On Friedrich Meinecke's Cosmopolitanism and the National State

A few months ago, some friends and I read Friedrich Meinecke's wonderful Cosmopolitanism and the National State, originally published in 1907. The work is an intellectual history of German nationalism, running from the reaction to the French Revolution through Bismarck and German unification. The first half is of particular note, as it traces rival strands of nationalism (liberal and conservatism) through such figures as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, Johann Gotlieb Fichte, Adam Müller, and Karl Ludwig von Haller. The treatment of each thinker is sensitive, if not comprehensive. And on the whole the book serves as a wonderful guide to German theories of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Meinecke himself is a great German nationalist, as his later, more famous works make clear. I want to flag here a few themes I found striking from this book. 

First, the role of the French Revolution in creating nationalism.

According to a common, Whiggish view of things, Western civilization has evolved (relatively linearly) from the more particularistic and tribal to the more universalistic and cosmopolitan. Of course, as with most Whiggish interpretations, that narrative isn't just simplistic, it's totally wrong. For Meinecke, it is clear that the eighteenth century is the century of individualism and cosmopolitanism. The nineteenth century, the century of nationalism.

The key event that sparks the transition from cosmopolitanism to nationalism is the French Revolution: "the French were the first to experience the desire for nationhood" (12). That much is clear if we think about the great trio of Revolutionary demands: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Fraternity, in particular, stands out as a nationalist ideal. Not just a demand for universal brotherhood, the French Revolution was a call for the French People to exercise their sovereign right as a people to govern themselves. Thus, Meinecke claims, the French Revolution unleashed a liberal form of nationalism, a sense of the people's identity and destiny. Liberal nationalism is, ultimately, a commitment to self-determination and popular sovereignty.

Meinecke goes further, not simply periodizing an age of cosmopolitan individualism and an age of nationalism. He claims that it is "no coincidence" that an era dedicated to cultivating individual, moral personality should naturally give rise to appeals to natural character and greatness. He writes of this as a period of personal development, transitioning from a passive, vegetative state to an autonomous, moral strength:

The nation drank the blood of free personalities, as it were, to attain personality itself. It is of no consequence here that this modern individualism was divided in itself. Its one branch, deriving from natural law and democratically oriented, sought to achieve equal rights for all, while its other branch, aristocraticlaly oriented in an intellectual sense, sought to achieve the liberation and elevation of the best minds. Democratic individualism could use the idea of the nation to fight all violations of social equality, and the same idea enabled aristocratic individualism to empathize with the masses, perceiving the forces lying dormant in them and embracing an ideal image of the people, if not the people themselves. Whether or not individualism actually achieved all its goals was not as important as the fact that everything the free and creative personality did served the nation by making its total life richer and more individual (15).

The striving for individual self-improvement and development ultimately gives rise to a sense of national destiny and a demand for national greatness: "If the full consciousness of a great national community is once awakened and raised to an intense longing for national realization, then this longing is like a flood that pours itself into everything it can fill and is not satisfied until everything is nationalized that is at all capable of nationalization" (14).

The French Revolution's ideal of liberal nationalism lives on, Meinecke claims, in the thought of such thinkers as Ernest Renan (see my earlier post), and clearly we see its legacy in the great liberal nationalism of Woodrow Wilson.

This leads to the second theme of note: The contrast between liberal and romantic nationalism.

The kind of liberal nationalism embodied by the French Revolution is fundamentally focused on democratic self-government, popular sovereignty, and institutional autonomy. It is a form of political nationalism. The conservative reaction to the French Revolution produces a turn away from the political state, and toward the cultural nation. According to the revolutionary ideal, to be a part of the demos just means to be an active citizen engaged in the work of crafting a common life. But German conservatives reacting against Jacobinism grew increasingly disillusioned with the cheap, shallow, mechanistic vision of national life entailed by procedural appeals to popular sovereignty.

That wasn't just a consequence of reaction. For much of the second half of the eighteenth century, German theorists (most notably Herder) had attempted to vindicate organic, cultural personality. To be German was not simply to be a part of some institutional regime, but to belong to the German volk. 

The problem with liberal nationalism is that "the nation was not much more here than a subdivision of humanity, a frame built out of abstract principles and without individual substance" (30). The popular plebiscite, in Renan's famous suggestion, was the ultimate institutional expression of liberal nationalism. But that brute, political, institutional vision has nothing to do with the true bonds of national identity. Paraphrasing Ranke (one of the figures he most favors), Meinecke writes: 

The subjective element seems to be completely extinguished here, the element of the conscious will that usually has an important role elsewhere in the rise in the rise of modern national consciousness. The principle is not: Whoever wants to be a nation is a nation. It is just the opposite: A nation simply is, whether the individuals of which it is composed want to belong to that nation or not. A nation is not based on self-determination but on pre-determination (205).

Liberal nationalism is tied to subjective understandings (institutionally expressed through the plebiscite) of the community as a political people. But it has nothing to say about a deeper identity of the cultural nation. 

Edmund Burke articulated an influential version of this charge in his polemic against the French Revolution. At least as he was interpreted by romantic conservatives like Adam Müller and Friedrich Gentz, Burke:

struck the first decisive blow against conceptions of the state that the eighteenth century had formed on the basis of natural law and added elements to all speculation about the state that are permanently relevant. He taught us deeper respect and understanding for the irrational components of the life of the state, for the power of tradition, customs, instinct, and impulsive feelings (101).

The French path to national self-identity ran through the French Revolution and therefore the demands of liberal, democratic self-government. For France, the political nation came first. For Germany, on the other hand, a sense of nationalism emerged not from a history of political autonomy, but from a sense of a distinctive cultural patrimony and heritage. This sense of cultural Germanness would only become a full, political nationalism once united with the historic experience of the Prussian state:

The peculiar situation in Germany was that the only usable foundations for a modern state were not available in the German nation but in the Prussian state. However, this state alone could not supply the intellectual forces that it needed for its nationalization but had to take them from the wide spectrum of the German cultural nation (33).

Our third theme is Meinecke's critique of an excessively romantic, cultural vision of German identity.

Figures like Herder, Humboldt, Novalis, and Schlegel celebrate the German cultural nation. In its more eighteenth century variety (Humboldt), the German spirit represents the highest form of human achievement and individualism. The German intellectuals have discovered a romantic humanism that drives not just German national greatness, but the cause of humanity. Gradually, however, this vision grows more particularistic. Meinecke traces the increasing emphasis on German cultural personality as an end in itself. The German spirit is not merely the vanguard of the human spirit, but a valuable, distinctive person, a "macroanthropos." 

Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define, but a key strand that Meinecke insists on is "the idea that the universe contains in itself an endless profusion of individualities and that its unity is not loosened or shattered by this but is instead strengthened by it, so that the universe is in itself an individual and a personality" (50).

Novalis and Schlegel (in addition to Schiller) are the key figures in this tradition. But Meinecke ultimately finds their emphasis on personality and culture excessively anti-political. While the nation is not merely a set of institutional forms, it also is more concrete (and powerful) than a vague, mysterious sense of spiritual identity. 

One symptom of romantic nationalism's unserious naiveté is its tendency to idealize the culturally particularistic if anti-political social character of medieval Christendom. Novalis' 1799 essay on "Christianity or Europe" is of particular note. His love of the Middle Ages is simultaneously a love of particularity and universality. Schlegel's "Essay on the Concept of Republicanism" runs further, defending not merely a universal catholic state standing above and uniting a politically fractured Christendom, but a world state governed by the postulates of reason. His romanticism ultimately makes him more cosmopolitan than Kant!

For Schlegel, the Holy Alliance is the most plausible means of re-establishing an ideal of Christendom, one that acts in a powerful, united way while preserving cultural diversity and particularity.

Catholicism, Meinecke insists, is largely to blame for the unseriousness of this romantic, feudal nostalgia. For while Schlegel and Novalis consistently condemn the flatness of absolutist, French Revolutionary cosmopolitan rationality, they turn to their own version of an equally dangerous universalism:

The cosmopolitan Enlightenment had already had an ethical and—cum grano salis—religious substance. Romantic universalism, too, was ethical and highly religious. The ethos was fundamentally different in some respects, but Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers had a common enemy in what they thought was the unethical state of the ancient regime but what was in reality the power state in general (70).

In associating Catholic moral universalism with liberal cosmopolitanism, Meinecke follows Carl Schmitt, whose Political Romanticism is often cited. Universalisms of any sort are dangerously anti-political. They invoke an airy realm of reason, while inclining toward social and cultural forms of particularism divested of real political power. The romantics, humanists, and Catholics are ultimately too anti-statist. 

One extreme version of this anti-statist commitment to Catholic moral universalism and radical particularism is the great reactionary Karl Ludwig von Haller. Haller is intensely critical of the modern state, which he credits to Hobbes and Rousseau. Modern liberal nationalism posits some kind of popular sovereignty as the ultimate basis of authority and legitimate power. But that is nonsense, Haller insists. It ignores the reality of rulers and ruled. Haller wishes to restore a medieval sense of direct, interpersonal hierarchy. He wants to do away with any public law conceptions of right, and to replace them all with direct claims of private law. 

There is no such thing as a liberal demos capable of self-government, just as there is no such thing as a conservative, romantic cultural macroanthropos personality. According to Haller:

A prince's people are a scattered swarm of men, an aggregate of dependent or voluntarily subservient people with infinitely varied obligations; they have nothing in common except their common master, and among themselves they do not constitute a whole, a community (quoted on 166).

Like Novalis, Haller turns to the Catholic church as the great, universal institution that can stand above neo-feudal social institutions. It is the great check on Leviathan, on political absolutism:

But the church offered more than a cosmopolitan antidote to the cosmopolitan poison of the principles of 1789. Its universal authority and power, extending beyond nations and states, were also an effective barrier against the most dangerous enemy of the modern state and the modern nation. [Haller's] keen understanding of power and his protest against its uncontrolled development came together here once again. The patrimonial state had been destroyed by an expanding desire for power. New intellectual structures had been created that passed beyond that state and over the heads of individual rulers. First came the absolutistic power state, both permeated with the desire for inner coherence and clear separation from the outside world. In this way, the situation Haller complained of had arisen: 'The borders of states and nations are more sharply drawn than ever. Every nation wants to be alone in the world, so to speak. Everyone is isolated, cut off, separated from everyone else.' But this had not been the case when the church had had more significance. 'Were not the states within the church, so to speak, just as it was within them? ... Did it not, in a spiritual sense, cause the border between states and nations to disappear?' He thought that the church itself could once again take up its previous office of settling quarrels of the worldly potentates by its friendly and disinterested arbitration. He saw the church serving as a means of calming the waves of modern state and national life (168).

Haller rejects nationalism of all sorts. He embraces, instead, the "patrimonial state." Personal, aristocratic power produces humanity. Delegated or fictitious collective power becomes despotic. The church must stand above as a means of balancing patriotism and cosmopolitanism.

We see here how a decisive rejection of liberal nationalism can lead to perverse forms of anti-statism, on Meinecke's view. It is no accident that the Romantics and Catholics turned to theories of global federation or a new Christendom as an alternative to the French Revolutionary vision of nationalism built on popular sovereignty. 

We can now reach our fourth theme: What does Meinecke favor?

The work traces the emergence of German, romantic, cultural ideas of nationhood as a reaction against the legal, democratic, popular-sovereignty idea of nationalism produced by the French Revolution. Meinecke welcomes that critique, but disparages the anti-statism, political naivete that comes out of neo-feudal, Catholic alternatives to liberal nationalism. 

What he favors instead, is what he terms the "conservative idea of the national state" (180). While Haller's views took an extreme anti-political turn, he nevertheless built a remarkable circle of conservatives around him that Meinecke takes to have been far more sober about the realities of political power. Their main organ was the Berliner Politisches Wochenblatt, which defined itself in opposition to the liberalism of the French Revolution. While sharing Haller's hostility to mechanistic, absolutist, political centralization, the circle began to embrace the national state as the most acceptable form of political unity. Their anti-revolutionary pluralism began to tie together with a more cultural, nationalistic vision of the organic, German state, championed by Savigny and others. As Meinecke puts it:

It is characteristic of this conservative idea of the national state that it rejects the consolidation of the cultural nation on principle, but that it regards the cultural nation as the fertile native soil in which varied political structures grow, both large and small but all showing genuine traces of the German spirit. We can take cognizance of the cultural nation only by the blossoms it bears in colorful profusion. The cultural nation itself, vitally productive, remains hidden in dark and impenetrable depths (181-2).

And he continues:

Not until this point had a concept of the state been available that could oppose the ideals of the liberal and democratic national state with meaningful national values. Political Romanticism could now play off the idea of the national spirit against that of popular sovereignty. Against the defined, autonomous personality of the nation it could set the imaginative concept of a total German nationality, which remained undefined and impersonal but which was still richly and mysteriously productive. ... The liberal idea of the nation state based its claim on the due rights and the will of the living nation; the conservative national idea based its claim on the national life of the past. Both ideas drew part of their strength from the great individualistic tendencies of the times, but the difference between them was that the one form of individualism was democratic and rationalistic, the other aristocratic and historicizing. The one valued the individual as the basic unit in society, state, and nation. The other valued the quality of individuality itself in the multitudinous forms of social, political, and national life. The one demanded equal rights for all in state and national life. The other assigned individuals particular functions within the state and nation according to the sphere of life in which they found themselves. The one saw the individual limited by the national will, which he in turn helped to form. The other saw the limits set by what the nation's previous generation had created. The one appealed to the consciously sovereign and controlling reason of the individual and of the whole society. The other traced the unconsciously functioning rationality of history back to the sovereign control of God. Both represented the vital interests of particular social classes; but both tried to elevate these interests tot he level of a universal ideal. The religious universalism of political Romanticism took its stand against the rationalistic universalism of the liberal concept of the state (183-4).

This turn away from cultural personality and toward a more definitive picture of the national state represents major progress, Meinecke thinks. Still, he fears that the extreme particularism, historicism, and culturalism of this conservative nationalism can still be insufficiently political. It contained "the seeds of a political quietism and relativism that could lame the head and hand for battle or action" (186).

Meinecke writes in the very beginning of the work that a nation state requires two things: Unity and Vitality: We demand "a unity replete with life and energy, not just a harmonic chord as such but the richest possible harmonic chord" (17).

The liberal national state secured unity. Its political centralization and absolutism create extraordinary, unified power, as the French Revolution made clear. But it retains a moral emptiness, a spiritual desiccation. The German cultural nation has spontaneity and vitality, it speaks not simply through institutions and centralized political forms, but through a cultural heritage. 

Yet the cultural nation lacks power, even despite the theoretical improvements made by the Haller circle: the source of political error lay here ... in the belief that the political unity of the German nation could be created without giving the nation the firm contours of an autonomous state personality. We see here once more the important practical consequences of the fact that the German nation first felt and created her unity primarily as a spiritual unity, and we must also note again that it was a unity shaped by universalistic ideas and that recourse to such ideas diminished awareness of the realities of power (191).

The great synthesis, Meinecke argues, comes from Prussian domination of the German cultural community. From Prussia, Germany acquired a tradition of bureaucratized, statist power, but one that could be tempered by a German spiritual inheritance and thus distinguished from the democratizing tendencies of the French. 

Ranke and Bismarck are the crucial theorists Meinecke embraces, here. Before them, even conservative nationalism remained too romantic:

Romanticism summoned up the spirits of the past against the despised rational and cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century, but because Romanticism itself was still rooted in that spirit, it retrieved something related to it from the past. Thus the ancient idea of a universal community of Christian states was revived, and the political aspect of Romanticism became cosmopolitanism with a religious-ethical character (229).

What Bismarck understood, however, was that "the only sound foundation for a major state ... is political egoism and not Romanticism. It is not worthy of a great state to fight for a cause that does not touch on its own interests" (225).

Ranke, Meinecke suggests, may be the most insightful theorist of this need to synthesize political power with cultural personality. His essay, "Politishces Gespräch" flips the primacy of culture over politics that characterizes earlier conservatives: 

We no longer feel the strength of the nation forming the state, but rather the strength of the state forming the nation, the 'moral energy' at work in the state and emanating from it. The 'particular state' becomes the 'spiritual fatherland' of the individual; and the 'spirit of communal life' that accompanies us to the end of this discussion is a political national spirit, more limited but also clearer, better defined, and more personal in character than that 'mysterious power' we left behind in the profound depths. For the state, to be imbued with nationality is to be imbued with moral strength. ... Everything is drawn together, then, in the idea of the individuality of the great states, an individuality that emanates from their own unique and spontaneous life (211).

One is inclined to think that Meinecke is some kind of right-Hegelian, favoring a balance of the universal with the particular that ends up defending a powerful state. There's truth in that, I think. But he's a right-Hegelian of a decidedly historicist bent. He praises Hegel for seeing the importance of state power--a major improvement over romantic, culturalist conservatives. Hegel understands, also, "the national principle historically in that the intellectual legacy of the entire past of a nation constitutes a living force together with the nation's present and future demands" (199).

But Hegel's universalistic philosophy obscures his empirical, historical insight. He misses the value of particularity itself, and sees the nation in service of the whole: "Hegel's view led inevitably to depriving all historical individualities of their proper rights and making them mere unconscious instruments and functionaries of the world spirit" (201).

That disregard for the value of particularity in itself is what repelled Ranke, and what makes Hegel, ultimately, an enemy of deep conservatism. 

Reading the 18th Brumaire in 2020

 The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte opens with one of the most famous lines in Marx's corpus:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidiere for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851 for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the Nephew for the Uncle. 

As was noted four years ago, election day 2016 also happened to fall on the 18th Brumaire. So one naturally wonders what Marx might have said about history's third repetition: Not tragedy or farce, but reality tv? 

The parallels, it seems to me, between Napoleon III and Donald Trump, are fairly striking. They both articulate a politics of national greatness, they both deploy (rhetorically) an attack on bourgeois economics, they both emerge out of a heightened conflict between executive power and parliamentary cretinism, and they both build their popular support on some vague kind of intense, populist fervor. Not to mention, of course, their common thorough buffoonery. 

Making this kind of comparison is precisely the sort of thing Marx warns us against doing in the next few sentences:

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle-cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. Thus Luther donned the mask of the Apostle Paul, the revolution of 1789 to 1814 draped itself alternately as the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793 to 1795. In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit of the new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use of the new.

This is a complaint about the inability of revolutions themselves to see themselves as genuinely radically new, and their consequent need to appeal to some more familiar past. The same thing might be said about political commentators. Unable to theorize things freshly or recognize novelty, we insist on assessing the present through historic analogies.  

There are better and worse versions of historical analogy. It seems to me that politics today bears no resemblance whatsoever to Weimar Germany, yet that remains the ubiquitous descriptor in the popular (and even more academic) press. A cottage industry of "we now live under fascism" has proved enormously financially successful. There are, it must be said, more sensible versions of making that particular comparison, as my friend the Rock of the Sea, the Tamer of Horses, Aaron Sibarium has recently attempted.

Still, I think the Weimar comparisons are strained at best. Perhaps Napoleon III is better! Probably not. 

A few parallels to our time immediately jump out from Marx's 18th Brumaire. Consider, for example, our tortured self-examination of the nature and purpose and character of implicit norms in modern political life. Read that alongside Marx's blistering account of parliamentary dithering and especially of the pathetic attempt to impeach then President Louis Bonaparte.

Striking too is the famous description of Bonaparte's base of support--the alliance of small-holding peasants and the lumpenproletariat. 

The core supporters from the lumpenproletariat are described as follows:

Alongside decayed roues with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, rogues, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ-grinders, rag-pickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars--in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French term la boheme.

I can see strained but not very effective comparisons to Trump's base of support. More similar is the description of Bonaparte's deployment of these fanatical supporters as members of his "Society of December 10." Tens of thousands would throng together to celebrate Bonaparte and call for a coup. What's striking isn't just the character of their support, but the way Bonaparte comes to fall for his own illusion of popular support:

At a moment when the bourgeoisie itself played the most complete comedy, but in the most serious manner in the world, without infringing any of the pedantic conditions of French dramatic etiquette, and was itself half deceived, half convinced of the solemnity of its own performance of state, the adventurer, who took the comedy as plain comedy, was bound to win. Only when he has eliminated his solemn opponent, when he himself now takes his imperial role seriously and under the Napoleonic mask imagines he is the real Napoleon, doe she become the victim of his own conception of the world, the serious buffoon who no longer takes world history for a comedy but his comedy for world history.

I think some kind of description along those lines makes sense of Trump and his rallies. The solemn buffoonery and the combination of comedy and severity make him difficult to characterize as any straightforwardly fascist figure. 

Parallels can be drawn also to the description of the small-holding peasants (whom Marx disparages as a "sack of potatoes") who form the other pillar of Bonaparte's political support. Today we emphasize the opioid epidemic, the decline of social capital, the collapse of working class communities, etc. for producing a spirit of social isolation and bitterness that fuels Trump. Similar features explain why the small peasants are unable to form radical class consciousness, and continue to long to be ruled by a strongman like Bonaparte. 

The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. The isolation is furthered by France’s poor means of communication and the poverty of the peasants. Their field of production, the small holding, permits no division of labor in its cultivation, no application of science, and therefore no multifariousness of development, no diversity of talent, no wealth of social relationships. Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly produces most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes. Insofar as millions of families live under conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes, and put them in hostile opposition to the latter, they form a class. Insofar as there is merely a local interconnection among these small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.

Historical tradition gave rise to the French peasants’ belief in the miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all glory back to them. And there turned up an individual who claims to be that man because he bears the name Napoleon, in consequence of the Code Napoleon, which decrees: “Inquiry into paternity is forbidden.” After a twenty-year vagabondage and a series of grotesque adventures the legend is consummated, and the man becomes Emperor of the French. The fixed idea of the nephew was realized because it coincided with the fixed idea of the most numerous class of the French people. 

Similar too is the rhetoric of order and stability. Marx's cheekily observes that The Economist praises Bonaparte as a source of preserving national tranquility just a week before he launched his coup. Today, of course, the press takes Trump as the major source of national chaos and disorder. But clearly Trump has tried to present himself as the choice for those who want to preserve order. 

What I take to be most similar is Marx's explanation of how the bourgeoisie (and the church) came to reconcile themselves to the idea of voting for a man like Bonaparte:

When the Puritans of the Council of Constance complained of the dissolute lives of the popes and wailed about the necessity for moral reform, Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly thundered at them: “Only the devil in person can still save the Catholic Church, and you ask for angels.” Similarly, after the coup d’état the French bourgeoisie cried out: Only the Chief of the Society of December 10 can still save bourgeois society! Only theft can still save property; only perjury, religion; bastardy, the family; disorder, order!

Leszek Kolakowski on Method

Derek Parfit famously described two rival approaches to the history of philosophy as a contrast between grave-robbers and archaeologists. Grave robbers want to rediscover ideas from the past to be deployed in contemporary battles. Archaeologists are more skeptical about the continuity of ideas. They sometimes view ideas as social constructions from different historical periods, altogether irrelevant for our own times. They warn that the grave-robber mentality ironically leads to undermining the significance of the past, discouraging us from taking old ideas seriously by inducing us to crudely assimilate them into our own vision of the world.

Grave robbers include Straussian approaches to discovering submerged, esoteric meaning in the history of philosophy, as well as analytic philosophical attempts to extract full, persuasive arguments from the past. Archaeologists include those derided by Strauss as "historicists" who insist that history is always a mere struggle for power, and that ideas are epiphenomenal consequences of particular historical struggles. 

There is truth in both positions. It is obvious to me (against the young Skinner), that there are indeed "perennial questions" in philosophy, and that we can profitably think through those questions by studying the best arguments across time. It is also clear, however, that a cheap, cynical deployment of the past as "anticipating" the present can lead to gross distortions of what old debates actually consisted in. It can lead us to naturalize our own parochial prejudices. 

The difficulty with the history of ideas is that for it to be useful, it must be simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar. It must speak to our present concerns, but it must do so in a way that is interestingly different from the ways in which we are already inclined to think.

Leszek Kolakowski notes as much in the opening of his extraordinary Main Currents of Marxism:

In general the history of philosophy is subject to two principles that limit each other. On the one hand, the questions of basic interest to each philosopher must be regarded as aspects of the same curiosity of the human mind in the face of the unaltering conditions with which life confronts it; on the other hand, it behoves us to bring to light the historical uniqueness of every intellectual trend or observable fact and relate it as closely as possible to the epoch that gave birth to the philosopher in question and that he himself has helped to form. It is difficult to observe both these rules at once, since, although we know they are bound to limit each other, we do not know precisely in what manner and are therefore thrown back on fallible intuition. The two principles are thus far from being so reliable or unequivocal as the method of setting up a scientific experiment or identifying documents, but they are none the less useful as guidelines and as a means of avoiding two extreme forms of historical nihilism. One is based on the systematic reduction of every philosophical effort to a set of eternally repeated questions, thus ignoring the panorama of the cultural evolution of mankind and, in general, disparaging that evolution. The second form of nihilism consists in that we are satisfied with grasping the specific quality of every phenomenon or cultural epoch, on the premiss, expressed or implied, that the only factor of importance is that which constitutes the uniqueness of a particular historical complex, every detail of which--although it may be indisputably a repetition of former ideas--acquires a new meaning in its relationship to that complex and is no longer significant in any other way. This hermeneutic assumption clearly leads to a historical nihilism of its own, since by insisting on the exclusive relationship of every detail to a synchronic whole (whether the whole be an individual mind or an entire cultural epoch) it rules out all continuity of interpretation, obliging us to treat the mind or the epoch as one of a series of closed, monadic entities. It lays down in advance that there is no possibility of communication among such entities and no language capable of describing them collectively: every concept takes on a different meaning according to the complex to which it is applied, and the construction of superior or non-historical categories is ruled out as contrary to the basic principle of investigation.

Isaiah Berlin on the Relevance of the Nineteenth Century

 From Isaiah Berlin's prologue to Political Ideas in the Romantic Age:

Fascists and Communists, imperialists and totalitarians, liberal republicans and constitutional monarchists too, to this day, speak the language not merely of Burke but of Hegel; social scientists of all brands, planners and technocrats, New Dealers and social and economic historians use, without knowing it, the notions and terminology of Saint-Simon virtually unaltered. And it is not only the traditional irrationalists and the enemies of democracy and the disciples of Charles Maurras who inhabit a violent world brought into being, almost single-handed, by Joseph de Maistre. Nor should it cause as much surprise as perhaps it might to find so much of modern anti-intellectualism and existentialism (particularly of the atheistical type), and much of the 'emotive' ethics, not merely in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche or Bergson, but in the writings of Fichte, and in forgotten treatises by Schelling.

This is not merely a question of tracing sources and attributing responsibilities. Few activities are more dangerous to the cause of historical truth than the attempt to find a fully grown oak in the acorn, or the attempt to stigmatise (or praise) thinkers living in and speaking to a society remote from us for the transformation, and often degradation, which their ideas have often undergone at the hands of demagogues and popular movements which have taken what they needed from such doctrines and put them to their own cruder uses, and have as often as not totally perverted, or at best violently oversimplified, the original vision of a great man whose name they place upon their banners. But during the years of which I speak, the issues debated were literally identical with those which stir individuals and nations in our own time (2).

And a few pages later, an interesting aside on method:

It is a platitude to say that each age has its own problems, its own imagery and symbolism and ways of feeling and speaking. It is a lesser platitude to add that political philosophy derives its intelligibility solely from the understanding of such change, and that its perennial principles, or what seem to be such, depend on the relative stability and unchanging characteristics of human beings in their social aspect. If the supersession of eighteenth-century doctrine, which evaluated everything unhistorically, by a more historical or evolutionary point of view has any value, it should teach us that each political philosophy responds to the needs of its own times and is fully intelligible only in terms of all the relevant factors of its age, and intelligible to us only to the degree to which (and it is a far larger one than some modern relativists wish to persuade us that it is) we have experience in common with previous generations. But to the extent to which it is so, it is idle to expect progress in this enterprise; the confusions and problems and agonies of each age are what they are, and attempts at solutions and answers and nostrums can be judged properly only in terms of them (12). 

Frank Knight on the Self-Destruction of Liberalism

I recently had occasion to read Frank Knight’s wonderful 1934 essay, “Economic Theory and Nationalism,” first presented at the annual American Economic Association meetings, and published in a collection of Knight's essays titled The Ethics of Competition. The essay is wide-ranging, provocative, and surprising. The sort of thing that is unimaginable coming out of today’s academy, let alone an economics department.

Knight is considered one of the chief intellectual influences behind the Chicago School—a reputation bolstered by the editors of this essay collection: Milton Friedman, Homer Jones, George Stigler, and Allen Wallis. But Knight did not just shape a generation of militant free-marketeers. His work—and this essay in particular—had an impact on the greatest Anglophone left-liberal thinker of the twentieth century, John Rawls. Indeed, core Rawlsian arguments and themes can be found scattered throughout the essay.

One line of thinking made famous by Rawls and characteristic of "luck-egalitarian" theorists is the claim that both material and genetic endowments are arbitrary from a moral point of view. Knight makes a version of this argument, though not in service of the redistributive implications that Rawls et al. took it to have: “no defensible clear distinction can be drawn from the point of view of either ideal ethics or practical politics between external wealth and personal powers as a source of income” (Knight 313). Knight moreover buries a version of Rawls’ difference principle in a footnote. He writes there that the main challenges of a liberal society are:

to prevent continued concentration of power in the hands of individuals or organizations; to assure to all a really equal start, or at least one as fair as possible, through an ‘equitable’ sharing of the material and cultural inheritance; to arrange such ‘handicaps’ as would give everyone a ‘chance’; and to provide the best distribution of prizes for making the contest interesting to participants and spectators. In this view of social life as a contest, enforced equalization would be absurd; a game is not bad or unfair because some win and others lose, but on the contrary its interest and value depend in part on the fact (303-4).

Rawls more fully democratizes this principle. He argues that these inequalities should be distributed not simply to keep participants invested in the game of liberal politics/market economics, but in service of the maximal benefit of the worst-off. 

But the pattern is the same: Inequalities, be they from natural or social origins, are presumptively unjust. They can only be justified if they serve some larger social good. For Rawls, that good is the benefit of the worst off. For Knight, that good is buy-in into the system. If anything, I take Knight's more capacious view of human motivation to be richer than the narrowed egalitarian character of Rawls’ mechanistic maximin mantra.

(The first chapter of Katrina Forrester’s new book emphasizes Rawls’ debt to this essay in formulating his difference principle)

The language of the “game” of politics recurs throughout the essay. Knight's master argument is that liberal politics and market economics tend toward self-destruction. Liberalism of the nineteenth century—which Knight celebrates and fears has disappeared—was at its heart a commitment to individual freedom:

The political ideal of the age was negative, individualistic. Its ideal was individual liberty; i.e. there should be no ideal of individual life enforced by society. It looked toward making society a mutual aid organization of a mechanical sort, by which each individual would achieve maximum efficiency in using his own means to his own ends. In the main, this ideal still stands, though it is visibly crumbling, in America and other countries which have not yet repudiated democracy outright for a dictatorial regime (286).

In an interesting restatement of Turner’s famous thesis, Knight suggests that the liberal ethic was only stable in the age of the open frontier. For Knight, humans are characterized by an insatiable desire to exert power over one another. The possibility of moving West and building an independent life for oneself allowed man to psychologically transpose his natural love of domination into an urge to build for oneself. (The draw of the frontier and the empire perhaps had a little more to do with the desire to exert power over men than Knight acknowledges).

With the closing of the frontier, however, Knight warns that we are returning to the pre-liberal world:

Getting ahead in the world would come again to mean, as it had before, a more direct struggle with other people, than with nature, and a struggle for power over other people, which is overwhelmingly the human meaning, immediate or ultimate, of power over nature itself (290-291).

Here we return to Knight’s emphasis on the “game” metaphor for society. Liberal politics and market economics are like games. They only succeed if the participants play by the rules. But in both cases, it is exceptionally difficult to construct rules powerful enough to compel obedience. Why should the losers accept the terms? And why should the winners make it possible that they might lose in the future?

This is clear in the tendency of market economies to dissolve into monopolization. Why would a temporarily dominant firm submit to market rules that may end up elevating a new, rival market-titan tomorrow? All the incentives point the way of changing the rules of the game once you’ve won:

interest in winning and the interest in the game tend to run into conflict; too much interest in winning first spoils a game and then breaks it up altogether, converting it into a quarrel, or beyond this into a fight. Unless people are more interested in having the game go on than they are in winning it, no game is possible. … The ‘natural’ tendency is for a game to deteriorate, if the participants follow their primitive impulses without conscious exercise of moral restraint. No game is possible unless the players have the attitudes and interests to which the term ‘sportsmanship’ is understood to refer (302).

This is commonly understood with the market, Knight suggests. But the problem is just as acute in liberal democratic politics: “democracy is competitive politics, somewhat as free enterprise is competitive economics, … and it shows the same weaknesses as the latter. In ideal theory, neither is competitive in the psychological sense” (295).

(As an aside, Knight suggests that Adam Smith overlooked the role of the passions in driving human behavior. Here he echoes (or anticipates, rather) themes from Albert Hirschman's classic The Passions and the Interests. But both Knight and Hirschman neglect Smith’s discussion of the role the libido dominandi plays in sustaining feudal and slave societies. Smith too was acutely aware of man's love of domination, and the mechanics of moral motivation underlying capitalism are not that different from those underlying feudalism and slavery. On this point, see Daniel Luban’s terrific article on Smith and vanity. See also my earlier blog post on Smith/Rousseau on vanity and trinkets).

Liberal economics and democratic politics have the same weakness. They cannot sustain themselves. The raw love of power makes them incapable of being self-sustaining. Their weakness:

lies in the natural, cumulative tendency toward inequality in status, through the use of power to get more power. The main error on the political side, in the theory of liberalism as expounded by the advocates of political cures for economic ills, is that competitive politics is not better than economics in this regard, but definitely worse (296).

I’m reminded here of a comment G.K. Chesterton made in his introduction to an edition of Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present:

[Carlyle] is already the first prophet of the Socialists and the great voice against the social wrong. He has, indeed, almost all the qualities of the Socialists, their strenuousness, their steady protest, their single eye, also something of their Puritanism and their unconscious but instinctive dislike of democracy. Carlyle was the first who called in political inequality to remedy economic inequality, but he will not be the last.

It is easy enough for socialists and other economic critics of capitalism to notice the market’s internal tendency toward monopolization and inequality. The natural response, Carlyle and his followers suggest, is to combat economic inequality with political inequality.

The mistake of this approach, Knight insists, is that political inequality is even more liable to the dangers of monopolization and domination. Social reformers insist that the state will somehow be immune to these dangers so long as they remain democratic. Knight thinks this is ridiculous. He mocks idealists like John Dewey for naively insisting on the psychological stability of democracy. As he repeats over and over again, there is no reason to think that a free democratic people won’t ultimately opt for dictatorship. The political events of Knight's day seem to suggest this is the most likely course of action.

The democratic politician—not the captain of industry—has the greatest chance of exploiting our psychological weaknesses:

Neither abstract reasoning nor the evidence of experience affords ground for belief that, given the moral drive toward such values as the dominant motive in society, democratic political processes could fail to distribute them even more unequally still than does competitive business (308-9).

At least there is something objective about the material wealth produced by competitive firms. To be electorally successful requires no such objective achievement. It requires only the capacity to captivate an audience: “it goes without saying that competence to persuade is only accidentally and improbably associated with competence to counsel and to lead” (305). Democracy rewards those who can get elected. But there is little reason to believe the skill of winning an election has anything to do with the skill of governing well.

As Plato has Socrates put it in the Gorgias: “evidently oratory produces the persuasion that comes from being convinced, and not the persuasion that comes from teaching, concerning what’s just and unjust” (454e). For Socrates, such oratory is of no value at all if it teaches injustice. The orator wins by playing to the crowd. Socrates continues: “If you say anything in the Assembly and the Athenian demos denies it, you shift your ground and say what they want to hear” (481e).

Knight says the same. To be successful in a democracy you must balance flattery with manipulation. This whole exercise is about as rational as having the patients choose the doctor.

(There’s force to this point. Then again, far better for the patient to choose the doctor than for the doctor to choose the patient).

Democracy, Knight continues, is just “government by discussion.” And there is nothing more psychologically unstable than discussion. Another crucial aspect of that instability is human pride. It is difficult for us to part with our view, even after we should have been convinced of its errancy. Knight notes that it is rare to see professional academics model this form of intellectual humility. I recall being told once that the leading scientific critics of the big bang theory were never convinced. They went to their grave believing in a steady-state account of the universe. 

How could we expect more from mass democracy? 

Democracy is government by discussion, and there is little as reliably truth-agnostic as discussion. As he remarks in a wonderful paragraph:

It [dictatorship] will perhaps be most democratic in its policy of suppressing freedom of discussion. In fact, ‘discussion’ needs little formal suppression. There is little evidence that any large mass of people ever wanted to discuss or attend to discussion, of serious issues, involving real intellectual effort. Real discussion is rare even among professional intellectuals, and their ‘argumentation’ commonly illustrates the tendency of a contest to deteriorate. Debate, and the preaching of unorthodox views, which are very different from discussion, may or may not be popular, depending on the aesthetic character of the performance. The successful dictator will have to provide suitable entertainment along these lines without permitting anything really dangerous. It is of course, a delicate problem to stage verbal gladiatorial combats and supply the craving to be shocked without running some risk of arousing loyalties competing menacingly with loyalty to a particular leader or party (323)

And again: “Once a man’s mind is liberated and set thinking, he becomes an inveterate ‘theorizer’ and is as partial to his own ideas as he is to his own children, or to any individual interest whatever” (355).

The metaphor above of "verbal gladiatorial combats" reminds me of Hobbes' wonderful complaint about democratic deliberations in De Cive:

perhaps someone will say that the popular state is preferable to Monarchy, because in that state, in which of course everyone manages public business, everyone has been given leave to publicly display his prudence knowledge and eloquence in deliberations about matters of the greatest difficulty and importance; and because the love of praise is innate in human anture, this is the most attractive of all things to all those who surpass others in such talents or seem to themselves to do so; but in Monarchy that road to winning praise and rank is blocked for most of the citizens. What is a disadvantage, if this is not? I will tell you. To see the proposal of a man whom we despise preferred to our own; to see our wisdom ignored before our eyes; to incur certain enmity in an uncertain struggle for empty glory; to hate and be hated because of differences of opinion (which cannot be avoided, whether we win or lose); to reveal our plans and wishes when there is no need to and to get nothing by it; to neglect our public affairs. These, I say are disadvantages [of democratic deliberation]. But to lose the opportunity to pit your wits against another man, however enjoyable such contests may be to clever debaters, is not such a disadvantage for them, unless we shall say that it is a disadvantage for brave men to be forbidden to fight, for the simple reason that they enjoy it (X.9).

And regarding this dangerous connection between reason, opinion, and vanity, see Publius in Federalist 10:

As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.

That is the crucial danger: The dominance of self-love over reason. This is why we are witnessing the collapse of democracy: “Fascist-nationalism, then, seems to be clearly indicated as the next stage in the political evolution of the liberal democracies” (319).

Voters react against the moral emptiness of democracy, which has revealed itself to be little more than sloganeering:

The individual reacts from the notion of reaching validity by general discussion—which he has seen degenerate into a contest in ‘selling’—to a faith in ‘strong’ individual leadership, which also represents a reaction from moral and intellectual equalitarianism to hero worship (322).

(Cf. here my earlier blogpost on the Protagoras).

It has been a hope of political theorists for some time now that refining or elevating or promoting deliberation will somehow save or improve democracy. But for Knight and Hobbes, deliberation is the central reason why democracy is naturally self-destructive. (On this topic, see Bryan Garsten’s wonderful defense of rhetoric, which deals with Hobbesian, Rousseauian, and Kantian critiques of rhetoric that rhyme with Knight’s).

What then is to be done? Knight’s prognosis is bleak. He warns that modern social scientific methods align with ever-firmer domination, with a new “technique of control” (341). (Another aside: I find it striking that Knight sounds at various points in this essay alternatively Hayekian and Foucauldian).

Knight warns us against embracing social scientific technocracy as a means of preserving liberal society. If technocracy can succeed, it will do so by monotonizing human behavior with a new, terrible form of tyranny. The power to predict social behavior is the power to control it.

So Knight leaves us with two conclusions.

First, we must be dispositionally conservative. We must do our best to preserve the rules of the game, because we must know that when we try to change the rules, we will almost always make things worse:

One of the evils which has resulted from carrying the natural science conceptions over into the field of social discussion is the common delusion that by the happy discovery of some formula, it may be possible to change the character and constitution of society in a way comparable to the modern development of technology through science. … Political society is a game which must go on under rules, or very quickly collapse into a war of each against all (347-8).

And later: “The notion that the general mass of mankind, taken on the scale of a modern national state, can quickly and reliably think out and apply important constitutional changes, is tragic nonsense” (350).

The second solution is to create a new aristocracy. We need an impartial leadership class (like the idealized clerical class of the Middle Ages) that can protect the realm of freedom while renouncing political ambition. Technocratic social science alone promises a cure worse than the disease. What we need instead is for science to provide “intellectual-moral leadership alongside the moral-religious” (359). The emphasis on the "moral-religious" is key. The appeal of dictatorship has proved decisively that we naturally long for leaders who appeal to our passions and emotions. Deadened, rationalist scientism will not cut it. Who wants to be ruled by Dr. Fauci?

Leadership on a religious-emotional basis is an indefinitely more natural, an easier, and less costly system of order than any other. The weakness of such a system is its excessive strength, its tendency toward rigidity. If freedom is to be maintained, the rate of change must be limited—with perhaps some provision for temporary recourse to authoritarian rule in times of crisis (352).

Here Knight sounds like Coleridge or the early JS Mill. The Mill of the “Spirit of the Age” insists on finding a new leadership class that can guide modern liberal society. He argues there that modern society is in an “age of transition,” and can only return to a natural state once “the opinions and feelings of the people are, with their voluntary acquiescence, formed for them, by the most cultivated minds which the intelligence and morality of the times call into existence.”

Knight and the young Mill agree: Liberal democracies require a liberal aristocracy. My own suspicion is that such an aristocracy will be impossible to find and even harder to civilize and control.

There's lots of other interesting stuff in this essay. In particular, Knight offers an impressive account of the philosophy of social science and of the various approaches to interpreting/predicting social behavior. Much of that goes over my head, unfortunately. But it's worth emphasizing that it's there.

Simone Weil on Nationalism and Rootedness

Simone Weil's The Need for Roots contains some complicated and occasionally contradictory thoughts on nationalism. (Like the similarly complicated thoughts on equality). Early in the book, in her section canvassing the fundamental "needs of the soul," she emphasizes the need for "honor" that goes beyond ordinary, interpersonal respect. The key feature of honor is that it ties people to great traditions of the past: "This need is fully satisfied where each of the social organisms to which a human being belongs allows him to share in a noble tradition enshrined in its past history and given public acknowledgment" (19).

We need to have heroes--socially recognized heroes--with whom we identify. She aptly notes the difficulty of this need when combined with the pressures of cultural assimilation and immigration:

Had France been conquered by the English in the fifteenth century, Joan of Arc would be well and truly forgotten, even to a greate xtent by us. We now talk about her to the Annamites and the Arabs; but they know very well that here in France we don't allow their heroes and saints to be talked about; therefore the state in which we keep them is an affront to their honour (20). 

The need for honor connects to the master topic of her book, the need for "rootedness." She defines rootedness as "participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future" (43).

One thinks here immediately of Burke's famous reworking of social contractarianism:

Society is indeed a contract.... but the state ought not to be considered as nothing better than a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties. It is to be looked on with other reverence; because it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. 

The "rootedness" our souls require entails a recognition of the connection between our lives and the treasures of the past and future. The rootlessness of the modern world is in large part a consequence of violent conquest and even more damning capitalist economic dislocation. On this latter point:

Money destroys man roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures. (44).

A friend of mine flagged this passage to me. He noted that this broad point--the complaint about a rising "cash nexus" society in which we only relate to one another via self-interested contract--is well known. What's striking about Weil's version is her focus on the mechanism. A rich, rooted social life is complicated, characterized by competing, overlapping sources and sorts of authority. It is much easier to wipe that all away and think only in terms of cash contract. Adam Smith might think something similar--this is why he is so keen on the aesthetic appeal of an orderly, simple system. I'm reminded too of Chesterton's definition of the madman: "The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

Weil's next section is about the rootlessness brought about by the modern economy. Much of her discussion is persuasive, broadly in the vein of a utopian socialist/distributist communitarian criticism of modern industrial capitalism.

My main interest here, however, is in Weil's section on the nation as a source of rootedness. She begins that discussion by noting that the State is effectively the only institution we have left that connects us to the past and future (99). Neither the family nor the village nor the professional guild can do that anymore.

This is where things get confusing. Weil is ferociously critical of the modern French state. Forged out of the brutal conquests of early modernity and the revolution of 1789, modern France's claim to unity comes out of a violent rejection of the past. Democratic popular sovereignty in modern times has become the essence of French patriotism. (The only alternative to that is a LARPy legitimism that ignores France's present and its future). Consequently, modern France is unlovable. The French "hunger for something to love which is made of flesh and blood" (114).

The political Right clings to nationalism, but has turned it into a kind of idolatry. Weil associates this idolatrous nationalism with the legacy of Rome: "The Romans really were an atheistic and idolatrous people; not idolatrous with regard to images made of stone or bronze, but idolatrous with regard to themselves. It is this idolatry of self which they have bequeathed to us in the form of patriotism" (140).

The political Left rejects nationalism and turns instead to a cosmopolitan justice. This too is a mistake. It entails an abandonment of the past, which is essential for rootedness: "Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose" (119).

(As Weil wryly notes, it's not really possible to reject nationalism. The cosmopolitan left has really just turned the Soviet Union into the locus of its national pride).

So Weil wants us to reinvent patriotism. Unpatriotic citizens are contemptible and infantile. They are like children always making demands and always refusing to obey (154). A healthy patriotism cannot be held with unmixed pride, for that way leads to neo-Roman, pagan, fascism. Nor can patriotism just be dedication to a set of principles, for that is too bloodless to satisfy the need for rootedness.

Weil's solution for all this is a Christian patriotism (as opposed to the Roman patriotism):

One can either love France for the glory which would seem to ensure for her a prolonged existence in time and space; or else one can love her as something which, being earthly, can be destroyed, and is all the more precious on that account (170).

We cannot ignore past sins (as the neo-Romans do). Nor can we tell noble lies to deceive ourselves about what we have done. But dwelling on past crimes should not destroy our sense of patriotism. On the contrary, in a strange sense we must love our country all the more because of its faults. This is the key difference between the Roman patriotism of glory and the Christian patriotism of compassion:

Let no one imagine either that a love of this [compassionate] nature would run the risk of ignoring or rejecting what there is of pure and genuine grandeur in the past history of France, or in the country's present hopes and ideals. Quite the opposite. Compassion is all the more tender, all the more poignant, the more good one is able to discern in the being who forms the object of it, and predisposes one to discern the good. When a Christian represents to himself Christ on the Cross, his compassion is not diminished by the thought of the latter's perfection, nor the other way about. But, on the other hand, such a love can keep its eyes open on injustices, cruelties, mistakes, falsehoods, crimes and scandals contained in the country's past, its present and in its ambitions in general, quite openly and fearlessly, and without being thereby diminished; the love being only rendered thereby more painful. Where compassion is concerned, crime itself provides a reason, not for withdrawing oneself, but for approaching, not with the object of sharing the guilt, but the shame. Mankind's crimes don't diminish Christ's compassion. Thus compassion keeps both eyes open on both the good and the bad and finds in each sufficient reasons for loving. It is the only love on this earth which is true and righteous (171).

Importantly, this patriotism of compassion is more STABLE than the Roman patriotism of glory. For glory can only hold a people together in times of war and crisis. It collapses in times of peace as "people cannot feel themselves at home in a patriotism founded upon pride and pomp-and-glory" (174).

But the patriotism of compassion begins from the flaws and fragility of the state. Teaching people to love the state that way produces a more enduring patriotism:

if their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society (175).

This is how we must reimagine the sanctity of the state. The state is not an idol to be blindly obeyed. The state is sacred in a different sense, and sacred enough to command legitimately that we sometimes make the ultimate sacrifice (162). Another familial metaphor:

We must obey the State, however it happens to be, rather like loving children left by their parents, gone abroad, in the charge of some mediocre governess, but who obey her nevertheless out of love for their parents" (177).

(The difference here between the parents and the governess, tracks a difference Weil deploys throughout between the nation and the political state).

The state is not sacred as an idol--holy in itself. Rather, it is sacred as a "vital medium" (160), as serving a sacred purpose, as something through which holy and good things emerge (180).

This does not entail an absolute duty to obey the state. We have a duty to obey the mediocre governess, but not the abusive one. Weil is appropriately fuzzy on the boundaries of this duty:

It is certainly not an unlimited obligation, but its only valid limit is a revolt on the part of conscience. No criterion can be offered indicating exactly what this limit is; it is even impossible for each of us to prescribe one for himself once and for all: when you feel you can't obey any longer, you just have to disobey. But there is at least one necessary condition, although insufficient of itself, making it possible to disobey without being guilty of crime; this is to be urged forward by so imperious an obligation that one is constrained to scorn all risks of whatever kind. If one feels inclined to disobey, but one is dissuaded by the excessive danger involved, that is altogether unpardonable, whether it be because one contemplated an act of disobedience, or else because one failed to carry it out, as the case may be. Besides whenever one isn't strictly obliged to disobey, one is under the strict obligation to obey. A country cannot possess liberty unless it is recognized that disobedience towards the authorities, every time it doesn't proceed from an overriding sense of duty, is more dishonourable than theft. That means to say that public order ought to be regarded as more sacred than private property (177).

A stark choice, without much room for prudence. You are either under a strict duty to obey or a strict duty to disobey. Woe to him whose conscience demands disobedience, but whose fear keeps him in line.

Simone Weil on Equality

One of the fundamental human needs Simone Weil identifies in The Need for Roots is equality. As she puts it:

Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists in a recognition, at once public, general, effective and genuinely expressed in institutions and customs, that the same amount of respect and consideration is due to every human being because this respect is due to the human being as such and is not a matter of degree.

In other words--all human persons qua human persons deserve to be treated with respect, that respect is not contingent on social rank, and that respect must be manifested through public recognition. All seems straightforward enough.

Weil goes on to distinguish her understanding of equality from the leading liberal account: Equality of opportunity, or meritocracy. The problem with meritocracy is not that it is impossible to deliver as an ideal. The problem is the moral perversity of the ideal itself! A true meritocratic society would distribute social rewards as a function of moral desert or effort or talent. But this implies that those at the bottom deserve their social inferiority, or at the very least are social inferiors in virtue of their incompetence:

For a man who occupies an inferior position and suffers from it to know that his position is a result of his incapacity and that everybody is aware of the fact is not any consolation, but an additional motive of bitterness. 

Weil's basic critique of meritocracy is quite familiar. It was probably given its best statement in John Schaar's phenomenal critique of the equality of opportunity, and the theme is found in the Michael Young book that gave us the word. But the worry is much older than that! It runs through Augustinian critiques of moral desert. Consider this example from the neo-Augustinian Pierre Nicole, who notes that IF we justify social inequality on the basis of moral desert, we are going to produce immense social discontent:

If one became Great only by desert, the height of the great would be a continual noise in our ears, that they were prefer'd to the prejudice of others, whom we fancy more deserving than they ... But thus joyning Greatness with Birth, the pride of inferiours is allaid, and Greatness itself becomes a far less eye-sore. There is no shame to give place to another, when one may say, 'Tis his Birth I yield to. This reason convinces the mind without wounding it with spight or jealousie. ... Another advantage that accrues from this establishment is, That Princes may be had without pride, and Grandees found that are humble. For it gives no occasion of pride to continue in the rank where God's Providence has plac'd us, provided we use it to the ends he prescribes.

The second problem with equality of opportunity as an ideal is that it destroys social stability. The meritocratic utopia is a permanently churning society, with rich falling and poor rising constantly. What many liberals take as an ideal strikes Weil as a reductio: "that sort of equality, if allowed full play by itself, can make social life fluid to the point of decomposing it."

I think this egalitarian vision of a radically dynamic society--which struck Plato and perhaps Marx as the definition of democratic freedom--is distinctively American. Of particular importance is its insistence not simply on upward social mobility, but on the mathematically necessary downward mobility. (My old boss Richard Reeves' hobbyhorse).

Here's one example from Jacksonian America:

Money and property, we know, among us, are constantly changing hands. A man has only to work on, and wait patiently, and with industry and enterprise, he is sure to get both. The wheel of American fortune is perpetually and steadily turning, and those at bottom today, will be moving up tomorrow, and will ere long be at the top. The rich man of this year, may be poor the next, and the wealthy family of this generation, is likely to dissipate its fortune in the next. Scarcely ever does it remain in the same line to the third generation. ... All property, among us, tends to the hands of those who work and wait for it. They are as sure to get it, as the sun is to rise and set.

And another example:

A very important and striking feature in our political and social system, which indeed is the result of our institutions and laws, is, that there is no aristocracy amongst us--not even an aristocracy of wealth. An aristocracy cannot exist without peculiar and exclusive privileges and rights, recognized, sanctioned, and upheld by law. There cannot be, in this country, even a confederacy or combination among the rich men to acquire peculiar privileges. They have none to defend. ... They are not like the hereditary nobles of Europe, whose names are enrolled in a heraldic college, set apart from the rest of mankind, designated by titles, marked by badges of honor, bound together by intermarriages, by a commuity of interests and of feelings, a distinct order in the state; nothing of all this, and they are as mutable besides as the motes that float in the summer air. Death is every busily at work in dismembering all overgrown fortunes.

... If a line could be drawn between the two classes, at any given moment, and then five years pass away, I doubt whether the smaller portion could be recognized as the same. Hundreds on hundreds would be found to have changed places. And to speak of a clan of men thus constituted as an aristocracy, is as sound and sensible a philosophy as to point to the insects of summer as the emblems of eternity. 

There's a nice contrast between the American meritocratic faith and Nicole's argument for the superiority of hereditary aristocracy.

But anyway--Simone Weil rejects the ideal of equality of opportunity. She offers two positive suggestions for manifesting the genuine need for equal respect. The first is that punishments ought to be given out in proportion to rank:

an employer who is incapable or guilty of an offence against his workmen ought to be made to suffer far more, both in the spirit and in the flesh, than a workman who is incapable or guilty of an offense against his employer. ... the exercise of important public functions should carry with it serious personal risks.

This seems eminently sensible to me.

Weil's next suggestion is less plausible. She argues that much of the difficulty in inequality comes from inequalities of degree. If we can force ourselves to understand social differences not as ranked inequalities along some scale, but simply as fundamental differences, then perhaps we might be able to experience social differentiation without inequality. Separate but equal, in other words:

Equality is all the greater in proportion as human conditions are regarded as being, not more nor less than one another, but simply as other. Let us look on the professions of miner and minister simply as two different vocations, like those of poet and mathematician. And let the material hardships attaching to the miner's condition be counted in honour of those who undergo them. 

There is certainly something true here. Weil is right to insist that a modern capitalist economy in which money forms the only social bond makes it impossible to think in terms of differences of kind, but always in terms of differences in monetary rank. But her proposal strikes me as wildly psychologically naive. It will not do to tell ourselves that these differences just represent different social roles, but not ranks of inequality. I think that's clear with Weil's next example:

In wartime, if an army is filled with the right spirit, a soldier is proud and happy to be under fire instead of at headquarters; a general is proud and happy to think that the sucessful outcome of the battle depends on his forethought; and at the same time the soldier admires the general and the general the soldier. Such a balance constitutes an equality.

Yes, there might be some important way of LEGITIMIZING the obvious inequality between general and soldier. Perhaps a reciprocal appreciation of the distinctive role each plays might contribute to a fuller sense of the web of mutual dependence in which we find ourselves. Perhaps too that appreciation might render legitimate and even positively valuable the reality of social inequality. But it's too much to suggest that we have done away with inequality as such. The soldier is obviously inferior to the general.

Weil makes this same mistake in her brief discussion of the human soul's need for hierarchy. She says obedience and a "certain devotion towards superiors" are necessary. Weil loves obedience. Later in the book she claims that the soldier whose bravery comes from an internal constitution or the pursuit of glory "is very inferior in human quality to that of the soldier who obeys the orders of his superiors." Only direct revelation from God is more praiseworthy than following orders.

Yet she insists that this obedience is a devotion to the superior as a SYMBOL of the transcendent chain of being. I don't think the human mind is capable of such abstractions. We obey our superiors as HUMAN BEINGS, either in virtue of their office or their person (usually some combination of the two). With some philosophic distance we might recognize that the master I obey is not naturally superior to me, but that seems besides the point. Authority is not simply a symbolic nod to the structure of the universe, it is an ineradicable social reality.

Berlin on Rousseau: The Philosopher of the Lower-Middle Class

Isaiah Berlin has probably one of the best readings of Rousseau (as in most philosophically exciting AND most in line with the authentic spirit of that lunatic great). From "The Idea of Freedom," included in his Political Ideas in the Romantic Age (emphasis mine):

This outlook and these opinions in their abraded, inflamed and morbid condition took the form - as so often both before and after him - of a violent, piously philistine attack on all that is refined, distinguished and unique in society, against that which could be considered in some sense withdrawn, esoteric, the product of exceptional elaboration or unique endowments, not immediately intelligible to the casual observer. Rousseau's furious onslaughts upon the aristocracy, upon refinement in the arts or in life, upon disinterested scientific enquiry, upon the lives and characters of all but the most immediate purveyors of objects useful to the average man - all this is not so much the cry for justice or understanding on the part of the representative of the insulted and injured helots, as something far more familiar and less respectworthy: the perennial distrust of moral or intellectual independence and freedom on the port of those spurious representatives of the middle class who found their voice in Rousseau, and who became progressively more influential in the nineteenth century - the believers in a solid, somewhat narrow, morally respectable, semi-egalitarian, privilege-hating, individualistic ideal, with its respect for work, success and the domestic virtues, its sentimental materialism and intolerance of differences - in short the great middle class of the nineteenth century, which becomes the enemy and the butt of all the révolté writers of that period, and which has survived so much more powerfully in America than in Europe today. Rousseau, so far from being the protagonist of the artist or the sans-culotte or the preacher of moral freedom, turns out to be an early and indeed premature champion of the lower middle class - the common man of our century - against not merely the aristocracy or the masses, but the uppers sections of the middle class, with its artistic and intellectual aims and demands and ideals, which prosperous peasants and industrious artisans - the 'common' men - obscurely feel to be a menace to their own more conventional, more deeply traditional, more rigidly set moral and intellectual values and decencies, with their solid protective crust of prejudice, superstition and faith in the sound, the kindly and the commonplace, concealing beneath a solid surface an elaborate network of social sensibilities and snobberies, passionately clung to, and a jealous consciousness of precise status and position in a profoundly hierarchical society. Rousseau is a poor, or rather deliberately self-blinded, sociologist, who threw dust in the eyes of many generations by representing as a rustic idyll or Spartan simplicity - the immemorial wisdom of the land - what is, in fact, an expression of that small-town bourgeois and class-conscious outlook, admittedly in an abnormal and diseased condition, which made him peculiarly aware of the vices and errors of the last days of a collapsing feudal order, and peculiarly blind to the deficiencies of that social outlook and those ideas which his own fiery genius did so much to enthrone in their place. In short, he was a militant lowbrow and the patron saint of the enemies of intellectuals, long-haired professors, avant-garde writers and the intelligentsia - the advanced thinkers - everywhere.

Of course this is all said with an Oxford sneer. But nevertheless, I think Berlin has captured much of the spirit of Rousseau. He's a great critic of luxuriating intellectual elites and a ruthless defender of entrenched popular prejudice. Does this make him a champion of the lumpenproletariat? Of the Trump voter? 

James Kent on Alexander Hamilton

Some interesting remarks from James Kent's "Memories of Alexander Hamilton."

What first struck Kent was Hamilton's "masterly" efforts "to reanimate the powers of the Confederation, and to infuse life, vigor, and credit into that languishing system" (283). This is all clear from Hamilton's early efforts beginning in 1782 to centralize the fiscal state of the nascent Confederation and to raise revenue for the national government. Hamilton was just 25 years old at the time:

it will abundantly appear, in the subsequent history of his life, that his zeal for the establishment of a national government, competent to preserve us from insult abroad and dissensions at home, and equally well fitted to uphold credit, to preserve liberty, and to cherish our resources, kept increasing; and that his views grew more and more enlarged and comprehensive as we approached the crisis of our destiny ... he did more with his pen and tongue than any other man, not only in reference to the origin and adoption of the Federal Constitution, but also to create and establish public credit, and defend the government and its measures, under the wise and eventful administration of Washington" (288).

Kent is effusive on Hamilton's talent as a lawyer (though he notes the competence of American lawyers at that time was nothing inspirational). When he was arguing before the Supreme Court of NY, Hamilton was just 27.

On Hamilton's role in the constitutional convention, Kent writes that Hamilton's "avowed object was to make the experiment of a great federative republic, moving in the largest sphere and resting entirely on a possible basis, as complete, satisfactory, and decisive as possible" (299). It is clear that in Kent's judgment, Hamilton was the indispensable figure in the crafting and ratification of the constitution. Particularly notable, I think, is the praise of Hamilton's oratorical skill in dominating the ratifying debates in New York state.

I think the most interesting discussion is of Hamilton's role as Treasury Secretary.

Summarizing the report on manufactures:

He contended that the encouragement of manufactures tended to create a more extensive, certain, and permanent home market for the surplus produce of land, and that it was necessary, in self-defense, to meet and counteract the restrictive system of the commercial nations of Europe. IT was admitted, however, that if the liberal system of Adam Smith had been generally adopted, it would have carried forward nations, with accelerated motion, in the career of prosperity and greatness. The English critics spoke at the time of his report as a strong and able plea on the side of manufactures, and said that the subjects of trade, finance, and internal policy were not often discussed with so much precision of thought and perspicuity of language (314-5).

Kent also brings to my attention Hamilton's pseudonymous pamphlets in favor of neutrality written under the names "No Jacobin" and "Pacificus." Kent thinks especially highly of Hamilton's "Camillus" pamphlets defending the Jay treaty. Kent predicts these will be long read, but I'd never heard of them.

By 1798, Hamilton's stance of neutrality had turned somewhat more bellicose, as he demanded a far firmer military response to potential French aggression.

Kent also quotes Washington's praise of Hamilton, which I hadn't seen before:

He declared Hamilton to be his 'principal and most confidential aid; that his acknowledged abilities and integrity had placed him on high ground and made him a conspicuous character in the United States and even in Europe; that he had the laudable ambition which prompts a man to excel in whatever he takes in hand; that he was enterprising, quick in his perceptions, and that his judgment was intuitively great.' (320)

After his tenure in government, Hamilton returned to the law, where many of his most important cases dealt with libel and defamation:

While he regarded the liberty of the press as essential to the preservation of free government, he considered that a press wholly unchecked, with a right to publish anything at pleasure, regardless of truth or decency, would be, in the hands of unprincipled men, a terrible engine of mischief, and would be liable to be diverted to the most seditious and wicked purposes, and for the gratification of private malice or revenge. Such a free press would destroy public and private confidence, and would overawe and corrupt the impartial administration of justice. (325) 

Kent also recounts a dinner he had with Hamilton in April, 1804, where Hamilton expressed disappointment that he had not fully developed a systematic account of jurisprudence built "upon the principles of Lord Bacon's inductive philosophy. His object was to see what safe and salutary conclusions might be drawn from an historical examination of the effects of the various institutions heretofore existing" (328).

And here's quite a remark! "I have very little doubt that if General Hamilton had lived twenty years longer, he would have rivalled Socrates, or Bacon, or any other of the sages of ancient or modern times" (328).

Orwell on the National Anthem

George Orwell's complex if deep sense of nationalism is well known. (Even if his distinction between patriotism and nationalism is less than convincing).

Here are the final paragraphs of "My Country Right or Left." Perhaps of some relevance in understanding the boiled rabbits of our day: 

If I had to defend my reasons for supporting the war, I believe I could do so. There is no real alternative between resisting Hitler and surrendering to him, and from a Socialist point of view I should say that it is better to resist; in any case I can see no argument for surrender that does not make nonsense of the Republican resistance in Spain, the Chinese resistance to Japan, etc. etc. But I don’t pretend that that is the emotional basis of my actions. What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage. But let no one mistake the meaning of this. Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same, like the devotion of the ex-White Bolshevik to Russia. To be loyal both to Chamberlain’s England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility, if one did not know it to be an everyday phenomenon. Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now the revolution has started, and it may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it is necessary. But when the red militias are billeted in the Ritz I shall still feel that the England I was taught to love so long ago for such different reasons is somehow persisting. 

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind of upbringing than be like the left-wing intellectuals who are so ‘enlightened’ that they cannot understand the most ordinary emotions. It is exactly the people whose hearts have never leapt at the sight of a Union Jack who will flinch from revolution when the moment comes. Let anyone compare the poem John Cornford wrote not long before he was killed (‘Before the Storming of Huesca’) with Sir Henry Newbolt’s ‘There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight’. Put aside the technical differences, which are merely a matter of period, and it will be seen that the emotional content of the two poems is almost exactly the same. The young Communist who died heroically in the International Brigade was public school to the core. He had changed his allegiance but not his emotions. What does that prove? Merely the possibility of building a Socialist on the bones of a Blimp, the power of one kind of loyalty to transmute itself into another, the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues, for which, however little the boiled rabbits of the Left may like them, no substitute has yet been found.