Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker, Fourth Edition [Fourth Edition] 978-1478629061; 9781478629061; 1478629061;

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Fourth Edition

Political Questions Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker

Larry Arnhart Northern Illinois University

WAVELAND

PRESS, INC. Long Grove, Illinois

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For information about this book, contact: Waveland Press, Inc. 4180 IL Route 83, Suite 101 Long Grove, IL 60047-9580 (847) 634-0081 [email protected] www.waveland.com

Copyright © 2016 by Waveland Press, Inc. 10-digit ISBN 1-4786-2906-1 13-digit ISBN 978-1-4786-2906-1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America 7

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To Mary One look, and I forgot the gloom of the past. One look, and I had found my future at last. One look, and I had found a world completely new. When love walked in . . . with you.

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Contents

Prologue

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Introduction: From the Declaration of Independence to Political Philosophy 1 Political Knowledge and Political Power: Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Republic 1. What is the political lesson of the trial of Socrates? 12 2. How far is a citizen obligated to obey the laws? 15 3. In defining justice, how do we move from opinions to knowledge? 18 4. Is justice the interest of the stronger? 21 5. Is justice the fulfillment of natural needs? 23 6. Is justice a social construction rather than a natural standard? 25 7. Is the rule of philosopher-kings meant to be a realistic political goal? 28 8. Why does Socratic statesmanship require a “noble lie”? 30 9. Is it natural for the city and the soul to be rank ordered into three parts? 32 10. Must a good political order depend on a cosmic order of divine law? 37

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2 Political Science as the Study of Regimes: Aristotle’s Politics 1. Is the best regime good enough? 42 2. Does political life fulfill a natural human end? 43 3. Are human beings the only animals capable of symbolic speech? 47 4. How do selfishness and aggression influence political life? 51 5. Does Aristotle show the prejudices of his culture in his views of slaves and women? 53 6. Does Aristotle’s understanding of citizenship illuminate modern democratic politics? 56 7. Does Aristotle’s regime suppress individual liberty? 8. Can we settle the conflict between oligarchic and democratic views of justice? 61 9. How does the Aristotelian leader handle a regime that is less than the best? 62 10. Why does Aristotle teach tyrants how to preserve their regimes? 63

3 The Political Realism of Christian Theology: Augustine’s City of God

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1. Was Augustine the first political realist? 70 2. Does Christian faith perfect our reasoning about politics? 74 3. Is nature apart from God a reliable standard for politics? 76 4. Must earthly political rule always be unjust? 83 5. Must Christians be Machiavellians? 85

4 Natural Law: Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law” 1. What is natural law? 90 2. Is law the command of the sovereign backed by threat? 95 3. How do human beings discover natural law? 99 4. Does the fact-value distinction refute the idea of natural law? 100 5. Is law the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation? 103 6. Does cultural diversity contradict the idea of natural law? 103 7. Must we legislate morality? 106

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8. Is Thomistic political thought compatible with liberal democracy? 109 9. Does the application of natural law to sexual conduct, abortion, and marriage threaten individual liberty? 111 10. Can government rightly promote our pursuit of the complete happiness that comes only with eternal life in Heaven? 113

5 Power Politics: Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses

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Is Machiavelli evil? 123 What is Machiavellian virtue? 125 In politics does the end justify the means? 131 Does political order require “cruelty well used”? 136 5. Are democratic leaders just as selfish as dictators in their pursuit of power? 141 6. Does Machiavelli elevate political power over political wisdom? 146

6 Liberal Rationalism: Descartes’s Discourse on Method

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1. Can the scientific method of Descartes lead us to a free and rational society? 155 2. Is Cartesian reason reasonable? 156 3. Does Cartesian science promote nihilistic tyranny? 162 4. Does Cartesian science promote technocratic tyranny? 164 5. Can machines think? 166 6. Must we soon be ruled by artificially intelligent robots? 169

7 Individual Rights and Absolute Government: Hobbes’s Leviathan and Behemoth 1. Are human beings too selfish to be naturally political animals? 180 2. Can selfish human beings create political order by consenting to a social contract? 185 3. Why should we obey an absolute government? 194 4. Can only an absolute government protect individual liberty? 196

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Contents 5. Does the right to revolution subvert good government? 199 6. Is anarchy better than a predatory government? 7. Is the founding of political authority on rational selfishness too idealistic? 204 8. Is the American government a Hobbesian Leviathan? 205 9. Is the interpretation of the Bible and the Quran a political question? 207 10. Does the English Civil War show how political history can be a natural laboratory for testing political philosophy? 210

8 Classical Liberalism: Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration 1. Are human beings entitled to equal liberty as being the workmanship of their Creator? 222 2. Are human beings entitled to equal liberty as members of the same human species who claim self-ownership? 224 3. Are human beings equal and free in the original state of nature? 228 4. Are all human beings entitled to equal liberty in acquiring property? 236 5. Can liberal government combine individual freedom with political authority? 243 6. Can Lockean government secure the consent of the governed? 244 7. By what right does the majority rule? 246 8. Does the protection of minorities require a minority veto in a consensus democracy? 248 9. Can the rule of law and the separation of powers secure individual rights? 250 10. Must the executive have the prerogative powers of a dictator? 254 11. Does the right to revolution mean that might makes right? 262 12. Should women have equal rights? 266 13. Are there good arguments for religious toleration and the separation of church and state? 268 14. Is a society of atheists possible? 272

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9 Participatory Democracy: Rousseau’s First Discourse, Second Discourse, and The Social Contract 1. Does popular enlightenment subvert political freedom? 282 2. Were human beings naturally good as solitary animals in the state of nature? 284 3. Has the evolution of civilization deprived us of our natural freedom and happiness? 290 4. Does participatory democracy promote or threaten individual liberty? 293 5. Does a participatory democracy require a godlike founder? 297 6. Is representative democracy disguised slavery? 7. Does democracy need a civil religion? 299 8. Is a true democracy impossible? 301

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10 Morals and Markets in the Commercial Society: Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations 1. Is Smithian moral sentimentalism rooted in selfishness, vanity, conformism, and emotivism? 312 2. Do evolutionary science and experimental game theory confirm Smith’s moral theory? 316 3. Does religion make people moral? 328 4. Do markets degrade morals? 334 5. In the commercial society, does commerce take the place of virtue? 340 6. Does the commercial society promote the bourgeois virtues? 343 7. Is Smith a man of the left, or even a proto-Marxist, in supporting distributive justice for the poor? 348 8. Does the system of natural liberty require private property anarchism? 354 9. Does the recent history of economic and financial crises show the failure of Smithian free-market thinking? 359 10. Has capitalism created a climate change that could soon destroy civilization? 365

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11 History and the Modern State: Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History 1. 2. 3. 4.

Does history have an ultimate meaning? 378 Is every political philosopher “a child of his time”? What is freedom? 383 Can the modern state unite individual rights and political duties? 384 5. Does war preserve the health of the state? 388 6. Is the United States a state? 389 7. Have we reached the end of history? 392

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12 Socialism: Marx’s Communist Manifesto

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1. Do economic interests determine history? 400 2. Must capitalists exploit their workers? 403 3. Does capitalism prevent workers from finding joy in their work? 404 4. Does capitalism inevitably create an unjust inequality, with wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 1 percent of the capitalists? 406 5. Would socialism emancipate human beings? 410 6. Can a socialist economy work? 414 7. Can we have Marx without Stalin? 416 8. Can socialism be democratic? 417 9. Can social democracy combine the best features of capitalism and socialism? 420 10. Do we need a new communism? 424 11. Is socialist anarchism more liberating than Marxist communism? 425

13 The Death of God and the Will to Power: Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Human, All Too Human; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and Beyond Good and Evil 1. Do we need the mythic illusions of music and drama to conceal the meaningless chaos of the world? 440 2. Can a free-spirited science of Darwinian evolution give us “humble truths”? 442 3. Can human beings live without transcendent longings? 444 4. Is a free-spirited science compatible with modern liberal democracy? 446

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Contents 5. Who is Zarathustra? 447 6. Can life be explained as will to power and eternal return? 451 7. Is Nietzsche too pious? 453 8. Does going “beyond good and evil” lead us to a new nobility or a new barbarism? 455 9. Is Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism?

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14 Relativism and Natural Right in the Crisis of Liberalism: Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing and Natural Right and History

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1. Is esoteric writing necessary to protect philosophy and politics from mutual harm? 469 2. Can philosophers refute modern relativism and nihilism by proving the truth of natural right? 473 3. Can modern biology support the natural teleology required for natural right? 476 4. Is the unnatural character of slavery an example of natural right that can be defended against historicist and positivist relativism? 478 5. Is the philosophic life of the few naturally superior to the moral, religious, and political lives of the many? 483 6. Does Lockean natural right teach hedonistic relativism, in which “life is the joyless quest for joy”? 489 7. Was Strauss a Jewish Nazi? 491 8. Does liberalism allow for human excellence and the philosophic life through liberal education? 499

15 The Social Justice of Equal Liberty: Rawls’s A Theory of Justice 1. Are the principles of justice those we would choose under impartial conditions of fairness? 510 2. Should government force the more fortunate people of a society to help those less fortunate? 513 3. Does justice require socialist equality? 520 4. Does justice require capitalist liberty? 521 5. Should we seek equality of opportunity but not equality of result, even when that allows a cognitive elite to become the ruling class? 523

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Contents 6. Is an instinctive moral grammar of justice part of our evolved human nature? 529 7. Does a liberal conception of justice require the coercive enforcement of a liberal way of life as the best life for human beings? 534

16 The Classical Liberalism of Declining Violence: Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature 1. Were prehistoric human foragers ignoble savages with a naturally evolved propensity for war? 548 2. Does history show declining violence? 554 3. Does religious ideology promote violence? 558 4. Is capitalist ideology more likely than communist ideology to promote violence? 560 5. Does the liberal peace require a world of flat souls without manly virtues? 563 6. Can a decline in violence arise from a genetic evolution towards the bourgeois virtues through survival of the richest? 566 7. Are classical liberals more intelligent people? 569 Epilogue 575 Appendix 579 Index 583

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Prologue

In this fourth edition, I have changed and added material throughout the book. I have added new chapters on Adam Smith, Leo Strauss, and Steven Pinker. I have written this book both for students who might be studying the history of political philosophy for the first time, and for scholarly experts in political philosophy who might find something here to stimulate (if not provoke) them. I hope that both novices and initiates can benefit from the way this book combines four major features: 1. A reliance on disputed questions. To stimulate readers to think for themselves, I raise a series of enduring political questions, and I leave the readers free to work out their own answers. As much as possible, I avoid imposing my own point of view. 2. An emphasis on primary texts. Because there is no good substitute for reading the original works of political philosophy, I tie my questions to specific texts. This book is intended only as a supplement to the primary sources. The best use of this book is to read it while reading some of the primary texts. 3. References to issues in American political history. Because it is important for students to see how the study of political philosophy can illuminate their political experience, I indicate how the questions raised by political philosophers clarify issues in American politics. In particular, I draw out some of the philosophic implications of the Declaration of Independence. 4. A multidisciplinary approach to political philosophy. Political philosophers make empirical claims about human nature, human culture, and political history. In this book, I argue that to assess those empirical claims, we need to draw from relevant knowledge gained from xiii

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Prologue all of the intellectual disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. So, for example, in my surveys of disputed political questions, I bring up pertinent ideas from anthropology, biology, economics, history, psychology, and theology. Political philosophy is best studied as part of a multidisciplinary liberal education that aims for a comprehensive science of nature and of human beings as part of nature. Larry Arnhart DeKalb, Illinois

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Introduction

From the Declaration of Independence to Political Philosophy

When Americans celebrate the Fourth of July as their national political birthday, they recognize their political identity as arising from the principles of the Declaration of Independence, particularly the principle of equality of rights. Any serious reflection on what that document means for American political life becomes an introduction to the enduring questions of political philosophy. To understand what it means for a political community to be devoted to equal rights, one must trace this idea back through the history of political philosophy. John Locke is particularly important, but the questions raised by the Declaration of Independence have been debated by all political philosophers. At the base of any political community are some principles of justice and the common good that are so widely shared, so pervasive throughout the community, that they are rarely questioned. These principles are not usually subject to debate because they constitute the very grounds on which ordinary political debate occurs. To reflect on them is to engage in political philosophy by thinking through the fundamental questions of political life. Why is it that Americans find it difficult to discuss any political issue without speaking about “rights” that should be enjoyed by all? Is it not because our basic principles have to do with equality of rights as being “self-evident” and “unalienable?” We cannot grasp the meaning of American politics—at the deepest level—unless we revivify those philosophic questions in response to which the American regime first arose. Of course, even as we concentrate on the Declaration of Independence as a statement of American principles, we should keep in mind that it is part of a long tradition of American political documents stretching back to the Mayflower Compact of 1620.1 1

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Introduction Consider the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The appeal to reasoned argument is apparent. The signers of the Declaration tried to give a rational justification for their deeds. They assumed that good political action is supported by good political reasoning. Yet they surely knew that to found a political community on such an assumption would be a rare achievement. That was the claim of Alexander Hamilton in the opening number of The Federalist: It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.2

Does politics depend on rational deliberation, or is political life usually determined by brute force? Does political power reflect political wisdom? Or is power ultimately an exercise in tyranny, even if usually disguised, in which rulers use force and fraud to exploit the ruled? We shall hear these questions echoing throughout the history of political philosophy—from Plato to Machiavelli to Marx—and they have to do with the very possibility of political philosophy: To what extent—if at all—can the political philosopher guide the political ruler? If one wanted to shape political life according to a rational standard, what would that standard be? The Declaration appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Beginning with Socrates, one of the enduring themes of political philosophy has been the distinction between nature and convention—nature referring to the universal and permanent elements of reality, convention referring to the more particular and evanescent aspects of the social world. The great concern of the Socratic political philosopher was not to be satisfied with the merely conventional side of politics, but to discover how political life might be brought into harmony with nature. As far as politics is concerned, it is not physical nature but human nature that is important. Human beings at different times and in different places are never quite the same. Are there, however, some fundamental similarities among human beings—needs, emotions, capacities, and such like—so that we can properly speak of an unchanging human nature? Can we then judge conventional political arrangements by how well they harmonize with this human nature? The Declaration of Indepen-

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From the Declaration of Independence to Political Philosophy

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dence seems to be founded on the premise that there are universal principles of nature by which political action can be directed. How does one discover these principles of human nature? Can they be grasped by the unassisted human mind? Or are they revealed by God only to the faithful? What are the predominant features of human nature? Are human beings so naturally selfish and competitive that the only realistic aim of government is to keep them from injuring one another, while leaving them free in all other respects to live as they please? Is it also natural for human beings to share in conceptions of justice and the common good, so that government can promote human excellence? On the other hand, is it perhaps incorrect to assume that there is an unchanging realm of nature? All of these questions might occur to the careful reader of the Declaration, and all have been debated by political philosophers. Here, I shall only indicate briefly how these questions are suggested by the language of the Declaration. Then, in the rest of the book, we shall work through the questions in a more detailed manner. First, by referring to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the Declaration implies some connection between the natural order and divinity. St. Augustine insisted that insofar as nature depends completely on God’s creative will, human beings cannot fulfill their nature except by yielding themselves in faith to the divine source of nature. The Declaration refers to God four times. At the beginning of the document, appeal is made to “the Laws . . . of Nature’s God” and to God’s creation of men as equal and endowed with rights. At the end, the authors appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world,” and they affirm their “firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence.” Would it be fair to infer from these passages that the Declaration assumes a rational piety? Is God presented as caring for human beings in a lawful and thus rational way that is manifest in the nature of the world he has created? Is it implied also that because God reveals himself in the things he has made, human beings can find guidance for their lives—even without revelation—by a rational understanding of nature? Some religious believers would deny that a purely intellectual grasp of nature uninformed by religious faith is a sufficient guide for political life. Having seen the invocation of nature in the opening sentence of the Declaration, we move to the next section to see exactly what nature dictates for politics. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,— That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and

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Introduction organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

It seems that holding these “truths” as “self-evident” constitutes the political identity of the American people. How do such principles, which by implication are derived from “the Laws of Nature,” come to be known as “self-evident”? Or must Americans “hold” them to be self-evident even if they really are not self-evident? What is a self-evident truth? In Federalist Number 31, Hamilton speaks of “certain primary truths, or first principles, upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend, [and that] contain an internal evidence which, antecedent to all reflection or combination, commands the assent of the mind.” As examples of such truths, he cites axioms of Euclidean geometry such as “The whole is greater than its parts; things equal to the same are equal to one another; two straight lines cannot enclose a space; and all right angles are equal to each other.”3 One way of explaining why such axioms are self-evident is to say that they are tautologies—that is, the object is contained within the definition of the subject. So, “the whole is greater than its parts” is obviously true to anyone who knows the meaning of “whole” because being greater than its parts is implied in the definition of “whole.” To see the truth of such statements, one need only understand the meaning of the words used. Could this be the case for the statement that all people are equal? How does this contain its own internal evidence? In fact, one might wonder whether this is not self-evidently false. For are not people so different in an endless number of ways that it is hard to find any two human beings who are exactly the same? Presumably the signers of the Declaration did not mean to assert that human beings were equal in intelligence, character, beauty, strength, or in any number of other respects. How, then, are human beings all the same? Why not say that all human beings are equally human beings? Despite all the important differences, they all are members of the human species. The equality of all human beings is self-evident insofar as all are human. So, as far as the Declaration is concerned, the first principle of the law of nature is the equality of all human beings as human. The validity of the principle becomes evident to anyone who understands it. It is a universal truth because it holds for all people at all times and in all places. Is this principle so abstract and general, however, as to be empty of content and thus of little use for the guidance of politics? The implications become clear only by considering what follows from the principle of human equality. In the Declaration, it is inferred that from the fact of equality it follows that all people possess “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” In accordance with the simple notion of justice as requiring that like cases be treated alike, human beings should be treated as human beings: we all

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have rights to that without which we could not be human. Although these rights cannot be completely enumerated—perhaps because the conditions of humanity vary somewhat—some of these rights are especially clear: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. These rights are essential conditions for human beings to secure their humanity. To fulfill oneself as a human being, one must preserve oneself, control the course of one’s life, and strive to make it a good life. To figure out more precisely what these rights might entail, one needs to work through the philosophic debate about this question. The most obvious source for the natural rights teaching of the Declaration is John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government.4 When Jefferson listed those political philosophers whose thought lay behind the Declaration, he included Locke, but also Aristotle. Later, we shall consider in some detail the points at issue between Aristotle and Locke, but here we need only see the general character of the dispute. Aristotle and Locke would agree that government should promote those conditions necessary for human beings to fulfill their humanity. But Locke, according to some interpreters,5 would think that it is sufficient for government to secure peace by prohibiting physical injuries among humans, then leaving them free to live as they please without shaping their moral character according to any standard of the common good. Aristotle, on the other hand, would insist that government should provide the conditions not only for living, but also for living well. In the pursuit of happiness, Aristotle believes, human beings seek to fulfill their natural potentialities, of which the capacity for reasoning is the highest, being that which is most distinctive of the human species, and the perfection of reason is possible only through sharing in a common culture. The aim of an Aristotelian regime is not just to keep the peace, but also to make human beings better by shaping their character and thought to promote the common good. The problem with Aristotle’s position is that human beings often seem to be so naturally selfish and competitive as to have no conception of the common good that would go beyond their own private interests. The problem with Locke’s position is that if there are no standards of justice beyond the selfish desires of individuals, it seems difficult to justify any exercise of governmental power as something other than the personal domination of some by others. How, for example, could Locke persuade people to risk their lives in defense of their government if they have been taught that the only purpose of government is to secure their rights, of which the most essential is the right to life? People must allow their rights to bear limitations in order to secure the sort of powerful government necessary to protect their rights. Similarly, for a community to act in unison, majority rule must prevail, inherently jeopardizing the rights of those in the minority. These two Lockean problems—the conflict of individual rights versus governmental powers and the conflict of minority rights versus majority rule—also emerge in the Declaration of Independence. These difficulties

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Introduction

arise from the need that human beings have for the government to protect their rights. For it is held to be self-evident not only that all are equally endowed with rights, but that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

What does it mean to move from the rights of “Men” to “the Right of the People”? Who speaks for the people? How is “the consent of the governed” expressed? Could the people consent to nondemocratic or even tyrannical government? And how can the powers of government be organized so as to best secure rights? The Declaration opens by proclaiming the rights of men; but with the reference to establishment of government, attention shifts to the rights of the people. In fact, from this point to the end of the Declaration, the word “men” is never used again, and all rights are said to be possessed by the people. Individuals find that to secure their rights they must establish a government; to do that they must join with others to form a people. (Here the Declaration seems to assume the Lockean teaching regarding the movement from the state of nature to civil society by way of a social contract.) This means that the members of a society are no longer free to exercise their rights as individuals. The ultimate instrument for insuring that government will protect rights—the right to revolution—belongs to the people, not to solitary individuals. It is for the people to decide whether and when a government has become so subversive of rights as to justify its abolition and replacement by a new government. Assuming that unanimity is impractical, the decision of the people will reflect the will of the majority. What then is to prevent the majority from tyrannizing over all minorities? What is to keep the majority of the people from consenting to a popular despotism? Indeed, Machiavelli advises princes that the best way to secure their power is to rely on the people. Because most people would prefer to devote themselves to the economic comforts of a private life without the burdens of self-government, they will give virtually unlimited power to a ruler who provides them the peace and prosperity they seek. Even Locke suggests that princes can increase their power by encouraging the people in their endless accumulation of property, which, as a private activity, diverts their attention from public issues. Is it perhaps the case that a regime founded on the conflict of selfish interests tends naturally to tyranny—either the tyranny of one group over another or the tyranny of a benevolent government that provides the people with comfortable private lives in exchange for their political liberty?

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From the Declaration of Independence to Political Philosophy

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This is the charge leveled against the Lockean regime by those followers of Rousseau who advocate participatory democracy. They insist that true democracy can be achieved only in a small community of self-governing citizens who share some conception of the common good. The character of the people must be shaped according to a common standard so as to discourage conflicts between people with different interests. With all the citizens participating directly in the government, public decisions would emerge as a consensus of all. In such a situation, no group would be permitted to tyrannize over another. Because all citizens would be actively engaged in political life, they would not be so preoccupied with the comforts of private life that they allow themselves to be excluded from the government. There are, however, problems with this scheme. A small community of self-governing citizens is as hard to establish as it is to maintain, especially in a world dominated by large nation-states. Its success would require transforming self-seeking individuals into public-spirited citizens, which might necessitate an authoritarian suppression of personal liberty. In any case, the underlying issue is clear—how to devise political arrangements that conform to human nature. Are human beings so divided by selfish passions that government should not be expected to do more than police their conflicts? Or is there, in addition to the selfish and competitive side of human nature, a social and cooperative inclination such that the fulfillment of human potentiality requires a communal sharing of common purposes? On the other hand, is it correct to even ask questions that assume there is an unchanging human nature? Is the character of human beings more a product of history than of nature? Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity that constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

There follows a long list of factual grievances that takes up approximately two-thirds of the entire document (see the appendix for a copy of the Declaration of Independence). This part of the argument cannot be founded on a “self-evident” grasp of nature. Rather, the reasoning here depends on “prudence,” “experience,” and the “facts” of “history.” Apparently, the sign-

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Introduction

ers of the Declaration think that to justify their revolution they have to combine self-evident reasoning about nature with probabilistic reasoning about history. That the aim of just government is to secure equal rights is declared as a necessary and unchanging truth deducible from the universal principles of nature. But that King George III has acted contrary to this standard is at best a probable conclusion from particular facts. Although the equality of rights for all is a universal norm, determining whether a particular government is despotic requires prudence in judging variable circumstances of history. By contrast, some Marxists would dismiss this separation of nature from history as illusory, on the premise that human beings’ ideas about nature arise from their historical conditions. Do not human beings take as true whatever universal principles will best serve their interests? One might then explain the American Revolution as dictated by the historical circumstances: the revolution occurred because it allowed those with newly acquired economic power to become the ruling class. Thus, the talk about “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” could be seen as a rationalization of the dominant economic interests of the time. The laws of nature are only the reflection in human minds of the laws of history as grounded in the material interests of human beings. If appeals to nature are replaced by appeals to history, does this deprive us of any fixed standard for political life? The Declaration appeals to the absolutes of nature in order to defend the idea of rights and reject tyranny. Yet if there are no natural absolutes, if everything is relative to changing historical circumstances, tyrants cannot be judged to be good or bad, just or unjust. If tyrants enjoy historical success, how can they be condemned? It will be our task in this book to think through these and other questions. By beginning with the Declaration of Independence, I want to stress that the questions posed by political philosophers are the questions that dominate modern politics. My claim is that because political philosophy goes to the roots of political life, we cannot clearly understand our political existence without reviewing the history of political philosophy from which modern political life arose. I do not mean to suggest, however, that the relation of political thought to political action is obvious, for the issue as to how political wisdom might bear on political power is the fundamental question of political philosophy, as should be evident to any reader of Plato.

Notes 1

For the history of American political documents from the Mayflower Compact to the Constitution of 1787, see Donald S. Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), who suggests that the ideas of the Declaration of Independence could be seen as “the result of radically extending the logic inherent in the Protestant Reformation, especially as the process occurred in colonial America” (120). According to Pauline Maier, the Declaration of Independence had only one limited purpose—to proclaim and justify American independence from Great Britain—and therefore it is a mistake to treat it as a grand statement of philosophical principles for American pol-

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2 3 4

5

9

itics. See Maier’s American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997) and “The Strange History of ‘All Men Are Created Equal,’” Washington and Lee Law Review 56 (Summer 1999): 873–88. For criticisms of Maier’s argument, see Michael Zuckert, “A Work of Our Own Hands,” Review of Politics 60 (Spring 1998): 355–60. For the debate over whether the Declaration of Independence can be rightly seen as an expression of European political philosophy, such as Lockean liberalism, see Alan Gibson, Interpreting the Founding: A Guide to the Enduring Debates over the Origins and Foundations of the American Republic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), and Barry Alan Shain, “Introduction,” in Barry Alan Shain, ed., The Declaration of Independence in Historical Context: American State Papers, Petitions, Proclamations, and Letters of the Delegates to the First National Congress (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014), 1–20. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Random House, Modern Library, n.d.), No. 1, p. 3. Ibid., p. 188. Locke’s influence on Jefferson has been denied by Garry Wills in Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978). But he ignores the clear echoes in the Declaration of language in Locke’s Second Treatise (e.g., secs. 210, 225, 230). Shortly before his death, Jefferson commented on the purpose of the Declaration and mentioned both Aristotle and Locke as sources of its ideas. (Letter to Henry Lee, 8 May 1825, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden [New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944], 719). See chap. 8, n. 3. Leo Strauss, for example, emphasizes Locke’s departures from Aristotelian thought; but Richard Ashcraft sees important continuities. Compare Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), and Ashcraft, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987). Algernon Sidney, another author cited by Jefferson as a source for the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, seems closer to Aristotle than was Locke. See Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), and Alan Craig Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

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1 Political Knowledge and Political Power

Plato’s Apology, Crito, and Republic

KEY READINGS Apology, Crito, Republic, 327a–379a, 414b–417b, 432b–445e, 504d–525a, 608c–621d

Political philosophy begins in ancient Greece. Even the words “politics” and “philosophy” are derived from ancient Greek. Politike denotes the affairs of the Greek city (polis). Philosophia means literally the love of wisdom. Of course, we could trace the history of politics farther back: to ancient Egypt or to ancient Mesopotamia, or even back to the nomadic bands of Stone Age people. But prior to the Greek city, social order arose from custom, and it was explained through religious myths rather than through independent human reasoning. Unlike previous civilizations, the Athens in which Socrates lived required its citizens to create and maintain order by deliberating about public affairs. The center of life was the agora, the public space in which citizens debated political questions according to the standards of human rationality. Thus, Athens gave birth to rational political thought.1 In the fifth century BC, the Greek cities—particularly Athens—reached one of the highest peaks of human cultural achievement. During the first half of the century, the Greeks were threatened by a series of wars with the Persian Empire. But their defeat of the Persians in 449 BC allowed them to flourish during a period some historians call the Age of Pericles, because of the preeminence of Pericles as an Athenian political leader. Some people 11

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suggest that the cultural brilliance of the Greeks—in art, poetry, history, philosophy, and politics—has never been surpassed. Plato (427–347 BC) was born a few years after the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), a conflict between Athens and Sparta that eventually was disastrous for Athens. By the time of Plato’s death, Athens was near the bottom of its decline. A few years after his death, Athens was conquered by the Macedonians. During Plato’s life, the Athenians were divided into factions that ranged from radical democrats to radical oligarchs. He was probably exposed to political debates at an early age, as all the major political groups were represented in his family. His own political activity was most evident in Sicily because of his friendship with Dion, a political leader in Syracuse. He had hopes of shaping Sicilian political life as a political advisor, but he never succeeded. Evidently, his conversations with Socrates (470–399 BC) influenced his life more than anything else. He extended the work of Socrates by founding the Academy, a center of higher learning until the sixth century AD. The universities of the Western world have continued, in some manner, the educational curriculum of the Academy. Plato’s writings are dialogues, most of which feature Socrates as the main character.2 Thus the life of Socrates is important for Plato’s philosophizing, and a central theme of Plato’s work is the conflict between Athenian politics and Socratic philosophy manifested in the trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC.

1. What is the political lesson of the trial of Socrates? We cannot consider this question without also considering many of the fundamental questions about the nature of political life. Socrates exemplifies an individual who wants to know the best way of life for a human being. Such a person will prefer those political arrangements that offer support in this pursuit. To some extent, this person represents all of us. Don’t we all seek to live the most fulfilling lives possible? Don’t we judge our political life by how well it supports us in this search? Surely, this is why Americans can hold it to be “self-evident” that the aim of any just government is to secure our “pursuit of happiness.” But how is this to be done? Some would say that a political community should shape the lives of its citizens according to some shared standard of the good life. But can human beings discover any reliable standard of goodness? Even if they can, is it feasible to establish politics on such a foundation? Those on the opposing side of this issue would say that government best promotes the pursuit of happiness by leaving people free to live according to their own personal views of the good life as long as they do not harm others. It might be argued that there are no absolute standards of goodness discoverable by human reason, so people should be free to live by whatever moral con-

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ceptions they choose. Yet if there are no moral absolutes, how can human freedom be justified as an absolute? Is it possible to have a free society without defending human freedom as an absolute value grounded on “the Laws of Nature”? The trial of Socrates thus leads us to consider two closely related lines of thought that will be important throughout this book. Some of the leading citizens of Athens regard Socrates as a threat to their political life simply because of the way he discusses with his fellow citizens ideas about the best way to live. We might wonder, first, what do philosophic ideas have to do with politics? Does every political community depend on certain shared ideas about the good life, so that a person who questions those ideas must always be a political threat? Or can a community that cherishes freedom refrain from imposing on its citizens any communal standards of goodness, so that a person like Socrates would not be perceived as politically dangerous? This might lead us into a second line of questioning. What does a citizen’s individual pursuit of happiness have to do with political life? The Athenians seemed to assume that the happiness of an individual’s life is intertwined with the happiness of the political community. But is it possible to separate the two, to restrict politics to a limited realm of life, so that individuals can be free in their private lives from political concerns? Oddly enough, those who have debated these questions raised by the trial of Socrates have been unable to agree as to where Socrates—or perhaps more exactly, Plato’s Socrates—stands on these issues. Not only do we want to figure out what Socrates is saying, we also want to understand Plato’s thoughts. This is quite difficult as Plato himself never speaks in his dialogues! Trying to discover Plato’s thought in his dialogues is like trying to find Shakespeare’s thought in his plays. We must consider every statement in the dramatic context in which it appears. We must ask why a specific person says something in a particular situation. Thus, far from being an abstract and dogmatic philosopher, as is commonly assumed, Plato writes in such a way that his ideas are conveyed through the concrete action of a dramatized conversation. I emphasize, therefore, that what we shall do in this brief introductory chapter is no substitute for a close study of the particular details of the Platonic dialogues. With this cautionary note in mind, let us turn to Plato’s Apology of Socrates and consider the questions we have already raised. The Athenian jurors had at least three choices in dealing with Socrates. They finally chose to silence him. Alternatively, they could have changed the Athenian way of life in accord with his wishes, or they could have tried to tolerate him. Many modern readers of the Apology assume that the last choice would have been the best and that Plato would have agreed. Indeed, in On Liberty, John Stuart Mill takes the case of Socrates as an obvious illustration of the dangers that come from not allowing complete freedom of speech.3 Moreover, those who read the Apology in this

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way tend to see Socrates as a relativist who doubted that there were any fixed norms of truth or morality, and therefore he challenged the traditional dogmatism of his city. Socrates appears, from this perspective, to be a defender of an open society in which all are free to think and speak as they wish, unrestrained by the community. What evidence is there in Plato’s account of the trial of Socrates to support this view? Socrates challenged the leaders of his time for not being as wise as they thought they were. He claimed to be wiser than they, in that he at least knew that he knew nothing (Apology 2la–22e). In questioning the commonly accepted moral and religious beliefs of his time, Socrates caught the interest of those young people who were eager to challenge the traditions of their elders; for this reason, to many he appeared to be a corrupter of the young. We might conclude that Socrates was only asking the Athenians to be tolerant of all ideas, no matter how new and shocking they might be. On the other hand, it could be argued that Socrates actually assumed a highly intolerant stance. In claiming that those who think they are wise are not wise, and that he himself is wise only in knowing he knows nothing, he is implicitly claiming that he knows what it would mean to know. That is to say, in order to be so confident in recognizing ignorance—his own and that of others—Socrates must be certain of his own knowledge of the standards of truth. To look for wisdom and to expose as unfounded the claims of those who appear to be wise presupposes that one knows what wisdom would be like (17a–b, 22c–e). Socrates also claims to know that even though he may never fully possess wisdom, the search for wisdom is the highest human activity. This, he holds, is the answer to that most important question, what is the best life for a human being? Knowing the answer to this question, he condemns the Athenians for seeking money, material comfort, and social status rather than devoting themselves wholly to thinking about the fundamental questions of life (30a–b, 36b). In doing this, he makes it difficult—perhaps impossible—for the Athenians to simply tolerate him. For he insists that he will continue to use his freedom to transform the Athenian way of life (28e–30b, 37e–38b). The Athenian jurors think the very existence of their community depends on certain commonly accepted beliefs about the purpose of human life, of which beliefs about the gods in their relationships with human beings are especially important. They cannot, therefore, allow Socrates to question these common opinions if they wish to preserve their community. (To see what opinions Socrates was thought to have subverted, compare the various accusations at 18b, 19b, 23d, and 24b.) Socrates agrees that one should not tolerate the public teaching of false opinion about what is good and bad, because corrupt opinions make people dangerous to their neighbors (25c–26a). The health of a community depends on its citizens holding right opinions about matters of con-

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duct. Socrates insists, however, that by teaching the supreme importance of rational self-examination and inquiry, he is improving his fellow citizens. The true source of corruption, he maintains, is the commonly accepted belief that one ought to seek wealth and status above all. It would seem that far from advocating an open society, as some have thought, Socrates is advocating a closed society ruled by philosophers who would shape public opinion to conform to their orthodoxy. Does this lead to an authoritarian or totalitarian denial of individual freedom? Or should we say that even a free society must be at least a partially closed society, because it must defend freedom as an absolute value against the enemies of freedom?4 We must turn to the Crito, because in this dialogue Socrates considers how a citizen’s freedom of thought and action might be justly limited by the laws.

2. How far is a citizen obligated to obey the laws? At first glance, the Socratic answer to this question in the Apology seems to contradict the answer in the Crito. In his trial, Socrates refuses to give up his philosophic conversations as commanded by the Athenian authorities; later, as he awaits execution, he insists in the Crito that he is obligated by the laws not to try to escape. Even while resisting a particular legal command as being unjust, Socrates is still subject to the laws in other respects. Once again, the more general question is how one reconciles one’s yearnings as a human being and one’s obligations as a citizen. In the first half of his discussion with Crito, Socrates says that he strives to act by a rational standard that goes beyond popular opinions. What is truly right and wrong is not necessarily the same as what most people think to be right and wrong. But what makes common opinions unreliable? And exactly what is the norm to which Socrates appeals? Satisfactory answers to these questions would require a careful reading of this and other Platonic dialogues. Here we can draw some tentative conclusions from a few of the hints that Socrates gives us. Most people were surprised that at his trial Socrates was unafraid of being sentenced to death. Now they are surprised that he does not try to escape with his life. For most people, death is the worst of evils, and so it is to be avoided at all costs. But for Socrates the important thing is not merely to live, but to live well. He would choose a noble death over an ignoble life. Socrates differs from most people in that they care about the body, its preservation and comfort; he cares about the mind, that distinctively human capacity for understanding one’s self and one’s world. For Socrates, the greatest of evils is not death, but rather self-deception.5 How might an Athenian respond? Surely, the bodily needs of life must be satisfied as a precondition for cultivating the mind. Anyone who pursues the life of the mind is indebted to the community for providing the physical security—if not even luxury—that makes intellectual activity pos-

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sible. The community not only secures the bodily existence of philosophers, it also provides for their education. Even Socrates is largely a product of Athens and of that rare combination of security, freedom, and high culture that distinguishes the Athenian way of life. The Athenian patriot might well demand of Socrates that he honor the city that has made his philosophic life possible. Even the intellectual independence that leads him to challenge Athenian traditions was instilled in him by an Athenian education. Far from ignoring these arguments, Socrates presents them to Crito as reasons to accept the prescribed punishment rather than to escape. Socrates asks Crito to imagine what the laws of Athens might say if they could speak to them (50a–b). The laws would oppose an escape attempt by saying that a city could not continue to exist if individual citizens were free to nullify legal judgments against them. To which Socrates might respond that the judgment against him was unjust, implying that even if citizens should obey the just decrees of the laws, they should be free to resist those that are unjust. Can any legal system work if its judgments may be disobeyed by any citizen who thinks them unjust? If every final decision of the laws must be accepted until legally changed, does this mean that justice is whatever the lawmakers and judges say it is? Can Socrates appeal to a standard of justice that goes beyond the legal conventions of his city and still be a good citizen? In the speech attributed to the laws, Socrates is reminded that both his birth and his education were made possible by the laws. When he reached adulthood, he was free to leave and take his property with him. By staying he showed his acceptance of the laws and the way of life of Athens, which could be considered a tacit agreement to abide by the conditions of Athenian citizenship. Moreover, Athens gave Socrates the chance to persuade the jurors that the demands made on him were unjust, but he failed to convince them that his position was in accord with “the just by nature” (51c). With these points in mind, the Athenian patriot might argue that Athens is as open to debate about questions of justice as any community can be, but that no community can allow disputes about fundamental political issues to continue indefinitely. Socrates complained at his trial (Apology 37a–b) that he had not been given enough time to state his case. He was, however, permitted to live to the age of seventy, which in itself would suggest that the Athenians had been patient with him for a long time. Socrates seems to be convinced by the arguments of the laws that to escape his punishment would violate his obligations as a citizen. He seems, then, to agree that the philosopher’s devotion to endless, radical inquiry into the most fundamental questions of life must be limited—at least in public—for the sake of a stable political order. Yet, though he seems to be so persuaded, the careful reader of the Crito might still doubt this. We note that Socrates distinguishes between his own reasoning in the first half of the dialogue and the arguments in the second half that he attri-

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butes to the laws. He says the words of the laws have so overwhelmed him that he cannot even listen to opposing arguments (54d), which contradicts his usual assumption that all sides of an issue should be presented before a decision is made. Is it possible that Socrates thought that the teaching of the laws would have a good effect on Crito and those like him? Would his apparent acceptance of this teaching make people think that Socratic philosophers are not politically subversive after all? Would Socrates have been more receptive to plans for an escape if he had been younger, with many years of philosophizing ahead of him, and if there had been another city suitable for pursuing his work?6 Considering subtleties such as these is essential for an accurate understanding of the text. But let us return to the general question at issue. To what extent is the individual’s pursuit of natural fulfillment limited by the political order that secures the conditions for such a pursuit? Have we not already seen this demonstrated in the Declaration of Independence? Human beings possess by nature those rights necessary to fulfill their humanity, but they must depend on a government to secure those rights; and the proper organization of the power of government is determined not by individuals, but by the people acting under majority rule. There is, then, an absolute standard of justice by which government may be judged, but individuals cannot nullify governmental acts by appealing to this standard unless they can persuade the people of the rightness of their cause. How can the moral claims of individual human beings be given some political recognition without violating the minimal conditions of a stable political order by leaving all people free to judge their own claims? This question has been raised at various points in American history by individuals who have claimed the right to disobey laws they considered unjust. This sort of argument was made, for example, by Henry David Thoreau in his essay “Civil Disobedience.”7 Thoreau opposed the injustice of slavery by refusing to support any law that protected it. He opposed the war with Mexico in 1846 because he thought it would extend the area for slaveholding, and he was jailed when he refused to pay a tax that he thought might indirectly support the war. To justify his disobedience he appealed to the Declaration of Independence, arguing that the right to revolution included the right of any individual to make a “peaceable revolution” by refusing to obey a government that sanctions injustice. He thought this could easily be done by self-reliant individuals like himself who had little or no need for government. “It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world,” he explained.8 Would Socrates agree with Thoreau? Surely he would agree that there are standards of justice beyond the laws and that individuals ought to resist unjust laws. But as we have seen, Socrates allows the case for obedience to Athens to be made in the Crito. Clearly, he takes law and government much more seriously than does Thoreau, who insists that he has no need for government. Socrates is reminded in the Crito that his intellectual

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development, even his ability to question the opinions of the Athenians, is itself a product of Athenian culture, which obligates him to respect the law. Should Thoreau have been reminded that his intellectual life had also been nurtured by the cultural life of America? One of the marks of the individualistic spirit of America is that Americans are more inclined than the Athenians were to separate individual life and political life. Americans such as Thoreau might say that the ancient Athenians failed to appreciate the importance of individual freedom. The Athenians might respond that Americans fail to appreciate the extent to which a good life depends on living in a civilized community. Whatever differences there might be between the views of Socrates and Thoreau, the underlying problem is the same. How do citizens maintain their independence of moral judgment while fulfilling their obligations to the political order that secures their lives? Martin Luther King, Jr., pointed to the same issue in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” of 1963. Justifying his illegal acts to protest racial segregation, he explained: “Just as Socrates felt it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths . . . , so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism.”9 But what would Socrates have to do to insure that individuals “rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths”? At times he suggests that the best answer would be for Athens to be ruled by a philosopher such as himself. Instead of being governed by traditional opinions of what is good for men, Athens might then be ordered according to the philosopher’s grasp of the true needs of human nature. But Socrates’s confession (or rather his boast) that he only knows that he knows nothing should make us wonder whether a philosophic ruler would have any clear substitute for the traditional political opinions. Would it be sufficient for a Socratic ruler to take as his only norm the promotion of endless philosophic inquiry as the highest human activity? These and related questions lead us to Plato’s Republic, in which the difficulties in uniting philosophic wisdom and political rule become evident.

3. In defining justice, how do we move from opinions to knowledge? Socrates challenges the commonly accepted opinions by which Athens is governed. He seeks a definition of political justice that arises not from the traditions of a particular community, but from the universal and unchanging principles of human nature. We can understand why he would do this. We have all noticed that different people have different opinions about justice and that the differences are especially evident when people do not belong to the same cultural tradition. This makes us wonder

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whether there is any universal standard of justice at all, or whether someone’s conception of justice is merely a product of upbringing. Where should we look for a universal definition of justice? If we take Socrates as our guide, we should start with that which we wish to transcend—the common opinions about justice.10 Socrates pursues justice by asking people what they think about it, and each person answers in a way that reflects his or her character. Never being satisfied with the first answer anyone gives, Socrates moves through a series of questions in which he assumes that the most rigorous knowledge comes from a refinement of the commonsense opinions of human beings. For this reason, the readers of a Platonic dialogue cannot be sure that they understand what is going on unless they carefully follow the dramatic details of each conversation. We cannot do that here, but we can at least glance at a few of the passages in Book One of the Republic to get some provisional impressions about how Socrates works with the opinions of those he meets. In the Republic, the first view of justice is that of Cephalus, who defines justice as telling the truth and giving back what one has borrowed from another (331a–d). Because this is an ordinary view of justice taken by many people, Socrates starts here. He does not totally reject Cephalus’s definition, but he does offer an example of a case where it would seem not to apply. If a man has borrowed a weapon from a friend, who later asks for it to be returned when he is drunk or deranged and likely to harm himself, the borrower would be just if he refused to return the weapon and deceived his friend until the friend recovered his reason. Cephalus immediately sees that Socrates is right. Thus Socrates has shown that Cephalus’s opinions about justice are contradictory. But why is Cephalus reluctant to broaden his definition of justice to include the kind of situation that Socrates presents? Perhaps it is his understandable hesitation to acknowledge the justice in some cases of lying and stealing. This may help to illustrate why Socrates was thought to be a corrupter of the youth. Cephalus is a respectable old man, surrounded by his children, showing them parental wisdom by teaching them that justice is telling the truth and paying one’s debts—honesty is the best policy. Socrates forces him to admit that sometimes it is just to lie and steal from one’s friends. Socrates shows the children that the traditional moral maxims of their father are not absolutes because they do not apply to every conceivable case. Cephalus thinks it best to teach his children to habitually obey the ordinary moral rules without considering the exceptional cases to which the usual rules do not apply. He knows that there are exceptions to the rules, just as any person of experience would, but he hesitates to draw attention to them. Consider the difficulties that arise from taking the approach of Socrates. Socrates believes that returning someone’s property can be harmful because people do not always use their property wisely. The reluctance of Cephalus to acknowledge this publicly is understand-

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able. Socrates implies that it would be best for people to have only that property which they can properly use as determined by the judgment of the wise. One cannot do good to one’s friends unless one knows what is good for them, which requires that one know what is good for human beings as such. This, however, suggests the need for philosopher-kings! Socrates assumes, provisionally, that justice is doing good to one’s friends. Why only friends? Why not all people? We should remember the admonishment of Jesus that although it is easy to love those who love us, it is a higher achievement to love even our enemies (Matthew 5:43–48). We enjoy doing good to our friends because friendship is rewarding; thus our duty coincides with our interest. We have no such motive for helping those who are not our friends—especially if they are enemies—unless as Christians we anticipate the rewards of Heaven. Because Socrates does not have the benefit of Christian revelation, he cannot rely on the motives of Christian piety. Should we conclude, therefore, that Socratic justice depends ultimately on self-interest? In any case, Polemarchus picks up Socrates’s suggestion and defines justice as doing good to friends and harm to enemies (332d). One of the questions that Socrates raises in response has to do with the difficulty of recognizing true friends. Those who seem to be good to us may not be so in truth, and those who are truly good to us may not seem so (334c). Thus, Socrates indicates one of the major themes of the Republic—the importance of moving from appearance to reality, from opinion to knowledge. Socrates points out the dependence of good conduct on genuine knowledge. To act properly we must know what people are like and what is appropriate for each. Habitual acceptance of the common moral opinions falls short of this knowledge, but the common opinions do reflect the truth and must therefore be the starting point for philosophic inquiry. Again, we are compelled to challenge Socrates to show us how we can gain knowledge of the truly just. Some of us might even suggest that Socrates is naive in talking about some ideal of justice that has no application to the harsh realities of politics. In fact, this is exactly the objection made at this point in the dialogue by Thrasymachus. Before looking at the argument of Thrasymachus, we should consider what it is that stirs up his anger. Socrates persuades Polemarchus to agree that although he was right in saying that justice means helping friends, he was wrong in saying that it is just to harm enemies. The just person harms no one (335a–336a). Of course, to refrain from injuring one’s enemies is still a long way from the Christian duty to love one’s enemies; even so, it does seem unrealistic to think that people could completely avoid harming their enemies. Must not a good citizen of any country be willing to injure the enemies of that country in war? Or is Socrates saying that a truly just person would be a pacifist? Although he implies that here, in later describing what he thinks would be the “best city,” he says that the soldiers should be trained to be gentle to their fellow citizens but cruel to their

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enemies (375c). This seeming contradiction should interest us because it illustrates a general problem in the interpretation of the Republic. Some readers have thought that Socrates is so idealistic as to be blind to the unpleasant necessities of political life, such as the harshness of war, that often require the violation of ordinary rules of moral conduct. We shall see that people such as Machiavelli have criticized the ancient political philosophers for ignoring how war exhibits the ignoble reality of politics as being founded on force and fraud. Yet, in various portions of the Republic, Socrates takes a tough-minded Machiavellian view of the grim necessities of politics. Perhaps what he intends to teach us is the political need for combining—as in the training of good soldiers—gentleness and cruelty. Political leadership requires being capable of ruthlessness without being vicious. This might help to explain why Socrates argues early in the Republic against harming enemies, even though later on he concedes that even the best city might have to fight its enemies. Although war is necessary, one should see it as a necessary evil. This attitude promotes as much moderation as is realistically possible. It discourages aggressive, imperialistic wars but does not undermine the capacity for defense against attacks. (It should be noted that Athens had just been defeated in an imperialistic war with Sparta.) Is it possible that Socrates knows everything that Machiavelli knows without being Machiavellian? If so, then what does Socrates know that Machiavelli does not? Some hints about how we should answer these questions arise in Socrates’s discussion with his Machiavellian friend Thrasymachus. What is said by Thrasymachus represents the characteristic teaching of the Sophists. The Sophists were teachers who traveled from one city to another, and they were best known for teaching people how to use rhetoric to defend whatever cause they wished. Like Machiavelli, they had the reputation—perhaps not entirely justified—for being unscrupulous individuals who, for a fee, would show people how to gain and use political power for selfish purposes.11 So, in confronting Thrasymachus, Socrates must deal with the sort of person whom we today might call a political realist, a person for whom justice is simply the interest of the stronger.

4. Is justice the interest of the stronger? Thrasymachus insists that whoever is strong enough to gain political rule will dictate the rules of justice to promote selfish interests (338c– 339a). Later, Thrasymachus explains that true justice does not exist because human beings are so divided by selfish competitiveness that they seek only to exploit one another whenever they can (34da–344c). What is thought to be justice is actually a tool for injustice, for those who rule exploit their subjects and call this justice. In fact, all would prefer to do injustice if they could get away with it; but only a few are strong enough

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and clever enough to fulfill this human desire for complete injustice, and they become tyrants. Justice is whatever the rulers say it is, and all rulers are tyrants—even if disguised—in that they rule for their own benefit at the expense of the ruled. Justice, therefore, is the interest of the stronger. As he did with Cephalus and Polemarchus, Socrates questions Thrasymachus about the problems that arise if his conception of justice depends on mere opinions about how things seem to be rather than on knowledge of how things really are (339c–340c). According to Thrasymachus, justice is doing whatever the rulers command; and they will command whatever serves their interests. But what happens when the rulers are mistaken about their interests and command their subjects to do what in fact is harmful to the ruling group? In that case, the subjects are not serving the rulers’ interests by obeying their commands. Thrasymachus is thus caught in a contradiction when he claims that justice is obeying all commands of the rulers, thereby advancing their interests. He justifies this by saying that “a ruler in the precise sense” never makes mistakes. To the extent that leaders possess the art of ruling, they know what they are doing; and to the extent that they misunderstand what they are doing, they lack the art (340d–341a). This turns out to be Thrasymachus’s fatal mistake because, by agreeing that “a ruler in the precise sense” has perfect knowledge of ruling, he gives Socrates what he apparently needs to win the argument. Socrates shows that in accepting the obligation to act according to the perfect knowledge of the art of ruling, the ruler must rule not simply to satisfy selfish interests, but for the perfection of the art of ruling as a form of knowledge. Thrasymachus cannot present political rule as combining power and knowledge without contradicting his view of ruling as essentially tyrannical—that is, serving the good of the ruler at the expense of the ruled. To seek knowledge is to seek a good that implies standards of truth common to all thinking people; thus it is a good that rests on agreement with others. But the tyrant seeks to dominate others rather than to win their agreement to common purposes. In denying that the goods most worth seeking are attained in cooperation with others, a tyrant cannot be a seeker of knowledge because this is a good held in common with others. This defect in tyranny becomes clearer by considering the character of Thrasymachus, who apparently sees himself as the sort of great tyrant that he praises. Why doesn’t Thrasymachus show his superiority by beating Socrates up rather than arguing with him? Is it not inconsistent for him to ask for agreement with a position that denies all grounds for agreement? By trying to persuade Socrates and the others to agree with him that he knows the truth about justice, Thrasymachus shows that he wants their assent to his claims. Would a true tyrant make himself dependent on the consent of those who were to be his victims? It might have been a more accurate demonstration of the superior power of tyranny for Thrasymachus to shut Socrates up by slugging him. This, however, would have only demonstrated the power of a big thug, and Thrasymachus would not have been

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satisfied with that. Why does he want to present tyranny as founded not just on the physical force of a bully, but on genuine knowledge of what life is like? Perhaps Thrasymachus thinks it is in his self-interest to show that tyranny is an art that requires a special sort of knowledge. If he wants to be employed as an advisor to rulers, he must convince those with political ambitions that he has the knowledge that they need to win and hold political power. This assumes, however, that power without knowledge is defective and thus leads to the problems indicated by Socrates. Another possible explanation of Thrasymachus’s behavior is that the bad like to think they are clever and that the good are naive (see 343a, 348c–d, 349b). Thrasymachus would like to think the tyrannical-minded are smart, and those like Socrates are childishly ignorant of the ways of the world. This would explain why Thrasymachus blushes when Socrates seems to defeat him in the argument (350d). For Thrasymachus to have been outwitted or even tricked implies that Socrates is smarter. Simply by engaging in a conversation about justice, Thrasymachus implicitly agrees that reason rather than mere force should rule in human life. By conceding that a true ruler should govern with perfect knowledge of the art of ruling, Thrasymachus accepts—without fully recognizing that he does so—the Socratic teaching that the best political rule would combine philosophic knowledge and political power. We should remember a similar thought in the Declaration of Independence. By appealing to “the Laws of Nature” and to rational standards held to be “self-evident,” the signers of the Declaration imply that, because political action is ultimately guided by some first principles, the reliability of political rule depends on the reasonableness of those principles. To differing degrees, every political regime depends on some principle of justice to sustain its authority.

5. Is justice the fulfillment of natural needs? Toward the end of his conversation with Thrasymachus, Socrates argues that politics aims at justice because justice is a necessary condition for human beings to fulfill their natural inclinations. Political rule should be guided by a knowledge of the various inclinations characteristic of human nature and of how these inclinations can be satisfied to the fullest. To make justice the highest political standard is to see the purpose of political life as the actualization of human potential. To clarify what Socrates is saying, we should consider two of the Greek terms he uses here. Ergon can be translated as work, activity, or function. Areté can be translated as virtue or excellence. “The work [or function] of each thing,” Socrates says, “is what it alone can do, or can do more finely than other things”; and there is “a virtue [or excellence] for each thing to which some work is assigned” (353a–b). We would say that it is bad for a horse to have a broken leg because it cannot perform the

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work for which it is naturally fitted; and we would say that it is bad for eyes to be blinded for the same reason. We would say that a good horse is one that can run well, and good eyes are those that can see well. We have standards of goodness here because we know what these things are naturally suited to do. The virtue of each thing is its doing well whatever activity is most appropriate to its nature. If we knew the activity for which human beings are best fitted by their nature, then we would have a standard of the human good for political life. Later in the dialogue, Socrates will distinguish three parts of the human soul—appetite, spirit, and reason—and he will claim that all three parts reach their fullest activity when they are well ordered under the rule of reason as the highest part. At this point in the dialogue, he alludes to this teaching by stating that what is distinctive about the human soul is its capacity for ruling through rational deliberation (353d). In having bodily appetites and spirited emotions, we are like all other animals; but we are distinguished from them by our ability to reason. Justice, therefore, exists in an individual soul when each power is fully active under the rule of reason. Justice exists in a community when each citizen does well what he or she is best suited for, in cooperation with the others, under the rule of the wisest. The key point here is the idea of justice—and of goodness in general— as being the fulfillment of natural tendencies. Figuring out the exact meaning of this idea and then trying to decide whether it is correct would lead us into a number of difficult questions. We can postpone this discussion until we come to Aristotle and later to Aquinas, who clarify the ideas of natural justice and natural law. What should we make of the thought that the goal of politics is justice understood as the realization or completion of the natural tendencies of human beings? It is claimed that human beings can discover moral standards in nature, which are not, therefore, simply arbitrary or artificial human products. These moral norms of nature are expressed in certain inclinations or needs shared by all members of the human species. We must satisfy our natural needs in order to be fully human. Food, socialization, and education are examples of such needs. Without food, we could not survive. Without social activity and some development of our minds (such as learning to speak), we might survive, but our growth as human beings would be stunted and deformed. If justice is viewed as the fulfillment of natural needs, then our moral duties coincide with our personal interests. To do what we ought to do is to do what we naturally desire to do. The good is the desirable. There can be conflicts, however, between our natural needs and our accidental wants. Someone’s pleasure in enslaving people may conflict with the need for social cooperation; though the latter should take precedence over the former because a social life is essential to human development, whereas enslaving others is not. To insure the proper satisfaction of their basic needs, individuals have to use their capacity to reason to understand their

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needs and how best to fulfill them. This rational ordering of human inclinations is as important for a just community as it is for a just individual. We should remember the argument of the Declaration of Independence that, according to the “Laws of Nature,” any just government must secure the conditions necessary for each human being to satisfy those needs that are shared equally with all other human beings. Can we be sure that Socrates is correct in presenting justice as the completion of our natural tendencies under the rule of reason? Does this depend on our commonsense experience of human nature? Some would insist that unbiased observations of how human beings act do not support the Socratic teaching. People often seem to be so narrowly passionate and selfish in their desires as to lack all the natural inclinations to justice of which Socrates speaks. From this viewpoint, justice might seem to be little more than an artificial set of rules created by human beings to pacify the natural conflicts among themselves. Of course, Plato is fully aware of this view of justice, as we have seen from the arguments he attributes to Thrasymachus. At the beginning of Book Two of the Republic, another version of this position is given by Glaucon and Adeimantus.

6. Is justice a social construction rather than a natural standard? Because Glaucon and Adeimantus are not satisfied with Socrates’s apparent refutation of Thrasymachus’s claim that most would naturally prefer to do injustice if they could escape detection, they restate the Thrasymachean argument. If justice is natural, then Socrates should show them that people naturally take pleasure in doing justice for its own sake. The common opinions and behavior of human beings, however, appear to deny this. It seems that people find doing injustice to be naturally good and suffering injustice bad. Yet, since most people cannot freely do injustice to others without suffering injustice themselves, and the pain of the injustice they endure is greater than the pleasure of inflicting injustice on others, they are generally willing to agree to a kind of contract that establishes laws to prohibit all people from injuring their fellow citizens. Whatever the law decrees is called justice (348e–359b). Justice, then, is more conventional than natural, because it is the arbitrary product of human agreement to keep the natural selfishness of human beings from leading to violent anarchy. Justice is natural, therefore, only in the sense that the natural desire for self-preservation leads people to want to escape the violence that results when they are unrestrained by law. This differs, however, from Socrates’s conception of natural justice. Socratic justice is a good in itself that fulfills natural human inclinations; but Thrasymachean justice (as described by Glaucon and Adeimantus) is only a lesser of two evils that people choose

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because they cannot satisfy their natural desire for injustice without suffering injustice themselves. While the aim of Socratic justice is to perfect human nature in its highest capacities, the aim of Thrasymachean justice is to restrain the viciousness of human nature. Socratic justice makes human beings better. Thrasymachean justice simply keeps the peace. The tyrant, as representative of those in the natural state, does what others would like to do if they could: dominate others for the satisfaction of selfish desires. Glaucon and Adeimantus recognize that if Socrates is to refute this view, he must show that living justly is more intrinsically pleasurable than living the life of a tyrant. By responding to the Thrasymachean view of justice, Socrates will also be responding to the arguments of modern political philosophers such as Machiavelli and Hobbes. As we shall see, they also deny that there is any natural inclination to justice beyond the desire to be free from the natural war of each against all. As in Glaucon’s account of justice (359a), Hobbes envisions justice as the product of a social contract through which people create an artificial restraint on their own natural rapaciousness. This same issue as to whether political justice is natural or conventional has been important in American political history. The debates in 1858 between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln illustrate this. Douglas argued that because the Constitution gave legal support to slavery, the moral question of whether slavery was right or wrong should not be discussed. To argue about the moral status of slavery would only promote conflict, he insisted; therefore, to keep the peace, we ought to leave the people of the new states in the West free to decide by majority vote whether or not their states will have slavery. Thus, Douglas was close to the Thrasymachean claim that justice is the rule of the stronger, which in this case meant the rule of the majority as embodied in the conventional legal arrangements of the society. Lincoln argued that there could be no right to hold slaves if slavery was wrong. He appealed to the equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence as a moral absolute grounded in natural justice that should be respected. Lincoln conceded that it was impracticable to abolish slavery immediately, which was why the Constitution gave at least temporary protection for the institution. Nevertheless, he insisted, as an abstract principle equality should be the goal toward which we would move as quickly as circumstances permitted.12 Like Socrates, Lincoln ascribed to a standard of natural justice by which all legal justice would be measured. There is a plausible argument for the position of Douglas and Thrasymachus. If the limitations of human nature, including the inability of human beings to agree about moral principles, make it impossible to reach moral perfection in politics (and both Lincoln and Socrates would have to admit this), then is it not dangerous to push political life toward that unattainable goal? Won’t such unrealistic moral idealism promote unceasing political conflict? Would it not be better, therefore, to secure political peace by lowering the aims of political justice?

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In response to this challenge, as presented by Glaucon and Adeimantus, Socrates must defend justice as naturally desirable in itself. To do this he offers to construct a “city in speech” in accordance with the natural needs of human beings, with the hope that true justice might come into view in this imaginary city (368b–369b). Without considering all the elements of this city, we should at least consider a few points that bear on the general questions we have raised. Socrates sees the city arising from two principles of human nature. First, “each of us isn’t self-sufficient but is in need of much” (369b). That we live in communities is natural because we must cooperate with one another in order to satisfy our needs. Food is the first and greatest need; of course, housing and clothing are also needed. The second principle of our nature that determines the shape of every community is that “each of us is naturally not entirely like anyone else, but rather differs in his nature; one man is fitted for one work, and another for another” (370b). According to this principle of the natural division of labor, all benefit when each does whatever each is most suited for by nature to do well. One individual is a farmer, another a carpenter, another a weaver, and so on. All are naturally equal in their needs, but they are naturally unequal in their capacities. The specialization of labor is more productive in both the quantity and the quality of its products. The question of whether the social division of labor is demanded by technical efficiency and human nature has been debated throughout the history of the social sciences. Adam Smith, for example, defends the division of labor as the basis for capitalism, while Rousseau and Marx warn of the degrading effects of dividing labor so that it becomes monotonous and dehumanizing (see chapter 11, section 3). Socrates defends the social division of labor as manifesting the natural human need for social cooperation. Are human beings naturally inclined to social cooperation? The anthropological evidence is conflicting, as we shall see when we consider Aristotle’s claim that we are political beings by nature. There is, however, some support for Socrates in certain contemporary theories of human origins. Some anthropologists have argued, for example, that it was the urge for cooperation and sharing that distinguished human evolution from that of the other primates.13 The most decisive element—just as in the Socratic account—is said to have been food sharing. The sharing of food might have supported all the other distinctive characteristics of our first human ancestors—erect posture, verbal communication, grouping around home bases, the use of tools, and long-term mating and kinship categories. Food sharing also gave rise to a natural division of labor based on sex. The men would hunt and scavenge while the women—being encumbered with children, and therefore lacking the speed and mobility for hunting—would gather plants and small animals. Rather than consuming the food as soon as they found it—like the apes— they brought it back to a home base for sharing. (Consider the implica-

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tions of the many social rituals associated with food sharing as a gesture of hospitality.) This anthropological theory supports to some extent the Socratic view of human nature, whereas other theories that stress the natural violence and aggressiveness of our human ancestors seem to support Thrasymachus. No one would deny that violent conflict has almost always been part of human life, especially when circumstances force human beings to compete for survival. But the issue here is whether aggression is the predominant characteristic of human nature. How one answers this question will shape one’s view of political life. Socrates recognizes the natural aggressiveness of human beings when he describes the move from a “healthy city” to a “feverish city” (372e). At the beginning his “city in speech” is a small community with a simple life. Because people are satisfied with the minimal necessities of life, there is enough to go around; in such circumstances, it is easy to have a cooperative community. But as the city becomes larger and more complex, and as people begin to desire luxuries so that their wants are never satisfied, competition grows, and there are wars. From this perspective, the move to the “feverish city” would seem to be a decline. From another perspective, it would seem to be an ascent, because in the city of luxury the highest cultural pursuits—such as philosophy—become possible. Yet if philosophy is not possible in a “healthy city,” a question is raised about the goodness of philosophy. Is the “healthy city” more natural, in that it reflects the natural necessities of existence? Or is the “feverish city” more natural, in that it allows the highest faculties of human nature to flourish? We begin to wonder whether philosophy is compatible with a good political life. We must ask ourselves what Plato intended his readers to conclude from Socrates’s description of a city ruled by philosophers.

7. Is the rule of philosopher-kings meant to be a realistic political goal? This might seem to be an odd question to ask about the Republic because the most famous—or infamous—teaching of this book is that the only cure for our political ills would be for philosophers to become rulers (473b–e). Yet some interpreters of the Republic (particularly, Leo Strauss and his students) have concluded that Plato intended to show how unrealistic it would be to combine philosophic wisdom and political power.14 When Socrates sets down as requirements for his city measures so seemingly contrary to human nature—especially the bodily appetites—as to be comical, these interpreters regard this as evidence that Plato wants his serious readers to see how ridiculous it would be to adopt the Republic as a program for political action (e.g., see 450a–473a, 540e–541b, 546a– 547a). What would be the value of such a teaching for understanding politics? An image of such a “city in speech,” even if not fully realizable in

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practice, might still serve as a standard for judging political proposals as better or worse (472b–473b). Plato could be warning against the dangers of expecting too much from politics. Utopian projects can produce the greatest political disasters. Plato might be a teacher of moderation insofar as he teaches that the highest human needs—as manifested in philosophic pursuits—go beyond the limits of political life (59lb–592b). But if Plato believes the highest life is philosophic, does he thus denigrate the moral life? If Plato believes morality is subordinate to philosophy, does that mean Thrasymachus was right in denying that morality is naturally good as an end in itself?15 Some commentators have challenged this interpretation of the Republic.16 They insist that the “city in speech” is really intended by Plato to be an ideal political order. After all, they point out, Socrates says that establishing his proposed city would be hard but not impossible (540d). As they see it, the Platonic teaching is that far from being in conflict with political rule, philosophic perfection can be achieved only in a good political order founded on the rule of reason. And even if Platonic philosophers cannot rule directly over political life, they might rule indirectly by teaching those politically ambitious people who do rule.17 Don’t all political philosophers hope to have some influence over political life? And if we take seriously Socrates’s proposal for the rule of philosopher-kings, we should also take seriously the proposed rule of philosopherqueens (449c–73e). Some feminist readers of the Republic have claimed that the feminist arguments for the equality of men and women can be found in the Republic, although many male scholars find this incredible. Natalie Harris Bluestone18 shows that Plato understood all the basic questions raised by the modern debate over feminism. She also shows the sociobiological assumptions in Plato’s view of justice as each person doing what he or she is biologically best suited to do, and despite the sexual differences between men and women in their reproductive roles, these differences are irrelevant to political rule, which suggests that the most talented men and women might be equally qualified to rule. To decide which of these interpretations of the Republic is correct requires a careful reading of the text itself. But let us keep in mind one of the principles that we shall stress throughout this book: every important question about interpreting a work of political philosophy is also likely to be an important question about how we should think about politics. The question here concerns the extent to which politics can be truly rational. Every political community rests on certain fundamental beliefs, of which the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration of Independence might be an example. Is the nature of politics such that these fundamental beliefs must be accepted by the citizens in an unreflective way as unexamined opinions? If so, then politics can never become philosophic, for philosophy requires radical inquiry into the most important questions of life. If it were possible to transform political life so that it would be

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grounded not on opinions, but on knowledge or at least on the rigorous pursuit of knowledge, politics could become philosophic. Thus, we return to the predicament of Socrates standing before the Athenian jurors. Because for him “the unexamined life is not worth living,” he cannot accept without question the traditional opinions by which Athens is governed. Yet it is hard to see how the Athenians could devote themselves fully to the Socratic way of life without political disaster. It seems that the possibility for a few people to live like Socrates depends on the stable political order secured by the very opinions that he questions. Would this problem be solved in a community ruled by philosophers? Could such a community exist without any reliance on unexamined opinions, which are usually mixtures of truth and falsity? The difficulty of achieving this is evident in a number of places in the Republic. We will examine only two examples: the account of the “noble lie” and the image of the cave.

8. Why does Socratic statesmanship require a “noble lie”? The Socratic “city in speech” requires a program of civic education. As one element of that education, the citizens must be told what Socrates calls a “noble lie.” Many readers of the Republic have been shocked by this. Does this show that Socrates—or Plato—was willing to use propaganda to establish a totalitarian state? How can anyone who believes in political freedom accept the idea of indoctrinating citizens with lies? Socrates has distinguished a “noble lie” from a “true lie” (382a–d). A “true lie” hides the truth, and it should be avoided at all costs. But a “noble lie”—or a “lie in speech”—resembles the truth in some manner, and it is told for a good purpose. Yet why is there any need for even a “noble lie”? Why can’t the citizens be told the unequivocal truth? The “noble lie” suggested by Socrates has two parts (414b–415b). First, the citizens must be told that their childhood was like a dream, that they were actually under the Earth, and that with the completion of their education, the Earth, which is their mother, sent them up. They should think of themselves as siblings born of the Earth, and they should defend their land as their mother. Second, they must be told that even though they are siblings, they were formed of three different natures by the god. Those with gold in them are to be the rulers; those with silver the soldiers (or auxiliaries); and those with iron and bronze the farmers and other workers. Although those of each class will generally produce offspring like themselves, sometimes a gold child will be born to silver parents, or a silver child to gold parents, and so on. In these cases, the children are to be removed and placed in the group for which they are naturally suited. Socrates admits that this story seems so fantastic that it would be difficult to convince people to accept it. Still, he thinks it conveys a truth about political life. Is this silly story true? Why shouldn’t we conceive of our

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childhood education as a process of being born to personhood, as a fetal stage during which our society gives us the language, the habits, and the culture that shape us into full human beings by the time we reach adulthood? Isn’t this why every society distinguishes between minors and adults and treats the passage into adulthood as a birth into real life? Imagine infants left to themselves from birth, with no human contact. Even if they could survive physically, which is unlikely, we might doubt whether they could ever become fully human without having been nurtured by society. Isn’t it common for political communities to be spoken of as families bound together by blood ties? We talk of the “fatherland” or the “mother country.”19 Consider the words that hundreds of millions of American schoolchildren were once required by their teachers to memorize: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” Thus, Americans have been taught from their youth that they are all brothers and sisters because they are the children of those “fathers” who signed the Declaration of Independence. It is even implied that “Liberty” is their mother in whose womb they were “conceived.” Does the completion of their birth as Americans come only with their dedication to the proposition of equality? Moreover, doesn’t Abraham Lincoln’s speech resemble the speech of the laws of the Crito, particularly when the laws claim that Socrates owes them the obedience due to parents because they are responsible for his birth and his upbringing (51c–52a)? But what about the second part of the “noble lie,” the story of the metals that divide the citizens into three groups? Some readers have criticized this as the establishment of a caste system. We should keep in mind, however, that Socrates insists that people should belong to whatever group they are best fitted for by nature, no matter who their parents are. He is actually teaching the importance of equality of opportunity. Still, it is hard to see how the rulers will be able to recognize gold children when they are born to iron-and-bronze parents. Don’t children need the proper education before their natural abilities become apparent? That the difficulties with this scheme are so obvious suggests that Plato thought the “city in speech” to be unrealizable in practice. Every political community seems to need some social division of labor—different people doing different jobs. As a result, power, privilege, and property are distributed unequally. The purpose of the story about the metals is to convince the citizens that the assignment of jobs and the distribution of benefits is based on merit, and Socrates has to assume that this can be done on the basis of natural abilities rather than artificial distinctions (such as wealth and family background). Would such inequalities be contrary to the principles of equality of rights as set forth in the Declaration of Independence? Jefferson did not think so, for he thought that the aim of American democracy was to pro-

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mote that “natural aristocracy among men” based on “virtue and talents,” while eliminating that “artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth.” He thought that an educational system was needed that would allow the most talented few to rise to the top even if they were born poor and of low social status.20 The equality to be sought is the equality of each person to develop natural talents without artificial restraints, allowing the social division of labor to be based on merit. Today, the science of intelligence testing allows us to measure cognitive ability as IQ (intelligence quotient). This allows us to see that the people who succeed in the more cognitively challenging occupations and at the higher levels of education tend to have above average IQs. Some of those who study this argue that in a modern, highly technological and highly complex society like the United States, those in the ruling positions in the economy, the culture, and the government belong to a cognitive elite, and that this constitutes what Jefferson identified as the “natural aristocracy.”21 Does that mean that the class structure of a free society like the United States can resemble in some ways Socrates’s city in the Republic? Is the equality of rights before the law compatible with the inequality of a class structure with a cognitive elite as the ruling class? (We will consider this question again in chapter 15, section 5.) As we shall see, Marx argued that only in a completely classless society could genuine freedom and equality be achieved. As long as there is any division of labor based on a class structure, human beings are not free to develop themselves without constraint and in cooperation with others. Although Plato does describe a kind of communism that anticipates Marx, it is restricted to the rulers; the division of labor by classes is not abolished. What explains these conflicting versions of communism? Does Plato think that completely abolishing the social division of labor and private property would be contrary to human nature? Should the hierarchical class structure defended by Socrates be taken as natural? Does the story about those of gold ruling over those of silver and those of bronze and iron have any grounding in nature—in the natural inequality of talent among human beings? Or is it simply a ruse to support the illegitimate claims of the ruling class?

9. Is it natural for the city and the soul to be rank ordered into three parts? Socrates argues that the just city will have a natural division of labor corresponding to the natural tripartition of the just soul. As reason rules over the spirited and appetitive parts of the soul, so should those with political wisdom rule over the soldiers and the moneymakers (432a–443e). Those who are to rule must have a special education, the character of which is vividly depicted by Socrates in his analogy of the cave (514a–525b).

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He compares political life to a dimly lighted cave in which everyone is bound, so that they can only look at one wall. Behind them is a fire, and objects carried in front of the fire cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners assume the shadows to be the whole of reality. Only a few people with the best natures can turn around to see the fire; eventually, a very few can even rise out of the cave to see the sun. These few undergo a philosophic education so as to view the true principles of reality rather than the shadows that occupy most people. As much as they would like to remain outside the cave, the philosophers are compelled to return so that they can take turns in ruling over the cave dwellers.22 Human beings are naturally unequal in their moral and intellectual capacities, and those few who have reached the peak of human development (living by the rule of reason) seem to have a justified claim to rule over the others at lower stages of development. Modern readers of the Republic are inclined to raise at least two objections to this. Socrates presents his hierarchical arrangement of the levels of human development— with reason at the top—as a universal truth of human nature, but many readers would doubt the truth of Plato’s rationalist psychology. Many would also reject this Platonic teaching because it seems unduly elitist and antidemocratic, and therefore contrary to modern liberal democracy. Even if one agrees with Socrates about the goodness of the philosophic life, one might wonder whether democracy is the best regime for philosophers, because it gives them the freedom to philosophize without persecution. In fact, even Socrates seems to recognize this in the Republic, when he speaks of the freedom of the democratic city, and concludes that “anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live” (555b– 62c). One might read the Republic as suggesting that democracy—including Athenian democracy—makes possible the freedom of choice that is the necessary condition for justice as well as philosophy.23 But what should one say to those who doubt Plato’s rationalist psychology? One possible response would be to argue that Plato’s account of human psychology is supported by certain contemporary theories that have some claim to being both scientifically valid and consistent with democracy. Lawrence Kohlberg, who was a prominent social psychologist at Harvard University, argued that Plato’s view of the moral and intellectual development of human beings had been confirmed by the findings of developmental moral psychology.24 Without deciding the truth or falsity of Kohlberg’s theory—his work is controversial—we should at least consider his testimony as evidence that the questions raised by Plato’s psychology remain alive today. Kohlberg distinguishes six stages of cognitive moral development. Each stage represents a particular structure of thought, a way of thinking about moral problems. Kohlberg claims that every human being begins at the lowest stage of infancy and then moves through the higher stages in later years. The six stages can be divided into three levels: the pre-conventional level, the conventional level, and the principled level.

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We all begin at the pre-conventional level, where our only concern is our own selfish pleasures and pains. We see morality as simply a matter of reward and punishment. If we help others, it is only because they have promised to help us in return. But by age nine or later, many of us have moved to the conventional level; at this point, we see ourselves not just as isolated individuals, but as members of society. We see the value of a family, a group, a nation. We want to be approved by others, and we obey authority because it preserves social order. Most people don’t rise any higher than this in their moral reasoning. But a few in their early adulthood reach the principled level, at which stage they look to universal moral principles that go beyond the authority of a particular group or society. The appeal of the Declaration of Independence to the “Laws of Nature” and to the equality of human rights illustrates this level of moral judgment. If Socrates had decided to obey the Athenian authorities simply because of the threat of physical punishment, he would have been at the pre-conventional level. The argument that he attributes to the laws of Athens in the Crito—that he should accept his punishment as part of his obligations to his city—is an example of reasoning at the conventional level. His own decision that his pursuit of truth is higher than his loyalty to Athens manifests moral reasoning at the principled level. But why should the higher levels be considered better than the lower? Why should one even speak of higher and lower levels? One reason is that, if Kohlberg’s empirical studies are correct, people prefer to reason at the highest level of which they are capable. This natural preference for the higher levels rests on the fact that as one ascends the hierarchy of stages, one’s reasoning becomes more differentiated, more integrated, and more universal. The reasoning is more differentiated in that one can distinguish between different goods—for example, life and property. It is more integrated in that one can rank these various goods: Life ranks higher than property because property is a means for sustaining life, not the reverse. And the reasoning at higher stages is also more universal, in that appeal is made to broad principles (such as justice and equality) applied to broader contexts (from isolated individuals to group and family members, then to citizens, and finally to human beings as such). The political importance of all this becomes clear if one agrees with Kohlberg that to be a good citizen one must be able to reason at least as high as the conventional level. Because the Declaration of Independence requires reasoning at the principled level—appealing as it does to universal rights grounded in the nature of humans as such—a full understanding of the American regime requires moral judgment at the highest levels of cognitive development. Kohlberg estimates from his empirical studies that very few people have reached the principled level by the time of high school graduation; and even among adult Americans, he doubts that more than 10 percent have attained the highest stages.

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Kohlberg agrees with the Platonic teaching that people must be educated for citizenship. He influenced the training of high school teachers who tried to move their students to higher levels of cognitive moral development. But does the failure of most people to reach the peak—even by Kohlberg’s measurements—suggest natural inequalities? If only a few can comprehend the reasoning of the Declaration of Independence, does that mean that full participation in political rule should be restricted to a few? If most American citizens are unable to directly grasp the logic of the fundamental principles of their regime, how can these ideas be put into a form they can understand? Must our rulers—as shocking as it might seem—resort to “noble lies”? (In the American debate over slavery, one Southern Congressman said that the so-called “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence were actually “self-evident lies.”) But we should also ask whether the rationalist psychology of Plato and Kohlberg is correct. Is it true that the proper order of the human mind requires that reason rule over the appetites and the passions of the body? David Hume argued that reason is and must be only the servant of the passions. And later we will see Adam Smith arguing that moral judgment is motivated primarily by moral emotions or sentiments based on our sympathy or fellow-feeling with other human beings. Reason can inform us of the circumstances of action, and reason can help us to harmonize our sometimes conflicting and confused emotions. But reason by itself cannot move us to action. Doesn’t even philosophy—as the love of wisdom—manifest the rule of erotic emotional longing in motivating a life of thought? Recently, some evolutionary moral psychologists like Jonathan Haidt have argued that the rationalist tradition of Plato and Kohlberg has been refuted by modern scientific research, which shows that Hume and Smith were right about the primacy of moral emotions in guiding moral judgments and actions.25 In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin confirmed the moral psychology of Hume and Smith by showing how the moral sentiments could have been shaped by evolutionary history.26 Now, the most recent research in neuroscience shows how these evolved moral sentiments arise in the brain. Those people who cannot feel moral emotions such as love, guilt, shame, and indignation cannot make good moral judgments. This is manifested most dramatically in the case of psychopaths, who have no moral sense, although their purely rational capacities are normal, because they lack the moral emotions that sustain empathy for other human beings in normal people. Does this refute Plato’s rationalist psychology, as Haidt argues? Or should we agree with those moral psychologists who argue that our emotional moral intuitions can be shaped and informed by prior reasoning, and that—sometimes at least—reasoning can influence the great moral debates in political history?27 To defend Plato, we would have to agree with him that philosophers reach the highest levels of intellectual development, which allows them to

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see things that cannot be seen—or at least not as clearly—by those people at the lower levels. If so, what are these ultimate objects of knowledge? And what exactly do they have to do with politics? Plato does have an answer, but it is not easy to understand. The ultimate objects of human knowing—seen by the philosophers when they leave the cave—are the “Forms” or “Ideas” (505a–511e).28 At the simplest level, the Idea of something is the visible shape or look by which something is recognized as being of a certain kind. (The Greek words eidos and idea are related to the word idein, which means to see.) For example, to recognize my pet Charlie as a dog, I have to recognize by his looks that he is a certain type or kind of thing. He shares certain typical characteristics with other dogs that distinguish them from cats, trees, and rocks. I don’t confuse him with my friend Rick, because as a human being, Rick differs essentially from dogs. At a higher level of generality, however, Rick and Charlie do share certain characteristics that distinguish them as animals from plants and nonliving things. Obviously, no two dogs are ever completely alike. Charlie is unique, as I indicate by giving him a proper name. But to think about him, I have to compare him with other things as I look for similarities and differences. This process of classification is the foundation of all knowledge. Even the simplest act of perception requires categorization. To perceive something I name it; and by naming it with a common noun (dog), I apply an elaborate system of classification. The wondrous mystery of this activity is suggested by the opening chapters of the Bible, where Adam participates in God’s creative ordering of the world by naming the animals. Is this system of names an arbitrary creation, or is it somehow inherent in the nature of things, in the order that human beings (or God?) discover? This is a critical question. In fact, it may be the most critical question that human beings can ask. It is a fundamental question for politics because how we view the natural order of things will influence how we view political order.29 The doctrine of the Ideas is an attempt to explain what it means to order things according to their names. The things we perceive through the senses are what they are on account of the Ideas.30 To recognize someone as just, I must have some understanding of the Idea of Justice, by virtue of which this particular person is just. To make sense of the visible world, I must appeal to invisible concepts. I can see this just person, and his or her just acts, before me, but only if I also “see” the meaning of justice. From this sort of experience, Socrates concludes that the visible world is an image of those invisible Ideas on account of which the world is as it is. One can see why philosophic materialists have rejected Plato’s teaching about the Ideas as airy nonsense. But consider what can be said in favor of Plato’s thought. Doesn’t all reasoning about the world require an explanation of the visible by reference to the invisible? To understand reality, we have to organize our visible experience according to some invisible

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conceptual framework. We do this whenever we sort things out into various kinds of things: dogs, trees, acts of justice, and so on. We continue to do this at the most abstract levels of thought. For example, Newton’s law of gravity—that the force of attraction between any two bodies is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them—is an invisible principle that explains something about the visible world. In this sense, modern science is clearly Platonic. Physicist Werner Heisenberg, in commenting on scientific theories of the behavior of elementary particles, said: “I think that on this point modern physics has definitely decided for Plato. For the smallest units of matter are in fact not physical objects in the ordinary sense of the word; they are forms, structures or—in Plato’s sense—Ideas, which can be unambiguously spoken of only in the language of mathematics.”31 For a political illustration of this point, let us think again about the Declaration of Independence. The principle of the equality of human rights is a standard of justice that pervades American political debate. Americans take this principle for granted even as they argue about how best to put it into practice. We cannot make sense of American political life in its distinctness without some reference to this abstract principle of equality. Later in this book, we shall evaluate the reasoning behind this particular principle of justice. But the deeper question here is whether it is reasonable to view politics in the light of any abstract standard of justice.

10. Must a good political order depend on a cosmic order of divine law? At the end of the Republic, Socrates concludes his quest for justice by looking for justice in the afterlife. He tells the story of Er, a man who died and then came back to life to tell people what he saw when his disembodied soul ascended to the next life (608c–21d). He reports that the gods reward those who have been good in this life and punish those who have been bad. He also reports the order of the cosmos, with the Earth at the bottom, and above it, the moon, the Sun, the planets, and finally the fixed stars. If this is true, then the human law of justice in political life can be judged as an imitation or reflection of the divine law of justice in the cosmic order. Is this similar to what we saw in the Declaration of Independence—in the appeal to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and to God as the providential Creator and Judge of humanity? This theological cosmology at the end of the Republic points ahead to Plato’s Timaeus, a dialogue that occurs the day after the dialogue of the Republic. Socrates begins his dialogue with Timaeus by summarizing some of the main ideas from the Republic. Then, just as Socrates had constructed the best city in speech in the Republic, Timaeus constructs the best cosmos in speech. Timaeus teaches that the world is the best of possible worlds as

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intelligently designed by a providential god.32 Some of the early Christians such as Augustine saw this as evidence that Plato embraced the biblical teaching that God was the Creator of everything.33 Plato’s Timaeus even became a primary source for the cosmic model of the universe—with Earth at the center—as a “Great Chain of Being” that dominated the cosmological thinking of the European Middle Ages.34 This medieval divine model of the universe as governed by the moral laws of God was challenged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the modern scientific model of the universe as governed by the mechanical laws of nature. The old moral model of the cosmos provided an external, transcendent standard of divine law for human moral and political order. The new mechanical model of the cosmos provided no cosmic standard for human life, because the mechanical cosmos of the new science seemed indifferent or even hostile to human life, and thus human beings were left on their own to care for themselves in a godforsaken world. Some philosophers have worried that this loss of the old moral cosmology leads inevitably to moral relativism and nihilism—to the thought that there are no eternal standards of right and wrong to guide human morality and politics.35 (Later, we will see how this threat of nihilism is handled by Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Strauss.) Does Plato—or Plato’s Socrates—agree that we need a moral cosmology to avoid nihilism? We do see various accounts of a moral cosmology in Plato’s dialogues—at the end of the Republic, in the Timaeus, and in Book 10 of the Laws. But even if Plato thinks it’s good for people to believe that there is such cosmic support for human morality, some readers have wondered whether Plato believes this to be simply true or to be only a noble lie.36 Instead of finding moral guidance in an intelligently designed cosmos, Plato’s Socrates often looks to human wants and desires as the source of norms for human life. If human beings are by their natural desires directed to certain ends or purposes, then we might see those ends or purposes as intrinsic to their human nature, regardless of whether they have any support in cosmic nature. We might accept a modern scientific conception of the cosmos as morally neutral, while seeing the natural desires of the human species as a natural ground for moral order. Must the human good also be the cosmic good? Must we look to God’s eternal order of the cosmos as providing a transcendent purpose for morality and politics? Or can we be satisfied with the thought that human life has no purpose but itself? In the history of political philosophy, these are perhaps the deepest political questions.

Notes 1 2

See Henri Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1949); and JeanPierre Vernant, The Origins of Greek Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982). Some excellent translations can be found in Plato and Aristophanes, Four Texts on Socrates: Plato’s “Euthyphro,” “Apology,” and “Crito” and Aristophanes’s “Clouds,” trans. Thomas G. West and Grace Starry West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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7 8 9

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John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 29–30. On Plato as a totalitarian, see Karl R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950). For criticisms of this view, see John Wild, Plato’s Modern Enemies and the Theory of Natural Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). See Plato, Apology 25d–26a, 28a–30b, 32b–3, 35b–d, 36b–38b, 40c–42a; Crito 43a–b, 44c–d, 48a–49b. Another student of Socrates—Xenophon—wrote his own version of Socrates’s defense at his trial, in which Socrates indicates his willingness to die because his mental powers were beginning to fade with age. Xenophon, Apology 5–9. Compare Plato, Apology 41d. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937), 635–59. Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, 638–39, 647, 656. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1976), 335. See David Miller, Social Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), who argues that the definitions of justice commonly depend on three conflicting criteria—rights, deserts, and needs. See G. B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Mark Backman, Sophistication: Rhetoric and the Rise of Self-Consciousness (Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press, 1991). Backman argues that in the modern world we can see the triumph of the five principles of sophistic rhetoric: “Words are tools. Images are real. Information is power. Change is inevitable. Truth is relative.” Paul Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 303–4, 332, 343–44, 351. See Glynn Isaac, “The Food-Sharing Behavior of Protohuman Hominids,” Scientific American 238 (April 1978): 90–108; and Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Norton, 2012). See Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 50–138. Allan Bloom, a student of Strauss, has developed this interpretation in the essay for his translation of the Republic (New York: Basic Books, 1968). That this is Strauss’s interpretation of Plato has been argued by Shadia Drury in The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). According to Drury, Strauss and his students promote a “Socratic hedonism” that “regards the good as something other than the morally good or noble” (p. 82). (See chapter 14, section 5.) See Dale Hall, “The Republic and the ‘Limits of Politics’,” Political Theory 5 (August 1977): 293–313; Allan Bloom, “Response to Hall,” ibid., 315–20; M. F. Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret,” New York Review of Books 32 (May 30, 1985): 30–36; and Donald Morrison, “The Utopian Character of Plato’s Ideal City,” in G. R. F. Ferrari, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato’s “Republic” (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 232–55. Jeremiah H. Russell, “When Philosophers Rule: The Platonic Academy and Statesmanship,” History of Political Thought 33 (2) (2012): 209–30. Natalie Harris Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s “Republic” and Modern Myths of Gender (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987). For the argument that Plato’s “noble lie” is “utterly true,” see Joseph Tussman, Government and the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 51–73. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 28 October 1813, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944), 632–33; Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, query 14, ibid., 262–66. See Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994), 530–31; and Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012). Does the cave art of Paleolithic human beings suggest the importance of image making for the emergence of humanity? See Hans Jonas, “Image-making and the Freedom of Man,” in The Phenomenon of Life (New York: Dell, 1966), 157–75; John E. Pfeiffer, The Creative Explo-

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25 26 27

28

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30 31

32 33 34

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sion: An Inquiry into the Origins of Art and Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Images of the Ice Age (New York: Facts on File, 1988), 149–90; Eva T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination (Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991); and R. Dale Guthrie, The Nature of Paleolithic Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See William H. F. Altman, Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the “Republic” (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 348–58. See, for example, Lawrence Kohlberg, “Education for Justice: A Modern Statement of the Socratic View,” in The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 29–48. Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012). Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2004). For this position, see David A. Pizarro and Paul Bloom, “The Intelligence of the Moral Intuitions: Comment on Haidt (2001),” Psychological Review, 110 (2003): 193–96; and Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Press, 2013). Why do the guardians begin with the study of arithmetic (Republic 52lb–526b)? In counting must we move from concrete plurality to abstract number and thus experience our first glimpse of the Ideas? Are we the only animals who can count? Or can human arithmetic be explained as rooted in a number sense of animal minds as shaped by evolutionary history? See Georges Ifrah, From One to Zero: A Universal History of Numbers, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Viking, 1985), 3–30; and Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). On Plato’s Idea of the Good as expressed in mathematics, see Alfred North Whitehead, “Mathematics and the Good,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, 2nd ed. (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1951), 666–81. For the typically modern affirmation of the arbitrariness of naming, see Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964), 131, 158, 178–79; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1973), xv–xxiv; and Murray Edelman, Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 23–26, 58, 62–63,152–55. For the argument that the human ordering and naming of the living world is rooted in human nature as an evolutionary adaptation, see Carol Kaesuk Yoon, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (New York: Norton, 2009). See Robert B. Williamson, “Eidos and Agathon in Plato’s Republic,” in Essays in Honor of Jacob Klein (Annapolis, MD: St. John’s College Press, 1976), 171–87. Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 116. See also Paul Friedlander, “Plato as Physicist,” in Plato: An Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 246–60; and D. H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). On the Platonism of many contemporary mathematicians and physicists, see Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (New York: Norton, 2012), 171–96. A good translation of the Timaeus can be found in Peter Kalkavage, Plato’s Timaeus (Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2001). Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, Random House, 1950), book 8, chapter 11, pp. 255–57. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936) and C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964). This has been argued by Rémi Brague in The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). See Catherine Zuckert, Plato’s Philosophers: The Coherence of the Dialogues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 419, 421, 684, 688, 700, 714–18, 842.

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2 Political Science as the Study of Regimes Aristotle’s Politics

KEY READINGS Politics, 1252a1–1256a1, 1260b25–1264b26, 1274b30–1284b35, 1288b10–1289b26, 1293b22–1297b35, 1301a20–1302a16, 1313a34–1315b39, 1323a14–1325b33.

Aristotle (384–322 BC) saw the political decline of Greece that had begun during the lifetime of Plato. In 338 BC The Greek cities were conquered by Philip II, King of Macedon. After the assassination of Philip in 336 BC, his son Alexander assumed the throne and eventually extended his empire to the borders of India before his death in 323 BC. Aristotle had ties to the Macedonian throne. His father was the court physician, and Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor. This aroused the suspicions of Greeks opposed to Macedonian power. After Alexander’s death, Aristotle was forced to leave Athens. Yet he was able to spend twenty years in Athens in Plato’s Academy, until the death of Plato in 347 BC. Later he established his own school, the Lyceum. His studies were as diverse as Plato’s, but he went beyond Plato in studying biology and the constitutional history of the Greek cities. The common view of the relationship between Plato and Aristotle is conveyed in Raphael’s “School of Athens” fresco, which was painted early in the sixteenth century for one of the walls of the library for Pope Julius II in the Apostolic Palace in Vatican City.1 The ancient philosophers are 41

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painted with Plato and Aristotle at the center, who are turning their heads to look at one another. Plato points upward with the index finger of his right hand, while holding upright in his left hand a copy of the Timaeus. Aristotle gestures forward and downward with his open right hand, while holding flat in his left hand a copy of the Nicomachean Ethics. On the one hand, this suggests a contrast between the vertical perspective of Plato and the horizontal perspective of Aristotle, as though Plato were saying “It’s up there,” and Aristotle were saying, “No, it’s down here amongst us.” On the other hand, the symmetrical design of the painting suggests that the Platonic and Aristotelian perspectives complement one another. Much of the history of human thought turns on the tension between the transcendentalist or idealist perspective of the Platonists and the naturalist or realist perspective of the Aristotelians. This raises the deepest political question: Can political order be founded on a natural order as we know it by ordinary experience, or must it be founded on a supernatural order transcending ordinary experience? This question is implied in the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Traditionally, Aristotle’s political thought is considered more practical than that of Plato. Aristotle considers not only what might be politically best in theory, but also what is politically necessary in practice when the best is unattainable.

1. Is the best regime good enough? Although there may be good reasons for theorizing on what the best political community would look like, there is one major problem with such a regime: it doesn’t exist. Presumably, the political philosopher should not be so preoccupied with the sort of “city in speech” sketched in the Republic that existing regimes are neglected. Plato does, in fact, comment on the variety of actual regimes in Books Eight and Nine of the Republic, where Socrates speculates as to how the decay of his best city would give rise to a sequence of bad cities. But we have to turn to Aristotle’s Politics to find a comprehensive and detailed account of the practical problems of existing regimes. Aristotle criticizes the unrealistic expectations of the Republic. He insists that the political actor should understand not only what would be the best regime generally, but also what would be best in certain circumstances—even what must be done to preserve a bad regime. Sometimes a political leader must make the best of a bad situation (1288b10–1289a25). We shall see, however, that Aristotle cannot escape the fundamental questions posed by Plato. If we agree, for example, that political action (at least in practice) cannot be guided by the norms of nature as grasped by a philosophic ruler, does that suggest that there are no minimal or natural standards for politics? In describing the regimes that might emerge after the collapse of his philosophic city, Socrates in the Republic is clearly most fascinated with

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the city that is next to the worst—democracy—and the one that is simply the worst—tyranny. If the best regime is not possible, then the philosophic student of politics must reconsider the claims of the worst. For if political life is not to be governed by rational standards of the good for human beings, then why not give people the political freedom to live as they please? Democracy allows such freedom, and Socrates concedes that it is “the fairest of the regimes” and even “divinely sweet for the moment” (Republic 557c–558a). Its beauty and sweetness come from the spontaneous variety of lives that it allows, people being free to live from moment to moment just as they wish with no particular way of life imposed on them by the laws. Such a situation should be attractive to the philosopher because it would allow the freedom to pursue the philosophic life without political constraints (561c–d). But if freedom to seek one’s pleasures just as one wishes is the only good, why shouldn’t a person of strength and cleverness strive for tyranny in order to use fellow human beings to secure his personal pleasure? Thus, tyranny might seem the logical outcome of extreme democracy (562a–569c). Again, we are forced to consider the argument of Thrasymachus. Is it possible to acknowledge the impracticality—if not impossibility— of Plato’s philosophic city without a drastic lowering of the aims of politics? Modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke argued for just such a reduction in political goals. They thought it was enough for politics to simply provide the security for people to pursue their selfish desires without inflicting or suffering violent injuries. Later, Nietzsche questioned why those persons superior in will and intelligence should refrain from dominating others inferior to them. If human life is a selfish pursuit of power unlimited by natural standards of justice, why shouldn’t political rule go to the most powerful, to those who are heroically superior in their “will to power”? Leo Strauss then worried that the modern lowering of the ends of politics created a crisis for modern liberal democracy because the soft relativism of liberal thought rendered liberalism defenseless against the aggressive attacks of its illiberal enemies. What is Aristotle’s response to this problem? Can he combine that realistic, tough-minded attitude for which he is well known with a devotion to high moral standards? Can he overcome the political conflict between the harsh ruthlessness of the person of action and the noble principles of the person of thought? With these questions in mind, we can begin by considering what Aristotle means by his famous statement near the opening of the Politics that humans are by nature political animals.

2. Does political life fulfill a natural human end? Like Plato, Aristotle appeals to nature as a standard for his political thought. In the Politics, he frequently identifies something as “by nature,”

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which indicates some essential feature of reality that is not simply a product of human will. The natural must be distinguished from the merely conventional. Sometimes, instead of a simple dichotomy of nature and convention, Aristotle speaks of a trichotomy of nature, custom (or habit), and reason (1332a36–b11).2 But how does he know that something is natural rather than conventional? Some readers of the Politics have suspected that Aristotle’s idea of nature depends more on the prejudices of the ancient Greeks than on the objective criteria of truth. It is often said that Aristotle’s view of nature as having purposes or goals, as aiming toward ends, contradicts what we know today from modern natural science. Does not natural science present the universe as governed by mechanical laws, so that it makes no sense to speak of nature’s purposes or ends? Aristotle’s conception of nature is teleological, but it is commonly believed that modern science rejects all teleology. We shall have to see whether Aristotle’s work can withstand this criticism. Let us begin by considering what he says about the “naturalness” of political life. The first human association is the sexual union of male and female (1252a24–b14). This arises from an innate desire for procreation that human beings share with other animals and—in some manner—with plants. From this springs the family as a means to provide for the daily wants of life. It is not hard to see why Aristotle calls this natural, because we can see evidence of the spontaneous, biological needs and desires that gave rise to the family. Nor is it difficult to see how natural it is for families to group themselves into villages that are subject to the traditional authority of patriarchal rule that is thought to reflect the authority of the gods (1252b15–26). Anthropologists might recognize this as a traditional society such as is commonly found in primitive communities. But the last stage of development as Aristotle sketches it may be more controversial. He writes (1252b28–1253a5): The final community composed of several villages is the city [polis]. At this point the community has attained the limit of full self-sufficiency, so to speak, arising for the sake of living but existing for the sake of living well. For this reason every city is by nature, if indeed the first communities are so. For the city is the end [telos] of these, and nature is an end. For what each thing is when its genesis is complete, this we say is the nature of each, such as with a man, a horse, a household. Further, that for the sake of which something is—its end—is the best. And selfsufficiency is an end and the best. From these things, it is clear therefore that the city belongs to the things of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.3

Sexual coupling, the family, and associations to provide for physical needs arise from the natural desires for life, sexual mating, and the parental care of offspring. Furthermore, it is natural, Aristotle claims, for human beings to desire not only life, but also a good life. The true political community—the city (polis in Greek)—is natural for human beings because it fulfills that natural desire to live in accordance with some shared conceptions

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of human goodness. In speaking of the city as “by nature,” Aristotle denies implicitly that it is simply “by art”—that is, a human construction—or that it is “holy”—a divine product. (Later, we shall see that Thomas Aquinas distinguishes natural law from human law on the one hand, and from divine law on the other.) Everything depends on Aristotle’s assumption that by nature each thing seeks its end (telos). Just as an acorn is inclined by nature to grow into an oak tree, so human beings are inclined by nature to fulfill their potentialities by living in political communities. The city is natural because it is the end of the human striving to live together with others, and nature is an end. Aristotle was a biologist, and he speaks here of the political nature of human beings as a biological inclination of the human species. But wouldn’t the modern Darwinian biologist have to reject this teleological biology? In 1909, on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, John Dewey delivered a lecture on “The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy.”4 According to Dewey, Darwin exerted his greatest influence by refuting Aristotelian teleology. Aristotle believed that nature conformed to a rational design such that each thing served some purpose in the order of the universe, but Darwin showed that species evolved through the struggle for existence without any preordained plan or purpose. Therefore, if we accept Darwinian biology, it would seem, we have to reject Aristotelian political thought insofar as it rests on an unscientific view of nature. Yet consider how a modern Aristotelian might respond to this argument. In 1959, on the centennial anniversary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, John Herman Randall delivered a lecture on “The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy.” Contrary to Dewey, Randall concluded that, as a result of Darwin’s influence, “nature is once more for us, as for the Greeks, full of implicit ends and ideals.” Randall argued, “When Darwin led men to take biology seriously once more, they had to reintroduce these functional concepts that physicists had forgotten—means and ends, function, teleology, and time.”5 Obviously, there is confusion among Darwin’s interpreters as to whether evolutionary biology denies Aristotelian teleology (as Dewey says) or confirms it (as Randall says). A modern Aristotelian might explain this confusion by arguing that Darwin denied one form of teleology but affirmed another, and it is only the failure to distinguish the various kinds of teleology that makes it appear that Darwin rejected Aristotelian teleology.6 We can distinguish between artificial (or external) teleology and natural (or internal) teleology. The first applies when something has been consciously intended by some agent; the second applies to goal-directed activity that is not intended by an agent. An individual making something or doing something for a purpose illustrates artificial teleology. The development of a fertilized egg into a mature adult or birds possessing wings for the purpose

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of flying illustrates natural teleology. Of course, the biblical religious believer would deny, in some sense, the validity of this distinction by claiming that all purposefulness in nature originates as a conscious purpose of the Creator. This is the sort of teleological view that Darwin would deny. No matter what God might have done to create the universe at the beginning, Darwin would say, the subsequent evolution of species through natural selection was not the work of a conscious designer. Notice that on this point Darwin and Aristotle would agree. Further clarification requires another distinction between two kinds of natural teleology—one being determinate, the other indeterminate. The teleological development of a fertilized egg is determinate in the sense that the end (the mature adult) is predetermined from the beginning by the genetic program in the egg. But the teleological adaptation of birds for flight is indeterminate in the sense that nothing in the remote reptilian ancestry of birds dictated this result. The path of growth from a fertilized egg is predetermined, but the path of natural selection from the first forms of life to birds is not. Darwin’s teaching of evolution by natural selection denies any form of cosmic teleology, which would present the evolution of the world as a progressive unfolding of a design somehow inherent in the beginning. To concede that this sort of cosmic teleology lacks Darwinian support, the modern Aristotelian might argue, does not subvert Aristotelian teleology. Ernest Mayr, one of the leading biologists of the twentieth century, insisted: “Aristotelian why-questions have played an important heuristic role in the history of biology. ‘Why’ is the most important question the evolutionary biologist asks in all of his researches.”7 Perhaps Aristotle was correct, then, in thinking that one cannot fully understand living things without asking about their natural purposes or goals. He thought that one could not explain the development of unorganized matter into a complex organism except by postulating that some potential form (eidos) is thereby actualized. Although many people once dismissed Aristotle’s eidos as nonsense, the modern discovery of how a genetic program regulates growth has apparently confirmed the truth of Aristotle’s insight. A prominent molecular biologist has even written an article with the title, “How Aristotle Discovered DNA.”8 Although the Darwinian biologist has to be skeptical about any cosmic teleology, Aristotelian teleology can be seen in the goal-directed activity of organic entities and processes. Aristotle, therefore, does not violate the spirit of modern biology in claiming that the human species has certain unique natural potentialities and that the actualization of these human potentialities in political life conforms to nature’s purposes. In fact, contemporary sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, and behavioral ecologists, who study the biological roots of human nature, might be seen as reviving Aristotle’s biological naturalism.9 And yet some people assume that since Darwinian biology denies the eternity of species, this denies the reality of species or kinds, and thus

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denies Aristotle’s belief that there is an enduring human nature with natural ends. Doesn’t Darwinian science suggest that the very idea of a human nature or human essence is an illusion?10 But some biologists and philosophers of biology today argue that although species are not eternally fixed, since they have evolved from ancestral species, that does not make them any less real during the time of their existence. The Darwinian affirmation of the historicity of life—that both living individuals and the species of life come into being and pass away—is compatible with an Aristotelian study of living nature and human nature. Aristotle’s biological writings show a turn from theological cosmology to empirical biology that could be consistent with modern science.11 Still, many people find this deeply disturbing. Those of a Platonic bent will worry that without eternal essences, everything collapses into a nihilistic flux. Those influenced by biblical religion will worry that without an eternal Creator, evolving nature provides no enduring standards of thought or action. But these worries from Platonic philosophy and biblical religion might be explained as arising from a false dichotomy of eternal fixity versus incoherent flux. Despite the historicity of nature in evolutionary time, the patterns in living nature are stable enough over long periods of time to enable our apprehension of natural kinds as enduring features of the world. And shouldn’t we consider ourselves lucky to have emerged from the natural history of life as the one form of life capable of studying that natural history and wondering what it all means?12 It is still questionable whether Aristotle’s biological claims could be supported by modern science. In particular, we might wonder about his assertion that human beings are the most political animals because only they are endowed with the capacity for speech that makes their political life uniquely human.

3. Are human beings the only animals capable of symbolic speech? Aristotle explains (1253a8–19): It is clear why man is more a political animal than is any bee or any gregarious animal. For, as we say, nature does nothing in vain; and man is the only animal that has reasonable speech [logos]. Voice is a sign of pleasure and pain, and so it is possessed by other animals; for their nature has reached such a point as to have sensation of pleasure and pain and to signify these to others. But reasonable speech is for indicating the useful and the harmful, thus also the just and the unjust. For with reference to other animals, it is peculiar to man that he alone has sensation of the good and the evil and the just and unjust and other things of this sort, and a community of these things makes a household and a city.

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Contrary to the common reading of this passage, Aristotle does not say human beings are the only political animals; rather, he says human beings are the most political animals. In his biological writings, he explains that there are other political animals, such as bees, wasps, ants, and cranes.13 Human beings are more political than these animals because only human beings have the capacity for logos. Political life is natural for human beings because it permits the actualization of that potentiality that is most distinctive to human nature—the capacity for speech or reason. The Greek word logos denotes either speech or reason and can, therefore, be translated as reasonable speech. This suggests that thinking and speaking are two sides of the same activity and that the fullest expression of human nature is both rational and social. This Aristotelian insight seems to be confirmed by recent biological research into how the human brain has evolved primarily for navigating through the complex circumstances of social life.14 Because of their possession of logos, human beings can live together in a more intimate and profound way than is possible for other political animals. The deepest association comes from mutual understanding through speech. Other animals can express to one another their immediate and particular sensations of pleasure and pain, but human beings can come to agreement about the meaning of life. For human beings living together means not just sharing in things of the body, but sharing thoughts. A human community is a state of mind. Theodosius Dobzhansky, an influential modern biologist, has said that science now confirms these insights of Aristotle.15 Although other animals (such as the social insects) are more “social” than human beings, we are the only political animals, in the sense that only we can consciously choose to live with other members of our species through symbolic communication. The evolution of the human brain, in both size and complexity, has reached a point such that we have an ability for thought and speech that other animals do not. Aristotle may also have suspected the neurological basis of this difference: “of all the animals,” he observes in the Parts of Animals (653a27–28), “man has the largest brain in proportion to his size.” Although there is some disagreement among scientists about what exactly makes human cognitive ability unique, there is wide agreement about two points. Human beings have a capacity for symbolic speech that other animals do not, and this linguistic ability reflects a high level of abstract thought unattained by other animals. Clearly, however, as Aristotle and Darwin recognized, many animals do communicate in some manner; and many have some ability for reasoning.16 We need to make some precise distinctions. Although some nonhuman animals, we might say, can communicate through signs, only human beings can understand and use symbols. This reflects different levels of cognition. Some other animals possess perceptual thought, but only human beings possess conceptual thought. Recent biological research is beginning to explain the emergence

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of language and the uniquely human mind through the evolution of the primate brain.17 Aristotle believes, as we have seen, that although other animals can use their voices to signify their sensations of pleasure and pain, only human beings use “reasoned speech” to symbolize their concepts of expediency, justice, and goodness. This is a consequence of the fact, as Aristotle explains in the De Anima (414a28–415a12), that the higher animals have some mental capacity for perceptual thought, but only human beings possess intellect (nous). This difference between animal communication and human speech has been observed by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz.18 Perhaps we can see this in our own experience with animals. If I approach my dog Charlie and say “food,” he might look around for his dinner. He can be conditioned to respond to the sound of the word “food” by expecting a meal. But if I say “food” to my friend Rick, he is likely to ask, “What about food?” Instead of simply responding to the word “food” as a sign of something in the immediate environment, he understands the word as a symbol conveying a meaning. If I clarified my meaning by explaining that I meant to announce that dinner was ready, he would salivate just like Charlie. But if I explained that I want to talk about the sociological significance of table manners or that I want to tell a story about food, he would show (I hope) an intellectual curiosity in what I have to say, whereas Charlie would be incapable of such curiosity. When my dog Charlie somehow recognizes that the sound of the word “food” uttered by different people at different times always points to being fed, he has made a perceptual abstraction that directs his attention to something in his present environment or in his immediate future. But it would be futile for me discuss with Charlie the sociology of table manners because this would require conceptual thought that goes beyond immediate sense experience. Similarly, I could train Charlie to respond in a certain way whenever he sees a triangle, but I could never train him to think about geometry. Unlike perceptual abstractions, symbolic concepts cannot be based simply on generalized sensible images. Through concepts, human beings can even think about things that do not exist at all as objects of sense experience. This world of purely conceptual or symbolic meaning is forever closed to other animals. So while the social life of some other animals shows some evolution of behavioral traditions, only human social life shows the evolution of symbolic traditions.19 The radical difference between animal signs and human symbols becomes clear in the autobiography of Helen Keller, who from early infancy was both blind and deaf. Annie Sullivan, her teacher, first taught Helen to communicate with signs. When she wanted a piece of cake, she spelled the word in Annie’s hand. At this point, she was simply responding like any other intelligent animal. She did not understand language as an instrument for conceptual thought. Then one day something happened. She describes the experience in her autobiography:

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Chapter Two We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water, and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.20

Previously, she had been conditioned to use words as signs of objects in her environment, but only at this point did she learn that words were also symbols of meaning and thus instruments of thought: “Each name gave birth to a new thought.” Henceforth, she could use the word “water” not just as a sign of something wanted or expected, but also as a symbol of a concept about which she might think. She accomplished that because as a human being she had an innate potentiality for it: “I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten.” Other animals do not have that potentiality. There have been attempts, however, to teach language to other animals. Some of the most publicized recent experiments have been efforts to instruct chimpanzees in the use of sign language. In surveying this work, many experts have concluded that there is no clear evidence of success. One group of researchers has reported: “Apes can learn many isolated symbols (as can dogs, horses, and other nonhuman species), but they show no unequivocal evidence of mastering the conversational, semantic, or syntactic organization of language.”21 Aristotle might be correct, therefore, in taking it to be a biological fact that, although other animals have some capacity for communication, the power of speech belongs only to human beings.22 What does all of this have to do with politics? At the very least, it suggests that politics could be rooted in the biological nature of human beings. Could political science include the comparative study of other social and political animals? Would it be reasonable to speak of “chimpanzee politics”?23 What difference would it make for politics if we discovered that other animals—apes or dolphins, for example—could think and speak in their own way at a level comparable to that of human beings?24 Would we, as some scientists have suggested, have to give them citizenship with all the political rights we give to human beings? Would we have to change the Declaration of Independence to recognize that all animals are created

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equal and endowed with rights? Would we have to take seriously those who argue for “animal liberation”? When we think about politics, we commonly assume that it is a uniquely human activity. We don’t think of dogs, dolphins, or apes as having any political claims. Thus, we take it for granted that politics expresses certain capacities of human beings that are not possessed by other animals. If that is so, then we should clarify what those capacities are in order to deepen our understanding of politics. If we agreed, for example, with Aristotle’s claim that human beings are the most political animals because they are the only animals endowed with the ability for “reasoned speech,” we might conclude that politics expresses somehow the perfection of human nature through the rule of reason. But this would bring us back to Plato’s recommendation of rule by philosophers as the consummation of political life, and we would have to wonder whether Aristotle has any answer to Thrasymachus’s claim that politics manifests not the rule of reason, but the natural human desire to dominate others for selfish ends. After all, Thrasymachus might argue, isn’t the human capacity for speaking and reasoning a powerful weapon for practicing deception in the quest for power over others? By declaring that we are political animals by nature, Aristotle stresses the natural cooperativeness of human beings. But aren’t human beings also naturally selfish? And, if so, doesn’t that impede their cooperation with one another in a political community?

4. How do selfishness and aggression influence political life? Aristotle concedes that although people are naturally inclined to share a common life, they are also thrown into conflict by their selfish desires. By nature, therefore, there is an impulse in all men to such a community. But the one who first established such a community was the cause of the greatest goods. For just as man when he is complete is the best of animals, so when he is separated from law and justice is he the worst of all. For injustice possessed of weapons is the most troublesome, and man is born possessing weapons for prudence and virtue that it is possible to use for entirely opposite things. For without virtue he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals and the worst with respect to sexuality and food. (1253a30–38)

Though we have a natural impulse for political life, the fulfillment of the impulse depends on the proper conditions, the securing of which is the aim of leadership. When circumstances are not conducive to the political inclinations of humanity, people can turn into savage beasts dominated by the appetites of hunger and sex. It is important to see this in Aristotle, otherwise he might seem naively optimistic in his judgment of human nature. Some scholars have even concluded from this that Aristotle does not really believe that human beings are political animals by nature, because he sees

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that political order depends on the constructive activity of political founders and lawmakers.25 But does Aristotle go far enough in recognizing the natural viciousness of human beings? In recent decades, some anthropologists and ethologists have depicted human nature as primarily dominated by an instinct for aggression.26 From this it would seem that far from being naturally inclined to social cooperation, the natural condition of humanity is a war of all against all such as that described by Thrasymachus or Hobbes. One example of this viewpoint is the work of the prominent anthropologist Colin Turnbull in his book The Mountain People.27 He describes the Ik of northern Uganda. The Ik lived a hunting-andgathering way of life that was primitive yet sufficient for their needs; but when they were excluded from their major hunting ground so it could be turned into a National Park, they were forced to struggle just to avoid death from starvation. Turnbull found them to be so utterly selfish as to be bereft of any social affections. Starving children and old people were thrown out of their homes by their relatives, who laughed at their suffering. Turnbull was ridiculed when he shared his food or did anything to help someone in need. No one helped anyone else unless some favor was expected in return. Turnbull concluded that the Ik “have disposed of virtually all the qualities that we normally consider are just those qualities that differentiate us from other primates.” He decided “that society itself is not indispensable for man’s survival, that man is not the social animal he has always thought himself to be, and that he is perfectly capable of associating for purposes of survival without being social.”28 How would Aristotle reply? From the passages in the Politics quoted earlier, we might infer that he would agree with Turnbull as to “how impossible it is, in certain circumstances, to be a beautiful human being,”29 but Aristotle would stress the words “in certain circumstances.” The social inclination of human beings is a natural propensity but not a natural necessity. When people are beaten down by harsh circumstances—especially when one person’s survival competes with another’s—their desire for self-preservation may overcome their social impulses. (Turnbull indicates that there is evidence that the Ik possessed the virtues of social life before they were deprived of the traditional hunting grounds that had always sustained them.) The problem, then, as far as Aristotle is concerned, is how to maintain a balance between the natural selfishness and the natural sociality of human beings. This viewpoint seems to be confirmed by certain contemporary theories of human nature advanced by some biologists and ethologists. Aggression is only one of many drives characteristic of the higher vertebrates. Aggressive behavior is likely to arise in those circumstances that create intense competition for mates or for natural resources. Yet there is no reason to deny the existence of widespread social inclinations.30 One ethologist has concluded “that both aggressive and altruistic behavior are preprogrammed by phylogenetic adaptations and that there are therefore preordained norms

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for our ethical behavior.” He has also argued “that the disposition to cooperation and mutual aid is innate, as are many specific behavior patterns of friendly contact.”31 Recent research has explained the Darwinian evolution of cooperation as based on kinship, reciprocity, and group selection.32 How can a political community recognize both the selfish and the social inclinations of human beings? An illustration of how this might be done is in Aristotle’s account of property. He argues that because of natural selfishness the communism of Plato’s Republic is unrealistic (1261b33–1262a2, 1263a21–1263b2). Individuals care for the property that they can own privately, but they are indifferent toward property owned in common. Yet to nurture the natural sociability of human beings, there should be some communal element in the system of property. Aristotle’s proposal, then, is that property should be private in ownership but common in use. Private ownership is a necessary concession to the self-regarding inclinations of human beings. If there is a civic education in the fundamental principles of the regime, the social bonds of the people will be strong and property will be shared in use as among friends, even though ownership is private. Perhaps an example of what Aristotle has in mind is his later suggestion in the Politics (1320a33–b16) that to preserve a democracy the poor should be saved from extreme poverty and, therefore, that the rich should contribute to a public fund for assistance to the most needy. Although this sort of measure might soften the conflict between rich and poor, it is likely that there will always be some conflict as long as the private ownership of property produces economic inequality. Won’t this lead many observers to conclude that some form of communism is the only final solution, as Marx argued? In any case, the inescapable question concerns the proper balance between the competitive and the cooperative, the selfish and the social, inclinations of human nature. We have seen that Aristotle believes human beings to be naturally political insofar as it is only in a political community that they can fulfill their distinctive potential for rational discourse. However, if the aim of politics is to promote the rule of reason, should only the most rational people share in ruling? This would lead us back to Plato’s philosophic rulers and to the problem of deciding who has the rational capacity for rule. Although Aristotle does not speak directly about the need for philosophic rulers, he does speak about the need for excluding from citizenship those without the rational ability for rule, those who are natural slaves. Also, what he says about women suggests to many readers that he would exclude them from citizenship as well.

5. Does Aristotle show the prejudices of his culture in his views of slaves and women? Aristotle, like Plato, assumes that a philosopher can go beyond conventional political opinions in the pursuit of truth. Some, however, would

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argue that a person’s thought is always the product of historical circumstances, and that it is only through historical progress that the mistakes of earlier periods become obvious. Do Aristotle’s views of slaves and women illustrate this? Is it possible for us, because we live in modern times, to see the injustice of slavery and the oppression of women, which Aristotle could not see because he was blinded by the prejudices of ancient Greece? Or can we see ambiguities in Aristotle’s remarks on slaves and women that suggest he did not believe these individuals to be naturally inferior human beings? Although most scholarly commentators have assumed that Aristotle endorses the Greek practice of slavery as natural, a few have concluded differently: “Aristotle was the first political thinker to realize that slavery needed a defense. In fact, his defense of slavery is a critique of the institution of slavery as it existed in Athenian society.”33 Aristotle’s remarks are ambiguous in that they point to the fundamental contradiction in the practice of slavery: some human beings are treated as if they were not human. Aristotle recognizes the biological unity of humankind as a single species, “simple and having no differentiation” (History of Animals 490b18). As members of the human species, all normal human beings are potentially rational and political animals (History of Animals 488a7–10; Politics 1253a8–19). There can be sympathy among animals of the same species, and this is especially so for human beings, so that “we praise those who love their fellow human beings” (Nicomachean Ethics 1155a20–21). For Aristotle, therefore, human beings are equal in their shared humanity. This allowed the early advocates of modern republicanism, like Algernon Sidney in the seventeenth century, to cite Aristotle in support of equality of rights understood as equality of opportunity.34 Aristotle distinguishes natural slavery from conventional slavery. If there were natural masters and natural slaves, he explains, they would have to differ “as much as the soul differs from the body and the human being from the brute animal” (Politics 1254b16–17). It is hard to see how this could be so, because he makes it clear that slaves do have souls, and that they are human beings (1253b33, 1259b29). He says that “the relation between master and slave, whenever they deserve by their nature to be called such, should be one of friendship and of benefit to both; but if their relation is not such but exists by law and is forced, it leads to contrary results” (1255b13–16). He also says, however, that citizens need military training “to hold despotic power over those who deserve to be enslaved” (1334a3). He argues that since friendship is possible only between human beings, “there can be no friendship with a slave as a slave, though there can be with him as a human being” (Nicomachean Ethics 1161b5–8). To justify slavery as natural, the master would have to be a friend to the slave, but the very possibility of friendship presupposes the humanity of the slave and therefore the injustice of enslaving people as though they were not human.

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When Aristotle describes his “best regime,” he recommends that all the slaves should have their freedom held out to them as a reward (Politics 1330a33–34). To commentators who assume Aristotle endorses slavery as natural, this makes no sense, because surely slaves with the desire and the capacity for freedom cannot be slaves by nature. Yet if we see the ambiguity in his account of slavery, we see that his apparent endorsement of slavery as natural establishes standards for natural slavery that can never be fulfilled in practice, thus implying that slavery as actually practiced is unnatural and therefore subject to reform. This ambiguity in Aristotle’s teaching about slavery was manifest in the debate in the sixteenth century over the Spanish conquest of the New World in Latin America. Some Catholic priests justified this conquest by arguing that the American Indians were natural slaves by Aristotle’s standards. But others—particularly, Bartolomé de Las Casas—argued that the rich social and political history of the American Indians showed that they were rational and political animals and not natural slaves, and consequently the Spanish conquest was contrary to natural justice. If any individuals satisfied Aristotle’s standards for natural slaves, Las Casas suggested, they would have to be rare mistakes of nature—those with unusual mental and physical disabilities from birth—and it is impossible for an entire race or society of people to show such deviations from the normal course of nature.35 There is a similar ambiguity in Aristotle’s remarks on women and men. Many feminists assume that he was the founder of the patriarchal tradition in the Western world in which women have been treated as if they were naturally inferior to men.36 For example, when Aristotle compares the virtues of rulers and ruled to different parts of the soul, he explains (1260a10–14): “The free rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the child in a different way. And all possess the parts of the soul but possess them differently. For the slave does not have the deliberative part at all; the female has it, but it is without authority [akuros]; and the child has it, but it is undeveloped.” That a woman’s reason is “without authority” in relation to her husband’s rule could mean that her reason is too weak to rule over her emotions, and therefore she needs the help of her husband. This could also mean, however, that her husband’s spirited love of rule will not allow her reason to exercise authority in the marriage. When Aristotle compares males and females in his biological texts, he never says females are less intelligent than males. On the contrary, he claims that females tend to be “more capable of learning” and “cleverer” than males (History of Animals 608a10–19). In the subsequent history of the debate over the nature of slaves and women, the ambiguity of Aristotle’s remarks becomes evident. In the American South before the Civil War, some of the defenders of slavery noted that “Aristotle declared that some men were slaves by nature, and that slavery was absolutely necessary to a perfect society.”37 In the sixteenth century, when the Spanish invaded the New World, some of the

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scholarly advisors to the Spanish leaders argued that the American Indians were natural slaves as defined by Aristotle. Yet other scholars (like Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas) could argue that by Aristotle’s standards, the only natural slaves, if they existed, would be freaks of nature who lacked the mental capacity of normal adults; and since such deviations from nature’s normal pattern must be rare, it would be impossible for an entire race or society of human beings to be natural slaves.38 Similarly, at about the same time, in France and Italy, when scholars debated whether men and women were morally and intellectually equal, Aristotle was cited on both sides of the argument.39 (On the question of sexual equality, see chapter 8, section 12.) It is not clear, therefore, that the prejudices of ancient Greek culture kept Aristotle from seeing the injustice in the exploitation of slaves and women. The larger question at issue here is the extent to which thought is determined by the historical conditions of the thinker. Of course, all thinkers are to some degree products of their social and economic circumstances. But if this means that even the most rigorous thinkers cannot question the unexamined opinions of their time, then Socratic political philosophy is impossible. Aristotle’s understanding of citizenship might seem to some readers to reflect the peculiar prejudices of the ancient Athenians. Athenian citizens had to be free from all labor in order to fulfill their public responsibilities, which is why slavery seemed essential as a way to give them the leisure they needed. Citizenship in the Greek polis was quite different from citizenship in a modern democratic state. Again we have to ask whether Aristotle’s political thought is so tied to his historical circumstances as to be inapplicable to modern political life.

6. Does Aristotle’s understanding of citizenship illuminate modern democratic politics? There are at least four important differences between citizenship in the ancient polis and citizenship in the modern democratic state. In the polis, citizens participated directly in public affairs; but in a modern liberal democracy, like that of the United States, citizens are represented by others who act for them in the government. A second difference, closely related to the first, is the small size of the polis as opposed to the large size of the modern state. A third difference is that although the state is distinguished from society, no such distinction was made in the polis. More needs to be said about this, but let it suffice here to say that the claims of the polis permeated all areas of social life—family, education, religion, and so on— whereas the claims of the modern liberal state are limited with respect to society. The final difference between ancient and modern citizenship is that unlike modern citizens, ancient citizenship was defined by the regime.

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That is to say, those who would be citizens in a democratic polis would not necessarily be citizens in an oligarchic polis; in a modern state, almost every native-born adult is a citizen regardless of the form of government. Should we conclude that Aristotle has nothing to teach us about citizenship because his ideas do not apply to modern politics? There is some truth to this insofar as it is unrealistic to expect a revival in the modern world of the ancient polis. On the other hand, Aristotle gives reasons for his conception of citizenship; and thinking through his reasons may force us to recognize problems with modern citizenship. Is there, for example, any justification for the Athenian claim that full citizenship comes only from direct participation in the affairs of a small community? Does genuine citizenship require something more than casting a vote every few years on election day? Rousseau even criticized the modern institution of representation as disguised slavery, because it deprives all citizens of the experience of governing themselves (see chapter 9, section 6). Similar criticisms of liberal democracy have been expressed in the United States by those of the Jeffersonian tradition, including contemporary advocates of participatory democracy, who argue that democratic citizens need to participate directly in political deliberation.40 The same line of thinking is suggested by all those who criticize modern government for being too big and too distant from the people. The major argument in favor of the liberal version of citizenship is that when the duties of citizens are minimal, people are left free to pursue their private activities without political interference. Aristotelian citizenship, on the other hand, seems to demand such total devotion to public service as to suppress individual liberty. The threat to personal freedom seems particularly clear when Aristotle claims that every regime should shape the moral character of its citizens according to a common goal. Do we see here the superiority of modern democracy over the Aristotelian regime insofar as the modern democratic state allows for individual freedom?

7. Does Aristotle’s regime suppress individual liberty? This question is closely related to the question as to whether Aristotle’s ideas hold true for modern liberal politics. Because individual freedom is a primary concern of the modern democratic state, Aristotelian political thought would seem to be irrelevant to modern conditions if it does not provide for such freedom. We need to consider more generally what Aristotle believes the purpose of a regime to be. “Regime” is a translation of the Greek word politeia, which might also be translated as constitution, government, or simply polity. The importance of this term is suggested by the fact that every book of the Politics except the first begins with some reference to it. A regime, according to Aristotle, is “the organization of offices in a city, by what mode they are to be distributed, and also what is to be the authoritative power in the regime

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and what is to be the final purpose of each community” (1289a15–17). The regime is the form of a city as distinguished from its matter. The form is higher than the matter, because the form shows the end or purpose to which the city is directed as determining everything else (1267a7–b15). This explains why even when the population and geography of a city have changed, we consider it to be the same city it was previously so long as its form of government—its regime—is the same. Similarly, although the United States has changed greatly since 1776 or 1789 in its material elements, it is still the same in form, as the principles of the Declaration of Independence and of the Constitution continue to shape the political life of the country. On the other hand, some people would insist that the modern state— of which the United States is surely an example—is not truly a regime in Aristotle’s sense. They would argue that although the modern state has a formal structure of power, the aim of that governmental structure is not to promote some common moral purpose as would be required for an Aristotelian regime. The goal of the modern democratic state may be nothing more than to keep the peace so that people can pursue their private selfish interests, which reflects the teaching of Hobbes and Locke. Aristotle insists that although this may be one of the conditions for a regime, it is not by itself sufficient. He explains that the ultimate aim of a regime is a community bound together by some common conception of the good life so that there arises among the citizens a political form of friendship (1280b30– 1281a8), which requires a common moral character in the citizenry. For every regime, there is a particular type of character that sets the moral tone of the community. Oligarchy promotes the oligarchic character, democracy the democratic character, and so on. But doesn’t this mean a sacrifice of individual freedom insofar as everyone is forced to conform to the same pattern of life? Doesn’t the modern democratic state allow for greater freedom by not prescribing a particular way of life for its citizens? Perhaps the best formulation of the modern principle of liberty is John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. By comparing Mill’s view of politics with Aristotle’s, we may see more clearly the difficulties in applying Aristotle’s theory of the regime to modern circumstances. The contrast with Aristotle is obvious when Mill asserts that the social control of the individual should be governed by “one very simple principle”: that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. . . . The only part of the conduct of anyone for which he is amendable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.41

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Mill adds immediately, however, as a qualification of this principle, that it applies only to “human beings in the maturity of their faculties.” Children or young people below the legally fixed age of adulthood must be protected against their own actions because they are not yet able to care for themselves properly. He indicates, also, that for the same reason, his principle of individual liberty does not apply to “those backward states of society” in which humanity is still in its childhood. Full liberty should not be given until people are mature enough to be “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” Although no modern state has ever adhered fully to Mill’s principle of liberty, it does express the spirit of modern liberal democracy. Every individual adult should be free from social control except to the extent that an individual’s actions might harm others; although society may restrict the individual in that which “concerns others,” each should be absolutely free in that which concerns himself.”42 Mill’s principle expresses the modern liberal denial of the Aristotelian claim that the formation of the moral character of citizens is a necessary and rightful concern of government. (In some of his other writings, it should be noted, Mill’s thinking is not as “individualistic” as it is in On Liberty.) What would the Aristotelian have to say about Mill’s principle? Considering Aristotle’s emphasis on the political character of human nature, the Aristotelian might challenge the fundamental assumption of Mill’s principle, that one can distinguish clearly the self-regarding and otherregarding actions of human beings. Can the self be separated from others? Or is the self by its very nature relational? Aristotelians might invite us to strip away from the individual everything that comes in one way or another from society—including language, moral training, and intellectual education—and then ask us if the naked, shivering being that remains is fully human. The simple point, of course, is that the self-development of the individual depends so decisively on social life that it is hard to see any clear separation between the life of the individual and the life of that individual’s community. Mill recognizes this. He concedes, for example, that even if a person’s action affects no one else “directly and in the first instance,” it may still “affect others through himself.” The Aristotelian might add that most of what one does to or for oneself is determined by what effects one thinks it will have on others. Even freedom of speech, which Mill is so concerned to defend, cannot be classified as a purely self-regarding activity with no effects on others. As Mill admits, no one would express opinions in public unless doing so would have some influence on others. Another problem is evident in Mill’s qualification of his principle of liberty as limited to mature adults. Doesn’t he thereby concede that a political community does have a just power to shape the character of its citizens through the education of the young? In fact, Mill suggests that the best way for society to insure the proper conduct of adults is to use well its

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“powers of education” with the young. Society has no right to deprive adults of their freedom because it “has had absolute power over them during all the early portion of their existence; it has had the whole period of childhood and nonage in which to try whether it could make them capable of rational conduct in life.”43 This might remind us of our earlier look at the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, who would argue that even the freest and most democratic society cannot avoid the duty of shaping the young according to some standard of citizenship. Is it the case, then, that because of its openness to different ways of life, modern liberal democracy is not a regime in Aristotle’s sense? Or does liberal democracy even fulfill Aristotle’s claim that every regime shapes the character of its people to conform to its principles? A liberal democracy may be open to different ways of life, but how can it be open to nonliberal, nondemocratic attitudes and beliefs? Does the very possibility of liberal democracy depend on the formation of liberal democratic citizens? If we were correct earlier in seeing the Declaration of Independence as the fundamental expression of the American political consciousness, then instilling in citizens a respect for the principles of the Declaration might be the sort of civic education that Aristotle would regard as essential for the regime.44 Recently, some political scientists have rediscovered Aristotle’s insight that the aim of politics is to shape the moral character of citizens. Some of the most serious problems for American public policy—such as crime, drug addiction, and poor schools—may reflect the failure of our regime to instill good moral habits conforming to the common good.45 Moreover, as we shall see later in considering Locke, a liberal regime might need to cultivate toleration of moral diversity as a liberal virtue. Even if we agree with Aristotle about the need for society to shape good moral character, why can’t this be done through the natural and voluntary associations of a liberal pluralist society—families, churches, schools, and various kinds of civic groups—without governmental coercion? If so, then we could combine an Aristotelian view of ethics as directed to social virtue with a Lockean view of politics as directed to individual liberty.46 Let us assume for the moment that we were persuaded by Aristotle that every political community requires agreement to some regime-defining principles of justice, and that the young must be habituated to conform to these principles. Even then we would be left wondering by what standard we should judge these principles, because the nature of justice is open to dispute. If every political community seeks a shared conception of justice, and if justice is always debatable, then political life is inherently controversial. This is apparent in Aristotle’s Politics because so much of the book is devoted to disputes about justice, disputes that give rise to a variety of regimes competing for our acceptance. The most common form of this controversy, to which Aristotle devotes much of his attention, is the debate between the oligarch and the democrat.

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8. Can we settle the conflict between oligarchic and democratic views of justice? The most visible of the differences among human beings in their social relations is their relative wealth or poverty. It is understandable, therefore, that disputes about justice often reflect conflicts between the rich and the poor. In considering the variety of regimes, Aristotle examines various solutions to this problem. Aristotle begins with the common opinions about this issue as expressed by the partisans themselves—the democratic poor and the oligarchic rich. He assumes that “all those who dispute about regimes express some part of justice” (1281a9–11). Both sides of the debate represent a partial grasp of justice that is distorted by self-interest. People tend to assert as an absolute principle that element of justice that favors their own interests (1280a14–15). Therefore, the first question is, what are the kernels of truth in the opposing claims of democratic and oligarchic justice? Second, what standard of justice can encompass both sides of this debate? Finally, through what sort of political arrangements might democrats and oligarchs be brought together without conflict? Aristotle assumes that justice requires like cases to be treated the same, unlike cases differently—or, phrased another way, equals should be treated equally, unequals unequally.47 The principle might be put even more simply: justice demands that each person get what he or she deserves (1281b15– 1283a20). Is this principle, as Aristotle suggests, implied in all the common opinions about justice? How does this differ—if at all—from the Platonic view of justice as doing that for which one is naturally best suited? Even if we accept as a general principle that equals should be treated as equals and unequals as unequals, we cannot apply this to particular cases without asking, equality or inequality of what? Human beings can be equal or unequal in an endless number of respects, and disputes about justice commonly involve questions as to what equalities or inequalities are relevant to the case at hand. In deciding how to distribute flutes among flute players, equality or inequality of birth, of beauty, or of strength is irrelevant; ability in flute playing is the decisive factor. What factor is relevant in deciding who will share in political rule? The democratic poor say that all those who are equal in being born free (that is, not enslaved) should participate equally in political rule. The oligarchic rich say that those unequal in wealth should have unequal political power. By what standard of merit do the democratic poor justify their political claims? The fact of being needy would not seem to be sufficient because many nonhuman animals might be even more needy. There must be some distinctly human quality possessed by the poor that would be a standard of dignity. On the other hand, to what do the oligarchic few appeal? If wealth is the only standard, then the one person who is the

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wealthiest should rule all of the people. What does the mere quantity of wealth have to do with political rule? Aristotle argues that because the final end of politics is to promote a good or noble life, any claim to rule should be based on the possession of “political virtue” (1280b32–1281a8). But a regime founded on perfect virtue would be as difficult to establish as Socrates’s “city of speech.” By speaking of “political virtue,” Aristotle suggests that in practice virtue will be interpreted according to whatever standards of conduct prevail in a particular community. He also indicates that the sort of virtue he has in mind is displayed in the multitude of common people if they are reasonably decent; this, then, would support the claims of democracy (1281a39–1282a41). Yet even if Aristotle is willing to settle for a low-level conception of virtue as the standard for political justice, is this a realistic solution to the conflict between the democrats and the oligarchs? Or will competing views of virtue give rise to further conflict? Would the final resolution of this problem, as Hobbes would argue, necessitate lowering the goals of politics? High goals—such as justice and virtue—may be as controversial in their definitions as they are difficult to actualize in practice. But low goals—such as security and comfortable self-preservation—are easier to define in thought and easier to attain in practice because everyone can quickly agree to them. It would seem that Aristotle would never be willing to lower the goals of political life this far, because he insists that every regime must have some shared conception of the good and the just. Yet, as we have noted earlier, he is concerned not only with the goodness of regimes, but also with their practicality.

9. How does the Aristotelian leader handle a regime that is less than the best? This question brings us back to the problem indicated at the beginning of this chapter. If Aristotle turns away from the Platonic preoccupation in the Republic with the best regime, by what standards will he guide leaders in working with regimes that fall short of perfection? At the beginning of Book Four of the Politics, Aristotle indicates the range of political possibilities that should be understood by the politician. The adept leader should know not only what would be the best regime in the best of circumstances, but also what would be the best in most cases and what would be the best that is practicable in a given set of circumstances. Thus, Aristotle may seem more “realistic” than Plato, but he is just as concerned with standards of perfection as Plato. The difference is that Aristotle’s standards are graduated. Even when the Aristotelian leader is prevented by practical circumstances from pursuing the simply best regime, the ranking of regimes helps to determine what would be the best in the given conditions.

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We can see as a general principle that the Aristotelian political reformer should moderate the excesses of each bad regime by introducing elements of other regimes. A democratic regime can be improved by making it somewhat oligarchic, and an oligarchy is improved by pushing it toward democracy. What makes a regime bad is that it serves the interests of the ruling group at the expense of other groups. By mixing elements from different regimes, there is a movement toward protecting the common interests of all, which creates stability by eliminating the serious grievances of oppressed groups. When the best regime is not possible, the second best alternative for the Aristotelian is some form of mixed regime. As both the poor and the wealthy have legitimate claims to rule, neither pure democracy nor pure oligarchy is as good as a judicious mixture of both in what Aristotle calls the “polity” (1293b2–1294b41). When even this is not possible, the next choice is a regime with a strong middle class that can soften the conflict between the rich and the poor (1295a25–1296b2). Some readers of Aristotle’s Politics see it as suggesting that a mixed regime leaning towards a moderate democracy is the best regime that is practically achievable.48 We find in American political history this same concern for balancing the power of the few rich and the many poor, so that neither class can exploit the other.49 Some scholars have argued that the American Founding Fathers intended to establish a mixed regime along Aristotelian lines that would combine democratic and oligarchic elements.50 The American founders were certainly Aristotelian in the sense that they were prudent in accepting the harsh limitations of practical politics. But isn’t there a temptation here to fall into unprincipled expediency? Aristotle himself seems to slip into this when he says that a leader should know how to preserve a bad regime even when it is not the best under the circumstances (1288b28–33). In many cases, a bad regime may be necessary (1286b4–23, 1296a22–26, 1296b25–35). Aristotle even goes so far as to advise tyrants how best to preserve their power!

10. Why does Aristotle teach tyrants how to preserve their regimes? Aristotle sketches two different ways for tyrants to protect their power. The first is the traditional method practiced by most tyrants, which is to intensify their tyranny by depriving the people of the inclination or the ability to rebel. Tyrants do this by humiliating their subjects, spying on them, getting them to distrust one another, making them powerless, and keeping them at war so that they need a leader (1313a34–39, 1314a15– 29). For modern illustrations of this, we might consider the actions of tyrants such as Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot.51 When a group of students called “The White Rose” started a movement to resist Hitler’s Nazi regime

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in 1942, they distributed a series of leaflets attacking the regime as tyrannical. In one of the leaflets, they quoted from Aristotle’s account of how tyrants preserve their tyranny as an accurate depiction of what the Nazis were doing in Germany.52 They were arrested for treason and sentenced to death by beheading. But still, some readers are shocked that Aristotle explains the techniques of tyrants. It could be said in his defense that insofar as he indicates that these have been the traditional practices of most tyrants, he does not think that he is teaching tyrannical individuals anything they do not already know. For what purpose, then, does he talk about such things? Does he wish to show tyrants that he knows everything that they know? Does he teach the tricks of the base to the good so that they can protect themselves?53 Does he also intend thereby to dispel the smug assumption of the bad that the good must be naive? Perhaps the ultimate justification for what Aristotle does here becomes clear as one considers what he says about the second method for preserving tyrannies. Aristotle says the first method is vicious and brutalizing, but he also indicates—probably with the recognition that this will catch the tyrant’s attention—that this method is not very successful. Generally, tyrannies are less durable than all other regimes, but the longest-lived tyrannies have followed the second method (1315b5–39). The general rule of this second approach is that the tyrant should cleverly appear to be a monarch rather than a tyrant. Tyranny should be moderated so that the ruler appears to be ruling for the common interests of the people. Yet it is hard to see how a tyrant could follow all of Aristotle’s suggestions for pretending to be a monarch without actually becoming one! Aristotle adheres throughout the Politics to the principle that the durability of a regime is directly proportional to its goodness and inversely proportional to its badness (1302a4–7, 1309b15–1310a12). The underlying reasoning is a model of Aristotelian common sense. The less oppressive a regime is, and the more the ruling group respects the claims of competing groups, the more durable the regime is likely to be. For that reason, tyranny is the worst regime and the least stable of regimes, and the only way to make it more enduring is to make it better by making it less of a tyranny. (There is some evidence over the past century that tyrants are likely to be assassinated or suffer a bad end.)54 How realistic is Aristotle’s reasoning? Has he underestimated the ability of tyrants to preserve themselves through sheer terror? When we look at Machiavelli, we shall have to ask how he might have replied to Aristotle. In any case, Aristotle agrees with Plato, and with the Declaration of Independence, that we can recognize tyranny as evil because it does not serve the common good, and because it denies the freedom of action and thought that is required to fulfill the natural desires of human beings. But what would be the political implications of a belief that the deepest human yearnings find satisfaction neither in political activity nor in

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philosophic thought, but only in religious devotion to God? That is the question posed by religious thinkers like Augustine.

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See Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura: Meaning and Invention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). See James Bernard Murphy, “Nature, Custom, and Stipulation in Law and Jurisprudence,” Review of Metaphysics 43 (June 1990): 751–90. See also chapter 4, section 5. All translations of the Greek texts are my own. I have used the Greek text of the Politics, ed. H. Rackham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1932). We do not know how Aristotle composed the Politics. He might have written it as a collection of lecture notes, as a handbook for his students, or as a finished book. See Carnes Lord, “The Character and the Composition of Aristotle’s Politics,” Political Theory 9 (November 1981): 459–78. John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 1–19. James H. Randall, “The Changing Impact of Darwin on Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (October 1961): 456–59. On the different kinds of teleology, see James G. Lennox, “Teleology,” in Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, eds., Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 324–33; and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 238–48. Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 89. Max Delbrück, “How Aristotle Discovered DNA,” in Kerson Huang, ed., Physics and Our World: A Symposium in Honor of Victor F. Wiskopf (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1976), 123–30. See Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right. See David L. Hull, “On Human Nature,” in David L. Hull and Michael Ruse, eds., The Philosophy of Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 383–97. See Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 642a28–30, 644b22–645a37. When Thomas Hobbes warned against the “vain philosophy” of the Aristotelian Scholastic theologians, he suggested that their “supernatural philosophy” was not really be part of Aristotle’s true teaching, which Aristotle had to hide to avoid persecution. See Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapter 46, paragraph 18, p. 465. For the argument that the secret teaching of Aristotle’s natural science might be compatible with modern natural science, see David Bolotin, An Approach to Aristotle’s Physics: With Particular Attention to the Role of His Manner of Writing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). See Marjorie Grene, “Reply to David Hull,” in Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, eds., The Philosophy of Marjorie Grene (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 279–83; and Richard Richards, The Species Problem: A Philosophical Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). History of Animals, 487b32–488a14, 588a15–589a10. See Wolfgang Kullmann, “Man as a Political Animal in Aristotle,” in David Keyt and Fred D. Miller, eds., A Companion to Aristotle’s Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 94–117. Recent biological research suggests that many animals show some cultural learning of behavioral traditions. See Kevin N. Laland and Bennett G. Galef, eds., The Question of Animal Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). See Jason P. Mitchell and Todd F. Heatherton, “Components of a Social Brain,” in Michael S. Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 953–60 Theodosius Dobzhansky, The Biology of Ultimate Concern (New York: New American Library, 1967), 82, 130–31. See Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1936), 459–70, 704–14. Compare Aristotle, History of Animals, 488a30–35, 504b1–6, 535a28–36b24, 608a10–18; Parts of Animals, 660a1–b6, 664a36– b6; Generation of Animals, 786b6–88a32.

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See Georg F. Streidter, Principles of Brain Evolution (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2005); and Todd Preus, “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Uniqueness,” in Gazzaniga, The Cognitive Neurosciences, 49–66. See Konrad Lorenz, King Solomon’s Ring (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1952), 76–91; and Lorenz, The Foundations of Ethology (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981), 338–44. See Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005). Helen Keller, The Story of My Life (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1927), 23–24. See Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), 53–78. H. S. Terrace et al., “Can an Ape Create a Sentence?” Science 206 (23 November 1979): 901. See W. Tecumseh Fitch, The Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). See Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and Glendon Schubert and Roger D. Masters, eds., Primate Politics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991). For the political life of the social insects, see Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, The Ants (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Thomas Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). See Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), 126–27, 130–31. Legal rights and duties apply only to “persons.” On the difficulties in recognizing different kinds of persons, see John Chipman Gray, The Nature and Sources of the Law, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 27–64. See Wayne Ambler, “Aristotle’s Understanding of the Naturalness of the City,” Review of Politics 47 (1985): 163–85. For a popular survey of this research, see Robert Ardrey, The Territorial Imperative (New York: Atheneum, 1966). Compare Ashley Montagu, The Nature of Human Aggression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972). Compare the effects of the plague in Athens as described by Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book. 2, sections 47–54. Turnbull, Mountain People, 234, 289. Ibid., 12. That one can be “a beautiful human being” even in a primitive society is the theme of Colin Turnbull’s earlier book, The Forest People: A Study of the Pygmies of the Congo (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961). See Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 242–55; David P. Barash, Sociobiology and Behavior (New York: Elsevier, 1977), 209–46; and Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 99–120. Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Love and Hate: The Natural History of Behavior Patterns (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 5. See also Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Human Ethology (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1989). See Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Jonathan Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 197. See Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1990), 51–52, 77–87, 132–34, 191–95, 452–54. See Venancio Carro, “The Spanish Theological-Juridical Renaissance and the Ideology of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” in Juan Friede and Benjamin Keen, eds., Bartolomé de Las Casas in History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974), 237-77; and Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, trans. Stafford Poole (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1974). For the interpretation of Aristotle as the founder of patriarchy, see Maryanne C. Horowitz, “Aristotle and Woman,” Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1976): 183–213; and Susan M.

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Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). For criticisms of this interpretation, see Harold L. Levy, “Does Aristotle Exclude Women from Politics?” The Review of Politics 52 (1990): 397–416; Larry Arnhart, “A Sociobiological Defense of Aristotle’s Sexual Politics,” International Political Science Review 15 (1994): 389–415; and Robert Mayhew, The Female in Aristotle’s Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson, 1858), 17. See Francisco de Vitoria, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 239–40, 250–51; and Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), 32–48. See, for example, Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1959), book 3. See, for example, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 13. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 100. For an interpretation of Mill’s defense of individual liberty as an Aristotelian argument, see Albert William Levi, “The Value of Freedom: Mill’s Liberty,” Ethics 70 (1959): 37–46. Joseph Tussman, in Government and the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), argues: “Democracy is not . . . the natural or universal habit of the human mind; it is a cultivated spirit. And if we wish to maintain a democracy, we cannot neglect its constant cultivation” (143). Compare chapter 15, section 7. See James Q. Wilson, On Character (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1991); James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); William A. Galston, Liberal Purposes: Goods, Virtues, and Diversity in the Liberal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). This is the position taken by Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl in Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991) and Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for a Non-Perfectionist Politics (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005). On the need for different principles of justice for different spheres of life, see William A. Galston, Justice and the Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983). This is the argument of Clifford Angell Bates, Aristotle’s “Best Regime”: Kingship, Democracy, and the Rule of Law (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). See, for example, Theodore Roosevelt’s comments on the “conflict between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess” in “The New Nationalism,” in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States (New York: New American Library, 1976), 227. See Paul Eidelberg, The Philosophy of the American Constitution (New York: Free Press, 1968); and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., The Spirit of Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 1–15. See Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1992); and Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). Jud Newborn and Annette Dumbach, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 195. That good people need to be well-armed with a knowledge of the tricks used by the base might justify Aristotle’s Rhetoric, which explains all the techniques of rhetoric, including the fallacious and manipulative techniques of the sophists. See Larry Arnhart, Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric” (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1981). See Arnold Ludwig, King of the Mountain: The Nature of Political Leadership (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002).

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3 The Political Realism of Christian Theology Augustine’s City of God

KEY READINGS The City of God, I, 8, 28–29; II, 7; IV, 3–4; V, 12–21, 24–26; VIII, 3–12; IX, 15–17; X, 24, 28–29, 32; XI, 2–4; XIV, 13; XIX, 21, 24–28; XX, 7–9.

In the history of Western civilization, the writings of St. Augustine (AD 354–430) have provided a bridge between the classical culture of ancient Greece and Rome and the Christian culture of Western Europe.1 Augustine was supremely qualified for this role because, as a teacher of rhetoric, he had studied the Greek and Roman classics before he converted to Christianity and later became a bishop in the Christian Church. The City of God was the first attempt to elaborate a Christian view of politics. The New Testament has no clear political teaching, because the first Christians were so preoccupied with their eternal salvation that they had no interest in earthly politics.2 Jesus had taught that Christians were to render “to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew 22:21); and St. Paul had exhorted Christians to obey their rulers as being ordained by God (Romans 13:1–7). This was interpreted to mean that Christians should obey all laws, so long as this did not violate their religious duties. Their primary concern was to look ahead to the heavenly kingdom. Eventually, however, as the political influence of the Christian Church grew, it became necessary to clarify the meaning of worldly political activity for the Christians. 69

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The last Roman persecutions of the Christians (AD 303–305) occurred under the Emperor Diocletian. Then, during a period of civil wars (305– 324), the emperor Constantine gained control of the western part of the Roman Empire in 312. He was converted to Christianity the same year. The following year Christianity became a legal religion. In 393, the emperor Theodosius made it the official religion of the empire. When the Visigoths and Alaric sacked Rome in 410, some people suggested that this was punishment for having forsaken the traditional gods. This charge against Christianity stirred Augustine to write The City of God.

1. Was Augustine the first political realist? As odd as it may sound, we should consider the suggestion of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that Augustine was “the first great ‘realist’ in Western history.”3 This seems a strange comment if we think about the moral ideals of Christianity, but it seems less strange if we remember the Christian doctrines of the Fall and Redemption, which were crucial for Augustine’s theology. All people bear the marks of that original sin of pride through which Adam fell from perfect union with God, and therefore they strive vainly to fill the emptiness in their souls. Their only path to fulfillment is the redemption in Heaven offered by Christ. From the viewpoint of these doctrines, the Christian might well be deeply pessimistic about the political life of human beings. In their fallen state, people are too selfish to attain true goodness in their political arrangements; and consequently, to strive for political justice in this life is futile. With this kind of reasoning, Augustine’s Christian theology might support the claim of Thrasymachus that in politics what is called justice is simply the rule of the stronger. By considering how even a Christian could be driven to such a harsh view of politics, we can begin to understand the issues in that perennial debate between political realists and political idealists. Idealists, we might say, adhere to abstract, universal principles, whereas realists look at concrete, particular circumstances. Political idealists insist on fixed principles of political justice, but political realists demand flexibility in responding to the flux of political events. Idealists want to direct political action to high moral ends, but realists see politics as a conflict of selfish interests settled by an appeal to force with little concern for moral principles. Idealists criticize realists for promoting the cynicism and nihilism that encourages brutality in political life. Realists criticize idealists for the blind sentimentality that leads them to impose their own moral abstractions on political circumstances with no regard for the often harmful consequences. Is there some truth on both sides? In recent centuries, we have seen the dangers of both excessive idealism and excessive realism. Idealists have seduced us with visions of a cooperative world community forever free of war and injustice, yet in some cases these utopian dreams may have created opportunities for

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unprecedented violence and oppression. Realists, on the other hand, seem to have legitimated crude tyrannies both of the Left and the Right by affirming that politics is nothing more than the pursuit and exercise of power. We hope that political philosophers such as Augustine can help us to understand this modern dilemma. To consider Augustine’s position, let us look first at the unifying theme of The City of God as expressed in the idea of the two cities. Augustine opens his book by contrasting the humility of the City of God and the pride of the City of Man. Later he explains: Two cities have been formed by two loves, the earthly city evidently by love of self even to the contempt of God, the heavenly city truly by love of God even to the contempt of self. In short, the former glories in itself, the latter in the Lord. For the one seeks glory from men; but for the other the greatest glory is God as the witness of conscience. (XIV, 28)4

In the City of Man, he goes on to say, rulers rule for the glory of ruling; but in the City of God, rulers find their true reward in the glory of Heaven. In the City of Man, the wise glory in their own wisdom, even though this darkens their minds; in the City of God, the wise see that true wisdom is not human but divine. The City of Man arises from the corruption of Adam’s sin of pride; the City of God arises from the humble believer’s hope in salvation by Jesus Christ. Thus, in speaking of the two cities, Augustine uses the Christian doctrines of the Fall and Redemption to illuminate the human condition. Without the light of those doctrines revealed by God to the faithful, we cannot, Augustine claims, make sense of the world or our place in it. We might conclude from this that, contrary to the earlier suggestion, Augustine exhibits a radical idealism, if we assumed that the City of God can be established on Earth as a Christian empire guided by the Christian Church. In fact, this interpretation of Augustine influenced some of the political activity of the Middle Ages. But there is evidence in The City of God that this reading of the book is profoundly mistaken. Augustine makes it clear that the City of God achieves its eternal peace only in Heaven. On Earth, Christians must submit to the earthly city, which provides only “the temporal peace, which is shared by both the good and the bad” (XIX, 26). Perhaps we should say that Augustine combines idealism and realism. He is an idealist in his view of the City of God as the perfect city, but he is a realist in his account of the earthly city as weighted down by the desperate wickedness of people without God. Doesn’t this resemble what we have already seen in the works of Plato and Aristotle? Don’t they also lament the difficulty of actualizing the best regime, which usually exists only in the mind of the philosopher? Why, then, shouldn’t they be considered just as realistic as Augustine? Plato and Aristotle are certainly political realists in thinking that what is politically best by nature is rarely, if ever, attained fully in political practice. Still, they are idealists, in contrast to Augustine’s realism, because of

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their confidence that nature provides a standard of political perfection discoverable by human reason, a standard that can guide political philosophy as a norm for judgment, even though it cannot be put completely into practice. The Socratic political philosophers had to make the optimistic assumption that although our knowledge of nature is always incomplete, the natural world is, in principle, rationally comprehensible as a self-sufficing and self-explanatory whole. Augustine would dismiss this view of things as showing a naive blindness to the fact that the natural world is, at its core, a mystery. Even if we could see every part of nature in its relationship to the whole, nature would still be incomprehensible because it is not a self-sufficient whole. Because the natural universe depends for its existence on a supernatural cause, the universe is not fully intelligible on its own terms. This leads Augustine to a much more pessimistic assessment of politics than can be found in the works of Plato or Aristotle. Rather than saying that nature’s standards of perfection are rarely satisfied in political life, Augustine insists that nature itself, in its present state, is imperfect, because, as far as nature is concerned, political justice does not exist anywhere, not even in the mind of the political philosopher. Nature becomes a reliable guide only when we see by faith that it points to a supernatural source of order. Great it is and very rare, after one has looked at the whole creation, corporeal and incorporeal, and has discerned its mutability, to go beyond it by the stretching of the mind, and to arrive at the unchangeable substance of God, and there to learn from God Himself that the whole of nature—that which does not belong to His essence—no one but He has made. (XI, 2)

Because of nature’s “mutability,” it cannot be adequately explained without reference to the immutable Creator. Therefore, when nature is considered independently of its supernatural cause, as it was by Plato and Aristotle, it cannot provide dependable norms for either political philosophy or political leadership. Because Augustine’s reasoning relies on faith in the divinely revealed doctrines of the Bible, we cannot through human reason alone adequately judge his argument. But we can at least assess the surface plausibility of his claims. We can ask ourselves, without any appeal to religious faith, whether pagan philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle failed, as Augustine says, to make sense of the natural world without the assistance of Christian doctrine. If the Christian teaching is correct, nature must be so mutable, so contingent, that it cannot be made intelligible as a self-contained whole. This Christian thought is expressed well in the questions raised by G. W. Leibniz in 1714: Why is there something rather than nothing? And why are things as they are and not different?

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It is a sign of the shallowness of our thinking that we commonly prefer to ignore such questions because we find them too troubling. We would rather ask easier questions about how things work than to ask why they work as they do or why they exist at all. Leibniz offered an answer to his questions: “This final reason of things is called God.”5 We are not entitled to reject his answer unless we have a better answer of our own.6 To Leibniz’s two questions, there are only two possible answers. Either we answer, as Leibniz did, God wills it; or we answer, it has to be so. If we say that the universe has to exist and has to exist in the form that it does, then the universe needs no supernatural cause because, being a necessary universe, it is its own cause. But if we say that this is only one possible universe of many, that it does not have to exist or exist in the form that it does, then we must conclude that because the universe has no internal cause for its own preservation, the universe must depend on a supernatural cause for its preservation. Notice that Christians do not have to assume that there ever were or will be other universes; they only have to assume that there could have been or could be other universes. The strength of the Christian position should be clear. For it seems plausible that, at least in principle, our universe is only one possible universe of many. The laws of physics could be different from what they are; if they were, we would live (let us hope we would be part of it!) in a different universe. Yet if a radically different universe is possible, then it is also possible for there to be no universe at all because our universe does not exist by necessity. Therefore, the continuing existence of the universe from one moment to another can be sustained only by a power beyond the natural universe itself, a supernatural cause of some sort.7 Do we see here the problem of ultimate explanation—that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained? All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation. To the question of why nature exists or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers. Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that’s just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature’s God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is. Thus, it seems that in looking for ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained—either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or selfcaused God. What does all of this metaphysical speculation have to do with the conflict between realism and idealism in political thinking? A lot. To be a political idealist one has to assume that there are some fixed standards of perfection in nature by which political life can be judged. However, if nature is radically contingent, only one possible universe among many, the status of nature’s standards of political perfection is thrown into question. It would seem that the perfection of nature’s tendencies can be found only in the supernatural source of nature’s laws. One might conclude from this,

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as Augustine does, that political life as guided by the natural norms of this world must be radically flawed. Because the world at its core is mysterious, human reason on its own cannot fathom reality completely; nature on its own is not fully explainable; and human beings on their own cannot secure their happiness. It is the pride of pagan philosophers that prevents them from finding the solution to the difficulties, Augustine argues (II, 7; VIII, 4; XI, 25). Only the humble faith of the Christian can dispel the darkness, because it reveals that God illuminates human reason, God creates and sustains nature, and God offers human beings the happiness they seek. To clarify Augustine’s political realism, we should consider how he argues for the superiority of Christian faith over pagan philosophy in the three areas just indicated: the study of morality, the study of nature, and the study of reason itself. The next three sections of this chapter will be devoted to these subjects as they bear on Augustine’s political thought.

2. Does Christian faith perfect our reasoning about politics? By its appeal to “self-evident” principles, the Declaration of Independence reminds us that political argument, like all reasoning, must have a starting point that does not need to be proven. It is futile to try to prove everything because reasoning depends on fundamental assumptions that cannot be proven since they are the source of all proofs. A conclusion is demonstrated when it is shown to follow from some premises. These premises may follow as conclusions from other premises. Eventually, however, we must reach first principles that are taken as true without proof, these being the starting points of reasoning. Indeed, are not the rules of logic themselves assumptions that cannot be proven logically? Even the most rigorous empirical science cannot avoid reliance on unprovable assumptions. Scientific induction, for example, depends on the assumption that we may generalize from particular cases; this rests, in turn, on the broader assumption that nature is uniform and governed by laws that do not change arbitrarily from one moment to another.8 Should we conclude, therefore, that all reasoning depends on acts of faith? For how else should we explain our apprehension of first principles as self-evident? Thus, we cannot easily dismiss Augustine’s claim that Christian faith does not contradict, but rather perfects, human reason (see chapter 6, sections 2–3, and 5). Pascal, who was influenced by Augustine’s writings, wrote in the seventeenth century: We know the truth not only through reason but also through the heart; it is by the latter that we know the first principles. . . . And it is on this knowledge from the heart and instinct that reason must depend and base all its argument. (Pensées, fr. 110)9

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Pascal was a mathematician, and he thought that geometry illustrated this dependence of “reason” on the “heart.” Before we can rationally demonstrate anything in geometry, we must start with definitions and axioms that are self-evident. For example, the axiom that two things equal to the same are equal to one another cannot be proven; it must be, in Pascal’s words, “sensed” or “felt” to be true. Pascal also thought a similar justification could be given for allowing Christian faith to guide our thinking. We can “sense” or “feel” that people strive for some perfect happiness for which they were designed but which now lies somewhere beyond this world. We should accept the Christian doctrines of the Fall and Redemption, because once we grasp these teachings by faith, Pascal maintains, our minds can comprehend the world more clearly than would ever be possible otherwise. Augustine would agree. As in his famous declaration, “I believe in order to understand,” Augustine affirms that faith allows reason to reach its natural fulfillment. “Those who do not believe and therefore cannot understand” allow their pride to darken their minds (X, 32). Through pride, the mind “deserts that to which it should cleave as its first principle, seeking to become and to be, so to speak, a first principle to itself” (XIV, 13). This proud refusal to accept divine enlightenment has so clouded the human mind that not even the wisest have succeeded in making sense of things. Perhaps the most obvious evidence of the intellectual confusion of the pagan philosophers is that they fail to reach agreement about even the most fundamental matters. Augustine observes that it is hard to find any two philosophers who agree in all respects. For example, concerning the question as to what is the highest good of life, Augustine catalogued 288 different answers given by the philosophers (XVIII, 41; XIX, 1). Philosophic debates must always be interminable as long as the debaters cannot appeal to any authority higher than their own reason. Only Christian faith can provide the “surpassing authority” that is needed (X, 32). Augustine concedes that the Platonists came close to grasping the insights of Christianity, but he thinks that they fell short due to their pride (VIII, 4–5; X, 24, 28–29). Augustine argues for the superiority of conscience over reason, with the claim that only the divinely inspired conscience can properly guide reason. Some would see this Augustinian idea implied in the Declaration of Independence. It was common among some English Puritans of the eighteenth century to argue that natural rights could be perceived as selfevident only through the inner light of conscience given by God.10 Although the invocations of divinity in the Declaration would support this view, the appeal to the “Laws of Nature” suggests that unassisted human reason can grasp the self-evident truths through its understanding of nature. Indeed, if the concern is with natural rights, shouldn’t nature itself (apart from God) be a sufficient standard? Moreover, we might question the wisdom of grounding our fundamental political principles on the

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unpredictable impulses of conscience. We might also doubt that even Augustine would recommend trying to establish earthly politics on the Christian conscience. At the same time, Augustine would surely question the wisdom of relying on the philosophic concept of nature as a source of political principles.

3. Is nature apart from God a reliable standard for politics? After invoking the universal principles of natural rights, the Declaration of Independence indicates that political reasoning requires more than just a knowledge of the universals of nature. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” To justify the revolution it is necessary to show that the facts of the “history of the present King of Great Britain” support such a drastic measure. Wise leadership requires a knowledge not only of nature, but also of history. Because the historical circumstances of politics are always unique and always changing, they cannot be understood simply as manifestations of the uniform patterns of nature. How, then, can we make sense of history on its own terms? As we have seen, Augustine maintains that the historical mutability of nature cannot be comprehended unless one sees it as reflecting God’s providential order. The pagan philosophers thought of nature as an eternally recurring pattern in which history was little more than the cyclical repetition of a limited number of possibilities. We have seen this, for instance, in the Platonic and Aristotelian accounts of the variety of regimes, in which there is assumed to be a fixed number of possible regimes that are repeated as historical circumstances change. But in Christian thinking, historical novelty is more important than natural recurrence, or perhaps we should say that nature itself becomes a fluid historical process of continual change in which the only fixed reality is that God’s will stands behind it all. Nature is orderly, according to the Christian conception, but the law of this order is the continual working of God’s will. Each thing is what it is by virtue of God’s unceasing creative activity. G. K. Chesterton captured the idea when he suggested: It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. . . . The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. . . . Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop.11

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But for Plato and Aristotle that one daisy is just like all other daisies is a matter of automatic necessity! The crucial point, Augustine might insist here, is that Plato and Aristotle fail to achieve through their conception of nature the very purpose they wish it to serve, which is to make reality fully intelligible. In trying to explain reality as ordered according to abstract, universal concepts, they have no way of explaining the concrete particularity of things. In their preoccupation with the repetitive patterns of nature, they cannot explain the unique and unpredictable occurrences that violate these natural patterns. So, for example, having constructed a “city in speech” that is the best by nature because it conforms to the universal principles of human nature, Plato has to concede that no existing city satisfies this political model. The philosopher’s rational grasp of the abstract principles of nature is not enough to make sense of the concrete reality of political practice. If we look at the world without any preconceptions, we see a chaotic flux, everything continually changing and nothing exactly the same as anything else. Not only do daisies differ from dogs, every daisy differs in some respect from all other daisies; moreover, each daisy changes from one moment to another. Similarly, in politics every set of circumstances is unique, so that a political decision appropriate to one time and place may not be appropriate to any other times or places. Augustine would argue that when confronted with such changeableness in nature, the mind should look beyond nature to the unchangeable Creator to find a source of order for an otherwise disordered world. But the proud Platonic philosopher tries to find within the human mind itself principles of order for understanding nature without reference to any reality beyond the mind or beyond nature. The Platonist relies on the mind’s power to simplify the complexity of the world through the abstract categories of the mind. Disregarding the fact that no particular thing is absolutely identical to anything else, the mind can classify things according to resemblances. As Friedrich Nietzsche would say, the human tendency “to treat as equal what is merely similar— an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal—is what first created any basis for logic.”12 Thus the mind looks for permanent, recurrent patterns as points of reference for finding a coherent order in the confusion of the world. Even if no two daisies are the same, they resemble each other more than they do dogs. Who has ever seen daisies produce seeds that grow into dogs? Is not the order of nature apparent in the tendency of daisies to manifest the characteristic features of all daisies and in the corresponding tendency of dogs to look like dogs? Similarly, do not human beings exhibit certain natural tendencies in their political activity, tendencies that remain essentially the same even in diverse political situations? Nevertheless, this natural regularity is not inevitable. Some puppies are born deformed, and others fail to grow to maturity. Likewise, the natural political tendencies of human beings can fail owing to changing cir-

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cumstances. The Platonist would try to explain this by saying that nature’s intention can be frustrated by chance. This is why the city that is best by nature has never been established. It requires a rare combination of circumstances that can only arise by “divine chance” (Plato, Republic 592a). To speak of chance, however, is not an explanation of why things do not always turn out according to nature, rather it is an admission that the notion of nature does not explain the whole of reality. To talk of chance is to confess one’s ignorance. This Christian criticism of the Greek concept of nature has to be taken seriously. But does referring everything back to God as the ultimate cause solve all the problems? At least it consoles the Christian to know that everything—even what seems to be purely accidental—serves some divine purpose. Augustine explains: God, therefore, Himself the author and giver of felicity, because He alone is the true God, He gives earthly kingdoms both to the good and to the bad, not blindly and, as it were, fortuitously—because He is God, not fortune—but according to the order of things and times hidden for us, but fully known to Him; which order of times, nevertheless, He serves not as being subordinate to it, but just like a lord He rules it, and just like a moderator He disposes it: true felicity He does not give except to the good. For in this life they can have or not have power over subjects, they can have or not have power over kings; and nevertheless their happiness will be full in that life where no one is a subject. (IV, 33)

Although the Christian knows by faith that there is a purpose behind every event (“according to the order of things and times”), it cannot be known— at least in this earthly life—what the purpose is (see also I, 28; V, 19, 21). Nevertheless, Christians can be sure that all that happens to them in this life points to the fulfillment of their happiness in the next life. Although Christianity can secure human happiness through divine providence, pagan philosophy cannot secure happiness from the vicissitudes of earthly life because such philosophy cannot transcend the visible course of nature. According to Plato and Aristotle, the core of human nature is membership in the human species, possessing the characteristics shared by human beings that distinguish them from other beings. Humans being defined as rational animals, each is unique by virtue of a combination of animality and rationality, but with reason being the distinctive and thus most important feature. Human nature, then, provides the moral standards for both the individual life and the political life of human beings. People should act so as to perfect their natural faculties—especially reason as the highest faculty—and thus fulfill their happiness. Likewise, a political regime should be constructed to promote such human perfection and the happiness that emerges from it. Certain external conditions that are not completely under human control are crucial to the expression of human nature in the securing of happiness. Whether or not

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an individual fulfills his or her natural potentialities depends on blind luck! Any one of us may have our life radically disrupted by physical disabilities or losses of external goods that are not due to any fault of our own. Such undeserved misfortune, contrary to nature’s intention, is inexplicable in Greek philosophy (see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1099a31– 1101a22). Moreover, the importance of luck is as much a problem for regimes as for individuals. No matter how closely a regime follows nature’s standards, it can suffer from events beyond its control. Even an internally well-ordered community cannot avoid conflict with foreign enemies for long, and the fortunes of war do not always favor the naturally excellent. As Winston Churchill once said, we cannot insure that we shall always win, we can only insure that we shall always deserve to win. From the Christian point of view, the dependence of individuals and regimes on luck no longer needs to be accepted as an unavoidable element of absurdity in life. For God is the source of both good and bad luck; even when good people and good regimes suffer misfortune inexplicable in natural terms, the Christian can be confident that this serves some divine purpose beyond the natural realm. The early Christian philosopher Boethius could argue that, within the context of divine providence, “all fortune is good fortune.”13 In this sense, the earthly sufferings of the Christian are not misfortunes at all when viewed in the light of the heavenly rewards that lie ahead. The pagan deprived of worldly happiness has no such consolation, Augustine observes (11, 8, 29; 111, 18, 20). The Christian is not favored over the non-Christian in God’s distribution of the good things of this life, even including political power (V, 26). There is no guarantee that the Christian ruler will be more successful politically than the pagan ruler (IV, 33; V, 21, 24–25), but as long as Christians look ahead to their rewards in the heavenly city, they can accept without despair any disappointments in the affairs of their earthly city. Thus Christianity solves the problem of the contingency of nature in a way that was not possible for the ancient philosophers. As an epistemological problem, contingency prevented the ancient philosophers from showing that nature was fully comprehensible to the human mind: although grasping certain recurrent features of nature, the pagan mind could not account for the variability and particularity of things. As a moral and political problem, the contingency of nature prevented the ancient thinkers from establishing an intelligible correspondence between character and fortune: no matter how virtuous a person or a political regime might be, happiness depended on fortuitous events.14 Christians, however, are not frustrated in their moral life by the contingency of worldly events because they are confident that every event serves some divine purpose. Similarly, Christians need not be troubled by the infinite flux of nature because, although it surpasses the comprehension of the temporal mind of human beings, it is all rationally ordered in the eternal mind of God. To put all of this into a simple formula, the Christian solves the problem of the contin-

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gency of nature by replacing philosophic naturalism with biblical creationism. Instead of explaining things in accordance with the recurrent patterns of nature conceived as a self-contained, self-explanatory whole, Christians see the natural order as a result of the continual working of the Creator’s will. (Augustine reflects on the createdness of the world in the last three books of his Confessions.) Doesn’t this put humankind in a precarious position insofar as the meaning of existence must now hang by the slender thread of human faith? What happens when that thread breaks, as apparently it has for many in the modern world? Does reality collapse into absolute meaninglessness? Although creationism provided Christians a form of consolation unattainable by the ancient philosophers, it may also have led the secular thought of the modern world toward an inconsolable despair. In its modern secularized embodiment, creationism can promote nihilism. For if it is believed that the natural world has no order or meaning of its own except what it receives from the Creator, then as the existence of the Creator comes to be doubted, human beings must see the world as empty of any order or meaning. This is nihilism in the literal sense of thinking that everything rests on nothing. Consider the potentiality for nihilism in the following passage from The City of God (XIV, 13), in which Augustine explains the sin of Adam: Nature could not have been depraved by vice if it had not been made out of nothing [ex nihilo]. And as a result, that it is nature, this is so because God made it; but that it falls from him, this is because it is made from nothing. Man did not so fall away as to become entirely nothing [omnino nihil], but as inclined toward himself, he became less than he was when he clung to Him who supremely is. And so having left God, to exist in himself, that is, to please himself, is not actually to become nothing, but to approach nothing [nihilo propinquare].

As the hold of the Christian faith loosened in the modern world, there was a tendency to assume a creationist ontology without a Creator. The world is as arbitrarily contingent as if it were created by God, but God does not exist. And if the world rests on nothing, one cannot deny the creative power of God without falling into that nothingness at the heart of things. This becomes apparent in the nihilism of existential atheism. The “death of God” leaves the existentialist with the Christian denial that nature is intelligible, but without the Christian hope in divine redemption. Karl Löwith has clearly formulated how modern thought emerges from the secularization of Christian doctrine: The modern world is as Christian as it is non-Christian because it is the outcome of an age-long process of secularization. . . . The ambition to be “creative” and the striving for a future fulfillment reflect the faith in creation and consummation, even when these are held to be irrelevant myths.

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Radical atheism, too, which is, however, as rare as radical faith, is possible only within a Christian tradition. . . . The fact that the Christian God has ruled out all the popular gods and protecting spirits of the pagans created the possibility of a radical atheism; for if the Christian belief in a God who is as distinct from the world as a creator is from his creatures and yet is the source of every being is once discarded, the world becomes emancipated and profane as it never was for the pagans. If the universe is neither eternal and divine, as it was for the ancients, nor transient but created, as it is for the Christians, there remains only one aspect: the sheer contingency of its mere “existence.”15

This may explain the talk about the despair, the boredom, the meaninglessness of modern life; in fact, it all sounds so familiar to us as to seem trite. Indeed, this vague metaphysical anxiety, this sometimes faint but ever-present feeling of homelessness in the universe, has pervaded the modern Western world. It characterizes the secular consciousness of our age that accepts, on the one hand, the Christian belief that nature on its own is devoid of meaning and therefore cannot guide us in thought or action, while rejecting, on the other hand, the Christian faith in the divine redemption of nature. Pascal sketches this new consciousness in his Pensées, in his remarks on the misery of human life without God. An individual who thinks about our place in the universe soon ends up staring into an abyss, discovering that he is “equally incapable of seeing the nothing from which he is drawn and the infinity in which he is engulfed” (fr. 390). Thinking about the fragility and brevity of mortal existence in the cold immensity of the universe creates a deep sense of nothingness. The only escape from these dark thoughts is to keep oneself so busy with the daily activities of life that one has no time to think. For that reason, human beings dread most of all quiet moments without distractions (fr. 269). For Pascal, however, there is a promise of redemption: “It is good to be tired and fatigued by the useless search for the true good, so that we stretch out our arms to the Savior” (fr. 306). But once that faith is shaken, all that remains is desperation mitigated by diversions. The political consequences of this nihilistic despair should be clear. If nature has no inherent order of its own, but has only whatever meaning human beings arbitrarily choose to give it, then it is absurd to speak of human beings as possessing natural rights or to claim that nature provides any principles of political justice. The sort of argument displayed in the Declaration of Independence would have to be dismissed as, at best, wishful self-deception, and at worst, fraudulent propaganda. Without any principles of natural justice, political activity might then be governed simply by the irrational preferences of those who happen to be powerful. Although the secularization of Christian teaching can thus lead to a despondent political nihilism, by another line of development that same process of secularization can lead to a utopian political idealism. The prob-

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lem with Christianity is its uncertainty: the Christian’s hope in the transcendent rewards of Heaven depends on faith alone. One way to eliminate that uncertainty is simply to give up hope, and we have considered the consequences of that move. Another way to escape the insecurity of Christian faith is to bring Heaven down to Earth. If we could establish the Kingdom of God in this earthly life, we could fulfill our happiness without the anxiety of waiting for a doubtful salvation in Heaven. Some of the most turbulent political movements in the modern world have pursued that vision. Augustine saw this tendency in Christian political thought, and he opposed it in The City of God. The problem arises from the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St. John. John describes Christ ruling the Earth with his saints for a thousand years (Revelation 20:1–6). Many Christians interpreted this to mean that they should prepare to enjoy the Kingdom of God on Earth. Using the Latin word for “one thousand,” they called themselves millenarians. Augustine dismissed these visions as “ridiculous fables” (XX, 7). He argued that John had written a metaphorical account of the present position of the Church (XX, 9). The City of God, Augustine explained, exists on Earth as the mystical body of believers; but the fulfillment of God’s Kingdom is in Heaven, not on Earth. Until their entry into Heaven, Christians must live in this life, with all the imperfection of worldly politics. Augustine’s rejection of millenarianism became the doctrine of the Christian Church. Nevertheless, from the Middle Ages to the present, millenarian groups have erupted in political history, often in the form of revolutionary movements. Some historians have traced an unbroken line of influence from the medieval millenarians through the Puritan revolutionaries in seventeenth-century England down to the Marxist and National Socialist revolutionaries.16 To provide only one example of modern millenarianism, Harold Laski, an influential English political thinker, once praised Lenin for seeking “to build his heaven on earth and write the precepts of his faith into the inner fabric of a universal humanity.” Laski thought “that the Russian principle cuts deeper than the Christian since it seeks salvation for the masses by fulfillment in this life, and, thereby, orders anew the actual world we know.”17 The problem, of course, with this sort of thinking is that it promotes a dangerous spirit of immoderation. When political leaders think they are establishing Heaven on Earth, they can see that goal as justifying whatever brutal measures they take to achieve it (see chapter 11, section 1; chapter 12, section 7). America has had its own tradition of millenarian idealism. Beginning with the first Puritan settlers, Americans have seen themselves as God’s chosen people to set an example of political excellence for all the world.18 The Declaration of Independence presented the American Revolution as a vindication of God-given rights. Lincoln, in the Gettysburg Address, called for a rededication to the principles of the Declaration, so that popular government “shall not perish from the earth.” That required a holy war, as

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described by Julia Ward Howe in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”: “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, with a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.” President Woodrow Wilson thought the League of Nations would extend this City of God beyond America to include the entire world, so that injustice and violence would be forever banished from world politics. The League was necessary, he insisted, to fulfill what American soldiers had done in the First World War. He spoke of the moral obligation that rests upon us not to go back on those boys, but to see the thing through, to see it through to the end and make good their redemption of the world. For nothing less depends upon this decision, nothing less than the liberation and salvation of the world.19

Such visions of American politics aiming toward the “redemption of the world” would be denigrated by Augustine as ridiculous fables. Political thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau have espoused a modern version of Augustine’s political realism as an alternative to the idealist tradition of American politics.20 Our concern with high moral norms, they argue, should not blind us to the harsh reality of politics. Owing to the ineradicable flaws in human nature, political life is usually dominated more by the selfish striving for power than by the concern for justice and the common good. The most that we can hope for is to maintain some stability and peace, both within and among nations, through balances of power—the aim being to keep any groups or nations from being powerful enough to tyrannize the others. Augustine accepts this as a consequence of the fallen nature of human beings. Still, we must ask whether this realistic view of politics is too narrow. Must we give up our pursuit of political justice? If we do, how do we judge political decisions as better or worse? Does the preservation of peace become the only standard of political judgment? Can we do this without being brutalized by the absence of any sense of justice?

4. Must earthly political rule always be unjust? In Cicero’s Republic (I, 39), he defines a republic as a large group of people “associated by a consensus about justice and a society for the common utility.” Augustine objects that this definition has never been satisfied because no republic has ever been founded on justice (II, 21; XIX, 23). Thus Augustine drastically lowers the aims of politics by denying that political justice is ever attainable in this life. We must wonder, then, whether Augustine ends up supporting Thrasymachus’s view of politics as the rule of the stronger disguised as justice. To replace Cicero’s standard, Augustine offers a more realistic definition of a republic: a political community requires “an assemblage of a mul-

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titude of rational beings associated in a common agreement about the things they love” (XIX, 24). Instead of justice, Augustine demands only that the people agree about something, without prescribing what that should be. Although he suggests a standard of rank when he says that a community is better or worse as the objects of their agreement are better or worse, he goes on to explain that the fundamental aim of every community is simply “temporal peace” (XIX, 26). This is, to say the least, a modest assessment of the purposes of political life in contrast to the higher expectations for politics in the ancient view. Those ancient Greek and Roman citizens who sacrificed everything else for the sake of the public realm had a more elevated view of political activity. We must wonder, then, whether Augustine is capable of appreciating the political virtues of such people. We must also wonder whether his Christian conception of politics can sustain grand leadership. Although ancient authors celebrated the heroic virtues of the leader as manifesting “greatness of soul” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1123a34–1125a17), Christians have denigrated such activity as corrupted by that most fundamental of all sins— pride. The spirit of this Christian doctrine has found its secular incarnation in the political thought of Hobbes, in his teaching that violent human pride must be subdued by the State for the sake of political peace. We might conclude, then, that heroic leadership has survived only to the extent that it has found sustenance in the cultural residues of pagan antiquity. Augustine does acknowledge, however, the genuine political virtues of the ancient Romans (V, 12–16). He explains those virtues as motivated by the love of praise. For the sake of political glory, to live after death through fame, Roman politicians suppressed vices such as the desires for wealth and private pleasures in order to serve the Roman Republic with their great deeds. This was not true virtue, however, because it was directed to human praise rather than to the highest human good. These individuals, therefore, were “not yet holy, but only less corrupt.” Yet God rewarded their virtues appropriately by granting Rome temporal power and peace. The decline of Rome came when its rulers were moved less by the desire for glory than by the desire for domination (V, 19). Thus Augustine can recognize political virtues even while denigrating them as falling short of the true virtues of the Christian. At least, he can distinguish leaders from tyrants. And yet, how can he do this—how can he speak of good and bad forms of political rule—if, as he insists, political life cannot truly conform to justice? Granted, one government may be more efficient than another in securing the temporal peace of its subjects, but that seems hardly sufficient for moral judgment. No matter how shocking it may be, we have to take Augustine seriously when he remarks: “When justice is removed, what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers? For what are bands of robbers if not small kingdoms?” (IV, 4). Must we conclude, then, that, for the Augustinian Christian, a politician differs from a tyrant, but only in that the one is a more heroic thief than the other?

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5. Must Christians be Machiavellians? This is a paradoxical question. We might assume that the Christian’s faith in the transcendent perfection of the Kingdom of God would promote a moral idealism directly opposed to Machiavellian politics. Yet, as we have seen, an Augustinian Christian who insists that God’s Kingdom is “not of this world” can be tough minded in judging the politics of this world. We shall grapple with Machiavelli, and others like him, later in this book. Here, we should consider whether Augustine’s political thought offers an alternative to Machiavellianism. Is it possible to avoid the illusions of political idealism while also escaping the cynicism of political realism? Can we find a path of moderation between the two extremes—the excessive realism that views all rulers as only great thieves and the excessive idealism that strives for a political utopia? Hans Morgenthau, as we noted earlier, was considered a modern exponent of Augustinian realism; and his thinking illustrates how a toughminded realism might be combined with a sense of moral purpose.21 Morgenthau influenced the study of American foreign policy by challenging the idealist tradition as perhaps best represented by Woodrow Wilson. It was a mistake, Morgenthau argued, to think that world peace could be established through a moral consensus among nations. Because every nation must secure its own national interest through the prudent use of force against its enemies, a stable peace can be maintained only through a balance of power among nations. Likewise, within each nation, political order requires a balance of power between competing groups. Despite this political realism, Morgenthau was not a Machiavellian, because he believed there are some moral standards in politics. Morgenthau’s political realism differed from Machiavellian power politics in that Morgenthau thought that the pursuit of power can be channeled to moral ends. Arguing that the political realism of thinkers like Augustine is superior to the political thought of Machiavelli and Hobbes, Morgenthau insisted: In the long run philosophies and political systems that have made the lust and the struggle for power their mainstays have proved impotent and self-destructive. Their weakness demonstrates the strength of the Western tradition that seeks, if not to eliminate, at least to regulate and restrain the power drives that otherwise would either tear society apart or deliver the life and happiness of the weak to the arbitrary will of the powerful.22

He also contended that rather than rejecting all moral principles, the political realist seeks those moral principles that are grounded in political reality. In particular, the realist favors the moral understanding that sees the need for flexibility in applying universal principles to particular political circumstances. Thus Morgenthau relied on what the ancient and medieval philosophers called prudence, the moral faculty for judging good and bad in concrete situations.23 Even in international politics, where the rule of the stronger seems to prevail, Morgenthau saw a need for moral judgment. “In order to be wor-

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thy of our lasting sympathy,” he wrote, “a nation must pursue its interest for the sake of a transcendent purpose that gives meaning to the day-byday operations of its foreign policy.”24 For American politics the “transcendent purpose” has been defined by the Declaration of Independence, which upholds the principle of natural human rights, or, as Morgenthau phrased it, “equality in freedom.”25 This explains the traditional belief that in foreign policy American national interests should coincide with the promotion of human rights. But, as we saw earlier in the quotation from Woodrow Wilson, this tradition can encourage utopian idealism if it is not restrained by a prudent recognition of the moral limitations of political life. Still, it has become clear in recent history that the moral ideals of the Declaration of Independence are powerful tools of foreign policy. Liberal democracy has spread throughout the world; and over the past two hundred years, no liberal democracy has gone to war against another liberal democracy. Is the dream of “perpetual peace” now a realistic possibility?26 Later in this book, we will consider Steven Pinker’s argument that history shows a dramatic decline in violence, particularly over the last two centuries through the influence of modern liberal humanism. So, again, we are left groping for a combination of realism and idealism. We might see our goal as illustrated by the Declaration of Independence, which unites a grasp of universal moral principles with prudential judgment of the demands of particular historical circumstances. We might also look to Pascal’s formulation of the goal in a passage of the Pensées: It is just that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what is stronger should be followed. Justice without force is impotent; force without justice is tyrannical. . . . We must therefore combine justice and force; and to do this, what is just should be strong, or what is strong should be just. (fr. 192)

If we could achieve this, we could take our motto from Abraham Lincoln: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”27 Augustine might warn us, however, that our “faith that right makes might” will only be fulfilled in Heaven. In response to our quotation from Pascal, Augustine could have cited another passage from the Pensées: “not being able to fortify justice, men have justified force, so that the just and the strong should unite, and there should be peace, which is the sovereign good” (fr. 171). Or he could have quoted Pascal’s claim that Plato and Aristotle were not serious when they wrote books on political philosophy: “If they wrote about politics, it was as though they were to make rules in a hospital for fools” (fr. 533). If every political regime is an insane asylum, we cannot expect its citizens to discover justice. We can only hope that they will know how to maintain a little peace in the madhouse. As long as Augustinian Christians stress the corruption of nature by human sin, they cannot see any way for earthly politics to go beyond tempo-

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ral peace toward true justice. But if it were possible to reconcile Greek naturalism and Christian creationism, if Christians could see nature even in its unredeemed earthly condition as a moral guide, then they might see some glimmer of justice in the politics of this world. Some Christians think that St. Thomas Aquinas achieved just that in his conception of the natural law.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8

9

For the history of Christianity, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985); and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Penguin, 2009). For some interpretations of the political teaching of the Bible, see Oscar Cullmann, The State in the New Testament (New York: Scribners, 1956); Walter E. Pilgrim, Uneasy Neighbors: Church and State in the New Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999); Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). Reinhold Niebuhr, “Augustine’s Political Realism,” in Christian Realism and Political Problems (New York: Scribners, 1953), 120–21. See Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), chap. 4; and R. A. Markus, Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), chap. 4. On Augustine’s life, see Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On the conflict in Augustine’s thinking between classical and Christian conceptions of political order, see Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 76–106. For encyclopedic coverage of Augustine’s thought and influence, see Allan D. Fitzgerald, ed., Augustine Through the Ages: An Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009). All translations of Augustine’s Latin texts are mine. I have used the text in De civitate Det libri XXII, ed. B. Dombart and A. Kalb, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928). G. W. Leibnitz, Principles of Nature and Grace, in Leibnitz: Philosophical Writings, trans. Mary Morris (New York: Dutton, 1961), 26. For a survey of how some contemporary philosophers and scientists explain the origin of the universe, see Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story (New York: Liveright, 2012). For a presentation of this line of reasoning as the best philosophic argument for God’s existence, see Mortimer J. Adler, How to Think About God (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Holt, Why Does the World Exist?, 95–107; and Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). For some atheistic responses to the arguments for God’s existence, see John Mackie, The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010). See Stanley L. Jaki, “The Role of Faith in Physics,” Zygon 2 (1967): 187–202; Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1982), 39–40, 46, 224–27, 261–62, 290; and Steven Weinberg, “Origins,” Science 230 (1985): 15–17. All references to the Pensées are based on the edition edited by Louis Lafuma (Paris: Editions du Luxembourg, 1952). The translations are mine. Pascal belongs to a tradition of modern skepticism with Augustinian roots, as manifested in Michel de Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” See The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 328, 368–70, 402–5, 425, 454, 457. The primacy that modern thinkers give to the “will” and the “self’ also shows the influence of Augustine and biblical theology. See Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Willing (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 84–110; and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 127–42.

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12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27

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See Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 24–37. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Image Books, 1959), 60–61. The implications of this idea for Augustine’s thought are worked out by Charles Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 399–516; and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Christianity and Political Philosophy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 60–110. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), sec. 111. See also Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 246–57. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), IV, 7. See Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 201. For elaboration of these points, see Hans Jonas, “Jewish and Christian Elements in Philosophy: Their Share in the Emergence of the Modern Mind,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 21–44; Larry Arnhart, “Statesmanship as Magnanimity: Classical, Christian, and Modern,” Polity 16 (Winter 1983): 263–83; and Karl Löwith, “Can There Be a Christian Gentleman?” in Nature, History, and Existentialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 204–13. See Löwith, Meaning in History; Voegelin, The New Science, 107–89; and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Harold Laski, Faith, Reason and Civilization (London: Victor Gollanez, 1944), 155, 200. See Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America’s Millennial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Woodrow Wilson, Address at Pueblo, Colorado, 25 September 1919, in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States (New York: New American Library, 1976), 255. See William T. Bluhm, Theories of the Political System, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 193–204. The fullest statement of Morgenthau’s thinking is his classic textbook, Politics Among Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961). The first text in the realist tradition is Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. See Laurie M. Johnson, Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 228. Ibid., 10. Hans Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 8. Ibid., 36–37. See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), 245–84; and Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Abraham Lincoln, Address at Cooper Union, 27 February 1860, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 3:550. Hans Morgenthau regarded Lincoln as a paradigm of prudent statesmanship that combined toughness and justice. See Morgenthau and David Hein, Essays on Lincoln’s Faith and Politics, ed. Kenneth W. Thompson (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983).

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4 Natural Law

Thomas Aquinas’s “Treatise on Law”

KEY READINGS Summa Theologica, I–II, qq. 90–97, 100, 105; II–II, qq. 10–11, 40, 64, 66, 77–78, 104

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) was the most important Christian philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. Going beyond Augustine, Thomas reformulated Christian philosophy in response to the intellectual, religious, and political controversies of the thirteenth century. The great political conflict was between the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope. Augustine’s distinction between the City of Man and the City of God failed to resolve the conflicts between the temporal authority of political rulers and the spiritual authority of the Church. Thomas sought to maintain the ultimate supremacy of the Pope while respecting the proper claims of the Emperor.1 The dominant intellectual controversy of the time arose from the revival of interest in Aristotle, which was feared by some Church authorities as a source of pagan corruption. Although Jewish and Islamic scholars had preserved Aristotle’s texts and had debated for centuries as to how his philosophy could be harmonized with biblical theology, until the thirteenth century Aristotle was not studied much in the Christian world, and many of his writings were not even available there. When Christian thinkers came into contact with this tradition, they had to reconsider the relationship between faith and reason as ways to truth. In 1270, the Bishop of Paris banned the teaching of certain Aristotelian ideas at the University of Paris. These ideas were condemned as false and heretical, and those who 89

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taught them could be punished by the Church. Although Thomas was not condemned, he was suspected by some Church leaders of advocating some of the condemned Aristotelian thinking.2 Thomas was also involved in the Church’s effort to suppress and punish heretics—professed Christians who promoted doctrines and practices that were condemned by the Church as false. From the time of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity, Church leaders could use governmental power to punish heretics, even to the point of executing them. Beginning in 1231, with Pope Gregory IX, the Popes appointed special agents of inquisition to hunt out and punish heretics. Most commonly, priests of the Dominican order were appointed with these special powers of inquisition, which included, in extreme cases, the power to condemn heretics to death.3 As a Dominican friar teaching at the University of Paris, Thomas was well prepared by his religious and educational background to reflect on these issues. He argued that the Christian could accept Aristotle’s philosophy in the realm of natural truth without rejecting the higher truth of revelation: the truths known by faith transcend, but they do not conflict with, the truths known by natural reason. In 1879, Pope Leo XIII recognized Thomas as an authoritative source of Christian philosophy.4 Of Thomas’s many writings, the best known is his Summa Theologica (“Summary of Theology”), which was written as a textbook of theology for young students. The Summa follows the pattern of medieval disputation. It takes up all of the major disputed questions of theology and ethics. First, Thomas poses a question and states the major objections to his answer. Then, he states his position by citing an accepted authority and supporting this with arguments. He concludes by responding to each of the objections stated at the beginning.5 Thomas divides his Summa into three parts and subdivides the second part into two parts. What has been traditionally called his “Treatise on Law” is not a separate writing, but rather questions 90–97 of the first part of Part Two (I–II, qq. 90–97). This contains his teaching on natural law, which has been the most influential part of his political thought. So, as we concentrate our attention on his account of natural law, we should keep in mind that this is only one small portion of his philosophical work.6

1. What is natural law? Whenever we talk about politics, we talk about right and wrong, justice and injustice. We praise some laws and decisions as good, and we condemn others as bad. Often we assume that there are some standards of right and wrong in politics that cannot be changed by human will. Thus, we accept, usually without fully realizing it, the idea of natural law. This idea becomes evident whenever we claim that there is a higher law by which human laws should be judged. The Declaration of Indepen-

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dence appeals to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” to justify rejecting the authority of King George III. It has become common in the modern world to argue that every government is obligated to respect the natural rights of human beings. A clear example of this is the trial at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945–1946 for German Nazi leaders accused of war crimes. The laws of Nazi Germany that permitted the injustices of Nazi rule were judged to be invalid as laws, because they violated universal standards of decency. Such a judgment assumes that there is a universal natural law beyond the conventional laws of particular nations.7 Natural law must be invoked whenever someone wants to justify disobeying a law by arguing that it is unjust and therefore not truly a law. For example, in 1963 Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” to which we referred earlier (chapter 1, section 2), relies on natural law in his resistance to laws supporting racial segregation: A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality.8

Thus King shows how belief in the existence of natural law arises from our commonsense conviction that because law aims at justice, we can rightfully disobey an unjust law insofar as it violates the purpose of law. There are various ways that citizens can resist laws that are unjust and thus contrary to natural law. For example, in the common law tradition, it is understood that the right to trial by jury in criminal cases includes the right of jury nullification, by which jurors refuse to convict a defendant if they think the law is unjust or the particular application of the law to the defendant is unjust. Before the American Civil War, some juries refused to convict people who were helping slaves escape from their slavery, in violation of the fugitive slave laws, because those laws were judged to be unjust.9 With a jury of twelve members who must agree unanimously on their verdict, the refusal of one juror to convict is enough for acquittal. If just government is based on the consent of the governed, as the Declaration of Independence says, does jury nullification allow citizens to refuse their consent to laws that are unjust and thus appeal to natural law? Those identified as legal positivists would raise an objection at this point. Belief in natural law, they would insist, confuses legality with morality by assuming that a rule cannot be a valid law unless it is also a just law. Surely, the validity of a law does not depend on its justice or injustice. We know that something is legal when it has been sanctioned by one of the lawmaking institutions of our society. Whether it is just or unjust is a personal judgment that can vary from one person to another. Though Martin

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Luther King thought the laws of segregation were unjust, the segregationists thought they were just. Similarly, the Nazis in Germany thought their laws were just, but their opponents disagreed. The positivists conclude, therefore, that because moral judgments are subjective, the stability of a legal order requires that there be formal rules of legal validity recognized by all, rules that do not depend on the moral content of the laws. Otherwise, there would be chaos, because people would not feel obligated to obey laws that they didn’t happen to like. The positivists would maintain, then, that the laws of Nazi Germany and the laws of segregation in the American South were valid laws, despite their injustice, because they were duly established by the socially recognized institutions. Against this position, the proponents of natural law insist that there are universal principles of justice that are not merely subjective human preferences, but objective features of the natural world discoverable by human beings. And insofar as human beings are naturally inclined to design human laws to fulfill this natural law, the definition of valid law depends on the moral content of law. In this conflict between legal positivism and natural law, we cannot avoid taking a stand on one side or the other. For we cannot think deeply about political issues without deciding either that all law arises from social conventions and therefore varies from one society to another or that, despite the variety in law among different societies, there is a universal law of natural justice that is the standard for all law. We turn to Thomas Aquinas’s explanation of natural law, therefore, to clarify our thinking about this issue. Our first concern is simply to figure out exactly what is meant by natural law. We can begin with Thomas’s definition of law as “nothing other than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by the one who has care of the community, and promulgated” (q. 90, a. 4).10 Thus, there are four requirements: A law must be (1) rational, (2) for the common good, (3) established by the proper authority, and (4) made known to those subject to the law. According to Thomas, there are four kinds of law that satisfy these standards: eternal law, natural law, human law, and divine law (q. 91, aa. 1–4). Eternal law is that law by which God governs everything in the universe as created by him. Natural law is “nothing other than the rational creature’s participation in the eternal law” (q. 91, a. 2). But because the general principles of natural law are not detailed enough to decide particular cases, this must be settled by human law. Finally, the divine law of the Bible guides human conduct according to eternal law beyond what could be done by natural and human law. We will concentrate on natural law. The precepts of the natural law, Thomas explains, are those principles of conduct derived from eternal law that are self-evident to all rational beings (q. 94, a. 2). This would seem to correspond to what we have seen in the Declaration of Independence.

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Examining Thomas’s argument on this point should help us, therefore, to decide whether there are any self-evident truths about political justice. The most fundamental of the self-evident principles of natural law is the idea of goodness. For every agent acts for the sake of an end, which has the meaning of goodness. And therefore the first principle in practical reasoning is that which is founded on the meaning of goodness, which is that good is what all things seek. This therefore is the first precept of law, that “good is to be done and sought, and evil to be avoided.” And on this are founded all the other precepts of natural law. (q. 94, a. 2)

This passage need not be obscure if we keep in mind what Thomas has said near the beginning of the Summa (I, q. 5, aa. 1–4) about the nature of goodness. Being and goodness, he indicates, are the same, because the good is simply that by which something becomes what it is. All things, especially living beings, have potentialities; so that the perfection of each thing is that it should develop its potentiality to actuality. Every living being has some essential tendency or inclination; it aims at an end or goal. The good of each living being is its self-fulfillment. The growth of an acorn into an oak tree or a puppy into a dog illustrates this. It is good for a plant or animal to grow to maturity. It is bad for its growth to be impeded by unfavorable circumstances. Thus, we recognize a puppy to be defective if it cannot fully develop the potentialities of its species. Goodness is not some external standard imposed on things from the outside; it is rather the unfolding of the innate tendencies of things. It is therefore self-evident that the good is to be sought, because by definition the good is what each thing seeks. To say that all things should seek the good is simply to endorse what all things strive to do anyway. But how does this apply to human beings? It is easy to see how Thomas can argue that because every plant and animal has biological tendencies, natural goodness is the completion of these tendencies. We must wonder, however, whether human beings have innate tendencies that constitute the natural principles of human conduct. First, it should be noted that, as Thomas indicates, human beings have a freedom in their conduct, by virtue of their rationality, that other creatures do not. The natural instincts of other animals determine their behavior in a way that leaves them little freedom, but human beings have a consciousness of their natural inclinations that gives them great freedom in deciding how—and perhaps even whether—to satisfy those inclinations (q. 93, a. 6). Although human beings display more flexibility in their conduct than do other animals, they do manifest some natural tendencies; the order of these natural inclinations, Thomas maintains, corresponds to the order of the precepts of natural law (q. 94, a. 2). At the lowest level, human beings share with all substances an inclination to preserve themselves. Therefore,

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whatever preserves human life pertains to natural law. At a higher level, human beings share with some animals such inclinations as sexual mating and the education of the young, which is thus part of natural law. Finally, at the highest level, human beings, possessing reason, have certain inclinations that distinguish human life from all other life: human beings naturally seek to know the truth about God and to live in society. Natural law, therefore, dictates the pursuit of knowledge, living in harmony with others, and so on. From these three kinds of natural inclination, we can easily infer the moral precepts of the Ten Commandments as being part of natural law (q. 99, a. 2; q. 100, a. 1): no killing, no adultery, honoring parents, no stealing, no lying, worshiping God, and so on (Exodus 20:1–17). From this natural law, Thomas asserts, human law is derived in two ways: as conclusions from first principles or as implementations of general directives (q. 95, a. 2). An example of the first would be a human law against murder as a conclusion from the natural law that no one is to be injured. An example of the second would be a human law setting a particular penalty for a crime in accordance with the natural law that criminals should be punished. Obviously, the human lawmaker has a lot of freedom, within the broad boundaries of natural law, to determine what should be done in particular cases (q. 91, a. 3, ad. 1). Moreover, the natural law itself can vary in some respects. The “primary principles” of natural law—such as that it is right for all to act according to reason—hold in all cases and are known by all. On the other hand, the “secondary principles”—such as that it is right to return goods to their owners—hold in most cases but not all and are known by most people but not all (q. 94, a. 5). Some human beings might not recognize the secondary principles, Thomas explains, if their reason “has been depraved by passion or by bad custom, or by bad disposition of nature.” He gives the example of the ancient Germans who, according to Julius Caesar, saw no evil in robbery (q. 94, a. 4). The vicious habits and passions of wicked human beings corrupt both their natural knowledge of the good and their natural inclination to the good. Yet even the wicked have some good inclinations (q. 93, a. 6). Natural law also varies in those exceptional cases that require setting aside the secondary principles. For example, it would be wrong to return goods to their owner if we knew that the owner intended to do harm with them (q. 94, a. 4). Because all practical reasoning concerns changeable things, the common principles of conduct are fixed, but not the particular decision. Fundamentally, virtue is the same for all human beings; but, with different people in different situations, it varies in its specific manifestations. Despite this variation, however, natural law provides standards for judging the validity of human laws. Thomas insists that because “all humanly established law has just so much of the rule of law as it has derived from natural law,” a law that violates natural law “will not be a law, but a corruption of law” (q. 95, a. 2). Laws that are unjust in violating

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human goodness, such as laws that promote the arbitrary desires of the ruler rather than the common good of all, are “more acts of violence than laws”; therefore, citizens are not obligated to obey them except when necessary to avoid disorder (q. 96, a. 4). If this all seems familiar to us, it is because we have seen in the ancient writings of Plato and Aristotle the idea that there are natural standards of justice, and we have seen in the Declaration of Independence the modern idea that all people are endowed by nature with certain rights. But we should distinguish the Greek notion of “natural right” from Thomas’s notion of “natural law,” and we should also distinguish both of these from the modern notion of “natural rights,” even as we recognize that they are alike in their appeal to human nature. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics (1134b17–35), says that although there is natural right or natural justice, it all changes according to the circumstances. But Thomas insists that at least the general principles of natural law never change (q. 94, a. 4, ad. 2). So, unlike Thomas’s “natural law,” Aristotle’s “natural right” does not consist of universally valid rules. Aristotle seems more concerned than Thomas about preserving the freedom of the virtuous to decide what is appropriate in particular cases. For this reason, Thomistic natural law has been criticized as too inflexible, in that rulers and citizens are not allowed to adjust their standards of justice according to their concrete circumstances.11 Nevertheless, Greek “natural right” and Thomistic “natural law” seem much alike when they are contrasted with modern “natural rights.” Although ideas of “natural right” and “natural law” stress the social duties of human beings, the modern notion of “natural rights” stresses their individual rights. The premodern conceptions stress virtue, but the modern conception stresses freedom. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas speak of what is right by nature to do; but Hobbes and Locke, as we shall see later, speak rather of possessing rights by nature. All these philosophers are concerned with protecting the natural dignity of human beings, but they disagree about whether this is best done by emphasizing social virtue or by emphasizing individual freedom. At this point, having surveyed Thomas’s account of natural law, we should think through some of the criticisms of natural law reasoning.12 We can begin by returning to the debate between the proponents of natural law and the legal positivists.

2. Is law the command of the sovereign backed by threat? Evidently, this question suggests a different view of law from that advocated by Thomas. All of Thomas’s talk about the moral foundations of law, the legal positivist would complain, is nonsense. Whoever has the power to make laws does so, and those laws are obeyed as long as the lawmaker can enforce them by coercion. The effectiveness of the laws com-

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monly has little to do with their justice or injustice. Moreover, Thomas’s claim that all true laws are derived from nature would also be ridiculed by the legal positivist. The laws made by human beings are just that—human laws. To assert that the ultimate source of these laws is superhuman— nature or God—must seem silly to all but the most naive. We shall see that Thomas Hobbes initiates this modern view of law in his Leviathan, but the classic statement of legal positivism is contained in John Austin’s lectures on law published in 1832.13 Austin defines law as a command backed by threat. The essence of legal authority is possessing sufficient force to compel the people of a society to obey the commands of the lawmaker. In some cases, monarchs have enough power to make laws on their own, but the people acting collectively can restrain a monarch’s power. The sovereign may be one, few, or many individuals, but in any case it is the superior might of the sovereign that permits lawmaking. Why should we prefer this positivistic view of law to Thomas’s natural law position? Consider three possible arguments. (1) Legal positivism describes what law is, not what it ought to be. (2) Far from being immoral, legal positivism promotes clear moral judgments by eliminating hypocrisy. (3) Legal positivism protects society against disorder. Austin wanted the study of law to be scientific, in the sense that he wanted to see the reality of law as observable human behavior undistorted by subjective moral judgments. We would like law always to be just, but it often is not. So to see law as it is rather than as one would like it to be, one must separate law and morality. To say, for example, that the laws of Nazi Germany were not true laws, because the Nazi regime was unjust, shows blindness to the reality of the situation. To insist, as Thomas does, that a law cannot be a valid law if it is unjust is not a theory of law but a moral wish. At this point, the defender of natural law might charge the legal positivists with encouraging immorality by endorsing the belief that might makes right. As Thrasymachus would say, what we call justice is really the rule of the stronger. But distinguishing law and morality, the positivists might respond, does not necessarily lead to the mindless view that whatever a lawmaker does is right. Rather, we must weigh the claims of valid laws against the claims of morality beyond the laws. Legal positivists can choose to disobey a valid law because they consider it immoral, but they do this only after they have balanced their legal obligations against their moral obligations. To identify legality and morality, as the natural law theorist must do, does not necessarily improve our moral judgments. Consider again the Nuremberg trials. Applying the natural law doctrine of “just war,” the Nuremberg Tribunal convicted Nazi leaders as “war criminals” for acts of war that violated certain universal standards of human decency—as, for example, in directly and intentionally attacking innocent noncombatants. Natural law theorists hailed this as a victory for international justice. But legal positivists denounced it as hypocrisy. The only ones tried for “war

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crimes,” they pointed out, were the defeated war leaders. The inhumane acts of the victors were not punished. Consider, for example, the decision of the Allied war leaders to terrorize the German civilian population through the saturation bombing of cities, in which the direct intention was to kill as many innocent civilians as possible. In this way, legal positivists could interpret the Nuremberg trials as showing that the stronger can always impose their will on the weaker and call it “justice.” Indeed, legal positivists have maintained that the very idea of international law is fraudulent. Because there is no sovereign power ruling over the nations of the world, there cannot be any international law in the strict sense. Nations accept rules of international behavior only as long as, and to the extent that, these rules serve national interests. Those national leaders who would speak of these rules as principles of natural justice are either naive or hypocritical. Legal positivists see dangers not only in the application of natural law theory to international politics, but also in its application to the legal order within a nation. Consider the case of Martin Luther King. King used Thomas’s doctrine of natural law to justify disobeying laws supporting racial segregation, which King thought to be unjust. King and others succeeded in changing the laws in order to eliminate segregation. But what if the segregationists had argued that they should be permitted to disobey the civil rights laws because they regarded them as unjust? If every individual were free to disobey any law thought to be unjust, wouldn’t this be contrary to any stable legal order and thus lead to utter chaos? How might Thomas and other proponents of natural law answer these arguments of the legal positivists? First, Thomas would surely dispute the positivistic attempt to separate law and morality by defining law as the command of a sovereign power backed by threat. Thomas could object that, if this were the only requirement for law, we could not distinguish the commands of a powerful outlaw from the commands of an authoritative lawmaker. A person with a weapon can enforce commands with threats, but such orders are not laws. Every government has to rely on coercion to some extent, but this works only as long as most of the people most of the time obey the laws voluntarily (q. 95, a. 1). Indeed, the more unpopular a law is, the more likely it is that the legal authorities think it prudent not to enforce it with much rigor. When conditions are such that people obey the laws only when they are compelled by fear of violent punishment, those people are living not in a social order but in a state of war. H. L. A. Hart, a legal positivist, tried to overcome this weakness in Austin’s theory while rejecting natural law theory. Austin was wrong, Hart thought, in claiming that law depends simply on superior strength; rather, it depends fundamentally on superior authority. But Hart insisted that the natural law theorists are wrong to assume that the authority of law arises from its morality. All that is required is that a legal system have what Hart called a “rule of recognition” that is accepted as the ultimate standard of

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authority. For example, Americans accept as valid laws those rules enacted by lawmaking bodies in accordance with the Constitution. The “higher law” of the Constitution is the fundamental standard of legal authority. Why do the American people accept the Constitution? Is it not because they see it as serving the common good of the nation? Would we not expect this to be true of any legal system—that is, the people accept the customary sources of legal authority as long as they perceive them to be essentially just? That, of course, is the teaching of the Declaration of Independence. We might wonder, therefore, whether Hart’s idea of legal authority leads us back to natural law. In fact, he conceded that he could not explain law fully without reference to “the minimum content of natural law.”14 Although rejecting the higher levels of natural law as not grounded in nature, Hart thought that human nature does dictate at least that law preserve human beings from violence. The desire for self-preservation is so strong that it is inconceivable that human beings would accept a legal system that did not secure their preservation. On this point, Hart acknowledged that he was following the teaching of Hobbes. In our chapter on Hobbes, we shall consider whether it is reasonable to reduce natural law to the law of self-preservation. In any case, the Thomistic natural law theorist would emphasize how hard it is to explain the authority of law without invoking at least some minimal moral standard of nature. Contrary to what the legal positivist assumes, Thomas would argue that because law incorporates moral judgments, we cannot see law as it is unless we take account of what it ought to be. Does it follow that according to natural law an unjust regime (such as that of the Nazis) cannot have any valid laws? If that were a consequence of Thomas’s teaching, legal positivists would be correct in dismissing any idea of natural law as unrealistic. Obviously, Nazi Germany had a genuine legal system, despite the injustice of the regime.15 But Thomas is careful to say that even an unjust regime can have valid laws providing that it secures some goodness in the community: “A tyrannical law, not being according to reason, is not straightforwardly a law, but rather it is a sort of perversion of law. And yet to the extent that it has something of the reason of law, it aims at the citizens being good” (q. 92, a. 1, ad. 4). Because any law must somehow contribute to social cooperation for a common end, and because such common effort instills in citizens some sense of justice, any law that is truly a law must have some element of justice. Even if they do not promote the higher human virtues, the laws of a bad regime might still secure the peace of the community. For that reason, Thomas is reluctant to advise disobedience of unjust laws for fear of the disorder that would result (q. 96, a. 4). In On Kingship (I, 6), Thomas even warns against killing tyrants if their tyranny is in any way tolerable.16 We have seen this same cautiousness about revolution in the Declaration of Independence: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long

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established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly . . . mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable.” Thomas would agree with the legal positivists about the dangers of encouraging people to disobey the law whenever they think it unjust. Prudent respect for the harsh necessities of social order sometimes requires that good people moderate their moral indignation. Because he does not expect moral perfection in political life, Thomas (like Aristotle) accepts the lesser of two evils in cases where the best is unattainable. But, in each case, one must know the principles of natural law to make such judgments: one cannot distinguish a lesser evil from a greater unless one can distinguish evil from good. We must wonder, however, how one can know these moral standards of natural law. Thomas says that a law must be made known to those subject to its commands. How, then, are human beings notified of the existence of natural law? A Christian such as Thomas might understand natural law through faith. But natural law should be comprehensible by natural reason alone.

3. How do human beings discover natural law? Some Thomists interpret Thomas’s understanding of natural law as inseparable from his Christian theology, because he sees natural law as participation in divine providence.17 As Thomas says, natural law reflects the eternal law of God; and as every law presupposes a lawmaker who promulgates and enforces it, we might assume that only those who believe in God’s existence can be bound by His natural law. But this has provoked the criticism—from those like Leo Strauss—that natural law cannot be really natural if it cannot be known by natural human experience without religious faith in the supernatural.18 Thomas contends, however, that natural law conforms to the limits of natural human reason (q. 91, a. 4). It is that part of God’s law manifest in nature itself, which is evident even to those without religious faith. Thomas cites the words of Paul in the New Testament (Romans 1:20): “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen being understood by the things that are made” (q. 93, a. 2, ad. 1). Consequently, some interpreters have argued, natural law must stand on its own natural ground independently of divine law. Natural law should be comprehensible by purely natural reason and experience without any need for faith in the supernatural. This would be so if we interpreted natural law as rooted in human nature understood as the natural biological inclinations of human beings.19 Natural law could come into view as human beings discover certain recurrent conditions for the success of their social and political life. The case of the ancient Germans might illustrate this.20 According to Julius Caesar’s Gallic War, the ancient German tribes saw nothing wrong with theft;

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and Thomas refers to this as an illustration of how corrupt customs can erase our knowledge of the secondary principles of natural law (q. 94, a. 4). Prohibiting theft would seem to be a clear example of natural law, because it would seem to be a condition for any social order. Even the ancient Germans, as Caesar indicates, permitted robbery only when the victims were outside the group. A band of thieves has to protect the property of its members if it is to exist as a stable community. Moreover, the Germanic tribes could live by raiding only as long as the economy of the Roman Empire remained strong. With the collapse of the empire, the German invaders were forced to confront the disastrous consequences of their raiding. They learned that in most situations human beings cannot secure the minimal conditions of social life unless property is protected against theft. The economic institutions of feudalism were established to do this. Thus, we might say, nature taught people that stealing must be prohibited. Perhaps all natural law is of this sort: as we strive to live comfortably in this world, we discover certain norms of conduct conforming to human nature that apply, with some variation in the details, to all human beings everywhere. This assumes, however, that we can derive moral standards from the facts of human nature, an assumption that many modern thinkers would deny. Natural facts and moral values, it is often argued, must be separated; and we cannot logically infer normative propositions about what ought to be the case from descriptive propositions about what is the case. That prohibiting theft secures social order is a judgment of fact. But we cannot infer from this that prohibiting theft is good or just unless we make the judgment of value that social order is good. The conditions of social order are factual matters objectively discoverable by reason. The goodness or badness of social order is a subjective preference that cannot be proven rationally. This sort of reasoning supports the most common objection that legal positivists make against natural law theory: there is no natural moral law because moral values cannot be derived from natural facts.

4. Does the fact-value distinction refute the idea of natural law? Until recently, most social scientists have agreed that the separation of facts and values, of “is” and “ought,” shows the falsity of any conception of natural law. But now there is less agreement about the validity of the fact– value dichotomy, because many social scientists now argue that we cannot study social reality without making some judgments of value.21 Some scholars of natural law (like John Finnis) have argued that the fact–value distinction does not refute natural law, because natural law is not actually inferred from our factual knowledge of human nature; but rather natural law is derived from self-evident principles of practical reasonableness. Others have objected that Finnis’s view is a distortion of natural law, because

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it assumes that we can have natural law without nature, which denies Thomas’s claim that natural law is rooted in natural human inclinations.22 The bridge between “is” and “ought,” the Thomist might say, is “wanting” or “desiring.”23 This is true not only for human beings but also for other animals. Aristotle makes this clear in The Movement of Animals where he explains the underlying logic of all voluntary animal movement, including human movement, as conforming by analogy to a “practical syllogism,” by which a decision to act arises from the conjunction of cognition and desire: I desire something; I know that a certain action will satisfy that desire; therefore, I undertake the action. The modern biology of behavior could confirm this analysis of animal movement into three functions: knowing, wanting, and appraising. All behaving organisms gather information (knowing) related to their needs (wanting) and then act in response to their evaluation of the information in relation to their needs (appraising).24 From this point of view, the biology of animal behavior must employ teleological or functional explanations. Animals act purposefully to secure their natural needs based on their information about the changing environments in which they live. Thus animal movement is inherently normative or value-laden insofar as animals cannot live without choosing between alternative courses of action as more or less desirable. This would explain Thomas’s adoption of Ulpian’s definition of natural law as the law “that nature has taught all animals” (q. 94, a. 2).25 In his biological reasoning about natural law, Thomas was influenced by the biological work of Albert the Great, his teacher at the University of Paris, who wrote a massive survey of zoology, beginning with Aristotle’s biological writings.26 Does all animal movement, including human movement, assume that something is good insofar as it is desirable, and something is desirable insofar as it is good? Does it seem absurd to imagine otherwise—that something could be good although utterly undesirable, or something could be desirable although utterly bad? If so, this would explain why the biology of human nature necessarily has moral implications, as indicated by the moral passions stirred by debates in human biology. If we find that we are naturally inclined to something or adapted for something, then we believe this helps us to know what is good for us. This does not mean identifying the human good with momentary or capricious impulses: we sometimes get what we think we desire only to discover it is not desirable. This common human experience of being mistaken about our desires confirms the reality of our basic desires as a part of our nature that cannot be willfully disregarded. Deciding what it is we truly desire and ordering our often conflicting desires into a coherent pattern requires habituation and thought over a whole lifetime. This human ordering of natural desires over a complete life identifies human morality as different from, even though rooted in, animal movement. What we desire is a life planned to achieve the fullest satisfaction of our needs over a whole life, which is what Aristotle in the Nicomachean

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Ethics calls eudaimonia, “happiness” or “flourishing.” Neither nonhuman animals nor children can enjoy happiness in this sense because they lack the ability to order their actions in accord with a conception of a whole life well lived. By nature human beings desire external goods (such as wealth), bodily goods (such as health, sensual pleasures, and beauty), and psychic goods (such as love, friendship, honor, and thinking). To pursue these goods in the right order, to the right degree, at the right time to avoid contradiction requires good habits of choice—the moral and intellectual virtues examined by Aristotle and Thomas. Although there are analogies between these human virtues and the behavioral patterns of other animals, only human beings have the capacities for conceptual abstraction and symbolic communication, which Aristotle identifies as logos. These capacities allow human beings to become moral agents who judge present actions in light of past experiences and future expectations to conform to some enduring standard of a good life. Some philosophers would argue that in everything we do, we move from is to ought through some hypothetical imperative in which ought means a hypothetical relationship between desires and ends.27 For example, “If you desire to be healthy, then you ought to eat nutritious food.” Or, “If you desire the love of friends, you ought to cultivate personal relationships based on mutual respect and affection and shared interests.” Such hypothetical imperatives are based on two kinds of objective facts that we can study empirically. First, human desires are objective facts. We can empirically discover—through common experience or through scientific investigation—that human beings generally desire self-preservation, health, and friendship. Second, the causal connection between behavior and result is an objective fact about the world. We can empirically discover that through eating good food and cultivating close personal relationships, we can achieve the ends that we desire. Natural law is natural because it is rooted in such objective facts of human nature and the natural world. Some philosophers might respond by saying that even if we can empirically study the ought of a hypothetical imperative, we cannot empirically study the ought of a moral imperative, which must be a categorical imperative (an unconditional command) rather than a hypothetical imperative (a conditional command). But others would say that if a categorical imperative is to have any motivating truth, it must become a hypothetical imperative. When a moral philosopher tells us that we ought to do something, we can always ask, why? And ultimately the only final answer to that question of motivation is that obeying this ought is what we most desire to do if we are rational and sufficiently informed. If the moral and legal order of a society reflects the desires inherent in human nature, it will also reflect how those desires have been refined first by individual habituation and customary practices and then by rational reflection on those habits and customs. Social order rests not only on innate nature, but also on social custom and individual judgment.

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5. Is law the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation? The advocates of positive law argue that since every law arises from the arbitrary will of a lawmaker, there can be no natural law, because nature cannot properly be personified as a lawmaker. Against both natural law and positive law, the advocates of customary law argue that law is rooted ultimately in the customary practices of a community, which arise neither from a universal nature nor from an arbitrary will. James Bernard Murphy has insisted that we need to incorporate the partial truths of all three positions into a comprehensive social theory that would explain social order as founded on three levels of analysis—nature, custom, and stipulation.28 The proponents of natural law are correct in seeing that law presupposes the natural needs and capacities of human beings. The proponents of customary law are correct in seeing that law presupposes custom.29 And the proponents of positive law are correct in seeing that law in the strict sense is the stipulation of the lawmaker. In fact, Murphy argues, law is the joint product of nature, custom, and stipulation. Family law illustrates this. By nature, human beings are inclined to produce offspring who need prolonged and intensive care by adults. By custom, societies have devised diverse ways of organizing the division of labor in caring for the young. By stipulation, lawmakers can specify the legal rights and duties of parents and children in a particular community. To be successful, these legal stipulations must respect both natural inclinations and customary practices, although this leaves the lawmakers free to choose among a wide array of practicable rules. Aquinas seems to accept these three levels of legal analysis, because in explaining human law (q. 91, a. 3) he endorses the claim of Cicero that “justice has its source in nature; then certain things came into custom by reason of their utility; afterward these things that emanated from nature and were approved by custom were sanctioned by fear and reverence for the law.” Thus, even as he affirms the universality of the natural human inclinations on which law is founded, Aquinas recognizes that those natural inclinations will express themselves in diverse ways through their interplay with the customary practices and formal stipulations of particular communities. Some of the critics of the natural law teaching, however, regard this diversity as a refutation of the very idea of natural law.

6. Does cultural diversity contradict the idea of natural law? The more we know about the variety of social customs among different cultures, the less inclined we are to believe that there are universal moral principles. There seems to be hardly any moral practice of our culture that has not been rejected by some other society. We might conclude, therefore, that everything is culturally relative, that there are no moral absolutes.

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This has been one of the predominant themes of modern anthropology. A good example is Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture,30 which became one of the most popular works of anthropology when it was first published in 1934. Benedict argues that the wide range of cultural differences shows that there is no universal human nature, and thus there are no universal moral values. How we distinguish good and bad, just and unjust, depends on our culture. We often assume that the moral beliefs of our society manifest the perfection of human nature, and so we regard societies radically different from ours as primitive. But Benedict maintains that this attitude is unjustified because there is no natural standard for ranking some social practices as better or worse than others.31 Thomas and anyone who believes in natural law would have to dispute this. It might be argued that anthropologists like Benedict have been so preoccupied with cultural diversity that they have overlooked the less obvious but nonetheless real uniformity among cultures. Benedict even indicates that studies of primitive cultures “help us to differentiate between those responses that are specific to local cultural types and those that are general to mankind.”32 But she chooses to give little attention to those matters “that are general to mankind.” Thomas, we should remember, distinguishes between the general moral principles of natural law, which remain the same for all people, and particular moral practices, which vary according to circumstances. The natural inclinations for sexual bonding and childcare, for instance, are universal; but the particular ways of structuring family life vary greatly from one culture to another.33 Cultural variation does not deny Thomas’s view of natural law as long as there is uniformity in the fundamental moral principles. Some anthropologists would agree with Thomas on this point. Ralph Linton, for example, maintains that anthropologists such as Benedict overlook universal values because they fail to distinguish between “conceptual values” and “instrumental values.”34 Conceptual values are the most fundamental values at their most abstract and generalized levels. Instrumental values are the concrete, particular expressions of value. That men and women should cover their genitals in public might be an example of a conceptual value. That they should wear trousers rather than a loincloth would be an example of an instrumental value. Because the bizarre variety of social customs at the instrumental level often captures our attention, we do not notice the broad uniformity of moral principles at the conceptual level. Conceptual values are universal, Linton explains, because they “stand in closest relation to the individual needs and social imperatives shared by all mankind.”35 Therefore, the moral principles found in some form in almost every culture correspond to certain individual and social needs inherent in human nature. Linton lists the following universal values: property (both personal and communal ownership), reciprocity and fair dealing in social relations, social division of labor (the need for leadership), stable family life (permanence of matings, conjugal loyalty, parental

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care for the young, respect for parents), knowledge (learning of social roles; intellectual curiosity expressed in “useless” knowledge, games, and esthetic activity), and belief in supernatural beings.36 This conforms to Thomas’s account of natural law. The principles arise from the natural needs or inclinations of human beings. We could also group them according to the three levels of human nature distinguished by Thomas (q. 94, a. 2). Moreover, doesn’t Linton’s list of universal values resemble the moral precepts of the Ten Commandments? If there is such a list of universal needs or values, this might allow us to judge some cultures as better than others in satisfying those needs or values. We might look to the modern sciences of psychology and anthropology for evidence that there is a universal human nature with universal drives, needs, or tendencies as the ground for natural law.37 We could then judge some cultures as “sick societies” if they fail to satisfy the most basic human needs.38 How would the legal positivist respond to this evidence of a universal moral law? A legal positivist might say that it is not strictly universal because there are exceptions to all the principles listed above. As only one example, Colin Turnbull’s The Mountain People,39 to which we made reference earlier in our chapter on Aristotle (chapter 2, section 4), might be cited. Turnbull describes how the constant threat of starvation among the Ik of northern Uganda forced them to give up all the moral beliefs that we consider characteristic of human beings. They discarded all human values except individual self-preservation. Thomas could reply, however, that although natural human tendencies can be impeded by unfavorable circumstances, that does not make those tendencies any less real, just as the fact that some infants are born blind does not refute our belief that the capacity for sight is natural to human beings. Thomas concedes that in application to particular cases, natural law can be distorted by powerful passions, by errors in reasoning, or by corrupt customs and habits (q. 94, a. 6). With respect to the Ik, Thomas might have emphasized the consequences of their viciousness—they are now extinct! Moreover, Thomas says, “the common principles of natural law cannot be applied in the same manner in all cases on account of the great variety of human things” (q. 95, a. 2, ad. 3). Perhaps natural law dictates that in situations like that of the Ik, the higher moral rules must yield to the demands of self-preservation, which is always the most basic level of natural law. But how far should we go in this direction? Some anthropologists, for example, argue that people tend to practice cannibalism when their diet suffers from a scarcity of animal protein.40 If this were true, would natural law in such cases justify cannibalism? The general problem here for Thomas is that to make the principles of natural law realistic he has to present them as both fixed and flexible. They have to be flexible to allow for the indefinite variety of circumstances that influence human conduct. But they must also be fixed if they are to

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guide practical judgment. Thomas can achieve flexibility by maintaining that the only unchanging principle of natural law is that “good is to be done and evil to be avoided” (94, 2), but that seems too vague to be of much help in deciding moral questions. Any standard more detailed than that, however, is likely to be too rigid for handling the contingencies of practical life. Perhaps we should reconsider Aristotle’s cryptic comment that although there is a standard of natural right, it is all changeable.41 Thomas’s account of natural law recognizes the necessity for the prudential judgment of leaders and citizens in deciding concrete political questions (see q. 91, a. 3, ad. 3; q. 95, a. 2, ad. 4; q. 96, a. 6). But Thomas reminds us of certain minimal standards of decency for judging political life. The essential end of law is to secure the conditions of human virtue; no matter how much diversity there may be in its practical implementation, that must always be the goal. Yet even this claim that law should promote morality is open to dispute. For must we not wonder whether it is proper for government to legislate morality?

7. Must we legislate morality? To which Thomas might reply, doesn’t every law legislate morality? Since every law requires, permits, or prohibits some activity, the lawmaker must judge that certain courses of action are better than others for the members of the society. The function of law is to provide common rules of action for a community, and therefore law cannot be morally neutral. Even so, we might ask, how far should we go in legislating morality? John Stuart Mill, for example, in On Liberty, would insist that we should legally regulate a person’s conduct only to prevent harm to others. People should be perfectly free in those activities that affect only themselves or those who choose to cooperate with them.42 Some people argue that Mill’s standard is too restrictive in insulating individual judgment from legal regulation. Since every society depends on shared moral ideas, some contend, it is proper for the laws to protect that morality. Consider some examples of how this issue has arisen in American politics. In 1973, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed in two cases its position that pornography could be legally regulated or prohibited. In Miller v. California and Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton, the Court decided that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution unless the material had “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” The critics of the Court argued that this legal enforcement of morality violated individual freedom. But Chief Justice Warren Burger, in the Miller decision, explicitly rejected the argument of Mill’s On Liberty and explained, “Totally unlimited play for free will . . . is not allowed in ours or any other society.”43 In 1977 members of the American Nazi Party wanted to march in a public demonstration in Skokie, Illinois. Since Skokie had many Jewish

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residents, many of whom were survivors of Nazi concentration camps, they tried to legally prohibit the Nazis from marching. It was argued that the public display of the swastika “constitutes a symbolic assault against large numbers of the residents of the . . . village and an incitation to violence and retaliation.”44 The Illinois Court of Appeals upheld this argument, even though the Nazis promised to keep their march peaceful. The Supreme Court of Illinois, however, overturned this decision and declared that the Nazis had a right to march under the First Amendment. The Jewish people of Skokie could avoid being offended, the court explained, by simply not watching the march. In the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the United States Congress prohibited racial discrimination in “public accommodations” (such as restaurants and hotels) that affect “interstate commerce.” As a result, a restaurant owner, for example, might be required to serve black customers. Opponents of the law saw it as a violation of the principle that people should be free to associate with whomever they wish. But defenders of the law thought it was proper to legally prohibit the immorality of racism. Thomas identified homosexuality as a sin that is “contrary to nature” (q. 94, a. 3, ad. 2). Through much of the history of law in the Christian world, homosexuality was punished as a capital crime. This was true for the British common law, which was adopted by the United States, in which homosexuality was identified as “sodomy” and punished as a “crime against nature,” as William Blackstone called it.45 Until recently, many of the American states continued in this common law tradition of punishing homosexuality as a crime, because it was regarded as immoral and unnatural to use the human body for sexual pleasure in ways that could not produce children. In 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States (in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick) upheld these state anti-sodomy laws as a constitutional enforcement of morality.46 But then, in 2003, the Supreme Court (in Lawrence v. Texas) declared that punishing homosexuality as a crime was an unconstitutional violation of the individual liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution.47 In 2015 (in Obergefell v. Hodges), the Court upheld gay marriage as a constitutional right. Are governmental restrictions on pornography, on the speech of Nazis, on the conduct of racists, and on homosexuals justifiable attempts to legislate morality? Radical libertarians could make at least three arguments against these uses of the law. First, they could argue that because our regime is supposed to protect each person’s equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we should leave individuals free in their moral choices as long as others are not directly harmed by those choices. Second, libertarians might contend that the morality enforced by law is merely the conventional morality of the majority, which is not necessarily superior to the unconventional morality of the minority. Finally, libertarians could suggest that legal coercion cannot really promote morality, because good moral character must always be voluntary to be genuine.

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Thomists could reply to the first argument by insisting that the very idea of human equality of rights is a moral principle that should be legally protected. The Declaration of Independence assumes that all human beings should be treated with dignity simply because they are human beings. Moreover, any legal system assumes that all human beings deserve respect as moral agents who can be held responsible for their actions. Laws are never enforced against inanimate objects or nonhuman animals because they are not rational moral agents. But don’t pornographers, Nazis, and racists deny the equal dignity of human beings? The pornographer teaches us to look at our sexual partners as merely instruments for our own physical gratification. The Nazi and the racist teach us that the members of some racial and ethnic groups are not fully human. Why can’t we, therefore, justify legally restricting these people to prevent them from subverting the principle of equal human dignity? It’s surely controversial to apply this kind of reasoning to homosexuals. But don’t we use the law to uphold some standards of human dignity in sexual conduct—as, for example, in laws against bestiality, incest, and polygamy? Or should we agree with the libertarian that all sexual conduct between consenting adults should be protected as an expression of individual liberty, as long as no one else is harmed by this conduct? As to the second point made by libertarians—that the morality enforced by law is merely conventional—Thomists would contend that social morality can reflect the universal standards of natural law. In this respect, Thomists would disagree with the argument of Patrick Devlin in his book The Enforcement of Morals.48 Devlin argues that any society can properly enforce its moral ideas through law, even though these ideas never have any foundation in reason or nature. By contrast, the natural law theorist would point to the universal values underlying social customs to justify the legal enforcement of morality. With respect to obscenity, for example, there is a lot of cultural variation; but the fact that every society exercises some sort of censorship of sexual matters suggests that this serves some deep social needs that are natural to human beings.49 Finally, Thomas would contend, contrary to the libertarian, that legal coercion can be an effective tool of moral education.50 Law by compulsion can habituate human beings to do what they might not choose to do on their own; and once these good habits are acquired, they can be the basis for good moral character (q. 90, a. 3, ad. 2; q. 96, a. 2). The stubborn resistance in the American South to the federal civil rights laws illustrates how hard it is for law to change human conduct. But now there is evidence that those laws have succeeded in transforming Southern life far more radically than many people ever thought possible. There may be less racism as a result of the habits instilled by the laws. Thomas might agree with the libertarian, however, that there are limits to how far the law can go in shaping moral character. He warns that human laws cannot prohibit all evil things because any attempt to do this

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would also eliminate many good things (q. 91, a. 4). To serve the common good, human laws cannot demand more moral stamina than most people possess. Thomas explains: Human law is framed for a multitude of human beings, the greater part of whom are not of perfect virtue. And therefore all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, are not prohibited by human law, but only the more serious vices from which it is possible for the greater part of the multitude to abstain, chiefly those which are to the harm of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be preserved: thus homicides, thefts, and suchlike are prohibited by human law. (q. 96, a. 2)

While insisting on the moral purpose of law, Thomas rejects the righteous callousness of those who would use law to punish those who fall short of moral perfection. He advises lawmakers that they have to settle for the minimal virtues necessary to pacify human aggressiveness and thus prevent social disorder. Moral perfection is attainable in Heaven, but not on Earth. Does this suggest that Thomas could support modern liberal democracy in protecting the liberty of individuals in making moral choices for themselves, as long as those choices do not directly harm others?

8. Is Thomistic political thought compatible with liberal democracy? Some critics of Thomas and Thomistic political thought have objected that Thomas is hostile to liberal democracy because he endorses monarchy as the best form of government, and because he thinks that the purpose of government is not to protect individual rights but to enforce a shared morality for the whole community. Is this true? In the twentieth century, Thomists like Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, and John Courtney Murray argued that Thomas’s teaching on natural law could support modern liberal democracy and the modern conception of human rights. This had great influence in moving the Catholic Church away from its traditional opposition to modern liberal democracy.51 Some Thomists have argued, however, that those like Maritain, Simon, and Murray had to distort Thomas’s teaching in claiming that it supported modern liberal democracy.52 One could interpret Thomas as teaching that the best regime is a mixed government that combines monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements (q. 105, a. 1).53 One might then argue that modern liberal democratic republicanism belongs to this tradition of mixed government as the best regime. Moreover, as we have seen, Thomas does seem surprisingly liberal in his argument that it is improper for human law to try to enforce perfect virtue, and that it is best for law to enforce a minimal order by prohibiting violence like murder and theft.

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And yet this apparent liberalism in Thomas’s teaching is contradicted by his shocking endorsement of the Inquisition, which included the power to execute heretics. Some of Thomas’s scholarly critics—like Shadia Drury—have condemned this as showing Thomas’s tyrannical fanaticism.54 Drury overstates her case, however, when she suggests that Thomas argued for the forced conversion of Jews and Muslims to Christianity. This is not exactly true. Thomas said that compulsion could be properly used against heathens and Jews only to prevent their hindering the Christian faith, but not to compel their belief. Only heretics—those who claim to be Christians but deny the doctrines of the Church—can be rightly compelled to keep the faith. Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). When Martin Luther and others launched the Protestant Reformation early in the sixteenth century, the Catholic Church responded by identifying the Protestants as heretics who could be condemned and even executed for their heresies.55 This power of the Church to punish heresy was extended to the punishment of scientists like Galileo Galilei, who taught the Copernican theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun, which was thought to contradict the biblical teaching that the Earth was the center of the cosmos.56 Against the Christian tradition of the Inquisition, one could argue that religious liberty and toleration is rooted in the New Testament teaching of Christianity about rendering to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s. After all, the Christians in the New Testament formed churches as voluntary associations of believers, and they never sought the coercive power of government to enforce their religion. Paul stated a libertarian position by which the Christians should enforce their religious norms on those who belonged to their churches, but should not act coercively against those outside the church. “For what is it to me to judge those outside? Is it not for you to judge those inside? But God is to judge those outside” (First Corinthians 5:12–13). This would allow churches to excommunicate heretics—expel them from the religious community—but nothing more. As we will see later, John Locke quotes this passage from Paul as one of many New Testament passages supporting religious toleration.57 In 1965, the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church approved a “Declaration on Religious Freedom” (also known from the first words of its Latin text as Dignitatis humanae).58 It was declared that by virtue of “the very dignity of the human person,” all human beings have a natural right to religious liberty, and therefore coercion is never rightly used to enforce religious belief. Moreover, it was declared that this was dictated by the New Testament, because Jesus and the early Christians taught that religious conversion could only come from voluntary choice and not from coercive force. Did this overturn the teaching of Thomas and other Church authorities that coercion—and even the threat of execution—could be rightly used

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against heretics? Does this suggest that in supporting the Inquisition Thomas and the Church were violating the true principles of Christianity as taught in the New Testament? Does this indicate how Christianity is corrupted whenever the Christian Church claims any coercive political power—that Christendom as a political order cannot be truly Christian?59

9. Does the application of natural law to sexual conduct, abortion, and marriage threaten individual liberty? For many people, natural law is rendered dubious by how it is used by the Catholic Church to justify its doctrines about sexual conduct, abortion, and marriage. The Church condemns abortion as murder and, thus, contrary to the natural law principle that innocent life is always to be preserved. The Church condemns non-reproductive sexual conduct as contrary to the natural law principle that the sexual organs are naturally directed to producing children. Homosexual conduct and homosexual marriage are therefore condemned as unnatural. According to the Church, the only sexual conduct that satisfies natural law is the sexual mating directed to producing children within lifelong monogamous marriages of heterosexual couples. The critics of Catholic natural law object that when these teachings are enforced by law, they infringe on individual liberty. There is some debate, however, as to whether this Catholic Church’s interpretation of natural law conforms exactly to Thomas’s teaching. Thomas never condemns intentional abortion as murder, and he never says that life begins at conception, because he agrees with Aristotle that human life begins sometime after the first month of gestation. Some Thomists argue, however, that if Thomas had had the knowledge of modern embryological science, he would have concluded that human life begins with the fertilization of a human egg, because that initiates the genetic potential for a unique human person to develop.60 Thomas employs biological reasoning in explaining marriage as natural, because it satisfies natural desires that human beings share with some animals (II-II, q. 57, a. 3; suppl., q. 41, a. 1). In the Summa Contra Gentiles, he identifies the human inclination to marriage as a “natural instinct of the human species.”61 The primary natural end of marriage is to secure the parental care of children; the secondary natural end is to secure the conjugal bonding of male and female for a sexual division of labor in the household. Among some animals, Thomas observes, the female can care for her offspring on her own, and so there is no need for any enduring bond between male and female. For those animals whose offspring do require care from both parents, nature implants an inclination for male and female to stay together to provide the necessary parental care. Just as is the case for those animals whose offspring could not survive or develop normally without parental care, human offspring depend upon parents for their exis-

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tence, their nourishment, and their education. Even if they do not have children, however, most men and women naturally desire marital union because, not being self-sufficient, they seek the conjugal friendship of husband and wife sharing in household life. Only a few people are inclined by their natural temperament to remain unmarried their entire lives—for example, those (like Thomas himself) who join celibate religious orders. Marriage thus illustrates how something can be natural to human beings in different ways (I-II, q. 46, a. 5; q. 51, a. 1; q. 63, a. 1). The natural inclinations can be generic (shared with other animals), or specific (shared with other human beings as rational animals), or temperamental (the traits of individual human beings). Also, something can be natural either as coming entirely from nature or as coming partly from nature and partly from an extrinsic principle. Self-healing, without medicine, is entirely from nature; but when an individual is healed through medicine, health is partly by nature and partly by the medicine. Similarly, human marriage is partly from nature, insofar as it is rooted in natural inclinations to parental care and conjugal bonding, and partly from the extrinsic stipulations of marriage law. The three levels of natural inclinations— generic, specific, temperamental—come from Aristotle’s theory of biological inheritance.62 Although Thomas declares that lifelong monogamous marriage is dictated by natural law, because human offspring are born dependent on the care of both a mother and a father, he concedes that there are exceptional cases. For example, a wealthy woman might have the resources to rear her children without the help of the father; and a man producing a child through fornication might provide for the rearing of the child (II-II, q. 154, a. 2). Thomas agrees with the biblical condemnation of homosexuality as unnatural (I-II, q. 94, a. 3; II-II, qq. 153-54). Homosexual marriage is unnatural insofar as it cannot achieve the primary natural end of marriage—procreation and parental care. But could we argue that homosexual marriage can achieve this natural end when a homosexual couple adopts a child, or when a lesbian couple produces a child through the artificial fertilization of one of the women’s eggs? Could we also argue that homosexual marriage can achieve the secondary natural end of marriage—conjugal bonding—which is also true for infertile heterosexual marriages? Thomistic opponents of homosexual marriage must argue that infertile heterosexual marriages are still natural marriages, because they are inherently directed to producing children, even when they fail to produce any children.63 Some Thomists assume that social order requires marriage as a formal, public institution created by marriage licensing law. But if marriage really does satisfy some of the deepest natural desires, as Thomas argues, why could we not privatize marriage just as we have privatized religion, so that marriage would stand on its own natural ground independently of government? In fact, throughout most of human history, marriage has

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been an informal social institution based on the consent of individuals and their families, without any formal licensing by government.64 Privatizing marriage would recognize it as ultimately rooted not in human law or divine law but in natural law. Even if one regards homosexuality as a vice, one might agree with Thomas that it is not the proper role of human law to enforce perfect virtue, and that human law should be concerned primarily with prohibiting conduct that is harmful to social order, such as murder and theft.

10. Can government rightly promote our pursuit of the complete happiness that comes only with eternal life in Heaven? As we have seen, one can interpret Thomas’s teaching as largely compatible with liberal democracy if one stresses Thomas’s teaching that the primary purpose of human law is to prohibit harmful conduct rather than promote Christian virtue. Yet sometimes Thomas seems to teach that the ultimate purpose of government is to promote the Christian virtue that leads to heavenly salvation. If that’s his teaching, wouldn’t that contradict the individual liberty and separation of church and state that we associate with liberal democracy? If it’s proper for government to secure the pursuit of happiness, as the Declaration of Independence says, and if true happiness is fulfilled only by immortality in Heaven, as Christians like Thomas believe, would that mean that Christians must desire a government that promotes the pursuit of heavenly happiness? At the end of the Declaration of Independence, there is an appeal “to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions,” which seems to assume that God will judge us in the afterlife, rewarding the just and punishing the unjust. Do our standards of justice imply such a belief in a cosmic justice of eternal rewards and punishments in life after death? In raising these questions, we must also wonder whether it is reasonable for us to long for immortality as the final object of our desires. Do we really want to live forever? Agreeing with Aristotle, Thomas argues that all human action is ultimately directed to happiness. Thomas goes beyond Aristotle, however, in arguing that the fullest human happiness comes only with beatitude, which is eternal life with God in Heaven. He then applies this to his understanding of law as directed to the common good. “The first source in practical matters, with which practical reason is concerned, is the ultimate end. But the ultimate end of human life is happiness or beatitude, as I have maintained before. And so law especially needs to regard the order of things to beatitude” (q. 90, a. 2). This suggests that the natural purpose of law is to promote the human pursuit of eternal happiness in Heaven.

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In On Kingship, Thomas advises that a Christian king should rule for this purpose. “Since the beatitude of Heaven is the end of that virtuous life that we live at present, it pertains to the king’s office to promote the good life of the multitude in such a way as to make it suitable for the attainment of heavenly happiness, that is to say, he should command those things which lead to the happiness of Heaven and, as far as possible, forbid the contrary.”65 If this means that political rulers should enforce the Christian doctrines about heavenly salvation, it would violate the separation of church and state that has become essential for liberal democracy. And yet in the passage just quoted, does the phrase “as far as possible” suggest a qualification that might make this compatible with liberal democracy? The footnote to this phrase cites the passage (I-II, q. 96, a. 2) that we have considered above, which teaches that it does not belong to human laws to prohibit all vices, but rather that human laws must prohibit only those vices that cause harm to others. This might mean that human rulers and human laws must be limited to enforcing the conditions for a peaceful society, while leaving individuals free to pursue their happiness as they wish, which would include protecting the freedom of Christians to pursue their heavenly salvation. Should we agree with Thomas that the pursuit of happiness is ultimately a pursuit of eternal life? Or should we say that the desire to live forever is unreasonable, and so we should accept the natural fact that we must die? There are at least four paths to immortality, which the philosopher Steven Cave identifies as the Staying Alive Narrative, the Resurrection Narrative, the Soul Narrative, and the Legacy Narrative.66 According to the Staying Alive Narrative, we could become immortal if we could postpone death indefinitely. According to the Resurrection Narrative, even if bodily death is inevitable, our bodies might be brought back to life. According to the Soul Narrative, even if our bodies must die, our souls can live forever because they are immaterial and thus not subject to bodily decay, and our souls are the most essential part of us. Finally, according to the Legacy Narrative, we can live on after death through those that live after us—either because they remember us or because they carry our genes. Thomas defends the traditional Christian view of immortality, which combines the Resurrection Narrative and the Soul Narrative. The Soul Narrative came from Plato and was adopted by Christian theologians like Augustine, while the Resurrection Narrative was introduced into Christianity by Paul in the New Testament. When our bodies die, Christians like Thomas believe, our souls will continue living in some afterlife. Then, at the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment, our bodies will be resurrected and reunited with our souls. Our embodied souls will then live forever—either enjoying eternal reward in Heaven or suffering eternal punishment in Hell. As we will see in our chapter on René Descartes, some of the founders of early modern science hoped that eventually science could slow or reverse the aging process so that human beings could stay alive forever.

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Today, some people think that scientific advances in medicine, robotics, and computer technology are moving us closer to this dream of immortality; and some believe that government should actively support this scientific research for life extension. Steven Cave claims that all four of the paths to immortality fail, and that we should see the wisdom in accepting our mortality. Against the Staying Alive Narrative, he argues that the science of aging suggests that the indefinite extension of healthy life through medical means is unlikely, and even if this were possible, this would not be immortality because we would still be vulnerable to accidental death. Against the Resurrection Narrative, he argues that any physical reassembling of a dead person’s body that has decayed would produce only a copy of the original person and not the real person. Against the Soul Narrative, he argues that souls cannot exist independently of bodies. Against the Legacy Narrative, he argues that whatever immortality one might have through one’s cultural or biological legacy is not a personal immortality of one’s individual consciousness. Contrary to Cave, don’t we see evidence for a universal human longing for immortality? And why can’t we see indications of the immateriality of our souls, and thus potential immortality, in our mind’s power to move our body? Haven’t some modern neuroscientists observed that the mind changes the brain and thus shows the separation of the mind from the brain?67 There does seem to be some evidence for near-death experiences that suggest the possibility of life after death. People who have nearly died report the experience of leaving their bodies and entering a realm of perfect peace. And if there really are multiple universes, as some physicists believe, does that suggest universes beyond this life to which our souls might go after death? Moreover, we might argue that believing in life after death with eternal rewards and punishments provides a cosmic sanction for right and wrong that supports the moral conduct that we need for a good society. And if so, we might properly want the law to support such belief. These and other lines of thought have been developed by those who argue that it’s reasonable to believe in life after death.68 Even if we can’t agree about whether our political life should promote a pursuit of happiness that includes a pursuit of immortality, or whether we should pursue the happiness of a purely mortal life, we might agree that any pursuit of happiness requires a government to protect our life, liberty, and property from violent assault. This suggests the need for a realistic view of the limits of what politics can do for us. Although we have seen some political realism in the authors we have studied so far, the political philosopher with the reputation for being the most tough-minded political realist is Niccolò Machiavelli.

Notes 1

See John O’Malley, History of the Popes: From Peter to the Present (Lanham, MD: Sheed and Ward, 2010).

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See Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003). The condemnation of 219 propositions in 1277 by the bishop of Paris has been translated by Ernest Fortin and Peter O’Neill in Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mahdi, eds., Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook (New York: Free Press, 1963), 335–54. See Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). The Encyclical of Leo XIII is reprinted in the complete English translation of the Summa Theologica by the Dominican Fathers (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981). For a general introduction to the Summa Theologica, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, Aquinas’s Summa: Background, Structure, & Reception (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005). Some commentators argue that Thomas’s moral and political teaching is concerned more with prudence than with natural law, and prudence allows for more flexibility of judgment than does the deductive reasoning of traditional natural law. See E. A. Goerner, “On Thomistic Natural Law: The Bad Man’s View of Thomistic Natural Right,” Political Theory 7 (February 1979): 101–22; Goerner, “Thomistic Natural Right: The Good Man’s View of Thomistic Natural Law,” Political Theory 11 (August 1983): 393–418; and Daniel Nelson, The Priority of Prudence: Virtue and Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). For the history of the idea of natural law, see Heinrich A. Rommen, The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998); and Jean Porter, Natural and Divine Law: Reclaiming the Tradition for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999). See William J. Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), chaps. 3, 8. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States (New York: New American Library, 1976), 336– 37. See Herbert J. Storing, “The Case Against Civil Disobedience,” in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., On Civil Disobedience (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1969), 95–120; and George Anastaplo, “Citizen and Human Being: Thoreau, Socrates, and Civil Disobedience,” in Human Being and Citizen: Essays on Virtue, Freedom and the Common Good (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 203–13, 313–16. See Clay S. Conrad, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2014). Unless otherwise indicated, all references in the text are to the first part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologica (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1961). All translations are mine. A convenient translation of the section on law can be found in William P. Baumgarth and Richard J. Regan, eds., Aquinas: On Law, Morality, and Politics, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). This has been the criticism of Thomistic natural law by Straussian commentators. See Harry Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 167–88; and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 162–64. A Straussian defense of Thomas as a teacher of Aristotelian natural right is set forth by Goerner, “Thomistic Natural Law,” 101–22. See H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” in Ronald Dworkin, ed., The Philosophy of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 17–37. John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, with an Introduction by H. L. A. Hart (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998). See Hart, The Concept of Law, 184–95; and Hart, “Positivism,” 35–37. Some historians argue that the tradition of legal positivism in German jurisprudence inclined judges to adhere to the letter of National Socialist laws despite the injustice of those laws. But others argue that Nazi jurisprudence broke with the positivist tradition by setting aside the rule of law and invoking the vague moral claims of the Volk (“the peo-

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25

26 27 28

29

30 31

32 33

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ple”) and the Führerprinzip (“leader-principle”). Compare H. W. Koch, In the Name of the Volk: Political Justice in Hitler’s Germany (London: I.B. Tauris, 1989), 245–47; Ingo Muller, Hitler’s Justice: The Courts of the Third Reich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 68–81; and Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 341–46, 423–34. See Aquinas, On Law, Morality, and Politics, 207–10. See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002). See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 163–64. See Anthony Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Here I am drawing on a line of reasoning developed by Goerner, “Thomistic Natural Law,” 114–19. For some of the debate over the is–ought distinction, see W. D. Hudson, ed., The Is/Ought Question (London: Macmillan, 1969). For this debate, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). See Henry B. Veatch, “The Rational Justification of Moral Principles,” Review of Metaphysics 29 (December 1975): 217–38. See William A. Mason, “Primate Social Intelligence,” in Donald R. Griffin, ed., Animal Mind-Human Mind (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982), 131–43; and C. Judson Herrick, The Evolution of Human Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956), chaps. 11–12. On the debate over Ulpian’s definition and the biological roots of natural law, see Michael B. Crowe, The Changing Profile of the Natural Law (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 46–51, 259–67; Porter, Natural and Divine Law, 80–88, 100–4, 134–35, 215–17; and Larry Arnhart, “Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right,” Social Philosophy and Policy 18 (1) (Winter 2001): 1–33. See Albertus Magnus, On Animals: A Medieval Summa Zoologica, trans. Kenneth F. Kitchell, Jr., and Irven Michael Resnick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). See Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 157–73. See James Bernard Murphy, “Nature, Custom, and Stipulation in Law and Jurisprudence,” Review of Metaphysics 43 (June 1990): 751–90; and Murphy, The Moral Economy of Labor: Aristotelian Themes in Economic Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). The importance of custom for social order becomes clear as soon as we realize that most of our daily social interactions are governed by informal customary norms that have little to do with formal laws. We appeal to formal laws only in those rare cases where the informal customs somehow break down. See Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934). For a recent survey of the evidence and arguments for cultural relativism, see Jesse J. Prinz, Beyond Human Nature: How Culture and Experience Shape the Human Mind (New York: Norton, 2012). Prinz, Beyond Human Nature, 20. On the cross-cultural regularities in family life and reproductive relations, see William N. Stephens, The Family in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963). On the biocultural flexibility of parent-child bonding as rooted in genetic and cultural evolution, see Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999); Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011). Ralph Linton, “The Problem of Universal Values,” in Robert F. Spencer, ed., Method and Perspective in Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 145–68. For

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45 46 47 48 49

50

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the best survey of this topic, see Donald E. Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991). Linton, “Universal Values,” 152. Compare the list of twenty natural desires in Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 29–36. This is the argument of Thomas E. Davitt, The Basic Values in Law: A Study of the Ethicolegal Implications of Psychology and Anthropology (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1978). See Robert Edgerton, Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony (New York: Free Press, 1992). Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972). See Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings (New York: Random House, 1977), chap. 9; and the criticism of Harris by Marshall Sahlins, “Culture as Protein and Profit,” New York Review of Books, 23 (November 1978):45–53. See also Michel de Montaigne, “Of Custom” and “Of Cannibals,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 77–90, 150–59. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1134b18–1135a5. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). See Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), and Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49 (1973). The court decisions are reprinted in Burton M. Leiser, ed., Values in Conflict: Life, Liberty, and the Rule of Law (New York: Macmillan, 1981), 216–37. For conflicting assessments of this case, see Franklyn S. Haiman, Speech and Law in a Free Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); and Donald A. Downs, Nazis in Skokie (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985). William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), vol. 4, ch. 15, pp. 215–16. See Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986). See Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003); and Dale Carpenter, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas (New York: Norton, 2012). Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford University Press, 1965). For criticism of Devlin, see H. L. A. Hart, Law, Liberty and Morality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963). For surveys of the evidence on this point, see Harry M. Clor, Obscenity and Public Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 175–209; and Reo M. Christenson, Challenge and Decision: Political Issues of Our Time, 6th ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 199–216. The arguments for legal moralism are well stated by Robert P. George, Making Men Moral (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). For a critique of George’s argument, see Andy G. Olree, The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006), 171–96. See Jacques Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); Yves Simon, Philosophy of Democratic Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); and John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, with an Introduction by Peter Lawler (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). See Robert P. Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in the Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); and John Hittinger, Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2002). See James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). See Shadia Drury, Aquinas and Modernity: The Lost Promise of Natural Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). See Robert Bellarmine, On Temporal and Spiritual Authority, ed., trans., and introduction by Stefania Tutino (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2012), 79–120.

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See J. L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 200–52. See Olree, The Choice Principle. See the Declaration on Religious Freedom at http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651207_dignitatis-humanae_en.html. On the Catholic debate over religious freedom, see John Courtney Murray, Religious Liberty: Catholic Struggles with Pluralism, ed. J. Leon Hooper (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993). See David Bentley Hart, “No Enduring City,” First Things, August/September, 2013. See John Haldane and Patrick Lee, “Aquinas on Human Ensoulment, Abortion, and the Value of Life,” Philosophy, 78 (2003): 255–78. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles: Book Three: Providence, Part 1, trans. Vernon Bourke (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 3.122–23. See Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 767b24–69b31. On the biological basis of Thomistic natural law, see Larry Arnhart, “Thomistic Natural Law as Darwinian Natural Right,” in Ellen F. Paul, Fred D. Miller, and Jeffrey Paul, eds., Natural Law and Modern Moral Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 101–22. For this argument, see Sherif Girgis, Robert George, and Ryan Anderson, “What Is Marriage?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, 34 (2010): 245–87; and S. Girgis, R. T. Anderson, and R. P. George, What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense (New York: Encounter Books, 2012). See Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History (New York: Viking, 2005). On Kingship, book 2, chapter 4, found in Thomas Aquinas, Political Writings, translated by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Steven Cave, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (New York: Crown, 2012). For the debate over the dualistic separation of mind and brain in neuroscience, see John C. Eccles, How the Self Controls Its Brain (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994); Karl Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain: An Argument for Interactionism (New York: Routledge, 1977); and Patricia S. Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain (New York: Norton, 2013). For these arguments, see Dinesh D’Souza, Life After Death: The Evidence (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009). For a critical response to these arguments, see Victor Stenger, “Life After Death: Examining the Evidence,” in John W. Loftus, ed., The End of Christianity (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), 305–32; and Michael Martin and Keith Augustine, eds., The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015).

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5 Power Politics

Machiavelli’s The Prince and Discourses

KEY READINGS The Prince, Chapters 3, 6–9, 12, 15–19, 21, 26; Discourses, Introduction, I, 1–5, 9–12, 16–18, 25–27, 34, 37, 55, 58; II, 2, 5, 13; III, 1, 6, 9.

The life of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) in Italy can be divided into four periods. From 1469 to 1498, Machiavelli spent his childhood and received his early education in Florence. From 1498 to 1512, he worked for the government of Florence. From 1512 to 1517, having been forced to retire from Florentine politics, he wrote The Prince and the Discourses. From 1518 to 1527, he wrote The Art of War and the History of Florence; and he was able to participate again in the political life of Florence. Machiavelli’s father was a lawyer who was influenced by those Italian scholars who would later be identified by historians as humanists. In the tradition of civic humanism it was thought that the best preparation for a public career was a study of the Latin classics in rhetoric, poetry, history, and philosophy. The ancient Roman leader Marcus Tullius Cicero was especially important, particularly his book De Officiis (On Moral Duties), which prescribes the moral and intellectual virtues that the young must acquire in order to serve their country with honor. Much of Machiavelli’s writing can be seen as a response to this classical teaching about the virtues and the vices of the good ruler.1 This humanist education helped Machiavelli to win a position in the Florentine government in 1498 when he was twenty-nine years old. Florence had been a republic for hundreds of years, but the Medici family had domi121

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nated the city through most of the fifteenth century. When Lorenzo de Medici died in 1492, his son Piero was unable to maintain the family’s power, and he was forced into exile in 1494. Then, a new republican constitution was established for Florence under the influence of a Dominican monk, Girolamo Savonarola, who used his public sermons to persuade the people to turn Florence into a Christian republic that would become the center of Christian renewal for the whole world. Claiming divine inspiration, Savonarola condemned the Catholic Church and Pope Alexander VI as corrupt. The Pope excommunicated him and demanded that he be punished. After leading the Florentine republic for almost four years, Savonarola was challenged by his enemies to prove that he was chosen by God by undergoing an ordeal by fire. When this never occurred, the people turned against him. After being tortured, he confessed that his prophetic visions were faked. He was then hanged and burned in the public square of Florence in 1498.2 Later reformers of the Church, including Martin Luther, were influenced by Savonarola’s writings. After the execution of Savonarola, Machiavelli entered the government. He served in the diplomatic corps until 1512. Machiavelli went on diplomatic missions that allowed him to observe many of the important rulers of his time, including Louis XII of France, Pope Julius II, and Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. His written diplomatic reports contain political observations that he later incorporated into his books. Much of his diplomatic work was devoted to protecting the independence of Florence in the face of foreign intervention in Italy by France and Spain. But a Spanish invasion in 1512 finally led to the fall of the Florentine republic and the return to power of the Medici. Machiavelli was dismissed from office. A few months later, he was suspected of conspiring against the new government. Although he protested his innocence, he was interrogated and tortured. Some of his letters suggest that he endured the torture with some fortitude.3 In The Prince, he advises that one reason princes rely more on fear than on love is that “fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never abandons you” (ch. 17, p. 101).4 Machiavelli retired to his country house outside Florence, where he spent most of his time for the next twelve years. But during his first year of retirement, when he wrote The Prince and began the Discourses, he still thought the Medici might call him into their service. As this hope faded, he turned all his attention to writing. His writing was inspired by an intensive study of the ancient Greek and Roman texts of political philosophy and political history.5 In 1518, Machiavelli began to participate again in the life of Florence. He was commissioned by the Medici in 1520 to write the history of Florence. In 1525, he was given a minor position in the government. Then, in May of 1527, the Medici were expelled from Florence, and the republic was restored. But Machiavelli’s ties to the Medici probably made him seem unreliable to the new republican leaders. A month later he died.

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Machiavelli claimed in his writings that he had discovered a new way of viewing politics, a new point of view that would influence those who would later follow his path (see The Prince, ch. 15; Discourses, Introduction). In many respects, however, his thinking reflected the tradition of Renaissance humanism. Perhaps he did break with all previous political thought on at least one crucial point. As Quentin Skinner has observed, Machiavelli rejected “the nerve and heart of humanist advice-books for princes” by denying the importance of moral virtue for political success.6 That leads us to our first question.

1. Is Machiavelli evil? We begin with this question because Machiavelli’s reputation makes it unavoidable. Those reading him for the first time are usually predisposed to take one side or the other of this issue. Some find confirmation for the common belief that Machiavelli was a teacher of evil, because he taught political leaders how to win and hold power through force and fraud. Other readers argue that because Machiavelli simply told the truth about the pursuit of political power, we should not condemn him. Moreover, many readers consider the graceful charm and noble tone of Machiavelli’s writing evidence that his teaching cannot be as monstrous as it is often assumed to be. But then those who have never read Machiavelli, and who perhaps never should read him, deserve to be warned about the dangerously seductive power of his writing. It’s the same power exerted by Friedrich Nietzsche: “The spell that fights on our behalf, the eye of Venus that charms and blinds even our opponents, is the magic of the extreme, the seduction that everything extreme exercises: we immoralists—we are the most extreme.”7 The apparent immorality of Machiavelli’s writing manifests a problem in modern political life generally. As we probe the meaning of Machiavellianism, we must wonder about the horrors of modern war and modern tyranny and about the brutal ruthlessness of many modern political leaders. We must wonder, in short, whether modern politics has lost all sense of moral purpose. “We live today in the shadow of a Florentine,” one commentator has explained, because he “taught the world to think in terms of cold political power. . . . Frederick, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Clemenceau, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, have gone to school to Machiavelli.”8 We have seen a different side of modern politics in the Declaration of Independence, in the claim that just government must be founded on the moral principles inherent in “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American founders insisted that the United States, unlike most (if not almost all) previous governments, would be based not on force and fraud, but on a moral theory of natural rights. Should we conclude, therefore, that, as Leo Strauss has said, the United States “may be said to be the only country in the world which was founded in explicit opposition to Machia-

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vellian principles”?9 In any case, the Declaration does lead us to question whether political order can rest on moral principles or whether political rule is simply the rule of the stronger. To think through that question, we must confront Machiavelli. Machiavelli was not the first political thinker to uncover the nasty realities of politics as the ruthless pursuit of power. We might be reminded of Plato’s Thrasymachus, Aristotle’s advice for tyrants, Augustine’s political realism, and Aquinas’s comments on the limits of law as a moral instrument. But none of these people display the shocking boldness of Machiavelli. We can see this, for example, early in The Prince (ch. 3). Machiavelli describes how the ancient Romans cleverly expanded their imperialistic control of provinces by ensuring that they always had enough power to overwhelm any challengers. He then contrasts their success with the failure of Louis XII in expanding French power into Italy: It is a thing truly very natural and ordinary to desire to acquire; and when men who are able to do so do it, they are always praised or not blamed; but when they are not able and yet want to do so in every mode, here is the error and the blame. If France, then, was able with his forces to attack Naples, he ought to have done so; if he was not able to do so, he ought not to have divided it. And if he had divided Lombardy with the Venetians, that merited excuse, for he put his foot into Italy by having done so; the other division merits blame, by its not being excused by this necessity. (ch. 3, pp. 17–18)

As far as Machiavelli is concerned, whatever succeeds is to be praised, whatever fails blamed. He introduces no moral standards. Rather, he merely judges whether political leaders have selected the most efficient means for their chosen ends, and he assumes that the final end of political activity is acquiring and holding power. We can see already why Machiavelli might be considered a teacher of evil. He teaches that in the pursuit of political power, the end justifies the means. As he makes clear later in The Prince, even cruelty can be justified as a tool of political rule. Machiavelli seems to have written a handbook for dictators. Instead of searching for standards of political justice, as was done by previous political philosophers, Machiavelli offers himself to any ambitious leader vicious enough to accept his diabolical advice. But consider how a defender of Machiavelli might respond to these criticisms. Surely, Machiavelli introduces a moral standard by praising those princes who exhibit virtue (virtù in Italian). And isn’t it true, the Machiavellian might ask, that the end does justify the means if the end is morally good? Even Machiavelli’s endorsement of cruelty might be defended by noting that he distinguishes the good uses of cruelty from the bad uses. Moreover, he need not be interpreted as promoting tyranny, for much of what he teaches might support popular or democratic government. Finally, if he emphasizes the selfish side of human nature—the

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“desire to acquire”—shouldn’t we accept that as an accurate view of the way most people live? We have begun by asking whether Machiavelli is a teacher of evil. This question has led us into a series of questions that we must ponder in our reading of Machiavelli. What is Machiavellian virtù? In politics, does the end justify the means? Does politics require “cruelty well used”? Does Machiavellianism subvert popular government? In politics, should we assume that all people are bad? Does Machiavelli subordinate political wisdom to political power? We begin with Machiavelli’s notion of virtue.

2. What is Machiavellian virtue? Starting in chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli speaks of the need for virtue, especially for new princes who wish to establish and maintain wholly new states. This concern for virtue would seem to contradict Machiavelli’s reputation as a teacher of immorality, for he advises new princes to set for themselves high goals of political greatness by imitating the political virtue of great leaders of the past. But in this same chapter, as he explains the virtue of great founders like Moses, he makes one of those remarks for which he has become infamous: “all armed prophets conquer, and the unarmed ones are ruined” (ch. 6, p. 34). Armed prophets like Moses conquer because “when the people do not believe any more, one is able to make them believe by force.”10 By contrast, Savonarola was an unarmed prophet who was ruined in his efforts to introduce new orders, because “the multitude began not to believe them; and he had no way to hold firm those who had believed, nor to make the unbelievers believe.” Obviously, in declaring that armed prophets like Moses are more virtuous than unarmed prophets like Savonarola, Machiavelli is giving “virtue” a meaning contrary to ordinary usage. Of course, religious believers who look to the Bible for their moral standards would agree that Moses was a model of moral leadership. But they might question Machiavelli’s presentation of Moses as an “armed prophet” who used force to compel obedience to his rule. Machiavelli could respond by pointing out that the Old Testament shows that Moses was a ruthless military leader. For example, in the book of Numbers (chapter 31), God ordered Moses to wage holy war against the Midianites. The soldiers of Israel were victorious. They killed all the adult males of the Midianites, and then they took all the women and children as captives. When they returned to camp, Moses was angry that they had not killed the women and children. He ordered them: “Kill all the male children, and kill all the women who have ever slept with a man; but spare the lives of the young girls who have never slept with a man, and keep them for yourselves.”11 Then, as ordered by God, Moses distributed the 32,000 virgins to the soldiers and the priests. Is this what Machiavelli recognizes as Moses’s virtuous leadership?

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In his Discourses (III, 30), Machiavelli observes: “Whoever reads the Bible judiciously will find that Moses, for the purpose of insuring the observance of his laws and institutions, was obliged to have a great many persons put to death who opposed his designs under the instigation of no other feelings than those of envy.” The “judicious” reader of the Bible might notice that when Moses found his people worshipping a golden calf, because they had lost their belief in his new religion, he ordered his men to slaughter over three thousand of the people as a punishment (see chapter 32 of Exodus). Moses really was an “armed prophet.” But even if Christians admit that the Old Testament endorses the brutal violence of Moses and others, they might argue that the New Testament teaches peace and love. Wasn’t Jesus an “unarmed prophet”? And yet Machiavelli might point out that Christian prophets like Savonarola, who follow the example of Jesus, are ruined if they don’t employ force to keep the obedience of their followers, as Moses did. After all, even the New Testament ends with the book of Revelation, which depicts a bloody last battle between the forces of Jesus and the forces of Satan; and beginning with Constantine, Christians have used political power to wage holy war and compel people to believe in Christian doctrines. Of course, success in a holy war often depends on a combination of military force and good fortune or luck. In chapter 6 of The Prince, Machiavelli contrasts virtue with fortune. Speaking of founders such as Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus, he explains: Fortune provided them with nothing other than the occasion which gave them the matter into which they could introduce whatever form they pleased; without that occasion their virtue of mind would have been extinguished and without virtue the occasion would have come in vain. (ch. 6, p. 33)

By thus exercising their virtue, Machiavelli adds, “their fatherland was ennobled and became most happy.” Political leaders display Machiavellian virtue, it would seem, when they impose their own “forms” on the “matter” provided by their circumstances. A virtuous political founder creates for the people a new way of life that reflects the founder’s own mind and will. A prince lays good foundations, Machiavelli says later in The Prince, “if with his mind and his orders he animates the whole” (ch. 9, p. 60). To achieve this, a prince must rely totally on himself without dependence on the power of others. For this reason he must be “armed” because with his own “arms” he can force people to obey his orders. As indicated by the title of chapters 6 and 7, Machiavelli distinguishes states acquired “by one’s own arms and virtue” and states acquired “by the arms of others and fortune.” The contrast here between virtue and fortune seems to be a contrast between ability and luck. A successful political leader needs a combination of ability and luck, but some leaders rely more on their ability, and others rely more on their luck.

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We might conclude, at least provisionally, that Machiavellian virtue denotes the power or ability of political leaders who can establish and hold a state by their own strength. But that would be a strange sort of virtue because it would suggest sheer ruthlessness with no sense of moral purpose. Perhaps we should give more weight to Machiavelli’s claim that through virtuous rulers states become “ennobled” and “most happy.” We could say, then, that the virtue of a Machiavellian prince serves a moral purpose insofar as it promotes the nobility and happiness of the state. But would this moral end justify any immoral means to its achievement? We must raise this question as we read Machiavelli’s account of the “virtues” of Cesare Borgia (chapter 7) and of Agathocles (chapter 8). Cesare Borgia “did all those things which ought to be done by a prudent and virtuous man” to secure his political power (ch. 7, p. 42). For example, when Borgia took the Romagna, he appointed an unusually cruel man to restore peace where the previous rulers had created disorder. Once the agent had done his job, Borgia judged that he should avoid the hatred stirred up by his minister by publicly punishing him. So, Borgia had the man cut in two and the pieces of his body placed in the public square. “The ferocity of that spectacle left the people at the same time satisfied and stupefied” (ch. 7, p. 45). That, Machiavelli insists, is virtue in action! How can Machiavelli offer such brutality as an example of political virtue? He does say that Borgia gave the Romagna “good government” by using the cruel minister to establish peace and then by setting up judicial institutions in each city. Does this provide the moral justification for his severe measures?12 Machiavelli suggests that virtue requires moral limits to political ruthlessness when he condemns the cruelty of Agathocles: “one cannot call it virtue to kill his fellow citizens, to betray his friends, to be without faith, without pity, without religion; which modes enabled him to acquire imperium, but not glory” (ch. 8, p. 52). Yet in the very next sentence, Machiavelli refers to “the virtue of Agathocles in entering into and escaping from dangers, and the greatness of his mind in standing up to and overcoming adverse things.” Thus Machiavelli does what he says one cannot do: he calls immorality virtue. Later in chapter 8, he explains that not all cruelty is good but only cruelty “well used.” Cruelties “well used,” such as those of Agathocles, are “those (if one may lawfully call the bad good) which are done at once for the necessity of securing oneself, and which are afterwards not continued within, but converted to the greatest possible utility of the subjects” (ch. 8, p. 54). Surely, we have all the evidence we need to condemn Machiavelli as a corrupter of political life, for he endorses the most inhuman acts of brutality as politically virtuous simply because they secure a prince’s political power. Thus he distorts the commonsense meaning of virtue by depriving it of any moral significance. Once he has lifted all moral restraints from political rule, making the pursuit of power an end in itself, has he not made it easy for tyrants to justify even the most monstrous deeds? Isn’t it a

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small step from Machiavelli to modern tyrants like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and many others? It could be argued in defense of Machiavelli, however, that he does try to separate the noble and the ignoble. He never recommends senseless violence. Rather, he always insists that harsh measures are justified only where they are necessary to secure the prince’s power and to benefit his people by promoting peace and unity. Moreover, he warns rulers that when they do the infamous things that Agathocles did, even when they are compelled to do so to achieve their ends, they may acquire “imperium, but not glory.” Rulers do not attain the highest virtue by simply becoming powerful; their power must also radiate glory. The greatest glory is achieved by those princes like Moses who become the founders of a new religion (Discourses, I, 10). Perhaps the value of glory constitutes a Machiavellian standard for distinguishing good and bad rulers. Machiavelli suggests this when he contrasts the glory of the good Roman emperors, who promoted peace and justice and lived securely among their people, with the infamy of the bad emperors, who promoted violence and injustice and lived in fear of their subjects. Machiavelli is willing to excuse those rulers who had to corrupt their cities in order to maintain their own princely power. But some rulers have the opportunity to preserve their power while organizing their cities properly: And, in fine, let him to whom Heaven has vouchsafed such an opportunity reflect that there are two ways open to him; one that will enable him to live securely and insure him glory after death, and the other that will make his life one of constant anxiety, and after death consign him to eternal infamy. (I, 10)13

If the circumstances are right, a power-hungry prince can achieve the greatest glory by promoting the general welfare of his people. In such a case, the prince’s selfish interest in power serves the public interest of his state. In American political history, Franklin Roosevelt’s career would illustrate this. “Roosevelt had a love affair with power,” one political scientist has observed. He wanted power for its own sake; he also wanted what it could achieve. The challenge and the fun of power lay not just in having, but in doing. His private satisfactions were enriched by public purposes, and these grew more compelling as more power came his way. . . . And happily for him, his own sense of direction coincided, in the main, with the course of contemporary history.14

Thus Roosevelt found himself in a fortunate situation where he could use his power to win glory. If Machiavelli understands the virtuous prince to be one who seeks great political power for the sake of glory, then his idea of virtue might be defended as morally respectable. In this respect, Machiavelli revives the ancient Greek and Roman idea of glory as the proper reward for political

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greatness. Even Augustine, as we have seen, concedes that this pagan love of glory elevated ancient political life. We might also note that the American Founding Fathers thought it important to appeal to this passion for political glory. Alexander Hamilton, for example, hoped that American presidents would be moved by “the love of fame, the ruling passion of the noblest minds” (Federalist No. 72).15 But pagan authors such as Cicero, who saw value in the pursuit of glory, insisted that true glory arose only from moral virtue (see De Officiis 11, 42–44).16 Generally, those who have revived the ancient appreciation for political glory, including the Renaissance humanists, have also assumed that genuine glory coincides with the highest moral virtue. It is not so clear, however, that Machiavelli would agree. For example, in the Discourses, he tells the story of a man who rose to political power through wicked means and then lost his power because he refused to kill the Pope. Thus, Machiavelli observes, he lost his chance for glory because although he was wicked, he was not wicked enough to do “an act the greatness of which would have overshadowed the infamy and all the danger that could possibly result from it” (I, 27). Partial wickedness is despicable, but utter wickedness is glorious. If this is the sort of glory for which the virtuous prince strives, then clearly Machiavelli’s virtue violates all traditional standards of moral virtue. A Machiavellian might respond, however, by arguing that if Machiavelli breaks with all previous traditions of political virtue, it is only because he formulates a new standard appropriate for the modern state. The pagan and Christian views of political virtue assume that all people share a common moral knowledge that they possess by nature. As Aristotle claimed, humans are by nature political animals bound together by their shared understanding of the good and the just. But in modern political life, don’t we see human beings as isolated individuals pursuing their own selfish interests in competition with one another? If that is so, aren’t we compelled to conclude that because human beings are not naturally bound together by moral bonds, they cannot live together in peace unless they are forced to do so? Doesn’t this suggest, then, that political order can arise only when great founders impose by violence their own personal forms on the otherwise formless matter of humanity? Machiavellian virtue, therefore, might be regarded as the ability of a leader to create a state through the intelligent and willful use of force. In this way, a Machiavellian could maintain that the immorality of Machiavelli’s teaching must be accepted as an inevitable feature of the political life of the modern state. There is some plausibility to this argument simply because our word “state” can be traced back to Machiavelli’s use of the Italian word stato.17 The very idea of the state originates with Machiavelli. Consider how he uses this word in chapter 3 of The Prince, for example. He speaks of what one must do when one “acquires states in a province” and wants “to hold them” (ch. 3, p. 13). The Romans held their state in the province of Greece

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because they never allowed some powerful challengers “to increase their state,” and they did not permit some others to “hold any state in that province at all” (ch. 3, p. 15). Thus, the state can be acquired or lost, increased or decreased, depending on the power of the ruler: the state is the product of the ruler’s will. Aristotle’s city, by contrast, arose by nature because it fulfilled the natural human inclination to live in communities. The modern state arises as an artificial construction because it must be imposed on human individuals who are not naturally inclined to live together. Aristotle’s city is a product of nature. Machiavelli’s state is a work of art.18 This same Machiavellian teaching appears in the idea of the state proposed by some modern social scientists. Consider, for instance, the remarks of Max Weber: “Today the relation between the state and violence is an especially intimate one. . . . A state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.” He also contends that the state, as “a compulsory association which organizes domination,” must be created by a forceful political leader: “Everywhere the development of the modern state is initiated through the action of the prince.”19 Here we see the new understanding of politics initiated by Machiavelli, which was captured in the term “reason of state” as coined by Machiavelli’s friend Francesco Guicciardini. If we want to secure the power of our state, argued Machiavelli and Guicciardini, we must set aside moral and theological reasoning about what is just or good, and instead we must understand the reasoning of states—the practical political reasoning by which the power of states is acquired and preserved through force and fraud. This new Machiavellian understanding of politics as guided by “reason of state” spread throughout early modern Europe.20 The reliance of the modern state on the use of violence by political founders has been manifested clearly in the revolutionary upheavals of modern times. Modern political history has been shaped by revolutionaries—such as Cromwell, Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao— who display the same ruthless willfulness as Machiavelli’s virtuous prince. As Lord Acton observed, “The authentic interpreter of Machiavelli is the whole of later history.”21 Yet, surely, some of us would want to argue that the character of the modern state does not dictate the political immorality endorsed by Machiavelli. Have we not seen in the Declaration of Independence that the modern liberal democratic state rests on some moral principles? Why shouldn’t the idea of natural rights serve as a moral standard for judging modern states? Indeed, don’t we commonly today rank states according to how faithfully they secure human rights? But perhaps Machiavelli would respond that, even in states devoted to human rights, the preservation of the state is itself the ultimate end to which everything else—including human rights—must yield.

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3. In politics does the end justify the means? We commonly assume that the motto of a Machiavellian politician is “the end justifies the means.” Machiavelli, however, never says that in exactly those words. So we must consider whether he would accept that formula as part of his teaching. We should look at chapters 15–18 of The Prince because these chapters are usually interpreted as teaching that the prince must employ immoral means to achieve his ends. Beginning with Plato’s Republic, we have seen that ancient and medieval political philosophers were often preoccupied with the “best city,” a city that would be perfectly just or good, even though it was rarely, if ever, achievable in practice. In the Republic, Glaucon observes that the perfect city imagined by Socrates exists only in speech and does not exist anywhere on Earth. It exists “in heaven,” Socrates responds, as a pattern of perfection that the philosopher can contemplate in his mind, and “it doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere.”22 Machiavelli begins chapter 15 of The Prince by rejecting such idealistic political thinking about purely imaginary patterns of political justice that cannot exist anywhere. A prince who wishes to preserve himself must understand not what ought to be done in politics but what is done, Machiavelli advises, because a prince who seeks to be good must fail as long as he is surrounded by those who are not good. “Hence it is necessary for a prince, if he wishes to maintain himself, to learn to be able to be not good, and to use it and not use it according to the necessity” (ch. 15, p. 93). A successful prince may have to engage in bad activities, but “he should not concern himself about incurring the infamy of those vices without which it would be difficult to save the state” (ch. 15, p. 94). Arguing throughout chapters 15–18 that the prudent prince must choose whatever virtues and vices will preserve the state, Machiavelli counsels the prince “not to depart from the good, if he is able, but to know how to enter the bad, when necessitated to do so” (ch. 18, p. 109). In chapter 18, Machiavelli comes closest to formulating the maxim that the end of preserving the state justifies any means: And with respect to all human actions, and especially those of princes where there is no judge to whom to appeal, one looks to the end. Let a prince then win and maintain the state—the means will always be judged honorable and will be praised by everyone; for the vulgar are always taken in by the appearance and the outcome of a thing, and in this world there is no one but the vulgar. (ch. 18, p. 109)

Machiavelli expresses a similar thought in the Discourses. Using the example of Romulus’s fratricide, he notes the brutality of founders of new republics. The wise accept this, he observes, when it is done for the public good and not for private interests: It is well that, when the act accuses him, the result should excuse him; and when the result is good, as in the case of Romulus, it will always

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Chapter Five absolve him from blame. For he is to be reprehended who commits violence for the purpose of destroying, and not he who employs it for beneficent purposes. (I, 9)

At times Machiavelli describes the consequences of political actions without making any moral judgment of his own. In the passage above from The Prince, he notes that whatever a prince does to preserve the state will be judged honorable by the vulgar multitude; but Machiavelli does not either endorse or condemn this judgment. It is simply a fact that most people think that the end of preserving the state justifies any means, but it remains an open question whether or not this public opinion is correct. Hence we might defend Machiavelli by insisting that he is not praising what he describes; rather, he is merely reporting what actually happens in political life. How plausible is this interpretation of Machiavelli’s writing? Doesn’t the quotation above from the Discourses imply that Machiavelli endorses the rule of unscrupulous expediency? He declares, “when the result is good . . . it will always absolve him from blame.” Preserving the state is indeed a good end, Machiavelli suggests, and therefore any means to that end should be permitted. If Machiavelli is recommending the principle that good ends justify bad means, can we criticize him for this? If the end truly is good, isn’t it sometimes proper to employ bad means to achieve it? Of course, Saint Paul in the New Testament taught us that we may not do evil that good may come. Perhaps some things should be absolutely forbidden no matter what the consequences. But when the preservation of a political community is threatened, aren’t the rulers entitled to do whatever is necessary to preserve the state? To illustrate how influential this Machiavellian argument has been among modern political leaders, we might think about those American presidents who have resorted to extreme measures in times of emergency. During the Civil War, for instance, Abraham Lincoln permitted his commanding officers to suspend the writ of habeas corpus. This allowed them to arrest and detain anyone they wished without formal charges or the right to a trial. In effect, this meant that military leaders could suspend all individual rights.23 Lincoln’s justification was that as president he had the power to do what he thought necessary to preserve the nation. (We shall examine Lincoln’s argument more closely in chapter 8, section 10.) Before and during the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt followed the same line of reasoning. He secretly cooperated with Winston Churchill in the war against Germany two years before Congress declared war. During this time, he lied to the American people to hide what he was doing.24 Then, when the war was officially declared after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he organized the removal from the West Coast of all Japanese Americans, who were put into detention camps. Although there was no evidence that any of these American citizens were disloyal, Roosevelt justified his actions as a necessary precaution in the time of war.25 Similarly, he thought that

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his secret maneuvering before the war was necessary, even though it was unconstitutional, in order to defend the country against the Nazi threat. Thus, Roosevelt followed Machiavelli’s precepts in using force and fraud to advance the interests of the state. It is not surprising therefore, that one of the best biographies of Roosevelt is subtitled The Lion and the Fox.26 We could easily think of many more examples, but the general point is clear enough: we sometimes permit our political leaders to break the law and violate individual rights for the sake of protecting the national interest. Even a nation founded on the high moral principles of the Declaration of Independence must allow rulers to use drastic expedients in time of emergency. Are we forced, then, to accept the Machiavellian maxim that immoral political actions are justified if they serve the interests of the state? Before we concede this point, let us review some of the major objections to Machiavelli’s argument. At least four points might come to mind. First, doesn’t Machiavelli exaggerate the conflict between morality and expediency? He assumes that moral principles are so inflexible that politicians must often find it advantageous to violate them. But haven’t we seen Thomas Aquinas explain that morality requires prudence in judging what should be done in particular circumstances? Cicero maintains, in De Officiis (III, 18–19), that there can be no conflict between moral goodness and expediency because what is morally right is always expedient and what is expedient is always morally right. If a conflict arises, it is between the morally right and what appears expedient but in fact is not. Or expediency might conflict with what appears morally right but in fact is not. We are confused, Cicero suggests, when exceptional circumstances force us to do what we customarily consider morally wrong. Yet Cicero advises that rather than setting aside moral goodness in such cases, we should see that what is morally right changes according to the circumstances. Cicero illustrates this by observing that although killing a friend is usually a vicious crime, killing a tyrant—even if considered a friend—is noble. Thus, moral rectitude guided by prudence coincides with expediency. It is surely true, however, that being immoral may be politically advantageous in the short run, and that is what Machiavelli stresses. But is it advantageous in the long run? A crucial point for Cicero’s argument is that the most useful resource for human life is human cooperation, and the moral virtues are essential for securing such mutual aid (De Officiis 11, 9– 18). For example, the virtues of keeping promises and telling the truth are advantageous because they secure social and political life. Relations among human beings depend on trust. Of course, it is sometimes expedient for political leaders to break their promises; but if fraud became the rule rather than the exception, the consequences for everyone would be disastrous. Indeed, the political chaos that Machiavelli deplored in his own day was largely the result of a lack of mutual confidence. It is often said that a successful politician must be a Machiavellian because “everyone does it.” In fact, just the opposite is the case. A Machiavellian strategy is advantageous

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only as long as it is rarely practiced because its widespread adoption creates unremitting conflict.27 (Compare the “prisoner’s dilemma” game described in chapter 9, section 4 of this text.) A second possible criticism of Machiavelli is that he emphasizes extreme cases in an unrealistic way. If by realism we mean relying on our ordinary experience of the usual course of things, then Machiavelli is not a realist because he draws his rules from the most unusual situations. Notice, for example, that in The Prince he is preoccupied with how new princes first come to power, which is far from the normal activities of daily political life. Political thinkers have always recognized that in times of war and revolution, when the very existence of a political community is in doubt, the normal rules of moral judgment may have to be modified. Much of what Machiavelli says can be found, for example, in Book Five of Aristotle’s Politics, the section devoted to revolution. Like Machiavelli, Aristotle observes that revolutions occur either through force or through fraud (Politics 1304b8–9). Much of Machiavelli’s advice for princes can be found in Aristotle’s study of how tyrannies are preserved (Politics 1313a34– 1315b39). What is only a small part of Aristotle’s work completely dominates Machiavelli’s writing. Once the Aristotelian ruler has provided for the physical security of the community, he can then turn his attention to the higher moral concerns of political life. But Machiavelli forces his ruler to imagine remote dangers and thus to worry about security to the exclusion of everything else. This leads us to ponder a third possible defect in Machiavelli’s teaching. If the Machiavellian leader must sacrifice everything to preserve the state, shouldn’t he think about exactly what it is that makes the state worth preserving? Does he wish simply to secure the territorial boundaries of the state and the lives of the people? Surely not, because he may seek to change those boundaries and may have to sacrifice the lives of some of the people for the greater good of the state. Is he perhaps concerned with preserving a certain way of life of the state? If so, that would imply a standard of moral worth by which one way of life might be judged better than another. We might want to argue, for example, that what makes the United States worth defending is its dedication to the principle of human rights; therefore, whatever our leaders do to protect the interests of the United States, they should never be willing to sacrifice that principle completely. But how far should we go in compromising our moral ideals for the sake of national security? We shall always have to agonize over that question. Would Machiavelli free us from such moral agony? Would that be beneficial? As a final criticism of Machiavelli, we might argue that by denying the existence of moral dilemmas in politics, Machiavelli naively overlooks the reality of our common moral world. That we worry about the moral consequences of our political decisions is an inescapable fact of our political life. Machiavelli testifies to this fact when he advises the prince to hide his immorality with hypocrisy. If there were no generally accepted standards

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of morality, if they were merely arbitrary “names,” as Machiavelli says, and if we saw no need for morality, hypocrisy would make no sense. That we argue about morality shows how difficult it is to judge moral claims. But that we understand moral arguments, that we agree on what counts as good moral reasoning, shows that we live in a common universe of moral discourse. And that those who act immorally have to try to justify their actions with moral reasoning indicates the stability of our moral sense. Hypocrisy, we might say, is the greatest tribute to virtue. And perhaps the best way to appear virtuous is to try our best to be virtuous. The Machiavellian would warn, however, that we cannot introduce moral judgment into politics without promoting an imprudent moral idealism. Good political judgment should always be an exercise in prudence; and “prudence,” as Machiavelli explains, “consists in knowing how to recognize the qualities of inconveniences and to pick the less bad as good” (The Prince, ch. 21, p. 135). Those political leaders who cannot settle for the “less bad” create political disasters by seeking an unattainable moral perfection no matter what the costs. But if prudence is picking “the less bad as good,” doesn’t this assume a moral standard of good and bad by which we judge the “less bad”? Why can’t we combine political prudence and moral judgment? We might think, for example, of political leaders like Abraham Lincoln who have striven for a prudent idealism in their political thinking. Because Lincoln revered the principle of equality of rights as stated in the Declaration of Independence, he thought that was the fundamental standard of moral judgment in American politics. But he saw absolute equality as an abstract goal toward which we must aim without ever attaining it fully because of the limitations of our circumstances. He thought, therefore, that there could be no right to hold slaves because slavery was simply wrong. Yet he also thought there was no practical way to abolish slavery immediately without disastrous consequences for the nation. He argued that we ought to have worked for the ultimate extinction of slavery while accepting it in the short run as a necessary evil. Thus Lincoln tried to steer a middle course between those Southern leaders who saw no moral problem in slavery and those Northern abolitionists who wished to abolish slavery immediately even if it meant destroying the Union.28 This might illustrate, therefore, how it is possible for a political leader to possess a realistic moral idealism. Consider how Machiavelli might answer the objections we have raised. First, Machiavelli might observe that a wise prince will always strive to unite expediency and morality, but sometimes what is expedient for political reasons clashes with moral goodness. Although a prudent leader understands the importance of promise keeping as a foundation of social and political life, in extreme cases breaking one’s promises might be politically prudent. To the charge that he gives too much weight to extreme situations, Machiavelli could reply that it is only under the pressure of severe circum-

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stances that the foundations of political life come into view. In times of calm, we can avert our eyes from the underlying, harsh realities of politics. And, surely, Machiavelli would want to reiterate that the fundamental reality of political life is the need for preserving the peace and unity of one’s state. Of course, every state is held together by certain moral ideals that political leaders must respect. But aren’t those moral ideals simply a means for pacifying human conflict and keeping the peace? In the Discourses (1, 2), Machiavelli describes how governments and the rule of law were established in primitive times by human beings to protect themselves against the mutual injuries to which they were naturally inclined; and he concludes: “Such was the origin of justice.” This might imply Machiavelli’s disagreement with the biblical teaching that human beings were originally created for life in a perfect Garden of Eden, which they lost after their original sin. By contrast, he suggests, human society originally evolved from a primitive condition of natural conflict, and to escape the violence of that natural state, human beings had to create rules of justice to keep the peace. We might see this as pointing back to the teaching of the ancient Roman Epicurean philosopher Lucretius, who explained the evolution of human society from a primitive state within the cosmic evolution of the universe from the natural motion of atoms.29 Or we might see this as pointing ahead to Thomas Hobbes and his teaching about the “state of nature” as the original condition of humanity. Finally, Machiavelli might contend that rather than denying the reality of moral judgment, he sees it for what it is: a product of the “virtue” of the great religious founders who have imposed their forms on the matter of human consciousness. As he indicates by his praise of Moses in The Prince (chapter 6) and in his comments on religion in the Discourses (I, 10–12; II, 2, 5), Machiavelli thinks that the most influential founders are those who establish new religions, for they shape the entire way of life of a people. If we find Machiavelli’s teaching too brutal, he might say that that only shows the effeminate softness of our Christian education (Discourses II, 2). The tenderness and leniency instilled in us by our democratic Christian culture manifest themselves most clearly in our rejection of the Machiavellian teaching that political rule requires cruelty. But Machiavelli does distinguish between “cruelty well used” and “cruelty badly used.” Does that suffice as a moral criterion for the political use of cruelty?

4. Does political order require “cruelty well used”? A prince’s cruelty is well used, Machiavelli explains, if it keeps his people “united and faithful” (ch. 17, p. 100). Those rulers who show too much pity may actually increase the suffering of their people by allowing disorders to get out of control. On the other hand, cruelty is badly used if it is employed so recklessly and unpredictably that the people despise the prince. Properly used cruelty is indispensable to “good government”

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because there must be a pervasive fear of punishment among a people if they are to live in peace under the rule of law (ch. 7, pp. 44–45). Machiavelli would seem to support the claim of the legal positivist that law is the command of the sovereign backed by threat. (We considered legal positivism in chapter 4, section 2.) In the Discourses, Machiavelli explains that governments originate when people see that they must have laws to keep themselves from injuring one another (I, 2). But all political bodies tend to become corrupt as their citizens lose their original respect for law. To restore that respect, Machiavelli advises, there must be executions of lawbreakers to recall that fear of punishment upon which government was originally founded; and this should be done at least every ten years. Restoring that primitive fear of punishment is what Machiavelli calls “bringing the government back to its first principles” (III, 1). “In the beginning there was terror.” The successful prince must be a political terrorist.30 Machiavelli thinks the greatness of the Roman Republic was manifested in the extent of the executions of those who disobeyed the law. The most shocking executions were those held to punish armies in cases where it was not feasible to punish all the guilty individuals because of the large number involved (III, 49). According to the procedure of decimation, one soldier out of every ten was chosen by lot to be executed. Those who escaped would be obedient for fear that next time they would be selected for execution. A prince establishes and maintains his rule through violence. Indeed, from Machiavelli’s point of view, all government is organized violence. The principal foundations which all states have, whether new, old, or mixed, are good laws and good arms. And because there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there needs must be good laws, I shall omit the reasoning on laws and speak of arms. (ch. 12, p. 71)

Later in The Prince, he indicates the traits of character required for the political use of force: You ought to know, then, that there are two kinds of fighting: one with the laws, the other with force. The first one is proper to man; the second to the beasts; but because the first proves many times to be insufficient, one needs must resort to the second. Therefore it is necessary for a prince to know well how to use the beast and the man. (ch. 18, p. 107)

In particular, the prince must combine the ferocity of the lion and the craftiness of the fox. What should we say in response to this disturbing recommendation that a good ruler should become like a beast in employing force and fraud? From Cicero’s De Officiis (I, 41; III, 69), we know that it was traditional to advise princes to imitate the viciousness of the lion and the cleverness of the fox, but Cicero warns against this. Surely, he argues, it can

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never be expedient for a man to become so mean that he is more like a beast than a human being (I, 41; III, 46–47, 69).31 When rulers live by force and fraud, Cicero contends, they break that natural social bond without which human life becomes unbearable. In contrast to Machiavelli (ch. 17), Cicero (De Officiis II, 23) advises that it is better to be loved than feared because fear creates hate, and hate creates threats. A tyrant must always suffer when hated by the people: either the tyrant is killed, or he lives in continual fear of being killed. “Whose life can be advantageous to himself,” Cicero warns, “if it is a life that is his on the condition that the man who takes it away will win the greatest gratitude and glory” (III, 85)? We can settle disputes through discussion or through force, Cicero observes (II, 34–35). We should prefer discussion, because this is characteristic of human beings, whereas using force is characteristic of brutish animals. Even when the failure of discussion compels us to resort to force, we must respect the “rights of war.” We must go to war only for the sake of restoring peace, and in victory we must spare those who have fought in a civilized manner. But hasn’t Machiavelli anticipated the objections suggested by Cicero? Isn’t Machiavelli as aware as Cicero is of the dangers of excessive brutality? His comments on the infamy of Agathocles would indicate this. Also, it should be emphasized that a clever prince relies more on fraud than on force. To the extent that he can persuade his subjects to willingly accept his rule, he does not have to depend solely on brute force. For new princes and new republics, Machiavelli says in the Discourses (II, 13), fraud and cunning are more important than force and fear in their rise to greatness. Even in counseling the prince that it is better to be feared than loved, Machiavelli warns him to avoid the hatred of the people by not disturbing them in their private lives (ch. 17). Like Cicero, Machiavelli urges the prince to secure his power by winning the goodwill of the people. In his chapter on conspiracies in the Discourses (III, 6), Machiavelli warns princes that the threat of conspiracies is unavoidable for princes who are hated by their subjects. Good rulers can be secure, but tyrants cannot because “they are in constant fear lest others are conspiring to inflict upon them the punishment which they are conscious of deserving” (III, 6). Machiavelli is careful, therefore, to warn the prince about the dangerous consequences of going too far in terrorizing his subjects. Yet Machiavelli departs from the traditional view of Cicero and others by insisting that some use of cruelty is essential for political order. This becomes evident in times of war, when acts of brutality become necessary means to the end of preserving the state. But aren’t there moral standards even in war? Cicero spoke of the “rights of war.” Since ancient times, as part of the tradition of “natural law,” there have always been “laws of war” prescribing which kinds of warfare are permissible and which are not. The Declaration of Independence

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refers to these international rules of justice when it speaks of the “acts and things which independent states may of right do.” If states have rights, just as individual human beings do, there must be standards of justice to govern conflicts among states. Machiavelli is preoccupied with war; his prince hardly thinks of anything else but the art of war (ch. 14, p. 88). One could justify this by observing that the history of politics has been shaped by the history of war. This is certainly true for the emergence of national states in modern Europe, where we could say that war made states, and states made war. States were thrown into military competition, and those with greater military power prevailed over those with less.32 The harsh demands of war would seem to provide the clearest confirmation of Machiavellian realism. But if it is possible to accept some moral restraints even in war, then Machiavellianism is refuted. Because war presents us with the most difficult situations, we must conclude that if our moral principles apply to war, they apply everywhere. In judging the morality of war, we must first ask: When is it just to go to war? Then we must ask: What are the just ways of fighting a war? To the first question, the most commonly accepted answer is that defensive wars are just, while aggressive wars are unjust. In response to the second question, an elaborate code of international law has developed to determine what can and cannot be done in war. For example, we prohibit direct attacks on civilians, and we require humane treatment of prisoners of war.33 These “laws of war” were used in 1945–1946, for instance, at the trial in Nuremberg of the German “war criminals.” They were charged with “crimes against peace” in the “waging of a war of aggression” as well as “war crimes” in attacking civilians and mistreating prisoners of war.34 Through this condemnation of the Nazi war leaders, we reaffirmed the reality of international principles of justice as a defense against the immorality manifested in the Nazi regime. Now, to carry on the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials, we have an International Criminal Court for trying cases involving crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.35 Doesn’t this show, contrary to what Machiavelli assumes, that even in war we can (and therefore should) adhere to some fundamental moral standards? The Machiavellian might remind us that Machiavelli distinguishes the good uses of cruelty from the bad uses. So to the extent that the “laws of war” prohibit wanton or unnecessary brutality, Machiavelli would agree with such restraints. Nevertheless, he would deny that there can be any absolute prohibitions as to what can be done in war. After all, he might observe, there is hardly any method of warfare that could not become justifiable if it were necessary for military success. Consider, for example, the prohibition of attacking civilians. We condemned the German war leaders for violating this provision of international law. But were we not hypocritical in ignoring the fact that Allied war

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leaders were just as guilty of this? In 1941, British leaders initiated a policy of “terror bombing” against German cities.36 Bombing was aimed intentionally at residential neighborhoods for the purpose of killing as many civilians as possible. As a result, some three hundred thousand German civilians were killed. Of these, one hundred thousand died in a single attack against the city of Dresden in 1945. American leaders adopted the same policy in bombing Japanese cities, a policy that culminated in Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total number of civilians killed in Germany and Japan is estimated at over one million. This set a pattern for subsequent wars. The wars in Korea and in Vietnam resulted in huge numbers of civilian deaths because of the American bombing of villages. Even more frightful possibilities arose from the American policy of nuclear deterrence through a “balance of terror.”37 During the cold war, American leaders were prepared to respond to any major aggression by the Soviet Union—such as an invasion of Western Europe— by launching a nuclear attack against cities in Russia that would kill tens of millions of civilians. Some critics regarded this policy as even more morally reprehensible than the policies of the Nazi war leaders. In all these cases, the justification for terrorizing civilians has been that such brutal measures are a necessary means of achieving victory. British leaders began the terror bombing of Germany when the British were desperate to defend European civilization against the horrors of Nazism. Truman used the atomic bomb against Japan to avoid the high casualties that would have arisen from an actual physical invasion. American bombing tactics in Korea and Vietnam were defended as unavoidable in fighting guerrilla wars. And threatening nuclear strikes against Russian cities was said to be the only effective means of defending the West against Communist aggression. Aren’t these all Machiavellian justifications in that they assume there are no moral limits to cruelty in war as long as the cruelty is a necessary means to victory? On September 11, 2001, operatives of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization attacked the World Trade Center in New York City with airplanes that they had hijacked. Almost 3,000 people were killed, which made this the single most deadly foreign attack on the United States in the history of the country. A few days later, President George W. Bush signed a secret order authorizing the Central Intelligence Agency to imprison and interrogate those who were suspected terrorists. The CIA set up secret prisons around the world where over 100 people were put through “enhanced interrogation techniques” that were actually acts of torture.38 In December of 2014, the United States Senate Intelligence Committee issued a report condemning the brutality of this CIA program and arguing that this torture was not only immoral but also ineffective in gathering information useful in combatting terrorism.39 In response to this report, some of the former CIA directors argued that this interrogation program forced terrorist suspects

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to give them information that saved thousands of lives that would have been lost in terrorist attacks.40 Was President Bush acting as a good Machiavellian prince in authorizing torture as cruelty well used? What are the alternatives? Is it possible to acknowledge the harsh necessities of war while respecting the demands of morality? Some people argue that because all war is immoral, morality dictates pacifism. Others contend that wars to resist aggression are moral just as long as the moral rules of war (such as protecting civilians) are never violated, even when violations seem to be necessary for victory.41 Still others concede that although there are moral rules of law, in some cases of extreme emergency, such as the Nazi threat in 1941 or the threat of terrorist attacks, we might have to set aside ordinary moral standards as dictated by military necessity. Most of us seem to have adopted this last position: we judge the morality of wars, but we accept immorality in extreme cases. Yet don’t we have to feel guilty in taking this position? Bombing civilians is killing the innocent, which is murder. Sometimes this kind of murder may be necessary. But even necessary murder is still murder, and therefore we must condemn it. This explains why the British after the war honored their fighter pilots with monuments, but not their bomber pilots. What the bomber pilots had done was necessary but dishonorable.42 We must wonder, however, about who should bear the guilt for such deeds. Surely, the shame should be felt not only by those who carry out the policy, but also by those who made the decision in the first place. Moreover, in a popular government, we would expect that such decisions should not be left to the discretion of political leaders because all the citizens should share the responsibility. Some political leaders, of course, may think that common people are too soft because of their moralism to deal properly with the brutal realities of war. Perhaps Machiavelli encourages that sort of thinking by speaking of the prince as ruling on his own with little consultation with his subjects. Indeed, Machiavellian political thought might seem contrary to any form of popular government, because Machiavelli seems to prefer dictatorships rather than democracies. But the Machiavellian might argue that Machiavelli’s teaching about the ruthless pursuit of political power applies to democracies, because there isn’t much difference between democratic leaders and dictators in their pursuit of power. Is that true?

5. Are democratic leaders just as selfish as dictators in their pursuit of power? Machiavelli is sometimes said to be the founder of modern political thought. But the teachings of The Prince would seem to contradict the principles of the modern democratic state. We have seen in the Declaration of Independence the goal of limited government founded on the consent of the people and devoted to securing individual rights. In contrast, Machi-

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avelli in The Prince recognizes few limits to the prince’s power, never mentions individual rights, and shows little respect for popular consent. Yet it should be said in Machiavelli’s defense that in the Discourses he endorses republican government. Even in The Prince, he says some things favorable to popular government. Machiavelli advises his prince to distinguish the desires of the “people” (populo) and the desires of the “great” (grandi): “The people desire not to be commanded or oppressed by the great, and the great desire to command and to oppress the people” (ch. 17, pp. 101–2; ch. 19, p. 111; ch. 21, p. 135). The “great” are more difficult to satisfy because they are the politically ambitious few who would deprive the prince of his power if they could (ch. 9, pp. 58–59). The prince must respect the desires of his people if he is to protect himself against conspirators who would plot to overthrow him. A prince ought to take little account of conspirators when he has the goodwill of the people; but when they are his enemies and bear him hatred, he ought to fear everything and everyone. And well-ordered states and wise princes have with all diligence thought of not making the great desperate, and of satisfying the people and keeping them content. (ch. 19, p. 113)

Doesn’t this resemble Aristotle’s advice for tyrants in the Politics, which we considered in chapter 2 (section 10)? Like Aristotle, Machiavelli counsels his prince to use his power for the public good in order to secure the goodwill of the people. This is even clearer in the Discourses, where Machiavelli advises the prince to please the people. Because the people “only care to live in security,” they are easily satisfied by institutions and laws that confirm at the same time the general security of the people and the power of the prince. When a prince does this, and the people see that by no chance he infringes the laws, they will in a very little while be content, and live in tranquility. (Discourses I, 16)

A prince who would follow this advice would have to accept the rule of law as a limit on his otherwise absolute power. Moreover, Machiavelli shows in the Discourses a preference for republics as superior to principalities. Whether one or the other form of government is best depends on the circumstances (I, 55). But generally republics are more enduring than principalities, because the diversity of the characters of the citizens gives a republic greater flexibility in responding to changing circumstances than is possible for a prince (III, 9). Also, republican cities achieve more greatness than tyrannies, because republics promote the general good whereas tyrants secure only their own private interests (II, 2). A virtuous prince is important for founding a new state or reforming an established state, but the virtuous people are necessary for maintaining a state (I, 9, 53).

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The most stable form of republican government, Machiavelli explains in the Discourses, is a mixed regime that arises from a balance of forces among three competing interests—the prince, the people, and the nobles. “When there is combined under the same constitution a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people, then these powers will watch and keep each other reciprocally in check” (I, 2). We might see here the idea of separation of powers with checks and balances that was later expounded by Locke, a scheme that influenced the thinking of the American founders. Still, it could be argued that Machiavelli cannot be considered a friend of popular government, because he lacks confidence in the ability of ordinary people to govern themselves. Believing that most human beings are “ungrateful, fickle, hypocrites and dissemblers, evaders of dangers, lovers of gain,” Machiavelli concludes that it is better for political rulers to be feared than loved by their subjects (The Prince, ch. 18, p. 101). In the Discourses, he declares: “Whoever desires to found a state and give it laws must start with assuming that all men are bad and ever ready to display their vicious nature, whenever they may find occasion for it” (I, 3). Considering this belief in the natural viciousness of most human beings, it is not surprising that Machiavelli warns that no republic can dispense completely with princely leadership. This is especially true in times of emergency when a republic should be ruled by a single dictator (I, 34). But we should note that many of the modern proponents of popular government have shared Machiavelli’s pessimistic assessment of human nature. James Madison, for example, in his famous Federalist essay Number 51, warned that in establishing a government we have to take into account the selfish nature of human beings. “If men were angels,” he explained, “no government would be necessary.” And in essay Number 10, Madison argued that the selfish passions and interests of human beings— particularly their greed for accumulating property—make a pure democracy too turbulent because of the factional conflicts in the community. It is better to have a representative democracy in which the representatives can “refine and enlarge the public views.”43 Thus Madison seemed to agree with Alexander Hamilton, who echoed Machiavelli when he wrote in 1775 that “in contriving any system of government . . . every man ought to be supposed a knave; and to have no other end in all his actions but private interest.”44 Throughout The Federalist and other writings of the American founders, one sees the Machiavellian image of humankind as always desiring more than they have. Machiavelli declares: “Nature has created men so that they desire everything, but are unable to attain it; desire being thus always greater than the faculty of acquiring, discontent with what they have and dissatisfaction with themselves result from it” (Discourses I, 37). Perhaps this exaggerates the extent to which the American founders agreed with Machiavelli. Although they were realistic in their assessment of human nature, they often affirmed that republican government required more public-spirited virtue in the citizens than any other form of govern-

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ment. When human beings are thoroughly corrupt in their selfishness, they are incapable of self-government, and only a despot can prevent them from falling into disorder. According to Madison in Federalist Number 55: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.45

Even Machiavelli concedes that republican government flourishes only when the citizens are willing to some extent to sacrifice their private interests for the common good (see Discourses I, 17–18, 58). No matter how virtuous the citizens might be, Machiavelli would still insist that no republic can last without something like the Roman institution of dictatorship. In times of emergency in Rome, when the preservation of the Roman Republic might be threatened, someone could be appointed as a dictator to do whatever was necessary to protect the country (Discourses I, 34). Appointed only for a limited term, the dictator was prohibited from altering the constitutional arrangement of powers. Machiavelli thinks such legalized dictatorship is unavoidable in those cases where speed and flexibility of decision are needed. Otherwise, popular leaders would have to seize power illegally for the public good. But is it wise for a republican government to allow anyone to have dictatorial powers? According to Machiavelli, the Roman dictator had the power “to do whatever he deemed proper without consultation, and to inflict punishment upon any one without appeal” (I, 34). To give any person such power, even in times of emergency, creates a threat to individual liberty and popular self-government. Yet is there any good alternative? In Federalist Number 70, Hamilton argued that the president should take the place of the Roman dictator in the American Republic. Despite the dangers, Hamilton explained, a strong executive is essential to good government.46 Haven’t American presidents in times of war become almost Machiavellian dictators in leading the country through emergencies? (We will look at this problem more carefully when we turn to John Locke’s account of executive prerogative in chapter 8, section 10.) And yet, at all times, in peace as well as war, the power of the American president or of any political leader depends on the loyalty of those supporters necessary for political survival. The fundamental principle of politics is that the power of political leaders depends on their having the support of a minimal winning coalition. No ruler can rule alone. Even an absolute dictator needs a small coalition of powerful people who are loyal to him, and to win and maintain that loyalty, the dictator must buy them off with money and status. Once a dictator is abandoned by his loyalists, he loses his power. But as long as he

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has the support of that small winning coalition, which usually includes military leaders, he can rule successfully even when he oppresses the great majority of the people under his rule, because his loyalists are ready to punish anyone who challenges his rule. Consequently, the private interest of the dictator’s small coalition of supporters is advanced at the expense of the public interest of the people at large. A democratic leader differs from a dictator in one fundamental respect—the democratic leader depends on a larger coalition of supporters. Because of the large size of a winning democratic coalition, a democratic leader must persuade a large number of supporters that he will advance public policies that serve the general welfare of the big coalition of people. But still this large democratic coalition is less than the whole community, and it does not have to be a majority of the citizens. For example, in the American electoral college system for the presidency, the minimal winning coalition requires the support of those voters in various states who will give a candidate at least 270 of 538 electoral votes. The winner in the Electoral College does not necessarily need to win the majority of the popular votes. For instance, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 with only about 40 percent of the votes, because the votes against him were divided among three opposing candidates who did not win a majority in the Electoral College. But still Lincoln’s winning coalition was so large that he had to promote policies that appeared to be for the public interest. And yet, Machiavelli might argue, democratic leaders like Lincoln are just as selfish as dictators in the pursuit of power. Lincoln was an intensely ambitious man, and he was a shrewd strategist in devising ways to advance his political career. He was a ruthless opportunist in winning and holding power. Some modern political scientists—such as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith—argue that Machiavelli was right about this: all politics is about getting and keeping political power, and this is as true for democratic leaders as it is for dictators. In every regime, politics is about the leader paying off the right people—those who constitute the minimal winning coalition. A dictatorial leader must pay off a small coalition of people. A democratic leader must pay off a large coalition of people. Thus, Bueno de Mesquita and Smith contend, all politics is about “pay to play”— “Paying supporters, not good governance or representing the general will, is the essence of ruling.” Consequently, all governments are corrupt, and they differ only in the level of their corruption. “If corruption empowers, then absolute corruption empowers absolutely.”47 This also seems to be true for chimpanzees and other political animals. In his study of “chimpanzee politics,” Frans de Waal found that the behavior of chimps in competing for dominance over their group conforms to the teaching of Machiavelli. Success in political competition among chimps, he found, depends on the exercise of strategic intelligence in which chimps

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must form coalitions that will support them as the alpha chimp in the group’s hierarchy.48 In speaking about the general determinants of dominance among animals, Edward O. Wilson observes that “combinations of ability and luck increasingly drive some animals downward in rank while lifting others upward.”49 Jane Goodall has identified the personality traits of dominant individuals among chimpanzees as including self-confidence, boldness, cleverness, manipulative deceptiveness, aggressiveness, skillful fighting, and an opportunistic ability for forming coalitions.50 There is some evidence that those who become dominant have greater sexual access to females and thus greater reproductive success.51 Other scientists have extended this reasoning to conclude that the evolution of high intelligence among primates and human beings was driven by the need for “Machiavellian intelligence.” The idea is that the complexity of primate intelligence evolved primarily to help individuals navigate complex social environments, so that intelligence evolved as the ability for social manipulation. Machiavelli was right in that human beings and other primates are evolved to be intelligent cooperators, and this originally evolved for individuals to out-compete their rivals for selfish gain, such as winning and holding the power of political leadership and advancing one’s group against competing groups.52 Moreover, some psychologists have discovered that people who are particularly adept at social manipulation of others for personal gain can be seen as having a “Machiavellian personality” that is a product of human evolution. In its most extreme form, the purest Machiavellians might be psychopaths, who manipulate and exploit other human beings unrestrained by any moral emotions of shame, guilt, or love.53 Was Machiavelli a Machiavellian? Was he a ruthless opportunist who would do anything for his own selfish advancement, even if that meant subverting the common good? In The Prince, he did seem quite willing to suppress his sympathies for republican government in order to win a position in the government of the Medici. We must wonder, then, whether Machiavelli saw himself as a political philosopher, or whether he considered his political writing only a way to win some rewards from the politically powerful.

6. Does Machiavelli elevate political power over political wisdom? To put the question more bluntly, does Machiavelli display his political knowledge only for the purpose of selling out to the first powerful ruler willing to take him in as a toady? Consider the “Epistle Dedicatory” of The Prince, in which Machiavelli offers his book as a present to Lorenzo de Medici and expresses the hope that Lorenzo will take notice of Machiavelli’s misfortune in being expelled from Florentine politics. He also con-

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cludes The Prince by flattering Lorenzo with the declaration that the Medici have been chosen by God to save Italy from foreign invaders. Ever since Plato, political philosophers have sought to unite wisdom and power so that reason could rule in human affairs. But Machiavelli would seem to have perverted this noble project by suggesting that the wise should become the servants of the powerful. We should not be too quick, however, to accept such an unfavorable interpretation of Machiavelli’s work. In various ways, he shows his disdain for those who happen to have political power but are too ignorant to use their power properly. Those who have the power to govern but not the knowledge of how to govern are inferior, Machiavelli says, to those who have the knowledge but not the power (Discourses, “Epistle Dedicatory”). And in the last chapter of The Prince, he implies that the Medici are not smart enough to seize the great political opportunities before them. The parallels between chapter 6 and chapter 26 of The Prince suggest that Machiavelli sees the possibility for someone to become another Moses by establishing a new order for the modern world as influential as that founded by Moses. But this opportunity may be lost owing to “the weakness of the heads.” In Italy one does not lack matter for introducing every form; here there is great virtue in the members, were it not that she lacks heads. . . . It all proceeds from the weakness of the heads; for those who know are not obeyed, and with everyone seeming to know, there has been no one until now who knew how to raise himself, through virtue and fortune, so that the others cede to him. (ch. 26, p. 153)

Of whom is Machiavelli thinking when he says, “those who know are not obeyed”? In the preceding paragraph, he says that great things can now be done “provided that one takes as a target, those orders which I have proposed” (p. 152). Does Machiavelli see himself as the new Moses? If so, then Machiavelli would be an unarmed prophet. He has no political power of his own. He commands no armies. Could he believe that his new ideas have sufficient power in themselves to transform the political life of the modern world? In the introduction to the Discourses, he claims to have discovered new political principles never seen by anyone else. Conceding that he may not be able to carry out his principles (like Moses?), he indicates that others will come after him to put his teachings into practice. The ideas of thinkers who do not rule can become powerful through their influence on those who do rule. If this is what Machiavelli has in mind, then he cannot be accused of degrading political philosophy by making it a mere tool of the powerful. Rather, we might say that just as Plato and Aristotle were the founders of premodern political thought, so was Machiavelli the founder of modern political thought. Like Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli influenced political practice by changing the way political leaders thought about what they did.

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How accurate is it to speak of Machiavelli as the founder of modern political philosophy? We can see in his writings many of the dominant themes of modern thought: political life as artificial rather than natural, government as coercive force, self-interest as the strongest human motive, and generally a realistic lowering of political standards from what ought to be to what is. On the other hand, some of the most prominent features of later political thought do not appear clearly in Machiavelli’s work. One point in particular is the concern for turning the study of politics into a science. Because of the achievements of the great natural scientists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, modern political philosophers (like Hobbes) sought to apply the new methods of science to political studies: political thought was to be replaced by political science. We must wonder, then, whether there is any connection between Machiavellianism and the modern scientific method. In fact, one commentator has interpreted Machiavelli’s teaching as the first “science of power” based on applying the scientific method to politics.54 With that in mind, we turn to one of the greatest advocates of that new method of thought—Descartes.

Notes 1

2 3 4

5

6

For a survey of the humanist background of Machiavelli’s work, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For a briefer version of this work, see Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). The best introduction to the Italian Renaissance is Jacob Burckhardt’s classic, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1954). See Donald Weinstein, Savonarola: The Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). For an account of the torture, see Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 32–39. Here and elsewhere I quote from the translation of The Prince by Leo Paul de Alvarez (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1989). All page references are to this edition. This is the most useful translation because it is the most literal. In a letter written while he was working on The Prince, Machiavelli describes his evening studies: When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient courts of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born; and I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions; and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death: I become completely part of them. (Letter to Francesco Vettori, December 10, 1513, in Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, eds., The Portable Machiavelli [New York: Penguin Books, 1979], 69). Skinner, Machiavelli, 37. Over the past fifty years, much of the debate over Machiavelli’s influence on modern political thought and practice has turned on whether Machiavelli promoted “classical” or “liberal” republicanism. Machiavellian classical republicanism is understood as the revival of ancient Greek and Roman republicanism as based on the civic virtue of citizens, which is the theme of J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

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11 12

13

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versity Press, 1974). Machiavellian liberal republicanism is understood as a rejection of antiquity in favor of the modern conception of government as directed to securing individual liberty, which is the theme of the essays in Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy, edited by Paul A. Rahe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). This latter position is associated with Leo Strauss and those under his influence. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, sec. 749. Max Lerner, “Introduction,” in Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1940), xxv, xliii. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 13. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, “the paths to power” include the ability “to introduce a new virtue under the name of an old one,” as was done by the founders of biblical religion who promoted “the slave revolt in morality” by using the word “good” for conduct that had previously been called “bad” (The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Random House, 1967], sec. 310; The Genealogy of Morals, in The Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: The Modern Library, 1968], 472–75; The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage Books, 1974], sec. 353). The quotation is from The New Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985). Borgia’s murder of his cruel henchman can be compared with Hitler’s liquidation of Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Brownshirts in the “night of the long knives.” See Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm, vol. 1 of The Second World War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 96–102; and Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 336–44. Here and elsewhere, in quoting the Discourses, I am quoting from Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). All references are to the book and the chapter of the Discourses. Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power, 2nd ed. (New York: John Wiley, 1976), 229–30. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Random House, Modern Library, n.d.), No. 72, p. 470. Compare Charles de Gaulle’s comments on the need for men of “grandeur” in The Edge of the Sword, trans. Gerald Hopkins (New York: Criterion Books, 1960), 63–64. On the connections between Machiavelli and Cicero, see Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 2: 3–59. See de Alvarez’s edition of The Prince, XXV, n. 9. On “the state as a work of art,” see Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 3–99. Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 78, 82. Weber’s Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) celebration of heroic and “charismatic” leadership manifests a tradition in German thought that may explain the success of Hitler. See Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Max Weber and German Politics, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 390–447; and Bullock, Hitler and Stalin, 351–57, 364–70. Harvey Mansfield, Jr., has argued that the very idea of the “executive” power is a uniquely modern political phenomenon that manifests the inherent Machiavellianism of modern politics (Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power [New York: Free Press, 1989]). On the importance of war in the evolution of the state, see Robert L. Carneiro, “A Theory of the Origin of the State,” Science 169 (1970): 733–38; and Peter A. Corning, The Synergism Hypothesis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983), 368–75. See Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics, 1250–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). L. Arthur Burd, “Introduction” to Il Principe di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1891), xix–xx. Plato, Republic, 592a-b. See Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 4 July 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953– 1955), 4: 421–41.

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See William Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). The issues were examined by the Supreme Court in United States v. Korematsu, 323 U.S. 214 (1944). James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956). See Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (New York: Pantheon, 1978), chaps. 2, 10. See Paul Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 41–42, 303–4, 332–33. Although Machiavelli never mentioned Lucretius by name in his writings, he wrote out a copy of Lucretius’s philosophical poem On the Nature of Things. Lucretius was condemned by Christians for denying divine providence and the immortality of the soul in an afterlife with eternal rewards and punishments. See Alison Brown, The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Paul A. Rahe, “In the Shadow of Lucretius: The Epicurean Foundations of Machiavelli’s Political Thought,” History of Political Thought, 28 (2007): 30–55. See Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 167: “Machiavelli’s return to the beginning means return to the terror inherent in man’s situation, to man’s essential unprotectedness. In the beginning there was terror. In the beginning men were good, i.e., they were willing to obey because they were afraid and easily frightened. The primacy of Love must be replaced by the primacy of Terror if republics are to be established in accordance with nature and on the basis of knowledge of nature.” In his Chimpanzee Politics: Power & Sex Among Apes (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), Frans de Waal finds Machiavelli’s Prince to be the best guide for studying chimpanzee political life; and he suggests that our pursuit of political dominance over others may have been inherited from our primate ancestors. See Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992). See Adam Roberts and Richard Guelff, eds., Documents on the Laws of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). On “just war” reasoning, see Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977); and James T. Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). For extracts from the final judgment, see Roberts and Guelff, Documents, 155–56. See William A. Schabar, An Introduction to the International Criminal Court, 4th ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For criticisms of the ICC as illustrating the naïve belief in the international rule of law without the support of governmental institutions, see Eric A. Posner, The Perils of Global Legalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 255–63. The morality of the terror bombing of Germany and Japan was debated during the war. See J. M. Spaight, Bombing Vindicated (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1944); and Barrie Paskins and Michael Dockrill, The Ethics of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 1–57. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 269–83. See also Amos A. Jordan and William J. Taylor, Jr., American National Security: Policy and Process (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 221–47. On the decision to drop the atomic bomb, see Henry L. Stimson and McGeorge Bundy, On Active Service in Peace and War (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948), 612–55; and Robert C. Batchelder, The Irreversible Decision, 1939–1950 (New York: Macmillan, 1965). For the history of one of these prisoners, see Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanomo Diary (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 2015). See Mark Mazzetti, “Panel Faults C.I.A. over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Investigations,” The New York Times, December 9, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1D3IYHa.

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George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss, Michael V. Hayden, John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland, and Stephen R. Kappes, “Ex-CIA Directors: Interrogations Save Lives,” The Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/cia-interrogations-saved-lives1418142644. See Elizabeth Anscombe, “War and Murder,” in Richard A. Wasserstrom, ed., War and Morality (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970), 42–53. See Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 323–27. Federalist, No. 10, pp. 58–59. Alexander Hamilton, “The Farmer Refuted,” The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett, 22 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 1: 95. Federalist, No. 55, p. 365. One of the fundamental debates among social scientists today is between those who think human social behavior is motivated primarily by self-interest and those who think there are powerful public-spirited motives as well. See Jane J. Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). For the argument that natural selection might have favored the evolution of moral sentiments to sustain social cooperation, see Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols. (London: J. Murray, 1871), 1: 70–106; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012). Federalist, No. 70, pp. 454–55. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 25, 127. Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 295. See Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 64-65, 415, 424–32, 435, 442, 571; and Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers, Tales from Gombe (Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2014), 28, 31–46, 134–49, 294–317. See Emily Wroblewski, Carson Murray, Brandon Keele, Joann Schumacher-Stankey, Beatrice Hahn, and Anne Pusey, “Male Dominance Rank and Reproductive Success in Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii,” Animal Behaviour 77 (2009): 873–85. See Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys, Apes, and Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne, eds., Machiavellian Intelligence II: Extensions and Evaluations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Dario Maestripieri, Machiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). See Richard Christie and Florence Geis, eds., Studies in Machiavellianism (New York: Academic Press, 1970); D. S. Wilson, D. Near, and R. R. Miller, “Machiavellianism: A Synthesis of the Evolutionary and Psychological Literatures,” Psychological Bulletin, 199 (1996): 285–99; and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 211–30. James Burnham, The Machiavellians—Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943), 29–30. See also Leslie J. Walker, The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950), 1: 80–99.

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6 Liberal Rationalism

Descartes’s Discourse on Method

KEY READINGS Discourse on Method

René Descartes (1596–1650) lived at a time when traditional sources of authority were being challenged by new ways of thinking in religion, science, and politics. During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church had become the highest cultural institution in Europe, not only in religious matters but also in matters of philosophy and politics. Then, beginning early in the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation attacked the religious authority of the Catholic Church. The religious disagreements between Protestants and Catholics led to political conflicts, which led to religious wars. Although of Roman Catholic heritage, Descartes lived in a region of France controlled by Protestant Huguenots at a time when Protestants and Catholics were frequently at war.1 The Catholic Church’s authority over intellectual questions was threatened by new ideas in science. In the early 1500s, Nicolaus Copernicus rejected traditional thinking in astronomy by arguing that the Earth and the other planets rotated around the Sun, which revived a heliocentric view of the universe proposed 1800 years earlier by the ancient Greek mathematician Aristarchus. At first the church authorities were receptive to this denial that the Earth was the center of the universe; but in the early 1600s they were less tolerant of another version of Copernicus’s system offered by Galileo Galilei. Based on astronomical observations through a telescope of his own making, Galileo in 1610 published his claim that these observations sup153

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ported the Copernican system. This seemed to contradict biblical passages indicating that the Sun moved around the Earth (Joshua 10:12–14), and it also contradicted the Aristotelian cosmology that had been adopted by the Church as compatible with the teaching of the Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas. In 1616, the theologians of the Church’s Congregation of the Inquisition (Holy Office) declared that the Copernican system was absurd, because it was contrary to Aristotle’s philosophy, and heretical, because it was contrary to the Bible and the Church Fathers. In 1632, Galileo published his Dialogue on the Two Chief Systems of the World. The following year, the Church declared him a heretic and forced him to renounce his ideas.2 Descartes was shocked by this, because he was preparing for publication a book developing scientific theories similar to Galileo’s. Although Descartes offered proofs for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, he was suspected of being an atheistic materialist, and he lived in fear of persecution. After his death, his books were put on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. Like Socrates, Descartes found that he risked public condemnation by pursuing knowledge contrary to the authoritative opinions of his society. But unlike Socrates, Descartes thought that he had a scientific method by which he could discover absolute knowledge. Because he broke away from medieval Aristotelianism and thought through the philosophic implications of a new science of nature, Descartes is often called the founder of modern philosophy. Descartes’s Discourse on Method, published in 1637, described his new method, but without openly espousing the ideas that might have invited persecution. He was well qualified for formulating a scientific method. The great wealth inherited from his family had allowed him to have the best education. He became interested in the latest scientific and mathematical thinking, and he was responsible for one of the greatest developments in the history of mathematics—the invention of coordinate geometry. This new kind of mathematics united algebra and geometry, forming a powerful tool for applying mathematics to the physical world.3 Descartes saw in this mathematical procedure a method of reasoning applicable to all fields of knowledge. For the first time, he believed, human beings could achieve in all of their thinking the rigor, clarity, and certainty of mathematical demonstration. Although Descartes is not usually considered a political philosopher, the political implications of his intellectual project have been immense. For if the Cartesian method is the only way to genuine knowledge, then traditional political philosophy has to be dismissed as nonsense if it cannot conform to the logical criteria of modern science and mathematics. In fact, many modern social scientists have argued that political philosophy should be replaced by scientific methodology. We can see the fundamental assumptions of that argument by examining the Discourse on Method.

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1. Can the scientific method of Descartes lead us to a free and rational society? If Descartes can show us how to achieve absolute certitude in our political reasoning, shouldn’t we welcome that as an escape from the endless disputes of the philosophers? Beginning with Socrates, philosophers have argued about the most fundamental questions, but without ever finding any final answers to which everyone can agree. We might condemn them, therefore, for subverting our confidence in common political opinions without providing us with any solid knowledge to take their place. All the political philosophers we have studied so far sought to put political life under the rule of reason; but if that means founding politics on truths that are really self-evident, then they all failed. Descartes is the first philosopher we have seen in this book to take seriously the claim that genuine knowledge requires reasoning logically from self-evident principles. Descartes initiated a new conception of rationality that has permeated both modern philosophy and modern politics. He was the first thinker to espouse what could be called liberal rationalism. One scholar has explained this intellectual position as founded on the following eleven major tenets: 1. The assumptions and methods of the previously dominant Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition are mistaken and must be fundamentally revised or supplanted before genuine “natural philosophy” can be possible. 2. The human understanding, guided by the “natural light” of reason, can be and should be autonomous. Moreover, it constitutes the norm and the means by reference to which all else is to be measured. 3. It is possible and necessary to begin the search for knowledge with a clean slate. 4. It is possible and necessary to base knowledge claims on a clear and distinct, indubitable, self-evident foundation. 5. This foundation is to be composed of simple, unambiguous ideas or perceptions. 6. The appropriate formal standards for all human knowledge are those of the mathematical modes of inquiry. 7. The key to the progress of human knowledge is the development and pursuit of explicit rules of method. 8. The entire body of valid human knowledge is a unity, both in method and in substance. 9. Therefore, human knowledge may be made almost wholly accessible to all men, provided only that they not be abnormally defective in their basic faculties.

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Chapter Six 10. Genuine knowledge is in some sense certain, verifiable, and capable of being made wholly explicit. 11. Knowledge is power, and the increase of knowledge therefore holds the key to human progress.4

Although we shall have to think more about the meaning of these claims, we can see immediately how they might support a “liberal” regime, in the sense of a society devoted to individual freedom and rationality. Human beings are to be liberated from the traditional authority of kings and priests, so that all people can live by the light of their own reason. While all people are equal in their natural capacity for understanding the simple truths of reality, they need the methods of modern mathematics and science to free their minds from the darkness of traditional prejudices. Furthermore, the power of this new knowledge will allow human beings to control nature for the benefit of all, thus allowing human beings to progress farther and faster than was ever possible previously. Plato thought that most human beings, like people chained in a cave, would always be incapable of rational enlightenment, because most would be bound by their unexamined opinions. Only a few truly philosophic individuals could leave the cave to see the truths that are only dimly reflected in common opinions. But doesn’t Descartes offer to free all human beings from Plato’s cave by giving them a method by which each person can discover the truth? And isn’t that necessary if we are to achieve a free and rational society, in which the truths of politics are self-evident to all? On the other hand, critics of Descartes’s liberal rationalism point to some possible problems. It is questionable whether Descartes’s method is an adequate standard for all genuine knowledge. Furthermore, the political consequences of Cartesian rationalism might in the long run promote tyranny rather than liberty. Two forms of tyranny are possible. We could call one form technocratic tyranny and the other nihilistic tyranny.5 Technocratic tyranny arises if it happens that the Cartesian method can be understood and applied only by a scientific elite, a small group of technical experts who think themselves entitled to rule over the rest of humanity. Nihilistic tyranny arises if it turns out that the Cartesian method provides no rational standards for moral judgment, and therefore political rule becomes simply the rule of the stronger over the weaker. We must examine each of these criticisms of Cartesian rationalism.

2. Is Cartesian reason reasonable? We can begin by summarizing the six parts of the Discourse on Method, which develop six themes: (1) doubt, (2) method, (3) morality, (4) certainty, (5) mechanism, and (6) mastery. To prepare the reader for his new method in Part Two, Descartes explains in Part One why he doubted all traditional thinking, because it

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does not produce proven conclusions that can guide life. He describes his education in the traditional disciplines of the liberal arts. He learned much, and he was especially pleased with mathematics “because of the certitude and the evidence of its proofs” (I, 10).6 But he was disappointed that his education did not give him a firm grasp of the truth. He had sought “a clear and assured knowledge of everything that is useful to life,” but his education could not give him that. “I found myself embarrassed with so many doubts and errors that it seemed to me that trying to instruct myself had no profit except that I had discovered more and more my ignorance” (I, 6). He then traveled widely to study the practical conduct of people. But, again, he found no reliable knowledge. “It is true that, while I only considered the moral customs of other men, I found there hardly anything to give me assurance; and I noted in them just about as much diversity as I had formerly seen in the opinions of the philosophers” (I, 15). Finally, having seen the confusion in both the ideas and the actions of other people, Descartes resolved to turn inward, to seek within himself some source of certainty. In Part Two, Descartes reports that he did, indeed, find in himself a method for attaining genuine knowledge. Fundamental to the method is his conviction that one can find truth only by sweeping aside all preconceived ideas from others, so that knowledge can be constructed step by step on firm foundations. The method itself consists of four rules. 1. One must accept only those ideas that present themselves so clearly and distinctly to the mind that there is no possibility of doubting them. 2. Difficult problems should be solved by dividing them into small parts that can be easily managed. 3. Thinking should begin with the simplest things, which are easiest to understand, and then it should move by small steps from the simplest to the most complex. 4. The mind should carefully survey every part of a problem, so that nothing is overlooked. Descartes regards these rules as generalizations for the procedures of geometrical demonstrations, which move through long chains of reasoning from the simplest to the most complex ideas. By following that path of thought, Descartes believes, there cannot be any truths “so remote that we cannot reach them, nor so hidden that we cannot discover them” (II, 11). In Part Three, Descartes presents some moral rules derived from the method. Although his method forces him to be irresolute in his beliefs, he does not want to be irresolute in his actions. Therefore, he prepares a “provisional morality” for his life during the time that he works to complete the building of his intellectual framework (III, 1). His temporary moral code consists of three maxims. The first was to obey the laws and the customs of my country, retaining constantly the religion in which by God’s grace I had been

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Chapter Six instructed since my childhood, and to govern myself in everything else following the opinions that were the most remote from excess, which were commonly received in practice by the more sensible of those with whom I would live. (III, 2) My second maxim was to be as firm and resolute in my actions as I could, and not to follow less constantly the most doubtful opinions, once I had made up my mind, than if they had been very certain. (III, 3) My third maxim was always to try to conquer myself rather than fortune, and to change my desires rather than the order of the world; and generally to accustom myself to believe that there is nothing entirely in our power except our thoughts, so that after we have done our best touching the things external to us, whatever is lacking for our success is absolutely impossible as far as we are concerned. (III, 4)

Descartes sees these maxims as necessary if he is to continue his search for truth, which he prefers above any other occupation. Therefore, he accepts the opinions of others in moral matters, but with the understanding that he will examine them more carefully when he has time and try to find better opinions if there are such. But except for these moral opinions and the tenets of his religion, Descartes submits all of his beliefs to absolute doubt. By doubting everything absolutely, Descartes is sure that whatever idea remains as indubitable will be the self-evident first principle of his philosophy. In Part Four of the Discourse, he reports that only one truth survived this test: “I think, therefore I am” (IV, 1). He cannot doubt his own existence because any doubt he has is his thought, which presupposes his existence as a thinker.7 Beyond this, another idea comes to him—the idea of a being more perfect than himself—and this leads him to infer the existence of God as another self-evident truth. Therefore, Descartes regards his own existence and the existence of God as the two principles from which everything else must be derived. In Part Five, however, Descartes says he is reluctant to continue with the chain of truths that he deduced from these basic two because they would be too controversial. He decides to speak only generally about those unpopular ideas. He then sketches his physics, explaining how the universe could have emerged through purely mechanical laws. He even explains the mechanics of living things, including the human body. He concludes, however, that the “rational soul” cannot be derived from the mechanical laws of nature, and therefore it must have been specially created by God. Finally, in Part Six, Descartes sketches what he thinks would be the most fruitful line of scientific research for the future. The general aim would be to use science to control nature for human benefit, and the specific aim would be to achieve such advances in medical science that human health would be improved dramatically. Making ourselves “the masters and possessors of nature” would be desirable, he explains, not only for the invention of an infinity of devices to enable us to enjoy without any trouble the fruits of the earth and all the commodities

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found there, but also principally for the preservation of health, which is without doubt the foremost good and the foundation of all the other goods of this life; because even the mind depends so very much on the temperament and disposition of the organs of that body that, if it is possible to find some means to render men generally wiser and more clever than they have been up to now, I believe that it is in medicine that one must search for it . . . we could be exempt from an infinity of maladies of both the body and the mind, and even also perhaps the enfeeblement of old age, if we had enough knowledge of their causes and of all the remedies with which nature has provided us. (VI, 2)

Thus, the ultimate conquest of nature would be to use biomedical technology to slow down human aging and thereby prolong the human life span, perhaps even to the point of fulfilling the human dream of conquering death. With this sketch of the Discourse before us, we can think through some of the possible criticisms of Descartes’s conception of reason and of the political implications of that conception. First, we must wonder about Descartes’s assumption that we must choose between absolute certainty and absolute doubt if we seek genuine knowledge. If it is possible for us to doubt the truth of an idea, he insists, then we should completely reject it. For the only solid knowledge rests on principles that are so clearly true that we cannot even imagine how to doubt their truth. But doesn’t this Cartesian account of knowledge contradict our common experience? Doesn’t most of our thinking fall somewhere between absolute certainty and absolute doubt? We look for good reasons to support our beliefs about what the world is like, but it would be unreasonable to demand that these reasons be self-evident and therefore free of all possible doubt. In short, we don’t expect to find absolute truth. Reality is too complex, and human reason too fallible. That doesn’t mean that we have to give up trying to understand things as best we can. We can judge our beliefs as more or less plausible, and thus we can strive to approximate the truth without ever fully grasping it. On this point, Socrates would seem closer to our experience than Descartes. Socrates argued that absolute knowledge is impossible for human beings, and therefore the philosopher must always lovingly pursue knowledge without ever possessing it. Descartes begins by doubting every opinion; Socrates begins by questioning every opinion. Socratic questioning and Cartesian doubting are not the same. For, unlike Descartes, Socrates assumes that common opinions are supported by reasons that can be examined and judged according to their degrees of persuasiveness. Although few, if any, opinions are completely indubitable, some opinions are rationally better than others. In contrast to Socratic knowledge, Cartesian knowledge is not human because it presumes a godlike abstraction from all personal attributes. The Cartesian knower must be empty of all the predispositions that come from culture, education, language and so on. But isn’t it true that our human

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rationality emerges slowly through our childhood as we are shaped by our society? Thus our rationality is a social product. The instruments of reason—such as language and logical rules—were given to us by our society. In our thinking as adults, we begin with premises that reflect our cultural tradition. Of course, as adults we can question traditional ways of thinking and revise them so that they conform better to reality, but we cannot absolutely reject them. Isn’t that one of the lessons of the trial of Socrates—that Socrates’s relentless questioning of Athenian culture was itself a product of his Athenian education? Moreover, isn’t it significant that whereas Socrates philosophizes by talking with his fellow citizens, Descartes withdraws into solitary meditations? Not only does Cartesian rationalism ignore the personal character of the knower, it also ignores the contingent nature of the known. A Cartesian self-evident idea is timeless and fixed, but reality is historical and changeable. Of course, certain abstract features of reality may be eternal and stable: mathematical objects, for example, might reflect some recurrent, abstract patterns in nature. But to demand that all knowledge conform to the procedures of mathematics, as Descartes does, would seem to deny us any rational access to reality in its concreteness and contingency. In fact, Descartes almost concedes that to apply his method, one must sometimes distort reality so that it fits the method. The third rule of his method is “to conduct my thoughts in an order, commencing with the objects the most simple and the easiest to understand, to rise little by little, as by degrees, to the knowledge of the most complex things; and even pretending there is an order among things which do not follow naturally a sequence relative to one another” (II, 9). To attain absolute certainty, Descartes must break complex things into parts simple enough for immediate comprehension; and when things do not naturally conform to this analysis, he must pretend that they do. Since the subjects of human knowledge are diverse, we should expect that different methods of inquiry will work best for different subjects. Why should we assume, as Descartes seems to do, that there is only one method appropriate for all fields of knowledge? After we have considered these general criticisms of Cartesian rationalism, we might still admire Descartes’s grand effort to achieve in all his reasoning the certainty that he found in the thought “I think, therefore I am.” Yet isn’t even this idea highly dubious? “I think, therefore I am.” Is this an immediately self-certifying truth? Or does it, rather, as Friedrich Nietzsche said in Beyond Good and Evil (sections 16–17), illustrate “the prejudices of philosophers”? How does Descartes know that if there is thinking, there must be an “I” to do the thinking? How does he even know what thinking is? Has he perhaps confused thinking with feeling or willing? If my thoughts change from moment to moment, does that mean there is no enduring “I” that remains the same through all these changing thoughts? If so, then what binds these

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thoughts together to make them my thoughts? We could easily continue asking such questions to point out the numerous assumptions buried in Descartes’s seemingly simple intuition, assumptions that are not self-evident, assumptions in need of proof if the Cartesian method is to be upheld. But now the Cartesian pursuit of self-evident principles begins to look endless and thus futile, because every proof depends ultimately on some fundamental assumptions that cannot themselves be proven. Moreover, we could show that Descartes’s assumptions arise from his cultural experience, confirming the claim that he is mistaken in thinking that genuine knowledge must be impersonal. “I think, therefore I am” is a line of reasoning that was originated by Augustine.8 Descartes has drawn his idea from the tradition of Christian culture. More generally, Descartes’s concern for personal identity—his pursuit of the “I” or “self”—reflects the Christian doctrine of the “soul” and the Christian concentration on the inner will or personality. How might a proponent of the Cartesian method defend it against all these criticisms? First, the Cartesian advocate might insist that if we do not reason methodically from self-evident premises, if we reject the possibility of absolute certainty, then we shall have to rely on irrational subjectivity. If all of our reasoning is ultimately founded on assumptions that can never be free from doubt, it would seem that our understanding of reality will always be distorted by arbitrary preferences. Owing to their different personal perspectives, people will disagree about what the world is like, without having any way to resolve their disagreements rationally. But we can avoid this, the Cartesian would argue, by recognizing that rational certainty is attainable through the procedures prescribed by Descartes. This should be clear to us today if we consider the mathematically rigorous knowledge accumulated by modern scientists since the seventeenth century. Doesn’t this show that the Cartesian method has, in fact, succeeded marvelously? Perhaps our only regret should be that the continuing influence of traditional political philosophy has hindered the application of scientific methodology to political science. It may be true, however, that certitude is more difficult to achieve in the study of moral and political action than in the study of the physical universe. Descartes would seem to provide for that in his “provisional morality,” for he acknowledges the need to settle for probability in our knowledge of practical matters as long as certainty is beyond our grasp. But these arguments in defense of Cartesian rationalism leave room for doubt. First, it is not necessarily true that the only alternative to Cartesian certainty is arbitrary subjectivity and relativism. We can judge the plausibility of our fundamental beliefs even when absolute certainty is unattainable. For example, I cannot prove beyond any conceivable doubt that I exist as a thinking being, and that my senses accurately convey the reality of the physical world around me. But unless I have some good reasons to doubt these commonsense assumptions, it is reasonable for me to

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accept them. When Descartes says that he doubted the existence of his body, it is hard not to think that he only pretended to have such a doubt. To seriously entertain such doubts would be a sign not of philosophical rigor but of insanity. In fact, people who doubt the reality of their own bodies are probably suffering from a peculiar kind of brain damage.9 If Descartes really believes in the absolute skepticism that he professes, then we would have to criticize him for his credulity. To his doubt that he has a body, we would have to respond, “If you disbelieve that, you’ll believe anything.”10 The argument that the success of modern mathematics and science validates Cartesian rationalism is inconclusive. Many philosophers of science now question the adequacy of Cartesian thought for explaining modern science. Michael Polanyi, for example, maintained that there is always a personal factor in scientific discovery that cannot be reduced to the formalized procedures demanded by the Cartesian method.11 To the extent that scientific knowledge depends on the personal judgments of a scientific community, such knowledge cannot display the impersonal certitude sought by Descartes. The formal rules of scientific method can be easily learned by any normal student, but knowing these rules cannot by itself generate great scientific discoveries, which come only from the minds of those individuals who have some deep personal insights. In the words of one prominent scientist, “Scientific statements can never be certain; they can be only more or less credible.”12 It is even doubtful that mathematics has fulfilled Descartes’s expectations, because some modern mathematicians have noted the reliance of mathematical reasoning on personal, commonsense intuitions that go beyond formal logic. This has led some to speak of the “loss of certainty” in mathematics.13 (Look back to chapter 3, section 2, of this book.) For our purposes, we should not go any deeper into the purely epistemological problems surrounding the Cartesian method, because we are concerned primarily with the moral and political implications of Descartes’s teaching. Descartes’s liberation of human reason from the traditional sources of intellectual authority could be seen as contributing to a free society in which every person is encouraged to think independently. From another perspective, however, under the restrictions of the Cartesian method, the rationality of moral and political judgment would be either distorted or destroyed. In either case, the consequence would be tyranny.

3. Does Cartesian science promote nihilistic tyranny? It seems unlikely that we could ever answer moral questions with the exactness and certainty required by the Cartesian method. So if we accept the Cartesian account of rationality, we have to conclude that morality cannot be rationally justified, and thus it might seem to be a matter of arbitrary preferences. But if moral judgments rest on arbitrary or irrational

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choices, the moral disagreements in political life might appear to be nothing but contests of wills in which the winners impose their selfish desires upon the losers. Consequently, all political rule would be tyranny, either open or disguised. That line of reasoning is one criticism of Cartesian rationalism in its political applications, and it points to one of the most serious problems in modern politics. We commonly accept natural science, defined in narrow terms, as the standard for all genuine knowledge. But because our moral reasoning is not scientific, we are inclined to deny its rationality, which leaves us with no rational moral standards for guiding political life. We thereby run the risk of allowing our fundamental political choices to be determined by irrational forces. Is it fair to criticize Descartes in this way? Through his “provisional morality,” he protects conventional moral opinions by suspending the methodical skepticism that he applies to all other opinions. Beyond that, his proofs for the existence of the soul and the existence of God would seem to support religious morality. Furthermore, even if Descartes does promote, to some extent, skepticism about moral absolutes, it could be argued in his defense that this fosters the toleration of moral diversity essential to a free society. On the other hand, Descartes explains his “provisional morality” in such a way as to emphasize the arbitrariness of moral judgment. As his second maxim, for instance, he says that he resolved “not to follow less constantly the most doubtful opinions, once I had made up my mind, than if they had been very certain” (III, 3). Does Descartes believe that morality must always depend on “the most doubtful opinions”? To avoid vacillation in our conduct, must we forever pretend that morality is rational? Or does Descartes expect this “provisional” moral code to be replaced at some point by a truly rational morality? His proofs for the existence of the soul and the existence of God might be intended to lay the foundations for a new rational morality. But his manner of presenting those proofs has suggested to some readers that he is not sincere. For example, Descartes’s proof that God must exist, because we could not have created ourselves, depends on the claim that, if we had created ourselves, we would have made ourselves perfect (IV, 4). We know that we have been created by God, because if we had done it ourselves, we would have done a better job! Is Descartes serious? Or is he mocking the traditional proofs for God’s existence? Considering his expressed fear of persecution by the religious authorities, we can understand why some readers have concluded that the theological portions of the Discourse on Method serve “merely as a pretense intended to let the rest of the work get by.”14 In Man a Machine (first published in 1748), Julien Offray de La Mettrie argued that human beings were purely mechanical bodies, without immaterial souls, and that this was the true teaching of Descartes, although he had pretended to believe in immaterial souls as “a clever stylistic trick to make theologians swallow a poison.”15

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Insofar as he felt constrained by the threat of religious persecution, Descartes may have thought that moral skepticism would encourage a healthy toleration for unpopular ideas. But does tolerance follow necessarily from the denial of moral absolutes? Couldn’t we just as easily conclude that if there are no rationally discoverable moral principles, if one person’s moral opinions are just as good as another’s, then there can be no moral restraint upon the intolerance of the powerful in imposing their preferences on the weak? How would we answer Thrasymachus, when he argues that justice is the rule of the stronger, because those strong enough to rule can define justice to serve their selfish interests? With regard to the practical benefits of his method for humanity, Descartes is less concerned with moral improvement than with advances in medical technology. When he considers how he might contribute to practical life, he decides not to offer moral instruction because everyone has his or her own opinions in that area: “As regard that which concerns morals, everyone is so convinced of his own good sense, that one can find as many reformers as heads” (VI, 2). But because Descartes is confident that everyone can agree about the value of physical health, he sketches in grand terms the prospects for scientifically protecting health, even to the point of slowing down the aging process and prolonging the average life span. The use of scientific knowledge to conquer nature for the relief of the human estate—that Cartesian vision has fructified modern culture. And the bountiful fruits of that vision have elevated the human condition. Doesn’t this confirm the practical superiority of Cartesian rationalism over traditional modes of thought? While the ancient and medieval philosophers could only argue endlessly about what is good for human beings, and how to secure the good in political life, the Cartesian scientist has provided us with tangible benefits: through scientific technology, the lives of people around the world have become less painful and more comfortable. Just as the Machiavellian prince conquers fortune through virtue for the security and well-being of his people, the Cartesian scientist conquers nature through method for the comfortable preservation of human life. Both seek not to interpret the world, but to change it. Nevertheless, it has become common for many people to worry about modern technology as a threat to human freedom. Descartes promised that science would show us how to conquer nature, but now it seems that science may give some human beings the power to conquer nature in ways that allow them to rule over other human beings. Does that open the way to an absolutely powerful tyranny?

4. Does Cartesian science promote technocratic tyranny? Because the Cartesian method reduces knowledge to its simplest elements, it is easy to assume that Cartesian scientific knowledge will be equally accessible to all. But even in Descartes’s time, only a few geniuses

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could fully comprehend the “simple truths” of modern science and mathematics. Since then, that gap between scientific knowledge and popular knowledge has widened. There is a danger, therefore, that to enjoy the practical benefits of scientific technology, we shall have to submit totally to the rule of a scientific elite. We would hope that scientists would not use their power for tyrannical purposes, that they would rather promote human freedom. This becomes a problem, however, if the scientific account of the world turns out to deny the reality of human freedom. If the modern scientist seeks to explain everything as determined by mechanical laws, why should human life be exempt from the causal mechanism of the universe? If human actions are determined essentially by the same laws that govern the motions of all matter, why should we believe that human beings have a freedom that distinguishes them from the rest of the universe? Descartes argued that the behavior of living organisms, including their mental activity, could be explained mechanically: an animal is simply a complex machine (V, 9–10). B. F. Skinner and other modern behaviorists have seen Descartes’s argument as an early version of their teaching that all behavior is determined mechanically by environmental conditions.16 Ideas about the freedom and dignity of human beings, Skinner insisted, are simply illusions. Human beings are not radically separated from the rest of nature, and therefore human behavior is determined by external conditions, just like the motion of all physical objects. Skinner advised that we should see this as a reason for hope rather than despair, because it means that natural science can provide us with a “technology of behavior.” As scientists discover the mechanisms of human behavior, they can teach us how to train human beings, so that they behave in ways that are beneficial rather than harmful to society. The scientific conquest of nature can include the conquest of human nature. Skinner exulted: “A scientific view of man offers exciting possibilities. We have not yet seen what man can make of man.”17 But who will be the maker? How can scientists control human behavior if their own behavior is already controlled by their environment? Critics see this as a contradiction: the behaviorists want to exempt themselves from the behaviorist determinism that they apply to all other human beings. Skinner has denied this, explaining that when scientists control behavior, they are themselves as much controlled as those upon whom they act.18 But this has not calmed the fears of those who see in behaviorist psychology one of the many manifestations of scientific tyranny. Behaviorist psychology is not as popular as it once was, because now many psychologists insist that behavioral conditioning by the environment is not enough to explain human thought and action, and they argue that we also need to see how the genetic and neurophysiological mechanisms of evolved human nature shape our responses to our environments. But this would still seem to be a deterministic denial of human free will, in that environmental determinism has been replaced by genetic and neuro-

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physiological determinism. Descartes himself wrote one of the first biological studies of human beings as driven by physiological mechanisms of the brain and body governed by purely material causes, which seemed to deny that there was any immaterial soul exercising free will.19 Modern neuroscience seems to confirm this.20 Descartes seems to escape this problem, however, because he asserts that the “rational soul” of a human being was specially created by God to be free from the mechanical laws governing everything else in the universe. Skinner suggested that Descartes did not believe this, but he was forced to profess it to avoid religious persecution.21 This is what La Mettrie and others had suspected. Although this may be true, Descartes does make a plausible argument for the uniqueness of human rationality as a spiritual power that could never arise as in a machine or an animal.

5. Can machines think? It is conceivable, Descartes suggests, that a machine could be so well designed to resemble an animal that we would have no infallible way to discover the deception. But if a machine were made to look and act like a human being, there would be two ways to show that this was not truly a human being. First, the machine would be unable to use language as a human being does. It could utter words in response to specified signals, but it could not create novel utterances to respond sensibly to whatever was said in its presence. The second sign would be that although it might do some things as well or better than human beings, it would fail in many human tasks. A machine must always be limited by its physical design to perform only a certain number of functions, but the rationality of a human being is a “universal instrument” that is virtually infinite in its functions (V, 9). With recent advances in computer technology, however, isn’t it conceivable that a machine—perhaps a cybernetic robot—could fully replicate human behavior? Descartes’s proposed test—whether a human-like machine could completely fool us into believing it was human—is now identified as the “Turing Test” (named after Alan Turing).22 Today many scientists argue that someday the artificial intelligence of a computer will simulate human intelligence so well that the computer will pass Descartes’s tests.23 Today, we talk with our computers, asking them questions about everything, and they answer us. Computers play chess with us, diagnose our diseases, make most of the buy-sell investment decisions on Wall Street, fly our airplanes, give us psychotherapeutic counseling, and even offer loving companionship to lonely people. We might insist that these are only artificial simulations of human thought. But what’s the difference between a simulated thinker and a real one? Alan Turing invented the concept of the modern digital computer, and like Descartes’s test for the intelligence of a machine, Turing proposed the Imitation Game, in an article in 1950, as the best test of whether a digital

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computer has achieved intelligence comparable to human intelligence.24 Put a computer and a human being in separate rooms. Ask a human being to try to detect which one is the computer by asking questions typed onto pieces of paper slipped under the doors of the rooms. The computer and human being will answer the questions on pieces of paper, with the computer pretending to be a human being, and the human being trying to show that he or she is the human being. If the computer has the intelligence for communicating in language in ways that a good human speaker of the language would interpret as showing human intelligence, then the computer has passed the test. Writing in 1950, Turing thought that digital computers would begin to pass the test by the year 2000. In his article, Turing anticipated all of the major objections to his reasoning that have been developed over the past decades. One of those objections was the argument from consciousness. He quoted from a Professor Jefferson: Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not be the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.25

Turing responded to this argument by suggesting that it is unreasonable, because it would throw us into a solipsism that none of us would accept: This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view, the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. On could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise, according to this view, the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold, but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe “A thinks, but B does not,” whilst B believes “B thinks, but A does not.” Instead of arguing continually over this point, it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.26

Consciousness is mysterious, Turing observed, because while we all have direct subjective access to our own thoughts and feelings, we have no direct access to the conscious subjective experiences of anyone else. We can only indirectly infer the consciousness of other people (or of animals) from their behavior. We must do the same in inferring the conscious thinking of machines. So Turing’s test for the intelligence of digital computers is essentially the same test that we all employ in our lives every day to infer the conscious thoughts and feelings of other human beings.

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In the continuing debate over whether artificially intelligent machines can ever truly think, philosophers like John Searle have restated Jefferson’s argument from consciousness as refuting the Turing Test. Against Searle, proponents of artificial intelligence like Ray Kurzweil have restated Turing’s response to Jefferson’s objection. Searle has insisted that a thought experiment—his Chinese Room Argument—shows that a computer could pass the Turing Test without having any conscious understanding of anything. He explains: “Imagine someone who doesn’t know Chinese—me, for example—following a computer program for answering questions in Chinese. We can suppose that I pass the Turing Test because, following the program, I give the correct answers to the questions in Chinese, but all the same, I do not understand a word of Chinese. And if I do not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing the computer program, neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis.”27 According to Searle, this shows that a computer programmed for communicating in language has syntax but no semantics. The computer can manipulate linguistic symbols according to rules of syntax, but it has no semantic understanding of the meaning of what it says, because it has no conscious experience of anything, no subjective thoughts or feelings. Kurzweil responds by arguing that Searle’s Chinese Room won’t work, because a computer could not perfectly simulate understanding Chinese— pass a Chinese Turing Test—if it did not really understand Chinese. After all, for a human being to persuade us that he or she understands a language, that person must actually understand it.28 Human brains can carry on a conversation about anything, because human brains are amazingly complex. Any computer that could do that would have to be as complex as the human brain. So far, no computer has ever reached that level of complexity, although computers today can translate texts and recognize speech and respond to questions in natural language. Once we understand the complexity of the human brain, and once a computer has replicated the complexity of the human brain, Kurzweil argues, we will recognize a breakthrough in artificial intelligence to human-level intelligence, when a computer can persuade us, through language and other intelligent behavior, that it has conscious thoughts and feelings comparable to those of human beings. Oddly enough, it seems that Searle actually concedes this possibility of creating an “artificial brain” when he writes: An artificial brain has to literally create consciousness, unlike the computer model of the brain, which only creates a simulation. So an actual artificial brain, like the artificial heart, would have to duplicate and not just simulate the real causal powers of the original. In the case of the heart, we found that you do not need muscle tissue to duplicate the causal powers. We do not know enough about the operation of the brain to know how much of the specific biochemistry is essential for duplicat-

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ing the causal powers of the original. Perhaps we can make artificial brains using completely different physical substances as we did with the heart. The point, however, is that whatever the substance is, it has to duplicate and not just simulate, emulate, or model the real causal powers of the original organ. The organ, remember, is a biological mechanism like any other, and it functions on specific causal principles.29

Kurzweil agrees with this: human-level artificial intelligence will have to arise in an artificial mechanical brain that copies the organization and causal powers of the human brain. The evolution of the human brain from the primate brain shows that as the primate brain expanded in size and complexity, it eventually passed over a critical threshold in which new patterns emerged that gave rise to human conscious intelligence. Similarly, we can imagine that in the technological evolution of computers, the increasing complexity of artificial intelligence will eventually pass over a critical threshold to human-level conscious thinking. Like Turing, Kurzweil admits that consciousness is mysterious, because it somehow emerges from the brain; but unlike the brain, consciousness is not objectively observable or measurable, because the subjective experience of consciousness can be directly known only in our personal mental experience. Deciding whether entities outside of us are conscious depends on an indirect inference from the behavior of those entities, and thus we cannot prove that entities outside of us are conscious through objective tests. This explains why the scientific study of consciousness is so difficult. Indeed, Kurzweil concludes that the question of consciousness is ultimately not a scientific question at all, because it’s a question that cannot be answered finally through objectively measurable tests.30 But despite this mystery of consciousness, we can scientifically observe the evolutionary history of the brain and the evolutionary emergence of the human mind in the brain. We are still left wondering, however, whether the next step in evolution is the technological evolution of human-level intelligence in an artificial brain. And if that happens, and if those artificially intelligent machines become more intelligent than we are, must we be ruled by them?

6. Must we soon be ruled by artificially intelligent robots? Beginning with Aristotle, we have assumed that human beings are the most political animals because they are the only rational animals. Previously, we have thought about how politically troublesome it would be to discover that other animals are as rational as we are (recall chapter 2, section 3, of this book). Presumably, it would be even more disturbing if we found that even machines can think as well or better than we do. If rationality is the essential qualification for membership in a political community, how could we deny admission to our intelligent computers? Furthermore, if their intelligence surpassed ours, would we have to submit to

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their rule? Even Plato’s philosopher-kings might have to yield to the new computer-kings.31 This is not as fantastic as it might seem at first. Some prominent scientists—including Stephen Hawking, the famous English theoretical physicist—have begun to warn us that because computers, unlike the human brain, are not limited in their intellectual capacity, we might soon be doomed to be enslaved to the rule of robots having an intelligence far beyond our human intelligence.32 Or, even worse, these super-intelligent rulers of the Earth might decide that the human species needs to be extinguished.33 “I for one welcome our new computer overlords.”

That is what Ken Jennings said when he was defeated in 2011 in playing the television game show Jeopardy by Watson, an artificially intelligent machine built by IBM.34 In Jeopardy, contestants are given clues that are answers to questions, and they must guess the question. IBM had built the chess-playing machine Deep Blue that defeated Gary Kasparov, the reigning world champion in chess, in 1997. This was impressive, but it did not show that AI machines are capable of general intelligence and flexible judgment comparable to that of human beings. Chess is a restricted domain with clear rules and a clear objective (capturing the King). By contrast, success in playing Jeopardy requires general knowledge of history, culture, literature, and science. It also depends on flexibility in interpreting puns, metaphors, and other nuances of language. And it requires strategy in placing bets and taking risks. The IBM scientists decided that if they could build an AI machine that could defeat a Jeopardy champion like Ken Jennings, who was undefeated through 74 games, this would show that artificial intelligence was finally moving towards general intelligence like that of human beings. In playing the game in 2011, Watson did not have the capacities for hearing speech or reading texts, but now it has those capacities. Scientists at IBM want Watson to read massive quantities of medical literature so that it can become a medical diagnostician. It might also read legal texts, so that it can become a legal consultant. In much of the older AI research, it was assumed that intelligence could be reduced to facts and rules—with lots of factual data and rules for inferring conclusions from those facts. But, in fact, much of what we identify as intelligence is intuitive judgment that is acquired by learning from experience, which cannot be completely reduced to rules and facts. Watson’s great achievement is that it can learn on its own. It has accumulated massive quantities of data from encyclopedias, novels, newspapers, and all of Wikipedia—the equivalent of millions of books. Then it surveys this data looking for patterns. It has also surveyed 10,000 old Jeopardy questions and answers, looking for patterns of success and failure. Machine learning from examples allows machines to acquire knowledge that cannot be reduced to facts and rules. For example, the skills for

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speech recognition and reading texts cannot be achieved through a simple set of rules. How do we recognize the letter A? There are many different fonts in which this letter might be printed, and the hand-written letter differs in the handwriting style of different writers. But if you give an intelligent machine millions of examples of the printed and handwritten letter A, and the machine looks for recurrent patterns, it can learn to recognize this letter. Similarly, speakers differ in how they pronounce letters and words, and so there is no clear set of rules for identifying spoken letters and words. But if you give an intelligent machine millions of examples of how a certain letter or word is pronounced by different speakers, the machine can learn to identify the patterns. From his experience in competing against Watson, Jennings decided that Watson was a lot like the human players of Jeopardy. “Watson has lots in common with a top-ranked human Jeopardy player,” Jennings observed. “It’s very smart, very fast, speaks in an uneven monotone, and has never known the touch of a woman.” Jennings also decided that Watson’s way of solving Jeopardy puzzles was similar to his own: The computer’s techniques for unraveling Jeopardy clues sounded just like mine. That machine zeroes in on key words in a clue, then combs its memory (in Watson’s case, a 15-terabyte data bank of human knowledge) for clusters of associations with those words. It rigorously checks the top hits against all the contextual information it can muster: the category name; the kind of answer being sought; the time, place, and gender hinted at in the clue; and so on. And when it fees “sure” enough, it decides to buzz. This is all an instant, intuitive process for a human Jeopardy player, but I felt convinced that under the hood my brain was doing more or less the same thing.35

But does Watson really think? The day after Watson won the Jeopardy competition, John Searle’s answer was no. “IBM invented an ingenious program—not a computer that can think,” he declared. “Watson did not understand the questions, nor its answers, nor that some of its answers were right and some wrong, nor that it was playing a game, nor that it won—because it doesn’t understand anything.”36 Some computer scientists have responded to this question of whether a machine can think by asking, “Can a submarine swim?” Submarines don’t swim the way fish swim or the way some reptiles and mammals swim. But in some ways, submarines swim better than fish, reptiles, and mammals. Similarly, Watson certainly doesn’t think the way human beings or other animals think, but it can solve problems and answer difficult questions about the world, in ways that have persuaded many people that it really is thinking. But can we trust our perception that a machine is thinking? Scientists at IBM are hoping to show in a few years that Watson can pass the Turing Test. Searle has objected, however, that this is not truly a test of humanlevel intelligence.

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The scientists at IBM who built Watson admit that it does not have one crucial feature of human thinking—emotion or feeling. It did not feel any fear of failure when it played Jeopardy. And it did not feel any pride in winning the game. The scientists behind Watson did feel such emotions. When the IBM scientists were testing Watson, they set up Jeopardy games in which Watson was playing against good Jeopardy players. When a comedian hired to host practice matches ridiculed Watson’s more obtuse answers (Rembrandt rather than Pollock for a “late ’40s artist”), David Ferrucci, director of the Watson program, complained: “He’s making fun of a defenseless computer.” When Ferrucci brought his daughters to see one of the practice sessions, one of the girls asked: “Daddy, why is that man being so mean to Watson?” Does human-level intelligence require not just abstract reason but also emotional drives, because human minds care about what they’re thinking and doing? How could emotion be put into a machine? One possibility is that an artificial brain might have to be put into an artificial body that would have something like a neuroendocrine system that would generate emotional experience. Another possibility is building cyborgs—cybernetic organisms—in which human brains and bodies have an interface with intelligent machines. Thus, human intelligence is augmented by machines, but it’s combined with all the normal emotional drives of human beings. In a way, many human beings today have already become cyborgs, because the intelligence of their brains is augmented by machines through interfaces with computers and smart phones. Over the next few years, that brain-machine interface will be put inside the human brain and body through neural implants. Right now, the intelligence of many of us has been augmented by our computers and smart phones. We converse with our machines, and this conversation occurs through brain-machine interfaces in our typing fingers, our speaking voices, our hearing ears, and our seeing eyes. As these interfaces move to the surface of our bodies (as in Google glasses), electronic skin implants, and then inside our brain, we will have ever more direct access to all of human knowledge. Google Earth will give us instant views of every place on Earth. GPS will insure that we are never lost. Google Books will allow us to download every book that has ever been published. When we run out of storage space in our heads, we can store our knowledge in Google cloud computing. This must be what Google cofounder Larry Page had in mind when he said: People always make the assumption that we’re done with search. That’s very far from the case. We’re probably only 5 percent of the way there. We want to create the ultimate search engine that can understand anything . . . some people could call that artificial intelligence. . . . The ultimate search engine would understand everything in the world. It would understand everything that you asked it and give you back the exact right thing instantly.”37

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Page has said that the ultimate goal is for us to merely think of a question, and then we instantly hear or see the answer from our smart search engine. Is it dangerous that we are going to our smart machines for answers to all of our questions? Most of the buy-sell decisions on Wall Street are being made by computers acting autonomously. Most of the infrastructure network of North America (electricity, water, and transportation) is controlled by computer systems connected to the Internet. Doctors are adopting expert computer systems for diagnosing their patients. Computers are piloting our commercial airplanes, with human pilots taking the controls for only a few minutes during a typical flight. Soon, our cars will be completely self-driven. The scientists at IBM are improving Watson so that it can make decisions for us in many areas of life. Computers are providing romantic matchmaking services. Much of the research on robot intelligence is funded by DARPA (The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), which is aimed at creating autonomous robotic weapons for the Department of Defense. Is it good for us that we are increasingly turning over our most important decisions to machines? Or is this a dangerous move towards having our society ruled by machines?38 In his survey of the latest research in AI directed to producing AGI (artificial general intelligence) and then ASI (artificial super-intelligence), James Barrat has concluded that there’s no reason that ASI will care about human beings, that such super-intelligence will be incomprehensible to us, and that this will lead to the extinction of our species.39 He also indicates, however, that only a few AI researchers (like Stephen Omohundro and Eliezer Yudkowsky) share his pessimistic vision of the perils of ASI. Most of the leading proponents of advanced AI research (like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks) are optimistic in their utopian vision of ASI as allowing human beings to finally fulfill the human dream, expressed by early modern philosophers and scientists like Descartes, of completely mastering nature for human benefit, even including human immortality. Even if we could create a super-intelligent species of androids, should we? Would it be immoral for us to do this? For this to be moral, would we have to endow these androids with moral rules? If so, how would we determine those moral rules? Would Descartes’s “provisional morality” be sufficient? Some of the scientists who are now building artificially intelligent robots say that they could program their robots with the moral rules proposed by science fiction author Isaac Asimov. Asimov wrote stories about robots designed to obey “Three Laws of Robotics.” 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.40 But as Asimov indicated in some of his stories, intelligent robots might interpret these laws in ways that could be dangerous. For example, these

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robots might decide that the best way to protect human beings from harming one another would be to put them under the dictatorial rule of robots. This problem of how to program robots with moral rules is not just a speculative issue for science fiction. Much of the research in artificial intelligence and robots is funded by the U.S. Department of Defense for the sake of developing autonomous robotic weapons. Some of that research is exploring the question of how these military robots can be designed to obey the laws of just war.41 Would super-intelligent robots be able to formulate their own rational morality?42 At the very least, if they are capable of rational self-preservation, they might agree to some rules of peaceful cooperation to avoid a war of all against all. If so, then they might learn to live in peace according to the teaching of Thomas Hobbes.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7

See Richard A. Watson, Cogito, Ergo Sum: The Life of René Descartes (Boston: David R. Godine, 2002); and Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche and Modern Times: A Study of Bacon, Descartes, and Nietzsche (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). See Fr. George V. Coyne, S. J., “Galileo and His Times: Some Episodes,” in Br. Guy Consolmagno, S. J., ed., The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 2009), 44–51; and John L. Heilbron, Galileo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See René Descartes, The Geometry, trans. David E. Smith and Marcia L. Latham (New York: Dover, 1954), which originally appeared as an appendix to The Discourse on Method. On the importance of Cartesian geometry in the history of mathematics, see Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 81–92; Morris Kline, Mathematics in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 159–81; and Scott Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 101–17. David Rapport Lachterman (The Ethics of Geometry [New York: Routledge, 1989]) argues that modernity originated in Descartes’s understanding of mathematics as an activity of construction by which human beings become like God. Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Irony of Liberal Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 22–23. I am adopting here the arguments developed by Spragens in his Irony of Liberal Reason. Similar arguments have been advanced by Chaim Perelman, The Idea of Justice and the Problem of Argument (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 109–42; and by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), 29–144. In my references to the text of the Discourse, I indicate the parts with Roman numerals and the paragraphs with Arabic numerals. For example, “I, 9” refers to the ninth paragraph of Part One. I have used the French edition of the Discourse in René Descartes, Discours de la Methode: Texte et Commentaire, ed. Étienne Gilson, 5th ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1976). All the translations are mine. I would also recommend the translation in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). In contrast to Descartes, Aristotle believed the mind was never directly aware of itself; rather, the mind was aware of itself only concomitantly through its direct awareness of external sensible things. See Joseph Owens, “The Self in Aristotle,” Review of Metaphysics 41 (June 1988): 707–22. For the argument that the proper starting point for philosophy is not the mind but things, see Frederick D. Wilhelmsen, Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1956).

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9 10

11

12

13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20

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See Augustine, The City of God, XI, 26; and Augustine, On the Trinity, XV, 22. On Descartes’s transformation of the Augustinian language of inwardness, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 143–58. For the argument that the fundamental assumptions of modern science arose from biblical theology, see Stanley Jaki, The Road of Science and the Ways to God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). See Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 43–54. Compare G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1956), 146: Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. . . . A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is above right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confidence man, that if once we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if once he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind. See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); and Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 22–45. Does all genuine knowledge combine technical knowledge (which can be formulated in rules) and practical knowledge (which cannot be formulated in rules)? See Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London: Methuen, 1962), 1–36, 80–110. For the argument that science—like all knowledge—depends ultimately on our common-sense awareness of reality, see Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 200–202; and Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers (New York: Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1975), 70–74, 84–86, 119–21. Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976), 16. Does every scientific proof depend on certain fundamental assumptions that cannot themselves be proven? If scientists disagree about the fundamental assumptions, is there any rational way to settle their disagreement? When the disagreement is fundamental, we cannot judge scientific theories by how well they conform to the facts because what counts as a fact will differ for each theory. Thomas S. Kuhn has drawn attention to this problem in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See Alfred North Whitehead, “The Philosopher’s Summary,” in Paul Arthur Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1951), 663–700; and Morris Kline, Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Robert Mandrou, From Humanism to Science: 1480–1700 (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 217. For evidence that Descartes wrote carefully to conceal his unpopular teachings from most readers, see Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 10–20. Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine and Man a Plant, trans. Richard A. Watson and Maya Rybalka (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 71. See B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Free Press, 1965), 46–47; and Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 17–18. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 17. See Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 445–49; and Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 144, 180–81, 206–7. See René Descartes, Treatise of Man, trans. Thomas Steele Hall (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). For the debate over whether neuroscience must reject free will and moral responsibility, see Martha J. Farah, ed., Neuroethics: An Introduction with Readings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010); and Judy Illes and Barbara Sahakian, eds., Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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176 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

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See Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 17. See A. M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, eds., The Mind’s I (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 53–68. See David Levy, Robots Unlimited: Life in a Virtual Age (Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2006); and David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008). For the life of Turing, see Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), and Jack Copeland, Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). For Turing’s Imitation Game, see Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (October, 1950): 433–60. For the efforts of artificial intelligence researchers to develop tests for the multiple dimensions of intelligence—including commonsense reasoning, social awareness, and storytelling—see Jia You, “Beyond the Turing Test,” Science 347 (9 January 2015): 116. Turing, “Computing Machinery,” 445–46. Turing, “Computing Machinery,” 446. John Searle, “What Your Computer Can’t Know,” The New York Review of Books, October 9, 2014. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005), 458–69. Searle, “What Your Computer Can’t Know.” See Kurzweil, Singularity, 467, 475. See Justin Leiber, Can Animals and Machines be Persons?—A Dialogue (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985). See Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, and Frank Wilczek, “Stephen Hawking: ‘Transcendence Looks at the Implications of Artificial Intelligence—But Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?’” The Independent, May 1, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/ news/science/stephen-hawking-transcendence-looks-at-the-implications-of-artificialintelligence--but-are-we-taking-ai-seriously-enough-9313474.html For a survey of recent research in artificial intelligence and of how this could lead to human extinction, see James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2013). See Stephen Baker, Final Jeopardy: The Story of Watson, the Computer That Will Transform Our World (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2011). Quoted in Barrat, Our Final Invention, 223–24. Quoted in Barrat, Our Final Invention, 223. Quoted in Barrat, Our Final Invention, 40. For the debate over whether smart machines are making us smarter or dumber, see Nicholas Cage, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (New York: Norton, 2014); and Clive Thompson, Smarter than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better (New York: Penguin Books, 2014). See Barrat, Our Final Invention. See Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1970), 6. See P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2009). See Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen, Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

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7 Individual Rights and Absolute Government

Hobbes’s Leviathan and Behemoth

KEY READINGS Leviathan, chapters 6, 8, 10–11, 13–15, 17–21, 24, 26, 29–30, 33, 42, 46–47; Behemoth in its entirety.

The individualism of the Declaration of Independence—the claim that individuals create government to secure their rights—was a revolutionary idea when it first appeared in seventeenth-century England. From the beginning, however, one problem was paramount. Any government powerful enough to protect individual rights is powerful enough to violate those rights. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) tried to resolve this paradox in his Leviathan. He wanted to unite individual liberty and political authority by taking a middle course between the extremes. In the dedicatory letter at the beginning of his book, he explained his difficult position: “For in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great liberty, and on the other side for too much authority, ’tis hard to pass between the points of both unwounded” (2 [3]).1 During his life, Hobbes saw England torn apart by this conflict between libertarians wanting “too great liberty” and authoritarians wanting “too much authority.” The constitutional history of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was dominated by two related but conflicting developments— the concentration of power in the monarchy and concern for individual freedom. When Henry VIII rejected the authority of the Catholic Church 177

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and became head of the Church of England in 1534, he began a long process of centralizing the power of the state at the expense of traditional feudal institutions. At the same time, traditional sources of authority were subverted by the Protestant insistence on the individual conscience as the guide to conduct. Scientists like Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Francis Bacon were challenging some of the oldest authoritative doctrines about the universe. And, finally, all of this turbulence was magnified by the political conflict between the King and Parliament. Civil war broke out in 1642. King Charles I was executed in 1649. Parliament abolished the monarchy and House of Lords and declared England to be a republic called a “Commonwealth or free State” that lasted from 1649 to 1660. Oliver Cromwell dismissed Parliament in 1653 and took the title of Lord Protector, but he was unable to establish a stable republic. The popular reaction against military dictatorship under Cromwell and the rule of Puritan fanatics led to a restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II in 1660. It was this collapse of traditional institutions and the subsequent battle between modern absolutism and modern individualism that stirred Hobbes to write Leviathan in 1651. In 1602, when he was fourteen years old, Hobbes entered Oxford University. Five years later, he left to join the household of an English nobleman—William Lord Cavendish, later to become Earl of Devonshire. For the rest of his life, he worked for the Earls of Devonshire or for their neighbors and cousins, as a tutor to their children and as a secretary, agent, and advisor. As a tutor, Hobbes was able to study, to travel around Europe, and to meet many of the leading thinkers and political leaders of his time. He developed lifelong interests in ancient Greek and Roman literature, Euclidean geometry, and the new mechanistic physics of Galileo. He devised a grand scheme for writing a series of books in which he would apply the methods of the mathematical sciences to understanding everything according to the mechanistic laws of matter in motion. Because the political part of this teaching seemed to support the monarchic position, the increasing power of Parliament forced him to flee to Paris in 1640. Later, the royal heir, Prince Charles (Charles II), was also compelled to go to Paris, and Hobbes tutored him. When Leviathan was published in 1651, two years after the execution of the King Charles I, those around Charles II accused Hobbes of justifying the parliamentary revolution; and Hobbes had to return to England. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Hobbes regained the King’s favor. Yet Leviathan continued to be controversial, with many people condemning it as an atheistic book. The King prohibited Hobbes from publishing a new edition of the book in England. At Oxford University, the book was condemned and burned. In 1703, it was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books. From the beginning, Leviathan has been interpreted in diverse ways. Among modern scholars, there have been at least four major kinds of

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interpretative arguments.2 Traditionally, interpreters have seen Hobbes’s political teaching as a deduction from the mechanistic physics of Galileo.3 But others have argued that Hobbes’s novel teaching about the primacy of individual rights was not derived from the new science.4 C. B. Macpherson, for example, claims that Hobbes assumed a bourgeois conception of individualism consistent with the interests of the rising commercial class in England. A third group of scholars have regarded Hobbes’s moral philosophy as a product of the atomistic metaphysics of late medieval nominalism.5 Hobbes shows his nominalism when he says there is “nothing in the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of them individual and singular” (ch. 4, 19 [26]). It seems to follow from this that whatever we know of the order of things in the world, including political order, is an artificial creation of our minds using language for naming and organizing experience. Finally, a few readers have seen Hobbes’s work as part of the natural law tradition as represented by Thomas Aquinas.6 Despite these different points of view, most readers would agree that Hobbes sought in Leviathan to reconcile individual freedom and political authority. Many readers have concluded that Hobbes fails in this because the absolute power of his sovereign does not leave much room for individual liberty. This is suggested by the title of the book. As Hobbes explains, “Leviathan” is the biblical name for a great sea monster (probably a whale) that is powerful enough to subdue all other earthly creatures (ch. 28, 209 [221]). If Hobbes wishes to secure human freedom, why does he argue for submitting to the rule of a political monster? Considering the selfish passions of people, Hobbes insists, their fear of the Leviathan of government is the only reliable way to keep peace among them. Thus Hobbes insists on the need for a government powerful enough to protect individual rights against the aggression of others. But don’t those rights also need to be protected against a government powerful enough to oppress them? This dilemma in the modern understanding of rights continues to be a problem in American political debate.7 On the one hand, we might emphasize the need for an energetic government to secure the individual rights of all citizens against the attacks of their fellow citizens. Using the terminology of contemporary American politics, those who favor this type of government would call themselves liberals or progressives. On the other hand, we could insist on limiting the powers of government so that it cannot deprive citizens of their individual rights. Proponents of this form of restricted government would call themselves conservatives or libertarians. But aren’t there plausible arguments on both sides of this debate? Don’t these two positions have the same goal—the promotion of individual rights? Because Hobbes’s political teaching is the classic formulation of the theory of individual rights, perhaps he can clarify our dilemma. A fundamental assumption of the modern theory of rights as developed by Hobbes is that political order is artificial rather than natural, and

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this must be so because of natural human selfishness. Because it is this view of human nature that makes it difficult for us to unite liberty and authority, we must begin by asking whether we are as viciously selfish as Hobbes says.

1. Are human beings too selfish to be naturally political animals? “Life,” Hobbes explains, “is but a motion of limbs” (Intro., 5 [9]). One sustains one’s life, therefore, by moving endlessly. The only happiness we can know is unimpeded, restless motion. There is no final end, no completed fulfillment in human action. “The felicity of this life, consisteth not in the repose of a mind satisfied,” but in “a continual progress of the desire from one object to another” (ch. 11, 63 [70]). One must always desire more than one has because there is always the concern about future losses. Consequently, Hobbes puts as “a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death,” because a man “cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more” (ch. 11, 64 [70]). In this unceasing pursuit of happiness, one’s mind becomes a tool for calculating the best means of satisfying appetites. “For the thoughts are to the desires, as scouts, and spies, to range abroad, and find the way to the things desired” (ch. 8, 46 [53]). In seeking to preserve life, however, people find themselves solitary but not alone. People are solitary because they cannot trust anyone else to care about their life as much as they do, but they are not alone because they must compete with others for the resources necessary to life. Thus the natural selfishness of human beings must create unremitting conflict. Hobbes identifies three sources of conflict—competition, diffidence, and glory. “The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third for reputation” (ch. 13, 81 [88]). Without a common power over them to settle disputes, human beings must become hostile to one another, because they compete for limited material resources, because their mistrust of one another forces them to try to protect themselves by dominating the others, and because some people seek the glory of appearing superior to others. The natural human condition, therefore, must be a war of each person against all others, in which the paramount virtues are force and fraud, and “every man is enemy to every man” (ch. 13, 82 [89]). In this state of war, where each lives only by strength and skill, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much

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force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. (ch. 13, 82 [89])

If this is the natural human state, where is Aristotle’s natural human being, who by nature is a political animal endowed with speech and reason? Reversing Aristotle’s reasoning from human biology, Hobbes argues that the natural rationality of human beings makes it impossible for them to be naturally social animals like bees and ants. Reason and speech allow human beings to disagree about what is good and to distinguish their selfish interests from the common interests of the community. Consequently, human rationality promotes conflict rather than harmony (ch. 17, 111 [119]). The problem for Hobbes is not that all people are unlimited in their appetites, but that because some are, all others must act to protect themselves (ch. 13, 81[87–88]). Because only a few are naturally aggressive, it is possible for others to agree on the laws of reason as secured by government to defend themselves against the aggressive few. Is Hobbes correct? Are human beings so naturally aggressive that they cannot live together in peace? Does Hobbes show us that Machiavelli was right in teaching that political order requires a brutally coercive government that forces people to obey the law? In 1672 Richard Cumberland published the first defense of Aristotle’s understanding of political animals against Hobbes’s critique. He argued that all the natural causes that incline animals to social cooperation—such as parental care, mutual aid, and reciprocal exchange—are just as strong in human beings as they are in some other animals. He saw the human capacities for speech and reason as the natural instruments by which human beings become more political than the other political animals.8 One obvious objection to what Hobbes says here about human beings in the state of nature without government is that this has never existed. Hobbes answers that, on the contrary, the European explorers and settlers in America have seen that the American Indians still live in this state: “the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner” (ch. 13, 83 [89]). In such a state, human beings are naturally equal, Hobbes thinks. He recognizes, of course, that human beings are naturally different in mind and body. But these natural differences are not so great as to give anyone unchallenged dominance over others. He explains: “Nature has made men so equal in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the stron-

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gest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself” (ch. 13, 80 [87]). There is some confusion in this description of the state of nature. On the one hand, Hobbes speaks of it as a “solitary” life, as if there were no social life at all, and it’s hard to imagine how this could be—how human beings could exist as purely solitary individuals. Yet, on the other hand, he recognizes “the government of small families” as bound together by “natural lust,” and he also sees that the weak can form a “confederacy” to overcome the strong. So it seems that even without formal governmental authority, human beings would have a social order based on familial ties and social alliances. If so, then Hobbes’s state of nature conforms to the kind of social life lived by nomadic hunting-gathering foragers in stateless societies. This is the kind of life shown by some of the American Indians, and it has been extensively studied by modern anthropologists, who recognize that for most of human evolutionary history—over hundreds of thousands of years—human beings lived in such foraging societies.9 Such societies were organized through customary rules enforced through social pressure. But in the absence of formal government, this informal enforcement often led to violent feuding and warfare, which Hobbes might see as confirming his argument that the natural aggressiveness of human beings needs to be tamed by the fear of a sovereign government. Rousseau, as we shall see in chapter 9, challenged this Hobbesian depiction of human nature. The issues in the dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau continue to be debated today. Do we have a natural instinct for aggression? Or do we learn aggression from our cultural environment? Is war a cultural invention rather than a natural instinct? Could we produce a more peaceful, harmonious social life if we taught our children to be more cooperative and less competitive? These are some of the critical questions that we shall raise in considering Rousseau’s thinking. Here we shall only sketch the issues. Hobbes’s depiction of the state of nature as a state of war is inaccurate, Rousseau complains, because he assumes that savage people have all the passions of civilized people. Hobbes looks at those around him, and then he imagines what they would be like in a state of anarchy without government. But Rousseau insists that the insatiable desires that drive civilized people into aggressive conflict are products of civilization that were not present in the savage state. The simple desires of savage people were so easily satisfied that they had no motive to fight with one another. Rousseau concludes, therefore, that the earliest stage of human development was a state of peace. Indeed, the civilized people of today would be happier if they could somehow restore some features of that earlier savage way of life. Modern versions of Rousseau’s argument have been developed by some anthropologists who contend that aggression is not a natural instinct but rather a product of a certain kind of culture.10 Some specifically blame

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bourgeois or capitalist culture for fostering aggressive, competitive behavior. Foraging societies of hunter-gatherers that apparently cultivate peaceable, cooperative conduct could serve as models for reforming our society. Similarly, some interpreters of Hobbes charge that he was an apologist for the capitalist class that gained power in seventeenth-century England.11 His description of human nature, it is claimed, is actually a description of the type of figure who dominates a market society—the acquisitive individual who is unrestrained by traditional social bonds in the selfish pursuit of wealth. And yet, even the most unrelenting critics have conceded that Hobbes is right about the desire for self-preservation as a primary motive for human action. We might doubt, however, that this is the only motive for human beings, to which all other motives must be reduced. We should remember Aquinas’s hierarchy of natural human inclinations: although self-preservation comes first, human beings are distinguished from other animals by some higher inclinations. Self-preservation is important for human beings as the precondition for everything else. In any list of human rights, the right to life must come first. But what is the self we want to preserve? What kind of life do we want? What is it about a life that makes it worth living? While we survive, we must do something. And surely the purpose of all that we do cannot be simply to survive. Shouldn’t we say that what we seek is not just life but human life—the sort of life appropriate to us as human beings? And doesn’t that lead us to the higher motives of life—love, honor, knowledge, and so on? Can Hobbes be defended against such criticisms? Hobbes recognizes that we may find it hard to believe that nature should “dissociate, and render men apt to invade and destroy one another” (ch. 13, 82 [89]). But he thinks this is the only conclusion we can draw from our general knowledge of human passions or from our particular experience with human beings. If we have no reason to fear others, Hobbes asks, why then do we lock our doors at night? Hobbes invites his reader, in the Introduction to the Leviathan (6 [10]), to look within. Considering “the similitude of the thoughts and passions of one man, to the thoughts and passions of another,” a man who looks into himself “shall thereby read and know, what are the thoughts and passions of all other men.” Hobbes, therefore, presents his book as a product of his own self-examination, and he thinks the only demonstration of the truth of his account of human nature will come from the reader’s own introspection. The problem, of course, is that the reader may be reluctant to admit that what is seen there is ugly. This resembles Freudian analysis. In fact, Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic probing into the deepest levels of the human mind seems to confirm Hobbes’s view of human nature. For like Hobbes, Freud concludes that the fundamental aim of civilization is to restrain “man’s natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each.”12

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Is what both Hobbes and Freud see in themselves and others a reflection more of the bourgeois culture identified by Rousseau and Marx than of universal human nature? A defender of Hobbes could reply that living in a modern bourgeois society allowed people to see the reality of human relations that had been previously hidden under traditional illusions. In a market society, we are forced to throw away all the artificial veils that would hide the individual self-interest at the root of every social order. Even Marx argues that in the Communist Manifesto. The bourgeoisie “has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations,” because it has drowned all the illusions of religion and chivalry “in the icy water of egotistical calculation.” All of the traditional sources of authority disappear, which leaves each to face life as an isolated individual. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”13 Moreover, there is some anthropological evidence that the individualism of a modern society does, indeed, manifest a universal human inclination. Earlier (chapter 2, section 4), we considered Colin Turnbull’s study of the Ik, an African tribe whose social life was dissolved as people were driven to brutality by the fear of starvation. Turnbull sees a parallel between the Ik and our society that confirms Hobbes’s claims: Our society has become increasingly individualistic. . . . In our world, where the family has also lost much of its value as a social unit, and where religious belief and practice no longer bind us into communities of shared belief, we maintain order only through the existence of the coercive power that is ready to uphold a rigid law, and by an equally rigid penal system. The Ik, however, have learned to do without coercion, either spiritual or physical. It seems that they have come to a recognition of what they accept as man’s basic selfishness, of his natural determination to survive as an individual before all else. This they consider to be man’s basic right, and at least they have the decency to allow others to pursue that right to the best of their ability without recrimination and blame.14

Should we say that the Ik reverted to what Hobbes would call a state of nature? Contrary to what is often assumed by his critics, Hobbes’s insistence on self-preservation as the strongest of human desires does not deny the importance of the higher goods of human life. Self-preservation is not so much the end of life as it is the necessary means to all human ends. Hobbes indicates, for example, that when the preservation of life is insecure, there are “no arts; no letters; no society” (ch. 13, 82 [89]). When government secures peace, that provides the leisure necessary for the arts and sciences, the pursuit of which elevates human beings above the other animals (ch. 3, 15 [21]; ch. 4, 18 [24]; ch. 6, 35 [42]). The philosophic life was impossible until the development of agriculture, cities, and centralized states provided the leisure required for a few people to become

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philosophers. “Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure” (ch. 46, 436 [459]). To achieve the peace that makes civilized life and human excellence possible, individuals must agree to restraints on their selfish aggressiveness. But many of Hobbes’s readers have doubted his explanation of how this is done.

2. Can selfish human beings create political order by consenting to a social contract? This question points to a paradox in Hobbes’s reasoning. Because the selfish passions of human beings incline them to injure one another, they must agree to obey a government that will keep the peace. But if selfish human beings in the state of nature cannot trust one another, then how can they be certain that one another’s promise to obey the government they have established will be upheld? There seems to be a circularity in Hobbes’s argument that government was established by consent of the governed through a social contract. Individuals keep their promises only when there is a government to enforce them, but a government comes into being only when people reliably promise to obey its laws. If promise keeping is a consequence of government, how can it also be the prerequisite of government? What could motivate someone in the state of nature to be the first person to keep his word in obeying the social contract? Hobbes seems to say that this would be foolish, because “he that performeth first, has no assurance the other will perform after,” and therefore “he which performeth first, does but betray himself to his enemy” (ch. 14, 89–90 [96]). Some opponents of Hobbes point to this problem as an indication of the flaws in any attempt to explain political authority as created by the consent of selfish individuals. If people are inclined to betray one another whenever it is selfishly beneficial to do so, then a social contract is impossible. But if they are not, then the contract is unnecessary. This problem must be solved if we want to defend the idea of governments “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Both the passions and reason, Hobbes explains, help us to escape the state of war (ch. 13, 84 [90]). A passionate fear of death and desire for the comforts of life incline us to peace, and our reason suggests rules of conduct that can secure peace if all obey them. These rules are the laws of nature that “conduce to the preservation of man’s life on earth” (ch. 15, 96 [103]). The first and most fundamental law of nature is that each should seek peace as far as it is attainable, but may resort to war when peace is unattainable (ch. 14, 85 [92]). This leads to the second law of nature, that each should give up the right to all things, when others do so also, to attain peace. From these two laws of nature, Hobbes infers seventeen other laws concerning the moral virtues and the social procedures necessary to the social contract. Even those people with limited intellectual

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capacity can understand the general principle of these laws as summed up in the Golden Rule—doing to others as we would want that they do to us, or (in its negative form) not doing to others what we would not want to have done to us (ch. 15, 103 [109]; ch. 17, 109 [117]. In support of Hobbes’s argument here, we might notice that the Golden Rule has been embraced by many moral, religious, and philosophic traditions around the world throughout history.15 Hobbes warns, however, that relying on mere promises of cooperation in obeying these laws of nature is foolish, because this assumes that individuals will keep their promises even when this is contrary to their interests. Rational self-interest does dictate that one submit to social order by sacrificing one’s absolute liberty for the sake of peace, but only when everyone else is forced by fear of punishment to make the same sacrifices. People are bound by “bonds, that have their strength, not from their own nature, for nothing is more easily broken than a man’s word, but from fear of some evil consequence upon the rupture” (ch. 14, 86 [93]). “Covenants, without the sword,” Hobbes insists, “are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (ch. 17, 109 [117]). In Hobbes’s social contract, one’s word is not an adequate bond. Fear of the sword—fear of the painful punishment if one cheats—is the only reliable bond. People must give up their individual right to independent judgment to establish one common power over them all, “as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner” (ch. 17, 112 [120]). A commonwealth is established by consent when all agree unanimously to accept whatever sovereign representative is selected by the majority (ch. 18, 113 [121]). Hobbes’s social contract covers not only the institution of a government by those who choose the sovereign, but also the submission of all to a conqueror. When people are conquered and submit to the conqueror out of fear, they have thereby consented to that government just as fully as if they had freely selected the sovereign without coercion (ch. 20). Regardless of whether they are established by institution or by conquest, all governments have the same end. For there is only one purpose for which it would be in the rational self-interest of all to obey a government: to preserve peace by defending the people both from foreign enemies and from the injuries that they might do to one another (ch. 29, 213 [224–25]). The general principle of Hobbes’s social contract is that to rationally maximize our self-interest at the expense of others is actually irrational, because in the long run we can best promote our self-interest by respecting the rights of others so long as they, in turn, respect our rights, because this allows us to engage in peaceful cooperation with others in ways that are mutually beneficial to all. If we lived without a government, our individual

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liberty would be unlimited but insecure. Living under a government, our liberty is secure but limited. Hobbes assumes that in consenting to government we are all naturally equal to one another. Each person has the same right to consent, and no person’s consent carries any greater weight than another’s. We know, however, that some people deny the principle of natural political equality. Some (like Socrates) would argue that it is natural for those who are wiser to rule those who are less wise. Others (like Thrasymachus) would argue that it is natural for the stronger to rule the weaker. Why shouldn’t those naturally superior in mind or body rule those naturally inferior in such respects? Hobbes dismisses the claims of physical strength by noting the rough equality of all people in their mortality. “For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself” (ch. 13, 80 [86-87]). The English Revolution provided vivid illustrations of Hobbes’s point. The victories won by Cromwell’s armies and the beheading of the King make it clear that the rule of kings and aristocrats could not depend on physical strength. Of course, Machiavelli had already warned princes that their vulnerability to assassination made it necessary to avoid the hatred of the people. And the invention of gunpowder had a marvelous leveling effect on social relations. It is not as easy, however, to dismiss superior intelligence as an entitlement to political rule. Nevertheless, Hobbes denies Aristotle’s claim that some are by nature more worthy to rule because of their superior wisdom. For there are very few so foolish, that had not rather govern themselves, than be governed by others: nor when the wise in their own conceit, contend by force, with them who distrust their own wisdom, do they always, or often, or almost at any time, get the victory. If nature therefore have made men equal, that equality is to be acknowledged: or if nature have made men unequal; yet because men that think themselves equal, will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted. And therefore for the ninth law of nature, I put this, that every man acknowledge another for his equal by nature. The breach of this precept is pride. (ch. 15, 100–101 [107])

Here is the origin of that opinion commonly expressed in liberal societies that each person is just as good as any other, and anyone who claims to be better than others is guilty of elitist pride. Aren’t there some good, commonsense objections to Hobbes’s reasoning? Why shouldn’t we agree with Socrates that those who know how to rule should rule, and therefore those who are wise about political things should rule those who are less wise? Isn’t it absurd to say that because any fool can kill a wise individual, fools are politically equal to the wise? What does the capacity to kill have to do with the capacity for political rule? Because a lion can kill a human, is a lion the political equal of a human?

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A defender of Hobbes might begin by emphasizing that the equal right to consent does not mean an equal right to participate in making laws or particular political decisions. Hobbesian consent of the governed is consent to be ruled by a sovereign who represents the subjects. The right of the people to consent to government is not a right to make policy but a right to decide who will represent the people in making policy. Popular consent, therefore, does not require that the people have a broad knowledge of how to rule. Perhaps the crucial point is not that all are equal in their knowledge or intelligence, which is obviously untrue, but that “there are very few so foolish, that had not rather govern themselves, than be governed by others.” Anyone with at least the minimal rationality of a mature adult has a desire for self-rule that cannot be denied without denying human nature itself. Despite the obvious differences among human beings that make some superior to others, no person is good enough to rule any other person without that person’s consent. Some other animals—such as the social insects—conform to a social order by instinct, but the rationality that distinguishes a human being from other animals dictates that human communities arise from the consent of their members (see ch. 17, 111 [119–20]). Moreover, that trying to rule people without their consent is contrary to human nature is confirmed by their natural rebelliousness: “because men that think themselves equal, will not enter into conditions of peace, but upon equal terms, such equality must be admitted” (ch. 15, 100–101 [107]). Another objection, however, to Hobbes’s idea of consenting to government is that it is founded on a fictional state of war. If in fact human beings have never existed as absolutely free individuals without a government, isn’t it absurd to say that they created governments by their consent? Hobbes answers with three observations (ch. 13, 83 [89–90]). First, he says some primitive peoples do, in fact, live in a state of war. Second, he says that we see a state of war whenever the fall of a government leads to civil war. Third, even if individuals were never in a state of war with one another, sovereign rulers are always in such a state in their dealings with one another: because there is no world government, governments are always either at war or in a posture of war toward one another. On this last point, we should notice that some contemporary “realist” theories of international relations do assume that the nations of the world are in a Hobbesian state of war with one another, because the international arena of politics is an “anarchical society.”16 Hobbes’s first point suggests that a study of primitive cultures would verify the movement from a state of war through a social contract as a fact of human history. His second point, on the other hand, would imply that the social contract is useful as an analytical tool for explaining politics even if it is not historically true. To evaluate the first point we could seek the guidance of modern anthropologists. The second point bears on some recent theories in the social sciences.

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The reports of cultural anthropologists would seem, at least at first glance, to contradict Hobbes’s explanation of the origin of government.17 Hobbes seems to assume that the state arose from an agreement among solitary individuals, though there is no anthropological evidence to support this. Instead, the evidence indicates that the political development of humankind has been a movement from stateless societies to the state. A stateless society is a primitive social order founded on small groups organized by kinship without any formal governmental institutions. A state arises when power and authority are centralized into a formal institutional structure. Throughout most of the biological and cultural evolution of humankind (for over a hundred thousand years), human beings lived in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers with informal leaders but no governments. Then, beginning about 10,000 years ago, agriculture made it possible for some human beings to settle into larger tribes or clans based on extended kinship ties with decentralized leadership by prominent individuals, but with no centralized government. These clan societies have been prevalent for thousands of years, and they still exist today in many parts of the world (such as Somalia and Afghanistan) where they can rule when central governments become weak.18 The first centralized state probably arose in Mesopotamia around 4000 to 3000 BC, but throughout recorded history, down to the present, societies of hunter-gatherers and tribal clans living without formal laws and governments have persisted. Therefore, insofar as Hobbes suggests that social order is impossible without government, he is mistaken. And on this point, modern anthropology confirms one of Rousseau’s major criticisms of Hobbes. Some passages in Leviathan, however, imply that Hobbes viewed the pre-political condition of human beings as based on a primitive form of government. As we have seen, he refers to the American Indians of the seventeenth century, for example, saying that although they have no government strictly speaking, they do have “the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust” (ch. 13, 83 [89]). In another passage concerning the natural condition without government, he says: “where men have lived by small families, to rob and spoil one another, has been a trade . . . and men observed no other laws therein, but the laws of honor” (ch. 17, 109 [118]). He even indicates that a large family that is not part of a commonwealth might be considered “a little monarchy” (ch. 20, 133 [142]; chap. 22, 153 [163]; ch. 30, 223 [235]). So Hobbes could accept the idea of stateless societies organized by familial bonds or extended kinship and living by customary “laws of honor.” Hobbes doubts, however, that “the government of small families” is a good way to secure order. The reasons he gives for this judgment are sustained by the anthropological evidence. He complains that familial groups do a poor job of keeping the peace either among themselves or in defense against other groups (ch. 20, 133–34 [142]). Societies governed by numerous familial groups tend to fall into continual, bloody feuding (ch.

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22, 153–55 [162–64]). Modern research suggests that as these weaknesses became acute, it was advantageous for people to allow centralized governmental institutions to form.19 People today who live in bands or tribes without a centralized government often have remarkably high homicide rates that can be reduced if they come under a centralized legal system.20 There is also anthropological support for Hobbes’s claim that stateless societies cannot promote the agricultural and commercial development necessary for high civilization (ch. 13, 82 [89]). We could also find in many anthropological case studies confirmation for Hobbes’s “laws of nature.” Even where there is no centralized government to make and enforce laws, Hobbes explains, “reason suggesteth convenient articles of peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement” (ch. 13, 84 [90]). He lists nineteen of these articles of peace, and many of them conform closely to the informal rules for settling disputes that have been found in primitive societies with no formal institutions of government. For example, three of the laws of nature near the end of Hobbes’s list dictate that disputes be submitted to judgment by impartial arbitrators (ch. 15, 102 [108–9]). In fact, the practice of arbitration is common among primitive groups.21 Disputants are always free to stubbornly resist the arbitrated settlement in the hope of winning what they want through physical force, but they will be punished by their group, perhaps by being ostracized from the group or by being killed. Violent feuds are usually costly to everyone involved, and therefore everyone has an interest in resolving conflicts peacefully, although the lack of a central authority can make it hard to avoid such feuds. Another way to achieve peace in primitive societies without centralized government is the exchange of gifts. Anthropologists have observed elaborate procedures for the giving and returning of gifts by which bonds of reciprocity are maintained among groups that otherwise would fight one another. Some anthropologists—for example, Marshall Sahlins—have recognized this as a primitive version of Hobbes’s social contract.22 Hobbes’s fourth law of nature is that each should show gratitude for gifts received by giving something in return. This is necessary because anyone who gives away something expects to receive some benefit in return, and if this expectation is frustrated, “there will be no beginning of benevolence, or trust; nor consequently of mutual help; nor of reconciliation of one man to another; and therefore they are to remain still in the condition of war” (ch. 15, 99 [105]). Hobbes argues, however, that only through the establishment of centralized government is the state of war fully escaped, because informal customs of reciprocity cannot suffice for securing a stable peace. Although he concedes that there can be a precarious social order without a central government, he insists that such a condition would still be a state of war, insofar as war is understood to consist “not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary” (ch. 13, 82 [88–89]).

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And yet, how is it possible—to restate the fundamental question—for radically selfish human beings to accept the restraints imposed by a central government? Is it sufficient to assume that all people will regard the sacrifices demanded by government as serving their own long-run selfinterest? We have seen how this problem arises in the anthropological study of primitive societies. The same Hobbesian problem is perhaps even clearer in Darwinian biology. If human beings have evolved through individual competition in what Charles Darwin called “the struggle for existence,” how can we explain the cooperative behavior that makes social life possible? This has become one of the central issues in the fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, in which the biological theories of human sociality manifest a Hobbesian logic.23 First, cooperation among closely related individuals can be rooted in genetic evolution. This corresponds to what Hobbes calls “the natural lust” underlying “the government of small families.” A natural inclination to aid one’s relatives would be favored by natural selection if this aid promotes the transmission of one’s genes into the next generation. Sometimes individuals maximize their contributions to the gene pool by sacrificing their own reproductive opportunities to promote the reproduction of their kin. In a beehive, for example, the queen is the only female who reproduces. All the other females care for their siblings rather than reproducing and caring for their own offspring. This is what evolutionary theorists call kin selection. Of course, this could not explain the social bonds in large communities of unrelated individuals. Social cooperation can be purely egoistic, however, even when the cooperating individuals are unrelated. To the extent that human beings are interdependent, it is in the rational self-interest of each to cooperate through reciprocal exchanges for mutual benefit. Edward Wilson, one of the founders of sociobiology, speaks of this kind of cooperation as founded on a social contract, of which only human beings are capable: “The perfection of the social contract has broken the ancient vertebrate constraints imposed by rigid kin selection. Through the convention of reciprocation, combined with a flexible, endlessly productive language and a genius for verbal classification, human beings fashion long-remembered agreements upon which cultures and civilizations can be built.”24 The parallel with Hobbes’s teaching is clear (see ch. 17, 111–12 [119– 20]). Even if humans are not as naturally social as are other animals, they are naturally inclined to artificially create social order through their cognitive ability for making agreements with one another. But doesn’t that same intellectual capacity for making promises include the ability for clever cheating? If those in Hobbes’s state of nature are rational egoists, concerned only with calculating the best way to promote their own selfish interests, why wouldn’t they try to enter the social contract dishonestly with the hope of becoming free riders? The smartest ones would seem likely to take advantage of their fellow citizens by enjoying the benefits of living in a cooperative society without assuming their fair share of

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the burdens. Successful thieves, for example, would steal from others while having legal protection for their own property. Again we confront Thrasymachus’s proposal that it is more beneficial to appear just than to be just. Hobbes sees this difficulty because he warns that a person is ruined by keeping promises faithfully while others break theirs with impunity (ch. 15, 103 [110]). But if everyone tries to cheat, the social contract is impossible. The very distrust that makes the contract necessary to secure peace will also dissolve it as quickly as it is formed. Some critics of Hobbes see this as indicating the futility of his attempt to derive social order from egoistic individualism. Talcott Parsons, for instance, an influential American sociologist, criticized Hobbes for not recognizing the importance of a “common value system.” It is the sharing of norms or values, Parsons argued, that establishes and maintains a society; a society of utterly selfish individuals is impossible.25 In reply to this sort of criticism, the Hobbesian could explain that Hobbes does give weight to a “common value system” as constituted by the “laws of nature” that he lists in chapters 14 and 15 of Leviathan. Explaining human nature as essentially selfish does not deny the reality of the social virtues. On the contrary, Hobbes sees that it is in the interest of all individuals to live in a society that allows people to enjoy the benefits of peaceful cooperation with each other. People know that, to secure this beneficial outcome, they have to protect themselves from the temptation to cheat; and they do this by establishing a coercive government. Here, then, is Hobbes’s solution to the problem of the Thrasymachean free rider. Where justice is defined by laws enforced by a common power through coercion, it is rational to be just. Hobbes concedes that a clever lawbreaker can procure greater benefits than the law-abiding citizen, at least in the short run (ch. 15, 94–96 [101–2]). But if the sovereign is rigorous in detecting and punishing crimes, the risks of criminal activity become too costly for those who might be tempted to become criminals. Hobbes engages in the same kind of cost-benefit analysis that some contemporary economists have applied to political problems. Like Hobbes, these economists assume that each individual is a “rational maximizer” of personal interests. Therefore, they are inclined to agree with Hobbes that social order must be explained as derived from a social contract that is mutually beneficial to all.26 (Compare the “prisoner’s dilemma” described in chapter 9, section 4 of this book.) Economists have also applied Hobbes’s reasoning to some contemporary economic and political issues. Consider, for example, ecological problems, such as overpopulation, pollution of water and air, global warming, and the scarcity of important natural resources. In each case, Hobbes might argue, governmental coercion is necessary to avoid the catastrophe that would result if every person was free to pursue personal interests. For example, the people who live along a river might find it beneficial to use the river to dispose of their wastes. But at some point, the river will

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become so polluted that everyone will be harmed. How can they prevent that? If conscientious individuals restrict their use of the river for waste disposal, they will be exploited by others who refuse to exercise the same self-restraint, because it’s in each person’s interest to get as much immediate use out of the river as possible, even though this will create a future disaster. This same logic applies to any natural resource that is available to all without anyone being held responsible for its proper conservation. Garrett Hardin, a prominent ecologist, has called this “the tragedy of the commons.” The Hobbesian solution is clear: allow a government to coercively restrict individual freedom in the use of natural resources to promote conservation for the long-range benefit of all. In fact, many experts today think that the only escape from environmental catastrophe is, in Hardin’s words, “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon by the majority of the people affected.”27 Would it be in everyone’s personal interest to agree to such coercive limits on individual freedom? Presumably it would be if the environmental disaster were so imminent that it threatened the present generation. But if the disaster is so far in the future that only future generations will suffer, why should those living today sacrifice anything to avoid that future calamity? Why should a society preoccupied with self-preservation worry about the future preservation of the human species, or even of its own descendants? Again, we see a possible weakness in the Hobbesian establishment of social order on egoistic individualism. A rational egoist might sacrifice present pleasures to attain even greater pleasures in the future. But it is not clear that such enlightened selfishness can support social life when it requires the sacrifice of one’s own life for the good of others. The death of a soldier fighting in defense of his or her country is an obvious example. Does social and political order require an agreement on some things as being more valuable than individual lives? Wasn’t that suggested by President John F. Kennedy in his celebrated words, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”? This problem is also implicit in the Declaration of Independence. On the one hand, government is established to secure individual rights, including the right to life. On the other hand, the signers of the Declaration must support it by promising to one another that they will sacrifice their lives in its defense: “We mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” Hobbes does not ignore this difficulty, however. He contends that the powers of a government must be absolute if it is to secure the public peace, and this includes the power to demand that subjects sacrifice their lives. Although Hobbes admits that such powers can be abused in ways that unfairly violate individual rights, he advises that such abuses of political power constitute a lamentable risk that must be accepted. But doesn’t it seem odd that to protect our individual rights, we must submit to a government of absolute powers that can easily deprive us of our rights?

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3. Why should we obey an absolute government? Hobbes’s answer to this question is that there is no rational alternative, because a limited government could never maintain order. “Sovereign power,” Hobbes believes, “ought in all commonwealths to be absolute”: the sovereign power, whether placed in one man, as in a monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in popular, and aristocratical commonwealths, is as great, as possibly men can be imagined to make it. And though of so unlimited a power, men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse. The condition of man in this life shall never be without inconvenience; but there happeneth in no commonwealth any great inconvenience, but what proceeds from the subject’s disobedience, and breach of those covenants, from which the commonwealth hath its being. (ch. 20, 136 [144–45])

Unlike Aristotle, Hobbes is concerned less with the various kinds of regimes than with the precondition for any regime whatsoever—the power to preserve order. And that power must be absolute, in the sense that the final judge of the rules of conduct for a society is the sovereign (see ch. 18, 120 [128–29]; ch. 29, 211–12 [223]). Because of their egoism, people cannot agree in their judgments of good and evil, just and unjust; and from their disagreements springs the unremitting conflict that is the natural state of war. Because the purpose of government is to pacify human life, a government must have an absolute monopoly in settling disputes; once a governmental ruling is made, it must be obeyed by all individuals. It is treasonous, therefore, to teach that each person is the judge of good and evil, or that each person must be guided independently by conscience. For if people live by their own judgment, they will be divided by the diversity of their opinions, and society will dissolve into anarchy. Although making the sovereign the absolute judge of the rules of conduct may have “evil consequences,” as Hobbes admits, the only alternative is the worst of all evils—a return to the state of war. Hobbes teaches us to pursue peace at any price. The “inconveniences” of absolute government are part of the price we must pay. Perhaps the most obvious objection to Hobbes’s argument would be based on our own political experience. Doesn’t the history of liberal democracies like that of the United States show that effective governments need not be absolute? Doesn’t the American government maintain order with only limited powers? And yet, a Hobbesian could reply that the government of the United States is, in fact, absolute in its power, at least in principle, in the sense that all human conduct in the United States is subject to governmental regulation. Of course, as Hobbes explains, an absolute government leaves many matters unregulated, which leaves the subjects free to act as they please; certainly, the American government does not try to regulate every

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form of conduct. The point is that in principle any government must have the unlimited power to prescribe rules for everything. As an example of the discretionary power of absolute government, Hobbes observes, “in many places of the world, men have the liberty of many wives: in other places, such liberty is not allowed” (ch. 21, 143 [152]). We could apply this to American legal history by considering the Supreme Court case of Reynolds v. United States (1878). In the nineteenth century, the Mormons practiced polygamy in violation of a federal law. They argued that the law was an unconstitutional violation of their religious freedom as protected by the First Amendment, which secures the “free exercise” of religion. But the Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional. In his decision, Chief Justice Waite explained: Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious belief and opinions, they may with practices. Suppose one believed that human sacrifices were a necessary part of religious worship, would it be seriously contended that the civil government under which he lived could not interfere to prevent a sacrifice? Or if a wife religiously believed it was her duty to burn herself upon the funeral pyre of a dead husband, would it be beyond the power of the civil government to prevent her carrying her belief into practice? . . . Can a man excuse his practices . . . because of his religious belief? To permit this would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself. Government could exist only in name under such circumstances.28

This decision established the principle in constitutional law that the protection for the “free exercise” of religion in the First Amendment means that Americans are free to believe what they wish in religious matters, but they are not always free to act on their beliefs. Is this sensible?29 Under a government of limited power dedicated to individual freedom, we might assume that our religious practices would be absolutely protected from legal restriction. Yet that is not the case in the United States. Notice how closely Waite’s reasoning follows Hobbes’s argument for absolute government. For any government to exist, the “law of the land” must be superior to religious doctrines. To avoid the anarchy in which every individual would be a “law unto himself,” government must have the power to regulate all actions, including those motivated by religious beliefs. Although American citizens might expect their government not to be excessive in its regulation of religion, the government must have in principle absolute discretion to restrict religious practices in whatever manner is necessary to preserve public order. Moreover, isn’t it hard to imagine any area of human life that would always be free from legal regulation? If we accept the Hobbesian doctrine of absolute government, can we still believe in the importance of individual freedom? Hobbes maintains

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that it is precisely the absoluteness of a government’s power that secures individual rights.

4. Can only an absolute government protect individual liberty? Although an absolute government deprives us of our unlimited natural liberty, Hobbes explains, it gives us a limited civil liberty protected from the force and fraud of our fellow citizens. For laws are made “to limit the natural liberty of particular men, in such manner, as they might not hurt, but assist one another, and join together against a common enemy” (ch. 27, 175 [185]). Thus, laws facilitate the exercise of individual freedom. The goal is “not to bind the people from all voluntary actions; but to direct and keep them in such a motion, as not to hurt themselves by their own impetuous desires, rashness or indiscretion; as hedges are set, not to stop travelers, but to keep them in their way” (ch. 30, 227 [239]). This image of the laws as hedges conveys Hobbes’s thought that, within the boundaries set by the sovereign, individuals are free to live as they please. If the only proper limit on the natural liberty of individuals is to prevent them from hurting one another, as Hobbes says, does this imply the liberal principle (elaborated by John Stuart Mill) that the only proper role of government in a free society is to prevent or reduce harm, and so individuals should be free to think and act as they please so long as they do not harm others?30 Although the sovereign has, in principle, the unlimited power to dictate rules for all the subjects’ actions, the rules actually established under any government cover only a small portion of human actions. Therefore, most of the liberties of the subject, Hobbes explains: “depend on the silence of the law. In cases where the sovereign has prescribed no rule, there the subject hath the liberty to do, or forbear, according to his own discretion. And therefore such liberty is in some places more and in some less; and in some times more in other times less, according as they that have the sovereignty shall think most convenient” (ch. 21, 143 [152]). This liberty arising from the silence of the laws covers most private affairs—“such as is the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit; and the like” (ch. 21, 139 [148]). From this we could conclude that Hobbes leaves more room for individual liberty than did the premodern political philosophers, for with Hobbes we see a distinctly modern separation between the state and society. Unlike the ancient Greek polis or city-state, the modern state need not regulate every facet of life. Within the limits set by the modern state, citizens are free to live their private lives as they wish. But in the ancient Greek city, every part of human life must conform to the moral standards of the regime. Hobbes assumes that what the law does not forbid it permits. But Aristotle assumes that what the law does not permit it forbids.31

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A Hobbesian Leviathan would seem to allow for more individual freedom than is possible in an Aristotelian polis. Is the Hobbesian Leviathan closer to the sort of democratic regime that Plato describes in The Republic, in which people are free to live as they please, and so “anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live”?32 On the other hand, some liberal critics of Hobbes have pointed out that unlike Aristotle, Hobbes gives little attention to political freedom. Hobbes speaks of the liberty of subjects in their private lives, but not of the liberty of citizens in their political activities. Aristotle’s citizen must participate in political rule, but Hobbes’s subject has only the right to be represented in government. Should we agree with Rousseau that because true freedom requires participatory democracy, representation is a disguised form of slavery? Or should we accept Hobbes’s claim that most people do not want to participate directly in political rule but would prefer a representative government that would secure their private liberty? Do modern liberal democracies—like the United States—conform more closely to Hobbes’s teaching than to Rousseau’s or Aristotle’s? Do we see in Hobbes what Benjamin Constant called the “liberty of the moderns,” which is concerned with the security of individuals in private life, as opposed to the “liberty of the ancients,” which is concerned with the participation of citizens in public life?33 And yet Hobbes seems to violate the principles of modern liberal democratic thought on at least one point. He seems to deny the claim that certain individual rights are unalienable, because the idea of unalienable rights would deprive governments of the absolute power that Hobbes regards as essential. Indeed, Hobbes has been criticized for not giving the individual sufficient protection from governmental tyranny. In response to Hobbes, John Locke argued that to be ruled by an arbitrary, absolute power is worse than living in the state of nature: “He being in a much worse condition, who is exposed to the arbitrary power of one man, who has the command of 100,000, than he that is exposed to the arbitrary power of 100,000 single men.”34 We should note, however, that Hobbes does recognize self-preservation as an unalienable right, so that one can disobey a life-threatening legal order. People do not forfeit all their rights when they consent to government. Because all voluntary actions serve the interests of the individuals who perform them, Hobbes explains, it is inconceivable that those individuals would voluntarily agree to sacrifice their lives. People give up their natural liberty only to enhance “the security of a man’s person, in his life, and in the means of so preserving life, as not to be weary of it” (ch. 14, 87 [93]). Consequently, we cannot be obligated by the social contract to act contrary to that very self-preservation that the contract must secure. Although social peace requires that all sacrifice certain natural rights, it is “necessary for man’s life, to retain some; as right to govern their own bod-

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ies; enjoy air, water, motion, ways to go from place to place; and all things else, without which a man cannot live, or not live well” (ch. 15, 101 [107]). Clearly, no one can be obligated by law to commit suicide or selfinjury, “because no law can oblige a man to abandon his own preservation” (ch. 27, 197 [208]). A subject legally condemned to die may justifiably try to escape punishment (ch. 14, 91–92 [98]; ch. 21, 142 [151]). Likewise, a subject forced into military service does not act unjustly in running away from battle because of his cowardly temperament (ch. 21, 142– 43 [151–52]). Hobbes would allow citizens to disobey their government to protect their bodily survival. But does their right to resistance extend beyond this to include the right to defend “all things . . . without which a man cannot live, or not live well”? In any case, Hobbes seems to recognize certain unalienable rights as limits on the power of the sovereign. Some readers of Leviathan have inferred that although Hobbes’s sovereign is absolute in principle, in practice the sovereign will always have to negotiate with the subjects when they are discontented. The sovereign needs the obedience of the subjects to secure the sovereign’s interests as much as they need the sovereign’s power to secure their own interests. Because a return to the state of war would be equally disastrous for everyone, regardless of status, the fear of civil war should moderate the sovereign as much as the subjects. Still, don’t we see here a fundamental dilemma for Hobbes? On the one hand, people must give up their natural liberty to a government if they want peace. On the other hand, they must retain at least some of their natural liberty to escape governmental oppression. If we want to protect an individual’s rights from the attacks of other individuals, then we must, Hobbes insists, have an absolute sovereign. But Hobbes concedes that if we also want to protect an individual’s rights from governmental oppression, then we must allow the individual to retain certain rights as a limit on the sovereign’s power. Thus, we are thrown into a contradiction in which the powers of government must be both absolute and limited. We can see this same dilemma in the Declaration of Independence. We are endowed with “certain unalienable rights” such as “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” but we need powerful governments to secure these rights, and the powers of government require some limits on individuals’ rights. For must not every government restrict the individual’s life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness? The Fifth Amendment to the American Constitution declares that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” But doesn’t that mean that any person may be deprived of life, liberty, or property as long as this is done by “due process of law”? Not only must a government have the power to punish criminals, it must also be able to demand sacrifices from law-abiding citizens, including the sacrifice of life itself in time of war. The Declaration of Independence, however, offers one weapon against tyrannical government that Hobbes does not—the right to revolution.

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Although Hobbes grants all citizens individually the right to defend their own lives against governmental violence, he denies that people have the right to combine their individual acts of resistance into a revolutionary movement (see ch. 21, 143 [152]; ch. 28, 202 [214]).

5. Does the right to revolution subvert good government? Even the authors of the Declaration of Independence concede that revolutions should be avoided whenever possible: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Surely, we would agree that to avoid the anarchy of civil war, people should be reluctant to support a revolution, even when they have serious grievances against the established government. Prudence and experience teach us that in most cases any stable social order grounded in the customary life of a people should be preserved. But should we go so far as to agree with Hobbes that no government should ever be overthrown as long as it is capable of maintaining order? Hobbes advises subjects to obey whatever government they have because even an oppressive government is better than returning to the natural state of war, which is “the greatest evil that can happen in this life” (ch. 30, 219 [231]). When subjects feel exploited by their sovereign, Hobbes observes, they desire a different form of government, “whereas the power in all forms, if they be perfect enough to protect them, is the same: not considering that the state of man can never be without some incommodity or other” (ch. 18, 120 [128]). Because preserving peace is perhaps the only purpose of government on which we can all agree, we should not worry about what kind of government we have as long as we have some government. Let us not argue about who should rule, Hobbes insists, because that will only lead to endless conflict; let us just be satisfied that someone rules. This is the reason why Hobbes ridicules Aristotle’s distinction between tyrannical and non-tyrannical rulers (ch. 19, 121 [129]; ch. 29, 214 [226]; ch. 46, 438 [461], 446–48 [469]). When someone calls a government tyrannical, Hobbes observes, that usually means only that this person does not happen to like it. But liking or disliking is a matter of personal taste that varies from one person to another. Therefore, Hobbes argues, to teach that people can justly overthrow every government that they regard as tyrannical—the teaching of Aristotle and the Declaration of Independence—is to promote anarchy. Hobbes does say that every sovereign is obligated by the law of nature to rule only for the safety of the people (ch. 21, 139 [; ch. 26, 174; ch. 28, 209; ch. 30, 219). But this does not provide a right to revolution, since Hobbes

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emphasizes that although the sovereign is accountable to God for any violation of the law of nature, he is not accountable to any human being. Because the right to revolution has become a traditional assumption in American political thought, American readers of Leviathan often find it hard to accept Hobbes’s rejection of that right. But at certain points in American history, many American political leaders have agreed with Hobbes. In the Smith Act of 1940, for example, the United States Congress made it illegal to teach the desirability “of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence.”35 Doesn’t this deny the right to revolution? When some leaders of the American Communist Party were arrested under this law for peacefully teaching Marxism, which includes the doctrine that capitalism must someday be overthrown in a socialist revolution, they appealed their case to the Supreme Court. In Dennis v. United States (1951), the Court upheld the constitutionality of the Smith Act. Chief Justice Fred Vinson claimed that self-preservation is “the ultimate value of any society.” And he explained: That it is within the power of the Congress to protect the government of the United States from armed rebellion is a proposition which requires little discussion. Whatever theoretical merit there may be to the argument that there is a “right” to rebellion against dictatorial governments is without force where the existing structure of the government provides for peaceful and orderly change. We reject any principle of governmental helplessness in the face of preparation for revolution, which principle, carried to its logical conclusion, must lead to anarchy.36

Does Vinson simply restate Hobbes’s reasoning? A right to revolution would subvert every government, he seems to say, because only as long as a government has the power to suppress attempts at revolution can it prevent anarchy. Or is Vinson saying that there is a right to revolution when a government does not provide for “peaceful and orderly change”? But how could any government permit revolutionary change that would bring about its own abolition? (Compare chapter 8, section 11.) In 1950, shortly before the decision in Dennis v. United States, George Anastaplo graduated at the top of his class at the University of Chicago Law School. He passed the Illinois bar examination. Then, when he applied for admission to the Illinois Bar, he was called for hearings with the Illinois Bar’s Committee on Character and Fitness. When he was asked whether he thought members of the Communist Party could be admitted to the Illinois Bar, he said he thought they could. One member of the Committee objected that Communists believed in the right to revolution. Anastaplo answered by indicating that the right to revolution was affirmed in the Declaration of Independence. He was then asked whether he was a member of the Communist Party, and he refused to answer on the grounds that this was an inappropriate question and that it violated his rights under the First Amendment to the Constitution. After the hearings, the

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Committee delayed its decision until the decision in the Dennis case was announced, and then the Committee voted to deny Anastaplo admission to the Illinois bar. When he appealed this decision first to the Illinois Supreme Court and then to the United States Supreme Court, he lost. He did win an eloquent dissenting opinion by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black arguing in his favor in In re Anastaplo (1961). Black had also dissented in the Dennis case. Anastaplo was never admitted to the bar. Were his opponents taking a Hobbesian position—like that of Justice Vinson—in denying that any government can properly allow for a right to revolution? Anastaplo has argued that the right to revolution is crucial for our understanding that there are standards of natural right by which we can judge governments as just or unjust.37 He has also argued that freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution may be considered “a continuing, if partial and restrained, exercise” of the natural right of revolution.38 Is this a reasonable position to take? Or is it dangerous to teach people that they can overthrow their government whenever they think it violates some “higher law”? If we could rely on people’s obeying the higher law as the ground for social order, and if we could assume that they would all agree on what exactly that higher law says, Hobbes might answer, we wouldn’t need governments at all. In fact, we need governments precisely because people fall into conflict when they are left to live by their own rules. Therefore, the Hobbesian would argue, those like Henry David Thoreau and Martin Luther King, Jr., who say that every person has a right to disobey laws that seem unjust, would destroy that unquestioned obedience to every law that is essential to any political order. (We have examined the idea of civil disobedience previously in chapter 1, section 2; and chapter 4, sections 1–2.) It is naive, Hobbes suggests, to think that through revolution an unjust government can be replaced by a truly just government. Human beings will always disagree about what is just and unjust. Every government will be disadvantageous to some people, and therefore no government can please everyone. Rather than requiring that government conform to some idealistic conception of justice, would it be more practical to insist that people obey any government that maintains order, because anarchy is the worst of evils for everyone?

6. Is anarchy better than a predatory government? Is it true, as Hobbes argues, that any government is better than no government, because no matter how bad a government is, life under such government is better than anarchy? Or are there some governments that are so bad that the people under their rule would be better off in a condition of anarchy? In recent history, we have seen how anarchic disorder can arise when states are weak or fail altogether—like Somalia, for example. And we

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might see this as confirming Hobbes. But some social scientists have argued that the recent history of Somalia actually shows how life in a stateless anarchy can be better than life under a predatory government.39 In 1960, the Republic of Somalia (located in the northeastern horn of Africa) was formed as an independent country uniting what had been British Somaliland and Italian Somalia. In 1969, Major-General Mohamed Siad Barre led a military coup that overthrew the democratic government of Somalia and established a military dictatorship that became a socialist dictatorship. All land and most of the industrial and financial property was nationalized. The government was repressive in denying all civil and political liberty, in suppressing all opposition to the government, and in promoting the power of Barre and those he favored. Somalia is divided into clans, and Barre used the government to advance the interests of his clan (the Marehan) over other clans. In 1991, Somalia’s government collapsed, the country fell into civil war, and there was no central government at all. Social order was organized through the rule of competing clans, in which people were bound together into groups based on extended kinship. After twenty years of being stateless, the leaders of Somalia’s clans finally agreed to a new constitution in 2012, which established a parliamentary government. And yet it was unclear whether the new government could maintain its power in the face of continuing factional conflict among the powerful warlords and clans. Although this might seem to confirm Hobbes’s warning about the propensity of stateless societies to fall into a war of all against all, there is some evidence that the Somalis were better off under the anarchy of a stateless clan society than they were under Barre’s predatory government. Many economic and social indicators—such as life expectancy, health care, levels of extreme poverty, and economic production—showed improvement during the years of anarchy as compared with the years of Barre’s government. During the years of anarchy, Somalia had a legal system based on private, customary law enforced by clan leaders, with security provided by clan militias. Thus, Somalia had a kind of government—the highly decentralized government that comes from the rule of clans, which has prevailed in many societies throughout human history.40 Just as there can be a “government of small families” in foraging bands of hunter-gatherers, there can be a government of large, extended families in clan societies. Strictly speaking, pure anarchy might be impossible, if we define it as a total absence of any form of governance. Those who identify themselves as anarchist theorists implicitly recognize this, because what they usually defend as anarchy is actually a society that is stateless but governed by natural and voluntary associations, such as families and clans. Anarchists argue that Hobbes was wrong in assuming that government was the only way to supply governance—making and enforcing social rules to protect life and property. He overlooked the possibility of self-governance—privately created and privately enforced social rules for peaceful cooperation.41

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In Peter Marshall’s grand history of anarchist thinkers and movements, he indicates that anarchists distinguish society and the state and defend society as a self-regulating order. He observes: “Pure anarchy in the sense of a society with no concentration of force and no social controls has probably never existed. Stateless societies and peasant societies employ sanctions of approval and disapproval, the offer of reciprocity, and the threat of its withdrawal, as instruments of social control.”42 Anarchists might see Somalia as an example of how a stateless society can be better for its members than a predatory government that oppresses them. But wouldn’t it be even better for Somalia to have a centralized liberal state with powers for protecting life and property and providing public goods for the common welfare? A Hobbesian liberal might argue that countries like Somalia—and also Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan—show us that the weakening or failure of central state power promotes not individual liberty but the rule of clans that deny individual autonomy. When there is no powerful central government to enforce law and order and provide public goods, people will not live as free individuals; rather they will revert back to an ancient tribal form of social order in which people are treated not as individuals but as members of their extended kinship groups. There are good Darwinian reasons for this, having to do with the evolved instincts for kinship, nepotism, and tribalism based on extended real or fictive kinship. The moral codes of these clan societies will enforce group honor and suppress individual liberty. For example, clan societies will enforce the blood feuds, the honor killings, the attacks on infidels, and the suppression of women that liberals abhor.43 The social order of liberal individualism will not prevail unless there is a powerful liberal state that will deny the customary legal systems of clan groups and protect the autonomy of individuals from coercion by clans.44 If so, then the Hobbesian might argue that liberalism requires a Liberal Leviathan. This is an important issue for the future of global politics. In many parts of the world, states are failing or disappearing. Some observers foresee that the modern state itself is in decline. Hobbesian liberals might insist that we must preserve the modern state and direct it to liberal ends. Anarchists will say that we should let the modern state fall and then look for new forms of stateless social order to protect our liberty and security. If the Hobbesian argument for a Liberal Leviathan that combines a proper balance of liberty and authority is compelling, why has it been so unpopular, beginning in Hobbes’s lifetime? Does Hobbes’s difficulty in winning acceptance for his political principles indicate that, in some respects, his teaching is just as idealistic as Plato’s?

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7. Is the founding of political authority on rational selfishness too idealistic? Considering the difference between his political teaching and the political practice of the world, Hobbes admits that his project may be as unrealistic as Plato’s in The Republic. Nevertheless, Hobbes hopes that someday a ruler will read Leviathan and apply it by teaching its principles, and thus “convert this truth of speculation, into the utility of practice” (ch. 31, 241 [254]). Does Hobbes assume that Hobbesian philosophers will need to rule over politics, even if only indirectly through the influence of their teaching? Hobbes concedes that the best objection to his account of political power is that it does not conform to political practice: in most cases, human beings have not voluntarily granted absolute power to their governments. Hobbes argues, however, that this explains why most governments have been unstable and thus unsuccessful in maintaining order. Does Hobbes’s political reasoning rest, therefore, not on what is but on what ought to be? “For though in all places of the world, men should lay the foundation of their houses on the sand,” Hobbes observes, “it could not thence be inferred, that so it ought to be” (ch. 20, 136 [145]). Hobbes presents government as an instrument by which selfish human beings rationally secure their interests. And yet, in assuming that rational selfishness dominates human nature, Hobbes may demand more rationality than most human beings have. In Behemoth, Hobbes’s book on the English Civil War, he indicates that human beings are not solely moved by rational self-interest; rather, they are often moved by irrational beliefs (particularly, religious beliefs) that lead them into self-destructive conflict. This would suggest that Hobbes’s psychology is more complex than the simple assumption of rational egoism made by some “rational choice” theorists.45 Hobbes faces the same problem that Socrates saw in Thrasymachus’s argument: even if political power is sought only to advance selfish interests, those seeking it must know what their true interests are, and therefore they must also seek political wisdom. But does this mean that Hobbes would have to agree with Socrates about the need for philosopher-kings? Unlike Socrates, Hobbes might say that the primary concern of politics is not the mind but the body, not the cultivation of the soul but physical survival and comfort. The proper concern of government is to care for our lives, not our souls. The proper care of our lives surely does require some thinking. Deciding how government can best secure the physical life of its subjects does demand political wisdom of some sort, and thus politics does depend somehow on the rule of reason. Hobbes suggests, however, that we are more likely to agree about the conditions of comfortable self-preservation than we are about the improvement of our souls. Doesn’t this make his teaching more practicable than that of Plato? But like Plato, Hobbes cannot succeed unless these political principles are promoted by the right kind of education. Particularly important is the

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instruction of the young in the universities (ch. 30, 221–22 [232–34]; concl., 467 [491]). Indeed, we might wonder whether the influence of Hobbesian principles in the universities has indeed shaped the history of modern liberal political thought. On the other hand, many scholars would claim that modern liberalism—especially as manifested in America—arose from the rejection of Hobbesian absolutism in favor of the Lockean conception of limited government. Is this true? Or can we find traces of Hobbesianism even in a liberal regime like that of the United States?

8. Is the American government a Hobbesian Leviathan? Surely, most American citizens would want to say no. We could offer a variety of reasons for concluding that the American regime is not Hobbesian. We could argue, for example, that the American founders—such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison—wanted a government of limited powers, which was contrary to Hobbesian absolutism. The separation and balance of powers was one way to insure that no one branch of the federal government would be absolute. Similarly, the decentralization of power in the states would check the power of the federal government. The Bill of Rights in the Constitution specified certain individual rights that were to be protected against governmental power. And, generally, the pluralistic structure of American society and government, which allowed many different groups to have some power, guaranteed that political decisions would emerge from bargaining and negotiation in which no one group of people would be able to completely dominate. In the American regime, therefore, it is hard to see that concentration of power in the hands of the sovereign which Hobbes demands. Nevertheless, a Hobbesian could maintain that a careful study of the matter will uncover the Hobbesian reality of American politics.46 The Hobbesian could point out, for instance, that the American founders wrote the Constitution to establish a very powerful government. In Federalist Number 1, Alexander Hamilton emphasized that “the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty.”47 And in Number 23, he observed, “It is both unwise and dangerous to deny the federal government an unconfined authority as to all those objects which are intrusted to its management.”48 The need for powerful government is especially acute, Hamilton argued in Number 70, with respect to the executive power. He even implied that in times of emergency the American president would have the power to become a temporary dictator.49 This conforms to Hobbes’s observation that in periods of crisis democratic governments are forced to set up “temporary monarchs, to whom for a time, they may commit the entire exercise of their power” (ch. 19, 125 [133]). As we shall see in the next chapter (section 10), John Locke spoke of this sort of power as an exercise of “executive prerogative.”

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The belief that the Bill of Rights limits the powers of American government would be challenged by the Hobbesian. As in the Supreme Court cases cited earlier in this chapter, couldn’t we think of many instances in which the government has been permitted to violate the rights listed in the Bill of Rights? The First Amendment, for example, protects “freedom of speech” absolutely from any congressional abridgment: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” But beginning with the case of Schenck v. United States (1919),50 the Supreme Court has said that Congress may make laws abridging the freedom of speech in some situations. In the Schenck case, a young man was sent to prison for breaking a federal law by criticizing the military draft during the First World War. Doesn’t this suggest that the government of the United States has, at least potentially, an absolute power to violate individual rights whenever the rulers deem it necessary? Contrary to Hobbes, however, there is no self-perpetuating governmental body in the United States that we could identify as the sovereign. The powers of sovereignty are divided between different offices of the government. Nevertheless, can’t a pattern of offices be just as absolutely sovereign as one? For to the extent that the Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court agree with one another, isn’t the power of the American national government as unlimited as that of Hobbes’s Leviathan? Prior to the Civil War, the sovereignty of the American national government was severely limited by the decentralization of power in the individual states. But with the victory of the North over the South, the national government emerged as what some historians have called a “Yankee Leviathan” with centralized sovereign power.51 Moreover, hasn’t the growth of the American welfare state confirmed Hobbes’s teaching about the need for powerful, centralized government? Hobbes argues that when citizens are deprived, through no fault of their own, of the ability to take care of themselves, then the government ought to provide for their needs so that they do not have to depend on private charity (ch. 30, 227 [239]). In this way, government promotes individual freedom by protecting the poor and the weak against the rich and the powerful. Franklin Roosevelt made this same argument to justify his New Deal programs during the economic crisis of the Great Depression in the 1930s.52 Although those Americans today who call themselves liberals would agree with Hobbes that only a powerful state can secure individual rights, others who call themselves conservatives (or perhaps libertarians) would insist that the greatest threat to liberty today comes from an excessively powerful government. A Hobbesian Leviathan, they complain, protects us from one another but does not protect us from itself. Or, as Ronald Reagan often warned in his presidential campaign speeches in 1980, “Any government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take from you everything you have.”

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Hobbes’s liberal critics reject the idea of a Liberal Leviathan, because they reject Hobbes’s claim that a government is too weak if it does not have absolute power (ch. 29, 210–11 [222]. To give any government absolute power, many liberals argue, is to ignore the wisdom of Lord Acton’s famous remark: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”53 To avoid the corruption that comes from an absolutely powerful government, liberals might turn to John Locke’s argument for how individual liberty can be secured by a government of limited powers. As we will see in the next chapter, Locke saw the protection of individual liberty from governmental interference as including religious liberty. But Hobbes saw that disputes over religion could lead to civil war, as happened in England; and so he argued that to keep the peace, the political sovereign might need to regulate religious belief, which would include prescribing the proper interpretation of the Bible. Modern liberals would surely object to this and argue that interpreting the Bible or any other religious book is not a proper power of government. Or would even liberals have to concede such a power to government when necessary to counter the threat of religiously motivated violence?

9. Is the interpretation of the Bible and the Quran a political question? The second half of Hobbes’s Leviathan (Parts 3 and 4) is devoted to the interpretation of the Bible. This reminds us that seventeenth-century England was a Biblical culture, because the Bible was seen as the authoritative source of all truth. The translation of the Bible into English in the sixteenth century and the invention of the printing press made the Bible widely available to common people, who could then interpret the Bible for themselves rather than being dependent on the authority of their priests. This was part of the Protestant Reformation in breaking from the authority of the Catholic Church. As a consequence of this elevation of the Bible, all the parties in the English political controversies of the time found their ideas in the Bible.54 In Behemoth, Hobbes indicated that disputes over the interpretation of the Bible were a primary cause of the English Civil War. Defending himself against the common accusation that he was an atheist, Hobbes had to show that his political arguments were supported by the Bible. Hobbes explained the English reverence for the Bible as a product of their cultural upbringing as children, which explains the religious culture of every society. “For what other cause can there be assigned, why in Christian commonwealths all men either believe, or at least profess the Scripture to be the word of God, and in other commonwealths scarce any; but that in Christian commonwealths they are taught it from their infancy; and in other places they are taught otherwise?” (ch. 43, 387 [406]). Hobbes immediately adds, however, that a few people are not believers, because they do not have the gift of faith. Is he implicitly referring to himself?

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In support of Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church and his establishment of the Church of England under the King’s authority, Hobbes argues that to keep the peace and avoid religious wars, the political sovereign must have ultimate authority over the national church, including the authority to interpret the Bible. This supremacy in religious matters of the political ruler is the only way to secure peace and avoid religious conflict. To carry out his project, Hobbes interprets the text of the Bible in its original historical context to determine its authors, the circumstances of their writing, and how the various writings were put together to create the Bible. Thus did Hobbes begin a scholarly tradition of studying the Bible according to what would later be called the “historical-critical method” or “higher criticism.” In their history of this tradition of Biblical scholarship, Scott Hahn and Benjamin Wiker argue that this was a political interpretation of the Bible, which was designed to secularize politics and privatize religious belief, so that the aim of politics would be the security of the body rather than the salvation of the soul. This way of studying the Bible, they contend, was developed to advance classical liberal politics.55 But is Hobbes really a Biblical liberal? After all, much of what Hobbes says about church-state relations seems illiberal in that he argues for the absolute power of the political sovereign to interpret the Bible, so that the sovereign acts as the “supreme pastor,” who “ought indeed to direct his civil commands to the salvation of souls” (ch. 33, 254 [268–69]; ch. 36, 283–85 [298–300]; ch. 39, 306 [321–22]; ch. 43, 355–56 [372–73], 379 [396]). And yet we might notice that Hobbes’s illiberal argument for the political regulation of an established church is based on his interpretation of the Hebrew theocratic state in the Old Testament; and as he moves into the New Testament, he turns towards a separation of church and state. Critical for his political interpretation of the New Testament is the declaration of Jesus that “my kingdom is not of this world,” and that Christ’s kingdom will not begin until his second coming. During the first three centuries of Christianity, Hobbes observes, the Christian churches were voluntary organizations that enforced doctrinal orthodoxy through the threat of excommunication from the church, but without any coercive force or violent persecution of heretics or infidels. Hobbes concludes that among the early Christians, “there was then no government by coercion, but only by doctrine, and persuading” (ch. 42, 348 [365]). The political enforcement of church authority did not arise until the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity in 312 AD (ch. 42, 322 [338], 342–44 [359–61]). By the time he reaches the end of Leviathan, Hobbes is ready to endorse the position of the Independents in Parliament, who wanted no politically enforced church at all and free toleration of religious diversity. “And so we are reduced to the Independency of the primitive Christians, to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best,” and if this promotes peace, Hobbes observes, it is “perhaps the best” (ch. 47, 456

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[479–80]). Thus does Hobbes move towards complete religious toleration and the privatization of religious belief as rooted in the New Testament as the best way to secure peace. In effect, Hobbes adopts the interpretation of the Bible advanced by Roger Williams, who argued that while the Old Testament teaches theocratic enforcement of religious belief, the New Testament teaches religious toleration. (We will take up Williams in chapter 8, section 13.) And yet we might wonder whether Hobbes was right in arguing that no matter how much religious liberty and toleration is allowed, every sovereign ruler must have the ultimate power to reject religious doctrines that promote violence, and thus to that extent the sovereign must be the “supreme pastor.” Consider, for example, what happened after the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. When it was discovered that the terrorists were members of the radical Muslim group alQaeda, a group that believed that they were obeying the teaching of the Quran in commanding holy war against infidels, this provoked a political and scholarly debate over whether Islam was a threat to the peace of the world, which would make it impossible to tolerate Islam in a liberal regime that must suppress religious violence. Radical Islamists quoted passages from the Quran where Allah orders the believers to make war against unbelievers.56 But their critics could quote passages from the Quran teaching that there is to be “no compulsion in religion.”57 Some scholars argued that the ideas of a secular state separated from religious authority and of religious toleration arose out of Christianity, and that these ideas were foreign to the Islamic tradition of theocratic authority. But other scholars argued that it is possible to find in Islam a tradition of separating Islamic religious law (Sharia) from the state, so that it is possible to have a secular state in an Islamic society, which would secure religious liberty and toleration. In the Quran, King David is said to have been chosen directly by God as his “viceregent” (khalifa) to rule over the Hebrew people.58 Muhammad claimed to be God’s Prophet on Earth to rule over his believers as a religious, military, and political leader. After Muhammad’s death, his successors or deputies took over his leadership as “caliph,” combining religious and political authority. Some radical Muslims seek a revival of the caliphate, in which Islamic religious law would be enforced on all. But many Muslims think that Islam is compatible with a secular state, like that established by Kemal Ataturk in Turkey.59 In a speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, nine days after the terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush offered his own authoritative interpretation of the Quran. He said that the terrorists “practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics; a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teachings of Islam.” He declared that the teachings of Islam “are good and peaceful, and those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.”60

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Does this show that even in a liberal democracy with separation of church and state and religious liberty, those with governmental authority need to reject those interpretations of religious texts that promote unjustified violence? Was President Bush acting as “supreme pastor” in condemning al-Qaeda for blaspheming the name of Allah? That religious disputes can become political disputes was evident in the English Civil War, because much of the political debate that led to civil war arose from conflicting interpretations of the Bible. Hobbes’s Behemoth is a history of the English Civil War. We must wonder how Hobbes’s political history in Behemoth is related to his political philosophy in Leviathan.

10. Does the English Civil War show how political history can be a natural laboratory for testing political philosophy? In Leviathan, Hobbes scorns political history, because the factual knowledge of history as a memory of past events does not give us the scientific or philosophical knowledge of causal laws that reveal the “general, eternal, and immutable truth” of politics (ch. 9, 53–55 [60–61]; ch. 46, 435–36 [458–59]). Due to the unpredictable contingency of events in history, political history lacks the predictive power and demonstrative certainty of true political science. Nevertheless, Hobbes indicates that he wrote Leviathan in response to “the disorders of the present time” (Review and Conclusion, 467–68 [491]). His political philosophy was a response to the political events of the English Civil War, and he wrote Behemoth in 1668 to show how the political history of the war might confirm his political philosophy. While Leviathan is written as a treatise, with Hobbes speaking directly, Behemoth is written as a dialogue between two characters—A and B—with A speaking as a teacher and B as his student. While we might think that Hobbes speaks primarily through A, Hobbes also seems to speak in some ways through both characters. In Behemoth, he declares: “There can be nothing more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war” (v [106]).61 Does this suggest that studying political history allows us to test ideas in political philosophy by seeing whether they are confirmed or denied by the lessons of history? The English Civil War was actually a series of wars and revolutionary conflicts from 1640 to 1660.62 King Charles I (1625–1649) attempted to make law and collect taxes by his own independent acts without consulting Parliament. From 1629 to 1640, he governed England without Parliament. This was seen by many lawyers and country landowners as a threat to the traditional liberties and property of Englishmen. He also tried to enforce religious uniformity in England through the established Church of England, which was seen as a threat to the religious liberty of Calvinist

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Christians (or Puritans) who sought a reformation of the English Church. In 1637, the King ordered the Scottish Church, which was Calvinist in doctrine and Presbyterian in church governance, to conform to the rituals of the Anglican Church, which provoked a revolt. Unable to find the money he needed for an army to suppress the revolt, the King was forced to summon Parliament into session in 1640, so that he could ask for special taxation to fund the army. Instead of granting his request, Parliament set out to punish the King’s advisers held responsible for the illegal acts of the previous eleven years and to present the King with their grievances and demands. This created a dispute over whether the King or Parliament was sovereign, which eventually led to war in 1642 between the King’s supporters and Parliament’s supporters. Under the military leadership of Oliver Cromwell, a fervent Puritan, Parliament’s army defeated the King’s army. Under the control of Cromwell’s army, a small portion of Parliament authorized the trial of the King for treason, and he was beheaded in January of 1649. Parliament announced that England was a “commonwealth or free state” without a King or a House of Lords. This began a long series of experiments in making different kinds of constitutional arrangements. For a few years, England was a Parliamentary republic. But then in 1653, Cromwell dissolved Parliament and had himself declared Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Although Cromwell was supposed to rule with the advice of a council and Parliament, he became a military dictator, leading the army to suppress revolts in England, Ireland, and Scotland. When Cromwell died in 1658, his son Richard lacked the ability to fill his place. The widespread public disgust with military dictatorship and the religious fanaticism of the Puritans led to the reestablishment of the original Parliament of 1840, which called new elections. In 1660, the newly elected Parliament asked Charles II to take the throne after he had promised amnesty and had declared that he would respect Parliamentary limits on his authority. Hobbes had tutored Prince Charles in France; and when the Prince took the throne as Charles II, Hobbes joined his royal court. From reading Behemoth, we might see at least seven lessons in the history of the English Civil War. The first lesson is that political power depends on political authority, which depends on the opinions of the people. Hobbes sees the history of the English Civil War as “so many shiftings of the supreme authority” (195–96 [376–77]). The war began with the dispute between Parliament and the King as to which had supreme authority to represent the people. There was also a religious dispute over what kind of church governance should be enforced by the state. The subsequent changes in the constitutional order were all based on differing opinions about where the political and religious authority to rule was to be found, and those who sought political power argued that they had the authority to rule coming from the consent of the people of England. Thus,

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“the power of the mighty hath no foundation but in the opinion and belief of the people” (16 [128]). As Hobbes observed in Leviathan, all government rests on opinion, because “the actions of men proceed from their opinions; and in the well-governing of opinions, consisteth the well-governing of men’s actions, in order to their peace, and concord” (ch. 18, 116 [124]. The religious opinions of the people are particularly important in determining their view of political authority. Does this confirm the claim of the Declaration of Independence that all governments can be understood as “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”? We might object to this by pointing out the importance of military power in forcing people to obey the rulers. And yet, as Hobbes suggests in Behemoth (59 [183]), we might ask, “What shall force the army?” Soldiers must be motivated to fight by their belief that they are fighting for a good cause. Cromwell persuaded his soldiers that they were fighting for the liberty of the people and in the service of God’s will. The second possible lesson of the civil war is that we must obey any government that can protect us, and so we must obey any government established by a successful revolution or conquest. At the end of Leviathan, Hobbes indicates that he wrote that book to teach “the mutual relation between protection and obedience.” In a civil war, there can be a point at which the old government can no longer protect us, and a new government has been established that can protect us. At that point, we must agree—either by express or tacit consent—to obey the government that protects our lives (Review and Conclusion, 46168 [484–91]). In January of 1650, Parliament enacted that all English men over the age of 18 would have to take an “Oath of Engagement,” promising “to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without King or House of Lords” (Behemoth, 164 [330–31]. There was an intense debate in England as to whether those who had previously pledged their obedience to the King could rightly take this oath of allegiance to a Parliament that had executed the King. Those who argued that all should take the oath could quote from Hobbes as supporting this because of the “mutual relation between protection and obedience.”63 Of course, this same reasoning could then lead Hobbes and others to shift back to obeying the King’s government once the monarchy was restored in 1660. The third lesson of the English Civil War might be to confirm Hobbes’s teaching that although absolute political sovereignty can have evil consequences, any attempt to limit sovereignty by constraining it or dividing it has the even worse consequence of bring on civil war. After all, it was the general opinion in England that the powers of government were divided between the King, the House of Lords, and the House of Commons that promoted the disputes that threw the country into the civil war (Leviathan, ch. 18, 119 [127]; ch. 20, 136 [144–45]). But notice that Hobbes admits that almost no one in England agreed with him that political sovereignty must be absolute and undivided in

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being held by one ruler or one assembly of rulers. Even the royalist supporters of the King believed in a “mixed monarchy,” in which the King shared authority with Parliament (Behemoth, 33 [150], 112 [256], 114–15 [260]). And when the monarchy was restored in 1660, the King’s power was still limited by Parliament. So it’s not clear that the history of the English Civil War supports Hobbes’s claim that limited and divided power must always fail. Moreover, as we have seen, even Hobbes sees the need to steer between “too much liberty” and “too much authority” (Leviathan, 2 [3]). Could we say that Charles I provoked the Civil War by claiming “too much authority” in trying to rule without Parliament, and thus his “negligent government” stirred rebellion against him as his “natural punishment” (Leviathan, ch. 31, 240–41 [253–54])? A fourth possible lesson of the Civil War—the one that Hobbes emphasizes—is that there cannot be peace in England until the English universities teach absolute obedience to the laws, instead of teaching the seditious idea that individuals have the right to disobey laws they judge to be contrary to their liberty or to the Bible (Behemoth, 55–59 [178–84], 70–71 [198–99]). Isn’t it hard to see, however, how this could work? Would this require the suppression of all freedom of thought? At some points in Behemoth, even Hobbes suggests that this cannot work: “A state can constrain obedience, but convince no error, nor alter the minds of them that believe they have the better reason. Suppression of doctrine does but unite and exasperate, that is, increase both the malice and power of them that have already believed them” (62 [188]). A fifth lesson that one might take from the Civil War is that successful political leadership depends on good judgment and good luck in managing the contingent circumstances of history. Hobbes often insists that government requires “infallible rules and the true science of equity and justice.” But his history of the Civil War repeatedly shows that political success came to those with practical wisdom in judging how best to respond to unpredictable situations, which was a practical art rather than an exact science (Behemoth, 19 [130–31], 28 [143], 70–71 [198], 124 [273–74], 167 [335], 204 [390]). A sixth possible lesson from Behemoth is that Oliver Cromwell’s ambition to become the dominant leader and the willingness of people to follow him show the natural tendency to monarchic rule in all governments. There will always be a few people like Cromwell, who longed “to make himself the first man” (139 [294]). Would Machiavelli have identified Cromwell as a “new prince”? Every properly ordered regime might have to channel that passion for preeminence towards the public good and away from tyranny. A final lesson of the Civil War is one that Hobbes would reject, but which some proponents of international human rights have defended: the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649 established, for the first time, the

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modern principle of human rights law that heads of state do not have sovereign immunity from legal punishment when they tyrannically violate human rights. Geoffrey Robertson, a leading human rights lawyer and judge in Great Britain, contends that when John Cooke as Solicitor-General wrote the legal brief for convicting the King of tyranny and then as prosecutor won the case, he established the first modern legal argument against tyranny based on a universal right to punish tyrants.64 Cooke’s legal argument for the trial of Charles I has been renewed in the trials of General Augusto Pinochet, Slobodan Milosevic, and Saddam Hussein. When Hussein addressed his judges and asked, “By what legal authority do you try me?” he was repeating the words that Charles I had addressed to his judges at his trial. Cooke’s answer to this challenge was to argue that heads of state may be punished for the crime of tyranny. Cooke paid a high price for doing what he did. When Charles II was put on the throne, Cooke and others were tried and executed for regicide. The King took pleasure in this, even watching while Cooke was disemboweled. Although the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 ended the Civil War, it did not end the debate over the balance of power between the King and Parliament. The debate was renewed by those like John Locke who argued for a more republican form of government to secure individual liberty.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8

9 10

All the references are to chapters and pages in Leviathan in the edition edited by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), which modernizes Hobbes’s spelling. The numbers within brackets are the page numbers in the edition of Leviathan edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The definitive critical edition of the Leviathan (in both its English and Latin versions) is that edited by Noel Malcolm, in three volumes, with extensive commentary and notes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). The best short introduction to Hobbes’s life and thought is Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2002). On the various interpretations of Hobbes, see W. H. Greenleaf, “Hobbes: The Problem of Interpretation,” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1972), 5–36; and Tuck, Hobbes, 104–27. See M. M. Goldsmith, Hobbes’s Science of Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966); and Thomas A. Spragens, Jr., The Politics of Motion (London: Croom Helm, 1973). See Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952); and C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). See Oakeshott’s Introduction to his edition of the Leviathan. See Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). See Gary D. Glenn, “Inalienable Rights and Positive Government in the Modern World,” Journal of Politics 41 (November 1979): 1057–80. See Richard Cumberland, A Treatise of the Laws of Nature, trans. John Maxwell (London: R. Phillips, 1727), 93–163; and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 51–63. For a study of primitive law in such societies, see E. Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See, for example, Margaret Power, The Egalitarians—Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Mar-

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12 13 14

15 16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

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shall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008), and Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). When Hobbes speaks of civil wars as manifesting the state of nature, he might have in mind Thucydides’s famous account of the Corcyraean civil war in his History of the Peloponnesian War (III, 80–84; IV, 46–48), a book that Hobbes translated into English. Compare Hobbes’s description of human nature with Thucydides’s History I, 22, 76; II, 47–54, 64–65; IV, 92; V, 89, 105; VI, 83–85. See Laurie M. Johnson, Thucydides, Hobbes, and the Interpretation of Realism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993). See Macpherson’s Possessive Individualism. Macpherson relies on a Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution that is now disputed by some historians. See Jack A. Goldstone, “Capitalist Origins of the English Revolution: Chasing a Chimera,” Theory and Society 12 (1983):143–80. Compare Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (New York: Norton, 1980), 1–4, 86–91, 161–64. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), 69. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 475–76. Colin Turnbull, The Mountain People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972), 182. Compare the struggle for survival among the Dobuans as described by Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), chap. 5. See Jeffrey Wattles, The Golden Rule (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). See, for example, Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics, 4th ed., with Forewords by Andrew Hurrell and Stanley Hoffman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). For an opposing point of view, see Charles R. Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 11–66; and Terry Nardin, Law, Morality and the Relations of States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). On the theories of the origins of the state, see Paul Bohannan, ed., Law and Warfare: Studies in the Anthropology of Conflict (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967); Elman R. Service, Origins of the State and Civilization (New York: Norton, 1975); Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds., Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978); and Ted C. Lewellen, Political Anthropology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). See Mark S. Weiner, The Rule of the Clan (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013). See Service, Origins of the State, 292–308. See Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011), 31–58. See, for instance, R. F. Barton, “Procedure Among the Ifugao,” in Bohannan, Law and Warfare, 161–81. See Marshall Sahlins, “The Spirit of the Gift,” in Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 149–83. See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, chaps. 4–5, in The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1936), 471–511; Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 106–29; Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 149–67; and Roger D. Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), chap. 5. Masters argues that “Hobbes’s political theory is easily translated into the terms of inclusive fitness and rational actor models” (p. 174), which are common ideas in sociobiological theory. Wilson, On Human Nature, 156. “Contrary to some cultural relativists, it can be hypothesized that a norm of reciprocity is universal” (Alvin Gouldner, “The Norm of Reciprocity,” American Sociological Review 25 [1960]: 171). On the biological roots of reciprocity, see Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 3–55; and Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield,

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25

26

27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

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SuperCooperators: The Mathematics of Evolution, Altruism, and Human Behavior (New York: Canongate, 2011). For the argument that a natural sense of justice as fairness could have arisen through the genetic and cultural evolution of a social contract, see Ken Binmore, Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), 91–94, 767–68. Compare Brian Barry, Sociologists, Economists & Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 75–98. See James Buchanan, The Limits of Liberty: Between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); David Gauthier, Morals by Agreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ian MacLean, “The Social Contract in Leviathan and the Prisoner’s Dilemma Supergame,” Political Studies 29 (September 1981): 339–51; and Michael Taylor, The Possibility of Cooperation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 6. Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” in Garrett Hardin and John Baden, eds., Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977), 27. See also William Ophuls, “Leviathan or Oblivion?” in Herman E. Daly, eds., Toward a Steady-State Economy (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1973), 215–30. Reynolds v. United States, 98 U.S. 145 (1878). For the history of the debate over the Mormon practice of polygamy as an exercise of religious liberty, see Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). On the harm principle as the fundamental principle of liberalism, see Jethro K. Lieberman, Liberalism Undressed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1138a4–8. Plato, The Republic, book 8, 555b–562c. Benjamin Constant, Political Writings, trans. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 307–28. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, section 137. See George Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist: Notes on the First Amendment, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 45–46, 446–51. For an opposing position, see Walter F. Berns, Freedom, Virtue and the First Amendment (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), 200–27. Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494 (1951). For an account of In re Anastaplo, see Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, 331–418. For Anastaplo’s reading of the Declaration of Independence, see Anastaplo’s Abraham Lincoln: A Constitutional Biography (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 11–38. Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, 112. See also George Anastaplo, Reflections on Freedom of Speech and the First Amendment (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006). This is the argument of Peter Leeson, “Better Off Stateless: Somalia Before and After Government Collapse,” Journal of Comparative Economics 35 (2007): 689–710. See Weiner, The Rule of the Clan. See Peter T. Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010), 12–13. For a liberal critique of Muslim clan morality by a native Somalian woman, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008), and Nomad: From Islam to America—A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). This is the argument of Weiner’s Rule of the Clan. See Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth or the Long Parliament, ed. Ferdinand Tonnies, with an Introduction by Stephen Holmes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). See Frank M. Coleman, Hobbes and America: Exploring the Constitutional Foundations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Random House, Modern Library, n.d.), No. 1, p. 5.

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53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64

217

Ibid., No. 23, p. 145. Ibid., No. 70, p. 454. Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). On the Schenck case, see Anastaplo, The Constitutionalist, 44–47, 294–305. See Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). See William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932–1940 (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); and Howard Zinn, ed., New Deal Thought (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). For a more critical view of the New Deal, see Amity Shlaes, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the New Deal (New York: Harper, 2007). John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton, Essays on Freedom and Power, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972), 335. See Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1993). Scott W. Hahn and Benjamin Wiker, The Roots of Historical Criticism and the Secularization of Scripture, 1300–1700 (New York: Crossroad, 2013). See The Holy Quran, trans. A. Yusuf Ali (Brentwood, MD: Amana Corporation, 1983), 4.76, 9.29. Quran, 2.256. Quran, 2.30, 38.26. For this debate, see Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and Abdullahi Ahmed An-Naim, Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Sharia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For the intellectual and political history of al-Qaeda, see Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). George W. Bush, Speech to a Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001, at http:// www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911jointsessionspeech.htm. In my references to Behemoth, the first number is the page number in the edition of Behemoth published by the University of Chicago Press in 1990; the number in brackets is the page number in Behemoth or The Long Parliament, edited by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Seaward’s edition has a long Introduction and extensive notes to the text. The best short history is Blair Worden’s The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660 (London: Orion Books, 2009). See Quentin Skinner, “Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,” in Visions of Politics, vol. 3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 287–307. Geoffrey Robertson, The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005).

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8 Classical Liberalism

Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Letter Concerning Toleration

KEY READINGS Second Treatise, sections 1–57, 60–61, 74–83, 85, 87–174, 183, 199–243; Letter Concerning Toleration

John Locke (1632–1704) was the son of an English lawyer. He was educated at a prominent school in London and then at Oxford University, where he stayed for many years and worked as a scholar and teacher. He studied widely in theology, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, natural science, and medicine.1 Locke was a practicing physician, who also engaged throughout his life in experimental scientific research in medical chemistry and natural science generally. He worked closely with leading scientists of his time, such as Robert Boyle, Thomas Sydenham, Thomas Willis, and Isaac Newton.2 For example, he contributed to Boyle’s experiments with his air pump to explore how air provided some element necessary for respiration, which apparently sustained the natural heat of the heart that was necessary for life. Boyle and Locke were close to the discovery of oxygen’s role in sustaining animal life. Locke also learned about how the human mind emerges from the brain and nervous system from Willis, who was the founder of modern neurology. Willis dissected monkeys and apes to study their neurological similarities to human beings, while also looking for differences that would explain the distinctiveness of the human mind. Locke lived through the English Civil War (1642–1648), with the armies of King Charles I fighting the armies of Parliament. On the one side, the Roy219

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alists defended the King as ruling by divine right and the Anglican Church as the national church. On the other side, the Parliamentarians defended the supremacy of Parliament, either within a constitutional monarchy or in a republican form of government without a monarchy, and they favored a Puritan reformation of the national church. The Civil War culminated in the execution of the King in 1649. This was followed by a period of republican government and military dictatorship without a monarchy (1649–1660). The widespread repugnance against the military dictatorship under the rule of Oliver Cromwell and then his son and successor, Richard Cromwell, led to a restoration of monarchy with Charles II on the throne in 1660. The issues leading to this turbulence were both political and religious. The political issue was over how far Parliament could properly go in limiting the power of the King. The religious issue was over how far the established Anglican Church could go in limiting the practices and beliefs of Puritans and other religious groups dissenting from the Anglican Church. These were the primary issues for Locke’s writings on politics and religion. In 1667, Locke joined the household of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke was Shaftesbury’s personal physician and political advisor. Shaftesbury held prominent positions in the British government, including that of Lord Chancellor, the most powerful minister in the government. Through the patronage of Shaftesbury, Locke became the secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina (1671–1675) and the secretary to the Council of Trade and Plantations (1673–1674). Becoming one of the principal Whig opponents of the restored monarchy, Shaftesbury conspired against the King, and Locke was drawn into those Whig conspiracies.3 In some unpublished texts written in 1661–1664, Locke argued for monarchic absolutism and against religious toleration. After 1667, he changed his thinking, apparently under the influence of Shaftesbury, and adopted the radically liberal political and religious thought that is manifest in his published writing.4 The absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, the Catholic king of France, was considered by the Whigs as an indication of the threat of Catholic absolutism if England were ruled by a Catholic king. Charles II’s brother James was a Catholic and heir to the throne. Hoping to prevent James from taking the throne, Shaftesbury led the Whigs in the House of Commons in proposing an Exclusion Bill in 1679 that would exclude any Catholic from the line of monarchic succession. Those identified as Tories opposed the Exclusion Bill as an improper assertion of Parliamentary power in challenging the prerogative powers of the King. Charles II prevented passage of this bill by using his royal prerogative to dissolve Parliament. During this period of debate over the Exclusion Bill, Locke began writing his Two Treatises of Government to justify the resistance to what the Whigs identified as arbitrary and absolute exertions of power by Charles II. Locke aroused the suspicions of the King, who had spies report on Locke’s activities. In 1682, as a result of an unsuccessful revolutionary plot

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against the King, Shaftesbury was forced to flee to Holland, where he died in 1683. During this time, Algernon Sidney, a Whig leader, was beheaded for treason. Much of the evidence at his trial arose from his Discourses Concerning Government, in which he argued that republican government was superior to monarchy, which was similar to what Locke was writing in the Two Treatises of Government. Locke was forced into exile in Holland from 1683 to 1689. Because of his fear of persecution, Locke felt compelled to be cautious in expressing his revolutionary teaching. James II ascended the throne in 1685 with the support of the Tory majority in Parliament, but the Whigs opposed him. In 1688, it appeared that the throne would pass not to James’s Protestant daughters—Mary and Anne—but to his newborn Catholic son. The Whigs led the bloodless revolution in that year that gave the throne to Mary and her husband William of Orange. William and Mary had to accept a Bill of Rights that made Parliament sovereign through its powers over taxation and the maintenance of the military. When Locke published his Two Treatises in 1689, it was regarded as a philosophical defense of this revolution of 1688. The Two Treatises were framed as refutations of Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680), which argued that human beings are naturally born as children under the authority of their fathers, and that the royal authority of the King over his people is the natural extension of this paternal authority. Against Filmer, Locke argued that all human beings are born free and equal, and consequently all rightful political authority must derive from the consent of the governed. Also in 1689, Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and his Essay Concerning Human Understanding were published. While the Essay was published under Locke’s name, he refused to identify himself as the author of the Two Treatises and the Letter Concerning Toleration, because of his fear of persecution. In later years, Locke published other works on economics, religion, and education. His Essay Concerning Human Understanding became one of the most widely read books of the eighteenth century. Locke defended individual liberty in every realm of life—economics, religion, culture, and politics. The aim of a Lockean government, therefore, would be to secure the equal right of every individual to freedom. All of his writings manifested a devotion to equal liberty that in the nineteenth century came to be called liberalism.5 That sort of thinking reminds us of the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, the Second Treatise formulated perhaps better than any other book the principles to which the Americans of 1776 would appeal: natural equality, unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, government by the consent of the governed, and the right to revolution.6 Moreover, many of the constitutional principles of American government, such as the separation of powers and the rule of law, can also be found in Locke’s work. Also, the American tradition of religious liberty and toleration reflects the argument of Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration.

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And yet some historians have recently argued that the influence of Locke’s liberal individualism has been exaggerated, and that, in fact, the more influential tradition in the eighteenth century was that of classical republicanism, which stressed the importance of civic duties rather than individual rights, because the classical republicans identified liberty with the civic virtue of citizens governing themselves. Nevertheless, the echoes of Locke’s language in the Second Treatise in the Declaration of Independence provide clear evidence of his influence.7 The first step in understanding and assessing Locke’s political thought—and the liberalism to which he contributed—is to examine his arguments for the fundamental principle of equal liberty. We can do that by asking a series of four questions about the possible grounds for considering all human beings entitled to equal liberty.

1. Are human beings entitled to equal liberty as being the workmanship of their Creator? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Thus does the Declaration of Independence affirm the religious belief in divine creation as the ground for equal liberty. All human beings are equal in their moral dignity insofar as they were all created in God’s image, and they are all equally endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Human rights come from God, not from government. Governments are established by popular consent to secure those God-given rights. In the Two Treatises of Government, Locke seems to agree. To properly understand political power, Locke explains in the Second Treatise, we must derive it from its origin in the state of nature. In the original state of nature, all human beings are equal and free in their natural right to order their lives and property as they wish, constrained only by the law of nature, so long as they do not infringe on the same equal liberty of all others (II.4).8 By the law of nature, each person is to preserve himself, his liberty, and his property. And if it is consistent with his own preservation, he is to preserve other human beings, which includes the natural power to deter and punish those who become aggressively violent in injuring others contrary to the law of nature. This must be so, Locke explains, because Men being all the Workmanship of one Omnipotent, and infinitely wise Maker; All the Servants of one Sovereign Master, sent into the World by his order and about his business, they are his Property, whose Workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one

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another’s Pleasure. And being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours. (II.6)

In the First Treatise, he explains this by saying that human beings were created by God in His image and likeness, which includes the intellectual nature that gives human beings dominion over those creatures that are irrational and thus inferior to human beings (I.30). In this way, in creating human beings as His “workmanship,” God has given them a rational nature that allows them to rule over irrational animals, while denying that any human being may rightly treat other human beings as if they were irrational animals. It seems, then, that Locke’s argument for equal liberty as dictated by natural law depends on his theistic religious belief in God as Creator and moral lawgiver. Moreover, in the Two Treatises as well as the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke cites the Bible repeatedly as support for his arguments. Some commentators have concluded that Locke’s argument for human equality in natural rights depends upon his Christian faith.9 If this is true, then we might wonder whether the modern liberal idea of universal human rights depends on the religious idea of the sacredness of human life, and whether we can hold onto that morality of human rights if we reject its religious foundation. When we come to Friedrich Nietzsche, later in this book, we will have to ask whether the modern “death of God” means the death of any belief in the equal moral dignity of human beings as created by God, and thus the death of any belief in the liberal idea of equal liberty. Despite his public profession of Christian faith, Locke was accused by some of his Christian critics of being an atheist, or perhaps a deist, and they regarded deism as only a disguised form of atheism.10 Locke was certainly serious in developing his interpretations of Christian theology in The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (published in 1694) and in his notes on the epistles of St. Paul in the New Testament (published after Locke’s death).11 But some readers have suspected that Locke’s “reasonable” theology was part of a rhetorical strategy to enlist religious belief in the service of his rationalist and purely secular political philosophy.12 Locke often spoke of “the Laws of God and Nature” as if to imply that God and nature are equivalent, so that a rational understanding of nature might give us a sufficient grasp of the law of nature even without religious belief (I.90, 93; II.1, 4, 60, 66, 142, 195). The appeal to the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence echoes Locke’s language. We might wonder, then, whether Locke’s argument for equal liberty as a law of nature might be rooted in human nature without any necessary dependence on religious belief.

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2. Are human beings entitled to equal liberty as members of the same human species who claim self-ownership? As we have just seen, Locke often speaks of human beings as the “workmanship” of God and thus belonging to God, who owns them and rules over them by his moral laws. But Locke also speaks of human beings as owning themselves. In his chapter on property, he writes: “Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself” (I.27). “From all which it is evident,” Locke explains, “that though the things of Nature are given in common, yet Man (by being Master of himself, and Proprietor of his own Person, and the Actions or Labour of it) had still in himself the great foundation of Property” (I.44). Here, some commentators have argued, the foundation of Locke’s political philosophy of natural rights is not God’s ownership of the world and His rule by natural law, but rather the idea that human beings have natural rights because they own themselves. This suggests the natural autonomy of human beings, rather than their natural subordination to God, as informing the modern understanding of human rights.13 Here we see a tension or contradiction that runs through much of our modern debate about liberal political thought. On the one hand, some people argue that human rights depend upon religious belief in creationism— in the idea that human beings have been created by God and endowed by Him with rights (as asserted by the Declaration of Independence). On the other hand, some people argue that human rights depend on a purely secular belief in individual autonomy, which includes the freedom of individuals from any politically enforced establishment of religion. So how we interpret Locke has implications for this continuing debate in liberal societies over the relationship between religious belief and liberal politics. One manifestation of this debate is the question as to whether the Darwinian science of human evolution denies the Lockean view of natural rights as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. If the Declaration and the Lockean philosophy of natural rights assume that human beings were created by God in His image, and thus endowed with rights, this might seem to conflict with the Darwinian teaching that human beings evolved from lower animals through a natural struggle for existence. From the Darwinian view, if nature gives human beings any rights, it might seem to be only the rights of the stronger over the weaker, or “might makes right.”14 Or is it possible that Darwinian science actually supports Locke’s understanding of natural rights as rooted in human biological nature? Locke justifies natural rights as grounded in the natural desires and natural reason of human beings as animals endowed by God with “sense and reason,” as opposed to the “inferior animals” that are moved by “sense and instinct.” Natural desires become natural rights when human beings as rational animals reflect on the social conditions for satisfying their

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desires (I.86–92). Because of their strong desire for self-preservation, human beings can recognize the right to life as a natural right. Because of their strong desires for sexual mating and parental care, human beings can recognize the rights of parents to rear their offspring. Because of their strong desire for property, human beings can recognize the rights of property. Murder and theft violate the laws of nature and God, because murder and theft are contrary to “the principles of human nature,” which are also contrary to God’s law insofar as God’s will is evident in the way He has “ordered the course of nature” (I.89; II.10, 67). Critical to this reasoning is the thought that human beings as rational animals can understand that to satisfy their desire to receive good from others, they must satisfy the “like desire” in others as “being of the same nature” (in the words of Richard Hooker as quoted by Locke) (II.5). This is the natural ground for the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you. It’s the natural rule of justice as reciprocity or “titfor-tat”—our natural disposition to reward those who cooperate with us and punish those who cheat or betray us. This could be the natural ground for equal liberty. Human beings are naturally equal, because as members of the same human species, they are born to the same general capacities for reasoning about the satisfaction of their desires. They are naturally free, because they naturally resist being attacked or exploited by those who would rule over them by force rather than consent. Could Darwinian science of evolved human nature support this Lockean view of natural self-ownership and social cooperation? In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke identifies a “person” or “self” as “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.” All the parts of a human body are vitally united to this thinking self, “so that we feel when they are touched, and are affected by, and conscious of good or harm that happens to them, are a part of ourselves; i.e. of our thinking conscious self.” Consequently, “the limbs of his body are to every one a part of himself; he sympathizes and is concerned for them.” “Self is that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. Thus every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so.”15 Ultimately, everyone pursues happiness—the fullest satisfaction of one’s natural desires over a whole life—as the natural end of all thought and action.16 This conception of individual personhood as embodied self-conscious awareness of, and emotional concern for, the survival and well-being of the body and mind reflects Locke’s work as a medical scientist. This could be supported by a Darwinian understanding of the human nervous system as a product of mammalian evolution. Through evolutionary neuroscience, we might explain the self-ownership of the person as the activity of particular parts of the brain—such as the anterior insular cortex—that constitute

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the subjective awareness of the individual in caring for one’s self and for others to whom one is attached. The brain responds not only to physical pain from bodily injury but also to social pain from social injury. In mammalian evolution, the neural circuitry for physical pain was appropriated for registering social pain in animals adapted for social attachment. Mammals must care for the survival and well-being not only of themselves but also of others to whom they are attached. Extending the neural mechanisms originally evolved for individual self-preservation to include the welfare of offspring and social partners secures mammalian social order. The uniquely human evolution of the neocortex elaborates this mammalian development to sustain human love and concern for others. Moreover, the human brain has evolved capacities for empathy or fellow-feeling by which human beings can read the minds of others and imaginatively share their emotions, which extends their care not only to relatives and friends but even to strangers.17 This mammalian extension of care to offspring, sexual mates, and other social partners is identified by Locke when he explains natural human sociality as rooted in the biological inclinations for survival, mating, and reproduction (I.86–89; II.54–56, 77–84). But even if we concluded that evolutionary neuroscience can support a Lockean conception of natural rights as rooted in natural self-ownership, we might still wonder about whether this science can also support the Lockean conception of divine ownership. Since its first formulation by Darwin, evolutionary science has often been identified as atheistic. And yet there are theistic evolutionists, and Darwin himself left room for the divine Creator as First Cause of those original laws of nature that allowed the natural evolution of life to unfold. Moreover, Darwin recognized the importance of religious belief for moral progress, although he implied that such religious belief was not absolutely necessary.18 The Darwinian understanding of the natural moral sense resembles Locke in his appeal to “God and Nature” or Revelation and Reason, so that divine right becomes natural right insofar as Nature’s God manifests His will in the way he has “ordered the course of nature” (I.88–90; II.25). We can discern the law of nature by reflecting on our natural experience of human life and following those moral and political rules that seem most likely to secure our pursuit of happiness. The atheistic naturalist will not go any further, because the natural order of things will be taken as the unexplained ground of all explanation. But the religious believer will look beyond nature to nature’s God as the unexplained ground of all explanation. Darwinian science neither affirms nor denies the theological claims in such religious beliefs. But it does affirm that the moral and political order of life can be rooted in evolved human nature without any necessity for religious belief, although religious belief has evolved to reinforce the natural human sense of right and wrong.19 By suggesting two possible grounds for the natural rights of equal liberty—divine workmanship and self-ownership—Locke indicates the ten-

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sion between religious or metaphysical ethics and secular or empirical ethics. If human beings are created by God in His image, then they have a divinely created worth that cannot be properly denied by those who would deprive them of their sacred rights. But if each human being is naturally inclined to take possession of himself in mind and body, and if each human being can see that all other human beings are equally inclined to assert the same self-possession, then this human experience of self-ownership could be a purely secular ground of human rights. When the Declaration of Independence appeals to the divine creation of all human beings as free and equal in their rights, it invokes Locke’s religious ground for equal liberty. But now the major statement of the modern idea of human rights is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations in 1948. In the UN commission that drafted the Universal Declaration, some of the delegates argued that the document should begin by declaring that human rights are “based on man’s divine origin and immortal destiny” as being “created in the image and likeness of God.” But other delegates argued that this would assume religious beliefs that were not universally accepted. The proposed religious language was dropped, and instead the Universal Declaration proclaims that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” It also proclaims: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” This echoes the language of the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, which says that “all men are by nature free and independent, and have certain inherent rights.” This appeal to the “inherent dignity” that all human beings have as “members of the human family” invokes Locke’s purely secular principle of human self-ownership as natural for all members of the human species, and thus seems to turn away from Locke’s religious principle of divine ownership.20 Darwinian evolutionary science and neuroscience might support this modern secular idea of human rights as inherent in the evolved human nature that all human beings share. In fact, the biological basis of human rights is affirmed in the Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, which was ratified by the United Nations in 1998. Article 1 declares: “The human genome underlies the fundamental unity of all members of the human family, as well as the recognition of their inherent dignity and diversity.”21 The Darwinian account of human evolution assumes that the earliest human ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in small foraging bands. One might ask, then, whether this conforms to what Locke identified as the original state of nature, and whether human beings in this original state really were free and equal.

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3. Are human beings equal and free in the original state of nature? Like Hobbes, Locke describes the state of nature as a condition where human beings live with “no common judge with authority,” which is a condition of natural liberty and equality, in that each person is free to live as he pleases without dependence on the will of another. Like Hobbes, Locke looks to the American Indians as showing this natural state. The American Indians provide “a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe” (II.108). “In the beginning, all the world was America” (II.49). Locke lays out a history of political evolution based principally on two sources—the books on the social history of the American Indians by Europeans who had travelled in the New World and the biblical history of politics in the Old Testament. This evolutionary history of politics is crucial for his argument that human beings are naturally equal in their freedom, and that governments arise by popular consent. Locke’s evolutionary history is tied to three factors—property, parental care, and political power—corresponding to three natural desires: self-preservation, reproduction, and political rule. In his history of property, Locke sees three stages of appropriation corresponding to the foraging life, the agrarian life, and the commercial life. The American Indians live as foragers who gather wild plants and hunt wild animals (II.26). Each person asserts a property in his own person, and he extends his property through his labor of gathering wild plants or hunting wild animals that he consumes. With the invention of farming, human beings appropriate land to themselves by cultivating it to produce food for consumption by themselves and their families. At this point, human life depends on the cultivation of domesticated plants and the herding of domesticated animals. If land is abundant and the human population low, there is no conflict over land use. Then, with the invention of money and development of commercial exchange, farmers can produce for the market, which gives them the incentive to expand their land claims, so that soon all the land has been claimed. Like Adam Smith, Locke marvels at how commercial exchange creates a spontaneous order in the division of labor, in which many strangers cooperate to produce something like a loaf of bread (II.43). But, then, conflicts over the property in land and animals require a government to regulate the right of property by legislation. In his history of parental care, Locke regards the conjugal society of husband and wife as the “first society,” which shows that human beings are naturally social, because they are naturally inclined to sexual mating, and all human beings begin their lives as children dependent on parental care. From this conjugal society of husband and wife arises the familial tie between parents and children. Comparing human mating with the mating systems of other animals, Locke sees that human beings show a long period of childhood dependency on parental care, so that for human

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beings, it is natural for both parents to provide extensive care that provides not just for the existence of their offspring but for their nourishment and their education. Thus does family life as the first social order arise from the natural desires for sexual mating, parental care, and familial bonding (II.77–84). Is this similar to what Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas say about the natural sociality of family life? Is Locke’s argument for the conjugal bonding of husband and wife in caring for their children as the first human society supported by Darwinian science?22 Children are not born in a state of equal freedom, Locke observes, because they are dependent on their parents. But as they mature and acquire reason, they naturally grow into their natural freedom (II.54–63). It was natural, however, for children in “the first ages of the world” to give a tacit consent to being ruled by their fathers, which created patriarchal political authority (II.74–76). Since all individuals are by nature free, equal, and independent, Locke argues, no one can be put under the political power of another without his consent. By their unanimous consent, individuals agree to join a community, and then that community by majority consent can establish any form of government. Locke recognizes two major objections to his reasoning. First, it is said that there are no historical cases of people who begin as free and equal and then meet to set up a government. Second, it is said that all individuals are born under a government to which they owe obedience, and they are not free to set up a new one (II.100). To the first objection, Locke admits that there is very little historical evidence of the state of nature and the establishment of government by consent, but this is only because government first arose before the invention of writing, and so there are no written records of the earliest governments. But even so, we can find some evidence among the American Indians and other foraging people indicating how human beings originally lived without government. We can also see in the Bible and other records stories of how government first arose. We can see that primitive societies commonly put themselves under patriarchal rulers or others who seemed best suited to rule them. Typically, tribal chiefs were war leaders who exercised little authority in time of peace. Locke sees evidence for this in the books about the New World and in the Bible (II.101–12). Locke quotes from José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies, based on Acosta’s experience as a Jesuit priest working in Peru from 1572 to 1586 (II.102). Locke also drew evidence from other European writings on the American Indians for his description of the state of nature.23 To the second objection—that all individuals are born under the authority of a government to which they have not consented—Locke answers by pointing to the obvious fact of the multiplicity of governments around the

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world as showing that human beings have regularly established new governments. Moreover, the history of colonization provides clear cases of where people have left the governments under which they were born to enter a new government. This indicates that when natural born citizens obey their government, they are showing their tacit consent (II.113–22). Locke recognizes that the history of government is largely the history of conquest, and in wars of conquest, popular consent is ignored (II.175– 96). But when government rules by force alone, without any authority from popular consent, that government can be overthrown whenever enough people are discontented and have sufficient courage and opportunity to rebel. People are naturally inclined to meet force with force, when they think they are being exploited by tyrants. People can always choose to rebel against their government. And when they do, they have “appealed to Heaven,” which is to say, they have invoked the God of battles, just as Jeptha did in leading the people of Israel in war with the Ammonites, as reported by the Bible (II.240–43). As suggested by both Hobbes and Locke, the ultimate ground of the natural right to equal liberty is the natural inclination of human beings to use violence in retaliating against those who attack or exploit them. In the state of nature, everyone has the “executive power of the law of nature,” so that each person can punish murderers, thieves, and others who disrupt the social order (II.6–13). Even when people are living under an established government, to which they have given up their natural executive power, they can still reclaim that natural power if they think it is necessary to defend themselves against the attacks of individuals or the oppression of government. (Aristotle and Machiavelli made the same point when they observed that a prince who is hated by his people is easily assassinated.) Is Locke right in claiming that all human beings were originally free and equal when they lived as foraging hunter-gatherers like the American Indians? Or can we assume that even the earliest human ancestors living in foraging bands had leaders, and thus showed a natural inclination to hierarchical inequality, with some ruling over others? This is the crucial issue in Locke’s debate with Robert Filmer, because Filmer argues that all human beings are born as children under the authority of their parents, and this would have been true for our earliest human ancestors, who would have shown the patriarchal rule of fathers that eventually led to the patriarchal rule of monarchs over their people. If Filmer is right, then the original or natural condition of human beings is not equal liberty but unequal authority. Does research in evolutionary anthropology help us to answer these questions? Consider how Locke uses his quotation from Acosta’s book to describe the lack of formal governmental rule in the state of nature. And if Josephus Acosta’s word may be taken, he tells us, that in many parts of America there was no Government at all. There are great and apparent Conjectures, says he, that these Men, speaking of those of Peru,

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for a long time had neither Kings nor Commonwealths, but lived in Troops, as they do this day in Florida, the Cheriquanas, those of Bresil, and many other Nations, which have no certain Kings, but as occasion is offered in Peace or War, they choose their Captains as they please.” (II.102)

Here’s another translation of this passage from Acosta: There are clear indications for a long time these men had no kings or any form of government but lived in free groups like the Indians of Florida nowadays and the Chiriguanas and Brazilians and many other tribes, who do not have regular kings but in accordance with the occasions that arise in war or peace choose their chiefs as they like.24

Notice the ambiguity in this passage. On the one hand, there is said to be among these people “no kings or any form of government” or “no government at all,” as Locke says. And yet, on the other hand, it is said that occasionally in war or peace, these people can choose “chiefs” or “captains” to lead them. This is an ambiguity in Locke’s account of the state of nature. At times, the state of nature seems to be an utterly asocial and apolitical state in which people live as solitary individuals with no structure of rule at all, which can be interpreted to mean that Locke is denying that human beings are political animals by nature. At other times, however, the state of nature does seem to have some informal structure of rule. This ambiguity is seen in Locke’s definition of the state of nature as “men living together according to reason, without a common Superior on Earth, with Authority to judge between them” (II.19). Living without any common superior or judge with authority might suggest an asocial state of solitary individuals, but “men living together according to reason” clearly indicates some kind of rule-governed social order. A similar ambiguity is that while Locke says that the state of nature is a state of peace rather than a state of war, and thus disagrees with Hobbes, Locke also says that the state of nature easily becomes a state of war that induces people to establish government to enforce peace, which agrees with Hobbes (II:19, 123). These two ambiguities can be seen in the anthropological reports about America that Locke was studying. For example, one report from the French missionary Gabriel Sagard-Theodat describes the Great Lakes Indians in Canada as organized by familial and tribal attachments under the leadership of their chiefs, which shows, he concluded, that “man is a social animal who cannot live without company.” And yet the reports of violence and warfare among the American Indians show that living without formal government made it hard for them to live always in peace with one another.25 What look like contradictions in Locke’s arguments actually show Locke’s effort to accurately generalize conclusions about the complex variability of this historical experience, in which primitive people can live orderly social lives governed by informal customary rules, even though the absence of formal governmental institutions makes it difficult to settle all disputes peacefully.

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Acosta distinguishes three levels or stages in the history of government in Peru and Mexico. The first human beings to arrive in America were savage hunters who crossed over a land bridge from Asia to America. Acosta was the first person to propose this theory of the original human migration from Asia to America over a land bridge, a theory that is now widely accepted by many evolutionary anthropologists, although there is controversy over the timing and patterns of these migrations.26 These hunters had no government. “They had no chief, nor did they recognize one, nor did they worship any gods or have rites or any religion whatsoever.”27 The second stage is “that of free associations or communities, where the people are governed by the advice of many, and are like councils. In time of war, these elect a captain who is obeyed by a whole tribe or province. In time of peace, each town or group of folk rules itself, and each has some prominent men whom the mass of the people respect; and at most some of these join together on matters that seem important to them to see what they ought to do.”28 The third stage is that of monarchy or empire—like that of the Incas or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico. Originally, this was a “moderate rule” that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were “equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good.” But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as beasts and treated themselves as gods.29 In some passages of his book, however, Acosta combines the first two stages and suggests that even the most primitive hunter-gatherers had some informal leadership by which prominent people could mediate disputes and lead them in war, but always constrained by the informal consent or resistance of the community. The one passage from Acosta’s book quoted by Locke is an example of this, as though Locke figured out that even primitive foragers would have some episodic and informal structure of rule in which some individuals would have more influence than others, although excessive dominance would be checked by popular resistance. In the state of nature, Locke observes, they judged the ablest, and most likely, to Rule over them. Conformable hereunto we find the People of America, who (living out of reach of the Conquering Swords, and spreading domination of the two great Empires of Peru and Mexico) enjoy’d their own natural freedom, though, ceteris paribus, they commonly prefer the Heir of their deceased King; yet if they find him any way weak, or uncapable, they pass him by and set up the stoutest and bravest Man for their Ruler.” (II.105)

The American Indian Kings were originally temporary war leaders. “And though they command absolutely in War, yet at home and in time of Peace they exercise very little Dominion, and have but a very moderate Sovereignty, the Resolutions of Peace and War, being ordinarily either in the Peo-

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ple, or in a Council. Though the War itself, which admits not of Plurality of Governours, naturally devolves the Command into the King’s sole Authority” (II.108). In his Third Letter for Toleration, Locke says that among those American Indians who lived as foraging hunter-gatherers, “the only Man of Authority amongst them” was a chief, whose only power was to lead them in war. They could live without any formally established laws or judges, because they could resolve their private conflicts “by the extemporary Determination of their Neighbors, or of Arbitrators chosen by the Parties.”30 Today’s evolutionary anthropologists might complain that Locke has confused two levels of primitive social organization—bands and chiefdoms. But still, Locke might be seen as remarkably accurate in describing how foraging societies without formal governments—called “stateless societies” today—enforce customary norms of conduct through private arbitration, while also organizing around war leaders in defense against outside groups. Although foraging bands of hunter-gatherers do not have formal institutions of law and government, they do have informal customary laws enforced by social agreement and by individuals recognized by the society as wise arbitrators in settling disputes.31 For example, the Eskimos originally lived as foraging bands of huntergatherers. E. Adamson Hoebel—an anthropologist who studied the evolution of law in primitive societies—described the Eskimos as anarchists, in the sense that they had “no government in the formal sense.” But they did have some informal leadership by headmen. Hoebel explained: The headman possesses no fixed authority; neither does he enter into formal office. He is not elected, nor is he chosen by any formal process. When other men accept his judgment and opinions, he is a headman. When they ignore him, he is not. Headmen are those who can hunt and who by their extended acquaintance with the traditions, customs, and rights connected with the festivals, as well as being possessed of an unusual degree of common sense, are deferred to and act as chief advisers of the community. Such are the germs of political authority among the rude societies of mankind.32

Does this suggest that human beings really are political animals by nature, so that even in primitive societies without formal governmental institutions, there are “the germs of political authority,” in that some individuals will assume positions of informal leadership? This might be what David Hume had in mind in his essay “Of the Origin of Government,” when he described how the “love of dominion” as rooted in the “principles of human nature” would motivate leaders in savage societies who get prestige from acting as dominant individuals, although this dominance would depend on the voluntary consent, or at least acquiescence, of the other individuals in the society. In this way, Locke’s idea of “original contract” really does explain the primitive origins of law and government, although

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the later history of government has been decisively shaped by war and conquest. Originally, one man might have been a temporary war leader, but as the state of war became almost perpetual, the war leader might become a permanent king with the authority to compel obedience to his rule. And thus, Hume concluded, the history of government has been a continuing struggle between liberty and authority.33 But is there any anthropological evidence today for the equal liberty that Locke saw in the state of nature? The Bushmen (or San) people of Southern Africa are regarded by many evolutionary anthropologists as the descendants of the earliest human ancestors. Until recently, they have lived as hunter-gatherers, and they have been studied as people who probably show the kind of social life characteristic of human life during the Paleolithic period before the development of agriculture. In many ways, their life coincides with Locke’s depiction of human beings in the state of nature.34 Polly Wiessner, an anthropologist who has studied the Bushmen, reports that “all adult members of the society are autonomous equals who cannot command, bully, coerce, or indebt others.” There is a “strong egalitarian norm that no adult can tell another what to do.” “All people as autonomous individuals are expected to stand up for their rights,” and so everyone has the right to enforce the social norms of the group by punishing those who violate them.35 Among these Bushmen, kinship ties are primary social bonds. Parents care for their children, and parents can call on extended kin to help in rearing their young. Until they reach maturity, children have no authority independent of their kin. Unmarried young males are particularly unruly, and they are often the objects of criticism. The common sources of disputes include food-sharing, claims on land, sexual misbehavior (such as adultery), jealousy over possessions, stinginess, laziness, fighting, power struggles, and “big-shot behavior.” Punishment can take many forms—from mild to severe—mocking, mild criticism, harsh criticism, ostracism from the group, or violent acts. Although peace is generally maintained, there is always an underlying threat of violence, and sometimes disputes escalate into general brawls. Although everyone is free to punish transgressors, those who are judged to be too critical or harsh suffer from their bad reputation. The Bushmen show what anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls “egalitarian hierarchy.”36 That is to say, there is an informal hierarchy in that some people have a little more power, influence, or status than others; but that natural drive of some for dominance is moderated by the natural drive of subordinates to resist excessive or exploitative dominance. Hunter-gatherers like the Bushmen enforce norms of equality, but they recognize that people are unequal in their talents and temperaments, and consequently some people will have more property, higher status, or more power than others. They distinguish between those who are “strong” and those who are “weak.” The “strong” are those skilled in persuasion, media-

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tion, hunting, gathering, music, or healing. Some of those who are judged to be superior in their social skills for mediation and persuasion become camp leaders. But those who are powerful or influential invite leveling by those wary of “big-shot behavior.” In their broad survey of the research in evolutionary political anthropology over the past 150 years, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus have shown that the Bushmen show a general pattern found in all hunter-gatherer societies. Some individuals have more influence and higher status than others, because some individuals naturally desire to be superior, and foragers rely on some informal and episodic leadership, although this leadership is not formal or permanent. These hunter-gatherer societies remain roughly egalitarian only because leaders who become too domineering or bullying provoke punishment from their subordinates who resist them.37 The norms enforced by the Bushmen correspond to the principles of social cooperation recognized by evolutionary theorists.38 People cooperate with their kin. People cooperate based on reciprocal exchange with titfor-tat behavior and based on people’s reputations for being cooperators or cheaters. Furthermore, people are willing to enforce social norms by punishing violators even when punishment is costly. People do this because they want to live in stable, cooperative groups that secure the conditions for the pursuit of happiness. But if it is true that human beings in the state of nature show the equal liberty that Locke takes to be the standard of natural right, then why doesn’t Locke argue for going back to that original state? Are there serious defects in that original state? Notice that the American Indian societies to which Locke is appealing as a standard for political freedom and limited government are societies of hunter-gatherers in a primitive condition, and they survived only as long as they remained out of reach of the Incan and Mexican empires. Thus, these hunting-gathering societies were both culturally uncivilized and militarily weak. The problem for Locke’s liberalism is how to combine freedom, civilization, and power. Beginning 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the development of agriculture after the Last Ice Age, human beings formed sedentary communities with growing populations, which led to the first agrarian states. In these novel circumstances, it became ever harder for subordinates to organize to resist the despotic dominance of their leaders, who now ruled through elaborate military, religious, administrative, and monarchic bureaucracies. These agrarian states provided the conditions for high civilization—economic wealth, technological innovation, cultural progress (particularly, through the invention of writing), bureaucratic administration, and military power. But that high civilization came with a big price—the loss of the individual freedom from domination that human beings enjoyed in foraging societies. Among foragers, the inequality of power, wealth, and status is minimal. Foraging societies don’t allow some to tyrannize over others. But agrarian states allow ruling elites to live by exploiting those they rule.

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Consequently, the history of politics over the past 5,000 years has been largely a conflict between freedom and domination—with the rulers inclined to tyrannical domination and the ruled looking for ways to escape that domination. There has often seemed to be no good resolution to the conflict, because human beings seemed to be caught in a tragic dilemma of having to choose between freedom without civilization and civilization without freedom. Classical liberalism attempts to overcome this dilemma through liberal republican capitalism. The combination of a liberal society, a republican polity, and a capitalist economy might promote both freedom and civilization: people can be socially, politically, and economically free, while enjoying all the benefits of a progressive civilization. The natural desires for social status, political rule, and economic wealth will always create inequalities of rank that will incline those at the top to become tyrannical. But Lockean liberals believe that we can mitigate this through social, political, and economic structures of countervailing power that create competing elites so that power does not become unduly concentrated or unchecked. For classical liberals, such a system is imperfect. But it’s the best we can do. A crucial feature of such a classical liberal regime is protecting property rights.

4. Are all human beings entitled to equal liberty in acquiring property? Although some readers might see it as a contradiction, Locke contends that if government is to secure equality of rights, it must protect the private property rights that permit economic inequality. Locke concedes that it is difficult to justify private property, considering what he has said about the state of nature (II.25). For if at the beginning equal rights to the resources of nature are enjoyed by all, how can anyone acquire the right to hold property exclusively, of which the ultimate consequence is that some will have much wealth and others little? As we have seen, the basis for human rights in Locke is that, having a rational nature, each human being exercises self-mastery or self-rule, of which the irrational animals are incapable. Therefore, people own what they are and are what they own. Moreover, they rightfully acquire property in those external possessions that are extensions of themselves. If they have property in their persons, they also have property in their labor as the expression of their persons. And finally, individuals have a property right to the objects of their labor. Even if we accepted this as a cogent justification for personally acquired property, we still might doubt that this would hold for the unlimited accumulation of land and money that permits some people to rule over others. For instance, we should be shocked by Locke’s casual observation, “The Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my Servant has cut; and the

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Ore I have digg’d in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my Property” (II.28). The parallel between “my horse” and “my servant” suggests that the servant is just as much the master’s property as is the horse. When the inequality of property becomes great, the poor must sell their labor to the rich. But doesn’t it contradict Lockean equal liberty for the labor of some to be owned by others? Doesn’t this mean that the poorest human beings are treated like inferior animals? These are the questions raised by the Marxist critics of Locke. Before taking up such criticisms, we should survey some of the major points in Locke’s account of property to see how he would answer these objections. We might be confused by our first reading of Locke’s Chapter 5 of the Second Treatise on property. The summary of his teaching at the end of the chapter (II.51) corresponds exactly to an earlier summary in section 39. We have to wonder, therefore, what is added in the intervening portion of the chapter (II.40–50). In fact, there seems to be a summary in section 50 that differs greatly from the summary in section 51. Are there two separate teachings in Locke’s chapter on property? The summaries in section 39 and in section 51 both contain four points. First, God gives the world to all people in common. Second, labor affords the right to property taken from the common. Third, the amount of property held by anyone is limited to what can actually be used. Fourth, there is no conflict over property because there is no reason for anyone to take so much as to infringe on the claims of others. In section 50, however, a rather different account of property is summarized. Once the use of money is agreed to, Locke explains, the accumulation of property becomes unlimited, which produces great inequality in private property. The purpose of government, then, is to secure the rights to unequal property. The crucial element in this second version of Locke’s teaching is money. The limits on property stressed in the early part of the chapter are dropped with the introduction of money, which creates an inequality of property that requires protection by government. Initially, Locke sets down three limits on the acquisition of property. First, the right to own property can only be acquired through labor for that property. Second, there must be “enough, and as good, left in common for others” (II.27). Finally, only as much as can be used without any thing being wasted can be taken (II.31). When our ancestors lived in primitive conditions with an abundance of natural resources and a small population, there was no reason for conflicts about property rights. Human agreement to the use of money upsets everything. Monetary wealth can be accumulated endlessly without spoiling (II.45–49). With the appearance of a market economy combined with population growth, all the land is appropriated as those with entrepreneurial skills find it profitable to cultivate thousands of acres through hired labor and then to sell the produce on the market. Thus the owners of land and capital can acquire property through the labor of others.

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But if a few appropriate all the land, doesn’t this violate the rule that “enough, and as good” must be left for others? One possible answer, implied in Locke’s account of property, is that because land is more productive when it is cultivated, it is best that all land is appropriated, even for those left landless, because even those without land will benefit from the resultant abundance (II.37). For example, although in America land is free for the taking, the Indians still live in poverty because they lack the monetary economy that would stimulate cultivation of the land. For that reason, Locke observes, “A King of a large and fruitful Territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England” (II.41). Another consequence of the invention of money is that because money is conventional rather than natural or divine, a monetary economy manifests the subjectivity of value as a human creation. Early in the chapter on property, Locke emphasizes the value of nature’s resources provided by God; later in the chapter, however, he explains that value is created by human labor using the “almost worthless materials” of nature (II.43). But with reliance on money, “the intrinsic value of things” is replaced entirely by monetary value (II.37). Thus, humans take the place of God and nature as the chief sources of value. In fact, in sections 40 through 50 of the chapter, there is no reference to God, although Locke does speak of the “wise and godlike” prince who rules so as to promote the economic activity of his people (II.42). Indeed, Locke’s ultimate purpose in this chapter is to persuade rulers that protecting private property should be their highest aim. We would expect, therefore, that socialists have been severe critics of this portion of Locke’s teaching. Although Karl Marx himself made no detailed comments on Locke’s work, some subsequent scholars influenced by Marx have. C. B. Macpherson has developed one of the best Marxist critiques, but others have also contributed.39 Macpherson speaks generally for the Marxist view of Locke when he argues that Locke defends a capitalist society in which the wealthy few would exploit the poor multitude. Although professing to believe in equality of rights, Locke endorses the development of a monetary economy that creates an inequality of property with a few people possessing all the land and capital and most people laboring for mere subsistence. The great majority of citizens in Locke’s society, according to Macpherson’s interpretation, would have to labor for the wealthy landowners just to survive. Labor becomes a commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace. If the human power for self-rule is expressed in labor, humanity—that is, life and liberty—is lost by the wage laborer selling labor. Therefore, a Lockean government secures property rights, Macpherson explains, by protecting the rights of the propertied few against the claims of the property-less multitude. Macpherson even claims that Locke would allow only the wealthy minority to be full members of his political society. Only those with property would have the right to vote. The poor citizens

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would have to obey the laws, but they would not participate in the making of the laws. Macpherson also contends that the fundamental assumptions implied in Locke’s thought constitute what he calls “possessive individualism.” According to this conception of human nature, the essence of humanity is freedom from the will of others. This freedom requires that no individual depend on others except to the extent that social relationships are voluntarily entered for reasons of self-interest, and the primary interest lies in the unlimited increase of individual wealth and power. Political society arises, therefore, from the free agreement of those who seek to protect their selfish accumulation of property. Some are more rational in their pursuit of property than others. The more rational ones become rich; the less rational become poor. Hence, for government to protect property, the rich must rule over the poor. Thus, the government promotes the freedom of the few rational individuals only by depriving all others of their individual freedom. Macpherson believes this to be an accurate description of the market society that Locke saw emerging in seventeenth-century England and that still exists in the Western liberal democracies. Macpherson thinks it is now possible, however, to develop a new view of property rights that would allow all people to exercise their human freedom rather than only a wealthy few. In a Lockean society, the rich have exclusive rights to use the accumulated capital and natural resources of society for their own selfish benefit, which gives them the power to exploit the poor. But Macpherson would give to everyone an equal right to use or benefit from the productive resources of society, so that everyone would have an equal opportunity to self-fulfillment as a free human being. This looks like a perfect socialist society in which the means of production would be owned in common by all rather than owned privately by a few. Are we ready now to become socialist revolutionaries? We should first consider how a Lockean might answer Macpherson’s criticism. To the charge that Locke would permit the wealthy to exploit the poor, a Lockean could insist that property rights in a market economy benefit everyone, the poor as well as the rich. Unlike the peasants in feudal society, who were constrained by their obligations to labor for their noble lords, the wage laborers in a Lockean society have a right to sell their labor as they wish. As Locke explains, “A Free-man makes himself a Servant to another, by selling him, for a certain time, the Service he undertakes to do, in exchange for Wages he is to receive. . . . It gives the Master but a Temporary Power over him, and no greater, than what is contained in the Contract between them” (II.85). The Marxist might protest that the master will always have a stronger bargaining position in negotiating such contracts. But Locke seems to believe that there is little room for exploitation as long as the contract is a voluntary, mutually beneficial agreement between employer and employee. Unequal entrepreneurial abilities make it advantageous for those with less

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ability to work for those with more. They are still equal in rights, however, even if unequal in capacities. How can there be equality of rights if the wealthy have more political power than the poor? Macpherson interprets some sections of the Second Treatise (II.140, 157–58) as indicating that in a Lockean government only the rich would have the right to vote because only those with property would be full citizens. Although the passages cited by Macpherson can be interpreted in this way, they are somewhat ambiguous. Moreover, Macpherson’s interpretation depends on the assumption that Locke’s emphasis on property rights leaves the poor without any rights because they have no property. But as we have seen, Locke derives the right to property in external goods from the fundamental right of all to have property in their own persons: self-ownership is prior to the ownership of objects (II.27). Therefore, everyone, no matter how poor, has some property in this broad sense. Occasionally, Locke seems to employ a narrow definition of property as the ownership of external goods (II.138–39). But generally he interprets property to include “life, liberty and estate” (II.87), and he is quite explicit about this: “By Property I must be understood here, as in other places, to mean that Property which Men have in their Persons as well as Goods” (II.173). Consequently, for a Lockean government to secure property, it must protect not only the wealth of the rich but also the life and the liberty of the poor. Still, Marxists such as Macpherson might criticize Locke for his “possessive individualism.” Contrary to Aristotle, Locke seems to deny that human beings are political by nature (II.15). Rather, they are isolated from one another, with no common bonds of understanding. Each pursues a selfish interest, primarily through accumulating possessions; and associates with others only if it is for personal economic benefit. The Marxist argues that this alienates humans from their social essence by hiding the communal life that they share with each other. In short, Locke promotes competition rather than cooperation. As one commentator has explained Locke’s view, “Man becomes conscious of his fellows only when he and they collide; conflict and friction are thus the sources of man’s awareness of man.”40 Even if there is some truth in this interpretation, does it perhaps exaggerate the atomistic character of Lockean individualism? Consider, for example, the importance that Locke gives to the family as the means by which children are nurtured and educated so that they can as adults exercise their freedom as rational beings (II.55–57). Humans are not born as solitary, self-sufficient individuals; rather, they depend totally on the care of others. Even as free adults, Locke indicates, they must make “promises and compacts” with others in the pursuit of economic, social, and political goods (II.14). Unlike the family, these communal bonds can be freely chosen by the individual. We might infer, then, that Locke allows for a “communitarian” individualism: he rejects the sort of traditional communal life found in feudal villages, but he affirms the communal relations that arise

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from voluntary associations. Does it not serve human dignity that, as much as possible, communities should be entered by free choice? On the other hand, doesn’t Lockean private property, as the Marxist would insist, hinder communal life? As long as the resources of society (land, capital, tools, and so on) are privately owned by a few people, most people will not be free to develop their human capacities. By contrast, if productive resources were held in common by all members of society, all people could share in the full exercise of their human powers; thus, true individuality would coincide with true sociality. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms,” Marx explained in the Communist Manifesto, “we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”41 A good case can be made, however, for the claim that the political freedom and the economic prosperity achieved in modern Western democracies is a consequence of Lockean property rights, and therefore it is unlikely that these gains could be preserved under socialism.42 In the feudal system of medieval Europe, the absence of clear private property rights provided little incentive for people to increase productivity. For example, medieval peasants who farmed land cooperatively with other members of their village were not inclined to adopt more efficient methods of farming, because they would not receive all the benefits of increased production. But as private property rights were established, first in Holland and then in England in the seventeenth century, unprecedented economic growth occurred. It might be argued that the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England arose not because of technological discoveries, but because governmental protection of private property rights gave people the economic incentives for technological innovation. Moreover, this new economic freedom was intertwined with a new political freedom. Capitalism prevailed in England because the monarch’s power was limited by Parliament, which allowed the rising bourgeois class to defend its property rights against royal prerogatives. But in Spain and France, absolute monarchy suppressed capitalist property. Thus, democratic freedom and economic abundance seem to arise together from Lockean liberalism as founded on private property rights. Even if the present critics of Lockean thought accepted its past successes, they might still claim that Lockeanism cannot continue to be successful today because economic and social circumstances have changed too radically. John Dewey, for example, maintained that although Locke was the founder of liberalism, modern liberals should reject his “atomistic individualism” so as to allow for more social cooperation. The goal of liberalism—“liberation of the capacities of individuals for free, self-initiated expression”—remains the same as it was for Locke; but the means to that end, Dewey argued, must change. Locke relied on free economic competition among selfish individuals to promote individual liberty. But today liberals must rely on governmental regulation of the economy—“organized social control of economic forces”—to promote free individual develop-

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ment as the end.43 Here we see the move from classical liberalism to modern liberalism, which we will see elaborated by John Rawls. That was the thinking behind President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism. Previously, liberals had fought to limit governmental power to protect individual liberty. But in early twentieth-century America, the threat to human freedom seemed to come more from the excessive power of the wealthy few than the excessive power of the government. The Lockean arguments for the rights of personally acquired property were used to insulate corporate wealth from public regulation for the common good. Under these circumstances, many liberals thought it necessary for the government to intervene in the economy to secure individuals from economic exploitation by the rich. Should we assume that Locke did not anticipate the need for governmental regulation of the economy to enhance individual liberty? In fact, doesn’t Locke emphasize the need for legal regulation of property? He makes it clear that “in Governments, the Laws regulate the right of property, and the possession of land is determined by positive constitutions.” The purpose of this governmental regulation is “to preserve and enlarge freedom,” and thus to promote “the public good” (II.50, 57, 120, 134). Moreover, we could interpret Locke as suggesting that government should intervene to prevent the inequality of wealth from becoming so great that some people are left without any property. For as he says, “the preservation of Property being the end of Government, and that for which Men enter into Society, it necessarily supposes and requires, that the People should have Property” (II.138). Would we be justified in concluding that Locke would endorse modern welfare-state liberalism, at least insofar as it promotes the acquisition of property by people in the lower classes of society?44 Or would Locke argue that redistributing property by taxing some people to give benefits to others violates the natural right to property? Would Locke support the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in declaring that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”? Would this suggest that the American government was intended to be Lockean in protecting private property, and that the redistribution of wealth is not a proper function of government? If a government does redistribute wealth, can we expect that powerful groups will seek to influence that government to use that redistributive power for their own benefit at the expense of others? To alleviate the suffering of the poor, would it be better to rely on voluntary charitable activities?45 In any case, it is clear that for Locke some form of governmental regulation of human action is essential to individual freedom. People seek to escape the insecurity of the state of nature by establishing legal institutions to protect their individual rights through rules of law that everyone must obey. However, there exists a fundamental difficulty here, which we

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have seen already in our consideration of Hobbes. Doesn’t the freedom of individuals come into conflict with the powers of government?

5. Can liberal government combine individual freedom with political authority? The Declaration of Independence claims that all people possess “unalienable Rights,” and that “to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” On the one hand, these rights are unalienable. On the other hand, governments must be established to protect these rights even though this would seem to require that some of the rights be compromised. Any government must limit the rights of those subject to its powers. For instance, in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, it is said that government shall not deprive any person of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” which means that our government may deprive us of our supposedly unalienable rights so long as the proper legal procedures are followed. And this conforms fully with Locke’s teaching. There seems to be a conflict between the individual autonomy of Lockean liberalism and the political authority of Lockean government.46 Every human being is autonomous, in the sense that a human being has a power of self-rule that other animals do not. A freedom of choice in their actions and the capacity to reason about those choices distinguish human beings from other living things. Humanity is fulfilled in the exercise of free and rational agency in ruling one’s self. Every government, however, must have supreme authority over its citizens, which means the right to command and to be obeyed. Governmental authority demands the right to rule over all citizens, but individual autonomy demands the right of self-rule. We might try to overcome this conflict by saying that because a government has genuine authority only if its powers are just or legitimate, a government that is oppressive has no authoritative claim to obedience. But it is hard to imagine any standard of political authority that would not violate individual autonomy in some manner. If, in ruling, even the best of governments must infringe upon natural freedom, then every government is oppressive, and what we call political justice is merely disguised oppression. This would confirm Rousseau’s complaint at the beginning of The Social Contract: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” There is at least one way to reconcile autonomy and authority that appears both in Locke’s Second Treatise and in the Declaration of Independence: government by the consent of the governed. In a community of self-governing citizens, people would exercise their self-rule by living under laws that they themselves have made. In entering such a political community, citizens would obey only themselves and would therefore be as free as if there were no government. If we adhere to the principle of

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individual autonomy, the only way to justify political authority is to derive it from the voluntary consent of all citizens. Wouldn’t this require a truly participatory democracy? All citizens would have to share directly in the making of all the major political decisions, and every decision would have to somehow reflect a unanimous consensus among the citizens. Yet there are obvious difficulties with such a scheme, particularly with respect to its practicality. Liberal political thinkers have argued, therefore, for representative democracy, in which citizens elect a small number of people to represent them in the government. We must wonder, however, whether voting for representatives satisfies our need for government by the consent of the governed.

6. Can Lockean government secure the consent of the governed? To understand Locke’s view of consent, we have to keep in mind that there are two steps in the movement from the state of nature to the establishment of government. First, individuals leave the state of nature by organizing themselves into a society (II.87–89). Then, the people of that society select a form of government (II.132). The formation of society requires unanimous consent, in that no one can become a member of a community except by individual consent (II.87–89, 123, 130–31, 211). But the selection of a government is by majority consent of the people of a society (II.94–98, 132). If individuals enjoy absolute freedom in the state of nature, why does anyone consent to leave it and accept the obligations of social life? This is especially perplexing because Locke, unlike Hobbes, insists that the state of nature is not a state of war (II.19). But Locke also observes that those living in the state of nature easily come into conflict since most people are “not strict observers of equity and justice”; therefore, the state of nature is “full of fears and continual dangers” (II.123). Societies are formed in an attempt to escape this disorder. Some commentators have even concluded that Locke’s state of nature turns out to coincide with Hobbes’s account of the natural “war of all against all.”47 In any case, Locke overcomes the conflict between individual autonomy and social authority by postulating that society arises from the voluntary consent of all its members. In obeying the rules of society, members submit only to what they themselves have authorized. The Preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 expresses Locke’s thought well: “The body-politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.”48 How is this consent expressed? When do people ever have a chance to decide whether or not they will pledge full allegiance to their society?

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Locke’s answer is that consent can be either “express” or “tacit” (II.119– 22). Individuals show their express consent to join a society when they promise their loyalty to it by some formal declaration. Those who give this consent are bound to be subject to the society as long as it lasts. On the other hand, tacit consent can be shown by simply living in a society and enjoying its benefits, particularly the protection accorded to privately owned property. Tacit consent, however, creates no permanent obligation, because those who have tacitly consented to be a member of a society can leave it whenever their enjoyment of its benefits ceases. How would this apply to American politics? As indicated in the Declaration of Independence, we profess to found our government on Lockean consent. It is difficult to see, however, that this can be an express consent. Immigrants to the United States must give their express consent to the American regime before they can become citizens. This is not required of natural-born citizens. If we were serious about Locke’s standards for consent, we might have the president mail copies of the Constitution to all citizens on their twenty-first birthdays along with a letter asking each individual to sign the document or forfeit citizenship. Would that be the only clear way of insuring that the American people have consented to their government? Some would claim, however, that we consent to our government by voting for our representatives. But it would be hard to prove that voting has this meaning. Many people don’t vote at all, and many of those who do vote convey no clear message. It is even conceivable that those who thought the government fundamentally unjust might, nevertheless, have various reasons for voting in the elections of representatives. If the procedures for express consent are dubious, we are left with tacit consent. During the debates over American participation in the Vietnam War, a popular slogan that appeared on automobile bumper stickers was “America—love it or leave it!” Indeed, some who opposed the war did leave, going to Canada, Australia, and other countries. Could we say, then, that as long as people are free to leave their country, they indicate consent to the government by staying and thus enjoy the benefits of life under that government? (Would this, for example, apply to the case of Socrates?) The defect in this reasoning, however, is that people may have many reasons for staying in a country, even though they regard the government as illegitimate. Their ties to friends, to relatives, and to the general cultural life of their nation can be strong enough to justify their living under a tyrannical government. Although we might infer from this that they are obligated to obey the ordinary laws of their regime, we could hardly condemn them for conspiring to subvert the regime in hopes of establishing a more just form of government. It is difficult, therefore, to see how a people would unanimously consent to a civil society as required by Locke. Moreover, even assuming that such popular consent could be secured, how does Locke move from this

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unanimous agreement in establishing a society to rule by a majority in selecting a form of government? Doesn’t majority rule deprive those in the minority of their individual autonomy?

7. By what right does the majority rule? In reference to the government’s power to tax an individual’s property, Locke explains: “It must be with his own Consent, i.e., the Consent of the Majority, giving it either by themselves, or their Representatives chosen by them” (II.140). This probably doesn’t seem controversial to most of us, perhaps as a result of the influence of Lockean liberalism. We commonly take it for granted that popular consent means the consent of the majority of the people. And yet, rule by the majority can be just as tyrannical as rule by a small minority. If we believe in individual rights, we must also believe there are some things that a majority of the people have no right to do. Indeed, some would assert that the principle of individual autonomy requires that each should exercise judgment without bowing to the pressure of public opinion. That was Henry David Thoreau’s argument in his essay, “Civil Disobedience”: “A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot be based on justice. . . . Can there be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?—in which majorities decide only those questions to which the rule of expediency is applicable? . . . The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”49 Consequently, society would become a strictly voluntary association; and the consent of the governed would become a continuing activity in which each person decides from day to day whether or not to consent to the policies of the society. It is natural to object that this sort of thinking would promote chaos. But don’t we often respect people like Thoreau who stand against the opinions of the majority? If we believe in the natural rights of individuals, don’t we then adhere to a standard of justice that goes beyond the will of the majority? We must challenge Locke, therefore, to show us how individual rights can be combined with majority rule. For Locke’s best treatment of this issue, we should look at the beginning of the eighth chapter of the Second Treatise (“Of the Beginning of Political Societies”). For when any number of Men have, by the consent of every individual, made a Community, they have thereby made that Community one Body, with a Power to Act as one Body, which is only by the will and determination of the majority. For that which acts any Community, being only the consent of the individuals of it, and it being necessary to that which is one body to move one way; it is necessary the Body should move that way whither the greater force carries it, which is the consent of the majority: or else it is impossible it should act or continue one Body, One Community, which the consent of every individual that united into it, agreed that it should; and so everyone is bound by that consent to be concluded by the majority. (II.96)

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Therefore, by consenting to enter a political society, everyone is obligated “to submit to the determination of the majority” (II.97). For if the members of a society were free to reject any rule of that society with which they disagreed, they would still be as free as they were in the state of nature, which cannot be so once they have consented to form a society. Moreover, Locke explains, it is not realistic to require the consent of every individual to every act of society. People are often too busy with their private lives to attend public meetings; even when they do attend, the diversity of opinions and interests in any large group of individuals prevents them from reaching unanimous agreement. Therefore, “where the majority cannot conclude the rest, there they cannot act as one Body, and consequently will be immediately dissolved again” (II.98). Locke thus suggests that, as all physical bodies move in the direction of the greater force, so political bodies must move in the direction of the majority. But in what sense does the majority exert the greater force? It would seem odd to derive the right of the majority to rule from its physical force, as though “might makes right.” Or does Locke think the majority exerts the greater moral force? In either case, he seems to assume that because each individual contributes one unit of force equal to that of every other individual, the course of action favored by the greater number of individuals should prevail by virtue of its greater force. Isn’t it true, however, that the majority of the people of a community are often apathetic about public issues and, therefore, that an active minority can exert more force than the passive majority? This has led some modern social theorists to conclude that every political society tends to be ruled by an elite class of those most active in public affairs. Indeed, the “iron law of oligarchy,” as Roberto Michels called it, may be one of the few “laws” in political science.50 Moreover, we can see here the obvious response to Locke’s argument that no community can exist unless the majority rules: clearly, many societies have been held together through the rule of minorities. (Does this point to the principle that leaders need the support of a “minimum winning coalition,” which we considered in chapter 5, section 5?) Willmoore Kendall, in his study of Locke’s account of majority rule, inferred that Locke’s argument makes sense only if we assume certain unstated premises.51 To conclude that the majority possesses “the greater force” in moving a society, we must assume that each individual participates equally in the making of decisions and that each individual’s conviction is equally intense on each issue. Otherwise, on any particular issue, a small group of extremely active and fervent people might exert more strength than the majority. So perhaps the best formulation of Locke’s defense of majority rule would be that, if unanimous consent on all issues is impossible, the rule of the majority is the only way to allow all individuals to participate equally in the making of decisions. As interpreted by Kendall, Locke would argue: “Individual consents being, in any case, the only rightful title to the exercise of power, the right

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of the majority flows as a matter of course from the fact that it can point to more consents than the minority.”52 Isn’t it doubtful, however, that every individual will, in fact, participate equally in the public deliberations about every issue? Even if we could be sure of equal participation, couldn’t we still challenge Locke’s claim that majority rule fulfills the individual right to consent to government? It is always possible that the people in the majority will tyrannize over those in the minority. A Lockean solution to this problem was well stated by President Thomas Jefferson in his First Inaugural Address: All . . . will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect and to violate which would be oppression.53

In thus appealing to “equal laws” to protect the “equal rights” of the minority, Jefferson relied on the Lockean principle of the rule of law. Individual rights are less likely to be violated when political decisions are formulated as impartial rules of law, and when the lawmaking body is both separated from and supreme over the other branches of government. But is this enough to protect the rights of minorities? Or do minorities need a veto power over policies that affect their interests as a protection from majority tyranny?

8. Does the protection of minorities require a minority veto in a consensus democracy? If the natural selfishness of individuals leads them into violent conflict, as some individuals try to exploit the others, then we need to empower government to enforce some rules of peaceful cooperation that secure our liberty from exploitation. But that natural selfishness that makes government necessary for protecting our liberty also makes government dangerous as a threat to our liberty, because powerful rulers moved by their selfish desires will tend to become tyrants in exploiting the ruled. In a majoritarian democracy, we can try to check this tendency by requiring the few rulers to win the consent of the majority of citizens, perhaps through popular elections. But then the natural selfishness of the majority will incline them to become tyrannical in exploiting the minority. We can try to prevent this by putting constitutional limits on the powers of government and by declaring certain constitutional rights of the minority that cannot be infringed. But a powerful majority cannot always be trusted to respect constitutional limits if there is some opportunity to exploit a minority. We might hope, as James Madison did, that in a large and complex society, there will be such a wide diversity of interests that it will be difficult for unjust majorities to be formed.54 But in a majoritarian electoral democracy with political parties competing for control of the govern-

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ment, the parties will have to find ways to build majority coalitions, which can then have the power to exploit minorities. The only reliable protection of minorities from the tyranny of the majority in a democracy, John C. Calhoun argued, might be to require that government win the consent of each interest or portion of a community. This would require that government be organized so as to “give to each division or interest, through the appropriate organ, either a concurrent voice in making and executing the laws, or a veto on their execution.”55 As an American Southern politician in South Carolina in the first half of the nineteenth century, Calhoun was concerned to protect the interests of the Southern States against possible exploitation by the Northern States through their majority control of the Federal Government of the United States. Calhoun was particularly concerned about protecting the Southern institution of slavery against efforts from the North to restrict or even abolish slavery. And so he claimed that each State should have the power to veto federal policies infringing on its interests. This would establish a consensus democracy based on the consent of all important interests in the community, rather than just the numerical majority of individual citizens. Beginning in ancient Greece, political theorists like Aristotle have distinguished between forms of government as based on rule by one, few, or many—monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. But what Calhoun proposed was government by all, or at least by all the segments of a society. Many of us might be suspicious of Calhoun’s proposal because of his proslavery motivations. But we should recognize that he identified a serious problem—that a majoritarian democracy does not eliminate all forms of tyranny if it allows for the tyranny of the majority over the minority. This is most clearly a problem in deeply divided societies where the community is splintered into different groups with conflicting interests based on economic, ethnic, racial, religious, linguistic, and other cultural differences. In such societies, a system of majority rule might allow the groups with majority power to oppress those groups that are in the minority. Preventing such oppression might require that the minority have the power to veto policies of the majority that threaten the minority.56 And yet there are at least three difficulties for any attempt at consensus democracy with minority vetoes.57 First, how do we prevent minority vetoes from creating anarchy or deadlock in which it’s impossible to reach agreement on governmental policies? Calhoun argued that the necessity for reaching agreement would force all political factions to compromise in ways that would promote the common good. But it’s not clear that this would happen unless there were enlightened statesmen with the wisdom and the will to negotiate such a compromise and then persuade all groups to accept it. Second, how can we be sure that a minority would not use its veto power to dominate the system and thus establish a minority tyranny over the

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majority? Calhoun argued that the necessity for a decision would force the minority to compromise its demands to reach an agreement with the majority. But in some cases, it might be in the interest of the minority to block any decision, and thus inaction would favor the minority over the majority. Finally, where do veto rights stop? If a minority group has the right to veto a majority, why don’t smaller groups within the minority group have the same veto right over the larger group? Doesn’t this create the absurdity of an infinite regression with vetoes within vetoes? Calhoun thought that the slave states were a distinct interest that should have a veto power. But why shouldn’t the slaves themselves have a veto power to use against their masters? And if the slave states can veto a federal policy, why can’t the free states veto that veto? There’s no clear way of identifying which groups should count as interests that deserve veto power. Any large and complex society could potentially have hundreds or thousands of distinct interests. But presumably it would be unrealistic to give each one a veto power over governmental powers. Even if it is imperfect, is a majoritarian democracy with the rule of law and the separation of powers the best we can do in securing liberty?

9. Can the rule of law and the separation of powers secure individual rights? In the summer of 1974, it became clear that President Richard Nixon had participated in various illegal activities. He had even exercised his presidential powers in ways that violated the constitutional rights of American citizens. To escape impeachment by Congress, Nixon resigned, allowing Vice President Gerald Ford to become the new president. In his inaugural address, Ford declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here, the people rule.”58 Thus Ford appealed to a recurrent Lockean theme in American political thought: to protect the liberties of the people from the tyranny of arbitrary, absolute power, governmental activity must conform to the rule of law. The rule of law requires not only that public officials act in accordance with the laws, but also that the lawmaking power be separated from the executive and judicial powers. This separation serves to eliminate potential danger resulting from the concentration of powers in the hands of one person or one group of people. But is it really possible to have “a government of laws and not of people”? Doesn’t any government depend on the personal judgment of those who rule? Those people with the ruling power make the laws, interpret the laws, and apply the laws to particular cases. The idea of the rule of law assumes that law can provide clear, consistent, impartial, and objective

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standards of justice that are not distorted by personal bias in interpreting the law. But if this is what we mean by rule of law, some legal scholars will argue that this rule of law is a myth.59 The law is made up of vague and contradictory rules that can support many different conclusions, and which conclusion one reaches will be determined by one’s moral and political beliefs and interests. It is a myth to believe that in obeying the law, we are being commanded by an impersonal law rather than other human beings. This is a myth that supports the authority of those politically powerful groups controlling the making and interpretation of the law. As long as the law is a monopoly of the state, the law will always be a tool of some political group to impose its conception of the good on the whole society; and there will always be a political struggle for the control of the legal system. The only way to avoid this would be to have an anarchistic free market in law, in which law would be free from monopolistic governmental control, and the suppliers of law would compete for customers. But, apparently, Locke would reject this anarchistic conception of law as impossible. Another problem for the idea of the rule of law is that governmental officials often have to decide what should be done in circumstances for which the law provides no clear standard. This is most evident in times of crisis— such as war—when it might seem necessary to set aside the ordinary rules of law. Should we even go so far as to concede that during severe emergencies we must permit the government to violate individual rights if the public good demands it? Or should we rather insist that a just government must never infringe on individual rights no matter what the circumstances? The state of nature becomes unbearable for people, Locke explains, because when all are free to preserve themselves as they see fit, their selfish passions create unremitting conflict, because people are biased in their own favor, and thus they cannot be trusted to be impartial judges of their own cases. To escape this disorder people must enter civil society in order to have an impartial common judge to settle disagreements. But the very selfishness that makes just government desirable would seem to make it impossible to achieve. For if, in fact, as Locke says, most people are “no strict Observers of Equity and Justice” (II.123), why should we trust anyone to rule over others impartially? Won’t natural selfishness incline rulers to govern for their personal interests rather than for the common good? Locke suggests that this problem can be solved through the rule of law and the separation of powers. In particular, three defects of the state of nature must be overcome. First, people need “an established, settled, known Law, received and allowed by common consent to be the Standard of Right and Wrong, and the common measure to decide all Controversies between them” (II.124). Second, they need “a known and indifferent Judge, with Authority to determine all differences according to the established Law” (II.125). Third, people need “Power to back and support the Sentence when right, and to give it due Execution” (II.126). Lawmaking promotes justice if it requires the dispassionate and impartial formulation

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of general rules. Lawmakers “are to govern by promulgated established Laws, not to be varied in particular Cases, but to have one Rule for Rich and Poor, for the Favourite at Court, and the Country Man at Plough” (II.142). To secure this justice that comes from the rule of law, the legislature must be supreme over the judicial and executive branches of government. Judges must apply the laws to particular cases. Executive officers must employ the force of the community in executing the laws (II.131, 149–50). Under these arrangements, no governmental official acts without the guidance of law; thus no one exercises arbitrary, absolute power (II.136–37). It is difficult for the rulers to use their powers for their personal advantage contrary to the public good, because the power to make laws is separated from the power to execute them (II.143–44).60 We can see in American government how difficult it is to adhere strictly to these Lockean standards for the rule of law and the separation of powers. It can be argued, for example, that bureaucratic power, which has become essential to modern government, violates these Lockean principles. Perhaps even more obvious is the extent to which the powers of the modern American presidency have subverted legislative supremacy. This has become a global problem insofar as governments around the world have established chief executives following the model of the American presidency. What might Locke say about these features of American government? Surely, Locke would insist that governmental administrators exercise only “subordinate powers” and must therefore be “accountable to some other power in the commonwealth” (II.152). Because governmental actions must be guided by law, and because the legislative body cannot delegate its lawmaking power to anyone else, administrators should serve simply as instruments for carrying out the laws enacted by the legislative body. Locke writes: “the Legislative cannot transfer the Power of Making Laws to any other hands. For it being but a delegated Power from the People, they, who have it, cannot pass it over to others” (II.141). In American government today, however, federal administrators often seem to have the power either to act without any clear legal standards or to make their own laws. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, was given by law the power to act against “unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce, and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce.”61 What’s the meaning of “unfair”? The language is so vague that the administrators in the FTC are free to improvise their own rules, so that, in effect, they exercise lawmaking power without any accountability to the United States Congress or to the voters. Some people claim that the bureaucratic complexity of the tasks assumed by modern government make this necessary. Because the members of Congress are not experts in the problems of economic and social regulation, they must allow the experts in the regulatory agencies to decide what should be done. One authority on administrative law has concluded: “The extravagant version of the rule of law is incompatible with

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any regulatory program. . . . The very identifying badge of the American administrative agency is power, without previously existing rules, to determine the legal rights of individual parties.”62 But the danger is that this power can be used for the benefit of influential interest groups contrary to the public interest, without any accountability to the Congress or to the electorate, which is exactly what Locke wanted to avoid by insisting on the rule of law.63 We must wonder whether administrative law is unlawful. If administrators in the executive branch of government can exercise binding legislative and judicial powers that are outside and above the legislative power of the Congress and the judicial power of the courts, is this an exercise of absolute power? Didn’t Anglo-American constitutional law originate to defeat such claims of absolute power by monarchs? If so, could it be argued that administrative law is not just unconstitutional but anti-constitutional?64 We should not exaggerate, however, the independence of federal bureaucratic agencies from congressional control. Although the Congress may often be slow in restricting unpopular bureaucratic activity, some observers argue that the Constitution gives it all the power necessary to assert its supremacy. In 1946, the Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs the process by which administrative agencies propose and establish regulations and the process by which federal courts and special administrative courts review agency decisions.65 Other countries have procedures for administrative rule making and enforcement and for review by administrative judges.66 The U. S. Congress has debated the “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny” Act (The REINS Act). This law would require Congress to either approve or reject every new “major rule” proposed by any administrative agency of the Executive Branch, with “major rule” defined as any rule that would likely impose over $100 million in costs each year.67 This illustrates how, if it were to become sufficiently aroused to reclaim its lawmaking powers, the Congress could impose its will upon recalcitrant administrators. But what happens when the Congress disagrees with the president? Obviously, in those cases where the president cannot act without legislative authorization, the Congress can assert its dominance if it wishes. In some areas, however, such as foreign policy, the president often seems free to act independently. Do we rely too much on the president, allowing dangerous concentration of powers in the hands of a single person? Or is it rather the case that only the president can provide the leadership necessary for effective government? Insofar as he insists on securing the rule of law through legislative supremacy, Locke seems to argue that a president should simply execute the will of the legislature. On the other hand, Locke thinks that any effective executive must exercise “prerogative,” which is the power “to act according to discretion, for the public good, without the prescription of the Law, and sometimes even against it” (II.160). Isn’t it dangerous to per-

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mit any ruler to violate the laws? Or is it necessary to allow this, particularly in times of emergency?

10. Must the executive have the prerogative powers of a dictator? During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was denounced as a dictator because many of his war measures seemed to be clearly illegal violations of individual rights. Lincoln defended his actions by arguing that, in times of crisis, the president sometimes has to infringe on individual liberty in doing whatever is necessary to preserve the country. Therefore, Lincoln explained, we must confront a difficult question: “Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain its own existence?”68 President Richard Nixon forced us to reconsider this question. As president he once stated: “It’s quite obvious that there are certain inherently governmental activities which, if undertaken by the sovereign in protection of the interests of the nation’s security, are lawful but which if undertaken by private persons, are not.” After he was forced to resign from office, Nixon was asked, in an interview with David Frost, to explain this remark. He responded: Well, what I, at root . . . had in mind, I think, was perhaps better stated by Lincoln during the War Between the States. Lincoln said, and I think I can remember the quote almost exactly, he said, “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation.”

Frost observed, however, that the Civil War was quite different from the situation faced by Nixon as president. Nixon was quick to reply: “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was President.” Then he explained to Frost: “If the President does it, that makes it legal.” But when Frost asked if there was any provision in the Constitution to support this, Nixon answered: No, there isn’t. There’s nothing specific that the Constitution contemplates in that respect. I haven’t read every word, every jot and every tittle, but I do know this: that it has been, however, argued that as far as a President is concerned, that in war time, a President does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re talking about.69

It would seem, then, that both Lincoln and Nixon believed the American president must possess the Lockean power of executive prerogative. For they restated Locke’s argument that, in some cases—particularly in

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times of emergency—the public interest requires setting aside the ordinary laws; and, in such cases, the executive has the duty to act according to personal discretion for the good of the community. As a Whig defender of parliamentary supremacy, Locke opposed the British King’s claim to monarchic prerogative power, and thus it might seem strange that Locke would allow for executive prerogative. Some people have argued that since prerogative originated as a broad monarchic power, it has no place in a popular form of government. In 1793, James Madison— arguing against Alexander Hamilton’s broad interpretation of presidential powers—complained that Locke’s “chapter on prerogative shows how much the reason of the philosopher was clouded by the royalism of the Englishman.”70 But in many of the presidential democracies established around the world, it has become common for presidents to claim prerogative power or “executive decree authority.”71 This can be carried out in one of two ways: either the president claims a discretionary power that has some formal basis in the constitution or legislation, or the president calls out the military to execute his decrees and shut down the legislative body. In either case, the president claims democratic authority from having been elected president to rule by discretionary decree without any clear legal limits. In most cases, the president claims that war or some urgent emergency has made it necessary for him to do this to serve the public good. Does such a power violate the principle of the rule of law, which is essential to constitutional government? Once we permit the president to step outside the Constitution, how do we prevent the abuse of that power? Consider, for example, the argument of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., in The Imperial Presidency.72 Schlesinger denies the validity of Nixon’s claims to prerogative power, but he concedes that Lockean prerogative is available to the president for use in emergencies. He praises Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, for instance, for the wise use of prerogative, but he condemns Nixon for misusing it. Schlesinger tries to distinguish between the proper and the improper uses of prerogative by setting down some conditions for its exercise, conditions that were not satisfied in Nixon’s case.73 And yet, since Schlesinger views prerogative as a power outside the Constitution, and thus not subject to constitutional restraints, it is hard to see how he can impose any definite limitations on a power that is totally outside the structure of constitutional government. We see now at least three major questions that we must ask in studying Locke’s account of prerogative. Is it really necessary for the executive to exercise prerogative powers? If we grant such powers, how do we protect ourselves against the tyrannical misuse of them? Can presidential prerogative be made consistent with the allocation of powers in the American Constitution? We can explain Locke’s teaching about prerogative as depending on three factors: the nature of the people, the nature of the legislative power, and the nature of nature. First, prerogative can be a response to popular

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demand, because the people will allow the widest prerogative as long as they think it is being used for their good. Second, prerogative is necessary because it serves a political need that cannot be satisfied by the legislature—the need for quick, flexible action to handle problems that cannot be governed by law. Finally, prerogative is necessary because, while law is fixed, it is the nature of things to always be in motion; prerogative allows for a flexible response to this natural flux in political history. The people are willing to allow prerogative power. Indeed, according to Locke, in the early ages of society, “the Government was almost all Prerogative” (II.162). The first governments were generally founded on the rule of one who, because of paternal authority or superior qualities, was permitted by the people to govern unrestrained by laws (II.74–75, 94, 105–12). But when “weak princes” used their prerogative to threaten the property of their subjects, people began to favor collective legislative bodies to restrict prerogative power. Thus the people made it clear that they permitted government by prerogative only with the understanding that the power would be used for the “public good” rather than the “private ends” of the ruler (II.111, 162–66). The people rarely question the prince’s prerogative power; they are “very seldom, or never scrupulous, or nice in the point” (II.161). In the history of England, for instance, the people were willing to overlook “any human frailty or mistake” of their kings providing that “the main of their conduct” tended to the public interest; they “let them enlarge their Prerogative as they pleased” (II.165). It was only the prerogative of “weak princes,” who set out to enslave their subjects, that was questioned by the people (II.94, 105–8, 110, 162). Thus the people permit the prince the widest possible prerogative as long as his actions generally serve the “public good.” But what is the “public good” in Locke’s view? Essentially, as we have seen, it is the protection of property. The “wise prince,” however, knows that promoting the acquisition of property serves his own interests as well as those of his subjects, because by increasing the wealth of his people he also increases his political power (II.42–43, 48, 173–74, 184, 193–95). That Locke’s prince is prohibited from invading the property of his people (or at least of the majority) is the fundamental limitation of his prerogative power, but this limit must be respected by any prudent prince no matter how absolute his power. Even Hobbes concedes that although all supreme rulers have absolute power, they often restrain themselves for fear that too much oppression would stir to political action people who ordinarily would be “busied about their private interest and careless of what tends to the public.”74 Similarly, we might see a parallel to Machiavelli’s teaching that the prince should base his power on the people because the people will not question his use of power as long as he keeps his hands off their property and their women. Yet while “wise princes” avoid using prerogative in an unpopular way, “weak princes” inevitably arouse the people to rebellion by using preroga-

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tive to infringe on their property, even to the point of threatening their lives. In response to this misuse of prerogative, the people demand that they be ruled by standing laws made by a legislative body to which they have consented so as to avoid being ruled by “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, Arbitrary Will” of one person (II.22). The establishment of a legislative body limits the prerogative power of the prince. Before the appearance of a legislature, the prerogative of a prince encompasses all the powers of government; but once a legislature is established, there must be a division of power so that the prerogative of the prince is limited to the executive functions of government. The executive prerogative of the prince is necessarily less than the total prerogative he possessed before the division of power into executive and legislative branches. Executive prerogative, therefore, is not a substitute for law, as was the case when princes ruled without a legislature, rather it is a supplement to law. Simply stated, executive prerogative is the power of the executive to act for the public good in those cases where action by the legislature would be impossible or ineffective. Locke sees the legislative power as limited in at least three major ways (II.160). First, a legislature is not always in session; and even when it is, the number of its members and the slowness of its deliberations prevent it from making quick decisions. Second, a legislature cannot write its laws to cover every situation, because some future problems are always unforeseeable. Finally, laws must be inflexible and are therefore not always appropriate to changing circumstances. The aim of a legislature is careful deliberation leading to the formulation of general rules of action. But the very factors necessary for achieving this prevent a legislature from acting quickly and flexibly in response to unexpected and ever-changing events. When this sort of action is required, the legislature must yield to the discretionary power of the executive. The most obvious cases are great emergencies, especially in times of war. Locke indicates that the prerogative power of the executive is greatest in foreign affairs, because such matters cannot be governed by law (II.88, 131, 146–47). The executive must be allowed to employ, according to discretion, the whole force of the community against foreign enemies and in negotiation with all foreign powers. If we now consider the general character of prerogative, don’t we see some contradictions in Locke’s Second Treatise? Locke says that legitimate government must be based on the rule of law, so that no person is exempt from the law (II.94). But prerogative power permits the executive to act against the laws. Locke insists that no legitimate government can exercise “absolute arbitrary power.” But prerogative power can be both “arbitrary” and “absolute” (II.137, 139, 166, 210). Locke teaches that the legislative power should be supreme (II.132, 144), yet he also speaks of the executive as the “supreme executor” whose prerogative power is not subordinate to the legislature (II.151–52, 154, 156). The ultimate judge of whether the

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executive has used prerogative properly is not the legislature, but the people themselves; and, as we have seen, they are easily satisfied. One way to overcome these apparent contradictions would be to say that although the legislature is the formal sovereign in a Lockean regime, the executive is the informal sovereign. The legislature is supreme in theory, but the executive often has to be supreme in practice. In ordinary circumstances, government operates by the rule of law; however, in extraordinary circumstances, the rule of one individual is necessary. Locke points to the underlying problem in the following remark with reference to prerogative: “Things of this World are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State” (II.157). Executive prerogative, we might say, is a political response to that flux in the world that runs against the fixity of law. A political community is an attempt by human beings to construct a formal structure through which the chaos of the world can be ordered so as to achieve the security and stability necessary for human preservation and comfort. But the unruly forces of the universe break down this formal structure. The laws constitute the walls of this structure, which are continually being undermined by natural forces acting either by slow erosion or sudden floods. Executive prerogative is the exertion of human force against those natural forces (II.88, 124–31). Locke’s doctrine of executive prerogative, therefore, could be viewed as founded on the modern assumption (suggested by Machiavelli, Descartes, and Hobbes) that there are no natural ends.75 Because humans are not at home in nature, they cannot secure political order for themselves except by a continual exercise of force to conquer nature. Having sketched Locke’s view of executive prerogative, we see how dangerous it is to allow the American president to possess such a power. For doesn’t Lockean prerogative subvert constitutional government? According to Locke, there can be no ultimate restraint on prerogative except the judgment of the people. But the fundamental assumption of American political thought is that although the people are the only legitimate source of power, the will of the people concerning the powers of government is embodied in the Constitution. The Constitution, not the public opinion of the day, determines the legitimacy of power. Through elections the people decide who should fill the office of the president, but the Constitution prescribes the powers of that office. To claim Lockean prerogative, the president would have to circumvent the Constitution and appeal directly to the people as the authoritative source of presidential powers. The dangers of allowing the powers of the president to be determined by fluctuating public sentiments rather than by the Constitution should be evident. On the other hand, doesn’t Locke argue persuasively for the belief that there must be some sort of discretionary power for dealing with emergencies? Surely, the president would exercise such a power more effectively than the Congress. Moreover, we might formulate Locke’s doctrine of prerogative in a manner that would make it consistent with constitutional govern-

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ment. In certain passages, Locke suggests that there are some constitutional limits to prerogative: the most important limit would be that, although the executive might have to violate particular laws of the legislature, he would not be permitted to keep the legislature from assembling. If the executive prevents the legislature from meeting, and thereby abolishes the form of government established by the people and exercises force without authority, this restores the state of nature (II.134, 155, 159–61, 214–15, 226, 239). Is it wise to constitutionalize executive prerogative? Schlesinger argues that it is best to force the president to go outside the Constitution when prerogative is necessary. To give prerogative constitutional status, Schlesinger warns, would encourage presidents to use it too often and too casually. On the other side of the issue, however, it can be argued that forcing a president to go outside the Constitution during emergencies promotes disrespect for law and creates all the dangers that go with unlimited power. There is a third possibility: instead of saying that prerogative is either totally inside the Constitution (and thus constitutionally confined) or totally outside the Constitution (and thus constitutionally unconfined), we could say that certain executive powers inside the Constitution allow the executive to go outside the Constitution. So, for example, we might argue that the power of the President as Commander in Chief is inside the Constitution, but that the exercise of that power (particularly in time of war) is outside the Constitution, in that there can be no constitutional restriction on what a President might have to do as Commander in Chief to preserve the nation in a time of emergency. So, for example, if the President as Commander in Chief in time of war or other emergency is acting outside the Constitution, he might suspend the Congress and the Supreme Court or suspend elections for the duration of the war. But if he were acting inside the Constitution, he could not suspend the constitutional structure of government, and thus he would be constrained by the Congress, the Court, and elections, even in time of war or emergency. One of the most famous examples of constitutional prerogative is the legal institution of dictatorship in the ancient Roman Republic. During a time of emergency, one person could be appointed dictator for six months to deal with the crisis. The appointed dictator could not change the formal institutions of government, and his term was too short to cause much permanent harm. Machiavelli, in the Discourses, advised, “All republics should have some institution similar to the dictatorship”: Now in a well-ordered republic it should never be necessary to resort to extra-constitutional measures; for although they may for the time be beneficial, yet the precedent is pernicious, for if the practice is once established of disregarding the laws for good objects, they will in a little while be disregarded under that pretext for evil purposes. Thus no republic will ever be perfect if she has not by law provided for everything, having a remedy for every emergency, and fixed rules of applying it.76

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Did the American founders intend that the president, in time of crisis, would exercise the powers of a constitutional dictator? Thomas Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia, insisted that the Roman precedent was not applicable to American politics. A republican government should be strong enough, he argued, to meet every danger without surrendering the rights of the people to even a temporary dictator.77 But Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Number 70, cited the example of the Roman dictator in support of his claim that any good government requires “an energetic Executive.” Hamilton conceded, however, that this was controversial because some people thought a strong executive was contrary to “the genius of republican government.”78 The precedents set by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War seem to favor the Hamiltonian conception of the president as possessing prerogative power. But Lincoln was vague in explaining the constitutional status of this power. Because it illustrates the crucial issues so well, we should examine Lincoln’s Message to Congress of July 4th, 1861. The firing on Fort Sumter occurred on April 12th, 1861. Because Congress was in recess at the time, Lincoln issued a call on April 15th for a special session of Congress. But he set the date for July 4th. By delaying the assembling of Congress, Lincoln secured for himself a period of almost three months in which he took complete charge of the war effort without any congressional authorization. Although some of his actions were clearly legal, some were not. His declaration of a naval blockade of the South was legally dubious because that seemed to require a congressional declaration of war. His suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was also questionable, because such a power seemed to belong to Congress rather than the president, but the Constitution is unclear on this point. The most obviously unconstitutional actions were his expansion of the army and navy and his unauthorized withdrawal of funds from the Treasury. The Constitution provides specifically for Congress to have the exclusive power of enlarging the military forces and authorizing appropriations. In his message to Congress, Lincoln explained: “These measures, whether strictly legal or not, were ventured upon, under what appeared to be a popular demand, and a public necessity; trusting then as now, that Congress would readily ratify them.”79 He thus appeared to claim a Lockean prerogative power to act illegally in time of emergency and to appeal directly to public opinion as a source of power. His suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was the most controversial of Lincoln’s actions because, in effect, this allowed a suspension of all individual rights. Citizens were put into jail by military authorities without any charges being made against them and without any right to trial. Lincoln claimed that it was his duty “to authorize the Commanding General, in proper cases, according to his discretion . . . to arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety.”80

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To provide constitutional support for taking such action, Lincoln cited three provisions of the Constitution. In Article II, Section 3, it is said that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Lincoln argued that in order to insure that the whole of the laws would be executed in the South, he had to violate some laws to win the war. Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution requires that the president swear to “faithfully execute the Office of the President” and to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Lincoln inferred from this that the president has a duty to violate the law if this is necessary to preserve the country. Isn’t it strange to argue that the president has a constitutional duty to violate the Constitution? Isn’t it also hard to see what would prevent a president from abusing executive powers once outside the Constitution? In Lincoln’s defense, we might say, in the words of one historian, “If Lincoln was a dictator, it must be admitted that he was a benevolent dictator.” That historian immediately added, however, “Yet in a democracy it is a serious question how far even a benevolent dictatorship should be encouraged.”81 But in citing a third constitutional provision, Lincoln suggested that he was not acting outside the Constitution at all. Article I, Section 9, provides: “The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public safety may require it.” Lincoln claimed, therefore, that by suspending the writ of habeas corpus he was simply exercising an emergency power specifically provided by the Constitution itself. We might infer from this, although Lincoln did not say so explicitly, that the framers of the Constitution wrote into the document emergency provisions so that it would never have to be set aside during times of crisis. Lincoln never violated the broad framework of the Constitution. Although he delayed calling Congress into session, for example, he never questioned the right of the Congress to meet during the war and to judge his actions. And in 1864, he ran for reelection, even though there was a strong possibility that he would lose, and a new Commander in Chief would appear while the war continued. Lincoln allayed the widespread fear that he would cancel the election. It is conceivable, however, that during some severe emergency, a president might at least temporarily disband the Congress and postpone a presidential election, arguing that such measures are necessary for the preservation of the country. Locke’s doctrine of prerogative could be interpreted as permitting this, but with the understanding that the executive would have to appeal for public support. The debate over whether the American president can exercise Lockean prerogative power continues in the twenty-first century. In response to terrorist attacks on the United States and its military forces, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama claimed extraordinary powers outside the normal rule of law. These two presidents waged wars without declara-

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tions of war from Congress; they arrested and detained American citizens without trials; and they even assassinated American citizens identified as threats to the United States without any due process of law. They have also gained secret access to billions of telephone messages without warrants.82 In the interrogation of some people suspected to be terrorists, over 100 people held in secret prisons around the world were tortured.83 Some law professors advising these presidents argued that Locke’s teaching about executive prerogative supports these extraordinary claims for presidential power in time of emergency.84 Others argued, however, that the American constitutional framers rejected Lockean executive prerogative as based on the British model of monarchy rather than the American model of republican government.85 The emergency powers of the president have expanded, because the United States has been in a perpetual state of emergency. Since 1976, when the Congress passed the National Emergencies Act, presidents have declared 53 states of emergency. In 2015, the United States was under 30 presidentially declared states of emergency, which confer on the president vast powers for violating individual rights—such as seizing control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilizing military forces, and suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Although the National Emergencies Act requires Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done this only once.86 Some scholars have argued that parliamentary systems are better at restraining executive prerogative and protecting individual liberty than are presidential systems. Unlike the prime minister in a parliamentary system, the president is both the head of government and the head of state; and the president is directly elected to an office that is separated from the legislature. Critics of the American presidency during the ratification debates over the Constitution warned that it would become an elective monarchy that would be even more threatening to liberty than the British monarchy. Some scholars have agreed with this in pointing to a history in which presidential systems have been inclined to one-man rule.87 Other scholars have argued that the American presidency is rightly limited in its domestic powers; but in foreign affairs, the president rightly exercises the prerogative powers of a Machiavellian prince.88 According to Locke, one-man rule through the abuse of executive prerogative is limited by the ultimate weapon for punishing tyrants—revolution. But how effective is the right to revolution in limiting governmental oppression?

11. Does the right to revolution mean that might makes right? Locke indicates that the most obvious objections to the right to revolution arise from the fear of disorder (II.223–26, 228–30). To affirm the

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right to revolution would seem to promote chaos by encouraging people to disobey their government whenever they think governmental policies are unfair. For any government to be effective, the people must feel obligated to obey its decrees even when they regard them as unwise. But still, when a government becomes too oppressive, the people will rebel. The puzzle, therefore, is how to combine the people’s duty to obey a just government with their right to disobey a tyrannical government. The Declaration of Independence asserts the right of the people to overthrow tyrannical rulers. Yet the Constitution of the United States does not mention this right. George Washington spoke for the framers of the Constitution when he stressed (in his “Farewell Address”) the duty to obey the laws: The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at anytime exists till changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people is sacredly obligatory upon all. The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government.89

We see this same cautiousness about revolution in Locke’s chapter on the “dissolution of government.” He does not even use the phrase, “the right to revolution.” And he repeatedly insists that his teaching about revolution will not promote a turbulent rebelliousness. He assures us that the people are so slow to rebel that wise rulers should never have any fear of revolution (II.223, 225). The Declaration of Independence echoes Locke’s language in its statement that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Furthermore, the oppression of particular individuals does not lead to revolution, Locke explains, until the great majority of the people feel oppressed (II.230). If there is a right to revolution in Locke’s teaching, it belongs not to individuals acting alone but to the “people,” or more precisely to the majority of the people. Locke conceives a just revolution as arising from the ultimate authority of the people to establish whatever form of government is most likely to serve the public good. This Lockean concept has been adopted by many modern advocates of revolutionary change, including the signers of the Declaration of Independence. In Locke’s time this idea was controversial, so much so, that even most of the Whigs who led the English Revolution of 1688 rejected it. They feared that allowing the people themselves to alter or abolish their form of government would create chaos.90 To calm this fear, Locke contends that it is possible to dissolve government without dissolving society (II.211). Hobbes argued that since there is no society without government, but rather a state of nature that is a state of war, resistance to government is suicidal except to escape one’s own

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death. Even the most oppressive government is better than the violent anarchy that inevitably occurs with a revolution. Hobbes thought the English Civil War (1642–1649) illustrated this. Although Locke denies that a state of nature is necessarily a state of war, he concedes that a state of nature tends to become warlike (II.19, 21, 123). He maintains, however, that the people acting as a community can set aside their old government without collapsing into a state of nature. It is possible, at least temporarily, for people to act as one body ruled by the majority even without the formal institutions of government (II.95–99, 132, 211). The Revolution of 1688 would illustrate this, despite the effort of the Whig leaders to adhere to the fiction of working within the established framework of government. Throughout the seventeenth century, English political leaders had searched for a way to settle constitutional conflicts between the King and Parliament without subordinating one to the other. Locke’s solution was to recognize the people as the final judge of such disputes (II.240–43). Later, as we will see, Rousseau worked out one of the radical implications of this idea: the only just governments are those sanctioned by the sovereign will of the people. Anarchist thinkers drew an even more radical conclusion. If the people can exercise their sovereign will without government, then justice would be best served by abolishing government forever.91 Locke’s account of revolution leaves us with many unanswered questions. For example, he assumes that in a revolutionary situation the will of the majority of the people should prevail. But doesn’t this allow the minority to be oppressed? Doesn’t it deny the equal right of all to protect their liberty? Why shouldn’t we follow Thoreau’s lead in concluding that the right to revolution includes the right of all individuals to disobey laws that violate their conscience? This reasoning has supported the doctrine of civil disobedience—that each person has the right, even the duty, to disobey unjust laws. It is also easy to see how this could lead to anarchism. Would Locke accept Thoreau’s interpretation of the right to revolution? He seems to agree with Thoreau in some passages of the Second Treatise. He says, for example, “every man is judge for himself” whether a ruler has become so unjust that rebellion is justified (II.241). But in other passages, he insists that only the people as a whole have the right to make this judgment (II.230, 240, 242–43). Locke speaks about the right of the people to rebel against unjust government as an “appeal to Heaven,” which he derives from the story of Jephtha in the Bible (in chapter 11 of the Book of Judges) (I.163; II.21, 109, 155, 168, 176, 232, 240–43). Whenever there is an irresolvable debate over whether or not political power has been rightly used, the ultimate question, Locke suggests, is “Who shall be judge?” In the conflict between the people of Israel and the Ammonites, Jephtha is selected by the people to be their chief and their war leader. He negotiates with the Ammonites. But when this negotiation fails to reach any agreement, Jephtha declares, “Let Yahweh the Judge give judgment today,” and Jephtha leads them into war.

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That’s what Locke means by the “appeal to Heaven” when there is no “appeal on Earth”—the dispute will be settled by force of arms, and the outcome on the field of battle will be taken to be the judgment of God. The phrase “appeal to Heaven” appears to be Locke’s. It doesn’t appear in the Bible. The influence of this idea was vividly displayed in the American Revolution when the Americans adopted a battle flag with a picture of an evergreen tree of liberty and the motto “Appeal to Heaven.” The same idea is evoked in the Declaration of Independence in declaring war with the British, and thus appealing to God as the “Supreme Judge of the world” to vindicate the justice of the American cause through its triumph in battle. Does this suggest that the natural right to revolution means that might makes right? Asserting that might makes right is usually interpreted as asserting that life is governed by brute force and not by any sense of right and wrong. But Locke implies that our natural sense of right and wrong is ultimately expressed by our natural tendency to violent rebellion or vengeance against exploitation or oppression, and thus it might really be true that might makes right. The enforcement of our natural sense of right comes through the threat or use of violence in punishing those who would injure us. Locke sees this expressed in the first law of nature stated in the Bible: “Who so sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (II.11, quoting Genesis 9:6). We know that murder is contrary to the law of nature, because human beings are naturally inclined to retaliate against murderers by executing them. This shows the “Executive Power of the Law of Nature”—the natural power of every individual in the state of nature to defend life, liberty, and property against murder, theft, and oppression. By consenting to government, people give up this power to their government. But if that power is abused—by being used to exploit them rather than to protect them—people can reclaim that executive power in rebelling against their oppressive government, and thus meeting force with force. Locke finds this teaching in the Old Testament, but not the New Testament. Like Machiavelli, Locke implies that the teaching of Jesus to love your enemies and resist not evil would allow tyrants to prevail, because they would meet no resistance from their victims. This issue is dramatized in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and in the debate provoked by her novel.92 First published in 1852, her novel’s depiction of the brutality of slavery in the American South helped to shift public opinion in the American North against slavery and thus contributed to the Civil War. But some of the leaders of the movement to abolish slavery—such as black abolitionist William Nell—criticized Stowe’s depiction of Uncle Tom as humbly submitting to his enslavement. Uncle Tom was a true Christian, who taught his fellow slaves to show Christian love towards their masters, with the thought that the Christian slaves would be rewarded in Heaven as compensation for their earthly suffering.

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Critics like Nell warned that the passive obedience of slaves and their refusal to resist their enslavement would make it appear that they were naturally adapted for slavery. Stowe recognized this as a problem. As an alternative to Uncle Tom, she depicted George Harris as a heroic slave who used violence to rebel against his enslavement. Rejecting the Christian teaching of humility and love for one’s enemies, he invoked the Declaration of Independence in his manly assertion of a spirited resistance to oppression. In her second novel—Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (published in 1856)— Stowe portrayed the heroism of Dred, a black revolutionary who led slaves in revolt, while quoting the Old Testament as favoring vengeance against injustice and as contradicting the passive obedience and pacifism taught by the New Testament.93 In this way, Stowe struggled with the question of whether the Christian teaching of nonviolence was contrary to the natural moral sentiments of violent resistance to injustice. One can see a similar struggle in Thomas Aquinas, who defended vengeance as a virtue. Against the teaching of Jesus that we are always to love our enemies and never resist evil with violence, Aquinas concluded that vengeance is a part of justice because it expresses a natural inclination to irascibility that we share with other animals, a special inclination of nature to protect individuals against harm.94 As we shall see later, Friedrich Nietzsche saw this as the natural root of morality in the evolution of animals, which is sustained by some modern Darwinian theories of morality. If there is a natural tendency to resist exploitation that supports a right to revolution, is this manifested in the modern movement of women to overthrow the oppressive rule of men?

12. Should women have equal rights? Locke speaks of the “rights of men.” Does this include the “rights of women”? If all human beings have natural rights by virtue of their shared membership in the human species, and if women are human beings, does it not follow necessarily that women have the same natural rights as men? The logic of this argument was elaborated by Mary Wollstonecraft in Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was first published in England in 1792. With respect to their natural sameness, women are equal to men in their humanity as rational animals, she argued, and therefore women have the same natural rights that belong to men by virtue of their rational nature. With respect to their natural differences, women cannot properly fulfill their nature as wives and mothers unless they are as independent and as well educated as men. Family life will be improved when wives and husbands see one another as intellectual equals whose sexual love can be transformed into marital friendship through their shared nurturance of children.95 In July of 1848, the first convention for the promotion of women’s rights was held in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention adopted a “Dec-

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laration of Sentiments” that followed the pattern of the Declaration of Independence, invoking the self-evident truth “that all men and women are created equal” and listing its grievances against the tyranny of men. The convention also passed resolutions applying natural law to the condition of women: since it is by natural law that “man shall pursue his own true and substantial happiness,” and any human laws contrary to this are invalid, it must also be true that any laws contrary to “the true and substantial happiness of woman” are also invalid.96 Would Locke agree? Some feminist scholars believe Locke’s reasoning would support, at least implicitly, the feminist argument for women’s rights, particularly in his attack on Robert Filmer’s theory of patriarchal authority.97 According to Locke, the authority of parents over their children belongs equally to mothers and fathers, not just to fathers (section 52). Locke also regards the spousal bond as a voluntary contract between man and woman; and therefore, if they have no children, or if their children are grown, there is no reason why they cannot terminate their marriage by mutual consent (sections 77–83). In this case, whatever property the wife has earned by labor or contract belongs to her as her share of the common property (section 183). Such an endorsement of divorce was controversial in Locke’s time, and it is only recently that “no-fault” divorce has been accepted in American and European law. Yet some feminist critics of Locke have noticed that he seems hesitant to fully affirm the equality of men and women. For example, when husband and wife cannot agree on some issue of common concern in the family, Locke explains, the final decision “naturally falls to the man’s share, as the abler and the stronger” (section 82). He immediately adds, however, that this “leaves the wife in the full and free possession of what by contract is her peculiar right, and gives the husband no more power over her life than she has over his.” Moreover, it is not clear what he means by man being naturally “the abler and the stronger.” Abler only in being stronger? At least, in comparison with Rousseau, who was the primary object of Wollstonecraft’s indignation, and who is commonly identified by feminist scholars as the founder of the modern patriarchal tradition, Locke seems far more sympathetic to women’s rights. Even Rousseau, however, is difficult to interpret on this issue. He indicates that although in general men and women tend to be naturally different, some women (“exceptions”) are just like men, and all women could be raised to be just like men.98 In an early essay (Sur Les Femmes), Rousseau described the tyranny of men in preventing women from expressing their natural capacities. Furthermore, even when Rousseau recommends cultivating and celebrating the natural differences between men and women, his teaching should be welcomed by those feminists who defend the “different voice” and the “maternal thinking” that women contribute to the human conversation.99 Our human nature is surely shaped by the nature of our human bodies. And since our bodies are either female or male, does this mean that

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human nature is divided into female and male natures? Or should we rather say that the division of social and political roles into female and male is more a product of nurture than of nature and is therefore open to social reform through education?100 These questions point us back to Plato’s Republic. They also point us ahead to Rousseau’s account of the origins of inequality. If Lockean liberalism is to secure the equal liberty of both men and women, does that include the legal tolerance of moral and religious diversity?

13. Are there good arguments for religious toleration and the separation of church and state? Most human beings profess some kind of religious belief. Today the majority of human beings around the world belong to one of the Abrahamic or biblical religions—Judaism, Christianity (Catholic and Protestant), and Islam. Islam can be identified as a biblical religion insofar as Muslims recognize Moses and Jesus as prophets of God, although they believe Muhammad was God’s final prophet. Traditionally, these religious believers have looked to the laws of God as providing the ultimate standard for judging human law and politics. We can see this, for example, in the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” and to God as the Creator and Judge of humanity. As we have seen, even pagan philosophers like Plato suggested that the moral and political order of society depended upon belief in a divine law enforced by eternal rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Does this mean that religious belief is necessary for any healthy society? If so, does that mean that our laws should enforce religious belief? Or should religious belief be left to the free choice of individuals without any legal or political interference? Reading Locke forces us to think about such questions, because while he often cites the Bible as supporting his political arguments, and thus implies that religious belief is necessary for political order, he also argues in his Letter Concerning Toleration that we need to tolerate religious diversity, and that it is improper for government to compel any religious belief or practice.101 Although religion serves the highest end of human life, which is to secure the eternal happiness of one’s immortal soul in the afterlife, Locke observes, law and politics serve the lower end of human life, which is to secure one’s life and liberty in the pursuit of earthly happiness. Consequently, Locke concludes, government is not properly concerned with the “care of souls.” Here we see one of the earliest statements of the modern liberal ideas of religious toleration and the separation of church and state. But when we notice the many biblical references in Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, we must wonder whether this idea of separating church and state is

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dictated by biblical religion. After all, many biblical believers would reject any absolute separation of church and state if that means that our legal and political life becomes godless. We need to begin by seeing how Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration fits into the long history of Christians debating whether the Bible requires religious toleration or religious persecution.102 We can distinguish three periods in this history. In the first period, during the first three centuries of Christianity, the Christian churches in the Roman Empire were purely voluntary groups that had no power to use persecution to enforce their beliefs, although they were themselves subject to persecution by the Roman state. The second period was initiated by the conversion to Christianity of the Roman Emperor Constantine in 311. Christianity then eventually became the exclusive religion of the empire, and this allowed the Christian Church to use legal coercion against pagans and heretics, which included the execution of heretics. The Catholic Church developed a theory of persecution that prevailed in the Middle Ages. Augustine argued that Christians could use legal coercion to help persuade heretics to see the errors in their beliefs, although he never endorsed killing heretics. As we have seen, Aquinas agreed with the position of the Catholic Church that heretics who stubbornly refused to change their minds could be properly executed. The third period was initiated by the Protestant Reformation. Protestants argued against the Catholic persecution of Protestants. But once Protestants gained political power, they persecuted Catholics, and the different Protestant churches persecuted one another. This provoked a long debate over the possibility of toleration to allow for peaceful coexistence of the differing religious traditions. In England, this controversy over toleration was complex. In the 1530s, King Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church and declared himself the supreme head of the English Protestant church. Later, Queen Mary I (1553–1558) restored Catholicism as the national religion, and she persecuted Protestants. But then, in 1559, Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) restored the Protestant Church of England as the national church with bishops appointed by the Crown. This became the only legally supported church, with forms of worship and doctrines legally enforced. Catholicism was banned, although it was still the religion of the majority of the English people when Elizabeth became Queen. Moreover, Protestants who disagreed with the doctrines, the rites, or the organization of the Church of England were persecuted. The Puritans wanted to “purify” the Church of England to make it less like the Catholic Church, and some of these Puritans wanted their own separate churches. Some Puritans and other religious dissenters were forced to immigrate to the American colonies where they could set up their own religious establishments, or to countries like Holland that tolerated religious diversity. Until the 1640s there were almost no advocates of religious toleration in England, and even then, only a very few individuals argued for com-

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plete toleration. One of those few was Roger Williams. Having been ordained a minister in England, Williams became dissatisfied with the Anglican Church. Joining the Puritan migration to Massachusetts in 1631, Williams was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for condemning the Puritan rule there as a Mosaic theocracy that was contrary to the New Testament, and for arguing that the American Puritan settlers should pay for the land that they had stolen from the American Indians. He then settled in what would become Rhode Island, purchased land from the territory of the Narragansett Indians, and founded a political community that extended legal toleration to all religions. In 1644, he published The Bloody Tenant of Persecution, in which he argued for legal toleration to protect the liberty of conscience and enforce a “wall of separation” between church and state.103 His book was considered so radical that the British House of Commons ordered it burned. Although Locke does not mention Williams, Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration repeats some of the same reasoning developed by Williams. Locke and Williams had to answer four kinds of arguments for religious intolerance. First, the political argument for intolerance was that this was necessary to enforce peace and unity through an established national church, because religious liberty would create anarchic disorder and seditious rebellion as people fell into religious conflict. Second, the theological argument was that false religions must be legally suppressed to save the souls that would otherwise be condemned to eternal punishment for their religious errors. Third, the biblical argument was that the Bible commanded Christians to propagate their faith and to be intolerant of false religions. Fourth, the ethical argument was that Biblical religion was necessary for morality, and therefore the legal enforcement of the true religion was necessary to preserve the good moral order of the community. Consider how Locke and Williams might answer these arguments. To the political argument, they can respond by pointing out that political conflict over religion has come mostly as a result of religious intolerance and efforts to legally force people to conform to an established religion. The religious violence in Europe during the Reformation was caused by religious persecution. A policy of toleration can bring political peace and unity, because people of different religious faiths can learn to live together peacefully without persecution. This does require, as both Locke and Williams argued, that government must rightly punish those churches that teach violent intolerance. Each church may properly enforce its beliefs and practices among its own members by shunning or excommunicating those who do not conform, but such excommunication cannot include legal persecution. To the theological argument for intolerance, Locke and Williams responded by arguing that government has no proper authority over theological disputes, because the end of government is to secure civil peace or civil goods rather than the spiritual goods of the soul. Williams argued that the “civil sword” for “defense of persons, estates, families, [and] liberties of

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a city” does not extend to “spiritual and soul-causes.” There are “diverse sorts of goodness,” and “civil or moral goodness” is distinguished from “spiritual goodness.”104 Similarly, Locke argued that political rule and lawmaking are concerned only with “civil goods,” which do not include the “care of souls,” which is left to individual conscience and the spiritual authority of churches.105 Both Locke and Williams argued that religious organizations are voluntary groups just like any other voluntary associations in society, all of which are protected by the civil peace enforced by government. Moreover, it is foolish to think that governments can coercively enforce belief in the true religion and thus save souls, because there is no reason to believe that those in government can correctly identify the true religion. In fact, the history of established churches in England illustrates this: whether the established church is Catholic or Protestant has depended upon the arbitrary choices of the monarch. If persecution is allowed, those who are persecuted might well be the believers in the true religion. Furthermore, Locke and Williams argued, the true religion cannot save our souls unless we sincerely believe its truth, and sincere belief cannot be forced. Sincere belief must come from being persuaded, not from being coerced to pretend to believe what we do not truly believe in our hearts. To the biblical argument for religious persecution, Locke and Williams responded by indicating that while the Old Testament does endorse persecution, the New Testament does not, and for Christians the New Testament must supersede the Old Testament. The legal and political community established by Moses for the people of Israel was a theocracy in which the Jewish religion was enforced by legal coercion. But Jesus and the early Christians in the New Testament sought to convert people through persuasion rather than coercion. The teachings of Jesus were for universal love extended even to one’s enemies. The early Christian churches were voluntary groups that used exhortation and the threat of excommunication to enforce the obedience of their members, but those outside the churches were not persecuted. Williams insisted that Constantine and the good Roman emperors did more harm to Christianity through their persecution of heretics and pagans than did Nero in his persecutions of the Christians.106 In adopting legal toleration, Christians can return to the true teachings of Christ and the early Christians, who refused to imitate Moses in setting up a national church. Thus, Locke and Williams developed what we today might identify as a liberal or libertarian reading of the New Testament as teaching that the purpose of government is to keep the peace by protecting us from force and fraud, while the moral and religious formation of the soul is to be done through family life and the voluntary associations of civil society.107 This interpretation of the New Testament as supporting religious liberty has even influenced the Catholic Church, after many centuries in which the Church endorsed religious persecution as dictated by the Bible. This change came in the Second Vatican Council of the Catholic Church,

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particularly in the “Declaration of Religious Freedom” approved in 1965. Under the influence of liberal Catholics like John Courtney Murray, the Vatican Council declared that “the human person has a right to religious freedom,” and the Council implied that the Church’s past support for religious persecution had been contrary to the New Testament: “In the life of the People of God, as it has made its pilgrim way through the vicissitudes of human history, there has at times appeared a way of acting that was hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel or even opposed to it.”108 Does this mean that the Catholic Church now embraces the interpretation of the New Testament advanced by Williams and Locke as supporting religious liberty and legal toleration? What about the ethical argument for religious persecution? As we have seen, Locke’s appeal to the religious teaching that all human beings are created in God’s image suggests that his liberal political thought depends on religious belief. We have seen similar religious ideas in the Declaration of Independence. If liberalism depends on such religious beliefs, does that mean that even in the most liberal society, the government will need to support and cultivate some religious doctrines? Doesn’t any healthy society depend upon a religiously based morality? If a society does not share any religious beliefs about right and wrong as based on God’s law, if decisions of right and wrong are left up to the free choices of individuals without any absolute religious standards, does that promote a moral relativism that subverts social order? Or is it possible that even an atheistic society could sustain itself?

14. Is a society of atheists possible? Remarkably, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke declares that atheists are intolerable. He explains: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God. Promises, Covenants, and Oaths, which are the Bonds of Humane Society, can have no hold upon an Atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. Besides also, those that by their Atheism undermine and destroy all Religion, can have no pretence of Religion whereupon to challenge the Privilege of a Toleration.”109 In another writing on toleration, Locke identified the “belief of a deity” as “the foundation of morality.”110 In his written constitution for the colony in the Carolinas, Locke prescribed that no one could be a citizen who did not acknowledge God and belong to some church that worshipped God.111 In The Reasonableness of Christianity, Locke insisted that one of the great advantages of Christianity was that its teaching about Heaven and Hell—that all human beings will be judged by God in the afterlife and either rewarded with eternal bliss or punished with eternal torment—provided the only solid foundation for morality.112 Is this true? Is it true that without the religious belief in God as the moral lawgiver and as the final judge of human conduct in the afterlife,

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good moral conduct is impossible? If so, does this mean that no healthy society can tolerate atheism, because atheists cannot be trusted to be good citizens? Throughout history, it has been common to assume that, as Locke indicates, “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of humane society, can have no hold upon an atheist.” Oaths require a swearing to some divinity with expressions such as “so help me God.” Witnesses and jurors in courts of law have been required to take such oaths. Those taking public offices have been required to take oaths of allegiance. Public officers have even been required to affirm their belief in certain religious doctrines. In many of the first constitutions of the American states, for example, state officials were required to swear that they believed in the existence of God and the reality of eternal rewards and punishments from God in the afterlife. In the Sixth Article of the Constitution of the United States, it is stipulated that “the Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” As opposed to an oath, an affirmation does not invoke God, and thus an atheist can make an affirmation, but not an oath. So, by allowing governmental officers to affirm their support of the Constitution and by eliminating any religious test, the Constitution apparently denies any need for religious belief. In fact, some Christians have criticized the American Constitution as “godless.”113 Does this suggest that the American constitutional founders thought that atheists could be good citizens, and thus that Locke was wrong in declaring that atheism was intolerable? Doesn’t it seem plausible, as Locke argues in The Reasonableness of Christianity and as Plato argues in the Republic and the Laws, that belief in a final judgment by God with eternal rewards and punishments will motivate virtuous conduct, and therefore that the atheistic denial of this religious doctrine will subvert virtue? If all human beings seek happiness, and if they believe that obeying God’s moral law will bring them eternal happiness in Heaven, while disobeying that divine law will bring them eternal torment in Hell, then one might expect that those human beings with such beliefs will be strongly motivated to be virtuous. And yet Pierre Bayle, writing at the same time as Locke, contended that this is contrary to what we know by experience, because we can see that Christians who sincerely believe in this doctrine of Heaven and Hell are no more virtuous than those people who doubt or deny this doctrine. The reason for this is that our conduct depends very little on our abstract ideas and much more on the dominant passions of our nature. This allows Bayle to argue that insofar as atheists are moved by natural moral passions that lead to virtue, they are virtuous in their conduct, and thus we can reasonably tolerate atheists. We can even imagine, Bayle suggests, that there

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could be a “society of atheists.” If atheists are moved by moral passions such as a concern for social praise and blame and a desire for a good reputation that will win the cooperation of others, then atheists will be motivated to moral conduct without any need for religious belief in God’s moral law, and consequently we could have a healthy society that is mostly or totally atheistic.114 Now, in the twenty-first century, we see many nations where atheism or religious indifference is growing. Does this show that we are moving towards a purely secular world where most people will be atheists? Can a secular society show a healthy moral order?115 As we will see, Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that modern liberal secularism was morally corrupting, and that good citizenship required a “civil religion” that would give divine sanction to the laws.

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See Roger Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See Kenneth Dewhurst, John Locke (1632–1704), Physician and Philosopher: A Medical Biography (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963). See Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). For the influence of Shaftesbury on Locke’s thought, see Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 75–127. See Guido Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927); and John Gray, Liberalism, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). On the importance of Locke for the American regime, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace World, 1955). For appeals to Locke in American rhetoric from 1783 to 1861, see Merle Curti, Probing Our Past (New York: Harper, 1955), 69–168. Locke’s influence on Jefferson has been questioned by Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); but for criticisms of Wills’s argument, see Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’ Inventing America,” William and Mary Quarterly 36 (October 1979): 503–23; and Garrett Ward Sheldon, The Political Philosophy of Thomas Jefferson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 41–52. For a survey of the history of Locke’s influence on British and American political thought and the debate among historians over the relative influence of liberalism and republicanism, see Mark Goldie, “Introduction,” in Mark Goldie, ed., The Reception of Locke’s Politics, 6 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 1: xvii–lxxi. All references are to the Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). References in the text indicate the First Treatise (I) or Second Treatise (II) and the section numbers. Thus, “II.4” refers to section 4 of the Second Treatise. This position is defended by Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). On the debate over whether the Bible and Christianity teach Lockean equality, see Joshua A. Berman, Created Equal: How the Bible Broke with Ancient Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Robert Kraynak, Christian Faith and Modern Democracy: God and Politics in a Fallen World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001); and John Courtney Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, with a Forward by Peter Augustine Lawler (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2005). See Woolhouse, Locke, 127, 350–52, 371.

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See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. George W. Ewing (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1965). See William T. Bluhm, Neil Winfield, and Stuart H. Teger, “Locke’s Idea of God: Rational Truth or Political Myth?” Journal of Politics, 42 (1980): 414–38. For this interpretation of Locke, see Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 216–22. This is the claim of Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Vintage Books, 1942), 274–76. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1959), II.xxvii.9, 11, 17. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, I.ii.3; II.xxi.39, 48, 52–53, 61–63, 70. See Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Patricia Churchland, Touching a Nerve: The Self as Brain, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013); A. D. (Bud) Craig, “How Do You Feel? Interoception: The Sense of the Physiological Condition of the Body,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 3 (August 2002): 655–66; Craig, “How Do You Feel—Now? The Anterior Insula and Human Awareness,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 10 (January 2009): 59–70; Naomi I. Eisenberger and Matthew D. Lieberman, “Why Rejection Hurts: A Common Neural Alarm System for Physical and Social Pain,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (July 2004): 294–300; and Christopher T. Dawes, et al., “Neural Basis of Egalitarian Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (April 24, 2012): 6479–83. See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 150–51, 163, 169–72, 680–83; and Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809–1882, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1958), 85–96. See David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Religion, Evolution, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). See Johannes Morsink, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Origins, Drafting, and Intent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 281–302. The Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights (1998) can be found at http://www.un-documents.net/udhghr.htm. That the formation of the pair bond between male and female was the crucial evolutionary step towards the ancestral human social structure based on kinship is argued by Bernard Chapais, Primeval Kinship: How Pair-Bonding Gave Birth to Human Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). See William G. Batz, “The Historical Anthropology of John Locke,” Journal of the History of Ideas 35 (1974): 663–70; José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, trans. Frances López-Morillas (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), and Claudio M. Burgaleta, José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600): His Life and Thought (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1999). See also Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Arneil argues that Locke’s reading of the travel books on America was biased by his desire to defend English colonialism in the New World. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 73–74. See Batz, “Historical Anthropology.” See Ted Goebel, Michael Waters, and Dennis O’Rouke, “The Late Pleistocene Dispersal of Modern Humans in the Americas,” Science 319 (14 March 2008): 1497–1502; and Michael Balter, “Bones from a Water ‘Black Hole’ Confirm First American Origins,” Science 344 (16 May 2014): 680–81. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 380–81. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 359. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 346, 359, 402. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, ed. Mark Goldie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), 76.

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See Ted C. Lewellen, Political Anthropology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). E. Adamson Hoebel, The Law of Primitive Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 81–82. David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 37–41. For the history of the changing anthropological interpretations of the Bushmen, see Alan Barnard, Anthropology and the Bushmen (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2007). Polly Wiessner, “Norm Enforcement among the Ju/’hoansi Bushmen: A Case of Strong Reciprocity?” Human Nature 16 (2005): 117, 126, 135. For a general survey of the scientific evidence and arguments for concluding that the earliest human ancestors were egalitarian hunter-gatherers, see Doron Schultziner et al., “The Causes and Scope of Political Egalitarianism During the Last Glacial: A Multi-Disciplinary Perspective,” Biology & Philosophy 25 (2010): 319–46. See Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). See Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 23–24, 32–33, 36–38, 44–45, 49–50, 54–55, 5960, 75, 86–87, 94– 97, 109, 112, 208–10, 547–64. See Martin Nowak, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed (New York: Free Press, 2011). See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 194–262; Macpherson, “Liberal Democracy and Property,” in Property, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 199–207; and Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 340. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 491. Some historical evidence for this argument can be found in Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973). John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935), 3–7, 87–93. For this interpretation of Locke, see Martin Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (New York: Praeger, 1969), 165–79. For the debate over the welfare state, see Norman Furniss and Timothy Tilton, The Case for the Welfare State: From Social Security to Social Equality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); Norman Barry, Welfare, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); and Tom G. Palmer, ed., After the Welfare State (Ottawa, IL: Jameson Books, 2012). For Lockean defenses of private property, see Timothy Sandefur, Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st-Century America (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2006); and Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom (New York: Vintage Books, 2000). On the history and prospects of voluntary charity for aiding the poor, see David Beito, From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Michael Tanner, The Poverty of Welfare: Helping Others in Civil Society (Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2003). On the contradiction between autonomy and authority, see Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Law in Modern Society (New York: Free Press, 1976), 23–43, 127–33, 140–55, 236–42, 262–65; and Robert Paul Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). See Strauss, Natural Right and History, 202–51; and Richard Cox, Locke on War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). Ronald Peters, The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 195.

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937), 636–37. See Roberto Michels, Political Parties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1949); Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, trans. Hannah D. Kahn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 50–69; and Peter Bachrach, The Theory of Democratic Elitism: A Critique (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967). Willmoore Kendall, John Locke and the Doctrine of Majority-Rule (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965), 112–19. Willmoore Kendall, 177. Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944), 322. For a meticulous analysis and justification of majority rule, see Elaine Spitz, Majority Rule (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1984). See James Madison, Federalist Number 10, in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 56–65. John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government, in Ross M. Lence, ed., Union and Liberty: The Political Philosophy of John C. Calhoun (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992), 21. A critical assessment of Calhoun’s arguments for consensus democracy and a study of how they apply to some deeply divided societies (Northern Ireland, the former Yugoslavia, and South Africa) can be found in James H. Read, Majority Rule Versus Consensus: The Political Thought of John C. Calhoun (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). These three difficulties are surveyed in Read, Majority Rule, 160–95. Gerald Ford, Inaugural Address, in Richard D. Heffner, ed., A Documentary History of the United States, 3rd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1976), 351. See John Hasnas, “The Myth of the Rule of Law,” Wisconsin Law Review 199 (1995): 199– 233, reprinted in Edward P. Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 163–92. On the debate over the meaning of the rule of law, see Judith Shklar, Legalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964); Bruno Leoni, Freedom and Law (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991); and Paul Dresch and Hannah Skoda, eds., Legalism: Anthropology and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1979), 101. Kenneth Culp Davis, Discretionary Justice: A Preliminary Inquiry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 41. For a defense of the rule of law as a necessary restraint on administrative power in American government, see Lowi’s End of Liberalism. For accounts of how the Congressional delegation of lawmaking power to administrative agencies has created an “Administrative State,” see Gary Lawson, “The Rise and Rise of the Administrative State,” Harvard Law Review 107 (1994): 1231–54; and David Schoenbrod, Power without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People through Delegation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). For this argument, see Philip Hamburger, Is Administrative Law Unlawful? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). See Stephen G. Breyer, Richard B. Stewart, Cass R. Sunstein, and Adrian Vermeule, Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy: Problems, Text, and Cases, 7th ed. (New York: Aspen, 2011). See Susan Rose-Ackerman and Peter L. Lindseth, eds., Comparative Administrative Law (Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2011). See Ron Arnold, “Reining in Regulation by Delegation: A Guide to the REINS Act,” National Policy Analysis, May 2011, #623, http://www.nationalcenter.org/NPA623.html; and Jonathan Adler, “Would the REINS Act Rein in Federal Regulation?” Regulation (Summer 2011): 22–28. Lincoln, Message to Congress 4 July 1861, in Collected Works, 4: 426. For diverse views of executive prerogative in American politics, see Larry Arnhart, “The ‘Godlike Prince’: John Locke, Executive Prerogative, and the American Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 9

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(Spring 1979): 121–31; Thomas S. Langston and Michael E. Lind, “John Locke and the Limits of Presidential Prerogative,” Polity 24 (1991): 49–68; Daniel P. Franklin, Extraordinary Measures: The Exercise of Prerogative Powers in the United States (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); and Benjamin A. Kleinerman, The Discretionary President: The Promise and Peril of Executive Power (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). The New York Times, 20 May 1977. James Madison, Writings, 1772–1836 (New York: Library of America, 1999), 540. See John M. Carey and Matthew S. Shugart, eds., Executive Decree Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), especially 8–10, 108–16, 148–49, 162, 176, 188, 193, 198, 302, 304, 321–24. Schlesinger lists the conditions in a passage added to the paperback edition of his book: The Imperial President (New York: Popular Library, 1974), 450–52. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive or The Citizen, ed. Sterling Lamprecht (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), VI.13.78. See Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. 1, chap. 2, secs. 5–8; bk. 2, chap. 17, secs. 17–18; bk. 2, chap. 21, sec. 35; bk. 2, chap. 27, secs. 9–14. See also Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., The Taming of the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989). Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Christian E. Detold, in The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1940), I.34.203. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Life and Selected Writings, 244–47. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Random House, Modern Library, n.d.), No. 70, pp. 454–55. Lincoln, Message to Congress, 4 July 1861, in Collected Works, 4: 429. Ibid. James G. Randall, Constitutional Problems under Lincoln (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951), 47. It should be noted, however, that Lincoln repeatedly denied that he was usurping dictatorial powers beyond the limits of the Constitution. Generally, he was careful to work within the boundaries of the Constitution broadly interpreted. See, for example, Lincoln, Collected Works, 4: 531–32, 6: 262–69, 6: 302–3, 6: 428–29, 8: 52, 8: 100–1. Compare Locke, Second Treatise, secs. 134, 155, 239; and The Federalist, No. 20, pp. 122–23; No. 25, p. 158. For a meticulous history of Lincoln’s actions, see Mark E. Neely, Jr., The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014). See Mark Mazzetti, “Panel Faults C.I.A. Over Brutality and Deceit in Terrorism Investigations,” The New York Times, December 9, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1D3IYHa; and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, Guantanamo Diary (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 2015). See John Yoo, Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: Kaplan, 2009), 3–8, 122–24; and Yoo, “The Continuation of Politics by Other Means: The Original Understanding of War Powers,” California Law Review 84 (1996): 167–305. See Louis Fisher, “John Yoo and the Republic,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 41 (2011): 177–91; and Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power, 2nd ed. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). See Patrick Thronson, “Toward Comprehensive Reform of America’s Emergency Law Regime,” University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform 46 (Winter 2013): 737–87. See Juan Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” The Journal of Democracy, 1 (1990): 51–69; and F. H. Buckley, The Once and Future King: The Rise of Crown Government in America (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2014). See John Yoo, “Seeds of Monarchy?” Claremont Review of Books, 14 (Summer 2014): 45–47. George Washington, “Farewell Address,” in Daniel J. Boorstin, ed., An American Primer, 2 Vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 1: 199.

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See Julian Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); and Nathan Tarcov, “Locke’s Second Treatise and ‘The Best Fence Against Rebellion’,” Review of Politics 43 (April 1981): 198–217. On the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as the turning point in the development of the liberal society and the Industrial Revolution, see Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), and Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012), 182–212. For one of the most persuasive statements of anarchist theory, see Morris Tannehill and Linda Tannehill, The Market for Liberty (New York: Laissez Faire Books, 1984). See also Mortimer J. Adler, The Common Sense of Politics (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971), 94–104; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 51–53, 120–31; David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom (New Rochelle: Arlington House, 1978), 151–222; and James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). See Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ed. Henry Louis Gates and Hollis Robbins (New York: Norton, 2007). See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Robert Levine (New York: Penguin, 2000). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), I–II, q. 107, a. 2; II–II, q. 50, a. 4; q. 108, aa. 2–3. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 79–84, 86–88, 113–14, 132, 139, 247–48, 265–66, 298–99, 313–19. See Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Alice S. Rossi, ed., The Feminist Papers (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 415–20. See Melissa A. Butler, “Early Liberal Roots of Feminism: John Locke and the Attack on Patriarchy,” American Political Science Review 72 (1978): 135–50, reprinted in Shanley and Pateman, Feminist Interpretations, 74–94; and Ludwig von Mises, Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), chap. 4. Compare Wollstonecraft, Vindication, 154, 188, 266; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 357, 362–64, 386, 408–9. See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982); and Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). On the debate over the biology of sexual differences, see Donald Symons, The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979); Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1988); Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Carol Tavris, The Mismeasure of Woman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); Linda Mealey, Sex Differences (New York: Academic Press, 2000); and Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 123–60. See John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings, which contains the English translation by William Popple of Locke’s Latin text, Epistola de Tolerantia. See Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). See Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenant of Persecution, in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. 3; and Williams, On Religious Liberty: Selections from the Works of Roger Williams, ed. James Calvin Davis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). Williams, Bloody Tenant, 160, 245–46, 331–34. Locke, Toleration, 12–13. Williams, Bloody Tenant, 184. For this libertarian reading of the Bible, see Andy G. Olree, The Choice Principle: The Biblical Case for Legal Toleration (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2006).

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The Declaration on Religious Freedom is printed with an introduction by John Courtney Murray in The Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild Press, 1966), 675–96. Locke, Toleration, 52–53. Similarly, Thomas Hobbes (in an appendix to the Latin version of his Leviathan) declared that atheists can be legally punished for their atheism by being banished (but not by being executed), because every political community requires religious belief to support the swearing of oaths (Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012], III, 1206). When atheist Charles Bradlaugh was elected to the British Parliament in 1880, he was denied his seat because he refused to take the required oath of office with the words “So help me God.” Not until 1888, with a change in the law of oaths, was he allowed to take his seat by making an “affirmation” without the words “So help me God.” See Bryan Niblett, Dare to Stand Alone: The Story of Charles Bradlaugh, Atheist and Republican (Oxford, UK: Kramedart Press, 2010). Locke, Toleration, 132. Locke, Toleration, 146–47. John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. George W. Ewing (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1965), 183–85. For the debate over the religious views of the American founders, see Isaac Kramnick and Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State (New York: Norton, 2005); David Barton, Original Intent: The Courts, the Constitution, and Religion (Aledo, TX: Wallbuilders Press, 2008); and Gregg L. Frazer, The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012). See Pierre Bayle, Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet, trans. Robert C. Barlett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), secs. 92, 157, 172. See Phil Zuckerman, “Atheism: Contemporary Numbers and Patterns,” in Michael Martin, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47–65.

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9 Participatory Democracy

Rousseau’s First Discourse, Second Discourse, and The Social Contract

KEY READINGS First Discourse and Second Discourse in their entirety; The Social Contract, I, 1, 6–8; II, 1, 3, 6–7; III, 4, 15; IV, 1–2, 6, 8.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was born in the city-republic of Geneva, Switzerland. His mother died shortly after his birth. His father, who was a watchmaker, taught him to value republican government and guided his reading of novels and histories. Plutarch’s Lives was particularly important in stimulating Jean-Jacques’s admiration for ancient Greek and Roman statesmen. At the age of twelve, Rousseau was abandoned by his father, who left Geneva to avoid prosecution for dueling. For the next fourteen years, JeanJacques learned various trades as he wandered around Europe. During periods of leisure, he pursued a wide range of studies. In 1742, he went to Paris with the hope of becoming successful by presenting to the world a new system of musical notation that he had invented. Although this project failed, he began writing poetry, plays, and operas. He became an associate of the philosophers who led the French Enlightenment, and by 1749 he was writing articles for Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. The crucial event in his writing career occurred in 1750 when he received a prize from the Academy of Dijon for his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (also called the First Discourse). He wrote his major works over the next twelve years. 281

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After the publication of his Émile in 1762, Rousseau suffered persecution from religious and political authorities for his unorthodox religious teachings. His books were burned in Paris and Geneva, and he had to move around Europe to avoid being arrested. For the rest of his life he tried to defend his writing, and his fears of persecution drove him to paranoia. He described himself as a “solitary walker” forced by the unjust hatred of humankind to withdraw into himself to find personal contentment. At the end of his life, he renewed his lifelong interest in botany as an activity that he could pursue in solitude. Thus Rousseau struggled in his life with the same problem that dominated his writing: the conflict between individual autonomy and social dependence. At the beginning of his Social Contract, Rousseau declares: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (I, 1).1 Rousseau agrees with Hobbes and Locke that all are naturally free and equal, that no one is entitled by nature to rule over anyone else, and therefore the only legitimate society is one that is free from the domination of some over others. On the other hand, Rousseau argues that the sort of modern regime endorsed by Hobbes and Locke promotes political and economic inequality, which deprives individuals of their freedom. The rulers dominate the ruled, and the rich dominate the poor. Hobbes and Locke think that individual liberty requires a government that represents the people while leaving them free to pursue their private lives. But Rousseau insists that people are free only when they participate directly in the making of laws, which requires that they not be distracted from their public duties by economic acquisitiveness. Thus Rousseau revives in some manner the ancient Greek and Roman concern for civic virtue as essential to political freedom. In the First Discourse, Rousseau complains: “Ancient politicians incessantly talked about morals and virtue, those of our time talk only of business and money.”2 Rousseau’s defense of political virtue against the commercial spirit of modern politics challenges one of the most fundamental assumptions of modern life—the belief in progress through science and educational enlightenment.

1. Does popular enlightenment subvert political freedom? Rousseau began his First Discourse with a tribute to the intellectual progress of human beings: It is a grand and beautiful sight to see man emerge from obscurity somehow by his own efforts; dissipate, by the light of reason, the darkness in which nature had enveloped him; rise above himself, soar intellectually into celestial regions; traverse with giant steps, like the sun, the vastness of the universe; and—what is even grander and more difficult—come back to himself to study man and know his nature, his duties, and his end. All of these marvels have been revived in recent generations. (35)

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Insofar as this reminds us of Plato’s image of the cave, we could say that the modern individual has finally escaped the darkness of prejudice through the advancement of knowledge. Many of the leading thinkers of Rousseau’s time thought that human beings could become truly free only through intellectual enlightenment. But Rousseau disagreed: The sciences, letters, and arts . . . spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sense of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples. (First Discourse, 36)

How can Rousseau celebrate the intellectual progress of human beings, yet condemn it for sanctioning their slavery? Why should we regard the modern growth in knowledge as a threat to political liberty? A free society, Rousseau maintains, depends on the patriotic virtue of citizens who devote themselves completely to their community. But scientists and philosophers weaken the spirit of patriotism by questioning the unexamined moral opinions and habits fundamentally accepted by a society. Science and philosophy also lure citizens away from public activity and into the essentially private pursuits of the intellectual life. Moreover, science and philosophy flourish only in a prosperous society that permits luxury and idleness, which soften the character of the citizens and destroy the warlike spirit necessary for national defense. Finally, the cultivation of intellectual talents promotes vanity, competitiveness, and inequality, thus undermining the equality of respect that all must have for one another if they are to live together as a community of self-governing citizens. To accept these arguments against science and philosophy as politically dangerous, we would have to agree with Rousseau’s claim that the model for a truly free society is ancient Sparta, a city ruled by warrior-citizens with no tolerance for philosophers. But while glorifying Sparta, Rousseau also praises Socrates in the First Discourse. Isn’t this a clear contradiction? Why doesn’t Rousseau condemn Socrates, as his Athenian accusers did, for corrupting Athens? How can Rousseau admire the philosopher who taught that knowledge is virtue, while he also asserts that the virtue of the citizen requires a healthy ignorance? One way to rationalize this inconsistency would be to say that Rousseau regards the pursuit of philosophy or science as bad for most people but good for a talented few.3 This would conform to Socrates’s teaching in the Republic that, because only a rare few can break the chains of unexamined opinions and ascend out of the cave to achieve genuine knowledge, it is best for most human beings to remain unenlightened. Rousseau suggests this when he observes: If a few men must be allowed to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and arts, it must be only those who feel the strength to walk alone in their footsteps and go beyond them. It is for these few to raise monuments to the glory of human intellect. (First Discourse, 63)

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We have seen this same emphasis on the rarity and solitariness of the scientific life in Descartes’s Discourse on Method, and Rousseau refers to Descartes as one of the few geniuses of modern science. Contrary to both Socrates and Descartes, however, Rousseau insists that all are “born” to “original liberty” (First Discourse, 36). People have not always been in chains. In their primitive state, Rousseau asserts, they enjoyed a natural freedom (First Discourse, 53–54). We have already seen in Hobbes and Locke the idea of the state of nature, in which all were originally free and equal. But Rousseau goes beyond his predecessors in pursuing the radical implications of that idea. To see evidence of this we must turn to the Second Discourse (The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality).

2. Were human beings naturally good as solitary animals in the state of nature? Aristotle declared that humans are by nature political animals because they are by nature rational animals. Thomas Aquinas inferred that, as rational and political animals, they have knowledge of a natural moral law. But Hobbes argued that in their natural state humans would be asocial, and therefore they would not be governed by natural law in the traditional sense: they would be moved only by the desire for self-preservation, which would create a war of all against all. Rousseau reasoned that “Hobbes saw very clearly the defect of all modern definitions of natural right, but the consequences he draws from his own definition show that he takes it in a sense which is no less false” (Second Discourse, 129). Hobbes failed to understand that by his own logic the state of nature would have to be “the best suited to peace and the most appropriate for the human race.” Rousseau thought that Hobbes was wrong to include “in the savage man’s care of self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary.” If our natural forebears were asocial, then they were also arational, because human reason develops only through social activity (particularly language). As dumb beasts moved solely by the sentiments of the moment, they lived in peace because they lacked the imagination necessary to experience the violent passions felt by socialized animals. Rousseau’s argument was therefore more radical than Hobbes’s. Rousseau maintained that humans were naturally good in their original state, but then they degenerated into rational and social beings. “If nature destined us to be healthy, I almost dare affirm that the state of reflection is a state contrary to nature and that the man who meditates is a depraved animal” (110). Isn’t Rousseau wrong? He claims that human beings were originally solitary. But modern anthropological and biological research indicates that even our earliest ancestors lived in social bands of extended families. He says that human beings in the state of nature were happy and good, free

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and equal. But isn’t there much evidence that primitive human beings lived harsh lives of hunger and violence? One way to defend Rousseau is to say that he regards the state of nature not as a historical fact, but as a hypothetical construction. He writes: Let us therefore begin by setting all the facts aside, for they do not affect the question. The researches which can be undertaken concerning this subject must not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings better suited to clarify the nature of things than to show their true origin, like those our physicists make every day concerning the formation of the world. (103)

Thus Rousseau suggests that to have a standard for judging the effects of social life, he will imagine what human beings would be like outside of society, but without claiming that such a condition has ever actually existed. This interpretation would contradict, however, the evidence in the Second Discourse that Rousseau considers the state of nature to be historically verifiable. He hopes that someday natural scientists will travel throughout the world to gather anthropological information on both humans and animals, and then they can write “the natural, moral, and political history” of humanity (213). This suggests that Rousseau’s political philosophy depends on the empirical science of evolutionary political anthropology. Subsequently, his proposed scientific research project was carried out by anthropologists, archaeologists, and evolutionary biologists. So we are now in a position to judge whether or not Rousseau’s account of human political evolution is empirically confirmed. Surveying the work over the past 150 years of hundreds of archaeologists and anthropologists studying human social evolution, Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (anthropological archaeologists at the University of Michigan) have concluded that Rousseau’s history is mostly correct.4 Rousseau speaks of “setting all the facts aside,” and yet he does this in the context of observing that the biblical account of human origins denies the idea of a state of nature. Does he, therefore, describe his reasoning as “hypothetical” only to hide his challenge to the biblical teaching that human beings originated as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden? His explanation of human evolution closely follows the reasoning of the ancient Roman philosopher Lucretius in Book Five of his De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), which reflects Lucretius’s desire to present a history of the universe that would not depend on religious beliefs.5 Rousseau explains that his history is “conjectural,” in that “two facts given as real are to be connected by a series of intermediate facts which are unknown” (141). That is to say, he is sure about the reality of the origin and the end—the natural state and the civil state—but he must rely on probable reasoning about the intermediate stages. If this is what Rousseau means, then we must wonder whether there is any historical evidence for his view of the state of nature.

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Rousseau sees our ancestors “wandering in the forests, without industry, without speech, without domicile, without war, and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow men, likewise with no desire to harm them, perhaps never even recognizing anyone individually” (137). He sees “an animal . . . satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed at the foot of the same tree that furnished his meal; and therewith his needs are satisfied” (105). When males and females encounter one another, they might unite just long enough to satisfy their sexual desire, but afterwards they separate with no further thought of one another (120–21). Sexual appetite in this state is purely physical, and therefore it does not create families. Nor does it lead to violent conflict. Aggressive sexual competition arises among animals when there is a scarcity of females relative to males or because of female estrus periods, but among human beings neither is true (134–36). Because human beings are solitary in this natural state, there is a rough equality among them. Of course, there are natural differences (in age, health, strength, and intelligence), but because each person lives independently of all the others, no one is subordinated to anyone else (101, 138–39, 180). Rousseau does imply, however, that the dependence of infants on their mothers will create at least a temporary bond between mothers and offspring, so that primitive females will be more social than primitive males (121, 130). On those few occasions when a man had some common interest with other men—such as cooperating in hunting a large animal for food—he could unite with them in a herd. But this would only be a temporary association (144–45). In very rare cases, men found themselves in competition; and “everyone sought to obtain his own advantage, either by naked force if he believed he could, or by cleverness and cunning if he felt himself to be the weaker” (145). The limited social interaction among our primitive ancestors made language unnecessary and impossible. Like other animals, they communicated only through “inarticulate cries, many gestures, and some imitative noises” (145). Contrary to Aristotle, Rousseau infers that because they were neither rational nor social, those in the natural state were not endowed with speech. But perhaps Rousseau’s most controversial claim is that, in the primitive state, humans are naturally good. He agrees with Hobbes that selfpreservation is the fundamental desire; yet he argues that while humans are completely selfish and solitary, they are naturally good. Their self-centered indifference to others in the state of nature makes them good, because they are free from the only source of evil—dependence on others. He distinguishes between the natural love of oneself (l’amour de soi-même) and civilized vanity (l’amour propre) (221–22). The first is the self-love of the primitive human beings who feel the sentiment of their present existence without comparison to others. The second is the pride of the socialized human beings who derive self-esteem from thinking themselves

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superior to others. The primitive human being will fight in defense against physical threats but feels no need to maliciously attack others to dominate them. Those in the natural state are too ignorant and too solitary to care what others think of them. Moreover, primitive human beings may be moved by the sentiment of pity to refrain from harming others except when their lives are threatened (133). But doesn’t the apparent aggressiveness of animal and human behavior cast doubt on Rousseau’s depiction of primitive human ancestors as naturally good? Animals fight to protect their reproductive fitness.6 They fight in competition for natural resources, in competition for mates, to repulse strangers, to protect their own lives, or to protect their young. Rousseau concedes that primitives will fight to preserve themselves. But except in cases where food becomes scarce, he sees no reason why these asocial beings would want to attack one another. The most intense conflicts arise from the desires to compete with, to dominate, or to be recognized by other beings, but such desires manifest sociality. The fundamental issue, therefore, is whether Rousseau is right about humans being asocial in their natural state. Modern evolutionary biologists and anthropologists believe that human beings have always been social beings.7 Throughout the evolutionary history of human beings, they have lived in groups. During most of that history, human beings lived in bands sustained by the hunting and gathering of food, in which survival required social cooperation in extended families. Although Flannery and Marcus generally support Rousseau’s history of social evolution, they silently throw out Rousseau’s first stage of human evolution—living as solitary animals—because they begin with what Rousseau saw as the second stage that arose with the establishment of families.8 From this, it would seem that modern science has refuted Rousseau’s depiction of the state of nature. To support his account of savages in the state of nature, Rousseau cites reports about the Caribs of Venezuela (108, 117, 179), other American Indians in the New World (113), and the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope (113). The frontispiece for the book shows a Hottentot who has renounced his conversion by Christian missionaries, who strips off his European clothing, and who announces that he is returning to his Hottentot relatives: “I renounce also for my entire life the Christian religion; my resolution is to live and die in the religion, ways, and customs of my ancestors” (225–26). Oddly, this does not support Rousseau’s view of the state of nature, because this Hottentot is obviously a social being with kinship ties and social customs. So Rousseau’s conception of the state of nature as utterly solitary with no social structure seems to be clearly wrong. Or is it possible that Rousseau correctly saw that the earliest human ancestors were orangutans, who live as largely solitary animals? Rousseau suggests in note j of his book that the savage being in the state of nature was actually an anthropomorphic animal or an orangutan

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(204–9). He quotes one report about the orangutan being “a sort of middle point between the human species and the baboons” (204). In the Malay language, orang hutan means “man of the forest,” and in Rousseau’s time, “orangutan” was a general term for any of the great apes, because no one had clearly distinguished the different species of apes. Only much later did scientific observers realize that the orangutans found only in Borneo and Sumatra were a distinct species separated from gorillas and chimpanzees found only in Africa. And it is only in recent decades that the bonobo in Africa has been recognized as a distinct species closely related to chimpanzees.9 Is Rousseau suggesting that the original ancestor of human beings was an orangutan? He even proposes to test his hypothesis by attempting to crossbreed orangutans and human beings (208–9). In fact, Rousseau, drawing on the best biological research of his time, was the first thinker in the eighteenth century to suggest that humans evolved from apes; and thus he anticipated modern evolutionary theory.10 Biologists now agree that humans are primates closely related to the great apes. Although the chimpanzee and the bonobo seem to be the most closely related to us, some primatologists think the orangutan deserves special attention. And, surprisingly, Rousseau’s sketch of the orangutan as a largely solitary animal seems to have been confirmed by some primatologists who have studied the orangutan in its natural habitat. John MacKinnon, one of the leading observers of the orangutan, describes this ape as “an anti-social and solitary animal” and “a shaggy, surly bundle of complete inactivity.”11 He lives by wandering through tropical rain forests in Borneo and Sumatra in search of the food provided by widely scattered fruit trees. The male usually travels alone. He mates on rare occasions; and although he may form a consortship with a female, this lasts no longer than a few days. The only stable social bond is between mothers and their infants, and typically adult females are somewhat social in contrast to the utterly solitary males. Occasionally males fight for dominance, but generally they avoid violence. Are these our primal forebears? If so, we would have to agree with Rousseau that we have descended from peaceful, asocial beings. Biruté Galdikas, after many years of studying orangutans in the wild, concludes: “Individual orangutans rely on no one other than themselves. They have been released from dependence on others of their kind. Paradoxically, they seem to have an inner strength and serenity no member of any gregarious species, including our own, could ever match.”12 Are these our primal ancestors? If so, we would have to agree with Rousseau that we have descended from peaceful, asocial beings, who were free and equal in being “released from dependence on others.” But notice that while these orangutans are solitary, in the sense that most individuals spend most of their time alone, they are also loosely social, in the sense that they show a social organization. Mothers caring for their offspring constitute a social unit. As we have seen, even Rousseau admits

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that maternal care for children would be required in the state of nature. Furthermore, the most recent studies of orangutans in the wild have shown a much more elaborate social structure than was previously reported.13 The strongest social bond among orangutans is between a mother and her offspring. She nurses her child for at least seven years, and even after weaning, the child will stay close to her for a year or two. There are other social structures as well. Orangutans live in loose communities organized around a dominant adult male who is intolerant of other adult males. Adult females prefer to mate with the same dominant male, who might protect their offspring from infanticide by subordinate males. The younger sub-adult males and females often travel together and play with one another. Mature females tend to settle close to their mothers and sisters. This social life allows for social learning, which creates cultural traditions that distinguish one orangutan community from another. Various skills (such as tool use and nest building) and communication signals seem to be passed from generation to generation through social learning. Consequently, we can say that all of the great apes are social animals, including the orangutans. If so, then it’s hard to defend Rousseau’s view of the state of nature as an utterly asocial state by interpreting it as a depiction of life among our ape ancestors. It would also be hard to defend Rousseau if he were recommending our returning to our natural state if “natural man” was actually a subhuman animal. But Rousseau insisted that he did not intend to make such a recommendation (201–2). The passage from the state of nature to civil society was beneficial, Rousseau explained in The Social Contract (I, 8), because the primitive human changed “from a stupid, limited animal into an intelligent being and a man.” What, then, is Rousseau’s purpose in describing the state of nature? At least one point is clear: by tracing our evolution back to prehuman ancestors, Rousseau shows the malleability of human nature. Throughout history, “the soul and human passions, altering imperceptibly, change their nature so to speak” (Second Discourse, 178). What distinguishes human nature from the nature of other animals is not so much its rationality as its perfectibility, the plasticity or openness to change in response to the environment (114–15). Modern biologists and anthropologists would confirm this insofar as they stress adaptive flexibility as the means by which humans as cultural and symbolic animals have come to dominate the Earth.14 To understand human nature, therefore, we must understand its social history. Rousseau sketches that history in his Second Discourse as a progression through four stages: “nascent man” (142), “nascent society” (150), “nascent inequality” (156), and “nascent government” (162). The stage of nascent humanity is the primitive state of nature that we have just considered. Nascent society arises from the “first revolution” in human history— the establishment of family life, which produces “a sort of property” (146). This is followed by the nascent inequality produced by “the great revolu-

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tion”—the invention of metallurgy and agriculture (152). The inequality of property creates such conflicts between rich and poor that “nascent government” arises to establish order. Except for the stage of “nascent man” as a solitary animal, this scheme conforms roughly with the account of human evolution accepted by most modern biologists and anthropologists. These people disagree with one another, however, about Rousseau’s claim that savage human beings in “nascent society” were freer and happier than human beings are now even with all the benefits of civilization.

3. Has the evolution of civilization deprived us of our natural freedom and happiness? The savage society that appears with the establishment of families is depicted by Rousseau in the Second Discourse as charming in its idyllic simplicity and contentment. The first developments of the heart were the effect of a new situation, which united husbands and wives, fathers and children in a common habitation. The habit of living together gave rise to the sweetest sentiments known to men: conjugal love and paternal love. Each family became a little society all the better united because reciprocal affection and freedom were its only bonds; and it was then that the first difference was established in the way of life of the two sexes, which until this time had had but one. Women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to tend the hut and the children, while the men went to seek their common subsistence. (146–47)

Rousseau judges that this “must have been the happiest and most durable epoch” and generally “the best for man” (151). The subsequent progress of civilization has actually been a decline. As civilized beings, we care only for two things: “the commodities of life for oneself, and consideration among others.” Consequently, we can hardly imagine the pleasure a savage finds “in spending his life alone in the middle of the woods, or fishing, or blowing into a bad flute, without ever knowing how to get a single tone from it and without troubling himself to learn” (223–24). Many of Rousseau’s critics have dismissed this depiction of savage life as a romantic fantasy. But some recent anthropological studies of huntinggathering societies seem to support Rousseau. Marvin Harris, an anthropologist at Columbia University, observed: Stone age populations lived healthier lives than did most of the people who came immediately after them: during Roman times there was more sickness in the world than ever before, and even in early nineteenth-century England the life expectancy for children was probably not very different from what it was 20,000 years earlier. Moreover, stone age hunters worked fewer hours for their sustenance than do

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typical Chinese and Egyptian peasants—or, despite their unions, modern-day factory workers. As for amenities such as good food, entertainment, and aesthetic pleasures, early hunters and plant collectors enjoyed luxuries that only the richest of today’s Americans can afford. For two days’ worth of trees, lakes, and clean air, the modern-day executive works five. Nowadays, whole families toil and save for thirty years to gain the privilege of seeing a few square feet of grass outside their windows. And they are the privileged few.15

Melvin Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University, has argued that Hobbes was wrong in declaring that life in the savage state was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”: Far from solitary, it is above all things mutual. Far from poor, it is amply leisured. . . . Far from nasty, it is based on human decency, respect for others, sharing, giving. Far from brutish, it is courageous, egalitarian, good-humored, philosophical—in a word, civilized—with an esthetic so fine its very music touches the gods. Although many die in early childhood, those who do not may live to a ripe old age, and this is an old age not consigned to a ghetto or to a “home” that is not a home; rather, it is one embedded in that same intimate social world, surrounded by grandchildren full of delight, by grown, powerful children full of courtesy.16

The anthropological evidence and reasoning for this view of Stone Age society was summarized in a famous essay, “The Original Affluent Society” by Marshall Sahlins of the University of Chicago.17 Sahlins explained that in a hunting-gathering society, the means for satisfying wants are limited, but the wants themselves are also limited. Unlike modern bourgeois individuals, whose wants are always greater than the means for satisfying them, savages can fulfill their limited material needs easily and thus have plenty of leisure. “We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free.”18 Moreover, they are free from domination because their rough equality of wealth prevents any subordination of the poor to the rich. It’s hard to believe that the life of human beings in the Stone Age was completely carefree. Even Sahlins conceded that hunters and gatherers survive only by severely limiting their population, particularly those people who hinder the mobility essential to a nomadic life: children and old people are often killed. Moreover, some experts have provided evidence of violent feuds, undernourishment, and a short average life expectancy.19 Although some critics of Rousseau have rejected his depiction of savage society as a romantic illusion, we should note that Rousseau does, in fact, see the darker side of life among hunters and gatherers. Because they want to be recognized by others, Rousseau observes in the Second Discourse, savages are vain and therefore easily aroused to anger by whatever they see as an insult. Hence, “vengeances became terrible, and men bloodthirsty and cruel,” which is “precisely the point reached by most of the savage people known to us” (149–50).

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We have lost our natural freedom through the evolution of civilization, because although the savage was self-sufficient and drew self-esteem from within, we depend on the opinions of others, “always asking others what we are and never daring to question ourselves on this subject” (Second Discourse 180). Yet Rousseau indicates that even savages began to feel this dependence on others. “By dint of seeing one another, they can no longer do without seeing one another again” (148). “Each one began to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem had a value” (149).20 Nevertheless, Rousseau thinks that the personal dependence of those in the savage state was not great enough to seriously threaten their natural freedom. Hunters and gatherers lost their freedom when they turned to farming for subsistence. At this point, they entered the state of “nascent inequality,” because an agricultural way of life created an unprecedented inequality of property by which there was, for the first time, a clear distinction between the rich and the poor. Rousseau calls this the “great revolution,” and modern anthropologists and archaeologists agree that the adoption of agriculture about ten thousand years ago laid the foundation for modern civilization, which brought about great inequality in political power, social status, and economic wealth.21 Some anthropologists and archaeologists think inequality arose much earlier, before the establishment of agriculture, perhaps as early as 14,500 years ago, when some ancient hunter-gatherers accumulated wealth and political power by taking control of concentrated patches of wild foods, such as wild cereal grains and good fishing spots along rivers. If this is so, then the private ownership of resources extends farther back in human history than Rousseau realized. Those individuals who claimed such ownership and used this to support their power over others might have been the most aggressive and dominant individuals, who looked for every opportunity to aggrandize power for their own interest.22 If so, does this suggest that some individuals have always had a natural desire for dominance, even among our most ancient hunting-gathering ancestors? The economic inequality fostered by agricultural civilization, Rousseau claims, created a state of war between the rich and the poor. The rich, wanting to secure their property, convinced the poor to establish civil society with the argument that the rule of law would protect everyone equally.23 This “destroyed natural freedom for all time” (Second Discourse 160). Although denying that natural liberty can ever be completely recovered, Rousseau suggests a way to legitimize political authority through the rule of law, so that society would be free from the domination of some over others. In his dedication of the Second Discourse to the people of Geneva, Rousseau presents their city as the model of what he has in mind. It is small enough that the citizens can know and love one another and thus become united in their social solidarity. The people themselves are the only sovereign authority. And everyone is equally subject to the laws: “you have no other masters except the wise laws you have made” (84). By uniting their individual wills

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into a single, “general will” and then obeying the laws made by that will, the people can combine personal freedom with political authority because each submits not to the rule of others but to the rule of law. Rousseau explains his reasoning in Émile: There are two sorts of dependence: dependence on things, which is from nature; dependence on men, which is from society. Dependence on things, since it has no morality, is in no way detrimental to freedom and engenders no vices. Dependence on men, since it is without order, engenders all the vices, and by it, master and slave are mutually corrupted. If there is any means of remedying this ill in society, it is to substitute law for man and to arm the general wills with a real strength superior to the action of every particular will.24

But far from securing freedom, “to arm the general wills with a real strength superior to the action of every particular will” might suppress individual liberty. Some commentators have even seen in Rousseau’s general will the basis for a totalitarian democracy such as that established by Robespierre during the French Revolution.25 For it seems that Rousseau would demand that each individual set aside personal interests and yield completely to the collective will of society. Does this mean a sacrifice of individual autonomy to social authority? Or should we say that the individual becomes truly free only through participating in social life? To think through this problem, we must turn to Rousseau’s Social Contract.

4. Does participatory democracy promote or threaten individual liberty? This question has become an issue at various points in American political history. In the 1960s and early 1970s, for example, those people calling themselves the New Left argued that the fulfillment of personal freedom could come only through participatory democracy. “The Port Huron Statement” of the Students for a Democratic Society declared: We seek the establishment of a democracy of individual participation, governed by two central aims: that the individual share in those social decisions determining the quality and direction of his life; that society be organized to encourage independence in men and provide the media for their common participation. In a participatory democracy . . . politics has the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community, thus being a necessary, though not sufficient, means of finding meaning in personal life.26

But what should be done about those individuals who find “meaning in personal life” by devoting themselves totally to private pursuits and withdrawing from political life? In fact, won’t most people prefer to stay home and not participate in politics? And if most people don’t participate, what’s to prevent the few people who are politically active from becoming a ruling elite?

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Some of the New Left theorists saw Rousseau as their intellectual forebear,27 yet they seldom stated as clearly as he did that participatory democracy requires the transformation of selfish individuals into public-spirited citizens. Those of the New Left did not always recognize how difficult it is to reconcile personal freedom and participatory citizenship. Solving this problem is Rousseau’s aim in The Social Contract: “Find a form of association that defends and protects the person and goods of each associate with all the common force, and by means of which each one, uniting with all, nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before. This is the fundamental problem which is solved by the social contract” (I, 6). Each person must yield himself completely to the community so that “as each gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one.” Because everyone submits to the impersonal authority of the collective body, no one is personally dependent on anyone else. As an “individual,” each person has a “private will” that serves a “private interest.” But as a “citizen,” each participates in the “general will” that serves the “common interest” of all the citizens (I, 7). The crucial requirement is the founding of society on “common interests”: “If the opposition of private interests made the establishment of societies necessary, it is the agreement of these same interests that made it possible” (II, 1). To the extent that citizens have shared interests, there is no conflict between individual autonomy and social authority. As long as the fundamental laws of society are made by the collective body of the citizens to serve the general interests of all, it is in some sense true that, in obeying the laws, each person “obeys only himself and remains as free as before.” Isn’t there a paradox here? Social authority requires common interests. But if human beings could always agree on their common interests, Rousseau argues, there would be no need for social authority in the first place: “If there were no different interests, the common interest, which would never encounter any obstacle, would scarcely be felt. Everything would run smoothly by itself, and politics would cease to be an art” (II, 3). Politics is the art of overcoming conflicting interests in the pursuit of the public interest. But we must wonder how this can be done without suppressing individual liberty. Rousseau explains: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the entire body; which means only that he will be forced to be free. For this . . . guarantees him against all personal dependence” (I, 7). In Rousseau’s society, the uncooperative citizen will be “forced to be free”! What more evidence do we need of Rousseau’s totalitarianism? Is he twisting the meaning of freedom so that the coercion of the individual by society can be carried out in the name of freedom? Totalitarian ideologies have used reasoning similar to Rousseau’s to justify the repression of individual liberty. The argument has been that people could achieve democratic government only by totally sacrificing their individuality to the collective will of the ruling party. An example of this would be Mao Zedong’s reflections on the character of a good Chinese Communist:

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A Communist should have largeness of mind, and he should be staunch and active, looking upon the interests of the revolution as his very life and subordinating his personal interests to those of the revolution; always and everywhere he should adhere to principle and wage a tireless struggle against all incorrect ideas and actions, so as to consolidate the collective life of the Party and strengthen the ties between the Party and the masses; he should be more concerned about the Party and the masses than about any individual, and more concerned about others than about himself. Only thus can he be considered a Communist.28

One way of explaining how Rousseau’s teaching can encourage this sort of totalitarian thinking is to distinguish his “positive” concept of freedom from a “negative” concept of freedom.29 Hobbes defines freedom in a negative manner when he says that it signifies “the absence of opposition.”30 The freedom of an individual from the interference of other people is a negative freedom. But Rousseau defines freedom in a positive manner when he says “the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom” (Social Contract I, 8). Such freedom requires not just absence of external restraints but self-mastery. To accomplish true self-mastery, each person must exercise self-control, so that reason rules over the appetites, and each must participate directly in making the laws of society. To achieve this kind of freedom, society might have to enforce rigorous standards of morality so that individuals would have the self-discipline necessary for “true” freedom: in this sense, therefore, they would be “forced to be free.” Does this positive social freedom threaten the negative individual freedom of all people to live as they please? Or is Rousseau right in assuming that individual liberty can be fully expressed only through the communal liberty of a self-governing community? Some people argue that the experience of small, egalitarian democracies—like the American New England township governments and the Swiss cantons—confirms Rousseau’s teaching.31 Rousseau wants to reconcile individual rights with social duties. He must explain, therefore, how to secure the social cooperation of selfish individuals. Contemporary social scientists have struggled with this same problem, and some of their reasoning resembles Rousseau’s. In particular, social scientists interested in “game theory” have compared the logic of social cooperation to the strategy of a game called the “prisoner’s dilemma.”32 Two prisoners are held in separate cells. The district attorney suspects they are guilty of armed robbery, but he cannot get convictions from a court unless he has their confession. So, he bargains separately with each of the prisoners. If one confesses and his partner does not, the one who confesses can go free, but the other will receive a ten-year sentence. If both confess, they will receive reduced sentences of five years. If neither confesses, both will be imprisoned for one year on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon. As selfish individuals, each prisoner is tempted to double-cross his partner by confessing while his partner refuses to confess, because the one

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confessing in that case goes free, whereas his partner serves ten years. But if both adopt this strategy, they will both receive five-year sentences. It would be better for both of them, therefore, if neither confessed so that they would be imprisoned for only one year. But to pursue this cooperative strategy, they must trust one another, which is foolish considering the advantage gained by one double-crossing the other. Consequently, to avoid the risk of being made a sucker, both will confess. But then both will be worse off than they would have been if they had trusted one another. When each seeks his individual interest, both suffer. They would be better off if they could cooperate in seeking their collective interest, but their distrust of one another prevents that. This dilemma should remind us of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” (discussed earlier in chapter 7, section 2). When people pursue their narrow self-interest in competition with others, they lose the benefits of social cooperation. As a result society as a whole may suffer. For example, one principal benefit of society is the legal protection against thieves. But if people think they can escape detection, it’s in their selfish interest to steal from their fellow citizens while relying on the law to protect their own property from theft. Those who enact this behavior would live like the clever criminal described by Glaucon and Adeimantus in Plato’s Republic (refer to chapter 1, sections 5, 6). Of course, when many people try to live like this, everyone suffers. We all benefit from social cooperation, but as selfish individuals we are tempted to become free riders who enjoy the benefits of cooperation without bearing our share of the costs. This dilemma would explain many contemporary social problems such as corporate fraud, tax evasion, inflation, and pollution. Consider how this illuminates the logic of Rousseau’s social contract. It serves the good of all citizens to share the obligations of citizenship so that they can act in concert for common goals. Each person can better satisfy individual needs with the cooperation of others. But everyone fears exploitation by the others. No one will bear the burdens of citizenship unless it is guaranteed that everyone else will bear the same burdens. This explains why Rousseau insists that the social contract requires “the total alienation of each associate, with all his rights, to the whole community” (I, 6). If all individuals are equally subject to the duties imposed by the social contract, and if all equally enjoy the rights it confers, then each person benefits from social life without fear of being exploited by the others. Thus personal interest is linked to the public interest, and individual advantage coincides with social justice. But to achieve such social unity is difficult. Although it might be found in very small communities, it is unlikely to arise in larger ones. The society must be small enough so that people can learn to trust one another, and so that those who cheat are easily detected. Even in a small community, however, it is hard to create the social spirit that unites individuals into a cohesive community in which all are equally free. For as conflicting interests foster distrust, the social bond is broken, and each person seeks private interest rather than the common good. Rousseau believes this can be

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avoided only if a great political founder establishes a society by transforming selfish individuals into patriotic citizens.

5. Does a participatory democracy require a godlike founder? Because the people cannot always judge correctly what is in their own interest, Rousseau suggests, they need to be enlightened by a legislator (II, 6). Rousseau’s legislator is not so much a lawmaker in the ordinary sense as a heroic founder of a civilization. Rousseau has in mind men like Moses, Lycurgus, and Romulus. The great legislator must be godlike in his power to transform solitary individuals into social beings (I, 7). He must unite isolated human beings into one people with a distinct identity, so that each person feels himself to be only a part of a larger social whole. To achieve this, the legislator must deceive people into thinking that he speaks for God. We have seen this idea of the godlike founder in Aristotle’s Politics (1253a30–38) and Machiavelli’s Prince (chapter 6). We could also consider Max Weber’s concept of “charismatic” authority as confirmation of Rousseau’s thought.33 But the most obvious examples are from the ancient and the medieval world: those like Lycurgus, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar. Have any great legislators arisen in modern political life? We could think of some modern examples among the Marxist revolutionaries. For Marxists the “revolution” supplants the “legislator” as the creator of the “general will.” Some have hoped that the people themselves would make the revolution on their own. Others have looked to a revolutionary vanguard. Mao Zedong, as quoted earlier, saw himself as creating a revolutionary consciousness that would transform Chinese society.34 Also, the American founders—those who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—come to mind. In fact, James Madison, in Federalist Number 38, compared the framers of the Constitution to ancient founders like Lycurgus and Romulus.35 Traditionally, Americans revere the American founders as godlike in their wisdom. They have even built monumental temples in their honor, just as the ancient Greeks and Romans built temples to divinize their political heroes. When Americans speak of their Founding Fathers, they speak of themselves as their political children, which assumes that they created Americans as a people. Unlike Rousseau’s legislator, the American founders did not attempt to transform human nature by changing selfish human beings into publicspirited citizens. Such a transformation may be necessary if the people are going to govern themselves directly. For then people must sacrifice their private interests for the sake of a total devotion to public affairs. The American founders, as James Madison explained in Federalist Number 10,36 did not establish a pure democracy in which the people ruled directly, but a representative democracy in which the people elected others to rule them. An advantage of representation is that it does not demand

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much from the people, who are free to withdraw into their private lives. Rousseau objects that this is a new form of enslavement.

6. Is representative democracy disguised slavery? “The instant a people chooses representatives,” Rousseau asserts, “it is no longer free; it no longer exists” (III, 15). In the same chapter, he cites the example of the English people. They are free only during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as the election is over, the people become slaves. Rousseau’s reasoning is simple. If the people are the sovereign authority, then they must make the fundamental laws. Although the people can delegate to the officers of government the application and execution of the laws, they cannot delegate their lawmaking authority. “Any law that the people in person has not ratified is null; it is not a law” (III, 15). Most Americans would probably find Rousseau’s argument strange. They believe, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, that governments derive their “just powers from the consent of the governed.” But they assume that it suffices for them to consent to be ruled by elected representatives. Why can’t representative democracy be as truly democratic as participatory democracy? The fundamental issue for Rousseau is how to reconcile individual freedom and political authority. (For a statement of this issue as it bears on Locke, see chapter 8, section 5.) If we start with the premise of individual autonomy—the idea that each person is entitled to rule over his or her own life—then the only way to support political authority is to derive it from the voluntary consent of all citizens. Consequently, as Rousseau explains, the only justifiable structure of authority is that of a self-governing, participatory democracy. If the only legitimate social order is a voluntary association, then only a participatory society can be legitimate. We should not conclude, however, that Rousseau argues for democracy as the only legitimate form of government. “Every legitimate government is republican,” he asserts (II, 6). But even an aristocracy or a monarchy can be a republic in Rousseau’s sense (see III, 1–7). In a republic, the people exercise sovereignty through popular assemblies that make the fundamental laws. If the entire people or a majority of them also possess the powers of government—the execution of the laws and administrative decisions—then they have a democracy. But if, while exercising sovereign legislative authority, the people place the powers of government in the hands of a monarch or an aristocratic body, then the people will have a republic but not a democratic form of government. It is legitimate for the people to select representatives to handle the executive and administrative affairs of government. But in the making of the fundamental laws of society, the people must express their will directly through an assembly of all the citizens. In the exercise of sovereign lawmaking, no one can represent anyone else. All must participate equally. Rousseau observes that representation subverts the expression of popular consent. The

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people are encouraged to become apathetic about politics; as a result, those few who take an active interest in public life become a political elite. Doesn’t American experience confirm this? Most American citizens have little knowledge of or interest in political issues, and they are usually completely passive except for casting votes every few years. This leaves the ruling elite free to govern as they wish. This has become so widely accepted that many American political scientists have even warned that it is dangerous to allow the people to rule themselves directly because they are unqualified to rule.37 It seems, therefore, that American democracy has succeeded only because it is not a true democracy! But from Thomas Jefferson to “The Port Huron Statement,” there has been a radical tradition in the United States favoring popular participation like that proposed by Rousseau. At certain critical periods throughout American history, radical thinkers have criticized American political institutions for betraying the democratic ideals of the Declaration of Independence; and they have argued for wider public participation in government.38 Henry David Thoreau, for example, echoes Rousseau when he writes: “When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special townmeeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”39 There are practical problems, however, with such a town-meeting democracy. The most obvious is the severe limitation on size. Rousseau emphasizes that true democracies must be very small, “where the people is easily assembled and where each citizen can easily know all the others” (III, 4). Moreover, he adds, the life of the people must be very simple, egalitarian, and free of luxury. A vigorous economy distracts the people from public affairs and creates conflicting interests owing to inequality of wealth. Rousseau attempts to revive the Athenian concept of citizenship as direct rule, but he faces the same problems that we noted earlier in the chapter on Aristotle (chapter 2, sections 6, 7). Furthermore, a truly participatory democracy requires that every individual be so totally involved in public activity as to have hardly any private life. The habits and opinions of human beings in their private lives become subject to public regulation, because even the most intimate parts of life must be designed to support civic virtue. Even religious beliefs and practices are supervised by law in accordance with what Rousseau calls the civil religion. Is this another illustration of how Rousseau’s democracy becomes totalitarian in its suppression of individual liberty?

7. Does democracy need a civil religion? When Jesus separated religion and politics as two realms, Rousseau complains, he “brought about the end of the unity of the State, and caused the internal divisions that have never ceased to stir up Christian peoples”

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(IV, 8). Rousseau agrees with Hobbes, therefore, that Christianity subverted politics when it gave the clergy the power to appeal to standards beyond the laws of the state. People can be neither good human beings nor good citizens when they are torn between their religious duties and their political duties. “Everything that destroys social unity is worthless. All institutions that put man in contradiction with himself are worthless” (IV, 8). Rousseau proposes that the sovereign should establish “a purely civil profession of faith” consisting of those dogmas essential to social duties. Anyone who refuses to profess belief in these dogmas can be banished, and individuals who behave as if they do not believe them should be punished with death. Rousseau moderates the shocking severity of his proposal in two ways. First, he would regulate only public belief and behavior. In private, people may hold whatever beliefs they wish, as long as they are discreet in their public appearances. Second, the public dogmas of the civil religion are so minimal that most people would have no trouble accepting them: The existence of a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and providential divinity; the afterlife; the happiness of the just; the punishment of the wicked; the sanctity of the social contract and the laws. These are the positive dogmas. As for the negative ones, I limit them to a single one—intolerance. It belongs to the cults we have excluded. (IV, 8)

Rousseau’s civil religion would tolerate any religion that tolerates other religions, as long as it does not contradict the dogmas of the civil religion itself. Does any form of civil religion violate the separation of Church and State, which liberal democrats regard as essential to individual liberty? Should religious belief be a private matter in which each person is free from governmental interference? Jefferson argued for religious liberty with the claim that “our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.” Jefferson declared: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”40 Still, we should question Jefferson’s assumption that religious beliefs and practices are never injurious to others. Doesn’t his argument imply that intolerant religions should not be tolerated? Those religious traditions that promote coercive persecution of heretics and unbelievers would surely be injurious to others. Furthermore, doesn’t the Declaration of Independence, of which Jefferson was the primary author, manifest exactly the religious dogmas that Rousseau considers essential to a democratic civil religion? There are four references to God in that document, two at the beginning and two at the end. First, there is the appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God”; then it is said that God created men equal and endowed them with rights. The Declaration concludes by “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions” and “with a firm reliance on

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the protection of Divine Providence.” This looks like Rousseau’s God—“a powerful, intelligent, beneficent, foresighted, and providential divinity” who judges human conduct, and who sanctions the principles of the American regime. From the Puritan colonists to George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to the most recent presidential inaugural address, we could survey American political rhetoric to find overwhelming evidence of an American civil religion.41 Americans do not require that political leaders belong to any particular church, but they do insist on those general religious beliefs essential to morality and citizenship. Publicly declared atheists are not very successful in American national politics. Moreover, Americans like to assume that they are God’s “chosen people.” Lincoln called this “the political religion of the nation,” which secured “reverence for the laws.”42 Of course, Lincoln himself became one of the paramount symbols of this religion. William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and biographer, wrote: For fifty years God rolled Abraham Lincoln through the fiery furnace. He did it to try Abraham and to purify him for his purposes. This made Mr. Lincoln humble, tender, forbearing, sympathetic to suffering, kind, sensitive, tolerant; making him the noblest and loveliest character since Jesus Christ. . . . I believe that Lincoln was God’s chosen one.43

Considering his godlike power in shaping the sentiments and habits of his people, Lincoln might also be one of the best American examples of Rousseau’s “legislator.” But even if this shows that some features of American political history correspond to Rousseau’s teaching, we have noted that America does not conform fully to what he would regard as a true democracy. Indeed, we must wonder whether any political regime could ever fulfill his requirements for democratic government.

8. Is a true democracy impossible? “In the strict sense of the term,” Rousseau concludes, “a true democracy has never existed and never will exist” (III, 4). The combination of circumstances necessary for a genuine democracy is unachievable. The principal difficulty is that a democracy presupposes a level of civic virtue unattainable by ordinary human beings. Inevitably, selfish passions create conflicting interests that destroy the “general will.” And, then, those who rule will distort the laws for their own personal gain contrary to the public good. Thus, freedom and equality will disappear as some people come to dominate others, the rich ruling the poor and the powerful ruling the weak. Democracy demands that everyone should be equal before the law, but Rousseau doubts that the equal rule of law is achievable. In his book on the government of Poland, he explains:

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Chapter Nine Although it is easy, if you wish, to make better laws, it is impossible to make them such that the passions of men will not abuse them as they abused the laws which preceded them. . . . The subjecting of man to law is a problem in politics which I liken to that of the squaring of the circle in geometry. . . . [W]henever you think you are establishing the rule of law, it is men who will do the ruling.44

If Rousseau is right, then democratic institutions will always fall short of democratic ideals. The history of the United States seems to confirm this. The Declaration of Independence sets forth ideals of equality of rights and popular government. But it would be hard to argue that Americans have ever fully succeeded in putting those ideals fully into practice. If we want to bridge the gulf between ideals and reality, we must look beyond Rousseau. Hegel maintained that he could unite the real with the ideal through the idea of history. For if history is progressive—with each historical epoch advancing beyond the previous epochs—then perhaps only with the complete unfolding of history will we see the full realization of democratic freedom.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

8 9 10

11

All quotations of The Social Contract are taken from On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978). The citations indicate the book and the chapter: “I, 1,” for example, refers to book I, chapter 1, of The Social Contract. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 51. All quotations of the First Discourse and the Second Discourse are taken from this translation, and all page references in the text are to this edition. See Leo Strauss, “On the Intention of Rousseau,” in Hobbes and Rousseau, ed. Maurice Cranston and Richard S. Peters (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1972), 254–90. Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). See Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, translated, with introduction and notes, by Martin Ferguson Smith (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001). See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). For the contrary view—that human beings are naturally peaceful—see Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). See, for example, Robert Boyd and Joan B. Silk, How Humans Evolved, 5th ed. (New York: Norton, 2009); and Michael Alvard, “Human Sociality,” in J. C. Mitani, J. Call, P. M. Kappeler, R. A. Palombit, and J. B. Silk, eds., The Evolution of Primate Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 585-603. See Flannery and Marcus, Creation of Inequality, 19–39. See David P. Watts, “The Apes: Taxonomy, Biogeography, Life Histories, and Behavioral Ecology,” in Mitani et al., Evolution of Primate Societies, 113–42. This has been argued by Robert Wokler in a series of papers: “Tyson and Buffon on the Orangutan,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 155 (1976): 2301–19; “Perfectible Apes in Decadent Cultures: Rousseau’s Anthropology Revisited,” Daedalus 107 (Summer 1978): 111–17; and Christopher Frayling and Robert Wokler, “From the Orangutan to the Vampire: Towards an Anthropology of Rousseau,” in R. A. Leigh, ed., Rousseau after 200 Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 109–29. John MacKinnon, The Ape Within Us (London: Collins, 1978), 110, 127.

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14

15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

23

24 25

26 27

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Biruté Galdikas, “My Life with Orangutans,” International Wildlife 20 (March–April 1990): 40. This new research is surveyed in Carel van Schaik’s Among Orangutans: Red Apes and the Rise of Human Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004) and in Orangutans: Geographic Variation in Behavioral Ecology and Conservation, edited by S. A. Wich, S. S. U. Atmoko, T. M. Setia, and C. P. van Schaik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the importance of cultural and symbolic evolution, see Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006). Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1978), x–xi. Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982), 8–9. The essay is found in Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972), 1–39. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 14. See Patricia Draper, “The Learning Environment for Aggression and Anti-Social Behavior among the !Kung,” in Ashley Montagu, ed., Learning Non-Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 31–53; Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, The Biology of Peace and War (New York: Viking, 1979), 129–61; and Napoleon Chagnon, Yanomamö, 6th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage, 2013). For the argument that the violence of the Yanomami observed by Chagnon came mostly from their contact with neighboring state systems, see R. Brian Ferguson, Yanomami Warfare: A Political History (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1995). On the importance of the concern for status and reputation in human evolution, see Jerome H. Barkow, Darwin, Sex, and Status (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), chap. 13; and Robert Frank, Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See Flannery and Marcus, Creation of Inequality. See Brian Hayden, “Big Man, Big Heart? The Political Role of Aggrandizers in Egalitarian and Transegalitarian Societies,” in Donelson R. Forsyth and Crystal L. Hoyt, eds., For the Greater Good of All: Perspectives on Individualism, Society, and Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 101–18; and Heather Pringle, “The Ancient Roots of the 1%,” Science 344 (23 May 2014): 822–25. Some anthropologists today would dispute the belief that economic inequality led to the formation of the first states. See Elman R. Service, “Classical and Modern Theories of the Origins of Government,” in Ronald Cohen and Elman R. Service, eds., Origins of the State: The Anthropology of Political Evolution (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1978), 21–34. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 85. See Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1956), 112–32; and J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Praeger, 1960), 38–49. The influence of Rousseau over the French revolutionaries has been denied by Joan McDonald, Rousseau and the French Revolution, 1762–1791 (London: Athlone Press, 1965). But compare Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986). “The Port Huron Statement,” in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., How Democratic Is America? (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1971), 7. See, for example, Howard Zinn, “How Democratic Is America?” in Goldwin, How Democratic Is America? 39–60; Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), vi, 32–34, 160; and James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). Mao Zedong, “Combat Liberalism,” in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Zedong (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), 136–37.

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32

33 34 35 36

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38 39 40

41 42

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See Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 118–72. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), chapter 21, p. 136. See Benjamin R. Barber, The Death of Communal Liberty: A History of Freedom in a Swiss Mountain Canton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); and Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3–35. For an attempt to apply Rousseau’s political vision to modern industrialized nations, see G. D. H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980). See W. G. Runciman and A. K. Sen, “Games, Justice and the General Will,” Mind 74 (October 1965): 554–62; Steven J. Brams, Game Theory and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), 30–39; Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and William Poundstone, The Prisoner’s Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992). See H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds. and trans., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 78–79, 245–52. On Mao as “The Great Legislator,” see Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 43–59. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist, ed. Edward Mead Earle (New York: Random House, Modern Library, n.d.), No. 38, pp. 233–42. Ibid., No. 10, pp. 53–62. Although Rousseau had little influence on the early American political founders, he had great influence on American novelists. See Paul M. Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1969). James Fenimore Cooper introduced the theme of the “return to nature” into American literature, and Catherine Zuckert argues that in The Deerslayer (1841) and the other “Leatherstocking” tales, Cooper developed a Rousseauian reinterpretation of the Lockean principles of the Declaration of Independence (Zuckert, Natural Right and the American Imagination: Political Philosophy in Novel Form [Savage, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1990]). See Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 305–23; Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 337–69; Samuel P. Huntington, “The Democratic Distemper,” Public Interest (Fall 1975):9–38; Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). For Rousseauistic defenses of direct democracy, see Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); and Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). See Huntington, American Politics. Henry David Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Walden and Other Writings, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1937), 670. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944), 275, 312. See Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 21–44. Abraham Lincoln, Address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, January 27, 1838, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 1: 112. Quoted in Bellah, “Civil Religion,” 32. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland, in Rousseau: Political Writings, trans. Frederick Watkins (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1953), 161–62.

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10 Morals and Markets in the Commercial Society

Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations

KEY READINGS The Theory of Moral Sentiments, pages 9–43, 74–91, 113–93, 212–317; The Wealth of Nations, pages 10–104, 157–59, 264–67, 324–29, 341–43, 493–96, 540, 647–54, 687–90, 708–25, 758–814, 825–26

Adam Smith was born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and died in Edinburgh in 1790.1 Along with philosophers like his teacher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) and his friend David Hume (1711–1776), Smith was one of the brilliant thinkers in Scotland who contributed to what some historians have called the Scottish Enlightenment, which some have identified as part of the British Enlightenment as distinct from the French Enlightenment and American Enlightenment.2 He was the author of two books: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759) and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (first published in 1776).3 The Theory of Moral Sentiments made Smith internationally famous during his lifetime as a moral philosopher. But since his death, he has been better known for The Wealth of Nations as the single most influential statement of economic theory and defense of free-market capitalism.

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Many of Smith’s readers have wondered whether these two books are consistent, because while The Theory of Moral Sentiments explains morality as rooted in the social nature of human beings who desire a mutual sympathy of sentiments, The Wealth of Nations explains economic exchange in markets as rooted in the selfish nature of human beings as caring mostly for their own self-interest. Some readers have seen a contradiction between two views of human nature in these books, which some scholars have called “the Adam Smith problem.” Reading these two books together raises questions about the relationship between morals and markets. Are morals and markets contradictory? Or can they be consistent, or even mutually dependent? Are the critics of capitalism correct in warning that a market society subverts morality by promoting selfish greed? Or can capitalism be defended morally by the argument that free markets cultivate and depend upon good morals, and particularly the bourgeois virtues? We have seen that the pre-modern political philosophers have generally scorned commerce and moneymaking. For example, Plato’s Socrates in The Republic declared that “the more men value money-making, the less they value virtue.”4 We have seen Rousseau’s warning that modern commercial society ruins our life by promoting inequality, avarice, vanity, and competitiveness. Although Smith admired the writing of Rousseau’s Two Discourses, Smith thought that the commercial society he saw emerging in the eighteenth century could have a civilizing effect on life by fostering not only material opulence but also moral and intellectual excellence. In 1737, at the age of 14, he became a student at the University of Glasgow, where he was influenced by the teaching of moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson. In 1740, he became a student at Oxford University. In that same year, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature was published, and it stirred controversy because of its apparent skepticism and atheistic denial of Christian doctrines. At Oxford, Smith read the book; and a few years later, Smith met Hume and began a lifelong intellectual friendship. Smith and Hume shared a dedication to developing an experimental science of human nature and human history that would be as intellectually rigorous as Isaac Newton’s physics in explaining the human mind, morality, politics, religion, and aesthetics as shaping human beings for social life. In 1746, Smith left Oxford and moved back to Kirkcaldy. Through his family’s social connections with some of the legal, political, religious, and intellectual leaders of the Scottish cultural world, Smith was recognized as a rising young philosopher, and he was invited to deliver a series of public lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence in Edinburgh between 1748 and 1751. The success of those lectures led to his appointment as a professor at the University of Glasgow, first as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1751 and then as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1752. The success of Smith’s teaching at Glasgow and of his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 established his international reputation as a philosophical

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teacher of gentlemen and noblemen. Charles Townshend, who would later become a prominent member of the British Parliament, offered Smith a generous salary and an annual pension for the rest of his life if he would tutor Townshend’s stepson—the Duke of Buccleuch. Smith accepted the offer, gave up his academic post at Glasgow, and travelled with the Duke around Europe from 1764 to 1766. Smith and the Duke became lifelong friends. Smith returned to Great Britain in 1766, living in London for six months, in Kirkcaldy from 1767 to 1773, and again in London from 1773 to 1776. During this time, he worked on the Wealth of Nations, which was published in 1776. In 1776 Hume died, and there was an intense public curiosity about how Hume had faced his death, with many Christians expecting that his fear of death and divine judgment in the afterlife would force him to ask for divine forgiveness for his infidelity. Smith wrote a letter that was published, describing Hume’s cheerfulness in his conversations with his philosophical friends and in editing his works for a final edition. Smith wrote: “Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any Whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.”5 Smith also reported that Hume joked about how he would ask Charon (the Greek mythic ferryman of Hades who took the newly deceased into the land of the dead) to delay his passage. “I might say,” Hume observed, “‘Good Charon, I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of people; have a little patience only till I have the pleasure of seeing the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business’; but Charon would reply, ‘O you loitering rogue; that won’t happen these two hundred years; do you fancy I will give you a lease for so long a time?’”6 Smith was denounced by Christians for supporting Hume’s flippant blasphemy. They were also disturbed by Smith’s concluding remark in his public letter about Hume’s life and death: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.”7 This language echoed the last sentence of Plato’s Phaedo, describing the last hours of Socrates before his execution for atheism and corrupting the young: “Such was the end of our companion, a man who, we may fairly state, was of all those we knew in our time the most virtuous and on the whole the wisest and most just.”8 Such open respect for Hume as an atheistic philosopher got Smith into trouble with Christians. And yet Smith was generally much more cautious than Hume was about expressing any doubts about traditional religious doctrines. While Hume appointed Smith as his literary executor, Smith refused to supervise the posthumous publication of Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, because he thought its attack on the religious argument for God as the intelligent designer of nature would provoke public outrage. Earlier in his life, Smith had refused to support Hume in 1751

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for a professorship at the University of Glasgow, because public opinion would have been against Hume’s appointment. In 1778, through the influence of the Duke of Buccleuch and other friends, Smith was appointed to the Board of Customs in Scotland, and he served on that Board until the end of his life in 1790. This Board was charged with regulating and taxing goods imported or exported through Scottish ports. The Board was located in Edinburgh, and so Smith moved his family there. Smith’s writing shows his responses to the political, economic, religious, and philosophical controversies of his time. The political controversies in Scotland turned on the place of Scotland in the British Empire and the threats to the Empire coming from colonial rebellion and European rivals. In 1707, Scotland had agreed to a Union with England, which made the British Crown and Parliament supreme over Scotland, although the Scots were granted extensive legal and political power over Scottish affairs. But while most of the Scots in the lowland areas where the large cities were located supported the Union with England, the clans of the Scottish Highlands resisted the monarchy established by the Revolution of 1688 that overthrew James II and installed William and Mary. In the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the Highlanders supported the attempt of Charles Edward Stuart to restore the Stuart monarchy by military force. The Highland army was defeated by the British in a bloody slaughter at the battle of Culloden in 1746, a few months before Smith returned to Scotland from Oxford. The continuing debate over the future of the clan system of the Highlands was a source of political instability. Another source of political instability was the rebellion of the American colonies from Great Britain, in which the British suffered an unexpected defeat. Smith thought that Great Britain would be better off by giving up its Empire entirely and forming a political union with America and Ireland with a system of free trade. The economic controversies in Scotland arose from the debate over the move of Scotland away from the Highland culture of a clan society ruled by tribal chiefs to the urban culture of a commercial society ruled by merchants, bankers, and manufacturers. Smith supported the commercial society that was arising as part of the Industrial Revolution emerging in Great Britain. His concern was to mitigate the morally degrading effects of that commercial society and to foster the morally elevating effects. Moreover, Smith thought the success of that commercial society would require a governmental policy that would protect freedom of trade as opposed to the older policy of mercantilist interventions by the government to favor some economic interests over others. Scotland benefited economically from the Union with England, which opened up to Scottish traders all the markets of England and the British colonies. Glasgow became one of the busiest trading ports in Europe. Particularly important was the importation of American tobacco, which was

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then exported to other ports in Europe. The tobacco trade was controlled by a group of 163 merchants organized into wealthy syndicates that restricted foreign competition to increase their own profits. Smith tried to persuade them to see the public benefits of free trade. He saw the American colonies as showing the best example of how a policy of free trade could promote liberty and prosperity. The religious controversies in Scotland turned on the cultural influence of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland (called the Kirk). From the time of the Calvinist dominance in Scotland during the Reformation, the Church had enforced its rule by law, including the persecution of those identified as apostates or blasphemers. By the middle of the eighteenth century, religious tolerance was established by law, but those who disputed the rules of the Church could be punished by social pressure. Before he could become a professor at the University of Glasgow, Smith had to formally pledge his belief in the Westminster Confession of the Church. He was also required to begin each of his classes with prayer and to teach natural theology as part of his course on moral philosophy. At this time, the University had come under the dominance of those identified as moderate Presbyterians, as opposed to the orthodox Presbyterians who were more strictly traditionalist in their beliefs and practices. These religious controversies were connected to the philosophic controversies, which often turned on questions about whether modern philosophy was compatible with Christian piety and morality. The orthodox Presbyterians insisted that because human beings had fallen into original sin, they could not know the moral law by natural human reason; and so moral knowledge came only through the divine revelation of God’s law in the Bible; and salvation came only by grace through redemption by Jesus Christ. The moderate Presbyterians argued, however, that natural human feelings could grasp the moral law through a natural moral sense, as Hutcheson called it. For Hutcheson, this moral sense was the voice of God implanted in human nature by divine design. For Hume, this moral sense could be understood as a purely natural product of human experience without any divine design. Smith’s stand in this controversy was unclear. While he apparently was not on the side of the orthodox Presbyterians, because he thought that morality could be known through natural moral sentiments, he often appealed to “the Author of Nature” as the divine source of the moral law. It was unclear whether Smith agreed fully with Hume’s skeptical questioning of the Christian belief that morality must be commanded by God. In response to all of these controversies, the Scottish philosophers sought a science of human nature and human history that could explain the origin, development, and maintenance of all human social institutions and practices, including morality, economics, law, politics, and religion. One of the fundamental themes of that new social science that was elaborated by Smith is the idea of social order as an unintended or spontaneous order—the idea that social order can arise through the social interactions

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of individuals acting for their individual ends without any deliberate or intended design by any single mind or group of minds. James Otteson has presented the evolution of unintended or spontaneous order as the unifying theme of all of Smith’s writing, which Otteson calls the “market model.”9 Just as individuals engaging in economic exchanges in a market generate an economic system without any centralized or deliberate planning of this outcome, so all of the social orders of life—moral, legal, political, and religious—can be explained as unintended orders. Otteson defines unintended order as “a self-enforcing, orderly institution created unintentionally by the free exchanges of individuals who desire to satisfy their own individual wants.”10 One can see such an unintended order in languages, for example. A language is not intentionally designed by any one person or group of people who deliberately design the language. Rather, as Smith indicates in his essay “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” language has arisen gradually over long periods of time through the innumerable efforts of many individuals to speak to one another, and none of these individuals could have foreseen what the language would look like in the future.11 At any moment in time, a language continues to evolve as new ways of speaking appear, and some of these innovations become popular and spread, while others become unpopular and disappear. Otteson suggests that Smith’s account of language shows a “market model” of unintended order with four elements that can be seen not only in language, but also in morality (in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments) and economics (in Smith’s Wealth of Nations). The four elements are (1) motivating desire, (2) rules developed, (3) currency (what gets exchanged), and (4) the resulting unintended system of order.12 For language, the motivating desire is the desire to make “mutual wants intelligible to each other.”13 For morality, the motivating desire is the “pleasure of mutual sympathy” of sentiments (TMS, 13). For economics, the motivating desire is the “natural effort of every individual to better his condition” (WN, 26–27, 341, 343, 540). For language, the rules developed are the rules of grammar, pronunciation, and so on. For morality, the rules are the standards of moral judgment determining propriety and merit. For economics, the rules are the laws of justice that protect private property, contractual agreements, and voluntary exchanges. For language, the currency includes words, ideas, and wants. For morality, the currency consists of moral sentiments and judgments. For economics, the currency consists of the goods and services that are traded. For language, the resulting unintended system of order is language itself. For morality, the system of order is the shared norms of morality and moral judgment. For economics, the system of order is the economy. An unintended order is contrasted with an intentional order that has been rationally designed by some mind or group of minds for a deliber-

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ately planned purpose. The contrast between these two kinds of order underlies a fundamental debate in social theory between constructivists and evolutionists—between those who think that a good social order must be deliberately and rationally designed for some foreseeable end state and those who think a good social order arises through a process of free exchanges between individuals acting for individual ends with no overall end in mind. Since the success of unintended order depends on individual liberty constrained only by rules of justice protecting life, liberty, and property, the idea of unintended order is the fundamental idea of classical liberalism in the Smithian tradition, which includes classical liberals like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.14 For the classical liberal, an economy can be explained as an unintended order that arises from what Smith in The Wealth of Nations calls “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another” (25). If you have something I want, and I have something you want, we can agree to exchange one thing for the other, if we think we would both be made better off by the trade. In a complex economy, numerous trades involving numerous individuals are occurring at every moment. The economic order that emerges from this could not have been deliberately planned out by anyone. The prosperity created by this economic order is good for the whole society. But none of the individuals in this economy are acting for the social good. Rather, they are all acting for their own selfish interests, and so the social good that emerges from their economic exchanges is unintended by anyone. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith explains: Man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can interest their self-love in his favour, and shew them that it is for their own advantage to do for him what he requires of them. Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages (WN, 26–27).

This might be interpreted as suggesting the model of human nature that some economists have called Homo economicus: human beings are primarily selfish, and so when they cooperate with one another, it’s because they find some selfish advantage in their cooperation. But even if Homo economicus prevails in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, his Theory of Moral Sentiments seems to assume the model of human nature as Homo moralis: despite their natural selfishness, human beings are also naturally moral in

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their concern for others. Sometimes, human beings really do help one another out of benevolence. We might wonder, however, whether even this appearance of moral care for others is actually disguised self-love.

1. Is Smithian moral sentimentalism rooted in selfishness, vanity, conformism, and emotivism? “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” (TMS, 9). With this first sentence of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith introduces his response to those like Thomas Hobbes who argued that human beings were so naturally selfish that even their moral sentiments of love and benevolence could only arise from some calculation of self-love. On the contrary, Smith observes, human beings naturally feel sympathy for one another—a “fellow-feeling with any passion whatever”—that cannot be explained as pure selfishness (TMS, 10). The pleasure that people take in mutual sympathy—in observing that others share their own emotions—is the natural root of our morality. It is true, Smith indicates, that we can have no immediate experience of what other people feel; but in our imagination, we can place ourselves in someone else’s situation and imagine what we would feel. We can even do this with characters in fictional stories or with people in history whom we can never meet. In each case, we judge the propriety of the sentiments expressed by these people by judging whether their sentiments are harmonious or contradictory with our own. If I can sympathize with the motives of a benevolent person and with the gratitude of those who benefit from his benevolence, then I praise this conduct. If I cannot sympathize with the motives of a violent person, while I do sympathize with the resentment of those who are harmed by his violence, then I condemn this conduct. We also judge ourselves by how we appear to others. We are proud when others share our sentiments and then praise us for them. We are ashamed when others cannot share our sentiments and then blame us for them. We desire the approval of those around us, and we fear their disapproval. Smith observes that this natural desire for the mutual sympathy of sentiments moves outward from ourselves (TMS, 218–27). Our first and principal care is for ourselves, because each person is better able to care for himself than for any other person, and each person feels his own pleasures and pains more immediately than those of other people. But then, after himself, each person cares for the members of his family, first his immediate family and then more distant relatives. After that, he cares for his friends and those in his neighborhood. Then he cares for those with whom he has developed trusting relationships of exchange. He also cares

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for suffering strangers who might elicit his charitable concern. And he might feel a patriotic love for his country and his fellow countrymen. Finally, all of humanity around the world might stir some concern for their welfare if their situation is somehow brought to his attention. This expanding circle of moral concern usually becomes ever weaker as it moves outward. One’s moral attachment is almost always stronger to those close to oneself—one’s family, friends, and neighbors—than to distant strangers. And, therefore, one is more concerned about the approval or disapproval of those one knows well than of unknown strangers. We know that sometimes people are mistaken in their judgments of ourselves and others. Sometimes people praise those who do not deserve praise, or they blame those who do not deserve blame. We are deeply pained when people do not judge us correctly. We respond to this problem, Smith observes, by imagining whether an informed and impartial spectator would sympathize with us and others. Even if others are mistaken in their judgments of us, we can take pleasure in the thought that our conduct would be approved by an imagined impartial spectator; just as we might be pained by the thought that the people around us have mistakenly praised us for something that does not deserve the praise of an impartial spectator. Surely, Smith claims, this capacity for sympathy and the desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments that sustains morality cannot be reduced to a purely selfish motivation, because sympathy “cannot, in any sense, be regarded as a selfish principle” (TMS, 317). And yet, Thomas Reid, who replaced Smith as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, criticized Smith’s moral theory as “only a refinement of the selfish system.”15 Reid complained: “as all our moral sentiments are resolved into sympathy, so even this sympathy seems to be resolved into self-love, which receives some change in its direction by an operation of the imagination.”16 After all, Reid complained, the motivation for the mutual sympathy of sentiments is the selfish desire for appearing virtuous rather than really being virtuous. “It needs only the appearance of virtue to draw the admiration and applause of mankind which is the inducement to that effort wherein social virtue consists.” So what Smith calls virtue is actually vanity. And the standard of virtue here is merely the social conformism of obeying the opinions and customs of one’s society. “The ultimate measure and standard of right and wrong in human conduct according to this system of sympathy,” Reid contended, “is not any fixed judgment grounded upon truth or upon the dictates of a well-informed conscience, but the variable opinions and passions of men.” Smith is better in accounting “for men’s putting on the appearance of virtue than for their being really virtuous.”17 Moreover, as some modern commentators have observed, this social appearance of virtue seems for Smith to be merely a matter of emotion, because it all depends on whether others share our emotions or sentiments. Morality is then a social construction of our emotions with no rational foundation in nature.18

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This might remind us of the allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, in which the life of most human beings was depicted as an enslavement to the shadows cast onto the wall of their cave, where only a few philosophic people could turn around to see the images before the fire behind them, and then perhaps ascend out of the cave to see the light of the Sun. But while Plato thought that true justice required the rule of philosophers who had seen the light of the truth—the Idea of the Good—over the multitude of people who lived by mere appearances, Smith seems to assume that we must all live in the cave of shadowy appearances, as we compete for social approval according to the customary standards of our society. As one commentator has suggested, Smith seems to have replaced Plato’s story of the cave “with the less edifying but more humane view that the cave may be remade into home.”19 Is this true? Does Smith’s moral theory depend on nothing more than selfishness, vanity, conformism, and emotivism? Is morality nothing more than a human construction conforming to no objective truth about nature or God? Does this confirm Rousseau’s warning about the moral corruption that must come from a commercial society of the sort that Smith promotes? To understand the criticism of Smith as an emotivist, one needs to understand the debate between Enlightenment rationalism and Enlightenment sentimentalism. As Michael Frazer observes, while the distinctive demand of Enlightenment liberalism was reflective autonomy—the freedom to reflect for ourselves in determining our moral and political standards—the Enlightenment thinkers disagreed about the character of this reflective autonomy.20 The Enlightenment rationalists (like Immanuel Kant in his later years) assumed that autonomy required the rule of reason over emotion and imagination, because the true self was identified as pure reason. The Enlightenment sentimentalists (like Hume and Smith) assumed that autonomy required reflective choices by the mind as a whole, including not only reason but also emotion and imagination, because the true self was understood as embracing the whole human mind. The mind can reflect rationally on itself and thus refine its emotional responses to the world by judging those responses as reasonable or unreasonable. We can reflect on whether our moral sentiments are contradictory or consistent, whether they rest on true or false judgments, and whether they promote or impede our happiness. But, as Smith says, reason by itself cannot render anything either agreeable or disagreeable for its own sake, which can only come from some immediate sense or feeling that something is good or bad, right or wrong (TMS, 320). Modern neuroscience seems to have confirmed Smith’s moral sentimentalism in showing that moral judgment requires the proper functioning of those parts of the brain that support moral emotions. Psychopaths are evil people, not because of some defect in their rational capacities, but because they don’t feel moral emotions such as guilt, shame, love, and empathy; and this emotional deficit probably arises from some abnormality in those neural circuits that sustain moral emotions in normal people.21

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Since Smith emphasizes these moral emotions, which show our concern for others, it would seem unfair to criticize his moral theory as belonging to the “selfish system” of Hobbes. The criticisms of the selfish system made by people like Rousseau and Reid were directed not just at Hobbes, but even more so at Bernard Mandeville. Mandeville’s book The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (published in 1732) was the most provocative statement of the argument that human beings are by nature egoistic individuals, that it is the liberation of this egoistic individualism that creates the material opulence and refined civilization that benefits all of society, and therefore that the traditional moral scorn for luxury and egoistic self-gratification was mistaken.22 In charging that Smith’s moral theory was “only a refinement of the selfish system,” Reid was accusing Smith of adopting Mandeville’s position. However, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith explicitly rejects Mandeville’s teaching as a “licentious system” that is “wholly pernicious” and “in almost every respect erroneous” (306–14). Is this enough to refute the charge that Smith is following Mandeville? Many readers have noticed that much of Smith’s writing echoes that of Mandeville. The editors of the Glasgow Edition of Smith’s writings have indicated that in their editorial footnotes. So some readers have suspected that Smith’s explicit rejection of Mandeville is a deceptive rhetorical move to escape any unpopular association with Mandeville. Smith actually conceded that Mandeville’s system “in some respects bordered upon the truth,” although it was deceptive in the sophistical ambiguity of its language (TMS, 310–14). We might suspect, then, that Smith saw some partial truth in what Mandeville said. According to Smith, Mandeville’s argument that all appearance of praiseworthy conduct is actually motivated by vanity fails to distinguish two higher levels of passion that go beyond vanity. Vanity is the passion or desire for praise even when we do not deserve it, Smith explained, and that passion or desire is rightly despised. But this is different from the passion or desire for acquiring praise by really deserving it. And this is different from the passion or desire for rendering ourselves praiseworthy without any regard for whether we are in fact praised by others. The second is the love of true glory. The third is the love of virtue. Vanity is rightly blamed, but the love of true glory and the love of virtue are rightly praised. The lover of true glory is like the vain man in that both desire to be praised. But unlike the vain man, the lover of true glory desires to be praised because he really is praiseworthy, and thus he is morally superior to the vain man. The lover of virtue is like the lover of true glory in that they both deserve to be praised. But unlike the lover of true glory, the lover of virtue cares not whether he is actually praised by anyone, because he cares only to deserve praise. “The man who acts solely from a regard to what is right and fit to be done, from a regard to what is the proper object of esteem and approbation, though these sentiments should never be bestowed upon

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him, acts from the most sublime and godlike motive which human nature is even capable of conceiving” (TMS, 311). The lover of virtue achieves happiness from his own self-approbation that makes him independent of external circumstances and of the opinions of those around him. He cannot be mortified by the foolish opinions of those who do not recognize his virtue. As a man of real magnanimity, he cannot be disturbed by undeserved blame. And yet Smith admits that this is rarely achieved: “It seldom happens, however, that human nature arrives at this degree of firmness” (311). Mandeville might respond by arguing that the lover of virtue shows a refined form of self-love in taking pride in his praiseworthiness. The lover of virtue is proud in praising himself, and thus he satisfies his passion or desire for approbation, even if it’s only his own self-approbation. Such proud self-love cannot be virtue in the Christian sense of humble selfdenial and extirpation of all passions.23 We might see both Smith and Mandeville as implicitly embracing Aristotle’s teaching that the good person loves himself and loves his friends as reflections of himself, but this noble self-love is higher than vulgar selfishness.24 If so, then Smith is rejecting the Christian teaching of virtue as selfdenial and affirming the virtue rooted in self-love taught by Mandeville. We should wonder whether this points to the moral philosophy of Ayn Rand. Against the common assumption that self-sacrifice is a virtue, and that morality requires serving the needs of others rather than our own, Rand argued that selfishness is a virtue, and that the truly selfish individual lives a life of rational morality based on affirming the value of one’s own individual life as a rational human being.25 If Smith is right in claiming that our morality arises from our natural desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, then we might expect to see some confirmation for that in the modern evolutionary science of moral psychology. Actually, some researchers today believe that evolutionary science and experimental game theory do support Smith’s moral theory.

2. Do evolutionary science and experimental game theory confirm Smith’s moral theory? When Charles Darwin developed his evolutionary theory of human morality in The Descent of Man (first published in 1871), he showed how Smith’s explanation of morality as rooted in the mutual sympathy of sentiments could be understood as a product of human evolution.26 Darwin’s general theory of the evolution of species by natural selection was based on three ideas: variation, inheritance, and struggle for survival. If there is variation in the traits of an organism, if those variable traits tend to be passed on by inheritance from parents to offspring, and if those traits influence the chances that the organism will survive and reproduce, then the

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beneficial variations will be preserved and the harmful variations will be eliminated. In this way, all of the species of plants and animals could have evolved to be adapted to their environmental conditions. And if this is true, it should explain the nature of the human species, including human morality. Although Smith did not elaborate an evolutionary theory like this, he did come close to it in observing that “self-preservation, and the propagation of the species, are the great ends which Nature seems to have proposed in the formation of all animals,” and in seeing how unintended order could arise through a process of trial and error (TMS, 77, 142). Darwin saw six steps in the natural and cultural evolution of morality.27 First, the dependence of children on parental care would favor the evolution of social instincts for the bonding of parents, children, and other relatives, so that these social animals would instinctively feel sympathy for one another. Second, as their mental capacities became highly developed, images of their past conduct would pass through their brains, and they would feel dissatisfaction with any of their conduct that was socially blameworthy. Third, once the capacity for language was developed, this would allow a social group to formulate in speech their standards for how each member of the group ought to behave, and these standards would be enforced through the desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments. Fourth, these social instincts of sympathy would be strengthened by social habituation and learning. Finally, in the warfare between competing groups, those groups with the most sympathetic members would be most successful in cooperating among themselves to compete with other groups with less sympathetic members. This natural and cultural evolution of morality can explain human cooperation as rooted in kinship and reciprocity, or in what some evolutionary theorists have called kin selection and reciprocal altruism.28 Evolution would favor any cooperative or altruistic traits that spread our genes into the future. This would include helping those genetically related to us—not only our direct offspring but also our collateral relatives (siblings, cousins, and so on). And, indeed, human beings and other animals do tend to be more cooperative with close kin than with those who are not related to them. We also cooperate with those who are not genetically related to us if there is some reciprocal exchange. I will cooperate with you if you have been cooperative with me in the past (direct reciprocity), or if I know you have a reputation for being cooperative with others (indirect reciprocity). It’s tit for tat. People are rewarded for their good reputation as trustworthy cooperators and punished for their bad reputation as untrustworthy cheaters. We might question, however, whether this shows genuine altruism or selfless concern for others. We could see helping our close relatives as genetic selfishness, because we’re acting to spread our genes. And we could see reciprocal cooperation as enlightened self-interest, because we’re cooperating only as long as we expect some reciprocation that benefits us. If so, then it seems the Homo economicus model of human beings as

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rational maximizers of their selfish interests is correct. This would confirm Mandeville’s claim that our appearance of acting for the good of others is disguised self-love. And yet, some evolutionary theorists—such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis—have argued that human beings also show genuine altruism through what they call strong reciprocity.29 This is a propensity to cooperate and share with others, even strangers, and to punish those who don’t cooperate and share with others—even when the cooperation, sharing, and punishment are personally costly to the strong reciprocator, and the strong reciprocity requires neither ties of kinship nor expectation of future reciprocation. Bowles and Gintis contend that this is what Smith had in mind in The Theory of Moral Sentiments in pointing to those lovers of virtue for its own sake who desire to do what is praiseworthy even without the reward of actually being praised. For Bowles and Gintis, the mistake of many economists has been to concentrate on the purely self-regarding side of human nature shown in Smith’s Wealth of Nations, while ignoring the otherregarding side of human nature shown in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.30 Moreover, they believe that recent experimental research in evolutionary and behavioral game theory confirms Smith’s moral theory. Much of neoclassical economics and classical game theory has been dominated by the Homo economicus model of human beings as rationally selfish maximizers of their utility. But then in the 1980s and early 1990s, experimental economists discovered that the predictions of the Homo economicus model were not being fulfilled in the way people played the Ultimatum Game. In this game, the experimenter provides some amount of money (say $10) for two players. One player designated the proposer will propose a split of this money between the two players. The other player designated the responder will respond by either accepting this proposed split or rejecting it. If he accepts it, the money is split as proposed. If he rejects it, neither player receives any of the money. The prediction of the Homo economicus model is that the proposer will take most of the money for himself ($9) and offer the responder a small amount ($1), and the responder will accept this, because a small amount of the money is better than none at all. In most cases, this is not what happens. In most cases, the proposer offers to split the money in a proportion close to 50/50 ($5 for each); and the responder accepts. When the proposer offers a smaller amount to the responder, the responder usually rejects the offer. Apparently, responders are expressing their moral indignation against unfair offers. This expression of moral sentiments in the Ultimatum Game has been shown to be correlated with activation of the brain’s reward systems, which suggests that social norms of fairness have been internalized in the brain.31 Bowles and Gintis see the experimental research with the Ultimatum Game as a refutation of the Homo economicus model and as evidence for strong reciprocity.32 When Bowles and Gintis first formulated the idea of

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strong reciprocity in response to the experimental outcomes with the Ultimatum Game, they became part of an intellectual movement among scholars in the 1990s who argued for moving “beyond self-interest” in the social sciences.33 Many of these scholars saw themselves as defending a complex moral psychology like that of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which recognizes the complex interaction of self-regarding and other-regarding motives in human behavior and attitudes. Research with the Ultimatum Game was often cited by these scholars as evidence for their position.34 However, Bowles and Gintis admit that experiments conducted by Vernon Smith and his colleagues show that strong reciprocity is considerably weakened when the Ultimatum Game is played in a social context that more closely resembles real life.35 The common practice in behavioral game experiments with the Ultimatum Game had been for the experimenter to provide the initial endowment of money to someone randomly chosen as the proposer, who then must decide how to divide the money with the responder. Vernon Smith’s insight was to realize that this is not what normally happens in real life. Usually, money is initially perceived as someone’s property. To simulate this, Smith had the participants in the game take a test on current events, and whoever scored the best was chosen to act as the proposer with the initial endowment of $10. This suggested that the proposer had “earned” the money as his property, and the responder knew this. In some cases, Smith added another condition: he told the participants that they were engaged in an “exchange game.” In those games where the proposer had earned his money as his property, the proposer offered less than $5 to the responder, and the responder accepted the offer. In those games where the proposer earned a property right and the game was called an “exchange,” the proposer offered even less money to the responder, and the responder accepted, although some responders rejected offers of only $1. From this, Smith concluded, “both proposers and responders in ultimatum games take account of the conditions under which rights to act have been conveyed. In particular, a person with a legitimate right believes he/she can use that right in a more self-regarding manner than when the right is ambiguous, ill defined, or illegitimate, and others (responders, in this case) agree with, or respect, those beliefs of the rights holder.”36 So what Bowles and Gintis identify as strong reciprocity is very weak when people are dividing up money that is perceived as belonging to someone. Smith also experimented with turning the Ultimatum Game into a Dictator Game, in which the responder has no opportunity to accept or reject the proposer’s offer. This allows the proposer to be selfishly unfair in dividing the money without any fear of punishment by the responder. But while a purely selfish dictator would be free to take all the money and share none of it, the typical outcome of the Dictator Game is that between 60 and 80 percent of the dictators give $1 or more, although dictators tend to give less than they would if they were proposers in an Ultimatum Game.

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Smith noticed, however, that while experimenters enforced anonymity among the players in the Dictator Game, so that dictators would not worry about their reputation, the players’ decisions were being recorded by the experimenters, who then would know what the dictators had done. Smith decided to conduct a series of Dictator Games with a double-blind procedure so that the individual decisions of the dictators would be known to themselves but not to the other players or to the experimenters. When the games were played this way, 64 percent of the dictators kept all the money for themselves, and 20 percent of them gave only $1. From this, Smith concluded, “The appearance of other-regardingness comes from the selfregarding requirements of, and the need for, reciprocity in social exchange. Take away all social context—no others can know—and we see the naked expression of purely self-regarding behavior.”37 This research by Smith and his colleagues suggests that what Bowles and Gintis see as evidence for strong reciprocity is actually evidence of indirect reciprocity in which people are generous because they expect (even if only unconsciously) to earn a reputation for generosity that will benefit them in the future. Under conditions of total anonymity, people tend to express their purely selfish motivations. Bowles and Gintis must respond to this evidence. But notice that even in the double-blind Dictator Game, 16 percent of the dictators gave away more than $1. Would Bowles and Gintis say that this shows that at least a small minority of people are strong reciprocators? Surprisingly, Smith reports that in one of his double-blind Dictator Games, one individual dictator gave away $9 and kept only $1 for himself! Surely, Bowles and Gintis might exclaim, at least this one individual was a strong reciprocator! Most game theory experiments are conducted with American college students. Should we wonder whether the benevolent dictator who gave away $9 was an undergraduate student who thought the whole game was a joke? After all, $10 is such a small amount of money for most American college students that deciding how to divide it up between two individuals might not be a realistic test of stinginess or generosity. This indicates the problem of whether these experimental games are really valid indicators of how people behave in everyday life. So the variability in the play of these games due to the social context points to a weakness in the argument of Bowles and Gintis: it’s never clear whether these artificially contrived games are revealing anything about the real world of everyday social interaction, and therefore it’s never clear whether these games are providing evidence for strong reciprocity. When researchers first began conducting behavioral game experiments, they designed the experiments so that the players would be influenced only by monetary calculations. But now it seems that this is almost never the case, because the behavior of the players is influenced by at least five other factors that have been surveyed by Steven Levitt and John List,

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who argue that this casts doubt on the validity of these experiments.38 First, the games are often designed to elicit moral or other-regarding behavior in ways that might not often arise in the economic and social interactions of real life. Second, the players typically feel themselves to be under the scrutiny of the experimenters, which would not occur in everyday life. Third, the individuals recruited to participate in these experiments might not be typical of the human population, because most of them are undergraduate students in the United States. Fourth, the contexts in which the games are framed can influence behavior: for example, as indicated earlier, calling an Ultimate Game an “exchange game” influences how the players behave. Moreover, the social context that subjects bring into the game from their social experience can differ from the context that the experimenter is trying to create in the lab. Finally, the level of the monetary stakes involved in a game can determine whether monetary gain becomes an overriding motive. As one example of how the scrutiny of the experimenters influences behavior, Levitt and List note that in one experiment, subjects who had never contributed to a charity in real life contributed to the charity in a Dictator Game. Bowles and Gintis admit that this shows “that one can never extrapolate directly from the laboratory to behavior in natural settings.”39 Bowles and Gintis assume that when subjects are playing a one-shot game in the laboratory, they won’t be concerned with building or maintaining a good reputation so that other people might cooperate with them in the future. This is important because actions influenced by a concern for one’s reputation cannot show strong reciprocity, for which there can be no expectation of future reciprocation. Yet it is often clear that subjects are playing the games in the lab in the context of their past experiences with social interactions in which one’s reputation is important. Cross-cultural experimental research shows that subjects with different cultural experiences play the same games differently, because they are acting in the context of their cultural lives outside the experimental game.40 It seems likely, therefore, that even when subjects are told by experimenters that they are playing a one-shot, anonymous game in which they have no chance to build or maintain a reputation, the subjects might still be influenced by psychic propensities rooted in their concern for winning and maintaining a good reputation. Bowles and Gintis argue that this is unlikely, because “humans are perfectly capable of distinguishing between situations in which reputation building and retaliation against free-riding are possible and situations in which they are not.”41 Similarly, they declare: “We do not think that subjects are unaware of the one-shot setting, or unable to leave their real-world experiences with repeated interactions at the laboratory door. Indeed, evidence is overwhelming that humans readily distinguish between repeated and nonrepeated interactions and adapt their behavior accordingly.”42 In disputing this, Robert Trivers—the theorist of “reciprocal altruism” who doubts the idea of strong reciprocity—responds:

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Chapter Ten Surely, awareness is irrelevant. You can be aware that you are in a movie theatre watching a perfectly harmless horror film and still be scared to death. As for leaving real-world experiences at the laboratory door, I know of no species, humans included, that leaves any part of its biology at the laboratory door; not prior experiences, nor natural proclivities, nor ongoing physiology, nor arms and legs, nor whatever. This is the whole point of experimental work. You bring living creatures into the lab (ideally, whole) to explore causal factors underlying their biology, the mechanisms in action. You do not imagine that you have thereby solved the problem of evolutionary origin; that is, that you can shortcut the problem of evolutionary function by simply assuming that the organism’s actions in the lab represent evolved adaptations to the lab.43

Trivers claims that we respond to one-shot encounters as if they were part of an ongoing chain of social interactions. So if someone in an Ultimatum Game makes us an unfair offer, we get angry with them and reject the offer, because both our evolutionary history and our individual history have shaped us to maintain a reputation for being indignant when we are treated unfairly. If Trivers is right, then we should expect to find ethnographic evidence that in those foraging societies most like those of our distant evolutionary ancestors, people show a sense of justice rooted in concerns for kin and for reciprocity (both direct and indirect). If Bowles and Gintis are right, then we should expect to find that people in smallscale societies engage in the costly punishment that identifies strong reciprocity—the punishment of those who violate social norms even when that punishment is personally costly to the punisher in ways for which there can be no payback for the punisher. In fact, there seems to be very little, if any, clear ethnographic evidence collected by anthropologists in the field that shows such costly punishment. Francesco Guala has surveyed the relevant research in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and he has concluded, “There is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment.”44 Of course, as Guala indicates, there is plenty of evidence that small egalitarian societies punish behavior that violates their customary norms. But this punishment is done collectively, so that the cost is distributed across many individuals; and therefore no single individual bears an absolute cost that is unlikely to be recouped somehow in the future. In their commentary on Guala’s article, Gintis and Ernst Fehr assert, “Anthropologists have confirmed that strong reciprocity is indeed routinely harnessed in the support of cooperation in small-scale societies.”45 But as Guala indicates in his response, none of the studies they cite provide field research that clearly shows costly punishment. They cite the work of Polly Wiessner and Christopher Boehm. Yet in their commentaries on Guala’s article, neither Wiessner nor Boehm clearly support strong reciprocity with ethnographic studies. Wiessner says that “experimental and ethnographic

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evidence do not concur,” and “whether positive and negative reciprocity are costly and thus truly ‘strong’ is difficult to measure in the field.”46 She stresses how small-scale societies use institutional practices to minimize the costs of maintaining cooperation for single individuals. Boehm concludes, “Hunter-gatherer punishment involves costs and benefits to individuals and groups, but the costs do not necessarily fit with the assumptions made in models that consider punishment to be altruistic.”47 So, it seems, the evidence suggests that strong reciprocity is weak—that only a few people will act as strong reciprocators, and in most cases they will do this only as long as the costs for them are very low. Actually, when Bowles and Gintis are challenged, they have to admit that to defend the reality of strong reciprocity they have to concede its weakness. If the argument for strong reciprocity is to succeed, Bowles and Gintis must persuade us that there is evidence for a strong propensity in human beings to cooperate with others and to punish cheaters, even when this cooperation and this punishment are costly and the costs cannot be recouped through reciprocation. One likely way in which there could be some payback through reciprocation would be from the benefits of having a good reputation for being a cooperator and a moralistic punisher. This is what theorists of reciprocal altruism call indirect reciprocity. To deny this possibility, Bowles and Gintis must persuade us that what looks like evidence for strong reciprocity cannot be explained as social conduct motivated by cues suggesting that this conduct will build or maintain a good reputation for the actor. These reputational cues could be unconscious, and they could be deceptive, in the sense that the actor could be motivated by an unconscious concern for reputation, even though there is little or no chance that the conduct will really enhance the good reputation of the actor. Human beings often act properly because they want to look good in the eyes of others, and they have some vague feeling that someone might see them. (Notice how this comes up in Plato’s Republic, in the discussion of whether just conduct depends on the fear of being punished, even if only through a bad reputation, and of whether people would be just if they had the ring of Gyges that would make them invisible.) Consider a famous natural experiment to test for this kind of behavior. The Department of Psychology at the University of Newcastle in England has a system by which its members pay for their tea, coffee, and milk by putting money in something called an honesty box. Above the box, there is a posted notice indicating the prices for the drinks, and people are enjoined to voluntarily pay their fair share into the box. When people are alone in the room with the drinks, their decision to pay is anonymous. Some members of the department decided to conduct an experiment to test the effect of images put above the posted notice. For alternating weeks, the image would be either a picture of flowers or a picture of a pair of human eyes. There was a careful record of the amount paid in proportion to the amount of drinks. It was found that during the weeks when the image of a pair of

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eyes was posted, the money put into the honesty box was much higher than during the weeks when there was just an image of flowers. One explanation for such generosity, in which people pay their fair share of a public good even when their fairness is anonymous, is that they are strong reciprocators, who are moved by other-regarding preferences shaped by a history of group selection. That’s the argument of Bowles and Gintis. But in this experiment, the researchers concluded that this was not plausible. They explained: A simpler explanation is simply that humans are strongly attuned to cues that generally indicate reputational consequences of behavior. . . . If even very weak, subconscious cues, such as the photocopied eyes used in this experiment, can strongly enhance cooperation, it is quite possible that the cooperativeness observed in other studies results from the presence in the experimental environment of subtle cues evoking the psychology of being observed. The power of these subconscious cues may be sufficient to override the explicit instructions of the experimenter to the effect that behaviour is anonymous. If this interpretation is correct, then the self-interested motive of reputation maintenance may be sufficient to explain cooperation in the absence of direct return.48

Although this experiment might seem trivial, using images of eyes to motivate good behavior could point to some deep evolutionary and neurophysiological grounds of human social conduct. Like some other primates, human beings have evolved to be visual animals whose social norms are often enforced through watching and being watched. The human perceptual system has special neural circuitry to perceive and respond to faces, eyes, and social gazes.49 As social animals that rely on visual signals of social praise and blame, we need to know when we are being watched, and we need to know what those eyes of the spectators are telling us, because we want to look good. (One possible reason for autistic people being socially awkward is that disorders in their neural circuitry make it hard for them to interpret and respond to social signaling through faces and eyes: they cannot read the minds of those around them because they cannot read their eyes.) The human concern for looking good is a major theme of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, particularly in his appeal to the “impartial spectator” as our standard of judgment, because he thinks our moral life is shaped by our sense that people are watching us and by our desire to look good in their eyes. The experiment in Newcastle might explain what happened when Vernon Smith conducted his double-blind Dictator Game experiments, so that it was absolutely impossible for the experimenters to know what decisions the players made: by removing even the subconscious cues that the players were being watched—that their reputations were being judged by the experimenters—players were free to be selfish, and more than 64 percent of the dictators kept all the money for themselves.

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Bowles and Gintis reject this interpretation. They quote from the last sentence of the report on the Newcastle research: “The self-interested motive of reputation maintenance may be sufficient to explain cooperation in the absence of direct return.” To this, they respond: The conclusion is a non-sequitur. It is incorrect to infer from the fact that people act more generously when there appear to be witnesses that people exhibit other-regarding preferences only when they believe, consciously or otherwise, that they are being observed. The above evidence is completely consistent with our view that individuals have moral values that they uphold for their own sake, although their self-assessment as moral beings is highly sensitive to how they fare in the eyes of others. The idea goes back to Adam Smith.50

They then quote this passage from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments: Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favourable, and pain in their unfavourable regard. She rendered their approbation most flattering and more agreeable to him for its own sake; and their disapprobation most mortifying and most offensive (TMS, 116, emphasis added).51

Bowles and Gintis then explain this by citing the twentieth-century sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, who coined the term “looking-glass self,” which means that “we strive to please others not only for reputation (material reward in either present or future), but also because our selfesteem depends on others’ evaluation of us.” Actually, they could have noted that Smith himself uses the phrase “moral looking-glass” (TMS, 112). Bowles and Gintis explain: We internalize norms that provide for us moral and prosocial preferences, and our self-esteem depends on meeting moral and prosocial expectations. While some individuals are capable of maintaining high self-esteem from personal self-assessment, most individuals are acutely dependent upon the positive evaluation of their behavior by others. The looking-glass self is thus an amalgam of personal selfassessment and the assessment of others.52

According to Bowles and Gintis, the point here seems to be that while “the self-interested motive of reputation maintenance” is the partial explanation for why people contribute generously to public goods, it is not sufficient, because some people—even if only a few—are generous because they think it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether this contributes to their good reputation. Most people depend upon how they are judged by others for their self-esteem, and they are the ones who would be influenced by subconscious neural cues of being watched. But a few people can maintain their moral self-esteem from their own self-assessment, and thus they do not depend completely on the opinions of others, although they would prefer to be well regarded by others.

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Although Adam Smith stresses the importance of social praise and blame in shaping our moral conduct, he also seems to agree with Bowles and Gintis that the self-interested motive of reputation maintenance cannot explain the conduct of those few people who love virtue for its own sake. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as we have seen, this is particularly clear in the section on distinguishing the love of praise from the love of praiseworthiness and in the section on “licentious systems” like that of Mandeville (TMS, 113–34, 306–14). Although most human beings need the reward of praise and honor for their good conduct, a few can maintain their selfesteem even when their virtue is not recognized by others. “Though a wise man feels little pleasure from praise where he knows there is no praiseworthiness, he often feels the highest in doing what he knows to be praiseworthy, though he knows equally well that no praise is ever to be bestowed upon it.” Similarly, although it is rare, “a man of real magnanimity” can act “solely from a regard to what is right and fit to be done, from a regard to what is the proper object of esteem and approbation, though these sentiments should never be bestowed upon him” (TMS, 117, 310–11). Smith’s “wise man” and his “man of real magnanimity” seem to manifest what Bowles and Gintis identify as strong reciprocity—doing what is right even when it is personally costly, and when there is no prospect of being personally rewarded by others. But it also seems that such conduct is weak in the sense that it is rare, because only a few people will show such conduct. But why is it that some people—even if only a few—care about doing what is praiseworthy and avoiding what is blameworthy, even when they know that no one will actually praise them for their good behavior or actually blame them for their bad behavior? What’s the psychological motivation for such behavior, which Bowles and Gintis identify as strong reciprocity? Bowles and Gintis suggest: The preferences that constitute strong reciprocity and other social preferences could appear de novo as the result of only a small behavioral modification of either kin-based altruism or reciprocal altruism. In the case of kin-based altruism, those behaving altruistically toward kin may have simply ceased discriminating against the non-kin members of their groups. Likewise, a reciprocal altruist could become a strong reciprocator by simply deleting the proviso that one should condition one’s behavior on expectations of future reciprocation.53

But this still leaves us wondering why human beings would ever want to undergo this “small behavioral modification.” Smith offers a plausible explanation. In explaining a man’s desire to be worthy of praise and not blame, Smith observes, “Nature, accordingly, has endowed him, not only with a desire of being approved of, but with a desire of being what ought to be approved of; or of being what he himself approves of in other men” (TMS, 117). When we praise others, we do so because we think they are truly virtuous, not because of their deceptive appearance of virtue that hides the reality of vice. If we think they have deceived us into thinking

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they are more virtuous than they really are, then we blame them. Therefore, our rules of morality dictate that we praise what is truly praiseworthy and blame what is truly blameworthy. We then feel guilty if we violate these rules ourselves. A man who feels guilty, Smith explains, “anticipates the contempt and derision from which nothing saves him but the ignorance of those he lives with. He still feels that he is the natural object of these sentiments, and still trembles at the thought of what he would suffer, if they were ever actually exerted against him” (TMS, 118). Smith suggests that our natural desire for mutual sympathy of sentiments makes it painful for us to even imagine that others would not share our sentiments. We judge ourselves by how we appear to an imaginary impartial spectator who is not deceived by mere appearances. Consequently, for Smith, what Bowles and Gintis identify as strong reciprocity could be explained as a form of indirect reciprocity, behavior motivated by our concern for having a good reputation, so that we care not only for our real reputation but even for our imaginary reputation. Of course, it is easier for us to do what is praiseworthy when we are actually praised for our good conduct, and that’s why only a few individuals are high-minded enough to always do what is praiseworthy, even when they are not actually praised. So Bowles and Gintis’s strong reciprocity might be better called “the weak reciprocity of the imagined impartial spectator.” Although Darwin never uses Smith’s phrase impartial spectator, Darwin’s account of morality as arising from social instincts of sympathy and reason conforms to Smith’s impartial spectator procedure.54 And as it is for Smith, Darwin sees this procedure as motivating our concern for both our real and our imagined reputations. He observes, “Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us—of their imagined approbation or disapprobation; and this all follows from sympathy, a fundamental element of the social instincts. A man who possessed no trace of such instincts would be an unnatural monster.”55 Darwin recognizes that Smithian sympathy is variable across individuals, and some few individuals, perhaps pure psychopaths, might show little or no concern for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, which would make such a person “an unnatural monster.” Similarly, Smith suggests that those who could commit dreadful crimes without feeling any pangs of remorse would have to fall into “the vilest and most abject of all states, a complete insensibility to honor and infamy, to vice and virtue” (TMS, 118). If our human sense of fairness as expressed in how we play the Ultimatum Game has deep evolutionary roots, then we might expect other animals closely related to us in their evolutionary ancestry—such as chimpanzees—to show a similar sense of fairness. This question has provoked a debate among primatologists and evolutionary psychologists. On the one side, Michael Tomasello and Josep Call have concluded that the expression of a sense of fairness in the Ultimatum Game is unique to human beings, and that chimpanzees show no concern for fairness in their play of the

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Ultimatum Game, because they are actually rational maximizers of their selfish interests.56 On the other side, Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan have concluded that chimpanzees really do show some sense of fairness in their play of the Ultimatum Game, and this suggests that human morality has evolutionary roots in a primate ancestry shared with chimpanzees.57 Brosnan and de Waal have suggested that this sense of fairness did not evolve for the sake of fairness as such but for the sake of beneficial cooperation. Both chimpanzees and human beings are highly cooperative animals who need the cooperation of individuals who are not their kin. Evolution will favor the propensity to cooperate only as long as the cooperating individuals receive roughly equal benefits from the cooperation. Individuals who feel that they are not receiving equal benefits will withdraw from the cooperative activity, and thus those receiving more than their fair share will be punished. Human beings show this same evolutionary psychology of fairness. But they are unique in that their cognitive abilities and their capacity for language allow them to develop and enforce rules of fairness that are far more abstract and complex than is possible for chimpanzees. Unlike chimpanzees, human beings can believe that the moral rules governing their social life are enforced by God and are thus rooted in some divine or transcendent truth. Smith often appeals to God as the ultimate ground of moral authority. This suggests the question of whether religious belief is necessary for morality.

3. Does religion make people moral? At various points in this book, we have raised questions about the importance of religious belief for moral and political order. This first came up in our noticing the religious language of the Declaration of Independence. We see the same language in Smith’s appeals to God as the supreme Creator, Lawgiver, and Judge (TMS, 130–31, 161–70). Did Smith believe it was impossible to be good without God? If so, how could he be such a close friend of Hume, who was reputed to be an atheist; and why did Smith praise him as the model of a “wise and virtuous man”? If morality is rooted in our desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments, and if we judge ourselves to be good when those around us approve of our conduct, then it would seem that morality depends on the judgment of our fellow human beings. But as we have seen, the social judgment of our conduct can be unfair or misinformed, and then we must appeal to a higher court—to the court of our own conscience, to our imagined impartial and well-informed spectator. But when the imaginary praise of our conduct by the impartial spectator is contradicted by the real blame of our conduct by the actual spectators in our lives, it is hard not to be thrown into despair. “In such cases,” Smith observes, “the only effectual consolation of humbled and afflicted man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never

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be deceived, and whose judgments can never be perverted” (TMS, 131). Thus, our happiness in this life is often dependent on our belief in a life to come after death, when God will reward the good with eternal bliss and punish the bad with eternal suffering. Immediately after speaking about this religious doctrine of eternal judgment, however, Smith observes “that the virtuous man who has the misfortune to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and anxiously to believe it” (TMS, 132). The virtuous man doubts this doctrine because some of the most zealous believers in the doctrine have described a divine distribution of rewards and punishments “too frequently in direct opposition to all our moral sentiments.” For example, Christians have often asserted that all of the virtuous pagans—all of the heroes, the statesmen, the poets, the philosophers, and other benefactors of humanity in the ancient world—will be condemned to eternity in Hell. This is contrary to our moral sentiments, to our natural sense of the praiseworthiness of such virtuous people (TMS, 133–34). In other passages in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warns that “false notions of religion” can grossly pervert our moral sentiments (156, 170, 176); and he observes that some thoughtful people might entertain the “suspicion of a fatherless world” (235). In The Wealth of Nations, he laments that in the medieval Christian universities, both moral and natural philosophy were corrupted by being made subservient to Christian theology (771). Comments like these have convinced some readers of Smith that he was not a sincere religious believer, but that he had to feign religious belief to avoid being persecuted or being offensive in a society where Christian orthodoxy was pervasive.58 Other readers, however, have concluded that the prominence he gives to religious ideas must mean that he took them seriously. While Smith could explain human social orders as unintended orders that were not deliberately designed, Otteson has argued, Smith thought that cosmic nature or human nature could be explained only through intelligent design by God. Moreover, by grounding morality in divine law, Smith gave morality a cosmic normativity that it would not have if it were purely a product of natural human experience.59 Ryan Hanley agrees with Otteson’s reading in arguing that Smith’s wise and virtuous man achieves the highest human excellence in transcending self-love by seeing that all human beings are equal in their sacred worth as created by God in His image.60 Smith has a chapter on “the influence and authority of the general Rules of Morality, and that they are justly regarded as the Laws of the Deity” (TMS, 161). Is it significant that Smith says not that the rules of morality truly are the laws of God, but that they are “justly regarded” as the laws of God? He says that this “opinion” is “impressed by nature” on human beings. He explains: Men are naturally led to ascribe to those mysterious beings, whatever they are, which happen, in any country, to be the objects of religious

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Chapter Ten fear, all their own sentiments and passions. They have no other, they can conceive no other to ascribe to them. Those unknown intelligences which they imagine but see not, must necessarily be formed with some sort of resemblance to those intelligences of which they have experience. . . . They could not fail, therefore, to ascribe to those beings, for the excellence of whose nature they still conceived the highest admiration, those sentiments and qualities which are the great ornaments of humanity, and which seem to raise it to a resemblance of divine perfection, the love of virtue and beneficence, and the abhorrence of vice and injustice. The man who was injured, called upon Jupiter to be witness of the wrong that was done to him. . . . These natural hopes and fears, and suspicions, were propagated by sympathy, and confirmed by education; and the gods were universally represented and believed to be the rewarders of humanity and mercy, and the avengers of perfidy and injustice. And thus religion, even in its crudest form, gave a sanction to the rules of morality, long before the age of artificial reasoning and philosophy. That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches. (TMS, 163–64)

Here, like Hume in his Natural History of Religion,61 Smith explains religious belief as a natural psychological propensity for anthropomorphic projection of human mental experience, so that human beings imagine that there are invisible spirits with minds like their own. And since human beings have moral sentiments and passions, they imagine that these divine beings have the same moral sentiments and passions. In this way, religion sanctions morality as divine law, and thus provides supernatural support for a natural sense of moral duty. A philosopher like Smith might then conclude that moral rules are “justly regarded” as divine laws. Even if he thinks this is only a noble lie, does he also think that it’s good for us if most of us believe it to be true? For Smith, religious belief seems to be both supportive and subversive of our moral sentiments. The religious belief that God shares our natural moral sentiments can strengthen our morality, but religious fanaticism can promote violence and intolerance that corrupt our morality. What we need, then, Smith argues in The Wealth of Nations, is “that pure and rational religion, free from every mixture of absurdity, imposture, or fanaticism, such as wise men have in all ages of the world wished to see established” (793). This could be achieved if government dealt equally and impartially with all religious sects, and everyone was free to choose his own religion. There might then be a free marketplace of religions, with hundreds or thousands of different religious sects; and if no sect was allowed to use violent coercion against any others, the competition for believers could induce “philosophical good temper and moderation,” such as one sees in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers have established religious liberty, and the law does not favor one sect over others. Thus does Smith

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embrace John Locke’s policy of religious toleration, but unlike Locke, Smith does not deny toleration for atheists. Smith worries that the morals of some of the small religious sects might become “disagreeably rigorous and unsocial.” To avoid this, the government has two remedies. It can secure the liberty of people to provide popular diversions through the arts—painting, poetry, music, dancing, and the theater—which had been restricted by the Calvinist churches. The government can also promote the study of science and philosophy, at least among the middle and upper classes, because “science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition” (WN, 796). Apparently, Smith foresaw that in a modern commercial society, natural science would replace religious superstition in explaining the natural world. He writes: The great phenomena of nature, the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, eclipses, comets, thunder, lightning, and other extraordinary meteors; the generation, the life, growth, and dissolution of plants and animals; are objects which, as they necessarily excite the wonder, so they naturally call forth the curiosity of mankind to enquire into their causes. Superstition first attempted to satisfy this curiosity by referring all those wonderful appearances to the immediate agency of the gods. Philosophy afterwards endeavoured to account for them, from more familiar causes or from such as mankind were better acquainted with, than the agency of the gods. As those great phenomena are the first objects of human curiosity, so the science which pretends to explain them must naturally have been the first branch of philosophy that was cultivated. The first philosophers, accordingly, of whom history has preserved any account, appear to have been natural philosophers. (WN, 767–68)

In Smith’s time, it was generally assumed that science could not explain “the generation, the life, growth, and dissolution of plants and animals” without referring all of this to “the immediate agency of the gods.” Based on the dating of Biblical history, many people assumed that the natural universe and all of life was created miraculously by God about 6,000 years ago. It was also assumed that the complex design of plants and animals could not have originated by purely natural processes without the miraculous intervention of a divine intelligent designer, which was regarded as natural proof for the existence of God. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume speculated that life could have originated through a natural evolutionary process in which plants and animals that were well designed would survive, and those that were not would perish.62 In 1859, Darwin, in The Origin of Species, elaborated the reasoning and evidence for this idea of evolution by natural selection.63 In 1871, in The Descent of Man, Darwin applied the same theory to human evolution, including the evolution of human religion, morality, and social life.64 In recent decades, evolutionary biologists—like Edward O. Wilson— have renewed the Darwinian study of human morality, and some of them

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have argued that this provides scientific confirmation for Smith’s moral theory, and for the idea that morality can be explained through an empirical science of evolved human nature without any need for a transcendentalist morality based on divine law.65 Against this, many religious believers have argued that the human knowledge of the moral law comes from human beings having been miraculously created by God in His image, and that any atheistic denial of this must subvert our morality. For Darwin, the evolutionary history of religious belief and morality was complicated. The anthropological evidence suggested to Darwin that our earliest human ancestors in foraging societies had no belief in any omnipotent, moral God. Darwin thought that human mental faculties were inclined to an anthropomorphic animism, so that there was a universal tendency for human beings to project their own mental experience onto the world and to imagine unseen spiritual agencies around them. In the earliest stage of human evolution, “anything which manifests power or movement is thought to be endowed with some form of life, and with mental faculties analogous to our own.”66 But these spirits were not omnipotent and moral deities concerned with monitoring human life. Only very recently in human evolutionary history, Darwin observed, have human beings come to believe in an all-seeing and moral God, and this has contributed to the advance of morality. This was a product of cultural evolution rather than biological evolution—driven by group warfare in which groups that were cohesive because of their shared religious belief in moralistic Gods would tend to prevail over groups that lacked such religious beliefs. Now this belief in morality as rooted in reverence or fear of God is “most important, although not necessary.” Now it is possible for people to live by their own moral judgment. “Man prompted by his conscience, will through long habit acquire such perfect self-command, that his desires and passions will at last yield instantly and without a struggle to his social sympathies and instincts, including his feeling for the judgment of his fellows.”67 In this way, according to Darwin, the evolutionary history of morality and religion has passed through three stages. First, in the earliest and longest stage, human hunter-gatherers organized their social lives in small primitive bands through social instincts such as kinship and reciprocity, without any need for a religiously grounded morality. Then, as human beings formed large, civilized societies, they formulated through cultural evolution religious traditions of believing in omnipotent and providential Gods who enforced a moral law for human beings. Now, it is possible for many human beings to live by the inner monitor of their consciences without the necessity for believing in a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad. Recently, the growing research in the evolutionary psychology of morality and religion has largely confirmed Darwin’s account. Ara Norenzayan and his colleagues have surveyed much of this research.68 They

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develop a cultural evolutionary theory of prosocial religions to resolve two interrelated puzzles of human evolution. The first puzzle is the appearance over the past 12,000 years of large agrarian communities of anonymous strangers cooperating with one another, established after the development of agriculture. Our Paleolithic human ancestors lived in small foraging bands comparable to other primates, in which people could cooperate based on genetically innate propensities to face-to-face relationships of kinship and reciprocity. Those social instincts cannot explain the large societies that most of us live in today, which must be explained as products of cultural evolution. The second puzzle is the appearance of prosocial religions with Big Gods or High Gods, Gods who are more powerful, more knowing, and more moralizing than the supernatural spirits of prehistoric religion. Now the majority of human beings around the world are believers in one of the global prosocial religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Norenzayan and his colleagues argue that these two puzzles are linked. The cultural evolution of prosocial religions was one of the major causes for the cultural evolution of large agrarian states. The beliefs and practices of these religions promoted social cooperation in large communities based on the shared belief in a morality enforced by an all-powerful and moralistic God. Like Darwin, they see this cultural evolution as driven by group selection in war: groups with prosocial religions were stronger than groups without such religions. Various kinds of archaeological, ethnographic, historical, and experimental evidence support this theory. The archaeological and ethnographic evidence indicate that hunter-gatherers in small foraging bands have some religious beliefs in animistic spirits that have limited powers and little moral interest in human beings. It was only with the development of agriculture and the establishment of large agrarian societies that we see evidence of priestly religions based on beliefs in powerful, moralistic Gods that sanctify the authority of the social order. The historical evidence from ancient Mesopotamia to the present suggests that social cooperation was enforced through belief in Gods that punished the bad and rewarded the good. Beginning with Plato, as we have seen, philosophers have assumed that moral order is impossible without belief in moralistic Gods. And in religious texts like the Bible, we can see the evolution of God from a morally dubious trickster to a universal moral lawgiver.69 There is also experimental evidence that believing in one of the prosocial religions promotes cooperation and fairness. People around the world playing the Ultimatum Game, the Dictator Game, and the Public Goods Game are more likely to show a sense of fairness if they are religious believers. And yet, as Norenzayan and his colleagues indicate, there is a dark side to this cultural evolution of moralistic religions. As a product of group selection, these religions show parochial altruism: believers are cooperative with their co-religionists, but they can be vicious in their treatment of

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those outside their religious group. This is what Smith identifies as the religious factionalism and fanaticism that distorts our moral sentiments. Religious violence and intolerance have provoked attempts in liberal political thought to overcome the factional conflict stirred by religious belief by promoting religious liberty and tolerance in a free marketplace of religious belief, as proposed by Smith. But as indicated by Locke, some liberal proponents of toleration have worried that moral order might be impossible without religious belief. If Darwin is right, the evolution of conscience or of what Smith called the “impartial spectator” can provide a human substitute for religious morality. Norenzayan and his colleagues agree. They argue that the spread of secular institutions since the Industrial Revolution—including economic, political, and legal norms for enforcing cooperative behavior—has begun to secure social order without the need for religious belief. They cite the example of those countries in Northern Europe today that are wellordered although most people have no deep religious beliefs. Does this mean that we can be good without God? The research of Joseph Henrich and his colleagues showing that religious belief increased fairness in playing the Ultimatum Game also showed increased fairness in societies with market integration.70 People who engaged in a lot of market exchanges tended to develop expectations of fair cooperation and a tendency to punish cheaters. Does this suggest that in a modern commercial society, the desire for a mutual sympathy of sentiments in a free society can generate morality as a spontaneous order without any need for divine intelligent design? The critics of the commercial society might warn, however, that there is a contradiction between markets and morals, which is manifest in the contradiction that many readers see between Smith’s account of morals in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and his account of markets in The Wealth of Nations.

4. Do markets degrade morals? In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith distinguishes two kinds of social order: It is thus that man, who can subsist only in society, was fitted by nature to that situation for which he was made. All the members of human society stand in need of each other’s assistance, and are likewise exposed to mutual injuries. Where the necessary assistance is reciprocally afforded from love, from gratitude, from friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy. All the different members of it are bound together by the agreeable bands of love and affection, and are, as it were, drawn to one common centre of mutual good offices. But though the necessary assistance should not be afforded from such generous and disinterested motives, though among the different members of the society there should be no mutual love and affection,

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the society, though less happy and agreeable, will not necessarily be dissolved. Society may subsist among different men, as among different merchants, from a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection; and though no man in it should owe any obligation, or be bound in gratitude to any other, it may still be upheld by mercenary exchange of good offices according to agreed valuations. (85–86)

The first kind of social order that is based on love and affection arises among people bound together by personal relationships of kinship and friendship. This is possible only in small groups of people who are personally known to one another. The second kind of social order is based on mutually beneficial but impersonal exchange, like trade between merchants. This can encompass large groups of people, because it does not require the close face-to-face relationships of kinship or friendship. Through most of human evolutionary history, human beings lived in small nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers who lived largely in the first kind of social order, because impersonal exchange in markets was limited. With the establishment of more sedentary societies based on farming and herding, there was more specialization in a division of labor with market exchange; and these agrarian societies became much larger. Then, over the last four or five centuries, some societies became even more dependent on extended networks of market exchange. Smith sees here a sequence of four stages: the Age of Hunters, the Age of Shepherds, the Age of Agriculture, and the Age of Commerce (WN, 689–708).71 In The Wealth of Nations, Smith explains this history as a growing extension of market relationships rooted in the natural “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” The final stage of this history is a commercial society. In such a society, everyone depends on the cooperation and assistance of a great multitude of people that they cannot know personally as relatives or friends, and so they cannot expect the help of others from their benevolence only. “Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant, and the society itself grows to be what is properly a commercial society” (37). Is it good for us to live in such a commercial society, where everyone acts and thinks like a merchant, where social relationships are organized by buying and selling? Or is it morally degrading to live in a society where everything can become a commodity to be bought and sold? In the eighteenth century, Montesquieu argued for “gentle commerce”—that commerce had a civilizing effect in polishing or softening manners—and thus that commercial societies would bring moral improvement. But Rousseau argued, on the contrary, that commerce would corrupt our morals. Since then, both Marxist radicals and traditionalist conservatives have taken Rousseau’s side in warning that the spread of the capitalist commercial system would destroy all of the traditional values of love, family, religion, and patriotism.72 On Montesquieu’s side, defenders of the modern commercial society—for example, Steven Pinker in The Better

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Angels of Our Nature—have insisted that commerce really has improved our morals. (We will see this in our chapter on Pinker.) A recent expression of the Rousseauist critique is Michael Sandel’s book What Money Can’t Buy.73 Sandel complains that in a commercial society, where almost anything can be bought and sold, markets degrade morals. Not only are there some things that money can’t buy, he argues, there are many things money shouldn’t buy. Sandel notes that a few years ago, there was a website where you could buy some good-looking fake “friends” for your Facebook page. We know this is silly, because a true friendship depends on an emotional bond that cannot be purchased with money. There are other things that money can buy but shouldn’t. Sandel contends that a human kidney is a possible example. Some people defend the idea that organs for transplantation should be put up for sale in markets, but others find this morally repugnant. A transplanted human kidney that has been bought will function as a kidney, and so the buying of the kidney has not ruined it. And yet, one might still argue that the buying and selling of human organs is morally corrupting and that there are many goods that ought not to be exchanged in markets. Another example of this for Sandel is baby selling. Judge Richard Posner, who is a proponent of applying economic reasoning to the study of law, has proposed adoption markets for the buying and selling of babies.74 This would make the allocation of babies for adoption more efficient than it is now, Posner argues, because the more desirable babies would have higher prices than the less desirable babies, and so those people willing to pay the higher prices would thereby express their preference for the more desirable babies. Surely, most of us, Sandel suggests, would object to this as morally corrupting. It is common for economists to argue that turning a good into a commodity that can be bought and sold does not change the character of the good, but it does make the production and distribution of that good more efficient. That’s why economists like to propose creating financial incentives to promote whatever behavior we might want. After all, the fundamental assumption of modern economics is that in a voluntary market exchange, both parties can be made better off without making anyone else worse off. Sandel objects to this by suggesting that as markets expand into all areas of life, including those traditionally governed by moral norms, the market commodification of goods destroys our moral motivations and promotes a social life governed by selfishness. Sandel indicates that one example of how markets crowd out morals is the study of blood donation by Richard Titmuss. In his book The Gift Relationship, Titmuss compared the British system of blood donation in which all blood for transfusion is given by donors without pay and the American system in which some blood is donated and some bought by commercial blood banks.75 Titmuss argued that the British system worked better and that it cultivated an

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altruistic sense of community, while the American system of commercializing blood created shortages and degraded the community. In response to Titmuss, economist Kenneth Arrow contended that it was a mistake to rely too much on moral motivations. He explained: “Like many economists, I do not want to rely too heavily on substituting ethics for self-interest. I think it best on the whole that the requirement of ethical behavior be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down. . . . We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.”76 This sounds like Smith’s claim that in those many cases where we cannot rely on benevolence to satisfy our needs, we must appeal to people’s self-interest through economic exchange. Sandel objects, however, that this ignores the possibility that benevolence and other moral dispositions are increased through practice, so that they are like muscles that are strengthened through exercise. If this is so, then a commercial society that relies too much on selfishness will weaken our moral character. If Sandel is right, then we might expect that the most commercial societies would manifest the most moral corruption in comparison with other societies in which markets have been less important. Is this really true? Some economists have suggested that there is nothing inherent in market exchange that makes markets morally corrupting. Actually, one might argue, markets depend on morals.77 Voluntary exchange in markets requires trust and a sense of fairness. Before you deal with strangers, you have to trust that they won’t cheat you. You have to trust that your property is secure. You have to trust that social norms of fairness and the rule of law will enforce contracts, protect your property from confiscation, and keep banks sound. You have to trust that the legal system will punish violence, fraud, and corruption. The modern commercial society did not arise in the modern world until the development of the moral infrastructure of the bourgeois virtues. When those bourgeois virtues are absent or weak, markets fail to work. Our recent experience with the global financial crisis illustrates the failure of markets without trust and fairness. Financial markets are built on trust in promises. In primary financial markets, borrowers sell their promises to repay their debts to lenders. In secondary financial markets, investors buy and sell these promises. The problem is that once these promises are made tradable, the networks of trust are weakened, and it becomes hard to judge the trustworthiness of the promises. Imprudent risk taking, unscrupulous greed, and fraudulent deception can then lead to financial collapse. If markets do depend on morals, then we should expect that societies with extensive market experience will show the moral norms of trust and fairness on which markets depend. Experimenting with economic games is one way to test this. Consider the research program that has come to be called “The Roots of Human Sociality Project.” Since 1997, about two dozen anthropologists

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and economists have been studying the evolution of prosocial norms by combining experimental economics and anthropological field ethnography in gathering evidence from 24 small-scale societies around the world. This research has been presented in a series of articles and two books.78 In 1995, Joseph Henrich was a graduate student in anthropology studying under Robert Boyd. After hearing about the results of the Ultimatum Game—mostly conducted with American undergraduate students— Henrich wondered how the game would be played by the people he was studying—the Machiguenga, who live in the Peruvian Amazonian rainforest in small family-level groups that subsist on a combination of hunting, gathering, fishing, and slash-and-burn agriculture. When he had them play the game that summer, he discovered that most proposers offered no more than 15 percent of the pot to responders, and that almost all of these offers were accepted. So, in contrast to the American students, the Machiguenga were acting as rationally selfish maximizers, apparently confirming the Homo economicus model! Boyd and Henrich decided that they should organize a large group of anthropologists and economists who would administer the Ultimatum Game to some small-scale societies around the world, representing a wide range of culturally diverse social organizations. Twelve field researchers recruited subjects from fifteen societies. The Ultimatum Game was played at each site. At a few of the sites, the Dictator Game and the Public Goods Game were also played. All of the games were played anonymously. In the Public Goods Game, the players were individually allocated some amount of money. They could then contribute some of their allocation to a common pool, which was then increased and divided equally among all the players regardless of their contribution. The selfish free-rider would not contribute anything to the common pool. The fifteen societies were from twelve countries on four continents and New Guinea. One was a purely foraging/hunting-gathering society (the Hadza of Tanzania). Others included slash-and-burn semi-nomadic horticulturalists, pastoralists, and sedentary farmers. The money allocated for each game was calculated to be the equivalent of an average day’s wage for each society. The studies of these societies were completed in 2000. In 2002, a second phase of this project was started. Four of the sites from the first phase were included in this second phase, and twelve new sites were added, including a group of Africans in a large city (Accra, Ghana) and a group of Americans in a small rural town in Missouri. In this second phase, three games were played at every site: the Dictator Game, the Strategy Method Ultimatum Game, and the Third Party Punishment Game. In the Strategy Method Ultimatum Game, the responder must say what his response would be to a range of possible offers from the proposer; and that determines the response once the proposer has made the offer, without the proposer knowing ahead of time what the response is going to be. In the Third Party Punishment Game, two players are allotted

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a sum of money (the stake), and a third player gets half of this amount. The first player must decide how much of the stake to give to the second player, with the second player making no decisions. The third player must decide whether to pay 20 percent of his allocation to punish the first player across each of all possible offers. This will measure the willingness of an individual to engage in costly third-party punishment to enforce social norms of fair behavior. As in all of the games, the stake was set at one day’s wage in the local economy, which meant that more money was involved in these games than is typically the case with the games using university students. This experimental research supported four major findings.79 The first finding is that fairness and punishment show both substantial variability and reliable patterns across diverse populations. There is great cultural variability in human societies. In all three experiments, there is substantial variability in the average offers and the willingness to punish low offers. People in Western industrialized societies are very different from people in other societies, and so when undergraduate students in Western countries play these games, there is no reason to assume that their conduct shows a universal human nature. And yet this cultural variability does not mean that human beings are infinitely malleable blank slates on which culture can write just anything. There is a clear pattern in this variation that shows how human culture is constrained by human nature. Offers of 50 percent were always the most acceptable offer. There were very few offers above 50 percent. No society showed an average offer above 60 percent. So there are no societies where most people give more than half, or where most people give zero. The Hadza foragers were the most selfish people, but even they are not completely selfish. In the Dictator Game, 71 percent of the Hadza offered more than zero. On the other end of the scale, neither do we see completely other-regarding behavior. In the play of the Dictator Game, only three individuals out of 427 offered 100 percent. Hume and Smith were right in observing that human beings naturally show limited benevolence. The second major finding is that fairness increases with market integration. Market integration was measured as the percentage of the average diet purchased in a market. In all three games, the strength of fairness (making more equal offers) is correlated with increasing market integration. The lowest average offers were made by the Hadza, a foraging band society in Tanzania with almost no market integration. So it seems that markets promote morals by fostering social norms of fairness and cooperation. A market society does not make people selfish, greedy, and amoral. The third major finding is that fairness increases with an individual’s participation in a world religion. In the societies studied, “world religion” means either Islam or some form of Christianity. As opposed to the indigenous religions in some of these societies, Christianity and Islam teach that God is a powerful and moral divinity who punishes the bad and rewards

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the good. This belief seems to reinforce social norms of fairness as reflected in the play of the Dictator Game and the Ultimatum Game. The fourth major finding is that willingness to engage in costly punishment increases with community size. People from larger societies tend to punish more. This is manifest in both second-party and third-party punishment. This could explain the cultural evolution of social norms that made it possible—beginning about 10,000 to 5,000 years ago—for human societies to expand in size far beyond the small foraging bands that characterized most of human evolutionary history. Those groups with social norms enforced by costly punishment could expand and prevail in competition with those groups that lacked this cultural enforcement of group morality. Henrich and his colleagues have argued that these findings of their experimental game project confirm the claims of Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith that the more market-integrated societies foster moral norms of fairness that facilitate expanded cooperation in the extended order of commercial exchange. Some readers of Smith would object that this misinterprets Smith. Rather than believing that the commercial society would promote the moral virtues, Smith thought that commerce should be a substitute for virtue; and in that way, he was rejecting the ancient and medieval teaching that the purpose of politics was to cultivate the virtue of the citizens. That’s the argument of Joseph Cropsey.80

5. In the commercial society, does commerce take the place of virtue? Cropsey identifies Smith’s commercial society as the system of “liberal commerce” or “liberal capitalism,” and he identifies the primary alternative to Smith’s commercial society as the system of “authoritative virtue.”81 According to Cropsey, Smith’s system of liberal commerce is Hobbesian in being based on the desire for self-preservation as the defining feature of human nature, in contrast to the Aristotelian principle that human beings are by nature political animals. For Aristotle, the purpose of political life is to promote moral and intellectual virtue; but for Smith, commerce takes the place of virtue. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith explicitly rejects Hobbes’s teaching; and he affirms his agreement with Aristotle’s moral philosophy in the Nicomachean Ethics (269–73, 315–18). Cropsey is silent about this. Presumably, he must have thought that Smith was mistaken, but Cropsey never explains this. Actually, in some passages of his writing, Cropsey contradicts his claim about Smith as a Hobbesian by acknowledging that Smith departed from the Hobbesian reduction of human nature to selfpreservation and affirmed the natural sociality of human beings.82 Cropsey says that dying for noble causes shows that human desires go beyond self-preservation. “If the end were living well or nobly, nothing would be easier to imagine than a conflict between the requirements of

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preservation and the requirements of man’s end. The death in battle of every courageous soldier, and the self-sacrifice of all those who have died for high causes, testify to this fact of human life.”83 Cropsey is silent about the fact that Smith says the same thing—that heroism in war shows how a sense of duty and honor overcomes the desire for self-preservation (TMS, 116, 138–39, 191–92). If Cropsey is right that Smith’s “liberal commerce” rejects “authoritative virtue,” then we must wonder, what exactly is meant by “authoritative virtue”? Cropsey says that “Smith rejects fear of the prince as the principle of virtuous society,” because this threatens liberty, security, and justice.84 “Before Smith’s epoch,” Cropsey explains, “it was a settled principle of political life and philosophy that fear of the prince and fear of power invisible were alike indispensable to common life.”85 Cropsey’s only evidence for this “settled principle” is a quotation from Tudor statesman Sir William Paget: “Society in a realm doth consist and is maintained by means of religion and law, and these two or one wanting, farewell all just society, government, justice.” Cropsey claims that Smith’s rejection of this “settled principle” was his “rejection of the virtuous society” and his affirmation of commerce as a substitute for virtue.86 Is it true that Aristotle believed that “fear of the prince and fear of power invisible” were the only way to make virtue authoritative? It is true that at the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle suggests that for many people swayed by irrational passions, the coercive force of law might be the only way to habituate them to virtue. But he also indicates that except for Sparta, almost no other political community has paid attention to the instilling of virtue through legal coercion, and consequently most moral education comes from parents shaping the character of their children and the social enforcement of the unwritten customs of a community.87 In Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle provides a comprehensive account of the social and political formation of the virtues through “friendship” (philia in Greek), which for Aristotle is a general term for all kinds of social bonding in which human beings show some care for one another. Aristotle’s “friendship” coincides with what Hume and Smith called “sympathy”—any kind of fellow feeling or affiliative care among human beings. This would include what Aristotle calls friendships of utility or mutual advantage that can arise among people through commercial activity.88 Darwin adopted this idea of “sympathy” as one of the fundamental themes in his evolutionary account of moral and political order. More recently, biologists and psychologists have used the word empathy in a way that largely corresponds to what Hume, Smith, and Darwin would call sympathy, or what Aristotle would call friendship. All agree with Aristotle: the various forms of friendly feeling or social bonding that unite human beings as individuals, as fellow citizens, and as members of the same species are originally rooted in the natural affection of parental care for off-

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spring.89 “In the household,” Aristotle declares, “are first found the origins and springs of friendship, of polity, and of justice.”90 Smith’s commercial liberalism coincides most closely with Aristotle’s teaching about friendship and philosophy in Books 8 and 9 of the Nicomachean Ethics, which is one section of Aristotle’s writing that shows his propensity to liberalism while also showing many references to his biology. The liberal character of Aristotle’s social anthropology here becomes clear as soon as one notices how Aristotle presents social order as arising spontaneously in the natural and voluntary associations of society.91 Some scholars have seen this as evidence of an ancient Greek tradition of liberal thought supporting Periclean democracy.92 Smith might be seen as following in this tradition of Aristotelian liberalism by arguing for a biological emergence of social order from the natural instincts of human beings as social animals (TMS, 28, 77–78, 86–87, 142, 219–34). While legal coercion is required to enforce the negative rights of justice to be free from violent attack and unfair injury, the other moral duties are enforced through social praise and blame and the spontaneous order of civil society (TMS, 85–86). Smith might also follow Aristotle in looking to the friendship of philosophers as the peak of human happiness that embraces all of the moral and intellectual virtues. Smith claims that the life of a Platonic or Aristotelian philosopher “necessarily supposes the utmost perfection of all the intellectual and of all the moral virtues” (TMS, 216). The friendship of such philosophers is the highest form of friendship that is possible only among men of the highest virtue (TMS, 224–25). Cropsey does not see how this contradicts his claim that The Theory of Moral Sentiments “contains literally nothing on the subject of intellectual virtue.”93 Similarly, Cropsey says nothing about how Smith in The Wealth of Nations stresses the importance of philosophy as produced by the division of labor in the most civilized societies, in which one sees “philosophers or men of speculation, whose trade it is, not to do anything, but to observe everything” (WN, 21). Cropsey ignores Smith’s argument that the contemplative life of the philosophic few flourishes only in civilized, commercial societies (WN, 782–84). The Theory of Moral Sentiments is full of observations about friendship (see, for example, 16–17, 22–23, 32–33, 38–43, 120–25, 129, 150, 174, 219–26, 256, 328). Cropsey is silent about this. His only reference to friendship in his book on Smith is his identification of Hume as Smith’s “senior friend and compatriot.”94 And yet Cropsey says nothing about the prominence that Smith gave to his friendship with Hume, particularly in his famous letter to William Strahan describing the magnanimity and cheerfulness of Hume in facing his own death while conversing with his friends. Recall Smith’s dramatic imitation of the last sentence of Plato’s Phaedo with reference to Hume. Thus, Smith showed how the opulence and liberty of a commercial society would provide philosophers like Hume and himself with the intellectual commerce, the individual liberty, and the

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leisured independence necessary for living a philosophic life with their friends. And yet, Cropsey assumes that there is no place for the intellectual virtues of philosophy in Smith’s commercial society. The intellectual friendship of Smith and Hume arose in a dense social network of friends who met regularly in social clubs in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Smith was a leading member of the Philosophical Society and the Select Society of Edinburgh that meet weekly for discussions of ideas in philosophy, science, and the other liberal arts. Smith was also an active member of the Political Economy Club of Glasgow and the Oyster Club of Edinburgh. These clubs brought together university teachers, clergymen, lawyers, judges, and merchants. These same people came together for public lecture series. Smith gained his first public notoriety from his long series of public lectures on rhetoric and jurisprudence from 1748 to 1751 that he delivered in Edinburgh at the invitation of Henry Home, Lord Kames, a prominent judge who was influential in shaping the intellectual life of Edinburgh. This intellectual commerce in Scotland was also manifested in the publication of journals like the Edinburgh Review and many books. Because of this intellectual activity, Edinburgh became known as the “Athens of the North.”95 According to Cropsey, Smith’s commercial society denies the importance not only of intellectual virtue but also of moral virtue. Cropsey does recognize that Smith relies on social approbation and disapprobation to enforce moral norms. Moreover, in small communities, such as religious groups, “the citizens’ conduct is regulated by their constant mutual surveillance.”96 But, apparently, Cropsey believes that this cannot enforce “authoritative virtue,” which depends upon the coercive force of law working through “the fear of the prince and fear of power invisible.” Here we see the fundamental issue in the debate over commercial liberalism. A commercial liberal like Smith separates the state and society, so that the coercive force of government is directed to securing liberty, while the natural and voluntary associations of society are directed to securing virtue. But for Cropsey virtue can only be secured through the coercive force of a Spartan government. Against Cropsey, other readers of Smith would insist that his commercial society does promote the moral and intellectual virtues, and particularly the bourgeois virtues. That’s the argument of Deirdre McCloskey.97

6. Does the commercial society promote the bourgeois virtues? Smith’s commercial society has also been called a bourgeois society, using the French translation for a German word for those who lived in walled cities, which became the common term for those middle-class urban people who flourish in a modern commercial society. The primary

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cause for the emergence of this society, economist McCloskey has claimed, was a change in ideas, so that while previously the bourgeois life had been scorned as vicious, it was for the first time recognized as virtuous. This began among the Dutch in the seventeenth century and then among the Scots and the English in the eighteenth century.98 There is resistance to the idea of bourgeois virtues from both supporters and opponents of capitalism, who assume that the bourgeois life is driven only by the vices of greedy materialism. At the beginning of Capital, Marx points to “the restless never-ending process of profit-making alone . . . , this boundless greed after riches.” Recently, Thomas Piketty has lamented the growing inequality of wealth in which a few greedy capitalists control most of the wealth as an unearned inheritance. Even those on the right warn about the “problem of the bourgeois” that was seen first by Rousseau—the problem of a society that produces great wealth and a comfortable existence but without the noble virtue and heroic excellence that would elevate the soul above the level of Nietzsche’s “last man.” Against this, McCloskey has made her argument for the bourgeois virtues—first in an article (“Bourgeois Virtue”) in The American Scholar in 1994 and then in a series of books. Also in 1994, McCloskey decided at age 52 to begin her crossing from a man (Donald McCloskey) to a woman (Deirdre McCloskey), which required three years of hormonal treatment and sexual reassignment surgeries. She saw this as an exercise of her bourgeois freedom.99 Pagan philosophers like Plato and Aristotle identified four cardinal virtues—courage, justice, temperance, and prudence. In Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (chapter 13, verse 13), he added three Christian virtues: “Now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; and the greatest of these is charity.” “Charity” (caritas) is commonly translated as “love,” understood as concern for others. Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas have combined these pagan and Christian virtues into a list of seven, which McCloskey adopts. In her article, McCloskey separated the new bourgeois virtues from the older pagan and Christian virtues. The pagan virtues were aristocratic virtues embodied in heroes like Achilles. The Christian virtues were peasant virtues embodied in saints like St. Francis. The bourgeois virtues were mercantile virtues embodied in successful men like Benjamin Franklin. And yet, in her books, McCloskey has been ambiguous as to whether she is arguing that the bourgeois virtues are distinctively bourgeois, differing from the pagan and Christian virtues, or whether she is arguing that bourgeois people in a commercial society are just as capable of displaying the seven traditional virtues as anyone else.100 In her books, she generally seems to take the second position, suggesting that the distinction between bourgeois and other kinds of virtues is “mere verbal shading.”101 So, for example, one could distinguish pagan courage, Christian fortitude, and bourgeois enterprise, or pagan love,

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Christian charity, and bourgeois affection. She understands the bourgeois virtues as “merely the seven virtues exercised in a commercial society.”102 Courage tends to be ranked at the top of the pagan virtues, while prudence tends to be ranked at the top of the bourgeois virtues. But in some situations, aristocratic courage is required even in a bourgeois society. And prudence was as much a virtue for Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as for Adam Smith. It was as true for Smith as for Aristotle and Aquinas that prudence was not the only virtue. For those economists who explain human beings as rational maximizers of utility, prudence understood as a rational calculation of one’s interests would seem to be the only virtue. But McCloskey contends that the moral excellence of the bourgeois virtues requires a balance of all seven virtues. As Aristotle saw, happiness requires some development of all of the virtues. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith gives some account of five of the virtues—prudence, courage, justice, temperance, and charity (or love) (78–82, 173–76, 212–17, 219–37, 267–72). He does not affirm the Christian virtues of faith and hope, although he does recognize that religious belief can reinforce virtue.103 Most importantly, McCloskey insists, Smith never says that “greed is good.” Of course, there is a lot of greed in bourgeois societies, just as there has always been greed in every human society. But there is nothing about a bourgeois society that prevents the cultivation of all seven of the traditional virtues as bourgeois virtues. On the contrary, McCloskey argues, the Bourgeois Revolution that produced modern commercial society has elevated the human moral condition in three ways. First, since 1800 the bourgeois revolution has increased the amount of goods and services for the average person around the world by about 850 percent. Even the poorest areas, as in Africa, have seen at least a tripling of average income since the beginning of the nineteenth century. And in those places were the bourgeois virtues have flourished the most—like the United States, England, Taiwan, and Hong Kong—national income per capita has increased by a factor of nineteen, which means an increase of eighteen hundred percent! Keep in mind what this means, McCloskey exclaims: for the first time in 250,000 years of human history, the majority of human beings are not living in a condition of grinding poverty that ruins their development. The second great improvement in the human condition brought by the Bourgeois Revolution is the increase in the average human lifespan and in the human population. More human beings are living longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history. The population of the Earth has increased from less than one billion to over seven billion, and amazingly most of those people are not starving. But while most capitalist economists point to these material achievements of capitalism in securing longer, healthier lives for more human

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bodies, McCloskey also sees a third achievement: the bourgeois virtues have made us better people by deepening our human souls. She writes: The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people, one person averaged with another, I claim, have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their impoverished ancestors of the pastoral. They have more, not fewer, real friends than their great-great-great-great grandparents in ‘closedcorporate’ villages. They have broader, not narrower, choices of identity than the one imposed on them by the country, custom, language, and religion of their birth. They have deeper, not shallower, contacts with the transcendent of art or science or God, and sometimes even of nature, than the superstitious peasants and haunted hunters-gatherers from whom we all descend.104

One way to put this is that the bourgeois virtues secure a commercial society that is the most desirable society in all of human history, because it tends to provide the fullest satisfaction of the natural human desires. For example, our natural human desires include desires to love and be loved: parental care, conjugal love, familial bonding, and friendship. As McCloskey indicates, in our bourgeois economies, over half of the purchases that consumers make are on behalf of their children, their spouses, their parents, and their friends.105 Bourgeois people are not solitary egoists, because, as Smith observed, “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved” (TMS, 41). Similarly, we can see the natural desire for intellectual understanding expressed in bourgeois societies. Scottish philosophers like Hume and Smith saw that the modern commercial society would provide the conditions for people like themselves to satisfy their longings for intellectual inquiry and philosophic friendship. Socratic philosophy arose in the commercial empire of Athens. And the arts and sciences are more widely available to more people in our commercial societies today than ever before in human history. But surely, critics of capitalism like Thomas Piketty will object, we cannot plausibly claim that the wealthiest people in a commercial society are the most virtuous people. According to Piketty’s data, in the United States today, those people in the top 1 percent of yearly income take almost 50 percent of the total national income.106 The top managers of large firms are often paid tens of millions of dollars a year, 50 to 100 times the average income. Will McCloskey claim that these rich people are 50 to 100 times more virtuous than others? In her response to Piketty, McCloskey admits that the inequality of wealth in countries like the United States probably cannot be completely justified morally based on the merit of the rich.107 She says that it would be good if a Smithian liberal society produced the sort of economic equality that Piketty desires. She points out that even Piketty’s data indicates variation in the patterns of inequality. The recent growth in economic inequality is characteristic only of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and not of the European countries generally.

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McCloskey also argues that improving the absolute welfare of the poor has more moral weight than reducing inequality. Smith was egalitarian in promoting the idea of “allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice” (WN, 664). He saw the liberty and dignity of ordinary people as based on equality of respect and before the law, but not the equality of material outcome. A liberal government will protect private property, which includes the property of laborers in their labor (WN, 138, 715, 783). And while the “system of natural liberty” will allow some people to be richer than others, it will not allow the rich to use the power of government to gain special privileges for themselves and protection from competition in the market. There will be great inequalities of property in such a free-market system, but there will also be “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN, 22). Using the government to coercively redistribute the wealth, as Piketty recommends, would reduce the economic productivity that raises the welfare of the poor. McCloskey warns that the pursuit of an absolute equality of condition would create an equality of poverty. The bourgeois virtues include charity, McCloskey insists. So we rightly expect rich people in a bourgeois society to be charitable, and we should condemn them if they are too greedy in accumulating wealth for themselves and their families. Historically, wealthy people in bourgeois societies have felt a moral duty to give away their wealth for the public good. Andrew Carnegie made such a fortune in the American steel industry in the last half of the nineteenth century that he became the richest man in the world. In his famous essay on “Wealth” and in other writings, he argued that wealthy people like himself were morally obligated to give away most of their wealth to public institutions before their death, and that it was morally corrupting for the children in wealthy families to inherit too much wealth.108 And, indeed, he distributed most of his wealth to libraries, museums, universities, and other public institutions. Other wealthy people in recent years like George Soros and Bill Gates have followed his example. McCloskey presents these people as showing the virtue of liberality as described in the words of Aquinas: “By reason of his not being a lover of money, it follows that a man makes use of it, whether for himself, or for the good of others, or for God’s glory.”109 But despite the liberality of such philanthropy, we might doubt that such wealthy bourgeois people are always exemplars of virtue. In 1892, Carnegie authorized violent methods to break the union that was striking against his steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, which led to some strikers being killed. And while Carnegie claimed to be a proponent of free markets, he lobbied the Congress of the United States to raise tariffs against imported steel that increased his profits.110 McCloskey admits that “these are serious ethical failures.”111 In contrast to McCloskey, Smith had a cynical view of rich merchants, manufacturers, and traders as people who look for every opportunity to

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advance their selfish interests at the expense of the public interest and the interest of workers. Merchants and manufacturers, Smith warns, are “an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it” (WN, 267). “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (WN, 145). Smith worries that his proposal for complete freedom of trade in Great Britain is unrealistically utopian, because it will always be opposed by the private interests of the rich merchants and manufacturers, who will use their influence in the legislature to protect their monopolistic control of markets against competitors (WN, 471, 647–48, 733). Smith also worried that the interests of employers were in conflict with the interests of workers, and that employers would use their advantageous position in negotiating contracts to force workers to accept low wages. In disputes with workers, employers will call in law enforcement to punish workers who have become desperate in expressing their outrage against employers who combine to exploit them (WN, 83–85). Smith suggested that any legal regulation of wages favoring workers over their employers is “always just and equitable,” because employers are so often inclined to keep wages unfairly low (WN, 157–58). Carnegie’s use of brutal methods in the Homestead Strike could be seen as illustrating what Smith feared. In expressing such scorn for how the rich and the powerful exploit the poor and the weak, Smith contradicts his common reputation as a rightwing defender of laissez-faire capitalism; and this supports the claim of some scholars that Smith is actually a man of the left.

7. Is Smith a man of the left, or even a proto-Marxist, in supporting distributive justice for the poor? Smith has generally been seen as the intellectual founding father for those right-wing thinkers (like Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan) who support free-market capitalism and oppose the leftwing tradition of socialism and welfare-state progressivism. Yet in recent decades, some scholars (like Emma Rothschild and Samuel Fleischacker) have suggested that Smith was more a man of the left than of the right, particularly in his sympathetic understanding of the condition of the poor in a commercial society and the need to protect them from exploitation by the rich.112 Karl Marx endorsed Smith’s analysis of capitalism; and in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx quoted Smith 52 times!113 In his Capital, Marx implied that Smith was an esoteric writer, with a surface teaching that offered a bourgeois ideological defense of cap-

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italism and a secret teaching that offered a scientific criticism of capitalism that anticipated Marxism.114 For the libertarian proponents of capitalism like Murray Rothbard, this shows that Smith prepared the way for the Marxist critique of capitalism; and so Smith’s reputation as a defender of capitalism is mistaken.115 Against the left Smithians, the right Smithians have interpreted Smith as predominantly a man of the right in contributing to the intellectual tradition of classical liberalism or libertarianism.116 Strictly speaking, it is anachronistic to identify Smith as belonging to either the “left” or to the “right.” Smith died in 1790, before those terms originated in the French Revolution as designating where people sat in the National Assembly: the supporters of the Revolution sat on the left of the President, and the supporters of the King and the Church sat on his right. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it became popular to distinguish economic and political thought as falling along a spectrum from left to right.117 The identification of economic and political ideas as left-wing or rightwing has varied greatly across time and across countries. But one of the most persistent points of distinction is that those on the left promote an egalitarian understanding of social justice as requiring that government should intervene in the economy to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, while those on the right reject this as a violation of individual liberty. Samuel Fleischacker has shown that the modern idea of distributive justice as requiring that everyone have a certain level of material resources necessary for a decent life is an idea that did not appear until the end of the French Revolution, when “Gracchus” Babeuf declared in 1796 that everyone had “an equal right to the enjoyment of all wealth.”118 Although Smith never explicitly affirms this distinctively leftist idea of distributive justice, Fleischacker argues that Smith does affirm the dignity of the poor and the justice of aiding the poor in a way that contributes to the modern conception of distributive justice. The right Smithians can respond to this by claiming that any governmental redistribution of wealth would contradict Smith’s “simple system of natural liberty,” in which “every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men” (WN, 687). The left Smithians can then respond by pointing out that according to the system of natural liberty, government has three duties—the duty of military defense, the duty of protecting every member of society from the injustice or oppression of others, and the duty of erecting and maintaining those public works and public institutions necessary for the public good (WN, 687–88).119 This shows that Smith saw the need for energetic government, and so he was not a strict laissez-faire theorist. Even Friedrich Hayek, a classical liberal proponent of capitalism, saw the need for governmental planning and welfare-state security.120

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The second duty of government for Smith is protecting people from injustice, and the left Smithians see evidence that Smith was particularly concerned about the unjust treatment of the poor. If labor is the source of all value, as Smith claims, then it must be unjust that those who labor the most are poor, and those who labor hardly at all are rich. The profits of the owners of capital and the rents charged by the owners of land must be seen as extractions from the produce of labor (WN, 65–67, 82). Smith worries about the injustice of the conditions of life among the laboring poor: “No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerable well fed, cloathed and lodged” (WN, 96). In a commercial society, whether the workers can afford good food, clothing, and housing depends on their wages as set in their negotiations with their employers. But Smith worries that employers have an unfair advantage in negotiating wage contracts, and they will use that advantage to keep wages as low as possible (WN, 83–84). For thousands of years, it was generally assumed that the unequal ranking of people in society was rooted in natural inequality, so that the poor were poor because they were naturally inferior. Smith rejected that idea and argued, instead, that human beings were naturally equal at birth, and that social inequality was mostly the product of differences in the cultural circumstances in which people live. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they come into the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference in talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. (WN, 28–39)

So while Socrates in Plato’s Republic indicated that the division of labor was the effect of natural differences, Smith seems to indicate that the division of labor is the cause of people appearing to be naturally different.121 The poverty of the poor is not a natural necessity, it seems, but a product of social conditions that have deprived the poor of the advantages enjoyed by others in the higher ranks of society. The left Smithians see this as suggesting that the duty of government to enforce justice includes governmental activity to alleviate poverty. And while Smith does not explicitly recommend a governmental redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor, he does, perhaps, imply this in one of his maxims on taxation, which seems to point to a progressive system of

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taxation that would redistribute the wealth: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state” (WN, 825). Moreover, when Smith discusses the charging of tolls on the carriages that make use of public roads, bridges, and canals, he recommends a higher toll on luxurious carriages than on the carriages used by the poor. In this way, “the indolence and vanity of the rich is made to contribute in a very easy manner to the relief of the poor” (WN, 725). The right Smithians can respond to this, however, by saying that while this toll on carriages is designed to help the poor by lowering the cost for them of transporting heavy goods, the purpose here is to facilitate commerce and not a systematic redistribution of wealth. The right Smithians might also argue that in recommending proportional taxation, Smith is not recommending progressive taxation. A proportional tax is what we today would call a flat tax, in which the rate of taxation is the same for all taxpayers, but as a proportion of their wealth, the rich will pay more than the poor. A progressive tax requires a higher rate for the rich. The right Smithians will agree that Smith is concerned with improving the condition of the poor. But the best way to do this is to promote commercial exchange and the division of labor. “It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labor, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people” (WN, 22). In any civilized commercial society, Smith believes, there will be great inequality. And in such a society, the government’s enforcement of justice must include protecting the property of the rich against the passions of the poor who would invade that property (WN, 709–15). Economic equality is found only in primitive hunting-gathering bands, which show “universal equality” in “universal poverty” (WN, 10–11, 712). In modern commercial societies there is great inequality of wealth, but this benefits the poor, because even the poorest are generally better off than even the highestranked people in savage societies (WN, 10, 22–24, 276–77, 712–13). John Locke was right about a day-laborer in England being better off than a King among the American Indians. The right Smithians will also say that while Smith believes that the moral virtue of charity or beneficence requires that we help the poor, he contends that in a system of natural liberty, this is a voluntary duty that cannot properly be coercively enforced by government as a compulsory duty of justice. Smith explains this in The Theory of Moral Sentiments through the mutual sympathy of sentiments. When someone violates the virtue of justice by injuring others through violent assaults—attacking them, robbing them, breaching their contractual rights, or attempting to murder them—we sympathize with the resentment of the people injured and their desire to punish the aggressor. And we can thus see that govern-

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ment may properly use force to compel the observance of the rules of justice. But when someone violates the virtue of beneficence by refusing to be generous or kind to others, we sympathize with the hatred or disapprobation that this excites. And yet we see that beneficence is always a voluntary virtue that must be freely chosen, and it cannot properly be extorted by force of governmental coercion. Justice is legally enforceable, but the other social virtues are not. No society can survive if injustice goes unpunished; but a society can survive, though with less happiness, without generosity, kindness, and love. We should promote acts of beneficence by rewarding them with social praise, but we cannot properly use legal coercion to compel people to be beneficent (TMS, 78–87). Here the right Smithians might see Smith as affirming the modern libertarian principle that we cannot rightly use force against one another except in retaliation to the initiation of force. The left Smithians could respond by pointing out that this section of The Theory of Moral Sentiments contains one passage suggesting that government might properly enforce the duties of beneficence. Smith writes: The laws of all civilized nations oblige parents to maintain their children, and children to maintain their parents, and impose upon men many other duties of beneficence. The civil magistrate is entrusted with the power not only of preserving the public peace by restraining injustice, but of promoting the prosperity of the commonwealth, by establishing good discipline, and by discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety; he may prescribe rules, therefore, which not only prohibit mutual injuries among fellow-citizens, but command mutual good offices to a certain degree. (TMS, 81)

If Smith believes the laws may rightly impose “duties of beneficence,” the left Smithians will argue, doesn’t this include the legal enforcement of our duty to help the poor? The right Smithians will respond by pointing out that Smith immediately warns that we need to be cautious about allowing government to compel beneficence: “Of all the duties of a law-giver, however, this, perhaps, is that which it requires the greatest delicacy and reserve to execute with propriety and judgment. To neglect it altogether exposes the commonwealth to many gross disorders and shocking enormities, and to push it too far is destructive of all liberty, security, and justice.”122 Smith gives only one example here of duties of beneficence that might be legally enforced—the duty of care between parents and children. Parents have a duty to care for their dependent children, and children have a duty to care for their elderly parents. Parents and children who fail to fulfill their duties will be exposed to social blame. Should they also be subject to legal punishment, so that parents are legally punished for neglecting their needy children, and children are legally punished for neglecting their needy parents? Smith observes, as a matter of general legal practice in civilized nations, that duties of familial care are often legally enforced.

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In his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Smith explains that in many of the earliest societies and in ancient Rome, parents were at liberty either to care for and educate their children or to abandon them, even leaving them exposed to the weather and wild animals, so that they would die. “As now men are only bound not to hurt one another and to act fairly and justly in their dealings, but are not compelled to any acts of benevolence, which are left entirely to his own good will, so in ruder times, this was extended to the nearest relations, and the obligation they were under to do for one another was supposed to be binding only by their inclination; and all kindnesses between them were reckoned as acts of benevolence and not as what they were bound in justice to perform.” But now, Smith reports, in Great Britain and other Christian countries, parents are legally obligated to care for and feed their children, and children are legally obligated to maintain their parents if they become destitute and unable to maintain themselves.123 So, the right Smithian might suggest, while Smith approves of the legal enforcement of beneficence in this one case—the beneficence between parents and children—he warns that going too far in the legal enforcement of other duties of beneficence will destroy all liberty, security, and justice. Generally, then, Smith insists on the distinction between justice, which is legally enforceable, and beneficence and the other social virtues, which are not legally enforceable, although they are enforced through moral praise and blame. The only moral virtue that is properly enforced by legal coercion is justice understood as a “negative virtue” that “only hinders us from hurting our neighbor” (TMS, 82). In this way, Smith comes close to John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” of liberty—“that the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”124 But surely, the left Smithian will respond, when Smith affirms the duty of government to provide for public works and public institutions, he sees government as concerned with much more than merely preventing us from harming our neighbors. This third duty of government is “that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it, therefore, cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain” (WN, 723). Some of these public works and public institutions will be necessary for military defense and the administration of justice. Others will be necessary for facilitating commerce (such as infrastructure for transportation and communication and protection and promotion of foreign trade) and for public education. Public educational institutions for the young are important for improving the moral and mental condition of the laboring poor, who in a commercial society tend to be degraded by the conditions of their working lives. Smith recommends publicly supported local schools that will provide an

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education for the common people in reading, writing, and simple mathematics. The people of some rank and fortune will have some higher education in the universities before they enter their professional careers (WN, 758–88). The moral and intellectual education of the people of all ages will come chiefly from religious instruction in the churches (WN, 788–814). The left Smithian sees an energetic government at work in all of this. But the right Smithian will point out that there seem to be two strict conditions for a government to provide “public institutions” and “public works”: they must benefit everyone and not just some special interest groups, and it must be impossible for private action to provide these goods. For example, it seems possible that public education could be provided mostly by private action, such as private schools and homeschooling. Smith clearly favors decentralization and private provisioning of these goods as much as possible (WN, 785, 815). And the education of people of all ages is to come from the private free market of religions (WN, 792–96). And yet, even if Smith wants a limited government, it is clear that he thinks that the system of natural liberty does require some governmental activity to provide the military defense, the administration of justice, and the public goods that cannot be provided through private activity and free markets. He is not an anarchist. But some of those people who agree with Smith about the need for a system of natural liberty in a commercial society think that any government inevitably expands its powers to the point that it threatens individual liberty; and so the only way to secure liberty is to abolish government, and to allow social order to evolve spontaneously through private property anarchism.

8. Does the system of natural liberty require private property anarchism? Surely Smith would say that government secures the life, liberty, and property of individuals; and without that security for individual rights, the system of natural liberty would be impossible. A free society could not exist in a condition of anarchy without government. But is government necessary to provide this security for individual rights? Private property anarchists—such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman—say no.125 Smith shows us that our needs for goods and services are best satisfied through private exchanges in free markets. So why can’t we satisfy our need for a secure social order in the same way? If social order can arise spontaneously as an unintended order through the interaction of individuals acting for their individual interests—without the need for a centrally planned and executed design by a guiding intelligence, which seems to be the point of Smith’s market model of human life—then why can’t we have an anarchistic society without government, without a central political authority? Most of us would answer that a social order without government is impossible, because without government, society collapses into disorder or

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chaos. Most of us, then, agree with Hobbes that anarchy—human life without government—is a war of all against all. But is that really true? (Here we return to questions raised in the chapter on Hobbes.) To see the possibility, desirability, and even obviousness of anarchy, John Hasnas has argued, all we have to do is look around and look back.126 We need to look around our world today and see the many ways in which law and order arise spontaneously without government. And we need to look back in history to see how anarchic order without government has emerged throughout human evolutionary history. For most of our history, we have lived in anarchic societies without government, because for hundreds of thousands of years, our evolutionary ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived without any formal governmental institutions. Anthropologists who have studied hunter-gatherers in the twentieth century have shown how they sustain social order with customary legal rules based on bonds of kinship and reciprocity and the arbitration of conflicts by men who have the reputation for trustworthy judgment. Any troublesome offender against the customary norms could be ostracized and expelled from the community or killed. Private-property anarchists like Bruce Benson have cited this research as proof that law originated in anarchy as customary law voluntarily accepted by all the individuals of a society who saw the benefits of peaceful cooperation. Only much later in human history did law appear as authoritarian law imposed from above by some coercive governmental authority (such as a king, a legislature, or a supreme court). The same kinds of customary legal systems found in primitive societies can be found in more complex societies, such as medieval Iceland, Anglo-Saxon England, medieval Europe, the American West of the 1800s, and even in modern commercial societies today.127 David Friedman has pointed to medieval Iceland during the period of the “Free Commonwealth” (930–1262) as one of the best examples of civilized anarchy.128 In the second half of the ninth century, King Harald Fairhair unified Norway under his rule. Some of his people fled his rule and found their way to Iceland, where they established a social system based on Norwegian traditions, but without a king or any centralized executive authority. The only centralized authority in Iceland was an assembly of local chieftains who represented their assemblymen. Every assemblyman was attached to a chieftain to whom he paid a fee. The chieftaincy was private property that could be bought and sold. The assemblymen could change their allegiance without changing their residence, so the chieftaincies were not based on territory. This freedom of assemblymen to move from one chieftaincy to another (along with their fees) created a free competition between chieftains so that chieftains had an incentive to serve their assemblymen. The legal system worked largely through private enforcement based on arbitration. Victims initiated prosecution of offenders. Victims (or their survivors) could agree to a settlement with offenders,

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or cases could be settled by arbitration. If offenders were convicted in court, the judgment would be a fine to be paid by the defendant to the plaintiff. If a convicted defendant refused to pay the fine, he could be declared an outlaw, and anyone was free to kill him. This system worked well for almost 300 years until 1230. By then, six large families had gained control of most of the original chieftaincies, and the competition between these led to civil wars. Once the rich farmers grew frustrated with the disorder of the civil wars, they accepted the invitation of the King of Norway to become part of his kingdom in 1262. Another example of anarchic law cited by Benson and others is AngloSaxon England (from the end of Roman occupation in 410 to the Norman Conquest in 1066).129 People joined voluntary groups of one hundred men or households that settled disputes and enforced customary law. What in a modern legal system would be considered “crimes” against the state were treated in Anglo-Saxon law as private torts, and private parties settled disputes without government. Offenders were required to pay restitution to their victims. Offenders who refused to pay were treated as outlaws outside the protection of law. This system of voluntary and customary law was weakened when the Anglo-Saxon kings expanded their power through the concept of the “king’s peace.” Crimes were declared to be violations of the king’s peace, and criminals had to pay restitution to the king, which increased the king’s revenue. After the invasion of 1066, the Normans expanded the scope of the king’s peace even more. A prime example of anarchic law in medieval Europe is the Law Merchant (lex mercatoria).130 As commercial trade increased in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, merchants needed an international commercial law to regulate their commercial transactions. The merchants themselves set up private courts to settle disputes and develop customary laws for commerce. Merchants recognized the mutual gains from exchange facilitated by this voluntary law, and those merchants who refused to accept this law were excluded from trade. This Law Merchant provided the basis for modern international commercial law. This was all done by private groups without government. A similar kind of anarchic voluntary law emerged in the American West in the 1800s.131 Contrary to the popular image of the early American West as lawless and violent, Terry Anderson and Peter Hill have shown that the wild West was not really so wild, because people formed voluntary organizations to enforce customary norms that protected private property and facilitated peaceful cooperation. From 1830 to 1900, although they were officially under the authority of government agencies, many areas of the American Western frontier were beyond the reach of government. In this anarchic situation, customary law was enforced by private protection agencies, vigilantes, cattlemen’s associations, mining camps, and wagon trains. Today, in the United States and other modern nations, most people assume that the anarchy of past history has disappeared, and now law and

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order depend on the formal institutions of government exercising coercive authority—legislatures, executive officers, courts, bureaucrats, and police. Hasnas and other private-property anarchists insist, however, that if we look around, we can see anarchic law in action as private individuals and organizations formulate and enforce voluntary law without any dependence on governmental authority.132 We should notice that there are more private police in the United States than public police. In shopping malls, gated communities, business offices, schools, and churches, we see privately employed security guards and police agencies, because the public police are unreliable. There were no public police in the United States at all until the 1840s. The New York City police department was not created until 1845. National and international commercial law depends mostly on private mediation and arbitration services. Business contracts usually contain provisions agreeing that disputes will be settled by some specified arbitration service or court. Businesses, universities, homeowner associations, and religious groups all have their own private regulations and judicial procedures for settling disputes. Most of the Anglo-American common law that governs social life in Great Britain and the United States arose originally through an evolutionary process of spontaneous order in which customary law developed through the settlement of actual disputes. Tort law, property law, contract law, commercial law, and criminal law all arose in this way. Most people assume that government had to create these laws through statutory legislation. But what really happened is that much of the common law that arose originally as customary law was codified through legislation. Common law was not created by the deliberate design of those in governmental offices to serve some intended end. It was created by the interaction of innumerable individuals over centuries who were looking for ways to settle disputes that would reduce violence and increase cooperation. This was an anarchic system of law because it arose through the voluntary agreement of individuals rather than the coercive authority of government. That’s the argument of the private property anarchists. Would Smith agree with them? We might think that he should agree with them insofar as they are extending his market model for the spontaneous evolution of order to explain the evolution of legal order without government. But as we have seen, Smith believed that even the system of natural liberty would need government to perform its three duties—military defense, administration of justice, and public goods. So, for Smith, the power of government should be limited but still essential. It seems that Smith is a limited-government liberal, not a private-property anarchist. Smith might agree with the anarchists about primitive societies being anarchic, with customary law but no government. As we have seen, Smith sees the history of society as moving through four stages—the age of hunters, the age of shepherds, the age of agriculture, and the age of commerce.

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Government first arises in the second stage, when disputes over property make government necessary. But when human beings live by foraging— hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants—there is no need for government, since disputes can be settled by informal social authority (WN, 68–90, 708–15). But in at least one passage of The Wealth of Nations, Smith suggests that even hunting-gathering bands are governed by “chiefs” who act as judges in peace and leaders in war (783). The reason for this confusion is that while primitive foragers can live in “stateless societies,” as anthropologists today would call them, because there is no formal institutional structure of centralized coercive authority that would constitute a “state,” there is, nonetheless, some informal and episodic social ranking in which some individuals act as leaders in arbitrating disputes or fighting in war. Whether this is anarchy depends on how one defines anarchy. If anarchy means a society without the centralized government of a state, then this is anarchy. But if anarchy means a society without any kind of governance, then this is not anarchy; and anarchy has never existed in any social order. Some of the private-property anarchists have conceded that a society without governance is impossible, and that what they are identifying as anarchic societies are societies with self-governance, but without a centralized coercive state.133 In all of the examples of anarchic legal systems presented by the privateproperty anarchists, one can see some structure of governmental authority in which some people exercise leadership. Benson points to the Kapauku Papuans of West New Guinea as an example of a primitive society living in anarchy without government. And yet they do have a leader or headman that they call tonowi, which means “the rich one.” He is a person who has earned the respect of others who voluntarily choose to follow him because he is generous, honest, and has good judgment. His authority was based on persuasion rather than coercion. He could even change the customary laws through his own deliberate design, as long as his followers voluntarily accepted the change.134 Although Benson claims that Kapauku society had no government at all, this leadership by a headman looks like government. Similarly, while the “Free Commonwealth” of medieval Iceland was stateless—in the sense that it did not have a centralized bureaucratic state apparatus—it still had political rule. It was a chiefdom, but with multiple competing chieftains. So what we see here is not the absence of government, but rather the freedom from tyranny that can come from a system of decentralized, limited government. Jesse Byock, one of the leading scholars studying medieval Iceland, identifies the “Free Commonwealth” as a “decentralized government.”135 Likewise, the making and enforcement of Anglo-Saxon law was highly decentralized, and yet there was government. Kings always existed, and they could be called upon to help victims of violence who were not strong enough to enforce restitution from a guilty offender. Kings were war leaders, and they expanded their power through centuries of warfare.136 Anar-

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chists have a hard time explaining how military power can be organized without governmental authority. While private-property anarchists have pointed to the evolution of customary law on the American western frontier as an example of anarchy, Anderson and Hill concede that the early American West was “not completely anarchistic” because government agencies “were always lurking in the background.”137 The same could be said about all of the examples of private customary law that anarchists see in modern commercial societies: they all appear under the shadow of government, because people know they can appeal to governmental institutions if private law fails to satisfy their needs. As we have seen, Smith was not an anarchist, because he thought that even a system of natural liberty would need government to exercise some essential duties. But we have also seen that Smith wanted that government to be very limited, because he thought society was best organized through the spontaneous orders of free markets without intrusive governmental intervention. At the end of the twentieth century, that kind of freemarket thinking became widely influential in many parts of the world. We might ask whether the historical record shows the success or failure of such thinking.

9. Does the recent history of economic and financial crises show the failure of Smithian free-market thinking? The critics of Smithian free-market capitalism have pointed to the history of economic and financial crises in capitalist societies over the past two centuries as showing the failure of unregulated markets and the need for energetic governmental regulation to manage such crises. One obvious example is the Great Depression of 1929–1939, a worldwide economic collapse that was especially severe in the United States. Many people have concluded that this illustrates market failure that can only be overcome or avoided by government intervention in the economic and financial system. And it is clear that the response to this crisis produced an enlarged national government in the United States. And yet some economists and historians have argued that the Great Depression arose not so much from market failure as from government failure—particularly, the mistaken policies of central banks, including the U.S. Federal Reserve.138 If this is true, does this suggest that it is better to allow markets to regulate themselves without government intervention? Or does it rather suggest that government regulators should learn from their past mistakes so that they can improve their regulatory policies? Economic historian Barry Eichengreen has argued that policy makers in 2008 and 2009 showed that they had learned the lessons from the policy failures in the Great Recession, and that their policies prevented the Great

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Recession of 2008 from sliding into a Second Great Depression. But still, Eichengreen claims, policy makers were not vigorous enough in their policies for stimulating the economy, and consequently the recovery was slower than it should have been. Does this show that markets need active governmental regulation to avoid or to recover from economic crises?139 In some ways, the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–2009 and the Great Recession to which it contributed provide an even sharper challenge to Smithian thinking than does the Great Depression of the 1930s. These recent crises came after a period that some economists have called “The Age of Milton Friedman.”140 In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of Great Britain. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. Both of these leaders—as well as some other world leaders— professed to follow the free-market thinking of people like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who saw themselves as defending the classical liberal tradition of Adam Smith. Over the next 25 years, free-market policies— such as deregulation of the economy, low tax rates, and free trade—were widely adopted in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. Up to the year 2005, these policies seemed to be successful in producing global increases in wealth, living standards, and democratic freedom.141 But the critics of free-market thought warned that the world was headed toward another economic and financial crisis, which began to appear in 2006 and which seemed to show the dangers of unregulated free markets.142 Through the process of deregulation in the United States (from the late 1970s to the late 1990s), state governments and the federal government removed the barriers that had prohibited banks from opening branches either within states or across state lines. The prohibition against paying interest on demand deposits was abolished, so that banks could compete in attracting depositors. And the federal government removed the restrictions that had separated commercial banking from investment banking. This deregulation allowed banks to expand and to merge into national megabanks with thousands of branches across the nation. One of the most profitable forms of banking activity was home mortgage loans. Banks increased their profits by making it easier for potential borrowers to qualify for large mortgages by reducing mortgage underwriting standards. While traditionally mortgage borrowers were required to make a down payment of at least 20 percent of the price of the house, in 2006 46 percent of first-time home buyers put down no money at all. Many of these borrowers had low credit ratings and low incomes, so there was a high risk that these borrowers would default on their loans. Trillions of dollars in risky mortgages were spread through the financial system as mortgage-related securities were packaged and sold to investors around the world. Housing prices had been growing steadily for many years, but then suddenly in 2006, prices dropped as the housing bubble collapsed. Home owners began to default on their loans. This led to the Great Financial Cri-

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sis because banks had exposed themselves to high risk in making loans and other investments, and also because they had not kept enough capital on their balance sheets to cover the losses from those risky loans and investments. Some of those failing financial institutions were judged “too big to fail,” because their failure could create a panic that would ripple through the entire global financial system. Therefore, the American government used taxpayer funds in 2008 and 2009 to bail out these institutions.143 As a friend and follower of Ayn Rand, and then chairman of the Federal Reserve, first appointed by Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan was regarded as one of the leading proponents of free-market economic thinking. But in October of 2008, as the global financial crisis created a deep recession, Greenspan admitted at a congressional hearing that he was in “a state of shocked disbelief” that free markets had failed to steer the economy away from disaster.144 Like Greenspan, Richard Posner is a prominent exponent of free-market economics. He’s a federal judge who argues for an economic analysis of law as properly directed to economic efficiency and protecting private property rights. But in his book on the financial crisis of 2008, he presented the crisis as a collapse into a depression that showed the “failure of capitalism,” because it was a market failure. This showed the need for government regulation. “The movement to deregulate the financial industry,” he declared, “went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.”145 This same conclusion was drawn by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which was created by the U.S. Congress to study what had happened in the Great Financial Crisis. In 2011, their final report declared: We conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets (emphasis added). The sentries were not at their posts, in no small part due to the widely accepted faith in the self-correcting nature of the markets and the ability of financial institutions to effectively police themselves. More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on selfregulation by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away key safeguards, which could have avoided catastrophe.146

So does the Great Financial Crisis illustrate the failure of Smith’s optimistic vision of how the “invisible hand” could achieve prosperity and social stability through the spontaneous orders of free markets? Or should we say that this ignores Smith’s doubt about whether his “system of natural liberty” was achievable, given the propensities of human nature to the foolishness, fraud, and injustice that create economic and financial crises? Smith studied one of the first modern banking panics to be faced by the Bank of England—the banking crisis of 1772—which was similar in

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some ways to the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.147 Smith saw three troublesome propensities in human nature that can disrupt banking and financial systems. The first troublesome propensity is the tendency of many human beings to irrational risk taking, because they overestimate their chances of success and underestimate their chances of failure. Smith observes that “the chance of gain is by every man more or less over-valued, and the chance of loss is by most men under-valued” (WN, 124–25). This creates problems in lending markets. Borrowers are too optimistic about their prospects for paying back their loans, and lenders who are rewarded for each loan they issue ignore the risks incurred in their loans. This was a big part of the mortgage crisis. Too many borrowers were asking for mortgages they could not repay, and too many lenders were giving out loans that were too risky. Both groups assumed that housing prices would go up perpetually without the bubble ever bursting. The problem of irrational risk taking in banks and other financial institutions extending too much credit is exacerbated by excessive concentration of financial power. When firms become “too big to fail,” they are not punished for their imprudent decisions by going into bankruptcy, because they will be saved by governmental intervention. For the free market economy to work in financial markets, there must be many small banks and financial institutions, which is what Smith recommends (WN, 329). Allowing a bank to fail teaches bankers a lesson. This needs to be done, Smith observes, because banks often do not understand their own interests, and they need to be taught to be prudent (WN, 300–21). The failure of a small bank is not a great shock to the economy. But if banks grow too large, their failure is too great a shock for the public good. The second troublesome propensity is the tendency for our moral sentiments to be corrupted by our disposition to admire the rich and the great (TMS, 61–66, 226, 252–53). The massive financial frauds of recent years can be explained by this tendency. When deceptive financial practices yield billions of dollars of wealth, and when “the great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness” (TMS, 62), then it should not be surprising that great financial frauds are committed. The success of financial transactions depends upon a moral culture of trust, because it depends on promise keeping. Economist Daniel Friedman has written, “Financial markets are where promises are traded: borrowers sell new promises to the highest bidder in the primary market, and investors buy and sell old promises in the secondary market.”148 When moral norms of trust decay, the financial system collapses. The third troublesome propensity is the tendency for human beings to form factions to advance their special interests at the expense of the public interest. “Sometimes the interest of particular orders of men who tyran-

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nize the government,” Smith warns, “warp the positive law of the country from what natural justice would prescribe” (TMS, 341). “To hurt in any degree the interest of any one order of citizens, for no other purpose but to promote that of some other, is evidently contrary to that justice and equality of treatment which the sovereign owes to all the different orders of his subjects” (WN, 654). Rich merchants, manufacturers, and bankers show this behavior. Smith warns: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (WN, 145). “The interest of the dealers . . . in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public” (WN, 267). Thus, Smith foresaw that big business would always be lobbying government to advance the special interests of big business at the expense of the public interest by engaging in what economists today call “rent seeking”—that is, seeking a stream of income from some special privilege (WN, 434, 468, 493-94, 496, 647–48). In their history of modern banking systems, Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber argue that whether a banking system is stable or fragile is the result of political choices in what they call the Game of Bank Bargains. Banking crises arise not from market failures but from winning political coalitions designing fragile banking systems that provide short-term benefits—wealth and power—for members of the coalition at the expense of the long-term public good. Every banking system is created by political deals, they contend, and those deals are guided by the logic of politics, not the logic of the market.149 To understand the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, Calomiris and Haber claim, we need to understand the U.S. bank bargain that was struck by the coalition of megabanks and urban activists. Under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, U.S. banks were required to serve their communities. Various activist groups interpreted this to mean that banks should expand their mortgage lending in poor and inner-city neighborhoods where many borrowers would not be able to satisfy high standards to qualify for the loans. Bankers seeking mergers to create megabanks needed the mergers approved by the Federal Reserve Board, and the Board could be swayed by evidence that a bank had contracted with activist groups to channel credit to low-income communities. Then, under pressure from activist groups, Congress began to put mandates on the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac)—two government-sponsored enterprises—to repurchase the mortgage loans directed to targeted groups. To meet these demands, Fannie and Freddie had to weaken their underwriting standards. They began buying mortgages for people with weak credit scores, little or no documentation of income, and down payments of 3 percent or less. These weaker standards were then extended to everyone

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applying for a loan, so that the American middle class was drawn into the dominant coalition, because now middle-class borrowers could qualify for more luxurious homes than they could afford to pay for, with the expectation that rising housing prices would protect them from financial disaster. Then the bursting of the housing bubble beginning in 2006 initiated the financial crisis. The analysis by Calomiris and Haber is guided by the perspective of Public Choice Theory—by their assumption that people generally pursue their self-interest, and that in a democracy, people form political coalitions to serve their selfish interests by getting politicians, who are motivated by their self-interest in reelection, to favor policies in the interest of the coalition, although these policies are contrary to the long-term public interest.150 Calomiris and Haber draw a deeply pessimistic lesson from all of this: “readers should not expect politicians or regulators to do much to prevent the next banking crisis.”151 But from their account of the Canadian banking system, we might conclude that Canada could be a model for reform. Since 1840 the United States has had 12 major banking crises, while Canada has had none! Canada seems to show that the political Game of Bank Bargains can create a good banking system if the political institutions allow this. Another possibility is to eliminate the political Game of Bank Bargains completely by moving from central banking to free banking. There has long been a debate between the relative merits of central banking and free banking, and libertarians have argued that in a totally free market, every individual would have the right to become a banker and make his own banking policy. The only role of government would be to enforce financial contracts and punish fraud.152 Although it’s hard to find clear historical examples of a fully free banking system, Scotland (from 1716 to 1845) comes closest to the libertarian ideal. Scotland had no official central bank or lender of last resort, no monopoly on the issuance of currency, no legal reserve requirements, and no formal limits on the size of banks. Calomiris and Haber agree that Scotland’s free banking system was remarkably efficient and stable.153 But in their criticism of “libertarian utopianism,” they insist that the Scottish banking system depended on special circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated elsewhere. They also argue that the libertarian understanding of the state as confined to providing military defense and enforcing voluntary contracts under the rule of law ignores the Darwinian historical reality that modern states without governmentally created central banks have not been able to survive. Modern states have had to use banks as a tool to gain military and economic advantages in competition with other states. A prime example of that is the governmental incorporation of the Bank of England in 1694 to finance the almost continual wars with France. When those wars were finally ended with the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, Great Britain stood

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alone as the only world power. And one reason for that triumph was the effectiveness of Great Britain in using its banking system to finance its increasingly expensive wars.154 Since Smith’s Wealth of Nations is an attack on economic monopolies, we might expect that he would oppose any monopolistic banking system with a governmentally chartered central bank (like the Bank of England) having legally granted special privileges. Indeed, in at least one passage, Smith does say that the public good is best served by a banking system in which bankers are “perfectly free” and constrained only by “free competition” with their rivals (WN, 329). But in other passages, he says that regulatory restrictions on banking are necessary to avoid banking crises, although he admits that such regulations are “a violation of natural liberty” (WN, 324). Some scholars have seen this as a fundamental contradiction in Smith’s writing that arose from his misunderstanding of the financial crisis of 1772.155

10. Has capitalism created a climate change that could soon destroy civilization? Critics of Smithian capitalism have seen it as the cause not only of financial crises but also of environmental crises, including the global warming of the Earth’s climate. These critics have argued that slowing or reversing that climate change will require that we move away from unregulated capitalism towards a more centrally regulated society that restricts economic consumption and production. Naomi Klein has defended this position in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.156 Climate change changes everything, she argues, because it provides progressives with the best argument against the ideology of capitalism. Surely, no one can justify unregulated capitalism if it is changing our global climate in ways that must make the Earth uninhabitable. Capitalist economic growth over the past 200 years has been fueled by the energy from the burning of carbon-based fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas. As a consequence of that, global carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere have created a greenhouse effect that has been raising global temperatures. If this continues, and temperatures increase between 2 and 4 degrees Celsius over the next few decades, scientists predict that this will raise sea levels by 1–2 meters. This will result in flooding of many coastal areas, and it is also likely to create severe weather events—hurricanes, storms, heat waves, flooding, and droughts—that will threaten the very existence of civilization. Klein sees a fundamental connection between modern capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, and the burning of fossil fuels that has created global warming. The history of human life on Earth, like the history of all life, has been an evolutionary history of transforming the energy of the Sun into useful work that can sustain living beings in ever more complex

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forms of order.157 The most successful species of plants and animals have been those that have found ever more efficient ways to transform solar energy into offspring. Through photosynthesis, plants turn solar energy into chemical energy that can drive organic activity. Animals capture that energy by consuming plants. Our hunting-gathering human ancestors captured that energy by gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals. At the end of the last glacial period, 12,000 years ago, the warming of the Earth’s climate made it possible for some of our human ancestors to become farmers, and they became more efficient in using the Sun’s energy by cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals. The story of energy then became a story of moving from one source of energy to another. First, all work was done by people using their own muscles. Then, some people forced other people to work for them as slaves or peasants. Over time, people replaced human muscle power with animal muscles–as in oxen and horses. Eventually, human and animal muscles could be replaced by machines driven by the energy of water, wind, and fossil fuel. Using fossil fuel, which holds solar energy captured hundreds of millions of years ago, was crucial for sustaining the Industrial Revolution.158 There wasn’t enough wind, water, or wood in England to power the factories being built in the nineteenth century. British coal fields were close to the surface of the ground and close to waterways on which the coal could be transported. The development of a railway system made the overland transportation of coal less expensive. The harnessing of this energy from coal—and then from oil and natural gas—made possible an explosive increase in the standard of living over the last two centuries in Great Britain, the United States, and other developed economies. Eighty-five percent of that energy that supports this high standard of living comes from burning coal, oil, and gas. And yet, the burning of these fossil fuels has released greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that have raised global temperatures and thus changed the climate of the Earth in ways that could be harmful for human life. So far, temperatures have increased by just .8 degree Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit), but that has been enough to bring about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the acidification of the oceans. As average temperatures increase more than that over the rest of the twenty-first century, more drastic changes can be expected. To slow or even reverse this trend in climate change, Klein argues, we will need global policies of “managed degrowth”—that is, a drastic reduction in our standard of living, so that we use less energy from fossil fuels and can rely more on energy from renewable sources (wind, water, and solar resources). How exactly would that work? And would this really improve human life on Earth? Some of Klein’s critics have complained that she is vague about exactly how this “managed degrowth” would work. Writing in The New York Review

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of Books, Elizabeth Kolbert agreed with Klein that drastic measures are required to save the Earth from the climate change created by capitalism; but Kolbert observed that Klein refused to confront the fundamental problem—that most human beings will not accept the drastic reduction in their standard of living that would be required to slow climate change.159 In fact, even Klein herself sometimes pulls back from “managed degrowth” when she writes that stressing the need for “shrinking humanity’s impact or ‘footprint’” is “simply not an option today, not without genocidal implications.”160 In a letter in The New York Review responding to Kolbert’s criticism, Klein insisted that she was very clear about how to achieve low-emission living. She noted that in her book she had cited the proposal from Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, who provided “a groundbreaking, detailed road map for how 100 percent of the world’s energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water, and solar resources, by as early as 2030.”161 But neither in her book nor in her letter did Klein tell her readers what the “detailed road map” from Jacobson and Delucchi required. If one looks at their article, one sees that what their plan requires is the building of 3.8 million 5-megawatt wind turbines, 5,350 100-megawatt geothermal plants, 500,000 1-megawatt tidal turbines, 720,000 .75-megawatt wave power generators, 1.7 billion 3-kilowatt rooftop solar panel farms, 49,000 300-megawatt concentrated solar power plants, and 270 new 1300-megawatt hydroelectric power plants.162 This would mean erecting 250,000 wind turbines each year for the next 15 years.163 As of the end of 2012, there were a total of 225,000 wind turbines around the world. Similarly, we would have to install 113 million 3-kilowatt rooftop solar panel systems per year. In 2013, the United States installed a record 4,751 megawatts of solar panels, which would be roughly equivalent to 1.6 million 3kilowatt rooftop panels. Delucchi and Jacobson estimate that the total cost of their plan would be over $100 trillion. The total economic output of the world in 2013 was about $75 trillion. So, to pay for their plan, the world would have to spend about 11 percent of the entire world’s economic output ($6.6 trillion) every year for the next 15 years. Klein is silent about all of this. She is also silent about how destructive this would be to the environment. For example, wind turbines require five to ten times as much concrete and steel per watt as nuclear power plants. If Klein’s proposal for “managed degrowth” seems too unrealistic and too costly, what’s the alternative? Can we continue to allow unregulated capitalism to bring climate change? Matt Ridley points out that the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for global warming assume a high rate of economic growth over the next century. “The reason for these rosy assumptions about wealth,” Ridley observes, “is that the only way the world can get that hot is by getting very rich through emitting lots of carbon dioxide.”164 So the real choice here is between a world that is warmer and richer and a world that is cooler and poorer. Ridley thinks a warmer and

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richer world is clearly better, because a richer world is a world that can afford to protect itself against global warming and to develop new energy technologies that reduce global warming. He also argues that the most obvious way to go low-carbon is nuclear energy, because nuclear power plants produce more power with less pollution and greater safety than any other energy technology. The key point for Ridley is that capitalism allows for the bottom-up spontaneous generation of innovation through the evolution of specialization and the division of labor. In such an evolving spontaneous order, we cannot predict the future, because we cannot know what new ideas and new inventions might be discovered by the human mind. So we cannot know how human beings will solve their problems in the future, including the problem of global warming. This is what Klein calls “magical thinking”—the assumption that capitalist markets will always create unimaginable technological solutions to our problems. Her alternative is to argue that the only solution to a problem like global warming is a top-down, centrally planned policy for slowing down economic production and consumption and investing over 10 percent of the world’s yearly economic output to build renewable sources of energy to replace high-carbon sources. But if the fundamental problem here is the capitalist promotion of endless economic growth, even when this growth is environmentally unsustainable, then should we consider the possibility that the only solution to this problem is to move from the capitalism of Adam Smith to the socialism of Karl Marx?

Notes 1

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One of our primary sources of biographical information about Smith is his friend Dugald Stewart, a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, who wrote Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith, reprinted in Adam Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), 269–351. A good intellectual biography is Nicholas Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). The most detailed biography is Ian Simpson Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). See Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). A good survey of the contributions of the Scottish Enlightenment to Western Culture is Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It (New York: Crown Publishers, 2001). All references in the text will be to the page numbers of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, published in cloth by Oxford University Press and in paperback by Liberty Fund. TMS is the abbreviation for The Theory of Moral Sentiments, edited by D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982). WN is the abbreviation for An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, edited by W. B. Todd (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981). Plato, The Republic, 550e. Adam Smith, Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 203. Smith, Correspondence, 204.

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Smith, Correspondence, 221. Plato, Phaedo, 118. James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Otteson, Marketplace of Life, 270. Adam Smith, “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,” in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 203–26. Otteson, Marketplace of Life, 124, 285–89. Smith, “Languages,” 203. See Ronald Hamowy, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Theory of Spontaneous Order (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Norman Barry, “The Tradition of Spontaneous Order,” Literature of Liberty 5 (Summer 1982): 7–58; Craig Smith, Adam Smith’s Political Philosophy: The Invisible Hand and Spontaneous Order (London: Routledge, 2006); and Ralph Raico, Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012). Thomas Reid, Letter to Lord Kames, October 30, 1778, in John Reeder, ed., On Moral Sentiments: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 1997), 66. Thomas Reid, “A Sketch of Dr. Smith’s Theory of Morals,” in Reeder, On Moral Sentiments, 70. Reid, “Sketch,” 77, 81. See Charles L. Griswold, Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 130, 146, 161, 165, 310, 339, 361. Griswold, Adam Smith, 247. See Michael Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). See Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 18–21, 211–30; and Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994). Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Publick Benefits, with a commentary critical, historical, and explanatory by F. B. Kaye, in two volumes (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988). See Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, vol. 1, p. 57. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1168a29–1170b20. See Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism (New York: Signet, 1964); and Peter Schwartz, In Defense of Selfishness: Why the Code of Self-Sacrifice is Unjust and Destructive (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). See Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, with an Introduction by James Moore and Adrian Desmond (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 120–23, 125– 26, 129–30, 147, 155–57, 680–82. Darwin, Descent, 120–22, 130, 155. For a survey of modern evolutionary theories of morality and cooperation, see Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield, SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed (New York: Free Press, 2012). See Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 1, 44–45, 79, 199; Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Robert Boyd, and Ernst Fehr, “Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: Origins, Evidence, and Consequences,” In Gintis, Bowles, Boyd, and Fehr, eds., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundation of Cooperation in Economic Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 3–39. See Ernst Fehr and Colin Camerer, “Social Neuroeconomics: The Neural Circuitry of Social Preferences,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11 (2007): 419–27; Alan G. Sanfey, “Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience,” Science 318 (2007): 598– 602; Alan G. Sanfey, James K. Rilling, Jessica A. Aronson, Leigh E. Nystrom, and Jonathan

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D. Cohen, “The Neural Basis of Economic Decision-Making in the Ultimatum Game,” Science 300 (2003): 1755–58. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 19–20. See Jane Mansbridge, ed., Beyond Self-Interest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). The Ultimatum Game was first developed in Werner Guth, R. Schmittberger, and B. Schwarze, “An Experimental Analysis of Ultimatum Bargaining,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 3 (1982): 367–88. See Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 34; Elizabeth Hoffman, K. Shachat, and Vernon Smith, “Preference, Property Rights, and Anonymity in Bargaining Games,” Games and Economic Behavior 7 (1994): 346–80. Vernon Smith, “The Two Faces of Adam Smith,” Southern Economic Journal 65 (1998): 14. Smith, “Two Faces of Adam Smith,” 16. Steven D. Levitt and John A. List, “What Do Laboratory Experiments Measuring Social Preferences Reveal about the Real World?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 21 (2007): 153–74. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 42. Joseph Henrich, et al., eds., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 94. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, “Origins of Human Cooperation,” in Peter Hammerstein, ed., Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 432. Robert Trivers, “Reciprocal Altruism: 30 Years Later,” in P. M. Kappeler and C. P. van Schaik, eds., Cooperation in Primates and Humans (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2006), 79. Francesco Guala, “Reciprocity: Weak or Strong? What Punishment Experiments Do (and Do Not) Demonstrate,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2012): 1. Herbert Gintis and Ernst Fehr, “The Social Structure of Cooperation and Punishment,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (2012): 28. Polly Wiessner, “Perspectives from Ethnography on Weak and Strong Reciprocity,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (2012): 44. Christopher Boehm, “Costs and Benefits in Hunter-Gatherer Punishment,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (2012): 19. Melissa Bateson, Daniel Nettle, and Gilbert Roberts, “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” Biology Letters 2 (2006): 413. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed., with an Introduction, Afterword, and Commentaries by Paul Ekman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); N. J. Emery, “The Eyes Have It: the Neuroethology, Function, and Evolution of Social Gaze,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 24 (2000): 581–604; and Roxanne J. Itier and Magali Batty, “Neural Bases of Eye and Gaze Processing: The Core of Social Cognition,” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 33 (2009): 843–63. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 44. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 45. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 45. Bowles and Gintis, Cooperative Species, 197. Darwin, Descent, 136–48. Darwin, Descent, 136. See Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximers in an Ultimatum Game,” Science 318 (5 October 2007): 107–9. See Darby Proctor, Rebecca Williamson, Frans de Waal, and Sarah Brosnan, “Chimpanzees Play the Ultimatum Game,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 110 (February 5, 2013): 2070–75; and Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, “Evolution of Responses to (Un)fairness,” Science 346 (17 October 2014): DOI: 10.1126/science.1251776. See Gavin Kennedy, “The Hidden Adam Smith in His Alleged Theology,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 33 (2011): 385–402; and Kennedy, “Adam Smith on Reli-

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gion,” in Christopher J. Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 464–84. Otteson, Marketplace of Life, 239–57. Ryan Hanley, Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 175–208. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, section 3, in Hume, Dissertation on the Passions and The Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40–43. David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part 8, in Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87. See Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 6th ed. in The Origin of Species and the Descent of Man (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1936). Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed., ed. James Moore and Adrian Desmond (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). See Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 238–65. Darwin, Descent of Man, 117. Darwin, Descent of Man, 138–40, 682; Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Norton, 1959), 94–95. See Ara Norenzayan, Azim F. Shariff, Aiyana K. Willard, Edward Slingerland, Will M. Gervais, Rita A. McNamara, and Joseph Henrich, “The Cultural Evolution of Prosocial Religions,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences (forthcoming, 2015). See also Ara Norenzayan, Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), and Ara Norenzayan, “Does Religion Make People Moral?” Behaviour 151 (2014): 365–84. See Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1996); and Robert Wright, The Evolution of God (New York: Little Brown, 2009). See Joseph Henrich, J. Ensminger, R. McElreath, A. Barr, C. Barrett, A. Bolyanatz, J. Cardenas, “Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” Science 327 (2010): 1480–84; and Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, Abigail Barr, and Richard McElreath, “Major Empirical Results: Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” in Jean Ensminger and Joseph Henrich, eds., Experimenting with Social Norms: Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), 89–148. For the history of this theory of four stages of socioeconomic development, see Ronald Meek, Social Science & the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). For a survey of this debate, see Albert Hirschman, “Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?” Journal of Economic Literature 20 (1982): 1463–84. Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2013). Richard A. Posner, “The Regulation of the Market in Adoptions,” Boston University Law Review 67 (1987): 59–72. Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (New York: Pantheon, 1971). Kenneth J. Arrow, “Gifts and Exchanges,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1 (Summer 1972): 354–55. This is the argument of Daniel Friedman, Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Account of the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). See Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd, Samuel Bowles, Colin Camerer, Ernst Fehr, and Herbert Gintis, eds., Foundations of Human Sociality: Economic Experiments and Ethnographic Evidence from Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Jean Ensminger and Joseph Henrich, eds., Experimenting with Social Norms: Fairness and Punishment in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014).

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Joseph Henrich, Jean Ensminger, Abigail Barr, and Richard McElreath, “Major Empirical Results: Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment,” in Ensminger and Henrich, Experimenting with Social Norms, 131–33. See Joseph Cropsey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001). Cropsey, Polity and Economy, xi. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 124, 128, 147. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 116. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 42. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 100. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 110. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179b20–1180b10. See Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (Ottawa, IL: Open Court, 1991). Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a1–33, 1159a27–37, 1160b23–62a29. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1242b1–2. See, e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1159b25–1160a30. See Eric A. Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 50. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 120. Phillipson’s biography of Smith emphasizes this rich intellectual life in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Cropsey, Polity and Economy, 95. See Donald McCloskey, “Bourgeois Virtue,” The American Scholar 63 (Spring 1994): 177– 91; Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010; and Deirdre McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Betterment Became Virtuous, 1600–1848, and Then Suspect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). See McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 68–87; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). See Deirdre McCloskey, Crossing: A Memoir (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). This point is made by Alan Ryan, “Is Capitalism Good for You?” The New York Review of Books, December 21, 2006. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 350. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 508. See McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 306–7. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 24, 28–29. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 56–57. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 323. See Deirdre McCloskey, “Measured, Unmeasured, Mismeasured, and Unjustified Pessimism: A Review Essay of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Erasmus Journal of Philosophy and Economics, 7 (Autumn 2014): 73–115. See Andrew Carnegie, The “Gospel of Wealth” and Other Writings, edited with an Introduction by David Nasaw (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,II–II, q. 117, a. 6. See David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin, 2007). McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, 494. See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Samuel Fleischman, On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”: A Philosophical Companion (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

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2004); and Samuel Fleischman, “Adam Smith and the Left,” in Ryan Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. with an Introduction by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964). See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Random House, 1981), 276, 290, 297, 448, 454, 465. For an elaborate interpretation of Smith as an esoteric writer, see Peter Minowitz, Profits, Priests, and Princes: Adam Smith’s Emancipation of Economics from Politics and Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993). See Murray Rothbard, Economic Thought before Adam Smith: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1 (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1995), 435–502. See Craig Smith, “Adam Smith: Left or Right?” Political Studies 61 (December 2013): 784– 98; and James R. Otteson, “Adam Smith and the Right,” in Ryan Hanley, ed., Adam Smith: A Princeton Guide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). See Marcel Gauchet, “Right and Left,” in Pierre Nora, ed., Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 241–300. See Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 203–26. Abraham Lincoln listed the same three duties as legitimate objects of government in his “Fragments on Government,” in Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don Fehrenbacher (New York: The Library of America, 1989), 301–2. See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, ed. Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 83–123, 147–56; and The Constitution of Liberty, ed. Ronald Hamowy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 369–516. See Plato, Republic, 369b–70c, 374a–76d, 414c–15d. For differing interpretations of this passage, compare Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” 212–13, and Smith, “Adam Smith: Left or Right?” 11. Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence, ed. R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael, and P. G. Stein (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 172–75. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. with an introduction by John Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 14. On the harm principle as the fundamental principle for classical liberalism, see Jethro Lieberman, Liberalism Undressed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). A collection of the best writing on private property anarchism can be found in Edward P. Stringham, ed., Anarchy and the Law: The Political Economy of Choice (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007). See John Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” in Roderick Long and Tibor Machan, eds., Anarchism/Minarchism: Is Government Part of a Free Country? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 111–31. See Bruce Benson, “Legal Evolution in Primitive Societies,” in Stringham, Anarchy and the Law, 624–38; and Benson, The Enterprise of Law: Justice Without the State (San Francisco, CA: Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, 1990), 11–21. See David Friedman, “Private Creation and Enforcement of Law—A Historical Case,” in Stringham, Anarchy and the Law, 586–601. See Bruce Benson, “Are Public Goods Really Common Pools? Considerations of the Evolution of Policing and Highways in England,” in Stringham, Anarchy and the Law, 538–64; and Benson, Enterprise of Law, 21–30. See Paul Milgram, Douglass North, and Barry Weingast, “The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,” in Stringham, Anarchy and the Law, 602–23; and Benson, Enterprise of Law, 30–36. See Terry L. Anderson and P. J. Hill, “An American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism: The Not So Wild, Wild West,” in Stringham, Anarchy and the Law, 639–57; and Anderson and Hill, The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). See Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” and Benson, Enterprise of Law.

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See, for example, Hasnas, “The Obviousness of Anarchy,” 112. See Benson, “Legal Evolution in Primitive Societies,” 629–30, 632–34. Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 94. See Benson, “Are Public Goods Really Common Pools,” 542–43; Benson, Enterprise of Law, 26–27. Anderson and Hill, “American Experiment in Anarcho-Capitalism,” 639, 642. For some of the debate over the Great Depression, see Ben S. Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Murray Rothbard, America’s Great Depression, 5th ed. (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2000). See Barry Eichengreen, Hall of Mirrors: The Great Depression, the Great Recession, and the Uses—and Misuses—of History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See Andrei Shleifer, “The Age of Milton Friedman,” Journal of Economic Literature 47 (2009): 123–35. See Leszek Balcerowicz and Stanley Fischer, eds., Living Standards and the Wealth of Nations: Successes and Failures in Real Convergence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). See Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy (New York: Norton, 2010). For the history of the Great Financial Crisis, see Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010), and Charles W. Calomiris and Stephen H. Haber, Fragile By Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises & Scarce Credit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 201–82. See Edmund L. Andrews, “Greenspan Concedes Error on Regulation,” The New York Times, October 23, 2008. Richard Posner, A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ‘08 and the Descent into Depression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), xii. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Commission Inquiry Report (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2011), xviii. See Hugh Rockoff, “Adam Smith on Money, Banking, and the Price Level,” in Christopher Berry, Maria Pia Paganelli, and Craig Smith, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Adam Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 307–32; and Tyler Beck Goodspeed, “Upon Daedalian Wings of Paper Money: Adam Smith, Free Banking, and the Financial Crisis of 1772,” a Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Harvard University, October, 2014, http://scholar.harvard.edu/goodspeed. Daniel Friedman, Morals and Markets: An Evolutionary Account of the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 100. See Calomiris and Haber, Fragile by Design. See George Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation,” Bell Journal of Economics and Management Science 2 (1971): 3–18; and Anne O. Krueger, “The Political Economy of the Rent-Seeking Society,” American Economic Review 64 (1974): 291–303. Calomiris and Haber, Fragile By Design, 281. This debate has been surveyed in Vera Smith’s The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1990). See Calomiris and Haber, Fragile By Design, 103, 112–14, 169–71, 302–3; Lawrence White, Free Banking in Britain: Theory, Experience, and Debate, 1800–1845 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Goodspeed, “Upon Daedalian Wings of Paper Money.” See Calomiris and Haber, Fragile By Design, 84–101, 491–92. See Goodspeed, “Upon Daedalian Wings of Paper Money,” and Edwin G. West, “Adam Smith’s Support for Money and Banking Regulation: A Case of Inconsistency,” Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 29 (February 1997): 127–34.

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Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014). For the history of life as the evolutionary history of energy flows to sustain high levels of order and complexity against the second law of thermodynamics, see Eric Chaisson, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 139–48, 245–54, 505–11; and Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 214–17, 229– 35, 244–46. On the importance of coal as cheap energy in sustaining the British Industrial Revolution, see Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 80–105. Elizabeth Kolbert, “Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?,” The New York Review of Books, December 4, 2014. Klein, This Changes Everything, 447. Naomi Klein, Letter to the Editors, The New York Review of Books, January 8, 2015; Klein, This Changes Everything, 101. See Mark Z. Jacobson and Mark A. Delucchi, “Providing All Global Energy with Wind, Water, and Solar Power,” Energy Policy 39 (2011): 1154–90. See Ronald Bailey, “Naomi Klein Changes Nothing,” Reason (November, 2014): 69–72. Ridley, Rational Optimist, 332.

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11 History and the Modern State Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History

KEY READINGS Philosophy of Right, Preface, Introduction, Third Part; Philosophy of History, Introduction.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was born in Stuttgart, the son of a revenue officer. He attended the grammar school and the high school (Gymnasium) in his native city. In 1788, he went as a student to the seminary at Tilbingen, where he studied philosophy and theology. His best friends there were J. C. F. Hölderlin and F. W. J. Schelling, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for the French Revolution. After graduation, Hegel became a private tutor in Bern, Switzerland, so that he could continue his studies. He read the Greek and Roman classics, history, and the contemporary philosophic works of Immanuel Kant. But because he felt cut off from his friends, he was happy to move to Frankfurt in 1797 to accept another tutorship secured for him by Hölderlin. Then, in 1799, his father’s death left him a modest inheritance, which allowed him to become a Privatdozent, an unsalaried university lecturer paid by students’ fees. In 1801, he secured such a position in Jena, where Schelling had been a professor since 1798. In his lectures at Jena, Hegel began to formulate the early versions of his philosophic system. In 1805, he was appointed to the salaried position of a regular professor. At this time he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit, which was published in 1807. His work was interrupted, however, in 377

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1806, by Napoleon’s seizure of Jena, which forced Hegel to flee, carrying his manuscript with him. The disorder caused by Napoleon’s conquests forced Hegel to work a short time as a newspaper editor and then to become the headmaster of the Gymnasium at Nuremberg from 1808 to 1816. Teaching philosophy to high school students allowed him to continue thinking and writing. In 1811, at the age of forty-one, Hegel married Marie von Tucher, who was twenty-one years old. They had two sons, and they brought into the family Hegel’s illegitimate son born earlier in Jena. From all that we know, it was a happy family. In 1816, Hegel accepted a professorship at Heidelberg. In 1818, he moved to an even more prestigious professorship at Berlin, where he remained until his death. In Berlin, Hegel became the leading German philosopher of his time. His Philosophy of Right was published in 1821. Afterwards, he devoted most of his attention to his lectures. His lecture notes combined with notes taken by his students were published after his death. The Philosophy of History, published in 1837, was one of the books compiled by editors from these notes. In many of Hegel’s lectures and writings, the predominant theme was history. He was not so much concerned with the simple narration of historical events as he was with uncovering the meaning of history as the progressive unfolding of a universal purpose. The consequences of the French Revolution dominated European history throughout Hegel’s lifetime. Although he was critical of some features of the Revolution, he saw it as the culmination of world history, because it would make possible the complete actualization of human freedom. Can we accept Hegel’s assumption that history works out a rational pattern of perfection?

1. Does history have an ultimate meaning? If we study the history of the world without any preconceptions about its meaning, we might conclude that the selfish passions and violent conflicts of human beings have always produced suffering and confusion. Nations and individuals rise and fall in a random manner. Sometimes the fate of a great civilization depends on the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of a single political leader or military commander. We can imagine how different the pattern of history would have been if Caesar or Henry VIII or Napoleon or Churchill had never been born. We could conclude from this that, far from having any universal meaning, history is largely an accidental succession of events that is only occasionally directed to some end by great leaders. Hegel admits, in the Introduction to the Philosophy of History, that history does indeed seem to be an aimless sequence of changes depriving human beings of any secure happiness. He believes, however, that “a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have

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these monstrous sacrifices been offered?” (History, 27).1 Does this question arise necessarily? In asking what the final purpose of history must be, doesn’t Hegel simply assume without argument that there must be some purpose? Our observations of historical change might suggest that history is a cyclical repetition of things coming into being and passing away. Yet Hegel dismisses this conception as “oriental not occidental” (History, 89). To be Occidental—that is, Western—in our thinking, we must see history as a progressive movement toward a final goal. But is this a generally Western point of view or is it more specifically Christian? The ancient Greeks and Romans were inclined to see history as cyclical—a recurrent pattern of growth and decay. Thucydides, for example, wrote history with the assumption that because human nature does not change, the political events of the past will be repeated in the future. Biblical religion, on the other hand, presents history as a linear progression with a beginning, a middle, and an end. “In the beginning,” we are told in the first verse of the Bible, “God created the heaven and the earth.” We are also told that God has intervened in human history to advance his plan for humankind. The coming of Jesus Christ initiated a new age of history. But Christ must come a second time to complete His redemption of man, which will be the end of earthly history. According to this vision, history is the unfolding of a providential design to be fulfilled at some point in the future. History has a meaning because it has a purpose. We could conclude, therefore, that the modern view of history as progressive depends, directly or indirectly, on Christian faith.2 Hegel even acknowledges the religious foundations of his philosophy of history: “We translate the language of religion into that of philosophy” (History, 25). Yet Hegel could be criticized by both the Christian and the non-Christian. The Christian—Augustine, for example—might complain that Hegel has distorted the Christian vision of history by secularizing it (see chapter 3, section 3). The orthodox Christian distinguishes the earthly City of Man and the heavenly City of God, seeking final redemption in Heaven, not on Earth. This individual has no reason to be optimistic about the pattern of earthly history. Moreover, the humble Christian does not presume to know God’s will for the history of the world. Hegel, by contrast, seems to claim that he can know God’s will and that he can foresee the final redemption of man on Earth. Hegel’s deformation of Christian doctrine is evident in his Phenomenology of Spirit, where he interprets the incarnation of Christ as teaching us that “the divine nature is the same as the human,” so that he can conclude the book with human self-consciousness divinizing itself as “absolute knowledge.”3 From the Christian point of view, Hegel’s philosophy of history is blasphemy. The non-Christian, however, might find little comfort in this. Even if it perverts the Christian teaching, Hegel’s conception of the purposefulness of history must be unacceptable to the non-Christian in that it depends on the Christian vision of faith. Without relying on Christian revelation, is

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Hegel’s philosophy of history a rationally defensible interpretation of the facts of history? “World history,” Hegel declares, “is the progress of the consciousness of freedom” (History, 24). In the Oriental world, people thought only one person was free—the ruling despot. In the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, people thought only some were free—the citizens of the city-states. Finally, with the advent of Christianity, people became conscious of the freedom of all human beings simply by virtue of their humanity. The full actualization of that absolute freedom made possible by Christianity required the Lutheran Reformation and the French Revolution. Therefore, Hegel explains, the modern state, in its dedication to complete human freedom, fulfills the purpose of all previous world history.4 Don’t we commonly accept this view of history as progressive? When we speak of our “modern” world as distinguished from the “ancient” and “medieval” worlds, we divide history into three parts, and we assume that our period of history is the culmination of all prior human experience. We speak proudly of the revolutions of modern times—the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the political revolutions in England, America, and France—all of which manifest progress. And as a consequence of those revolutions, we think that people in the modern Western democracies enjoy more freedom (in every sense of the word) than was ever possible previously. So, it would seem that we agree with Hegel that history has an ultimate meaning, which is progress toward freedom. But is this anything more than an unproven assumption? If we think of the unprecedented tyrannies of the twentieth century—such as those established by Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin—it’s difficult to tell that this is the age of freedom. In fact, observing the horrors of our century has led many people to talk about decline rather than progress. Moreover, it is hard to deny that the historical process is to a large extent accidental. We cannot say that the sequence of events is by necessity because we can always imagine how things could have turned out differently. Indeed, if we believe in human freedom, we must also believe that human beings are not completely determined by historical necessity. To discover the purpose of history, we would have to see the whole course of history from beginning to end, but that would require that we stand outside of history itself. Because we live in history, we cannot fully comprehend either the past or the future; therefore we cannot understand the order of history. Obviously, we cannot predict the future; and consequently we cannot know the final destination of history—or even whether there is a destination. On the other hand, while we can know the past, our view of it is distorted somewhat by our particular standpoint in the flux of history. Discovery of the ultimate meaning of history, therefore, would require some trans-historical knowledge—such as that provided by Christian revelation. There are other problems with Hegel’s philosophy of history. For instance, should we conclude that insofar as the thoughts and actions of

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human beings are historically determined, there are no fixed, natural standards for human life? The Declaration of Independence appeals to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” But Hegel would seem to replace nature with history. If human nature is historical, if it changes over time, there would seem to be no enduring principles in nature to guide political life. Of course, we could say that Hegel points to the end of history as the ultimate standard for politics. But that suggests that until we reach the end of history, all standards are provisional. This is not merely an abstract, theoretical problem. Some of the revolutionary leaders of twentieth-century politics, inspired directly or indirectly by Hegelian historicism, justified shocking atrocities as necessary means to achieve what they thought to be the end of history. In defense of Hegel, we could say that his teaching does not promote revolutionary activism. He does celebrate those rare human beings— “world-historical individuals” like Caesar, Luther, and Napoleon—who shape the course of history as it moves to its final goal. But Hegel leaves it unclear as to whether these individuals are fully conscious of their historical mission. Sometimes he speaks of them as people who consciously make the universal purpose of history their own particular purpose. But often he describes them as “practical and political men” who have “no consciousness” of their historical roles or who at best have only a vague, instinctive grasp of the historical meaning of what they do (History, 39–40). Only the philosopher is aware, after the fact, of the full historical significance of great actions. The irony, therefore, as one commentator on Hegel expresses it, is that “those who make history do not understand it, and those who understand it do not (and should not) make it.”5 This points to another problem. As simply an interpreter of history, does the philosopher therefore have to endorse whatever political arrangements happen to exist at the time? Does Hegel’s philosophy of history manifest a conservative bias that whatever is is right?

2. Is every political philosopher “a child of his time”? In the preface to his Philosophy of Right, Hegel sketches his view of political philosophy. He maintains that every philosopher is indeed “a child of his time” (Right, Preface, 11).6 He also declares: “What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational” (Right, Preface, 10). He explains that “the science of the state” should “portray the state as something inherently rational” (Right, Preface, 11). It seems obvious from these remarks that Hegel was an uncritical defender of the political status quo of his time, which was Marx’s criticism of Hegel. And when we notice how closely his “idea of the state” resembles the Prussian state of the 1820s, we see why Hitler’s National Socialists could cite Hegel as the philosopher of German nationalism. But before we accept these unfavorable interpretations of Hegel’s political philosophy, we should consider the remarks quoted above in their original context.

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Chapter Eleven What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational. On this conviction the plain man like the philosopher takes his stand, and from it philosophy starts in its study of the universe of mind as well as the universe of nature. (Right, Preface, 10) This book, then, containing as it does the science of the state, is to be nothing other than the endeavor to apprehend and portray the state as something inherently rational. As a work of philosophy, it must be poles apart from an attempt to construct a state as it ought to be. The instruction which it may contain cannot consist in teaching the state what it ought to be; it can only show how the state, the ethical universe, is to be understood. . . . To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason. Whatever happens, every individual is a child of his time; so philosophy too is its own time apprehended in thoughts. It is just as absurd to fancy that a philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as it is to fancy that an individual can overleap his own age. (Right, Preface, 11)

To understand what Hegel means in identifying the rational with the actual we must keep in mind that he distinguishes actuality (Wirklichkeit) from existence (Dasein). Whatever happens to exist is not necessarily actual in Hegel’s sense. When something does not fulfill its true essence, it is not actual. As an illustration, Hegel observes that although an adult is rational in essence, a child is only potentially rational and therefore not rational in actuality (Right, section 10A). Similarly, Hegel explains that the state in its actuality preserves a harmony between public interests and private interests. But because a bad state fails to do this, a bad state has existence but not actuality, because it leaves the essence of a state unfulfilled. A bad state is like a hand cut off from a body: Because the hand can no longer fulfill its proper function as a member of a body, it exists without being actual (Right, section 270A). Far from being a complacently conservative principle, the identification of rationality and actuality is a standard of criticism. Just as Hegel can condemn the failure to educate children so that they actualize their rational essence, so can Hegel condemn a bad state for failing to actualize the rational essence of the state. He believes, therefore, that political philosophy “does not remain stationary at the given,” even when “the given be upheld by the external positive authority of the state” (Right, Preface, 3). But what does Hegel mean in saying that the state is inherently rational? We assume that nature is inherently rational whenever we probe beneath the superficial appearances of nature to discover its underlying laws. Why then, Hegel argues, shouldn’t we also assume that the state is inherently rational? Insofar as the state is a product of human reason, we should expect the political order to be even more fully rational than nature. We must not allow the evanescent contingency of political events to distract us from the deeper rationality of political history. The defender of Hegel could also argue that, by linking rationality and history, Hegel promotes philosophical realism. Instead of trying to escape

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from the world through idealistic abstractions, the Hegelian philosopher can feel at home in the world, doing this in the only way a rational being can. Since it is in thought that I am first by myself, I do not penetrate an object until I understand it; it then ceases to stand over against me and I have taken from it the character of its own which it had in opposition to me. . . . I am at home in the world when I know it, still more so when I have understood it. (Right, section 4A)

This still leaves unanswered, however, the question as to whether or not Hegel’s understanding of world history as a rational process is correct. And since Hegel believes that history is the progressive actualization of freedom, we cannot assess his philosophy of history without examining his conception of freedom.

3. What is freedom? “Only the will that obeys the law is free,” Hegel believes, “for it obeys itself and, being in itself, is free” (History, 53). By putting limits on arbitrary impulses and capricious passions, the law of the state does not limit but rather secures the true freedom of the individual. Therefore, “the idea of freedom is genuinely actual only as the state” (Right, section 57). Isn’t it easy to see why many of Hegel’s critics have accused him of distorting the idea of freedom to make it consistent with his political authoritarianism? For he seems to assert that people find true freedom only by submitting blindly to the authority of the state. But consider the reasoning behind Hegel’s concept of freedom. According to Hegel, freedom is self-conscious, rational self-determination.7 To be free is to be self-determined (Right, sections 5–7). Those who are free control their own lives. However, they should also be conscious of their choices as being their own, and therefore they should be self-conscious in their self-determination (Right, sections 228, 260). And yet, what is the self that consciously determines the free person’s life? Because rationality distinguishes human beings from other animals, our true selves are our minds. We are most fully masters of our own lives when we behave according to the laws of reason. A person who is driven by physical impulses is not truly free. “As it is not the animal but man alone who thinks, so also he alone has freedom—and only because he thinks” (History, 86). People by themselves cannot fulfill their rationality unless they conform to the objective rational order of a community. Consequently, freedom is actualized only in a truly rational state. Individual freedom coincides with social duty. “In duty the individual acquires his substantive freedom” (Right, section 149). “Duty is the attainment of our essence, the winning of positive freedom” (Right, section 149A). Because Hegel thinks human beings actualize their freedom only as members of communities, he adopts Aristotle’s metaphor of the political community as an organic body:

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Chapter Eleven The state does not exist for the citizens; on the contrary, one could say that the state is the end and they are its means. But the means-end relation is not fitting here. For the state is not the abstract confronting the citizens; they are parts of it, like members of an organic body, where no member is end and none is means. (History, 52)

To balance the excessive individualism of modern politics, Hegel would revive the communitarianism of Plato and Aristotle, in which the individual was an organic member of the community. But Hegel also wants to overcome the defect of ancient politics, which failed to leave room for the subjective freedom of individuals. He criticizes Plato’s Republic for not respecting the claims of “free infinite personality” (Right, Preface, 10). In Plato’s city, only the philosophic rulers are free. In Hegel’s state, all citizens must be free. Hegel’s project resembles Rousseau’s in that Rousseau also attempts to unite modern individualism and ancient communitarianism. But while Rousseau would do this through small, self-governing communities, Hegel considers this impossible in the modern world as dominated by large states. What is required, Hegel believes, is the combination of a realm of free individuality with a realm of political solidarity in a large nation-state. That is easier said than done. Throughout the history of political philosophy, there has been a conflict between the principle of individual autonomy and the principle of political authority. Strengthening one seems to inevitably weaken the other. Hegel insists that “the idea of the state” unites these principles; however, the idea of the state is an empty abstraction, by Hegel’s own standards, unless he can show it to be achievable in modern history. This is what he must accomplish in the Philosophy of Right.

4. Can the modern state unite individual rights and political duties? Modern democratic politics often emphasizes the rights of citizens rather than their duties. While vigorously declaring that governments must secure individual rights, the Declaration of Independence uses the word duty only once: the right of the people to overthrow tyrants is also a duty. In accordance with Lockean liberalism, rights must be primary; for since any just government arises from a contract among selfish individuals to promote their own interests, the only duty of the individual is to refrain from infringing on the rights of others. This is evident in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens: “Political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every man has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every other man the free exercise of the same rights.”8 But Hegel argues that this elevation of individual rights at the expense of political duties subverts true freedom. The state can fully express

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human freedom only by uniting rights and duties. “The fundamental principle of both right and duty” is “the principle that men, as persons, are free” (Right, section 261). A slave can have no duties; only a free man has them. If all rights were put on one side and all duties on the other, the whole would be dissolved, since their identity alone is the fundamental thing. (Right, section 155A)

If the individual finds personal fulfillment in serving the state, “right and duty coalesce, and by being in the ethical order, a man has rights in so far as he has duties, and duties in so far as he has rights” (Right, section 155). To see how Hegel proposes to achieve this we must look at some of the details of the Third Part of the Philosophy of Right. Hegel distinguishes three moments in ethical life: the family, civil society, and the state. These comprise the three kinds of relationships that human beings can have with one another: particular altruism (the family), universal egoism (civil society), and universal altruism (the state).9 In a family, people make sacrifices for other members of the family, but this altruism is limited to the narrow circle of the family itself (Right, section 158). In civil society, which is primarily concerned with economic relationships, each person cooperates with others only as a means to satisfy selfish interests (Right, sections 182–86). In the state, citizens cooperate with one another out of a sense of political solidarity. The state is like a large family in its altruistic spirit, but the state arises from self-conscious willing rather than biological instincts, which allows the state to be universal in encompassing all citizens (Right, sections 260–69). The bond of a family is love. The bond of a civil society is rational self-interest. The bond of a state is patriotism. In Hegel’s civil society, there are public regulations of the economy to adjust conflicts between producers and consumers, to provide relief for the poor, and to secure the education of the young. But otherwise the free market operates unhindered (Right, sections 236–49). Hegel thinks a modern state must secure civil society as the realm in which individual selfinterest can be expressed, thus satisfying “the principle of subjective freedom” (Right, section 185). In the industrial and commercial sectors of civil society, people belong to “corporations” corresponding to their various occupations (Right, section 250–56). These groups are trade and professional associations that regulate the affairs of common interest to their members. (Contrary to common usage of the word today, Hegel’s corporations are not limited-liability, joint-stock companies.) These associations are similar to the medieval guilds except that they are voluntary organizations. The primary value of the corporations is in creating a sense of unity among their members founded on their shared interests. This is a step toward patriotic attachment to the state. The corporation becomes “like a second family for its members” (Right, section 252).10

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In the large nation-state of modern times, citizens have few opportunities to participate in political affairs, and therefore they tend to withdraw completely into their isolated private lives. Hegel thinks that the corporations provide at least a partial solution to this problem because they are intermediary bodies between the individual and the state that widen the opportunities for people to get involved in the public activity closest to their own daily lives (Right, section 289). Because “the proper strength of the state lies in these associations,” Hegel criticizes the French revolutionaries and Napoleon for going too far in centralizing the powers of government: “France lacks corporations and local government, i.e., associations wherein particular and universal interests meet” (Right, section 290A). Beyond civil society lie the institutions of the state—civil servants, the legislature, and the monarch. As prescribed by Hegel, the class of civil servants conforms largely to the sort of professional bureaucracy that has become a familiar part of modern government (Right, sections 291–97). The legislature has an upper house of members drawn from the nobility and a lower house of elected members (Right, sections 301–2). The election to the lower house is not by direct, individual suffrage. Rather, people vote as members of their corporate groups. Thus the corporations act much like modern political parties in aggregating individual voters according to group interests. Finally, Hegel’s constitutional monarch serves as a symbol of unity but is virtually powerless. In a well-ordered state, the monarch’s approval of the ministers’ decisions is a mere formality (Right, sections 279–81, 279A, 280A). The state, however, as understood by Hegel, encompasses far more than the formal institutions of government. It includes the “spirit of a people,” the culture or way of life of a political community. Therefore “the state, as the spirit of a people, is both the law permeating all relationships within the state and also at the same time the manners and consciousness of its citizens” (Right, section 274).11 We must keep in mind this broad conception of the state if we are to comprehend Hegel’s claim that the state is separate from—and superior to—civil society: If the state is confused with civil society, and if its specific end is laid down as the security and protection of property and personal freedom, then the interest of the individuals as such becomes the ultimate end of their association, and it follows that membership of the state is something optional. But the state’s relation to the individual is quite different from this. Since the state is spirit objectified, it is only as one of its members that the individual himself has objectivity, genuine individuality, and an ethical life. (Right, section 258)

When Locke speaks of a community as established by the consent of individuals to protect their lives and property, he is—in Hegel’s terms— describing not a state but a civil society. Locke’s conception of the individual’s relationship to the state as contractual distorts the political realm,

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Hegel argues, by applying to it a concept appropriate only to the economic realm. This is the same sort of mistake as speaking of marriage as a purely contractual relationship. Even if it begins as a kind of contract, a good marriage eventually creates a spiritual unity of the partners that transcends the selfish interests of each (Right, section 75). When marriage partners worry about protecting their rights under the marriage contract, it probably indicates that the marriage is breaking up. Similarly, when citizens resist the claims of the state by appealing to their individual rights under the social contract, they manifest political decay. But does Hegel’s conception of the state unite rights with duties? Or does it, rather, favor duties over rights and thereby threaten individual freedom? Hegel’s insistence on dutiful service to the state seems to annul individual autonomy. Thus we see again the authoritarian implications of Hegel’s teaching. Two points, however, could be made in defense of Hegel’s position. First, he does, in fact, preserve civil society as the realm of individual freedom. Second, he has a good argument for the claim that even a Lockean regime demands individual sacrifices that must be justified as duties to the state. Hegel wants to have a sphere of political life in which citizens are conscious of public activity as an end in itself. But he also wants to have civil society as a sphere of social and economic life in which people freely pursue their private interests. This requires individual freedom not only in economic activity, but also in private matters such as religious belief. Hegel is careful, therefore, to protect “the sphere of the inner life, which as such is not the domain of the state” (Right, section 270). Hegel rejects ancient political thought in endorsing the modern concern for “private judgment, private willing, and private conscience.” He continues, “The ancients had none of these in the modern sense; the ultimate thing with them was the will of the state” (Right, section 261A). By securing the realm of civil society, Hegel’s teaching incorporates modern individualism. And yet, any modern state—even one founded on Lockean individualism—must be something more than an instrument to preserve individual rights. The state is not a contract at all, nor is its fundamental essence the unconditional protection and guarantee of the life and property of members of the public as individuals. On the contrary, it is that higher entity which even lays claim to this very life and property and demands its sacrifice. (Right, section 100)

Human beings conform to the dictates of civil society because it promotes their self-interest. But citizens must sometimes sacrifice their private interests to the interests of the state. When they do so, they are moved not by the desire for personal gain, but by some sense of patriotic duty (Right, section 268). Hegel therefore agrees with Rousseau about the importance

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of patriotic virtue, although he rejects Rousseau’s claim that such patriotism can be cultivated only in small, participatory democracies. Hegel offers three illustrations of how the moral claims of the state transcend individual self-interest: taxation, capital punishment, and military service. If the Lockean is right about just government existing only to protect the property of its citizens, why should people pay their taxes? To the extent that a person’s tax contributions help other people, paying taxes is a personal sacrifice (Right, sections 184, 299, 299A). Moreover, even if an individual benefits from tax-supported activities, it would serve his or her selfish interests to cheat on tax payments in order to enjoy a free ride at the expense of the honest taxpayers. Of course, many people do cheat on their taxes, but what is surprising is the large number of people who pay their taxes because they think it is right to do so. This is true of the income tax system in the United States. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has to rely largely on voluntary compliance with the tax laws because the chances of a tax return being audited—less than three in one hundred for most taxpayers—are so low that it is profitable in most cases to cheat. In recent years, however, tax evasion has increased greatly because of the growing perception that the tax system is unjust.12 Does that confirm Hegel’s point that the strength of the state depends on its appeal to political justice as transcending selfish interests? Not only can the state take the property of its citizens, it can also take their lives. But the power of capital punishment would seem unjustified if the authority of the state arose simply from the consent of its citizens (Right, section 100). If the only reason for any person to accept a government’s authority is to secure the right to life, why would a citizen consent to allow a government to take away that right under any circumstances? Hobbes failed to solve this problem. Hegel thinks the only way to solve it is to reject the social contract theory of the state’s legitimacy. That we continue to debate the justice of capital punishment indicates how difficult it is to reconcile it with our Hobbesian-Lockean principles.13 Of course, we could abolish capital punishment because it is not absolutely necessary for political order. It would not be so easy, however, to eliminate the other life-threatening power of the state—the claim to military service in time of war. This leads us to ponder Hegel’s disturbing assertion that the moral strength of the state shows itself most clearly in war.

5. Does war preserve the health of the state? In war, Hegel argues, the ethical majesty of the state shines (Right, sections 323–24). If the state is merely a civil society preserving individual life and property, why should citizens sacrifice their lives and property in defense of it? That citizens do make such sacrifices indicates they believe the public interests of the state should outweigh the private interests of civil society. During long periods of peace, citizens become preoccupied

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with their private lives and neglectful of their public duties. With the coming of a war, they are reminded of their need to unite to preserve the state: “The true courage of civilized nations is readiness for sacrifice in the service of the state, so that the individual counts as only one amongst many” (Right, section 327A). Should we see this as evidence of Hegel’s Prussian militarism? Such a glorification of war has had disastrous consequences for Germany. Or should we concede that there is at least an element of truth in what Hegel says? Surely, war brings out both the best and the worst in human beings. It can brutalize, but it can also promote noble heroism. War can create among the citizens of a nation a warm sense of communal unity. Consider, for example, the way Americans talk about the Second World War. Despite the horrors of the war, some of those who went through it were elevated in a way by it. John Kennedy, in his first political campaign in 1946, described his experience of the war with fondness: Most of the courage shown in the war came from men’s understanding of their interdependence on each other. . . . [T]here was built up during the war a great feeling of comradeship and fellowship and loyalty. Now they miss the feeling of interdependence, that sense of working together for a common cause. In civilian life, they feel they have only themselves to depend on. They miss their wartime friends, and the understanding of their wartime friendships.14

That quotation was once used by an American journalist as evidence of a sense of community that has been lost in America as the nation has fallen into “a politics of selfishness.” And as one way to renew that experience of national community, he proposes establishing a national service program in which all young Americans would be required to devote two years to either military or civilian public service activity. Such a proposal seems almost un-American to many people. Even in wartime, the military draft has been controversial in the United States because it assumes that the duty of national service can take precedence over individual rights. Furthermore, even Hegel himself suggested that the American tradition of individualism would make it difficult for the Americans to ever establish a genuine state.

6. Is the United States a state? Looking at the America of the 1820s, Hegel saw a civil society that was without a true state. The Americans did not have a real state because they had only “a community arising from the aggregation of individuals as atomic constituents” in which “the state was merely something external for the protection of property.” There was no truly public realm, Hegel complained, because political institutions were simply means for securing private ends. America was dominated by “the endeavor of the individual

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after acquisition, commercial profit, and gain; the preponderance of private interest, devoting itself to that of the community only for its own advantage.” But immediately after these remarks, Hegel calls America “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself.”15 Does he mean to imply that in the future America will have a genuine state or perhaps even some new, higher form of political order? In any case, Hegel’s criticism of American politics has been echoed by many observers representing a wide range of political viewpoints. Among contemporary political commentators—from democratic socialists (like Michael Walzer) to Tory conservatives (like George Will), from neoliberals (like Charles Peters) to neoconservatives (like Irving Kristol)—there is a general agreement that the United States has been weakened by an excessive reliance on individual self-interest and a failure to cultivate publicspiritedness founded on shared values.16 George Will’s argument is typical. He laments the “disproportionate individualism” of American political culture, and he argues for reviving the notion (set forth by Aristotle, Hegel, and others) that man is a social creature, and the value of his life is to some extent a function of his association with persons whose similar moral construction derives from intercourse in a moral community. He even endorses Aristotle’s idea of political friendship: “The aim of politics . . . is a warm citizenship, approximating friendship, based on a sense of shared values and a shared fate.”17 Could Americans adopt such a Hegelian view of the state without subverting the American tradition of individual liberty? John Kennedy, in his presidential inaugural address, exhorted Americans to patriotic devotion: “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” If we substituted “state” for “country,” that statement would be a perfect reflection of Hegel’s thought. But Milton Friedman, the famous libertarian economist, denounced Kennedy’s remark as contrary to “the ideals of free men in a free society”: To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above him. . . . [H]e regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve.18

On the one hand, the popularity of Kennedy’s remark suggests that America has become a state in the Hegelian sense. On the other hand, Friedman’s conception of America as merely “a collection of individuals” reflects an enduring element of American political thought. The Lockean spirit of the Declaration of Independence would seem to support Friedman’s point of view. For if “Governments are instituted among Men” to “secure” the “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty and the

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pursuit of Happiness,” then the American government should be merely an instrument for advancing the individual interests of its citizens. But the last sentence of the Declaration manifests the same patriotic public-spiritedness invoked by Kennedy: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” In their willingness to sacrifice their lives and property in defense of the new American nation, the signers of the Declaration exhibited the self-sacrificing devotion to their political community that Hegel regarded as crucial for any state. Thus the Declaration exemplifies a strange combination of Lockean and Hegelian themes. We might agree with Hegel that during its early constitutional history, the United States was a civil society without a state, because the weakness of the national government hindered the development of national unity. But since the Civil War, we might argue, the increasing unification of the nation has produced a true state to which civil society is subordinated. According to this view of American history, the first phase of American constitutional history was purely Lockean, but the second was Hegelian. The Lockean founding of the American civil society was achieved by James Madison and the other framers of the Constitution. The Hegelian founding of the American state was begun by Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln—as indicated in the Gettysburg Address and other speeches— thought that the American people were bound together as one nation by their dedication to a high moral principle—“the proposition that all men are created equal.” He thought that those who opposed this moral ideal would corrupt the people by “insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”19 For it was through their dedication to equality that the American people were a moral community rather than just a collection of selfish individuals. Even during the Civil War, through his rhetoric Lincoln sought to sustain that sense of community based on a shared moral principle: We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.20

It had always been thought that “political friendship” was possible only in communities small enough that all the citizens could develop common interests through face-to-face, personal relationships. That was why those of the Jeffersonian tradition in America favored local and state governments and feared the power of the national government. But Hegel argued that in the large, modern nation-state, there could be a moral community nourished by patriotic solidarity even without face-to-face contact. Lincoln seems

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to put that idea into practice with his conception of an American national community of friends whose friendship depends on their shared dedication to the principle of equality. In the words of George Will, Lincoln thought “the fact that Americans were not physically close might be compensated for by making them morally close through a crucial shared proposition.”21 There is evidence that Lincoln’s Hegelian conception of a national community has shaped the history of American political thought and practice to the present day. For example, political scientist Samuel Beer has traced through American history what he calls “the national idea.” As he understands it, this idea encompasses more than just the centralization of power in the national government: It means not only governmental unification, but also national integration. . . . [I]ts imperative is . . . to make the nation more solidary, more cohesive, more interdependent in its growing diversity—in short, to make the American nation more of a nation.22

The welfare state programs initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, the enforcement of the Supreme Court’s decisions requiring racially integrated public schools, the various federal civil rights laws—all of these national programs have deepened the American dedication to the principle of equality, thus making the American nation more of a nation. Or perhaps we should say the United States has become more of a state. Some critics of American politics, however, would say that the capitalist economy of the United States promotes an inequality of wealth that always impedes the American dedication to equality. Some of the more radical critics would suggest that we need to advance beyond the Hegelian state to Marxist communism. Marx saw the need to eliminate class conflict by establishing a classless society in which human beings would experience a genuine sense of community for the first time. Hegel struggled to overcome the conflict between individual rights and social duties, but Marx thought this conflict would disappear with the emergence of “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”23 Marx agreed with Hegel that history was evolving toward an ever greater satisfaction of the human longing for freedom. But unlike Hegel, Marx believed that complete freedom would be achieved in a communist society, which would constitute the end of history. Some political commentators have announced that we reached the end of history in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Contrary to Marx’s prediction, however, it seems that history has found its consummation not in a communist society, but in liberal democracy.

7. Have we reached the end of history? In 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a deputy director of the American State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, wrote an article announcing that, since

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the Cold War had ended with the triumph of liberal democracy over communism, we had reached the end of history. Three years later, he elaborated his argument in a book.24 His article provoked a worldwide debate among scholars and political leaders. Even President George H. W. Bush, in his State of the Union Address of 1992, responded to Fukuyama’s article by claiming that the end of the Cold War meant not the end of history, but the resumption of history. We should examine Fukuyama’s argument, because he claims to have drawn his fundamental ideas from Hegel. Actually, his reasoning relies less on Hegel than on a controversial interpretation of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, who emphasized Hegel’s account of the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit.25 Nevertheless, the idea that history has a direction and a purpose, if not an end, is surely Hegelian, at least in spirit. History as a continuing series of unpredictable events will never come to an end, Fukuyama concedes. But history as the human search for the fully satisfying social order has come to an end, he insists, because most of the people in the world today agree in principle that liberal democracy is the only fully satisfying social order. In practice, of course, the ideals of liberal democracy—liberty and equality for all—have not been completely attained. Nevertheless, even if we disagree about how best to achieve these ideals, most of us agree on the ideals themselves. Never before has this happened, because in all previous history there were fundamental disagreements about what the ideal society would be like. To be sure, there seems to be some resistance to liberal ideals in certain parts of the world today—Islamic fundamentalism, for example. But Fukuyama argues that although such resistance can create a lot of international conflict, this will only delay the inevitable victory of liberal democracy. According to Fukuyama, there are two reasons for the triumph of liberal ideals. First, liberalism satisfies the human desire for material security and comfort through economic productivity and the scientific conquest of nature. Second, liberalism satisfies the human desire for recognition through an egalitarian cultural and political order in which all human beings are recognized as equal in their dignity. Thus, the history of human striving for satisfaction comes to an end when human beings discover that liberal democracy is the only social order that satisfies their deepest longings—the longing for material prosperity and the longing for nonmaterial recognition. There are many possible criticisms of Fukuyama’s position.26 First, it is not clear that Fukuyama is faithful either to Hegel or to Kojève. Although we have seen some of the liberal elements of Hegel’s political teaching, we have also seen his defense of a communitarian, corporate state as superior to the liberal individualism of civil society. And Kojève was hardly an orthodox liberal, because he identified himself as a Stalinist Marxist.27 Even if we abstract from his interpretations of Hegel and Kojève and assess Fukuyama’s arguments on their own merits, we might still criticize him for his internal contradictions. His fundamental claim is that history

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has come to an end because liberal democracy completely satisfies the most essential desires of human beings. But near the end of his book he concludes: “No regime . . . is able to satisfy all men in all places. This includes liberal democracy. . . . Thus those who remain dissatisfied will always have the potential to restart history.” He repeats this in the very last sentence of the book.28 Fukuyama agrees with Plato’s account of human nature as composed of three parts: appetite, spiritedness (thymos), and reason. He argues consistently that liberal democracy satisfies appetite through the material prosperity of capitalist economics. But he vacillates over whether liberalism can satisfy spiritedness or the desire for recognition. Sometimes he argues that liberalism provides recognition through the principle of equal recognition for all. But at other times he agrees with Nietzsche that the recognition of all people as equal will not satisfy those who are unequal, and thus a society based on equal recognition must mean dehumanization through a slave morality in which human beings are reduced to comfortseeking animals. Fukuyama assumes that reason has no independent status apart from its connection to appetite or spiritedness; and thus he does not consider Plato’s claim that the fullest satisfaction of human longings comes only through the rational life of philosophy as that which conforms to the highest in human nature, which was argued by Leo Strauss in his debate with Kojève.29 Liberal democracy certainly does not allow philosophers to rule. But does it, at least, allow those few with the desire and ability for it to pursue the philosophic life? Or does liberalism promote a soft relativism that discourages even potential philosophers from taking philosophy seriously? Fukuyama does not raise these questions, but he should have. To his credit, however, Fukuyama does raise fundamental questions about the greatest political development of our times: although many people criticize liberal democracy for failing to live up to its ideals, almost no one in any position of influence (at least in the Western world) criticizes the liberal democratic ideals of equality and liberty. Does this mean that the principles of the Declaration of Independence have become the only principles of political legitimacy for most people around the world? Does this mean that those principles are, indeed, “self-evident” to any human being who understands them, because they satisfy the deepest yearnings of human nature? Before we accept that conclusion, we should question Fukuyama’s claim that Marxist communism is not a serious alternative. Although he takes seriously Nietzsche’s complaint from the political Right that liberal democracy treats unequal people as if they were equal, he too quickly dismisses Marx’s complaint from the political Left that liberal democracy treats equal people as if they were unequal.

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Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

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15 16

The reference is to G. W. F. Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1953), which is a partial translation of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History. Other references to this translation are indicated in the same manner. For elaboration of these points, see Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949). R. G. Collingwood explains that, unlike Greco-Roman history, “any history written on Christian principles will be of necessity universal, providential, apocalyptic, and periodized” (The Idea of History [New York: Oxford University Press, 1956], 49). On Hegel’s political thought as a combination of classical and Christian elements, see Michael B. Foster, The Political Philosophies of Plato and Hegel (New York: Russell & Russell, 1935). G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 460. On Hegel’s philosophy of history as a deformation of Christian experience, see Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), 260–71; and Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968). See Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1956), 133–48. Shlomo Avineri, Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 234. The reference is to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). For references to the Preface, I will indicate the page numbers in the Knox translation. All other references are to the standard section numbers. I have drawn this formulation from Richard L. Schacht, “Hegel on Freedom,” in Alasdair MacIntyre, ed., Hegel (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1972), 289–328. The importance of freedom for Hegel is stressed in Michael Oakeshott’s interpretation of Hegel’s state as a “civil association [of] persons related to one another in the enjoyment of a self-chosen multiplicity of conduct” (On Human Conduct [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975], 256–57). Oakeshott’s “On the Character of a Modern European State” (On Human Conduct, 185–326) is a brilliant essay on the subject. The French Declaration can be found in Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (New York: Dutton, 1951), 94–97. Here I am indebted to Avineri’s commentary in Hegel’s Theory, 133–34. On the idea of corporatism in recent political theory, see Philippe C. Schmitter, “Still the Century of Corporatism?” Review of Politics 36 (January 1974): 85–131. I have altered Knox’s translation by translating Geist as “spirit” and Volk as “people.” See Shlomo Maital, Minds, Markets & Money (New York: Basic Books, 1982), 239–60. Consider Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 172–73: Capital punishment . . . serves to remind us of the majesty of the moral order that is embodied in our law and of the terrible consequences of its breach. . . . The criminal law must possess a dignity far beyond that possessed by mere statutory enactment or utilitarian and self-interested calculations; the most powerful means we have to give it that dignity is to authorize it to impose the ultimate penalty. . . . It must remind us of the moral order by which alone we can live as human beings, and in our day the only punishment that can do this is capital punishment. Compare Hegel, Philosophy of Right, secs. 99–103, 99A, 101A. For contrasting views, see Lawrence Kohlberg, The Philosophy of Moral Development (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 243–93; and Hugo Adam Bedau, ed., The Death Penalty in America, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). Charles Peters, “Tilting at Windmills,” Washington Monthly, December 1983, 11–12. For the debate over national service, see Williamson Evers, ed., National Service (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1990). G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 84–86. See Michael Walzer, “Politics in the Welfare State,” in Irving Howe, ed., Essential Works of Socialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 809–34; George Will, Statecraft as

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20 21

22

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Soulcraft (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983); Charles Peters, “A Neoliberal’s Manifesto,” Washington Monthly, May 1983, 8–18; and Irving Kristol, “‘When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness’—Some Reflections on Capitalism and ‘The Free Society,’” in On the Democratic Idea in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 90–106. See also William M. Sullivan, Reconstructing Public Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Michael Sandel, “Morality and the Liberal Ideal,” New Republic, 7 May 1984, 15–17; and Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft, 60, 143, 165. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1–2. Abraham Lincoln, Speech at Peoria, Illinois, 16 October 1854, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955), 2: 255. Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, in Collected Works, 4: 271. Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft, 56. Will seems to agree with the liberal progressives in claiming that Lincoln was the first American leader to combine Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian democracy. See Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 85–99, 167–214. See also James M. McPherson, “How Lincoln Won the War with Metaphors,” in Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 93–112. Samuel Beer, “Liberalism and the National Idea,” in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Left, Right and Center (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967), 142. On the idea of American nationality, see Paul C. Nagel, One Nation Indivisible: The Union of American Thought, 1776–1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Nagel, This Sacred Trust: American Nationality, 1798– 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). On the Civil War as a turning point in the transformation of the United States into a state, see Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 491. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18; Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969); Fukuyama, End of History, 144, 203, 208, 329, 388–89; and Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, secs. 178–230. Of the many critiques, two of the best are Stephen Holmes, “The Scowl of Minerva,” The New Republic 206 (March 23, 1992): 27–33; and Alan Ryan, “Professor Hegel Goes to Washington,” The New York Review of Books 39 (March 26, 1992): 7–13. See Fukuyama, End of History, 351, 388. Fukuyama, End of History, 136, 314, 334, 339. See Fukuyama, End of History, 311, 334, 337, 370, 386; Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, rev. ed., ed. Victor Gourevitch and Michael Roth (New York: Free Press, 1991), 207–12, 237–38; and Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 126–34. For evidence that Strauss was right in suggesting that Hegel’s philosophy of history presupposes a teleological conception of nature, see Hegel, The Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), secs. 245–52, 337, 360, 376.

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12 Socialism

Marx’s Communist Manifesto

KEY READINGS Communist Manifesto, Parts 1, 2.

The most important political development of the twentieth century was the rise and decline of socialism as a model for the best society. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, however, many people have argued that the failures of capitalism—economic crises and growing inequality—point to the need for a new communism. Others have made the case for a social democracy that would combine the best of capitalism with the best of socialism, perhaps following the example of countries like Sweden and Denmark. To understand this debate over socialism, we must go back to its original proponents in the nineteenth century, particularly Karl Marx. Marx (1818–1883) was born in Trier, Prussia (now in Germany). He was one of seven children of Jewish parents who had converted to Christianity. His father was a lawyer who supported the movement for liberal reforms in Prussia. In 1835, Marx entered the University of Bonn. He transferred to the University of Berlin in 1836 and then went on to the University of Jena, from which institution he received his PhD in 1841. At Berlin he was influenced by the “Young Hegelians,” under the leadership of Bruno Bauer, who were known for their atheism and their radical political ideas. Marx’s studies were broad—literature, law, philosophy, and theology. His doctoral dissertation was a comparison of the natural philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus. During this period, Marx’s thinking was also shaped by Ludwig 397

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Feuerbach’s materialist criticism of Hegel. Marx sought to unite the idealism of Hegel with the materialism of Feuerbach. When he was unsuccessful in securing a teaching position, Marx worked as a newspaper editor and writer in Cologne in 1842. When the authorities closed down his newspaper, Marx moved to Paris in 1843, where he continued his work as a journalist and his studies of philosophy and economics. He began his lifelong collaboration with Friedrich Engels. As a manager of his family’s textile factory in Manchester, England, Engels could afford to help Marx financially. Such support was essential as Marx and his family were desperately poor. In 1845, when he was banished from Paris as a result of his writing, Marx moved to Brussels. Then early in 1848, he and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto for the Communist League. It was a timely pamphlet because during the early months of 1848 revolutions exploded across Europe: in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria. Marx was active in the German Revolution of 1848. He argued for an alliance between the workers and the liberal bourgeoisie. In 1849, a conservative reaction suppressed socialist agitation, and Marx was forced to move to London. Marx decided that in any future revolution, the workers should not allow their socialist spirit to be stifled by the democratic bourgeoisie. But from 1850 to 1864, Marx was not directly involved in any revolutionary activity. The economic misery of his family was so severe that several of his children died. He was forced to earn a small income by writing hundreds of articles for the New York Tribune as its European correspondent. He also worked in the reading room of the British Museum where he did research that led eventually, in 1867, to the publication of volume one of Capital, his most massive work. Marx returned to political activity in 1864 when he helped to found the International Working Men’s Association (later called the First International). In his writings for the group, he emphasized the importance of trade union activity and reform legislation to improve economic conditions for workers and to increase their political power as voters. The fragmentation of the First International into competing factions led to its collapse in 1876. One of the subjects of controversy was the Paris Commune of 1871. For two months, Parisian workers set up a government of representatives elected directly by the people of the city. Marx succeeded in having the First International endorse the Commune, despite the opposition of some English trade unionists who favored more moderate reforms. Another source of conflict in the organization was the split between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. Bakunin was a Russian anarchist who denounced Marx as an authoritarian. Since Marx’s death in 1883, his ideas have given birth to a wide variety of socialist ideologies. Around the turn of the century, Eduard Bernstein, a leader of the German Social Democratic Party, provoked intense debate when he argued for revising Marxism in accord with what he called evolu-

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tionary socialism. Rejecting the idea of a violent revolution leading to the dictatorship of the proletariat, Bernstein recommended a continual expansion of the political and economic rights of the workers through peaceful, democratic reforms. This sort of thinking dominated the social democratic parties of Europe. Most recently, the Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Denmark, and Norway) have become a model of social democracy for socialists who want to combine a capitalist economy with a socialist welfare state. At the other extreme, V. I. Lenin elaborated the revolutionary strategy of Marxism and applied it to the Russian Revolution. He emphasized the need for a small revolutionary elite—a party vanguard—to lead the Revolution. After he won power in the Bolshevik coup of October 1917, Lenin centralized control of the state and prohibited any opposition to the Communist Party. After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin gradually took power and established a brutally authoritarian regime. Leon Trotsky, an important participant in the Russian Revolution, led the opposition to Stalin’s bureaucratic totalitarianism, which he regarded as a betrayal of the Revolution. Stalin expelled him from Russia in 1929; and in 1940, Stalin had him assassinated in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s, Ludwig von Mises and his students—most notably, Friedrich von Hayek—led the intellectual opposition to socialism. Mises’s Socialism, first published in 1922, is still the best critique of socialist economics, ethics, and politics.1 Originally, the arguments of Mises and Hayek for free markets and against central planning were unpopular. Now many economists and political theorists regard the collapse of Marxist socialist regimes as a confirmation of their ideas.2 After the Second World War, new varieties of Marxism appeared. In China, Mao Zedong put into practice an interpretation of Marxism as adapted to the Oriental, peasant society of China. One of his major concerns was to fight against party bureaucracy in order to encourage popular participation at all levels of society. In 1948, Josip Broz Tito freed Yugoslavia from the control of the Soviet Union. Yugoslavia became a testing ground for democratic socialism, particularly as founded on workers’ control of factories. The harsh totalitarianism of the socialist system led some socialist leaders to look for a “humanist socialism” that would take a “third road” between capitalist markets and socialist planning. In the late 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev tried to lead the Soviet Union in this direction; but his reforms eventually led to the complete destruction of the Soviet system. Socialists continue to debate the possibility of combining the “invisible hand” of free markets and the “visible hand” of central planning.3 One reason for the diversity of interpretations of Marxist socialism is that Marx scattered his ideas over a massive corpus of writings, and we cannot rely on any one text as a complete and coherent presentation of his teaching. Although we shall use the Communist Manifesto as our main text, we shall also have to refer to other works. The following are particularly

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important: “On the Jewish Question,” Part 1, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the sections entitled “Estranged Labor” and “Private Property and Communism”; the “Theses on Feuerbach”; The German Ideology, Part 1; and Capital, Volume I, chapters 1, 7, 12, 32 and Volume III, chapter 48.4 In a preface to the Manifesto, Engels emphasized three points as essential to Marx’s basic thought: That economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, of struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time forever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles. (472)

Engels defines the bourgeoisie as “the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour,” and he defines the proletariat as “the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labourpower in order to live” (473). Why should we accept Marx’s claim that capitalist employers must always exploit their workers? Isn’t it true that the standard of living for most workers has improved greatly in the capitalist nations? Why then should workers want to have a communist revolution? In fact, isn’t there a substantial amount of evidence that a socialist economy cannot work? Moreover, didn’t the communist regimes—like those in Russia and China— deprive the workers of their economic and political freedom? Or is it conceivable that those regimes violated Marx’s teaching? Would Marx want a socialist society to be democratic? Before we can properly consider these questions, however, we must examine the most fundamental of Marx’s principles—that “economic production” shapes “the structure of society” and “the political and intellectual history” of every historical period.

1. Do economic interests determine history? This question is crucial, not only for the assessment of Marx’s ideas but also for understanding the entire history of political ideas. If Marx is correct, then we must conclude that the arguments of every political philosopher reflect economic interests. Marx makes this clear in the Manifesto: Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with

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every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact, that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of society. (489)

Before human beings can do anything, they must provide for their physical existence, and how they secure their economic needs will shape how they think about the world. Law, politics, religion—the whole way of life of a community—will therefore reflect an economic foundation. For example, the culture of primitive people who live by hunting and gathering their food differs greatly from the culture of modern people who live in a capitalist society. The economic arrangements of a society, Marx indicates, create class struggles. This must be so because every society has a ruling class of people who live by exploiting the labor of others. In ancient Greece and Rome, the citizens exploited the slaves. In medieval Europe, the lords exploited the serfs. Now the capitalists exploit the workers. But every system produces the seeds of its own destruction, so that some of the exploited are driven to overthrow their rulers in order to establish themselves as a new ruling class. Capitalism, however, is now creating the conditions for a revolution that will establish a classless society in which there will be no separation of people into rulers and ruled. The concentration of economic power under capitalism favors only a tiny minority. Eventually—as a result of capitalism’s growing economic crises—the great majority of the people will revolt and then arrange things so that all people can share in controlling the means of economic production. The revolutionary idea of communism arises, therefore, from the economic conditions created by the capitalists. “The bourgeoisie,” Marx declares in the Manifesto, “has played a most revolutionary part” (475). Socialism actualizes the potentialities inherent in capitalism. It would seem to follow from Marx’s reasoning that the ideas held by any person are simply rationalizations of economic interests. This presumably is what Marx means when he speaks of ideology (5, 154, 489). Many modern social scientists have adopted this point of view. Some historians, for example, explain the movement of history as controlled by the economic interests of dominant classes. Some political scientists believe that people usually favor those political opinions that serve the interests of the economic groups to which they belong. It would seem that there are no eternal Ideas (contrary to Plato), and hence no self-evident, universal principles for politics (contrary to the Declaration of Independence). Rather,

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political ideas are merely tools for advancing our selfish interests. Because there is plenty of evidence to support this, it would be unreasonable to reject it completely.5 One criticism, however, is that this sort of economic determinism ignores the complexity of history in reducing everything to economic conditions. Was the assassination of Julius Caesar economically determined? Was Martin Luther’s opposition to the Catholic Church simply a result of his economic background? Did Isaac Newton’s formulation of the law of gravity arise from the class struggle in England? Another difficulty is that economic determinism is self-contradictory. If all ideas are determined by economic interests, then the idea of economic determinism must itself be so determined. We would have to say that Marx’s ideas do not conform to reality because they are rationalizations of his economic interests. But obviously Marx believes that his ideas are undeniably true. If in defending economic determinism, he assumes that the cogency of his arguments is not affected by his economic background, doesn’t he thereby deny the truth of his theory in the very act of asserting it? In fact, the influence of Marx’s ideas in the twentieth century illustrates the independent power of ideas in shaping history. Belief in the ideology of socialism has been the prime cause for the success of socialist systems, and loss of belief in the ideology has been the prime cause for their collapse.6 But perhaps we have placed too much emphasis on the deterministic element of Marx’s thinking. For Marx insists that human beings can change the material conditions of life: “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances” (144). An economic system shapes the lives of all those people who live under its influence, but because any economic system is a product of human action, human beings can change it. Human beings are molded by the institutions that they themselves have created. Engels argued that although Marx thought the economic element of life was “the ultimately determining element in history,” he did not think it was “the only determining one” (760). Legal, political, philosophic, and even religious ideas influence the course of history in important ways, Engels explained, and therefore history arises from a complex “interaction” of factors in which the economic factor is “ultimately decisive.” This would explain the flexibility of Marx’s political strategy. Rather than simply waiting for capitalist economic oppression to bring about an international revolution leading inevitably to communism, Marx supported various political reforms designed for particular circumstances. In some cases, he argued for an alliance between workers and peasants. In other cases, he endorsed the political goals of the union movement such as laws to shorten the workday and to give workers the right to vote. In a preface to the German edition of the Manifesto of 1872, Marx explained

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that although “the general principles” of the Manifesto are always true, “the practical application of the principles” must vary according to “the historical conditions for the time being existing” (470). Marx’s critics, however, would say that this only states the problem without solving it. For isn’t there a contradiction between asserting, on the one hand, the absolute truth of Marx’s general theory and asserting, on the other hand, the need to change the practical strategy of Marxism with every change in the circumstances? One illustration of this difficulty concerns the improvement of living conditions for workers. In the Manifesto, Marx claims that the workers will revolt when their oppression under capitalism becomes unbearable. But now that the workers have won shorter working hours, higher pay, the right to vote, and other reforms supported by Marx, they no longer feel oppressed. As a result, the proletarian revolution as predicted by Marx has not occurred anywhere. Does this prove that Marx was wrong? Or does it only show the success of the capitalists in hiding the reality of exploitation?

2. Must capitalists exploit their workers? In every society, Marx believes, there is a ruling class composed of people who do not work, who therefore must live by exploiting those who do work. In a capitalist society, the capitalist ruling class lives off the property acquired by paying workers less than what they have earned. Under this arrangement, Marx explains in the Manifesto, “the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it” (485).7 If we agree that labor is the only or at least the primary source of value—as was assumed by John Locke and classical economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo—then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the wealth of the capitalist, who does no actual labor, depends on the exploitation of hired laborers. We have noted this as a weakness in Locke’s argument. One passage in the Second Treatise should come to mind: “Thus the grass my horse has bit; the turfs my servant has cut; and the ore I have digged in any place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property” (section 28). If people are entitled to all the products of their labor, then why should I profit from the labor of “my servant,” whom I treat like “my horse”? Marx insists that capitalists must always exploit their workers because capitalism depends on what Marx calls “surplus value” (351–61). For the capitalist to make a profit, the value of wages the laborers are paid must be less than the value of the output of their labor. Laborers must therefore always receive less than what they have earned. If the laborers in a factory must work six hours a day to produce goods equivalent in value to a day’s wage, the factory owner might force them to work eight hours a day so that he can draw his profit from their two hours of unpaid labor.

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Couldn’t workers go on strike and refuse to work until they are paid wages equal to the full value of their work? Marx thinks this unlikely because of their weak bargaining position and their fear of unemployment. Marx emphasizes that a capitalist employer could not pay the workers for all their labor without thereby losing the margin of profit. A critic of Marx could argue, however, that the strength of the union movement today eliminates this sort of exploitation. A Marxist could deny this by pointing to the situation in the United States today. Employers use the threat of unemployment to force workers to lower their wage demands. American companies exploit the nonunion, cheap labor available in some parts of the United States or in foreign countries. And when there is a concern about inflation, the government creates unemployment so that the competition for jobs lowers wages. In a capitalist economy like that of the United States, workers can have jobs only if they agree to be exploited. This Marxist assessment of capitalism depends, however, on assuming that labor is the only source of value. Many economists have criticized this element of Marx’s teaching. Even most Marxist economists reject Marx’s labor theory of value.8 One example of the weaknesses in Marx’s theory is his claim that different kinds of labor can be explained as different quantities of simple, homogeneous labor. “Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified” (310). If an architect is paid ten times as much per hour as a carpenter, does that mean that the architect’s labor is ten times as intense as the carpenter’s? Marx also has trouble explaining increases in labor’s productivity owing to machinery. Machines allow workers to produce more with less labor (306). The capitalist would argue that one way to increase profits is to invest in labor-saving tools. Far from exploiting workers, an entrepreneur who improves the productivity of labor can increase the profits earned while giving the workers higher wages, better working conditions, and a shorter workday. But Marx would respond by saying that machinery itself is a product of labor as exploited by the capitalists. He would also argue that automation allows employers to replace workers with machines when the workers demand good wages. Moreover, this leads to another form of exploitation—workers are forced into jobs that are monotonous and degrading.

3. Does capitalism prevent workers from finding joy in their work? As is evident in the Manifesto, this is an important part of Marx’s criticism of capitalism: “Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him” (479). Capitalism

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turns work into joyless toil, and thus it degrades the workers by making them lifeless tools of production. Underlying this assessment, however, is Marx’s assumption that work can be—and should be—pleasurable for the worker. We must wonder, therefore, about Marx’s understanding of work. Insofar as work is necessary to provide for their physical needs, human beings do not differ from other animals. But human beings separate themselves from other animals, Marx argues, in pursuing work as creative, selfexpressive activity. Other animals labor by instinct, but human beings labor freely and purposefully as rational beings. Human labor is thought realized in action. Bees can construct hives with great architectural beauty, Marx observes, but what distinguishes the human architect from any bee is that the architect “raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” (344).9 Through labor an individual conquers nature by imposing upon it rational purposes, and thus “develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway” (344). Every person should enjoy work “as something which gives play to his bodily and mental powers” (345). In labor, each should also express his or her human essence as a social being. Through labor each person cooperates with other human beings for common purposes, and thus finds an identity in being recognized by others (75–76). And yet, in a capitalist state, most people cannot see their labor as an expression of their humanity. They experience their work as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. They run home at the end of each workday desperately seeking some satisfaction in their leisure activities. Because their work fails to nurture their capacity for social involvement, they withdraw into the narrow circles of their private lives where they devote themselves to the petty diversions.10 At this point, staunch defenders of capitalism would dispute Marx’s claims. Hasn’t capitalism made workers comfortable and secure in their work? Rather than being forced to accept low wages that provide only for the barest necessities of life, most workers today can afford luxuries that previously have been available only to the rich. They also have plenty of leisure time to freely pursue their own interests. At the same time, the social and economic programs of the modern welfare state protect workers from various social ills. Government helps the unemployed, the disabled, and the elderly. Government even regulates the workplace to prohibit unsafe working conditions. These and many other political measures combined with the general prosperity of the capitalist economies have eliminated the traditional conflict between the few rich and the many poor because, in capitalist nations like the United States, most people belong to the middle class, which owns most of the wealth. Marx admitted that during periods of economic expansion, capitalists would be able to pay higher wages and increase their profits at the same time. He argued, though, that this would not eliminate the exploitative

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features of capitalism: “If capital is growing rapidly, wages may rise; the profit of capital rises incomparably more rapidly. The material position of the worker has improved, but at the cost of his social position. The social gulf that divides him from the capitalist has widened” (211). Higher wages “would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not conquer either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity” (80). Even if many modern workers do not suffer from the poverty of physical deprivation, they do suffer from the poverty of social deprivation. Although the workers may benefit from high incomes, they still occupy an inferior position in society as long as most of the wealth is controlled by a small economic elite. Marx warned that the capitalists would be willing to bribe their workers in various ways to break their revolutionary spirit and thus protect the power of the ruling class (504–5).

4. Does capitalism inevitably create an unjust inequality, with wealth concentrated in the hands of the richest 1 percent of the capitalists? Marx predicted that capitalism would inevitably concentrate wealth, so that a few capitalists would own almost all the wealth, and their workers would sink into miserable poverty as their wages were reduced. In doing that, however, capitalism would produce the conditions for its revolutionary overthrow, because the workers would be provoked into revolutionary violence, and the communists could lead them into abolishing private property and then establishing a classless socialist society in which all people could cooperate without a ruling class. Marx’s prediction that workers would become ever more impoverished turned out not to be true. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the purchasing power of workers’ wages began to increase, and thus many workers were happy enough to be turned away from revolutionary activity. But Marx’s prediction about the growing inequality of wealth seemed to be true. By the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the top 5 percent to 10 percent of the richest people in the richest countries owned most of the wealth, and the bottom 50 percent of the people owned almost nothing. Thus, capitalism seemed to promote an unjust inequality of wealth. By the 1950s, however, some economists thought they saw evidence that inequality was declining. In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 1954, Simon Kuznets surveyed income tax data from the United States, England, and Germany that showed that economic inequality had declined since World War I.11 Kuznets claimed that while inequality increased in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, Marx mistakenly assumed that this would continue into the future.

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Kuznets saw a long historical swing in income inequality: early in the Industrial Revolution, inequality grew; but later, as more people benefited from economic growth, this inequality would decline. For many economists, this became part of the intellectual defense of capitalism against Marxist criticisms. And yet, Kuznets admitted that his empirical evidence was so limited that his general theory was mostly speculation, in which he was generalizing from a limited stretch of historical experience. In 2014, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the TwentyFirst Century entered this debate over the history of economic inequality with more quantitative evidence over a longer period of history than had been offered by any other economic historian.12 Piketty and his colleagues have collected and analyzed relevant data for over 25 countries, mostly from income tax returns and national economic accounts. Most of this evidence is from the twentieth century, but some of it goes back into the eighteenth century. Piketty has studied the share of total wealth in the United States held by the wealthiest class of people. Wealth or capital is defined as the sum total of all nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market, which includes real estate and financial and professional capital (such as plants, infrastructure, machinery, and patents). This stock of capital owned at a particular point in time comes from the wealth appropriated or accumulated in all prior years. From 1917 to 1932, the share of the top 10 percent of the wealthiest people ranged from 75 percent to 83 percent of the total wealth. That share dropped to a low of 64 percent in 1986. But then it started rising so that in 2012 it was back up to 75 percent. The top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans today own about 35 percent of all the wealth. By contrast, the bottom 50 percent of the American people today own only 2 percent of the wealth.13 Piketty has also studied the share of total yearly income in the United States received by the people with the highest incomes. Income includes both payments to workers and others who contribute to the production of goods and services and payments to the owners of capital (such as profits, dividends, interest, rents, and royalties). From 1917 to 1928, the share of the top 10 percent with the highest incomes ranged from 38 percent to 49 percent. That share dropped in later years to a low of 33 percent. But then it started rising in the late 1970s up to a high of over 50 percent in 2012.14 Notice that for both wealth and income, economic inequality declined after World War I and then started rising in the 1970s or 1980s. Piketty shows the same pattern in Europe. He explains this as a consequence of the economic and political shocks of the two world wars and the Great Depression, which destroyed much of the wealth of the richest people.15 Only such severe shocks could reduce the rate of return on capital below the economic growth rate, which reduces inequality. The general tendency of capitalism without such shocks, Piketty argues, is to foster a rate of return on capital (r) that is higher than the economic growth rate

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(g), which creates steadily increasing inequality. Thus, Marx was right about the tendency of capitalism to increasingly concentrate wealth in the hands of a few capitalists, and thereby create an unjust economic inequality. This must be so, Piketty argues, as long as r > g, which is the central contradiction of capitalism. Piketty analyzes the economic data to chart the history of this inequality, r > g.16 Piketty sketches the rate of return on capital compared with economic growth rate at the global level from antiquity to the present. For 2,000 years or more, Piketty assumes, the average yearly rate of return on capital was 4.5 percent to 5 percent, while there was essentially no annual economic growth until the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution. Since then, the economic growth rate has been 1.5 percent to 4 percent a year. In the first half of the twentieth century, the economic and political shocks of that period created a situation where for the first time in history, the net return on capital was less than the growth rate, which brought a decline in inequality. But if this is reversed in the rest of the twenty-first century, and once again r > g, then we can expect that capitalism will resume its normal tendency to increase inequality. Piketty argues that such inequality—in which the richest 1 percent of the people own most of the wealth—violates the principles of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of Rights of 1789, which require that governments secure the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Surely, extreme economic inequality deprives middle-class and lower-class people of their equal rights.17 To avoid this future of capitalist oligarchy and grossly unfair inequality, Piketty proposes that we adopt three policies. First, we need to expand the social welfare state so that government provides everyone an equal right to education, health care, employment, and a pension. Second, we need a steeply progressive tax rate with marginal tax rates for the wealthiest people at 80 percent or higher. Third, we need a progressive global tax on wealth with marginal tax rates of 2 percent to 4 percent for the wealthiest people, combined with international financial reporting so that rich people cannot hide their wealth by moving it into secretive tax havens around the world.18 Much of what Piketty recommends about progressive taxation was a general policy in the United States and Great Britain for 50 years. Prior to 1980, the top marginal tax rates for the richest people in the United States and Great Britain were 80 percent to 90 percent.19 After 1980, those rates dropped to 28 percent to 40 percent, because of the conservative revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Piketty’s primary aim is to overcome the effects of Reaganism and Thatcherism and return to the Anglo-American confiscatory tax policies of 1920–1980.20 Piketty hopes that his proposed policies would move us towards an ideal society with low inequality. In the United States today, the wealthiest 1 percent of the people own 35 percent of the total wealth, and the wealthiest

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10 percent own 72 percent of the wealth. The Scandinavian countries have lower inequality: the wealthiest 1 percent own 20 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent own 50 percent of the wealth. In Piketty’s ideal society, the wealthiest 1 percent would own 10 percent of the wealth, and the wealthiest 10 percent would own 30 percent of the wealth.21 How would the classical liberal defenders of capitalism respond to Piketty? Some economists have argued that Piketty’s statistics are flawed, because the level of inequality in the richest countries is actually less than what Piketty asserts.22 Moreover, much of the wealth of the richest people is confiscated and redistributed to the poor through taxation and various governmental programs. For example, in the United States, some estimates indicate that the top-earning 40 percent of households pay over 80 percent of federal income taxes, while the bottom 40 percent pay less than 9 percent. Those at the bottom receive refundable tax credits and other transfer payments such as food stamps and Medicaid, plus Social Security and Medicare payments at a much higher proportion to what they paid in than do richer households.23 Some of Piketty’s critics have argued that he speaks about the return on capital as if this were fixed and automatic, whereas in fact capital investments are always risky. Even Piketty admits, in various passages of his book, that “the return on capital is in practice extremely volatile.”24 They have also argued that Piketty conveys the false impression that economic class divisions are rigidly fixed, which ignores the fact that there is a lot of circulation of people into and out of the top income groups. Some studies have shown that in the United States 12 percent of the population will be in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year, and 73 percent will reach the top 20 percent of the income distribution for at least one year.25 Finally, some of Piketty’s critics have objected that his obsession with measuring inequality ignores the importance of measuring well-being. Why should we worry about capitalist inequality as long as capitalism generally makes all of us better off in the long run? Piketty admits that capitalism has promoted economic growth that has made most human beings better off on average than ever before in the history of the world. Piketty suggests, however, that no matter how well off people are at the bottom of the social scale, the mere fact that they are at the bottom makes them miserable and angry, because of their envy for those at the top, and at some point this will lead them to violent conflict.26 Unlike Piketty, Marx welcomes the prospect of revolutionary violence as the only way to achieve the communist classless society. Marx would seem to agree with Piketty about the need for a steeply progressive income tax. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx declares that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” (484). The first steps towards complete abolition of private property will require “despotic inroads on the rights of property,” which

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will include four measures: “1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels” (490). But for Marx, these are only the first steps towards the final goal of the complete abolition of private property. Unlike Marx, Piketty argues for a partial abolition of private property—abolishing the excessive property of the richest—that stops short of complete abolition. Piketty agrees with Mises and Hayek that pure socialism is impossible, because a modern economy cannot be organized without market prices and private property.27 Surely, Marx would argue that the complete abolition of unjust inequality requires the complete abolition of private property. Piketty’s capitalist welfare state fails to do this, because even in his ideal society, as we have seen, the wealthiest 10 percent of the people would own 30 percent of the wealth, which would give them an unfair dominance over the rest of society. In Piketty’s capitalist welfare system, the freedom of the workers must always be illusory, because the workers’ choices are always constrained by the capitalist’s need to exploit labor for profit. True freedom for the workers—and for all human beings—can be achieved only through a socialist revolution.

5. Would socialism emancipate human beings? In the Communist Manifesto, Marx presents socialist society as the first truly free society: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (491). A society without class conflict will permit all people to freely develop their human powers. They will do so in such a way that the freedom of each secures the freedom of all. But this gives us only a vague idea of what socialist freedom would be like. As a general formulation, we could say that for Marx, human freedom is the self-actualization or self-determination of humans as conscious, rational beings. (This corresponds closely to Hegel’s idea of freedom.) Complete emancipation requires that human beings consciously develop their human powers by exercising rational control over both the natural and the social conditions of life. When we look, however, for a more concrete account of freedom under socialism, Marx suggests the possibility of two different kinds of freedom: the social freedom of self-expressive social labor and the political freedom of self-governing democratic citizenship. The prerequisite for both forms of freedom is the abolition of private property. Socialism would not abolish the right to maintain personally acquired property used for individual consumption. Even in a socialist society, workers would have personal property (484–85, 490–91). But land and the means of production would be owned in common and used for the

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benefit of all (326–27, 438). Factory workers, for example, would not have to sell their labor to the factory owner. Instead, they would manage the factory themselves as a cooperative enterprise. Rather than working for an employer, the workers would work for themselves, which would transform their labor into self-expressive activity. “Hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart” (518). Marx paints an even more romantic picture of socialist freedom in The German Ideology: As soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. (160)

Henry David Thoreau lived like this at Walden Pond, so did Robinson Crusoe, and—except for the literary criticism—so did Rousseau’s savage.28 But is this a realistic vision for a socialist society? Marx says, “Each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes.” How can a person become accomplished in some activity without complete devotion to it to the exclusion of other activities? We might also wonder how this could be done in a modern industrialized, technological society that requires a specialized division of labor. The activities of hunting, fishing, and rearing cattle suggest a simple, pastoral existence, but Marx often implies that socialism would build upon the technological advances of capitalism (476–78). If all the people of a socialist society are free to do as they please, will every person creatively develop all innate talents? Won’t many people prefer idleness and self-indulgence? And what is meant by the remark that “society regulates the general production” for the freedom of all? Who are the regulators? Must all the people participate in the regulatory decisions? If so, won’t this interfere with their freedom to do what they please when they please? Finally, we should note that three of the four activities of Marx’s ideal socialists are directed to procuring food. The socialist waits until after dinner to study literary criticism. How can hunting, fishing, and rearing cattle be fully expressive of freedom if they are imposed by the bodily necessities of life? Marx indicates in Capital that even in socialist society, labor is not liberating as long as it is imposed on the laborer to satisfy physical needs.

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Chapter Twelve The realm of freedom actually begins only where labor which is determined by necessity and mundane consideration ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. . . . Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favorable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with the realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite. (441)

This passage lends itself to various interpretations. One would be that Marx relies on the continuing expansion of labor-saving technology in socialist society to give everyone free time for “that development of human energy which is an end in itself” (406). But the realm of physically necessary labor can never be abolished completely. At the very least, people will have to produce, operate, and repair the machines. Marx is ambivalent about whether labor can become a humanizing activity in a socialist society. At times, he argues that under socialism the productive process would be organized in such a way that labor would become a humanly self-expressive activity. At other times, he agrees with Adam Smith that the division of labor demanded by technical efficiency must be morally degrading because of the monotony of narrowly specialized tasks, and therefore moral freedom is found not in labor but in leisure. Insofar as he agrees with Smith, Marx assumes that the technical division of labor dictates the social division of labor. But such technological determinism is dubious. The technical division of labor into separate tasks does not necessarily require a social division of labor in which each worker performs only one task. Through batch production, one worker might perform different tasks at different times; and this may be more efficient than restricting a worker to one task. Neither Smith nor Marx recognizes that the monotony of narrowly specialized labor may lower the morale of workers in ways that lower their productivity.29 Marx’s assumption that technically efficient labor must be degrading leads him to hope that automation will allow workers to escape from labor and thus fulfill their humanity in leisurely activities. This confidence in the liberating effects of technology as a tool for conquering nature should remind us of Descartes’s recommendations at the end of the Discourse on Method. Some of the objections to Descartes’s project might apply also to Marx’s. It is unclear, for instance, how Marx would protect socialist society against the establishment of a technically trained elite as the new ruling class. Marx, of course, would argue that there will be no ruling class in a socialist society, because there will be no political rule at all. The revolution-

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ary proletarians must abolish the state (200, 490–91). Who, then, should rule? This has been one of the central questions throughout the history of political philosophy. But Marx answers, no one should rule over anyone else. Once socialism creates a classless society—or perhaps we should say a society with only one class to which all human beings belong simply by virtue of their humanity—politics as such, which means the rule of some over others, will disappear. Isn’t it implausible, however, that any society—even a socialist one—could escape fundamental conflicts of interest among various groups? Wouldn’t a government be necessary to settle such conflicts? Another difficulty is that this idea of abolishing the state contradicts Marx’s suggestions that a socialist society would promote freedom through democratic citizenship. Marx rejects the modern assumption that human beings are by nature asocial individuals, and he reaffirms the Aristotelian view that human beings are naturally political—or at least social—animals.30 The “human essence” emerges not as an isolated individual but as “the ensemble of the social relations” (145). The human being is in the most literal sense a zoon politikon [political animal], not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society—a rare exception which may well occur when a civilized person in whom the social forces are already dynamically present is cast by accident into the wilderness—is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language, without individuals living together and talking to each other. (223)

Therefore, true freedom demands that all individuals become citizens. “Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen” (46). In much of his writing, however, Marx implies that socialist citizens will fulfill their social essence in social labor rather than political participation. “Man first sees and recognizes himself in other men,” Marx believes. “Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind” (317). Marx indicates that under socialism, economic production would be organized to satisfy this need for mutual recognition. Let us suppose that we had produced as human beings. In that event each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and his neighbor in his production. . . . In the individual expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my authentic nature, my human, communal nature. Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth.31

If socialist individuals recognize one another as fellow workers, is it unnecessary then to seek recognition as fellow citizens? Although political power as “the organized power of one class for oppressing another” must

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disappear in socialist society, would a classless society create a truly democratic form of political power in which the state would not be distinguished from the people? Marx suggests this when he explains that “in true democracy the political state is annihilated” because “the political state qua political state, as constitution, no longer passes for the whole.” “In democracy the constitution, the law, the state itself, insofar as it is a political constitution, is only the self-determination of the people, and a particular content of the people” (21). Although such comments give us only a vague picture of socialist society, what we see entices us. Nevertheless, we must wonder whether such a society is practicable. In particular, we must ask about the problems in organizing a socialist economy.

6. Can a socialist economy work? This question presses upon us as soon as we notice in the Communist Manifesto that Marx wants to abolish buying and selling (486). Capitalism deprives human beings of their dignity by grounding all human relationships on money (101–5). A socialist society, therefore, would have to abolish money. Economic life would be organized without a system of market prices. Although Marx is not completely clear on this point, presumably the production and distribution of goods in a socialist economy would be determined by central planners (529–32). Capitalist economists—like Ludwig von Mises—have argued that if socialism requires the abolition of money, then a socialist economy for a large industrialized society is impossible.32 When Lenin attempted to establish pure socialism by abolishing money in the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1921, the disastrous consequences forced him to restore limited markets under the “New Economic Policy” in 1921.33 Without the pricing mechanism of the marketplace, socialist planners cannot allocate resources rationally because they have no basis for economic calculation. As a simple illustration of the problem, imagine having to choose between two ways of manufacturing the same product. One way requires ten tons of wool and fifteen tons of cotton, the other fifteen tons of wool and ten tons of cotton. Deciding which is more efficient demands a common unit of measurement between wool and cotton. In a capitalist economy, prices provide such measurement. If wool is twice as expensive as cotton, then the more efficient process of production would be the one that uses less wool and more cotton. The prices tell us that wool is valued more highly than cotton. In this way, market prices help us to make rational economic decisions. A pricing system is superior to socialist planning, Mises maintains, because prices are spontaneous signals, because they simplify the pertinent information, and because they measure subjective needs. Prices arise from unplanned patterns of interaction, and they change quickly as the

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patterns change. A socialist planner, however, would have to work everything out through conscious design. Therefore, the planner would have to have absolute knowledge of all the relevant information. Instead of simply watching the fluctuating prices of wool and cotton, the planner would have to know—hour by hour, day by day—everything that might affect the relative values of cotton and wool. But how would anyone know the value of anything insofar as “value” reflects subjective human preferences? Prices register those preferences automatically. Aside from Mises’s logic, the persuasiveness of his argument has been enhanced by the failure of socialist governments to organize their economies without market prices. Many socialist economists have tried to solve the problem by arguing for market socialism—that is, some combination of central planning and a pricing system.34 It is debatable whether this answers Mises’s objections.35 Beyond the purely economic issues, some socialists fear that market socialism is only capitalism in disguise. Another weakness in a socialist economy is the lack of material incentives to work. The motto for a Marxist economy must be: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” (531). But if people know that what they receive will not be proportionate to what they contribute, won’t they be tempted to become free riders with no motivation to work? Why would people work hard if it doesn’t increase their wealth? In fact, socialist governments have been forced to allow some capitalist economic incentives to avoid economic catastrophes. There have been some intriguing socialist experiments—in Cuba and China—designed to replace material incentives with moral incentives. The idea is to devise programs of social education to teach people that they have a social duty to work hard and that they should value the social recognition they receive for performing their social duty. The experiments have not been very successful, but that may be because they have not gone far enough.36 If human beings are social creatures, if they desire the approval of others, and if they tend to adopt the values instilled in them by their culture, then it would seem possible to educate them—particularly during their childhood—to work for social rewards rather than material rewards.37 Indeed, there is evidence that even the capitalist spirit of individual acquisitiveness arose as a product of social conditioning. Adam Smith suggested this when he observed that the selfish desire for accumulating wealth reflects the social desire for the recognition of others. “The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world.”38 This man was probably taught from birth that great wealth confers high social status. Would he have turned out differently if he had been educated to believe that only those who fulfill their duties as socialist citizens win “the attention of the world”? But if socialist citizens must be socially conditioned to think more about their social duties than their individual interests, a socialist society

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begins to look like a totalitarian regime that uses indoctrination and terror to stifle individual liberty. This certainly was the case under the rule of Josef Stalin.

7. Can we have Marx without Stalin? To reject Marx because Stalin was a Marxist would be as unjustified as rejecting Christianity because the Spanish Inquisition was led by Christians. On the other hand, it would also be unreasonable to maintain that there was no connection at all between Marx and Stalin. Irving Howe, a prominent socialist writer, confessed that Stalinism “forced thoughtful socialists to reconsider the terms of their conviction.”39 Both Lenin and Stalin justified their despotic rule as an exercise in what Marx called the dictatorship of the proletariat, which was supposed to be the transitional period between capitalism and communism (220, 538). Howe spoke of the dictatorship of the proletariat as an “uncomfortable legacy from Marx,” and he noted that Marx never used that phrase in any of his major writings.40 But even when he did not use those exact words, Marx did not hesitate to stress—in the Manifesto—the need for “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production” (490). Marx also insisted that the idea of socialism cannot be separated from its history, and so it would seem odd to free Marx from any responsibility for the history of Marxist regimes. Is there a flaw in Marx’s teaching that could account for the brutality of Stalinism? Some commentators have pointed to Marx’s millenarianism as the crux of the problem. Marx speaks easily of communist society as the final redemption of humankind from the conflicts that have plagued all previous history: “Communism is the riddle of history solved” (84). Thus, Marx secularizes the Christian vision of salvational history (see chapter 3, section 3; chapter 10, section 1). Despite its atheism, Marxism can stir in its followers all the fervor of religious zealotry. And this fanatical devotion to the redemptive transformation of human nature can easily create a messianic Machiavellianism. If the inevitable end of the Communist Revolution is the earthly salvation of the human race, then any means is justified to that end. (As we will see later, Steven Pinker warns that such utopian ideology has been responsible for some of the greatest atrocities in human history.) The redemptive expectations of Marxism are well illustrated by Leon Trotsky’s description of what a human being will look like in communist society: Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.41

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Revolutionary leaders who take this as their goal find it hard to compromise with anyone or anything that stands in their way. If this is the inevitable outcome of the Communist Revolution, then for the sake of the Revolution, everything is permitted. Unfortunately, Stalin is only one of the many revolutionaries who have applied this sort of logic. In the early 1970s, the communist rulers in Cambodia caused the deaths of millions of their people. One observer explained: “Their inflexible ideology has led them to invent a radically new kind of a man in a radically new society. A fascinating revolution for all who aspire to a new social order. A terrifying one for all who have any respect for human beings.”42 Albert Camus suggested that to escape this revolutionary nihilism, we must restore a spirit of moderation founded on the recognition that human nature imposes limits on political action. When human beings strive to become gods, they become monsters. There is only one way to avoid this: “Each tells the other that he is not God.”43 Many socialists, shocked by the brutal tyranny of Stalinist regimes, maintain that this is not the inevitable consequence of Marxism, because Marxist socialism can be, and should be, democratic.

8. Can socialism be democratic? If not, Marx would suggest, then democracy itself is doomed, because only through socialism can we achieve a true democracy (20–21, 46, 326– 27, 518, 623–29, 631–43, 647–52). Only in a classless society, where all people become workers, and where the means of production are socially owned, can all participate equally in making the decisions that shape their lives. Only socialism allows us to have “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (491). To defend this position, however, a socialist must answer the argument—perhaps best stated by Friedrich von Hayek in The Road to Serfdom44—that a centrally planned economy must necessarily suppress individual freedom. Through the free market, the preferences of millions of individuals can be coordinated in a rational manner without authoritarian coercion. Employers and employees are free to negotiate mutually acceptable arrangements. Buyers and sellers are free to bargain with one another over prices. In this manner, the impersonal mechanism of the market organizes economic life without the coercive domination of some by others. Although the rich start out with more advantages than the poor, at least the poor have more freedom to advance in a market society than in a society where a ruling elite controls the economy. Even some socialists—such as Robert Heilbroner—have acknowledged the force of this argument that socialism cannot be democratic.45 The capitalist market mechanism relies on individuals pursuing their personal gain in competition with one another. But a socialist economy must force individuals to obey a central plan. Capitalism stresses individual freedom,

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while socialism stresses collective solidarity. It is hard to see how bourgeois individualism could be combined with socialist collectivism. Consequently, socialists like Heilbroner must admit with regret that they cannot have “a socialist cake with bourgeois icing,” and therefore “socialism cannot be the best of all worlds.”46 The example of Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s was often cited by some socialists as evidence for the possibility of a democratic form of socialism.47 Rejecting the authoritarian socialism of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavian socialists tried to create a truly democratic regime based on economic self-management and political self-government. In the Soviet Union, management of the means of production was transferred from private owners to the centralized bureaucracy of the state. But in Yugoslavia, the means of production were treated as social property managed by the workers themselves. Although there was some central planning by the state, Yugoslavia seemed to have a system of market socialism in which self-managed enterprises competed within the framework of a market economy. In Yugoslavia, most firms were required by law to be managed by a workers’ council. The members of the workers’ council were elected every two years by their fellow workers. The number of members varied from fifteen to 120, depending on the size of the firm. Restrictions on the number of times a member could be reelected were designed to encourage wide participation. The workers’ council met once a month to make the basic decisions for the firm—hiring and firing, production, distribution of wages and profits, and prices. Also, the council elected a management board with five to eleven members serving one-year terms. The management board met weekly to execute the decisions of the workers’ council. None of these representatives were paid, and they continued as workers during their periods of service on the council or the board. Finally, the management board hired a full-time, paid director to handle the daily management of the firm in conformity with the policies set by the workers’ representatives. During the first ten years of this system (1953–1963), Yugoslavia had annual growth rates of over 9 percent, making it one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. But subsequently there were high levels of unemployment and inflation. The defenders of the system argued that such problems could have been avoided by making some minor changes. Some critics, however, doubted that Yugoslavian socialism was truly democratic. Yugoslavia was a one-party state that engaged in authoritarian repression. Even within the self-managed enterprises, there was some evidence of a subtle form of authoritarianism. Upper-class men tended to be the most active participants in the workers’ councils. Women and men from lower-class backgrounds were less inclined to participate. Ordinary workers were sometimes reluctant to assume the burdens of managerial responsibility; they sometimes preferred to be led by the well-educated, skilled workers or even the professional director and the director’s staff.

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And yet, it seemed that Yugoslavia had been more successful than the capitalist countries in allowing workers to participate in management. Another objection to the Yugoslavian experiment in socialism is that it was not really socialism at all. For insofar as they relied on a market economy, the Yugoslavian socialists seemed to concede Hayek’s argument that socialist planning without free markets cannot be democratic. Some socialists thought that Yugoslavia betrayed the socialist cause. But Yugoslavia provided inspiration for those democratic socialists who wished to combine a market economy with a socialist culture. Some American socialists have argued for simply extending the welfare-state measures initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, the aim being to moderate the excessive individualism of bourgeois society with an increasing sense of communal unity. Irving Howe, for example, speaks of “the lasting contribution of the Roosevelt era—the socialization of concern, the vision of society as a community, not based as yet on truly egalitarian principles but at least modulating the heartlessness of ‘rugged individualism’.”48 Socialists like Michael Walzer emphasize the need to draw people into public life by giving them more opportunities for democratic participation.49 Would this fulfill Marx’s vision of human emancipation? Or would it simply continue our quest for a community in which all human beings are equally entitled to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”? Many of the critics of Marxism have become smug in asserting that the collapse of the Soviet Union and other socialist regimes proved that Marxism must fail. Mises would argue, however, that this kind of reasoning from “the lessons of history” is fallacious. “Historical facts and historical experience can never prove or disprove a statement in the way in which an experiment proves or disproves.”50 History is not a laboratory in which we can control all the relevant variables to determine causal relations. For that reason, the socialist can always argue that the Soviet experience was not a good test of socialism, because the historical circumstances were not right, or because the Soviet system was not truly socialist. Under different conditions, socialism rightly understood might still be possible. One leftist philosopher—Peter Singer—has concluded that the fundamental mistake of Marxist socialists is their assumption that human nature is so malleable that a transformation in the social and economic circumstances of life could radically transform human nature. The failure of socialism, he argues, shows that leftists should learn from Darwinian biology that a totally egalitarian society without differences in social status, economic wealth, or political power would be contrary to human nature. A “Darwinian left,” he suggests, would study human nature to look for ways to channel human cooperative propensities in ways that would promote social justice for all.51 Some socialists think this can be achieved through social democracy such as one sees in the Scandinavian countries.

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9. Can social democracy combine the best features of capitalism and socialism? At the end of the twentieth century, many socialists were dispirited by the apparent triumph of neoliberal models of economic development and globalization. There were debates over whether socialism had failed in its attempt to challenge liberal capitalism. But in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the economic and political crises faced by the liberal democratic states around the world forced a reassessment of socialism. Even if many socialist experiments had a dismal record, the democratic socialism of social democracy as manifest in the Nordic countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) showed success. They had some of the highest rates of economic growth and lowest rates of poverty and economic inequality in the world. Although they have largely capitalist economies, they also have the largest welfare states in Europe, which provide governmental social security and public services universally for all citizens.52 These countries have very high levels of taxation and government spending, but their citizens think it is worth it, because as measured by many social indicators, their lives are healthier, freer, and happier than in other countries. This has led some social scientists and journalists to recommend that the United States should become more like the Nordic social democracies.53 Does the success of the Nordic model show that the welfare-state socialism of social democracy is superior to the free-market capitalism of classical liberalism, because social democracy combines the best features of socialism and capitalism in a way that secures the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This question of whether social democracy can combine the values of socialism and capitalism first arose among Marxists at the end of the nineteenth century in the “revisionist debate” provoked by Eduard Bernstein. He was a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party, which was the most important socialist party in Europe that was heavily influenced by the thought of Marx. In a series of articles published during the period 1896–1898, and in a book published in 1899 (The Preconditions of Socialism), Bernstein contended that Marx’s teaching needed to be revised in the light of recent historical experience. Marx had predicted that capitalism would inevitably collapse because of its own internal contradictions, and because the growing intensity of the class struggle would lead the working class to a violent revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state. The economic depression of the 1870s and 1880s seemed to confirm this prediction. But then, the new economic growth and global trade of the 1890s seemed to show that capitalism was not going to collapse anytime soon. Moreover, the partial success of the labor movement in demanding social reforms favoring the working class suggested that the socialist workers’ movement could advance its goals through peaceful reforms rather

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than violent revolution. The political freedom of a liberal democracy could provide the conditions for the evolution of socialism out of capitalism, Bernstein argued. Socialism could be understood as “organized liberalism.”54 Indeed, in her Marxist critique of Bernstein’s revisionism, Rosa Luxemburg complained that he had transformed socialism into a “variety of liberalism.”55 Bernstein thought that “there is actually no really liberal thought which does not also belong to the elements of the ideas of socialism,” including the liberal ideas of individual liberty and responsibility.56 Even those socialist measures that appear coercive must be justified as expanding the range of liberty in a society. While orthodox Marxists insisted that true socialism required the abolition of private property and of market competition and the public ownership of the means of production, Bernstein thought that “democratic socialization” would not require a complete state management of the economy or abolition of private property, at least in a long transitional period. He thought that socialism “would be completely mad to burden itself with additional tasks of so complex a nature as the setting up and controlling of comprehensive state production centers on a mass scale—quite apart from the fact that only certain specific branches of production can be run on a national basis. . . . Competition would have to be reckoned with, at least in the transitional period.”57 He also thought that private property was necessary for any social order. “We do not abolish private property, we limit its rights. The total abolition of property is impossible.”58 Such social democratic revisionist thinking became dominant in the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the 1920s and 1930s. Per Albin Hansson, the leader of the party, declared that the party’s ideal was “a society of free and equal individuals in democratic cooperation, where common resources are used to ensure security and well-being for all.” He promised that the Social Democrats would never allow the private owners of the means of production to use their power to keep underprivileged people in a state of dependency. And yet he also promised that the Social Democrats would never interfere in the economy in any way that would reduce economic productivity.59 In 1936, American journalist Marquis Childs’s book Sweden: The Middle Way became a best seller, and he popularized the idea that Sweden had found a “middle way” between the extremes of American capitalist individualism and Russian socialist collectivism.60 Childs described Sweden’s policies as combining governmental economic planning, market competition, and cooperation between the government, business, and labor unions to achieve a modification of the capitalist economy for the common good. At the 1936 convention of the American Democratic Party, President Franklin Roosevelt held a press conference to speak about the importance of Childs’s book in showing how capitalism and socialism could be combined; and he announced that he was sending a special commission to Sweden to study this “middle way.”

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So do Sweden and the other Nordic countries today still offer a model for all the world to imitate? The Nordic welfare state provides universal, publically supported health care and health insurance, generous unemployment benefits, a universal pension system, universal free education, and a system for redistributing wealth from the richest to the poorest. As a consequence, their levels of economic inequality are lower than in other developed economies. They also have low rates of crime. And in international studies of the “happiness index,” their people report some of the highest levels of happiness. Their welfare states are expensive. Government expenditures as a share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are around 47 percent to 50 percent for these countries, as contrasted with 37 percent for the United States. This requires higher taxes in these countries. Many Americans assume that such levels of governmental spending and taxing must impede economic growth. But in fact, the Nordic countries have had high economic growth rates over the past two decades; and their wealth per capita is good compared with other wealthy countries.61 Political scientist Lane Kenworthy infers from this that the United States could easily increase governmental spending to 47 percent of GDP to pay for new welfare programs without any decrease in economic growth. He declares: “Freedom, flexibility, and market dynamism have long been hallmarks of America’s economy. These are qualities worth preserving. The Nordic countries’ experience shows us that a nation can successfully embrace both flexibility and security, both competition and social justice. Modern social democracy can give us the best of both worlds.”62 Journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge make the same argument.63 It should be noted, however, that achieving this “best of both worlds” requires a high level of economic freedom in the Nordic countries.64 Contrary to what Kenworthy suggests, Micklethwait and Wooldridge show that the Nordic countries achieved this through a reduction in public social spending, taxation, and governmental regulation of society and business, beginning in the mid-1980s. In doing that, they adopted some of the policies proposed by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and other classical liberals for reducing governmental intrusion into social and economic life and for reforming the welfare state in ways that make it compatible with the classical liberal ideals of individual liberty and free markets.65 The Social Democratic Party ruled Sweden from 1932 to 1976, and they had steadily increased taxes, government spending, and the restrictions on business. In 1974, Olof Palme, the party’s leader, said that “the era of neo-capitalism is drawing to an end,” and that “it is some kind of socialism that is the key to the future.” But then the government began to face public protests and financial crises, and free-market ideas began to enter the public debate. In 1970, Sweden was the fourth richest country in the world as measured by per capita wealth. But by 1993, it has fallen to seventeenth. There were a series of radical neoliberal reforms, including cuts

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in public spending. Public spending as a share of GDP had reached 67 percent by 1993, but now it’s down to 49 percent. Public debt as a share of GDP fell from 70 percent in 1993 to 37 percent in 2010. Sweden has cut the marginal tax rate by 27 percent since 1983 to 57 percent, and it has cut the corporate tax rate to 22 percent, much lower than in the United States. Unemployment compensation was reduced. Denmark and Norway allow private firms to run public hospitals. Denmark has a system of “flexicurity,” which makes it easier for employers to fire people, but with programs for supporting and training the unemployed. Sweden has reformed its pension system to make it affordable by replacing a defined-benefit system with a defined-contribution system and making automatic adjustments in benefits to reflect longer life expectancy, which means a reduction in pension benefits. Sweden also has a universal system of school vouchers paid by the government, so that private forprofit schools can compete with the public schools for voucher funding. Micklethwait and Wooldridge observe, “The Swedes have done more than anyone else in the world—certainly more than the cautious Americans—to embrace Milton Friedman’s idea of educational vouchers.”66 Friedman helped the Frazer Institute—a classical liberal think tank in Canada—to develop a method for measuring and ranking “economic freedom” in countries around the world. Here is how the variables for this rating are summarized: “The cornerstones of economic freedom are personal choice, voluntary exchange, freedom to compete, and security of privately owned property. Forty-two variables are used to construct a summary index and to measure the degree of economic freedom in five broad categories: (1) size of government; (2) legal system and property rights, (3) sound money; (4) freedom to trade internationally; and (5) regulation.”67 They now have ratings for 152 nations. All of the Nordic countries have high rankings. Finland is #7, and Denmark is #14. Thus, they rank higher than the United States, which is #17. Sweden is #29. Norway is #31. Iceland is #41. The Heritage Foundation—another classical liberal think tank—has a similar “Index of Economic Freedom.”68 Denmark ranks at #10, ahead of the United States at #12. The other Nordic countries rank high once again—Finland at #19, Sweden at #20, Iceland at #23, and Norway at #32. This supports the conclusion of Swedish economist Andreas Bergh that Sweden and perhaps also the other Nordic countries are capitalist welfare states. These social democratic welfare states survive only because of their high levels of economic freedom and capitalist institutions.69 The Marxist critics of social democracy agree with this assessment, because it confirms their complaint that the Nordic social democracies have never been truly socialist societies.70 Marxists support welfare-state policies that benefit the working class, but they see this as only a transitional stage in the way to communism, which will require a violent revolution in which the working class takes ownership and management of the means of production and overthrows the bourgeois ruling class. The ruling class permits welfare-

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state programs only as long as they do not impede the accumulation of wealth by the capitalists. So, when Sweden faced economic crises in the 1980s and early 1990s, the capitalists reduced welfare-state spending, sold off state-owned enterprises, had the taxpayers bail out failing banks, and reduced the tax rates for the wealthy. Now, inequality is rising in Sweden. The richest 1 percent of the people in Sweden holds 20 percent of the wealth, and the richest 10 percent holds 60 percent of the wealth.71 In 2006, a rightwing coalition government was elected to push even more for neoliberal economic policies that benefit the capitalists. This shows that Rosa Luxemburg was right about Bernstein’s social democratic deviation from Marxism—it’s only a “variety of liberalism.” To achieve socialist emancipation, the Marxists argue, we need not social democracy, but a new communism.

10. Do we need a new communism? Since the collapse of Soviet Communism and of the Maoist communist regime in China, it has been common to assume that Marxist communism no longer has any popular appeal, which led Francis Fukuyama to declare the “end of history” with the triumph of liberal democracy over its illiberal adversaries (see chapter 12, section 7). And yet, now some people have argued that as liberal democratic capitalism faces new crises, we are seeing the “return of history,” and we need to look for a “new communism.”72 One good example of this new communist thinking is Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis.73 Badiou’s book develops two lines of reasoning—a mathematical analogy and a historical argument. To show how the “communist hypothesis” has not ended in complete failure, because its failure “simply proves that it was not the right way to resolve the initial problem,” Badiou compares the hypothetical truth of communism with Fermat’s theorem: No three positive integers a, b, and c can satisfy the equation an + bn = cn for any integer value of n greater than two. He explains: Countless attempts were made to prove this, from Fermat, who formulated the hypothesis . . . to Wiles, the English mathematician, who really did prove it a few years ago. Many of these attempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself. It was therefore vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned. As Mao puts it, the logic of imperialists and all reactionaries the world over is “make trouble, fail, make trouble again,” but the logic of the people is “fight, fail, fail again, fight again . . . until their victory.74

Badiou’s critics might think of at least two reasons why this is a bad analogy. First, while Badiou is right that a failure to prove a hypothesis is

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not a proof of its falsity, there’s a good argument that socialism has been proven to be false by Ludwig von Mises, who showed that socialism could not solve the problem of economic calculation. Pure socialism, as Marx indicated, would have to abolish money and all buying and selling. If this were done, it would be impossible to organize any large industrialized economy, because no one would be able to calculate economic value without prices. Lenin discovered this when the Russian socialist economy of 1917–1921 collapsed, and he had to reintroduce limited markets as the “New Economic Policy.” Socialist planners in modern economies can limit but cannot completely abolish market pricing, which shows that Mises was right. Badiou makes no attempt to refute Mises’s reasoning. The other reason why Badiou’s mathematical analogy is weak is that the many failed attempts to prove Fermat’s theorem did not kill anyone! By contrast, the many failed attempts to prove the communist hypothesis have killed many people in some of the greatest atrocities of human history. In fact, Badiou casually mentions that some historians estimate that Mao killed seventy million people, and Badiou is not bothered by this at all.75 Badiou’s second line of reasoning for the communist hypothesis is the historical argument that the idea of communism has been clarified through three historical episodes—the Paris Commune of 1871, the Cultural Revolution in China (1965–1976), and the general strike of students and workers in France in May of 1968. What Badiou sees here are three attempts to move away from the centralized power of the “party-state” towards a mass mobilization of the people for decentralized self-management by which the state is abolished. This suggests that the true idea of communism would be fulfilled in socialist anarchy.76 Remarkably, except for a couple of references to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Badiou never mentions any of the anarchist thinkers, and he is completely silent about the debates between anarchists and communists, including the debate between Marx and Mikhail Bakunin that broke up the First International (the International Working Men’s Association) in 1872. And thus Badiou does not face the fact that Bakunin and other socialist anarchists predicted that Marxist communism would establish a new form of centralized state power that would exploit the proletariat. Badiou repeatedly quotes Mao’s remark that in a communist society, the bourgeoisie can be found hiding “right inside the Communist Party itself.”77 But Badiou does not acknowledge that this is exactly what Bakunin predicted—that the “worker’s state” of communism would actually become rule by the “red bourgeoisie.”

11. Is socialist anarchism more liberating than Marxist communism? The word anarchy is based on two Greek words that mean “no rule” or “no government.” A socialist anarchy would be a classless and stateless

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society without private property that would be based on communal cooperation without any coercive governmental apparatus.78 Marx agreed with Bakunin that the fulfillment of socialist society would eventually require the “withering away of the state,” and thus both Marx and Bakunin were anarchists. But Marx also insisted that the socialist revolution could not immediately abolish the State, as Bakunin argued, because there would have to be first a centralization of State power in the “dictatorship of the proletariat” under the leadership of the Communist Party, which would have the power to abolish the rule of the bourgeois class as preparation for the final stage of socialist anarchy. We might wonder whether evolved human nature permits a socialist anarchy. How do human beings organize their social life without a government or state? Anarchists have answered that in fact most of human evolutionary history has been anarchistic, in that our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in stateless societies that organized social life without a centralized government or bureaucratic state exercising coercive authority over them. But then we might question whether this is possible in the large industrialized societies that dominate the world today. Bakunin contended that this was possible if farmers and workers organized themselves into local self-governing communal groups that could organize themselves into federations of communes cooperating for common purposes. Instead of working for employers, workers would cooperatively manage their own workplaces. Although individuals would own personal property, the land and the means of production would be held as common property for all, and wage labor would be abolished. Thus, social order would emerge from the bottom up, and at each level of social organization, decisions would be made by social consensus or majority rule. There would be no professional bureaucrats or politicians, and thus there would be no centralized government or state ruling over all. Bakunin thought that the Paris Commune of 1871 was moving in this direction. After France was defeated by Prussia in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the French Empire of Napoleon III fell, and a new French Republic was established. The working-class population of Paris resisted the authority of the new government and demanded that Paris should be selfgoverning with its own elected council. Paris was the home of various radical groups, including socialists and anarchists. The largest armed force in Paris was the National Guard, composed of men with little training who were organized by neighborhoods, who resisted the French troops who entered Paris to attempt to take the cannon claimed by the National Guard. By March 18 of 1871, the French troops were forced to withdraw, and the National Guard assumed control of Paris. The National Guard created a Central Committee of 38 members that took over the functions of government and called elections for March 23. A Commune council of 92 members was elected, one member for each twenty thousand residents in a city of two million. There was no president,

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mayor, or commander-in-chief. Most members of the council were radical republicans, and some were anarchists and socialists. The council declared that Paris was an independent commune and that all of France should be organized as a confederation of independent communes. All council members could be recalled at any moment by the voters. They were paid a wage equal to an average worker’s wage. The council initiated proposals to turn workplaces into self-managed worker cooperatives. Every ablebodied man was considered a member of the National Guard. The officers of the National Guard were elected by the soldiers. The Commune was under constant military threat. On May 21, troops of the French government entered the city. After seven days of savage street fighting, the Communards were defeated, and many were massacred. The Commune had lasted for only a short time, from March 18 to May 28. Shortly after the collapse of the Commune, Bakunin wrote about it as the first demonstration of socialist anarchism in which the state could be abolished, and the people could spontaneously rule themselves cooperatively without government. He admitted, however, that the majority of the Parisians were Jacobin republicans who still believed in the need for government, and that the socialist anarchists were a small minority.79 He thought the Commune had gone far enough towards anarchism to show that Marx was wrong to believe that a socialist revolution would have to first go through a period of proletarian dictatorship under the rule of the Communist Party. Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat, Bakunin argued, would create a new state with a ruling party elite that would exploit the people under the pretext of serving the common welfare. Marx drafted a statement on the Paris Commune on behalf of the General Council of the First International.80 At this time, in 1871, the International included both Marxists and Bakuninists, and Marx was trying to reconcile these two currents of thought in the International. Contrary to what Bakunin said about the Commune as the abolition of government, Marx saw the Commune as a democratic republic based on universal suffrage that was designed to replace the old repressive government with a “working men’s government” that would emancipate labor and organize an economy based on cooperative production. Rather than abolishing the state power, the communards were trying to appropriate state power for the interests of a working men’s society. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels had said that the “first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” (490). In the preface to the German edition of 1872, they identified the Paris Commune as illustrating the first step of the revolution, because “the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months” (470). Later, Engels declared that we now know what the dictatorship of the proletariat looks like: “Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (629).

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Even if Marx had a more accurate view of the Paris Commune than did Bakunin, the anarchists might still insist that Bakunin had a more accurate view of the tyrannical propensities of a Marxist dictatorship under Communist Party rule. After all, Bakunin’s predictions were born out by the rule of V. I. Lenin’s party in Russia. Following Marx’s teaching, Lenin insisted that the dictatorial rule of the Communist Party would have to precede any “withering away of the state.” When anarchist Emma Goldman was deported from the United States to Russia in 1919, she saw confirmation of her anarchist suspicions of Marxist government. She saw that workers who tried to strike were crushed. In a dictatorship of the proletariat, she was told, workers cannot strike because they would be going on strike against themselves! She saw that anyone who criticized the brutality of the party was imprisoned. And, then, in 1921, she saw the ultimate expression of Leninist tyranny. Workers in Petrograd attempted to go on strike. The sailors on Kronstadt (a naval fortress in the harbor of Petrograd) expressed their solidarity with the strikers. The Kronstadt sailors were famous for their support of the Bolshevik Revolution. But in response to their support of the strikers, the party leaders authorized Leon Trotsky to launch a ten-day bombardment of Kronstadt. Then, on March 18, the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, Kronstadt fell to communist troops, and thousands of the sailors were massacred.81 After leaving Russia, Goldman became one of the first people on the left to argue that Soviet Russia had betrayed the promise of socialist revolution to emancipate the workers and the peasants and that, on the contrary, it had become a new form of statist tyranny with the Communist Party as the ruling class. But even if one is persuaded by the attack on Marxist socialism coming from anarchists like Bakunin and Goldman, one might then wonder whether the anarchists have any positive alternative of their own. How exactly can they bring about a socialist revolution that immediately abolishes the state without any need for a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat? For Goldman and other anarchists, the answer came in the Spanish Civil War, particularly during the ten months (from July of 1936 to May of 1937) when the anarchist union movement controlled the Catalonian region of Spain.82 Based on the principle that “the emancipation of the workers must be the work of the workers themselves,” workers took control of the factories and workplaces, and peasants took control of their land, with workers and peasants organizing their lives cooperatively. And instead of armies and police forces, the enforcement of order was turned over to worker militias. This great anarchist experiment was finally crushed by Communists backed by the Soviet Union. This conflict between the Communists and the anarchists contributed to the final defeat of the republican forces by Francisco Franco’s fascists. This debate between the anarchists and the Marxists can be confusing if one does not distinguish the points of agreement and disagreement.83

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The Marxists and their anarchist critics agree that the end of the socialist revolution is anarchy. They disagree about the means to that end. For the anti-Marxist anarchists, the only proper means to anarchy is the immediate abolition of the state; and therefore the Marxist teaching about the need for a dictatorship of the proletariat through the rule of the Communist Party promotes a new form of statist oppression. The Marxists contend, however, that the proletarian state is only the temporary but necessary means to eventually achieve the abolition of the state. In The State and Revolution, V. I. Lenin explained: The proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not at all differ with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as the aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the temporary dictatorship of the oppressed class is necessary for the abolition of classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating his case against the anarchists: After overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should the workers “lay down their arms,” or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance? But what is the systematic use of arms by one class against another if not a “transient form” of state?84

Marxists and anarchists agree in aiming towards the classless and stateless society in which human beings will cooperate freely without governmental coercion and centralized bureaucratic power. According to the anarchists, the means to achieve this must prefigure the end result; and so we must immediately begin organizing social life as a voluntary association free from any coercion. According to the Marxists, this is a foolishly utopian idea that ignores the harsh necessity of socialist revolution today as the only means to achieve a future society of anarchy. To eventually achieve a classless society, the Marxists insist, we need a revolutionary transformation in which the oppressed proletarian class becomes the ruling class and suppresses the class that has exploited them. To eventually achieve a stateless society, we need a political revolution in which the Communist Party, leading a workers’ democracy, can use highly centralized and dictatorial state power to crush all the opponents of the proletarian revolution. Marxists see revolutionary anarchism as both theoretically incoherent and practically impotent. It is theoretically incoherent because the anarchist theory that all authority must be rejected makes revolution impossible. It is practically impotent because the anarchist practice of refusing to exercise political authority makes it impossible for anarchists to challenge the established state authority. The theoretical incoherence of anarchism was identified by Engels, who explained that the anarchist theory of a revolutionary abolition of all authority is self-contradictory, because revolution itself is an exercise of authority, and a successful revolution must exercise that authority in ter-

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rorizing its opponents.85 So, for example, when anarchists like Emma Goldman condemned Lenin and Trotsky for smashing the Kronstadt revolt in 1921, they ignored the fact that this came after three years of civil war in which the Bolshevik Revolution was threatened with defeat, and the counterrevolutionaries were prepared to use the Kronstadt revolt to weaken the position of the communist government. Years later, Trotsky explained this in his defense of the repression of the Kronstadt revolt.86 He pointed out the confusion in the minds of his anarchist critics, who professed to be revolutionaries but who refused to accept the dictatorial means required for any successful revolution. Trotsky also pointed to the practical impotence of anarchism as illustrated by the failure of the anarchist revolution in the Spanish Civil War.87 In February of 1936, a new government, called the Popular Front, was elected. This had been preceded by workers’ strikes and peasant rebellions, and most workers and peasants saw the Popular Front as advancing their cause. On July 17, a coalition of army officers, monarchists, and fascists initiated a military coup led by General Francisco Franco. The Popular Front government attempted to avoid confrontation, but the workers and peasants acted on their own. Workers took over factories and organized them through committees of workers. Workers formed militias to fight against the fascists. Peasants took control of the land, expropriating big landowners and putting much of the land into the collective management of communal organizations. The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT)—the National Confederation of Workers—was an anarchist trade union organization with more than a million members dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. The CNT gained control of much of anti-fascist Spain. The Catalonian Popular Front governor Luis Companys called the CNT leaders into his office in Barcelona. He told them that since they had the support of the people, they could decide whether he was to remain in power, or they could take over. The CNT decided that they would have to leave him in office, because if they replaced him with a workers’ government it would result in a dictatorship, which would contradict their anarchist principle of never exercising state power. But then having renounced any overthrowing of the state, they later decided to collaborate with the Popular Front government for the sake of fighting against the fascists. As the communists gained power in the Popular Front, they turned against the anarchists. In May of 1937, the communists attacked the anarchists in Barcelona and defeated them. Then, on January 26, 1938, Franco’s troops conquered Barcelona. Socialist anarchists have never been as close to leading an anarchist revolution as they were in Spain in 1936. They failed, the Marxists say, because an anarchist revolution is inherently self-contradictory: any revolution requires the exercise of coercive authority, but that denies the antiauthoritarian principles of anarchism. Either the anarchists remain true to their principles by refusing to engage in revolutionary politics, and thus

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they become impotent; or they engage in revolutionary politics, and thus they give up their principles.

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, trans. J. Kahane (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981). See, for example, the articles on “The Road Back from Serfdom: A Tribute to Friedrich A. Hayek,” published in The American Economic Review 82 (May 1992): 1–36. See also János Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), especially chaps. 1–4, 15, 24. Kornai argues that any attempt to do this creates self-destructive contradictions in which neither markets nor planning can work well. For the opposing point of view, see Michael Harrington, “Markets and Plans: Is the Market Necessarily Capitalist?” Dissent 36 (Winter 1989): 56–70. All of these texts can be found In Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978). All page references in the text are to The Marx-Engels Reader. For a comprehensive history of Marxist theory, see Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). For a history of the Russian Revolution, see Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution (New York: Stein & Day, 1984). Two of the best general surveys of Marxist ideas and history are Paul D’Amato, The Meaning of Marxism: Updated Edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014); and Thomas Sowell, Marxism: Philosophy and Economics (New York: William Morrow, 1985). See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Harvest Books, n.d.), 1–13, 124–64; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 193–233; and Paul Ricoeur, Hermaneutics and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See Kornai, The Socialist System, chaps. 4, 15. On the debate among historians as to whether early capitalism exploited or helped the working class, see E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1966), 189–212. See Eugene von Böhm-Bawerk, Capital and Interest, trans. George D. Huncke and Hans F. Sennholz (South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1959), 290–307. In distinguishing human work as guided by conceptual thought from the work of other animals, Marx shows the influence of Aristotle’s biology. Modern evolutionary biology confirms this distinction. See Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), chap. 1. See Studs Terkel, Working (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Paul L. Wachtel, The Poverty of Affluence: A Psychological Portrait of the American Way of Life (New York: Free Press, 1983); and Mark Robert Rank, Thomas A. Hirschl, and Kirk A. Foster, Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Simon Kuznets, “Economic Growth and Income Inequality,” The American Economic Review 45 (March, 1955): 1–28. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014). For a short summary of the historical data on inequality, see Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Inequality in the Long Run,” Science 344 (23 May 2014): 838–43. Piketty, Capital, 347–50; Piketty and Saez, “Inequality.” Piketty, Capital, 246–60, 315–25; Piketty and Saez, “Inequality.” Piketty, Capital, 13–15, 271–76. Piketty, Capital, 350–58, 571–73. Piketty, Capital, 1, 30–31, 422, 479–80, 493, 504. Piketty, Capital, 471–539. Piketty, Capital, 505–12. Piketty, Capital, 98, 138–39, 333, 511, 549.

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23 24 25 26 27 28

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Piketty, Capital, 248. For these criticisms of Piketty, see Tyler Cowen, “Capital Punishment: Why a Global Tax on Wealth Won’t End Inequality,” Foreign Affairs 93 (May/June 2014): 158–64; and Scott Winship, “Inequality and the Fate of Capitalism,” National Review (May 19, 2014). See The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010 (Washington, DC: Congressional Budget Office, December 2013). Piketty, Capital, 6, 115–16, 353, 362, 411, 414, 446, 449–52, 488, 527. See Mark R. Rank, “From Rags to Riches to Rags,” The New York Times, April 18, 2014; and Rank, Hirschl, and Foster, Chasing The American Dream. See Piketty, Capital, 1, 10, 21, 39–41, 77, 228–29, 257, 263, 297, 358, 422, 439, 473, 497, 530, 538, 571–72. Piketty, Capital, 6, 531–32. See Staughton Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 92–96; and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 223–24. See Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), 13–30. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 1: 326. Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1975), 277–78. Mises, Socialism, chaps. 5–6; and Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1944), 20–56. See Peter J. Boettke, The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years, 1918– 1928 (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1990). On market socialism, see Oskar Lange and Fred M. Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964); David Miller, Market, State and Community: Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (Winchester, MA: Allen & Unwin, 1983); and Theodore A. Burczak, Socialism After Hayek (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. See Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Lavoie, National Economic Planning: What Is Left? (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1985); and Kornai, The Socialist System, chap. 21. See Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 276–90. In A Pattern for Failure: Socialist Economies in Crisis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Sven Rydenfelt, a Swedish economist, surveyed fifteen socialist countries and argued that they all failed to provide people the incentives necessary for productivity. See also P. T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). See Joseph H. Carens, Equality, Moral Incentives, and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 96–138, 164–77. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1976), 50–51. See also Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957); and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Irving Howe, Introduction to The Essential Works of Socialism, ed. Irving Howe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976), 15. Howe, 7–8, 11. For the argument that Engels rather than Marx is responsible for Soviet totalitarianism, see Terence Ball, “Marxian Science and Positivist Politics,” in Terence Ball and James Farr, eds., After Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 235–60. Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (New York: Russell & Russell, 1957), 256. François Ponchaud, Cambodia: Year Zero, trans. Nancy Amphoux (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), xvi.

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48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1956), 306. See J. L. Talmon, Political Messianism: The Romantic Phase (New York: Praeger, 1960). Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944). See Robert Heilbroner, “What Is Socialism?” Dissent (Summer 1978): 341–48; and Robert Heilbroner, Marxism: For and Against (New York: Norton, 1980), 150–72. Heilbroner, “What Is Socialism?” 348. For differing assessments of workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia and elsewhere, see Charles E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 330–43; Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982); Mihailo Markovic, Democratic Socialism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); Kornai, The Socialist System, chap. 20; Diane Flaherty, “Self-Management and the Future of Socialism: Lessons from Yugoslavia,” Science & Society 56 (Spring 1992): 92–108; Gregory K. Dow, Governing the Firm: Workers’ Control in Theory and Practice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Phil Gasper, “Are Workers’ Cooperatives the Alternative to Capitalism?” International Socialist Review 93 (Summer 2014): 102–8. Irving Howe, “From Roosevelt to Reagan,” Dissent (Winter 1983): 46. Michael Walzer, Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 23–53, 128–38. For examples of democratic socialism in utopian communities, see John Humphrey Noyes, History of American Socialisms (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1870); and Melford E. Spiro, Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (New York: Schocken Books, 1970). Mises, Socialism, 533. Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). See Nik Brandal, Oivind Bratberg, and Dag Einar Thorsen, The Nordic Model of Social Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). See Lane Kenworthy, Social Democratic America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Eduard Bernstein, The Preconditions of Socialism, trans. Henry Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 150. Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, Pathfinder Press, 1970), 85. Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 147. Eduard Bernstein, “Critical Interlude,” in Henry Tudor, ed., Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896–1898 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 218–19. Quoted in Manfred B. Steger, The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147. Quoted in Sheri Berman, The Primacy of Politics: Social Democracy and the Making of Europe’s Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 176. Marquis Childs, Sweden: The Middle Way (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1936). See Brandal, Bratberg, and Thorsen, Nordic Model; and Kenworthy, Social Democratic America. Kenworthy, Social Democratic America, 9. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). See Kenworthy, Social Democratic America, 8–9, 89, 102–7, 127, 178; and Micklethwait and Wooldridge, Fourth Revolution, 169–87. See Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962); Milton Friedman and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Avon Books, 1981); and Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 253–394. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, Fourth Revolution, 171. James Gwartney, Joshua Hall, and Robert Lawson, Economic Freedom of the World: 2013 Annual Report (Vancouver, Canada: Fraser Institute, 2013), p. v. Terry Miller, Anthony Kim, and Kim Holmes, eds., 2014 Index of Economic Freedom (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2014).

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See Andreas Bergh, Sweden and the Revival of the Capitalist Welfare State (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014). See Per Olsson, “The Reality of Swedish Neo-Liberalism,” May 5, 2013, http://www.socialistworld.net/doc/6330; and Madeleine Johansson, “Sweden’s Welfare State: A Marxist Analysis of the ‘Nordic Model,’” Irish Marxist Review 1, no. 3 (2012): 47–53. See Piketty, Capital, 344–45. See Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, eds., The Idea of Communism (London: Verso, 2010). Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010). Badiou, 6–7. Badiou, 265. Badiou, 23, 69–71, 87–88, 108, 113–56, 177–228, 240, 248, 253, 275. Badiou, 70, 113–14, 263. The best history of socialist anarchism is Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010). The best collection of socialist anarchist writing is Daniel Guerin’s edited anthology, No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005). Mikhail Bakunin, “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” in Guerin, No Gods, No Masters, 202–8. Karl Marx, “The Paris Commune,” in Guerin, No Gods, No Masters, 208–12. See Emma Goldman, “Memories of Kronstadt,” in Guerin, No Gods, No Masters, 545–60. On anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, see Guerin, No Gods, No Masters, 605–16; and Marshall, Demanding the Impossible, 453–68. Much of the Marxist writing on anarchism can be found in N. Y. Kolpinsky, ed., Marx, Engels, Lenin: Anarchism and Anarcho-Socialism (New York: International Publishers, 1972). For a good summary of the Marxist critique of socialist anarchism, see Paul D’Amato, “Anarchism: How Not to Make a Revolution,” International Socialist Review (Winter, 1997). Kolpinsky, Marx, Engels, Lenin, 275–76. Kolpinsky, 103–4. See Leon Trotsky, “Hue and Cry over Kronstadt,” The New International 4 (April 1938): 103–6. See Geoff Bailey, “Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War,” International Socialist Review 24 (July-August 2002).

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13 The Death of God and the Will to Power

Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy; Human, All Too Human; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; and Beyond Good and Evil

KEY READINGS The Birth of Tragedy, sections 1–2, 12–15, 23–25; Human, All Too Human, sections 1–144, 224–92, 438–82, 629–38; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part, Prologue, sections 1, 11, 15, 17, 21, Second Part, sections 12, 20, Third Part, sections 2, 4, 12, Fourth Part, sections 6, 17–19; Beyond Good and Evil, Preface, sections 205–13, 257–96.

Much of the ideological warfare of the twentieth century was a contest between Marxist socialism and Lockean liberalism. But there was also a third alternative—the aristocratic radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was transformed into a political ideology by Italian fascists and German Nazis. Nietzsche wrote in response to a crisis of values in the nineteenth century that was leading to nihilism—the sense that there are no fixed standards for ethics or politics. While Nietzsche embraced the nihilist negation of all traditional values, he also hoped to overcome the negativity of nihilism through the creation of new values by “philosophers of the future” exercising their “will to power.” 435

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The appeal in the Declaration of Independence to “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” assumes that there are some enduring standards of truth and justice rooted in the universal order of nature and of God as the Creator of nature. But what happens when people decide that belief in an eternal Creator or in a natural order shaped by such a Creator is an illusion? If truth and justice are not products of some cosmic order of nature or God but creations of human will, can we live with that? If the universe has no cosmic meaning or purpose, can we give our lives moral dignity by creating and then obeying our own norms for thought and action? Or will this idea of the moral emptiness of the universe have degrading effects on human life? Will some people become self-indulgent hedonists as they choose to live only for the pleasures of the moment? Will other people become brutal tyrants as they choose to live a life of domination over others? In nineteenth-century Europe and America, the apparent decline in religious belief and growth in scientific materialism led many thinkers to ask such questions, as they worried that the loss of faith would bring a moral, intellectual, and political crisis. One manifestation of that crisis was in the writings of Nietzsche.1 He proclaimed that “God is dead.” He warned that Europe was approaching a nihilist catastrophe, with the thought that since there are no universal standards of truth or value, and since all such standards are actually arbitrary creations of the human will, then life has no transcendent meaning; and human beings must choose how to live without knowing that any choice is objectively better than any other. To escape the emptiness of their lives, some people will distract themselves by pursuing a soft life of petty pleasures. Others will choose to satisfy their desire for domination by tyrannizing over others. And yet, Nietzsche hoped that this crisis of nihilism would allow a “Superman” to create new values through a new “master morality” of nobility. He thought the creation of new values by superior human beings was the highest expression of the “will to power” that is the fundamental reality of life. In creating new values, human beings will take the place of God. Nietzsche (1844–1900) was born the son of a Lutheran minister in a small village in Prussia.2 When he was five years old, his father died. His sister Elisabeth—two years younger than he—was deeply attached to him throughout his life. He was a brilliant boy who wrote poetry, essays, and music. Much of his writing expressed deep religious feelings. In 1858, he went to Pforta, a famous German boarding school, where he studied the Greek and Latin classics. In 1864, he went to the University of Bonn to study theology. At this time, Nietzsche was beginning to doubt his religious faith. In 1865, Nietzsche moved to Leipzig University to study classical philology. At Leipzig, he impressed Friedrich Ritschl, a prominent professor of philology, who promoted Nietzsche’s career. In 1868, Nietzsche became entranced by the operatic music of Richard Wagner. After meeting Wagner, they became close friends, with the young Nietzsche looking up to Wagner as his hero. Nietzsche and Wagner shared a deep interest in the ideas of

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Arthur Schopenhauer, particularly his idea that music was the highest art because the musical genius can express the deepest inner nature of reality— the metaphysical “thing-in-itself”—that cannot be grasped by conceptual thought. Wagner thought he was such a musical genius, and the young Nietzsche agreed. But later, Nietzsche turned against both Schopenhauer and Wagner in rejecting their romantic metaphysical claims for music as a delusional attempt to use art to satisfy religious longings for redemption from the world. In 1869, Nietzsche was appointed a professor of philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He taught there until 1879, when his poor health forced him to resign and to live on his small retirement salary. Nietzsche’s first book was published in 1872—The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music.3 As was first noticed by his friend Lou Salomé, his books show a chronological movement in his thinking that falls into three periods—early, middle, and late.4 The Birth of Tragedy shows his early enthusiasm for Wagner’s operatic music as a return to the spirit of Greek tragedy. The Greek tragic poets, Nietzsche believed, had presented a pessimistic view of human suffering in an incomprehensible universe. But this deep insight was overturned by the rational optimism of Socrates, who assumed that the universe was intelligible and therefore comprehensible to the human mind. Under the influence of Wagner’s romanticism, Nietzsche thought that the ecstatic emotions stirred by romantic poetry and music gave human beings a deeper experience of reality than the cool rationality of Socratic philosophy and modern science. Nietzsche moved into the middle period of his writing with the publication in 1878 of Human, All Too Human.5 He rejected Wagner’s romantic elevation of artistic emotion as a vulgar appeal to the popular desire for art that would take the place of Christianity in satisfying religious longings for transcendent knowledge. Against Wagner and romanticism, Nietzsche looked to the rationality of modern science as a way for “free spirits” to pursue rigorous but limited knowledge without any yearning for transcendent, metaphysical truth. During this time, he adopted the new scientific teaching of Charles Darwin that everything has evolved, including human beings and their human morality, by natural laws. In his Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, Nietzsche was influenced by his friend Paul Reé, who developed an evolutionary psychology of the moral sentiments, based on Darwin’s Descent of Man.6 In 1882, Nietzsche became enthralled with Lou Salomé, a twenty-oneyear-old, beautiful, and intelligent Russian woman. Nietzsche, Salomé, and Reé became close friends who planned to live together to share their philosophical ideas. But when Salomé twice rejected Nietzsche’s proposals of marriage, and he and Reé became romantic rivals for her attention, he broke off his friendship with both of them, while also breaking away from the scientific naturalism that Salomé and Reé favored. With the 1883 publication of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche entered the third and last period of his writing.7 He moved away

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from the scientific rationality of Human, All Too Human and back towards the romantic feelings of The Birth of Tragedy. Zarathustra was a work of poetic fiction in which he told a series of allegorical fables using Zarathustra—the name of an ancient Persian who founded a new religion—as his main character. The language and the stories of Zarathustra parody the New Testament. This looks like Nietzsche’s attempt to devise poetic imagery that will satisfy the transcendent yearnings of atheists like himself who still have religious longings. With the publication of Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, Nietzsche offered a statement in prose of the themes poetically presented in Zarathustra.8 These two books present Nietzsche’s most famous ideas—the death of God, the will to power, eternal return, and the Superman. In January of 1889, Nietzsche collapsed in a street in Turin, Italy. He suffered a mental breakdown from which he would never recover. His madness became evident in delusions that his friends saw in his letters to them. He identified himself variously as Caesar, the Crucified Christ, the god Dionysus, and the Creator of the world. The cause of his madness is unclear, but when he entered a mental institution in Basel, his doctor diagnosed him as suffering from neurosyphilis, a form of syphilis in which bacteria attack the brain. Recently, some doctors examining the evidence of his symptoms have speculated that he suffered from a brain tumor. Others have proposed that he manifested manic depression with late-developing psychotic features.9 Some neurologists have seen evidence of a genetically inherited disorder that damages the brain in ways that would explain all of Nietzsche’s symptoms: migraine headaches, mood swings from depression to euphoria, delusions, visual problems, strokes, and progressive dementia.10 Some of Nietzsche’s critics, however, have suggested that his derangement was the inevitable consequence of his mental and moral degeneration. But for those entranced by his writings, Nietzsche’s madness was part of his magic. In 1917, Isadora Duncan—a famous dancer and enthusiastic follower of Nietzsche—remarked: “How do we know that what seems to us insanity was not a vision of transcendent truth?”11 There does seem to be a connection between the Dionysian side of his philosophizing—his frenzied ecstasy in saying yes to life that bursts out as singing and dancing—and the craziness of his final letters. A letter to Peter Gast was one sentence: “Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured, and all the heavens are full of joy.”12 Until his death in 1900, Nietzsche’s madness made him dependent on the care given by his mother and his sister. During this last decade of his life, his writings made him an international celebrity. His sister Elisabeth sought to control his public reputation by setting up a Nietzsche Archive of his writings and managing the editing and publishing of his works. She presented her brother as a Prussian patriot. The influence of Nietzsche’s writings since his death has been extensive, confusing, and disturbing. It has been extensive, because many of the most important artists and thinkers of the last century—including Sig-

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mund Freud, C. G. Jung, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Thomas Mann, Martin Heidegger, and Leo Strauss—have been touched by his ideas. This influence has been confusing, however, because different people take radically different views of what Nietzsche taught. Nietzsche’s followers have included neopagans, feminists, anarchists, socialists, fascists, vegetarians, and nudists! This influence has also been disturbing because many of those claiming to be Nietzsche’s followers have interpreted his ideas as justifying evil conduct. Consider, for example, the famous murder trial of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in Chicago in 1924.13 Leopold and Loeb were the sons of wealthy families in Chicago. They were both young and intellectually brilliant. Loeb was the youngest student ever to graduate from the University of Michigan. Leopold was a law student at the University of Chicago. In 1924, Loeb was 18 years old, and Leopold was 19. Having read Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and other works, they agreed with Nietzsche’s attack on traditional morality and his claim that the “Superman” would be “beyond good and evil.” To show their Nietzschean “will to power,” they decided to commit the perfect murder. They abducted and murdered Bobby Franks—a 14-year-old boy from a wealthy family—with the intention of getting ransom money from the Franks family. Their mistakes, however, left evidence for the police, who caught them. Their families hired Clarence Darrow—the most famous criminal lawyer in America—to defend them. He made an impassioned plea to the judge to give them a life sentence rather than the death penalty. A crucial part of his argument was that reading Nietzsche had had a harmful effect on their vulnerable young minds, for which they were not responsible. Although the prosecutor argued vigorously for the death penalty, the judge was persuaded by Darrow to reduce the sentence to life imprisonment. The apparent harmfulness of Nietzsche’s writings was not limited to a few individuals like Leopold and Loeb. In Germany, some of the militaristic nationalists who led the country into the First World War saw this as an expression of what Nietzsche called “great politics.” Nietzsche’s ideas were also adopted by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, who saw themselves as following Nietzsche’s celebration of the “will to power” expressed in “master morality” in their political pursuit of world domination under the rule of the “master race.” In 1934, Hitler visited the Nietzsche Archives and posed for a photograph next to a bust of Nietzsche. Some of the leading philosophic proponents of Nazism—such as Martin Heidegger and Alfred Baeumler—were prominent as scholarly interpreters of Nietzsche.14 Thus Nietzsche became part of the official culture of Nazism. We must wonder whether Nietzsche can be held responsible for such dangerous interpretations of his teaching. Does his talk about rejecting traditional moral standards and going “beyond good and evil” through the “will to power” of the “Superman” necessarily encourage immoral conduct? Does it suggest a new version of Thrasymachus’s teaching that

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morality and politics are ultimately expressions of the rule of the stronger? Does Nietzsche’s thought promote an irrational willfulness in which might makes right? Does the death of God bring on a collapse into godless bestiality and thus the death of humanity? To properly consider such general questions about the moral and political implications of Nietzsche’s teaching, we must first ask some more particular questions about his books.

1. Do we need the mythic illusions of music and drama to conceal the meaningless chaos of the world? In our chapter on Plato, we saw how the history of political philosophy began with Socrates’s relentless questioning of everyone, as he moved beyond unexamined opinions to a rational understanding of the universe. He found that those who claimed to have some knowledge of the world— politicians, orators, poets, and artists—could not give a rational explanation of their beliefs and actions. He claimed to be superior to these people only in his full awareness of his own ignorance, which prompted him to seek for knowledge through rigorous questioning of himself and others. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche recognizes the importance of Socrates as a turning point in world history, in which the quest for true knowledge of the world through philosophy or science became the highest life for people like Socrates. And yet, Nietzsche criticizes “scientific Socratism” for destroying the tragic view of life that had developed in ancient Greek art and music, and he hopes that musical artists like Wagner can revive the vision of tragic art as an alternative to the Socratic tradition of science and philosophy. He identifies this tragic art with Dionysus, the Greek god of an emotional religion, in which members of the cult could be thrown into orgiastic frenzy and intoxicated dancing. Greek drama developed as part of the Dionysian festivals. According to the Dionysian “tragic world view” that Nietzsche defends, the world is not rationally comprehensible, and thus we need human art to contrive those illusory appearances that make it possible for us to live in this incomprehensible world. In contrast to this Dionysian view, Socrates is the prototype of the “theoretical man,” who lives by “the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it” (Birth of Tragedy, section 15). In Socrates, we see the first “theoretical optimist,” who has “faith that the nature of things can be fathomed” by logic. Nietzsche thinks this is a delusion that fails to see “the limits of logical nature.” If one pushes the logical investigation of the world far enough, eventually one sees that the ultimate presuppositions of logic—fundamental assumptions about the world—cannot themselves be logically demonstrated. In fact, the very assumption that the world is logical is itself not a conclusion of logic but an act of faith. The

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lover of wisdom who seeks pure knowledge through the logic of science and philosophy must eventually reach the limits of logical knowledge, which should lead to a tragic insight into the need for artistic illusion. Socrates was famous for asking questions about everything. What is justice? What is courage? And so on. We saw in our chapter on Plato that he thought such questions pointed to the eternal Ideas or Forms as the highest objects of knowledge (see chapter 1, section 9). All knowledge depends ultimately on organizing our sense impressions into enduring categories or classes. In language, every common noun represents such a category or class. So, for example, to speak of Socrates as a “man” is to classify this unique individual as a member of a class with common characteristics. Nietzsche agrees that this activity of classification of unique events into common categories is required for human knowledge. But unlike Plato and Socrates, he sees this as an artistic creation of illusions. In an early fragmentary note written shortly after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche concluded that “truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are.”15 This is so because every word becomes a concept in which some unique experience is classified with similar experiences that are not exactly the same. “Every concept originates through our equating what is unequal.” So, for example, no leaf is ever exactly equal to any other leaf, but the concept of “leaf” abstracts from all differences and assumes that there is some kind of original form— the Idea of Leaf—and that all individual leaves are only copies or imitations of this original Leaf. Similarly, if we call people “honest,” we assume that their unique actions are the same as similar actions that we classify as “honesty.” Ultimately, Nietzsche explains, this is all an exercise in the poetic art of creating metaphors, because instead of seeing each experience as unique, we use general terms that classify our unique experiences according to their similarities and differences. Our truths are really illusions, because we are treating similar things as if they were the same. Nietzsche assumes that the reality of the world is chaotic—a formless confusion of unique events that never repeat themselves in exactly the same way. Such chaos is incomprehensible to us. But we cannot survive if we do not organize our experiences of the world into comprehensible patterns. Consequently, Nietzsche reasons, we must use language as a poetic device for creating comprehensible patterns and then pretending that those patterns really exist in the world. This poetic illusion prevails because it allows us to live in the world. The Greek tragic poets, Nietzsche believes, accepted this need for artistic illusions to allow human beings to survive in an otherwise incomprehensible world. Socrates, however, wanted to tear away the veils of illusion in the pursuit of pure knowledge through logical reasoning. Nietzsche sees this as a deep mistake of the “theoretical man”—the philosopher or the scientist—who does not see that his faith in the logical comprehensibility of the world is illusory.

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As we have seen in chapter 3 (sections 2–3), Augustine made a similar argument for the primacy of faith over reason: reasoning about the world assumes a faith in the logical regularity of nature that cannot be proven by reason. We might, then, reply to Nietzsche’s argument as we did to Augustine’s. Even if it is true that no two events are ever exactly the same, it is also true that there are patterns of similarity and difference that allow us to generalize about the regularities in the world. Even if no two leaves are ever identical, they resemble each other more than they do dogs, and thus to speak of leaves as different from dogs is not an illusion. We have seen in earlier chapters that reasoning about sameness and difference is crucial for judging the appeal of the Declaration of Independence to human equality (see chapter 8, section 1). How can we say that all human beings are created equal and endowed equally with natural rights, when we know that no two human beings are ever exactly the same? We must be able to infer that the similarity of human beings in their humanity is clear enough and important enough to justify equal treatment in some respects, even as we acknowledge that there are also clear and important differences between human beings that justify unequal treatment in other respects. This thought will be important in responding to Nietzsche’s claim that the natural “order of rank” among human beings denies human equality. Nietzsche’s point about the difficulty of reasoning about unique events that never recur in exactly the same way should remind us of the problem we saw in Locke’s account of “prerogative power” (see chapter 8, section 10). Restraining the discretionary power of individual rulers by putting it under the rule of law assumes that we can devise general rules of action that apply to all particular cases. But as Locke saw, in times of war and emergency, we might have to allow the executive to act at his own discretion to meet unpredictable contingencies that cannot be anticipated by general rules. Similarly, when Nietzsche speaks of the founders of new religions and new regimes who create new values for a people, he celebrates heroic leadership that is always outside any general framework of law. As with Machiavelli’s celebration of “new princes” who establish new religions and new regimes, there is something morally disturbing about this. After all, it was such talk about the need for extraordinary leadership that prepared the way in Germany for Hitler as “the Leader” (der Führer) to come to power, with Wagner’s music playing in the background.16

2. Can a free-spirited science of Darwinian evolution give us “humble truths”? Although Human, All Too Human was published only six years after The Birth of Tragedy, it contradicts that first book on some fundamental points. While the first book criticizes Socrates and the scientific tradition

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that he began, the second book praises Socratic science. While the first book shows Nietzsche’s friendship with Wagner and agreement with Wagner’s romantic view of the supremacy of art, the second book shows Nietzsche’s break with Wagner and rejection of Wagner’s romanticism. The style of the first book is intoxicated and enthusiastic. The style of the second is sober and restrained. The calm writing style of Human, All Too Human partially explains why it has been one of the least popular of Nietzsche’s books. The subtitle of Human, All Too Human is A Book for Free Spirits. In his preface to the 1888 edition of the book, Nietzsche admitted that he had invented these “free spirits” because none existed when he wrote the book. And yet he indicates that there have been free spirits throughout history beginning with Socrates (sections 433, 437), and he expects new free spirits in the future who will revive Socratic science.17 (When Nietzsche speaks of science he uses the German word Wissenschaft, which denotes any systematic and rigorous knowledge.) “Free spirits,” Nietzsche explains, are rare among human beings, while “bound spirits” are the rule (sections 225–29). (Free spirits translates freie Geister, which could also be translated as “free minds.”) Free spirits demand reasons for their positions, and therefore they cannot accept traditional customs based on habitual acceptance. Bound spirits demand faith for their positions, and therefore they can accept traditional customs based only on habitual acceptance. Consequently, the stability of social traditions depends on bound spirits. “All states and social arrangements—class, marriage, education, law—acquire strength and permanence solely because of the faith of bound spirits in them; they exist, then, in the absence of reasons, or at least in the resistance to asking for reasons” (section 227). As we saw in our chapter on Plato, when Socrates questioned the common opinions of his fellow Athenians by asking for reasons, he was perceived as dangerous and eventually was tried and executed for corrupting the young and denying the gods of the city. It is easy to understand, therefore, why Nietzsche can identify Socrates as a free spirit. But since Nietzsche denies that there are any eternal truths, it might seem that he thereby denies the basis for the Socratic pursuit of truth. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche explains that while he rejects the possibility of “absolute truths” that assume a metaphysical reality, he affirms the value of “humble truths” as discovered through a scientific investigation of evolutionary history. Since “everything has evolved,” everything is historically contingent, and therefore there are no eternal truths. And yet a properly historical or evolutionary science can discover the “humble truths” of historical development (sections 2–3). So, for example, while human nature is not eternal, because it evolved as the product of a historical development, we can draw historical generalizations about human beings that are true for as long as human beings exist in their present form.

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Although the historical knowledge that comes from science is limited and contingent, it is a genuine kind of knowledge. “True science,” Nietzsche believes, is “the imitation of nature in concepts” (section 38). This scientific knowledge of nature is always conditional and subject to revision. Socrates was famous for conversational discussions that raised questions without reaching final answers. Nietzsche identifies that questioning way of life as the life of the “free spirit.” Nietzsche believes that the scientific, skeptical spirit of the European Renaissance and the Enlightenment continued in the tradition of the spirit of Socrates. He acknowledges, however, that most human beings cannot live the skeptical life of a Socratic “free spirit,” because they yearn for transcendent truths and transcendent values that are absolute and eternal.

3. Can human beings live without transcendent longings? Religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam satisfy the transcendent longings of human beings to be redeemed from ordinary earthly existence, so that they can enter an eternal realm of perfect bliss and immortality. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche speaks of this need for redemption as an “artificial” or “acquired” need that was cultivated by the Christian church in the Middle Ages, and he suggests that a future society might eliminate this need while serving “the common true needs of all men” (sections 27, 476). (At this point, Nietzsche agrees with Marx about the future possibility of forming a completely atheistic society.) But Nietzsche also indicates that this need for redemption has become so strong that even those who believe themselves to be atheists are moved by the religious desire to find some transcendent satisfaction through art. Those who might otherwise be considered atheistic free spirits enjoy music (such as Wagner’s operas) that stirs religious feelings without requiring belief in religious doctrines. Indeed, romantic art in general shows “the magic of religious feeling” as the modern artist appeals to those who have given up religious beliefs but who still yearn for religious ecstasy through art (sections 130–131, 150–153). This modern romantic tendency to atheistic religiosity is evident in skeptical thinkers like William James, who saw no scientific basis for religious doctrines but who still yearned for the emotional profundity of religious experience.18 We must wonder, then, whether this transcendent longing could ever be eliminated from the human soul. As we have seen in our chapters on Augustine and Aquinas, they believed that the longing to return to our Creator was so deep in the human soul that it could never be completely suppressed (see chapter 3, sections 1–2; and chapter 4, sections 1, 3). In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche sometimes suggests that “free spirits” could completely free themselves from such religious needs. Yet he concedes that higher cultures require the passionate energy that comes only from the transcendental aspirations of religion and art. Human beings will

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not exert themselves to build great civilizations if they are not motivated by the feeling that they are building for eternity and eternal rewards. Transcendental longings provide the “source of strength,” and a free-spirited science can only act as a “regulator.” “Illusions, biases, passions must give heat; with the help of scientific knowledge, the pernicious and dangerous consequences of overheating must be prevented” (section 251). That Nietzsche’s science cannot provide much “heat” for human action is illustrated in Human, All Too Human by his scientific explanation for the origin of justice (sections 92–104). Justice originated from exchange and reciprocity. Where people are roughly equal in their power, they see that it is in their interest to engage in mutually beneficial exchanges, because while fairness will create gratitude, unfairness will provoke revenge. Where one party is clearly weaker than another—as where a weaker city is under siege by a stronger city—the weaker party can choose to fight to the death, which imposes a loss on the stronger party. This allows the weaker party to enforce fair treatment when the stronger party sees the advantage in being moderate in its rule over the weaker. Those who are cruel must expect their victims or potential victims to desire requital or revenge, and thus those who might be cruel learn that it is advantageous to moderate their cruelty. The natural inclination of the strong to dominate the weak will be checked by the natural inclination of the weak to resist domination.19 In this way, the natural tendency of the human animal to answer in kind—to return injury for injury and benefit for benefit—promotes customary norms of justice as reciprocity as being advantageous for all. But such an explanation of justice as a historical development of human beings seeking their long-term advantage provides little “heat.” It cannot motivate those who want justice to come from the transcendent authority of a just God who gives out eternal rewards and punishments to enforce his cosmic justice. By Nietzsche’s scientific account, morality does not elevate human beings beyond the natural world, because human morality arises as a natural development of animal nature. Nietzsche explains: The beginnings of justice, as of prudence, moderation, bravery—in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues—are animal: a consequence of that drive which teaches us to seek food and elude enemies. Now if we consider that even the highest human being has only become more elevated and subtle in the nature of his food and in his conception of what is inimical to him, it is not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal.20

Explaining “morality as animal” conforms to a Darwinian science of human beings as animals shaped by a history of natural evolution.21 But many human beings regard such an explanation as a degrading view of human beings, because it denies their spiritual character as elevated above the natural world by their divinely instilled conscience.

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If the science of “free spirits” is not going to satisfy most people, then we must wonder whether Nietzsche’s free spirits can live in modern democratic regimes ruled by majority will.

4. Is a free-spirited science compatible with modern liberal democracy? Although Nietzsche is critical of modern democracy in much of his writing, Human, All Too Human shows a moderate acceptance of democratic politics and institutions, while strongly rejecting socialism. He sees that in modern Europe all political parties must appeal to popular opinion because of the triumph of democracy. He believes that nothing can be done to change this. “Now that this has happened, one must adapt to the new conditions, as one adapts when an earthquake has moved the old limits and outlines of the land, and changed the value of property” (section 438). He accepts the political rule of the majority of the people as long as the few free spirits are given their freedom to keep out of politics generally while occasionally being allowed to speak out about public issues. Philosophers such as Plato were enemies of democracy, Nietzsche observes, because believing they possessed absolute truth, they wanted to rule over others. They were “tyrants of the spirit.” But free-spirited philosophers pursue scientific knowledge in a skeptical spirit. Free spirits want to be free to investigate everything, but they have no desire to become tyrants. They are “oligarchs of the spirit” (section 261). Free spirits can live in a modern democracy, because they ask only for the freedom of speech and thought that democracy can provide. Previously, Nietzsche observes, the state claimed a transcendent religious authority to rule absolutely over the life of a people. But in modern democratic states, the state has no such transcendent authority because the government is merely an instrument of popular will (section 472). Religion is purely a private matter, and therefore there is a great diversity of religious sects. The popular distrust of central authority leads to a weakening of the state. Increasingly, the functions of government are given over to private contractors. This decline of the state gives free spirits a freedom that they would not have under a centralized state. But while Nietzsche welcomes the freedom provided by modern democracy, he fears the tyranny to come from modern socialism. Modern socialism will require “the most submissive subjugation of all citizens to the absolute state, the like of which has never existed” (section 473). Since socialists will not be able to use traditional religious authority to support the state, they can only rule for short periods “by means of the most extreme terrorism.” Nietzsche foresees that this socialist rule by terror will only reinforce the lesson that all accumulations of state power are dangerous, and thus the reaction against socialist state terror will promote the idea

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of minimizing the power of the state. It seems, then, that Nietzsche predicted the rise and decline of socialist despotism in the twentieth century and the eventual triumph of liberal democracy and limited government. Nietzsche’s political thinking in Human, All Too Human contradicts those German Nazis who claimed that he was their ideological founder. Not only does he argue in favor of individual freedom and against centralized state power and rule by terror, he also rejects nationalism as an artificial obstacle to the political and cultural unification of Europe to form “a mixed European race” that will include the Jews, whom he praises for their contributions to European culture (section 475). Moreover, Nietzsche ridicules the idea of a “party member” as contrary to free thought. “He who thinks much is not suited to be a party member: too soon, he thinks himself through and beyond the party” (section 579). In fact, some of the National Socialists recognized that Nietzsche was not friendly to their cause. Ernst Krieck, a leading Nazi intellectual, remarked: “Apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, not a nationalist, and opposed to racial thinking, he could have been a leading National Socialist thinker!”22 As long as modern democracy leaves Nietzsche’s free spirits free to pursue their lives of scientific and philosophic inquiry, they are not much interested in political activity. There is a kind of solitariness that characterizes the Nietzschean life, which is indicated by the last part of Human, All Too Human, entitled “Man Alone with Himself” (sections 483–638). The “man of science” is constantly questioning his beliefs, and thus he cannot be a “man of convictions” who is confident about his beliefs, which means that the scientific man cannot be a political man because he cannot serve a political cause with unexamined enthusiasm. It is still true, however, that some of Nietzsche’s writing stirred the political enthusiasm of Nazis and other political ideologues. The most popular of Nietzsche’s books for these readers was Thus Spoke Zarathustra. They saw that book as an inspirational text for a new kind of political fanaticism that would express the “will to power” in response to the “death of God.”

5. Who is Zarathustra? Nietzsche began writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883. This book initiates the third and last period of his writing. He turns away from the cool skepticism and scientific spirit of Human, All Too Human, and he turns back to the romantic passion and prophetic attitude of The Birth of Tragedy. In The Gay Science, published in 1882, he had written his first statement of his famous proclamation that “God is dead.”23 He thought the disappearance of belief in God—and in any god-like eternal standards—would be both catastrophic and liberating. It would be catastrophic, because human beings would lose the transcendental religious support for human aspirations for greatness—but it would also be liberating, because human beings

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would now be free to create new values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche uses a poetic style of allegorical storytelling to explore both the catastrophic and the liberating character of this world without God. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a work of fiction with purely fictional characters. But the leading character—Zarathustra—has the name of a man who founded an ancient Persian religion. The only other name of a historical individual to appear in the book is Jesus (Part One, section 21). The Iranian prophet Zarathustra is commonly known by the Greek form of his name—Zoroaster—and the religion he founded is commonly called Zoroastrianism. We must wonder about the meaning of Nietzsche’s use of Zarathustra as his spokesman. According to tradition, Zarathustra lived in eastern Iran in the sixth century BC.24 (Some scholars believe he lived much earlier, sometime during the period 1200 to 1500 BC.) He was a priest of the traditional religion of the Iranians. But after having a vision of the god Ahura Mazda, he became a prophet who sought to reform the traditional religion with his new teachings. He took ideas from the traditional religion, but he reformulated them in ways that brought about a radically new religion. The traditional Iranian religion was polytheistic, with some deities being good and others bad. Such a religion could be used by corrupt priests to justify evil actions. To reform this religion, Zarathustra elevated the god Ahura Mazda into the supreme God, who upheld truth, order, and goodness. Zarathustra began his public teaching as a prophet when he was 30 years old. Although he converted few followers during his lifetime, his teaching was eventually adopted as the official religion of ancient Iran. Ahura Mazda, he taught, is the supreme God—the all-knowing, everpresent, and all-good Creator of the universe. In the beginning, Ahura Mazda created everything that exists. He created human beings with life, mind, and conscience. He continues to care for human beings by providing everything good. Despite the supremacy of Ahura Mazda, his power for good has been challenged from the beginning by the supernatural spirits of evil led by Angra Mainyu. Ahura Mazda supports asha—meaning truth, order, and goodness—while Angra Mainyu supports druj—meaning falsehood, disorder, and evil. Human beings are free to choose between these principles of truth and falsehood, good and evil, cosmos and chaos. Zarathustra’s teaching was dualistic, therefore, in that good and evil were projected onto the universe as opposing supernatural forces. But essentially this teaching was monotheistic, because Ahura Mazda knew that he would ultimately prevail against the forces of evil. At death, Zarathustra explained, the disembodied souls of human beings would be judged as good or bad based on whether their thoughts, words, and deeds in life had been good or bad. Those who had chosen truth, goodness, and order would go to Heaven. Those who had chosen falsehood, evil, and disorder would go to Hell.

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According to Zarathustra, the perpetual combat between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu would continue throughout history until a final battle led by a divine savior—the Saoshyant—in which the forces of evil would be completely destroyed, and the universe would be transformed into a perfect condition that would endure eternally. After this great battle, there would be a resurrection of the bodies of all human beings who had died. The souls of those in Heaven and Hell would be reunited with their bodies. All human beings—living and dead—would then be judged. Those who had chosen evil would be forever destroyed. Those who had chosen good would be rewarded with an immortal body living in a perfect world free of conflict and disorder. This would be the end of history. Ordinary historical time would cease, and human beings would enjoy the timeless perfection of eternal life under the benevolent rule of God. Many of the doctrines of Zarathustra’s religion appear in some form in the Biblical religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Shared doctrines include God as the Creator of the universe, the conflict between God and Satan, human beings as free to choose between good and evil, immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, divine judgment in the afterlife to reward the good and punish the bad, a Savior who brings about the redemption of the world, and a final battle between God and Satan to bring history to an end with the establishment of an eternal realm of perfection. Although some scholars disagree, there is plenty of evidence that the ancient Jews and Christians had enough contact with the ancient Zoroastrians to be influenced by them. There is also some evidence that Plato and the ancient Greek philosophers knew and were influenced by Zarathustra’s religion. Plato’s theology in the Republic (608c–621d) and the Laws (Book 10) incorporates some of Zarathustra’s teaching. Plato speaks of one God who has created all things, who endows human beings with immortal souls and the power to choose between good and evil, and who judges human choices by punishing the bad and rewarding the good for eternity. Like Zarathustra, Plato sought to reform the polytheistic religion of his time by developing a monotheistic theology with one supremely powerful and good God who cares for and judges human beings both in this life and in the afterlife. We do not see in Plato, however, the doctrine of the end of history through an apocalyptic conflict in which the world is transformed into a realm of eternal bliss free of imperfection. (But we have seen how Hegel and Marx adopted this religious conception of history as moving progressively toward a final resolution of all conflict.) In Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo—his intellectual autobiography—he indicates that his use of Zarathustra’s name is important. I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight

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Chapter Thirteen of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. But this question is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created the most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter for a longer time, than any other thinker—after all the whole of history is the refutation by experiment of the principle of the so-called “moral world order”—what is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the “idealist” who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers taken together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is the Persian virtue.—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.25

All traditional morality, Nietzsche seems to say, has been based on a great error first made by Zarathustra, who created the idea that the conflict between good and evil was part of a transcendent, cosmic order. But as the first person to create this error, Zarathustra would likely be the first person to recognize this error. Moreover, since he regarded truthfulness as the highest virtue, he would be the one thinker most inclined to admit the falsehood of projecting good and evil onto a metaphysical realm. If telling the truth is a virtue, then one is morally obligated to face up to the falsehood inherent in the traditional conception of morality as supported by divine, transcendent causes. In doing this, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will destroy all morality as it has been traditionally understood, and thus he will become “the first immoralist.” It is shocking for Nietzsche to identify himself proudly as the first immoralist. Does this confirm the fears of his critics that he is possessed by a demonic desire to destroy morality and thus throw the world into an immoral chaos? Does this mean that Nietzsche wants to create a world where people cannot distinguish between good and evil, and therefore everything—even the most brutal cruelty—is permitted? Should we say, then, that the viciousness of Leopold and Loeb and the tyranny of Hitler’s Nazis follow naturally from the teachings of this “first immoralist”? To defend Nietzsche against such criticisms, we might notice that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra presents his destruction of traditional values as a preparation for his creation of new values. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra declares: “Whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest good: but this is the creative” (Part 2, section 12). In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche quotes this passage and then says: “I am by far the most terrible human being that has existed so far; this does not preclude the possibility that I shall be the most beneficial.”26 Nietzsche openly admits that his teaching is dangerous—it is “the highest evil” and “most

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terrible”—because it denies all traditional standards of truth and goodness. But this negative side of his teaching prepares the way for the positive side—the creation of new values—that could be “most beneficial.” We must wonder, then, what exactly is this positive teaching? The answer seems to be—the will to power and eternal return.

6. Can life be explained as will to power and eternal return? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the phrase will to power appears first in the section “On the Thousand and One Goals” (Part 1, section 15). Zarathustra found that no people—no civilization—could live without creating some authoritative standards of good and evil that they obey without question. “A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings: behold, it is the voice of their will to power.” The will to power appears as the human creation of values. So, for example, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Persians, and the ancient Jews all obeyed some authoritative moral law. “Verily, men gave themselves all their good and evil. Verily, they did not take it, they did not find it, nor did it come to them as a voice from heaven. Only man placed values in things to preserve himself—he alone created a meaning for things, a human meaning.” But while there have been a “thousand goals” for a “thousand peoples,” “humanity still has no goal.” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra would create a goal— a vision of good and evil—not for some particular people but for all of humanity, and that would be the most spiritual will to power. When the term will to power appears for the second time in the book, Zarathustra speaks to the “wisest,” and he explains to them that they express their “will to power” as “a will to the thinkability of all beings” (Part 2, section 12). Philosophers express their power by assuming that everything in the universe is ultimately intelligible to human reason. They create standards of good and evil that serve their philosophic will to power, and those standards can ultimately shape the life of a whole people. The unwise, of course, the people—they are like a river on which a bark drifts; and in the bark sit the valuations, solemn and muffled up. Your will and your valuations you have placed on the river of becoming; and what the people believe to be good and evil, that betrays to me an ancient will to power.

Zarathustra then identifies the will to power with life itself. “Where I found the living, there I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I found the will to master.” In speaking of this as something he “found,” Zarathustra presents this as a fundamental fact about life. All living things express the will to power by seeking to expand their mastery over the circumstances of their existence. Human beings do this by creating and then obeying standards of good and evil by which they impose their will on existence.

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When the will to power appears for the third time in the book, Zarathustra speaks of the frustration of the “will to power” that leads to a “spirit of revenge” expressed as a desire for “redemption” from earthly life (Part 2, section 20). Willing liberates, but even this liberator is enslaved by “it was,” by the past, by the fact that “the will cannot will backwards.” Human beings find themselves thrown into the flow of earthly history, in which past circumstances constrain what they can do. The contingencies of earthly history and the suffering they bring cannot be brought under the control of the human will. Zarathustra speaks of the revenge that the will takes against this fact by creating the idea of a redemption from earthly history, which is viewed as a punishment. “Everything passes away; therefore everything deserves to pass away.” Human beings yearn for a salvation from history through entering some eternal realm of perfection that is beyond history. This was the teaching of the ancient Zarathustra that permeated biblical religion and Platonic philosophy: we can escape the suffering of this earthly life, because in the afterlife we can enter a transcendent realm of divine justice. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is shocked by this because it shows a revengeful hatred of life on Earth. To overcome this—to redeem earthly life as good in itself—he must show how the will to power can will backwards so that human beings can willfully accept all of human history. Later in the book, Zarathustra indicates in what sense we can will backwards by teaching eternal return or eternal recurrence (Part 3, section 2). “Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before?” And, if so, “must we not eternally return?” If time moves in a circle, then what we will today must return forever. Instead of falsely imagining some eternally transcendent realm beyond earthly existence to which we can flee, we can see earthly history itself as eternal in its perpetual circling in on itself. In this way, Zarathustra teaches, human beings can fulfill their will to power by creating new values for themselves so that they give the Earth its meaning eternally. I taught them to work on the future and to redeem with their creation all that has been. To redeem what is past in man and to recreate all “it was” until the will says, “Thus I willed it! Thus I shall will it”—this I called redemption and this alone I taught them to call redemption. (Part 3, section 12)

Human beings do not need to flee to the eternity of an imaginary Heaven, because now earthly history itself is eternal. Zarathustra sings: “All joy wants eternity—wants deep, wants deep eternity.” Zarathustra’s teaching of eternal recurrence brings joy by making earthly history eternally selfsufficient in its circling upon itself, which moves human beings to love the Earth, to say Yes to life (Part 4, sections 18–19). Why should we accept this teaching of eternal return? Are we supposed to believe it to be literally true that history moves eternally in a circular path so that every event eventually repeats itself exactly? That’s hard to believe.

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In some notes for a book he never completed, Nietzsche tries to make a scientific argument for this. “If the world may be thought of as a certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force,” and if every possible combination of forces is worked out over infinite time “in the great dice game of existence,” then, Nietzsche reasons, “a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum.”27 Few readers have found this reasoning persuasive. Many readers of Nietzsche have concluded that eternal return is not meant to be a literally true theory of the circular movement of cosmic history. Rather, it is meant as a kind of psychological experiment. Imagine that everything in life were going to repeat itself exactly forever, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra seems to say, and then ask yourself whether you could say Yes to all of it—including all the suffering and anxiety of earthly existence. If you could, then you have learned to love the Earth as it is for itself. You have learned that you don’t need to invent some imaginary heavenly realm beyond the Earth to which you can escape, because you have learned to accept human life on Earth as desirable in itself. In that case, you could accept the fact that standards of good and evil are human creations—products of the human will to power—and you could live by those humanly created standards without having to imagine that they came from God or some other eternal source beyond the Earth. If so, then you would not need the “noble lies” of the ancient Zarathustra, the Bible, or Plato about good and evil as eternally transcendent standards of perfection by which earthly life is judged to be imperfect. Only then would you love the Earth for what it is in itself. Only then would you have fully accepted the fact that we are alone in the universe, that there is no life after death, that this bodily life on Earth is all we will ever have. Only then could you find joy in recognizing that “God is dead.”

7. Is Nietzsche too pious? If the death of God is the teaching of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, we must wonder whether it really works. It sometimes seems that Nietzsche’s reverent love of the Earth becomes a new religion, which suggests that he can never fully give up his transcendental longings. This is especially clear in the Fourth Part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. One character—the “last pope”—says that he has sought out Zarathustra as “the most pious of all those who do not believe in God” (Part 4, section 6). The book ends with the followers of Zarathustra worshipping an ass in a religious festival. The “last pope” exclaims: “Better to adore God in this form than in no form at all!” (Part 4, section 18). Doesn’t this look like the atheistic religiosity that Nietzsche had warned against in Human, All Too Human? Are Zarathustra and his followers only pretending to be atheists, even as they try to satisfy their need for religious feelings?28

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This religious longing in Nietzsche was seen by Lou Salomé, one of his closest friends and the woman who rejected his proposal of marriage. As a skeptical free thinker, Salomé agreed with Human, All Too Human and the other books from Nietzsche’s middle period of writing for free spirits. But in his later writings—particularly, Thus Spoke Zarathustra—she saw a religious mysticism that she rejected, and which she attributed to a religious yearning that Nietzsche could never overcome.29 This seemed to be confirmed by the fact that Nietzsche described his experience in writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra as “inspiration” and “revelation.”30 Against Salomé’s reading of Nietzsche, we might notice that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Zarathustra scorns his followers when he sees them worshipping the ass. “They have all become pious again,” he shouts, “they are praying, they are mad!” (Part 4, section 17). This suggests that Nietzsche foresees—but rejects—the possibility that many of his followers will fall back into religious emotions that will keep them from fully accepting his teaching. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche declares: “There is nothing in me of a founder of a religion—religions are affairs of the rabble; I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people—I want no believers. . . . I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy.”31 This suggests, however, that even if Nietzsche himself could live without religion, most human beings could not, and therefore we must wonder how his radical atheism could ever become a way of life for all humanity. Moreover, after the passage just quoted from Ecce Homo, Nietzsche reaffirms his “Dionysian nature” and his devotion to the god Dionysus, which again suggests a religious celebration of the Earth. Do we see here (in sections 53, 58) what Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil calls “the religious instinct”? The teaching of eternal return does sound religious in its “eternalizing” of the Earth. But Laurence Lampert—one of the best commentators on Nietzsche—has argued that eternal return is not religious at all if one interprets it properly to mean “the affirmation that lets beings be what they are.”32 Yet this points to a recurrent problem in interpreting Nietzsche: his negative teaching in attacking traditional values is much clearer than his positive teaching about creating new values, and consequently Nietzsche’s influence has been more destructive than constructive. What does it mean to “let beings be what they are?” Isn’t this vague? The thought seems to be that the doctrines promoted by the ancient Zarathustra, the Bible, and Plato have not allowed earthly experience to be accepted and valued for what it is in itself, because human beings have been taught that earthly life is only an imperfect reflection of a perfect realm beyond life. By contrast, Nietzsche would teach us to reject notions of a transcendental realm as falsehood, so that we can accept our transient, mortal lives on Earth as good in themselves. And yet, as we saw in our chapter on Augustine, shouldn’t we expect that we will always ask questions about the origins and grounds of the uni-

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verse that we experience (chapter 3, section 1)? Why is there something, why not nothing? And why are things as they are and not different? How will the Nietzschean human beings of the future respond to such questions? Lampert explains: “‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ remains an enigma that challenges inquiry: but that there is something, that there are these beings, remains a marvel that draws from the most spirited being the blessing that lets them be what they are.”33 Yet for many human beings this enigma or mystery points beyond nature to nature’s God as the uncaused cause of the visible universe. The problem here is that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that is unexplained. As suggested by Jefferson’s appeal to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the human search for ultimate causes that would explain the universe culminates in a fundamental alternative: either we take nature as the ultimate source of order, or we look beyond nature to God as the ultimate source of nature’s order. Our desire to understand is satisfied ultimately by either an intellectual understanding of nature or a religious understanding of God as the Creator of nature. The Nietzschean atheist would have to say that all explanation presupposes the observable natural order of the world as the final ground of explanation that cannot itself be explained. To the question of why nature has the kind of order that it has, the only reasonable answer is that we must accept this as a brute fact of our experience. That’s just the way it is! The Nietzschean would insist that there is nothing in our ordinary experience of the world that would make it likely, or even comprehensible, that something would have the power to create everything in the world out of nothing. If we are reasoning from our ordinary experience of the world, the existence of an uncaused nature is far more probable than the existence of an uncaused Creator of nature.34

8. Does going “beyond good and evil” lead us to a new nobility or a new barbarism? We should return to the questions raised at the beginning of this chapter about the moral and political implications of Nietzsche’s teaching. Does his talk about going “beyond good and evil” in expressing the will to power promote political immorality? Does it support the teaching of Thrasymachus or Machiavelli that in politics all moral standards must yield to the rule of those who know how to use force and fraud to impose their will on others? If so, does Nietzsche’s teaching encourage the brutal power politics of those like Hitler who thought they were Nietzsche’s true followers? To defend Nietzsche against the charge of supporting political nihilism, we might notice that he concludes his book Beyond Good and Evil with a teaching about the need for a new nobility. Surely, this idea of nobility suggests a high vision of human moral excellence to which Nietzschean politics would be directed.

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What does Nietzsche mean by nobility? “Every enhancement of the type ‘man,’” he declares, “has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other” (section 257). Consequently, he defends the “master morality” of a ruling group of noble human beings as superior to the modern “slave morality” of modern democracy based on equality. He looks forward to “a new caste that would rule Europe.” “The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to great politics” (section 208). Some Nazi ideologists quoted this talk about “great politics” and similar passages in Nietzsche’s writings as forecasting the Nazi ambition to create a new aristocratic class that would first rule Europe and then gain mastery over the whole Earth.35 What kind of human beings does Nietzsche have in mind when he speaks of this “new caste” that will rule over Europe? Sometimes he compares these future rulers with political rulers such as Caesar and Napoleon. At other times, he compares them to artists and thinkers such as Goethe and Wagner. The subtitle of Beyond Good and Evil is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Nietzsche speaks of “the philosopher—the Caesarian cultivator and power-man of culture” (section 207), as if the “philosophers of the future” will have the kind of political and cultural power to transform human existence and create new values on an unprecedented scale. How would this be done? He says that beginning with Beyond Good and Evil, “all my writings are fish hooks,” although he was not sure how many fish there were.36 The success of his project might depend on the influence of his books. He points to the power of the Bible in shaping civilizations for thousands of years, which indicates how the right kind of book can create a transvaluation of all values (Beyond Good and Evil, sections 51–52, 247, 263). Would Machiavelli recognize Nietzsche as a new prince, like Moses, who needs only a fortunate opportunity to introduce whatever form he pleases (see chapter 5, sections 2 and 6)? Or would Machiavelli say that Nietzsche is an “unarmed prophet”? Nietzsche speaks of “breeding” or “cultivating” a new ruling caste. The Nazis tried to do this in a crude way through eugenics, with disastrous results. Recently, however, advances in genetic engineering and the use of psychotropic drugs suggest that we are now acquiring the scientific knowledge necessary to carry out Nietzsche’s project for cultivating a new race.37 Another possibility is that progress in computer technology and robotics will give us the chance to create cyborgs (cybernetic organisms)—superintelligent beings that combine human and computer parts.38 Of course, as we saw in our chapter on Descartes, it is debatable as to whether computers could ever fully replicate human intelligence (see chapter 6, section 5). Yet we must consider the possibility that genetic engineering, psychopharmacology, and computer technology could enhance our will to power in

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the most fundamental way: someday soon, we could have the power to radically change human nature and create a new race of superior beings that would become the new noble caste to rule the Earth. Many people fear such prospects, and they warn that we should not attempt this because it would violate the sanctity of human life, and because it is not right to “play God.” But if Nietzsche is right—if we were not created in the image of God, because God is a fiction, and if we create our own standards of good and evil—why shouldn’t we use scientific technology to recreate ourselves or to create a new race of superhuman beings? If we feel repugnance towards such a possibility, as many of us surely do, can we justify that repugnance as grounded in our moral nature? Or do we have to appeal beyond human nature to God as the eternal judge of good and evil? Does the nobility of human life depend on the “noble lies” of religion? Or could we defend such religious beliefs as simply true? Nietzsche forces us to ask such questions, and in the twenty-first century, these will be our deepest political questions.

9. Is Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism? In 1887, the Danish scholar George Brandes wrote a letter to Nietzsche praising his writings and endorsing his “aristocratic radicalism.” Nietzsche responded by accepting this label: “The expression Aristocratic Radicalism, which you employ, is very good. It is, permit me to say, the cleverest thing I have yet read about myself.” In Bruce Detwiler’s Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism, Detwiler adopts this expression as the best term for Nietzsche’s political teaching. On the one hand, Detwiler suggests, Nietzsche was not an “aristocratic conservative,” because he was an atheistic radical in affirming the death of God and the death of all ultimate standards. On the other hand, Nietzsche was not an “egalitarian radical,” because he was aristocratic in affirming that there was an order of rank by which one could recognize a few human beings as “higher men” who deserve to rule over the inferior majority of human beings. Nietzsche thus became “the first avowed atheist of the far Right.”39 Thus, Detwiler adopts Leo Strauss’s interpretation of Nietzsche as initiating the “third wave of modernity” that led to fascism and National Socialism.40 According to Detwiler, the fundamental idea of aristocratic radicalism is that “Nietzsche’s response to the demise of all ultimate ends is to make the highest human being the ultimate end,” and that highest human being is the Dionysian artist-philosopher who exercises his will to power by tyrannically legislating new values for all of humanity.41 This is most clearly expressed in Nietzsche’s later writings, particularly Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power. Nietzsche declares that European democ-

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racy must ultimately transform itself into “a new and sublime development of slavery,” in which the “herd animal” is enslaved to the “leader animal.” (Will to Power, sections 954, 956). Thus, the democratization of Europe is “an involuntary arrangement for the cultivation of tyrants—taking that word in every sense, including the most spiritual” (Beyond Good and Evil, section 242). This tyrannical rule of the artist-philosophers will require “conscious breeding experiments,” “terrible means of compulsion,” and even “the annihilation of millions of failures.” This is necessary for the “domination of the earth” by a “new, tremendous aristocracy” in which “the will of philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants will be made to endure for millenia,” and the rule of this “new caste” over Europe will unify it into “one will” (Beyond Good and Evil, sections 208, 251; Will to Power, sections 764, 954, 960, 964). But after showing how this aristocratic radicalism constitutes the fundamental political teaching in all of Nietzsche’s early and late writings, Detwiler admits that this teaching is contradicted by Nietzsche’s apparent endorsement of liberal democracy in his middle writings—especially, Human, All Too Human and The Wanderer and His Shadow. In this middle period, Nietzsche was committed to a Darwinian natural science of evolutionary history in which the highest life is the dispassionate pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own sake. This free-spirited science refutes the metaphysical and religious claims to superhuman authority that have supported the traditional state’s legitimacy in subordinating individuals to its rule. Consequently, the state as “a mysterium, a supernatural institution” must disappear, and increasingly individuals will judge the state as either useful or harmful to them (Human, All Too Human, section 472). This favors modern liberal democracy, which claims no superhuman authority, because it is understood as merely instrumental to the security and freedom of the individuals that it serves. This conception of the liberal state defended in the middle period contradicts the aristocratic radicalism of Nietzsche’s early and late writings, Detwiler observes, because this latter requires “a new kind of superhuman authority”—the superhuman authority of the Superman or the artist-philosopher who must create a new religion for humanity. Here the indispensable goal is “the establishment of a sense of devotion to the superhuman in a world without God.”42 Detwiler sees no way around this contradiction— “in the middle period, Nietzsche appears to turn suspiciously against himself.”43 Detwiler sees a stark contrast with the rest of his writing: Although there is little enthusiasm for democracy in The Wanderer and His Shadow, there is no advocacy of new ruling castes or master races or conscious breeding experiments, and there is no talk about the domination of the earth or the annihilation of millions of failures or about philosophers working as artists upon men to produce a higher sovereign species. Indeed, democracy does not appear as a new, subtle

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form of slavery in The Wanderer and His Shadow; rather, democracy appears as a bulwark “against physical and spiritual enslavement,” and as that which seeks “independence for as many as possible.”44

Is it possible that this shows the superiority of the middle Nietzsche over the early and late Nietzsche? Is it sensible not to advocate master races, breeding experiments, the annihilation of millions of human beings, and the creation of artistic-philosophical tyrants? Is it reasonable to defend democracy if it can protect us “against physical and spiritual enslavement” and promote “independence for as many as possible”? Detwiler doesn’t consider this possibility. And yet, Detwiler does indicate the serious problems with Nietzsche’s aristocratic radicalism. He offers five criticisms of Nietzsche.45 First, he suggests that Nietzsche shows “an impoverished sensibility” when he denies that the lives of most human beings have any value—that “the majority of mortals” are “physiologically deformed and deranged,” and that “a people is a detour of nature to get six or seven great men” (Genealogy of Morals, part 3, section 1; Beyond Good and Evil, section 126). Detwiler thinks it shows a strange blindness to the reality of human experience to say that there is nothing worthwhile in the ordinary lives of ordinary human beings. Detwiler’s second criticism is that Nietzsche never offers a convincing argument for his claim that life is will to power. He offers no empirical proof for this as either a metaphysical or psychological hypothesis. In fact, much of what Nietzsche says about the will to power is clearly deficient as an account of human experience. As one can see, for example, when he claims that love is just will to power, because love is “at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes” (Ecce Homo, “Why I Write Such Good Books,” section 5). Detwiler’s third criticism is that Nietzsche’s teaching that the human drives are totally chaotic with no innate order at all is empirically false. Surely, the human drives show neither total harmony nor total disorder. Even if we are the “undetermined animal,” in that nature does not perfectly define or arrange our drives, and thus psychic definition or arrangement depends on social culture and individual choices, it is still likely that there is “a significant level of innate order among the drives, and even a significant level of order common to all human beings.” By totally separating art from nature, Nietzsche makes his Dionysian philosopher an omnipotent god. But this denies what we know by experience as to how human nature puts limits or constraints on human art. Detwiler’s fourth criticism is his questioning of whether Nietzsche is correct in asserting that all gods have died, and therefore that all the foundations of morality in the Western world are gone. Isn’t it possible that Nietzsche has not properly understood the foundations of Western morality? Detwiler’s fifth criticism is that Nietzsche’s immoralism is so excessive in its immoderation that we should all rightly reject it because it is so disturbing.

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Detwiler does not reflect on the possibility that in the writings of his middle period, Nietzsche embraced a Darwinian aristocratic liberalism that escaped all five of these criticisms. First, in these middle writings, Nietzsche recognized human inequality and the excellence of those few human beings who devote themselves to scientific and philosophic inquiry, but he also recognized the dignity or worth of ordinary human beings living ordinary lives that can display some of the beauty and sweetness of human life. His Darwinian aristocratic liberalism affirmed the individual freedom of a liberal society as the primary condition for the diverse expression of human excellence at all levels of human potentiality. Second, Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism did not try to explain all life as will to power, although it did recognize the drive for domination and warn about the need to control it. Third, Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism recognized “a significant level of innate order among the drives, and even a significant level of order common to all human beings.” Nietzsche’s Darwinian science saw that evolved human nature constrains but does not determine human culture, and that human nature and human culture together constrain but do not determine human judgment. Our natural desires constitute an innate order that is universal to the human species, although there is cultural and individual variation in the particular expressions of that universal human nature. Consequently, a Darwinian political science requires a complex study of the interaction of natural history, cultural history, and individual history. Although the innate order of the human drives does not precisely determine the moral and political orders of human life, it is not true that those human drives are so completely chaotic as to impose no constraints at all on a supposedly superhuman Dionysian philosophy. Indeed, Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism denies that any human being can claim to be “superhuman” (übermenschlich), because we are all “human, all too human.” Fourth, Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism denies that all the foundations of Western morality have collapsed, because it affirms the reality of human morality as rooted in evolved human nature. And while Darwinian aristocratic liberalism allows for religious belief as a possible support for morality, it does not make such religious belief indispensable for moral and political life. Fifth, Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism denies immoralism by affirming the natural moral sense as a product of human evolution. Finally, Nietzsche’s aristocratic liberalism is based on a Darwinian anthropology that is open to empirical verification or falsification, while his aristocratic radicalism is based on mythopoetic fictions—the will to power, eternal recurrence, the Übermensch, and Dionysian religiosity—that are beyond empirical testing. From all of this, could we conclude that Nietzsche’s Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism?

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Notes 1

2

3 4 5

6

7

8 9 10 11 12 13

14

15 16

For an account of this crisis of faith in the nineteenth century, see A. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral: A Biography of Faith and Doubt in Western Civilization (New York: Ballantine Books, 1999). Two good biographies are Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York: Penguin Books, 1982); and Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Both biographies stress the persistence of Nietzsche’s religious longings throughout his life, despite his declarations of atheism, which is also the theme of Bruce Ellis Benson’s Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). All references to The Birth of Tragedy are to the translation in Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968). See Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, translated by Siegfried Mandel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). All references to Human, All Too Human are to the translation in Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), which includes Assorted Opinions and Maxims and The Wanderer and His Shadow as volume two of Human, All Too Human. In Nietzsche’s Middle Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Ruth Abbey argues for Nietzsche’s writing in his middle period as being superior in its moderation to the extremism of his early and late writing. In Nietzsche’s Enlightenment: The Free-Spirit Trilogy of the Middle Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), Paul Franco argues—contrary to Abbey—that there is no contradiction between the writing of Nietzsche’s middle period and his earlier and later writing. See Paul Reé, The Origin of the Moral Sentiments, in Basic Writings, translated by Robin Small (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Robin Small, Nietzsche and Reé: A Star Friendship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Penguin Books, 2004). All references to Thus Spoke Zarathustra are to the translation in Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966). All references to Beyond Good and Evil are to the translation by Walter Kaufmann in Basic Writings of Nietzsche. For a survey of the whole debate over Nietzsche’s insanity, see Young, Nietzsche, 528–33, 559–62. See D. Hemelsoet, K. Hemelsoet, and D. Devreese, “The Neurological Illness of Friedrich Nietzsche,” Acta Neurologica Belgica 108 (2008): 9–16. Quoted by Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 27. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 685. See Hal Higdon, The Crime of the Century: The Leopold and Loeb Case (New York: Putnam, 1975); and Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 109–47. The complex history of Nietzsche’s influence in Germany is set forth in Aschheim’s The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany and in Hans Sluga’s Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See also Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). This note is “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche, 42–47. On the connection between Nietzsche and the modern celebration of heroic leadership in politics, see Robert Eden, Political Leadership and Nihilism: A Study of Weber and Nietzsche (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983).

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18

19

20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34

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Some scholars have suggested that Nietzsche’s idea of “free spirits” is derived from the medieval Christian heresy of the free spirit. Those who adopted this heresy were mystical anarchists who believed that they had attained a spiritual perfection so complete that they were free from all moral laws. For some, this spiritual liberty was expressed erotically as “free love.” See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 149–94. See William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green, and Company, 1902); and Wilson, God’s Funeral, 307–32. Compare the “religious naturalism” of Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Nietzsche is influenced here by his reading of the “Melian Dialogue” in Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 5.85–116. For a Darwinian account of how human morality could have arisen from a natural tendency of the weak to resist bullying by the strong, see Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), sections 26, 49, 112. Daybreak—belonging to Nietzsche’s middle period—was originally published in 1881, three years after Human, All Too Human. For an account of “morality as animal” rooted in a Darwinian view of animal nature, see Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: The State University of New York Press, 1998); Frans de Waal, Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Primates and Other Animals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); and Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, Wild Justice: The Moral Lives of Animals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Quoted in Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 253. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), secs. 108–109, 125. For surveys of the scholarly studies of Zarathustra and the Zoroastrian religion, see S. A. Nigosian, The Zoroastrian Faith: Tradition and Modern Research (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993), and Norman Cohn, Cosmos, Chaos, and the World to Come: The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993). Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, 783–84. I have altered Kaufmann’s translation slightly to bring it closer to Nietzsche’s German text. Ecce Homo, 783. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), section 1066. On Nietzsche’s Dionysian religiosity, see Benson, Pious Nietzsche. On the religious longing for myth that Nietzsche shared with Wagner and the Nazis, see George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, translated by Siegfried Mandel (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). Ecce Homo, 756–62. Ecce Homo, 782. Laurence Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching: An Interpretation of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 255. Lampert, Nietzsche’s Teaching. For more on this issue, see Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, 272–75; and Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). Swinburne argues: “It is very unlikely that a universe would exist uncaused, but rather more likely that God would exist uncaused” (131). See Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 234. Ecce Homo, 766. For opposing positions on whether we should use biotechnology to change human nature, see Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution

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(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002); Lee Silver, Remaking Eden: Cloning and Beyond in a Brave New World (New York: Avon, 1998); and Sean Sutton, ed., Biotechnology: Our Future as Human Beings and Citizens (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009). On the future prospects of superintelligent robots, and the possible dangers for human beings, see Stuart Armstrong, Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence (Berkeley, CA: Machine Intelligence Research Institute, 2014); James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2013); and Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 189–90. See Detwiler, Nietzsche, 83–84. Detwiler, Nietzsche, 191. Detwiler, Nietzsche, 187–88. Detwiler, Nietzsche, 183. Detwiler, Nietzsche, 177–78. Detwiler, Nietzsche, 193–96.

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14 Relativism and Natural Right in the Crisis of Liberalism

Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing and Natural Right and History

KEY READINGS Persecution and the Art of Writing, 5–37; Natural Right and History, 1–164, 202–51.

Leo Strauss (1899–1973) was one of the most important and most controversial political philosophers of the twentieth century. In studying the history of political philosophy, he argued, we need to recognize that most of the political philosophers prior to the nineteenth century engaged in esoteric or secret writing. Since the philosophic pursuit of truth must always challenge the moral, religious, and political opinions supporting social life—as manifested in the trial and execution of Socrates—philosophers had to write so as to convey their true teaching to a few philosophic readers, while hiding it from the many non-philosophic readers, both to defend philosophers from persecution and to protect society from being harmed by the dangerous truths of philosophy. Strauss stressed the teaching of Plato’s Republic that every society is like a cave where people see only shadowy images cast on the wall before them, and only a few philosophers like Socrates can climb out the cave to see the light of the Sun, which is an image of the philosopher’s ascent from unexamined opinion to genuine truth. Strauss doubted that this enlightenment of a philosophic few could be extended to all of society. As Plato indicated in The Republic, 465

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even in the most just city ruled by philosophers, the philosophers would have to teach “noble lies.” According to Strauss, this practice of esoteric writing shows the contest over whether the philosophic life or the practical life is the best way of life for human beings, with philosophers thinking that the only naturally good life is the life devoted to the pursuit of truth as opposed to unexamined opinions, and all others thinking that the good life is guided by the traditional opinions that govern moral, religious, and political life. Strauss thought that most of the ancient and medieval philosophers believed that this conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life was so deeply rooted in human nature that it could never be overcome, but that modern political philosophers (beginning with Machiavelli and Hobbes) believed that an enlightened society based on truth rather than opinion was achievable, so that everyone could climb out of the darkness of the cave to see the light of the Sun, which would create harmony between the philosophic life and the practical life. Modern political philosophers saw the need to practice esoteric writing as a literary strategy in their war against the false opinions of traditional society. But their ultimate goal was to achieve a liberal society with freedom of speech and thought for all individuals; and in such a society where all ideas were tolerated, esoteric writing would no longer be necessary. Philosophers would not be persecuted, and the philosophic pursuit of truth would not be seen as dangerous for the social order. Since Strauss often suggested that ancient and medieval political philosophy was superior to modern political philosophy, and since he also suggested that the liberal democracy that emerged from modern political philosophy was open to serious criticisms, many of his readers have wondered whether he was an illiberal enemy of modern liberal democracy or a friendly critic who wanted to save liberal democracy from its weaknesses. Some of Strauss’s most severe opponents have accused him of favoring a right-wing authoritarian regime, perhaps even some kind of fascist or Nazi political order.1 Some have charged that the neoconservative foreign policy of President George W. Bush showed the influence of Strauss’s former students in their conspiratorial plan for advancing right-wing imperialism in the military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.2 Strauss’s teaching about esoteric writing was influential with many political scientists (especially in the United States) in changing the way they studied political philosophy. In the middle of the twentieth century, it was common for political scientists to assume that knowledge of political philosophy could be best attained by reading a general textbook like George Sabine’s History of Political Theory (first published in 1937), which summarized the history of ideas in political theory from the pre-Socratic thinkers to fascism and Nazism. Reading such a textbook made it unnecessary to read the original texts for oneself. Moreover, one could assume that Sabine was right in asserting that the “social relativism” of all political phi-

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losophy (the idea that all political philosophy is determined, as Sabine said, by “the problems, the valuations, the habits, or even the prejudices of its own time”)—and therefore of theories of politics—“do[es] not refer to an external reality but are produced as a normal part of the social milieu in which politics itself has its being.”3 So the teachings of political philosophers can never be true, because their thought is always historically relative to the opinions that prevail in their time and place. Strauss’s claim that political philosophers have written esoterically challenged this assumption of historicist relativism, because while such writing appears in its exoteric or surface teaching to endorse the prevailing opinions in society, the hidden teaching in such writing can deny common opinions in the pursuit of the truth. If this is possible, then historicism is wrong, because this shows that the human mind—or at least the mind of the true philosopher—can transcend social prejudices in the quest for the truth of things. For Strauss, the recovery of esotericism was the recovery of the possibility of philosophy in the true sense—philosophy as the quest of truth beyond the mere opinions that happen to prevail in particular times and places. And if this is true, then political scientists cannot properly rely on scholars like Sabine to summarize the history of political philosophy. Rather, political scientists will have to carefully read the original texts of political philosophy for themselves, because they will need to see for themselves whether those texts have hidden teachings that were overlooked by scholars like Sabine. Consequently, it became common in many departments of political science, those influenced by Strauss and his students, for the courses on political philosophy to be organized around the careful and slow reading of the original texts rather than the reading of scholarly textbooks. Sabine rejected this by dismissing Strauss’s account of esoteric writing as “an invitation to perverse ingenuity.”4 Many scholars have agreed with Sabine that Strauss and his students were only showing their “perverse ingenuity” in their ridiculous obsession for finding secret messages in the texts of political philosophy, which made them look like some kind of strange cult.5 Strauss was born in Germany in 1899 as the child of orthodox Jewish parents.6 Throughout his life he took seriously the appeal to divine revelation in the Jewish religion and the modern predicament of Jews exposed to persecution in Europe and the United States. As a teenager he embraced political Zionism—the movement for restoring a Jewish state in Israel that would be a refuge for Jews. Some of his Jewish friends were disturbed by his “affirmation of atheism as the most important Jewish watchword.”7 His friend Hans Jonas said that Strauss’s atheism was painful for Strauss, because the “intellectual necessity of becoming an atheist in order to be a philosopher tormented him all his life.”8 Strauss attended the University of Marburg and the University of Hamburg, where he received his doctorate in philosophy in 1921. He then had a postdoctoral year at the University of Freiburg, where he studied

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with the phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. At Freiburg, he was impressed by Husserl’s assistant—Martin Heidegger. He came to regard Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century. Heidegger became a devoted Nazi in 1933, and he never apologized for his support of the Nazis, even after World War Two. Strauss’s praise for Heidegger has created the suspicion among some of his critics that he sympathized with Heidegger’s Nazism. Strauss left Germany in 1932 and lived in Paris for a year. After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Strauss wrote from Paris to his friend Karl Löwith, declaring his refusal to embrace liberalism and his support for “the principles of the right—fascist, authoritarian, imperial.”9 Jonas said that Strauss was an early supporter of Mussolini.10 Strauss’s defenders have insisted that this was only a fleeting flirtation with Italian fascism as a possible alternative to Hitler. Even his defenders have admitted, however, that “Strauss clearly flirted with dangerous ideas during this period,” including Nietzsche’s ideas and German nihilism.11 Strauss moved to England in 1934 and then to New York in 1937. In 1938, he became a professor at the New School for Social Research. In his letters to Jacob Klein from January 1938 to November 1939, he described the “state of frenzy that’s consuming me” in his discovery of esoteric writing in the works of ancient and medieval philosophers.12 Some commentators identify this as the point where “Strauss became a Straussian.” Strauss began to attract students in New York who would become influential advocates of Straussian thought. He continued to attract such students in Chicago after he became a faculty member in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago in 1949. Strauss delivered a series of lectures at Chicago in 1949 on “Natural Right and History,” which were revised for publication as a book in 1953. Natural Right and History became his most widely read book. In it and other writings, Strauss stressed the “crisis of liberal democracy” as manifested in the threat of fascism and Nazism that peaked in World War Two and the threat of communism that peaked in the Cold War. He argued that the vulnerability of liberal democracy before its enemies was rooted in the theoretical mistakes of modern political philosophy that moved toward the relativism of historicism and positivism, which made it hard to defend liberal democracy as grounded in natural standards of right. Many people saw Strauss’s criticism of modern relativism, his appeal to classic natural right or natural law, and his anti-communism as part of the American conservative movement that arose after World War II.13 Strauss retired in 1967. He taught briefly at Claremont Men’s College in California. He then moved in 1969 to his last academic appointment at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. He died there in 1973. Since Strauss’s death, his influence has spread through the teaching, the scholarship, and the political activity of his students and the students of his students. The Straussians have fallen into a deep debate among

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themselves over the meaning and implications of Strauss’s teaching, particularly for the interpretation of how American liberal democracy fits into the history of political philosophy.14 One reason for the difficulty in interpreting Strauss is that readers cannot be sure as to whether Strauss himself engaged in the kind of esoteric writing that he had seen in the history of political philosophy.

1. Is esoteric writing necessary to protect philosophy and politics from mutual harm? Not only must we wonder about whether Strauss was an esoteric writer, we must also wonder whether he was correct about the lost history of esoteric writing. What would be the evidence of esoteric writing? How exactly would we detect it? And, finally, the deepest question here might be whether Strauss was right in his claim that esoteric writing is necessary and desirable because of the unresolvable conflict between the philosophic life and the practical life, which seems to suggest that the striving of liberal democracy for an open society with complete freedom of thought and speech is a dangerous delusion. We might look for testimonial evidence of esoteric writing—writers who openly say that they or other writers engage in esoteric writing. Strauss gives many examples of this, and we have seen many examples in this book—as in Augustine’s claim that the Roman pagan philosophers wrote so as to conceal their disbelief in Roman religious myths. Arthur Melzer has written a book defending Strauss’s account of esoteric writing, which includes an appendix with hundreds of quotations from writers throughout history testifying that authors have often written so as to convey an exoteric or surface teaching to most readers—which agrees with the common opinions of their society—while conveying an esoteric or secret teaching to a few philosophic readers, affirming truths that contradict the common opinions.15 Melzer has noticed, however, that since about 1800, this tradition seems to have been largely forgotten; and thus Strauss’s recovery of esoteric writing in the late 1930s was a great achievement that is still controversial. So it seems that for thousands of years many writers have assumed that it has been necessary to engage in “writing between the lines,” as Strauss calls it.16 Such secret writing was often made necessary by persecution. If we know that people who espouse unpopular ideas in certain societies have been persecuted, then we might expect that any writers who believe in those unpopular ideas will find it prudent to hide their ideas from the censors and to pretend to accept the popular ideas. This is what Melzer calls defensive esotericism—esoteric writing that defends the writer from persecution. If writers believe that the truths they have discovered really are harmful to most people who are not philosophers, then these writers might engage in what Melzer calls protective esotericism—esoteric writing that

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protects most people from dangerous ideas. Strauss indicates that the most common example of this is that philosophical atheists have often concluded that religious belief is necessary for the moral and political order of society, and therefore the philosophers have hidden their atheism from most readers to avoid harming them and their society. If philosophical writers want to teach young readers who are potential philosophers, they will want to teach these readers to think for themselves. And so, instead of dogmatically stating their conclusions, the writers might write esoterically, so that the readers will be forced to read slowly and carefully in moving step by step through the reasoning that leads to the truth. This is what Melzer calls pedagogical esotericism—esoteric writing that teaches readers how to think for themselves in the philosophic search for truth. Strauss and Melzer believe that unlike the ancient and medieval philosophers, modern philosophers have thought that it would be possible to establish an open and rational society based on truth, so there would be harmony between the philosophic life and political life. And yet, achieving this would require a long philosophic battle to overturn traditional societies based on false opinions, particularly religious opinions, and this would require esoteric writing to advance a political revolution of enlightenment. This is what Melzer calls political esotericism—esoteric writing to secretly support a political revolution to establish a fully liberal or open society in which hiding the truth would no longer be necessary. Modern philosophers might have to lie to establish a new kind of liberal society in which it would no longer be necessary to lie. Strauss and Melzer suggest many ways to detect esoteric writing.17 If a careful writer contradicts himself in obvious ways, so that what he says most often conforms to common opinion, but what he says only once or twice denies common opinion, then we can suspect that what he says less often is his true belief. Readers who are not philosophers, and therefore not careful readers, will not notice that his true teaching challenges the prevailing opinions of society. Or a careful writer might put his true teaching into the mouth of some disreputable character in his writing, and a careful reader might notice that the arguments of this disreputable character are stronger than the arguments of the characters who endorse prevailing opinions. Or a careful writer might commit an easily detectable blunder in something he says, which will alert the careful reader that something important is being conveyed secretly. Or a careful writer might put a strange statement in the center of his text; and while careless readers pay attention to the beginning and the end of a text, hardly noticing what is found in the center, careful readers might wonder whether the statement in the center is the true teaching. Or a careful writer with a teaching that denies the prejudices of his society might write commentaries on the texts of authors who advance that

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same teaching, which allows the commentator to pretend not to believe the unpopular teaching that he is conveying in his interpretive commentary. Most of Strauss’s writing consists of commentaries on texts in the history of political philosophy. Since he tells us that this is one way to engage in esoteric writing, should we suspect that he is indeed an esoteric writer who hides his teaching in his commentaries? And if so, what might that esoteric teaching be? Surely, most of us would say that once Strauss left Germany, he lived in largely liberal regimes with freedom of speech and thought—France, England, and the United States—in which he faced little or no threat of persecution for teaching unpopular ideas. There was some persecution of Marxist communists in the United States, but there’s no reason to doubt the sincerity of Strauss’s statements of anti-communism. Therefore, we might assume that he had no need to engage in esoteric writing. Strauss does say, however, that “the term persecution covers a variety of phenomena,” ranging from the extreme persecution of the Spanish Inquisition to mild persecution through social ostracism. And even in “comparatively liberal periods,” there can be “a kind of persecution.” According to Strauss, modern liberal philosophers believed “that the kingdom of general darkness could be replaced by the republic of universal light,” that through progress in popular education we could achieve “practically complete freedom of speech.” The ancient and medieval philosophers, however, believed that “the gulf separating ‘the wise’ and ‘the vulgar’ was a basic fact of human nature,” and that “public communication of the philosophic or scientific truth was impossible or undesirable, not only for the time being but for all times.” This must be so if “there are basic truths which would not be pronounced in public by any decent man, because they would do harm to many people who, having been hurt, would naturally be inclined to hurt in turn him who pronounces the unpleasant truths.”18 If Strauss thought the pre-modern philosophers were closer to the truth than the modern philosophers, would this mean that he had to see modern liberal societies as based on a dangerous delusion—the mistaken belief that a liberal society can safely tolerate complete freedom of speech and thought for philosophers, because philosophic truth does no harm to a liberal social order? If this is what he thought, would he not have had to practice esoteric writing in seeking to overturn the liberal social order and promote some kind of illiberal social order that denies freedom of speech and thought? Two of the most prominent students of Strauss—Catherine and Michael Zuckert—have pointed out that there is an obvious contradiction in Strauss’s apparent teaching about the history of political philosophy as applied to American liberal democracy. Strauss seemed to teach that modern political philosophy was inferior to pre-modern political philosophy. He also taught that American liberal democracy was rooted in the thought

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of the early modern political philosophers (particularly John Locke). And he also defended the goodness of the American way of life. So Strauss seemed to make three claims. First, modernity is bad. Second, America is modern. Third, America is good. We don’t need much training in logic to see the contradiction between these three claims! According to the Zuckerts, the Straussians have divided up into three opposing groups depending on which of these three claims they deny.19 Labeling them according to their geographic location in the United States, the Zuckerts identify the East Coast Straussians (led by Allan Bloom) as those who deny that America is good, the West Coast Straussians (led by Harry Jaffa) as those who deny that America is modern, and the Midwest Straussians (led by Martin Diamond) as those who deny that modernity is bad. If Strauss had been a Midwest Straussian, then he would have had no need to engage in esoteric writing. He would have claimed that since the modern philosophical project had succeeded in establishing liberal societies in which the philosophic life and the practical life were harmonious, because philosophic truth could be openly tolerated without any danger to society, then modernity is good, and pre-modern political philosophy has been shown to be mistaken. In that case, esoteric writing is no longer necessary or desirable, at least in liberal societies, although esoteric reading is still necessary and desirable in our reading of the texts of political philosophy written before 1800. Although Melzer is unclear about this, he seems to interpret Strauss in this way. Melzer expresses his personal distaste for esoteric writing.20 He also says that the modern liberal goal of harmony between reason and society has been achieved or at least approached in modern liberal societies to the point that esotericism is no longer necessary or desirable. That the philosophic life as based on truth must threaten the social life based on opinion is perhaps true for traditional societies that have dominated most of human history, he suggests, but it is not true for the modern liberal societies that have emerged in many parts of the world over the past two centuries.21 Melzer observes, “The idea of subversive truth has little plausibility today. We citizens of the enlightened, secular, liberal, pluralist, multicultural society have dared to open our doors to every idea and doctrine and have discovered, at length, that all the supposed dangers of doing so were greatly exaggerated. So we are inclined to ask with some skepticism, not to say condescension: exactly how is it that truth or philosophy is a threat to society?”22 Melzer indicates that one example of the conflict between reason and politics in traditional societies is that slavery seemed necessary in many societies, including the ancient Greek cities; and so philosophers like Aristotle had to write exoterically in support of slavery as natural, while writing esoterically to teach their philosophic readers that slavery was unnatural and thus unjust. But then the triumph of liberalism in the modern world has allowed for the abolition of slavery, so that Aristotle’s eso-

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teric truth could be publicly affirmed.23 While the historicist will say that Aristotle’s endorsement of slavery shows how philosophers are held captive by the opinions of their time, those who understand the practice of esoteric reading can see that he understood the truth about slavery that could not be publicly recognized in his society. And yet, is Melzer right in implying that Strauss was a Midwest Straussian? If he were, this would imply that Strauss rejected the ancient and medieval conception of the philosophic life as transcending and in conflict with the practical life, because the success of modern liberal societies had shown that the philosophic life and the practical life could be brought into harmony. Consider the alternatives suggested by the Zuckerts. If Strauss had been a West Coast Straussian, and he denied that America was purely modern in breaking with pre-modern thought, then he could have believed that the modern liberal regime was actually the fulfillment of ancient political thought. He might have seen Aristotle’s praise for the mixed regime or polity as praise for a regime similar to that established by the American founders. Or he might have thought that the superiority of liberal democracy was taught by Plato in Book 8 of The Republic, in describing democracy as the one bad regime that left people free to choose the philosophic life. In Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss identifies the Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries BC as “comparatively liberal,”24 thus suggesting that modern liberalism might be a fuller expression of the liberal freedom provided by ancient Athens, in which there was plenty of room for open Socratic philosophizing, at least until Socrates provoked the Athenian people into putting him on trial at the end of his life. On the other hand, if Strauss had been an East Coast Straussian, in denying that the American regime was a good regime, he must have been an esoteric writer, and his esoteric message would have been that liberalism is based on a delusional denial of the human reality that the philosophical life is dangerous for most people. Presumably, that esoteric message would have included advocacy of an illiberal regime. If that were so, it would contradict what Strauss says in Natural Right and History in defense of American liberal democracy and its principles as stated in the Declaration of Independence. Strauss does make us worry, however, about whether those principles of the Declaration of Independence can be defended against the denial of the cosmic teleology of natural right by modern natural science.

2. Can philosophers refute modern relativism and nihilism by proving the truth of natural right? In his Introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss begins by quoting the most famous passage of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that

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they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness (1).25 He sees this as expressing the idea of natural right—the idea that there are natural standards of right and wrong that transcend the merely conventional standards prevailing in particular historical circumstances and the merely subjective preferences of particular human individuals. He wonders whether the American nation is still dedicated to this proposition of natural right. Strauss sees two threats to this American idea of natural right—the historicist relativism of German thought and the positivist relativism of American social science. German historicism denies natural right by denying that the human mind can discover natural standards that are not merely popular prejudices that prevail in some particular time and place. American positivist social science denies natural right by distinguishing between objective facts and subjective values and by seeing the principles of the Declaration of Independence as stating the values of an ideology or a myth that cannot be objectively or scientifically known as facts. If Americans believe either of these forms of relativism, then they cannot defend the principles of American liberal democracy as simply true and right, because those principles must rest on nothing more than blind preferences. This rejection of natural right must thus lead to nihilism—to the belief that there are no enduring or eternal standards of right and wrong, because all standards of right and wrong are arbitrary creations of human will and social custom. Strauss sees the denial of natural right as the cause of what he identifies as the crisis of modern liberal democracy. This is a practical crisis insofar as America and other liberal democracies are threatened by the military power of illiberal regimes such as Nazi Germany and Marxist Russia. But more fundamentally, this is a theoretical crisis insofar as modern political philosophy has moved towards a denial of natural right that makes impossible any intellectual defense of liberal democracy as better by nature than the illiberal regimes. Moreover, insofar as the denial of natural right is the denial of any natural standards of human virtue or excellence, this creates an internal crisis for liberal democracy by promoting a degrading hedonism, in which the pursuit of happiness in a liberal society is understood as the right of all individuals to pursue the satisfaction of their base desires with no sense of shame, because they don’t believe in any clear standards for ranking some desires as better or nobler than others. The disastrous consequences of the denial of natural right show the need for natural right, but Strauss warns that the seriousness of this need does not prove that the need can be satisfied: “A wish is not a fact. Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true” (6). According to Strauss, any attempt to prove the truth of natural right must confront the fundamental problem of natural right. The problem is

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that the ancient Greek idea of natural right seems to have been refuted by modern science in its refutation of Aristotle’s teleological conception of the universe. Natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end or purpose. Modern natural science, however, seems to deny natural teleology by explaining natural phenomena as determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes. From the point of view of Aristotle, Strauss observes, “The issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved” (8). Apparently, modern physics and astronomy have shown that the motion of the heavenly bodies is purely mechanical and not guided by any intelligent design towards any ends or purposes. Thus, modern science has refuted “the teleological view of the universe, of which the teleological view of man forms a part” (7). Strauss warns: “The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved” (8). Remarkably, while we might expect Strauss to solve this problem in Natural Right and History, he declares that he cannot do so: “Needless to say, the present lectures cannot deal with this problem. They will have to be limited to that aspect of the problem of natural right which can be clarified within the confines of the social sciences.” And, indeed, at the end of Strauss’s book, readers are left waiting for a philosophic grounding of natural right that will withstand the attack of modern relativism and nihilism. If Strauss cannot solve this problem of natural right and thus cannot prove the truth of natural right, does that mean that natural right for him is only a “salutary myth”—salutary because it denies modern relativism and nihilism, but a myth because there is no philosophic proof of its truth? Some readers have suspected that this is Strauss’s secret teaching.26 They have concluded that Strauss’s appeal to pre-modern natural right is more rhetorical than philosophic. Strauss might think it is morally and politically salutary to attack modern relativism and nihilism as inferior to natural right. But even as he does this, he might leave clear indications to his careful readers that there really is no ground in nature for natural right. Strauss might be intimating this in the “Preface to the 7th Impression” of Natural Right and History that he wrote in 1970, just three years before his death, in which he states, “Nothing that I have learned has shaken my inclination to prefer ‘natural right,’ especially in its classic form, to the reigning relativism, positivist or historicist.” Notice that he puts natural right within quotation marks. This is surprising, because Strauss criticizes Max Weber for the “childish trick” of putting terms designating value judgments in quotation marks, so that he can talk about value judgments while denying their truth. Notice also that Strauss speaks of his “inclination to

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prefer” natural right. In Natural Right and History, he criticizes Weber for seeing value judgments as merely personal “preferences” (47). So does Strauss’s failure to solve the problem of natural right show that natural right is for Strauss and his students merely a personal preference that they know to be only a noble lie? Some of Strauss’s readers will object that Strauss does not have to solve the problem of natural right to embrace the truth of the idea of natural right. Strauss explains that the truly philosophic life of Socrates shows a perpetual questioning and inquiry into the “fundamental and permanent problems” of human existence in the universe without any expectation of final answers or solutions to those problems (23–24, 31–32, 123–26).27 As long as the fundamental problems are permanent objects for philosophic inquiry throughout history, the philosophic life will be a good life by nature, even though philosophers never solve those problems. The problem of natural right is such a problem. But then Strauss says that “there cannot be natural right if all that man could know about right were the problem of right.” In that case, the cause of natural right would be “hopeless” (24). If this is the case, would Strauss still “prefer” natural right as a “salutary myth”? Or is it possible that we could solve the problem of natural right by seeing natural right as based not on a cosmic teleology of the universe refuted by modern physics and astronomy, but rather on an immanent teleology of human nature supported by modern biology?

3. Can modern biology support the natural teleology required for natural right? Strauss says that deciding whether science can sustain the Aristotelian natural teleology required for natural right depends on how science solves “the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion” (8). But Roger Masters—one of Strauss’s students—has argued that Strauss is wrong in suggesting that the question of teleology depends on physics or astronomy, because Aristotle’s teleology is primarily biological: most of Aristotle’s examples of teleology are of plants and animals, not of the heavens. And so the question is whether teleology is necessary for explaining living nature.28 As we have seen in our chapter on Aristotle, some modern biologists believe that Aristotle’s biological teleology is confirmed by modern Darwinian biology (chapter 2, section 2).29 Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as an organic whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator. By contrast to such cosmic teleology, Aristotle’s teleology is primarily an immanent teleology based on the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities. Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or

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purpose. Evolution by natural selection explains the adaptation of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection. And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do. Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young—these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed. Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. Does this suggest how Aristotelian natural right could be supported by modern biology as Darwinian natural right? If we see the good as the desirable, and if we see that evolved human nature includes a range of natural desires, can we see natural right as grounded in our evolved natural desires? Strauss seems to point to something like this. The example of Aristotle shows that it is possible to embrace natural right without believing in a cosmos that has been intelligently designed by a just Creator. Strauss explains: For, however indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions. To illustrate the point by the example of the best-known pre-Socratic doctrine, namely, of atomism, the fact that the atoms are beyond good and bad does not justify the inference that there is nothing by nature good or bad for any compounds of atoms, and especially for those compounds which we call “men.” In fact, no one can say that all distinctions between good and bad which men make or all human preferences are merely conventional. We must therefore distinguish between those human desires and inclinations which are natural and those which originate in conventions. Furthermore, we must distinguish between those human desires and inclination which are in accordance with human nature and therefore good for man, and those which are destructive of his nature or his humanity and therefore bad. We are thus led to the notion of a life, a human life, that is good because it is in accordance with nature. (94–95)

If the good is the desirable, and the naturally good is the naturally desirable, and if the naturally desirable is rooted in our natural human instincts, then the question of natural right becomes the question of how best to understand the range of our instinctively natural desires. This assumes an immanent teleology of human nature that does not require a cosmic teleology of the universe. And while cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, the immanent teleology of evolved human nature can be supported by modern evolutionary science. Some readers of Strauss—such as Carson Holloway and Richard Hassing—have responded to this idea by arguing that Strauss would not have accepted this as a solution to the problem of natural right.30 These readers insist that Strauss saw classic natural right as concerned with human

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excellence or perfection, which transcends the concern in Darwinian natural right with mere human decency or ordinary goodness. What distinguishes human perfection from human decency is that while human decency is “anthropocentric,” human perfection is “cosmocentric.”31 “Humanism is not enough,” Strauss declared, because to understand natural human perfection, we must look up to the “superhuman” and not down, as the Darwinian evolutionist does, to the “subhuman” origins of the human. We must see, as Strauss says, that man is not “an accidental product of a blind evolution,” but the result of a “process leading to man, culminating in man,” and “directed toward man.”32 In Natural Right and History, Strauss distinguishes American social science from Catholic social science in how they handle this issue: “Presentday American social science, as far as it is not Roman Catholic social science, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are endowed by the evolutionary process or by a mysterious fate with many kinds of urges and aspirations, but certainly with no natural right” (2). Holloway observes: “Strauss exempts Catholic social science from this difficulty presumably because it posits a cosmic hierarchy in light of which these various ‘urges and aspirations’ can be evaluated and a cosmic teleology in light of which they can be seen as products of an evolutionary process guided by a benevolent cosmic intelligence. Darwinian naturalism, however, rejects such notions and is therefore left with only the (seemingly inadequate) fact of these various aspirations and their unintelligent origins.”33 So, without the cosmic teleology guided by a “benevolent cosmic intelligence,” Holloway argues, Darwinian natural right as grounded on the natural desires of an evolved human nature provides no way to rank those various and conflicting desires according to any natural standard of human perfection. Therefore, Holloway contends, the idea of natural right must be grounded in a “religiously informed cosmic teleology.”34 After all, isn’t that clear in the passage from the Declaration of Independence that Strauss quotes in Natural Right and History, which appeals to the self-evident truth that all men have been created equal and endowed with rights by their Creator? For example, could we infer from the truth that the Creator has created all human beings in His image that they have an equal dignity that sets them apart from and above all other beings, and that practices such as slavery violate natural right, because they deny this equal human dignity?

4. Is the unnatural character of slavery an example of natural right that can be defended against historicist and positivist relativism? In Natural Right and History, Strauss doesn’t give many examples of natural right. But one example that appears repeatedly is slavery (23, 103– 4, 118, 121, 159). In speaking about conventionalism, Strauss observes,

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“What is natural comes into being and exists without violence. All violence applied to a being makes that being do something which goes against its grain, i.e., against its nature. . . . The unnatural character of slavery seems to be obvious: it goes against any man’s grain to be made a slave or to be treated as a slave” (103). Is this an illustration of natural right that can be defended against the relativism of both historicism and positivism? The historicist relativist could point out that slavery has been practiced for thousands of years in many societies, which shows that our moral judgment of slavery is historically determined by the prevailing opinions of our time and place, and thus there is no natural standard for judging slavery as right or wrong. After all, even philosophers like Aristotle defended slavery as natural, because that was the common opinion in the ancient Greek world. And so, later defenders of slavery, including the slaveholders of the American South, could cite Aristotle as supporting their position.35 Strauss responds to this by arguing that it is untrue that Aristotle could not have conceived of the injustice of slavery, because in fact he did (23). Most slavery in the ancient Greek world was based on the convention that people taken prisoner in war and not ransomed can be enslaved. Such slavery is merely conventional, not natural (104). By making the distinction between natural and conventional slavery in The Politics, Aristotle conveys an exoteric teaching that slavery is natural, which appears to conform to prevailing opinions; but he also conveys an esoteric teaching to his careful readers who will notice that by Aristotle’s standards slavery as actually practiced in ancient Greece is purely conventional and not natural. As we have seen in our chapter on Aristotle, when the Spanish conquerors of the New World enslaved the Indians in the sixteenth century, this provoked a debate in Spain over the justice of this enslavement; and Bartolomé de Las Casas was able to use Aristotle’s standard of natural slavery to show that the American Indians could not be natural slaves (see chapter 2, section 5). This example of natural right does not depend on a cosmic teleology that has been refuted by modern science. This example of natural right depends only on the immanent teleology of human nature, which can be supported by modern biological science. If Darwin was right that an evolved moral sense is part of our evolved human nature, and that our moral sense condemns slavery, then we might see slavery as contrary to Darwinian natural right. We can see that slavery frustrates the natural human desires of the slave, especially the desire to be free from exploitation. But then the positivist relativist (like Max Weber) might object that in trying to draw moral conclusions from our knowledge of human nature, we are violating the distinction between facts and values, or between the is and the ought, because we fail to see the fallacy in deriving moral values from natural facts (38–48). As historians or scientists, we can describe the facts of human slavery: that slavery has been practiced for thousands of

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years, that this has satisfied the natural desire of masters for dominating and exploiting their slaves, and that this has frustrated the natural desire of slaves to be free from exploitation. But judging whether this is right or wrong is not a factual judgment but rather a value judgment. Slave masters will say that slavery is right because it satisfies their natural desires. Slaves will say that slavery is wrong because it frustrates their natural desires. To say that one side is right and the other wrong is not an objective judgment of fact but a subjective judgment of value. Scientific knowledge must be value free, because while we can have an empirical and rational knowledge of facts, we cannot have any genuine knowledge of values. The values of human beings are arbitrary preferences that conflict with one another, and there is no rational way to say that one set of values is better than another. Reason cannot tell us that anti-slavery values are better than proslavery values. The idea of Darwinian natural right is mistaken, therefore, the positivist can argue, because it fallaciously infers moral values from natural facts. Darwin was vehement in his condemnation of slavery, and much of his book on human evolution—The Descent of Man—was written to refute the proslavery argument that the human races were separate species; that some species were naturally inferior, morally and intellectually, to others; and that these inferior species were naturally adapted for slavery.36 But the positivist relativist will say that Darwin was wrong if he thought that his personal value judgment condemning slavery could be grounded in his natural science. Indeed, Darwin in The Origin of Species recognized that slavery was a naturally evolved adaptation for some ant species that have a “slave-making instinct,” which shows that slavery can arise by natural evolution. In the first edition of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote that this ant instinct for making slaves was “extraordinary and odious.”37 In the second edition of his book, he struck out the word “odious.” Perhaps he did this because he realized that this word was only an expression of his moral emotions—his hatred of slavery—and not a scientific description of the facts. The proslavery American southerner Thomas Cobb pointed to ant slavery as a natural fact showing that slavery conforms to the law of nature. “It is a fact, well known to entomologists,” Cobb observed, “that the red ant will issue in regular battle array, to conquer and subjugate the black or negro ant, as he is called by entomologists,” and “that these negro slaves perform all the labor of the communities into which they are thus brought, with a patience and an aptitude almost incredible.”38 Some religious believers will argue that this shows how a Darwinian science of nature and human nature cannot provide any standard of right and wrong for judging that slavery is wrong, because our knowledge of right and wrong depends on a religiously informed cosmic teleology like that suggested in the Declaration of Independence.39 If it is self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with the

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rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, then we can see that slavery is wrong because it violates God’s law in denying the equal dignity of all human beings as created in God’s image. The positivist relativist would see this as a religious value judgment that cannot be derived from our empirical knowledge of the facts of nature. Strauss objects to this positivist fact–value distinction by insisting that a value-free social science is impossible, because the social phenomena studied by social scientists are “constituted by value judgments,” and all social scientists must strive to make “objective value judgments” about the social phenomena they study (53–57). So, for example, Strauss claims, a military historian studying the actions of statesmen and generals must necessarily make value judgments in which he judges whether these actions were successful or mistaken. A general who loses a battle because of a blunder in some tactical maneuver must be judged to be a bad general, because he has not correctly chosen the right means for achieving his ends. All human actions are purposeful—aimed at some end—and so we can judge the success or failure of those actions in achieving their ends. As we have seen, it is possible to argue that we don’t need a cosmic teleology for our value judgment here, because we have an immanent teleology of human action. Strauss explains: “It is impossible to understand phenomena of this kind without being aware of the standard of judgment that is inherent in the situation and accepted as a matter of course by the actors themselves; and it is impossible not to make use of that standard by actually evaluating” (54). As opposed to nonliving things, all living organisms have specific standards of value inherent in their nature as the kind of organism that they are. To live, every animal must act, either consciously or unconsciously, to achieve the goals set by its nature. An animal either succeeds or fails in this, and its relative success or failure will decide whether it lives or dies, and whether or not its life is satisfying. This is not true for inanimate entities. We might explain a thunderstorm, for instance, as a physical and chemical system that sustains itself for a period of time and then dissipates, but we could not properly speak of its relative success or failure in achieving its goals. In all animal behavior, by contrast, there are natural goals, which are standards of achievement that we can identify as values or goods. If we define value or good in relational terms as whatever satisfies a desire, then all animals have values, because they all have natural desires that they strive to satisfy as they gather information about their world. This includes human beings, who are unique only in the complexity of their desires and the complexity of the information they gather to satisfy their desires.40 If Darwin is right about human evolution, human beings have evolved to be social animals who desire the praise of those around them and fear their blame. They have evolved to have a natural desire for justice as reciprocity in their social life, so that they are naturally inclined to feel love

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and gratitude in return for benefits conferred on them, they are inclined to feel anger and hatred in return for injuries inflicted on them, and they are inclined to feel guilt and shame when they violate their reciprocal obligations to others. If this is so, then we can expect that slave masters will feel the injustice of their exploitation of their slaves, and they will try to hide that injustice by pretending that slavery is good for the slaves. So, when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, its depiction of the brutal exploitation of slaves by masters was denied by many defenders of slavery as a fictional misrepresentation of the truth. Stowe responded by writing a book that presented the documentation to prove that her depiction of the brutality of slavery was an accurate portrayal of what slaves had actually suffered.41 Stowe’s proslavery critics had betrayed their sense of guilt by their need to hide the ugly truth of slavery. In fact, Abraham Lincoln argued, anyone with “ordinary perceptions of right and wrong” can see the injustice of slavery, because anyone can see how it frustrates the natural human desire to be free from exploitation. Even in the American South, Lincoln observed, slave traders are despised: it is considered improper for a gentleman to shake hands with them, because the buying and selling of human beings as property elicits a feeling of disgust.42 What Lincoln called “ordinary perceptions of right and wrong” might correspond to what Strauss called “those simple experiences regarding right and wrong which are at the bottom of the philosophic contention that there is a natural right” (31–32, 105). But then the critics of Darwinian natural right will say that what we see here is a conflict between evolved natural desires with no standard beyond those desires to resolve the conflict.43 The slave masters’ desire to exploit their slaves is opposed to the slaves’ desires for reciprocity and sympathy. And there is no standard here for determining that one desire is better than the other. The slave masters are free to suppress their sense of the injustice of slavery by deceiving themselves and others to believe that slavery is actually just. Some of the critics will argue that the standard we need for recognizing the injustice of slavery is a transcendent standard that goes beyond evolved human nature—a religiously informed cosmic teleology by which we can see that slavery violates God’s moral law. But if this is an appeal to the biblical God, then it’s not obvious that this gives us a clear and reliable standard for judging slavery, because Christian defenders of slavery have cited the Bible as supporting slavery.44 That’s why the American Civil War became a theological crisis: the theological dispute between proslavery Christians and anti-slavery Christians was settled by force of arms.45 Lincoln pointed to this in his Second Inaugural Address: “Both sides read the same Bible and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”46 Some readers of Strauss would object to the assumption here that Strauss views the injustice of slavery as a good example of natural right. In

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Natural Right and History, when Strauss speaks of the injustice of slavery, it’s not always clear that he is speaking for himself. At times, Strauss seems to intimate that if there is natural right, the only clear principle of natural right is the supremacy of the philosophic life of those few who can live it as the only naturally good life (36, 74-79, 110, 112–13, 115, 126–27, 143, 151–52, 156).

5. Is the philosophic life of the few naturally superior to the moral, religious, and political lives of the many? Shadia Drury’s The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (first published in 1988) was the first book on the political thought of Strauss.47 She argued that Strauss’s core teaching was the natural superiority of the philosophic life of the few human beings capable of such a life as being the only life that was good by nature, and thus the inferiority of the non-philosophic life of the great multitude of human beings who were incapable of living this naturally good life. She criticized this teaching as both false and dangerous. It was false, she argued, because this absolute separation of all of humanity into two groups—the philosophic few and the vulgar many—was a pure fantasy rather than an accurate account of what human beings are like. It was dangerous because it promoted a tyranny of the philosophers, in which the moral, religious, and political life of the vulgar many was seen as governed by lies—the noble lies supported by philosophers for the good of philosophy. We must ask whether her interpretation and criticisms of Strauss are convincing. In The Truth about Leo Strauss, Catherine and Michael Zuckert try to answer Drury’s arguments. But if one is aware of the textual evidence cited by Drury, one can see that the Zuckerts don’t fully confront all of the textual evidence in Strauss’s writings for Drury’s position. For example, Drury cites, but the Zuckerts ignore, the following passage from Natural Right and History (151): “If striving for knowledge of the eternal truth is the ultimate end of man, justice and moral virtue in general can be fully legitimated only by the fact that they are required for the sake of that ultimate end or that they are conditions of the philosophic life. From this point of view, the man who is merely just or moral without being a philosopher appears as a mutilated human being.” The Zuckerts never consider the strange and disturbing implications of viewing the “merely just or moral” person as a “mutilated human being,” whose life has value only in so far as it promotes the life of the philosophic few. Nor do the Zuckerts comment on Strauss’s propensity to throw out bold assertions like this without supporting evidence or argumentation. Drury identifies this claim that most human beings are “mutilated” as part of Strauss’s teaching on the tyranny of the wise. Strauss writes, “It

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would be absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by any regulations; hence the rule of the wise must be absolute rule. It would be equally absurd to hamper the free flow of wisdom by consideration of the unwise wishes of the unwise; hence the wise rulers ought not to be responsible to their unwise subjects” (140–41). Consequently, “the rule of a tyrant who, after having come to power by means of force and fraud, or having committed any number of crimes, listens to the suggestions of reasonable men, is essentially more legitimate than the rule of elected magistrates who refuse to listen to such suggestions.”48 Drury identifies this as what Strauss calls the “tyrannical teaching” of Plato and Xenophon. The Zuckerts try to refute Drury’s reading of Strauss’s “tyrannical teaching.” They say that Drury “makes Strauss incoherent in moving between the claim that natural right points to the ‘absolute rule of the wise’ (i.e., the tyranny of the wise) as best, and that the rule of gentlemen under law as best. She nowhere makes intelligible how these two quite different ideas fit together.”49 But this ignores what Drury says about Strauss teaching that while the absolute rule of the wise would be best, “a close approximation of it exists in the rule of gentlemen, or any other regime (even a tyranny), where those in power listen to the advice of the wise.”50 The Zuckerts say that Drury has distorted what Strauss says in his commentary on Xenophon’s Hiero. Simonides presents the “tyrannical teaching” in conversation with Hiero. According to the Zuckerts, however, Strauss makes it clear that Simonides is not a truly wise man.51 After all, Strauss says that “the form in which [the ‘tyrannical teaching’] is presented characterizes it as a philosophic teaching of the sort that a truly wise man would not care to present in his own name.”52 And yet the Zuckerts are silent about what Strauss says elsewhere in his commentary about how “it is one thing to accept the theoretical thesis concerning tyranny; it is another thing to expound it publicly.” Neither Plato nor Xenophon could safely expound this thesis in their own names or in the name of Socrates, but they could safely put it into the mouth of a “stranger” like Simonides.53 Similarly, while Drury interprets Strauss as supporting the teaching of Thrasymachus—that justice is the advantage of the stronger—the Zuckerts quote Strauss as saying that “we ought to loathe people who act and speak like Thrasymachus and never to imitate their deeds and never to act according to their speeches.”54 But the Zuckerts take this remark out of context. In speaking of Socrates’s “friendship with Thrasymachus,” Strauss writes, “Plato makes it very easy for us to loathe Thrasymachus: for all ordinary purposes, we ought to loathe people who act and speak like Thrasymachus and never to imitate their deeds and never to act according to their speeches. But there are other purposes to be considered.” The Zuckerts drop Strauss’s ambiguous language: “for all ordinary purposes. . . . But there are other purposes to be considered.” Notice also that while we should “loathe” people who speak and act like Thrasymachus, we are not told that the teaching of Thrasymachus is utterly false. Moreover, the

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Zuckerts are silent about Strauss’s statement that “the difference between Thrasymachus and Socrates is then merely this: according to Thrasymachus, justice is an unnecessary evil, whereas according to Socrates, it is a necessary evil.”55 So for Strauss, it seems, Socrates and Thrasymachus agree that justice is evil. The Zuckerts recognize that Strauss clearly teaches that the only natural human good is philosophy.56 But they don’t comment on the troubling implications of this—that no non-philosophic life, no matter how moral, can be truly good. They don’t comment on Strauss’s claim that if philosophy is the only good, then the moral life of non-philosophers must be based on “a fundamental falsehood, albeit a noble falsehood.”57 The Zuckerts speak about “the morality of the philosopher,” but they also quote Strauss’s remark that “philosophy is as such trans-political, trans-religious, and trans-moral.”58 How can the philosopher be moral if philosophy is “trans-moral”? We must ask: Where’s the proof? Where’s Strauss’s demonstration that the life of philosophy or science is the only good life for a human being? If the philosophic life is the life of relentless questioning and inquiry where one accepts nothing as true unless it has been proven to be true based on what we can see and know for ourselves, rather than relying on faith in what others have told us, then it is self-contradictory to choose such a life as the best life without demonstrative proof that it is so. Although Strauss generally assumes that the philosophic life is superior in dignity to any moral life, it is hard to find any place in Strauss’s writing where he carefully lays out a demonstrative proof that the philosophic life is the only truly good life for a human being. Considering the writings of Plato and Aristotle, there is at least one place where one might think the proof for the supremacy of the philosophic life has been provided—the end of Book 10 of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But some readers have noticed that Aristotle’s arguments there are remarkably dubious. They are so dubious—particularly, when one considers them in the context of the whole of the Ethics—that the careful reader might conclude that Aristotle does not take them seriously, that he is actually mocking the Platonic arguments for the supremacy of philosophy as a human life that is actually divine. For example, Aristotle says that one sign of the supremacy of the philosophic life is that the gods love philosophers, although he has said earlier in the Ethics that the gods don’t care for human beings. Some readers think this points to the books on friendship in the Ethics as the true peak of the Ethics, where Aristotle indicates that the happiest life is a life that embraces a wide range of moral and intellectual goods.59 One of Strauss’s fullest statements of the reasoning on the supremacy of philosophy is his lecture on “Reason and Revelation,” which he delivered in 1948 at Hartford Theological Seminary, although it was not published until 2006.60 While it was not published during Strauss’s lifetime, it

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contains language and formulations that appear in his published writings, beginning with Natural Right and History. Consider the following passage from this lecture: This view of the relation of philosophy to life, i.e. to society, presupposes that philosophy is essentially the preserve of the very few individuals who are by nature fit for philosophy. The radical distinction between the wise and the vulgar is essential to the original concept of philosophy. The idea that philosophy as such could become the element of human life is wholly alien to all pre-modern thought. . . . The philosophic enterprise that stands or falls by the possibility of suspense of judgment, requires therefore that all matters of life and death be settled in advance. All matters of life and death can be reduced to the question of how one ought to live. The philosophic enterprise presupposes that the question of how one ought to live be settled in advance. It is settled by the pre-philosophic proof of the thesis that the right way of life, the one thing needful, is the life devoted to philosophy and to nothing else. The pre-philosophic proof is later on confirmed, within philosophy, by an analysis of human nature. However this may be, according to its original meaning, philosophy is the right way of life, the happiness of man. All other human pursuits are accordingly considered fundamentally defective, or forms of human misery, however splendid. The moral life as moral life is not the philosophic life: for the philosopher, morality is nothing but the condition or the by-product of philosophizing, and not something valuable in itself. Philosophy is not only trans-social and trans-religious, but trans-moral as well. Philosophy asserts that man has ultimately no choice but that between philosophy and despair disguised by delusion; only through philosophy is man enabled to look reality in its stern face without losing his humanity. The claim of philosophy is no less radical than that raised on behalf of revelation.61

So, first, there must be a “pre-philosophic proof” that the philosophic life is the only right way of life; second, this proof is then confirmed by “an analysis of human nature.” But does Strauss ever provide this “pre-philosophic proof” or the “analysis of human nature” that would confirm it? “However this may be” is a strange expression in this passage, suggesting that Strauss is inclined to assume the supremacy of philosophy without proving it. Some people might agree that “an analysis of human nature” can show that there is a range of natural human desires that constitute the natural goods of life, which might include goods such as family life, social ranking, politics, property, friendship, religious understanding, and intellectual understanding. These generic human goods include philosophy or science as devoted to intellectual understanding. But even if we agree that the philosophic life is a good life for those inclined to it by nature, is there any good reason to say that this is the only truly good life for human beings, that any life other than the philosophic life is a life of “despair disguised by delusion”?

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The generic standard for a good human life might include all or most of these human goods to some degree. But the ranking of goods—so that one good is stressed more than the others—might depend upon the temperament and circumstances of individuals. The philosophic life is best for only a few people. As Strauss says, philosophy is “the preserve of the very few individuals who are by nature fit for philosophy.” So “an analysis of human nature” might recognize that individuals differ in their nature, and therefore differ in what is naturally good for them. The philosophic life is best for Socrates, but not for those who lack the natural inclinations of Socratic individuals. These Socratic philosophers are likely to be extremely rare. In fact, Strauss says that they are so rare that we are lucky if there is a single one of them alive in our time. Strauss even says that he himself is “only a scholar,” not a true philosopher.62 We might agree that someone who would live a life without any intellectual understanding at all—someone utterly ignorant and lacking in any curiosity about the world—would be living a less than fully satisfying life. But even if some desire for knowledge is an element of any minimally good life, is there any reason to say that those few people who live a purely Socratic life of relentless questioning and inquiry are the only happy human beings? In a letter to Karl Löwith, Strauss wrote: “A man like Churchill proves that the possibility of magnanimity exists today exactly as it did in the fifth century BC.” But according to Strauss, the life of the magnanimous or greatsouled man is a merely moral life that is not a truly good life because it is not a philosophic life. So, according to Strauss, the life of Churchill manifests “human misery, however splendid” or “despair disguised by delusion.” Where’s the demonstrative proof of this strange assertion? In “Reason and Revelation,” Strauss offers a few hints as to what he might take as proof. But he never lays out the necessary evidence and arguments. He asserts “man’s desire to know as his highest natural desire.”63 But he never explains exactly why we should be persuaded that the other natural desires don’t count as part of a good human life. He says that knowledge of the good is the necessary precondition for finding the good. But to say that we need some knowledge to pursue the good for us does not prove that pursuing knowledge for its own sake is the only good. In “Reason and Revelation,” Strauss writes a dialogue between “the philosopher” and “the theologian” that includes this exchange: The theologian: philosophy is self-deification; philosophy has its root in pride. The philosopher: if we understand by God the most perfect being that is a person, there are no gods but the philosophers. . . . Poor gods? Indeed, measured by imaginary standards.—As to “pride,” who is more proud, he who says that his personal fate is of concern to the

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Is Strauss serious about this—“there are no gods but the philosophers”? Does this make any sense? Strauss notes that theologians like to use Pascal’s claim that the “misery of man without God” is shown by the craving for distraction and the mood of boredom. Strauss seems to accept this as a reason for rejecting all lives other than philosophy: . . . these and similar phenomena reveal indeed the problematic character of all ordinary human pursuits of happiness which are not the pursuit of the happiness of contemplation. The philosopher as philosopher never craves distraction (although he needs relaxation from time to time), and he is never bored. Theological psychology is such a psychology of non-philosophic man, of the vulgar, as is not guided by the understanding of the natural aim of man which is contemplation.65

Does the proof depend on evidence of boredom? Are philosophers never bored, while everyone else is always bored? According to Strauss, the proof for the supremacy of the philosophic life depends crucially on the reason–revelation debate—on whether philosophy can refute revelation, or whether revelation can refute philosophy. If this debate remains inconclusive, as Strauss suggests it does, then the assertion “that philosophy is the highest possibility of man” is only a “hypothesis” and thus “a blind decision.”66 What kind of a “decision” is this? Isn’t this a moral decision, because it’s a decision about how one ought to live, about what constitutes a good life? But if so, then the choice to live a philosophic life is a moral choice. If it’s a moral choice, then how can the Straussian philosopher denigrate morality as lacking any dignity? Has Strauss given any clear proof that the life of religious faith cannot be superior to the philosophic life as the naturally best life? Actually, in Natural Right and History, Strauss admits that philosophy cannot refute revelation, which means that the choice for the philosophic life must be “an unevident, arbitrary, or blind decision,” which seems to show the refutation of philosophy by revelation (75). Or is this only Strauss’s exoteric or surface teaching, which supports religious belief as a “salutary myth”? Is it Strauss’s esoteric or secret teaching that philosophy has refuted revelation, just as it has refuted morality and politics, but it would be harmful to the huge multitude of people who cannot live a philosophic life to teach this publicly? That the philosophic life as lived by only a tiny number of god-like human beings is the one and only good life is identified by Strauss as the core teaching of pre-modern philosophy, in contrast to modern philosophy’s lowering of the ends of human life to the base hedonistic pleasures of comfortable self-preservation. Is it true, then, as Strauss indicates, that modern philosophy promotes a degrading political hedonism that is blind to human excellence, particularly the excellence of the philosophic life?

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6. Does Lockean natural right teach hedonistic relativism, in which “life is the joyless quest for joy”? Strauss begins Natural Right and History by quoting from the Declaration of Independence as a statement of the idea of natural right that Strauss wants to defend against the attack of modern relativism. Since much of the Declaration of Independence echoes the language of John Locke, we might expect that Strauss would defend Locke’s understanding of modern natural right. Surprisingly, however, Strauss concludes his section on Locke with a bleak picture of the hedonistic relativism of Lockean society in which “life is the joyless quest for joy” (251). Does this show that Strauss believes that the Lockean conception of natural right has had a degrading effect on human life? If so, does this contradict Strauss’s opening endorsement of modern natural right in the Declaration of Independence? If so, is Strauss correct in his account of Lockean liberalism as promoting individual liberty but not social virtue? Or is it possible to interpret Lockean liberalism as promoting both liberty and virtue, by securing individual liberty as the condition for moral and intellectual virtue? Concentrating on Locke’s chapter on property in the Second Treatise (chapter 5) and his chapter on power in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (chapter 21 of book 2), Strauss sees Locke as teaching that the true standard of natural right is the emancipation of acquisitiveness, in which the pursuit of happiness means the unlimited accumulation of money and other wealth. The older view that the unlimited acquisition of wealth is unjust or morally corrupting is swept away. Unlike the older view, Locke turns away from the high standards of virtue and turns toward the “low but solid ground” of selfishness. According to Strauss, Locke’s teaching on property shows a shift from one’s natural duties to others to one’s natural rights to one’s own individual self-indulgence. Strauss writes: Through the shift of emphasis from natural duties or obligations to natural rights, the individual, the ego, had become the center and origin of the moral world, since man—as distinguished from man’s end—had become that center or origin. . . . Man is effectively emancipated from the bonds of nature, and therewith the individual is emancipated from those social bonds with antedate all consent or compact, by the emancipation of his productive acquisitiveness. . . . The world in which human creativity seems to reign supreme is, in fact, the world which has replaced the rule of nature by the rule of convention. (248–49)

Locke uses the phrase “pursuit of happiness” repeatedly in his chapter on power in the Essay, and this could be the source for Jefferson’s use of the phrase in the Declaration of Independence. According to Strauss, Locke’s argument here is that the greatest happiness consists only in the power to pursue pleasure or escape pain. And “since there are no knowable natures, there is no nature of man with reference to which we could

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distinguish between pleasures which are according to nature and pleasures which are against nature, or between pleasures which are by nature higher and pleasures which are by nature lower: pleasure and pain are ‘for different men . . . very different things’” (249). Consequently, as Locke says in the Essay, “the philosophers of old did in vain inquire, whether summum bonum consisted in riches, or bodily delights, or virtue, or contemplation?” But even if there is no summum bonum (highest good), there is still a summum malum (highest evil)—death. And, consequently, the strong desire for self-preservation, or perhaps for a comfortable self-preservation, can be the natural motive for human life. But it’s a life that, Strauss concludes, becomes a “joyless quest for joy” (250–51). Some readers of Locke have disagreed with Strauss in this interpretation of Locke.67 Contrary to Strauss’s claim that Locke has replaced the rule of nature with the rule of convention, they point out, Locke repeatedly appeals to “the principles of human nature,” which include the social nature of human beings as moved by natural social desires such as parental care, sexual mating, and conjugal bonding.68 It is not true that for Locke, “there is no nature of man” that can provide a natural standard of action. As Locke says in his chapter on power in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, by nature, happiness, as the fullest satisfaction of our natural desires, is that “which we all aim at in all our actions.”69 On this point, Locke agrees with Aristotle and Aquinas on happiness as the natural end of human action. Strauss and the Straussians object, however, that Locke breaks fundamentally with Aristotle and Aquinas in denying that there is any single natural summum bonum for human life. Strauss correctly quotes Locke’s claim that the summum bonum is not the same for all human beings. But he does not quote Locke’s claim that human beings “are both concerned and fitted to search out their summum bonum.”70 So Locke’s point seems to be that there is a summum bonum—a highest good—for each person that constitutes the natural standard of happiness for each person. But there is no single highest good for all people. If there are certain generic goods of human nature that are universally good for human beings—like health, property, parental care, friendship, and intellectual activity—then these generic goods constitute a natural standard for the human good. But if the appropriate ranking or organization of these generic goods varies according to the natural temperament, talents, and circumstances of different individuals, then each individual has a distinctive summum bonum. And if so, government cannot properly enforce a single summum bonum for all individuals, but it can properly enforce the conditions for people to have the liberty to pursue their summum bonum in the natural and voluntary associations of civil society. Lockean government cannot guarantee the self-perfection of every individual. But it can guarantee the self-direction that is the condition for the pursuit of self-perfection.

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Locke seems to say that there is a natural end to human conduct, because there are certain generic goods required for a good human life— for a happy or flourishing human life—that are rooted in a universal human nature. For example, one could not live a flourishing human life if one had no friends at all or no intellectual curiosity at all. Here then is the natural telos for human beings: human flourishing requires the fullest expression of the generic goods of human nature. But while we can conceive of these generic goods by abstraction, the actual reality of these goods is always individualized and agent-relative, because the human good is always the good for someone in particular, and the ranking or balancing of these diverse goods will be different for each individual based on the talents, temperaments, and circumstances of the individual. There are no universal rules of ethics to decide this for all individuals in all situations. Choosing the best form of life for each individual is a matter for the practical judgment or prudence of individuals. This is an inclusive end conception of ethics—with the human good encompassing all the generic goods of life and the ranking of these goods differing for differing individuals. But Strauss affirms a dominant end conception—that there is some one ranking of goods that is best for all human beings: philosophy is the only natural good for human beings, and so the only naturally good life is the life of those very few god-like human beings who engage in philosophic activity as the only good for them. Consequently, for Strauss, as we have seen, the life of almost all human beings consists of “forms of human misery,” “despair disguised by delusion,” and a “joyless quest for joy.” To settle this debate, we would have to decide which side is closer to the truth about human life and the pursuit of happiness. Which side is more plausible? Can one side prove its position and refute the other side? If Strauss’s side is correct, Locke’s hedonistic relativism was the first of three waves of modernity, with each wave flowing logically from the inadequacies of the previous wave. According to Strauss, the first wave came with Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke; the second wave came with Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel; and the third wave came with Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The third wave led to fascism and Nazism. A few readers of Strauss have seen evidence in his writing that he was secretly promoting this fascist or Nazi wave as the only good illiberal alternative to the Lockean “joyless quest for joy” in liberal democracy. But most of Strauss’s supporters are disgusted by such a shocking interpretation of Strauss.

7. Was Strauss a Jewish Nazi? Strauss concludes his essay on “The Three Waves of Modernity” with this paragraph: I draw a political conclusion from the foregoing remarks. The theory of liberal democracy, as well as of communism, originated in the first and

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Chapter Fourteen second waves of modernity; the political implication of the third wave proved to be fascism. Yet this undeniable fact does not permit us to return to the earlier forms of modern thought: the critique of modern rationalism or the modern belief in reason by Nietzsche cannot be dismissed or forgotten. This is the deepest reason for the crisis of liberal democracy. The theoretical crisis does not necessarily lead to a practical crisis, for the superiority of liberal democracy to communism, Stalinist or post-Stalinist, is obvious enough. And above all, liberal democracy, in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.71

In the first sentence, Strauss announces that he is speaking for himself in stating a political teaching: “I draw a political conclusion.” We could infer that his political teaching here is that despite the fact that liberal democracy is in a theoretical and practical crisis, liberal democracy is still theoretically and practically superior to the illiberal alternatives. Practically, the superiority of liberal democracy to communism is “obvious enough.” Theoretically, liberal democracy is superior to communism and fascism, because unlike those illiberal regimes, liberal democracy can draw support from pre-modern thought. And since Strauss is a proponent of premodern thought as superior to modern thought, we might infer that he is suggesting that the resolution of the crisis of liberal democracy can come from stressing the pre-modern support for liberal democracy. Perhaps we could stress the ways that modern liberal democracy resembles the classical republican or mixed regime as it’s described in Aristotle’s Politics. But if we read Strauss’s paragraph carefully, we might find it puzzling. He sets up a comparison of liberal democracy, fascism, and communism. He then asserts that the practical superiority of liberal democracy over communism is obvious, but oddly he does not say that its practical superiority over fascism is obvious. Why is he silent about this? We might think that, of course, Strauss thought that liberal democracy was practically superior to fascism as well as to communism, and his failure to say so was an oversight. But since Strauss was so attentive to careful writing and careful reading, and to the possibility that careful writers can convey secret teachings by not saying what readers might expect them to say, is it possible that Strauss is intimating that he thought liberal democracy was not practically superior to fascism? Strauss does seem to praise liberal democracy because it finds powerful support in pre-modern thought in a way that is not true for communism and fascism. But in a lecture on “German Nihilism,” delivered during World War Two, Strauss said that National Socialism was “a return to a pre-modern ideal.”72 How should we interpret this contradiction? Did Strauss change his mind about this? If Strauss really thought that National Socialism was an alternative to liberal democracy rooted in pre-modern thought, that might suggest that Strauss believed that overcoming the crisis of liberal democracy would require some kind of illiberal regime.

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But if this is so, then presumably Strauss could not say this publicly while living in the United States without provoking scorn, and he would have had to convey this as a secret teaching for those few truly philosophic readers capable of understanding and accepting such a teaching. That this really was Strauss’s secret political teaching is the disturbing claim of William Altman. Altman identifies himself as a Jew, a Christian, a Platonist, and a liberal. These religious, philosophic, and political commitments support one another, he argues, because the Bible and Plato teach a dualism that provides the metaphysical ground for political liberalism. According to Altman, Strauss rejects the dualism and the liberalism of the Bible and Plato. In doing so, Altman concludes, Strauss agrees with the intellectual core of National Socialism—in its nihilistic denial of dualism and liberalism—and thus he became the German Stranger in the United States, seeking to destroy the American enemy of German Nazism. Altman calls Strauss “the German Stranger,” because he compares Strauss to the Athenian Stranger in Plato’s Laws. According to Altman, the teaching of the Athenian Stranger corresponds to the teaching of Strauss. Strauss’s last major work, completed two years before his death, was a commentary on Plato’s Laws, in which Strauss agreed with Karl Popper that Plato’s Laws described a closed society with laws enforced by the secret police.73 Just as the Athenian Stranger left Athens for Crete, where he sought to impose an anti-democratic regime of repression supported by an atheistic religion that denied Plato’s teaching of dualism in the Republic, Altman suggests, Strauss left Weimar Germany and eventually settled in the United States, where he sought to subvert liberal democracy, while secretly promoting the National Socialist atheism of those like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Strauss pretended to do this as a Platonist, but Strauss’s Plato was not a Platonist at all. Strauss’s Plato was an atheist who denied the Platonic Theory of the Ideas as based on the dualistic separation of Being and Becoming as belonging to two worlds. Strauss’s Plato was not the true Plato, Altman argues, because he was actually the Athenian Stranger of the Laws. Plato’s Laws was Plato’s prediction of Strauss and his Nazi program for attacking liberal democracy. Altman makes nine claims: Biblical dualism, Biblical liberalism, Platonic dualism, Platonic liberalism, Straussian anti-dualism, Straussian antiliberalism, Nazi anti-dualism, Nazi anti-liberalism, and Straussian Nazism. Biblical dualism is one of Altman’s less controversial claims. Given the existence of a transcendent God, reality is divided into two worlds—the real world of divinity and the apparent world of ordinary human experience. This dualistic metaphysics is shared by Judaism and Christianity, because Christianity is originally a Jewish religion. Here Altman apparently agrees with Nietzsche about the “two worlds” tradition of the Western Biblical culture. Biblical liberalism is a more controversial claim. To support it, he cites only two Biblical verses—1 Samuel 8:7 (on the conflict between the rule

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of kings and the rule of God) and John 18:36 (“My kingdom is not of this world”).74 Altman believes that the true solution to the “theological–political problem” is the liberal solution—the separation of religion and politics through religious toleration.75 In response to Altman on this point, some people contend that it’s easier to find this in the New Testament than in the Old Testament, which is why it was easier for Locke to find support for religious toleration in the New Testament than in the Old Testament. As we have seen in our chapter on Locke, Christian proponents of toleration like Roger Williams contrasted the theocracy of the Jewish polity with the New Testament teaching that Christians were not to expect a legal enforcement of their religion. In defending Platonic dualism, Altman accepts the traditional interpretation of Plato as teaching “the absolute existence of transcendent Being and the problematic existential status of everything else.”76 The transcendent peak of Platonic philosophy is the ascent to the Idea of the Good. This puts Plato in opposition to Aristotle’s naturalism. Plato really is a Platonist, and Aristotle really is an Aristotelian. Altman elaborates this in a book on Plato.77 Altman argues that Plato’s dualism is found most clearly in the Symposium, the Republic, and the Phaedo. In the other dialogues, Plato’s teaching is challenged in various ways. In contrast to the true Plato, Altman argues, Strauss’s Plato is actually the Athenian Stranger of the Laws, which is an anti-Platonic book, with no Idea of the Good and with a political theology that is invented by the Stranger for his political ends. According to Altman, Strauss distorts the Republic by reading it through the lens of the Laws. Like Clement of Alexandria and Augustine, Altman sees Plato’s dualism as prefiguring Christianity and the transcendent God of Israel who identifies Himself as “I am that I am.”78 So, again, Altman agrees with Nietzsche—Christianity is “Platonism for the common people.”79 Altman’s affirmation of Platonic liberalism is a controversial claim. Traditionally, Plato has been read as a fervent critic of democracy, and generally modern liberalism is assumed to be fundamentally contrary to Plato’s political thought. Oddly enough, however, one of Strauss’s insights supports Altman’s reasoning for Plato’s liberalism. Strauss points out that when Plato gives his history of regimes in Book 8 of the Republic, his sequence of five regimes corresponds to Hesiod’s history of the five races of men.80 Consequently, democracy as the fourth of five corresponds to Hesiod’s divine race of heroes. So, although Plato presents democracy as a bad regime, he also suggests that it comes closer to the golden age than any other bad regime. The end of democracy is not virtue but freedom— the freedom of each to live as he pleases by choosing from among all the possible human lives. This freedom of choice makes democracy the only bad regime in which some people can choose the philosophic life. Indeed, the conversation of the Republic, in which people are free to philosophize about all the various regimes, is possible only in a democracy like Athens.

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Even if Socrates is a critic of democracy, he shows his preference for democracy by his action in living in Athens, fighting in its wars, and living by its laws. So while democracy does not aim at excellence or virtue as such, democracy does secure a freedom of choice that allows people the freedom to choose excellence or virtue, including the excellence of the philosophic life. If one believes that philosophy is the highest life, as Strauss does, then the openness of democracy to philosophy might lead one to regard democracy as at least the best of the bad regimes. Altman elaborates this Straussian insight into democracy as the best of the bad regimes in his book on Plato, and this constitutes his argument for Platonic liberalism. But then in his book on Strauss, Altman never seriously considers the possibility that such reasoning could have supported Strauss’s qualified embrace of liberal democracy, which would deny Altman’s claim that Strauss was the enemy of liberal democracy. In his book on Plato, Altman comments on “Plato’s characteristically serious joke: despite appearances, Democracy—fourth on Plato’s list as the Age of Heroes is fourth in Hesiod—is philosophy’s golden age; i.e., the golden age tout court.”81 The democratic freedom to choose one’s own way of life is the precondition for Glaucon’s choosing justice and the precondition for the philosophic discussion in the Republic—democracy is the only regime where the philosophic life can be freely chosen. Altman suggests that those like Karl Popper who see the Republic as a defense of totalitarianism fail to see this Platonic endorsement of democratic freedom, and they also fail to see that the totalitarianism of the Athenian Stranger in the Laws is meant to be a challenge to Plato’s teaching. Altman argues that the Straussians can’t fully accept Plato’s liberalism, because they can’t accept the dualism on which it is grounded. But this contradicts what Altman notices about the purely naturalistic grounding of democracy in Book 8 of the Republic. According to Altman, Socrates states “the single most important truth about democracy” when he says: “anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live.”82 If democracy is rooted in natural freedom, we might observe, then it’s not clear that this requires any appeal to a supernatural dualism. Altman writes: This is not to say, of course, that Democracy values the Idea of the Good: none of the defective cities do this. But unlike the false forms of the merely apparent good sought after in Timocracy (honor), Oligarchy (wealth) and Tyranny (absolute power), Democracy’s good is merely an indefinite plurality: freedom (cf. 562b10-c2). Of course, Plato does not regard freedom per se as the Good. In fact, it is worth repeating the central Idea of Platonism as often as necessary: Plato regards only the Idea of the Good as the Good. But because the citizens of a democracy (unlike other cities) can agree on no one thing that is absolutely good—other than the freedom to seek after their good— only here is the door left open to philosophy, as ‘the bazaar of constitutions’ passage indicates.83

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Against Altman’s claim that liberal democracy requires metaphysical dualism, we might wonder whether liberal democracy could be founded on a purely naturalistic conception of human nature. We could argue that democratic freedom allows for human beings to pursue their natural desires, which includes the natural desire for intellectual understanding, and a few human beings will be inclined by this natural desire to live a life of philosophic inquiry, which might include questioning whether there is an Idea of the Good. But regardless of what we might think about the Idea of the Good, we can recognize the natural goods of human life as constituted by the natural human desires. Liberal democracy is naturally good in so far as it secures the freedom that is the condition for the possibility of the expression of those natural human desires. Would that be what Strauss calls natural right? Even if Altman is right about Straussian anti-dualism— the tendency of Strauss and the Straussians to dismiss the metaphysical dualism of Platonism as not truly Plato’s teaching—it’s not clear that this must lead to Straussian anti-liberalism. We might also question Altman’s thesis about Nazi anti-dualism, because many of the Nazi philosophers were neo-Kantian or Platonic dualists who appealed to eternal values grounded in some transcendent realm of absolute good. Most of the prominent German philosophers who stayed in Germany after Hitler’s ascent to power publicly supported Hitler and Nazi ideology.84 Thirty German philosophers joined the Nazi Party in 1933. By 1940, almost half of Germany’s academic philosophers were Nazis. The many German philosophers who became Nazis manifested a wide range of often conflicting philosophical positions. The common assumption that the major philosophical position supporting Nazism was some kind of moral relativism (such as Nietzschean subjective value relativism) is not correct. Many, if not most, of the Nazi philosophers—for example, Nicolai Hartmann, Bruno Bauch, Hans Heyse, Hermann Schwarz, and many others in the German Philosophical Society—were Kantian idealists who assumed a metaphysical order of objective eternal values, and who argued that it was the destiny of the German nation to be rooted in that eternal order of value. Altman could respond, however, by pointing out that the most famous case of a German philosopher who courageously opposed the Nazi regime was Kurt Huber, who was a Kantian dualist. As a professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, where he often taught courses on Kant, Huber became the only academic philosopher in Germany to resist Nazism. He joined with a group of his students at the University—led by Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans Scholl—who wrote and distributed a series of leaflets in 1942 and 1943 calling for nonviolent resistance to the Nazi regime. This became known as the White Rose resistance movement. They were arrested and convicted of treason. Some of them—including Huber—were executed by beheading.85 Altman is clearly right in identifying Strauss as a critic of liberal democracy. But the question in dispute is whether Strauss was a friendly or

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unfriendly critic. Against Altman’s claim that Strauss was an unfriendly critic of liberal democracy, Strauss’s defenders can quote what appears to be a clear statement from Strauss: “We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy.”86 Altman identifies this as the “‘Golden Sentence’ of Straussian apologetics,” because it is so frequently quoted to show that Strauss was a friend of democracy.87 Altman’s commentary on this sentence illustrates both the strengths and the weaknesses of his argumentation. The strength of his argument here is in pointing out Strauss’s use of the word “we” in the Golden Sentence, in contrast to his multiple uses of “I,” “me,” and “my” in the first paragraph of the essay in which the Golden Sentence appears. This is significant if one considers what Strauss says about how Maimonides uses the word “we” to distinguish a popular opinion from what he himself believes, and how Strauss himself switches from “I” to “we” to suggest that he is saying something that he does not believe.88 Strauss could have said: “I am not permitted to be a flatterer of democracy precisely because I am a friend and ally of democracy.” We might criticize Strauss for not speaking in such an emphatic way, so that all his readers could recognize him as a friendly critic of liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the weakness of Altman’s commentary on Strauss’s writing here is that Altman fails to note that the immediate context of the Golden Sentence suggests a rather clear, even if qualified, embrace of liberal democracy. Strauss writes: What then are the prospects for liberal education within mass democracy? What are the prospects for the liberally educated to become again a power in democracy? We are not permitted to be flatterers of democracy precisely because we are friends and allies of democracy. While we are not permitted to remain silent on the dangers to which democracy exposes itself as well as human excellence, we cannot forget the obvious fact that by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence. No one prevents us from cultivating our garden or from setting up outposts which may come to be regarded by many citizens as salutary to the republic and as deserving of giving to it its tone. . . . As matters stand, we can expect more immediate help from the humanities rightly understood than from the sciences, from the spirit of perceptivity and delicacy than from the spirit of geometry. If I am not mistaken, this is the reason why liberal education is now becoming almost synonymous with the reading in common of the Great Books. No better beginning could have been made.89

Notice that Strauss evokes the same Platonic argument for democracy that Altman adopts: “by giving freedom to all, democracy also gives freedom to those who care for human excellence.” Moreover, many of those influenced by Strauss—Martin Diamond and William Galston, for example— have developed this idea as supporting the conclusion that liberal democracy can cultivate human excellence by cultivating the “liberal virtues.”90

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Moreover, the conviction that a liberal education through the Great Books can promote excellence, at least among those few open to such an education, underlies much of Strauss’s influence in promoting the study of the classic texts of political philosophy as well as the Great Books generally. Another weakness in Altman’s account of Strauss as a Jewish Nazi is indicated in Altman’s admission that Strauss regarded Adolf Hitler as a fool.91 Altman also admits that there is no evidence that Strauss ever developed any positive program for moving towards a National Socialist society. And yet, Altman insists that Strauss was “remarkably successful” in his project “to take Germany’s western enemy out of the picture: to destroy Liberal Democracy’s faith in itself.”92 Where’s the evidence for this? Is there any evidence that Strauss and his students have in fact destroyed liberal democracy’s faith in itself? Clearly, many of those under Strauss’s influence have actually defended liberal democracy, and particularly the American regime.93 Would Altman say that all of these people failed to get the secret message from Strauss? If so, who did get the secret message that Strauss wanted to destroy liberal democracy’s faith in itself? In describing his “personal encounter with Straussianism,” Altman begins with this startling claim: “As is now the case with every American, I came under the influence of Leo Strauss long before I’d ever heard his name.”94 Can this really be true? Every American has been under Strauss’s influence without knowing it? And consequently, every American has been losing faith in liberal democracy? Wild claims like this weaken Altman’s argumentation. Still, we might agree that Altman has shown that Strauss is open to the criticism that he was not clear enough or emphatic enough in defending liberal democracy against the ideas of Nietzsche, Schmitt, and Heidegger. Strauss never offered a thorough refutation of these ideas, and instead he showed some attraction to them—most clearly in his lectures on “German Nihilism” and the “Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism.” Significantly, these lectures were not published in Strauss’s lifetime. In “German Nihilism,” Strauss seemed to admire the “young German nihilists.” Many of the ideas he attributed to them were recurrent themes of Strauss’s writing. For example, he writes: It is a moral protest. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life. That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral; the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.95

This claim that a moral society is necessarily a closed society and that any attempt to create a perfectly open society must destroy the moral order of

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the society was a common assertion of Strauss, or at least of Strauss’s interpretation of classic thought (130–33). Strauss seemed to agree with Plato’s comparison of society with a cave, from which the philosopher must ascend in pursuing the light of the truth of things; and therefore every society “is more closed to philosophy than open to it.”96 In “Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” Strauss left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger’s Nazi attack on liberal democracy: “All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power. One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate. I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism. Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight. But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.”97 George Anastaplo told the story of trying to arrange a meeting between Strauss and Strauss’s old friend, Hans Jonas. Both Strauss and Jonas had been students of Heidegger before he joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Anastaplo reported that Strauss refused to meet with Jonas because Jonas had met with Heidegger briefly in 1969. For Anastaplo, this showed Strauss’s hatred of Heidegger for his support of the Nazis.98 But does this story show that Strauss exercised better judgment in his handling of Heidegger than did Jonas? Jonas publicly criticized Heidegger’s ideas and his support of Nazism. In fact, Jonas’s 1964 lecture on “Heidegger and Theology” provoked an international controversy because of the vehemence of Jonas’s criticisms, and there was even a front page story in the New York Times about the controversy. This led to lecture invitations for Jonas from around the world to explain his disagreements with Heidegger, and Heidegger told some of his friends that Jonas had betrayed him.99 Strauss did nothing like this. Instead, Strauss praised Heidegger— just after Heidegger had reaffirmed his support for Nazism in 1953—as “the only great thinker in our time.” Anyone defending Strauss against Altman’s charges must explain Strauss’s behavior in refusing to be as clear and emphatic as was Jonas in his public criticism of Heidegger’s Nazism. As we have seen, those who defend Strauss as a friendly critic of liberal democracy rely heavily on what Strauss said about the life of the mind cultivated by liberal education in a liberal democracy, which leads to our next question.

8. Does liberalism allow for human excellence and the philosophic life through liberal education? In a lecture entitled “What Is Liberal Education?” Strauss declared: “Liberal education is the counterpoison to mass culture, to the corroding effects of mass culture. . . . Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant. Lib-

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eral education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society. Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness.”100 Is this true? Does liberal democracy allow for human excellence through liberal education? Do the colleges and universities in the United States and other liberal democracies promote the sort of liberal education that Strauss has in mind? Or do we see these schools providing only vocational and technical training for students preparing for professional careers? In their concern for career success, have our schools abandoned the aim of liberal education—cultivating the minds of students so that they can think about the big questions of life, questions about the meaning and purpose of human life in the universe? Strauss saw liberal education as devoted to the reading of the Great Books. “Liberal education is education in culture or toward culture,” he observed, and culture is the cultivation of the mind, which requires teachers. The teachers are themselves pupils; but ultimately there must be teachers who are not pupils, teachers who can teach themselves, and these are the great minds. The greatest minds are so extremely rare that we are not likely to ever meet one. “It is a piece of good luck if there is a single one alive in one’s time.” Consequently, most pupils have access to the greatest minds only through reading the Great Books that the great minds have left behind. Liberal education must then consist in studying carefully these Great Books.101 If this is liberal education, then there is not much liberal education in American higher education today. In some of their courses, particularly in philosophy and literature, some college students might read some of the Great Books. But very few schools (like St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland) are organized around the Great Books. In most college courses, students read only ordinary textbooks. And rather than being engaged in knowledge for its own sake, students often see their studies as mere training for acquiring a job after graduation. Consider the case of William Deresiewicz, who had an elite education as an undergraduate at Columbia University and a graduate student at Yale University. He had taught English literature at Yale for ten years. But then he decided that he was part of an educational system that was no longer providing a truly liberal education devoted to cultivating the mind for thinking about the big questions of life. Instead of this, he saw that education in the elite schools—like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford—had become a purely vocational and technical education to prepare students to enter high-paying and high-status jobs. To gain entrance to such elite education, students had been working hard since elementary school to build their resumes, to achieve high grade point averages, and to score high enough on the college entrance examinations to be admitted into the most prestigious schools. But once they got to those schools, they often could not explain why they were there, except to say that they were building the credentials necessary for careers that would

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give them the wealth and power of an upper class life. These students were smart and successful, but also empty and anxious. Many of these students would find no personal satisfaction in the careers they would enter. As one student told Deresiewicz, these students had become “excellent sheep.”102 So Deresiewicz began to wonder whether these students would have been happier—better able to live meaningful, purposeful lives—if they had not had an elite education, but instead had attended some small liberal arts college or public university, where they might have sought a liberal education in which thinking and learning are pursued for their own sake rather than as a means for career advancement. They might have learned how to find a job doing something they enjoyed doing, a job that would give them a comfortable living, although perhaps not great wealth or status. They might have become inquisitive thinkers rather than excellent sheep. But why can’t we see liberal education and education for career success as compatible rather than contradictory? As Deresiewicz indicates, many employers recognize that the most important skills required for professional success in cognitively challenging jobs today—critical thinking, clear and vigorous writing and speaking, analysis of complex problems—are the skills developed by liberal education. Moreover, finding a career requires the sort of knowledge toward which liberal education is directed—self-knowledge and questioning the meaning of life. To find the right career, you need to know what you’re good at, what you care about, and what you believe to be the good life. These are the sort of questions that come up in liberal education.103 But to ask questions about the good life—about how we ought to live—assumes that we can discover true standards of good and bad, perhaps even natural standards rooted in human nature and the nature of things, or what Strauss called natural right. In liberal democracy, however, there is often a tendency to relativism, which denies that there are any true standards for judging some ways of life as better than others. If liberal democracy requires complete openness and tolerance, so that people can live as they please in their pursuit of happiness, this might be interpreted as meaning that all must be free to create their own values. But once such relativism pervades higher education, this makes true liberal education impossible, because it denies the fundamental assumption of liberal education that the human mind is capable of moving from opinion to knowledge, of ascending out of Plato’s cave into the light of the Sun. If relativism is correct, there is nothing but the cave, and thus no natural standard of the true and the good transcending the cave of opinion. That was the worry of Allan Bloom in his book, The Closing of the American Mind.104 Bloom was a student of Strauss who argued that relativism in American universities had destroyed liberal education, and thus had frustrated Strauss’s hope that liberal education could create an aristocracy within democratic mass society. First published in 1987, The Closing of the American Mind became an international best-seller that provoked an intense debate about American higher education.105

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Most readers saw Bloom’s apparent criticism of the relativism in America’s elite universities and his apparent defense of Socratic liberal education as directed to the pursuit of truth. But some readers also saw in the book a dramatic conflict over whether Bloom’s heroic model for liberal education was to be Socrates or Nietzsche.106 Socrates and Nietzsche were the two thinkers that Bloom mentioned more often than anyone else. He set them in opposition to one another. And he never clearly stated any disagreement with Nietzsche, while suggesting that Nietzsche might have been correct in his criticisms of Socrates.107 Much of Bloom’s book was designed to show us what he called “the extraordinary thought and philosophical greatness” of not only Nietzsche but also Heidegger and the other German nihilists.108 Bloom reported that when he first began teaching, he thought the good students in the elite universities were open to liberal education, and that “these students are a kind of democratic version of an aristocracy.”109 Later, however, he began to suspect that Nietzsche was right about how a liberal democratic culture brings a decadence that deprives the human soul of any transcendent longings. So Bloom began to doubt the Great Books appeal to nature and the permanent natural desire to know. He feared the cultural flattening of the human soul that was at the center of all Nietzsche’s thought, and he understood Nietzsche’s concern that the creation of a new nobility would require philosophic creators like himself. Without openly embracing Nietzsche’s position, Bloom pointed in that direction: “He may not have been right, but his case looks stronger all the time.” Originally, Bloom wanted the title of his book to be Souls without Longing, and his book was all about the Nietzschean lament that liberal democratic culture has created people with flat souls, and that the creation of a new nobility requires creating a new culture of noble values.110 Many readers of Bloom’s book assumed that his criticism of relativism was part of a defense of traditional morality. But some readers noticed that this was not true. Bloom declared, “It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives.”111 So the immorality of relativism was not appalling to Bloom. Rather, what Bloom found disgusting was America’s “easygoing” relativism, or “nihilism, American style,” as opposed to the anguished relativism of Nietzsche. Bloom explained, “Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences.”112 Bloom pointed to the possibility of a natural teleology of human biological nature, which would support the idea of natural right. But his Nietzschean nihilism denied that possibility. For example, he wrote, “I mean by teleology nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human

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life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.”113 Even as he recognized the evident teleology of human biology, he could not fully affirm it, because it “may be only illusory.” This happened often in his book.114 Like Strauss, Bloom’s interpretation of Nietzsche concentrated on the early and late writings of Nietzsche; and thus Strauss and Bloom ignored Nietzsche’s embrace of Darwinian science in Human, All Too Human, where Nietzsche suggested how the problem of natural right could be solved by a Darwinian science of evolved human nature that would allow for the immanent teleology of natural human desires (see chapter 13, sections 2–4).

Notes 1 2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

This is the argument of William Altman, The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). For the debate over Strauss’s influence in American politics, see Shadia Drury, Leo Strauss and the American Right (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Peter Minowitz, Straussophobia: Defending Leo Strauss and Straussians against Shadia Drury and Other Accusers (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); and Peter Minowitz, “What Was Leo Strauss,” Perspectives on Political Science 40 (October-December 2011): 218–26. Minowitz’s book provides the most meticulous history of the debate over Strauss and the best defense of Strauss against his critics. George Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th ed., revised by Thomas Landon Thorson (Hinsdale, IL: Dryden Press, 1973), iii–iv. George Sabine, Review of Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, Ethics 63 (April 1953): 220–22. See, for example, Myles Burnyeat, “Sphinx without a Secret,” New York Review of Books (May 30, 1985): 30–36. For a biography of Strauss, see Steven B. Smith, “Leo Strauss: The Outlines of a Life,” in Steven B. Smith, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13–40. Gershom Scholem as quoted by Smith, “Leo Strauss,” 21. Hans Jonas, Memoirs, translated by Krishna Winston, edited and annotated by Christian Wiese (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2008), 49. A translation of the letter appears in Altman, German Stranger, 226–27. Jonas, Memoirs, 161. Smith, “Leo Strauss,” 19–20. See Laurence Lampert, The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 7–31. See George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 (Wilmington, DL: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 1996), 44–46, 151–52. See Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); and Catherine and Michael Zuckert, The Truth About Leo Strauss: Political Philosophy & American Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 195–259. Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Melzer’s appendix (over 110 pages long) is available online: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/Melzer/. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 24. See Strauss, Persecution, 14, 24–25, 30–33, 36, 184–85; and Melzer, Philosophy Between the Lines, 53–67, 287–324. Strauss, Persecution, 33–36.

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41

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See Zuckerts, Truth About Leo Strauss, 197–259; and Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the Strauss Divided: Essays on Leo Strauss and Straussianism, East and West (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 1–34. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, xvii. See Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 5, 92, 98, 101, 105, 115, 119, 121, 129, 134-43, 153, 159, 163, 168–73, 196–98, 200–3, 206–7, 234, 236, 246, 249, 366, 383–84. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 168–69. See Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines, 196, 323. Strauss, Persecution, 36. All references in the text are to the page numbers of Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). See Richard Sherlock, “The Secret of Straussianism,” Modern Age 48 (Summer 2006): 208–16. See also Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? (New York: Free Press, 1959), 38–40. See Roger Masters, “Evolutionary Biology and Natural Right,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 48-66; and Larry Arnhart, “Roger Masters: Natural Right and Biology,” in Deutsch and Murley, Straussians and the American Regime, 293–303. See Leon Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: Free Press, 1985), 253–64; Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231–48; and Allan Gotthelf, Teleology, First Principles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See Richard Hassing, “Darwinian Natural Right?” Interpretation 27 (Winter 1999–2000): 129–60; Carson Holloway, The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy (Dallas, TX: Spence, 2006); Holloway, “Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right,” in Peter Pagan Aguiar and Terese Auer, eds., The Human Person and a Culture of Freedom (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 106–29. Holloway, “Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right,” 114; Leo Strauss, Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, edited by Kenneth Hart Green (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 102. Holloway, “Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right,” 128; Leo Strauss, The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, edited by Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 7. Holloway, “Strauss, Darwinism, and Natural Right,” 118. Holloway, The Right Darwin?, 185–89. See Thomas R. R. Cobb, An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (Philadelphia: T. & J. W. Johnson & Co., 1858), 17. See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859), 220. Cobb, The Law of Negro Slavery, 8–9. See Carson Holloway, The Right Darwin? Evolution, Religion, and the Future of Democracy (Dallas: Spence, 2006); and Benjamin Wiker, “Is Darwinism Compatible with Classical Liberalism’s View of Morality?” in Stephen Dilley, ed., Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 31–48. See Harry Binswanger, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts (Los Angeles: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1990), Binswanger, “Life-Based Teleology and the Foundations of Ethics,” The Monist 75 (1992): 84–103; C. Judson Herrick, The Evolution of Human Nature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1956); and Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. See Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Boston: John P. Jewett 1853). Abraham Lincoln, Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler, 8 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 2:264–65.

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60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70 71 72 73

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See Holloway, The Right Darwin?, 90–95; and John Hare, God and Morality: A Philosophical History (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 71–72. See Cobb, The Law of Negro Slavery; and Rev. Fred A. Ross, Slavery Ordained of God (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1857). Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Lincoln, Collected Works, 8:333. Shadia Drury, The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss, Updated Edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, Revised and Enlarged (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 76–77. Zuckerts, Truth about Leo Strauss, 159. Drury, Leo Strauss, 111. Zuckerts, Truth about Leo Strauss, 163. Strauss, On Tyranny, 35. Strauss, On Tyranny, 76-77. Zuckerts, Truth about Leo Strauss, 163; Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 74. Strauss, City and Man, 83. Zuckerts, Truth about Leo Strauss, 171. Strauss, City and Man, 125. Zuckerts, Truth about Leo Strauss, 176. See Germaine Paulo Walsh, “The Problematic Relation between Practical and Theoretical Virtue in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics,” in A Moral Enterprise: Politics, Reason, and the Human Good, edited by Kenneth Grasso and Robert Hunt (ISI Books, 2002), pp. 59–81, 354–60. Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” in Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the TheologicalPolitical Problem (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 141–80. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 146–47. See Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, 29; Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 3, 7. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 149. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 163. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 163. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” 175–76. See, for example, Peter Myers, Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); and Thomas West, “The Ground of Locke’s Law of Nature,” Social Philosophy and Policy 29 (Summer 2012): 1–50. John Locke, First Treatise, secs. 88–97, Second Treatise, secs. 10, 67, in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, edited by Peter Laslett, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2 vols. (New York: Dover, 1959), II.21.36. Locke, Essay, IV.12.11. Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays, edited by Hilail Gildin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 98. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 26 (Spring 1999): 372. See Leo Strauss, The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 89, 155–56, 170; and Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, new one-volume edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 184, 189, 239. Altman, German Stranger, 27. Altman, German Stranger, 527. Altman, German Stranger, 14. See William Altman, Plato the Teacher: The Crisis of the Republic (Lanham, MD: Lexington Press, 2012). Altman, German Stranger, 522. Altman, German Stranger, 19.

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See Strauss, City and Man, 130–33; Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, 35. Altman, German Stranger, 349 Altman, Plato, 353. Altman, Plato, 353–54. See Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). See Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013). Strauss, Liberalism, 24. Altman, German Stranger, 356. See Strauss, Liberalism, 9–10, 21, 24; Strauss, Persecution, 82-84; Altman, German Stranger, 356–57. Strauss, Liberalism, 24. See William Galston, “Leo Strauss’s Qualified Embrace of Liberal Democracy,” in Smith, Cambridge Companion to Leo Strauss, 193–214; Galston, Liberal Pluralism: The Implications of Value Pluralism for Political Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Martin Diamond, “Ethics and Politics: The American Way,” in As Far as Republican Principles Will Admit: Essays by Martin Diamond, edited by William Schambra (Washington, DC: The AEI Press, 1992), 337–68. See Altman, German Stranger, 323–36, 451–52, 515–16. Altman, German Stranger, 516. See Deutsch and Murley, The Straussians and the American Regime. Altman, German Stranger, 393. Leo Strauss, “German Nihilism,” Interpretation 26 (Spring 1999): 358. See Strauss, Liberalism, viii, 8, 13–15, 19–20. Strauss, Classical Political Rationalism, 29. See George Anastaplo, The Artist as Thinker: From Shakespeare to Joyce (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1983), 475. See Jonas, Memoirs, 187–93; Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” in The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Dell, 1966), 235–61; and Paul Montgomery, “Scholar Breaks with Heidegger,” The New York Times, April 11, 1964. Strauss, Liberalism, 5. Strauss, Liberalism, 3. See William Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life (New York: Free Press, 2014). See Deresiewicz, Excellent Sheep, 89, 151–55. Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). See Martha C. Nussbaum, “Undemocratic Vistas,” The New York Review of Books, November 5, 1987; and Andrew Ferguson, “The Book That Drove Them Crazy: Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind 25 Years Later,” The Weekly Standard 17 (April 9–16, 2012). See Harry V. Jaffa, “Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom,” Interpretation 16 (1988): 111–38. See Bloom, Closing, 51, 60, 79–80, 143, 145, 160, 163, 194–98, 204, 207–8, 268, 270, 277, 310–11. Bloom, Closing, 239. Bloom, Closing, 49. Bloom, Closing, 51, 198, 208. Bloom, Closing, 239. Bloom, Closing, 139, 196. Bloom, Closing, 110. See Bloom, Closing, 112–116, 126, 130, 143, 133, 166, 181, 207–208, 270–71, 300, 356–58.

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15 The Social Justice of Equal Liberty Rawls’s A Theory of Justice

KEY READINGS A Theory of Justice, sections 1–4, 9, 11–17, 20–30, 36–37, 39–40, 43, 46, 48, 65, 67, 75, 77–82, 85–87.

Despite the general agreement in American political debate on the idea that government should secure equal liberty for all individuals, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, Americans disagree about the best way to pursue that goal. Thomas Jefferson hoped that although previous regimes had promoted “an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth,” American democracy would be ruled by “a natural aristocracy” grounded on “virtue and talents.”1 Democratic equality, therefore, would be an equality of opportunity that would give all people the liberty to develop their talents, so that the naturally best could rise to the top. Abraham Lincoln conveyed this thought in his image of life as a race. The primary aim of popular government, he believed, was “to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”2 This is the noble vision that elevates American political rhetoric. It’s the American Dream—a fair chance for all to get ahead in life. And yet Lincoln’s image of the race of life suggests a possible conflict between equality and liberty. The fairness of the race demands equality at the starting line but liberty in the running of the race. The faster runners must be free to take the lead and leave the slower runners behind. But how can we be sure that the slower runners are not hindered by “artificial 507

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weights”? How many of the slower runners were raised in families that didn’t train them to run fast? Were they perhaps born to parents who had already fallen behind in the race? Is it unfair for the fast runners to be free to give their children a head start? Does fairness require that we occasionally stop the race, bring everyone back to the starting line, and then start again? What should we do for those who from birth suffer physical or mental disabilities that prevent them from running well? And what should we do for those who accidentally injure themselves during the race? Should the faster runners be forced to help those people who are unfairly disadvantaged? On the one hand, those of us who stress the fairness of equality would want to protect the unfortunate from unfair competition. On the other hand, those of us who stress the fairness of liberty would want to protect the freedom of the fastest runners to win all the trophies. In a footrace, the competitors are rewarded according to their ability to run fast. But in the race of life, don’t we want to recognize many different kinds of talent? Aren’t there many human attributes—strength, beauty, courage, imagination, diligence, compassion, intelligence, and so on—that we want to reward? And don’t we want to preserve the boundaries between different fields of competition? We might allow someone with a talent for making money to accumulate great wealth, but we would not want that person to run for public office with the expectation that the office could be bought. To depict life as a race suggests that we must always compete with one another. Competition may stir us to develop some talents more fully than we would otherwise. But don’t we also want to develop our capacities for cooperating with one another? Aren’t we all naturally dependent on one another? After all, don’t we all come into life as infants dependent on caregivers? Don’t we want to affirm not only the natural differences that divide us, but also the natural similarities that unite us as human beings? Many of us will not excel in the various spheres of human competition. Yet insofar as we all share in the dignity of being human, we deserve equal respect. How is it possible to secure both the liberty of each person to get ahead in life and the equality of respect owed to each person as a human being? And how is it possible to insure that the inevitable inequalities in a free society do not deprive disadvantaged people of an equal opportunity to succeed? These are the critical questions of American political debate, and they are the questions that John Rawls tried to answer in A Theory of Justice.3 Rawls (1921–2002) was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University when A Theory of Justice first appeared in 1971. His book created a public controversy that went beyond the normal borders of academic philosophy. Some commentators praised the book as a brilliant defense of liberal democracy that secured both liberty and equality. But critics on the political Right denounced the book for promoting a radical standard of equality that would suppress individual liberty. Critics on the political Left scorned the book as a defense of bourgeois liberty against the just claims of genuine equality. This

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continuing debate over A Theory of Justice has made it the most influential work of political philosophy written in the twentieth century. Rawls was born in Baltimore, Maryland, as the child of a wealthy and socially prominent family.4 Two of his four brothers died from diseases— diphtheria and pneumonia—that they had contracted from him. He wondered why they had died, while he remained alive. He also wondered about the contrast between his privileged life and the disadvantaged lives of other children that he saw. Such experiences stirred a lifelong concern that people’s opportunities in life should not be determined by the accidental circumstances of good luck or bad luck. Rawls attended an Episcopalian private school for boys and then entered Princeton University in 1939, at the beginning of World War II in Europe. He graduated from Princeton with a BA in philosophy. He then served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, taking part in the fighting in the Pacific. He was part of the occupying forces in Japan, where he saw the devastating effects of the firebombing of Japan and the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was troubled by the brutality of the fighting and by the luck of his surviving the war when so many people that he knew were killed. His undeserved luck seemed unfair. He was also troubled by the reports of the horrors of the Holocaust in Europe. All of these experiences made him wonder whether it was possible to achieve justice in the world despite the sinfulness of human nature. Although he had intended to attend Princeton’s School of Divinity and then become a minister, his experiences in the war led him to doubt that the world was ruled by a just God, and he decided to earn a PhD in philosophy from Princeton. His dissertation—“A Study on the Grounds of Ethical Knowledge”—argued that a general moral principle can be justified by showing that our reasonable moral intuitions in particular cases are specific applications of that general moral principle, which became a fundamental idea for A Theory of Justice. The publication of A Theory of Justice in 1971 ended the first stage of Rawls’s work. The publication in 1993 of his book Political Liberalism belonged to the second stage of his work.5 He indicated that in A Theory of Justice, he had not taken seriously the fact that in a modern liberal democratic society, there will be a great diversity of religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines about the good life, and therefore a liberal society must not try to impose on everyone any single comprehensive doctrine about the good life, not even a comprehensive doctrine about the goodness of the liberal way of life. As opposed to “comprehensive liberalism,” Rawls argued for a “political liberalism” that would tolerate all reasonable conceptions of the good life, and such liberalism would be grounded in political agreement without any metaphysical foundations. Even believers in illiberal doctrines about the good life that deny the primacy of individual autonomy should be tolerated as long as they tolerate opposing doctrines, and as long as membership in these illiberal groups is voluntary.

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In the third stage of his work, with the publication in 1999 of The Law of Peoples, Rawls extended his teaching about justice to international relations, to show how justice among peoples could be achieved through international standards of just war and human rights. Here he defended a “realistic utopia,” in which “the great evils of human history—unjust war and oppression, religious persecution and the denial of liberty of conscience, starvation and poverty, not to mention genocide and mass murder” will all eventually disappear.6 In examining A Theory of Justice and the disputes provoked by it, we shall have to consider whether there is a conception of justice that respects both human liberty and human equality. To formulate such a conception, Rawls argued, we must think about how justice would appear to us if we were guided only by impartial considerations of fairness. And we must see how “justice as fairness” would dictate two principles that would define “the end of social justice” through “a reconciliation of liberty and equality” (TJ, 204; TJR, 179).

1. Are the principles of justice those we would choose under impartial conditions of fairness? This is surely so, Rawls insists, because we could, presumably, rely on whatever standards of justice we would choose as free, equal, rational, and impartial persons acting under circumstances that were fair. In such a hypothetical situation, Rawls believes, we would adopt a general conception of justice as fairness requiring “that all primary social goods be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution would be to everyone’s advantage” (150). We must begin by surveying the circumstances of that hypothetical choice and the principles that would be chosen.7 Rawls begins with the idea of a social contract that he borrows from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. But what he calls the “original position” is a more general and abstract idea than that of the traditional social contract (TJ, 11; TJR, 10). To construct the original position, we must imagine people restricted in both their knowledge and their motivations. Under what Rawls calls a “veil of ignorance,” no one knows anyone’s particular abilities, desires, moral preferences, or social position. This insures that no one can design principles that unfairly favor anyone, and thus impartiality is secured. And yet, each person must know certain general facts about human psychology and social life. Each must know, for example, that people often need economic incentives to be productive. Each person must also understand that there are certain “primary goods”— rights and liberties, powers and opportunities, income and wealth, selfrespect—that all rational people would want as the necessary means to any ends they might choose to pursue. Concerning their motivations, people in the original position must be “rational and mutually disinterested” (TJ, 13; TJR, 12). By “mutual disin-

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terest” Rawls does not mean egoism. Rather, he wants only to assume that people “take no interest in one another’s interests” (TJ, 127; TJR, 110). In thinking about justice, we must assume conflicting interests, because where there is no such conflict, there is no need for justice (TJ, 129–30, 281; TJR, 111–12, 248–49). Moreover, in the original position, people are rational in judging how best to advance their interests. They are rational “in the narrow sense, standard in economic theory, of taking the most effective means to given ends” (TJ, 14; TJR, 12). If we make all of these assumptions about the parties in the original position, we should be able to infer, Rawls contends, that they would choose the following two principles of justice: “First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all” (TJ, 60; TJR, 53) Later in the book, “to everyone’s advantage” is interpreted to mean “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged”; and “open to all” is said to mean “open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity” (TJ, 302; TJR, 266). Why would people in the original position select these principles? Fundamental to their reasoning, Rawls believes, is their desire to express their respect for one another. They do not want to force anyone to sacrifice his or her interests to advance the interests of someone else. Adopting the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant, these people “desire to treat one another not as means only but as ends in themselves” (TJ, 179; TJR, 156). Because they do not regard persons as means, they will not “impose upon them lower prospects of life, for the sake of the higher expectations of others” (TJ, 180; TJR, 157). In this Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, human beings are to be treated as ends in themselves because of their capacity for moral choice, which gives them a dignity that nonhuman animals do not have. Not being determined simply by the physical laws of nature, human beings are separated from the physical world by their ability to choose the ends of their lives (TJ, 251–57; TJR, 221–27). “Thus a moral person is a subject with ends he has chosen, and his fundamental preference is for conditions that enable him to frame a mode of life that expresses his nature as a free and equal rational being as fully as circumstances permit” (TJ, 561; TJR, 491). To secure this human capacity for free choice, Rawls argues, we must accept the first principle of justice, which protects the equal liberties of citizenship. This includes all the basic liberties of citizens: “political liberty (the right to vote and to be eligible for public office) together with freedom of speech and assembly; liberty of conscience and freedom of thought; freedom of the person along with the right to hold (personal) property; and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law” (TJ, 61; TJR, 53). This equality of citizenship

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provides an equality of respect for all. Despite social and economic inequalities, each person derives self-esteem from the equal dignity possessed by each citizen (TJ, 544; TJR, 477). Additional support for the equal moral worth of all citizens comes from the second part of the second principle of justice—fair equality of opportunity. This requires that all should have a fair chance to succeed in life through their own talents and efforts regardless of their social class (TJ, 73; TJR, 63). The educational system, for example, should be designed so that even the poorest people have an equal chance to acquire technical training and cultural knowledge. Consequently, even those in the lowest classes of society need not feel degraded. For not only are they equal as citizens, they also have an equal chance to rise in society through work and effort. But if the equal dignity of human beings as moral persons dictates equal liberty and equal opportunity, why does it not also dictate equality in income and wealth? Rawls answers that as long as social and economic inequalities make everyone better off, it would be rational for us to permit them. If unequal economic rewards provide incentives that increase economic productivity, then such inequalities are morally just, as long as they improve the expectations of the least advantaged members of society (TJ, 75, 151; TJR, 65, 131). Inequality is unjust only when it is not to the benefit of all (TJ, 62; TJR, 54). Therefore, one of the standards of justice, which Rawls calls “the difference principle,” is that social and economic inequalities must be “to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged” (TJ, 302; TJR, 266). We can now summarize the two principles of justice as they apply to the primary social goods that are the means to any good human life—liberties, opportunities, economic resources, and self-respect. All citizens must be equal in their basic liberties. All must have equal opportunities to develop their talents and abilities. And these two kinds of equality—in liberties and opportunities—should secure equality of respect for all. Inequality in economic resources is permitted, but only as long as it benefits the least advantaged. Some of Rawls’s critics on the Left object that these principles do not, in fact, reconcile liberty and equality. Don’t the social and economic inequalities permitted by the second principle of justice subvert the political equality of the first principle? Even if all people are formally equal in their political rights—voting, political participation, freedom of speech, property rights, equality under the law, and so on—won’t the poorest citizens lack the economic means to exercise these rights fully? (We have seen that Locke is open to the same criticism.) Rawls can reply to this criticism by stressing the importance of equality of opportunity in allowing the poor to improve their conditions. But he admits that absolute equality of opportunity is impossible under his principles. For example, a child’s success in life depends largely on the character of his or her family. If the family does not properly nurture the child’s capacities, that child may never have an equal chance in life. Yet

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Rawls does not want to interfere with the institution of the family (TJ, 74, 301, 511; TJR, 64, 265, 448). Would equal opportunity require abolition of the family? Is this the same problem we saw in Plato’s Republic? Even if Rawls could guarantee equal liberty and equal opportunity, would this insure equal dignity for all? As long as there are distinctions between the rich and the poor, won’t the poor feel degraded by their low economic status? Rawls insists that the poor should not envy the rich, but he admits that when economic inequality is great, the poor tend to suffer a loss of self-respect (TJ, 534; TJR, 468). In allowing some people the freedom to acquire great wealth, Rawls permits economic inequality that may violate the moral dignity of the poor. From another point of view, however, some critics on the Right have charged that Rawls sacrifices individual liberty in his pursuit of social equality. Although Lincoln argued that we should remove the “artificial weights” that prevent people from running as fast as they can in the race of life, Rawls seems to argue for hindering the faster runners so that the slower runners can keep up with them. According to Rawls, those whose natural talents permit them to succeed in life must not be free to enjoy all the rewards of their success. The benefits of their work must be shared with those less fortunate. Through taxation or other means, the government must transfer some of the wealth of the rich to the poor (TJ, 277–80; TJR, 244–48). Rawls might agree with Thomas Piketty that we need marginal tax rates of 80 percent to 90 percent for the wealthiest people so that we can confiscate their excessive wealth and reduce economic inequality. Moreover, to overcome the natural inequalities among people, society must devote more attention to those who are naturally inferior. “In pursuit of this principle greater resources might be spent on the education of the less rather than the more intelligent, at least over a certain time of life, say the earlier years of school” (TJ, 101; TJR, 86). In his insistence on equality, Rawls seems to restrict the freedom of Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” to develop their “virtues and talents.” To reflect on how Rawls might answer these criticisms we begin with the difference principle, since it seems to be the most controversial part of his teaching.

2. Should government force the more fortunate people of a society to help those less fortunate? Most of us would agree that the more fortunate people should help those less fortunate than themselves. But how far should government go in compelling those who are well-off to sacrifice some of their resources and opportunities to help those less well-off? Consider, for example, the policy of affirmative action. This policy was first proposed in the United States in the 1960s. The objective of affirmative action is that minority-group members or otherwise disadvantaged

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people who have suffered from discrimination or other disabilities should receive preferential treatment. President Lyndon Johnson made this a national policy in September 1965, when he signed Executive Order 11246. It stated that on all projects supported by federal money, employers had to prove that they had sought out job applicants from minority groups and that they had given special treatment to such applicants. Later, this was extended to universities and professional schools. In its most extreme form, this could establish a quota system in which a certain proportion of positions would be set aside for women, blacks, and other disadvantaged groups. To justify this policy President Johnson used his own version of Lincoln’s image of life as a race: Imagine a hundred yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed 10 yards, while the unshackled runner has gone 50 yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap; or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action towards equality.8

There may be some justice in this. But affirmative action in its most radical form—a quota system—seems unjust to most people because it appears to be reverse discrimination. If it is unjust to discriminate against individuals merely because they are black, is it not also unjust to discriminate in their favor merely because they are black? Still, there is much to be said in favor of rectifying past injustices by helping those who have suffered unjust treatment. What would Rawls suggest? Those critics of Rawls who also oppose affirmative action charge that his difference principle would require a quota system of reverse discrimination to favor disadvantaged groups.9 The clearest evidence is in his comments on the principle of redress: The difference principle gives some weight to the considerations singled out by the principle of redress. This is the principle that undeserved inequalities call for redress; and since inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for. Thus the principle holds that in order to treat all persons equally, to provide genuine equality of opportunity, society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions. The idea is to redress the bias of contingencies in the direction of equality. (TJ, 100– 1; TJR, 86)

But Rawls immediately adds that this principle is only one principle of justice that must be weighed in the balance with others such as “the principle to improve the average standard of life, or to advance the common good”:

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Now the difference principle . . . does not require society to try to even out handicaps as if all were expected to compete on a fair basis in the same race. But the difference principle would allocate resources in education, say, so as to improve the long-term expectations of the least favored. If this end is attained by giving more attention to the better endowed, it is permissible; otherwise not. And in making this decision, the value of education should not be assessed only in terms of economic efficiency and social welfare. Equally if not more important is the role of education in enabling a person to enjoy the culture of his society and to take part in its affairs, and in this way to provide for each individual a secure sense of his own worth. (TJ, 101; TJR, 87)

It would not be just “to try to even out handicaps” through preferential treatment for the disadvantaged so that everyone could compete in the same race. But it is just, Rawls suggests, to provide sufficient opportunities—especially education—for the disadvantaged so that each person is secure in the inherent dignity of a human being. From this point of view, special help for the victims of past discrimination would be one principle of justice to be balanced against others. We should give more attention, however, to one of Rawls’s comments quoted above: “[S]ince inequalities of birth and natural endowment are undeserved, these inequalities are to be somehow compensated for.” We can see how this could be true. No one deserves to be born as a member of some race or ethnic group, for instance, and therefore no one deserves rewards or punishments as a result of race or ethnic affiliation. Similarly, someone born with a physical disability does not deserve the suffering it brings. But Rawls’s idea is more extreme than this. It is commonly assumed, Rawls observed, that in a just society the good things of life would be distributed according to moral desert (TJ, 310; TJR, 273). There seems to be no more obvious principle of justice—to each what each deserves. But Rawls dismisses the idea of rewarding merit as “impracticable” (TJ, 312; TJR, 274). Jefferson rejected as “artificial” the aristocracy based on wealth and birth because no one deserves to be born into a noble family with inherited wealth. Yet Jefferson assumed that an aristocracy based on talents and virtue would be “natural” because it is reasonable to reward people for such personal merit. Rawls, however, argues that talents and virtue are just as arbitrary as noble birth and inherited wealth. No one deserves natural talents or moral character, because these personal attributes arise largely from genetic endowment and social circumstances, which are accidental factors that no one deserves (TJ, 101– 4; TJR, 87–90). Someone who is born with a great natural capacity for intellectual activity has not earned that capacity. It’s an accident of nature. Surely, an accidental gain does not merit any reward. But we might argue against Rawls by saying that rewards are deserved not so much for inherited abilities as for efforts in developing those abilities. Rawls can answer, however,

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that a person’s capacity for disciplined effort has been shaped largely by fortunate family and social circumstances forming that person’s character that have not been earned. Each person as an infant was absolutely dependent on other human beings for assistance in developing into an adult. Whether physical and cultural growth would be nurtured or stunted was largely beyond the infant’s control. So, insofar as a person’s achievements depend on personal attributes, which are determined by the accidents of social circumstances and genetic endowment, success in life depends on “luck in the natural lottery” (TJ, 75; TJR, 65). Believing it is unjust to allow the happiness of human beings to depend on the arbitrary workings of the natural lottery, Rawls tries to mitigate this injustice through the difference principle. We see then that the difference principle represents, in effect, an agreement to regard the distribution of natural talents as a common asset and to share in the benefits of this distribution whatever it turns out to be. Those who have been favored by nature, whoever they are, may gain from their good fortune only on terms that improve the situation of those who have lost out. The naturally advantaged are not to gain merely because they are more gifted, but only to cover the costs of training and education and for using their endowments in ways that help the less fortunate as well. No one deserves his greater natural capacity nor merits a more favorable starting place in society. But it does not follow that one should eliminate these distinctions. . . . [W]e wish to set up the social system so that no one gains or loses from his arbitrary place in the distribution of natural assets or his initial position in society without giving or receiving compensating advantages in return. (TJ, 101–2; TJR, 87)

But isn’t it hard to accept Rawls’s fundamental claim here that justice cannot be based on merit or desert? Rawls asserts that justice cannot be the rewarding of desert if desert is based on undeserved attributes. Yet isn’t this wrong? As Michael Zuckert has argued, this would make impossible any conception of justice at all.10 Whatever claim a person might make to meriting or deserving some reward must ultimately rest on an unmerited, undeserved attribute. A person might argue, for example, that he or she deserves admission to law school because of exceptional intelligence or moral character. But we could ask, is this intelligence and moral character deserved? Of course, we could raise this question about any claim of merit. To avoid an infinite regress, we must accept some basis of desert that itself is undeserved. Because no human being is completely self-created, no person is ever completely responsible for the kind of person that he or she is. In denying that justice can be based on undeserved attributes, Rawls subverts his own account of justice. If Rawlsian justice rests on the claim that all human beings deserve equal respect because of their human dignity as moral persons, then such justice rests on an undeserved base. No one

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can claim to be responsible for being born a human being. That we were born human beings rather than cockroaches was just a lucky break for us! Would a consistent application of the difference principle require that we compensate cockroaches for the misfortune of their birth? In fact, proponents of “animal liberation” have criticized Rawls for “speciesism,” because he unfairly favors the human species over other species of animals.11 If it is just to respect human beings simply because of their membership in the human species, as Rawls insists, then why is it not also just to respect them for developing whatever human capacities nature has given them? That one human being has greater natural assets than another is no more arbitrary than the fact that they are both human. Isn’t it just to recognize both their equal merit as human beings and their unequal merit as human beings with different human abilities? Another way to see the implausibility of Rawls’s denial of moral desert is to consider its implications for the policy of affirmative action. A Rawlsian justification for affirmative action in law school admissions, for example, would rest on the argument that no one deserves to go to law school.12 As a society, we can decide that to promote equality we want more black lawyers. We can then require that law schools admit a certain number of black applicants, even if that means that some of the blacks admitted have lower test scores and lower average grades in college than some of the white applicants who are rejected. Some people will say this is unfair discrimination because it violates the right of the white applicants to be judged on the basis of their merit alone. But presumably Rawls would argue that those with high test scores don’t deserve the intelligence and discipline that permitted them to do so well on the tests. To judge applicants based on their race is no more arbitrary than judging them based on their intellectual abilities. So, when we admit a black applicant and reject a white applicant, we are not saying that the black applicant is better or more deserving than the white applicant. They are both equally undeserving! The only just standard is the judgment of society as to what admissions criteria are most likely to promote equality. Doesn’t this kind of reasoning threaten individual freedom? Rawls insists on the Kantian principle that we should always treat human beings as ends in themselves, never as means. But when Rawls says that the natural talents and moral capacities of a person should be treated as a “common asset” to be exploited for the good of all, isn’t he treating this person as a means to the advancement of others? By denying that a person has a right to certain talents and abilities, and by arguing that these personal attributes are really social resources to be used as society wishes, doesn’t Rawls dehumanize that person by taking away the independent nature of that person and by treating that person as a tool for the use of others? What, then, should we say in defense of Rawls? First, we should remember that the “principle of redress,” which seems to support affirmative action, is not an absolute principle for Rawls. It should be balanced

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against other principles. A policy like affirmative action—or any social program to compensate the victims of unjust discrimination or of other misfortunes—becomes unjust when it is pushed to unreasonable extremes. Surely most of us would agree with this principle in some form. Social programs for the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the elderly, and the unemployed or the civil rights laws prohibiting racial, ethnic, and sexual discrimination illustrate how we allocate social resources to protect people against arbitrary disadvantages.13 Shouldn’t we admit that there is some truth in Rawls’s claim that the causes of success or failure in our society arise largely from undeserved circumstances? Some empirical studies of the American economy suggest that economic success depends less on intelligence, schooling, or other factors than on sheer luck.14 Even Friedrich A. Hayek and Milton Friedman— Nobel Prize economists who defend capitalism—have conceded that the free market distributes goods without reference to moral merit.15 But how should Rawls answer the charge that the difference principle would exploit the naturally talented people to benefit the disadvantaged, thus depriving the talented few of their liberty for the sake of promoting a tyrannical equality? We should remember that traditionally, liberty and equality have been part of a liberal trinity—liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although supporting political liberty and equality of opportunity, Rawls also wants to use the difference principle to secure fraternity (TJ, 105–6; TJR, 90–91). A person’s identity is shaped largely by the community—by the person’s family, education, culture, and so on—and therefore, that person is indebted to that community for its formative influence. When some citizens are asked to work to improve the lives of fellow citizens who are less well off than themselves, they need not feel that they are being used as means to advance the ends of other people, because they should recognize the ends of their community as their own. We might wonder whether Rawls’s argument for the difference principle is empirically testable. Could we put some people in Rawls’s original position to see whether they would choose the difference principle? Although it is impossible to replicate Rawls’s original position completely, and thus it must remain a hypothetical thought experiment, it is possible to devise experimental conditions that approximate the original position. Norman Frohlich, Joe Oppenheimer, and others have organized behavioral experiments in which people are put in conditions that approximate the procedures of the original condition.16 Participants come together in small groups; and in choosing from a list of principles of justice for allocating resources in their group, they must reach unanimous agreement on their choice, without the participants knowing what their class position will be in that society. They are then randomly assigned to high or low social positions, and they receive monetary payoffs based on the distributive principle they have chosen. Experiments of this sort have been conducted with

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university students in the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Japan, and communist Poland. Remarkably, the outcome is uniform across all of these cultures. Rawls’s difference principle is almost never chosen. By far the most common choice (in over three-fourths of the cases) is a floor constraint without a ceiling—that is, there is a minimum income guaranteed for the worst off, but there is no limit on the income that can be earned by the richest. The next most common choice (in about 12 percent of the cases) is the principle of maximum income (no floor, no ceiling). The third most common choice (in about 8 percent of the cases) is the principle of a range constraint—there could be economic inequality, but the gap between the richest and the poorest would be limited. The difference principle—that no person’s income can go up unless it increases the income of the people at the bottom—was chosen in only 1 percent of the cases, and this occurred in Poland when it was still under a communist regime. When participants are asked to explain their choices, they say they are trying to balance three distinct ethical claims—human needs, just deserts, and economic efficiency. They think it’s fair that those who are least welloff should have their minimal needs secured. But they also think that those who earn higher incomes deserve this reward. And they think that higher incomes for those who succeed is economically efficient in providing incentives for productivity that benefits everyone. The most commonly chosen principle—floor constraint without a ceiling—looks a lot like what Friedrich Hayek proposed in The Constitution of Liberty as securing “freedom in the welfare state”: a largely free market economy combined with governmental programs that provide a minimal standard of income and security for all.17 Does this seem to weaken Thomas Piketty’s appeal to the Rawlsian difference principle as justifying confiscatory tax rates on high incomes and wealth for the sake of reducing inequality? Towards the end of his life, Rawls conceded what Frohlich and Oppenheimer had revealed in their experiments—that in circumstances of impartiality approximating the Rawlsian original condition, reasonable people would not all choose the difference principle but would rather choose the principle of a floor constraint without a ceiling. In 1995, in his introduction to the paperback edition of Political Liberalism, Rawls admitted that while he still thought that “justice as fairness”—with its two principles of justice, including the difference principle—was the most reasonable conception of liberalism, there were other reasonable conceptions of liberal justice, including, for example, “one that substitutes for the difference principle, a principle to improve social well-being subject to a constraint guaranteeing for everyone a sufficient level of adequate all-purpose means.”18 It might be significant, however, that in the behavioral experiments surveyed by Frohlich and Oppenheimer, the few groups that choose the difference principle were in communist Poland. Does that suggest that a socialist society might be conducive to the difference principle? Perhaps

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Daniel Bell saw this when he complained, “With Rawls, we have the most comprehensive effort in modern philosophy to justify a socialist ethic.”19 Many of Rawls’s socialist critics, however, would disagree.

3. Does justice require socialist equality? Much of what Rawls writes appears to deny that socialism is necessary for justice. He assumes “a democratic regime in which land and capital are widely though not presumably equally held” or a “property-owning democracy” (TJ, 274; TJR, ix–xvi, 242). He does note, however, that at least in theory, “a liberal socialist regime can also answer to the two principles of justice” (TJ, 280; TJR, 247–48). By “liberal socialism,” he has in mind a market socialism in which the means of production are publicly owned and workers manage their own firms. Socialist commentators on Rawls’s theory are usually disturbed by the great inequalities that would be permissible under the difference principle. Kai Nielsen, for example, complains that because Rawls justifies any inequality that increases the material wealth of the most disadvantaged, he would deny the right of those at the bottom of society to attain equal citizenship and equal opportunity. Like most apologists for capitalism, Rawls assumes, according to Nielsen, that as long as the material standard of living rises continually for all, then economic, social, and political inequalities do not matter.20 This is clearly a misunderstanding of Rawls, however. Although in theory the difference principle would sanction great inequalities in exchange for small benefits to those least well-off, Rawls does not expect inequalities of wealth to be excessive (TJ, 536; TJR, 470). Indeed, the other principles of justice would severely limit inequality. To preserve equal political liberty, Rawls proposes the use of public funds to promote free public discussion and political campaigning. Moreover, the tax system and the laws of property should “prevent concentrations of power detrimental to the fair value of political liberty and fair equality of opportunity” (TJ, 277; TJR, 245). Equality of opportunity demands that even those in the lowest classes of society should have an equal chance to advance themselves. Because such equal opportunity is jeopardized “when inequalities of wealth exceed a certain limit,” government should enforce that limit (TJ, 278; TJR, 246). And we should not forget the principle of equality of respect. Rawls hopes that in a just society there would be little envy. In the absence of envy, the equality of political liberty should provide equal dignity for all despite inequalities of income and wealth. But Rawls concedes that where economic inequality becomes excessive, it might be reasonable for those less well-off to feel envious and thus experience a loss of self-respect. “To some extent men’s sense of their own worth may hinge upon their institutional position and their income share” (TJ, 546; TJR, 478). In that case, equality of self-respect would dictate at least a rough equality of wealth.

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In the words of one socialist writer, Rawlsian justice would require socialism of some sort “if the self-respect of the worst off could be maintained in no other way, or if the fair value of liberty could be protected in no other way, or if fair equality of opportunity would be achieved in no other way.” Even if capitalism and socialism were equally justified on these points, Rawls’s teaching would still support socialism “if a socialist economy were capable of providing the worst off with a higher level of wealth and income than could be provided under any other system.”21 There is, then, a socialist undertone in Rawlsian justice, which has provoked those who advocate capitalism as the only secure basis for freedom. They worry that Rawls endorses a socialist conception of equality that would deprive us of our individual liberty.

4. Does justice require capitalist liberty? The case for libertarian capitalism as an alternative to Rawls’s egalitarian justice was set forth in 1974 by Robert Nozick in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia.22 Nozick, a colleague of Rawls in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard, advocated “the minimal night-watchman state, a state limited to protecting persons against murder, assault, theft, fraud, and so forth.”23 The only just power of government is to prevent force and fraud. Beyond that, all have the right to live as they please. The sort of government endorsed by Rawls would therefore be unjust because it would violate individual freedom. A Rawlsian government, for example, would use taxation to redistribute income and wealth to help the poor. But taxation, Nozick argues, is clearly unjust because it is a form of slavery. If I have to work a certain number of hours to earn enough income to pay my taxes, then in effect the government is forcing me to work those hours for the benefit of others. That taxation is slavery is only one of many shocking conclusions reached by Nozick. But his arguments supporting those conclusions are often seductive in their plausibility. A good example is his story about Wilt Chamberlain.24 Assume that you were able to distribute property in a society to conform to your favorite conception of justice. You might want an equal distribution. Or you might prefer a distribution according to some standard of merit. Now imagine that Wilt Chamberlain is a popular basketball player. Because he is so popular, he negotiates a contract that gives him fifty cents from the price of every ticket of admission. People pay this willingly because they enjoy watching him play basketball. If a million people attend the home games, Chamberlain receives $500,000 for the season. This upsets your just pattern of distribution. But what is wrong with it? If each person had a just share of the wealth under your distribution, then all are entitled to whatever they have. But if all are entitled to hold what they have, are they not also entitled to freely transfer some of their wealth to

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someone else in exchange for some benefit? If Chamberlain has not defrauded or coerced his fans, is he not entitled to whatever they willingly pay him for his services? At this point, however, you might want to object. If you are a Rawlsian, you would insist that Chamberlain’s accumulations of wealth must not interfere with equal political liberty or equality of opportunity. You might recommend taxing Chamberlain’s income to support social welfare programs for the poor. But if he has justly acquired his property, Nozick would ask, how can you force him to give it up without violating his rights? The Chamberlain example illustrates the three basic principles of Nozick’s account of justice: just acquisition, just transfer, and rectification. A person is entitled to hold property if that property was acquired without unjust injury to anyone else. If that property is voluntarily transferred to someone else in exchange for something, then the second person has a just title to the property. But if some property was originally acquired unjustly, then we would have to rectify the injustice somehow. Thus, Nozick’s entitlement theory of property conforms to the usual legal procedure for determining property rights. We do a title search to insure that the property was originally acquired justly and to insure that it has been justly transferred. Notice that we do not have to ask whether anyone deserves the property or whether having it promotes any conception of justice. We should also notice the similarities to Locke’s defense of property rights. Although he departs from Locke at critical points, Nozick agrees with Locke in stressing individual freedom in the acquisition of property. Nozick’s individualism, however, is more radical than Locke’s because, unlike Locke, Nozick rejects the idea of individuals consenting to the establishment of society and government for the promotion of the common good. Nozick has to struggle to distinguish his position from that of the libertarian anarchists.25 This extreme individualism might be the best point of attack for the Rawlsian critic. Consider what Rawls might say about the Wilt Chamberlain example.26 Nozick assumes that as long as individual economic transactions are just, their collective effects will also be just. But this is not necessarily true. It is not unjust for people to pay to see Wilt Chamberlain play basketball. Yet if these and other kinds of transactions eventually create a situation of great inequality in which some people have great wealth and others have little, then we might properly act to prevent that as unjust if it would deprive the poor of equal opportunity. After all, Chamberlain’s freedom to succeed in sports arose in a society that secured certain conditions of equality of opportunity. Nozick denies that there is a social entity or a social good. “There are only individual people, different individual people with their own individual lives.” He concedes, nevertheless, “that we partially are ‘social products’ in that we benefit from current patterns and forms created by the multitudinous actions of a long string of long-forgotten people, forms which

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include institutions, ways of doing things, and language.” He insists that this “does not create in us a general floating debt which the current society can collect and use as it will.”27 But if we are in fact “social products,” how can we deny any “floating debt” to the society that produced us? Although at times Rawls seems to accept a radically individualistic view of human nature, he goes farther than Nozick in acknowledging the social nature of human beings. Rawls describes the formation of human character through social relationships: “The members of a community participate in one another’s nature: we appreciate what others do as things we might have done but which they do for us, and what we do is similarly done for them. Since the self is realized in the activity of many selves, relations of justice that conforms to principles which would be assented to by all are best fitted to express the nature of each” (TJ, 565; TJR, 495). Insofar as we are social creatures, Rawls suggests, we need the help of society to develop and express our human capacities. It is not unreasonable, then, to expect more than a “minimal night-watchman state.” Yet how far is a government obligated to go in providing an equal chance for all in the race of life? Many of Rawls’s critics would agree with him on the need for social welfare measures to secure equality of opportunity, but some of his critics fear that his principles would require an absolute equality of conditions that would threaten individual freedom.

5. Should we seek equality of opportunity but not equality of result, even when that allows a cognitive elite to become the ruling class? Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell—known as leading “neoconservatives”— criticized Rawls for demanding equality of result rather than equality of opportunity. Kristol and Bell saw Rawls as subverting that reconciliation of equality and liberty achieved by welfare-state capitalism, in which people have an equal opportunity to become unequal. Treating people equally, they argued, does not mean making them equal. Kristol accused Rawls of failing to respect the justice of the “bourgeois notion of equality”: The founding fathers of modern bourgeois society (John Locke, say, or Thomas Jefferson) all assumed that biological inequalities among men—inequalities in intelligence, talent, abilities of all kinds—were not extreme, and therefore did not justify a society of hereditary privilege (of “two races,” as it were). This assumption we now know to be true, demonstrably true, as a matter of fact. Human talents and abilities, as measured, do tend to distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve, with most people clustered around the middle, and with much smaller percentages at the lower and higher ends. . . . [I]t is a demonstrable fact that in all modern, bourgeois societies, the distribu-

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Moreover, Kristol explained, once this distribution of talents and abilities along a bell-shaped curve has determined the economic structure and the social structure, it then shapes the distribution of political power as well.28 Inequalities in economic wealth, social status, and political power are justified as long as they reflect the natural inequalities in talents and abilities. Bell made a similar argument in defending what Michael Young, a British sociologist, called “meritocracy.”29 In a meritocratic society, those at the top have an “earned status” based on “individual merit” or “superior competence.” They are the “best men.” What kind of merit or competence do they have? By what standard are they the best? Bell was unclear about this, but he did speak of them as “technical elites” who have “technical skills and higher education.” More specifically, he spoke of their high intelligence as measured by IQ tests.30 According to Young, the formula for merit is I + E = M (intelligence + effort = merit). The quantity of intelligence is measured by IQ tests, and the quantity of effort is measured by modern time-and-motion studies. Would this conform to Plato’s vision of a community ruled by philosopher-kings where all members receive what they deserve? Or is it perhaps closer to the kind of society suggested by Descartes, a society ruled by scientists and technically trained elites? In any case, it does resemble the society sought by Jefferson, which was to be ruled by the “natural aristocracy.” In the early 1990s, Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft) was asked which company was his most serious competitor. Goldman Sachs, he answered. He explained: Software is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future. I don’t worry about Lotus or IBM, because the smartest guys would rather come to work for Microsoft. Our competitors for IQ are investment banks such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Charles Murray has quoted this as illustrating “the increasing market value of brains” that is creating a “cognitive elite”—a new upper class of people who are economically, politically, and culturally dominant because they have the high cognitive ability required to be successful in highly technological and mentally challenging economies.31 Throughout much of human history, most jobs were in agriculture or other occupations that required physical labor and simple skills that did not demand advanced educational training or great intellectual ability. But now, in the most technologically advanced societies, the best jobs require complex cognitive activity. Consequently, the jobs with the highest salaries are filled by people with advanced educational training in universities and professional schools, which requires high IQ.32 Increasingly, those people with the most wealth, power, and status in society are the cognitive elite—

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those who have won “the IQ war.” These are a small group of people—the top 1% or 5% of the people—and the growing gap between these people with high IQs and the other 95% of the people with average or belowaverage IQs has created a stark inequality in society. Is this the new “natural aristocracy” for a liberal meritocracy? The idea of a meritocracy based on inequality in IQ becomes especially controversial when one considers racial differences in average IQ. For example, the American black average IQ is at least 15 points lower than the American white average IQ, and East Asian people tend to have the highest average IQ. When Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray wrote about this in 1994, in The Bell Curve, they provoked an intense debate, with their critics charging them with racism.33 Herrnstein, Murray, and a few others argue that IQ is shaped partly by genetic causes and partly by environmental causes.34 Their critics insist that IQ is mostly, if not entirely, shaped by environmental influences such as social learning and the circumstances of family life.35 Their critics have also argued that race is not a biological reality, because the distinctions between the human races are cultural constructions rather than genetically determined facts.36 While defending the biological reality of race, Murray has also argued that gaps in average IQ contributing to the separation between upper classes and lower classes is not just a racial problem but also a problem in white America, because a large portion of the American white population with below average IQ has become a disadvantaged underclass.37 If it were true that some human groups tend to become a ruling elite because their average IQ is higher than that for other groups, would that deny the principle in the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are equal in their right to pursue happiness? Peter Singer has claimed that there are at least three arguments against this.38 Singer’s first point is that if a race suffers a disadvantage because its genetic nature creates a low average cognitive capacity, this should strengthen, rather than weaken, the moral duty of society to help this race that suffers from an undeserved disadvantage. People do not earn their genetic endowment, and so the distribution of genetic capacities and propensities is unfair. Justice demands that we help people who suffer from genetic defects through no fault of their own. Singer’s second point is that since the statistical generalizations about racial averages tell us nothing about individuals, they give us no reason to abandon our individualist principle that we should treat people as individuals and not as members of a group. Since the bell-curve distributions of traits for whites and blacks overlap, they cannot tell us whether any black individual is more or less intelligent than any white individual. Singer’s third point is that the statistical generalizations of racial science give us no reason to reject the moral principle of “equal consideration of interests,” which is the principle of equal rights as affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and in other texts of modern liberal thought. Singer

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explains, “The principle of equality is not based on any actual equality that all people share. I have argued that the only defensible basis for the principle of equality is equal consideration of interests, and I have suggested that the most important human interests—such as the interest in avoiding pain, in developing one’s abilities, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, in enjoying warm personal relationships, in being free to pursue one’s projects without interference, and many others—are not affected by differences in intelligence.”39 Singer then quotes from Thomas Jefferson who insisted that the natural equality of rights belonging to African-Americans did not depend on their natural intellectual capacities: “whatever be their degree of talent, it is no measure of their rights. Because Sir Isaac Newton was superior to others in understanding, he was not therefore lord of the property of person of others.” Singer comments, “Jefferson was right. Equal status does not depend on intelligence. Racists who maintain the contrary are in peril of being forced to kneel before the next genius they encounter.” Murray agrees with all three of these points. First, he agrees that the inheritance of cognitive ability is not earned, and therefore it’s unfair. We can hold people responsible for how they develop and use whatever capacities they have received, but we cannot hold them responsible for whatever nature or nurture has given them. And so, we are morally obligated to help those who suffer from inherited disadvantages that are undeserved.40 Murray agrees with Rawls’s difference principle, arguing that giving higher salaries to high-IQ people than to low-IQ people is justified not as a matter of just deserts but as a way of producing compensating benefits for the least advantaged members of society.41 Second, Murray agrees that we should treat people as individuals and not as members of a group. In The Bell Curve, he and Herrnstein repeatedly stress this.42 In doing so, they embrace the classical liberal principle of individualism: “A person should not be judged as a member of a group but as an individual. With that cornerstone of the American doctrine once again in place, group differences can take their appropriately insignificant place in affecting American life.”43 Third, Murray agrees with the principle of equal rights as equal consideration of interests or an equal chance to pursue one’s happiness. Human beings are “unequal in every respect except their right to advance their own interests.”44 In the last chapter of The Bell Curve—entitled “A Place for Everyone”—Murray and Herrnstein elaborated this thought as the ground of their classical liberalism. Freedom is the condition for “finding valued places for everyone,” so that “every citizen has access to the central satisfactions of life.”45 What Murray calls “the central satisfactions of life” or “the stuff of life” correspond to what Singer calls “the most important human interests”—those universal natural desires that constitute the human pursuit of happiness. Like Singer, Murray also quotes Jefferson as supporting this idea that equal rights does not mean equal outcomes, because equal rights to life,

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liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will allow the “natural aristocracy of virtues and talents” to freely express itself.46 In a free society, natural human inequality will show itself, and this will allow those of high intellectual ability to become a cognitive elite. But in such a free society, even those with low cognitive ability can secure their happiness, because “most people by far have enough intelligence for getting on with the business of life.”47 “There is no inherent barrier to happiness for a person with a low level of education holding a low-skill job,” because that person can take pride in doing his job well, and he can enjoy all the satisfactions of living in a community of family, friends, and neighbors.48 But while Murray accepts Young’s idea of a meritocracy, Rawls rejects it (TJ, 106–8; TJR, 91). And again we must wonder why it would be wrong to reward people according to their natural talents and abilities. Consider how a Rawlsian might reply to Kristol, Bell, and Murray.49 First, we might challenge the assumption that all human abilities and talents can be judged by one standard of measurement—the IQ test. Even if IQ scores distribute themselves along a bell-shaped curve—a few people with very high scores, a few with very low scores, and most in the middle—why should that justify a similar distribution of economic, social, and political rewards? Modern psychological research would confirm our commonsense impression that there are many forms of intelligence that cannot be measured by IQ tests.50 Why should a person’s performance on a single test of abstract reasoning determine his or her place in society? Should we agree with the decision of the United States Supreme Court—in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. in 1971—that employers may not use IQ tests to help make hiring decisions because this is unfair discrimination?51 Or should we agree with Herrnstein and Murray that IQ tests measure general cognitive ability, which is related to job productivity in a wide range of jobs that are mentally challenging?52 We might also argue that the capitalist society defended by Kristol, Bell, and Murray rewards not so much intelligence as it does the talent for making money. Where money is the universal medium of exchange, it tends to become the only standard of social worth. We should remember Rousseau’s complaint about this in the Second Discourse. As Rousseau says, although social inequality arises generally from four kinds of differences— ”wealth, nobility or rank, power, and personal merit”—eventually they are all reduced to wealth, “because being the most immediately useful to wellbeing and the easiest to communicate, it is easily used to buy all the rest.”53 Marx made the same criticism. In a bourgeois society, what people possess is not proportioned to what they deserve, because what they possess is determined not by what they merit but by what they can buy.54 Would Kristol, Bell, and Murray say that a rich person merits all the things money can buy? Does a rich person merit more legal protection, more political power, or more medical treatment than a poor person? Even if the talent for making money is rewarded in the economic sphere, there is no good reason to reward it in all other spheres of social life.

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Rawls would insist that with respect to “basic liberties,” all citizens as moral persons deserve equal status. The right to a fair trial or the right to vote, for example, should not be distributed according to wealth. And to insure fair equality of opportunity, a certain minimal level of education should be provided equally to all, regardless of wealth. Distributive justice requires different principles of distribution for the different spheres of society.55 For some purposes, it makes sense to distinguish equality of opportunity and equality of result. But Bell, Kristol, and Murray push this distinction too far. To some degree, genuine equality of opportunity in a democracy does dictate equality of result. Democratic citizens demand equal respect and equal protection for their interests. They demand this because as human beings they share a common moral dignity. Nevertheless, equal respect and equal protection of interests do not necessarily require equal power or equal property. The natural differences among human beings might dictate some inequality in power and in property. Both the unity and the diversity among human beings must be respected.56 Rawls believes, therefore, that we need to balance equality of opportunity against other principles of justice. He does not deny the principle of careers open to talents, but he argues for limits on meritocratic inequality to insure all citizens an equal sense of self-respect. Even Bell appears to agree with this when he says we should “insist on a basic social equality in that each person is to be given respect and not to be humiliated on the basis of color, or sexual proclivities, or other personal attributes.” Bell adds, “We can assert that each person is entitled to a basic set of services and income which provides him with adequate medical care, housing, and the like.” He explains that a just meritocracy would rest on the belief that although all are not entitled to equal praise, all are entitled to equal respect.57 Consequently, Bell observes, a capitalist meritocracy creates cultural tensions between the different standards governing different realms—efficiency in the economy, equality in the polity, and self-actualization in the culture.58 But this contradicts Bell’s argument that economic, political, and social goods should all be distributed according to the bell-shaped curve of technical knowledge. The idea that we should seek a balance between efficiency, equality, and self-actualization would support Rawls’s conception of justice. His first principle requires political equality. His second principle incorporates the principle of economic efficiency (TJ, 65–72, 79–80; TJR, 57–62, 68–70). And one of the needs promoted by Rawlsian justice is selfrealization (TJ, 84, 107, 560–66; TJR, 73, 91, 491–96). If we accept Rawls’s complex account of justice as dictating different distributive principles for different spheres of life, then we must wonder how to settle conflicts between these principles. For example, how do we resolve the tension between the political equality demanded by Rawls’s first principle of justice and the social and economic inequalities permitted by his second principle? Don’t we need some single, comprehensive standard of judgment? Rawls argues for certain rules of priority for ranking

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the principles. Underlying these rules is a conception of human nature and of what human beings need to fulfill their nature. Equal liberty, for example, takes precedence over other principles because of “the central place of the primary good of self-respect and the desire of human beings to express their nature in a free social union with others” (TJ, 543; TJR, 476). And more generally, Rawls maintains, the principles of justice allow people to “express their nature as free and equal rational beings subject to the general conditions of human life” (TJ, 252–53; TJR, 222). If the aim of justice is to secure the conditions for the fullest expression of human nature, then it would seem that to agree on the meaning of justice we must first agree on the meaning of human nature. And the very possibility of justice, Rawls indicates, assumes that “humankind has a moral nature” (TJ, 580; TJR, 508). We must wonder whether Rawls is right in suggesting that a natural sense of justice is imprinted in our evolved human nature.

6. Is an instinctive moral grammar of justice part of our evolved human nature? Rawls compares moral theory to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory that acquiring language depends on a Universal Grammar innate in all human beings.59 Just as there might be an innate “sense of grammaticalness” that makes language possible, Rawls suggests, there might be an innate “sense of justice” that makes the practice and theory of justice possible (TJ, 46–53; TJR, 40–46). And just as scientific linguists like Chomsky judge the truth of their linguistic theories by how well they explain the data of our linguistic practices, likewise moral philosophers can judge the truth of their moral theories by how well they explain the data of our moral judgments. We must strive for “reflective equilibrium,” Rawls argues, in which our general moral principles and our individual moral judgments about particular cases are in harmony, so that our particular judgments can be seen as specifications of our general principles. To achieve this, we might have to revise our principles or revise our judgments until we reach some coherence between them, just as scientists revise their theories or reconsider their data until they reach sufficient harmony between theory and data. Achieving such harmony in our moral understanding is made possible by our instinctive moral grammar of justice as part of our evolved human nature. Rawls often appeals to conceptions of human nature rooted in evolutionary biology (TJ, 431–32, 485–90, 494–95, 502–4; TJR, 378–79, 425– 29, 433, 440–41). His theory of justice requires a notion of human flourishing as the satisfaction of the natural desires and powers of human beings as products of evolution by natural selection. The very possibility of justice as fairness presumes a natural human propensity for reciprocity that some evolutionary biologists (such as Robert Trivers) regard as the

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biological ground for human morality.60 Some evolutionary game theorists have shown how cooperation could evolve among egoists in repeated prisoner’s dilemma games, where the best strategy would be “tit-for-tat” reciprocity—cooperating with those who are themselves cooperative, but punishing those who are not cooperative.61 Rawls explains: Reciprocity, a tendency to answer in kind . . . is a deep psychological fact. Without it our nature would be very different and fruitful social cooperation fragile if not impossible. . . . Beings with a different psychology either have never existed or must soon have disappeared in the course of evolution. A capacity for a sense of justice built up by responses in kind would appear to be a condition of human sociability. (TJ, 494–95; TJR, 433)

Thus, Rawls assumes that as an expression of our evolved human nature, a natural sense of justice arises from the human tendency to answer in kind—returning benefit for benefit and injury for injury. As Adam Smith would say, this tendency to reciprocity is enforced by moral sentiments found in most human beings: they are inclined to feel gratitude, love, and benevolence in return for benefits conferred on them; they are inclined to feel anger, hatred, and malevolence in return for injuries inflicted on them; and they are inclined to feel guilt, shame, and regret for their violations of their reciprocal obligations to others. Although some human beings do not feel these moral emotions very strongly, and a few do not feel them at all, such people are treated as moral deviants by their fellow human beings. In modern psychological research, those people who lack any moral emotions are recognized as psychopaths.62 But is Rawls right in claiming that this sense of justice as reciprocity expresses an innate moral grammar comparable to what Chomsky identifies as the Universal Grammar that makes language possible? John Mikhail thinks that Rawls is correct about this, and that the experimental study of how people solve certain moral dilemmas confirms Rawls’s insight.63 Peter Singer, however, thinks Rawls is wrong about this, because his linguistic analogy ignores the point that describing moral intuitions is not the same as justifying moral principles.64 Mikhail’s argument depends on his study of one of the most famous thought experiments in modern moral philosophy—the trolley problem. Imagine that you are walking along the tracks of a trolley in San Francisco. You notice that there is a runaway trolley that will kill five people who have become somehow bound to the tracks. You also notice that there is a switch that will turn the trolley onto a side track, a spur, and thus save the lives of the five people. Unfortunately, however, there is one person bound to the side track, and so if you throw the switch, he will be killed. Should you throw the switch? On another day, you are walking on a footbridge over the tracks. You see another runaway trolley speeding toward five people bound to the

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track. This time, there is no possibility of switching the trolley to a side track. You could jump onto the track to try to stop it, but you are such a small person that you probably could not stop the trolley. You notice that there’s a big fat man on the footbridge who is big enough to stop the train if you push him onto the track. Should you push the fat man? These stories might seem too cartoonish to be taken seriously as moral dilemmas. But in recent decades, ever since they were first proposed by philosophers Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, they have become some of the most debated thought experiments among moral philosophers. They have also been introduced into scientific experimentation conducted by philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists to test whether our moral intuitions about the trolley problem manifest an innate and universal moral sense shaped by human evolution and written into the neural circuitry of the brain. Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have been surveyed for their answers to these trolley problems, and some of them have done this while in a brain scanning machine, so that scientists could map the patterns of activity in their brains while they made their decisions. This shows how a fundamental question in moral and political philosophy can be translated into experimentally testable propositions. This “trolleyology” (as it has been called) has become a crucial part of the recent movement towards “experimental philosophy.”65 Of the many people who have participated in formal trolley-problem surveys, most people (up to 90 percent in some studies) would divert the trolley in the Spur Case, but they would not push the fat man in the Footbridge Case. What is most striking about this is that most people react differently to the two cases although pulling the switch and pushing the fat man have identical consequences—one person dies to save five. Joshua Greene and his colleagues have used brain scanning (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to study the brains of people as they think about trolley problems.66 He found that there was a kind of neural wrestling between the calculating and emotional parts of the brain. Responding to the Spur Case, most people decide to pull the switch, and the more calculating areas of the brain are active (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the inferior parietal lobe), suggesting that they are calculating costs and benefits. But in response to the Footbridge Case, most people decide that they cannot push the fat man, and the more emotional areas of the brain are active (amygdala, posterior cingulate cortex, and medial prefrontal cortex), suggesting that the idea of pushing the fat man is triggering emotional alarms. For centuries, philosophers have argued about the relationship between moral reason and moral emotion in moral judgments. Now, it seems, we can see that complex interaction between reason and emotion in the human brain. The trolley problems involve both homicide (the killing of one person to save five people) and battery (the pushing of the fat man). Mikhail claims that the general principle that accounts for how most people solve the trol-

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ley problems is the principle of double effect as stated by Thomas Aquinas.67 While the killing of innocent people is generally prohibited, killing can be permissible if the deaths are foreseeable but not directly intended, and if there are good effects from this that outweigh the bad effects. So, for example, if I kill in self-defense or in defense of the lives of others, and if the death of the victim is only a side-effect of my actions rather than a directly intended end, then the killing might be permissible. Mikhail generalizes this principle to cover the legal standards for homicide and battery: The principle holds that an otherwise prohibited action, such as battery or homicide, which has both good and bad effects may be permissible if the prohibited act itself is not directly intended, the good but not the bad effects are directly intended, the good effects outweigh the bad effects, and no morally preferable alternative is available. (149)

To apply this principle, we need to distinguish means, ends, and side effects. This allows Mikhail to explain the morally relevant distinction between the Spur Case and the Footbridge Case. In the Spur Case, the bystander creates a bad effect (the killing of the man on the spur) only as a side effect. We know this, because we assume that if the man on the spur were able to free himself and avoid being hit by the train, the bystander would prefer this. The bystander directly intends to save the five people, but he does not directly intend to kill the man on the spur, although this is a foreseeable consequence. The bystander must also assume that the bad effect of killing the man is outweighed by saving the five, and that there is no morally preferable alternative (such as throwing some object on the tracks to stop the trolley). By contrast, Mikhail notes, if we suspected that the bystander was looking for a chance to murder the man on the spur, and so he used the runaway train as an excuse for switching the train towards his intended victim, then this might be considered intentional homicide. Mikhail also points out that the Footbridge Case differs from the Spur Case in one respect. The bystander’s pushing of the fat man is a directly intended battery and not just a foreseeable side effect, which most people judge to be forbidden. Singer’s objection to all this is what Mikhail calls “the objection from insufficient normativity.”68 The descriptive adequacy of Mikhail’s account of how people respond to trolley problems says nothing, Singer complains, about the normative adequacy of our principles in deciding how people ought to respond to trolley problems. Justifying moral principles is not the same as describing moral intuitions. Singer insists that normative moral theory must look for universal and eternal principles of what is morally right or wrong that are true independently of what human individuals or human cultures believe to be right or wrong. When Rawls appeals to the moral intuitions that are common among people who live in liberal democratic societies, Singer observes, he becomes a cultural relativist, so that liberal principles of justice are regarded as true only because they happen to be accepted in liberal cultures. When Rawls suggests that there might

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be a universal moral sense that is expressed in liberal moral intuitions, and when Mikhail provides empirical evidence for this, this might escape the charge of cultural relativism; but this universal moral sense as imprinted in human psychology by human evolution is still only subjective, lacking in any objective truth, because it’s a psychological projection of the evolved human mind rather than an objective truth about the universe. For a Kantian utilitarian like Singer, the relevant moral principle in the trolley problem—that five deaths are worse than one death—is the same in both cases, and therefore Singer would pull the switch and push the fat man. For Singer, the 10 percent of the people who would push the fat man are rightly following pure moral reason, while the other 90 percent are allowing their emotions to override their reason, because from the viewpoint of pure reason, there is no morally relevant difference between the two cases. Singer concedes that the reluctance to push the fat man probably shows a naturally evolved emotional predisposition against intentionally and directly killing an innocent person, even when such killing will save more lives. But for Singer that only shows that moral reason should overcome the irrationality of our evolved psychology. The fact that most people would not push the fat man is irrelevant to the normative question of what they ought to do. Unlike the empirical sciences (such as the evolutionary science and neuroscience of human nature), normative moral and political philosophy belongs to a realm of pure reason that transcends the natural world of observable experience. For these reasons, Singer rejects Rawls’s claim that moral theory must be rooted in a moral psychology of moral intuitions. Mikhail’s response to Singer’s objection is to admit that, yes, the moral grammar of human nature as a product of evolutionary history imprinted on the human brain is a projection of human psychology that has no cosmic reality outside of the human mind. If human beings did not exist as the kind of moral animals that they are, then their human morality would not exist. Thus, there is no sharp distinction between the normative and the empirical, because normative morality is a projection of our empirical psychology. Mikhail suggests that the evolved rules of morality are more like the rules of baseball than the laws of physics: the rules of baseball must be created by human beings, but the laws of physics exist independently of human beings. What alternative is there? Singer says that we need a cosmic morality—eternal and universal principles of right and wrong that are somehow woven into the fabric of the universe and discoverable by human reason just as we discover principles of mathematics as somehow inherent in the structure of the world. But Singer never gives a clear explanation or proof of how this could be the case. He says that we need to prove the objective truth of morality as based on “pure reason” without intuition or emotion, but he indicates that no philosopher has ever successfully done this, and he will not do it himself.69 Recently, Singer has admitted that after many years of trying to prove that morality can be objectively true and rationally based, without any

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necessary foundation in evolved human psychology, he has failed; and so he now doubts his earlier arguments for a Kantian utilitarianism. But after making this admission, he has reaffirmed “the existence of objective moral truths.” Although his Platonic longing for an eternal Idea of the Good has been frustrated, it seems that he still cannot give it up.70 We have seen this longing for a moral cosmology of eternal and universal truths in Plato’s dialogues. But we have also seen some suggestion in those dialogues that while Plato and Plato’s Socrates thought such a moral cosmology might be necessary for the good morals of most people, it was not really plausible, because the universe appears to be morally indifferent. The universe does not care for or about us. But we care for ourselves. And that care for ourselves as an expression of our human nature constitutes the natural ground for the human good as perfected in the moral and intellectual virtues. In Rawls’ references to the Darwinian science of moral psychology, we see the suggestion that an evolutionary account of life, including human life, might support such a naturalistic ethics of human care. The denial of moral cosmology does not have to drive us into nihilism, because the evolved nature of human beings as caring for themselves constitutes a natural ground for the human good, even though the human species is not eternal or invariant.

7. Does a liberal conception of justice require the coercive enforcement of a liberal way of life as the best life for human beings? Rawls defends his account of justice as morally neutral, in that it does not presuppose any conception of the moral ends of life. In his John Dewey lectures, delivered in 1980, Rawls explains that because his view of justice should “serve as a shared point of view among citizens with opposing religious, philosophical and moral convictions, as well as diverse conceptions of the good, this point of view needs to be appropriately impartial among these differences.”71 But insofar as principles of justice shape the general structure of a community, won’t they necessarily favor some way of life as morally preferable to others? Rawls comes close to conceding this in A Theory of Justice when he notes that as a consequence of his principles, “certain initial bounds are placed upon what is good and what forms of character are morally worthy, and so upon what kinds of persons men should be” (TJ, 32; TJR, 28). If Rawls advocates a liberal theory of justice, we would expect his principles to form the character of citizens to conform to a liberal way of life. And yet, Rawls tries to avoid this. He would like to have an open society in which every way of life can be pursued freely. In the quest for a morally neutral conception of justice, Rawls looks for purely formal standards of justification that do not rest on any substantive

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moral judgments. To do this, he can appeal either to the idea of formal rationality or to the idea of the autonomous self. “The theory of justice,” he says, “is a part, perhaps the most significant part, of the theory of rational choice” (TJ, 16; TJR, 15). Here, he draws on the modern economic concept of rationality (TJ, 142–50, 407–39; TJR, 123–30, 358–86). Even without making a substantive judgment about what ends people should pursue in life, we can make a formal judgment about their rationality in calculating the best means to whatever ends they might choose. We can judge whether a person has chosen means that are appropriate to specific ends, and we can judge the internal consistency of the choices that person has made. We do this, however, without judging the reasonableness of the ends themselves. Rawls offers a bizarre example: Thus imagine someone whose only pleasure is to count blades of grass in various geometrically shaped areas such as park squares and welltrimmed lawns. . . . [I]f we allow that his nature is to enjoy this activity and not to enjoy any other, and that there is no feasible way to alter his condition, then surely a rational plan for him will center around this activity. (TJ, 432–33; TJR, 379)

The two principles of justice as fairness are rational, Rawls suggests, insofar as they would help anyone to pursue any rational plan of life, even if the aim of that plan is only to count blades of grass! Why should we allow every person to choose an individualized, rational plan of life no matter how absurd the ends may seem to us? We must do so, Rawls answers, because to deny people such freedom would violate their human dignity as beings capable of free choice. Human beings must be autonomous in choosing their plans of life because they will thus express their nature as “free and rational beings with a liberty to choose” (TJ, 256; TJR, 226). This suggests that we can determine the meaning of justice without determining the meaning of life because justice requires that we leave each person free to determine the meaning of life. Indeed, Rawls implies that what makes a person human is the capacity for freely creating a meaningful life out of an otherwise meaningless universe. Despite the appearance of moral neutrality, doesn’t Rawls rely on some substantive judgments of human excellence? In judging that rational life plans are better than irrational ones, he assumes that rationality is good. And in judging that we should allow people to express their human nature as free and rational beings, he assumes that human life is good and that the fulfillment of human purposes is good.72 We can easily overlook these assumptions, because we take them for granted. As products of a liberal culture, it is also easy for us to overlook the fact that Rawls’s principles promote a liberal way of life—a life in which individual autonomy is the highest good—as being the best life for human beings. Brian Barry has sketched the liberal conception of life implicitly endorsed by Rawls:

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Chapter Fifteen A liberal . . . must hold that a certain type of man, and a society in which that type of man flourishes are superior to others. Liberalism rests on a vision of life: a Faustian vision. It exalts selfexpression, self-mastery, and control over the environment, natural and social; the active pursuit of knowledge and the clash of ideas; the acceptance of personal responsibility for the decisions that shape one’s life. For those who cannot take the freedom it provides alcohol, tranquilizers, wrestling on the television, astrology, psychoanalysis, and so on, endlessly, but it cannot by its nature provide certain kinds of psychological security. Like any creed it can be neither justified nor condemned in terms of anything beyond it. It is itself an answer to the unanswerable but irrepressible question: “What is the meaning of life?”73

Rawls himself recognized this problem in Political Liberalism. In most of A Theory of Justice, he had argued for a liberal theory of justice that left people free to disagree about their comprehensive conceptions of the good life, as long as these conceptions did not interfere with the equal liberty of others to live by their comprehensive conceptions of the good. But in Part Three (“Ends”) of the book, he had implied that liberal justice required a comprehensive liberal conception of the good to shape a single liberal way of life for all members of the just society. In Political Liberalism, he rejected this latter position as “comprehensive liberalism” in favor of a “political liberalism” that was consistent with the “fact of a plurality of reasonable but incompatible comprehensive doctrines” in a modern democratic society. The comprehensive liberalism of Part Three of A Theory of Justice was unrealistically utopian in denying this fact of reasonable pluralism. It was also illiberal, because any attempt to enforce a continuing shared understanding of one comprehensive doctrine in a society would require the oppressive use of state power.74 And yet, even in Political Liberalism, Rawls seemed to fall into the same contradiction that he had identified in A Theory of Justice, because he could not give up his utopian vision of comprehensive liberalism in a society united as one cohesive community with one shared understanding of the good. In Part Three of A Theory of Justice, Rawls has a section on “The Idea of Social Union.” Here he explains how “the congruence of the right and the good depends in large part upon whether a well-ordered society achieves the good of community” (TJ, 520; TJR, 456). Achieving this good of community requires more than what Rawls calls “private society,” which corresponds to what Plato in the Republic identifies as a society based on the division of labor in the “city of pigs,” or what Hegel identified as “civil society” (TJ, 521; TJR, 457).75 In such a society, there are many different types of social union—families, friendships, and larger associations. But the full good of community requires “a social union of social unions” based on a “shared final end.” “When this end is achieved, all find satisfaction in the very same thing; and this fact together with the complementarity of the good of individuals affirms the tie of community.” He stresses this

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point by repeating it: “when everyone acts justly, all find satisfaction in the very same thing” (TJ, 526–27; TJR, 461–62). This restates the utopian claim of Plato’s Socrates that in the perfectly just city, the city will be most like a single human being, with a “community of pleasure and pain,” and most people will say “my own” and “not my own” about the same thing and in the same way.76 In this communized conception of humanity, the individual has no identity outside of the social whole to which he belongs. Because of such communal unity of interests and a single shared conception of the good, the truly just city will be free from all factional conflict.77 Is there a flaw in such a conception in that it is contrary to the human nature of individual diversity and self-love? As naturally social animals, we surely do find our fulfillment in social groups—in families, friendships, and social associations of various kinds. But can there ever be an absolute social unity in which “all find satisfaction in the very same thing”? Plato seems to acknowledge this problem when he considers the alternatives to his best city and identifies democracy as the “fairest of the regimes,” because it secures the freedom that makes it open to all kinds of regimes, all kinds of human life, including the philosophic life. Because of this freedom, “anyone by nature free regards this city alone as a fit place to live.”78 As we saw in our reading of Plato, this could be Plato’s implied argument for liberal democracy. Rawls seems to agree with this when he asserts in Political Liberalism that political liberalism is superior to comprehensive liberalism, because political liberalism secures the freedom for the expression of all reasonable comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral doctrines about the good life. This openness is limited, however, to the “reasonable” conceptions of the good—that is, those conceptions that are compatible with the equal liberty for the expression of all other conceptions. Liberal tolerance cannot tolerate intolerant doctrines. In a liberal regime, people are free to form associations to enforce common beliefs and practices among all the members, such as a religious group that enforces a strict orthodoxy among its believers. But the membership must be voluntary, and so groups that teach that their doctrines can be enforced by violent coercion will be excluded from a liberal regime. “No society can include within itself all forms of life,” Rawls observes.79 We might say that while a politically liberal regime cannot be a completely open society, it can be a largely open society. Even in Political Liberalism, however, Rawls endorses the comprehensive liberalism of A Theory of Justice, because he still affirms the “social union of social unions” as based on “a far more comprehensive good than the determinate good of individuals when left to their own devices or limited to smaller associations.”80 This “more comprehensive good” seems to point to the utopian vision of comprehensive liberalism. And thus, apparently, Rawls never frees himself from the contradiction of embracing both political liberalism and comprehensive liberalism, because he cannot fully

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give up his utopian longing for a perfectly cohesive community free from any natural conflicts of interest. While Rawls’s political liberalism is often criticized as radically relativistic, one could see it as recognizing human nature in both its unity and diversity. There is a natural standard insofar as there is range of natural desires that constitute the universal human good, but the deliberate ranking of those desires over a whole life must vary to conform to the natural diversity of individuals. Interpreted this way, political liberalism could recognize those natural desires as setting the generic human good, while also recognizing the need for freedom in expressing the variation in individual nature. Thus political liberalism could affirm both the equality that comes from a shared human nature and the liberty for expressing diverse human temperaments.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9 10 11

Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, October 28, 1813, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, eds. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1944), 632–33. Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress, 4 July 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953– 1955), 4: 438. For criticisms of the American liberal metaphor of life as a race, see Garry Wills, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 234–45, 589–602. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971). All page references in the text to this book are identified with the abbreviation TJ. There is a revised edition—A Theory of Justice: Revised Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). All references in the text to this book are identified with the abbreviation TJR. A short intellectual biography of Rawls can be found in Percy B. Lehning, John Rawls: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1–15. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 6–7. For useful introductions to the interpretation and evaluation of Rawls’s Theory of Justice, see Brian Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); Norman Daniels, ed., Reading Rawls (New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a survey of all of Rawls’s writing, see Lehning, John Rawls. Quoted by Daniel Bell, “On Meritocracy and Equality,” Public Interest No. 29 (Fall 1972): 44. For the debate over affirmative action, see Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Philip Green, The Pursuit of Inequality (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 165–210; Richard A. Epstein, Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Thomas Sowell, Affirmative Action Around the World: An Empirical Study (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and William M. Leiter and Samuel Leiter, Affirmative Action in Antidiscrimination Law and Policy: An Overview and Synthesis, 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). See Bell, “Meritocracy,” 56–58. Here I am following closely the argument of Michael Zuckert, “Justice Deserted: A Critique of Rawls’s Theory of Justice,” Polity 13 (Spring 1981): 466–83. See chap. 2, sec. 3; chap. 6, sec. 5; chap. 8, sec. 1. See also Rawls, TJ, 512; TJR, 448. For the “animal rights” argument against Rawls, see Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, 2nd ed. (New York: Random House, 1990); and Singer, Writings on an Ethical Life (New York: The Ecco Press, 2000).

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13 14

15

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17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

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Some elements of Rawlsian justice appear in Ronald Dworkin’s defense of affirmative action. See Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 223–39; Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 293–303; and Sandel, Liberalism, 135–47. For a Rawlsian defense of welfare rights, see Frank Michelman, “Constitutional Welfare Rights and A Theory of Justice,” in Daniels, Reading Rawls, 319–47. Based on a survey of the evidence, Christopher Jencks, in Inequality (New York: Basic Books, 1972), concludes: “Economic success seems to depend on varieties of luck and on-the-job competence that are only moderately related to family background, schooling, or scores on standardized tests. The definition of competence varies greatly from one job to another, but it seems in most cases to depend more on personality than on technical skills” (8). See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 85–102; and Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 161–66. See Norman Frohlich, Joe A. Oppenheimer, and Cheryl Eavey, “Laboratory Results on Rawls’s Distributive Justice,” British Journal of Political Science, 7 (1987): 1–21; and Norman Frohlich and Joe A. Oppenheimer, Choosing Justice: An Experimental Approach to Ethical Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 251–394. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xlvii. Bell, “Meritocracy,” 57. See Kai Nielsen, “Capitalism, Socialism and Justice,” in Tom Regan and Donald VanDeVeer, eds., And Justice for All (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982), 277–85; and Nielsen, Equality and Liberty: A Defense of Radical Egalitarianism (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 78–99. For socialist defenses of Rawls, see Robert Amdur, “Rawls and His Radical Critics: The Problem of Equality,” Dissent (Summer 1980): 323–34; and Arthur DiQuattro, “Rawls and Left Criticism,” Political Theory 11 (February 1983): 53–78. Amdur, “Radical Critics,” 333. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974). Ibid., 162. Ibid., 160–64. See Virginia Held, “John Locke on Robert Nozick,” Social Research 43 (Spring 1976): 169–95. See G. A. Cohen, “Robert Nozick and Wilt Chamberlain: How Patterns Preserve Liberty,” in John Arthur and William Shaw, eds., Justice and Economic Distribution (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 246–62. Nozick, Anarchy, 33, 95. Irving Kristol, “About Equality,” in Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 184–85. Michael Young, The Rise of Meritocracy (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961). Bell, “Meritocracy,” 30–31, 41, 65, 67. Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2012), 46–68. See David H. Autor, “Skills, Education, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality among the ‘Other 99 Percent,’” Science 344 (May 23, 2014): 843–51. Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: The Free Press, 1994). See J. Philippe Ruston and Arthur R. Jensen, “Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability,” Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 11 (2005): 235–94. See James R. Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? Race, Class, and Ideals in America (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 68–111. See Nathaniel Comfort, “Under the Skin,” Nature, 513 (18 September 2014): 307–8; Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Michael Yudell, Race Unmasked: Biology and Race in the 20th Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

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52 53 54 55

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See Murray, Coming Apart. Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28–32. Singer, Practical Ethics, 31. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 21, 142, 418, 442, 445, 500, 527, 535, 547. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 527. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 21, 68, 117, 270–71, 312–15, 385, 450, 500. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 550. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 531. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 551. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 530–31. Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 536. Murray, Coming Apart, 267. For egalitarian arguments against meritocracy, see Michael Walzer, Radical Principles (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 237–56; Green, Pursuit; and Nielsen, Equality and Liberty, 132–87. On the many kinds of intelligence, see Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983). For the controversy surrounding IQ testing, see Arthur R. Jensen, Bias in Mental Testing (New York: Free Press, 1979); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Robert J. Sternberg and Elena Grigorenko, eds., Intelligence, Heredity, and Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Ian J. Deary, Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 401 US 424, 91 S.Ct. 849; and Robert Belton and Stephen L. Wasby, The Crusade for Equality in the Workplace: The Griggs v. Duke Power Story (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2014). Herrnstein and Murray, Bell Curve, 481–84. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Roger D. Masters and Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 174. See Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 1978), 101–5. This pluralistic conception of justice is defended by Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1983). For an Aristotelian defense of this conception, see William A. Galston, Justice and the Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See Jane J. Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3–7. A rigorous analysis of the various conceptions of equality is set forth in Douglas Rae, Equalities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Rae criticizes Rawls, Bell, and other theorists. Bell, “Meritocracy,” 64–66. Can social respect be distributed equally? Or is the pursuit of respect of such a nature that one person’s gain must be another’s loss? See William J. Goode, The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige as a Social Control System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); and Robert H. Frank, Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). See Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978). Rawls cites Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965), 3–9. See also Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (New York: William Morrow, 1994). Rawls cites Robert Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46 (2001): 35–57. See also Robert Trivers, Natural Selection and Social Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). See Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984). On psychopaths as moral strangers, see Kent A. Kiehl, The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscience (New York: Crown Publishers, 2014); and Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 211–30.

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66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

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See John Mikhail, Elements of Moral Cognition: Rawls’ Linguistic Analogy and the Cognitive Science of Moral and Legal Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). See Peter Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions,” The Journal of Ethics, 9 (2005): 331–52. An engaging presentation of this research is David Edmonds’s Would You Kill the Fat Man? The Trolley Problem and What Your Answer Tells Us about Right and Wrong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). See Joshua Greene, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them (New York: Penguin Press, 2013) Thomas states the principle of double effect in Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 64, a. 7. Mikhail, Moral Cognition, 188. Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions.” See Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 105, 107, 198–200, 204. John Rawls, “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory,” Journal of Philosophy, 77 (September 1980): 542–43. On these points, see William Galston, Liberal Purposes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chapters 4 and 6. For the argument that economic rationality fails as a morally neutral standard for social theory, see Barry, Liberal Theory, 19–33, 116–27; Brian Barry and Russell Hardin, eds., Rational Man and Irrational Society? (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1982), 367–86; and Allen E. Buchanan, Ethics, Efficiency and the Market (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985). Barry, Liberal Theory, 126–27. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xv–xx, 37. Rawls cites Plato, Republic, 369–72. Plato, Republic, 462c–d. Plato, Republic, 464c–465b. Plato, Republic, 557a–562c. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 197. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 320–23.

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16 The Classical Liberalism of Declining Violence

Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature

KEY READINGS The Better Angels of Our Nature, pages xxi–64, 144–162, 177–231, 244–294, 361–481, 508–529, 556–570, 611–696

Steven Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from McGill University in Montreal in 1976. He received his doctoral degree in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1979. He has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is now a Professor of Psychology at Harvard. Pinker has specialized in studying the psychology of visual cognition and language acquisition. He has also written books for a popular audience of readers that explain the human mind and human nature generally as shaped by Darwinian evolution. The popular success of these books has made him one of the leading public intellectuals in the world. In his book The Blank Slate, published in 2002, Pinker defended a scientific theory of human nature rooted in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, while arguing against three popular ideas.1 Against the “blank slate”—the empiricist idea that the human mind is like a blank sheet of paper on which society can write anything—he argued that the biological sciences show that human beings have an innate human nature that constrains what can be done through social culture and individual learning. Against the “noble savage”—the romantic idea of Rousseau that 543

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human beings were originally free, equal, and peaceable, before they were corrupted by civilization—he argued that Hobbes was right to see that the state of nature was a state of war, and that we need laws and government to restrain our aggressive passions. Against the “ghost in the machine”— the dualistic idea that the human mind separates itself through free will and cultural communication from the material nature of body and brain— he argued that the mind is the activity of the naturally evolved brain and is thus constrained by the innate structure of human cognition. He saw all of these false ideas as supporting a utopian vision in which changes in child rearing and the cultural environment could liberate human beings from their social problems, so that they could all be free, equal, and peaceful. Against this utopian conception of human perfectibility, Pinker defended a realist conception of human imperfectability as constrained by human nature. So, for example, the utopians believe that violence is not natural for human beings, because it’s a purely learned behavior, and therefore human beings would be totally peaceful if they were shaped by a just society teaching nonviolence. But according to Pinker, this ignores how conflicts of interest leading to violence are inherent to the natural human condition, such that an individual is naturally inclined to hurt others in circumstances where the expected benefits of aggression exceed the expected costs. Moreover, there is a natural evolutionary logic to violence by which men are more inclined to physical violence than women, and young men between the ages of 15 and 30 are responsible for most violent crimes.2 In response to his critics who saw this as a manifestation of a crude biological determinism, Pinker answered that our evolved human nature combines propensities to violence and propensities to peace, and that it is possible to devise cultural institutions and norms that tame the violent propensities and promote the peaceful propensities. He also argued that the history of the Western liberal democracies shows a trend towards declining violence, which became the theme for his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.3 The increasing strength of that historical trend towards declining violence in recent centuries, he suggested, shows the influence of classical liberal ideas founded on the thought that violence is never justified except to avoid greater violence, and that increasing liberty requires decreasing violence. Pinker presents his history of declining violence in Better Angels as a story of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces. The first trend is the Hobbesian Pacification Process, by which societies based on farming rather than foraging used governmental institutions and laws to reduce the violence of raiding and feuding endemic to the way of life of foraging bands and horticultural tribes. The second trend is the Civilizing Process, by which centralized authority and commercial society in early modern Europe reduced the violence and brutality characteristic of the Middle Ages.

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The third trend is the Humanitarian Revolution, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which the European Enlightenment reduced socially sanctioned forms of violence such as slavery and judicial torture. The fourth trend is the Long Peace, beginning at the end of World War II, which is the longest period in history in which the Great Powers of Europe and America have not fought any wars with one another. The fifth trend is the New Peace, beginning at the end of the Cold War in 1989, in which all kinds of organized military conflicts have declined. Finally, the sixth trend, beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, is the Rights Revolution, in which human beings have shown increasing disgust towards violence of all kinds directed at persecuted groups, such as ethnic minorities, women, children, homosexuals, and animals. Much of Pinker’s argumentation for these six trends depends on marshaling the quantitative data showing the decline in violence. The absolute number of deaths by homicide in the modern world—as, for example, in the two world wars—was very high, and that makes us think that the modern world is much more violent than the pre-modern world. But Pinker reminds us that the human population has grown explosively over the past two centuries, and if we look at the level of homicidal violence in proportion to the human population, we can see that the number of violent deaths relative to the population has declined greatly across human history. To understand the causes of violence, Pinker contends, we must understand the five inner demons of human nature that motivate us to be violent: • The first inner demon is instrumental violence, or violence employed as a practical means to any end. • The second inner demon is dominance, or violence employed to gain power or glory in contests over prestige. • The third inner demon is revenge, or violence employed by a moralistic desire for retributive punishment. • The fourth inner demon is sadism, or violence employed because of one’s pleasure in the suffering of others. • The fifth inner demon is ideology, or violence employed as a means to achieve some moral vision of human perfection grounded in a shared utopian belief system. These five inner demons are countered by the four better angels of human nature that motivate us to be peaceful: • The first better angel is empathy, or a sympathetic concern for the pains and pleasures of others. • The second better angel is self-control, or the habituated ability to inhibit our impulses based on our anticipation of the bad consequences of impulsive behavior.

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Chapter Sixteen • The third better angel is the moral sense, or the social norms governing conduct that can sometimes reduce violence, but which can also increase violence toward those outside of one’s group. • The fourth better angel is reason, or the capacity of deliberate judgment by which we see ourselves as others see us, so that we expand our moral concern to ever wider circles of humanity, and by which we can plan how to use the other better angels of our nature to improve our social life.

The success of these better angels of human nature in constraining the inner demons so as to reduce violent conflict and promote peaceful cooperation depends on five historical forces: • The first historical force is the Leviathan, or the legal and governmental institutions that mediate conflict in ways that reduce the disorder that comes from the selfish impulses that incline us to exploitation and vengeance. • The second historical force is commerce, or the exchange of goods and ideas over ever-longer distances and ever-larger groups of people, so that we see people as valuable trading partners, and consequently we are less inclined to attack them. • The third historical force is feminization, or the process by which the increasing status and influence of women has promoted feminine caregiving as a check on male violence. • The fourth historical force is cosmopolitanism, or the globalization of human culture by which an increasing number of people expand their circle of sympathetic concern. • The fifth historical force is the escalator of reason, or the growing application of human rationality to recognizing how violence becomes self-defeating and how peaceful cooperation with an everexpanding circle of trading partners becomes beneficial for all. Pinker’s historical analysis of declining violence has been influenced by a book that he often cites: James Payne’s History of Force.4 What is implicit in Pinker’s book becomes explicit in Payne’s book—that the evolutionary history of declining violence can be seen as historical confirmation for classical liberal or libertarian political thought. Pinker and Payne are arguing that human beings, through a long history of trial-and-error learning, have discovered the benefits of peaceful cooperation and the costs of violent aggression, and that the classical liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century were the first political theorists to see the importance of this and to adopt the reduction in the use of violent coercion as their fundamental moral and political principle. If one accepts the classical liberal definition of liberty as the freedom of each individual to live as he pleases without being coerced by violence or the threat of violence, so long as he respects the same freedom for all other individuals, then a decline in violence

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means an increase in liberty, as people enjoy the benefits of voluntary cooperation while minimizing the costs of violent conflict. This understanding of the right to individual liberty as the right to be free from the coercion of violent force is prominent among those in the United States who call themselves libertarians. So, for example, those who join the Libertarian Party of the United States must take a pledge: “To validate my membership, I certify that I oppose the initiation of force to achieve political or social goals.”5 As Payne indicates, the classical liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century were the first political philosophers to adopt the reduction in the use of force as their fundamental political principle. Although previously some political philosophers had condemned some uses of force, they also wanted to use force to promote what they regarded as good ends for social and political life. The classical liberals were the first political philosophers to see how the reduction in the use of force was the primary condition for human progress through capturing the gains from voluntary cooperation. This is what Payne calls voluntarism, which holds that “all uses of force, even those that seem most necessary and unavoidable today, are slated for eventual displacement.” Although this might seem utopian, Payne argues that it is realistic insofar as we recognize that while renouncing the assertive use of force, we must accept the reactive use of force—that is, the use of force to deter or punish aggressors. Pure pacifism or nonviolence does not work as long as there are individuals and groups who will aggressively use force for predatory purposes. “The goal of reducing the use of force cannot be achieved by applying the principle of never using force!”6 Pinker generally agrees with Payne’s classical liberal or libertarian voluntarism as aiming for the reduction or elimination of all uses of force, so that societies are organized mostly through the voluntary cooperation of free individuals rather than the coercive force of governmental regulation (see 180, 284–88, 475–76, 632–37, 662–63). But Pinker does not adopt Payne’s contention that compulsory taxation rests on violence or the threat of violence; and therefore the complete reduction of violence would require that all taxation be voluntary, so that the raising of revenue for publicly supplied goods and services would come from voluntary sources such as user fees, lotteries, and philanthropic contributions.7 Pinker and Payne believe that social and political history is a series of experiments in searching for solutions to the problem of violence. No society can solve this problem by eliminating violence completely, because the tendency to violence is too deeply rooted in human nature and the human condition, which create tragic conflicts of interest between individuals and groups that motivate violence. But violence can be contained and managed, and the different kinds of social order can be distinguished by how they do that and by how well they do it. From this point of view, we can distinguish three broad forms of social order: the foraging order of hunter-gatherers, the agrarian order of states

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based on agricultural production, and the open-access societies that have arisen only in the last few centuries.8 In the foraging order, social norms are enforced by vengeance and vigilante justice, so that violence is checked by retaliation. But in the absence of impartial judges and formal law, foraging societies tend to fall into a violent state of nature caught in vicious cycles of feuding and raiding. Hobbes and Locke saw the need for pacifying this conflict through laws and government that came with the establishment of agricultural communities and the invention of writing. But Locke also saw the tendency to despotic violence in agrarian states and thus the need for limiting the powers of government and protecting liberty from abusive governmental power. Locke pointed to the open-access society that began to emerge in England through the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The fully open-access order has been manifested in modern liberal capitalist republics that constrain and manage conflict through free competition, voluntary cooperation, and limited government. An open polity provides free access to political organizations; an open economy provides free access to economic organizations; and an open society provides free access to ideas and culture. Pinker and Payne suggest that as liberal capitalist republicanism has spread around the world, and as the liberal regimes are bound together in global networks of open political, economic, and cultural exchange, violence has been reduced to the lowest levels in human history. This liberal success in constraining and managing violence promotes the political good of liberty, the economic good of prosperity, and the cultural goods of moral and intellectual excellence.9 This argument provokes many questions. We can begin by asking whether Pinker is right about the violence of hunter-gatherer societies.

1. Were prehistoric human foragers ignoble savages with a naturally evolved propensity for war? As we have seen, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau recognized that human beings originally lived as nomadic bands of foraging hunter-gatherers without any formal laws or governments. But as we have also seen, there has been disagreement over whether this original state of nature was peaceful or violent. Hobbes thought the state of nature was a state of war. Locke thought the state of nature was a state of peace, but he also thought it tended to fall into a state of war. Rousseau thought the state of nature was an enduring state of peace. Over the past two centuries, social scientists have debated this issue—some taking the Rousseauean position that our earliest human ancestors were peaceful noble savages and others taking the Hobbesian position that these ancestors were warlike ignoble savages. For Hobbes, war is rooted in human nature. For Rousseau, war is a late cultural invention.

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Pinker thinks the evidence gathered by anthropologists, archaeologists, and evolutionary psychologists studying the evolutionary history of hunter-gatherer societies now supports Hobbes against Rousseau. Is he right? Some of Pinker’s critics think not. Here is a case where a great debate in political philosophy can be clarified, or perhaps even resolved, through empirical scientific research. On the one side, we have scientists defending the Hobbesian position on the state of nature, which includes Pinker as well Richard Wrangham (a biological anthropologist) and Azar Gat (a political scientist).10 On the other side, we have those defending the Rousseauean position, which includes the cultural anthropologists Marshall Sahlins, Douglas Fry, and Brian Ferguson.11 Since our ancient prehistoric foraging ancestors lived long before the invention of writing, which occurred first in Mesopotamia around 3,500 BC, we have no written records of how they lived. So to reconstruct the evolution of their social behavior, we must rely on inferences from indirect evidence. In doing this, we can employ three lines of reasoning. First, we can study archaeological evidence, such as gravesites and skeletons that might show evidence of violent death. Second, we can study the ethnographic reports about the nomadic foragers that have survived in the modern world, if we can assume that their way of life is similar to that of our prehistoric ancestors. Third, we can study those primates—particularly, chimpanzees and bonobos—that are our closest living evolutionary relatives, with the thought that their social behavior might be similar to that of our earliest common ancestors. The Rousseauean scientists claim that all three kinds of research— archaeological evidence, the ethnographic analogy, and the primate analogy—indicate that our prehistoric foraging ancestors were largely peaceful, and therefore war cannot be a natural evolutionary adaptation but must be a purely cultural invention that arose when our ancestors settled into agricultural societies and came under the rule of bureaucratic states. Pinker summarizes much of his evidence for the high level of deaths in warfare among our foraging ancestors in Figure 2-2 of Better Angels (49). He provides bar graphs of the percentage of deaths in warfare for 21 prehistoric archaeological sites, 8 hunter-gatherer societies, 10 hunter-horticulturalists and tribal groups, and some modern states. For the prehistoric sites, the average is 15 percent. For the hunter-gatherer societies, the average is 14 percent. For the pre-state societies that mix hunting, gathering, and horticulture, the average is 24.5 percent. The average for states ranges somewhere between 1 and 3 percent. Clearly, Pinker concludes, this shows that our ancient ancestors must have been violent and warlike, and that the modern establishment of states has brought declining violence. Pinker’s critics have pointed out, however, that if one checks the sources for his data, one can see that Pinker has distorted the evidence in ways that make it look far more supportive of his argument than it really is.12 The oldest archaeological site on Pinker’s chart has zero war deaths. At three of

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these archaeological sites, there is evidence of only one violent death. But when a site has three skeletons, and one of the three shows signs of violent death, Pinker presents this as a 33 percent rate of deaths in warfare, which is a biased presentation of the evidence to favor Pinker’s argument. Pinker’s critics have also pointed out that his 8 cases of hunter-gatherer societies that he uses for his Figure 2-2 are a tiny sample, and they are not necessarily representative of all the hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied. Moreover, even the 8 cases that he uses are presented in a biased way. For example, Pinker presents the Ache of Paraguay as having 30 percent of their deaths due to war, and the Hiwi of Venezuela-Colombia as having 20 percent. But what Pinker doesn’t tell his readers is that most of these violent deaths among the Ache and the Hiwi were indigenous people killed by frontiersmen, which is hardly evidence for the indigenous people being warlike. In his Figure 2-2, Pinker includes the Yanomami, an Amazonian people in the Venezuela/Brazil border region, as hunter-horticulturalists who have shown some of the highest rates of violent deaths in war ever known to anthropologists. He also cites the work of Napoleon Chagnon, who reported that Yanomami men who had killed other men had higher reproductive success (more wives and more children) than men who had never killed, and this could favor the evolution of a genetic propensity to kill (612). But Pinker does not mention that some anthropologists (like Brian Ferguson) have disputed Chagnon’s research by arguing that the warfare of the Yanomami is not a naturally evolved trait but a cultural response to the influence of Westerners and Western goods (particularly steel tools).13 In challenging Pinker, Douglas Fry has reported that a systematic survey of nomadic forager-band societies shows that most lethal violence arises from personal disputes rather than from coalitionary conflicts between groups that we could identify as war. Therefore, most of the violent killing should be classified as homicide or feuding and not as war.14 Fry’s conclusion is that war was not a natural adaptation for our huntinggathering ancestors, but rather that war arose first as a cultural invention of the bureaucratic states that appeared first a few thousand years ago after human beings had settled into agricultural communities. Fry agrees with Pinker that over the past few centuries, all kinds of violence have declined because of the cultural institutions and norms that have been devised to promote peace. But while Pinker sees a steady decline in violence that began when our human ancestors turned away from the violence of foraging societies and accepted the peacemaking institutions of Hobbesian government, Fry sees a pattern shaped like the letter n—first, very low levels of violence among our nomadic foraging ancestors, followed by very high levels of violence during the history of bureaucratic states, which has only recently been followed by declining violence. Turning to the comparison with other primates, Pinker relies on the work of Jane Goodall and Richard Wrangham, who have studied chimpan-

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zees in Africa (36–40). In the 1960s, Goodall reported that the chimpanzees she was studying in the Gombe National Forest in Tanzania were completely peaceful. But then in the 1970s, she shocked the world with her reports of brutal chimp warfare in which one chimpanzee community was eventually annihilated by another. The Kasekela Community of chimpanzees annexed the territory of the Kahama Community. Now, there are three communities in Gombe—the Mitumba Community in the north, the Kalande Community in the south, and the Kasekela Community in the middle. Adult male chimpanzees led by alpha males patrol the borders and look for isolated members of other groups who can be attacked and even killed.15 Goodall suggested that chimpanzee warfare showed the primate precursors of human warfare. Wrangham has elaborated the argument that human beings are descended from a common ancestor shared with chimpanzees, which shows the deep evolutionary roots of human warfare as an evolutionary adaptation.16 Although critics of Wrangham’s theory argue that chimpanzee warfare arises only as a non-adaptive result of human impact, a comprehensive study of all the chimpanzee communities studied in Africa shows that lethal aggression is better explained as an adaptive strategy than as a consequence of human impacts.17 Pinker agrees with this. While bonobos are closely related to chimpanzees, bonobos differ in that they have never been observed to engage in the sort of lethal raiding that chimpanzees display. Since human beings are as closely related to the peaceful bonobos as to the warlike chimps, it is possible that human beings were descended from an animal more like bonobos rather than chimps. Pinker rejects this possibility, but some of the scientists who have studied bonobos think they show us the evolutionary roots of primate peace.18 In response to Fry and other critics, Pinker and Wrangham can identify four weaknesses in the reasoning of those who argue that war is a purely cultural invention and not a natural evolutionary adaptation for human beings.19 The first weakness is that Fry fails to distinguish “simple warfare” and “complex warfare,” and then he assumes that hunter-gatherer societies show no warfare if they don’t show complex forms of warfare. “Simple” warfare, found in small societies without formal political hierarchies, consists mostly in raiding and feuding without lethal battles between organized opponents. “Complex” warfare is found in larger societies with formal political hierarchies, where lethal battles are fought by soldiers under the command of leaders. Chimpanzees and some other animals show “simple” but not “complex” warfare. When Fry finds little evidence of “complex” warfare among hunter-gatherers, he falsely concludes that there is no warfare at all. So he sees a record of raiding and feuding among hunter-gatherers but refuses to recognize this as war. A second weakness is that Fry fails to identify the important criteria for determining whether a hunter-gatherer society provides the best model of prehistoric behavior. A crucial criterion for Wrangham is whether a hunting-gathering society was constrained by neighboring farming societ-

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ies. By the time most of these recent hunting-gathering societies were studied, they were bordered by farming societies that could dominate them politically and militarily, and so if the hunter-gatherers had no record of warfare, this could easily be explained as coming from a wise calculation that war was futile. If one is looking for situations comparable to those faced by our original hunter-gatherer ancestors, one would need to look only at hunter-gatherer societies with neighboring societies of hunter-gatherers. The anthropological record shows only a few cases like this, including societies in Alaska, Tasmania, Australia, the Andaman Islands, New Guinea, and Tierra del Fuego. If one surveys the record for these societies, one can see a universal pattern of warfare. A third weakness in Fry’s reasoning is his assumption that proof of hunter-gatherer warfare would require that a high proportion of violent deaths should come from war. But that does not follow if one agrees with Thomas Hobbes: “For Warre, consisteth not in Battel only, or in the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by Battel is sufficiently known.”20 Even when hunter-gatherer societies have long periods without high death rates from war, there can still be a perpetual state of hostility and readiness to go to war. A final weakness in Fry’s position is his assumption that affirming the evolutionary roots of war is affirming that war is inevitable and ineradicable, and therefore those (like himself) who deny the evolutionary roots of war are thereby promoting peace. This is not true, because explaining the evolutionary propensity to war in human nature does not affirm this as a necessity that cannot be changed. Understanding war as a natural propensity can be a precondition for understanding how best to promote peace. For Pinker and Wrangham, who argue for primitive warfare as an evolutionary adaptation, this helps us to understand how to promote the modern decline in violence. If Pinker and Wrangham are right in their Darwinian theory of war and violence, then human beings share with chimpanzees a naturally evolved propensity to war and violence. Male chimpanzees are naturally inclined to form coalitions to patrol the borders of their territory and to launch raids into the territories of other chimpanzee communities. If the raiders find one or a few individuals of the other community, the raiders will viciously attack and sometimes kill their victims. But they will do this only when the raiders clearly outnumber their opponents, and the raiders can attack without risking injury to themselves. If the raiders face a roughly equal number of opponents, then both sides will engage in loud bluffing displays, but neither will attack the other. There thus seems to be a cost-benefit calculation underlying their behavior, and they will fight only when the likely benefits outweigh the likely costs. The benefits come when an aggressive chimpanzee group can expand its territory and thus gain greater access to food and mates. The costs come from being injured or killed. Natural selection would favor such behavior insofar as it enhances the survival and reproductive success of a chimpanzee group.

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Similarly, in human hunter-gatherer societies, young males join raiding parties that launch surprise attacks on other societies, when the attackers can kill without risk to themselves. But if the attackers face an equally strong group of opponents, capable of defending themselves, then the two groups engage in bluffing displays before retreating. Like the chimpanzees, human warriors fight only when the benefits of survival and reproductive success outweigh the costs of injuring themselves. Huntergatherers are not naturally inclined to die in war for the good of their group. Willingness to die in war requires the cultural indoctrination and coercive institutions of a military hierarchy of leadership, which arose only with the establishment of bureaucratic states. In arguing this position, Pinker and Wrangham disagree with those Darwinian theorists who contend that human hunter-gatherers evolved through a process of group selection favoring parochial altruism, such that individuals were willing to risk death for their groups in competition with other groups, and that this is a uniquely human trait not found among chimpanzees.21 If Pinker and Wrangham are right about the natural propensity to lethal fighting being based on an evolutionary calculus of costs and benefits, then violence can be reduced by signals in the social environment that identify the costs of violence as greater than the benefits. As Azar Gat says, war is “both innate and optional.”22 That allows for the cultural evolution of norms and institutions that channel human behavior towards peaceful cooperation and away from violent conflict, and this can be done without trying to change human nature. Promoting the cultural evolution of such norms and institutions is the aim of classical liberalism in securing a social order of peaceful coexistence and nonviolence. President Barack Obama seemed to agree with Pinker and Wrangham in his Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech in 2009.23 He had to justify the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Commander-in-Chief who was leading his country in two major wars. He argued that war is so deeply rooted in human nature and the human condition that it can never be completely abolished. He declared: “War, in one form or another, appeared with the first man.” And yet, explaining how we can and should strive for peace, he quoted from President John Kennedy: “Let us focus on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.” Obama then repeated that last phrase—“a gradual evolution of human institutions”—as the theme for his speech. Without trying to change human nature, he explained, we can promote peace through institutional evolution—through culturally evolved norms of just war, human rights, global commerce, and international sanctions for punishing unjustified violence. He thus summarized the argument of Pinker that while war and violence express the “inner demons of our nature,” we can nevertheless move towards a life of peaceful coexistence as long as our cultural environment

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strengthens the “better angels of our nature.” But is Pinker right in claiming that history has in fact been moving in this direction?

2. Does history show declining violence? Of course not, many of Pinker’s critics complain, because isn’t it obvious that the twentieth century was the bloodiest century in all of human history? Pinker admits that some of the greatest atrocities in history occurred in the twentieth century. Why isn’t this enough to refute Pinker’s argument for a historical trend of declining violence? In Better Angels, Pinker has a table of history’s greatest atrocities as taken from Matthew White’s list of “(Possibly) The Twenty (or so) Worst Things People Have Done to Each Other” (195). White identifies himself as an “atrocitologist” who has been compiling records of the greatest atrocities in human history based on his estimates of violent deaths drawn from historical sources. This work has been published as a book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities, with a foreword by Pinker.24 In Pinker’s table, he says that he is following White in ranking the 21 worst atrocities. Number 1 is the Second World War, with a death toll of 55 million. Number 2 is Mao Zedong, who was responsible for a death toll of 40 million (mostly through a government-caused famine). Number 3 is the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century, with a death toll of 40 million. Number 4 is the An Lushan Revolt in China in the eighth century, with a death toll of 36 million. This seems to confirm the common belief that the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history, especially when one notices that 5 of the top 21 atrocities were during that century. This seems to refute Pinker’s theory of a historical trend of declining violence. In fact, White concludes his book by identifying the bloody events of the first half of the twentieth century as the Hemoclysm (Greek for “blood flood”), which he sees as a series of interconnected events stretching from the First World War to the deaths of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, who were the three individuals responsible for most of the violence during this period. The collective death toll here would be 150 million, which makes it the true Number-1 atrocity of human history.25 If Pinker is to save his theory of declining violence, he must reinterpret White’s account of the historical record of violence culminating in the Hemoclysm of the twentieth century. Pinker does this with five arguments. Pinker’s first argument is that we must adjust White’s numbers to overcome the illusion that the twentieth century was much bloodier than past centuries. Pinker adjusts the estimated numbers of violent deaths, and he also asks us to look at the relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the global population at each point in history. Once these adjustments are made, Pinker can conclude that “the worst atrocity of all time

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was the An Lushan Revolt and Civil War, an eight-year rebellion during China’s Tang Dynasty that, according to censuses, resulted in the loss of two-thirds of the empire’s population, a sixth of the world’s population at the time” (194). In an endnote to this sentence, Pinker writes: “An Lushan Revolt. White notes that the figure is controversial. Some historians attribute it to migration or the breakdown of the census; others treat it as credible, because subsistence farmers would have been highly vulnerable to a disruption of irrigation infrastructure” (707, n. 13). A reader who notices this endnote might become curious about what White has said about these controversial calculations concerning the deaths caused by the An Lushan Rebellion. A reader who looks at White’s book will notice that he revises the estimates of violent deaths—moving from 36 million to 26 million to a final estimate of 13 million. With the lower estimate, the An Lushan Rebellion ranks Number 13 on the list of atrocities, not Number 4 as Pinker has it, because Pinker accepts the highest estimate of 36 million.26 Historians know that the Chinese census recorded a population of 52,880,488 in the year 754; and then after ten years of civil war, the census of 764 recorded a population of 16,900,000. This would suggest that 36 million people died in the war, which would be two-thirds of the entire population of China. Pinker accepts these numbers, which allows him to rank the An Lushan Rebellion as Number 4 on the list of greatest atrocities. But White indicates that most historians doubt the accuracy of these numbers, because they suspect that the chaos created by the war had impeded the ability of the Chinese census takers to find every taxpayer. Not only does Pinker depart from White in accepting the 36 million estimate of violent deaths, Pinker also insists that death tolls should be adjusted as a proportion of the global population, because this allows us to judge the relative risk of being killed at different points in history. The 55 million deaths in World War II is higher than the 36 million in the An Lushan Revolt, but the world population at the middle of the twentieth century was much larger than that in the eighth century. So if 36 million violent deaths was a sixth of the world’s population in the eighth century, this would be the equivalent of 429 million violent deaths in the middle of the twentieth century—which raises the An Lushan Revolt to Number 1 on Pinker’s list of greatest atrocities and causes World War II to drop to Number 9 on the list. White does not adjust the ranking in this way. Some of Pinker’s critics have objected that he is distorting the numbers in a biased way. Pinker’s second argument for why the Hemoclysm of the twentieth century does not refute his theory of declining violence is that the causes of war are so contingent that we can have something like World War II erupt by chance without altering the otherwise declining trend of violence. We can thus see World War II, Pinker says, as “an isolated peak in a declining sawtooth—the last gasp in a long slide of major war into historical obsolescence” (192). If wars start and stop at random, then the accidents

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of history and the peculiarities of particular individuals can result in cataclysmic spasms of violence (200–22). In 1999, there was a lot of discussion about who should be considered the most important person of the twentieth century. White’s answer was Gavrilo Princip. And who was he? He was the 19-year-old Serbian terrorist who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary, which was the spark that ignited World War I. This was a lucky accident for Princip. If the Archduke’s driver had not made a wrong turn in Sarajevo, the assassination would not have happened, and it’s also likely that World War I would not have happened—and it would not have set off the series of events leading to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, World War II, and the Cold War (207–10, 262–63). In the eighty-year-long Hemoclysm sparked by Princip’s bullets, three individuals—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao—were responsible for most of the violent deaths. White estimates that the communist regimes were responsible for 70 million deaths, which would justify ranking communism as the Number-1 atrocity—even greater than World War Two—except that it’s hard to think of the whole communist movement as one event.27 If one agrees with this, then one could say that most of the violence of the twentieth century has been caused by illiberal ideology, namely, Nazism and communism. This supports Pinker’s third argument for why the violence of the Hemoclysm of the twentieth century does not deny his theory of declining violence. The historical trend towards decreasing violence and increasing liberty depends on the spreading influence of classical liberal culture based on the principle that violence is never justified except in defense against violence. That illiberal regimes have been the primary sources of violence in the twentieth century confirms Pinker’s argument. Because of the contingency of history, we can never be sure that illiberal leaders will not arise in the future and cause great disasters. Someday, we might see another Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot. So Pinker must concede that there is no inevitability in the historical trend towards declining violence, because it could be reversed by illiberal turns (xxi, 361–77, 480). But insofar as classical liberal institutions and norms spread around the world, they can increase the odds in favor of declining violence, which is what has happened since World War II. Pinker’s fourth argument for why the Hemoclysm of the first half of the twentieth century does not refute his view of history is that World War II was followed by the Long Peace and the New Peace. The Long Peace is the term adopted by some historians to denote the fact that since World War II, the greatest military powers of Europe have not directly fought any wars with one another. This is the longest period in modern history in which the Great Powers have not fought one another. During the Cold War, it was assumed by many people that World War III was inevitable. But it never occurred, although there were many indirect conflicts and bloody wars (like the Korean War and the War in Vietnam) between the Great

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Powers. And since the end of the Cold War in 1989, there has been a New Peace, as Pinker calls it, and an even greater decline in military violence. Some of Pinker’s critics have ridiculed this claim. John Gray listed nineteen wars fought since World War II as showing that Pinker was obviously wrong in asserting that we live in an era of peace.28 But Pinker not only mentions these wars, he also offers evidence that they conform to the pattern of declining violence. For example, he writes about the Americanled wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as showing that, of course, the United States is still willing to fight major wars. His point, however, is that there has been a drastic decline in the American tolerance of military deaths. There were 300,000 American combat casualties in World War II and 58,000 in the Vietnam War. But when American casualties in the Iraq war reached 4,000, there was a popular demand for withdrawal from that war. So Pinker concludes that there has been a steep decline in the level of military violence that Americans will accept (266–67). And it’s not just violence in war that has declined, according to Pinker, but all kinds of violence. This is his fifth argument for why the bloodiness of the twentieth century should not obscure our view of the general historical trend towards less violence. Rates of homicide and violent crime generally have declined (60–128). The use of judicial torture has declined as liberal regimes have prohibited “cruel and unusual punishments” (144– 58). Slavery has declined (153–58). Political violence, such as rioting and revolutions, has declined (158–61). Violence against racial minorities has declined (382–94). Violence against women, such as rape, has declined (394–415). Violence against children has declined (415–47). Violence against homosexuals has declined (447–54). Violence against animals has declined (454–74). And capital punishment has declined (149–53). Many countries have totally abolished capital punishment. And even in those countries where there is some capital punishment, the number of capital crimes has been drastically reduced. In 1822, England had 222 capital offenses. By 1861, this was reduced to 4. In earlier times, people could be legally executed for theft, homosexuality, adultery, burglary, horse theft, blasphemy, heresy, and many other crimes. Now, in the United States, some states have no capital punishment; and those states that do espouse capital punishment have only a few capital crimes—murder, espionage, treason, and terrorism. Pinker indicates, however, that this trend towards declining violence has not yet been fully extended to the whole world. In those parts of the world where the institutions and norms of Western liberal humanism have not yet been established—including some of the Islamic world where religious ideology supports violence to enforce moral and religious values, and in some of the communist world (such as North Korea) where political ideology supports the violent suppression of individual liberty—one does not see this decline in violence. But in making this claim, is Pinker showing his unfair bias as an atheistic and anti-communist liberal? Or should

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we agree with him that both religious ideology and communist ideology foster the use of violence to enforce ideological visions of perfection?

3. Does religious ideology promote violence? The cover of Pinker’s Better Angels has a reproduction of Rembrandt’s painting of “The Angel Stopping Abraham from Sacrificing Isaac to God,” which is based on the story of Abraham’s faith being tested by God’s command to sacrifice his son.29 This image captures much of the argument of Pinker’s book. Isaac is bound on top of a stack of wood. One of Abraham’s hands forcefully holds down Isaac’s head. The other hand has held a knife and is thrusting towards Isaac’s chest. But the angel has grabbed his wrist, so that the knife falls from his hand. (Oddly, the book jacket reproduction is actually a mirror image of the original painting, so that Abraham is stabbing with his left hand rather than his right hand.) The painting raises disturbing questions about violence and religion. Abraham is vigorously attempting to execute God’s command to murder Isaac, which shows his faithful obedience to God. But the angel’s intervention suggests that God knows that this is wrong. If God knows it’s wrong, why did He command it? Are we being taught by the Bible that there is no natural standard of right and wrong, because whatever God commands is right, even when he commands the murder of an innocent child? Should we infer that, as Kierkegaard argued, this story shows that total faith requires a “suspension of the ethical”?30 From Pinker’s perspective, what this really shows is the tension between the “better angels of our nature”—as Abraham Lincoln called them in his First Inaugural Address—that favor peaceful cooperation and the “inner demons of our nature” that move us to violent behavior. The tension is not within God’s will, but within human nature. Pinker worries that when religious believers think they are executing God’s will, this can release the inner demons that lead to violence. For Pinker, religion belongs to one of the five inner demons—ideology, which is “a shared belief system, usually involving a vision of utopia, that justifies unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good” (xxv). Nazism, fascism, communism, and religion are all ideologies in Pinker’s sense, and ideologies have driven some of the greatest atrocities (556–70). Ideological violence is a means to an end, and the end is a glorious vision of infinite good, which true believers feel justifies them in killing those thought to be the evil enemies of that infinite good. Here one can see Pinker’s atheistic scorn for religious belief, and particularly for biblical religion, which runs throughout his book. Pinker agrees with White, who calculates that the 30 deadliest religious killings in history add up to over sixty million deaths—including, for example, seven and a half million in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), when Catholics and Protestants fought for control of Germany; three million in the French

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Wars of Religion (1562–1598), when French Catholics and Protestants fought; three million in the Crusades (1095–1291), when Christians and Muslims fought for control of the Holy Land; one million in the Albigensian Crusade (1208–1249), when Catholics fought to exterminate the Cathar heresy in southern France; and perhaps sixty thousand killed in witch hunts (1400–1800). White also calculates that the death toll for all of the specifically enumerated mass killings in the Bible is 1,167,000.31 Pinker expresses his disgust for the brutal violence of the Bible: The Bible depicts a world that, seen through modern eyes, is staggering in its savagery. People enslave, rape, and murder members of their immediate families. Warlords slaughter civilians indiscriminately, including the children. Women are bought, sold, and plundered like sex toys. And Yahweh tortures and massacres people by the hundreds of thousands for trivial disobedience or for no reason at all. (10)

Even if this is true for the Old Testament, isn’t the New Testament more peaceful in its teachings? Pinker admits that early Christianity was a pacifist movement before Constantine turned Christianity into a militant political movement (162). Does this indicate that originally Christianity was nonviolent and tolerant? And if so, does this suggest the possibility that New Testament Christianity could be interpreted as sustaining a classical liberal teaching of religious liberty and peaceful coexistence? This is perhaps implied in Pinker’s observation that Jews and Christians today, in modern liberal cultures, find ways to overlook the violence of the Hebrew Bible and to interpret the Bible as promoting modern liberal tolerance and peace (11–12). One can see that, for example, in the history of the Catholic Church. As we have seen in our chapter on Thomas Aquinas, he could justify religious violence. He said that God’s commanding Abraham to kill his innocent son was not wrong, because God’s command can never be wrong.32 But he also suggested there might be a contradiction here between natural reason and supernatural revelation: “Abraham did not sin in being willing to slay his innocent son, because he obeyed God, although considered in itself it was contrary to right human reason.”33 Thomas justified the violent persecution of the Inquisition and the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars by insisting that any Christian who disagrees with even one article of faith as set down by the authority of the Catholic Church can be rightly “exterminated from the world by death.”34 But he also suggested that the coercive enforcement of human law should be limited to preventing and punishing conduct that harms others, such as murder and theft.35 And thus he pointed to the central principle of liberal jurisprudence as stated by John Stuart Mill that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”36 All of liberalism can be founded on this “harm principle.”37 In recent decades, Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have asked forgiveness for the faults of the Catholic Church in promoting religious vio-

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lence and persecution, and this is the first time in the history of the Church that there has been such a papal admission of guilt in the use of violence. These popes have declared that the true teaching of the New Testament supports religious liberty and peaceful toleration in a pluralist society, and that the religious violence and theocratic politics of the Old Testament must be rejected by Christians.38 Does this confirm Pinker’s argument about the power of the evolutionary historical forces of liberalism in pushing for declining violence, including violence motivated by religious ideology? If so, could this also work to reduce violence motivated by political ideologies like communism? Or should we worry more about the violence promoted by capitalist ideology?

4. Is capitalist ideology more likely than communist ideology to promote violence? If political ideology is one of the inner demons of our nature leading to violence, as Pinker argues, then we must ask whether some political ideologies are more prone to violence than others. Pinker agrees with White’s calculation that seventeen communist regimes of the twentieth century were responsible for a rough total of over seventy million violent deaths. White concludes: If history had seen only one or two nasty people’s republics amid a few decent ones, I might accept that a few bad apples gave the whole movement a bad name, but when death and destruction have followed every single Communist regime ever established, there would seem to be a flaw somewhere in the system.39

In contrast to communism, Pinker argues, capitalism promotes peace. In fact, some political scientists think that the decline in war and violence that began in the nineteenth century should be called a “capitalist peace,” because global capitalism rests on liberal norms and institutions of peaceful cooperation and free trade (284–90). But in one of the most extensive critiques of Pinker’s book, Edward Herman and David Peterson have contended that Pinker has an ideological bias in favor of capitalism and against communism, because he exaggerates the violence associated with the communist regimes and is blind to the violence of capitalism.40 An example of Pinker’s bias against communism, Herman and Peterson claim, is his acceptance of White’s assertion that Mao Zedong was responsible for one of the greatest atrocities in world history—the Great Famine during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1961). Pinker says that “Mao masterminded . . . a famine that killed between 20 million and 30 million people” (331). Against this, Herman and Peterson declare: Pinker misrepresents the truths at a number of levels in dealing with the Chinese starvation episode. He avoids the need to reconcile alleg-

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edly deliberate starvation deaths with a prior and continuous Chinese state policy of helping the masses by simply not discussing the subject. He ignores the evidence that policy failure and ignorance rather than murderous intent was the source of those deaths. He fails to mention the rise in mortality rates under the post-Mao new capitalist order.41

In support of this assessment, they cite the explanation of the Great Famine provided by Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen. Herman and Peterson are silent, however, about the judgment of Dreze and Sen that after 1979 “there is little doubt that the Chinese economy has surged ahead in response to market incentives, and the agricultural sector has had—at long last—a proper ‘leap forward.’”42 They are also silent about the growing evidence in recent years as to the brutality of the Great Famine and Mao’s responsibility for it. Based on archival material of the Chinese Communist Party that has only recently been opened to study, Frank Dikotter has concluded that at least 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962, and “the widespread view that these deaths were the unintended consequences of half-baked and poorly executed economic programs” is wrong. He explains: By a rough approximation 6 to 8 per cent of the victims were tortured to death or summarily killed—amounting to at least 2.5 million people. Other victims were deliberately deprived of food and starved to death. . . . People were killed selectively because they were rich, because they dragged their feet, because they spoke out or simply because they were not liked.43

Furthermore, Dikotter observes that Mao was directly responsible for the Great Leap Forward that created the Great Famine: “He had to work hard to push through his vision, bargaining, cajoling, goading, occasionally tormenting or persecuting colleagues.” Dikotter also concludes that “the catastrophe unleashed at the time stands as a reminder of how profoundly misplaced is the idea of state planning as an antidote to chaos.”44 This is a critical issue for Pinker’s argument, because he claims that classical liberal thought promotes declining violence, and that most of the atrocious violence of the twentieth century was due to the illiberal regimes led by three individuals—Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Herman and Peterson complain, however, that Pinker ignores the “structural violence” built into the system of liberal capitalism, which allows the rich ruling classes to exploit the labor of the working classes. This violent exploitation occurs not only within each capitalist nation but also through the Western capitalist nations that conquer poor nations in imperialistic wars. Herman and Peterson criticize Pinker for refusing to recognize that Western capitalist states wage imperial wars of conquest. They quote him as saying that not only do “democracies avoid disputes with each other,” but they “tend to stay out of disputes across the board,” which is called the “Democratic Peace” (283). They remark: “This will surely

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come as a surprise to the many victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings and invasions since 1945. For Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or more of the great democracies counts as real war or confutes the ‘Democratic Peace,’ no matter how many people die.”45 They also quote Pinker as saying, “Among respectable countries, conquest is no longer a thinkable option. A politician in a democracy who suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter” (260). They respond: This is an extremely silly assertion. Presumably, when George Bush and Tony Blair sent U.S. and British forces to attack Iraq in 2003, ousted its government, and replaced it with one operating under laws drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority, this did not count as “conquest,” as these leaders never stated that they launched the war to “conquer” Iraq.46

Herman and Peterson don’t indicate to their readers that Pinker’s comments about the “Democratic Peace” are part of his summary of the research of Bruce Russett and John Oneal,47 who used the statistical technique of multiple logistic regression to analyze more than 2,300 militarized interstate disputes between 1816 and 2001. They concluded, as Pinker puts it, “not that democracies never go to war . . . , but that they go to war less often than nondemocracies, all else being equal” (281). Herman and Peterson don’t point out any mistakes in the research of Russett and Oneal. Indicating that democracies sometimes do fight wars does not refute the claim that they go to war less often than regimes that are not democratic. Pinker’s comment that “conquest is no longer a thinkable option” comes as part of his summary of Mark Zacher’s research, who shows that since World War II, there has been an international norm favoring the freezing of national borders.48 As compared with wars prior to the end of World War II, the percentage of territorial wars that has resulted in a redistribution of territory has dropped dramatically. Herman and Peterson don’t point out any mistakes in Zacher’s research. Instead, they cite the example of the invasion of Iraq by U.S. and British forces in 2003 as a conquest of that country. But since the U.S. and British forces have withdrawn from Iraq, and there has been no change in the national borders of Iraq, it’s not clear how this refutes Zacher’s argument. But what should we say about the claim of Herman and Peterson that capitalism is founded on the “structural violence” which the rich use to exploit the poor? The rich capitalist uses force against his workers, forcing them to accept his terms of employment. Don’t we need a socialist government to use force to restrain the force exercised by the capitalist, and thus protect the workers from the violence of their employers? In response to this argument for the socialist use of force against capitalism, the classical liberal Auberon Herbert has distinguished indirect force from direct force.49 The socialist is not really reducing force, Herbert

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claims, because he is using direct force in the attempt to reduce indirect force. Indirect force requires consent, while direct force does not. So, for example, when employers and employees are negotiating wages and the terms of employment, both sides are subject to indirect force by the other side, because employees can be threatened with loss of their jobs, and employers with the loss of their best employees. Similarly, friends and lovers can use indirect force in making demands on one another as conditions for their love or friendship. In general, we all need to negotiate for the cooperation of others who can indirectly force us to consent to their terms for cooperation. Indirect force can be used in unfair ways to harm people, and we can try to use moral persuasion to minimize the abuse of such unfairness. But indirect force is a condition of life that can never be eliminated totally in a free society. By contrast, we can strive to eliminate direct force or violence from social life. In a capitalist society, Herbert argues, socialists can form socialist communities, based on sharing everything without private property, as long as membership in those communities is voluntary. But in a socialist society, people are forced to be socialists against their will. There is much less direct force or violence in a capitalist society than in a socialist society. And thus, the classical liberals believe, decreasing violence coincides with increasing liberty. But when people are free to live as they choose, free from violent attacks, as long as they do not initiate violence against others, what kind of life will they choose to live? Will they live noble lives of excellence and exaltation or base lives of mediocrity and vulgarity?

5. Does the liberal peace require a world of flat souls without manly virtues? Pinker’s history of declining violence seems to be a history of declining manliness. As an expression of their evolved human nature, men tend to be more violent and more inclined to fight for dominance than are women (23–30, 63–64, 394–415, 515–29, 684–89). A pervasive theme of Pinker’s book is that violence comes from men fighting over matters of honor, and therefore the historical trend towards declining violence requires a turn away from the culture of manly honor and a turn towards feminine values. In the past, wars were fought as contests of honor. But now we know that Shakespeare’s Falstaff was right about honor—it’s only a word, or a social construction, as we would say today (247). War is not glorious and exciting. It’s stupid and cruel. We need to puncture the swollen egos of men who fight over who is most important. After all, it’s only the silly games of little boys. If we get rid of that macho striving for honor and glory, then we can see that moral progress is measured, as Pinker declares on the last

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page of his book, by our success in allowing “a greater and greater proportion of humanity to live in peace and die of natural causes” (696). But can we be satisfied by a world of peace without honor, a world of feminine values without masculine virtues, a world of bourgeois comfort without manly courage? Are we willing to live in the world of Nietzsche’s “last man,” the man who lives for petty pleasures, and who most of all doesn’t want anyone to hurt him? In Pinker’s long book, he raises such questions in only one paragraph, and he quickly dismisses them. He is speaking about the historical trend towards a feminized culture favoring peace over violence: Feminization need not consist of women literally wielding more power in decisions on whether to go to war. It can also consist in a society moving away from a culture of manly honor, with its approval of violent retaliation for insults, toughening of boys through physical punishment, and veneration of martial glory. This has been the trend in the democracies of Europe and the developed world and in the bluer states of America. Several conservative scholars have ruefully suggested to me that the modern West has been diminished by the loss of virtues like bravery and valor and the ascendancy of materialism, frivolity, decadence, and effeminacy. Now, I have been assuming that violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence, but these men are correct that this is a value judgment, and that no logical argument inherently favors peace over honor and glory. But I would think that the potential victims of all this manliness deserve a say in this discussion, and they may not agree that their lives and limbs are a price worth paying for the glorification of masculine virtues. (686–87)

Although Pinker does not identify the “conservative scholars” who worry about the decline of manly spiritedness as a flattening of the human soul, one might suspect that Harvey Mansfield—one of Pinker’s colleagues at Harvard—must be one of these people. After all, he’s the one who’s written the book Manliness, in which he worries that the liberal humanism and feminine values defended by Pinker fail to satisfy the human need for manly self-assertion.50 Mansfield thinks the biology of Plato and Aristotle rightly recognizes the complementariness of male and female virtues in human biological nature, while also recognizing that manliness can be either bad or good, so that we need a virtuous mean between too little and too much masculinity. Although Pinker fails to respond to this Mansfieldian view of manliness, there are some hints in his writing as to how the evolutionary psychology of human nature recognizes the comprehensive complementariness of male and female virtues in a way that can promote a decline in violence without a decline in true manliness. Pinker observes that the greatest human suffering from violence has been caused by the narcissistic personality of tyrants, who show the grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy characteristic of men inflated by unearned self-esteem (519–21).

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Pinker fails to point out, however, that such narcissism is different from what traditionally has been recognized as manly “greatness of soul”—the magnanimity of those men who have earned their confident self-esteem and who are contemptuous of those who derive sadistic pleasure from the suffering of innocent people. That such manly magnanimity can serve a liberal morality of protecting human life from violence is suggested by the new martial arts program of the United States Marine Corps described by Pinker. The Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP) teaches Marines “a new code of honor, the Ethical Marine Warrior.” The chant for this new code is “The Ethical Warrior is a protector of life. Whose life? Self and others. Which others? All others.” Jack Hoban, a former Marine captain and martial arts expert who helped to implement this program, wrote to Pinker: “When I first joined the Marines in the 1970s, it was ‘Kill, kill, kill.’ The probability that there would have been an honor code that trained Marines to be ‘protectors of all others—including the enemy, if possible’—would have been 0 percent” (264–66). Hoban has described this “ethical warrior training” as especially important in counterinsurgency warfare. “Our warrior ethics charge us to act differently than insurgents—more respectful of life—killing only to protect lives and when absolutely necessary.” He sees this as grounded in the principles of the Declaration of Independence: We had to go all the way back to our 1776 values for the clue. The foundation of ethical warriorship is that “all men are created equal.” This often quoted, but largely unexamined, phrase pertains to the intrinsic value of life (the life value), not to any relative value, such as culture, ethnicity, religion, or behavior. Insurgents operate as if all men are not created equal. They don’t respect the lives of those they consider nonobservant of their fanatic cultural, political, and/or religious values. And they will kill anyone—even innocent women and children—to reach their goals.51

All human beings are naturally equal in their valuing life—their life and the lives of the others they love, Hoban argues. All other values are only secondary to this primary value of life. Hobbes and Locke rightly saw this in the natural human desire for life and fear of violent death. In recognizing this, we can see this as the ground in human nature for the equal right to life. As serving this ultimate value of life, the Ethical Warrior must risk his life to protect the lives of others, even strangers, and even his enemy, if that is possible. It is hard to do this, but the Ethical Warrior will do it, because he doesn’t want to be just a killer, because he wants to be an honorable soldier with “a feeling of nobility as a warrior knight.”52 Pinker doesn’t reflect on the deeper implications of this—that the liberal humanism of declining violence might be best promoted not by denigrating manly honor, but rather by a new code of manly honor by which men can take pride in their courageous self-discipline in defending human

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life against violence. After all, if Pinker is right in declaring that violence is always a bad thing except when it prevents greater violence, doesn’t that require manly courage from those trained to use violence to prevent greater violence and thus defend life? Didn’t the signers of the Declaration of Independence indicate this in their oath at the end of the document: “we mutually pledge to each other, our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”? Some pacifists might object, however, that violence is always wrong, and that any movement against injustice should always be nonviolent. After all, doesn’t the success of the American Civil Rights Movement show how nonviolent demands for the civil rights of American blacks helped to fulfill the principles of the Declaration of Independence? And yet, we might wonder whether the Civil Rights Movement could have succeeded if the civil rights organizers had not been protected by Southern blacks with guns, who had experience in using their guns to defend themselves against violent attacks by white supremacists.53 Does this show us the deepest natural root of all human rights in the natural inclination to use violence in defense against violent attacks? Is this what John Locke meant by the “executive power of the state of nature”?

6. Can a decline in violence arise from a genetic evolution towards the bourgeois virtues through survival of the richest? If Pinker is right about the evidence of evolutionary trends towards declining violence, we might wonder whether this is evidence not just of the cultural evolution of human society, but also the biological evolution of human nature. Is it possible that human beings in some societies have become less violent because of genetically inherited propensities to peaceful behavior? And if this is associated with the norms of liberal culture and capitalist economics, does this suggest that the evolution of liberalism and capitalism depends as much on genes as on ideas? Do liberal regimes create cultural environments that favor the evolution of genetic propensities for peaceful cooperation and less violence? This is implausible if we assume that genetic evolution—as opposed to cultural evolution—is so gradual that it cannot occur in only a few centuries. Many biologists and evolutionary psychologists believe that human genetic evolution stopped sometime before modern humans migrated out of Africa some 50,000 years ago, and since then human evolutionary change has been cultural rather than genetic. Stephen Jay Gould observed, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”54 But some scientists believe that genetic evolution can be much faster than that, and that genetic evolution has actually accelerated over the past 10,000 years.55

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Beginning about 10,000 years ago, human beings went through the first of the two greatest social revolutions of human history. Some human beings—first in Mesopotamia and then later in other parts of the world— moved from foraging to farming, which allowed for permanent settlements and then eventually cities, and the emergence of states with bureaucratic governments and a formal class structure. While nomadic foragers had gathered wild plants and hunted wild animals, settled farmers cultivated domesticated plants and herded domesticated animals. This increased the productivity of human labor and allowed for growth in the human population. But as the growing population eventually overstepped the limits of natural resources such as land, the death rates would have to rise to equal birth rates, and the population would collapse. This was the harsh logic of nature’s limits on population first stated by Robert Malthus in 1798 in his Essay on the Principle of Population.56 But then at about the time that Malthus published his book, England began to show a spurt in population growth and economic productivity that surpassed the Malthusian limits that had previously governed human society. Beginning in England, the Industrial Revolution initiated an era of liberal capitalism that has brought an unprecedented growth in human population and prosperity over the past two centuries. Economist Gregory Clark explains the English Industrial Revolution as the product of a Darwinian evolutionary process of “survival of the richest.”57 From at least 1250, those people in England who were economically successful tended to rear more children to adulthood than did the poorest people. The economic success of the richer people, he argues, was due to their capitalist or bourgeois values—less violence (as measured by homicide rates), self-control reflected in delayed gratification and increasing saving (as measured by low interest rates), and a propensity to work long hours. Their children inherited their genetic propensities for moneymaking and commercial life, and so their reproductive success over hundreds of years spread their bourgeois attitudes through English society. Then, there was a sudden surge in population in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, which combined with the pervasively capitalist values of English society to bring about the explosion in economic productivity that we now know as the Industrial Revolution. Thus, the triumph of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism in the modern world was not just cultural but also genetic. Now for the first time in history, a nation had escaped the Malthusian trap, because the evolution of its bourgeois virtues in a free market economy provided the innovation and productivity for unprecedented economic growth. Some anthropologists think that genetic evolution contributed not only to the Industrial Revolution but also to the earlier revolutionary transition from foraging to farming. When foragers became farmers, they eventually came under the rule of ruling elites in bureaucratic states who punished those aggressive individuals who disrupted the social order, and thus there was an evolutionary selection for less violence.58 Perhaps, just

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as farmers bred domesticated plants and animals for traits the farmers wanted, so the rulers of agrarian states bred peasants for the traits that made them peaceful subjects. So what Pinker identifies as the Pacification Process under the rule of Leviathan governments and the Civilizing Process by which modern Europe became less violent and more cooperative could have changed the genetic nature of human beings. Pinker surveys much of the evidence for recent human evolution, and particularly evidence of biological mechanisms regulating the propensity to violence that could be subject to genetic selection. And yet he concludes that there is not enough hard evidence for recent human genetic evolution in behavioral traits. He offers various objections to Clark’s argument for “survival of the richest” as explaining the English Industrial Revolution. His most important objection is that Clark cites no evidence that the English are genetically more self-controlled and less violent than people in other societies that did not initiate an industrial revolution (611–22). Nicholas Wade and others have defended Clark against Pinker’s objections, and they have argued that there has been genetic evolution in human history favoring the behavioral traits necessary for liberal capitalist societies.59 But they must admit that there is no ultimate proof for this, because there isn’t enough knowledge of how exactly genes govern the brain and social behavior to identify the precise genetic pathways for recent human evolution.60 There is, however, at least one line of research that provides a plausible example of recent genetic evolution supporting the human cognitive abilities and behavior that are favorable to liberal social order. This is the evolutionary explanation of the unusually high levels of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews.61 The Ashkenazim are European Jews who are distinguished genetically from other Europeans, as indicated by a unique pattern of genetic diseases caused by single-gene mutations (such as Tay-Sachs). They also have the highest average IQ—110 to 115—of any group that has ever been tested, and this high intelligence is reflected in their success in intellectually demanding occupations. For example, Jews have won almost one-third of all the Nobel Prizes, although the Jews are only .2 percent of the world’s population. One explanation for this is that Ashkenazi Jews have evolved genetic adaptations for occupations that require high cognitive capacity. For many centuries, beginning in Medieval Europe, the Ashkenazim filled occupations like money lending and international commerce that were cognitively demanding. Moreover, there is evidence that the wealth earned by these occupations increased the reproductive fitness of those Jews, so that they on average reared more children to adulthood than people in other groups. And until recently, Jews were discouraged from marrying outsiders, and thus they became a reproductively isolated group in Europe. One should also notice that many of their genetic diseases seem to be associated with regions of the genome that are connected to brain func-

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tion. Even though we are ignorant of the precise genetic pathways for the evolution of high intelligence in the Ashkenazi Jews, all of these various lines of evidence add up to a plausible conclusion that over a few centuries the Ashkenazi Jews were genetically selected for high intelligence. If this is true, then the evolutionary adaptation of Jewish intelligence for the cognitive challenges of modern commercial exchange was just a stronger version of what might have been happening to other groups in England and elsewhere, who were evolving the behavioral traits conducive to success in capitalist economies and liberal societies.62 Pinker identifies such conclusions as “politically uncomfortable,” because they would imply that some human populations are not biologically adapted to life in modern liberal capitalist societies (614). Moreover, if some groups of people have a higher average IQ than others, and if this difference in intelligence is at least partially caused by natural differences in innate cognitive capacity, does this deny the principle of human equality? Does this mean that contrary to the Declaration of Independence, human beings are not created equal? Or should we say that if a free society secures the equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this will provide equal opportunity but unequal outcomes?

7. Are classical liberals more intelligent people? If reason is one of the better angels of our nature that teaches us the benefits of peaceful coexistence and cooperation, and if classical liberal culture promotes declining violence and increasing liberty, then we might wonder whether classical liberals tend to be the more intelligent people, who have the best-developed rational capacity for reasoning about the social benefits of peace and the social costs of violence. In fact, Pinker claims that we are becoming more peaceful as we become smarter, and that the smartest people are classical liberals who best understand the reasoning for minimizing violence. Pinker explains this as a “moral Flynn effect.”63 The “Flynn effect” is named after political scientist James Flynn, who is famous for pointing out that average IQ scores have been increasing dramatically over the past century. By today’s standard in the United States, a typical person of 1910 would have an IQ score that would today be at the border of mental retardation! These increases in IQ scores have come primarily in the subtests that measure abstract thinking, as in the testing of reasoning about similarities, analogies, and visual matrices. Flynn has argued that this increase in intelligence comes from the influence of modern science, so that now more and more people in the most developed societies have been educated to think about the world through the abstract categories and formulas of science. To illustrate how modern scientific education has changed the way modern people think as compared with pre-modern peoples, Flynn quotes from Alexander Luria’s interviews with Russian peasants in remote parts of

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the Soviet Union who were given similarities questions like those on IQ tests. Here’s an example that Pinker quotes: Q: All bears are white where there is always snow. In Novaya Zemlya there is always snow. What color are the bears there? A: I have seen only black bears, and I do not talk of what I have not seen. Q: But what do my words imply? A: If a person has not been there, he cannot say anything on the basis of words. If a man was 60 or 80 and had seen a white bear there and told me about it, he could be believed.

Flynn remarks: “The peasants are entirely correct. They understand the difference between analytic and synthetic propositions: pure logic cannot tell us anything about facts; only experience can. But this will do them no good on current IQ tests.” Pinker observes: “This is because current IQ tests tap abstract, formal reasoning: the ability to detach oneself from parochial knowledge of one’s own little world and explore the implications of postulates in purely hypothetical worlds” (654). As Flynn explains it, those Russian peasants were seeing the world through their “prescientific spectacles” that focus on the immediate, concrete experiences of everyday life rather than “scientific spectacles” that focus on hypothetical and abstract conceptions of the world. The sort of education that has taught modern people how to do well on IQ tests is an education in using “scientific spectacles.” Such hypothetical and abstract reasoning can support moral reasoning that expands our circle of moral concern. Flynn saw this in relating a conversation with his Irish father, who was born in 1884 and was largely unschooled: My father has so much hatred for the English that there was little room left over for prejudice against any other group. But he harbored a bit of racism against blacks, and my brother and I tried to talk him out of it. “What if you woke up one morning and discovered your skin had turned black? Would that make you any less of a human being?” He shot back, “Now that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. Who ever heard of a man’s skin turning black overnight?”

Pinker observes: “Like the Russian peasant considering the color of bears, Flynn’s father was stuck in a concrete, prescientific mode of thinking. He refused to enter a hypothetical world and explore its consequences, which is one of the ways people can rethink their moral commitments, including their tribalism and racism” (656). But is Pinker right that this new kind of moral intelligence that promotes declining violence and peaceful cooperation supports the classical liberal commitments to limited government and individual liberty? Pinker explains: The escalator of reason predicts only that intelligence should be correlated with classical liberalism, which values the autonomy and well-

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being of individuals over the constraints of tribe, authority, and tradition. Intelligence is expected to correlate with classical liberalism because classical liberalism is itself a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives that is inherent in reason itself. (662)

Pinker identifies this rational grasp of the “interchangeability of perspectives” with the Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or don’t do to others what you would not want them to do to you (182, 291, 647–48, 666). He also sees this kind of reasoning in Adam Smith’s account of the “impartial spectator” as allowing us to see ourselves mirrored in the eyes of others, so that “we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it” (669–70). The classical liberal principle of equal liberty—that each has the liberty to do as he wills, provided that he does not infringe the equal liberty of every other person—captures the reasoning of the Golden Rule. This reasoning is rooted in human nature, in the recognition that all human beings are naturally alike in their not wanting to be attacked or exploited, in their propensity to strike back against aggressors, and in their need for the voluntary cooperation of others to satisfy their nature as social animals. As evidence for this link between intelligence and classical liberalism, Pinker refers to some studies suggesting that high IQ people tend to be morally, economically, and politically liberal in their thinking (662–65). For example, he cites the research of economist Bryan Caplan, who claims to have shown that brighter people tend to think like classical liberal economists, because more intelligent Americans (those with high IQs) tend to support free markets and free trade as more advantageous for the country than governmental wage and price controls and protectionism. But Pinker’s argument that there is a “moral Flynn effect” favoring classical liberal attitudes must seem strange to James Flynn, because he is a social democrat who rejects classical liberalism. Flynn agrees with Pinker that the greater rationality of modern scientific societies has brought moral progress, including declining violence.64 But unlike Pinker, Flynn advocates social democracy or democratic socialism.65 Flynn insists that for it to fulfill its Jeffersonian ideals of equal rights in the pursuit of happiness for everyone, America will have to have a “robust welfare state,” one far more robust than America has ever had. And he argues for following the model set by the Scandinavian countries that have combined a capitalist economy with an extensive welfare state. If modern intelligence allows us to expand our moral concern to everyone in our society, Flynn suggests, why shouldn’t that lead us to support the welfare state programs and the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor that ensure to everyone an equal chance to a decent life? But as we have seen, classical liberals (like James Payne) reject this because they think that when government enforces a welfare state and redistributes wealth, this violates individual liberty by using governmental violence or the threat of violence to force people to do what they would

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not choose to do voluntarily. If we abolished the welfare state, classical liberals argue, we could rely on private charity to help those who are socially disadvantaged. Human beings in a free society can solve their social problems through voluntary cooperation without using governmental force.66 This debate between the social democrats and the classical liberals brings us back to some of the questions raised by the Declaration of Independence. If we agree that governments are established to secure equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we must wonder how that is best done. Does this require that governmental programs provide equal access for all citizens to a minimum standard of living, even if this means coercively redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor? Or should we reject this as an infringement of individual liberty? Without a welfare state, could a free society rely on the natural inclinations of people as spouses, parents, children, friends, and fellow citizens to voluntarily care for those who need help? We must continue to study the texts of political philosophy that help us to think through such political questions.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9

10

11

Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002). Pinker, Blank Slate, 306–36. Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (New York: Viking, 2011). All the page numbers in the text of this chapter are references to this book. James Payne, A History of Force: Exploring the Worldwide Movement Against Habits of Coercion, Bloodshed, and Mayhem (Sandpoint, ID: Lytton, 2004). See the website for the Libertarian Party at http://www.lp.org/. Payne, History of Force, 250, 253. See Payne, History of Force, 200–19, 254–65. Payne’s argument for voluntarism as the consummation of the historical progress from force to liberty is drawn from Auberon Herbert’s The Right and Wrong of Compulsion by the State and Other Essays, edited by Eric Mack (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1978). This analysis comes from Douglass North, John J. Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For the argument that liberal regimes with “inclusive institutions” tend to make nations prosperous, while illiberal regimes with “extractive institutions” tend to make nations poor, see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012). See Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, Demonic Males: Apes and the Origin of Human Violence (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Richard Wrangham and Luke Glowacki, “Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model,” Human Nature, 23 (2012): 5–29; and Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See Marshall Sahlins, The Western Illusion of Human Nature (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2008); Douglas P. Fry, Beyond War: The Human Potential for Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Douglas P. Fry, ed., War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Douglas P. Fry and Patrik Soderberg, “Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands and Implications for the Origins of War,” Science 341 (19 July 2013): 270–73; and R. Brian Ferguson, Yanomami Warfare: A Political History (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1995).

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13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41

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See R. Brian Ferguson, “Pinker’s List: Exaggerating Prehistoric War Mortality,” in Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 112–31; and Douglas P. Fry, “War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Challenge of Achieving Scientific Objectivity,” in Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 1–21. See Ferguson, Yanomami Warfare; Napoleon A. Chagnon, Yanomamo, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1997); and Chagnon, Noble Savages: My Life among Two Dangerous Tribes: The Yanomamo and the Anthropologists (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). See Fry and Soderberg, “Lethal Aggression in Mobile Forager Bands.” See Jane Goodall, The Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 488–534; and Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers, Tales from Gombe (Buffalo, NY: Firefly Books, 2014), 73–75, 218–19, 276. On chimpanzee warfare, see Michael L. Wilson, “Chimpanzees, Warfare, and the Invention of Peace,” in Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 361–88. See Michael L. Wilson, “Lethal Aggression in Pan Is Better Explained by Adaptive Strategies than Human Impact,” Nature 513 (18 September 2014): 414–17. Frances J. White, Michel T. Waller, and Klaree J. Boose, “Evolution of Primate Peace,” in Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 389–405. See Wrangham and Glowacki, “Intergroup Aggression.” Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), chap. 13, p. 88. On the evolution of “parochial altruism,” see Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). Gat, War in Human Civilization, 40. Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech can be found at http://www.nobelprize.org/ nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2009/obama-lecture_en.html. Matthew White, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (New York: Norton, 2012). White, Great Big Book, 563–65. White, Great Big Book, 88–93, 529. White, Great Big Book, 453–57. John Gray, “Delusions of Peace,” Prospect (September 21, 2011). Genesis 22:10–12. See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylva Walsh, introduction by C. Stephen Evans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). White, Great Big Book, 107–12. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, q. 100, a. 8, ad 3; II–II, q. 64, a. 6, ad 3; q. 104, a. 4, ad 2. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 154, a. 2, ad 2. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II–II, q. 5, a. 3; q. 11, aa. 1–2. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I–II, q. 96, a. 3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 9. See Jethro K. Lieberman, Liberalism Undressed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). See “Memory and Reconciliation: The Church and the Faults of the Past,” International Theological Commission, December, 1999, at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000307_memoryreconc-itc_en.html#Before Vatican II; and Edward Stourton, John Paul II: Man of History (London: Hodden & Stoughton, 2006). White, Great Big Book, 453. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “Steven Pinker on the Alleged Decline of Violence,” International Socialist Review 86 (November–December, 2012); and Herman and Peterson, Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence, 2012, available as an e-book at http://coldtype.net/Assets.12/PDFs/0812.PinkerCrit.pdf. Herman and Peterson, Reality Denial, 60.

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574 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65 66

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Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and Public Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 215. Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker, 2010), xi. Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine, xii–xiii. Herman and Peterson, Reality Denial, 9. Herman and Peterson, Reality Denial, 9. Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001). Mark Zacher, “The Territorial Integrity Norm: International Boundaries and the Use of Force,” International Organization 55 (2001): 215–50. Herbert, Right and Wrong of Compulsion, 145–47. Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). Jack E. Hoban, “The Ethical Marine Warrior,” Marine Corps Gazette (September 2007), 36. Hoban, “Ethical Marine Warrior,” 40. See Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (New York: Basic Books, 2014). Stephen Jay Gould, “The Spice of Life,” Leader to Leader 15, Winter 2000. See Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009); and Nicholas Wade, A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History (New York: Penguin Press, 2014). Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). See Cochran and Harpending, 10,000 Year Explosion, 110–19. See Wade, Troublesome Inheritance, 150–64, 169–72. See Wade, Troublesome Inheritance, 4, 15, 40–41, 51–54, 58, 61, 64, 85, 105–106, 127, 172, 185, 190, 208, 237–38, 243–44. See Cochran and Harpending, 10,000 Year Explosion, 187–224; and Wade, Troublesome Inheritance, 198–214. See Jerry Z. Muller, Capitalism and the Jews (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). For an elaboration of Pinker’s argument for the moral Flynn effect, see Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015). See James R. Flynn, Intelligence and Human Progress: The Story of What Was Hidden in Our Genes (Oxford: Academic Press, 2013), 59–74, 108–11. See James R. Flynn, Where Have All the Liberals Gone? Race, Class, and Ideals in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). For this argument, see Charles Murray, What It Means to be a Libertarian (New York: Broadway Books, 1997).

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Epilogue

I shall not end this book with a statement of conclusions because I believe any rigorous examination of the fundamental issues of political life will always be inconclusive. It is as true for political philosophy as it is for any serious intellectual inquiry that we can never possess the final answers. Those who think they have the final answers are those who do not understand the questions. Those questions that we can answer with certainty are usually not very interesting questions. The most important questions—such as those raised in this book—are likely to be insoluble. This must be so for two reasons. First, we cannot discover the ultimate answers to the important questions because we do not have absolute wisdom. Like Socrates, we must confess that because we are not divine, we must search for truth without ever fully possessing it. But we find the pursuit valuable in itself. Although deprived of absolute knowledge, we can still gain some limited understanding of the questions. Through studying the greatest books of the greatest minds, we can learn how to weigh the plausibility of competing arguments. The second reason for the deficiency of our political knowledge is that the most important object of our study—human nature—is too complex to be explained in simple formulations. By nature human beings strive for diverse and conflicting ends. As a result, we can never arrange political life to fulfill all of our natural needs and capacities. We must rank what often seem to be equally worthy ends. In understanding the necessity for such choices, we gain a tragic insight into the human condition. We should not become discouraged, however, when we cannot answer philosophic questions with absolute certainty. For we should realize that all of our knowledge, with the possible exception of mathematical proofs and demonstrative logic, consists of plausible conjectures. Through a mathematical proof, we might draw an inference from given premises in a manner that is precise and conclusive. But such demonstrative reasoning is 575

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too limited to make sense of our world, particularly politics. Our answers to the enduring questions of political life must always be to some degree imprecise and inconclusive. And yet, we can support our answers with plausible arguments. (For that matter, even mathematical reasoning properly understood may, in its own way, be merely plausible.) As in a Socratic dialogue, plausible argumentation requires that we move through three stages of reasoning: (1) we must clarify the question at issue; (2) we must then distinguish the major answers to the question; and (3) we must survey and weigh the pertinent evidence and reasoning for each answer. In judging a political philosopher, we must look for consistency, comprehensiveness, and brilliance. Is the reasoning free of selfcontradiction? Is there a comprehensiveness of vision? Does the account of politics cover the full range of human nature as manifested in political life, or are critical features of our political experience ignored? Finally, we must ask about the brilliance of the work in illuminating our understanding. Does the philosopher's thinking throw light upon areas of politics that would otherwise be obscure? Furthermore, we must ask, at every step, about the relevant evidence of human experience as recorded by poets, historians, and scientists. By asking such questions, as we have in this book, we see that, even when we cannot attain absolute precision and certitude in our knowledge, we can still judge the plausibility of what political philosophers teach us. By relentlessly posing questions—to ourselves and to others—and by refusing to settle for easy answers, we strive to free ourselves from illusions. We devote ourselves to Socratic questioning because we seek the dignity of living without self-deception. Only as long as we are thinking can we be fully awake and thus fully alive. If we want more than this, if we wish to transcend doubt in the discovery of the final answers, then we must move from philosophic quest to religious belief. But doesn't even religious faith depend somehow on human reason? If we appeal to faith rather than reason in our search for truth, it is because we think we understand the limits of reason. But determining the limits of reason would itself be the highest achievement of reason. Our inescapable dependence on reason points us to an enduring feature of our nature. Surely, Aristotle was right: as human beings, we are by nature rational animals. By nature we desire to understand. We are the animals for whom to live means to think. Consequently, even if we can never resolve the fundamental questions of life, we shall continue to think about them. We are also political animals because we cultivate our natural capacity for thought by living in civilized communities. We live together by thinking together. We can therefore judge a political community according to how well it promotes this natural human end. Of course, a political regime must first secure the material needs of life. But it must also nurture the mind and the spirit if life is to be worth living. Although a political regime can never fully satisfy our deepest yearnings for meaning and pur-

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pose in our lives, it can at least accommodate our natural need to explore with one another the mystery of what it means to be a human being today, living on an Earth that has been shaped by billions of years of natural history and hundreds of thousands of years of human history. That political life should foster rather than impede that pursuit is one truth that we can hold to be self-evident.

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Appendix

The Declaration of Independence in Congress, July 4, 17761 The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. —We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, —That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. —Such has been the 579

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patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. —He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. —He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. —He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. —He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures. —He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people. —He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within. —He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws of Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands. —He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers. —He has made Judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. —He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance. —He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies, without the Consent of our legislatures. —He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power. —He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: —For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us: —For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States: —For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world: —For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent: —For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury: —For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offenses: —For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies: —

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For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments: —For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. —He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us. — He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. —He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation. —He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands. —He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions. In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people. Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.— We, Therefore, the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which independent States may of right do. —And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

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Notes 1

Reprinted from the facsimile of the engrossed copy of the original manuscript in the Library of Congress.

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Index

Acton, Lord John, 130 Acosta, José de, 229, 232 Administrative law, Locke on, 252–253 Affirmative action, 513–514 Aggression anthropological study of, 28, 51–53, 182–184, 287–289, 548–553 Aristotle on, 51–53 Freud on, 183 Hobbes on, 181–182 Machiavelli on, 123–130 of Machiavellian chimpanzees, 145–146 Pinker on, 544–545 Plato on, 28 Rousseau on, 182, 286 Agricultural revolution genetic evolution in, 567–568 as transition from foraging to farming, 189, 235–236, 289–290, 292, 333 Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on U.S., 140–141, 209, 261–262 Altman, William, 493–498 Altruism, 312–318, 323, 326, 333 American Civil War, 135, 254–255, 260–261, 391–392 American foreign policy, 85–86, 139–141, 209–210, 261–262, 553, 557, 561–562. See also International law; International relations

American government as a Hobbesian Leviathan, 205–207 as lacking a true state, 389, 389–392 See also Constitutional law; Declaration of Independence; Executive power; Judicial power; Legislative power; Separation of powers American West, anarchism in, 355–356 American presidency executive prerogative of, 205, 253–260, 262 Machiavellian characteristics of, 128–129, 132–133, 144–145 See also Executive power Analogy of the cave (Socrates), 33, 156, 283, 314, 465–466 Anarchism absolute government as alternative to, 194, 262–263, 544 in Anglo–Saxon England, 355–356, 358–359 civil disobedience and, 17–18, 264 conventional justice and, 17–18, 264 of Law Merchant, 356 libertarian, 354–359 in medieval Iceland, 355–358 predatory government worse than, 201–203

583

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in right to revolution, 199–201, 264 socialist, 425–431 Somalia, 202 state of nature as, 180–182, 203, 355, 358 Anarchy, State, and Utopia (Nozick), 521 Anastaplo, George, 200–201, 499 Anderson, Terry, 356 Animals bonobo peace, 551 capacity for counting and language among, 40, 47–51 chimpanzee politics, 145–146, 550–551 chimpanzee warfare, 550–552 computers evolving into, 165–169, 456–457 cultural traditions among, 65n, 289 human and nonhuman compared, 47–51, 93–94, 101, 111–112, 145–146, 188, 222–227, 284, 288–89, 405, 413, 445–446, 511 orangutans in Rousseau’s state of nature, 288–289 political, 44–45, 47–48, 145–146, 169, 180–181, 233, 284, 413 prudence of, 101, 445 rights of, 50 teleology of, 481 See also Biology; Darwinian ethics Anthropology of aggression and war, 27–28, 52, 182–185, 548–554 of cooperation, 318–325, 338–340 cultural relativism in, 103–106 evidence for Hobbes’s state of nature in, 182–184, 188–190 evidence for Locke’s state of nature in, 229–236 of Rousseau’s account of evolution, 287, 290–293 Socratic view of human nature and, 27–28 Aquinas, Thomas, 89–119 abortion not condemned by, 111 definition of law, 92 on executing heretics, 90, 110–111, 559

and fact–value dichotomy, 100–102 Greek natural right vs. natural law, 95 Hobbes and, 95–96, 98 on homosexuality, 107, 112–113 legal positivist critics of, 91–92, 95–100 as liberal, 108–111 on marriage, 111–113 Martin Luther King quotes, 91–92, 97 natural inclinations, natural law based on, 99, 101–102 on natural law, 90–95 on prudence, 105–106, 116n on pursuit of happiness and longing for immortality, 113–114 reconciliation of Aristotelian ideas and Christian doctrine, 90 on religious violence, 90, 110–111, 559 social order as nature/custom/ stipulation, 103 on tyranny, 98 on vengeance as a virtue, 266 Areté, Socrates on, 23 Aristocracy, natural, 31–32, 507, 526–27 Aristotle, 41–67 on aggression’s influence on political life, 51–53 biological naturalism of, 45–47, 476 Christian perception as a source of pagan corruption, 89–90 on circumstantial nature of natural right/natural justice, 95 on citizenship, 56–57 criticism of the Republic, 42 and Darwinian biology, 45–46, 100–102, 476 on “friendship” (philia), compared with Smith’s “sympathy,” 341–342 on human capacity for speech and thought, 47–51 on human potential and the common good, 5 on individual freedom, 57–60 liberalism of, 53–56, 341–343, 479

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Index and Machiavellianism, 63–65, 134 and Mill on liberty, 57–60 Nicomachean Ethics, 340–343, 485 on oligarchic vs. democratic views of justice, 61–62 philosophic life as superior to moral life, dubious arguments for, 485 Plato and, in Raphael’s “School of Athens,” 41–42 on political community as organic body, 383–384 on preserving the power of tyrants, 63–65 on ranking regimes, 42–43, 62–63 on the self, 174n on slavery, 53–56, 473, 479 teleology of, 45–46, 476–478 on virtue, 341 on women, 53–56 Arrow, Kenneth, 337 Art evolution of, 39n, 440–442 Raphael, 41–42 Rembrandt, 558 Artificial intelligence argument from consciousness, 167 cybernetic organisms (cyborgs), 172 danger of human reliance on smart machines, 173 human-level, artificial brain required for, 168–169 lack of semantic understanding in, 168 as Nietzschean creation of new ruling caste, 456–457 Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, 168–169 Turing Test for, 166–167 Watson’s defeat of Jeopardy champion, 170–172 Ashkenazi Jews, genetic evolution of, 568–569 Asimov, Isaac, three laws of robotics of, 173 Atheism Bayle’s society of, 273–274, 334 of Descartes, 154, 166 of Hobbes, 207 of Hume, 307, 328

585

Locke on, 272–274 of Nietzsche, 438, 444, 454–455, 457 of Plato, 493 protective esotericism and, 470 of Strauss, 467 Augustine, 69–88 on connection between the natural order and divinity, 3 on contingency of nature, 71–74, 78–79 Descartes taught by, 161 on faith as the basis of human reasoning, 74–76 on impossibility of political justice, 83–84 millenarianism rejected by, 82 and nihilism, 80–82 on Plato’s Ideas, 77–78 political realism of, 70–74 on political virtues of the ancient Romans, 84 Austin, John, 96 Badiou, Alain, 424–425 Bakunin, Mikhail, 425–428 Banking systems central vs. free banking, 364–365 modern, 359–364 Barrat, James, 173 Barry, Brian, 535 Bayle, Pierre, 273 Beer, Samuel, 392 Bell, Daniel, 523, 527–528 Benedict, Ruth, 104 Beneficence. See charity Benson, Bruce, 355–356 Bergh, Andreas, 423 Bernstein, Eduard, 398–399, 420–421 Bible disputed interpretations as cause of English Civil War, 207 divine law of, 92 dualism of, 493 eternal life in Heaven and Hell taught by, 113–115 Hegel’s philosophy of history shaped by, 379–380 history of politics in, 228–229

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Hobbesian interpretation of, 207–209 liberalism of historical–critical method in interpreting, 208 liberalism of New Testament, 110–111, 208, 269–272, 493 Locke on “might makes right” in, 265 Locke’s citation of, in support of human equality in natural rights, 223 Machiavelli’s reading of, 125–126 modern science’s assumptions in, 175n natural law in Ten Commandments, 94, 105 political rulers’ need to interpret, 207–210 on religious tolerance, 110–111, 208, 269–272 Rembrandt’s painting of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, 558 slavery defended by, 482 theocracy of Old Testament, 208, 270 theology of, in Declaration of Independence, 3, 113, 222–223, 265, 299–301, 328 violence of, 126, 269–270, 558–560 Zarathustra’s teaching in, 449 See also Augustine; Christ, Jesus; Christianity; God; Heaven and Hell; Moses Biology of aggression and war, 52–53, 145–146, 287, 548–553 and animal prudence, 101–102 biotechnology and immortality, 114–115, 158–159, 173 of bourgeois virtues, 566–569 of free will, 165–166 of human brain, 35, 48, 115, 168–169, 219, 225–226, 531 of human equality, 224–227 of human evolution, 27–28, 225–236, 284–292, 437, 443–445, 548–553, 566–569 of human genome as basis for human rights, 227

of life’s extraction of energy from the Sun, 365–366 of morality, 27–28, 35, 225–226, 316–328, 476–483, 529–534 neuroscience of moral emotions, 314–315, 529–534 neuroscience of self-ownership, 225–227 of sex differences, 29, 55, 266–268, 546, 563–566 species in, 4, 54, 224–227 as teleological, 45–47, 476–478 See also Anthropology; Darwinian ethics; Nature; Psychology; Sociobiology Black, Hugo, 201 Bloody Tenant of Persecution, The (Williams), 270 Bloom, Allan, 472, 501–503 Bluestone, Natalie Harris, 29 Boehm, Christopher, 234, 322–323 Boethius, 79 Bourgeois virtues genetic evolution of, 566–569 McCloskey on, 343–348 Bourgeoisie, Marxist view of, 184, 400 Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), 107 Bowles, Samuel, 318–325, 327 Boyd, Robert, 338 Brosnan, Sarah, 328 Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce, 145 Burger, Warren, 106 Bush, George H. W., 393 Bush, George W., 209, 466 Byock, Jesse, 358 Calhoun, John C., 249–250 Call, Josep, 327 Calomiris, Charles, 363–364 Capitalism bourgeois virtues of, 343–348 cognitive elite in, 523–529 environmental crises caused by, 359–368 exploitation/drudgery of workers created by, 403–406 free-market, 359–365 inequality of wealth promoted by, 406–410, 523–529

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Index justice of, 521–523 liberal republican, 236 Lockean defense of, 238–242 Marx’s endorsement of Smith’s analysis of, 348 peace promoted by, 560–563 Piketty on, 344, 346, 410 property rights and, 241 Smith’s cynical view of, 347–348 traditional values destroyed by, 335 See also Commercial society; Economics; Smith, Adam; Socialism Caplan, Bryan, 571 Carnegie, Andrew, 347 Categorical imperative, 102 Categorization, process of, 37, 444 Catholic Church doctrines concerning sexual conduct, abortion, and marriage, 111–113 forgiveness for violence of, 558–560 liberalism of, 109–113, 559–560 political absolutism of, 220 political authority of, 69–70, 90 punishment of heretics, 89–90, 110–111, 559 Second Vatican Council of, 110 See also Augustine; Aquinas, Thomas; Christianity Cave, Plato’s analogy of, 33, 156, 283, 314, 465–466 Cave, Steven, 114–115 Chamberlain, Wilt, 521–522 Character formation as accidental, 515–518 Aquinas on, 106–115 Aristotle on, 56–60 through cosmic morality of divine law, 37–38, 113–115, 272–274, 299–301, 328–334 and criminology, 60 as ground of rationality, 159–162 Hegel on, 385–388 Hobbes on, 204–205 liberal, 60, 106–113, 268–274, 340–348, 353–354, 457–460, 489–491, 499–503, 534–538, 563–572 Locke on, 240–244, 268–274

587

Machiavelli on, 125–130 Marx on, 414–416 meaning of life expressed in, 74–83, 534–538 Plato on, 30–37 Rawls on, 523, 534–538 Rousseau on, 282–284 Smith on, 312–316, 328–348 See also Bible; Darwinian ethics; Family life; Law; Morality Charity in bourgeois societies, 347 Smith on the virtue of, 351–353 Chesterton, G. K., 76, 175n Childs, Marquis, 421 Chimpanzee politics, 145–146, 550–551 Christ, Jesus Hegel’s philosophy of history and, 379 Lincoln like, 301 on rendering to Caesar, 69 and Socrates on love, 20 as weakening patriotism, 299–300 Christianity atheistic nihilism as product of, 79–81 Hegel’s philosophy of history influenced by, 379–380, 395n Machiavelli and, 85–87 Marxist millenarianism and, 416–417 as Platonism for the common people, 38, 494 politics as viewed by, 69–88, 109–115, 268–272, 299–300 proofs for God’s existence, 72–73, 444–445, 454–455 as teaching universal love, 20 teleology of, 46 See also Augustine; Bible; Catholic Church; Christ, Jesus; Faith and reason; God; Heaven and Hell; Moses Churchill, Winston, 79, 132, 487 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 83, 103, 121, 129, 137–138 Citizenship in ancient and modern regimes, 56–60

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Athenian concept of, revived by Rousseau, 299 comparing Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau on, 196–197 Hegel on, 384–392 Marx on, 412–414 Rawls on equality of, 511–513, 520–521 Roman and Christian views of, 83–84 See also Character formation; Law “City in speech,” Socratic, 27–31, 37 Civic humanism, 121 Civil disobedience, 17, 90–92, 97, 201, 246, 264 Clark, Gregory, 567–568 Classical liberalism declining violence and, 543–572 Lockean, 219–280 Smithian, 305–375 See also Liberalism Classification, process of, 36–37, 444 Climate change, free-market capitalism as cause of, 365–368 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 501 Cognitive moral development, Kohlberg on six stages of, 33–35 Commercial society degrading morals, 334–343 inequality of wealth in, 344, 346, 406–410 peace promoted by, 546 philosophic life in, 342–343 promotion of bourgeois virtues, 343–348 Smith’s support of, 308–309 See also Capitalism; Economics; Smith, Adam Common law, 357 Common sense Descartes’s denial of, 161–162, 175n See also Doubt, Socratic and Cartesian Communism. See Socialism. Communist Hypothesis, The (Badiou), 424 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977, 363

Computers, 166–174 Concurrent majority of J. C. Calhoun, 248–250 Conscience, evolution of, as substitute for religious morality, 334 Consciousness, 167–169 Consent, government by in Declaration of Independence, 6, 243 Hobbes on, 186–188 Hume on, 233 Locke on, 244–246 Rousseau on, 298–299 Conspiracies, Machiavelli on, 138, 142 Constitutional law administrative law, 251–252 Bowers v. Hardwick (1986), 107 Dennis v. United States (1951), 200–201 Fifth Amendment, 198 First Amendment, 106–107, 195, 206, 300–301 Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 527 In re Anastaplo (1961), 200–201 Lawrence v. Texas (2003), 107 Miller v. California (1973), 106 “no religious test,” 273 Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), 107 Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton (1973), 106 Reynolds v. United States (1878), 195 Schenck v. United States (1919), 206 United States v. Korematsu (1944), 132 See also Executive power; Judicial power; Law; Legislative power; Separation of powers Cooley, Charles Horton, 325 Cosmic teleology vs. immanent teleology of evolved human nature, 37–38, 477–478 Cosmos, medieval divine model vs. modern scientific model of, 38, 153–154, 328–334, 474–475, 478 Costly punishment, 318, 322, 340 Creationism, biblical, 3–4, 79–80, 222–223, 226

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Index Cropsey, Joseph, 340–343 Cultural relativity, and problems of legislating morality, 106–109 Cumberland, Richard, 181 Cybernetic organisms, 172–173 Darrow, Clarence, 439 Darwin, Charles Aristotelian (cosmic) teleology and, 45–46, 476–478 evolutionary theory of human morality, 35, 316, 331–333 influence on Nietzsche, 437, 445, 460 Locke and, 224 natural right and, 476–478 on struggle for existence, 191 Darwinian ethics, 43–47, 100–102, 191, 225–226, 316–318, 331–334, 437, 443–445, 460, 476–482, 529–530. See also Morality Death Cartesian conquest of, 158–159, 164 Hume’s cheerful approach to, 307 life after, 113–115 resisting government to escape, 263–264 Socrates’s calm approach to, 15 See also Heaven and Hell Declaration of Independence, 1–9, 579–582 Anastaplo’s affirmation of right to revolution in, 200–201 appeal to Heaven in, 265 conflict of minority rights vs. majority rule, 5–6 equality of rights in, 37, 222, 227, 408, 442, 473–474 as Euclidean, 4 foundation on natural law, 90–91, 223–224, 381, 486 government by consent in, 3–4, 212, 243, 245 Hegelian spirit of, 390–391 Hobbesian notion of absolute power and, 193 human life as value in, source of ethical warriorship, 565

589

human nature and, 2–7 as Lockean, 1, 5–6, 221–222, 390–391, 489 moral principles and prudential judgment inherent in, 86 pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” 193 prudence in, 7–8, 98–99, 199 pursuit of happiness in, 3–5, 77–79, 113–115, 127, 489–491, 526 right to revolution in, 82, 198–201, 263 rights vs. duty in, 384 self-evident lies of, 35 self-evident truths of, 4, 74–75, 92–93 slavery conflicts with, 26, 135 Strauss on, 473–474 theology of, 3, 113, 222–223, 265, 299–301, 328 Delucchi, Mark, 367 Democracy as bad regime but “divinely sweet,” 42–43, 494–495 character formation necessary for, 59–60, 534–538 dictatorship similar to, 141–146 impossibility of, 301–302 Machiavelli on, 141–146 natural aristocracy promoted by, 31–32, 499–500, 507, 523–529 Nietzsche on, 446–447 oligarch’s opposition to, 61–63 participatory form of, 297–299 representative form of, 56–57, 188, 244–248, 298–299 socialist form of, 417–424 triumph over communism and the “end of history,” 392–394 Dennis v. United States (1951), 200–201 Deresiewicz, William, 500 Descartes, René, 153–176 absolute doubt of, 155–156 on artificial intelligence, 166–169 on existence of God, 158, 163, 167 on his own existence, 158, 160–161 liberal rationalism of, 155–156 on medical science for immortality, 164

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method of, 160 Nietzsche on the prejudices of, 160 nihilistic tyranny promoted by, 162–164 provisional morality of, 163 Rousseau on, 284 on scientific conquest of nature, 158–159, 165 scientific method of, 154, 156–158 technocratic tyranny promoted by, 164–166 Detwiler, Bruce, 457–460 Devlin, Patrick, 108 Dewey, John, 45, 241 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), 307, 331 Diamond, Martin, 472, 497 Dictator Game, 319–320, 324, 338 Dictatorship of the proletariat, 428–429 Dionysus, Nietzsche’s identification with, 440, 454 Discourses Concerning Government (Sidney), 221 Division of labor Marx on, 27, 32, 404, 411–412 Plato on, 27, 30–31 Rousseau on, 27 Smith on, 27, 335, 350–351 Socrates on, 31–32 Divorce, Locke on, 267 Domination, Rousseau on, 287 Douglas, Stephen, Thrasymachean view of justice, 26 Doubt, Socratic and Cartesian, 14–15, 154–155, 158–160 Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (Stowe), 266 Drury, Shadia, 110, 483–484 Duncan, Isadora, 438 Economics capitalist, 305–375, 521–523 of climate change, 192–193, 365–368 of commerce as corrupting morals, 334–340 efficiency and equality in, 528 game theory in, 192–193, 295–296, 318–325, 338–340

in Hegel’s civil society, 384–388 history as determined by, 400–403 Homo economicus of, 192–193, 318–319 of inequality, 349–354, 406–410 instrumental rationality of, 511, 535 modern preoccupation with, 282 of social democracy, 420–424 socialist, 397–434 See also Capitalism; Commercial society; Socialism Education Bloom on, 501, 503 Deresiewicz on, 500–501 Hobbes on, 204–205 liberal, 499–503 Pinker on, 569–570 Plato on, 30–32 Smith on, 353–354 Strauss on, 499–500 See also Character formation; Family life; Law; Morality Egalitarian hierarchy, 234 Egoistic individualism, Hobbes on, 192–193 Eichengreen, Barry, 359–360 Émile (Rousseau), 282, 293 Emotion as critical component in human intelligence and morality, 35, 172, 314–315, 529–34 Emotivism, Smithian moral sentimentalism and, 312–316 Enforcement of Morals, The (Devlin), 108 Engels, Friedrich, 400, 402, 427, 429 Enlightenment rationalism vs. Enlightenment sentimentalism, 314 Equality American dedication to principle of, 3–5, 392, 507–508 Fukuyama on liberal democracy and, 394 Hobbes on, 187–188 Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy” and, 31–32, 507, 526–527 liberty in tension with, 507–508 Locke on, 222–243 Rawls on, 508, 511–513

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Index through redistribution of wealth, 242, 349, 408–409, 420, 571 Rousseau on, 282 Smith on, 350 See also Inequality of wealth; Redistribution of wealth Ergon, Socrates on, 23 Esoteric writing, 154, 220–221, 223, 465–466, 469–473 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 221, 225, 489–490 Euclid, 4, 178 Executive power in American government, 132–133, 144, 205–207 chimpanzee politics of, 145–146 and Cromwell’s desire “to make himself the first man,” 213 cruelty well-used, 136–141 and desire of a few to be dominant leaders, 128, 145–146, 213, 233 in emergencies, 132–133, 144 Locke on, 254–262 Madison on Lockean prerogative, 255 prerogative as part of, 205, 253–260, 262 suspending writ of habeas corpus, 260–261 Existential atheism, nihilism of, 80 Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Benefits (Mandeville), 315 Fairness evolutionary roots of, 327–328 fostered in more market-integrated societies, 337, 339–340 increase with individuals’ participation in a world religion, 339 substantial variability and reliable patterns across diverse populations, 339 Fact–value dichotomy, 100–102, 131, 143, 148, 204, 530, 532–533 Faith and reason, 2–4, 75–76, 113–115, 272–274, 307–308, 328–334, 436, 453–455, 576 Family life Aristotle on, 44–45, 341–342 Darwin on, 317, 341–342

591

and economic success of children, 512–516, 525, 566–569 as first moment in ethical life, 385 homosexuality and marriage, 107–112 of the Ik, 52–53 moral development of young in, 30–31, 59, 240 natural law manifested in, 44, 94, 103–105, 111–113 rationality as dependent on, 159–160 Rawls on, 512–513 sex differences in, 55, 266–268, 344 Smith on, 341–342 social bonds rooted in, 189, 286–289, 312, 341–342 See also Biology; Character formation; Darwinian ethics; Women Fehr, Ernst, 322 Feminism, 29, 55 Feminization promoting peace, 546, 563–566 Finnis, John, 100–101 Ferguson, Brian, 549 Fermat’s theorem, and hypothetical truth of communism, 424–425 Ferrucci, David, 172 Filmer, Robert, 221, 267 Financial Crisis of 2007–2009, 359–361, 363 First Amendment, 106–107, 195, 206, 300–301 Flannery, Kent, 235, 285 Fleischacker, Samuel, 348–349 Flynn, James, 569–571 Foot, Phillipa, 531 Franco, Francisco, 430 Frazer, Michael, 314 Freedom Aristotle and Mill on, 57–60 the condition for finding “valued places for everyone,” 526 equality in tension with, 507–508 Hegel on, 380, 383–385 history as progress from force to, 547, 572n Hobbes on, 193

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Locke on, 221, 268–272 Marx on, 410–414 Nozick on, 521–523 Rousseau on, 282, 295 suppression in a centrally planned economy, 417 Thomistic natural law and, 95 See also Liberalism; Libertarianism Freud, Sigmund, 183, 438–439 Friedman, Daniel, 362 Friedman, David, 354–355 Friedman, Milton, 360, 390, 423 Friendship, Smith and Aristotle on, 341–343 Fry, Douglas, 549–550, 552 Fukuyama, Francis, 392–394 Galdikas, Biruté, 288 Galston, William, 497 Game of Bank Bargains, 363–364 Game theory, 192–193, 295–296, 318–325, 338–340 Gat, Azar, 549 German historicism, threat to natural right, 474 German Ideology, The (Marx), 411 “German Nihilism” (Strauss), 498 Gintis, Herbert, 318–325, 327 Global warming, free-market capitalism as cause of, 365–368 Glory, 71–72, 84, 127–129, 138, 180, 315–316, 563–566 God death of, 436, 440, 447, 453 Descartes on, 157–158, 163 evolution of, 331–334 human need for, 72–75, 444–446, 449–450 as moral lawgiver, 3, 70–71, 92–93 Nietzsche’s, 453–455 proving existence of, 72–73, 162, 444–445 replaced by human creation of value, 81–83, 237–238, 452 Rousseau’s legislator speaking for, 297 See also Bible; Catholic Church; Christ, Jesus; Christianity; Moses Golden Rule, 186, 225, 571

Goldman, Emma, 428 Good. See Morality Goodall, Jane, 146, 550–551 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 399 Great Depression of 1929–1939, 359–360 Great Recession of 2007–2009, 359–361, 363 Greene, Joshua, 531 Greenspan, Alan, 361 Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), 527 Guala, Francesco, 322 Haber, Stephen, 363–364 Haidt, Jonathan, 35 Hamilton, Alexander on Euclidean self-evident truths, 4 on human selfishness, 143 on presidential dictatorship, 144, 174, 205 on presidents as glory seekers, 129 on rational basis of politics, 2 Hanley, Ryan, 329 Hansson, Peter Albin, 421 Happiness, pursuit of Aristotle on eudaimonia, 101–102, 341–342, 485 in Declaration of Independence, 3–5 equal “access to the central satisfactions of life” required for, 526 eternal life in Heaven fulfilling, 77–79, 113–115 and generic unity and individual diversity in summum bonum, 486–487, 538 the good as the desirable in, 101–102 Locke vs. Strauss on, 489–491 Machiavelli on, 127 political protection of, 115 Hardin, Garrett, 193, 296 Harris, Marvin, 290 Hart, H. L. A., 97–98 Hasnas, John, 355, 357 Hassing, Richard, 477 Hawking, Stephen, 170 Hayek, Friedrich von, 311, 349, 360, 399, 417

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Index Heaven and Hell, 37–38, 41–42, 69–72, 78, 81–82, 86, 113–115, 272–274, 299–301, 328–334, 448, 493–494 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich, 377–396 Christianity’s influence on, 379–380 criticism of American politics, 389–392 on freedom, 383–384 on history, the ultimate meaning of, 378–381 on individual rights vs. political duties, 384–388 Locke and, 386–387 Marx’s criticism of, 381 political authoritarianism of, 382–383 Rousseau vs., 384 on state as superior to civil society, 386–388 on war and the moral strength of the state, 388–389 See also History Heilbroner, Robert, 417 Heisenberg, Werner, 37 Henrich, Joseph, 334, 338, 340 Herbert, Auberon, 572n Heresy, Aquinas on, 110–111 Herndon, William, 301 Herrnstein, Richard, 525–526 Hill, Peter, 356 History in Biblical religion, 76–83, 379–380, 449 communist hypothesis tested by, 424–425, 556, 560–563 of declining violence, 543–72 economic interests determining, 400–403 end of, 381, 392–394, 449 Hegel on, 378–383 Hobbes on English Civil War, 210–214 of ideas, 381–383, 469–473, 478–483 and Machiavellian millenarianism, 82–83, 455–456, 558–563

593

as natural laboratory for political philosophy, 210–214, 419, 424–425 nature and, 7–8, 43–44, 76–83, 378–381, 440–444 as progress of consciousness of freedom, 380, 547, 572n prudence judging contingencies of, 7–8, 76, 135, 213 Rousseau on, 289–293 ultimate meaning of, 378–381, 449–450, 455–457 uniting real and ideal, 302, 382 world-historical individuals as shaping, 130, 297, 381, 451–452, 555–557 History of Force (James), 546 History of Political Theory (Sabine), 466 Hitler, Adolph, 63–64, 91–92, 123, 439, 442, 468, 498, 556 Hoban, Jack, 565 Hobbes, Thomas, 177–217 American constitutional law and, 205–207 on anarchy vs. predatory government, 201–203 Bible, historical–critical method in interpreting, 207–210 on Bible’s interpretations as cause of English Civil War, 207 on consent of the governed, 185–194 doctrine of absolute government, 194–197, 256 on government of small families, 182, 189, 191, 202 on individual freedom/individual rights, 179, 193 on justice, 26 Locke and, 244 on mutual relation between protection and obedience, 212 on origin of government, 189 on political authority and religious toleration, 207–210 political history as laboratory for political philosophy, 210–214 on political sovereignty, 212–213 Rousseau and, 182, 189, 284, 300 on self-rule, human desire for, 188 Smith and, 312, 315

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on social contract, 185–193, 211–212 on state of and laws of nature, 180–194 Hoebel, E. Adamson, 233 Holloway, Carson, 477–478 Homo economicus model of human beings, 311, 317–318, 338 Homosexuality and marriage, 107–112 Honesty Box experiment, 323–324 Hooker, Richard, 225 Howe, Irving, 416 Howe, Julia Ward, 83 Huber, Kurt, 496 Human nature Aquinas on, 93–94, 99–102 Bowles and Gintis on evolution of, 318–328 Camus on, 417 Cartesian view of, 165 conflict of minority rights vs. majority rule, 5 Darwin on, 317, 331–334, 476–482 Declaration of Independence and, 2–7 evolved, cosmic teleology vs. immanent teleology of, 328–334, 442–446, 477–478 Freud on, 183 as generically universal and individually diverse, 486–487, 538 Hegel on, 381 Hobbes on, 180–183, 192, 312 Homo economicus model of, 311, 317–318, 338 human culture and human judgment as constrained but not determined by, 103, 339–340 and human culture studied experimentally through economic games, 316–328, 338–340 of human genome as basis for human rights, 227 liberalism based on unity and diversity of, 486–487, 538 Locke on, 239–240, 490–491 longing for immortality in Heaven, 37–38, 78–82, 115, 442–445, 448–451, 453–455, 493–494

Machiavelli on, 124–125, 129, 143–144 Mandeville on, 315–316, 318 Marx on, 413, 416 Nietzsche on, 443–446 philosophic, moral, religious, and political lives as peaks of, 483–488 Pinker on inner demons and better angels of, 543–546, 564 Plato on, 23–25, 32–37, 394 Rawls on, 529–534 Rousseau on, 284–287, 289–290 selfish interests vs. social/cooperative interests, 7, 51–53, 180–193, 316–328 slavery as contrary to, 53–56, 478–483 Smith on, 311–312, 318, 326, 362–363 socialist anarchy and, 426 socialist equality contrary to, 419 as source of moral standards for individual and political life, 78–79, 101–102, 486–487, 538 Strauss on, 471, 477, 487 at three levels (generic, specific, and temperamental), 112 of vengeance as expressing naturally evolved sense of injustice, 63–64, 98–99, 137–138, 142, 178, 211, 213–214, 220–221, 230, 234, 262–266, 318, 322, 338–340, 445, 564–565 Human rights, 91, 138–141, 213–214, 227, 545, 557 Hume, David, 35, 306–307, 331, 341–343 Hunting-gathering societies, 292, 323, 332–335, 351, 355, 358, 366, 426, 547–554 Hutcheson, Francis, 309 Hypothetical imperative, 102 Idealism and realism, 21, 70–74, 81–82, 135, 139–141, 188, 204, 558, 560–563 Ik, 52, 105, 184 Immortality, Steven Cave on four paths to, 114–115, 158–159

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Index Imperial Presidency, The (Schlesinger), 255 Indirect reciprocity and reputational selection, 317–328 Industrial Revolution, 366, 407, 567–568 Inequality of wealth cognitive elite based on, 523–529 as impediment to American equality, 392 Marx on, 406–409 Piketty on, 407–410 Smith on, 348–554 Intelligence as an entitlement to political rule, 28–37, 147, 169–174, 187, 523–529 Intelligence quotient (IQ) of Ashkenazi Jews, 568–569 of cognitive elite, 32, 523–529 genetic evolution of, 568–569 and meritocracy, 524–525 racial differences in, 525–527 International law, 91, 96–97, 138–141, 188, 213–214, 510, 562 International relations declining violence in, 543–566 end of history in, 392–394 idealist and realist theories of, 70–74, 85–87, 139–141, 188, 213–214 “Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism” (Strauss), 499 Iron law of oligarchy, 247 Islam, political interpretation of, 207–210 Jacobson, Mark, 367 Jaffa, Harry, 472 James, William, 444 Jefferson, Thomas, 31–32, 248, 260, 507, 526 Jonas, Hans, 467, 499 Judicial power, Locke on, 251–252. See also Constitutional law; Natural law; Law Justice Aristotle on circumstantial nature of, 95 conflict between oligarchic and democratic views of, 61–62

595

distributive, Smith on, 348–354 as fulfillment of natural needs, 23–25 Hobbes on, 26, 192 as interest of the stronger, 21–23, 25–26 Locke on reciprocal nature of, 225 might makes right, 262–266 as natural standard vs. social construction, 25–28 Nietzsche on, 445 from opinions to knowledge of, 18–21 Plato on, 18–25 Rawls on, 510–513, 529–534 as reflection of divine law in the cosmic order, 37–38 as a social construction, Plato on, 25–28 Socratic interpretation of, 19–20 See also Morality; Natural right; Vengeance Keller, Helen, 49–50 Kendall, Willmoore, 247 Kennedy, John, 389–390 Kenworthy, Lane, 422 Kin selection, 191, 317, 326 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 18, 91–92, 97 Klein, Naomi, 365–367 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 33–35 Kojève, Alexandre, 393–394 Kolbert, Elizabeth, 367 Konner, Melvin, 291 Krieck, Ernst, 447 Kristol, Irving, 523, 527–528 Kurzweil, Ray, 168–169 Kuznets, Simon, 406–407 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de, 163 Labor Locke on, 237–239 Marx on, 403–405, 411–412 See also Division of labor Lampert, Laurence, 454–455 Language Aristotle on, 47–51 deep structure of, 529 Nietzschean classification and, 441, 444

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Index

Rousseau on absence of, in state of nature, 286 Smith’s account of, 310–311 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 55–56 Laski, Harold, 82 Law anarchic, 355–357 Aquinas’s definition of, 92 and authority, “rule of recognition” accepted as ultimate standard of, 97–98 as coercive moral habituation, 106–109, 224–236, 341–342 just disobedience of, 15–18, 91 natural, 89–120, 185–186 as natural, customary, and stipulated, 103 rule of, 248, 250–253, 255, 257–258 Smith on, 355 See also Constitutional law; Natural law Law of Peoples, The (Rawls), 510 Lawrence v. Texas (2003), 107 Lectures on Jurisprudence (Smith), 353 Left/right political spectrum, 349 Legal positivism Machiavelli’s concordance with, 137 natural law vs., 91–92, 96 Legislative power, 91–92, 96, 257–258 Leibniz, G. W., 72–73 Lenin, V. I., 399, 428–429 “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” (King), 18, 91 Leopold and Loeb murder trial, 439 Levitt, Steven, 320–321 Liberal democracy crisis of, 468, 471–473, 489–491 the end of history and, 393–394 Strauss’s view of, 491–503 Liberalism of Aristotle, 341–342 of Catholic Church, 109–113, 559–560 classical, 219–280 conservatism and, 179 declining violence in, 543–574 distinguishing direct and indirect force, 562–63

high IQ associated with, 569–572 as historical progress from force to freedom, 547, 572n historical record of illiberal violence supports, 556–563 human nature’s unity and diversity affirmed by, 486–487, 538 and liberal education, 499–503 of Mill’s harm principle, 58–60, 106, 351–52, 546–547 modern, 241–242 moral and intellectual virtues cultivated by, 340–348, 499–503 moral neutrality of, 534–538 open society of, 537 of Plato, 42–43, 494–496, 537 Rawls on political vs. comprehensive, 509, 534–538 spontaneous orders of, 309–311 of Thomistic natural law, 106–115 of welfare state, 420–424, 523–529 Libertarianism anarchist, 354–359 against coercive enforcement of morality, 107–109 free banking system advocated by, 364 of Nozick, 521–523 Libertarian Party of the U.S., 547 Liberty. See Freedom Lincoln, Abraham on “better angels of our nature,” 558 on combining force and justice, 86 as dictator, 254, 260–261 and Hegelian founding of the American state, 391–392 on life as a race, 507 like Jesus Christ, 302 natural right defended by, 26, 482 prudence of, 135 pursuit of power by, 145 slavery rejected by, 482 Linton, Ralph, 104–105 List, John, 320–321 Literature Harriet Beecher Stowe, 265–266, 482 Isaac Asimov, 173

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Index mythic illusions of, 440–442 poetic creation of values through, 37–38, 447–453 See also Bible Locke, John, 219–280 on administrative law, 252–253 on appeal to Heaven, 264–265 on atheism, 272–274 consensual democracy with minority veto as check on majorityrule of, 248–249 on dissolution of government, 263 on equal liberty, 222–223 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 221, 489–491 on executive prerogative, 253–260, 262 on government by consent, 244–246 hedonistic relativism of, 489–491 Hegel and, 386–387 Hobbes and, 244 on individual freedom vs. political authority, 243–244 on individual rights and majority rule, 246–248 “joyless quest for joy” in liberal democracy of, 490–491 liberal individualism of, 221–222 Marxist criticism of, 238, 240–241 on natural rights as rooted in divine workmanship, 222–224 on natural rights as rooted in natural self-ownership, 224–227 and popular despotism, 6 on pursuit of happiness, 489–491 on religious tolerance, 268, 270–271 on religious/metaphysical ethics vs. secular/empirical ethics, 227 on right to revolution, 262–266 on rule of law, 248, 250–252 on separation of church and state, 268–269 on separation of powers, 251–252 on state of nature, 224–236, 244–246, 251–252, 263–266 summum bonum of, 489–491 on theistic evolutionism vs. atheistic naturalism, 226 on women, 266–268

597

Logos, 102 Looking-glass self, 325 Löwith, Karl, 80, 468, 487 Luxemburg, Rosa, 421, 424 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 121–151 on “armed prophets,” 125–126 on character traits required for political use of force, 137–138 civic humanist influence on, 121–122 on conspiracies, 138, 142 on “cruelty well used,” 24, 127, 136–141 denial of moral virtue as necessary for political success, 123–125 on dictatorship, 144–145 endorsement of republican government, 142–143 on ends justifying means, 131–136 evolutionary thought of Lucretius influencing, 136 as founder of modern political thought, 147–148 on glory, 128–129 on impossibility of political justice, 131 is/ought dichotomy of, 131, 143 on keeping political power through minimum winning coalition, 144–146 on political corruption, 145 on political wisdom, 146–148 and popular despotism, 6 on power, 124,146–148 prudence of, 131, 133–135 on relation between the state and violence, 129–130, 137 on securing the goodwill of the people, 138, 142 as a teacher of evil, 123–125 on virtue, 125–130 Machiavellian personality, 146 MacKinnon, John, 288 Macpherson, C. B., 179, 238–240 Madison, James, 143–144 Majority rule, 5–6, 246–250, 446 Man a Machine (La Mettrie), 163 Mandeville, Bernard, 315–316

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598

Index

Manliness, 125–130, 455–460, 563–566 Manliness (Mansfield), 564 Mansfield, Harvey, 564 Mao Zedong, 297, 399, 554, 556, 561 Marcus, Joyce, 235, 285, 287 Maritain, Jacques, 109 Market model, Smith on, 310–311 Market socialism, 415, 418, 420–424 Marshall, Peter, 203 Marx, Karl, 397–434 on capitalist exploitation of workers, 403–404 on classless society, 401, 409, 413, 417, 429 criticism of Hegel, 381 criticism of social democracy, 423–424 on dictatorship of the proletariat, 416, 427 on division of labor, 32, 404 economic determinism of, 401–402 endorsement of Smith’s analysis of capitalism, 348 on freedom, 410–414 Fukuyama’s critique of, 394 on human selfishness, 184 on labor, 411–412 on lack of joy in capitalist workers, 404–406 Machiavellianism of, 416 and Piketty on inequality of wealth in capitalism, 406–410 on political reforms endorsed by, 402–403 on property, 409–410 on revolutionary violence, 409, 416–417 socialist ideologies attributed to ideas of, 398–399 on socialist work as creative, selfexpressive activity, 405 Stalin and, 416–417 on the vices of greedy materialism, 344 vision of socialist society, 411 Masters, Roger, 476 Mathematics of Declaration of Independence, 4

of Descartes as origin of modernity, 154–162 Euclidean geometry, 178 Fermat’s theorem and hypothesis of communism, 424–425 intuition in, 162 as known by “heart,” 74 loss of certainty in, 162 Plato’s Ideas and, 37 Mayr, Ernest, 46 McCloskey, Deirdre, 343–347 Melzer, Arthur, 469–473 Meritocracy and IQ, 524–529 Michels, Roberto, 247 Micklethwait, Adrian, 422–423 Might makes right, 86, 178, 213–214, 262–266, 445 Mikhail, John, 530–533 Mill, John Stuart, 13, 58–60, 106, 353, 559 Millenarianism idealistic, American tradition of, 82–83 Marxist, 416, 558–563 violence of, 558–563 Miller v. California (1973), 106 Minimum winning coalition as fundamental principle of political power, 144–146 Mises, Ludwig von, 311, 399, 414, 425 Modern science and modern political philosophy, 153–154, 179, 219, 283 refutation of natural teleology, 475 See also Anthropology; Artificial intelligence; Biology; Darwinian ethics; Nature; Psychology; Teleology; Universe Money banking and, 359–365 Locke on, 238 Marx on, 414–415 morally corrupting effects of, 336–337 unfair power of, 406–410, 527–528 Montesquieu, on gentle commerce, 335–336, 440

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Index Moral cosmology, avoiding nihilism through, 37–38, 328–334, 442–445, 448–451, 453–555, 532–534 Moral development, cognitive stages of, 33–35 Morality Aquinas on legislating, 106–109 of atheists, 272–274 of bourgeois virtues, 343–348 civilizing vs. corrupting influence of commerce on, 335–336 cultural relativity vs., 103–106 Darwinian evolutionary theory of, 43–47, 100–102, 191, 225–226, 316–318, 331–334, 437, 443–445, 460, 476–482, 529–530 destruction of, through commodification of goods, 336 good as desirable, 101–102 of human goods as both generically universal and individually diverse, 112, 486–487, 538 human self-assessment as moral beings, 325 hypothetical imperative in, 101–102 intellectual development and, 33–35, 546, 569–572 Locke on Christian belief as necessary for, 272–273 markets’ promotion of, 337, 339 natural desires and capacities as ground for, 23–28, 101–102 natural law vs. legal positivism, 96–100 Nietzsche on evolution of, 445, 449–450, 460 philosophy as superior to, 29, 483–488 Plato on, 29, 37–38 political realism based on, 85 provisional, of Descartes, 163 religious beliefs supporting, 37–38, 113–115, 272–274, 328–334 revelation and conscience as grounds for, 74–79, 328–334, 447–449

599

of robots, 173–174 self-love at root of, 312–316 Smith’s moral sentimentalism, 312–316 Strauss on, as inferior to philosophic life, 483–486 See also Character formation; Darwinian ethics; Natural right; Vengeance Morgenthau, Hans, 83, 85–86 Moses, 125–126, 136, 147 Movement of Animals, The (Aristotle), 101 Muhammad, 209 Murphy, James Bernard, 103 Murray, Charles, 524–528 Murray, John Courtney, 109 Natural and Moral History of the Indies (Acosta), 229 Natural law biology of, 93–94, 101–102, 111–112 and civil disobedience, 90–92, 97 compared with natural right and natural rights, 95 cultural diversity’s contradiction of, 103–106 defining, 90–95 and fact–value distinction, 100–102 Finnis on, 100–101 as human law, Aquinas on, 95, 103 hypothetical imperatives of, 100, 102 legal positivism vs., 91–92, 95–99 legislation of morality and, 106–109 prudence in, 105–106, 116n of sexuality, abortion, marriage, and homosexuality, 103, 106–109, 111–113 of Ten Commandments, 94 as threat to individual liberty, 111–113 at three levels of human natural inclinations (generic, specific, and temperamental), 112 Natural right American positivist relativism as threat to, 474 Aristotelian vs. Darwinian, 476–478

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600

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based on teleology of human nature, supported by modern biology, 476–478 as concerned with human excellence or perfection, 477–478 as a fundamental and permanent philosophical problem, 476 grounding in a religiously informed cosmic teleology, 478 Strauss on Lockean conception of, 489 teological view of nature required for, 475 See also Darwinian ethics; Morality; Vengeance Nature evolution of, 442–444 Greek and Christian conceptions of, 72–78 and history, 7–8, 76–83, 135, 213 Hobbes on laws of, 185–186 mystery of, created or uncreated, 72–74, 331, 454–455 See also Human nature; Teleology Nazism freedom of speech for, 106–107 German philosophers supporting, 496 legal positivism of, 92, 116n and natural law, 91, 96–98 Nietzsche’s influence on, 439, 447, 450, 456, 492 Strauss’s connection to, 491–499 violence caused by, 554–557 White Rose resistance to, 63–64, 496 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 95, 101–102, 341–342 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 70, 83 Nielsen, Kai, 520 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 435–463 on chaotic reality of the world, 440–442 Darwinian aristocratic liberalism vs. Dionysian aristocratic radicalism of, 457–460 Darwinian science of, 445, 460 on death of God, 436, 447–448, 457

denial of human equality, 442 on desire for redemption, 452 Detwiler’s criticism of, 458–460 Dionysian, 454, 457–460 on eternal return, 451–453 on founders of new religions, 452, 454 on free spirits, 443–444, 446–447 on humble truths of historical development, 443–444 immoralism of, 449–450, 455, 459 influence of writings of, 438–439 on language tool for artistic illusions, 77, 149n, 441–442 at Leopold and Loeb murder trial, 439 liberalism of, 446–447, 457–460 and Lou Salomé, 437, 454 madness of, 438 on modern socialist tyranny, 446–447 on morality, 445, 449–450, 460 Nazis influenced by, 439, 447, 450, 456, 492 on need for redemption, 444 on origin of justice, 445 Plato and Socrates criticized by, 440, 442 on power, 123 religious longings of, 444–446, 453–455 on romantic art and the “magic of religious feeling,” 444 on rule by the most powerful, 43, 455–457 in Strauss’s third wave of modernity, 492 on Superman, 458 on transcendental longings, 444–446, 453–454 on truths as illusions, 441 on tyranny, 458–459 on Wagnerian romanticism, 437, 443 on will to power, 436, 439, 451–453, 459 on Zarathustra, 447–451 Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Detwiler), 457

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Index Nihilism Aristotle’s biological naturalism and, 47 avoiding through a moral cosmology, 37–38, 328–334, 442–445, 448–451, 453–455, 532–534 Nietzsche on, 435–436 revolutionary, 417 secularized creationism as source of, 80–81 Strauss on, 474–475 Nihilistic tyranny, 162–164 Nixon, Richard, 250, 254 “Noble lie” of Plato, 30–32, 35, 38, 476, 483, 485 Nordic countries, social democracy in, 422–423 Norenzayan, Ara, 332–333 Nozick, Robert, 521–523 Obama, Barack, 553 Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), 107 Oligarchy Aristotle on, 61–62 capitalist, 406–410 of cognitive elite, 523–529 Michels’s iron law of, 247 See also Aristocracy, natural Omohundro, Stephen, 173 On Kingship (Aquinas), 114 On Liberty (Mill), 13, 58–60, 106, 353, 559 Orangutans as solitary beings, Rousseau on, 287–289 Otteson, James, 310–311, 329 Page, Larry, 172–173 Paris Adult Theater I v. Slaton (1973), 106 Paris Commune of 1871, 426–428 Parochial altruism, 333 Parsons, Talcott, 192 Participatory democracy, Rousseau on, 282, 293–298 Pascal, Blaise, 74–75, 81, 86, 488 Patriarchal authority, Filmer’s theory of, 221, 267 Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 104 Payne, James, 546–547, 571

601

Peace bonobo, 551 democratic, 562 Hobbes on, 185, 190, 194 liberal, 563–566 long, 545, 556–557 new, 545, 556–557, See also Pinker, Steven Pensées (Pascal), 86 Peters, Charles, 390 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 379 Philosopher-kings, 20, 28–29 Philosopher-queens, 29 Philosophy in commercial society, 342–343 as contemplative life vs. active life, 12–15, 28–32, 469–473 economic interests determining, 342–343, 400–403 esoteric writing of, 469–473 experimental, 531 as “its own time apprehended in thoughts,” 381–383 liberalism promoting a life of, 446–447, 499–503 luxury and high civilization as conditions for, 28, 282–283 Nietzsche on artistic creativity of, 435, 440–444, 455–457 peace and leisure necessary for, 184–185, 342 political power of, 28–36, 146–148, 455–457 in Raphael’s “School of Athens,” 41–42 Strauss on supremacy of, 483–488 Piketty, Thomas, 344, 346, 407–409 Pinker, Steven, 543–574 on An Lushan Revolt as greatest atrocity in history, 554–555 on bonobo peace, 551 on chimpanzee warfare, 550–552 criticized by Ferguson, 549–550 criticized by Fry, 550–552 criticized by Gray, 557 criticized by Herman and Peterson, 560–562 on dangers of utopian ideology, 416 on decline in all kinds of violence, 557

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602

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on declining violence as measured by relative numbers of violent deaths (in proportion to world population), 554–555 on ethical warriorship, 565 on evolution of genetic propensities for peaceful cooperation and less violence, 566–569 on evolution of war in foraging societies in the state of nature, 548–554 on five inner demons of human nature, 545–546 on four better angels of human nature, 545–546 on high IQ of classical liberals, 569–572 on historical trend towards declining violence as not inevitable, 556 on illiberal regimes as primary source of increasing violence, 556–557 life as ultimate value for, 565 on manly honor, 564–565 on “moral Flynn effect,” 569–571 Payne’s voluntarism, influence on, 546–548 on peace through feminization, 546, 563–566 presentation of evidence disputed, 549–552, 554–557 on six trends in history of declining violence, 544–545 Plato, 11–40 on aggressiveness of humans, 28 analogy of the cave, 33, 156 Aristotle and, 41–42 on city in speech, 27–31 on civic education, 31–35 common opinions as source of reason for, 18–21 on community-imposed standards of goodness, 15–16 on cosmic order of divine law, 37–38 on definition of justice, 18–21 on division of labor, 27 on ergon (function) and areté (virtue), 23

feminist arguments of, 29 on Forms and Ideas, 36–37 on individuals’ pursuit of happiness, 15–16 on justice, 19–28 as liberal democrat, 42–43, 494–496, 537 modern science and, 37 on moral cosmology vs. mechanical cosmology, 37–38 on morality, 14, 29, 38 on natural and conventional justice, 25–28 “noble lie” of, 30–32, 35, 38, 476, 483, 485 on obligation to obey the law, 15–18 on philosopher-kings, 28–30 in Raphael’s “School of Athens,” 41–42 rationalist psychology of, 33, 35 on the soul, 24, 32–34 speaking through the character of Socrates, 13–15 Timaeus, 37–38 Polanyi, Michael, 162 Political animals, humans as, 44–45, 47, 145–146, 169, 180–181, 233, 284, 413 Political Liberalism (Rawls), 509, 536–537 Political science, as the study of regimes, 41–65 Pope Benedict XVI, 559 Pope John Paul II, 559 “Port Huron Statement” (SDS), 293 Posner, Richard, 336, 361 Poverty, Smith on, 350–352 Power(s) Aristotle on, 61–62 Hobbes on, 193–196 legislative, 257–258 Locke on, 222, 241–252, 257–258 Machiavelli on, 124, 141–148 minimum winning coalition required for ruling, 144–146 Nietzsche on, 123 political, and political knowledge, 11–38 prerogative, 442

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Index Preconditions of Socialism, The (Bernstein), 420 Presidential prerogative. See Executive prerogative Prices, Mises on, 414–415 Pride, Hobbes on, 187 Primate intelligence, Machiavellian nature of, 145–146 Private property anarchism, 354–359 Proletariat, Engels’s definition of, 400 Property Aristotle on, 53 Locke on, 236–243, 489 Marx on, 409–410 Nozick’s entitlement theory of, 521–523 Smith on, 347, 351, 354–359 Strauss on, 489 See also Capitalism; Economics; Inequality of wealth; Redistribution of wealth; Socialism Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 425 Prudence Aristotle on, 53 in commercial society, 345 history judged by, 7–8, 76, 213 Lincoln’s, 135 Machiavelli’s, 131, 133–135 of political realism, Morgenthau on, 85–86 Thomas Aquinas on, 98–99, 106 Psychology of artificial intelligence, 166–174 evolutionary, of morality, 35, 224–226, 316–328, 331–334, 442–445, 476–478, 529–534 of Hobbes and Freud, 183–184 intelligence as measured as IQ in, 32, 524–527, 568–569 of Machiavellian personality, 146 Plato and Kohlberg on moral, 33–35 of psychopaths, 146, 314, 327, 530 of self-awareness, 158, 160–162, 166–169, 174n of Skinner’s behaviorism, 165–166 of violence, 545–546 See also Aggression; Animals; Artificial Intelligence; Darwinian eth-

603

ics; Human Nature; Intelligence quotient (IQ); Morality Psychopaths, 146, 314, 327, 530 Public Choice Theory, 364 Public Goods Game, 338 Punishment, costly. See Costly punishment Rand, Ayn, 316, 361 Randall, John Herman, 45 Raphael’s “School of Athens,” 41–42 Rational egoism, 191–193, 204 Rawls, John, 507–541 affirmative action and, 513–520 balance between efficiency, equality, and self-actualization, 528 Barry’s criticism of, 535–536 Bell’s criticism of, 520, 523–525, 528 biological arguments of, 529–530 on capacity for moral choice, 511–512 on character formation, 534–538 difference principle of, 512–529 disturbed by his experience with undeserved good luck and bad luck, 509 economic rationality of, 510–511, 535 on equality of citizenship, 511–513 on equality of opportunity, 523–529 on family life and success, 512–513 on fraternity, 518 on injustice of rewarding merit, 515–517 on instinctive moral grammar in evolved human nature, 529–534 on international relations, 509 on justice as fairness, 510–513 Kant and, 510–511, 517 Kristol’s criticism of, 523–524 Locke and, 510, 512, 522 meaning of life and, 523–528 and Murray on meritocracy of the cognitive elite, 524–529 Nozick’s response to, 521–523 “original position” of, 510–513 on personal character as accidental, 515–517

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on “political liberalism” as not enforcing a liberal way of life as the best life, 509, 534–538 on property, 521–526 reconciling equality and liberty as aim of, 507–508, 510, 512 refuted by behavioral experiments, 518–520 on right to education, 513 on rights, 510–513 social contract of, 510–511 on social recognition and selfrespect, 510–511 socialism and, 520–521 on taxation and redistribution of wealth, 513, 520 “veil of ignorance” of, 510 Reagan, Ronald, 206, 360 Realism and Idealism, 21, 70–74, 81–82, 135, 139–141, 188, 204, 558, 560–563 “Reason and Revelation” (Strauss), 485, 487 Reason–Revelation debate, 37–38, 70–83, 113–115, 453–455, 488, 494 Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures, The (Locke), 223, 272–273 Reciprocal altruism, 190–192, 317–328, 445, 530 Reciprocity, indirect, as reputational selection, 317, 321, 323–328 Reciprocity, strong, 318–328 Redistribution of wealth Flynn on, 571 in Nordic welfare states, 420–422 Piketty on, 347, 408–409 Rawls on, 513 Smith on, 351 Reé, Paul, 437 Regimes, Plato and Aristotle on ranking of, 42–43 Reid, Thomas, 313 Relativism as threat to natural right, Strauss on, 467, 472–476, 478–483, 501–502 Religion. See Bible; Catholic Church; Christ, Jesus; Christianity; Faith

and reason; God; Moses; Islam; Zarathustra Rembrandt, 558 Renewable energy, combating climate change through, 366–368 Rent seeking, 363 Representative democracy, Rousseau on, 298–299 Reynolds v. United States (1878), 195 Ridley, Matt, 367 Right/left political spectrum, 349 Rights animal, 516–517 computer, 169–170 in Declaration of Independence, 1–6 distinguishing different kinds of, 95, 342 duties and, 295, 384–388, 489 expanding, and promotion of declining violence, 545, 553 human capacity for rational choice as ground for, 222–227, 382–383, 511, 516–517, 535–536 human genome as root of, 227 minority vs. majority, 5–6, 246–250 Rawls on, 510–513 of religious liberty and toleration, 207–210, 268–274 right to life, 5, 183, 193, 197–198, 225, 388, 565 right to revolution, 6–8, 17, 199–201, 220–221, 262–266, 398–399, 445–446, 565–566 suspending, by suspending writ of habeas corpus, 132, 260–262, 266–268 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 227, 545 Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek), 417 Robots, 166–176 Roosevelt, Franklin, 128, 132–133, 206, 421 Roots of Human Sociality Project, 337–338 Rothbard, Murray, 349, 354 Rothschild, Emma, 348

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Index Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 281–304 anthropological archaeologists’ confirmation of account of human social evolution by, 285, 287 anthropology and evolutionary biology of, 285–290 civil religion proposed by, 299–301 on conjectural nature of history, 285 on Descartes, 284 on economic inequality fostered by agricultural civilization, 292 evolutionary thought of Lucretius influencing, 285 four stages of social history (nascent man, nascent society, nascent inequality, and nascent government), 289–290 on freedom, 295 on general will, 293–294, 297, 301 on godlike legislator, 297–298 on government by the sovereign will of the people, 264 Hegel vs., 384 Hobbes and, 182, 284, 291, 300 on human nature, 284–285, 289–290 on impossibility of true democracy, 301–302 on intellectual enlightenment, 282–283 on orangutans and human evolution, 288–289 on participatory democracy, 7, 293–298 on personal freedom and participatory citizenship, 294–296 on representative democracy as disguised slavery, 298–299 research to develop “natural, moral, and political history” of humanity proposed by, 285 on rule of law, 292 on savage in state of nature as ape ancestor of humans, 287–288 on social contract, 294, 296, 300 on social inequality and wealth, 527 on state of nature, 284–293 warning on moral corruption from commercial society, 314 on women, 267

605

Rule of law failure of, 250–251 Locke on, 250–54 Rousseau on, 292 Sabine, George, 466–467 Sagard-Theodat, Gabriel, 231 Sahlins, Marshall, 190, 291, 549 Salomé, Lou, 437, 454 Sandel, Michael, 336–337 Schenck v. United States (1919), 206 Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., 255, 259 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 437 Science. See Anthropology; Artificial intelligence; Biology; Darwinian ethics; Mathematics; Modern science; Nature; Psychology; Teleology Searle, John, 168–169, 171 Self-governing societies/decentralized government, 358 Selfishness American politics of, 389 Ayn Rand on, 316 and Ethical Marine Warriors, 565 Hobbes on, 180–185, 204 James Madison on, 143 Machiavelli on, 143–144 Mandeville on altruism as disguise for, 315–318 Public Choice Theory and, 364 Rousseau on, 296 Sandel on, 336–337 Smith on, 311, 347–348 Self-preservation duty and honor overcoming the desire for, 340–341 Hobbes on, 183–184, 204 Locke on, 225–226 Rousseau on, 286–287 Smith on, 317 Strauss on, 490 Separation of powers, Locke on, 251–252, 257 Sidney, Algernon, 9n, 54, 221 Simon, Yves, 109 Singer, Peter, 419, 525–526 Skinner, B. F., 165 Skinner, Quentin, 123

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Slavery Aristotle on, 53–56, 473, 479 Lincoln on, 26, 86, 482 Melzer on, 472 Stowe on, 265–266, 482 Strauss on, 478–483 Smith, Adam, 305–375 and anarchism, 354–359 anticipation of Marxist critique of capitalism, 348–354 Aristotle and, 341–342 on banking and financial crises, 362–363 on benefits of commercial society, 306, 335 on bourgeois virtues in commercial society, 343–348 capitalism of, as possible cause of climate change, 365–368 on costly punishment, 305, 318, 322, 340 Cropsey’s critique of, 340–343 on economic order, 311 Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 as possibly refuting, 359–365 on four stages of human evolution, 335 on friendship of philosophers, 342 historical influences on, 308–309 Hobbes and, 312, 315 Hume, intellectual friendship with, 307, 342–343 on impact of religion on morality, 328–334 on importance of reputation to human beings, 323–327 on importance of social praise and blame in shaping human moral conduct, 326–327 libertarianism of, 347, 349, 352–354 Mandeville vs., 315–316 “market model” of unintended order, 310–311 Marx on, 348–349 moral sentimentalism of, 312–316 on primacy of moral emotions in guiding moral judgments and actions, 35, 312–316

Reid’s criticisms of, for his “selfish system,” 313–314 on religious tolerance, 334 on social recognition and the accumulation of wealth, 415 on special interests, 362–363 on spontaneous social order, 309–311, 334–335, 354–355 support of distributive justice for the poor, 348–354 Ultimatum Game/Dictator Game experiments confirming, 316–328, 337–340 on virtue, 315–316, 340–343 Smith, Alastair, 145 Smith, Vernon, 319, 324 Social contract in economics, 192 Glaucon and Adeimantus on, 26 Hegel’s criticism of, 386–387 Hobbes on, 185–193 Rawls on, 510–511 Rousseau on, 292–297 sociobiology of, 191, 445 Social democracy Marxist criticism of, 423–424 revisionist thought of, 420–421 Social division of labor. See Division of labor Socialism anarchist, 425–431 capitalist incentives in, 415 coercive violence of, 563 democratic, 417–424 historical failures of, not denying the truth of “communist hypothesis,” 397, 424–425 impossibility of, 417–419 Marxist, criticisms of, 425, 427–429 Marx’s vision for, 410–414 Mises’s criticisms of, 399, 410, 414–415 pure, Piketty on impossibility of, 410 in social democracies of Nordic countries, 420–424 from unjust inequality in capitalism to just equality in, 410 Sociobiology, 29, 146, 191, 331. See also Biology; Darwinian ethics

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Index Socrates, 12–15, 27–33, 37–38, 159, 440. See also Plato Somalia, 202 Spanish Civil War, 430 Stalin, Josef, 399, 416–417 State and Revolution, The (Lenin), 429 State of nature anarchism of, 180–182, 203, 355, 358 Hobbes on, 180–194 Locke on, 224–236, 244–46, 251–252, 263–266 Pinker on, 548–554 Rousseau on, 284–293 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 265–266, 482 Strauss, Leo, 465–506 as advocate of right-wing imperialism, 466, 468 on ancient vs. modern political philosophy, 466, 471 and Bloom, 501–503 as challenging textbooks like Sabine’s, 466–467 claiming “there are no gods but philosophers,” 487–488 on crisis of modern liberal democracy, 468, 474, 492 criticism of Weber, 476 on dangerous delusion of modern liberal societies, 469, 471, 473 Darwinian natural right as possible solution to problem of natural right, 476–478, 481–482 on Declaration of Independence, 473–474, 478 Drury’s criticisms of, 483–485 East Coast Straussian interpretation of, 473 on esoteric writing of early political philosophers, 465–473 failure to prove supremacy of philosophic life, 485–488 failure to solve problem of natural right, 474–476 flirtation with dangerous ideas, 468 as “the German Stranger,” Altman on, 493–495 on Heidegger, 468, 499 Holloway on “cosmocentric” teleology of, 477–478

607

as a Jewish Nazi, Altman on, 491–499 on liberal education for democratic aristocracy, 499–500 on Lockean liberalism as “joyless quest for joy,” 489–491 Midwest Straussian interpretation of, 472–473 Minowitz’s defense of, 503n on moral person as “mutilated human being,” 483 Mussolini supported by, 468 on natural right, 473–483 on persecution’s many forms, 469, 471 on philosophic life as only naturally good life, 483–488 on philosophy’s refutation of revelation, 488 on Plato’s cave analogy, 465–466 refutation of historicist relativism in political philosophy, 467, 472–474, 478–483 on slavery’s injustice as example of natural right, 478–483 on Thrasymachean justice, 484–485 on tyranny of the wise, 483–484 West Coast Straussian interpretation of, 473 Zuckerts’ defense of, 471–473, 483–485 Strong reciprocity, 318–320, 322–324, 326 Students for a Democratic Society, 293 Sur Les Femmes (Rousseau), 267 Sweden: The Middle Way (Childs), 421 Sympathy of sentiments, Smith on, 312, 315–316, 327 Taxation for fair redistribution of wealth, 350–351, 408–410, 513 Piketty on, 408 Smith on, 351 as violence, 547 Technological determinism, 412 Teleology, 23–25, 43–47, 100–102, 476–478 Terrorism, 140–141, 209, 261–262

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Thatcher, Margaret, 360 Third Party Punishment Game, 338–339 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Klein), 365 Thomas Aquinas, Saint. See Aquinas, Thomas Thomson, Judith Jarvis, 531 Thoreau, Henry David, 17–18, 246, 264, 299 Thrasymachus, on justice as the interest of the stronger, 21–23, 25–26, 28–29, 43, 51–52, 70, 83, 96, 124, 164, 187, 192, 204, 439–440, 455, 484–485 Timaeus (Plato), 37 Titmuss, Richard, 336 Tito, Josip Broz, 399 Tomasello, Michael, 327 Torture, 122, 140–141, 261–262 Tragedy of the commons, 193, 296 Trivers, Robert, 321–322 Trolley problem, 530–532 Trotsky, Leon, 399, 416, 428, 430 Truth about Leo Strauss, The (Zuckert and Zuckert), 483 Turing, Alan, and Turing Test, 166–168, 171 Turnbull, Colin, 184 Tyranny Aquinas on, 98 Aristotle on, 63–65 assassination and execution as threat to, 98–99, 137–138, 178, 211, 213–214, 220–221 Descartes on, 162–164 Leninist, 428 Locke on, 249 as logical outcome of extreme democracy, 43 Machiavelli on, 127–128, 138 narcissism of, 564–565 Nietzsche on, 446–447, 458–459 Plato on, 21–23, 26 power of, depending on minimum winning coalition, 144–146 in regimes founded on conflict of selfish interests, 6 Strauss on Thrasymachean “tyrannical teaching,” 484–485

technocratic vs. nihilistic, and Cartesian rationalism, 156 Thrasymachean view of, 21–23, 484–485 Ulpian, on natural law, 101 Ultimatum Game, 318–321, 338 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 265, 482 United States v. Korematsu (1944), 132 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 227, 545 Universal Declaration on the Human Genome and Human Rights, 227 Universe Plato’s cosmic model of, 38 supernatural vs. necessary cause of, 72–74, 454–455 Zarathustra’s, 448–450 Utopian ideology, dangers of, 416–417 Vanity vs. virtue, Reid vs. Smith on, 313–315 Vengeance as expressing a naturally evolved sense of injustice, 63–64, 98–99, 137–138, 142, 178, 211, 213–214, 220–221, 230, 234, 262–266, 318, 322, 338–340, 445, 564–565 Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), 266 Vinson, Fred, 200 Violence, 543–572. See also War Virtue(s) Aristotle on, 62, 341 Augustine on, 84 authoritative, 340–341, 343 Ayn Rand on selfishness as, 316 bourgeois, 343–348, 566–569 cardinal, identification by pagan and Christian philosophers, 344 Machiavellian, 124–130 as vanity, Smith and Reid on, 313–315 See also Character formation; Darwinian ethics; Morality; Philosophy Vitoria, Francisco de, 56 Voluntarism, Payne on, 547

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Index de Waal, Frans, 145, 328 Wade, Nicholas, 568 Wagner, Richard, friendship with Nietzsche, 436–437 Walzer, Michael, 390 Wanderer and His Shadow, The (Nietzsche), 458–459 War chimpanzee, 550–551 compulsory service in, 193, 197–198, 245, 390 declining, 554–566 evolutionary anthropology of, 548–554 executive prerogative in, 140–141, 254–262 justice and force in, 86, 138–141, 445, 563–566 liberal manliness of, to protect life, 564–566 Machiavelli on, 136–139 as natural human condition, 180–182, 187–188 perpetual peace and, 86 Plato on, 21 preserving the health of the state, 388–389 terror bombing in, 141 See also Aggression; International law; International relations; State of nature Washington, George, 263 Wealth. See Inequality of wealth; Redistribution of wealth

609

Weber, Max, 130, 297, 475–476 “What Is Liberal Education?” (Strauss), 499 What Money Can’t Buy (Sandel), 336 White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany, 63–64, 496 White, Matthew, 554–556, 558–560 Wiessner, Polly, 234, 322 Will to Power, The (Nietzsche), 457 Will, George, 390 Williams, Roger, 209, 270–271 Wilson, Edward O., 146, 191, 331 Wilson, Woodrow, 83, 85 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 266 Women Aristotle on, 53–56 as less violent than men, 544, 546, 563–566 Locke on, 266–268 maternal attachment to children, 286, 288–89 as philosopher-queens, 29 Rousseau on, 267 Wooldridge, John, 422–423 Wrangham, Richard, 549–553 Young, Michael, 524 Yudkowsky, Eliezer, 173 Yugoslavian socialism, 418–419 Zarathustra, 447–451 Zuckert, Catherine, 471–473, 483–485 Zuckert, Michael, 8, 471–473, 483–485, 516