members of the radical republican faction.** But whereas they regarded the
label ‘conservative’ as an accurate description of the opportunists, the right
bitterly contested the validity of this appellation. Again, the crisis of 16 May
provides a striking illustration of this. Thus when Gambetta was at the trib-
une a right-wing deputy shouted: ‘We represent conservative France.’*
Bert’s adoption of ‘conservative’ during parliamentary debates was also
challenged by hecklers, who, when he linked republicanism to traditions
established during the Revolution, riposted that this legacy amounted to the
freedom to starve and a licence for insurrection.*° Throughout this period
politicians and intellectuals on the right repeatedly asserted that they were
the real conservatives, committed to a programme of social conservation.*”
This was clearly affirmed in MacMahon’s message read to the National
Assembly after the fall of Thiers in May 1873. After noting that all the laws
passed by the Assembly with large majorities had an ‘essentially conserva-
tive character’, he continued: ‘The government that represents you must
therefore be and will be, I guarantee you, energetically and resolutely con-
servative.’** It was by prefixing ‘conservative’ with ‘true’ that the repub-
licans sought to identify their own brand of conservatism, in opposition to
the reactionary motives of the right which the latter sought to conceal by
calling themselves conservatives.
This did not come easy to the republicans, as is shown by the inconsisten-
cies in their use of ‘conservative’. Gambetta, for example, often slipped
back into conventional republican rhetoric at the tribune, dismissively refer-
ring to his opponents on the right as conservatives.*” Furthermore, there is
some evidence that the more radical among the opportunists abandoned the
term after the consolidation of the Republic in early 1879 with a Republican
majority in the Senate and the resignation of President MacMahon. Thereafter
Gambetta’s speeches, for example, exhibited an emphasis on reform rather
than conservation. In 1881 he anticipated a republican victory in the forth-
coming election and a new Chamber that would be ‘strongly and effectively
reformist’. After the election he reasserted the need for a reformist republic,
though not one that was utopian and levelling in its policies.”° By the autumn
of 1879 Bert was also pressing for more rapid and comprehensive reforms
84 See the comments made at the time by radical politicians and journalists as
reported in Alexandre Zévéas, Au Temps du seize-mai (Paris, 1932), pp. 92-4.
85 Gambetta, Discours, VIII, p. 14.
86 Bert, Discours parlementaires: Assemblée Nationale — Chambre des députés,
1872-1881 (Paris, 1882), pp. 30, 82.
87 A situation which subsequently prompted Edgar Faure to observe that everybody
called themselves conservative during the events surrounding the 16 May: ‘Préface’ to
Fresnette Pisani-Ferry, Le Coup d’état manqué du 16 mai 1877 (Paris, 1965), p. 16.
88 Cited in Zévéas, Au Temps du seize-mai, p. 46.
89 For examples, see Gambetta, Discours, VII, pp. 117, 154, 319.
90 Gambetta, Discours, IX, pp. 405, 466.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 139

and accusing the government of excessive timidity, which he saw as discour-

aging its supporters and creating dissension within republican ranks.”!
Prost’s analysis of electoral manifestos from 1881 to 1889 also reveals that
the label ‘conservateur’, both as a noun and as an adjective, was pre-
dominantly used by the right rather than the left during this period, whereas
‘progress’ was a keyword for the latter (though the frequency of its usage
declined).”* This suggests that the republican adoption of the label was simply
a rhetorical manoeuvre aimed at consolidating the Republic, and abandoned
once this was achieved.”’ This was undoubtedly true for some of the oppor-
tunists, but there are additional considerations which point to more profound
and more permanent implications of this strategy.
First, the republicans succeeded in implanting the idea among a consid-
erable portion of the electorate that the Republic was the legally consti-
tuted political order and also the legitimate heir to the progressive (though
not repressive or violent) features of the French revolution. They also pre-
sented themselves as the upholders of this political order, dedicated to the
maintenance of stability and enemies of upheaval and disorder — in
which, ironically, they were undoubtedly assisted by Thiers’ violent
repression of the Commune. They therefore associated the Republic with
both order and progress — the attainment and preservation of an order
which nourished the forces of enlightenment and reason and created
opportunities for the advancement of talent.”* This is evident from Prost’s
investigation, where republicans were more likely than the right to use the
terms ‘conserver’ and ‘maintenir’ to describe their programme between
1881 and 1889.
Second, by arguing for a historical and social realism which correctly
identified the direction of historical evolution and the social transforma-
tions accompanying it, republicans constructed their advocacy of order
and progress as a scientifically informed strategy in harmony with the
imperatives of modernity. This meant that theirs was the only party that
could provide France with a political leadership capable of coping with
the demands of the present and the uncertainties of the future. A proce-
dural conception of conservatism was thus wedded to more substantive
vision in which the status quo was one that progressively incorporated the
civic and moral achievements of a politics that was realistic not just

9! Bert, Legons, p. 363. For a discussion of Bert’s exasperation over the rate of
reform, see Léon Dubreuil, Paul Bert (Paris, 1935), pp. 142, 221.
92 Antoine Prost, Vocabulaire des proclamations électorales de 1881, 1885 et 1889
(Paris, 1974), pp. 116, 71.
93 Chastenet has gone further and claimed that this period discredited the term con-
servative in the eyes of the French public and introduced into political life ‘a regrettable
element of confusion and insincerity’. Chastenet, L’Enfance, pp. 241-2.
94 Prost, Vocabulaire, pp. 70-1.
140 M. HAWKINS

because its practitioners had the relevant experience,” but also because
they were armed with a scientific understanding of human nature, society
and history.
The elements of this credo — order, tradition, socio-historical realism —
were not the creations of the opportunists, but their synthesis established a
powerful yet flexible basis for a theory of republican governance and citizen-
ship that tends to be granted insufficient attention in the scholarly literature on
this period.”° They were certainly not the only constituents, and other genres
of thought — particularly neo-Kantian critical philosophy — were to play
crucial roles in creating a rich and sometimes inconsistent melange of ideas,
analysis of which is beyond the scope of this paper.’’ But my suggestion is
that the synthesis outlined above was certainly no ephemeral jeu d’esprit, for
it continued to furnish the scaffolding for a certain strand of republican politi-
cal thought for some time.
This is particularly noticeable in the writings and speeches of Jules Ferry
after his fall from office in 1885. Ferry took seriously the commitment to order
and progress, with the former providing the foundation and pre-requisite of
the latter.°* The conclusion he drew from this was that the function of govern-
ment was intrinsically conservative, since whatever form it took, it repre-
sented ‘the conservative force which holds together the parts of the social
body, in the context of the passions and the struggle of interests, just as the
vital force assures the unity of the human organism in the comings-and-
goings of molecules which perish and are replaced’.””
Here Ferry developed the slogan of order and progress into a specifically
republican formulation. Order was an inevitably conservative function inher-
ent in the activity of governing, but a republican government was committed
to an order which furthered progress and was in tune with both the requisites

°5 Nord has shown how this experience had been forged during the Second Empire by
the participation of republicans in a wide range of organizational structures; Nord, The
Republican Moment, pp. 250-4.
°6 For an exception see Francois Ewald, ‘La Question sociale’, in Les Opportunistes:
les débuts de la république aux républicains, ed. Léo Hamon (Paris, 1991), pp. 149-61.
°7 There is an illuminating analysis of the positivist and Kantian components of re-
publican political theory in Patrice Decormeille, “Sources et fondements de la philosophie
politique des “républicains de gouvernement” ’, in Les Opportunistes, ed. Hamon,
pp. 17-48. See also Barrel ‘Introduction’, Les Fondateurs, pp. 21-5.
98 Ferry, Discours, VI, p. 172.
°° Ferry, Discours, VII, p. 121. For an analysis of this development of Ferry’s
thought, see Nicolet, ‘Jules Ferry et la tradition positiviste’, pp. 22-48. Gaillard, Jules
Ferry, pp. 137-55, also discusses the positivist elements of Ferry’s thought. However,
both writers draw attention to the importance of other influences, particularly the liberal
belief in rights.
 REPUBLICANISM & CONSERVATISM IN FRANCE 141

of a changing social reality and the preferences of the majority of its citi
zens.'°
Waldeck-Rousseau, a future Prime Minister, sometimes used a similar lan-
guage to describe the responsibilities and limits of republican governance.'”!
In an address to the Chamber in 1899 Waldeck-Rousseau argued that there
were ‘common and invariable rules’ that all states had to obey and all govern-
ments, irrespective of their ideological orientation, could not escape from a
primary and higher law: ‘the law of preservation’. When a heckler claimed
this made him a conservative, Waldeck-Rousseau agreed, but added: ‘A
democracy, however, does not seek preservation outside of progress.’!°” This
suggests that at least for some eminent republicans the efforts to change the
minds of the French citizenry engendered a coherent and distinctive theory of
republican governance.
Finally, the effort to combine order and progress, a conservative focus on
socio-economic stability with a commitment to change and social justice and
the concomitant tensions between these two goals, could be seen to fore-
shadow a permanent feature of republican political thought and practice. This
is evident not only in the history of the Radical party, but is apparent in the
writings and actions of socialists who supported the Republic, such as Jaurés
and Blum.'® Analysis of this legacy, however, is beyond the scope of this
paper.

Mike Hawkins KINGSTON UNIVERSITY

100 Tt should be noted though that Thiers, in his Presidential address of November
1872 had claimed, immediately after his assertion that the Republic would either be con-
servative or not exist: ‘Any government ought to be conservative and no society could
live under a government that is not.’ See Grubb, Politics of Pessimism, p. 91.
101 See, for example, his speech at Rennes, 16 July 1883, in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau,
L’Etat et la liberté, 2nd series (1883-5) (Paris, 1906), pp. 49-50.
102 Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau, Associations et congrégations (Paris, 1902), p. 25.
103 Hazareesingh, Political Traditions, p. 89.
 Michael Oakeshott
on Hobbes
lan Tregenza
242 pp., $40/£25.00, 0
907845 592 (hbk.)
Imprint Academic
PO Box 200
Exeter EX5 5YX, UK

email:
[email protected]
www.imprint-academic.com

{
Caloshott Skucine, Volnne

This book offers an account of Oakeshott’s political theory and examines

the way in which it changes and develops—from a broadly Hegelian to a
recognisably, if idiosyncratic, Hobbesian character. Oakeshott’s own
theory is shown to mirror changes in his reading of Hobbes and many of
the distinctive features of Oakeshott’s thought—including the modal and
sceptical conception of human knowledge, the concern with moral
individuality, the rule-based account of modern authority, and the critique
of rationalism—all find a fascinating focal point in his writings on Hobbes.
The book also explores some of the methodological implications of
Oakeshott’s interpretation of Hobbes, examining its significance for his
modal conception of knowledge and for contemporary debates on
intellectual history.
‘lan Tregenza’s meticulous study shows how Oakeshott deployed
selective readings of Hobbes to support his own developing ideas.
Mark Garnett, Conservative History Journal
“A history of ideas that ranges with formidable learning.”
Peter Coleman, Quadrant
‘The book sheds considerable light on the thought of Oakeshott and on
how it may be clarified by looking at the ways in which he used Hobbess
thought to reflect on politics in the broadest context.’
James G. Mellon, Political Studies Review

TOC & sample chapter: www.imprint-academic.com/idealists

BOOK REVIEWS

Volume XXVI- Issue 1

Spring 2005
 BOOK REVIEWS

147 Ian Tregenza, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A Study in the Renewal of

Philosophical Ideas (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2003), ix + 232 pp.,
£25.00/$49.90, ISBN 0 907845 592. Reviewed by Steven A. Gerencser.
149 The Enlightenment, ed. David Williams (Cambridge University Press:
Cambridge, 1999), xii + 529 pp., £17.95, ISBN 0 521 56490 S.
Reviewed by John Hope Mason.
149 The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader, ed. Paul Hyland with
Olga Gomez and Francesca Greensides (Routledge: London, 2003),
Xviil + 467 pp., £17.99, ISBN 0 415 20449 6. Reviewed by John Hope
Mason.
150 Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and
the State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz
Neumann (The British Academy/Oxford University Press: Oxford,
2003), ix + 368 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 19 726287 2. Reviewed by Eckard
Bolsinger.
ey From Republican Polity to National Community: Reconsiderations of
Enlightenment Political Thought, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides
(SVEC 2003:09) (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 2003), xviii + 257 pp.,
€90.00/£55.00, ISBN 0 7294 0822. Reviewed by Biancamaria Fontana.
154 Raia Prokhovnik, Spinoza and Republicanism (Palgrave Macmillan:
Houndmills, 2004), x + 280 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 333 73390 8. Reviewed
by Hans W. Blom.
156 Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty. Moral Right and State Authority in
Early Modern Political Thought, ed. tan Hunter and David Saunders
(Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, 2002), xii + 257 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0
333 96459 4. Reviewed by Wolfgang E.J. Weber.
158 Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Boydell: Wood-
bridge, 2003), xii + 208 pp. £50.00, ISBN 1 884383 020 5. Reviewed by
John Miller.
160 Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century: The Political
Culture of Limited Suffrage (Palgrave: Houndmills, 2003), viii + 239
pp., £50.00, ISBN 1 4039 1174 6. Reviewed by Michael Freeden.
162 Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and
Heine (Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature) (Uni-
versity of Wisconsin Press: Madison, 2004), x + 351 pp., £33.50/
$45.00, ISBN 0 299 19080 3. Reviewed by Stephen B. Smith.
164 Frederick Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill
(Routledge: London and New York, 2003), xiii + 289 pp., £65.00, ISBN
0 415 22094 7. Reviewed by James E. Crimmins.
167 Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing Amer-
ica’s Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press:
 BOOK REVIEWS 145

Cambridge, 2003), x + 374 pp., £21.99/$28.00, ISBN 0 521 82878 3.

Reviewed by Andrew Lockyer.
169 Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford University
Press: Oxford, 2003), xxiv + 384 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0 19 924532 0.
Reviewed by Robert Lamb.
169 Mona Scheuermann, Jn Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters
Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (University Press of Kentucky:
Lexington, 2002), xiv + 255 pp., $40.00, ISBN 0 8131 2222 8.
Reviewed by Robert Lamb.
171 Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in
Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2002), xii + 263 pp., £16.95/$22.00, ISBN 0 521 89057 8. Reviewed by
Clement Fatovic.
Ly Civil Society in British History, ed. Jose Harris (Oxford University
Press: Oxford, 2003), x + 319 pp. £50.00, ISBN 0 19 926020 6.
Reviewed by Andrew Vincent.
175 Sieyés: Political Writings, including the Debate between Sieyés and
Thomas Paine in 1791, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Hackett: Indianapo-
lis, 2003), Ixiv + 190 pp., ISBN 0 87220 430 8. Reviewed by Murray
Forsyth.
a] Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in
the Italian Enlightenment (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2004), x + 228 pp.,
£50.00, ISBN 0 19 926983 1. Reviewed by Christopher Berry.
Lio F.W. Maitland: State, Trust and Corporation, ed. David Runciman
and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), lv
+ 136 pp., £15.95/$22.00, ISBN 0 521 52630 2. Reviewed by Julia
Stapleton.
181 Robert T. Gannett, Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His
Sources for ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution’ (The University of
Chicago Press: Chicago, 2003), xiii + 246 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0 226
28186. Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu.
181 Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform
(Palgrave: London, 2003), xii + 310 pp., £55.00, ISBN 1 4039 1567 9.
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu.
186 William Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England, with a
new introduction by John Morrow (Thoemmes Press: Bristol, 2002), 8
vols., 2510 pp., £595.00/$895.00, ISBN 1 84371 004 8. Reviewed by
Blair Worden.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

 eading Allowed —
MUuSSOLINI’S INTELLECTUALS
Fascist Social and Political Thought
A. James Gregor
Fascism has traditionally been characterized as irra-
tional and anti-intellectual. This intellectual history of
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by one of the leading experts on the subject in the
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A. James Gregor argues that Italian Fascism was
neither more nor less irrational than other revolution-
ary ideologies of the twentieth century.
Cloth $35.00 £22.95 ISBN 0-691-112009-9 Due January

LIBERAL LANGUAGES
Ideological Imaginations and Twentieth-Century Progressive Thought
Michael Freeden
Liberal Languages reinterprets twentieth-century liberalism as a complex set
of discourses relating not only to liberty but also to welfare and community.
Written by one of the world’s leading experts on liberalism and ideological
theory, it uses new methods of analyzing ideologies, as well as historical case
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Paper $19.95 £12.95 ISBN 0-691-11678-4 Cloth $55.00 £35.95 ISBN 0-691-11677-6

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Jeanne Morefield
Covenants without Swords examines an enduring tension within liberal theory:
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 BOOK REVIEWS

Ian Tregenza, Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A Study in the Renewal of Philo-

sophical Ideas (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2003), ix + 232 pp., £25.00/$49.90,
ISBN 0 907845 592.

Interpreting a philosopher well is difficult work. Interpreting a philosopher’s

work by means of his interpretation of yet another philosopher creates even
more challenges. In his book Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes, lan Tregenza
takes up these difficult challenges and is well rewarded. This is a skilfully
posed and smartly analysed work that offers a definitive study of neither
Oakeshott nor Hobbes but confronts the reader with an intriguing view of a
philosophical relationship. This is a path of Oakeshott studies that others have
trod, but Tregenza does not simply walk a familiar lane — he clears and wid-
ens it. He complements the work others have done, and when disputing them,
he does so as a calm critic whose desire is to achieve greater clarity.
Arguing that Oakeshott’s reading of Hobbes is central to understanding the
former’s thought presents some initial challenges, including an important one
that Tregenza acknowledges at the outset. Without question, Oakeshott was
drawn to Hobbes and wrote more about him than about any other philosopher.
Yet Oakeshott, in his famous Introduction to Leviathan, placed Hobbes in the
anti-thesis moment of a great philosophical dialectic, one with Plato in the
role of thesis and Hegel providing the great synthesis. Hegel, not Hobbes, was
the pre-eminent philosopher of (at least) Oakeshott’s early work. For this rea-
son, some (like W.H. Greenleaf) have diminished the significance of Hobbes
for Oakeshott’s own thought, while others (such as the current reviewer) have
suggested Oakeshott substantially abandoned early Idealist approaches as
Hobbes became his touchstone. Tregenza adopts a middle course, although
perhaps closer to the latter line. Expressions of Oakeshott’s own thought and
variations in his interpretation of Hobbes suggest that ‘Oakeshott’s changing
reading of Hobbes, which demonstrates a convergence with his own thought,
points to a modification in his understanding of the adequacy of these Idealist
traditions’ (p. 13).
One of the strengths of Tregenza’s reading is the variety of works over
which it ranges. This allows a view that does not enforce an artificial consis-
tency on Oakeshott’s philosophical identity, but looks for fine alterations that
when placed together create a complex portrait. In one original and subtle
tracing of change, Tregenza examines Oakeshott’s complex set of ideas
regarding moral conduct, human agency and individual intelligence. Taking
the bulk of Chapter 2, Tregenza calls upon a wide variety of Oakeshott’s
works, his writings on Hobbes, his famous books and essays, and more
obscure book reviews, to end up with a view that reveals both consistency and

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 1. Spring 2005

148 BOOK REVIEWS

change in Oakeshott. When Tregenza holds that for Oakeshott ‘[m]Joral

agency is acomplex whole in which both prudential and moral considerations
interact simultaneously’ (p. 71), it is only after a set of balanced and careful
explications of moments in Oakeshott’s work.
Another central task Tregenza undertakes is to delineate the interpretative
postures from which Oakeshott approached Hobbes. Doing so tackles head ona
problem faced by Oakeshott and his interpreters. As Tregenza outlines,
Oakeshott espoused a type of modal theory of human experience that thor-
oughly separated science, practice, history and art from each other, and all of
these from philosophy. Yet in Oakeshott’s writings these distinctions often
blur. He seems to make philosophical claims about someone like Hobbes based
on historical readings, and, as Tregenza points out, one cannot read many of his
theoretical essays ‘without picking up the strong moral tone in which they were
written’ (p. 193). Tregenza highlights this dilemma, but is unclear as to what his
judgment of this lapse is. Tregenza himself runs together idioms that Oakeshott
hopes to keep separate, labelling him a ‘philosophical historian’ and drawing
attention to the rhetorical aspects of Oakeshott’s work in a philosophical analy-
sis, perhaps an intrusion of the aesthetic on the philosophical. At this point we
can guess that Tregenza, while appreciating much in Oakeshott, is not himself
providing an Oakeshottian analysis — Oakeshott may have failed at living up
to his strictures, but that, perhaps, is not Tregenza’s attempt. This is most clear
in a provocative discussion that takes up a quirky work by Oakeshott, ‘Levia-
than, A Myth’. Tregenza seems to pursue the question ‘What is Leviathan?’ Is
ita work with practical advice? Is it a masterpiece of philosophy? Is it the retell-
ing of an ancient myth? But this is probably the wrong set of questions. Levia-
than can be any or all of these things. It 1s a text if itis recognized as such, and
whether it can be any of these or any others is neither up to Hobbes nor the text,
but to the reader. Stull, Tregenza does more than others to consider Oakeshott as
interpreter via his practices of interpretation.
A final original moment in Tregenza’s interpretation focuses on Oakeshott’s
allusive and limited number of writings about religion. While Tregenza has
some interesting things to say about these topics, this discussion does less
well in integrating Oakeshott’s ideas and his interpretation of Hobbes. This is
a good start to thinking about Oakeshott and religion, but the topic as a whole
still awaits a thorough study.
Tregenza’s work makes a fine contribution as the third book in a significant
series on Oakeshott, in the British Idealist Studies line from Imprint Aca-
demic. Tregenza writes clearly, and while the reader may need no special
knowledge of Oakeshott to understand the work, it is not an introductory text.
It presumes a basic knowledge of the history of political thought and twentieth-
century debates about political theory.
Steven A. Gerencser
INDIANA UNIVERSITY SOUTH BEND
 BOOK REVIEWS 149

The Enlightenment, ed. David Williams (Cambridge University Press: Cam-

bridge, 1999), xii + 529 pp., £17.95, ISBN 0 521 56490 5.
The Enlightenment: A Sourcebook and Reader, ed. Paul Hyland with Olga
Gomez and Francesca Greensides (Routledge: London, 2003), xviii +
467 pp., £17.99, ISBN 0 415 20449 6.

The Enlightenment, edited by David Williams, is a volume in a new series,

“Cambridge Readings in the History of Political Thought’, which is described
as ‘intended for students of politics, history and philosophy at all levels from
introductory undergraduate upwards’, and ‘manageable for the beginning stu-
dent’. This is not what this book provides. It contains a considerable amount
of informed editorial comment and an admirably wide range of texts from
both well-known and lesser-known figures. But the lengthy introduction
assumes rather than provides a knowledge of the eighteenth-century Euro-
pean context and gives little information about the different political, reli-
gious, social and economic conditions prevailing in Britain, France and
Germany. The texts are organized under a number of headings: Natural Law,
The Civil Order, The Nation State, Government, Civil Rights, War and
International Relations, Trade and Economics, Crime and Punishment, and
Revolution. While this seems fairly comprehensive there are a number of
areas — such as toleration, cameralism, le doux commerce, or enlightened
absolutism — where there is little material. Locke’s impact is described as
‘immeasurable’ but that is not demonstrated, and no mention is made of him
in connection with the substantial extracts from Paine’s Common Sense. It
cannot be said that the book is (as the publishers claim) ‘the most convenient
and accessible single introduction to Enlightenment thinking currently avail-
able’, and it does not seem likely that there would be much here of interest to
philosophy students; but the volume could be useful for advanced students of
politics and history.
By contrast, the anthology edited by Paul Hyland can be recommended to
anyone (student or otherwise) interested in eighteenth-century European
thought. The book provides excellent introductory sections to extracts dealing
with all the main topics and a wide range of issues (including the fine arts,
autobiography, gender, and European contact with the non-European world).
There are also extracts from twentieth-century discussions of the Enlighten-
ment (Cassirer, Adorno, Habermas, Foucault and others), a six-page chronol-
ogy, over thirty pages of further reading listing both texts and secondary
sources for fifty writers, and bibliographies for each of the chapters, as well as
for general introductory material. This must be the best general reader on the
Enlightenment now available.
John Hope Mason
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSITY OF HULL
150 BOOK REVIEWS

Duncan Kelly, The State of the Political: Conceptions of Politics and the
State in the Thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann (The
British Academy/Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2003), ix + 368 pp.,
£45.00, ISBN 0 19 726287 2.

Contemporary political theory is mainly concerned with the determination of

moral criteria to evaluate political institutions and decisions. It maintains and
propagates an image of itself as narrowly engaged in, and committed to, the
quest for a greater understanding of the nature of the good community, or the
just society. Analysis of the moral — rather than of the strictly political —
world, enjoys top priority within the theory. What has been celebrated in
recent decades as a rebirth of political theory is in fact a mere extension of
moral philosophy. This preoccupation with moral-political theory is accom-
panied by an attempt to exclude the problems of domination and force, state
and law, legitimacy and legality, struggle and order, which so clearly distin-
guish the political from the moral realm.
Duncan Kelly suggests rethinking these problems and bringing them back
into the centre of political theory. To this end, he analyses the political
thought of Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz Neumann. Kelly rightly
claims that the insights of these thinkers remain absolutely central to the way
we think about the nature of politics and the state. For him, their continued rel-
evance extends far beyond the context of the Weimar Republic. According to
Kelly, the arguments of Weber, Schmitt and Neumann fit the realities of con-
temporary politics more easily than do the discussions of much recent, pre-
dominantly liberal, political theory. These three thinkers ‘appeal to us as
sophisticated “realists”, rather than elaborate normative theorists’ (p. 299).
From this perspective, Kelly is right in holding that contemporary political
philosophy is naive, since it completely ignores the harsh realities of political
life. It becomes clear that with these strong claims Kelly rejects all approaches
that attempt to avoid serious discussion of the analytical content of Weber’s,
Schmitt’s and Neumann’s theories: he refuses to stigmatize the three as
ideologists of some politically obscure, extremist projects.
Kelly’s book is more than just an ‘exercise in historical revisionism’
(p. 15). In particular, he shows convincingly that all three thinkers have for-
mulated a state-centred concept of politics, by criticizing the reduction of
political power to merely formal/legal terms, in which politics becomes com-
pletely circumscribed by an abstract legal system. Weber, Schmitt and
Neumann share the common belief that politics can never be fully
constitutionalized. State power and political struggles continuously extend
far beyond any legal forms. Liberalism and legal-positivism may reject this
view as politically dangerous. Yet, in Kelly’s view, this dynamic of power
justifies talk of the ‘irreducibility’ of politics. Politics is not morality, exchange,
discourse or law. Essentially, it has to do with domination, leadership, force,
 BOOK REVIEWS 151

struggle, and the formation and maintenance of political order in an inherently

conflictual world. Herein lies the autonomy and necessity of the political
realm. Therefore, political theory is different from legal, economic or moral
theory.
In Kelly’s estimation, the central problem of all three thinkers represents
the problem of political unity in modern mass democracies. Particularly, they
point out that modern democracy leads to the fusion of state and society. The
state intervenes in nearly every social sphere, and social power groups
attempt to influence the governmental apparatus to further their own selfish
interests. What democratic theory euphemistically describes as ‘pluralism’
may lead to political fragmentation, the constant risk of civil war. Political
parties and centrally organized lobby groups exploit parliament and govern-
ment to their own benefit. The state simply becomes a tool in the hands of
powerful social forces; it is no more than a switchboard of various political
and social power groups. Instead of being an autonomous form of power, the
state receives its energy from the social sphere. It is no longer a neutral arbiter,
above special interests and the embodiment of political unity. Kelly shows
that Weber and Schmitt formulate similar counter-models to the dissolution
of the state in modern mass politics. Like classical liberalism, they intend to
roll back society, by de-politicizing the economy and strengthening the state.
In utilizing the seemingly unavoidable and necessary trend towards charis-
matic individual leadership in mass democracy, Weber and Schmitt suggest
empowering political leadership, in order to reinstall political unity. To
achieve these aims, political and constitutional forms are subjected to the sin-
gle aim of maintaining the political unity of the nation. To a certain extent,
Weber and Schmitt continue the old tradition of ‘reason of state’. The sole
political imperative becomes the maintenance of the state, if necessary by the
suspension of law and the violation of moral norms.
Kelly’s book impressively shows that it still makes sense to assimilate the
concepts of politics and the state. Beyond that he implies that the realist tradi-
tion in political thought is still in need of a contemporary, systematic re-
formulation. However, public-choice theory, with its concepts of the ‘median
voter’, the ‘rent-seeking society’ and ‘government failure’, comes very close
to this tradition. Unfortunately, Kelly fails to explain why Weber’s and
Schmitt’s blind trust in strong political leadership should offer a plausible
remedy for the deficiencies of modern democracies. To a certain extent,
Weber and Schmitt are not realistic enough. Throughout their theorizing, they
still assume a kind of ‘benevolent despot’ model of state and government.’
According to this model, the society is considered to be split by partial inter-
ests, whereas the state appears free from any egotistic motives. But why
should politicians in power behave differently than the self-interested lobby

' Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan, The Reason of Rules: Constitutional Polit-
ical Economy (Indianapolis, 2000), pp. 47 f.
152 BOOK REVIEWS

groups and political parties outside the government? In particular,

Anglo-American constitutionalism has always been more realistic concern-
ing the natural tendency of governments to extend their power in favour of
partial interests. Therefore, to formulate a convincing realist theory of poli-
tics, the German state-centred tradition has to be balanced against the
Anglo-American tradition of the rule of law. The problem before us is always
the same: ‘If we cannot do without the state, we cannot do with it either. How
does one get the state to behave like an impartial third party?’.”

Eckard Bolsinger
INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE OF POLITICS AND ECONOMICS
(HAUS RISSEN HAMBURG)

From Republican Polity to National Community: Reconsiderations of

Enlightenment Political Thought, ed. Paschalis M. Kitromilides (SVEC
2003:09) (Voltaire Foundation, Oxford 2003), xviii + 257 pp., €90.00/
£55.00, ISBN 0 7294 0822.

Amongst the many controversial aspects in the political heritage of the

Enlightenment, the relation between nationalism and cosmopolitanism,
between national identity and international society, occupies a special place.
One of the most significant contemporary developments in eighteenth-
century studies has been the extension of scholarly research to wider cultural
and linguistic areas, thus achieving a richer, more diversified picture of the
Enlightenment as an intellectual movement stretching across the whole of
Europe and beyond. Pioneered in the late 1960s and 1970s by Franco Venturi
in his encyclopedic work Settecento riformatore, subsequently extended and
perfected by younger generations of scholars, this wider view of the Enlight-
enment to which we have become accustomed has acquired new political rele-
vance with the recent enlargement of the European Union. The uncertain
institutional and cultural identity of this new Europe, the internal tensions
between will to belong and aspirations to autonomy which traverse its forma-
tion, have brought once again to the forefront of the international debate the
ambiguity of our common heritage.
On the one hand, the eighteenth century gave expression to a new cosmo-
politan vision, founded on the recognition of the universal rights of persons
and the independence of nations. On the other hand, the political models that
dominated the European experience during the ancien regime — classical

? Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

(Cambridge, 1990), p. 58.
 BOOK REVIEWS 153

republicanism and absolute monarchy — were both characterized by a strong

commitment to national interest, differently articulated in the languages of
patriotism and reason of state — a commitment that the new republics created
by the American and French revolutions made their own. The very fact that
modern Europe as we know it today first took shape under the impulse of a
revolutionary republic, which turned its cosmopolitan ideals into a project of
imperial conquest, exemplifies the contradictions implicit in this heritage.
From a somewhat different perspective, the novel approach set forth by politi-
cal economists gave a new substance to the issue of national versus
cosmopolitan identity, by exploring the tensions between international mar-
kets and national economies, between single political units and a global sys-
tem of credit and prices, between rich and poor countries.
From Republican Polity to National Community collects a set of contribu-
tions originally presented to the Tenth International Congress on the Enlighten-
ment held at University College Dublin in 1999. In his Introduction the editor,
Paschalis Kitromilides, discusses the problems associated with the exercise of
studying the Enlightenment in a national context. Though ready to recognize
the merits of this widely practiced approach, he sets forth a warning against the
risk of superimposing a prefabricated label of ‘national’ upon political and
intellectual realities that were in fact far more fluid, or evolved significantly
through time, especially under the impact of the revolutionary experience of the
1790s. In parallel with the historical transformation of geopolitical units, with
the shifting of borders, languages and populations, notions such as ‘patriotism’,
‘civic virtue’ and ‘national community’ underwent important mutations, which
are often difficult to trace and reconstruct. If there is nothing new in the belief
that a contextual approach to intellectual history requires a close monitoring of
changing discursive units, Kitromilides is certainly right in pointing out that in
practice this exercise may often prove confusing.
As is inevitable in a collection of this kind, there is a certain discontinuity in
focus and tone amongst the different contributions. The most stimulating
interventions, especially keeping the editor’s agenda in mind, are those which
appear in Part II, dedicated to the issue of inter-state relations. In his assess-
ment of Rousseau’s position, Georg Cavallar argues persuasively that the
writer’s passionate republican patriotism did not exclude a commitment to
cosmopolitan values, the point being that Rousseau’s love of country repre-
sented a universal political ideal, which did not involve any aggressive
nationalist sentiments. For him the national community represented a civic
space to be protected, rather than the basis for the imposition of a particular
set of ethnic or cultural values. In a different register, Lucian M. Ashworth’s
survey of the contributions of major eighteenth-century writers, from Gibbon
to Kant, illustrates the extent to which Enlightenment views of inter-state
relations remained substantially dependent on absolutist ancien regime doc-
trines and practices.
154 BOOK REVIEWS

Other contributions in the volume do not share the same clarity of design.
The vast literature produced in recent years on the different republican tradi-
tions seems to have created a maze of interpretative categories in which schol-
ars get increasingly lost, often losing sight of the central political issues in
favour of a purely academic dissection of previous commentaries. Thus in
their essay on Germaine de Staél’s republicanism Andreas Kalivos and Ira
Katznelson argue at length that the Genevan writer progressed towards a syn-
thesis of ‘republican’ and ‘liberal’ views — which is precisely the reading set
forth, years ago, by the same interpretations they criticize. In particular their
discussion of Marcel Gauchet’s work seems to proceed from a misunder-
standing of the implications of the political model generally described as the
‘modern’ or ‘bourgeois liberal’ republic. Similarly Martin Thom’s interesting
account ofthe evolution from the ideal of the ‘ancient city’ to that of the ‘me-
dieval commune’ gets sidetracked into a rather circular discussion ofthe read-
ing set forth by Stephen Holmes in the 1980s of Benjamin Constant’s
‘Discourse comparing the liberty of the ancients and the moderns’. In fact
after 1815 Constant’s political views were seriously affected not just by the
experience of the Restoration, but by the impact of the major economic crisis
that struck Europe after the end of the Napoleonic wars. Given the focus of
Thom’s essay, Constant’s novel understanding of the limits that the interna-
tional market imposed on the sphere of action of national states would have
been more illuminating than the old question of his greater or lesser commit-
ment to ancient liberty. Much remains to be done to clarify the evolution of
nationalism in the transition that followed the Napoleonic adventure. It is to
be hoped that the agenda set forth by Kitromilides in this volume will con-
tinue to engage the attention of historians.
Biancamaria Fontana
INSTITUT D’ ETUDES POLITIQUES ET INTERNATIONALES
UNIVERSITY OF LAUSANNE

Raia Prokhovnik, Spinoza and Republicanism (Palgrave Macmillan:

Houndmills, 2004), x + 280 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 333 73390 8.

This book presents — it seems — the following argument. Beginning in 1568,

the rebellious Dutch Provinces claimed their privileges against the aggressive
policies of their Spanish overlord. They by chance got rid of him, erstwhile
looked for a replacement monarch, but, not being satisfied with what was
available, decided to live without. Instead of solving the problem of an absent
monarch by forging a unity, the Dutch stayed within their medieval traditions
and institutions. That is one reason why they never articulated a republican
 BOOK REVIEWS 155

theory of their amalgamated state, the other being that they were not given to
theorizing in the first place. The period 1653 to 1672, when John de Witt
effectively ruled the United Provinces, really was an exception ofsorts, and in
the argument against Orange stadholders we find something that comes
closest to a republican argument, although it does not bear a comparison to the
revolutionary and progressive republicanism ofthe English Interregnum. The
reason being just this: the Dutch mentality was to cherish traditional practice,
and even while William HI somewhat changed things in the direction of
national unification, essentially things remained as they were until and
including the Batavian revolution of the 1780s.
Spinoza is a crown witness for this story. He does not have a concept of
sovereignty — it is said — nor of absolutism; his notion of liberty is tradi-
tional; and in his Holland-centrism and heralding the rights of cities he
reflects Dutch traditional practice. Even his notion of natural rights should be
understood as referring to privileges. He is conservative, moreover, because
he advises the maintenance ofthe fundamental laws and original constitution.
In this summary, I have highlighted inconsistencies and incomplete argu-
ments in Prokhovnik’s Spinoza and Republicanism, as, for example, in the
use of the terms ‘constitution’ and ‘sovereignty’. Noticeable is her denial of
political innovation (pp. 74 f., 91): what about the stock exchange, the VOC,
the Council of State, the actual political practice in The Hague, the financing
of the public debt, to name but a few important political innovations for which
the Dutch Republic was generally praised by contemporaries and historians
alike? It doesn’t help either to say that ‘the constitution of the Netherlands
continued more or less unchanged from the medieval period to the end of the
seventeenth century’ (p. 139), and was characterized by ‘a traditionalist
political identity . . . the assumption that there was an ongoing tradition, even
in the face of radical de facto constitutional innovation’ (p. 156).
Apparently, neither Dutch-language studies, nor the political literature of
the seventeenth century have had their bearing on the book; it does not dem-
onstrate ‘an enormous debt to Quentin Skinner’s revolutionary insights’
(p. vili), nor does it seem to be a convincing case of drawing ‘upon political
theory, the history of political thought, and history, and thereby introduc[ing]
to an English-speaking audience a specific case-study of this combined
approach’ (p. 16). What we do have are five chapters commenting on second-
ary literature on the history of the Dutch Republic from the origins of the
Revolt until the rise to power of William III in 1672, and a further three chap-
ters on Spinoza.
No doubt, there is a range of interpretation of Dutch seventeenth-century
political thought. The conservative interpretation of E.H. Kossmann — which
Prokhovnik exploits to the utmost — has its antithesis in the ‘radical’ inter-
pretation of Jonathan Israel. While Kossmann never got tired of pointing out
that there is a conservative strain in Dutch political ideology from the
156 BOOK REVIEWS

sixteenth to the twentieth century, drawing on the pre-eminence of historical

argument in Dutch politics and political historiography, Israel famously
argues that in the radical innovation of Dutch scholarship, religious life and
intellectual engagement we find the lasting contribution to European Enlight-
enment. Both Kossmann and Israel have contributed enormously to our
understanding of the Low Countries, by the scope of their scholarship and the
tenacity of their intellectual take on their subject. Consequently, their analy-
ses have brought to light a great variety of sub-themes and issues. If one con-
centrates on Spinoza, the opposition is less striking: here they disagree mainly
about the relevance and influence of the rationalist philosopher. While
Kossmann believed Spinoza to present abstract theory without practical
application, Israel — integrating more recent scholarship — emphasizes
Spinoza’s involvement with Dutch political debate as well as his widespread
influence in burgeoning radical and democratic circles. Prokhovnik’s thesis
that Spinoza is adequate to Dutch political practice because he is conservative
represents the opposite of what either Kossmann or Israel stand for, let alone
what unites them.
The author remarks on p. 220: ‘Insight could be usefully gained into
Spinoza’s theory of sovereignty through a contextualisation drawing upon
comparisons with a number of other authors, including Grotius and other
Dutch writers.’ Indeed, from Meinsma’ to Israel* the study of discourses (i.e.
context) has immensely contributed to the understanding of Spinoza’s politi-
cal philosophy. While recognizing the possibility, Spinoza and Republican-
ism does not follow up this tradition, neither for the theory of sovereignty, nor
for that of republicanism in general.
Hans W. Blom
ERASMUS UNIVERSITY

Natural Law and Civil Sovereignty. Moral Right and State Authority in Early
Modern Political Thought, ed. lan Hunter and David Saunders (Palgrave
Macmillan: Houndmills, 2002), xii + 257 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 333 96459 4.

According to Thomas Aquinas and his followers, natural law is a God-given

gift which has to be protected and administered by the eternal church. That
means the church owns the right, the duty and the capacity to determine
whether positive law is in conformity with natural law or not, and, in case of
disagreement, is entitled to declare such law invalid or even to punish the

3 K.O. Meinsma, Spinoza and his Circle (Haarlem, 1896).

4 J. Israel, Monarchy, Orangism, and Republicanism in the Late Golden Age
(Amsterdam, 2004).
 BOOK REVIEWS 15%

lawmaker. As is well known, however, already during the late medieval

period this claim met with opposition from the rising holders of territorial
state power, who tried to shake off such church control by developing the con-
cept of sovereignty. Even more, in the sixteenth century, the new reformed
churches had to resist it because otherwise they would have accepted papal
domination and consequently their own ruin. Therefore, new solutions to the
status and operationalization of natural law had to be found. That these solu-
tions were developed not by throwing religion overboard but by ‘reworking
the specific theological, juridical and political instruments used to configure
the grounds and limits of sovereignty’ (p. 3) is the perspective and conviction
which all contributors to this important collection share.
The introduction of the editors, who work at Griffith University and the Uni-
versity of Queensland, Australia, respectively, outlines both the assumptions
and the main results of the book. Seen from around 1700, all new doctrines
diminished the transcendentalism of Christian-Platonic and Christian-
Aristotelian natural law. Instead, these doctrines started to seek ‘in man’s
“observable” nature and historical circumstances a new basis for politics and
law’. Thus they ‘juridified and politicized’, and gradually secularized, natural
law ‘in the specific sense of seeking to partition law and politics from theol-
ogy and religion and thereby effect[ed] a desacralization of sovereignty’
(pp. 3-4). Within this broad scheme, however, they varied greatly.
Contributions by B. Kriegel, in a more general inspection, K. Haakonssen,
focusing on Grotius and the Genevan philosopher Jean Jacques Burlamaqui,
and T. Behne, concentrating on Pufendorf, show that to abandon transcenden-
talism did not mean to establish conceptions of individual rights as a new
basis for civil authority immediately. Rather, this development caused most
of the thinkers to retain ideas of moral ontology. C. Condren, J. Parkin and
T. Ahnert submit new insights on the relations of church and state; here, the
Anglican approach of Richard Cumberland (1672) formed especially an inter-
esting contrast with Thomasius’ determined pleading for consistent secular-
ization. Studying the limits of sovereignty in the light of the new natural-law
conceptions, P. Korkman, F. Grunert and D. Hiining draw very different and
specific pictures. Korkman deepens our knowledge of Jean Barbeyrac’s con-
ception of natural law not only as a ‘justification for the human sovereign’s
right to rule’, but also as a means ‘to impose crucial limits to his authority’
(p. 119). Grunert’s contribution focuses on one of the most important
subtopics of natural law, the right of resistance. On the other hand, Hiining
depicts the significance of the formula suum cuique tribuere in Hobbes’s
Political Philosophy as the motor of the philosopher’s turn from the virtue of
justice to the concept of legal order.
The results of these investigations are underpinned by both C. Jackson’s
and R. von Friedeburg’s contributions. In Scotland, Jackson shows, George
Mackenzie of Rosehaugh found a very specific solution to both tame previous
158 BOOK REVIEWS

radical natural-law and resistance ideas and strengthen the new political order
after the irrevocable suspension of the Stuarts. The reception of German
political ideas in England and Scotland, according to Friedeburg, was a most
complicated process, but nevertheless contributed to the formation of even
sharper controversies in Britain. Finally, K. Saastamoinen, P. Schréder,
D. Ivison and M.J. Seidler reconstruct very convincingly how and with what
results Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf and others perceived, reflected and con-
ceptualized new political problems in the light of their natural-law ideas.
Saastamoinen demonstrates that Hobbes and Pufendorf did not assist the
breakthrough of modern egalitarianism but held on to older notions of equal-
ity. Schréder’s careful comparison of natural law, sovereignty and interna-
tional law brings the story up to the present. Ivison mixes a historical and a
normative approach and — with regard to minorities — pleads fora ‘modified
respect for the territorial integrity of states’ (p. 228). In a similar way, Seidler
uses Pufendorf to emphasize the liberal state’s principle of recognizing all
religious and cultural groups on an equal level in order to neutralize their
demands and any potential danger to public security.
Undoubtedly this collection marks an important step in the historization of
the history of political thought on natural law, which has been influenced by
misconceptions of a philosophia perennis and the autonomy of ideas for far
too long. Nevertheless, it has one weakness: unavoidably, at the start of the
period, many thinkers of the new reformed or confessionalized churches, who
understood themselves as the one and only legitimate church at that time, did
not abandon their supposed right and duty to interpret and administer natural
law, but tried to establish their own scholastic conceptions. A contribution on
this topic is missing here.
Wolfgang E.J. Weber
UNIVERSITY OF AUGSBURG

Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Boydell: Woodbridge,

2003), xii + 208 pp. £50.00, ISBN 1 884383 020 5.

In a personal monarchy, access to the monarch’s person was of paramount

importance. Those who enjoyed such access, even by virtue of menial offices,
were in a better position than others to beg favours or influence policy. In a soci-
ety where the exchange of services and favours was taken for granted, those
close to the king used their access to enhance tieir power and wealth. The sig-
nificance of access was even greater than usual under a king like Charles II,
who, despite his cynicism about human nature, was easily influenced by
stronger personalities or by whoever had spoken to him last. Courtiers knew
 BOOK REVIEWS 159

that his verbal promises could not be relied on and that it was essential to get
them in writing.
Brian Weiser has thus identified an important topic and makes some valu-
able points about the nature and significance of access, discussing (among
other things) the layout of royal palaces and the rules that Charles laid down to
govern who could come where. Unfortunately he is better at posing questions
than at providing answers and he fails to link his discussion of access to the
wider political history of the reign, for several reasons. First, there is an alarm-
ingly high level of verbal and factual inaccuracy. He refers to Lord Brixton
(presumably ‘Bristow’, i.e. Bristol) and the earl of Stratford (Strafford). The
bishop of Winchester (who signed himself George Winton) appears as ‘George
Withton’. He talks of the Nonconformity Act, presumably meaning the Con-
venticle Act, and thinks that the Five Mile Act needed to be renewed; it did
not. When discussing the letter from Danby, which Ralph Montagu read to the
House of Commons, he says that the French ‘promised Danby a subsidy for
Charles IJ in return for peace’ (p. 80). In fact, in the letter Danby asked the
French for a subsidy that would enable Charles not to call Parliament for three
years; Louis said no.
A second problem is that the question of access is over-emphasized, to the
exclusion of everything else. We are told that the main reason for opposition
to Danby was that he monopolized access. There is no real discussion of
Danby’s policies or of his attempts to confine royal patronage to those who
followed his political line. In a chapter on local politics, there is the extraordi-
nary statement that the ‘main duty [of recorders, stewards and town clerks]
was to serve as intermediaries between local corporations and the royal
administration’ (p. 118). In fact, their main duty was to ensure the effective
running of municipal law courts and, in the case of the town clerk, municipal
administration as well. Only high stewards, who were often senior govern-
ment ministers or peers, might also act on the corporation’s behalf at the
king’s court. The responsibility of these officers for law enforcement also, of
course, explains why, in the charters of the early 1680s, Charles reserved the
right to approve their election and remove those who were unsatisfactory.
Finally, Weiser is very keen to discern distinct royal ‘policies’ towards
access. He uses the changing configuration of rooms in Whitehall Palace, and
changing rules as to who could enter where, to argue for a change from rela-
tively open access early on, in which people of all sorts of political and reli-
gious views could secure admittance, to a more restricted access, in which
only Tories were welcome. The increasingly formal arrangement of rooms
and increasingly restrictive regulations might seem to support this, as would
the tightening of security at court after the Popish Plot and (especially) the
Rye House Plot. Moreover, as Weiser points out, if the court had moved to the
new palace at Winchester, access would have been much more restricted;
indeed, Charles was already spending much less time in London. But to see a
160 BOOK REVIEWS

conscious change of policy from open to restricted access is simplistic and is

not borne out by the evidence. Even in his last years, Charles still allowed
access to all sorts of people. In the height of the Exclusion Crisis, leading
Whig politicians slipped up the backstairs for discussions with the king,
which left them hoping that he might agree to exclusion after all. Even after
the Rye House Plot, he was always careful to hear both sides in an argument,
for example hearing the complaints of Quakers about the maltreatment of
their fellows in various prisons. Charles was a man who liked to keep his
options open and was not tied by rules or ‘policies’. Charles made the rules
about access because (contrary to received wisdom) he took matters of cere-
mony and precedence very seriously, as necessary supports for the dignity
and authority of monarchy. Indeed, he emphasized them more in the latter
part of the reign, when he touched as many as 8,000 people a year for the
king’s evil. Moreover, he did so increasingly in the Chapel Royal at Windsor,
against the backdrop of a large painting of Christ healing the sick. But as Anna
Keay argues, in a thesis that supersedes much of Weiser’s argument,’ Charles
laid down these rules so that he, and he alone, could enforce them or waive
them, as a mark of favour and power. When a delegation from the City of Lon-
don came with a petition, they knelt before the king, who did not ask them to
stand up; the lord mayor had to read the petition from a kneeling position. In
other words, the only person not bound by the rules was the king himself. In
short, this is a book with some good ideas, and which asks some interesting
questions, but the execution is too slapdash, and engages too little with the
events of the reign, to come up with very meaningful answers.
John Miller
QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON

Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century: The Political Culture

of Limited Suffrage (Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, 2003), viii + 239 pp.,
£50.00, ISBN 1 4039 1174 6.

In a previous book, Alan S. Kahan adopted the phrase ‘aristocratic liberalism’

to indicate the elitist proclivities of some key nineteenth-century liberal theo-
rists. In this book he takes the same theme into the realm of political culture
and arrives at the same conclusion. Liberals in Britain, France and Germany
were fighting a rear-guard battle to keep democracy out of politics. By the end
of the nineteenth century they — and liberalism — had failed.

5 Anna Keay, ‘The Ceremonies of Charles II's Court’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, Uni-
versity of London, 2004).
 BOOK REVIEWS 161

Kahan has drawn meticulously on parliamentary and other public debates

in order to reconstruct an illuminating cross-national comparison between the
liberalisms of the three countries, in which similarities far outweigh differ-
ences. The test of capacity was crucial to liberal expectations of participation
— capacity relating not only to property and education (the German notion of
Bildung is not quite captured by the latter), but also to work, self-help and
independence. Nineteenth-century liberalism, the author contends, displayed
a typical elitist mix of believing in social hierarchy while permitting limited
social mobility. The result was an insistence on a restricted franchise based
either on the features of a group, such as class, or of an individual. Interest-
ingly, English liberalism was initially more inclined to the former, despite its
mid-century association with a Millian individualism, and Germany to the lat-
ter, despite its later association with bureaucracy and with nationalism.
It is a pity that the title of the book is so misleading, raising expectations
that the subtitle and the book’s contents then disappoint. It is not about liberal-
ism in nineteenth-century Europe but about the language of (mainly) legisla-
tive discussion of the issue of the suffrage. That is a valuable project in itself,
but it would have benefited from a broader understanding of liberalism, not
only as a discourse on the relationship between capacity and participation, but
as a rich set of values and beliefs that supply the intellectual context within
which the suffrage made sense. Development, liberty, reason, high culture,
conceptions of the general good: it would have been helpful to link all those
central liberal concerns to the question of the vote. All these also constitute
political liberalism despite the author’s disavowal.
The problem with this research perspective is that, when you hitch liberal-
ism to capacity, you will inevitably find decline as modern polities began to
emerge. If you link liberalism also to the fortunes of the party that bore its
name, you will find institutional disintegration. Finally, if you associate liber-
alism with the bourgeoisie (in itself not incorrect), a sociological view of lib-
eralism will trump an ideational one, and will clash with the endeavour of
European liberals to paint themselves as transcending the demands of class
altogether. For a political historian taking the nineteenth century as a discrete
unit of study, these interpretative constraints may make sense. For an intellec-
tual historian claiming to analyse liberalism as a political language — and that
is one of Kahan’s contentions — one could expect some recognition of the
methods of conceptual history, or acquaintance with the complexities of
tracing the successful dissemination of liberal argument beyond political
party constraints, or even with discourse analysis.
Above all, as Kahan is alert to the question of ideological adaptation, why is
it that he can nevertheless claim categorically that in the new world of democ-
racy ‘as a language of politics, [liberalism] was dead’ (p. 191), or that ‘liberal-
ism was replaced by democracy’ (p. 139) — the latter observation suggesting
a spurious zero-sum relationship between the two? How can a serious scholar
162 BOOK REVIEWS

maintain that ‘the “New Liberalism” that arose after 1885 adopted democratic
rhetoric and was liberal in name only’ (p. 140)? Liberalism is no fixed thing,
nor can it be assessed in its entirety through the prism of its institutional hey-
day about a hundred and fifty years ago. Specifically, the discourse of civil
rights and individual freedom that Kahan recognizes as consonant with
democracy played a vital part in public and political liberal discourse in both
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The exciting thing about liberalism —
not democracy, or social democracy, or socialism — was that it became stun-
ningly successful in outgrowing its earlier discourse. In launching the lan-
guage of welfarism in the early twentieth century, liberalism appealed to its
older themes of community, integration, tolerance, reason and expertise, but
set them in contexts in which they underwent a dramatic renaissance. A read-
ing of nineteenth-century liberalism in the light of its later evolution could
have added balance to this study.
Michael Freeden
MANSFIELD COLLEGE, OXFORD

Willi Goetschel, Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

(Studies in German Jewish Cultural History and Literature) (University of
Wisconsin Press: Madison, 2004), x + 351 pp., £33.50/$45.00, ISBN 0 299
19080 3.

To say that Spinoza’s political theory has suffered from neglect would be an
understatement. The reasons for this neglect are manifold, but among the
most prominent would have to be the view stated by the late Stuart Hamp-
shire, who, following R.G. Collingwood, complained about the relative lack
of any conception of history in Spinoza’s political thought. Until fairly
recently the charge that Spinoza had no idea of historical change has stuck.
Even the Cambridge “Blue Book’ series in the history of political thought,
which has produced so many fine volumes in early modern political theory,
has never yet issued a volume of Spinoza’s writings.
In recent years this negative verdict on Spinoza has been undergoing a
re-evaluation. Spinoza’s place in formulating the modern historical reading of
the Bible has been given new attention, as has his role in shaping the philoso-
phies of historical immanence (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche). He has been seen as
contributing to the revival of Dutch republicanism and as a pivotal figure —
perhaps the pivotal figure — in the European Enlightenment. His status as an
excommunicated Jew has been regarded as a model for later conceptions of
the liberal self, emancipated from the traditional bonds of community and
 BOOK REVIEWS 163

ecclesiastical authority. It is not premature to say that a virtual Spinoza renais-

sance is now well under way.
Spinoza’s Modernity is one of several recent books that attempt to under-
stand Spinoza’s contribution to the birth and development of modernity. The
author is especially interested in Spinoza’s later appropriation by the German
philosophical tradition, notably Lessing, Mendelssohn and Heine. The offi-
cial reception of Spinoza into German thought took place in 1785 with the
publication of F.H. Jacobi’s On the Teaching of Spinoza. The Pantheismus-
streit, or pantheism controversy, in which virtually everyone had a say, pro-
vided the basic terms in which German philosophy would be worked out over
the next century. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to say that the German phi-
losophy of the nineteenth century was essentially the creation of a seven-
teenth-century Dutch Jew, especially when one considers Hegel’s later
encomiums to Spinoza (‘to be a follower of Spinoza is the commencement of
all philosophy’).
Goetschel’s basic insight is that the key to Spinoza’s philosophy lies in his
relation to Judaism (‘the scandal of Spinoza’s Jewishness’, he calls it). In
most commentaries, Spinoza’s Jewishness has been treated as a contingent
historical fact of his childhood and early education that had no essential con-
nection to his later philosophy. When his treatment of Jewish themes and texts
has been examined, they have been conveniently hived off as part of his ‘phi-
losophy of religion’. Rarely has Spinoza’s Judaism been treated as a specifi-
cally philosophical problem. By contrast, Goetschel asks us to consider
Spinoza’s Judaism as the cornerstone of his metaphysics and ontology and as
such the key to his political theory. This sounds promising, but what does it
mean?
According to Goetschel’s argument — if I understand it correctly —
Spinoza’s Judaism helped to reconceptualize the relation of the particular to
the universal, that is, the problem of adherence to a particular theological or
political identity or eventual acceptance of a universal humanity. This is not a
matter of finding new materials about Spinoza’s Jewish background and
influences. Rather, the issue at stake is Spinoza’s insistence on regarding him-
self not as a Jew, an outsider, or a ‘state within a state’, but as a free agent on
equal standing with everyone else. Spinoza’s resolute individuality, his
rejection of hierarchy of all kinds, and his embrace of democratic politics are
all said to be the direct outgrowth of his refusal to be limited by any
particularistic ascriptive identity.
The tension between Judaism and universal emancipation only came to
fruition in Germany, where the Judenfrage was more intensely debated than
anywhere else. This theme received dramatic illustration in Lessing’s play
Nathan the Wise (1779), itself an idealized portrait of Mendelssohn. It was
worked out in various guises over the next century as thinkers debated
whether (to use Hermann Cohen’s later terms) Deutschtum was compatible
164 BOOK REVIEWS

with Judentum. The so-called German-Jewish dialogue that ensued was never
a real dialogue between Germans and Jews, but at best a monologue among
German Jews who sought acceptance through gradual assimilation and loss of
tradition. Needless to say, the outcome was not a success.
Spinoza’s Modernity is a learned and compelling account of one aspect of
the history of the reception of Spinoza. It suffers from being both too worship-
ful of Spinoza and too uncritical of the ‘emancipatory’ potential of his project.
Throughout the book Spinoza’s ‘radical modernity’ is celebrated without
considering the costs and benefits of what he repudiated. The real hero of
Goetschel’s narrative is the poet and philosopher Heinrich Heine, who refash-
ioned Spinoza to create a new modernist sensibility that would produce nei-
ther Germans nor Jews, but human beings. The result of Heine’s tortured
relation with his own Judaism (‘Judaism is not a religion but a misfortune’) is
not so much high-brow critical theorists like Louis Althusser and Antonio
Negri (as is asserted by Goetschel) as the comic self-mockery of Woody Allen
and Jerry Seinfeld.
‘Spinoza,’ Leo Strauss once wrote, was ‘the greatest man of Jewish origin
who had openly denied the truth of Judaism and had ceased to belong to the
Jewish people without becoming a Christian.’® Although Spinoza was the
greatest repudiator of Judaism within Judaism, he did pay Judaism the singu-
lar honour of treating it seriously as both a body of revealed law and as a way
of life, which is something that many of his epigones did not. He made his
readers an offer he thought they could not refuse: adherence to Judaism or
assimilation to the new emancipated human identity that he himself would
create. He did not realize that true emancipation comes not from the specious
sense of liberation from all tradition, but from the self-respect that derives
from loyalty to one’s particular heritage and its fate.
Steven B. Smith
YALE UNIVERSITY

Frederick Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (Routledge:

London and New York, 2003), xiii + 289 pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 415 22094 7.

Since the 1983 publication of Jeremy Bentham and Representative Democ-

racy (Oxford: Clarendon Press) Professor Rosen has been at the forefront of
the effort to dispel from the historical and philosophical debates about utilitar-
ianism the persistence of a misleading understanding of that theory. Too often

© Leo Strauss, ‘Preface to “Spinoza’s Critique of Religion”, Liberalism Ancient and

Modern (New York, 1968), p. 239.
 BOOK REVIEWS 165

an oversimplified aggregative interpretation of utilitarianism dominates the

literature — iterated by critics as a strawman to be challenged and found
wanting, and by defenders who seem prepared to argue the issue on their
opponent’s terms. In Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill Rosen has
brought together the various strands of his previous research and thinking on
the subject, and written a masterful exposition and defence of utilitarian theory
as it developed in the writings that define the classical phase of its history.
The book is divided into two parts. The first, and far longer, part contains
eleven chapters, in which are discussed the Epicurean influences shaping util-
itarian theory, and the writings of Hume, Smith, Helvétius, Beccaria, Paley,
Bentham and J.S. Mill. The short second part is constituted of four chapters
which address inter-related issues that commonly haunt modern debates
about utilitarianism: (1) the issue of the punishment of the innocent; (2) the
complaint that individual interests are invariably sacrificed in any strict appli-
cation of the theory; (3) the problem posed by minorities; and (4) the associa-
tion of utilitarians with the ‘negative’ view of liberty as expounded in Isaiah
Berlin’s famous essay “Two Concepts of Liberty’. It is in the revisionist his-
torical understanding of utilitarian theory in Part I that we find the purchase
for Rosen’s philosophical defence of the theory in Part II.
One of the anachronisms of many studies of utilitarianism is that scholars
take what they believe to be Bentham’s version of utilitarianism as the stan-
dard, and then read back into the development of the theory, determining
along the way who counts as a utilitarian and who does not or is only a partial
adherent of the theory. But, what if the view of Bentham’s theory from which
they begin is incorrect? This is the underlying proposition behind Professor
Rosen’s approach in the first part of the book. From a close reading of several
central Bentham texts, and a range of other less important writings, he con-
structs a persuasive new interpretation of Bentham’s theory. It is a theory
characterized by an abiding concern for the liberty of the individual, a sub-
stantial commitment to equality as a vital element in social justice, and to
democratic institutions designed to protect the security of individuals and
their property and hold public officials accountable for their conduct, laws
and policies. These are the constructs upon which the happiness of the
community is founded, and it is not something that can be produced by an
all-powerful legislator intent on producing the maximum amount of happi-
ness construed merely in act-utilitarian and aggregative terms. Rather, in
Rosen’s account utilitarianism is a ‘bottom-up’ theory, in which the means to
the end of happiness are located in a range of important secondary principles
(each demonstrably justified on the grounds of utility). Such secondary prin-
ciples include (1) the idea that there should be a just proportion between crime
and punishment in penal law, (2) the distributive principles of security, sub-
sistence, abundance and equality, and the ‘non-disappointment preventing
principle’ in civil law, and (3) principles like the maximization of aptitude and
166 BOOK REVIEWS

minimization of expense, and the need for mechanisms of public accountabil-

ity in constitutional law. Once the importance to Bentham’s utilitarianism of
such operational ideas and principles is fully recognized, we can appreciate
the force of Rosen’s defence of the theory in the second part of the book.
In general, it is the relationships between utility, justice and liberty that
underpin Rosen’s account of the distinctive features of classical utilitarian
theory, and working back from Bentham he discovers the threads of these
inter-relationships elaborated in the texts of earlier writers, especially Hume’s
Enquiry (in which utility, not sympathy, is the key principle), Smith’s Moral
Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, and Helvétius’s De l’esprit and De
l’homme. Rosen rejects the view that Bentham did not share with Hume and
Smith a common eighteenth-century context regarding pleasure and pain and
utility, and thereby frees these philosophers from ‘their fairly recent historical
imprisonment within the so-called “Scottish Enlightenment” ’ (p. 2). This con-
stitutes one of the more provocative results of Rosen’s approach. In a similar
interpretive vein, it is not Paley’s adherence to Anglican theology that separates
him from Bentham (though this is significant), but rather his ‘inattention to
individual liberty’ (p. 133). Of greater significance is Rosen’s challenge to Mill
scholars, who are too often concerned to distance their man from Bentham,
pointing out Mill’s refinements of utilitarian theory and greater commitment to
individual liberty (rather than utility, or liberty in some complex association
with utility). In response, Rosen demonstrates how closely Mill’s theory
approximates to Bentham’s. This is apparent in such matters as Mill’s distinc-
tion between the quality and quantity of pleasures (Bentham would not disagree
that some sorts of pleasure are more desirable than others), his discussion of
justice in relation to the security of individuals, and his view of liberty (the neg-
ative aspects of which require positive intervention by the state).
A brief review is no place to do justice to Rosen’s arguments in all these
areas, and they will undoubtedly call forth a slew of scholars of Hume, Smith
and Mill ready to contest his findings. The jury is out as to whether or not
Rosen’s interpretations will withstand their scrutiny — certainly scholars will
look closely at some of the textual evidence linking Bentham to Hume and
Smith, and Rosen’s claim that they worked within a ‘common intellectual tra-
dition’ (p. 48, cf. p. 81) may not persuade them — but that there is something
worth debating no one should doubt. Critics of utilitarianism, if their criti-
cisms are still to be relevant, will be forced to reconsider their understanding
of the theory, and pay attention to the philosophical history from whence it
developed. In this regard Professor Rosen deserves our thanks for livening up
a field of scholarship that in recent times has become complacent about ortho-
dox interpretations.
James E. Crimmins
HURON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
 BOOK REVIEWS 167

Judith Sealander, The Failed Century of the Child: Governing America’s

Young in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,
2003), x + 374 pp., £21.99/$28.00, ISBN 0 521 82878 3.

This is a thoroughly researched and well-written book, both scholarly and

entertaining. It provides an overview of the range of domestic public policy
relating to children in America during the twentieth century. The central
claim is that between 1900 and 2000 the principal ambition of state regulation
was to improve the lives and prospects of America’s children; judged by this
aspiration the century on balance ‘failed’ the child.
This assessment is grounded on a detailed analysis of policy implementa-
tion, divided into four parts: ‘children’s welfare’, ‘children’s work’, ‘chil-
dren’s education’ and ‘children’s health’. Under the first heading there are
separate chapters on juvenile justice, child abuse and state aid to poor chil-
dren; the second part is a single chapter on state reactions to the labour of chil-
dren; the third provides three chapters on compulsory secondary education,
infant and pre-school education and education for disabled children; and in
the final part there are chapters on government attempts to get children to
‘shape up’ through diet and fitness and a chapter on ‘mandatory medicine’
dealing with the problems of compulsory immunization policy.
The author tells us that the ‘enormous literature’ she utilizes in her special-
ized chapters 1s ‘largely unintegrated’. Her approach ‘synthesizes work from
many different disciplines as it investigates the transformation of American
childhood into a public concern’. The focus is ‘longitudinal and broad’ — to
‘capture the complex landscape of change’ affecting children (p. 5). So while
individual chapters treat their subjects chronologically, and have a distinctive
story to tell, they substantiate the general theme. Each area of policy reveals
similar patterns of development — beginning optimistically with a mixture of
philanthropy and faith in science informing policy, then encompassing ambi-
tious legislative innovation, followed by unforeseen consequences and fail-
ures of implementation, leading to retrenchment and reversals of strategy, in
the end yielding some confusion and disillusion.
The template is set by beginning with the story of juvenile justice. The cen-
tury started with creating juvenile courts, based on an enlightened philosophy
of welfare and reform rather than punishment. The ‘child savers’ saw the
court in the role of a ‘sorrowing parent’ whose ‘dispositions’ were to rescue
children from a life of crime by ‘treating’ its causes. The application of the
‘treatment model’ never happened. Juvenile judges failed to act as politically
disinterested ‘parents’, reformatories failed to adopt therapeutic regimes, and
well-trained probation officers (with manageable case-loads) never material-
ized. By mid-century there was disillusionment with the ‘rehabilitative ideal’.
Delinquency was thought rife, the young (male) offender was a thug, and the
paternal approach of the juvenile court had been found by the Supreme Court
168 BOOK REVIEWS

(most decisively in re Gault 1967) to deny a young person’s “due process’

rights. The last three decades were characterized by the abandonment of the
concept of childhood innocence, and by state legislatures remodelling their
juvenile courts to deliver what approximates adult justice. By 2000 America no
longer intervened in children’s lives on the basis of ‘status offences’, but it had
its highest proportion of teenagers in adult prisons, and led the world in the
number of under-eighteen-year-olds indicted for murder and executed (p. 49).
Other chapters reveal common themes. One is a faith of policy-makers in
academics, especially ill-placed in the ‘poorly understood paradigms of social
science’. Nowhere was this more evident than in the problem of quantifica-
tion and definition of ‘child abuse’. It created an ‘industry’ around ‘“molesta-
tion mania’ — with an excessive commitment to reportage, investigation and
removal of children to foster care. This led to backlash legislation securing
‘family preservation’ and making child protection professionally hazardous,
in the face of parental rights and the threat of litigation. The chapter heading
only slightly over-states the outcome as ‘The Pontius Pilate Routine’.
The increase in the size of the legal profession from one to four in a thou-
sand merits the designation of the ‘litigious century’. The disposition of
American parents to seek legal redress, and the court’s willingness to enter-
tain ‘class action’ compensation had a massive impact in many areas of chil-
dren’s policy. The expense of meeting the requirements of ‘appropriate
education’ for disabled children from the public purse was matched by the
cost of not doing so. In child health and education the risk of being sued has
constrained the provision of health-promoting school activities. The history
of mandatory immunization represents the century’s greatest achievement in
the prevention oflife-threatening contractible diseases. But the immunization
programme survived only at a huge public cost to the Federal government,
rather than through the private insurance industry’s funding of claims for
vaccine-related damages.
It is possible to take issue with the thesis of the book. ‘Failed children’ were
not those who in a previous century would have died at birth, nor those who at
the century’s start contracted smallpox at an early age. The book provides
other evidence of policy successes. The failure was in the ambition to provide
roughly equal life prospects to all America’s children. As Sealander notes,
those ‘most failed’ were children from immigrant, non-white, poor and other-
wise disadvantaged families. Yet she seems reluctant to put the thesis in terms
of distributive justice. Moreover, while her detailed policy analysis is sharp,
her concluding generalized explanatory narrative is relatively thin. The fail-
ure was ‘in part because ideas central to improve [sic] childhood also
enshrined contradictions in American culture’ (p. 356). She mentions ambiv-
alent attitudes to privacy and state interference, to family values and family
breakdown, love of the company of children and separating them from adult
lives — ‘They said a good society was one that nurtured its young but more
 BOOK REVIEWS 169

easily justified care for the politically influential old’ (p. 356). The latter
theme is worth developing. But there is a level of general explanation miss-
ing. I suggest it is to do with a conflict of values in twentieth-century America
between the welfare of children and families and the development of liberal
market individualism. This is a big topic and, though not directly addressed
here, it is one for which this excellent book provides much of the grist.

Andrew Lockyer
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2003), xxiv + 384 pp., £35.00, ISBN 0 19 924532 0.

Mona Scheuermann, /n Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas

Paine and the Radical Threat (University Press of Kentucky: Lexington,
2002), xiv + 255 pp., $40.00, ISBN 0 8131 2222 8.

Described by a previous biographer as ‘Burke for Beginners’, Hannah More

is an influential, yet oft overlooked, figure in the history of British conserva-
tism. After spending the first half of her life campaigning for the abolition of
slavery and establishing a number of Sunday schools in Somerset, More then
came to prominence as one ofthe most successful loyalist propagandists writ-
ing in response to the French Revolution. Her rural drama Village Politics
ingeniously ridiculed abstract values such as liberty and equality, encourag-
ing instead a faith in Christianity and ‘the roast beef of Old England’. Her
later ‘Cheap Repository Tracts’ — though read mostly by middle-class read-
ers — far outsold Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, and the list of illustrious sub-
scribers included William Pitt. Despite More’s success in her time, she has
received relatively little scholarly attention, no substantial work having
emerged for almost fifty years.
Anne Stott’s impressive biography goes some way towards rectifying this
situation and will surely become the standard work on its subject. It is meticu-
lously researched, making use of a large amount of previously ignored personal
correspondence. It provides comprehensive and insightful analysis of More’s
relationships with (and influence on) the “bluestockings’, as well as David
Garrick, William Wilberforce, Burke and Horace Walpole, and of the signifi-
cance of her political writings. Stott’s central thesis is that More’s political
thought represents one of the first examples of the “earnest moralism’ associ-
ated with ‘Victorianism’ and is much more than merely the shrewd public voice
170 BOOK REVIEWS

of a widespread reactionary sentiment. She argues that it was More’s gradual

conversion to an Evangelical form of Christianity that most clearly informed
her political beliefs, from her involvement in the abolitionist movement to her
campaign for religious education. Indeed, like many loyalists, More’s hatred of
the French Revolution emerged only after its violent campaign against religion
became apparent. As well as offering a reassessment of More’s motivations and
beliefs, Stott also attempts to reinterpret the consequences of her political
programmes. Thus, rejecting previous ‘Marxist’ and ‘Foucauldian’ interpreta-
tions of the role of her schools, Stott claims that the institutions were actually
crucial in providing the working classes with a source of agency and independ-
ence. As she points out, the main tension within More’s conservatism was
between a desire to allow the lower classes to participate in political discourse
and a need to ensure that they recognized the rightness of the status quo.
All this book lacks is extensive textual analysis of More’s didactic political
writing. There is plenty of this in Mona Scheuermann’s In Praise of Poverty,
which is, however, ultimately far less impressive than Stott’s biography.
Scheuermann claims to place More in her immediate context by examining
exemplars of both conservative and radical political discourses. However,
this amounts to a lengthy (and slightly pedestrian) textual analysis of, first,
Joseph Townsend’s A Dissertation on the Poor Laws and, second, Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man. Nothing new is produced by this strategy and the first
third of the book is of limited interest as a result. The rest of the text, which
concentrates on More’s own writing, is more successful. Like much recent
historical work, it attempts to draw parallels between the thought of More and
that of Mary Wollstonecraft, the two at first appearing to be political oppo-
sites. The argument proposed by many historians is that although they had
very different political views, they had similar concerns over the marginal
position of women and its effects on society. However, Scheuermann’s analy-
sis of the issue, which serves as the book’s conclusion, is a mere twenty pages
and does not really get to grips with the problem. There was more to the com-
plex relationship between More and Wollstonecraft than a mere shared belief
in the ‘extraordinary power of the printed word’. Despite its flaws, Scheuer-
mann’s book could, if taken together with Stott’s, be regarded as a useful
addition to this neglected area of scholarship.
Robert Lamb
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
 BOOK REVIEWS 171

Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in

Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2002),
xii + 263 pp., £16.95/$22.00, ISBN 0 521 89057 8.

In this lucid and highly engaging book, Jeremy Waldron argues that contem-
porary scholars interested in the philosophical foundations of basic equality
need to consider some of the lessons offered in John Locke’s ‘mature corpus’.
In Waldron’s estimation, this body of work ‘is as well-worked-out a theory of
basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy’ (p. 1). The
most striking — and perhaps troubling — lesson of Locke’s writings from the
1680s and 1690s is that a full-fledged theory of equality may not be able to do
without theological underpinnings antithetical to the secular commitments of
liberalism. Even though the main subject of Waldron’s well-informed book is
the principle (as opposed to particular policy implications) of ‘basic equality’
as formulated by Locke, his interest is motivated largely by concerns about
the possibility and the desirability of bracketing religious arguments from
public life, as John Rawls and others have proposed.
The bulk of Waldron’s complex yet accessible book examines the way
theological considerations structure and complicate Locke’s theory of equal-
ity as it is developed across his epistemological, political and religious writ-
ings. In the process of working out the complicated details of this theory,
Waldron frequently defends Locke against a number of different scholars
who have challenged both the consistency and the coherence of his views,
especially as they pertain to women, the labouring class and Roman Catho-
lics. Waldron addresses these and other groups in separate chapters, noting
instances where Locke ‘flinched’ from his stated principles. Locke is perhaps
most vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency on the question of gender
equality, which is where Waldron begins. Though he acknowledges that
Locke justified the subordination of wives to their husbands on the basis of
‘natural differences’ between the sexes, Waldron indicates that this is a
regrettable departure from a fundamental gender egalitarianism that was
sometimes better understood by Locke’s contemporaries than by present-day
scholars. In just a few lively pages of typically careful and detailed textual
exegesis, Waldron demonstrates convincingly that Locke’s references to the
natural freedom of ‘man’ include both males and females. In spite of Locke’s
undeniable inconsistencies on certain issues of gender equality, the crucial
point for Waldron is that men and women (like the learned and the ‘vulgar’, or
property owners and the poor) are intellectual creatures made in the image of
God. That characteristic forms the basis of Lockean equality.
It is not uncommon for thinkers to construct a theory of human equality on
the basis of human rationality, but Locke’s conception of rationality is dis-
tinctive in its fundamentally theological orientation. This becomes evident
from a careful reading of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding,
172 BOOK REVIEWS

a text that Waldron seeks to vindicate against Peter Laslett’s claim that it is
irrelevant to Locke’s political theory. (Waldron takes admittedly “mischie-
vous’ (p. 54) delight in deriding Cambridge school historians whenever the
opportunity presents itself, but this is one of the few instances in which he
actually identifies one of their positions with a name.) What makes humans
special, and distinguishes them from other animals that also have some ability
to reason, is ‘the “power of Abstracting”, the capacity to reason on the basis of
general ideas’ (p. 75). Waldron considers this ability such a ‘modest’ qualifi-
cation that he ascribes to Locke ‘a democratic view of the intellect’ that exhib-
its greater esteem for illiterates of ‘ordinary capacities’ than for scholars
whose reason has been corrupted by ‘learned gibberish’.
The essential link between theology and equality becomes clear only when
Waldron explains why the ability to form abstract ideas is so important. This
capacity enables humans to attain knowledge of the existence of God. The
ability to form a conception of God is of crucial significance because it
implies ‘a special moral relation to God’ (p. 80). It makes individuals subject
to the laws of nature. Obvious intellectual differences among individuals are
morally and politically irrelevant as long as an individual possesses this spe-
cial ‘range property’. Anyone with the capacity to form a conception of God is
subject only to God’s commandments, and not to those of other humans,
except by their own freely given consent. As Locke asserted in paragraph six
of the Second Treatise, ‘Men’ are ‘all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent,
and infinitely wise Maker . . . made to last during his, not one anothers [sic]
Pleasure’. Christian revelation supplements our knowledge of those moral
duties that are not fully accessible to reason.
Despite the acknowledged role of Christian revelation, it is not entirely
clear from Waldron’s account what makes this theory of equality specifically
Christian. Even though Waldron leaves no doubt that theology is inseparable
from Locke’s political thought and that it even forms a crucial part of its foun-
dations, the particular content of that theology is rather vague. It is easy to
come away with the impression that Waldron’s Locke is a theist with few
identifiably Christian convictions. And because Waldron neglects the rhetori-
cal context of seventeenth-century religious disputation, he fails to appreciate
how closely Locke (like many others) identified Roman Catholicism with
despised beliefs unworthy of toleration — hardly an attitude that comports
with Locke’s egalitarianism.
Even though Waldron is largely uninterested in figuring out where Locke
stood on religious disputes such as the Unitarian Controversy, his relative
indifference to the particular details of Locke’s Christianity has a direct bear-
ing on contemporary debates on religion and politics, which concern Waldron
most. If liberal societies are to take religious forms of argumentation in poli-
tics more seriously, as Waldron proposes, it is important to know just how
sectarian or divisive a particular set of religious beliefs might be. But this
 BOOK REVIEWS 173

vagueness leaves Locke exposed to the increasingly common criticism that

liberalism fails to take seriously enough the specificity of religious beliefs and
therefore fails to show genuine respect for religion.
Other books have stressed the role of religion in Locke’s political thought,
but none has demonstrated the enduring philosophical relevance and integrity
of Locke’s religious views as convincingly as Waldron’s. Its bold and intrigu-
ing insights urge us to rethink the place of religion within liberalism.

Clement Fatovic
FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Civil Society in British History, ed. Jose Harris (Oxford University Press:
Oxford, 2003), x + 319 pp. £50.00, ISBN 0 19 926020 6.

As Jose Harris points out, the term ‘civil society’, despite its more common
currency in the eighteenth century, slowly dropped out of use in the nine-
teenth and much of the twentieth centuries. It has subsequently experienced a
significant renaissance of interest, certainly since 1989. The current mantra
seems to be ‘Wouldn’t it be nice for global politics if civil society were to
develop more widely?’. Civil society now seems to have a social-democratic
and human-rights imprimatur — although those who presently make claims
for it do stretch across the ideological spectrum. It is not clear how all this cur-
rent global enthusiasm relates to the odd and elusive traditional conceptions
of civil society. Concepts often go in and out of fashion, and ‘civil society’ is
no exception. One consequence of this process is that, over time, large
amounts of ‘meaning baggage’ are inevitably accumulated. Civil society —
whatever it denotes — carries long strands of etymology, from late Roman,
medieval, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages. How far, and in what
manner, civil society relates to concepts such as societas, society, community,
pluralism, voluntarism, civilization, civility, and so forth remains a fascinat-
ing but immensely complex question. Some meanings are virtually lost to us,
others are half-understood, others just seem inappropriate in the present or
just downright odd, some seem to over-inflate or idealize civil society, and
others to denigrate it. Most problematically, civil society seems to drift regu-
larly in and out of a multifaceted relation with the enormously more complex
concept of the state. In some cases it has even been a synonym for the state.
Indeed, as Jose Harris comments in her introduction, if there is one consensus
in the book, it is that, in Britain at least, ‘the state itself had been an important
element in either shaping or actually constituting civil society’ (p. 11). Unfor-
tunately, the concept of the state is never really systematically analysed, so
 174 BOOK REVIEWS

this issue remains knotty and unresolved. However, any comprehensive grasp
of the concept of civil society has at least to acknowledge this tremendous
diversity of meaning.
Part of the problem of reviewing this volume is that it premises itself on
some ofthis baffling conceptual diversity. As Jose Harris notes, there are con-
sequently considerable differences amongst the contributors as to how the
concept is deployed. However, she continues, all the chapters are nonetheless
‘fused together’ ‘by the common theme of exploring and defining the multi-
ple meanings of “civil society” ’ (p. 11). Probably the verb ‘fused’ is slightly
too strong here. One way in which the volume is clearly delimited and made
more manageable is that its focus is on Britain. However, this delimitation is
actually more of a worrying chimera, partly because the conceptual ground-
work of civil society ranges far more widely than Britain alone. Inthe detailed
discussions of the concept, we inevitably encounter broader conceptual vistas
across both Europe and North America. Second, many of the substantive
chapters of this book utilize strong comparative material from Europe, North
America and indeed India and Australia. Third, many of the key protagonists
of civil society in Britain were clearly not isolated from European develop-
ments. Locke, Hobbes, Hooker, Ferguson, Maine and Figgis were all fully
integrated with European thought. In some cases their theoretical metier was
premised on wider European traditions. Thus the idea that one could con-
sider just the British experience of civil society is obviously odd. It is also
questioned by certain essays in this present volume.
The book has an excellent introduction and conceptual overview of civil
society by the editor. Chapters then deal with eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century ideas of ‘government interference’; the complex ways in which a cer-
tain class of eighteenth-century British women focused on conversation as the
currency of civil society; and the development of voluntarist and pluralist
ideas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In another chapter a com-
parison is made between German and British conceptions of civil society in
the nineteenth century. Further chapters deal with Edwardian middle-class
views of civil society; ideas of public and private ownership of urban utilities
in New York and London in the late nineteenth century; and conceptions of
civil society in early twentieth-century India. A slightly darker aspect of civil
society is examined in the context of military-service tribunals in First World
War Britain. Subsequent chapters examine the idea of countryside planning in
mid-twentieth-century Britain; the early twentieth-century Irish womens’
movement; and, a fascinating and quite unique topic, the idea of the clerisy in
mid-twentieth-century Britain. This latter chapter examines the little-known
work of a number of intellectuals, Kar! Mannheim, T.S. Eliot, Middleton
Murray and Christopher Dawson, amongst others, in a group called the Moot,
whose main concern was preserving religion, hierarchy and common culture
in a modern mass society. The final chapters of the book deal with the 1960s
 BOOK REVIEWS {75

Greater London development plan; competing notions of citizenship in

twentieth-century Britain; and finally the ‘double logic’ of civil society —
that is, ‘integration’ and ‘valuing difference’ — in the context of twenti-
eth-century Australian settler-colonial liberalism.
As one can see, the individual studies present a diverse and mixed picture. The
richness of detail and the level of scholarship is, as one might expect, commend-
able. However, if the volume has one slight problem it is that it does not ever
resolve the complex and awkward relation between the conceptual and historical
dimensions. The individual historical studies collected here are so dissimilar and
often get so caught up at the micro-level of empirical detail that, at times, one vir-
tually loses all sight or sense of the concept of civil society itself.
Andrew Vincent
SHEFFIELD UNIVERSITY

Sieyés: Political Writings, including the Debate between Sieyés and Thomas
Paine in 1791, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Hackett: Indianapolis, 2003), Ixiv +
190 pp., ISBN 0 87220 430 8.

It has taken a long time for Sieyés’ writings to be accepted as part of the canon
of Western political thought that is taught in British universities. Even today
his name is probably unknown to many students of political theory in this
country. Rousseau and Burke tend to occupy centre stage when the late eigh-
teenth century is treated, with Thomas Paine perhaps appearing from the
wings. The omission of Sieyés is to be lamented not out of any perverse pref-
erence for the obscure in place of the obvious, but because his writings
express the conceptual underpinnings of the modern European state in some
ways far more clearly than do the writings of any of the others. The ‘represen-
tative system’, which it was Sieyés’ achievement to elaborate at the outset of
the French Revolution, is in essence the type of political system within which
we in Europe live today. This new English edition of some of Sieyés’ key
texts is therefore to be warmly welcomed.
The volume includes the three pamphlets that Sieyés wrote on the very eve
of the Revolution, and which had an immense impact, namely the Views on
the Executive Means available to the Representatives of France in 1789, the
Essay on Privileges, and the most famous of all, What is the Third Estate?,
which the editor has translated afresh. It also includes a translation of the text
of the famous exchange that took place between Paine and Sieyés in the pages
of the Moniteur in 1791 on the merits of monarchy. One could have wished
for a few more texts, but even this modest selection is an advance over previ-
ous ones.
176 BOOK REVIEWS

Michael Sonenscher’s scholarly Introduction is devoted to a discussion of

different aspects of Sieyés’ political ideas, rather than to a detailed examina-
tion of the texts themselves. He concentrates mainly, and quite properly, on
Sieyés’ concept of representation, which he analyses with sensitivity, linking
it to Sieyés’ concept of the nation, and distinguishing it carefully from the
conventional view of representation held by the man in the street. As he
rightly observes:
Words may not matter all that much. But there may still be a price to pay by
forgetting the questions about the relationship between one state and many
people that Sieyés addressed and why, in the setting in which he addressed
them, the answers that he gave were based on the logic of representation,
not democracy. (pp. |xiii-lxiv)
Sonenscher also explores at some length the intellectual origins of Sieyés’
concept of representation, taking as his guideline the thesis put forward by
Garat, a fellow revolutionary, that Sieyés’ theory had its foundations in Hobbes,
but incorporated ideas from Rousseau and Montesquieu. Garat’s categorical
assertion, in December 1791, of a link between Hobbes and Sieyés is indeed
fascinating, and there would seem to be good grounds for thinking he was
correct. Similarly, few would deny that Rousseau influenced Sieyés. Their
theories march together for a considerable distance, even if Sieyés diverged
fundamentally from Rousseau on the question of representation. The
influence of Montesquieu is much more questionable, however. Sieyés’
whole manner of thought, and its substance, was diametrically opposed to
Montesquieu’s, and his notes on the earlier writer are basically critical. One
feels Sieyés would have been the first to reprimand Garat for suggesting a
connection between them. Of course, some fragment of Montesquieu’s ideas
might have lodged itself in his mind unacknowledged, but in the absence of
hard corroborative evidence Sonenscher’s efforts to build bridges between
the two thinkers seem strained and perhaps liable to confuse.
Sonenscher’s account of the immediate historical context of Sieyés’ writ-
ing follows a fairly narrow gauge, and he tends to avoid general speculation
on the meaning of the French Revolution and Sieyés’ role in it. The drama and
tragedy of Sieyés’ life do not appear. Sonenscher does, however, enter deep
waters when he argues that the system of political representation that Sieyés
tried to establish in France from 1789 to 1799 was designed to prevent the
cataclysmic, civilization-threatening ‘social revolution’ predicted by certain
eighteenth-century writers, and the despotic outcome that this revolution was
expected to entail.
This idea that Sieyés, so to speak, sensed an incipient Terror in France in
1789 and was striving from the start to contain it, will not, in my view, bear
examination. The accumulation of reasons why his essentially rational, logical
and temperate plans for France in 1789 were swept aside by a torrent of direct
democracy will always be a matter for debate, and he can doubtless be accused
 BOOK REVIEWS 177

of naivete in not realizing that the drastic changes he fought to introduce in the
political and administrative superstructure of France would have vast emo-
tional and aspirational repercussions throughout society. To think that he was
propelled in 1789 by a premonition of the horrors that eventually did erupt,
however, is to misread his revolutionary mentality at that time and to project
back on him a concern that was to evolve only later. For him, in 1789, a ‘social
revolution’ had taken place, and was taking place in France, namely the growth
and ascendance of the Third Estate, which was the embodiment of a radically
new economic society. It was precisely this social revolution that was for him
the guarantor of the political revolution he sought to effect, and was the reason
why he saw no need to go back to classical models for guidance.
Sonenscher has researched widely and his allusions are original and stimu-
lating. His reference to Garat has already been mentioned. His citation of the
remarkable tribute paid to Sieyés by the arch-reactionary Karl von Haller, at
the end of the revolutionary epoch, is another good example. Theory, for Sieyés,
wrote Haller, ‘is something serious. He believes in it in good faith. Accept the
premises of his reasoning and his logic 1s invigorating, irresistible. All these
qualities make Sieyés’ writings so dangerous and seductive that it is certain
that they have had more effect and done more harm than all the others . . .’
(p. xiv). Sonenscher has done a good service in making these compelling and
subversive writings more widely available.
Murray Forsyth
UNIVERSITY OF LEICESTER

Till Wahnbaeck, Luxury and Public Happiness: Political Economy in the

Italian Enlightenment (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2004), x + 228 pp., £50.00,
ISBN 0 19 926983 1.

This monograph has its origins in an Oxford doctorate. It possesses the virtues
of that provenance — it is scholarly, thorough and solid and (for an
Anglophone audience) throws light on some obscure corners of the Enlight-
enment. Moreover, it succeeds in avoiding many ofthe vices of ‘doctorese’ —
it is well-written, the footnotes are under control and the scholarship disci-
plined. There is, however, some repetitiveness and in the end it claims rather
more than it delivers.
The book is divided into three parts. The first gives a cursory historical
run-through of the ‘luxury debate’ before a longer survey of the Enlighten-
ment contentions. These are competently done and no pretence is made at any
originality. The opening part also includes an account of the origins of
political economy in Italy. This background coverage is the only place
178 BOOK REVIEWS

where the views of perhaps the two best-known Italian ‘economists’, Galiani
and Genovesi, are discussed. The bulk of the book thus deals with the thought
in effectively the third quarter of the century. Parts Two and Three deal
respectively with the debate in Tuscany and Lombardy. These have a similar
structure. An opening chapter places the debates in a socio-political context.
The practical dimension is emphasized, as intellectuals sought to emphasize
policy. The remaining chapters in each part outline the debates. This takes the
form of brief exegeses of key documents of key thinkers with appropriate
attention to the dynamics of debate. The Tuscan thinkers, among whom
Bandini and Paoletti are given most attention, are relatively little-known, cer-
tainly in comparison to the two chief Lombard representatives — Pietro Verri
and Beccaria.
The book propounds two arguments. The first is that while there is not one
coherent Italian Enlightenment, there were common questions that were
answered differently in the light of local contexts. Hence, though this 1s not a
point made explicitly, it is doubly appropriate to talk of a Milanese and Tus-
can Enlightenment. Rather more might have been said on the difference
between the two. Wahnbaeck does note that the elites were more directly
involved in Tuscany than in Lombardy, and he emphasizes the fact that Melon
entered ‘Italy’ via Muratori, the champion of the Catholic Enlightenment
(p. 188). This is used to help account for the character of Tuscan thought, but
it seems not to apply in Lombardy, where Verri is said to have read Melon
directly (p. 157). This reliance on intellectual context would have benefited
from more analytical care in the area. For example, Wahnbaeck claims that
Paoletti’s focus was ‘predetermined by the great tradition of Tuscan eco-
nomic thought’ (p. 122) yet this legacy ‘left considerable freedom’ (p. 133).
The second argument deals with the posited ‘common questions’. As the
book’s title indicates, Wahnbaeck uses luxury as the motif in the debates
about economic development, which in Italy is given a distinctive focus by its
shift to agriculture. More precisely, he claims that the very vagueness of the
term lusso enabled it to be put to different uses in the different circumstances.
Sitting not altogether comfortably alongside this is a description of the book
as an attempt ‘to chart the development of a new language of political econ-
omy’ (p. 1). In practice this ‘new language’ is attributed only to Beccaria and
Verri in the guise of the former’s development of a mathematical approach
and the latter’s deductive systematization. The Tuscan counterpart is more
vague. They used luxury’s indeterminacy to add ‘new meanings to the term’
(p. 187) — though it is never made clear what these are — to retain a moral
element within an economic argument for development. Indeed, Wahnbaeck
claims that Italy resisted the Europe-wide trend to replace old moral notions
with new economic considerations. This is dubious. His own discussion
means this is true only of the Tuscans, since the very point about Beccaria and
Verri’s new language is precisely that it leaves ‘the question of luxury behind’
 BOOK REVIEWS 179

(p. 186). More than that, it is not true of elsewhere in Europe (Wahnbaeck
himself says as much about France (p. 49)).
It is perhaps worth noting a prima facie puzzling absence. Regardless of
whether they are pro or con, if Wahnbaeck’s protagonists do not avail them-
selves of civic humanist discourse (a major source of antipathy to luxury),
then that is worth saying. (Even the brief treatment of Rousseau does not
allude to that discourse, while there is no reference to Machiavelli despite sev-
eral re-editions of his Opere in the period here discussed.) Yet it is because the
book contains much of interest and value that it whets the appetite for more.

Christopher J. Berry
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

F.W. Maitland: State, Trust and Corporation, ed. David Runciman and
Magnus Ryan (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2003), lv + 136 pp.,
£15.95/$22.00, ISBN 0 521 52630 2.

This delightful collection of essays in the Cambridge Texts in the History of

Political Thought series is warmly to be welcomed. It reprints, and adds sig-
nificant editorial material to, some of F.W. Maitland’s late essays on the legal
fortunes of groups in England. Comprehensive editorial work on the essays
has not been attempted since their first publication together in 1911 in the
Collected Papers of F.W. Maitland, edited by H.A.L. Fisher. The effect is
impressive. The book sheds considerable light on Maitland’s interest in
groups and its significance for political theorists and historians of political
thought, in particular. While Maitland’s primary concern was with English
legal history and the ideas that had shaped it, his writings emphasize the ten-
sion and interaction between law and the wider realm of politics. In their
introduction, the editors ably bring out the precise nature of Maitland’s role.
He was not a proselytizer on behalf of groups against the perceived over-
mighty state — that was left to ‘pluralist’ thinkers, such as J.N. Figgis and
H.J. Laski, whom he influenced. He was instead a unique interpreter of the
course that associational life had taken in Britain, and keenly aware ofits con-
tingency. He was therefore not concerned to make universal prescriptions.
The fact that his admiration for the ingenuity of English lawyers — not least
those in the court of Equity in developing the idea of the ‘trust’ — was barely
concealed, or that he was entirely out of sympathy with the reigning ‘conces-
sion’ theory of groups from which trusts provided an escape, only emphasizes
his allegiance to the primacy of practice over theory. It is clear from these
180 BOOK REVIEWS

essays that he was more exercised by national differences in political and

legal understanding than the ‘eternal’ questions that political philosophers
have traditionally considered, certainly when taken out of context — national
context in particular.
The essays are all focused on the distinctiveness of English development in
relation to the question of corporateness. Maitland argued in ‘Moral Personal-
ity and Legal Personality’ (1904) that English political philosophers, hung up
as they were on questions of individual agency in moral philosophy, had sig-
nally failed to acknowledge groups as rights- and duties-bearing units. This
they ought to have done, given that England was well favoured with groups
for all manner of purposes, shielded by the peculiarly English notion of the
‘trust’ that developed from the law of property. The editors emphasize
Maitland’s concerns about the incautious transplanting of legal theory into
political theory, in — for example — the idea of contract, which was legally
valid only for the original parties. Maitland also showed that trusts would not
work in perpetuity either, being products of a particular set of circumstances
that might be overtaken by events. (Surprisingly, he seems not to have men-
tioned the most obvious application of the trust concept in political theory,
that of Locke.) Trusts were not static in law, because they were not static in
life; their ability to grow and develop was especially highlighted in the Scot-
tish Free Church case of 1900 to 1904. An act of Parliament was required in
this instance to correct the injustices consequent upon the application of the
wrong kind of legal theory — the ‘Fiction theory’; this flew in the face of legal
facts, and, as the editors point out, what would have been ‘moral facts’ for
Maitland too. For all his enthusiasm for trusts and the good work they had
done in England, he lamented their effect in distracting attention from the
issue of corporateness, not least the corporateness of the state, which had been
originally obscured by another singularly English device, the Corporation
Sole. Maitland’s essay on this subject, written in 1900, and an accompanying
essay on “The Crown as Corporation’ are highly suggestive of early aversion
on the part of English law to the concept of the state, perhaps indicative of a
concern to avoid its aggrandizement that — as Maitland shows — went too
wide of the mark.
The editors have done a fine job on these essays. Their scholarship encom-
passes a list of Maitland’s sources in English legal history, a glossary of tech-
nical terms, biographical references, and highly illuminating notes at the end
of each essay. The notes do everything from identifying Gilbert and Sullivan
lines and relevant disputes in German legal scholarship to explaining key
legal decisions, such as those in the Taff Vale and Free Church of Scotland
cases, and providing a wealth of other detail: religious, commercial, historical
and financial. In addition, the editors give translations of foreign words, which
especially litter the essay ‘Trust and Corporation’ (1904). The formidable
challenge this represents is well known to the present reviewer, who enlisted
 BOOK REVIEWS 181

similar help for an abridged version of the essay some years ago. The Cam-
bridge edition is as much a tribute to the editors’ erudition as it is to
Maitland’s. The greatly improved accessibility of all the essays is a boon to
those interested in questions of law and the state, liberty and groups, and the
adaptation of legal theory to life, both in a historical and contemporary
context.
Julia Stapleton
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

Robert T. Gannett, Jr., Tocqueville Unveiled: The Historian and His

Sources for ‘The Old Regime and the Revolution’ (The University of Chicago
Press: Chicago, 2003), xiii + 246 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0 226 2818 6.

Michael Drolet, Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform (Palgrave:

London, 2003), xii + 310 pp., £55.00, ISBN 1 4039 1567 9.

The Old Regime and the Revolution has never enjoyed in the English-
speaking world the high reputation that it has always had in France. Not sur-
prisingly the archives of The Old Regime and the Revolution have not been
studied as closely as those of Democracy in America. Robert T. Gannett, a
former student of the late Francois Furet, has now written a splendid book on
this topic that will serve as a valuable reference for all Tocqueville scholars.
Gannett obtained permission to consult Tocqueville’s family archives, which
proved to be a true goldmine. With the skills of a detective, and following in
the footsteps of Furet, Gannett lifts the veil of secrecy imposed by
Tocqueville and shows how Tocqueville crafted the form and substance of his
book in response not only to his findings in the archives at Tours and Paris’s
H6tel de Ville but also to the theses advanced by other interpreters of the Rev-
olution and the Old Regime, such as Burke, Macarel, Dareste, Constant and
Barante. Gannett consulted the approximately 3,700 pages of archival notes
preserved in Tocqueville’s archives and read his detailed endnotes, following
Tocqueville’s famous ‘hic’ observations and passionate rejoinders, ranging
from single words to full pages of commentary.
Chapter Two of Tocqueville Unveiled traces the stages of Tocqueville’s
historical apprenticeship and comments on the seminal influence on
Tocqueville exercised by Francois Guizot. Chapters Three and Five shed light
on Tocqueville’s analysis of feudal rights and the growth of administrative
centralization during the Old Regime, while Chapter Four concentrates on the
fascinating dialogue between Tocqueville and Burke. Chapter Six explores
182 BOOK REVIEWS

Tocqueville’s ideas on the pre-revolutionary spirit in France. Gannett shows

how Tocqueville made creative use of the ideas of lesser-known historians
and economists such as Macarel and Le Trosne. Chapters Seven and Eight
comment on Tocqueville’s unconventional liberalism and offer illuminating
insights into his writing style and the intended political message of The Old
Regime. In sharp contrast to Sheldon Wolin and Richard Herr, who
downplayed the work’s political message, Gannett convincingly demon-
strates that Tocqueville regarded this book as the essential catalyst for the
revival of liberty in France and hoped that by illuminating the causes of the
fall of the Old Regime he would.be able to contribute to the rejuvenation of
political liberty under the Second Empire.
Gannett’s book retraces each stage of Tocqueville’s project, allowing us to
see how the work’s general framework evolved significantly over time. While
writing The Old Regime and the Revolution, Tocqueville was stricken with
recurring painful stomach and lung ailments and had to overcome many
doubts regarding the book’s subject, method, scope and genre. Setting out to
write a book about the rise of Napoleon, he eventually shifted his research
focus. What was initially a history of the Revolution and the First Empire
eventually became a history of the Old Regime as Tocqueville realized that
the administrative regime of the Consulate and Empire was not a creation but
a restoration. Gannett argues that this decisive shift occurred in August 1853
(Furet had mentioned the end of 1852), when Tocqueville decided to write a
full-length book on the period preceding the Revolution and acquired the
proper historical perspective, which other interpreters of 1789, including
Burke, had lacked. The blocks that forced Tocqueville to reassess the focus
and method of his work stemmed from a contradiction at the heart of his
historical vision, ‘as he struggled to reconcile his view of the Revolution’s
continuity, seen in its administrative structures, and its radical ideological
transformation’ (p. 39).
Gannett demonstrates that Tocqueville’s investigation of the Old Regime
was a masterful blend of archival research and historical, sociological, politi-
cal and philosophical analysis that examined the loss of local liberties and the
growth of centralization in France. Gannett’s account should serve as a cau-
tion to those who criticize Tocqueville for his allegedly impressionistic writ-
ing style. He presents Tocqueville as a remarkably gifted social historian who
carefully researched a wide array of resources including personal interviews,
journals, histories, memoirs, diplomatic papers, letters and unpublished
manuscripts. Tocqueville’s capacity for archival research was certainly amaz-
ing, equalled only by his unique propensity for theoretical generalization. He
delved into huge collections of documents (legislative acts, records of proper-
ties, population counts) and extracted from them the essential information he
needed. Equally astonishing was Tocquevilie’s interpretation of the famous
cahiers des doiéances, which helped him trace the course of public opinion
 BOOK REVIEWS 183

before 1789 and ‘eavesdrop’ on the ideas, habits and mores of that time. It is
surprising to learn how much attention Tocqueville paid to economic and
social factors and how little he was initially preoccupied with the role of ideas.
Gannett points out that Tocqueville found in Dareste’s 1853 essay on the
Old Regime the main source of instruction regarding feudal rights. He made
extensive use of Dareste’s feudal sources and vocabulary but reached a differ-
ent conclusion. While the latter noticed solidarity among the classes of the
Old Regime that allegedly brought steady improvement to the French coun-
tryside, Tocqueville saw isolation and polarization that fuelled the trend
towards centralization. Gannett also demonstrates that Burke’s texts were
seminal for Tocqueville at a crucial juncture during the writing of The Old
Regime. Tocqueville regarded Burke as his primary interlocutor and Gannett
highlights how efficient was his treatment of Burke, ‘stripped to the essentials
of Burke’s thought on the Revolution and adapted to the rhetorical purposes
of Tocqueville’s argument’ (p. 76). Tocqueville claimed that Burke lacked a
proper historical perspective and did not realize that the Revolution was not a
mere French accident. In fairness to Burke, Gannett also points out that
Tocqueville’s treatment of Burke was ultimately biased, as he often failed to
mention the broad areas of congruence between their ideas. In explaining
Tocqueville’s ambivalence towards Burke, Gannett argues that Tocqueville
overstated the continuity between pre-Revolutionary and revolutionary
France and thus understated the break introduced by the Revolution. In this
respect, one can only regret that Gannett does not pay more attention to the
incomplete Volume Two of the Old Regime, to which he devotes less than ten
pages. Furet once argued that after 1856, much like Burke, Tocqueville even-
tually came to view the French Revolution as a radical ideological revolution.
Hence, Gannett’s readers are left wondering to what extent in Tocqueville’s
eyes this shift altered his previous framework of analysis that downplayed the
novelty of the Revolution.
Michael Drolet’s Tocqueville, Democracy, and Social Reform approaches
Tocqueville from a different perspective that highlights a dimension of
Tocqueville’s works often neglected by his interpreters: social reform (in this
respect, Drolet follows in the footsteps of Eric Keslassy’s recent Le
libéralisme de Tocqueville a l’épreuve du paupérisme). Most Tocqueville
scholars have tended to separate his social from his political and historical
works and Drolet’s book seeks to remedy this problem. He argues that in
order to understand Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Rev-
olution, we must examine and understand how these books relate to
Tocqueville’s lesser-known writings as well as to their historical and intellec-
tual context. Drolet offers a nuanced and detailed analysis of the ways in
which Tocqueville’s social and empirical investigations into prisons and pov-
erty informed his thoughts on democracy, ‘gave him new insights into the
interaction between various elements of society, and helped him understand
184 BOOK REVIEWS

better how economic developments transformed people’s outlooks, habits,

and ideas’ (p. 11). Drolet also argues that although Tocqueville never saw
himself primarily as a political economist, he clearly understood how political
economy could be used to explore general questions about democracy. This
thesis challenges the orthodox view articulated by (among others) Furet, who
once claimed that Tocqueville was never really interested in economics as an
independent dimension of human life or as a basic mechanism of change.
The book is divided into three parts. The first examines Tocqueville’s ideas
on society, economy and democracy. It includes important chapters on
Tocqueville’s reading of Say, Malthus and Villeneuve-Bargemont as well
as the dialogue between Tocqueville and Guizot. Part Two looks at
Tocqueville’s opinions on social reform, with special reference to his thoughts
on prison reform and his investigations into the causes of poverty and the situ-
ation of abandoned children. The last part of the book examines Tocqueville’s
ideas on democracy and revolution and contains detailed analyses of Volume
Two of Democracy (1840) and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856).
One of the most valuable chapters of Drolet’s book explores Tocqueville’s
dialogue with J.B. Say. According to Drolet, Tocqueville fully understood the
economic and political implications of Say’s ideas that challenged the pri-
mary role of agriculture and the power of landed aristocracy. Tocqueville was
also attentive to Say’s ideas on the relationship between self-interest and good
government in modern society. Drolet argues that “Tocqueville’s description
of American democracy uncannily resembled Say’s description of the market
economy in the Cours complet’ (p. 65). Yet, inspired by the Christian political
economy of Villeneuve-Bargemont, Tocqueville eventually came to advocate
a more traditional view rooted in the belief that small- and medium-scale agri-
culture rather than industry should have priority in the use of a nation’s
resources. By meditating on Say, Tocqueville realized the complexity of the
relationship between liberty and prosperity. Tocqueville, argues Drolet, oscil-
lated between understanding liberty as independent of commerce and as stem-
ming from it. While emphasizing the importance of mores and customs, he
was also prepared to affirm liberty as independent of its association with man-
ners, customs, modes of thought and laws. In Drolet’s opinion, this is one of
the most original and innovative aspects of Tocqueville’s thought.
Like Gannett, Drolet claims that in all his writings Tocqueville pursued an
important political goal. Believing in the importance of enlightened politics in
an age of mass democracy, he sought to convince his compatriots of the need
for greater civic and political participation and for finding a decent compro-
mise between the interests of various social and political groups.
Tocqueville’s new science of politics, based on a close interaction between
theory and practice, was the response to the chailenge of educating democ-
racy. The use of statistics, argues Drolet (perhaps overstating this point),
enabled Tocqueville to create a large body of particular facts that could then
 BOOK REVIEWS 185

be integrated into his analysis ofthe general facts of democratic society. Thus,
the particular facts of crime and poverty revealed something about the general
facts of society. In Drolet’s view, the study of American prisons influenced
Tocqueville’s selection of topics for Democracy in America, most notably in
the chapters on judicial power, lawyers in America, the effects of demography
on public morality, and the effects of private morality on public manners. The
examination of prisons offered insights into the relation between citizens and
government and revealed important information about American society’s
governing customs, laws, religious beliefs and philosophical ideas.
In another important chapter, Drolet shows how Tocqueville analysed pau-
perism within the larger context of the development of democracy and in rela-
tion to social justice and political stability. Like Malthus, Tocqueville
understood the close relation between combating poverty and crime, the rise
of industry, and the growth of the working-class population. Drolet argues
that Tocqueville’s visits to England and Ireland were catalysts for his thinking
on the issues of political economy and poverty, his rejection of a legal right to
welfare, and his endorsement of private charity. Tocqueville believed that the
principle of a legal right to welfare made it in practice impossible to distin-
guish between the undeserving and the deserving poor and fostered class con-
flict, thus weakening the bonds of community. For Tocqueville, the solution
was the creation of private charities linking private and local initiatives. He
also emphasized the importance of widespread property ownership to lessen
dependency, economic crises and poverty.
Perhaps the most controversial conclusion of Drolet’s book is that
Tocqueville “was very sensitive to the plight of the working classes and the
poor’ (p. 161). Sheldon Wolin has recently taken Tocqueville to task for hav-
ing misunderstood the rise of socialism and the situation of the working
classes. Drolet offers a different perspective on this issue, demonstrating that
Tocqueville proposed to reform the whole system of taxation so as to dimin-
ish the burdens on the poor by increasing slightly those on the rich. His pro-
posals for welfare, Drolet claims, were equally far-reaching, but they ought to
be related to his general reflections on economy and responsibility. Workers,
Tocqueville thought, must be given the feeling for and the habits of propri-
etorship and encouraged to build up a capital fund for investment. To this
effect, Drolet shows, Tocqueville envisaged increasing the number of saving
banks, monts-de-piété, mutual aid societies and charitable workshops, estab-
lishing free schools and laws restricting working hours, and creating hospices
and welfare payments. The book also demonstrates that Tocqueville took a
strong interest in the issue of abandoned children and understood how this
issue related to those of poverty and crime. Drolet’s account would have
benefited, however, from a more detailed analysis of Tocqueville’s rejection
of socialism, which would have made clearer his attempt to find a third way
between economic liberalism and socialism.
186 BOOK REVIEWS

The two books reviewed here show that Tocqueville’s writings remain an
inexhaustible source of inspiration for political theorists, sociologists,
philosophers, legal scholars and historians. By approaching different aspects
of his works, Gannett and Drolet shed new light on Tocqueville’s unconven-
tional liberalism and demonstrate that his ideas retain a great measure of nor-
mative power and intellectual provocation. Although it is quite difficult to
agree on what kind of liberal Tocqueville was — Gannett argues that we
should resist the temptation to situate him too neatly within any larger tradi-
tion of liberalism — this ambiguity will continue to fascinate Tocqueville’s
interpreters in the years ahead.
Aurelian Craiutu
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON

William Godwin, History of the Commonwealth of England, with a new

introduction by John Morrow (Thoemmes Press: Bristol, 2002), 8 vols.,
2510 pp., £595.00/$895.00, ISBN 1 84371 004 8.

Willliam Godwin’s History of the English Commonwealth, written in his old

age and published in four volumes between 1824 and 1828, is the forgotten
history of the civil wars. Though overshadowed from 1845 by Carlyle’s
Cromwell, it was not eclipsed by it and it remained an essential guide until the
publication of S.R. Gardiner’s History late in the century. Its influence is ini-
tially surprising, for while an ever-growing number of readers identified with
the parliamentarian cause, few went so far as to share Godwin’s admiration
for its republican phase, the rule of the Commonwealth of 1649-53. At times
Godwin, saluting ‘the immortal love of liberty which now glowed in such a
multitude of bosoms’ (II, 99), or hailing the Greek and Roman attributes of his
English heroes, seems merely to echo the histrionic republicanism of Cathar-
ine Macaulay half a century earlier. Yet his narrative differs significantly
from hers.
This was partly a matter of method. Goodwin was energetic and thoughtful
in his use of sources. Though for much of the time he kept to familiar collec-
tions of memoirs and letters, he examined them with a newly critical eye. He
also went beyond them, reading widely in the Thomason Tracts, making
unprecedented use of the Lords and Commons Journals and (though on a lim-
ited scale) of the newly ordered material in the Public Record Office. The
book also reflects shifts in the historical philosophy of English radicalism
since Macaulay’s publication. Macaulay, in line with the eighteenth century’s
yearning for incorruptibility, favoured the memory of inflexible statesmen
 BOOK REVIEWS 187

who had resisted contamination by the pressures and temptations of power

and office. Though Godwin can himself applaud ‘inflexible integrity’ (II,
201), he generally espouses a political realism that distances him from
eighteenth-century interpreters. As nineteenth-century historians would
increasingly do, he recognizes the impossibility of political achievement
without compromise, and disclaims what he calls the ‘unyielding virtue’ of
republicans who, however understandably, refused to accommodate them-
selves to the rule of Cromwell (IV, 271n.). While one half of Godwin’s mind
adheres to the traditional republican view of Oliver as the villainous apostate
usurper whose destruction of the Commonwealth was a ‘sacrilegious’ and
fatal blow to liberty (III, 304), he also supplies a novel acknowledgement of
Cromwell’s stature and humanity and is ready to ‘do justice’ not only to the
man but to the benefits of his rule (IV, 461). Another shift of values is
reflected in Godwin’s assessment of Puritanism, the creed which had so
embarrassed eighteenth-century admirers of the parliamentarian cause but
which would delight most nineteenth-century ones. Like his republican pre-
decessors, he is averse to ‘fanaticism’, but he takes it to have been an excess,
rather than the substance, of the Puritan movement, in which (especially on
its Independent wing) he finds an instrument of human fulfilment and uplift
in secular spheres. In this he stands early in a line of nineteenth-century writ-
ers who had renounced their own early Dissent but who found high virtue
among the forebears of Nonconformity.
Ultimately, however, Godwin prefers the “soaring and independent spirit of
a genuine republican’ to the finest of Christian virtues (IV, 104). Republican
rule is the only form of government that “can raise human beings to [a] gener-
ous, honest and independent tone of mind’ (II, 549). Since 1688 the English
had settled instead for mere ‘negative liberty’ and ‘personal liberty’, which
had made them ‘selfish’ and ‘glaringly deficient in public spirit and public
virtue’ (II, 497, 499). Liberty, they failed to grasp, ‘is merely a means to an
end’, valuable only insofar as it promotes ‘knowledge, virtue, happiness’ (III,
189). Godwin’s difficulty, in a work of which only a quarter is occupied by
the rule of the republic (see II, ‘Advertisement’), is to make republicanism the
centre of his story. He rejoices in the eloquence and courage of Sir Henry
Vane and of those familiar heroes of the self-styled patriots of the eighteenth
century, John Milton and Algernon Sidney, all of whom he met in the largely
secularized guises in which historians and posthumous editors had clothed
them. To move beyond them he has to find republicanism in figures who were
devoid of it (II, 202, 353; III, 304), and to conflate the values of James Har-
rington and other republican thinkers with those of the less cerebral and the
often parochial outlooks of most of the MPs who held power from 1649. He
would like to make the early leaders of the Roundhead cause, John Pym and
John Hampden, perhaps even Sir Edward Coke who is the first on his list of
parliamentary heroes (I, 7), proto-republicans. Yet his honesty and his
188 BOOK REVIEWS

alertness to the constitutional conservatism of the Long Parliament (II, 33-4)

restrain him from pressing that case. So he distinguishes between ‘the friends
of constitutional liberty in the early period of the civil war, and the
commonwealthsmen afterwards’ (IV, 585). It was the virtue of the first group
to have paved the way for the second. Yet its members can look less like
anticipators of republicanism than spokesmen for ‘negative liberty’ and for
the narrow legalism which, in Godwin’s scheme of thought, republicanism
renounces.
John Morrow has performed a most valuable service by bringing out this
photographic reproduction of a scarce text, to which he supplies a perceptive
Introduction, though his expertise in early nineteenth-century historiography
would have profitably sustained a fuller discussion. His emphasis on the simi-
larities between Godwin’s historical teaching and the principles voiced both
in his Enquiry concerning Political Justice and in his fiction deserves to
encourage broader approaches to Godwin’s writings, which, in common with
those of so many versatile authors, have suffered the modern fate of
compartmentalization among the academic disciplines. Godwin’s reflections
on the relationship between historical and fictional writing (IV, 530-1),
which are mirrored elsewhere in his writings (see his Collected Novels and
Memoirs, V, 320-1), can be set beside the musings on the civil war that are fit-
tingly annexed to the Penguin edition of Caleb Williams. The unexpected
allusion to the civil war and to John Hampden in Mary Shelley’s Franken-
stein, a work published in the year that Godwin urged his daughter to write
‘lives of the commonwealthsmen’, is another pointer to the overlap of fact and
fiction in Godwin’s mind and circle.
The Introduction has tiny slips. The historian of the Cromwell family, Mark
Noble, is misspelled, as is Marchamont Nedham’s newsbook Mercurius
Politicus, while the Roundhead leader Oliver St John is misnamed (pp. xiii,
xv). It is a pity that the opportunity has not been taken to provide an index,
especially as the helpfulness of a modern photographic reprint of another
work, one which can usefully be read alongside Godwin’s and which comple-
ments his combination of republicanism and scholarship, is enhanced by the
addition of an index: the edition by J.T. Rutt, published in 1828, of the diary
of Thomas Burton, the MP of the 1650s.
Blair Worden
UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
 New Labour’ s Old Roots: Revisionist Thinkers in
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Patrick Diamond (ed.)
New Labour was not conjured up out of thin air — it only
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‘This book asks a question to which many of us would
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 HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT — STYLE SHEET

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 CONTENTS

1 How the Sophists Taught Virtue:

Exhortation and Association D.D. Corey

Pal Justice, Power and Athenian Imperialism:

An Ideological Moment in Thucydides’ History E. Podoksik

43 The Book that Never Was: Montesquieu’s

Considerations on the Romans in
Historical Context P.A. Rahe

90 Gladstone, Religious Freedom and

Practical Reasoning D.J. Lorenzo

120 What’s in a Name? Republicanism and

Conservatism in France 1871-1879 M. Hawkins

143 Book Reviews

Volume XXVI_ Issue 1

Spring 2005
 I S T O R
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 HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT
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Department of Politics, University of Exeter
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(Kent), Professor Michael Oakeshott (L.S.E), Professor Dr Heiko Oberman
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ARTS & HUMANITIES CITATION INDEX
CURRENT CONTENTS/ARTS & HUMANITIES
HISTORICAL ABSTRACTS & AMERICA: HISTORY AND LIFE
INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOK REVIEWS
INTERNATIONAL BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PERIODICAL LITERATURE
INTERNATIONAL MEDIEVAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE ABSTRACTS
PERIODICA ISLAMICA
THE PHILOSOPHER’S INDEX
POLITICAL SCIENCE ABSTRACTS
 CONTENTS

189 The Uses and Abuses of Philosophy: Aristotle’s

Politics V as an Example E. Garver

209 Two Cities and Two Loves: Imitation in

Augustine’s Moral Psychology and
Political Theory J.M. Parrish

236 Was Ptolemy of Lucca a Civic Humanist?

Reflections on a Newly-Discovered Manuscript J. La Salle &
of Hans Baron J.M. Blythe

266 Economic Nationalism and the ‘Spirit of Capitalism’:

Civic Collectivism and National Wealth in the
Thought of John Fortescue C. Nederman

284 Grotius and Pufendorf on the Right of Necessity J. Salter

303 Aristotle, Diderot, Liberalism and the Idea of

‘Middle Class’: A Comparison of Two Contexts
of Emergence of a Metaphorical Formation E. Adamoysky

334 Was Fichte an Ethnic Nationalist? On Cultural

Nationalism and Its Double A. Abizadeh

361 Book Reviews

Volume XXVI_ Issue 2

Summer 2005
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 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY:
ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS V AS AN EXAMPLE

Eugene Garver'

Abstract: Virtuous people, unlike the rich and poor, do not form factions. What,
then, is the role of philosophical argument within political argument? Politics V can be
read as a handbook of practical advice that will help any rulers to stay in power, but it
in fact develops a more subtle, and radical, role for philosophy in political argument.
Like virtue, philosophy cannot be partisan, but the philosophical understanding of fac-
tion that Aristotle presents here makes its own contribution to political stability.

Erotic necessities are probably better than geometrical necessities at per-

suading and compelling most people (Republic V.458d).’

Philosophy as Useless and as Authoritarian

Thales was the first philosopher, and charges of the irrelevance of philosophy
began with the story of him watching the stars and so falling into a well. A few
generations later, Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens and
ethical philosophy generated a new and contrary accusation, that of imposing
a grand rational plan on people and so denying human choice. Philosophy is
either as useless as Thales or as authoritarian as Socrates.’
Politics I looks like a paradigm of philosophy, with all the standard dan-
gers of possible uselessness and imperialism. It establishes scientific defini-
tions for key terms, formulates demonstrative connections among the terms,
and erects normative standards concerning justice to which all states and citi-
zens should be responsive. It defines city, citizen and constitution, and shows
that, of the three, constitution is the fundamental term which sets the meaning
for city and citizen.*
Book III also provides the normative standards for politics. Correct consti-
tutions aim at the good of all citizens, while in corrupt constitutions the rulers

' Regents Professor of Philosophy, Saint John’s University, Collegeville, MN,

56321, USA. Email: egarver @csbsju.edu
2 Ou gedmetrikais he, all’ erétikais anagkais, hai kinduneuousin ekinon drimuterai
einai pros to peithein te kai elkein ton polun ledn. Reeve translates it slightly more liter-
ally as ‘the necessities aren’t geometrical but erotic, and they’re probably better than the
others at persuading and compelling the majority of people’. Plato, Republic (2nd edn.),
trans. G.M.A. Grube, revised by C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, 1992).
3 ‘Of all those who start out on philosophy . . . most become quite queer, not to say
completely vicious; while the ones who seem perfectly decent, do nevertheless suffer at
least one consequence of the practice you are praising — they become useless to cities’
(Republic V1.487c6—d5).
4 Politics W.1.1275a22, b13-21, 5.1278al5.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005
190 E. GARVER

try to benefit only themselves.” Correct constitutions live by rule of law, while
deviant constitutions rule by decree and the individual decisions of the rulers.
Correct constitutions aim at living well, while corrupt constitutions, like vul-
gar men, aim at life itself, at material goods such as wealth or honour. All con-
stitutions, correct or not, embody their own sense ofjustice; each conception
of justice is only a partial truth.°
If Aristotle succeeds in constructing this train of definitions and demonstra-
tions, he will make it seem obvious that constitution is the fundamental term,
and that it defines citizen and polis. The necessities of philosophical demon-
strations can be seen as empty tautologies and circularities — philosophy as
useless — or as an iron cage of necessity denying choice and autonomy —
philosophy as domination. To get a little distance from these necessities, we
should ask: When Aristotle says that the constitution defines who is a citizen,
what’s the alternative? Who could disagree? What is at stake in this thesis?
In fact, the priority of the constitution is not as obvious as he makes it seem.
One could instead put the polis first. The polis stays the same despite constitu-
tional changes. The polis is defined by historical continuity and the nomos of
tradition. Alternatively, the people, the citizens, could come first. Start from
people with natural rights. A sufficient number of those make a polis. In both
those cases, something outside politics, history or natural rights, defines the
central concepts of politics. Aristotle has avoided the two dangers of philoso-
phy that I have represented by Thales and Socrates, by not standing outside
politics. However, that success creates a new danger of abuse of philosophy,
that of becoming a partisan.

Philosophy as Partisan
If philosophy stands outside politics, it is either useless or imperial, but if phi-
losophy exists within politics, then it can be partisan and ideological. The
issue of the practical uses of philosophy concerns the relationship between
Aristotle’s discourse and thought and the discourse and thought of the states-
man. Plato is criticized in Book II because he, and the others discussed there,
try to solve political problems in a way that preempts any further deliberation
in particular circumstances. How does Aristotle carve out a role for philoso-
phy that doesn’t usurp the workings of phronésis?’

> Ibid., 6.1278b30-1279a21.

6 T have explored the argument of Book III in E. Garver, ‘Politics HI and the Incom-
pleteness of the Normative’, Ancient Philosophy, 18 (1998), pp. 381-416.
7 The right property arrangements are supposed to be a permanent escape from the
contingencies of deliberation. Aristotle’s own emphasis on education as the fundamental
way of addressing political problems makes political wisdom a continuing task rather
than a settled body of knowledge. Aristotle is just as confident as Plato that he knows the
truth about what is the best life; he differs on the relevance of that knowledge to practice.
When education is fundamental to politics, there will be a continuity between political
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 19]

This ambiguity in the relationship between the Politics and ordinary politi-
cal activity is reflected most crucially in the recurring issue about justice: is
justice according to merit a third conception of justice alongside democratic
and oligarchic justice, which respectively distribute offices according to
equal freedom or unequal wealth, or are there only two possibilities, arithme-
tic vs. geometric equality, with justice according to merit a variant of the lat-
ter?® The difficulty of securely placing justice according to merit as either a
third kind ofjustice or as a species of geometric equality alongside oligarchic
justice, present throughout the Politics, becomes especially acute in Book V.
It would be much easier to understand the relation between philosophy and
politics if justice according to merit were clearly either a third kind ofjustice
or a kind of geometric equality. But either univocal answer to that question
would provide a reductive answer to the question of the uses of philosophy.
Relative to Book III, Book V is practical politics, and problems about the
uses and abuses of philosophy emerge acutely there. The discussion of Book
III generates a pair of issues about the uses of philosophy for Book V. First,
Book III shows that ‘who is a citizen’, and what citizenship involves, depend
on the constitution. Book V raises questions about how the statesman is to
make use of this analysis. Those establishing a constitution dictate who is a
citizen, and Aristotle has proved that there can be no appeal beyond what they
do. Factions, though, arise because that direct imitation of Aristotle’s argu-
ment backfires. What, then, is the proper use of philosophy?
Second, since Aristotle identifies the partial conceptions of justice on
which all constitutions, or at least all democracies and oligarchies, rely, he
himself must have a conception of absolute justice relative to which he can
declare the conceptions ofjustice embodied in particular constitutions as par-
tial. He does: such absolute justice is simply proportion to merit. One must
wonder whether the truth Aristotle knows can be directly instantiated in a con-
stitution of its own. That is precisely the question of the uses of philosophy. If
absolute justice can be directly instantiated, does it follow that that is what we
should do? If it cannot be directly instantiated, what does that failure tell us
about the uses of philosophy, and about the nature of political wisdom?

philosophy and the activity of the statesman. As we will see, Book V ends with a criti-
cism of Plato. Plato gets wrong the answers to my two questions. He fails practically and
ethically. There is, according to Plato, no deliberation in an ideal state because it is ruled
by theoretical reason, and no deliberation about constitutional change either because it is
subject to necessity rather than practical thought.
8 Aristotle ‘Politics’ Books V and VI, ed. David Keyt (Oxford, 1999), p. 147 (note to
V.101310b31—40). ‘The word avia is a key term in Aristotle’s political philosophy and
sometimes has a broad and sometimes a narrow sense. In the section before us he uses the
word in a narrow sense in which it signifies one specific standard of worth, the aristo-
cratic (see also III.5.1278a19-—20), rather than in the broad sense of his theory ofjustice
where it is a mere place-holder for an unspecified standard of worth (see EN
V.3.1131a24—9 and the note to 1.1301a25—b4 above).’
192 E. GARVER

Puzzles about the uses and abuses of philosophy come from the ambiguity
in whether Aristotle is a partisan in disputes about justice, speaking in the
name of virtue against those who will make justice proportional either to free-
dom or wealth, or speaking as a neutral analyst standing apart from factional
disputes. The dangers of philosophy I have outlined suggest that neither parti-
san nor analyst can be a stable role for Aristotelian political philosophy. The
problem ofjustice is the substantive version of the problem of the relation
between political philosophy and practical wisdom, between Aristotle and the
statesman.
Constitutions are characterized by their conceptions ofjustice. Both Books
III and V say that democracy and oligarchy judge partially, thinking that
equality or inequality in one respect means equality or inequality as such.
All fasten on a certain sort ofjustice, but proceed only to a certain point, and
do not speak of the whole ofjustice in its authoritative sense. For example,
justice is held to be equality, and it is, but for equals and not for all; and
inequality is held to be just and is indeed, but for equals and not for all; for
they disregard this element of persons and judge badly.”
Though all agree about the just and the proportionately equal, they make a
mistake about it .. . For democracy arose as a result of those who are equal
in some respect supposing themselves to be wholly equal . . . whereas oli-
garchy arose as a result of those who are unequal in one respect conceiving
themselves to be wholly unequal . . .’.'°
But Book V omits a normative consideration present in Book III. In H1.9,
demociats and oligarchs are doubly mistaken. They not only generalize about
equality and inequality, thinking either that someone equal in some respect is
simply equal, or that someone unequal in some respect is simply unequal, but
in addition, ‘of the most authoritative consideration they say nothing’.'’ Like
the democrats and oligarchs, Aristotle himself in Book V says nothing ofjus-
tice according to merit and its connection to the end of the city, the good life.
Hence the conclusion of III.9 is absent from Book V: “Those who contrib-
ute most to a partnership [in living well] have a greater part in the city than
9 Politics I1I.9.1280a9-13.
10 Tbid., V.1.1301a26-33. The Greek text of the Politics used here is W.D. Ross,
Aristotelis: Political (Oxford, 1957). My translations are based on Carnes Lord, Aris-
totle: The Politics (Chicago, 1984); I make some modifications, and always substitute
‘constitution’ for Lord’s preferred ‘regime’. For the Greek text of the Nicomachean Eth-
ics, | have used Bywater’s Oxford Classical Text edition (Oxford, 1894). I have con-
sulted a variety of translations to keep the work fresh in my mind. Most of my translations
are based primarily on, Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence C. Irwin (Indian-
apolis, 1985). For the Rhetoric, the text is R. Kassel, Aristotelis Ars Rhetorica (Berlin,
1971). My translations are based on Anstotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse,
newly translated with Introduction, Notes and Appendixes by George A. Kennedy (New
York and Oxford, 1991).
'! Politics 111.9.1280a25.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 193

those who are equal or greater in freedom and family but unequal in political
virtue, or those who outdo them in wealth but are outdone in virtue’ .'* Book V
is silent where Book II offered normative standards. Is this a sign of the use-
lessness of philosophy?
There is good reason for the normative standards of Book III to disappear
when Aristotle faces the more practical issues of Book V. Book III notices the
variability in the nature of citizen and constitution in different poleis. There
are better and worse constitutions and so better and worse ways of defining
citizen, but that doesn’t mean that some constitutions fail to define citizen.
What a given constitution says goes. I may have given my son a name that will
cause him no end of unhappiness in his life, but I have still named him. Nor-
mative distinctions among constitutions seem irrelevant to the constitution’s
power to decide on the nature of citizenship.
At the same time that philosophy becomes useless when it faces issues that
concern power, philosophy also looks positively pernicious as it becomes a
weapon of power of its own, which is what happens when the normative ori-
entation of Book III is abandoned. One of the appeals of philosophy is that it
rises above contests of strength to decide things by more objective standards.
The corresponding danger is that such ascent is just another way of exercising
power. The extreme democrats and oligarchs of Book V try to make the defi-
nition of citizen into a performative utterance in which saying makes it so.
Who is a citizen is defined by the constitution; therefore by being in charge of
the constitution we can define citizens as we like, and there is no appeal to a
standard beyond what we say, no appeal to heaven. These democrats and
oligarchs are simply doing to their opponents what Aristotle himself does in
Book III. This is the revenge of the politicians on the philosophers: good phi-
losophy becomes bad rhetoric.'* Democrats and oligarchs legislate their
opponents out ofthe state through their definitions of citizenship, constitution
and justice. I want to figure out what precisely they do wrong in seeming to
follow Aristotle.

Philosophical Necessity and Coercion

The coherence and interdependence among the definitions in Book III is part
of their scientific character. Performative utterances, in which saying makes it
so, and to which there is no reply, are the practical imitations of necessary
philosophical connections. And the extreme democrat or oligarch imitates
Book II] in another respect. These rulers don’t simply take control of the state
for themselves; they do so in the name ofjustice. ‘Many different constitu-
tions have come into being because, though all agree about the just and the
12 Tbid., 1281a3-7.
!13 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. and trans. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1998),
p. 32: ‘The method of starting with definitions and avoiding equivocation is of course the
proper method for those who leave no opportunity for counter-argument.’
194 E. GARVER

proportionately equal, they make a mistake (hamartia) about it’.'* These cor-
rupt rulers are in the happy position ofbelieving that whatever is in their inter-
est is just. They rule for the sake of the ruling class, not the polis as a whole,
but they believe they rule for the benefit of the whole, since they get to define
the whole. Aristotle’s neutral analysis can be used as a weapon by whoever is
in power. That by itself is not criticism of Aristotle: there are no philosophical
reflections that cannot be so used.'° But it will be a flaw in Aristotle if he has
no philosophical response.
Prior to a response, I can at least offer a diagnosis. The extreme democrats
and oligarchs pictured in Book V go wrong because they want convention to
do a job that only nature can do. The practical discourse of the statesman can-
not fully imitate Aristotle’s own performance. It is true, as Aristotle demon-
strated, that constitutions define citizenship. Therefore politicians infer that
they can make their constitution define citizenship as they like. But they’re
more ambitious than that. They claim both that whatever they say goes and
that they are right, two assertions that don’t sit easily together. If their dicta
about who is a citizen and what citizenship is are claims about justice, then
they are responsive to criteria outside themselves, and so cannot be performa-
tives. If saying makes it so, then the propositions are not just except insofar as
justice is defined by might. Without their adherence to partial definitions of
justice, there would be no factions fighting over justice, only two sides com-
peting for power. Aristotle does not take the assertions of justice in stasis as
mere cover for the play of power.
If all rulers were fully successful in combining performative power with
justice, as those in Books VI and VIII are, factions would not arise. The defi-
nitions proclaimed by those rulers succeed not because they are better at
performative utterances than the rulers of inferior states, but because in their
ideal world considerations of birth, wealth and merit coincide. Only in the
ideal state would we not have to worry about whether absolute justice was a
third formula for justice alongside democratic and oligarchic conceptions.
When aconstitution embodies absolute justice, philosophy has direct implica-
tions for practice and does not have to try to be a neutral arbiter or a partisan.
God’s propositions are performative — let there be light — and are just — it
was good, very good. The judgments of statesmen in the ideal state are

'4 Politics V.1.1301a25-26.

'S “As a human being is the best of the animals when perfected, so when separated
from law and justice he is worst of all. For injustice is harshest when it has weapons, anda
human being grows up with weapons for virtue and phronésis to use, which are particu-
larly open to being used for opposite purposes’ (Politics 1.2.1253a32-35; see Republic
1.333e—334a). ‘If itis argued that great harm can be done by unjustly using such power of
words [as rhetoric], this objection applies to all good things except for virtue, and most of
all to the most useful things, like strength, health, and military strategy’ (Aristotle, Rhet-
oric 1.1.1355b2-S).
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 195

similar. But what can philosophy say in Books IV—VI, where attempts at such
direct application generate my choice of sins?

Philosophy and Appeals to Nature

Since I will praise Aristotle for recognizing the limitations of philosophy and
leaving room for a political wisdom imbued with character, I want to contrast
the complexities of Book V with the simplicities of Book I, as well as those of
Books VII and VIII. Who ought to be a citizen is a different sort of question
from the question of who should be a slave addressed in Book I. The power of
philosophy to answer particular practical questions is smaller — and the need
for phronésis consequently greater — when the issue is the relation of free
people to each other than when it is a question of the relation of natural mas-
ters and slaves. The nature discerned by the philosopher has direct practical
implications for slavery, but not for political questions. Politicians who try to
imitate Aristotle by making the definition of citizen into a performative utter-
ance elide that difference. They end up treating free people as slaves as a
result of confusing political with despotic rule. Therefore the central criticism
Aristotle gives of Plato in Book II is that Plato reduced the practical unity of
the polis to the natural unity of the family, destroying the polis in the process.
A natural slave ought to be a slave in any polis. Conventional variations in
who is a slave are errors. But there is no similarly natural answer to the ques-
tion of who should be a citizen. Answers to that latter question have a variabil-
ity that means that convention cannot be abandoned in favour of nature. The
pre-political inquiry of Book I is far simpler than the questions central to poli-
tics itself. Seeing who ought to be a citizen, and making sense out of that ques-
tion, take more practical intelligence than knowing who should be a slave.
The Politics begins and ends with practical situations in which argument is
unnecessary.'° Slaves must be made to obey. If words work better than force,
by all means the master should use words. But commands are not arguments,
and there is no talking back. Should a wife, child or slave dispute the head of
household’s claim to rule, they should be punished and put in their place.
These are not disagreements to be taken seriously. At the other extreme, in the
perfect state, since claims to rule based on freedom, wealth and virtue coin-
cide, there are no disputes about justice. Slaves may be necessary, as Book I
argues, but can never be parts of the state. In the ideal state of Books VII and
VIII, mechanics and labourers are similarly necessary conditions that are not
parts of the state, while other states include such people as citizens.

'6 | don’t mean this as an argument about the order of the books. But it does make the
ordering that ends with the ideal state appealing. Equally, if one prefers the other order-
ing, renaming Books IV—V1 as Books VI-VIII, then the Politics will move towards prac-
tical problems for which the uses of philosophy are increasingly indirect. That ordering
has its attractions, too. More on this at the end of this article.
196 E. GARVER

Philosophy and Constitutional Stability

Disputes about justice are a permanent part of the circumstances of politics,
and Book V looks at how those disputes cause factions and generate problems
of stability. In such circumstances, can philosophy be anything more than
rhetoric deployed as a weapon? Does the variability of politics silence
philosophy? To illustrate the difference between the direct use of philosophy
with regard to slavery and its indirect use for strictly political questions, con-
sider these lines from Book IV:
If one were to regard soul as more a part of an animal than body, things of
this sort — the military element and the element sharing in justice as it
relates to adjudication, and in addition the deliberative element . . . must be
‘regarded as more a part of cities than things relating to necessary needs."
In Book I’s discussion of slavery, the mind/body analogy made slaves into
necessary conditions rather than parts of the state. In Books IV—VI these
things are a matter of degree. The determinacy of who is a natural slave is
replaced here by a flexibility of a more circumstantial inquiry. What does phi-
losophy have to say in these more contingent circumstances in which words
are both opposed to power and are a form of power? The issue is whether there
is arole for philosophy beyond becoming a rhetorical weapon.
Philosophy gives less determinate answers to political questions because
people grasp only a part of justice. Oligarchs and democrats who aim at
wealth and freedom engage in praxis, although a limited form, while slaves
are merely instruments of praxis. Oligarchs and democrats do not aim at
wealth and freedom as opposed to aiming at living well; wealth and freedom
are their ways of living well. ‘Oligarchies made wealth a thing of honor’.'®
‘Mankind meet together and maintain the political community also for the
sake of mere life (in which there is possibly some noble element).’'? Those
who aim at wealth and freedom have their own sense of justice. While it
diverges from justice according to merit, it still has to be taken into account,
unlike the desires and opinions of slaves, which can be dismissed as simply
mistaken. For the philosopher to step in and give his own full account of jus-
tice in such a situation would reduce the claims of oligarchs and democrats to
rationalizations.
In Book III constitutions that aim at freedom or wealth are corrupt constitu-
tions, but here in Book V, aiming at wealth and freedom, as oligarchs and
'7 Politics 1V.4.1291a24—28. See too VI.8.1321b6—7: ‘Without the necessary offices
it is impossible for a city to exist; without those that relate to its good arrangement and
order, it is impossible for it to be finely administered.’ Books VII and VIII can follow
Books I-III in opposing life to the good life, while in Books IV—VI, living well will be
living, aiming at wealth and honour, but in such a way that the good life emerges as the
perfection, not the contrary, of such more vulgar ends.
'8 Politics 11.15.1286b15.
'9 Tbid., 111.6.1278b25.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY ee,

democrats do, is a truncated way of aiming at the good life, not a matter of sat-
isfying immediate needs, which is supposedly all that slaves are capable of.
Direct philosophical intervention would denigrate those partial ways of aim-
ing at living well.*° Debunking the claims to justice on the part of democrats
and oligarchs will be philosophy as authoritarian, making things worse. The
distinction between correct and corrupt constitutions, so fundamental to Book
III, is absent from Book V. When Aristotle talks about the measures statesmen
can take to improve the constitution, it is unclear whether the reformed
democracy or oligarchy becomes a polity or aristocracy or simply a better
democracy or oligarchy, unclear because those distinctions do not exist for
the statesman of Book V.”! The distinction between correct and corrupt con-
stitutions, so fundamental to Book III, is absent from Book V. Book V doesn’t
treat aristocracies and polities in chapters S—7 and monarchies in chapters 10
and 11 any differently from how it analyses the democracy and oligarchy.
The fact that the correct/corrupt distinction, crucial to Book III, does no
work in Book V, is symptomatic of the difference between Books HI and V
that constitutes the practical use of philosophy. When these normative dis-
tinctions disappear, philosophy is not silent, but Book V will not distinguish
preserving the state from improving it. The statesman in circumstances of fac-
tion achieves reform of the state only by aiming at stability.”
Because oligarchs and democrats aim at justice and therefore at living
well,” albeit in an incomplete way, their voices need to be heard. Democrats
and oligarchs assume that because they are equal or unequal in some salient
respect, they are equal or unequal in virtue.** While their claims to justice may
be partial, these are claims about justice. Factions are not mere conflicts of
interest, but conflicts between people who think they have justice on their
side. Therefore philosophy has to figure out a way to become dialogical. How

20 Tbid., 1.2.1252b28-29.
21 Peter Simpson, A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle (Chapel
Hill and London, 1998), p. 288, n. 8: ‘Some scholars believe that Aristotle’s proposals
for reforming regimes in the books that follow all involve changing the existing regime
into another one, as say into a measured form from an extreme one so, R.G. Mulgan, Aris-
totle’s Political Theory, An Introduction for Students of Political Theory (Oxford, 1977),
p. 134, and C.J. Rowe, ‘Aims and Methods in Aristotle’s Politics’, Classical Quarterly,
27 (1977), pp. 159-72. But in fact a regime that is made less extreme, or stabilized where
it is, is reformed but is still the same regime, for it will still have the same ruling body
(which is what defines regimes) save that this ruling body will be less self-destructive in
the way it exercises control.’
22 This thesis about Politics V requires separate treatment, which Igive in E. Garver,
‘Factions and Constitutional Change’, Polity (forthcoming), and in E. Garver, “The
Revolt of the Just’, Aristotle’s Politics and Contemporary Politics, ed. Lenn Goodman
and Robert Tallesio (forthcoming).
23 Politics 11.9.1280a9-11, II.13.1283a23-42, V.1.1301a25—b4.
24 Tbid., I11.9.1280a22-25, V.1.1301a28-b1.
198 E. GARVER

can statesmen use philosophy to learn how to persuade, rather than command,
the opposition?

Philosophy as Dialogical
The most obvious way for philosophy to enter the world of factions is to
become rhetorical and supply arguments on both sides of any question. Phi-
losophy participates in political argument as a hired gun available for partisan
uses. Politics V doesn’t do that. Even Aristotle’s Rhetoric doesn’t present a
hired gun conception of rhetoric, and political philosophy can learn some-
thing from the Rhetoric about how to avoid this particular philosophical temp-
tation. While the art of rhetoric can find arguments on both sides, the
rhetorician shouldn’t argue indifferently on either side, like the sophist who
will advocate whatever would serve his client. ‘The orator should have the
power to convince about (peithein) opposites, as in syllogisms . . . not that we
should do both (for one ought not to convince people to do wrong), but that we
will not miss the way things really are.’”°
Both the philosopher’s advice in Book V and the rhetorician’s behaviour in
the Rhetoric are one-sided. In rhetoric, the rhetorician who follows Aristotle’s
precepts argues on the side of what is right. But Politics V sets its sights lower
than in rhetoric, on the side of the existing constitution. According to the
programme announced at the beginning of Book V, we have to understand the
causes of constitutional change, but we have to know how to preserve consti-
tutions.” Preserving the constitution is part of the statesman’s art; overthrow-
ing aconstitution is not. The rhetorician has to understand arguments on both
sides in order not to be surprised and to know which arguments to make on the
side of the right; the statesman has to know the causes of faction, not to cause
faction, but to know how to resist it. By restricting himself to methods of
achieving stability, Aristotle seems to take the side of the extreme democrats
and oligarchs who imitate him by trying to solve political problems by defini-
tional fiat. They act as though whoever is in power should stay in power, that
might makes right.
Here is where Aristotle’s own method avoids the abuses of philosophy. He
takes that partial truth grasped by democrats and oligarchs and makes it into a
complete truth, as methods of preservation become methods of converting
corrupt into correct constitutions, correct by the measure of Book V. Rhetoric
is a faculty for arguing both sides of any question, but still is oriented to truth.
The Rhetoric shows how finding arguments, even in aid of a bad or losing
cause, can be a noble activity. Political wisdom encounters a situation in
which both sides grasp partial truths about justice. It is the task of political
wisdom to preserve existing constitutions. Politics V shows how preserving

25 Aristotle, Rhetoric I.1.1355a29-32.

26 Politics V.1301a20-25.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 199

the constitution can be a noble activity. This is how philosophy can be

dialogical instead of either imperial or rhetorical. Especially in V.9, some of
the methods of preservation are actually methods for improving the constitu-
tion.”’
While for purposes of governance someone excluded from citizenship is
not a part of the state, for purposes of understanding factions, people who fail
the test of a particular constitution but who could be citizens in other poleis
still are citizens. They are citizens in the sense that they have to be persuaded,
not commanded. Definitional fiat will legislate problems out of existence, but
that is a self-defeating strategy. Monarchies no longer exist because too many
people think themselves capable of ruling and won’t recognize anyone as
superior.”® People don’t sit still for definitional fiat. Greeks show how civi-
lized they are by distinguishing between despotic and political rule, and con-
sequently between despotic and political kinds of persuasion. While Ethics
V.6 says that we can only have relations ofjustice and injustice among fellow
citizens, Politics V.8 shows that we have to have relations of justice towards
the free men who are not citizens. This is not a shift from a more idealistic to a
more realistic view, but anew challenge to political wisdom and to the uses of
philosophy.
The justice of a master and that of a father are not the same as thejustice of
citizens, though they are like it; for there can be no injustice in the unquali-
fied sense towards things that are one’s own, but a man’s chattel, and his
child until it reaches a certain age and sets up for itself, are as it were part of
himself, and no one chooses to hurt himself (for which reason there can be
no injustice towards oneself). Therefore thejustice or injustice of citizens is
not manifested in these relations; for it was as we saw according to law, and
between people naturally subject to law, and these as we saw are people
who have an equal share in ruling and being ruled.”
One should see that not only some aristocracies but even some oligarchies
last, not because the constitutions are stable, but because those occupying
the offices treat well those outside the regime as well as those in the govern-
ing body — those who do not have a share, but not acting unjustly toward
them and by bringing into the constitution those among them who have the
mark of leaders, not acting unjustly toward the ambitious by depriving them
of prerogatives or toward the many with regard to profit.*°
The partial definitions of democracy and oligarchy put those whom they
exclude into a practically unstable position, not quite out of the state and not
quite in it either, citizens by one standard and not by another. This instability

27 I consider this tacit shift from preservation to reform in Garver, ‘Factions and Con-
stitutional Change’.
28 Politics I1.1286b4—22.
29 Nicomachean Ethics V.6.1134b10-17.
39 Politics V.8.1308a3-9.
200 E. GARVER

comes from the attempted combination I noted earlier of a performative utter-

ance with claims to following normative standards outside the utterance itself.
The excluded aren’t slaves, or resident aliens, and they aren’t quite citizens
either. Faction is the rational response to such an ambiguous position.
Once the democrats and oligarchs in power realize that, they have to
rethink how to treat the opposition. Being dialogical means that the constitu-
tion should define citizenship in such a way that it continues to be a democ-
racy or an oligarchy, but with the recognition that it is one constitution among
several possibilities. While the great distinction between correct and corrupt
constitutions disappears from Book V, recognizing that one’s constitution is
one among many possibilities makes any constitution better. Specifically,
when I know that my democratic or oligarchic justice is only partial justice, I
will extend relations ofjustice to non-citizens. That is a powerful contribution
of philosophy to practice. Book HI equates the distinction between corrupt
and correct constitutions with that between constitutions that aim at mere life
and at the good life, and between those which rule for the benefit of the rulers
or for the whole polis. Book V approaches correct constitutions, the good life,
and the benefit of the whole through the statesman’s rational methods of
achieving stability. The crucial distinction is between despotism and political
rule, between command and persuasion: ‘Those constitutions that look to the
common benefit turn out, according to what is unqualifiedly just, to be cor-
rect, whereas those which look only to the benefit of the rulers are mistaken
and are deviations from the correct constitutions. For they are like rule by a
master, whereas a polis is a community of free people.’*!
The political science of Book III constructs the strongest scientific connec-
tions between terms: necessary connections. The strongest corresponding
practical connection is a performative utterance. Science succeeds when its
opposition is silenced. There are no counterarguments against necessary con-
nections. Performative utterances, in which saying makes it so, similarly
admit no rejoinders. But praxis fails when it tries to silence the opposition.
Necessary connections become coercive. Tyranny, we learn at the end of
Book V, is unstable. The statesman is better off with a weaker connection
between constitution, city and citizen, not a definition of constitution in which
saying makes it so, but a persuasive and circumstantial definition of constitu-
tion which establishes probable, and desirable, connections between constitu-
tion, city and citizen.”

31 Jbid., 1M1.6.1279a16-21.
32 For a contemporary example of what is to one party philosophical necessity, but
looks to another party like coercion, see Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and
Idolatry (Princeton and Oxford, 2001), p. 20: “The idea of rights as trumps implies that
when rights are introduced into a political discussion, they serve to resolve the discus-
sion. In fact, the epposite is the case. When political demands are turned into rights
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 201

It might sound odd to prefer a weaker argument, but there is an important

sense in which we should. Book V is one long argument that shows that mod-
eration, which might otherwise be seen as weakness, is the source of stability
and of political excellence. In the same way, politicians should not think that
they can profit from the necessary connections of the philosopher. Outsiders
have to be persuaded that they will not be injured by being excluded, and that
others should rule. As Aristotle says: ‘People governed in this way are neces-
sarily governed well; the offices will always be in the hands of the best, while
the people being willing and not envious of the respectable.’*’ The active citi-
zenship of the Greek polis takes energy, commitment and abilities that many
people don’t have and don’t want to have, so it would be easier to persuade
them not to participate in the constitution than it would be to persuade people
today, with our less active conception of citizenship. At the same time, citi-
zens must be persuaded to act politically rather than despotically. The end
result of acorrect constitution is friendship (philia and homonoia) ofboth citi-
zens and non-citizens toward the constitution, and consequently friendship
among the citizens and between citizens and non-citizens.

Philosophy and Phronésis: Logos and Ethos

Thinking that some connection among ideas is necessary removes the need to
create, develop and fortify the relationship between people. Justice then
makes friendship unnecessary. Philosophy makes bad rhetoric — certainty is
unpersuasive — because it makes us think our job is done once we have made
connections among ideas. When people refuse to accept putatively necessary
relationships, the temptation is then to use compulsion, to force people to be
free. Necessary connections remove the need for engaging the éthos and pas-
sions of the parties being related. We should be glad that attempts to depopu-
late the moral world by replacing people with ideas fail.
Demonstrative connections are too strong for politics, certainly for the
world of political factions. But simply weakening the connections among
terms by itself doesn’t make things better. It doesn’t help to say that a consti-
tution usually or partially defines the citizen. For example, one could think
that while the constitution defines who is a citizen, considerations of interest
or sympathy imply that we shouldn’t act despotically towards those whom we
exclude from the constitution. Outsiders have no rights that we should
respect, but we should still hold back from doing everything that our position
in power allows. The trouble with that line of thought is that it balances Aris-
totle’s demonstrations from Book JJJ with further, distinct, ethical claims. It
maintains that Aristotle’s science is incomplete because there are further con-
siderations he doesn’t think about. While this is a coherent and respectable
claims, there is a real risk that the issue at stake will become irreconcilable, since to call a
claim a right is to call it nonnegotiable . . .’.
33 Politics V1.4.1318b33-36.
202 BE. GARVER

form of moral reasoning, it is very far from Aristotle’s own way of thinking.
This is no way to treat a scientific demonstration.
When facing constitutional change, the interdependence between constitu-
tion, city and citizen that was a scientific virtue becomes a vicious circle.
Non-citizens have no reason to accept the claims of the constitution, since
those claims are partisan. Anything said in such a context 1s partisan, regard-
less of the truth or honesty of the speaker. That Aristotle is on their side makes
the claims no less partisan, only more self-righteous. In disputes between fac-
tions, both sides uphold competing conceptions ofjustice. Even though Aris-
totle may be offering a true analysis of constitutions, in such a world it cannot
exist as anything other than a partisan statement. In the same way, true justice
consists in proportion to merit. But in the context of factions, claims to true
justice cannot exist as anything other than a partisan statement, which is why
Aristotle does not promote a party of virtue.** Using performative definitions
to imitate Aristotle is an attempt to escape the world of partisanship into a
pure realm of truth and justice. Demonstrative necessities become the pretext
for silence and coercion. That is almost a definition of self-righteousness.”
What, then, is the alternative to refuting Book HI by showing its practical
irrelevance? In the world of factions, nothing is impartial. Does philosophy
have any role in such a world? The statesman shouldn’t ignore Aristotle’s
demonstrative connections. He should instead convert them from being
purely logical into ethical connections. The politician who tries to rely on
Aristotle or succeed by definitional fiat lives by logos alone. The statesman
should instead make Aristotle’s thesis, that constitutions define citizens, into
an ethical proposition: that citizenship acknowledges something that is
embodied in his character.*° In my epigram I quoted Plato, ‘Erotic necessities
are probably better than geometrical necessities at persuading and compelling
most people.’*” Aristotle repeats Plato’s point, but as usual, toning down the
passion.
The crucial issue then is how the statesman can convert logical truths into
ethical ones. What does it mean to change a logical truth into an ethical one?
That general problem of the relation between political philosophy and
phronésis is especially acute here, not only because Book V’s world of fac-
tions seems to call for a hermeneutics of suspicion — since it looks like a
place where reason fails to function — but because the logical or scientific

34 See Garver, ‘The Revolt of the Just’.

35 | consider the performance of Socrates in the Protagoras, a situation where all
claims will be heard as interested and combative, in E. Garver, “Can Virtue Be Bought?’,
Philosophy and Rhetoric (forthcoming).
36 That connection between logical and ethical connections is the subject of
E. Garver, For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character and the Ethics of
Belief (Chicago, 2004).
37 Piato, Republic V.458d.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 203

truth in question is a definition, and its apparent rhetorical counterpart the

pure assertion. Since practical argument will be more sensitive to circum-
stances, a single logical truth can be embodied in several different ethical
arguments. How the necessary connections of Book HI become practical
truths depends on the éthos of the particular constitution.**
Ethical reasoning has more stages than the logical simplicities of Book III.
When Aristotle says in the Rhetoric that premises cannot be too far from their
conclusions, he reminds us that rhetorical and ethical argument can contain
more stages than a theoretical argument, since each probable connection has
to be made plausible to its audience. Ethos gives meaning to abstract proposi-
tions; it determines which of the logically possible implications of a given
proposition can be affirmed. In this case, an ethical argument must begin with
the constitution which defines who is a citizen, and, via the democratic or oli-
garchic éthos, lead to the conclusion that rulers must treat non-citizens well.
That seems like a long distance to travel.
Philosophy, Aristotle says, begins with wonder. We start by marvelling
that the diagonal could be incommensurable with the sides of a square, and
end by marvelling that anyone could think otherwise. Here we start by mar-
velling that anyone with the power to define citizenship should act moderately
rather than despotically, and we end wondering why anyone should be so
short-sighted as to choose despotism.
The philosopher offers two discoveries to statesmen about the relations
between their respective activities. First, philosophy is incomplete. Except in
rare circumstances — exemplified in Politics | and then in VII and VIII —
philosophical truths cannot be directly instantiated; except in those circum-
stances it is a mistake, an ethical and practical mistake, to try. The incomplete-
ness of philosophy creates an opportunity for freedom and autonomous
decisions by the statesman. Second, the statesman has to learn the harder truth
that such freedom does not mean the freedom to do as one likes, as democrats
like to believe, or that might makes right, as oligarchs tend to think. The inde-
terminate nature of philosophical truth is an opportunity for practical deliber-
ation about what is best in the circumstances. Philosophical truths are
incomplete, but true nevertheless; they cannot be ignored, but have to be
incorporated into the statesman’s character. ‘Man, as a principle of action, is a
union of desire and intellect.’*’ Practical philosophy is incomplete without
éthos.
Extreme democrats and oligarchs start from the same thesis from Politics
III and reason more simply: since the constitution defines who is a citizen, rul-
ers can do as they like, and can treat non-citizens as they like. The constitution
necessarily defines the citizen. But once that definition is made, we leave
necessity for the realm of the arbitrary. This is the same fallacy we find when

38 Politics 1V.11.1295a40-b1, VII.8.1328a41-b2.

39 Nicomachean Ethics V1.2.1139b4-5.
204 E. GARVER

people discover that a founding document like the US Constitution doesn’t

uniquely determine all practical issues. The thought is that if we leave a field
of total determinacy, we enter into the realm of the indeterminate. If those are
the only alternatives, then persuasion is fraud, and political friendship impos-
sible. Logic is the only way to bind ideas together, and interest is the only
means of binding people. If extreme democrats and oligarchs think that rulers
can do as they like, how can statesmen with political wisdom criticize that
inference and substitute a better one? What is the ethical argument that
replaces that simple retracing of Aristotle’s logical argument?
The function of philosophy is to provide logoi which are made determinate
through a particular éthos. ‘Decision requires both understanding and thought
and also a state of character; for acting well or badly requires both thought and
character.’*° Political philosophy offers reasonings which are made determi-
nate by the éthos of a particular constitution. Book V, and Books [V—VIII
overall, are still philosophy, but they help supply continuity between the
necessity of Book III and the probability of actual ethical arguments made. by
statesmen in particular circumstances. Practical wisdom acknowledges that
the constitution defines who is a citizen but it sees that thesis as raising the
question of how citizenship should be defined. Freedom here is not the ability
to do as one likes but to do what is best. When we leave the realm of necessity
we don’t enter that of the arbitrary but the field of deliberation. This is the
field of the probable, and it takes éthos to judge probabilities. The constitution
defines who is a citizen, and therefore the éthos of the particular constitution
will lead from the general principles of Book III to decisions about what to do.
The particular éthos of a particular constitution will lead from general
principles to determinate decisions. It goes where philosophy cannot.

Philosophy and Phronésis as Practical Activities

All deliberation is guided by a conception of what is best. The best, though,
we learn at the beginning of IV.1, is ambiguous. The meaning of best appro-
priate for Book V is ‘best on a hypothesis’.*! When the statesman finds him-
self in a democracy or an oligarchy, aiming at the best means aiming at
preserving the given constitution. Democratic and oligarchic constitutions are
best maintained through an education in harmony with the constitution. “The
greatest of all the things [that make] constitutions lasting — though it is now
slighted by all — is education relative to the constitution.“ With such an
éthos, the statesman, whether in a democracy or an oligarchy, lives politi-
cally. The ruler with a constitutional éthos will treat outsiders weil, not out of

49 Politics V1.2.1139a35.
41 Ibid., 1V.1.1288b17-33.
42 Ibid., V.9.1310a12-14.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 205

sympathy or interest, but because mutuality and friendship are part of his
character, his éthos as a ruler within this constitution.
The rich are citizens in a democracy, although not qua rich. Treating them
justly means letting them continue to be rich — precisely how rich will be a
prudential judgment that Aristotle cannot make, but must leave to the states-
man. Being a citizen in a democracy does not preclude one from being
wealthy. The situation is more complicated in the question of how oligarchy
treats the poor. If the oligarchy treats them justly, they become citizens in the
modern sense of rights holders rather than potential rulers. They are excluded
from important offices, but not from justice. “The offices with the most
authority, which should be retained by those in the constitution, must have
expensive public services attached to them, so that the people may be willing
to forego sharing in them, and may feel indulgence for their rulers as having
paid heavily for the office.’**
The ethical and practical argument of Book V draws on another feature of
the logos of Book III. The definition of citizen in Book III applies best in a
democracy. There is no implication there, or elsewhere, that we should there-
fore prefer democracy. But we learn at V.8.1308a15 that all constitutions con-
tain a démos within the rulers, who should treat each other equally and
democratically. Even without the indefinite offices which Aristotle says
define the constitution most properly in a democracy, there is an element of
democratic éthos in every constitution. Since factions arise not only from the
people excluded from the constitution, but, especially in oligarchies, from
within the ruling class,** preservation is as much a matter of how best to treat
fellow citizens as how to treat the outsiders.
Rulers treat fellow rulers democratically. Although they can’t extend that
courtesy to those excluded from the constitution, they can treat these outsiders
politically. While the strategy with regard to slavery is to maximize the dis-
tance between masters and slaves, the statesman aiming at security and trying
to dampen the threat of factions should behave in the opposite way. Treating
outsiders politically means, minimally, refraining from injustice. Injustice is
only possible towards fellow members of a community.” Therefore, however
the constitution defines citizenship, and however justice is limited to fellow-
citizens, the constitution never defines our relations to non-citizens despoti-
cally. The statesman will maintain his constitution’s distinction between citi-
zens and non-citizens, but will not identify that distinction as a line between
people one must treat justly and those outside the law whom one can treat des-
potically. The constitution may be restrictive, but not the éthos of its rulers.
Many practices that are held to be characteristically democratic overturn
democracies and many of those that are held to be oligarchical overturn
43 Ibid., V1.7.1321a32-34.
44 Ibid., V.6.1305b1 1-37, 1306a1 3-20.
45 Recall Nicomachean Ethics V.6.1134b10-17, quoted above.
206 E. GARVER

oligarchies. Those who suppose this to be the single virtue pull the constitu-
tion to an extreme.”°
A constitution may be primarily a democracy or an oligarchy and only sec-
ondarily a constitution, but the éthos of a good ruler is primarily the éthos of a
citizen living constitutionally, and only secondarily someone living demo-
cratically or oligarchically. Man is a political animal, not a democratic or oli-
garchic animal. Becoming dialogical means recognizing this truth about
oneself. This ethical improvement will often imply institutional changes in
the constitution, and these are the detailed methods of preservation of Book
V. But Book V is saved from being a handbook of preservation by recogniz-
ing that preservation is actually a means to constitutional improvement.
Restricting justice in the full sense to the relations among fellow citizens does
not preclude, but indeed implies the application ofjustice in a looser sense to
the other free people in the polis.
In Book V, there is no access to who should be a citizen apart from the parti-
san claims of democrats and oligarchs. The crux of the ethical argument
comes in the discovery in V.9 that the best means of preserving states improve
them. In the Rhetoric Aristotle rejects the uses of éthos defined outside the
argument, one’s reputation or the trappings of character — for a modern
example, the need of contemporary politicians to surround themselves with a
multiracial backdrop — to make room for an éthos developed by the argument
itself.” When one argues ethically, one argues better. Similarly, Politics V
rejects antecedent distinctions of better and worse — some states are better
than others, some revolts more justified — in order to develop the goodness of
a constitution that comes from choosing the right methods of achieving stabil-
ity. Insisting on the distinctions of Book III between correct and corrupt con-
stitutions, between aiming at life and the good life, would only impede the
ethical project of Book V.**
This, then, is an ethical argument not only because the character of those
making and receiving the argument is involved — the extreme democrats and
oligarchs who see their position as the opportunity for despotism reveal their
éthos too — but in the more restricted and normative sense that phronésis as
well as the more abstract reasoning of Book III is engaged. The phronimos
abandons what are here external standards of value in order to develop forms
of political goodness within his own ethical activities. The statesman can
know that the considerations of Book III are not by themselves a complete
guide to action, and that he must also rely on ethical considerations. Just as the
statesman discovers democratic equality within any constitution, so he dis-
covers justice as proportion to merit within the operations of stability.

46 Politics V.9.1309b19-24.
47 Aristotle, Rhetoric 1.2.1356a8-13.
48 See Garver, ‘The Revolt of the Just’.
 THE USES AND ABUSES OF PHILOSOPHY 207

Aristotle investigates the circumstances under which non-citizens will be

satisfied with the rule of others, since that is how constitutions are preserved.
For most people, he thinks, not being treated unjustly is good enough, and
they are happy to avoid heavy burdens of active citizenship, especially if they
can’t make a profit from being in office.” Instead of relying on definitional
fiat, the statesman gets rid of faction by aiming at the good life. We aim at the
good life under the flag of preservation. A constitution that aims at the good
life, then, does not stop being a democracy or an oligarchy; it just becomes a
correct rule of the many or of the wealthy.
Ethical argument creates a distinction, unknown to extreme democrats and
oligarchs, between living democratically or oligarchically and ruling demo-
cratically or oligarchically. ‘To be educated relative to the constitution is not
to do the things enjoyed by oligarchs or proponents of democracy, but rather
to do the things that will enable them, respectively, to govern in an oligarchic
or democratic way.’*’ This distinction replaces the correct/corrupt distinction
of Book II. The democratic or oligarchic constitutional éthos expresses itself
in ruling democratically or oligarchically. It interprets its power to define citi-
zenship — who is a citizen, what are the powers of citizenship, what is the
relation between citizens and non-citizens — according to its peculiar consti-
tutional éthos. Aristotle’s own argument in Politics V embodies no éthos. It
has to be judged by scientific, not ethical, standards. The statesman using it
takes those /ogoi and thinks through them ethically, deliberates about how
they can lead to decisions and actions. He has to figure out what they mean in
particular circumstances. The statesman will know how to mollify outsiders,
making them less disposed to engage in faction, prevent the injustices against
which factions react, and remove the occasions of faction that give them hope
of success. That is the practical use of philosophy.”
I have identified a very common fallacy. It consists in thinking that one can
impose patterns of reasoning on people. It is often misdiagnosed as forgetting
that something can be true in theory but not in practice. If the abuse of reason
consists in trying to rely on reason alone, then maybe the remedy 1s to use less
reason. I doubt that that diagnosis is faithful to Aristotle’s own way of thinking.
While the fallacy is easy to identify, the corresponding valid way of thinking is
not. There is no general remedy to this fallacy, except to reason ethically. The
statesman will understand Aristotle’s argument and interpret it according to the
éthos of his constitution and according to his particular circumstances. The

49 See too Politics 1V.13.1297b6-10.

50 Tbid., V.9.1310a19-22; see too VI.5.1319b33-1320a4.
5! Lest one be too harsh on the policy of making outsiders satisfied with their fate,
especially by refraining from injustice towards them, at least those outsiders know that
they aren’t part of the polis. It seems to me ethically and politically superior to an oligar-
chy consolidating its rule by persuading most of the people that they are living in a
democracy when they are not.
208 E. GARVER

éthos, in turn, allows the statesman to go where argument alone cannot, to

confront the particulars unintelligible to reason alone. Ethical argument is
more circumstantial than purely logical reasoning, which is why there is no
general remedy. Instead one can only point to examples such as Aristotle’s
performance in Politics V.>”

Eugene Garver SAINT JOHN’S UNIVERSITY

>? This paper was improved by the useful criticisms of Sandra Peterson and Betty
Belfiore, as well as the editor of HPT.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES:
IMITATION IN AUGUSTINE’S MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
AND POLITICAL THEORY

John M. Parrish’

Abstract: This article explores the surprisingly important role played in Augustine’s
moral and political theory by the idea that pride, the great evil of Augustine’s system,
was capable of mimicking both the actions and the outward effects of the one good in
his moral system, charity. This feature of Augustine’s moral psychology, the article
shows, underlay two of the most important aspects of Augustine’s political theory.
First, Augustine’s understanding of the imitative relationship between pride and char-
ity served as the basis of his understanding of the mutually informing and sometimes
even tenuously cooperative relationship between the otherwise seemingly antagonis-
tic forces of the earthly and the heavenly city. Second, Augustine’s conception of the
radical moral opacity in human life lays the groundwork for some of Augustine’s more
troubling positions on questions of the nature of political theory and the moral require-
ments of political action.

Now we see through a glass darkly...

I Corinthians 13:12
In the late seventeenth century, a group of Jansenist followers of the theology
of St Augustine introduced into political discourse an idea about the relation
between moral virtue and social benefits that was destined to exert a critical
influence on Western conceptions of political and economic morality. The
idea in question, advanced in particular by the Jansenist thinker Pierre Nicole,
held that a certain form of moral vice — namely that which imitated the
actions of charity and virtue — could produce the same socially beneficial
effects as charity, and that such beneficial vices were not merely possible but
even prevalent in worldly affairs. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that
Nicole’s theory went on to exercise great influence in subsequent social and
political thought, mainly by means of its adaptation by Bernard Mandeville
(to whom virtually all Enlightenment moralists felt obliged to respond) in
order to justify or at least present as inevitable the expansion of those ordinary
vices such as pride, luxury and hedonism which helped fuel the emerging
commercial economy.’ But this scholarship has shown little interest in the

' Dept. ofPolitical Science, Ohio State University, 2140 Derby Hall, 154 North Ovall
Mall, Columbus OH, 43210, USA. Email: parrish.179 @osu.edu
2 Among those who have explored the connection between Mandeville and the
Jansenists, see especially: Dale Van Kley, ‘Pierre Nicole, Jansenism, and the Morality of
Enlightened Self-Interest’, in Anticipations of the Enlightenment, ed. Alan C. Kors and
Paul Korshin (Philadelphia, 1987); Laurence Dickey, “Pride, Hypocrisy, and Civility in
Mandeville’s Social and Historical Theory’, Critical Review, 4 (1990), pp. 387-431; and

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005

210 J.M. PARRISH

question of whether this idea can be traced to Augustine’s own philosophy. In

the following article, I explore the surprisingly important role that this
dynamic plays in Augustine’s theory, and argue that a due appreciation of its
significance should bring new and heretofore under-appreciated themes to
greater prominence in interpretations of Augustine’s moral and political
thought.
Like other seventeenth-century followers of Augustine, Nicole held that
true virtue was much less widely distributed than was commonly believed;
most human beings were instead dominated by sin and particularly by pride or
self-love, which in Augustine’s theology had been the root of all moral evil.
To explain the discrepancy between the Jansenist position and common
understandings of moral virtue, Nicole adopted the view that vice and specifi-
cally human pride had an almost limitless capacity for mimicking godly vir-
tue, both in its outward characteristics and in its effects. Thus Nicole held that
much of what was taken for virtuous moral action in the world was actually
fraud, and that much of what preoccupied ordinary sinful peopie was trying to
produce merely the appearance and the outward effects of charity and virtue,
so that others would (mistakenly) attribute to them those virtuous and chari-
table dispositions they lacked. So on Nicole’s theory it was by means, not of
charity and virtue, but of this selfish interdependence, that ‘all of life’s needs
are somehow met without involving charity’.’ He elaborates:
However corrupt [such a] society might be inwardly and in the eyes of God,
outwardly nothing would be more orderly, courteous, just, peaceful, honor-
able, and generous; moreover, it would be an excellent thing that, every-
thing being inspired and driven only by self-love, self-love would not show
itself and that, society being entirely without charity, what one would see
everywhere would be only the forms and the outward marks of charity.’
Augustine’s own characterization of the relation between pride and charity,
as we will see, bears a striking resemblance to Nicole’s adaptation of his theory.
Like Nicole, Augustine held that there was practically no virtuous action and
practically no beneficial effect which could not be produced as well (or
almost as well) by a pride seeking to imitate virtue as it could by virtue itself.
This claim introduced into Augustine’s system two important features which
in turn played a key role in the rest of his thought: first, the idea of moral opac-
ity, and second, the idea of mutual reflection between the two cities imagined
in The City of God.

EJ. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of
Society (Cambridge, 1994).
3 Pierre Nicole, ‘On Charity and Self-Love’, in Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to
Kant: An Anthology, ed. J.B. Schneewind (Cambridge, 1990), Vol. 2, ch. 2, p. 372.
4 Nicole, ‘On Charity and Self-Love’, ch. 11, p. 383.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 211

Augustine declares at the outset of that great work that his ambition is to
describe the relation between two cities: the city of the God and the earthly
city. Augustine offers several explanations of the two-cities metaphor and its
constituent elements. On different occasions he says that what constitutes the
difference between the two cities is that they ‘owe their existence to the fact
that some men live by the standard of the flesh, others by the standard of the
spirit’, or alternatively that ‘some live by man’s standard, others by God’s’.°
But his most famous explanation comes at the end of Book XIV, where he
observes that ‘the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city
was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly
City by the love of God carried as far as contempt for self’ .° Since this is so, it
is natural to suppose that an understanding of how Augustine conceived of the
two cities will depend greatly on our understanding of how he conceived of
the natures of, and the dynamics of the relations between, the two principal
forms of love in his moral psychology, pride and charity. As I hope to show,
Augustine’s account of the relationship between the earthly city and the heav-
enly city finds a close counterpart in Augustine’s account of the fundamen-
tally imitative relationship between pride and charity.
This natural inclination of both pride and the earthly city to imitate their
higher counterparts, I then want to argue, is what underlies some of the most
significant features, from a modern perspective, of Augustine’s political theory
and political ethics. For it is as a consequence of his recognition of this imita-
tive impulse, I will contend, that Augustine comes to view human moral
behaviour as radically opaque to human judgment with respect to its inward
dimensions. Because pride imitates charity, human beings are profoundly
limited with respect to their ability to evaluate reliably one anothers’ motiva-
tions and intentions, since one and the same action can issue from either pride
or charity, and therefore in their capacity to exercise moral judgment gener-
ally. Yet because human beings must make judgments, especially in the
sphere of politics and social life, they are on Augustine’s account cut off from
their most important moral sources precisely with respect to those actions
which carry the most significant temporal consequences.

* ck &

In order to come to understand Augustine’s concept of pride and why it car-

ries this special significance for the ethics of social life, it is necessary to turn
first to Augustine’s theories of love and self-love, of which pride constitutes a
disordered variation. Augustine places the concept of love at the centre of his
moral philosophy in a way that no previous thinker, Christian or pagan, had

5 Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans (henceforth CG), trans.
Henry Bettensen (New York, 1972), XIV.4, p. 553.
® CG, XIV.28, p. 593.
212 J.M. PARRISH

ever done before.’ Love is the key to understanding human beings: it is the purpose
and function for which they were created, and in one form or another it is des-
tined to dominate their existence. The highest attainments of human life, its
deepest passions, its greatest tragedies, are explicable only in terms of the fact
that human beings are made to be lovers. However misguided, it is love, of
some form or another, which inevitably drives their every thought and action.
But human beings are created not just for the purpose of loving, but of lov-
ing in a certain way: there are particular objects, in a particular order, which
they are meant to love, and it is the misidentification and disordering of these
objects that leads to all the great miseries of the human condition. This mis-
identification and disordering of love’s proper objects Augustine gives the
name of Just, and he defines love in opposition to lust. ‘By love I mean the
impulse of one’s mind to enjoy God on his own account and to enjoy oneself
and one’s neighbour on account of God; and by lust I mean the impulse of
one’s mind to enjoy oneself and one’s neighbour and any corporeal thing not
on account of God.’* Augustine therefore makes central to his moral theory
not just the concept of love, but also a theory about correct ordering of loves.’
But this is no simple matter: the business of properly ordering our loves is
as complex as the order of creation itself. For Augustine, we must order our
love with the most finely tuned calibration, so that we do not ‘love what it is
wrong to love, or fail to love what should be loved, or love too much what
should be loved less (or love too little what should be loved more), or love two
things equally if one of them should be loved either less or more than the
other, or love things either more or less if they should be loved equally’.'° He
approaches the point of unintentional self-parody in telling us that we must
‘observe the right order even in our love for the very love with which we love
what is deserving of love’.'' The upshot of this is that for Augustine ‘a brief
and true definition of virtue is “rightly ordered love” ’.'? Vice or sin consists
precisely in our failure to make these judgments correctly. It does not ‘consist
in defection to things which are evil in themselves; it is the defection itself
which is evil . . . contrary to the order of nature’.'’ For instance greed

7 On this point see the Introduction to Oliver O’ Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love
in St. Augustine (New Haven, 1980). O’Donovan’s work is the most careful and insight-
ful treatment of the general themes I discuss in this section, though he does not consider
the particular issue of imitation on which this paper focuses.
8 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine (henceforth OCD), II1.36-7, p. 76, ed. and trans.
R.P. Green as On Christian Teaching (Oxford, 1997).
9 Hannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine (Chicago, 1996), Pt. I, ch. 3, gives an
important treatment of the concept of ordered loves in Augustine.
10 OCD, 1.59, p. 21.
1! CG, XV.22, p.637.
!2 Ibid.
'3 Thid., XI1.8, p. 480.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 213

is not something wrong with gold; the fault is ina man who perversely loves
gold and for its sake abandons justice, which ought to be put beyond com-
parison above gold. Lust is not something wrong in a beautiful and attrac-
tive body; the fault is in a soul which perversely delights in sensual
pleasures . . . Pride is not something wrong in the one who loves power, or in
the power itself; the fault is in the soul which perversely loves its own
power, and has no thought for the justice of the Omnipotent . . .'
Moreover, as a consequence of this framework of precisely ordered loves, the
very same qualities may at one moment be virtues, at other moments vices,
depending on their position within this divine ordering.
The virtues which the mind imagines it possesses, by means of which it
rules the body and the vicious elements, are themselves vices rather than
virtues, if the mind does not bring them into relation with God in order to
achieve anything whatsoever and to maintain that achievement. For although
the virtues are to be reckoned by some people to be genuine and honourable
when they are related only to themselves and are sought for no other end,
even then they are puffed up and proud, and so are to be accounted vices
rather than virtues.'°
Augustine outlines this ordering along predictable lines. First among the
proper objects of human love is of course humanity’s Creator; at some remove
from this summit of love’s objects, we find human love for one’s neighbour
and for one’s self. Some simplistic understandings of Augustine characterize
him as opposing love of God to love of self, but this is flatly to ignore Augus-
tine’s claim that in the proper form, self-love is far from being necessarily
vicious. ‘A man who loves God is not wrong in loving himself,’ '® because ‘the
commandment to love our neighbour excludes no human being’,'’ and there-
fore ‘when it is said, “you shall love your neighbour as yourself,” your own
self-love is not neglected’.'* Indeed, Augustine gives self-love a kind ofprior-
ity among various instances of neighbour love. ‘What love does to benefit
itself is self-interest, and what it does to benefit a neighbour is known as kind-
ness. And here self-interest comes first, because nobody can do good to
another out of resources which he does not possess.’ '? This is based on Augus-
tine’s theory of loves as ordered in part by proximity. “All people’, he claims,
‘should be loved equally. But you cannot do good to all people equally, so you
should take particular thought for those who, as if by lot, happen to be particu-
larly close to you in terms of place, time, or any other circumstances.’”” For

14 Tbid., pp. 480-1.

'5 Thid., XYX.25, p. 891.
16 Tbid., X1X.14, p. 873.
OED 161s). 22.
18 Thid., 1.58, p. 21.
'9 Tbid., 111.38, p. 76.
20 Ibid., 1.61-2, p. 21.
214 J.M. PARRISH

Augustine, then, our self-love must be strictly limited to a state of equality

with our love for other human beings, lest we neglect our duties of charity,
while at the same time it holds unrivalled the status of first among these
equals. This is so natural that the moral law does not even need to address it:
there is, Augustine observes, ‘no need of acommandment to love oneself’ fe
Augustine’s view of self-love taken by itself, then, is basically positive.”
His reputation as a critic of self-love rests largely on the close association he
drew between the intrinsically benign phenomenon of self-love, on the one
hand, and on the other, its frequent transformation into pride, which for
Augustine constitutes the chief of our vices.** So closely are the two matters
associated, indeed, that Augustine sometimes appears to conflate them: he
speaks, for example, of pride or exaltation being ‘assuredly the great differ-
ence that sunders the two cities of which we are speaking . . . [for] in one city
love of God has been given first place, in the other, love of self’.?* Neverthe-
less, as we have seen in the preceding analysis, self-love is on Augustine’s
account not intrinsically evil, which is not the case with pride: on the contrary,
pride is ‘the original evil’ and ‘the start of every kind of sin’.*° Augustine
goes on to define pride as ‘a longing for a perverse kind of exaltation’.”’ This
pride begins with the benign phenomenon of self-love, but transforms itself
into a perverse exaltation of that love beyond the proper ordering ofloves nat-
ural to human beings. Pride is thus ultimately a matter of the self’s improper
claim to the highest loyalty of its own love, and it is therefore a matter not only
of right direction but also of natural justice, since the corrupt mind covets and
claims ‘as its due what is really due to God alone’.”* Self-love in this form is
fundamentally unjust ‘because it wants what is beneath it to serve it while

21 Tbid., 1.84—5, pp. 26-7.

22 For acloser consideration of this complex problem, see O’ Donovan, The Problem
of Self-Love, particularly ch. 3. O’ Donovan argues for an important change over time in
Augustine’s works, with the concept of disordered self-love in the form of pride becom-
ing increasingly predominant in his thinking as work proceeded on the City of God.
23 On the destructive effects of pride, see O'Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love,
ch. 4; D.J. MacQueen, ‘Contemptus Dei: St. Augustine on the Disorder of Pride in
Society and its Remedies’, Recherches Augustiniennes, 9 (1973), pp. 227-93; and
R.A. Markus, “De civitate dei: Pride and the Common Good’, in Augustine: Second
Founder of the Faith, ed. Joseph C. Schnaubelt and Friederich Van Fleteren (New York,
1990).
24 CG, XIV.13; p. 573. On Augustine’s occasional conflation of self-love and pride,
see O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love, especially pp. 94-5.
23 CG, XIV.13} p.'573.
26 Tbid., p. 571.
27 Ibid.
28 OCD, 1.46, p. 18. Fora general exposition of Augustine’sview ofpride and the lust
for domination, especially in its political implications, the standard account is that of
Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York, 1963).
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 215

itself refusing to serve what is above it; and it has been very well said that “the
person who loves injustice hates his own soul” ’.”°

* *

All this might at first glance appear to be rather straightforward. Augustine, it

might be thought, though novel in his emphasis on love, should be seen pri-
marily as a theorist of order: he is adapting to the new terrain of love the per-
fectly familiar Platonic notion that moral philosophy is simply a matter of
bringing about conformity on an earthly scale to a particular and knowable
pattern of cosmic hierarchy. What makes this untrue, at least in practical
terms, is the fact that as a moral psychologist, Augustine developed a more
lively sense than any of his predecessors of the depth of moral ambiguity
endemic to matters of human conduct.*’ What I would now like to explore, on
the basis of the preceding analysis, is one of the rather peculiar and little-
noticed reasons that Augustine’s sensitivity to moral ambiguity was able to
run so deep. Augustine believed that all good was derived from a correct
ordering of proper loves, and that the human epidemic of sin found its origin
in a disordering and impropriety of loves, namely pride. But at the same time
he perceived, partly through the well-known intensity of his own introspec-
tive endeavours and partly through the sheer distance he ascribed to God as
set against all human goodness, that self-love in the form of pride (and partic-
ularly in this form) possessed an almost limitless capacity for mimicking love
itselfin human life and behaviour: and, further, that the great curse of human
moral existence was our incapability, not just to choose to be loving rather
than to be proud, but of reliably knowing which was which.
Although considerable scholarly attention has been paid to the concept of
pride in Augustine’s thought, practically none of it has focused on the fact that
Augustine specifically identifies pride’s imitative character as central to its
functioning, so central, indeed, that Augustine offers as an alternative defini-
tion the claim that ‘pride is a perverted imitation of God’.*' This imitative
quality, on Augustine’s account, is fundamental to the very nature of pride.
‘Pride imitates what is lofty’:** and since the loftiest of all things is God, it is
in the nature of pride to imitate God. From this fact it follows, according to
Augustine, that all those vices of which pride is the fountainhead are in their
very nature imitative of God. ‘Ambition [seeks] . .. honour and glory’, which

29 OCD, 1.46, p. 18.

30 For an eloquent contemplation of this theme, see Oliver O’ Donovan, ‘Augustine’s
City of God X\X and Western Political Thought’, Dionysius, 11 (1987), pp. 89-110,
especially at p. 109.
31 CG, XIX.12, pp. 868-9.
32 Augustine, Confessions (hereafter C), ed. and trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford,
1991). II.vi.13, p. 31.
216 J.M. PARRISH

are truly attributes of God alone.** ‘The cruelty of powerful people aims to
arouse fear’, while God alone is truly to be feared.*’ ‘Soft endearments are
intended to arouse love’, but there is no affection more tender than God’s.*°
‘Curiosity appears to be a zeal for knowledge’; ‘idleness appears as desire for
a quiet life’; ‘luxury wants to be called abundance and satiety’; yet we find
true knowledge, true rest, true abundance in God alone.*’ Above all, pride
aspires to and longs to imitate God’s power. ‘For pride hates a fellowship of
equality under God, and seeks to impose its own dominion on fellow men, in
place of God’s rule.’*’ So pride and its subsidiary vices by nature seek to imi-
tate God himself; but, Augustine observes, there is of course something nec-
essarily false about this imitation. The vices must masquerade as virtues in
order to bolster their own lofty aspirations, but the falseness of their imitation
is inevitably shown through the comparison with the virtues of God himself.
This imitative impulse of pride not only accords with the vice’s nature, but
also serves the pragmatic function of concealing its true motivation. Naked
pride not only threatens to engage the moral censure of the good, but also the
resentment of the wicked.** As a consequence, the works which proceed from
human pride will to a very considerable extent disguise themselves as the
works of love:
Consider now the works that pride may do: notice how they may resemble
or even equal those of charity. Charity feeds the hungry, so does pride; char-
ity, to the praise of God, pride, to the praise of itself. Charity clothes the
naked, so does pride; charity fasts, so does pride; charity buries the dead, so
does pride. All the good works that are willed and done by charity, may be
set in motion by its contrary pride, like horses harnessed to a car.*®
To be sure, there is a clear priority between the two. Charity on Augustine’s
account is properly the principal actor in the affair: ‘when charity is the
inward driver, pride must give place’; while pride suffers from the inevitable
internal conflict characteristic of the earthly city: ‘the man who has pride for
his charioteer . . . is sure to be overturned’ .“° Nevertheless, Augustine believes
that in practice this natural priority is checked by the extent to which pride,
rather than charity, tends to dominate human existence.

33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Tbid.
36 Ibid. The catalogue of vices continues, with prodigality mimicking God’s true gen-
erosity, avarice aspiring to God’s true possession of all, envy and anger and fear imitating
God’s true claim to excellence and vengeance and awe. C, II.vi.13, p. 31.
37 CG, XIX.12, pp. 868-9.
38 OCD, 1.47, p. 18.
39 Augustine, Ten Homilies on the First Epistle of St. John (henceforth H/J), in
Augustine: Later Works, ed. John Burnaby (Philadelphia, 1955), HJ, 8.9, p. 322.
40 IJ, 8.9:'p. 322,
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 217

In warning ofthese moral dangers of charitable action, Augustine seems to

have in mind particularly Christ’s injunction about giving alms to the poor,
not letting one’s left hand know what one’s right hand is doing. Augustine
warns that it is not a necessary feature of good actions that they should be
undertaken in secret: this caution is necessary only when one’s own heart
accuses one ‘of acting for the sake of display’, when one turns introspectively
to see, as God sees, the intention of one’s actions.*’ So long as our heart is
untroubled on this account, we may, indeed must, do our good deeds openly,
so that we may be a model of virtue for others to imitate.” Instead, the purpose
of Christ’s teaching on this point is to warn against the dangers of pride:
The right hand is a pure conscience, and the left the desire of the world...
From the desire of the world, many perform many a wonder: but it is the
work of the left hand, not the right. The right hand must do the work, and
without the left hand knowing it, lest worldly desire intrude itself when we
do a thing in the love of what is good. And how can we be sure of this? You
stand before God: ask your own heart, look at what you have done and what
was your purpose in it — your own salvation, or the empty praise of man.
Look within; for a man cannot judge one whom he cannot see.”
Thus Augustine’s view is that public applause should not and indeed cannot
always be avoided, but that rightly understood this constitutes an additional
moral burden for the agent to bear.
The capacity ofpride to imitate love or charity constitutes for Augustine the
greatest difficulty of pursuing a moral life in our sinful world. It is this which
as much as any other factor creates for Augustine the persistent problem of
moral uncertainty, the opacity of human moral psychology that Augustine
laments as the ‘wretched’ epistemological blindness of the human condition.
How can we know or see that it be not pride which governs the good deed?
Where is the proof? We see the works: hunger is fed by compassion, but
also by pride; strangers are entertained by compassion, but also by pride;
poverty is protected by compassion, but also by pride. In the works them-
selves we can see no difference.*
Instead, Augustine tells us, we need to recall ourselves constantly ‘from all
this outward showing . . . from the surface appearance displayed before men,

aY Ibid. ,p. 323.

42 Ibid.
43 Tbid., 6.3, p. 304.
44 Ibid., 8.9, p. 322. Even martyrdom may be the result of pride, a claim for which
Augustine cites no less than the authority of St Paul. (Indeed it may not be accidental that
Augustine’s citation of St Paul here comes in such close proximity to the apostle’s
famous remark about seeing ‘through a glass darkly’. See I. Corinthians 13:3 and 13:12,
respectively.)
218 J.M. PARRISH

to the inward truth’.*° This is what motivates the intensely introspective bent
of Augustine’s moral psychology; we are required to question our con-
sciences vigorously, to ‘pay heed, not to the visible flowering but to the root
beneath the ground’, where covetousness or pride may lurk.”°
That human beings are to a great extent incapable of distinguishing
between charity and pride is a theme Augustine returns to repeatedly.*” It
emerges most clearly in the pages of Augustine’s Homilies on First John.
There he asks: ‘can there be a work more apparent than giving to the poor?
Yet many do it for display and not for love. Can there be a greater work than
dying for the brethren? Yet even of this many seek only the reputation, ambi-
tious of acquiring the name, and not in truly heartfelt love.’** Ultimately for
Augustine
Love is the only final distinction between the sons of God and the sons of
the devil. All may sign themselves with the sign of Christ’s cross; all may
answer Amen, and sing Alleluia; all may be baptized, all may come to
church, and line the walls of our places of meeting. But there is nothing to
distinguish the sons of God from the sons of the devil, save charity. They
that have charity, are born of God; they that have not charity, are not. There
is the great token, the great dividing mark. Have what else you will; if this
one thing you have not, all is to no purpose. If you lack all the rest, have this,
and you have fulfilled the law. ‘For he that loveth another,’ says the apostle,
‘hath fulfilled the law’; and ‘charity is the fullness of the law’.*?

There is a similar discussion of the problem in Augustine’s Confessions.

There he remarks that there are
acts which resemble a vicious or injurious act but are not sins, because they
do not offend against you, Lord our God, nor the consensus of the commu-
nity. People accumulate resources for use as may be appropriate for the

AP HIS, S Opp. 322.

46 Ibid..pp. 322-3.
47 For the very interesting suggestion that an impulse towards concealment and pri-
vacy is central to Augustine’ s conception of pride, see further Markus, ‘De Civitate Dei’,
pp. 250-1.
eS HIS, 6:2; 'p. 303.
49 Tbid., 5.7, p. 298. Augustine is even willing to go so far as to argue that the actions
of God and Judas Iscariot, respectively, in giving up Christ to be crucified, can be distin-
guished only in terms of their inner character since they had identical outward effects.
‘But what makes the difference between the Father delivering up the Son, the Son deliv-
ering up himself, and Judas the disciple delivering up his master? In that the Father and
the Son did it in charity, Judas in treachery. You see, we have to look, not at what a man
does, but with what mind and will he does it... The difference in intention makes a dif-
ference in the acts. Though the thing is one, yet when we measure it by the difference of
intention, the one lovable, the other damnable, we find that one is to be glorified and the
other execrated. Such great virtue has charity: you see that it alone divides, it alone dis-
tinguishes the actions of men.’ /bid., 7.7, pp. 315-16.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 219

situation and the time; and it is uncertain whether or not the accumulating is
done for mere lust for possession. Or with a zealous intention for improve-
ment, proper authority may inflict punishment, and it is uncertain whether
the motive was a mere desire to hurt people. Accordingly, there are many
actions which people do not approve but which are attested by you to be
right; and there are many actions praised by mankind which on your testi-
mony are to be censured. Frequently the overt act has one face, the intention
of the person doing it has quite another, and the critical circumstances ofthe
moment cannot be known to us.”
There is some ambiguity in Augustine as to whether the true motivating
principles of human action are visible only to God, or whether they are capable
of being reviewed by personal introspection. It is clear that such motivation is
opaque to external viewers. In the Confessions, Augustine, addressing God,
states that ‘in this still uncertain state of human knowledge, you alone mark
the difference between them and us. You test our hearts and call light day and
darkness night. Who can distinguish between us except you?’*! As a conse-
quence, we should not judge
which persons are spiritual and which carnal. They are known to your eyes,
our God. To us no works have as yet appeared so that we can know them by
their fruits. Yet you, Lord, already know them and have made a division.
You called them in secret before the firmament was made. The spiritual per-
son does not judge the storm-tossed peoples of this world. How can he
‘judge of those outside’ when he does not know who will come out of the
world into the sweetness of your grace, and who will remain in the perma-
nent bitterness of godlessness?””
But despite the external opacity of human motivation, Augustine at times
seems to suggest that the agents themselves may have access to the truth of
their own intentions.’ A person knows he acts from true charity when he ‘be-
fore God assures his own heart, wherein God alone sees . . . [and] puts to his
heart the question whether what he does is indeed for love of the brethren; and
has witness borne him by that eye that penetrates the heart, which no man can
observe’.** It is the voice of conscience which is supposed to provide an
authoritative answer to this question: he cites St Paul’s dictum “Let each man
prove his own work’, adding “when witness is borne him not by another’s
tongue but by his own conscience’.””

50 C, Il.ix.17, p. 48.
5! Tbid., XII.xiv.15, p. 282.
52 Thid., XILxxiii.33, p. 293.
53 On introspection and ‘inwardness’ generally in Augustine, see Charles Taylor,
Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1989), ch. 7, par-
ticularly pp. 138-9.
54 H1J, 6.2, p. 303.
55 Tbid., p. 304.
220 J.M. PARRISH

At the same time, it is a special feature of pride as opposed to other sins that
it is especially resistant to introspective analysis of this sort. ‘I cannot easily
be sure how far I am cleansed from that plague [pride]’, Augustine says, for
with regard to other temptations, ‘I have some capacity for self-exploration,
but in this matter almost none’.*° For example, if avarice is a temptation, ‘if
the mind cannot clearly perceive whether it despises the possession of them,
that can be simply tested by giving them away’.”’ Not so with pride: for
how can we live so as to be indifferent to praise, and to be sure of this in
experience? Are we to live evil lives [to eliminate praise]? . . . If admiration
is the usual and proper accompaniment of a good life and good actions, we
ought not to renounce it any more than the good life which it accompanies.
Yet I have no way of knowing whether my mind will be serene or upset to be
lacking something unless it is actually absent.”®
Even more troublingly, pride ‘is a temptation to me even when I reject it,
because of the very fact that Iam rejecting it. Often the contempt of vainglory
becomes a source of even more vainglory. For it is not being scorned when the
contempt is something one is proud of.’*’ So the greatest evil in Augustine’s
philosophical system is all the more dangerous because it is the most resistant
to our powers of knowledge and self-examination.
What I hope emerges from this discussion is a sense of the dizzying set of
theoretical challenges Augustine set himself by trying to couple his strict
sense of moral order with the radical expanse of evaluative uncertainties, both
external and internal, implicit in his moral psychology. Yet because of this
very complexity, Augustine found that his moral theory must ultimately issue
in a kind of moral simplicity. Knowing that ‘many things can be done that
look well, yet do not issue from the root of charity’, and that ‘some actions
seem harsh or savage, but are performed for our discipline at the dictate of
charity’, Augustine is willing to state that ‘a short and simple precept is given
you once for all: Love, and do what you will. Whether you keep silence, keep
silence in love; whether you exclaim, exclaim in love; whether you correct,
correct in love; whether you forbear, forbear in love. Let love’s root be within
you, and from that root nothing but good can spring’.

*k FF

Augustine’s own understanding of the relationship between pride and charity,

then, is strikingly similar to the understanding which we find in Nicole’s later
theory, particularly in its identification of the imitative capacity of pride to

56 C, X.xxxvii.60, pp. 214-15.

57 Tbid.
58 Tbid.
59 Tbid., X.xxxviii.63, perige
60: HIS, 7.8, 316,
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES Zan

masquerade as charity beyond all human ability to distinguish. But the moral
opacity and uncertainty which this engendered was not merely a problem
peculiar to the deepest recesses of psychological analysis or spiritual confes-
sion. On the contrary, as I now hope to show, it is also one of the centrally
important features of Augustine’s political theory, in a way which has been
insufficiently appreciated by contemporary scholarship. In the remainder of
this essay, I will try to trace out two important implications of this dynamic for
our understanding of Augustine’s thought. First, Augustine’s understanding
of the imitative relationship between pride and charity served as the basis of
his understanding of the mutually informing and sometimes even tenuously
cooperative relationship between the otherwise seemingly antagonistic forces
of the earthly and the heavenly city, a relationship that is ultimately as much
as anything else one of mutual reflection. Second, Augustine’s conception of
moral opacity in human life, discussed above, lays the groundwork for some
of Augustine’s more troubling positions on questions ofthe nature of political
theory and the moral requirements of political action. Together, these two
implications of Augustine’s theory provide the backdrop which made pos-
sible both the immediate political and religious uses to which Augustine’s two
cities theory was put, as well as the later innovations in moral and social psy-
chology from which Nicole and those who followed him were to draw so
influentially.

* *

The implications of this imitative dynamic for our understanding of Augus-

tine’s ‘two cities’ theory can be seen most clearly in Augustine’s account of
the relationship between the heavenly city on the one hand and the city of
Rome on the other. While Rome is not straightforwardly equivalent to the
earthly city in Augustine’s thought, it is nevertheless the most compelling vis-
ible exemplar of that city’s character, and what Augustine says about Rome
must go a long way towards explaining what Augustine thinks about the rela-
tion between the earthly city and the heavenly city.°’ What emerges from
Augustine’s intriguing analysis of the Roman republic is that, in a fashion
very similar to the imitative relationship of pride and charity, Rome, too,
forms a kind of shadowy imitation of the heavenly city, in one sense quite dis-
tinct, but in another quite difficult to distinguish.
The Roman people, Augustine tells us, were ‘passionately devoted to
glory; it was for this that they desired to live, for this they did not hesitate to
die’. This desire for glory was the motivating factor behind all the Romans’

61 On this relationship, see particularly R.A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society
in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 3, as well as J.M. Rist, Augus-
tine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 6.
62 CG, V.12, p. 197.
LPs J.M. PARRISH

impressive political achievements.® First, it was the passion for glory that led
the Romans to achieve their political freedom, since they found servitude to
constitute the most shameful kind of political existence.“ Then, finding that
‘liberty alone did not satisfy’, they decided that ‘they had to acquire domin-
ion’ and the glory of power and empire that came with external expansion.”
So according to Augustine the celebrated myth of the Roman attainment of
liberty and empire has at its root the city’s collective addiction to the praise of
their fellow citizens and of the world.
The Roman love of glory, Augustine makes clear, is a vice, indeed a vice
closely connected to, if less dangerous than, the fundamental evil of pride.
Augustine distinguishes the desire for glory from the libido dominandi which
was central to his analysis of human evil. Even though he acknowledges that
there is ‘a slippery slope from the excessive delight in the praise of men to the
burning passion for domination’, he insists that true lovers of glory will not be
as fully depraved as those driven by the desire for power, since they will
always be anxious, not just for praise, but for the well-earned praise of good
men.®° Nevertheless, the love of glory is decidedly inferior to true virtue,
Augustine claims, precisely because virtue itself “is not content with the testi-
mony of men, without the witness of a man’s own conscience’.°’ Instead, this
glory-seeking passion is wrong because it has an earthly rather than a heav-
enly object: Augustine believes that ‘no one can have true virtue without true
piety, that is without the true worship of the true God’, and that consequently
‘the virtue which is employed in the service of human glory is not true virtue’
in the fullest sense of the term.® It is instead a false virtue or quasi-virtue, an
imitation of virtue that is only partially successful. The love of glory thus con-
stitutes ultimately yet another instance of the disruption of true moral order
and thus of moral failure. ‘Glory, honour, and power — those Roman aims,
which the good men strove to attain by honourable means — must be the con-
sequences of virtue, not its antecedents’, Augustine maintains.” Even the
most ‘morally clear-sighted’ of the Romans themselves recognized that the
love of praise was indeed a fault.’? Such Roman thinkers acknowledged that
‘it is better to resist this passion [for praise] than to yield to it’, and that ‘a man
is more like God, the purer he is from this contamination’, though according
to Augustine they equally recognized that ‘in this life it cannot be wholly

63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Jbid., p. 198.
66 Ibid., V.19, p. 212.
67 Tbid., V.12, p. 199.
68 bid. V.19.p.. 213,
69 Tbid., V.12, p. 200.
70 Ibid., V.13, p. 202. On the background of these ideas in Roman historical thought,
see further Rist, Augustine, ch. 6.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 223

rooted out from the heart’, because all are vulnerable to the temptation of
pride.”
But while the desire for glory might be morally inferior to virtue, it never-
theless had its good effects, since it was from ‘the moral quality of those who
stride towards glory, honour, and power by the right path, that is, by virtue
itself’ that true benefits came to the city.”” This useful propensity of the
Roman hunger for glory to generate publicly beneficial actions and outcomes
manifested itself in two important ways. First, the desire for glory, Augustine
thinks, tended to have a restraining effect on other human vices: it was the
Romans’ ‘unbounded passion for glory, above all else, [that] checked their
other appetites’, causing them to forego other sinful gratifications in favour of
their one overarching passion.”* This created citizens of courage and self-
control, and thus of at least partly virtuous character. It would of course be
preferable to have fully virtuous citizens: but since true virtue is not always
available, Augustine asserts, if men have not learned to suppress their vices
entirely, ‘at least it is good that the desire for human praise and glory makes
them, not indeed saints, but less depraved men’.”*
In addition, Augustine believed, the desire for glory tended to restrain the
ruthless conduct of ambitious men. Because glory requires the good opinion
of others, those who pursued it needed at least to appear to have those virtuous
qualities for which men are praised, as Machiavelli was later to make much of.
As aconsequence, their pursuit of glory tended to forestall their willingness to
do harm in seeking their advancement: whereas anyone who aims at power
without regard for glory, Augustine claims, ‘generally seeks to accomplish
his heart’s desire by the most barefaced crimes’.” By this means, the Roman
passion for glory helped to generate ‘the energy at home . . that brought
riches to the public treasure, while private fortunes remained straightened’, in
contrast to ‘the perverted situation after the moral corruption [from luxury
and idleness] had set in, when we find the public purse empty and private
pockets well lined’.’°
Augustine, then, recognizes that the Romans’ passion for glory, while ulti-
mately sinful, nevertheless had beneficial effects that contributed in the short
term to the political well-being of the Roman state. In particular, Augustine
tells us that it was because of the Romans’ quasi-virtuous acts in pursuit of
earthly glory that God favoured them with such an extensive earthly dominion

11 CG, V.14, p. 203.

? Ibid., V.12, p. 201.
73 Tbid., p. 197.
74 Ibid., V.13, p. 202.
75 Ibid., V.19, p. 212. The limiting factor to this beneficial feature of the vice of
glory-loving is that it must at least ‘be overcome by the love ofjustice’. See ibid., V.14,
p. 203.
48 Thid., VA2,p. 201:
224 J.M. PARRISH

and used them as his agents in subduing and disciplining the nations of the
world. It was for this reason that God, in order ‘to suppress the grievous evils
of many nations. . . entrusted this dominion to [the Romans], who served their
country for the sake of honour, praise and glory, who looked to find that glory
in their country’s safety above their own and who suppressed greed for money
and many other faults in favour of that one fault of theirs, the love of praise’.”’
This semblance of virtue which the love of glory affects, Augustine presumes,
is the main reason why God has assisted the Romans, ‘who are good accord-
ing to the standards of the earthly city, to the attainment of the glory of so
great an empire’, though he acknowledges that in addition to this there may be
‘another hidden cause on account of the diverse merits of mankind, which are
better known to God than to us’.”
Thus Augustine suggests that the reason the Romans received divine
favour in their acts of earthly conquest was the fact that their actions 1n pursuit
of their own glory bore a genuine if imperfect resemblance to the true human
virtue exercised in pursuit of God’s glory.
Those Roman heroes belonged to an earthly city, and the aim set before
them, in all their acts of duty for her, was the safety of their country, and a
kingdom not in heaven, but on earth; not in life eternal, but in the process
where the dying pass away and are succeeded by those who will die in their
turn. What else was there for them to love save glory? For, through glory,
they desired to have a kind of life after death on the lips of those who praised
them.”
Thus Augustine wants to claim that because of this resemblance between the
Romans’ imitated virtue and real virtue, they deserved, as the consequence of
a kind of natural justice, to receive the glory they sought ‘as a reward for such
virtues’, even though their city was of infinitely lesser worth.*? Since God
refused to grant true eternal life or heavenly citizenship to these Roman
glory-seekers, it was only through glory that they could be ‘rewarded in full’,
paid in Caesar’s coin, thus to Augustine there is a certain natural justice to the
fact that ‘men of this stamp should be accorded this kind of reward’.*!
The famous ‘left hand, right hand’ passage from the Sermon on the Mount
(discussed above, p. 217) ends with the thought that those who do good deeds
for the praise of men ‘have their reward in full’, and this seems to have been
the dominant image for Augustine in conceptualizing God’s providential pur-
pose in granting dominion to the Roman people. He explains:

17 Ibid., V.13, pp. 201-2.

78 Thid., V.19, p. 213.
?? Thid. p_ 212.
80 Tbid., V.17, pp. 206-7.
81 Thid., V.16, p. 205.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 220

If God had not granted to them the earthly glory of an empire which sur-
passed all others, they would have received no reward for the good quali-
ties, the virtues, that is, by means of which they laboured to attain that great
glory. When such men do anything good, their sole motive is the hope of
receiving glory from their fellow men; and the Lord refers to them when he
says, ‘I tell you in truth, they have received their reward in full.’ They took
no account of their own material interests compared with the common
good, that is the commonwealth and the public purse; they resisted the
temptations of avarice; they acted for their country’s well-being with
disinterested concern; they were guilty of no offense against the law; they
succumbed to no sensual indulgence. By such immaculate conduct they
laboured towards honours, power, and glory, by what they took to be the
true way. And they were honoured in almost all nations; they imposed their
laws on many peoples; and today they enjoy renown in the history and liter-
ature of nearly all races. They have no reason to complain of the justice of
God, the supreme and true. ‘They have received their reward in full.’®
So for Augustine there is a kind of limited natural justice which explains the
Romans’ dominion: because their (sinful) love of glory was nevertheless
strong enough to suppress their baser vices, they are rewarded, in a strictly
limited sense, with the lesser gain of earthly dominion, even while the greater
gain of the heavenly city’s majesty is denied them.

* *F *

In one sense, then, the heavenly city is a kind of higher standard against which
the earthly city pales in comparison.® But the reflective relationship between
the two cities implied by this reading of the metaphor is not a one-way trans-
action, as Augustine’s later explanations make clear. For Augustine, the
earthly city also and importantly serves as a kind of comparative standard, a
shadowy but genuine reflection of the heavenly city, able to motivate and
inspire those members of the heavenly city who reside in the earthly realm.™*
One aspect of this reflective process is familiar: Augustine always maintained
that a part of the earthly city (usually that embodied either in the people of
Israel or later in the Christian Church) served to represent and reflect the
nature of the Heavenly City here on earth. “Thus we find in the earthly city a
double significance’, Augustine says: ‘in one respect it displays its own pres-
ence, and in the other it serves by its presence to signify the Heavenly City’,
imperfectly.**
82 Ibid., V.17, pp. 204-S.
83 This relationship is discussed in greater detail in Markus, Saeculum. See also Rex
Martin, ‘The Two Cities in Augustine’s Political Philosophy’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 33 (1972), pp. 195-216.
84 Here I follow Richard Tuck’s suggestion about Augustine in The Rights of War
and Peace (Oxford, 1999), p. 55.
85 CG, XV.2, pp. 597-8.
226 J.M. PARRISH

But Augustine also seems to believe that the earthly city as a whole, and not
the part of it constituted temporarily by God’s elect, can serve to signify and
reflect the heavenly city by reason of its imitation ofthat city’s true virtue. We
see this most clearly in Augustine’s treatment of the ways in which Rome’s
own imitation of virtue was able to serve as a reflection and an example of true
heavenly virtue for Christians. In granting the Romans dominion, Augustine
claims, God was not merely giving them their due: he also had in mind
this further purpose: that the citizens of that Eternal City, in the days of their
pilgrimage, should fix their eyes steadily and soberly on those examples [of
Roman virtue] and observe what love they should have towards the City on
high, in view of life eternal, if the earthly city had received such devotion
from her citizens, in their hope of glory in the sight of men.*°
In order to suppress any pride they might feel in their own goodness, Augus-
tine urges his Christian readers to “consider all the hardships these conquerors
made light of, all the sufferings they endured, and the desires they suppressed
to gain the glory of men’.*’ As aconsequence, ‘the citizens of so great a coun-
try should not suppose that they have achieved anything of note if, to attain
that country, they have done something good, or endured some ills, seeing
that those Romans did so much and suffered so much for the earthly country
they already possessed’.** For instance, countless Roman citizens sacrificed
their private fortunes for the public good, and Brutus even sacrificed his chil-
dren’s lives for his city: what sacrifice is it then for Christians to share their
property and even their childrens’ inheritances for the furtherance of the pur-
poses of the heavenly city?
The imitation of virtue inspired by the appetite for glory is not true virtue in
the ultimate sense, because it is tainted by pride; yet even this sort of
quasi-virtue must be given its due, he insists, since the worldly men thus
inspired by glory really do come to be ‘of more service to the earthly city
when they possess even that sort of virtue than if they are without it’.*? Thus
for Augustine the imitative activity of false virtue to true virtue is not mere van-
ity: on the contrary, Augustine’s theory seems to indicate that the Romans’
virtue, as far as it goes, is ea virtue deserving of a real, if limited, reward at
the hands of natural justice.”

86 Tbid., V.16, p. 205.

87 Ibid., V.17, pp. 206-7.
88 Ibid. Augustine adds that ‘what gives special point to this comparison is that the
remission of sins, the promise which recruits the citizens for the Eternal Country, finds a
kind of shadowy resemblance in that refuge of Romulus, where the offer of impunity for
crimes of every kind collected a multitude which was to result in the foundation of the
city of Rome’. See more generally ibid., V.17—18, pp. 206-11.
89 Ibid., V.19, p. 213.
°0 In reaching this conclusion, I advance a view of Augustine’s evaluation of Rome
and the earthly city that is substantially more positive than has been usual in Augustine
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 22%

So there is not only a kind ofnatural justice, but also a positive, providential
purpose in Rome’s acquisition of earthly dominion, Augustine claims; for
such instances as these ... would never have gained such renown, or been
so often quoted, had not the Roman empire extended far and wide, coming
to greatness with so impressive a record of success. Accordingly, it was that
Empire, so far-spread and so long-lasting, and given lustre and glory by the
heroic quality of its great men, that gave to them the return they looked for
as arecompense for their resolution, while it sets before us Christians exam-
ples whose message we cannot but heed. If we do not display, in the service
of the most glorious City of God, the qualities of which the Romans, after
their fashion, gave us something of a model, in their pursuit of the glory of
their earthly city, then we ought to feel the prick of shame. If we do display
these virtues, we must not be infected with pride, for, as the Apostle says,
‘The sufferings of the present time are not worth thinking of, in view of the
glory which will be manifested in us.” Whereas the Romans judged their life
abundantly worthwhile in view of the glory of men in the immediate pres-
ent.”
God, then, according to Augustine, was working out his own beneficent
purposes in ordaining the earthly dominion attained by the Roman people,
and thus in permitting them to reach the heights attained by their own vicious
appetite for glory. God was not the cause of this vice in the Roman people, but
he made use of it for his own purposes.” This assertion is characteristic of
Augustine’s account of how God interacts with human vice where he encoun-
ters it. God’s providence makes use of vice, but Augustine is anxious to insist
that God’s use of vice in this way does not implicate him in evil. He explains
that God, ‘who is supremely good in his creation of natures that are good, is
also completely just in his employment of evil choices in his design, so that
whereas such evil choices make a wrong use of good natures, God turns evil
choices to good use’.”? Augustine wants to claim further that even the lust for
domination is frequently used by God to advance his good ends.

The man who despises glory and is eager only for domination is worse than
the beasts, in his cruelty or in his self-indulgence .. . Yet even to men like
this the power of domination is not given except by the providence of
God, when he decides that man’s condition deserves such masters. God’s
scholarship. For opposed views, see for example Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity
and Classical Culture (Oxford, 1944), Paul Weithman, “Augustine’s Political Philoso-
phy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman
Kretzmann (Cambridge, 2001), and Michael J. Wilks, ‘Roman Empire and Christian
State in the De Civitate Dei’, Augustinus, 12 (1967), pp. 489-510.
91 CG, V.18, p. 211.
92 On this point see further Wilks, ‘Roman Empire and Christian State’, pp. 529-30.
For an important discussion of Augustine’s conception of usefulness, see O’ Donovan,
“Augustine’s City of God XIX’.
93 CG, XI1.17, pp. 448-9.
228 J.M. PARRISH

statement on this point is clear, when the divine Wisdom says, ‘It is through
me that kings rule, and through me that tyrants possess the land.’ It might be
supposed that ‘tyrants’ here is used not in the sense of ‘wicked and irrespon-
sible rulers’, but in the ancient meaning of ‘men of power’ . . . This sugges-
tion is precluded by an unambiguous statement in another place, that God
‘makes a hypocrite to reign, because of the perversity of the people.’”*

God, as we have seen, made similar use of the Roman people’s appetite for
glory, to fashion the courage and self-control they exercised in pursuit of
praise into a functional imitation of virtue, something better than simple lust
for domination though still ultimately vicious.”
Augustine’s account of the good use God makes of human vice is closely
related to his explanation of how vice mimics virtue, and especially how pride
mimics charity. Indeed, according to Augustine, making good use of human
vice is God’s standard way of responding to the propensity of vice to imitate
virtue. To take one example, Augustine, citing Paul’s dictum, ‘Let Christ be
preached, whether in pretence or in truth’, goes on to add: ‘Christ is the truth,
and yet the truth can be proclaimed even by untruth, in the sense that things
which are right and true may be proclaimed by a wicked and deceitful heart . . .
by those who seek their own and not the things of Jesus Christ.’”° Yet even this
has its usefulness, Augustine tells us, since ‘even those that behave unprofit-
ably are heard with profit’, and consequently ‘they benefit many people by
preaching what they do not practice’, even though ‘they would benefit far
more people if they practiced what they preached’.”’
Augustine is able to employ this analysis of the good use of evil actions as a
way of explaining the core proposition of his political theory, that political
action is properly geared towards securing the specific and limited good of
temporal peace. He asserts:

When we enjoy here, if we live rightly, such peace as can be the portion of
mortal men under the conditions of mortality, virtue rightly uses the bless-
ings of peace, and even when we do not possess that peace, virtue turns to a
good use even the ills that man endures. But virtue is truly virtue when it
refers all the good things of which it makes good use, all its achievements in
making good use of good things and evil things, and when it refers itself

94 Ibid., V.19, p. 213.

°> At the same time, Augustine acknowledges that ‘to examine the secrets of men’s
hearts and to decide with clear judgment on the varying merits of human kingdoms —
this would be a heavy task indeed far beyond our poweis’, and because of this God, ‘who
never leaves the human race unattended by his judgment or his help, granted dominion to
the Romans when he willed and in the measure that he willed’. /bid., V.21, p. 215.
% OED, 1V.151-2, p. 142.
97 Ibid: ,TV .152-3, pp. 142-3.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 229

also, to that end where our peace shall be so perfect and so great as to admit
of neither improvement nor increase.”*
However imperfect this peace might be, it is the chief earthly good for which
human beings in the earthly city actually do strive, and ‘it would be incorrect
to say that the goods which this city desires are not goods, since even that city
is better, in its own human way, by their possession’.”’ Such goods as earthly
peace ‘are goods and undoubtedly they are gifts of God’, though if the higher
goods of the heavenly city ‘are neglected and those other goods are so desired
as to be considered the only goods, or are loved more than the goods which are
believed to be higher, the inevitable consequence is fresh misery, and an
increase of the wretchedness already there’ .'” Still, ‘even such a people loves
a peace of its own, which is not to be rejected; but it will not possess it in the
end, because it does not make good use of it before the end’.'”’ Before the end,
however, “itis important for us also that this people should possess this peace
in this life, since so long as the two cities are intermingled we also make use of
the peace of Babylon — although the People of God is by faith set free from
Babylon, so that in the meantime they are only pilgrims in the midst of her’.'°
Here again we see the doctrine of the ‘reward in full’ at work.
The approaches of the two cities are doubtless very different. Those in the
earthly city are ‘in pursuit of an earthly peace based on the things belonging to
this temporal life, and on its advantages’, while those in the heavenly city look
forward
to the blessings which are promised as eternal in the future, making use of
earthly and temporal things like a pilgrim in a foreign land, who does not let
himself be taken in by them or distracted from his course towards God, but
rather treats them as supports which help him more easily to bear the bur-
dens of ‘the corruptible body which weighs heavy on the soul’; they must
on no account be allowed to increase the load.'”
So for Augustine ‘both kinds of men and both kinds of households alike make
use ofthe things essential for this mortal life’; but each has its own very differ-
ent end in making use of them.'™ Augustine elaborates that the ‘harmonious
agreement’ of the earthly city about ‘the giving and obeying of orders’ is what
leads to ‘the establishment of a kind of compromise between human wills
about the things relevant to mortal life’.'°° The heavenly city, in contrast,

98 CG, XIX.10, pp. 864-5.

99 Tbid., XV.4, p. 599.
100 Thid., p. 600.
101 Thid., X1X.26, p. 892.
102 Ibid.
103 Thid., X1X.17, p. 877.
104 Ibid.
105 Thid.
230 J.M. PARRISH

must needs make use ofthis peace also, until this mortal state, for which this
kind of peace is essential, passes away. And therefore, it leads what we may
call a life of captivity in this earthly city as in a foreign land, although it has
already received the promise of redemption, and the gift of the Spirit as a
kind of pledge of it; and yet it does not hesitate to obey the laws of the
earthly city by which those things which are designed for the support of this
mortal life are regulated; and the purpose of this obedience is that, since this
mortal condition is shared by both cities, a harmony may be preserved
between them in things that are relevant to this condition.'”°

* * OK

It is this task, that of making use of an imperfect peace and of the shadowy goods
of the earthly pilgrimage for higher purposes, that occupies the attention of the
responsible actor in Augustine’s politics. It is here that the second application of
Augustine’s conception of pride’s imitative capacity, namely its creation of a
world of profound moral opacity, comes to play a role of key importance.
In considering the problems of political ethics, Augustine displays a fairly
thorough realism about the moral difficulties which may confront those who
are called upon to rule. Under certain circumstances and for certain individu-
als, Augustine acknowledges, the claims of political responsibility compel a
person to take up the active life out of love for others. ‘It is the compulsion of
love that undertakes righteous engagement in affairs’,'°’ Augustine tells us,
and so if the task ‘is laid upon us, it is to be undertaken because of the compul-
sion of love’.'°* But such responsibility is not something to be sought for its
own sake; if it ‘is not imposed on us, we should employ our freedom from
business in the quest for truth and its contemplation’.'®
The principal reason we should avoid politics if we can, according to
Augustine, is because of the grave moral dangers which politics poses for its
practitioners. Nothing is more morally dangerous than the lust for domination
which is an inevitable temptation for those who wield power. Given this risk,
Augustine thinks, we should prefer even to endure the rule of an unjust gov-
ernment than to hazard our own moral purity unnecessarily. For ‘as for this
mortal life, which ends after a few days’ course, what does it matter under
whose rule a man lives, being so soon to die, provided that the rulers do not
force him to impious and wicked acts?’''® So while the political life does not
for Augustine necessarily entail moral tragedy, its avoidance of such tragedy
is strictly a matter of moral luck.'"!

106 Tbid.
107 Tbid., X1X.19, p. 880.
108 Thid.
109 Thid.
M10 Thid.,. V.173p. 205.
'1l See Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 2.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 231

But it is not only these hazards of the soul, especially the temptation to
glory, that complicates Augustine’s account of the ethics of political action.
Perhaps even more importantly, Augustine is acutely aware that human life,
especially in politics, is beset by unavoidable choices which appear, at least
on the surface, to constitute genuine moral dilemmas, even where no question
of internal moral corruption such as pride appears to be at stake. The special
cause of these recurrent dilemmas, according to Augustine’s account, is most
frequently the problems arising from our blurry perceptions of human moti-
vation and the consequent difficulties which arise in trying to render our
inevitable judgments upon them. When Augustine lists the ‘number and grav-
ity of the ills’ of our mortal condition, he focuses sharply on those features of
human life that are caused by the uncertainty of our moral knowledge. The
story of mankind, Augustine says, is filled with
wrongs, suspicions, enmities, and war — undoubted evils, these. And even
peace is a doubtful good, since we do not know the hearts of those with
whom we wish to maintain peace, and even if we could know them today,
we should not know what they might be like tomorrow. In fact, who are, in
general, more friendly, or at any rate ought to be, than those within the walls
of the same home? And yet, is anyone perfectly serene in that situation,
when such grievous ills have so often arisen from the secret treachery of
people within those walls? And the bitterness of these ills matches the
sweetness ofthe peace that was reckoned genuine, when it was in fact only a
very clever pretence.'!
It is precisely for this reason that Augustine uses the terms ‘pitiable’ and ‘lam-
entable’ to describe ‘those judgments passed by men on their fellow-men,
which cannot be dispensed with in cities, however much peace they enjoy’ .'!’
The reason for this tragic state of affairs is, moreover, an epistemological
problem, arising out of the moral opacity created by the ability pride has to
imitate charity and all its virtuous outward effects. The trouble, Augustine
tells us, is that ‘those who pronounce judgment cannot see into the con-
sciences of those on whom they pronounce it’.''* As a consequence, those
who exercise political power
are often compelled to seek the truth by torturing innocent witnesses in a
case which is no concern of theirs. And what about torture employed on a
man in his own case? The question is whether he is guilty. He is tortured,
and, even if innocent, he suffers, for a doubtful crime, a punishment about
which there is no shadow of doubt and not because he is discovered to have
committed it, but because it is not certain that he did not commit it. This
means that the ignorance of the judge is often a calamity for the innocent.
And there is something yet more intolerable . . . the fact that the judge

112 CG, XIX.5, p. 858.

'13 Tbid., XIX.6, p. 859.
M14 Thid.
232 J.M. PARRISH

tortures the accused for the sole purpose of avoiding the execution, in igno-
rance, of an innocent man: while his pitiable lack of knowledge leads him to
put to death, tortured and innocent, the very person whom he had tortured to
avoid putting the innocent to death.'!
If, as frequently occurs, the accused, though innocent, ‘confesses to a crime
he has not committed’, then afterwards ‘the judge still does not know whether
it was a guilty or an innocent person he has executed, after torturing him to
avoid executing the innocent in ignorance’.''°
All this might appear to the modern reader to constitute strong arguments
against the employment of both torture and execution, but Augustine refuses
to draw this conclusion.''’ More conspicuously, Augustine resists even the
claim that the Christian judge will not employ these methods himself. Instead,
he takes for granted that the Christian who has truly been called to a life of
political action will undertake to perform even these extremely dubious
actions given the weight of his responsibility for the public good.''* ‘In view
of this darkness that attends the life of human society’, Augustine asks, ‘will
our wise man take his seat on the judge’s bench, or will he not have the heart
to do so? Obviously he will sit; for the claims of human society constrain him
and draw him to this duty; and it is unthinkable to him that he should shirk
it.’'!? In fact, ‘it is not to him an unthinkable horror’ that innocent witnesses
are tortured in cases in which they are not accused, or that prisoners should be
driven to make false confessions through torture, even torture that results in
death, or that witnesses should give false evidence, or the guilty resist torture
and refuse to confess, or that the judge ‘in his ignorance, may condemn
them’.'”°
But despite the fact that Augustine’s judge must make use of such violent
and uncertain methods, Augustine consistently maintains that when he does
so in fulfilment of the public responsibilities to which he has been called, he
incurs no moral blame. In other circumstances, Augustine was extremely
resistant to the notion that evil means may sometimes be necessary to promote
just ends; he argues for example that ‘anyone who believes that a lie is some-
times useful believes that injustice is sometimes useful’, which is according to
Augustine ‘impossible’.'”’ So in the case of the judge, Augustine argues that
he will not only participate in these processes, but will do so blamelessly. ‘All

'IS Tbid., pp. 859-60.

6 Thid., p. 860.
'17 On this point see O’ Donovan, ‘Augustine’s City of God XIX’, p. 107.
'18 Max Weber echoes this language of the ‘calling for politics’, though with quite a
different moral in mind, in his famous essay ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in From Max
Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Oxford, 1946).
119 CG, XIX.6, p. 860.
120 Ibid.
12 OCD ART=8, po 2?
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES 233

these serious evils our philosopher does not reckon as sins’, Augustine tells
us, ‘for the wise judge does not act in this way through a will to do harm.’!”
His predicament is rather that ‘ignorance is unavoidable — and yet the exi-
gencies of human society make judgment also unavoidable’
.'** The wise man
who acts in accordance with this reality and performs his responsibilities
under it is not evil ‘in his judicial capacity’, since ‘it is through unavoidable
ignorance and the unavoidable duty of judging that he tortures the innocent’;
he is excused by the joint pressures exercised by his office and his igno-
rance.'**
Thus it is the opacity of human moral existence that makes the moral evils
characteristic of political action both necessary and endurable; it is our help-
lessness to distinguish definitively among inner moral phenomena that both
requires and excuses the brutality of our public actions. Yet in fulfilling his
duty innocently, the Christian political actor is not to be deemed ‘happy’,
- Augustine tells us: he is called to troubling work, and therefore is expected to
be troubled by it. It is not wickedness, but rather ‘the wretchedness of man’s
situation’, which accurately characterizes the judge’s predicament:
How much more mature reflection it shows, how much more worthy of a
human being it is when a man acknowledges this necessity as a mark of
human wretchedness, when he hates that necessity in his own actions and
when, if he has the wisdom of devotion, he cries out to God, ‘Deliver me
from my necessities!’!”°
The same attitude is found expressed in Augustine’s treatment of just wars
and political action on an international scale.'*° Augustine observes that ‘they
say’ the wise man will wage just wars; but in doing so he will ‘lament the fact
that he is faced with the necessity of waging just wars; for if they were not
just, he would not have to engage in them, and consequently there would be
no wars for a wise man’.'*’ What lays the duty of waging wars on the wise man
is ‘the injustice of the opposing side’, and injustice is assuredly ‘to be
deplored’ even though ‘no necessity of war should arise from it’ .'8

122 CG, XIX.6, p. 860.

123 Ibid.
124 Thid. One of the few commentators to attend to the fact that for Augustine the
moral agent’s actions are excused by his ignorance combined with his responsibility is
Weithman, ‘Augustine’s political philosophy’.
125 CG, XIX.6, pp. 860-1.
126 For a general account of these views, see Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of
St. Augustine, as well as R.A. Markus, ‘Saint Augustine’s Views on the “Just War” ’, The
Church and War: Studies in Church History, 20 (1983), pp. 1-13, and Paul Ramsey, “The
Just War According to St. Augustine’, in Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscience
(Durham, NC, 1961).
127 CG, XIX.7, p. 862.
128 Ibid.
234 J.M. PARRISH

The point I particularly want to stress here is that, for Augustine, it is not
merely human sinfulness in some general sense which is at the root of the spe-
cial ethical problems attached to political action. That is doubtless true, but it
fails to capture the more interesting aspect of Augustine’s treatment of the
problem. For in singling out the epistemological blindness of the human con-
dition as the fundamental problem of the ethics of political action, Augustine
is in effect associating this problem with the deeper issue found in his moral
psychology of the ineliminable opacity common to both human motivation
and to the workings of God’s providence from the point of view of the human
moral agent. In particular, it is precisely that imitative, reflective quality of
pride as against love, the earthly city as against the heavenly, which at one and
the same time makes ethical action in politics so difficult to perform in the
hands of human beings, and yet because of that quality’s usefulness in the
hand of God, constitutes one of the most common modes of operation of
God’s mysterious providence. The political actor does not seek to capitalize
on this usefulness himself, in Augustine’s theory: that is left to the hand of
God. Nor is he required to commit actual moral evils himself: the combination
of his office and his ignorance excuse him. But in a strange way, Augustine’s
responsible political actor, while in one sense himself the instrument of God’s
providence, is at least placed in the position of navigating uncertain and
treacherous moral waters precisely because God has chosen to use the mys-
terious moral blurriness of the human condition as a means of providence for
his human creation.'”
But as I suggested at the outset, Augustine’s innovative conception of pride
had also some unexpected implications which would later profoundly influ-
ence the subsequent history of social and political theory. By bringing vice
indoors, so to speak, and thereby radically internalizing the conceived loca-
tion of moral action, Augustine was able to conceive of vice as both a much
more widespread and a much more inconspicuous phenomenon than any pre-
vious moral theory had done. In doing so, Augustine prepared the way for a
much more radically democratized conception of vice that was at the core of
Nicole’s influential theory of the production of social benefits by means of
private vices. Nicole’s argument, it is true, departs from Augustine’s in cer-
tain key respects (for example, his abandonment of Augustine’s distinction
between correct self-love and vicious pride), and goes beyond it in others (in
particular, in asserting that an imitative pride was equally capable of produc-
ing the full range of good works which charity might also produce). But his
!29 |offer this as an argument against Peter Burnell’s attempt in his article ‘The Prob-
lem of Service to Unjust Regimes in Augustine’s City of God’, Journal of the History of
Ideas, 54 (1993), pp. 177-88, to deny that Augustine excuses necessary evils by political
actors. Burnell claims that to do so would involve a contradiction of other parts of Augus-
tine’s thought. While not denying that a tension exists, I suggest that the argument here
shows that Augustine’s position has an equally strong affinity with other, significant
aspects of Augustine’s philosophy that might have motivated this tension.
 TWO CITIES AND TWO LOVES aoe

argument seems faithful to the spirit of Augustine’s in the most crucial

respect, its insistence on the morally opaque character of human existence,
and in the resulting extension of the concept of sinfulness almost completely
beyond human comprehension and differentiation.
In doing so, the modern Augustinians created an opportunity for apologists
of modern commercial society to employ the Jansenists’ contempt for this
world for more worldly purposes, with Bernard Mandeville and his secular
adaptation of this ‘private vices, public benefits’ argument leading the way. For
if self-interest, through self-conscious mimicry of pure charity, was capable
of bringing about all the positive social consequences of charity, Mandeville
in effect asked, why should we not leave charity to God? He is, after all, the
only one who will recognize it when he sees it. Much of eighteenth-century
moral philosophy was devoted to trying to soften the force of that blow, but
the main thrust of it eventually found its way into the very heart of the modern
theory of the market, in the form of Adam Smith’s account of the positive,
unintended consequences of self-interested behaviour and the metaphor of the
‘invisible hand’ .'*° Thus at least the possibility, though perhaps not the neces-
sity, of the dominant modern moral justification for capitalism taking the
form that it eventually did emerged from this obscure but potentially explo-
sive feature of the moral psychology of St Augustine."”!

John M. Parrish OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

130 Here I merely assert this; I provide an argument for it in my dissertation (not yet
published) From Dirty Hands to the Invisible Hand: Paradoxes of Political Ethics, PhD
thesis, Harvard University.
131 | am indebted to Christopher Brooke, Alan Jacobs, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Russell
Muirhead, Dennis Thompson, Richard Tuck and Alex Tuckness for their help in formu-
lating, correcting and refining the arguments of this essay.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST?
REFLECTIONS ON A NEWLY-DISCOVERED MANUSCRIPT
OF HANS BARON

John La Salle and James M. Blythe!

Abstract: In his famous Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955) Hans Baron
treated the Dominican political thinker Ptolemy of Lucca (1236-1327) as purely
medieval, his ideas totally separate from the doctrine that Baron named civic human-
ism. However, in an unpublished, and previously-unstudied, manuscript written more
than a decade earlier, Baron maintained that Ptolemy’s ideology evolved into some-
thing quite close to civic humanism. He attempted to prove this through a comparison
of early and late work of Ptolemy and through an analysis of Ptolemy’s process of
composition of his De Regimine Principum. This article analyses Baron’s arguments
and in general supports them, with some qualifications. Baron’s manuscript supports
the conclusions previously published by Blythe and is also significant in what it
reveals about the intellectual evolution of one of the twentieth century’s most signifi-
cant historians of political thought.

Few historians of the Italian Renaissance have been more influential than
Hans Baron, whose Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance has remained the
touchstone of discussions on the relationship of humanism and republicanism
for almost fifty years. Rejecting the view that accumulation of knowledge and
increase of philological skills led to a continuous development of humanism
between the fourteenth and fifteenth century, Baron saw a rupture in continu-
ity of such magnitude that it marked the transition between the medieval
world view and that of the nascent Renaissance. He further argued that this
was linked to the emergence of a celebration of political participation in clas-
sical terms, which he called civic humanism.” Among the many areas in which
this has been challenged in the last several decades is Baron’s unyielding
contention that before 1402 in Florence nothing that fitted his definition of
civic humanism existed, and certainly not around 1300, when the Dominican
Ptolemy of Lucca (c.1236—1327), student of Thomas Aquinas and republican
theorist, finished his De Regimine Principum.’ In Crisis, Baron addressed

! Department of History, University of Memphis, Memphis TN 38152-3450, USA.

Email: jmblythe @memphis.edu
? H. Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Repub-
lican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (2 vols., Princeton, 1955; 2nd edn.,
Princeton, 1966). Hereafter, Crisis will refer to the 1966 edition.
3 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum ad Regem Cypri, in Thomas Aquinas,
Opuscula Omnia necnon Opera Minora, R.P. Joannes Perrier, O.P., ed. Tomus Primus:
Opuscula Philosophica (Paris, 1949), pp. 221-445. All translations here are from Ptol-
emy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers (‘De Regimine Principum’), with portions
attributed to Thomas Aquinas, trans. J. Blythe (Philadelphia, 1997). Chapter divisions in
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? Lo7

Ptolemy’s republicanism, only to dismiss any claims that it could be consid-

ered an early manifestation of civic humanism. He admitted that one could
detect a civic-minded attitude, similar to that in Bruni’s Laudatio, as early as
the thirteenth century and that Ptolemy showed ‘an astonishing openness of
mind toward the role played by free city-republics in the ancient world. . .
[and formed] the clear-cut judgment that the power of Rome had been built up
under the consuls and free councils of the Republic’.* But for Baron this falls
short of a true appreciation for the Roman Republic over the Roman empire:
the few examples ‘of an early emphasis on the Respublica Romana . . . show
that the occasional deviation from the medieval view during the Trecento had
not yet come close to any coherent critique of the institution of the Empire...’
Petrarch, to whom he attributes the ‘rediscovery of pre-imperial Rome’,
expressed merely a form of ‘racial nationalism’; Ptolemy simply reflected the
republican ideals of the existing Northern Italian communes, and ‘a new
appreciation, or rather, depreciation, of the Jmperium Romanum is lacking in
his De Regimine Principum’.°
One of the present authors (Blythe) recently assessed this claim, and
argued:
While it is true that the civic consciousness of fifteenth-century Florence, or
at least Northern Italy from the late fourteenth century on, represents some-
thing considerably different from what had existed before, none of Baron’s
indicia for civic humanism were lacking in the thought of some late thir-
teenth and fourteenth century scholastic writers. In the thought of one of
these writers, Ptolemy of Lucca, we can find almost all of them.°
Now it appears that support for this view comes from an unlikely source:
Baron himself, who many years before writing Crisis had reached a very dif-
ferent conclusion about Ptolemy of Lucca’s republicanism. At that time,
Baron began work on what he called, in a 1976 note to Ronald Witt of Duke
University, his ‘Ptolemy paper’. He never finished this paper, and in 1976 he

this translation correspond to those in the Latin edition cited, though paragraph number-
ing does not, and all citations of paragraph numbers are to the translation. Thus, a refer-
ence to 2.6.3 is to Book 2, chapter 6, paragraph 3. We will also include, when appropri-
ate, the English translation provided by Baron in his unfinished manuscript. In a few
cases we have slightly modified the Blythe translation to correct some small errors or
infelicities.
4 Baron, Crisis, Psa:
5 Ibid., p. 57. Though the meaning is normally clear in context, there is some ambigu-
ity in the terms ‘Roman Republic’ and ‘Roman Empire’, since to some degree they were
used interchangeably: Romans and medievals often called the entire period of Roman
history, including the Empire, the Roman Republic; Ptolemy in particular also some-
times referred to the Empire when he was writing about the enlargement of Roman power
before the emperors.
© J. Blythe, ‘ “Civic Humanism” and Medieval Political Thought’, in Renaissance
Civic Humanism, ed. J. Hankins (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 30-74, p. 32.
238 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

sent his work on it, some eighty-two pages oftyped text with handwritten cor-
rections, additions and deletions, to Witt, with the suggestion that they work
together to produce an article to be published in 1978, though warning him:
‘Please don’t forget, all this was written thirty-five years ago, never looked
through, never revised, never annotated with finished notes. The typescript
contains hundred of lacunae and misreadings.’ Not only is this material in a
preliminary form; Baron never wrote several sections he planned and men-
tioned in the text. The lacunae he mentions consist mostly of a word or two,
which sometimes are easy to guess. These are indicated in the typescript by a
question mark and a gap of varying but limited (never more than about twenty
characters) size, which suggests that the typist, almost certainly Baron’s
daughter Renata, transcribed the pages and inserted this sign whenever she
could not decipher Baron’s handwriting. Baron’s handwritten notes on the
typescript were undoubtedly made while reading over the typed copies of the
work; it is puzzling why, since he added comments, he never filled in the lacu-
nae or corrected the misreadings, though he probably intended to do this
through comparison with his original manuscript.
Witt never followed up Baron’s suggestion, and since Baron’s death, the
unfinished manuscript has resided at the Duke University Special Collections
Library in boxes 3 and 21 of the Baron Papers Collection.’ There it remained
without notice until recently, when one of the authors of this paper (La Salle),
as part of an undergraduate honors project under Witt’s direction, edited the
Baron manuscript and subjected it to a critical analysis.
While for the most part Ptolemy’s work, the first of De Regimine
Principum’s four books and the beginning of Book 2 were written by another
author, usually believed to be Thomas Aquinas, though this is still debated.*

7 The Baron documents considered here consist of three parts: a note about Witt’s
academic commitments (1 page), the note to Witt already mentioned (the front and back
of a single sheet), and the manuscript about Ptolemy itself (82 pages). Because Baron’s
numbering of the text is inconsistent, we have numbered the pages of this manuscript
sequentially, from 1 to 82, to avoid confusion, and will use these numbers in our refer-
ences to the ‘Ptolemy Paper’, giving Baron’s numbers in parentheses afterwards. Baron
largely paginated the manuscript by hand, occasionally crossing out one number and
substituting another, though a few numbers are typed. The first eleven pages are num-
bered with Roman or Roman and Arabic numbers; the rest is numbered sequentially with
Arabic numerals from | to 67, though there are two page ones (which are partially two
drafts of the same material), two page twos (containing different material), and pp. 4-7
and 8-11] are two versions of the same text, the last two pages of each section being nearly
identical (pp. 4-11 are the only parts of the documents contained in Box 21; we have
inserted them between pp. 1-3 and 12-82 because they logically belong there, as drafts
of part 2 of the proposed paper). See <imprint-academic.com/lasalle> for full text of
manuscript.
8 For the arguments about Thomas’s authorship, see Blythe, ‘Introduction’ to Ptol-
emy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, pp. 3-5. The first part is also often known as
De Regno, ad Regem Cypri. There is near-universal agreement that the first part breaks
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 239

Baron examined the text partially in order to investigate the relationship

between the two parts. The essence of his conclusion about this is that
Ptolemy wrote and revised his part over many years and that in the process he
inserted passages into Thomas’s part to prepare the reader for the transition
between the pro-monarchical perspective of the first book and the pro-
republican perspective in Books 2—4. We will discuss these alleged interpola-
tions on another occasion. In this article, we wish to look at two other aspects
of Baron’s paper: first, his comparison of Ptolemy’s portions of De Regimine
Principum to his earlier treatise, Determinatio Compendiosa,’ which is
partially reprised in De Regimine Principum, leading to the conclusion that
Ptolemy’s views evolved over time in a civic humanist direction. Second, his
attempt to draw the same conclusion from an analysis and reconstruction of
Ptolemy’s process of composition within De Regimine Principum itself,
which Baron believes took at least fifteen years and serves as a mirror for the
evolution of his mature political ideology.
Baron’s manuscript consists of six parts, identified by Roman numerals: I.
‘From Section I of the Introduction’, which introduces De Regimine
Principum and its authorship and Baron’s argument; II. another part of the
introduction, consisting of two drafts of the same material; II. an analysis of
the specific passages that Baron believes someone inserted into Thomas’s
part; IV. an argument that Ptolemy was this reviser; V. an analysis of the
editorial process of combining the two parts, Ptolemy’s writing process, and
the development of Ptolemy in the direction of civic humanism; and VI. the
chronology of the writing. The manuscript concludes with a tantalizing hand-
written note: ‘A section VII, dealing with the influence of De Regimine
Principum through the centuries, was prepared but only partially drafted.’'°

off in the middle of a sentence in 2.4, as numbered in modern editions and most manu-
scripts of the complete work, but there are also many manuscripts, which are reflected in
the authoritative Leonine edition of the work of Thomas Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas, De
Regno (Rome, 1979), 42, pp. 448-71), containing only the first part, and these have a dif-
ferent chapter division: Book | chapters 13-16 of the complete editions are Book 2.14
in these, and Book 2.1—4 of the complete editions are Book 2.5-8 in these. The Leonine
also combines what the complete editions call Book 1, chapters 1 and 2, so that chapter
numbers for chapters of Book 1, beginning with chapter 2, are one lower than those in
complete editions, except that it considers what is chapter 12 of Book 1 in complete edi-
tions to be two chapters, 11 and 12.
9 Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio compendiosa de iurisdictione imperii, auctore
anonymo ut videtur Tholomeo lucensi O.P, ed. M. Krammer (Henceforth Determinatio
Compendiosa), in Fontes iuris germanici antiqui in usum scholarum ex Monumentis
Germaniae historicis. Separatim editi (Hannover and Leipzig, 1909).
10 7, 1-3 (1-1); I, 4-11 (11.1-I1.4 repeated); III, 12-28 (1 (repeated), 2 (repeated),
3-8, 8b, 9-14); IV, 29-47 (15-27, 27a, 28-32); V, 48-75 (33-60); VI, 76-82 (6161-7);
note about VII, 82 (67). In his note to Witt (1r) Baron refers to the first and second part,
saying that, ‘of the much longer introduction, only two brief sections were typed and
placed at the head of the following typescript’. Each version of II is headed “4 of Section
240 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

Since there has been little established about Ptolemy’s impact, other than his
direct influence on Savonarola and John Fortescue,'! this section would have
been most welcome. He gives one clue about the direction of this lost section
in his assumption that Dante, despite fundamental disagreements on the
papacy and empire, derived many of his ideas from Ptolemy,’* who in fact was
prior of Santa Maria Novella in Florence in the very years of Dante’s greatest
political struggle and eventual exile.
The revisions that Baron finds in Book 1, all of which could be character-
ized as civic humanist, strengthen his conviction about Ptolemy’s signifi-
cance: ‘Every stone broken out of the present architecture of De Regimine
Principum and shown to belong to the reviser, strengthens our reconstruction
of the genesis of the ideas of self-government and citizenship in a phase of the
[Commune] in which the evidence of sources is still dim and scarce.’'? What
Baron means here is not that the ‘interpolated’ passages add anything to our
understanding of Ptolemy’s political views as expressed in the later books,
since they do not (in fact, Baron uses their similarity to Ptolemy’s ideas to
argue that Ptolemy wrote them), but that if he can show them to be written
later by Ptolemy and not in the late 1260s or early 1270s, when Thomas wrote,
he can argue for the emergence of the civic humanist ideology in that period in
Ptolemy’s works, and then possibly among others whose thoughts have not
survived. Thus, in his early perspective, as represented by this manuscript,
Baron is making an even stronger claim than Blythe or other medievalists:
that civic humanism already existed in all essentials in the late thirteenth
century.
Blythe, in another recent article, made a distinct but complementary
evolutionary argument: that a comparison of the Aristotelian content of
Determinatio Compendiosa, De Regimine Principum and Exameron (usually

II’, although in the first version this is struck out and ‘III’ written in by hand (probably an
error). The section marker ‘III’ appears on 13; 12 is an alternative version of 13.
'l See, for example, T. Osborne, ‘Dominum Regalem et Politicum. Sir John Fortes-
cue’s Response to the Problem of Tyranny as Presented by Thomas Aquinas and Ptolemy
of Lucca’, Medieval Studies, 62 (2000), pp. 161-88; D. Weinstein, Savonarola and Flor-
ence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, 1970), pp. 290, 293, 304,
309. Both, and some other influences also, are treated in J. Blythe, Ideal Government and
the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1992), pp. 134, 210-11, 219-21,
239, 247, 260-4, 267, 290-4, 303-6, and ‘Introduction’ to Ptolemy of Lucca, On the
Government of Rulers, pp. 45-9.
!2 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 39 (25), 65 (SO). This idea was argued about the same
time as Baron by T. Silverstein, “On the Genesis of De Monarchia II.V’, Speculum, 13
(1938), pp. 326-49, and discussed in relationship to another Florentine Republican at
Santa Maria Novelia, Remigio dei Girolami, by C.T. Davis, ‘Ptolemy of Lucca and the
Roman Republic’, Proceedings of the American Philosophic Society, 118 (1974),
pp. 34 ff., but the relationship of these three figures and other Northern Italian writers of
the time needs to be explored much more fully.
'3 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 28 (14).
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 241

considered to have been written between the other two works) demonstrates
that ‘for his general approach to the analysis of politics, his criteria for judg-
ing the worth of government, and his basic political principles Ptolemy is
greatly and increasingly indebted to Aristotle’s Politics’.'* It may surprise no
one that Aristotelianism and civic humanism might develop together, but
when Biythe’s article was in press Christoph Fliiehler, editor of the special
issue of Vivarium in which it appeared, brought to his attention a recently-
published book, Jiirgen Miethke’s De potestate papae,'> which contends that
Determinatio Compendiosa was not written c.1277—81, as previous scholarly
consensus held, but in 1300 or shortly after. The nub of Miethke’s argument is
that the precise formulation found in Determinatio Compendiosa concerning
the relationship between the election of the German king and his right to exer-
cise lordship in non-German lands as rex romanorum was developed only
during the latter half of the reign of Pope Boniface VII (1294-1303), and that
the traditional dating is therefore suspect. In the Vivarium article it was only
possible to make some preliminary observations: that Miethke admits that it
would not have been impossible for Determinatio Compendiosa to have been
written around 1280, and that there are many strong arguments, beyond tradi-
tion, to believe that it had been. Nevertheless, Miethke’s opinion is one that
must be taken seriously and further investigated.
It was in this context that Blythe, a few months later, found out about La
Salle’s work and realized that it was important in many regards, in particular
in addressing Miethke’s argument. For, if two independent chains of reason-
ing led to similar conclusions: that both in regard to civic humanism and
Aristotelianism Ptolemy of Lucca underwent a major development of outlook
between Determinatio Compendiosa and De Regimine Principum, it would
be much more likely that this transformation could only have taken place over
a longer period of time than the one or two years allowed by Miethke at a
maximum. A consideration of Ptolemy’s possible evolution as a civic human-
ist is thus one of the two primary aims of this paper; the other, of course, is to
address the question of how Baron’s earlier views modify the way we look at
The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance.
Baron’s manuscript sheds light not only upon thirteenth- and fourteenth-
century thought but also upon the history of ideas in the twentieth century.
Significantly, Baron did not choose to resurrect this sketched-out essay for his
1988 summation of his life’s work, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism,

14 J. Blythe, ‘Aristotle’s Politics and Ptolemy of Lucca’, Vivarium, 40 (2002),

pp. 103-36, p. 135.
'S J. Miethke, De potestate papae: die pdpstliche Amtskompetenz in Widerstreit der
politischen Theorie von Thomas von Aquin bis Wilhelm von Ockham (Tiibingen, 2000),
pp. 86-93.
242 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

as he did several other unpublished articles of the same period.'® This should
not be surprising in view of Baron’s well-known penchant for never admitting
error in any of his published works.!’ For, as we shall see, Baron in the
decades before Crisis developed two competing and contrasting portrayals of
Ptolemy of Lucca and his republicanism; the winner became known to the
academic community as the reduced and marginalized Ptolemy of Crisis
while the loser was confined to the Special Collections Library at Duke Uni-
versity. Equally as striking is the fact that some of the strongest arguments
that others would raise against Baron’s claims in Crisis about the originality
of Bruni are found within the pages of this text, indicating that Baron recog-
nized, before publishing his thesis, the criticisms it would receive; he had
already written them himself, many years before he published Crisis.
What is surprising is that in the 1970s he proposed to publish this material.
Though we may never know what stimulated this proposal, it is an interesting
coincidence that in 1974 and 1975, the years just before Baron sent his manu-
script to Witt, Charles Till Davis published two remarkable articles on Ptol-
emy of Lucca, in which, among other things, he attacked Baron repeatedly for
his blindness to the appreciation of the Roman Republic by Ptolemy and oth-
ers and adds: “Baron does not mention an even more significant departure
from earlier medieval writings on the Republic. He [Ptolemy] was the first,
both in the De regimine and in another treatise written some twenty years ear-
lier, the Determinatio Compendiosa, to attack the Augustinian verdict on
self-love.’'’ Baron may have wished to answer these charges by showing that
he had indeed considered all these things decades earlier, but had come to a
more mature analysis of their significance.
The exact date of Baron’s manuscript is not known, though his 1976 com-
ment about having written ‘thirty-five years ago’ suggests a date of around
1941. Baron originally had been interested in exploring the continuity
between the Southern and Northern Renaissance, but after returning to Ger-
many after two years of Italian travel following his 1922 doctorate at the

16 H. Baron, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism (2 vols., Princeton, 1988). See

R. Fubini, ‘Renaissance Historian: The Career of Hans Baron’, Journal of Modern His-
tory, 64 (1992), pp. 541-74, p. 542.
17 For example, in a letter to Werner Gundersheimer dated 16 October 1966, and cur-
rently in his possession, Baron wrote: ‘Not a single word of what is found in The Crisis
and Humanistic and Political Literature needs to be modified.’ He could occasionally
admit that his perspective had matured over the years, as in his comment when publish-
ing areworked article of 1932: ‘I would now say that although this is not entirely wrong,
much more of early Quattrocento civic Humanism remained alive in Machiavelli’.
Baron, In Search, 1.24—42; see Rubini, Career, p. 551, n. 45.
'8 C.T. Davis, ‘Roman Patriotism and Republican Propaganda: Ptolemy of Lucca
and Pope Nicholas III’, Speculum, 50 (1975), pp. 41 1-33; C.T. Davis, ‘Ptolemy of Lucca
and the Roman Republic’, Proceedings of the American Philosophic Society, 118
(1974), pp. 30-50; the quotation is from p. 33.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 243

University of Leipzig, he redirected his studies to the roots of the ideas of the
Florentine writers whom he would later label ‘civic humanists’, a term he had
used as early as 1928.'? Although he did not attempt to address this compre-
hensively in print until 1955, in Crisis, this question occupied him in varying
degrees throughout the intervening years. The Ptolemy manuscript puts us in
a position better to understand the stages of his thinking in this formative
period.
Presumably this interest motivated the work on the manuscript under con-
sideration, since the distinction between what Baron interprets as Aquinas’
medieval, monarchical perspective and the early Ptolemy of Lucca’s less
monarchical, but still thoroughly medieval, perspective and the republican
ideology of the later Ptolemy of Lucca speaks precisely to the question of the
origin of civic humanism. As Baron writes in Crisis: ‘It was the double experi-
ence of the secularization of politics and the rise of a republican city-state to a
foremost place in the Italian scene that caused a revolution in the politico-
historical outlook of the Florentines: the history and nature of the Empire was
for the first time envisaged without medieval and theological disguises.’”°
Baron’s approach to Ptolemy derives from his understanding of the conflu-
ence of guelphism and communalism in the thirteenth century, before this
unity was shattered in the crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries:
For the citizen of the Italian commune in the second half of the thirteenth
century, who had not yet lived through these later phases, all signs still
seemed to point in one direction — a spiritual as well as political confeder-
acy of papal councils, mendicant movements, and the communal world, for
which we have no better label than the term used by Italian students
‘guelfismo popolare’.”'
This milieu was one in which someone like Ptolemy could evolve over a
period of years from a thoroughly medieval thinker, revealing ‘what is still
largely the attitude of a monk’” to one who initiated and nurtured ‘the growth
of the still tender politico-historical thought of the Renaissance’
:”
In this era of popular guelfism [in] the intellectual climate of the Comune
curialist[s], Florentine and Dominican authors who were in close contact

'9 Fubini, ‘Renaissance Historian’, pp. 550, 543. In describing Baron’s career,
Fubini points to Baron’s first usage of the term ‘Burgerhumanismus’: “We read, in fact,
in Baron’s introduction to Bruni’s Humanistisch-philosophische Schriften (1928), that
Bruni’s humanism had become the foundation for the education of the high bourgeoisie
(“zur Grundlage fiir die Bildung der hoherer Florentiner Biirgerschichten”’) and that only
the survival of the Florentine Republic had permitted the connection of Humanismus
with Biirgerbildung.’
20 Baron, Crisis, p. 445.
21 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 67—8 (52-3).
22 Thid., p. 62 (47).
23 Thid., p. 71 (56).
244 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

with the communal life are able intellectually to build up a house which the
citizen could accept as well fit in spirit to his own needs. Yet when he set-
tled down in it, he immediately began to change detail after detail, without
realizing the broader implications of these inner changes, but going on con-
sistently until the architecture of that whole building was changed — until
what had been first a curialistic and medieval world had become truly a citi-
zen’s world. This process of replacement and change of emphasis from
within from ‘guelfismo popolare’ to humanism is one of the most essential
chapters in the growth of the ethos and politico-historical outlook of the
Renaissance, and there is no more revealing scrutiny of this process but to
observe the gradual secularization of the guelph mind throughout the
phases of Ptolemy’s work.”
In the portion of Determinatio Compendiosa that overlaps with De Regimine
Principum, the clearest point of comparison is with regard to Ptolemy’s treat-
ment of ancient Rome, and in particular to his view of Roman virtue. This is
where Baron begins. He argues that the correlation between Roman virtues
and the positive attitude towards the communal life of the Roman Republic —
so frequently united in De Regimine Principum — 1s not found in Determinatio
Compendiosa. Instead, this text ‘is still a weapon in the hands of a medieval
monk and curialistic adversary’ of the empire’s supremacy. The passages that
praise Roman virtues are preceded by dark accounts of the tyrannies of rulers
in the earliest part of human history — Cain, Nemroth, Belus and Ninus —
which testify ‘not to the divine plan of providence . . . but to the inherent sin-
fulness of secular power’.” How did Ptolemy reconcile his enthusiasm for
Roman virtue with his Augustinian distrust of the state? For Baron, the argu-
ment is simple: he did not. Rather, Ptolemy was interested in the dignity of the
Romans only because, in his view, they prepared the world for the monarchy
of Christ’s Church. The reassessment of Roman virtues was not identical with
the reassessment of the Roman Republic. Rather, Ptolemy was interested in
the Roman Republic only as the Fourth Universal Monarchy, the precursor of
the Fifth Monarchy of the Roman Catholic Church; its importance was not as
a political state but as a phase in the process of evolution intended by Christ.
Thus, the ‘revival of the admiration of the Roman virtues on a spiritual, fig-
urative plan was possible, without the implication of any revival of the mem-
ory of the Respublica Romana’.”® Further, though Baron does not mention it,
Ptolemy asserts in Determinatio Compendiosa that although God may have
chosen to reward the Romans for their virtue and because they were to be the
Fourth Empire, nothing they did gave them the right to rule by any kind of nat-
ural right; this right existed only because God granted it.”’

24 Tbid., p. 68 (53).
25 Ibid., p. 63 (48). Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio compendiosa, 21-4, pp. 42-7.
26 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 64 (49).
27 Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio Compendiosa, 25, p. 48.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 245

At this stage, Ptolemy’s thought reveals ‘its impotence to embody the his-
torical outlook’ of the Roman Republic.** The transition to the next phase of
an appreciation of republican Rome separate from any transcendental pur-
pose, required ‘the growth of Augustinian praise of the heroes of early Rome’,
and an acknowledgment that the virtues displayed by these heroes led to politi-
cal greatness.” This is exactly what happened in De Regimine Principum, in
contrast, Baron points out, to the treatment in Dante, whose emphasis on
Roman virtues is sometimes considered the first decisive step of the Renais-
sance. Yet itis only in Ptolemy that the ‘Augustinian reappearance of Roman
virtues gradually leads over to the rediscovery of the Respublica Romana, to
the historical parallel between Athens, Rome, and the Commune... and to the
beginnings of the political thought of the Renaissance’.*”
Baron does not mention one key related aspect of the change between
the two works, though it strongly supports his point: in Determinatio
Compendiosa there is no indication that Roman government evolved in any
way, only that the Romans possessed virtues abstractly. In De Regimine
Principum, however, there is consideration of the way that Rome gradually
added institutions to represent the interests of the various parts of the people,”
and it was this development that ended with the admirable government
described in the Book of Machabees and discussed below. This suggests
Polybius’ analysis of Rome (unknown in 1300) and anticipates to a small
degree Machiavelli’s much later explanation of the success of Rome, even
suggesting Machiavelli’s argument that dynamism in political life is more
beneficial than stasis.
Baron further proposes to investigate Ptolemy’s development by looking
at four themes as they developed from Determinatio Compendiosa to De
Regimine Principum, although he only actually elaborates on the first two in
this manuscript: (a) Ptolemy’s analysis of the power of the emperors, which,
by exaggerating the role of the Senate, presents it as limited, and the evolution
of this idea into an appreciation of the Senate’s role throughout the Republi-
can period, mediated by the Book of Machabees’ view of Rome; (b) Ptolemy’s
re-evaluation of the view of kingship in the Book of Samuel in a republican
direction, as opposed to the mixed constitutional view of Thomas Aquinas;
(c) Ptolemy’s extension of Christ’s message that spiritual rule is based in pov-
erty and is higher than secular rule to the citizens of Republican Rome, who

28 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 65 (50).

29 Ibid., pp. 65—6 (50-1). The manuscript has the word ‘nerves’, but it is clear in con-
text that Baron means ‘heroes’. This is borne out by a similar, but corrected, error four
pages earlier (p. 62 (47)) where the word ‘nerves’ is over-typed with ‘heroes’. Probably
the typist misconstrued Baron’s handwriting, and caught this in the first case but not the
second.
30 Ibid., p. 66 (51).
31 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 4.19.5.
246 J.LA SALLE AND; J.M> BLYTHE

then are seen to partake in the fullest virtue through Stoic poverty; (d) Ptol-
emy’s transformation of the virtue of love of fatherland.** Baron never again
refers to the last two points, though his relatively contemporary article,
‘Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Humanistic
Thought’ (1938), suggests, without directly mentioning Ptolemy, that point
(c) might be one area in which Baron felt that Ptolemy advanced towards civic
humanism without completely attaining it.’
Baron, in the two points that he does develop, emphasizes the role of bibli-
cal sources in the transformation of Ptolemy’s outlook, something he sees as
typical of the common medieval practice of testing political theories using the
Old Testament, which thus serves as a midwife in the transition between the
medieval and the Renaissance outlook on Roman history. With regard to the
Roman Empire, although Ptolemy’s changed attitude ultimately stemmed
from developments within ‘popular guelfismo’, his argument depended upon
a novel interpretation of the Book of Machabees, particularly of one passage
praising Roman government and especially its senate:
no one wore a diadem or assumed the purple so as to be glorified by those
things, and they held court to consult daily with the 320, always taking
counsel about matters concerning the multitude so that they might do those
things that were worthy. They committed their magistracy to one person to
exercise lordship over all the lands for a single year, and all obeyed that one,
and there was neither ill-will nor jealousy among them.”*

32 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 68-75 (53-60). The texts explaining (a) and (b) are
each several pages; for (c) the complete text is: “From Christ as teaching spiritual rule
higher and from poverty-Roman-virtue in (first virtue chapter) to full poverty — ideal for
Roman past and stoic poverty.’ For (d) it is “TI.4 supplemented into Amor patriae’.
Blythe, in several articles and books, has analysed much of this material, and its relation-
ship to biblical texts, but only in regard to Ptolemy’s Aristotelianism has he previously
argued for his development over time in a republican direction, though he intended to
make this part of his book on Ptolemy now in preparation, even before coming across the
Baron material.
33 H. Baron, ‘Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth as Factors in the Rise of Human-
istic Thought’, Speculum, 13 (1938), pp. 1-37. Baron revised this article late in life, with
consequences we will discuss later. See H. Baron, “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth
in the Shaping of Trecento Humanistic Thought’, in Baron, Jn Search of Florentine Civic
Humanism, Vol. 1, pp. 134-57.
34 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 3.6.3. The same passage also occurs in
whole or part in Determinatio Compendiosa, 31, p. 64 and De Regimine Principum,
3.12.5, 3.20.3, 3.20.6, 4.1.4, 4.2.1, 4.7.4, 4.19.4, 4.25.2. ‘Nemo portabat diadema nec
induebatur purpura ut magnificaretur in ea, et quia curiam fecerunt in qua consulebant
quotidie trecentos viginti, consilium habentes semper de multitudine ut quae digna sunt
gerant, et quia committunt uni homini magistratum suum per singulos annos dominari
universaé terrae, et omnes obediunt uni, et non est invidia nec zelus inter eos.’ The quota-
tion given differs in a few insignificant words from 1 Machabees 8.14—16. Though the
word ‘multitude’ can have many meanings in biblical, Roman and medieval texts, and
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 247

Baron believes that Ptolemy’s ‘unusual interest in the role of the Roman
senate’ and his assertion that the Empire was never a hereditary monarchy,
since the senate played an influential role in electing and controlling the
emperor, were placed in Determinatio as the result of ‘a curialistic tendency
to enfeeble the authority of the imperial position’ after the struggle with the
Hohenstaufen, and not because of any re-evaluation of government as such.”
The reason for citing Machabees is, again, the promotion of papal power in
the context of the Fifth Monarchy, through an analogy with the Roman
Republic in which the pope and his curia take over the role of the emperor and
senate: “The Roman Church acts in the same way today, for the highest pontiff
takes counsel with the cardinals, who hold the position of the senators.’ Baron
does not mention it, but his argument receives some support from the fact that
Ptolemy did not repeat this analysis in De Regimine Principum, which speaks
to his different purpose there. Baron also does not mention that the rest of the
quoted sentence refers to the Donation of Constantine, which formally,
though spuriously, bestowed the imperial power on the pope.** Though all
this was essentially medieval to Baron, and not based on concern for good
earthly government, he admits that Determinatio Compendiosa did demon-
strate a Somewhat new attitude toward such government, in that ‘even in this
curialistic context, the quotation from 1 Maccabees produces an argument in
favor of government by discussion. Proverbs 24.6, Ptolemy recalls, also
maintains that “in a multitude of counsellors there is safety”, and it is for this
reason that the ancient Romans are praised as models in the time, “quando
floruit res publica’”.’*’ Thus even in this rudimentary form Ptolemy’s under-
standing of ancient Rome was “a starting-point for a historical reinterpretation
of the ancient Roman empire’ and, though ‘not yet reaching correct historical
conclusions’, a precursor of the later Renaissance tendency to approach his-
tory ‘from the spirit of venerable institutions of the Respublica Romana’.**
By the time of De Regimine Principum, Baron argues, though unfortu-
nately not in much detail, Ptolemy had made the crucial transition. He writes

refers to any group ofpeople (or anything else) functionally related, in usages like this in
De Regimine Principum it generally refers to the whole people, and not just the common
people or any other subgroup.
35 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 68 (53).
36 Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio Compendiosa, 31, p. 64, cited in Latin by Baron,
‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 78 (55) up to the word ‘senatorum’. “‘Quemadmodum adhuc hodie
Romana observat ecclesia, summus enim pontifex cum cardinalibus, qui locum possident
senatorum, ut Constantini habetur traditione et in allegato supra frequentius capitulo de
eiusdem actibus declaratur.’ The ‘oft-cited chapter’ is Gratian, Decretum, D.96, c.14,
which is the text of the Donation.
37 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 70-1 (55-6), quoting Ptolemy, Determinatio
Compendiosa, 31, p. 63, except that Ptolemy mistakenly identified the biblical passage
as Proverbs 33.
38 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 68 (53).
248 J::LA SALLE AND: J.M. BLYTHE

with much more concern for government in itself, and while the ‘interest of
the curialist writer receded into the background, the impact of the Roman sen-
ate behind and beside the Empire remained revealed to an extent which had
been unknown and inaccessible to all preceding medieval writers’. Though
Determinatio Compendiosa mentioned the senate only in conjunction with
Machabees, and to say both that election by the senate was one of the tradi-
tional methods of electing an emperor and that Constantine enacted the Dona-
tion of Constantine with the senate and other officials, in De Regimine
Principum there is a ‘new clear vision of a pivotal place of the Senate through-
out the consular period down to Caesar’s overthrow of the republican consti-
tution’.*? Baron is struck by the way a biblical passage has served as a
stimulus to this re-evaluation of Republican Rome, which in turn would lead
to a new understanding of classical authors, which had been ignored even
when readily available, and thus lead directly to Renaissance humanism:
It is a very remarkable fact that the impression made by the rise of Roma
from a late biblical author should thus have filled the place in the history of
the historical thought of the Renaissance which would finally be taken by
the grandiose report and analysis of Polybius. It is a striking example of the
continuity of the Renaissance from ‘Guelfism’ to Humanism.”
Baron’s second point concerns Ptolemy’s changing view of kingship,
which again rests on a biblical foundation. Baron argues that the Guelph men-
tality could not accept Thomas Aquinas’ monarchical, even if mixed constitu-
tional, views of government. In particular it rejected Thomas’s analysis both
of ancient Hebrew government under Moses, whom he portrayed as an effec-
tive king in a mixed constitution, and of the Judges, such as Samuel, whom he
considered to be ineffective because they were not monarchs. Thus, Baron
says, Ptolemy was forced to go back to the same sources and re-evaluate them.
As he did so in De Regimine Principum he was led to the institutional solu-
tions a free people must find in order to govern itself well, and thereby to the
organs in the Roman Republic that enabled the ancient Romans to succeed. In
the case of Samuel, Ptolemy elaborated one of two contradictory accounts,
thereby praising the Judges’ political rule while condemning the anointing of
a king as the beginning of tyranny. In the case of Moses, Ptolemy revoked his
monarchical character and identified his government and that of the Judges
as exemplars ‘of the way a free people must produce agencies of self-
government’ 4! None of this is yet found in Determinatio Compendiosa,
where Moses was still treated as a king though surrounded by advisors. Above
all, this is clear in the comparison there of Moses’ government to that of the
39 Ibid., 69 (54).
40 Tbid., p. 71 (56). The key parts of Polybius would not be available until the six-
teenth century, though many other classical republican writers were available in the thir-
teenth century.
41 Tbid., pp. 73-4 (58-9).
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 249

pope, both described in terms that suggest Thomas Aquinas’ mixed consti-
tution. Likewise, in Determinatio Compendiosa’s interpretation of Samuel,
the displeasure of God when the people asked for a king stemmed not from
aversion to monarchy in any way, but from anger that the ungrateful people
preferred human power over themselves to divine. Baron does not actually
make any of these points about Determinatio Compendiosa, but he must have
something like them in mind since he argues for a radical change between the
two books. Baron comments:
The reevaluation and reinterpretation of this second account [in Samuel]
was, in the guelph world, in fact the indispensable condition for any definite
re-appreciation of the phases of free government in Greek and human his-
tory. The path to the Respublica Romana was bound to start from the dis-
covery of the early Hebrew commonwealth.”
Central to the changes in the first and second points is Ptolemy’s evolving
concept of the distinction between political and regal rule, which results in
De Regimine Principum’s praise of republican government. Indeed, though
Baron does not mention it, the word ‘political’ occurs only twice in
Determinatio Compendiosa (in the same sentence) to refer to the goals of the
‘earthly kingdom’, and its use there is the generic one, which refers to civil
affairs in general and not specifically to this distinction.** Baron stresses the
importance and inevitability of the Bible in Ptolemy’s development:
In a world in which it could happen that a writer who was an intimate disci-
ple of Aquinas and guided by Christianity in historical matters, approached
the Roman constitution from a side-glance in the Bible, vitality of interest
and originality of thought was so completely on the side of the study of the
Bible that a ‘regimen politicum’ could not be differentiated from the ‘regi-
men regale’ in Roman history, until it had been found and studied in the
Biblical world.“
The third point concerns Ptolemy’s changing view of the role of wealth.
Interestingly enough it is in Baron’s extensive revision of his 1938 article on
Franciscan poverty and civic wealth for /n Search of Florentine Civic Human-
ism that he gives his most substantial published treatment of Ptolemy, but
only to separate him decisively from civic humanism. In the earlier version of
the article he had argued that humanists of the fourteenth century after
Petrarch had been unable to break from the purely medieval and mendicant
idea of poverty as an ideal and embrace the wealth and commerce of the
42 Ibid., p. 73 (58).
43 Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio Compendiosa, 28, p. 57. ‘. . . philosophus in
Ethicis in hoc felicitatem politicam dicit consistere, ad quam ceteras virtutes politicas
civiles disponit’. Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 39-59, 92-118, treats extensively both
Thomas Aquinas’ usage of the terms ‘regal’ and ‘political’ and their very different usage
by Ptolemy of Lucca.
44 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 71 (56).
250 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

Italian city-states, and that they had persisted, in the face of contrary evi-
dence, in interpreting Cicero and other Roman Republican writers in a way
that supported this ideal. In the later version he attempted to seek the roots of
this outlook in early fourteenth-century Dominican writers, and particularly
in Ptolemy of Lucca. But, unlike the humanists who shared his view of
poverty, Ptolemy represented
a prelude entirely medieval in tone .. . An unusual interest in Rome and in
the literary memory of Rome’s greatness did not, however, turn Ptolemy
into a protohumanist. His admiration of Rome’s republican form of govern-
ment . . . was based on occasional comments in the Second Book of
Machabees, not on authentic Roman sources . . . [his misreading of ancient
authors] shows him far from having even the rudiments of humanistic his-
torical knowledge.*”
Now we know that in his Ptolemy paper Baron would not have agreed with
this later assessment, but at the same time his 1938 article shows that he would
also not have considered Ptolemy a full civic humanist, because of his embrace
of poverty. By the time of Crisis, and even more In Search of Florentine Civic
Humanism, this defect has become decisive and Baron considers Ptolemy
fully medieval, with little or nothing in common with civic humanism.
We have to assume that the evolution of Baron’s thought went something
like this: in 1938 he believed that the fourteenth-century humanists were held
back by an anachronistic, medieval dislike of wealth. At that time he probably
had little knowledge of Ptolemy of Lucca, since if he had he surely would
have mentioned him. In the succeeding few years he read De Regimine
Principum and other medieval political texts and began to think that the
Dominican ideas of voluntary poverty as applied to politics, while not human-
ist, were at least an innovative step away from the medieval privileging of the
spiritual and contemplative life and fostered concern for active political par-
ticipation and pursuit of the common good as equally valid activities. Thus
these ideas served as a bridge to civic humanism, and when combined in Ptol-
emy with an appreciation of the Roman Republic and republicanism in gen-
eral, this resulted in something approaching civic humanism. Baron could
have added, though apparently he did not notice it, that Ptolemy’s embrace of
poverty in politics extended only to the virtuous citizen-official and not to
civic wealth in general or the benefits of a prosperous trade. This would have
put him even closer to the civic humanists. Later, when Baron became con-
vinced of the pivotal significance of Florence and 1402, the medieval aspects
of Ptolemy’s thought, including his ideas on poverty but also the biblical
sources for his republicanism and the Christianization of the civic virtues,
came to the fore, and he felt compelled to retreat from his earlier treatment of
Ptolemy as almost a civic humanist.

45 Baron, ‘Franciscan Poverty’ (1988(revised edn?)), pp. 199-200.

 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 2o1

The fourth point is the most enigmatic; the complete text is ‘II.4 supple-
mented into Amor patriae’. However we think Baron’s intent is clear, some-
thing similar to what Blythe argued with reference to Aristotle:
A comparison of similar sections of Determinatio Compendiosa and De
Regimine Principum on Roman virtues shows how Aristotle affected Ptol-
emy’s understanding of the common good. In both works he praised the
Romans for their love of fatherland, love of justice (tradition of laws in
Determinatio Compendiosa), and their benevolence. The reason in the ear-
lier work was that in governing they focused on ‘preserving the republic’.
This is also a common theme in De Regimine Principum. But thejustifica-
tion of Roman rule is directed more explicitly there to ideas of community
and common good: love of fatherland, for example, ‘participates in the
divine nature by directing its affection to the community ... Thus, Aristotle
says in J Ethics that the good of a nation is a divine good’.*°
In contrast to De Regimine Principum, Determinatio Compendiosa included
no mention of the common good, nor any idea that the civic virtues were ofthe
same order as the traditional Christian virtues, and it placed greater emphasis
on the idea that personal virtue not necessarily directed to the republic led to
God’s approval of Roman rule, rather than that their civic virtue led through
natural causes to a successful empire. Baron certainly was aware of the last of
these, and probably of the others, for he comments on this in the context of the
markedly different attitude towards the civic virtues in the two works.*’ Prob-
ably he would have interpreted them more in the spirit of civic humanism than
Aristotelianism, and he admits as much about Ptolemy’s later views in his
revision ofa 1938 article on Cicero in Jn Search of Renaissance Civic Human-
ism:
But Cicero now began to be recognized along with Aristotle as the most
effective guide to civic obligations. When Tolomeo of Lucca asked why
God had allowed the pagan Romans of Antiquity to build their world
empire, he concluded that more than any people they had been guided by
amor patriae. Love of one’s country is ‘the most meritorious of all virtues’,
he insisted, because ‘zeal for the common good’ tends toward the same end
as the divine commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Like God’s
commandment, therefore, the call of the patria admits of no exception.
‘This is why Tullius [Cicero] says in reference to the respublica, that noth-
ing which prevents you from answering the summons of your country must
be permitted to stand in your way’. In the De Officiis, Tolomeo pointed out,

46 Blythe, ‘Aristotle’s Politics’, p. 121, citing Ptolemy of Lucca, Determinatio

Compendiosa, 21, p. 42. ‘*. . . tota eorum intentio erat in ipsorum regimine sive dominio
ad conservandam rem publicam .. .’ and De Regimine Principum. 3.4.2. ‘. . . particibat
quamdam naturam divinam eo quod communitatem suus fertur affectus . . . unde et
Philosophus dicit in 1 Ethicorum quod bonum gentis est bonum divinum’. Ptolemy’s
citation is to Aristotle, Ethics, 1.2.1094b.8-10.
47 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 65 (50).
252 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

‘the respublica is considered the most gratifying and most valuable of all
human associations’, because Cicero says that love of relatives and friends,
and of anything else, ‘is encompassed by the love of one’s patria’.
Nevertheless, in this later work Baron regards this attention to Cicero as
merely the first reawakenings of Roman republican values and not in any way
identifiable with civic humanism. We would suspect that he would have
stated the case for Ptolemy’s prescience much more strongly had he com-
pleted his manuscript. Once again, the original 1938 article does not mention
Ptolemy; had Baron known of his work then his conclusion would probably
have been quite different from that in the later version.
A refinement of Baron’s arguments about the evolution of Ptolemy’s
thought between Determinatio Compendiosa and De Regimine Principum is
his attempt to discern a similar evolution within De Regimine Principum
itself, through a reconstruction of Ptolemy’s process of writing it over a num-
ber of years. We begin with a number of weaknesses in his argument, before
going on to show how other parts of it are very significant.
Though there is no consensus on this, Baron believes, following different
earlier scholars, that there is internal evidence to show that some of the text
was written after 1298 and some of it before 1282. The former is uncontrover-
sial, since the text refers to the German king Albert (1298-1308), though
Baron is unjustified in his conclusion, without any argument, that the men-
tions of Albert and Adolf (r.1291—8) in 3.20.2 is an addition to a text written
earlier. The latter is more problematic in its argument that 4.8 could not have
been written after 1282, the date of the Sicilian Vespers, because of Ptolemy’s
comment: “The nature of Gauls who move to Sicily becomes like that of the
Sicilians. This is apparent since, as the histories relate, the Gauls populated
this island three times — first in the time of Charlemagne, second three hun-
dred years later in the time of Robert Guiscard, and now in our own times by
king Charles — and they have already soaked up the Sicilian nature.’*” This
could not, Baron believes, have been written after ‘the expulsion of the
French from Italy in 1283 made the contention that they “imbuerant” the
nature ofthe land, of course, illusory’ ©’ To us, and in the absence of other evi-
dence, this seems less than convincing. If Ptolemy believed that the French

48 H. Baron, ‘The Memory of Cicero’s Roman Civic Spirit in the Medieval Centuries
and in the Florentine Renaissance’, in Baron, Jn Search of Florentine Civic Humanism,
Vol. 1, pp. 94-133; 114, citing Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 3.4; a revi-
sion of ‘Cicero and the Roman Civic Spirit in the Middle Ages and Early Renaissance’,
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 22 (1938), pp. 72-97.
49 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 4.8.3. ‘Gallici enim, qui se transferunt
in Siciliam, ad naturam applicantur Siculorum: quod quidem apparet, quia, ut narrant
historiae, iam ter est populata dicta insula de praefata gente. Primo enim tempore Caroli
magni; secundo ad trecentos annos tempore Roberti Guiscardi; et temporibus nostris per
regem Carolum, qui iam induerunt ipsorum naturam.’
50 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 76 (61).
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 293

who accompanied Charles of Anjou had taken on a Sicilian nature by 1282, he

would be perfectly capable of reporting this twenty years later as having taken
place ‘in our own times’, even if, subsequently, they had been driven out.
Baron believes that both of these datings may be right, because Ptolemy
may well have made insertions in or revisions of his earlier work and, ‘any
discovery of passages that point to a later date works, of course, as an addi-
tional argument for an early beginning of the work on De Reg., if the late-
datable sentence gives the impression of an insertion in an older text’.*! This
also is a rather dubious principle, since there is nothing to say that a revision
was made long after the first passage was written, unless perhaps the revision
reveals a significant intellectual shift, but let us see what use Baron makes of
it. He finds another likely example in a description of Cyprus in 3.22 as under
despotic or tyrannical rule. This could only have been written after 1286, and
‘Ptolemy would hardly have included the kingdom, to whose ruler the preface
of his work was still addressed, until it was definitely and disappointingly lost
to Tyranny’. So far there is nothing controversial, since no one seriously
believes today that De Regimine Principum was finished until well after that
date, but then Baron goes further. In the passage in which the reference to
Cyprus occurs, Ptolemy begins by stating that governmental officials gener-
ally rule by the same kind of rule as the highest ruler, then continues:
Such rulers [in kingdoms, like barons] commonly govern by the regal or
imperial mode, unless by chance a different practice arises in some place
from usurpation, from tyranny, or from the evil of the nation, which could
not be subdued except through a tyrannical government, as I said above.
This happened on the islands of Sardinia and Corsica, on certain Greek
islands, and on Cyprus, where nobles exercise their lordship through a des-
potic or tyrannical rule. The histories also tell us that the island of Sicily
was always the wet nurse of tyrants. In parts of Italy the necessary custom
has arisen that even counts and other rulers govern their subjects politically
and civilly, perhaps so that they do not tyrannize through their use of vio-
lence.
Baron argues that ‘there is no doubt that’ the entire passage reads more
clearly if the italicized passage (one sentence in Latin) is omitted and that ‘the

5! Tbid., p. 77 (62).
>? Ibid.
53 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 3.22.6 (italics ours). ‘Tales enim
principes modum habent communiter regendi, regaliter, vel imperialiter, nisi forte in
aliquibus locis propter consuetudinem usurpatam, vel ex tyrannide, vel propter malitiam
gentis, quia aliter domari non possunt, ut dictum est supra, nisi tyrannico regimine, ut
accidit in insula Sardiniae et Corsicae, item in quibusdam insulis Graeciae, item in
Cypro, in quibus dominantur nobiles principatu despotico vel tyrannico: unde et de
insula Siciliae tradunt historiae, quod semper fuit nutrix tyrannorum. In partibus etiam
Italiae comites et alii principes, nisi forte per violentiam tyrannizent, oportet subditos
suos regere more politico et civili.’
254 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

note on Italy is a mere appendix’, suggesting it also was a later addition.” Far
from seeming out of place, the ‘inserted’ passage seems completely relevant
and typical of how Ptolemy is accustomed to handling his material. He has
just finished itemizing various officials who serve under a king or emperor
and wants to emphasize that other kinds of rule generate different kinds of
officials, and so he gives several examples, first of tyranny and then of politi-
cal rule, especially important since it will be the subject of Book 4, which
begins only one hundred and thirty-nine words after this passage.
Even if we accepted all of Baron’s candidates for additions to the text, he
has little basis for concluding, ‘[t]he stronger the suspicion that these refer-
ences did not form part of the original text, the stronger also the proof that the
work was begun at an earlier date than 1282—1286’.*° He seems to make the
same strange argument for the sections of Book 3 that overlap material in
Determinatio Compendiosa, since he believes that the presence of the much-
modified material suggests that Ptolemy began work on De Regimine
Principum in the 1280s, though he makes no argument to support what must
be his unstated assumption that at first Ptolemy simply copied the text from
Determinatio Compendiosa (which he dates to 1281) and then, after his views
had matured, edited it. A priori it seems more likely that when he sat down to
write De Regimine Principum many years later he brought out his old work,
saw that he no longer totally agreed with it but that it was not useless, and
rewrote it according to his new understanding. This is, in fact, what Baron
himself did when he rewrote and vastly expanded some of his early articles
for In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism.
Baron is on stronger ground when he analyses Ptolemy’s order of composi-
tion of the text as a whole, and it is here, although not everything he says can
stand, that we think he makes a real contribution to understanding Ptolemy’s
evolution as a political thinker in the course of writing De Regimine
Principum, in addition to his strong argument for Ptolemy’s evolution
between Determinatio Compendiosa and De Regimine Principum. Central to
his argument is the often-observed fact that Book 3 begins with an analysis of
government from its fundamentals, rather than simply progressing from the
material of Book 2. In fact, in Baron’s view, there is no coherent transition
between the end of Book 2 and the beginning of Book 3, and nowhere in
Book 3 is there any evidence that two books concerned with monarchy
preceded.
Throughout his part of Book 2, Ptolemy frequently sought to broaden the
previous near-exclusive emphasis on kingship, to say, even when this is not
necessary, that his argument applies to any government whether regal or
political. Book 2 ends with a similar statement, though it does not explicitly
mention political government, that the subject of this book has been good

54 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 77 (62).

>> Ibid.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 255

government, especially regal lordship. One expects, then, that if Ptolemy sub-
sequently wrote a further book it would have continued with this distinction,
perhaps through a discussion of how the two kinds of lordship differ, and per-
haps with an emphasis on political government. Instead, we find a new begin-
ning, and the matter of regal vs. political rule, according to Baron, is not
broached again until 3.10.°° Though this is not completely accurate, since
regal and political are mentioned in 3.3, in another generic comment about
something applying equally well to a regal government or a polity, and in 3.6,
with respect to the Romans, it is true that it is only in 3.10 that Ptolemy begins
to address them systematically. Up until this point in Book 3 there have been
no certain cross-references to Books | and 2, and it is in 3.9, which begins the
systematic treatment of kinds of lordship, that we begin to find such refer-
ences, though there are only four in Book 3 that unambiguously refer to ear-
lier books.*’ In Book 4, in contrast, there is a substantial ‘network of precise
cross-references, not only to book 3. . . but also [to] the 2 and even 1 book’,*®
often explicitly mentioning the number of the earlier book.
What does this mean? Baron believes Ptolemy began to write an independ-
ent political treatise, with no intention of combining his work with that of
Thomas, though he may well have already revised Thomas’s treatise. Book 3
represents the initial stage of this work, which was to have been about the
‘divine parts of dominium’ and ‘the place of Rome in the divine plan of
Roman history’.*? That Rome was an early interest of Ptolemy is shown by
Determinatio Compendiosa, and Ptolemy sought to build upon this treatment
in which he had praised Roman virtues without going on to praise the Roman
Republic. Then, at some time after writing Book 3, according to Baron, Ptol-
emy decided to combine his work with Thomas’s, then wrote Book 4 at the
same time he was completing Book 2. In these two books Baron discerns an
evolutionary advance, ‘in which the “regimen politicum” is built on the his-

56 [bid., pp. 57-8 (42-3). Through a misleading use of quotation marks, Baron
implies incorrectly that Ptolemy did explicitly mention both political and regal at the end
of Book 2. A typographical error has Baron making the distinction between ‘reg. pol’ and
‘reg. pol’.
57 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum: 3.9.1 (‘lordship that the ancient
Fathers were accustomed to have as herders of cattle, which I defined above as natural
wealth’, areference to 2.6.1, 2.6.3); 3.9.6 (‘If we speak of lordship involving the mode of
servile subjection, this was introduced only on account of sin, as I said above’, a refer-
ence to 2.9.45); 3.11.1 (‘Butin 1 Kings the laws of akingdom are handed down more for
the utility of the king, as I made clear above, where I quoted those words as clearly per-
taining to a servile condition’, a reference to 2.9.2); 3.19.3 (‘It was said above that the
tuler’s position in the kingdom is the same as God’s in the world and the spirit’s in the
body’, a reference to 1.13.3). Though there are a number of other references that could
refer to Book | or 2, they could also simply be references to earlier parts of Book 3.
58 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 59 (44).
59 Tbid., p. 60 (45).
256 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

torical rediscovery of the Respublica Romana’.®’ In working on Book 2,

whether or not he had access to Thomas’s notes as some have suggested, Ptol-
emy adhered closely to the outline that Thomas sketched in his part, but
shaped every line with an eye to what would follow in the next two books.
Baron argues that understanding the chronology of Ptolemy’s writing will
enable us to see the gradual evolution of his thought, in which the rediscovery
of the Roman Republic came as the climax of a long process. Thus Baron
argues that ‘the reconstruction of the growth of our present four books is able
to throw light not only on the supplementation of Aquinas’s work by the ideas
of the new author, but also on the phases in which these new ideas grew to
maturity’.°!
Let us look at the argument in more detail, and first summarize what the
authors state as their purpose and procedure in the text itself. In the prologue,
Thomas announces to the King of Cyprus that his ‘book’ will concern ‘the ori-
gin of the kingdom and what pertains to the office of the king’. At the very
end of 1.12 (which is the last chapter of Book 1 in the manuscripts containing
only Thomas’s part), he writes that he has ‘said many things about a king’ —
what a king is, the expediency of kingship, and the necessity to avoid tyr-
anny — then begins 1.13 (Leonine 2.1) with the statement: ‘We must now
consider what the office of king is and what sort of person a king ought to
be.’®’ The rest of Book 1 compares human rule to its perfect model, divine
rule, and discusses the role of the king in promoting virtue and providing for
and preserving the good life for the multitude. Book 1 concludes: ‘These are
the things that pertain to the office of king, and I must now treat each of them
more diligently.’® Book 2 considers the variety of resources and services that
a king must provide for the well-being of a ‘city or kingdom’, some of which
in Thomas’s part assume that the king is the founder of a new political entity:
an appropriate region and climate (2.1—2.4) (Leonine 2.5—2.8), natural and

60 Tbid., p. 61 (46).
61 Jbid., p. 60 (45).
62 Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, prologue: ‘. . . librum de regno
conscriberem, in quo et regni originem et ea quae ad regis officium pertinent’. Citations
are from Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine Principum ad Regem Cypri, in Opera Omnia,
ed. R. Busa, S.J. (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1980), Vol. 3, pp. 595-601. The numbering of
this edition corresponds with that in manuscripts containing both Thomas Aquinas’ and
Ptolemy’s parts. We will indicate in parentheses where chapter numbering differs from
that of the Leonine edition.
63 [bid., 1.12-13 (Leonine 1.12-2.1). ‘De rege autem quid sit, et quod expediat
multitudini regem habere; adhuc autem quod praesidi expediat se regem multitudini
exhibere subiectae, non tyrannum, tanta a nobis dicta sint . . Consequens autem ex dictis
considerare quid sit regis officium et qualem oporteat esse regem . . .’. The first ellipsis
indicates a chapter break, but there are no intervening words.
64 Tbid., 1.16.8 (Leonine 2.4). ‘Haec igitur sunt quae ad regis officium pertinent, de
quibus per singula diligentius tractare oportet.’
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? aot

monetary wealth (2.5—2.7), good governmental ministers (2.8—2.10), and a

variety of other things like fortifications, roads, coinage, standard weights
and measures, welfare for the poor and support for religion (2.11—2.16). Book
2 concludes: ‘In this book was written what pertains to the good government
of lordship, especially regal lordship.’® Book 3 begins with a new consider-
ation of government in general and God’s role in government (3.1—3.8),
which includes three chapters in the middle (3.4-3.6) about the Romans and
why God favoured them. In 3.9 Ptolemy begins to speak about the various
kinds of lordship and, having briefly discussed the rule of humans over ani-
mals, in 3.10 outlines his plan to discuss the four forms of lordship of human
over human — regal and sacerdotal, regal (including imperial), political and
household. The rest of Book 3 covers the two (or three) forms of regal rule,
Book 4 covers political rule, and at the end of Book 4 Ptolemy announces his
decision to defer writing about household rule and promises a later work of
yet undetermined book divisions. He also suggests that he also planned to
write a work, of undetermined size, on the virtues appropriate to rulers and
rectors of various kinds and subjects.° As far as we know, he never wrote
either of these.
It is obvious from this, as has long been realized, that the overall work lacks
coherence and, were it not for the internal cross-references, Books 3 and 4
could stand on their own as a complete and much more coherent work, or at
least the first part of such a work. Baron goes further than this, since he
believes that when Ptolemy set out his plan in 3.10 he had neither decided to
incorporate Thomas’s part nor yet decided the exact plan or number of books
needed. This is perhaps supported by the fact that the books are not divided
along the lines of the four forms of lordship; instead two forms were treated in
Book 3. Regardless, Ptolemy clearly had a coherent plan in mind, in which an
initial treatise on monarchy has no logical place. 3.11, which is itself an analy-
sis of regal government, does not even mention that it is following up an ear-
lier treatment of monarchy, although there is one cross-reference to 2.9, as
already mentioned.
Another controversial question concerns the coherence of Thomas’s part
and whether 2.4.7—2.16 fit in comfortably with it. Baron argues, in line with
much, though not all, scholarship, that there is no logical lack of overall cohe-
sion within Thomas’s part in terms of organization, but that Ptolemy, while
following Thomas’s schema in Book 2, at least to some degree, makes a num-
ber of modifications. Baron extracts what he believes to be Thomas’s plan for
the rest of his work from material in 1.14 and 1.16 (Leonine 2.2—2.4)” and

65 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 2.16.10. ‘Haec igitur de pertinentibus

ad regimen cuiuscumque dominii, sed praecipue regalis, in hoc libro in tantum sint
dicta.’
66 Tbid., 4.28.10.
67 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 54-5 (39-40).
258 J: LA SALLE AND) J.M) BLYTHE

then compares this to what is actually done in Book 2. What he deduces is that
Ptolemy made selective use of Thomas’s plan: ‘From this comparison it
appears immediately that Ptolemy, far from merely composing Book 2 from
material still collected by Aquinas, built up the book from some selected
items which could bridge the gulf to his own following work, leaving the rest
untouched.’ Baron finds Ptolemy’s general approach to be instructive: he
‘limits himself completely to the more concrete aspects of the political life of
the state’ and ignores the analysis of state as microcosm and the identification
of political life with the unity of peace, and shows no interest in ‘the education
of the multitude by royal punishments and rewards’. He also drops Thomas’s
interest in the foundations of new states.”
More important are the modifications Ptolemy made to prepare the transi-
tion to the later books. The subjects covered in Ptolemy’s portion of Book 2,
especially since they concentrate on concrete tasks of rulers with regard to
finances, ministers, infrastructure and religion, are ones that ‘offer an oppor-
tunity to show the limitations of a discussion made solely in terms of royal
government’, even though Thomas had no idea of extending his analysis in
this direction when he brought the areas up for future discussion in 1.16 (Leo-
nine 2.4). Thus Ptolemy shifts the emphasis from monarchy to other forms of
government and, in order to discuss the kinds of ministers needed in the dif-
ferent circumstances, must elaborate the political/despotic dichotomy that
will be key to Books 3 and 4. Likewise, considering defence of the govern-
ment, Ptolemy outlines the role ofthe citizen, and in the discussion of religion
and the state he analyses the ‘unique bond between Christianity and the
ancient Roman state’.® Ptolemy’s presumed moving of Thomas Aquinas’
chapters 2.1—2.4 to the end of the combined Book | may also have been done
to ease this change in emphasis.
The fact that Ptolemy continually brings in the regal/political distinction in
Book 2, even when this is not necessary, “can only be explained’, Baron feels,
‘as a cautious attempt to reconcile the Thomistic fragment with a divergent
work already existing in clear shape in the continuator’s mind. This feeling
that the author is looking forward and backward at every step, no careful
reader of 2.5-2 end can escape . . .’.’” The only objection he can imagine to
this is that such comments could have been added in a final draft of the whole
text, but this is obviated by the fact that such reconciliation of discordant text
68 Tbid., p. 56 (41). Baron’s manuscript actually says ‘unity of plan’ instead of ‘unity
of peace’, but his chart of Thomas’s plan on 54—5 (39-40) makes it clear that he means
‘peace’.
69 Jbid., pp. 56-7 (41-2).
10 Ibid., pp. 57-8 (42-3). In De Regimine Principum, 2.5.1, at the very beginning of
his part, Ptolemy goes so far as to misrepresent Thomas’s content, in writing, ‘{n]ow that
the things that are necessary for the substantial being of any civic entity, whether it is a
polity or a regal government, have been itemized . . .’, when Thomas had not mentioned
this distinction at all.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 5)

was not done uniformly, and is totally lacking in the place we would most
expect it — the discontinuity at the beginning of Book 3.”
We can thus see Baron’s explanation of the text as the gradual breaking
forth of Ptolemy’s celebration of political over monarchical government,
mediated both by his own development into a more sophisticated political
thinker and by the restrictions imposed by the structure of Thomas’s work and
by Ptolemy’s sense of obligation toward his master. If we accept Baron’s theory
of interpolation in Book 1, Ptolemy there mainly modified Aquinas to impose
limitations on kingship, which except for one passage on the Roman Repub-
lic, is assumed to be the best government and the sole subject of the treatise.
Even if we reject this part of the theory, we can see Ptolemy’s parts of Book 2
somewhat in the same light. While Ptolemy there seeks to broaden Thomas’s
range, he still tends to maintain the earlier emphasis on kingship, though
accepting political government as a good and legitimate alternative:
The full scope of the rediscovery of the ‘regimen politicum’ and the values
of free civic life does not become visible immediately in Ptolemy’s continu-
ation of Aquinas’ work. The second half of book 2, although introducing
the alternative between ‘reg. despoticum’ and ‘reg. polit.’ immediately, is
on the whole bent on establishing a fair balance between the two possible
forms of government . . . Only in the two last books the full preponderance
of the ‘reg. pol.’ proves itself, for the original state of men, for the ancient
world, for the most highly developed peoples. This difference in accent is
strong enough to be looked upon by some students as an indication of Ptol-
emy’s inconsistency toward the form of government. In reality, the novel
political arguments and historical discoveries of the last two books remove
every doubt about Ptolemy’s mature conviction. Yet differently tuned sec-
tions — here, as in so many cases — point to divergent phases in the growth
of not <lacuna> interpreted work. ”
If anything, this understates Ptolemy’s insertion of his own views in Book
2, since, although it is generally true, 2.8 and 2.9 draw a strong contrast
between despotic and political government, with extremely negative implica-
tions for monarchy, at least for virtuous people. In both chapters Ptolemy says
that he will discuss these things more later, in 2.9 saying explicitly ‘in the next
book’.”? But, as Baron does imply without being clear on this,” there is no hint
of this distinction in the first ten chapters of Book 3, which include the chap-
ters on virtue in the Roman Republic, though 3.9 and 3.10 are different from
the earlier chapters in that they begin to outline the taxonomy of lordship that
will lead to the renewed treatment of the distinction in 3.11. The most obvious
interpretation is that Ptolemy is trying to follow Thomas’s plan while preparing

71 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 58-9 (43-4).

72 Ibid., p. 52 (37).
73 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 2.8.1, 2.9.2.
74 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, pp. 58-9 (43-4).
260 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

the readers for his own specific ideas, and that he had already written the first
part of Book 3, partially based on his earlier Determinatio Compendiosa,
before his theory of political vs. despotic government had matured. After
completing Book 3, or at least 3.1—3.8, he then inserted the references in
Book 2 on the distinction with the promise to consider it more fully later.
This analysis makes another possibility much less likely. Though it is
rarely mentioned, Books 1| and 2, as well as Books 3 and 4, form a coherent
treatise on their own. Perhaps Ptolemy both completed Thomas’s part (with or
without interpolations) and wrote Books 3 and 4, but with no intention of
combining the two projects, at least at first. Later, he, or someone else, plan-
ning to put them together, added the cross-references in Books 3 and 4 to
Books 1 and 2. Besides the obvious objection that no manuscripts with only
Books | and the complete Book 2 exist, we now have another: it is not simply
a matter of cross-references; whole sections of Book 2 seem consciously
designed to anticipate Books 3 and 4, and the way this is done suggests an
evolutionary process rather than a later revision done all at the same time.
Baron’s reconstruction sheds light on the growth and construction of a text
that has long confused its readers. In general we find it convincing, though the
presence of a few cross-references in Book 3 to 2 and 1, even though far fewer
than in Book 4, somewhat challenges his conclusion. However, none of the
clear-cut references come before 3.9, that is not until after the chapters just
discussed were finished. His references there, then, could be seen as part of
what by then was his plan to finish Book 2 and include there some points that
were to be elaborated in Book 3. This receives some support from an impor-
tant distinction, which Baron does not make: the citations in Book 3 all refer
vaguely to passages ‘above’, whereas five of the citations in Book 4 explicitly
state the book number or numbers to which they refer.” If Baron is correct
that it was only as he began to write Books 4 and 2 that Ptolemy had decided
upon a clear outline of his project, it was only then that he would know the
detailed arrangement of the material. This also explains why there was no
effort in the opening of Book 3 to make a transition from Book 2, since when
Ptolemy wrote it he had not established which text, if any, would immediately
precede it. On the other hand, it is disturbing that he did not provide any tran-
sition to the coming Book 3 at the end of Book 2. If the former were already
finished at that point, there would have been no reason not to prepare the
reader for what is otherwise an abrupt shift. It is also possible that Baron is
right in principle but wrong in detail. Ptolemy, on the evidence above, could
just as easily have written the first eight chapters of Book 3, then written the
end of Book 3 and Book 2 at the same time (or the end of Book 2 before the
end of Book 3), and finally written Book 4. This has the additional advantage
of explaining the detailed cross-references in Book 4 and the more vague ones
in Book 3.

75 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 4.1.3, 4.1.8, 4.2.9, 4.7.3, 4.8.3.

 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 261

A final question is when Ptolemy made the decision that resulted in the
merged four-book work. Baron argues that this came shortly after Ptolemy’s
visit to Germany in 1301, the earliest date that a detail in 2.13 concerning the
monetary conditions of the German economy could have been written.”
While the general order of writing that Baron proposes seems right, we see no
reason for this particular dating. Even if Ptolemy’s knowledge of the German
economic situation came from his 1301 trip, which seems reasonable, though
far from certain since he could have heard about it from many sources, either
from fellow mendicants or from others in the commercial crossroads of Flor-
ence or Lucca, he could have added this detail at any time, as Baron is eager to
suggest he did in other cases. We can find no internal evidence to show con-
clusively when Ptolemy made his decision. But the heated political situation
in Florence during his tenure there as prior of Santa Maria Novella (1301-2)
at the height of Florentine urban factional strife, when the potential dangers of
despotism was ever present and when he was daily in the company of republi-
cans like his fellow Dominican Remigio dei Girolami, provided a stimulating
environment for finishing and publishing a republican political treatise.
Though Baron suggests nothing that directly spurred this specific decision,
he cites three factors that help to explain why the transition in political out-
look epitomized by Ptolemy of Lucca was able to occur successfully in the
late thirteenth century, ‘in the very generation in which the Italian Commune,
after two centuries in the milieu of Federation with the Empire, began to cre-
ate a civic culture and literature of her own making’. The first factor involves
a contemporary democratic admixture to the procedures of the monastic
orders, which already were distinguished from monarchy by the cooperative
election of the abbot and conventual representatives. Though Baron’s manu-
script has a lacuna at this point, what he surely meant by this was not any
change in traditional monasticism, but the constitutional provisions of the
new mendicant orders, above all that of Ptolemy’s own Dominican Order
which was characterized by multiple levels of participation and election. The
second factor, closely connected to ‘guelfismo popolare’, concerns the
popes’ decision to break the papacy’s ‘spiritual alliance with the ideas AND
the institution of medieval empire’ in the wake of their struggle with the

76 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 59 (44); referring to Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine

Principum, 2.13.13. “Second, one’s own coinage is more fruitful. When foreign money is
involved in exchanges, it is necessary to have recourse to the art of money-changing,
since coinages may not be as valuable in other regions as in their own. This cannot help
but be harmful, and this situation comes up especially in parts of Teutonia and regions
thereabout, which is why those who travel from place to place are compelled to carry a
mass ofgold or silver to sell as needed to make exchanges for things for sale.’ Baron cites
Schmeidler (‘Introduction’ to Ptolemy of Lucca, Die Annalen des Tholomeus von
Lucca, ed. B. Schmeidler in Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores Rerum
Germanicorum, N.S.., t.8 (Berlin, 1930; 2nd edn., 1955), xvi, n.6; xxv), who argues that
Ptolemy’s statement probably reflects his 1301 German trip.
262 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

Hohenstaufen, which led to the papal alliance with the Northern Italian
city-republics.’’ This had been happening throughout the thirteenth century,
but had not previously led to an appreciation of the Roman Republic.
Determinatio Compendiosa already reflects this in its demotion of the Roman
Empire to a precursor of the Fifth Monarchy of the church, but despite its
praise of Roman virtue it had nothing to say about the Roman Republic. As
Baron writes: ‘It shows that it is possible to praise the legendary deeds of the
Roman heroes and yet, when it comes to the explanation of the Roman world
conquest, not to remember the Respublica at all.’”* What changed this, obvi-
ously, was the experience of the Italian Guelph communes like Lucca and
Florence; it ‘did not spring, as is often wrongly thought, from the Dantean
pride in the Roman roots of the medieval empire’.” The third factor is the
most unexpected: the growth of millennial movements linked to the teachings
of the Calabrian biblical exegete Joachim of Fiore.“ In the late thirteenth cen-
tury Joachim’s ideas were most associated with the dissident Spiritual Fran-
ciscans who did have a substantial following in Northern Italy. Though Baron
does not explain his reasoning, Joachim’s doctrine of a dawning third age of
the spirit in which the world would live in peace and harmony could lead to
hopes of the purification of earthly political practice. This seems rather dubi-
ous to us, since the Spirituals were not much concerned with politics, but that
Joachite ideas could lead to a radical republicanism derived in part from Ptol-
emy of Lucca’s ideas on government is proved by the example of Savonarola
in the 1490s.*!
In any case, we feel that Baron makes a strong case for the evolution of
republican ideas, akin in many ways to those of civic humanism, in Ptolemy
of Lucca between Determinatio Compendiosa and De Regimine Principum,
something he would deny years later when he wrote Crisis. A critical question
remains: assuming that Ptolemy made no interpolations in the first part of De
Regimine Principum, and that Thomas Aquinas wrote all the republican com-
ments there, as seems possible at the very least, is Baron wrong in concluding
that the first civic humanist ideas arose near the end of the thirteenth century?
Can we not say that they were common at least thirty years before Ptolemy
expressed them in his part of De Regimine Principum? Even it Ptolemy did
make the interpolations, would not their republican character and praise of the
institutions of the Roman Republic (indeed, the very beliefs that made Baron
suspicious about Book 1) also contradict Baron’s developmental argument,

7 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 67 (52). ‘With the movement of the <lacuna> a defi-
nitely democratic element was added to the monastic movement.’ The missing part is
probably either “‘mendicants’ or ‘Dominicans’.
78 Tbid., p. 64 (49).
79 Ibid., p. 66 (51).
80 Tbid., p. 67 (52).
8! See Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 263

since he admits that the interpolations would have had to be made soon after
Thomas’s death?
That these are even questions stems from Baron’s well-known tendency to
posit critical turning points and his attraction to either—or analyses. His
attempt here to date the emergence ofrepublican ideas related to civic human-
ism to the period after Thomas’s death and solely to Northern Italy is in many
ways reminiscent of what he later tried to do in Crisis: ban any real expression
of these things until after 1402. His relegation there of Ptolemy to a purely
medieval perspective with no real historical understanding of the sentiments
he sometimes expressed is quite similar to what he does in this manuscript
with the republican sentiments of Bonaventura who, he claimed, was unable
to ‘wring any clear idea of the Respublica out of the fantastic medieval
legends’ .** This is what Baron, no doubt sincerely, did time and again in his
career: once he had decided that a certain time was the critical one for the
development of some idea, any earlier similar expression must really be
something quite different. This is why he was always so tenacious in sticking
to his dating of key documents. But history is not as tidy as Baron would wish;
though doubtless certain events or milieux may be pivotal for the emergence
of ideologies, these ideologies never come forth fully formed, and almost
always we can trace a more or less continuous development of ideas as they
emerge and change over a period of centuries. Republican ideas never totally
disappeared, and they were preserved even in Christian texts, like Augus-
tine’s City of God, that sought to denigrate human politics. Italian civic life
never completely disintegrated after the fall of Rome, and as the communal
life evolved from the eleventh century on these republican ideas came more
and more to be recalled and the life and heroes of the Roman Republic to be
praised. Republican theory, though sadly not republican reality, may have
reached its height in oligarchic fifteenth-century Florence, but its flourishing
built upon the struggles for republican government in the preceding centuries.
Ptolemy of Lucca is extremely important in this process, but he was not the
first medieval writer to express genuinely republican ideas, nor was he the
first to show appreciation for the Roman Republic. Though there was great
development in his way of thinking, his positive attitude towards republics in
general and the Roman Republic in particular did not suddenly emerge from a
monarchical-imperial world view but had its inception in his childhood
experience as a member of a middle class burgher family in republican Lucca.
It was only his explanation of his preferences for republicanism, their ground-
ing in Aristotelian or civic humanist language, and his historical understand-
ing of other polities, especially that of Rome, that changed.

82 Baron, ‘Ptolemy Paper’, p. 46 (31), referring to Bonaventura, Collationes in

Hexamera, 5.19, Opera omnia (Quaracchi, 1891), Vol. 5, p. 357: *. . . as long as the
Romans chose those who were in charge, they chose the wisest men and then the republic
guided well. But after they adopted succession, it was completely destroyed.’
264 J. LA SALLE AND J.M. BLYTHE

Beyond the chronological impediment, there are other assumptions that

inhibit Baron’s understanding of medieval thought. One of these, which one
of the current authors has often pointed out as a common mistake, involves
first of all an unjustified opposition of Northern Italian republican and
Northern European monarchical political thought and, more fundamentally, a
related ‘tendency to equate non-monarchical and republican government and
to distinguish sharply between monarchical and republican government’,
which, ‘except for Ptolemy of Lucca . . . is problematic with respect to medi-
eval political thought; perhaps it is Baron’s artificial demands that blind him
to medieval thought that could be considered republican’.** This was written
before the manuscript under discussion here emerged, in which Baron
extended the umbrella of civic humanism at least partially over Ptolemy of
Lucca. Even in Crisis he would accept that Ptolemy and other Northern Ital-
ians had some republican ideas, but relegated them to a separate and inferior
category of medieval republicanism. It was only conceivable for Baron to
consider Ptolemy a budding civic humanist because he was a Northern Italian
and hostile to monarchy. That Thomas Aquinas, a monarchist and Southern
Italian, could also express republican ideas seemed impossible to him. Even
more remote from his thought was the fact that there were real republican sen-
timents expressed in the cities of Northern Europe, in Germany and Flanders
particularly, such as the comment of the Flemish chronicler Jean de Hocsem
in the early fourteenth century that the government of the many good is best of
all.** Knowledge of such sentiments, combined with his knowledge of the
commercial cities of the North, is one reason that Ptolemy commented: ‘Cities
live politically in all regions, whether in Germany, Scythia, or Gaul.’®
Further, it was ultimately psychologically difficult for Baron to maintain
that civic humanism could come out of medieval scholasticism, even of the
Northern Italian republican variety, since this was a school that for him was
characterized by its uninspiring prose and dry, systematic logic, which hardly
seemed to him an appropriate source for a classical revival. Much more satis-
factory to his mindset was the milieu of fourteenth-century Northern Italian
citizens and their literary circles, which sought to revive and imitate the rhe-
torical works of classical antiquity, especially for the political propaganda of
the city-state chanceries, and were thus exposed to the Roman Republic
directly by its ancient Roman apologists. Clearly, this was important in the
development of fifteenth-century civic humanism, but it was only one of sev-
eral streams of influence, another of which was medieval republicanism, like
that of Ptolemy of Lucca.

83 Blythe, ‘Civic Humanism’, p. 54.

84 Jean de Hocsem, La Chronique de Jean de Hocsem, ed. G. Kurth (Brussels, 1927),
p. 16.
85 Ptolemy of Lucca, De Regimine Principum, 4.1.5. ‘...in omnibus regionibus, sive
in Germania, sive in Scythia, sive in Gallia, civitates politice vivunt. ..’.
 WAS PTOLEMY OF LUCCA A CIVIC HUMANIST? 265

A likely explanation for the fact that passages of the first part of De
Regimine Principum seem similar to ones from the second portion is that Ptol-
emy built upon and transformed the rudimentary republican arguments that he
found in Thomas’s writing. Thomas was not incapable of republican senti-
ments, though these did not form the centre of this thought. They became
much more central for Ptolemy and he became a pivotal figure in the evolu-
tion of what has come to be called civic humanism. His concepts of the
Roman Republic, monarchy, self-government and political rule, among oth-
ers, were highly innovative, yet they built on what had come before. There is
no definite evidence that his writings stand in a direct line to Baron’s later
heroes, like Leonardo Bruni, but ideas like Ptolemy’s were in the air in North-
ern Italy around 1300, and over the next century they developed in still other
innovative ways. Unlike Baron, we do not wish to point to a certain time,
place or person and say, “Here for the first time is civic humanism; what came
before was purely medieval’. One hopes that in the years since Baron wrote,
the Burckhardtian view of the radical disjunction between the Middle Ages
and Renaissance has become less accepted by Renaissance scholars, as it has
for a long time by medievalists.
The present inquiry in no way intends to raise doubts concerning Baron’s
honesty as a scholar or to ensnare him in a web of his own inconsistent find-
ings, especially considering the unfinished nature of his ‘Ptolemy Paper’;
rather, we are concerned to map the evolution of Baron’s theory of the crisis
of 1402 and his anticipation of the arguments it would provoke. When Baron
published Crisis, he did not cynically conceal his previous evaluation of Ptol-
emy. Rather, we believe that he was so carried away by the discovery of what
appeared to be a coherent, sweeping and compelling argument, and one that
was more in line with his preconceptions, that his previous considerations
paled in comparison. Baron’s almost mystical vision of 1402 and of cata-
clysm averted, reflected in Bruni’s Ciceronian eloquence, provided the solu-
tion that Baron had sought since the early 1920s: a succinct explanation for
the revival of republicanism completely developed within humanism itself.
Consumed by this theory, Baron convinced himself that what he had previ-
ously identified as the beginning of Renaissance republicanism in the late
thirteenth and early fourteenth century was instead merely an ‘occasional
deviation from the medieval view of the Trecento’.**

John La Salle UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

James M. Blythe UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS

86 Baron, Crisis, joe Ie

 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM AND THE
‘SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM’:
CIVIC COLLECTIVISM AND NATIONAL WEALTH
IN THE THOUGHT OF JOHN FORTESCUE

Cary Nederman'

Abstract: In her 2002 book The Spirit of Capitalism, Liah Greenfeld argues that the
emergence of nationalistic economic doctrines in Europe, and especially in Britain,
after about 1600 constitutes the salient explanation for the capitalist ‘take-off in the
modern West. This paper re-examines a central feature of Greenfeld’s analytical
apparatus, namely her strict distinction between ‘collectivist’ and ‘individualistic’
approaches to nationalism that she believes holds so much of the key to persistent dif-
ferences in levels of political and economic development among nations even today.
According to Greenfeld, only the individualistic version of nationalism is capable of
promoting the convergence of personal and public economic interest and the competi-
tive spirit of economic internationalism. The paper investigates a nationalistic theory,
spun out of a series of tracts written in the second half of the fifteenth century by the
English lawyer John Fortescue, that is clearly rooted in a medieval, collectivistic out-
look but which promotes economic values (economic achievement, competitiveness
and prosperity) that comprise Greenfeld’s ‘spirit of capitalism’. I argue that Fortescue
offers a powerful counterexample to Greenfeld’s central explanatory framework.

Nationalistic Foundations of the Capitalist Spirit

In her provocative and wide-ranging recent study of The Spirit of Capitalism,
Liah Greenfeld grapples with what she takes to be the central unanswered
question of modern economic history: why did the capitalist economy suc-
ceed in ‘taking off (in the economist’s sense) when and where this occurred,
while failing to do so elsewhere until later (if at all)? She rejects the material-
ist arguments favoured by both liberal and Marxist economic thought, to the
effect that the response to this question must be found internal to economic
processes per se. Following a broadly Weberian line, Greenfeld argues that a
fundamental shift in values — the postulation and acceptance of ‘a new set of
ethical considerations and social concerns that invested economic growth
with a positive value and focused naturally diffuse social energies on it’? —
constituted the indispensable prerequisite for capitalist ‘take off’. The ‘spirit
of capitalism’, the driving force behind the endorsement and expansion of
‘economic civilization’, precedes and prepares the way for the spread of capi-
talist practices and relations. Yet Greenfeld eschews the orthodox Weberian
explanation. She takes it as given that religion — especially of a Calvinist or
l Department of Political Science, Texas A&M University, 2010 Allen Building,
College Station TX 77843-4348 USA. Email: nederman @polisci.tamu.edu
? Liah Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth
(Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 24.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005

 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 267

Puritan variety — did not provide the salient historical explanation for the
reorientation of values that made capital accumulation a worthy goal. To that
extent, the critics of Weber such as R.W. Tawney were correct.
Greenfeld proposes instead that the dissemination of nationalism (of a par-
ticular sort) yields the reason why Britain achieved its ‘economic miracle’ in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries while other locales that seemed to
have the same (or even more propitious) material and religious conditions
(the low countries in particular) did not embrace economic growth of their
own accord. This is hardly a surprising claim from an author whose previous
book was entitled Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.’ Greenfeld builds
her case around two main points. First, nationalism of the British variety,
which she terms ‘individualistic-civic’, in contrast with ‘civic-collectivist’ or
‘ethnic-collectivist’,* ‘represents the foundation of the moral order of modern
society, the source of its values, the framework of its characteristic —
national — identity, and the basis of social integration in it’ in terms of acom-
mon good that pertains to all the members of society in equal manner.’ Hence,
according to Greenfeld, Anglo nationalistic patriotism posits that
the individual as the highest social value and the fundamental moral unit of
society — that is, as an independent moral actor — adds dignity to the
national identity and, taking much farther the commitment to egalitarianism
that every nationalism preaches, makes its practice in individualistic
nationalism much more consistent than in nationalisms ofother types. . .’°
Stated more succinctly, by promoting individualism, the English version of
nationalism generated both unprecedented loyalty and unreserved desire to
increase wealth.
Second, Greenfeld maintains that the stunning success of the ‘British eco-
nomic miracle’ — the fact that a relatively underdeveloped nation by the com-
mercial standards of c.1500 became within a century the epitome of economic
growth — served as the stimulus for other countries to develop nationalistic
fervour that generated ‘the formation of the modern “economic civilization” ’
on a global scale.’ The reason, simply, is that Britain’s accomplishments pro-
voked international competition that sooner or later coalesced into national-
ism of a similar sort in other countries. The initial spark ignited by British
nationalism rendered economic ‘competitiveness’ a hallmark of capitalist
expansion, on account of ‘the members’ investment in the dignity of the
nation — that is, its prestige — which is necessarily assessed in relation to the

3 Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

4 Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, p. 2.
5 Ibid., p. 24.
© bid., p. 25.
7 Ibid., p. 24.
268 C. NEDERMAN

status of other nations .. .’.’ The aim to prove themselves ‘as good as’ or
‘better than’ the British led governments and their citizens in modern Europe
to develop their own capitalist economies oriented towards the primary goal
of unrestrained growth. Ultimately, Greenfeld concludes, nationalism was
not merely the ‘source’ of the spirit of capitalism, it was coextensive with that
spirit, ‘the ethical motive force behind the modern economy of growth’.”
Greenfeld’s thesis, defended over the course of a volume that runs to more
than five hundred pages, has by now been dissected and criticized from a
number ofperspectives.'° My aim in the present paper is not so much to add to
the body of critical literature as to point out a historical limitation in her argu-
ment as presented that may — depending upon how it is understood — consti-
tute either a confirmation or a criticism of her main points. Greenfeld takes the
emergence ofnationalism in Britain after 1500 to be ‘a radical transformation
of social consciousness, nothing less than a conceptual revolution’ that is in
effect coextensive with modernity itself.'' Nationalism presupposes ‘an inclu-
Sive, sovereign, and in essence egalitarian community’ and thus stands ‘in
sharp contrast to the hierarchical and compartmentalized image of the feudal
society of orders in which nationalism first arose’.'!* The sort of nation
Greenfeld has in mind — a nation founded on equality and individual interest
as the defining characteristics of the polity — is utterly removed from essen-
tially medieval assumptions about society composed of diverse orders and
ranks in which group or communal identity trumps private advantage. While
the latter may persevere in ‘collectivist’ forms of nationalism that lack any
inherent economic content! — types of nationalism that she clearly believes
to be incomplete or partial — only modern civic-individualist nationalism
takes ‘economic achievement, competitiveness, and prosperity . . . as positive

8 Ibid., p. 23.
9 Ibid., p. 58.
'0 The Spirit of Capitalism has been appraised in popular as well as academic venues,
including the following reviews: by Christoper Dyer in History Today, 53 (2003),
pp. 57-8; by John A. Hall in Journal of Economic History, 63 (2003), pp. 300-2; by
Dudley Baines in Business History, 45 (2003), p. 135; by Carl Strikwerda in American
Historical Review, 108 (2003), pp. 159-60; by Robert Skidelsky in New York Review of
Books, 13 March 2003, pp. 28-31; by Duncan Kelly in Political Quarterly, 74 (2003),
pp. 123-7; by Eric Jones in Journal of Economic Literature, 40 (2002), pp. 1273-5; by
Mark N. Hagopian in American Political Science Review, 96 (2002), pp. 803-4; and by
John Gray in Times Literary Supplement, 7 June 2002, pp. 9-10. The book also received
the 2002 Donald Kagan Best Book in European History Prize.
'! Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, p. 31. Interestingly, many elements of this
thesis are also defended, albeit from a quite different perspective, by another recent
study: Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London, 2nd
edn., 2002 [1999]), esp. pp. 93-121.
'2 Greenfeld, The Spirit of Capitalism, p. 32.
13 Ibid., pp 2-324.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 269

or important national values’.'* While briefly acknowledging that in the tran-

sition from pre-modern values (those views, such as ‘traditional Christian
teaching’, that ‘inhibit economic growth’)'? to modern ones, public interest
may have taken the initial priority over private interest, the two were ulti-
mately and irresistibly seen to be wedded.'®Nationalism is not only the spirit
of capitalism for Greenfeld, it is the harbinger of modernity in all its charac-
teristic forms — a conclusion flowing directly from her previous work.
Yet nothing Greenfeld (not to mention other scholars who might broadly
assent to her thesis)'’ says about the integral connection between nationalism
and economic growth — neither about the primacy of economic values for
political and social order nor about the promotion of competition through
self-conscious assertions of nationality — comes as much of a surprise to the
student of high and late medieval political and economic thought. The phrases
‘economic nationalism’ and ‘economic humanism’ were deployed a genera-
tion ago by John McGovern to describe lines of thought that pervaded philo-
sophical, theological, commercial and legal writings from 1200 onwards."
More recently McGovern’s terminology has been supported and extended by
Diana Wood, who detects a broad ‘shift in attitude’ commencing during the
twelfth century already, shaped by “both economic nationalism and economic
humanism, the one advocating the wealth ofthe State, starting with that of the
ruler, the other the wealth of the individual’ .'” England provided a particularly
fertile — although by no means distinctive — territory for works in this vein.
From John of Salisbury and Richard FitzNigel in the second half of the
twelfth century to William of Pagula towards the middle of the fourteenth
century, advice to the king about the management of his realm for the sake of
the economic well-being of all formed a recurrent feature of political
thought.”° Likewise, many early works of vernacular English literature

14 Thid., p. 23.
'5 Jbid., p. 24.
16 Tbid., p. 26.
'7 Two studies of the early modern period come immediately to mind: Neal Wood,
Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society
(Berkeley, 1994); and Andrea Finkelstein, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual
History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor, 2000).
18 John F. McGovern, ‘The Rise of New Economic Attitudes — Economic Human-
ism, Economic Nationalism — during the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance, A.D.
1200-1550’, Traditio, 26 (1970), pp. 225-6.
19 Diana Wood, Medieval Economic Thought (Cambridge, 2002), p. 117; see
pp. 117-20.
20 See Cary J. Nederman, ‘The Origins of “Policy”: Fiscal Administration and Eco-
nomic Principles in Later Twelfth-Century England’, in Rhetoric and Renewal in the
Latin West 1100-1500: Essays Presented to John O. Ward, ed. Constant J. Mews, Cary J.
Nederman and Rodney Thomson (Turnhout, 2003), pp. 149-68 and C.J. Nederman, “The
Monarch and the Marketplace: Economic Policy and Royal Finance in William of
270 C. NEDERMAN

explicitly concentrated on the promotion and diffusion of economic ideas and

commercial motivations: Wynnere and Wastoure (1350s or 1360s) and The
Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1436/7) are but two of the better known exam-
ples of this genre.”' The civic-individual nationalism that Greenfeld posits as
the hallmark of modernity and the birth of the capitalist spirit had long been a
feature of English discourse.
Yet my purpose is not to play Werner Sombart to Greenfeld’s Max Weber
by attempting to push the nationalistic origins of capitalism well back into the
Middle Ages.” Rather, I want to re-examine a somewhat more cherished fea-
ture of Greenfeld’s analytical apparatus, namely the strict distinction between
‘collectivist’ and ‘individualistic’ approaches to nationalism that she believes
holds so much of the key to persistent differences in levels of political and
economic development among nations even today. According to Greenfeld,
as we have observed, only the individualistic version of nationalism is capable
of promoting the convergence of personal and public economic interest and
the competitive spirit of economic internationalism. In the remainder of this
paper I will investigate a nationalistic theory, spun out of a series of tracts
written in the second half of the fifteenth century by the English lawyer John
Fortescue, that is clearly rooted in a medieval, collectivistic outlook but
which promotes economic values (economic achievement, competitiveness
and prosperity) that comprise Greenfeld’s ‘spirit of capitalism’. I conclude
that, if Greenfeld is right about nationalism as the ‘source’ or concomitant of
the capitalist spirit, she must be incorrect about the necessity of either its
modernity or its individualistic quality. Otherwise, it seems that she must sur-
render the equivalence between nationalism and the capitalist spirit that she
upholds, either in deference to some other intellectual (or material) force or by
seeking a more complex, multi-variant explanation that incorporates but does
not give priority to nationalism among an ensemble of factors. In the present
paper I offer no opinion concerning the resolution of this larger dilemma.
Pagula’s Speculum Regis Edwardi III,History of Political Economy, 33 (Spring 2001),
pp. 51-69.
71 The texts are to be found in: Wynnere and Wastoure, ed. Stephanie Trigg (London,
1990) and The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, ed. George Warner (Oxford, 1926). For dis-
cussions of their leading ideas, see Lois Roney, ‘Winner and Waster’s “Wyse Wordes”:
Teaching Economics and Nationalism in Fourteenth-Century England’, Speculum, 69
(1994), pp. 1070-100 and Roger Ladd, ‘ “Cheryshe marchandyse”: The Libelle of
Englyshe Polycye and Pro-Mercantilism’, paper presented at International Congress of
Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2001 (my thanks to Professor Ladd for
sharing a copy of his paper with me). On the ethos in which these and similar works were
created, see David Harris Sacks, ‘The Greed of Judas: Avarice, Monopoly, and the Moral
Economy in England, ca.1350-ca.1600’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies,
28 (1998), pp. 263-307 and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Articulate Citizen and the English
Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1965), pp. 3-129.
2 On Sombart’s critique of Weber, see McGovern, ‘The Rise of New Economic Atti-
tudes’, pp. 217-25.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 271

Fortescue’s Constitutional Principles

The fifteenth-century English jurist and legal theorist, Sir John Fortescue,
is something of an enigma in the history of Western political thought: he
has been taken both as a culmination of medieval trends and as a forerun-
ner of modern developments. He has been crowned the last great theorist
of classical natural law and also the harbinger of modern political doc-
trines such as constitutional government.”? Neal Wood, in particular, has
drawn attention to Fortescue as a ‘forerunner’ of the economic reform
movement of the early Tudor period that affords some of the primary
evidence for Greenfeld’s account of the (early) modernity of economic
nationalism. Yet Fortescue’s central sources and doctrines, not to men-
tion his methodology, are firmly rooted in the scholastic discourse of the
preceding two centuries.
In particular, Fortescue appropriated and reconfigured many of the
concepts and terms developed in De regimine principum, Ptolemy of
Lucca’s continuatio of the de regno tract commonly attributed to Thomas
Aquinas.” Scholars have devoted considerable attention in recent times to
the relationship between Fortescue’s writings and his medieval anteced-
ents,°° a topic that I do not intend to address at present. Nor am I interested
in his immediate polemical agenda in the midst of the violent and tumultu-
ous conflicts between parties contending for royal supremacy. Rather, my

23 Among the scholars weighing in on this topic are: Max Adams Shepard, ‘The
Political and Constitutional Theory of Sir John Fortescue’, in Essays in History and
Political Theory in Honor of Charles H. MclIlwain, ed. Carl Witke (1936; reprinted New
York, 1967), pp. 289-319; Franklin Le Van Baumer, The Early Tudor Theory of King-
ship (New Haven, 1940), pp. 4-12; Donald W. Hanson, From Kingdom to Common-
wealth: The Development of Civic Consciousness in English Political Thought (Cam-
bridge, MA, 1970), pp. 217-52; J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton,
1975), pp. 9-30; Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute
and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), pp. 102-9.
24 Wood, Foundations of Political Economy, pp. 44-69. Similar observations are
made by Eberhard Isenmann, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Theories of State Finance’, in
Economic Systems and State Finance, ed. Richard Bonney (Oxford, 1995), pp. 41-3.
25 On the twisted textual history, see James Blythe’s very useful introduction to his
translation of Ptolemy of Lucca: On the Government of Rulers (Philadelphia, 1997),
pp. 3-S.
26 Especially noteworthy are: S.B. Chrimes, ‘Sir John Fortescue and his Theory of
Dominium’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fourth Series, 17 (1934),
pp. 117-47; Felix Gilbert, ‘Sir John Fortescue’s “dominium regale et politicum” ’,
Medievalia et Humanistica, 2 (1944), pp. 88—97; J.H. Burns, “Fortescue and the Political
Theory of Dominium’, The Historical Journal, 28 (1985), pp. 777-97; J.H. Burns,
Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy 1400-1525 (Oxford, 1992),
pp. 58-70; and Edwin T. Callahan, “The Apotheosis of Power: Fortescue on the Nature
of Kingship’, Majestas, 3 (1995), pp. 35-68.
Lie C. NEDERMAN

present interest lies in how he employs these sources to articulate a version

of economic nationalism that reaches Greenfeld’s threshold for collectivism.
In a series of legal-political treatises composed in the 1460s and 1470s,
Fortescue used as his intellectual framework two categories of constitutional
regime that Ptolemy had described in De regimine principum: dominium
regale (royal lordship, or the rule of a single man according to his own will)
and dominium politicum (political lordship, namely a mixed constitution
based on consensual law and the sharing of power — in sum, a republic). For-
tescue’s innovation was a proposed synthesis of these systems into a single,
superior and all-embracing form of government, namely dominium regale et
politicum. This type of hybrid regime, in Fortescue’s view, 1s no mere theo-
retical construct; rather, it is embodied by the rule of the English monarchy.
Corresponding to the particular characteristics of this system is an idea of
governance distinct from that conceived by Ptolemy (a republican) or the
author (usually still identified as Aquinas) of the earlier portion of De
regimine principum (a monarchist).
Fortescue’s earliest attempt to articulate the notion of a third category that
transcends the distinction between political and royal governments occurred
in his treatise De natura legis naturae (c.1461). Having described both
dominium regale and dominium politicum, he continues: ‘But that there is a
third kind of dominium, not inferior to these in dignity and honor, which is
called the political and royal, we are not only taught by experience and ancient
history, but we know has been taught in the doctrine of St. Thomas.’”’ Fortes-
cue proposes, in sum, that the strict classification of regimes as either ‘politi-
cal’ or ‘royal’ need not be respected. Instead pointing to England, where
‘kings make not laws, nor impose subsidies on their subjects, without the con-
sent of the Three Estates of the realm’, Fortescue asks:

May not, then, this dominium be called political, that is to say, regulated by
the administration of many, and may it not also be named dominium regale,
seeing that the subjects themselves cannot make laws without the authority
of the king, and the kingdom, being subject to the king’s dignity, is pos-
sessed by kings and their heirs successively by hereditary right, in such
manner as no lordships are possessed which are only politically regulated?”
Fortescue then invokes the examples of Rome during the early Principate and
scripturally-depicted Israel under the Judges as additional illustrations of
mixed regimes. The account here is not merely an empirical one. Instead, De
natura legis naturae asserts: ‘It is good for a people to be ruled by laws to

27 Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lock-
wood (Cambridge, 1997), p. 128. (Of course, ‘Aquinas’ proposed no sure third classifi-
cation.) I have occasionally adjusted the published translations from Latin when it
seemed appropriate.
28 Ibid., pp. 128-9.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 2I3

which it consents.’*? The normative dimension of this institutional arrange-

ment is of primary concern for Fortescue.
But why should dominium regale et politicum be judged superior to either
dominium regale or dominium politicum? This question receives a detailed
reply from Fortescue in two of his later works, De laudibus legum Anglie
(1468-71) and The Governance of England (1471). His view is two-fold:
first, he insists that there are distinct advantages to the king arising from the
political character of his regime; second, and perhaps most significantly, he
identifies clear and tangible benefits for those who are governed by a political
and royal system. These arguments turn him towards a doctrine of economic
nationalism.
Already in De natura legis naturae, Fortescue had proposed that the con-
junction of political with royal rule should not be construed as an infringe-
ment on the king’s authority or prerogative. The fact that the monarch ruling
politically as well as royally is limited by the laws that his subjects approve
means only that he lacks licence to decree and enforce unjust statutes. Such
licence is in no way appropriate to a king’s true liberty; it does not fall within
the legitimate power of the king to commit evil acts.*” This theme is carried
forward into De laudibus legum Anglie, which purports to be a dialogue
between the Chancellor of England (a stand-in for Fortescue himself) and the
young Prince of Wales regarding the study of law. The Chancellor explains to
Edward why English government, organized politically and royally, gener-
ates a legal structure superior to those systems found in continental Europe.
For while kings elsewhere possess a wide latitude to do evil, if they are so
inclined, the English ruler is prevented, as a result of the constraint imposed
by the political quality of his regime, from acting contrary to just law. The
political component of the King of England’s governance is a check on tyr-
anny, the will to act improperly, not on his capacity to behave rightly. “With
the king ruling his people politically . . . he himself is not able to change the
laws without the assent of his subjects nor to burden an unwilling people with
strange impositions ...’.°’ So far from interfering with the king’s valid author-
ity, the English dominium regale et politicum actually yields a positive bene-
fit: it ensures the stability of the realm and of the crown. ‘Rejoice, therefore,
good Prince’, Fortescue proclaims, ‘that such is the law of the kingdom to
which you are to succeed, because it will provide no small security and com-
fort for you and for the people.’
Fortescue points out that previous English kings thus erred by scheming to
rule the realm according to dominium regale alone: they undermined their
own authority, the Chancellor tells the Prince, in order to satisfy ‘ambition,

29 Ibid., p. 135.
30 Thid., pp. 133-6.
3! Tbid., p. 17.
32 Ibid., p. 18.
274 C. NEDERMAN

lust, [and] license, which your said ancestors preferred to the good of the
realm’.*? Yet the condemnation of such rulers is notably consequentialist and
temporal, rather than moral or religious, in bearing:
Hence, Prince, it is evident to you, from the practical effects, that your
ancestors, who sought to cast aside political government, not only could not
have obtained, as they wished, a greater power than they had, but would
have exposed their own welfare, and the welfare of their realm, to greater
risk and danger . .. The power of the king ruling royally is more difficult to
exercise, and less secure for himself and his people, so that it would be
undesirable for a prudent king to exchange a political government for a
solely royal one.
Fortescue’s criteria for judging between different kinds of regimes, and for
preferring dominium regale et politicum, are highly pragmatic: such a system
of government evinces greater strength and longevity than royal rulership,
and thus benefits the king directly and materially. Less germane are consider-
ations of the personal wisdom and virtue of the monarch, not to mention
responsibility for promoting the moral goodness or salvation of the populace,
precisely the concerns that animated the main body of medieval advice-to-
princes literature.”
This reflects, in turn, Fortescue’s understanding of the proper aim of gov-
ernment. According to the Chancellor,
All the power of a king ought to be applied to the good of his realm, which
in effect consists in the defense of it against invasions by foreigners, and of
the protection of the inhabitants of the realm and their goods from injuries
and rapine by the native population. Therefore, a king who cannot achieve
these things is necessarily to be judged powerless.*°
Like John Locke two centuries later, Fortescue upholds the central (perhaps
sole) responsibility of government to be the protection of the life, liberty and
estate of the inhabitants.” (It is hardly surprising, in fact, that Locke in the Sec-
ond Treatise explicitly cites Fortescue as an antecedent authority on the nature
of government.)**® Fortescue consequently believes that those who submit to

23 Ibid, p. 53.
34 Ibid., p. 54; also p. 49.
35 On this literature generally, see Cary J. Nederman, ‘The Mirror Crack’d: The
Speculum Principum as Political and Social Criticism in the Late Middle Ages’, The
European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 3 (June 1998), pp. 18-38. Lisa H. Cooper
provides an excellent survey of some economic attitudes in the advice-book literature in
Chapter 4 of her 2003 Columbia University Department of English doctoral dissertation.
36 Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, p. 53.
37 A fact not missed by some of Fortescue’s commentators; see Shepard, ‘The Politi-
cal and Constitutional Theory of Sir John Fortescue’, pp. 302-4.
38 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988),
p. 426.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE Za

dominium regale et politicum enjoy far greater benefit than the subject of
merely royal government for reasons that are strictly instrumental. The civic
dimension of communal life is useful inasmuch as it contributes to the ability
of individuals to administer, consume and augment their personal possessions
as they choose without interference from neighbours, foreigners or magis-
trates.’ The king’s main goals should be avoidance of ‘poverty and lack of
goods’, and instead promotion of ‘riches and property’, so that his kingdom is
‘the mightiest and most wealthy realm of the world’.*® Fortescue resists
assigning spiritual and moral goals to government, turning rather to material
satisfaction (whether fear of its loss or desire of its increase) as the primary
factor motivating a populace to acknowledge political authority. So, the
greater the likelihood that subjects will be free to take full advantage of their
bodies and properties, the better by definition that government will be.

Economic Nationalism and International Competition

The theme of reciprocity between regime type and the physical welfare of the
people runs throughout both De laudibus legum Anglie and The Governance
of England. In the latter work, Fortescue explicitly assesses the relative
‘fruits’ of royal, as contrasted with royal and political, government by com-
paring the circumstances of France with those of England. The French king’s
royal regime, which taxes subjects arbitrarily and heavily, is held directly to
blame for the immiseration of the populace. The French ‘commons are so
impoverished and destroyed that they can barely live’, since the harshness of
the king’s exactions ensures that ‘they live in the most extreme poverty and
misery, and yet they dwell in one of the most fertile realms of the world’.”’
Fortescue provides a very detailed depiction of this poverty — describing the
diet, clothing and working conditions of the French nation” — and lays the
blame squarely on the royal system of rule through which France is gov-
erned.** Just as the purely royal king causes such poverty, so he must con-
stantly be on his guard lest his subjects muster the courage to rise up and
oppose him, contributing to the general instability of the realm.”
The contrast with England and its ‘mixed’ royal and political system, is
striking. According to Fortescue,

39 For Fortescue’s concomitant quasi-Lockean individualism in respect to the

acquisition of property, see Edwin T. Callahan, ‘Blood, Sweat, and Wealth: Fortescue’s
Theory of the Origin of Property’, History of Political Thought, 17 (1996), pp. 21-35.
40 Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, p. 138; these phrases derive
from an alternative version of Chapter 16 of The Governance of England that Lockwood
includes as an appendix.
41 Tbid., pp. 88, 89.
42 Ibid., p. 89.
43 Ibid., pp. 90-2.
44 Ibid., pp. 88, 110-11.
276 C. NEDERMAN

This land is ruled under a better law; and therefore the people are not in such
penury, nor thereby hurt in their persons, but they are wealthy and have all
things necessary to the sustenance of nature. Wherefore, they are mighty
and able to resist the adversaries of this realm . . . Lo, this is the fruit of
‘political and royal law’, under which we live.”
The major reason for this, says Fortescue, is that the English king is restrained
in his ability to lay claim to the goods of subjects, should he ever desire to do
so. The Governance of England recounts in great detail the structure of fiscal
administration that bridles the king.*® On the one hand, the English king is
assured a sufficient income to perform the tasks appropriate to his office, so
that he will not be tempted to pursue illegal sources of income. But on the
other hand, the prerequisite of parliamentary approval conjoined with the
independent authority of royal counsellors and magistrates form a check upon
and barrier to the whims to which a king who reigns royally might easily
succumb.
Consequently, the royal and political ruler takes it as integral to his office
not to drain income away from his subjects into his own coffers, but to enact
policies that enhance the wealth of the entire nation. ‘It is the king’s honor’,
Fortescue remarks, “and also his duty, to make his realm rich; and it is a dis-
honor when he has but a poor realm. Yet it would be a much greater dishonor,
if he found his realm rich, and then made it poor.’*” In turn, the wealth of sub-
jects that arises from royal and political rule acts as an assurance of public
order. Inhabitants who enjoy material well-being are, in Fortescue’s estima-
tion, more willing and able to fight for their realm; they are less likely to
engage in rebellious and seditious activities; and they possess the resources,
not to mention the good-will, to subsidize the government in times of particu-
lar need. Fortescue’s view, in short, seems to be that the public bearing of the
governed is strictly determined by the measurable impact of government upon
their private benefit: if they are contented with their physical lot, they will
gladly subject themselves to the king and will perform their roles; but if their
ruler adopts policies that impoverish them, they will express their displeasure
directly and violently. ‘The greatest safety, truly, and also the most honor that
may come to the king is that his realm should be rich in every estate’, Fortes-
cue observes.** A more succinct statement of the principle of economic
nationalism would be difficult to locate.
The physical benefits accruing to those who submit to dominium regale et
politicum are also underscored by Fortescue in De laudibus legum Anglie.
The Chancellor recommends that Prince Edward ‘begin with the results of
only royal government, such as that with which the king of France rules his

45 Tbid., p. 90.
46 Ibid., pp. 92-108, 112-20.
47 Ibid., p. 109.
$8 Ibid. p..110.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE ZAG

subjects; then examine the practical effect of the royal and political govern-
ment, such as that with which the king of England rules over his subject peo-
ple’.”” In French territories, despite the fact that they are naturally rich, the
privileges of the king despoil the people of their goods. On royal authority,
knights are billeted and fed without charge (or at least below market value)
wherever they go in the realm; monopolies over essential commodities such
as Salt and wine compel the populace to pay extortionate prices; and the crown
demands arbitrary and constant payments in the form of monetary taxes and
assessments in kind and in person. ‘Exasperated by these and other calami-
ties’, Fortescue concludes, ‘the people live in no little misery.’ He then
describes the very stark poverty that the subjects of the French king (or at any
rate, the vast mass of the populace) endure, echoing the depiction presented in
The Governance of England.*° The royal character of French government, by
permitting the king to impoverish the inhabitants of his lands with impunity,
directly causes the material suffering of subjects.
By contrast, the English king, who rules royally and politically, enjoys nei-
ther the privilege of purveyance nor the right of monopoly. Moreover, his
government can in no way impose ‘tallages, subsides, or any other burdens
whatsoever on his subjects, nor change their laws, nor make new ones, with-
out the concession and assent of his whole realm expressed in his parlia
ment’.°' Thus, the English harvest the fruits of the earth in all their abundance,
without fear of confiscation. Because it is by their own consent that subjects
of a royal and political king are ruled, they cannot be involuntarily denied
their goods and abused in their persons. On Fortescue’s account, the immedi-
ate result of such government renders England a sort of earthly Garden of
Paradise.** Who could fail to prefer a form of government that defends and
protects the populace and its property to a system whose ruler “is so overcome
by his own passions or by such poverty that he cannot keep his hands from
despoiling his subjects, so that he impoverishes them, and does not allow
them to live and be supported by his own goods’?°’ As in The Governance of
England, the presumed criteria employed here by Fortescue to judge the
impact of regime type on citizens are not fundamentally civil, moral or reli-
gious, but instead economic and physical. Individuals are satisfied to leave
the conduct of the daily affairs of government to the king and his ministers so
long as their material well-being is not imperiled. In turn, as private persons,
they are encouraged (indeed, expected) to contribute to the public good by
seeking their personal advantage in economic activity. Thus, a nation that

49 Tbid., p. 49.
5° Ibid., pp. 49-51.
5! Jbid., p. 52.
52 Ibid., pp. 52-3.
53 Tbid., p. 53.
278 C. NEDERMAN

possesses large numbers of merchants engaging in commerce is one, Fortes-

cue insists, that has been truly blessed by God.

Collectivism and the Values of Economic Society

All of the evidence thus far presented might seem to confirm Greenfeld’s
analysis of nationalism as a force for ‘jump starting’ capitalism in England.
Fortescue appears as simply an early voice — a ‘forerunner’, in Neal Wood’s
description — of the new social consciousness that would take off in the six-
teenth century and beyond. Yet Greenfeld’s account requires not nationalism
per se, but a particular sort of nationalism — civic-individualist national-
ism — to form the ‘spirit of capitalism’. Fortescue, for all of his apparent
attention to the centrality of economic life, does not meet the criteria for civic
individualism; he remains, at heart, a civic collectivist. This is seen especially
in the social theory underlying his account of nationalism, which reaches back
to the quintessentially medieval conception of the communal order as a body
politic, an organic totality greater than the sum of its parts. Fortescue’s
self-conscious perpetuation of organic imagery marks him as firmly within
the intellectual terrain of the Latin Middle Ages.
Although Fortescue makes reference to the body politic throughout his
political writings, it is in De Laudibus legum Anglie that we find the most
thorough exposition of the analogy. Chapter 13 addresses the question of how
the ‘political’ regime originated, arguing that government of this sort must
have a ‘voluntary’ basis. Citing Augustine and Aristotle,” Fortescue asserts
that a ‘kingdom ruling politically’ emerges when a people, sharing a commu-
nity of interest and law, appoints a head.
A people does not deserve to be called a body when it is acephalous, that is,
without a head. Because, just as in natural things, what is left over after
decapitation is not a body, but what we call a trunk, so in political affairs, a
community without a head is not by any means a body . . . So a people that
wills to erect itself into a kingdom or any other body politic must always set
up one man for the government of all that body . . . Just as in this way the
physical body grows out of the embryo, regulated by one head, so the king-
dom issues from the people, and exists as a mystical body, governed by one
man as head.*°
In many ways, Fortescue’s position constitutes a straightforward restatement
of a quite hierarchical version of the organic metaphor. He clearly lacks any
sympathy for republican or popular conceptions of self-governing political
institutions. Any political body worthy of the name must be ruled from above;

54 Ibid., p. 75.
5° Although his direct source seems to be Ptolemy of Lucca; see James M. Blythe,
‘Aristotle’s Politics and Ptolemy of Lucca’, Vivarium, 40 (2002), pp. 126-31.
56 Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, p. 20.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 279

this is what nature teaches. Moreover, the reference to the community as a

‘mystical body’ certainly resounds with the theological language that other
theorists had left aside in favour of thoroughgoing naturalism. Even the claim
that the head arises from a public act of the people does not entail populist
conclusions inasmuch as it does not require accountability or constitutional
limitation of power.
De Laudibus legum Anglie in fact does not leave the people entirely passive
in relation to the king. Rather, Fortescue argues that it is the people, not the
ruler, who keep the body politic alive and active.
And just as in the natural body, as the Philosopher said, the heart is the first
living thing, having in itself the blood that it sends forth to all the members,
whereby they are quickened and live, the will [intencio] of the people is the
first living thing, having in it the blood, namely, political provision for the
interest of the people, which it transmits to the head and all the members of
the body, by which the body is nourished and quickened.*’
The head is not the supreme or final authority in the life of the body politic, for
the king’s will extends only to what has been approved by the people for their
interests. The head does not give direction autonomously, but according to the
principle of the public welfare from which he originates and to which he
remains permanently responsible. Indeed, this is what differentiates a ‘politi-
cal’ regime from a purely ‘royal’ one — the latter is arbitrary and governs
without necessary reference to the common good.” Just as the body cannot
exist without the head to coordinate and organize its activities, so neither the
head nor any other member can survive without the continuous functioning of
the heart, which establishes the common purposes that define the community.
The equilibrium of the body politic derives from the operation of the heart in
the circulation of blood. This is a way of describing the source of reciprocal
equity within the political organism and it evokes the fundamental idea that
public order is not identical to simple subordination and rule.
Nor does this complete Fortescue’s employment of physiological images to
describe the ‘political’ community. Recall that what distinguishes a ‘political’
regime, according to him, is its foundation in law. Following Augustine, For-
tescue holds that the well-spring of a people — even before they authorize a
head — is their agreement about shared legal principles. Thus, as one might
expect of an author trained not only in scholastic philosophy but also in Eng-
lish common law, a central place must be made in the body for legal statute.
Law becomes the muscular structure of the realm:
The law, indeed, by which a group of men is made into a people, resembles
the sinews of the physical body, for just as the body is held together by the
sinews, so this body mystical is bound together and preserved as one by the

57 Ibid., pp. 20-1.

58 Ibid., pp. 19-20.
280 C. NEDERMAN

law .. . and the members and bones of this body, which signify the solid
basis of truth by which the community is sustained, preserve their rights
through the law, as the natural body does through the sinews.””
The heart, as the popular will, may pump the blood through the limbs and
organs. But what permits the body to act in concert — to move itself for-
ward — is the unity generated by the law. Without the system of muscles, the
body would remain limp and inert. In turn, because the law reflects an agree-
ment amongst the members of the body before the selection of a royal head,
the king lacks the authority to make any modifications of the law.
And just as the head of the physical body is unable to change its sinews, or
to deny its members proper strength and due nourishment of blood, so a
king who is head of the body politic is unable to change the laws of that
body, or to deprive that same people of their own substance uninvited or
against their wills.
The organic metaphor thus functions also in Fortescue’s account as a way of
stipulating the constitutional limits of ‘political’ power. Just as the head can-
not change the physiology of the body — to do so would be self-destructive as
well as dangerous to the other members — so the king is prohibited from alter-
ing the legal conditions under which he rules. The physical constitution of the
body becomes a direct model for the legal constitution of the polity.
It should not escape our attention that the physiological analogy at the core
of Fortescue’s civic-collectivism is explicitly economic in nature. He recog-
nizes that a direct consequence of the organic community 1s the defence of the
material interests, including property, of all of its members. Fortescue evinces
particular cognizance that a royal head firmly ‘bound’ by the legal muscle of
the body ‘is set up for the protection of the laws, the subjects, and their bodies
and goods, and he has power to this end from the people’.®' As if to emphasize
the point that a properly arranged body politic is one in which subjects can
enjoy their own lives and property securely, Fortescue’s Prince Edward sum-
marizes the relation between the royal and political king and his realm in
material terms:
I now very clearly perceive that no people ever incorporated themselves
into a kingdom by their own agreement and will, unless in order to possess
safer than before both themselves and their own, which they feared to
lose — a design which would be thwarted if a king were able to deprive
Hes their means, which was not permitted before to anyone among
men.

59 Tbid., p. 21.
60 Tbid.
61 Tbid., pp. 21-2.
62 Tbid., p. 23.
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 281

Fortescue indeed sometimes moves beyond merely or simply the level of

analogy to a more direct correspondence of bodies: the political organism is
not merely /ike a natural creature, it is immediately productive of the natural
well-being of the human bodies that form its membership.® Thus, a sort of
physiological microcosm and macrocosm may be detected in Fortescue’s use
of the metaphor.
This organicism does not fit well within the specific nationalistic frame-
work that Greenfeld holds to stand behind England’s ‘economic miracle’.
There is no particular presumption of individual rights and certainly no sense
that pursuit of perceived interest can occur or be justified outside the regula-
tion ofthe legal sinews of the body. What Fortescue depicts, in other words, is
something far closer to the East Asia communitarian capitalist model than
what Greenfeld ascribes to sixteenth-century England. Yet, given the attrib-
utes that she believes are necessary for capitalist ‘take off’, namely a social
emphasis on economic achievement, competitiveness and prosperity, there is
no reason to suppose that Fortescue’s civic-collectivism would be less effec-
tive at stimulating capital accumulation than civic-individualism. The ethos
of organic holism propounded by Fortescue and grounded in the predecessor
culture of the European Middle Ages shows itself equally suited to attain the
kind of nationalistic fervour that Greenfeld holds to be essential to the capital-
ist spirit. There is no reason to suppose, along with Fortescue, that people will
be any less willing to view economic goals as worthy of pursuit for the sake of
king and country than for private advantage. This does not mean that individ-
ualism is incompatible with capitalism, at least in its early phase, simply that
concentration on the individual is not required or entailed. That conclusion,
however, undermines the entire rationale for Greenfeld’s distinction between
individualist and collectivist versions of nationalism.

Conclusion

There are some broader historiographical issues at stake in this discovery of a

capitalist spirit inhering within civic-collectivist nationalism. The first con-
cerns the modernity of capitalism. If Greenfeld’s general point about nation-
alism is sustained, then there is nothing necessarily or particularly ‘modern’
about capitalism; the capitalist spirit as she conceives it could, and perhaps in
some ways did, flourish during the Latin Middle Ages. If so, why did no
full-blown capitalist practice emerge until later ttmes? Two answers suggest
themselves. On the one hand, the transformation of the ‘cognitive and moral
organization of reality’, in sum, of ‘social consciousness’, that Greenfeld pos-
its as the precursor of capitalism as a material way of life simply took far lon-
ger than she imagined and can be traced to the cultural and intellectual
63 Fortescue’s somewhat obsessive use of organic language is noted by both Burns,
Lordship, Kingship, and Empire, pp. 67—70 and Callahan, “Blood, Sweat, and Wealth’,
pp. 26-30.
282 C. NEDERMAN

developments that characterized the rise of legal, scholastic and political doc-
trines in medieval Europe. This would certainly be in line with what we are
coming to realize generally about the nature of economic reflection — includ-
ing what we might call early political economy — from 1100 onwards.” Such
a conclusion would also be in line with the emerging tendency, among
intellectual historians at any rate, to identify far more consistency between
medieval and early modern Europe than earlier generations supposed.” Alter-
natively, we might conclude that Greenfeld is simply wrong in the sense that
nationalism was not in fact the salient stimulus to capitalism, since values she
holds to be the requisite ones for the creation of capitalist enterprise were
entirely consonant with and acceptable within a non-capitalist world view. As
I remarked in my introduction, I leave it to the reader to decide which conclu-
sion to endorse.
Regardless of one’s choice, however, one must take issue with the pre-
sumption — and it is only ever an unstated premise in Greenfeld’s work —
that a bright line exists between the intellectual terrain of modernity and that
of the medieval era. Time and again this modernist prejudice has been proven
grossly inaccurate or just plain wrong — as the recently examined cases of
constitutionalism, natural rights theory and religious toleration illustrate.
Yet scholars who ought to know better return to the same well of historical
ignorance. One cannot help concluding that this arises from an invidious
stereotype among historians of modernity that caricatures the European Mid-
dle Ages as rigidly and monolithically dedicated to a narrow set of principles
and ideals rooted in Roman Christianity. Indeed, this perception has some-
times been inadvertently encouraged by medievalists themselves, whose
occasionally infelicitous choice of terminology (think of R.I. Moore’s ‘perse-
cuting society’) lends itself readily to popularization that conforms to and
reinforces existing preconceptions. The myth of the unified and ‘authoritarian’
Respublica Christiana plays as well into the hands of modern secularists and
sceptics as once it did into the haughty self-image of popes and potentates.

4 See Wood, Medieval Economic Thought, pp. 206-9, and the contributions to the
December 2000 special issue of Quaderni storici, 35, on “Etiche economiche’, edited by
Maria Luisa Pesante, as well as the many important writings by the Scandanavian histo-
rian of medieval economic thought Odd Langholm.
65 See the remarks of J.H. Burns, ‘Introduction’ to The Cambridge History of Politi-
cal Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J.H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 1-3.
66 See Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought,
1150-1650 (Cambridge, 1982); Francis Oakley, Politics and Eternity: Studies in the His-
tory of Medieval and Early-Modern Political Thought (Leiden, 1999); Francis Oakley,
The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870
(Oxford, 2003); Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, GA, 1997); Cary J.
Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c.1100—c.1550
(University Park, PA, 2000).
 ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN JOHN FORTESCUE 283

Yet medievalists and scholars attuned to the Middle Ages know better. As
Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl observe,

Latin Christendom had always encompassed great variety within its nomi-
nal unity of religious faith. The vision of a uniform Christendom under the
leadership of a single Church barely concealed the heterogeneity of the peo-
ples it embraced or the diversity of the beliefs that they held.*
The intellectual terrain of the Middle Ages, Alasdair MacIntyre has acknowl-
edged, was constituted not by the unity of a single form of life but by the sheer
multiplicity and diversity of such forms.°* Consequently, any conception of a
unified Christian life had to contend with what Constantin Fasolt describes as
‘a plethora of actors jostling side by side to assert their particular ideas of the
highest good’.® Lest this teeming diversity seem incongruous with the appar-
ent self-conceptions of the age, Raoul Vaneigem offers a useful contemporary
analogy: “The Middle Ages were, in short, Christian in the same way that the
countries of Eastern Europe were communist.’”’ These are lessons that seem
to require regular recitation and their significance for historical research can
hardly be overstated. If significant improvement in the understanding of
modernity and its attendant forms of life (economic, social, political and cul-
tural, as well as intellectual) is to occur, scholars will increasingly need to turn
their attention to the preceding history of Europe.”'

Cary Nederman TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

67 Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl, ‘Introduction’ to Christendom and Its Discon-
tents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1100-1500, ed. Waugh and Diehl (Cam-
bridge, 1997), p. 5.
68 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, 2nd edn., 1981), p. 165.
69 Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy (Cambridge, 1991), p. 103.
70 Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York, 1998), p. 58.
7! For a further example of the too rigid insistence upon the separation of the medi-
eval and modern worlds, see Cary J. Nederman, ‘Empire and the Historiography of Euro-
pean Political Thought: Marsiglio of Padua, Nicholas of Cusa, and the Medieval/Modern
Divide’, Journal of the History of Ideas (2005).
GROTIUS AND PUFENDORF ON THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY

John Salter!

Abstract: Grotius and Pufendorf upheld the principle that a person in extreme and
unavoidable need, who took from the surpluses of property holders, was not guilty of
the crime oftheft. Grotius theorized this exception to the law of property as a revival of
the original common use right, thus continuing a long-standing tradition of thought
according to which in extremis all goods are regarded as common. Pufendorf’s
engagement with Hobbes led him to reject the Grotian theory ofthe revival of the com-
mon use right. He tried to construct an alternative theory by making use of his concepts
of imperfect rights and duties, but he had no way of expressing the lawfulness of the
actions of the necessitous poor in terms of the imperfect duties of the rich. As a result
Pufendorf failed to produce a coherent alternative to the Grotian theory.

I
In the course of discussing the origins of private ownership Hugo Grotius
upholds the right of a person in need to use the surplus property of others.
Supreme necessity, he says, seems to have been excepted from all human
laws, including the law of property. Thus: ‘if a man under stress of such
necessity takes from the property of another what is necessary to preserve his
own life, he does not commit a theft.’” As Brian Tierney has shown, this was a
doctrine that had had a ‘continuous history’ since the work of the twelfth cen-
tury canonists who had provided the commentaries on the Decretum of
Gratian (c.1140).° They had been confronted with the need to interpret certain
key texts of the founders of Christianity, which had taught that according to
the natural law, the use of all things should be common to all people. These
teachings, Tierney says, suggested that ‘common property was a permanent
feature of Christian society, informing it with charity andjustice’, yet private
ownership had always existed in the Christian world and was clearly endorsed
by biblical sources.* One solution to this inherent conflict, Tierney explains,
was to interpret ‘common property’ to mean that in times of need goods were
to be shared with the poor.’ It was not a crime, therefore, for people in need to
take the surpluses of the rich because need made these surpluses common
property. This became a standard Christian doctrine, which embedded the
Christian duty of charity in the idea of common ownership. Thomas Aquinas

! School of Economic Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL.

Email: [email protected]
2 H. Grotius, De Jure Belli Ac Pacis Libri Tres, trans. F.W. Kelsey (2 vols., Oxford,
1925), I.II.V1.4.
3 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, GA, 1997), p. 333.
4 Ibid., p.72.
5 Ibid.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 285

expressed the same ideas in his two competences, according to which private
ownership is justified in relation to the power to procure and dispense things,
but with regard to the use of things ‘man ought to possess external things, not
as his own, but as common, so that, to wit, he is ready to communicate them to
others in their need’.° Thus, when Thomas considers whether it is lawful to
steal through stress of need, he says ‘[i]n cases of need, all things are common
property’. It is not, therefore, a crime to take another’s property in a case of
extreme need because ‘that which a man takes for the support of his life
becomes his own property by reason of that need’.’
For Grotius, however, common property was not a ‘permanent feature of
society’ but a stage in human development, which had been brought to an end
by the agreement to introduce private ownership. Necessity, according to
Grotius, was a reason for making an exception to the law of private owner-
ship, or in other words, for suspending the law. Hejustified this by arguing, in
effect, that this exception had been intended by those who had agreed to the
introduction of private ownership. However, Grotius maintained the connec-
tion between the preservation of the poor and the idea of common property by
arguing that the suspension of the law of private ownership in times of need
had the effect that the necessitous were at liberty to exercise their prior natural
common right to use whatever they needed to preserve themselves. Thus, in
cases of direst need ‘the primitive right of user revives, as if community own-
ership had remained’.* Grotius’ right of necessity was thus a natural right.
Grotius insisted, however, that this right was subject to a number of restric-
tions. A person in need cannot take from another who is in equal need, and
whatever is taken must be repaid if possible. Furthermore, the ‘permission’ to
use the property of others applies only to those who are under genuine and
unavoidable necessity through no fault of their own, and who have first tried
to obtain the things they need by seeking the authority of a magistrate or
through entreaties to the owner.
Samuel Pufendorf agreed with Grotius that exceptions should be made to
the law in cases of necessity, and that a necessitous person who takes what he
needs from another does not commit a crime. But he rejected the Grotian theory
of the revival of the natural right of use for two reasons. First, he argued that
the restrictions that Grotius had placed on the right, and which Pufendorf
regarded as essential if the security of property owners was not to be entirely
undermined, were incompatible with the theory of a return to a state of com-
mon ownership. If the needy could take the property of others by right, as if it
were common property, there were no grounds, he argued, for insisting that a

© Thomas Aquinas, On Law, Morality, and Politics, ed. W.P. Baumgarth and
R.J. Reagan (Indianapolis and Cambridge, 1988), ST II-II, Question 66, second article,
pal79:
7 Tbid., seventh article, p. 187.
8 Grotius, De Juri Belli, U.11.V1.2.
286 J. SALTER

needy person could not take from a person in equal need. Nor was it possible
to insist on restitution after the emergency was over, or to distinguish between
those whose need is genuine and caused by their circumstances and those
whose predicament is their own fault. The second reason why Pufendorf
rejected Grotius’ theory was that one of the primary purposes of private own-
ership, according to Pufendorf, was to give individual owners the opportunity
to show compassion and generosity to the needy, thereby winning their grati-
tude. Granting the needy such an unrestricted right to take from an unwilling
owner denied property holders the opportunity of fulfilling this humanitarian
duty, thus defeating a primary reason for private ownership.
Pufendorf sought a way of formulating the right of necessity that retained
the fundamental principle that it is lawful for a person in dire and unavoidable
necessity to take from the property of others, but that gave greater prominence
to the humanitarian duties of property holders and avoided any reference to
the idea that the poor could avail themselves of the same kind of natural right
that they enjoyed in the state of nature.
My first aim in this paper is to examine Grotius’ theory of the revival of the
primitive right in order to bring out its relationship with his theory of sociabil-
ity and his understanding of common ownership. My second aim is to explore
the connection between Pufendorf’s objections to the Grotian theory of the
right of necessity and his engagement with Hobbes, which had led him to
question Grotius’ optimistic conception of human sociability and to revise the
Grotian theory of common property and the state of nature. My final aim is to
evaluate Pufendorf’s attempt to revise and improve upon the Grotian theory.

I
Before the introduction of private ownership, all things, Grotius says, were
‘the common and undivided possessions of all men, as if all possessed a com-
mon inheritance’.’ Under these conditions ‘the first one taking possession
would have a right to use things not claimed and to consume things up to the
limits of his needs’.'® The introduction of private ownership by agreement,
however, which allowed people to take more than they need for current use,
eventually diminished the extent of the common so that the exercise of the
primitive right was no longer possible. This development, Grotius says,
“seems completely to have absorbed the right which had its origins in a state
of community of property’.'' However, he says that we must consider the
intentions of those who first introduced individual ownership, ‘and we are
forced to believe, that it was their intention to depart as little as possible from
natural equity’. It follows that in direst need ‘the primitive right of user

9 Ibid., V.11.11.1.
10 Thid., L.IL1.5.
1 Yhid., W.VI.1.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 287

revives, as if community ownership had remained’.'? Grotius remarks that

even the theologians accept the principle that an exception should be made to
the law in cases of necessity, but the reason for it is not ‘as some allege, that
the owner is bound by the rule of love to give to him who lacks’, rather, it is
that ‘all things seem to have been distributed to individual owners with a
benign reservation in favour of the primitive right’.'*
Now Grotius’ central definition of a right is ‘a moral quality of a person,
making it possible to have or to do something lawfully’. So in saying that a
person who acts out of necessity does not commit a crime, he is saying that the
person has a right to act. Such a moral quality can be either perfect, which
means it is a legal right to one’s own, or it is not perfect, in which case it is
classed as an aptitude, which has the same meaning as ‘worthiness’. Aptitudes
are concerned ‘with those virtues which have as their purpose to do good to
others’, for example by showing generosity and compassion.'* Now as we
have seen, Grotius denies that the reason why necessity makes an exception to
the law is that the rich are morally bound to assist the needy. He is thus saying
that the kind of right available to the necessitous 1s stronger than an aptitude,
and the only alternative he provides is to say that they have a perfect right.
However, Grotius theorized this right as a revival of the primitive right of
use. This primitive right was merely a right to use things that were not being
used by others and it did not confer a right to any particular goods or to a cer-
tain quantity of goods necessary to preserve life. Grotius’ original position
lacked the kind of inclusive right to one’s due that appears, for instance, in
Locke’s theory. In fact, Grotius says that the original common use of things
conferred a form of ownership on the user only in the limited sense that the
use of some things ‘consists in their being used up’ and so prevents the thing
from being available to others.'* With the help of terminology introduced by
Hohfeld and developed by Hart, Grotius’ original use right is best described
as a liberty or privilege rather than a claim right.'® To have a claim right to a
resource is to have the right to exclude others from its use; others are under an

12 Tbid., I.11.V1.2.
13 [bid., TI.V1.4.
14 Tbid., L1IV-VIII.
15 H. Grotius, Mare Liberum (New York, 1916), p. 24. ‘For “own” implies that a
thing belongs to some one person, in such a way that it excludes others from using the
same thing.’ Grotius was here drawing on an argument used by Pope John XXII to coun-
ter the claim of the Franciscans that they had no property (dominium) but only a ‘use of
fact’ in the goods they used. Pope John’s point was that dominium and use of fact were
inseparable. Grotius, however, was using this argument to make the point that although
there was no dominium originally, the transition to dominium was modelled on the natu-
ral use right: ‘when property or ownership was invented, the law of property was estab-
lished to imitate nature’ (p. 25).
'6 W. Hohfeld, Fundamental Legal Conceptions (New Haven, 1919); H.L.A. Hart,
Essays on Bentham (Oxford, 1982).
288 J. SALTER

obligation to abstain from using it. To have a liberty or privilege to use a

resource means that others lack the right to exclude the liberty holder from its
use, although others can prevent the liberty holder from using it by using it
themselves. The difference is best illustrated by Cicero’s example of the pub-
lic theatre, which Grotius himself uses.'’ All citizens are at liberty to enter the
theatre and occupy a vacant seat. They do not, however, have a claim to any
particular seat nor do they have a right to be admitted once the theatre is full.
The liberty of citizens to occupy vacant seats owes its existence to (a) the
complete absence of claim rights to seats, which means that no one can be
excluded by the exercise of another’s right, and (b) the fact that citizens pos-
sess the right not to be physically assaulted on their way to the theatre or to be
physically evicted from their seats once they have occupied them.
This is a perfect illustration of Grotius’ understanding of the use of resources
in a state of nature. There are no private property rights, so nobody can be
excluded from the use of the earth’s resources. Moreover, Grotius says that
people were then content ‘to feed on the spontaneous products of the earth, to
dwell in caves’ and to ‘have the body either naked or clothed with the bark of
trees or the skins of wild animals’.'* In other words, he confines the use of the
earth’s resources to uses that were inseparable from possession. Under these
conditions, use of the earth’s resources cannot be prevented without some
kind of physical assault, and this was ruled out, Grotius says, ‘for life, limbs
and liberty would in that case be the possessions belonging to each, and no
attack could be made upon these by another without injustice’.'”
Grotius’ right of necessity was the same kind of right, and was subject to
the same limitations, as the primitive liberty right. People in need have the lib-
erty right to use, that is to say, they cannot be legally or physically prevented
from using, the possessions of property holders. But they do not acquire a
claim right over these possessions; they cannot demand that property holders
hand them over, or use force to acquire them. They cannot even demand that
property holders refrain from consuming their possessions themselves. The
necessitous merely become free from the normal duties implied by the rights
of property holders.”
Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the necessitous are freed from some
of the duties implied by the rights of property holders. Property holders retain
the right to use the property themselves, and Grotius argues that in the case of

'7 Grotius, De Juri Belli, W1.IL.1.1.

18 Tbid., ILI.
'9 Ibid., 1.1.1.5. For a discussion of Grotius’ theory of the origins of private property
see John Salter, “Hugo Grotius: Property and Consent’, Political Theory, 29 (4) (2001),
pp. 537-55.
20 Hillel Steiner notes that the terms privilege or licence are typically used to denote
‘an exceptional absence of a duty of a type normally present’. H. Steiner, An Essay on
Rights (Oxford, 1994), p. 60.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 289

equal need the right of the owner prevails. Grotius also says that property
holders retain the right to demand restitution once the emergency has passed.
Against those who argued that ‘a man who has availed himself of his own
right is not bound to make restitution’ Grotius answered that ‘the right here
was not absolute, but was restricted by the burden of making restitution,
where necessity allowed. Such a right is adequate to maintain natural equity
against any hardship occasioned by private ownership.’”!
Thinking of the right of necessity as a liberty rather than as a claim right
underlines the fact that it arises because of an exception to a law. Grotius
refers to Biblical examples to illustrate that even God’s law allows exceptions
in cases of extreme necessity: breaking the Sabbath, eating the shewbread and
breaking laws forbidding the eating of certain types of food have all been jus-
tified, rightly so Grotius thinks, on grounds of some kind of imminent peril.
Now we would not normally think of these examples as cases where people
acquire Claim rights. It is more accurate to say, as in all cases where there is an
exception from a law, that people acquire a liberty or privilege to act in ways
normally forbidden by the law. If such laws are seen as being imposed on peo-
ple at a particular point in time, then it is appropriate to think of people regain-
ing their original liberty, which is the way Grotius sees the revival of the
primitive right of use.

Ill
Richard Tuck has interpreted Grotius’ theory as an application of the princi-
ple of ‘interpretive charity’, which requires that we are generous in interpret-
ing past agreements. Tuck points out that Grotius uses a similar argument
when he considers whether extreme and unavoidable necessity makes an
exception to the law of non-resistance against the sovereign. In both cases
Grotius is saying that ‘all our rights could be renounced; but interpretive char-
ity requires that we assume that all were not in fact renounced’.””
It is important to distinguish, however, between the extent of the legal
rights of the parties to an agreement, and thejustification for making excep-
tions to a particular law under certain circumstances. In relation to the former,
Grotius makes it clear when he discusses the agreement to enter political soci-
ety, that a people can choose whatever form of government it wishes, and that
‘the extent of its legal right in the matter is not to be measured by the superior
excellence of this or that form of government, in regard to which different
men hold different views, but by its free choice’.”* Thus when people entered
political society they agreed to give up the right of self-defence, which they
had in the state of nature, and to grant to the sovereign the necessary powers to
2! Grotius, De Juri Belli, T.ILIX.
22 Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cam-
bridge, 1979), pp. 79-80.
23 Grotius, De Juri Belli, 1.111. VII1.2.
290 J. SALTER

maintain ‘public tranquillity’ and effective defence of the whole community

against other states.” It is quite possible that people gave up the right of
self-defence completely, with no reservations. Just as it is permissible for an
individual voluntarily to enter into a state of slavery, so too it is permissible
for a whole people to transfer to another the right to govern ‘retaining no ves-
tige of that right for itself’.”” Not only is this complete renunciation of rights a
theoretical possibility but, Grotius thinks, it is quite plausible that reasonable
people might have entirely given up the right to resist a sovereign if doing so
prevented their destruction. On the other hand, it is also possible that men
may, in fact, have given up the right of self-defence only conditionally, that is,
in conferring authority on the sovereign, people stipulated that in a particular
case the king can be resisted, for ‘he who alienates his own right can by agree-
ment limit the right transferred’.”°
However, in considering whether people can resist the sovereign in the case
of extreme necessity, Grotius is not considering the possibility that a particu-
lar people may have limited the legal rights of the sovereign by attaching con-
ditions of this kind to the agreement. In fact, this is not about the legal rights of
sovereigns at all, and to make this clear Grotius once again draws an analogy
with religious laws such as the law ofthe Sabbath and laws forbidding the eat-
ing of certain types of food. It is recognized, he says, that these laws ‘carry a
tacit exception in case of extreme necessity’, but this does not mean ‘that God
has not the right to oblige us to submit ourselves to certain death’.”’ It does
mean, however, that we should not believe that such laws ‘were given with so
inflexible intent’; and the reason that we should not believe this is that we
believe God is merciful and would not want us to die needlessly.
The same considerations apply to human law:
I do not deny that even according to human law certain acts of a moral
nature can be ordered which expose one to a sure danger of death; an exam-
ple is the order not to leave one’s post. We are not, however, rashly to
assume that such was the purpose of him who laid down the law; and it is
apparent that men would not have received so drastic a law applying to
themselves and others except as constrained by extreme necessity. For laws
are formulated by men and ought to be formulated with an appreciation of
human frailty.”*

24 Tbid., 1.IVII.1.
2° Tbid., 1.11. VII.1.
26 Tbid., 1.IV.XIV.
27 Tbid., LIV.VIL.1.
28 Ibid., 1.1V.VII.2. In a particularly illuminating passage, Grotius also discusses
whether an innocent individual may be sacrificed to an enemy when this would save the
state. He first establishes that a person clearly has a moral duty to ‘value the lives of a
very large number of innocent persons above his own life’. The question is ‘whether he
can be compelled to do that to which he is morally bound’. Vasquez had denied it on the
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 291

Grotius then says that if those who first formed a civil society could be
asked whether they intended to impose on citizens an obligation to die rather
than in any circumstances to take up arms against a violent sovereign, he does
not know what they would have said. He thinks it is probable that they would
not have wished to resist the sovereign if doing so would cause great disrup-
tion to the state and the death of many innocent people. He remarks: ‘I do not
doubt that to human law also there can be applied what love (caritas) under
such circumstances would commend.’” The ‘circumstances’ referred to in
this sentence are those in which resistance would cause the death of many
innocent people. So Grotius is saying that the law in such a case can demand
what caritas would commend, namely to sacrifice one’s life to avoid the
destruction of a great many innocent people. But, he adds, ‘I should hardly
dare indiscriminately to condemn either individuals, or a minority which at
length availed itself of the last resource of necessity in such a way as mean-
while not to abandon consideration of the common good.’*”
Grotius’ discussion of the right of resistance is instructive for a number of
reasons. First, he allows complete freedom in the choice of the form of gov-
ernment; there is no presumption in favour of absolutism or liberty. Second,
even when people have chosen an absolutist sovereign, unconstrained by con-
stitutional limits, they still have the right to resist in extremis, at least where
the common good is not threatened. Third, Grotius does not allow an absolute
or unqualified right of resistance in cases of necessity, of the kind that is found
in Hobbes. Hobbes says: ‘If a man by the terrour of present death, be com-
pelled to doe a fact against the Law, he 1s totally Excused; because no Law can
oblige a man to abandon his own preservation.’*' For Grotius, it all depends
on the extent to which resistance endangers others.
When Grotius discusses the question of whether necessity makes an excep-
tion to the law of property, however, his equivocation disappears and he states
with confidence that ‘if those who made the original distribution had been

grounds that ‘the nature of political society, which each enters for his own advantage,
does not require it’. But Grotius says that whereas an equal cannot be compelled by an
equal to perform something unless it is owed ‘in accordance with a right properly so
called’ a superior can ‘compel an inferior to do other things also, which some virtue
demands, because this is embraced in the proper right of the superior as such’. This is a
vitally important passage because it shows that the rights and duties of citizens are not
confined to the realm of ‘justice properly speaking’. Their extent cannot be determined
by considering the nature of political society and the reason men first entered it. Our
moral duties can, if the circumstances require, be strengthened by the civil law into per-
fect obligations. It is thus within the power of the sovereign to demand the death of an
individual when this serves the common good even when we would not wish to say that
this is strictly demanded by the terms of the original contract (ibid., Il. XX V.III).
29 Tbid., 1.1V.VII.2.
30 Tbid., LIV. VIL4.
3! T. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), p. 208.
292 J. SALTER

asked what they thought about this matter they would have given the same
answer that we do’. The answer is that given by Seneca: ‘Necessity . . . the
great resource of human weakness, breaks every law.’ Why is Grotius sure
about the intentions of those who first introduced private ownership? In De
Jure Belli ac Pacis he says that all agreements must be interpreted in the light
of what can be inferred about the intentions of the parties involved. In discuss-
ing the interpretation of personal contracts he says that a fair judge would
release a person from the obligation ofan agreement when it becomes burden-
some or unbearable as a result of changed conditions, and when we can infer
from the intentions of those making the contract that they never intended the
obligation to apply under such circumstances. He stresses, however, that such
inferences can only be drawn from the nature of the agreement and the cir-
cumstances under which it was made.”*? In considering the agreement to enter
into political society Grotius cannot rule out the possibility that people did
intend a complete renunciation oftheir rights, and circumstances can easily be
imagined under which they would have done so. So the grounds for making
such a favourable interpretation of the law of non-resistance are not compel-
ling and Grotius appears to be unsure when he considers what the parties to
the agreement to establish political society would have thought. By contrast,
private property replaced common property, under which all had the primitive
right of use, so we can be sure that necessity was not the occasion for the intro-
duction of private property. Moreover, breaches of property rights are less
serious than breaches of the law of non-resistance. There is no danger that the
lives of many innocent people may be threatened. So it would never be rea-
sonable to assume that the purpose of the law is that people should die rather
than commit the crime of theft. In other words, it is possible in the case of the
introduction of private ownership to make reasonable inferences about the
intentions of the parties involved from the nature of the agreement and the cir-
cumstances under which it was made.
But why does Grotius need to refer to the intentions of those who first intro-
duced private ownership at all? After all, he does not say that we must believe
in Seneca’s principle because they believed it, he merely says that they would
have given the same answer that we do. So if we have reason to make an
exception in the case of necessity, why does it matter whether they would
have thought the same? The reason is that Grotius distinguishes between, on
the one hand, suspending the law on the grounds that ‘an act from the begin-
ning was not embraced in the intent of the law’, and on the other hand, relax-
ing the law ‘for a worthy or even a pressing cause’.** If the former is the
case, then the act is not considered a crime, but if the latter is the case, then the
act is considered a crime but there are grounds for omitting or moderating the

32 Grotius, De Juri Belli, IL.JI.V1.4.

33 Jhid., W.XVI.XXVIL.1-3.
34 Tbid., .XX.XXVIL.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 293

punishment. Taking from the surplus property of others out of dire necessity
falls into the former category because this is a case where the ‘intent of the
law’ seems clear.*°

IV
Pufendorf devotes a whole chapter of De Jure Naturae et Gentium to the right
of necessity.*° He begins by asking ‘[w]hether ... we may sometimes do what
the laws forbid, or neglect to do what they command, when, through no fault
of our own, we are in such straights that we cannot secure our own safety in
any other way’. He then observes that whatever right or privilege is allowed in
such a case ‘proceeds only from the fact that a man cannot avoid straining
every nerve for his own preservation, and therefore it is not easy to presume
such an obligation to be resting upon him, as ought to outweigh the zeal for his
own Safety’. Moreover, those who introduced positive laws ‘are supposed
always to have had before their eyes the weakness of human nature, and how
man cannot help avoiding and repelling whatever tends to his destruction’.
For this reason, most laws are understood to make an exception of cases of
necessity. They lay no obligation “when such an obligation will be attended
by some evil, destructive of human nature, or too great for the common con-
stancy of mankind; unless such a case is included expressly, or in the nature of
the matter’. Hence, ‘it is presumed from the benevolent mind of the legislator,
and from the consideration of human nature, that a case of necessity is not
included under a law which has been conceived with a general scope’.*’
Pufendorf elaborates on these ideas when he discusses the relationship
between moral responsibility and the liberty of the will and his associated
imposition theory of law, and it is here that the Aristotelian origins of these
ideas become explicit.** He argues that actions that are compelled by the force
of necessity are not entirely voluntary. They are voluntary insofar as they are
the result of the operation of free will, and they are involuntary insofar as the
will is forced to them ‘contrary to its own inclination’ because it would not
undertake them ‘if it could escape the evil in any other way’.*” In other words,
they are consistent with freedom of action because they result from choosing
one thing rather than another, but we cannot say strictly that the agent is the

35 For a discussion of Grotius’ theory of punishment see John Salter, ‘Sympathy with
the Poor: Theories of Punishment in Hugo Grotius and Adam Smith’, History of Political
Thought, XX (2) (1999), pp. 205-24.
36 §. Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae et Gentium libri octo, Vol. 2, trans. C.H. Oldfather
and W.A. Oldfather (Oxford, 1934).
37. Ibid., T1.V1.1=2.
38 Compare Pufendorf’s discussion at De Jure Naturae, I1.1V.8—10 with Aristotle,
Ethics, trans. J.A.K. Thomson (London, 1976), Books III and V.
39 Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae, 1.IV.8—9. Following Aristotle, Pufendorf calls these
actions ‘mixed’.
294 J. SALTER

author of his own action because circumstances compel him to make a choice
that he would not make under normal circumstances. In such cases the moral
effects that follow purely voluntary actions are largely lacking. Now Pufendorf
says that a person is fit to receive an obligation if he is subject to a superior,
and if he has a free will that enables him to conform to the law if he chooses. A
duty imposed by the law should, therefore, be within the powers of an individ-
ual to perform. A person cannot be held responsible for failing to do what
exceeds his powers and it is ‘absurd and cruel’ to attempt to require it.”
Pufendorfis not denying, any more than Grotius, that it is within the power
of a sovereign lawmaker to impose on an individual the obligation to give up
his life if that is required by the common good. He is not saying that it is
impossible for an individual to receive such an obligation, but that ‘it is not
easy to presume such an obligation to be resting upon him’ and that we should
not presume such an obligation to exist unless the law expressly demands it or
unless it is clear from the nature ofthe law. So, as with Grotius, the question is
what should be presumed when the law is not explicit about particular cases;
when, as Pufendorf says, it is “deficient through its universality’. In such
cases, Pufendorf says, it is appropriate to apply the principle of equity, which
means to correct or interpret the law when it can be ‘shown from natural rea-
son that some particular case is not covered by a general law since an absurd
situation would result if it were’. Since not all cases can be foreseen by the
lawmaker, it falls to judges to apply and interpret the law and to make the
exceptions that the lawmaker would have made if he had foreseen such
cases.”
Pufendorf then turns to the specific question of whether a necessitous per-
son has a right to use the surpluses of the rich. He begins by observing that
ownership was introduced to avoid quarrels and to encourage industry but it
was not introduced ‘with the purpose of allowing a man to avoid using it in the
service of others’. It was introduced so that each man may use it as he pleases
and that he may have the opportunity of sharing it with others, and ‘to put
another person under obligation to him’. It follows, at the very least, that we
cannot take another’s property without first asking that he hand it over volun-
tarily. However, if the owner refuses to hand it over, the force of ownership is
not so great ‘that property owed another may not be taken from an unwilling
owner’ either by the authority of a judge or, in a state of natural liberty, by
force. Thus, according to Pufendorf, from the point of view of natural right a
person has only an imperfect obligation to assist another in distress, but ‘noth-
ing prevents this imperfect obligation from being strengthened by civil law
into a perfect one’. Thus, a person who refuses to meet his obligations of char-
ity can be compelled by a court to give to the needy. When the law does

40 S. Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, 1991),
128s
41 Tbid., 1.2.10.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 295

provide for the poor in this way, taking the property of another without the
consent ofthe owner or the authority of the court should be regarded as theft.””
But what if the law does not make such provisions for the poor? What
should we say about a person in unavoidable necessity, who, by entreaty or by
the offer of money or services, has tried to persuade a person of means to give
freely, but who as a last resort takes what he needs by ‘violence or by stealth’?
‘I should not feel’ says Pufendorf, that such a man ‘has made himself guilty of
the crime of theft’.*°
There is, therefore, important common ground between the two authors.
First and foremost they agree that, as a last resort and in extreme and unavoid-
able necessity, it is not a crime to take from the surpluses of an unwilling
owner. They both justify this claim by reference to the intentions of those who
first laid down the law. Granted, the sovereign lawmaker had the right to
demand that an innocent person should die if that would serve some greater
good, but unless the law was explicit in this respect it should be assumed that
the lawmaker did not intend that the innocent should perish unnecessarily.
However, Pufendorf parts company with Grotius over Grotius’ characteri-
zation of the right of necessity as a revival of the primitive right of use. The
problem with this, according to Pufendorf, is that it is inconsistent with the
restrictions that Grotius himself places on the right. It would mean that any-
one who is strong enough could simply take the property of another person
‘even if the latter is straightened by an equal necessity’.** Yet Grotius had
insisted that the right does not apply in cases of equal need. Grotius had also
said that restitution should be made wherever possible. But, according to
Pufendorf, if the goods were taken as of right there could be no grounds for
insisting on restitution. Nor would there be any grounds for distinguishing
between the deserving, industrious poor who had fallen into necessity through
no fault of their own and those who had fallen upon hard times due to their
own idleness.
In relation to the last objection, Pufendorf says that property owners should
be able to make a distinction between the deserving poor and the idle. It fol-
lows, he says, that ‘a property owner will have a right over his property even
against a person who is in extreme necessity, to the extent, at least, of being
able to decide whether such a person is or is not deserving of his pity’.
Retaining this right is essential to Pufendorf because it gives the property
holder the opportunity to show kindness and humanity to the needy and to
receive their gratitude in return. Granting the needy a perfect right removes

42 Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae, II.V1.5.

43 Ibid.
44 Tbid., I1.V1.6.
45 Ibid.
296 J. SALTER

this opportunity because ‘there is no ground for gratitude if a person does for
another only what the other might have taken by force on his own right’.*°
In order to understand Pufendorf’s criticisms of Grotius’ theory it is neces-
sary to place them in the context of his engagement with Hobbes and his sub-
sequent attempt to revise the Grotian theory of natural law. In general terms,
we can say that Pufendorf was persuaded by reading Hobbes that Grotius’
view of human nature was too optimistic. This led to significant revisions to
three aspects of the Grotian theory: the state of nature, the theory of sociabil-
ity and the theory of the origins of private property.
Grotius’ natural state was a state of simplicity and innocence. People lived
a primitive but harmonious existence which was undisturbed by the mutual
fear or distrust that featured in Hobbes’s conception of the state of nature.
Their wants were easily satisfied because they were content with a simple life.
This made it possible for people to make use of the natural world, which God
had bestowed on mankind as a whole, without conflict and without the need
for an agreement. The introduction of private ownership, which did require an
agreement, was bound up with the corruption and fall of mankind. It would
not have been necessary if people had remained in the simple and innocent
state in which God had made them.
Even in their fallen state, however, Grotius thought that people were essen-
tially sociable creatures, by which he meant that they possess a compelling
desire to live a peaceful and organized social life;*’ and the maintenance of
such a sociable existence, which Grotius says is the source of law, requires
only that individuals respect each other’s perfect rights and that wrongdoers
are punished according to their deserts.*®
Pufendorf’s vision of the state of nature was, as he says in On the Natural
State of Men a kind of middle course between Grotius and Hobbes. He states
that his intention is to consider man ‘with his inclinations as we now find them
to be, disregarding the question of whether or not he was originally differ
ent’.”” He thus has no time for Grotius’ prelapsarian state of simplicity and
innocence. He says that “people usually prefer love of their own possessions
and consider their own advantage and glory to be most important’ and that
they therefore ‘pay small regard to anyone with little or no ability to benefit
them’.*’ But he goes much further, declaring that human beings possess ‘an
innate wickedness that enjoys harming others as much as possible’®*! and that:

46 Ibid.
47 Grotius, De Juri Belli, Prolegomena 6.
48 Ibid., 8.
49 M. Seidler, Samuel Pufendorf’s ‘On the Natural State of Men’, the 1678 Latin edi-
tion and English translation (Lewiston, NY, 1990), Section 3.
50 Thid., #16.
5! Ibid, #17.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 297

nearly constant suspicion and mutual distrust thrive among those living
together in a natural state, especially if their situation provides them with
opportunities for harming one another. And many of them evince a desire to
undermine the growth of others’ strength, to augment their own strength out
of the latter’s ruin and when occasion is finally given, to beat them to the
blow and crush them.”
But he does not conclude from this that the natural state is a state of war. Our
feelings of hostility to others do not manifest themselves ‘on just any occa-
sion’ and many people lack the inclination or the opportunity to harm others.”
So instead of a state of war, Pufendorf says the natural state is characterized
by a ‘rather unstable and undependable peace’
.**
Pufendorf’s more pessimistic assessment of human nature and his view of
the natural state of man as unstable and potentially dangerous, led him to
revise Grotius’ conception of sociability in two ways. First, sociability was
not, for Pufendorf, a natural disposition of any kind, rather he viewed it more
as a natural duty, a disposition or sociable attitude that one was obliged to
adopt in view of the natural law duty to seek peace with other human beings.”
Second, it was a duty that encompassed more than the minimal respect for the
perfect rights of others. It was an ‘attitude of each man towards every other
man, by which each is understood to be bound to the other by kindness, peace,
love and therefore by mutual obligation’.*° In addition to giving others their
due, people must also give freely ‘such things as will encourage mutual good-
will’ and earn gratitude.°’ For although ingratitude is not an offence ‘still a
name for ingratitude is regarded as baser, more odious and more detestable
than a name for injustice’.
We can see from this why, in dicussing the right of necessity, Pufendorf
placed so much emphasis on the humanitarian duties of the rich and the corre-
sponding gratitude of the poor. The reciprocal relationship between kindness
and gratitude, which the introduction of private ownership made possible,
was a valuable social bond that would help to overcome the instability arising
from the wickedness and selfishness of human beings. Grotius’ right of neces-
sity removed an important opportunity for people to perform the duty of
sociability and for the necessitous poor to show their gratitude: “there is no

52 Ibid., #16.
53 Tbid., #17.
54 Ibid., #18.
55 Pufendorf says that it is a fundamental law of nature, that ‘[e]very man, so far as in
him lies, should cultivate and preserve toward others a sociable attitude, which is peace-
ful and agreeable at all times to the nature and end of the human race.’ De Jure Naturae,
II.01.15.
56 Tbid., 11.10.15.
57 Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man, 1.8.1.
58 Ibid., 1.8.8.
298 J. SALTER

ground for gratitude if a person does for another only what the latter might
have taken by force on his own right, and as if it were coming to him.’””
Pufendorf also revised Grotius’ theory of common ownership and provided
an alternative account of the origins of private ownership. Both authors inter-
preted common ownership as a kind of negative community, but they dis-
agreed over how it worked in practice. Grotius thought that people could take
from the common what they needed to preserve themselves, but Pufendorf
thought people could not make use of the material world at all without enter-
ing into an agreement of some kind:
For although after God had made the gift, nothing remained to prevent man
from appropriating things for himself, yet there was need of some sort of
convention if it was to be understood that by such appropriation or seizure
the right of others to that thing was excluded.
Without the agreement, Pufendorf thought, there was nothing preventing peo-
ple from taking by force things that had already been taken by others for their
use. As we have seen, this possibility did not trouble Grotius, partly because
the simple original usages that he envisaged were easily met by natural abun-
dance, but also because these simple usages were protected by the natural
right to life, limbs and liberty, and so there was no need for the introduction of
conventional forms of property. Pufendorf, however, says that:
Most things which are of use to men immediately and are employed to nour-
ish them and protect their bodies, are not produced everywhere by nature
and without cultivation in such abundance that they fully suffice for every-
one. Therefore, an occasion for quarrels and wars lay ready at hand, if two
or more people needed the same thing, and individuals tried to appropriate
for themselves the same thing, when it was not enough for all.°!
There was, therefore, the need for an agreement to introduce private owner-
ship, which ‘does away with quarrels and everyman takes greater interest in
his own portion, while an opportunity is given him to show liberality to others
out of his own store’.®? Moreover, Pufendorf saw the natural state as a com-
munity of people who had left the uncultivated paradise, which Grotius
seemed to have in mind, and who were already engaged in agriculture and
other useful productive arts. This entailed labour and storage for future use,
both of which required the introduction of conventional property.
59 Tbid., II. V1.6.
60 Jbid., IV.IV.4.
61 Tbid., 1V.IV.6. At this point he refers to Hobbes’s: ‘the most frequent reason why
men desire to hurt each other, ariseth hence, that many men at the same time have an
Appetite to the same thing; which yet very often they can neither enjoy in common, nor
yet divide it; whence it followes that the strongest must have it, and who is strongest must
be decided by the Sword’. T. Hobbes, De Cive: The English Version, ed. H. Warrender
(Oxford, 1983), ch. I, para. VI.
62 Pufendorf, De Jure Naturae, IV.IV.6.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 299

For Pufendorf, therefore, the right of necessity could not be theorized as the
revival of a right that existed prior to the agreement to introduce private own-
ership. To say that in case of necessity goods reverted to the original common
ownership meant for Pufendorf that all rights and obligations governing the
use of resources would expire. Those with sufficient strength could simply
take whatever they wanted with no regard for the circumstances of the pos-
sessor, and with no obligation to restore the goods at a later stage. Any return
to a state such as this was unthinkable. Not only would it fail to provide pro-
tection for the poor, but it would endanger everyone else.
Pufendorf had to find a way of formulating the right of necessity that
reflected these fundamental disagreements with Grotius. To be consistent
with his broader conception of sociability, which encompassed benevolence
and kindness, he had to place greater emphasis on the humanitarian duties of
property owners; and to be consistent with his account of the introduction of
private ownership, the right of necessity could not be construed as the revival
of a natural right, but had to be grounded in some provision of the positive
law. Moreover, whatever kind of right is available to the person in need, the
owner should retain some of his rights. Specifically, the owner must retain the
opportunity to decide who is deserving of his pity, he must have a right to
retain his property if he needs it, and he must have the right to have the prop-
erty returned to him.

Vv
Pufendorf broadly accepted Grotius’ division of rights into perfect rights and
aptitudes, but used the term imperfect rights to describe the latter.°’ He makes
the observation, which is implicit but not elaborated in Grotius’ account, that
the former are active, in the sense that the possessor can demand a thing or an
action of another, while the latter are merely passive, meaning that the pos-
sessor can lawfully suffer, admit or receive something. He also modifies
Grotius’ description of an aptitude by saying that it is a passive right, whereby
we can lawfully receive something from another “not in such a way that it can
be extorted by force against his will, unless a chance necessity requires it, but
only in so far as he is obliged by some moral virtue to give it’. Pufendorf is
here moving the stress from the worthiness of the recipient to the moral duty
of the giver. He is also including, within the definition, the possibility that the
passive right can become an active, perfect right under necessity.
Drawing on these terminological distinctions Pufendorf says that the right
of necessity is ‘better explained’ by saying:
that a man of means is bound to come to the aid of one who is in innocent
want by an imperfect obligation, which no one should, as a rule, be forced to

63 [bid., 1.VII.7.
64 Thid., 1.1.20.
300 J. SALTER

meet; and yet the urge of supreme necessity makes it possible for such
things to be claimed, on the same ground as those which are owed by a per-
fect right, that is, a special appeal may be made to a magistrate, or, when
time does not allow anything of the sort, the immediate necessity may be
met by taking the thing by force or stealth. For the reason why only an
imperfect obligation is allowed, especially to things that are owed on the
grounds of humanity, is that thereby a man finds the opportunity to show
that his mind is intent upon voluntarily doing his duty, and at the same time
possesses the means to bind others to him by his kindness.”
Now even when we take into account the minor redefinitions that Pufendorf
made to Grotius’ legal categories, this passage fails to indicate any difference
of substance with Grotius’ theory, at least in relation to the kind of right that is
available to the necessitous poor. Perfect rights, by Pufendorf’s own defini-
tion, are rights that can be claimed by force, that is to say, they are defined by
reference to the grounds on which they can be claimed. To say, therefore, that
in extremis the poor can claim the surpluses of the rich ‘on the same ground as
things that are owed by a perfect right’ can only mean that in extremis the poor
have a perfect right. It is not clear, therefore, quite how Pufendorf thinks he
has avoided what he regarded as the objectionable features of Grotius’ theory.
By his own account the owner retains his rights over his property, and hence
the opportunity to fulfil his humanitarian duty, only until the point at which he
declares his unwillingness to be charitable: for ‘whoever refuses to show
humanity should lose his property as well as his merit’.°° An uncharitable
owner, therefore, loses his property, and presumably all rights over it, includ-
ing the right to decide who should benefit from it, and the right to demand
restitution.
Perhaps the point of Pufendorf’s prevarication, however, is to emphasize
that the relief of the poor should primarily, and in the first instance, be a matter
of the humanity of property owners, and only as an absolute last resort, under
condition of supreme necessity, a matter of rights. But Grotius had already
made it absolutely clear that taking from an unwilling owner is justified only
under supreme necessity, not as arule, and even then, only after appealing to a
magistrate and to the owner. He does not deny that people of means ought to
help those in need, he merely says that this moral duty is not the ground of the
exception to the law. He stresses that the needy should first try to persuade
owners to give freely and only when they are refused can they avail them-
selves of the right to use the owner’s goods. Grotius also makes it clear that it
is always within the discretion of the state officials who administer the law to
decide whether the person’s predicament is unavoidable or whether it is due
to idleness and to judge whether the person has tried to relieve his situation in
all the ways they both require.

65 Thid., I1.VI.6.
66 Tbid.
 GROTIUS & PUFENDORF: THE RIGHT OF NECESSITY 301

Pufendorf’s account, however, does suggest a different explanation of the

source of the right of necessity. For Grotius, it is a natural right: necessity cre-
ates a situation in which the poor regain their freedom to exercise their prior
natural common right of use. Pufendorf, by contrast, seems to think that prop-
erty ownership is conditional upon carrying out the duty to help others, and
that owners who refuse to carry out this humanitarian duty forfeit the rights to
their property, which are transferred to the person in need. However, this cre-
ates serious difficulties for the overall coherence of Pufendorf’s position.
First, it undermines the essential distinction between perfect and imperfect
duties, namely that the former are compulsory and the latter are involuntary.
Pufendorf makes much of this difference in arguing for his broader concep-
tion of sociability and his insistence, against Grotius, that the law of nature
encompasses the imperfect duty to give freely to others to encourage mutual
goodwill and gratitude. He also relies on this distinction in claiming that by
granting the necessitous poor only an imperfect right to the property of the
rich, he does not remove the opportunity for the rich to voluntarily come to the
aid of people in need. But this is entirely inconsistent with the idea that those
who refuse to be charitable should lose their property, as if they are being pun-
ished for their refusal to show humanity. The second difficulty that Pufendorf
creates for himself is that having criticized Grotius for shifting the balance of
rights and duties too far in favour of the poor, he ends up by granting the poor
a far stronger right than Grotius had done. All rights to the property, including
the right to use force to secure its use, are transferred from the owner to the
person in need. Thus Pufendorf says that as a last resort the emergency can be
met by taking what is needed by force. Grotius’ natural right, by contrast, was
a limited right to use property that is not fully one’s own, and it certainly does
not permit the use of force against the owner.

VI
Grotius’ doctrine of the right of necessity continued a tradition of thought
which went back at least to the twelfth century, according to which in extremis
all goods are to be regarded as common. Grotius could argue this because he
understood common ownership as a workable arrangement under which peo-
ple could use the material world, as God had intended them to do, in a state of
innocent and simple sociability. Private ownership was introduced because
people were not content with such a simple existence and chose a ‘more
refined mode of life’.®” But it was always possible to revert to the original
arrangements in times of necessity. Human preservation did not depend upon
private property, and its obligations could always be set aside for those whom
it failed.

67 Grotius, De Jure Belli, I1.11.11.4.

302 J. SALTER

Pufendorf, just as much as his predecessors, thought that God had given the
world to mankind for the preservation of everyone. But his engagement with
Hobbes had convinced him that as long as property was held in common it
could not support human life without causing endless quarrels. People could
not live in peace with each other without some kind of convention that intro-
duced the idea of mine and thine. Human preservation was thus from the
beginning dependent on private ownership, if only of a limited kind. There
was, therefore, no viable alternative to private ownership that could be
reverted to in extremis.
The doctrine of the right of necessity thus presented Pufendorf with a
dilemma. He agreed with Grotius that exceptions must be made to the law of
private ownership, and that a necessitous person who took from an unwilling
owner acted lawfully. The laws of private property had been introduced to
serve the end of human preservation and so it was unthinkable that those who
had introduced the law would have intended it to be interpreted in such an
inflexible way that people should die rather than steal from those who had
more than they needed. He had to concede, therefore, that the right of neces-
sity must override the rights of property holders. But he resisted the conclu-
sion that Grotius had drawn from this, namely that the laws ofprivate property
must be suspended in cases of extreme need. Suspending these laws would
revive the natural disorder that had necessitated their introduction. Pufendorf
tried to find a way out ofthis dilemma by making use of his concepts of imper-
fect rights and duties, but he had no way of expressing the lawfulness of the
actions ofthe necessitous poor in terms of the imperfect duties of the rich. The
result was that he was unable to produce a coherent alternative to the Grotian
theory.

John Salter UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM
AND THE IDEA OF ‘MIDDLE CLASS’:
A COMPARISON OF TWO CONTEXTS OF EMERGENCE OF
A METAPHORICAL FORMATION

Ezequiel Adamovsky'

Abstract: This article seeks to contribute to the history of the idea of ‘middle class’,
an idea that was fundamental to Aristotle’s philosophy but disappeared from the reper-
toire of political thinking for centuries, re-emerging shortly before the French Revolu-
tion to be developed by Diderot and other French liberals. The modern notion of
“middle class’ is compared with that of Aristotle, and the similarities between the two
contexts of emergence — the crisis of Ancient Greek democracy and that of the French
Ancien Régime — are explored to cast new light on the meaning and political function
of that idea, and on the metaphorical operations it performs.

The idea of ‘middle class’ is an extremely important element of Western

political thought, yet it remains poorly studied. Fundamental to Aristotle’s
philosophy, the idea of ‘middle class’ disappeared from the repertoire of
political thinking for centuries, until it re-emerged shortly before the French
Revolution. Denis Diderot was one of the first modern philosophers to
develop the notion as part of a philosophical system. Later, other French liber-
als — the doctrinaires and Guizot in particular — made use of a similar sys-
tem as part of their political discourse. In this article, Diderot’s and other
modern notions of ‘middle class’ will be compared with that of Aristotle. The
similarities between the two contexts of emergence — the crisis of Ancient
Greek democracy and that of the French Ancien Régime — will be explored.
The comparison of these two formative moments may cast new light on the
meaning and political function of the idea of middle class, and on the meta-
phorical operations it performs.

I
‘Middle Class’ as Metaphor
The most common current distinction of three social classes, ‘upper’, “middle’
and ‘lower’, is by no means necessary or obvious. Many methods and criteria
by which to classify social groups can be (and have been) conceived. The cri-
teria of social function and/or status are examples of this, as in the Middle
Ages, when the main distinction was between ‘those who make war’, ‘those
who pray’ and ‘those who work’, or between three social estates, the nobility,
the clergy, and the People or third estate. Another possible criterion is the
! Lecturer in History at the Universities of Buenos Aires and Lujan. Email:
eadamovs @mail.retina.ar. This article was written thanks to the financial support of
CONICET and Fundacién Antorchas.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005
304 E. ADAMOVSKY

distribution of power, as in the early modern distinction of ‘the Grands’ vs.

‘the people’, or in the anarchist ‘the oppressors’ vs. the ‘oppressed’, or the
ancient ‘Patricians’ vs. ‘Plebeians’ (which also relates to status and function).
If we prefer an economic criterion, then we can conceive of society as divided
according to different interests, that is, ‘the commercial interests’, ‘the finan-
cial interests’, ‘the industrial interests’ and so on. Or we can distinguish only
two classes, ‘the rich’ and ‘the poor’ or, following the Marxist scheme, the
‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’. If we prefer to distinguish three classes
rather than two, we can still divide society, as some of the Physiocrats did,
into the ‘productive class’, the ‘propertied class’ and the ‘sterile class’. Many
more examples can be added; the important conclusion, however, is that it
cannot be taken for granted that society contains such a thing as a ‘middle
class’. On the contrary, the naming of social groups always presupposes a cer-
tain hypothesis of how society works. Let us analyse the presuppositions
behind the concept of ‘middle class’.
Unlike other expressions used to define social groupings — such as ‘work-
ing class’ or ‘businessmen’ — the concept of ‘middle class’ does not refer to a
directly observable condition of the people it comprises (for example, ‘work-
ing class’ = ‘the people who work’). It can be discussed whether those who
work constitute a social class or not, but it is unquestionable that those people
do work; working is part oftheir lives. But the same does not apply to ‘middle
class’; on the contrary, together with the other two classes that the same
expression evokes (the ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ classes), ‘middle class’ alludes to
a specific mental image of society rather than to an observable feature.
But what does it mean to be ‘at the top’, ‘at the bottom’ or ‘in the middle’ of
society? This question becomes relevant if we remember that what we call
‘society’ is a composite of different types of relationships between people,
and between people and nature. Therefore, society does not have a volume; it
is not a physical entity, of which we can distinguish a ‘top’, a ‘bottom’ and a
‘middle’. In sum, the idea of ‘middle class’ conveys a metaphorical operation,
by means of which we understand society in terms of the physical world.
There is nothing particularly strange in that; without noticing it, we make use
of such metaphors all the time in our everyday language. For example, if a
president is overthrown, we say ‘the president fell’, without meaning that he
is actually lying on the floor. As we are proud of our condition as bipeds, and
falling to the floor appears to us as an unfortunate incident and a sort of defeat,
we transport that sense to other (non-physical) situations of disgrace and
defeat. Metaphors, however, are one of the favourite loci of ideology, and the
metaphor of the ‘middle class’ is a perfect example of that. It is in order to
understand the ideological content of the idea of ‘middle class’ that we must
go back to its ancient and modern contexts of emergence. Let us start with the
latter.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 305

Il
Inventing the Middle Class in Modern Times:
Diderot’s Representations of Society
In Diderot’s early days, society was not perceived as a particular sphere. The
modern conception of civil society as a third space, the locus of economic
activities, social reproduction and social classes — distinguishable from both
individuals and the state — emerged in the thought of the Scottish Enlighten-
ment, to be fully developed in Hegel’s idea of civil society in the 1820s.” This
is not to say that earlier political thinkers did not perceive social conditions;
these, however, were immediately ‘translated’ into political categories —
notably in Montesquieu’s thought.’ On the other hand, there was a long tradi-
tion of criticism of the extreme inequality between rich and poor, but this was
part of moral or Christian concerns rather than political or social philosophy.*
In this section we shall analyse the shifts in Diderot’s representations of soci-
ety (the issue of social inequalities in particular) and their relation to the philo-
sophe’s perception of a class ‘in between’.
Diderot’s early political thought is somewhat unoriginal, and was taken
mainly from Montesquieu and the Greek classics. As Jacques Proust has
pointed out, his idea of equality was limited to the political sphere and was to
some extent abstract. Thus, it was never for him a matter of rich and poor but
rather of powerful and weak; his interest in equality was limited to the
defence of the weak in terms of political power. Moreover, references to
actual social groups and social distinctions are notably scanty in Diderot’s
earlier works (the Encyclopédie included). As Jacques Proust has argued, the
philosophe conceived social distinctions mainly in terms of ‘useful’ citizens
vs. ‘privileged parasites’, the former group encompassing all the citizens who
performed useful activities for society (and this might include nobles and
priests). Thus, Diderot’s distinctions were somewhat vague and blurred, no
longer part of the feudal categories but still not modern economic distinctions
properly speaking.°
In order to understand the development of Diderot’s ideas on social in-
equality after the Encyclopédie, a particular fact must be taken into account:
in 1755 Rousseau had produced one of the most radical denunciations of

2 John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York and Lon-
don, 1999), pp. 88-97, 124.
3 Norberto Bobbio, La teoria de las formas de gobierno en la historia del
pensamiento politico (Mexico City, 1994), p. 163.
4 See for example the articles ‘Pauvre’ and ‘Richesse’ in Diderot’s and d’ Alembert’s
Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers, 17 vols
(Paris, 1751-65). Hereafter Encylopédie.
5 A possible exception to this statement can be found in Diderot’s article ‘Homme’
(1765) in the Encyclopédie.
© Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1962), p. 480.
306 E. ADAMOVSKY

inequality then in existence in his famous Discours sur l’origine et les

fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, in which he goes so far as to
attack private property. As will become evident, Diderot would also come to
discover the awkward fact of social inequality, of which he would also
become a critic. However, unlike his friend Rousseau, Diderot had to attack
inequality on different grounds, for he was not ready to impugn the right to
property or to adopt a primitivist standpoint.
At the beginning of the 1770s Diderot’s perception of the inequality of
social conditions seems to increase. Thus, in the Lettre de M. Denis Diderot
sur l’Examen de l’Essai sur les préjugés (c.1771) or in the Fragments divers
(1772) he distinguishes ‘high conditions’ from ‘subaltern conditions’, or “op-
ulent men’ from ‘lower’ or ‘poor’ conditions.’ In those days Diderot also
sided with the Helvetian ideal according to which ‘the happiness [bonheur] of
the individual in society is placed in well-being [aisance], between extreme
wealth and poverty’.*
Interestingly enough, in the Mélanges .. . pour Catherine IJ, written during
his trip to Russia (1773-4), the concept of ‘class’ becomes more frequently
used. In its modern sense — a social group defined by economic criteria —
the concept of class was still somewhat unusual. For example, the article
‘Classe’ in the Encyclopédie does not include any reference to social group-
ings. In fact, until the nineteenth century, the most common concepts used to
allude to social distinctions were ‘rank’, ‘order’ and ‘estate’. However, the
development of capitalism was affecting the social dynamics of the Ancien
Régime. Social distinctions were becoming less stable and birth-related, and
more fluctuating and variable. The introduction of the concept of class was
then the sign of a new awareness of this fact.’ In France in particular, the new
concept started to be used in its modern sense in the second half of the eigh-
teenth century and was popular among the Physiocrats (as in their distinction
between a classe laborieuse and a classe stérile). However, the use of ‘class’
as denoting fixed social entities (as in “working class’ or ‘middle class’)
would have to wait until the nineteenth century.'°

7 Denis Diderot, uvres, ed. Laurent Versini (5 vols., Paris, 1994), III, pp. 165, 168,
604, 610. Hereafter cited as LV.
8 LV, DI, pp. 588-9. The theme of happiness (bonheur) as aurea mediocritas was
taken from Greek classical philosophy and widely discussed in eighteenth-century
France. Particularly, in the philosophical—political debate on ‘luxury’ a particular con-
ception of a ‘bonheur bourgeois’ — a médiocrité between luxury and asceticism —
emerged. On the theme of aurea mediocritas see the discussion of Aristotle’s ideas
below, and Robert Mauzi, L’idée du Bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée francaises
au XVIIle siécle (Paris, 1960), pp. 175-9.
9 See Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London,
1988), pp. 60-2.
10 Dallas Clouatre, ‘The Concept of Class in French Culture Prior to the Revolution’ ,
Journal of the History of Ideas, XLV (2) (April-June 1984), pp. 219-44, pp. 227-44; see
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 307

The concept of class in Diderot’s works becomes frequent only in the

1770s. Nevertheless, until the end of his life he remained more likely to use
the words ‘condition’, ‘estate’ and ‘rank’ to refer to all types of social groups
(that is, professional groups, corporations, privileged orders, and groups with
different levels of political or economic power). On the contrary, the use of
‘class’ was usually limited exclusively to economic groupings.
Also in the Mélanges . . . pour Catherine II Diderot introduces the so-called
‘debate on the two luxuries’.'! To understand the importance of this debate, a
short digression is needed. The issue of luxury was widely debated not only
among the French philosophers, but also in England, Italy and other nations
during the Enlightenment. Luxury was traditionally condemned by Christian
moralists — Rousseau followed this tradition — but also by aristocratic writ-
ers (as a sign of bourgeois pretension) and others. Against this condemnation,
a group of writers concerned, like Mandeville, with economic issues, argued
that luxury had positive effects for society, since it encouraged general pros-
perity by distributing wealth. In this debate, other writers such as Beccaria,
Saint-Lambert, Deleyre and Condillac argued that there was a ‘good’ luxury
and a ‘bad’ one, depending on the characteristics of different nations.’
Diderot seems to have followed Saint-Lambert’s position.’ In the article
‘Luxe’ in the Encyclopédie Saint-Lambert argued that luxury is not good or
bad in itself, but depends on the productivity of a nation, that is, it must be
commensurate with production. Governments must encourage in individuals
the love of property and wealth, for it is advantageous for society. But a good
government has to counterbalance this feeling with the “community or patri-
otic spirit’, so that no social group ends up subjugating another. Bad luxury

also Peter Calvert, The Concept of Class (London and New York, 1982), and Marie-
France Piguet, Classe: Histoire du mot et genése du concept des Physiocrates aux
historiens de la Restauration (Lyon, 1996).
'1 Diderot had already given attention to this debate in his Salon de 1767. See Denis
Diderot, @uvres Completes, ed. Jules Assézat and Maurice Tourneux (20 vols., Paris,
1875-7), XI, p. 87. Hereafter cited as A-T.
'2 Dominique Margairaz, ‘La querelle du luxe au XVIIle siécle’, in Le Luxe en
France, du siécle des ‘Lumiéres’ a nos jours, ed. Jacques Marseille (Paris, 1999),
pp. 25-37; see also John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, from Eden to
Smollett (Baltimore, 1977); Carlo Borghero, La polemica sul lusso nel settecento
francese (Turin, 1973); R. Galiani, Rousseau, le luxe et l’idéologie nobiliaire: Etude
socio-historique (Oxford, 1989); Philippe Perrot, Le luxe: une richesse entre faste et
confort XVIIIe-XIXe siécles (Paris, 1995); J.-P. Goubert, Du luxe au confort (Paris,
1988); André Morize, L’apologie du luxe au XVIlle siécle et ‘Le Mondain’ de Voltaire
(Geneva, 1970).
!3 As G. Goggi has argued, another possible influence may have been that of
Alexandre Deleyre. Gianluigi Goggi, “Alexandre Deleyre et le Voyage en Sibérie de
Chappe d’Auteroche: la Russie, les pays du Nord et la question de la civilisation’, in Le
mirage russe au XVIIe siécle, ed. Sergei Karp and Larry Wolff (Ferney- Voltaire, 2001),
pp. 75-134, pp. 100-1.
308 E. ADAMOVSKY

emerges only when the patriotic spirit weakens, and this is the fault solely of
the government. Moreover, if this is the case, the result is that wealth becomes
unequally distributed and the gap between social groups grows. Thus, the
‘people’, the ‘intermediate estate’ and ‘the great’ become equally corrupt. On
the other hand, if the government is good, then wealth and virtue are in accord
and good luxury permits a more equitable distribution of both among the
social ‘conditions’. The people will then work and love the law and the great
will serve the state and cease to be inactive and corrupt. It is from the ‘inter-
mediate estate’ or ‘second class of citizens’ that ‘enlightenment will spread
down to the people and up to the great’.'* Thus, Saint-Lambert welcomes lux-
ury as the desire to take pleasure from material goods, because, if it is moder-
ate and counterbalanced by patriotism, it benefits society as a whole.
In Diderot’s work, the theory of the two luxuries appears in the
Mélanges . ., but itis in the Réfutation d’Helvétius, written between 1773 and
1775, that we find the best formulation of it. Interestingly enough, Diderot
inverts Saint-Lambert’s argument, and the themes of the effect of bad govern-
ments and the need for patriotism disappear. Thus, the origin of bad luxury is
not a fault of the government, but rather of the ‘senselessness’ in the use of
wealth that comes with a ‘too unequal distribution’ of it. Where bad luxury
prevails, it is because society 1s divided into just ‘two classes, a narrow class
of rich citizens and a numerous class of poor citizens’. On the other hand,
nations where good luxury prevails are those in which there are ‘three classes,
the rich, the comfortably-off [aisés] and the poor’.'? Unlike Saint-Lambert,
Diderot distinguishes two types of society in terms of social-economic char-
acteristics, rather than by the mere wisdom of the rulers or the patriotism of
the citizens. Moreover, social distinctions appear clearly as social classes (in
the modern sense of the concept). Interestingly enough, the intermediate class
not only appears in the ‘good’ society alone, but also constitutes the very cri-
terion by which to distinguish a good society.'° Thus, luxury is good only in
relatively egalitarian societies; in nations with greater class cleavage, it is just
a sign of depravity and corruption. Good rulers must ensure that wealth
remains fairly distributed without limiting people’s freedom or disregarding
the right to property."”
Diderot’s ideas on luxury must be understood in the context of his projects
for Russia, in which the creation of a ‘third estate’ was the most important of

14 A-T, XVI, pp. 14-24. ‘Luxe’ was mistakenly included in this edition of Diderot’s
works, but it was written by Saint-Lambert.
15 LV, I, p. 889.
16 Tt is worth remembering that, in its Latin root (/uxus), ‘luxury’ means ‘excess’ or
‘deviation’ from a norm. The opposite was mediocritas, attachment to the norm. As will
become evident, Diderot’s idea of an intermediate class is deeply connected to the
ancient idea of aurea mediocritas.
LTDA, 1p) 892.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 309

the measures recommended to ‘civilise’ that country.'* The optimum degree

of civilization is located at an intermediate point, just as the right amount of
wealth for an individual lies between the condition of the rich and the poor,
as becomes evident in the following passage of Diderot’s Réfutation
d’Helvetius:
Had Rousseau taken care of imagining a half-polished, half-savage kind of
society, instead of preaching a return to the forest, I believe it would have
been worth responding to him. Men have come together in order to gain pre-
dominance in their struggle against their constant enemy: nature. But they
were not satisfied with only defeating it, they wanted to triumph. They have
found the cottage more comfortable than the shack, so they have moved to
the cottage. Fair enough. But what an enormous distance there is between
the cottage and the palace! Do they live better in the palace than in the cot-
tage? I doubtit... 1am convinced that man’s industry has gone too far; had
it been hindered at an earlier stage, so it was possible to simplify its work,
we would not be worse now.
Interestingly enough, this optimum intermediate degree of civilization
appears associated with a particular social group:
Helvétius has placed man’s social happiness in mediocrity; I believe that
there is a similar stage in civilization, a stage which is more in agreement
with man’s felicity in general, and which is less removed from the savage
condition that we would imagine. But how to return to that stage once one
has passed it, how to stay there once one has reached it? I ignore it .. . The
Ancient legislators have only known the savage condition. More enlight-
ened than them, a modern legislator, who would set up a colony in a remote
spot on earth, could probably find a middle ground between the savage
stage and our wonderful polished stage, a middle ground which may delay
the progress of the child of Prometheus . . . and fix civilized man between
the savage’s infancy and our decrepitude."”
The third estate embodies both civilization and the right balance of society. A
marked social inequality is the characteristic of both barbarous nations and
societies that went beyond the right level of civilization. Hence Diderot’s con-
cern for the division of wealth in Russia as it appears in the Observations sur
le Nakaz, the philosophe’s commentary, written after his trip to Russia, on the
famous Instruction (Nakaz) that the Empress Catherine II had issued to the
Legislative Commission elected in 1767 to design a new legal code for Rus-
sia. Large fortunes, Diderot argues, should be inherited on an equal basis by

'8 On Diderot and Russia see Ezequiel Adamovsky, ‘Diderot en Rusia, Rusia en
Diderot. El papel de la imagen de Rusia en la evolucion del pensamiento politico del
Ultimo Diderot’, Stvdia Historica: Historia Moderna, 22 (2000), pp. 245-82.
PL p. 903. Diderot had expressed some of these ideas before, in a contribution
for the second edition of the Histoire des Deux Indes (1774). See LV, III, pp. 588-9.
310 E. ADAMOVSKY

all children of the family (or other relatives in cases where there were no chil-
dren). No other device is as effective ‘to maintain political equality’.”°
Interestingly, a disagreement between Diderot’s and Catherine’s ideas of a
‘third estate’ becomes apparent in the philosophe’s commentary on articles
363 to 367 ‘On the Middle Estate [état moyen]of the Nakaz. According to
Catherine’s Instruction, the ‘middle estate’ was the part of the population that
belonged neither to the peasantry nor to the nobility. The responsibility of this
group was to have ‘good customs’ and to devote themselves to their labours.
If they failed to do this, they would be ‘excluded’ from this order.”! In his
Observations sur le Nakaz Diderot expresses confusion: *. . . will be excluded
from this order .. . 1 cannot understand. Will they be turned into serfs?’.”
Diderot’s ‘confusion’ is quite significant. In Russia, the legal status of a
person did not necessarily correspond to his or her economic activities or
place of residence, but was assigned from above, as a degree in a legal hierar-
chy that was based in the Russian principle of service to the state. The prob-
lem arises, then, how to classify that ‘third estate’ that Russia lacked. Was it a
class or arank ala russe? The full significance of this problem becomes clear
when we look at the different ways in which the expression ‘third estate’ was
translated into Russian. As David Griffiths has noted, when this translation
ocurred, it gained a hierarchical sense that the French original lacks. For
example, the two most frequent translations in the 1760s were tretii chin and
tretii rod liudei, the latter being Catherine’s and Ivan Betskoi’s favourite. In
Russian, chin means ‘degree’, ‘rank’, ‘order’ or ‘position’ and has a charac-
teristic hierarchical sense: it was the category used in Peter the Great’s Table
of Ranks. Rod, on the other hand evokes familial inborn characteristics. Other
common translations were srednee sostoianie (middle element) or srednii
shtat liudei (people of the middle estate); both refer to a mean position
between peasants and nobility.” In the context of the Russian debates, all
these translations give the idea of an intermediate rank between serfs and aris-
tocracy, related to the urban space, and part of a state-defined hierarchy. This
hierarchical sense is absent in the French tiers-état; likewise, it is worth not-
ing that the expression ‘middle class’ was still unknown in France at this time.
Diderot developed his ideas on the importance of the third estate when
thinking about Russia’s civilization and in contact with Russian debates.
20°LV, IH;.p. 563.
?1 Catherine II, Instructions adressées par sa Majesté l’Impératrice de toutes les
Russies a la Commission établie pour travailler a l’exécution du projet d’un nouveau
code de lois (St Petersburg, 1769), pp. 174-6.
22-LV, Ill, p. 561.
3 David Griffiths, ‘Eighteenth-Century Perceptions of Backwardness: Projects for
the Creation of a Third Estate in Catherinean Russia’, Canadian-American Slavic Stud-
ies, 13 (4) (Winter 1979), pp. 452-72; see also Robert Jones, ‘Jacob Sievers, Enlightened
Reform and the Development of a “Third Estate” in Russia’, The Russian Review, 36 (4)
(October 1977), pp. 424-37.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 311

When he started to relate the third estate to an intermediate group (the

‘comfortably-off class [classe aisée]’ between the rich and the poor),
Diderot was not referring to a fixed intermediate administrative rank in a
political hierarchy, but rather to an intermediate class in terms of a contin-
uum of social-economic distinctions. Thus, although they often used the
same expressions, Diderot’s and Catherine’s conceptual frames were com-
pletely different. Whilst Catherine II was trying to insert a new rank into the
Russian social-administrative hierarchy, Diderot’s ‘comfortably-off class’
foreshadowed the modern concept of ‘middle class’. In the Observations sur
le Nakaz Diderot seems to have realized that to some extent he and the
Empress had been talking about different things.
Thus, in “Sur la civilisation de la Russie’, a fragment that is part of the philo-
sophe’s contribution to the third edition of Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes
(1780), Diderot came to the conclusion that ‘civilization’ was a long and diffi-
cult project rather than the simple achievement of an enlightened monarch.
Russia lacked the preconditions for civilization, for it was ‘split into two
classes’ with ‘opposite interests’; the creation of a ‘third estate’ to eliminate this
cleavage, on the other hand, ‘takes centuries’. For Diderot it was not just a mat-
ter of inserting an intermediate class in Russia, for the lack of such a class was at
the same time cause and consequence of Russia’s backwardness: ‘the tyrants
will never permit the extinction of serfdom’.” Thus, for Diderot, Russia is a
space marked by an absence, an empty wasteland that lacks the indispensable
‘yeast’: the third estate as the intermediate ‘comfortably-off class’.
Russia was only one point in Diderot’s geographical imagination in these
(his later) years. If Russia was a wasteland for civilization, France was in peril
of decadence — interestingly enough, because of the unfair distribution of
wealth. In the ‘Apostrophe a Louis XVI’, a contribution to the third edition of
the Histoire des deux Indes (1780), Diderot implores the young king:
Cast your eyes over the capital of your empire and you will find two classes
of citizens. Some, wallowing in wealth, flaunt a luxury which provokes
indignation among those not corrupted by it. Others, overwhelmed with
need, make their situation worse by the pretence of a prosperity which they
do not have. For such is the power of gold, when it has become the god of a
nation...”
Disappointed with Russia and worried about France, Diderot now turned his
eyes to the new space of the possible, post-revolutionary America. In the
Essai sur les regnes de Claude et de Néron (finished in 1778) he hopes that the
‘brave Americans’ will ‘prevent’ the aggravation of the ‘unequal distribution

24 LV, III, p. 662.

25 Tbid., p. 638.
SL E. ADAMOVSKY

of wealth’, and therefore ‘preserve freedom’ and postpone the seemingly

inevitable decadence of society.”°
As becomes apparent, the unequal distribution of wealth and power among
social classes is at the core of Diderot’s concerns, from Russia to France, and
from France to the United States. The presence of intermediate groups
between the rich/powerful and the poor/weak constitutes the keystone of civi-
lization, political freedom and happiness in general.
Thus, especially through his observations of Russia, Diderot in his later
work developed a specific line of thought on social inequality and its impor-
tance for historical progress. Having taken up Montesquieu’s simple remark
on the absence of a third estate in Russia in De l’esprit des lois”’ (and its
‘translation’ into the Russian debates), Diderot came to the conclusion that a
third estate — defined as an urban independent class in between the rich and
the poor — was at the same time a precondition for and an outcome of civili-
zation. Moreover, his idea of civilization assimilated individual and social
happiness; thus, individuals and nations should remain at an intermediate
point (of wealth in the case ofthe former, and of economic development in the
case of the latter). Diderot understands this aurea mediocritas as an unstable
and fragile balance that requires social and political energy to maintain it.
As will become apparent, these kinds of ideas would develop as the core of
French post-revolutionary liberalism. Suffice it to say for the moment that, by
means of this formulation, Diderot was replying to Rousseau’s primitivism
and to those who, by then, were already attacking private property as the
source of social unhappiness.

11.1 Diderot’s ‘Intermediate’ as Metaphorical Formation”*

The theme of the virtue of ‘the intermediate’ appears time after time in
Diderot’s later political philosophy. Be it in his argument that the best place
for humankind is between wilderness and civilization, or his claim that the
optimum place for the individual in society is between wealth and poverty or,
finally, his assertion that the existence of an intermediate class in society
guarantees economic progress and the maintenance of political freedom, the
intermediate always appears as something virtuous, or something of positive
effect. In this section, I will attempt to interpret the theme of ‘the intermedi-
ate’, which lies at the core of Diderot’s materialism. I will argue that this
theme links Diderot’s social-political thought to his ideas about nature, in a
materialistic and deeply unitary philosophy.

26 LV, I, p. 1197. Similar opinions can also be found in a text for the Histoire des deux
Indes: see LV, Ul, p. 722.
27 Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois (2 vols., Paris, 1995), p. 732.
28 The hypothesis set out here and in II.2 has been presented at length in Ezequiel
Adamovsky, “Presencias intermedias: la “clase media” y el tema de lo intermedio en la
filosofia de Diderot’, Revista Latinoamericana de Filosofia, XX VU (1) (2001), pp. 31-58.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 313

As we have seen, Diderot developed the ideal of a society ‘half polished,

half wild’ by comparing nations to individuals. Thus, following Helvétius’
idea of the ‘happy mediocrity’ of the individual who is neither too rich nor too
poor, Diderot argued that the process of ‘civilization’ should be stopped at an
intermediate degree, after which decadence and decrepitude would begin.”
This idea is related to the cyclical conception of history that he expressed, for
example, in the Salon de 1767 and later in the Essai sur les regnes de Claude
et de Néron, according to which ‘everything carries in itself the secret germ of
destruction’, everything in this world is “condemned to be born, reach vigour,
proceed to decrepitude, and then perish’.*? Thus, the comparison of the cycles
of individuals and nations results from the assimilation of biological and his-
torical life, which leads Diderot to believe that to maintain an intermediate
stage of development means to extend life.
Regarding social groupings, we have already noted that, in considering the
case of Russia, Diderot became convinced of the importance of the third
estate for the civilization of a barbarous nation. This class not only guarantees
economic progress but also acts as the ‘yeast of freedom’.*' In the Réfutation
d’Helvétius the third estate is clearly defined through economic criteria as a
‘comfortably-off class between rich and poor. Again in this case, the social
and biological criteria overlap: the intermediate place is best because both
rich and poor ‘perish before the time established by nature, the former ofindi-
gestion, the latter of starvation’. This is another way of saying that the mem-
bers of the intermediate class live longer, just as nations do that are stopped at
an intermediate degree of civilization. In fact, the weakening ofthe intermedi-
ate class and the growth of the gap between rich and poor was for Diderot a
clear symptom of national decadence.*”
Similarly, in the later Diderot a strong concern for mediating institutions
between the individual and the state becomes apparent. Thus, he proposed the
idea of creating fixed and elective bodies or ‘intermediate powers’ in Russia,
which would function as channels to communicate the general will to the sov-
ereign, and where different “general wills’ and ‘particular wills’ would find a
place to negotiate their interests. In Diderot’s projects for Russia, the theme of
‘intermediate powers’ overlaps with the creation of a third estate. Thus, the
‘intermediate powers’ (for example, Catherine’s Commission, if it were ren-
dered permanent) would stimulate the creation of an intermediate social class,
‘amalgamating’ Russian society (a society that Diderot perceived as split into
two opposite social classes and therefore despotic). It is the existence of such

29 LV, I, p. 903.
30 A-T, XI, pp. 93-4; LV, I, p. 1197.
31 LV, Ill, pp. 326-7, 609-11.
32 LV, I, p. 902; III, p. 638; I, p. 1197.
314 E. ADAMOVSKY

a social amalgam that permits a political constitution that guarantees free-

dom.”
Interestingly enough, the theme of the virtues of the intermediate is also
present in Diderot’s treatment of aesthetic issues. In the Salon de 1767, for
example, Diderot praises ‘mediocrity’ and the ‘golden mean [juste milieu]’ in
art, and considers that the secret of artistic success consists in sticking to the
average ‘national taste’: those who attempt to go above that level will be
called ‘bizarre men’, whilst those remaining below the national taste will be
looked upon as ‘simpletons’.**
In summary, several overlapping issues can be distinguished in Diderot’s
understanding of ‘the intermediate’: the optimum intermediate degree of civi-
lization; ‘mediocrity’ as the social condition that guarantees the happiness of
the individual; the intermediate social group acting as a stimulus of economic
development and protector of freedom; intermediate bodies as constraints on
the state’s power and, finally, the intermediate as aesthetically beautiful.
So why then does ‘the intermediate’ assume so much importance in his phi-
losophy? From where does it obtain its almost magical powers, enabling it to
guarantee happiness, beauty, freedom and economic progress? In order to
answer these questions, a deeper analysis is required. Let us go back to
Diderot’s observations while in Russia.
On his trip to Russia, Diderot noted that St Petersburg had the appearance
of a set of isolated palaces, and that it would be necessary, as a part of the civi-
lization programme, ‘to bring them together’ by means of private houses
owned by members of the third estate. This would transform the Russian capi-
tal, according to Diderot’s hopes in 1773, into a more ‘lively, active, and com-
mercial’ city. In an interesting comparison, Diderot then argued that the
settlements of wild peoples were formed by isolated huts ‘without order, con-
tinuity or bond’. If we have palaces instead of huts, as in St Petersburg, the
image of wildness remains the same. A different picture emerges only when
those houses are ‘linked by intermediate houses’, so that the settlement looks
like a ‘beehive’. Continuing this image, Diderot adds: ‘You will have little
honey as long as your bees remain unbound.’** Thus, the intermediate houses
function here as symbols of the intermediate status of their owners, a status
that brings the population together. Wildness and decadence, in which men
are unbound, are the two extremes of this ideal situation. This perception is
related to Diderot’s ideas of history, in which the intermediate, as can be seen
in the Mélanges, has exceptional value in that it gathers men together. Before

33 LV, Ill, pp. 518, 277, 280-1.

34 A-T, XI, pp. 125, 293-4. It must be said, however, that in some other texts Diderot
advanced completely opposite aesthetic opinions, and praised pieces of art which were
out of the ordinary. See Jacques Chouillet, La formation des idées esthétiques de
Diderot, 1745—63 (Paris, 1973).
35 LV, III, pp. 239, 325.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 315

society was established, Diderot argues, humans were like a multitude of ‘iso-
lated little springs’. These springs would from time to time bump into each
other, thus harming themselves. Society was aimed at organizing the
‘springs’, so as to avoid those eventual collisions. However, by bringing the
springs closer, social organization actually multiplied the risks. As the springs
have ‘diverse and opposite interests’, society may turn into a ‘continuous war’
of terrible consequences. To prevent that from happening, Diderot argues, it is
indispensable for men to remain together:
Isolated men have only one opponent: nature. Gathered together, men
have two: men and nature. Thus, when they are gathered together, men
have an even more urgent reason to come closer to each other . . . This
becomes evident in the great maxim of tyranny: divide and rule. She
wants individuals, but no corps; noblemen, but no nobility; priests, but
no clergy; judges, but no magistracy; subjects, but no nation, that is —
in the most absurd of consequences — society and isolated men.*°
Thus, Diderot’s positive appraisal of the intermediate social classes is related
to his particular vision of history (which recommends an intermediate stage of
civilization) and to a political vision that assimilates the intermediate bodies
that limit power to the intermediate classes. Diderot’s representations of dif-
ferent aspects of human life can be seen to be integrated and operating within
a greater scheme in which the ‘comfortably-off class’ or third estate is the
foundation stone, the ‘amalgam’*’ that binds men together, promotes eco-
nomic development (the struggle against nature) and prevents the ‘little
springs’ from destroying each other or from being tyrannized by a despot.

11.2. The ‘Yeast of Freedom’

As now becomes apparent, the theme of the intermediate articulates a whole
series of representations in a scheme that connects all the aspects of social life.
However, the significance of the intermediate in Diderot’s political philoso-
phy can be properly understood only within the wider framework of his phi-
losophy of nature. In this section, I will argue that the metaphor of the third
estate as ‘the yeast of freedom’ connects Diderot’s representations of social
life to a vast coherent metaphorical system, in which social life is interpreted
in terms of the natural world. As is well known, a metaphor permits the reader
to understand one thing in terms of another, and far from being adventitious
associations, metaphors (together with metonymies) can constitute vast co-
herent systems in terms of which we conceptualize our experiences.** There-
fore, metaphors are particularly useful in transitional or formative periods of
intellectual history, when thinkers are inventing new concepts or systems of

36 Jbid., pp. 311-13.

37 Ibid., p. 281.
38 See G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980).
316 E. ADAMOVSKY

ideas to express themselves. Likewise, metaphors are often at the core of

ideologies. That is why the analysis of metaphors can be particularly reveal-
ing for the intellectual historian.
Let us begin with Diderot’s ideas on the organization of Nature, and his
idea of ‘energy’ in particular. As Jacques Chouillet has pointed out, in his phi-
losophy of nature Diderot linked several areas that are usually thought of as
being separate from each other — inertia and energy, matter and life, the con-
tiguous and the continuous — in a deeply unitary thinking. In order to estab-
lish these links, Diderot had to answer the question of how transitions
between these areas happen. As is well known, the philosophe resolved the
first passage — from inertia to energy — by means of his theory of ‘molecular
energy’. This theory serves to abolish all contradictions between inertia and
energy, for the former can thus be considered a force. Once the first transition
was resolved, the other two became easier to unravel.*’ Thus, around 1769
Diderot found the solution to the second problem, by completely assimilating
matter and life. In Le réve de d’Alembert, the philosopher presented a vision
of the world as an ‘ocean of matter’ in continuous fermentation, in which a
series of animalcules form a continuous chain, thus linking without any
breach the kingdoms of the inanimate with that of the most complex forms of
living beings.” In his dream, d’ Alembert ‘sees’ the spontaneous generation of
life, that is, the passage from inert matter to animate beings.
The third problem (the transition from contiguous to continuous) was also
resolved in Le réve. The fundamental issue at this point consists in knowing
how individual molecules gather together to form an organized whole.
Diderot answers this question by comparing the individual molecules to drops
of mercury: just as two mercury drops that are close to each other fuse, ‘the
contact of two homogeneous molecules, perfectly homogeneous, forms conti-
nuity; this is the case of union, cohesion, combination, the most complete
identity that can be imagined’.*!
One may readily imagine how Diderot’s conception of natural organization
relates to the features of social life described above. As Geoffrey Bremner has
pointed out, the theory of the natural sociability of man, which Diderot pro-
fessed, is remarkably similar to the explanation of the passage from contigu-
ous to continuous.*” However, the mystery we are trying to resolve here is that
of the intermediate, and for this we need to go a little further. The key to this
mystery can be found in Diderot’s Eléments de Physiologie (written between

39 See Jacques Chouillet, Diderot poéte de l’énergie (Paris, 1984), pp. 227-8.
BOE Tp, 631:
4! Ibid., p. 626; see also Merle Perkins, Diderot and the Time-Space Continuum:
His Philosophy, Aesthetics and Politics (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,
no. 211) (Oxford, 1982), pp. 40-3, 61, 69, 144-6.
42 Geoffrey Bremner, Order and Chance: The Pattern of Diderot’s Thought (Cam-
bridge, 1983), pp. 92-3.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 317

1778 and 1780), in which the author echoes the ancient theory of the continu-
ous chain of being linking all the realms of nature. According to the philo-
sophe, “The chain of being is not interrupted by diversity of forms .. . The
vegetal realm could well have been the primary source of the animal realm,
and could well have found its source in the mineral realm; and the latter could
have emanated from heterogeneous universal matter.’*? This is why at the
time of the Encyclopédie Diderot was particularly interested in the ‘interme-
diate beings’, supposedly half vegetal and half animal, such as the polyp, the
sensitive plants or the carnivorous plants, which he thought were the starting
point of the transition linking both realms. But in the Eléments Diderot added
recently discovered examples. As is well known, while writing the Eléments
Diderot read the new scientific studies by Beccari (the discoverer of gluten),
Keisser and Mayer (specialists in flour fermentation) and Macquer (specialist
in starch). Diderot found the fermentation processes particularly striking, for
they seemed to demonstrate his hypothesis of the connection between vegetal
and animal, just as did fungi that grew on cereals.
Thus, in this picture of nature as a universal fermentation, in which the
intermediate animalcules constitute the expression of the cosmic vitality,*° the
meaning of the metaphor of the ‘yeast’ or the ‘amalgam’ referring to the third
estate becomes apparent. We are able to understand at last the deep secret of
the intermediate’s magic: the third estate is a ferment that stimulates eco-
nomic development, the arts, good mores and freedom; it is the ‘amalgam’
that gathers men together, and the ‘yeast’ that, applied on barren soil (such as
Russia’s), gives rise to the marvel of civilization. At the same time, because of
its intermediate nature, the third estate also serves to maintain the right equi-
librium in society, by balancing the extremes of wealth and poverty. To put it
in terms of Diderot’s philosophy of nature, the third estate brings both conti-
nuity and a higher stage in life.
Several paragraphs of the Eléments de Physiologie confirm that for Diderot
social life and natural life function analogously. For example, Diderot uses

43 LY, 1pp. 1261-2.

44 See the remarks of the editor in LV, I, pp. 1262-4. On the importance ofthe idea of
spontaneous generation and universal fermentation in Diderot’s thought, see Gerhardt
Stenger, Nature et Liberté chez Diderot apres |’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1994), pp. 140 ff.;
Annie Ibrahim, ‘Diderot ou le paradoxe du développement aléatoire’, in Entre forme et
histoire: Laformation de la notion de développement al’dge classique, ed. Olivier Bloch
et al. (Paris, 1988), pp. 145-58; B. Lynne Dixon, Diderot, Philosopher of Energy: The
Development of his Concept of Physical Energy 1745-1769 (Studies on Voltaire and the
Eighteenth Century, no. 255) (Oxford, 1988), pp. 11-13, 21-3, 149-52. Itis worth noting
that Aristotle was already interested in the ‘intermediate beings’, the zoophytes, which
seemed to prove the idea of a Great Chain of Being; see the classic study by Arthur
Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York, 1960),
pp. 56-9.
45 See LV, I, pal2ove
318 E. ADAMOVSKY

examples taken from social life to explain how live organisms work. To begin
with, the philosopher uses the word ‘society’ to designate the association of
the organs that form a system or organism. Second, Diderot argues that for a
living creature to live longer, the strength ofits organs must be ‘equal’, that is,
there must be an ‘exact equilibrium’ among the organs. In fact, the ‘perfect-
ibility’ of men compared to other animals resides in the relative weakness of
all human organs compared to the ‘organ of reason’. Had men had a very spe-
cialized organ — such as the sight of the eagle, or the olfactory sense of
dogs — they would not have developed reason.”°
The isomorphic character of these quotations and the statements that
Diderot uses to support his positive appraisal of the intermediate class (a class
that is able to avoid the huge gap and the consequent opposition between
the interests of the poor and the rich, and thus to maintain equilibrium) 1s
self-evident. An unevenly formed organism will die and disappear: some-
thing that Diderot appears to dread in observing the increasing inequality in
his own nation. Finally, Diderot seems to prefer a not very specialized organ-
ism. “Perfectibility’ ‘evolution’, we would say today) is a feature of humans,
which derives from the weakness of their senses; paradoxically, organisms
that have developed one of these senses to its maximum capacity (to the
neglect of others) are inferior. This is yet another reason for favouring an
intermediate degree of civilization, before ‘gold becomes a nation’s God’.
If more evidence of the physiological and social analogies in Diderot’s
thought were needed, the Eléments de Physiologie present the following
explanation of diseases:
There are two kinds of disease. One is produced by an external cause that
brings disorder; the other, by a part that is too vigorous and, therefore,
causes troubles to the whole machine: it is a too powerful citizen for democ-
racy. The matrix is healthy, but his action is too strong for the rest.*”
Thus, ‘democracy’ is associated with the only truly organic form of living
creatures’ operation. Inequality is the cause of diseases in society in the same
way as in living organisms, yet another reason to praise the intermediate. As
Elisabeth de Fontenay has pointed out, Diderot’s metaphor of society as a
body is the metaphor of a spontaneously anarchic society that establishes
itself as a republic; this image allows for a new conception of the body as an
organism that is always in a precarious balance, and whose vital principle
resides in a balanced plurality.** Diderot’s idea of civilization and his image
of society can also be interpreted as the precarious balance of a plurality of
forces or elements. In fact, much of the liberal tradition is based on a similar
assumption.
UV -A pp. 1270;,1311,1271, 12779:
UTNE p: 1313.
48 Elisabeth de Fontenay, Diderot o el materialismo encantado (Mexico City, 1988),
p22:
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 319

In summary, the intermediate/equality/life/evolution (ferment), as opposed

to extremes/inequality/death/stagnation, appears as a vast system of oppositions
through which Diderot interprets both the social and the natural worlds. In the
making of this system (in which the mental structures for understanding
nature and society are isomorphic), the metaphor of the yeast is the clue that
connects the meaning of the intermediate in society to the intermediate in
nature. In both realms the intermediate is the key to balance, and the spark
of new life. By ‘carving’ an intermediate class between the extremely rich
and the poor, and by assigning to the third estate the extraordinary virtues of
being in between, Diderot was anticipating the invention of the modern idea
of ‘middle class’ and responding to Rousseau’s critique of private property
with a theoretical justification of (a ‘moderate’ level of) inequality. This theo-
retical move, as will become evident in the last part of this article, became a
fundamental component in the liberal tradition’s shift from aristocratic to
bourgeois.

Ill
Inventing the Middle Class in Ancient Times:
Aristotle’s Politics and the Doctrine of the Mean
Although Diderot had no way of knowing it, many centuries before, Aristotle
had constructed his idea of ‘middle class’ by means of a similar metaphorical
operation, and in order to address comparable political challenges. As many
commentators have argued, Aristotle’s ethics and political philosophy cannot
be understood without taking into account the peculiar political circum-
stances in which he (as did the Socratics in general) produced his work. In
Aristotle’s times the traditional! landed aristocracy of Athens was rapidly los-
ing its formerly unchallenged place as the head of society. As citizenship
expanded and urban economic prosperity increased, democracy became more
dynamic, and a growing number of traders, manufacturers, artisans, shop-
keepers and wage labourers posed a strong threat to the aristocratic world.
Hence the social struggles and political instability characteristic of this period
(stasis). In this context, some aristocrats developed a renewed aristocratic
consciousness, so as to distinguish themselves from the nouveaux riches and
reinforce their sense of identity and pride, and their belief in their mission.
Thus, they endeavoured to rescue, reform and revitalize rural aristocratic val-
ues, ‘in order to stem the levelling tide of democracy, the tyranny of the
majority, and the vulgar commercialism that they felt were engulfing Athens
and the whole of Greece’.*? An aristocrat himself, Aristotle, together with
other Socratic philosophers such as Plato, played a central role in this move-
ment; moreover, as Osvaldo Guariglia has argued, Aristotle’s political and

49 Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political
Theory: Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Social Context (Oxford, 1978), pp. 2-5.
320 E. ADAMOVSKY

ethical philosophy expresses the ‘ideology’ of the aristocratic ‘patriarchal

order’.*° However, unlike Plato’s openly authoritarian ‘solution’, Aristotle
developed a more subtle political thinking, which formally accepted Athenian
democracy and egalitarianism, but only after reintroducing them into a con-
servative and elitist frame.
Aristotle’s contempt for the lower classes and for democracy is well
known. In his famous scheme of six forms of government, ‘democracy’
appears as one of the ‘bad constitutions’. His own ideal for the Polis, given
that the ‘aristocracy’ was ‘too perfect’ for most peoples, was the ‘polity’, a
mixed constitution (a mixture of oligarchic and democratic institutions) by
means of which, Aristotle imagined, the stasis could be resolved without
affecting the status of the aristocracy. What is important for our purposes is
that, in Aristotle’s opinion, that political arrangement should preferably be
based on a certain social order, namely, a society with a large ‘middle class’.
When such aclass does not exist or is not strong enough, ‘the rich and the poor
struggle’ with each other, and the party that wins rules for its own benefit and
not for society as a whole, whereas the presence of a middle class ‘re-estab-
lishes equilibrium and impedes any excessive preponderance’ in the Polis.
Besides, the ‘middle class’ is more inclined to ‘follow the voice of wisdom’
than are the rich or the poor, who are more prone to excesses and negative pas-
sions such as perversion, arrogance, insolence, envy, greed, servility and so
on. The relationship between the “middle class’ and Aristotle’s reinterpreta-
tion of the meaning of ‘equality’ becomes evident in the last book of his Poli-
tics, on the sources of ‘revolutions’. Whilst the rich often want to ‘amass
privileges and thus increase inequality’, the poor frequently pursue the false
idea of ‘absolute equality’; these are the two most common causes of revolu-
tions. But equality, Aristotle argues, must be understood as ‘proportional
equality’; needless to say, this political proportionality finds its correlation in
the social middle ground that the ‘middle class’ embodies.” In this way, as
Eric Havelock has argued, Aristotle does not directly reject equality, but
5° Osvaldo Guariglia, Etica y politica segin Aristételes (Buenos Aires, 1992),
PDaco ale
5! Aristotle, La Politica (Madrid, 1996), pp. 187-9 and 219-21; see also Romano
Garcia, “Estado y clase media en Aristételes’, Pensamiento, 44 (174) (1988),
pp. 163-87; Stephen Salkever, Finding the Mean: Theory and Practice in Aristotelian
Political Philosophy (Princeton, 1990), pp. 224—5. There is disagreement among com-
mentators about the relationship between the Polity and what Aristotle calls the ‘middle
constitution’. Whilst for most authors the two labels refer to the same thing, John Creed
has argued that the latter constitutes the best type of the Polity. Moreover, whilst the Pol-
ity is conceived as a mixture of the institutions representing the rich and the poor (that is,
a sort of political device that balances oligarchy and democracy), ‘middle constitution’
seems to refer to the situation in which the predominance of the ‘middle class’ already
embodies that equilibrium in society, beyond institutional devices; see John Creed,
‘Aristotle’s Middle Constitution’, Polis: Newsletter of the Society for the Study of Greek
Political Thought, 8 (2) (Autumn 1989), pp. 2-27. For our purposes it is enough to note
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 321

re-appropriates it in a hierarchical frame, thus obliterating its meaning. So,

‘proportional equality’ means a ‘correspondence’ or ‘proportion’ of the social
benefits or attributions that each person must enjoy, which must accord with
the fundamental inequalities that actually exist among men.” Thus, in this
metaphorical move, social happiness is equated to (physical or chemical)
equilibrium or proportion between unequal parts or elements, the ‘middle
class’ being a crucial component to achieve the right state. As Romano Garcia
has argued, the medical and scientific environment in which Aristotle grew up
provided him with the basis for understanding other fields. Thus, medical
analogies are a prominent feature of his Politics, the idea of the ‘mixed consti-
tution’ being a translation of the humoural equilibrium of the human body to
the realm of social life.”
But the question remains: why is the ‘middle class’ supposed to act in a
more virtuous way than the mob or the nouveaux riches? The answer must be
looked for in Aristotle’s Ethics, for, as John Creed has argued, the philoso-
pher concludes that the ‘middle class’ has the best moral disposition for social
life ‘by a not very rigorous extension from his ethical theory’.™
Let us begin with a brief account of Aristotle’s ideas about political virtue
and virtue in general. As Stephen Salkever has argued, Aristotle considers
that the best political judgments are those free from personal or party bias, that
look to the good of the polis as a whole, while political mistakes or injustices
are the result of pleonexia or passion generally, but more specifically of the
human passions: as we are mortals rather than gods, ‘spiritedness (thumos)
distorts the rule of even the best’. The cure for this deficiency is the rule of
law, since even though there may surely be bad laws, law as such is a sort of
reason without desire.” But if the law is written by humans, the same danger
of injustice obviously reappears in that sphere. It was in order to resolve this
issue that the Socratics introduced one of the most influential principles in the
history of Western philosophy: the foundationalist approach to knowledge,

that Aristotle conceived social happiness as equilibrium between the rich and the poor,
and that the ‘middle class’ embodies that equilibrium and is assumed to act in the most
virtuous way, because of its intermediate economic status.
52 Bric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven and London,
1964), p. 328.
53 Garcia, ‘Estado y clase media’, p. 167. Like everything else in the field of Aristotelian
studies, the idea that the philosopher found inspiration in the physical realm for his con-
ceptions about ethics and social life is far from undisputed. Early commentators were
more convinced by the idea than were later scholars, who tended to reject it; see W.F.R.
Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory (Oxford, 1980), pp. 142-51. However, George Terzis
has recently provided a very convincing revalidation of the earlier positions; see
G. Terzis, ‘Homeostasis and the Mean in Aristotle’s Ethics’, in Aristotle, Virtue and the
Mean, ed. Richard Bosley et al. (Edmonton, 1995), pp. 175-89.
54 Creed, ‘Aristotle’s Middle Constitution’, p. 4.
55 Salkever, Finding the Mean, p. 223.
22 E. ADAMOVSKY

virtue and the law; that is, the idea that there is a sort of cosmic order, beyond
the realm of the people’s opinions and decisions, which indicates what is true,
virtuous and fair.°° Thus, regarding knowledge and the discernment of the
truth, the Socratics distinguished between ‘sensible existence’ and ‘meta-
physical reality’. Our opinions and observations belong to the former, that is,
the superficial, ever-changing, unreliable and disputable realm of sensory
perceptions or appearances. The truth, however, belongs to the latter, that is,
the essence, being, or nature of things, which is external to and independent
from the human mind. In order to reach the metaphysical reality behind its
confusing manifestations, the rigorous analytical effort of a dispassionate
mind was indispensable; not everybody was equal to such a task.*’ Similarly,
as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, from the Socratics’ idea of the unity of vir-
tue — that is, the presupposition ‘that there exists a cosmic order which dic-
tates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life’ — it
follows that ‘truth in the moral sphere consists in the conformity of moral
judgement to the order of this scheme’.** Likewise, laws and political deci-
sions were considered right and fair if they corresponded to a sort of eternal
human nature. As Eric Havelock has argued, this principle represents a seri-
ous shift away from the egalitarian and universalistic approach to the law and
political decisions formerly predominant in Greek thought. The Greeks
tended to consider the rules ‘less as principles than as conventional patterns,
embodying not eternal laws written in heaven or printed on man’s spiritual
nature, but rather common agreements elaborated by man himself in a
response to collective need’. By means ofthis shift, Aristotle was able to rede-
fine the political notion of “common interest’, which was not to be interpreted
as the egalitarian harmonization of all personal interests, but rather as attach-
ment to an abstract principle of fairness supposedly emanating from human
nature.”
In this fashion, the Socratics placed the definition of truth, virtue, justice,
common interest, and so on, in a metaphysical sphere, far away from the opin-
ions and sovereign decisions of ordinary people. Here the elitist bias of their
philosophy becomes evident. For, as Socrates argued, those most capable of
attaining the knowledge of virtue (and, therefore, those who would make the
best political decisions) were those with a ‘dispassionate’ mind. In turn, the
acquisition of such a mind depended on constant self-analysis, which required
an abundance of free time. Those who were too busy with economic activities
were not so likely to achieve access to the knowledge of virtue in its highest

56 On this issue see Havelock, The Liberal Temper, and Alasdair MacIntyre, After
Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN, 1981).
57 See Meiksins Wood and Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory,
pp. 101-5.
58 MacIntyre, After Virtue, p- 133.
59 Havelock, The Liberal Temper, pp. 29-30, 393-4.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 323

degree, because they did not have enough free time, but, more important,
because they were too close to the sensual and material world, which impedes
the achievement of disinterest, temperance and dispassion. The ordinary peo-
ple inhabited the superficial world of necessity and appearance, and knowl-
edge requires first of all liberation from necessity, bodily needs and sensory
confusion. The philosophers and the traditional aristocracy were the only two
groups that fulfilled Socrates’ expectations. This is not to say that other
groups could not live a moral life, but they would do so on a level inferior to
the Socratic ideal.
As Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood have argued, a similar elitist bias
can be found in the positive definitions of virtue. For example, the virtues that
Plato appreciated the most were gentility, grace, refinement, cultivation and
so on, whilst the most regrettable vices were vulgarity, commonness, coarse-
ness, insolence and presumption. Virtues and vices thus defined correspond
to the stereotypes of Plato’s own aristocratic class. A similar elitist bias
appears in Aristotle’s list of the eleven fundamental virtues: courage, self-
control, liberality or generosity, magnanimity, great-souledness or high-
mindedness, a nameless virtue between ambition and its lack, gentleness,
friendliness, truthfulness, wittiness, and shame. Of this list, at least two vir-
tues — liberality and magnanimity — are unattainable (or less attainable) for
a common person. Moreover, the list of opposite vices often appears in Aris-
totle’s depiction of the common people. In this point, as Osvaldo Guariglia
has argued, Aristotle’s ethical theory becomes ideology, by presenting the
particular interests of one class as universally correct.*'
What is important for our purposes is to understand the ideological proce-
dure by which Aristotle naturalized those particular virtues (that is, converted
them into a universal ideal for all men), and assigned to the ‘middle class’ the
role of the most politically virtuous of social classes. Regarding the first issue,
it must be remembered that, according to Aristotle, each virtue represents a
mean — the famous ‘golden mean’ — between excess and deficiency; hence a
life in accord with them is a life of moderation. So, for example, Aristotle con-
siders the virtue of ‘courage’ to be the golden mean between the vices of cow-
ardice (too little courage) and temerity (too much courage). Scholars have
debated intensely about the validity of this doctrine, known as the ‘doctrine of
the mean’. This is because, as Rosalind Hursthouse has argued, there is no
logical reason to assume that there is such an extraordinary symmetry, so as to
60 Meiksins Wood and Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory,
pp. 103-5.
61 Jbid., pp. 155, 223-4; Guariglia, Etica y politica, pp. 236—40, 253.
62 Some scholars still believe that the doctrine of the mean is consistent. Often in this
debate scholars dispute the correct translation and meaning of Aristotle’s words; at this
level of subtlety it is impossible for a non-specialist to decide for or against a position. As
ahistorian of ideas, I have chosen the interpretation that I present here because it seems to
correspond to modern uses of the doctrine of the mean as well. For this debate, see
324 E. ADAMOVSKY

believe that there are two and only two vices per virtue, that they are opposite
vices, and that the corresponding virtue lies right in the middle of them.
Rather, virtue means to feel and act in the right way, in the right moment, for
the right reason. For example, getting angry for a foolish reason is not a vice
because it shows excessive anger, but because anger is expressed in an inap-
propriate situation. In this situation, any amount of anger is excessive. Wrong
behaviours are usually wrong not because of their proportion (too much/too
little), but just plain wrong according to an external rule. In other words,
moral behaviour does not derive internally from Aristotle’s logic, but exter-
nally from traditional customs and laws. Besides, Aristotle puts the order of
explanation the wrong way round. In a certain circumstance we do not decide
to act courageously by calculating a middle point from the knowledge we
already have about what the extremes of fear and temerity would mean in that
context. In fact, we first know what is expected from us in that situation, and
from that knowledge we decide what a cowardly or an excessively risky
behaviour would be. Thus, our internal struggle in that situation is not
between the vices of cowardice and temerity, but between our natural fear and
the moral imperative to do the right thing. If we finally overcome fear and act
courageously, that does not mean that we have behaved in a moderate way,
but in the right way.®
But why would Aristotle endorse such an apparently senseless doctrine? It
must be said that Aristotle was not the only one who held these kinds of
beliefs. The doctrine of the mean can be found, in different formulations, in
the works of other Greek philosophers and even in other civilizations, such as
ancient China.™ The appeal of such a formulation of ethical rules lies in that it
permits the naturalization of those norms by means of a metaphorical opera-
tion. By stating that certain attitudes, behaviours or feelings are a mean
between two extremes, the doctrine of the mean implies that they are mea-
sured, balanced, moderate. But, again in this case, the ethical realm does not
have a volume, nor is it a mathematical quantity of which we can distinguish
the middle or find a position of equilibrium. Thus, the doctrine of the mean

Salkever, Finding the Mean; Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory, pp. 129-51; Guariglia,
Etica y politica, pp. 180-2; J.O. Urmson, ‘Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean’, in Essays on
Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 157—70; Rosalind
Hursthouse, “A False Doctrine of the Mean’, in Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays, ed.
Nancy Sherman (Lanham and Oxford, 1999), pp. 105-19; Ioannis Evrigenis, ‘The Doc-
trine of the Mean in Aristotle’s Ethical and Political Theory’, History of Political
Thought, XX (3) (Autumn 1999), pp. 393-416; Aristotle, Virtue and the Mean, ed. Rich-
ard Bosley et al. (Edmonton, 1995); Stephen A. White, Sovereign Virtue: Aristotle on the
Relation Between Happiness and Prosperity (Stanford, 1992).
63 Hursthouse, ‘A False Doctrine of the Mean’; see also Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical
Theory, pp. 129-51, and Guariglia, Etica y politica, pp. 180-2, 224, 247.
64 See Richard Bosley, On Virtue and Vice: The Metaphysical Foundations of the
Doctrine of the Mean (New York, 1991).
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 325

performs a metaphorical operation that transfers our understanding of the

physical world to the realm of ethics. In this way, a certain image of physical
reality as a stable, balanced and ordered unity provides the basis for the claim
that society (including norms about what is good or bad) works similarly.
After the completion of this metaphorical operation, a pattern of behaviour —
that is, a social convention — appears as a measured or balanced conduct,
whilst a different pattern can be labelled as deviant, extreme, unreasonable,
intemperate. This happens without the need of the rational negotiation ofdif-
ferences between individuals, for the distinction of good and evil has been
naturalized. Indeed, this metaphorical operation seems to be part of a wider
structure that can be traced in the philological origin of some of the words we
still use. Thus, notions such as mean or middle, moderation, measure, medi-
cine, to think (meditate), to govern and to judge are all related to the same
Indo-European root ‘med-’ and its equivalent ‘ius’, which mean driving
something back to its measure. In any case, scholars have pointed out the
similarity between Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean and his ideas about physi-
ology and nature in general. For example, George Terzis has noted that in his
Partibus Animalium Aristotle developed an idea of homeostasis, according to
which ‘all influences require to be counterbalanced, so that they may be
reduced to moderation and brought to the mean . . . nature has contrived the
brain as a counterpoise to the region of the heart with its contained heat, and
has given it to animals to moderate the latter, combining in it the properties of
earth and water’.®
In summary, Aristotle’s ethical quest for virtue understood as a mean that
avoids the danger of extremes was inspired by his idea of nature’s tendency
towards equilibrium by means of the combination of elements and their mod-
eration. The mean is the locus of equilibrium, balance, harmony and serenity;
for that reason, the mean also represents the teleological object of natural and
human perfection. The connection between these ideas and Aristotle’s politi-
cal thought becomes clear. The ideal of the mixed constitution as the combi-
nation of democratic and oligarchic institutions and the idea of the
moderating role of the ‘middle class’ also stem from the same source, thus
configuring a vast metaphorical system in which the different aspects of real-
ity have an isomorphic constitution. If virtue lies in a mean, it is not surprising
that middling people are the most necessary for the maintenance of a virtuous
State.

65 See Emile Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes (2 vols.,

Paris, 1969), II, pp. 123-32.
66 Terzis, ‘Homeostasis and the Mean in Aristotle’s Ethics’, p. 181; see also Richard
Bosley, ‘Aristotle’s Use of the Theory of the Mean: How Adaptable and Flexible is the
Theory?’, in Aristotle, Virtue and the Mean, ed. Bosley et al., pp. 35-66, 49-50;
Evrigenis, ‘The Doctrine of the Mean’; Garcia, ‘Estado y clase media’.
326 E. ADAMOVSKY

However, as pointed out earlier, societies do not really have a middle. We

have examined the role of the ‘middle class’ as the locus of moderation and as
counterweight to the sovereignty of the majority in Aristotle’s political
thought. But who was ‘middle class’ according to the philosopher? By ‘mid-
dle class’ Aristotle probably meant the group of ‘self-sufficient landed propri-
etors who evidently work their land with the help of a few slaves or part-time
labourers’.®’ To a great extent, this definition is arbitrary. Why should that
group be considered the ‘middle class’, to the exclusion of other sections of
the population, such as merchants, shopkeepers or artisans? Were these
groups not also in between the rich and the poor (at least in terms of economic
wealth)? Aristotle’s attribution of a ‘middling’ role to the yeoman alone prob-
ably lies in his contempt for urban economic activities, and his preference for
the rural lifestyle and the values of his own class. To his mind, merchants,
shopkeepers and labourers were all part of the urban multitude that was
threatening the supremacy of the well-born; in that context, Aristotle con-
cluded, the yeoman could probably be mobilized in support of the landed aris-
tocracy or, at least, in defence of the (reformed, if necessary) status quo. This
was one of the central items of the political programme with which Aristotle
sought to face the challenge of democracy and egalitarianism.

IV
The Idea of ‘Middle Class’ in Perspective:
Aristotle and Modern Liberalism

In this respect, Aristotle’s political programme strongly resembles that of the

French doctrinaires in the first half of the nineteenth century, when they made
use of a discourse of ‘middle class’ for the first time in order to mobilize the
higher bourgeoisie against the tide of democracy and egalitarianism un-
leashed by the French Revolution. As Frangois Guizot conceded in a para-
graph of his memoirs recalling his early political years:

It was real dangers that we were facing while discussing the electoral
regime for France in 1817. We perceived that the most legitimate principles
and the most obscure interests of the new society were equally threatened
by a violent reaction. We felt, at the same time, that the revolutionary spirit
was being reborn and was fermenting around us, making use, as usual, of
noble passions in order to conceal the march of the worst, and to prepare
their victory. Due to their disposition and interest, the middle classes were
the most likely to fight against both dangers . . . To turn this anti-revolution-
ary situation of the middle classes to the benefit of the ancient monarchy —
now constitutional — and to ensure that monarchy the support and help of
those middle classes, while granting the middle classes a large role in

67 Meiksins Wood and Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory, p. 222;
see also Creed, “Aristotle’s Middle Constitution’, p. 7.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 327

government: that was the politics that the spiritual and factual reality clearly
indicated; that was the politics of the electoral law of 1817.
It is not surprising that a similar political device appeared when a social order
based on birth and fixed social conditions was being replaced by mobile
social classes and threatened by egalitarianism, be it in modern Europe or
ancient Greece. Indeed, the very expression ‘middle class’ was almost com-
pletely unknown in Europe’s political vocabulary until the French Revolution
of 1789. Some years before that revolution, a few authors had already toyed
with the idea of there being such a thing as a class in between rich and poor,
for example Diderot’s ‘comfortably-off class’ and Saint-Lambert’s ‘interme-
diate estate’, Rousseau’s ‘middle order’ (1764) and Volney’s ‘middling
order’ (1787). In some of these cases the idea that the middling people are
more prone to moderation had already appeared — for example, in 1748
Montesquieu had presented the Aristotelian idea that the ‘mediocre people’
were the basis of a wise constitution.”” But until 1789 these expressions
remained at the theoretical level, without contaminating the political vocabu-
lary.”' As Jacques Guilhaumou and others have argued, the language used to
designate classes and parties in 1789 was still mainly binary. The appearance
of the modern expression ‘middle class’ or ‘middling class’ [classe moyenne
or mitoyenne], from 1789 onwards, was related to the necessity to mobilize a
group of supporters who were ready to defend some of the achievements of
the revolution, but reject the most radical claims of the populace. Thus, the
politician Philippe-Antoine Grouvelle, who was interested in the creation of a
third party of the ‘moderate’, launched in 1789 an appeal to the ‘middling
class’, for that class alone would save France ‘from the tyranny of the Grands
and the excesses ofthe populace’. Interestingly enough, Grouvelle also redis-
covered the utility of Montesquieu’s ideas in his De l’autorité de Montesquieu

68 Francois Guizot, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire de mon temps (8 vols., Paris,
1858-67), I, pp. 170-1.
69 See Willibald Steinmetz, ‘Gemeineuropiische Tradition und nationale
Besonderheiten im Begriff der “Mittelklasse”. Ein Vergleich zwischen Deutschland,
Frankreich und England’, in Biirgerschaft. Rezeption und Innovation der Begrifflichkeit
vom Hohen Mittelalter bis ins 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Reinhart Koselleck and Klaus
Schreiner (Stuttgart, 1994), pp. 161-236; Marie-France Piguet, Classe: Histoire du mot
et genése du concept des Physiocrates aux historiens de la Restauration (Lyon, 1996).
70 See Klaus-Peter Sick, ‘Le concept de Classes Moyennes. Notion sociologique ou
slogan politique?’, Vingtiéme siécle, 37 (January—March 1993), pp. 13-33, p. 14.
71 Tt must be said, however, that similar expressions — such as ‘the middle sort of
men’ — were to some extent part of the English political vocabulary already in the sec-
ond half of the seventeenth century. See Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution
1603-1714 (London, 1980), p. 105.
328 E. ADAMOVSKY

(1789).”* In the first years of the revolution, the new expression ‘middle class’
was also present in writings and speeches of moderate leaders — including
moderate Jacobins — and in the new translations of Aristotle’s Politics (in
previous editions of that work, ‘middle class’ had been rendered as les
médiocres).’* Moreover, the Aristotelian inspiration of that brand of ‘moder-
ate’ politics can be found in leaders such as Lafayette, who argued in favour of
a mixed government combining old and new institutions.‘ The anti-egalitarian
tendency ofthis supposedly ‘moderate’ programme did not pass unnoticed by
leaders such as Brissot or Robespierre; in 1792 the latter denounced Lafayette
because he
wanted to create a middling party between the hideous aristocracy of the
Ancien Régime and the people, and to support it by all the royal power, by
letting Louis XVI participate in the project. In order to accomplish this, it
was indispensable to present the party of the people itself as a faction. It was
indispensable to invert the morality of equality and social justice into a sys-
tem of destruction and anarchy. By means of this system of defamation, all
the bad citizens, who are too cautious or too cowardly to raise high the
ensign of the aristocracy openly, are provided the means to combat liberty
without seeming to abandon its banner. All the shy, the weak, and the pru-
dent are thus detached from the people’s class. The rich, the civil servants,
the selfish, the ambitious and intriguers, and those who play the role of
authorities, get together under the banner ofthis hypocritical faction known
as ‘moderates’, who have put the Revolution in jeopardy.”
But it was only some years later that the discourse of “middle class’ became
more visible, in the political programme of Guizot and the doctrinaires. Since
then, liberal political programmes have been presented as juste milieu or
‘moderate’, that is, the ‘centre’ between ‘extremes’ equally inadequate, harm-
ful or even evil.’° It should be obvious by now that the measures that the liber-
als usually recommend are not in the ‘middle’ of anything; nor are they the
balanced combination of all other political programmes. There are many dif-
ferent ways to organize social life. Liberal measures are just one set among
many thinkable measures; it is debatable whether they are better for the peo-
ple or not, but it can be said that they represent the right equilibrium or the

? Jacques Guilhaumou, L’avénement des porte-parole de la République (1789-1792):

Essai de synthése sur les langages de la Révolution frangaise (Villeneuve-d’ Ascq,
1998), pp. 215-16.
73 See Steinmetz, “Gemeineuropiische Tradition’; Piguet, Classe: Histoire du mot,
p. 102; Sick, ‘Le concept de Classes Moyennes’.
74 See Georges Benrekassa, ‘Modéré, modération, modérantisme: le concept de
modeération, de |’4ge classique a |’Age bourgeois’, in G. Benrekassa, Le langage des
Lumiéres: Concepts et savoir de la langue (Paris, 1995), pp. 125-64, pp. 141-3.
75 Quoted in Benrekassa, ‘Modéré, modération, modérantisme’, pp. 144-5.
76 See Mechtild Fischer, Mittelklasse als politischer Begriff in Frankreich seit der
Revolution (Gottingen, 1974).
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 329

‘centre’ only by use of the cunning metaphorical device that we have analysed
in this article. By saying that liberal measures are at the ‘centre’ of the politi-
cal spectrum, the liberal ideology naturalizes them. In other words, liberal
ideology makes use of the ancient metaphorical formation of the golden mean
in order to present a particular political programme (‘moderate’, ‘centre’,
‘middle way’ and so on) and the interests of acertain social (‘middle’) class as
the common good and as common sense. In this way, liberal choices appear
validated not merely by the opinion of individuals, but by the law of nature;
once the public has accepted this ‘common sense’ as neutral, all other inter-
ests and programmes appear as ‘ideological’, interested, partial, immoderate,
excessive, extreme, deviant and even evil.
In sum, the concept of ‘middle class’ (and generally the metaphorical for-
mation of the golden mean as applied to politics) has been a typical element of
elitist ideologies; it seems to appear when mobile social categories pose a
threat to the authority of the elite. As such, the concept of ‘middle class’
always remains partially ‘open’ and changeable, for if society, as I have
already argued, has no ‘middle’ of its own, it follows that a certain group can
be called ‘middle class’ only by virtue of a cultural convention. Who then
belongs to the ‘middle class’? To put it simply, the delimitation of the ‘mid-
dle’ of society depends on the question of who must be brought in, in order to
keep whom out. Thus, Aristotle chose to convince his fellow aristocrats to
accept the yeoman, in order to keep the urban mob out; so, the yeomen were
named the ‘middle class’. In Guizot’s times, the issue was to accept the fact of
the social predominance of the higher bourgeoisie and to keep the people out;
so, in Guizot’s mind the bourgeoisie was the new ‘middle class’. Later on,
under the pressure of a better-organized and radical working class, the ‘mid-
dle class’ had to open its lower ranks to the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’, as
the French republican politician Gambetta liked to say in the early 1870s.
Thus, towards the turn of the century ‘middle class’ included in France not
only the bourgeoisie, but also the petty shopkeepers and, later on, some cate-
gories of independent workers and even some types of wage-earners.”’

77 See Sick, ‘Le concept de Classes Moyennes’; Gilles LeBéguec, ‘Prélude a un

syndicalisme bourgeois: I’ Association de défense des classes moyennes (1907-39)’,
Vingtiéme Siécle, 37 (January—March 1993), pp. 93-104; Jean Ruhlmann, Ni bourgeois
ni prolétaires: La défense des classes moyennes en France au XXe. siécle (Paris, 2001).
The emergence and evolution of the concept of “middle class’ in Britain seems to have
followed a similar scheme. As in France, after 1789 the concept of ‘middle class’ was
introduced and used in Britain with anti-egalitarian purposes; see Dror Wahrman, /mag-
ining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780-1840
(Cambridge, 1995); Vincent E. Starzinger, Middlingness: Juste milieu Political Theory
in France and England 1815—1848 (Charlottesville, 1965). Similar anti-egalitarian uses
of ‘middle class’ can be found elsewhere, from the policies of the United States in Latin
America during the Cold War, to the social and political ideas that the Catholic Church
favoured in various countries in the 1940s and after. See Michael F. Jiménez, ‘The Eli-
330 E. ADAMOVSKY

In this respect, despite the defeat of the exclusive and openly bourgeois
regime of the doctrinaires in 1848, their political project was victorious at the
deeper level inhabited by ideologies. Thus, under the pressure of radical
republicanism and socialism, after 1848 the new generation of liberal politi-
cians finally accepted universal suffrage and republicanism as facts, and dis-
tanced themselves from Guizot and from any explicit appeal to the
bourgeoisie. However, this ‘dissimulation’ of the role ascribed to the bour-
geoisie after ‘le moment Guizot’, as Pierre Rosanvallon argues, constitutes the
step through which ‘bourgeois ideology’ finally crystallized. True, the bour-
geoisie could no longer present or think of itself as a separate class (not to
mention a privileged class); but the counterpart of this move was the projec-
tion of its own image upon the rest of society, as an abstract and universal
ideal of the good (bourgeois) society. If disguising particular interests as the
general interest is the basic function of ideologies, Guizot was no longer con-
venient, because far from masking the rule of the bourgeoisie, he had openly
proclaimed it. His role, however, was fundamental to the consolidation of
bourgeois ideology, for he provided in his works the basic narrative and
political account of the new society. Indeed, despite all their criticism of
Guizot, the thinkers and politicians who led France in the second half of the
nineteenth century shared his conservatism. However, they re-inscribed the
elitist and typically liberal idea of ‘capacity’ (that is, the idea that individuals
can make use of certain rights only if they show the capacity to do so in a ratio-
nal way) in a different frame. Thus, this elitist dimension was dissociated
from any direct sociological reference (such as ‘the pre-eminence of the mid-
dle class’), and related now to a cult of science and intelligence. The founders
of the Third Republic in particular resolved the typically doctrinaire issue of
the gap between the sovereignty of the people and the sovereignty of Reason
— that is, the distance between what the liberals consider is right, and peo-
ple’s decisions — by means of two subtle shifts. First, they ascribed a funda-
mental role to education, for it expands political ‘capacity’ downwards
(Ferry), and, second, they advocated expanding small property ownership and
incorporating the ‘nouvelles couches sociales’ as a key element of democracy
(Gambetta). To these aspects should be added the permanence of an institu-
tional design aimed at counterbalancing the will of the majority. In sum, for
all the critical remarks on Guizot and doctrinaire liberalism, the politics of the

sion of the Middle Classes and Beyond: History, Politics, and Development Studies in
Latin America’s “Short Twentieth Century” ’, in Colonial Legacies: The Problem of
Persistence in Latin American History, ed. Jeremy Adelman (New York and London,
1999), pp. 207—28; also Fr. Marion Habig, “The Golden Mean’, Franciscan Studies, 22
(4) (December 1941), pp. 122-35; J. Roberto Bonamino, ‘El comunismo y la clase
media’, Boletin de la Accion Catélica Argentina, 340 (October 1950), pp. 151-5; Pope
Pio XII, ‘All’ Istituto Internazionale delle Classi Medie’, in Discorsi e Radiomessaggi di
Sua Santita Pio XII (20 vols., Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, n.d.), XVIII, pp. 603-5.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 331

Third Republic represented less of a change than its leaders would have liked
to accept: the elitist dimension of political life remained untouched.”
What is important for our purposes is to visualize the line of continuity that
unites Aristotle’s elitist political thinking and modern liberalism, and the
importance of both in the making of bourgeois ideology.” For all the claims
of liberalism’s moral neutrality, existing liberalism actually shares with Aris-
totle’s philosophy the belief in a universal ethics, beyond the realm of human
choice. In both cases, in fact, ‘universal’ ethics is actually marked by the pro-
jection of the elite’s particular values and code of behaviour. Hence the
importance of (elitist) moral education for Aristotle and for most modern lib-
erals (for example, Tocqueville).*° For liberal democracy — to put it in the

78 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le moment Guizot (Paris, 1985), pp. 344-8, 354-70; see also
George A. Kelly, ‘Liberalism and Aristocracy in the French Restoration’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, XX VI (4) (October-December 1965), pp. 509-30.
79 The close resemblance of Aristotelian philosophy and liberalism has been pointed
out by many scholars — some of whom are liberals themselves, the perfect examples
being Leo Strauss and his school. See Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New
York and London, 1968). For example, David Lowenthal has explored the deep influ-
ence of Aristotle on Montesquieu’s political philosophy. Similarly, Stephen Salkever
has argued that Tocqueville’s political philosophy has much in common with Aristotle’s.
Alan Kahan has found in Aristotle one of the main sources of ‘aristocratic liberalism’, in
that they share a similar teleological definition of human nature, with which political
decisions should agree. Ronald Beiner and Stephen Macedo have argued that, despite the
opinion of many liberals, liberalism does have a particular definition ofvirtue, and in that
respect is related to Aristotle’s philosophy. Finally, Eric Havelock goes so far as to argue
that “Aristotle has exercised over the Western mind a moral authority not unlike that
which has been wielded by the Old Testament...’ .See David Lowenthal, ‘Montesquieu
and the Classics: Republican Government in The Spirit of the Laws’, in Ancients and
Moderns: Essays on the Tradition of Political Philosophy in Honor of Leo Strauss, ed.
Joseph Cropsey (New York and London, 1964), pp. 258-87; Salkever, Finding the
Mean, pp. 227-35; Alan S. Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political
Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford,
1992), pp. 83-4; Ronald Beiner, ‘The Moral Vocabulary of Liberalism’, in Virtue, ed.
John W. Chapman and William A. Galston (New York, 1992), pp. 145-84; Stephen
Macedo, ‘Charting Liberal Virtues’, in Virtue, ed. Chapman and Galston, pp. 204-32;
Havelock, The Liberal Temper, p. 376. On this issue see also Garcia, ‘Estado y clase
media’, p. 179; Classical Influences on Western Thought, A.D. 1650-1870, Proceedings
of an International Conference Held at King’s College, Cambridge, March 1977, ed.
R. Bolgar (Cambridge, 1979).
80 As the prominent scholar and liberal theoretician Leo Strauss argued, ‘A democ-
racy is a regime in which all or most adults are men of virtue, and since virtue seems to
require wisdom, a regime in which all or most adults are virtuous and wise, or the society
in which all or most adults have developed their reason to a high degree, or the rational
society. Democracy, in a word, is meant to be an aristocracy, which has broadened into a
universal aristocracy . . . Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the
corroding effects of mass culture, to its inherent tendency to produce nothing but “spe-
cialists without spirit or vision and voluptuaries without heart”. Liberal education is the
332 E. ADAMOVSKY

words of a contemporary liberal theoretician who argues for an Aristotelian

ethical turn in liberal philosophy — does not mean the sovereignty of any
people, nor freedom the protection of the interest of any individual. On the
contrary, the modern agreement between the sovereignty of the majority and
the protection of the individuals’ rights presupposes the existence of a partic-
ular type of citizen (as opposed to any human being as such), for whom virtue
and interest are not opposed. Thus, for this author, liberal democracy means
‘rule by the kind of people who are primarily concerned with personal inde-
pendence and an income adequate to achieve this comfortably’ (or, to put it in
the words Stephen Salkever borrows from Ralph Lerner, “the American com-
mercial republican as the new-model man’).*!
In summary, the transition from overt bourgeois discourse (Guizot) to
bourgeois ideology means the social internalization of bourgeois values and
patterns of behaviour usually ascribed to the ‘middle class’: ‘moderation’
understood as acceptance of the status quo, self-restraint with regard to other
persons’ established rights and privileges, and so on. The de-politicization of
the interests and aspirations of a group of society by means of the metaphori-
cal formation of the ‘golden mean’, and the projection onto it of the values of
the elite, can be conceived as the first step towards the naturalization of the
elite’s way of life as the norm for society as a whole. The invention of the idea
of ‘middle class’ was a fundamental part of that process.**

V
Conclusion

We have explored the political uses of the idea of ‘middle class’, and the meta-
phorical operation it performs. Through the comparison of its two formative

ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally

meant. Liberal education is the necessary endeavour to found an aristocracy within
democratic mass society.’ Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, p. 6. The connection
between elitism, teleological virtue, liberal education and restrictive political rights
could not be clearer.
8! Salkever, Finding the Mean, pp. 218-19. It is worth pointing out that this implicit,
class-biased model of the ‘democratic’ individual has effects that go beyond the theoreti-
cal sphere. It has often served, in modern and contemporary times, overtly or tacitly to
ignore or limit the political rights of those without the ‘right’ disposition regarding the
(bourgeois) ethical or behavioural code; the relationship between Western liberal
democracies and their colonial subjects is a good example of that.
82 Another example of this can be found in the following statement: ‘The linkage
between liberalism and middle-class society is not that of ideology to infrastructure, but a
kind of synthesis of theory and practice. Liberalism is the political expression of the mid-
dling, centrist view of life. It is the humanism of moderation, modesty, and morality. It is
the expression of a desire to live above the brute existence of the poorest and below the
idle luxury of the richest.’ William Logue, From Philosophy to Sociology: The Evolution
of French Liberalism, 1870-1914 (DeKalb, IL, 1983), p. 9.
 ARISTOTLE, DIDEROT, LIBERALISM & ‘MIDDLE CLASS’ 333

periods — ancient Greece and modern Europe — it became apparent that the
idea of ‘middle class’ belongs to a wider metaphorical formation, which
transports our understanding of nature to our conceptualization of social life.
The metaphorical nature of the idea of ‘middle class’ was identified in the
works of Aristotle and Diderot, in which comparisons to physical, chemical
and biological realities became evident. By means of that metaphorical opera-
tion, the idea of ‘middle class’ helps to naturalize and universalize certain
aspects of society. Thus, a number of facts, values and political preferences
ascribed to a ‘middle class’ are discursively constructed as ‘balanced’,
‘equilibrated’, in sum, ‘moderate’. By the same token, other political prefer-
ences appear as ‘extreme’ and, therefore, dangerous for social ‘equilibrium’
(and, therefore, for society as a whole).
The ideological function of this metaphorical operation was also explored.
The idea of ‘middle class’ was used, in both ancient Greece and modern
France, as a way to face the challenge of social equality and radical democ-
racy. The idea of a ‘middle class’ social order permits acceptance of some ele-
ments of the critique of inequality, while maintaining, however, an elitist
society. “Middle class’ always remains an ‘empty significant’, whose specific
content — that is, the concrete social groups who will be defined as ‘mid-
dling’ — is defined historically, according to the challenges “from below’ and
the possible strategies to counter those challenges “from above’.
We do not know how influential Aristotle’s formulation of the ‘middle
class’ polity was in his own epoch. It is clear, however, that a very similar
idea, adopted and further developed by modern liberalism, proved extraordi-
narily effective in our time.

Ezequiel Adamovsky UNIVERSITY OF BUENOS AIRES

 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST?
ON CULTURAL NATIONALISM AND ITS DOUBLE'

Arash Abizadeh?

Abstract: Even though Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation (Addresses to the Ger-
man Nation) arguably constitutes one of the founding texts of nationalist political
thought, it has received little scholarly attention from English-speaking political theo-
rists. The French, by contrast, have a long tradition of treating Fichte as a central figure
in the history of political thought, and have given considerable attention to the Reden in
particular. While the dominant French interpretation, which construes the Reden as a
non-ethnic cultural nationalist text, provides a welcome corrective to those who impute
unmediated ethnic nationalism to Fichte, it is ultimately flawed for missing the text’s
crypto-ethnic character. While Fichte officially defines nationality in terms of language
and culture, his linguistic—cultural nationalism ultimately collapses into ethnic national-
ism. This collapse, signalled by his appeals to Abstammung and Abkunft, is propelled by
the fact that, ultimately, the appeal to language and culture is incapable of securing
immortality, which is the supposed source of its motivational power for Fichte.

If only a handful of texts can rightly claim to rank amongst the foundational
texts of nationalist political thought, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Reden an die
deutsche Nation (Addresses to the German Nation) is surely one of them. Yet,
despite a growing interest amongst Anglophone scholars in Fichte’s philoso-
phy in its own right — and not just as a historical bridge between Kant and
Hegel — and despite contemporary Anglophone political theorists’ resurgent
interest in nationalism, scholarly work in English on the nature of Fichte’s
nationalism, and on the Reden in particular, barely exists.’ One reason for this
paucity is easy to discern: the chauvinistic character of the Reden’s nationalism,
' T am grateful to Seyla Benhabib, Louis-Philippe Hodgson, Frederick Neuhouser
and Steven Smith for valuable comments on a previous draft.
2 Department of Political Science, McGill University, 855 Sherbrooke Street West,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T7.
3 A recent exception is the analysis of the Reden in the excellent article by David
Martyn, ‘Borrowed Fatherland: Nationalism and Language Purism in Fichte’s Addresses
to the German Nation’ ,The Germanic Review, 72 (4) (1997), pp. 303-15. Older works in
English that discuss Fichte’s nationalist thought include: H.C. Engelbrecht, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte: A Study of his Political Writings with Special Reference to his National-
ism (New York, 1933); Hans Kohn, “The Paradox of Fichte’s Nationalism’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 10 (3) (1949), pp. 319-43; Hans Kohn, Prelude to Nation-States:
The French and German Experience, 1789-1815 (Princeton, NJ, 1967); and Elie
Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford, 4th edn., 1993 (1960)). For an example of the recent
scholarly interest in English of Fichte’s philosophy in general, see Frederick Neuhouser,
Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge, 1990); for a work that covers his political
philosophy, see Allen Wood, ‘Fichte’s Philosophy of Right and Ethics’, The Cambridge
Companion to Fichte, ed. Giinter Zéller (Cambridge, forthcoming); neither work covers
his nationalism in any depth.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005

 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 335

combined with the history of the text’s subsequent reception in Germany

which marked it as an icon of German nationalism, has rather too closely tied
the Reden to the darkest hours of the twentieth century. When Anglophone
scholars of Fichte do take his practical philosophy seriously, they tend to
focus on his earlier works, written before the ‘nationalist turn’ taken under
French occupation; and when the Reden is read at all, either it is read in light
of Fichte’s earlier anti-Semitic outbursts, his patriarchalism and the Reden’s
notorious legacy, or, for those who wish to take Fichte’s philosophy seri-
ously, it is read in light of the fact that Fichte’s nationalism is little to be seen
in his earlier — or, indeed, his later — works, thus inviting the easy dismissal
of the text as inconsistent with these other, more ‘serious’ ethical and political
writings, to which proper philosophical attention must be paid. In either case,
what is tacitly taken for granted by many Anglophone scholars is that the eth-
nic character of the Reden’s nationalism is so obvious (and perhaps so obvi-
ously proto-racist) that the text’s only interest is as a historical footnote to one
of human history’s most shameful chapters.
The state of affairs in France could not be more different. In sharp contrast
to his treatment in the English-language scholarly literature, in France Fichte
is commonly treated as a central figure in the history of modern political phi-
losophy,” a status that has spawned an extensive discussion of the character of
his nationalism. Rather than dismissing the Reden as an ethnic nationalist text
incompatible with Fichte’s more ‘serious’ philosophical writings, the domi-
nant view that has emerged in France — represented by Fichte scholars such
as Xavier Léon, Martial Gueroult, Alain Renaut, Luc Ferry and Etienne
Balibar — is that the Reden’s nationalism is decisively not of the ethnic vari-
ety. This is the thesis that I propose to examine here: that the Reden cham-
pions cultural but not ethnic nationalism.°
Several considerations lend particular interest to such an examination. First,
by interrogating the character of one of nationalism’s foundational texts, the
present analysis fills a considerable gap in the English-language scholarly liter-
ature on the history of nationalist political thought. Second, the dominant
French thesis is especially interesting and provocative because it suggests that
the Reden’s notorious legacy, as an icon of German nationalism, does a great
injustice to the character of Fichte’s political thought. In particular, the French
scholarship forces us to complicate considerably our reading of the Reden’s
nationalism — we can no longer simply take for granted the text’s unmediated
ethnic character. My exegetical thesis here is twofold. The non-ethnic, cultural
nationalist reading of the Reden in France provides a welcome corrective to

4 See, for example, Luc Ferry’s three-volume Philosophie politique (Paris, 1984—5)
(the final volume of which is co-authored with Alain Renaut).
5 On the distinction between cultural and ethnic nationalism see, for example, Kai
Nielsen, ‘Cultural Nationalism, Neither Ethnic nor Civic’, The Philosophical Forum, 28
(1-2) (1996-7), pp. 42-52.
336 A. ABIZADEH

caricatured readings that have, for too long, justified the scholarly neglect in
English of one of the key texts of nationalist political thought. This is not to
say, however, that the Reden’s nationalism is devoid of ethnicism; to the con-
trary, my suggestion is that while officially the Reden indeed constitutes a cul-
tural nationalist text, its ultimately ethnic character emerges in subtle ways
that greatly illuminate the discursive character of cultural nationalist ideol-
ogy. One ought to distinguish here between two kinds of ethnic nationalism:
unmediated ethnic nationalism, which champions a nation defined in the first
instance directly in genealogical terms; and mediated or crypto-ethnic nation-
alism, which initially conceives of the nation in other terms, but whose
nationalist politics in the final instance draws upon an ethnic supplement. The
French scholarship helps us to see that the Reden never advanced the unmedi-
ated ethnic nationalism that eventually captured the German imagination; but
contrary to the dominant French view, I will demonstrate that the Reden none-
theless remains an ethnic nationalist text — of the second, mediated variety.
This points to a third consideration, which gives the present analysis an
interest in addition to the purely exegetical one. Many contemporary social
and political theorists have argued that the nation is indispensable to solving
the ‘motivation problem’ in modern liberal democracy — 1.e. that the nation is
necessary for mobilizing democratic projects and effecting social integra
tion.® Alain Renaut has accordingly suggested that, properly understood, the
Reden articulates precisely the sort of political theory that liberal democracies
must learn from today: in particular, he argues that, by championing a cultural
nationalism that potentially avoids the pathologies of its ethnic kin, the Reden
opens up an intellectual space for precisely the sort of nationalism that
contemporary political theorists sympathetic to the nation have been seek-
ing.’ My reading of the Reden suggests that, to the contrary, the crypto-ethnic
logic of Fichte’s argument raises some important doubts about that potential.

I
The French Debate about Fichte’s Reden

The non-ethnic reading of the Reden is perhaps best understood against the
background of a longstanding debate in the French secondary literature on
Fichte. Not surprisingly, the key issue through the lens of which Fichte’s
French commentators (though not solely his French commentators) have read
him has been his relationship to the values of the French Revolution. The Reden

© Cf. Brian Barry, ‘Self-Government Revisited’, Democracy and Power: Essays in

Political Theory I (Oxford, 1991), pp. 156-86; Dominique Schnapper, La Communauté
des citoyens: Sur V’idée moderne de nation (Paris, 1994); and David Miller, On National-
ity (Oxford, 1995).
7 Alain Renaut, ‘Présentation’, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Discours a la nation
allemande, ed. A. Renaut (Paris, 1992).
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 337

appeared eighteen years after the French Revolution: it comprises thirteen

addresses that Fichte delivered at the Berlin Academy on Sundays during the
winter of 1807 to 1808. Berlin was under French occupation at the time, and the
foreign occupiers are the target of Fichte’s polemic: his stated goal is to rouse
the German nation from its slumber to assert its freedom and throw off the
Napoleonic yoke. For French readers of the Reden, then, the key exegetical
question has been whether by the time of the Reden Fichte had abandoned his
youthful and staunchly republican defence of the Revolution in favour of
Romantic nationalism and even pan-Germanism.* Did the Reden’s chauvinistic
appeal to the German nation as the only modern nation with the inherent cap-
acity for freedom, and his polemic against the French as the bearers of a dead
language, imply that the French Revolution had soured for Fichte as well? Did
it imply, for instance, that Fichte had now concluded that a French Revolution
could never have been the harbinger of freedom even in principle, regardless of
how things actually turned out in the end?
For Charles Andler, the answer to such questions is yes: Fichte, particularly
in his Reden, provides one of the primary philosophical sources of the chau-
vinistic pan-Germanism thought to be at the root of German aggression in
World War I.’ But in the eyes of Xavier Léon, Fichte to the contrary never
abandoned his allegiance to the French Revolution:
The Addresses to the German Nation, far from marking, as all too often has
been believed, a sort of conversion by Fichte to nationalism under the pres-
sure of circumstance, are thus nothing but the continuation — adapted as
always to the events of the hour — of the struggle which he never ceased to
wage for the reign of liberty and for the triumph of democracy.'°

8 For an overview of these debates in the French secondary literature, see Renaut,
‘Présentation’, p. 23; Martial Gueroult, ‘Fichte et Xavier Léon’, in M. Gueroult, Etudes
sur Fichte (New York, 1974), pp. 247-84; Blandine Kriegel, ‘Droit du peuple et esprit du
peuple’, Philosophie politique, 8 (1997), pp. 95-117. On the character and the historical
context of Fichte’s defence of the Revolution, and particularly of Fichte’s Beitrag zur
Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums iiber die franz6sische Revolution of 1793-4, see
Anthony J. La Volpa’s important recent intellectual biography of Fichte’s early years,
Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799 (Cambridge, 2001).
9 Charles Andler, Le Pangermanisme philosophique (1800 & 1914) (Paris, 1917). Of
course, it was not just French writers who read Fichte in this way. For example, in
Nationalism and Culture, the manuscript that Rudolf Rocker published in English trans-
lation after having fled from Germany, Rocker asserts that under French occupation
Fichte underwent a sudden conversion to nationalism and abandoned his earlier republi-
canism. Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, trans. Ray E. Chase (Los Angeles,
1937), p. 189.
10 Xavier Léon, Fichte et son temps, Vol. II, 2 (Paris, 1927), p. 119. All translations
from the French are mine.
338 A. ABIZADEH

In a work published in the same year (1927) as Léon’s, Victor Basch explicitly
claimed that the Reden was opposed to everything that pan-Germanism stood for."
Similarly, for Martial Gueroult, rather than having abandoned his allegiance to the
French Revolution, by 1796 Fichte had simply shifted his justification of it from
individualist to collectivist premises.” Far from being essential, the Reden’s chau-
vinism was imposed upon Fichte by the force of circumstance, and pan-
Germanism was an unforeseen and unwelcome subsequent development.'? Fichte,
for Gueroult as for Léon and Basch, remained an unwavering republican."*
My interest here is not in the debate about Fichte’s relationship to the Revo-
lution per se; rather, it is in the characterization, implicit in that debate, of the
Reden’s relation to nationalism. In this connection it is important to note the
implicit analytical opposition common to these French interpretations:
invariably, they contrast the ‘French Revolution’ to the collectivism,
hierarchicalism and nationalism associated with the counter-revolution and
Romanticism, while they conceive of the Revolution itself as an ally of lib-
erty, equality, rationalism and individualist contractarianism. In other words,
the French Revolution as such is not here represented as itself having any
affinity to nationalism, cultural or otherwise.’°
Even so sensitive a reader of Fichte as Louis Dumont succumbs to this
impulse. Dumont argues that, despite Fichte’s continuing loyalty to the
French Revolution, his thought is constituted by a hierarchicalism alien to the
Revolution. (By hierarchicalism Dumont means what he calls ‘l’englobement
du contraire’, 1.e. the elevation of a particular, masquerading as the universal,
to stand in for all particulars.) But in a reification of national boundaries wor-
thy of the staunchest of cultural nationalists, he explains this aberration in
terms of the fact that, after all, Fichte is a German:

[T]he difference between these two sub-cultures, German and French, is

what best accounts for both Fichte’s social philosophy and its subsequent
destiny. I wish above all to mark the presence, in Fichte the egalitarian, of a

' Victor Basch, Les Doctrines politiques des philosophes classiques de |’Allemagne:
Leibnitz — Kant — Fichte — Hegel (Paris, 1927), pp. 98-102.
!2 Martial Gueroult, ‘Fichte et la Révolution francaise’, in M. Gueroult, Etudes sur
Fichte (New York, 1974), pp. 152-246, at pp. 216-19.
13 Tbid., p. 231.
'4 Fora sharp critique of what La Volpa sees as the tendency of French commentators
such as Léon, Basch and Gueroult to portray the young Fichte as a German Jacobin of
sorts, see La Volpa, Fichte, pp. 83-4.
'S Thus, for Léon, Fichte’s purported loyalty to the Revolution furnishes proof that
his Reden, far from being a source of German nationalism, remains staunchly opposed to
‘la conception romantique du Nationalisme allemand’, in favour of a democratic nation.
Léon, Fichte et son temps, Vol. II, 2, p. 78.
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 339

form of genuinely hierarchical thought the equivalent of which would be

difficult to find in the French revolutionaries.'°
Germanic thought, for Dumont, is infused with hierarchicalism; the French
Revolution (and not, say, Kant) stands on the side of universalist individ-
ualism; Fichte combines the two.'’ This nationalistic explanation takes on a
rather strange quality when one notes that by Fichte’s hierarchicalism Dumont
has in mind his nationalist chauvinism — the fact that for Fichte the Germans
are the particular bearers of a universal world-historical mission on the path of
human progress. We are thus asked to believe not only that the French Revo-
lution was primarily individualist in outlook,'® but also that visions of a
national world-historical mission were never entertained by the revolutionar-
ies.'? Ultimately, it is up to a non-French scholar of Fichte to see that Fichte’s
nationalism may have actually been linked to his allegiance to the French
Revolution.”
Against this background, Renaut argues that Fichte must be understood as
advancing a conception of the nation that is neither ethnic’’ nor purely
contractarian. Renaut attributes the ethnic or genealogical conception of the
nation to Romanticism, and agrees with Léon that it is a mistake to understand
Fichte as a Romantic. He attributes the purely contractual conception of the
nation to the Enlightenment and the ideology of the French Revolution, taking
Habermas’ constitutional patriotism to be a contemporary variant.” Thus

'© Louis Dumont, ‘Une variante nationale: Le peuple et la nation chez Herder et
Fichte’, Essais sur l’individualisme: Une perspective anthropologique sur l’idéologie
moderne (Paris, 1983), pp. 115-31, at p. 122.
'7 Ibid., p. 128. I take it that Kant is by far the more important source for Fichte’s
thought. For the capital importance of Kant to Fichte’s intellectual development, see La
Volpa’s Fichte. Léon argues that Fichte not only remained loyal to the French Revolu-
tion, but also to his Kantian rationalism. Léon, Fichte et son temps, Vol. Il, 2, pp. 242-54.
Kedourie, Nationalism, goes so far as to argue that even Fichte’s nationalism finds its
roots in Kant’s notion of autonomy.
'8 But see Brian C. Singer, ‘Cultural versus Contractual Nations: Rethinking their
Opposition’, History and Theory, 35 (3) (1996), pp. 309-37.
!9 But why explain the ‘subsequent destiny’ of Fichte’s thought in terms ofits essen-
tial hierarchicalism, without similarly explaining the French Revolution’s “subsequent
destiny’?
20 Engelbrecht, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, p. 33. 1am not offering an ‘explanation’ in
terms of national character here; if there is an explanation, it is that French writers tend
subjectively to identify with the French Revolution, as part of their ‘own’ history, thanks
to the national imagination.
21 By an ‘ethnic’ conception of the nation, I understand a conception that defines the
nation genealogically in terms of (a myth of) common descent.
22 On constitutional patriotism, see Jiirgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other:
Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA,
1998), Part III; Attracta Ingram, ‘Constitutional Patriotism’, Philosophy & Social Criti-
340 A. ABIZADEH

Renaut reproduces the same analytical opposition we have seen in other French
interpreters but, like Dumont, provides an ambivalent answer about Fichte’s
loyalty to the French Revolution by the time the Reden were delivered: not
abandoning the Enlightenment values of the Revolution, Fichte is supposed to
have provided them with an internal critique.”
Concomitantly, his conception of the nation is supposed to be a third way
between the (Romantic) genealogical nation and the (Enlightenment) con-
tractual nation: the nation as educabilité. Like the genealogical conception,
this recognizes the importance of past tradition and culture, especially the
nation’s rootedness in a historic language. But unlike the genealogical con-
ception, and like the contractual one, it is in principle open to anyone, i.e. irre-
spective of supposedly ascriptive characteristics: Renaut argues that what
defines membership for Fichte is adherence to the national spirit and a set of
(universal) values.”* According to Renaut, Fichte understands membership of
the nation as a matter of cultural character formation. The nation forges its
members; the criterion of membership is not descent, but a historically shared
language and culture (educabilité, which is a translation of ‘Bildung’).
In a sense Renaut is quite right. Fichte officially defines the boundaries of
the nation — in uncompromising terms, in fact — as those of a shared culture,
above all a shared language. The Fourth Address of the Reden, for example,
defines a people (Volk) or nation (Nation) — terms that, as best as I can
tell, Fichte uses interchangeably — as a group of human beings ‘who live
together’ and who possess a distinct language developed ‘in continuous
communication with each other’. The Thirteenth Address draws out the
nationalist political implications of Fichte’s conception of a people qua nation
in explicitly linguistic—cultural terms: ‘the first, original, and truly natural
boundaries of states’, he says, ‘are beyond doubt their internal boundaries’
corresponding to the fact of ‘speak[ing] the same language’.*® Not only does
Fichte make language the defining criterion, a passage in the Fourth Address
cism, 22 (6) (1996), pp. 1-18; and Patchen Markell, “Making Affect Safe for Democ-
racy? On “Constitutional Patriotism” ’, Political Theory, 28 (1) (2000), pp. 38-63.
23 Renaut, ‘Présentation’, pp. 26-7; see also Alain Renaut, ‘Fichte et la Révolution
francaise’, in A. Renaut, La Révolution francaise dans la pensée européenne (Lausanne,
1989), and Alain Renaut, ‘Fichte et la politique de l’entendement’, Revue de théologie et
de philosophie, 123 (1991), pp. 305-13.
24 Renaut, ‘Présentation’, Pao:
25 Reden, p. 315 (56). All references to Fichte’s Reden here will be to Johann Gottlieb
Fichte, Reden an die deutsche Nation, in Sémmtliche Werke, ed. J.H. Fichte, Vol. 7 (Zur
Politik, Moral, und Philosophie der Geschichte) (Leipzig, 1845 (1808)), pp. 257-502.
Page numbers in parentheses refer to the English translation by R.F. Jones and G.H.
Turnbull, Addresses to the German Nation (Westport, CT, 1922), though, for the sake of
greater literalness and accuracy, I have often modified their translation. References to
Renaut’s French translation of the text itself (as opposed to his introduction to the text)
refer to the German pagination that Renaut’s edition also provides.
26 Reden, p. 460 (223).
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 34]

appears explicitly to dismiss ‘purity of descent’ as ‘insignificant’ for deter-

mining membership of the German nation;”’ and of course Fichte spends a
good deal of the Reden outlining a plan for educational reform geared towards
forging solid German nationals. Construing the Reden as a linguistic—cultural,
but not ethnic, nationalist text has ample textual support. I take it that the
French scholarship decisively demonstrates that a view of the Reden as a
champion of unmediated ethnic nationalism is wide of the mark.
But the French ‘open nation’ interpretation also has a blind-spot, and what
it misses is a feature of Fichte’s text crucial to my argument. The problem is
that when Fichte turns his attention to the question of motivation — the ques-
tion that has led contemporary Social and political theorists to argue that mod-
ern democracy requires the nation — a different picture emerges: the fact of a
shared language and culture proves to be insufficient. The Reden starts out as
uncompromisingly culturally nationalist, to be sure; but eventually its cultural
nationalism subtly collapses into an ethnic one. The task here is to demon-
strate and explain this collapse. As we shall see, what propels it is the fact that
for Fichte the nation is meant to solve a version of the motivation problem.
The Reden constitutes a crypto-ethnic nationalist text.

II
Language Child of Nature

According to the Reden, unless the state is built upon a national foundation,”
politics will have no basis other than the instrumentalist pursuit of egoistic
interests.” It is only the Vaterlandsliebe of a living people that can provide the
appropriate affective base to mobilize individuals in favour of the common
good. Thus the true political motive is love of Vaterland, not of the con-
stitution and laws, for it is the nation, not the state, that solves the motivation
problem. Ultimately, Fichte’s position provides a stark contrast to Jiirgen
Habermas’ Verfassungspatriotismus: what motivates sacrifice is

[nJot the spirit of calm, citizenly love (ruhigen biirgerlichen Liebe) for the
constitution and laws, but the devouring flame of higher patriotism (Vater-
landsliebe), which embraces the nation as the vesture of the eternal . . . It is
not citizenly love for the constitution; that love is quite unable to achieve this,
insofar as it remains at [the level of] the understanding (bei Verstande).*°

27 Ibid., pp. 313-14 (55).

28 Fichte officially defines this national foundation in linguistic—cultural terms, but
his characterization of love of the nation as Vaterlandsliebe — love of the fatherland —
already suggests, though it need not imply, an ethnic conception. This ambivalence, of
course, is precisely what is at issue in this paper.
29 Renaut interprets this as a critique of the Enlightenment (‘Présentation’, pp. 35-6).
30 Reden, p. 384 (141).
342 A. ABIZADEH

What, exactly, is the source of the nation’s power to motivate individuals

on a non-egoistic basis? The answer Fichte will provide has to do with his
belief that the nation is a natural as well as sacred entity that persists over time.
Rousseau, seeing in the nation a thoroughly conventional construct, sought to
naturalize and sacralize it to lend itforce. For Fichte, the nation in fact already
has a natural basis: language.
Yes, language: for Fichte, a language is a natural phenomenon. Indeed, the
possession of a shared language defines the natural boundaries of a Volk or
Nation. To most moderns — heirs of the Enlightenment — the idea that lan-
guages are natural phenomena is counter-intuitive: following Hobbes and
Locke, we tend to think of languages as conventional. We can get at what
Fichte means by contrasting his theory of language to the antecedent theories
of Locke and Locke’s self-declared disciple Condillac.*!
Locke’s theory of language has three features that are relevant here. First,
for Locke, the sign is arbitrary, in the sense that there is no reason why this
word, rather than that one, could not have been chosen to signify the same
idea. Second, it is voluntary — language consists of acts of particular individ-
uals who voluntarily use a particular word to signify a particular idea. Third,
these linguistic acts are private: words signify ideas in the speaker’s mind, not
external objects, nor others’ ideas (and ideas are, according to Locke, pri-
vate). So, Locke concludes, language is conventional or artificial, not natu-
ral.” But if the relation of signification between word and idea is arbitrary,
voluntary and private, then how can we be sure that the same word signifies
the same idea for different speakers? In other words, how can we be sure that
we understand each other when we communicate? Locke paradoxically con-
cludes that although language serves us well enough for our ordinary pur-
poses, we do not really understand each other.*
Condillac agrees with Locke that languages are artificial. For Condillac,
there are three kinds of sign: accidental signs, determined by circumstances
(e.g. the smell of the cookies which reminds me of my grandmother); natural
signs, which are biologically determined responses, such as a cry ofjoy, fear
or pain; and instituted signs (signes d’institution), which are voluntary cre-
ations not determined by circumstance or physiological makeup (e.g. the
word ‘orange’).** Human languages are dominated by the third type of sign,
and so, Condillac concludes with Locke, they are artificial, not natural. So,
31 My discussion of Locke and Condillac draws heavily on Talbot J. Taylor, Mutual
Misunderstanding: Scepticism and the Theorizing of Language and Interpretation
(Durham, NC, 1992).
32 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch
(Oxford, 1975), especially Book III, ch. 2 (pp. 404-8).
33 Jbid., Book III, chs. 9-11. This is what Talbot Taylor calls ‘Locke’s puzzle’.
34 Condillac, Essai sur I ’origine des connoissances humaines, in Oeuvres philoso-
phiques de Condillac, ed. Georges Le Roy, Vol. | (Paris, 1947), Part I, section II, ch. IV,
joy, EP
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 343

again, how can we be sure that, when two speakers speak the same artificial
language, they are using the same code to analyse their thoughts and put them
into verbal form? Condillac’s solution is that while languages are indeed con-
ventional or artificial, they are not arbitrary in the sense that they are for
Locke.** Languages, and their component signs, did not develop arbitrarily:
there is a reason for the choice of each word, and this reason is furnished by
analogy with a natural sign. (For example, the sound used to signify the idea
of an animal might have imitated the noise made by the animal. Presumably
the sign for a soundless object would be a sound naturally analogous to some
other sensory quality of the object: a soft surface would be signified by a soft
sound, and so on.) Natural signs, because natural, have the same signification
for all humans. So the argument is that the development of admittedly artifi-
cial linguistic conventions has a natural basis: artificial signs evolved by an
unbroken, non-arbitrary process of development from natural signs. How-
ever, the problem is only postponed. If Condillac’s account were plausible, it
could potentially explain how speakers of the same language could under-
stand each other. But then how could we be sure they were speaking the
‘same’ language?
Enter Fichte. In his Reden he too claims that the linguistic sign is not arbi-
trary; indeed, he pushes even further than Condillac.*° There is an invariable
fundamental law (ein Grundgesetz) that determines the sign, in the sense that
the idea of every natural object elicits a definite sound from humans who are
beginning to speak.*’ Fichte tries to suggest the plausibility of this apparently
fanciful claim by drawing an analogy: just as natural objects produce a defi-
nite representation in the sense organs, so too do they produce a definite

35 It is true that Condillac says, ‘Les signes d’institution . . . n’ont qu’un rapport
arbitraire avec nos idées’ (‘Signs of institution . . . have only an arbitrary relationship
with our ideas’), and indeed uses ‘signe arbitraire’ as a synonym for ‘signe d’institution’
(ibid.). But here he does not mean what I mean by arbitrary, i.e. that there is no reason for
the choice of words. He simply means that there is a choice of words, that the sign is used
by choice. See Taylor, Mutual Misunderstanding, pp. 61-2.
36 The view expounded in the Reden marks an important shift from Fichte’s position
on this issue in his ‘Von der Sprachféhigkeit und dem Ursprung der Sprache’ of 1795,
where signs are deemed to be arbitrary and voluntary. For an analysis (and English trans-
lation) of this text, see Jere Paul Surber, Language and German Idealism: Fichte’s Lin-
guistic Philosophy (New Jersey, 1996).
37 ‘Die Sprache tiberhaupt, und besonders die Bezeichnung der Gegenstiinde in
derselben durch das Lautwerden der Sprachwerkzeuge, haingt keinesweges von will-
kiirlichen Beschliissen und Verabredungen ab, sondern es giebt zuv6rrderst ein
Grundgesetz, nach welchem jedweder Begriff in den menschlichen Sprachwerkzeugen
zu diesem, und keinem anderen Laute wird’ (‘Language in general, and especially the
designation of objects in language by sounds from the organs of speech, is in no way
dependent on arbitrary decisions and agreements. On the contrary, there is, to begin
with, a fundamental law, in accordance with which every concept becomes in the human
organs of speech one particular sound and no other’), Reden, p. 314 (56), my italics.
344 A. ABIZADEH

representation in the social organ of speech. The conclusion is that there is

only a single human language!** This apparently solves the problem of mutual
understanding, which is secured by the fundamental law that explains the
make-up of the single human language. But this account obviously raises its
own problem: how to explain the empirical diversity of languages. Fichte’s
answer is: via secondary influences on the organ of speech. Both locality and
the frequency of use of particular signs varied for different humans when lan-
guage was first developing,” and these secondary influences introduced vari-
ation in their development. For example, in different localities, the order in
which objects were observed and designated varied, with different results.
But — and this is crucial for Fichte — these secondary influences were nei-
ther arbitrary nor indeterminate: they too operated via a fixed law. ‘Jedoch
findet auch hierin nicht Willkiir oder Ohngefahr, sondern strenges Gesetz
statt’ (‘However, here again one finds neither arbitrariness nor chance, but
strict law’).*° This law operates at the level of words designating both sen-
suous and super-sensuous objects. Fichte believes that at first humans only
designated sensuous objects. Only afterwards did people gradually gain super-
sensuous perception and begin to designate super-sensuous objects (such as
‘freedom’) in language. But this designation occurred only via analogy with
the sensuous.*! In other words, language evolved via the actual observations
of a historical people, according to a fundamental non-arbitrary law.
So for Fichte actual languages are not arbitrary, in three senses. First, they
have a deep relation to nature. Language springs forth from the immediate
force of nature (Naturkraft) in the sense that the object determines the sign.
Second, and relatedly, language has a deep relation to the life of a people, in
two senses: words influence life** and life influences language. Language
develops out of the common life of a Volk. Third, the evolution of language is
a continuous non-arbitrary stream out of the actual common life of a people.”

38 ‘[D]ie Sprache ist eine einzige und durchaus nothwendige’ (‘[T]here is only, and
absolutely unavoidably, but a single language’), Reden, p. 315 (56).
39 Reden, p. 315 (56).
40 bid.
41 Tbid., pp. 316-17 (58).
42+ | da die Sprache nicht durch Willkiir vermittelt, sondern als unmittelbare
Naturkraft aus dem verstandigen Leben ausbricht, so hat eine ohne Abbruch nach diesem
Gesetze fortentwickelte Sprache auch die Kraft, umittelbar einzugreifen in das Leben
und dasselbe anzuregen’ (“. . . since language is not mediated via arbitrary decision, but
breaks forth out of the life of understanding as an immediate force of nature, a language
continuously developed according to this law has also the power of immediately affect-
ing and stimulating life’), Reden, pp. 318-19 (60-1), italics mine.
43 “(Bs tritt in den Fluss der Bezeichnung keine Willkiir ein’ (‘[I]nto the stream of
designation (or: naming) no arbitrariness enters’), Reden, p. 319 (61). That Fichte
grounds cultural nationalism in the non-arbitrariness of the linguistic sign requires a
rethinking of Anderson’s thesis that the non-arbitrariness ofthe sign, which he associates
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 345

Soa language is both a child ofnature and intimately bound up with the life of
a people. Indeed, it provides a natural basis for distinguishing one people
from another: a people is a group of individuals whose speech organs receive
the same secondary influences over time,“ i.e. one who speaks a common lan-
guage. Just as its language persists over time, so too does the Volk itself.

Ii
Earthly Immortality
This fact about nations — that they persist over time — is the key to
understanding why Fichte thinks nations inspire and motivate human beings
beyond narrowly egoistic pursuits. In his Reden, Fichte delineates two types
of motive for human action: material motives, which stem from the hope or
fear of reward or punishment, and spiritual motives, which stem from moral
(sittlich) approval or disapproval.” The state as such is concerned only with
material motives: its ends consist in securing positive law, peace and material
needs.*° But reliance on solely material motives leads to pure self-seeking in
government — and this, Fichte warns, would ultimately spell its collapse.”
Thus Fichte calls for a new system of education that appeals to spiritual
motives, in order to inspire a passion among Germans for the moral order.**
Here is the crux of the argument: the human will, Fichte asserts, acts only
out of love,”” and the true object of love is eternal.*’ Now, one way to seek
eternity is to view the body as a cage, and to set one’s sights on the afterlife.
But Fichte calls this an abnormal, exceptional situation, one wrought by
extreme hardship and misery. Under normal circumstances, noble persons hope
to bestow eternity on their earthly work.”! This longing for earthly eternity, for

with pre-national sacred languages, had to be overcome to make possible imagining the
nation. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London, revised edition, 1991), p. 14.
44 For Fichte, ‘die unter denselben dusseren Einfliissen auf das Sprachwerkzeug
stehenden, zusammenlebenden und in fortgesetzter Mittheilung ihre Sprache fort-
bildenden Menschen’ (‘men whose organs of speech are influenced by the same external
conditions, who live together, and who develop their language in continuous communi-
cation with each other’) comprise ‘ein Volk’. Reden, p. 315 (56).
45 Ibid., p. 273 (12).
46 Ibid., p. 384 (138).
47 Tbid., pp. 270-1 (8-9).
48 Ibid., pp. 274—5 (12-14).
49 “(DJer Mensch kann nur dasjenige wollen, was er liebt; seine Liebe ist der einzige,
zugleich auch der unfehlbare Atrieb seines Wollens und aller seiner Lebensregung und
Bewegung’ (‘[T]he human being can only will what he loves; his love is the sole as well
as the unfailing motive of his will and of all his life impulse and activity’), Reden, p. 283
(22).
50 Tbid., p. 383 (136-7).
5! Tbid., pp. 378-80 (131-3).
346 A. ABIZADEH

a sacred earthly order that is eternal, is precisely the promise of a people that
persists over generations: a nation that not only shares a language, but also
one that shares it over time.’ This is what explains the Reden’s subtle slide
from linguistic to ethnic nationalism, why Fichte begins with an uncompro-
misingly linguistic—cultural conception of the nation, but ends up speaking of
descent (Abstammung, Abkunft). The eternal order by which the noble person
is moved, the ‘Ordenung der Dinge, die er fiir selbst ewig und fiir fahig,
ewiges in sich aufzunehmen, anzuerkennen vermochte’ (the ‘order of things,
which he can acknowledge as in itself eternal and capable of absorbing into
itself that which is eternal’), is ‘das Volk, von welchem er abstammt’ — the
people from which he is descended.» A nation is not just a people with a
shared language, but one of common descent through time.
Thus the nation is the only sacred earthly embodiment of eternity, accord-
ing to the fundamental law. This makes it the locus of freedom. In his Reden,
Fichte distinguishes two kinds of freedom: a lesser freedom and a higher free-
dom.” Lesser freedom is merely the hesitation (Schwanken) of the will
between good and evil: it is indecision or arbitrariness. Higher freedom is the
virtuosity ofthe will, reflecting its capacity for creativity and originality. Here
the will taps into something beyond the phenomenal realm of natural
causation, into the sacred realm of the eternal, which produces a supplement
(ein Mehr) that cannot be explained by reference to the natural laws pertain-
ing to the world of appearances (Erscheinung).”° It is within the context of a
living nation that one can attain this higher freedom: in the nation, individuals
deposit their creativity, their supplement, as a contribution to the life of their
people. While the individual’s supplement is not the mere result of “des
geistigen Naturgesetzes seiner Nation’ (‘the spiritual law of nature of his
nation’), its embodiment does occur according to the nation’s spiritual law of
nature: his ‘Werk’ finds ‘einen sinnlichen Ausdruck’ (‘a sensual expression’ )
only according to that law. In turn, the nation’s law is influenced by the indi-
vidual’s contribution, whose improvement (Ausbildung) is carried on by that
Volk, so long as the people itself remains, and remains itself (‘so lange dieses
selbst bleibt’).*° As such, the nation becomes an embodiment of one’s higher
freedom: expressive creativity. This is why, for Fichte, true freedom ends up
meaning the freedom to be German.”’ The nation (and its language) is the
sacred site of the divine in history: ‘Es ist Géttliches in ihm erschienen . . .’*®
But to tap into the realm of eternity the nation needs to maintain its identity

52 Ibid., pp. 380-3 (133-6).

53 [bid., pp. 380-1 (134), italics mine.
54 Ibid., p. 372 (123).
5° Ibid., pp. 371 (122), 369 (120).
56 Tbid., p. 381 (134).
57 Ibid., pp. 382-3 (135-6).
58 ‘The divine has appeared in it . . .’, ibid., p. 383 (136).
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 347

intact over time, i.e. higher freedom is possible only so long as the people
remains itself. The motivation problem is solved only insofar as some thing of
nature anchors the national identity in the face of historical change. In other
words, to solve the motivation problem, the nation must be natural not just ina
static sense, but in a dynamic sense as well. Not only must it have a natural
basis for its boundaries now, but its sacred order needs a natural basis to main-
tain a single identity over time. The latter is what descent provides for the
individual: ‘The eternal order of things in which he places his portion of
eternity’ is grounded in ‘his love for his people’ from which he is honoured to
be descended (‘mit der Abstammung daraus sich ehrend’).°*’ The nation’s
common Abstammung, and one’s sense of ‘honour’ in such descent, is what
solves the motivation problem over time. Language must coincide with
descent.

IV
The ‘Open Nation’ Interpretation: Textual Evidence
I have argued, then, that the Reden begins with an officially linguistic—
cultural definition of the nation, but that Fichte is compelled by the logic of
his own nationalist argument to end up collapsing the linguistic nation into an
ethnic one. I have argued, in other words, that the Reden constitute a crypto-
or mediated ethnic nationalist text. What is important about this account is
that it does two things at once: it accounts both for the textual evidence and for
the logic of Fichte’s argument; moreover, in treating the textual evidence, it
accounts for both the linguistic—cultural elements of Fichte’s text and the
genealogical language of Abstammung and Abkunft to which Fichte resorts.
This, I take it, is a minimum standard that any competing interpretation must
meet. I will therefore consider the most important textual evidence in light of
the historical context in favour of the competing ‘open nation’ reading, fol-
lowed in the next section by objections to my reading that appeal directly to
the logic of Fichte’s nationalist argument.
There are two key passages that at first glance appear to sit poorly with an
ethnic nationalist reading of the Reden. The first comes from the end of the
Seventh Address. This passage has been the linchpin of the dominant French
‘open nation’ interpretation, and any challenge to that interpretation must
account for it. Fichte there declares that
whoever believes in spirituality and in the freedom of this spirituality, and
who wills the eternal development of this spirituality by freedom, wherever
he may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is of our kin
(unsers Geschlechts); he is one of us, and will come over to our side. Who-
ever believes in stagnation, retrogression . . . wherever he may have been

59 Ibid.
348 A. ABIZADEH

born and whatever language he speaks, is non-German and a stranger to

us.°°
Renaut concludes that, with this ‘stupefying text’, Fichte
decisively breaks with Romanticism’s naturalization of the nation: a Ger-
man here is no longer the depository of some national genius inscribed in
language; he is one who subscribes to the universal values of the spirit and
of liberty. As a matter of right (En droit), therefore, the German nation 1s
open to all, wherever they might come from and whatever be their past.°'
The problem for Renaut is that this was not the ‘open nation’ reading that
he was seeking. Renaut, it will be recalled, was trying to show that Fichte is a
cultural-linguistic nationalist, but not an ethnic one. Even if this passage did
support an ‘open nation’ reading — and it does not — the open nation it would
support would be too open for Renaut’s purposes. Gueroult’s similar attempt
to enlist this passage in favour of a non-genealogical interpretation demon-
strates the problem:
[I]t is no longer race that defines this ‘absolute people’, but rather its apti-
tude for liberty and its revolutionary mission. The word German thus takes
onan entirely cosmopolitan signification ... As such spirituality is no lon-
ger a privilege resulting from Germanic ethnicity, but Germanness itself
results from profound spirituality, independently of any reference whatso-
ever to ethnic, linguistic, or geographic characteristics . . . Germanness no
longer designates anything but the character possessed by all those who rec-
ognize themselves as belonging together to a single fraternal humanity (a
people).
If we distinguish between three criteria according to which nationality might
be defined — the genealogical/ethnic criterion of shared descent; the criterion
of historically shared language and culture; and the ideological criterion of a
shared belief in freedom — then Gueroult is suggesting that this passage
marks the ideological criterion as a necessary and sufficient condition for
German nationality. In other words, even language would fail to be a criterion
of national membership. But as my discussion of Fichte’s text above makes
clear, this reading would make nonsense of a good deal of the Reden — which
is why Renaut, rightly, does not adopt it elsewhere.
How, then, are we to make sense of the passage? Even taken in isolation,
its meaning is more ambiguous than that supposed by Renaut and Gueroult.
It might with equal facility, for instance, be cited in support of Rocker’s hos-
tile evaluation that not only did Fichte designate ‘the German nation as des-
tined by fate to be the “mother and reconstructor” of humanity’, but also
that, thanks to his ‘obstinately authoritarian character’, he ‘condemned and

60 Tbid., p. 375 (126-7).

61 Renaut, ‘Présentation’, Dao2e
62 Gueroult, ‘Fichte et la Révolution frangaise’, pp. 240-1, italics in original.
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 349

excommunicated everything which did not fit into his concept of what consti-
tutes “Germanism” ’.*° A more balanced reading requires placing the passage
in context; in particular, the problem with the Renaut—Gueroult interpretation
is that it requires reading this passage, first, in isolation from the Reden’s
historical—political context and rhetorical intent and, second, in isolation from
its textual context in the Reden as a whole.
Renaut and Gueroult read this passage as if it were a purely ‘philosophical’
act, 1.e. a conceptual clarification of the meaning of a key term. But it is clear
that Fichte understood the delivery of the Reden in 1807-8 to be a political act
intended to ‘rouse’ the German nation against the Napoleonic yoke.“ The
rhetorical character of the Reden as a whole, and in particular their political
intent, suggests that Fichte, far from redefining the empirical manifestation of
Germanness in ideological terms, in terms of a set of values, is here, rather,
exhorting empirically existing Germans to live up to their true metaphysically
given spiritual and political potential. These are, after all, addresses to the
German nation and, given their political nature, we should assume that Fichte
is philosophically engaged in conceptual clarification only when there is solid
evidence to that effect. In fact, Fichte has, in the Fourth Address, already
explicitly defined the empirical manifestation of Germanness linguistically in
contrast to what other Teutons lack. If there is a definitional component to the
passage in question, then Fichte can only be understood to be exhorting
empirically existing Germans (already defined linguistically, if not
genealogically) to live up to the metaphysical potential (defined here in terms
of liberty). Indeed, that is what Fichte says he is doing, in the sentence imme-
diately preceding the passage Renaut quotes: ‘.. . a proposal (Antrag) is being
made to it [this nation] . . . to make itself wholly and completely what it ought
to be’.® That the belief in freedom represents the true, metaphysical potential
of the German nation, rather than its empirical differentia, is clear not only
from the rhetorical character of the Reden and from Fichte’s stated purpose,
but also from the textual context: the quoted paragraph immediately follows
Fichte’s only extended metaphysical discussion in the whole of the Reden. As
we have seen, this metaphysical potential for freedom enjoyed by the German
nation exists thanks to the unique character of the German language. Pace
Renaut, an empirically existing German precisely is ‘the depository of some
national genius inscribed in language’, a genius that defines the German’s
metaphysical potential.”

63 Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, p. 192.

64 On the nature of the Reden as a political act, see Léon, Fichte et son temps, Vol. II,
2 peis9.
65 Reden, p. 375 (126).
66 Hans Kohn picks up on a similar distinction in Fichte, between the Germans as
they are and the Germans as they ought to be, and argues that Fichte systematically con-
fused and conflated the two: ‘[A]gain and again he seemed to confuse the ideal and the
350 A. ABIZADEH

But even if the passage in question does not support the ideological version
of the ‘open nation’ interpretation that Gueroult adopts and to which Renaut is
drawn, a defender of the non-ethnic ‘open nation’ interpretation could still
return to the contention that a shared language and its associated culture is a
necessary and sufficient condition for shared nationality. The problem for the
linguistic—cultural view manifests itself again, however, if we compare
Fichte’s formulation just a few sentences earlier, in the same paragraph, to the
‘stupefying text’ that Renaut quotes. Fichte is making essentially the same
point, not defining Germanness, but exhorting Germans to realize their meta-
physical potential, their ‘true’ differentiating criterion; but once again, the
empirical boundaries of the German nation are specified by reference to a
genealogical criterion:
And so let there finally appear with perfect clarity what we have meant, in
our portrayal so far, by Germans. The true differentiating criterion (eigent-
liche Unterscheidungsgrund) is this: whether one believes in something
absolutely primary and originary in mankind itself, in freedom, in endless
improvement, in the eternal progress of our kin [or: of our race/clan (unsers
Geschlechts)].©
‘Unsers Geschlechts’ here has an empirical referent given prior to the belief
in freedom: the belief in freedom provides the ‘true’ differentiating criterion
being urged upon the members of the (antecedently and genealogically
defined) clan as a realization of their metaphysical potential. Renaut must
have intuitively sensed the danger that this passage poses to his interpretation:
in his French translation, ‘unsers Geschlechts’ becomes the impeccably uni-
versalist and non-ethnic ‘de l’espéce’. While dropping the possessive pro-
noun is a clear distortion of the text, the rendering of ‘Geschlecht’ as
‘espéce’ is equally but more subtly problematic in this context. It is a subtler
distortion because in many contexts ‘Geschlecht’ could indeed mean spe-
cies. In isolation, this reading of the sentence is in principle plausible: Fichte
would be read here as urging Germans to rise to their ‘true’ potential as an
agent for the progress of the entire human species, a world-historical role he
in fact did envision for Germans. The problem is, however, that Fichte uses

real and to attribute to the actual Germans those qualities which in other passages were
clearly reserved to the “true” German completely remade by the new education. This
confusion of the historical reality and the metaphysical ideal was a dangerous legacy
which Fichte’s Reden bequeathed to German nationalism.’ Kohn, Prelude to Nation-
States, pp. 240-1. Kohn’s reading is much more plausible than, say, Gueroult’s, but if
Kohn is right, then Fichte has committed an egregious and entirely obvious analytical
error with respect to one of the Reden’s key concepts. My reading does not attribute stu-
pidity to Fichte: he is not confusing the two different concepts; he is putting them to rhe-
torical use for his own clear ends. See also Balibar’s reading of this tension (Etienne
Balibar, ‘Fichte et la frontiére intérieure: A propos des Discours a la nation allemande’ ,
Les Cahiers de Fontenay, 58/59 (June 1990), pp. 57-81, at p. 80).
67 Reden, p. 374 (125).
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 351

the expression ‘unsers Geschlects’ not once, but twice in this paragraph: he
also uses it in the ‘stupefying’ passage that Renaut and Gueroult quote. There
‘unsers Geschlects’ clearly does not mean ‘our species’. Recall the passage:
Fichte says that whoever believes in ‘spirituality by freedom, wherever he
may have been born and whatever language he speaks, is of our kin (unsers
Geschlechts)’, and that, by contrast, ‘Whoever believes in stagnation . . . is
non-German (undeutsch) and a stranger to us’.®* To interpret ‘unsers
Geschlects’ here as ‘our species’ (as Renaut does) is to forget that Fichte is
explicitly telling us what it is to be a true German: the contrast with ‘unsers
Geschlects’ is ‘undeutsch’, not ‘non-human’. The meaning of Geschlect
corresponds to the first and most important entry given in the nineteenth-
century Deutsches Worterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm: ‘die
gesamtheit der von einem stammvater herkommenden’ (‘the entirety of those
who come from a single forefather’), which is variously glossed as ‘die
blutsverwandte familie, die sippe’ (‘blood relatives, the clan’) and ‘nach-
kommenschaft’ (‘descendants’).
The second passage that appears to support the ‘open nation’ interpretation
comes from the Fourth Address. It is the passage I have already mentioned, in
which Fichte dismisses ‘purity of descent’ as insignificant (unbedeutend) for
distinguishing between Germans and other peoples of Teutonic descent.
Intermixing between Teutons and other peoples, Fichte says, both in the
ancestral lands and in conquered lands, has meant that ‘it would not be easy
nowadays for any one people descended from Teutons to demonstrate a
greater purity of descent (Reinheit seiner Abstammung) than the others’.”°
The crucial difference, he argues, is linguistic: Germans, in contrast to other

68 Tbid., p. 375 (126-7).

69 This is the first of six main entries for Geschlect in the Wérterbuch. The second
entry, like the first, also provides a clearly particularistic, genealogical meaning: an indi-
vidual who stands in for the clan. The third entry, also genealogical, has seven subhead-
ings and refers to the ‘extended meaning’ (erweiterter bedeutung) of the word. The first
few subheadings provide particularist definitions: the first subheading, for example,
glosses Geschlect as ‘stamm’ ,as in ‘die zwelff geschlechte Israel’ (‘the twelve tribes of
Israel’), while the second glosses it as a ‘volk’, whether of place or language. The fourth
subheading of the extended meaning finally provides the more universalist definition
Renaut is looking for: ‘im singular, auf die ganze menschheit bezogen, nach ihrer
abstammung von einem stammvater, das menschengeschlecht’ (‘in the singular, all of
mankind related by descent from a single forefather, the human race’).But the examples
the Wérterbuch provides tend to make the scope of the term explicit, as in “das geschlecht
der menschen’ (quoted from Schiller). The fourth entry of the dictionary refers to gender;
the fifth refers to the natural qualities of an object. The sixth and final entry of the
Worterbuch glosses the term as ‘gattung, art’ (‘kind’), and provides classifications of
animals and plants as examples. See Rudolf Hildebrand and Hermann Wunderlich,
Deutsches Wérterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm, Vol.14, section 1, part 2
(Leipzig, 1897), pp. 3903-18.
70 Reden, pp. 313-14 (55).
352 A. ABIZADEH

Teutons — the Franks above all — have maintained the German language.
This is precisely the passage that Etienne Balibar emphasizes when he argues
that Fichte follows Kant in ‘the complete dissociation of the notions of race
and people’ — in effect agreeing with Renaut’s thesis that Fichte is not an eth-
nic nationalist. ‘Anthropological unity’, Balibar concludes, ‘is not genealogi-
cal’ for Fichte.”!
The passage does indeed speak against seeing Fichte as a racist champion
of unmediated ethnic nationalism, but Balibar’s more far-reaching conclusion
relies on a slight exaggeration. While it is true that Fichte is here specifying
criteria for distinguishing the members of the German nation, he is not doing
so in general. Fichte is taking for granted that he is distinguishing amongst
Teutons, all of whom are already supposed to share a common genealogy. So
while it is true that Fichte says that purity of descent is insignificant in
distinguishing between Germans and other Teutons, the passage continues to
assume that one is a Teuton by virtue of having (at least some) Teutonic ances-
tors. Fichte is rejecting purity of descent, not descent as such, as a criterion.
The very title of the fourth address — ‘Hauptverschiedenheit zwischen den
Deutschen und den tibrigen Volkern germanischer Abkunft’ (“The Chief Dif-
ference between the Germans and the other Peoples of Teutonic Descent’) —
already alerts us to this genealogical component. So, too, does his statement,
in the second paragraph, that ‘Der Deutsche ist zuvérderst ein Stamm der
Germanier uberhaupt’ (‘The Germans are first and foremost a branch of the
Teutons’ ).””Renaut’s rendering of this sentence as ‘L’ Allemand est avant tout
un héritier de ce qu’étaient les Germains en général’ is entirely suspect: it
completely erases the genealogical connotations of the original by suppress-
ing the term ‘Stamm’ .”’ Accounting for Fichte’s genealogical language surely
does not mean excising it from the text.

Vv
The Logic of Fichte’s Argument: Descent or Culture?
The most difficult textual evidence, then, is consistent with the Reden’s ulti-
mately ethnic nationalist character. But the defender of the ‘open nation’
interpretation may now take issue with the way in which I have explained the
co-existence of both linguistic nationalist and ethnic nationalist language in
Fichte’s text. It might be objected, in other words, that I have misconstrued
the logic of Fichte’s nationalism. Recall my argument that the reason Fichte is
compelled to resort to genealogical language is in order to solve the motiva-
tion problem. More particularly, to motivate individuals with a promise of
71 Balibar, ‘Fichte et la frontiére intérieure’,pels:
72 Reden, p. 311 (52).
® This is despite the fact that in the sixth paragraph (Reden, p. 314), where Fichte is
engaged in denying the importance of (purity of) descent, Renaut does not hesitate to ren-
der the German ‘Stamme’ by the French ‘branche’.
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? oo

eternity, the nation requires a natural anchor to secure a single continuous

national identity over time. Now, it might be objected that while Fichte may
indeed require such a natural anchor over time, this anchor need not be lodged
in descent. Perhaps, on Fichte’s account, language itself could solve the
over-time identity problem and so promise eternity. After all, for Fichte lan-
guage is not just natural in the sense that the adoption of particular signs is
governed by non-arbitrary laws of nature, but also in the dynamic sense that
particular languages evolve via the actual observations of a historical people,
according to a fundamental non-arbitrary law. This means that even if
previous generations’ speech would be incomprehensible to the current one
because of changes over time, it is still the same language thanks to its contin-
uous, non-arbitrary history: ‘Darum bleibt auch die Sprache immer dieselbe
Sprache’ (‘Thus the language always also remains the same language’).”
Language, it seems, provides not just a static but also a dynamic ground in
nature. Descent does not seem necessary to secure a single identity over time.
The upshot of this objection is that Fichte’s genealogical flourishes are sim-
ply that: flourishes or incidental lapses that could (and should) have been
avoided, lapses that are insignificant to the overall spirit of his argument. This
deflated interpretive strategy, of course, essentially seeks to save Fichte from
himself: it consists in a strategy of sympathetic reconstruction on behalf of
Fichte despite Fichte’s own appeals to genealogy in the Reden.”
But even this deflated interpretative strategy faces a complication. The
problem is that, for Fichte, not just any sort of national language, with just any
evolutionary history, is sufficient to transform the nation into the sacred site
of eternity and divinity, the locus of expressive freedom, which is the source
of its motivational power. This expressive freedom requires a particular sort
of historical evolution: it requires a living and original language; and it turns
out that when Fichte comes to describe this process which truly secures a
language’s identity over time — i.e. when he comes to say exactly what an
original language is — he is again compelled to resort to the language of
genealogy: expressive freedom and its promise of eternity requires ‘die
urspriingliche Sprache des Stammvolkes’ — the original language of one’s
ancestral people.” It is true that Fichte’s denial, cited above, that ‘purity of
descent’ is required follows in the next few paragraphs; the point is, however,

74 Reden, p. 316 (57).

75 Such a defence would require reconstructing the spirit of the Reden’s argument by
emphasizing related texts from the period, such as Die Grundziige des gegenwartigen
Zeitalters of 1806, in which Fichte places greater emphasis on the progress of humanity
(available in English as The Characteristics of the Present Age in Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. William
Smith, Vol. 2 (Bristol, 4th edn., 1999)).
76 Reden, p. 313 (54), emphasis mine.
354 A. ABIZADEH

that Fichte cannot tell us what makes a language urspriinglich without making
reference to ancestors. Expressive freedom requires the historic language of
one’s ancestral people, organically linked with (indeed, arising out of) the
people’s ‘own’ historical experiences, uncorrupted by foreign influences —
where the notion of foreignness tacitly relies on the over-time boundary of
descent that constitutes the Stammvolk. Infiltrated by foreign elements, the
national language would lose its anchor in the nation’s history — which, it
will be recalled, is subject to a non-arbitrary law — thereby becoming a cor-
rupt and dead language incapable of harbouring expressive freedom.’” Lan-
guage must indeed coincide with descent.
But again it may be objected that Fichte’s rich account of the process of
linguistic corruption suggests that the notion of foreignness, even dynami-
cally, does not require a genealogical component — that it requires language
to coincide with culture as a whole, but not with descent. Fichte suggests
that to adopt a foreign tongue as one’s own, without also fully adopting the
cultural way of life and history of the people whose language it originally
was — what Fichte calls its sphere of observation (der Kreis or Umkreis der
Auschauungen) — would spell catastrophe for the nation, tearing it from the
historical roots that anchor its linguistic life in nature.’* The problem does not
arise at the level of sensuous words that refer to (ideas of) objects still present
in national life, for their meaning is fixed by the objects they represent, via the
continuing presence of the objects themselves.” Rather, the problem arises at
the level of super-sensuous words, words that are the basis for the cultural and
spiritual flourishing of a people striving for higher freedom. The super-sensuous
sign would be stripped of its basis in nature, thus becoming arbitrary, and
hence meaningless for the nation. In one’s own historical language, the verbal
image (das Sinnbild) is linked to the sensory observations (die sinnlichen
Anschauungen) the people has historically made, observations that secure a
live, natural meaning for super-sensuous words. But when sensory observa-
tions are detached from the verbal image, by adopting foreign words devel-
oped during the course of a set of sensory observations not belonging to one’s
own history, the sign no longer has any relation to the sensory observations of
the nation that imports it. The sign loses its connection to the original force of
nature. It loses its anchor in the nation’s history — it becomes arbitrary, dead.
The nation loses its capacity for creative agency. It becomes corrupt.*°

77 On this point, see Martyn, “Borrowed Fatherland’.

78 Reden, pp. 320-1 (62-3).
79 ‘(Jjedes Zeichen aber in diesem sinnlichen Umkreise kann durch die unmittelbare
Ansicht oder Beriihrung des Bezeichneten vollkommen klar gemacht werden’ (‘But in
this sphere of the senses every sign can be made completely clear by directly viewing or
touching [or: via the unmediated viewing or touching of] that which is designated’),
Reden, p. 320 (62-3).
80 Ibid., pp. 320-1 (62-3).
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 355

Fortunately for the Germans, they have preserved their original, living lan-
guage:*! neither the sensuous nor the super-sensuous part of their language is
arbitrary. Their language comes from ‘the whole previous life of the nation’.
The sign remains alive and sensuous: like Rousseau’s melodic southern
tongue, it stimulates the senses without mediation:

The sign [in such a language] is itself living and sensuous without media-
tion (unmittelbar lebendig und sinnlich), re-presenting (wieder darstellend)
the whole of actual [or: original] life . . . To the possessor of such a lan-
guage, spirit speaks without mediation, and reveals itself as man does to
man. But the sign of a dead language stimulates [or: moves] nothing
directly (unmittelbar).”
The implication of the foregoing account might be that one can adopt the
language of others’ ancestors, as long as one also adopts the historical and
cultural totality from which that language arose, 1.e. that, dynamically, lan-
guage must cohere with culture, but not necessarily with descent. This would
be to interpret Fichte’s dynamic account of corruption by foreign elements
with the most ‘open’ and least genealogical spin possible, a spin that is neces-
sary to salvage the interpretation favoured by Gueroult, Renaut, and Balibar.
But, once again, that interpretive spin is countered by both the direct textual
evidence and the logic of Fichte’s argument.
The most immediate textual problem for Fichte’s French commentators is
his use of genealogical language in precisely the moment that is most compro-
mising to the salvage that they are attempting. Fichte says:
[T]he first, original, and truly natural boundaries of States are beyond doubt
their inner boundaries. Those who speak the same language are, long before
any human art (Kunst) begins, by unadorned nature (blosse Natur) herself
already joined together by a multitude of invisible bonds; they understand
each other and are capable of making themselves understood to one another
ever more clearly; they belong together, and are by nature one, an insepa-
rable whole. Such [a whole] cannot wish to absorb or mix with [or: inter-
breed with (mit vermischen)] any people of different descent (Abkunft) and
language without at least at first becoming confused (sich zu verwirren),
and violently disturbing the even progress of its culture (Bildung).*°

8! Tbid., p. 314 (55).

82 ‘Das Zeichen in der letzten [in einer lebendigen Sprache] ist selbst unmittelbar
lebendig und sinnlich und wieder darstellend das ganze eigene Leben . . . mit dem
Besitzer einer solchen Sprache spricht unmittelbar der Geist, und offenbart sich ihm, wie
ein Mann dem Manne. Dagegen regt das Zeichen einer todten Sprache unmittelbar nichts
an.” Ibid., p. 332 (76-7).
83 ‘(D]ie ersten, tirsprunglichen und warhaft naturlichen Grenzen der Staaten sind
ohne Zweifel ihre inneren Grenzen. Was diselbe Sprache redet, das ist schon vor aller
menschlichen Kunst vorher durch die blosse Natur mit einer Menge von unsichtbaren
Banden aneinander gekniipft; es versteht sich untereinander, und ist fahig, sich immerfort
klarer zu verstandigen, es gehért zusammen, und ist natiirlich Eins und ein unzertrenn-
356 A. ABIZADEH

Passages such as these, in which descent and language appear as an indissoluble

pair, make the view that Fichte was not an ethnic nationalist problematic,” for
the subtle slide from language to descent appears at the crucial moment where
the ‘open nation’ interpretation requires it not to be there. Ernest Renan’s
observation in 1882 about the rhetorical structure of the debates of his century
is perhaps nowhere more germane than in relation to Fichte: “The political
importance attached to languages comes from the fact that they are regarded
as signs of race.’
The coup de grace comes from the fact of Fichte’s notorious chauvinism:
today, Fichte claims, only the Germans are a proper nation with an original,
living language.*° (Fichte, it should be said on his behalf, is generous enough
to the rest of humanity to signal that in principle there might be other such
peoples too; he just doesn’t know of any.) By contrast to the Germans, the
Franks — who are also Teutons by descent, but who have adopted a neo-Latin
tongue — possess a dead language. Fichte ostensibly speaks of the nation in
open terms only when he is speaking of non-Germans adopting German
nationality (language and culture); but when it is a matter of a person of Ger-
manic (i.e. Teutonic) descent adopting a foreign tongue, he tightens the
national boundaries genealogically. In other words, the ethnic character of
Fichte’s nationalism is obscured for the twenty-first-century reader, because
we tend to think of genealogical limits on entry, rather than exit, as the sine
qua non of an ethnic doctrine, and Fichte seems to go soft on entry. But we
should not be fooled: this ‘softness’ is the result not of the lack of a genealogi-
cal doctrine, but of the combination of genealogy with chauvinism. The
moments in which Fichte’s genealogical boundaries go soft are those in which
he is driven by the thought that of course non-Germans would do well to adopt
the totality of the German Bildung; it is the only culture on offer with a living
language. Notice the implication. It will not do to say that Fichte’s chauvinism
is a contingent feature of his doctrine,*’ and that, stripped of its chauvinism,
his account would have been less genealogically bound. On the contrary, it

liches Ganzes. Ein solches kann kein Volk anderer Abkunft und Sprache in sich
aufnehmen und mit vermischen wollen, ohne wenigstens fiirs erste sich zu verwirren,
und den gleichmassigen Fortgang seiner Bildung machtig zu stéren.’ Ibid., p. 460
(223-4). For extensive commentary on this passage, see Balibar, ‘Fichte et la frontiére
intérieure’. ;
84 Even if the ‘furs erste’ clause meant that in theory ethnic entry or exit were possible,
it 1s certainly not desirable. Even if Fichte were not in principle an ethnic nationalist, in
practice he still would be: the total adoption of the whole of another culture and language
is, for Fichte, almost impossible.
85 Ernest Renan, ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’, Oeuvres completes de Ernest Renan,
ed. Henriette Psichari, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1947 (1882)), p. 900.
86 Reden, seventh address.
87 Cf. Dumont’s argument about the essential role of hierarchy in Fichte’s text, in
‘Une variante nationale’.
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 37

would have been more genealogically bound: if the contemporary world were
full of living languages, then there would be no good reason why the ethnic
criterion of national membership should be relaxed. In other words, one must
choose: a ‘Fichtean’ who gives up the Reden’s chauvinism cannot also give
up the genealogical features of the theory advanced therein.**

VI
Conclusion

Ultimately, then, the motivating nation is natural in two senses: it possesses a

natural boundary to mark members off from non-members (language), and it
is passed on through time via descent (ethnicity). As the legitimate basis for
the state, it provides its natural boundaries. The nation-state potentially and
ideally possesses a natural, prepolitical bond, and to weaken that bond one
need only dilute its constituents with foreign elements. To dislodge its natural
anchor over time would also be to undermine the nation’s bid to be the sacred
site of eternity.
Now we have all of Fichte’s reasons for why the nation can so inspire its
members. In the first place, the (true, i.e. German) nation is based in nature: its
defining feature is a shared language, and a shared language springs forth
from nature according to a fundamental natural law. The nation moves us
because language as such is part and parcel of the same nature, so to speak,
that flows through our veins. In the second place, the nation moves us because
it promises us immortality on earth, and thus is an object worthy ofour love. It
offers us immortality because it persists through time, and does so while
embodying our expressive acts of creative freedom that contribute to the life
of the nation. The nation is not just natural, it is also sacred, the immortal site
of divinity; and what allows it to persist through time is that it is defined by a
language which, because it evolves in a continuous non-arbitrary way accord-
ing to natural evolutionary laws, possesses a single identity passed on to our
descendants over time. The nation moves us because its particular language is
literally passed on through the blood that flows in our veins.
So Fichte does not, in the end, provide defenders of a non-ethnic cultural
nationalism with much room for optimism. On the contrary, an analysis of
88 Since my focus has been on whether the Reden in particular constitutes an ethnic
nationalist text, and since the Reden do not refer to Jews, I have not raised the issue of
Fichte’s attitude towards Jews as an objection to the non-ethnic reading of the Reden that
I am challenging. Fichte’s notorious and brutal attempt to express his views about Jews
with a touch of ‘humour’ — he said that, in order to prevent Jews from corrupting Chris-
tians, it would be necessary to ‘cut off all their heads in one night and replace them with
others in which there is not a single Jewish idea’ — was written in 1793 as part of a dia-
tribe in the Beitrag zur Berichtigung des Publikums iiber die franz6sische Revolution
(quoted in La Volpa, Fichte, p. 132). As La Volpa points out, “the Jew-hatred of the Con-
tribution is largely absent from Fichte’s later writings’ (Fichte, p. 135). See ch. 5 of La
Volpa’s book for a more extensive discussion of Fichte’s attitude towards Jews.
358 A. ABIZADEH

Fichte reveals why the discursive logic of cultural nationalism may have a
tendency to propel its own collapse into its ethnic kin. Part of the cultural
nation’s appeal is that it is supposed to solve the motivation problem. In par-
ticular, the nation is supposed to mobilize citizens around socially integrative
political projects by incorporating the naturally mortal individual into a
greater collective self that promises a form of immortality.* The problem is to
know how the collective self of the future can be the same collective self into
which the present individual is to be incorporated. Some link of continuity is
needed. Ostensibly, cultural nationalism’s answer is that the collective
national self persists through time in the set of individuals who continue to
bear the same national culture. But now we need to know how, in the face of
the inevitable cultural changes, the future culture can be seen as the same as
the current one.
The cultural nationalist is already committed to the reification of ‘culture’
as an entity with distinct boundaries but now needs to go further and defend
those boundaries through time as well. He or she needs to identify some ‘es-
sence’ of the cultural nation, an essence whose own persistence explains the
nation’s persistence in the face of cultural change. The cultural nationalist
must either locate that essence in some set of core cultural practices, or find
some extra-cultural supplement that secures over-time identity. Neither solu-
tion is attractive. It is tempting for the cultural nationalist to suppose that a
culture’s essence can consist in some core cultural practice(s) whose purity
over the generations must be defended at all costs: this bit of our culture can-
not be changed. The problem is not just that this option amounts to an
extremely reactionary cultural conservatism; it is also that each generation’s
view of what the essential cultural core consists in may itself change.”° Turn-
ing to the second option, the most obvious — though certainly not the only —
extra-cultural candidate is blood. The boundary of cultural continuity is to be
genealogically secured here: this is the supplement that Fichte’s cultural
nationalism draws on, and it is a supplement to which cultural nationalist
politics in practice has found itself drawn again and again. This collapse into
ethnic nationalism is neither a logically necessary consequence”! nor a random

89 This promise of immortality is what Anderson identifies as the source of the

nation’s power as well, in /magined Communities.
90 A frequent observation about Québécois cultural nationalism, for instance, is that
this ‘cultural core’ was previously located in the Roman Catholic religion, whereas
today’s nationalists locate it in the French language. Of course neither of these two are
static entities either.
°! Another option besides blood is, of course, the soil. But this never really solves the
problem, for soil by itself cannot really tell us who, over time, the members of the cultural
nation are. On the one hand, if we say that over time the nation is instantiated by whoever
happens to be on (or exercises effective control over) a plot of land, the link to culture has
been lost. If, on the other hand, we say that the nation is instantiated by those who con-
tinue to practise the same culture previously practised on this plot ofland, either this begs
 WAS FICHTE AN ETHNIC NATIONALIST? 309

occurrence: it results from some identifiable discursive features of cultural

nationalist ideology. If contemporary cultural nationalists have something
to learn from Fichte, it is not, as Renaut suggests, how to proceed; it is,
rather, to know something of the ethnic pathology that lurks beneath the
cultural surface.”

Arash Abizadeh McGILL UNIVERSITY

the question or it collapses into a genealogical account. Another frequent suggestion is

that continuity is secured by the fact of a “shared history’. But as Appiah has demon-
strated, this answer logically begs the question as well. See Anthony Appiah, “The
Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race’, in ‘Race,’ Writing, and Dif-
ference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago, 1986), pp. 21-37, at p. 27.
92 This is not to say that crypto-ethnic cultural nationalism plays itself out politically
in the same manner as does unmediated ethnic nationalism. The mediation involved in
the former variety places constraints upon its ethnicism that are altogether missing in the
latter. This is why it matters that the Reden cannot be equated with the character that Ger-
man nationalism subsequently took.
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BOOK REVIEWS
 BOOK REVIEWS

363 Matt Carter, 7.H. Green and the Development of Ethical Socialism (Green
Studies, Volume 1) (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2003), x + 223 pp.,
£25.00/$40.00, ISBN 0 907845 320. Reviewed by Avital Simhony.
364 Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: ‘Nonsense
upon Stilts’ and other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip
Schofield, Catherine Pease-Watkin and Cyprian Blamires (The Col-
lected Works of Jeremy Bentham) (Clarendon Press/Oxford University
Press: Oxford, 2002), Ixvili + 486 pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 19 924863 X.
Reviewed by Jean-Fabien Spitz.
366 Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in
Post-1967 Arab Intellectual History (Pluto Press: London and Sterling,
VA, 2004), xvii + 485 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0 7453 2169 0. Reviewed by
Jeremy Salt.
368 Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France
and Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and Lon-
don, 2003), x + 227 pp., £23.95/US$39.95, ISBN 0 8014 4144 7
(boards). Reviewed by P.A. Monaghan.
370 Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson,
ed. Malcolm Crook, William Doyle and Alan Forrest (Ashgate:
Aldershot, 2004), x + 223 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 7456 0682 1. Reviewed
by Colin Jones.
372 Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy and
Passion in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (State University of
New York Press: New York, 2002), x + 256 pp., $25.95, ISBN 07914
5442 8 (pbk.). Reviewed by Delba Winthrop.
374 New Essays on Fichte’s Later Jena Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Daniel
Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Northwestern University Press:
Evanston, IL, 2002), xviii + 360 pp., £60.50/$89.95, ISBN 0 8101 1864
5 (boards); £24.99/$29.95, ISBN 0 8101 1865 3 (pbk.). Reviewed by
P.A. Monaghan.
374 Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge, 2003), xlii + 197 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 521 64353 8
(boards); £15.99, ISBN 0 521 64392 9 (pbk.). Reviewed by P.A.
Monaghan.
 BOOK REVIEWS 363

Matt Carter, 7.H. Green and the Development of Ethical Socialism (Green Stud-
ies, Volume 1) (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2003), x + 223 pp., £25.00/$40.00,
ISBN 0 907845 320.

Matt Carter’s book joins a growing crop of books on the philosophy of

T.H. Green. Unlike other recent books that focus solely on Green’s philosophi-
cal ideas, this work situates Green’s ideas in context. Carter’s central claim is
that ‘Green and his followers have played a significant role in the creation of a
type of ethical socialism that has been adopted by figures such as R.H. Tawney’
(p. 3), who, in turn, influenced socialists within the Labour Party. Vindicating
this is a challenging task, to which Carter measures up nicely.
Much as empiricist philosophy could be said to propel Classical Liberal-
ism, he claims, the British idealists, led by Green, established an alternative
and ‘new philosophical settlement’ (pp. 3, 21, 76), which, in turn, inspired a
new liberal political ideology. The idealist philosophical settlement embraced
three key ideas: the spiritual nature of reality, the moral value ofindividuality,
and an organic view of social relations. The key concepts of the new liberal
ideology — the common good, positive freedom, equality of opportunity, and
the state as an enabling agency — were used by later idealists to justify ethical
socialism. Indeed, Carter’s definition of ethical socialism, in terms of individ-
ual moral development and organic social relations (p. 7), 1s virtually identi-
cal to Green’s idealist philosophical settlement (pp. 3, 21-7, 76). As well,
Carter claims that the key concepts of the idealist ideology underpin Taw-
ney’s own socialism, albeit with the relevant adjustments required by differ-
ent circumstances (pp. 27-44, Chap. VI).
If so, the claim that ‘Tawney . . . saw liberalism as superseded by socialism,
which took the battle against privilege from the realm of legal rights into the
social and economic domain’ (p. 171) does not capture Carter’s own argu-
ment that Green’s Constructive liberalism superseded classical liberalism.
Indeed, Carter properly stresses Green’s idea of equality, which, as he holds,
is ‘an idea not so typically connected with his [Green’s] ideology’ (p. 32) and
is ‘astronger form of equality’ than the formal equality of classical liberalism.
One way to appreciate that idea of positive equality is to see that Green recon-
structed rights not only in form — the rejection of natural rights in favour of
the social recognition thesis of rights — which Carter does, but also in con-
tent — embracing positive rights (though Green himself does not use this very
phrase) — which Carter does not, though it is implicit in his argument. That
Tawney adopted Green’s new conception of rights, as Carter points out, is
worth attention. It reveals that there is no inconsistency, as such, between
socialism and the language of rights, only between socialism and a certain
kind of rights, as Tawney’s socialist argument illustrates.
The path from Green’s liberalism to Tawney’s socialism was, Carter
claims, mediated by Green followers. Tawney himself declared his

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 2. Summer 2005

364 BOOK REVIEWS

indebtedness to the ‘intellectual and moral tradition which . . . especially, I

imagine, Green helped to create’ (p. 168). Unearthing that tradition, rather
than the discussion of Green’s liberalism, is effective and is where Carter’s
main contribution lies. He carefully, thoroughly and convincingly brings to
life the way Green’s followers not only carried on but expanded his ideology
with regard to Darwinism, competition and economics, equality of opportu-
nity, education, and, importantly, state interference. Of special interest is dis-
cussion of the Christian Socialist phase of that tradition, not least because
their idea of ‘a socially conscious Christianity became the guiding theme of
Tawney’s practical and intellectual career’ (p. 170).
Carter’s project depends on the claim that ideological labels are not fixed
which explains his claim that Green’s liberalism was the root of Tawney’s
ethical socialism. Carter’s point is that Green’s influence was not bounded by
the label ‘liberalism’. In pursuing this line of analysis, Carter explicitly draws
on Freeden’s original approach to the study of political ideologies which sees
political ideologies as complex collections of different political concepts. At
the same time, however, Carter’s analysis is shot through with an unceasing
effort to refute Freeden’s claim that Green’s influence beyond the walls of the
academy was marginal. Though it is obvious why Carter feels the need to do
so, the effectiveness of his argument does not depend on such a preoccupa-
tion. Students of British political thought and ideology as well as of Green
will learn much from his book.
Avital Simhony
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: ‘Nonsense upon

Stilts’ and other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield,
Catherine Pease-Watkin and Cyprian Blamires (The Collected Works of
Jeremy Bentham) (Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2002),
Ixvili + 486 pp., £65.00, ISBN 0 19 924863 X.

This volume of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham gathers Bentham’s

various writings on the French Revolution from the pre-revolutionary period
of the Assemblée des Notables in 1788 to the constitution of 1795 and Sieyés’
return to politics after the Terror and the end of the convention period. From
the very start of the French troubles, Bentham had been in personal contact
with some of the major revolutionary figures, such as Mirabeau and Brissot;
through his friend and patron, the Marquis of Lansdowne, he was also con-
nected with Morellet, one of the most important of the second-generation
 BOOK REVIEWS 365

philosophes in Paris, who kept him informed about French politics, with Sam-
uel Romilly and, above all, with Etienne Dumont, who acted both as an inter-
mediary between him and Mirabeau and as a translator, allowing Bentham’s
thought to reach the French reading public and Bentham to take part in the
revolutionary intellectual debate about elections, representation, constitution-
framing and reform.
In his first writings on the Etats généraux, Bentham argued against any idea
of sticking to the old juridical tradition and especially against the vote par
ordres, according to him, each order should be represented in the newly
elected assembly in proportion to its specific weight in the general population,
so that if the members in the two privileged orders stand to the Tiers Etat as
one to twenty, they should get no more than one twentieth part of the national
representation. As for the franchise, Bentham thought that property qualifica-
tions should indeed be required lest the whole social fabric run the risk of sub-
version, but he deemed it possible to settle on modest ones even if he was far
from thinking the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ appropriate. During the
period of the Assemblée Nationale, Bentham also argued against bicameralism
and for an omnipotent legislature; in his eyes, the disposition in the 1791 con-
stitution tending to bind succeeding legislatures and preventing them from
making constitutional changes for the next ten years was absurd, since a
supreme legislature invested with complete freedom to pass any legislation it
deems appropriate is a required feature of a well-functioning society.
Of course, the main title in this volume is Bentham’s famous Nonsense
upon Stilts, a vigorous criticism of the declaration of rights issued by the
French Assemblée Nationale after protracted consideration and debate.
Bentham’s project was to show that the very idea of declaring rights is both
theoretically flawed and practically dangerous. From a theoretical point of
view, it is false to assert that men have rights by nature, since the only rights
they can enjoy are those conferred upon them by the existence of govern-
ments and laws. Where there is no government, there can be no rights, no
security, no property, no liberty; and where the regular control of laws is
absent, men are not free, but subjected to the irregular control and mandates of
stronger individuals. Rights should be established by law so far as they are
advantageous to society and abolished whenever their abolition is advanta-
geous to that same society, so that the very notion of an imprescriptible right
is confused and impractical. From the point of view of practical conse-
quences, declaring natural and imprescriptible rights is dangerous because it
will necessarily foster what Bentham called ‘a spirit of resistance to all laws, a
spirit of insurrection against all governments’. Bentham’s view is that the
declaration of rights is in a way levelled against the laws themselves and that
it tries to secure these so-called natural rights against the encroachment of
legislators; but since government is possible only if it can pass laws as it
thinks necessary for the well-being of society, indefeasible rights are in fact
366 BOOK REVIEWS

incompatible with the very existence of government and all peaceable society.
The example of property is telling: if property is declared an imprescriptible
right of man, it can mean only that whatever property a man happens to have
cannot be taken from him without his free consent. But this makes anyone free
to refuse to pay taxes, and makes at the same time all government radically
impossible. Bentham also expands on what appears to him to be deep-seated
contradictions in the Declaration; for instance, how is it possible to say both
that liberty is a natural right which exists in spite of all laws, and to say at the
same time that the right to be free owes all the bounds it has to those same
laws? How is it possible to claim to declare both the rights of man and the
rights of the citizen when it is clear as day that if no distinction were to be rec-
ognized between the two expressions, one of them ‘must be acknowledged to
be unmeaning, and the insertion of it a dangerous impertinence’? The 1795
declaration seems to take notice of this in confining itself to the rights of man
in society, but Bentham underlines that, at the same time, it leaves in doubt
whether or not there are natural rights over which laws have no power at all.
Reading Bentham’s writings on the revolution can thus be a good introduc-
tion to the ambiguities of French republican political culture, which is torn
between natural-rights theories and Rousseau’s ideas on volonté générale and
the sovereignty of the people’s laws. With its copious critical apparatus, this
most careful edition of Bentham’s pieces discussing French political ideas as
they unravelled during the revolutionary years will be very useful not only to
students and Bentham scholars, but also to all those interested in the English
view of French political ideas and concepts.
Jean-Fabien Spitz
UNIVERSITE PARIS 1
PANTHEON SORBONNE

Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi’, Contemporary Arab Thought: Studies in Post-1967

Arab Intellectual History (Pluto Press: London and Sterling, VA, 2004),
Xvii + 485 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0 7453 2169 0.

Any book dealing with Arab thought these days, especially Arab Muslim
thought, can at least be said to be timely. This very brave attempt to compress
different streams of thinking into one comprehensible narrative is a book for
scholars, which is somewhat of a pity because there is a rather desperate need
for the general reader to be offered alternatives to the explanations offered by
a number of high-profile commentators for Arab and Muslim animosity
towards the ‘west’. Inherent civilizational hostility and the envy of ‘failed
 BOOK REVIEWS 367

societies’ are just two of these, offering not so much an authentic explanation
as a comfortable way out of one. Still, a short and more ‘accessible’ work
could not possibly cover the field, as Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ has done very suc-
cessfully in this book.
The starting point is the collapse of 1967, military, economic, political and
emotional. Raking through the coals of defeat for their own explanations,
many Arabs remained within the mainstream of secularized thought which
has been the dominant intellectual paradigm since the nahda ofthe nineteenth
century. Some moved even deeper into secularism, finding in Marxism a
more substantial structural approach for dealing with the region’s problems.
Others abandoned secularism altogether, while others who had never
accepted it in the first place were able to argue more convincingly than before
that, now that it had (apparently) failed, the only ideology that could fill the
gap was Islam. Since then, Muslim movements have arisen in abundance
across the Middle East. They are far more variegated in their approach than
the reductionists in the ‘west’ seem prepared to allow, often if not usually
choosing to work within democracy (such as it is in the Middle East) rather
than attempt to bring the kafir state down through violence.
‘Secularism came to us on the back of a tank and it has remained under its
protection ever since’ is one of Rashid al Ghannushi’s remarks quoted by
Abu-Rabi’ in the context of shari’a and civil society in Tunisia. His personal
experience highlights the unwillingness of Arab governments to allow Mus-
lim movements to play the democratic game, for the simple reason that for
most of them it is no more than a game. Ghannushi’s mistake was to take the
Tunisian government at its word. The result was three years of imprisonment
followed by exile (in London). The suppression of his Nahda Party was more
than matched in Algeria a few years later by military intervention against the
Islamic Salvation Front, in between the first and second stages of an election it
seemed certain to win. The ISF was also committed to working for an Islamic
system through the democratic process. In Egypt, the greatest danger to the
state came not from the Muslim militants but from the Muslim Brotherhood,
whose gains within the mainstream in the 1990s were so substantial that the
government began shifting the goalposts in the attempt to marginalize it. With
Muslim activists suppressed, blocked, arrested or driven into exile by govern-
ments making ruthless use of their power in the name of cooperating with the
United States against ‘terrorism’, it is no wonder that Abu-Rabi’ concludes
that the modern Muslim renaissance, which he dates back to the eighteenth
century ‘before Western intrusion into the Muslim world’, cannot lead to ful-
filment of the ‘Islamist project’ in present world political conditions.
When one looks at Ghannushi, or Husayn Fadlallah of Lebanon for that mat-
ter, one sees deeply committed Muslim thinkers who have had the flexibility to
absorb a wide range of external influences. There is more than a whiff of liber-
ation theology in their approach to how society should evolve in a Muslim
368 ; BOOK REVIEWS

context. Ghannushi places the emphasis on Muslim self-improvement and

self-awareness as a first step. Once influenced by Arab nationalism, he found
it deficient because it ‘failed to construct a true project of intellectual and cul-
tural emancipation since it remained, at heart, indebted to the mental and sci-
entific contributions of Western modernity. Nationalism gained politically
but lost intellectually’ (p. 208). This does not open Ghannushi up to the
charge of abandoning modernity, because all he is seeking is the release of
Arab intellectuals from the ‘captivity’ of the ‘west’. They have their own con-
tribution to make: in his view they can best make it as Muslims, by putting
aside hair-splitting arguments originating in the distant past and concentrating
on the development of ‘a rationalist Islamic system that can deal with the issues
of the modern world, one of which is modernity’ (p. 208). For Ghannushi the
difference is between the ‘fake, aborted modernity of the Westernised elite in
the Arab world’ and the genuine modernity of the ‘west’, which developed on
foundations built over centuries and has simply been picked up in the most
superficial fashion by Arab elites and utilized as ‘a tool of class and an elite
privilege’ (p. 208).
Different Muslim perspectives, including Ghannushi’s, Hasan al Turabi’s
and those of other leading figures, are supplemented by the liberal Arab
nationalist views of Costi Zurayk, the Marxism of Mahdi ‘Amil and the move-
ment from ‘objective Marxism to liberal etatism’ in the writings of Abdullah
Laroui. The current state of the Arab world is the despair of Arab thinkers and
those who study their history. Ibrahim Abu-Rabi’ has very effectively given a
picture of the search for meaning, explanations and answers taking place on a
broad intellectual front. When he has put so much work into this project, it is a
pity that it is pulled down by sloppy editing. There are numerous mistakes in
the text and index, along with the misspelling of proper names on the back
cover — and why, for a cover of the book on the Arab world, did the editors
choose a photograph of a mosque in Istanbul?
Jeremy Salt
BILKENT UNIVERSITY

Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and

Germany, 1750-1914 (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 2003),
X + 227 pp., £23.95/US$39.95, ISBN 0 8014 4144 7 (boards).

This interesting study examines the mutual influences, transformations and

aporias, of French- and German- Enlightenment neoclassical cultural identi-
ties in art, literature and politics. In Mah’s ‘post-structuralist’ approach,
 BOOK REVIEWS 369

concepts in these fields display inherent instabilities such that initially fixed
positions slip into their opposites, often in the work of those whom he exam-
ines, and within the tradition itself. The book is, for the most part, a running
commentary on the opposition between French outerness and German inner-
ness, i.e. between French practice and materialism, and German theorizing
and idealism. The book, as Mah himself indicates, consists more of illustra-
tive examples of these themes in significant personalities than a systematic
study.
Mah claims to bring together recent trends in the historiography of the
period, beginning with Gale’s 1960s uniformitarian view of the Enlighten-
ment, followed by the dissenting pluralist empirical studies of the 1970s, then
the ‘gender’ studies which followed. He points to the instability in Enlighten-
ment thought, which moves from the ‘Roccoco classicism’ of the Ancient
Regime into the ‘neoclassicism’ of revolutionary republicanism. A feature of
this development was the changed attitude of the philosophes, who first
accepted the French language and manners (the standard of European civility
and courtly life) and then called them into question. For Diderot and
Condillac the French language had lost transparency through sophistication;
Montesquieu, and especially Rousseau, saw French civility as a cover for
deception. Mah indicates a parallel disenchantment in Germany: first in
Winkelmann, who profoundly influenced the German classical turn; and, sec-
ond, in Herder’s eventual disenchantment with French civility, which, consis-
tent with his cultural historicism, led to his vision of German as a genuinely
transparent expression of ‘sense’. This was finally developed by Fichte as
appropriate for the ‘innerlichkeit’ of practical reason: German was seen by
him as essential to any cultural improvement of Europe. In Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister German is the language of sincerity, while French is that of dissimu-
lation. Goethe is also shown to humanize Enlightenment neoclassicism: femi-
nine persuasive powers — parallelling the influence of the salonniére —
result in mundane bourgeois domestic life triumphing over that masculine
heroism symbolized in David’s painting “The Oath’, yet, paradoxically, as
Mah shows, resulting in male exclusiveness in public life. However, de Staél
would apparently wish to restore female public influence by uniting French
civility with German genuineness in a transparent match.
Indicating the deep roots of German inwardness from protestantism to
Kant, Mah shows its easy slide into its romanticist opposite, which plays a
part in destabilizing and undermining classical Enlightenment. This is found
in young Goethe’s Sturm und Drang, in Schelling’s mystical turn, in Frederick
Schlegel’s Catholic conversion and, finally, in Schopenhauer’s blind will,
which inverts Fichte’s rational one, and is expressed in Nietzsche’s Apollonian
impulse, which Nietzsche subordinates to the blind Dionysian drive, exhib-
ited in Greek Tragedy. The disconcerting effects of failing to achieve identity
with a putative fantasized past is felt in the epigones with whom Mah deals.
370 BOOK REVIEWS

Goethe fails to be a Homer, Winkelman’s vision oftimeless perfection in for-

mative art collapses into temporality when he moves from ‘glance’ to ‘gaze’,
and Mann, influenced by the Neitzschean Zeitgeist, indicates, in Death in
Venice, how Auerbach’s initial vision of aesthetic perfection in the boy is dis-
concerted by homoerotic feelings.
Parallelling Goethe and de Staél, Mah concludes by indicating how, in poli-
tics, through perceived homologies between French outerness and German
innerness, a synthesis of the two was seen as a possibility for a modernized
Germany. Thus Hegel sees German thought as a ‘modern’ parallel with
French practice: the unity of the two he sees enabling German political trans-
formation avoiding the excesses of revolution. Heine seeks to transform ‘ro-
mantic’ tyrannical innerlichkeit into a force for liberal reform whereby,
inspired by French, St Simonian socialism, material prosperity will lead to
practical reform. Marx, in collaboration with Ruge, goes to Paris in 1843 ina
failed attempt to unite the modernity of German ideas and French practice, to
bring political change; failure led him later, Mah suggests, to turn to the prole-
tariat as a revolutionary force.
Mah writes in an interesting and elegant style, his central theme will doubt-
less provoke interest, and his post-structuralist presentation suits his case,
though other approaches could have been successful. Most informative in
dealing with the Franco-German connection up to the Bourbon restoration,
the book deals subsequently almost exclusively with the German perspective,
and after 1843 only with Nietzsche and Mann. In treating of German politics it
is unclear whether he thinks any whom he discusses are Enlightenment fig-
ures, or whether the synchrony of French outwardness and German inward-
ness are residues of Enlightenment idioms, adding weight to his critique of
Enlightenment fantasy and identity.
P.A. Monaghan
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson,

ed. Malcolm Crook, William Doyle and Alan Forrest (Ashgate: Aldershot,
2004), x + 223 pp., £45.00, ISBN 0 7456 0682 1.

Norman Hampson is very much the doyen of British historians of the French
Enlightenment and Revolution, and this is thus an aptly titled festschrift vol-
ume for this influential and wholly inimitable figure. It brings together a
dozen contributions from leading and emergent scholars of the fieid to honour
aman whose ‘life and opinions’ — a nicely ironic homage to the author of The
 BOOK REVIEWS 4

Life and Opinions of Maximilien Robespierre (1974) — are also here sur-
veyed by William Doyle. With a festschrift, there is always a danger of schol-
ars wishing to join the celebration but lacking an appropriate paper, but this
seems not to be the case with the present team. The contributors are wholly
British-trained and almost exclusively British-based (though, slightly worry-
ingly, there is a paucity of contributions from scholars under forty years of
age is there a missing generation of French Revolutionary studies in
Britain?).
More chapters than one would perhaps have liked are synthetic surveys
rather than research papers — but all are professionally done and all provide
fresh insights. Political ideas find a place in many of the contributions. The
general approach of these chapters is Hampsonian, so to speak, and seeks to
provide socially grounded interpretations rather than to explore inner and
contested meanings of particular texts. Haydn Mason tracks Voltaire’s rela-
tionship with David Hume; Alan Forrest surveys the links between science
and institutional reform in the Bourbon army; Tim Blanning, in an elegantly
written and informative piece, examines the incapacity of Louis X VI to domi-
nate the emergent public sphere; Leigh Whaley follows the dual Revolution-
ary careers of journalists and political activists Louise de Kéralio and her
husband Francois Robert; James Macmillan considers the Abbé Grégoire’s
wayward if dedicated ‘search for reconciliation’ from Ancien Régime to
Bourbon Restoration; Marisa Linton examines various ‘ideas of the future’
expressed during the Revolution; David Andress, in a ‘no surprises’ contribu-
tion, scrutinizes elite perceptions of popular action from Rousseau to
Robespierre (and finds them wanting); and James Walvin offers a helpful
overview of ‘the Haitian Revolution and the World of Atlantic Slavery’. I
found the most enjoyable and rewarding papers were those which were not
interpretative surveys but which engaged with substantial bodies of primary
material and offered new research pathways. All of these, significantly,
placed the French experience in a wider, more global prism. Thus Jane
Rendall analyses the ‘political reveries’ of the cosmopolitan artillery officer
Alexander Jardine, inveterate traveller and sometime habitué of William
Godwin’s circle; Peter Jones provides a gem of a paper, based on his new
research in the Watt and Boulton archives, that highlights the vagaries of the
commemorative ‘toy’ trade in Britain and the world from 1789 to 1805; while
Gwynne Lewis’s chapter on Louis XV’s ‘little minister’, Henri-Léonard Ber-
tin, an obsessive student of Chinese ways, opens up ‘the Chinese connection’
in Bourbon diplomacy and Enlightenment political thought in a manner
which is at once evocative, illuminating and genuinely thought-provoking.
Overall, I am sure that Norman Hampson would approve: high praise for any
volume.
Colin Jones
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
372 BOOK REVIEWS

Laura Janara, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy and Passion

in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (State University of New York Press:
New York, 2002), x + 256 pp., $25.95, ISBN 07914 5442 8 (pbk.).

Is there anything left to be said about Democracy in America? Laura Janara’s

Democracy Growing Up shows that there is. Its theme, the human passions
and how they shape and are shaped by the political order, has by no means
been exhausted by previous scholars. This Canadian author’s attention to
detail is nicely indicated by her tacit rebuke of Tocqueville’s readers, if not
Tocqueville himself: the subject of his book and of her own is ‘US democ-
racy’, not ‘American’ democracy. For the most part, her readings of
Tocqueville’s text are fair, if not always as original as she claims. As she pro-
ceeds, she makes us acutely aware of his use of analogy and metaphor and of
how his style reflects and reveals the substance of thought. In her interpreta-
tion of this substance, she gets many big points right. She correctly reminds us
that for Tocqueville, ‘mores’ are decisive for democracy’s prospects. In keep-
ing with this observation, she focuses on women and family, not political
institutions. And she always has in mind his goal in writing: to make democ-
racy worthy of our attachment to it.
Janara’s chief concern seems to be demonstrating that her way of reading
Democracy brings to light aspects of the book that would otherwise be
missed. This reading is guided especially by mid-twentieth century object-
relations psychoanalytical theory. According to the theory, human passion
and behaviour are decisively affected by whether or not children have been
reared in a maternally dominated environment, where growing up means
turning first to a father to escape maternal control, then attempting to assert
one’s independence vis-a-vis both parents. For Janara’s Tocqueville, this
dynamic structures not only the lives of the individuals he describes, but
democracy itself as a political form. Other scholars have recognized that
Tocqueville gives the traditional family, which women influence but do not
rule, the task of moderating democratic excesses. But her Tocqueville con-
ceives of democracy itself as emerging from a maternal upbringing. Demo-
cratic men struggle to realize its principles of freedom and equality, attempt-
ing to shed the forms of mother aristocracy and to avoid new tyrannical
excesses of republican ‘manliness’, all the while relying on the essential,
albeit subordinate, contributions of women. Yet reliance on the traditional
family as democracy’s ‘foundation’, she argues, in fact precludes the matura-
tion of all citizens. So here is the cause of the failure of Tocqueville’s enter-
prise in theory as well as practice.
Janara relies on a plausible, though curious reading of the second chapter of
Democracy, ‘On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of
the Anglo-Americans’. This chapter, Tocqueville announces, contains ‘the
seed of what is to follow and the key to almost the whole work’. In it, he
 BOOK REVIEWS 373

analogizes that each nation was once like an infant ‘in the arms of his mother’.
The circumstances of a nation’s ‘birth’, and the ways of feeling and acting that
it unconsciously develops early on, make intelligible aspects of its character
that could not be accounted for by looking simply at its consciously articu-
lated principles and laws. Most readers understand Tocqueville to be calling
attention to the peculiarities of America’s point of departure in contrast to
those of other democracies, especially post-Revolutionary France. Janara,
however, takes him to mean that the key to the work is not so much the content
of America’s colonial period as the fact that every nation has had such a
beginning. So she notes, but does not make thematic, America’s uniquely
‘marvellous’ combination of ‘the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom’.
Janara may leave some unconvinced. She is right to take an analogy seri-
ously, if not to treat it as an identity. Tocqueville does say that a man should be
seen as once having been a babe in his mother’s arms. When referring to Eng-
land, he often uses the feminine patrie (a most implausible feminine noun),
and consequently the phrase la mere patrie, where he could conceivably use a
masculine or otherwise less suggestive feminine term. Does he therefore con-
sciously or unconsciously intend to mark the feminine character of democ-
racy’s forebear? As Janara herself notes, it might make more sense to think of
aristocracy, with its rigid patriarchal forms, as a father- rather than a mother-
figure. And, pace Janara, Tocqueville would not confuse noblesse oblige with
maternal instinct. The same doubt might be raised about other terms featured
in the analysis: ‘Equality’ and ‘liberty’ may be feminine nouns and the
‘charms’ of the one and the ‘sublime pleasures’ of the other may arouse the pas-
sions of democratic men. But sometimes a gendered noun is just a gendered
noun, not an object of sexual desire. If so, perhaps modern democracy’s diffi-
culties can be appreciated without feminist sensibilities, and an argument that
only new familial and gender arrangements would ameliorate these difficul-
ties must be made on other grounds.
Tocqueville, in the aftermath ofthe socialist Revolution of 1848, wondered
whether the seemingly necessary institutions of modern society (in that
instance, property rights) were not in fact mere conventions, which could be
replaced. In Democracy, he concedes that the structure of the family is subject
to political variation. So he might well have been willing to engage in the con-
sideration of alternatives to the bourgeois family that Janara’s work is
intended to promote. But her book is exceedingly repetitious, quotation-laden
and insufficiently probing. She notes that ‘the human pleasure in enterprise
and inventiveness and the desire for mastery’ ‘intersects’ or ‘combines’ with
passions shaped in childhood (p. 24). Then can and should it not be analysed
without the exclusive lens of gender issues? Similarly, is the human inclina-
tion to religion merely psychosexual, or is it one that no alternative gender
arrangements could substantially alter? In addition, how, precisely and
concretely, would democratic theories that did not take for granted the
374 ; BOOK REVIEWS

female-dominated family or binary sex-gender identities be more likely to

produce and sustain more mature democratic citizens?
Finally, more needs to be said about the goal Janara claims Tocqueville
shares with her: a world in which ‘mature’ democrats ‘act well amid flux’
(p. 70). Perhaps by ‘flux’ she means just change and uncertainty — for which
Tocqueville allowed. But ‘flux’ (not Tocqueville’s term) suggests an inexo-
rable flow of possibilities, devoid of human meaning. Tocqueville emphati-
cally denied that human beings could live and act well with a belief in such a
reality, even if true. Why else would he have so admired the Americans’ com-
bination of liberty and religion? Janara, Tocqueville might have surmised,
exhibits democracy’s characteristic error — excessive confidence in the
power of each individual’s capacity for ‘indefinite perfectibility’, or what she
calls ‘maturity’. One is left to wonder whether Janara takes either passion or
authority as seriously as she does autonomy.
Delba Winthrop
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

New Essays on Fichte’s Later Jena Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Daniel Breazeale

and Tom Rockmore (Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL, 2002),
Xvili + 360 pp., £60.50/$89.95, ISBN 0 8101 1864 5 (boards); £24.99/$29.95,
ISBN 0 8101 1865 3 (pbk.).

Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge University Press:

Cambridge, 2003), xlii + 197 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0 521 64353 8 (boards);
£15.99, ISBN 0 521 64392 9 (pbk.).

The New Essays are useful contributions to Fichte studies, some by well-
established authorities, all from North American and German institutions.
Critical, concise and well-documented, they investigate how Fichte’s ideas
developed from his 1794 Grundelage to his Rechtslehre, Sittenlehre, and his
later Wissenschaftslehre and are based on two recently-discovered student
manuscripts (translated and published as Foundations of Transcendental Phi-
losophy (1796-9) by Daniel Breazeale).
The main discussion concerns the development of Fichte’s efforts to
ground the theoretical in the practical reason. He felt it necessary to explain
the subject’s finite-infinite drive for knowledge and its practical obligation to
operate within the legal and moral world consistent with the ethical demand.
Through introducing his ‘new natural’ method, knowledge and action were
 BOOK REVIEWS 375

now not derived from theoretical leading to practical reason, but from their
unity, interest being focused on supersensible intersubjective experience
instead of the ‘check’ (Antoss) of the sensible world. Much of Fichte’s reason
for the new method was not to develop his original philosophic position but to
remove misunderstandings without necessarily rejecting what went before.
Nevertheless, change in language and fresh developments have encouraged
much speculation over his philosophical development. The contributions
cover many topics, including aspects of Fichte’s treatments of ethics, law,
punishment, the state, aesthetics, ‘soft matter’ (a difference between him and
early Schelling), the relation of the Divine Will to duty, and Fichte’s notion of
the ‘fictiveness’ of philosophical concepts.
Naturally, these studies give varied impressions of Fichte’s position. There
is Piche’s highly speculative but convincing account of Fichte’s aesthetics (of
which he wrote little). Razzini, plausibly emphasizes unity between the ear-
lier and later period (Fichte’s Vocation of Man often seen by others as a break
from his 1790s writings), whereas Rockmore emphasizes change within the
1790s. Some see the jettisoning of terminology by Fichte as a radical change
from 1794. Needless to say, there is much to encourage debate. Nuzzo sees
Fichte’s intersubjectivity theory as discarding of causality in Fichte’s self-
positing ego. For Brinkman intersubjectivity shifts cause from non-ego to ego,
the causality of the ego being merely limited by the non-ego not as immanence
within the former but as ‘postulate’, suggesting Fichte failed to expunge the
thing-in-itself. Seemingly contradicting Brinkman, Brackendorf claims
Fichte’s dropping of ‘ideal-realism’ in his later philosophy indicates a move to
pure idealism. A plausible reply to both is Fichte’s assertion that his realism
was ‘critical’, not ‘dogmatic’ as traditionally understood, therefore envisaging
an ideally experienced common world. Other views may also be questioned.
Williams suggests that Fichte’s ethical—political state collapses when he resorts
to the coercive state as the answer to crime. Yet Fichte’s reference in his histori-
cal eschatology to his age as a transitional one of ‘sinfulness’ and his hint of the
state’s possible withering away suggests that Williams’ contention needs quali-
fication. Finally Farr’s emphasis on a transformation of Fichte’s ‘ethical
demand’ from an individualistic regulative ideal to intersubjectivity seems to
underplay or forget that Fichte’s notion of the ethical demand as ideal was
never abandoned and not incompatible with intersubjectivity. These comments
should not, however, detract from an overall rewarding work from which the
reviewer has benefited.
Novalis’ Fichte Studies will be of significant interest to English readers
interested in German philosophy and literature. As brief notes they reveal
Novalis’ efforts to resolve his philosophic concerns, centrally his criticism of
Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition, seeing self-knowledge rather as a rep-
resentational feeling-response, in which the self paradoxically is a ‘non-
knowing self-knowing’, regulative, absolute ego, the illumination of which,
376 } BOOK REVIEWS

such as is possible, apparently being accomplished through a seamless move-

ment between philosophy and poetry, i.e. a ‘romanticizing’ whereby the ordi-
nary is made mysterious and the mysterious ordinary. The editors have
provided a useful introduction detailing recent literature on Novalis and his
relevance to post-modernism.

P.A. Monaghan
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
 Ww
new in paperback

Justice by Lottery
by Barbara Goodwin
270 pages, ISBN 1-84540-025-9 (pbk) June 2005, £17.95/
$34.90
This book is about the virtues and social justice of random
distribution. The first chapter is a utopian fragment about a future
country, Aleatoria, where everything, including political power,
jobs and money, is distributed by lottery. The rest of the book is
devoted to considering the idea of the lottery in terms of the
conventional components and assumptions of theories ofjustice,
and to reviewing the possible applications of lottery distribution in contemporary society.
This revised second edition includes a new preface and afterword.
‘Goodwin is to be congratulated on her formidable achievement. THES
‘Gallantly, and with great success, she fights off the objections.’ Zygmunt Bauman, TLS
‘Insistently and acutely challenges readers to say what our moral equality justly demands.’ American Political Science Review
‘Justice by Lottery will richly repay close reading.’ Noam Zohar, Mind
‘Imaginative and provocative.’ Jonathan Riley, Ethics
‘Clearly written and honestly argued.’ Richard Mulgan, Political Science
Weighs in as the year’s most dangerous political book. It should provide a sensation. Fat chance.’ Boyd Tonkin, New Statesman

Wile tte New Labour’s Old Roots

Revisionist Thinkers in Labour’s History 1931-1997

edited by Patrick Diamond

264 pp., ISBN 0 907845 894 (pbk.), £14.95 / $29.90

S}]OO}
P/O ‘Patrick Diamond poses a double challenge — that Tony Blairs critics should
acknowledge New Labour's roots in social democratic thinking and that his
supporters should cherish those roots too. The intriguing thing is that neither
group will be comfortable with what he has to say.’— Martin Kettle (The
Guardian)
‘The frequent, and deliberate, presentation of New Labour as novel
phenomenon and a break with the party's past has always been misleading.
This skilfully edited collection of extracts shows how New Labour stands clearly
in the long and rich tradition Labour “revisionism”, even though its achievements
in office remain uncertain and unfulfilled.’
— Peter Riddell (The Times)
|
New Labour was not conjured up out of thin air — it only looks
tithe a like that because of the party’s amnesia concerning its
intellectual development. This book provides extracts from fifteen
thinkers located within the revisionist tradition as an antidote to
hat amnesia. It is an ‘all star cast’ from Labour's history, from Tawney, Jay and Gaitskell to Gordon
3rown.The collection shows that revisionism is not a body of doctrine but a cast of mind that
listinguishes between core values (ends) and policy instruments (means) — revisionist thinkers do not
shrink from abandoning any policy that fails to deliver the desired ends. In the contentious debates about
he future of public services, the Blair government is determined to avoid the confusion of means and
nds. These essays show this determination to be deep-rooted in Labour thinking and to be focused on
he commitment to equality. The book is intended for students of political thought and general readers.

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 CONTENTS

3T7 Tragedy as Political Theory: The Self-Destruction

of Antigone’s Laws J. Tralau

397 Locke on Language in (Civil) Society H. Dawson

426 Tocqueville’s Brief Encounter with Machiavelli:

Notes on the Florentine Histories (1836) M. Richter

443 The Structure of Marx and Engels’

Considered Account of Utopian Socialism D. Leopold

467 From ‘Republicanism’ to ‘Democracy’: China’s

Selective Adoption and Reconstruction of Modern G.T. Jn &
Western Political Concepts (1840-1924) O.F. Liu

502 The Theory of the Partisan: Carl Schmitt’s

Neglected Legacy G. Slomp

520 The Objects of Ideology: Historical Transformations

and the Changing Role of the Analyst G. Talshir

551 Book Reviews

Volume XXVI_ Issue 3

Autumn 2005
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 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY:
THE SELF-DESTRUCTION OF ANTIGONE’S LAWS'

Johan Tralaw?

Abstract: This paper attempts to save Hegel’s claim that tragedy involves mutual
guilt on the part of the adversaries in the drama. More specifically, it is claimed that a
reading interested in the political theory of tragedy has to work in a different way than
has hitherto often been the case. For the claims regarding the ‘subjectivity’ of interpre-
tation can be countered if the interpretation of the play is based on an internal critique,
i.e. in a normative assessment proceeding from the principles stated by the adversaries
themselves. Hence, it is argued that in Sophokles’ Antigone not only Kreon, but also
Antigone herself is inconsistent in her attachment to the bonds of philia, of the com-
munity of the ‘one womb’ that she wishes to protect. This implies that the tragedy
itself shows the self-destructive nature of Antigone’s ‘laws’ and that this normative
reading can be developed out of the work of art itself.

In a way, Antigone was always part of political theory. In Sophokles’ play,

the sons of Oidipous, Polyneikes and Eteokles, fight for control of their home
city, Thebes, and they kill each other. The new king, Kreon, the brother of
their mother Iokaste, decides that Polyneikes, who has tried to invade the city
with the help of a foreign army, may not be buried, but is to be devoured by
scavengers. Yet Oidipous’ daughter Antigone does not accept the decree.
After having asked her sister Ismene for help, and then ferociously rejecting
her for being too cowardly, Antigone decides to give her brother his burial
honours on her own, thus risking death which is the punishment Kreon deter-
mined for anyone who attempts to bury the enemy of the city. Antigone is
caught and sentenced to death by imprisonment in a cave. The diviner
Teiresias, however, makes Kreon understand that his decision is unjust, and
hence the latter decides to liberate Antigone, only to find that she has already
committed suicide. Her betrothed, Kreon’s son Haimon, who has argued
with his father for her release, tries to kill Kreon after having discovered
Antigone’s corpse and then kills himself. When hearing the news of her son’s

! The author wishes to thank Luca Di Blasi, Inga Brandell, Benjamin Grazzini, Jonas
Hansson, Duane Lacey, Morgan Meis, Dmitri Nikulin and Erik Wallrup for valuable
comments on earlier drafts of this paper. A most generous postdoctoral grant from the
Swedish Foundation for Internationalisation in Research and Higher Education,
Stiftelsen fér internationalisering av forskning och hégre utbildning (STINT), made it
possible for me to spend a remarkable year at the New School in New York; for this I
wish to express sincere gratitude.
2 Dept. of Government, Uppsala Universitet, Box 514, SE 751 20 Uppsala, Sweden.
Email: Johan.Tralau @ statsvet.uu.se
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005
378 : J. TRALAU

death, Kreon’s wife, Eurydike, also commits suicide. The ruler is thus devas-
tated and admits that his edict was a crime.*
It has often been pointed out that Attic tragedy explores political issues in
Athens through the language of myth; in this case, for instance, the Athenian
policy of prohibiting the burial (at least within the confines of the city) of
those who are considered enemies of the city.’ Yet already from the begin-
ning, tragedy was also read as a source of claims to universal truths with
regard to political and moral questions.” Thus, the Antigone has been inter-
preted in many different ways — so many and so divergent, in fact, that the
history of these interpretations can be understood, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet
puts it, as ‘histoire de la conscience européenne’ (‘the history of European
consciousness’).° One of the most influential interpretations is that of Hegel,
who claims that the conflict between Antigone and Kreon is that between the
archaic principle of the oikos, the ‘family’ or ‘house’, on the one hand, and the
polis or ‘city state’, on the other. The most contested claim in Hegel’s theory
of tragedy is that Antigone’s ‘sacred crime’ and Kreon’s decree, are, in a way,
both justified, and hence to some extent both are also unjust. The specifically
tragic conflict, according to Hegel, is the clash between just principles, a con-
flict that can, however, be superseded by a higher order — in this case, then,
by arational political order where family and civil society accept the authority
of the state. So, for Hegel, the tragedy is in itself a kind of political philoso-
phy. The tragic conflict between Antigone and Kreon means that the princi-
ples to which they adhere are both justified, but that the adversaries in the
drama act on them in a one-sided way, thus succumbing to the injustice intrin-
sic to such one-sidedness.’ That the principles colliding in the tragic conflict
are both justified, however, does not mean that Hegel argues that they are
equally justified in every case and under all circumstances.* Rather, the colli-
sion shows exactly that they are one-sided, or that they are acted upon as such.
Now, Hegel’s theory of tragedy in general, and his interpretation of the

3 The text used in this article is the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics edition of
Antigone, ed. Mark Griffith (Cambridge, 1999); the translation used is Antigone, trans.
Reginald Gibbons and Charles Segal (Oxford, 2003).
4 Danielle Allen, The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic
Athens (Princeton, 2000), pp. 216 ff.
> As in Aristotle’s Poetics, 1451b7; for a defence against the contemporary critique
of the alleged anachronism of interest in tragedy as political theory, cf. J. Peter Euben,
The Tragedy of Political Theory: The Road not Taken (Princeton, 1990), pp. 4 ff.
© Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Le miroir brisé: Tragédie athénienne et politique (Paris,
2002), p. 47.
7G.WE. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik, I, in Werke, XV (Frankfurt/Main,
1993), p. 523.
8 Christoph Menke, Tragédie im Sittlichen. Gerechtigkeit und Freiheit nach Hegel
(Frankfurt/Main, 1996), p. 31.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY Nhe

Antigone in particular, are highly complex readings.’ Nevertheless, a mini-

mum requirement for the corroboration of his theory would be to show that
there is something wrong not only with the political and moral actions of
Kreon, but also with those of Antigone herself.
However, this is probably the most vigorously rejected of claims. One of
the most influential critics of Hegel’s theory of the tragic, Gennaro Perrotta,
who rejects it as “esagerazioni intellettualistiche’ (‘intellectualist exaggera-
tions’), says that the only one who is guilty of anything in that drama is
Kreon — thus concurring that the primary task in any interpretation of the
play is the normative question.'? Similarly, the famous Antigone scholar
R.C. Jebb rejects any real guilt on the part of Antigone.'’ Surely, important
objections have been raised. In one of the most influential commentaries,
Gerhard Miiller shows that Kreon’s position is undermined by ambiguous
speech: his own words, like those of the chorus, can be turned against him.
The wording of Kreon’s own condemnation of hybris and rebellion against
the city is thus the means by which Sophokles himself indicts Kreon.'?
Others, however, though perhaps rejecting Hegel’s interpretation, claim
that there must indeed also be something wrong in Antigone’s actions. An
authority like Jean-Pierre Vernant, for instance, claims that Antigone and
Kreon are both one-sided, thus committing injustice.'? Martha Nussbaum
shows that Antigone’s words and the web of associations evoked by the cho-
ral lyrics also suggest one-sidedness on the part of Antigone.” In an explicitly
neo-Hegelian interpretation, Vittorio Hésle argues that Antigone’s guilt con-
sists in her unrelenting attitude and her refusal to accept the authority of the
state.!°
Yet claims about a form of reciprocal guilt on the part of Antigone and
Kreon are very much contested and there is no consensus regarding the proper

2 See, for a recent account, Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001), pp. 89-121.
10 Gennaro Perrotta, Sofocle (Messina and Milan, 1935), pp. 59 f.
1 RC. Jebb, ‘Introduction’, in Antigone, ed. R.C. Jebb (Cambridge, 1966), pp. ii-xxx,
especially pp. xix ff.
'2 Gerhard Miiller, Sophokles Antigone (Heidelberg, 1967), especially pp. 9-21.
Miiller seems to consider Hegel’s theory to be a specifically German statist apology of
political repression.
13 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Tensions et ambiguités dans la tragédie grecque’, in Jean-
Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Mythe et tragédie en Gréce ancienne, | (Paris,
2001), p. 34.
'4 Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy
and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 67 ff.
15 Vittorio Hésle, Die Vollendung der Tragédie im Spédtwerk des Sophokles:
Asthetisch-historische Bemerkungen zur Struktur der attischen Tragédie (Stuttgart and
Bad Canstatt, 1984), pp. 92, 112 ff.
380 J. TRALAU

interpretation of the Antigone.'® So it has recently been claimed that Antigone

‘is right not just in her action (righting Kreon’s ritual error) but in her moral
and religious intuition: she genuinely has good sense (phronei)’.'’ The most
recent editor thus concludes in his overview: ‘No consensus has emerged’
regarding the proper interpretation of the play.'* In this article an attempt will
be made to save Hegel’s interpretation by looking at the issue in a different
way.

Intention, Meaning and the Hermeneutic Path to Tragedy as Politics

Most of the debates concerning different interpretations probably originate, in
this case as in many others, in the differing purposes of different scholars. At
least four such different approaches appear tc be prevalent, or at least pos-
sible, in the case of the interpretation of the Antigone. Here, we will try to
strengthen the Hegelian interpretation by moving it onto less ‘subjective’
ground.
Firstly, an interpretation may be one that is based on the supposed inten-
tions of the author. In the study of the history of political thought, this is the
approach advocated by, for instance, Quentin Skinner, who claims “the essen-
tial aim, in any attempt to understand the utterances themselves, must be to
recover this complex intention on the part of the author’.'? Regarding inter-
pretations of the Antigone, versions of this approach have clearly been impor-
tant. Gerhard Miiller, for example, adheres to this method when stating that
the Hegelian interpretation misunderstands Sophokles’ intention.”
Secondly, however, an interpretation may not be concerned with the inten-
tion of the author at all. One version of this approach considers the meaning of
a tragedy to be the way in which it was understood by its audience.”' This is, of

'6 George Steiner, Antigones (New York and Oxford, 1984), p. 40.
'7 Martin Cropp, ‘Antigone’s Final Speech (Sophocles, ‘Antigone’ 891-928)’,
Greece and Rome, Second Series, XX XXIV (2) (1997), pp. 137-60, here p. 153. Cf.
Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Polis und Hades in der Antigone des Sophokles’, in Sophokles, ed.
Hans Diller (Darmstadt, 1967), p. 61.
18 Griffith, Antigone, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.
'9 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, in Mean-
ing and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Cambridge, 1988),
pp. 29-67, here p. 68.
20 Miiller, Sophokles Antigone, p. 9: ‘ein tiefliegendes Missverstiindnis dessen ist,
was Sophokles darstellen will’ (my emphasis).
21 This seems to be the kind of interpretation suggested in Christiane Sourvinou-
Inwood, ‘Assumptions and the Creation of Meaning: Reading Sophocles’ Antigone’,
Journal of Hellenic Studies, C1X (1989), pp. 134-48; Gregory Crane, ‘Creon and the
“Ode to Man” in Sophocles’ Antigone’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, XC
(1989), pp. 103-16, here p. 115. Whereas the latter is vague on this issue, it seems as if the
former at least comes fairly close to equating the audience’s understanding of the play
with the correct interpretation of it.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 381

course, a legitimate method, but it cannot be considered the only correct kind
of interpretation.
A third view is that a text has a meaning of its own, which is necessarily
dependent on the linguistic and other conventions ofits time, but which can be
interpreted independently of the author’s intentions and how it was read in its
own epoch.”* Hans-Georg Gadamer has persuasively argued the legitimacy of
this sort of venture.”* Also, this approach may look very different in different
interpretative schemes, and it may entail relativism as well. But interpreting
what Umberto Eco has called the ‘intentio operis’,”* the ‘intention of the
work’ itself as being independent of the intentions of the author cannot be
considered a strange or eccentric position.” The upshot is that these different
kinds of interpretation cannot really refute one another, since they are con-
cerned with different things; lack of clarity on this fact is probably one of the
reasons why there is ostensibly so little consensus regarding interpretations of
intellectual history.
Fourthly, however, an interpretation of the play may be an ‘illustration’ or
‘case study’. This has also been suggested regarding Hegel’s interpretation of
the Antigone.*° Now, if such is a case study in political, legal or moral issues,
then it seems that an assessment of the normative questions can be made quite
independently of the author’s intentions and the meaning or ‘message’ con-
veyed by the work. The play is treated as a mere illustration, then, as a para-
digm case upon which an external — and hopefully valid — framework is
imposed. The objection that is bound to be raised is why the interpreter would
need the work at all, since the interpretation does not seem to be concerned
with the author’s intentions or the meaning (however understood) of the work
itself. This kind of critique can also be aimed at purportedly non-normative
claims. In this vein, Jean-Pierre Vernant ferociously argues that psycho-
analytical readings of the Oidipous tyrannos were just exercises in the preju-
dices of psychoanalysis itself.*” The same can be argued in the case of recent
attempts at appropriating Antigone for the purpose of questioning norms of

22 For an attempt at clarifying the conditions under which such an approach is viable,
indeed necessary, cf. Johan Tralau, Mdnniskoskymning: Framlingskap, frihet, och Hegels
problem hos Karl Marx och Ernst Jiinger (Stockholm and Stehag, 2002), pp. 25-44;
German translation: Menschenddémmerung: Karl Marx, Ernst Jiinger und der Untergang
des Selbst, trans. Klaus-Jiirgen Liedtke (Freiburg and Munich, 2005).
23 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode: Grundziige einer philosophischen
Hermeneutik, in Gesammelte Werke, I (Tiibingen, 1990), p. 301.
24 Umberto Eco, J limiti dell’interpretazione (Milan, 1995), pp. 22 f.
25 Cf. Griffith, ‘Introduction’, pp. 25 f., who acknowledges the plurality of approaches.
26 Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, p. 105.
27 Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘(Edipe sans complexe’, in Vernant and Vidal-Naquet, Mythe
et tragédie en Gréce ancienne, I, pp. 75-98.
382 J. TRALAU

heterosexuality.”* The objection would be, then, that the interpretation is com-
pletely external to the work that is interpreted, and that a story constructed ad
hoc would serve the same purpose just as well or even better.
Given this manifold of possible perspectives, it is no surprise that a consen-
sus has not been reached. The first category seems to be, in principle, internal
to the work, whereas the third can have very different kinds of claims regard-
ing the truth of the interpretation as that which expresses something proper to
the work itself. Indeed, Gadamer’s hermeneutics in a way strives to supersede
this dichotomy of ‘internal’ and ‘external’. Moreover, objections regarding
the externality, and hence the irrelevance, of the fourth kind might not
impress Freudians, who are interested neither in intentions nor in meanings
but rather in the workings of the omnipresent unconscious. If this is also the
case in Hegel’s interpretation of the tragic, then we do not need to bother
about it. For Hegel claims to be doing something different: his project is to
develop something out of art that is already there in the work of art itself.”
There are two points that should be made here. First, in this case as in many
other debates, it seems that much of the controversy emanates not just from
different interpretations, but also from interpretations of different things. A
true interpretation of the intention of the author may not be identical to a true
interpretation of the meaning of the text. Furthermore, and more importantly,
when it comes to a normative understanding of Antigone, there might be a
way of countering the claim that a normative framework is imposed on the
tragedy from the outside, thus ignoring the work of art itself and simply using
it as a mere illustration of anachronistic principles that are foreign to it. Critics
who do not conform to the Hegelian reading, from Gennaro Perrotta and
R.C. Jebb to Gerhard Miiller and, more recently, Martin Cropp, are bound to
object to Vittorio Hésle’s Hegelian interpretation by saying, for instance, that
Antigone’s relentlessness and her crude rejection of Ismene are not portrayed
in a negative light within the drama itself, and that her lack of interest in the
authority of the state is due to her or Sophokles’ belief that there are other and
incomparably more important things.
Now, it has not really been conclusively argued that this is indeed the
case. Nevertheless, the purpose of this article is to propose a different way of
settling the dispute. Hegel is quite vague when it comes to showing that his
interpretation is indeed, in this sense, internal. But if, as is claimed by Hegel
and others, tragedy is really to be read as political philosophy in action,
then one should be able to do what one would do in other cases of normative
claims: articulate an internal criticism, that is, a normative assessment proceed-
ing from Antigone’s own principles and exploring their internal coherence.

28 Cf. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (New York,
2000), p. 6.
29 G.W-F. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Asthetik, 1, in Werke, XII] (Frankfurt/Main,
1986), p. 26.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 383

There is a general belief that a critique which deductively reveals how a

principle is applied inconsistently in a given work, or is even in some way
self-destructive, is more persuasive than a merely external critique. Indeed,
internal critique lies at the heart of any normative enterprise. Therefore, ina
way this would be the standard procedure in normative theory. However, if
the work being interpreted and assessed 1s a work of art, this is more often
than not much more difficult. Paintings rarely state principles from which
they deduce decisions regarding action. Perhaps, however, the Antigone is
different. For it may be possible to subject Antigone’s action to an internal
critique due to the moral and political position to which she herself adheres,
thus assessing its internal consistency. This would imply, then, that one
would in fact read the tragedy as political philosophy — and take it seriously
as such.
This sort of reading would not entail merely imposing an external norma-
tive framework on the play, for an internal critique cannot be external. It
would thus not be an imperialist appropriation of tragedy and its ‘Asian
values’. Internal critique was, of course, deeply imbedded in Greek culture.
Thus, such critique is not only true of, say, Plato, who lets Socrates advocate
a very demanding position when it comes to taking the opponent’s state-
ments seriously and thence slowly unravelling their inconsistencies.”
Indeed, Giorgio Colli suggests that the conflict and contest implied in the
Sophistic and Platonic philosophical practices, the attempt to reveal the lack
of clarity and consistency of one’s opponents, lies at the heart of Greek cul-
ture.*' But even those arguments about the role of internal critique in Greece
are not really necessary, since internal critique is fundamental to any kind of
normative inquiry. This goes also for the way political issues are raised in
the Antigone: critics of the Hegelian position claim that the drama itself
shows that Kreon’s action is inconsistent with his principles.” If it is indeed
possible to identify Antigone’s principles, then it will also be possible to
assess her position from within, without necessarily taking it to be the right
position. Such, then, would make it possible to read tragedy as political
theory.

Enmity and Amity

Early in the play, the new king, Kreon, gives a speech where he lays down
what he considers to be the principles of his politics, and proceeds to issue the
edict prohibiting the burial of Polyneikes. Now, it is generally held that the
political and moral conflict of the drama centres on the issue of philia. The
30 Cf. Plato, Meno, 75d.
31 Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milan, 2001), p. 102.
32 See, apart from Miiller’s Sophokles’ Antigone, passim, R.P. Winnington-Ingram,
Sophocles: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 97, 124; the latter, however, does
not cite Hegel in this context.
384 J. TRALAU

word philos — like its corresponding abstract noun philia and the verb
philed — carries a broad range of meanings, from ‘own’ and ‘close’ to
‘loved’, ‘spouse’, ‘family member’, ‘friend’ (in the sense of an emotion not
pertaining to love) and ‘political ally’: and philia generally has extremely
important normative implications in Greek political thought. We will see that
Antigone has her own particular understanding of who is a philos and what
that means.
Kreon is actually quite cautious about philos, even about simply using the
word. In his first speech, he condemns twice the idea that a philos 1s more
important than the good of the polis, the city or the ‘state’. His political
morality is that of the polis: for him, a person who is an enemy of the city
could never be a philos — out’ an philon pot’ andra dysmené chthonos /
theimén emautdi, ‘nor would | love / An enemy of my Jand as a close friend’
(187—188/210-211).*’ He could, perhaps, have used the term in a less cau-
tious and more affirmative way, in the sense of a “political ally’; yet the ambi-
guity of the term, and its possible meanings pertaining to kinship and ‘private’
emotions, seem to make it a genuinely problematical category for him to use.
Thus, being a philos is subordinated, indeed dependent upon, being loyal to
one’s city. Only when, as Kreon says by using the common Greek metaphor
of the state as a ship, the city sails straightly, can we philous poioumetha,
‘choose [literally: “make’’] friends for ourselves’ (190/213). The word is, as
R.P. Winnington-Ingram points out, important: ‘philoi are made, not
born’.** This immediately establishes a conflict with Antigone, for whom, as
we will see, philoi are not something that one chooses. So Kreon’s state-
ments about loyalty to the city are directed not only against personal emo-
tions of attachment and love, but also against the ties of kinship. This was
one of the deepest conflicts in Athens at the time, since the rising authority
of the city could only be won at the expense of the family or house, oikos,
and the ‘clan’, the genos — in particular, then, this applies to the noble fami-
lies who had their own claims to authority and legitimacy.*° Kreon fiercely
sides with the polis by making loyalty to the city a prerequisite for the bonds
of philia: when confronting Antigone, he explicitiy says that outoi poth’
houchthros, oud’ hotan thanéi, philos, ‘An enemy, even when he’s dead, is
not a friend’ (522/573).

33 Numbers in brackets refer to verses in the original text and in the translation.
34 Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, p. 123. Moreover, Bernard Knox points out that
this is the word used of * “adopting” a child’; Bernard W. Knox, The Heroic Temper:
Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1964), p. 87.
35 See, for instance, Charles Segal, Tragedy and Civilization: An Interpretation of
Sophocles (Norman OK, 1999) p. 184. Cf. Martin P:n Nilsson, Den grekiska religionens
historia: Olaus Petri foreldsningar hallna vid Uppsala universitet (Stockholm, 1921),
p. 140, who points out that the cult of the family’s ancestor-hero is similar to that of the
polis’ statefounder-hero.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 385

Yet there is something strange about this adhesion to the city instead of the
family. Kreon says that it is ‘like a brother to these [laws]’ (adelpha tonde,
192/215) that he has ordained the prohibition of burial. This ‘brother to’
means ‘according to’, but it is precisely adelpha, literally ‘sibling to’, which
is perhaps so remarkable in a drama about the burial of a brother, and which
seems to echo Antigone’s first line in the play where she addresses her
“very-sisterly’ (autadelphon) sibling Ismene and their subsequent dialogue,
where it is used several times about Polyneikes and Eteokles (adelphoin 13,
adelphon 46, adelphdoi 81). This phrasing is no mere coincidence: Kreon uses
a language that is adapted to other principles than those he expounds —
indeed, he is dependent on them for his position. He has, after all, inherited his
office because of Polyneikes’ and Eteokles’ death, that is, precisely through
the ties of kinship. Conversely, when his edict is questioned by his son, his
appeal to the imperative of a son’s absolute loyalty to his father appears to be
borrowed from the language of alliances and international relations of the
epoch.*° Moreover, it is often held that Kreon’s thought and politics are
shown to be unjust by the fact that he himself is defeated by the undoing of his
own closest philoi, his wife and son, towards the end of the tragedy.*’ But for
our purposes, what is of more interest is the principle — and it should be
pointed out that Kreon himself demands the absolute obedience of his son in
accordance with a family-oriented morality. As was previously said, it has
also been shown that Kreon’s own words can be used against him; this would,
for instance, apply to his statements about the inadequacy of not listening to
advice and of being too ‘hard’ or ‘rigid’ (178-181, 473-476). Kreon’s actions
thus do not seem to be in accordance with the principles to which he claims to
adhere, and his one-sidedness is shown by the fact that his political under-
standing of philia seems to disregard the importance of kinship and family.
Suffice it to say, for our purposes, that Kreon expounds a principle accord-
ing to which an enemy of the city must not be considered a philos, and that the
common good of the city may not be sacrificed for the sake of a philos, regard-
less of whether he is a friend or a member of one’s own family. Thus, philia is
dependent on personal loyalty: only one who does not behave like an enemy
can be a philos. Let us keep this ‘law’ in mind, for we may need it in what
follows.

36 Cf. Jebb’s commentary, ad 643-4, where Kreon’s understanding of philia seems

to echo Thoukydides’ definition of an alliance between cities, a symmachia.
37 Knox, The Heroic Temper, pp. 112 f. In an interesting reading (which would not,
however, give an adequate answer to the kind of question asked in this paper) Charles
Segal has claimed that Kreon’s action is shown to be unjustified by the fact that, at the
end of the play, he turns to a traditionally feminine grief and lament, that is, to the rituals
that he has himself scorned: Segal, ‘Lament and closure in Antigone’, in Sophocles’
Tragic World: Divinity, Nature, Society (Cambridge, MA and London, 1995), pp. 119-37,
here pp. 126, 136 f.
386 J. TRALAU

The Law of Philia

Antigone’s ‘law’ is different, of course: hers is a world wherein philia is the

main concern. She immediately establishes that denying Polyneikes a proper
burial is immoral. When telling Ismene about the edict, she says that Eteokles
will be buried syn dikéi / chrésthai dikaion toi nomdi, ‘as justice and law /
Require’ (23—4/29-30), whereas Polyneikes will not.** Here, she insistently
labels the prohibition unjust: nomos is, like diké, ambiguous: it is used of
‘laws’ in the strictly legal sense as well as of what is objectively ‘right’ — ina
sense, natural law — but also of ‘customs’. Thus, the prohibition of the
funeral transgresses right, justice, law or customary usage. This is not just an
offence against ‘tradition’, but also, as Antigone later makes clear when con-
fronted by Kreon, against religious obligations, and hence against the gods.
Kreon’s edict is not valid since it contradicts the agrapta kasphalé theon /
nomima, ‘the laws / Of the gods, that are unwritten and unfailing’ (454—5 /
500-501), which are by their nature eternally valid as opposed to the ephem-
eral existence of merely human laws, the nomoi that are given by Kreon. Now,
it might be tempting to look for a distinction between Kreon’s nomoi and
Antigone’s own (or rather, the gods’) nomima, but Antigone, as we will see,
will later also use nomoi with regard to the latter (908). Burial is, however, an
essential topic in Greek religious, moral and political thought. Jebb argued
that prohibiting a burial was such a scandal in the eyes of the Greeks that the
only possible interpretation is that Kreon is entirely wrong and that Antigone
is right.*? Yet this suggestion seems somewhat rash, though the outrage to tra-
ditional religion appears undeniable.“° After all, Athens itself had a legal prac-
tice that at the very least resembled Kreon’s edict. Indeed, it has been argued
that the reaction of the audience would necessarily be a categorical rejection
of Antigone’s action simply because everyone recognized the polis’ right to
punish wrongdoers in such fashion as Kreon lays down.*! This alleged reac-
tion on the part of the spectators does not necessarily interfere with the kind of
reading suggested in this paper, but in any case it would not seem to be a satis-
factory argument. First, it fails to consider that Thebes is, as Froma Zeitlin has
shown, depicted as an ‘Anti-Athens’ in tragedy, and that it is thus the scene of
gruesome conflicts from which Athens was free — a city whose importance

38 Here, the text is corrupt and very much contested (Miiller, for instance, says that he
does not even consider Jebb’s suggestion ‘mégliches Griechisch’ (Sophokles Antigone,
pp. 31 f)); yet the most recent editor points out that ‘[w]hatever reading we adopt, it is
clear that Ant. is describing the burial of Eteokles as “right” and in accordance with
“law” or “custom” ’ (Griffith, Antigone, p. 126).
39 Jebb, Antigone, ‘Introduction’, p. xx.
40 For the importance of libations and burial honours, see Walter Burkert, Griechische
Religion der archaischen und klassischen Epoche (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne and
Mainz, 1977), pp. 123 f., 297 ff.
41 Sourvinou-Inwood, ‘Assumptions’, p. 139.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 387

for the self-understanding of the Athenians was as a negative image, as what

Athens itself did not want to be.*” The audience might have been equally
acquainted with a version of the myth that portrayed how the Athenian hero-
king Theseus had forced Kreon and Thebes to let the corpses be buried —
which would make it difficult for the Athenian audience to immediately and
unconditionally identify themselves with Kreon.** Furthermore, one has to
take into account the extent to which, as Simon Goldhill has argued, tragedy
not only affirms the city’s politics and morality, but also actually questions
it?
So the burial issue evidently does not itself render any immediate answer to
the normative question raised by the drama. The first thing about Antigone’s
position, then, seems to be that it is imperative that the dead should be buried.
There is, of course, more to Antigone’s position than this, and the main
concern here is the role of philia. Polyneikes is a philos, and hence must be
buried. Antigone very insistently evokes the normative importance of some-
one’s being a philos. Dying for transgressing the decree is actually a small
thing since she will be with her ‘loved ones’ or ‘friends’: philé met’ autou
keisomai, philou meta, ‘With loving ties to him, / Ill lie with him who is tied
by love to me’ (73, 88-89). One might be tempted to interpret this as a kind of
incestuous desire for her brother. This would probably render the play less
interesting as a work in political philosophy, since her action would, then,
really just be due to a strange emotion in regard to a person for whom she
should not so feel. But Ove Strid has in any case recently argued that there is
actually very little textual evidence for such an interpretation.* Polyneikes is
not the only one to whom Antigone explicitly declares herself to be a phileé:
later, in her lamentation about going to Hades unwedded and unwept, she
addresses her dead father, mother and brother, saying that she departs in the

42 Froma Zeitlin, ‘Thebes: Theater of Self and Society in Athenian Drama’, in Noth-
ing to Do with Dionysos ?Athenian Drama in its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and
Froma Zeitlin (Princeton, 1992), pp. 130-67, here pp. 144 f.
43 As mentioned in Apollodoros’ Library, UI.vii.1. For an overview of the sources,
see Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources, | (Balti-
more, 1996), p. 296, cf. I, pp. 521 f. Such an Athenian intervention can be found in
Euripides’ Suppliants, which, admittedly, was written about twenty years after Sopho-
cles had staged the Antigone around 421 sc. But Aischylos’ lost Eleusinioi is supposed to
have contained such a version of the myth, too.
44 Simon Goldhill, ‘The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology’, in Nothing to Do with
Dionysos?, ed. Winkler and Zeitlin, pp. 97-129.
45 Strid points out that Antigone’s calling the dead Polyneikes adelphdi philtatdi,
‘[most] beloved brother’ (verses 81/98), often evoked in support of such an interpreta-
tion, is also used by Ismene about Antigone’s betrothed, Haimon (572); see Ove Strid,
‘Sophocles’ Antigone and her Incestuous Namesake’, in For Particular Reasons: Stud-
ies in Honour of Jerker Blomqvist, ed. Anders Piltz et al. (Lund, 2003), pp. 289-303.
Some editors have attributed verse 572 to Antigone instead, but that would not affect this
point
388 J. TRALAU

strong ‘expectation’ or ‘hope’ or ‘belief’ (kart’ en elpisin, ‘I hold strong

hopes,’ 897/958) that she will go there as a philé to them. Now, philoi, as we
have seen, connotes ‘friends’, ‘loved ones’ or ‘members ofthe family’ in gen-
eral. But one should be cautious about letting Antigone’s claim be a universal
one: the only ones actually mentioned by her as philoi are parents and sib-
lings.*° This, as we will see, is quite important.

But not Husbands and Children

This interpretation probably accounts for a very disturbing passage. In her

final speech, Antigone says that she would not have defied the edict had the
dead not been her brother: ou gar pot’ out’ an ei teknon métér ephyn/ out’ ei
posis moi katthanon etéketo, / biai politon tond’ an éiromén ponon, ‘For I
would never have assumed this burden, / Defying the citizens, if it had been /
My children or my husband who had died’ (905—7/967—969). Such would
appear to be a strange way of respecting the divine laws hitherto evoked by
Antigone in defence of her actions. But what is most disturbing to most critics
is her justification for this hypothetical choice: posis men an moi katthanontos
allos én, / kai pais ap’ allou photos, ei toud’ émplakon, ‘Were my husband
dead, there could be another, / And by that man, another child, if one / Were
lost’ (909-9 10/972—974). Since Antigone could substitute a dead child or
husband, but could never have a new brother, she would not have transgressed
the edict for a husband or a child. The text here echoes a passage in Herodotos,
where the Persian Intaphrenes’ wife answers in a similar way when given the
choice of whom to save when the rest of her family would be killed.*’ In the
case of Antigone, this has been perceived as either preposterous, scandalous,
primitive or sophistical. Goethe famously said that he hoped the text was cor-
rupt.** Moreover, some scholars have questioned its authenticity: Jebb and
Miiller claim that it is too linguistically deviant and awkward to be genuine,
and that it is inconsistent not only with her character but also with the ‘unwrit-
ten laws’.’? However, the passage is not generally considered corrupt, and
various attempts have been made to assert its consistency with the rest of the

46 Likewise, it could be suggested that Antigone’s main concern is an aristocratic

conception of honour. In the prologos, she says Ismene will — when deciding whether
or not to help her sister — show if she eugenés pephykas, is ‘[born] noble’ (38); and
when confronted by Kreon, she rhetorically asks how she could have had kleos . . .
eukleesteron, ‘greater glory’ (502) than by burying her brother. But clearly, there has to
be some reason why her action is indeed honourable apart from just being courageous —
that is, there has to be a kind of obligation regarding what she does.
47 Herodotos, Histories, 3.119.
48 Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespréaiche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines
Lebens: 1823-1832, II (Berlin, no year), p. 184 (28 March 1827),
4° See Jebb’s commentary, Antigone, pp. 181 ff.; Miiller, Sophokles Antigone, pp.
206 ff.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 389

play. Bernard Knox, for instance, gives a psychological explanation by saying

that a confused Antigone is trying to justify her actions to herself.°° Of a dif-
ferent kind are dramatic explanations, like the claim that this shift has nothing
to do with either psychology or principles, but is really just a shift from one
important Greek ‘theme’ or ‘motif’ to another, namely the transition from vir-
gin to wife.*' But neither of these interpretations would appear to be very sat-
isfying for a reading which is concerned with the political theory of the
drama: for in that case, this alleged shift would have to make some kind of
sense as a normative principle with a claim to logical consistency. If the pas-
sage is indeed authentic, it would in fact seem that Antigone actually wants to
explicate her principle. The justification is preceded by the kind of language
one would expect from a principled justification: tinos nomou dé tauta pros
charin lego; ‘In deference to what law do I say this?’ (908/971). Antigone
thus explicitly and rhetorically asks herself according to which nomos, which
‘law’ or ‘custom’, or more precisely, as Kamerbeek renders it, ‘principle’, it
is that she has this obligation.
A reasonable interpretation of Antigone’s nomos could thus be that there is
a special kind of obligation to those who are of one’s own blood in a more nar-
row sense, namely the siblings and the parents. Mark Griffith points out that
the thedn nomima she expounded earlier in the play are actually so vaguely
stated as to allow for this sort of content.°* Moreover, it has been claimed that
this would actually fit well with the structure of kinship in Athens, where the
child of a deceased man would be part of his family, but the widow would
return to the family to which she was born — which amounts to a strict separa-
tion of kinship by nature, physei, that is, blood ties, and kinship by law or con-
vention, nomdi.”* The opposition between nature and convention was indeed
one of the most important and controversial issues in fifth-century Athens.”
Furthermore, it should be noted that this kind of emphasis on the birth family,
as opposed to the marriage family, is elsewhere in tragedy expressed by other
one-sidedly archaic characters, namely Aischylos’ Erinyes in the Eumenides,
who say they do not haunt Klytaimestra, despite her murder of her husband,
precisely because she and Agamemnon were not of the same blood.”

50 Knox, The Heroic Temper, p. 104.

5! Matt Neuburg, ‘How Like a Woman: Antigone’s “Inconsistency” ’, Classical
Quarterly, XL (2) (1990), pp. 54-76.
52 J.C. Kamerbeek, The Plays of Sophocles: Commentaries, Ul, The Antigone
(Leiden, 1978), p. 160.
53 Griffith, Antigone, pp. 277 ff.
54 Cropp, ‘Antigone’s Final Speech’, p. 152.
55 As attested in Sophist writings such as Antiphon’s Peri alétheias (On Truth),
Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, B 44.
56 Aischylos, Eumenides, 212, 605.
390 J. TRALAU

Thus, Antigone’s understanding of kinship seems to be very narrow: philia

is about being of the same blood or, rather, ‘of the same womb’. Already, in
the first line of the play, Antigone uses autadelphon when addressing Ismene,
thus stressing their close relationship. She emphasizes, as Charles Segal
astutely points out, the etymological origin of the more common word for
brother and sister, adelphos and adelphé, which is precisely of ‘the same
womb’, delphys. In a similar manner, Antigone uses the extremely rare word
homosplagchnos (510), which originates in homos, ‘same’, and splagchna,
‘womb’. Antigone thus ‘struggles to restore the primordial unity of that “one
womb” ’.°’ So this kinship-philia must be understood as a radically exclusive
community, one to which only a mother, father and their children belong.
But the question is whether or not this reading of her final speech really
saves Antigone from inconsistency. It has been claimed that this is not the
case: Segal, for instance, says that ‘[t]he reasoning is emotionally, if not logi-
cally, consistent’. ** In a similar vein, Knox argues that one cannot deny the
‘illogicality’ of her words.” But neither of them really presents any conclu-
sive argument for their claims, and it is worth looking into it.
The principle on which Antigone acts is that there are universal laws
according to which performing burial honours is imperative, but this 1s only
an absolute obligation to philoi, to those who are of the same blood as the
deceased, that is, a sibling or a parent. Yet Antigone’s heavy emphasis on
‘same-wombness’ may account for her hypothetical but explicit choice not to
pay the burial honours to a husband if it were to entail her being executed for
the deed; on the face of it, however, it seems less apt to account for her pro-
fessing that she would not have done it for her own child. If the tie between
parent, child and siblings is of such immense normative importance, then it
would seem strange not to attribute just as much significance to one’s own
children as being members of a new birth family who are thus of a similarly
special philia relating to a person of the same blood and womb; for if
Antigone had children, she would be part of two different ‘same-womb’ com-
munities, one into which she was born, and one that she had herself taken part
in creating. It would, indeed, seem to be logically inconsistent not to let the
new “same-womb’ community be as important a philia as the old one.
Therefore, the only way of saving Antigone from inconsistency would be
to have the children belong to the community of philoi in a much stronger way
than do the parents. For the latter would also belong to another ‘same-womb’
community, and their loyalty and attachment to it would indeed have to be
stronger and more intense than to the one they, in turn, share with their chil-
dren. Now, this would establish an asymmetry in Antigone’s community of

57 Segal, Tragedy and Civilization, p. 173; cf. pp. 183 ff.

58 Jbid., p. 201.
59 Knox, The Heroic Temper, p. 107.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 391

the womb, but as a ‘law’ it could probably be formulated in a manner that is

not in any strong sense self-contradictory.
It could be argued that this ignores what Antigone says about the possibili-
ties of substituting a new philos for a dead one. This statement seems to add a
new element to Antigone’s ‘law’. But it can really be understood as a refor-
mulation of the same thing, namely the importance ofphilia and the superior-
ity of the natural over the conventional. For the only ones that are per
definitionem incapable of being substituted in Antigone’s ‘same-womb’ com-
munity are the parents. This reinforces her attachment to the original philia of
the womb as opposed to the one established later. The bonds of this commu-
nity are thus intrinsically regressive: even the ties of parent and child are dif-
ferent from each other depending on this attachment to the origin, for the
attachment of a parent for a child must be weaker than that for the parent’s
own parent.°°
So if Antigone is ‘inconsistent’, she is so in accordance with what Aristotle
in the Poetics argued to be necessary for the personae of tragedy — namely
that they should show consistency in character, or at least be ‘consistently
inconsistent’, homalés anomalon.°' This, then, is precisely what Antigone
is: her revolutionary attachment to the birth family envisages a law of kinship-
philia in which the emphasis on one’s own birth family is so radical and
strong that itrenders any new marriage family problematic or superfluous: the
birth family of one’s own children must indeed, according to Antigone’s
philial laws, necessarily and essentially be second to one’s own birth family.
It is thus ideologically coherent with an anti-political thought to which not
only the polis, but also in a broader sense the family, is a problem.
Thus, even if this law of philia can be formulated in a logically consistent
way, still this interpretation reveals an opposition that is inherent to it. By
seeking to establish an original, undivided and indivisible community, the law
expounded by Antigone actually creates an inner conflict among the ‘same-
womb’ philoi. For the parents, as members of this community, actually and
essentially belong to other and different communities, and likewise their chil-
dren are, even as members of a community of one womb that they have them-
selves created, in a very radical sense always much more a part of their birth

60 Tt could be objected that Antigone really just states the view that the child was more
related to the father than to the mother. But in the lamentation quoted earlier (898-9),
Antigone seems to make no distinction whatsoever between father, mother and brother
as philoi. Antigone says once that Eteokles is “of the same mother and father’ (ek mias te
kai tautou patros) in 513; in 466-7, she even says Polyneikes is ton ex emés / métros, ‘of
my mother’, without mentioning the father. If anything, this would appear to entail
emphasizing the mother as opposed to the father. Aristotle famously claimed that the
father provided the ‘form’ to the embryo whereas the mother contributed the ‘matter’
(Aristotle, De generatione animalium, 729a10-12); but this is not what Antigone seems
to be saying either.
61 Aristotle, Poetics, 1454a34.
392 J. TRALAU

family, than they are a part of the new birth family that they share with their
children.
This attachment to the original philia of the ones who share the same womb
actually establishes a kind of immanent division and potential conflict within
the ‘same-womb’ community — the kind of division, perhaps, that Antigone
herself seeks to overcome. For this community is at once inferior to a preced-
ing community as well as superior, indeed potentially hostile, to regeneration
and to the subsequent ‘same-womb’ community. Hence, the community of
the one womb is itself an opposition and a conflict.
It is thus perhaps no mere coincidence that Sophokles lets the guard
describe Antigone’s reaction when seeing her dead brother as that of a mother
bird: kanakonyei pikras / orthinos oxyn phthoggon hos, hotan kenés | eunés
neosson orphanon blepséi lechos, ‘wailing [. . .] the way a bird will give sharp
cries when she finds / that her nest and bed are empty and her babies / are
gone’ (423—425/468-471); for here, emotions usually associated with moth-
erhood are instead transferred to the brother. The image of the mourning
maternal bird conjures up language suggestive of matrimony as well: the
words meaning ‘nest’ or ‘bed’ (euné, lechos) are also words that carry the
meaning ‘marriage’. The sister is depicted as a mother and a wife, of sorts, to
her own brother. This not only corresponds to the kind of confusion of genera-
tions, the merging of what must be kept apart that constitutes the underlying
perversion and subversion in the Oidipous plays, but it also shows the nature
of Antigone’s law of the community of the ‘same womb’. The antipolitical
philia of the original birth-family not only has no loyalty to the polis, but also
excludes, crowds out and usurps the sentiments relating to children and
spouses.

Politics and Loyalty

Still, since the passage regarding husband and children has been contested
by some scholars, perhaps it cannot be taken as conclusive evidence that
Antigone’s laws are self-destructive. One would, however, because of her
stressing close family ties, have to grant that philia is her main concern. Yet
there is something strange about Antigone’s philia. It seems to be radically
unconditional — and at the same time very much dependent on one prerequi-
site: loyalty.
Philia, of course, has to be bounded by something else, something differ-
ent. Very early on, in the first lines of the play, Antigone establishes a relation
between friends and enemies. By asking if Ismene is aware of the pros tous
philous steichonta ton echthron kaka, ‘evils of our enemies / Are marching
now against our friends and dear ones’ (10/12—13), she posits an opposite to
the philoi, namely the echthroi, enemies. It is soon suggested that this does not
signify the Argive army just ousted from Thebes — of which the chorus will
tell us in the parodos celebrating sunrise and victory after Antigone and
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 393

Ismene have left the scene — but on the contrary Kreon. If her understanding
of philia were wider, her uncle Kreon would, of course, have been among the
loved ones. At the same time, Antigone emphasizes her close ties to Ismene
by calling her very insistently 6 koinon autadelphon Isménés kara, ‘my own
true sister’, or literally something like, ‘common “born of the same womb”
[sisterly] Ismene’s head’ (1). She thus shows that Ismene is a philé, whereas
Kreon is the opposite. It is at first not clear if Kreon would have been consid-
ered a philos had he not issued the edict so detested by Antigone — we will
have to wait for Antigone’s defence of the ‘same-wombness’ to discern
this — but by making the edict he has obviously turned into an echthros.
This does not yet, given her narrow understanding of friendship, show that
there is acomponent of demanding loyalty in Antigone’s notion ofphilia. But
there is more to consider. For when Ismene refuses to help, Antigone then
immediately transforms her status in the already established relation between
friends and enemies. The words from the semantic field of echthos, enmity
and hatred, which are conjured up by Antigone, are so insistent as to suggest
that this is not just a reaction of anger, but a deep-seated conviction in
Antigone’s morality of philia. When Ismene says that she will not tell anyone
about her sister’s plans, Antigone replies pollon echthion eséi / sigos’, ‘V\l
hate you even more if you / Keep quiet’ (86—7/103—104), thus rendering her
‘much more hated’ or ‘much more an enemy’, ‘much more echthra’. Just after
that, when Ismene insists that the action should not be taken, Antigone twice
evokes enmity again: ei tauta lexeis, echtharéi men ex emou, / echtra de toi
thanonti proskeiséi dikéi, ‘If you say that, you will be hated by me. / And
justly to the dead man you’ll remain / A hated enemy’ (93—4/110-112).
Ismene’s lack of loyalty will thus render her an enemy, an echthra, to both the
living and the dead loved ones. Thus, the very insistent language regarding
the proximity and intimacy ofthe sisters in Antigone’s first lines immediately
yields to a very intense categorization of Ismene as an enemy. This is, indeed,
an irreversible one: Antigone says that she would not accept Ismene’s help if
the latter were to offer it to her later. Antigone’s philial morality is a demand-
ing one.
For Antigone, then, being a philos seems to require loyalty. Later, after
Antigone has been caught pouring the libations for Polyneikes, Ismene claims
that she was herself Antigone’s accomplice, stating that she wishes to share
her sister’s death. However, this too is rejected by Antigone, and once more
we find this expressed in a language that is heavily loaded with the impor-
tance ofphilia: logois d’ egd philousan ou stergo philén, ‘I don’t like a loved
one who only loves with words’ (542/594). So one who is a loved one, a
philos, only in words, as opposed to being a loved one in prohibited and dan-
gerous deeds, is not someone to be loved — indeed, as Antigone has declared
earlier, such a one is an enemy.
394 ; J. TRALAU

But the question is how can this be reconciled with what Antigone thinks in
the case of Polyneikes. When confronted by Kreon, she claims that refraining
from giving her brother the appropriate honours would have hurt her more
than being executed for it, and that the god of death demands that she do it for
her brother (469, 519). When Kreon points out that the man killed by him was
a brother, too, and claims that outoi poth’ houchthros, oud’ hotan thanéi,
philos, ‘An enemy, even when he’s dead, is not a friend’ (522/573), Antigone
replies in a very oracle-like way: outoi synechthein alla symphilein ephyn,
‘My nature’s not to join in hate but to join in love’ (523/574). It is “her nature’
to ‘love together with’ — or she was, indeed, ‘born to love together with’:
what she is referring to, once again, can only be the community of the ones
sharing in birth and womb. By the use of this ephyn she once again sides with
nature, with what has been established by nature, physis. Respecting the
divine laws of Hades 1s, of course, one thing, and this could still be imperative
concerning Polyneikes’ corpse. Yet to Antigone it obviously does not matter that
Polyneikes has attacked not only his city, but his brother as well. She was
‘born’ or ‘created’ or it ‘is her nature’ to regard philoi as philoi rather than as
echthroi. Yet when Ismene displays lack of loyalty, she is excluded from the
bonds of philia. So it seems, as Mary Whitlock Blundell points out, that
Antigone is inconsistent: fratricide would have to be considered at least as
good a reason to turn a philos into an echthros as is refraining from giving the
proper burial honours when this entails risking one’s own life.”
It could of course be objected that the irreversibility of a philos turning into
an echthros only applies to those who are alive, and that a dead friend-turned-
enemy would bejust aphilos. But Antigone is very vague at this juncture. She
says that the dead man — Eteokles, one has to presume — would actually not
agree, or, more specifically, would not ‘testify’ to Kreon’s claim that bury-
ing Polyneikes would be a disgrace to Eteokles (ou martyrései tauth’ ho
katthanon nekys, ‘Eteokles’ dead body won’t testify to that’, 515/566). She
enigmatically, or ironically, asks tis oiden ei kato ’stin euagé tade, ‘Who
knows if down there that is not considered holy?’ (521/572). Still, it would be
difficult to claim that for Antigone complete philia prevails in Hades; in that
case, she would not have to say that she has a strong ‘hope’ or ‘expectation’

62 See Mary Whitlock Blundell, Helping Friends and Harming Enemies: A Study in
Sophocles and Greek Ethics (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 113 f, whose astute and innovative
approach is in some ways very similar to the one in this article, but whose interpretation
accounts neither for the internal opposition involved in Antigone’s speech about the
substitutability of husband and wife, nor for Antigone’s one-sidedness in her dependence
on Kreon’s political philia, to which we will now turn. Furthermore, and more impor-
tantly, it appears that her critique is in the end not internal, for she seems to be judging
‘character’ from a standpoint that is not always intrinsic to the drama itself -- an example
of this is her claim that Kreon does not understand ‘authentic philia’ (p. 121), for one
would have to ask what this ‘authentic’ phenomenon is and whether it is really a value to
which Kreon himself adheres.
 TRAGEDY AS POLITICAL THEORY 395

that she will come to her mother and father in Hades as a philé. Moreover, it
could be argued that Antigone punishes Ismene not only in life but also in
death, when fiercely rejecting her and not letting her sister share in her own
death.
Antigone thus demands a kind of loyalty from Ismene that she declares to
be irrelevant in the case of Polyneikes. The double fratricide among philoi
does not affect philia, but the refusal to bury the dead brother entails turning
into an enemy, even if performing the burial implies risking one’s life. This
surely seems self-contradictory, for when dealing with Ismene, Antigone dis-
tinguishes between friend and enemy in a way that she has herself declared
irrelevant.

The Law of Philia as the Law of Enmity: the Need for the Political
But this also means that Antigone ultimately has to fall back on a position to
which she is opposed. Kreon had grounded his conception of the political
community in the notion of loyalty: a good and stable city whose authority
was respected by its citizens was, indeed, a prerequisite for philia; only then,
Kreon says in a very Hegelian way, philous poioumetha, ‘[do we] choose
friends for ourselves’ (190/213). Hence, Hegel claims that both Kreon and
Antigone are one-sided, which is a claim that is easily substantiated in the
case of Kreon, but often said to be less so with respect to Antigone. But this,
then, is Antigone’s one-sidedness: her law, her principle, can really only
make sense when subordinated to a principle that is foreign to it. The nomos of
the unconditional unity of the ones related to the same womb actually does not
work when it is not simply applied to the dead loved ones, to whom Antigone
herself devotes her attention.
Antigone never responds to the arguments regarding the authority of the
polis expounded by Kreon and Ismene: she insistently ignores the city as a
political entity. To Ismene, she says about Kreon’s authority that all’ ouden
autoi ton emon m’ eirgein meta, ‘It’s not for him to keep me from my own’
(48/60) — this seems to express complete philia among those of the ‘one
womb’, while at the same time not acknowledging any political authority out-
side the bonds of that community. When she does indeed talk about the polis,
just before she is taken away never to return, it should be noted how she
equates the city with her own family: 6 gés Thébés asty patrdion / kai theoi
progeneis, ‘O city of Thebes, of /my fathers and my land! / O gods of my
ancestors!’ (937—938/1005—1006).° This seems to be her authority — the
father and the ancestors. Those are tribal gods. Those are her family, her

63 Winnington-Ingram, Sophocles, p. 141, seems to interpret this as a kind of recog-

nition of the polis. Yet it seems reasonable to argue that the intertwining of the polis in the
language of kinship is too insistent for such discontinuity in her character to be estab-
lished.
396 J. TRALAU

oikos. So one should not make too much of the fact that Antigone never
explicitly states that the polis has no legitimate authority whatsoever.”
For Antigone never grants the city any authority to distinguish between
friend and enemy. When one of her philoi attacks Antigone’s and his own
polis with a foreign army and kills his own brother, she therefore insists on
equal treatment, since no distinction is to be made between philoi. Lack of
loyalty, enmity, echthos, towards the city and other philoi, is irrelevant — she
will accept no distinctions in the community of the womb. Polyneikes remains
a philos, and Antigone rejects the kind of political understanding of philia
according to which loyalty to the political community is imperative. Yet this
intransigent insistence on philoi being philoi breaks down when she is con-
fronted with a philos who is alive and who acts in a way that divides the fam-
ily. Here, Antigone has to fall back on a political principle, that is, a principle
that is oriented to the polis, and which she herself has rejected: namely that
distinguishing between friend and enemy is imperative, and that this must be
done based on loyalty.
Such, then, is the one-sidedness of Antigone: in order to make sense of her
own principles she has to rely on a principle that she rejects — namely the one
which Kreon expounds. This is also, then, the inconsistency and self-
destructive character of Antigone’s ‘laws’: even according to her own princi-
ples she will have to take over and appropriate their opposite. If this is correct,
then understanding the Antigone in this way does not merely imply the impo-
sition of an external normative perspective that is alien to the work itself (and
Hegel takes pains to emphasize that his dialectics is not such a ‘foreign’ per-
spective), but rather it implies something internal to the work which is being
interpreted, criticized and understood. It is supposed to be, as Hegel says, ‘der
Gang der Sache selbst’, ‘the way of the thing itself’.®° According to the inter-
pretation developed in this article, this applies to the Antigone as well: the
destruction of her principles seems to follow from the principles themselves.
Thus, the reading suggested here makes it possible to read tragedy, and hence
art, as political philosophy. For the understanding of Antigone’s laws as
essentially inconsistent, self-destructive and one-sided, is internal; it comes
from inside the work of art itself.

Johan Tralau UPPSALA UNIVERSITY

64 As does Blundell, Helping Friends, p. 146.

65 G.W.F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik, 1, Die objektive Logik, in Gesammelte
Werke, XXI (Hamburg, 1984), p. 38.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY

Hannah Dawson'?

Abstract: This article investigates the impact of Locke’s philosophy of language on

his political thought. It argues that certain aspects of his linguistic theory have a devas-
tating impact on his vision of civil society. There are three ways in which the Lockean
commonwealth is threatened. First, Locke’s belief in the sovereign and constitutive
power of words impedes the toleration that he holds so dear. Second, his fear that men
break the compacts that make language work throws into doubt the possibility of the
trust that generates and sustains political society. Third, his radical thesis of semantic
instability undermines the foundations of community: sociability, the ‘social contract’
and culture. While Locke’s politics might, in the light of this analysis, appear impos-
sible, I end by suggesting that these tensions capture the ineliminably problematic
character of political life.

I
In Book II of his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689), John
Locke lays out a rich philosophy of language. While philosophers have
poured over this particular book, evaluating the truth and integrity of its
arguments and examining their place in Locke’s theory of knowledge,’
historians of his political thought have largely ignored it. While there has been
some illuminating work which integrates his epistemology into his political

' Tam extremely grateful to Richard Bourke for asking me to speak at the History of
Political Ideas Seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for which I conceived this
paper and at which I received many helpful comments, particularly from Janet Coleman,
Greg Claeys, Ross Harrison and Fred Rosen. I am also grateful to David Runciman for
inviting me to the Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar at the University of
Cambridge, where I benefited from further observations, particularly from Annabel
Brett, John Dunn and Mark Goldie. My warm thanks go to Quentin Skinner and James
Tully for their stimulating suggestions on the final chapter of my book — Locke, Lan-
guage and Early-Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, forthcoming in 2006) — out of which
this article grew. Finally, I am indebted to the referees of this journal, whose incisive
notes J have done my best to incorporate.
2 Queens’ College, Cambridge. Email: [email protected]
3 Some notable examples are: Norman Kretzmann, ‘The Main Thesis of Locke’s
Semantic Theory’, The Philosophical Review, 77 (1968), pp. 175-96; Hans Aarsleff,
‘Leibniz on Locke on Language’, in From Locke to Saussure (Minneapolis, 1982),
pp. 42-83; E.J. Ashworth, ‘Locke on Language’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 14
(1984), pp. 45-73; Charles Landesman, “‘Locke’s Theory of Meaning’, in John Locke:
Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft (London and New York, 1991), Vol. IV,
pp. 218-34; Michael Losonsky, ‘Locke on Meaning and Signification’, in Locke’s Phi-
losophy: Content and Context, ed. G.A.J. Rogers (Oxford, 1994), pp. 123-41; Walter
Ott, Locke’s Philosophy of Language (Cambridge, 2003).
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005
398 H. DAWSON

philosophy,* very little has been said about his linguistic theory in this con-
text.° This is strange, given that language is the means of human interaction;
more particularly, in some important and irreducible ways, language is the
essential mechanism by which political society, as Locke understands it, is
both created and sustained. Far from being just another aspect of his elaborate
way of ideas, which tends to be siphoned off to the other side of what is too
often a strict disciplinary divide, language is part of the heart of his political
vision. This article will assess the impact of Locke’s philosophy of language
on his political project.
I argue that Locke’s beliefs about language have a potentially devastating
effect on his vision of civil society. I identify three elements in his linguistic
theory that threaten to sever the already splitting threads on which his ideal
commonwealth hangs.
I should begin by emphasizing that the kind of words I examine in this article
concern culture, not nature.° To put it more technically, I consider the names of
what Locke calls ‘mixed modes’ and ‘relations’ (although he tends to subsume
relations under the category of mixed modes, and I shall do so here).’ These are
entities that, if they exist in nature at all, do not do so in any permanent way,
such as ‘truth’, ‘heresy’, ‘right’, ‘love’ and ‘vice’. They are made up by men
and have no fixed referents in the external world. The names of mixed modes
therefore form the vocabulary of the social sphere and, unfortunately, they are
peculiarly affected by the three features of language that I discuss.
4 This includes: James Tully, ‘Governing Conduct’, in Conscience and Casuistry in
Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 12-71; Ian Harris,
The Mind of John Locke: A Study of Political Theory in its Intellectual Setting (Cam-
bridge, 1994); Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in
Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge, 2002), especially pp. 44-82. See John Dunn,
‘Measuring Locke’s Shadow’, in John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and a Letter
Concerning Toleration, ed. Jan Shapiro (Yale, 2003), pp. 257-85, for a critique of the
quest for a unified Locke.
5 There has been some work done on the relationship between language and society
in Locke, notably: Rosalie L. Colie, “The Social Language of John Locke: A Study in the
History of Ideas’, in John Locke: Critical Assessments, ed. Richard Ashcraft (4 vols.,
London, 1991), Vol. IV, pp. 259-80; Peter Walmsley, ‘Prince Maurice’s Rational Par-
rot: Civil Discourse in Locke’s Essay’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 28 (4) (1995),
pp. 413-25.
6 While Locke has many interesting things to say about names of simple sensations
and of natural substances, and some of them very much at odds with what he says about
names of non-natural things, for the most part these lie outside the social scope of this
paper — except in two regards: first, they can provide an illuminating contrast to the
non-natural names; second, some substance terms, particularly ‘man’, are involved in
social discourse (on this difficult issue see note 95 below).
7 He admits as much in John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding,
ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), p. 437 (III.v.16); Cf. II.v which is entitled ‘Of the
Names of mixed Modes and Relations’, but talks only about mixed modes, revealing
Locke’s inclusion of relations in this category.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 399

In the first place, Locke fears that words effectively dominate ideas — or
meanings.* While he accepts without question the long-established view that
thought is theoretically prior to language, he argues that in practice language
has a sovereign place over ideas in cognition as well as in communication.
This linguistic regime especially affects mixed modes because they have no
objective standard to keep them real, as we might say. Their names, being the
only firmly public things about them, have carte blanche. Unable to see
beyond description, we are locked in a vicious circle of words. The practical
priority of non-natural language gives it a mask-like and creative potency that
jeopardizes one of the key policies of Locke’s ideal commonwealth: religious
toleration. The very reality of the words themselves enables them impres-
sively to overreach their ideational limits and thereby to undermine Locke’s
humbling, quietist, epistemological-political agenda. Intolerance is illegiti-
mate, but the act of war that it constitutes against its victims appears to be
legitimated by the ‘truth’ trumpeted in language.
The second element in Locke’s philosophy of language that has dangerous
political ramifications is directly connected to the first. The conventionality
of language, in addition to its constitutive power, opens the gate to the enemy
of Locke’s state: infidelity. Words only have public meaning through com-
pact and they obscure their subjective content. Together, these characteristics
of language provide the possible instantiation as well as the instrument of
breaking one’s word. In certain crucial circumstances we have no option but
to take the contents of words on faith, or credit. The dense front of language,
that cannot be gainsaid, is the site as well as the means of breaches of trust;
and trust is, for Locke, the very foundation of political society. Language
therefore, through a combination of opacity and creativity on the one hand
and conventionalism on the other, both enables and exhibits the perforation of
the quality upon which political society is based.
The third aspect of Locke’s linguistic theory that has strong political reso-
nance seems to destabilize the civil edifice at an even deeper level. I shall call
this aspect semantic instability: the view that the meanings of words are unstable,
that different people mean different things by the same words. This view calls
into question the very existence of the compact that affixes certain words to
certain ideas. It suggests that there is not even an agreement to be broken,
thereby unpicking yet further the social fabric. Semantic instability is the
shocking but logical consequence of the traditional claim that words signify
ideas, when that claim comes up against Locke’s distinctive epistemology. If
8 Given that for Locke, as for his contemporaries, words signify thoughts or ideas,
‘ideas’ and ‘meanings’ come to the same thing. For example, Locke, Essay, p. 422
(IIL.iv.6): ‘the meaning of words, being only the ideas they are made to stand for by him
that uses them’. Cf. John Kersey, A New English Dictionary, ed. R.C. Alston (Menston,
1969 [1702]), wherein ‘to mean’ is explicated as ‘to purpose, to understand, or to sig-
nify’; John Sergeant, The Method to Science (London, 1696), p. 3: “The words Notion,
Simple Apprehension, Conception, and Meaning, are all synonymous terms’.
400 H. DAWSON

words signify ideas, as all agree, then, Locke concludes, they can only signify
the particular ideas that their users happen to have — which will diverge as
radically as their particular experiences and beliefs diverge. Locke’s anti-
innatist, ‘empirical’ and constructivist way of ideas has the effect of giving
people very different ideas from one another. Mixed modes are particularly
likely to proliferate because they are collections of ideas that are voluntarily,
and therefore possibly divergently, composed by people. Moreover, unlike
ideas of natural ‘substances’, like gold, which more or less converge, mixed
modes have no external benchmark to which the community can ostensibly
refer, and are therefore subject to radical diffusion. Semantic instability jeop-
ardizes the genesis and the sustenance of the Lockean commonwealth, both of
which rely on semantic universality. Locke commits himself to a thesis of
thorough miscommunication. But at the same time his civil community
depends in various fundamental ways on collective understanding. I shall ask
whether Locke’s sceptical philosophy of language threatens to render impos-
sibly fraught, if not logically impossible, his political project.

II
I turn first to the constitutive, and therefore potentially duplicitous power of
words. Locke’s fundamental linguistic thesis is that ‘words in their primary or
immediate signification, stand for nothing, but the ideas in the mind of him that
uses them’.’? However, ideas, the absolute limits to meaning, are irrevocably
private and depend entirely on words for their publicity. A man’s ideas ‘are all
within his own breast, invisible, and hidden from others, nor can of them-
selves be made appear’. In order to communicate, “it was necessary that man
should find out some external sensible signs, whereby those invisible ideas,
which his thoughts are made up of, might be made known to others’.'° Words
serve as the only means by which we might know someone else’s mind. We
have no other choice but to take words at face value.
The names of mixed modes — words such as ‘trust’, ‘love’, ‘liberty’, ‘obliga-
tion’ — that form the language of civil society, are particularly imperspicuous.
When Locke is speculating about how language began, he conjectures that
words that have no public referents must have been taken from those that do.
While people could agree to name an idea derived from the five senses by vir-
tue of ostensive definition, it would have been impossible to agree what to call
non-sensible ideas except by applying to them, metaphorically, those already
agreed upon names. Locke gives the example of ‘spirit’ which, ‘in its primary
signification, is breath’.'' His hypothesis about the origin of language illumi-
nates the distinctive obscurity of names of ideas that are not derived from

9 Locke, Essay, p. 405 (ILii.2).

10 Tbid., p. 405 (IILii.1).
\l Tbid., p. 403 (IIL.i.5).
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 401

sense experience. Unlike names of sensations and substances, such as ‘blue’

and ‘tree’, which can be somewhat verified and checked by the objective
world, purely conceptual talk has nothing to tie it down. Mixed modes, those
ideas that mediate society, are peculiarly dependent on words for their com-
munication, and therefore have a peculiar form of generative power.
It is not only in communication that ideas are at the mercy of words, but in
private thought as well. As Locke says, men ‘set their thoughts more on words
than things’.'* Ideas, especially of an abstract and complex kind, are elusive
and difficult and the mind prefers to think in sensible and simple words. This
preference is developed when we are very young, and we internalize the
sounds rather than the meanings of words. ‘From our cradles’, writes Locke,
“we come to learn certain articulate sounds very perfectly, and have them
readily on our tongues, and always at hand in our memories’, so that ‘not only
children, but men’ turn out ‘no otherwise than parrots do’.'? It is due to the
pre-eminence of words in thought as well as in conversation that Locke feels
impelled to add Book III to the Essay. He must deal with words separately
from ideas because, as he says, words “interpose themselves so much between
our understandings and the truth, which it would contemplate and apprehend,
that like the medium through which visible objects pass, their obscurity and
disorder does not seldom cast a mist before our eyes, and impose upon our
understanding’.'* Words might be subservient to ideas in theory, but they
dominate in practice, writing the world in their own opaque image.
This disjunction between linguistic theory and practice leads Locke to
adopt two opposing positions on toleration — one of the pillars of his civil
society. On the one hand, his thesis that words signify ideas, along with his
probabilistic, mitigated scepticism, is designed to promote toleration. On the
other, the practical predominance of language undermines the theoretical lim-
itations on it. Locke’s constriction of language, like knowledge, to purely
experiential ideas, is intended to delegitimate most claims to absolute truth. ‘I
think’, counsels Locke in the vicious debate about the soul’s immateriality,
‘that it becomes the modesty of philosophy, not to pronounce magisterially,
where we want that evidence that can produce knowledge’.’° By restricting
the scope of language to the poverty of the human understanding, Locke
reveals the epistemological sand on which the blaring dogmatists stand. He
thereby uncovers the injustice of any interventions in people’s lives that are
grounded on indifferent doctrinal convictions.

!2 Ibid., p. 408 (IIL.ii.7).

'3 Thid., pp. 407-8 (IIL.ii.7).
'4 Tbid., p. 488 (IIL.ix.21). For a fuller analysis of Locke’s concerns about the domi-
nance of language and the context to which they were a response see Dawson, Locke,
Language and Early-Modern Philosophy, Chs. 6 and 9.
'5 Locke, Essay, pp. 541-2 (IV.iii.6).
402 H. DAWSON

However, this benign effect of Locke’s linguistic theory is undermined by

his fears about the constitutive power of words. Rather than enforcing tolera-
tion, creative words in fact usher in persecution and enthusiasm. The theoreti-
cal chains on speech are broken by the unfettered power of words to say
anything they like. Words give the lie to their ideational limits. They enable
and encourage speakers to outstretch their knowledge. ‘However preposter-
ous and absurd it be’, admits Locke ruefully, ‘to make our names stand for
ideas we have not. . . it being in effect to make our words the signs of nothing;
yet tis evident to any one, whoever so little reflects on the use men make of
their words, that there is nothing more familiar’.'° At the same time that it
theoretically shuts the mouths of power-hungry persecutors, the contradictory
core of Locke’s philosophy of language contains the means by which speak-
ers might gloss over their ignorance with a picture of certainty. While Locke
dismisses the great bulk of fancy terms as ‘gibberish’, he sees clearly how
they serve ‘so well to palliate men’s ignorance, and cover their errours’ ."”
The fine looking visage of language not only conceals the speakers’ igno-
rance from those they are lecturing, but also from the speakers themselves. In
their lazy, vain self-interest, speakers use the palpable comfort of language to
plug the gaping holes in their minds. Locke gives an insightful analysis of
how the nature of language prompts people to take it for true and how people
rush to delude themselves thus. ‘Because men would not be thought to talk
barely of their own imaginations, but of things as really they are; therefore
they often suppose their words to stand also for the reality of things’.'* In the
earliest draft of the Essay (1671), Locke had already come to the sad conclu-
sion that ‘the greatest part of men take the sounds of words for the notions of
things’.'? Language produces a mirage of reality, and the heat of (self-)
delusion.
The de facto rule of words over ideas enables clerics and politicians to
pretend to a knowledge they do not have. On this basis they force people to
conform and punish those who do not, thereby invading precisely those invio-
lable rights it is their duty to protect, and so chip away at civil society.

lil
The insuperable opacity of words plays a leading role in the second element in
Locke’s philosophy of language that poses a serious obstacle to the progress
of civil society. The fact that words act more like a painting than a window
contributes to their being both agents and illustrations of infidelity. In
16 Tbid., p. 502 (IIL.x.21).
'7 Tbid., p. 497 (III.x.14).
18 Tbid., p. 407 (IILii.5).
'9 Locke, Draft A in Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and
Other Philosophical Writings, ed. Peter H. Nidditch and G.A.J. Rogers (3 vols., Oxford,
1991), Vol. I, pp. 1-83, p. 13.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 403

addition, this perfidious potentiality in language is more fundamentally gen-

erated by the fact that language is a creature of compact. It is the result of cer-
tain agreements between members of the speech community that they trust
each other to keep.”’ As with all compacts, the linguistic compacts are liable to
be broken. This liability is especially problematic in the case of language as a
result of the impenetrability that I described above. The dark facade of words
hides the breaches of trust from the hearer; and breaches of trust, for Locke,
are bad news for civil society. While commentators are well aware of the piv-
otal role played by trust in Locke’s political theory and of his deep anxiety
about its betrayal, they have not considered his treatment of language in this
regard.”! It reveals particular concerns about people’s everyday propensity to
break their compacts and therefore casts an even longer shadow over Locke’s
commonwealth, where relationships between subjects as well as between sub-
jects and prince are brokered through compact. Locke’s reflections on lan-
guage develop the distress about interpersonal faith he expresses elsewhere
and make even more doubtful the likelihood of a true political association.
Language is in two senses a compact. The first is what I shall call the
semantic compact. This is the agreement and the obligation between men to
make certain sounds stand for certain ideas, or meanings. With the exception
of an albeit enthusiastic minority of thinkers, the great majority of early
modern philosophers subscribed to this conventionalist thesis.” In the
Advancement of Learning (1605), Francis Bacon, for example, explains that
20 Although Locke and his contemporaries may not have been clear on this termino-
logical distinction (and while his contemporaries did describe language as a ‘contract’, I
use the term ‘compact’ to distinguish it from a ‘contract’. Whereas a ‘contract’ is a tech-
nical legal term, enforceable by positive law, a ‘compact’ is just a synonym for an agree-
ment. In the case of language, it signifies an informal, tacit agreement enforceable only
by reciprocal expectation (and natural law) that entails reciprocal obligation and bene-
fits. 1am very grateful to James Murphy for helping me to clarify contemporary use of
‘contract’, “compact’ and ‘trust’.
21 See John Dunn, ‘Trust in the Politics of John Locke’, in Rethinking Modern Politi-
cal Theory: Essays 1979-1983 (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 34-54. Cf. Dunn, ‘Trust and
Political Agency’, in Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981-1989 (Cam-
bridge, 1990), pp. 26-44, p. 34 on betrayal being ineluctably the other side of the coin.
22 In Les voix du signe: nature et origine du langage a la Renaissance (1480-1580)
(Paris and Geneva, 1992), Marie-Luce Demonet establishes that there was a broad con-
sensus in the sixteenth century that the relationship between language and meaning was
arbitrary. A sweeping look at seventeenth-century texts indicates that the consensus
held. By contrast, many commentators have emphasized beliefs in a natural link
between sign and signified, in particular with reference to Adamicism, Plato’s Cratylus,
Hermeticism and the Cabbala. Notable among these commentators are: Allison Coudert,
‘Some Theories of a Natural Language from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Cen-
tury’, in Magi Naturalis und die Entstehung der modernen Natur wissenschaften
(Wiesbaden, 1978), pp. 56-114; Allison Coudert, ‘Forgotten Ways of Knowing: The
Kabbalah, Language and Science in the Seventeenth Century’, in Shapes of Knowledge
from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Donald R. Kelley and Richard H. Popkin
404 : H. DAWSON

words are connected to cogitations ‘ad placitum, having force only by con-
tract’.** Locke agrees. Words are made signs of ideas ‘not by any natural
connexion, that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain
ideas .. . but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbi-
trarily the mark of such an idea’.** While language began through acts of indi-
vidual linguistic legislation, people like Adam affixing words to ideas as they
pleased, these word—idea connections were cemented by the ‘tacit consent’ of
the community, in a process almost as unimaginable as it had been impercep-
tible.”” Once established, ‘common use’ deprives people of their original ‘lib-
erty’ to make (now familiar) sounds stand for whatever ideas they please.”
They are bound in a loose form of reciprocal obligation to use words as “the
rule of propriety’ dictates.’? While the semantic compact does not have the
force of a legal contract, Locke evokes its normative power when, drawing on
a venerable metaphorical tradition,”* he compares words to money in an effort
to explain how speakers are obliged to obey the law of propriety. “For words,
especially of languages already framed, being no man’s private possession,
but the common measure of commerce and communication, ’tis not for any
one, at pleasure, to change the stamp they are current in; nor alter the ideas

(Dordrecht, 1991), pp. 83-99; The Language of Adam, ed. Allison Coudert (Wiesbaden,
1999); David S. Katz, ‘The Language of Adam in Seventeenth-Century England’, in His-
tory and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper, ed. Hugh Lloyd-Jones,
Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (London, 1981), pp. 132-45; James T. Bono, The Word
of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science and
Medicine (Wisconsin, 1995). The important piece that argues for the strength of
Adamicism in the seventeenth century and for Locke’s correlative rejection of it is
Aarsleff, ‘Leibniz on Locke on Language’.
23 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon: The Oxford
Authors, ed. B. Vickers (Oxford, 1996), pp. 120-299, p. 231.
24 Locke, Essay, p. 405 (IILii.1).
25 Ibid., pp. 470-1 (III.vii.51); p. 408 (IILii.8).
26 Tbid., p. 408 (III.ii.8). In Part IV we shall see that, while personal and public use
ought to converge, Locke was concerned that in fact people still individually determine
what ideas words stand for, with the effect that common use often turns out to be little
more than a collection of disparate individual uses. The very existence of the semantic
compact is therefore called into question. For the moment, however, I am dealing with
the law of propriety in the existent way that Locke frequently presents it — as a fixed
and accessible standard that arbitrarily links certain words to certain ideas (of any kind,
sensible as well as insensible, simple as well as complex) to which people are bound to
conform.
27 Ibid., p. 467 (III.vi.45); p. 479 (IILix.8).
28 E, g- Quintilian, /nstitutio, Vol. 1, p. 113; Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 231;
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 28-9. Locke owned all
three of these texts. (The Library of John Locke, ed. John Harrison and Peter Laslett (2nd
edn., Oxford, 1965), pp. 78, 155.)
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 405

2 29 ¢
they are affixed to’.~’ ‘He that applies his names to ideas, different from their
common use, wants propriety in his language, and speaks gibberish’.*” Words
have no public meaning except insofar as the community takes them to mean
something, and people can only trust that others are using them in this way.”!
The breach of the semantic compact, hidden behind words, is therefore a seri-
ous offence, making communication impossible and going more or less
undetected.
The ease with which the semantic compact can be broken depends on what
type of idea is involved. While the association between words such as ‘blue’
and the ideas they stand for is set up by convention, the rule is readily estab-
lished (for example, by pointing to the sky on a clear day), effortlessly obeyed
and tricky to flout. There is no doubt about whether the word is being properly
used, and where there is doubt it can be dispelled by bringing the infallible
senses to bear. The situation is more complicated with the names of sub-
stances — scholastics, Cartesians and (new) nominalists profoundly disagree-
ing about what they refer to. What is important to us, however, is the way that,
even in philosophical debate, as in ordinary conversation,” the objective exis-
tence of the things presses irresistibly on all discourse, regardless of what one
might believe about the shape of ultimate reality. Nature restricts the extent to
which people can speak improperly about it; they would just sound ridiculous
if they said that a parrot was a ‘man’. With regard to mixed modes, however,
the semantic compact is extremely fragile. It is easily broken because all that
exists, in a permanent, public sense, are the words. While the natural world
sets a limit on credulity, there is no such pressure on cultural discourse.
Largely a matter of ideational-linguistic construction, mixed modes have no
third party to regulate them. Categorical statements can be made about ‘right’
and ‘wrong’, ‘murder’ and ‘self-defence’, for example, without check. With-
out an objective block to the audience’s gullibility, speakers can easily get
away with ‘improper’ speech.
The most extreme instance of the disruption of the semantic compact is the
art of rhetoric, which by the end of the seventeenth century had arguably been

29 Locke, Essay, p. 514 (IILxi.11).

30 Thid., p. 506 (III.x.31).
3! | am grateful to Janet Coleman for pointing out the many continuities between
Augustine and Locke. On Augustine’s view that conventional language is grounded in
trust and on his more general characterization of humans as ‘creatures of trust’ see Janet
Coleman, A History of Political Thought From Ancient Greece to Early Christianity
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 317-18. Cf. Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Recon-
struction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 86, 98.
32 Locke, Essay, p. 501 (III.x.19) explains that ‘the word Gold (which by standing for
a more or less perfect collection of simple ideas, serves to design that sort of body well
enough in civil discourse)’. On the distinction between the ‘civil’ and ‘philosophical’
uses of words see ibid., p. 476 (IIL.ix.3); p. 484 (IILix.15).
406 H. DAWSON

whittled down to the techniques of elocutio — the figures and the tropes.”
This is certainly how Locke sees it, summing up the art as ‘figurative
speeches’.** The orator professionally breaks the semantic compact. He takes
a word, removes it from its ‘proper’ meaning and applies it to another. As
Henry Peacham recounts in his Garden of Eloquence (1577), a trope is ‘an
alteration of a worde or sentence, from the proper and natural signification, to
another not proper, but yet nye and likely’.*” George Puttenham’s introduc-
tion to figurative speech in his Art of English Poesie (1589) evokes the unself-
conscious delight with which the rhetorical tradition broadcasts its linguistic
transgressions. He says of the figures:
be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trepasses in speech, because they
passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose
to deceive the eare and also the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and
simplicitie to a certaine doubleness, whereby our talke is the more guileful
& abusing.*°
As Thomas Hobbes puts it baldly in Leviathan (1651), metaphors, queens
among tropes, ‘openly professe deceipt’.*’ This brazen severance of the
semantic compact had long incited attack. Michel de Montaigne accuses rhe-
toricians of ‘bastardizing and corrupting things in their very essence’.*
Thomas Sprat calls rhetoric ‘this beautiful deceit’.*” Locke rounds on the
ornaments of eloquence, renaming them ‘the arts of fallacy’, which must be
shunned if ‘we would speak of things as they are’.*° They are a ‘perfect cheat’

33 Classical Roman rhetoric had five parts: invention, disposition (following the
Ramist reforms, both of these were appropriated by logic), elocution (the figures and the
tropes), memory (this increasingly became an art of its own, as well as suffering a demise
with the advent of printing), pronunciation (this too became less of a concern in the con-
text of printing, although spoken oratory, for example in the pulpit, remained hugely
important). On the specialization of rhetoric see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric
in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 55-65.
34 Locke, Essay, p. 508 (III.x.34). Strictly speaking, only tropes (e.g. metaphors)
involve a change in word meaning. Figures are ‘shapes’ of speech (e.g. antithesis). How-
ever, ‘figurative’ increasingly became not only an umbrella term but also a term to
denote the tropes, to the extent that ‘tropical’ has now fallen out of use almost completely
and been replaced by ‘figurative’. '
35 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, ed. R.C. Alston (Menston, 1971), sig.
Biv.
36 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 128.
37 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 52.
38 Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M.A. Screech (Harmonds-
worth, 1991), p. 341.
39 Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold
Whitmore Jones (London, 1959), p. 112.
40 Locke, Essay, p. 508 (III.x.34).
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 407

because they contravene the agreement that makes words intelligible at all.*!
They demonstrate that words are only connected to their meanings by the
loose bonds of human consensus. Words are revealed floating free of their
meanings, predisposed to be applied wherever the speaker desires. The tacit
consent which joins words to their meanings and which ought to bind men in
their speech does not hold fast.
Locke believes that this wilful disregard of the semantic compact occurs
outside the squalid circle of orators. He declares that ‘it is hard to find a dis-
course written of any subject’ wherein the words are not ‘used sometimes for
one collection of simple ideas, and sometimes for another’
.*” He calls this dis-
honest habit ‘a perfect abuse of language’ and a ‘plain cheat’, thereby verbally
picking up his own vitriol against rhetoric in general, as well as the actual
name of a particular trope — catachresis or, in English, ‘abuse’, whereby a
name is applied to a thing to which it absolutely does not conventionally
belong.** He compares the act of using words inconstantly to a debtor who
cooks the books to erase what he owes, making ‘this character 3, stand some-
times for three, sometimes for four, and sometimes for eight’.**However, for
he who plays with language, ‘the cheat [is] the greater, by how much truth is
of greater concernment and value, than money’.*° According to Locke, selfish
speakers daily hoodwink the community, with sickening results.
A further instance of speakers running roughshod over the semantic com-
pact is what Locke calls ‘affected obscurity’ — where speakers apply old
words to new meanings, or introduce new words without defining them.”
Locke begins by characterizing this as a crime mastered in the pedagogical
practice of disputation, whereby every gentleman is taught to prove such
things as that ‘snow is black’. In an essentially competitive forum, where

41 Tbid., p. 508 (III.x.34).

42 Ibid., p. 492 (III.x.5). Locke is specifically talking about the names of complex
ideas, which, as we shall see in Part IV, are, being voluntarily composed, liable to inad-
vertent semantic alteration, so that the very idea of common use fades as a possibility.
Here, however, Locke is making a different point. While the pliability of complex ideas
doubtless plays its part, Locke is concerned about a situation where the speaker wilfully
makes a word stand sometimes for the complex idea that common use dictates and some-
times for ideas that ought to be represented by different words. The abuse recalls the fal-
lacies or sophisms of logic, whereby a false point is proved by putting an ambiguous
word as the middle term, making it stand for one thing in the first proposition and another
in the second, such as ‘dog’ which is both an animal and a star. That Locke has this kind
of thing in mind is confirmed when he complains that ‘in arguings, and learned contests,
the same sort of proceeding passes commonly for wit and learning’ (Locke, Essay, p. 493
(I.x.5)).
43 Ibid., pp. 492-3 (III.x.5). Puttenham, Art of English Poesie, p. 163, calls the trope:
‘plaine abuse’.
44 Ibid., p. 493 (IIL.x.5).
45 Tbid.
46 Thid., p. 439 (IILx.6).
408 H. DAWSON

victory is prized above truth, disputants ‘perplex, involve, and subtilize the
signification of sounds’.*’ Students take this verbal chicanery out of univer-
sity and into the world, thereby having ‘the advantage to destroy the instru-
ments and means of discourse, conversation, instruction, and society’.**
Locke proceeds to spell out the lacerating effect that the slippery use of words
has on civil society:
Nor hath this mischief stopped in logical niceties, or curious empty specula-
tions; it hath invaded the great concernments of humane life and society;
obscured and perplexed the material truths of law and divinity; brought
confusion, disorder, and uncertainty into the affairs of mankind; and if not
destroyed, yet in great measure rendred useless, those two great rules, reli-
gion and justice.”
Locke’s wrath is presumably aimed here, at least in part, at the two connected
groups he hated most in the 1680s: Filmerian absolutists and Anglican clergy,
and their unholy alliance which instituted a terrifying blend of tyranny and
persecution. These courtly and clerical hermeneuts spin out of their seminal
texts — ‘the laws of God and man’ — so-called ‘truths’ that enslave the peo-
ple, such as that kings and priests have unfettered power by divine right. They
use the name of the ‘law’ to legitimate the confiscation of dissenters’ prop-
erty, thereby obliterating the entire rationale of the law — which is to protect
people’s property.’ The breach of the semantic compact itself therefore has
deeply uncivil consequences.
There is a second compact on which language relies. I shall call this the
moral compact. It is the protocol that we speak ingenuously. It informaliy
binds us to tell the truth. One of Locke’s strongest influences, Samuel
Pufendorf, explicitly articulates the morally contractual nature of language,
the speaker’s obligation to speak their mind and the hearer’s right to know it,
and the imperspicuous nature of language that both necessitates and poten-
tially destabilizes this communicative predicament. He elaborates on the ‘pact
between us’, whereby ‘although signs do not inform us of the minds of others
by an infallible, but only by a probable certainty, men being naturally capable
of dissimulation and disguise; yet that which any person hath express’d by
these signs shall be presumed to be his serious purpose’.°' While Locke does
not spell out the reciprocal obligation that members of a speech community
are under to tell the truth, the faith-based nature of this element of communi-
cation is clear. Given that words are naturally opaque, we can only trust that
speakers mean what they say. It is this rather precarious foundation of
47 Tbid., p. 494 (IIL.x.7).
48 Ibid., p. 495 (III.x.10).
49 Tbid., p. 496 (III.x.12).
°° Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Lasiett (Cambridge, 1988), p.412.
5! Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. Basil Kennett
(Oxford, 1703), IV, p. 278. See IV, pp. 280-1 on linguistic obligation.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 409

communication that underpins the long-standing doubt about the value of tes-
timony as proof. As Hobbes had said on the subject of saying sorry, ‘no man is
able to discern the truth of another mans repentance, further than by externall
marks, taken from his words, and actions, which are subject to hypocrisie’.””
Given the ineluctable privacy of another’s mind, we only have their public
utterances as our guide to what is inside. As Locke puts it, ‘one man’s mind
could not pass into another man’s body’.°’ We must therefore put our faith ina
man’s word.
Unfortunately, Locke does not believe that there is ‘too much sincerity to the
professions of most men’. His concerns in this regard emerge most forcibly
in the context of religious and political authority. In his Letter Concerning
Toleration, published in 1689 but written in 1685 in exile in Amsterdam in sup-
port of the English non-conformists, Locke accuses their Anglican persecutors
of ‘covering . . . with some specious colour’ their ‘Pride and Ambition’ and
‘Passion and uncharitable zeal’.* He is picking up the image of the ‘colours’
of rhetoric and thereby connoting the deceitful, but beguiling, use of words.
These duplicitous speakers ‘colour their spirit of persecution and unchristian
cruelty with a pretence of care of the publick weal, and observation of the
laws’.°° Charles II’s government comes under Locke’s thinly veiled fire for its
duplicity in The Second Treatise, also published in 1689, but written in the
early 1680s in the heat of the Exclusion crisis and of Charles II’s ‘acts of war’,
as Locke calls them, against the people of England. Referring perhaps to the
treason trials that Charles rigged to convict Whig activists, or to the expropri-
ation of estates, Locke explains how governments conceal their injustice with
a verbal masquerade. Peeling it off, he insists that violence and injury ‘is still
violence and injury, however colour’d with the name, pretences, or forms of
laws’
It might be objected that the likes of Charles are not lying here, but speak-
ing in good faith. There is, indeed, a distinction between a ‘lie’ in the more
proper sense of a statement which the speaker believes to be false, and a ‘lie’
in the sense of a statement which, perhaps unbeknownst to the speaker, sim-
ply is false. Locke subscribes to the first of these definitions. He defines a
‘lye’ as ‘made of those simple ideas: 1. Articulate sounds. 2. Certain ideas in
the mind of the speaker. 3. Those words the signs of those ideas. 4. Those
signs put together by affirmation or negation, otherwise than the ideas they

52 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 348.

53 Locke, Essay, p. 389 (II.xxxii.15).
54 Ibid., p. 69 (Liii.6).
55 Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis, 1983),
p25:
56 Ibid.
57 Locke, Two Treatises, p. 281.
410 H. DAWSON

stand for, are in the mind of the speaker’ 8 While the breach of the moral com-
pact clearly obtains here, it might not seem to do so where the speaker is inno-
cent of the objective falsehood. However, while the malign speakers whom
we have just met, who colour their illegitimate actions with legitimating
words, might well be convinced, or have convinced themselves, that what
they say is true, this would not seem to exculpate them in Locke’s eyes. They
might be subject to that subtle form of linguistic self-delusion that I men-
tioned at the end of Part II, whereby the very reality of the words themselves
happily dupes vain, ambitious speakers into thinking that they stand for an
equivalent reality. Locke writes incisively about the blurred line between sub-
jective ‘truth’ and ‘lies’. While a man can admit to himself that his wife is ‘no
very handsome’, he is not “bold enough openly to avow, that he has espoused
a falsehood, and received into his breast so ugly thing as a lye’..’ Men can
only live with their lies by either seeking arguments that ‘varnish over, and
cover their deformity’, or by not examining them at all and swallowing them
whole.” Speakers who have self-reflexively talked an objective lie into a
subjective truth, who have taken refuge in easy, palpable words that suit their
cause without probing their ideational integrity, are nonetheless guilty of lying.°!
For example, Locke is unsympathetic to the most convinced Filmerians
because he suspects that ‘it’s not the force of reason and argument, that makes
them for absolute monarchy, but some other interest’.” If they were ‘rational
and indifferent’ they would think differently — and truly — and are therefore
in a strong sense to blame for their, albeit fervently held, objective lies. Those
hateful sycophants who, in return for personal preferment, ‘flatter princes’
with the false ‘opinion, that they have a divine right to absolute power’ break
the mora! linguistic compact.® Language both exemplifies and facilitates
deceit to oneself as well as to others — with dire political consequences.
Language, then, has in itself the seeds of its own destruction. Together, the
two linguistic compacts and the publicity of words, are what make language
work in the first place. But it is in the nature of compacts that just as they are
made by men, they can be broken by them; and it is the dominance of words
that enables them to belie their wayward contents.
The latent ruptures of the linguistic compacts are not only themselves dam-
aging to civil society, but also reveal Locke’s scepticism about people’s

58 Locke, Essay, p. 292 (II-xxii.9).

5? Ibid., p. 552 (IV .iii.20).
69 Ibid.
61 However, my interpretation of Locke’s analysis of linguistic self-delusion that
nevertheless does not exculpate the believer does not square easily with what Locke says
about personal identity and responsibility: a person is only responsible on the day of
judgment for that of which he is conscious (Essay, pp. 3434 (IL-xxvii.22)).
62 | ocke, Two Treatises, p. 150.
63 Tbid., p. 142.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 41]

capacity to keep faith more generally. This scepticism has grim consequences
for civil society which, in many regards, is dependent on trust and the capacity
of people to keep their compacts.
Most fundamentally, Locke’s civil society relies for its very existence on
trust. What makes a society civil, or political (as opposed to natural), is the
fact that naturally equal individuals have entrusted their natural political
rights first to society as a whole in the ‘original compact’ and then, by a sec-
ond compact, to the government, on the condition that the government will
protect their ‘property’ — Locke’s broad term for their lives, liberties and
estates. The people give up their rights, or power, to the government, ‘with’,
as Locke says, ‘this express or tacit trust, that it shall be imployed for their
good, and the preservation of their property’.® Since the only power that peo-
ple legitimately have is the power to protect their property, this forms the limit
as well as the content of the gift. If the government, which is only a trustee of
the people’s power, dishonours the gift and uses it to attack rather than protect
them, then its power, which is only a ‘fiduciary power’, reverts to its original
owners.
For all power given with trust for the attaining an end, being limited by that
end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected, or opposed, the trust must
necessarily be forfeited, and the power devolve into the hands of those who
gave it, who may place it anew where they shall think best for their safety
and security.°”
Civil society, as Locke understands it, is generated through compact and dis-
solved by its breach.
If we turn to ‘civil society’ as we would understand it, as that pre- or
extra-political sphere, we find that there too trust and compact are crucial. In
his juvenile Essays on the Law of Nature he lays down what will be a lifelong
principle: societatis vinculum fides (faith is the bond of society).® Individuals
are bound together through trust. In nature as well as the city, we find Lockean
men occupied with ‘promises and compacts’ and ‘bargains for truck’.® Mar-
riages and master—servant relationships are made with ‘contracts’.”” Money,
that indispensable lubricator of the world, was invented by ‘the tacit agree-
ment of men’.”' ‘Gold and silver . . . has its value only from the consent of

64 Tbid., pp. 325, 332, 337, 406, 350.

65 Tbid., p. 381.
66 Jhid., p. 367.
67 Tbid.
68 Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), p. 212.
69 Locke, Two Treatises, De OAT
10 Ibid., pp. 321, 322.
71 Tbid., p. 293. Cf. Locke on Money, ed. Patrick Hyde Kelly (Oxford, 1991), p. 374.
412 H. DAWSON

men’.’* Locke attests to the overriding importance of trust when he explains in

the Essay, perhaps following one of Plato’s proofs in the Republic that justice
pays,” that even villains have to keep faith among themselves if they are to
get by.
Justice, and keeping of contracts, is that which most men seem to agree
in... Justice and truth are the common ties of society; and therefore, even
outlaws and robbers, who break with all the world besides, must keep faith
and rules of equity amongst themselves, or else they cannot hold together.”
The absolute necessity that Locke attributes to trustworthiness comes out
sharply in his blunt refusal to tolerate atheists. His reason for this piece of
intolerance is as follows: ‘promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the
bonds of humane society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away
of God, tho but even in thought, dissolves all’.”” Without our relationship with
God to ground both our knowledge of and our obligation to the natural law,
and without the heady inducements of hope and fear of heaven and hell,
Locke cannot see how we could be brought to honour our word — a disposi-
tion which, in itself, is ‘necessary to the preservation of civil society’.”°
It is not only our practical lives that depend on trust but our intellectual
lives too. Given Locke’s limiting epistemology, his reduction of knowledge
to experience, we rely greatly on hearsay for the beliefs that guide us. He sums
up this rather desperate state of affairs in a letter to one Tom he wrote in 1659
when he was at Oxford. Bemoaning the frailty of reason and the rule of ‘phansye’
in discovering truth in general and the natural law in particular, the young
Locke declares that ‘men live upon trust and their knowledg is noething but
opinion moulded up betweene custome and interest, the two great luminarys
of the world, the only lights they walke by’.”
Civil society, then, is made from head to toe through trust and compact.
However, Locke’s concerns about the everyday breaches of the linguistic
compacts suggest that the individuals who constitute society ought not to be
trusted. His anxieties about language therefore add weight to the case for a
suspicious Locke — a case that is already strong. The Second Treatise was of
course written precisely because he felt that Charles II — and his flattering,
power hungry followers — had broken the people’s trust. His writing from the

? Ibid., p. 301.
3 Plato, The Republic, ed. G.R.F. Ferrari, trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge, 2000),
p. 32 (351c-—d). Locke could also have in mind Augustine’s characterization of criminal
gangs as ‘bound by a compact’ (Concerning The City of God Against the Pagans, trans.
Henry Bettenson, intro. John O’ Meara (Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 139).
74 Locke, Essay, p. 66 (Liii.2).
75 Locke, A Letter, p. 51.
76 Tbid., p. 49.
77 Locke, The Correspondence, ed. E.S. de Beer (8 vols., Oxford, 1976-1989),
Vol. I, p. 123.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 413

1690s on the bullion crisis and on raising the value of money is also shot
through with despair at the treacherous clippers and reforgers of coins who
were wrenching their real value from their face value. The shortage of bullion
in England at the time also had the dreadful consequence of forcing people to
rely on ‘hazardous paper-credit’.’* He declares that ‘the necessity of trust and
bartering is one of the many inconveniences springing from the want of
money’.”” Paper money has as much value as its signature is trustworthy —
which leaves it, in Locke’s eyes, pretty worthless.*°
Locke’s fears about people’s disregard for the linguistic compacts there-
fore corroborate and develop his concerns about people’s trustworthiness in
general. Linguistic infidelities are themselves instruments of political and
social fragmentation. They also exemplify a central tension in (and insight of)
his political thought. Language can only be buoyed by agreements between
men, but those men break those agreements with alarming frequency. In the
same way, interpersonal trust is the lifeblood of civil society, but that society
is made up of men who cannot be trusted. Locke’s is a polity motored by fidel-
ity which is also undone by the lack of it.

IV
I now turn to the third aspect of Locke’s philosophy of language that under-
mines his civil society. This aspect poses a more fundamental danger. Indeed,
it seems a priori to thwart the most basic of Locke’s social proposals, so that it
is unclear whether they can even get off the ground. It throws into doubt the
possibility of consensus and compact in the first place, before people have
even had a chance to betray them.
This potentially lethal aspect of Locke’s philosophy of language is semantic
instability, whereby the meaning of words is unsteady. It turns out that this
disturbing and surprising phenomenon follows from the mundane and com-
pletely unquestioned philosophy of language that he had inherited. It was a
commonplace that words signify thoughts. This had been laid down by Aristotle
who had provided the basically uncontroverted maxim of early modern lin-
guistic theory. The philosopher had written that ‘spoken sounds are symbols
of affections in the soul’.*' Bacon applauds: ‘Aristotle saith well, “words are
the images of cogitations” ’.*? Hobbes chimes in with the claim that ‘the
generall use of speech, is to transferre our mental discourse, into verbal; or the

78 Locke on Money, p. 450.

79 Ibid., p. 451.
80 Ibid., p. 522.
81 Aristotle, On Interpretation, trans. Harold P. Cooke (Cambridge, MA, 1938),
joy tte
82 Bacon, Advancement of Learning, p. 230.
414 H. DAWSON

trayne of our thoughts, into a trayne of words’.*’ This belief that language
expresses the contents of the mind was embedded in the trivium, the three arts
of language which still formed the bedrock of gentle education in
seventeenth-century England. In his Certaine grammar questions for the
exercise of young Schollers (1590), John Stockwood explains that “speech...
is a pronouncing of words together, wherein every man and woman speaking
to each other, use to utter their myndes’.** Locke simply repeats the claim.
‘The use then of words’, he declares, ‘is to be sensible marks of ideas; and the
ideas they stand for, are their proper and immediate signification’ .®
However, while philosophers and pedagogues had tended to generalize
‘the mind’, Locke probed the point that if language reflects the mind, it must
reflect the mind of someone. He and his contemporaries must be committed to a
belief in semantic individualism, whereby the meaning of words is determined
by their particular users. When Locke feeds this truism through his particular
account of the mind, it has some disturbing ramifications for communication.
For various reasons that I shall elaborate, the minds of Lockean individuals
differ from each other. Therefore, the same words will ineluctably signify
different ideas for different speakers. Just as one person’s mental landscape
differs from another’s so, by definition, will the meanings of their words.
Locke’s clear-eyed application of his innovative, anti-scholastic, anti-Cartesian
theory of ideas to the time-honoured theory of language, reveals the social
predicament to be one of drastic and inevitable miscommunication and
atomization.
Given that, according to Locke, we are not born with a set of universal,
innate ideas, but accrue them through our unique experience of the natural
world and of other people, individuals are very likely to have different ideas
from one another. If we add to this inevitable ideational diversity, the neces-
sary limitation of meaning to the speaker’s ideas, it follows that speakers will
mean diverse things in accordance with the diversity of their experience.
Locke asks us to think of a child who has noticed only the ‘bright, shining col-
our’ in gold. For that child, that colour is the meaning of the word ‘gold’.
When he sees the same colour in the ‘peacock’s tail’, he calls it ‘gold’.*° For
someone who is more familiar with ‘gold’, the meaning of the word might be
‘a body, bright, yellow, fusible, and very heavy’.®’ A jeweller mug add ‘mal-
leability’.*®

83 Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 25.

84 John Stockwood, Certaine grammar questions for the exercise of young Schollers
in the Learning of the Accidence (London, 1590), sig. B2r.
85 Locke, Essay, p. 405 (IILii.1).
86 Tbid., p. 406 (IIL.ii.3).
87 Ibid.
88 Tbid. See Coleman, A History of Political Thought, pp. 316-17 on Augustine’s
experiential and semantic individualism.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 415

It is not only different experience that diverges meaning between people. It

is also the fact that the meanings of most of the words we use in our social
lives are ‘arbitrary’, that is, purely a product of human will and not derived
from nature.’ While we are almost entirely passive in the generation of ‘sim-
ple’ (single) ideas, such as ‘yellow’ or ‘sweet’, we voluntarily — and there-
fore possibly divergently — forge ‘complex’ (compound) ideas. There are
two types of complex ideas. The first are of ‘things’ or substances, such as
‘gold’, whose meanings we have already seen to proliferate due to divergent
experience. However, the semantic proliferation of substance terms is limited
by a public ‘standard made by nature’ which causes those ideas in us.”’ So the
meaning of ‘horse’ is unlikely to include the idea of ‘barking like a dog’
because such an idea was never experienced in regular conjunction with ideas
of a horsy shape and size.”!
By contrast, the possible semantic latitude is infinite in the case of the
names of the second category of complex ideas: mixed modes and relations —
that great raft of non-natural vocabulary that keeps our interpersonal lives
afloat. As we have seen, mixed modes are not ‘things’ themselves, but are
‘dependences on, or affections of substances’ that are wilfully gathered
together by the mind, such as ‘beauty’ or ‘theft’, ‘murder’, ‘apotheosis’, ‘re-
prieve’.”’ Relations are relations between ideas,”’ such as ‘identity’ and ‘mor-
ally good and evil’. These ideas are likely to be made differently by different
people because they ‘are not only made by the mind, but made very arbi-
trarily, made without patterns, or reference to any real existence’.”* In theory,

89 E.g. ibid., p. 429 (IIL.v.3); p. 479 (IILix.7).

90 Tbid., p. 468 (III.vi.46). Locke is, nonetheless, worried about the divergence of the
meanings of substance terms in the context of ‘philosophical enquiries and debates’
(ibid., p. 484 (IU.1x.15); cf. p. 453 (IL.-vi.26)).
91 Tbid., p. 391 (ILxxxii.18).
92 Ibid., p. 165 (II.xii.5).
93 Tbid., p. 319 (ILxxv.1).
94 Ibid., p. 429 (III.v.3). It ought to be noted that mixed modes are not arbitrary in the
sense that, in the interest of convenience, it is in the nature of man to make mixed modes
(ibid. ,p. 290 (II.xxii.5)). Itis in what men decide they consist that is perfectly arbitrary. It
should also be noted that mixed modes are, for the most part, species of ‘abstract’ or uni-
versal ideas, and that it is again in the God-given nature of man to make these kind of gen-
eral ideas (for the purposes of expedience, knowledge and communication (ibid., pp.
409-10 (II.iii.2-4)). However, when Locke deals with abstraction, he often implies that
men abstract identically (which is precisely why abstract ideas, being universal, enable
men to communicate). So, for example, he explains how a child notices a resemblance
between his ideas of particular persons and abstracts from them a universal idea of ‘man’
(ibid., pp. 409-11 (II1.iii.3-8)). But when Locke deals with ideational complexity, he
often insists that men make complex ideas differently from each other, and one of his
favourite illustrations of this phenomena is the very same idea of ‘man’ (e.g. tbid.,
pp. 453-5 (III.vi.26—-27)). While the relationship between complexity and abstraction is
difficult to pin down, and is perhaps another permutation of the tension that this final part
416 H. DAWSON

the arbitrary or invented nature of moral ideas (the most important kind of
mixed modes) does not prohibit there being one demonstrable and true moral-
ity.” Indeed, the fact of the accessible and uniform divine law ought to block
semantic plurality, and to render moral ideas perfectly stable — in a way that
is forever closed to ideas of substances, due to our irrevocable
epistemological myopia in this regard. However, Locke fears that in practice
most people do not discover the natural law through reason, but make it up
divergently and erroneously, rattling around in their own peculiar misconcep-
tions. The theoretical hope of semantic universality in the case of moral ideas
fades in the horrible light of the practical reality of moral plurality. Overall,
the cultural lexicon is riddled with ambiguity because, while there ought to be
a law of propriety that binds a man’s speech, in reality he is free.”° So it is that
men come to gather different ideas under the same words. Locke gives the
examples of ‘justice, or gratitude, or glory’ as names for which people have
different subjective meanings. “The reason whereof seems to me tovbe this’,
he says, ‘that the abstract ideas of mixed modes, being men’s voluntary com-
binations of such a precise collection of simple ideas; and so the essence of
each species, being made by men alone, whereof we have no other sensible
standard, existing any where, but the name it self, or the definition of that
name’.””
This quotation brings me on to a further reason for semantic plurality in
mixed modes: their peculiar inaccessibility. In contrast with the meanings of
substance terms that roughly cohere across speakers, being caused by one and
the same sensible object, mixed modes have no fixed, public referents to

of the article is concerned to reveal, it does not detract from Locke’s anti-scholastic,
nominalist polemic about the voluntary nature of complex ideas, and his associated
claims about their divergence. In this article I do not deal with the distinction between
abstract and particular ideas because all the words I am concerned with are general. Par-
ticular names, such as Charles II, are unproblematic and not in danger of duplicity or pro-
liferation.
°5 While Locke struggles throughout his life with the demonstrability of natural law,
he lays the groundwork. Briefly, we have intuitive knowledge of our own existence, from
which we achieve demonstrative knowledge of God and his will — by which we are
bound, according to the right a maker has in his work or labour. The fundamental dictate
of the law of nature, that mankind is to be preserved, can be deduced from God’s giving
us life and the means to preserve it (Locke, Essay, p. 549 (IV.iii.18); Locke, Two Trea-
tises, p. 271). Locke declares that morality can be a demonstrable science because the
ideas involved are mixed modes and so ‘not of nature’s, but man’s making’; being there-
fore ‘perfectly known’, they can be the objects of demonstration (Locke, Essay, p. 516
(III.xi.16)). However, the ideas that begin moral ratiocination are precisely those of sub-
stances: me (man) and God. For an interesting exploration of this problem see Jeremy
Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought
(Cambridge, 2002), pp. 44-82.
% Locke, Essay, p. 408 (IIL.ii.8).
97 Tbid., pp. 387-8 (II.xxxii.12).
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 417

determine them, and therefore vary relentlessly. The problem of privacy that
has been hurled at Locke by commentators as the fatal flaw in his ideational
theory of meaning is one to which he himself is exceptionally alive.** While
he does in fact provide an internally coherent account of how meanings are
ideas, and how these private entities can be communicated, he is deeply aware
of — and concerned by — the obstacle that privacy places in the way of the
generation as well as the communication of those ideas that are most impor-
tant to social life. As Locke says of the names of mixed modes, their meanings
cannot easily be known because they ‘have no certain connexion in nature;
and so no settled standard, any where in nature existing, to rectify and adjust
them by’.”? Mixed modes exist barely in the minds of individuals. The only
permanent, public thing about them is their names, and these, as in a hall of
mirrors, reflect back only themselves.
The alarming promiscuity of the meanings of mixed modes ought to be reg-
ulated by the ‘tacit consent’ we met in Part III. Convention should converge
and fix meaning. However, the semantic compact, the only creator of public
meaning, now appears so weak as to be non-existent, and the foundations of
civil society threaten to dissolve before they have even been built. Common
use fails to unify the meanings of mixed modes because ‘no body’ has ‘an
authority to establish the precise signification of words’.'°° Moreover, it is an
invisible law. ‘Being no where established’, there is no public standard to
which we can turn to conform our words.'*' The law of propriety, then,
emerges as undeserving of its name. Unpromulgated and unlegislated, “com-
mon’ use reduces to the particular uses of words by particular individuals.
Again, we see Locke pushing received wisdom to startling but nonetheless
consistent conclusions. According to the conventionalist theory of language,
whereby words signify ideas ‘by a perfectly arbitrary imposition’, the mean-
ing of words must rest ultimately on the free choice of individuals. ‘Every
man’, writes Locke, ‘has so inviolable a liberty, to make words stand for what
ideas he pleases, that no one hath the power to make others have the same
ideas in their minds, that he has, when they use the same words, that he
does’.'” The semantic compact, by which we are supposed to divest ourselves
of that liberty, has neither content nor force. Locke concludes that ‘even in
men, that have a mind to understand one another, [the names of mixed modes]
do not always stand for the same idea in speaker and hearer. Though the
names glory and gratitude be the same in every man’s mouth, through a whole

98 For an investigation of Locke and his commentators on the subject of private lan-
guage see Dawson, “Locke on Private Language’, British Journal for the History of Phi-
losophy, 11 (4) (2003), pp. 609-38.
99 Locke, Essay, p. 477 (IILix.5).
100 Thid., p. 479 (IILix.8).
tC) ibid.
102 Thid., p. 408 (IILii.8).
418 H. DAWSON

country, yet the complex collective idea, which every man thinks on, or
intends by that name, is apparently very different in men using the same lan-
guage’!
The fractures in the semantic edifice are caused not only by the inherently
imperfect nature of language itself, but also by the individualism of its human
users. The ideas of mixed modes are further diversified by the deeply partial
nature of Lockean man. He is a self-centred creature whose nearly every
thought is seeped in his self-referential passions. For Locke, a considerable
number of even the most everyday ideas we receive through sensation and
reflection are ‘accompanied with pain or pleasure’. We move through the
world, by turns flinching from and yearning for it, evaluating it in the light of
how it makes us feel. Our language will reflect our highly personalized view-
points. In the hedonistic, Hobbesian mode that so upset his contemporaries,
he writes ‘things then are Good or Evil, only in reference to Pleasure or Pain.
That we call Good, which is apt to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish
pain in us’ .'” For Locke, different things cause different people pleasure and
pain, depending on how those people have been educated and habituated, with
the result that they call different things ‘bad’ and ‘good’. Our divergent pas-
sions, beyond obviously informing our evaluative terminology, also inform
the great raft of our opinions. Locke pleads that since reason ‘can receive no
evidence from our passions or interests, so it should receive no tincture from
them’.'°° However, his protestations derive from a sense of despair at their
futility; his entire project is set against the kaleidoscope of personal reasons
that blot out Reason itself.'°’ For example, it is human partiality that motivates
his political theory. ‘It is unreasonable’, Locke tells us, ‘for men to be judges
in their own cases’, because ‘self-love will make men partial to themselves
and their friends. And on the other side. . . ill nature, passion and revenge will
carry them too far in punishing others’.'°* The lure of a common judge draws
us out of the state of nature. For all its apparent freedom, equality and peace,
we quit that place where great inconveniences spring from the fact that ‘he
who was unjust as to do his brother an injury, will scarce be so just as to con-
demn himself for it’.'° Our indelibly self-centred understandings make it
improbable that our descriptions of the world will converge.

103 Tbid., p. 479 (IIL.ix.8).

104 Tbid., p. 229 (IL.xx.1); p. 229 (ILxx.3).
105 Tbid., p. 229 (II.xx.2); cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 110-11.
106 Locke, Essay, p. 698 (IV.xix.1); cf. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 31.
107 John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the
Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Cambridge, 1969), p. 191, argues power-
fully that ‘the intention of the entire epistemological venture’ was to ‘restrain the
encroaching flood of partiality’ by providing a ‘morals of thinking’.
108 Locke, Two Treatises, pa2lo.
109 Tbid., p. 276.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 419

Our moral partiality is compounded by Locke’s account of how our per-

sonal histories inscribe themselves on the blank slates of our minds. In Ofthe
Conduct of the Understanding he sketches various narrowing viewpoints
engendered by our environments. The “day labourer’ and the ‘country gentle-
man’ are both victims of their circumstances, whether these be ‘poor conver-
sation’ or ‘claret’.'!° Echoing Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians about the
dark glass that divides us from the truth, Locke sums up our subjective con-
finement: ‘we see but in part, and we know but in part... . no one sees all, and
we generally have different prospects of the same thing, according to our dif-
ferent .. . positions to it’.!"!
When things could not look much worse for the univocity of words, Locke
takes a final step into the mire. Meanings do not only differ from person to
person, but in the same person from moment to moment. This depiction of
semantic fluidity within the same person coincides with Locke’s deconstruc-
tion of personal identity. One’s identity consists only in the memory and con-
sciousness of one’s continuing self.'!* Given the fluctuating and forgetful
character of the mind, one’s self is a patchy entity, and one’s speech will suf-
fer accordingly. Locke depicts the great throng of ideas that rushes at us as
fading and disappearing, ‘leaving no more footsteps or remaining characters
of themselves, than shadows do flying over fields of corn; and the mind is as
void of them, as if they never had been there’.''? In another simile, Locke
describes our evanescent selves.
Thus the ideas, as well as children, of our youth, often die before us: and our
minds represent to us those tombs, to which we are approaching; where
though the brass and marble remain, yet the inscriptions are effaced by
time, and the imagery moulders away. The pictures drawn in our minds, are
laid in fading colours; and if not sometimes refreshed, vanish and disap-
pear.'"
In this passage, the transience of our consciousness is poignantly evoked
through comparison with the transience of our earthly lives. In the unceasing
flow of ebbing perception, parts of us die; and our words, which follow
irrevocably in the light and uncertain footsteps of our mind, undergo endless
caprice. The names of mixed modes, Locke writes, repeating Montaigne,
‘have seldom, in two different men, the same precise signification; since one

110 Locke, Of the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. John Yolton (Bristol, 1993),
pals:
11 [hid ,p. 8. Cf. The King James Bible, 1 Corinthians, ch. 13.
112 Locke, Essay, p. 340 (II.xxvii.16): ‘whatever has the consciousness of present
and past actions, is the same person to whom they belong’.
"13 Thid., p. 151 (IL-x.4).
114 Thid., pp. 151-2 (ILx.5).
420 H. DAWSON

man’s complex idea seldom agrees with anothers, and often differs from his
own, from that which he had yesterday, or will have tomorrow’.'”
Locke therefore paints an extremely fragmented picture of what is sup-
posed to be one semantic universe. The meanings of our most important
words are at the mercy of the deep divisions that run between and even within
individuals. Being of ‘men’s making’, they are ‘by men still having the same
power, multiplied in infinitum’ .''® This inestimable and untold semantic multi-
plicity not only reveals the inefficacy of the semantic compact that is sup-
posed to unify meaning, but also makes communication impossible. Locke is
quite explicit that if speaker and hearer do not attach the same ideas to the
same words ‘they fill one another’s heads with noise and sounds; but convey
not thereby their thoughts’.""’
This atomized semantic web and its fatal effects on communication under-
mine three foundations of Locke’s civil society.
The first is the natural, God-given sociability of man. Unconcerned to com-
municate with each other, people seem indisposed to be the sociable creatures
that God intended. Language 1s the evidence as well as the means of God’s plan
for our peaceful and productive union. He gave men the capacity to speak so
that they could help one another. “God having designed man for a sociable crea-
ture’, writes Locke, ‘made him not only with an inclination, and under a neces-
sity to have fellowship with those of his own kind; but furnished him also with
language, which was to be the great instrument, and common tye of society’.
However, while language is aimed ‘to drive [man] into society’,''? Locke’s
concurrent contention that people do not communicate through language sug-
gests that the natural sociability that God injected into our veins does not run
thick. Bucking our maker’s design, we use words to build barriers, not bridges,
confirming Locke’s pessimism about our moral individualism.
The second foundation of Locke’s state that is shaken by semantic instability
is what is commonly called, somewhat improperly, the social contract. We have
seen how the compacts that create and sustain society come under pressure
from Locke’s scepticism about people’s trustworthiness. Now we see them
under even greater pressure: they require precisely the kind of collective under-
standing that we have seen is in tatters. If people speak ‘a distinct language,
though the same words’,'”° in what sense can they agree to transfer their natural
political ‘rights’ to the community on condition that their ‘property’ be

'15 Ibid., p. 478 (IIL.ix.6). Cf. Montaigne, Essays, p. 1210. Locke owned both the
1669 French edition of the Essais and Florio’s 1603 translation (Harrison and Laslett,
Library, p. 191).
'16 Locke, Essay, p. 480 (IIIL.ix.9).
'I7 Thid., p. 478 (IILix.6).
118 Tbid., p. 402 (IIL.i.1).
'19 Locke, Two Treatises, pp. 318-19.
120 Locke, Essay, p. 489 (III.ix.22).
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 421

preserved? How can a collection of individuals, riven by mutual misunder-

standing, incorporate meaningfully into ‘one body’?’*' Moreover, and more
worryingly, what myriad interpretations go through the minds of men in
Locke’s conceptually distinct second compact, when they give up their
‘equality, liberty, and executive power’ to the government on the trust that
this power is used only for ‘the common good’.'** Might not the people and
their prince have wildly different ideas about what ‘rights’ they have and have
been delegated, and in what exactly the goal of civil society — the protection
of the people’s ‘lives, liberties and estates’ — consists? When men make
those ‘oaths of fealty, or allegiance’ to the government, both parties are bound
by the logic of Locke’s sceptical philosophy of language to mean different
things in the exchange.'*? While semantic instability besets all linguistic inter-
action, it will be especially vigorous in this case, where the interests are so
divergent and so keen. Unlike Hobbes, Locke firmly maintains that ‘nothing
can make any man [the subject of a commonwealth] but his actually entering
into it by positive engagement, and express promise and compact’.'** Locke’s
civil society is generated out of verbal promises whose smoothly unified exte-
rior covers a host of disjointed meanings. The great and already uneasy pressure
that Locke puts on the subjects’ judgment in deciding whether their trustee is
honouring their trust, as the subjects understand it,” looks anarchically

121 T ocke, Two Treatises, p. 331.

122 Thid., p. 353. Locke often elides the difference between the two compacts (e.g.
ibid., pp. 347, 353). However, it is important for Locke that the generation of the govern-
ment is a two-stage process, whereby there is one, powerful body of the people that is
prior to the government and to which the government is answerable. Here Locke is
implicitly attacking the Hobbesian one-stage compact whereby there is no body of the
people independent of the sovereign.
123 Tbid., p. 309.
124 Tbid., p. 349. Locke’s stress on express consent, particularly at the original com-
pact, has perplexed some commentators. However, as John Dunn has suggested, the pro-
posal becomes more credible if one considers the “occasions in any man’s life in which
he uses verbal formulae which imply a recognition of his membership in the national
society to which he belongs’ (Dunn, Political Thought, p. 141). Even if one admits of the
necessarily behavioural and hypothetical nature of much of the rights-transfer, the pro-
cess remains reliant on linguistically constituted moral concepts and therefore danger-
ously threatened by semantic promiscuity. For further thoughts on this issue see Dunn,
‘Consent in the Political Theory of John Locke’, Historical Journal, X (2) (1967), pp.
153-82; John A. Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of
Society (Princeton, 1993); Michael W. Brough, “‘Lockean Express Consent: An Argu-
ment Against Irrevocability’, Locke Studies, 3 (2003), pp. 113-31.
125 See John Dunn, ‘Measuring Locke’s Shadow’, in Locke, Two Treatises of Gov-
ernment and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Shapiro, pp. 257-85, pp. 277-8 on the
centrality of judgment at the precarious and creative centre of Locke’s vision of the
human political predicament.
422 H. DAWSON

ill-placed in the light of the normative dislocation he perceives between

individuals.
The final foundation of Locke’s civil society that looks set to be ruined by
semantic instability is the most deep-seated of the three. It is, in effect, what
we might call ‘culture’. It is nothing other than that great raft of mixed modes,
those ideas that do not refer to things in the world, but are made up by men,
such as ‘goodness’, ‘love’, ‘king’ and ‘concubine’. Mixed modes constitute
the entire representational system that makes sense of our lives. We are
already familiar with Locke’s individualistic account of the creation of mixed
modes. However, he directly contradicts this with a separate, holistic account.
He declares, apparently unaware of the inconsistency, that mixed modes are
made by and for the community. Unfortunately, this collectivist story, that
gives a robust representation of culture, is completely dependent on the
semantic consensus that its author simultaneously ravages. Semantic instabil-
ity snuffs out the symbolic vista that orientates our existence.
On Locke’s collectivist account, mixed modes embody the particular ideas,
values and practices of a community. To demonstrate the authority that the
community has in creating mixed modes, he points to the incommensurability
between languages. This ‘plainly shews’, he says, ‘that those of one country,
by their customs and manner of life, have found occasion to make several
complex ideas, and give names to them, which others never collected into
specifick ideas’.'*° The ideas of a ‘triumph’, a ‘hatchet’ or a ‘constable’ grow
out of collective techniques. As Locke writes, ‘mankind have fitted their
notions and words to the use of common life, and not to the truth and extent of
things’.!77
Locke compounds the crucial role that the community plays in the creation
of mixed modes, by asserting that language itself is integral to their identity.
Given that they do not have objective existences but are only arbitrary con-
glomerations of naturally disparate ideas, they rely on being named to ‘give
them lasting duration’.'*® Having, as Locke says,
no particular foundation in nature’, ‘the loose parts of those complex ideas,
being made by the mind . . . would cease again, were there not something
that did, as it were, hold it together, and keep the parts from scattering.
Though therefore it be the mind that makes the collection, ’tis the name
which is, as it were the knot, that ties them together.!””

126 Locke, Essay, pp. 432-3 (III.v.8). Cf. pp. 349-50 (IL.xxviii.2).
127 Thid., p. 349 (IL_xxviii.2).
128 Tbid., p. 434 (III.v.10).
129 Ibid.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 423

It is the name that fixes and gives life to a mixed mode idea;'”° and it is the
community alone that can make a sound into what is commonly accepted as a
word.
The community emerges yet more importantly as the maker of mixed
modes in the light of Lockean man’s intense concern with how he appears to
others. Out of the three laws against which men judge their actions — the
divine, the civil and the law of opinion or reputation — it is the last that
presses most firmly on our behaviour. “The greatest part’ of men ‘govern
themselves chiefly, if not solely, by this law of fashion’.'*' While God’s fiery
punishments cool at our earthly distance and while we break the civil law if
we think we can get away with it, ‘no man’, says Locke, ‘scapes the punish-
ment of their censure and dislike, who offends against the fashion and opinion
of the company he keeps, and would recommend himself to. Nor is there one
of ten thousand, who is stiff and insensible enough, to bear up under the con-
stant dislike, and condemnation of his own club’.'*? Lockean man tends to be
a thin-skinned egoist. He is fiercely self-interested, but his self-interest has as
one of its overriding goals the approbation of others. His gaze fixated on the
evaluation of his community and his mind filled with its cultural discourse,
his very self cannot be understood outside that community.'*’ His private
mental landscape is cultivated by his society through language. Given that
public censure ‘is a burden too heavy for humane sufferance’,'** individuals
are desperate to know and loudly to voice the community’s normative frame-
work that is embodied in mixed modes. The values of the group, that its mem-
bers so fervently follow, are only manifest in the public, palpable language
that passes between them, and it is therefore on these words which everyone
hangs.
Our ‘manner of life’, as Locke calls it, is constituted through a shared net-
work of mixed modes. However, he tells us that no such thing exists. Social
life 1s dependent on the semantic universality that he refutes.
Of all the obstructions that Locke’s philosophy of language causes to his
civil society, semantic instability is the most problematic. It not only threatens
civil society but renders it theoretically unfeasible. Both the consensual gen-
eration and the cultural sustenance of civil society depend on a common
tongue. But his commitment to semantic instability rules out such a thing.
130 Tid.
131 Tbid., pp. 432-3 (III.v.8). Locke contradicts himself on this point in the (1686-8?)
manuscript entitled Of Ethick in General, in Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie (Cam-
bridge, 1997), pp. 297-304.
132 Locke, Essay, p. 357 (II.xxviii.12).
133 This is an important point to make against the various claims for Locke’sindivid-
ualism (notably C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism:
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962); Laura Brace, The Idea of Property in Seventeenth-
Century England: Tithes and the Individual (Manchester, 1998)).
134 Locke, Essay, p. 357 (IL-xxviii.12).
424 H. DAWSON

Vv
At the end of this paper, it seems fitting to ask whether Locke himself would
have accepted my somewhat energetic and depressing application of his phi-
losophy of language to his vision of civil society. I think that his deep con-
cerns about language were precisely motivated by a sense of their negative
consequences for society. To confirm this we need only think back to his fer-
vent attack on the breach of the semantic compact having ‘unsettled peoples
rights’ and ‘rendered unintelligible both morality and religion’.’* At another
point in Book III, when the semantic compact itself is under threat from
semantic multiplicity, Locke says that the kind of words he is worried about
occur in ‘controversial debate, or familiar discourse, concerning honour,
faith, grace, religion, church, etc.’ ‘Language .. . was given us’, Locke tells
us, as the ‘bond of society’.'*’ It is therefore consistent with his purposes to
probe further the intersection between language and society.
However, such a probing results in what could be fatal blows to Locke’s
civil society. His doubts about people’s propensities to keep their (linguistic)
compacts, and then his demolition of semantic compacts as such, imperil both
the birth and the life of civil society. Moreover, some of his linguistic beliefs
are simply incompatible with his other commitments. This is most glaringly
so in the case of (mis)communication. If Locke had applied his theory of
semantic instability intrepidly to his characterization of civil society, he
would have had to revise one or the other; and he surely would have reined in
his conclusions about unchecked semantic proliferation. He did, after all,
bother to write books, which suggests some faith in collective understanding.
Moreover, there is a more cheerful, assertive streak in Locke that would
suggest some softening of the pessimistic, despairing character I have drawn.
Locke wrote for the reform of both mental and physical conduct.'** One could
imagine his juridical and habitual instruments of improvement being used to
induce people to use language clearly, honestly and carefully, to strive for that
intersubjective union that is the attainable goal of Locke’s theory oflanguage.
However, even this strategy gets stuck if one considers that the instigators of
reform would be themselves subject to the very linguistic fissures and infidel-
ities that they would be supposed to eradicate.
I would like to end by suggesting that rather than see the contradictions in
Locke’s philosophy as faults, we see them as capturing some compelling
complexities and intractable tensions at the heart of individual, social and
political life. Locke reveals the porous boundary between self and society,
135 Tbid., p. 497 (III-x.13).
136 Thid., p. 480 (III.ix.9).
137 Tbid., p. 497 (III.x.13).
138 Tully, ‘Governing Conduct’ is the piece that illuminates Locke’s ‘mercantilist’,
reformist agenda. Cf. E.J. Hundert, ‘The Making of Homo Faber: John Locke Between
Ideology and History’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXV (1) (1972), pp. 3-22.
 LOCKE ON LANGUAGE IN (CIVIL) SOCIETY 425

whereby individuals are inscribed by and fixated on the community, while at

the same time being insulated and secret from it. Locke shows us the towering
importance of trust in a polity, while at the same time being deeply aware of
people’s guile. He shows us the need for communication, while at the same
time not flinching from the interpersonal fissures which divide people from
one another. There is a courageous realism in his laying bare the fragile base
on which his civil society is built.

Hannah Dawson QUEENS’ COLLEGE

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
TOCQUEVILLE’S BRIEF ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI:
NOTES ON THE FLORENTINE HISTORIES (1836)

Melvin Richter’

Abstract: After publishing the first part of Democracy in America, Tocqueville

travelled through England and Ireland. With his impressions of the early industrial
revolution still fresh, he read and annotated Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories.
Tocqueville’s interest was present-minded: could Florence be used ‘as an argument
for or against democracy in our time?’ Rejecting charges that modern democracies
share the defects that bought down the Florentine Republic, Tocqueville contrasted
late medieval and modern republicanisms; direct and representative democracies; the
politics of city states to those of larger modern nations with substantial urban and rural
populations. Comparing renaissance Florence to industrial revolution Manchester and
Birmingham led Tocqueville to consider redefining equality in economic rather than
purely social terms. These notes suggest that in 1836, he held a view of the relation-
ships between manufacturers and workers different from that of his later chapter “How
Industry could Give Rise to Aristocracy’ in the 1840 Democracy.

Introduction

The ten printed pages of Tocqueville’s little known notes on Machiavelli’s

Florentine Histories constitute a short but revelatory text.? What is revealed,

! 390A West End Avenue, PH B, New York, NY 10024. Email: MelvinRichterl @cs.com
2 There are three French editions of Tocqueville’s collected works. The oldest is
Oeuvres complétes d’Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave Beaumont (9 vols., Paris,
1864-6). The almost complete newer edition, Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres completes,
ed. J.P. Mayer, André Jardin and Frangoise Mélonio (Paris, 195 1—) will be designated as
OC. The three volume Pléiade edition of Tocqueville (Paris, 1991-2004) will be desig-
nated as OCP.
Our knowledge of De la Démocratie en Amérique has been transformed by two critical
editions in French. The first, edited by Eduardo Nolla (2 vols., Paris, 1990), will be desig-
nated as DA, N; the second, edited by Jean-Claude Lamberti and James Schleifer (Paris,
1992), will be designated as DA, OCP, II. The English translations available in paperback
editions are: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. P. Bradley
(2 vols., New York, 1990), which will be designated as Bradley; Democracy in America,
trans. George Lawrence, ed. J.P. Mayer (New York, 1988), which will be designated as
Lawrence; and Democracy in America, trans. G.E. Bevan (London, 2003). Other new
translations are by Harvey Mansfield, Jr. and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, 2000) and Arthur
Goldhammer (New York, 2004). Tocqueville’s notes on Machiavelli’s Florentine Histo-
ries were first published by Beaumont in 1865 in tome VIII of his edition under the title
Voyage en Allemagne, Bade, 1836. The exemplary recent edition by Francoise Mélonio,
‘Notes sur Machiavel’, is in Mélanges, ed. Mélonio, OC, XVI, pp. 541-50. All refer-
ences to Tocqueville’s notes on Machiavelli’s Histories are to this edition. Because of
the French translation Tocqueville used, he referred to Machiavelli’s work as |’Histoire
de Florence. In adopting the plural form, ‘Histories’, I have followed the most recent

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005

 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 427

however, is not a new interpretation of Machiavelli’s book, but what it sug-

gested to Tocqueville as he was writing the second part of De la Démocratie
en Amérique in 1836.° When he first encountered Machiavelli, Tocqueville
was pondering the probable effects upon democracy of the industrial revolu-
tion he had just seen at work in England. Thus these notes do not represent a
study by Tocqueville of Machiavelli for his own sake, that is in terms of
Machiavelli’s distinctive theoretical problems and their historical context.
What these ten pages do provide are valuable insights into how Tocqueville’s
mind worked when confronted by another great theorist ostensibly concerned
with problems far removed from the social and economic focus forced upon
Tocqueville by his view of Manchester and Birmingham as they entered the
industrial revolution.
The first part of the Démocratie, published in 1835, had just won
Tocqueville an international reputation. That same year he travelled to Eng-
land and Ireland with Gustave de Beaumont. Struck by the changes already
produced by the industrial revolution in England, Tocqueville began to pon-
der how this transformation might affect the type of democratic society (/’état
social démocratique) he had just predicted would become universal through-
out the modern world. Tocqueville’s visit also altered fundamentally his con-
ception of aristocratic societies. He now perceived that aristocracy in England
and Ireland respectively had developed very different social characteristics
and produced political systems almost diametrically opposed. This, joined to
the shock produced by seeing at first hand the factories and living conditions
of workers in Manchester and Birmingham, led Tocqueville to reconceptual-
ize both democracy and aristocracy, the ideal types he used to categorize both
politics and society. These alterations in Tocqueville’s analysis he applied to
pre-revolutionary France in the 1836 essay commissioned and translated by
John Stuart Mill as ‘Political and Social Condition of France before and after
1789” (l’Etat social et politique de la France avant et apres 1789).
At this same time Tocqueville began to plan his political career in France.
Henceforth his theoretical depiction of democracy would have practical conse-
quences. Whatever he wrote would affect his relationship, political and intel-
lectual, to his reading public, to his local Norman constituency, and to other
theorists and historians such as Guizot and Thiers who now played leading
roles in the politics of the July Monarchy created after the Revolution of 1830.
Guizot, like other ‘doctrinaires’, opposed popular participation in the
political process, and rejected any extension of the suffrage beyond a very

English translators, Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Florentine Histories
(Princeton, 1988), pp. vii—x.
3 Tuse both the complete and the short French title to recall Tocqueville’ s identification
of the audience he was addressing: ‘In a word, this work is directed principally to France
(Cet ouvrage est, en définitive, écrit principalement pour la France).’ Tocqueville to
Henry Reeve, 15 September 1839, OC, VI, p. 47.
428 M. RICHTER

small class.‘ Dominating the political life of the July Monarchy, Guizot was
able to put into place those arrangements he and his party had devised to avert
the alleged dangers of democracy by instituting a system of representative
government elected by a fraction of French adult males.
Thus when Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories was read and annotated by
Tocqueville in 1836, he related this text to the British Reform Bill of 1832 as
well as to his own controversy with the doctrinaires, ostensibly theoretical but
in fact intensely political. The defence of democracy (in the mitigated form
Tocqueville favoured) against the doctrinaires emerges from that section of
his notes called ‘General remarks on the Florentine republic, principally on
what distinguishes what has been called the democracy of Florence from the
democracies of our own time’.° Specifying his own interest, Tocqueville
wrote: ‘What matters to me is to learn whether Florentine democracy can be
used as an argument for or against democracy in our time.’®
To this question Tocqueville provided both political and social answers. He
did not confuse republicanism with democracy. Contrasting late medieval and
early modern republicanism to that of his own time, he also differentiated
the political regimes of renaissance Italian city-states from the much larger
modern nation-states of Britain, France and America. But in these notes, his
emphasis fell upon comparing social and economic class differences in the
Florence of Machiavelli’s time to the striking inequalities produced by
the early industrial revolution in England. As Engels was to be after him,
Tocqueville had been horrified by the conditions of workers in the factories
he had seen in Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool. The contrast between
the working classes’ standard of living and that of their employers could not
have been more evident. Were such class differences compatible with democ-
racy as understood by Tocqueville?
In Chapter III, Part 1, of the 1835 Démocratie, Tocqueville had defined
democracy not as a political regime, but as a distinctive type of society (état
social) based on the equality of its members.’ This he contrasted to the struc-
tured inequalities of aristocratic societies. When Tocqueville came to Eng-
land and Ireland, what he observed suggested to him that the new economy of
industrialization was already producing a type of society in which members of
different social classes were less, rather than more, nearly equal than before.
Did not such inequality count against his theory of democracy and his predic-
tions of an irresistible movement towards social equality?

4 For references to the doctrinaires see M. Richter, ‘Tocqueville and Guizot on

Democracy: From a Type of Society to a Political Regime’, History of European Ideas,
30 (2004), pp. 61-82. Further discussions of the doctrinaires occur in other articles of the
same issue.
5 OC, XVI, p. 547.
6 Ibid.
7 DA,N,I, pp. 37-8; DA, OCP, II, pp. 50-2; Bradley, I, pp. 46-7; Lawrence, pp. 50-1.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 429

In his notes on the Florentine Histories, Tocqueville provided an answer to

this question which differed significantly from that to be given in the 1840
Démocratie. There, in Tocqueville’s chapter ‘How Industry could Give Rise
to Aristocracy’ (‘Comment l’aristocratie pourrait sortir de l’industrie’), he
treated the great wealth derived by a minority from industrial manufacturing,
banking and commerce as so limited and exceptional as not to endanger the
otherwise egalitarian characteristics of that type of society he called demo-
cratic.* The alternative formulation given in his notes on Machiavelli reveals
Tocqueville in an earlier stage of his dialogue with himself about the meaning
of what he had seen in England. He can thus be observed at two differing
phases as he registered and assessed the significance of the new social and
economic developments produced by the industrial revolution. Tocqueville
perceived immediately the threat they posed to the concepts of democracy and
aristocracy basic to his thought. It was at just this time that he encountered
Machiavelli.
The history of Florence interested Tocqueville as a potential challenge to
the theory of democracy he had just developed in the 1835 Démocratie. The
notes on Machiavelli are dominated by this pragmatic and present-minded
concern with the arguments in France and England for and against extending
democracy through enlarging the number of those allowed to vote.
After Tocqueville posed the question of the extent to which Florentine soci-
ety was democratic, he added an analysis of its political institutions. Were
they republican or democratic? Distinguishing ancient and medieval repub-
lics from their modern analogues, he depicted Florence as having been gov-
erned by aristocratic rather than democratic principles. But could these two
classifications be combined, or were they mutually exclusive? Madison,
insisting that republics differ from and are superior to democracies, had
described the American Constitution as republican.” But in Chapter IX, the
real conclusion to the 1835 Démocratie, Tocqueville had classified the United
States as a democratic republic. Thus he could meaningfully pose a central
question of his inquiry: How did the Florentine republic differ from modern
democratic republics such as the United States?
Indispensable to Tocqueville’s analysis of Florence is the comparative
method he had developed and applied explicitly to America and implicitly to
France. What is novel in the notes on Machiavelli is the extended range of
comparisons now made possible by Tocqueville’s newly acquired knowledge
of societies, governments and histories other than those of France and the
United States: those of the United Kingdom, Switzerland and renaissance
Florence. In his Introduction to the 1835 Démocratie, Tocqueville had
remarked that there were as yet no ‘terms of comparison’ that would make it

8 DA,N, Il, pp. 40-2; DA, OCP, II, pp. 671-5; Bradley, II, pp. 158-61; Lawrence,
pp. 551-8.
9 The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York, 1961), pp. 81-2.
430 M. RICHTER

possible to analyse the momentous changes transforming modern societies."

His notes on Machiavelli show how he himself was thinking about the
requisite ‘terms of comparison’. In addition to democracy and aristocracy, the
categories employed in his comparative analyses included the distinctions
between society and political institutions, between mores (moeurs) and laws,
between representative and direct democracy, between large- and small-scale
polities, between the politics of large cities and those of agricultural rural
districts.
But did Tocqueville ignore economics in his treatment of social and politi-
cal change? As Seymour Drescher established in his classic study, striking
alterations in Tocqueville’s thought occurred after he visited England and
Ireland in 1835.'' Tocqueville’s notes on the Florentine Histories were writ-
ten at a moment when he seems to have considered defining equality in eco-
nomic rather than purely social terms. These notes suggest that Tocqueville
once held views of the relationships between the classes of manufacturers
and industrial workers other than those he ultimately adopted in the 1840
Démocratie.

Tocqueville on Machiavelli as Political Theorist and Historian

Readers may well wonder why Tocqueville chose to read Machiavelli at just
this time. The fact is that after Tocqueville’s return from England and Ire-
land, he and his wife, whom he had married in 1835, left for a month’s holi-
day abroad. However, after she fell ill, she was advised to seek treatment at a
spa in Baden, Switzerland. During their stay, Tocqueville read both The
Prince and the Florentine Histories in French translation. According to
Tocqueville’s own account, these happened to be among the books he had
thrown at random into his luggage just before their departure from Paris.’
Thus it was Fortuna that led Tocqueville to Machiavelli.
In a number of letters from Baden, Tocqueville recorded his reflections on
Machiavelli as a political theorist (publiciste). Tocqueville’s judgments were
for the most part hostile, and not particularly well-informed. We do not know
whether he ever read the Discourses and The Art of War, neither of which is
mentioned in his correspondence or elsewhere in his work.
But Tocqueville nowhere represents himself as an authority on Machia-
velli. Although surprisingly ready in his correspondence to pass sweeping

10 “We lack terms of comparison’ (les termes de comparison nous manquent), DA,N,
I, Introduction, p. 8; DA, OCP, Il, p. 7; Bradley, I, p. 6; Lawrence, p. 12. “A new world
requires a new science of politics’ (/lfaut une science politique 4 un monde tout nouveau)
DA, N, I, Introduction, p. 9; DA, OCP, II, p. 8; Bradley, I, p. 7; Lawrence, p. 12.
'l Seymour Drescher, Tocqueville and England (Cambridge, MA, 1964).
!2 The other books brought by Tocqueville were Bossuet, /’Histoire des Variations,
and Plato’s Oeuvres completes in French translation. Tocqueville to Royer-Collard,
Baden, 25 August 1836, OC, XI, p. 19.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 431

judgments, Tocqueville never claims that they derive from a reading of

Machiavelli’s entire oeuvre, much less from knowledge of commentaries on
it, or from historical research on renaissance Florence. He frankly admits that
all he knows about that history is what he found in Machiavelli.
However, Tocqueville’s mind was spontaneously and incurably theoreti-
cal. Despite the fact that he was reading Machiavelli’s Histories for the first
time, he set out a number of comparisons between Florence and the most
recent developments in Great Britain, France and the United States, the sig-
nificance of which he was assessing in the second part of the Démocratie.
What he wrote about the Histories were reading notes never intended for pub-
lication. They are more valuable for what they reveal about Tocqueville’s
own thought at just this time than for his verdicts either on Machiavelli as a
theorist or on the history of Florence.
Yet Tocqueville was stimulated by the Histories to comment on a number
of topics in political theory such as the distinctions between modern and Flor-
entine republicanism and democracy, as well as the potentially destructive
nature of extreme social conflict. Since the Histories is among the least
known of Machiavelli’s major works, it may not be out of place here to review
some of the controversies about its place in his thought. To do so may clarify
which subjects attracted Tocqueville’s attention, as well as those he ignored.
In Felix Gilbert’s valuable summary:
Diverse judgments have been made on. . . the [storie Fiorentine. For some
itis an amplification and exemplification of the rules and laws Machiavelli
had expounded in The Prince and the Discorsi; it is proof that Machiavelli
was no historian, only a political scientist... For some it is a sign that after
Machiavelli’s system had been formed it underwent no further change; for
others the /storie Fiorentine represents a new and final stage in the evolu-
tion of Machiavelli’s thought: less utopian and more realistic but also more
pessimistic than his previous writings.’
Disagreements by commentators about this last point have been identified
by Gisela Bock as turning on the contrast between the Florentine Histories
and Machiavelli’s earlier assertion in the Discorsi:
[that] civil discord should be viewed not as a disruptive element but as the
leaven and cement of a free republic, and as making possible the common
good [achieved in the Roman Republic] as the result of compromises and
balances between the nobles and plebs. Later, however, in the [storie
Fiorentine, Machiavelli seems to have abandoned this positive evaluation
of civil conflict."

!3 Felix Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli’s Jstorie Fiorentine: An Essay in Interpretation’, in

History: Choice and Commitment (Cambridge, MA, 1977), p. 135. Gisela Bock, “Civil
Discord in Machiavelli’s [storie Fiorentine’, in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed.
Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 182-3.
'4 Bock, ‘Civil Discord’, pp. 182-3.
432 M. RICHTER

On this view, Machiavelli returned to that tradition of political thought which

had always condemned discord as both cause and effect of bad government
and corruption.
The text usually cited to support this view that Machiavelli drastically
altered his evaluation of conflict or civil discord comes in his Preface to the
Histories:

For most other republics . . . have been content with one division by which
they have sometimes expanded and sometimes ruined their city; but Flor-
ence, not content with one, made many. In Rome, after the kings were
driven out, disunion between the nobles and the plebs arose and Rome was
maintained by it until its ruin.
... But in Florence the nobles were first divided among themselves; then
the nobles and the people; and in the end the people and the plebs; and it
happened many times that the winning party was divided in two. From such
divisions came as many dead, as many exiles, and as many families
destroyed as ever occurred in any city in memory.'”
In his notes, Tocqueville both accepts this negative characterization of con-
flict in Florentine history, and yet presents a qualified conclusion close to the
positive view of civil discord found in the Discorsi. Tocqueville certainly
knew and indeed endorsed the positive view of discord as reaffirmed by
Montesquieu in Chapters VIII and IX of his Considérations: ‘It was highly
necessary that there be internal divisions in Rome... [W]henever everyone is
tranquil in a state that calls itself a republic, that state is no longer free.’ '® Just
the year before in England, Tocqueville had written in the same vein: ‘To live
in freedom, it is necessary not to be upset by constant agitation, movement,
and danger.’'’ One of Tocqueville’s comments about Florentine history is
positive, although qualified. Despite the political passions, violent revolu-
tions and unremitting partisanship that disfigured Florentine history, while it
remained a republic, its territory and wealth continued to grow and its arts,
sciences and literature achieved extraordinary distinction. Tocqueville added:
‘So powerful is liberty, even when knowledge of how to use it remains incom-
plete.’'* Once Florence was pacified and subjugated by the Medicis, its
power, wealth and creativity began to decline. Thus in different passages of
his text, Tocqueville made both positive and negative estimates of the effects
of social discord in Florentine history.

15 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield,

Jr., (Princeton, 1988), pp. 6-7.
16 Oeuvres complétes de Montesquieu, ed. R. Caillois (2 vols., Paris, 1949), II,
p. 119; the translation is from Montesquieu, Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans.
M. Richter (Indianapolis and Cambridge, MA, 1990), p. 101. The passage from Tocqueville
is in OC, VI, 2, p. 91; OCP, I, pp. 513-14.
7 Tocqueville, OC, VI, 2, p. 91; OCP, I, pp. 513-14.
18 OC, XVI, p. 547.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 433

Even more puzzling in Tocqueville’s letters from Baden to Royer-Collard

is that, in them, Tocqueville rated the Florentine Histories far above The
Prince, dismissed by Tocqueville as a superficial work:
Machiavelli makes a great show of wickedness, as he taught knowingly
how to commit political crimes. His [Prince] is a highly complicated
machine driven by cunning, deceit, lying, and intrigue. But, in the end, what
does he achieve? In my view, the student of Machiavelli would become
entangled in his own ruses. Seeking advantages on one side, he exposes
himself on the other. He would never be astute enough to hide his cunning;
nor could his treasons be so well hidden as to prevent him in the long run
from being identified as a traitor.
... In short, Machiavelli’s Prince would have to work so artfully and labori-
ously to become a consummate criminal, that it would be less difficult to
achieve his goals by acting honorably.'®
Even accepting the goals assumed in The Prince, Tocqueville continued,
the means counselled by its author are self-defeating, 1f invariably applied. A
truly clever prince would reserve such deceptions for only the most extreme
emergencies.”
Despite Tocqueville’s preference for the Histories over The Prince, he saw
the same morality at work in both books:
Always the same indifference to justice and injustice, the same admiration
for cunning, whatever the means employed, the same profound admiration
for those who succeed ... Machiavelli was so infinitely flexible, so unaf-
fected by principles of any kind, that he was capable of doing anything,
even good, provided only that it were profitable to him.”!
As for Machiavelli’s view of politics, Tocqueville wrote, it contained noth-
ing to support the belief that self-sacrifice and civic virtue are the prerequi-
sites of republican liberty. ‘The basis of his thought was that in themselves
actions are neither good nor bad. The only criteria for judging them is the cun-
ning of the actor, and the extent to which his actions produce success.’”
Although occasionally praising noble and disinterested conduct, Machiavelli
neither understood nor appreciated it. ‘For him the world is a great arena,
from which God is absent, where there is no place for conscience, and where
everyone seeks only to get the best for himself. Machiavelli is the grandfather
of Thiers. That is to say it all.’”°

'9 Tocqueville to Royer-Collard, Baden, 25 August 1836. OC, XI, p. 19.

20 Tbid.
21 Tid.
22 Tocqueville to Kergorlay, 5 August 1836, OC, XIII, p. 390.
23 Ibid. When young, Tocqueville had read Thiers’ history of the French Revolution,
which he found repugnant because of its moral relativism and exclusive concern with
success. In Tocqueville’s view, Thiers, as a leading politician in the July Monarchy, was
following the same immoral principles he had so admired in his history.
434 M. RICHTER

These severe criticisms of Machiavelli made by Tocqueville in his 1836

letters from Baden may explain a doubly ambiguous judgment made by him
many years later. In 1852 Tocqueville, then President of the Académie des
Sciences Morales et Politiques, gave an address on the science of politics. In it
he ranked Machiavelli among the most famous political theorists. These he
described as constituting a group which
[B]asing its views either on detailed study of history or on abstract consid-
eration of the nature of man, seeks to determine which rights belong natu-
rally to the society (corps social), and those which are exercised by the
individual; which laws are best suited to societies in accordance both with
the forms of traditions and subsequently adopted ideas; which system is
appropriate to which conditions, places, and times. These are the political
theorists (publicistes): Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and
Rousseau, to mention only a few of the most remarkable (éclatants).*

The ambiguity in question stems both from the adjective éclatant used to
characterize these six theorists and from Tocqueville’s twofold characteriza-
tion of political theory. Tocqueville could be saying that Machiavelli is so
well known because of his notoriety as an alleged teacher of evil, the view
presented in the Baden letters. As for the distinction between, on the one side,
those theorists whose ideas originate in their attention to the details of history
and, on the other, those who study human nature at a high level of abstraction,
Tocqueville may have recalled his admiration of the Florentine Histories and
how he had preferred it to The Prince. Because Machiavelli’s name appears in
so few other places in Tocqueville’s work, we shall never know for certain
what he meant to convey in this lecture. Equally inconclusive is the list of
authors read by Tocqueville as he was trying to end the 1840 Démocratie. He
describes himself as devouring pell-mell in the space of four months a ‘con-
fused and bizarre collection of books. Rabelais, Plutarch, the Coran, Cervan-
tes, Machiavelli, Fontenelle, Saint-Evremond.’* Which works of Machiavelli
he read at that time remain a mystery.
How were the harsh judgments of Machiavelli in Tocqueville’s letters from
Baden related to his notes on the Florentine Histories? It will be seen that
these strongly adverse moral judgments in Tocqueville’s correspondence
contrast sharply with the relatively detached tone of his notes on the Histories.
Intended for himself alone, the notes are more matter of fact and less judg-
mental than Tocqueville’s letters.
In these notes, Tocqueville’s defence of modern representative democ-
racy continues the qualified optimism with which he concluded the 1835

24 The text of the speech is in OC, XVI, pp. 229-42. The reference to Machiavelli is at
p. 232. The speech has been translated into English by George Lawrence as “The Art and
Science of Politics’, Encounter, XXVI (1971), pp. 27-35.
25 Tocqueville to Beaumont, 22 April 1838. OC, VIII, 1, p. 293.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 435

Démocratie.” 26 The notes also anticipate Tocqueville’s subsequent judgment:

despite the profound changes transforming England, violent revolution was
not imminent there. Political liberty could and probably would be maintained
in England, the first modern society to be simultaneously democratized and
industrialized.”’

Equality and Inequality in Renaissance Florence and

Early Industrial Revolution England
As has been noted, the first question Tocqueville asked himself was set within
the controversies raging in France and England about extending democracy.
He replied that Florentine history should not be used as an argument against
modern democracy. Thus in 1836 when already well into writing the second
part of the Démocratie, Tocqueville still believed that in its American form,
representative democracy, adapted to national conditions, remained an option
both viable and desirable in France and elsewhere.
The ambiguities of Tocqueville’s definition of democracy in the Démocratie
are notorious. He shifted between treating democracy as a type or form of
society (état social), and as a political regime, or type of government, histori-
cally the more usual application of ‘cratic’ designations.”* Further confusion
has been created by Tocqueville’s use of two substantive terms ‘democracy’
(démocratie) and ‘democratic type of society’ (état social démocratique), but
only one adjective: ‘democratic’ (démocratique) to designate both the social
and political aspects of democracy. Tocqueville had begun the 1835
Démocratie (Chapter III) by following Guizot and Royer-Collard in asserting
the primacy of the social over the political, that is, making the type or form of
society (/’état social) prior to and determining its form of government and
institutions politiques. These may be either free or despotic. By the time that
Tocqueville completed this first part of the Démocratie, he concluded that the
potential dangers of democracy could be mitigated by political and legal
means. Equal rights for all citizens, their general participation in local gov-
ernments, freedom of speech and religion, as well as a number of other rights
and institutional arrangements make liberty possible in modern democratic
societies.”

26 See M. Richter, ‘The Uses of Theory: Tocqueville’s Adaptation of Montesquieu’,

in Essays in Theory and History, ed. M. Richter (Cambridge, MA, 1970), pp. 74-110.
27 See Drescher, Tocqueville and England, pp. 54-151.
28 A diagnosis of the political reasons for the semantic instability of Tocqueville’s
treatment of democracy as a concept has been proposed by Pierre Rosanvallon, La
Démocratie Inachevée (Paris, 2000), pp. 116-26. My own analysis is in M. Richter,
‘Tocqueville and Guizot on the Relationship between Politics and Society’, in History of
European Ideas, 30 (2004), p. 61-82.
29 DA,N, I, p. 245; Bradley, I, p. 330; Lawrence, p. 315.
436 M. RICHTER

In 1836 Tocqueville compared the Florentine republican experience to a

modern democratic republic such as the United States. This Tocqueville had
described as having developed a legal system defining the rights of citizens,
and with institutional guarantees of liberty unknown in Machiavelli’s time.
American citizens were for the most part self-restrained, as the Florentines
had not been, by inner checks derived from mores (moeurs) and religion.
When formulating this contrast, Tocqueville may have recalled Federalist 9,
where Hamilton expressed his ‘horror and disgust’ with the small republics of
Greece and Italy (including Florence), ‘at the distractions with which they
were continually agitated, and at the rapid succession of revolutions by which
they were kept in a state of perpetual vibration between the extremes of tyr-
anny and anarchy.*? Hamilton had gone on to give reasons for believing that
modern republics, as he defined them, could preserve order and maintain lib-
erty. The modern science of politics had discovered those great institutional
arrangements by which the excellences of republican government may be
retained, and its imperfections avoided.
However, disregarding Hamilton and Madison, Tocqueville, in the 1835
Démocratie, had classified the United States as a democratic republic. Thus
he merged what Madison in Federalist 10 had declared to be mutually exclusive:
democracies and republics.*! This formulation is continued in Tocqueville’s
notes on the Florentine Histories:
General remarks on the Florentine republic, principally on what distin-
guishes the so-called democracy of Florence from the democracies of our
own time...
Considering first the type of society (/’état social), | ask whether the
Florentines, at any period of their history, ever lived under conditions
analogous to those of our really democratic society. My conclusion is that
they never did.*
Tocqueville’s analysis of Florentine history was in terms of three classes:
la noblesse, la bourgeoisie and le peuple. Throughout otherwise contrasting
periods when one or another class took power, certain uniformities persisted:
Whether noble, popular or bourgeois, all three parties (partis) had ruled
with the same habitual violence. To be able to inflict exile, confiscation, or
death upon enemies were the goals [of all parties]. The means used to attain
them were riots, and wars, civil or foreign. Altogether absent from internal

30 The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, p. 71. Other potential sources for a dim view
of Florentine history were Guizot’s famous 1829-30 lectures on the history of civiliza-
tion in Europe and France, attended by Tocqueville and Beaumont just prior to their
departure for the United States. See the nearly one hundred printed pages of Tocqueville’s
lecture notes on Guizot, OC, XVI, pp. 441-534. Descriptions and evaluations of the Ital-
ian republics occur in both series on the history of civilization in Europe and France.
31 The Federalist Papers, ed. Rossiter, pp. 81-2.
32 OC, XVI, p. 547.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 437

quarrels were the spirit of legality, respect for law, moderation, reason
itself. Once a party took power, it proceeded immediately and without hesi-
tation to establish its tyranny by violence. The very idea of right (droit) was
absent to a degree exceeding any other history known to me.*?
Implicitly Tocqueville was contrasting Florentine practice to his own
depiction of the United States in the 1835 Démocratie as approximating the
ideal of a democratic polity in which liberty was moderated by the rule of
law, religion and the mores of citizens who respected the rights of all. As a
republic, Florence, for two hundred and fifty seven years, had enjoyed civic
liberties, but because of the failure by all parties to observe the restraints
requisite to ordered liberty, it fell into the licence described in the words of
Machiavelli:
Cities, and especially those not well ordered that are administered under the
name of republic, frequently change their governments and their states not
between liberty and servitude, as many believe, but between servitude and
license. For freedom is extolled in name only by the ministers of license,
who are the men of the people, and by the ministers of servitude, who are
the nobles, neither of them desiring to be subject either to the laws or to
men.**
Tocqueville kept returning to the comparability of the Florentine republic
to modern democracies. How was this to be determined? Tocqueville turned
first to identifying Florence’s type or mode of society, its état social. At any
time in its history had the état social of Florence been democratic, analogous,
that is, to modern societies characterized by equality of conditions? Tocqueville
denied that Florence had ever been democratic in this sense.
From the foundation of the Florentine republic in 1255 until 1343, the city
had not only an aristocratie, but also a noblesse, or body of nobles (un corps
de nobles) which exercised feudal dominion over the countryside surround-
ing the city .. . This noblesse possessed considerable wealth, which was
transmitted by the laws of inheritance . . . No one could call this state of
affairs a democratic type of society (état social démocratique).*°
After 1343, the noblesse, having lost a civil war, no longer existed. “But
there was still an aristocratie, that is, a considerable number of immensely
rich families, along with many more extremely poor citizens.’** Tocqueville
was here reconceptualizing the concept of aristocracy in terms of the relative
wealth of social classes. He no longer equated aristocracy with noblesse,
defined exclusively in terms of feudal privileges based on birth.

32,OC XVI, pi5As:

34 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. Banfield and Mansfield, p. 146.
35 OC, XVI, p. 547.
36 OC, XVI, p. 545.
438 M. RICHTER

At this point, Tocqueville’s analysis took a surprising turn. Using the cri-
terion of economic inequality, he compared fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Florence to Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool in the first third of the
nineteenth century. Just one year before, when Tocqueville visited and described
Manchester, he had vividly detailed his horror at what he saw.”’ For perhaps
the first and only time, Tocqueville was considering the possibility of defin-
ing equality and inequality in economic rather than social terms. Previously,
he had made the presence or absence of socially ascribed statuses into the
defining characteristic of democracies and aristocracies, respectively. But
confronted with Manchester, he had written: “Here is the slave, there the mas-
ter; here the misery of the majority, there the wealth of the few. Here the
organized force of the many; there the profit of a single person . . . Here the
effects; there the causes.’**
In his notes on Florence, Tocqueville was still using this same opposition
between the few very rich and the many living in misery:
It must not be forgotten that all of the Florentine Republic was confined to
the city itself. To hold that Florence at that time was an état social
démocratique would be like applying that classification to Manchester, Bir-
mingham, and Liverpool, or to other great urban centers of industry and
commerce. All such cities have families with colossal fortunes at the same
time that unspeakable miseries are suffered by the much more numerous
poor. No doubt such cities are to be found in modern democratic societies,
but it would be absurd and unfair to reduce the conditions of a people to
those of its large cities.”
Analysing Machiavelli’s Histories, Tocqueville denied that large modern
states are characterized by the same range of inequalities as great manufactur-
ing and commercial cities. In his view, modern states also include rural areas,
towns and smaller cities. This Tocqueville believed to be as true of the United
States as it was of England and France. Despite his visits to English cities in
1835, he did not conceive of urbanization as a necessary consequence of
industrialization. Tocqueville saw no qualitative difference between renais-
sance Florence on the one side, and, on the other, Manchester, Birmingham
and Liverpool in the 1830s.
When in the second part of the Démocratie, Tocqueville later wrote a chapter
on how a new aristocracy might emerge from industry, he invoked the same
phrase he had first used when he saw Manchester, and then applied to Florence
in his notes on Machiavelli.*° Radical inequality is what distinguishes this type

37 OCP, I, pp. 490-510; OC, V, 2, pp. 67-84. For a description of rich and poor in
Manchester see, OCP, I, p. 503.
38 OCP, I, p. 503, and OC, V, 2, p. 81. The Pléiade edition of the travel notes is prefer-
able to that of the OC.
39 OC, XVI, p. 547.
40 DA, N, Il, pp. 140-2.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 439

of society, in which a small minority enjoys opulence, while the majority of

inhabitants live in poverty. In Tocqueville’s reflections on the Histories, he
ascribed such a class structure to all large industrial and commercial cities. He
did not distinguish them in terms of time or place, as ancient or modern, or in
terms of their type of economy.
Despite having perceived clearly the drastic novelty of the industrial revo-
lution, Tocqueville, in his notes on Machiavelli, still was content to classify
Machiavelli’s Florence as an aristocratic society because of its drastic in-
equalities of wealth. While admitting that the same or an even greater degree
of inequality characterized the English cities of his own time, to which he
compared Florence, Tocqueville now made a significant move. By his empha-
sis upon the far greater scale of modern societies, Tocqueville was asserting
that modern societies include populations of rural areas, towns and smaller
cities which cannot be said to share the inequality common to both great mod-
ern industrial and commercial cities, and to renaissance city-states such as
Florence. It must be remembered that at this time the population of France
was still largely rural and agrarian, while even in England, urbanization was
only beginning.
Thus, in his dialogue with himself, Tocqueville saved his basic hypothesis
that modern societies are or are becoming democratic, that is, egalitarian.
Florentine history could not be used in political argument against the desir-
ability of those modern democratic republics possessing the type of restraints,
the system of ordered liberty Tocqueville commended in the 1835 Démocratie.
However, in the second or 1840 Démocratie, Tocqueville took another way
of maintaining his thesis that modern societies are or are becoming demo-
cratic in the social sense (état social démocratique), that is, that the conditions
of citizens approximate equality. Now he argued that the few rich industrial-
ists constituted an exceptional aristocracy, which was anomalous rather than
paradigmatic.
Tocqueville contrasted ancient, medieval and early modern aristocra-
cies to the status of manufacturers and merchants in modern democracies.
In previous aristocracies, the opulent few had constituted a class. But this,
Tocqueville held, is not true of rich industrialists in modern democracies.
Wealthy manufacturers and merchants do not constitute a class. They share
neither collective goals nor a common identity. Thus they are united by nei-
ther traditions nor common hopes. They have no esprit de corps because in a
modern democratic society rich individuals do not constitute a corps, estate,
or Stand with a corporative identity, as did aristocrats in the past. Nor, as was
the case with previous aristocracies, do the modern rich class have any soli-
darity with those under them. Never having exercised the sort of patronage
practised by territorial aristocracies, this new minority of rich manufacturers
feels no obligations, moral or legal, to those impoverished employees who
create their employers’ wealth. Thus industrialists perform no functions
440 M. RICHTER

which, by legitimating their great wealth, could inspire loyalty, deference or

willing obedience on the part of their employees.
Rich manufacturers and merchants form a type of aristocracy which is an
exception to the democratic society as a whole, to the generic type of society,
l’état social démocratique. All things considered, Tocqueville concluded,
these industrialists are an aristocracy which treats its employees with unprec-
edented harshness rather than the compassion characteristic of democratic
societies. Yet because of its restricted scope and exceptional status in an
otherwise egalitarian society, this aristocracy of manufacturers ranks among
the least formidable threats to modern democracy.
Tocqueville now turned from society to government, from /’état social to
institutions politiques. He posed two questions: first, whether Florentine
institutions had been democratic or republican; second, the extent to which
these institutions resembled those of modern democratic republics like the
United States. Tocqueville conceded that, apart from the little he had been
able to learn from Machiavelli, he knew nothing about the changes in Floren-
tine political institutions during the two and a half centuries in question.
Nevertheless he proceeded to make a number of points. In the 1835
Démocratie, he had not accepted Madison’s reconceptualization in Federalist
10 of republics as qualitatively different from democracies. The title of the
penultimate chapter of the 1835 Démocratie is: ‘The Principal Causes Tend-
ing to Maintain the Democratic Republic of the United States’ (Des causes
principales qui tendent a maintenir la république démocratique aux
Etats-Unis).
It was for this reason that Tocqueville could reject the comparison of a
manufacturing and commercial city-state like Florence to the representative
democracy (démocratie représentative) of a modern territorial state.
I can see no possible comparison between the tumultuous, ignorant, and
passionate society of a great manufacturing and commercial city-state like
Florence, which almost always acted by itself, and the representative
democracy (démocratie représentative) of a modern territorial state as con-
ceived in our time. In such a representative democracy, the spirit of order,
morality, and peace found in rural districts combats the violent populations
of the cities; at the same time that the urban representatives pabeticn and
stimulate their colleagues from the country.’
According to Tocqueville, renaissance Florence resembled ancient and
medieval, but not modern republics, whose constitutions are based on the
principle that everyone living in them has the right to participate in govern-
ment. Florence had not been democratic, but rather was based on the aristo-
cratic idea that only the small number considered to be citizens have the rights
both to be free themselves and to do as they wished with those non-citizens
they governed. Nor did ancient and medieval republics know modern systems
41 OC, XVI, p. 548.
 TOCQUEVILLE’S ENCOUNTER WITH MACHIAVELLI 441

of political representation. They consisted not, as do modern republics, of a

vast association of citizens spread over a large territory, but of a restricted
association of sovereigns living in the same place. Equally unknown were the
separation of the legislative from the executive power and the independence
of the judiciary. Thus Florentine political institutions in no way resembled
those of modern democratic republics.
Revelatory of Tocqueville’s thought at this time was his denial that the
worst aspects of the society and government of Florence could be attributed to
their democratic character. These characteristic defects derived instead, he
thought, from its medieval type of republican organization. He found another
reason to reject anti-democratic conclusions drawn from Florentine history.
Tocqueville concluded that during the period when Florence had been ruled
by a powerful noblesse, its political life was at least as unsettled, violent and
murderous as anything after it. Thus, just as in his treatment of aristocracy in
England and Ireland, Tocqueville was far from being a partisan defender of
the class into which he had been born. Because his mode of thought was
counter-cyclical, he could attack or defend democracy as the situation might
demand. Despite frequent claims to the contrary by commentators,
Tocqueville viewed himself as committed to neither democracy nor aristoc-
racy. His notes on Machiavelli show Tocqueville defending modern democ-
racy in the qualified form he championed.”
What light do these notes on Machiavelli cast upon Tocqueville’s thought,
when in 1836 he returned from his travels to write the second part of the
Démocratie? Clearly he still believed that the état social of any society is
crucial to determining its political regime, as well as its ideas, emotions and
moeurs. Butas late as November 1839. Tocqueville made a significant change
in the title he projected for what we now know as the 1840 Démocratie.
Tocqueville wrote to John Stuart Mill that this second part would be called
‘The Influence of Equality on Ideas and Sentiments’.”*
This title represented a weaker version of the concept of état social than
that stated in Chapter III of the 1835 Démocratie. Now Tocqueville claimed
only that equality exerted some influence on the way members of democratic
societies characteristically thought and felt. This was a retreat from social
determination in the strong sense originally asserted in 1835. As he wrote to
Mill, his subject had been redefined: it was no longer the United States, but
rather the potential dangers to liberty in modern democratic societies, and the
means available for mitigating such potential evils.
Because Tocqueville was writing for a French audience in the Démocratie,
he stressed the weaknesses and dangers of democracy, still defined in terms of
an egalitarian society. Nevertheless, he regarded himself both as a friend of

42 See Tocqueville’s letter to Reeve, Paris, 22 March 1837, OC, VI, 1, pp. 37-8. This
claim is repeated in the Preface to the second part of the Démocratie: DA, N, Il, p. 9.
43 Tocqueville to John Stuart Mill, Paris, 14 November 1839, OC, VI, 1, pp. 326-7.
442 M. RICHTER

democracy and as committed to persuading his readers in France to accept his

diagnosis that it was necessary to give political rights to all while limiting the
powers of government. Only by the participation of citizens could the poten-
tially undesirable consequences of this new form of social organization be
mitigated or obviated. This was a political solution to problems created by the
l’état social démocratique.

Conclusion

Tocqueville’s notes on Machiavelli confirm that after his travels and exposure
to the industrial revolution in England, he continued to defend modern repre-
sentative democracy by using the conceptual tools developed in the first part
of the Démocratie he had just published. As the result of seeing Ireland, read-
ing about Florence, and thinking about France prior to the Revolution, he had
become more critical of aristocratic societies. Now that he had followed
Machiavelli’s chronicle of Florence, he thought better of the options open to
those living in his own time.
Perhaps least to be anticipated was the moment in Tocqueville’s thought
when he considered redefining equality in economic terms in order to take
into account the injustice of a system that created such an imbalance between
the wealth of a few and the suffering of most. This, as has been seen, resulted
from his attempt to put together what he had just seen in Manchester, Bir-
mingham and Liverpool with renaissance Florence.
That he grouped them altogether as large manufacturing and commercial
cities is significant, because it reveals that he did not perceive the industrial
revolution as producing a situation qualitatively different from what had
existed in Machiavelli’s Florence. The economic inequality of great cities
such as Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool was, in his view, more than
outweighed by the greater degree of equality outside them, by the situation
produced by the greater scale and more balanced populations of modern soci-
eties, as contrasted to city-states, and by the political institutions of constitu-
tional and representative government.

Melvin Richter HUNTER COLLEGE

 THE STRUCTURE OF MARX AND ENGELS’ CONSIDERED
ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM

David Leopold '

Abstract: Marx and Engels are frequently portrayed as holding an unremittingly

hostile view of utopian socialism. This negative reading is undermined by the
approving comments on the same subject also found in their writings. However, it
does not follow that Marx and Engels disparage and laud utopian socialism in an
ambiguous or inconsistent manner. There is an underlying structure to their views
which renders their considered account of utopian socialism consistent. Two distinc-
tions provide that structure: a chronological distinction (between the first and the
subsequent generations of utopians); and a textual distinction (between two kinds of
subject matter in utopian writings). These two distinctions correspond to a differ-
ence in the degree of approbation that Marx and Engels bestow. They express a dis-
tinct preference for the first (over any second or subsequent) generation of utopian
socialists, and for the ‘critical’ (over the ‘systematic’) dimension of utopian writ-
ings. A clear (although not unproblematic) rationale motivates each of those
preferences.

I
Introduction

The account of utopian socialism contained in the writings of Karl Marx

(1818-83) and Friedrich Engels (1820-95) is easily misunderstood. Not least,
Marx and Engels disparage and laud these utopian authors in a manner which
can appear inconsistent. Moreover, this apparent inconsistency is not always
illuminated by the scholarly literature. In particular, many commentators are
guilty of neglecting the positive elements in Marx and Engels’ account of uto-
pian socialism, as if this apparent tension between condemnation and praise
could be satisfactorily resolved by simply ignoring the second of those
threads.
I will suggest that this apparent inconsistency — between the con-
demnation and praise of these utopian authors — can be resolved by
attending to the underlying structure of Marx and Engels’ considered
account of utopian socialism. However, before considering the substance
of Marx and Engels’ response to utopian socialism, it is necessary to
address some of the problems of evidence and definition that confront any
discussion of this topic.

l Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, Manor

Road, Oxford OX1 3UQ, UK. Email: david.leopold @ politics.ox.ac.uk. I am grateful to
Matthew Kempshall, Lucinda Rumsey and two anonymous HPT referees, for their
encouragement and criticism.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005

444 7 D. LEOPOLD

II
Some Problems of Evidence

The present topic — Marx and Engels’ account of utopian socialism — raises
several problems of evidence, two of which might be mentioned here. The
first is a concern about the amount of relevant material; whether Marx and
Engels wrote enough about utopian socialism to make a reconstruction of
their considered views possible. The second is a concern about whether their
views can be treated together; whether Marx and Engels held broadly the
same views on this topic.
Regarding the first of these issues (the volume of primary material), it is
apparent that neither author produced anything which might be described
accurately as an exhaustive or authoritative study of utopian socialism.
Marx’s views, in particular, have to be reconstructed from comments made in
passing, in discussions of other subjects and in unpublished texts (including
his correspondence). Engels provides some rather more sustained discussions
of utopian socialism — most obviously in Zur Wohnungsfrage (1872-3) and
in Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique (1880) — but there is still
nothing that could be called a comprehensive or definitive study.” However,
their combined miscellaneous comments constitute a significant body of evi-
dence, certainly enough material to provide textual support for an account of
their attitude towards utopian socialism.
Regarding the second of these issues (the degree of agreement between the
two authors), there is little to be gained by raising the complex and well-worn
issue of the general intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels. I am
interested here only in their views concerning this particular subject, and, in
that context, there are some clear and relevant differences between the two
authors. However, as far as differences in the substance of their views are
concerned, these are largely confined to their earlier writings. For example, in
the early 1840s, Engels attributed a significance to utopian experimentation
which Marx never shared and which Engels himself would subsequently
deny. The young Engels welcomed the growth of intentional communities in
Europe and America (including those communities established by religious
groups, mainly Christian separatists such as ‘Shakers’ and ‘Rappites’) with
considerable enthusiasm, and maintained that the success of such communi-
ties provided important supporting evidence regarding the feasibility of

* The titles of Marx and Engels’ writings are given in the language of their first publi-
cation. Subsequent references are to the most complete and accessible German and Eng-
lish editions of their writings, namely: Marx Engels Werke (Berlin, 1956-68), hence-
forth MEW; and Marx Engels Collected Works (London, 1975-2005), henceforth
MECW.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 445

socialism.’ There is no trace of such positive views concerning intentional

communities in Marx’s own early writings, and every indication that he
already harboured serious reservations about utopianism in general.’ That
said, these particular differences between the two authors did not last. These
early communal enthusiasms of Engels were soon dampened — the rapid col-
lapse of most of the communities whose existence he had previously com-
mended was presumably a factor in this lessening enthusiasm (perhaps
especially the downfall of the ostensibly secular Owenite community of Har-
mony in Hampshire) — and he subsequently came to hold, broadly speaking,
the same view of utopian socialism as did Marx. It is Marx and Engels’
shared views which form the subject matter of this paper, and (henceforth) I
ignore any texts (such as these early writings of Engels’) where they appear to
hold significantly different views.
I have emphasized that after early differences Marx and Engels shared,
broadly speaking, the same substantive views on this subject. That is, beyond
the early 1840s there remained between them no fundamental difference of
standpoint concerning utopian socialism. However, differences concerning
both the form of their remarks, and their level of interest in this topic, appear
to continue beyond that early period. By comparison with Marx, Engels not
only seems more engaged by utopian socialism, but also the tone of his com-
ments (for example, about individual authors) is typically a more generous
one.
In short, I maintain that both of these evidential concerns can be answered.
There is sufficient material, and the views expressed in that material are suffi-
ciently uniform, to make possible a reconstruction of the considered position
of Marx and Engels.

Ill
Some Problems of Definition

My subject here also raises some problems of definition. It is easy enough to

list the individuals that Marx and Engels classify as utopian socialists. That
catalogue is dominated by the three writers and activists that they identify as
constituting the founding generation of utopian socialism, namely Charles
Fourier (1772-1837), Robert Owen (1771-1858) and Henri de Saint-Simon

3 See, for example, Engels, ‘Beschreibung der in neuerer Zeit entstandenen und noch
bestehenden kommunistischen Ansiedlungen’ (1844), MEW, Vol. 2, p. 521; MECW,
Vol. 4, p. 214. ,
4 In ‘Ein Briefwechsel von 1843’ (1843), for example, Marx insists that, in order to
achieve an impact, political practice must engage with contemporary concerns and not
simply confront individuals with a ‘ready made’ utopia. MEW, Vol. 1, p. 344; MECW,
Vol. 3, p. 143.
5 On the troubled history of Harmony, see Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Com-
mencement of the Millenium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998).
446 D. LEOPOLD

(1760-1825). The portrayal of this triumvirate as belonging to the same gen-

eration is a plausible one; not only do they form an age cohort (that is, a group
born within certain dates) but they also share a certain historical identity
(although the precise character of that shared identity is only touched upon
here). They were born within twelve years of each other, and — as Engels
observed — the mature form of their work emerged at around the same time;
the publication of Saint-Simon’s Genevan letters, the ‘groundwork’ of Fou-
rier’s theory (his discovery of ‘passionate attraction’) and Owen’s appoint-
ment as manager of New Lanark, all occurred within a year or two of 1800.°
Marx and Engels were, of course, much younger, and did not know any of this
generation personally (although Marx did attend a lecture by Owen on the
occasion of the latter’s eightieth birthday, reporting that “despite his idées
fixes, the old man was ironical and endearing’
).’ To this original triumvirate,
Marx and Engels added not only second and subsequent generation
Fourierists, Owenites and Saint-Simonians, but also a number of later writers
and activists, including, for example, Etienne Cabet (1788-1856).
Identifying the rationale behind the classification of this diverse group of
writers and activists as utopian socialists is less straightforward. In consider-
ing the characteristics which underpin this label, I shall not say much here
about what makes utopian socialism socialist. For the purposes of argument, I
shall simply assume that the utopian socialists share a commitment to (any
plausible account of) socialist values (such as equality, community, democ-
racy and so on). My qualifier (‘for the purposes of argument’) is an important
one, since adopting this particular classification for some of these writers is
neither obviously appropriate nor universally accepted. It would, for exam-
ple, be possible to construct a plausible case questioning the accuracy and
utility of the description of Saint-Simon as a socialist. However, the socialist
credentials of these writers is not an issue that it seems helpful to linger over
here.
In the present context, it is the question of what makes utopian socialism uto-
pian which is of greater relevance. This is not a straightforward issue. The term
‘utopia’, with its various cognates, is a notoriously slippery one. The neologism
was, of course, created by Thomas More (1478-1535) who added a Latin end-
ing (ia) to a combination of a Greek adverb for ‘not’ (ou) and a Greek noun for
‘place’ (topos). The resulting word for ‘nowhere’ was explicitly linked with

6 See Engels, Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique, MEW, Vol. 19, p. 193;
MECW, Vol. 24, p. 289. Saint-Simon’s Lettres d’un habitant de Genéve a ses
contemporains was written in 1802 (and published in 1803); Fourier’s crucial discovery
of ‘passionate attraction’ occurred in April 1799 (although the first full statement of his
theory — in the Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales — did not
appear until 1808); and Owen entered the ‘government’ of New Lanark on 1 January
1800.
7 Marx to Engels, letter dated 21 May 1851, MEW, Vol. 27, p. 263; MECW, Vol. 38,
p. 360.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 447

the notion of a ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ (eu) place, to produce the additional

connotation of a good society which does not (yet) exist. The word spawned
many neologistic imitators, and its additional connotations multiplied rapidly.
However, one result of this proliferation of meanings (over several hundred
years) is that the characteristics which can be said to make any body of work
utopian remain moot.
In what follows I adopt a use of the adjective utopian which is intended to
meet three conditions. Namely: to respect (elements of) common and critical
usage; to identify the work ofthe socialist thinkers just listed above as utopian
(in a sense in which the writings of Marx and Engels are not); and to be consis-
tent with (elements of) Marx and Engels’ own use of the term.
Consider two definitions, taken from the literature on utopianism, which
fail to meet one or more of these conditions.
Some commentators have sought to limit the adjective utopian to those
socialists who have written texts with a particular literary form. In particular,
one might insist that in order to count as a utopian one has — like More him-
self — to have produced a proper literary utopia, that is, to have described an
imaginary good society in a work of fiction.’ However, whatever its merits,
this somewhat narrow definition would fail to identify our founding trium-
virate (Fourier, Owen and Saint-Simon) as utopian, since none of them wrote
a utopia in precisely this sense (although some of the other socialists who are
identified as utopian by Marx and Engels — most obviously, Etienne Cabet,
whose Voyage en Icarie (1839) traces the fictional visit of one Lord Carisdall
to the island community of Icaria, situated somewhere off the coast of East
Africa — did write classic literary utopias of this kind).
Alternatively, one might be tempted, in the expansive spirit of some mod-
ern ‘utopists’ (as contemporary students of utopianism are sometimes called),
to extend the adjective to all those who envisage improved social arrange-
ments.’ However, this somewhat promiscuous approach would appear to
make it impossible to distinguish utopian from Marxian forms of socialism.
Indeed, such an expansive usage would seem unable to distinguish the
utopian from any other form of socialism (or, indeed, from any other form of
progressive social thought). Perhaps the only non-utopian socialist, on this
account, would be the unlikely (and surely imaginary) figure of the
Panglossian socialist who held that we already live in the best of all possible
worlds.
Having rejected these two alternatives, I turn to the usage which I shall
adopt here. By utopian socialism I mean to designate a socialism which treats
the detailed portrayal of the (good) society of the future as one of its central
concerns. In referring to the centrality of this concern, the suggestion is that
the utopian socialist sees the provision of such descriptions as an important

8 See, for example, A.L. Morton, The English Utopia (London, 1952), p. 10.
9 See, for example, Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (London, 1990), p. 8.
448 D. LEOPOLD

and entirely legitimate endeavour. In referring to the detail of these descrip-

tions, the suggestion is that these utopian portraits of the socialist future have
a comprehensive and involved character (and not that these descriptions of
alternative social arrangements are necessarily complete or rigorous or
persuasive). ;
My proposed definition would seem to fulfil the three conditions identified
above. First, it appears to be consistent with common and critical usage; the
provision of a detailed description of a good society that does not (yet) exist
has often been identified as a defining feature of utopianism.'° Second, it
would successfully identify the writers and activists in question as utopian in
a way that Marx and Engels are not; the utopian socialists listed above differ
in many important respects, but all of their writings are characterized by an
enthusiasm for what might be called the blueprints (the various plans, models
and templates) of a future society. Not least, all of the founding triumvirate of
utopian socialists offer detailed (and divergent) descriptions of the (good)
society of the future. The present article is only indirectly concerned with the
views of the utopian socialists themselves, it may, nonetheless, be useful to
provide some representative examples of the kind of detail that is at issue
here.'' Thus Fourier offers an hour-by-hour account of the work schedule of
representative harmonians in a typical phalanstery;'* Owen outlines the vari-
ous divorce procedures, complete with ‘cooling-off’ periods, appropriate to a
rational society;'* and Saint-Simon sketches the membership rules of the
maritime council responsible for the naval budget of the new industrial
order.'* This kind of detail is noticeably absent from Marx and Engels’ own
writings. I do not, of course, mean to suggest that they offer no intimation

10 See, for example, Lyman Tower Sargent, ‘Utopian Traditions: Themes and Varia-
tions’, in Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World, ed. Roland
Schaer, Gregory Claeys and Lyman Tower Sargent (New York, 2000), p. 15.
!l One reason for illustrating the kind of utopian detail that Ihave in mind is that it has
occasionally been suggested that Marx and Engels do provide ‘detailed descriptions’ of
many of the central institutions of the society of the future. See, for example, Roger
Paden, ‘Marx’s Critique of the Utopian Socialists’, Utopian Studies, 13 (2) (2002), p. 80.
At least some of the disagreement here may stem from different understandings of what
would count as a detailed description.
!2 See the account of ‘Lucas’ and ‘Mondor’ in Charles Fourier, Oeuvres Completes
de Charles Fourier, Vol. 6: Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire (Paris, 1845),
pp. 67-8.
'3 See the ‘Appendix’ to Robert Owen, ‘Lecture on the Marriages of the Priesthood
of the Old Immoral World’ (1835), in Selected Works of Robert Owen, ed. Gregory
Claeys (London, 1993), Vol. 2, pp. 320-1.
'4 See Saint-Simon, ‘Considérations sur les measures 4 prendre pour terminer la
révolution’ (1820), in Oeuvres de Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1966),
p. 109.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 449

whatsoever of the future social order whose emergence they envisaged.'°

However, Marx and Engels are as reluctant as the utopians are eager to offer a
detailed description of that future. Whilst it is possible to uncover the broad
contours of Marx and Engels’ vision of the society of the future, the kind of
enthusiasm and intricacy at issue here is singularly absent. (Note that I insist
only that their writings are not in this sense of the word utopian; the possibility
that Marx and Engels’ work might be utopian in some other sense is deliber-
ately left open here.) The third way in which my proposed usage fulfils the
conditions identified above is that it is consistent with (elements of) Marx and
Engels’ own understanding of these matters. For example, in the First Draft
of The Civil War in France (1871), Marx treats the drawing up of ‘pictures
and plans of a new society’ as one of the defining characteristics of utopian
socialism, and, in a (subsequently much-quoted) letter to Friedrich Sorge
(1828-1906), he identifies utopianism with ‘the play of the imagination on
the future structure of society’.'® In Zur Wohnungsfrage, Engels appears to
confirm that the level of detail in these accounts plays a crucial role in the
appropriate use of this label. He maintains that it would not be utopian to
claim that some particular social problem (the antithesis between town and
country, for example) would be overcome in the socialist future; ‘the utopia
begins only’, Engels elaborates, ‘when one ventures, “from existing condi-
tions”, to prescribe the form in which this or any other antithesis of present-
day society is to be resolved’.””
Note that according to this usage — whereby socialism becomes utopian
when it concerns itself with a detailed portrayal of the (good) society of the
future — utopian socialism is only one form of non-Marxian socialism. This
claim is consistent with Marx and Engels’ own account of this matter (albeit
one frequently contradicted by commentators). In particular, Marx and
Engels do not use the terms ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism in an exhaust-
ive manner, as if all socialisms had to be either one or the other.'* Utopian
socialism is only one of several traditions of non-Marxian socialism that they
identify. In Section Three of the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848),

'5 Ror an attempt to reconstruct the basic outline of Marx’s views, see Bertell Ollman,
‘Marx’s Vision of Communism: A Reconstruction’, Critique, 8 (1977), pp. 7-41.
16 Marx, First Draft of The Civil War in France, MEW, Vol. 17, p. 559; MECW,
Vol. 22, p. 499. Marx to Sorge, letter dated 19 October 1877, MEW, Vol. 34, p. 303;
MECW, Vol. 45, p. 284.
'7 Engels, Zur Wohnungsfrage, MEW, Vol. 18, p.280; MECW, Vol. 23, pp. 384-5.
18 Commentators frequently suggest that Marx and Engels used ‘non-Marxian’ and
‘utopian’ synonymously. See, for example, Judith Shklar, “The Political Thought of Uto-
pia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’, in Utopias and Utopian Thought, ed. Frank E.
Manuel (London, 1975), p. 103; Barbara Goodwin and Keith Taylor, The Politics of Uto-
pia: A Study in Theory and Practice (London, 1982), p. 77; Krishan Kumar, Utopia and
Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, 1987), p. 51; and Frank E. Manuel, A Requiem for
Karl Marx (Cambridge, MA, 1995), p.157.
450 D. LEOPOLD

for example, they portray utopian socialism as one of five extant strands of
non-Marxian socialism (more precisely, utopian socialism is identified as one
of three main contemporary schools of such socialism — ‘reactionary social-
ism’; ‘conservative or bourgeois socialism’; and ‘critical-utopian’ — the first
of which is broken down into three further types, namely ‘feudal socialism’,
‘petty-bourgeois socialism’ and ‘German or true socialism’). In a letter
(1875) to August Bebel (1840-1913), Engels identifies utopian socialism as
one of three schools of socialism — namely ‘feudal’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘petty-
bourgeois or utopian’ — that had existed before Marx (either in a pure state or
in the form of an admixture of these various elements).'”

IV
Marx and Engels’ Attitude Towards Utopian Socialism
The attitude of Marx and Engels towards utopian socialism is frequently mis-
represented. In particular, they are often portrayed as having a fierce and
unqualified hostility towards utopianism, and towards utopian socialism in
particular. That account — which might be called the relentlessly negative
interpretation — appears in both the literature concerning utopianism and that
concerning Marxism. Marx and Engels are said, for example, to have viewed
utopian socialist writings as ‘worthless’ speculation;”’ and to have ‘con-
demned’ the ideas of the utopian socialists.”! Marx’s hostility, in particular, is
identified as savage and unremitting. His opposition to utopianism, for exam-
ple, is portrayed as ‘total and unwavering’ ;” his references to utopianism are
characterized as ‘invariably critical’;” he is described as having ‘contemptu-
ously’ dismissed utopian forms;™ he is said to have possessed an ‘aggressive’
attitude towards the utopian socialists; to have ‘never ceased to scorn’ their
work;” and so on.
It is as well to admit that the relentlessly negative interpretation has some
textual foundation. It is certainly not difficult to find passages in which Marx

19 Engels to Bebel, letter dated 15 October 1875, MEW, Vol. 34, p. 161; MECW,
Vol. 45, p. 99.
20 Goodwin and Taylor, The Politics of Utopia, p. 163.
21 J.B. Sanderson, An Interpretation of the Political Ideas of Marx and Engels (Lon-
don, 1969), p. 42.
22 Darren Webb, Marx, Marxism, and Utopia (Aldershot, 2002), p. 1.
23 Nicholas Lash, A Matter of Hope: A Theologian’s Reflections on the Thought of
Karl Marx (London, 1981), p. 235.
24 Kerry S. Walters, The Sane Society Ideal in Modern Utopianism (Lewiston, NY,
1988), p. 12.
25 Avner Cohen, ‘Marx and the Abolition of the Abolition of Labour — End of Uto-
pia or Utopia as End’, Utopian Studies, 6 (1) (1995), p. 40.
26 Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge, 2nd edn.,
1972); p. 201.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 451

and Engels distance themselves from utopian socialism. Moreover, their

assessments of the latter are often expressed in a fierce and uncompromising
manner (even when measured against the high vituperative standards of Marx
and Engels’ own best polemic). Thus, in the Manifest der kommunistischen
Partei, they dismiss the beliefs of the utopian socialists as ‘fanatical and
superstitious’ ;”’ and in his letter to Sorge Marx condemns utopian views as
‘silly, stale, and thoroughly reactionary’ .”®
However, as a complete account of their views, this relentlessly negative
interpretation will not stand. Alongside critical statements of the kind just
noted, it is also possible to find many passages where Marx and Engels adopt
a more positive and complimentary stance. Effusive comments from
Engels — offering expansive praise of both individual authors and utopian
socialism more generally — are easily found. In a preface (1870) to a reprint
of Der deutsche Bauernkrieg (first published in 1850), for example, he refers
to the ‘genius’ of the founding triumvirate of utopian socialists, and describes
them as ‘amongst the most eminent thinkers of all time’.”” In Socialisme
utopique et socialisme scientifique, Fourier is identified as ‘one of the greatest
satirists of all time’, a figure whose critique of the relations between the sexes
is ‘masterly’ and whose use of ‘the dialectic method’ (in his philosophy of
history) equals that of his contemporary G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831).*° How-
ever, analogous praise — including commendations (albeit perhaps less gen-
erously expressed) of both utopian socialism in general and the contribution
of particular authors — can also be found in Marx’s work. For example, in a
letter to Ludwig Kugelmann (1828-1902), Marx credits utopian literature
with an intuitive insight into, and an imaginative portrayal of, future socialist
society (‘the utopias of Fourier, Owen, etc’ are said to contain ‘the presenti-
ment and visionary expression of a new world’).*' In a series of introductory
remarks in an early and little known article (published in 1846) concerned
with suicide in Paris, Marx writes positively about both the form and content
of Fourier’s work. He identifies Fourier as an example of a tradition of French
criticism whose ‘great merit’ was to have ‘shown up the contradictions and
unnaturalness of modern life’, and he commends the manner in which Fourier

27 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 491;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 517.
28 Marx to Sorge, letter dated 19 October 1877, MEW, Vol. 34, p. 303; MECW,
Vol. 45, p. 284.
29 Engels, ‘Preface’ (1870) to Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, MEW, Vol. 7, p. 541;
MECW, Vol. 23, p. 630.
30 Engels, Socialisme utopique und socialisme scientifique, MEW, Vol. 19, p. 196;
MECW, Vol. 24, pp. 292-3.
31 Marx to Kugelmann, letter dated 9 October 1866, MEW, Vol. 31, p. 530; MECW,
Vol. 42, p. 326.
452 D LEOPOLD

accomplished this insightful social criticism as evincing ‘the warmth of life

itself, broadness of view, refined subtlety, and bold originality of spirit’.°?
Such positive remarks occur with some frequency in the writings of Marx
and Engels. Moreover, they clearly undermine the relentlessly negative inter-
pretation of their attitude towards utopian socialism.
However, in drawing attention to some of the positive remarks that coexist
alongside more negative assessments, I do not mean to imply that Marx and
Engels have an ambiguous or contradictory attitude towards utopian social-
ism. Such a characterization might suggest that they condemn and praise uto-
pianism in disparate and conflicting ways. That is not the interpretation that is
advanced here. Rather, I maintain that there is an underlying structure to the
position that Marx and Engels adopt, a structure which helps make sense of
judgments about utopian socialism which might otherwise appear to conflict.
In order to reveal that underlying structure, it is necessary to isolate two
important distinctions which occur in Marx and Engels’ remarks on this
subject.

Vv
The Chronological Distinction
The first of these distinctions — which illuminate Marx and Engels’ response
to utopian socialism — is concerned with chronology. It differentiates between,
on the one hand, the original generation of utopian socialists (Fourier, Owen
and Saint-Simon) and, on the other hand, their various successors, disciples
and epigones (including, not least, assorted subsequent Fourierists, Owenites
and Saint-Simonians). It is important to note that the degree of Marx and
Engels’ approbation typically parallels this distinction. That is, they are usu-
ally relatively generous about the original utopians and comparatively critical
of their successors and subsequent imitators.
Examples of this distinction between the first generation and the second
(and subsequent) generation of utopian socialists, together with its associated
levels of approval, can be found throughout Marx and Engels’ work. Indeed,
several of the remarks about utopian socialism that I have already quoted
above — including both approving and disapproving comments — were
made in the context of comparisons between the meritorious original cohort
and their lamentable utopian progeny. Thus the praise for utopian socialism’s
intuitive insight into, and imaginative portrayal of, future socialist society
(expressed in Marx’s letter to Kugelmann) is restricted to the founding trium-

32 Marx, ‘Peuchet: vom Selbstmord’, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 597. This article is not
included in MEW. For the German text, see Marx on Suicide, ed. Eric A. Plaut and Kevin
Anderson (Evanston, IL, 1999), pp. 77-101. This quotation is from p. 77.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 453

virate and not extended to their ‘philistine’ successors.*? The condemnation of

utopianism as ‘silly, stale and thoroughly reactionary’ (in Marx’s letter to
Sorge) is made not with reference to ‘the great French and English utopians’
themselves, but is rather restricted to their ‘ineffectual’ disciples.’
The general principle which underlies these comparative judgments is
stated most clearly in the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, where Marx
and Engels maintain that the merits of utopian socialism are in ‘inverse pro-
portion to historical development’.*? That is, the more recent the utopian
author, the less meritorious their contribution. There is, I think, no intimation
here that the content of utopian socialist beliefs have changed significantly
over time. Indeed, Marx and Engels appear to assume that subsequent genera-
tions of utopians hold the same views, broadly speaking, as the founding tri-
umvirate. The suggestion is rather that views which were once praiseworthy
can become reprehensible when the circumstances in which they were first
propounded have changed.
Marx and Engels often describe this declining merit in terms of the increas-
ingly reactionary nature of utopian socialism. In the Manifest der kommunis-
tischen Partei, they plot the different generations of utopians against a scale of
historical progression, noting that ‘although the originators of these systems
were, in many respects, revolutionary’, their myriad modern imitators (each
with their own ‘duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem’) have ‘in every
case, formed mere reactionary sects’.*° The same historical pattern of declin-
ing merit (and increasingly reactionary character) is identified elsewhere. For
example, in a joint circular (1872) on alleged schisms in the International,
Marx and Engels sketch the decreasingly progressive impact of the utopians
on the international movement for socialism. In the beginning, they maintain,
the various utopian sects had a progressive historical impact, acting ‘as levers
of the movement’. However, that socialist movement soon outgrew its early
stages, and the utopian socialists became, in turn, first an ‘obstruction’ and
then, finally, ‘reactionary’.*’

33 Marx to Kugelmann, letter dated 9 October 1866, MEW, Vol. 31, p. 530; MECW,
Vol. 42, p. 326.
34 Marx to Sorge, letter dated 19 October 1877, MEW, Vol. 34, p. 303; MECW,
Vol. 45, p. 284.
35 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 491;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 516.
36 Ibid., MEW, Vol. 4, p. 491; MECW, Vol. 6, p. 516.
37 Marx and Engels, ‘Les Prétendues scissions dans I’internationale’ (1872), MEW,
Vol. 18, p. 34; MECW, Vol. 23, p. 107.
454 D. LEOPOLD

VI
The Textual Distinction Between System and Criticism
The second of these distinctions — which illuminate Marx and Engels’
response to utopian socialism — is concerned with the object, the subject mat-
ter, of utopian writings. It differentiates between the ‘systematic’ and the
‘critical’ dimension of utopian texts. The systematic dimension of utopian
writings consists in those positive elements which describe the ideal society
of the future; whilst the critical dimension of utopian writings consists in
those negative elements which portray faults within contemporary society. To
take an individual case: Fourier’s account of attractive labour — dismissed
(perhaps not entirely fairly) by Marx-as a ‘childishly naive conception’ which
envisions productive activity becoming ‘pure fun, pure amusement’ — con-
stitutes part of the systematic dimension of his work;** whereas his account of
bankruptcy — welcomed by Engels as a component of Fourier’s ‘masterly’
satire on contemporary society — constitutes part of the critical dimension of
his writings.*? (With his usual passion for cataloguing, Fourier had identified
bankruptcy as one of thirty-six features of contemporary trade, and had gone
on to provide a serial account of its thirty-six varieties, including such beguiling
strains as ‘daredevil bankruptcy’, ‘cosmopolitan bankruptcy’ and ‘sentimental
bankruptcy’.) As the case of Fourier illustrates, this second distinction, like
the first, is associated with a difference in the degree of approbation accorded
by Marx. and Engels. Simply put, they are typically more enthusiastic about
the ‘critical’ than the ‘systematic’ elements of the writings of the utopian
socialists.
Examples of this second distinction, and its associated levels of approval,
can be found throughout Marx and Engels’ work. For example, in the early
article on suicide quoted above, it is Fourier’s ‘criticism’ of existing society
(and not his system-building) which Marx identifies as valuable for having
illuminated ‘the contradictions and unnaturalness of modern life’.*° In the
introduction to his (rather free) translation of a ‘fragment’ of Fourier on trade
(1845), Engels regrets that the German socialists have thus far been attracted
only to ‘what is worst and most theoretical’ in the writings of the utopians,
namely ‘the schematic plans of future society’. In responding thus, they are
said to have ‘pushed aside’ the “best aspect’ of utopian writings, namely ‘the
criticism of existing society’.*’ The same regret is repeated in Die deutsche

38 Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Okonomie (Rohentwurf), 1858-1859

(Berlin, 1953), p. 505; MECW, Vol. 28, p. 530.
39 Engels, ‘Ein Fragment Fouriers tiber den Handel’ (1845), MEW, Vol. 2, p. 609;
MECW, Vol. 4, p. 643.
40 Marx, ‘Peuchet: vom Selbstmord’, MECW, Vol. 4, p. 597. For the German text of
this quotation see Marx on Suicide, ed. Plaut and Anderson, p. 77.
4l Engels, ‘Ein Fragment Fouriers tiber den Handel’, MEW, Vol. 2, p. 605; MECW,
Vol. 4, p. 614.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 455

Ideologie (1845), where Marx and Engels maintain that it would be unfortu-
nate if his German contemporaries were to judge Etienne Cabet by his ‘sys-
tem’ alone (as outlined at unremitting length in the Voyage en Icarie), and
thereby fail to take into account his political activity and ‘polemical writings’
as well.** In the same text, they criticize Karl Griin (1817-87) for concentrat-
ing on the ‘system’ rather than ‘the critical side’ of Fourier’s work, since it is
the ‘critical side’ of Fourier which represents his ‘most important contribu-
tion’ (and which includes his ‘brilliant satires on the conditions of life of the
bourgeoisie’).*’ Finally, in the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, it is the
‘critical element’ of utopian literature (as distinct from its ‘fantastic pictures
of future society’) which is acclaimed as being ‘full of the most valuable
materials for the enlightenment of the working class’.“*
I should caution against a possible misunderstanding here. In highlighting
this second distinction, I do not mean to suggest that Marx and Engels, whilst
warm to the social criticism of the utopian socialists, are relentlessly critical
of their system-building. My claim is rather that they are more approving of
the ‘criticism’ of the utopian socialists than of their ‘systems’. Note that, on
occasion, Marx and Engels also comment positively on the systems of the uto-
pian socialists. In Die deutsche Ideologie (1845), for example, the claim of
so-called ‘true socialists’ — such as Karl Griin — that all systems are “dog-
matic and dictatorial’, is dismissed as getting us nowhere.*° The systems of
the original generation of utopian socialists, in particular, are said to have a
number of merits.*° Most obviously, they are of historical interest because
they provide an authentic reflection of “the needs of the time in which they
arose’, but they may also possess some aesthetic value (Fourier’s ‘system’, in
particular, is said to exhibit a ‘vein of true poetry’).*” Elsewhere, Engels also
credits those utopian systems with a certain capacity to hearten and amuse.
Referring to the notorious seas of lemonade and ‘anti-lions’ that populate
Fourier’s writings, Engels remarks that he would prefer to believe in ‘all these

42 Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, MEW, Vol. 3, p. 448; MECW, Vol. 5,
p. 461. In the well-known letter to J.B. Schweitzer (1833-75), dated 24 January 1865,
Marx insists that Cabet is ‘worthy of respect for his practical attitude towards the French
proletariat’, MEW, Vol. 16, p. 30; MECW, Vol. 20, p. 31. On Cabet’s political activities
in France, see Christopher H. Johnson, Utopian Communism in France: Cabet and the
Icarians, 1839-1851 (Ithaca, NY, 1974).
43 Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, MEW, Vol. 3, p. 498 and, Vol. 4, p. 251;
MECW, Vol. 5, pp. 510 and 543.
44 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 490;
MECW, Vol. 6, pp. 515-16.
45 Marx and Engels, Die deutsche Ideologie, MEW, Vol. 3, p. 449; MECW, Vol. 5,
p. 462.
46 Ibid., MEW, Vol. 3, p. 448; MECW, Vol. 5, p. 461.
47 Tbid., MEW, Vol. 3, pp. 448-9; MECW, Vol. 5, pp. 461-2.
456 DeLEOPROLD

stories’ than in the Hegelian ‘identity of being and nothing’.** ‘French non-
sense’, he writes, ‘is at least cheerful, whereas German nonsense is gloomy
and profound’; adding, in a memorable apergu, that in the dour Teutonic
realm of the absolute ‘there is no lemonade at all’.”” (The same capacity pre-
sumably explains, at least in part, the correspondence with Marx in which
Engels demonstrates a predictably bawdy interest in the details of the account
of the copulation of planets contained in Fourier’s posthumous writings.)”°

Vil
The Rationale Behind the First (Chronological) Distinction
In short, the familiar portrayal of Marx and Engels as having a relentlessly
negative attitude towards utopian socialism is an inaccurate one. Scattered
throughout their work, and alongside more critical remarks, there are numer-
ous acknowledgements of the achievements of utopian socialism. Moreover,
there is a structure to these apparently disparate judgments. Marx and Engels
think more highly of the first generation of utopian socialists than they do of
their successors, and they think more highly of the critical dimension of uto-
pian writings than they do of the system-building that those works also con-
tain. Of course, to put the matter in this way is to acknowledge that a certain
structured disapproval of utopian socialism remains central to the position
that Marx and Engels adopt (namely that they think less highly of subsequent
generations than of the founding triumvirate of utopian socialism, and that
they think less highly of the systematic than of the critical dimension of uto-
pian writings). I now seek to elaborate the reasoning behind that response to
utopianism, beginning with the first (chronological) distinction.
The rationale which underpins the greater hostility that Marx and Engels
demonstrate towards the second (and subsequent) generation of utopian
socialists (by comparison with that shown to the founding triumvirate) is open
to misunderstanding. In particular, one might assume that this hostility was a
consequence of the (quantity of) perceived errors (perhaps in their views
about the transition to, and nature of, socialism) made by these different gen-
erations. That is, Marx and Engels might be thought to assume that the found-
ing generation made comparatively fewer errors (about the transition to, and

48 Fourier held that the natural world would become more amenable to human inter-
ests once the evils of civilization were overcome; seas would develop the flavour of lem-
onade and dangerous animals would be transformed into docile and obedient servants
(the ‘anti-lion’, for example, would carry passengers at high speed and in considerable
comfort).
49 Engels, ‘Ein Fragment Fouriers tiber den Handel’, MEW, Vol. 2, p. 605; MECW,
Vol. 4, p. 615.
50 Engels to Marx, letter dated 19 August 1846, MEW, Vol. 27, p. 34: MECW,
Vol. 38, p. 55.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 457

nature of, socialism) than did subsequent generations of utopians. However,

this is not the position that Marx and Engels adopt.
The rationale in question is based on an understanding of historical develop-
ment and an associated notion of culpability. It is not that the founding trium-
virate of utopian socialism made fewer errors than did subsequent generations.
It is rather that, by comparison with their successors, this first generation were
not to blame for their erroneous beliefs (about the transition to, and the
nature of, socialism). According to Marx and Engels, the intellectual forma-
tion of this first generation took place in a historical context (the cusp of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) which inevitably limited their under-
standing in certain crucial respects. That historical context may have been
sufficiently developed to provoke socialist criticism, but it was not suffi-
ciently developed for that socialist criticism to have escaped serious misun-
derstandings. In short, the first generation of utopian socialists were not to
blame for their relevant false beliefs because a correct understanding was not
yet possible. (In this way, Marx and Engels might be said to provide a sympa-
thetic reading in which the first generation of utopians are given a historical
‘way out’ of their mistakes.)°! The same excuse is not available to subsequent
generations who, despite significantly changed historical circumstances, “hold
fast by the original view of their masters’.”*
Marx and Engels identify two features of the original historical context, out
of which that first generation emerged, as relevant to this question of culpabil-
ity. This was a time when both the material conditions of modern society (the
industrial development which would make socialism possible) and the agency
capable of bringing about the future socialist society (the industrial working
class) were underdeveloped. As Marx and Engels put it in the Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei, the epoch in which the first generation of utopians
emerged was characterized by the ‘underdeveloped state’ of both ‘economic
conditions’ and the ‘proletariat’.°’ The same two features are identified (and
elaborated) in the First Draft of The Civil War in France, wherein Marx
describes the founding generation of utopian socialists as working in a period
‘in which the working class themselves were neither sufficiently trained and
organised by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents

5! Reflecting on his approach to lecturing on classical philosophical texts (by ‘Locke,

Rousseau, Kant, or J.S. Mill’), John Rawls maintained that he had sought to avoid
impugning the author for every ‘error’ that a keen modern reader might spot. Sometimes
the ‘way out’ of ‘a mistake in their argument’ was a historical one — ‘in their day the
question need not be raised, or wouldn’t arise and so couldn’t then be fruitfully dis-
cussed’. John Rawls, ‘Afterword: A Reminiscence’, in Future Pasts: The Analytic Tra-
dition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy, ed. Juliet Floyd and Sanford Shieh (New York,
2000), p. 427.
52 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 491;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 516.
53 Ibid., MEW, Vol. 4, pp. 489-90; MECW, Vol. 6, p. 514.
458 D; LEOPOLD

upon the world’s stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation
sufficiently matured in the old world itself’.’ As a result, these utopian writ-
ers were bound to develop faulty understandings of the nature of, and transi-
tion to, any future socialist society. The relevant misunderstandings were
unavoidable in that historical context and, as such, the founding triumvirate
themselves remained blameless. In contrast, although later generations of uto-
pians do not (necessarily) make more or greater errors than their forebears,
because of their changed historical circumstances, Marx and Engels consider
them responsible for those errors in a way that their predecessors were not.
A full list of the utopian misunderstandings that Marx and Engels identify
is scarcely appropriate here. However, three representative errors might use-
fully be mentioned.
First, Marx and Engels condemn what might be called the ‘abstentionism’
of the utopians, that is, their disinterest in, or hostility towards, political
action. Marx and Engels tend to identify this rejection of ‘politics’ with a dis-
engaged or condemnatory attitude towards the class struggle of the proletariat
(that is, towards the very means by which, on their own account, the future
socialist society will come about). Thus, in the Manifest der kommunistischen
Partei, they bemoan the utopian socialists’ rejection of ‘political’ engage-
ment, and in particular their tendency to stand back from class struggle.” In a
later (and less well-known) article, Marx repeats this objection to the ‘absten-
tionist’ tendencies of utopians, and especially regrets their condemnation of
the various ‘strikes, combinations or political movements set in train by work-
ers to improve their lot’.*°
Second, Marx and Engels claim that the utopian socialists hold an overly
passive view of the proletariat. Whereas the authors of the Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei had portrayed the proletariat as a class capable of
‘historical initiative’, it was only as ‘the most suffering class’ that the working
class existed for the utopians.°’ Engels makes a parallel observation in an
interesting letter to the novelist Margaret Harkness (1825-97) concerning A
City Girl. A Realistic Portrait — which Harkness had published under the
name ‘John Law’ in 1887 — in which a young proletarian woman (the seam-
stress Nelly Ambrose) is seduced by a middle-class married man (the ‘Radical
and gentleman’ Arthur Grant). Whilst denying that he wanted her to have pro-
duced ‘a point blank socialist novel’ (a ‘Tendenzroman’ as ‘we Germans’
54 Marx, First Draft of The Civil War in France, MEW, Vol, 17, p. 557; MECW,
Vol. 22, p. 499. See also, Engels, Herrn Eugen Diihrings Umwdilzung der Wissenschaft
(1878), MEW, Vol. 20, p. 240; MECW, Vol. 25, p. 245.
55 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 490;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 515.
56 Marx, ‘L’indifferenza in materia politica’ (1873), MEW, Vol. 18, p. 301; MECW,
Vol. 23, p. 394.
57 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 490;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 515.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 459

would say), Engels maintains that the book is let down by its inaccurate por-
trait of the modern working class. He insists that Harkness’ account of the
proletariat ‘as a passive mass’ was no longer a credible or accurate one,
although it may have correctly described that class in its nascent stages, that is
‘in the days of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen’.*®
Third, Marx and Engels criticize the utopian belief in the efficacy of
small-scale experimentation as a means of engineering the transition to a
future socialist society. The utopian socialists are said to believe that it is ‘the
force of example’ — that is, small-scale experiments funded by the ‘purses of
the bourgeoisie’ — which constitutes the method by which socialism might
come about.” Marx remained fiercely sceptical about what he refers to (in a
letter to Engels) as this ‘phalanstére modéle’, according to which history is to
be put on hold until the world is “bowled over’ by a particular instance of com-
munal experimentation.” Marx and Engels maintained that, rather than facili-
tating the transition to socialism, these ‘small experiments’ — the Owenite
‘Home Colonies’ and the isolated Fourierist ‘phalanstéres’ — were ‘necessar-
ily doomed to failure’.°!
These erroneous views (the hostility to politics, the passive view of the pro-
letariat and the reliance on communal experiments) are typically held by all
utopian socialists; not only the founding triumvirate, but also their various
successors. However, for the first generation of utopians these errors were
unavoidable because both the material conditions of modern society and the
agency capable of bringing socialism about were as yet underdeveloped. In
suitably changed historical circumstances that defence (the unavoidability of
error) is no longer available; anyone who continues to cling to the mistaken
strategies and limited understanding of that earlier period is now culpable.
At times, Marx and Engels identify an additional feature of their own his-
torical circumstances which exacerbates the culpability of the second (and
subsequent) generation of utopian socialists. Itis not only that material condi-
tions and historical agency had now developed to the point where the erro-
neous character of these utopian views was readily apparent, but also that a

58 Engels to Harkness, letter dated early April 1888, MEW, Vol. 37, p. 43; MECW,
Vol. 48, p. 167. Harkness’ self-deprecating reply to Engels (“Many things you say about
my little book are very true, especially about the want of realism in it’) is reproduced
in Beate Kaspar, Margaret Harkness ‘A City Girl’. Eine literaturwissenschaftliche
Untersuchung zum naturalistischen Roman des Spdtviktorianismus (Tiibingen, 1984),
p. 103.
59 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 491;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 516.
60 Marx to Engels, letter dated 20 June 1866, MEW, Vol. 31, p. 229; MECW, Vol. 42,
p. 287.
61 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, p. 490;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 515. Note that Saint-Simon would appear to be innocent of this partic-
ular charge.
460 D. LEOPOLD

correct understanding of the relevant issues (namely political action, proletar-

ian agency and communal experimentation) was now available in the wider
intellectual culture. (Those correct accounts include, of course, the views of
Marx and Engels themselves.) In ‘L’indifferenza in materia politica’ (1873),
for example, Marx seeks to illustrate the situation of contemporary socialists
using an elucidatory analogy with progress in the natural sciences (in which
alchemy represents utopian socialism and modern chemistry stands for scien-
tific socialism). He notes that ‘while we cannot repudiate these patriarchs of
socialism [the original utopians — DL], just as chemists cannot repudiate
their forebears the alchemists, we must at least avoid lapsing into their mis-
takes, which, if we were to commit them, would be inexcusable’.
This elucidatory analogy — which is repeated elsewhere by both Marx and
Engels — helps clarify two issues.
First, this elucidatory analogy illuminates the historical relation between
utopian and scientific socialism. Marx and Engels had long recognized the
existence of affinities between these two bodies of thought. For example, in
the mid-1840s, when Marx and Engels — together with Moses Hess
(1812-75) — planned to publish a series of foreign (French and English)
socialist writings in German translation, they determined to start with the
(first generation) utopian socialists because these writings ‘are closest to our
principles’.® However, the analogy in question suggests that there is also a
developmental relation here; it is not only that alchemy and chemistry share
some similarities, but also that the latter developed out of the former.
Alchemy and utopianism, as Marx and Engels (elsewhere) insist, constitute the
‘infancy’ of chemistry and scientific socialism respectively.™ In his letter to
Sorge, Marx made the same developmental point in a rather different way;
utopianism, he explains, ‘bore within itself the seeds [literally ‘contained it in
nuce’ — DL] of critical and materialist socialism’.” (The developmental
point is also made in the title given to the first German pamphlet edition
(1882) of Engels’ Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique which
was published as Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur
Wissenschaft — that is, The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Sci-
ence.)

62 Marx, ‘L’indifferenza in materia politica’, MEW, Vol. 18, p. 301; MECW, Vol. 23,
p. 394.
63 Engels to Marx, letter dated 17 March 1845, MEW, Vol. 27, p. 24; MECW, Vol. 38,
p27.
64 Marx and Engels, ‘Les prétendues scissions dans I’ Internationale’, MEW, Vol. 18,
p. 34; MECW, Vol. 23, p. 107.
65 Marx to Sorge, letter dated 19 October 1877, MEW, Vol. 34, p. 303; MECW,
Vol. 45, p. 284.
66 See Vincent Geoghegan, Utopianism and Marxism (London, 1987) p. 30; and
G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge, MA,
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 461

Second, this elucidatory analogy illuminates the correct critical attitude

of scientific socialism towards utopian socialism. Chemists (and scientific
socialists) should honour their alchemic (and utopian) predecessors (without,
of course, repeating their mistakes). Marx and Engels sought accordingly to
defend the first generation of utopian socialists against those who would deni-
grate them. For example, in responding to the intentionally dismissive charac-
terization of the original utopian socialists as ‘alchemists’ by Eugen Diihring
(1833-1921), Engels insists that this label would only constitute a meaningful
criticism if it were aimed at contemporary utopians (who were like the indi-
vidual who ‘after the discovery and establishment of the laws of modern
chemistry, attempts to restore the old alchemy’).®’ As far as Fourier, Owen
and Saint-Simon are themselves concerned, Diihring is accused of forgetting
that alchemy ‘was necessary in its epoch’.® The contribution of the original
generation of utopians is, as a result, to be celebrated rather than dismissed.
As Engels elsewhere affirms: ‘We German socialists are proud ofthe fact that
we are descended . . . from Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen’.® Marx also
criticizes others for failing to show the first generation of utopian socialism
sufficient respect. For example, in a note prefacing a partial reprint (in 1880)
of Misére de la philosophie — a critical engagement with the work of Pierre
Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) which was first published in 1847 — Marx
explains the fierce tone of his earlier polemical volume as a reaction (in part)
to the ‘coarse insults’ that Proudhon had heaped on the utopian socialists, a
group of writers whom Marx himself had rightly ‘honoured’ as the forebears
of modern socialism.”°

VIII
The Rationale Behind the Second (System/Critical) Distinction

I turn now to consider the reasoning behind Marx and Engels’ second dis-
tinction, and its accompanying evaluative judgment; that is, their considered

2000), p. 44. The developmental point is lost in the standard English translation Social-
ism: Utopian and Scientific (1892) by Edward Aveling (1849/185 1—98), but captured in
an earlier American version — published by the Socialist Labour Party in serial form (in
The People) and as a pamphlet under the title Development of Socialism from Utopia to
Science (1891) — by Daniel De Leon (1852-1914) and H. Vogt. Engels was not
impressed with the overall quality of this ‘pirated American edition which has been done
into quite execrable English’. Engels to Friedrich Adolf Sorge, letter dated 24 October
1891, MEW, Vol. 38, p. 183; MECW, Vol. 49, p. 265.
67 Engels, Herrn Eugen Diihrings Umwéilzung der Wissenschaft, MEW, Vol. 20,
p. 248; MECW, Vol. 25, p. 254.
68 Ibid., MEW, Vol. 20, p. 248; MECW, Vol. 25, p. 253.
69 Engels, ‘Preface’ (1882) to the first German edition of Socialisme utopique und
socialisme scientifique, MEW, Vol. 19, p. 188; MECW, Vol. 24, p. 459.
70 Marx, ‘Note on Misére de la philosophie’ (1880), MEW, Vol. 19, p. 229; MECW,
Vol. 24, p. 326.
462 D. LEOPOLD

preference for the ‘critical’ over the ‘systematic’ dimension of utopian social-
ism. Once again, that rationale is not straightforward, and might easily be
misunderstood.
According to what I shall call the commonsense account, it would seem
that, in order to achieve their goals, socialists need not only detailed and per-
suasive accounts of the failings of contemporary society, but also detailed and
persuasive accounts of what any future socialist society might look like.”!
Marx and Engels’ relative enthusiasm for the critical over the systematic
dimensions of utopian socialism might then be thought to follow from their
conviction that utopian accounts of the failings of modern society are more
accurate and useful than are utopian accounts of what any future socialism
will look like. However, on closer examination, this is not quite the position
that our two authors adopt.
Whereas the commonsense account assumes that socialists need detailed
and persuasive assessments of both contemporary failings and future social
arrangements, Marx and Engels adopt a significantly asymmetrical view of
these matters. That asymmetry tracks the distinction between system and
criticism. On the one hand, Marx and Engels accept the need for socialists to
possess a detailed and persuasive account of what is wrong with modern soci-
ety, and moreover they acknowledge that the utopians have something to con-
tribute to such an account. In the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, for
example, having dismissed the utopian systems (these “fantastic pictures of
future society’), Marx and Engels note that the writings of the utopian social-
ists also contain a critical element in which they ‘attack every principle of
existing society’. It is as a result ofthe latter that Marx and Engels judge these
utopian writings to be ‘full of the most valuable materials for the enlighten-
ment of the working class’.’” On the other hand, Marx and Engels deny the
need for detailed and persuasive accounts of what socialism might look like.
Whereas the commonsense account assumes that socialists require detailed
and persuasive accounts of future social arrangements, but questions whether
the utopians have much to contribute to that endeavour, Marx and Engels
insist that the endeavour itself is redundant. When it comes to issues of social-
ist design, they do not primarily criticize the utopian socialists for the inade-
quacy and implausibility of their blueprints, they criticize them for supposing
that we need blueprints at all.’”’ This strikes me as a remarkable viewpoint, and
it is important to understand why Marx and Engels might have held it.

71 This is not the place to address the positive case for utopian design. However, for
some tentative remarks in a rather different context, see my ‘Introduction’ to William
Morris, News From Nowhere, ed. David Leopold (Oxford, 2003), pp. xxx—xxxi.
72 Marx and Engels, Manifest der kommunistischen Partei, MEW, Vol. 4, pp. 490-1;
MECW, Vol. 6, p. 516.
73 As will be apparent, I dispute the claim — sometimes ventured in the literature —
that Marx and Engels have no problem with utopian speculation about the society of the
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 463

Marx and Engels frequently resist the opportunity to say very much about
what, on their own account, socialism might look like. When it comes to pro-
viding significant detail regarding the social and political arrangements of the
society of the future, they adopt something of a self-denying ordinance. Thus
Marx famously remarks, in the ‘Afterword’ (1873) to the second German edi-
tion of volume one of Kapital, that, rather than writing recipes ‘for the
cookshops of the future’, he has confined himselfto ‘the mere critical analysis
of actual facts’.”* In Zur Wohnungsfrage, Engels similarly declines to answer
the question of what will happen to the instruments of production once social-
ists have come to power. To attempt to provide an answer to that question, he
insists, ‘would be utopia-making, and that I leave to others’.”° The prohibition
appears to be a strict one. Indeed, Engels suggests that the most that can be
ventured legitimately is a few cautious claims regarding what the future will
not look like. For example, regarding the scarcely marginal matter of the eco-
nomic structure of socialist society, Engels asserts that ‘the utmost we can do
is State from our understanding of the basic conditions of all modes of produc-
tion up to now that with the downfall of the capitalist mode of production cer-
tain forms of appropriation which existed in society hitherto will become
impossible’
.’°
The rationale which underlies this self-denying ordinance is perhaps made
clearer in a letter (1881) to Domela Nieuwenhuis (1846-1919) in which Marx
warns that it would be a mistake to raise a question (as the Dutch social demo-
crats were seeking to do at a forthcoming international socialist congress in
Zurich) concerning the actions of socialists once they had come to power.”
The only legitimate answer to such a question, Marx maintains, is ‘a critique
of the question as such’ (that is, an exposure of the faulty assumptions presup-
posed by such a question).’* The purportedly faulty assumption here is that we
need to plan how a socialist society would operate. Marx appears to think that
such plans are neither possible nor necessary.” It is not possible to make plans
(at least, accurate plans) because we cannot anticipate now what that future
programme of action will need to be. It is not necessary to make plans because

future (disagreeing only with utopian views concerning the transition to that society).
See, for example, Levitas, The Concept of Utopia, p. 55.
74 Marx, Kapital, MEW, Vol. 23, p. 25; MECW, Vol. 35, p. 17.
75 Engels, Zur Wohnungsfrage, MEW, Vol. 18, p. 282; MECW, Vol. 23, p. 386.
76 Ibid., MEW, Vol. 18, p. 285; MECW, Vol. 23, p. 389.
77 The conference was convened on the initiative of Belgium socialists to discuss the
establishment of a new International. Delegates from socialist parties in twelve countries
met in Chur (the authorities in Zurich having prohibited the conference) on 2—4 October
1881.
78 Marx to Nieuwenhuis, letter dated 22 February 1881, MEW, Vol. 35, p. 160;
MECW, Vol. 46, p. 66.
79 Tn addition, Marx suggests that attempting to draw up such plans ‘only serves to
distract from the present struggle’. Ibid., MEW, Vol. 35, p. 161; MECW, Vol. 46, p. 67.
464 D.-ALEGPOLD

socialists will only come to power in circumstances in which all the relevant
‘modus operandi’ are also available.*° There are two pertinent features of this
latter claim. First is the extraordinary optimism at the heart of such formula-
tions; it seems that the optimal solution to social problems is guaranteed by
historical circumstances (when socialists come to power all the socialist
‘means of operating’ will be conveniently lying to hand). Second is the cir-
cumscribed role that this optimistic claim about the historical process leaves
for political action; the task of socialists, on this account, is not to design solu-
tions to social problems but rather to facilitate the delivery of the optimal
solution which is already being produced by historical development.*!
Marx and Engels maintain that blueprints are redundant because the opti-
mal solution to the social and political problems of humankind is immanent in
the historical process.** Their insistence that there is little to learn from uto-
pian designs for the society of the future is a product, not of a belief that they
themselves can come up with better proposals, but rather of their conviction
that such plans and templates are unnecessary.** The point is made throughout
their work using a familiar and revealing series of obstetric metaphors.** As
early as the early 1840s, Marx had rejected a view of the historical process as
setting humankind problems to which individuals have to invent solutions, in
favour of a view of the historical process as providing its own solutions
(which individuals would be motivated to identify and help bring into life).
Political practice, he maintains, should consist not in confronting contempo-
raries with ‘some ready made system’ (such as the Voyage en Icarie), but in
helping deliver the new world which ‘the present now bears within its
womb’.*° Perhaps the best-known remark of this obstetric kind appears in The
Civil War in France (1871), in which Marx insists that the working class

80 Marx to Nieuwenhuis, letter dated 22 February 1881, MEW, Vol. 35, p. 161;
MECW, Vol. 46, pp. 66-7.
81 Elsewhere Marx claims that it is ‘not a matter of putting some utopian system into
effect, but of conscious participation in the historical process revolutionising society
before our very eyes’. Marx, Herr Vogt (1860), MEW, Vol. 14, p. 439; MECW, Vol. 17,
p. 79:
82 See Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich, chs. 3-4. (My
reflection on the relation between Marxism and utopianism has been much influenced by
Cohen’s valuable book.)
83 Indeed, the little that Marx and Engels do say about future society is largely deriva-
tive of utopian socialism. As Eric Hobsbawm has noted: ‘Very nearly everything that
Marx and Engels said about the concrete shape of communist society is based on earlier
utopian writings.’ Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Marx, Engels, and Pre-Marxian Socialism’, The
History of Marxism, ed. Eric J. Hobsbawm (Bloomington, IN, 1982), Vol. 1: Marxism in
Marx’s Day, p. 9.
84 On the obstetric conception of political practice in Marxism, see especially Cohen,
If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich, chs. 3-4.
85 ‘Rin Briefwechsel von 1843’, MEW, Vol. 1, pp. 344 and 343; MECW, Vol. 3,
pp. 143 and 141.
 MARX & ENGELS’ ACCOUNT OF UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 465

‘have no ready-made utopias to introduce’, and limits the historical task ofthe
proletariat to setting free ‘the elements of the new society with which old col-
lapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ .*°
The link here between the rejection of blueprints and the obstetric concep-
tion of political practice is acknowledged in a letter to Engels in which Marx
discusses the (mischievous) possibility of Engels placing a review of the first
volume of Kapital in a journal run by one of Marx’s political opponents.*’
One of the (deliberately provocative) lines of elaboration that Marx recom-
mends developing in the proposed review concerns the relation between his
own approach and that of what he calls ‘socialism by the book’ or ‘utopian-
ism’. Marx suggests that his own magnum opus has ‘sounded the death-knell’
of utopianism and that it has accomplished this by its demonstration ‘that
present society . . . is pregnant with a new, higher form’ .** If the central fea-
tures of socialism are not to be invented but are rather determined beforehand
by the development of the capitalist mode of production, then blueprints
would indeed seem redundant. The role of the proletarian midwife, to pursue
the obstetric metaphor, is to deliver and not to design the contents of the his-
torical womb.
This claim — that since the solutions to social problems are imminent in the
historical process blueprints are redundant — strikes me as highly question-
able. This is not the place to discuss such doubts at length, but three reserva-
tions might be mentioned briefly. First, this rejection of blueprints seems to
lack a foundation. Not least, it lacks a foundation in Marxist theory since the
materialist conception of history — at least on my understanding of that
theory — contains no account of a developmental plan underwriting the his-
torical process which would guarantee that appropriate solutions will always
emerge. Second, it is a position to which only those with an extraordinary
confidence in the historical process can subscribe. Such confidence was per-
haps widely felt in the nineteenth century. However, in the wake of what has
been plausibly characterized as ‘the morally worst century of human history’,
the belief that the solutions to the social problems that face humankind need
only to be delivered (and not designed) no longer seems a reasonable one to
hold.* Finally, the thought that the new society is to be found in the old is a
dangerous idea which encourages a lack of attention to questions of socialist
design (the analysis of what this new society should look like). The failure to
clarify ends, and the social and political arrangements that might embody

86 Marx, The Civil War in France, MEW, Vol. 17, p. 343; MECW, Vol. 22, p. 335.
87 Namely Der Beobachter, the Stuttgart newspaper edited by Karl Mayer
(1819-89). Engels’ unsigned review duly appeared (December 1867). See MEW,
Vol. 16, pp. 226-8; MECW, Vol. 20, pp. 224-6.
88 Marx to Engels, letter dated 7 December 1867, MEW, Vol. 31, p. 404; MECW,
Vol. 42, p. 494.
89 Joseph Raz, Value, Respect, and Attachment (Cambridge, 2001), p. 10.
466 D.- LEOPOLD

them, can have deleterious practical consequences. As one commentator has

recently put it — alluding to Marx’s already quoted ‘Afterword’ to the second
edition of Kapital — unless we write recipes for the cookshops of the future
‘there’s no reason to think we’ll get food we like’.”

Ix
A (Brief) Summary

I have been concerned here with Marx and Engels’ understanding of, and atti-
tude towards, utopian socialism. After considering some problems of evi-
dence and definition, I sought to demonstrate that the familiar portrayal of
Marx and Engels as having a relentlessly negative attitude towards utopian
socialism is mistaken. Scattered throughout their work, and alongside more
critical remarks, there are numerous acknowledgements of the positive
achievements of utopian socialism. Moreover, there is a structure to these
apparently disparate judgments. Marx and Engels think more highly of the
first generation of utopian socialists than they do of their successors; and they
think more highly of the critical dimension of utopian writings than they do of
the system-building that those works also contain. Marx and Engels’ chrono-
logical preference (for the first over subsequent generations of utopians) is
explained by their understanding of the relation between historical develop-
ment and culpability. As a result of the historical circumstances in which they
wrote (the undeveloped state of both economic conditions and proletariat),
this first generation (unlike their successors) were free of responsibility for
their errors (their erroneous beliefs about the nature of, and transition to,
socialism). Marx and Engels’ textual preference (for the critical over the sys-
tematic element in utopian writings) is explained by their belief that blue-
prints are unnecessary. Marx and Engels maintain that since the optimal
solution to social problems is immanent in the historical process, the proper
role of political practice is limited to delivering the elements of the society of
the future with which the collapsing old world is pregnant. I have suggested
that this rejection of the need for blueprints is questionable; it is a view which
appears baseless, unreasonable and potentially dangerous.

David Leopold UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

90 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich, p. 77. The Marx quo-
tation is from Kapital, MEW, Vol. 23 p. 25; MECW, Vol. 35, p. 17.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’:
CHINA’S SELECTIVE ADOPTION AND RECONSTRUCTION
OF MODERN WESTERN POLITICAL CONCEPTS (1840-1924)!

Guantao Jin and Qingfeng Liu?

Abstract: This article discusses the introduction of the Western concept of democ-
racy to China from the late nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth
century and the formation of the Chinese concept of democracy. It suggests that the
modern Chinese concept of democracy underwent two formational phases. At the
beginning, the traditional elite tended to interpret Western democracy in terms of
republicanism. During the New Culture Movement (1919-25), the new generation of
intellectuals began a selective reconstruction of the notion of democracy, which
resulted in the modern Chinese view of democracy characterized by popular participa-
tion and elections. With funding from several research grants, we have created a data-
base of texts related to modern Chinese political thought (about 60 million words). By
carrying out a frequency count and meaning analysis of the terms gonghe (republican-
ism) and minzhu (democracy), this article examines the roots of the replacement of the
concept of republicanism by democracy from the perspective of intellectual history.

I
A New Perspective on the Formation of the
Modern Chinese Concept of Democracy
Why was the path of democratic development so bumpy in twentieth-century
China? There have been two theories on this subject in the field of the history
of political thought. One is that traditional Chinese culture is incompatible
with democracy. Lucian Pye contended that the republican polity of early
twentieth-century China was a phantom republic. Following its collapse,
China became enmeshed in a crisis of authority.’ In his view, Western democ-
racy and republicanism could not take root in China because ofthe traditional
Chinese political system and culture. One shortcoming of this theory is its
failure to recognize the instrumental role played by the New Culture Move-
ment in shaping modern Chinese political culture. It is widely accepted that
modern Chinese political thought basically took shape during the period
of the New Culture Movement (1915-24). As Yu-sheng Lin pointed out,
totalistic anti-traditionalism was a particular feature of the New Culture

! Translated by Lap-wai Lam.

2 G11, Research Centre for Contemporary Chinese Culture, Institute of Chinese
Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, NT, Hong Kong. Email:
guantaojin @cuhk.edu.hk and qingfeng @cuhk.edu.hk
3 Lucian W. Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics — A Psychocultural Study of the
Authority Crisis in Political Development (Cambridge, 1968).
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005
468 be GT. JINSAND Oe LAU

Movement.’ Elements of traditional Chinese culture such as patriarchy and

Confucian notions of hierarchy were denounced and rejected. In fact, in post
May Fourth China the legitimacy of political systems was based on anti-
traditionalism, rather than on Confucianism. In view ofthe difficulties facing
its first approach, another theory, grounded on studies of the New Culture
Movement, was proposed to explain China’s lack of success in democratic
development.
The New Culture Movement has been referred to as the Chinese Enlighten-
ment by Vera Schwarcz. Schwarcz pointed out that Chinese intellectuals of
the time ‘made “science” and “democracy” into slogans to connote all-
encompassing alternatives to the Confucian tradition’. Ying-shih Yu attrib-
uted the pro-Marxist leanings of May Fourth intellectuals to their steadfast
belief in science. He explained China’s political development in the post May
Fourth era in terms of the marginalization and radicalization of intellectuals.°
The question, of course, is why considerable technological and economic
development occurred in China during the twentieth century, while demo-
cratic development was insignificant. Why have science and democracy had
such different fates when both were core values of the New Culture Move-
ment? Vera Schwarcz believed that the crisis facing the Chinese nation after
the May Fourth Movement forced the Chinese to embrace collectivism in
order to save the country, and that such a development led to the suppression
of the individual values that underlie democracy.’ Li Zehou referred to this
view as ‘national salvation prevailing over enlightenment’.* This has been the
prevalent theory among Chinese scholars since 1990. However, an important
issue that is rarely probed is whether democracy had the same importance as
science in the era of the New Culture Movement.
The belief that democracy was given the same importance as science was
rooted in a famous remark of Chen Duxiu in the influential journal, The New
Youth (Xin Qingnian):
The staff of our journal are innocent people. It is our advocacy of democ-
racy and science that invites accusations of evildoing. If we are to promote
democracy, we cannot but fight against Confucianism, ritualism, obsession
with virginity, traditional morality and established politics. If we are to

4 Yu-sheng Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in

the May Fourth Era (Madison, 1979).
> Vera Schwarez, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the
May Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley, 1986), p. 107.
® Ying-shih Yu, ‘The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century’, Daedalus,
1221895):
7 Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment.
8 Li Zehou, ‘Qimeng yu jiuwang de shuangchong bianzou’ (‘Variations of Enlight-
enment and National Salvation’), in Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun (On Modern Chi-
nese Intellectual History) (Beijing, 1987).
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 469

promote science, we cannot but fight against old-fashioned forms of art and
outdated religions.”
In this statement, equal importance was placed on democracy and science.
They were defined as the opposites of traditional Chinese beliefs, and the
foundation of the legitimacy of political systems. The above passage has long
been seen as an accurate description of the zeitgeist of the New Culture Move-
ment. But it was, in fact, nothing but a personal opinion. Did Chen’s remark
accurately reflect the situation at the time? The dissemination of concepts is
closely bound up with the use of terminologies. We have conducted a count
of the frequency with which the terms kexue (science) and minzhu (democracy)
appeared in the most representative journals of the New Culture Movement,
and an analysis of their meanings. The results contradict the long-held belief
that intellectuals of the time placed science and democracy on an equal plane.
In The New Youth, there were 1,843 occurrences of kexue. By contrast,
minzhu appears only 1,067 times. Even when the two interchangeable terms of
demokelaxi (the transliteration of democracy) and dexiansheng (Mr Democ-
racy) are counted in, the total is only 1,283. This figure is just slightly more than
two-thirds that of the occurrences of kexue. Even if we count in other
democracy-related terms like minzhi (rule by the people, two hundred and
fifty-three occurrences), minquan (civil rights, one hundred and twenty-five
occurrences) and pingmin zhuyi (another translation for democracy, twenty
occurrences), the total is still less than that of kexue. What is more notable is that
the term kexue was used in a positive sense in all cases, by contrast minzhu was
used negatively in seven hundred and sixty-four cases, nearly half of its total
occurrences (see Table 3, p. 496). This was also the case with the other journals.
For example, in Shaonian zhongguo (Journal of the Young China Association),
a journal that published the views of a greater variety of intellectual groups than
any other during the May Fourth era, minzhu only appeared three hundred and
twenty-five times while the figure was 2,204 for kexue.
Further investigation has revealed that the lower frequency of appearance
of and fewer positive uses of minzhu was a general fact. In this regard,
whether Marxism was accepted or rejected in a journal is irrelevant. The
Weekly Critic (Xingqi pinglun) was a political commentary published from
1918 to 1919, when the influence of Marxism in China was still insignificant.
In this journal kexue appeared one hundred and seventeen times while minzhu
appeared only forty-four times. Inspired by The New Youth, a group of stu-
dents at Peking University published a liberal journal called Renaissance
(Xinchao). Terms like shehuizhuyi (socialism) were frequently used in The
New Youth, but rarely appeared in Renaissance, which we take as evidence
of the latter’s liberal stance and rejection of Marxism-Leninism. The term
kexue appeared 1,170 times in Renaissance, while minzhu (plus demokelaxi)
9 Chen Duxiu, ‘Xin Qingnian zuian zhi dabianshu’ (‘Rebuttal to the Accusations
against New Youth’), Xin Qingnian (The New Youth), 6 (1) (1919).
470 MGA JIN: AND? Q.F,. TU

appeared only one hundred and seventy-five times. We can see that the con-
cept of kexue appeared more frequently than minzhu even in the May Fourth
era, when liberalism prevailed.
For researchers of the transference of political thought across cultural
boundaries, the above quantitative analysis raises a new question: why was
minzhu far less important than kexue while both of them were new values
introduced during the New Culture Movement and underlay the legitimacy of
political systems in the post May Fourth era? The New Culture Movement
coincided with the failure of China’s ‘phantom republic’, as Lucian Pye
called it. This fact is meaningful: Was the modern Chinese concept of democ-
racy established in the May Fourth era related to the failure of China’s adop-
tion of Western republicanism? Chang Hao has argued that what the Chinese
adopted in the process of learning Western political thought was Western
republicanism, not democracy. But he did not further elaborate on this issue
or realize that the term gonghe had been replaced by minzhu during the May
Fourth era.'° Thus, the following previously unexamined issue arises: How
did republicanism and democracy interact with traditional Chinese political
thought when modern Western political thought was being introduced to
China, and how did they shape the modern Chinese concept of democracy? In
this essay we will discuss the introduction of republicanism to China in the
late nineteenth century.'! We will also examine its influence on the formation
of the Chinese concept of democracy during the New Culture Movement. The
primary method of research in this study is an analysis of the meanings of sen-
tences related to democracy, which were extracted from a database containing
the full texts (66.5 million words in total) of publications appearing in the
period 1840-1925.”

II
The Popular Election of Leaders and Rule by the People
The dissemination of ideas is inseparable from language. In investigating the
cross-cultural transfer of the notions of republicanism and democracy, we
must first address the question of why the Chinese used the term minzhu to
translate democracy. This is not merely an issue of linguistics or translation.
The acceptance of a translated term by a community is determined by certain
historical contexts and deep cultural structures. The centuries-old term minzhu

10 Chang Hao, ‘Zhongguo jin bainian de geming xixiang daolu’ (‘The Evolution of
Chinese Revolutionary Thought in the Past One Hundred Years’ ), in Zhang hao zi xuan ji
(The Self-Selected Essays of Chang Hao) (Shanghai, 2002), p. 300.
'! This essay is a result of the research project ‘A Quantitative Study of China’s
Selective Absorption of Modern Western Ideas and the Origins of Certain Key Concepts
(1840-1915)’, supported by the Research Grants Council Competitive Earmarked
Research Grant (CUHK4006/02H) for 2002/3.
!2 See Appendix to this article, pp. 499-501.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 47]

had existed prior to the Qin period (221-7 sc). Shangshu (The Book of Docu-
ments) contains the following passage: ‘Heaven then sought a lord for the
people (minzhu), and grandly it sent down its illustrious and felicitous man-
date to Ch’eng T’ang.’'’ Here, minzhu means the ruler, the lord of the people.
We have investigated the term minzhu in classical texts and found that it had
only one meaning: the emperor. The English word democracy derives from
the Greek demokratia, a combination of demos (people) and kratos (power or
rule) which literally means ‘rule by the people’. Obviously, the original
meaning of minzhu is just the opposite of ‘democracy’. This raises the ques-
tion: Why did people choose an antonym to translate democracy?
In order to explore the origin and dissemination of the practice of using
minzhu for democracy, we conducted a search of the database and found that
the earliest appearance of minzhu for democracy was in Wanguo gongfa, the
Chinese translation of Elements of International Law. Published in 1838, Ele-
ments of International Law was a well-known book. In 1864, the Office of
Foreign Affairs (zongli yamen) of the Qing (1644-1911) government ordered
its translation into Chinese and sent every government agency a copy in the
hope of familiarizing government officials with international law and West-
ern political systems. The American missionary W.A.P. Martin oversaw the
Chinese translation. Because minzhu was originally used to denote republi-
canism, there is a theory that the use of minzhu for democracy in Wanguo
gongfa was a mistranslation.'* This assertion is not entirely correct. The Chinese
compound minzhu has two morphological relationships. As Federico Masini
argued: “Previously min and zhu were understood to have the determining—
determined relationship, meaning “the chief of the people”. With the loan-
translation, the relationship becomes that of subject—predicate: “the people
are the chief”.’'” This transformation in the morphological link, which is
believed to have been brought about by the influence of Western mission-
aries, reflected the transition in the use of minzhu from its traditional meaning
to a modern political concept. But why was minzhu, a term that had long car-
ried the sense of ‘the lord of the people’, chosen to translate a semantically
contrary concept? It was a very curious choice, because the semantic confu-
sion and contradiction of the term would make people hesitate to use it to refer
to Western social systems.
In fact Masini failed to recognize the complicated connotations of democ-
racy in Wanguo gongfa. Our database search shows that minzhu had sixteen
occurrences in Wanguo gongfa and carried a triple meaning. First, it was used

13 Berhard Karlgren, The Book of Documents (Goteborg, 1950), p. 64.

14 Federico Masini, The Formation of Chinese Lexicon and its Evolution Toward a
National Language (Berkeley, CA, 1993), p. 47.
'S Thid., p. 144.
472 © GT. JIN AND QO-F. oni

to denote ‘democratic character’ and ‘democratic republic’ .'®Second, it was

used to refer to anon-monarchical political system (most of them were repub-
lics). Third, minzhu was used to denote ‘elective governments’.
The reasons of using minzhu for democracy and republic can be found if we
place these translated texts under scrutiny. We can see that the first and sec-
ond senses ofthe term minzhu were derived from the notion of ‘sovereignty of
the people’. The third sense of minzhu, namely the popularly elected ruler dif-
ferent from the hereditary monarch, is worth investigation. Although minzhu,
with its traditional determining—determined structure, carried the sense of
‘lord of the people’, it also bore the modern meaning of “the popularly elected
ruler’. Because of China’s long history of imperial rule it is difficult for Chi-
nese intellectuals to understand the practice of ‘rule by the people’. Hence, the
connotation of ‘popularly elected ruler’ served as a bridge connecting the tra-
ditional sense of minzhu — ‘lord of the people’ and its modern usage — the
political system opposed to monarchy and characterized by ‘rule by the peo-
ple’. Naturally, the usage of a term plays an instrumental role in the dissemi-
nation of new concepts. When the Chinese began to use minzhu to denote the
Western democratic system, the traditional connotation of the term crept in
and influenced the Chinese understanding of this Western political concept.
In other words, the modern meaning of ‘rule by the people’ would certainly
be tinged with the traditional meaning of ‘lord of the people’. Let us exam-
ine the following passage from Wanguo gongbao (The Globe Magazine and
A Review of the Times), then the most popular newspaper published by
missionaries:
The lord of the people (minzhu) in America is called ‘president’
(bolixitiande) ... The current American king (meihuang) is in his second
term ... It is said the American people want him to stay on for four more
years Bs the chief of America (meizhu) but Mr. Grant resolutely refused the
offer.'
In this passage, minzhu (the lord of the people), bolixitiande (the translitera-
tion of president), meihuang (American king), meizhu (the chief of America)
were used to denote the American president. This conceptual and lexical con-
fusion clearly reflects the bewilderment of Western missionaries and Chinese
intellectuals over the correct translation for a popularly elected ruler. At last
they had to translate it into minzhu and described the American presidential

'6 For instance, the following passage is found in chapter 2, part 9: ‘Thus the House of
Orange was expelled from the Seven United Provinces of the Netherlands, in 1797, in
consequence of the French Revolution and the Progress of the arms of France, and a
democratic republic substituted in the place of the ancient Dutch constitution.’ The trans-
lators of Wanguo gongfa translated ‘democratic republic’ as minzhu zhi guo. In another
passage, minzhu was used to translate ‘democratic character’.
'7 Young John Allen, Wanguo Gongbao (The Globe Magazine and A Review of the
Times).
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 473

election as xuanju minzhu (the election of the lord of the people). Here minzhu
was used in its third sense — a popularly elected head of state."
Our analysis of the literature shows that there were four meanings for the
term minzhu in the nineteenth century. The first meaning was the emperor.
This was the original and earliest meaning of the term in the Chinese lan-
guage. The second was popularly elected ruler. The third was a political sys-
tem opposed to hereditary monarchy. The fourth was ‘people’s sovereignty’
and ‘rule by the people’. Figure 1 shows the frequency with which these four
different meanings of the term minzhu appeared before 1915. We can see that
the three non-traditional meanings of minzhu appeared only after 1864, when
the Western concept of democracy was introduced. The term was used to refer

Figure 1: Patterns in the Use of the Different Meanings of Minzhu

(The data for this chart were obtained from ‘The Database for Studies of Modern
Chinese Intellectual History [1830-1925]’)

300[

*— Emperors

™— Popularly elected rulers

“— The political system opposed to

200 hereditary monarchy
*— The people are the rulers and rule
jez byithe Peomle: = 2a

150 |

50

0 Imisiitiistignii git A Aware i

1850 1854 1858 1862 1866 1870 1874 1878 1882 1886 1890 1894 1898 1902 1906 1910 1914

18 ‘President’ is translated as zongtong in Chinese today, a translation that can be

dated back to the late nineteenth century. As to why ‘president’ was translated into four
different terms rather than just as zongtong, the reason is simple. In classical Chinese,
zongtong did not mean the supreme leader but the military commander under his sub-
ordination. For example, the following passage can be found in Han Shu (The History of
the Han Dynasty): ‘[The zongtong] assists the emperor in governing the country and is in
charge of every aspect of the government.’ Thus, in the eyes of the translators of Wanguo
gongfa, minzhu would be a more suitable term for the elected leader than zongtong, since
the latter could easily lead to confusion.
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to both popularly elected rulers and a new political system opposite to heredi-
tary monarchy, before coming into wide use to denote the latter. The two uses
of the term peaked in 1895, showing that the Chinese acceptance of the West-
ern concept of democracy was closely related to the concept of popularly
elected rulers. After 1898 the use of minzhu for popularly elected rulers began
to wane. Although the use of the term in its fourth sense, ‘rule by the people’,
showed an upward trend in the early twentieth century, the frequency of this
use still did not exceed the employment of the term in its third sense. In other
words, before the New Culture Movement, while minzhu bore the sense of
mass political participation, it was chiefly used to denote a modern political
system that was opposite to hereditary monarchy.
Even though minzhu was understood as ‘rule by the people’ and as the
political system opposed to hereditary monarchy in the early twentieth cen-
tury, its connotation of ‘popularly elected leaders’ still remained. In 1906,
the revolutionary-minded Zhu Zhixin argued that rule by the people would
result in pandemonium and potentially lead the popularly elected leader to
declare a dictatorship.'? Liang Qichao, the reform-minded spiritual leader of
the Chinese elite, also repeatedly used the terms minzhu zhuanzhi (democratic
dictatorship). He believed that democracy would plunge China into political
chaos and lead to the dictatorship of popularly elected rulers because the
majority of the people were still uneducated and uncultured. He argued that
China should be ruled by enlightened autocrats. The term democratic autoc-
racy means both the autocracy of the ‘lord of the people’ and the autocracy
resulting from democracy.”” The reason why we place so much emphasis on
the traditional sense of the term minzhu — ‘lord of the people’ — is that it has
much to do with the evolution of the view of democracy in twentieth-century
China. In traditional Confucian political thought, the lord of the people — the
emperor, who is at the highest level of the Confucian hierarchy — was sup-
posed to act on behalf of heaven. He was supposed to practise benevolent gov-
ernment and promote the well-being of the people. Therefore, when minzhu
came to assume the modern sense of ‘rule by the people’ in addition to its tra-
ditional sense of the ‘lord of the people’, the people who used this term uncon-
sciously imposed their expectations of imperial rulers on modern rulers. In
other words, they placed greater emphasis on whether a ruler had the ability to
improve the lives of the people than on whether a ruler could contribute to the
promotion of democracy.
Using our database, we went on to review the attitudes of writers towards
minzhu when they used this term in their articles. We made an interesting

'9 Xian Jia (Zhu Zhixin), ‘Lunshehui geming yu zhengzhi geming bingxing’ (‘On the
Simultaneous Implementation of Social Revolution and Political Revolution’), Minbao
Monthly, no. 4 (1906).
20 Liang Qichao, ‘Kaiming zhuanzhi lun’ (‘On Enlightened Dictatorship’), Xinmin
congbao (New People’s Miscellany), nos. 75, 77 (1906).
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 477

finding. Table | (pp. 474—5) shows the attitudes people took when they used
this term (+ is positive, o is neutral, — is negative) from 1864 to 1915. It is
evident that most of the writers adopted a neutral attitude. This represented
the Chinese scholar-officials’ understanding of Western systems. Moreover,
prior to 1898 people rarely used the term minzhu in a negative manner. This
shows that some Chinese intellectuals aimed to introduce Western political
systems and promote the ideals of these systems by using the term minzhu.
The negative usage mainly appeared after 1898 and was often associated with
the meaning of ‘the people are the ruler’. During this period the Qing govern-
ment declared its intention of embarking on reforms and began elements of
modern Western political systems on a large scale. Why did the political term
used to describe modern Western political systems begin to assume negative
connotations when such a system was becoming a reality? We found that the
reason was connected with the elite.
The elite, naturally enough, stressed the importance of elitism in the intro-
duction and implementation of a Western political system and were against
the idea of ‘rule by the people’. At this time, another political term, gonghe,
rose to prominence and became the focus of social attention.

Il
Learning about Western Political Systems in the
Early Twentieth Century: The Introduction of Republicanism

As previously mentioned, in Wanguo gongfa the term minzhu encompassed

both republicanism and democracy. At that time the Chinese intellectuals
were unaware ofthe differences between these two concepts, which have very
different etymological origins and evolved in different ways. The root mean-
ing of the term democracy is ‘rule by the people’. But democracy was not a
widely used term in the West for centuries, and was rarely used in Latin litera-
ture.”' In the long medieval period, res publica was discussed. But the Latin
word res publica, which means ‘the public thing’, does not mean the same thing
as democracy. Before the seventeenth century, res publica was used to denote
the ‘state or commonwealth’. It actually referred to a political system as distinct
from hereditary monarchy.” The wide usage of this word implies that national
affairs were separated from the private affairs of the monarch and became pub-
lic matters. We can see that republicanism and democracy were similar in sig-
nificance in that they were opposite in nature to hereditary monarchy. This may
be the reason why the translators of Wanguo gongfa decided to use minzhu to
cover both concepts. But they failed to see the major difference between these
two concepts. In classic political philosophy, democracy means rule by the
majority. By contrast, in addition to autonomy, political liberty, equality,
21 Richard Wollheim, ‘Democracy’, Journal ofthe History of Ideas, 19 (2) (1958).
22 Chamber’s Encyclopaedia, Vol. XI (London, 1973), p. 610.
478 > GT: JIN AND:eO YF 21

citizenship and self-government, republicanism stresses the common good,

which includes patriotism and virtue.”* Republicanism has remained a con-
cept closely related to the elite politics of early Western political history, that
is, that politics is a public activity separated from the private or family affairs
of the monarch.
In other words, republicanism and democracy differed in two ways. First,
in comparison to democracy, republicanism placed a greater emphasis on the
common morality of citizens when they are participating in politics. Second,
republicanism stressed the separation of the public realm from the private
realm. It viewed politics as public matters that are separate from the activities
of the private realm.” Because of its emphasis on the moral standards of
politicians, it was easy for republicanism to slip into elitism.” In traditional]
Chinese political culture, politics was seen as an extension of ethics. Only the
Confucian elite were allowed to enter politics. We can see why, when imple-
menting a modern Western political system, the Chinese elite were immedi-
ately aware of the necessity of distinguishing between gonghe and minzhu,
despite the fact that radical intellectuals liked to use gonghe to refer to their
desired political ideal.
This difference can be seen in the Chinese equivalent of republicanism.
Like minzhu, the Chinese translation for republicanism, gonghe, is a centuries-
old term. Its meaning is best illustrated in the following passage in Shiji
(Records of the Grand Historian): “The two prime ministers, the Duke of
Shao and Duke of Chou, took charge of the government. This [era] was called
Kung-ho (gonghe).’*° This text suggests the existence of an elite political sys-
tem different from an imperial autocracy. But the rulers were still the elite
instead of the common people.
According to research by Japanese scholars, the first person to use gonghe
for ‘republicanism’ was a Japanese. In 1845, when translating a Dutch work
on geography, Mizukuri Shogo turned to Otsuki Bankei for his advice on the

23 Jeffrey C. Isaac, ‘Republicanism vs. Liberalism? A Reconsideration’, History of

Political Thought, 1X (2) (1988), pp. 349-77.
24 Cass R. Sunstein, ‘Beyond the Republican Revival’, Yale Law Journal, no. 97
(1988), pp. 1539-90.
25 American republicanism does not imply elitism. In The Federalist: A Commentary
on the Constitution of the United States, James Madison defined a ‘republic’ as ‘a gov-
ernment in which the scheme of representation takes place’. This was different from a
democracy, which he saw as ‘a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who
assemble and administer the government in person’. But as Robert A. Dahl noted, ‘this
distinction had no basis in prior history’. See Robert A. Dahl, On Democracy (New
Haven, 1998), p. 16.
26 English translation of the passage was cited from Ssu-ma Ch’ien, ‘The Chou,
Basic Annals Four’, in The Grand Scribe’s Records, Vol.1: The Basic Annals of Pre-Han
China, ed. William H. Nienhauser, Jr., trans. Tsai-fa Cheng, Zongli Lu, William H.
Nienhauser, Jr. and Robert Reynolds (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1994), p. 72.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 479

appropriate Japanese translation for republiek. Otsuki, who obviously had a

deep understanding of the meaning of the Chinese term gonghe, suggested
that kyowa-seiji (republicanism) was the best choice. Seemingly, the Japanese
usage of the Chinese term gonghe for a Western political system was influ-
enced by the introduction of Dutch learning.”’ The spread of this term and the
popularization of a Western system of representative government in Japan
can be attributed to Fukuzawa Yukichi’s efforts during the early Meiji
period.** During the Movement for Freedom and Civil Rights (Jiyu Minken
Undo, 1870-80), republicanism was seen as an opposite notion to dictator-
ship. The cause of the adoption of gonghe by Japanese scholars as the transla-
tion for ‘republicanism’ lay in their elitist mentality. It is possible that the
Chinese usage of gonghe for republicanism was introduced from Japan. But it
is also possible that the adoption of gonghe by Chinese intellectuals was spon-
taneous and free of Japanese influence. The coincidental choice of the term by
Chinese and Japanese intellectuals might be the result of their shared elitist
mentality.”
In fact, the elitist-minded Chinese intellectuals had long been against the
idea of ‘people are the lord’ in the discourse of political reforms. Before
minzhu was used to denote democracy, Chinese scholar-officials had been
dismissive of the Western notion of ‘rule by the people’. Xiong Yuezhi has
pointed out that before 1820, the term ‘democracy’ in English-Chinese dic-
tionaries was clearly interpreted negatively, with the use of such descriptions

27 Tsuyoshi Saito, Meiji no Kotoba: Higashi kara nishi e no kakehashi (Meiji Words:
A Bridge from East to West) (Tokyo, 1977), pp. 114-16.
28 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Bunmeiron no gairyaku (An Outline of aTheory of Civiliza-
tion) (Tokyo, 1875).
29 We found from a search through our database that in the 1830s gonghe had been
used several times in articles on ancient Chinese political history and Jewish history in
the Eastern Western Monthly Magazine, a journal published by Charles Gutzlaff. But on
these occasions gonghe was used in its traditional sense. In 1896 when Young John Allen
edited and translated his book Zhongdong Zhanji Benmo (The Whole Story of the
Sino-Japanese War), he unequivocally used gonghe to denote ‘republican’. He wrote:
‘Votes from forty-five states were counted and the results were sent to Washington. The
Democratic Party and the Republican Party of the United States. Democratic [sic] candi-
date William McKinley won the presidential election.’ We can see from the above pas-
sage that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party were respectively translated as
Hezhongdang and Gonghedang. Young John Allen was clearly aware of gonghe’s mean-
ing. His choice of gonghe for ‘republican’ was based on his understanding of the concep-
tual difference between ‘republicanism’ and ‘democracy’ in Western political culture.
Full-scale exchanges between China and Japan had not begun when the term gonghe
appeared in these Chinese publications. Therefore, the choice of gonghe for ‘republican-
ism’ made by missionaries familiar with Chinese culture, such as Young John Allen, was
probably free from Japanese influence. In other words, it seems that the Chinese and Jap-
anese shared the same understanding when absorbing modern Western political con-
cepts, which determined their coincidental choice of gonghe for ‘republicanism’.
480 MGVE. JIN ANDYOF? 110

as duoren luanguan (disorderly administration by the many) and xiaomin

nongquan (abuse of power by the mean).*’ In other words, before 1864, when
minzhu was used to translate ‘democracy’ in Wanguo gongfa, the Chinese
held a negative attitude towards democratic politics. But after minzhu was
used to denote both democracy and republicanism, scholar-officials began to
hold a positive attitude towards minzhu because of the notion of elitist politics
implied by its triple meaning. The term was mainly used by individual intel-
lectuals to express their yearning for Western-style political systems. It is
commonly believed that the Chinese were struck by the necessity of learning
Western social and political systems after China’s defeat in the 1895 Sino-
Japanese War. But it was not until the outbreak of the 1900 Boxer Movement
that political reforms truly came to be implemented. This was because such
efforts depended on the support of the elite. When the blueprint for a Western-
style political system was being drawn up, the semantic distinction between
gonghe and minzhu had to be drawn. The practice of using minzhu to denote
Western political systems was then overshadowed and eclipsed by the term
gonghe.
Figure 2 shows the frequency with which the terms minzhu and gonghe
were used from 1830 to 1915. The rise of the term gonghe can be divided into
three stages. The first was the period before 1895. Gonghe was rarely used in
this stage. This was because minzhu encompassed the connotations of both
‘democracy’ and ‘republicanism’. People simply used minzhu to denote a
political system opposed to hereditary monarchy, which made gonghe a
redundant word. The period from 1895 to 1905 was the second stage. In this
stage, the elite came to be aware of the necessity of introducing Western
political systems. The use of the term gonghe increased significantly in fre-
quency, although was still not comparable to that of minzhu. The third stage
was the period after 1906. In this stage the Qing government was eager to
introduce Western political systems to China and embarked on political
reforms. Under these circumstances the use of gonghe finally exceeded that of
minzhu in frequency. There were two peaks in the third stage, in 1906 and the
period after 1911. 1911 was the year of the founding of the Republic of China.
It is therefore natural that the term gonghe came into widespread use after that
year. But why did 1906 see the highest previous peak of the use of the term?
The year 1906 saw the conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War. Russia and
Japan had fought for control of Northeastern China, especially for Lushun
(also known as Port Arthur). The Chinese government had been too weak to
stop the war from taking place on its territory. It could only declare neutrality
and watch the war being waged on its soil. In the end, Japan, with its

30 Xiong Yuezhi, ‘ ‘‘Liberty’”, “Democracy”, “President”: The Translation and Usage

of Some Political Terms in Late Qing China’, in New Terms for New Ideas: Western
Knowledge and Lexical Change in Late Imperial China, ed. Michael Lackner, Iwo
Amelung and Joachim Kurtz (Leiden, 2001), p. 73.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 481

constitutional monarchy, defeated imperial Russia. Such an outcome had a

huge impact on the Qing government and Chinese intellectuals alike because
they saw Japan’s victory as proof of the superiority of a constitutional monar-
chy over imperial monarchy. In the wake of the Russo-Japanese War, calls for
reform escalated and reverberated throughout China. Delegations were sent
to foreign countries by the Qing government to study the viability of imple-
menting a constitutional monarchy in China. It was during this period that
gonghe became a widely used political term. We know that at this stage the
Qing government launched its political reforms under the rubric of lixian
(constitutionalism or, literally, setting up a constitution). Meanwhile, the
revolutionaries and reformists used gonghe, which was seen as the opposite of
hereditary monarchy, in their rhetoric. We can see that neither lixian nor
gonghe connote popular democratic participation. In other words, the preva-
lence of gonghe after 1906, when a modern Western political system was
introduced to China, served as evidence of the Chinese elite’s preference for
republicanism in Western political thought.

Figure 2: Frequency of the Appearance of the Terms

Minzhu and Gonghe from 1830 to 1915
(The data for this chart were obtained from “The Database for the
Studies of Modern Chinese Intellectual History [1830—1925]’)

1000. [

900 *— minzhu(democracy) ]
ih —
gonghe (Republicanism)

a ad
1833 1838 1843 1848 1853 1858 1863 1868 1873 1878 1883 1888 1893 1898 1903 1908 1913

With the help of the database, we can obtain statistical information on

the usage of political terms. From this information, we conclude that it was
the elite who first introduced the Western concept of republicanism to
China. By analysing the uses of the term gonghe, we have discovered that
the elite’s understanding of republicanism was more accurate than that of
482 Gib, JIN -ANDO. BIG

the revolutionaries. A reading of the political texts of this period yields the
somewhat surprising finding that the Chinese intellectuals of the time had a
far deeper understanding of Western republicanism than people today.
Although Liang Qichao went into exile in Japan after the failure of the 1898
Reform Movement, he remained a leading political theorist and spiritual
leader of the elites who had introduced Western republicanism to China.
Liang noted the differences between republicanism and democracy as early
as 1902. He was aware that the key to the success of republicanism was the
morality of politicians. When introducing Montesquieu’s ideas, he wrote:
‘What republicanism stresses are virtues. These virtues are not the same as
those advocated by moralists or preached by religious people. The virtues of
republicanism are public morals with an emphasis on patriotism and
equality.’*! Likewise, Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader, had some
understanding of republicanism. He believed that republicanism was more
appealing to the Chinese because of China’s thousands of years of moral
political tradition. Sun argued that it was necessary for China to establish a
republic through revolution. He said, “Gonghe was the essence of the gover-
nance of our nation, a heritage from our ancient sages. Whenever the people
talk of ancient China, they all admire the governance of the Three Ancient
Dynasties. What they do not know is that the governance of the Three Ancient
Dynasties was the manifestation of the gonghe.’*” If we compare Liang and
Sun’s views of republicanism, we will see that Liang’s understanding of
Western republicanism was apparently deeper than Sun’s. He knew that the
virtues stressed in republicanism were different from traditional Chinese mor-
als (Confucian ethics). These virtues could not be achieved by revolution.
Hence, aithough Liang Qichao was a vocal advocate of republicanism, he
believed that it was impractical for China to attempt to practise republicanism
immediately. He contended that China should first be ruled by an enlightened
dictatorship so as to foster public morals among the Chinese (Liang called
these morals the qualification for citizenship). Liang believed that this
approach could lay the groundwork for republicanism in China in the future,
and that the existence of public morals was necessary for the success of repub-
licanism.** Because of his understanding of republicanism, before the 1911
Revolution Liang had been an opponent of the idea of realizing republicanism
through revolution. But after the founding of the republic, he became the most
adamant defender of the republic. This was because he realized that the
31 Liang Qichao, ‘Falixue dajia mengdesijiu zhi xueshuo’ (‘Ideas of the Great Legal
Theorist Montesquieu’), in Yinbingshi wenji (Collected Writings from the Ice-Drinker’s
Studio), Vol. 13 (Shanghai, 1928).
32 ‘Sun Yixian yu bailangan taotian zhi gemingtan’ (‘Conversation between Sun
Yat-sen and Miyazaki Toten on Revolution’), in Xinhaigeming qian shinianjian shilun
xuanji (Selected Political Essays before the 1911 Revolution), Vol. 1, ed. Zhang Nan and
Wang Renzhi (Hong Kong, 1962).
33 Liang Qichao, ‘Kaiming zhuanzhi lun’.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 483

republic was faced with two threats. One was the restoration of the monarchy
and the other was the dictatorship of thugs. It was vital to prevent either of
these from happening, and to keep the republic intact.
Another aspect of the introduction of republicanism to twentieth-century
China was the elite’s understanding of politics as public affairs separate from
private affairs. This is another characteristic of republicanism. In traditional
China, the nation was basically an enlarged version of the family. Although
there had always been a boundary between national affairs and the affairs of
the royal family, in Confucian morals loyalty to the country was equal to loy-
alty to the ruler, and loyalty to the ruler was equal to loyalty to parents. Under
the circumstances there was no clear-cut boundary between the affairs of state
and the affairs of the royal family. The earliest distinction between national
politics and the private affairs of the emperor was made during the late Ming
to early Qing periods by Huang Zongxi in his Mingyi daifang lu (circa 1663).
In his metaphor oflog hauling, he likened the emperor to the leader of agroup
of log haulers. In his view, the hierarchical difference between the emperor
and the others was simply a result of the division of labour.** In fact, Huang
Zongxi did not oppose hereditary monarchy, Confucian ethics or patriarchy.
He believed that decisions on public affairs should be made by the intelligent-
sia and elite (representatives of various family clans).*? During the late Qing
reform period, namely, from 1900 to 1911, Huang Zongxi’s long-neglected
ideas were highly valued and earned him a reputation as the Chinese Rous-
seau. In a sense, the promotion of Huang’s thought represented the emergence
of a Chinese version of Rousseauean republicanism. But unlike Rousseauean
republicanism, the assertion of Huang’s thought did not imply the promotion
of the general will of the public; instead it stressed that politics was an affair of
the public realm. The late-Qing attempt at introducing a Western representa-
tive system was framed by the public sphere of the elite. We have argued that
the public sphere of the elite in China was different from the modern public
sphere of the West. The basic units of the elite public sphere were families
instead of individuals. While Western political systems were being intro-
duced to the public sphere by the elite, Confucian patriarchy was still being
maintained in the family.*° Therefore, the gentry-dominated constitution-
making process or republican politics naturally implied a hierarchical in-
equality and a resistance to popular participation.

34 Huang Zongxi, ‘On Ministership’, in Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince,
trans. William Theodore De Bary (New York, 1993), p. 95.
35 Huang Zongxi, ‘On the Prince’, in ibid.
36 Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, ‘Cong “qun” dao “shehui”, “shehuizhuyi” —
zhongguo jindai gonggong lingyu de sixiangshi yanjiu’ (“From “Community” to “Soci-
ety” and “Socialism”: Transformation of the Public Sphere in Modern China from the
Perspective of Intellectual History’), Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo jikan
(Bulletin of The Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica) (Taipei), Vol. 35 (2001).
484 GT: JIN AND-QFo ED

IV
The Failure of Republicanism and the Prominence of Democracy
The year 1911 witnessed the fall of the Qing dynasty and the birth of the first
Asian republic — The Republic of China. Republicanism had for the first time
a chance to be realized in China. The successful translation of republicanism
from an idea into an actual political system hinged on two factors: the estab-
lishment of a viable system of representation that would allow elitist politics
to be realized; and the formulation by the elite of constitutional restrictions on
governmental interference in the realm of the family (which was a private
realm different from the Western one). In a sense, as recognized within the
Western tradition, a representative system is a system for the selection of the
elite. It is an indispensable institutional device for the running of political
affairs when the participation of the whole population is not possible. The
idea of establishing constitutional restrictions on governmental power was
supported by the gentry because this could prevent the government from
interfering in elite control of the family realm and in regional autonomy.
Therefore, when the modern Western political system was being introduced
to China during the late Qing period, what kind of representative system
should be selected and how the constitution should be drawn up were the two
overarching issues that had to be addressed first.
In 1905 the Qing government declared its intention of establishing a consti-
tutional monarchy. Its representative system was almost a copy of the past
imperial civil service examination system (keju). For example, the Qing gov-
ernment prescribed that only traditional scholars or people with equivalent
qualifications would be allowed to vote in the local council elections. Among
the 1,643 representatives throughout the country, eighty percent had earned a
scholarly rank in the traditional imperial examinations. At that time, there
were 1.67 million members of the elite throughout China. This figure was
close to the number of eligible electors — 1.45 million.*” Moreover, when the
Qing government decided on the amount of members of regional advisory
councils, it set the ceiling at five percent of the successful examinees of the
imperial civil service examination. The election procedures were also differ-
ent from those of the modern popular election. They resembled the traditional
method of appointing candidates.** In other words, the representative system
introduced during the late Qing period was shaped by the legacy of the old
elitist examination system. Could this device for selecting elites be trans-
formed into a representative system for a modern country?

37 Geng Yunzhi, ‘Qingmo zhichanjieji lixianpai yu ziyiju’ (‘The Bourgeois Consti-

tutionalists and Advisory Councils in Late Qing’), in Jinian xinhaigeming gishi zhounian
xueshu taolunhui lunwenji (Proceedings of the Symposium in Commemoration of the
Seventieth Anniversary of the 1911 Revolution) (Beijing, 1983).
38 Chang Pengyuan, Jindai zhongguo: zhishi fenzi yu zigiang yundong (Modern
China: Intellectuals and the Self-Strengthening Movement) (Taipei, 1972).
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 485

The Qing dynasty was seemingly overthrown by revolutionaries in the

1911 revolution. But in fact the coup de grace was delivered by the political
elite. Their betrayal of the Qing government was the inner cause of its fall.
The newly established provincial advisory councils were instrumental in the
overthrow of the Qing dynasty.*” Because of the decisive role the elite played
in the fall of the Qing government, the elite-dominated representative polity
remained intact during the early republican era. After the establishment of a
modern system of representation in China, people shifted their focus to
another issue: What kind ofconstitution should be drafted and how could it be
drafted? During the early republican era, the Chinese constitution was
amended four times. The constitution and related laws recognized the elite’s
dominance in the realm of the family. The most controversial issue was how
to constrain the power of the president and the central government. At that
time, the Kuomintang (KMT or The Nationalist Party) favoured the cabinet
system. But when it was on the verge of winning the majority of the seats in
parliament, which posed a great threat to the power of the president, the
KMT’s political leader Song Jiaoren was assassinated by Yuan Shikai, the
then president of the Republic of China. Realizing that a constitution and the
republican system would not be sufficient to restrain the power of Yuan
Shikai, Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, launched
the so-called Second Revolution. However, the revolution failed because of a
lack of support from the elite. Sun Yat-sen was thus forced into exile, and the
constitution was reduced to a mere scrap of paper. In 1915, Yuan Shikai fur-
ther expanded his power, intending to turn the republic into a constitutional
monarchy. Liang Qichao, the leader of the Progressive Party (Jinbudang) and
his student Cai E called for an anti-monarchical campaign. Their appeal
roused a countrywide anti- Yuan campaign, the rallying cry for which was ‘In
Defence of Republicanism’. China then plunged into the chaos of warlordism,
marking the failure of the Chinese attempt to adopt a republican form of gov-
ernment in the early twentieth century.
The failure of republicanism during the early years of the Chinese republic
has long been the focus of research in modern Chinese political history. The
violation of the constitution by the elite and their contempt of procedure were
seemingly the causes of the political chaos in the republican era. But if we
look at the issue from the perspective of political thought, we can detect the
inner cause of China’s difficulty in adopting Western republicanism. Al-
though the elite accepted that moralized politics would facilitate the introduc-
tion of republicanism to China, the political morals that were required by
Western republicanism could not be generated from Confucianism because
the latter emphasized filial piety. Modern elites were aware of the fact that

39 Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng, Kaifang zhong de bianqian (The Transformation of
Chinese Society [1840-1956] — The Fate of Its Ultrastable Structure in Modern Times)
(Hong Kong, 1993).
486 eC ONGIT. JIN AND OP, a1

Confucian ethics were effective only in the family realm. They also knew
that it was necessary to introduce that public morality of the public realm
which was non-existent in Confucianism. But it was still difficult for elites,
who had long placed more emphasis on family and individual morals than on
procedures, to accept the new emphasis on procedures. The huge discrepancy
between traditional Chinese morals and the virtue of citizens, stressed by
republicanism, has been discussed by many scholars. But the impact of the
failure of republicanism on the formation of modern Chinese political ideas
has rarely been investigated. In fact, it was because of the failure of republi-
canism that the new intellectuals attributed the difficulty of learning modern
Western political systems to elitism and to traditional Confucian ethics, to
the extent that an all-encompassing attitude of anti-traditionalism emerged.
During the times when elitism and traditional morals were severely criticized,
Western republicanism was seen as the opposite of democracy. Because of the
many drawbacks exhibited by an elite-dominated republican polity, Western
republicanism was treated with contempt and as a result the modern Chinese
conception of democracy had to be reconstructed. This was what the notion of
democracy underwent in the May Fourth era.
It has been widely believed that Yuan Shikai’s attempt and failure to
restore the monarchy in 1916 was the direct cause of the New Culture Move-
ment (1915-26), which shaped the political thought of twentieth-century
China and the modern Chinese state. Today many scholars are aware that the
failure of republicanism led to the dismissal of a republican system consti-
tuted by an elitist system of representation dominated by scholar-officials,
and to the eruption of a radical anti-traditionalism that rejected Confucian
ethics.“ But many people fail to see that republicanism was replaced by
democracy during the New Culture Movement. Below we will use The New
Youth as the object of research in our study of people’s preference for
minzhu or gonghe in the New Culture Movement. The intellectual changes
of The New Youth has been widely seen as representative of the wider changes
in attitudes among the intelligentsia during the New Culture Movement. Our
40 While most Western scholars recognize the relationship between the failure of
republicanism and the rise of the Leninist party (see Andrew J. Nathan, Peking Politics,
1918-1923: Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism (Berkeley, 1976)), Chi-
nese scholars are more concerned with the links between the failure of republicanism and
May-Fourth anti-traditionalism. For example, Hu Chun-hui pointed out that the political
chaos during the republican period was the direct cause of the citizens’ rising appeal for
direct participation of politics. (see Hu Chun-hui, Minchu de difang zhuyi yu liansheng
zizhi (Localism and Federation of Self-Governing Provinces in Early Republican China)
(Beijing, 2001)). The relationship between Yuan Shikai’s failed attempt at restoring
monarchy and the Anti-Confucianism Movement has also been a focus of historians (see
Max Huang Ko-wu, “Minguo chunian kungjiao wenti zhi zhenglun [1912-17]’ (‘The
Debate over Confucianism during the Republican Era’), Lishi Xuebao (Builetin of His-
torical Research) (Department of History, National Taiwan Normal University), no. 12
(1984)).
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 487

choice of The New Youth was also based on two other reasons: first, as con-
cluded from our statistical analysis of The New Youth, from 1919 onward the
frequency of appearance of minzhu had been higher than that of gonghe (see
Figure 3). We believe that this was a universal phenomenon and the jour-
nal’s later transformation into an organ of the Chinese Communist Party was
irrelevant to it. This universal trend is much in evidence in the results of our
database search, which shows that the frequency of appearance of gonghe
was higher than that of minzhu in almost all journals before 1919, but the sit-
uation changed completely after 1919. In journals published after 1919, the
frequency of appearance of minzhu was commonly higher than that of
gonghe.*' So we believe that the trend shown in the statistical data of The
New Youth was typical of the wider range of intellectual journals in the New
Culture Movement. Second, The New Youth is the only journal in our database
that spanned over ten years (i.e. the timeframe of the whole New Culture
Movement). Other journals were too short-lived and lacking in the continu-
ity of The New Youth, therefore these journals cannot be used as materials for
an indepth analysis. By conducting frequency counts of gonghe and minzhu
in various volumes of The New Youth, we can obtain a picture of the gradual
replacement of gonghe by minzhu and this would facilitate our exploration
of its underlying mechanism.
Figure 3 shows the frequency with which the terms gonghe and minzhu
appeared in The New Youth during the New Culture Movement. We can see
from it that the frequency of gonghe was higher than that of minzhu during the
early stage of the New Culture Movement. This phenomenon was consistent
with the fact that gonghe reached its full bloom and prevailed in China’s
political discourse after 1911. But the period from July 1918 to November
1919 was a turning point. After that, the use of the term gonghe diminished
in frequency.” In contrast to gonghe, minzhu began to be used more and more
frequently, and finally came to supersede gonghe. What happened in this
fifteen-month span to bring about this change? The cause was the 1919 May
Fourth Movement, which had erupted as a result of the Treaty of Versailles.
The impact of the Treaty on the Chinese mentality towards politics has been

41 For example, the term minzhu had only ninety occurrences in Jiayin (The Tiger,
1913-15) while gonghe had eight hundred and forty-nine. In Dazhonghua Magazine
(Great Chung Hwa, 1915-16), gonghe appeared four hundred and sixty times and
minzhu only one hundred and seventy-eight. After 1919 the situation changed com-
pletely. For instance, gonghe had only twenty-nine appearances in the liberal journal
Xinchao (Renaissance, 1919-21) while minzhu had one hundred and eighteen. In the
nationalist Shaonian zhongguo (Journal of the Young China Association, 1919-24),
gonghe appeared ninety-one times and minzhu three hundred and twenty-five times.
42 At that time constitutional monarchy was known as xujun gonghe (republicanism
with anominal monarch). According to our data, when the term gonghe was used to refer
to constitutional monarchy, it apparently bore a negative meaning.
488 SVG JES TIN CAND 2O.F,. LAG

stressed by many academics.” The fact that China’s rights were not protected
in Versailles disillusioned Chinese intellectuals. They came to realize that
Western democratic countries were actually exploitative and self-interested.
This awakening sparked off a surge of nationalism among Chinese intellectu-
als. They found Western democracy so undesirable that they turned for inspi-
ration to the Russian Revolution. We believe that this commonly accepted
explanation is correct, but if one looks at the issue from the perspective of
intellectual history, one will find that this explanation does not completely fit
the intellectual changes of the time. First, the damage done to China’s inter-
ests by the Treaty of Versailles was not more serious than that wrought by
other unequal treaties imposed on China by the West. Why, for example, did
the unequal treaties of the nineteenth-century not discourage Chinese intellec-
tuals from looking to the West as a model for political development? What
made Chinese intellectuals find the Treaty of Versailles so distasteful that
they came to the conclusion that Western countries were imperialistic? A sat-
isfactory explanation cannot be offered without taking into account the partic-
ular mindset of the May Fourth intellectuals. To understand this, we have to
examine the impact of the incidents that took place before the Treaty of

Figure 3: Frequency of the Appearance of Gonghe and Minzhu in

The New Youth
(The data for this chart was obtained from ‘The Database for Studiesof Modern
Chinese Intellectual History [1830-1925]’)

— Minzhu+Minzhi+Demokelaxi

= Gonghe
500

400

300

200

100

VoLI(1915.9- Vol. (1916.9 VoL3(1917.3- VoL4(1918-1- — VoLS(1918.7- — VoL6{1919.1- —VoL7(1919.12- VoL8(1920.9 VoL 1921.5 Quarterlies(192 Irregular
1916.2) 1917.2) 1918.8) 1918.6) 1918.12) 1919.11) 1920.5) 1921.4) 1922.7) 3.6-1924,12) _Issues( 1925.4
1926.7)

43 Ror example, see Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement (Cambridge, MA,
1960), pp. 92-4.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 489

Versailles on people’s concepts. Second, as shown in Table 3 (p. 496), it was

not until September 1920 that Chinese intellectuals saw Western democracy
as a hoax by the capitalists and began to hold a negative attitude towards it.
After Versailles, Chinese intellectuals did embrace Western democracy. Why
did the new intellectuals applaud democracy and neglect republicanism in
1919 and for a brief period after that? We found that there was a link between
the failure of republicanism and the rise of democracy. As shown in Figure 3,
before the plunge in the frequency of the use of gonghe, use of the term
reached a peak from January to June 1918. This peak was caused by the
debate about republicanism among intellectuals. An analysis of the contents
of the debate can depict the mechanism of the rise of democracy and the
decline of republicanism. Before going on to analyse the debate over republi-
canism, let us first make a simple review of the causes that sparked off the
debate.
In June 1917, the Royalist general Zhang Xun sent his troops to Beijing in
an attempt to restore the abdicated boy emperor Puyi to the throne. If Yuan
Shikai’s attempt to restore the monarchy had a shattering effect on the repub-
lican illusions of Chinese intellectuals, then Zhang Xun’s attempt dealt a
deathblow to their cause of building a democratic and republican China. The
farcical event, which lasted for two months, coincided with the high point of
the New Culture Movement. It naturally caused much soul-searching among
Chinese intellectuals. During Zhang Xun’s restoration, Kang Youwei pub-
lished two essays advocating constitutional monarchy in Bu Ren magazine.
Kang Youwei blamed the then political chaos, economic plight and diplo-
matic failure on the attempt to introduce Western republicanism. He believed
that the remedy for such a chaotic situation was a constitutional monarchy. In
March 1918, Chen Duxiu published a criticism in The New Youth of Kang
Youwei’s proposition. In his essay, Chen Duxiu stressed the value and impor-
tance of democracy. Their debate over democracy was the backdrop to the
peak in the use of minzhu and gonghe in 1918.
Looking closely at Chen’s essay, we found that the term minzhu was used
fifty five times, fifty four occurrences of which were quotations from Kang
Youwei’s essay, the last occurrence of which was used to refer to the Western
political system. In Chen Duxiu and Kang Youwei’s essays, minzhu was used
to refer to the opposite of junzhu (monarchy), just as the term had principally
been used before the 1911 revolution. The contrast between minzhu gonghe
(democratic republicanism) and xujun gonghe (republicanism with a nominal
monarch) was often seen in their essays. Xujun gonghe was a term used by the
elite to denote constitutional monarchy. Before 1911, Liang Qichao had used
it to refer to the British constitutional monarchy. In the early republican era,
xujun gonghe became the equivalent of constitutional monarchy. In Western
eyes, it would be ridiculous to put constitutional monarchy in the category of
republicanism. But for the Chinese elite, their acceptance of Western
490 “Ge: JIN AND VQ. 10

republicanism was based on a belief in political elitism. From their point of

view, the distinction between constitutional monarchy and republicanism was
not very clear. However, because of the blurred distinction between republi-
canism and constitutional monarchy in China, when new Chinese intellectu-
als rejected the restoration of monarchy, they also rejected republicanism.
Our literature analysis shows that Kang Youwei’s proposition of xujun
gonghe elicited a strong resistance from intellectuals. We can see two conse-
quences resulting from their semantic usage. First, the combined usage of
xujun and gonghe implied the idea of the restoration of the monarchy and
deprived gonghe of its anti-monarchical motif. Second, as previously dis-
cussed, minzhu had not been a commonly used political term in the Chinese
language after the 1911 revolution. But it was now frequently used in the
phrase minzhu gonghe. People had to use minzhu, a term opposite to monar-
chy, to refer to a modern political system that was opposite to monarchy.
Since the introduction of minzhu and gonghe into China in the latter half of
the nineteenth century, these two concepts had not been mutually exclusive,
although they were conceptually different. But early republican politics ended
up in chaos, and the failure of republicanism led to the rejection of gonghe and
to the divorce of minzhu and gonghe. When republicanism was rejected,
related ideas such as representative systems and constitutional restrictions on
governmental interference in private affairs were also cast into doubt. After
1919, minzhu finally became the symbol of Western politics, and the term
gonghe was rarely used except in the official names of China, such as the
Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China. During the New Cul-
ture Movement, the replacement cf gonghe by minzhu was significant. It was
during this process that minzhu was redefined and contributed to the forma-
tion of the contemporary Chinese conception of democracy. The bankruptcy
of early republican politics and the criticism of traditional ethics as repre-
sented by the old elites during the New Culture Movement contributed to the
emergence of a view of equality that promoted popular participation and
socialism. These elements became the content of the concept of democracy in
modern China, and were important in explaining why Chinese intellectuals
came to embrace Marxism-Leninism.

Vv
The Changing Definitions of Democracy:
From ‘Rule by the People’ to ‘Democratic Dictatorship’
In order to examine how the rejection of republicanism led to the redefinition
of the idea of democracy, we first have to review the idea of democracy in
China in the early twentieth century. As mentioned in Section II, from the late
nineteenth century to the early twentieth century the Chinese concept of
democracy had the following three meanings: a modern political system that
was opposed to hereditary monarchy, rule by the people and popularly elected
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 49]

rulers. After the notion of republicanism was introduced to China, people

began to confuse republicanism with democracy and used these two concepts
interchangeably. To sum up, before the New Culture Movement, the Chinese
understanding of democracy and republicanism contained the following four
elements:
1. popularly elected rulers;
2. popular participation;
3. a representative system (but one that ideally was a blend of Confucian
elitism and a Western system of representation);
4. constitutional restrictions on the government’s power to interfere in the
autonomy of the elite and in the affairs of the private realm.
Generally speaking, the first two were ingredients of democracy and the latter
two of republicanism. As the enthusiasm for republicanism faded after 1919,
the establishment of a representative system and a constitution was excluded
from the agenda of building democratic and republican systems. This meant
that the only components of the conception of democracy left were popular
participation and popularly elected rulers. This led to the disintegration of the
original overall view of democracy and republicanism. On the other hand, it
also created a vacuum that made possible the incorporation of other new com-
ponents. It must be pointed out that the emphasis on the virtue of politicians in
the Chinese understanding of democracy-republicanism was originally an
element of republicanism. Thus, the separation of democracy and republican-
ism led to the recreation of new moral ingredients for the concept of democ-
racy. This process took place in the context of rising sentiment against elitism
and patriarchy. As a result, the related values of the concept of democracy
became more and more radical and egalitarian. It was in this way that the
opposition to Confucian ethics and hierarchy became a defining feature of
democracy during the period of the New Culture Movement.
Li Dazhao, a leading figure in the New Culture Movement and one of the
founders of the Chinese Communist Party, stated: ‘The Pro-Democracy
Movement is a movement aimed at overthrowing the patriarchal monarchical
dictatorship. It is also a movement aimed at overthrowing the Confucian
belief in imperial loyalty.’ At this time, the core value of democracy was
political and economic egalitarianism instead of the morality stressed by
republicanism. The idea of democracy bore the sense of mass participation.
With growing popular sentiment against elitism and the overlooking of the
constitutionalism, the idea of ‘rule by the people’ came to imply majority rule.
If the possibility of a representative system was ruled out, there were only two
ways to implement majority rule: one was through direct government by all of

44 |i Dazhao, ‘You jingji shang jieshi Zhongguo jindai sixiang biandong de yuanyin’
(An Economic Explanation for the Intellectual Changes in Modern China’), Xin Qingnian
(The New Youth), 7, (2) (1920).
492 . GT. JIN AND Q.F. LIU

the people (the notion of mass participation in the Cultural Revolution was
directly related to this); the other was by a dictatorship of an ideological party
representing universal ethical values and the will of the public (the Maoist
idea of the people’s democratic dictatorship originated from this).
Since the 1980s, people have repeatedly pointed out that minzhu was a
very loose term during the May Fourth era.* For example, on some occa-
sions patriarchy was depicted as undemocratic and the overthrow of patriar-
chy was seen as democratic. On other occasions, democracy was linked to
populism and socialism. Li Dazhao even drew a parallel between democracy
and anti-imperialism.*° In a more curious instance, Chen Duxiu called the
vernacular language the democratizing of literature.*’ Not only were West-
ern scholars perplexed over the curious connotations of minzhu during the
New Culture Movement, Chinese scholars reviewing the legacy of the May
Fourth era during the 1990s have also been baffled by the semantic chaos.
Some scholars have even singled out one of the multiple senses of the Chi-
nese conception of democracy to explore the underlying causes of the accep-
tance of Marxism-Leninism by radical intellectuals.** A careful examination
of the definition of democracy during the May Fourth era would reveal that
the most semantically chaotic accounts relating to democracy were concen-
trated in the period after December 1919. This semantic chaos was the mani-
festation of the redefinition of the moral contents of the idea of democracy
that had been triggered by the rejection of republicanism. A qualitative
analysis of the meanings of democracy would provide evidence for such a
claim. We have conducted a quantitative analysis of certain democ-
racy-related terms, such as minzhu, minzhi, demokelaxi, The New Youth.
The result is presented in Table 2. We can see from Table 2 that minzhu had
the following very specific definition before 1919: popular participation,
rule by the people, and the modern Western political system that was
opposed to monarchy. The ambiguity of minzhu emerged only after 1919.
After 1925 minzhu was chiefly used to denote bourgeois politics and the
multi-meaning minzhu had gone out of use. In other words, a new definition
of minzhu was established.
We may view the reconstruction of the meaning of democracy from the
angle of linguistics. Since the term minzhu had a specific meaning before
1919, the redefinition of democracy prompted intellectuals to look for other

45 Jiang Yihua, ‘Panghuang zhong de qimeng’ (‘Enlightenment amid Bewilder-

ment’), Wen Shi Zhi Shi (Knowledge of Literature and History), no. 5 (1999).
46 Li Dazhao, ‘Shumin de shengli’ (‘The Victory of the Common People’), Xin Qingnian
(The New Youth), 5 (2) (1918).
47 Chen Duxiu, ‘Wo weishenme yao zuo baihuawen?’ (‘Why do I write in the Ver-
nacular?’), Chenbao (Morning Post), 20 February 1920.
48 Gu Xin, ‘Yishixingtai yu wutuobang’ (‘Ideologies and Utopia’), in Lishi de
fanxiang (Echo of History) (Hong Kong, 1990).
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Chinese terms for it. Hu Shih found that the Deweyan concept of economic
egalitarianism had not been covered in the term minzhu; he therefore used
minzhizhuyi (literally ‘democratism’) in its place.” This term was also adopted
by Chen Duxiu. After 1920, there was a tendency to use transliterations for
democracy — demokelaxi and Mr De were popular at that time. Figure 4
shows the frequency of the use of minzhu, minzhi and demokelaxi (including
Mr De). We can see that after 1919 new terms for democracy appeared. Using
new terms for democracy was the linguistic manifestation of the redefinition
of the concept of democracy. If we analyse the patterns in the distribution of
democracy-related terms appearing in The New Youth, as shown in Figure 3,
we will be able to see how the concept of democracy was reconstructed. In
Figure 4, Curves B, C and D, respectively, represent the frequency of the use
of minzhu, minzhi and demokelaxi. Curve A (the total of the democracy-
related terms in Figure 3) represents the occurrence of the notion of democ-
racy, which is the sum total of the three above-mentioned curves. What is
interesting is that the three peaks of curve A respectively correspond to the

Figure 4: Frequency Count of Minzhu, Minzhi and Demokelaxi

(The data for this chart were obtained from ‘The Database for
Studies of Modern Chinese Intellectual History [1830-—1925]’)

600 —*— minzhu (B)

— -&- — minzhi (C)
~~ Me => demokelaxi (D)
500

300|

200|

a eee
~
7 5 eel Shana
Bes A ogee
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1916.2) 1917.2) 1918.8) 1918.6) 1918.12) 1919.11) 1920.5) 1921.4) 1922.7) 3.6-1924.12) Issues( 1925.4
1926.7)

49 In his 1919 essay ‘Xinsichao de yiyi’ (‘The Significance of New Thought’). Hu

Shih used the term minzhizhuyi (democratism) interchangeably with dexiansheng (Mr
Democracy). A month later he used this term again in his translation of John Dewey’s
lecture on social philosophy and political philosophy. See Xin Qingnian (The New
Youth), 1 December 1919 and 1 January 1920.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 495

highest frequency of usage of the three distinct senses.” Putting Figure 4

together with Table 2, it becomes evident that the first peak appeared from the
latter half of 1917 to the first half of 1918. The concept of ‘opposition to mon-
archy’ and ‘rule by the people’ came into frequent use in this period. Also dur-
ing this period, minzhu became separated from gonghe. The second peak was
from January 1920 to April 1921. The cause of this peak was the growing
interest in minzhi and demokelaxi exhibited by Chinese intellectuals. During
this period, minzhi and demokelaxi bore multiple senses, such as egalitarian-
ism, opposition to monarchy, popular political participation.*' The third peak
was from 1925. This peak marked the completion of the reconstruction of the
Chinese idea of democracy. An examination of the usage of minzhu reveals
that two new elements, namely proletarian dictatorship and democratic dicta-
torship, were added to its repertoire of meanings. Therefore, these three peaks
coincided with efforts to reconstruct the concept of democracy during the
New Culture Movement.
The repositioning of the concept of democracy was also the reconstruction
of Chinese understanding of Western political thought. The idea of the rule of
proletarian majority was realized by the notion of exercising dictatorship over
the bourgeoisie. The trend towards this direction was very clear. Table 2
shows the value orientation exhibited by the people towards democracy-
related terms when they used these terms in The New Youth.” It is apparent
that before 1920 people’s view of democracy was positive without exception.
After 1920, democracy began to pick up negative connotations. Capitalist
democracy and social democratic parties were all commented upon nega-
tively. The rejection of bourgeois democracy was tantamount to the confirma-
tion of proletarian dictatorship. This was the cause of the third peak. If we
compare the positive and negative opinions towards democracy during the
period of the third peak as shown in Table 3, we see that after June 1923 there
were far more negative usages (six hundred and twenty times) than positive
usages (sixty-four times). That means the idea of democratic dictatorship
finally rose to prominence above the other meanings of democracy, and
became the most important element in the twentieth-century Chinese concept
of democracy.

50 This figure is basically the same as Figure 3. The only difference between them is
that the x-axis has been changed from the volume numbers to the corresponding years in
which the volumes were published.
5! Gu Xin, ‘Yishixingtai yu wutuobang’.
52 By ‘value orientation’, we mean the writers’ attitudes (positive, negative or neu-
tral) towards democracy when they were using those democracy-related terms. For
example, in his critique of Kang Youwei’s view of democracy, Chen Duxiu quoted pas-
sages from Kang’s article. In his own article, Kang held a negative attitude towards
democracy. But Chen quoted Kang’s words to criticize Kang. Therefore, in Chen’s cri-
tique, the democracy-related terms were used positively.
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 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 497

It is necessary to point out that although the concept of democracy began to

bear the connotation of democratic dictatorship after 1924, the Chinese
binome minzhu zhuanzheng (democratic dictatorship) was rarely used at that
time. Perhaps this was because intellectuals still remembered the original
meaning of minzhu and saw it as the opposite of monarchical autocracy. To
them, the combination of minzhu and zhuanzheng was as contradictory as
terms like ‘icy fire’ and ‘good evil’.°? However, as the original meaning of
democracy was forgotten after the New Culture Movement, the term minzhu
zhuanzheng finally came into common use in the 1930s. Mao Zedong also
used this term in an article written in 1940. Mao defined his new-democratic
constitutional government as ‘the joint democratic dictatorship of several
revolutionary classes over the traitors and reactionaries’ .™*
It is also necessary to point out that democratic dictatorship is not the same
as one-party dictatorship. The term ‘proletarian dictatorship’ seems to have
been borrowed from the translated essays of Lenin and Stalin. In China, how-
ever, this term bore the connotation of ‘transforming the masses by means of
education’. In 1949, when defining “people’s democratic dictatorship’, Mao
Zedong first drew on the political chaos facing modern China to denounce
bourgeois democracy as pseudo-democracy and argued that the only way to
achieve majority rule was by exercising dictatorship over reactionaries. He
then contended that the people’s democratic dictatorship was aimed at depriv-
ing the reactionaries of the right to speak, and that the right to vote belonged
only to the people, not to the reactionaries. However, what if a disagreement
arose among people? Mao argued that it must be resolved by educating and
persuading the people.’ This means that ‘transformation through education’
was the mechanism for a people’s democratic dictatorship. Why did the
reconstruction of the concept of democracy move in the direction of a peo-
ple’s democratic dictatorship? The rejection of republicanism created the
necessity for introducing new underlying values for democracy. These values
turned out to consist of the interest of the majority and economic equality. The
two points that had been emphasized in republicanism, public morality and
the prevention of governmental interference in the private realm, were seen as

53 When minzhu was understood as ‘the lord of the people’, minzhu zhuanzhi (demo-
cratic dictatorship) was not seen as a semantically contradictory term. Therefore, such a
term had appeared before the New Culture Movement. An example is Liang Qichao’s
‘Kaiming zhuanzhi lun’ (‘On Enlightened Dictatorship’).In this essay, Liang mentioned
minzhu zhuanzhi (democratic dictatorship) and zhuanzhi minzhu (dictatorial democracy)
on two occasions. Here, minzhu carried a certain connotation of ‘the lord of the people’
(see ‘Kaiming zhuanzhi lun’). However, the term minzhu zhuanzhi hardly appeared dur-
ing the May Fourth era.
54 Mao Zedong, ‘New-Democratic Constitutional Government’, in Selected Works
of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 2 (Beijing, 1967), p. 409.
55 Mao Zedong, ‘On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship’, in Selected Works of
Mao Tse-tung, Vol. 4 (Beijing, 1961), pp. 417-18.
498 ( aiGer: JIN ANDO 7? LE

invalid. In addition, the popularly elected leaders (or those representing the
interest of the majority) were seen as the representatives of the will of the pub-
lic with the duty to educate and morally reform the people. Moreover, the
notions of ‘rule by the people’ and mass participation became prominent. In
the end, the synergy of all of these ideas resulted in the transformation of
minzhu to mean the democratic dictatorship of the people.
Of course, without taking into account the October Revolution in Russia and
the nationalism of the intellectuals of theMay Fourth Movement, we have been
able to paint only a partial picture of the reconstruction of the Chinese concept
of democracy during the New Culture Movement. The fact that ‘democracy’,
which was understood in multiple ways, narrowed down to the notion of ‘peo-
ple’s democratic dictatorship’ after 1924 is astonishing. The most important
characteristic in the development of political ideas is that an idea will return to
its original form. But the formation of the modern Chinese concept of democ-
racy suggests that ideas may undergo a kind of cyclical development in their
transformation. The traditional sense of minzhu was that of an autocrat ruling in
the interest of the people. When China came into contact with modern Western
politics, minzhu was used to mean popularly elected rulers and rule by the peo-
ple. After the rise and fall of republicanism, minzhu came to be used to denote
the people’s democratic dictatorship. Although its meaning was different from
Liang Qichao’s description of the dictatorship of popularly elected rulers, the
concept of the people’s democratic dictatorship apparently invoked the old
meaning of minzhu in traditional Chinese culture. The selective absorption and
reconstruction of the Western concepts of republicanism and democracy in
China’s modernization make us realize that the pre-existing thought of China
played a pivotal role in the acceptance of Western political thought. It also pro-
vides a unique historical experience of the development of modern political
thought — that is, the interdependence of republicanism and democracy. The
polarization of these two concepts led to a surprising result in China: the trans-
formation of the meaning of minzhu from ‘democracy’ to ‘the democratic dicta-
torship of the people’.

Guantao Jin and Quingfeng Liu THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF

HONG KONG

Appendix
The research presented in this essay is based on the data of ‘The Database for
Studies of Modern Chinese Intellectual History (1830—-1925)’. The texts
included in the database total approximately 66.5 million words. Since most
of these texts do not have English translations, we only put a brief list of them
here. Interested scholars could email us for a full list of the texts included in
the database.
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 499

I. Important Modern Publications on Politics:

Wang Tao, Taoyuan wenlu (Additional Essays of Wang Tao) (Shanghai,

2002).
Feng Guifen, Jiaobinlu kangyi (Proposals from the Jiaobin Studio)
(Taipei, 1971).
Yan Fu, Yanfuji (The Complete Works of Yan Fu) (279) (Beijing, 1986).
Wei Yuan, Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated Gazette of the Maritime Countries)
(Taipei, 1967).
Zhang Binglin, Qiushu (Words of Urgency) (Hong Kong, 1998).
Liang Qichao, Liang Qichao Quanji (Complete Works of Liang Qichao)
(Beijing, 1999).
Kang youwei, Shili gongfa quanshu (Complete Writings on Implementing
Universal Principles) (Hong Kong, 1998).
Xinxue wetjing kao (An Inquiry into the New Learning and the Apocrypha)
(Hong Kong, 1998).
Kongzi gaizhi kao (A Study of Confucius as a Reformer) (Beijing, 1958).

and some forty collections of essays of Late-Qing scholars like Ma Jianzong,

Zheng Guanying, Zhang Zhidong, Xu Jiyu, Chen Tianhua, Tan Sitong, Liu
Shipei, Yung Wing, Xu Fucheng, Song Shu, He Qi, Hu Liyuan, Su Yu.

I. Official Publications:
Qingdai waijiao shiliao (Historical Materials on Foreign Relation in
Dynasty) (Taipei, 1968).
Chouban yiwu shimo (A Complete Account of the Management of
Barbarian Affairs) (Taipei, 1971), etc.

III. Modern Periodicals, including:

Dongxiyangkao meiyue tongjizhuan (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine)
(Beijing, 1997).
Liuhe congtan (The Shanghai Serial) (Beijing, 1982).
Shiwu bao (Chinese Progress) (Taipei, 1967).
Zhixin bao (The Reformer China) (Shanghai, 1996).
Yong Yan (The Justice) (Taipei, 1971).
Qingyi bao (China Discussion) (Taipei, 1967).
Waijiao bao (Foreign Relations Journal) (Taipei, 1964).
Minbao (Minpao Monthly) (Taipei, 1969).
Xinmin congbao (New People’s Miscellany) (Taipei, 1966), etc.

Journals related to the New Culture Movement, including:

Jiayin (The Tiger) (Taipei, 1975).
Xin Qingnian (The New Youth) (Shanghai, 1988).
500 . GT. JIN AND -Q-F, LIU

Xinchao (Renaissance) (Taipei, 1976-80).

Shaonian zhongguo (Journal of the Young China Association) (Beijing,
1920).
Meizhou pinglun (Weekly Review) (Beijing, 1951).
Xinggi pinglun (Weekly Critic) (Beijing, 1933).
Jianshe (Construction) (Hong Kong, 1980).
Xiangdao (Guide) (Shanghai, 1927).
Jiefang yu gaizao (The Emancipation and Reconstruction Semi-Monthly)
(Beijing, 1920).
Xingshi (The Awakening Lion Weekly) (Taipei, 1993).

IV. Missionary Works in Chinese:

Wanguo gongfa (Elements of International Law), ed. W.A.P. Martin

(Beijing, 1864).
John Fryer, Gezhi huibian (The Chinese Scientific and Industrial
Magazine) (Nanjing, 1992).
Zuozhi chuyan (Political Economy) (Shanghai, 1995).
Taixi xinshi lanyao (The Nineteenth Century: A History), ed. Timothy
Richard et al (Shanghai, 1992).
Zhongdong Zhanji Benmo (The Whole Story of the Sino-Japanese War),
ed. Young John Allen and Cai Erkang (Taipei, 1972).

V. Selected Collections of Essays on Politics by Modern Writers:

Xinhaigeming gian shinianjian shilun xuanji (Selected Political Essays

before the 1911 Revolution), ed. Zhang Nan and Wang Renzhi (Hong
Kong, 1962).
Jian Bozan, Wuxu bianfa (The 1898 Reform Movement) (Shanghai, 1957).
Zheng Zhenduo, Wanqing wenxuan (Selected Late-Qing Essays) (Beijing,
2002).

The database is based on the following studies:

‘A Quantitative Study of the Formation of Certain Modern Chinese

Political Concepts’, funded by the Research Grants Council (Hong
Kong) Competitive Earmarked Research Grant (CUHK4001/97H) for
1997/98.
‘An Intellectual Historical Study on the Origins and Development of
Liberalism in Modern China 1736-1927 (RGO18—D-99)’, funded by the
Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange in
2000/2.
‘Data Mining for the Quantitative Database of New Youth: Research on the
Interactions between Changes in Political Concepts and Important
 FROM ‘REPUBLICANISM’ TO ‘DEMOCRACY’ 501

Incidents during the New Culture Movement’, funded by the Direct

Grant for Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong for 2001/2.
‘A Quantitative Study of China’s Selective Absorption of Modern Western
Ideas and the Origins of Certain Key Concepts (1840—-1915)’ funded by
the Research Grants CouncilCompetitive Earmarked Research Grant
(CUHK4006/02H) for 2002/3.

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the above-men-

tioned institutes and would like to thank Dr Wu Tongfu and Ms Staphany T.Y.
Wong for their efforts in the collection and analysis of data. We are also grate-
ful to Dr Josephine Khu and Professor Joseph C.W. Chan for error checking
and polishing of this English text.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN:
CARL SCHMITT’S NEGLECTED LEGACY

Gabriella Slomp'”

Abstract: The paper aims at providing the missing link between Carl Schmitt’s The
Concept of the Political (1932) and his Theorie des Partisanen (1963), revealingly
subtitled Complementary Notes to the Concept ofthe Political. The paper argues that
Theorie des Partisanen spells out the view, implicit in The Concept of the Political,
that the meaning of enmity is not invariant throughout human history, and sup-
plements it with an analysis of the interaction of factors that brought about both the
erosion of ‘conventional enmity’ assumed by jus publicum europaeum and the advent
and development of ‘real’ and ‘absolute enmity’ with the consequent criminalization
and de-humanization of the enemy during the twentieth century.

In his Foreword to the 1963 German edition of The Concept of the Political
Carl Schmitt makes three important points: first, he states his dissatisfaction
with the ‘abstract’ level of the discussion in The Concept of the Political
(1932) and excuses it on the ground of its didactic nature;? second, he points
out that ‘the main lacuna [of The Concept of the Political] lies in the fact that
the different types of enemy — conventional, real and absolute — are not sep-
arated and distinguished with sufficient clarity and precision’;* third he
claims that ‘the age of the great systems is now over’ and that at present only
two modes of thought are available, namely either ‘a retrospective historical
glance’ or the ‘aphoristic style’. He adds that to a
jurist ‘a leap into aphorism’
is impossible and so the former mode of thought becomes obligatory.”
In 1963, in addition to the Foreword to The Concept of the Political,
Schmitt published another short piece, entitled Theorie des Partisanen.° Here
he takes his own advice very seriously and instead of indulging in generaliza-
tions on the concept of enmity in the twentieth century he provides the reader

! School of International Relations, University of St Andrews, St Andrews. Email:

gs21 @st-and.ac.uk
2 lam grateful to two anonymous referees and to the Editor of HPT for helpful com-
ments on an earlier draft. Also, I wish to thank William Walker for enjoyable conversa-
tions on Schmitt.
3 ‘Who can understand a thesis formulated in such abstract terms?’, Foreword to the
1963 German edition of Carl Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen (Berlin, 7th edn.,
2002), p. 13.
4 Der Hauptmangel in der Sache liegt darin, da8 die vershiedenen Arten des
Feindes — konventioneller, wirklicher oder absoluter Feind — nicht deultich und
prazise genug getrennt und unterschieden werden’, ibid., p. 17.
* Ibid., p. 13.
© Carl Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen. Zwischenbemerkung zum Begriff des
Politischen (Berlin, 1963, 1975).

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005

 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 503

with ‘a retrospective historical glance’ at a specific phenomenon that in his

opinion has significant bearing on the contemporary notion of enmity: the
birth and development of partisan groups. In spite ofthe fact that Schmitt gave
to his Theorie des Partisanen the revealing subtitle Zwischenbemerkung zum
Begriff des Politischen [Complementary Notes to the Concept ofthe Political]
thereby suggesting that this work integrates his seminal Concept of the Politi-
cal, Schmitt makes no effort to enlighten the reader about the link between the
two works. Indeed, probably led by his conviction that any attempt to con-
struct a system of ideas is at present doomed to failure, Schmitt leaves to the
reader the uneasy task of investigating any connection between his 1932 con-
ceptual work on the political and his 1963 historical study of partisanship.
There are arguably many ways in which Theorie des Partisanen can be linked
to The Concept of the Political; this article aims at exploring some that seem
to me particularly important.
First, the article suggests that in Theorie des Partisanen one can find an elu-
cidation and elaboration of the claim made in The Concept ofthe Political that
in the twentieth century the state has no longer the monopoly of the political.
Second, the article argues that in Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt provides the
criteria to disentangle three notions of enmity that in The Concept of the
Political were presented in a confused manner. Third, the article claims that
while in 1932 Schmitt had given a very abstract definition of enmity, in his
1963 historical analysis one can detect the interplay of specific historical fac-
tors that according to Schmitt brought about the progressive erosion of ‘con-
ventional enmity’ (associated with jus publicum europaeum) and the advent
and development of ‘real’ and ‘absolute enmity’ during the twentieth century.
Finally and indirectly the article hopes to widen the critical readership of
Theorie des Partisanen, a text that although very influential in continental
Europe since its appearance in 1963 has been largely neglected by the
Anglo-American literature and indeed has yet to find an English translation.’
The article is organized in five sections: in Section I, I identify the three
political actors that populate the world of Theorie des Partisanen, giving spe-
cial attention to the two political actors (the telluric partisan and the global
revolutionary) who, according to Schmitt, have come to challenge the monopo-
ly of the political by the conventional political actor (the sovereign state) in the
twentieth century. In Section II, I offer my reconstruction of the three notions of
enmity (conventional, real and absolute) that emerge from Schmitt’s writings,
and argue that each of them is linked to a particular political actor and

7 There are of course exceptions. References to Theorie des Partisanen can be found
for example in Eckard Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political: Carl Schmitt’s and
Lenin’s Political Realism (Westport and London, 2001), pp. 156-60; and Jan- Werner
Muller, A Dangerous Mind: Carl Schmitt in Post-War European Thought (New Haven
and London, 2003), who discusses the influence of this facet of Schmitt’s theorizing on
the European Left.
504 G. SLOMP

materializes under particular historical conditions. In Section III, I suggest

that Schmitt argues for an interesting dialectics between theory and practice
insofar as historical practices are seen as influencing theory as much as theory
and ideologies are regarded as responsible for affecting historical practices. In
Section IV, I attempt to highlight the complex pattern of historical factors
that, in addition to ideology, are seen by Schmitt as responsible for the gradual
dehumanization of the enemy in the twentieth century. In Section V, I draw
some conclusions about the link between Schmitt’s The Concept of the Politi-
cal and his Theorie des Partisanen.

I
Three Political Actors:
The State, the Telluric Partisan and the Global Revolutionary
‘The concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political’ :* the open-
ing of Carl Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political is justly famous, yet its
meaning is elusive. From Leo Strauss to Jan-Werner Muller,’ from Gopal
Balakrishnan'’ to Eckard Bolsinger,'' many of Schmitt’s interpreters have felt
the need to elucidate the above statement and to explain that in Schmitt’s view
‘state’ and ‘political’ are not identical concepts. Whereas the former ‘presup-
poses’ the latter, the ‘political’ can take different historical forms, of which
the state is just an instance. Leo Strauss was among the first to challenge
Schmitt’s claim that ‘state’ and ‘political’ do not coincide and did so on
etymological grounds.'* However, Schmitt never retracted his original state-
ment. Although, as mentioned above, in 1963 Schmitt stated his dissatisfac-
tion with the ‘abstract’ nature of the discussion in the Concept of the Political
and in particular of the above remark, he never renounced the view that ‘state’
and ‘the political’ coincided historically for less than four hundred years and
that in the twentieth century the state had lost the monopoly on political deci-
sion, i.e. it was no longer the only source of the friend/enemy principle.'* As
Bolsinger has pointed out ‘already at the beginning of the 1920s, Schmitt’s
theory of sovereignty ceased to be centred on the state. In opening this theory

8 Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago, 1996), p. 19.

9 Muller, A Dangerous Mind, p. 31.
10 Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (London
and New York, 2000).
'l Bolsinger, The Autonomy ofthe Political, p. 35.
12 See Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chi-
cago and London, 1995), p. 125.
'3 Balakrishnan highlights a shifting away from a state-centric perspective in the
various changes that Schmitt introduced in successive editions of The Concept of the
Political (Balakrishnan, The Enemy, p. 102). In these changes he also detects a gradual
distancing of Schmitt from Hobbes, whose classical state-centred political theory may
have appeared to have lost some of its interpretative power (ibid., p. 208).
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 505

for newly emerging political actors, he clearly broke with the state-focus tra-
dition in German political thought.’'*
In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt spells out more clearly than in The Con-
cept of the Political that in the twentieth century the state’s monopoly of the
political decision is in crisis and he singles out partisan groups as the main chal-
lenge. In this section I will analyse the key criteria used by Schmitt to capture
the identity of the two new political actors that have entered the stage of poli-
tics: the traditional partisan and the global revolutionary. My concern here is
not to address the problem of the historical accuracy of Schmitt’s portrait of the
partisan, nor to compare it with similar accounts that appeared in Europe in the
post-war years,’° but rather to highlight Schmitt’s claim that the partisan is, on
the one hand, a by-product of the modern state and, on the other hand, a type of
political actor who endangers the state’s monopoly of the political.
In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt offers an explanation of the term ‘Parti-
san’ (from the French and in turn from the Latin pars), meaning ‘an adherent
to a party’ — a meaning conveyed also by the German term Parteigdnger.'®
The bond between the partisan and the group or party is quintessentially politi-
cal and this is the criterion used by Schmitt to distinguish him from the com-
mon criminal. Although the two at times might use similar tactics, their
motivation — explains Schmitt — is altogether different, insofar as the for-
mer aims at achieving the political goal of a group, or party, whereas the latter
seeks private gain. The political bond between the partisan and his group, or
party, is described as a total bond (die totale Erfassung), altogether different,
claims Schmitt, from any type of bonds and allegiances that link individuals
together under normal circumstances and in a modern liberal state.'’ One
could ask under what circumstances this type of political bond can arise. To
address this question we have to reconsider Schmitt’s definition of the “politi-
cal’ in The Concept of the Political as the force that brings people together as
friends against other people regarded as enemies. In The Concept of the
Political Schmitt maintained that under normal circumstances the state, and the
state alone, can name the enemy.'* In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt re-states
this view: ‘[t]he legal government decides who the enemy is against whom the
army has to fight’.'? As to the question of under what circumstances the state
is no longer in charge of naming the enemy, Schmitt’s reply is the same in all
'4 Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political, p. 112.
'5 This latter issue is discussed admirably in Muller, A Dangerous Mind.
16 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, ps2:
17 Ibid., p. 21.
'8 As argued by Muller, for Schmitt ‘a normal state was one in which relations of
enmity were directed outward, in which the “enemy” was foreign’ (Jerry Z. Muller, “Carl
Schmitt, Hans Freyer and the Radical Conservative Critique of Liberal Democracy in the
Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, XII (1991), pp. 695-715, p. 709).
19 Die legale Regierung entscheidet dariiber, wer der Feind ist, gegen den die Armee
zu kampfen hat’, Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, p. 87.
506 G. SLOMP

his works: if the state is unable to protect, then citizens are no longer obliged
to obey.”’ This latter view is put across in Theorie des Partisanen more for-
cibly than ever before. Here we are shown that when the state is no longer
capable of offering protection, then the partisan emerges: partisan insurgence
and partisan groups are for Schmitt the symptoms of a ‘weak’ state. The stron-
ger the political bond of an individual to a group or party, the weaker the state.
By choosing their own enemy, partisan groups are challenging the legitimacy
of the state and are claiming their own legitimacy.”’ Thus, all-absorbing polit-
ical commitment to a group or party is not only one of the criteria used by
Schmitt to capture the identity of the partisan; it is also at the same time a fun-
damental index of the strength, or weakness, of a state. It shows that under
some circumstances the state no longer has the monopoly of naming the
enemy.
In addition to being politically motivated, the partisan is described by
Schmitt as an irregular combatant.” Obviously it is impossible to define the
very notion of ‘irregular’, unless there exists a well-established regular army
with the attendant notion of regular combatant, which, argues Schmitt, hap-
pened historically with Napoleon. Before then, the essence of the partisan,
which lies in challenging the idea of ‘regularity’, simply could not materialize.
Hence for Schmitt the partisan is a modern phenomenon.” A third criterion is
of a more technical nature: it refers to the greater mobility and agility of
partisan groups vis-a-vis regular armies that are usually engaged in slower
20 The protection/obedience principle is put forward by Schmitt as the foundation of
the state’s legitimacy in many of his writings; see for example The Concept ofthe Politi-
cal, pp. 43-4; in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 1988),
Chapter 2; in Political Theology (Cambridge, MA, 1985), especially Chapter | on the
definition of sovereignty (pp. S—15); and, above all, in The Leviathan in the State Theory
of Thomas Hobbes (Westport, CT, 1996). Indeed the main reason why Schmitt admired
Hobbes is that Hobbes was the first to single out the obedience/protection principle as the
foundation of the modern state. In spite of this similarity between Hobbes and Schmitt,
their understanding of politics is in my view incommensurable. As it is outside the scope
of this article to discuss the relationship between Schmitt and Hobbes, I would refer the
reader to Richard Wolin’s argument that Schmitt’s political theory ‘ends up by standing
Hobbes on his head’ (Richard Wolin, “Carl Schmitt, The Conservative Revolutionary:
Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror’, Political Theory, 20 (1992), pp. 424-47, p. 442).
On Hobbes and Schmitt, see also: John McCormick, ‘Fear, Technology, and the State’,
Political Theory, 22 (1994), pp. 619-52; and Horst Bredekamp, ‘From Walter Benjamin
to Carl Schmitt, via Thomas Hobbes’, Critical Inquiry, 25 (1999), pp. 247-59; Muller, A
Dangerous Mind, p. 45; John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Cam-
bridge, 1997), pp. 249-65 and 270-89.
21 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, pp. 83-7.
22 Tbid., ‘Der Partisan kampft irregulir’, p. 11.
23 Although Schmitt himself provides examples of wars that could be called ‘parti-
san’ throughout the history of the world, he is at pains to point out that the birth of the par-
tisan strictu senso cannot be traced back earlier than the guerrilla war waged by the Span-
ish against Napoleon (1808-13).
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 507

operations on a greater scale. As irregularity, so mobility is for Schmitt a char-

acteristic way of fighting that could develop only as a response to the state’s
approach to war. We may now consider the final criterion used by Schmitt to
define the traditional partisan. Schmitt refers to this criterion as the ‘telluric’
element (der tellurische Charakter),”* i.e. the deep-rooted attachment that a
partisan has with a particular land or space.
To sum up the argument so far, the distinctive features of the Schmittian
traditional partisan are his irregularity, mobility, intense political commitment
and deep bond to a particular place or country. Of these features, it is worth
pointing out that the first two highlight the fact that the partisan is an indirect
product of the modern state and its notion of regular army; the other two crite-
ria, instead, illustrate the challenge created by the partisan to the sovereign state
as the ultimate source of the political, i.e. of the friend/enemy principle.
The bond with a specific land distinguishes the traditional (or telluric or
autochthonous) partisan from a different form of combatant — a combatant
who according to Schmitt became more and more visible in the second half of
the twentieth century: the revolutionary fighter, active at a global level. This
figure is the third political actor who, alongside the traditional partisan and
the state, populates the world described by Schmitt in Theorie des Partisanen.
Prima facie, the difference between the global revolutionary and the tradi-
tional partisan may appear to be superficial insofar as the former lacks only
one of the key characteristics of the latter, namely the telluric element. How-
ever, Schmitt insists that the global revolutionary is the source of a type of
enmity that is incommensurable not only to the enmity we associate with the
sovereign state, but also to the enmity of the traditional partisan.
Leaving the discussion ofthis claim to the next section, we may conclude this
section by saying that in Theorie des Partisanen one can find an elucidation and
elaboration of the claim made in The Concept of the Political that the state has
no longer the monopoly of the political. In his 1963 work Schmitt points out
that the twentieth century witnessed the strengthening of bonds between indi-
viduals in groups and parties and stresses the historical importance of two new
political actors: traditional partisan groups and global revolutionary groups.
In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt stresses that the debate on the so-called
total state” had failed to notice that throughout the twentieth century it was
not the state as such but the revolutionary party that had been the true

24 Tbid., p. 27.
25 On this issue, see Jerry Muller, who quotes from Schmitt’s article in the
Europdische Revue of February 1933: ‘the total state [in the qualitative sense] is an espe-
cially strong state ... Such a state allows no forces to arise within it which might be inimi-
cal to it, limit it, or fragment it... Such a state can distinguish friend from foe’ (Muller,
‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer...’, p. 712). See also Muller, A Dangerous Mind, part 1. On
the meaning of the ‘totality of the political’ see Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political,
p. 120 fn. 32. On the debate on the total state in Nazi Germany see, for example, Peter
508 G. SLOMP

fundamental totalitarian organization, i.e. the source of the ‘total bond’

between individuals. As the state loses its monopoly of the political decision,
so, according to Schmitt, the very notion of enmity associated with it under-
goes a transformation. The task of the next section is to explore this transfor-
mation and to offer an analysis of Schmitt’s typology of enmity.

II
Three Concepts of Enmity: Conventional, Real and Absolute
As mentioned at the start of this article, in 1963 Schmitt admitted that The Con-
cept of the Political contained a ‘lacuna’ insofar as he had failed to separate and
distinguish with sufficient clarity and precision three different types of
enmity — conventional, real and absolute — a point that apparently was made
to him by Julien Freund and George Schwab.”° Although acknowledging this
problem with his 1932 work, in the 1963 Foreword Schmitt does not say much
in terms of an elucidation. Yet a reconstruction of Schmitt’s understanding of
conventional, real and absolute enmity can be pieced together by examining a
number of Schmitt’s writings and in particular his Theorie des Partisanen. The
aim of this section is to offer my reconstruction of the meaning of Schmitt’s
notion of conventional, real and absolute enmity and to establish the original
agency associated with each type of enmity and the conditions under which it
materializes. We will see that each of the three political actors (state, traditional
partisan and global revolutionary) introduced in the previous section is linked
by Schmitt to a different notion of enmity (conventional, real and absolute)
which in turn emerges from different circumstances (inter-state wars, civil or
colonial wars and revolutionary wars).

The ‘Conventional’ Enemy

In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt discusses conventional enmity only indi-

rectly, namely as the shadow against which the notion of real and absolute
enmity developed since Napoleon’s times. Hence my reconstruction of con-
ventional enmity cannot rely only on Theorie des Partisanen but is also based
on references to this concept made by Schmitt in a number of works, includ-
ing the 1963 Foreword.
Schmitt links ‘conventional’ enmity to jus publicum europaeum, namely
the system of law born out of the Westphalia Treaty that informed foreign pol-
icy between nation states and regulated hostility and war between them. In his
writings Schmitt never fails to point out that the central concept of jus

Caldwell, “Ernst Forsthoff and the Legacy of Radical Conservative State Theory in the
Federal Republic of Germany’, History of Political Thought, XV (1994), pp. 615-41.
26 Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, p. 18.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 509

publicum europaeum is the sovereign state’’ and that according to it the

acknowledgement of a state implies the acknowledgement of the right to war
and of legitimate enmity. According to jus publicum europaeum — Schmitt
insists — ‘the enemy has a status; he is not a criminal’.** In Schmitt’s view,
jus publicum europaeum was able to regulate the waging of war by sovereign
states precisely because it did not regard it as a crime. In particular, it
established clear distinctions between war and peace, between internal and
external, between combatant and non-combatant, between neutrality and
engagement, between enemy and criminal. According to Schmitt, these dis-
tinctions imposed boundaries on war which in turn, Schmitt maintains, was a
major progress in a humanitarian sense.”
Of course Schmitt’s interpretation of jus publicum europaeum (as it emerges
from Ex Captivitate Salus, and especially from Der Nomos der Erde im
Volkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum)* has often been challenged as inac-
curate. Indeed Schmitt’s reading of the inter-state wars between the seventeenth
and nineteenth century is very controversial. However, it is beyond the scope of
this article to engage with the debate on Schmitt’s historical accuracy and inter-
pretative bias. Here my concern is simply to unravel the notion of enmity that —
rightly or wrongly — Schmitt associated with jus publicum europaeum.
In this classical model of war and enmity, the state, according to Schmitt, is
the agency making the political decision of naming the enemy; the soldier has
a duty of obedience to the state and ‘the distinction of friend/enemy is there-
fore no longer a political problem which the fighting soldier has to solve’.”’
The army is trained to recognize and to respect the difference between sol-
diers and civilians and to regard as enemies only those who wear a uniform.”
The uniform is worn with pride as a sign of immediate identification and rec-
ognition and all weapons are clearly visible. The enemy is not denied respect;
when captured or wounded the enemy is not denied rights and justice; victory
over the enemy is valuable and honourable exactly because the enemy is
accorded both value and honour.
In a nutshell, conventional enmity means for Schmitt limited and regulated
enmity; its limitation is imposed by the classical distinctions assumed by jus
publicum europaeum between war and peace, criminal and enemy, civilian and
27 Schmitt, Ex Captivitate Salus, Erfahrungen der Zeit 1945/47 (Berlin, 2nd edn.,
2002), p. 69.
28 “Auch der Feind hat einen Status; er ist kein Verbrecher’, Schmitt, Der Begriff des
Politischen, Foreword, p. 11; see also Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, p. 39.
29 Die Hegung und klare Begrenzung des Krieges enthilt eine Relativierung der
Feindschaft. Jede solche Relativierung ist ein grofer Fortschritt im Sinne der
Humanitit’, Schmitt, Der Begriff des Politischen, Foreword, p. 11.
30 Carl Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde im Vélkerrecht des Jus Publicum Europaeum
(Cologne, 1950; new edition Berlin, 1974).
31 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 34.
32 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, paso!
510 G. SLOMP

combatant. The protagonist of conventional enmity is the nation-state. The cir-

cumstances under which it materializes are inter-state wars. Schmitt claims that
this model of enmity was dominant in Europe until the First World War.

The ‘Real’ Enemy (der wirckhliche Feind)

The notion of real enmity can be reconstructed by an examination of Theorie
des Partisanen; here more than anywhere else in his writings Schmitt puts
across the view that real enmity is different in kind from conventional enmity.
The original agency of real enmity as well as the circumstances when it first
appeared are also different from those of conventional enmity.
To begin with, whereas the notion of conventional enmity is associated
with the sovereign state, Schmitt associates the origin of the notion of real
enmity with the phenomenon of the autochthonous partisan** introduced in
the previous section. In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt makes clear that tra-
ditional partisan groups emerge in civil wars as well as colonial wars.** In
other words, whereas the conventional enemy is described as a challenge to
the state from outside, Schmitt defines the real enemy as a challenge to the
state from within; he is keen to link the emergence of real enmity with the
weakening of the state as it happens in civil and colonial wars.
The enemy is seen by the autochthonous partisan as an invader or as an
oppressor to be fought with all available means, using all strategies available,
aiming at nothing less than his annihilation.’ In Schmitt’s account of the
behaviour of the traditional partisan, one can detect the many ways in which
this new political actor blurs all the distinctions assumed by jus publicum
europaeum. | would argue that the Schmittian partisan challenges first of all
the classical distinction between military and civilian; in Schmitt’s words:
‘Partisan is he who avoids being seen armed, who fights by ambush, who uses
as camouflage sometimes the enemy’s uniform and stolen or lost badges,
sometimes every type of civilian clothing’.*° The partisan leads the regular
army away from the traditional theatre of war and into a secret clandestine
underground war, without traditional fronts, without emblems or uniforms.
Secondly, from Schmitt’s account it can be noticed that the partisan also
rejects the classical distinction between enemy and criminal. The enemy is
seen by the partisan as someone acting according to a notion of legality and
legitimacy that he does not acknowledge.*’ The partisan knows, says Schmitt,
that the enemy, too, regards him as a criminal acting outside legality and out-
side the traditional notions of honour and right: ‘he [the partisan] does not risk

33 Jbid., p. 27.
34 Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid) ps7.
36 Thid., pp. 41-2.
37 Ibid., p. 33.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN Dit

simply his life, as any regular combatant. He knows, and all depends on this,
that the enemy regards him as acting outside legality, right and honour’ .** The
risk*’ the partisan is taking is a total risk, that he is prepared to take, sustained
by his total bond with a group or party. There lies the source of his own legal-
ity, his own value, his own honour.*° Thirdly, it can be argued that the
Schmittian partisan obscures the classical distinction between internal and
external, domestic and foreign. Insofar as the partisan operates in civil or
colonial wars, his enemy is internal and on the other hand his friend is often a
foreign state — a powerful ‘third party’, who for self-interest, i.e. to increase
his own power on the international sphere, provides the partisan not simply
with arms and supplies, but most importantly with what the partisan needs
most: political recognition, without which his activities are categorized as
non-political and therefore criminal.*! Finally, I would suggest that the parti-
san blurs the most important of all distinctions attributed by Schmitt to jus
publicum europaeum, namely the distinction between war and peace. Where-
as peace with the enemy is the normal conclusion of hostilities in inter-state
wars, for the Schmittian partisan peace and war are moments of the struggle
that cannot end until the annihilation of the enemy.
To sum up, according to Schmitt the notion of conventional enmity was
first challenged in the nineteenth century when the partisan first appeared on
the scene: ‘the partisan turns away from the conventional enmity of a con-
trolled and circumscribed war and projects himself in a new sphere: the sphere
of “real enmity” which by means of terror and counter terror keeps growing
until annihilation’.** Real enmity for Schmitt is enmity that is unbridled by the
rules and regulations of jus publicum europaeum and by its classical distinc-
tions between war and peace, enemy and criminal, civilian and military, inter-
nal and external, peace and war. Schmitt, however, is at pains to point out that
real enmity is not totally unbounded insofar as the ‘telluric’ characteristic of
the partisan, i.e. his bond to a particular land, imposes spatial and temporal
limits on his hostility and prevents him from making claims of absolute jus-
tice. Real enmity is, Schmitt insists, relative and not absolute, defensive and
not aggressive.”

The ‘Absolute’ Enemy (der absolute Feind)”

Having examined the meaning, agency and circumstances of conventional
and real enmity, the next step is to reconstruct the third and final type of
38 Jbid., p. 35.
39 Tbid., pp. 33-5.
48 Thid., p. 33.
41 Tbid., p. 78.
42 Ibid., p. 17.
43 Thid., p. 93.
44 Ibid., pp. 91-6.
a2 G. SLOMP

enmity dealt with by Schmitt in his works: absolute enmity. To begin with, I
will consider Theorie des Partisanen where Schmitt concentrates his atten-
tion on the original carrier of the notion of absolute enmity in the twentieth
century — the global revolutionary. We may recall from the previous discus-
sion that what sets the global revolutionary partisan apart from the traditional
partisan is the lack of a special bond with a particular land. This, according to
Schmitt, affects his notion of enmity and war. Unlike the autochthonous parti-
san whose mission is defensive and concrete, the global revolutionary fights
for an abstract notion of justice; his field of action is the whole world; his mis-
sion is aggressive; he is the protagonist of all revolutionary wars. Whereas for
the autochthonous partisan the enemy is located in time and space and hence
relative to — and bounded by — specific historical conditions; for the revolu-
tionary the enemy can be a universal enemy, a class or racial enemy. The
enemy is not simply ‘criminalized’ by the revolutionary, 1.e. regarded as
someone acting outside his own notion of legality and legitimacy, but also he
is de-humanized, i.e. regarded as a monster, the source of all evil. Repeatedly
Schmitt points out that the enmity of the revolutionary is totally unbridled and
literally absolute: ‘the war of total and absolute enmity knows no limitations’,
free from the limitations of both jus publicum europaeum (that constrain con-
ventional enmity) and of time and space (that relativize real enmity). In
Bolsinger’s words: ‘the absolute enmity transcends and defies all legal and
political bounds’.* Indeed, for the revolutionary, politics is just a cover for a
never-ending state of hostility.
To conclude this section, Schmitt regards the state, the traditional partisan and
the global revolutionary as the original agencies of three notions of enmity —
conventional, real and absolute — that take place under different conditions,
namely inter-state wars, civil and colonial wars, and revolutionary wars.

Ill
Theories and Practices of Enmity
Although there is scope for debate, it seems to me that in Theorie des
Partisanen Schmitt articulates an interesting dialectics in which historical prac-
tices penetrate concepts and theories which in turn influence future practices.*°
Indeed in this work Schmitt’s argument seems to proceed in three steps: first, he
provides his own account of the historical phenomenon of the traditional parti-
san — he dates the birth of this new political actor to the anti-Napoleonic wars
in Spain, Tyrol and Russia and describes his approach to fighting, his views on
legality and legitimacy, his notion of honour, his bond with a group and above
all his uncompromising commitment to repel the enemy. Next, Schmitt illus-
trates how the historical figure of the partisan gradually entered the world of

45 Bolsinger, The Autonomy ofthe Political, p. 156.

46 On this topic, see for example Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political, pp. 37-40.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 513

ideas, from official Prussian documents to writings on war, from works of lit-
erature to works of philosophy and even (somewhat ambiguously) to interna-
tional jurisprudence. Finally, from Schmitt’s argument it emerges that the
world of ideas was not simply acted upon by the historical experience of the
partisan but also in turn it affected the development of partisan groups. In
Theorie des Partisanen Clausewitz plays a crucial role insofar as he seems to be
a two-way link between practice and theory. His writings on war are presented
by Schmitt both as reflections on experience and on the other hand as intellectu-
ally influential for the practices of fighting later fostered by Lenin and Mao.
Schmitt points to Clausewitz as someone who (ironically, considering he was a
Prussian military man) theorized a concept of enmity and war that contributed
to the process of erosion of the notion of conventional enmity. Schmitt refers
the reader to Clausewitz’ notion of real enemy, to his intuition that ‘popular war
and partisans — or Parteiginger, as Clausewitz called them — . . [are] essen-
tial elements of those forces that erupt in war’*’ and above all to his insight that
‘war 1s nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of
other means’.*® In The Concept of the Political Schmitt had lamented that
Clausewitz’ famous formula ‘is generally incorrectly cited’* and misunder-
stood. In both The Concept of the Political and Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt
clarifies Clausewitz’ point as meaning that war and politics are intertwined con-
cepts, that peace contains the possibility of enmity and hence war, and that the
clear distinction made by jus publicum europaeum between war and peace
becomes blurred. This insight by Clausewitz, according to Schmitt, contains
‘the seed of the theory of the partisan’.
In the Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt does not engage with Marx
directly,’ but points to the theory and practice of Marxism by Lenin®! and
Mao as important contributions to the development of the notions of absolute
and real enmity. In particular, Lenin is singled out by Schmitt as the theorist of
absolute enmity: ‘Lenin made of the real enemy an absolute enemy’.”

47 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, p. 50.

48 Schmitt points to Books 6 and 8, Chapter 6B of Clausewitz’ On War. The quota-
tion in the text is from Carl von Clausewitz, On War (Ware, 1997), Book 8, Chapter 6B,
pi3od/.
49 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 34.
50 A discussion of Carl Schmitt and Karl Marx can be found for example in Jorge E.
Dotti, ‘From Karl to Carl: Schmitt as a Reader of Marx’, in The Challenge of Carl
Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London and New York, 1999), pp. 92-117.
5! For a comparative analysis of Schmitt’s and Lenin’s views on politics and power
see Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political.
52 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, p. 94. Prima facie the association of Lenin with
‘absolute enmity’ made by Schmitt in Theorie des Partisanen seems to contradict the
association of Lenin with ‘real enmity’ suggested by Schmitt in The Concept of the Politi-
cal. The balance of evidence seems to me to suggest that when writing Theorie des
Partisanen Schmitt thought that Lenin made practical use of autochthonous partisans
514 G. SLOMP

According to Schmitt, Lenin learned from Clausewitz, whom he much

admired and studied,” that war and politics cannot be disentangled as con-
cepts. In Schmitt’s view, however, there is a crucial difference between
Clausewitz and Lenin in this respect, insofar as the enmity implicit in politics
for the former is of the ‘real’ variety, an enemy located in time and space,
whereas for the latter it is ‘absolute’, directed against an abstract enemy, the
class enemy and the capitalist class system everywhere in the world.”
Schmitt detects a strong Clausewitzian influence also on Mao (whom he
refers to as ‘the new Clausewitz’),°° insofar as he too, like Lenin, interprets
Clausewitz’ formula of war (as the continuation of politics) as meaning that
politics contains the possibility of war. Schmitt claims that although in the
theories and practices of both Lenin and Mao one can detect the presence of
both types of enmity, Lenin favoured the global revolutionary and the notion
of abstract enmity, whereas Mao never abandoned the Clausewitzian notion
of real enmity and never played down the role of the autochthonous partisan,
either in theory or in practice. Schmitt indeed goes as far as saying that the
seed of the ideological differences between Chinese and Russian Commun-
ism had its origin in the different weight assigned to the ‘telluric’ element.*°
To conclude this section, in Theorie des Partisanen theory is not simply
influenced by historical practice, but also affects it in turn. Indeed Schmitt is
very keen to point out how Lenin’s ideas in particular fostered the practice of
absolute enmity in the second half of the twentieth century. However, it is
worth pointing out that for Schmitt Marxism is not the only ideology promoting
absolute enmity. In Theorie des Partisanen Schmitt mentions, albeit briefly,
other ideological views undermining the conventional notion of limited and
regulated enmity — views that are touched upon also in The Concept of the
Political, namely the notion of the ‘last war of humanity’ coined after the First
World War, the notion of ‘just war’ or ‘war in the name of humanity’.°’ Schmitt
suggests that all these ideologies and beliefs promote the identification of the

(whose enemy is real), while theorizing the notion of the global revolutionary and hence
the notion of absolute enmity.
53 ‘Lenin war ein groBer Kenner und Bewunderer von Clausewitz’, Schmitt, Theorie
des Partisanen, p. 55.
54 Schmitt contrasts Lenin with Mao, who apparently never abandoned the
Clausewitzian notion of real enmity, never played down the role of the autochthonous
partisan, either in theory or in practice. Schmitt goes as far as saying that the seed of the
ideological differences between Chinese and Russian Communism had its origin in the
different weight assigned to the telluric element.
5° In Theorie des Partisanen, Schmitt attempts to reconstruct ‘das Bild der Kriegs-
lehre dieses neuen Clausewitz’, p. 60. Earlier Mao is defined by Schmitt as ‘the greatest
practitioner [Praktiker] and the most famous theorist [Theoretiker] of revolutionary
war’, ibid., p. 59.
56 ‘Maos Revolution ist tellurischer fundiert als die Lenins.’ Ibid., p. 61.
57 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 54.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 515

enemy with ‘evil’ thereby supporting the necessity of its complete elimination
contrary to the spirit of jus publicum europaeum.

IV
Multiple Factors Affecting the Notion of Enmity
Although it is beyond doubt that according to Schmitt Marxism and other
forms of ideology played a crucial role in the progressive erosion ofthe con-
cept of conventional enmity, a close reading of Theorie des Partisanen sug-
gests that other factors contributed significantly to the gradual criminalization
and dehumanization of the enemy during the twentieth century. In order to
single out these other factors it is worth considering, albeit very briefly,
Schmitt’s views on the partisan wars that took place throughout the world
after the Second World War.” All these wars were, according to Schmitt, dif-
ferent in kind from the conventional wars between the regular armies of sov-
ereign states insofar as they were a combination of autochthonous and global
partisanship. In Schmitt’s account of partisan wars the link between domestic
and international politics” that interpreters have noticed in The Concept of the
Political becomes even more apparent. Schmitt points out that partisan wars
have a special connection with world politics insofar as the partisan relies on
external assistance, on an agency more powerful than himself. This, in Schmitt’s
opinion, applies to both the traditional autochthonous partisan and to the
global activist and it has always been so. However, in the technological age
this dependence on a third party becomes more obvious and more necessary
insofar as the partisan cannot survive and flourish without continuous help
from an ally that is both technically and economically capable of supplying
him with arms. This powerful ‘third party’ is described by Schmitt as

58 According to Schmitt, the Spanish example of partisan guerrilla in the early nine-
teenth century was imitated only to a limited extent in other anti-Napoleonic wars on the
continent. The only notable exception, Schmitt points out, was Russia where partisan
warfare against Napoleon did take place. Schmitt claims that this state of affairs changed
dramatically in the twentieth century. Partisan wars took place first in China (1927) and
then, during the Second World War in Russia, Poland, the Balkans, France, Albania and
Greece, among others. Schmitt mentions the Russian partisan war against Hitler’s Ger-
many as crucial for Germany’s defeat as it engaged much of Germany’s war efforts.
After the Second World War, examples of partisan struggle mentioned by Schmitt are
Indochina, the Philippines, Algeria, Cyprus and Cuba. At the time when Schmitt was
writing (1963), partisan wars were taking place in Laos and Vietnam.
59 Stephen Holmes has argued that for Schmitt ‘the only politics is international poli-
tics’: Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Liberalism (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 41. See
also Muller, ‘Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer . . .’, especially pp. 707-9. Peter Stirk argues
that the links in The Concept of the Political between domestic order and international
order were recognized also by Schmitt’s own contemporaries: Peter Stirk, ‘Carl
Schmitt’s V6lkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung’, History of Political Thought, XX
(1999), pp. 357-74, pp. 358-9.
516 é G. SLOMP

motivated by self-interest to help the partisan: the influence and power that
the third party has on the partisan enhances its own standing on the interna-
tional stage.® According to Schmitt partisan wars are greatly affected by tech-
nological change in many ways. Although he points out that even the most
pre-industrial partisan with the most unsophisticated of weapons can create
problems to the most technologically advanced modern army, he believes that
it is also true that the partisan takes part, as any other agent, in the technologi-
cal development of arms and communications. According to Schmitt, it is
the traditional, ‘telluric’ element of the partisan that is especially affected by
technological change. Mechanization, industrialization and technological
advancement in communications and weaponry are singled out by Schmitt as
the forces that bring about the loss of the ‘telluric’ element and turn the parti-
san into a small part of a gigantic machine that operates politically on a global
scale. In today’s terminology, we could say that, for Schmitt, globalization
fosters the further growth of the global activist and the notion of absolute
enmity that goes with it. Moreover, with technological change the partisan
becomes more and more dependent on ‘the third party’ whose power on the
international scene increases correspondingly. The partisan becomes an
instrument of an external agency by which, according to Schmitt, he is manip-
ulated.’
To sum up, in addition to ideology Schmitt regards increased political
interdependence, industrialization, mechanization and technological advance-
ments as contributing factors to the rise of partisan groups throughout the
world and to the progressive loss of the ‘telluric’ element of the traditional
partisan. Of all these factors, Schmitt seems very keen to single out and high-
light the negative effect of technological advancements” in communications
and weaponry. As Schmitt did in Der Nomos der Erde where he appealed to
Hegel to argue that there is a relationship between technical advance in wea-
ponry and the underlying notion of enemy,” so in Theorie des Partisanen he
offers the powerful example of the nuclear bomb and claims that in order to
justify its possession and deployment one must convince oneself that the
enemy is worthless and inhuman. Weapons of mass destruction for Schmitt
presume the notion of absolute limitless enmity.

69 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, pp. 77-8.

61 Ibid., pp. 27-8.
62 The dislike of technology seems to me a constant characteristic of Schmitt’s
thought before and after the war. On Schmitt’s view on technology see for example,
Bolsinger, The Autonomy of the Political, ch. 8.
63 Schmitt, Der Nomos der Erde, ch. 7.
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 317

Vv
Some Conclusions

In the previous sections I have argued that for Schmitt: (1) the twentieth-
century crisis of the state as the sole political actor entails the crisis of the
conventional notion of enmity, delimited and regulated by jus publicum
europaeum, (2) the rise of the telluric partisan in the context of civil and
colonial wars implies the rise of real enmity, unregulated by jus publicum
europaeum and yet partially limited insofar as it is targeted against a specific
enemy located in time and space; (3) finally the slow but steady replacement
of the traditional partisan by the global revolutionary implies for Schmitt the
advent of absolute enmity, both unregulated and unbound because its protag-
onist cannot rest until the target of his hostility is totally removed from the
face of the earth.
The article has interpreted Theorie des Partisanen as an attempt by Schmitt
to give a historical content to the abstract definitions of ‘enmity’ and ‘politi-
cal’ offered in The Concept of the Political. Schmitt’s 1963 work spells out
the view, only implicit in the earlier treatise, that the meaning of enmity is not
constant throughout human history and that in the twentieth century the crisis
of the sovereign state, the ideologies of absolute enmity, industrialization,
developments in technology and communications, and weapons of mass des-
truction have all contributed to the erosion of the notion of conventional enmity
and have fostered the progressive criminalization and de-humanization of the
enemy.
On the ground of my interpretation of Theorie des Partisanen, 1 will now
venture to draw some tentative conclusions. First, it can be noticed that as the
category of the ‘political’ for Schmitt does not coincide with any particular
historical form (such as the state) but nevertheless acquires its concrete mean-
ing only when it does so, likewise the category of enmity does not coincide
with the historical forms that it may take in different ages, but nevertheless
gains its concrete content from the interaction of a large number of factors in
each epoch. These include the structure of the international political system,
the ideology of the political agent applying the friend/enemy principle, the
level of technological advancement in weaponry and communications, the
stage of economic development, changes in jurisprudence and, last but not
least, the prevailing culture.” It seems to me that for Schmitt not only can
these factors not be isolated from each other, but the relation of cause and
effect between each of them and the prevailing notion of enmity is far from
clear-cut.
Secondly, although Schmitt associates the origin of the notions of conven-
tional, real and absolute enmity with three different historical conditions
4 In 1963 Schmitt wrote that the notion of conventional enmity was the result of
European rationalism and wondered about the effects of the increasing contacts with
non-European cultures.
518 ; G. SLOMP

(inter-state wars, civil and colonial wars and revolutionary wars respectively)
and with three different agents (the state, the telluric partisan and the global
revolutionary), nevertheless in his argument one can detect the view that
when the notions of real and absolute enmity emerge on the international
sphere they are no longer confined to the situation and agency with which
they were originally linked. Textual evidence to support this claim can be
found for example in Schmitt’s remark in Theorie des Partisanen that Euro-
pean states entered the First World War as conventional enemies and left it as
real enemies.® This implies, for example, that a strengthening of the state sys-
tem — although welcomed by Schmitt — by itself no longer guarantees a
return to the conventional notion of enmity associated with jus publicum
europaeum. The reason why this is so has to be found in Schmitt’s idea that
multiple factors (from ideology to technology, from international political
system to industralization) influence the dominant notion of enmity of an
age — and that political agency, although the essential carrier of a particular
notion of enmity, is not the only source of its meaning in different historical
periods.
Finally, although in this article I have not considered the context® of
Schmitt’s writing nor addressed the issue of whether Schmitt’s political affili-
ation with the Nazi regime ought to play a role in interpreting his theory,’ I
hope to have shown that even a strictly textual analysis is sufficient to
65 In Schmitt’s opinion Germany was criminalized for having waged war and this
criminalization marked the abandonment of jus publicum europaeum and the endorse-
ment of real enmity even in inter-state wars.
66 Many interpreters have emphasized the centrality of context in examining Schmitt’ s
political thought. See, among others: Dirk van Laak’s Gesprdiche in der Sicherheit des
Schweigens. Carl Schmitt in der politischen Geistesgeschichte der friihen Bundes-
republik (Berlin, 1993); Duncan Kelly, ‘Rethinking Franz Neumann’s Route to Behe-
moth’, History of Political Thought, XXUI (2002), pp. 458-96; Renato Cristi, “Carl
Schmitt on Liberalism, Democracy and Catholicism’, History of Political Thought, XIV
(1993), pp. 281-300; Muller, “Carl Schmitt, Hans Freyer . . .”; Peter Caldwell, ‘Ernst
Forsthoff’ ;William E. Scheuerman, “The Rule of Law under Siege: Carl Schmitt and the
Death of the Weimar Republic’, History of Political Thought, XIV (1993), pp. 265-80;
and William E. Scheuerman, ‘Legal Indeterminacy and the Origins of Nazi Legal
Thought: The Case of Carl Schmitt’, History of Political Thought, XVII (1996),
pp. 571-90.
67 There is a long-standing debate on Schmitt’s affiliation with the Nazi regime. The
terms of the debate can be briefly summarized by referring to the views of Joseph W.
Bendersky and Stephen Holmes respectively. For the former, Schmitt’s involvement
with Hitler’s regime was minimal and Schmitt ‘never became an ideological convert to
Nazism’ (Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich (Princeton, NJ,
1983), p. 208). For Holmes, any attempt to rehabilitate Schmitt is disturbing. “But per-
haps . . .no more disturbing than Schmitt himself, a theorist who consciously embraced
evil and whose writings cannot be studied without moral revulsion and intellectual dis-
tress’ (Stephen Holmes, book review of Joseph W. Bendersky, Carl Schmitt: Theorist for
the Reich, American Political Science Review, 77 (1983), pp. 1066-7, p. 1067). Impor-
 THE THEORY OF THE PARTISAN 519

highlight Carl Schmitt’s ideological ambiguity. Whilst in Theorie des

Partisanen Schmitt strongly opposes the notion of absolute enmity, which he
associates mainly with Marxism andjust-war theory, nevertheless he tellingly
fails to make any mention of Nazism, thus omitting from his account the para-
mount example of de-humanization of the enemy in the twentieth century. In
Theorie des Partisanen, the Nuremberg trial against war criminals is referred
to simply as an illustration of the abandonment of jus publicum europaeum,
according to which the enemy is not a criminal. Hitler’s Germany is men-
tioned only a few times and merely as an example of how difficult it is for reg-
ular armies to fight against partisans. Schmitt indeed regards the engagement
of twenty German divisions by Russian partisans as a decisive contribution to
the defeat of the Third Reich.
In conclusion, I would argue that Theorie des Partisanen, far from being
merely a historical account of partisanship, contributes to and enhances the
understanding of the meaning of Schmitt’s central concepts of enmity and the
political. This, I would suggest, is the main reason why Schmitt subtitled
Theorie des Partisanen ‘Complementary notes to the Concept of the Politi-
cal’. Only by examining these two works jointly can one attain a proper appre-
ciation of either.

Gabriella Slomp UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS

tant contributions to this debate can be found in Paul Hirst, Representative Democracy
and its Limits (Cambridge, 1990); John McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberal-
ism; Richard Bellamy, Rethinking Liberalism (London and New York, 2000); Jef
Huysmans, ‘Know Your Schmitt: A Godfather of Truth and the Spectre of Nazism’,
Review of International Studies, 25 (1997), pp. 323-8; and Stirk, ‘Carl Schmitt’s
Volkerrechtliche Grossraumordnung’, especially p. 373.
68 Schmitt, Theorie des Partisanen, p. 42.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY:
HISTORICAL TRANSFORMATIONS AND
THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE ANALYST

Gayil Talshir’

Abstract: The debate over the relationship between political practice and theory is as
old as political science itself. The study of ideology, this article contends, offers a
unique opportunity to explore the nexus of social phenomena and political philosophy,
provided the study is launched from a new perspective. Instead of undertaking another
exercise in the endless effort to define the concept of ideology, this analysis empha-
sizes the objects of ideology. It thereby exposes, first of all, that historically analysts of
ideology have ineptly assumed they were studying the same concept — ideology ——
whereas in fact they used the same term to refer to significantly different political
phenomena. Second, the genealogy of the objects of ideology discloses the changing
terrain of political reality since the Enlightenment. Three moments in the history
of ‘ideology’ are identified as heuristic devices: ideology as a function of class
(eighteenth—nineteenth centuries), ideology as a function of (totalitarian) regimes
(early twentieth century), and in the aftermath of the ‘end of ideology’ debate, ideol-
ogy as a social discourse (1960s onward). Third, the role of the analyst is therewith
also transformed: from a scientist, to a critical historian of ideas, to a political agent of
social change. The inevitable embeddedness of political theory in changing political
praxis urges a new dialogue between empirical and theoretical political scientists.

‘Our ideas are the necessary consequences of the societies in which we live’
(Helvétius, De L’ Esprit)

Ideology — To What End?

In 1960, Daniel Bell pronounced the End of Ideology.” However, since the
late 1960s we have witnessed the emergence of new collective political actors
advocating alternative ideologies, as well as the proliferation of ideology
studies. Had Bell simply got it wrong? Had the political phenomena changed, or
was the theoretical concept of ‘ideology’ rendered obsolete? The relationship
between the way analysts of ideology use the concept and the social reality
that they analyse is instrumental to determining the answer. Crucially, the
concept of ideology is a highly contested one. Scholars of ideology debate
whether ideology is a voluntary set of beliefs or a form of false consciousness;
whether ideology is a rational, consciously-held worldview or a set of emotional
and irrational beliefs; whether it is a total, comprehensive and exhaustive sys-
tem of values, or a partial and contradictory set of ideas; whether it necessarily
conserves asymmetrical relations of power — or whether any political force

' Department of Political Science, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

91905. Email: msgayil @huji.ac.il
2 D. Bell, The End of Ideology (Cambridge, 1960/ 1988).
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY Jail

will be ideological by definition; whether ideology is a zeitgeist or a product of

ideologues, politicians or ordinary citizens; and whether ideology is a modern
phenomenon or an immanent part of human society throughout history.
The thesis ofthis article is simple: if one changes perspective, and observes
the study of ideologies not through the internal dynamic of the discourse, pur-
suing the ultimate definition of the term, but through the objects of ideol-
ogy — the political phenomena which shape the context in which the theories
are conceived — then three things occur: first, one finds that the concept
‘ideology’ was used to define radically different political phenomena
throughout the history of the term. Second, these conceptual changes corre-
spond to the dominant political force at play in different historical periods.
The implicit correlation between the scholarly work of analysts of ideology
and social reality becomes explicit. Political concepts — including ideology
itself— change meaning and adapt to new realities. Third, the perception of
the analyst of ideology regarding her own role has also undergone substantial
transformations in the different historical periods. Thus, political theorists are
embedded in their own social environment, or else investigate a certain
historical period which inevitably leaves its tooth marks on the theory which
they have supposedly rescued from the jaws of reality, in aspiring to the “good
society’.

Framing the Debate:

Political Science between Empirical and Theoretical Research
Before analysing the interrelationship between the concept of ideology and
political reality — the object of ideological research — the discussion needs
to be located in the wider disciplinary context. The debate over the vocation of
political science (to rephrase Weber) — i.e. whether to describe, explain and
predict political processes or try to develop a normative social model — has
always been central. One distinction is already apparent, between Plato, pre-
supposing that humans are philosophers, guards or artisans by nature, upon
which he reconstructs his Republic, and Aristotle, who examined, in Politics,
one hundred and fifty eight constitutions of the ancient world as the basis for
his classification of good regimes. That distinction is just as apparent in modern
political science: Sartori, for one, in ‘What is Politics?’ distinguishes
between political philosophy, which he identifies with Hobbes’ Leviathan, and
political science, represented by Machiavelli’s Prince. Hobbes started from
human nature to develop the political community, Machiavelli analysed con-
temporary politics to advise the prince. The autonomy of political science,
Sartori concludes, depends upon the maintenance of this separation and the
development of a strictly empirical political science, on following
Machiavelli.’ The struggle between these research archetypes has gone

3 G. Sartori, ‘What is Politics’, Political Theory, I (1) (1973), pp. 5-26.

322 G. TALSHIR

through many phases, especially with the rise of logical positivism and the
aspirations of social studies to become ‘real’ sciences. Yet Habermas called
for thinkers to refrain from both logical positivism and hermeneutic idealism
since ‘(t)he point was — and is — to bring explanatory and interpretative
approaches “under one roof”, as Max Weber had already seen’.* The reality of
the discipline was, however, more accurately captured in Almond’s paper of
1990: ‘Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science’.” Under the
single roof ofpolitical science co-exist a variety of schools, which continue to
dine at separate tables. Around these tables, the two sub-cultures of political
science, political theory and empirical research, sit side by side, but with very
little exchange between them.
The gap between normative and empirical approaches seems, at the very
least, to be anecessary by-product of the specialization within social sciences.
If, however, we shift the emphasis from the methodologies used in the two
sub-disciplines, and examine the objects of their exploration, asking why they
are investigating these issues and not others, we might find the gap is gradually
narrowing. For example, consider the challenge to Lipset and Rokkan’s
account of the freezing of party-systems.° New hard data concerning electoral
volatility and processes of realignment and dealignment’ challenged the
framework which had captured the trends of European politics for over a cen-
tury; complementary or alternative theories were consequently developed.
Political reality has changed and political science — albeit belatedly — has
reacted. Has there been any equivalent shift in political theory? What promp-
ted the move from regime theory (democratic vs. totalitarian vs. authoritar-
ian) to competing models of participatory democracy, or from formal vs.
essential democracy to questions of distributive justice, multiculturalism and
environmental ethics? Some political theorists contend they are solely con-
cerned with ‘the good society’; one might, nevertheless, suggest that political
realities affect theory as much as they affect empirical studies. Thus, the same
in-depth processes inducing realignment and dealignment, such as the
information age, changing global markets and the multicultural make-up of
advanced industrial societies, gave rise to a new set of problems, which old
theories of justice, equality and freedom could not properly address. Theoreti-

4 T. McCarty, in J. Habermas, On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA,

1996), p. viii. For the discussion concerning the legitimation crisis see Legitimacy and
the State, ed. W. Connolly (New York, 1984); J. Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston,
1975).
5 G. Almond, ‘Separate Tables: Schools and Sects in Political Science’, in A Disci-
pline Divided (London, 1990), pp. 13-32.
© M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Align-
ments’, in The West European Party System, ed. P. Mair (Oxford and New York, 1990),
p. 123.
7 R. Dalton, J. Flanagan et al., Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democra-
cies — Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton, 1984).
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 523

cal and empirical approaches are reacting to the same set of changes in
advanced democracies.
Does the fact that the two disciplinary ‘camps’ share the same diet of con-
temporary reality encourage a discourse between the parties dining at their
different tables? Arguably not. Crucially, the ‘pure science’ models, viz.,
physics, have themselves ceased to regard neutrality and objectivity as neces-
sary conditions for a good scientific explanation.* Empirical data is theory-
oriented, as Popper and Kuhn and others long ago convincingly argued;?
critical discourse in the social sciences thus provides ample incentive for empiri-
cal scientists to adopt an integrated approach. This paper challenges political
theorists, using the study of ideology to demonstrate the inherent, if implicit,
interconnections between practice and theory within political philosophy.
This reassessment is necessary for establishing the conditions to construct a
common political research discourse to be held at a shared disciplinary table.

The Design of the Argument:

Three Moments in the History of Ideological Research
On the one hand, ‘ideology’ appears to be a natural interface between political
practice and theory, since ideology may be roughly defined as a way of realiz-
ing a particular social vision through political means, in light of a certain his-
torical analysis. On the other hand, the study of ideology seems at times a
paradigmatic case of arguing for the detachment of philosophical analysis
from concrete political reality, seeing that a distinct field of ideological stud-
ies has emerged. Ironically, a good example here is the sub-field of Marxism,
where the concepts, arguments and internal logic are often incomprehensible
to anyone unfamiliar with the formulations of the Marxist discourse, despite
the due prominence of historical materialism.'° The study of ideology, it
seems, has developed its own boundaries, subjects, histories and narratives
that dwell upon both its inner discursive sources and texts, and debates within
the community of analysts, rather than on any concrete political reality. It
appears that, if anything, the concept of ideology powerfully demonstrates the
dividedness of political theory and the isolationism of its various camps, only
serving to intensify the estrangement between social theorists, political scien-
tists and interested citizens.

8 For example, it became scientifically established that the answer to the question of
whether light is travelling as particles or as waves is dependent on the device through
which the observation is made.
9 K. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1969); T. Kuhn, The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).
10 See, for example, T. Eagleton, ‘Ideology and its Vicissitudes in Western Marx-
ism’, in Mapping Ideology, ed. S. Zizek (New York, 1995), pp. 179-226 and M. Barrett,
‘Ideology, Politics, Hegemony: From Gramsci to Laclau and Moffe’, in ibid., pp.
235-64; H. Marcuse, Das Ende der Utopie (Berlin, 1967).
524 G. TALSHIR

It is here that a new approach to thinking about ideology becomes pivotal.

By turning from the attempt to define and refine the concept of ideology from
within a Marxian, Straussian or postmodern discourse, to the task of disclos-
ing the objects of ideology — the social phenomena which are at the heart of
the study of the analysts of ideology — a new facet of the relationship
between political theory and practice can be revealed. Reassessing some of
the major analysts of ideology yields simple yet surprising evidence that the
scholars were not studying the same phenomena to which they applied the
term ‘ideology’. Moreover, such an exercise can demonstrate that at different
periods of time the objects of ideology captured the major agent of political
change, indicative of the era in question.
The paper discloses three diachronic phases, defined here as historical
moments, in the genealogy of the objects of ideology. All the analysts in ques-
tion use the same term — ideology — as a prime analytical concept in their
accounts. They each define the concept somewhat differently; however, our
perspective focuses not on the definitions of the concept, but on the social
phenomena under investigation. Decontesting and decoding the empirical
political forces which are at the centre of their analysis of ideology allows us
to delineate three dominant phases in the evolution of the study of ideology.
In each historical moment we ask, first, what are the objects of ideology
which emerge from a critical reflection on the analysts’ understanding of
‘ideology’; namely, what social phenomena in the political reality of their
time did their investigation target? Second, what is the analysts’ understand-
ing of the relationship between science and ideology; put differently, what is
the role of the analyst of ideology? Comparing the answers to these questions
during the three historical moments exposes both the historicity of the usage
of the term ‘ideology’ and, interestingly, the changing role of the analyst in
the views of the scholars of ideology throughout the last two centuries.
Using the same criterion — the objects of ideology — allows us to cluster
together analysts who use very different definitions of ideology according to
the subject of their investigation. Thus, despite the fact that the French
ideologues and Karl Marx used markedly different definitions of the term
ideology, they both, as will be demonstrated, perceived ideology at the end of
the day as a political product of social classes. Both comprise the first ideolog-
ical moment. Against the Enlightenment ethos, with its trust in science and
individualism, the second moment of ideology rejects liberalism in face of a
greater social force. The phenomena under research in the first half of the
twentieth century were nationalism, fascism, Nazism and communism. Ana-
lysts thus focused on regimes, especially totalitarian regimes, as their objects
of ideology. In the aftermath of the ‘end of ideology’ debate, since the 1960s,
an interesting trend has appeared: political analysts deny that they study ideo-
logy. Ideology is being hidden behind such notions as hegemony, critical the-
ory and discourse analysis. The contention of this article, however, is that
 THE OBJECTS-OF IDEOLOGY 525

these investigations are, nevertheless, accounts of ideology. The diverse stud-

ies of contemporary ideologies — from political parties to social movements,
from post-Marxism to post-structuralism — all share the same object of ideol-
ogy: political discourse. They thus comprise the third ideological moment. In
each phase, the ideal ofthe role of the analyst is also changing: from the objec-
tive researcher, striving to establish positive science in the first ideological
moment, to the critical scholar who morally condemns the phenomena in
question in the phase of totalitarianism, to the analyst as an agent of social
change in the final, contemporary phase.
As with any broad argumentative framework seeking to scan two hundred
years in an attempt to paint a larger picture, certain details will inevitably be
compromised. The main argument can bejuxtaposed to Althusser’s analysis.
He distinguished between the study of ideologies and the development of a
theory of ideology, arguing that

if |am to put forward the project of a theory of ideology in general, and if

this theory really is one of the elements on which theories of ideologies
depend, that entails an apparently paradoxical proposition which I shall
express in the following terms: ideology has no history.'!

While Althusser takes it for granted that all ideologies are ideologies of social
classes, his concept of a theory ofideology is a-historical, insofar as he claims
that ideology has permanent features, omni-historically present, which trans-
cend each specific history and define the essence of ideology, abstracted from
any particular circumstances.’
The argument of this article is quite the reverse: I seek to demonstrate that
ideologies cannot be a priori solely ascribed to social classes, and that
changes in the objects of ideology are precisely what the theory of ideo-
logy — theory which reflectively analyses the use of the concept throughout
history — must undertake to disclose. The main aim of this discussion is
therefore to analyse the historicity of the usage of the concept ‘ideology’,
thereby demonstrating that the application of the same concept changes each
time the political phenomena under investigation change. In contrast to
Althusser, the present discussion suggests that ideology indeed has history,
that the study of ideologies also has history, and that unveiling both these his-
tories is the task of the theory of ideology. Exposing the immanent relation-
ship between theoretical concept and political reality should call scholars’
attention to the objects of their research, and encourage them to re-evaluate
the interrelationship between political practice and theory.

11 1. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus’, in Mapping Ideology,

ed. Zizek, p. 121.
12 Ibid., p. 122.
526 G. TALSHIR

The First Ideological Moment:

The Enlightenment Era — Between Class and Ideology
Most studies of ideology open their conceptual survey with Destutt de Tracy’s
(1754-1836) conceptualization of ‘ideology’ as the science of ideas, but then
rest content and commence their substantive analysis with Marx. However,
comparing the French ideologues (late eighteenth century) with Marx’s ideas
(mid-nineteenth century) reveals both the differences and, crucially, their
similarities. Thus, there are two stages in the first ideological moment, but
both of them draw upon the ethos of the Enlightenment, with the belief in sci-
ence and the emphasis on the materialization of the individual at their heart.
The two themes — the relationship between science and ideology as encapsu-
lated in the role of the analyst, and the objects of ideology — are discussed in
the case of the French ideologues, and then compared to Marx’s theory.

Late Eighteenth Century: The French Ideologues — The Science of Ideas

and the Idea of Liberty

Thinkers of the late-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment conceptual-

ized ideology as the science of the order of knowledge. The ideologues saw
themselves as followers of the tradition established by Bacon, Hobbes, Locke
and Descartes. They believed they could reach a true understanding of the
world through the science of ideas, a science that would offer the basis for all
other sciences, a philosophy of the spirit that provided the ultimate methodol-
ogy for each and every science. This method, which they termed ‘Analysis’,
involved dismantling composite phenomena into primary constituents — ele-
mentary concepts — from which a new synthesis could then be constructed.
Note, first, that to the French ideologues, ideology was theoretically con-
structed as a science: the essence of ideology lies in its nature as a foundation
for all sciences — regardless of the subject matter. Second, for the French
ideologues, ideology — where reason, not faith, presides — provided a way
to escape the prevailing meta-narratives, and to transcend religion and the
conservative power elites:
the ideologues . . . felt that the traditional intellectual, political, and reli-
gious authorities were so attached to the prevailing, centuries-old preju-
dices that they had a common interest in resisting any transition to a new
kind of education. Most difficult was the obstacle of religion; the religious
authorities clung most strongly to prejudices, and their quarrels over theo-
logical dogma became fanatical political-religious conflicts."
The dichotomy created by the Enlightenment thinkers was that ideology —
the science of ideas — was a science instrumental in opposing religion and the

'5 R. Cox, Ideology, Politics and Political Theory (Belmont, 1969), p. 12.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 527

old regime and hence at the centre of the dispute between rationality and tradi-
tion.
Based on the first principles of human reason, ideology was conceived as
objective, universal and omni-historical science. It represented the optimistic
spirit of the Enlightenment, with its complete faith in universal reason. Ideol-
ogy, thus, rightly appears to be the ancestor of logical positivism, which a cen-
tury later was to exert a tremendous impact on the social sciences. However, a
central question arises: was the scientific endeavour itself, the application of
the method of analysis, a pure, objective, abstract trade? Was the historical
context left behind the closed doors of the academic institution? What was the
outcome of the analysis, the analytical building block of the science of ideas?
Curiously, the very elementary concept at the base ofthe ideologues’ analysis
is none other than the concept of liberty. This idea was introduced by Destutt
de Tracy in the fourth part of his book Eléments d’Idéologie, in which he
attempted to apply his theoretical ideas to the question of nature and the
power of will, which are also conceived as having relevance to the under-
standing of politics. Liberty is thus an essential concept, fully realized as a
political concept, on which the understanding of both the world and human
society should be constituted:
Liberty, understood in its most general meaning (and the only reasonable
one), signifies the power to materialize our will. It is thus the remedy for all
our ills, the fulfillment of all our desires, the satisfaction of all our needs,
and consequently, our first blessing, the source of all others, which contains
all others. It is the same thing as our happiness."*
Thus, the objective, scientific method that attempts to derive the basic con-
stituents of human understanding from complex phenomena ends with the
conceptual atom of liberty. How could liberty form the cornerstone of the nat-
ural sciences? For the ideologues this was no contradiction, as they perceived
ideology as part of zoology, the true foundation of science. Science is the nat-
ural history of the spirit; the natural, for them, was the social. Liberty and
rationality are the principles on which every science is constructed and the
methodology used, ‘analysis’, was the ultimate course of study for both the
natural and social sciences.
Once the concept of liberty has been established as the elementary unit of
analysis, the objectivity and universality of the science-of-ideas becomes
questionable. The notion of ideology in the late eighteenth century suddenly
expressed less the era of transcendental science and more the ideals of the
Enlightenment thinkers, the class of liberals:
(t)he ‘ideologists’ of the Institute were liberals who regarded freedom of
thought and expression as the principal conquest of the Revolution. . . They

14 A_L.C. Dustutt de Tracy, Eléments d’Idéologie: Traité de la Volounté et de Ses

Effets (Paris, 1815), Vol. IV, p. 51 (my translation — GT).
528 G. TALSHIR

could put up, at least temporarily, with an enlightened dictatorship, which

safeguarded the major gains of the Revolution, but not with a regime which
visibly steered back towards an absolutism supported by established reli-
gion.”
. 15

Indeed, to understand the extent to which the concept of liberty was at the
heart of the political struggle of the ideologues, a historical reminder is in
order. The ethos of the Enlightenment, which became the political will of the
Revolution, remained the torch carried by liberal intellectuals even at the
height of the terror of 1794. The window of opportunity was to open a year
later, with the establishment by law of the new National Institute by the
National Convention in August 1795. The ideologues were members of the
Institute and the curriculum and research programme reflected their science
of ideas approach.'° In their prominent position, the ideologues exerted influ-
ence over the middle classes, influence that Napoleon exploited in his strug-
gle for power. Thus, the Institute awarded Napoleon an honorary membership
in 1799, the same year that the ideologues supported him in the coup d’état de
Brumaire, hoping he would actualize their vision of enlightened rule. How-
ever, in politics alliances are provisional, and following Napoleon’s reconcil-
iation with the Church in 1801 he turned his back on the liberal intellectuals
who had facilitated his legitimization a few years before. His fear of their
sway over public opinion, and their abhorrence of his despotic reign, led
Napoleon to attack the heart of the Institute by cancelling the classes in sci-
ences and morals. The considerable impact of the ideologues on Bonaparte in
the early part of his reign, and their disillusionment with his quest for despotic
power, are encapsulated in Napoleon’s ascription, on his return to France in
December 1812, of his military defeat by Russia to none other than ideology:
It is to ideology, that obscure metaphysics, which searching after first
causes, wishes to found upon them the legislation of nations, instead of
adapting the laws to the knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of
history, that we are to attribute all the calamities that our beloved France has
experienced.”
Ideology, the science of ideas, becomes a highly politicized concept identi-
fied by Napoleon as an anti-nationalist force. For Destutt de Tracy and the
French ideologues, ideology was the archetypal science, metaphysics of the
spirit. They perceived their own role as exposing the basic conceptual elements
on which human and natural science is constituted. However, the fundamental
unit of their analysis — liberty — exposed the object of their ideology: the lib-
eral intelligentsia of the middle classes. The unique position enjoyed by these
thinkers in the aftermath of the French Revolution points to the inherent
'5 G. Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays (New York, 1967), p. 5.
'6 Ibid., p. 6.
'7 See Napoleon, in J. Adams, The Life and Works of John Adams (Boston, 1851),
pp. 401-2.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY a20

interconnection between (scientific) ideas and the reality in which they are
conceived: the very attempt to constitute a transcendental ideology reflects
above all the spirit of the Enlightenment. The role of the ideologues in
post-revolutionary politics offers a paradigmatic example of the interface
between science and history.

The Mid-Nineteenth Century — Scientific Marxism and the Idea of the

Creative Man

Napoleon’s contempt for ideology and the expectation that history would
provide an alternative source of knowledge were later maintained and
ideologized by Karl Marx. Napoleon and Marx bear the formative respon-
sibility for stamping ‘ideology’ with its pejorative connotation in Western
culture. Indeed, the inherent tension between the ideologues’ attempt to for-
mulate a transcendental science ofideas that would facilitate all sciences, and
their effort to justify their own ardour for rational rule, was explained by
Marx, arguing that during the domination of the bourgeoisie the concepts of
freedom and equality prevailed, since
(e)ach new class which displaces the one previously dominant is forced,
simply to be able to carry out its aims, to represent its interest as the com-
mon interest of all members of society, that is, ideally expressed. It has to
give its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the only ratio-
nal, universally valid ones.'®
At the very least, Marx and Destutt de Tracy have in common the denuncia-
tion of religion, as Marx also argued: ‘the basis of the irreligious criticism
is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man’.'? However, for the
ideologues ideology was a universal science with which to combat religion
and the old regime. For Marx, in feudal times ideology hadjustified itself via
religion, in capitalism ideology justified itself through science.” Both reli-
gion and speculative science are manifestations of ideology. Ideology is just a
form of false consciousness, which is embedded in class.”' Contrary to ideal-
ism (the French ideologues were bracketed together with the speculative Ger-
man philosophers), Marx famously assumes a different point of departure:

18 K, Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, in L. Easton and K. Guddat, Writings of the

Young Marx on Philosophy and Society (New York, 1967), p. 439.
19 K. Marx, ‘Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction’, in
Easton and Guddat, Writings of the Young Marx, p. 248; and in Capital: “The religious
world is but a reflex of the real world. . . The religious reflex of the real world can, in any
case, only then finally vanish, when the practical relations of every day life offer to man
none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men
and nature’. K. Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. | (Chicago, 1932),
pp. 91-2.
20 J. Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London, 1979), p. 189.
21 Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, p. 404.
530 G. TALSHIR

(t)he premises from which we start are not arbitrary; they are not dogmas
but rather actual premises from which abstraction can be made only by
imagination. They are the real individuals, their actions, and their material
conditions oflife, those which they find existing as well as those which they
produce through their actions. These premises can be substantiated in a

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 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 531

Substantial differences seem to distinguish the ideologues and Marx, as

Table | shows.
Three points are instrumental for the discussion here: the role of the analyst
as reflected in the relations between science and ideology; the objects of ideol-
ogy; and the shared ethos of the Enlightenment thinkers. As Table 1 demon-
strates, the crucial difference lies in the prospect of social change, of ideology
as a transformative force. For the French ideologues, comprehending ideology
and pursuing their analysis — the mere realization that the ‘science of the spirit’
harnesses political liberty as a rational foundation for understanding human
beings and the world — was itself capable of transforming reality. Conscious-
ness, for them, generates social change. For Marx, however, political change
requires a social revolution:
all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criti-
cism, by resolution into ‘Self-consciousness’ . . . but only by the practical
overthrow of the actual social relations, which gave rise to this idealistic
trickery. Not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history and also
of religion, philosophy and all other types of theory.”*
But what is the role of the analyst in attempting to apply material analysis and
determine the nature of social change? Marx searches for the organizing prin-
ciple of history itself: struggle motivates human history,” in particular the
struggle over the forces of production. However, the organizing principle —
class struggle — is conceived by a reflective thinker, rather than by an
interested party in the struggle.
Whereas in German and French idealism ideology is disguised as science,
Marx’s attempt at true science aims to disclose the implicit relationship
between class and ideology.” He applies historical materialism to expose
class struggle as the dominant historical force, and to enable an investigation
into the future of social change. So far Marx has appeared to hold science in
contempt. But he qualifies his position: “where speculation ends, namely in
actual life, there real, positive science begins as the representation ofthe prac-
tical activity and practical process of the development of men’.** Thus Marx
aspires to establish a real, positive, true science; and furthermore, seeks to
establish a unified science, equally authentic as that of the ideologues: ‘His-
tory itself is an actual part of natural history, of nature’s development into
man. Natural science will in time include the science of man as the science of

23 Tbid., pp. 431-2.

24 «This whole interpretation of history appears to be contradicted by the fact of con-
quest. Violence, war, pillage, murder etc. have been seen as the motive force of history.’
Ibid., p. 463.
25 Even in the speculative science the material conditions of the intellectual is
exposed. See Larrain, The Concept of Ideology, pp. 172-212.
26 Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, p. 415.
532 G. TALSHIR

man will include natural science: There will be one science.’*’ Thus, despite
his fierce critique of the science theorized by the ideologues, the main differ-
ence between them is in the methodology, not in the role of the analyst or the
belief in science. Now the similarities between Marx and the Enlightenment
thinkers are clearer.
Table 2: Humanities

Destutt de Tracy Marx

Humanistics/ Science of ideas is Science of man 1s

natual science part of zoology part of the science of
Relations nature

Structure of Seeking a unitary ‘There will be one

sciences science science’

The essence of Basis for positivism Positive science

science

Scientific tradition Locke, Hobbes, Empiricist tradition

Bacon, Descartes of Bacon, Locke,
Hobbes

The ideal Liberated Man Man Free to Produce

Objects of ideology Liberal intellectuals The exploited

proletariat

The role of the scientist is to expose the relationship between class and
ideology. But what was the object of this investigation into ideology for
Marx? Note that if we had focused on Marx’s own concept of ideology, this
would have meant analysing bourgeois ideology, i.e. false consciousness uti-
lized for achieving domination and inflicting alienation on the subordinated
classes. However, by emphasizing the objects of ideology, we train our focus
on the prime force underlying change in political history, and observe its
impact on political theory. Undeniably, in the mid-nineteenth century this
force was the rising proletariat. Thus, Marx’s own definition of ideology was
concerned with the dominant classes; the objects of the ideology, however,
are the emerging working classes. Whereas for Marx the subject of ideology
is the bourgeoisie, the object of his analysis, and of historical change, is the
proletariat of the industrial society.
Comparing Marx’s analysis with that of the ideologues reveals the deeper
ethos they shared as thinkers of the Enlightenment: the belief in science and
27 Tbid., pp. 311-12.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 333

its relation to historical progress, the attempt to gain a comprehensive under-

standing of the world by discovering a basic principle (whether universal sci-
ence or the class-struggle); and the aspiration to reach the final synthesis
(conceptual or historical) that would disclose the driving force of humanity.
In both cases, the objects of ideology are social classes: middle class liberals
for the ideologues, the proletariat for Marx’s theory. Underlying both theories
was the humanist, liberating ethos of self-materialization. For Marx, the
liberating ethos of individualism was concretized in the material lifeworld,
humans are part ofthe species insofar as they produce themselves.** The prob-
lem is alienation, caused by the division of labour.” It might be solved by the
liberated individual:
In communist society, however, where nobody has an exclusive area of
activity and each can train himself in any branch he wishes, society regu-
lates the general production, making it possible for me to do one thing today
and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed
cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I like, without ever
becoming a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critic.”
The ideal of man emerges from behind the Marxist analysis of the division
of labour: a man who materializes himself in his production and creation, a
man who is free to choose his activities and who is liberated through his pro-
duction. The same ideal of the abstract, free, man presented by the ideologues
reappears now, materialized in a concrete person living a concrete life. What
had changed since the late eighteenth century was the social and economic
circumstances, and this was reflected in the object of the analysis of ideology:
from the liberal middle class to the proletariat. The humanistic ideal of the free
intellectual was now the ideal of every working man.*' The definitions of ideol-
ogy in both cases differed substantially; the objects of ideology, in both, were
social classes. The values of the Enlightenment underlay both philosophies.

Second Ideological Moment:

The Collectivist Era Between Ideology and Terror
If the debates between Marx and the ideologues on the subject of ideology
seem relevant at all today, it is only because we live in a post-totalitarian age;
for the Enlightenment thinkers had failed to predict the crucial historical
development of the turn of the century — the emergence of nationalism. The
new world order of sovereign nation-states, discussed in Weber’s analysis of

28 Marx, ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts’, in Easton and Guddat, Writings

of the Young Marx, p. 295.
29 Marx, ‘The German Ideology’, pp. 424-5.
30 Tbid.
3! For the argument that the socialist project is about extending democracy, see
G. Eley, Forging Democracy (Oxford, 2002).
534 G. TALSHIR

the monopoly over power and Gellner’s analysis of the monopoly over educa-
tion,” led social ideas into realms anticipated by neither Destutt de Tracy nor
Marx. The class struggle cringed in the face of the enormous apparatus of the
state — bureaucracy, governmental institutions and the education system —
which reshaped the relationship between the citizens and the administration.
Collectivist and national conceptions provided the background for imperial
and colonial wars throughout the world, which reached their peak in the two
world wars. Despite the fact that nationalism had an integrating function for
all nation-states, including liberal democracies,’ the intellectual discussion
of ideology turns to the more radical forms of collectivism, taking Fascism as
a case in point.
In ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’ (1953), Hanna
Arendt argues:
Ideologies — isms which to the satisfaction of their adherents can explain
everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise —
are a very recent phenomenon and, for many decades, this played a negli-
gible role in political life . . . Not before Hitler and Stalin were the great
political potentialities of ideologies discovered.”*
Ideologies, according to Arendt, only acquired their full role when German
National-Socialism and Soviet Communism alighted on the stage of history.
The correlation between class consciousness and ideology, the struggle for a
positive, universal, objective science — the whole debate of the Enlighten-
ment era — appear irrelevant to this new concept of ideology in the twentieth
century. Indeed, Bracher’s anatomy in The Age of Ideologies, has very little to
do with the Enlightenment: “The beginning of our century, the stirring of its
new ideas within the turbulent arena between progress and crisis, is eclipsed
in retrospect by the emergence of new, unprecedented, forms of dictatorship
and despotism.’*°
Three aspects of this second moment of ideology are important for our
purposes here: the re-appropriation of the ‘people’ in the dispute between
regimes, as the new objects of ideology; the new role of emotions, education
and terror in the study of ideology; and the separation between the ideologists
as political actors and the analysts of ideology, with the normative role of the
latter. First, whereas the French ideologues and Marx shared the ideal of
self-materializing individuals, the totalitarian movements of the twentieth
century rejected liberalism and individualism and aspired to a collectivist

32 M. Weber, ‘Politik als Beruf’, Gesammelte Politische Scriften (Munich, 1921), pp.
396-450; E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1983).
33 -Y. Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, 1993).
34H. Arendt, ‘Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government’, The Review of
Politics, 15 (July 1953), p. 315.
35 K. Bracher, The Age of Ideologies (London, 1984), p. 81.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 339

ethos. In his ‘Fundamental Ideas of Fascism’, Benito Mussolini provides an

eminent example thereof:
Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance
of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide
with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal
will of man as a historic entity. It is opposed to classical liberalism, which
arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when
the State became the expression of the conscience and will of the people.
Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts
the rights of the State as expressing the real essence ofthe individual ... The
Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or
spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism
is totalitarian, and the Fascist State — a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all
values — interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of the people.*°
Fascism at once repudiated the building block of liberalism — the individ-
ual — and claimed that the State expresses his real essence. Talmon observed:
‘Nothing was left to stand between man and the State . . . extreme individual-
ism thus came full circle in a collectivist pattern of coercion.’*’ Instead of
renouncing democracy and propagating an alternative form of rule, the
ideologists of totalitarianism insisted that their regime is the real democracy:
‘(t)he Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people’s State and as such, the demo-
cratic State par excellence.’*® Gentile, the thinker behind Mussolini, re-
appropriates the rule of the people — demo-cracy — from individual citizens
to a unified collective. As Talmon argued: “There is an ironic law which
causes revolutionary salvationist schemes to evolve into regimes of terror,
and the promise of a perfect direct democracy to assume in practice the form
of totalitarian dictatorship.” The objects of ideology have significantly
changed — from class-based ideology to totalitarian regimes.
Second, the privileged relations between science and ideology are replaced
by a new identification of and reliance on emotions, irrationalism and fear as
ideological tools. In order to generate collectivist consciousness, propaganda
and terror are manipulatively used. The Enlightenment thinkers’ shared trust
in science was abandoned. Science, e.g. social Darwinism, became another
tool in the propaganda kit. The aspiration for truth is replaced by a strong
emphasis on emotions, irrationality, education and coercion. Gentile explains:
the formation of the Fascist state ‘is the formation of a consciousness of it in
36 B. Mussolini, ‘Fundamental Ideas’, Fascism — Doctrine and Institutions (New
York, 1968), pp. 10-11.
37 J. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York, 1970), pp. 250,
sph
38 G. Gentile, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Fascism’, Foreign Affairs, VI (2) (1928),
prsole
39 J. Talmon, ‘The Myth of the Nations and the Vision of Revolution’, in Bracher,
The Age of Ideology, p. 80.
536 G. TALSHIR

individuals, in the masses. Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instru-
ments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought
and will of the Duce, the thoughts and will of the masses’.*° The source of this
conceptual shift is the change in the political and psycho-social reality, as
identified by Arendt: “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the
non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness . . . has become an everyday
experience of the ever growing masses of our century.’*! The two sides of the
coin — atomization and mass culture — explain the impotence of the individ-
ual. Emotional deprivation generates a yearning for an alternative collective,
for a sense of belonging, and plays a crucial role in the fascination with
nationality.
Thus, in the context ofthe crisis of legitimacy explored by Weber, the prob-
lem of alienation accentuated by Marx could no longer be overcome by a criti-
cal, sceptical, reflective, incremental and differentiated science. Instead,
pseudo-science and quasi-religion characterized totalitarian belief systems.
The tools of modernity — technology, industry, media and education — were
instrumentalized for the creation of the national unity. Education propagates
unifying myths (such as Sorel’s general strike) and indoctrination is exempli-
fied in the attempt to control the consciousness and emotions of the popula-
tion. Gentile, again:
In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the comprehensive, or
as the Fascists say, the ‘totalitarian’ scope of its doctrine, which concerns
itself not only with political organisation and political tendency, but with
the whole will and thoughts and feeling of the nation.”
Mussolini and Gentile, Hitler and Goebbles were operating mind-controlling
machines, the oil of which was ideology. The emphasis on propaganda, obe-
dience and state apparatus shifts the terms of the debate from rational science
to indoctrination, coercion and terror as the weapons of the ideological
armory.** Totalitarian ideology established a total philosophical, spiritual,
economical, political ideal of a new man recruited to a single unifying idea.
Sternhell explains: ‘the fascist act was a direct consequence of the ideology
... the negation of liberal democracy and the parliamentarian system, the rite
of national unity and cross-class co-operation which is forced by the
corporatist state, were all applications of the ideology.’“ In the twentieth cen-
tury we witness a move from ideology as ideas and consciousness to ideology
as political action, recruiting irrationalism, romanticism and myth to the
service of an all-encompassing regime.

40 Gentile, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Fascism’, pp. 301-2.

41 Arendt, ‘Ideology and Terror’, p. 326.
42 Gentile, ‘The Philosophical Basis of Fascism’, p. 292.
43 Arendt, ‘Ideology and Terror’, p. 310.
44 The Fascist Thought and its Variations, ed. Z. Sternhell (Tel-Aviv, 1988), p. 42.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 534

Third, with the collectivist era the role of the analyst of ideology has sub-
stantially changed. The analyst of ideology in the twentieth century distanced
himself from the historical period. His work was a historical attempt to
unearth the mechanism behind ideology, to expose the logic behind the hor-
rors:
At the centre of this process is a tendency towards an extreme simplification
of complex realities: the claim that they can be reduced to one truth, and at
the same time, divided into a dichotomy of good and evil, right and wrong,
friend and foe, that the world can be grasped with a single explanatory
model in bipolar terms, in the manner attempted more specifically by the
Marxist class theory or the National Socialist racial theory.”
Reflecting the changing objects of ideology, the definition of the concept of
ideology is transformed accordingly: from the science of ideas of the eigh-
teenth century, to the class interest of the nineteenth century, to the internal
logic of a single idea in the twentieth century: ‘an ideology is quite literally
what its name indicates: it is the logic of an idea. . . The ideology treats the
course of events as though it followed the same “law” as the logical exposi-
tion of its “idea’’.’*° The ‘one idea’ was different in the three manifestations of
totalitarian ideology — Fascism, National-Socialism and Communism. The
concept of the nation stood at the centre of Fascism, the superior race at the
heart of Nazism, and the total revolution of the proletariat at the core of Com-
munism. In all, the analyst exposed the structure of the single idea from which
a comprehensive social order was deduced.
Crucially, the ideologue — e.g. Gentile — is no longer comparable to the
scientists of the French national institute, but becomes a recruited intellectual,
a political actor. In contradistinction, the analysts of ideology — Arendt,
Bracher or Talmon — are historians of ideas, whose task is to expose the ana-
lytical framework of the horribly effective workings of ideology. However,
given the colossal eclipse of humanistic values entailed in these ideologies,
the analyst’s role is not that of a detached scholar. He adopts a clear position
of total condemnation: ‘ideologization and crisis of progress have become a
fascinating motivation. They have also become a nightmare.’“*’ The analyst of
ideology was a professional historian, who launched his critique from a set of
normative democratic values. The term ‘ideology’ itself was recruited to the
conflict between liberal-democracy and totalitarianism, between the individ-
ual and the collective, free choice and terror, with the analysts of ideology nat-
urally aligned to one side. Ironically, democracy, with its own ways of using
education, the media, politics and nationalism, was never conceptualized as
an ideology, even at the height of the cold war. ‘Ideology’ was a concept
reserved for the dark regimes (as opposed to enlightened forms of govern-
45 Bracher, The Age of Ideology, p. 5.
46 Arendt, ‘Ideology and Terror’, p. 316.
47 Bracher, The Age of Ideology, p. 1.
538 G. TALSHIR

ment) against which democracy fought. The term ‘ideology’ was thus
ideologized, in the sense used by Bracher: it became a simple, single idea
which simultaneously distinguishes between good and bad, friend and foe,
right and wrong. Thus, the pejorative overtone of ‘ideology’ received a new
meaning, becoming a vehicle in the struggle between democracy and ideologi-
cal, totalitarian regimes.

The Third Ideological Moment:

From the ‘End of Ideology’ to Social Discourse
Once ideology was identified with totalitarian regimes, Daniel Bell’s End of
Ideology thesis becomes self-explanatory:
Today, these ideologies are exhausted. The events behind this important
sociological change are complex and varied. Such calamities as the Mos-
cow trials, the Nazi-Soviet pact, the concentration camps, the suppression
of the Hungarian workers, form a chain; such social changes as the modifi-
cation of capitalism, the rise of the Welfare State, another.*®

According to Bell, Western realization of the scope of the mass murders on

the altar of Fascist, Nazi and ‘real Communist’ ideologies entailed the moral
victory of democracy over totalitarianism and gave way, within democracies,
to consensus about both the mixed economy and political pluralism.” In light
of Bell’s thesis, it is now time to recall the question, posed at the beginning of
this paper: Have the political phenomena referred to by ‘ideology’ plainly dis-
appeared? Has the theoretical concept of ‘ideology’ been rendered obsolete?
Was there really an end to ideology? It is evident that for Bell, the political
phenomena he identified with ideology have terminated their political role
and departed from the social stage; consequently, the concept of ‘ideology’
should be consigned to the dustbin of history. However, as the preceding dis-
cussion of the dynamics of praxis-theory interrelations has implied, once the
political reality changes, the heuristic concept is not automatically obliter-
ated. On the contrary, its meaning may be enlarged, simplified, altered or
reconceptualized, but theoretical concepts tend to remain within the scientific
discourse; the concept itself survives historical upheavals. It is therefore use-
ful to explore the reincarnation of the term since the 1960s, in a of key
historical changes, in order to assess Bell’s thesis.
Once we reach the end of the 1960s, an interesting process occurs. On the
one hand, ideologies are strongly identified with political parties. In fact,
ideology becomes the quintessential feature of the established parties, and the
left/right ideological spectrum serves as the main conceptual tool for compre-

48 Bell, The End of Ideology, p. 402.

4° K. Mingue, ‘Ideology after the Collapse of Communism’, in A. Shtromas, The End
of ‘Isms’? Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism’s Collapse
(Oxford, 1994), p. 6.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 539

hending the party system within Western democracies. On the other hand,
simultaneously with the crystallization of ideology as the defining feature of
the established political system, there is a process of disowning of the concept
of ideology, both by the new collective actors in civil society and by political
theorists. However, the (ideological) disavowal of the term is not a sufficient
basis for proclaiming the end of ideology. On the contrary: it is the objects of
ideology which will provide the decisive evidence that ideological studies
have entered the third moment. The role of the analyst is therewith also
transformed.

Ideology — The Jewel in the Political Crown

The literature of political science suggests that representative democracy is,
above all, party democracy: ‘to talk, today, about democracy, is to talk about a
system of competing political parties’.°’ The competition among parties con-
sists of alternative ideological programmes, encapsulating alternative social
visions with a political plan for their materialization put before the voters —
the citizenry — in election campaigns. Contrary to Bells’ intuition, ideology
not only survives its own ‘end’, but in the third moment, ideology becomes
the distinctive feature of the democratic political system.
Three major debates characterize contemporary comparative research. The
first is whether there are essential definitions, enduring clusters of ideas,
which characterize the left and right throughout history, or whether the defin-
ing features of left and right are changing over time. On the latter view, the
left/right ideological spectrum is resilient enough to incorporate new political
issues into its framework, thus allowing for change.”' In either case the con-
nection between social cleavages, parties and political ideologies is main-
tained.” The second debate has to do with political realignment. The major
issue here is whether a new ideological dimension emerged in advanced
industrial democracies, which reshuffled the political spectrum. This
ideological dimension has to do with the emergence of New Politics, that is,
the rise of new political issues, such as environmental problems, identity poli-
tics, multiculturalism and globalization in the public agenda, as well as the
new methods and means of political action which were used to propagate
these issues. The argument, in short, runs as follows: changes in socio-eco-

50D. Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London, 1976), p. 5. See also E.E.
Schattscheneider, Party Government (New York, 1942).
5! For a defence of an essentialist understanding ofthe left/right, see N. Bobbio, Left
and Right (Chicago, 1996). For the absorption capacity of left/right see G. Smith, “Core
Persistence, System Change and the “People’s Party” ’, in Understanding Party System
Change in Western Europe, ed. P. Mair and G. Smith (London, 1990).
52 §.M. Lipset and S. Rokkan. ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Align-
ments: An Introduction’, in Party Systems and Voter Alignments, ed. S.M. Lipset and
S. Rokkan (New York, 1967), pp. 1—64.
540 G. TALSHIR

nomic structure in advanced industrial societies produced the new, educated

middle classes, who profess a distinct set of values — postmaterial values —
and hold a corresponding set of social and political demands.’ They have
introduced New Politics issues into the public debate, and a new ideological
dimension into the political spectrum.” The dispute revolves around the ques-
tion of whether indeed postmaterialism caused a realignment of political par-
ties, or was consumed by the left/right spectrum. In other words, analysts
debate whether New Politics parties manifest an internal split within the left
block, or reorganize the whole ideological axis. The third debate follows on
from ideological realignment, and concerns political dealignment. Electoral
volatility, declining party membership and the immanent role of the media in
shaping political competition have suggested that parties are now less con-
cerned with comprehensive ideologies, and far more with policies and lead-
ers. Ideologies, according to this view, no longer provide conclusive
alternative visions tailored to specific social sectors, but sell political pack-
ages of policies and candidates as consumer goods. All these debates demon-
strate the endurance of the ideological dimension of politics. On this view,
ideology is entrenched in party politics and dominates the understanding of
political scientists, the media and the public regarding the nature of politics
itself. In the second half of the twentieth century, therefore, ideology becomes
emblematic of the established political sphere.
However, the immanence of the processes of dealignment provides strong
evidence for the declining role of parties.*° The very freezing of the party sys-
tem, and the institutionalization of parties as part of the state apparatus with
the rise of the cartel party model,’ facilitated the emergence of alternative
politics in civil society. Within the ‘affluent society’,* the educated middle
classes created a host of new collective actors such as citizens’ initiatives,
protest groups, new social movements, non-governmental organizations, and
the Greens. Understandably, the newcomers to the public sphere have gone
out of their way to deny they profess an ideology. Titles like the ‘philosophy
of the Greens’, “feminist political theory’ and ‘anti-capitalist manifesto’ are
abundant among social activists, who have been offended by the suggestion
that their movements have an ideology, as they have sought to distinguish
53 R. Inglehart, The Silent Revolution (Princeton, 1977).
54 A. Lijphart, ‘Dimensions of Ideology in European Party Systems’, in The West
European Party System, ed. P. Mair (Oxford, 1990), pp. 253-65.
55 See the discussion in P. Mair, Party System Change (Oxford, 1997), pp. 24-38. For
policy analysis see Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors and
Governments 1945-1998, ed. I. Budge et al. (Oxford, 2001).
56 Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies,
ed. R. Dalton and M. Wattenberg (Oxford, 2000).
57 P. Mair and R.S. Katz, ‘Party Organization, Party Democracy and the Emergence
of the Cartel Party’, in Mair, Party System Change, pp. 93-119.
58 J. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (London, 1963).
 THE OBJECTS ‘OF IDEOLOGY 541

their methods, ideas and values from those of the parties in power. Even when
the Greens in Germany were entering the governing coalition, true to their
anti-parties party and grassroots movement tradition, they called their world-
view ‘a value-framework’ to refrain from using the term ideology.’ The new
collective actors within civil society manifest a new development in the tran-
sition to post-industrial democracies. The activists themselves deny the whole
notion ofideology since it is identified with the stagnated political system that
they challenge.
Still, political theorists’ reluctance to use the concept of ideology is the
more intriguing. Three moves are crucial for grasping the third moment of
ideology, complementing the analysis of the established political system.
First, in normative theory, ideological analysis was replaced by alternative
concepts, such as critical theory, communicative action and discourse analy-
sis. The reasons behind this conceptual shift need to be explored. The second
move substantiates the claim that these theories are nevertheless analyses of
ideology, using the objects of ideology as a key mechanism for the argument.
By reflecting on the objects of ideology shared by mainstream comparative
politics and contemporary social theory, we can unearth evidence for classify-
ing these theories as analyses of ideology. Finally, these two moves allow us
to see the new role of the analysts of ideology, in distinction from that of the
other two moments.

Ideology in Disguise?
The collapse of totalitarianism, the rise of advanced capitalism and the
awakening of the extra-parliamentary opposition in civil society triggered
social critique in advanced industrial democracies. However, many of the
new schools of thought — neo-Marxist, deconstructivist, postmodern and oth-
ers — have avoided using the concept of ideology. The discussion in this sec-
tion traces some of the main reasons for that, illustratively — and by no means
exhaustively — drawing upon several schools of thought.
Unsurprisingly, post-Marxist currents had an inherent problem with ideo-
logy, as Marx dismissed it as a mere superstructure, a reflection of the
economic relationship. Consider, first, Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
Hegemony differed from ideology in two major respects. First, whereas ideol-
ogy, in the classic Marxist sense, was a reflection of economic interests,
Gramsci saw hegemony as referring also to the cultural, political and social
arena in civil society. Second, hegemony for Gramsci was, in Barrett’s
words: ‘best understood as the organisation of consent — the processes

59 For the analysis of the Greens’ new type of ideology, namely a modular ideology,
see G. Talshir, The Political Ideology of Green Parties: From Politics of Nature to
Redefining the Nature of Politics (London, 2002).
60 A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Q. Hoare and G. Nowell-
Smith (London, 1976), p. 328.
542 G. TALSHIR

through which subordinated forms of consciousness are constructed without

recourse to violence or coercion’.°' Gramsci maintained the critical edge in
the Marxist analysis, as well as, arguably, the pervasive notion of class domi-
nation, but replaced the concept of ideology with that of hegemony; it
acquired, from within a Marxist perspective, a wider role, as the structure of
consent within civil society. The first reason for rejecting the concept of ideol-
ogy is hence its confinement to the superstructure as a mere reflection of eco-
nomic analysis.
Another attempt to substitute for ideology a more potent concept for the
purposes of social critique was made by the Frankfurt school. Horkheimer
rejected Mannheim’s own notion of the sociology of knowledge as a replace-
ment for ideology, arguing that Mannheim had in fact returned to an idealistic
tradition.* However, scholars of the Frankfurt school have generally ab-
stained from directly analysing ‘ideology’. Instead of Marx’s positive science
they offered Critical Theory. At the centre of Horkheimer and Adorno’s
analysis was no longer the mode of production, but the manufacturing of mass
culture. The transition from the industrial to advanced industrial society mani-
fested itself in the culture of consumption. Selling images, popularizing art
and the role of commercials became essential to the new dynamic of advanced
capitalism.°* Their theory was critical of popular culture — which could not
have been seen as a mere reflection of class struggle, but captured the very
heart of the consumer society. The second reason to refrain from ‘ideology’,
then, was that the very relationship between politics and economics had
changed dramatically and eclipsed class analysis in advanced capitalism. Cri-
tiques of culture and consumerism were theoretically complementary to the
new social order.
Developing a critical analysis that transcends economics as the main realm
of socio-political relevance was not a uniquely post-Marxist trade. Michel
Foucault contributed one of the major breakthroughs in this area by establish-
ing the link between ‘ideology’ and discourse. Drawing upon ‘Truth and
Power’ I argue that Foucault challenged the concept of ideology from two
critical perspectives.” First, ideology presupposed the existence of truth.
Posed in the terms of our analysis so far, ideology, in the early phase, was
itself a true science; it was then associated with deception and false conscious-
ness; and later, within totalitarianism, with manipulation and indoctrination.
61 M. Barrett, The Politics of Truth (Oxford, 1991), p. 54.
62 M. Horkheimer, ‘Ein neuer Ideologiebegriff?’, in Archiv fiir Geschichte des
Sozialismus und der Arbeiter-Bewegung, 15 (1930), pp. 33-56. Manheim’s own notion,
curiously enough, comes close to the understanding of the French Ideologues. Karl
Mannheim, /deology and Utopia (New York, 1955).
63 See M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory (New York, 1968); T. Adorno, The Culture
Industry (London, 1991).
64 M. Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon (Brighton, 1980), p. 118.
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 543

The obsession with striving to uncover the real roots, unmasking appearances
and attaining some inner truth which lies beneath the surface, was a feature of
modernism, which postmodern thinkers have challenged. Second, Foucault
also brought out the emphasis on power as practice, contrary to Marx’s notion
of possessing power. The analytical locus of Foucault’s writing was power
relations, which he investigated through genealogical examinations of the
practices of power in such diverse social systems as schools, prisons, clinics
and sexuality. Foucault’s major contribution can be reformulated thus: power
relations are a structural part of social systems, not necessarily consciously
motivated by a malevolent agent. Thus Foucault provided two more reasons
for replacing ideology with what he named discourse: the identification of
ideology with the search for deeper truth, characteristic of modernism, and
the underlying assumption that ideology entails specific authorships of decep-
tion. Foucault demonstrated that power relations need to be understood as
inevitable and often unintended features of social systems. Foucault’s empha-
sis on discourse gave rise to critical discourse analysis.
An order of discourse constitutes the discoursal/ideological facet of a con-
tradictory and unstable equilibrium . . . discoursal practice is a facet of
struggle which contributes in varying degrees to the reproduction or trans-
formation of the existing order of discourse, and through that existing social
and power relations.°°
Thus what is most apparent in critical discourse analysis is that language is
not transparent, and that discourse is precisely a socially-situated language.
This approach maintains Foucault’s preoccupation with unearthing power
relations as embedded in social structures. For discourse analysts, these were
to be most effectively revealed by exposing patterns of domination in every-
day language. Fairclough, in Language and Power, explains:
Ideologies are closely linked to power, because the nature of ideological
assumptions embedded in particular conventions, and so the nature of those
conventions themselves, depends on the power relations which underlie the
conventions; and because they are means of legitimising existing social
relations and differences of power, simply the recurrence of ordinary,
familiar ways of behaving which take these relations and power differences
for granted. Ideologies are closely linked to language, because using lan-
guage is the commonest form of social behaviour, and the form of social
behaviour where we rely most on ‘common sense’ assumptions.”
The critical perspective strongly relates ideology to power: discourse stud-
ies analyse relations of domination. Thus the emphasis moves from ideology
to discourse, since ideology, as previously construed, assumed that language

65 Barrett, The Politics of Truth, p. 135.

66 N. Fairclough, Critical Discourse Analysis (London, 1995), p. 77.
67 N. Fairclough, Language and Power (London, 1989), p. 2.
544 G. TALSHIR

was transparent, whereas for the discourse analyst discourse is itself a system
where power relations exist and interact with reality.
Lastly, Habermas added another dimension to the contemporary discredit-
ing of ‘ideology’. He analysed the crisis of legitimation of the modern state, a
significant part of which was the disillusionment with representative democ-
racy and the power of the state apparatus.®* The identification of ideology
with the party system disabled it as a critical concept. He therefore con-
structed the notion of communicative action.® Habermas and his followers
not only offered a critique, but went one step further, offering an alternative
normative model of deliberative democracy. It was based on a network of
communicating collective actors in civil society.”” Seyla Benhabib explicates
the model of deliberative democracy:
The procedural specifications of this model privilege a plurality of modes of
association in which all affected can have the right to articulate their point
of view .. . Itis through the interlocking of these multiple forms of associa-
tions, networks, and organizations that an anonymous ‘public conversation’
results. It is central to the model of deliberative democracy that it privileges
such a public sphere of mutually interlocking and overlapping networks and
associations of deliberation, contestation and argumentation.”!

Thus deliberative democracy identifies the established political system —

within which party ideology is instrumental — as part of the crisis of legitima-
tion. It turns to civil society as an independent third realm for an alternative
and legitimate democratic practice. It emphasizes communicative actions of
the new collective actors in civil society as a new source of this democratic
legitimacy. The final reason for discrediting ideology, therefore, is its identi-
fication with the party system and the crisis of legitimation in the twentieth
century.
It is here that the role of the objects of ideology becomes pivotal to our
understanding of the relation between political praxis and theory. Is there any
connection between the political scientists who analyse the ideology of par-
ties, critical theorists’ analysis of consumerist culture, Foucault’s system of
power, discourse analysts’ discursive orders, and deliberative democracy’s
preoccupation with communicative action? Crucially, the object of their
analysis is the same: social discourse. Whether it is the programmes, manifes-
tos or speeches of politicians, the communicative action of social movements,
or the patterns of domination embedded in everyday language and practices,
all these schools are preoccupied with analysing social discourse. The ‘ob-

68 Habermas, Legitimation Crisis.

69 J. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston, 1984).
70 J. Habermas, ‘Three Normative Models of Democracy’, in Democracy and Differ-
ence, ed. S. Benhabib (Princeton, NJ, 1996), pp. 21-30.
71 §. Benhabib, ‘Towards a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy’, in ibid.,
p73:
 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 545

jects of ideology’ approach to making sense of the place of ideology in politi-

cal practice and theory thus reveals both the collective actors which are the
subject of the investigation — be they the established parties, the alternative
actors of civil society or the consumerist culture — and the analysts, who
name their own trade differently, but who are essentially concerned with the
analysis of ideology. Thus the objects of ideology, hitherto excavated from
the historical ruins of social theories, now become the foundations on which
the third ideological moment is constructed. Political scientists and social the-
orists alike are preoccupied with the analysis of the social discourses of the
diverse collective actors in advanced democracies.
The very fragmentation and diversification of political actors is one of the
defining features of contemporary history. This can also be seen in the emer-
gence of theory-of-ideology studies as another analytical school. Theories of
ideology are equally concerned with power-relations within discourse, how-
ever their role is categorically different. Such theories as Sussre’s Grammar
of Ideology, Thompson’s critical approach to the theory of ideology, and
Freeden’s conceptual approach to ideology, all offer elements of an analytical
framework which could account for the dynamics and the evolution of differ-
ent ideologies of diverse collective actors and attempt to demarcate the field
of ideological studies itself.” They undeniably identify the object of ideology
after the 1960s with the configuration of political concepts, that is social dis-
course. The whole range of ideological schools of analysis in the third
moment is summarized in Table 3.
Finally, with the change of times there is also a change in the role of the ana-
lyst. Whereas in the Enlightenment era the analyst of ideology was an objec-
tive scientist, and the analyst of the totalitarian age distinguished between
herself and the ideologists while condemning those regimes, the analyst of
ideology in the third moment unavoidably becomes a political agent. Within
critical theory, the analyst plays the role of social critic. For Foucault, the ana-
lyst reveals the many structures of power. Discourse analysts are more
explicit:
Ideology is most effective when its workings are least visible. If one
becomes aware that a particular aspect of common sense is sustaining
power inequalities at one’s own expense, it ceases to be common sense, and
may cease to have the capacity to sustain power inequalities, i.e. to function
ideologically.”
The analyst becomes an agent for social change. With deliberative theory the
role of the analyst is taken another step forward: the political theorist writes
the blueprint for an alternative normative model of society.
72 B. Susser, The Grammar of Modern Ideology (London, 1988); J.B. Thompson,
Studies in the Theory of Ideology (Berkeley, 1984); M. Freeden, /deologies and Political
Theories: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford, 1996).
73 Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 85.
546 G. TALSHIR

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 THE OBJECTS -OF IDEOLOGY 547

In the aftermath of the ‘end of ideology’ debate, the field of ideological stud-
ies diversified. Yet, beyond the different approaches, the objects of the ideo-
logical analysis remained the same: political discourse. Whether the
analytical focus is on parties’ manifestoes or social movements’ creeds,
behaviour patterns of psychiatrists or commercial breaks, political speeches
or conceptual analysis, ideology within the third moment is understood as
public discourse. The verbal and visual public sphere has immensely
expanded in the information society. The presence of the media, public rela-
tions, advertising, virtual communication and consumerism, as well as their
roles and dominance in advanced democracies, increased significantly.
Complementarily, one saw a proliferation of approaches within the field of
ideological studies that, in many ways, reflected the diversification of politi-
cal actors: the decentralization of political elites, the increased power of eco-
nomic corporations, the pluralization of social movements, and the virtual
global village contribute to the redistribution of power-relations. The interac-
tions among different and competing actors on the public agenda, debating
‘what is politics’, is reflected in the diverse analytical approaches. Once again
it becomes clear that ideological studies are actually intertwined with the soci-
ety in which they operate and which they criticize, and that a mutual influence
exists. The broadening of discourse-oriented ideological research therefore
reflects a change in the nature of advanced contemporary democracies. Ideol-
ogy since the 1960s is identified with political discourse, power-relations as
manifested in the conventions of the social language. The definition ofideol-
ogy differs substantially among scholars, but the object of ideology — one or
another form of social discourse — provides a crucial dimension of
continuity.

Conclusions

In this article a ‘historiography’ of the objects of ideology has been used to

draw attention to a complex theory/praxis nexus. Whereas Destutt de Tracy’s
concept of ideology was denounced by Marx, both thinkers aimed to liberate
man (as the free individual and the free producer, respectively) and both
entrusted the work of social change to social classes (liberal intellectuals or
proletarians). Arendt, who shared Marx’s fascination with alienation, studied
completely different phenomena — totalitarian regimes — when analysing
ideology. The enlightened, progressive, scientific ethos of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century thinkers was replaced by the irrational, indoctrinating,
terror-driven mass cultures of Fascism, Nazism and Communism. In the con-
text of the cold war, ideology was condemned as the dangerous worldview of
the opponent, and rebuked in the 1960s with the ‘end of ideology’ thesis. How-
ever, ideological studies have taken diverse forms ever since. Analysing par-
ties’ manifestoes proved instrumental in times of realignment and
dealignment. Despite the explicitly reproving approach to ideology,
548 G. TALSHIR

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 THE OBJECTS OF IDEOLOGY 549

Gramsci’s ‘hegemony’, Manheim’s ‘theory of knowledge’, the Frankfurt

school’s ‘critical theory’, Foucault’s ‘discourse’ and Habermas’ ‘communi-
cative action’ were conceptual replacements for ideology. They all had a com-
mon object of research: political discourse. These developments are
summarized in Table 4.
This diachronic analysis of the objects of ideology demonstrates the inter-
connections between political thinkers, social phenomena and the historical
context. While the political concept — ideology — radically changed refer-
ent, it was not obsolete. ‘Ideology’ never ended, it was only transformed. The
viability of the conceptual tool is greater than the changing historical condi-
tions, which are reflected nevertheless in the objects of ideology that always
concerned dominant social forces. The second dimension of our diachronic
analysis — the changing role of the analyst of ideology — reflected that. The
self-understanding of the French ideologues — and of Marx — as searchers
for the driving force of history, pursuing a true science, changed once the
objects of ideology became totalitarian regimes. The historians of ideas were
now exposing the mechanisms of ideology, endorsing democratic values as a
clear alternative to dictatorship. The final transformation came, however, in
the third ideological moment. In contemporary political theory the analyst is
first and foremost a critic. Furthermore, by exposing the structures of power
and patterns of domination she aspires to become an agent of social change.
Finally, as the example of deliberative democracy showed, some political
theorists in the third moment of ideology assume the role of constructing nor-
mative models, writing blueprints, of re-legitimized democracy. Political
thought is embedded in social reality. The inescapable linkage of political theory
with its objects of analysis suggests that a renewed co-operation between
empirical and theoretical political studies and a praxis-oriented theory is long
overdue.

Gayil Talshir THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

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BOOK REVIEWS

Volume XXVI_ Issue 3

Autumn 2005
 BOOK REVIEWS

553 Gary K. Browning, Rethinking R.G. Collingwood, Philosophy, Poli-

tics and the Unity of Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan:
Basingstoke, 2004), vii + 213 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 333 99872 3.
Reviewed by Peter Johnson.
Sees Stein Helgeby, Action as History, The Historical Thought of R.G.
Collingwood (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2004), ix + 240 pp., £25.00,
ISBN 0 907845 576. Reviewed by Peter Johnson.
ee) Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ‘How Good an Historian Shall I Be?’
R.G. Collingwood, The Historical Imagination and Education (Imprint
Academic: Exeter, 2003), x + 241 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0 eee
Reviewed by Peter Johnson.
556 Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 160 pp., $24.50, ISBN 0
231 13428 2 (boards). Reviewed by Milja Kurki.
aay La pensée politique doctrinaire sous la Restauration: Charles de
Rémusat — Textes choisis, ed. Dario Roldan (L’Harmattan: Paris,
2003), 236 pp., €19.00, ISBN 2 7475 4746 9. Reviewed by Aurelian
Craiutu.
337 Dario Roldan, Charles de Rémusat: Certitudes et impasses du
libéralisme doctrinaire, with a foreword by Pierre Rosanvallon
(L’ Harmattan: Paris, 2000), iv + 337 pp., €27.45, ISBN 2 7384 7992 8.
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu.
D200 John Hope Mason, The Value of Creativity (Ashgate: Aldershot,
2003), 316 pp., £47.50, ISBN 0 7546 0760 7. Reviewed by David
Wootton.
Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law
in the Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Columbia Univer-
sity Press: New York, 2004), ix + 294 pp., $40.00, ISBN 0 231 13178 X.
Reviewed by John Morrow.
 BOOK REVIEWS 553

Gary K. Browning, Rethinking R.G. Collingwood, Philosophy, Politics and

the Unity of Theory and Practice (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2004),
vii + 213 pp., £50.00, ISBN 0 333 99872 3.
Stein Helgeby, Action as History, The Historical Thought of R.G. Colling-
wood (Imprint Academic: Exeter, 2004), ix + 240 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0
907845 576.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington, ‘How Good an Historian Shall I Be?’
R.G. Collingwood, The Historical Imagination and Education (Imprint Aca-
demic: Exeter, 2003), x + 241 pp., £25.00, ISBN 0 907845614.

As a method of understanding in the history of ideas, Collingwood does not

rate the activity of comparison very highly. To think of one philosopher in
terms of their resemblance to another, he thinks, risks portraying the thinking
of each as more static than it actually is, or can be. Philosophical ideas are not
objects to be compared in terms of similarities and differences, as we might
contrast varieties of rose, but processes of question and answer that we re-
create because they offer the promise of assistance in addressing our own
problems and arguments. Why, then, in explaining Collingwood’s philoso-
phy, should we listen to any voices other than his own?
If understanding in philosophy is a matter of re-creation then Collingwood’s
answer is clear. The philosopher’s voice cannot be listened to independently of
the conversation of which it is a part and to which it may be a vital contribution.
In other words, philosophers do not stand apart from the history of philosophy,
but rather advance it by making it their own. Thus, by attending to those whom
Collingwood argued against we gain a stronger purchase on the questions that
preoccupied him. Equally, by listening to those voices that Collingwood him-
self listened to we are able to explain his own views better.
Understanding Collingwood, then, means, in no small measure, keeping
track of his conversations with others. Thus, just as writers on Sartre, say, rou-
tinely explain his ideas in terms of his intimate knowledge of Marx and Freud
so commentators on Collingwood point to his close reading of Kant and
Hegel. Gary K. Browning wishes to take this familiar observation a stage fur-
ther. So, in his extensively researched and immensely detailed study, Rethink-
ing R.G. Collingwood, Browning argues that Collingwood is a fully paid up,
if not altogether uncritical, Hegelian. Collingwood’s project is that of bring-
ing Hegel up to date. Throughout the book Browning is assiduous in ensuring
that his readers do not become complacent about this central claim. If there is
one voice other than his own that enables us to understand Collingwood better
then, that voice is Hegel’s.
The main difficulty with this is that it can just as easily prevent an under-
standing of Collingwood as facilitate it. Browning himself is sometimes dis-
trustful of Collingwood’s own view of his relation to Hegel (e.g. p. 124), but
that is not the crucial point. Rather, it is that listening to Hegel can stop us from

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 3. Autumn 2005

554 BOOK REVIEWS

getting what we want philosophically from Collingwood. For understanding

Collingwood is as much a matter of our conversations with him as his conversa-
tions with others. This is the full force of Collingwood’s doctrine of re-creation.
So in order to have a fruitful conversation with Collingwood about his
expressivism, for example, we may find it essential to jettison his Hegelianism.
We cannot, in other words, get what we want from Collingwood on this issue if
we listen to him speaking in Hegel’s voice. Equally, we cannot understand
Collingwood’s attempt to formulate his own voice if we think ofitas an echo of
Hegel’s. For we would then entirely miss Collingwood’s struggle to make his
insights compatible with the strengths of realism as he perceives them.
Stein Helgeby’s theme in his Action as History is the connection between
Collingwood’s philosophy of history and his account of action. In an impres-
sive piece of writing Helgeby argues that Collingwood conceives historical
knowledge to operate more like a general condition of human understanding
than a specific study occupying its own limited terrain. It is through historical
thinking that we come to understand linguistic conventions, social practices
and the thoughts and actions of others. History is autonomous, so reflecting
the freedom involved in human deliberation and choice, and thereby, in
Helgeby’s view, anticipating the liberalism that Collingwood sought to defend.
As Helgeby portrays it, Collingwood does not owe a single debt to his past.
Vico and Hegel, or Hegel mediated through Croce, are each voices to which
Collingwood paid close attention, but no one voice is pre-eminent. Each
derived its significance from Collingwood’s re-creation of them in the light of
his present concerns.
Action as History is a tightly argued work that began life as a doctoral thesis.
To a degree this is reflected in a somewhat cautious tone and a determination
to stop up all the gaps in the argument, including the potentially more interest-
ing ones. Even so, Helgeby’s study certainly deserves a wider audience
because it contains (Chapter 4) one of the best discussions of Collingwood’s
logic of question and answer I have encountered. Here Helgeby does an excel-
lent job in linking the originality of Collingwood’s new logic with our own
dissatisfaction with logic that is based exclusively on the proposition.
If Stein Helgeby’s primary aim of rendering Collingwood’s thought system-
atic leaves his own voice a little muted Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s rings out
loud and clear. In her ‘How Good an Historian Shall I Be?’ Hughes-
Warrington asks what it means to be educated in history in the Collingwood
manner. She gives her answer by re-creating Collingwood’s doctrines of
re-enactment and the historical imagination in the light of the problems that she
faces and the questions that she wishes to ask. Nothing in Collingwood’s
thought is pre-judged by making it appear more inter-related than it is. Indeed,
many will find this treatment illuminating precisely because it sets aside ques-
tions to do with the internal development of Collingwood’s thought, so giving
contemporary philosophers the opportunity to get what they want
 BOOK REVIEWS 555

unencumbered by long-discarded ideas. This is one reason why Collingwood’s

occasionally paradoxical and apparently self-defeating expressions (I am think-
ing here of Collingwood’s ‘tune in the head’ view of artistic creation, but there
are many more) are much better at keeping our conversation with him going
than an ‘official’, more systematic presentation of his thought.
So ‘all history is contemporary history’, says Collingwood, in one of the
very phrases that appear to bring joy to his detractors and cause even his most
enthusiastic defenders to consider surrendering the field. Yet, in Hughes-
Warrington’s hands we can see more clearly what he means. ‘Imagination
activates connection and interpolation’, she writes (p. 143), thereby evoking
Collingwood’s doctrine of re-enactment as the best way of telling us what a
liberal philosophical conversation is like. A re-enactment that projects our
thoughts back onto a dead past is one that has failed, as has one that tries
uncritically to melt past thoughts into our own. Collingwood’s philosophy of
education merits re-investigation, then, but it is the clarity of Hughes-
Warrington’s thesis about history as well as the manner in which she develops
it that catch the eye.
In her conversation with Collingwood there are moments, perhaps not com-
pletely avoidable, when even Hughes-Warrington’s refreshing voice labels
Collingwood in advance of hearing what he wants to say. Dichotomy is the
great enemy of philosophical conversation. Re-creating another’s voice to
more adequately express your own becomes impossible if the terms of
engagement are drawn too exclusively. Thus tired either/or terminology (e.g.
p. 90) sometimes rubs the polish from Hughes-Warrington’s prose. But then
three of the best chapters in the book (Chapter 2 on Sympathy and Chapters 4
and 5 on Theories of the Imagination and on Collingwood’s Historical Imagi-
nation) show readers how to place Collingwood’s views in the appropriate
historical context without blunting their conversational edge.
In short, to this reviewer’s mind, Hughes- Warrington has written an exem-
plary book. When she draws Collingwood into conversation with Wittgen-
stein, Oakeshott or contemporary writers on education, her interest is not that
of abstract comparison. Parallels and overlaps are not her concern. Each voice
is considered because it has something important to say to the argument. For
her, as for Collingwood, the philosophy is found in the detail, and it is her
clear-sighted recognition of this that gives the book its main value. Indeed, of
the very many books about Collingwood during the years of his most intense
re-assessment it is this one that most reflects the spirit of Collingwood’s own
way of doing philosophy.
When Alan Donagan spoke of the amount of work to be done on the
Collingwood manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library, he was, perhaps,
quietly hinting at the many further questions about Collingwood that they
would generate. Each of the books under review displays close acquaintance
with this material and yet they each continue their discussions with
556 BOOK REVIEWS

Collingwood with different aims in mind. All are well produced, and one at
least testifies to what we are likely to miss if a doctoral thesis is relegated too
quickly to the most inaccessible university library stock room.
Peter Johnson
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTON

Steve Fuller, Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle for the Soul of Science (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995), 160 pp., $24.50, ISBN 0 231 13428 2 (boards).

Steve Fuller’s Kuhn vs. Popper: the Struggle for the Soul of Science aims to
give an accessible account of the influential Kuhn—Popper debate over
‘growth of knowledge’. However, Fuller’s account goes far beyond most in
that Fuller focuses on drawing out the social and political ‘sensibilities’ that
underlie this debate. This book is ground-breaking in that it seeks to explicitly
focus on analysing the social and political dynamics involved in philosophy
of science debates.
The starting point for Kuhn vs. Popper is that Kuhn’s relativistic account of
science has ‘won the day’ in philosophy of science, in social theory, and in
everyday discourse concerning science. Fuller wants to examine the social and
political reasons for, and implications of, Kuhn’s ‘victory’. Fuller starts out by
discussing the arguments of both Popper and Kuhn, and the dynamics of the
‘debate’ between them. He then moves on to discuss a range of social and
political implications of the contenders’ positions, from their religious under-
tones to their implications for university education. Fuller seeks to show that
while Kuhn’s thought appeals to the elitist and conservative tendencies in soci-
ety, Popper’s view of science was a brave defence of social democratic ideals.
While Fuller takes an explicit stance in the debates on the side of Popper,
his discussions of the social and political dynamics of the Kuhn—Popper
debate are highly interesting even for those whose theoretical and political
leanings would take them in another direction. Some sections stand out partic-
ularly. For example, the discussion over the role of evidence in science is
especially strong in drawing out the close interrelationship of philosophical
and political understandings of science. Also, Fuller’s discussion of the asso-
ciation of Popper with the Frankfurt School of thought is interesting: Fuller
reminds the reader of the (often overlooked) links between Popper and the
early forms of critical theory. In the closing chapters, Fuller advances an
uncompromising defence of Popper as he indicts Kuhn’s political and intel-
lectual ‘irresponsibility’. This argument is emotive but also powerful given
the groundwork covered in the course of the previous chapters.
Fuller’s style is highly provocative. This makes the book engaging and
helps put the emphasis squarely on the politics of science. Yet some might
find disturbing how easily Popper is glorified as a ‘heroic’ welfare socialist
 BOOK REVIEWS 557

in defence of democratic government, while Kuhn is characterized as an

intellectual coward unwilling to challenge the abuses of science in the social
and political context of his time. One gets the feeling that Fuller often too
readily overlooks the strengths of Kuhn’s argument and the weaknesses of
Popper’s understanding of science — both theoretically and politically.
While some readers may find the style unusually provocative, Fuller has
made an important contribution to philosophy of science, and political thought
more widely, by drawing out the political context and implications of this key
philosophy of science debate. Kuhn vs. Popper is a concise and engaging
book that philosophers of science, investigators of political thought and,
indeed, laymen with a philosophical interest will find an interesting read.
Milja Kurki
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

La pensée politique doctrinaire sous la Restauration: Charles de Rémusat —

Textes choisis, ed. Dario Roldan (L’ Harmattan: Paris, 2003), 236 pp., €19.00,
ISBN 2 7475 4746 9.
Dario Roldan, Charles de Rémusat: Certitudes et impasses du libéralisme
doctrinaire, with a foreword by Pierre Rosanvallon (L’Harmattan: Paris,
2000), iv + 337 pp., €27.45, ISBN 2 7384 7992 8.

A scion of a distinguished French family, Charles de Rémusat (1797-1875)

belonged to the new generation that came of age during the Bourbon Restora-
tion. After joining the group of the Doctrinaires, he affirmed himself as a
gifted writer especially through his numerous articles published in Le Globe
and Le Courier. A close friend of Guizot, Rémusat held various ministerial
positions during the July Monarchy and the Third Republic but progressively
distanced himself from his mentor during the last years of the Orléanist
regime. Elected member of the French Academy in 1846, Rémusat found
himself equally alienated from the politics of the Second Republic and Sec-
ond Empire. The rise to power of Napoleon III forced him to leave the coun-
try. After his return from exile, Rémusat dedicated the last two decades of his
life to writing and made a final attempt to return to politics during the Third
Republic after being appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs. When he died on
6 June 1875, Rémusat left behind a substantial and original body of work that
included an impressive array of literary, social and political works on issues
as diverse as French politics, eighteenth-century English society, politics and
literature, German philosophy, Abélard, and St Anselm of Canterbury. He
also wrote many influential articles in the prestigious Revue des deux mondes
on topics ranging from the French Revolution, Protestantism and Burke, to
political pessimism, Tocqueville and centralization in France. Rémusat’s
most important book, Politique libérale, ou Fragments pour servir a la
558 BOOK REVIEWS

defense de la Révolution francaise appeared in 1860. His memoirs have unan-

imously been considered as one of the finest testimonies of nineteenth-
century French political life (they were posthumously published by C.-H.
Pouthas, alas in an abbreviated and rare edition).
It is surprising that in spite of the prominent role played by Rémusat in
French political and cultural life, his political writings have been largely
ignored in France and abroad. Rémusat’s contemporaries, from Balzac to
Guizot and Royer-Collard, regarded him as a dilettant in everything, even when
they admired his literary skill and capacity to write on many topics. Dario
Roldan, a former student of Francois Furet who now teaches at the Torcuado di
Tella University in Buenos Aires, has finally restored Rémusat to the place he
fully deserves in the pantheon of modern French political thought. Roldan’s
masterful analysis of Rémusat’s works along with the collection of Rémusat’s
articles clearly demonstrate why his contemporaries were mistaken in seeing
him as a second-rate thinker. Roldan meticulously highlights the theoretical
import of Rémusat’s impressive journalistic output from the 1820s and repub-
lishes here for the first time seminal texts (from Le Courier, Le Globe, Revue
francaise and Archives politiques, philosophiques et littéraires), in which the
young Doctrinaire courageously defended key liberal principles under an
oppressive right-wing regime. Some of these texts, such as Rémusat’s review
of Madame de Staél, his analysis of Lamennais or his essays on democratic
mores in France, are true gems of political analysis. Any reader interested in
modern French political thought or democratic theory will benefit immensely
from reading them because they demonstrate that Rémusat addressed, a decade
before Tocqueville, some of the most important issues that also loomed large in
Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, such as equality, social mobility, indi-
vidualism, the relation between social and political order, and the irresistible
progress of modern democracy. In his articles published in Le Globe in the
1820s, Rémusat used the phrase ‘démocratie mouvante’ to describe the nature
of the new social condition that had arisen in post-revolutionary France. ‘An
evolving democracy’, Rémusat wrote in 1826, ‘escapes all the efforts to contain
it’ not only because it is the outcome of a new social condition characterized by
an irresistible trend towards greater equality and social uniformity, but also
because, in Roldan’s words, it makes the social fabric more complex, diverse
and subject to a myriad of factors that can no longer be controlled or predicted.
Not surprisingly, in a letter from the 1850s, Tocqueville acknowledged his debt
to Rémusat in connection with his analysis of the relation between social and
political order (it is also known that Tocqueville discovered Burke after reading
Rémusat’s two essays on the Reflections of the Revolution in France published
in Revue des deux mondes).
Dario Roldan successfully points out the originality, complexity and unity
of Rémusat’s political writings by focusing on his theories of democracy, sov-
ereignty, constitutional monarchy and representative government. Rémusat
 BOOK REVIEWS 559

believed that the main task of his post-revolutionary generation was to bring
the French Revolution to an end. To this effect, he defended a liberalism of
government that sought to create a new balance between the executive and
legislative powers and took into account the new democratic forces at work in
modern society. The essays collected by Roldan, most notably Rémusat’s
long study of Lamennais (never before published), portray him as a profound
analyst of political power who understood the laws and mechanisms that
made political institutions dependent on social order. Roldan devotes a few
chapters to discussing the evolution of Rémusat’s ideas on the nature and
principles of representative government, from his early defence of the sover-
eignty of reason and the Charter of 1814 to his later views on constitutional
monarchy and parliamentarism. These chapters show that towards the end of
his life, Rémusat (partly) reconciled himself with the doctrine of popular sov-
ereignty, although, like Tocqueville, he remained at heart a liberal deeply
committed to pluralism and freedom and strongly opposed to socialism.
Finally, the reader of these two rich books will also have the opportunity to
reflect on the complex relation between liberal and democratic principles in
modern French political thought. The merit of Darfo Roldan can hardly be
exaggerated and may be compared to the contribution of Pierre Rosanvallon
to the rediscovery of Guizot two decades ago. Roldan has brought to the fore a
first-rate political thinker whose writings place him in the company of his
peers, Tocqueville and Guizot. One can only hope that Rémusat’s Politique
libérale along with his important articles published in Revue des deux mondes,
including his seminal essays on Burke, will soon be republished and, maybe
one day, even translated into English.
Aurelian Craiutu
INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON

John Hope Mason, The Value of Creativity (Ashgate: Aldershot, 2003), 316
pp., £47.50, ISBN 0 7546 0760 7.

John Hope Mason has written a complex, subtle and important book on the
history of the idea of creativity. The core of the book, Chapters 5 to 10,
explores the idea of creativity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Three chapters (2 to 4) establish the earlier history of the idea from the Old
Testament and Greek Myth to the seventeenth century, and there is a prologue
and an epilogue. It is difficult to do justice to the book in a short review
because the argument is always careful, the detail telling, and the author
always has an intimate knowledge of his material (whether in Greek, Latin,
German, French or English). I found, for example (and it is one example
among many), the seven pages on Hume original and insightful. It is a feature
of the book, I think, that it is at its most impressive when one is already
560 BOOK REVIEWS

familiar with the material, because then the originality of the interpretation is
most apparent. Mason does not waste time explaining how his account differs
from that of other scholars, so that the thought that has gone into his presenta-
tion is often not apparent.
The big argument is that creativity became a central value exactly at the same
time as human beings acquired rapidly developing mastery over nature: the
idea of creativity went hand in hand with industrial development and the idea of
progress. But creativity became a value associated with artistic expression, and
opposed to commercial and industrial activity. It was (until Nietzsche’s
transvaluation of values) associated with moral authenticity, while industry was
attacked as being inseparable from a crude utilitarianism. Creativity was thus
presented as the antithesis of those very economic, social and intellectual devel-
opments that had made a preoccupation with creativity possible. Even in Nietz-
sche, creativity remained inseparable from aesthetic values.
There are a number of interesting difficulties within this account. First, it
argues that the idea of creativity is essentially double: on the one hand Prome-
thean, on the other neo-Platonic; on the one hand associating the creative with
the rebellious and disorderly, on the other with the harmonious and divine.
Although Mason tries to pursue this theme throughout his argument, I am not
entirely convinced (as the summary above suggests) that it is as central to his
argument as he thinks it is. Second, his argument involves taking Burck-
hardt’s account of the Renaissance as representative of the new age of creativ-
ity, while arguing that the idea of creativity within the Renaissance itself had
only a limited role to play. Here I think he is more persuasive.
Mason believes that the centrality of notions of creativity, authenticity and
self-expression in our own culture, combined with the displacement of those
notions from any account of those activities which have made possible contin-
uing economic growth, means that the idea of creativity has become part of
the problems advanced societies face as their economic growth endangers the
environmental and ecological systems they depend upon, rather than offering
a solution to those problems. If authors as diverse as Coleridge, Arnold and
Marx thought that a creative society would be preferable to an industrial soci-
ety, Mason thinks that the culture of creativity is so bound up with industrial-
ization that it offers no alternative in the present crisis: both economic growth
and self-realization need to be rethought if developed societies and the natural
processes they depend upon are to become capable of cohabiting the planet.
Personally, I found the chapters which covered the period from Bacon to
Rousseau, the period of the emergence of the modern idea of creativity, the
most impressive, and I was surprised to find how important the idea of crea-
tivity was, for example, in Diderot. But that, I suspect, is because these are the
chapters where J already knew a good deal, and I think a central problem for
the book is that one would need to be enormously learned to appreciate just
how good it is. Another problem is that the book is unfashionable in tackling a
 BOOK REVIEWS 561

big subject over a long period of time: most intellectual history tackles
smaller problems and offers local interpretations. I do think even this book
would have been improved by a more careful account of linguistic change, not
only in English (which is handled well), but also in French and German.
The defects of this book are unusual ones. It is too reserved in that it fails to
draw attention to its own originality. It is (a very rare defect) too short: I
would have liked to see more on the nineteenth century and something on the
twentieth century. It’s last chapter, I think, is too concerned to return in a cir-
cle to its beginning point, when something about what a world after individual
creativity would need to look like was needed. But these are defects that go
hand in hand with virtues: modesty, brevity, a sense of form. The book
deserves to be read, both in part and in whole — and after that, reread, for
there is more to it than may be apparent on first acquaintance. Its reputation
will grow over time, and its arguments will be widely influential.
David Wootton
UNIVERSITY OF YORK

Pamela Edwards, The Statesman’s Science: History, Nature, and Law in the
Political Thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Columbia University Press:
New York, 2004), ix + 294 pp., $40.00, ISBN 0 231 13178 X.

In this handsomely produced volume from Columbia University Press

Pamela Edwards presents an account of Coleridge’s political thought that
stresses strong strands of continuity in his writings, from the Bristol Lectures
of 1795 through to On the Constitution of Church and State, first published in
1829. She portrays Coleridge as a consistent admirer of the ancient constitu-
tion and the common law, one with a lifelong commitment to a markedly lib-
eral perspective on individual autonomy which foreshadowed J.S. Mill’s
position. Professor Edwards pursues her thesis in chapters which start with
Coleridge’s early writings, proceeds with some attention to chronology
through a number of themes (‘Liberty and Law’; “Morality and Will’; ‘Sci-
ence and Nature’; ‘History and Life’; ‘Defending the Church’; “Attacking the
Doctrine’) and concludes with a detailed consideration of Church and State.
The author has some interesting things to say about Coleridge’s ideas on
law and morality, and on his application of concepts derived from natural and
medical science to the study of politics. She also offers a useful, if largely
unexceptional, analysis of Church and State. Unfortunately, however, key
aspects of Professor Edwards’ interpretation of Coleridge’s political thought
rest on readings of his works that are in some cases highly questionable, and
in others demonstrably wrong.
Although Professor Edwards’ account ranges widely over Coleridge’s
writings, the critical stages of her analysis rely on far more selective
562 BOOK REVIEWS

references to them. Thus in the second chapter of the book when she portrays
Coleridge as a ‘sceptical whig’, critical of corruption but appreciative of the
role ascribed to aristocracy and monarchy in the British constitution, she
focuses largely on ‘The Plot Discovered’ (1795), an attack on Pitt’s moves to
restrict press freedom. The ‘Lectures on Revealed Religion’, which other
scholars have seen as being central to placing Coleridge in the debates of the
mid 1790s, are almost entirely ignored. So too is ‘A Moral and Political Lec-
ture’ a work in which Coleridge endorsed the doctrine of philosophical neces-
sity. When he reprinted the lecture in The Friend (1809) he noted his
abandonment of this view and, while claiming to reproduce the lecture in its
original form, he silently removed some of its more heated passages. It would
have been interesting to consider how Professor Edwards would square this
episode with her thesis. She makes very little use of The Friend, Coleridge’s
extensive journalism or, in spite of her title, The Statesman’s Manual or the
second Lay Sermon. There are only occasional references to Coleridge’s let-
ters, marginalia and notebooks.
While the author complains of the rhetorical slipperiness of Coleridge’s per-
formance in ‘The Plot Discovered’, she treats his account of other people’s
arguments as representing his own position (pp. 53-8). In doing so, she ignores
Coleridge’s signals — ‘these [people] would say’; ‘their opponents reply’; “you
have asserted that’, and so on — and thus undercuts the textual basis of her
interpretation.’ For example, on pp. 57-8 she makes much of ‘Coleridge’s roy-
alism’ and uses references to the role of the monarch in the British constitution
to support her critique of those who have seen radical elements in Coleridge’s
early writings. Two of the references in support of this position (notes 32 and
33) are to a passage where Coleridge is recounting someone else’s claims; two
other notes (34 and 35) are to a page in the sixth lecture on revealed religion
which deals with a completely different topic. The fact of the matter is that
Coleridge does not provide a defence of the ancient constitution in ‘The Plot
Discovered’. Coleridge’s apparently favourable references to it are presented
as claims made by others on its behalf. His treatment is highly critical and con-
cludes with the argument that freedom of the press is the only thing that saves
English government from being a despotism, hence the enormity of Pitt’s
assault on this principle. One would require a great deal of careful, properly ref-
erenced analysis of Coleridge’s statements of his views in the mid 1790s to sup-
port the claims that Professor Edwards makes on his behalf.
Other aspects of Professor Edwards’ analysis exhibit an even more cavalier
engagement with her sources. On p. 124 Professor Edwards refers to Coleridge’s
criticism in 1796 of a speech made in the House of Commons by William
Windham. Windham is presented as a proponent of a ‘natural right to

! ‘The Plot Discovered’, Lectures 1795: On Politics and Religion (1971), ed. Lewis
Patton and Peter Mann in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge , ed. Lewis
Patton and Peter Mann (Princeton, 1969-) (hereafter CW), pp. 307-8.
 BOOK REVIEWS 563

property’; Coleridge’s criticism is taken to mean that he thought that natural

rights language had become meaningless claptrap. This account of the
exchange is inconsistent with the text upon which it is based. In the record of
the parliamentary debate that Coleridge reproduces, Windham is reported as
saying that he ‘deprecated these arguments in favour of the repeal of these
[game] laws which had been founded on abstract notions of natural rights; all
of which seemed in the highest degree chimerical’. Coleridge’s response to
this statement was that ‘[t]his sentiment is so lugged into every debate, that it
has degenerated into mere parrotry’.’ It is patently obvious that Coleridge is
criticizing Windham for his hackneyed claims about the inadequacy of
appeals to ‘abstract notions of natural rights’. In other words, Professor
Edwards has unaccountably reversed the positions of the protagonists in the
exchange, ignoring the significance of Coleridge’s gibe that Windham was ‘a
professed imitator of Mr. Burke’, and his claim that it is the right of ‘each indi-
vidual to enjoy every pleasure which does not injure himself, nor lessen or
render insecure the enjoyments of others’.
Professor Edwards actually quotes this passage when presenting an argu-
ment concerning Coleridge’s anticipation of Mill’s liberty principle. She then
seeks to show, by reference to an essay published in The Friend (1809), the
ongoing strength and depth of Coleridge’s ‘protoliberalism’ (pp. 125-6). This
discussion is really most unfortunate. The passage that Professor Edwards
quotes (‘Each man is the best judge of his own happiness . ... and to himself
must it therefore be entrusted . .. The only duty of the citizen . . . in fulfilling
which [duty] he obeys all the laws, is not to encroach on another’s sphere of
action.’) does not represent Coleridge’s views at this time. Rather, it forms
part of a critical exposition of the ideas of the ‘French Economists’.
Coleridge’s judgment on this position appears in the paragraph following that
from which Professor Edwards quotes. ‘I shall prove, that this System, as an
exclusive Total, is under any form impracticable; and that if it were realized,
and as far as it were realized, it would necessarily lead to general Barbarism
and the most grinding Oppression’.’
The last two chapters of Professor Edwards’ book deal primarily with
Church and State. In the course of demonstrating the distinctive moral, intel-
lectual and institutional features of Coleridge’s conception of the ‘clerisy’ (an
important and often discussed theme) she treats it as a learned elite that does
not include the clergy of the Church of England, claiming that the ‘nationalty’
(consistently misspelt as ‘nationality’) was reserved for this elite (pp. 181-2).
If these claims were true it would prompt Coleridge scholars to reconsider the
relationship between Coleridge’s last major work and the debates over the
Church of England occasioned by the repeal of religious penalties imposed on

2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman (1970), ed. Lewis Patton, CW, p. 122.
3 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend (1969), ed. Barbara Rooke, CW, II, p. 131.
564 . BOOK REVIEWS

Roman Catholics and Protestant Dissenters. In fact, Professor Edwards’ inter-

pretation flies in the face of Coleridge’s clearly stated views:
The Nationalty .. . was reserved for the support and maintenance of a per-
manent class or order, with the following duties. A certain smaller number
were to remain at the fountain heads of the humanities . . . being, likewise,
the instructors of such as constituted . . . the remaining more numerous
classes of the order. This latter and far more numerous body were to be dis-
tributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral
part or division without a resident guide, guardian and instructor.
Professor Edwards’ later suggestion that Coleridge believed that the ‘pastoral
clergy’ were ‘ “imperfectly” suited to their task as exemplars because their
religious ordination separated them from the concerns of the community’
(p. 206) rests on yet another of those perverse misreadings of the texts which
mar her work. Celibacy is the issue here, not ordination. Having identified a
‘pastor, presbyter, or parson’ as one of the appropriate recipients of the
Nationalty, Coleridge defines this person as “the representative and exemplar
of the personal character of the community or parish’. He then writes that
‘this the pastoral clergy cannot be other than imperfectly — they cannot be
that which is the paramount end of their establishment and distribution
throughout the country, that they should be — each in his sphere the germ and
nucleus of the progressive civilization — unless they are in the rule married
men and heads of families’.*
Finally, Professor Edwards refers to an entry in one of Coleridge’s note-
books to support her claim that Coleridge endorsed Adam Smith’s views on the
moral significance of commerce (p. 211). Since this entry does not mention
Smith, commerce or political economy — it deals with Sir James Steuart’s
remarks on memory — it cannot lend support to the author’s argument.°
It is salutary to be reminded that Coleridge’s position in relation to political
argument in the 1790s was complex, that he regarded liberty as a condition of
moral personality, that his defence of the Church of England in the ‘constitution
of the nation’ did not depend on its dogma or ritual, and that he identified a place
for both the commercial and landed interests in his account of the idea of the
‘idea’ of the state. It is far less clear, however, that the more novel claims
advanced by Professor Edwards merit the injunction: ‘New readers of Coleridge
should start here’, that appears on the jacket of her book. They should probably
be advised to begin with the excellent introductions to the various volumes of
Coleridge’s Collected Works and then move on to read the texts themselves.
John Morrow
THE UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND

4 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State (1976), ed.
John Colmer, CW, pp. 43, 53 note.
> The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London, 1957),
I, #308.
 New Labour’ s Old Roots: Revisionist Thinkers in
: Labour’s History 1931-1997
New. Labour Ss Patrick Diamond (ed.)
HEE IO LEE KRSM TERT ATR
So New Labour was not conjured up out of thin air — it only
looks like that because of the party’s amnesia concerning its
intellectual development. This book provides extracts from

8 fifteen thinkers located within the revisionist tradition as an

antidote to that amnesia. It is an ‘all star cast’ from
Labour's history, from Tawney, Jay, Crosland and Gaitskell
to Gordon Brown.The collection shows that revisionism is
not a body of doctrine but a cast of mind that distinguishes
between core values (ends) and policy instruments
(means) — revisionist thinkers do not shrink from
abandoning any policy that fails to deliver the desired ends.
‘This book asks a question to which many of us would
welcome an answer: “What are the philosophical roots of new
Labour?” In the end, the search has to be declared
unsuccessful — but the fascination of the journey is more than
adequate compensation.’ Richard Reeves, New Statesman

Y by Mt Hon Tony Blair Me

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Relativism and the Foundations of Liberalism

Graham Long
Moral relativism is often regarded as incompatible with
liberalism. This book aims to show why such criticism is
| RELATIVISM misconceived. First, it argues that relativism provides a
(ANDTHE plausible account of moral justification. Drawing on the
FOUNDATIONS contemporary relativist and universalist analyses of
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 CONTENTS

Sis Tragedy as Political Theory: The Self-Destruction

of Antigone’s Laws J. Tralau

597, Locke on Language in (Civil) Society H. Dawson

426 Tocqueville’s Brief Encounter with Machiavelli:

Notes on the Florentine Histories (1836) M. Richter

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Considered Account of Utopian Socialism D. Leopold

467 From ‘Republicanism’ to ‘Democracy’: China’s

Selective Adoption and Reconstruction of Modern G.T. Jn &
Western Political Concepts (1840-1924) O.F. Liu

502 The Theory of the Partisan: Carl Schmitt’s

Neglected Legacy G. Slomp

520 The Objects of Ideology: Historical Transformations

and the Changing Role of the Analyst G. Talshir

Doll Book Reviews

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 CONTENTS

565 Between Advantage and Virtue: Aristotle’s

Theory of Political Friendship E. Irrera

586 Augustine and the Rhetoric of Roman Decline A.R. Murphy

607 Defending Christian Fellowship: William of Ockham

and the Crisis of the Medieval Church T. Shogimen

625 Machiavelli’s Missing Romulus and the Murderous

Intent of The Prince J.M. Parent

646 Republicanism in the University of Krakéw

in the Eighteenth Century B. Rundell

664 Hume and Rawls on the Circumstances and

Priority of Justice A. Lister

696 Freedom, Desire and Revolution: Alasdair MacIntyre’s

Early Marxist Ethics P. Blackledge

721 Book Reviews

748 Annual Index

Volume XXVI_ Issue 4

Winter 2005
 BETWEEN ADVANTAGE AND VIRTUE:
ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP

Elena Irrera'

Abstract: How can the Aristotelian account of friendship contribute to an under-

standing ofthe notion of politiké philia? The aim ofthis paper is to sketch out a general
description of political friendship in the light of Aristotle’s well-known distinction
between friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure and friendships between virtu-
ous people drawn in Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics. | shall define the bound-
aries of political friendship through the analysis of resemblances to and differences
from both friendship according ethical excellence and friendship grounded in mere
utility. Political friendship seems to be a kind of advantage-friendship sui generis,
where the search for utility does not prevent people from displaying other-regarding
qualities like cooperation, trust and loyalty, that are typical of friendship according to
ethical excellence. I will also show that activity according to justice replaces the form
of mutual and intimate love that should subsist in a friendship based on ethical virtue.

In our culture, the ordinary use of the word ‘friendship’ is generally confined
to the characterization of some kind of intimate relationship between a few
people, inspired by values such as love, trust and reciprocal concern with a
friend’s happiness. By contrast, in order to understand how friendship is con-
ceived by Aristotle and the role it plays in his thought, we need to cast our net
wider. The topic of friendship occupies a prominent place in his ethical
writings; his treatment of philia covers books VUI-IX of the Nicomachean
Ethics, a fifth of the whole work, and one of the four books of the Eudemian
Ethics. In his ethical works, friendship emerges as a complex and protean
dimension of human life, whose richness cannot be fully grasped without an
understanding of its relationships towards other issues of high philosophical
relevance: goodness, justice, happiness and self-identity.
Yet, one dimension of Aristotle’s account of friendship to which I believe
insufficient attention has been paid is the political. On my view, this is partly
due to the absence of a systematic treatment of politiké philia, which might
lead us to wonder whether he is really interested in such an issue. Annas, for
example, maintains that he is not, on the grcund that political friendship is not
singled out for special concern.” Another reason for over-neglecting the
notion of politiké philia might be that nowhere is it introduced as a proper

!Via Camposanto Vecchio 22/b, 60019 Senigallia (AN), Italy. Email:

irrera@ hotmail.com
2 See J. Annas, Comments on J. Cooper, in Aristotle’s Politik. Akten des XI Sympo-
sium Aristotelicum 1987, ed. G. Patzig (Gottingen, 1990), pp. 242-8, p. 248, quoted by
S. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship (Albany, NY, 1995), p. 153.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005
566 E. IRRERA

kind of friendship, and — even if we assume that Aristotle takes it as a real

form of philia — it might be held as a ‘diluted’ and ‘reduced’ form.’
Conversely, Yack attempts to highlight the importance of political friend-
ship in Aristotle’s thought, although he is inclined to take it as ‘a fact of ordi-
nary political life rather than a moral ideal, a source of conflict as well as a
means of promoting greater cooperation’.* Unlike Yack, Stern-Gillet argues
that political friendship represents a powerful ethical ideal in Aristotle’s
thought, and that the reason why he does not attempt to provide a systematic
account of the topic is that the nature of political friendship varies too greatly
in ways that correspond to variations in the kind of constitutions, so that he
would be unable to provide a general account ofpolitiké philia, valid for any
kind of constitution whatever.” Even more, given that a large part of Book
VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics is devoted to a description of political com-
munities of different nature,° we might ask ourselves at what point would
Aristotle have to include a treatment of political constitutions within the con-
text of philia, if he did not hold them as forms of friendship.
In this article I will challenge the assumptions of both those scholars who
maintain that political friendship plays only a marginal role in Aristotle’s dis-
cussion of philia and those claiming that political friendship is just a kind of
advantage-friendship which does not involve any moral ideal. By contrast, I
propose that political friendship is an essential notion in his ethical and politi-
cal theory. I shall explore and re-construct his concept of political friendship
(i) by finding out in what sense it might be taken as a proper kind of friendship

3 See J.M. Cooper, ‘Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship’, Review of Metaphysics, 30

(1977), pp. 619-48, p. 645. However, it is worth noticing that Cooper deems the topic of
friendship to be ‘of decisive significance for an understanding of Aristotle’s moral theory’
(p. 648).
4B. Yack, The Problems of a Political Animal: Community, Justice, and Conflict in
Aristotelian Political Thought (Berkeley, 1993), p. 110.
5 See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp. 153-4: ‘The answer to
these perplexities [i.e. those upon the relevance of political friendship in Aristotle’s
thought] lies, I submit, not in Aristotle’s unconcern with civic friendship but in his
assumption that civic friendship is but the reflection, in the lives of individuals, of the
constitution of the state. Considered in itself, civic friendship is neither noble nor pettily
contractual, neither disinterested nor manipulative, neither stable nor unsteady. It is the
constitution of the state which, to a large extent, determines not only the nature and the
extent of the civic bond but also its moral worth. Like the criteria of good citizenship,
those of civic friendship, according to this interpretation, will vary with the constitutions.
While sound constitutions encourage all citizens to have regard for each other, defective
and deviant ones prompt rulers to be solely concerned with securing a balance of
power . . . There is little in common between the kinds of civic friendship that these con-
stitutions generate.’
6 NE VIII, 1161a10-b12. Ail the passages of the Nicomachean Ethics quoted in this
paper will be taken from Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translation, Introduction, and
Commentary, ed. S. Broadie and C.J. Rowe, trans. C.J. Rowe (Oxford, 2002).
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 567

and how it relates to the concept ofjustice in the polis; (ii) by illustrating in
what respects political friendship resembles/differs from two of the three
kinds of friendship identified in Sections II] and II of Book VIII of the
Nicomachean Ethics: friendship grounded in utility and friendship grounded
in ethical excellence (areté).
My view is that, in Aristotle’s thought, when it comes to good communi-
ties, political friendship is a kind of advantage-friendship sui generis, where
the search for utility does not prevent people from displaying ‘other-regarding’
qualities like cooperation, trust and loyalty, that are typical of friendship
according to virtuous individuals. I hope to show that activity according to
justice replaces the form of mutual and intimate love that should subsist in a
friendship based on ethical excellence, i.e. a kind of love which is not con-
ceivable between citizens who do not know each other personally.

I
In Book VIII of the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle introduces the discussion
of philia by describing it as a kind of excellence, or something related to it,
that is necessary for human life: ‘it will be appropriate to discuss friendship,
since friendship is a kind of excellence, or goes along with excellence, and
furthermore is very necessary for living’.’
As it might be noticed here, rather than presenting friendship as a kind of rela-
tion, he seems to be more keen on stressing its closeness to areté,* as though
he meant to emphasize the ethical aspect of friendship; it would seem that —
on his view — one cannot be friend to another without possessing a virtuous
state of character. Secondly, friendship is described as a very necessary thing
(anagkaiotaton) for human life. The idea of the necessity of friendship with a
view to living might make us wonder whether Aristotle is holding friendship
to be necessary simply for ‘mere living’ or, rather, for ‘living well’.
As he makes clear in Book A of the Metaphysics, ‘necessary’ means both
‘that without which, as a concomitant condition, life is impossible’ '® and ‘the
conditions without which good cannot be or come to be’.'’ It seems to me that

7 NE Vill, 1155a3-S.
8 See M.C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge, 1986), p. 343.
9 In more than one case Aristotle implies a conceptual distinction between ‘mere liv-
ing’ (zén) and ‘living well’ (eu zén); see for instance Politics I, 1252b29-30, where it is
said that the polis ‘grows for the sake of mere life’, but ‘it exists for the sake of a good life’
(Aristotle. Politics, trans. E. Barker (Oxford, 1948)); cf. Politics, III, 1280b33—5); see
also Politics, I, 1253b24—S (with reference to the art of acquiring property Aristotle says:
‘it is impossible to live well, or indeed to live at all, unless the necessary conditions are
present’).
10 Metaph. A, 1015a20-1.
'l Metaph. A, 1015a22-3.
568 . E. IRRERA

Aristotle’s interest is addressed towards the necessity of friendship in the light

of the good life rather than in mere living, as he shows when he claims that
no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other
good things; for even the wealthy or those who rule over or dominate others
are thought to need friends more than anything — since what use would
such prosperity be if they were deprived of the possibility of beneficence,
which occurs most, and is most to be praised, in relation to friends?!”

A similar concern emerges in the Eudemian Ethics, when he states that we

think a friend to be one of the greatest goods, and lack ofphilia and solitude a
very terrible thing, since our entire life and our voluntary associations are
with friends.'? Again, the supposed connection between friendship and the
good life is supported by Aristotle’s appeal to the notion of ‘to kalon’ which,
in the Aristotelian lexicon, is intimately intertwined with areté. An indicative
example of the relationship between friendship and fo kalon is provided at NE
VII 1155a29-31:
It [philia] is not only necessary, but fine’ as well, for we praise those who
love their philoi, and having many philoi seems to be one of the fine things;
and, furthermore, we think the very same people are good people and good
philoi.
It might be thought that, in the passage at issue, Aristotle is not expressing his
own theory of friendship, given that the expressions ‘we praise’, ‘seems’ and
‘we think’ occurring in the passage seem to indicate beliefs generally held by
people.’® On the other hand, we should be reminded that Aristotle often
assumes the so-called endoxa as a starting point for the development of his own
philosophical views, ending up by interiorizing such general beliefs;’® there-
fore, there is no need to suppose that, when it comes to friendship, he rejects
such beliefs, not least because Aristotle’s resort to ‘to kalon’ here might evoke
the importance held by this notion both in his ethics and in his metaphysical
thought.’’ If so, although the idea of friendship as a necessary thing, taken at

'2 NE VIII, 1155a5-9.

'3 EE VII, 1234b31-4.
\4 My italics.
'5 See Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, p. 366.
'6 On Aristotle’s frequent appeal to and confidence in endoxa see T.H. Irwin, Aris-
totle’s First Principles (Oxford, 2002), pp. 30-1.
'7 The notion of to kalon occurs many times in Aristotle’s ethical works, especially in
the Nicomachean Ethics, where he repeatedly stresses that acting according to ethical
excellences is a fine thing (see for instance NE II, 1109a29-30, where it is said that get-
ting the intermediate in actions and passions is a rare thing and something fine; see also
its relationship with voluntariness of actions at NE III, 1113). As for the employment of
to kalon in Aristotle’s metaphysical thought, see Metaph. A, 1013a20-3; where to kalon
(alongside to agathon), is mentioned as the principle of knowledge and movernent; see
also Metaph. A, 1072a27-—30, where the object of desire, which coincides with the object
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 569

face value, seems to be more conceptually connected to advantage than to to

kalon, its importance with a view to the good life locates it within the frame-
work of human eudaimonia and the choices made with a view to it."®
It is interesting that, in his ethical works, Aristotle strives to portray
eudaimonia not only as an individual matter, but as a product of political
expertise, whose task is to guarantee the good life and make citizens good and
obedient to the laws.'? In that case, friendship, being declared as an indis-
pensable ingredient of human happiness, is not only to be taken as a private
and personal bond between two individuals, but also as a relationship involv-
ing the whole of the political community. This is confirmed by NE VIII,
1155a22—4, where he claims that ‘Friendship also seems to keep cities
together, and lawgivers seem to pay more attention to it than to justice.’”° We
shall have to return to this passage later. At this stage of the discussion, it will
be sufficient to see that friendship is presented as the ground of political
communities, rather than being introduced as an occasional, unnecessary
partnership.
Undeniably, friendship as it is fostered by lawgivers presents some degree
of expediency, since it is introduced also as a means through which the cohe-
sion of cities can be brought about; yet, this aspect of utility, if connected to
the preliminary definition of friendship as ‘a kind of excellence or something
related to it’, may suggest that both usefulness and some kind of excellence
are involved in the nature of friendship itself. Furthermore, Aristotle’s men-
tion of friendship in relation to lawgivers and political communities might
indicate his real interest in its political dimension. As I believe, the idea of
political friendship involves much more than isolated interventions on the
lawgivers’ part, but, by contrast, requires the active participation of each
fellow-citizen.
The expression politiké philia is rarely mentioned in Aristotle’s ethical and
political works, and the scarce textual occurrences do not allow us to outline
directly a proper description of its prominent features. One of these occurrences
is at NE IX, 1167b2-3, where Aristotle, speaking of homonoia, describes it as a
politiké philia, for it has to do with the sumpheron, i.e. what is advantageous,
and ta eis ton bion, which Rowe translates as ‘what affects people’s lives’.

of nous, is what appears fine to us, and the primary object of boulésis is what is objec-
tively fine (to on kalon); again, at Metaph. A, 1074b24, it is said that the divine nous
thinks to kalon rather than anything whatever; finally, see Metaph. M, 1078a31-bS,
where Aristotle claims that to kalon can be found not only in actions, but even in
immovable things, and its supreme forms are orderly arrangement (taxis), proportion
(symmetria) and definiteness (to Orismenon).
18 On the relationship between philia and eudaimonia see Cooper, Aristotle on the
Forms of Friendship, p. 619; A. Kenny, Aristotle on the Perfect Life (Oxford, 1992),
pp. 45-55; see also Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, pp. 343-72.
'9 NEI, 1102a9-10.
20 Cf. EE VII, 1234b22-5.
570 E. IRRERA

Similarly, at EE VII, 1242a7—-10 politiké philia is claimed to be based

mostly on utility:
Civic friendship has been established mainly in accordance with utility; for
men seem to have come together because each is not sufficient for himself,
though they would have come together anyhow for the sake of living in
company.
It is undeniable that the passages above considered focus on political friend-
ship as the ground of activities concerned with human needs and the search
for advantage; however, its nature will become clearer only after having illus-
trated the systematic distinction drawn by Aristotle between three different
kinds of friendship.
Since friendship concerns the ‘lovable’ (to philéton), and the lovable can be
good (agathon), pleasant (hédu) or useful (chrésimon),”' a corresponding
kind of friendship will subsist for each kind of lovable thing, given that, as
Aristotle states at VE VII, 1156a9-10, ‘those who love each other wish good
things for each other in the way in which they love’. As we see here, the three
kinds of friendship are identified on the basis of (i) the nature of the object of
love; (ii) the way in which friends love (tavty y @tAovotv). These two aspects
seem to be deeply intertwined; undeniably, the nature of what is loved will
end up affecting the way of loving.
To which of these three kinds of friendship does political friendship
belong? My view is that a stable and good politiké philia is a kind of friend-
ship grounded in utility, which, nevertheless, will promote in the community
values like love of the other, living together, trust and reciprocal reliability on
the citizens’ part. In other words, if my idea is reasonable, political friend-
ship — in Aristotle’s theory — would consist of a sort of shared-advantage
friendship in which people behave according to some degree of ethical
excellence.
A first objection that might be raised is that it is quite difficult for us to
imagine a civic association composed only of virtuous people and based on
mutual well-wishing as though people knew each other and wished them well
for their sake. As a matter of fact, a political community includes a wide range
of people of different characters, and political ties are doomed toJink virtuous
citizens with people of inferior worth. It might be wondered if a friendship
grounded in some degree of excellence is conceivable even in such a
variegated frame. As we are going to see, Aristotle believes that friendship
between virtuous people is a rare phenomenon insofar as goodness is a prerog-
ative of just a few individuals,” which suggests that such a friendship in the
political community is impossible to actualize (not least because, not even in

21 NE VIII, 1155b18-19.
22 See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 148.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 571

an ideal polis where each citizen, hypothetically, behaves in a virtuous way,

would every citizen know all her fellows personally).
One possible reply is that, in some cases, the many and their lack of good-
ness — as Aristotle conceives it — might not prevent virtuous men from act-
ing according to complete excellence in the affairs of the polis, as long as the
less virtuous people abide by the established norms ofjustice. Respect for the
laws in force might exist even if not all the citizens were intrinsically good, for
instance if they were afraid of punishment or if they considered that through
activity according to justice they would get their personal share of goods. Even
in those cases, to some extent, would justice be a means to the preservation of
political stability and to the avoidance of conflicts within the community.
A legal system set up byjust people (especially people who are ‘inherently’
just) in order to yield political harmony may create some form of reciprocal
respect between citizens,” which might be intended to replace the intimate
love proper to friendship that cannot be realized in the polis. As far as political
friendship is concerned, reciprocal loving is not to be understood as an inti-
mate feeling between people, but rather as some form of legal, virtuous
respect: in good political communities, obedience to the laws on the citizens’
part will be supported by their intrinsic disposition of character which makes
them actjustly; in less virtuous cities, people might abide by the established
laws simply to escape punishment or, more generally, for the sake of personal
advantage, without being authentically virtuous people themselves.
However, it might be supposed that even in this case some friendship will
subsist among fellow-citizens, insofar as some degree ofjustice is preserved
and people are not damaged by their fellows’ behaviour. Justice, then, would
provide the necessary political bonds of reciprocity and proportional equality
among all the members of a community, both virtuous and less virtuous, so
replacing in this way the love and the trust typical of virtuous friends. Since
justice, like friendship, seems to hinge on some sort of reciprocity, each indi-
vidual will act in relation to his fellows’ needs and expect a proportionate
return from them. People who are not equipped with a suitable level of ethical
excellence may act simply by subscribing to the norms of justice imposed by
external prescription, once they have realized that adapting themselves to it
will bring about greater advantage to them. This does not necessarily mean
that people without noble inclinations will become virtuous and perform
noble acts for the sake of the fine, just by acting according to law (especially if
the law is not devised with a view to the common advantage), but only that, at
least, they may contribute to the well-being of the polis without being an
obstacle to those who wish to pursue a virtuous kind of life.

23 See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden City, NY, 1958), p. 218.
Arendt defines respect as ‘a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the
world puts between us’. The same passage is quoted by Yack in The Problems of a Politi-
cal Animal, p. 113.
S72. , E. IRRERA

I
In the sections that follow I propose to show that politiké philia is a real kind
of friendship, corresponding to a peculiar kind of advantage friendship.
Before undertaking such a task, however, we need to stress a main problem
emerging in Aristotle’s account ofphilia. Aristotle seems to exhibit an ambig-
uous attitude towards utility- and pleasure-friendships. On the one hand,
when he points to the existence of three different kinds of friendships, he
seems to legitimate utility and pleasure as the grounds of real forms of friend-
ship; on the other hand, on more than one occasion he presents such friend-
ships as friendships incidentally (kata symbebékos),”* as though he meant to
stress their inferior quality in relation to friendship between good people,
which seems to be taken as a relationship that truly deserves the title of
‘friendship’; such a friendship, in which people are ‘friends most of all’
(malista philoi)” is called ‘perfect’ (teleia),”° since, as Cooper says, ‘it exhib-
its fully and perfectly all the characteristics that one reasonably expects a
friendship to have’.”’ Aristotle’s emphasis on both the difference between the
three kinds of friendship and the perfection of friendship between good peo-
ple might raise doubts as to whether friendships of utility and pleasure really
deserve to be called friendships.”*
Friendships grounded in utility and in pleasure are regarded as friend-
ships kata sumbebékos mainly because, as Aristotle points out at NE VIII,
1156a10—12, those who love dia to chrésimon or di’ hédonén do not love their
friends for themselves (kath’hautous), i.e. by reference to the way the person
loved is (or, in Cooper’s words, ‘in recognition of his goodness of charac-
ter’),”’ but, principally, insofar as some good or pleasure accrues to each of
them from the other. By contrast, only friendship between good people, i.e.
those resembling each other in are?é, is a teleia friendship, i.e. friendship in
the full sense, because they love their friends for themselves (kath’hautous),
i.e. for their inner qualities.”

24 The expression ‘kata symbebékos’ is often employed in Aristotle’ sMetaphysics as

distinct from expressions employed to qualify ousia, like ‘to kath’ hauto’. See for
instance Metaph. A, 1017a7—8, where he claims that Being (to on) can be said ‘acciden-
tally’ or ‘for itself’; cf. A, 1015b16—17; see also , 1003b32-3; [, 1007a29-32. When
Aristotle applies the notion of ‘kata symbebékos’ to friendship, he seems to be referring
to his idea that ‘only character friends are essentially and without adventitious qualifica-
tion’ (Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, p. 636).
29 NE VIII, 1156b10.
26 Cf. NE VIII, 1156b7; 1156b34.
27 Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, p. 625.
28 §_A.D.M. Walker, ‘Aristotle’s Account of Friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics’ ,
Phronesis, 24 (1979), pp. 180-96, p. 187.
29 Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, p. 630.
30 NE VIII, 1156b7-9.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP = 573

True loving seems to be an exclusive prerogative of the latter kind of

friendship. As Aristotle claims, according to a generally shared view, friend-
ship demands well-wishing for the friend’s sake;*' it might seem then, that
even on his personal view well-wishing for the sake of one’s friend ensures a
real kind of friendship. In the Rhetoric, for instance, to philein is described as
‘wishing for him what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake
but for his,” and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things
about’.*?
Again, in the Eudemian Ethics Aristotle denies that eunoia exists in pleasure-
and advantage-friendships at all, precisely on the ground that evnoia is not for
the sake of the well-wisher himself, but for that of the person to whom one
wishes well.*
Provided that friendship is described as any relationship characterized by
mutual well-wishing and well-doing out of concern for one another, how can
it be combined with the idea that, of the three different kinds of friendship
detected by Aristotle, two kinds do presuppose principally a concern for one’s
own Sake rather than that concern for one’s friend? On my view, in order to
solve the problem we need to consider that advantage- and pleasure-friendships
are described as ‘friendships’ by virtue of some sort of similarity to friendship
between virtuous people:
They also seem both to be and not to be friendships, by virtue of similarity
and dissimilarity to the same thing: in so far as they resemble friendship in
accordance with excellence, they look like friendships (for one of the two
has the attribute of the pleasant, the other that of the useful, and the friend-
ship of excellence also has these), but in so far as that friendship is immune
to slander, and lasting, while these kinds change quickly, and differ from
the other in many other respects, they do not look like friendships, because
of dissimilarity to the other kind.*°
What does Aristotle have in mind when he claims that they are friendship kata
homoiotéta? The idea of ‘friendships kat’ homoioteta’ presents a high degree
of complexity, which would deserve a wide and detailed treatment. However,
in this article Iwill not examine the issue in depth; it will be sufficient to stress
that different approaches to the notion of resemblance between friendships
are provided in both the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics.*°

3! See NE VIII, 1155b31.

32 My italics. Aristotle. Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts in The Complete Works of
Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. C. Barnes (2 vols., Princeton, 1984).
33 Rhet. II, 1380b36-1381al.
34 FE VII, 1241a1—14. See Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, p. 632.
35 NE VIII, 1158b5-10.
36 The treatment of resemblance between perfect friendship and friendships kata
sumbebékos in the Nicomachean Ethics seems to differ greatly from that provided in the
Eudemian Ethics. See A.W. Price, Love and Friendship in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford,
574 E. IRRERA

At NE VIII, 1157al-—2 Aristotle tells us that the kinds of friendship that

exist because of the pleasant or the useful have a resemblance to friendship
grounded in goodness, since the good too are pleasant and useful to each
other. A different approach to the issue of resemblance is offered instead at
NE VAI, 1157a30-3, where friendships of utility and pleasure are claimed to
resemble friendship of goodness insofar as a relation of mere utility or pleas-
ure also brings something good; in other words, both the pleasant and the use-
ful are good in the eyes of those who love them.
Differently from NE VUI, 1157a1—2, in which the utility and pleasure are
described as inner components of virtue, in the latter passage the useful and
the pleasant are not regarded as deriving from what is good haplos, i.e. the
good in absolute.*’ Although Aristotle is saying here that friendships of pleas-
ure and utility resemble in a way the friendship of goodness, nowhere does NE
VIII, 1157a30-—3 suggest that all resemblances must be mediated through the
friendship of morally good men,” that is, that their being useful or pleasant is
not dependent on the first kind of friendship.

1989), p. 131: ‘It is characteristic of the Eudemian Ethics that it offers a more logical
theory, or presentation of a theory, than does the Nicomachean about the relation
between the varieties of friendship.’ In the Eudemian Ethics friendship of goodness is
described as ‘primary’ (see for instance EE VII, 1236b2: proté philia), presumably in
accordance with the meaning of ‘primary’ at EE VII, 1236a19-22: ‘The primary is that
of which the definition is implicit in the definition of all, for example a surgical instru-
ment is an instrument that a surgeon would use, whereas the definition of the instrument
is not implicit in that of surgeon’ (cf. Metaph. Z, 1028a34-6; M, 1077b3-4). As is
claimed at EE VU, 1236a17—20, difterent kinds of friendships are defined exclusively
with reference to one kind of friendship, i.e. the primary (pros mian [philian] . . . kai
protén). This kind of comparative analysis has led Owen to claim that friendships of util-
ity and pleasure appear to be ‘focally related’, even in the Nicomachean Ethics (see
G.E.L. Owen, Logic and Metaphysics in Some Earlier Works of Aristotle, in Aristotle
and Plato in the Mid-Fourth Century, ed. I. During and G.E.L Owen (Goteborg, 1960),
pp. 163-90, p. 169; cf. R.A. Gauthier and J.Y. Jolif, L’ Ethique a Nicomaque. Introd,
Traduction et commentaire (Louvain, 1970), pp. 669 and 686). By contrast, Annas
claims that no trace of focal meaning, so prominent in the Eudemian Ethics, can be found
in the Nicomachean account of friendship (see J. Annas, ‘Plato and Aristotle on Friend-
ship and Altruism’, Mind, 86 (1977), pp. 532-54, p. 547). I tend to agree with Annas,
although, on my view, a ‘focal’ approach might be tracked down in NE VIII, 1157a1-2,
similarly to EE VII, 1236a17-20.
37 Cf. NE VIII, 1156b19-23, where Aristotle points out that ‘every kind of friendship
is because of some good or because of pleasure, either without qualification or for the
person loving’, and that ‘the good without qualification is also pleasant without qualifi-
cation’.
38 See W. Fortenbaugh, ‘Aristotle’s Analysis of Friendship: Function and Analogy,
Resemblance and Focal Meaning’, Phronesis, 20 (1975), pp. 51-62, p. 56. Fortenbaugh
maintains that on some occasions in the Nicomachean Ethics the three forms of friend-
ship described by Aristotle appear to be analogically related. For an explanation and a
criticism of Fortenbaugh’s view, see Walker, Aristotle’s Account of Friendship in the
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 575

I believe that the two approaches to the issue of resemblance introduced

above can be regarded as perfectly compatible, as long as we keep in mind
that, in the first case, Aristotle is speaking of what is good haplos, whereas, in
the second case, he seems to be stressing an analogy”’ between the perfect
goodness of virtue and the goodness of utility and pleasure, which are not nec-
essarily grounded in what is objectively good. I suggest that, in order to
explain in more general terms the resemblance of the inferior kinds of friend-
ship to the superior (without resorting to either of the two Aristotelian
approaches), we might say that advantage- and pleasure-friendships resemble
the friendship of goodness insofar as they manage to meet some basic require-
ments (as I am going to show in the next section ofthis paper) like reciprocity,
awareness of the friendship and, mainly, eunoia, i.e. well-wishing.”°
It is true that, in the already mentioned EE VII, 1241al—14, eunoia is not
claimed to exist in friendships of utility and pleasure; still, it might be replied
that, in the passage at issue, Aristotle’s main concern is to stress the particular
eunoia that lies at the basis of friendship between virtuous people, in the light
of which every other kind of friendship appears devoid of well-wishing. The
eunoia at the basis of virtue-friendships depends on recognition of the
virtuous nature of the friend, rather than springing from the expectation of the
utility or the pleasures that a possible friendship might produce. By contrast,
if some form of well-wishing were admitted in pleasure- or advantage-
friendships, this would be only consequent to one’s recognition of the advan-
tage or the pleasure that such friendships can offer;*' when it comes to such
‘inferior’ forms of friendship, no eunoia would subsist independently of the
established relationship. In that case, when in the passage in question Aristotle
mentions eunoia, he does not seem to have advantage- or pleasure-friendships
in mind, but, rather, perfect friendship. This might find a confirmation in the
following lines,*” where he describes well-wishing as arché philias, i.e. as the
starting point for friendship;*’ in fact, only in friendship between virtuous
people will eunoia be antecedent to the establishment of a given partnership.

Nicomachean Ethics. On the notions of focal and analogical homonymy see J. Owens,
The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background
of Mediaeval Thought (Toronto, 1963), pp. 116-25.
39 See footnote above.
40 See Walker, Aristotle’s Account of Friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics,
pp. 185-90.
41 See Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, pp. 642-3. With reference to NE
VII, 1167a13-14 he claims: ‘So what Aristotle denies here is that evvora precedes, and
possibly turns into, a friendship of one of the derivative sorts; he does not deny that once
such a relationship has begun eunoia develops within it’.
42 EE Vil, 1241a12-14.
43 Aristotle’s main intention here is that of showing that eunoia is not a sufficient
condition of friendship.
576 E. IRRERA

However, it seems to me that a degree of well-wishing towards one’s

friends will subsist even in those friendships resembling the perfect one;“*
after all, as Aristotle explains at NE VIII, 1156a9-10, in any kind of friend-
ship (even in friendships by utility) friends will wish each other well, pre-
cisely in the way in which they love each other. In other words — I suggest —
Aristotle does not mean to say that no eunoia exists between friends by utility
or by pleasure, but, by contrast, that the nature of the object of love will affect
the quality of the eunoia existing between friends. Furthermore, that even in
non-virtuous friendships people harbour benevolent feelings towards their
friends might be entailed by Aristotle’s argument at NE VIII, 1155b21-7,
where he introduces the possibility that the good which people love does not
coincide with what is really good for themselves. At NE VIII, 1155b27-8 he
concludes that it will make no difference, presumably because the intensity of
love will not depend on the knowledge of the real good, but on the strength of
the belief (true or false) that something is good for oneself. When people
engage in advantage-friendships or in pleasure-friendships, they do so
because they regard advantage or pleasure as good for themselves, even when
such a good is not the good haplos. It is their wishing for what they believe to
be good for themselves that makes their loving a real form of concern, not
only towards the object of their desire (i.e. advantage or pleasure), but — as I
believe — also towards the friends through which the specific good they seek
is achieved.
On my view, it is plausible to assume that the pursuit of personal profit is
not completely at odds with some form of well-wishing towards one who is
able to provide a friend with some advantage; provided that the particular
kind of concern is specified, the tendency to love one’s friend in utility- and
advantage-friendships will not appear so unnatural.*° It might be suggested,
then, that even where personal interest is prevailing the well-being of the
other will be wished for to some degree.“°

44 That well-wishing for the friend occurs in all three kinds of friendship identified by
Aristotle is the thesis maintained by Cooper in Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship;
however, I do not agree with Cooper when he claims that Aristotle really makes general
well-wishing and well-doing out of concern for the other person’s good a condition of
any kind of friendship, even of advantage- and pleasure-friendships, without specifying
the particular way in which friends reciprocally love themselves. His point is that Aris-
totle ‘does not maintain that friendships of the derivative kinds are wholly self-centered:
pleasure- and advantage-friendships are instead a complex and subtle mixture of
self-seeking and unself-interested well-wishing and well-doing’ (p. 626). Criticism
against Cooper’s view, to which I subscribe, is lodged by Kahn in C.H. Kahn, ‘Aristotle
and Altruism’, Mind, 90 (1981), pp. 20-40, p. 21, footnote 1. Kahn thinks that the evi-
dence provided by Cooper is inconclusive.
45 See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 38.
46 See Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, pp. 625-6. For an opposite view
see J.E. Whiting, ‘Impersonal Friends’, Monist, 74 (1991), pp. 3-29, p. 20. With refer-
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 577

The idea that friendships kath’homoiotéta presuppose a degree of well-

wishing will be preliminary to the examination of political friendship, conceived
as a real kind of friendship. I will now try to identify the conditions which
make political partnership a kind of philia.

Ul
In order to define the domain of political friendship, we have to establish first
in what respect it satisfies the general conditions of friendship laid down by
Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle
does not provide any explicit definition of friendship, but he confines himself
to putting forward some basic conditions without which no form of relation-
ship will be regarded as friendship. As we have seen, the inner core of philia
appears to be eunoia, i.e. well-wishing. One cannot be a friend to another
unless one wishes another well and shows some kind of concern for him, even
when such a concern does not spring from the inner qualities of the friend; so
we can plausibly assume well-wishing in general as the main condition of
friendship, even of those friendships kata sumbebékos.
A second, indispensable feature of friendship is reciprocity of love. When
at NE VIII, 1155b27-9 Aristotle explains why there cannot be friendship with
inanimate objects, he underlines the absence of both eunoia and antiphilésis,
i.e. reciprocal loving. Good will, Aristotle holds, will not be friendship if it is
not reciprocated: ‘Those who wish good things for someone else like this are
said to have good will towards him, if the same is not forthcoming from the
other party as well; friendship, people say, is good will between reciprocating
parties.’*’
Furthermore, in order to become friendship, reciprocal love should be accom-
panied by awareness on the reciprocating parties’ side, otherwise people
would never either realize a life in common or even do anything together.** At
NE VII, 1155b34—-1156a5 Aristotle wonders:
Or should one add, good will that one is aware of? For many people have
good will towards those whom they have not met, but suppose to be decent,
or useful; and one of these might in fact be in the same position in relation to
them. Good will, then, is what these people evidently feel towards each
other; but how could one call them friends, if they are not aware of their
mutual feelings? If there is to be friendship, the parties must have good will
towards each other, i.e. wish good things for each other, and be aware of the
other’s doing so.

ence to NE IX, 1167a10-18, Whiting claims that, in Aristotle’s thought, character-

friendship alone is founded on eunoia.
47 NE VIII, 1155b31-4.
48 See Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, p. 620.
578 E. IRRERA

As we can see, a third condition emerges here: awareness of mutual feeling

and of the subsisting relationship.
Having established the three main conditions of friendship, i.e. well-wishing,
reciprocity and awareness of the reciprocal loving, let us go to political friend-
ship, and try to find out in what respects it meets these general requirements.
As far as political friendship is concerned, reciprocity might represent an
essential condition of it just insofar as every citizen is involved in the life of
the community, which must be based on interchanges and reciprocal interac-
tions, both in the economical and in the political sphere. Mutual well-wishing
needs to exist in every community, although people do not know each other,
since each of them is supposed to play a particular role in the city, and the
impersonal reciprocity of functions relies at any rate on reciprocal good-will
on the part of those who exercise those functions, with a view to supplying
mutual deficiencies. Reciprocity, thus, should be at the basis of the fulfilment
of a chain of needs allowing each citizen some degree of a good life.
Moreover, well-wishing must not be hidden, but it has to be shown openly
and, possibly, put into practice, both in properly political affairs and in the
preservation of a virtuous behaviour in accordance with the laws of the
community.
In Section I of this paper (p. 571) I have asked myself how mutual benevo-
lence may exist among people who do not even know each other. What allows
their display of mutual and aware well-wishing? I suggested that a plausible
answer might be a constant activity according to justice. Aristotle’s account
of justice and his well-known distinction between universal and particular
justice present deep complexities, which I will not be able to treat here. How-
ever, it is worth saying that in Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics, justice is
described both as a form of excellence which presupposes a relationship with
other individuals” and in terms of a set of principles of organization underly-
ing the well-functioning of the polis.
In order to promote the well-being of the community, justice must be recip-
rocal and involve all the citizens in a relationship, more or less impersonal,
which cannot remain unreturned. Besides this, justice, by reminding both the
rulers and the ruled of their reciprocal role in the friendship, also promotes

4° At NE V, 1129b30-3 it is claimed that universal justice prescribes complete excel-

lence of character to the highest degree, since the person who possesses it exercises his
excellence in relation to other people, and not just by himself; such a view finds support
in the common belief that justice is an allotrion agathon (see NE V, 1130a2—5). On the
notion of allotrion agathon, see G. Zanetti, La Nozione di Giustizia in Aristotele (Bologna,
1993), p. 21: ‘La giustizia universale si differenzia dalle altre virth grazie al suo
costitutivo rapportarsi all’ altro: essa rappresenta dunque il fondamento intersoggettivo
della virtt, la fondamentale interazione presupposta da Aristotele nella sua concezione
della giustizia come virtt sociale, ponte teorico fra cid che in epoca moderna sarebbero
stati definiti come ambiti dell’etica e della politica’. Cf. R. Bodéiis, La Véritable
Politique et ses Vertus Selon Aristote (Leuven, 2004), pp. 109-12.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 579

awareness of the relationships established, without which individuals could

eschew their own contributions and fail to acknowledge the advantages
yielded by life in the community.
As for awareness, lack of it would prevent people from realizing acommon
ground of action and of life; awareness of reciprocal loving seems to be at the basis
of particular justice, which can be either distributive or rectificatory.°° Perhaps more
than in distributive justice, the necessity for aware interactions emerges in
the rectificatory, in that, as Aristotle explains at NE V, 1130b30—-1131a9
when he draws a distinction within the sphere of particular justice into distrib-
utive and rectificatory, the latter operates in interactions between one person
and another. In particular, given that the relationships involved in justice of
the rectificatory kind are divided into voluntary, which include activities such
as selling, buying and so forth, and counter-voluntary ones, such as theft,
adultery etc., voluntary relationships will be those more fitting our context.
As it seems, voluntary interactions, among which commercial transactions
are included, might be extended to political ‘exchanges’ in general, which is
confirmed by the idea expressed at NE V, 1132b31—1133a2 that reciprocal
action is the basis of the city’s unity:
In commercial associations, however, the parties are bound together by a
form of the just that is like this, i.e. what is reciprocal in proportional terms,
not in terms of numerical equality. For it is reciprocal action governed by
proportion that keeps the city together. Either people seek to return evil for
evil, and if they don’t, it seems like slavery; or they seek to return good for
good, and if they don’t, there is no giving in exchange, and it is exchange
that keeps them together.
At any rate, both distributive and rectificatory justice must rely on a ground of
reciprocity,’ and the latter form of justice seems to be the basic condition of
the well-functioning of the polis, just insofar as it puts people in relation to
one another, although not necessarily in personal and intimate terms. So much
for reciprocity and awareness of mutual loving; in the next section I will dis-
cuss the issue of well-wishing. I am going to treat it as a separate matter in
that, as I believe, such an issue is preliminary to the description of the respects
in which political friendship resembles both the friendship rooted in utility
and the friendship of ethical excellence.

5° See NE V, 1130b30-1131al.
51 See D.G. Ritchie, ‘Aristotle’s Subdivisions of “Particular Justice” ’, Classical
Review, 8 (1894), pp. 185-92, p. 185. Ritchie maintains that the concept of reciprocity is
at the basis of those forms of particular justice; he coins the term ‘Catallactic justice’ with
reference to the ground of reciprocity which makes the practice of particular justice pos-
sible. On his account of Catallactic justice see p. 192 of his article. Cf. Bodéiis, La
Véritable Politique et ses Vertus Selon Aristote, p. 107; cf. B.A.O Williams, Justice as a
Virtue, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A.O. Rorty (Berkeley, 1980), pp. 188-99.
580 E. IRRERA

IV
Having argued that political friendship is a real kind of friendship, let us try to
find out what kind of friendship it is, or, in other words, in what way friends in
political communities wish each other well. My view is that, in some respects,
the well-wishing proper to civic friendships is akin to the well-wishing of
friendships grounded in utility, as Aristotle himself openly declares, whereas,
in other respects, it might be compared to friendships grounded in areté.
Let us now see in what respects political friendship might be taken as a
friendship of utility, and in what sense it seems closer to friendship between
inherently good people; as we have already seen, friendships grounded in util-
ity are described as relationships which are not caused by the inner character-
istics of the friend, but only by the advantage that can be drawn from him.
That the individual is not loved for the sake of himself seems to be the main
reason why friendships based on utility get easily dissolved. Were a friend
loved for her inner qualities, friendship would be something lasting, as it
might be entailed by Aristotle’s pronouncement on the stability of hé proté
philia: ‘friendship seems something stable, and this alone is stable’.*” By con-
trast, utility-friendships are dissolved when the parties become different, so
that, if they cease being pleasant or useful, their friendship terminates;** the
useful, as Aristotle explains, ‘is not something that lasts, but varies with the
moment; so, when what made them be friends has been removed, the friendship
is dissolved as well, in so far as it existed in relation to what brought it about’ at
We might wonder whether political friendships possess the contingent and
transitory character which is proper to utility-friendships, and also if they are
friendships kata sumbebékos. My answer to both hypothetical questions is
negative. Although it is true that in political friendships friends do not love
each other haplos and they join in political communities for the sake of advan-
tage, they do not get dissolved so easily. Although Aristotle shows his realis-
tic concern with the reasons why political constitutions often change and
rebellions take place, as he does for example in Book V of the Politics, the
friendship at the basis of a political organization gets dissolved only when the
reciprocal relationships among the citizens hinge on an extremely low degree
of justice; for instance, when fellow-citizens do not conform themselves to
the legislative system in force in their community or in case the established
laws fail to attain the common advantage. Aristotle’s concern for the causes of
political change does not seem to be a matter of mere historical curiosity, and
might reveal his eagerness to spread the need to reflect on the measures to be
adopted in order to keep constitutions safe.*° For this purpose, political friendship

52 FE VII, 1237b9-10.
53 NE VII, 1156a19-21.
54 NE VIII, 1156a21-4.
55 Cf. Aristotle, Politics V, 1301a20-5S.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 581

would not be unessential to the community, especially if we think that friend-

ship keeps cities together.*°
Political friendship seems akin to utility-friendships because it is founded
on the continued and shared expectation, on the part of each citizen, of per-
sonal advantage’’ as emerges at NE VIII, 1160a9-11, where it is claimed that
‘people make their way together on the basis that they will get some advan-
tage from it, and so as to provide themselves with some necessity of life’. In
political communities people join together without knowing each other, and
they are mainly related insofar as the association is a convenient way to get an
advantage. In this respect, utility-friendships are surely prone to recrimina-
tions;°> however, in constitutions of good quality, it seems reasonable to
assume that their degree of stability will be higher than in a crude kind of
utility-friendship. Although advantage is the first mover of civic friendships,
we should not forget that the aim of expert lawgivers is to promote the highest
good, and that the state, as we have already seen, does not seek after the mere
life of its members, but rather aims at a good life.°? Even more, that at Politics
II, 1262b7 friendship is openly pronounced to be ‘the greatest good of states’
seems to imply that co-operation between fellow-citizens, although pursued
in view of self-interested goals, engenders some good-will and stability
within the state.”
Another aspect of friendship grounded in utility is that utility-friendship is
not characterized by living together, and people engaged in such a kind of
friendship do not pursue the pleasant, as Aristotle makes clear at NE VIII,
1156a24—31 when he introduces the example of friendship among old people.
On the one hand, civic friendship resembles this kind of relationship insofar
as people do not live together in the community except in a broad sense, and in
most cases they do not even know each other; on the other hand, Aristotle
sometimes observes that the bonds linking citizens to each other are not the
same as those linking different cities: so, cities which are, for example, mere
alliances, as e.g. at Politics U1, 1280b7—12:

56 NE VIII, 1155a22-3.
57 See Cooper, Aristotle on the Forms of Friendship, pp. 645-6.
°8 NE 1162b16-21; 1163a9-16; EE 1243a2-b38.
59 Politics I, 1252b28-30. Cf. Politics I, 1280a31—2; 1280b32-S. Irwin, Aristotle’s
First Principles, pp. 399-406. See in particular p. 402: ‘Since the city is comprehensive,
seeking to plan for everything that is needed for the complete good, a rational agent has
good reason to want to share in its deliberations. This argument implies that a virtuous
person does not value the city simply because of its general concern with the expedient
(Cf. EN 1160a9-14). Aristotle suggests that essentially political activities are them-
selves part of the complete and happy life. If the city provides only the instrumental
resources needed for a complete and happy life, it is not clear why the virtuous person
values just action for its own sake’.
60 See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 45.
582 ; BE. IRRERA

Any polis which is truly so called, and is not merely one in name, must
devote itself to the end of encouraging goodness (areté). Otherwise, a
political association sinks into a mere alliance, which only differs in space
[i.e. in the contiguity of its members] from other forms of alliance where the
members live at a distance from one another.
What Aristotle is saying here is that a real state must pay attention to ethical
excellence. He points out that, without such a concern, law would simply be a
covenant, instead of being a rule oflife which contributes to making the mem-
bers of a polis good and just. In this respect, political friendship resembles the
kind of friendship which involves a display of ethical excellence more than it
does friendship of mere advantage.
More than in any other kind of friendship, the activities involved in primary
friendship allow the exhibition and the actualization of human potentialities;°!
citizens can act on the basis of a stable disposition of character, i.e. justice,
which is even more solid if grounded on friendly feelings among them. If jus-
tice is more than obedience to a mere set of rules shared in as an external
imposition and is a proper disposition of character, reciprocal trust and coop-
eration between just citizens will rest on safer ground. But if justice is estab-
lished by virtuous lawgivers, even when it is not an inner disposition of
character possessed by all the citizens stability will be secured within the
polis, provided that they confine themselves to sticking to the laws. Only if a
polis falls short of justice, either legal or based on inner excellence or both,
will friendship be dissolved, insofar as the citizens are mostly advantage-
seekers and do not love each other for their own sake.
With reference to the perfect kind of friendship, Aristotle states: “However,
itis the friendship between good people, those resembling each other in excel-
lence, that is complete; for each alike of these wishes good things for the other
in so far as he is good, and he is good in himself.’
Intrinsic goodness prompts love between similar people, insofar as their
excellence leads them to establish friendly ties with individuals provided with
the same characteristics as their own. This induces Aristotle to claim that the
friend is ‘another self’ (allos autos).® As Irwin believes, ‘The virtuous friend

6! Tbid.
62 NE VIII, 1156b7-9.
63 | will not treat the issue in detail; however, the notion of friend as allos autos has
often been thought to represent ‘the crucial concept which permits Aristotle to pass from
virtuous self-love to an altruistic concern for the interests of others’ (Kahn, Aristotle and
Altruism, p. 29). It might also be taken as implying that the virtuous person’s attitude
towards herself might serve as a normative paradigm for her attitudes towards her friends
(see Whiting, Impersonal Friends, p. 4), in other words, that relations of philia to others
derive from one’s relations to oneself (see Annas, Plate and Aristotle on Friendship and
Altruism, p. 539). The idea of friend as “allos autos’ casts a new light on the relationships
egoism and altruism. It seems that, on Aristotle’s view, there is some compatibility
between egoism (as involving rational desire towards what is good in absolute, e.g.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP = 583

is “another self” because he is a virtuous person, sharing the aims and pleasures
of his friend because they are both virtuous’. In political communities it is
not always possible to recognize any fellow-citizen as similar to oneself,
especially because not every individual can be good in a community; never-
theless, this does not exclude that even less virtuous persons may feel love
towards eminently virtuous ones, for instance when friendship based on
superiority is at stake.
As I have already suggested, in political friendship intimate relationships are
not practicable, nor do fellow-citizens love each other for their inner features, not
least because many of them do not have good dispositional traits. Only friends
resembling each other in excellence want to live together, contrary to the needy,
who just want some help; in order to spend their time together, friends must enjoy
the same things;® still, such a kind of intimate friendship cannot take place when
friendship involves an entire citizen body, provided that it is not possible to be a
friend to many, just as it is not possible to feel erotic desire for many people at
once.*’ The kind of love people can feel for each other in a political community
hardly fits the idea of intimate love; certainly it is a kind of impersonal love,
which we could identify as a form of respect; but reciprocal respect, guaranteed
through the excellence of justice, assures mutual reliability and the possibility of
living without fear of continuous recriminations.
In political communities people do not choose their friends, but they can be
good towards each other to the extent that they are respectful of the estab-
lished laws, even if their behaviour is not dictated by an intrinsic excellence.
However, if some degree, even a minimal one, of areté is maintained within
the polis, political friendship can be something lasting, just like friendship
between good individuals.”

ethical excellence) and altruism (conceived as a form of concern for the welfare of others
for their own sake). See for instance T. Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton, NJ,
1970). See also J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth,
1977), p. 132, who speaks of ‘self-referential altruism’, i.e. a ‘concern for others who
have some special connection with oneself’; cf. pp. 84 f. (he has adopted this terminology
from C.D. Broad, ‘Egoism as a Theory of Human Motives’, Hibbert Journal, 48
(1949-50), pp. 105-14). The logical priority of egoism over altruism is stressed by Kahn,
Aristotle and Altruism, p. 26 (cf. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, pp.
70, 76 and 103).
64 Irwin, Aristotle’s First Principles, p. 398. Cf. Kahn, Aristotle and Altruism, p. 31:
‘The excellence and pleasure of the good life partially consists in the observation of
moral activity; but we are better placed to observe the actions of others; hence the happy
man will need others around him, who are like him in goodness and bound to him in
friendship, so that he can observe their actions as akin to his own (1169b30—70a4)’.
65 Cf. Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 41.
66 NE VIII, 1157b19-24.
67 NE VIII, 1158a10-12.
68 See Aristotle, NE VIII, 1156b10-12.
584 ; FE. IRRERA

Reciprocal trust is surely a typical feature of friendship grounded in good-

ness. At NE VIII, 1157a20-4 Aristotle says:
The friendship of the good is also the only kind that is immune to slanders;
for it is not easy to give credence to anyone about a person one has scruti-
nized oneself over a long period; also trust exists between them, and the
thought ‘he would never have treated me unjustly’, and all the other features
that one expects of a friendship that is truly friendship.”
In order to have a civic friendship grounded in excellence, trust is required.
However, trust in a polis cannot exist regardless of the existence of unjust
individuals, in that their search for personal advantage can create conflicts. To
this it might be replied that justice should be displayed in order to resolve dis-
putes, and laws themselves are established in order to prevent irregularities
and consequent conflicts. By acting according to shared norms of justice,
good fellow-citizens will establish a reciprocal bond of trust and loyalty
between themselves, just as in the ‘virtue-friendship’. In this respect, they
might be thought of as living together, just insofar as they belong to the same
community and share in the same network of laws, although their community
of life turns out to be impersonal.
The connection between friendship, trust and stability might also explain
the reason for Aristotle’s belief that lawgivers pay more attention to friend-
ship than to justice.”? Unlike absolute justice, which does not necessarily
involve forms of affections and intimacy, friendship, conceived in its perfect
form, is a better guarantee of trust and stability; in fact, to be friends implies
behaving justly to one another, so that good friends will not need rules of jus-
tice.’' That friendship between fellow-citizens, although being a kind of
shared-advantage friendship, might have an ethical character is confirmed by
the fact that, even within utility-friendships, a basic distinction can be drawn
between nomiké and éthiké philia, the former depending on rules and expect-
ing returns proportional to outlay, the latter proceeding from character and
involving a certain amount of trust.”
The more éthiké is the friendship subsisting in political communities, the
more justice will resemble a disposition of character. Justice as mere lawful-
ness differs from justice as an ethical disposition. Nevertheless, I think that, in
both cases, justice may be regarded as a plausible substitute for excellence,
even when it is mere lawfulness, although it is not practised for the other’s
sake. Behaviour according to laws of justice can promote the well-being of
each citizen without this being the outcome of a conscious purpose. If love
cannot be felt towards unknown people, nevertheless respect can be taken as a
69 Cf. EE VII, 1237b10-13, where it is claimed that there is no stable friendship with-
out confidence.
10 NE VII, 1155a23-4.
7 NE VIII, 1155a26-7.
? See Stern-Gillet, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Friendship, p. 150.
 ARISTOTLE’S THEORY OF POLITICAL FRIENDSHIP 585

form of well-wishing, maybe less personal and more formal, but capable of
replacing the reciprocal love typical of virtuous persons.

Vv
It is now time to draw some conclusion. In this article I have tried to sketch a
general description of political friendship, and define its boundaries through
the analysis of resemblances to and differences from both friendships based
on ethical excellence and friendships grounded in utility; what emerges from
this investigation of political friendship is a picture whose distinguishing fea-
tures are reciprocity of virtuous acts and useful benefits. Politiké philia
appears as a system of bonds established so as to produce both individual
advantage and the advantage of the whole of the community. No kind of politi-
cal organization will work without the employment of some degree of ethical
excellence, given that individual advantage pursued without any respect for
other people’s needs turns out to shake the foundations of the political com-
munity: lawfulness, trust and equality of opportunity according to worth.
Political friendship in non-ideal communities involves people of different
sorts, among whom there will be many who are not provided with the inner
dispositional traits typical of virtuous individuals; still, the adoption of norms
of justice seems to supplement the lack of virtuous inner features and to pro-
mote mutual advantage according to excellence. Political friendship is neither
a mere advantage-friendship, nor a pure friendship grounded in goodness; in
any case, it is plausible to assume that it is a friendship consisting in some
reciprocity of roles and functions and involving ethical excellence with a
view to the well-being of the community.
Political friendship will never be exclusively based on authentic goodness,
not even in its most ideal condition, since the intimate well-wishing proper to
such a friendship cannot take place among many people who do not know
each other; moreover, justice may not be practised for its intrinsic nobility,
but simply for the sake of advantage. However, in any political community
advantage will never mean exclusive and personal utility: rather, mutual
cooperation which supplies reciprocal needs will require some degree of
respect for the interest of one’s fellow-citizens.
That Aristotle insists on the characteristics of stability, trust and mutual
love typical of friendship of goodness rather than sheer justice seems to imply
that endorsing authentic friendship in political communities amounts to fos-
tering a justice of higher quality than mere ‘prudential’ obedience to the
established laws. In this respect, friendship becomes a source of inspiration
for a good life in the polis.

Elena Irrera UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

 AUGUSTINE AND THE RHETORIC
OF ROMAN DECLINE’

Andrew R. Murphy’

Abstract: The rhetoric of moral, spiritual and political decline represents a recurrent
rhetorical form, one that has appeared throughout history in a variety of contexts. This
article takes a closer look at one episode in the history of decline rhetoric — the
fourth-century anti-Christian critiques regarding Roman imperial decline, and Augus-
tine’s responses to them in his City of God — in order to explore the phenomenon of
decline rhetoric more deeply. Augustine’s response to those who blamed Christianity
for the empire’s decline took place on both the empirical and the interpretive levels.
First, he drew on the Roman historians Sallust and Livy to argue that moral decline, if
it took place at all, predated Christianity. Second, his theory of the two cities took issue
with the notion of decline as a fundamental misunderstanding of historical change.
The article closes by drawing out some implications of this particular study for
approaching decline rhetoric in political life more generally, concluding with a con-
sideration of the controversial remarks of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who
viewed the 11 September attacks as divine punishment for American moral decline.

Bad times! Troublesome times! This men are saying. Let our lives be good;
and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are, such are the
times.*
Consider the following narrative, or something like it.
Once, this nation was governed by a moral-religious consensus that checked
self-interest and cemented the close connection between piety, self-sacrifice,
and a commitment to the common good. Under this regime, the nation
became great, growing from a small group of fledgling settlements to rule a
world empire. As time went on, however, commitment to these religious
foundations waned, and what had formerly been a relatively robust public
consensus was supplanted by new and quite different ideas, ones that under-
mined the willingness of citizens to work for the common good and distracted
them from service to their neighbours. A number of citizens and public fig-
ures tried to shore up the traditional beliefs and practices, but neglect of these
foundations brought a steady rise in social pathologies and a diminution of

' An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the
American Political Science Association. For helpful comments on that occasion, I thank
Nadia Urbinati. Thanks go also to Cary Nederman, Scott Huelin and John von Heyking.
2 Asst. Prof. of Humanities and Political Philosophy, Christ College, Valparaiso
University, Valparaiso, IN 46383-6493, USA. Email: Andrew.Murphy @ vaipo.edu
3 Augustine, Sermon 30, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers
of the Christian Church, ed. P. Schaff; Vol. 6, trans. R.G. MacMullen (Grand Rapids,
MI, 1980 [1887]), p. 352.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 587

public morality. As a result, the nation’s past glories now seem to rebuke the
present, and serve as a shameful reminder of a time in which public and pri-
vate virtue coexisted. Only a reaffirmation of these foundational values offers
hope for reuniting national greatness and goodness.
The above narrative will probably sound familiar to twenty-first century
Americans, as well as to those who have followed the dynamics of religion
and culture in any number of other countries since at least the 1970s. In the
contemporary United States, such critiques often lament the loss of a pur-
ported Judeo-Christian consensus, with talk of ‘culture wars’ appearing
everywhere from talk radio to decisions of the US Supreme Court.* According
to many critics, much of this moral or spiritual decline has come about due to
the destructive effects of the 1960s, in which the search for liberation (per-
sonal, political, sexual) has led to a variety of social pathologies, all moral or
spiritual at their core.” The American left has historically been less overtly
religious, generally speaking, in its rhetoric, but the revival of republican and
communitarian perspectives in recent years has injected the language of val-
ues and morality into progressivist critique in new and intriguing ways.° Each
of these critiques of contemporary American society has focused increasing
attention on the nation’s founding period as offering insights into potential
solutions for contemporary ills. More generally, such late-twentieth century
critiques of American society often reflect a larger current of theorizing and
critique that blames liberal theory (and, by implication, liberal society) for a
host of civic ills including a declining commitment to the common good, an
increasing reliance on individualistic rights claims, and the fostering of a false
sense of ‘neutrality’ that privileges autarchic, autonomous reasoning at the
expense of constitutive commitments and group identities.’
With surprisingly little alteration, however, the above narrative might also
appear in an incredible variety of situations across cultures and times. Each of
4 See, most recently, Justice Scalia’s dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558
(2003). Scalia laments that ‘the Court has taken sides in the culture war’ (p. 18). The cen-
tral text elaborating these issues remains James D. Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to
Define America (New York, 1991).
5 See, e. g., Robert Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and
American Decline (New York, 1996), esp. pp. 57-61.
© See, e.g., Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Pub-
lic Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1996); Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Col-
lapse and Revival of American Community (New York, 2000); and R. Bellah et al., Hab-
its of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, 1985).
7 See,e. g., I. Young, Jnclusion and Democracy (Oxford, 2000); I. Young, Justice and
the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 1990); M.A. Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impover-
ishment of Political Discourse (New York, 1991); M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits
of Justice (Cambridge, 2nd edn., [1982] 1998); but cf. B. Yack, “Liberalism and its Com-
munitarian Critics: Does Liberal Practice Live Down to Liberal Theory?’, in Community
in America: The Challenges of Habits of the Heart, ed. C. Reynolds and R. Norman
(Berkeley, 1988).
588 A.R. MURPHY

the major religious traditions, for example, has produced reform movements
dedicated to rescuing pristine original doctrines and practices from the accre-
tions of the ages, and directly connecting such renewal with a reform of social
mores,® The fourteenth-century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun argued that
‘[vJast and powerful empires are founded on religion’, and invited readers to
‘consider .. . how matters change when the religious fervor begins to weaken
and gets corrupted so that religion ceases to play an important part. . .’:
weaker but socially cohesive armies can defeat those of great empires.” Reli-
gion underwrites social cohesion, and the neglect of the former will eventu-
ally prove fatal to the latter. The rhetoric of spiritual decline is thus neither
uniquely American, nor uniquely Christian, nor uniquely modern.
Such declinist accounts generally consist of several clearly identifiable ele-
ments, and constitute a recognizable rhetorical form. First, they identify a
phenomenon or group of phenomena as illustrative of the seriousness of con-
temporary decline. Such claims are always put forward as empirical ones,
with vivid examples or statistics presented to back them up.'° Second, in addi-
tion to explaining what is wrong, decline narratives also identify an ‘agent’ or
entity responsible for initiating the process of decline, and assign this ‘agent’
a causal role in spurring on the observed decay.'' Decline narratives, third,
propose a time period in which the agent of decline appeared and became
entrenched, however gradually, in the Zeitgeist; and trace decline since that
time by presenting unfavourable contrasts between contemporary conditions
and the world as it existed prior to the appearance of the ‘decline agent’.
Finally, declinists generally conclude their accounts with calls for reintegrat-
ing the lost values that previously obtained into contemporary life.'? The
power of declinist rhetoric lies not in advancing original critiques of the exist-
ing order, but in blending longstanding rhetorical strategies — for example

8 E.g. English Puritanism, the American Great Awakenings; for such movements in
the Muslim tradition, which are often tied to apocalyptic social critique, see David Cook,
‘Moral Apocalyptic in Islam’, Studia Islamica, 86 (1997), pp. 37-69.
9 An Arab Philosophy of History: Selections from the Prolegomena of Ibn Khaldun of
Tunis, trans. Charles Issawi (London, 1950), pp. 131-2.
10 Ror a contemporary example, see the data in Putnam, Bowling Alone.
'l For example, much of the contemporary environmental rhetoric locates the Scien-
tific Revolution (and important figures such as Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes) as the cen-
tral mechanism responsible for much of the contemporary environmental danger. See
Andrew Murphy, ‘Antimodernism, Environmentalism, and the Recurrent Rhetoric of
Decline’, Environmental Ethics, 25 (1) (Spring 2003), pp. 79-98. ‘Agent’ in this context
need not imply a person or group of persons, but has to do with the assignment of causal
responsibility for the perceived decline.
!2 One exception to this claim is the sort of apocalyptic social rhetoric that views
moral decline as heralding imminent divine judgment. I do not address this sort of cri-
tique in this article.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 589

heightening a sense of fear in the audience’? — with a sense of historical

urgency about the dire nature of the present moment.
In this article, I would like to step outside the contemporary fray and con-
sider what we might learn from visiting a historically distant case of religious
decline rhetoric: Rome in the fourth and early fifth centuries. More specifi-
cally, I shall focus on Augustine’s response to the anti-Christian rhetoric of
Roman imperial decline in his day. I do not claim to be advancing a new inter-
pretation of Augustine’s approach to history or society here; rather, I hope to
revisit a historical moment, and a set of texts, in the history of thinking about
decline and society, and draw out some insights presented by these authors for
the consideration of scholars in a very different time and place. The custom-
ary historical disclaimers all apply here: we are talking about vast differences
in historical placement; contexts affect the terms of debate in fundamental
ways; and so on. Indeed, in some ways the nature of change in the two exam-
ples is precisely inverted: whereas Roman culture underwent a movement
from relatively loosely articulated, syncretic polytheism to a rather orthodox
Christianity (internecine disputes notwithstanding), contemporary critics often
decry the disappearance of a religious consensus and the rise of a cacopho-
nous multitude of sects and even religious hyperindividualism.'* The issues
raised, then, are far from identical. But they are, I think, broadly and sugges-
tively parallel in ways that I shall lay out below and at the conclusion of this
article.
I see a number of reasons for turning to Augustine and his Roman interloc-
utors for insight that might help us puzzle through questions of history, rheto-
ric and decline in our own time. Both historical moments share a strong claim
that social pathologies have been brought on by the loss of traditional reli-
gious foundations. An accomplished teacher of rhetoric himself, perched at
the nexus of classical and Christian culture, Augustine’s lifelong project — if
we can speak of such a thing in the singular — represented an ongoing effort
to make peace with the classical tradition that formed such a large part of his
education and training.'° The fruits of this effort, most notably the Confes-
sions and City of God but also scattered across hundreds of occasional pieces,
sermons, controversial literature and correspondence, represent perhaps the
most far-reaching and articulate attempt of any of the Church Fathers.
Secondly, Augustine proposes a particularly powerful and comprehensive
response to anti-Christian declinists of his day. As I stated above, declinist
accounts generally consist of both a series of empirical claims and a narrative
that locates those empirical claims in a causal nexus flowing from a “decline
agent’ to concrete social pathologies. Augustine, as we shall see, does spend a

'3 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1382a25—32, 1383a8.

14 See Bellah’s comments on ‘Sheilaism’ in Habits of the Heart, p. 221.
'5 Charles N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and
Action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford, 1940), ch. 11.
590 A.R. MURPHY

great deal of time attending to the empirical claims (that catastrophes have
worsened since Christianity became the empire’s official religion). But he
spends far more time treating the fundamental historiographical and interpre-
tive premises of his declinist opponents — that one can infer God’s verdict on
acommunity’s piety by examining its earthly prospects, that history presents
a story of decline induced by ‘decline agents’ — and presenting his own
understanding of history as the story of two cities defined by the objects of
their love. In considering the totality of his response in the City of God, then,
we shall see that Augustine’s engagement with the late imperial rhetoric of
Roman decline both drew on an earlier Roman rhetoric of republican decline
while taking issue with the whole notion of declinism as a way of reading
God’s purposes in history.
One final note before proceeding. I seek to avoid two extremes in reacting
to the ubiquitous presence of declinist rhetoric in its many historical in-
stantiations; that is, I neither accept uncritically or anecdotally the claims that
‘things used to be better, things now are worse’, nor do I assume that all such
critiques are mere carping and complaining about ‘the good old days’. Neither
response, in my view, takes declinist critique seriously, for the substantive
and powerful way of speaking about historical change that it is. The reader
will find throughout this paper that I am sceptical that declinist accounts are,
on one level, ‘true’ (i.e. I do not think that they make a persuasive case as a
comprehensive description or interpretation of social reality). At the same
time, their presence across time and place tells us that they certainly do ring
true, at some level, to countless people. For this reason alone, declinist rheto-
ric is deserving of serious study. I hope, then, to approach the subject with an
appropriate charitable scepticism, as suggested by Augustine’s typically tren-
chant observation that serves as this article’s epigraph.

Augustine’s Opponents:
Christians, ‘Pagans’ and the Roman Empire”®
Scholars have long known that Augustine undertook the City of God at the
request of a number of his fellow Christians, who were seeking a response to
widespread criticisms that Christianity was responsible for Roman imperial
decline late in the fourth century. Such debates reached a head after the sack
of Rome in 410, with traditionalists claiming that this latest and crowning
insult was brought on by Romans turning away from their traditional religions
and embracing Christianity as the official faith of the empire. It also seems
clear that, aside from the polemical value such a work would serve in disputes
between Christians and non-Christians, a significant amount of disaffection
and concern existed within the Christian community as well; and Augustine
sought, in his sermons as well as in the development of his ‘two cities’ thesis,

'6 Several disclaimers are given in an appendix on pp. 605-6.

 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 591

to reassure his flock and place the events of 410 into a larger (historical and
eschatological) context."
The precise nature and social location of these criticisms remains some-
what difficult to pin down: Augustine distinguishes between ‘ignorant men
who lack .. . knowledge’ and ‘[t]hose among our adversaries who are learned
in the liberal arts’ and who have inflamed mobs’ hostility towards Christian-
ity.'* Early in the third century, Arnobius of Sicca refers to Roman declinists
as merely ‘spread[ing] abroad common rumors’ .'’ Nonetheless, it seems safe
to say that critiques of Christianity as causally implicated in the empire’s
steadily worsening prospects were widespread in the late fourth and early
fifth centuries, at least widespread enough for Christians to feel the need for a
cogent reply.
What sorts of charges did such anti-Christian declinists level? Some critics
apparently claimed that Christianity had brought with it an increase in such
phenomena as plagues, famines, wars, droughts, and other natural disasters.
Years prior to Augustine, we find such prominent Christians as Tertullian,
Arnobius and Cyprian taking issue with anti-Christian rhetoric along these
lines. The latter noted that ‘very many are complaining that to [Christians] it is
ascribed that wars arise more frequently, that plague, that famines rage, and
that long droughts are suspending the showers and rains . . .’.”° Tertullian, for
his part, complained that ‘If the Tiber has overflowed its banks, if the Nile has
remained in its bed, if the sky has been still, or if the earth been in commotion,
if death has made its devastations, or famine its afflictions, your cry immedi-
ately is, “This is the fault of the Christians!’”.’*' Symmachus, prefect of Rome,
noted how a famine followed directly on the withdrawal ofthe Vestal Virgins’
and priests’ subsidies: “The lands were not at fault: we should not blame the
winds; rust did not spoil the crops, nor did weeds choke the standing corn. It
was blasphemy that dried up the year’s yield... What comparable disaster did
the provinces have to endure when the public conscience provided food for

'7 See Theodore S. DeBruyn, “‘Augustine’s Sermons on the Sack of Rome: Ambigu-
ity Within a “Totalizing Discourse” ’, Journal of Early Christian Studies, 1 (1993), esp.
pp. 411-14.
18 Augustine, City ofGod, ed. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge, 1998), Bk. 2, ch. 3, p. 53. See
also Augustine, Letter 138 “To Marcellinus’, in Select Library, Vol. 1 (Grand Rapids,
MI, 1974 [1886]), ch. 2.
'19 Arnobius of Sicca, Adversus Nationes, trans. George E. McCracken (Westminster,
MD, 1959), Bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 58.
20 Cyprian, To Demetrianus, sec. 2, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers [American reprint of
the Edinburgh edition], ed. Rev. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, Vol. 5 (Buf-
falo, 1885), p. 458; see also sec. 8, p. 459. See also Arnobius, Adversus Nationes, Bk. 1,
ch. 9.
21 Arnobius, Adversus Nationes, Bk. 1, ch. 9.
ie A.R. MURPHY

the servants of religion?** Augustine, too, acknowledged these charges: if

Christianity had appeared before the Punic Wars, he opined, many would
have blamed it for that devastation as well.”
Far more prominent, apparently, and powerful (since the above claims
were rather easily undermined by a cursory look at natural history)” was the
claim that traditional Roman religion had facilitated the expansion and main-
tenance of Rome’s worldwide empire. According to this view, the abandon-
ment — indeed, the proscription, in 391, by Theodosius — of traditional
sacrifices under Theodosian Christianity was responsible for the empire’s
ensuing decline. Rhetorically speaking, the causal line from 391 to 410 was
clear: the enemies of Christianity, Augustine reports, ‘say that this calamity
has fallen upon the city of Rome because she ceased to worship her gods’;
they ‘attribute the disasters which have befalien the Roman commonwealth to
the fact that our religion has forbidden the offering of sacrifices to the gods’.”
Shortly after making these statements, Augustine summarized the aim of the
City of God as a reply to ‘those who attribute the wars by which this world is
consumed, and especially the recent sack of Rome by the barbarians, to the
Christian religion by which they are forbidden to offer abominable sacrifices
to demons’.”°
These traditionalist claims about Christianity’s responsibility for imperial
decline seemed to target not only Christian monotheism and exclusivist
claims to salvific power, but also Christian newness. In other words, critics
keenly sensed that the ancestral religion had been abandoned in pursuit of
something newer, to the detriment of Roman imperial health: ‘we should not
have abandoned the religion of our fathers to be led over into barbarous and
foreign rites’.*’ Lactantius noted this grounding of the popular opposition to
Christianity: ‘if you should ask [the people] the grounds of their persuasion,
they can assign none, but have recourse to the judgment of their ancestors,
saying that they were wise, that they approved [the traditional rites], that they
knew what was best . . .’.“8 This aspect of the argument about the negative
public consequences of Christianity continued, if in slightly altered form,
well after Augustine: Zosimus, writing in the early sixth century, emphasized
22 Symmachus, Relatione 3, sec. 14, in Prefect and Emperor: the Relationes of
Symmachus, A.D. 384, trans. R.H. Barrow (Oxford, 1973), p. 45.
23 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 3, ch. 31, p. 140.
24 Tertullian, Ad Nationes, Bk. 1, ch. 9, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Roberts and
Donaldson, Vol. 3, pp. 117—18; and see Orosius, The Seven Books of History Against the
Pagans, Vol. 50 of The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, ed. Roy J. DeFerrari
(Washington, DC, 1964). For more on Orosius see below, p. 595.
2> Augustine, City of God, Bk. 1, ch. 15, p. 25; Bk. 1, ch. 36, p. 46.
26 Tbid,, Bk. 2, ch. 2, p..52.
27 Amobius, Adversus Nationes, Bk. 2, ch. 66, p. 178.
28 Lactantius, Divine Institutes, Bk. 5, ch. 20, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Rob-
erts and Donaldson, Vol. 7, p. 155.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 593

the abandonment of the gods as epitomizing a spirit of innovation that led to

Rome’s downfall.” In fact, some Christians acknowledged the newness of
Christianity and sought to turn this quality in its favour: as Ambrose put it,
‘Not the old age of years is worthy of praise but that of character. There is no
shame in passing to better things.’*’ In this sense, Rome has ‘grown up’ from
paganism to Christianity; what traditionalists criticized as ‘newness’ was
actually a process of social development and a movement towards the true
religion away from a false one.
I touched briefly on Symmachus above: his personal connection to Augus-
tine*! and his prominent public role as guardian of Roman religious tradition,
makes his dispute with Ambrose over the Altar of Victory worth considering
in the context of this discussion. Symmachus lamented the lack of attention to
traditional religious rites: ‘now neglecting the altars is, for Romans, a way of
furthering one’s career’ .** Protesting to Emperor Valentinian for the restoration
of the ‘pagan’ Altar of Victory to the Senate House, Symmachus defended
‘ancestral religious rites’ and asked the emperor to “give us back our religious
institutions as they used to be when for so long they were of value to the
state’.**Symmachus connects the Altar of Victory to defences against exter-
nal enemies — “Who is so friendly with the barbarians as not to require an
Altar of Victory?’ — as well as to the customs of the Senate and the ability of
‘religious sanction [to terrify] the false mind’ and frighten potential perjurers.
Drawing a close connection between the history of Roman expansion and the
maintenance of traditional religious forms, Symmachus has Rome itself
address the Emperors: ‘This worship of mine brought the whole world under
the rule of my laws, these sacred rites drove back Hannibal from the walls,
and the Senones from the capitol.’**
Thus we can see, in rough outline, how the Roman declinist argument
went, and how it fits into the very brief overview of the declinist rhetoric
that I sketched at the outset of this paper. First, anti-Christian declinists
offered a series of empirical observations about the current imperial situation:
specifically, natural disasters, increasingly brazen ‘barbarian’ invasions and,

29 Zosimus, Historia Nuova 2.7, trans. James J. Buchanan and Harold T. Davis (San
Antonio, 1967), pp. 53-4; see also W. Goffart, “Zosimus, The First Historian of Rome’s
Fall’, American Historical Review, 76 (1971), pp. 412-41, esp. pp. 416-17.
30 Ambrose, Epistle 18, in Select Library (second series), Vol. 10, p. 418.
31 Symmachus approved Augustine for a position as teacher of rhetoric at Milan; see
Augustine, Confessions, Bk. 5, ch. 23, in The Works of St. Augustine: A Translation for
the Twenty-First Century, intro. and trans. M. Boulding and J. Rotelle (New York, 1997),
p. 130; and Brown, Augustine, ch. 7.
32 Symmachus, correspondence (c.383), in Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity:
A Sourcebook, ed. A.D. Lee (London and New York, 2000), p. 114.
33 Symmachus, Relatione 3, sec. 3, in Prefect and Emperor, trans. Barrow, pp. 38,
36-7.
34 Symmachus, Relatione 3, sec. 9; in Prefect and Emperor, trans. Barrow, p. 41.
594 ; A.R. MURPHY

ultimately, the sack of Rome. Secondly, they identified an ‘agent’ of decline:

Christianity or, more particularly, the rise of official Christianity or, put
somewhat differently, the neglect or prohibition of traditional Roman religion
as a result of intolerant official (Theodosian) Christianity. The third ele-
ment — timeline — might vary on different accounts, but the key dates
always included Constantine’s conversion, his tolerationist Edict of Milan
(313), and the Theodosian proscription of ‘pagan’ sacrifices (391). Proposed
reforms generally included the restoration of subsidies and other types of offi-
cial support for traditional priestly functions, sacrifices, the Vestal Virgins,
and so on; or, at the very least, the lifting of prohibitions on traditional reli-
gious exercise.
The directness with which one drew a connection between Roman decline
and Christian ascent depended a great deal on one’s understanding of the
term ‘Christian times’ and/or what contemporary scholars refer to as the
‘Christianization’ of the Roman world. Tempora christiana was a term much
used and disputed during these years, both by triumphalist Christians and
their traditionalist critics. Recent scholarship has, by and large, painted a
more nuanced picture of developments than is evident from looking at im-
perial decrees and official government actions against ‘paganism.’ Despite
Jerome’s exultant claim that ‘the Huns are learning the psalm-book’,”
‘Christianization’ probably proceeded much more slowly and haltingly —
and was opposed by many local communities for various reasons — than pre-
viously thought. In addition, the term itself is freighted, often implying a
wholesale replacement of one thing (‘paganism’) with a wholly different and
other thing (‘Christianity’). Historical realities are rarely much more complex
than such a one-way process, of course, and the best scholarship on the subject
takes note of this fact.*° It is possible, furthermore, to understand Christianity as
intricately connected with Roman decline without necessarily repeating Gib-
bon’s caustic denunciations of Christian intolerance.*’

35 In Pagans and Christians, ed. Lee, p. 126.

36 E.g. Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 1; Cameron,
Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, ch. 1. Not only were both Christianity and
paganism internally plural, they were also mutually influential and formative. For the
most recent and most magisterial treatment of these issues see Peter Brown, The Rise of
Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000 (Malden, MA, 2003).
37 See, among others, Arnoldo Momigliano, ‘Christianity and the Decline of the
Roman Empire’, in The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth
Century, ed. A. Momigliano (Oxford, 1963); A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Social Background of
the Struggle Between Paganism and Christianity’, also in Conflict, ed. Momigliano;
Peter Brown, Authority and the Sacred (Cambridge, 1995), ch. 1; and Robert A. Markus,
‘Tempora Christiana Revisited’, in Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of
Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London and New York, 2000).
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 595

Augustine’s Response(s)

Empirical

For Augustine, the empirical facts of Roman decline are not nearly so
straightforward as anti-Christian polemicists might suggest: recall that the
primary charges brought to bear included natural disasters and strife of vari-
ous sorts, as well as the increasing ‘barbarian’ incursions that culminated in
the sack of Rome by Alaric’s troops in 410. Augustine was not at all con-
vinced that these dire events constituted fundamentally new phenomena, nor
that things after 410 (politically, socially, religiously) were notably worse
than in previous times: “Perhaps Rome is not perishing; perhaps she is only
scourged, not utterly destroyed; perhaps she is chastened, not brought to
nought.’** In fact, he set his younger colleague Orosius the task of assembling
all available evidence on the question of previous wars, famines and other
disasters. The result was Orosius’ Seven Books of History Against the Pagans,
a ponderous compilation of ‘the burdens of war or ravages of disease or sor-
rows of famine or horrors of earthquakes or of unusual floods or dreadful out-
breaks of fire or cruel strokes of lightning and storms of hail or even the
miseries of parricides and shameful deeds . . .’.*”
Dealing with the empirical claims of anti-Christian declinists, for Augus-
tine, involved not only refuting the charges, but exploring the importance of
Rome itself, and the classical heritage more generally. In doing so, Augustine
in the first five books of the City of God drew on the classics of the Roman tra-
dition — just the texts most formative and familiar to the educated members
of his audience — to press these claims most vigorously. The references, as
any reader will know, range across the history of Latin literature. It is no acci-
dent, however, that Augustine refers to Sallust and Livy more than any other
Roman authors, save perhaps Cicero, in the first third of the City of God. Both
Sallust and Livy viewed the writing of history as an intensely moral task, shar-
ing acommon concern regarding the moral health of the Roman polity, which
they saw as precipitously declining in their own time. Perhaps no two Latin
authors (again, save Cicero) figured more prominently in the educational
experience of Roman youth of Augustine’s generation, and the educated,
influential traditionalist Romans who represented a significant part of Augus-
tine’s target audience would have known their Sallust and Livy inside out.*°

38 Augustine, Sermon 31, in Select Library, Vol. 6, p. 356.

39 Orosius, Seven Books of History, p. 4.
40 See Catherine Conybeare, ‘Terrarum Orbi Documentum: Augustine, Camillus,
and Learning from History’, in History, the Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination,
ed. Vessey, Pollman and Fitzgerald, pp. 59-74. Also helpful are the entries ‘Livy’ (by
R.M. Ogilvie) and ‘Sallust’ (by F.R.D. Goodyear) in The Cambridge History of Classi-
cal Literature, II: Latin Literature, ed. E.J. Kenney (Cambridge, 1982).
596 A.R. MURPHY

What would Sallust and Livy teach them? Sallust’s two main works, the
Bellum Jugurthium and the Bellum Catilinae, were introduced by politico-
historical polemics of Roman moral and political development and decline.
Sallust’s accounts of the Roman war against Jugurtha and the conspiracy of
Catiline presented tales of treachery and naked ambition that rocked the city
and divided citizens into factions, one against the other. The time period on
which Sallust focused proved important to Augustine on both rhetorical and
theological grounds, throwing a critical eye on a Rome wracked by divisions
before the birth of Jesus, let alone the rise of Christianity.*' Livy, for his part,
opened his history dramatically, inviting his readers to ‘trace the process of
our moral decline, to watch, first, the sinking of the foundations of morality as
the old teaching was allowed to lapse, then the rapidly increasing disintegra-
tion, then the final collapse of the whole edifice, and the dark dawning of our
modern day when we can neither endure our vices nor face the remedies
needed to cure them’.*” Both emphasized the ills of their times as moral ones
that proceeded to spill over into the political realm, and hearkened back yet
further for examples of virtue and self-sacrifice that had purportedly been lost
even during the late Republic.”
Relying on these two stalwart Roman examples, then, Augustine suggests
that the responsibility for moral decline can not be laid at the feet of the
Christians. Other examples from the Roman literary or historical traditions
(Terence, Perseus, Horace, Cicero, Virgil, Regulus, the invasion of the Gauls)
serve to bolster Augustine’s claim that worship of the traditional gods guaran-
teed neither individual nor communal flourishing, either in this life or in the
next, and that Roman public life was fatally flawed before the Incarnation.
At the same time that Rome offered, via the work of Sallust, Livy and oth-
ers, examples of previous moral decline and depravity, it also offered Augus-
tine a number of moral exemplars who showed that a degree of admirable
virtue was possible for those in the city of man.** By using the example of
Regulus’s personal rectitude and reiterating Sallust’s praise of Cato over
Caesar,*” Augustine employs Roman history to rebuke his Roman contempo-
raries, and asserts that classical history and experience can speak to Christian

41 Paul C. Burns, ‘Augustine’s Use of Sallust in the City of God: The Role of the
Grammatical Tradition’, in History, Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination, ed.
Vessey, Pollman and Fitzgerald.
42 The Early History of Rome (Books I-V of The History of Rome from its Founda-
tion), trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (London, 1960), p. 34.
43 The best work on this topic remains D.C. Earl, The Political Thought of Sallust
(Cambridge, 1961).
44 We know from the Confessions of the important role played by Cicero in initiating
Augustine’s lifelong search for wisdom. Augustine refers to Cicero’s De republica often
in the first five books of the City of God. But these citations are less germane to the main
focus of this article.
45 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 1, ch. 15; also Bk. 5, ch. 12, pp. 210-11.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 597

concerns in relevant ways. In devoting his attention to Cato and Regulus,

Augustine followed in a long tradition of using exempla to recommend ethical
behaviour, one that was very much a part of the Roman tradition in his day.
‘Historical examples were the basic means of moral instruction in the ancient
world from the earliest times’, writes Clive Skidmore, and ‘[t]he persuasive
efficacy of historical examples is superior to that of precepts alone’.”®
It is also important to note not only that Augustine uses these Roman
sources, but where he does so. Opening the City of God with five books that
draw largely on Roman sources is a way of acknowledging, even endorsing, a
set of common resources, placing Augustine squarely within a common
Roman tradition. My claim is not merely that in the use and location of
Sallust, for example, Augustine ‘invokes a familiar and authoritative author
from the Roman school curriculum in order to engage the educated part of his
audience’, nor that he “‘employ[s] resources in Roman rhetorical culture to
engage his diverse audience in ways that display deep sympathy and at times
profound criticism for the values of that culture’.*’ These claims are too tepid
and generic. More to the point, I think, is the description of Augustine as
‘{uJsing the cultural expectations and literary training he shares with the clas-
sically educated members of his audience to destabilize their perceptions of
their own history and environment, and to substitute a Christian interpretation
of events’.** This process is sequential, rhetorically speaking: first, he de-
stabilizes, then he substitutes. When we place the use of Regulus and Cato
into the larger rhetorical plan of the City of God as a whole, we see how it
makes Augustine’s larger eschatological and historiographical claims pos-
sible, by ‘working through the familiar, by appealing from the known to the
unknown’.” By establishing Augustine’s bona fides as one versed in Roman
literature and history, by using familiar figures and arguments to prepare the
ground for more controversial ones, Augustine has opened his work with a
significant gesture to his classically-trained audience.

Historiography, Interpretation, and Eschatology

I shall not go into the details of Augustine’s theory of the two cities, their
origins in the two companies of angels,” their early history in the Biblical

46 Clive Skidmore, Practical Ethics for Roman Gentlemen: The Work of Valerius
Maximus (Exeter, 1996), p. 84; p. 3.
47 Burns, ‘Roles of Roman Rhetorical exempla in Augustine’s City of God’, in Studia
Patristica, Vol. 38 (Leuven, 2001), p. 40; Burns, ‘Augustine’s Use of Sallust in the City
of God, p. 114.
48 Conybeare, ‘Terrarum Orbi Documentum’, p. 63.
49 Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire, p. 25.
5° Augustine, City of God, Bk. 11, ch. 33.
598 A.R. MURPHY

account of human origins,” nor of their journey through history towards their
appointed ends.” I shall assume that the rough outlines of his view of history
are familiar to the reader; along the way I shall highlight points especially ger-
mane to this article. Suffice it to say that there were always far more funda-
mental issues at stake in the dispute over Christianity in Roman public life
than identifying the ubiquitous nature of natural disasters or military defeats
in Roman history. (Orosius could handle that rather pedantic task.) Addressing
the empirical objections raised by anti-Christian polemics was, for Augustine,
necessary but not sufficient to probe the depth and complexity of the decline
arguments he faced, and confining his analysis to these sorts of issues (as he
commissioned Orosius to do) would have left his work primarily negative.
Thus, ‘knowing what is expected of me and not unmindful of my duty’,
Augustine turned to the elaboration of the two cities, and moved from nega-
tive critique to an articulation of his own view of history (the substitution in
Conybeare’s destabilization/substitution process above). This part of the City
of God, arguably, is Augustine’s true contribution to the debate of his times.”
Recall that the claims of anti-Christian declinists were underwritten by a
basic understanding of the relationship between divinities and humans. The
gods, so the argument goes, have historically blessed humans and human
communities that honoured them, and punished those that neglected to carry
out their requirements; as Symmachus’s Rome put it, “This worship of mine
brought the whole world under the rule of my laws, these sacred rites drove
back Hannibal from the walls, and the Senones from the capitol.’ In other
words, one can with relative confidence ‘read off’ divine evaluations of
human actions by observing earthly outcomes. Such a set of interpretive com-
mitments were neither unique nor uniquely ‘pagan’: did not God promise a
great kingdom, in a new land, to the Hebrews if they would walk in his ways,
and yet refuse to allow those who grumbled against him to see the Promised
Land?* Are not the historical books of the Hebrew Scriptures a record of the
misfortunes and blessings that transpire when a community (respectively)
neglects or adheres to God’s law? Would not John Winthrop, 1200 years after
Augustine, write that the Massachusetts Puritans were entering into a cov-
enant with God, and that blessings would attend faithfulness: ‘if we are faith-
ful the world will Say Make us like New England’?°’

>! [bid., Bk. 14, ch. 2.

> Ibid., Bks, 15-18, 21-2.
53 [bid., Bk. 11, ch. 1, p. 450.
54 DeBruyn, ‘Jerusalem versus Rome’, pp. 54, 58-61, 65; R.A. Markus, Saeculum:
History and Society in the Theology of Saint Augustine (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 3.
55 Symmachus, Relatione 3, sec. 9; in Prefect and Emperor, trans. Barrow, p. 41.
56 Genesis 17; Numbers 14.
57 John Winthrop, ‘Model of Christian Charity’, in Winthrop Papers (Boston,
1929-47), Vol. 2, pp. 292-3.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 599

Not only was this interpretive paradigm widespread among ‘pagans’, but
indeed one of the most powerful pieces of Christian rhetoric of Augustine’s
time took just this approach. Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History exhibits just
the same understanding of historical causality — divine pleasure leads to
earthly flourishing, divine wrath to destruction — in tracing the rise of Chris-
tianity in the Roman Empire. The examples are almost too numerous to men-
tion, but note especially Eusebius’s interpretation of the persecution of the
Jews by the Romans: as he puts it, ‘Thus the divine vengeance overtook the
Jews for the crimes which they dared to commit against Christ.’ As to the final
destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, Eusebius relates, ‘Such was the
reward which the Jews received for their wickedness and impiety against the
Christ of God.’** In the Life of Constantine, Eusebius claims that ‘God honors
pious princes and destroys tyrants’ — and points to ‘the fearful end of those
tyrants who denied and opposed him’. At the same time, Eusebius, taking a
far grander historical analogy, connects the growth of Rome’s power with the
Incarnation, as arranged by God. Thus, both Eusebius and many of his
anti-Christian detractors share a common presupposition (one that remains
strong to this day, for many): ‘For Christians, as for pagans, adversity was a
sign of the displeasure of God.’®' Even more specifically, both read earthly
political outcomes as relatively straightforward disclosures of divine pleasure
or wrath; they just read different dates and events as particularly salient.
Augustine rejects this ‘correspondence theory’ outright, denying that an
earthly community’s earthly prospects have anything to do with its piety. God
did facilitate Rome’s rise to world dominance, but in Augustine’s view this
facilitation took place for reasons of God’s own. He argued that ‘when illus-
trious kingdoms had long existed in the East, God willed that there should
arise in the West an empire which, though later in time, should be more illus-
trious still in the breadth and greatness of its sway’.” This willing reflected
God’s own purposes — to show forth God’s glory — and in order for that
glory to be best shown, ‘God granted it to men who, for the sake of honour and
praise and glory, so devoted themselves to their fatherland that they did not
hesitate to place its safety before their own, even though they sought glory for
themselves through it’.®’ Thus the reasons for Rome’s rise related first to
God’s own purposes, and only secondarily to specific Roman qualities.

58 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, in Select Library (second series), Vol. 1; Book 2,

ch. 6, p. 110; see also Book 3, ch. 6, p. 141.
59 Eusebius, Life of Constantine, in Select Library (second series), Vol. 1; Book I, ch.
3, p. 482.
60 T. Mommsen, ‘St. Augustine and the Christian Theory of Progress’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 12 (1951), pp. 360-2.
61 DeBruyn, ‘Ambiguity Within a “Totalizing Discourse” ’, p. 420.
62 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 5, ch. 13, p. 212.
63 Tbid., ch. 12, p. 212.
600 A.R. MURPHY

Lest we make too much of these qualities, Augustine goes so far as to call
them ‘vice[s]’, which although they drove the Romans to perform ‘wondrous
deeds’ through their ability to overpower other vices, still made the Romans
‘only less vile’.* At the same time, Augustine intends to give these early
Romans their due, as they serve as a standing rebuke to their late imperial
descendants.® He pours forth effusive praise of famous Romans, and warns
Christians not to boast of having performed great deeds for God, when
Romans have done so much for their own city.®%° But Romans’ love of glory
did not enable them to achieve empire, nor did they achieve empire because of
their virtues. Such decisions were always in the hands of the one God, whose
purposes far outstrip the Romans’ view of their own importance: ‘It was not
God’s purpose . . . to give to these persons eternal life with the angels in His
Heavenly City.’®’ History, for Augustine, is not the story of the gods’ (or even
God’s) favouring of one earthly group’s political prospects due to the appro-
priate nature and level of its religious piety; rather it is the story of two cities,
defined by two different ‘love-objects’, moving towards their final reckon
ing.®
What Augustine does so starkly, both in Book 5 and then again through the
elaboration of the two cities in Books 11—22 of the City of God, is to object
wholly to the causal claim that underwrote both the anti-Christian critique and
Christian triumphalism a la Eusebius; namely, that one can with some confi-
dence read historical events as manifestations of divine pleasure or displeas-
ure. Indeed, at times in his earlier career, Augustine had inclined towards such
a view.” But by the time he came to write the City of God he had long since
jettisoned such views. If we can’t read Rome’s rise and fall as due to proper or
inappropriate piety towards traditional deities, Augustine argues, neither can
we endorse a theory of Christian triumphalism in which conversion of Roman
emperors paves the way for tempora Christiana or augurs a new phase of
godly rule on earth.
This fundamental interpretive premise recurs throughout the City of God:
Augustine repeatedly underscores the mysteries of God’s inscrutable plan for
individual and collective life. For example, Book 1 begins with the vexing
questions that surround the suffering of innocents in the sack of Rome: why
do good suffer along with evil? There he suggests that God inflicts punish-
ment for specific purposes (due to Christians’ leniency towards sin, shirking
their duty to teach, and so on): at times ‘it pleases God to punish abandoned

64 Tbid., ch. 12, p. 213; Bk. 5, ch. 18, p. 219.

65 Markus, Saeculum, pp. 56-7.
66 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 5, ch. 18: pp. 218 ff.
67 Jbid.,.ch. 15, :p. 215.
68 Mommsen, ‘Augustine and the Christian Idea of Progress’, pp. 354-5.
69 Markus, ‘Tempora Christiana Revisited’, pp. 205-6; Markus, Saeculum, ch. 2.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 601

morals with the infliction of temporal penalties’.”° Yet later in the City of God
we can find another scenario, where Augustine admits that the reasons that
suffering afflicts good and evil alike will continue to lie hidden. ‘For we do
not know by what judgment of God this good man is poor, while that wicked
man is rich . . . It would be easier if such cases displayed some consistency
even in their absurdity, as it were.’’' In fact, it is much more difficult to dis-
cern God’s plan since there seems no rhyme or reason as to who flourishes
and who languishes: some good people, and some evil, suffer outrageous mis-
fortunes, while others are blessed beyond compare.’”” As Markus puts it,
‘Every moment may have its unique and mysterious significance in the ulti-
mate divine tableau of men’s doings and sufferings; but it is a significance to
which God’s revelation does not supply the clues.’”
We must be clear, then: the rise of Rome, in Augustine’s view, is not due to
the blessing of Jupiter, or any other(s) of the countless deities laid out in
Varro’s impossibly complex catalogue. Necessarily, then, if these gods were
not (causally) responsible for Rome’s rise, that is, if they did not grant Rome
power in recognition of the city’s piety and sacrifice, then the empire’s
decline can not reasonably be ascribed to their wrath at being supplanted
by worship of the Christian God. Augustine’s substitution of monotheistic
providentialism overseeing the progress of the two cities for the model of
gods rewarding and punishing human piety maintains a divine principle in
history, of course, but not one in which divine approval maps onto earthly
flourishing. At the same time, Augustine will not let the opposite error in
either; earthly punishments and failure visit both the faithful and the unfaithful.
This view of historical change and causality — this providential eschatology
of the two cities moving towards their final day — severs the longstanding
and comforting assumptions that our earthly prospects correlate, even in a
rough way, with our spiritual health.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Augustine’s position on meaning in history did
not command universal or immediate assent, even among his co-religionists.
Twenty years after the City of God, one finds the Christian thinker Salvian
invoking the moral failings of Christians to explain the empire’s misfortune,
going so far as to suggest that God gave victories to the Goths and Vandals
because these exhibited greater chastity and humility.”* But for Augustine, we
simply can’t read God’s purposes in history.

70 Augustine, City of God, Bk. 1, ch. 9, p. 15; more generally, Bk. 1, chs. 8-10.
71 Ibid., Bk. 20, ch. 2, p. 967.
?2 Ibid.
73 Markus, Saeculum, p. 21.
74 Salvian, De Gubernatione Dei (On the Government of God), trans. E.M. Sanford
(New York, 1930), Bks. 7, 8; see also David Lambert, “The Uses of Decay: History in
Salvian’s De Gubernatione Dei’, in History, the Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagina-
tion, ed. Vessey, Pollman and Fitzgerald, pp. 115-30.
602 A.R. MURPHY

Implications and Conclusions: Augustine, Decline and Us

I have noted Augustine’s entry into the debate of his time via Roman sources,
and noted how this debate over empirical data represents an important rhetori-
cal element of his approach, in beginning from universally accepted, indeed
highly revered, sources. But we should also remember how relatively little of
the City of God consists of discussions of the empirical facts of Roman history
or misfortunes, natural or otherwise. Augustine’s real contribution was fund-
amentally to recast the interpretive and rhetorical framework of debate about
the causes and consequences of Roman decline; this recasting, far from
simply undercutting his critics, also radically undermined the Christian
triumphalism of his day. Let me reiterate that I do not claim originality for
the above discussion of Augustine’s view on history: what I would like to do,
in concluding this article, is to offer some reflections on contemporary decline
rhetoric, reflections that grow out of this reading of Augustine. After all,
given the ways in which Rome’s rise was brought about by God for God’s
own reasons, Augustine’s interpretive recasting of the rise and fall of human
history must surely undermine any claims to divine blessing leading necessar-
ily to earthly advantages. After Augustine, then, there is no city on a hill, no
godly society, no Manifest Destiny, no ‘redeemer nation’. All talk of decline
is banished from Augustine’s eschatology and social analysis, it seems; not
only because of the personalistic counsel quoted at the outset of this article,”
but also due to the nature of his fundamental theological claims about the way
God works through humans in history.
Recall that decline accounts always involve both empirical and causal
claims: claims about how things are and claims about why they are that way.
Of course, these empirical observations — claims about the way things are —
appear in a highly charged polemical atmosphere, and are not merely ‘facts’
impartially related. Nor must we necessarily accept that the facts add up to the
story told by their declinist authors. (In this sense, the sack of the city of Rome
is a classic example of a ‘fact’ whose polemical significance far outran its
political or military importance.)”° But the story of decline, or progress for
that matter, always begins with concrete observations that we encounter not in
abstract isolation, but embedded in a narrative that gives them a historical
meaning: a moral, a lesson.

75 ‘Let our lives be good; and the times are good. We make our times; such as we are,
such are the times.’ Augustine, Sermon 30, in Select Library, Vol. 6, p. 352.
76 ‘To a historian, the history of the historiography of Rome is of as great an interest
as the history of Rome; the ghost has worked as effectively in the minds of men as the real
thing had worked in their lives .. . [T]he year 410... is a dramatic date; but it is dramatic
in the biography of the ghost rather than in the history of its earthly body. It is certainly
extremely easy to exaggerate the effect of the three days’ looting and violence in the city
perpetrated by the Goths’ (R.A. Markus, “The Roman Empire in Early Christian Histori-
ography’, The Downside Review, 81 (1963), pp. 340-1).
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE _ 603

In joining discussions and debates about religious or moral decline, there is

a role for empirical disputes. When, specifically, was the purported golden
age of purity, unity and right belief and conduct? Might historical change
have resulted in important advances alongside decline of various sorts? How,
specifically, did the overturning of primitive unity, the loss of ancient virtue,
the retrenchment of imperial borders on various edges of the empire, take
place? Which events were key? Might competing narratives explain the events
equally well, even better? Such questions are legitimate and unavoidable for
anyone concerned with the health of his or her own society, Romans no less
than late-twentieth century citizens of liberal democracies. Indeed, contem-
porary declinists like Robert Putnam turn the tools of social scientific analysis
onto these questions, often with impressive substantive and methodological
results. Too often, though, such disputes can degenerate into questions of
what earlier times (or our own) were ‘really like’, as if we could somehow
pierce the hermeneutic veil and describe complex social and political phe-
nomena objectively.””
Since declinist critique consists of both empirical and causal claims, we
might envisage several types of response. First, one could simply deny that
the purported decline has in fact taken place: in other words, contest the
empirical presentation. Orosius’s approach exemplifies one way of proceed-
ing along these lines: if Christians were being blamed for famines, disasters
and wars, then one’s rhetorical task was to find and emphasize the chaos and
destruction that existed in the pre-Christian past, such that the empirical
claims about increased destruction could not be sustained. Augustine’s
response to the empirical objections of his critics mirrors Orosius’s (or,
rather, Augustine does in a compressed form what Orosius takes as his main
task). As noted earlier, contesting empirical claims represents a necessary, but
for Augustine not a sufficient, strategy.
Alternately, one might acknowledge some sort of decline but dispute the
interpretive, or causal, account presented by declinist authors. Cyprian, for
example, admitted that natural disasters seemed more frequent in his day than
in times past, but attributed this fact to the routine afflictions of an aging
world, and not to the nefarious influence of Christians. As he put it, “you must
in the first place know . . . that the world has now grown old, and does not
abide in that strength in which it formerly stood . .. What if old men should
charge it on the Christians that they grow less strong in their old age. . .?’”* In
our own time, critics who admit the decline of community, for example, often
77 This sort of approach is taken by Derek L. Phillips, in Looking Backward (Prince-
ton, 1993); not to mention the larger tendency of critics on either side to resort to such
overblown polemics as “There is no virtue in the modern world’ or “Perhaps there was
virtue back then, but there was slavery as well, and women could not vote!’ Neither of
these sorts of claims helps, in my view, to navigate through the layers of meaning and dis-
content that declinist rhetoric has always articulated.
78 To Demetrianus, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Roberts and Donaldson, Vol. 5, ch. 3.
604 A.R. MURPHY

exhibit a great deal of diversity as to the reasons for this decline. Some, such
as Putnam, emphasize factors like television and commuting (technological
and economic); others look at the rise of American industrialism as far back as
the post-Civil War period.”
Augustine takes issue with both the empirical and the causal claims of his
opponents. The empirical critique is fairly straightforward, and as I argued it
is especially effective by virtue of its use of the Romans’ own words to con-
demn them. But the implications of Augustine’s eschatology and historiogra-
phy is even more sweeping. We might locate the significance of these
Augustinian views, in part, to his understanding ofthe nature of declinist rhet-
oric (which he encountered in anti-Christian polemics) as well as that of its
mirror image, progress narratives (which he encountered in Eusebius). The
presentation of a declinist critique — like the progress narrative — represents,
according to one scholar, ‘an emphatic way to assert the accessibility of the
historical process to the powers of educated human reason’.*° If this claim is
correct — and I think it is — we begin to see what it was about the Roman
declinist claim and Eusebian triumphalism alike that so incensed Augustine:
not the accuracy or inaccuracy of depictions of the Republic; not the tallying
up of natural disasters or crop failures; but rather the whole enterprise of
investing historical events with a meaning that humans can know. For Augus-
tine, God is always the author of history, author of a plot that always remains
beyond our comprehension.
I would like to close by considering one example of religious declinism
from the contemporary United States. Of all the commentaries and reflection
occasioned by the September 11 attacks, none received such immediate and
virtually unanimous condemnation as those of Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell. These two public figures saw signs of divine displeasure at the
growing ungodliness of American society in the horrific events of that day;
and pointed to such phenomena as pornography, abortion and homosexual-
ity as evidence of a declining American morality that has led to the lifting of
God’s protective hand from this once-chosen nation. I have argued else-
where that, although these comments were ill-timed and condemned from
across the religious and political spectrum, their underlying premises are far
more deeply ingrained in the American tradition than many of their critics
would like to admit.*' After all, Abraham Lincoln raised the possibility of
understanding the American Civil War as a divine punishment for the sin of
American slavery, a political decline from founding ideals that were intended
to pave the way for slavery’s gradual elimination. Before him, the New

79 Putnam, Bowling Alone; Bellah, Habits of the Heart.

80 Goffart, ‘Zosimus’, p. 427.
81 A. Murphy, ‘ “One Nation Under God”, September 11, and the Chosen Nation:
Moral Decline and Divine Punishment in American Public Discourse’, Political Theol-
ogy, 6 (2005), pp. 9-30.
 AUGUSTINE & THE RHETORIC OF ROMAN DECLINE 605

England Puritans interpreted crop failures, hurricanes, Indian attacks and

deformed births as evidence of God’s displeasure for their failure to maintain
the godliness of their settlements as time went on. The notion of American
history as containing some sort of extraordinary, eschatological, cosmologi-
cal import has been deeply embedded in the collective American identity
since the earliest days.
Clearly Augustine’s understanding of historical change and the nature of
historical causality would offer a cogent critique not only of Robertson or
Falwell, but also of the much broader American tradition that sees the US as a
‘chosen nation’ with a divine mandate to impose on an ungodly world. In
other words, Augustinian eschatology seems an equal-opportunity frustrater
of pretensions about the implications of historical events and our ability to
read those implications.
How different, really, are Robertson and Falwell’s remarks — or the New
England Puritans, for that matter — from those anti-Christian polemics that
animated Augustine to write the City of God? Traditional beliefs and practices
founded the nation and oversaw its rise to prominence; neglect of these tradi-
tions has led to divine punishment. There is an odd and intriguing irony in the
use of similar rhetorical forms — specifically, religious declinism — by both
classical ‘pagans’ and contemporary evangelical Christians. Rather than intend-
ing this remark to dismiss contemporary Christian conservatives, though, we
might reflect a bit on what it tells us about the power of historical narrative per
se, and the difficulty of conceiving of an alternative to the historical process
as ‘accessib[le] . . . to the powers of educated human reason’.

Andrew R. Murphy VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY

Appendix
1. Ido not offer a history of the events surrounding 410: for this, see either
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, esp. Vols. 2 and 3 (London,
1781); or Peter Brown’s classic Augustine of Hippo (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2000 [1967]), Part 4.
2. Ido not explore general anti-Christian polemics, such as Porphyry’s
Against the Christians; nor general expressions of Roman religious tradition-
alism such as Macrobius’s Saturnalia; but focus on claims about the histori-
cal influence of Christianity on the health of the Roman polity.
3. I enclose ‘pagan’ in quotations to emphasize its polemical nature as a
term coined largely by Christians and one that grouped a large number of dif-
ferent local religions under one rubric. In the words of Averil Cameron,
‘[T]he promotion of the notion of the difference between Christian and pagan

82 Goffart, ‘Zosimus’, p. 427.

606 A.R. MURPHY

expression in the work of the Christian writers themselves is to be read as a

rhetorical device and a symptom of adjustment rather than as a descry of a real
situation’ (Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Develop-
ment of Christian Discourse (Berkeley, 1991), p. 7). More frequently, I use
the term ‘anti-Christian’, since to my mind this is more appropriately descrip-
tive. See also J. J.O’ Donnell, ‘The Demise of Paganism’, Traditio, 35 (1978),
pp. 45-88; and G.J.P. O’Daly, ‘Thinking Through History: Augustine’s
Method in the City of God and its Ciceronian Dimension’, in History, the
Apocalypse, and the Secular Imagination: New Essays on Augustine’s City of
God, ed. M. Vessey, K. Pollman and A.D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A. (Bowling
Green, OH, 1999), p. 46 n.4.
4. I take the rhetoric of imperial decline as given, realizing that the histo-
ries of the Eastern and Western empires diverge in important ways with
important ramifications for future developments, politically and religiously.
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP:
WILLIAM OF OCKHAM AND THE CRISIS
OF THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

Takashi Shogimen'

Abstract: Modern scholarship on Ockham’s political thought suggests that his anti-
papal polemical activities were intended to be destructive. A close analysis of
Ockham’s Dialogus, Part I in particular, reveals that the truth is just opposite: the real-
ity as Ockham saw it was that the ecclesiastical institution had already broken down
due to the heresy of the contemporary popes. Ockham thus proposed an alternative —
non-institutional — vision of the Christian society; drawing on the Ambrosian (and
Ciceronian) discourse on negative injustice, he appealed to all believers that a faithful
believer’s dissent from allegedly heretical papal authority was not irrelevant to them.
Ockham called for the mutual protection of believers in opposition to heretical popes
for the preservation of orthodox faith, which was indeed the common good of the
Christian community. Ockham’s anti-papal polemic was a constructive endeavour to
rescue the very foundation of Christian solidarity.

In European intellectual history, William of Ockham (c. 1285-1347) is widely

known as a radical thinker who seriously transformed medieval scholasti-
cism. It can hardly be argued, however, that he is recognized as a political
thinker beyond the circle of experts in medieval European political thought.
This is not to say that the historical significance of Ockham’s political thought
has not been perceived. He actually looms large in a number of textbooks on
the history of political thought.’ The truth is that Ockham as a political thinker
remains an enigma. Before I expand on this, perhaps a few introductory
remarks on Ockham’s polemical activities are required.
Ockham’s interest in political theorizing was accidentally cultivated by his
personal involvement in the ecclesiastical dispute between the papacy and the
Franciscan Order. Until 1324, Ockham was an innovative Oxford scholar in
such fields as logic, metaphysics and natural philosophy. As far as we can

l Department of History, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand.
Email: takashi.shogimen @ stonebow.otago.ac.nz
2 See, for example, H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory (London, 3rd edn..,
1951), pp. 250-70; M. Judd Harmon, Political Thought from Plato to the Present (New
York, 1964), pp. 144-7; Jean Touchard, Histoire des idées politiques (2 vols., Paris,
1959), 1, pp. 200-7. See also Charles Mcllwain, The Growth of Political Thought in the
West from the Greeks to the End of the Middle Ages (New York, 1932), pp. 293-6; R.W.
and A.J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West (Edinburgh and
London, 1903-36), Vol. 6, pp. 44-51; The Cambridge History of Medieval Political
Thought, c.350-c.1450, ed. J.H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988); Antony Black, Political
Thought in Europe, 1250-1450 (Cambridge, 1992); Joseph Canning, A History of Medi-
eval Political Thought, 300-1450 (London, 1997); and Janet Coleman, A History of
Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford, 2000).
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005
608 T. SHOGIMEN

determine, he had not yet written anything of a political nature. His summon-
ing to the Avignon papacy in that year, however, changed the course of his
life; the orthodoxy of Ockham’s speculative writings was officially ques-
tioned. His sojourn in Avignon coincided with the period when Pope John
XXII was engaged in a furious battle of words with the Franciscan Order over
the question of the orthodoxy of the Franciscan doctrine of poverty. Ockham,
of course, was a Franciscan. When the Minister General of the Friars Minor,
Michael of Cesena, commissioned Ockham to scrutinize the papal decrees
which condemned Franciscan poverty as heretical, Ockham was clearly stu-
pefied by the discovery that the pope had fallen into heresy by rejecting the
orthodoxy of Franciscan poverty.* He fled Avignon with his Franciscan com-
rades, including Michael of Cesena, for the court of Ludwig of Bavaria, who
was also in conflict with the pope over the validity of his imperial election.‘
Ockham subsequently devoted the rest of his life to anti-papal polemics; after
he vindicated the Franciscan doctrine of poverty, he elucidated a general theory
of heresy and heretics with special reference to papal heresy, whereby he
demonstrated that contemporary popes, John XXII and Benedict XII, were
heretics. Later, he shifted his polemical interest to the true definition of
papal power by attacking the contemporary papal doctrine of plenitudo
potestatis — the pope’s claim for universal power over both spiritual and tem-
poral affairs. A large body of his surviving works exercised influence upon
conciliarists and inspired early modern Protestant polemicists.”
I stated earlier that Ockham remains an enigma. Indeed, the historiography
of Ockham’s political thought is anything but settled: the interpretation of
his political thought has been polarized. Some historians have argued that
Ockham was a ‘destructive’ and even ‘anarchic’ thinker,°® while other writers

3 William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor, ed. and trans. A.S. McGrade and
John Kilcullen (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 3-4: ‘In these [bulls], I found a great many things
that were heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane, and defamatory, con-
trary and likewise plainly adverse to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain
experience, and fraternal charity.’
4 For Ockham’s biographical facts, see especially Léon Baudry, Guillaume d’Occam:
sa vie, ses oeuvres, ses idées sociales et politiques (Paris, 1950) and Jiirgen Miethke,
Ockhams Weg zur Sozialphilosophie (Berlin, 1969).
> Many of Ockham’s polemical works are collected in Guillelmi de Ockham Opera
Politica, ed. H.S. Offler et al. (4 vols., Manchester, 1940-63; Oxford, 1997). The critical
edition of the Dialogus is currently in preparation under the editorship of John Kilcullen,
George Knysh, Volker Leppin and John Scot. Sections of it are available on the British
Academy website.
© See especially Georges de Lagarde, La Naissance de l’ésprit laique au déclin du
Moyen Age (6 vols., Paris, 1932-46); Georges de Lagarde, La Naissance de l’ésprit
laique au déclin du Moyen Age, new edition (5 vols., Louvain and Paris, 1956-70); and
M.J. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1963).
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 609

maintained that he was fundamentally a Catholic traditionalist.’ Other histori-

ans have denied that Ockham was a ‘political’ thinker at all; he was at bottom
a theologian who reduced politics to the theological paradigm that was under-
pinned by the idea of divine absolute power (potentia Dei absoluta).* More
recently, Ockham has been presented as a distinctively Franciscan social and
political philosopher;’ a proponent of the doctrine of ‘anti-papal infallibil
ity’;'° a political pragmatist who attempted to separate spiritual power from
temporal power, thereby rehabilitating traditional institutional principles
while undercutting institutionalism;'! and a disseminator of the idea of natural
rights.'? In the face of such diverse interpretations, it is safe to say at least that
Ockham was ‘probably the most difficult medieval theorist’.'°
I hope to discuss the modern historiography in depth elsewhere;'* for now,
attention needs to be drawn to one of the dominant views — namely, Ockham
as a destructive critic of the medieval church. Indeed, his confrontation with
the allegedly heretical papacy was polemically aggressive and persistent. He
demonstrated tirelessly that John XXII was a heretic, denounced the defini-
tion of papal power pronounced by Benedict XII as the worst heresy that he
had ever heard,’° and called for action against the ‘pseudo-popes’. But what
did Ockham intend to achieve in this series of anti-papal campaigns? George
de Lagarde argued that Ockham’s polemical activities radically criticized the
idea of the magisterium in the medieval Catholic Church. Ockham success-
fully destroyed the existing conception of the medieval ecclesiastical order;
however he failed to propose an alternative.'® Michael Wilks wrote that
Ockham’s ‘nominalist’ doctrine, once translated into an ecclesiological theory,
resulted in the view that ‘every man must be his own priest and his own

7 See especially, Philotheus Boehner, ‘Ockham’s Political Ideas’, Review of Politics,

V (1943), pp. 462-87. See also J.B. Morrall, “Some Notes on a Recent Interpretation of
William of Ockham’s Political Philosophy’, Franciscan Studies, 1X (1949), pp. 335-69;
and George Knysh, Political Ockhamism (Winnipeg, 1996).
8 Richard Scholz, Wilhelm von Ockham als politischer Denker und sein Breviloquium
de principatu tyrannico (Stuttgart, 1952).
9 See Miethke, Ockhams Weg zur Sozialphilosophie. See also Annabel S. Brett, ‘In-
troduction’, in William of Ockham, On the Power of Emperors and Popes, ed. and trans.
A.S. Brett (Bristol, 1998).
10 Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150-1350 (Leiden, 2nd impression,
1988).
'l Arthur Stephen McGrade, The Political Thought of William of Ockham. Personal
and Institutional Principles (Cambridge, 1974).
!2 Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights (Atlanta, 1997).
13 Black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250-1450, p. 71.
'4 See Takashi Shogimen, Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages
(Cambridge, forthcoming).
15 William of Ockham, Contra Benedictum, iv, c.2 in Opera Politica, 3, p. 245.
16 De Lagarde, La Naissance de l’ésprit laique, new edition, Vol. 5.
610 T. SHOGIMEN

church’.'’ This virtually amounts to the rejection of all ecclesiastical author-

ity; in Wilks’ words, ‘at bottom, Ockham was an anarchist’ .'* From an entirely
different perspective, Brian Tierney argued that Ockham’s ecclesiology, which
manifested the doctrine of what he called ‘anti-papal infallibility’, was very
subjectivist, filled with odium theologicum; Ockham wanted self-righteously
to label all his enemies ‘heretics’.'” Most recently, Matthew Kempshall
characterized Ockham’s political discourse as ‘primarily destructive in its
intent’.”° These views differ in perspective, and yet they share the understand-
ing that Ockham’s anti-papal polemical activities were, in essence,
‘destructive’.
This essay is intended to argue that Ockham’s criticism of the medieval
church was far from being ‘destructive’; on the contrary, it was a constructive
endeavour to defend the fellowship (societas) among Christians. The problem
as Ockham saw it was the breakdown of ecclesiastical institutions: confronted
by the reality that the pope had fallen into heresy and cardinals and other bish-
ops wittingly or unwittingly supported and defended the pope, Ockham real-
ized that no ecclesiastical institution was infallible. He could not entrust to
any ecclesiastical office or institution the role of teaching the orthodox faith
infallibly. Nonetheless, the orthodox faith must be maintained and dissemi-
nated. The preservation of orthodox faith was the ethical duty of all believers
and at the same time the common good of the Christian community. Christ
once stated that ‘I am with you always, to the end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20).
It is well known that Ockham understood this verse in the sense that until the
end of time there would always be, at least, one individual who would main-
tain the true faith; and that believer must profess the faith and reject heretical
errors.
Practically, however, a theologian’s or a lay believer’s dissent from the
allegedly heretical papacy would not be a viable course of action; it would
probably result in a condemnation for the dissenting individual, rather than
the deposition of a heretical pope. This was precisely the dilemma that faced
Ockham, who was no more than a theologian without ecclesiastical office.
Despite this, however, a heretical pope must be brought down. Ockham there-
fore placed the issue at stake in a wider context and enquired: what ethical
obligations do all other believers — the third party to the dispute between a
heretical churchman and a dissenting individual — bear? When an individual
warns against the danger of papal heresy to the entire Christian community,
are other believers allowed to stand by and ‘pass over’? Ockham argued
forcefully that all other believers bear the duty of protecting a dissenter who

'7 Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages, p. 519.
18 Tbid., p. 109.
'9 Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, p. 235.
20 M.S. Kempshall, The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought (Oxford,
1999), p. 359.
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 611

warns of papal heresy, thereby defending the fellowship of believers. In the

face of the breakdown of the hierarchical institution of the medieval church
caused by papal heresy, Ockham proposed a new idea of Christian society. He
envisaged an alternative vision of Christian solidarity by replacing the duty of
obedience that served to maintain the hierarchical order with the duty of
mutual protection among believers for the preservation of orthodox faith.
Demonstrating this requires an analysis of Ockham’s discourse in Book 6
of Part I of the Dialogus. The Dialogus is a gigantic work. An understanding
of that section of the work would be impossible without grasping preceding
relevant arguments. In what follows, I will first examine Ockham’s discussion
of a believer’s duty of subscribing to the faith. Next, I will turn to his argu-
ment on Christian fellowship. In this light, Ockham’s anti-papal polemical
activities will emerge not merely as a criticism of papal heresy, but also as a
theoretical endeavour to rebuild Christian social ethics upon the idea of nega-
tive injustice, which Cicero had proposed and St Ambrose drew upon.

I
Ockham’s Dialogus was a voluminous treatise in the format of the fictitious
dialogue between a master and a student, which was written intermittently
throughout his years in exile and was eventually left unfinished.”' Part I of the
work in particular discussed a wide range of issues relating to the ideas of
heresy and heretics; it was effectively a general treatise on heresy with special
reference to the problem of papal heresy. The work is characterized by its
impersonal, dispassionate and encyclopaedic style; in writing Part I of the
Dialogus, Ockham was clearly seeking sound theological grounds upon
which he could actually demonstrate the heresy of John XXII, rather than
merely labelling him as a heretic.
The conceptions of heresy that proliferated among theologians and canon-
ists before Ockham was, put simply, authoritarian; as R.I. Moore observed
correctly in his celebrated work The Formation of A Persecuting Society,
‘heresy exists only in so far as authority chooses to declare its existence...
heresy can only arise in the context of the assertion of authority’.”” Augustinus
Triumphus’s discourse serves as a case in point. This Austin theologian and
staunch papalist rejected the view that those who were better versed in Chris-
tian doctrine than the pope could better judge doctrinal problems than him. He
maintained that what was required for settlement in doctrinal disputes was not
only knowledge but also power. Thorough knowledge of Scripture is one

21 J will adopt the abbreviated form I Dialogus ii, c. 5, p. 416, referring to chapter 5 of
Book 2 of Part I of the Dialogus in the British Academy’s electronic edition. The page
number refers to the relevant page in Monarchia Sancti Romani Imperii, ed. Melchior
Goldast (Frankfurt, 1614; reprinted Graz, 1960), Vol. 2.
22 R.I. Moore, The Formation ofA Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), p. 68.
612 ; T. SHOGIMEN

thing; pronouncement of final judgment is quite another.”* Furthermore,

Augustinus asserted that it was not permissible to enquire into heresy without
a papal mandate because heresy could only be recognized by the pope, who
was the judge of the universal Church.” The definition by the authority of the
Church, the pope in particular, was the parameter for defining heresy. This
hierarchical premise indeed underpinned the discourse on heresy by leading
theologians of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Ockham challenged this prevalent idea of heresy. He highlighted and
undermined the common hierarchical premises of the contemporary dis-
course on heresy and heretics and reduced the concepts of heresy and heretics
to purely interpretative categories in theological enquiry. To understand this
requires some analysis of Ockham’s definition of heresy. He defined heresy
in a twofold manner: in the strict sense and in the broad sense. Heresy in the
strict sense was an assertion that was not consonant with Scripture. More spe-
cifically, the strict sense of heresy may take a threefold mode: an assertion
may be judged heretical, (1) if it not only opposes but also verbally contra-
dicts the truth as found in a proper form ofthe Bible, (2) if it denies the content
of Scripture as it is obvious to both the learned and the ignorant, or (3) if it is
shown through lengthy and skilful deliberation by learned and wise scholars
that the assertion objects to Scripture, although in such fashion that is not nec-
essarily evident to all other people.”
Ockham defined heresy primarily as an opinion against Scriptural truths,
and yet Scripture should not be deemed to be the only source of Christian
doctrine. Heresy in the broad sense — what Ockham called ‘mortal’ error
(error mortiferus) — was not only that which contradicts the Bible but may
also be dissension from chronicles, histories or oral traditions that were
deemed worthy of belief by the Church. According to Ockham, there are five
modes of ‘mortal’ error: (1) to contradict Scripture; (2) to oppose the unwrit-
ten doctrine of the apostles; (3) to deny what has been revealed to the Church
since the time of the apostles; (4) to contradict the approved chronicles, histo-
ries or oral traditions; and (5) to contradict the sources of catholic truth, which
are apparently not evident but demonstrable.” In short, heresy was defined as
a contradiction to either Scripture or the extra-Scriptural sources of Christian
doctrine.
Attention needs to be drawn to the point that, in Ockham’s definition, her-
esy can only be identified either evidently or demonstrably when it contra-
dicts the texts of doctrinal sources. The obverse of this is the exclusion of any
arbitrary — neither evident nor demonstrable — determination of heresy.

23 Augustinus Triumphus, Summa de ecclesiastica potestate (Rome, 1584), q.10,

a. lapse
24 Ibid., q.10, a.4.
25 | Dialogus ii, c. 15, p. 422.
26 Tbid., c. 16, pp. 422-3.
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 613

What, then, if the authority of the Church declares without any evidence or
demonstration that an assertion is heretical? Would it be possible that the
mere declaration by ecclesiastical authority makes a certain assertion a new
catholic truth without evidence or demonstration? In Part I of the Dialogus,
Ockham made the Student draw readers’ attention to this question, and the
Master’s reply is highly significant: the Church could not determine or define
the truth unless it was done evidently or demonstrably.”” Mere declaration by
the Church does not constitute the truth-value of the assertion. An important
implication of this is that the Church could define heresy wrongly. Ecclesias-
tical authority cannot guarantee the truthfulness of a declaration.
It can be inferred from this that identifying heresy was not the monopoly of
the ecclesiastical authorities. Anyone who could read and interpret the textual
sources of the Christian doctrine rationally and have sufficient knowledge of
such texts would be entitled to identify heresy, regardless of his or her ecclesi-
astical status. This effectively reversed the existing authoritarian discourse on
heresy. Ockham vindicated the ‘cognitive’ entitlement to identify the heresy
of any individual, including ‘someone who calls himself the Vicar of Christ’.
Knowledge, not office, constitutes the power to decipher heresy.
Indeed, high ecclesiastics in Ockham’s time were not necessarily well
versed in theology. Since Innocent III, most of the popes had been lawyers
rather than theologians.”* The theological ignorance (and even illiteracy) of
the clergy was in fact public knowledge. Archbishop John Pecham’s Council
of Lambeth (1281), for instance, drew up a manual of instruction for lay
clerks, which is commonly known as [gnorantia Sacerdotum. Pecham feared
that the ignorance of priests might ‘lead the people into the pit of error’.
Ignorantia Sacerdotum defined what priests should know and expound to

27 Tbid., c. 5, p. 416. Here Ockham’s epistemology comes into play. Evident knowl-
edge is according to Ockham ‘the cognition of a true complex of terms or proposition(s)’;
in order for such cognition to be evident, it needs to be established primarily by intuitive
knowledge of whether a thing actually exists or whether a contingent proposition about
the present is true. It is, in short, immediate knowledge by experience. Demonstrative
knowledge, on the other hand, requires preceding indemonstrable knowledge and is
established by a knowledge-producing syllogism. It arises only in the absence of imme-
diate knowledge and can only be deduced from what is already known intuitively. For
Ockham’s epistemology, see especially: Marilyn McCord Adam, William Ockham
(Notre Dame, 1987); Gordon Leff, William of Ockham: The Metamorphosis of Scholas-
tic Discourse (Manchester, 1975); Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories:
Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge, 1992) and, more succinctly, Janet
Coleman, A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 172-5. Ockham did not merely preach but also practised the applica-
tion of his epistemology and logic to Biblical exegesis; on this, see Takashi Shogimen,
‘Ockham’s Vision of the Primitive Church’, in Studies in Church History 33: The
Church Retrospective, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, 1997), pp. 163-75.
28] Dialogus, ii, c. 28, p. 431.
614 T. SHOGIMEN

the parishioners.*” This document proved a most useful guide for parish
clergy, and writings of a similar nature were produced by later generations:
in fourteenth-century England, for instance, William of Pagula’s Oculus
Sacerdotis and John Mirk’s Instructions for Parish Priests were designed to
enlighten unlearned priests about their duties.*° William Durand the Younger
proposed explicitly that ‘the level of knowledge expected from every ecclesi-
astical rank should be defined precisely and the possession of such knowledge
should be supervised by examinations’.*! Clearly theologians and canonists
believed that ecclesiastics were expected to rise to this doctrinal challenge.
The reverse side of this is that it was widely recognized that theological
knowledge was not a prerequisite for holding ecclesiastical office.
Perhaps it is fair for all the churchmen to be expected to have some special-
ist knowledge of the Christian doctrine; however, could lay believers be rea-
sonably expected to possess some knowledge of the texts that determine the
Christian doctrine? What do believers have to know? Ockham’s response to
this question was that theological knowledge was commensurate with ecclesi-
astical office or status. The holders of ecclesiastical office should know more
about doctrine than lay believers, and the higher the position an individual
occupies, the fuller the knowledge he is obliged to have. This idea, which I
call the ‘theological version of noblesse oblige’, was also commonplace
among medieval theologians. Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, Thomas
Aquinas and Bonaventure maintained that the holders of ecclesiastical office
are bound to have full knowledge of explicit faith, whereas all other Chris-
tians are bound only to have implicit faith.*” Durand de Saint Pourcain argued

29 Robert Anthony Antczak, ‘John Pecham and the Postilla super Johannem’ (The
Catholic University of America PhD Dissertation, 1975), pp. 241-50. See also P. Hodgson,
‘Ignorantia Sacerdotum: A Fifteenth-Century Discourse on the Lambeth Constitutions’,
Review of English Studies, XXIV (1948), pp. 1-11; and W.A. Pantin, The English
Church in the Fourteenth Century (Notre Dame, 1962), pp. 189-95, 211-12.
30 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England,
1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992), pp. 53-63. See also Pantin, The English Church,
pp. 195-219.
3! Constantin Fasolt, Council and Hierarchy: The Political Thought of William
Durand the Younger (Cambridge, 1991), p. 195.
32 Alexander of Hales, Summa theologica, Vol. 3 (secunda pars secundi libri),
(Quaracchi, 1930), p. 331: ‘Quaeritur iterum utrum quilibet catholicus teneatur scire de
quolibet mortali quod sit mortale. Quod videtur. Non enim potest vitari malum nisi
cognitum; quilibet autem tenetur vitare mortale peccatum; ergo quilibet tenetur scire de
quolibet mortali quod sit mortale. Contra. Doctores dubitant in casibus subtilibus
simoniae et huiusmodi peccatorum; ergo non possunt sciri a laici; ergo non tenentur.
Respondendum est ad hoc quod quilibet tenetur scire implicite vel explicite, particulariter
vel ad minus generaliter, sub illa scilicet ratione generali qua dictat natura; sed laici non
tenentur scire de quolibet mortali explicite, licet teneantur vitare in propria ratione.’
Albertus Magnus, Jn quattuor libros Sententiarum, III Sent., dist.25, a.4; Aquinas,
Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q.2, aa.S—6, Vol. 31: Faith (London and New York, 1974),
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 615

that the knowledge of explicit faith that one is obliged to have depends upon
one’s status, and probably Pierre de la Palud copied his view. According to
this, superiors, such as the pope and bishops, are not only obliged to know
everything but also to defend everything against heretics. Individuals of middle
status such as parish priests and doctors must know what appertains to their
office, and entrust judgment on intricate matters to their superiors. Finally,
people of low standing are not obliged to know anything explicitly.
Ockham’s idea stemmed clearly from this medieval theological tradition;
however, he also made a subtle yet significant modification. Ockham’s prede-
cessors and contemporaries in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries
maintained that the holders of ecclesiastical offices are bound to have full
knowledge of explicit faith, whereas lay believers are bound to have implicit
faith only. This view appears similar to Ockham’s, except on one point: his
predecessors and contemporaries argued that lay believers are bound only to
implicit faith, whereas Ockham imposed on them the duty of possessing some
knowledge of explicit faith. The difference is far from trivial. Thomas Aquinas
defined ‘implicit faith’ as a ‘readiness to believe . .. whatever is contained in
Scripture’.** This virtually amounts to the idea that lay Christians are obliged
to believe whatever they are instructed to do so by ecclesiastical authority.
The duty they bear is, in effect, obedience. By contrast, Ockham imposed on
all believers the duty of knowing and believing explicit faith. The traditional
view expresses a vision of the superior’s heavier duty that coincides with his
magisterial authority and the inferior’s obligation to obey. Ockham’s argu-
ment generates an alternative vision: every believer is equal in that each
Christian bears the duty of knowing explicit faith, commensurate to his status.
Each individual must fulfil his duty, according to his or her status or office in
society.
As every believer bears the duty of possessing explicit faith, Ockham wrote
that the defence of explicit faith became every believer’s duty. This idea was
perhaps not too optimistic in the light of the contemporary proliferation of

pp. 82-5; Aquinas, Quaestione disputate de veritate, ed. R. Spiazzi (Rome, 1964), q.14,
a.11. Bonaventure, Commentarius in Tertium Librum Sententiarum, dist.25, a.1, q.3, in
Opera omnia, 3 (Quaracchi, 1887), pp. 543-6. For a similar view, see also John Peckham,
Quodlibeta Quatuor, ed. Girard Etzkorn (Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica Medii
Aevi, xxv) (Quaracchi, 1989), iv, q. 45, pp. 271-2.
33 Durand de Saint Pourcain, In Petri Lombardi Sententias Theologicas
Commentarium, Libri IV (Venice, 1621), Lib. II, dist.25, q.1, fol. 258v. Cf. Pierre de la
Palud, Tertium scriptum super Tertium Sententiarum (Paris, 1517), dist.25, q.1, ff.
132v-133.
34 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 2, a. 6, pp. 82-3: ‘Quantum ergo
prima credibilia, quae sunt articuli fidei, tenetur homo explicite credere, sicut et tenetur
habere fidem. Quantum autem ad alia credibilia, non tenetur homo explicite credere, sed
solum implicite vel in praeparatione animi, inquantum paratus est credere quidquid
divina scriptura continent.’
616 ; T. SHOGIMEN

Christian knowledge among lay believers. Indeed, medieval laymen, who

were often described as ‘illiterate’, were not necessarily ‘illiterate’ in the lit-
eral sense: illiteratus was a synonym for ‘lay’. In the medieval world where
oral reading was more celebrated than visual and mute reading, ‘illiteracy’ of
laymen did not necessarily signify ignorance because they could learn Chris-
tian teachings through ‘hearing’.*° Indeed, laymen in Ockham’s time might
have a good deal of knowledge of the Christian faith due to the proliferation of
preaching. As W.A. Pantin once noted, ‘the revival of preaching was one of
the things that helped to transform the everyday life of the Church in the thir-
teenth century and to give the laity a more active and informed participation in
that life’.*° It is now known that from the thirteenth century onwards a sermon
was far from a rare event in England,*’ and what constituted an audience for
preaching was not necessarily ‘simple men’ but often men with a religious
(and secular) education.**® Preaching was a medium of ‘mass communication’
in the high and late Middle Ages, through which the knowledge of Christian
faith was diffused. The instructional materials, the standard for which was set
by Pecham’s Ignorantia Sacerdotum, also facilitated the dissemination of
basic knowledge of the faith. They were written primarily for the clergy, but
also met the demands of the laity. Evidence shows that the manuals were often
translated from Latin into vernaculars so that they could be read out by the
clergy to their parishioners. Thus the laity had access to various aspects of
faith in a concise and comprehensible form.*” Arguably the wider dissemina-
tion of Christian knowledge through preaching constitutes the background
against which Ockham claimed the laymen’s duty to know some explicit
faith. Without the lay individual’s commitment to explicit faith, Ockham’s
extensive discourse on the possible ways for a Christian to censure a heretical
pope would have been meaningless.
Thus Ockham dissolved the ecclesiastical monopoly of the entitlement to
discover heresy and attributed such entitlement to any individual who has
sufficient knowledge of doctrine, irrespective of his or her status. According
to the hierocratic conception of heresy, papal heresy could be judged only by
God. Ockham destroyed this argument by reducing heresy to a purely

35 M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307 (Oxford, 2nd
edn., 1993).
36 Pantin, The English Church, p. 236.
37 D.W. Robertson Jr., ‘Frequency of Preaching in Thirteenth-Century England’,
Speculum, XXIV (1949), pp. 376-88. For recent literature on preaching in late medieval
England, see, for instance, H. Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1993).
38 D.L. d’Avray, The Preaching of the Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before
1300 (Oxford, 1985), pp. 29-43.
39 R.N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c.1215-c.1515 (Cambridge,
1995), pp. 59-63.
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 617

interpretative category. Heresy could no longer be created by ecclesiastical

authority; it could only be discovered by rational reading of doctrinal texts.

Il
An important consequence of this metamorphosis of the conception of heresy
was that the correction of heresy, which follows its discovery in procedural
terms, ceased to be the monopoly of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. According to
the prevalent view in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, demanding
(not merely admonishing) the correction of errors to believers pertained to
ecclesiastics alone. The traditional scholastic discourse on fraternal correc-
tion assumed that the corrector should be an occupant of an ecclesiastical
office, and the correction — whether correctly or incorrectly informed — was
unconditionally binding. This traditional view was scrutinized by Ockham; he
reversed the traditional discourse by reducing the discovery of heresy to a
purely interpretative process. The correction of doctrinal errors could be
legitimate if and only if it is correctly informed, irrespective of the status or
office of the corrector. A correctly-informed correction requires uncondi-
tional withdrawal of the error, no matter how low the social standing of the
corrector might be, and no matter how high in the ecclesiastical order the cor-
rected might be.*°
Ockham, however, was fully aware that an individual’s dissent from papal
authority would immediately present a serious practical difficulty: however
legitimate a Christian’s appeal against papal error may be, he is too feeble in
front of the authority of the (pseudo) Vicar of Christ. A moral justification for
such dissent would allow a dissenter to take action; however, the action could
hardly be sufficiently influential within the Christian community to bring
down a heretical pope. Nonetheless, papal heresy must be corrected. Should a
pope hold an error pertinaciously and attempt to teach it throughout Christen-
dom, he must be deposed at once; otherwise, the heretical pope will ‘poison’
the entire Christian community by his authority that compels every believer to
subscribe to the error.*! The orthodox faith will be effectively destroyed.
Up to this point, Ockham focused on the relationship between the holder of
doctrinal errors (especially an erring ecclesiastic) and the corrector of the
error (a theologian without ecclesiastical office or a lay believer). But is this
problem irrelevant to all other Christians? Would other believers bear any
duty when the pope’s orthodoxy was seriously questioned by a believer with
good knowledge of the Christian faith? Should those who appeal against a
heretical pope be protected by other Catholics? Ockham’s response was
affirmative. Every Catholic was bound to protect those who, urged by their
40 On the idea of fraternal correction, see Takashi Shogimen, ‘From Disobedience to
Toleration: William of Ockham and the Medieval Discourse on Fraternal Correction’,
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, LI (2001), pp. 599-622.
41 | Dialogus, vi, c.100, p. 631.
618 T. SHOGIMEN

orthodox faith, appealed against a heretical pope. Catholic faith and human
fellowship (societas) would fall into crisis unless every member of the com-
munity protected each other. No communal fellowship is sustainable without
the mutual defence of its constituting members.”
When Ockham wrote this, he repeatedly appealed to Ambrose’s De officiis,
as it was cited in the Decretum. Referring to the Ambrosian text, Ockham
maintained that those who, when they could, did not dissent from illegitimate
authority, effectively agreed with such authority. Those who can and yet do
not defend an individual who endures injustice are committing the same crime
of injustice.” In so arguing, Ockham appealed to several canonist texts.
Indeed, the equation of negligence in correcting errors with consenting to the
error was not unfamiliar to canonists.** Commenting on dist. 83, to which
Ockham referred, Rufinus wrote: ‘It must be known that one is said to consent
in two ways: when one is negligent in objecting to sin when one must object or
when one supports sin by defending it or providing help in another way.’”
This shows a striking similarity to Ockham’s statement that ‘he who does not
resist someone who commits a harmful misdeed is his accomplice in crime
and his supporter’
.*°
But Ockham’s use of the canon-law texts departed from the canonists in
that the latter did not accept the idea of the universal duty of believers to repel
injustices inflicted upon their fellow believer. For Ockham, anyone, regard-
less of his status, who knows that injustice is inflicted upon someone else
could and should repel that injustice. Ockham’s Disciple raised this issue with
reference to the gloss on the Ambrosian text, suggesting that the text ‘if he
can’ means ‘if he wields an authoritative office’. Hence, the task of repelling
injustice appertains to the prelates alone.*’ Indeed, the Summa Parisiensis
maintained that ‘an individual to whom the rejection of injustice does not
42 | Dialogus vi, c.41, p. 540: ‘Illud sine quo periclitatur tam fides catholica quam
humana societas magis est a catholicis impendendum pro fide catholica conservanda
quam pro societate servanda, eo quod quilibet catholicus magis zelare tenetur pro fide
quam pro societate humana. Absque mutua tamen defensione periclitatur tam catholica
fides quam humana societas. Pro humana autem societate servanda Christiani sibi debent
auxilium mutuum impendere . .’
43 | Dialogus, vi, c.43, pp. 541-2.
44 Stephan Kuttner, Kanonistische Schuldlehre von Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen
Gregors IX (Vatican, 1935), p. 43, n.2.
45 Rufinus, Summa decretorum, ed. Heinrich Singer (Paderborn, 1902), p. 173:
‘Sciendum autem est quia duobus modis dicitur quis consentire: vel cum negligere
peccato obviare, cum debeat; vel cum cooperatur peccato defendendo aut aliquo modo
auxilium dando.’
46 | Dialogus, vi, c.43, p. 543: ‘Ex quibus verbis colligitur quod qui non resistit
iniuriam facienti eidem communicat in crimine atque favet.’
47 | Dialogus, vi, c.43, p. 542: ‘Ad hoc respondet glossa ibidem dicens: “si potest, id
est si est in potestate positius.” Ex quibus verbis glosse datur intelligi quod Ambrosius
loquitur de prelatis.’
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 619

appertain would commit a sin if he repels the injustice’.“* By contrast,

Ockham did not merely appeal to Ambrose’s texts in accordance with their
canonist interpretations but rather interpreted them more liberally, since
Ockham’s Master rejected the canonist interpretation as found in the gloss.”
Attention should be drawn to the fact that the Ambrosian idea Ockham fre-
quently drew on could be readily traced back to Cicero. It is widely known
that Ambrose’s De officiis was modelled on Cicero’s De officiis, and Ockham’ s
reading of the Ambrosian texts echoes the Ciceronian doctrine of fellowship
(societas). Cicero touched upon negligence as an individual’s personal failure
to do justice during the course of his discussion on injustice. Cicero consid-
ered that there were two types of justice and correspondingly two types of
injustice: positive and negative. Cicero’s positive notion of injustice was
when an individual inflicted injury upon other(s). “Anyone who makes an
unjust attack on another, whether driven by anger or by some other agitation,
seems to be laying hands, so to speak, upon a fellow.’*° On the other hand, the
‘negative’ kind of injustice was when individuals do not protect an individual
who is in need of protection, and abandon the fellowship of life. “The man
who does not defend someone, or obstruct the injustice when he can, is at fault
just as if he had abandoned his parents or his friends or his country.’®' Thus
Cicero asserted the public duty of protecting individuals who ought to be pro-
tected from the injustice inflicted upon them. In a similar vein, Ockham wrote
as follows:
But he who does not defend, when he can, those who oppose the pope for
cause of heretical wickedness, provides an opportunity for persecution or
disturbance or harm, because if he offered defence, as he could, persecution
or disturbance or harm done or to be done would be excluded. Therefore
this person in failing to defend papal opponents appears or is known to have
inflicted the damage described. But no one must inflict persecution or dis-
turbance or harm on opponents of the pope who impute heretical wicked-
ness to the latter before it shall have been established that they acted with
malice. Therefore everyone who can is obligated to defend them.”

48 The Summa Parisiensis on the Decretum Gratiani, ed. Terence P. McLaughlin

(Toronto, 1952), pp. 211-12: ‘Si igitur is ad quem pertinet iniuriam propulsare non
propulset, peccat. Sicut econverso, si is ad quem non pertinet propulsare propulset,
peccat.’
49 | Dialogus vi, c.43, p. 542.
50 Cicero, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge, 1991), p.10.
5! [bid.
52 | Dialogus, vi, c.50, pp. 552-3: ‘Sed non defendens impugnantes papam de
heretica pravitate, cum potest, occasionem persequendi vel molestandi vel iniuriandi
dat, quia si defenderet, ex quo potest, persecutionem vel molestiam vel iniuriam illatam vel
inferendam excluderet. Ergo talis non defendens predictos predicta intuilisse videtur vel
dinoscitur. Sed nullus debet impugnantibus papam de heretica pravitate antequam
constiterit eos malitiose procedere, persecutionem aut molestiam vel iniuriam irrogare.
620 ' T. SHOGIMEN

Conversely, catholic faith and social bonding would face devastation without
the mutual defence of every catholic from injustice. This idea underpinned
Ockham’s extensive discourse on supporters and defenders of a heretical
pope in Book 7 of Part I of the Dialogus. In it he argued, for instance, that
bishops and priests who solemnly promulgate the sentence of a heretical
pope, whether or not they are aware of the error, become supporters of the
pope. Those who do not resist error would be no less sinful than those who
promulgate the error.”> Ockham never alluded directly to Cicero; however, it
is sufficiently clear from all these arguments that through the Ambrosian text,
Ockham inherited the Ciceronian idea of negative injustice.
One may readily see the implication of this Ciceronian notion to Ockham’s
defence of contestability on doctrinal matters within Christendom. The fer-
vent commitment to explicit faith was, for Ockham, the equal duty of every
single believer. If such a duty were simply personal, there would be no good
reason to be concerned with another believer’s failure to fulfil his or her duty.
On the contrary, Ockham’s emphasis on the duty of mutual aid among believ-
ers put in sharp relief his view that the preservation of the faith by every
believer’s commitment to the explicit faith constituted the foundation of
social bonding in Christendom. Every catholic must bear the duty of embrac-
ing, professing and preserving the explicit faith precisely because the fulfil-
ment of such a duty preserves and strengthens Christian society.°* When he
argued thus, Ockham expounded a dynamic concept of the common good:
explicit words and deeds of the members of the community, not the ‘given’
laws that are entrusted to rulers to put into practice, defined the cominon
good.” ‘An appeal interposed for the cause of faith pertains to public law and

Ergo quilibet qui potest eos tenetur defendere.’ A similar view was expressed in numer-
ous orher parts of I Dialogus, for instance, vii, cc. 30, 46, 56, 61.
53 | Dialogus vii, 36: ‘. . . omnes Episcopi et Praelati publicantes et divulgantes
solenniter coram sibi subiectis totam tenendam doctrinam erroneam Papae haeretici,
tanquam catholicam, sunt fautores haereticae pravitatis, sive sciant eam esse erroneam
sive ignorent . . Non minus peccare videtur, qui non resistit errori, quam qui errorem
divulgat, et tanquam catholicum publicat.’ Furthermore, Ockham maintained that bishops
and priests are obliged to know whether their superior’s order contradicts the divine com-
mand, and therefore, in following the superior’s order against the divine will would be
likewise sinful, and ignorance of the superior’s error could not be an excuse. Ockham’s
notion of theological noblesse oblige is evidently applied.
>4 Similarly Cicero valued justice ‘precisely because it preserves and strengthens
society’. E.M. Atkins, © “Domina et Regina Virtutum”: Justice and Societas in De
Officiis’, Phronesis, 35 (1990), pp. 258-89, at p. 268.
5° Hence, I disagree with M.S. Kempshall’s following view: ‘Ockham understands
the common good, not as the life of virtue, but as the social necessity of peace and tran-
quillity (pax et tranquillitas). The individual is subordinated only to those external obli-
gations which have been imposed by spiritual and temporal authority in order to enable
humans to live together in peace and tranquillity.” (Kempshall, The Common Good in
Late Medieval Political Thought, p. 360.)
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 621

the common utility.”°° The actual commitment to explicit faith — not the
office or status — defined Ockham’s notion of the membership of the
Christian community. Clearly, the idea of the social obligation of protecting a
dissenting believer was far from destructive or anarchic in its intent. In oppo-
sition to the ‘papalist’ vision of the hierarchical order, Ockham envisaged an
alternative social bonding. His replacement of a hierarchical order with a cog-
nitive order was neither intended as, nor resulted in, the subjective multiplica-
tion of Christian beliefs and the fragmentation of the ecclesiastical order. On
the contrary, the destruction of the ecclesiastical order, which some modern
commentators identified as the logical consequence of Ockham’s
ecclesiology, was precisely the reality that Ockham witnessed. For him, the
ecclesiastical institution had already been paralysed by heretical popes and
papal supporters; hence, any recourse to institutional measures would be
utterly pointless. Ockham had no choice but to seek a non-institutional solu-
tion in a desperate attempt to preserve the orthodox faith, which was in his
view under serious threat of papal heresy.
In recognizing the urgent need of defending the fellowship, Ockham
agreed with Marsilius. After acknowledging that peace and tranquillity were
the source of the greatest good, Marsilius asserted that ‘we ought to wish to
seek and conserve peace and ‘to repel with all our strength the strife which is
opposed to it’. ‘To this end’, he continued, ‘individual brethren, and in even
greater degree groups and communities, are obliged to help one another, both
from the feeling of heavenly love and from the bond or law of human soct
ety.’°’ Mutual aid for the sake of peace was a duty for all members of the com-
munity. He reinforced this idea by citing Cicero: ‘And so, as the Stoics were
wont to say, the things that grow in the earth are all created for the use of men;
but men are born for the sake of men. In this we ought to follow the lead of
nature, and to bring forth common utilities for all.’** Accordingly, Marsilius
maintained that ‘whoever was willing and able to discern the common utility
is obliged to give this matter his vigilant care and diligent effort’. The
reverse side of this is clear: to uproot evil that might infect the community
was also a universal duty. All men are obliged who have the knowledge and

56 | Dialogus, vi, c.45, p. 547: ‘appellatio pro causa fidei interiecta spectat ad ius
publicum et utilitatem communem’.
57 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, C.W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928) (here-
after DP)I,i, 4: ‘Suntigitur, ut diximus, pacis seu tranquillitatis fructus optimi, oppositae
vero litis importabilia nocumenta, propter quod pacem optare, non conamine repellere
debemus. Ad ea quoque singuli fratres, eoque magis collegia et communitates se invicem
iuvare tenentur, tam supernae caritatis affectu, quam vinculo sive iure societatis humanae..’
The quotation is taken from the English translation by Alan Gewirth, Defensor pacis
(New York, 2001), p. 5.
58 As cited in Gewirth’s translation, Defensor pacis, p. 5.
59 DP, I, i, 4, p. 4: ‘... curam vigilem diligentemque operam huic praebere tenetur
quilibet, commune volens et potens utile cernere’.
622 T. SHOGIMEN

ability to thwart this evil, and those who neglect or omit this knowledge on
whatever grounds are unjust and commit a grave sin.*”’ As Nederman wrote,
‘Marsiglio . . . affirms the existence of rigorous standards of responsibility
binding all persons and communities claiming inclusion within the civilized
fraternity.’°' Clearly Marsilius’ discourse echoes the same Ciceronian idea of
negative injustice as Ockham’s does.
But Marsilius’ reference to the Ciceronian idea of mutual aid did not have
any more significance than as a tool to justify his controversial writings.
Marsilius, indeed, wrote the Defensor pacis in order to fulfil his duty, which
was, in his view, to unmask the one and only cause of strife in the Italian
city-states. This is why Marsilius’ Defensor pacis was devoted to revealing
the perversity of the contemporary theory and practice of papal government.
He certainly hoped to arouse resistance among those who suffered papal
oppression; and yet, he did not elaborate on thejustifications and obligations
of individuals to dissent from the unjust authority of the pope, but rather
entrusted the task to Ludwig of Bavaria, the dedicatee of the Defensor pacis.
By contrast, Ockham endeavoured to vindicate popular dissent in the hope
that the Christian community would hear the voice of dissenters like himself
and his fellow Michaelists. He drew on the Ambrosian defence of Christian
fellowship more heavily than Marsilius did precisely because he built a theory
of ecclesiastical dissent upon it. The idea of the mutual defence of the fellow-
ship justified Marsilius’ writing the Defensor pacis, whilst the same idea not
only vindicated but also conceptualized Ockham’s programme of ecclesiasti-
cal dissent.

Il
In the furious dispute with the Avignon papacy, Ockham found himself in a
situation where he was unable to submit himself to orthodox faith and the
pope simultaneously. He did not hesitate to opt for the former. The orthodox
faith lost institutional attribution and was reduced to the contingent subscrip-
tion of individual believers. But Ockham was all too aware of the coercive
nature of ecclesiastical authority. An ordinary believer who adheres to the
orthodox faith is utterly feeble in front of the authority of the (pseudo) ‘Vicar
of Christ’ and his ecclesiastical supporters. Thus Ockham called for mutual
protection of orthodox believers.
The defence of Christian fellowship that Ockham envisaged, however,
entailed an important prerequisite on the part of other believers: that is, they
bear the obligation to listen to others. All believers must be aware and fulfil
their duty of listening to others including disconcerting and dissenting voices.

© DP yA iSup. 4.
6! Cary J. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Theory of
Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis (Lanham, MD, 1995), p. 19.
 DEFENDING CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP 623

Ockham considered that listening to what is said publicly about the Christian
faith constituted an important part of the fellowship of the Christian commu-
nity. Listening to others is a prerequisite for all the actions that define Chris-
tian fellowship, such as professing faith and dissenting from error: the pope
will not reconsider his doctrinal decision or recognize the need to suspend his
authority unless he listens to a dissenter. Similarly, other believers will not
defend a dissenter until they listen to him. This explains why Ockham under-
lined that a dissenter should not be dismissed as a slanderer. The Christian
community must hear the voice of dissenters, especially if they are prudent
and reputable individuals and if their claim touches upon the common good.”
Ockham deplored the fact that the dissenting voices of the Michaelist Fran-
ciscans, including his own, were never heard. The extensive discussion of
supporters and defenders of a heretical pope illustrates that not only inaction
but also a failure to listen to dissenting voices would effectively be equivalent
to committing the same sin as the heresy of the pope.” Dissent that aspires to
the common good of the Christian community will become sufficiently visible
and audible only if many other believers, including high ecclesiastics, theo-
logical experts and laymen, listen to it. Thus Ockham’s knowledge-centred
notion of the Christian community was conceived as space for ‘dialogue’ —a
web of linguistic communications on doctrinal matters between individuals
who speak and listen to one another. This was not Ockham’s personal experi-
ence, of course. He appealed to a general readership as follows:
I grieve and lament over the iniquities and injustices that have most wick-
edly been brought upon you all, to the whole world’s cost, by him who
boasts that he sits in Peter’s chair and by some who preceded him in tyranny
and wickedness. The anguish I feel is the greater because you do not take
trouble to inquire with careful attention how much such tyranny wickedly
usurped over you is contrary to God’s honor, dangerous to the Catholic
faith, and opposed to the rights and liberties given to you by God and
nature; and worse, you reject, hinder, and condemn those who wish to
inform you of the truth.“

62 | Dialogus vii, c.9: ‘Ad omnes auctoritates, quibus suadetur, detractores esse
minime audiendos: respondetur unico verbo, quod omnes debent intelligi, quando
sciuntur esse detractores, quia illi de quibus scitut quod detractionis vitio sunt infecti,
absque magna causa audiri non debent, cum volunt de aliis aliquid narrare sinistrum, illi
autem de quibus ignoratur an sint detractores, sunt omnino audiendi: praecipue cum
aliquid, quod in dispendium potest vergere boni comminis, cupiunt enarrare, et multo
magis sunt audiendi illi, qui hactenus discreti et bonae famae reputati fuerunt, si
intendunt aliquid sinistrum de aliquo reserare, quare si tales laborant ostendere, quod
papa est haeretica pravitate maculatus, sunt audiendi omnino.’
63 | Dialogus vii, c.9.
64 William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on Tyrannical Government, ed. A.S.
McGrade, trans. John Kilcullen (Cambridge, 1992), Prologue, p. 3, (my emphasis).
624 T. SHOGIMEN

Ockham’s dissenting voice was not merely ignored; it was, he claimed,

silenced.
In this light, the problem that papal heresy posed to Christendom was not
the crime of the pope alone: the laity, through their inaction and failure to lis-
ten, was equally culpable. Ultimately, then, what Ockham perceived in the
problem of papal heresy was the breakdown not only of the ecclesiastical
institution, but also of Christian fellowship. He witnessed, criticized and
deplored the decay of Christian solidarity. Ockham’s anti-papal polemic was
not destructive of the ecclesiastical order; far from it. It was a desolate
endeavour to rescue the very foundation of Christian society.”

Takashi Shogimen UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO

65 An abridged version of this paper was delivered to the Research Seminar held at
the Department of History in the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, on 13
October 2004. Iam grateful to Dr John Stenhouse and Mr Stephen Conway for their valu-
able comments.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS AND
THE MURDEROUS INTENT OF THE PRINCE'

Joseph M. Parent’

Abstract: This paper argues that The Prince should be read as bearing uncomfortably
specific policy recommendations, namely for the work’s dedicatee Lorenzo de’ Medici
to kill his uncle Pope Leo X and the college of cardinals to begin unifying Italy. In sup-
port of the argument, the paper develops Machiavelli’s parallel construction between
Chapters Six and Twenty-Six, where he mysteriously omits Romulus from a list of
great founders whose example should be emulated. In short, Chapter Twenty-Six is an
integral, integrated part of The Prince.

It is well known that Machiavelli’s Prince can be read as a book of stately

advice, for perhaps republicans and/or princes, a trap for the Medici, and an
extremely sophisticated job application. Much of the debate has centred on
the final chapter. Felix Gilbert frames the issue well:
The structure of The Prince has always been examined in the hope of find-
ing a solution to the much debated question whether the Italian nationalism
of the last chapter formed an integral part of Machiavelli’s political outlook
or whether it was merely a decorative conclusion — a rhetorical, humanist
ornament . . . I believe we have to accept . . . the last chapter, which is not
prepared for by any hint in the preceding sections of the book, stands by
itself, mainly intended as a concluding rhetorical flourish.’

But another view has never been adequately presented. While scholars such
as Friedrich Meinecke, Leo Strauss and J.H. Whitfield have reticently indi-
cated the possibility that Chapter Twenty-Six is an integral, integrated part of
the work, which intimates concrete policy prescriptions, no prior treatment

' Paper presented at the ‘Competing Visions of Italy’ Conference, 1 April 2005,
Columbia University. I am grateful to Joshua Baron, Abigail Becker, Steven Gorman,
Hanna Gray, Alison Kennedy, Frank Lovett, Zane Mackin, Panos Papadopoulos, Stefan
Pedatella, Nathan Tarcov, Nadia Urbinati, Kenneth Waltz and anonymous referees. I
alone atone for remaining errors.
2 Buttenwieser Fellow, Columbia University, Dept. of Political Science, 420 West
118th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA. Email: jmp84 @columbia.edu
3 F, Gilbert, ‘The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli’,
The Journal of Modern History, 11 (1939), pp. 449-83; cf. E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’
Crisis, 1919-1939 (New York, 2nd edn., 1964), p. 89. Viroli has pointed out that using
the term ‘nationalism’ in discussions of Machiavelli is historically imprecise, I therefore
do so with reservations and only when engaging another author’s perspective. See M.
Viroli, For Love of Country (New York, 1995), pp. 36-7.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005
626 J.M. PARENT

has elaborated the argument.’ The stakes of the debate are Machiavelli’s
intentions and the aims of the most famous book on politics.
I argue that The Prince should also be read as an ominously detailed death
warrant. Through an underappreciated parallel construction in Chapters Six
and Twenty-Six, I believe Machiavelli employs a Livian pattern to commend
Romulus as the superlative model of how to go about liberating Italy. What
makes Romulus the most excellent example in Chapter Twenty-Six is that he
executed his uncle and brother and united diverse peoples, all to found a pol-
ity which became a great empire on the Italian peninsula. Presenting the work
to Lorenzo de’ Medici and encouraging him to emulate Romulus implies hor-
rific undertakings, specifically murdering his uncle, Pope Leo X, and the col-
lege of cardinals. Machiavelli cannot suggest such odious actions openly
without risking rebuke and depriving his tactical and strategic plans of helpful
stealth.
The paper is organized in the following manner. The first section discusses
the practical and theoretical puzzles of Chapter Twenty-Six; the second sec-
tion presents the argument in-depth; the third section details the alternative
hypotheses; and the final section addresses the implications of the argument
and how it speaks to the literature.

I
The Puzzles

The puzzles can be divided into practical and theoretical. Let us start with the
practical problems of Italian unification. If the goal is to liberate and unify
Italy, there is no question what keeps it divided and weak: the Church.
Machiavelli argues:
And no province has ever been united or happy unless it has all come under
obedience to one republic or to one prince, as happened to France and to
Spain... Thus, since the church has not been powerful enough to be able to
seize Italy, nor permitted another to seize it, it has been the cause that [Italy]
has not been able to come under one head but has been under many princes
and lords, from whom so much disunion and so much weakness have arisen

4 See F. Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison D’Etat and Its Place in
Modern History, trans. D. Scott (New Brunswick, 1998), pp. 41, 166, 293, 359;
L. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago, 1978), pp. 69, 309; J.H. Whitfield, Dis-
courses on Machiavelli (Cambridge, 1969), pp. 27, 123, 157, 158, 161, 204; cf. C. Lefort,
Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel (Paris, 1972), pp. 446-7. Like Machiavelli, Meinecke
and Whitfield move Romulus’ position repetitively when listing the four founders while
keeping the other three in the same order. Strauss raises the silence of Romulus and then
footnotes Stefano Porcari’s attempt on the pope’s life (of which more later). All chapter
references are to The Prince unless otherwise stated.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 627

that it has been led to be the prey not only of barbarian powers but of who-
ever assaults it.
If one wanted to decrease the number of political heads in Italy by decapi-
tating the Church, the attempt would probably involve multiple targets. The
pope is not the only obstacle to unity, cardinals also exert a divisive influence:
‘Nor will these parties ever be quiet as long as they have cardinals; for cardi-
nals nourish parties, within Rome and without, and the barons are forced to
defend them.’® The core problem is the pope and the cardinals’ circular
sources of legitimacy. That is, popes gain their legitimacy by being selected
by the cardinals and cardinals gain their legitimacy by being selected by
popes. Should the pope be eliminated, the cardinals could select a new one,
and vice versa.
In addition, semi-powerful Italian city-states stand in the way of unity, jeal-
ously guarding their autonomy. They too have to be brought under one rule if
Italy is not to remain at the mercy of great powers.’ In short, the practical puz-
zle of liberating Italy is how to rid the peninsula of the divisive influence of
the Church and baleful Italian multipolarity.
Turning to the theoretical puzzle, in the dramatic conclusion of The Prince
Machiavelli details the deplorable state of Italy to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the
young prince to whom the work is dedicated:
And if, as I said, it was necessary for anyone wanting to see the virtue of
Moses that the people of Israel be enslaved in Egypt, and to learn the great-
ness of spirit of Cyrus, that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to

5 N. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. H. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (Chicago,

1996), p. 38 [I 12]; cf. N. Machiavelli, Art of War, trans. C. Lynch (Chicago, 2003), VII
247. Since this passage is from the Discourses, we cannot assume a reader of The Prince
would be familiar with it. Yet there is enough anti-Church sentiment and praise of lone
unifiers in The Prince for a reader to understand that reorganizing the Church might aid
the liberation of Italy. See V. Sullivan, Machiavelli’s Three Romes: Religion, Human
Liberty, and Politics Reformed (De Kalb, 1996), Chs. 1-2.
© N. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. H. Mansfield (Chicago, 1998), p. 47 [Ch. 11]; cf.
N. Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, trans. L. Banfield and H. Mansfield (Princeton,
1988), 19.
7 On political autonomy, fear of relative gains and balancing in Italy, see Machiavelli,
The Prince, Chs. 11 and 20. A counterargument to this point is that Machiavelli desired a
temporary military alliance to drive out the foreigners, instead of a true unification.
While Machiavelli advocates expedient balancing behaviour, such a quick fix is anathema
to his doctrine of self-help through expansion. When a political unit cannot keep up with
the dominant powers, it must imitate or pay the costs of inferiority. See B. Ackerman, We
the People: Foundations (Cambridge, 1993), p. 180; cf. K. Waltz, Theory of Interna-
tional Politics (New York, 1979), p. 127. To be competitive in the system, Italy would
have to ape England and France, and Machiavelli says as much in The Prince, Ch. 3 (cf.
Discourses, II 4). See Machiavelli’s letters to Vettori, 10 August 1513 and 26 August
1513, in N. Machiavelli, The Letters of Machiavelli, ed. A. Gilbert (New York, 1961),
pp. 128-9, 136-7.
628 J.M. PARENT

learn the excellence of Theseus, that the Athenians be dispersed, so at pres-

ent to know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was necessary that Italy be
reduced to the condition which she is at present, which is more enslaved
than the Hebrews, more servile than the Persians, more dispersed than the
Athenians, without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, pillaged,
and having endured ruin of every sort.*
When Machiavelli remarks, ‘as I said’ he can have but one reference in mind.
The only other time that series occurs in the text is in Chapter Six, where he is
extolling the ‘most excellent’:
For since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others. . . a prudent
man 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 is at least in the odor of it. . . | say that the most excellent are
Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and the like.”

In fact, in Chapter Six, Machiavelli actually recommends these four illustri-

ous names three times. Why is it that when Machiavelli commends liberating
Italy in Chapter Twenty-Six he omits the only founder whose empire success-
fully accomplished the task?’° This is especially curious given Machiavelli’s
remarkable obsession with the Romans.

II
The Argument
This section answers three questions: Why is Romulus the supreme example
of Italian liberation? How does Machiavelli suggest his example? Why does
he make his suggestion sotto voce? The argument is that Machiavelli omits
Romulus not because he is unworthy of recommendation but because he is
supremely worthy of recommendation. Although all four founders have much

8 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 102. Whitfield sees a parallel construction between

Chapters Six and Twenty-Six in the four epithets ‘powerful’, ‘secure’, ‘honored’ and
‘happy’ at the end of Chapter Six with ‘beaten’, ‘despoiled’, ‘torn’ and ‘pillaged’ in
Chapter Twenty-Six. See Whitfield, Discourses, p. 27.
9 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 22. On how strongly Machiavelli encourages imitation,
see The Prince, Chs. 6, 14, 21, 26; cf. L. Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist (Berkeley,
1945), pp. 43-4; F. Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in 16th
Century Florence (New York, 1984), pp. 238-9. A secondary omission in The Prince is
Numa Pompilius, Rome’s second king. In the Discourses Machiavelli gives credit for the
founding of Rome to Romulus as well as Numa, see Discourses, I 11. Ultimately,
Machiavelli prefers Romulus to Numa (Discourses, 1 19.4) but his warm praise for Numa
in the Discourses contrasts starkly with his stony silence towards him in The Prince.
10 On the importance of founders and the example of Rome, see Machiavelli, Dis-
courses, 1 6, Il 2; P. Villari, The Life and Times of Niccolo Machiavelli, trans. L. Villari
(New York, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 134. Guicciardini famously criticizes Machiavelli for his
fetish with Rome, see F. Guicciardini, Selected Writings, ed. C. Grayson (New York,
1965); F. Guicciardini, Ricordi, trans. M. Domandi (Philadelphia, 1972).
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 629

in common, Romulus stands out because he rose to power by executing his

uncle and consolidated power by killing his brother. Applying Romulus’
actions to his own situation, Lorenzo might see that by assassinating his
uncle, Pope Leo X, and the college of cardinals, he could shatter the founts of
their legitimacy. Lorenzo would then be free to reorganize the Church and
begin conquering an Italian state that could compete with other great powers.
Machiavelli may use a subtle pattern of Livy’s to try to implant curiosity in
Lorenzo’s mind about the greatness of Romulus; and because Machiavelli’s
anti-papal, parricidal policy prescriptions go beyond the unseemly, and pub-
lic knowledge of them would hinder their execution, he is forced to suggest
them sotto voce.
Two preliminary observations. One should bear in mind that the differ-
ences between Machiavelli’s most excellent examples are few. (1) All are rul-
ers in search of states: Moses founds the spiritual empire that begets Judaism
and Christianity; Cyrus creates the Persian Empire; Romulus and Theseus
found cities that spawn military and cultural empires. All claim distinguished
lineage despite being abandoned at birth by one or both of their parents and,
with the exception of Theseus, were exposed to the elements.'! All are mili-
tarily successful and take upon themselves the task of establishing an empire,
typically at a young age.'* All die unfulfilled if not ignominiously. Moses
expires at one hundred and twenty, overlooking the Holy Land he would
never reach. Cyrus falls in battle (ironically from a Machiavellian perspec-
tive, against a woman) and his empire crumbles.'* Theseus falls from power,

'l See N. Machiavelli, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, trans. A. Brown (London,
2003), p. 3; cf. J.C. Macfarland, ‘Machiavelli’s Imagination of Excellent Men: An
Appraisal of the Lives of Cosimo de’ Medici and Castruccio Castracani’, American
Political Science Review, 93 (1999), pp. 133-46; Lefort, Le travail, pp. 336, 362, 422.
'2 Moses excepted. Lorenzo de’ Medici is also very young — and perhaps malleable,
as Whitfield points out — when he becomes Duke of Urbino. This is consistent with
Machiavelli’s assertion that fortune favours the young, but that should not obscure a pro-
found tension in The Prince. Machiavelli’s work is founded on the belief that a correct
understanding of politics is indispensable to successful action, yet who knows less than
the young? It appears that there is a tradeoff between learning and audacity that must be
optimized. See Whitfield, Discourses, pp. 103-4; A. Kontos, ‘Success and Knowledge
in Machiavelli’, in The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, ed.
A. Parel (Toronto, 1972), Ch. 4.
13 T use Herodotus’ account for Chapter Six because Machiavelli goes out of his way
twice to refer to the Cyrus ‘by Xenophon’ in Chapter Fourteen. By implication some
other Cyrus (historical Cyrus? The effectual truth of Cyrus? Herodotus’ Cyrus?) is meant
in the other three chapters in which Cyrus appears. I speculate on meager evidence that it
is Herodotus’ Cyrus. Xenophon tells a tale of a death more peaceful and deliberate for
Cyrus than Herodotus relates. On Machiavelli’s ambivalence towards and differentia-
tion from Xenophon, see W.R. Newell, ‘Machiavelli and Xenophon on Princely Rule: A
Double-Edged Encounter’, Journal of Politics, 50 (1988), pp. 108-30; cf. C. Nadon,
630 J.M. PARENT

is taken in by a false friend and thrown from a rock. Romulus dies in a thunder-
storm, mythically as if scooped up by the gods, but probably, says Livy, it is
the Senate who kills him.
Further, (2) determining Machiavelli’s message is an inescapably messy
matter. He admits that ‘for a long time I have not said what I believed, nor do
I ever believe what I say, and if indeed sometimes I do happen to tell the
truth, I hide it among so many lies that it is hard to find’.'* All arguments on
Machiavelli labour under his dissimulation, and mine more than most. If
Machiavelli wanted to hint at homicide he needed to retain plausible deniability
if his audience recoiled in horror. Thus, plausible deniability builds dis-
confirming evidence into the structure of my argument. I concede that defini-
tive proof is a vanishingly unlikely prospect, yet seek to show that my
interpretation is at least as tenable as its rivals.

1. What Qualifies Romulus as a Supreme Example for Chapter

Twenty-Six?
Romulus is the unsurpassed example because the opportunity (occasione) he
faced most resembles Lorenzo’s. Italy is not being unified so much as reuni-
fied, and Romulus’ empire was the only political entity to bring Italy under
one rule.’ But the opportunity goes beyond geography. Of all the most excel-
lent founders, Romulus alone attained and consolidated his power by assassi-
nating family members.'® Before founding his new principality, he had to
murder his great uncle Amulius and his brother Remus. Also, in contradistinc-
tion to others, Romulus had no preexisting people and had to create one from
disparate groups with outstanding martial virtue.
While all the most excellent examples used extraordinary modes to come to
power, and all were responsible for many deaths, no one but Romulus
founded a new principality directly through parricide. This is not to say that
any of the others were not responsible for the death of many people and some

‘From Republic to Empire: Political Revolution and the Common Good in Xenophon’s
Education of Cyrus’, American Political Science Review, 90 (1996), pp. 361-74.
14 Letter 179, of 17 May 1521. See Machiavelli, Letters, 200.
!5 Machiavelli is sensitive about moving from generalities to particulars, see The
Prince, Ch. 20.1, Discourses, II 33.
'6 This story is drawn from T. Livy, The Early History of Rome, trans. A. de Selincourt
(New York, 1971), p. 39 [16]. Livy also suggests that Romulus’ victory over Remus was
not random. Earlier, only Remus fell into a trap laid for both of them. Machiavelli blames
Tatius’ death on Romulus, but excuses him carte blanche in Discourses, 1 9. If one is to
believe Plutarch, Romulus was also responsible for slaying two of his foster fathers. If we
are to lay responsibility on Romulus on a grander scale, it was not long before Rome
swallowed Alba. See Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans.
J. Dryden and H. Clough (New York, 1992), Vol. 1, p. 32.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 631

family members. Moses was ‘forced to kill infinite men’,'’ including the Pharaoh
in whose house he had lived. Cyrus deposed his grandfather and deceived his
uncle, though he did not kill them. Because he forgot to put up the white sail of
victory, Theseus caused the suicide of his father. However, Romulus alone
founded his state through parricide.
Applying the example of Romulus to Machiavelli’s times, Lorenzo’s
opportunity is strikingly similar. Lorenzo too faces an Italy that is a ‘mixed’
or ‘disparate’ province.'* He has the opportunity to found a new principality
by murdering his uncle, Pope Leo X, and the cardinals (interpreting clergy as
‘brothers’ is a plausible view) thereby subjugating the Catholic Church, reor-
dering it along more civic religious lines. Machiavelli is not the enemy of reli-
gion; he detests destroyers of religion. But the Church uses Christianity as an
infantilizing force, and an Italian unifier could change religio-moral standards
along more glorious earthly lines.'? That Machiavelli originally intended to
dedicate The Prince to Giuliano de’ Medici, the Duke of Nemours and the
brother of Leo X, supports the conjecture that the work may have been con-
ceived with a persistent parricidal purpose. Both Giuliano and Lorenzo stood
to gain the same prize by the same actions.”
No historical parallel is perfect, and the parallel between Romulus/Amulius
and Lorenzo/Leo X is no exception. Romulus gained prominence violently;
Lorenzo inherited his position peacefully. One gained by killing his great
uncle, the other could gain by killing his uncle. One benefited by murdering
his blood brother, the other could gain by murdering priestly brothers
(Lorenzo did not have a blood brother). But the similarities are striking given
the historical materials available to Machiavelli.

'7 Machiavelli, Discourses, III 30.1; cf. ibid., 1 9.3.

'8 Machiavelli uses this terminology in Chapter Three where he discusses how Louis
XII could have conquered Italy, highlighting mistakes a succeeding conqueror could
avoid. See N. Tarcov, ‘Machiavelli and the Foundations of Modernity: A Reading of
Chapter 3 of The Prince’, in Educating the Prince, ed. M. Blitz and W. Kristol (New
York, 2000), Ch. 3. Cesare Borgia and The Life of Castruccio Castracani also illustrate
traps for an Italian unifier to avoid.
19 On Machiavelli’s criticism of destroyers of religion, see Discourses, I 10.1. On
religio-moral standards, see I. Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli’, in The Proper
Study of Mankind, ed. H. Hardy and R. Hausheer (New York, 1998), pp. 269-325; J.T.
Scott and V. Sullivan, ‘Patricide and the Plot of The Prince: Cesare Borgia and
Machiavelli’s Italy’, American Political Science Review, 88 (1994), pp. 887-900. With
regard to Numa’s absence from The Prince, Numa may be excluded because sixteenth-
century Italy, a land with more religion than military virtue, was ripe for anew Romulus,
not a new Numa.
20 The Medici were not the only family so situated. Shortly we will turn to the
Borgias, but here I should note that Machiavelli has positive things to say about
Francesco Maria della Rovere, the militant nepote of Pope Julius II. See Machiavelli,
Discourses, II 10.1 and II 24.4.
632 J.M. PARENT

Consistent with this interpretation, Machiavelli favourably mentions four

other individuals who could have killed the pope. In 1505, Machiavelli was
present when Giovampagolo Baglioni had a golden opportunity to kill Pope
Julius Il and all the cardinals. In Discourses, 1 27, Machiavelli laments
Giovampagolo’s restraint in the strongest of terms:
So Giovampagolo, who did not mind being incestuous and a public parri-
cide, did not know — or, to say better, did not dare, when he had just the
opportunity for it — to engage in an enterprise in which everyone would
have admired his spirit and that would have left an eternal memory of him-
self as being the first who had demonstrated to the prelates how little is to be
esteemed whoever lives and reigns as they do; and he would have done a
thing whose greatness would have surpassed all infamy, every danger, that
could have proceeded from it.7!
Similarly, Machiavelli observed to Vettori, “all the things that have been can,
I believe, be again; and I know that pontiffs have fled, gone into exile, been
pursued, suffered to the utmost, like temporal rulers, and this in times when
the Church in the spiritual matters was more revered than she is today’.”*
Moreover, Machiavelli infamously details the exploits of Cesare Borgia,
son of Pope Alexander VI. Jacob Burckhardt once argued:
In fact, there can be no doubt whatever that Cesare, whether chosen pope or
not after the death of Alexander, meant to keep possession of the pontifical
state at any cost, and that this, after all the enormities he had committed, he
could not as pope have succeeded in doing permanently. He, if anybody,
could have secularized the States of the Church . .. Unless we are much
deceived, this is the real reason of the secret sympathy with which Machia-
velli treats the great criminal; from Cesare, or from nobody, could it be
hoped that he ‘would draw the steel from the wound’, in other words, anni-
hilate the papacy — the source of all foreign intervention and of all the divi-
sions of Italy.”
Machiavelli also describes Cesare’s unification of the Romagna in language
that could easily describe unification of Italy: ‘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 for union’. So too
Machiavelli’s admiration of Cesare’s solution could be instructive to a would-
be Italian unifier. Borgia employed Remirro de Orco to pacify the region, but
21 Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 64.
22 Machiavelli, Letters, p. 180. The passage is drawn from letter 155 of 20 December
1514.
23 J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore
(New York, 1990), p. 88. Burckhardt may be referring to Chapter Twenty-Six in a pas-
sage where Machiavelli elliptically refers to “someone who could judge that he had been
ordered by God for her [Italy’s] redemption, yet later it was seen that in the highest course
of his actions, he was repulsed by fortune’. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 102; cf.
Machiavelli, Art of War, p. 12 [I 43].
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 633

when his cruelty became excessive and hated Borgia savagely punished him,
leaving him in two pieces in the piazza. The spectacle ‘left the people at once
satisfied and stupefied’. Yet it was Borgia’s cruelty that ‘restored the Romagna,
united it, and reduced it to peace and faith’.
When cataloguing Cesare’s virtues in Chapter Seven, Machiavelli counts
among them that ‘he could have kept anyone from being pope’” leaving
ambiguous whether Cesare merely held veto power over pontifical ascension
or could eliminate the pope and the college of cardinals altogether. Further, in
Chapter Eight Liverotto da Fermo gains his patrimony through parricide and
Cesare enlarges his by killing Liverotto. The reader may fairly wonder: what
benefits would Cesare reap by becoming a parricide like Liverotto? Ulti-
mately, Borgia depends too much on his father, loses his prudence and meets
his political demise. But Borgia began to fulfil Machiavelli’s unifying project
and his mistakes could be instructive to a successor.
Yet another instance is in Florentine Histories, V1 29, where Machiavelli
writes an apologia for a would-be assassin of the pope. Stefano Porcari, ‘a
Roman citizen, noble by blood and learning, but much more so by the excel-
lence of his spirit’ seeks to kill the pope and restore his fatherland to its
ancient form of life. Stefano becomes suspect and is banished to Bologna.
Nonetheless, he still undertakes the conspiracy, but it is exposed and fails the
night before its execution. Machiavelli closes the section ruefully, noting ‘the
intention of this man could be praised by anyone, but his judgment will
always be blamed by everyone because such undertakings, if there is some
shadow of glory in thinking of them, have almost always very certain loss in
their execution’.”°
Lastly, Machiavelli admiringly mentions Gaston de Foix, Duke of Nemours.
De Foix, the nephew of Louis XII, is given great credit for his audacity and
military exploits throughout the Discourses. His untimely death in the Battle
of Ravenna was a crushing blow to his army and turned back an attack on the
pope. Prior to the battle, the Duke harangued his troops, promising booty in
Rome ‘where the boundless riches of that wicked court . . . will be sacked by
you ... [de Foix calls for] divine justice to punish . . . the pride and enormous
vices of that false Pope Julius’.”’ If title dictated behaviour and the Duke of
Nemours were always an enemy of the pope, the position could have been
24 The Machiavelli quotes of this paragraph are drawn from, respectively, The
Prince, pp. 29, 30 and 65. ‘Stupefy’ shows up one other time in the work. It is in Chapter
Nineteen, referring to how the cruelty of Severus stupefied the people and kept Severus
safe from conspiracies. I thank Nathan Tarcov for bringing this to my attention.
25 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 33. Scott and Sullivan have made these interpretations
of Chapters Seven and Eight before. See Scott and Sullivan, ‘Patricide’, pp. 888, 895.
26 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, p. 264. Keeping with a motif, Machiavelli once
again posits Petrarch as the poetic inspiration of Italian unification.
27 B. Guicciardini, The History ofItaly, trans. S. Alexander (Princeton, 1984), p. 244.
See also Machiavelli, Discourses, II 16.2, II 17.1, Il 17.4, II 24.3, I 44.2-3.
634 J.M. PARENT

auspicious. After de Foix, the Dukedom of Nemours went to Giuliano de’

Medici, the original dedicatee of The Prince.
Also consistent with this interpretation are three favourable references to
nephews increasing their power by deceiving their uncles: Cyrus attained
greatness by deceiving his uncle Cyaxares; Giovan Galeazzo Visconti gained
a state by killing his uncle Bernabo Visconti and tried to become king of Italy;
and, as mentioned, Giovanni Fogliani was killed by his nephew Liverotto da
Fermo, who thereby acquired his state.”**

2. How Might Machiavelli Recommend Imitating Romulus Subtly?

Machiavelli may be imitating his favourite historian, employing a Livian pat-
tern of silent but superlative praise. To argue that Machiavelli looks favour-
ably on instruction by omission, some point to Discourses, II 10. In this
chapter Machiavelli calls Livy a ‘truer witness than any other’ for the opinion
that money is not the sinew of war perhaps because ‘he comes to his conclu-
sion without ever mentioning money’.”? That is, Livy sets his conclusions off
in bold relief by not referring to the common opinion, and Machiavelli is dis-
posed to follow him. Yet I contend this is the wrong model. In Discourses, II
10, what is obvious and omitted is frowned upon. Scholars have overlooked a
better model, where Livy uses silence to label an example as excellent.
While Discourses II 10 generally supports my argument, the specific
Livian model Machiavelli would use is more likely to be found in XXXV 14
of Livy’s History. If Machiavelli is offering a signal list of examples as a
context-sensitive ranking, Livy provides him with a precise pattern of how to
name three individuals while ranking four. He tells a story of Hannibal meet-
ing with Scipio after the Second Punic War. Scipio asks Hannibal to rank his
top three generals. Hannibal replies that first is Alexander, second is Pyrrhus
and third is himself. Laughing heartily, Scipio inquires where Hannibal
would rank himself had Scipio not beaten him. ‘I should certainly put my-
self . . . before all other generals!’, was Hannibal’s response, implying with

28 Machiavelli, Discourses, II 13; Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 1 27; Machia-

velli, The Prince, Ch. 8. Although the greatest examples do not illustrate the practice, it
could be that Machiavelli is open to the reverse; that is, to uncles killing nephews to
found a new principality. Or Machiavelli may merely want to catalyse fear of such
duplicity in Lorenzo to stoke a security dilemma and provoke preemption. See
Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 35, 37, 47, 67, 79.
29 Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 149; cf. Machiavelli, Art of War, p. 159 [VII 178];
H. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders (Chicago, 1979), p. 216. Alas, the
common opinion continues to be stubborn. Hendrik Spruyt asserts: ‘Money is the sinews
of power, argued Machiavelli succinctly, observing the winds of military change in his
day.’ H. Spruyt, “The Origins, Development, and Possible Decline of the Modern State’,
Annual Review of Political Science, 5 (2002), pp. 127-49. Because Spruyt’s bibliogra-
phy does not contain any Machiavelli, it is unclear which source Spruyt has not read
where Machiavelli does not make that point.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 635

‘elaborate Punic subtlety’ that he was not ranking amateurs with profession-
als. So much did Scipio outrank all the greatest generals that Hannibal consid-
ered him worthy ‘beyond calculation’.*° By this logic, omitting Romulus
indicates his unsurpassed virtue.

3. Why Would Machiavelli Communicate Policy Prescriptions Sotto Voce?

Machiavelli risks rebuke by suggesting odious actions openly: strategic sur-

prise aids assassination and cloaking who the initial targets of Italian unifica-
tion would be dulls the strength of a balancing coalition.*’ Since Machiavelli
was an ambassador, it makes sense to interpret his ambiguity as the ‘sign lan-
guage’ of a diplomat. The literature on this point is clear about the utility of
ambiguity; it is excellent for retaining flexibility and safely sounding out
another’s position. One does not have to be a Straussian to believe that
Machiavelli had normative commitments and professional experience, and
that he would recommend policies that followed from his principles and train-
ing. Rising to greatness requires fraud, and Lorenzo needs deception just as
Machiavelli does. Characteristically, he praises the early Romans for their
fraud.
The Romans therefore are seen in their first increases not to be lacking even
in fraud, which it is always necessary for those who wish to climb from
small beginnings to sublime ranks to use and which is less worthy of
reproach the more it is covert, as was that of the Romans.”
With regard to plausible deniability, Machiavelli is in a delicate situation
advising Lorenzo to kill his uncle. The Medici had previously exiled and tor-
tured him and the suggestion would horrify most people. Machiavelli must be
cautious in his counsels in case they are received unfavourably, in fact
Machiavelli was hesitant about whether and how to circulate a copy of his
work. But by setting the agenda, Machiavelli can lead the reader to a door and
have the reader enter on her own.” Indeed, The Prince in its entirety can be

UN Livy, Rome and the Mediterranean, trans. H. Bettenson (New York, 1976),
p. 209; cf. Discourses, I 10.1.
31 Machiavelli’s thoughts on surprise are more complicated than usually realised
(e.g. M. Handel, Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought (London, 2nd edn., 1992),
pp. 3-4) and, because it would impede the argument, as presented here. On how the diplo-
matic use of ambiguity can elicit desired outcomes, see R. Jervis, The Logic of Images in
International Relations (New York, 1989), Ch. 5; cf. M. DeCallieres, On the Manner of
Negotiating with Princes, trans. A.F. White (Notre Dame, 1963), pp. 14, 31-2.
32 Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 156 [II 13]. See also ibid., II 1.2 and III 40.
33 On Machiavelli’s caution about circulating his work or giving it to its dedicatee,
see H. Baron, “The Principe and the Puzzle of the Date of Chapter 26’, Journal of Medi-
eval and Renaissance Studies, 21 (1991), pp. 83-102; S. DeGrazia, Machiavelli in Hell
(Princeton, 1989), p. 40. There is a story — perhaps apocryphal — that Machiavelli did
give his little work to Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was uninterested in it and more taken by
636 J.M. PARENT

read as an exercise in this. Machiavelli starts the book with a series of appar-
ently neutral classifications, then ends up by focusing only on virtuous new
princes — a poor fit if the book aims to help Lorenzo keep his hereditary state
as is. The final chapter calls for the redeeming of Italy, a great task for a new
prince.
With regard to strategic surprise, although it is unclear who the actual read-
ership of The Prince was, overtly suggesting papacide would increase the
chances that Lorenzo would be exposed and suffer the same fate as Porcari.
So too executing the pope and cardinals and announcing oneself as a new
Romulus would quickly create a formidable balancing coalition against the
new prince — a recipe for brilliant, unlasting success. The first targets of
inchoate Italian political union would be other Italian states, and they could
not be expected to sit idly by awaiting their demise. Ancient Rome had to lull
its neighbours into thinking it unthreatening and defeat them sequentially to
unify Italy.** A new Romulus would have to do the same. On this reading, the
bright tone in the final chapter may be employed to disguise or diminish
Machiavelli’s dark intent, and the ‘barbarians’ of Chapter Twenty-Six (and
Discourses, 1 12) may be some combination of the pope, the cardinals and
other Italian powers. It could be that the deficiently-lettered ultramontanes
were also barbarians, but a precondition to beating those barbarians was uniting
the barbaric and savagely selfish Italian heads first.
To close, there are good reasons to suspect that Machiavelli had decisive
policy recommendations hidden in his Prince. By killing his uncle Pope Leo
X and the college of cardinals, Lorenzo could begin to unify Italy and aggre-
gate enough power to contend with Europe’s great powers. Machiavelli is
forced for tactical and strategic reasons to offer his suggestions quietly, so he
employs a pregnant silence to raise, and advocate, the emulation of Romulus.

some hounds he had received as a gift. See F. Chabod, Machiavelli & the Renaissance,
trans. D. Moore (London, 1958), pp. 17-18, 106; R. Ridolfi, The Life of Niccolo
Machiavelli, trans. C. Grayson (Chicago, 1963), p. 164. Contra Baron, I interpret this
hesitance not as uncertainty about the conclusion but as the prudent floating of a trial bal-
loon on a work that could endanger the author’s life. On agenda setting, concealment and
complicity, see L. Strauss, ‘Machiavelli’, in History of Political Philosophy, ed.
L. Strauss and J. Cropsey (Chicago, 1987), p. 312. See also Machiavelli, Art of War, pp.
152, 154 [VII 99, VII 124]; Machiavelli, Discourses, 125,139, III 48. In the present case
itis a second-order conspiracy: Machiavelli conspires to get Lorenzo to conspire. Also, I
wish only to adduce my interpretation of Chapter Twenty-Six, not embroil myself in
debates on Machiavellian ethics. For an overview of such debates, see Q. Skinner, The
Foundations of Modern Political Thought (New York, 1980), Vol. 1, pp. 135-8.
34 See Strauss, Thoughts, pp. 63-9. This pacific facade was not complete fraud. In the
expansions of the Roman Republic (510 sc to 121 Bc), Rome went to war on average
about once every twenty years. L. Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the
Peaceful Savage (New York, 1997), p. 33. Lorenzo was no stranger to the balance of
power, his grandfather is credited in one of the earliest formulations of it, see
Guicciardini, History, Book 1; cf. S. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, 1987).
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 637

ll
Alternative Hypotheses: Parallel Lives?
Alternative hypotheses may be grouped under three rough headings. The
omission of Romulus in Chapter Twenty-Six is explained away on: (1) per-
sonal grounds for the author and/or his audience; (2) textual grounds, which
disqualify Romulus for special consideration in Chapter Twenty-Six; and (3)
historical grounds, i.e. Hans Baron’s celebrated interpretation of Chapter
Twenty-Six.

1. Personal Grounds

An initial reaction could be that Romulus’ absence is accidental. Everyone

makes mistakes; authors forget; manuscripts are miscopied. Yet it is incredibly
implausible to think that someone smart enough to write the most famous
book on politics would forget such an obvious example in a fit of absent-
mindedness, especially when the author is so fond of Rome. Not only is
Machiavelli too intelligent and The Prince too finely-chiselled for such a
gaffe but it is inconsistent with the evidence. Conspiracies are a preeminent
interest for Machiavelli, taking up the largest chapters in both The Prince and
the Discourses.*? Moreover, Chapter Twenty-Six is not missing the word
‘Romulus’, but, to maintain balance, it is missing a whole phrase referring to
Romulus’ opportunity. Therefore, a massive, mid-sentence copy error would
have had to surgically remove the whole phrase referring to Romulus and
nothing else. Also, if Romulus’ placement is accidental, it is logical that prior
orderings would be either unchanged or random. However, Machiavelli
draws our attention to Romulus by changing his placement in the order and no
one else’s.*° Through all the listings Moses, Cyrus and Theseus always stand
meticulously in the same relation to each other. An accidental omission is less
likely than an intentional one.
A sceptic might argue that Machiavelli would not hint so silently because
his intended audience would not understand the hint. Arguing about the intel-
ligence of Lorenzo is not only fruitless — he died young and we do not know
enough about him — but beside the point.*’ Machiavelli could not be clearer
without losing plausible deniability, personal safety and strategic surprise.

35 See also Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, VII 1. As Rousseau noticed in On the

Social Contract, Chapter VI: ‘Under the pretext of teaching kings, he has taught impor-
tant lessons to the peoples. Machiavelli’s The Prince is the book of republicans.’ See J.J.
Rousseau, The Basic Political Writings, trans. D. Cress (Indianapolis, 1987), p. 183.
When Machiavelli tells princes how to avoid conspiracies he is simultaneously announc-
ing to conspirators where princes are most vulnerable to conspiracies.
36 Strauss, Thoughts, p. 308, fns. 34-5; cf. M. Martelli, Saggio Sul Principe (Rome,
1999), p. 137.
37 Were it not beside the point, there is some evidence that Lorenzo was intelligent.
His tomb, sculpted by Michelangelo, has three sculptures on it: Dawn, Dusk and Lorenzo
638 J.M. PARENT

Furthermore, making his policy recommendations slightly less accessible has

the benefit of screening out those who are more likely to botch the plans. On
this reading, The Prince is not a unidirectional job application. Machiavelli is
investigating whether Lorenzo has a job for him at the same time that he is
investigating whether Lorenzo will do a job for him.
Another hypothesis is that Lorenzo did not have sufficient motive to kill his
uncle. In fact there were many tensions between the Medici.** When Lorenzo
was put in charge of Florence, Leo X gave him condescending instructions,
stipulating exactly what to do. By May 1513, Lorenzo explicitly overruled his
uncle’s plans for the size of the Florentine governing council. Lorenzo was
also put in the resentful role of scapegoat when Florentines did not receive
their hoped-for papal patronage. There was further conflict over marital
matches, competition to lead the army in 1515, who should rule Urbino and
the Romagna and Lorenzo’s arrogance in governing Florence. Worse yet,
Lorenzo owed Leo X quite a bit of money, and Leo X accused Lorenzo of bad
alliance formation, tilting too far towards France, especially after his mar-
riage. When Lorenzo died, Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici came to Florence to
undo Lorenzo’s policies with such haste that he did not bother attending
Lorenzo’s funeral. In sum, the political roles of the Medici were often at odds
with their familial obligations. Not only was it reasonable to guess at such
family tensions, not only were such tensions present, but also the
Machiavelli—Vettori correspondence records dismay about Leo’s political
and familial roles causing friction.*? Certainly these problems did not lead to
parricide, but parricide has happened over less, and one could be forgiven for
thinking these motives sufficient.

thinking, pensieroso. For Machiaveili’s initial impression of Lorenzo, see his correspon-
dence of August 1513, letter 135; Machiavelli, Letters, pp. 138-9.
38 For background, see H. Reinhard, Lorenzo von Medici, Herzog von Urbino
(Freiburg, 1935); J. Najemy, ‘Machiavelli and the Medici: The Lessons of Florentine
History’, Renaissance Quarterly, 35 (1982), pp. 551-76. On the initial tensions between
the Medici, see H.C. Butters, Governors and Government in Early Sixteenth-Century
Florence, 1502-1519 (New York, 1985), p. 240; R. Devonshire Jones, Francesco
Vettori: Florentine Citizen and Medici Servant (New York, 1972), p. 111; Ridolfi, Life,
p. 176; J.N. Stephens, The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512-1530 (New York,
1983), p. 80. On Lorenzo’s role as scapegoat, see Butters, Governors, p. 234. On
Lorenzo’s spending and debt problems, see Stephens, Fall, p. 100; Butters, Governors,
p. 235. On the issues of Lorenzo’s quest for and securing of a marital match, see Butters,
Governors, pp. 237, 269, 299; Stephens, Fall, pp. 97, 100, 106. On Lorenzo’s offensive
political self-assertion, see Devonshire Jones, Francesco Vettori, pp. 119, 136; Butters,
Governors, pp. 240, 269, 300; Stephens, Fall, pp. 98-100, 102, 107. On the speedy undo-
ing of Lorenzo’s rule in Florence and the lack of lamentation at his death, see Ridolfi,
Life, p. 176; Devonshire Jones, Francesco Vettori, pp. 138-9; Stephens, Fail, p. 108.
39 J. Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-
Vettori Letters of 1513-1515 (Princeton, 1993), p. 147.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 639

The deeper trouble with this perspective is that it assumes that if there were
amity between Medici, then Machiavelli would not have dared to suggest
treachery. However, in the examples Machiavelli provides, there appears to
be longstanding amity prior to the moment of hostility. Romulus, Cyrus,
Giovan Galeazzo Visconti and Liverotto da Fermo all betrayed their relatives
with little warning. Discord is unnecessary; a glory-seeking prince could
make his own opportunity as others have done.*° Nevertheless, while the situ-
ation may be ripe for parricide, it is difficult to determine a relationship’s soli-
darity from the outside; proceeding with double entendres is a prudent course.

2. Textual Grounds

Another hypothesis would be that Machiavelli disqualifies Romulus from

consideration with the others by making his disadvantages more personal. ‘It
was fitting that Romulus not be received in Alba, that he should have been
exposed at birth .. .’.*! Yet this smacks of subterfuge. There are two claims
here: (i) Romulus was unique in being unreceived and (ii) he was unique in
being exposed. Therefore these differences disqualify him from being com-
pared to the other excellent examples in the context of Chapter Twenty-Six.
Both claims are false. First, Livy is quite clear that Romulus and Remus are
not unreceived in Alba — they are ‘seized by an urge’” and take it upon them-
selves to found another city. God’s directives to Moses notwithstanding,
Cyrus and Theseus are alike self-motivated; they too do not found because
they are unreceived. Second, all four founders are abandoned at birth, with all
but Theseus left exposed to the elements. Nevertheless, Machiavelli could use
the personal difference defence, however flimsy, to plead ignorance should
his audience react adversely. The passage on Romulus’ personal disadvan-
tages is more probably a screen than a mistake.
An additional textual hypothesis is deficient religiosity. Some contend that
Romulus is not included in Chapter Twenty-Six ‘perhaps because to Romulus...
“the authority of God was not necessary” ’.**? This hypothesis, in seeking to
distinguish the founders from one another, is not sustained by the text. In
40 For glory as supreme motive and particularly necessary in the state-building enter-
prise in Machiavelli, see R. Price, “The Theme of Gloria in Machiavelli’, Renaissance
Quarterly, 30 (1977), pp. 588-631, pp. 595, 618, pp. 595, 618; DeGrazia, Machiavelli
in Hell, pp. 259, 375; Strauss, Thoughts, Ch. 4; Villari, Life, Vol. 2, Chs. 2-3;
Machiavelli, Discourses, p. 31 [I 10].
41 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 23.
42 Livy, Early History, p. 39. Plutarch (Lives, Vol. 1, p. 31) provides various accounts
of the same event, but even in the less honourable account, Romulus and Remus are not
unreceived or forced out, but choose to go elsewhere because Alba does not desire the
twins’ slave and fugitive associates.
43 DeGrazia, Machiavelli in Hell, p. 53. Gennaro Sasso also makes this point, albeit
tentatively. See G. Sasso, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi (Milan, 1987), Vol. 2, pp.
340-1.
640 J.M. PARENT

Chapter Six, Machiavelli makes it clear that although Moses was a ‘mere
executor’ of things ordered by God, if one examines the actions of the other
three illustrious founders ‘they will appear no different from those of Moses,
who had so great a teacher’ .“* Hence, the ‘authority of God was not necessary’
for any of them to found their states. The biblical grounds DeGrazia adduces
to substantiate his point only support Moses and Cyrus — there are no reasons
for supposing that Theseus too should not have been omitted. Moreover, if
religion is so important in founding, why is Numa never mentioned in The
Prince?
Yet another hypothesis, and one made by Martelli, is that Romulus may be
disqualified because he is the only one who does not have an oppressed people.
This is true, but it ignores the fact that Machiavelli presents oppression as
empirically uninformative when explaining political change. Although Machia-
velli claims that if princes avoid being hated and are not oppressive then they
will not be overthrown from within, his examples undermine his claim.* He
recommends a prince who is not hated yet is still killed in conspiracy, Nabis
the Spartan, as well as a prince who is hated but is not killed in a conspiracy,
Severus. Of fifteen major conspiracies Machiavelli chronicles in his Floren-
tine Histories,** hatred of the rulers does not explain much. In the nine cases
where the ruler was hated, four conspiracies were strategically successful; in
the six cases where the ruler was not hated, three were strategically success-
ful. Across his works, Machiavelli’s examples point to the minimal effect that
44 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 22-3.
45 Martelli’s claim can be found in his, Saggio, pp. 135-7. On Machiavelli’s method
and empirics, see H. Butterfield, The Statecraft of Machiavelli (New York, 1967);
Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Ch. 6; F. Gilbert, ‘Machiavelli: The Renaissance
of the Art of War’, in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. P. Paret (Princeton, 1986), Ch. 1;
Olschki, Machiavelli the Scientist.
46 To keep my accounting transparent, what follows are the cases, where they can be
found in the Florentine Histories and whether the target was hated and the conspiracy
strategically (as opposed to tactically) successful. The cases are: Walter, Duke of Athens
(II 36-8) (hated, successful), Ciompi (II 13-16) (not hated, successful), Maso Degli
Albizzi (III 27) (hated — NM calls the people ‘malcontent’, unsuccessful), Florentine
Revolution (III 28) (unclear — hence this case is dropped, unsuccessful), Pagolo (IV 25)
(hated — NM calls hima ‘tyrant’, successful), Cosimo de’ Medici (IV 27-9) (not hated, a
qualified success), Rinaldo Peruzzi (IV 32-3) (hated, a qualified success), Erasmo (V
6-7) (hated, successful), Annibale Bentivoglio (VI 10) (not hated, unsuccessful), the
pope (VI 29) (hated, not successful), Piero de Medici (VII 10-17) (hated for collecting
debts mercilessly, unsuccessful), Cesare Petrucci (VII 26-7) (not hated, unsuccessful),
Duke of Milan / Galeazzo (VII 33-4) (hated, unsuccessful), Pazzi (VII 2) (not hated,
unsuccessful), Girolamo Riario (VIII 34) (hated, not successful), Galeatto Manfredi
(VIII 35) (not hated, successful). I code hatred based on Machiavelli’s favourable or
unfavourable references to conspiracy targets in the passage. By strategic success I mean
gaining and maintaining power for more than a year. In the Discourses, III 6, Machiavelli
also undermines his claim through the examples of Spurius Cassius and Manlius
Capitolinus.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 641

oppression has on effecting political change. He therefore could not have

believed that an oppressed people was a requisite or even significantly inter-
esting condition for founders or a would-be founder. Nonetheless, the sub-
tlety may have been enough to confuse potential persecutors or filter out the
incompetent.

3. Historical Grounds

Finally, one of the most popular interpretations of Chapter Twenty-Six is

Hans Baron’s. He argues that the last chapter of The Prince was a late addi-
tion, tacked on sometime between December 1514 and September 1515. The
claim rests mostly on biographical and historical detail; circumstances at that
moment were most favourable for Leo X to set up a nepote state for Giuliano
de’ Medici in the North, to keep the French at bay. Baron finds his conclu-
sions ‘definitive’ and notes that the ‘incubus’ of the nationalist interpretation
of The Prince ‘will never have the power to make a comeback’.*”
However, the nationalism of The Prince may not be as easily dismissed as
Baron believed. Although he makes no mention of Romulus’ disappearance,
his is the reigning interpretation of Chapter Twenty-Six and one that cannot
be overlooked.** We have several points of disagreement; here I sketch the
most salient. His view is incompatible with mine because he does not see
Chapter Twenty-Six as an essential part of The Prince; he finds the political
window of opportunity too ephemeral and he believes that Machiavelli does
not expect or desire the liberator of Italy to become so by force. In brief, the
problem with Baron’s argument is that it is fundamentally anti-Machiavellian.
Baron soft-pedals deceit and duress, he makes Machiavelli and his intended
audience too dependent on fortune.
With regard to Baron’s diachronic composition argument that the idea of
Chapter Twenty-Six proceeded from conditions in Italy during an eight-month
period, I cannot concur. I agree conditions in Italy influenced Machiavelli to
write what he did, and revisions were made over time. Where Baron and I part
company is how fleeting the opportunity was and how transformative revi-
sions were. I find it dubious that Giuliano de’ Medici at the head of a fragile
balancing coalition to keep the French out of Milan in 1515 would impel
Machiavelli to attach a patriotic conclusion to a finished study. Baron dis-
agrees.”
Textually, Baron is on shaky ground. His belief that Italian liberation
depends on a delicate constellation of political factors is contrary to what The
Prince preaches. Machiavelli makes clear that one does not need much
47 Baron, ‘The Principe’, pp. 101-2.
48 Baron may have made the same mistake as Chabod (Machiavelli, p. 69), who
imagined that Romulus reappears in Chapter Twenty-Six when he does not.
49 See N. Tarcov, ‘Quentin Skinner’s Method and Machiavelli’s Prince’, Ethics, 92
(1982), pp. 692-709. See note 7 above.
642 J.M. PARENT

opportunity, people had a hand in forging their own destiny. While ultimately
lady Fortune’s preferences are the final arbiter — she ‘lets herself be won’ by
the bold — virtue is a fair match to fortune. It is not only in Chapter
Twenty-Five that he makes this case, but also in Chapter Twenty-S1x when he
is comparing the situation in Italy to the opportunity that the most excellent
examples faced. Although ‘these men are rare and marvelous, nonetheless
they were men, and each of them had less opportunity than the present; for
their undertaking was not more just than this one, nor easier, nor was God
more friendly to them than to you.’°° The most excellent exampies all founded
great states despite probably being lowly, bastard children with criminal his-
tories. They are great for the very fact that they overcame all the things
beyond human control, in a word, fortuna. Machiavelli approves of men who
did not need to be related to the pope to have the opportunity to kill him and
the cardinals, and he frowns on Cesare Borgia for his dependence on his
father. Machiavelli occasionally appeals to ‘anyone who understands’, thus
broadening the application of his ideas. It would be contrary to the letter and
spirit of the work to be so contextually sensitive that the predictable vagaries
of politics would invalidate a chapter shortly after its inception.
Baron claims that Machiavelli does not expect or even wish for a ‘re-
deemer’ of Italy to use force of arms. Thinking about the matter in a common
sense manner, how exactly would one free Italy from barbarians without
recourse to force? And would Machiavelli of all people be likely to think an
unarmed policy possible, desirable or durable? Baron bases his claim on a
passage in Chapter Eleven, where Machiavelli hopes Leo X’s ‘goodness and
infinite other virtues’ can make the pontificate very ‘great and venerable’ .”'
Baron ignores that Machiavelli is an improbable advocate for pontifical
aggrandizement.
It is more likely that Machiavelli is alluding to other instances where he
used similar language to make a broader, bloodier point. The only other time
he uses the phrase ‘infinite virtues’, Chapter Seventeen, is in the context of
Hannibal’s inhuman cruelty, which made him ‘venerable and terrible’. Machia-
velli also uses ‘infinite’ with reference to two other individuals when discuss-
ing the topic of cruelty. One is Agathocles for his ‘savage cruelty and
inhumanity, together with his infinite crimes .. .” and ‘infinite betrayals and

50 Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 103. The founders listed in Chapter Six are of highly
dubious paternity; Machiavelli supposes them to ‘have had such humble fathers that,
feeling ashamed of them, they have made themselves out to be sons of Jupiter or some
other god’ (Machiavelli, Life, p. 3). Machiavelli may be making a related point in Dis-
courses, III 48. He curiously refers to Fulvius, a humble figure in Livy’s History, who
rises to greatness (the point is complicated by the evocation of Quintus Fabius, but that is
a digression). See also Strauss, Thoughts, p. 75; H. Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman: Gender
and Politics in the Thought of Niccolo Machiavelli (Berkeley, 1984), p. 260.
>! For Baron’s claim and the text on which he bases it, see Baron, ‘The Principe’, pp.
95-6; Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 47.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 643

cruelties’ in Chapter Eight. The other is Antoninus [Caracalla] for his ‘infinite
individual killings’ in Chapter Nineteen.” The latter two references relate
back to cruelties well or badly used. Cruelties well used are those done at a
stroke, like the acts of Agathocles who killed the rich people and senators of
his city at once in order to assume power. Having ‘infinite virtues’ in this
sense is a suggestion: to kill many important people quickly, then stop and
turn the cruel deed to public advantage. Whoever understands this lesson may
have to practise it to liberate Italy.
To conclude, no previous treatment of Romulus’ disappearance has been
remotely satisfying. An accidental omission is highly improbable, there are
sufficient motives and opportunity to suspect Machiavelli may be plotting,
textual explanations have been seriously inadequate, and Baron’s historical
explanation of Chapter Twenty-Six is textually insensitive. While a water-
tight explanation is too much to hope for, no alternative hypothesis solves the
practical problems of Italian unification, and none offers a compelling expla-
nation for Romulus’ disappearance in Chapter Twenty-Six.

IV
Conclusion

In summary, Romulus’ attributes singularly qualify him as the example par

excellence for sixteenth-century Italian liberation. He kills his uncle and
brother to unify power, unites disparate peoples and founds a mighty empire,
not coincidentally on the Italian peninsula. In Machiavelli’s day, few individ-
uals were as well positioned as Lorenzo to kill the pope and cardinals, reorder
the Church and reunify Italy. The Prince represents Machiavelli’s effort to
imply the horrific undertaking through his parallel constructions in Chapters
Six and Twenty-Six. But Machiavelli cannot commend Romulus’ example
too openly. An untoward reaction might lead to retaliation, deprive the plan of
surprise, make the targets harder to destroy and increase the probability and
strength of a balancing coalition.”
Some implications follow from the argument above, chief of which is the
coherence of The Prince. An inconclusive debate has raged for some time on
the chronology of its composition, and nothing contained in this work is likely
to strike a decisive blow. Nevertheless, if my argument is correct, The Prince

52 For the reference of which I speak, see Machiavelli, The Prince, pp. 35, 37, 47, 67,
79. On cruelty well used by unifiers in Italy, see also the Remirro de Orco and Severus
narratives in ibid., pp. 30, 65, 78.
53 Returning to the first quote of this paper, it is curious that Felix Gilbert sees no pre-
paratory groundwork laid for Chapter Twenty-Six, and believes the Chapter to be deco-
rative. First, it is odd because Gilbert is Meinecke’s most famous student and Gilbert
appears not to have learned what his teacher saw. Yet second, it is odd because Gilbert
dismisses the last chapter as ornament, in a work that begins with the author stating ‘I
have not ornamented this work’ (Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 4; cf. Discourses, II] 48).
644 J.M. PARENT

is a more cohesive document than it is often given credit for.°* With the tie
between Chapters Six and Twenty-Six, the suggestions for Italian conquest in
Chapter Three, the anti-Church vitriol, as well as the narratives on Agathocles,
Cesare Borgia, Remirro and Liverotto, Machiavelli suggests repeatedly through-
out the work how Italy could be liberated.*” How consonant The Prince is with
the Discourses is a matter that cannot be treated adequately here.
Another central implication of this work is the content of Machiavelli’s
republicanism. If Romulus is the exemplar of how to unify Italy, then imitat-
ing his model means an imperfect, not immediate republicanism. Romulus
created free institutions, with princely elements, that survived his death and
on which the strength of the Roman Republic was built. But reaching the
Republic took time and tyranny, and the institutions themselves were incom-
plete and in need of innovation and renewal to attain greatness. Commending
the example of France and absolute leaders with popular armies in the Dis-
courses suggests that Machiavelli was open to non-republican institutions.”°
He could not have thought of crudely importing Republican Rome wholesale
into the conditions of sixteenth- century Italy, but insofar as their empire is the

54 Anexception to this trend is M. Viroli, Niccolo’s Smile: A Biography of Machiavelli,

trans. A. Shugaar (New York, 2000), p. 159.
55 On Machiavelli’s tension between liberty and greatness, see P.J. Coby, Machiavelli’s
Romans: Liberty and Greatness in the Discourses on Livy (Lanham, 1999); also
J. Najemy, ‘Baron’s Machiavelli and Renaissance Republicanism’, American Historical
Review, 101 (1996), pp. 119-29; Whitfield, Discourses, pp. 198-204. Contra Baron,
Strauss believes (Thoughts, pp. 48, 52) that twenty-six was the original number of chap-
ters intended for The Prince. This is in keeping with his numerological interpretation of
Machiavelli. Twenty-six is, says Strauss, 2 times 13, which signifies fortune, or it could
be the alphanumeric sum of the Hebrew God (Strauss, Machiavelli, p. 311). Perhaps, per-
haps not, though this last interpretation strikes me as far-fetched. If one is to read
Machiavelli numerologically, I offer another alternative. Twenty-six could be a
calendrical reference. There are twenty-six weeks in a half-year, suggesting the Machia-
vellian theme of cycles and nature’s variability. See Machiavelli, Letters, p. 185. Why
twenty-six as opposed to fifty-two or some other multiple of thirteen is a larger issue, but
it could relate to middle ways, half-truths and the Discourses. English readers should not
suspect that twenty-six refers to the alphabet; sixteenth-century Italian did not have
twenty-six letters.
56 On Machiavelli’s view of France, see Discourses, I 16, 1 19, 1 55; he also com-
mends France in Chapter Nineteen of The Prince. I owe to J. Langton (‘Machiavelli’s
Paradox: Trapping or Teaching the Prince’, American Political Science Review, 81
(1987), pp. 1277-88, p. 1281) the claim that Machiaveili praises absolute leaders with
popular armies such as Tullus, Pelopidas, Epaminondas and the King of England. This
view concurs with the Cambridge School’s idea that a prince, or princely power, is neces-
sary in founding. See, for example, Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. G. Bock,
Q. Skinner and M. Viroli (New York, 1990). For critical views, see J.P. McCormick,
‘Machiavelli Against Republicanism: On the Cambridge School’s “Guicciardinian
Moments” ’, Political Theory, 31 (2003), pp. 615-43; J. Femia, ‘Machiavelli and Italian
Fascism’, History of Political Thought, 25 (1) (2004), pp. 1-15.
 MACHIAVELLI’S MISSING ROMULUS 645

best guide, a Roman stamp would be the predominant cast on a Machiavellian

unifier. The most excellent examples all died unfulfilled; there could be no
illusions of seeing the completion of one’s founding efforts. With Romulus as
the great example though, sound institutions, citizens infused with civic vir-
tue and an expansionist republic would be the ultimate, glorious rewards.
My argument also speaks to some of the more compelling arguments in the
literature. For example, John Scott and Vickie Sullivan®’ do extraordinary
work on patricide in The Prince, and this work builds on and largely corrobo-
rates theirs. They contend that Cesare Borgia squandered the opportunity to
kill the pope and cardinals to free Italy from its ruinous reliance on the Church
and fortune. They are partially right about Borgia being a great example;
Machiavelli does flatter him highly and mentions him in more chapters of The
Prince than anyone else. Nonetheless, they go astray when they render unto
Cesare more than they render unto Romulus. Borgia is at best half — and the
less successful half at that — of Machiavelli’s Italian unifying models in The
Prince. Borgia fails because he relies too much on this father and does not
insulate himself enough from the vicissitudes of fortune; Romulus succeeds
because he founds great institutions that persist beyond his life and endure the
trials of history. He, not Borgia, is The Prince’s model nonpareil.
Adopting an idea of Hans Baron’s, Mary Dietz accuses Machiavelli of using
cunning to ensnare the Medici.** She argues that if they followed the advice in the
book it would recoil on them and bring back republican rule to Florence. The
argument presented here agrees with Dietz that The Prince has republican inten-
tions and is designed to ensnare, but not through the pathways she indicates. On
my reading, Machiavelli intends to divide and conquer the Medici in order that a
Medici can begin dividing and conquering Italy. When Dietz treats the Medici as
a monolithic bloc she marginalizes the benefits of intramural feuding.
Finally, since no interpretation of The Prince has taken the field (nor, I
hope, will), I have sought to enliven the contest with the introduction of
another competitor. We have seen how The Prince can be read as a book of
stately advice (which aims to deprive others of their states), a trap for the
Medici (or perhaps just one of them), and a job application (for both Machia-
velli and Lorenzo). Alongside the better-known interpretations belongs another,
perhaps no less worthy. A richer reading of The Prince includes the exclusion
of Romulus.

Joseph M. Parent COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

57 Scott and Sullivan, ‘Patricide’. Chabod (Machiavelli, p. 69) also makes the case
for Cesare Borgia as exemplar.
58 See H. Baron, ‘Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and the Author of The
Prince’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961), p. 217-53; M. Dietz, “Trapping the
Prince: Machiavelli and the Politics of Deception’, American Political Science Review,
80 (1986), pp. 777-99.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW
IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Benedict Rundell'

Abstract: Modern histories of Polish-Lithuanian political thought in the eighteenth

century have tended to focus only on the ideas of the nobility of the Republic of the
Two Nations and not on the ideas of those outside the nobility, for example the burgh-
ers of the towns of Poland-Lithuania. Further, Polish-Lithuanian republicanism has
normally been described as lacking an explicit theoretical framework. However, an
examination of the ideas being taught in the University of Krakéw during this period
not only shows at least some of the townspeople of Poland-Lithuania joining the nobil-
ity in subscribing to republican ideas of freedom, law and government, but also shows
the University’s professors — especially those of law — setting out a theoretical basis
for those republican ideas that the Polish-Lithuanian nobility generally lacked.

Historiography, both contemporary and modern, has tended to see the Univer-
sity of Krakow as spending the eighteenth century in a state of disarray and
complete chaos. Historians have tended to follow the description of Hugo
Kolttataj — passionate enlightened reformer of the University and University
Rector from 1783 — which is of a University whose curriculum was back-
ward, whose professoriate was of poor quality and whose students hardly
bothered to turn up at all. In particular, Kottataj’s criticism that the University
was sunk in a moribund state of anarchy that simply mirrored the plight
of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic has — with the exception of Emanuel
Rostworowski’ — largely been accepted. This is especially true in the case of
the University’s Faculty of Law, described by Koltataj as being ‘superfluous’,
as a result of the Republic having fallen into total chaos, with hardly anything
apart from dusty Canon Law being taught there at all, and even would-be law-
yers tending to steer clear.
As a result of this bleak picture of the University and the Faculty, modern
historians have not tended to look into the question of whether any formal
political theory was actually being taught at the University and the Faculty.
However, there are a few sources — dissertations and disputations from the
Faculty — that suggest that in fact there was a coherent political theory being
taught and learned in the Faculty of Law during the eighteenth century. These
sources are few in number, for various reasons. Firstly, a large number of Uni-
versity and Faculty records from the eighteenth century have been lost — in
particular, a serious fire in the Collegium Iuridicum, home of Faculty and
' Magdalen College, Oxford, OX1 4AU. Email: benedict.rundell @ magd.ox.ac.uk
2 E. Rostworowski, ‘Czasy Saskie’, in Dzieje Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego w latach
1364-1764, ed. K. Lepszy (Krakéw, 1964), p. 354.
3 H. Kollataj, Stan OSwiecenia w Polsce w ostatnich latach panowania Augusta III
1750-64, ed. J. Hulewicz (Wroctaw, 1953), pp. 79 f.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Autumn 2005

 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 647

some University records, destroyed many documents relating to the running

of the Faculty. Further losses have also meant that the picture that can be gen-
erated of important topics such as student numbers, backgrounds and details
of student careers is very patchy.* Secondly, although records that would give
exact figures have not survived, the Faculty of Law cannot have had a very
large number of students — given that the structure of the University of
Krakow required students to gain a second degree (i.e. Master’s) from the
propaedeutic Faculty of Philosophy before moving on to one of the three
higher Faculties (i.e of Law, Medicine and Theology), the number of students
entering the Faculty of Law must necessarily have been less than that of
students gaining such degrees in philosophy. The number of students
receiving a Master’s degree from the Faculty of Philosophy is not known, but
Rostworowski gives the average number of students achieving the lower (i.e.
Bachelor’s) degree in philosophy as only fourteen per year.” With such a low
graduation rate from the lower Faculty, the numbers of students entering the
Faculty of Law each year cannot have been very high. This small group of stu-
dents then appear to have produced dissertations or disputations on only a few
occasions, for example as examinations for degrees in law,° and these disser-
tations covered a wide range of subjects in Canon as well as Civil Law. So the
number of dissertations dealing with public law and political theory is, there-
fore, very small. However, a close look at these dissertations and disputations
surviving from the Faculty in this period, as well as a few other sources,’ sug-
gests that in fact there was a coherent political theory being taught and learned
in the Faculty of Law during the eighteenth century — a theory that has been
described as ‘neo-classical’ republicanism.
The so-called ‘neo-classical’ republican argument, as identified by Quentin
Skinner,® derives from interpretations of certain passages of the Corpus Luris
of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (AD 482-565), and can be summarized as
resting upon two related key premises. Firstly, this republican argument

4 Historians such as Emanuel Rostworowski (‘Czasy Saskie’, p. 354), Leszek

Hajdukiewicz (L. Hajdukiewicz, ‘Autour de problématique de la jaunesse de I’ Université
Cracovienne’, in Les étudiants — Liens Sociaux, Culture, Moeurs du Moyen-Age jusqu’au
XIXe siécle, ed. M. Kulczykowski (Krakow, 1987), p. 35) and Irena Kaniewska
(I. Kaniewska, ‘Les étudiants de Cracovie aux XVIle et XVIe siécles’, in D. Julia,
J. Revel and R. Chartier, Histoire sociale des populations étudiantes (Paris, 1986),
p. 144) have produced analyses of the various pieces of evidence that have survived,
but no complete picture seems to be possible.
5 Rostworowski, ‘Czasy Saskie’, p. 380.
© Anexample of this being the Quaestio Juridica de Iure Maiestatico of 1762 that will
be discussed at length below.
7 See below.
8 Q. Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty and the Coming ofthe English Civil War’, in Repub-
licanism: A Shared European Heritage, ed. Q. Skinner and M. van Gelderen (2 vols.,
Cambridge, 2002), Vol. II, pp. 9 ff.
648 B. RUNDELL

derives from the definition of the free man and the slave, to be found both in the
Digest of Roman Law and in the shorter introductory work, the /nstitutiones,
prepared by Justinian’s minister Tribonian for the benefit of Cupidae Legum
Tuventuti (Young Enthusiasts for Law). In the first book of the /nstitutiones,
all persons are divided into two categories — free men and slaves, with slav-
ery being defined as ‘constitutio iuris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra
naturam subicitur’ (‘an institution of international law, by which a man is sub-
jected, contrary to nature, to the dominion of another’
).”To be free, therefore,
aman must be not subjected to the will of another. This contrast is brought out
a little later in Book 1 of the /nstitutiones when the free and the enslaved are
once again contrasted, between those who live sui iuris (independently) and
those who ‘In potestate itaque dominorum sunt servi’ (‘are under the power of
masters, and so are slaves’).!°
With liberty thus being defined with reference to the free man’s independ-
ence from the will of another, it follows that citizens (who are by definition
free) of a republic can only be governed according to a pattern to which they
have at some point consented. From this, therefore, the second key premise of
the neo-classical republican argument is derived, namely that sovereignty
ultimately resides with the citizen body as a whole, and that rulers and govern-
ments therefore exercise only such authority as is assigned to them by the con-
sent of the people.
From these twin premises, a theory of government has been shown by Skin-
ner to have been derived, in which a concept of ‘republican’ liberty is central.
Particular freedoms (in the sense of a lack of restriction) that might be granted
by the prince do not serve to make the subject free, as long as they are still
dependent upon the goodwill of that prince — a freedom that can be taken away
by the ruler on a whim is deemed to be no freedom at all. This neo-classical
republican theory therefore finds practical expression in a wholesale attack on
the ‘arbitrary’ prerogatives of rulers, with constitutions being championed
which included a strong representative element, that restricts the ability of the
prince to rule simply according to his own will. For example, Skinner has
argued that the Parliamentary opposition to the prerogatives of Charles I of
England in the 1640s was to a large extent expressed in terms of Roman ideas
of freedom and servitude, and that ‘the outbreak of the English revolution was
legitimated in neo-Roman terms’.'!
In the case of Poland, it has long been recognized that this concept of repub-
lican liberty was central to the claim of the nobility to be citizens of a free
republic — for example, Anna Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz has identified such

9 Justiniani Institutiones, 1:3, ed. P. Birks. and G. Mcleod (Ithaca, NY, 1987), p. 39.
10 Tbid., 1:8, p. 41.
'l Skinner, ‘Classical Liberty’, Vol. II, p. 14.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 649

freedom as the most important in the eyes of Polish republicans,'* and

Andrzej Walicki has even singled out the possession of this sort of liberty as
the defining characteristic of the Polish nobleman.’ In the Polish case, this
freedom to participate in government included the rights of every nobleman
to a vote in electing a king, to vote in electing deputies to the national parlia-
ment and the right (which developed later, its first use not coming until 1652)
of any single deputy in that parliament to veto any legislative proposal. These
rights, and their defence by conservative noblemen, have been much dis-
cussed by modern historians, but whether the conservative republican posi-
tion has been identified as crude anti-monarchism, the first steps along the
road to modern democracy, or simply the selfish defence of its privileges by
an elite caste, the more abstract roots of this republican theory have not, in the
Polish case, been explored. Furthermore, Polish republican thought of this
period is invariably seen through the eyes of the nobility, who were the citi-
zens of the Polish Republic and therefore were those in possession of the
rights and privileges that citizenship brought and that conservatives sought to
protect. In the University of Krakéw, however, something of a different per-
spective can be seen, as the vast majority of students at the University were
not of noble background. Once again, precise statistics are hard to arrive at,
but Rostworowski and Kaniewska have both analysed the fragmentary evi-
dence that is available. Kaniewska shows that in the period 1761 to 1764, for
which records of students’ background do survive, the nobility made up only
10% of matriculants — 69 out of a total of 690. This figure may be slightly
low, as she also lists thirty-five matriculants as priests, some of whom may
have been of noble origin, but even so it is clear that in the years that she could
study, the student intake was overwhelmingly non-noble. In fact, 503 of the
690 matriculants (73%) were described as ingeniosi, that is burghers or peas-
ants, and a further twenty-five (3.5%) as nobili, that is the urban patriciate of
major cities such as Krak6w itself.'* So the noble students are clearly in the
minority. Rostworowski’s research supports this conclusion — he notes that
in the period 1721 to 1747 there were only twenty students from magnate
backgrounds (approximately 0.3% of the total), and from 1747 to 1764, only
seven (less than 0.25%). Further, he estimates that over the whole period of
1700 to 1764, the proportion of burgher students was between 60 and 70%,
concluding that ‘na jednego Swieckiego szlachcica przypadnie nam 8
“przemysinych” plebejuszy’ (‘for each secular noble student we find eight

12 A. GrzeSkowiak-Krwawicz, ‘Anti-Monarchism in Polish Republicanism in the

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Republicanism, ed. Skinner and van Gelderen,
Vol. I, p. 45.
13 A. Walicki, The Three Traditions in Polish Patriotism and their Contemporary
Relevance (Bloomington, IN, 1988), p. 4.
14 Kaniewska, ‘Les étudiants de Cracovie’, p. 144.
650 B. RUNDELL

plebeian “intellectuals” ’).'!° Rostworowski therefore describes the University

of Krak6w as acting to help the creation in Poland-Lithuania in this period of a
‘plebeian intelligentsia’.'° Given that the University’s professors were almost
all former students of the University themselves, this non-noble dominance
can be seen to continue into their ranks as well. The fact that the Faculty of
Law is described by Rostworowski as the most noble of all the University’s
Faculties (giving the statistic that, in the period 1697 to 1764, fourteen out of
the Faculty’s thirty-two professors had noble names)'’ while still having
only a minority of its professors being nobles themselves serves to underline
the extent to which the University of Krakéw was a non-noble institution,
expressing and teaching the ideas of non-noble professors and their students.
In the Faculty of Law of the University of Krakéw, the neo-Roman republican
theory can be seen being expounded and taught by these non-noble professors
throughout the eighteenth century. Lectures based upon the /nstitutiones were
a regular part of the curriculum of the Faculty of Law’s lectures, with a lecture
on this text being listed as one of the roughly half-dozen lectures given each
term during the period 1742 to 1774 for which records survive.'® So the defi-
nition of freedom found in Book I of this text would have been regularly
explained by the Faculty’s professors.
The political implications of this definition of freedom can be seen being
worked out in a disputation of 1762, the Quaestio luridica de lure Maiestatico.
This disputation was carried out as the viva voce examination of one of the
faculty’s professors, Jakub Marciszowski, for the degree of utriusque iuris
doctor, i.e. Doctor of Law. Presiding was a senior professor, Jan Pataszowski,
and also present was another more junior professor, Andrzej Lipiewicz.'? The
subject was the description found in the Digest of Roman Law of the Lex
Regia, a law which probably never existed, but which was alleged to have
been the act by which the Roman people transferred its sovereignty to the
Emperors. In the 1762 Quaestio, this law is briefly paraphrased, being
described as the law by which ‘summa potestas’, is ‘traductum a Consulibus,
Dictatoribus, & Populo Romano in Imperatores, Reges Principesve [sic],
Superiores non recognescentes’ (‘transferred from the Consuls, Dictators, and
the Roman People to the Emperors, Kings and Princes, not recognizing any
Superiors’.”” Obviously, this was a part of the Corpus Iuris that republican

'5 Rostworowski, ‘Czasy Saskie’, pp. 374 f.

16 Ibid., p. 417.
'7 Ibid., p. 392.
'8 “Conclusiones iuridicae facultatis’, Archiwum Uniwersytetu Jagiellonskiego (here-
after AUJ), MS 56.
'9 Authorship is therefore hard to establish precisety — all three must be considered
joint authors.
20 J. Pataszowski, J. Marciszowski and A. Lipiewicz, Quaestio Iuridica de Iure
Maiestatico (Krakow, 1762). Unpaginated, references are to numbered sections.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 651

writers had to find some way of dealing with, and Skinner shows that the earli-
est attempt to do so can be found in the twelfth century when the Bolognese
jurist Azo argued that power being ‘transferred’ did not mean that power had
been completely alienated by the people, but that rather they had only ever
transferred this sovereignty to the Emperors in such a way as at the same time
to retain it for themselves.’'! Thus Azo defended the rights of the Italian cities
against the claims of the Holy Roman Empire, in the process reducing the
Emperor to a mere rector, that is a magistrate whose power the people could,
if they chose, revoke whenever they wished.
The authors of the 1762 Krakow Quaestio follow a similar argument,
modified in one important respect. They argue that although the Lex Regia
describes sovereignty as having been transferred by the people to their prince,
this transfer was not a complete one, as only part of the people’s sovereignty
was involved. For they describe sovereignty as being ‘dividitur in realem
seu Imperii, & personalem: illa in constituenda, haec in administranda seu
gubernanda Republica consistit’ (‘divided into real sovereignty, or that per-
taining to authority, and personal sovereignty: the one consists in constitut-
ing, and the other in administering or governing the Republic’). The Quaestio
then goes on to state that
Maiestatis realis seu Imperii, Reipublicae est coeva, quamdiu corpus eius
durat, permanet, & etiam sub interregnis persistit: quae ideo fundamentum
Reipublicae dicitur. Personalis concidit cum persona, & ad Rempublicam
redit. Huius Maiestatis realis intuitu, etiam post Regiam Legem Populus
Romanus aliquam retinuisse dicitur Maiestatem, cum Lex Regia de personalis
tantum Maiestatis translatione intelligi debeat, ac transtulit solum per eam
Populus potestatem administrationis, non constitutionis.”
(Real or Imperial Sovereignty is coeval with the Republic, as long as the
body of the Republic endures, it is permanent, and even persists through
interregna: so this is called the foundation of the Republic. Personal Sover-
eignty dies with the person [of the ruler], and reverts to the Republic.
Regarding this Real Sovereignty, even after the Lex Regia the Roman Peo-
ple were said to have retained Sovereignty, since the Lex Regia should be
understood as a transfer only of personal Sovereignty, and the People trans-
ferred by it only the power of administration, not of constitution.)
This idea of divided sovereignty was not at all new in the 1760s — it has been
shown by Franklin to have been developed in Germany in the seventeenth
century in order to explain the form of the constitution of the Holy Roman
Empire,” but it has not previously been identified in Polish political thought.

21 Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics (3 vols., Cambridge, 2002), Vol. II, p. 16.

22 Pataszowski, Marciszowski and Lipiewicz, Quaestio Iuridica, Conclusio I.
23 J. Franklin, ‘Sovereignty and the Mixed Constitution: Bodin and his Critics’, in
The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450-1700, ed. J. Burns (Cambridge,
1991), p. 316.
652 B. RUNDELL

For the authors of the 1762 Krakéw Quaestio, this means of denying the
complete transfer of sovereignty to the prince — that is, the executive** — is
essential in order to preserve the citizens’ status as free men. For the Quaestio
argues that
... Si Rex Maiestatem in dominio haberet, comprehenderet ubique sub eo
omnia, quae sub Imperio continerentur, atque Maiestate; hinc homines
liberi, qui sub Imperio sunt, comprehenderentur etiam sub dominio, quod
est absurdum.
(if the King were to hold sovereignty as his property, he would hold under
him everywhere everything that is bound by legitimate Authority, and Sov-
ereignty; thus free men, who are subject to Authority, would also be held as
the King’s property, which is absurd.)
The absurdity is contained within the contradiction between the citizens on
the one hand being free — for elsewhere in the Quaestio, a Regnum is defined
as a regimen liberorum hominum — and on the other becoming the property
(sub dominio) of the King. For, according to the definition of freedom in the
Corpus luris, a person who is dominio alieno . . . subicitur is a slave. There-
fore, if sovereignty should become the property of the prince, the argument
runs, the people would become ‘servi sub dominio . . . non sub Imperio’
(‘slaves, subject to mastery, not to authority’).”°
Having established that sovereignty is not, therefore, to be the property of
the ruler, the Quaestio then goes on to define exactly what the position of the
prince really is. The prince is described as exercising (the people’s) sover-
eignty by way of usufruct, which is restricted by two general conditions.
Firstly, as has been seen above, the prince is expressly forbidden to take pos-
session of that sovereignty by usucapio, as that would be incompatible with
the liberty of the citizens. Secondly, the prince is obliged always to exercise
his delegated sovereignty in the interests of the people. It is in this sense,
therefore, that the prince is described by the Quaestio as the Tutor of the peo-
ple, that is the people’s guardian. The Quaestio briefly outlines the role of the
guardian,” but a more detailed explanation is given in a dissertation from the
1760s, the Dissertatio Iuridico-Civilis ex Lib: I Institutionum Imperialum de
Tutoribus et Curatoribus by Faculty of Law professors Franciszek Minocki
and Antoni Camelin. In this treatise, the tutor is defined as the guardian of a
child not yet come of age (at the beginning of the piece, the word tutor is
derived from the verb tueor meaning to care for or defend), and his rights and

24 The term prince (princeps) should be understood more as meaning ‘government’

in the general sense than specifically referring to a monarch. For although the language
of the later sections of the Quaestio does refer to this prince as a monarchical ruler, in the
earlier sections other forms of government — including oligarchic and popular forms —
are discussed as well.
25 Pataszowski, Marciszowski and Lipiweicz, Quaestio Iuridica, Conclusio II.
26 Ibid., Conclusio II.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 653

powers are detailed. It is here made clear that although ‘auctoritas vero
Tutorum maxima ea est, quod videlicet pupillus nihil agere potest sine
voluntate Tutoris’ (‘the authority of guardians is indeed most great, as it is
clear that the ward cannot do anything contrary to the will of his guardian’),
there are nonetheless restrictions on the rights of the guardian. Firstly, the
property of the ward does not at any stage become that of the guardian, and the
treatise points out that since the fourteenth century in Poland guardians were
obliged to render accounts of their wards’ property at the end of their
guardianship. In language reminiscent of the description of divided sover-
eignty at the beginning of the 1762 Quaestio, the treatise on guardians
describes the guardian as possessing ‘potestatem .. . administrandi Bona
eius, qui vel ob aetatem, vel ob mentis corporisque vitium suis rebus
superesse non potest’ (‘the power to administer the goods of someone who
either because of age or because of physical or mental deficiency is not able to
control his own affairs’). This power is only that of administering the
ward’s property, not of ownership. In particular, this treatise makes clear,
‘vero Tutores ipsi pupillorum Bona alienare nequeunt sine Decreto Iudicis’
(‘indeed guardians are forbidden of their own accord to alienate the property
of their wards without a court order’).”’
The power of the prince, therefore, is described as being comparable to this
strictly limited power of a guardian — power which is delegated from the
ward’s father and which is a power only of administration, not of possession,
over the ward and his property. Such restrictions on the power of the ruler will
clearly have important implications for the extent to which the citizens have a
duty of obedience to the prince, and the extent to which they have a right to
resist. The Quaestio luridica de Iure Maiestatico devotes a substantial amount
of space to a discussion of exactly what would happen if the ruler were to try
to overstep the limits placed upon his sovereignty and to try to take possession
of that sovereignty for himself, thus enslaving the citizens. The Quaestio is
very clear that the consequences for such a usurpation of sovereignty would
be disastrous, not only for the authority of the prince but indeed for the whole
society. The guiding principle of the Quaestio’s argument is that for the citi-
zens to be free they must only be ruled according to the terms of a pactum or
contract to which they all consented at the very beginning of the society. The
terms being used to describe this process — a pactum leading to the creation
of a societas — are taken once again from the /nstitutiones of Justinian, where
they are also defined. The significant characteristics of these definitions are
firstly that a pactum can only be considered binding if freely entered into, and
that a societas — imagined in the /nstitutiones as a corporation formed for

27 BR. Minocki and A. Camelin, Dissertatio Iuridico-Civilis ex lib: I Institutionum

Imperialum de Tutoribus et Curatoribus (Krak6éw, 1766).
654 B. RUNDELL

business purposes — can only be brought into being by means of a (freely

agreed to) pactum.”®
Therefore, should the prince break the terms of this pactum by seizing for
himself the sovereignty that is rightfully the property of the citizens, that
breach of the contract not only invalidates his own claim to authority as a ruler
(as seen above, the Quaestio considers that those who have been enslaved are
no longer sub Imperio, i.e. subject to legitimate authority), but he also
destroys the only basis upon which society itself survives. The result, as the
Quaestio says is that:
Si enim esset in arbitrio unius positum convellere Rempulicam,
humanamque dissolvere societatem, iam corrupta, conturbataque forent
omnia, prorsusque iaceret civilis nexus societatis, iusque commerciorum,
ipseque Princeps amitteret Maiestatem, quo circa sublato vinclo humanae
ad naturalem quisque libertatem rediret.””
(For if it were placed under the dominion of one man, this would tear apart
the Republic, and dissolve human society, and then everything would be
corrupt and thrown into disorder, and the basic tie of civil society and the
bonds of intercourse would be overthrown, and the Prince himself would
lose his Sovereignty, from which bond he would release people, restoring
them to their natural liberty.)
So the former citizens are returned to the state of nature. Given that in the state
of nature a man has the right to resist any oppressive force, the former citi-
zens, having been returned to that state, therefore enjoy the right to resist any
attempt to command them by the person who used to be their ruler but who is
now similarly just another independent human being in the state of nature. In
practice, therefore, a right to resist a despotic ruler is firmly asserted.
This right of resistance is further elaborated in another dissertation from the
Faculty of Law, published by Franciszek Minocki in 1775. This treatise, a
Dissertatio Canonico-Civilis de Crimine Laesae Maiestatis, briefly states at
its beginning that the ruler does not hold sovereignty as his own property and
has a duty always to act in the best interests of all his people, before going on
to examine at some length the various forms of treason. Armed rebellion is,
unsurprisingly, listed as a form of treason, but this definition is accompanied
by the important qualification that
non tamen in Confaederationibus, & colligationibus factis super re licita, ut
v.g. pro sui Corporis & Bonorum defensione, ad defendendum se ab
oppressionibus Tyrannorum, vel malarum societatum, quae saepe insurgunt
ad depraedandum alios, nam, tunc dicunur fieri ad conservandum iustitiam.”®

28 Tustiniani Institutiones, 111:25, ed. Birks and McLeod, pris:

29 Pataszowski, Marciszowski and Lipiewicz, Quaestio Iuridica, Conclusio II.
30 F. Minocki, Dissertatio canonico-civilis de Crimine laesae Maiestatis (Krak6w,
M75)
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 655

([it is] not, however, [treasonous to join] in Confederations and associations

formed for a legitimate purpose, such as, for example, for the defence of
one’s Body and Property, for the defence of oneself against the oppression
of Tyrants, or of evil societies, which often arise to plunder others, for then
[Confederations] are said to have been formed for the preservation of
justice.)
So the act of rebelling against a tyrannical king is specifically ruled not to be
treason, and the Polish institution of the Confederation is also specifically
legitimated, if formed for that purpose, which is a statement that is especially
remarkable as it was made only three years after the end of the civil war that
had erupted in 1768 as a result of the formation of the Confederation of Bar.
Further, in a dictionary of legal terminology that he published in 1773,
Minocki had also included in the entry concerning treason the statement that
‘Crimen laesae Maiestatis, est quod committunt ii, qui . . . arrogant sibi ea,
quae sunt Maiestatis’ (‘Treason is the crime committed by those who claim
for themselves the attributes of Sovereignty’).*! So not only is the act of
resisting the tyrannical king not treason, but rather the tyrant himself is the
true traitor for having attempted to seize for himself the sovereignty that is
rightfully only ever the property of the people.
But, having asserted the right to resist a tyrannical ruler, the Quaestio
luridica de lure Maiestatico then goes even further, arguing that not only are
society and sovereignty dependent upon the contract between the people, but
that human nature itself is also somehow connected to this act of formation of
civil society. For, continuing on the consequences of a breach of the contract
by the ruler, the Quaestio then further describes the relationship between
man, society, the social contract and laws:
Itaque Maiestatem, quam Graeci summan potestatem vocant, nemo aliunde
quam a Civitate deducere potest, & Civitas non a murorum ambitu, sed a
legibus constituitur. Nam hominum multitudo sine lege collecta turba
dicitur, quae nullam habet communionem civilem, neque Maiestatem,
neque ex legitima oritur potestas, & potestas a legibus minime deducta, non
civilis potestas, sed naturalis nimirum violentia est; quare a legibus
deducere oportebit Maiestatem, hoc est ab humana ratione, unde profluunt
leges, quae fundamentum sunt humanae societatis. Quamobrem Maiestas
ipse non eximitur a legibus; nam cum vitam e legibus publicis ducat, iisdem
& obstrictam oportet esse, per quas Civitas consistit, iisque neglectis, status
eripitur civilis, publicumque foedus funditus evertitur, & homines a feris
discrepare non videntur.”
(And so no-one can derive Sovereignty, which the Greeks called supreme
power, from anywhere other than from the State, and the State is not made
up of the circuit of its walls, but of its laws. For a multitude of men gathered

31 B, Minocki, Terminorum Iuris Canonico-Civilis Interpretatio (Poznan, 1773).

32 Pataszowski, Marciszowski and Lipiewicz, Quaestio luridica, Conclusio II.
656 B. RUNDELL

together without law is called a mob, and it has no civil intercourse, neither
does it have any Sovereignty, nor any power coming from a legitimate
source — and power derived not from laws is not civil power, but is simply
natural violence; hence it is correct to derive Sovereignty from laws, that is
from human reason, from which flow out the laws which are the foundation
of human society ... When life is taken out of the public laws... [and] with
those same laws set aside, the civil state is torn away, and the basic social
contract is overturned, and men do not appear to be distinguishable from
wild beasts.)
So having been returned to this state of nature, and being now no longer gov-
erned by laws but simply compelled by violence, the former citizens lose
some part of their own humanity. The implication of this line of argument is
therefore that not only do oppressed citizens have a right to resist a tyrant, but
that they even have a positive duty to do so, since they cannot fully realize
their human nature unless they can re-form the social state that their despotic
ruler had — through his usurpation of their sovereignty — destroyed. Given
that the despot would of course stand in the way of such a re-formation of
society, in practice the subjects of such a ruler are here being given a positive
duty to rebel.
It is important to note the importance of laws in all of these statements
about society, sovereignty and government. Perhaps it should come as no sur-
prise that academics in a Faculty of Law should afford such a prominent place
to laws, but in the ideas of these Krakow professors, law becomes the central
feature of republicanism. Just as the Quaestio Iuridica de lure Maiestatico
defines a state as being made up of its laws and not anything else, so other
documents from the faculty follow a similar line. Two text-books survive for
a course on court procedures in this period — the course was called Processus
Iudicarius, and the two surviving books date from 1741 and 1770. Both
text-books begin with a preface in which the questions of the origins and
necessity of laws are answered. Both of these prefaces tell the same story of
the development of the Polish state and of it laws. Starting in the distant past,
the story goes that
Quemadmodum populus R’nus, ita et Gens nostra Polona ab initis sine lege
scripta vixit, omnique nutu et arbitrio Principum et Regum regebant[ur].
(Just like the Roman people, so in the beginning our own Polish nation lived
without written laws, and in everything they were ruled by the whim and
decision of Princes and Kings.)
This period is described as a time in which the people’s liberty was reduced
‘in ferream Servitutem licentia et iniustitia’ (‘into bestial Servitude by licence
and injustice’ ).* However, a crucial moment came with the reign of King

33 Note that once again those living in a state not ruled according to law have become
less than human.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 657

Kazimierz II (1333-70), when the king, ‘certe ordine et legibus Poloniam

gubernari volens’ (‘wanting Poland to be governed according to exact order
and to laws’) took the step of having Poland’s laws written down and thus —
the prefaces argue — fixed.** Comparing Kazimierz to ancient law-givers
such as Solon of Athens, Lycurgus of Sparta and Numa of Rome, the 1770
manuscript describes how he
Rempublicam certis statutis munitam legibus adauxit, Iudicia correxit,
Magistratos constituit, eorumque potestatem certis limitibus circum-
scripsit, et ne ex moribus, consuetudine, ac voluntate sua, sed ex lure
scripto iudicarent, sub penas indignationis Regiae demandavit.*
(increased the defended Republic with exact statutes and laws, corrected
Trials, established Magistrates, and circumscribed his own power within
fixed limits, and ordered, on pain of Royal indignation, that [the Poles]
should be judged not according to custom or habit, or according to his own
will, but according to written Law.)

This is therefore the moment at which the jurists of the eighteenth century
celebrated Poland’s transition from the arbitrary government of the early
mediaeval kings to a state ruled according to laws, and therefore a Republic.
It is interesting to note that defining and therefore limiting the power of the
king is explicitly made a central part ofthis transition from a medieval monar-
chy to a republic. This limiting of the powers of the king is one of the running
themes of the Processus Iudicarius text-books’ description of the creation of
the Polish Republic, and can be seen in particular in the description that the
1741 manuscript gives of the powers of the courts in the Polish-Lithuanian
Republic. These courts — the manuscript does not specify which of the
Republic’s various different courts are being described here, but they would
appear to be the Tribunaly which were established by King Stefan Bathory
(r.1574—86), a king celebrated in a variety of documents from the Faculty of
Law as another great Polish law-giver along with Kazimierz IJ — whose
judges are elected by the nobility from among their own number, are described
as having five main characteristics: Mutabilitas, Authoritas [sic], Securitas,
Tranquillitas and Continuitas. Mutabilitas places the courts firmly in the con-
trol of the nobility — their Sejm and their Sejm alone can alter the structure of
the court system. The courts are then described as having “summa et absoluta
potestas’ (‘supreme and absolute power’) (as a definition of Authoritas), in a
phrase that repeats exactly the words that would be used in the 1762 Quaestio
Iuridica de Iure Maiestatico as a definition of sovereignty. In addition, the
courts may never be threatened or attacked (they enjoy Securitas) and, on pain
of a fine, all matters brought before them must be presented ‘sine tumultu’
(‘without uproar’) (Tranquillitas). Finally, the authority of the courts persist

34 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, Biblioteka Jagiellonska (hereafter BJ), MS 2631, p. 5.

35 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, BJ, MS 67, p. 3.
658 B. RUNDELL

‘sine intermissione’ (‘without interruption’), as they are endowed also with

Continuitas.*°
In the Polish context, these five characteristics are extremely striking. Not
only is it important that the courts are placed under the control of the nobility,
but the possession by the courts of Authoritas and Continuitas are particularly
noteworthy. Not only does the wording of this text-book ascribe to the courts
all the powers of sovereignty, but in listing Continuitas among the attributes
of the courts, this manuscript ascribes to them a further right that Polish kings
specifically did not enjoy. As Lukowski and others have pointed out, the
interregnum and the ban on any king working to promote the candidacy of any
contender for the throne during his lifetime were seen by the nobility as
almost sacred safeguards for their liberty, to be defended at all times.*’ So, in
this manuscript, the courts are clearly being elevated above the kings in terms
of their prerogatives — this republic is clearly therefore one in which laws
and not men are to reign supreme. It should be noted, however, that this is a
rather idealized vision of the courts of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic, which
in practice did not always enjoy all of these five characteristics. In particular,
the assertion that they enjoyed continuitas is incorrect, as all of the normal
courts of the Republic, rather than enjoying the continuity of power that was
denied to the Kings, were suspended during interregna (precisely because
they operated in the King’s name) and replaced with specially-established
kaptur courts — an institution that was not abolished until the Sejm of
1767-8.
This immense importance ascribed to laws in the minds of the Krakéw
republicans can be further seen in the striking passages in the prefaces to the
two Processus Iudicarius text-books in which the question is raised of why
laws are needed at all. The 1741 text-book gives a short answer — without
laws ‘Nemo certe domi securus viveret’ (‘no-one would live certain of their
security in his own home’),*® but the 1770 manuscript elaborates on this
theme in dramatic terms. This text claims that:
Tolle enim Iudicia de mundo, reviviscent periuria, tonabunt blasphemia,
exultabit licentia, exulabit pudor, ardebunt odia, dominabitur furor,
minabitur invidia, Tirannus saeviet, libertas serviet, incendetur libido,
imperabit ambitio, bellabunt cives, rebellabunt subditi, scindentur populi,
miscebuntur gentis, ruet cum Urbibus Orbis.*”
(For, take laws out of the world, and perjury will revive, blasphemy will
resound, licence will spring up, chastity will be banished, hatreds will burn,
fury will rule, envy will threaten, a Tyrant will rage, liberty will be a slave,

36 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, BJ, MS 2631, pp. 182 f.

37 J. Lukowski, ‘The Szlachta and the Monarchy’, in The Polish-Lithuanian Monarchy
in European Context c.1500-1795, ed. R. Butterwick (Basingstoke, 2001), p. 134.
38 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, BJ, MS 2631, p. 7.
9 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, BJ, MS 67, Dio:
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 659

lust will be kindled, ambition will command, citizens will fight, subjects
will rebel, the people will be torn asunder, the race will be thrown into
chaos, the World will be ruined with its Cities.)
A bleak picture indeed — presented with that as the alternative, one could be
forgiven for choosing to be governed according to laws instead. But the most
interesting feature of this portrait of a world without laws is the juxtaposition
of on the one hand the people being thrown into chaos and waging war on one
another, and on the other of tyranny springing up and reducing liberty to
servitude.
With tyranny and anarchy so closely linked, the implication must be that
there are in the world only two sorts of states, namely those governed by laws
(that is Republics) and those not governed by laws. Without the rule of law, as
the Quaestio luridica de lure Maiestatico argues, no-one obeys authority, for
there is no authority — instead people are simply compelled by force, which
is directed arbitrarily by those able to employ it. In this context, it is interest-
ing once again to note that both Processus Iudicarius text-books describe the
period before Kazimierz III promulgated his law-code as one in which the
Polish people were governed ‘nutu et arbitrio Principum et Regnum’ (‘ac-
cording to the whim and decision of Princes and Kings’) — that is, arb
trarily.“° Without laws, they were simply obeying the superior force of the
king, and the emphasis on the establishment of laws is so important because
by defining all states as either being governed by laws or not by laws, any dif-
ference between on the one hand an anarchy and on the other a tyranny“! must
disappear. For there can be no difference in principle between a lawless state
dominated by a large number of small-scale bullies and a lawless state domi-
nated by a smaller number of more powerful bullies. Under this argument,
therefore, an absolutist monarchy is simply a rather well organized anarchy.
It seems clear, therefore, that the republicanism being taught in the Faculty
of Law at Krakéw was far from anarchic, and that the often-quoted Polish
proverb that Polska nierzqdem stoi (Poland stands through anarchy) was not
therefore representative of the whole of the republican tradition in Poland in
the eighteenth century. What is more, it seems clear that the Krak6w republi-
cans would have had considerable sympathy with the view expressed by the
prominent educationalist and political reformer Stanistaw Konarski, which
Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz quotes, that ‘anarchia niszczy wolnsé i jest jej
zaprzeczeniem podobnie jak niewola’ (‘anarchy destroys freedom and is just
as much its antithesis as slavery’).”” Further, when Konarski describes the
results of the growth of anarchia in Poland in his treatise O Skutecznym Rad

40 ‘Processus Iudicarius’, BJ, MS 2631, p. 5; BJ, MS 67, p. 3.

41 Meaning in this context any arbitrary or absolute government.
42 A. Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz, ‘Wktad Pijaréw w_ ksztattowanie politycznych
kultury szlachty w czasach stanistawowskich’, in Wktad Pijaréw do nauki i kultury w
Polsce XVII-XIX w., ed. I. Stasiewicz-Jasiukowa (Warsaw, 1983), p. 135.
660 : B. RUNDELL

Sposobie, his list — which includes the disintegration of society, the ruin of
towns and cities, the end of all security for life and property, continual strife
between neighbours, and political chaos leading to the end of freedom*? —
can be seen to match rather closely the lurid description of a state without laws
given in the Processus Iudicarius text-book quoted above. It could therefore
be argued that Konarski should be seen as having a place within the tradition
of Polish republicanism and not opposed to it, and that republicanism should
be seen as more than simply the ideology of the constitutional conservatives
of Poland in this period.
Now, the republican ideas of the Faculty of Law may not have had a great
deal of influence beyond the university, as contacts between the university
and the major forces in Polish politics are very difficult, if not impossible, to
establish. The political elite of the Republic tended not to send their sons to
the University, favouring instead either the schools of teaching Orders such as
the Jesuits or the Piarists or military academies such as the Knights’ School in
Warsaw or else sending their sons abroad for their education. Although a few
professors from the Faculty of Law did work as private tutors in magnate
households — for example Faculty of Law professor Jan Pataszowski may
have served in the 1720s as tutor to Ignacy Sapieha, son of Wladyslaw
Sapieha, wojewoda of Brzesc¢, and himself the future Vice-Treasurer of Lithu-
ania and wojewoda of Mscistaw™ — it is hard to find any evidence for any
direct political impact that they might have made.
However, it is possible to argue that these ideas were something of an
orthodoxy inside the Faculty itself, for a number of reasons. Not only are the
important treatises all the work of multiple authors, all of whom can be identi-
fied as professors in the faculty, but also the disputation itself was a public
event and so something of a show to the outside world of the Faculty’s learn-
ing. Also, there are no documents from this period that could be construed as
‘monarchist’ in any sense, and the statutes of the faculty of themselves display
something of a republican character. The preface to the statutes of the faculty,
drawn up in 1741 to replace those lost in a fire in 1719, directly compares the
Faculty to a Republic, justifying the need for Statutes on the basis that
Animam corpori, Reipublicae et cuicumque communitati statuta ac leges
necessarias esse nemo est, qui ambigat.*
(There is no-one who doubts that, just as a mind is necessary for a body, so
statutes or laws are necessary for a Republic or for any other kind of
community.)

43S. Konarski, O skutecznym rad sposobie, albo o utrzymywaniu ordinaryinych

seymow (4 vols., Warsaw, 1761), Vol. II, p. 6.
44 Polski Stownik Biograficzny.
45 *Statuta Facultatis Iuridicae’, AUJ, MS 54, p. 3.
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 661

These statutes were drawn up by one of the Faculty’s senior professors and
were ratified without dissent in 1741, suggesting that this republican spirit
was not controversial. Further, that spirit is also to be found in the new statutes
of the Collegium Iuridicum, which were also replacements for statutes lost in
the 1719 fire and which were also adopted without controversy.” In addition,
something of a formulaic list of Polish kings can be seen from a variety of
panegyrics and dedications, which praise above all other kings Kazimierz III
(r.1333-70), Aleksander (r.1501-6), Zygmunt August (r.1548—72) and Stefan
Bathory (r.1574—86), all on the basis that they were rulers who furthered the
cause of government according to law in Poland.*”
It seems reasonable, therefore, to talk of a faculty orthodoxy that is being
displayed in these treatises, and that orthodoxy is, as has been noted, dis-
tinctly conservative. Not only is the emphasis in dissertations such as the
Quaestio luridica de lure Maiestatico firmly on the limitations to which royal
power must be subjected, but whenever contemporary Polish institutions are
considered they are presented in a very conservative light. For example, the
Quaestio, in the brief history of the Polish state with which it begins,
describes kings as ancient as the quasi-legendary medieval king Piast as hav-
ing been ‘electus .. . in Principem’ (‘elected as Prince’),** and when it men-
tions in its later sections the Henrician Articles and pacta conventa sworn by
every newly-elected Polish king, these are interpreted as constituting the
basic social pactum from which all legitimate political authority must be
derived.” There is no doubt, therefore, that the king must be bound absolutely
by the terms of these oaths, which can only be altered by a complete re-formation
of the society to be ruled according to their terms. Also, Minocki’s discussion
of treason, and his specific exemption of confederations from his definition of
treasonous rebellions can only be seen as an extremely conservative state-
ment, given that it was written so shortly after the four-year civil war that the
Confederation of Bar had triggered on the pretext of resisting the tyrannical
ambitions of King Stanislaw August.
So, although this Krak6éw strand of republican thinking can clearly be seen
to be distinct from the Sarmatian republicanism that has been seen by modern .
historians as essentially anarchic, and although in its arguments against anar-
chy, this strand of republicanism can be seen as having something in common
with the ideas of reformist writers such as Konarski, nonetheless this still
remains at heart a very conservative ideology in the context of the political
and constitutional debates going on in Poland at the time. Perhaps it should
not, therefore, come as any surprise that when Hugo Kollataj came to reform

46 ‘Leges et Statuta Collegii Iurdici’, AUJ, MS 53, p. 5.

47 For example, K. Pataszowski, Potestas Themidis Polonae Spuremae (Krakow,
1725):
48 Pataszowski, Marciszowski and Lipiewicz, Quaestio Iuridica, Conclusio I.
49 Tbid., Conclusio II.
662 : B. RUNDELL

the University of Krakéw in the 1780s, the Faculty of Law should have been
such a target for his vilification and for his alterations.
By way of an epilogue, two quick disclaimers need to be made concerning
these republican ideas. Firstly, they were hardly original thoughts in the eigh-
teenth century — as noted above, similar ideas had been present in England in
the previous century, and parts of the republican argument can be traced back
as far as the twelfth century. So the Krakéw professors were more faithful
repeaters than innovators in this field. Secondly, this set of ideas never really
leaves the abstract level of generalizations about questions such as sovereignty
and prerogative. No specific political controversies are really addressed, and
no actual policy suggestions are made. These are, after all, the ideas of profes-
sors and not those of practising politicians (as noted, most of the professors
were not nobles and therefore had no right of participation in national politics
anyway). In particular, these academics are open to the charge of naivety at
various stages in their reasoning. Who exactly should judge whether or not the
king has usurped the people’s sovereignty, how to distinguish between a con-
federation formed to resist a tyrant and mob of rebels, and above all how, pre-
cisely, these abstract ideas about law and government should be applied in the
real world — these are all questions with which the Krakow professors do not
engage. However, if the Krakéw school of republican thought did not tackle
the practical details of politics, what this strand of republicanism did do was to
provide a theoretical basis to political thought that seems to have been com-
pletely lacking elsewhere in Poland during this period. Whereas the Polish
nobility’s obsession with liberty and with the need to remain free at all costs
has long been recognized, it appears that the nobles lacked a theory of liberty
to support this obsession. The nobles plainly believed that the institutions of
their Republic and the privileges that they enjoyed in that Republic made
them (almost uniquely in Europe) free citizens, but they do not appear to have
constructed an abstract theory of liberty that could explain what their freedom
really meant and by extension how it was that their rights and privileges in the
Republic made them free. The professors of the Faculty of Law in Krakow,
however, do provide just this sort of abstract theory, placing the claims to lib-
erty made by the Republic’s political elite on a more solid and intellectually
sophisticated foundation.
Furthermore, the Krakéw school of republicanism can be seen to have
broadened the boundaries of Polish republicanism beyond the nobility in two
important ways. Firstly, it should be repeated that these republican ideas
were being produced in an institution that was overwhelmingly non-noble.
Although some connections between the Faculty of Law and the Republic’s
political elite are possible, it is nonetheless the case that this was an institution
in which the nobility were definitely in the minority, and was instead largely
an academy for the townspeople of Poland-Lithuania. This is particularly inter-
esting because modern histories of Polish republicanism have tended to focus
 REPUBLICANISM IN THE UNIVERSITY OF KRAKOW 663

almost exclusively on the nobility, and also because it suggests that the popu-
lation of the towns of the Republic — that is, those who were denied any for-
mal rights of participation in politics, at least at the national level — were to a
certain extent buying into a set of ideas that underpinned the very structures
that kept them effectively disenfranchised. Whether this was being done in an
attempt to use republican arguments to call for an extension of citizenship in
Poland or simply in anticipation of joining the ranks of a nobility that Robert
Frost has suggested was perhaps easier to get into in practise than in theory,”°
it is not possible to say. However, for whatever reason, it does seem that at
least a certain section of the population of the cities and towns of the Polish-
Lithuanian Republic were not completely rejecting the ideological frame-
work of that Republic.
Also, this Krakow school of republican thought can be seen as connecting
Polish political thought with ideas elsewhere in Europe during the early mod-
ern period. Not only had some of the key texts being discussed in the Faculty
of Law (notably the Lex Regia) been objects of consideration in Italy since the
twelfth century (see above) but also the concept of liberty as derived from
independence — upon which the whole of the Krakéw school’s thought
depends — has been shown to have been central to republican thought in
Italy, where the maintenance of the independence of the citizens through
equality before the law was a key objective of early republicans,’! England,
where the neo-Roman concept of liberty featured so prominently in attacks on
the prerogatives of Charles I°* and the Netherlands, notably in Grotius’ defini-
tion of the freedom enjoyed in the state of nature.*? The theoretical underpin-
ning that the professors of the Faculty of Law in Krakéw gave to Polish
republicanism in the eighteenth century therefore helps to show that although
the Polish nobility were perhaps rather exceptional in the fervour with which
they defended their liberty, and although the institutions through which their
Republic guaranteed that liberty were very different from those elsewhere in
Europe, even so the liberty that the citizens of the Polish-Lithuanian Republic
were so keen to defend was basically similar to a concept that had been known
to European political thought throughout the early modern period.

Benedict Rundell MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD

50 R. Frost, ‘The Nobility of Poland-Lithuania 1569-1795’, in The European Nobili-

ties in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. H. Scott (2 vols., London, 1995),
Vol. II, pp. 193 ff.
51 Skinner, Visions of Politics, Vol. Il, p. 29.
52 Skinner ‘Classical Liberty’, in Vol. II, pp. 9 ff.
53 M. van Gelderen, ‘Aristoteleans, Monarchomachs and Republicans: Sovereignty
and respublica mixta in Dutch and German Political Thought, 1580-1650’, in Republi-
canism, ed. Skinner and van Gelderen, Vol. I, p. 202.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON THE CIRCUMSTANCES
AND PRIORITY OF JUSTICE

Andrew Lister’

Abstract: This article addresses a historical puzzle that arises from Sandel’s critique
of Rawls’s use of Hume’s ‘circumstances ofjustice’, and a related philosophical puz-
zle about the priority of justice over other values. Sandel questioned whether a remedy
for selfishness could be the first virtue. Yet, as Rawls understood, Hume’s theory gave
justice priority over other personal virtues, and was not incompatible with Rawls’s
claim that justice was the first virtue of institutions. Rawls was mistaken, however, to
think that there was room for moral disagreement within a Humean account of the cir-
cumstances ofjustice. Sandel turns out to have been right that there was a problem in
Rawls’s account of the circumstances and priority of justice, but wrong about what
this problem was. Justice can come first, in Humean circumstances, but in the partly
non-Humean circumstances Rawls described, agreeing to put justice first is a form of
moral compromise.

Introduction

John Rawls’s theory of justice developed through an ongoing dialogue with

the major figures of Western moral and political thought,” and Hume was one
of Rawls’s most important interlocutors.* Yet the question of Rawls’s rela-
tionship with Hume has not received much attention. Michael Sandel began
Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by questioning whether Rawls could
assert the primacy of justice based on Hume’s account of the circumstances of
justice. How could a remedy for selfishness be the first virtue?* Sandel’s critics
pointed out that mutual disinterest in the original position represented plural-
ism rather than selfishness. Since moral disagreement plays no apparent role
in Hume’s account, however, this response implicitly rejected Rawls’s
claim to have followed Hume’s account of the circumstances of justice in all
essential respects. Rawls’s defenders also did not question whether Hume’s
account truly did conflict with the priority Rawls claimed for justice. How then

' Assistant Professor, Department of Political Studies, Queen’s University, Kingston,

Ontario, Canada. Email: [email protected]. For encouragement, comments and
criticism, I would like to thank Charles Marriot, James Moore, Carole Pateman, Alan
Patten and Andrew Sabl.
2 Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls, ed. A. Reath, B. Herman,
C.M. Korsgaard (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 2-4.
3 See in particular J. Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman (Cambridge, MA,
1999) (hereafter, CP), p. 56, note 8; J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, 1971)
(hereafter, T/), pp. 22 (note 9), 32-3, 184-7; and J. Rawls, Lectures on the History of
Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2000), pp. 21-101.
4M. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 23-46.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Autumn 2005

 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 665

did Rawls understand Hume, and to what extent did he or his communitarian
critics misunderstand Hume? J argue that Rawls was right to think that the pri-
ority he claimed for justice did not conflict with Hume’s account of the cir-
cumstances of justice, but wrong to think that there was room for moral
disagreement within even a broadly Humean account of the circumstances of
justice. Sandel, because he misunderstood Rawls’s interpretation of Hume,
misidentified the philosophical problem in Rawls’s account of the circum-
stances and priority of justice. If justice is to social institutions as truth is to
systems of thought, justice must be ‘uncompromising’.° In the partly non-
Humean circumstances Rawls describes, however, agreeing to put justice first
is a form of moral compromise.
The first section of this article explains the idea of the circumstances ofjus-
tice, summarizes Sandel’s critique of Rawls’s use of Hume’s account of these
circumstances, then presents in more detail the historical questions that arise
out of the liberal response to Sandel. The second section explains how
Hume’s understanding of confined generosity as partiality for those near and
dear and his understanding of the rule-governed or institutional nature ofjus-
tice assigns priority to justice over other personal virtues, and also how
Hume’s non-utilitarian understanding of social utility is compatible with the
claim that justice is the first virtue of institutions. The third section describes
how Rawls modified Hume’s concept of a ‘circumstance ofjustice’, and dis-
entangles Rawls’s account of these circumstances from his description of the
original position. The fourth section shows that Hume’s and Rawls’s starkly
different views on the depth and reasonableness of moral pluralism fit into
different understandings of the circumstances and function of justice. The
conclusion summarizes the historical argument and makes the case that
Rawls’s account of the circumstances ofjustice makes the priority ofjustice a
form of moral compromise.

I
Hume’s Circumstances and Rawls’s Priority of Justice
In the broad sense, the circumstances of justice are the conditions that make
justice a virtue of human beings and their political institutions: the possibility
of mutual benefit from cooperation and conflict over the terms of cooperation.
If we had no need of aid nor companionship, we could live happy solitary
lives, without any sense of justice; if our purposes never conflicted, we could
live together in harmony, without any sense of justice. Taking the possibility
of mutually beneficial cooperation for granted, the circumstances of justice
are, in the narrow sense, the conflict-generating conditions making justice
necessary for social life. In Book Two of Plato’s Republic, for example,
Glaucon challenges Socrates by suggesting that it is the desire for mastery

5 -TI,p. A:
666 A. LISTER

that gives rise to justice, as a pact for mutual protection between equals unable
consistently to dominate each other. According to the standard summary of
Hume’s view, scarcity and selfishness give rise to conflict over possessions,
with ‘rules ofjustice’, as Hume calls them,® arising as a set of conventions
establishing the institutions of property and contract. These institutions would
never have been invented if resources were abundant, if individuals were less
equal, or if the ‘nobler’ virtue of benevolence were more extensive, making
justice, in Hume’s words ‘the cautious, jealous virtue’ .’
These accounts of justice focus our attention on what are, at least at first
glance, defects in character — selfishness and the desire for mastery —
defects, the socially disruptive effects of which, justice alleviates. The preva-
lence of these vices is alleged to be a permanent feature of the human condi-
tion, not just the product of local institutions and policies, with the result that
there is no possibility of aworld beyond justice — no possibility of emancipa-
tion from the conditions that make public rules or principles of justice neces-
sary.®
Rawls began his 1958 article ‘Justice as Fairness’ by arguing that mutually
self-interested persons constrained to choose principles for evaluating all
future complaints against their common practices would choose his two princi-
ples of justice. He then drew attention to the similarity between this approach
to the justification of principles and the older tradition that viewed justice as
the result of a prudential pact.
These ideas are, of course, connected with a familiar way of thinking about
justice which goes back at least to the Greek Sophists, and which regards
the acceptance of the principles of justice as a compromise between persons
of roughly equal power who would enforce their will on each other if they
could, but who, in view of the equality of forces among them and for the
sake of their own peace and security, acknowledge certain forms of conduct
insofar as prudence seems to require. Justice is thought of as a pact between

© Hume’s use of the term ‘justice’ is not entirely consistent, but the core elements are
‘the stability of possession . . . its transference by consent, and . . . the performance of
promises’, Hume’s three ‘fundamental laws of nature’ (D. Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature (Buffalo, 1992) (hereafter, 7), p. 526) — hence my use of the phrase “property
and contract’. On Hume’s terminology, see the note to p. 153 in Barry’s Theories of Jus-
tice (Berkeley, 1989) as well as p. 87 of D.D. Raphael’s Concepts of Justice (Oxford,
2001).
7 T, pp. 494-5, and D. Hume An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (India-
napolis, 1983) (hereafter, E), p. 21.
8 Socrates’ healthy city is an example of a society beyond justice, since it is effort-
lessly just, without the need for any conscious orientation towards justice on the part of
its inhabitants. Marx’s communist society is another example of such a society; see
A. Buchanan, Marx and Justice (London, 1982), p. 57, and S. Lukes, Marxism and
Morality (Oxford, 1985), p. 34.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 667

rational egoists the stability of which is dependent on a balance of power

and a similarity of circumstances.’
Of course, Rawls also insisted on the differences between this view and his
own,’” but it is the similarities that have long struck Rawls’s critics as more
important.
In A Theory of Justice, when describing the parties to the original position
as mutually disinterested, Rawls drew explicitly on Hume’s ‘especially per-
spicuous’ account of the circumstances ofjustice.'! If it were merely a remedy
for selfishness, Sandel responded, justice could not be in all social contexts
the primary virtue. He offered three main arguments for this conclusion.
1. The war zone limitation: Selfishness'* may be typical in relationships
between strangers in the modern nation-state, but it is much less prevalent
in families, neighbourhoods, unions, ethnic and religious communities,
etc., making it unlikely that in all social contexts justice is engaged in
greater measure than any other virtue. Hence justice is the first virtue ‘not
absolutely, as truth is to theories, but only conditionally, as physical cour-
age is to a war zone’.”*

ST p50,
10 CP, p. 56. Rawls also suggested that Plato’s account of this view was misleading.
Rawls cited Karl Popper’s claim that Plato had misrepresented what Popper called the
protectionist doctrine (ibid.). Sophists such as Lycophron maintained that the proper pur-
pose of the city was to protect the basic interests of individuals, not that rules of justice
can be explained as a pact between evenly matched egoists. K. Popper, The Open Society
and its Enemies (Princeton, NJ, 1950), p. 114. Plato’s account involved (as Rawls put it)
‘a quality of manic egoism which one feels must be an exaggeration’ (though Rawls
noted a similar trait in Thucydides’ Melian Debate (CP, p. 56, note 8)). Rawls said that
Hobbes and Hume offered ‘more sophisticated’ versions of the theory (ibid.).The chief
sophistication in Hobbes’s version is of course his account of how the interactions of
individuals who do not, as a rule, have a taste for violence can generate a violent, danger-
ous condition through a vicious cycle of uncertainty and pre-emption.
11 TJ, p. 127.
!2 Tn making his first point, Sandel referred to the circumstances of justice as involv-
ing a lack of common purposes, which could include individualism and disagreement as
well as selfishness. (Selfishness consists in a narrow concern with one’s own good, let’s
say, while individualism consists in the definition of the human good in a way that
ignores communal activities and interests, but may be altruistic; disagreement consists in
conflicting visions of the human good.) Yet Sandel’s second and third points focused on
selfishness alone, as did his criticism of Rawls’s claim that mutual disinterest was a weak
assumption. ‘How does [Rawls] know that assuming mutual disinterest is not a demand-
ing assumption in that “it asks little of the parties”? Does this assume that we are inclined
by nature toward selfishness rather than benevolence? Maybe for some it is asking much
more to ask that they act selfishly rather than benevolently.’ Sandel, Liberalism and the
Limits of Justice, p. 46.
13. Ibid., p. 31.
668 A. LISTER

2. The priority of benevolence: If all justice does is to solve a problem created

by the scarcity of benevolence, benevolence must be at least as important a
virtue as justice, if not nobler, as Hume had said."
3. The perverse effect: When a close friend insists on paying his precise share
of common expenses, it communicates a lack of trust, and so undermines
the intimacy that previously prevailed. Giving priority to justice can thus
exacerbate the vices that make justice necessary.'°
In short, justice cannot come first in all contexts, in all contexts it is second to
benevolence, and putting justice first can diminish benevolence.
Sandel’s critics pointed out that he had misrepresented Rawls’s claim for
the primacy of justice and misinterpreted Rawls’s assumption of ‘mutual dis-
interest’.'° Sandel construed justice as a virtue of persons and a motive for
individual acts, while Rawls had always been concerned primarily with jus-
tice as a virtue of institutions, which is to say as a criterion for assessing dif-
ferent institutional designs, and in particular the basic structure of a political
society. Sandel took the phrase ‘first virtue of social institutions’ to mean
‘first virtue of persons in all institutions’, including as ‘institutions’ every-
thing from families and neighbourhoods to nations, not distinguishing
between the groups that exist within the legal structure of a political society
and political society itself. Sandel also interpreted the priority of justice over
other personal virtues as the claim that in all of these social contexts one ought
normally to act from the sense of justice. Yet even at the level of personal vir-
tues, the priority justice has is not that in general one ought to act from the
sense of justice rather than from other motives. It is rather that when justice
conflicts with other motives, justice must prevail. Thus, even in contexts in
which love or benevolence predominates, in the sense that people act from
love or benevolence more often than they do from self-interest or the sense of
justice alone, justice can be dominant, in the sense that people refuse to act
unjustly even for love’s sake.
Sandel’s critics also pointed out that he had misconstrued Rawls’s account
of the circumstances of justice. The mutual disinterest of the parties in the
original position did not represent present-day selfishness. Rather, it repre-
sented the pluralism of conceptions of the good that would persist even in a
well-ordered society.'’ Disagreement is not a vice or a defect in the same way

DThid p03 2:
'5 Tbid., pp. 33-5; see also C. Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian
Debate’, reprinted in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, 1995), p. 183.
16 See in particular T. Pogge, Realizing Rawls (Ithaca, NY, 1989), pp. 93-4, and
S. Caney, ‘Sandel’s Critique of the Primacy of Justice: A Liberal Rejoinder’, British
Journal of Political Science, 21 (1991), pp. 512-18.
'7 See, for example, A. Buchanan, ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liber-
alism’, Ethics, 99 (1989), pp. 864, 877; Pogge, Realizing Rawls, p. 93; and Caney,
‘Sandel’s Critique of the Primacy of Justice: A Liberal Rejoinder’, p. 511. Sandel was far
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 669

that selfishness is a defect. A world without any disagreement would not be a

better place. Hence justice is not simply a remedial virtue."
These criticisms do much to undercut Sandel’s three points. War Zone:
Why should the members of a political society with a high level of mutual care
and moral agreement accept that institutions can promote economic growth
unjustly, or protect tradition unjustly, or beautify the environment unjustly,
and so on? Conflicts between justice and other standards might be rarer in
such a society, but people could still reasonably think that, when conflicts
arose, justice ought to prevail. Priority of Benevolence / Agreement: Why
should it be acceptable in any society for institutions to cultivate benevolence
or moral consensus unjustly? Perfect benevolence and consensus would not
justify unjust institutions, but merely ensure that conflicts between justice and
other standards of institutional design did not arise. Perverse Effect: Why
should it promote selfishness or disagreement to require that institutions not
advance society’s goals by unjust means?'®
The liberal response to Sandel on these points was largely convincing, but
it left unanswered two interesting historical questions about the relationship
between Hume and Rawls and an important philosophical question about jus-
tice and compromise. The first historical question is how Rawls could claim
that his own account of the circumstances ofjustice added ‘nothing essential
to Hume’s much fuller discussion’? when moral disagreement plays no role
in Hume’s account. Surely it would be an essential difference if Rawls, but
not Hume, counted genuine disagreement about values and ideals as one of
the conflict-generating conditions making justice necessary for social life?
Perhaps Rawls simply misread Hume. Yet Rawls was in other respects a very
careful historian of philosophy. As we will see, he argued that Hume’s views
on justice were not utilitarian, and hence not incompatible with the central
normative claims of a contractarian such as Locke, despite Hume’s explicit
condemnation of the idea of the social contract. Must we conclude, then, that
from alone in thinking that Rawls’s account of the circumstances of justice in Theory was
essentially Humean, not mentioning the fact of moral disagreement. See, for example,
C. Kukathas and P. Pettit, Rawls: A Theory of Justice and Its Critics (Oxford, 1990),
pp. 23-4; Taylor, ‘Cross-Purposes: The Liberal-Communitarian Debate’, pp. 183-4;
D. Weinstock, ‘The Justification of Political Liberalism’, Pacific Philosophical Quar-
terly, 75 (1994), p. 165; F. D’Agostino, Free Public Reason: Making It Up As We Go
(Oxford, 1996), p. 23; S. Freeman, Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ‘Introduction’
(Cambridge, 2003), p. 53, note 6.
18 Buchanan, ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique of Liberalism’, p. 877.
19 Sandel could answer that the problem with Rawlsian justice is not its role as first
principle of institutional appraisal, but its individualistic content. ‘Each person possesses
an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot
override’, Rawls famously said (TV, p. 3). It is hard to see, however, why agreeing to lim-
its on aggregative thinking in the design of institutions should make us more selfish or
more focused on individualistic goods.
20 TJ, pp. 127-8.
670 A. LISTER

‘selfishness and scarcity’ is not an accurate summary of Hume’s account of

the circumstances ofjustice, and that it is rather Rawls’s critics who misread
Hume?
Answering this question about what Hume and Rawls thought the circum-
stances of justice were opens up a second historical question, about Hume’s
views on the standing of justice relative to other virtues. Sandel’s critics
essentially accepted his claim that the primacy Rawls claimed forjustice was
incompatible with Hume’s account of the circumstances ofjustice, but simply
denied that Rawls shared Hume’s understanding of these circumstances, and
ofjustice itself. However, if within the space of five pages Rawls could both
assert that justice was the first virtue of institutions and cite, without dissent-
ing from, Hume’s description ofjustice as the ‘cautious, jealous’ virtue,”' we
should ask whether he might have seen something in Hume that others
missed. Is Hume’s account of the circumstances ofjustice truly at odds with
the assertion that justice should trump other considerations, as Sandel and his
critics assumed?

II
Hume on the Circumstances of Justice

Hume’s account of the origin of justice proceeds in two stages.” First, how
did rules ofjustice first arise? Cooperation is necessary for life, but selfish-
ness and scarcity lead to conflict. People realize it would be better for every-
one if possessions were not transferable, without consent. Expression of this
fact makes it common knowledge, inducing people to refrain from taking the
possessions of others, on the expectation others will reciprocate. The institu-
tion of property arises gradually, by the establishment of a convention rather
than by explicit agreement. The original motive for observing rules ofjustice
is love of gain, which restrains itself for better long-run satisfaction.
Second, how did moral approbation come to be attached to rules of justice?
As society grows, the interest each individual has in following the rules
becomes more remote, yet people still object to unjust acts they witness.
When they have no personal interest at stake, people see that injustice is preju-
dicial to human society. The source of the moral approbation that attends jus-
tice is thus sympathy with the public interest, but only by way of a convention
establishing general and inflexible rules of conduct.” Thus, a ‘circumstance
of justice’, in Hume’s usage, is one of the conditions of human nature or of our
world responsible for the development of rules of justice. But rules of justice

Al TJ, pp.3, 8.
22 The full account is found in Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature (T, pp. 484-501),
but Hume presents essentially the same ideas from a somewhat different perspective in
his Enquiry Concerning Human Nature (E, pp. 20-7). The two accounts are complemen-
tary and so I do not make an effort to distinguish them.
23 T, pp. 498-501.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 671

develop only because they advance a goal people have: security in the enjoy-
ment of possessions. The circumstances of justice are thus the conditions
under which justice is necessary for the peaceful enjoyment and exchange of
possessions. The main circumstances ofjustice are scarcity, selfishness and a
rough equality of strength and ability.
Hume’s account bears some similarity to the classical view ofjustice as a
prudential compromise between evenly matched rational egoists: justice con-
sists in rules of conduct rather than the proper order of the soul; justice is a
means to the greater long-run satisfaction of lower or ordinary interests,
rather than being constitutive of the higher good; justice alleviates the conse-
quences of selfishness; and justice can exist only between those roughly equal
in strength and ability. It is understandable, then, that communitarians wor-
ried about the ‘atomistic’ tendencies of liberal modernity might think Hume’s
account of human sociability too narrowly instrumental, material and self-
regarding, or that Marxists might accuse Hume of misconstruing the local
traits of commercial society as unchangeable features of the human cond+
tion.”
At the same time, Hume’s theory presents a number of stark contrasts with
the view suggested by Glaucon. The problem justice solves is insecurity of
possession, not vengeance, lust for power or malice. Hume’s individuals
appear amazingly gentle, as Annette Baier puts it.” Hume acknowledged that
people typically have strong feelings of care and concern for family and
friends; his account of the origin ofjustice is largely instrumental and material
because he was concerned with the problem of large-scale cooperation rather
than with intimate relations.*° Hume also recognized that our feelings of

24 Hume said that selfishness is ‘the most considerable’ aspect of our natural temper
that renders social cooperation difficult (7, p. 486). Hume also described men as ‘natu-
rally selfish’ (T, p. 519), and claimed that this selfishness was “‘inalterable’ (7, p. 521). If
moralists and politicians could only change conduct by ‘correcting the selfishness and
ingratitude of men, they wou’d never make any progress, unless aided by omnipotence,
which is alone able to new-mould the human mind, and change its character in such fun-
damental articles’. All politicians and moralists can do is to give a new direction to our
natural passions, teaching us that we can better satisfy our appetites in an oblique man-
ner. ‘Hence I learn to do a service to another, without bearing him any real kindness;
because I forsee, that he will return my service, in expectation of another of the same
kind, and in order to maintain the same correspondence of good offices with me or with
others’ (T, p. 521).
25 A. Baier, A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Cambridge,
MA, 1991), p. 222. Like Hobbes, Hume believed that people did not by nature typically
take intrinsic enjoyment in harming each other. See, for example, Hume’s comment in
his Enquiry concerning the absence of pure or absolute evil, and the cruelty of a Nero
being due to the accumulation of fear and resentment, rather than to an unprovoked and
disinterested malice (E, pp. 47-8).
26 ‘So far from thinking, that men have no affection for any thing beyond themselves,
I am of the opinion, that tho’ it be rare to meet with one, who loves any single person
672 A. LISTER

approval and disapproval are not simply an expression of self-interest and can
by themselves move us to act.”’ Hume argued that we praise actions, senti-
ments or characters as virtuous or blame them as vicious according to whether
they cause pleasure or uneasiness when considered in general, without refer-
ence to our own particular interest.** These capacities for sympathy and
impartial judgment explain how justice comes to be considered a virtue.
Although at first people follow rules of justice solely out of clear-sighted,
long-term self-interest, people later develop a sense of duty that has real, if
limited, motivational force. When we observe an injustice, we sympathize not
only with the immediate victim’s pain but with the public interest in there
being regularly observed rules of justice. Our capacities to sympathize and to
consider things from an impartial perspective thus invest rules of justice with
some real, if limited, motivational force, distinct from long-term self-interest.
It is in light of these differences that we should understand Hume’s accep-
tance of the equality condition, which would otherwise be the strongest con-
nection between Hume and the classical mutual protection tradition. Hume
claimed that if there existed a race of rational but much weaker creatures, who
could never do us any harm, we would not be under obligations of justice
towards them.” The strong, of course, will often act unjustly with respect to
the weak, but it seems odd to argue that we cannot rightly criticize them for

better than himself; yet ’tis as rare to meet with one, in whom the kind affections, taken
together, do not over-balance all the selfish’ (7, p. 487). A good comparison here is
Cicero, who emphasized that the main function of cities was to protect property, while
insisting that lack of material self-sufficiency was not the primary reason humans associ-
ate with one another (in families and as friends, for example). M.T. Cicero, On Duties
(Cambridge, 1991), pp. 61, 93. On the importance of Cicero to eighteenth-century
thought, and to Hume in particular, see J. Moore, ‘Utility and Humanity: The Quest for
the Honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson, and Hume’, Utilitas, 14 (2002), pp. 365-86.
27 Hume rejected Hobbes’s reduction of evaluative terms to personal appetite and
aversion, as Barry Stroud explains: “There is a strong tendency, in thinking about human
nature, to say that a man approves of only those things . . . he believes to be in his
self-interest. This monistic theory finds a single feature present in every case of approval.
Hume explicitly and energetically rejects any such view . . . We praise or condemn
actions performed in ancient times, although we know that they cannot further or impede
our self-interest in any way; and we can approve of the actions or character of an enemy
who is actually thwarting us’ (B. Stroud, Hume (London, 1977), p.194). Hume main-
tained that this propensity to express judgments from an impartial standpoint makes
social intercourse possible. *’ Tis impossible we could ever converse together on any rea-
sonable terms, were each of us to consider characters and persons, only as they appear
from his particular point of view. In order, therefore, to prevent those continual contra-
dictions, and arrive at a more stable judgment of things, we fix on steady and general
points of view; and always, in our thoughts, place ourselves in them, whatever may be
our present situation’ (7, p. 581).
28 T9472:
29 FE, pp. 25-6.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 673

doing so because standards of justice apply only between equals.*° Yet the
narrowness of Hume’s concept of justice may go some way to making his
position intelligible as a moral view. Given extreme inequality, rules of prop-
erty and contract are not necessary for peace between weak and strong, and so
lose their point; but the natural virtues such as humanity and generosity still
apply.*' The question for Rawls will be what role the equality condition plays
in his theory, given his broader understanding ofjustice as the first virtue of
institutions.
Hume’s views about human selfishness are also more subtle than generally
recognized in contemporary debates about liberalism and communitarianism.
The limit on human generosity Hume identifies consists as much in a partial-
ity in the norms that govern our feelings of care and concern as it does in the
tendency to be too narrowly self-concerned.*” Hume pointed out that we care
more for family than acquaintances, for acquaintances than strangers, for

30 As Brian Barry puts it: ‘Justice is normally thought of not as ceasing to be relevant
in conditions of extreme inequality of power but rather, as being especially relevant to
such conditions.’ (Barry, Theories of Justice, p. 163.) Thomas Pogge suggests in
response to Barry that Hume’s primary purpose was to explain the origin of rules of jus-
tice rather than to justify or appraise them (Pogge, ‘Review of Brian Barry’s Theories of
Justice’ ,Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), p. 382). In effect, Pogge attributes to Hume a
purely causal rather than a functional understanding of the idea of a circumstance of jus-
tice (a condition leading to the development of rules of justice, not a condition making
these rules necessary for an outcome assumed to be valuable). However, Hume does not
say simply that rules of justice do not develop in the presence of extreme inequality of
strength. Were there a much weaker species unable to do us harm, Hume says, ‘the neces-
sary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound by the laws of humanity, to give
gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint
of justice with regard to them’. It is because ‘no inconvenience ever results from the exer-
cise of a power, so firmly established in nature’ that the restraints of justice are ‘totally
useless’ and have no place in ‘so unequal a confederacy’ (E, pp. 25-6). In this passage
Hume appears to be both explaining and appraising.
3! Barry says that ‘it is surely normally regarded as a paradigm of injustice to kill
some innocent person simply because that person is in the way of your getting something
you want’ (Barry, Theories of Justice, p. 163). But it is unnecessary for the strong to kill
the weak in order to take their property, while killing for pleasure would be inhumanity.
D.D. Raphael suggests as much in noting that ‘Hume was himself an exceptionally
humane man and would undoubtedly have been moved by humanity “to give gentle
usage” to creatures of inferior strength’ (Raphael, Concepts of Justice, p. 103).
32 Tt may even be that Hume intended to distinguish selfishness from limited or con-
fined generosity. After asserting that justice is a remedy for inconveniences resulting
from ‘certain qualities of the human mind and from the situation of external objects’,
Hume remarks ‘The qualities of the mind are selfishness and limited generosity . . .’ (T,
p. 494; emphasis added), not “The quality of the mind is selfishness or limited generos-
ity’. We might define the fact of selfishness as the fact that “each person loves himself
better than any other single person’, and the fact of confined generosity as the fact that ‘in
his love to others [he] bears the greatest affection to his relations and acquaintance’ (7,
p. 487). However, Hume’s comment ‘Encrease to sufficient degree the benevolence of
674 A. LISTER

fellow citizens than foreigners,*’ and that this natural partiality of sentiment
influences our ideas of right and wrong.
We always consider the natural and usual force of the passions, when we
determine concerning vice and virtue; and if the passions depart very much
from the common measures on either side, they are always disapprov’d as
vicious... .Hence arise our common measures of duty, in preferring the one
to the other.**
Or again,
This partiality, then, and unequal affection, must not only have an influence
on our behaviour and conduct in society, but even on our ideas of vice and
virtue; so as to make us regard any remarkable transgression of such a
degree of partiality, either by too great an enlargement, or contraction of the
affections, as vicious and immoral. This we may observe in our common
judgments concerning actions, where we blame a person, who either centres
all his affections in his family, or is so regardless of them, as in any opposi-
tion of interest, to give the preference to a stranger, or mere chance acquain-
tance.*
Thus, our ideas of duty and virtue incorporate views about the appropriate dis-
tribution of social sentiment, which is neither pure egoism nor an equal con-
cern for all human beings. Persons we praise as unselfish still care more for
some people than others, and in this sense display limited benevolence.
The partiality of the norms that govern our concern for others is a problem
because in any large society it leads to factional conflict. ‘Popular sedition,
party zeal, a devoted obedience to factious leaders; these are some of the most
visible, though less laudable effects of this social sympathy in human nature’.*°
The virtue of justice makes possible cooperation not between rational egoists
unable to dominate each other, but between beings whose sentiments of con-
cern and affection decline with distance and who view deviations on both

men...and you renderjustice useless’ suggests that there is only one variable in play, the
degree of selfishness or altruism (the distribution of our concern over persons; T,
pp. 494-5). Iam suggesting that Hume also recognized the fact of PagaUnysin the norms
that Meanern our feelings of concern for self and others.
3 *A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better
than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where every thing else is equal’ (T,
pp. 483-4). ‘In the original frame of our mind, our strongest attention is confin’d to our-
selves; our next is extended to our relations and acquaintance; and ’tis only the weakest
which reaches to strangers and indifferent persons’ (T, pp. 488-9). “We sympathize more
with persons contiguous to us, than with persons remote from us: With our acquaintance,
than with strangers: With our countrymen, than with foreigners’ (T, p. 581).
34 T, pp. 483-4; emphasis added.
35 T, pp. 488-9.
36 E, p. 46; see also T, p. 487.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 675

sides of this standard as blameworthy. Since it represents normatively endorsed

partiality rather than narrow egoism, it is not implausible to think of confined
generosity as a fixed point of the human condition.*’
The interpretation of limited benevolence as partiality affects our under-
standing of the priority of the virtues. If it is right that our social sentiments
should diminish with distance, perfect benevolence would not be a virtue.
One of the standard objections to utilitarianism is that it requires us to act
always for the greatest good overall, leaving no room for personal projects
and special obligations to family and friends.** If it would be inhuman always
to be motivated by an equal concern for the welfare of every person, then,
contra Sandel, it is not true even for Hume that justice merely supplies the lack
of higher virtues.
The interpretation of confined generosity as partiality also makes more under-
standable how Hume could claim that his analysis showed human nature to be
fundamentally good. In a famous passage from the conclusion to his Treatise,
Hume said that the sense of morals “must certainly acquire new force, when
reflecting on itself, it approves of those principles, from whence it is derived,
as finding nothing but what is great and good in its rise and origin.*” Selfish-
ness might be better than disinterested malice, but it would be hard to see it as
great and good, even if (implausibly) social cohesion were possible on the
basis of narrow self-interest alone. It is much easier to be reconciled to partial-
ity, particularly if it is tempered by a real if limited sense ofjustice.
Although it is impossible to know exactly how Rawls understood Hume on
this point, at the time he wrote Theory, in later years, at least, he did not adopt
the simple scarcity-and-selfishness interpretation. In his lectures on Hume,
Rawls noted that Hume ‘does not assert the false doctrine of the egoism of
individuals’.*° After quoting a passage in which Hume discusses the affection

37 In the Enquiry, Hume also denies making any claim about the precise degree of
benevolence or self-love in human nature. Since his theory depends only on there being
some benevolence in the human heart, Hume claims to avoid the interminable debate
about just how selfish or altruistic humans are (E, pp. 47, 74). Hume’s assumption about
human motivation is thus a weak assumption, in the sense that it is a range assumption
rather than a point assumption; his theory is valid, he claims, even if he is off somewhat in
his assessment of how selfish people typically are. While it may seem naive to claim that
human beings as such are selfish (mistaking the conditions of capitalist society for the
human condition in general), it is far more plausible to claim that under any social condi-
tions there will be some selfishness in human motivation. Rawls will follow Hume’s
lead, but in the dimension of disagreement and doctrinal conflict, rather than in the extent
of typical human care.
38 B. Williams and J.J.C. Smart, Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge, 1973);
S. Scheffler, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford, 1982).
39 T, pp. 619-20.
40 Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, p. 59.
676 A. LISTER

of fathers for their families, Rawls underlines the importance of group interest
and draws a link between factional conflict and ideological pluralism.
We might equally mention the collective self-centeredness of groups of all
kinds, universities and churches along with the rest. These can be worse
than individual egoisms when supported by religious and philosophical
doctrines. Hume is quite realistic about this, and his view of the circum-
stances ofjustice allows for it.*!
Thus, not only did Rawls see the importance Hume attributed to group con-
flict, he suggested (wrongly, I will argue) that Hume’s account of the circum-
stances of justice was compatible with the assumption that this conflict was
based on ideological division rather than conflicts of selfish material interests.
Perhaps the most important connection between Hume and Rawls, but one
overlooked by communitarian critics such as Sandel and Taylor, concerns the
institutional nature of Hume’s rules of justice. Joseph Butler had argued
against Hutcheson’s claim that the whole of virtue was contained in benevo-
lence by pointing out that we approve or disapprove of certain actions
whether or not they have a tendency to promote the happiness or misery of the
world.”” We do not condone stealing just because the pleasure of the recipient
outweighs the pain of the victim and there are no further bad consequences. It
is part of our nature, and part of God’s design, that we should condemn such
acts. Hume accepted Butler’s description of moral common sense, but tried to
show, without recourse to divine intention, how this way of thinking could
have developed from more fundamental dispositions. Hume insisted that jus-
tice does serve the general good, but admitted that the connection between
them was ‘somewhat singular’ .*’ In a series of passages in the Treatise and the
Enquiry, Hume argued that the whole system of rule-following is in the public
interest, even though not every act of justice is publicly beneficial.“4 ‘When a
man of merit, of a beneficent disposition, restores a great fortune to a miser, or
a seditious bigot, he has acted justly and laudably, but the public is a real suf-
ferer.” However, “the whole plan or scheme’ or ‘the whole system of actions,
concurr’d in by the whole society’ is essential to the public interest, since
without rules of property, society would dissolve.”
The property rights of misers and seditious bigots illustrate a conflict
between single acts of justice (restoring lost property, repaying a debt) and the
public good. Yet, as Hume’s commentators have recognized, it is somewhat
unclear what exactly this conflict is and how Hume thinks he has resolved the

41 Tbid.
42 My summary of Butler’s position is based on J.B. Schneewind, The Invention of
Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 349-52.
a3 7. p. 497.
44 T, pp. 497, 532, 579-80; E, pp. 83, 93-4.
45 T, pp. 497-8.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 677

problem it creates.”° If the public suffers when a beneficent man repays a loan
to a miser or a seditious bigot, as justice requires, why do we approve of it?*’
One answer would be that only the direct effects of the loan repayment are
publicly harmful, and that these direct costs are more than compensated for by
the indirect benefits of being seen to have done what justice requires. It is
plausible to think that following the rules of justice encourages others to fol-
low them, while breaking the rules encourages others to violate them. The
direct harm to the public caused by repaying the miser (rather than donating
the money to a worthy charity, say), might therefore be less than the indirect
benefit of encouraging others to comply with justice. On this account, the
motivation for (and our approval of) just acts is supplied by the fact that each
just act is publicly beneficial, all consequences considered. Butler miscalcu-
lated the consequences of just acts for human happiness because he neglected
the effects of our actions on the actions of others. On this account, then, rules
of justice do not change the way we think; they merely change the conse-
quences our actions have.
Of course, what normally undermines our own willingness to act justly is
injustice committed for selfish reasons, not altruistic injustice. Respect for
justice need not be undermined if those who are aware of the loan know the
lender to be miserly and the borrower to be beneficent — or at least would
only be undermined in similar situations (situations in which justice conflicts
with the public good). Perhaps Hume’s idea is that people are more likely to
recognize that not repaying the miser violates the rules of justice than they are
to recognize that repaying the miser is publicly harmful, since the fact of the
debt is more easily known than the circumstances and character of the parties
involved. Perhaps people will make mistakes about what advances the public
good, leading observers to misinterpret public-spirited injustice as selfish
injustice. It is implausible, however, that any deviation from justice will trig-
ger a collapse of the system, particularly since injustice may go unobserved.*
This first account of the discrepancy between single acts of justice and the
public good therefore has the counter-intuitive consequence that when one
can commit an unjust act unobserved, or observed only by those who know
the injustice to be altruistic, one’s motive to act justly simply disappears.
Secrecy can of course lead self-interest to override the sense of duty, but it
should not entirely eliminate the motive in someone who ordinarily has a
sense ofjustice.”

46 Stroud, Hume, p. 204; J.L. Mackie, Hume’s Moral Theory (London, 1980), p. 91;
J. Harrison, Hume’s Theory of Justice (Oxford, 1981), p. 67.
47 Stroud, Hume, p. 204.
48 Tbid., p. 208.
49 Brian Barry tries to defend an act-consequentialist interpretation of justice’sartifi-
ciality by arguing that each individual act of justice is advantageous to the society when
considered as part of the whole scheme and in relation to the feasible alternatives (Barry,
678 A. LISTER

Perhaps, then, Hume accepts Butler’s claim that the public suffers all-
consequences-considered from some acts of justice on specific occasions.
Hume’s point, on this second interpretation, would be that we nonetheless
come to approve of rule-following itself, for something like the following rea-
sons. Even though in some cases repaying a debt can be publicly harmful all
consequences considered, we recognize that, given the limits of human
knowledge and the facts of human partiality, it is better for everyone if we all
follow the rules of justice without exception than if we allow ourselves to
make exceptions when it seems that doing so would be publicly beneficial.
We approve of respect for rules of justice because we are uncertain about the
public harm in particular cases, but confident that justice is usually publicly
beneficial and confident that exceptionless respect for justice is better than the
universal making of exceptions according to the vagaries of individual judg-
ment. On this interpretation, then, rules of justice change the way people think
rather than just changing the consequences of our actions. Instead of choosing
the action whose total consequences have the greatest expected value, people
maximize within the constraints of rules of justice, at least to the extent they
are motivated by justice. On this account, the systems or schemes of conduct
Hume describes limit the scope of ordinary act-consequentialist rationality.°°

Theories of Justice, p. 170). Similarly, John Mackie argues that in some circumstances
the real unit of choice may not be a single act but a practice, and that if the only effectively
open choice is between practices, ‘then it is easy to see why one might rationally choose a
practice which carries with it some acts which one would not choose in isolation’; such
acts would be ‘side-effects of an intelligible larger-scale choice’ (Mackie, Hume’s Moral
Theory, p. 92). The problem with these interpretations is that even if the only feasible
alternatives or effectively open choices for society are practices, the individual always
has the option of acting now so as to maximize valuable consequences. If in some set-
tings individuals ask instead “What if everyone did likewise?’, that fact would need to be
explained, from Hume’s point of view. Indeed, I think that the second stage of Hume’s
argument (why justice is considered as virtue) is intended to provide just such an expla-
nation. Ina small society, where everyone knows each other and observes or hears about
what everyone else does, there might well be a tight causal connection between individ-
ual acts of justice and the maintenance of the general system of rule-following. As soci-
ety grows, however, individually act-rational behaviour will begin to diverge from the
requirements of justice, to the detriment of the public good. Recognizing this fact, we
come to approve of respect for rules of justice.
50 Tt remains unclear, on this second interpretation, how one could justify giving pri-
ority to justice in a particular case in which, to the best of one’s knowledge, injustice
would best promote the public good (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 370).
Hume’s main purpose is explanatory, however; his argument is meant to describe how
human beings in fact come to be ‘mightily addicted to general rules, and . . . often carry
[their] maxims beyond those reasons, which first induc’d us to establish them’ (T, p. 551).
The lack of a fully rational justification would only undermine Hume’s explanation on
the assumption that human beings are perfectly rational. However, if Hume’s account
cannot justify respect for rules ofjustice in all cases, universal knowledge of Hume’s
theory would undermine the institutions in question. The same must not be true for
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 679

What is important about this second, non-act-consequentialist interpreta-

tion of justice’s artificiality, for the present discussion, is that it gives priority
to justice over virtues such as benevolence. On the first, act-consequentialist
interpretation, any conflicts that arise between justice and the public good are
only apparent conflicts. When the fact that an unjust act would prompt others
to act unjustly is taken into account, it becomes clear that all just acts do pro-
mote the public good, though some of them only because they help maintain
the institution of justice. On the second interpretation, however, there can be
situations in which a particular just act will not advance the public good, all
things considered, but people must not take the authority to make such deter-
minations into their own hands. As Hume puts it, rules of justice are ‘univer-
sal and perfectly inflexible’, unlike the rules we use on other occasions, which
are essentially just rules of thumb about what promotes the good.°! Justice
may be the cautious, jealous virtue but, according to the second interpretation
at least, it is better for the public if everyone accepts that justice trumps
benevolence, when the two standards conflict, than if they consider them-
selves entitled to judge what is most beneficial in each particular case.
Whichever interpretation of Hume is correct, it seems fairly clear that
Rawls adopted the second, non-act-consequentialist, account. In his 1955
article “Two Concepts of Rules’, Rawls called a ‘practice’ any form of activ-
ity (such as a game, trial, parliament or market) whose structure is specified
by rules that define offices, roles, moves, penalties, defences, etc., citing
Hume’s discussion of rule-governed schemes of social interaction as the basis
for this idea.’ ‘The point of a practice’, Rawls said, is ‘to abdicate one’s title
to act in accordance with utilitarian and prudential considerations’. If rules
are constitutive of practices, and one holds an office defined by a practice,
‘questions regarding one’s actions in this office are settled by reference to the
rules which define the practice’. In contrast, if rules are merely generaliza-
tions about what actions are effective in specific situations, ‘one always holds
the office of a rational person seeking case by case to realize the best on the
whole’, in effect doing away with the idea of distinct offices governed by dif-
ferent norms of conduct.** Thus, Rawls understood Hume’s ‘systems of con-
duct’ or ‘general schemes of action’ as practices that limited the use of
consequentialist reasoning by participants. What Rawls seems to have taken
from Hume is the idea that institutions are, fundamentally, forms of joint or
social activity that cannot be reduced to instrumentally act-rational individual
behaviour.

Rawls, who seeks a public conception of justice (i.e. one that is common knowledge:
known by all and known to be known by all, etc.).
51 T, pp. 531-2; see Rawls’s discussion of this point in CP, pp. 20-46.
52 CP, p. 20, note 2, and p. 32, note 19.
53 CP, p. 31.
34 CP, p. 39.
680 ; A. LISTER

For Hume, however, justice was an institution but not a standard we could
use to assess institutions; the rules of property could not themselves bejust or
unjust, in his view. This narrowness is not only contrary to normal usage, but
odd given Hume’s goals. Hume had tried to explain an obvious fact of moral
psychology, which is that people are to some extent moved by the sense that it
is wrong to steal, to refuse to pay one’s debts, and in other ways violate rules
of conduct whose general observance is mutually beneficial. Yet it is an
equally obvious fact that people can be moved by the sense that the distribu-
tion of benefits is unfairly skewed, even if everyone benefits relative to the
alternative of having no rules at all. It is a short step from the idea that it is
wrong to violate rules while benefiting from their observance to the idea that
it is wrong to impose or accept rules that disproportionately benefit oneself. If
Hume had simply proposed a selfish, instrumental account of the value of
rules ofjustice, his failure to explain the origin of feelings of injustice directed
towards institutions (the rules of justice themselves) would be understand-
able. But since Hume’s first goal was to give a naturalistic explanation of the
fixed points of moral consciousness, the lack of discussion of this common
intuition is a problem in his theory.”
One might object that in this instance Hume was not explaining ordinary
moral psychology, but was offering a rule-utilitarian moral theory. Questions
of justice arise only with respect to the conformity of particular acts to rules of
property; the design of such rules raises only questions of social utility.°° How-
ever, as Rawls and many others have pointed out, Hume’s theory was not
utilitarian in the strict sense, since he assumed that to advance the public inter-

55 Hume of course had serious arguments against the pursuit of egalitarian distribu-
tive justice. Yet the infeasibility of “perfect equality’ (E, p. 28) is no excuse for not
explaining how people came to be moved by perceptions of injustice in the design of
social practices. An anonymous referee of this article plausibly suggested that Hume did
not focus on principles of institutional design because, unlike Rawls, he did not think of
us as being in control of the basic institutional structures by which we live. Nonetheless,
people have a tendency to perceive injustice in the design of institutions, and this ten-
dency seems a fairly natural extension of the sense of justice as Hume describes it. Even
if people are wrong to think that they could redesign their institutions, the fact that they
direct complaints towards the design of institutions demands an explanation. The same
referee pointed out that Hume resists the thought that justice can be a standard for mea-
suring institutions because justice does not exist, prior to institutions; the only prior
standards are those characteristics such as benevolence that are naturally attractive to the
sympathetic psyche. In my view, however, without asserting any historically pre-existing
standards, Hume could have added a third stage to his explanation of the origin of justice,
explaining how the sense of justice evolves to focus on the institutions themselves rather
than just on the violation of institutional rules.
5° This formulation is adapted from A. Macleod ‘Rule-Utilitarianism and Hume’s
Theory of Justice’, Hume Studies, 7 (1981), p. 75.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 681

est, rules ofjustice had to be in everyone’s interest.’ Unlike the principle of

maximizing aggregate utility, Hume’s ‘public interest’ rules out the possibil-
ity of some people not benefiting at all from the rules of property.°* Hume
showed little concern for inequalities beyond this point, yet in Rawls’s view
Hume’s theory did not rule out a more stringent distributive requirement.
Despite his criticisms of contractarianism as a theory of political obliga-
tion, nothing Hume said about social utility was inconsistent with the
contractarian conception of justice. The role of equal rights in Locke’s argu-
ment, Rawls explained, was to ensure that the only permissible departures
from the state of nature benefit everyone. ‘It is clear that all the transforma-
tions from the state of nature which Locke approves of satisfy this condition
... Hume nowhere disputes the propriety of these constraints. His critique of
Locke’s contract doctrine never denies, or even seems to recognize, its funda-
mental contention.’ The transformations of the initial state of equality that
Locke describes increase inequality, but Locke claims that at each step every-
one gains. The normative point of this story, Rawls suggests, is that each per-
son’s life-time prospects must improve with each successive transformation.
The fundamental contention of Locke’s theory is thus not just that institutions
must make everyone better off than they would be without any institutions,
but that institutionally-engendered inequalities must benefit all. The striking
feature of the utilitarian view, in contrast, is that the question of how the sum
of satisfactions is distributed across individuals matters only indirectly, to the
extent that it influences the total sum of satisfaction.® If this is how Rawls
understood the contrast between Locke and the Utilitarians, Rawls was claim-
ing that Hume’s conception of utility did not conflict with the idea that all
must benefit from inequality in the distribution of the cooperative surplus. So
not only did Hume accept the priority of justice over other personal virtues
(because of the general and inflexible rule provision), in Rawls’s view Hume
did not deny that justice was the first virtue of social institutions!
57 ‘Hume assumes that each man stands to gain, as judged by his long-term advan-
tage, when law and government conform to the precepts of utility. No mention is made of
the gains of some outweighing the disadvantages of others. For Hume, then, utility seems
to be identical with some form of the common good; institutions satisfy its demands
when they are to everyone’s interests, at least in the long run. Now if this interpretation of
Hume is correct, there is offhand no conflict with the priority of justice and no
incompatibility with Locke’s contract doctrine’ (TJ, p. 33). See also R.P. Hiskes, ‘Has
Hume a Theory of Social Justice?’, Hume Studies, 3 (1977), p. 75; D. Gauthier, ‘David
Hume, Contractarian’, Philosophical Review, 88 (1979), pp. 10-11; and Macleod,
‘Rule-Utilitarianism and Hume’s Theory of Justice’, pp. 78-9.
58 For this reason, Alistair Macleod argues that Hume’s criterion of the public inter-
est plays part of the role of a principle of justice — but only part, since so long as every-
one benefits to some extent, the distribution of benefits is irrelevant. Macleod, ‘Rule-
Utilitarianism and Hume’s Theory of Justice’, p. 79.
2? TI, p33.
0 TJ, p. 26.
682 A. LISTER

Il
Rawls on the Circumstances of Justice

Rawls drew on Hume’s understanding of the institutional nature of ‘rules of

justice’, but shifted the focus from the virtue of respecting institutional rules
to principles of institutional choice.®' To be well-ordered, a society needed
some common standard with which to arbitrate conflict over the design of
social institutions. In a society with publicly accepted first principles of insti-
tutional design, citizens might put forth excessive demands on one another,
but they would nevertheless acknowledge a common point of view from
which their claims might be adjudicated, establishing between them ‘the
bonds of civic friendship’.
Apart from this difference in their concepts of justice, Rawls’s explanation
of the idea of the circumstances of justice in Theory seemed straightforwardly
Humean:
1. ‘[S]ocial cooperation makes possible a better life for all than any would
have if each were to try to live solely by his own efforts.’
2. Yet ‘men are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their
collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each pre-
fer a larger to a lesser share’.
3. Therefore ‘principles are needed for choosing among the various social
arrangements which determine this division of advantages’.
The circumstances ofjustice are then the ‘background conditions’ that give
rise to this need for agreement on first principles of institutional choice.” The
second point in particular seems to suggest the Humean view that social con-
flict is conflict over the division of scarce, commonly but selfishly-valued
goods.
When it comes to the question of what the circumstances of justice are,
however, Rawls’s account is more puzzling. Instead of directly describing
which features of the human condition give rise to the possibility of mutually
beneficial cooperation and to conflict over division of the benefits of coopera-
tion, Rawls describes the situation and characteristics of the parties in the
original position. For example, Rawls says that the parties have roughly simi-
lar physical and mental powers so that none can dominate the rest.“ But this

6! Rawls began 1958’s ‘Justice as Fairness’ by stating that he would consider justice
only as a virtue of practices rather than as a virtue of particular actions or persons, refer-
ring the reader to the definition of practices he had offered in 1955’s ‘Two Concepts of
Rules’ as forms of activity specified by rules defining offices, roles, moves, etc. (CP,
p. 47, note 1).
Pod So,
3°TJ, pi126.
64 TN 2 7.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 683

equality condition is even odder for Rawls than it was for Hume. Rawls surely
cannot mean that under conditions of severe inequality of strength or intelli-
gence, the strong would have no duties ofjustice towards the weak. Similarly,
it is not immediately evident what it says about the circumstances ofjustice
that the parties to the original position are ‘mutually disinterested’.
To understand just what Rawls was up to it is useful to go back to 1958’s
‘Justice as Fairness’, in which Rawls presented an early version of his original
position. This device had two main parts: a set of parties with certain special
characteristics and a special procedure for choosing principles to regulate
institutions. The characteristics of the parties reflected the typical circum-
stances ‘in which questions ofjustice arise’, Rawls said, while the choice-
procedure represented (to paraphrase somewhat) constraints on social institu-
tions analogous to the constraints of morality for an individual.® In other
words, the characteristics of the parties were supposed to represent the cir-
cumstances ofjustice, and the choice-procedure was supposed to represent
common intuitions about fairness.
However, the phrase ‘conditions in which questions of justice arise’ was
ambiguous.® Was Rawls talking about (a) the conditions in which questions
of justice typically come to be debated, or (b) the conditions in which one
could reasonably (if perhaps unwisely) raise a question of justice? Question
(a) involves the causal sense of a ‘circumstance of justice’: a circumstance
that explains the origin of rules of justice, a circumstance such as rough equal-
ity, which is a condition necessary for or contributing to the recognition and
acceptance of rules of justice. Question (b) involves the functional sense: a
circumstance that makes justice necessary for some valued outcome, such as
social peace, stability, harmony or friendship, which are valued consequences
of such rules. Neither condition holds in Socrates’ healthy city, in which there
is a natural harmony of ends without any publicly recognized rules ofjustice
to constrain the behaviour of its inhabitants.°’ However, the two sets of cir-
cumstances are not equivalent, because where there is a large difference in

65 CP, p. 54. Brian Barry has argued that in 1958’s ‘Justice as Fairness’ the circum-
stances of justice ‘hold among the people who are to make the choice of principles’, with
the result that in this article the circumstances of justice are ‘the conditions under which
there is reason to suppose that the principles chosen will be principles of justice’ (Barry,
Theories of Justice, p. 323). In a highly critical review, Thomas Pogge calls ‘fantastic’
the idea ‘that Rawls had initially intended the circumstances of justice as a representation
of impartiality’ (Pogge, ‘Review ofBrian Barry’s Theories of Justice’, p. 383). As Pogge
points out, it is the procedure for the choice of proposals that is intended to ensure fair-
ness (see CP, p. 54). Barry’s view that in Rawls’s early work the circumstances of justice
represent impartiality is not completely wrong, however; see note 72 and accompanying
text.
66 CP, pp. 54, 55, 56.
67 Plato, Republic, 369b-372e.
684 A. LISTER

strength or other abilities, the victims of injustice may be unwise to raise their
voices in complaint, even if they would be logically justified in doing so. Fol-
lowing Hume, Rawls included among the circumstances ofjustice the condi-
tion that the parties ‘are sufficiently equal in power and ability to guarantee
that in normal circumstances none is able to dominate the others’ ,®* which
suggests he was using sense (a), the causal variant, in which the origin ofjus-
tice is explained in terms of people’s desire for security of possessions. How-
ever, Rawls also claimed that justice is owed to those capable of a sense of
justice, not just to those capable of effective resistance,” suggesting sense (b),
the functional variant, in which justice is assumed to be necessary for civic
friendship.”
Given that his primary purpose was normative rather than explanatory, it
might seem odd that Rawls would care about sense (a). Yet in ‘Justice as Fair-
ness’, his first goal was to elucidate the concept ofjustice. Thus, he proceeded
anthropologically, saying, in effect, ‘Here are the circumstances in which
questions that we call questions of justice tend to be debated — what is the
concept at play in these situations?’. Rough equality of capacities is one of the
circumstances ofjustice, in this sense. It is then a further question of whether
duties of justice exist in other situations — situations in which prudential con-
cerns generally prevent the raising of questions of justice.
Yet there was also a procedural rationale for the equality condition in ‘Justice
as Fairness’. Prior to Rawls’s introduction of the veil of ignorance in Theory,
it was the rule of having to make a once-and-for-all decision that was sup-
posed to represent our intuitions about impartiality in the design of institu-
tions. A particular principle might benefit me at the expense of others today,
but if tomorrow I might find our positions reversed, I will be inclined to
choose a principle that is fair for all. Playing the role of mouse to the Athenian
lion, the Melians relied on this logic in their plea for mercy:
It is in your interest not to subvert this rule that is good for all: that a plea for
justice and fairness should do some good for a man who has fallen into dan-

68° CP, p253:

6° This argument about the scope of justice is from 1963’s ‘Constitutional Liberty
and the Concept of Justice’ (CP, pp. 96, 112), but the basic idea was already present in
‘Justice as Fairness’ (CP, pp. 61-3).
70 To have a reason for raising a question of justice, there must be conflict (latent or
manifest) over the design of institutions. Where there are conflicting ends, principles of
justice are necessary for truly cooperative social life. For it to be likely that someone will
actually make a complaint of injustice, however, inequality must be limited or uncertain.
Without rough equality, justice is not necessary for peaceful social life, since the strong
can secure ‘cooperation’ through control of resources and threat of force. But principles
of justice are necessary for civic friendship so long as there are conflicting ends, particu-
larly when strength and other capacities are unequal.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 685

ger... this rule concerns you no less than us: if you ever stumble, you might
receive a terrible punishment.”!
The Athenians dismissed this warning because their much greater power
made them discount the possibility of any such reversal in fortune. By itself,
then, uncertainty about the future does not guarantee impartiality. But in ‘Jus-
tice as Fairness’, Rawls made the parties equal in order to reflect the circum-
stances in which questions ofjustice are typically raised and debated. Given
rough equality, uncertainty about the future is sufficient to guarantee impar-
tiality.’*
In Theory, the parties to the original position still had roughly equal
physical and mental powers,”* but they were now behind a veil of ignorance,
denying them knowledge of their strength, intelligence and other abilities.”
Ignorant of their relative standing, the parties would be unable to capitalize on
any superiority they might have. The assumption of roughly equal capacities
was now superfluous, its only effect being to blur the distinction between the
conditions in which questions ofjustice in fact tend to come up, as subjects of
debate, and the conditions in which questions ofjustice could meaningfully
be raised.”
The crucial fact about the circumstances ofjustice (in the functional sense
that was of primary concern to Rawls — the conditions under which justice is
necessary for friendly, or truly cooperative, social life) is that these conditions
characterize well-ordered societies, as well as existing human societies. ‘I
shall assume’, Rawls said, ‘that the persons in the original position know that
these circumstances ofjustice obtain. This much they take for granted about
the conditions of their society’.’° ‘Their society’ was of course a ‘well-
ordered’ society — one whose institutions are just and known to bejust and
whose members act justly for the most part, but also one which exists under
conditions that generate conflict over the design of its institutions.”’ A well-
ordered society needs a conception of justice so that it can have a common

71 Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature, ed. Paul Woodruff (Indian-
apolis, 1993), p. 103. In Aesop’s fable, the lion is repaid for letting the mouse go when
later the mouse frees the lion by gnawing through the ropes of the hunter’s net.
72 Therefore, while Barry is wrong to say that the circumstances of justice represent
the constraints of having a morality (they were not meant to — that was the job of the
choice procedure), Pogge is wrong to suggest that the circumstances of justice had no
role in representing fairness (see note 66). It is the combination of future uncertainty and
rough equality that ensures fairness in ‘Justice as Fairness’.
73 TY, p. 127.
13 TI, pelsds
75 Not surprisingly, equality of capacities was absent from Rawls’s account of the
circumstances of justice in his final statement of ‘justice as fairness’ (J. Rawls, Justice as
Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA, 2001), pp. 84-5).
16 TY, p. 128.
7] TJ, pp. 4-5, 8-9, 453-4.
686 A. LISTER

standpoint from which to resolve these conflicts. The circumstances ofjustice

are thus the conditions of any feasible social ideal that would generate con-
flicting goals for the design of institutions, requiring principles ofjustice for
such a society to be well-ordered. Rawls’s claim was just that conflict over the
nature and distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation
would be present in any appropriately realistic social ideal, necessitating prin-
ciples of justice for social life to be truly cooperative, rather than merely the
object of grudging acceptance based on weakness and fear.”
What then were the circumstances of justice? The question is what condi-
tions Rawls intended to represent with the stipulation that the parties to the
original position were mutually disinterested (each seeking to advance their
own conception of the good, without envying the fortune of others, and not
knowing the details of their own conception of the good, including the extent
to which it was selfish or egoistic).” Rawls’s answer was ambiguous. Each
party is uncertain what its conception of the good will be because a well-
ordered society is home to a diversity of conceptions of the good. But what
exactly is a conception of the good? Sometimes Rawls talked as if a concep-
tion of the good was a personal life-plan — a concrete description of one’s
own good. For example, Rawls pointed out that it is good that individuals’
conceptions of their good differ in significant ways. ‘[W]e not only benefit
from the complementary nature of our developed inclinations but we take
pleasure in one another’s activities . .. as if others were bringing forth a part of
ourselves we were not able to cultivate’.*° Diversity of conceptions of the
good in this sense is one of the conditions that makes mutually beneficial
cooperation possible (a circumstance of justice in the broad sense). If we both
enjoy music and art, but cannot perfect our skills in both domains at the same
time, we can specialize and share in the enjoyment of each other’s perfor-
mances and products. If I like cooking but not cleaning, and you like cleaning

78 There is an ambiguity at this stage in Rawls’s work as to whether the conditions

Rawls identifies as circumstances of justice are features of the human condition, such
that they characterize human societies always and everywhere, or whether they are
merely features of modern social life or, even more narrowly, of democratic life (cf.
Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, pp. 29-31). In his later work, Rawls pres-
ents the assumption of ‘reasonable pluralism’ as a fact that is unchangeable within the
context of democratic institutions under modern social conditions; an authoritarian regime
might severely limit the diversity of belief, and earlier ages might not have experienced
the same kind of doctrinal diversity. J. Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York, 1996),
pp. 36-7. However, the reason democratic institutions generate this pluralism is that
freedoms of conscience, expression, association and participation in public life allow for
the free exercise of human reason. It is a fact about the human condition, at least past a
certain point of socio-cultural development, that the free exercise of human reason gen-
erates a plurality of religious, philosophical and moral doctrines.
? TJ, po 129.
80 TY, p. 448.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 687

but not cooking, but we both like to eat good food in a clean apartment, we
will make good roommates.
At other times, however, Rawls clearly included within the notion of a con-
ception of the good abstract accounts of what is good as such or for all. For
example, Rawls stated that the society for which the parties are choosing prin-
ciples would be home to a diversity of philosophical, religious, social and
political doctrines, and to explain why he offered a rudimentary account of the
burdens of judgment, or obstacles to reasonable agreement.*' Understood so
as to include doctrines about ultimate values, however, diversity in concep-
tions of the good is one of the conflict-generating conditions making coopera-
tion difficult (a circumstance of justice in the narrow sense). If I am a
vegetarian defender of animal rights and you are a leather-wearing meat-
eater, we will not make good roommates, not because we will quarrel over
who gets the bigger steak, but because I will object to your killing animals for
food.
The claim that reasonable pluralism was one of the circumstances ofjustice
in Theory may seem implausible. The more common view seems to be that it
was only post-Theory that Rawls recognized that reason does not generate
convergence of moral conviction, across some important range of questions.*”
However, the discussion of pluralism began in 1963’s “Constitutional Liberty
and the Concept of Justice’,*’ and continued in Theory.** Although Rawls had
not yet articulated the distinction between pluralism and reasonable plural-
ism, his description of the epistemic shortcomings to which human beings are
subject emphasizes the possibility of genuine disagreement, not reducible to
bad will or camouflaged self-interest.®°

81 TJ, p. 127.
82 See, for example, R. Arneson, ‘Introduction’, Ethics, 99 (1989), p. 697; Weinstock,
‘The Justification of Political Liberalism’, p. 165; N. Daniels, ‘Reflective Equilibrium
and Justice as Political’, in Justice and Justification: Reflective Equilibrium in Theory
and Practice (Cambridge, 1996), p. 146.
83 CP, pp. 74, 95.
84 To clarify the assumption of mutual disinterest, for example, Rawls talked about
the possibility of conflict between the spiritual ideals of saints (JJ, pp. 129-30; compare
CP, pp. 56-7). Rawls’s argument for the principle of equal liberty of conscience (rather
than maximization of the net balance of satisfactions) and for the priority of liberty over
economic welfare also depended on the assumption of moral pluralism (TJ, p. 207). In
his first post-Theory articles, Rawls re-emphasized the connection between pluralism
and mutual disinterest as a way of underlining his desire to broaden the scope of tolera-
tion to include competing moralities (CP, pp. 270-1, 274). In Rawls’s final restatement
of ‘justice as fairness’, he stated that ‘reasonable pluralism’ is one of the subjective cir-
cumstances of justice (Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. 84).
85 True, Rawls later admitted that the idea of a well-ordered society in Theory was
unrealistically ‘monistic’, so to speak. “An essential feature of a well-ordered society
associated with justice as fairness [in Theory] is that all its citizens endorse this concep-
688 A. LISTER

IV
Hume and Rawls on Pluralism and Justice

This emphasis in Theory on the inevitability of reasonable moral disagree-

ment seems to conflict with Rawls’s claim to have followed Hume’s account
of the circumstances of justice. But perhaps we are being uncharitable to
Hume. Rawls later said that Hume’s account of the circumstances ofjustice
‘allowed for’ conflict motivated by rival doctrines, ideals and philosophies.
Was Rawls right?
Hume was of course aware of the many battles that raged in his day
between partisans of different creeds. In his essay “Of Parties, In General’,
Hume claimed that ‘parties from principle, especially abstract speculative
principle, are known only to modern times, and are, perhaps, the most extraor-
dinary and unaccountable phaenomenon, that has yet appeared in human
affairs’.*°Hume did not mention conflicts of principle in his treatment of the
circumstances of justice because in that setting he was concerned with the ori-
gins ofjustice and he thought that wars of religion and other speculative prin-
ciples were primarily confined to the modern age.*’ This chronology explains
why Rawls could say that Hume’s account of the circumstances ofjustice ‘al-
lows for’ (but does not mention explicitly) the possibility of doctrinal con-
ict
Yet Hume had a deeply sceptical view of religious and philosophical dis-
agreement. Consider the pointed comparison Hume makes between European
wars of religion and the civil wars of the Moors.
We laugh at them; but I believe, were things rightly examined, we afford
much more occasion of ridicule to the Moors. For, what are all the wars of
religion, which have prevailed in this polite and knowing part of the world?
They are certainly more absurd than the Moorish civil wars. The difference
of complexion is a sensible and a real difference: But the controversy about
an article of faith, which is utterly absurd and unintelligible, is not a differ-
ence of sentiment, but in a few phrases and expressions, which one party
accepts of, without understanding them; and the other refuses in the same
manner.”

tion on the basis of what I now call a comprehensive doctrine’ (Rawls, Political Liberal-
ism, p. Xvili; Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, p. xvii and p. 186). But Rawls is
talking here of Part III of Theory, which he admits is not consistent with the whole.
Rawls’s account of stability in Part III is not consistent with the whole because elsewhere
in Theory he had assumed that a well-ordered society would be home to competing reli-
gious, philosophical and moral views.
86 D. Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary (London, 1963), p. 130.
87 Tbid., pp. 131-2.
88 Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, p. 59.
89 Hume, Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, pp. 129-30.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 689

Hume denies that there are real questions at stake in these conflicts over
abstract speculative principles, questions one could get right or wrong. It is
perhaps for this reason that he unmasks conflicts of interest behind ostensible
differences of principle. Religious divisions may be esteemed factions of
principle on the part of the people; “but on the part of the priests, who are the
prime movers, they are really factions of interest’.°°
Hume comes closest to acknowledging the inevitability of deep but reason-
able moral disagreement in the dialogue that follows his Enquiry.’' Hume’s
friend Palamedes claims that the seemingly stark differences between Athe-
nian and European views on sex, family and crime demonstrate the uncer-
tainty and arbitrariness of judgments concerning character and morals. Hume
responds that all nations follow the same first principles of praise and blame,
but reach different specific judgments because of differing circumstances,
uncertainty about consequences and the local indeterminacy of the criterion
of public utility.°? Palamedes denies that Hume’s theory can explain differ-
ences in lives led according to religious principle, such as those of Diogenes
and Pascal. ‘Where then is the universal standard of morals, which you talk
of? And what rule shall we establish for the many different, nay contrary sen-
timents of mankind?’ Hume’s confidence in the essential moral unity of man-
kind is not shaken by evidence of religious diversity.
When men depart from the maxims of common reason . . . no one can
answer for what will please or displease them. They are in a different ele-
ment from the rest of mankind; and the natural principles of their mind play
not with the same regularity, as if left to themselves, free from the illusions
of religious superstition or philosophical enthusiasm.”
In other words, the deep and intractable differences that arise from differences
of religious and philosophical doctrine are essentially unreasonable.”*

® Ibid., p. 132.
91 E, pp. 107-19.
oF op. LA
93 EF, p. 119.
94 The difference between Hume and Rawls on the subject of moral disagreement is
particularly clear in their discussions of the infeasibility of the rule of distribution
according to virtue. The problem Hume sees has to do with disagreement in particular,
context-specific judgments about who is generous and who is miserly, not disagreement
about what the distinction is in general between generosity and miserliness (7, p. 502).
The idea of generosity is clear, but whether a particular person is generous depends upon
a whole range of details about the person’s behaviour and motivations in a host of differ-
ent situations, and people’s perceptions of the various incidents that make up a person’s
life may be shaped by their interests and perspective. This combination of the complexity
of the traits in question and the subjectivity of perception makes attributions of virtue and
vice generally controversial, even where individuals can agree on a meaningful defini-
tion of the moral properties in question. In contrast, for Rawls the infeasibility of distri-
bution according to virtue results from disagreement about what constitutes virtue and
690 A. LISTER

The disagreement between Hume and Rawls about the depth of reasonable
moral disagreement is closely connected with the difference between their
understandings of the purpose justice serves. For Hume, irrational ideological
enthusiasm was a threat to peaceful social cooperation, but not one that justice
in Hume’s narrow sense could help to resolve, let alone one of the conditions
that originally gave rise to justice. In contrast, Rawls thought that the inevi-
tability of deep moral disagreement between reasonable people was one of the
conditions making public principles of justice necessary for civic friendship.
Community with the deluded or the fanatical may be impossible or undesir-
able, but a kind of community across deep reasonable moral disagreement is
possible, and it requires mutual recognition of principles ofjustice.
Hume’s and Rawls’s understandings ofjustice differ also in terms of the
relationship between justice and the good it secures. Whereas the relationship
between Hume’s rules of justice and security of possessions is instrumental
(collectively), the relationship between Rawls’s principles of justice and civic
friendship is constitutive. It is not merely that the public recognition of such
principles leads, over time, to friendlier feelings. Rather, public moral assent
to principles of justice defines or constitutes a specific kind of social relation-
ship. Consider that in a pluralistic society characterized by a mere modus
vivendi, it would be common knowledge that the various ideological groups
would change the fundamental charter of society if they could, even if they
generally lack the strength to do so. Common knowledge of this counter-
factual would affect the way people look upon each other and how they under-
stand their social relationship. In contrast, common moral assent to principles
underlying social institutions would mean that people’s commitment to the
rules of the social game was not strategic and temporary, based on the current
balance of power. People who recognize publicly a common standpoint for
resolving conflict over the design of shared institutions would by that fact be
in a relationship of trust and mutual respect, which Rawls called fraternity or
civic friendship. The priority of justice over the promotion of the good or the
cultivation of virtue is meant to allow a common, publicly recognized stand-
point of assessment on social institutions, constituting a relationship of trust
and even to some extent friendship, despite the deep disagreement that char-
acterizes a modern democracy.
The difference between Hume and Rawls on the subject of pluralism helps
resolve the puzzle in Hume’s account of how one could be justified in prefer-
ring justice to public benefit in cases in which one was convinced that an
vice in general. In his restatement of justice as fairness, Rawls insists that according to the
conception of justice as fairness there is no criterion of entitlement or desert apart from the
public rules that constitute the society’s scheme of cooperation, because reasonable peo-
ple will inevitably disagree about what constitutes comprehensive moral deservingness.
The plurality of reasonable comprehensive moral doctrines makes it impracticable to
specify an idea of moral desert, for political purposes. Rawls, Justice as Fairness, A
Restatement, p. 73.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 691

unjust act would, all things considered, maximize the public good. If there is
no agreed-upon conception of the good, the problem the individual faces is
not a choice between justice and the public good, but between justice and the
individual’s own conception of the public good. But given the fact of (reason-
able) pluralism, it is a condition of mutual trust and respect that citizens agree
to renounce the right to act according simply to their own comprehensive
moral doctrine where fundamental political questions are concerned. This
public commitment is constitutive of the relationship of friendship that holds
between citizens, and it is violated by arrogating to oneself the authority to
decide what the public good is, apart from justice itself.

Vv
Conclusion

How could Rawls claim to follow Hume’s account of the circumstances of

justice in all essential respects? The first part of the answer is that Hume’s
account ofjustice and its circumstances was not inconsistent with the priority
Rawls wanted to claim for justice. The problem justice solved, according to
Hume, was as much the normative endorsement of partiality for friends,
neighbours and fellow citizens as it was the tendency to be overly partial to
oneself, and it is by no means clear that this partiality is something to be
regretted, as would be the case with a narrow egoism. Even for Hume, there-
fore, justice was not strictly a remedial virtue. Moreover, in Hume’s view the
sense ofjustice rested on a system of general and inflexible rules of conduct,
which meant that justice trumped benevolence, in cases of conflict between
the two. Despite Hume’s neglect of justice in the design of institutions, Rawls
insisted that Hume’s theory was not utilitarian, strictly speaking, and so was not
incompatible with the contractarian premise that institutionally-engendered
inequalities should benefit everyone.
The second part of the answer is that Hume obviously understood the real-
ity of doctrinal conflict and the obstacles it posed to peaceful social life. Rec-
ognizing that ‘confin’d generosity’ referred to partiality rather than narrow
egoism and, in Hume’s view, generated factional conflict, Rawls could plau-
sibly believe that Hume’s account of the circumstances of justice allowed for
group-based ideological conflict. However, ‘moral disagreement’ was not a
circumstance of justice in Hume’s sense. Hume focused on the conditions
explaining the origin and development of rules of justice, which are also the
conditions making justice instrumentally necessary for mutually materially
beneficial cooperation. In contrast, Rawls focused on the conditions making
common recognition of principles of justice necessary for mutual respect and
friendship between citizens. The inevitability of deep reasonable moral dis-
agreement was one of the circumstances of justice in the latter sense only.
Hume did not recognize the possibility of deep reasonable disagreement, he
did not think that rules of justice could help solve the problems that religious
692 A. LISTER

enthusiasm created, and he did not share Rawls’s concern for fraternity at the
level of the polity as a whole.
This account of how Rawls understood and misunderstood Hume shows
that A Theory of Justice contained important communitarian assumptions and
aspirations, not just in the discussion of moral psychology in Part II, but in
the set-up of the problem and the method in Parts I and II.” Rawls took from
Hume an anti-individualist understanding of institutions, but deviated from
Hume in believing that public recognition of first principles of institutional
design was necessary for civic friendship, in a pluralistic society. Rawls was
thus ‘a singularly bad choice for demonstrating the flaws that communitarians
saw with liberalism’, in Anthony Laden’s words.” Rather than ‘reduc[ing]
the citizen to an economic man who calculates his own advantage in a soli-
tary, egoistical manner’,”’ Rawls, if anything, exaggerated the prospects for
fraternity between citizens.
In one respect, however, the argument of this paper vindicates Sandel,
since it forces liberals to reevaluate the point or significance ofjustice’s prior-
ity. One of the distinctive characteristics of Glaucon’s hypothesis, as Rawls
noted in his 1958 article, is that it makes justice a kind of compromise. People
would like to do wrong with impunity, but fear suffering wrong without
revenge more, and so agree to abide by rules of non-aggression on the condi-
tion others do likewise. Each views the resulting pact as non-ideal, but best,
given the circumstances: among which is the need to cooperate — and hence
compromise — with roughly evenly-matched competitors. The situation in
the original position is structurally similar, since each party would prefer to
design institutions according to its own conception of the good, but fears most
the possibility of institutions being designed according to someone else’s
conflicting conception of the good. Of course, the psychology of parties in the
original position is not meant to represent the motivations of the persons using
the original position to think about the requirements of justice. The parties to
the original position put justice first prudentially, because of the special con-
ditions under which they are placed; we put justice first as a matter of princi-
ple given the moral norms those conditions represent. The parties’ ignorance
of their social and genetic position represents the assumption that we should
prefer to live according to fair terms of cooperation, so long as others are will-
ing to do so, even over the alternative of ending up on the winning side of
unfair terms. There is no compromise involved in putting fairness over per-
sonal advantage, on this account, since we prefer not to take advantage of

°° For a discussion of Rawls’s communitarian psychology, see R. Alejandro, ‘Rawls’s

Communitarianism’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23 (1993), pp. 75-99.
96 A.S. Laden, ‘The House That Jack Built’, Ethics, 113 (2003), p. 376.
°7 This phrase is Bernard Manin’s summary of the literature accusing Rawls of
excessive individualism. B. Manin, ‘On Legitimacy and Political Deliberation’, Politi-
cal Theory, 15 (1987), pp. 350-1.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 693

unfair terms, so long as fair terms are available. But what about when we put
fairness above what we each in our different ways take to be the true general
good? The parties’ ignorance of their conceptions of the good represents the
idea that basic principles of institutional design should be impartial between
reasonable moral conceptions, rather than just impartial between the good of
all persons.*® If this reasonable diversity of moral opinion includes some
points of deep disagreement, however, as Rawls’s account of the circum-
stances ofjustice suggests, are we not compromising when we put fairness
above what is (in our own view) truly good as such and for all? The priority of
justice limits our ability to compromise justice in favour of other values, but
the account of the circumstances ofjustice suggests that attributing this prior-
ity to justice is a compromise between persons who, if these circumstances
did not obtain, would prefer different first principles of institutional design —
particular religious, philosophical or moral doctrines. Our acceptance of prin-
ciples of justice is not meant to be merely a strategic accommodation, of
course, dependent on a balance of power or uncertainty about the future con-
figuration of forces. Yet this caveat leaves open the possibility of construing
liberal justice as a form of principled moral compromise, rather than as an
uncompromising elevation of one value and one philosophical perspective
above all the rest.”
On this line of reasoning, Sandel was right to think that there was a problem
in Rawls’s account of the circumstances and priority of justice. Rawls had
attempted to justify the common intuition that ‘justice is the first virtue of
social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought’.'°° Sandel’s discussion of
Hume and Rawls was directed against the idea that justice should always
come first, but his discussion can also be read as a critique of liberal views on
why justice should come first. The problem is not that if justice is a remedial
virtue it cannot come first, but that if it is a remedial virtue the spirit in which
we accept justice’s priority is not what liberals had claimed. Justice can come
first, in Humean circumstances, but in the partly non-Humean circumstances

98 The idea of higher-order impartiality is taken from Thomas Nagel’s ‘Moral Con-
flict and Political Legitimacy’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 16 (1987), pp. 215-40.
°° According to John Kekes, for example, despite their many endorsements of plural-
ism, liberals always find a way of elevating one particular value above the rest as always
and everywhere the overriding value. The language of liberals such as Rawls ‘is perme-
ated with talk about absolutes, inviolability, trumps, ultimate justification, fundamental
prohibitions, first virtues, uncompromising claims that cannot be overridden, and so
forth’ (J. Kekes, Against Liberalism (Ithaca, 1997), p. 171). There is much truth in
Kekes’s interpretation, particularly as applied to liberals such as Ronald Dworkin. My
argument here is that Kekes’s view misses an important strand of Rawls’s thinking,
which is that agreement on first principles of institutional design is the key to commu-
nity, under conditions of deep but reasonable moral disagreement — and also a kind of
compromise.
OTT 3:
694 A. LISTER

Rawls describes, putting justice first is a form of compromise, since it

involves each of us putting justice above our own comprehensive moral doc-
trine. Rawls’s theory therefore does not support the intuition that justice is the
first virtue of social institutions as truth is to systems of thought, because truth
is not acompromise. Whereas truth is uncompromising, as Rawls said, agree-
ing not to compromise justice for the sake of our various different moral con-
ceptions is itself a compromise.
One way to resist the conclusion that putting justice first is a compromise
would be to deny that the conflict-generating conditions that make justice
necessary for civic friendship are unfortunate, as they initially seem. Such a
move was easily available to Hume. Partiality for oneself, one’s family and
one’s friends was not an unfortunate condition, in Hume’s view, since it com-
bined with other features, such as sympathy and the sense ofjustice, in sucha
way as to make it possible for human beings to live good lives, together.
Hume could not have been reconciled to deep religious and moral pluralism,
but he didn’t have to be because he didn’t see such pluralism as reasonable,
nor as an inevitable part of the human condition, nor did he understand justice
as a response to such pluralism. Rawls differed from Hume in his account of
the circumstances of justice, but remained faithful to Hume in attempting to
reconcile us to these circumstances. ‘The fact of reasonable pluralism is not
an unfortunate condition of human life’, Rawls later said, but ‘the inevitable
outcome of free human reason.’!”! It is much easier, however, to be reconciled
to the fact of human partiality than it is to be reconciled to the inevitability of
deep moral disagreement between reasonable persons. Rawls’s hope was that
a plurality of conflicting, not necessarily secular, not necessarily liberal, com-
preheiisive doctrines could be compatible with a stable, reasonably just con-
stitutional democracy. If it could coexist with justice, reasonable pluralism
would not be a disaster.’ But reasonable pluralism involves moral disagree-
ment, not just differences in personal life-plans. How is it possible for defend-
ers of gay liberation not to think it unfortunate, in some sense, that orthodox
Catholics believe that homosexual conduct is sinful, or for orthodox Catholics
not to think it unfortunate that defenders of gay liberation think that hetero-
and homosexuality are fully spiritually and ethically equivalent?!”
A second way to resist the conclusion that the priority of justice involves
moral compromise would be to argue that we would still espouse this priority

101 Rawls, Political Liberalism, pp. 37, 144.

102 See J. Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 124.
103 We can always declare one side unreasonable, and hope that belief in such ideas
will disappear as generations go by. But if the circle of the reasonable is drawn too
narrowly, defenders of Rawlsian liberalism will be vulnerable to the charge of simply waging
the battle for a comprehensive, secular or liberationist philosophy of life dishonestly,
behind the mask of a spurious higher-order impartiality.
 HUME AND RAWLS ON JUSTICE 695

even if there were only shallow, narrow and not-unfortunate disagreement.'™

If justice would still come first in the absence of significant pluralism, then we
would not be compromising when we put justice first in the face of deeper,
unfortunate but still reasonable disagreement. In defending freedom of reli-
gion, for example, I am not compromising with Muslims or Jews or atheists,
since I would still defend freedom of religion even if everyone were Christian.
Religious freedom is not a second-best policy, intermediate between coer-
cively imposing Christianity and coercively imposing some other religion.
It is not true, however, that political justice always requires what a compre-
hensive philosophical liberalism would dictate is the ideal policy. Consider
the case of public education and sexual orientation. In the ideal situation, I
think we would want public schools to teach children the truth about sex, gen-
der and sexual orientation. However, if some parents hold conservative reli-
gious views about these topics, while others hold liberal or liberationist
views, justice might require merely teaching public non-discrimination, while
largely avoiding the deeper spiritual and ethical questions about pleasure, the
body, reproduction, God and so on that are the subject of disagreement (or
treating them only pluralistically, as a matter of debate). Putting political jus-
tice above one’s own comprehensive religious or moral conception in this
way would be at best a principled compromise; were it not for the ongoing
disagreement, we would adopt a different educational policy. If one thinks
that there is room for reasonable disagreement in this area, and if teaching
only non-discrimination while avoiding deeper questions is an example of
putting justice before our conflicting comprehensive moral doctrines, then the
priority of justice involves moral compromise.

Andrew Lister QUEEN’S UNIVERSITY, ONTARIO

104 Alan Buchanan makes this argument in ‘Assessing the Communitarian Critique
of Liberalism’, p. 877.
 FREEDOM, DESIRE AND REVOLUTION:
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS'

Paul Blackledge?

Abstract: This article examines the pre-history of Alasdair MacIntyre’s contempo-

rary moral philosophy. In the 1950s and 1960s MacIntyre was a leading member ofthe
British New Left, from whence he gravitated towards a form of heterodox Trotskyism.
During this period he began to formulate a Marxist ethics which both compares with
and informs the thesis of his magnum opus After Virtue. As the conclusion of After
Virtue is premised upon a dismissal of Marxism, it is of some interest to explore the
exact route through which MacIntyre came to replace his earlier with his later frame-
work. The article, after reconstructing MacIntyre’s Marxist ethics, traces the trajec-
tory through which he came to reject Marxism, and shows that while MacIntyre’s
mature critique of Marxism first took shape in the 1960s, his political pessimism was
built upon two assumptions — that Marx’s economic theory was outdated and that a
defensible theory of human nature did not exist — which he has recently questioned.
The conclusion is that MacIntyre’s rethinking of these assumptions has opened a space
for a renewed dialogue between himself and Marxists.

Introduction

While Alasdair MacIntyre is best known today as the foremost exponent of

what Kelvin Knight has labelled ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’,’ there was
another MacIntyre, only dimly perceptible in the footnotes of his more recent
books, whose contribution to social and ethical theory bears comparison with
that of the author of After Virtue and other subsequent works. In the late 1950s
and early 1960s, MacIntyre made a fundamental contribution to Marxist
ethical theory which repays reading today. Nevertheless, despite its power,
MacIntyre’s period as a Marxist has been unduly neglected by students of his
work.* This is unfortunate, for an analysis of the totality of MacIntyre’s
Marxist essays of the time is not only interesting in and of itself, it can also
' Thanks go to Neil Davidson and Kristyn Gorton for their comments on a draft of this
essay.
2 School of Social Sciences, Leeds Metropolitan Way Saal Leeds: LS1 3HE. Email:
p.blackledge @leedsmet.ac.uk
3 A. MacIntyre ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, in The Macintyre
Reader, ed. K. Knight (Cambridge, 1998), p. 235.
4 Indeed, the two collections on his ideas that have been published do not address his
early Marxism except tangentially (After MacIntyre, ed. J. Horton and S. Mendus (Cam-
bridge, 1994); Alasdair MacIntyre, ed. M. Murphy (Cambridge, 2003)). This failing is
magnified in Knight’s selection of MacIntyre’s work: The MacIntyre Reader. For, while
Knight is to be congratulated for his inclusion in this selection of MacIntyre’s 1958-9
essay “Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, he misrepresents the power of that essay
through his decision to locate it simply as a misguided precursor to his later arguments
rather than as a key constituent of a very different project. In contrast to the bulk of Mac-
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Autumn 2005
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 697

illuminate the process through which his thought began to evolve towards his
more recent conclusions.
Maclntyre famously concluded After Virtue with the suggestion that ‘we
are waiting not for Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St.
Benedict’, and premised this suggestion on a prior dismissal of the adequacy
to the modern world of Marxist politics. He suggested that, first, Trotsky’s
late political optimism was based upon subsequently falsified predictions for
the future of the Soviet Union; while, second, Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism
‘entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was
to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led to darkness’.
Consequently, MacIntyre argued, ‘a Marxist who took Trotsky’s last writings
with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the
Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way
have ceased to be a Marxist’.° A decade later, MacIntyre outlined what was if
anything an even more devastating critique of Marxism. Marx failed to recog-
nize, he argued, ‘that while proletarianisation makes it necessary for workers
to resist, it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through
which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the
moral needs of resistance’.®
As we shall see, MacIntyre first elaborated versions of these arguments in
the 1960s when he was still a member of the revolutionary left. What set Mac-
Intyre aside from his comrades in this period was not his criticism of Trotsky
or his analysis of the fragmentation of working-class struggles. Rather, Mac-
Intyre differentiated himself from more orthodox members of the far-left
through his disputation of Marx’s theory of economic crisis and his rejection
of any theory of human nature. Interestingly, while these underlying argu-
ments informed the growing political pessimism that was to become most
apparent in After Virtue, in his more recent work MacIntyre has gone some
way to reversing these arguments; suggesting that the gap between his con-
temporary thought and his earlier Marxism is not as wide as it once was.

Marxism and Morality

Marx, famously, had an ambivalent relationship to ethical theory. On the one
hand, in some of his more mechanical formulations, his ‘science’ of history
appeared to explain behaviour rather than act as a guide to it. Indeed, in his Cri-
tique of the Gotha Programme, he explicitly dismissed certain moral criticisms

Intyre scholarship, McMylor’s introduction to MacIntyre’s moral theory engages with

his early Marxism, but only though a very limited reading of his output in the late 1950s
and early 1960s (P. McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic ofModernity (London, 1994)).
5 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London, 2nd edn., 1985), pp. 262-3.
6 A. MacIntyre, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken’, in The MacIntyre
Reader, ed. Knight, p. 232 (first published in Artifacts, Representations and Social Prac-
tice, ed. C. Gould and R. Cohen (Hingham, 1994).
698 P. BLACKLEDGE

of capitalism. He argued that the demand for the ‘just distribution of the pro-
ceeds of labour’ ignored the truth of the bourgeois assertion ‘that the pres-
ent-day distribution is “just” ’, so long as ‘just’ was understood in terms of
‘distribution’ on the basis of the ‘present-day mode of production’.’Com-
menting on these arguments, Wood has claimed that Marx rejected the con-
cept of justice because he understood it to be tied up with, and to sanction,
particular historical modes of production.® It is a problem for Wood’s argu-
ment that Marx, palpably, did make a number of claims as to the injustice of
capitalism, such that Peffer is able to argue, with some justification, that he
held to a ‘deontological’ ethics.’ Certainly, in his Notes on Indian History,
Marx sounded ‘conventionally’ moralistic when he wrote of ‘the blood suck-
ing English scoundrels’ who ‘shamelessly annexed’ part of the country and
‘atrociously’ or ‘foully murdered’ many of its inhabitants.'°
Lukes has attempted to make sense of this ‘paradox’ in Marx’s oeuvre by
distinguishing between two types of moral claims which Marx unfortunately
conflated: the morality of emancipation and the morality of justice or Recht.
‘The paradox in marxism’s attitude to morality is resolved once we see that it
is the morality of Recht that it condemns as ideological and anachronistic, and
the morality of emancipation that it adopts as its own.’!' In opposition to
Lukes, Geras has argued that this distinction between a morality of justice and
one of self-realization is ‘unfounded’, for individuals can only realize their
true potential within a political context. Thus, following remarks made by
Marx in Volume III of Capital, Geras argues that if post-revolutionary soci-
eties are not to be understood in a utopian manner, then they must include
some conception of distributive justice.'* Geras insists that, rather than distin-
guish a morality of self-realization from one ofjustice in Marx, it is better to
distinguish two conceptions of justice, one implicit and one explicit, which
can help explain that while ‘Marx did think that capitalism was unjust . . . he
did not think he thought so’. Whereas Marx therefore dismissed justice in its
narrow ‘legal positivist fashion’, he subscribed to a broader distributive jus-
tice based upon the principle that each should receive according to their

7 K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme [1875], in Karl Marx: The First Inter-
national and After, ed. D. Fernbach (Harmondsworth, 1974), pp. 343-4.
8 A. Wood, Karl Marx (London, 1981), pp. 130-2.
9 R. Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton, 1990), p. 46.
10 K. Marx, Notes on Indian History (London, 1950), pp. 110, 124, 127, 163.
'l §. Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford, 1985), p. 29.
12 N. Geras, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, in Marxist Theory, ed.
A. Callinicos (Oxford, 1989), p. 232. Geras is commenting on Marx’s claim that ‘the
realm of freedom really begins only where labour determined by necessity and external
expediency ends . . The reduction of the working day is the basic prerequisite’ (K. Marx,
Capital, Vol. UI [1894], (Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 959.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 699

needs.'* Such a principle, Geras suggests, would not act merely as a bench-
mark against which capitalism is seen to be wanting, but would continue to
operate in a socialist society as a distributive standard of ‘reasonable’ need in
a system without absolute abundance.'* While Geras’ account of a Marxist
approach to justice is exemplary as far as it goes, beyond an implicit link to the
development ofthe productive forces, he does not discuss the actual processes
through which this abstract concept of justice can be made concrete.

MaclIntyre’s Marxist Morality

By contrast with this solution to the paradox posed by Marx’s ambiguous rela-
tionship to morality, MacIntyre, in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to relate
claims forjustice to the proletariat’s developing struggle for freedom. MacIn-
tyre’s first contribution to the Marxist literature on ethics was articulated in
his book Marxism: An Interpretation, which, while it was written at the height
of the Cold War and from a radical Christian perspective, succeeded in prefig-
uring many of the themes that were to emerge three years later with the birth
of the New Left." In particular, MacIntyre began to explode the shared Stalin-
ist and Liberal myth of Marxism as a mechanical model of historical progress.
MacIntyre was drawn, as a Christian, towards Marxism because, as he saw
it, Marx’s political theory converged with his vision of critical Christian eth-
ics: ‘Marxism is of first-class theological significance as a secularism formed
by the gospel which is committed to the problem of power and justice and
therefore to themes of redemption and renewal which its history can but illu-
minate.’'® Specifically, he perceived a parallel between the situation faced by
Marx in the early 1840s, and that encountered by contemporary radical Chris-
tians. For just as Marx ‘was faced with a stark antithesis’ between both
Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s visions of human freedom, and the reality of the
world of work and suffering, so contemporary Christianity accepted a split
between the sacred and the secular such that it had lost any critical perspective
on the world. Indeed, he argued, bourgeois Christianity, because it had been
reduced to a matter of personal taste to be practised at the weekend, no longer
concretely criticized social injustice and thus did not interfere with daily secu-
lar existence.'’ MacIntyre believed that radical Christians would do well to
learn from Marx’s turn to politics as a means of overcoming the gap between
reality and the vision of freedom in Hegel’s system. He thus concluded Marx-
ism: An Interpretation with the suggestion that the key text that should be read
by Christians, alongside St Mark’s Gospel, was Marx’s ‘National Economy

13 Geras, ‘The Controversy about Marx and Justice’, p. 245.

14 Tbid., p. 264.
15 McMylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, p. 12.
16 A. MacIntyre, Marxism: An Interpretation (London, 1953), p. 18.
\7 Ibid., pp. 45, 10.
700 P. BLACKLEDGE

and Philosophy’; for it was in this early essay that Marx was at his prophetic,
moral best; before he succumbed to the allure of pseudo-scientific prediction
that is evident in his work from The German Ideology onwards.'®
Unfortunately, while MacIntyre was at this time both a practising Christian
and a member of the Communist Party, this interpretation of Marxism failed
to provoke much interest in either Communist or Christian circles. It was the
emergence of the New Left three years later that provided MacIntyre both
with an audience for his ideas and a practical source of inspiration from which
he deepened these ideas. Therefore, while it is true to say, as does McMylor,
that MacIntyre’s early work prefigured many of the themes that dominated
New Left thinking, it is also important to remember that, without the New
Left, MacIntyre’s project would have remained abstract and disconnected
from practical politics.
The events of 1956 — Khrushchev’s secret speech, his invasion of Hun-
gary and the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt — together created a space for
widespread criticism of the world order as a totality. In striking deep at the
heart of the international system these actions created a space within which
independent political forces could grow in Britain. In response to these events
a ‘New Left’ emerged which sought to map a third way between Eastern
Communism and Western Capitalism, and their left-wing political allies:
Stalinism and social democracy.” Nevertheless, the New Left, as Peter Sedg-
wick pointed out, was less a coherent movement than it was a milieu, within
which many very diverse political perspectives were aired.”° Interestingly,
this spectrum of political positions found expression through a debate on the
moral critique of Stalinism; and it was through his contribution to this debate
that MacIntyre signalled both the trajectory of his future research and his
embrace of revolutionary Marxism.
Edward Thompson articulated the most sophisticated New Left critique of
Stalinism in his essay ‘Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines’.
This essay was a brilliant and original contribution not just to the analysis of
Stalinism specifically, but also to Marxist moral theory more generally. At its
heart, however, Thompson’s essay embraced a fatal contradiction, which
even his grand rhetorical flourishes were unable fully to conceal. He opened
his essay with the claim that one quarter of the earth’s surface was controlled
by a new society, which, despite its many abhorrent features, represented a
qualitative break with capitalism:

18 Tbid., pp. 109, 69.

'9 P. Blackledge, ‘Reform, Revolution and the Problem of Organisation in the First
New Left’, Contemporary Politics, 10 (1) (2004), pp. 21-36, p. 23.
20 P. Sedgwick, ‘The Two New Lefts’, in The Left in Britain, ed. D. Widgery
(Harmondsworth, 1976). This essay was originally published in International Socialism,
17 (1964).
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 701

The instruments of production in the Soviet Union are socialised. The

bureaucracy is not a class, but is parasitic upon that society. Despite its par-
asitism, the wave of human energy unleashed by the first socialist revolu-
tion has multiplied the wealth of society, and vastly enlarged the cultural
horizons of the people.”!
However, in contrast to this characterization of the Soviet system as being at
once socialist while yet morally unpalatable, elsewhere he insisted that ‘the
“end” of Communism is not a “political” end, but a human end’.” This formu-
lation suggested a tremendous gap between the human ends of the Soviet
experiment and the inhuman means through which these ends were, at least
partially, being realized. So while Thompson implied that a plurality of means
could be utilized to achieve the end of communism, he was aware that these
means were not morally equivalent. Concretely, in the Soviet case, he argued
that the flaws of the Stalinist system could best be understood as a conse-
quence of the inadequate model of Marxism that had guided the Bolsheviks.
He claimed they had embraced a mechanical interpretation of Marx’s base/
superstructure metaphor such that agency, in the form of the conscious activ-
ity of the masses, was increasingly disregarded, only to find expression
through the monolithic party which became the guardian of true socialist con-
sciousness. Following this, the ‘immorality’ of replacing the actions of real
individual with those of cardboard abstractions became ‘embodied in institu-
tional form in the rigid forms of “democratic centralism” ’.”* Consequently,
Thompson’s moral critique of Stalinism involved a call both for a more flex-
ible interpretation of Marx’s theory of history and a rejection of the Leninist
form of political organization.
For all its undoubted power, Thompson’s thesis was susceptible to two dis-
tinct, but related, criticisms. First, could a mechanical version of Marxism as
embodied in a democratic centralist organization bear the weight of his expla-
nation of the rise of Stalinism? Second, what, if any, were the relations
between socialism and Communism in his model, and if the latter was a
human ‘end’, then what could be said of the abhorrent means through which
the Stalinists had at least gone some way to achieving this end? Thompson’s
implicit answers to these questions suggested that he had not broken with as
much of the common sense of his age as he imagined. Indeed, parallelling tra-
ditional consequentialist ethics, which included, for the little they were worth,
the ethical justifications of their actions deployed by the Stalinists, Thompson
appeared to agree that good ends could come from bad means. Moreover, in
common with both the dominant liberal and Stalinist histories of the Soviet
system, Thompson agreed that Leninism entailed Stalinism. In tacitly

21 B.P. Thompson, ‘Socialist Humanism’, The New Reasoner, 1 (Summer 1957), pp.
105, 138.
22 Ibid., p. 125.
23 Ibid., p. 121.
702 P. BLACKLEDGE

accepting both of these positions, Thompson opened his moral critique of Sta-
linism to an immanent critique from those who saw a contradiction between
his humanist claim that socialism represented the realization of historically
(self) created human potentialities,” and any suggestion that the Stalinist sys-
tem might represent, in however distorted a form, a progressive break with
capitalism. This is more or less the form of the critique that was formulated by
Harry Hanson in the next issue of The New Reasoner.
Hanson argued that ‘Communism, in the modern world, is not the creed of
the proletariat. First and foremost, it is a technique, operated by a revolution-
ary elite, for pushing forward the economic development of an underdevel-
oped country at the fastest possible rate . . . [which] is a very painful
process.’” Furthermore, he insisted that, for all Thompson’s rhetoric and his
indisputable honesty, his was an untenable critique of Stalinism, as it shared
with the Stalinists, and Marxism more generally, a consequentialist moral
framework which, despite fine talk of the interdependence of means and ends,
tended to subordinate the former to the latter, thus offering an unsatisfactory
basis from which to criticize Stalinist immorality. In place of such a moral
framework, Hanson suggested that the left should look to Kant as a guide to
action.*° However, in so doing he dehistoricized morality in a way that was
obviously alien to Marx’s conception of history. This argument thus
demanded some reply from the Marxists within the New Left, and it was Mac-
Intyre who came to the defence of a sophisticated version of socialist human-
ism, which, while building on Thompson’s insights, began to outline a project
capable of offering a powerful alternative to both Hanson’s Kantianism and to
Stalinist consequentialism. Moreover, in developing this perspective, MacIn-
tyre also began to outline one of the most sophisticated defences of revolu-
tionary politics of his day.
MaclIntyre’s critique of Hanson’s reply to Thompson’s moral critique of
Stalinism, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, while written as a defence of
Thompson’s general perspective, was simultaneously an implicit critique of
the weaknesses of Thompson’s own exposition of the doctrine of socialist
humanism. MacIntyre opened this essay with a classically Marxist critique of
the implied Kantianism of Hanson’s morality: ‘The ex-Communist turned
moral critic of Communism is often a figure of genuine pathos .. . They repu-
diate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle; but the fragility of their
appeal to moral principles lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of that

24 Ibid., p. 124.
25H. Hanson, ‘An Open Letter to Edward Thompson’, The New Reasoner, 2
(Autumn 1957), p. 88.
26 Ibid., p. 79.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 703

appeal.’*’ MacIntyre was just as critical of those apologists for Stalinism, for
whom socialism’s moral core was lost amidst a mechanical theory of histori-
cal progress. As to their theory of history, while MacIntyre acknowledged
that it was understood by both Stalin and Popper as being authentically Marx-
ist, he could not accept that it could truthfully be read into either Marx’s youn-
ger or, changing his position since 1953, his more mature writings. Rather, he
suggested, Engels had played a negative role in the history of Marxism, when,
through his comparison of Marx with Darwin, he had helped foster a mechan-
ical interpretation of historical materialism which reduced human history to a
special case of natural history.** In place of the orthodox interpretation of his-
torical materialism, MacIntyre insisted that if the moral core of Marxist politi-
cal theory was to be retrieved and reconstructed from the fragments that Marx
had written on the subject then it must be carried out alongside a similar
reconstruction of Marx’s theory of history.
MacIntyre suggested that it was the Stalinists, who, through the medium of
a teleological vision of historical progress, identified “what is morally right
with what is actually going to be the outcome of historical development’, such
that the ‘ “ought” of principle is swallowed up in the “is” of history’.” It was
thus not enough to add something like Kant’s ethics to this existing Stalinist
theory of historical development if one wished to reassert moral principle into
Marxism, for this theory of history negated moral choice. However, neither
was it right to reject, as immoral, any historical event from some supposed
higher standpoint, as ‘there is no set of common, public standards to which
[one] can appeal’. Indeed, any such manoeuvre would tend to gravitate to an
existing tradition of morality which, because these had generally evolved to
serve some particular dominant class interests, would ‘play into the hands of
the defenders of the status quo’.*” Therefore, MacIntyre suggested, apologists
for both the East and the West in the Cold War based their arguments upon
inadequate theoretical frameworks. If this was true, what would be the struc-
ture of an alternative ‘third moral position’? MacIntyre’s answer was that
such a position could only be built by ‘replacing a misconceived but prevalent
view of what Marxism is by a more correct view’.*!
The Stalinist insistence that history’s general course was predictable
rested, or so MacIntyre insisted, on a misconception of the role of the
base/superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. What Marx suggested when
he deployed this metaphor was neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship.

27 A. MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, in The MacIntyre Reader, ed.
Knight, pp. 31-2. Originally published in two parts in New Reasoner, 7 (Winter 1958-9),
pp. 90-100 and New Reasoner, 8 (Spring 1959), pp. 89-98.
28 Jbid., p. 38.
29 Ibid., p. 32.
30 Tbid., pp. 34-5.
3! Jbid., p. 37.
704 P. BLACKLEDGE

Rather, he utilized Hegelian concepts to denote the process through which the
economic base of a society provides ‘a framework within which superstruc-
tures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine
themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows’.
Indeed, MacIntyre wrote that in ‘creating the basis, you create the super-
structure. These are not two activities but one’. Thus the Stalinist model of
historical progress, within which political developments were understood to
follow automatically from economic causes, could not be further from Marx’s
model; for in Marx’s view ‘the crucial character of the transition to socialism
is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary
change in the relation of base to superstructure’.*” Moreover, as the essence of
the human condition is historically conditioned freedom, while general pre-
dictions can reasonably be made as to the tendency of people to revolt against
capital and other oppressive systems, Marxists would be mistaken to mechan-
ically predict either revolts or successful revolutions as the automatic conse-
quence of any particular economic process. Hence, where both Stalin’s
teleology of historical progress and Kant’s ahistorical categorical imperative
were found to be wanting, MacIntyre suggested that we look for a ‘theory
which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our stan-
dards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress
automatic’.** In his search for a basis from which to reconstruct a Marxist eth-
ics, MacIntyre insisted, contrary to ‘the liberal belief in the autonomy of
morality’, that it was the purposive character of human action that could both
distinguish human history from natural history, and which could provide a
historical and materialist basis for moral judgments.**
MacIntyre suggested that Marxists should follow Aristotle specifically,
and the Greeks more generally, in making a link between ethics and human
desires: ‘we make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as
human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human
desires, needs and the like’ .*° He thus proposed to relate morality to desire in a
way that was radically at odds with Kant; for where, in Kant, ‘the “ought” of
morality is utterly divorced from the “is” of desire’, MacIntyre insisted that to
divorce ethics from activities which aim to satisfy needs and desires in this
way “is to make it unintelligible as a form of human action’. While MacIntyre
therefore sought to relate morality to human desires and needs, his reading of
Freud had taught him that desires could be ‘redirected’ by a ‘variety of inhibi-
tions’.*° Moreover, he followed Marx in radically historicizing human nature,

32 Ibid., p. 39.
33 Tbid., p. 40.
34 Tbid., p. 41.
35 Jbid., pp. 43, 41.
36 A. MacIntyre, The Unconscious (London, 2nd edn., 2004), p. 62. The first edition
of this book was published in 1958 — the new edition contains a substantial new preface.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 705

without losing sight of its biological basis: ‘it is only with Hegel that Man
begins to possess and with Marx that Man achieves a real history’, for in Marx,
history ‘becomes one with the history of men’.*’ It is in thus historicizing Man
that Marx’s greatness lies, for he refuses to follow either Hobbes into a melan-
cholic model of human needs and desires, or Diderot into a utopian
counterposition of the state of nature against contemporary social structures.
Instead, Marx comprehends the limited historical truth of Hobbes’s insight,
but counterposes to it, not a utopia, but the real movement of workers in strug-
gle through which they realize that solidarity is a fundamental human desire.
MacIntyre sought to ground this suggestion of Marx’s through a peculiar
rewriting of the history of ethics. He argued that such a history could be writ-
ten as a synthesis of three strands: first, a “history of moral codes’; second, ‘a
history of human attitudes to desire’; and third, a history of ‘human nature’.
While moral codes initially related to human desires, with the Protestant
reformation the connection between desire and morality is broken. Indeed, for
the Protestants, as humanity is by nature corrupt, then human desires cannot
act as the basis for moral codes. Moreover, as men are finite beings, then they
cannot hope to understand the mind of God, and thus cannot hope to fathom
His moral code. Consequently, ‘the moral law becomes a connection of divine
fiats’, which are ‘so far as we are concerned totally arbitrary’.** In such a
world, ‘desire becomes something anarchic and amoral’, and, indeed, once
moral codes lose their religious colouration and take on a secular form, they
are seen to act, for instance in Hobbes, as ‘at best an uneasy truce or peace
between warring desires’.*? To counterpose desires in their natural state to
these moral codes, as did Diderot, was an inadequate response to the post-
reformation view because this strategy failed to acknowledge that ‘in class
society desire itself is remoulded, not simply repressed’ .“° Two questions nec-
essarily arose from this claim: could this remoulding be absolute, and if this
process of remoulding was not absolute, was it possible that it might be tran-
scended? To understand these issues historically we must ask if a form of
human nature could emerge such that the needs and desires of individuals are
not felt to be in simple atomized opposition one to the other? Marx, according
to MacIntyre, comprehended both the deep historical and sociological content
to this question when he suggested that ‘the emergence of human nature is
something to be comprehended only in terms of the history of class-struggle.
Each age reveals a development of human potentiality which is specific to that
form of social life and which is specifically limited by the class-structure of
that society.’ In particular, under advanced capitalism, according to Marx and
MacIntyre, ‘the growth of production makes it possible [for man] to

37 MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, p. 46.

38 Tbid., p. 43.
39 Tbid., p. 44.
40 Thid., p. 43.
706 P. BLACKLEDGE

reappropriate his own nature’. This is true in two ways: first, the increasing
productivity of labour produces the potential for us all to lead much richer
lives, both morally and materially; and second, capitalism also creates an
agency — the proletariat — which, through its struggles for freedom, embod-
ies a new collectivist spirit, through which individuals come to understand
both that their needs and desires can best be satisfied through collective chan-
nels, and that they do in fact need and desire solidarity.*! According to MacIn-
tyre, the proletariat, in its struggles against capital, begins to create the
conditions for the solution of the contemporary problems of morality: it
begins to embody the practice which could overcome the ‘rift between our
conception of morality and our conception of desire’.** Indeed, in acting in
this way the proletariat comes to realize that solidarity is not simply a useful
means through which its individual members struggle to meet their needs, but
it is in fact what they naturally desire.”
MacIntyre therefore understood the history of morality as ‘the history of
men ceasing to see moral rules as the repression of desire and as something
that men have made and accepted for themselves’; which concretely culmi-
nates in the socialist struggles of the proletariat against its alienation and
against reified ways of perceiving the world. Conversely, ‘both the autonomy
of ethics and utilitarianism are aspects of the consciousness of capitalism;
both are forms of alienation rather than moral guides’.** So, once the political
left has rid itself both of the myth of the inevitable triumph of socialism and of
the reification of socialism as some indefinite end which justifies any action
taken in its name, then socialists will truly comprehend the interpenetration of
means and ends through the history of class struggle, and will understand
Marxist morality to be, as against the Stalinists, ‘an assertion of moral abso-
lutes’, and ‘as against the liberal critic of Stalinism it is an assertion of desire
and history’.*°
Unfortunately, far from seeming inevitable, the proletariat’s struggle for
socialism appeared to be almost non-existent in the late 1950s: and it was to
this pressing problem of apathy that the New Left turned its attention. Indeed,
as part of its project of building a new socialist movement, in 1960 the New
Left published a collection, edited by Edward Thompson, entitled Out ofApa-
thy. As its title suggests this collection was designed to be both an analysis of,
and a counter to, the exiting culture of apathy. In his introductory essay,
Thompson overviewed two different explanations for the rise of apathy,
which he defined as the tendency for people to look to ‘private solutions to
public evils’, and countered to them his own alternative. First, he rejected the

41 Tbid., p. 46.
42 Ibid., p. 45.
43 Tbid., p. 48.
44 Ibid., pp. 42, 49.
45 Ibid., p. 47.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 707

view that apathy had grown because ‘prosperity leaves no room for discon-
tent’; while, second, he accepted the partial truth of the view that apathy was
‘an expression of the impotence of the individual in the face of contemporary
institutions’, but noted that this was a universal truth, whereas apathy was not.
In place of these models, Thompson believed that the key cause of the con-
temporary malaise was that people ‘do not believe that there is any workable
alternative, or they very much dislike any alternative (such as Communism)
which is proposed’. He thus argued that the New Left should aim to demon-
strate the practicality of a preferable political system. Indeed, he insisted that
so Over-ripe was Britain for socialism that ‘any vigorous initiative which
probes beyond the conventional limits of party controversy calls into question
the continuance of the capitalist system’.*’ The rest of the book was then
designed to explore this possibility. Moreover, while the New Left did not
hold to a ‘party line’, most of the contributors to the volume worked within a
broadly shared framework, whereas, as Thompson wrote, MacIntyre ‘as a
Trotskyite differs in some ways from all other contributions’
.**
Whatever his disagreements with his New Left comrades, MacIntyre
agreed with them that apathy was a pressing political concern which
demanded serious consideration; and so, in his essay ‘Breaking the Chains of
Reason’, he set himself the task of uncovering the intellectual culture that
reinforced political apathy by denigrating the very concept of commitment.
Pointing out that at the cusp of the modern era intellectuals were wont to iden-
tify themselves as radicals, MacIntyre noted that the dominant reason given
by contemporary intellectuals to excuse their own lack of political commit-
ment was to note the apathy of the workers. Yet, as he argued,
an addiction to ITV is perhaps no more likely to reduce one to being an
impotent spectator of life than is an habitual reading of The Times or The
Guardian. The grooves of conformism are different for different social
groups. What unites all those who live within them is that their lives are
shaped and driven forward by events and decisions which are not their own
making.”
So what had happened to the radical intelligentsia to cause the growth in its
apathy over the last two centuries?
In answer to this question, MacIntyre sought to trace the intelligentsia’s tra-
jectory from the Enlightenment to the modern age. “The inheritors of the
Enlightenment are in their different ways Hegel and Marx’; and these two
used a bevy of concepts that are still of the utmost value to contemporary

46 E.P. Thompson, ‘At the Point of Decay’, in Out of Apathy, ed. E.P. Thompson
(London, 1960), pp. 5-8.
47 Tbid., p. 10.
48 Ibid., p. 14.
49 A. MacIntyre, ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, in Out ofApathy, ed. Thompson,
pp. 195-240, p. 198.
708 P. BLACKLEDGE

thinkers: freedom, reason, human nature and history.°’ MacIntyre then reiter-
ated much of what he had written in ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ on the
importance of purposive action to satisfy developing, but biologically rooted,
needs, wants and desires through history. Indeed, he claimed that human his-
tory ‘is a series of developing purposes, in which, through the action of reason
in the overcoming of conflicts, freedom is attained’.°' Unfortunately, he
noted, ‘post-Hegelian discussions of freedom have not often preserved this
vital link between freedom and reason’. Instead, tyrannies have been insti-
tuted in the name of positive freedoms while ‘in the name of negative freedom
men have been called free when enclosed by ignorance and their natural situa-
tion’. Moreover, as the ideals of classical education declined, education
became fragmented and therefore lost sight of the totalizing conception of
human potential through which the link between freedom and reason could be
maintained. This process left intellectuals, operating within that fragmented
culture, ill equipped to respond to the ‘moulding pressures of industry and the
state’.>* In this context, the human sciences were overwhelmed by the imperi-
alistic method of natural science, such that the search for mechanical explana-
tions of social processes became ‘the dream that still haunts and informs the
human sciences’. This process was double-edged, for while it became the
model for the rat psychologists and their ilk, those who rejected its method
tended to counterpose to it the impossibility of ever developing adequate gen-
eral models of society. Thus Popper rejected the mechanical model of the
human sciences and took Marxism as the prime modern incarnation of this
disease, despite the fact that ‘Marx himself had first indicted it’.°°
MacIntyre’s critique of Popper’s classification of Marxism as a form of
mechanical materialism allowed him to reject, as a false dichotomy, the oppo-
sition that he constructed between Marx’s pseudo-scientific collectivism and
methodological individualism. By contrast, MacIntyre insisted that ‘the char-
acterisation of individuals and classes has to go together. Essentially these are
not two separate tasks’. Therefore, Popper ‘is right to stress that there is no
history and no society which is not the history or society of concrete individu-
als; but equally there are no individuals who exist apart from their history or
apart from their society’. Whereas MacIntyre rejected clockwork models of
human behaviour, he continued to believe that general models of human
action could, adequately, be postulated; for he refused to accept the atomistic
alternative of the methodological individualists. In opposition to Popper’s

5° Tbid., p. 199.
5! Jbid., p. 200.
52 Ibid., p. 201.
53 Tbid., p. 208.
54 Ibid., p. 210.
55 Tbid., p. 217.
56 Thid., p. 220.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 709

false alternatives, MacIntyre repeated his claim for the importance of purpos-
ive action: for both mechanical rule-governed behaviour and lawless individ-
ual action broke the link between ‘understanding and action’. The problem
with both of these approaches to social action is that they entail political
fatalism:
Either men can discern the laws which govern social development or they
cannot. If they can, then they must avow that their own behaviour is subject
to these laws and consequently they must admit that they have discovered
themselves to be not agents, but victims, part of a social process which
occurs independently of human mind, feeling and will. If they cannot dis-
cern such laws, then they are necessarily helpless, for they have no instru-
ments of change at their hands. So in any case human agency is bound to be
ineffective. Of course, so far as small-scale changes are concerned, it may
be otherwise. All sociologists leave room for reformist manoeuvre.”
This ideology, MacIntyre reminded us, did not exist in some pure state
divorced from the world of work and routine, but rather grew out of this
world: ‘our social life and our intellectual visions reinforce each other. Our
social life is one in which human activity is rendered uncreative and sterile.
We live in a society of . . . predetermined lives’.°* Indeed, so sterile is our
social life that even when intellectuals reach beyond it their work is neutered
through the most conformist interpretation: thus the radical implications of
both Wittengenstein and Freud were, or so MacIntyre argued, castrated in
interpretation. How then to break from these predetermined pathways? In
opposition to crude vanguardism, MacIntyre insisted that freedom cannot be
won by telling the masses to do what the elite desires it do, but only by helping
‘them move where they desire. The goal is not happiness, or satisfaction, but
freedom. And freedom has to be both means and ends. The mechanical sepa-
ration of means and ends is suitable enough for human manipulation, not
human liberation.’*? For MacIntyre, emancipatory politics emerge spontane-
ously through the struggles of the working class against capitalism. This
insight allowed him to move from a standard Marxist critique of Kantianism
to a powerful break with the vestigial influence of consequentialism that had
been felt as a burden on Marxist approaches to ethics in the century before
MacIntyre made his contribution. Thus, because freedom was both the means
and the end of socialist activity, such activity, contra the Kantians, required a
strong anchorage in contemporary history, while, contra the consequen-
tialists, it was not a reified end that could be inaugurated by a variety of
means. Therefore, MacIntyre concluded, ‘the philosophers have continued to

57 Ibid., p. 225.
58 Tbid., p. 230.
59 Ibid., p. 235.
60 Tbid., pp. 230, 238.
710 P. BLACKLEDGE

interpret the world differently; the point remains, to change it’.°' Neverthe-
less, while he signalled his allegiance to Trotskyism at the end ofthis essay, it
was less than clear from the text what this allegiance actually entailed. Fortu-
nately he put some meat on these bones in a number of essays published in the
journals of the Trotskyist left in the early 1960s.
Perhaps the most substantial of these essays was ‘Freedom and Revolu-
tion’. This essay was in large part a continuation and deepening of his previ-
ous humanist reinterpretation of Marxism. Jt opened with a reiteration of his
defence of Hegel’s conception of freedom as the essence of man and Marx’s
deepening of this notion through his insistence that ‘the achievement of free-
dom and the achievement of a classless society are inseparably united’. As a
Hegelian, MacIntyre refused to reify freedom as the endpoint of history, but
rather historicized it as a series of moments moving towards this end. Thus,
the free man ‘in every age is that man who to the extent that it is possible
makes his own life his own’.® Within bourgeois society, MacIntyre located
the freedom of the bohemian as an inauthentic model of freedom ‘a mere
inversion of bourgeois values’, and counterposes to this model the Marxist
argument that as we exist as individuals through our relations with other peo-
ple then the achievement of ‘freedom is not a problem of individual against
society but the problem of what sort of society we want and what sort of indi-
vidual we want to be’. Given the validity of this claim, it was only logical for
MacIntyre to conclude that ‘to assert oneself at the expense of the organisa-
tion in order to be free is to miss the fact that only within some organisational
form can human freedom be embodied’. Further, as capitalism emasculates
freedom, then to be free means to involve oneself in some organization that
challenges it: ‘The topic of freedom is also the topic of revolution.’® At this
point, MacIntyre introduced a crucial mediating clause into his argument:
while the working class, through its struggles against capital, might spontane-
ously generate emancipatory movements, workers have proved incapable of
spontaneously realizing the potential of these struggles. However, if freedom
cannot be handed to the working class from above, how then might it be real-
ized from such unpromising material? MacIntyre answered that socialists
must join revolutionary parties, whose goal is not freedom itself, but rather to
act in such a way as to aid the proletariat to achieve freedom. ‘The path to free-
dom must be by means of an organisation which is dedicated not to building
freedom but to moving the working class to build it. The necessity for this is
the necessity for a vanguard party.’** Moreover, and against those socialists
such as Thompson and the rest of the majority within the New Left who

61 Jbid., p. 240.
62 A. MacIntyre, ‘Freedom and Revolution’, Labour Review (February/March 1960),
pp. 19-24, p. 20.
63 Thid., p. 22:
Ibid., 0.23:
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 711

rejected the goal of building a socialist party, MacIntyre suggested that they
suffered from ‘the illusion that one can as an isolated individual escape from
the moulding and the subtle enslavement of the status quo’. Indeed,
the individual who tries most to live as an individual, to have a mind
entirely of his own, will in fact make himself more and more likely to
become in his thinking a passive reflection of the socially dominant ideas;
while the individual who recognizes his dependence on others has taken a
path which can lead to an authentic independence of mind.
Thus, MacIntyre concluded, ‘the road to socialism and democratic centralism
are . . . inseparable’.® More specifically, MacIntyre turned theory into prac-
tice when he joined the Trotskyist movement in the late 1950s.

Towards MacIntyre’s Rejection of Marxism

But what did remaining true to the spirit of Trotskyism imply in the early
1960s? Knight suggests that it involved embracing dogma: by which he most
probably means the dogmatic assertion that the working class could become
the agency of the socialist revolution. However, MacIntyre, at least in the
mid-1960s, did not understand his allegiance to Marxism in such crude terms.
Rather, as is readily apparent from his review of Lucien Goldmann’s The Hid-
den God, he did not believe that the working class would, at some point in the
future, certainly be transformed into a revolutionary agency, but rather he
wagered that it might. According to Goldmann’s model, Marxists could not
guarantee the victory of socialism, but must make a wager on the revolution-
ary potential, and indeed triumph, of the proletariat in the struggle against
capital.°° MacIntyre accepted this argument, and indeed developed it when he
wrote that ‘one cannot first understand the world and only then act on it. How
one understands the world will depend in part on the decision implicit in one’s
already taken actions. The wager of action is unavoidable.’®’ To label MacIn-
tyre’s wager as dogmatic is thus to miss the point: he believed that one way or
another we all make the wager, and those who do not bet on the workers are
compelled to retreat back to the tragic vision: if we reject Marx then we fall
back to Kant. To fully comprehend MaclIntyre’s break with Marxism we must
therefore ask not what made him drop the dogma, but rather what made him
change his bet?
One fact that did not entail MacIntyre’s break with the revolutionary left
was his realization, noted at the close of After Virtue, that Trotsky’s late politi-
cal perspectives had been refuted by history. In contrast to his later

65 Tbid., p. 24.
66 1, Goldmann, The Hidden God (London, 1964), p. 301.
67 A. MacIntyre, ‘Pascal and Marx: On Lucien Goldmann’ s Hidden God’ ,in A. Mac-
Intyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age: Essays on Ideology and Philosophy (London,
1971), pp. 76-87, p. 84.
712 P. BLACKLEDGE

pessimistic reading of the failings of Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism, in a

review of the third volume of Deutscher’s biography of Trotsky, MacIntyre
insisted that Trotskyism was a contested tradition, whose ossification in the
hands of Deutscher stood in stark contrast to its living force in the work of
those such as Alfred Rosmer and Trotsky’s widow Natalya. The general
thrust of this analysis was borrowed from /nternational Socialism, the group
with which MacIntyre had become associated from 1960. In line with the per-
spectives of this organization, MacIntyre insisted that orthodox Trotskyism,
through its reification of one moment of Trotsky’s evolving attempt to
achieve a scientific analysis of the Soviet Union, was built upon an indefensi-
ble and incoherent foundation; for Trotsky had linked his characterization of
the Soviet social formation and the future of classical Marxism to a number of
predictions which had been refuted by history. To maintain an allegiance to
classical Marxism after this refutation of Trotsky’s predictions thus implied a
necessary break with the letter, if not the spirit, of Trotskyism. Indeed, in
holding to the letter of their master’s thought, the orthodox Trotskyists, or so
MacIntyre claimed, necessarily broke with the revolutionary spirit of his
thought.
Despite this powerful defence of the relevance of heterodox Trotskyism to
the modern world, within a few years MacIntyre had broken both with Jnter-
national Socialism specifically and Marxism more generally. The first sug-
gestion that MacIntyre had begun to rethink the role of the working class as a
potential agent of socialist revolution came in 1962. A year earlier, in a review
of Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution, he had criticized Williams for
losing sight of the tension in an individual’s life between ‘his unrealised
potentialities and the barriers which confront their realisation’.””However, in
‘The Sleepwalking Society’ he bemoaned the lack of impact of the latest of
CND’s Aldermaston demonstrations, and explained this as a consequence of
the power of the mass media in inculcating, within the working class, ‘an atti-
tude of apathy and acceptance towards the political status quo’. Moreover, he
sought to explain proletarian susceptibility to this power with a claim that the
‘working class has been effectively divided into the oppressed but helpless
and the strong but bribed’. Indeed, he insisted that in conditions of ‘continu-
ally expanding investment and continually expanding consumption’, the

68 A. MacIntyre, ‘Trotsky in Exile’, in MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age

pp. 52-9, pp. 57-8. This essay was first published in Encounter in 1963. For Interna-
tional Socialism’s reading of Trotsky see T. Cliff, ‘The Nature of Stalinist Russia’
[1948], in T. Cliff, Marxist Theory after Trotsky (London, 2003), p. 1.
69 While MacIntyre’s name was removed from the list of editors of International
Socialism in 1968 — as the organization sought to disassociate itself from his actions
against student radicals in Essex — he had in fact ceased to involve himself with the
organization some two or three years earlier.
TOA Macintyre, ‘Culture and Revolution’, International Socialism, 5 (1961), p. 28.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 713

struggles of the working class, or at least part of it, had been ‘institutional-
ised’.”!
While MacIntyre therefore seems to have responded pessimistically to the
decline of CND, in the short term he continued to defend revolutionary poli-
tics. Thus, in ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, he took issue with Henry Col-
lins’ defence of a left reformist strategy for Labour. Like Bernstein and the
revisionists of the 1890s, Collins, according to MacIntyre, accepted a
mechanical separation of the economic structure of the world, from ideas
about it. Consequently, Collins failed to see that reformism was less a coher-
ent response to the problems that beset the working class, than it was a reflec-
tion of a particular moment in the history of capitalism, which arose ‘within a
capitalism which has learnt some degree of rationalisation and control’ .””
However, while the ideology of revisionism reflected a specific moment in
the evolution of capitalism, it was less apparent that revolutionary politics
would replace it as the hegemonic ideology within the working class. Accord-
ingly, MacIntyre suggested in his essay ‘Prediction and Politics’, published in
International Socialism in 1963, that contemporary economic trends had cre-
ated barriers to the diffusion of socialist class consciousness across the work-
ing class. He opened this essay with a critique of the use by socialists of the
word inevitable: indeed, he insisted that as socialism was premised on the
rejection of the inevitability of the continuation of capitalism, it was some-
what ironic that many socialists merely inverted the dominant ideology refer-
ring to the inevitability of the victory of socialism, rather than the inevitable
continuation of capitalism. Moreover, while he noted that a minority of Marx-
ists had rejected the argument that socialism was inevitable, most notably
Lenin and Trotsky, none of these had produced a ‘coherent substitute’ to the
mechanically deterministic interpretation of historical materialism; rather
they had merely rejected a form of ‘automism’ for ‘substitutionism’.” MacIn-
tyre opened his attempt to move beyond these two inadequate interpretations
of Marxism with the suggestion that post-war capitalism had been trans-
formed by the ‘conscious, intelligent innovation’ of the bourgeoisie and its
representatives:
If capitalists had behaved in the forties and fifties as they did in the twenties
the apparently mechanical laws of the economy would have issued in
slump. But there are no longer slumps for the same reason that the pig-cycle
is no longer with us: the changed self-consciousness of the participants.”*
However, if this argument implied that economic crises on the scale of the
1930s could be managed out of existence, then, while MacIntyre’s break with
71 A. MacIntyre, ‘The Sleepwalking Society’, Socialist Review (May 1962), p. 5.
72 A, MacIntyre, ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, /nternational Socialism, 6 (1961),
pp. 20-3, p. 21.
73 A. MacIntyre, ‘Prediction and Politics’, International Socialism, 13 (1963), p. 17.
74 Ibid., p. 18.
714 P. BLACKLEDGE

mechanical Marxism was plain, it was not obvious how his own politics could
avoid the trap of substitutionism: for if capitalism had overcome its tendency
towards crises, then what force would push workers to question their position
in society? In 1959 he had avoided this trap through his insistence on the nec-
essary relationship between his theory of human nature and his understanding
of human reactions to economic processes:
Marx’s explanation of capitalist crisis is not a matter of underconsumption,
but of falling return on profit which leads the capitalist to lower his invest-
ment. And this explanation, like the explanation of proletarian reactions to
such crisis, rests on his view of what has happened to human nature under
capitalism.”
Moreover, he reasserted and deepened this argument in 1961 when he sug-
gested that revolutionaries should develop a programme that sought ‘to bring
together three elements in our social life’: ‘the deep and incurable dissatisfac-
tion with social life which capitalism breeds’; ‘the recurrent state of objective
crisis in capitalist social order’; and ‘socialist theory’.”° However, by the time
he wrote ‘Prediction and Politics’ he no longer accepted that economic crises
were inevitable. This is not to suggest that he understood the ‘objective’ ter-
rain upon which socialists operated to be much more static than was tradi-
tional amongst Marxists. On the contrary, the dynamic economic processes
associated with capitalism tended to fragment rather than to unify the working
class: ‘there is a sad case for saying that being in an economically strong posi-
tion today against the employers in certain industries at least, means that the
issues on which you are likely to fight and even possibly win are just the
issues that are going to divide you from less skilled workers’.”’ Interestingly,
this argument was not a particularly heretical analysis within the /nterna-
tional Socialism group. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the group this ‘cause of
concern, though not for pessimism’, was combined with an analysis of a ‘defi-
nite cause for optimism’: the shop-floor confidence of many ordinary work-
ers. Moreover, as the Wilson Government was reacting to the ‘stop—go’ crises
by launching a generalized challenge to sectional confidence through the
medium of incomes policy, then it was suggested that the contradiction
between sectional strength and the general attack opened a series of opportu-
nities for the left to influence the emergence of a genuinely socialist con-
sciousness within the working class.”* In contrast to this perspective, as

7 MacIntyre, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’, pp. 39-40.

76 MacIntyre, ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, p. 23.
77 A. MacIntyre, Unpublished paper given to International Socialism day school in
1963, p. 6. A. MacIntyre, “Herbert Marcuse’, Survey No 62 (January 1967), p. 43.
78 T. Cliff and C. Barker, Incomes Policy, Legislotion and Shop Stewards (London,
1966), pp. 128-36. For an earlier elaboration of a similar argument, see M. Kidron, ‘Re-
joinder to Left-Reformism’, International Socialism, 7 (1961), p. 15. Kidron’s aim in
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 715

MacIntyre argued that Marx’s theory of economic crisis was inapplicable to

the modern world, his analysis of contemporary trends within the working
class ended on the pessimistic note of the working class’s growing fragmenta-
tion. Consequently, his understanding of the one hope for socialism was lim-
ited to the feeling, found within the working class, that capitalism was
constraining their potential for free development: “The germ of his liberation
lies in the twin facts that capitalism cannot prevent him from recognising that
he is unfree and from combining with other workers to free himself’.”
Problematically, if economic crises were not going to play the role of fan-
ning the flames of rebellion against this feeling of enslavement, and indeed
acted to retard them, then MacIntyre was at a loss to explain what forces,
beyond the general tendency of capitalism to expand the size of the working
class, would act upon human nature to generate the collective revolts upon
which socialists could base their practice. Bereft of an objective tendency
towards revolutionary consciousness, MacIntyre increasingly came to view
the subjective role of socialist activists as the crucial catalyst to the develop-
ment of socialist consciousness within the working class. Thus ‘Prediction
and Politics’ concluded with the argument that as the condition for the fall of
capitalism was the growth in socialist class consciousness within the proletar-
iat, and, as this growth was neither inevitable nor impossible, it “depends upon
us’ to make that change in consciousness: ‘because with our working class
allies we may yet learn both what now makes us behave as we do, and what
may transform our action until we become capable of making the transition to
socialism’
.*°
MacIntyre followed this general argument with a more concrete applica-
tion of his understanding of historical materialism in his next essay for Inter-
national Socialism: ‘Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning’. In this essay he
argued that while socialists should reject, as unfeasible, the goal of winning
over the Labour Party to socialism, they should aim to ‘recreate a political
trade unionism out of the existing links between the Labour Party and the
unions’. Indeed, MacIntyre was keen to point to the positive potential inher-
ent in the emergence of a new form of capitalism: for where most sociologists
interpreted the growth of a new layer of brain workers as a sign of the
embourgeoisification of the working class, MacIntyre noticed that the condi-
tions of work of these supposedly middle-class professionals were becoming
increasingly proletarianized, such that not only could they be won over to
socialism, they could also add to the intellectual capital of the workers’ move-
ment. Moreover, he envisaged a socialist perspective for this new enlarged

this essay was to bolster MaclIntyre’s critique of Collins noted above. Thanks to Chris
Harman for this reference.
79 MacIntyre, ‘Rejoinder to Left Reformism’, p. 23. A. MacIntyre, Marcuse (Lon-
don, 1970), p. 72.
80 MacIntyre, ‘Prediction and Politics’, p. 19.
716 P. BLACKLEDGE

proletariat. However, to realize this potential would involve a political strat-

egy that, initially, involved placing a series of demands on the incoming
Labour Government: first, to ‘side with the workers and against the employ-
ers’; then to insist that education be designed to equip ‘workers to control
their own lives and to take power’; and last, to abolish ‘the bomb’. Subse-
quently, as these demands were being made, a new form of political trade
unionism might organize strikes, not as reactions to managerial pressures, but
as planned attempts to break capitalism at its points of greatest vulnerability.
However, the prerequisite for the success of this project was that ‘almost
every worker is able to understand and assent to this strategy’.*!
Unfortunately, there were two obvious sets of problems with these strategic
suggestions. First, and least seriously, there was a problem of coherence
involved in denying that the Labour Party could be won to socialism, whilst
simultaneously demanding that it essentially act as a socialist, or at least as an
anti-capitalist, government, in respect to three key areas of policy. This prob-
lem was not too serious because, in practice, the demands could easily be
interpreted as a series of ‘lines in the sand’ over which the left was preparing
to struggle against the incoming government: indeed, this is exactly how
MacIntyre imagined them.** However, there was a second and far more seri-
ous problem with MacIntyre’s formulation of a strategy for socialists: by sug-
gesting that the only hope for the realization of this strategy was that ‘almost
every worker is able to understand and assent’ to it, MacIntyre essentially
confused the ends of a revolutionary process with its means; for once the
working class acted as a united anti-capitalist force, then the success of the
socialist revolution would be guaranteed, indeed it would have been achieved.
How then did MacIntyre envisage the movement from the existing class con-
sciousness of the mass of workers to a future socialist consciousness?
MacIntyre had addressed this issue in ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, but
only tangentially and at a very general level: ‘Our deep need is . . . to provide
all the growing points of human activity against the present social order with
coherent theoretical expression, so that they may be rationally guided and
effective’ .*’ He added some weight to this framework in an unpublished paper
presented to an Jnternational Socialism day-school in 1963. In this essay,
implicitly drawing upon Trotsky’s Transitional Programme, he argued that
revolutionary leadership involved formulating a series of political demands
which could be made upon the incoming Labour government, and which,
while being formally reformist, could in practice only be realized through a
revolutionary transformation of society. His suggestion was that in fighting
for the realization of these demands workers would develop the socialist

81 A. MacIntyre, ‘Labour Policy and Capitalist Planning’, International Socialism,

15 (1963), p. 8.
82 MacIntyre, Unpublished paper, p. 20.
83 MacIntyre, ‘Breaking the Chains of Reason’, p. 238.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 717

consciousness necessary to make that revolution.** However, as the effective-

ness of Trotsky’s model of transitional demands depended on the circum-
stances within which they were made, unfavourable circumstances would
negate their revolutionary content. As Duncan Hallas has argued: ‘If at a
given time “today’s consciousness of wide layers” is decidedly non-revolu-
tionary, then it will not be transformed by slogans.’®* Unfortunately, the con-
text within which MacIntyre wrote was characterized by decidedly
non-revolutionary working-class consciousness; and no amount of transi-
tional demands were going to change this. If MaclIntyre’s transitional
demands were not equal to the task of relating to workers in a period of eco-
nomic boom and relative depoliticization, it is easy to imagine how he might
move from an ultra-optimistic to an ultra-pessimistic interpretation of the
potential of workers’ struggle to generate socialist consciousness, especially
given his belief that at the economic level the class struggle tended to divide
workers more than it united them.
Hence, without any model of objective tendencies that might facilitate the
political unification of the working class, the workers’ cry for freedom was
destined to be atomized and hopeless. This is the conclusion implied in his
works of the later 1960s, which, while written when he was still nominally an
editor of International Socialism, universally suggested no hope for revolu-
tion. So, in his introduction to Marx’s ideas for an academic audience, while
he powerfully argued that ‘the most crucial later activity of Marx’, was not to
write Capital, but was rather through his actions in ‘helping to found and
guiding the International Working Men’s Association’, he concluded that
Marx ‘still leaves the question of working-class political growth obscure’ .*®
Whether this observation was correct of Marx, it certainly appeared to be true
of MacIntyre’s interpretation of Marxism, for his contemporary strategic
insights seemed increasingly abstract and divorced from the practice of a
mass movement that could bring them to life.
The feeling that MacIntyre’s social theory was divorced from any sense
that immanent forces within contemporary capitalism might develop into a
transformative agency was reinforced in a series of lectures originally given
in 1964, but published some three years later as Secularization and Moral
Change. In this book he deployed his sophisticated Marxist method to outline
a comparative history of religious and secular beliefs in modern Britain and
America. On the basis of this history he argued that Engels had been mistaken
in his overly optimistic perspective for the future secularization of British
society, as a corollary of his overly optimistic perspectives for socialism.
However, MacIntyre went beyond a critique of Engels to suggest that ‘the

84 MacIntyre, Unpublished paper, p. 20.

85 PD. Hallas, Trotsky’s Marxism (London, 1979), p. 104.
86 A. Maclntyre, ‘Marx’, in Western Political Philosophers: A Background Book, ed.
M. Cranston (London, 1964), pp. 99-108, p. 106.
718 P. BLACKLEDGE

inability of men to discard Christianity is part of their inability to provide any

post-Christian means of understanding their situation in the world’. While he
suggested that this failure was by no means ‘ultimate’, he noted no inherent
tendencies with which socialists might engage that could, belatedly, help
them to prove Engels correct.*’
If MacIntyre’s rejection of the applicability of Marx’s economic theory to
post-war capitalism opened the door to his increasing sense of political pessi-
mism, this tendency was reinforced in the mid-1960s when he moved to reject
Marx’s (and indeed any other) model of human nature as a basis upon which a
coherent theory of the struggle for socialism could be based. For instance, in
his classic A Short History of Ethics, despite some tangential remarks as to the
relationship between morality and desire, his own moral standpoint seemed
disjoined from either any historical or materialist premises to which he had
earlier been so committed.** Thus, he rejected the idea of human nature as a
benchmark from which to adjudicate moral claims, and consequently reduced
individual morality to an existential choice.*’ While he chose Marxism in
1966, at least in as far has he did not publicly break with the editorial board of
International Socialism, he refused any criteria such that this choice could be
defended against any alternative. Moreover, without a theory of human nature
with which to underpin it, his theory of revolution, at least as he had outlined it
in ‘Freedom and Revolution’, was left baseless. MacIntyre’s socialist moral-
ity, in this context, could boast no more compelling foundation than any com-
peting moral claim. In fact, by the late 1960s it appeared that he had ceased to
view Marxism as either a science or as a guide to action, but rather as just one
of many competing worldviews. As a result, when he republished a new edi-
tion of Marxism: An Interpretation in 1968, under the new title of Marxism
and Christianity, he removed any suggestion that the original text might have
been written to inform a committed Christian-socialist practice. Therefore,
where, in the second edition, Marx’s relationship to Christianity through
Feuerbach and Hegel was still there, gone was the call to action; as was most
of the Christianity.”? Indeed, while the second edition, as a work of theory,
was formally closer to Marxism than was the first, the reviewer for Interna-
tional Socialism bemoaned the re-write and proclaimed that the activist core
of the first edition had made that much the better of the two books.”!
Whatever the theoretical roots of MacIntyre’s break with International
Socialism in 1968, at the time he remained silent as to his personal motives.

87 A. MacIntyre, Secularization and Moral Change (London, 1967), p. 75.

88 A. MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London, 1966), pp. 210-14. Cf P. Sedg-
wick, “The Ethical Dance — A Review of Alasdair MaclIntyre’s After Virtue’, in The
Socialist Register, ed. M. Eve and D. Musson (London, 1982).
89 MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, pp. 268-9.
90 A. MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London, 1968).
°! R. Kuper, ‘Marxism and Christianity’, International Socialism, 42 (1970), p. 35.
 ALASDAIR MACINTYRE’S EARLY MARXIST ETHICS 719

However, something of his mind-set can be gleaned from his book Marcuse,
published in 1970. In this essay, MacIntyre emphasized his own continuing
allegiance to the concepts of human liberation and freedom. However, he also
held to something of a performative contraction in so far as he simultaneously
rejected the argument that an ideal pure Marxism could be deployed as an
alternative to the reality of Marxism’s history, while accepting an implicitly
idealized vision of the struggle for liberation. Thus, he denounced the con-
temporary student struggles as ‘the first parent-financed revolts’ that were
‘more like a new version of the children’s crusade than a revolutionary move-
ment’.” This elitist critique of the movement of 1968 allowed Maclntyre to
maintain a formal allegiance to the emancipatory politics of the left, whilst
dismissing real struggles as they happened around him: so, against the disrup-
tive influence of ‘Marcuse’s students’, MacIntyre extolled, in 1970, the vir-
tues and ‘authority’ of the university as a seat of learning.”

Conclusion

The power of MacIntyre’s Marxism in the period of the first New Left was
rooted in his argument that any moral claim, if it was to be universalized in the
modern world, must be rooted both in a historically conceived theory of
human nature, as actualized within the real historical struggles for freedom of
the oppressed. To this end, he played a key role in retrieving the revolutionary
kernel of Marx’s theory of history from the deadening grip of Stalinism, and
thus in releasing historical materialism from the cage of Stalinist determin-
ism. However, despite this contribution to Marxist theory, MacIntyre pro-
gressively distanced himself from the Marxist left through the 1960s. While
this tendency was brought to a head in 1968, when he played a minor role as
‘policeman’ to the students of Essex, it had much deeper roots than this. On
the one hand, the context was unpropitious for the left, and MaclIntyre’s tra-
jectory can be read as a response to the decline of the New Left and CND.
However, this context demanded interpretation, and MacIntyre’s pessimistic
reading of it was informed by, first, his rejection of the idea of an essential
human nature, and second, by his dismissal of Marx’s theory of economic cri-
sis. Together, these two revisions of Marxism meant that he read the contem-
porary fragmentation of the class struggle as a much more profound barrier to
the struggle for socialism than was implied by the ‘cause for concern’ noted
by other members of International Socialism. Indeed, as the 1960s wore on,
the tension between the optimism of MaclIntyre’s will and the pessimism of
his intellect became so great that something eventually had to give. Since
then, while MacIntyre has remained a firm critic of international capitalism, a
deep sense of pessimism has coloured his moral theory.

92 MacIntyre, Marcuse, pp. 61, 89.

93 Tbid., p. 91.
720 P. BLACKLEDGE

Nonetheless, in his most recent works MacIntyre has moved some way
towards rejecting the two fundamental assumptions that informed his earlier
pessimism. For instance, in his introduction to the 1995 edition of Marxism
and Christianity, he suggests that he had previously been too harsh on Marx’s
value theory which itself underpins his theory of crisis. Moreover, in
Dependent Rational Animals he argues that he had been mistaken, in After
Virtue and A Short History of Ethics, to suppose ‘an ethics independent of
biology to be possible’.” In thus reappraising his relationship to Marx’s eco-
nomic theory and more general theories of human nature, MacIntyre has sig-
nificantly reduced the theoretical space between himself and Marxism.
Indeed, in a new preface to his 1958 study of Freud, MacIntyre reasserts the
necessity of a linkage between psychoanalysis and politics in a way that
would have made perfect sense to his earlier Marxist self.” While a large gap
remains between Marxism and his contemporary moral and political thought,
MaclIntyre’s changed perspective at least opens up the possibility of a
renewed dialogue between his ideas and Marxism.

Paul Blackledge LEEDS METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY

94 A. MacIntyre, Marxism and Christianity (London, 1995), p. xx. A. MacIntyre,

Dependent Rational Animals (London, 1999), p. x.
95 Maclntyre, The Unconscious, pp. 27, 114.
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BOOK REVIEWS

Volume XXXVI Issue 4

Winter 2005
 BOOK REVIEWS

723 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (University of Chicago Press:

Chicago and London, 2004), xxi + 326 pp., $40.00/£28.00, ISBN 0 226
23910 1. Reviewed by Joseph Canning.
724 Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (Yale University
Press: New Haven and London, 2004), xii + 209 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0
300 10404 9. Reviewed by Richard Mullender.
726 Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and
the Spirit of Empire (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2005),
xii + 253 pp., £26.95, ISBN 0 691 11992 9. Reviewed by Julia Stapleton
730 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion
Volume I: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764, ISBN 0
521 63345 1 (boards), ISBN 0 521 79759 4 (pbk.)
Volume II: Narratives of Civil Government, ISBN 0 521 64002 4
(boards), ISBN 0 521 79759 4 (pbk.)
Volume II: The First Decline and Fall, ISBN 0 521 82445 1 (boards)
(Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2005), xiii + 537 pp., £45.00
($60.00). Reviewed by Iain Hampsher-Monk.
fie) Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the
English Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), xii
+ 402 pp., £45.00/$75.00, ISBN 0 521 84375 8. Reviewed by David
Armitage.
743 Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton University
Press: Princeton, 2003), xiv + 348 pp., £46.95, ISBN 0 691 11516 8.
Reviewed by John Hope Mason.
745 Peter Ives, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (Pluto: London and
Ann Arbor, MI; Fernwood: Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2004), xiv + 204 pp.,
£16.99, ISBN 0 7453 1665 4. Reviewed by James Martin.

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005

 BOOK REVIEWS Fes,

Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (University of Chicago Press: Chi-

cago and London, 2004), xxi+ 326 pp., $40.00/£28.00, ISBN 0 226 23910 1.

This book is of interest both to those concerned with the theory of history in
general and to historians of political thought in particular. The core of this
work comprises a comparison between the political theory of the seventeenth-
century German polymath, Hermann Conring, and the fourteenth-century
Italian jurist, Bartolus of Sassoferrato. Thejustification for this lies in the sys-
temic criticism of Bartolus’ approach found in Conring’s works on the Holy
Roman Empire. Fasolt has previously written a number of articles on both
writers.
In pursuing this case study, Fasolt shows us how increasingly despondent
he has become about the limits of historical understanding — how much we
can know about the past as distinct from the evidence about it. He is especially
concerned with the perceived gap between an author’s thought and expres-
sion. History he sees as no innocent academic discipline: all historians’ state-
ments are illocutionary acts of one kind or another; the practice of history
itself is political in the widest sense of leading to action.
Fasolt takes Bartolus and Conring as representatives of the difference
between medieval and early modern ways of looking at the world. The study
of Roman law is ideal for this purpose because of the emergence of legal
humanism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which consciously dis-
tanced itself from the Bartolist scholastic approach. The legal humanists prac-
tised a historical approach to the Roman law, setting out to establish its
meaning in its original historical context. Fasolt sees this historical-
mindedness as the characteristic of a modern approach breaking with the
anachronistic medieval scholastic one represented by Bartolus. He is not will-
ing to privilege one over the other, seeing clearly that they were essentially
different. There is a problem here because fourteenth-century jurists did have
a historical sense. They were explicitly concerned with applying the text of
the Corpus iuris civilis to their changing contemporary conditions. For
instance, Bartolus’ pupil and colleague, Baldus de Ubaldis of Perugia, used
his developed historical sense expressly to rule out enquiry into the original
conditions in antiquity in which the Roman law had been produced, on the
grounds that it would be a useless undertaking: what was important was the
application of Roman law in the fourteenth century.
Of particular interest to historians of political thought is Fasolt’s sensitive
and detailed reading of Bartolus’ text (something Conring himself never
undertook, deriving his knowledge via the works of Grotius). In particular,
Fasolt gives a profound, critical treatment of Bartolus’ solution to the funda-
mental problem which faced him: how to reconcile the Emperor’s lordship of
the world, as set out in the Roman law, with the fact that so many city-
republics and kingdoms did not accept his rule and had reached a position of

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVI. No. 4. Winter 2005

724 BOOK REVIEWS

territorial independence. Modern scholarship has maintained that Bartolus,

though his use of the de iure—de facto distinction, made a juristic break-
through in holding that legitimate de facto power can have full legal validity,
whatever the letter of the law might be de iure, thus accepting the facts of
political change. Fasolt departs from this interpretation, seeing Bartolus’
solution more in terms of layers of legitimate jurisdiction. It is almost per-
verse of him that his most striking statement on this matter is buried in foot-
note 109 on page 194. In consequence he interprets Bartolus as according de
iure jurisdiction to city-republics which did not recognize the superiority of
the emperor. It is difficult to agree with this view, since such non-recognition
involved the deliberate rejection of the emperors’ de iure claims.
Fasolt is particulary helpful in discussing whether such terms as ‘sover-
eignty’, ‘politics’ and ‘state’ can usefully be applied in interpreting Bartolus’
ideas. He points out that the assumption that political thought is focused on
these concepts only presupposes the categories which emerged as end prod-
ucts in the development of European political ideas. He therefore condemns
any downgrading of medieval thinkers on the grounds that they do not utilize
early-modern forms of these concepts.
Fasolt has written a very important book which illustrates the central rele-
vance of late medieval juristic thought if we wish to understand the develop-
ment of political ideas in the crucial transitional period from the fourteenth
through to the mid-seventeenth century. His thoughts on the nature of histori-
cal enquiry are profound indeed and must give all practitioners of this art con-
siderable pause.
Joseph Canning
UNIVERSITY OF WALES, BANGOR

Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction (Yale University Press:

New Haven and London, 2004), xii + 209 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0 300 10404 9.

Paul Franco highlights two ‘enduring contributions’ made by Michael Oake-

shott to philosophy and political philosophy. First (and in the area of epis-
temology), Oakeshott’s argument that the world of knowledge consists in a
multiplicity of modes (history, science and practice) that are irreducible and,
hence, not amenable to ranking. Second, Oakeshott’s theory of civil associa-
tion in which he points up the main features of an essentially liberal political
order. Franco succeeds in impressing upon his readers the importance and dis-
tinctiveness of these contributions. In some respects, however, Franco could
usefully have pressed his analysis of Oakeshott further. Relevant here is
Oakeshott’s observation that ‘political action involves mental vulgarity’
(which Franco quotes in his discussion of Oakeshott’s political philosophy).
There are reasons for thinking that Oakeshott’s distaste for ‘mental vulgarity’
 BOOK REVIEWS 725

(in political and other contexts) may go a long way towards explaining both
the strengths and weaknesses of his contributions to philosophy and political
philosophy.
In his discussion of Oakeshott’s early (epistemologically-oriented) writ-
ings, Franco emphasizes the importance placed by Oakeshott on the fallacy of
irrelevance (ignoratio elenchi) as a source of confusion in practical and philo-
sophical contexts. We fall victim to ignoratio elenchi in circumstances where
we fail to keep the various modes of experience separate from one another.
This happens when, for example, scientific thought is used to interrogate fea-
tures of practical life. Moreover, where this sort of mistake results from insen-
sitivity to the distinctiveness of the sphere under interrogation, we are, on
Oakeshott’s view, confronted with mental vulgarity. The same point applies
where we misapprehend a ‘world’ (Oakeshott’s term for a ‘complex integral
whole or system’) by failing to understand it in terms of the ensemble of
norms that invest it with significance. In light of these points, Oakeshott
argues that we should understand philosophy as a discipline that grasps
“experience without presupposition, reservation, arrest, or modification’. To
this end, we should see ‘worlds’ as concrete universals.
The emphasis on ‘worlds’ as concrete universals is, as Franco makes plain,
a prominent feature of Oakeshott’s political philosophy. Relevant here is
Oakeshott’s writing on liberalism. Oakeshott regards liberalism not as an
abstract idea or a fixed body of abstract rights but, rather, as a ‘living method
of social integration’. This ‘method’ (or tradition or practice) involves, inter
alia, the diffusion of power and the rule of law. Moreover, liberalism does
not, on Oakeshott’s account, exhibit an overarching purpose. Hence, ‘liberal-
ism’ names a non-instrumental civil association. In this civil association, indi-
viduals enjoy, inter alia, the freedom to engage in the conversation of
mankind (in which various discourses and modes of knowledge complement
rather than compete with one another). But this does not stop politicians try-
ing to impose on liberal institutions purposes that threaten freedom and the
conversation it makes possible. Where this happens, we are confronted with a
paradigmatic example of vulgar political thought. For ‘the most effective
method ever invented’ for social integration (liberal civil association) is mis-
taken for or turned into a means by which to pursue some more or less narrow
(and often stultifying) end.
But while the ends about which Oakeshott has misgivings are both narrow
and a threat to liberal civil association, some of them have (as Franco notes)
moral appeal. Consider the egalitarian project of expanding participation in
higher education. This is an end about which Oakeshott had misgivings. For
he saw the agenda of social justice as a threat to the quietistic ideal of the uni-
versity as ‘a place apart’, where conversation and individuality could flourish.
For Oakeshott this threat was embodied in students unprepared to take the
opportunity to ‘stretch [their] sails to the wind’ but alive to the material
726 BOOK REVIEWS

benefits to be wrung from a valuable academic qualification. Here, again, we

see Oakeshott responding disdainfully to mental vulgarity. But on this occa-
sion his response surely merits sharp criticism. For even in the radically
instrumentalized British university of today we can see (in efforts to widen
participation) an attempt (typically clumsy; often forlorn) to encourage par-
ticipation in the sort of conversation celebrated by Oakeshott.
Had Franco pressed his analysis further in the way suggested above, he
might have been better placed to throw light on, inter alia, Oakeshott’s admi-
ration for ‘philosophical imagination’ and his distaste for ‘minute analysis’.
The modesty of Franco’s analytic ambitions becomes particularly obvious in
his concluding chapter. He makes two telling criticisms of Oakeshott. First,
Oakeshott failed to address ‘the crucial, if contingent, question of the social,
economic, and cultural conditions necessary for the perpetuation of civil asso-
ciation’. Second, by drawing (most obviously in his early writings) a
‘hermetic distinction’ between theory and practice, Oakeshott deprives phi-
losophy of any bearing on the way we live our lives. Franco makes these
points on the penultimate page of his book. Thus he denies himself the oppor-
tunity to pursue them very far. Nonetheless, he offers a crisply written and
meticulously researched introduction to Oakeshott. He also succeeds in con-
veying some sense of Oakeshott’s personality. Plainly, Oakeshott was (like
Montaigne, whose writings he greatly admired) a man for whom there was no
occupation as sweet as scholarship. This may go some way towards explain-
ing his distaste for the vulgarity of politicians. But it is perhaps no coinci-
dence that the Oakeshott who returned to academic life after service in the
Second World War moved away from astringent philosophy. He struck down
the path of political philosophy and offered a sometimes polemical defence of
the liberal tradition. Thus he compromised his commitment to the view that
theory and practice should be sharply distinguished, and he came danger-
ously, but fruitfully, close to the vulgar world of the politician.
Richard Mullender
NEWCASTLE LAW SCHOOL

Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the

Spirit of Empire (Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, 2005), xii +
253 pp., £26.95, ISBN 0 691 11992 9.

This ambitious and well-researched book is a pioneering study of two influen-

tial figures in the field of international relations in interwar Britain. Alfred
E. Zimmern was the first occupant of two Chairs in the subject, one at
Aberystwyth from 1919 to 1921 and the other at Oxford, from 1931 to 1944.
His mentor, Gilbert Murray, was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford
from 1909 until his retirement in 1936. However, since the First World War
 BOOK REVIEWS Tad

Murray had worked tirelessly for the cause of the League of Nations; he
spread its message of disarmament and collective security to a large and
receptive public in Britain, particularly through the League of Nations Union
which he chaired from 1923 until 1938. Zimmern was also a classicist by pro-
fession who turned to the study of international relations in the wake of the
First World War, an event which claimed the lives of some of his best stu-
dents. Both men played a key role in the ‘Cecil Draft’ which the British dele-
gation took to Paris in 1919 as the basis of the League of Nations’ Covenant;
they also helped to establish the League’s Institute of Intellectual Co-
operation in 1923.
Jeanne Morefield critically explores the shared liberalism of both men, par-
ticularly what she conceives as its indebtedness to the Idealist heritage in Brit-
ish political thought, and its role in shaping their conception of both classical
Greece and international society in the twentieth century.
The book certainly brings out many of the preculiarities of British Idealist
thought. Morefield argues that British Idealists since T.H. Green remained
wedded to an ‘oddly transposed’ form of Liberalism which mirrored their
commitments to patriarchy. For Morefield, nationhood was important to these
thinkers, as it was for Zimmern afterwards, because it represented the fam-
ily — the patriarchal family — writ large; rooted in the most ‘natural’,
‘pre-political’ unit of civil society, nationhood overshadowed the state as the
basis of universality within and across societies. It was not ‘completed’ by the
state, either, being far more fundamental and ‘spiritual’ than the mere frame-
work of law which the state existed to maintain; hence, for Zimmern, the prin-
ciple of national self-determination was a non-starter, leaving the field of
sovereignty to the state. For Morefield, the compromises this entailed for a
liberal theory of society — and a democratic world order — are significant.
By projecting the unifying Idealist concepts of ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ onto the
international level to prevent further outbreaks of world conflict, while at the
same time denying sovereignty to international agencies such as the League,
the progressive promise of Murray’s and Zimmern’s liberalism was stillborn.
For both men, the trappings of world government were problematic in the
extreme, thereby countering the Hobbesian contention that ‘covenants with-
out swords’ were ‘mere words’.
Morefield convincingly highlights the basis of Murray’s and Zimmern’s
aversion to the abrogation of state sovereignty — and thus limited conception
of the League — in a fear of Bolshevism on the one hand, and anti-colonial
movements, on the other. The Hellenist ideal of ‘One Great City of Gods and
Men’ embraced by Murray, in particular, was a top-down vision of reform,
rooted in a fervent belief in the power of reason and ‘liberality’ to transform
all that it touched; the invention of new mechanisms of government (as
opposed to deliberation) would only serve to dissipate rather than concentrate
the international mind, flouting the existence of the ‘rational’ in the ‘real’.
728 ' BOOK REVIEWS

Bolshevism and colonial independence threatened to deflect ‘cosmos’ into

‘chaos’. While eminently aware of the threat which a global capitalist econ-
omy posed to world harmony, Murray and Zimmern felt that it was much the
lesser of two evils beside violent class warfare on the one hand, and political
backwardness, on the other.
For Morefield, the fact of the matter was that, bizarrely, Murray and
Zimmern retained fond affections for ‘pre-liberal’ forms of associations —
family, nation and class system — that in her eyes contradict the essential lib-
eral ideals of individual freedom and equality. Nor, for all their commitment
to the principle of state sovereignty, were they apostles of the state, or even
possessed of a clear understanding of its contours. Morefield brings out their
liberal scepticism of the state, which was enhanced by the state’s association
with ‘Prussianism’ and Bolshevism after the First World War. Her suggestion
that this scepticism was overlaid by a Social Darwinist belief in the necessity
of ‘struggle’ centred squarely on the nuclear, patriarchal family in the first
instance is less convincing. For example, Zimmern was not opposed to state
education; if he had believed that unfit individuals should not be raised by the
state ‘above their natural station’ (p. 83) because of the adverse consequences
for natural selection, he would not have been an ardent supporter of working-
class and adult education in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Nor
would he have embraced the need for secondary education — albeit at
part-time level — to safeguard ‘the fruits of the elementary school’ and
‘shield’ young people from “the competitive struggle’ (Nationality and Gov-
ernment (London, 1918), pp. 250-1).
There are other problems with the book’s thesis. While it might have been
difficult to avoid the influence of Idealist concepts and categories at Oxford
during Murray’s and Zimmern’s formative years there in the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries (and in Murray’s case, at Glasgow, where he
taught alongside Henry Jones), their ideas were shaped by wider forces. In
Murray’s case we find echoes of an ‘aristocratic’ brand of liberalism which
openly eschewed equality as a direct threat to liberty. J.S. Mill is an obvious
case in point, and Morefield acknowledges his influence on Murray. But
when we consider Murray’s concern about the fragility of progress and soci-
eties privileged enough to enjoy it being the exception rather than the rule —
as in his early work, The Rise of the Greek Epic (Oxford, 1907)— the ghost of
Henry Maine also seems alive and well; Murray’s fervent belief in the impor-
tance of leadership, both national and international, follows logically from
this assumption. The voices of Hume and Gibbon are also audible in his
increasing anxiety in the interwar years about the rise of vituperativeness and
fanaticism in politics as the sine qua non of ‘Satanism’, a conception of which
Morefield rightly makes much. The pre- and extra-idealist influences on
Zimmern’s liberalism include Burke (whom Morefield cannot teconcile with
Zimmern’s liberalism, despite Burke’s importance for Whig liberalism in the
 BOOK REVIEWS 729

nineteenth century), Lord Acton and the Jewish exponent of ‘spiritual’

nationalism, Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Ginzberg).
Morefield comes close to illuminating the wellsprings of Murray’s and
Zimmern’s liberalism in a distrust of state power at both national and interna-
tional levels, yet awareness that freedom could not be conceived in abstrac-
tion from communal ends. However, at several points she loses patience —
and detachment — in drawing out the tensions here. For example, she refers
to ‘the complete absence of a state in Murray’s and Zimmern’s international-
ism’ as ‘forc[ing] to the surface liberalisms’ [sic] dirty little secret — its
dependence on some untheorized form of legitimizing community — and at
the same time demonstrat[ing] just how densely paternalistic, hierarchical,
and pre-liberal such a community can be’ (p. 21). Confidence in her judgment
is not restored by an uncritical approach to the ‘people’s state’ in Bolshevik
Russia as the obverse of the ‘vitiated’ forms of liberalism upheld by Murray
and Zimmern (p. 85). We hear much about the power politics from which
Murray and Zimmern characteristically shrank, and at the same time the
Bolshevik readiness to use the power of the state to “‘trans[form] liberal, bour-
geois society in its entirety’ (p. 103). A list of Bolshevik achievements is
accompanied by exasperation with — to the point of ridicule of — Murray’s
and Zimmern’s ‘language of sprit [sic]’ (p. 112). No reference is made to the
brutality of Bolshevik rule affecting women no less than men, the suppression
of the press and nationalist movements, religious persecution and the subordi-
nation of the soviets to the Communist Party. In this light, one begins to sym-
pathize with Murray and Zimmern in their — as Morefield terms it — ‘liberal
unwillingness to imagine political alternatives to sovereignty, to envision a
global economy regulated by workers, and theorize a democratic form of
international governance with real political (not just moral and symbolic)
power’ (p. 15).
Covenants without Swords is a valuable contribution to the growing litera-
ture on interwar ‘idealism’ in the study of international relations. Morefield is
at her best in identifying the shortcomings of E.H. Carr’s critique of the ideal-
ists in his The Twenty Year Crisis, and that of Hans Morgenthau subsequently.
Her focus on the generation gap and consequent intellectual distance between
A.J. Toynbee and his erstwhile tutor, Zimmern, is perceptive. Her analysis of
the limitations of Murray’s and Zimmern’s political understanding is also
illuminating in places.
But the excitable manner in which the book is written detracts from the
weight of its scholarship. Small slips abound. There are some convoluted and
infelicitous sentences (for example, at the top of p. 18, and the second sen-
tence of the second paragraph on p. 223); also some jarring references to the
University of Oxford as a ‘campus’ and the School of Literae Humaniores as
‘the Literae Humaniores’ .The evidence for some of Morefield’s arguments is
slim, not least in relation to the influence of Idealism on Murray and
730 BOOK REVIEWS

Zimmern, for all their admiration of Green et al. as Liberal activists. Murray’s
use of German ideas and phrases in relation to learning and scholarship is in
itself no indicator of an Idealist, Hegelian mind-set (pp. 66—7); indeed, he —
like Zimmern — owed far more here to the great German classical scholar,
Ulrich von Wilomowitz-Moellendorff than Hegel. Morefield’s critique of
present-day attempts to revive empire in the aftermath of 9/11 is often marred
by the ‘idealism’ (i.e naivity) she castigates in Murray and Zimmern. This is
apparent in her belief in the triumph of world order and harmony given a
global polity dedicated to the principle of the ‘universal equality of individu-
als’ (p. 134), a concept which is never adequately defined.
Julia Stapleton
UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM

J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion: Volume I: The Enlightenments of

Edward Gibbon, 1737-1764, ISBN 0 521 63345 1 (boards), ISBN 0 521
79759 4 (pbk.): Volume II: Narratives of Civil Government, ISBN 0 521
64002 4 (boards), ISBN 0 521 79759 4 (pbk.): Volume III: The First Decline
and Fall, ISBN 0 521 82445 1 (boards) (Cambridge University Press: Cam-
bridge, 2005), xiii + 537 pp., £45.00 ($60.00).

These three extraordinary volumes have begun Pocock’s study of Edward

Gibbon. The last of the third volume’s six sections takes us to the opening vol-
ume of Decline and Fall and we are promised more. Although connected,
these three works do not treat either Gibbon’s life or Decline and Fall in any
sequential way; rather they provide ‘a series of contexts in which Gibbon’s
life and the Decline and Fall may be situated . . . a peinture, rather than a recit,
an ecology rather than an etiology of decline and fall; a study of the world in
which it existed, not confined to its genesis in that world’.! Readers of
Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment will have some sense of the ambition and
powers of synthesis displayed in these three volumes, but the breathtaking
recalibration of the sense of scale needed to grasp the enterprise envisaged
here evokes the realization that even the three extant volumes of Capital rep-
resent only the first section of Marx’s project or, and the architectural analogy
is more fitting, that the fifteenth-century Sienese had intended to construct a
nave which would have relegated their already impressive cathedral to the sta-
tus of a mere transept of the new building.
There can be few scholars who can match the range and depth of Pocock’s
scholarship. To his mastery of renaissance and anglophone seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century political and historical writing, Pocock has now added
major — and some minor — historiographical figures of the Francophone
enlightenment and the major figures of Classical, late Classical and medieval

' Vol. I, p. 10.

 BOOK REVIEWS 731

historiography. He presents a truly compendious context within which to

appraise the figure of Gibbon on whom he has worked so long. Decline and
Fall is a notoriously big work, but the scale of the contextualization it is
afforded here makes one wonder whether even it might be overwhelmed. Yet,
another way of viewing the subject of these works (periodically suggested by
Pocock himself)” is not only Gibbon’s masterwork but also the three related
fields of eighteenth-century political and historical discourse which find in it
their synthesis.
Volume I recounts the life and diverse cultural exposure enjoyed or
endured by the young Gibbon, initially through exile and latterly through a
process of ‘self-fashioning’ which equipped and motivated him to write
Decline and Fall. But The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon is also ‘an
attempt to reshape the geography of enlightenment’ to recognize the denomi-
national, regional and even disciplinary forms of it — English, Arminian,
Parisian and Scottish — as they impinged on Gibbon and to vindicate
Venturi’s claim, long championed by Pocock, that Gibbon was the ‘English
Giant of the Enlightenment’.*
Gibbon’s early life and education at Oxford exposed him to religious con-
troversy which was not unconnected with issues of dynastic and regime legiti-
macy (in which Gibbon’s father, with a Jacobite ’45 past, was implicated).
Moreover, at Oxford, theological issues were already being discussed through
appeals to secular historical evidence in ways that can be seen as prefiguring
his own mature account of their role. At a level of personal belief, the evi-
dently uncertain historical status of the Church of England had led the young
Gibbon to convert to Catholicism, following persuasion (through reading
Bossuet) that the Catholic Church’s doctrine and forms of worship were iden-
tical with those of the primitive church and thus carried Christ’s authority
through history to the present. These claims about the relationship between
secular and sacred history not only initially drove Gibbon to Catholicism, but
permeated the historiographical questions he would inherit with his subject
matter. The family response — to send Gibbon to Lausanne for exposure to a
resolutely protestant environment — provide Pocock with the opportunity for
a swift tour of the forms taken by Arminianism in different confessional con-
texts. Uniquely, in England, Arminianism was deployed by the senior clergy
of an established church seeking to retain a quasi-Catholic insistence on
sacred monarchy and an apostolic church,’ this permitted the emergence of
some peculiar, but nevertheless enlightened, and eventually — in a way that

2 Vol. I, p. 369.
3 Vol. I, pp. 8-9 (rather than the much less impressive (and what was for a time more
puzzling) claim that he was merely a ‘Giant of the English Enlightenment’.
4 Rather than, as in Saumur, against such an establishment, or against a Calvinist
establishment (as in Holland) or even a Calvinist non-establishment (as amongst other
Hugenots of the refuge).
432 ; BOOK REVIEWS

was perhaps distinctively English — relaxed, ecclesiological positions, such

as the view that the Pope was neither the anti-, nor the vicar of, Christ, but ‘a
patriarch who had succumbed to the temptations of civil history’ and the
increasingly easy latitudinarianism which saw Christ’s message as wholly
conformable to at least the Hanoverian civil order. In Lausanne Gibbon also
read Locke’s Essay; which Pocock deftly (in the circumstances) glosses as ‘a
treatise at once anti-papal, anti-Platonist, and . . . anti-enthusiastic’.
There was a central political issue in religious history which was to reso-
nate both through the discourses on civil religion and the historiography of the
Christianized Empire to be dealt with in Volumes II and III: ‘if the spirit had
not been incarnate in the flesh, there was no one in the world who could claim
authority from the spirit. If Jesus had been simply a man, social authority had
nothing to fear from him’ (but neither then, had he anything to give to it). Civil
society might have thought it needed the assistance of the Church in ruling,
but such assistance was increasingly coming with the huge costs of the politi-
cal cleavages which religion itself engendered. A society that could authorize
itself politically, would have less need to summon the support — and so incur
the costs of the divisive claims — of faith. But of course the very claim to
self-authorization was divisive, and its ultimate historical implications
unseen, even by those who then espoused it.
Religious controversies, both intra- and inter-confessional, were intricately
bound up with the emergence of scepticism. But scepticism was initially a
weapon deployed by all the parties of religion, and only finally a disposition
opposed to it. The controversies were resolved largely through textual inter-
pretation, a humanist but not an irredeemably secular skill, albeit one which
led in secular directions. A history of the early church written under such a
discipline was likely to ‘depict heresy and orthodoxy alike as products of
human intelligence, not of extraneous authority’. From there it was only a
small step (which some were already taking) to seeing the mind as not so
much inspired by God, or facing Him, but as part of the material creation it
observed. Implicated in these secularized understandings of religious history
and belief was the possibility of collapsing the distinction between God and
his creation, and we get the (to moderns) odd convergence of rationalist
millenarians and materialist pantheists. There is no evidence of Gibbon’s
direct exposure to these views. In Lausanne he moved mostly amongst critical
humanist, but still believing, Arminians; but Pocock’s way of proceeding is to
sketch out the range of positions which a certain set of tenets permits in
advance of encountering them, which we, and Gibbon, duly do on his return to
England. Thus the tour of the theological positions available at the time is
vital, Pocock insists, both to an understanding of the milieux, and to the sub-
stance of a wide range of reformation ecclesiastical histories.
Each of the first two volumes is dedicated to a historian whose apercu finds
vindication and elaboration in the text: Volume I dedicated to Francesco
 BOOK REVIEWS 133

Venturi’s observation that Gibbon was the ‘English giant of the Enlighten-
ment’; Volume II to Arnoldo Momigliano’s claim that Gibbon’s historio-
graphical importance lay in his synthesizing classical narrative, renaissance
erudition and enlightened philosophy. In Volume II Pocock has accordingly
reviewed the enlightened histories of Giannone, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson
and others as ‘culminating in an accepted enlightened narrative’ recounting
how a civilized system of internally competent states had emerged in Europe
in a culture in which commerce and manners supplanted religious conviction
as the determinant sociology of belief. That volume concludes in a discussion
of the location of Decline and Fall in relation to this story.
Volume III seeks to establish the language of historical decline and fall
available to Gibbon through nothing less than a massive overview of the his-
toriography of the fall of the Roman Republic and Empire from the writers of
classical antiquity through to Gibbon’s immediate predecessors. The historio-
graphical tradition of Rome is divided into six phases. The historians of the
period of the process of decline and fall itself are treated in Part One: Sallust,
Tacitus and Appian with walk-on parts from Livy, Josephus, Ammianus and
Eusebius. In Part Two Pocock discusses the complexities of giving a Chris-
tian account of the significance of Rome, and the possibilities of claiming its
continuance — the translatio imperii to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman
Empire — as they appear in Orosius, Augustine and Otto of Freising. In Part
Three the humanist Brunetto Latini, Ptolemy of Lucca and Marsilius all
receive detailed attention. The next two parts deal with the subsequent histori-
ography of the period during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, focusing on
the perceived relationships between the imperial phase of Roman history and
ideas of extensive monarchy in the early modern state, and between the treat-
ment of the dynamics of republic and empire in the Enlightenments of France
and Scotland. Only in the final part — ‘Gibbon and the structure of decline’
— do we encounter Gibbon himself. The enormous historiographical excur-
sus of Volume III then, assembles the elements and traces the emergence of a
conceptual vocabulary which enabled Gibbon not merely to construct Decline
and Fall, but indeed, even to arrive at that conception of his subject matter.
Pocock’s starting point is classical Roman historiography, which ends with
the termination of the Republic itself. Paradoxically that art ‘which should
flourish only in freedom [the writing of history conceived as the acts of free
citizens] attained greatness in recording its loss’, Tacitus, who describes the
transition from Republic to Empire, being its greatest exponent. Tacitus the
political commentator observed that the decline of free republican culture
entails a loss of the rhetorical capacity for citizens publicly to debate and so
initiate political action. Pocock presents this as setting a problem for Tacitus
the historian, for, without the existence of such deliberative discourses and
their role in historical action, it is not clear what history can be about nor how
it should be written, nor who would read and understand it (nor, one might
734 BOOK REVIEWS

add, what would be the motivation for doing so). The history of a society in
which the republic has been lost must therefore be a different kind of history,
and Pocock’s opening theme is to chart the discovery of how that history
could be written. It is in part a self-referential history, about how the condi-
tions of historiography themselves are changed, and shows how history
becomes less a story of what human agents have done, than about what hap-
pens to them, or at least about the way their circumstances affect or prevent
their actions. It is a history that increasingly tends to ascribe cause or signifi-
cance to agencies other than the rhetorical force of the human actor — a his-
tory of military or economic necessity, of barbarian incursions, or of the
inscrutible actions of a God standing outside, but involving Himself in,
human history.
Such historical forces had already made their appearance in the late repub-
lic — although they were not treated historically until later. Appian, writing in
Greek but from earlier Roman sources, identifies what might be called a
Gracchan moment, deploying an analysis inherent in the political programme
of the eponymous agrarian reformers. According to this, a cycle of instability
arises in the state because the increasing concentration of landed wealth gives
rise to both slave-worked Jlatifundia and a landless ex-soldiery. These latter
fought under leaders competing for a political legitimacy itself rendered
uncertain by the way these very circumstances undermined security of prop-
erty. For soldiers sought, and were promised, the reward of colonial settle-
ment in Italy. But since Italian land was already wholly settled, political
power could be acquired only by leaders promising to expropriate it and so
undermine its proprietorial base. This account of decline and fall however,
related as it was essentially to the endogenous demise of the Republic, could
hardly be used to account for the decline and fall of the Empire, which suc-
ceeded it by so many centuries. A distinct and post-Tacitean account,
describes how frontier armies descend on Rome to install their own Emper-
ors. Here there are designs not specifically on Italian land but on the control of
the wider Empire with resultant effects on its stability and continuance. Here
the focus shifts from politics and land-tenure to a deraciné soldiery and the
control of imperial flows of wealth.
The advent of Christianity immeasurably complicated the historio-
graphical repertoire, and the consequent patterns into which it could be
assembled. At one (the later Augustinian) extreme Christianity seemed to
invalidate the historiographical enterprise altogether by denying the ultimate
importance of even the most far-reaching political and military changes. At
the other (Eusebian), it claimed significance for the Empire, at least in estab-
lishing a Western ecumene within which the Christian message could easily
spread, and perhaps according ecclesiastical (although not eschatological)
significance to the adoption of Christianity by both the emperor and the
Empire. This gave rise to the continuing topos of the translatio imperii. If the
 BOOK REVIEWS TS

Empire was significant from the perspective of Christian history, then (for
Christians) the events of the fifth century could not represent a fall but rather
must have been an episode in an on-going Christianized imperium; the draw-
back (for the Roman West) being that the most obvious locus of this continu-
ity lay disconcertingly in Byzantium. Denying this religiously unpalatable
fact involved showing how the relevant imperium came to be transferred to a
Frankish ruler claiming specifically Catholic legitimation. Yet this saving of a
Christian perspective on the Western lands was paradoxically possible only
through the writing of secular history — the history of Justinian’s destruction
of the Gothic Kingdom of Italy, the conflict between the Popes and the icono-
clastic Emperor’s Ravennese lands, the alliance between the Papacy and the
Franks, and the Donation of Constantine — all of which enabled the claim to
be made that a Western, Christian, imperial translatio had taken place.
In incorporating these structural elements Pocock presents the History of
Otto of Friesing as the transition from ancient to modern history. Yet the para-
dox of this history is that in giving central importance to the successful
translatio of imperium it subverted the whole question of decline and fall.
Pocock begins to limn out, within the language of Roman historiography as it
came down to the West, a set of conflicting possibilities. In a secular history
Rome had indeed suffered decline and fall, by contrast in religious terms its
‘rule’ had passed to Charlemagne and thence (admittedly with some disconti-
nuities) to the later medieval Emperors, and according to some was even
locally exercised by the Christian successor to the barbarian Kingdoms. No
decline and fall had taken place.
The re-emergence of decline and fall as a historical event, let alone one that
needed explaining, let alone explaining in secular terms, was therefore con-
ceptually premised on the humanist revival. This not only because it was only
with the recovery of civic ideals that what had happened could be judged to be
a decline or fall, but also because only with humanist techniques could those
ideals be established as different from both classical and prevalent late-
medieval ideals about the desirability of universal empire. Those involved in
so characterizing decline and fall are figures familiar from Pocock’s earlier
work: Leonardo Bruno, Flavio Biondo and Niccolo Machiavelli, albeit here
deployed in a meta-historical rather than a civil narrative.
The writing of history in the ‘Western Monarchies’ under these circum-
stances was then rendered problematic by the fact that their imperium was
obviously not (or at least not obviously) descended from that of the emperor,
nor could they (as did some Italian cities) lay claim to republican origins or
institutions. They were, they now recognized (even the French), each the
product of barbarian invasions of the various Roman provinces, and to write
their history required a history of the interaction of barbarism and surviving or
revived Roman institutions, such as the Papacy or the Civil Law, but no lon-
ger their continuity with it. This had implications not only for any conception
736 BOOK REVIEWS

of decline and fall, but also for the emergence both of conceptions of differ-
ence between present and historical past, and the dynamic by which that dif-
ference came about.
Recognition of the barbarians’ role as sources of modern kingship sat awk-
wardly with the role previously allotted them as agents of decline and fall. But
another Tacitean text, the Germania, could be used to claim that liberty had
barbarian as well as classical origins, and that contractually-based land ten-
ures, rather than membership of the civis, could be the basis of liberty. But
what Pocock calls the ‘radically ancient’? account of civic liberty became
intertwined with the modernizing monarchy through the common medium of
the court as a Tacitean locus of potential corruption and tyranny. For Tacitus
and, potentially, for his early modern exponents, the republic cast an ambiva-
lent and ghostly light over the shadows of courtly corruption — even where
there had never been a republic. The hundred or so early modern commentar-
ies on Tacitus mostly illuminated a quietist scepticism in the face of potential
or actual despotic rule. The appropriate genre here was aphoristic, for the con-
struction of a coherent narrative history of action in a court was problematic.
But another reading, a tacitismo rosso with a real republican animus,
remained a possibility, and a Tacitean analysis and narrative would re-emerge
in the attempts of Lipsius and Harrington to understand — with political
intent — the dynamic of early modern states and their armies.
The Enlightenment, too, revived a renaissance speculation that liberty was
to be sustained by a competitive state system, a feature of the ancient Italian
peninsula that had been obliterated by the rise of Rome. The idea that expan-
sive success destroyed liberty was thus maintained whilst the locus and char-
acter of that liberty was changed from tensions within to tensions between
polities. The early modern state economy, too, raised issues about the rela-
tionship of different kinds of proprietors to the interests of the state in its
war-making capacity. These, however institutionally different, were moralis-
tically sufficiently similar to the worries of the Roman Augustans to have, at
least in England, given that name to the age, and Tacitus ‘ceases to be a source
of aphorisms . . . of resignation, and becomes a critic of the ways in which
monarchy . . . substituted itself for disorder’.
The ‘French narrative’ brings us back to the thought and milieu of Bossuet
explored in Volume I but in which the focus is now projected forward via
Tillement to Montesquieu, who is ambiguously situated both between the his-
toriography of Rome and the Enlightened project of a science of human
nature, and between the thought that whilst commerce may indeed corrupt
pure morals it also softens those of the barbarian. The hint that the ancient
republic — at least that of Rome — was itself barbarian is pursued in the
opening pages of the Discours . . . where, Pocock points out, the early city is

5 Vol. III, p. 267.

 BOOK REVIEWS ise

likened to Tartar encampments: the Romans, like them, lacking the benefits of
commerce, were forced to live on conquest.
The final part of Volume III brings us face to face with Gibbon himself and
his opening depiction of the state of the Empire. Pocock now draws together
the strands of the massive and multiple contexts prepared for this moment. He
points out the richly diverse geographical and chronological significances of
Gibbon’s account. The presentation of the Empire as both unified and yet
(like its community of modern successor states — to whose successor-
identity attention is drawn) diverse, recalling the renaissance suggestions that
the Etruscan multi-state system might have sustained liberty within Italy. The
tour proceeds in two chains — one, which runs from the Spanish and British
coast of the Atlantic east between the Mediterranean and the Rhine-Danube to
Constantinople, will be Christian; the other, running from the Atlantic
Maghreb along the south of the Mediterranean to what would become the
Ottoman lands east and south of the Black Sea, would become Muslim.
The Antonine moment, the ‘happy age of mankind’, is depicted as poised in
an unstable equilibrium generated by forces whose natures must, for Gib-
bon’s contemporaries, have resonated uncomfortably with their own situa-
tion. The rationale of the ‘first (republican) decline and fall’ plays itself out in
the praetorian politico-military anarchy of the third century, to be replaced by
an imperial regime in which even the illusion of senatorial republicanism is
given up. This in turn generates its own instabilities from the separation of the
military and civic roles of citizens. As war became a profession it required the
inculcation of manners, and religion and honour are invoked to supply what
virtue erstwhile had.
Pocock’s work is an intellectual history in an Anglophone tradition and
also contains elements of the German Begriffsgeschichte school. What we
have is a chronologically derived assemblage of historiographical positions
that account for ‘decline and fall’ (or not) in different ways, and with different
concerns, depending on different writers’ conceptions of the nature of history
and the particular historical moment at which the writer perceives himself to
be in relation to that process. But that assemblage itself produces a repertoire
of positions in relation to the persistence, translation, decline or dispersal of
the Empire. This assemblage we can see providing a vocabulary within which
a story can eventually be constructed with the range, power and finality of
Gibbon’s production. But it not only provided Gibbon with a discursive reper-
toire, it also posed him a series of problems deriving from the incom-
mensurability of the different ways in which ‘decline and fall’ had been
conceptually framed.
At the same time there were clearly long-term processes at work that ren-
dered certain versions of decline and fall quite redundant to the way history
related to political legitimation in the early-modern world. Two of these can
be singled out here.
738 BOOK REVIEWS

The decline of a unified Christian world-view made any account of decline

and fall couched in terms of a purely Christian historiography irrelevant to
modern sensibilities. Indeed, outright secularization apart, even the Reforma-
tion, rejecting as it did the authority of a Pope and a Catholic Church which had
persisted through the period of decline and fall, could cease to be interested in
any Eusebian claims about the theological significance of the Christianized
Empire and hence be unconcerned about the lapse of imperium, devoid as it
would then be of Christian import. In this light Gibbon’s view might be seen as
offering comfort to or at least be congruent with the historical perspectives of
protestants seeking to return to a purer, pre-papal, view of Christianity. How-
ever, and despite Gibbon’s deprecation of the intrusion of neo-platonic meta-
physics into Christianity (which deprecation must also have been congenial to
such protestants), his studied irony and determinedly sociological treatment of
religion offered little comfort to any religious partisans. In a curious way the
Reformation played a more important role here than the subsequent, enlighten-
ment processes of secularization, for whilst on the one hand it neutralized the
historiographical importance of the papacy, on the other it fostered the emer-
gence of national confessional communities with their own needs for legitima-
tion; and these, although not reliant on demonstrating the translation of
authority from Rome itself, were nevertheless freed to use Rome in other ways,
which did not involve claiming continuity, to provide legitimations for their
regimes. Nor did these regimes need to be monarchies, and amongst the most
significant syncretisms of the early modern period is that of Christian republi-
canism — drawing on pagan Rome — to be found in Savanorola’s Florence,
Calvin’s Geneva and the English Interregnum.
Secondly, once the fate of Rome was freed from theological implications
and could be seen as discontinuous with that of modernity, the question of a
secular decline and fall re-presented itself as a case study in political science.
The elaboration of the purely social, political and economic forces which
operated on communities to shape their success or failure provided the con-
ceptual resources not merely for the writing of history but for that science of
civil society which was being constructed around Gibbon even as he wrote.
In these first three volumes, Pocock has examined the mental world avail-
able to Gibbon, his exposure to contemporary theological disputes, his read-
ing in Church and religious history, his view of the confrontation between the
approaches to textual and historical evidence of the érudits and of the philoso-
phers, his readings of the different accounts available of the character of civil
government, and the historiography, Christian and secular, of Rome. He
shows, as always, not only the relevance of the discourses on which Gibbon
drew and how they constructed questions for him, but how Gibbon used them
to construct answers and in so doing changed the discourses themselves.
Not only the scale — as mentioned at the start — but the method here is
itself Gibbonian. Consider another scholar’s comment on ‘Gibbon’s artful
 BOOK REVIEWS 7329

sense of how the reader can be encouraged to accept an interpretation as natu-

ral and unquestionable if it has been foreshadowed with sufficient delicacy so
that its eventual statement appears the fulfilment of a meaning already latent
within the narrative’.° This is precisely the effect of Pocock’s own massive
rehearsal here of the conceptual landscape within which Gibbon wrote. Yet,
curiously, it not only renders the argument and preoccupations of Decline and
Fall ‘natural and unquestionable’, but in deepening and enriching at least this
reader’s understanding of the works and discourses on which Gibbon drew, it
also reveals him to be an even greater, more comprehensive and extraordinary
writer than we had before supposed. Moreover, this is, we are promised, only
a prelude to further work which will focus more directly on that text.

Tain Hampsher-Monk
UNIVERSITY OF EXETER

Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the Eng-

lish Revolution (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2004), xii + 402
pp., £45.00/$75.00, ISBN 0 521 84375 8.

No scholar in recent years has done more than Jonathan Scott to reintegrate
the history of classical republicanism with other currents of thought in
seventeenth-century England. His two monographic studies of Algernon Sid-
ney (Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-1677 (Cambridge,
1998) and Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677-1683 (Cam-
bridge, 1991)) together comprise the single most extensive and detailed con-
textual study of any English republican of the period. His historiographical
overview, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century Political Instability in
European Context (Cambridge, 2000), was the boldest attempt since Christo-
pher Hill’s The Century of Revolution, 1603—1714 (Edinburgh, 1961) to place
the radicalism of seventeenth-century political thought within broader devel-
opments in institutional, intellectual and (in a major advance upon Hill) inter-
national history. Now, only five years after that major synthesis, Scott has
drawn together the fruits of two decades of research to provide in Common-
wealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (2004) the
first synoptic account of seventeenth-century English republicanism since
Zera S. Fink’s The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945).
The study of seventeenth-century republicanism has undergone multiple
transformations in the sixty years since Fink published his pioneering study.
The central canon of English republicans would still be recognisable to their
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century admirers — Wordsworth’s ‘Sydney,

6 David Womersley, in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed.
Edward Gibbon (3 vols., Harmondsworth, 1995), Vol. I, Introduction, p. xlviii.
740 BOOK REVIEWS

Marvel, Harrington,/ Young Vane and others that called Milton friend’ — but
it now also includes a host of other figures, among them Marchamont
Nedham, John Streater, Edmund Ludlow, Slingsby Bethel and Henry Neville.
In light of the work of Caroline Robbins, J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn,
Keith Baker and others, the tradition in which these thinkers participated can
be seen to have extended at least as far as the American and French Revolu-
tions, while its roots have been traced to their Greek, Roman, Italian, French
and, increasingly, Dutch antecedents and analogues. It has also inspired a
neo-republican revival in contemporary political theory spearheaded by
Philip Pettit and Quentin Skinner.
Much of the earlier historiography of English republicanism has stressed
the diachronic at the expense of the synchronic, the movement rather than the
moments which, like the flight of Zeno’s arrow, made up a trajectory which
never quite reached its target to create an enduring English (or British) repub-
lic. The work of John Pocock on James Harrington, Blair Worden on
Algernon Sidney, Marchamont Nedham and Edmund Ludlow and of Scott
himself on Sidney returned individual republican thinkers to their specific
political contexts without forgetting that the history of their reception (and in
many cases their redaction and redistribution) contributed crucially to the
meaning of their works. More recently, Patrick Collinson, Markku Peltonen,
David Norbrook and Quentin Skinner have excavated the various strains of
republican or ‘neo-Roman’ thought to be found in England before 1649. In
light of their work, republicanism looks less like a political language in search
of an institutional programme and more like an ideology originating in jocal
political participation, nurtured by the humanist curriculum of every grammar
school and widely transmitted in poetry and pamphlets that could adapt
readily to the changing conditions of the 1640s and 1650s.
Commonwealth Principles is the culmination of this recent effort to com-
bine the synchronic story of English republicanism with the diachronic his-
tory of its transmission. The book comprises three parts which survey
seventeenth-century republicanism contextually, analytically and chronolog-
ically. The chapters in the first part reconstruct the major long-range and
broadly encompassing contexts that Scott judges to be most informative for
understanding the specific character of English republicanism from the 1640s
to the 1670s: its Greek and Roman sources; its entanglement with religious
radicalism; the impact upon it of social and institutional change (especially
the rise of the fiscal-military state); and the geopolitical and economic shifts
(particularly commercial and colonial innovations) that shaped its utopian-
ism. The chapters in the second part cover a canon of central concepts, most of
which are familiar to students of the republicanism of the period (constitu-
tions, liberty, virtue, theories of history and empire) but one of which — resis-
tance theory — has been less often treated in relation to republicanism
because it is usually associated with the tradition of natural jurisprudence.
 BOOK REVIEWS 741

The concluding section traverses the course of the seventeenth century from
the oppositional politics of the decades before the regicide of 1649, by way of
the constitutional and religious debates of the Commonwealth and Protector-
ate to the dashed hopes and revived energies of the Restoration and the Exclu-
sion Crisis, with a coda tracing the emergence of anglophone Whiggism from
the matrix of ‘commonwealth principles’.
Scott’s aim is to redress what he judges to be various imbalances in earlier
studies of seventeenth-century republicanism. In his view, those studies have
been variously too secular, too focused on the Roman heritage of republican-
ism at the expense of the Greek, too often centred on James Harrington and in-
sufficiently contextual because excessively conceptual. Some of these
charges stick more firmly than others. It is certainly true that there has been
relatively little attention paid to the relationship between republicanism and
religion, with the exception of the scholarship on John Milton and Sir Henry
Vane. (J.C.D. Clark laid a similar charge against studies of the eighteenth-
century ‘Commonwealthman’ tradition, in his The Language of Liberty
(Cambridge, 1994), with equal justice.) Likewise, the Greek strain within
classical republicanism has been underexamined by the leading historians of
republicanism, perhaps because of its association with the attempt to smuggle
metaphysics back into either an unanchored modern ethics (by Alasdair Mac-
Intyre) or a disenchanted epistemology (by Charles Taylor); Scott avoids
these pitfalls, in part by relying on the recent work of Eric Nelson, whose The
Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge, 2004), has set a new
standard for all studies in the field. Almost all studies (from Pocock to Nel-
son) of seventeenth-century republicanism have been drawn into the vortex of
Harrington’s work, but Scott resists Harrington’s allure and calls him only ‘a
minority voice’ (p. 61) within seventeenth-century republicanism. It is also
the case that scholars of republicanism have long been drawn to studying it
because of its conceptual content, whether as an alternative to monarchy,
heredity and hierarchy, as a vision of virtue ethics within specific institutions
or as the means of escape from some of the futile dichotomies of contempo-
rary political theory. Yet if republicanism offers no such conceptual
resources, one might ask, why study it all?
Many of the complaints Scott makes against previous scholarship can be
read as protests against a model that rendered Algernon Sidney marginal and
inassimilable and thus made his appeal to radicals, republicans and revolu-
tionaries before the twentieth century incomprehensible. As Scott has shown
in his earlier studies, Sidney was the heir to the ‘militant protestant human-
ism’ (p. 214) of his ancestor Sir Philip Sidney, the earl of Essex, Sir Walter
Ralegh and Francis Bacon. Sidney was also clearly indebted to Aristotle, for
example, in ways that had not been so well established for other republicans
like Harrington. He has never been quarried conceptually and has suffered
neglect for being relatively unsystematic, non-narrative and aphoristic as
742 BOOK REVIEWS

compared with Harrington or Milton, for example. There are no ‘neo-

Sidneyians’ to stand alongside Pocock’s ‘neo-Harringtonians’ in the pan-
theon of political thought. In fairness, it must be said that Commonwealth
Principles does not slight Harrington or Milton either biographically or ana-
lytically. Each is given their due, as are the other republicans, major and
minor, of an age and for all time, who wrote amid England’s seventeenth-
century revolutions. Yet if Scott counterbalances the secularity,
neo-Romanism, conceptualism and Harringtonianism of his predecessors, it
is in the service of a vision of English republicanism within which Sidney
appears exemplary rather than anomalous.
Commonwealth Principles is much more than an effort to imagine a world
safe for Algernon Sidney. Its chronological account of the unfolding of Eng-
lish republicanism across the course of the seventeenth century can be recom-
mended as the best narrative now available. Its sceptical treatments of
republican constitutionalism, conceptions of history and attitudes towards
empire will inject informed controversy into much-debated fields. Its chap-
ters on republicanism and ‘the cause of God’ and on its relation to resistance
theory will now bring studies of English republicanism into more productive
dialogue with recent work on early-modern Dutch and German republican-
ism. Moreover, the depth of Scott’s primary research, his respectful treatment
of previous scholarship and the unpretentious clarity of his prose will make
the book a model for future studies of seventeenth-century political thought.
Some loose ends remain. Scott never fully integrates his account of the spe-
cific argumentative contexts of republican texts with the non-discursive con-
texts he has made central to his conception of the seventeenth century, both
here and in England’s Troubles. As in that previous book, Scott argues for
religious reformation, statebuilding and fiscal-militarism as the informing
forces of the century, across Europe but especially in England and the Dutch
Republic. ‘When English republicanism emerged,’ he states, ‘it did so as
(among other things) the ideology of the first fiscally and militarily modern-
ised English and British state’ (p. 67): the brackets conceal a major conces-
sion that may reveal that the author is as unconvinced by his surrounding
assertion as his reader is likely to be, while the portmanteau term ‘English and
British’ hints at two kingdoms more than the one that otherwise monopolizes
Scott’s attention. The book concludes with a rather breathless comparison of
English and Dutch modernization in which the English appear as heirs to the
‘Dutch “miracle” ’ and thus the co-creators of an ‘Anglo-Dutch achieve-
ment. . . [b]y the consequences of [which] the world would be genuinely
transformed’ (pp. 355, 357). Such conclusions take the reader far beyond
England, the seventeenth century and republicanism, just as they outrun the
real achievements — and the evidence — of Commonwealth Principles.
Whether they are as yet unsubstantiated speculations or merely attention-
grabbing afterthoughts may remain unclear unless Scott turns from the
 BOOK REVIEWS 743

intellectual history he has made his own to offer the comprehensive compara-
tive history of seventeenth-century England and the Netherlands his over-
arching thesis requires.
David Armitage
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton University Press:

Princeton, 2003), xiv + 348 pp., £46.95, ISBN 0 691 11516 8.

Over the last thirty and more years a generation of scholars has worked dili-
gently and energetically to dismantle the caricature version of “The Enlight-
enment’ which had been constructed in the nineteenth century. Across a wide
range of subjects they showed how inappropriate was the epithet which it had
then been given, as ‘The Age of Reason’, and how distinct eighteenth-century
thought was from both the rationalism ofthe previous century and the positiv-
ism of the succeeding century. But even as the arguments and evidence for
this historically more accurate view grew stronger the caricature version itself
rose again from what was now announced to have been a premature burial.
Because this same period (the last decades of the twentieth century) also saw
the emergence of post-modernism, and like all intellectual movements that
felt the need (in the process of defining itself) to demonize an opponent. If you
regard notions of objective truth, scientific knowledge, human nature, per-
sonal identity, etc., as sad, tired (and maybe dangerous) delusions, all needing
to be as it were handcuffed with scare quotes (like scientific ‘knowledge’,
then you did not need to look far for a source of all error. So the old caricature
of “The Enlightenment’ was given a new lease of life and installed as
post-modernism’s Other.
The argument about eighteenth-century thought therefore continues, and
Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment against Empire, dealing with European atti-
tudes to the non-European world, is a valuable contribution to this debate. The
book examines in detail the writings of Diderot, Kant and Herder and the way
in which these present ‘a cohesive set of arguments about international justice
and cultural pluralism’ (p. 7), with cultural differences being understood in
term of ‘the interactions of human freedom and reason with diverse environ-
ments’ (pp. 9, 281). All three rejected the primitivist view of an idealized
Noble Savage, an attitude which Muthu describes as a ‘dehumanizing exoti-
cism’ (p. 12), because it depicted the people in such conditions as
‘hard-wired, instinct-driven creatures’ (p. 52), barely (if at all) different from
‘inhuman . . . mechanized animals’ (p. 68). The fact that these three writers
saw non-Europeans as ‘cultural agents’, endowed with reason and freedom,
making their own worlds in their own ways, meant that they (Diderot, Kant,
Herder) considered them to be no less human than themselves. The clearest
744 BOOK REVIEWS

single example of this non-idealizing attitude was Diderot’s Supplément au

Voyage de Bougainville, which opens with an idyllic picture of Tahitian soci-
ety, in particular because of its sexual freedom, but then reveals how sophisti-
cated were the demographic concerns that lay behind this freedom.
Because of his numerous contributions to the abbé Raynal’s Histoire des
Deux Indes, a multi-volume history of European expansion and colonialism
published in three successively larger editions (1772-80), Diderot was one of
the most widely read writers on this subject. His participation was not known
at the time, since only Raynal’s name appeared on the title page (and only in
recent years have all his contributions been identified). They cover an enor-
mously wide range of topics and are infused with a passionate sense of indig-
nation at the inhumanity and cruelty that accompanied European expansion:
the horrors of slavery and the world-wide effects of ‘the fanaticism of religion
and the spirit of conquest’ (p. 111). Given the level of censorship that existed
then in absolutist France the fact that Diderot was writing under the cover of
anonymity gave him a freedom which he otherwise attained only in the writ-
ings he never published in his lifetime. But his contributions to the Histoire
were also marked by a pessimism (based on the contemporary situation) and
fatalism (reflecting his own materialist determinism), as Muthu recognizes
(pp. 118-19).
Herder’s magnum opus, his /deen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der
Menschheit (1784-91), has an even greater range and energy, and is notable
for its confidence in the future. This was due in part to Herder being a genera-
tion younger than Diderot and therefore coming of age at the time when the
modern idea of progress was taking shape. But it was also an aspect of his
deist confidence that God is present in human beings individually and human
history generally; he often makes use of the principle of plenitude as well as
the topos of man being made ‘in the image of God’. Muthu rather underplays
this spiritual dimension of Herder’s notion of Humanitdt, but otherwise gives
an excellent account of the way the /deen combine a ‘core humanity’ with a
‘plurality’ of life-worlds (p. 232), and so made it possible for Herder to assert
that ‘the American [Indian] and the Negro are our brothers’ (p. 232).
The discussion of Kant is less satisfactory. In part this is because it is almost
as long as the chapters on Diderot and Herder together, and seems unnecessar-
ily elaborate; but there is also a certain loss of focus. The distinction between
the anthropological/historical and the normative/philosophical is not always
clear; less is needed about Kant’s different uses of Humanitdt and more could
be said about cosmopolitan right. There is also the problem of a notion of equal-
ity that relies so heavily on rationality (p. 130), since that opens the door to lev-
els of differentiation and discrimination which are not discussed here. It is a
lamentable fact that Kant’s concept of race seems to have been, contra Muthu
(p. 183), both ‘hierarchical and biological’, and while the 1788 Teleologische
Prinzipien essay may not contain ‘arguments’ about the pre-eminence of whites
 BOOK REVIEWS 745

(p. 184) it does contain assertions of the inferiority of blacks. Likewise, while it
is true that ‘the more the universal category of the human was particularized the
more meaningful and robust it became in practice’ (p. 123), that could mean
that it was applied adversely as well as favourably, and this was surely the case
with Kant’s occasional remarks about negroes.
In his well-known comment about his debt to Rousseau Kant wrote that the
former taught him ‘to honour human beings’ for their simple humanity. This
can be seen to have been due to several aspects of Rousseau’s work, among
them his concern for the poor and uneducated and his hatred of privilege, hier-
archy and inequality in general. For him European imperialism combined the
evils of the ancien régime and modern commerce together, which is why his
writings were an inspiration not merely to many at the time of the French Revo-
lution but also to those active in le tiersmondisme of the twentieth century. It is
curious therefore that this book gives so little attention to Rousseau. The reason
lies in a misplaced belief that /’homme sauvage of the Discours sur l’inégalité
was only another version of the Noble Savage (p. 49), a ‘hard-wired automaton’
(p. 34) or ‘mechanical animal’ (p. 68). Muthu overlooks the fact that while two
of the characteristics Rousseau attributed to natural man (self-preservation and
repugnance at others’ suffering) were qualities that humans held in common
with animals, there were two others (freewill and what he called ‘perfectibil-
ity’) which were unique to humans. Mutu refers to the latter (pp. 36, 48) but
oddly does not see how that conflicts with his other comments and his general
view of Rousseau’s thought. Apart from this omission this is an admirable
study, handling an important subject with insight and care.
John Hope Mason
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY

Peter Ives, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (Pluto: London and Ann
Arbor, MI; Fernwood: Winnipeg, Manitoba, 2004), xiv + 204 pp., £16.99,
ISBN 0 7453 1665 4.

Gramsci’s thought grew enormously popular after the Second World War,
just as the ‘linguistic turn’ entered decisively into philosophical and social
scientific debates. The dissemination of his ideas about ‘hegemony’ and the
cultural preconditions for class power in the advanced capitalist states of the
‘West’ parallelled — indeed, they partially enabled — a wider and increas-
ingly theoretical interest in the role of language, ideology and ‘discourse’ in
explaining human subjectivity and social behaviour. Yet the fact that Gramsci
was himself educated as a linguist and that his Prison Notebooks contain
numerous reflections on language both as a practice of communication and as
a model for social analysis has, for the most part, been entirely missed, cer-
tainly in Anglophone debates. Instead, his observations about culture and
746 BOOK REVIEWS

ideology have been absorbed into analyses that presuppose the impact, above
all, of Ferdinand de Saussure’s ‘structural’ linguistics, ignoring the distinc-
tive pre-Saussurian model he himself employed.
Peter Ives redresses this situation in his illuminating and timely study, the
second volume in a highly promising series on Gramsci and specific themes
edited by Joseph Buttigieg. Ives makes Gramsci-the-linguist the focus of his
reconstruction of the Italian’s major political concepts, taking us through his
university training under the ‘neolinguistics’ of Matteo Bartoli, his journalis-
tic interventions against Esperanto as a young socialist critic and, finally, trac-
ing the elements of his linguistic interests among the scattered observations of
the Notebooks in the 1930s. Ives then turns to the issue of Gramsci’s contem-
porary relevance, comparing him to more recent language-centred social
theories in the work of Foucault and Derrida, as well as the neo-Gramscian
‘post-Marxism’ of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.
Being a Sardinian who had to learn Italian, Gramsci’s linguistic interests
were not strictly academic. Indeed, as Ives makes clear, the language question
was central to the debates about the minimal extent to which the Italian state
had been founded upon a common national culture. The imposition of the
‘Italian’ language — in fact, a variant of Tuscan — on a variety of regional
dialects symbolized the wider misfortunes of national unification that intel-
lectuals like Gramsci sought to remedy. His analysis of class politics in terms
of the struggle for cultural and political hegemony — arguably Gramsci’s
most enduring legacy — reflected precisely this sense of the dangers of forced
imposition and the need instead to combine political leadership with a linguis-
tic assimilation that creatively absorbs, rather than obliterates, dialects. Thus
Gramsci’s training in linguistics prepared the way for his concept of hege-
mony as much as did, for example, his anti-economistic Marxism or his inter-
est in Italy’s Southern Question.
Neolinguistics analysed language change in terms of the historical forma-
tion of word forms that would ‘irradiate’ from geographical locations, gradu-
ally acquiring ‘prestige’ and ‘hegemonic’ dominance. Language was
conceived as the outcome of socio-cultural struggles between different social
groups. Forging a path between strictly ‘synchronic’ and ‘diachronic’
approaches (emphasizing the structural and agential factors in language
respectively) neolinguistics was itself already a metaphor for cultural and
political unification. Whereas Saussure followed the synchronic model, ana-
lysing language as a closed system of differences, the neolinguists enquired
into the complex formation of relatively structured systems and the traces of
historical variation and conflict they retained. Although they shared with
Saussure a rejection of the ‘nomenclature’ model of language whereby words
stand for ‘external’ objects, the neolinguists’ interest in the contingent, social
origins of languages opened a field of enquiry in which systematic unity could
not be presupposed. It is this peculiar orientation, argues Ives, that accounts
 BOOK REVIEWS 747

for Gramsci’s nuanced style of hegemonic analysis in the Notebooks and

which makes him open to comparison with later, post-Saussurian analysts of
language and discourse.
Ives’s argument is that Gramsci’s later analyses of hegemony reflect the
distinction he makes between ‘normative’ and ‘spontaneous’ grammars, that
is, languages as either closed systems or as open-ended, creative responses to
historical experiences. For Gramsci, no system was so closed that it left no
historical traces of its spontaneous formation. But spontaneity could not
account for language as a more or less coherent structure. By emphasizing the
dialectical interplay between the two, Gramsci developed a logic that, Ives
argues, applied also to hegemony: namely, that domination involves the
ongoing assimilation of diverse meanings and spontaneous experience, not
their eradication. All of his major political concepts — state and civil society,
wars of ‘position’ and ‘manoeuvre’, coercion and consent, etc. — were
broadly congruent with this view, informed as it was by a sense of the subtle
interplay of culture and power.
When placed alongside contemporary post-Saussurian linguistic models,
Gramsci’s approach can be seen to share many of the same anti-essentialist
concerns — particularly the rejection of a strict differentiation between ‘ma-
terial’ and ‘symbolic’ realms — but his is decidedly less abstract and more
grounded in historical contingency. Ives offers a lucid and sympathetic
account of the similarities and differences between Gramsci’s linguistics and
those of Foucault and Derrida. But he argues that Laclau and Mouffe’s cri-
tique of Gramsci’s purported class essentialism doesn’t hold up. Gramsci’s
materialism was heavily mediated by his sensitivity to cultural and historical
variation and such an accusation, claims Ives, fails adequately to grasp this. It
is a fair claim: Laclau and Mouffe arguably interpreted Gramsci wholly
within their own post-structuralist counterposition to Marxist thought. But I
disagree that their discourse theory somehow reinforces ‘apologies for capi-
talism’ because of its overt refusal to privilege economic factors. Any anti-
economism, Gramsci’s included, is susceptible to that rather casual criticism.
Laclau and Mouffe’s in particular is aimed precisely at deconstructing any
kind of ‘naturalness’ to social phenomena, economic or otherwise.
Such quibbles aside, there is no doubt that Ives has made a vitally important
contribution to Gramscian studies, providing, in a sense, the ‘missing link’
that explains why Gramsci’s arguments seem so attractive even to contempo-
rary language-centred social theory, but also why his work is not wholly
assimilable to structuralist or poststructuralist enterprises.
James Martin
GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON
 INDEX TO TITLES

Aristotle, Diderot, Liberalism and How the Sophists Taught Virtue:

the Idea of ‘Middle Class’: A Exhortation and Association
Comparison of Two Contexts of D Dit CORY cicero ees eet 1
Emergence of a Metaphorical Hume and Rawls on the Circum-
Formation stances and Priority of Justice
Be ACO VSD ith Sasi Bees 303 Avi Ster veth aty eae core ce 664
Augustine and the Rhetoric of Justice, Power and Athenian Imperi-
Roman Decline
alism: An Ideological Moment in
PETRA, realest Bi, igs ae 586
Thucydides’ History
Between Advantage and Virtue: ESPORAORSISS,: . SIGUE. Tank 21
Aristotle’s Theory of Political
Locke on Language in (Civil) Society
Friendship
DAWOR OTe oe ger tea 307
"Od ak PO a Ne er 565
Book that Never Was, The: Machiavelli’s Missing Romulus and
Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Murderous Intent of The Prince
the Romans in Historical Context TIVE PATENT este ee 625
Objects of Ideology, The: Historical
Defending Christian Fellowship: Transformations and the
William of Ockham and the Changing Role of the Analyst
Crisis of the Medieval Church 5.) COST as eau eee
ES TAL [1S OTe EE 607 Republicanism in the University of
Economic Nationalism and the Krakow in the Eighteenth Century
‘Spirit of Capitalism’: Civic Col- OTT Ld Ree eae ea ee 646
lectivism and National Wealth in Structure of Marx and Engels’
the Thought of John Fortescue Considered Account of Utopian
CINCOEITAGH co coreeins «aaa 266 Socialism, The
Freedom, Desire and Revolution: DD LCODON to ace A elie 443
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Early
Theory of the Partisan, The: Carl
Marxist Ethics
Schmitt’s Neglected Legacy
P PIGCKICUREs nts was ne es 696
GaSlomp: 9cching ibe Gettin 502
From ‘Republicanism’ to ‘Democ-
racy’: China’s Selective Adoption Tocqueville’s Brief Encounter with
and Reconstruction of Modern Machiavelli: Notes on the Floren-
Western Political Concepts tine Histories (1836)
(1840-1924) Mi Richter weantcetaian teks 426
Co site OF Line eee 467 Tragedy as Political Theory: The Self-
Gladstone, Religious Freedom and Destruction of Antigone’s Laws
Practical Reasoning DEPAUL sO Oe 377
Bd: LOKENOV ree het oe 90 Two Cities and Two Loves:
Grotius and Pufendorf on the Right Imitation in Augustine’s Moral
of Necessity Psychology and Political Theory
ds, RQUIET ree ge ee eee eae 284 DOR Parrish ove te tens 209
 ANNUAL INDEX 749

Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, Was Ptolemy of Lucca a Civic

The: Aristotle’s Politics V as an Humanist? Reflections on a
Newly-Discovered Manuscript of
EXG CipCie Re EU: 189 Hans Baron
Was Fichte an Ethnic Nationalist? J. La Salle & J.M. Blythe... . 236
On Cultural Nationalism and its What’s in a Name? Republicanism
Double and Conservatism in France
PRADICAdEeR 25 05k Sok 334 1871-1879
MOT OWIUIS oie oe aE 120

INDEX TO AUTHORS
ADIZAACHis uw igeais ae aee dees 334 PREO Be Si ae odes tee ee 565
Was Fichte an Ethnic National- Between Advantage and Virtue:
ist? On Cultural Nationalism and Aristotle’s Theory of Political
its Double Friendship
AdQMOVSKY, Tetjesan cates «ia 303 ULES C2)AC PMS ET 467
Aristotle, Diderot, Liberalism and
From ‘Republicanism’ to
the Idea of ‘Middle Class’: A
‘Democracy’: China’s Selective
Comparison of Two Contexts of
Emergence of a Metaphorical Adoption and Reconstruction of
Formation Modern Western Political
Concepts (1840-1924)
DCRICACE Te Soe oe ee ee 696
Freedom, Desire and Revolution: E@SQUE HIE Fae ee ee 236
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Early Was Ptolemy of Lucca a Civic
Marxist Ethics Humanist? Reflections on a
PEED, NV. adcsicgintsous, eevee ere 236 Newly-Discovered Manuscript of
Was Ptolemy of Lucca a Civic Hans Baron
Humanist? Reflections on a L2OPOWU SD) one Sou hte oe ee 443
Newly-Discovered Manuscript of The Structure of Marx and
Hans Baron
Engels’ Considered Account of
OREN DD Ps ok acta ty: Jatact decide 1 Utopian Socialism
How the Sophists Taught Virtue:
Exhortation and Association
Listers ANsoe FCS Sreece 664
Hume and Rawls on the Circum-
DOW SON mE en eet cre cae os 397
stances and Priority of Justice
Locke on Language in (Civil)
Society +LingOHR A Oe ee ee 467
GORVEl wE ae ie ee ere 189 From ‘Republicanism’ to
The Uses and Abuses of Philoso- ‘Democracy’: China’s Selective
phy: Aristotle’s Politics V as an Adoption and Reconstruction of
Example Modern Western Political
LQWKINSYMS 2 A 120 Concepts (1840-1924)
What’s in a Name? Republican- LOVENZOSD TORSO AAO ok 90
ism and Conservatism in France Gladstone, Religious Freedom
1871-1879 and Practical Reasoning
750 ANNUAL INDEX

Murphy AREA <0 LBs 586 Richtee Mires” (27 eee 426
Augustine and the Rhetoric of Tocqueville’s Brief Encounter
Roman Decline with Machiavelli: Notes on the
Florentine Histories (1836)
INEGETINGN AC Gata ee 266
Rundenppsrs, Lone} Sh eee 646
Economic Nationalism and the
Republicanism in the University
‘Spirit of Capitalism’: Civic Col-
of Krak6w in the Eighteenth
lectivism and National Wealth in
Century
the Thought of John Fortescue
UIE dol fala Aid aa nant one ee 284
GHENT RI Vie Rea ere 625 Grotius and Pufendorf on the
Machiavelli’s Missing Romulus Right of Necessity
and the Murderous Intent of The SO SUMAN el gues 'svain oe Soom ola 607
Prince Defending Christian Fellowship:
Parris Ms os ces Che kee 209 William of Ockham and the
Two Cities and Two Loves: Crisis of the Medieval Church
Imitation in Augustine’s Moral DLOMIE G. eeh meter ae 502
Psychology and Political Theory The Theory of the Partisan: Carl
Schmitt’s Neglected Legacy
PPOGORSIK, foie ok As tak eeeec al
Talshit Geo an ee 520
Justice, Power and Athenian
The Objects of Ideology: Histori-
Imperialism: An Ideological
cal Transformations and the
Moment in Thucydides’ History
Changing Role of the Analyst
Raner Atak sbee ee 43 1 Oct) OOM ES meron yiles fom eee 377
The Book that Never Was: Tragedy as Political Theory: The
Montesquieu’s Considerations on Self-Destruction of Antigone’s
the Romans in Historical Context Laws

INDEX TO BOOKS REVIEWED

Abu-Rabial,Mic4. 1.3 cieomniens 366 Browning: Gk ee eee eee 553

Contemporary Arab Thought: Rethinking R.G. Collingwood,
Studies in Post-1967 Arab Intel- Philosophy, Politics and the
lectual History. Reviewed by Unity of Theory and Practice.
Jeremy Salt. Reviewed by Peter Johnson.
Bentham ee eee 364
Carter, Mth i iam te a ast Ga 363
Rights, Representation, and Re-
T.H. Green and the Development
form: ‘Nonsense upon Stilts’ and
of Ethical Socialism. Reviewed
other Writings on the French
Revolution. Reviewed by by Avital Simhony.
Jean-Fabien Spitz. Crook, M., Doyle, W.,
Breazeale & Rockmore (ed.). . . 374 & Forrest; A: (ed.)..«3 wa 5370
New Essays on Fichte’s Later Enlightenment and Revolution:
Jena Wissenschaftslehre. Essays in Honour of Norman
Reviewed by P.A. Monaghan. Hampson. Reviewed by C. Jones.
 ANNUAL INDEX Tou

DIGet Me iic.g ou FR RRR 181 Hughes-Warrington, M. ...... 553

Tocqueville, Democracy, and ‘How Good an Historian Shall I
Social Reform. Be?’ R.G. Collingwood, The
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu. Historical Imagination and
Bdwardsnes ieee:
x3 ee 561 Education.
The Statesman’s Science: Reviewed by Peter Johnson.
History, Nature, and Law in the Hunter & Saunders (ed.)...... 156
Political Thought of Samuel Natural Law and Civil Sover-
Taylor Coleridge. eignty. Moral Right and State
Reviewed by John Morrow. Authority in Early Modern Politi-
RasoltuG. 2 os be cdo eee 728 cal Thought. Reviewed by
The Limits of History. Wolfgang E.J. Weber.
Reviewed by Joseph Canning.
Fiylands te (ed. tite oe. eee = 149
Branco Ps! 2st
3 Aiea 724 The Enlightenment: A
Michael Oakeshott: An Introduc- Sourcebook and Reader.
tion. Reviewed by Richard Reviewed by John Hope Mason.
Mullender.
PUMEEAOR: Spee. ares eek 556
Language and Hegemony in
Kuhn vs. Popper: The Struggle
Gramsci. Reviewed by J. Martin.
for the Soul of Science.
Reviewed by Milja Kurki. Janata, enw ee ees 372
Gannett alan eet 181 Democracy Growing Up:
Tocqueville Unveiled: The Histo- Authority, Autonomy and Passion
rian and His Sources for ‘The in Tocqueville’s Democracy in
Old Regime and the Revolution’. America.
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu. Reviewed by Delba Winthrop.
God wins Wen3: ee eee 186 Kahane: Sinn sec eee
oie 160
History of the Commonwealth of Liberalism in the Nineteenth
England. Century: The Political Culture of
Reviewed by Blair Worden. Limited Suffrage.
Goeischel Was wrens. heath 162 Reviewed by Michael Freeden.
Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendels- CoileeBee eee ee SUN 150
sohn, Lessing, and Heine. The State of the Political:
Reviewed by Stephen B. Smith. Conceptions of Politics and the
Harris, Jaco jas Bie. Sahel. 173 State in the Thought of Max
Civil Society in British History. Weber, Carl Schmitt and Franz
Reviewed by Andrew Vincent. Neumann.
Heloctv eS: mice. SORA 553 Reviewed by Eckard Bolsinger.
Action as History, The Historical Katromilides, PsMa(Cd is ae 152
Thought of R.G. Collingwood. From Republican Polity to
Reviewed by Peter Johnson. National Community: Reconsid-
Hope Mason, J... <4 ee 8h ate 559 erations of Enlightenment
The Value of Creativity. Political Thought.
Reviewed by David Wootton. Reviewed by B. Fontana.
752 ANNUAL INDEX

Scheuermann, Miry, aacseveere 169

Enlightenment Phantasies: In Praise of Poverty: Hannah
Cultural Identity in France and More Counters Thomas Paine
Germany, 1750-1914. and the Radical Threat.
Reviewed by P.A. Monaghan. Reviewed by Robert Lamb.
Morefield es atseageee eens 726 Scots 24h oi ee en 139
Covenants without Swords: Commonwealth Principles:
Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit Republican Writing of the English
of Empire. Revolution.
Reviewed by Julia Stapleton Reviewed by David Armitage.
Sealanders [SGicssaren.
cet lets 167
Muthiics: Attiteink eis cates 743 The Failed Century of the Child:
Enlightenment against Empire. Governing America’s Young in
Reviewed by John Hope Mason the Twentieth Century.
Noyaliste.aeprst.
aw sk ani eke 374 Reviewed by Andrew Lockyer.
Fichte Studies, ed. J. Kneller. Sonenscher, Mp (diya o LS
Reviewed by P.A. Monaghan. Sieyés: Political Writings, includ-
ing the Debate between Sieyés
PococksJ:GuAcess* sete 730
and Thomas Paine in 1791.
Barbarism and Religion.
Reviewed by Murray Forsyth.
Reviewed by Iain Hampsher-
Monk. Stott; AVR SOR Se 169
Hannah More: The First Victorian.
Prokhoviikesares es ie eee 154 Reviewed by Robert Lamb.
Spinoza and Republicanism. Aregenza Ane Ses eee 147
Reviewed by Hans W. Blom. Michael Oakeshott on Hobbes: A
Rolgair gre.) ee ete hee ear fo | Study in the Renewal of Philo-
Charles de Rémusat: Certitudes sophical Ideas.
et impasses du libéralisme Reviewed by Steven Gerencser.
doctrinaire. Wahnbaecki i... or eee 17
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu. Luxury and Public Happiness:
Political Economy in the Italian
Reollseing IDET) Ge UGS Sesoe SEM
Enlightenment.
La pensée politique doctrinaire
Reviewed by Christopher Berry.
sous la Restauration: Charles de
Rémusat — Textes choisis. Waldron; Ja Savane et eee: 171
Reviewed by Aurelian Craiutu. God, Locke, and Equality:
Christian Foundations in Locke’s
Political Thought.
Classical Utilitarianism from Reviewed by Clement Fatovic.
Hume to Mill. Weisens Bite ccs pene 158
Reviewed by James E. Crimmins. Charles II and the Politics of
Runciman, D. & Ryan, M. (ed.) 179 Access. Reviewed by John Miller.
FW. Maitland: State, Trust and Williams} Dr(ed, )es.5 Ree: 149
Corporation. The Enlightenment.
Reviewed by Julia Stapleton. Reviewed by John Hope Mason.
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 CONTENTS

565 Between Advantage and Virtue: Aristotle’s

Theory of Political Friendship E. Irrera

586 Augustine and the Rhetoric of Roman Decline A.R. Murphy

607 Defending Christian Fellowship: William of Ockham

and the Crisis of the Medieval Church T. Shogimen

625 Machiavelli’s Missing Romulus and the Murderous

Intent of The Prince J.M. Parent

646 Republicanism in the University of Krakow

in the Eighteenth Century B. Rundell

664 Hume and Rawls on the Circumstances and

Priority of Justice A. Lister

696 Freedom, Desire and Revolution: Alasdair MacIntyre’s

Early Marxist Ethics P. Blackledge

721 Book Reviews

748 Annual Index

Volume XXVI_ Issue 4

Winter 2005
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