Polis, Nation, Global Community: The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship 9780367630126, 9780367703066, 9781003145608

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POLIS, NATION, GLOBAL COMMUNITY

This book examines the basic tenets of nation, nationalism and citizenship. It explores the relevance of the nation-state to human freedom and f lourishing, as well as the concept of citizenship that it implies, in contrast to that of the ancient polis and the “global community.” The volume focusses on the shifting notions of various political concepts over time to present a systematic understanding of core concepts such as polis, nation and state from antiquity to the present. It includes contributions that analyze ancient and modern thought, and sections that address postmodern and contemporary thinkers, including Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Arendt, Weil, Grant and Manent. A comprehensive handbook to introductory politics, this book will be invaluable to students and teachers of political science, especially political theory, political philosophy, democracy, political participation and international relations theory. Ann Ward is Professor of Political Science at Baylor University, USA. Her research interests are ancient political philosophy, especially Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, and nineteenth century political thought. Ward’s most recent book is The Socratic Individual: Philosophy, Faith and Freedom in a Democratic Age (2020). She is also the author of Contemplating Friendship in Aristotle’s Ethics (2016), and Herodotus and the Philosophy of Empire (2008). She has edited Classical Rationalism and the Politics of Europe (2017), Socrates and Dionysus: Philosophy and Art in Dialogue (2013), Matter and Form: From Natural Science to Political Philosophy (2009), and Socrates: Reason or Unreason as the Foundation of European Identity (2007). She has co-edited with Lee Ward Natural Right and Political Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Catherine Zuckert and Michael Zuckert (2013), and The Ashgate Research Companion to Federalism (2009). She has published widely in scholarly journals, including POLIS:The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought, Perspectives on Political Science, European Journal of Political Theory, and The European Legacy:Toward New Paradigms.

POLIS, NATION, GLOBAL COMMUNITY The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship

Edited by Ann Ward

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Ann Ward; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ann Ward to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-63012-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-70306-6 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14560-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services Chennai India

For Lee and Mary

CONTENTS

List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Polis, Nation, Global Community

ix xii xiii

PART I

Ancient Conceptions of Polis and Empire 1 Citizenship and the polis in Aristotle’s Politics Ann Ward 2 Cicero’s empire of wisdom Stephen Patrick Sims

1 3 16

PART II

Modern Birth and Life of the Nation-State

31

3 Defining the law of nations: Revisions of Cicero’s ius gentium in Suárez, Grotius, and Burke Michael R. Gonzalez

33

4 The creation of man: Linguistic reformation and the necessity of the state in the work of Thomas Hobbes Emma Planinc

47

viii Contents

5 Nation against empire: J.G. Fichte on economic and cultural nationalism Jeffrey Church

67

6 Creating sovereignty: Religious authority, the social contract and the need for political friendship Karen Taliaferro

82

PART III

The Postmodern Challenge to Nationalism and State Sovereignty 7 Nietzsche against the sovereign individual in the second essay of the Genealogy Matthew D. Dinan 8 What is a people? Mark Blitz

95 97 110

PART IV

Contemporary Challenges to Global Citizenship 9 Rootedness and national identity in the twenty-first century Luma Simms

123 125

10 Honor, cynicism, and liberal education Timothy W. Burns

139

11 Loving one’s own: Pathway to justice or retrograde tribalism? Leah Bradshaw

154

12 Pierre Manent on the nation, humanity, and politics as the great mediation Trevor Shelley

168

Index

183

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Blitz (A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard University) is Fletcher Jones Professor of Political Philosophy at Claremont McKenna College. He is the author of Reason and Politics: The Nature of Political Phenomena; Conserving Liberty; Plato’s Political Philosophy; Duty Bound: Responsibility and American Public Life; Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and the Possibility of Political Philosophy; and is co-editor (with William Kristol) of Educating the Prince. He served during the Reagan administration as Associate Director of the United States Information Agency, where he was the senior United States official in charge of educational and cultural programs abroad, and as a senior professional staff member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. He has been Vice President of the Hudson Institute, and has taught political philosophy at Harvard University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Leah Bradshaw is Professor of Political Science at Brock University in Canada. Much of her career has been focused on the work of Hannah Arendt, and on the distinction between classical and modern political thought. Work on this latter theme includes publications on empire, tyranny, oligarchy, and rights. More recent work has turned to consideration on citizenship, multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. She co-edited with David Tabachnik Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies (2017). Timothy W. Burns is Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. He is the

author of Shakespeare’s Political Wisdom and of Leo Strauss on Democracy, Technology, and Liberal Education; co-author (with Thomas L. Pangle) of Introduction to Political Philosophy; and editor of four collections of essays. He has published numerous articles on thinkers from Homer to Fukuyama. He is also co-editor (with Thomas L. Pangle) of the “Recovering Political Philosophy” series, and editor-in-chief of Interpretation:A Journal of Political Philosophy.

x Contributors

Jeffrey Church is a Professor of Political Science at University of Houston.

His research focuses on late modern political thought from Rousseau through Nietzsche, especially on the themes of freedom, culture, individuality, liberalism, and the good life. He is the author of three books, including, most recently, Nietzsche’s Unfashionable Observations. Matthew D. Dinan is an Associate Professor in the Great Books Program at St.

Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. He is the co-editor of Politics, Literature, and Film in Conversation: Essays in Honor of Mary P. Nichols (2021) and is completing a manuscript treating Kierkegaard as a political thinker called Kierkegaard’s Socratic Modernity. Michael R. Gonzalez is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Baylor University,

with a focus on political philosophy and international relations. His MA thesis examines Suárez’s articulation of the law of nations and earned the International Studies Association’s Frances V. Harbor Graduate Student Paper Award in international ethics. His doctoral research focuses on religion’s role in society according to Epicurus, St. Augustine, and Thomas Hobbes. Emma Planinc is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Program of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Before this, she was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago. She is an historian of political thought, with research interests in early modern and Enlightenment political philosophy, and contemporary political theory. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the History of European Ideas, Political Theory, the Review of Politics, and the Canadian Journal of Political Science. She is currently working on her monograph, Regenerative Politics, which addresses the “regenerative” theological-natural science of the eighteenth century in France and its relation to our contemporary political world. Trevor Shelley is a proud Albertan temporarily displaced in the desert southwest as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. He is the recent author of Globalization and Liberalism: Montesquieu, Tocqueville, and Manent (2020) as well as articles in The Political Science Reviewer and Society. Luma Simms is an American essayist and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy

Center. Her essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in a variety of publications including National Affairs, The Point Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Law and Liberty, Public Discourse, National Review, First Things, Institute for Family Studies, and others.

Contributors

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Stephen Patrick Sims is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is coeditor of Whittle Johnston’s Realism and the Liberal Tradition (2016) and has published essays on Aristotle, Cicero, American foreign policy, and international relations. Karen Taliaferro is Assistant Professor of Civic Thought at the School of Civic and

Economic Thought and Leadership, Arizona State University. A Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Morocco, 2006-2008), she specializes in the history of political thought with a focus on Islamic philosophy and religion and politics. Karen is the author of The Possibility of Religious Freedom: Early Natural Law and the Abrahamic Faiths (2019). Ann Ward is Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. Her research inter-

ests are ancient political philosophy, especially Herodotus, Plato and Aristotle, and 19th century political thought. She is the author of three books, including, most recently, The Socratic Individual: Philosophy, Faith and Freedom in a Democratic Age (2020). She is also the editor or co-editor with Lee Ward of six collected volumes, and her work has appeared in POLIS: The Journal of the Society for Greek Political Thought, Perspectives on Political Science, European Journal of Political Theory, and The European Legacy:Toward New Paradigms.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The present collection grew out of a workshop I developed and chaired for the 16th International Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas (ISSEI), Aftershocks: Globalism and the Future of Democracy, held at the University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain, July 2–5, 2019. I wish to thank Professors Jose Angel Bergua and Iván López of the University of Zaragoza for convening the conference and the ISSEI for sponsoring it. I also thank Dr. Edna Rosenthal of the ISSEI for inviting me to develop and chair the workshop, “From Polis to Nation to Global Community and Back Again,” that has given rise to this volume, and Mr. Aakash Chakrabarty and Ms. Brinda Sen of Routledge for their support in transforming the proceedings of the workshop into the present collection. I also wish to thank Dr. David Clinton, Chair of the Political Science Department at Baylor University, for providing financial support for my participation in the 16th International Conference of the ISSEI. I wish to acknowledge and express my gratitude to the participants of the workshop and to the contributors to this volume. It is their intelligence, creativity, rigor and professionalism in the search for truth that have made this collection possible. I have learned and will continue to learn much from them. I also wish to thank my colleagues and students in the Political Science Department at Baylor University for the intellectually stimulating environment they provide every day. Finally, my deepest thanks are for my husband and colleague Lee Ward and for our daughter, Mary. They give my life meaning and joy and make possible all that I do. Waco, January 2021 Ann Ward

INTRODUCTION Polis, Nation, Global Community

The Philosophic Foundations of Citizenship Ann Ward For modern progressives, the human essence is freedom, and any conception of the good that seeks to place limits on human freedom is oppressive. Moreover, the modern theory of progress stipulates that humanity can only achieve their ideal of absolute freedom in a universal, homogeneous society or “global community,” making all “local cultures” either redundant at best, or repressive at worst. Therefore, much like Karl Marx, who argues that only with the overcoming of the political state will the final form of human emancipation be achieved, modern progressives believe that the nation-state must be transcended if human freedom is to be actualized. Political thinkers such as George Grant, on the other hand, argue that “globalism” or the process we have come to call “globalization,” far from allowing human freedom to f lourish, is actually the outcome of the greatest form of imperialism humankind has ever known. This form of imperialism is not characterized by direct military or political control over other countries, such as practised by empires in the past, but, rather, it is the control that multinational corporations, usually headquartered in America, have over nation-states. The main avenue through which multinational corporations control nation-states, including the United States, is through the spread of free market capitalism and free trade, which allows such corporations to take control of national economies and, therefore, indirectly, of national governments as well. For thinkers like Grant, there is a conf lict between nationalism and free trade capitalism. Sceptical of both the classical liberal commitment to free market capitalism and expansion of individual rights, and of the progressive commitment to human “emancipation” in the global community, thinkers like Grant often

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draw inspiration, if not direction, from classical philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Of particular interest to Grant is the classical conception of the polis and the friendship within it. In the Politics, for instance, Aristotle argues that the human being “is by nature a political animal” whose natural home is in the polis or city, and whose end is participation in the good life that only the city can provide. In order to aspire to the good life, citizens must be more than just artisans who engage in mutual exchange for economic advantage. Rather, for Aristotle, citizens must engage in communal institutions such as intermarriage, religious festivals and the pastimes of living together to foster the mutual affection necessary for friendship to thrive. This more elevated feeling of friendship allows for the doing of morally virtuous actions for the sake of the noble, which is the true end of the regime. For Aristotle, therefore, friendship is essential to politics. In the Nicomchean Ethics, Aristotle argues that friendship, more than justice, holds cities together and is noble in itself. The citizens of modern states are not, it seems, “friends” in the strict sense as the citizens of Aristotle’s polis are. The United States, for example, boasts the fourth largest landmass of the world’s states and at nearly 330 million people hosts the world’s third-largest population. Modern states, in other words, house a nation and not a polis, and seem to be held together by the emotive bond of nationalism rather than an Aristotelian concept of friendship. Moreover, scholars such as Benedict Anderson argue that for nationalists, nations are exclusive and are always conceived of by its members as finite with borders beyond which other nations lie. We are, thus, back to the nation-state that progressives reject on behalf of human emancipation in the global community and that more classically minded thinkers critique as detrimental to the virtues fostered by smaller human communities such as the polis. Is the nation-state, conceived of by thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, grounded in the social contract for the purpose of protecting individual rights, the best political organization to ensure human f lourishing? Should we seek to preserve the nation-state and tolerate the nationalism that binds it together? As a particular political community, is it preferable to a universal society? On the other hand, should we look beyond the nation-state to some form of transnational, global community to pursue the human freedom desired by progressives or to smaller forms of community resembling the polis to pursue the friendship and nobility valued by the ancients? This volume, drawing on thinkers in the history of political philosophy from ancient to contemporary times, will explore the relevance of the nation-state to human freedom and f lourishing, as well as the concept of citizenship that it implies, in relation to that of the polis and the “global community.” Although few books have sought to draw lessons from the history of political philosophy concerning current trends toward “globalization” and “cosmopolitan” citizenship, Lee Ward’s Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Rethinking Politics in the Age of Brexit and Trump, is an exception. In this excellent collection of essays, the theory of cosmopolitanism and its philosophic and political critique is explored from

Introduction

xv

antiquity to the most modern debates. Ward’s framework for this exploration is the Brexit Referendum result in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US in 2016. Arguing that these two events were fuelled by the apparent and much decried populist movement sweeping Europe and North America, Ward concludes that Brexit and Trump signify a profound public loss of confidence in the cosmopolitan ideal of postnational political identity and the ever-deepening progress toward international peace and prosperity. Like Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents, this book seeks to draw lessons from the history of political philosophy concerning current questions surrounding globalism and the concept of global or cosmopolitan citizenship. Yet, it will differ from Ward’s collection in two ways. First, whereas Ward’s framework is Brexit and Trump in 2016, the framework of this volume reaches back to the arguments of George Grant and the publication in 1963 of his book Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Here we can see that the discontent or disillusionment with cosmopolitanism stretches back, for some, to the shift after World War II from British to American leadership of the West against the communism of the East. For Grant, this shift allowed American multinational corporations, through the spread of free market capitalism, to take control of the economies and, therefore, the governments of other states. This process we have come to call globalization, and its ethos, or perspective, cosmopolitanism. Although perhaps originally benign, allowing America to successfully lead the “free world” to victory in the Cold War, if we apply Grant’s argument beyond the collapse of communism, a contemporary Grantian may suspect that what were once American multinational corporations have come to be and see themselves as global corporations, and that the American economy and American governments have become just as much subject to their control as other economies and states were in the past and still are today. This relates to the second way in which this volume differs from Ward’s. Although Ward’s volume includes philosophic critiques of cosmopolitanism and contemporary case studies on controversies surrounding populism, nationalism and democratic citizenship, I believe that the overall message of the book is favourable to cosmopolitanism or serves as a defence of the philosophic ideal even as it acknowledges that it can be problematic. This volume is less favourable to cosmopolitanism and, in certain respects, serves as a defence of the ideal of particular political communities who see others beyond themselves, whether they be the polis of antiquity or the nation-state of modernity. On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, edited by Geoffrey C. Kellow and Neven Leddy, also seeks to draw lessons concerning globalism and cosmopolitanism from the history of political philosophy. On Civic Republicanism is a collection of essays that explores what the civic republicanism of both ancient and modern republics can say to citizens of contemporary republics regarding current questions of civic virtue, public life and popular politics. Chapters draw on ancient sources such as Thucydides and Aristotle and, recognizing the early modern reclamation and restatement of ancient

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republicanism, modern sources such as Machiavelli, Montesquieu, Hume, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft. Although recognizing the decades-long debate between two schools of thought regarding the character of the relationship between ancient and modern republicanism, that represented by Skinner and Pocock arguing for a deep continuity, whereas that represented by Mansfield and Strauss arguing for a discontinuity and departure, the collection includes contributions from scholars from a variety of positions between Pocock and Mansfield. Although this book will be similar to On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, there are also significant ways in which it will differ and improve upon the latter volume. First, despite the title of the collection, only chapters within the ancient section, and only three of these, in On Civic Republicanism directly address the themes of globalism and cosmopolitanism. In this volume, every chapter addresses these and related themes directly. Moreover, although this volume also recognizes the contested nature of the relationship between ancient and modern civic republicanism, because its focus is slightly different ref lecting on the virtues or requirements necessary for republican citizenship in light of current processes of globalization, it sees a continuity rather than discontinuity between ancient and modern thought in this area. Although the polis of antiquity may be quite different from the nation-state of early modernity, chapters in this volume argue that both ancient and modern philosophers would reject the establishment of a universal regime as an obstacle to fulfilling our political nature, and thus as detrimental to human freedom and f lourishing. In addition, this volume includes contributions that analyse not just ancient and modern thought, but also sections that address postmodern and contemporary thinkers as well. Two books having philosophic assumptions contrary to this one are Joseph Carens’ The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Driven From Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants, David Hollenbach, SJ, ed. (Georgetown University Press, 2010). In The Ethics of Immigration, Carens argues that immigration poses problems for the ways in which people in Western democracies think about citizenship, rights, freedom and equality. Specifically, he argues that, according to their own liberal democratic values, many North American and European practices that restrict access to citizenship are indefensible and need reform. In the last section of the book, Carens furthers his critique of Western democracies, arguing that living up to our most basic democratic principles of freedom and equality entails a full commitment to open borders and thus, I would argue, the ultimate withering away of the nation-state as a sovereign political entity. Like The Ethics of Immigration, Driven From Home is critical of the response by Western democracies to the crisis of mass migration in the modern world, arguing that a new human rights framework to guide political and policy responses to forced migration must be developed. The contribution by Arash Abizadeh, “Closed Borders, Human Rights, and Democratic Legitimation,” is exemplary of the collection’s philosophic orientation.

Introduction

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According to Abizadeh, open borders and the denial of state sovereignty are necessary to secure human rights; freedom of movement across borders is a basic human right and necessary to reduce global poverty and inequality. Abizadeh goes further though, arguing that human rights doctrine can ground its denial of the state’s right to close its borders to foreigners in the democratic theory of popular sovereignty. Democratic theory argues that people subject to the state’s coercive power, and not the state itself, are ultimately the sovereign arbiter of political questions, and because migrants subject to the state’s border laws are also subject to the state’s coercive power, it is necessary to give them a say in setting those laws. Although this book does not deal with the issue of immigration directly, the philosophic orientation of most of the contributions is distinct from that which guides the arguments of Carens and Abizadeh. Almost all of the chapters in this volume find much to be concerned about in the attempt to suppress the sovereignty of particular political communities, whether they be the polis or the nation-state, that see other particular political communities beyond themselves. In fact, many of the contributions argue that the attempt to open borders, deny state sovereignty and institute cosmopolitan rule by a global “elite” will only continue to foster the tribalistic nationalism and populism that Carens and Abizadeh apparently so deplore. Contributions to this volume will be divided into four parts. Part I explores conceptions of the polis in antiquity. In Chapter 1, I argue that Aristotle’s concept of nature suggests a plurality of poleis in which distinct citizen bodies develop unique understandings of beauty, goodness and justice, thereby fulfilling their political potential. Aristotle indicates the exclusive nature of the polis in Book 1 of the Politics. Human beings, Aristotle argues, are naturally political because they possess reason and because the polis emerges from a process that originates in families. Thus, whereas citizenship cannot be reduced to birth, neither can it abstract from it altogether. Aristotle argues in Book 3 that citizens, to achieve their highest natural end, must be friends and perform virtuous actions including justice. I conclude, therefore, that friendship and justice are essential to politics, yet suggest a small citizen body sharing a definite territory. Stephen Sims, in Chapter 2, notes that scholarship on Cicero tends to focus on his openness to Stoic philosophy, in particular natural law and the city of the universe, or cosmopolitanism. Through this lens, Cicero appears as a representative of a moral cosmopolitanism that undercuts particular attachments, especially patriotic citizenship. Consequently, Cicero appears to be a major interlocutor and even opponent to thinkers like Plato and Aristotle. Sims, however, argues that, due to appetite, Cicero believes most human beings find it difficult to engage in the intellectual labour that is necessary to comprehend the natural law. Furthermore, human nature includes our mortality, which evinces virtues such as piety and friendship. These virtues, for Cicero, are achieved in political life. Thus, Sims concludes that, while Cicero makes room for a possible empire of wisdom, he shows that republicanism is a more likely guarantee to human f lourishing. It

xviii Introduction

follows, according to Sims, that Cicero is far closer to Plato and Aristotle than he is to his Stoic interlocutors and comes down on the side of grounded citizenship over the empire of wisdom. The chapters in Part II analyse the origins of the nation-state and its role in the international system as conceived in early modern political philosophy. In Chapter 3, Michael R. Gonzalez examines three exemplary attempts to rearticulate or redefine the Ciceronian law of nations in early modernity. He begins by considering the juridical and philosophical definitions of the law of nations (ius gentum) in Roman and Christian authors (namely, Cicero, Ulpian, Gaius, Gratian, Aquinas and Vitoria). He then proceeds to explicate Suaréz’s position, arguing that Suaréz provides the law of nations with a lower but sounder basis than that given it by earlier or later authors. Afterward, Gonzalez examines the positions of Grotius and Burke on the law of nations, in contrast with that of Suaréz. Emma Planinc, in Chapter 4, brings Hobbes’s theory of language into dialogue with his Leviathan, illuminating a novel justification for the existence and necessity of the nation-state. Employing Hobbes’s account of propositions in De Corpore, Planinc reinterprets Leviathan’s laws of nature as hypothetical propositions, which become necessarily true—or obligatory—for men only when an absolute authority already exists. This reveals that the necessity of natural law and, more radically, reasonable man himself is possible, or made true, only through the existence of the state. Man is not by nature a political animal, but man, for Hobbes, is made by politics. In Chapter 5, Jeffrey Church examines J.G. Fichte’s liberal nationalism as developed in his Closed Commercial State and Addresses to the German Nation. Church argues that Fichte’s economic and cultural nationalism are both motivated by the same purpose, namely, to curb, discipline and direct the selfish desires of the modern age toward moral ends. Church also holds that Fichte’s nationalism can contribute to contemporary liberal nationalism by revealing how nationalism can curb the imperial impulses built into the liberal project that have been the subject of recent scholarship. Karen Taliaferro, in Chapter 6, argues that authority in the West historically occurred along two axes, a vertical one between man and God, and a horizontal one among people (including between rulers and other people), which Taliaferro includes under the umbrella of political authority. Yet, according to Taliaferro, in eliminating the vertical, religious authority, social contract traditions altered the nature of the political authority they left behind. This led to a West in which all human affairs are increasingly politicized, with correspondingly high stakes in politics and law and a deeply polarized society. Concluding that a return to a dual-authority (religious and political) system is both impossible and likely undesirable, Taliaferro argues the ancient concept of political friendship is worth reconsideration in the modern West, particularly as it is presented by Alexis de Tocqueville. Part III analyses postmodern challenges to nationalism and state sovereignty. In Chapter 7, Matthew Dinan explores Friedrich Nietzsche’s criticism of the “sovereign individual” in the second essay of On The Genealogy of Morals. He

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suggests that Nietzsche subtly connects this figure to the moral and political philosophy of Immanuel Kant and shows how Nietzsche’s critique complicates attempts to theorize political community beyond the sovereign nation state. Nietzsche shows that the autonomous, sovereign self of Kantian thought creates a “logic of sovereignty” that problematically intensifies our relationship to one another and our ways of thinking. Mark Blitz, in Chapter 8, notes that an important impulse for today’s discussions of topics such as “polis, nation and global community” is the resurgence of populism. According to Blitz, concerns about populism and celebrations of it both have in mind a view of what a “people” is. This opinion is usually hazy, or it is partisan and rhetorical, a cudgel with which to beat opponents or a lure to attract followers. Blitz first clarifies the meaning of “people” intellectually—particularly in the philosophies of John Locke and Martin Heidegger—and then indicates how rule by or attention to the people can and cannot be salutary politically. Part IV, which concludes the volume, ref lects on contemporary challenges to the concept of global citizenship. In Chapter 9, Luma Simms argues that at the heart of our national and international disquiet is an existential homelessness, an identity crisis. According to Simms, what makes one nation different from another and creates solidarity between a people is attachment to several elements: common history, place, culture, language, religion, traditions, civilizational memory, and a variety of institutions particular to that nation. Severing the human person from all these elements causes a personal and national crisis. The link, or tether, Simms argues, between the elements that constitute identity, and identity, as such, is rootedness. Simms uses Alexis de Tocqueville, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and others to trace the deterioration of the elements that constitute national identity and to diagnose the causes and nature of rootlessness. For Simms, it is rootedness that makes it possible for a human person to participate in the life of a community. Timothy Burns, in Chapter 10, addresses honor’s place in liberal education and a deep if unacknowledged threat to students’ sense of honor and to the liberal education they come to colleges and universities to obtain, a threat that Burns calls cynicism. Burns first sketches a common sense understanding of honor and how this is ref lected in the classical presentation of honor and political life. He then explains how this understanding was overthrown through the work of modern political philosophers, especially Thomas Hobbes, and how that overthrow has yielded a cynicism that one finds in modern liberal democracies, a cynicism that threatens both liberal education and citizenship in the liberal regime. On a more positive note, Burns concludes with a ref lection on possible ways out of this cynicism. In Chapter 11, Leah Bradshaw considers the “love of one’s own,” understood as one’s own country or one’s traditions or culture, as a pathway to justice. Working primarily from the thoughts of George Grant, Canadian political philosopher, and his lament for Canadian nationalism in the prospect of absorption into the broader imperatives of modernity and progress, Bradshaw lays out Grant’s case for national solidarity. She subsequently examines Grant’s argument

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in comparison to the dominant liberal democratic paradigm of justice grounded in individual rights. The chapter concludes with Bradshaw’s reluctant judgement that Grant’s defence of the “love of one’s own” may not justifiably hold its ground against the more universal imperatives of liberalism. Trevor Shelley, in the concluding chapter of the volume, examines Pierre Manent’s understanding of politics as the greatest form of mediation by discussing his ambifocal political gaze—ahead to humanity and back to the city. The significance of the nation is better appreciated when understood to be the only political form presently available for Western peoples to mediate the diverse aspects of human life and mediate the particularity of the politically defined city and the universality of indeterminate humanity. Shelley argues that Manent’s political defence of the nation, as undergirded by the inescapable problem of mediation, offers an incisive way to think about the limits of human unity, the challenges of political homogeneity and globalization and the modes in which particular peoples express their common humanity.

Biblography Abizadeh, Arash. 2010. “Closed Borders, Human Rights, and Democratic Legitimation.” In Driven From Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants, Hollenbach, David S.J., ed. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. Carens, Joseph. 2013. The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, Geroge. 2000. Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Hollenbach, David, S.J., ed. 2010. Driven From Home: Protecting the Rights of Forced Migrants. Georgetown: Georgetown University Press. Kellow, Geoffrey C. and Leddy, Neven, eds. 2016. On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ward, Lee, ed. 2020. Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents: Rethinking Politics in the Age of Brexit and Trump. Lanham: Lexington Books.

PART I

Ancient Conceptions of Polis and Empire

1 CITIZENSHIP AND THE POLIS IN ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS Ann Ward

According to Canadian political philosopher George Grant, modern progressives believe the human essence is freedom, achieved in a universal society or “global community,” making all “local cultures,” such as nation-states, redundant at best and repressive at worst.1 In the Politics, Aristotle argues that the human being “is by nature a political animal” whose home is in the polis.2 He defines the citizen of the polis as someone who participates in the regime. Although acknowledging the common view that citizenship derives from birth, Aristotle argues that those who first establish the polis are not citizens by birth; therefore, we must recognize that citizenship is not simply derivative of birth but also of the ability to participate in the regime. Yet, can the regime and the polis over which it rules be extended beyond a finite group of citizens to include all persons capable of citizenship? Are scholars such as Mary Dietz, Michael Wineman and Martha Nussbaum correct to see in Aristotle’s understanding of nature an unstable polis without fixed boundaries, suggesting that the citizens of the most complete regime see themselves as a global citizen of the world?3 In contrast to these scholars, I argue that Aristotle’s polis is a finite political community that, like the nation-state, sees other political communities beyond itself. Aristotle indicates the exclusive nature of the polis in a number of places. For instance, in Book 1 of the Politics, he argues that human beings are naturally political because they possess reason and speech and because the polis comes to be from a process that originates in families. Thus, whereas citizenship cannot be reduced to birth or to biology, neither can it abstract from it altogether; the regime must defer to both birth and speech, both body and soul. Moreover, Aristotle argues that human beings’ highest natural end is participation in the good life that only the polis can provide. In order to aspire to this highest human good, citizens, Aristotle argues in Book 3, must engage in communal institutions that foster an elevated feeling of friendship that allows for the doing of

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morally virtuous actions for the sake of the noble, the true end of the regime. Yet, Aristotle suggests that the noble can only be pursued in cities exercising the virtue of justice, and thus both justice and friendship must be maintained by the regime. Friendship and justice between citizens, therefore, are essential to politics, and the requirements that allow both to come into being suggest a rather small citizen body sharing daily life together in a particular territory they call their own. Aristotle would thus caution against attempts to establish a universal regime. Rather, Aristotle’s concept of nature suggests a plurality of poleis in which distinct citizen bodies develop unique understandings of beauty, goodness, and justice. Such understandings make pursuit of the noble possible and allow human beings to fulfil their political nature and, thus, attain their highest good.

The citizen In Book 1 of the Politics, Aristotle argues that the polis, “coming into being for the sake of living […] [but] exist[ing] for the sake of living well,” is “among the things that exist by nature.”4 This means, according to Aristotle, that the human being “is by nature a political animal” whose natural home is in the polis.5 Citizenship is thus natural to us and necessary if we are to achieve the good life, our highest human end. Aristotle enquires into the nature of the citizen at the beginning of Book 3. Noting that citizenship is often relative to the regime and that citizens of one type of regime often do not qualify as citizens of another type, Aristotle says he is “seeking the citizen in an unqualified sense.”6 Aristotle first defines the citizen in an unqualified sense as a person who shares “in decision” and “indefinite office,” the latter understood as that of juror and assemblyman, those, according to Aristotle, “with greatest authority” in the polis.7 The citizen, in other words, is someone who participates in rule through serving on juries and voting in assemblies, or the way the many actually participate in decision-making and hence the regime. Aristotle, however, acknowledges that his definition of the citizen is of someone, “above all in a democracy; he may, but will not necessarily be, a citizen in the other [regimes].”8 Democracy, therefore, seems to have the most citizens, or to be the most political or public of regimes. In some regimes, according to Aristotle, “there is no people,” as it were, as the majority, bereft of all political rights, is excluded from citizenship altogether if citizenship is defined as participation in rule; hence, there is no public or political sphere at all.9 Aristotle, to take in more regimes, proceeds to a second definition of citizenship that would be more inclusive. Therefore, a citizen is now said to be “[w]hoever is entitled to participate in an office involving deliberation or decision.”10 Thus, whoever the regime allows to participate in rule and political decision-making in any way can be considered a citizen.11 Who qualifies as a citizen, therefore, can change with the regime, and, as the regime changes, the citizen body can either increase or decrease.

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It is important to note in this discussion thus far that Aristotle has given two definitions of the citizen that makes citizenship derivative of the regime; different regimes allow different kinds and numbers of people to participate in rule, with the democratic regime allowing all to participate in rule, therefore containing the most citizens. Aristotle acknowledges, however, that this is not the common view of what makes a citizen a citizen. Rather, according to Aristotle, “[a]s a matter of usage, […] a citizen is defined as a person from parents who are both citizens, and not just one, whether the father or the mother; and some go even further back, seeking two or three or more [generations of citizen] forbears.”12 In the customary view, therefore, citizenship is based on birth or ancestry; it is determined by blood or biology, not the regime. The suggestion here is that the identity of the polis is in its biology and is determined by its past, despite any changes of its regime that may occur. Thus, even if the city experiences a regime change from democracy to tyranny, there is no contraction in its citizen body. The identity of the city and its citizens, in other words, is based in body and, thus, has a certain freedom from its regime or governing institutions. Aristotle, however, immediately points to the problem of basing citizenship on birth by asking about the founders or first inhabitants of the polis. Aristotle thus argues: [S]ome raise the question of how that third or fourth [generation ancestor] will have been a citizen […] If they shared in the regime according to the definition that has been given [—i.e. “sharing in decision and [indefinite] office”—] they were citizens; for at any rate, it is impossible that the definition from citizen father or mother should fit in the case of the first inhabitants or founders.13 The founders or first inhabitants of the polis, in other words, were not citizens by birth, and thus we must look to another principle other than birth that allowed them to be citizens. According to Aristotle, we must go back to the original definition; founders or first immigrants can be considered citizens because they participated in rule or political decision-making. We must recognize, therefore, that citizenship is not simply derivative of birth but also of participation in the regime. The regime-based character of citizenship is further emphasized when Aristotle enquires whether a city changes when the regime changes and whether the city owes the debts of past regimes.14 Does the regime give the city its identity or not? Aristotle indicates that when a city experiences regime change from an oligarchy or tyranny to a democracy, the customary opinion is that city does not owe the debts contracted by the oligarchs or the tyrant.15 Two reasons are given: first, the people did not consent to the tyrant’s actions, which were not taken for the common good.16 Second, (implied) is that the regime gives the city its identity; the city changes along with the regime, so the city under the new democratic regime is not the same city as that under the tyranny. Aristotle, therefore,

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subtly indicates that there is an inconsistency in customary opinion that is trying to have it both ways. With respect to citizenship, customary opinion asserts that it is based on birth or ancestry—biology gives the city its identity. With respect to regime change from tyranny to democracy—it insists that the city does not owe the debts of past tyrants because the regime gives the city its identity; the “slate is wiped clean,” as it were, with the new democratic regime. Aristotle then raises the question of the debts contracted by a democratic regime itself.17 Do future generations within a democracy need to make reparations for the injustices of previous generations in the same democracy? Does the city change with the passage of time and the birth and death of human beings, or does it stay the same if the regime stays the same?18 Here, Aristotle is addressing not regime change but generational change. To both questions, 1) if the regime changes from tyranny to democracy, does the city owe the debts of the past regime, and 2) do future generations owe the debts of past generations, when the regime stays the same, Aristotle indicates his answer when he says: At any rate, just as we assert that a chorus which is at one time comic and at another tragic is different even though the human beings in it are often the same, it is similar with any other partnership and any compound, when the compound takes a different form […] If this is indeed the case, it is evident that it is looking to the regime above all that the city must be said to be the same.19 In this passage Aristotle posits an analogy between actors in the chorus and the city, and between the script of the chorus and the regime. He then suggests two possibilities: 1) If the actors stay the same, but the script changes from comic to tragic, the chorus changes. So, if the people stay the same (the same generation) but the regime changes, the city changes because as the script gives identity to the chorus, so the regime gives identity to the city. 2) If the actors change, but the script—either comic or tragic—stays the same, the chorus stays the same. So, if the people change (generational change) but the regime stays the same, the city remains the same. Again, as the script gives identity to the chorus, so the regime gives identity to the city. So, for Aristotle, if the regime changes, does the city owe the debts of the past regime? No, the city has changed. If the regime stays the same but the generations change, do future generations owe the debts of past generations? Yes, the city is the same. The regime gives identity to the city, and citizenship, therefore, is derived from the regime or the ability to participate in rule.

The family Aristotle, as we have seen, argues that citizenship is not simply derivative of birth but also of participation in the regime, and thus citizenship rises above the body

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or the biological roots of the city. Yet, can the regime and the polis over which it rules be extended beyond a finite group of embodied citizens to include all potential citizens of the world, so to speak. Can the polis be a global community, as it were? As conceived by Aristotle, the polis, I believe, is a finite political community that, like the nation-state, sees other political communities beyond itself. Aristotle indicates the exclusive nature of the polis in a number of places. For instance, in Book 1 of the Politics, he argues that human beings are naturally political because they possess reason and speech and because the polis comes to be from a process that originates in families. In Book 1 Chapter 2 of the Politics, Aristotle argues that human beings are by nature political animals because they, “alone among the animals,” possess reason and speech, speech understood as reason’s external manifestation.20 Unlike other animals that intuit the merely pleasant and painful and express this through the sounds that they make, human beings, according to Aristotle, can grasp through reason the advantageous and the harmful, the good and the bad, and the just and the unjust, and communicate these things to each other through speech.21 Aristotle, therefore, suggests that political activity is discursive, involving rational argumentation and deliberation among diverse individuals and groups regarding the advantageous, the good, and the just and their opposites and making decisions based on such rational deliberations.22 Yet, in addition to possessing reason and speech, Aristotle argues in the same chapter that human beings find their natural home in the polis because the latter comes into being from a process that originates in families. The family itself, according to Aristotle, is composed of two partnerships: 1) between male and female for the purpose of reproduction and 2) between master and slave for the purpose of the preservation.23 Aristotle defines a master as that “which can foresee with mind,” and the slave as that which can “do […] things with the body.”24 Is Aristotle suggesting that, within the family, the female is slave to the male? It appears not, as Aristotle is careful to distinguish women from slaves on the basis of nature.25 Aristotle concludes this initial discussion of the family by asserting: From these two partnerships, then, the household first arose, and Hesiod’s verse is rightly spoken: “first a house, and woman, and ox for ploughing”— for poor persons have an ox instead of a servant. The household is the partnership constituted by nature for [the needs of ] daily life: Charondas calls its members “peers of the mess,” Epimenides “peers of the manger.”26 The end or purpose of the family, therefore, is the satisfaction of daily needs, namely the daily needs of sex and food—reproduction and preservation—or the bodily needs. The family is natural, therefore, or the first association human beings form, because they fear bodily death, either immediate bodily death from starvation or a more abstract, eternal bodily death through lack of descendants or the failure, “to leave behind another that is like oneself.”27

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Near the end of Book 1 in Chapter 13, Aristotle suggests that once the city or polis comes into being, the family can acquire an end not in its beginning— namely the virtue of its members—and thus can address the needs of the soul in addition to those of the body.28 Thus, Aristotle argues, “It is evident then that household management gives more serious attention to human beings than to inanimate possessions, to the virtue of these [free persons] than that of possessions (which we call wealth).”29 Yet, Aristotle also suggests that the family’s initial end or purpose in addressing the fear of bodily death, for now or for eternity, can never disappear and be transcended completely.30 For Aristotle, therefore, although citizenship cannot be reduced to birth, neither can it abstract from it altogether; the regime must defer to both birth and speech, to both body and soul.31 Thus, after the first generation of founders, Aristotle indicates that there will be a distinction within the polis between citizens born of citizen parents—those who have past biological relations situated in the polis—and citizens and potential citizens who do not.

The regime The exclusive nature of the polis is also suggested by Aristotle when he argues that human beings’ highest natural end is participation in the good life that only the polis can provide.32 In order to aspire to this highest human good, citizens, Aristotle argues, must have a concept of and pursue what is noble. Illumination on what Aristotle actually means by the noble can be found in his classification of regimes in Book 3 of the Politics. Before discussing his regime typology, Aristotle begins by defining what he means by a regime (politeia). According to Aristotle, the regime is that which has “authority over all (matters),” and in the city, “what has authority […] is everywhere the governing body, and the governing body is the regime. I mean, for example, in democratic regimes the people have authority, while by contrast, it is the few in oligarchies.”33 Aristotle suggests that the regime is that class of people in the city—for example, the few in oligarchies or the many in democracies—who have the determinative voice in political decision-making; it is, as it were, “who rules.” The regime defined as such can then be classified by looking to the ends that human beings pursue through political life. The proper end of political life, according to Aristotle, is to achieve the common advantage, understood not merely as securing the material necessities of life, but to attain a beautiful or noble (kalos) life, both for the city as a whole and for each member individually.34 To understand how a noble life can be pursued, one must look to how the city is constituted. If the end of the city were simply wealth or security, Aristotle asserts that all who have “alliances” or “agreements with one another” for the purposes of “not committing injustice against each other and of transacting business,” would “be as citizens of one city.”35 Members of military alliances and trade agreements, however, are not citizens of one city because wealth and security, although absolutely necessary, are not sufficient to constitute a city, as

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neither are its highest ends. The collective pursuit of the proper end, therefore, is what constitutes the city; the end, as it were, is the beginning or founding. That which constitutes the city as one political entity, Aristotle argues, are not military alliances or trade agreements but, rather, communal institutions that foster friendship or affection, as “affection is the intentional choice of living together.”36 The institutions that foster friendship among citizens are “intermarriage,” common religious “festivals”, and the “pastimes of living together,” such as going to the theatre or the collective enjoyment of common cultural events.37 Friendship among citizens is not itself the end of the city, however, but, rather, serves as the means that makes the pursuit of the noble possible. The city, Aristotle asserts, “must be regarded […] as being for the sake of noble actions, not [simply] for the sake of living together.”38 This more elevated feeling of friendship allows for the doing of morally virtuous actions for the sake of the noble, which is the true end of the regime. Friendship between citizens is thus essential to politics, and the requirements that allow it to come into being suggest a rather small citizen body sharing daily life together in a particular territory they call their own. To live nobly, understood as the good common to all, requires not simply friendship among citizens but also that the regime exercise the virtue of justice. According to Aristotle, “(t)he political good is justice, and this is the common advantage.”39 In maintaining that the presence of justice in addition to friendship is necessary to attain the noble, Aristotle suggests that the noble can only be pursued in cities properly constituted and exercising the virtue of justice. In just regimes, those that look to the proper end of political life, Aristotle asserts rule is “political” and exercised on behalf of the common good, while “those which look only to the advantage of the rulers” are unjust deviations from the former, and the character of rule is despotic.40 Aristotle, therefore, suggests that rule, if exercised properly, is by nature burdensome and unattractive because it looks to the good of others rather than one’s own interests. Thus, Aristotle argues that in ancient times, the citizens “claimed to merit doing public service by turns and having someone look to their good, just as when ruling previously they looked to his advantage.”41 In more recent times, however, Aristotle maintains, “because of the benefits to be derived from common (funds) and from office, they wish to rule continuously.”42 Only when profit perverts the true end for which power should be exercised and it becomes a good avenue to personal wealth is rule sought and greedily held on to. Thus, at the outset of his classification of regimes, Aristotle implies that in unjust and despotic regimes, the interests to which the rulers look are the material or financial rewards that they will gain for themselves by exercising political power. Aristotle, with the just and unjust ends of political power in mind, classifies regimes on the basis of the number and character of the people who rule in the city. With respect to just regimes, monarchy, or what Aristotle says we commonly call kingship, is that in which one person rules with a view not to his or her own but to the common good. Likewise, aristocracy is the regime in which the few best persons rule for the sake of the common good, and polity—or

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“politeia,” the generic name for the regime as such—occurs when the many rule with a view to the common good. Moreover, the quality possessed by the many who rule in a polity, Aristotle argues, is “military virtue, as this arises in a multitude; hence … the warrior element is most authoritative, and it is those possessing (heavy) arms who share in it.”43 Aristotle, therefore, suggests that polity, in which the many share in rule for the common good, is the regime of citizensoldiers. The logic of such an understanding of polity may refer to the ability of the many, manifested in their willingness to die in battle in defence of their city, to rise above concern for their own lives and look to the good of the whole.44 Yet, the virtue of the citizen-soldier assumes the existence of other cities with whom they fight. Without a multiplicity of cities warring or potentially warring against each other, the virtue of the citizen-soldier would collapse or disappear. It therefore appears that the regime in which the many can rule justly is a polity that sees other regimes beyond itself.45 The unjust regimes are deviations from the just ones. Tyranny, oligarchy and democracy are, respectively, the rule of the one, the few and the many not with a view to the common good of the city as a whole, but to their own interests.46 Aristotle further elaborates on the character of oligarchy and democracy, arguing that number is only incidental, whereas the economic status of those who rule is key. Oligarchy is rule by the rich, who are usually but only incidentally few, and democracy is rule by the poor, who are usually but only incidentally many.47 Although Aristotle identifies three regimes that he considers just—monarchy, aristocracy and polity—what, for Aristotle, is not simply an acceptable but, rather, the best regime? Who should rule, as Aristotle asks at the beginning of Book 2 of the Politics, if we wish to live “as far as possible in the manner one would pray for.”48 In other words, what is Aristotle’s best regime in theory?

Absolute monarchy and the problem of honour As we move toward the conclusion of Book 3 of the Politics, Aristotle suggests the superiority of a monarchy that is absolute. Here Aristotle turns to the question, arising naturally from his previous argument that the people should participate in rule because of their superior capacity for judgment, of who should actually be considered a part of the people or citizen body that shares in rule.49 Aristotle initially considers two “unjust” regimes, oligarchy and democracy, to shed light on the issue. According to Aristotle, oligarchs base their claim to citizenship and thus to participation in rule on their possession of wealth, while democrats, on the other hand, do not put forward their poverty as a claim to rule but, rather, their free birth or birth from citizen parents.50 The claims of oligarchs and democrats to citizenship are partially just because, as Aristotle maintains, “a city cannot exist wholly of those who are poor, any more than of slaves.”51 Yet, although wealth and freedom contribute to the city’s existence, they do not contribute to its highest end, which, as mentioned above, is to live nobly. Thus, other claims to

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citizenship and participation in rule need to be taken into account. The most important of these, Aristotle implies, is the possession of “[the virtue of ] justice,” as “[the virtue of ] justice is a virtue characteristic of partnerships, and that all the other [virtues] necessarily follow on it.”52 Aristotle’s implication in raising justice as a third claim to citizenship and rule is that perhaps the child of non-citizens who possesses justice should be brought into the citizen body. The deeper issue that Aristotle is pointing to, I would suggest, is that all regimes, including the various forms of polity, will give preference to their own citizens and their children—especially those basing their claim on free birth or birth from citizen parents—over non-citizens who may be good; not all good persons will be able to become citizens of the best regime. Thus, to the extent that all regimes must choose their own over the good, no regime, it seems, is either perfectly just or completely universal. Aristotle reaffirms the imperfect justice and particularity of even the just regimes when he discusses the problem that occurs for a city if an individual of exceptional virtue appears within it. According to Aristotle: If there is one person so outstanding by his excess of virtue […] that the virtue of all the others and their political capacity is not commensurable with his alone […] such persons can no longer be regarded as part of the city. For they will be done injustice if it is claimed they merit equal things in spite of being so unequal in virtue and political capacity; for such a person would likely be a god among human beings.53 If, as Aristotle suggests, common membership in a political community requires at least some measure of equality or commensurability among the citizens, a person so exceptional because of his or her extraordinary moral and political virtue, such that they were “gods” among human beings, could not take part in the common life of the city. The solution initially suggested by Aristotle in the event that such a person arises in their city, is that regimes utilize the instrument of ostracism or the “pulling down and exiling [of ] the preeminent.”54 It is not only tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies that must ostracize individuals of outstanding virtue, but, as Aristotle asserts, “[t]he issue is one that concerns all regimes generally, including the correct ones. For the deviant ones [ostracize] looking to the private [advantage of the rulers], yet even in the case of those that look to the common good the matter stands in the same way.”55 Thus, it appears that all regimes, even the just ones, must do injustice to the best human beings, tolerating mediocrity to some extent. Aristotle, however, quickly revises his position, arguing that in the case of the best regime, if a person of outstanding virtue should appear, “surely no one would assert that such a person should be expelled and banished.”56 Moreover, because it is unjust to claim that such a person either “merits to be ruled in turn” or to be ruled by law, because for them “there is no law—they themselves are the law,” Aristotle claims that the only just and natural solution that remains for the city “is

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for everyone to obey such a person gladly, so that persons of this sort will be permanent kings in their cities.”57 It appears, therefore, that in the final analysis of his regime classification, Aristotle’s understanding of the best regime is a form of absolute monarchy, in which an individual so exceptional in virtue and justice rules but is not ruled in turn and is not subject to or limited by law. Moreover, because this monarch is of superior virtue, it is just not simply for persons in one city to obey him or her, but all persons everywhere to obey.58 The individual of exceptional virtue points to the justice of a universal polis governed by a virtuous elite. An immediate problem arises, however, with concluding that Aristotle’s best regime is the elite rule of outstanding virtue if we ref lect for a moment on Aristotle’s discussion of the relationship between honour and political rule. Earlier in Book 3, Aristotle speculates on whether authority should be given either to the multitude, the wealthy, the few best or even to “the one best of all,” the individual of outstanding virtue.59 Although all possibilities involve difficulties, Aristotle draws our attention to the fact that all who are deprived of a share in rule in the city, “[will not be] honored by [filling] political offices. For we say that offices are honors [timas], and when the same persons always rule the others are necessarily deprived of [these honours or] prerogatives.”60 The deprivation of honour, moreover, is highly problematic because, according to Aristotle, “when there exist many who are deprived of prerogatives […] that city is necessarily filled with enemies.”61 For persons of outstanding virtue, therefore, ostracism rather than rule is much more likely to await.62 Aristotle surprisingly concedes that the primary motivation for those who seek to participate in political rule is honour. Participation in rule, therefore, as a form of honour, signifies that one is a being capable of pursuing the noble, and such capacity simultaneously seems to justify one’s participation in rule.63 Thus, Aristotle’s initial classification of regimes into just regimes in which the rulers self lessly look to the common good, and unjust regimes in which the rulers look to their own material self-interests is incomplete.64 It cannot be sustained because no human being, including individuals of outstanding virtue and those beneath them, simply looks either to the good of others or to their own private material interests when they seek political power. Rather, all human beings, and not simply those of exceptional virtue, seek to be honoured or to satisfy a desire in the soul to be recognized as worthy in the eyes of others. They want to be recognized as capable of the noble actions for the sake of which the city is constituted and that are its highest end. The noble, the capacity for which is signified by honour, not only calls into question the initial classification of regimes in Book 3 of the Politics but it also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for exceptional virtue to rule or even find a home in the city. Individuals of exceptional virtue are separated from the city by the many. To avoid exclusion from political rule and the attendant implication that one is incapable of nobility, Aristotle suggests human beings would rather ostracize individuals of exceptional virtue than allow them participation in political life.

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Aristotle, therefore, would caution against attempts to establish a “global citizenship” under a universal regime of exceptional virtue, as doing so would prevent human beings from achieving their highest natural good. Rather, Aristotle’s concept of nature suggests a plurality of poleis in the international system in which unique and diverse citizen bodies, engaging in intermarriage, common religious festivals, and the pastimes of living together, develop and express through speech common understandings of beauty, goodness and justice. Such common understandings make pursuit of the noble possible and allow human beings to fulfil their political nature.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

Grant, 2000: 53, 204. Aristotle, 1984: 1253a3–4. All subsequent translations will be taken from this edition. Weinman, 2016: 67–69; Dietz, 2012: 286–87, 289–90; Nussbaum, 1993: 264–66. Aristotle, 1984: 1252b29–30; 1253a2 Ibid., 1253a3. Ibid., 1275a19; 1275b1–2. Ibid., 1275a21–30. Ibid., 1275b5. Ibid., 1275b7. Ibid., 1275b18–19. See Samaras, who argues that definition of the citizen as one who participates in rule because it means that the common good of the polis becomes identical to the common good of the ruling class is inconsistent with and, therefore, undermines Aristotle’s later distinction between just and unjust regimes. I argue that the honour attached to rule does. Samaras, 2015: 127. Aristotle, Politics, 1275b–21-23. Ibid., 1275b24–33. Ibid., 1276a6–13. Ibid., 1276a10. Ibid., 1276a10. Ibid., 1276a13–16. Ibid., 1276a33–38. Ibid., 1273b3–10. Ibid., 1253a2–3, 9. Ibid., 1253a14–18. Nichols, 1992: 14–15 Aristotle, 1984: 1252a25–30. Ibid., 1252a 31–33. Ibid., 1252a35–1252b5. Ibid., 1252b10–14. Ibid., 1252a30. Ibid., 1259b20. Ibid., 1259b18–21. For the importance of the biological family to the virtue of the soul as well as the body, see Aristotle’s critique in Book 2 of the Politics of the proposal in Plato’s Republic to abolish the biological family. Aristotle, 1984: 1261a10–1262b35. But see Frede, who limits Aristotle’s understanding of citizenship to that solely determined to the regime in abstraction from the family and heredity. Frede, 2005: 170, 172. Aristotle, 1984: 1252b30–1253a5; 1253a28–29.

14

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

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Ibid., 1278b10–13. Ibid., 1278b21–22. Ibid., 1280a34–37, 1280b30. Ibid., 1280b38. Ibid., 1280b38. Ibid., l28la2–3. Ibid., l282b16–17. Ibid., 1279al 7–20. Ibid., 1279al 1–13. Ibid., 1279a14. Ibid., 1279b2–4. See Nichols, 1992: 91. Also see Ward, 2001: 74. But see Samaras, who argues that the reference to military virtue reduces the understanding of the “many” who rule in polity from all adult males to a smaller property-owning middle class. Samaras, 2015: 127, 129, 133. Also see Frede, 2005: 174. Aristotle, 1984: 1276b4–10. Ibid., 1279b34–1280a5. Ibid., 1260b28–29. Ibid., 1281a16–23; 1281a44–1282b2; 1282a12–18, 25–40. Ibid., 1283al6–17, 1280al8–25. Ibid., 1283al8. Ibid., 1283al9–22, 38–40. Ibid., 1284a4–11. Ibid., 1284a36. Ibid., 1284b3–6. Ibid., 1284b28-29. Also see Aristotle, 1984: 1288a25. Ibid., 1284b32-33. Also see Aristotle, 1984: 1288a29–30. Also see Dietz, 2012: 281–82. Aristotle, 1984: 1281a14–15. Ibid., 128la29–31. Ibid., 1281b31–33. Also see Pangle, 2013: 124, 127–28, 153, 161; and Davis, 1996: 57–59. Waldron suggests that ostracism is the normatively correct course. See Waldron, 1995: 581. See Pangle who argues that the citizen has a contradictory conception of the noble and its relation to political rule. Pangle, 2013: 130. Waldron notes that the honour accorded to political office but does not see that it undermines Aristotle’s classification of regimes. Waldron, 1995: 572. See Davis, 1996: 46.

References Aristotle. 1984. Politics. Carnes Lord, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, Michael. 1996. The Politics of Philosophy: A Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Dietz, Mary G. 2012. “Between Polis and Empire: Aristotle’s Politics.” American Political Science Review 106/2: 275–293. Frede, Dorothea. 2005. “Citizenship in Aristotle’s Politics.” In Aristotle’s Politics: Critical Essays, Richard Kraut and Thornton Lockwood, eds. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 167–184. Grant, George. 2000. Lament for a Nation. The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press.

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Nichols, Mary P. 1992. Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1993. “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach.” In The Quality of Life, Martha C. Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 243–268. Pangle, Thomas L. 2013. Aristotle’s Teaching in the Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Plato. 1968. Republic, Allan Bloom, trans. New York: Basic Books. Samaras, Thanassis. 2015. “Aristotle and the Question of Citizenship.” In Aristotle’s Politics: A Critical Guide, Thornton Lockwood and Thanassis Samaras, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 123–141. Waldron, Jeremy. 1995. “The Wisdom of the Multitude: Some Ref lections on Book 3, Chapter 11 of Aristotle’s Politics.” Political Theory 23/4: 563–584. Ward, Ann. 2008. “Mothering and the Sacrifice of Self: Women and Friendship in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.” Thirdspace: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture 7/2: 1–25. Ward, Lee. 2001. “Nobility and Necessity: The Problem of Courage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.” American Political Science Review 95/1: 71–83. Weinman, Michael. 2016. “Living Well and the Promise of Cosmopolitan Identity: Aristotle’s Ergon and Contemporary Civic Republicanism.” In On Civic Republicanism: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, Geoffrey C. Kellow and Nevin Leddy, eds. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 59–71.

2 CICERO’S EMPIRE OF WISDOM Stephen Patrick Sims

Serious inquiry into the value of the sovereign nation is no longer a mere matter of speculation but of political choice consequent to that speculation. International institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization dominated the system of states in the 1990s and early 2000s but that system coincided with unrivalled American power, the so-called “unipolar moment.” That moment appears to have passed away, as great powers are readier to challenge the United States diplomatically and strategically. If not dead already, the internationalist system appears to be on its deathbed. Whether to revive it is a decision upon which the great democracies are divided; the quarrel between the “globalist” and the “nationalist” is perhaps the chief quarrel roiling the politics of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries for the past several years. In this chapter, I suggest some ways in which classical political philosophy can help navigate that debate. In particular, I turn to Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero is one, if not the chief, of the classical political philosophers who can help clarify the debate between nationalists and globalists. Like all classical political philosophers, he pursues that debate through the question of the human good. But his place is unique among the classical political philosophers in that he lived in and helped govern both the Roman Republic and its immense empire, since, in Pierre Manent’s inimitable styling, Rome, “the narrow city,” underwent “a distension.”1 Whether the species should live in a world of separate, free nations or under the supervision of imperial institutions was not just a question for Cicero but was, in fact, Rome’s political reality. Cicero’s legacy on this question is complex but dominated by scholarship on his alleged Stoicism and, consequently, his utility for modern cosmopolitanism. According to this group of scholars, Cicero’s most important contributions to political theory are his transmission of the Stoic doctrine of natural law and the cosmopolis, i.e. a global community of all human beings.2 Indeed, some have

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gone so far as to claim that Cicero believed that Rome itself was the reality of the Stoic cosmopolis and that its empire was an empire of absolute wisdom. 3 As I argue below, there is certainly an element of Cicero’s political thought that supports a cosmopolitan position. One of the claims to rule is wisdom, and the Stoic justification for “global” rule is on the basis of superior wisdom. But although Cicero explicates the Stoic idea of the cosmopolis, it is by no means clear that it is one that he holds himself. Indeed, Cicero’s mode of philosophizing is Socratic, which he quite clearly distinguishes from the Stoic mode. While recent scholarship has helpfully reemphasized Cicero’s devotion to Socrates over and above his interest in Stoicism, little work has been done to connect his specifically Socratic political philosophy with the question of whether a world of free republics is better than cosmopolitan world order.4 A sterling exception is Thomas Pangle’s article in which he shows Cicero’s doubts about the Stoic doctrine of divine providence while concomitantly focusing on the more definite obligations to fellow citizens compared to the more ambiguous obligations to humanity as a whole.5 Whereas Pangle focuses on Cicero’s approach to natural theology, I suggest that Cicero has deeper concerns about the possibility of genuine wisdom; the claim to genuine wisdom applies a degree of certainty to the conclusions of reason that go beyond human nature. Furthermore, the moral reasoning that justifies a world order founded on wisdom would, in turn, have morally harmful effects, for it could only come about through acts of impiety. Cicero tames the aspirations of cosmopolitans and imperialists by revealing the limitations of human reason and reminding us of the obligations we have to our more limited communities, whether the city or the nation.

Law and wisdom Cicero’s reputation as a Stoic cosmopolitan comes from his dialogue, On the Laws.6 The dialogue takes place among Cicero himself, styled Marcus, his brother Quintus, and their friend Atticus. To reach the outline of the legislation of the best republic, Marcus must speak about human nature, or the origin of law must be traced “from the profoundest philosophy.” 7 Profoundest philosophy shows a “highest law which was born before any law was written for generations in common or before any city was established.”8 This law is highest reason or prudence.9 He then asks Atticus whether they can agree “that all nature is ruled by the force of nature, reason, power, mind, majesty—or whatever other word there is by which I may signify more plainly what I want—of the immortal gods.”10 Atticus replies that he will, if Marcus “expects it,” because his fellow Epicureans cannot hear him. Atticus does not say that he believes that there is indeed a providential god, but, rather, he will agree with Marcus to see where the conversation goes. The conversation and everything that follows is based upon friendly agreement rather than demonstrations. The agreed-upon providential order is the foundation of a divinely ordered law that exists independently of human opinion.11 Both gods and humans share

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in right reason, i.e., law. Thus, gods and men share in law and justice. But, if those who share in law and justice are fellow citizens, all gods and all humans are members of the same city and are ruled by the divine mind of the “very powerful” supreme god. This theological beginning serves as the foundation for Marcus’s most important point: humans are born for justice, and justice is not mere opinion.12 Marcus argues not only for a natural community of humanity but also for human equality, claiming that “for nothing is so similar one to one, so equal, as we all are to one another.”13 While human nature is most itself when abiding by the divinely instituted law of reason, this does not mean that all human beings necessarily become virtuous. Rather, virtue requires education because “there is not one of any people who is unable to come to virtue if he encounters a leader.”14 If virtue is natural to humans, it is not so in the sense of being inborn; we are apt for virtue, not born with it. Thus, virtue is something taught, but teaching requires teachers and learners. But not all teachers of virtue are equally capable, as evidenced by the ubiquity of vice, weakness, and folly. Marcus identifies two groups of bad teachers in Book 1 of On the Laws. The first are parents, nurses, schoolteachers, poets, the stage, and popular opinion.15 Most of these educators do not teach that virtue is good for its own sake but, rather, that pleasure is the highest good. These educators teach poorly because they themselves were educated poorly. This leads to the second, more important, teachers: The laws. As Quintus tells his brother, “I do not desire the laws of Lysander or Solon or Charondas or Zaleucus or our Twelve Tables or plebiscites, but I think that in today’s discussion you are going to give the laws of living and the training in living, for both peoples and individuals.”16 Marcus, agreeing with his brother, says “since it is proper for the law to be the corrector of vices and the recommender of virtues, education about living is drawn from it.”17 The legislator and his work, the laws, are the chief educators of virtue and vice. They fail in their task to the degree that the law inculcates love of pleasure and ambition rather than a love of justice. Thus, while justice exists by nature, and the highest law is its rational expression, the majority of human beings cannot see the highest law because of miseducation. This miseducation f lows from the regime down to the parent, teaching the superiority of pleasure and advantage over the right and the true good. If nature is so obscure because of human opinion, how can anyone break free from the false opinions that implant themselves at a young age, let alone reform the republic and legislate new and better laws? The law of nature seems doomed to remain unknown. It is not surprising, then, that Marcus concludes Book 1 of On the Laws with an encomium to philosophy. While he repeats the importance of law for education, he subsequently replaces law with wisdom, which, he tells his listeners, is “mother of all good things,” and that “nothing given by the immortal gods is richer” or even “preferable.”18 The most important teaching of wisdom is also what is most difficult: “we should know ourselves.” Marcus explains this reference to Socrates by claiming that the self-knower recognizes the divine element within: reason. Upon recognizing this, he becomes a philosopher. He will

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enter the fellowship of affection with his own, and regards as his own all those who are joined with him in nature, and undertakes the worship of the gods and pure religion, and has sharpened the sight of his intellect[.] A sharpened intellectual sight will allow him to exercise the chief political virtue “prudence” or the capacity for correctly seeing the good and bad. When he has looked into the “nature of all things” and understood the generation and corruption of them, the “eternal and divine” things, and even perhaps the supreme god, the wise man will know that he is not “surrounded by the wall of a definite place” but is rather “a citizen of the whole world as if it were a single city.” He will “know himself ” and scorn the things that the vulgar believe are splendid. Fortifying his mind with dialectic and logic will allow him to retain his wisdom. Sensing that he is born for civic society, he then learns oratory. Oratory, paired with prudence, allows him to “rule peoples, stabilize laws, castigate the vicious, care for the good.” He will teach his fellows how to achieve the human good, both for the body and the soul.19 To recapitulate: While justice is natural, and is spelled out in the “highest law,” but bad legislation darkens human sight and thus obscures the highest law. Thus, Marcus leads us to conclude that only the philosopher, indeed, only the wise man, knows justice. This happens through self-examination, allowing the nascent philosopher to ascend from knowledge of the soul and its passions to the nature of all things, including the supreme god. Knowledge of the supreme god leads to the wise man understanding himself as a citizen of the world rather than the citizen of a definite place. Dialectic and logic serve to protect his wisdom from theoretical attack. Wisdom does not teach him to contemplate the god or the cosmos; rather, he turns willingly, even eagerly, to political life. But as the boundaries of the city have been overcome by wisdom—political life becomes limitless for the wise man. Marcus indicates this by emphasizing that the wise political ruler will not rule over a single people but many peoples. The wise man appears in the final image as a philosopher-king or, indeed, a philosopheremperor. When the philosopher calls wisdom down to earth, its political form shaped by wisdom coextends with the whole. It is thus a universal empire, rather than a defined city. One city, the city of the whole, is the “highest law” incarnate. Is a philosopher-emperor the best way to eradicate bad customs and institute customs informed by the highest law? Yes, according to Marcus Cato, the Stoic in de Finibus, who argues that the wise man alone has a true claim on political authority and owns all things.20 Likewise, Scipio Africanus, in On the Republic, states that it is a law of nature that the wise man alone owns anything because he alone knows how to use it.21 We can certainly see the glimmering of a universal kingdom of justice and truth ruled over by the one person who truly possesses wisdom. The question is whether that universal kingdom is Rome, and, more generally, whether the universal kingdom could be founded by anyone. To approach this question, we will turn to On the Republic, with a supplement from On Duties. First, we will brief ly sketch out the basics of Cicero’s political theory

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and how he understands the nature of republics, and then we will look at how he entangles that understanding with the question of justice and empire.

Love and piety On the Republic is set in Scipio Africanus’ villa, wherein he and his “prudent” friends discuss the political problems that beset Rome, particularly the conf lict between the many and the few. This leads to a discussion of the nature of republics. Scipio replies: A republic is a thing of the people. A people, however, is not every assemblage of human beings herded together in whatever way, but an assemblage of a multitude united in agreement about right and in the sharing of advantage. The first cause of this assembling, however, is not so much weakness as a certain natural herding together, so to speak, of human beings.22 The republic is the thing shared by the people. But what makes a people, and what makes it distinct from another people? The answer is consensus about what is just (ius) and what is useful (utilitas) for everyone, i.e. the common good. Furthermore, the common good is not merely satisfying individual needs but is the manifested human desire to live with others. As well as needing each other, human beings love each other and, thus, wish to live in common. While the text in On the Republic breaks off, we can provisionally fill in the rest of Scipio’s argument using other works of Cicero. Elsewhere, Cicero suggests that the first cause of human sociality is the selfsacrificial love that parents have for their own children.23 Love is a fundamental cause of political communities and not the mere calculation that others may be useful for individual ends. This love creates community and, consequently, mutual obligations, as can be seen in the preface of On the Republic.24 We might say that justice, the duty to serve the common good, f lows from the existence of community, which itself f lows from love and care. In On Duties, Cicero makes this connection clear. While there is an “infinite” association of humanity as such, our bonds grow stronger as they become closer to us, such as our tribe, nation, and those who speak the same language as us.25One may speak of a universal association of humanity, but the associations that matter to us are smaller and more personal, such as the family and the political community.26 The sameness of origin and the shared life ties a people together. But this tying together requires excluding the rest of humanity; they make up other peoples. Cicero lists the shared life as “forums, temples, colonnades, streets, laws, right principles, law courts, voting privileges” or “habits and attachments.”27 While these shared experiences of life create a strong bond, Cicero argues that the most excellent and sturdiest association is the friendship of good men “of similar customs.” Good men delight in each other, especially when they have the same inclinations and devotions. But it seems that the best sort of association

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is that of the republic itself. Cicero writes that no association is more “serious” (gravior) or “dear” (carior) than the republic. It is so because it “alone” encompasses all of the other association that are “dear” to us. Hence, the good man will die for it if necessary.28 If the bonds of family are stronger in intensity, and the friendship of the virtuous is more exalted, the republic makes both sorts of associations possible and perfects them; therefore, good people care for it more than anything else. We care for the republic most of all through virtuous actions, and we especially honour our ancestors in doing so, i.e. civic life is pious.29 Piety—grateful care for ancestors and country—is the heart of a good human life.30 Political life is good for its own sake, inasmuch as its chief virtue is piety. The republic’s foundations are love and the citizens’ connection with their past; in this respect, Cicero supports political institutions that express a particular people’s agreement about justice and the good. The virtues that support republics are oriented toward the particular and concrete and not the universal. Cicero thinks about politics in a way that emphasizes the real and concrete over the abstract and universal. The concrete f lavour of his thinking carries over into Scipio’s analysis of regimes. Scipio argues throughout Book I that the mixed regime is superior to pure monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. When Laelius insists on choosing the best of the pure regimes, Scipio reluctantly chooses monarchy, but he quickly reminds his friend of the absolute superiority of the mixed regime.31 But the mixed regime is not found merely in the shadowy imagination of the intellectual. It is real and concrete and has a history. For Scipio, Rome herself is an example of the judiciously mixed regime and hence the best regime. Scipio and Cicero both emphasize the particularity of political life, drawing us away from abstract empires of reason toward the common experience of inherited shared life. While wisdom characterizes the Stoic emperor, piety and love for his own characterize the Ciceronian citizen. This is even true of the quest for the best regime; it is not found in the imagination of theorists but in the experience of history. If one wishes to see the best regime, Cicero points to Rome. Of course, when one observes Rome, its empire is probably more noticeable than its mixed regime. If it is the case that Rome is best, could it be the case that it is a historical case of an empire of wisdom?

Justice and the Roman Empire Scipio’s claim that Rome’s regime is best is perplexing when we recall its origins. However intelligent the founders of Rome may have been, it is not evident that they were just men. As Scipio points out, a crucial episode in early Roman history was the mass rape of a neighbouring people.32 Furthermore, early Roman history was one of constant war against the peoples. The institutions that distinguished between just and unjust wars were not put into place until the reign of Tullius Hostilius, the third king of Rome.33 It is defensible to conclude that Roman policy until that point, especially under Romulus, was indiscriminate

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and unjust. How does one square the injustice of Roman foundation, especially its domination over its neighbours, with its supposed excellence? Book 3 of the On the Republic deals with this question directly. One of the interlocutors, Philus, makes a speech against justice, arguing that it is both unnatural and foolish. Justice, which is another’s good, does not obtain in cases of extreme necessity. Where survival is at stake, it is natural for individuals to think of their own well-being rather than caring for others. Even if individuals may be strong enough to resist the urge to survive at all costs, entire peoples can never look beyond their own needs. Consequently, cities rely on “prudence” rather than justice in their foreign relations, looking to gain advantages and never giving what is owed. Indeed, “wisdom” encourages everyone, citizens and cities alike, to increase their power and wealth without consideration of others. Only fear of punishment—that is to say, necessity—causes citizens and cities to act “justly.” Philus then applies this concept of justice and wisdom to Rome, noting that the Romans have grown from an insignificant people to a major power by taking what had belonged to others.34 Furthermore, just as no one would choose to be the perfectly just man who is enslaved and tortured rather than the tyrant who is praised and loved, so also no “city so stupid as to serve justly rather than rule unjustly.”35 While justice may be possible and laudable in the ordinary run of human life, in the extreme case, it is antithetical to the human good. Philus suggests that the ordinary case in foreign affairs is always the extreme case. Scipio’s friend Laelius takes up the cause of defending justice. Given the fragmentary nature of Laelius’s speech, much of which is preserved by authors such as St. Augustine, it is difficult to be sure of Cicero’s meaning. But it is clear that Laelius defends justice partly by asserting the naturalness of ruling and being ruled. God rules human beings, the mind rules the body, and the reason commands the passions of lust and anger. Laelius compares the ruling of the soul over its lust to the way a master rules a slave, and the way the mind rules the body is as a king rules his people or a parent his children, or as republics rule allies. Laelius is likely drawing on Aristotle’s argument in Book 1 of The Politics, with important alterations.36 Aristotle argued that servitude is a condition whose justice ultimately depends on nature. Laelius appears to think about Roman imperialism in terms of those who are fit to rule and those who are fit to serve. Superiority does not entail the right to rule however one wishes. War should be waged for defence and recovering lost property and should be preceded by an attempt to redress harms peacefully. Wars “without cause” are unjust. But Roman wars always begin with cause; indeed, Laelius asserts that the Roman Empire is entirely founded on justice, for, as he reports, “but our people have the whole earth now by defending our allies.”37 If it is true that Rome stands to other cities as reason stands to passion, this relation does not, in itself, amount to a just claim to imperial rule. It must be matched with specific unjust acts on the part of the inferior republic that can then be redressed by the superior republic. Only then, when confronted with the manifold injustices of a world of lesser republics, can Rome extend its rule to the “whole earth.”38

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Laelius also suggests that a universal rule can be the product of “true law” as “right reason fitting with nature.” The true law is legislated by “one god who is master and emperor over all.” The true law applies to all and is unchanging; the laws of all nations may be judged by right reason that takes its pattern from the divine emperor. Hence, there will be the same law in Rome and Athens. Laelius, offering a similar doctrine to Marcus’s in On the Laws, defends the Roman Empire as both acquired and managed justly. Justice is not subordinated to exigencies coupled with amoral cleverness but, rather, is convertible with the intelligence of a supreme god. As such, justice is the same everywhere, as well as the rational expression of justice: the laws.

Cicero and the empire of wisdom Although Laelius believes that Rome is an empire of wisdom, justly ruling over its neighbours because of its superior constitution and adherence to the highest law, it is not clear that Cicero agrees. By observing how Cicero portrays the role of the philosopher in the action of his dialogues in On the Republic and On the Laws, we shall see that his humbler understanding of human wisdom is at odds with the confident rationalism of Laelius. As we have seen above, in the On the Republic, Scipio asserts the Stoic teaching that all things belong to the wise person because he alone knows how each thing can be used without harm.39 But in the same passage, Scipio also argues that the wise man disregards fame and glory because he takes a cosmic view regarding human activity—he knows that human life is short, and human deeds are insignificant in comparison to eternity. This insight includes the Roman Empire and the exploits necessary to support it.40 Where Laelius identifies the Roman Empire with the world, his friend notes more than once the smallness of Rome. The cosmos, the city of the world, is immeasurably larger than any human community. Thus, while Scipio’s cosmic wisdom entitles him to rule all, it also tempers human ambition to rule all. Scipio’s tempered ambition is also on display in the way that he organizes his philosophic conversation. If On the Republic is meant to show that Cicero is writing in the tradition of Plato, it does not have a clear-cut analogue to Socrates. If Scipio seems more truly a philosopher than Laelius, he yields the centre of the group to his older friend.41 This is due to a “law” in their friendship; Cicero describes their relationship as defined by law, an element of the political rather than apparent natural superiority of Scipio. And while Scipio takes on the beginning question on the nature of the republic and which regime is best, he yields again to his older friend to defend the strength of justice in the central part of On the Republic. Scipio is conscientious in making sure that he is not the chief speaker; he thinks that the question of the best regime and its justice should be a common project and, thus, political rather than explicated by an “instructor or teacher,” in a more monarchical way.42 Political philosophy, for Scipio, should be a common good with friends. After all, his friends are themselves prudent

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citizens of Rome.43 Finally, although Scipio’s cosmic vision in his dream seems to correspond with his right to rule all, he clearly wishes to remain in contemplation of the cosmic whole. His father reasserts the virtue of pious care for the republic so that his son can tear himself away from the delight of contemplation. Far from wishing to rule the cosmopolis, the philosophic statesman rules what has been entrusted to him by the god because it has been so entrusted. On the Republic emphasizes the moderate, political, and pious Scipio rather than the philosopher-emperor of On the Laws. But On the Laws itself casts doubt on the philosopher-king as best, or even possible. This can be seen in the way that Cicero, as Marcus, speaks with his friend and brother and the modest results that f low from their conversation. As noted above, the proposition that the gods rule the universe is one assented to but not demonstrated. Indeed, Cicero’s emphasis that the theological beginning point is agreed upon, not shown demonstratively, reminds us that Atticus does not believe that the gods are providential. When Atticus later prods his friend about his apparent acceptance of Stoic cosmology, Marcus responds that he does not always argue from authority, but he does when his purpose is “strengthening republics” and “healing peoples.”44 In order to accomplish this goal, Marcus bids philosophers like Carneades to be quiet because undermining faith in a providential order would undermine the people’s commitment to justice and virtue.45 Thus, even if Atticus does not believe in the Stoic teaching on justice and virtue, he certainly is willing to accept that it might be necessary for the best regime to exist. Shortly after, Marcus notes that his championing of virtue over the life of pleasure causes him to “slide forward” to “the end of good things,” that is to say, the fundamental question of moral and political philosophy—to what end or purpose should all our actions be directed. This is explicitly the theme of Cicero’s De finibus, wherein the Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic answers to this question are interrogated and each is found lacking in some way. By referring to this work, we recall that the ultimate good remains a question for Cicero, even as he and Atticus playfully suggest that they will determine the answer once and for all by sitting like a proconsul in judgment.46 Quintus must recall Atticus and Marcus to the task at hand, namely thinking about law. Over and against Atticus’s objection to abandoning the question of the ultimate good, Marcus calls his brother “prudent” for restraining his fellows from ascending to the greatest question of practical philosophy and remaining in the realm of legislation. Marcus cannot prudently legislate while admitting that the question of the ultimate good is unknown. Cicero portrays himself as uncertain of the ultimate human good. Despite that uncertainty, Cicero affirms political life as a great good and supports it through just and wise laws. In so doing, Cicero reveals his own conception of the philosophic and political tasks, the ways in which they support one another and are in tension with each other. Stoic philosophy is useful for building a good political order, so useful, in fact, that the Epicurean Atticus assents to it while clearly doubting the truth of its claims. This suggests that politics is useful for

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permitting men like Atticus the leisure to pursue philosophy. But philosophy cannot be confused with law; the law is certain and defined. Philosophy, on the other hand, is the Socratic activity. In his Tusculan Disputations, Cicero claims that the Socratic conversation is the best way of philosophizing because it permits each participant to speak his view of the truth and compare it to the others. This allowed Socrates to see what was “probable”—the standard that Cicero uses for the sort of wisdom human beings can achieve.47 Philosophic wisdom is the search for the most “probable” and to “relieve others from deception,” that is to say, the false beliefs that cause moral and political pathologies.48 Rather than a clear, even dogmatic, set of propositions about the nature of the cosmos and the supreme god, Cicero offers an aid to human living that leaves the ultimate questions as questions with, at best, probable answers. Rather than a self-sufficient Stoic, he is more like the resourceful yet needy Socrates, searching with friends rather than transcending the human by pure intellect.

Conclusion The portrait of the philosophic emperor at the end of Book 1 of On the Laws is at odds with Cicero’s portrayal of philosophy in the action of the same book and On the Republic. Philosophy is the search for the probable, which is best approached from both sides of a question. The philosopher approaches the truth, but the truth will continue to remain mysterious. The mystery is best approached with family and friends, as if the self-sufficiency of the wise is beyond human nature. Cicero’s admiration for Stoic wisdom and its vision of a wise emperor does not displace his Socratic orientation. Through portraying Scipio’s activity as something very different from that of the Stoic wise man, as well as continually reminding his readers of Scipio’s political and strategic accomplishments, we see the political philosopher that embraces a patriotic duty to accomplish the common good whatever the personal costs.49 Marcus, Scipio, and Laelius are examples of philosophic politicians who yearn for wisdom while caring for the common good. Their care is founded on its superior constitution, their shared life, and that Rome is their inheritance from their forefathers. If cosmic wisdom scorns human concerns, piety and love draw them back to earth and care for Rome. Scipio’s turn from the contemplative to pious care—his mode of philosophizing with prudent fellow citizens—and Cicero’s own portrayal of legislating in the Laws suggest that if an empire of wisdom may be a possibility, Cicero thinks it both unlikely and perhaps even undesirable. The empire of wisdom is unlikely because Cicero does not think that the certainty of the Stoics translates to genuine knowledge and thus wisdom; we might say it is probable that the world is ruled by a providential god, but it is by no means certain. Philosophy cannot end in the certainty required by laws but only probabilities. Hence, the providential order of the cosmos is agreed to by the interlocutors; they consent to an assertion rather than demand its demonstration. Human communities are founded on consent or received wisdom rather than demonstrated wisdom.

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Even if by some way such wisdom were possible, an empire of wisdom would be incompatible with the virtues necessary to live justly. As argued above, piety holds a central role in keeping the republic together and clarifying to whom we owe the most, and, thus, it is a central role in living justly. But piety entails honouring those who have given us more than we can return, such as our parents and country, the ancestral gods, and the supreme god. Each of these objects of piety reminds us that our nature includes the mortal and passing as well as the immortal and divine; Cicero was born into a family and republic, and these communities helped sustain him until he reached the age when he could help sustain them. Piety ref lects birth and death, the human lack of self-sufficiency and need of others. This very humanity is what the philosopher-emperor forgets or even denies. In forgetting or denying, he commits an injustice, for living justly requires cognizance of both the divine and the mortal parts of human nature; it requires Scipio returning from the heavens to save the republic.

Notes 1 Pierre Manent, The Metamorphosis of the City, trans. M. LePain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 132. 2 The cosmopolitan interpretations of Cicero’s thought include natural law scholars, scholars of international relations, prominent professors of philosophy, and great thinkers of the 20th and 21st centuries. See: Fernando Llano Alonso, “Cosmopolitanism and Natural Law in Cicero,” in The Threads of Natural Law, ed. Francisco Jose Contreras (New York, NY: Springer, 2012), 33, 35; Martha C. Nussbaum, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019), especially 28–30; Kai Nielsen, “Cosmopolitanism” in South African Journal of Philosophy, 24, no. 4 (2013): 273–288; Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness (New York, NY: Routledge, 2001), 19; David Boucher, The Limits of International Ethics (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009), especially 42; Malcolm Schofield, The Stoic Idea of the City (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 103. 3 Eric Voeglin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 91; Michael Hawley, “The Protectorate of the World: The Problem of Just Hegemony in Roman Thought,” POLIS: The Journal for Greek and Roman Political Thought, 37 (2020): 44–77, especially 64–68. One could also put Dante in this category, although his De monarchia is built on explicitly Aristotelian, not Stoic, principles. 4 Jed Atkins, Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Raphael Woolf, Cicero: Philosophy of a Roman Skeptic (New York, NY: Routledge, 2015); Walter Nicgorksi, Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016). 5 Thomas Pangle, “Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero’s Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal,” Canadian Journal of Political Science, 31 no. 2 (1998): 235–262. 6 Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. D. Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 1.15, 20. 7 Ibid. 1.17. 8 Ibid. 1.19. 9 Ibid. The identification of highest law and prudence suggests that prudence or wisdom as such is superior to any generalization of reason, which is the form of law. 10 Ibid.1.21. 11 Ibid. 1.23, 2.11. 12 Ibid. 1.28.

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Ibid. 1.29. Ibid. 1.30 Ibid. 1.47. Ibid. 1.57. Cf. Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King (Cambridge, UK: Harvard University Press, 1927), 3.2–3 Laws, 1.58. Ibid. Ibid. 1.61–62. As Marcus Cato says in De finibus, the wise man has the best claim to the throne, is the true master of the people, and truly owns all things because he alone knows how to use all things. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De finibus, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), 3.75. On the Republic, 27. Ibid, 1.39. De finibus, 3.62. Cf. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On Duties, trans. B.P. Newton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 1.54. It is worth noting that Cicero points out the possibility or likelihood of human beings living in a prepolitical state, with a corresponding condition of moral degradation. Some great individual was able to gather people together through reason, persuasive speech, and strength. See Walter Nicgorski, “Nationalism and Transnationalism in Cicero,” History of European Ideas, 16, no 4–6, (1993): 785–791, especially 786. On the Republic, 1.4–11. While showing the pain and suffering that decent citizens undergo, not least of which is the ingratitude, even hostility, of their fellow citizens, Cicero soberly maintains that the virtuous must serve the common good. Cf Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Amicitia, trans. W.A. Falconer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 42–43, where Laelius observes that, although Themistocles had been treated unjustly by the Athenians, he nonetheless had an obligation to continue serving his city. On Duties, 1.53. In de Finibus, 3.64, Cato simultaneously acknowledges the existence of a cosmopolitan bond, but then pivots to showing that human sociality—love, being born, and giving birth—is the root of the virtue of patriotism, preferring the good of our country to our own. On Duties, 1.53. Ibid. Ibid. 1.57. Ibid. 1.58. Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Inventione, trans. H.M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949), 2.66. Piety as justice toward those who have given us more than we can possibly return also connects with Cicero’s observation that ingratitude – the characteristic vice of democracies – is the root of moral decay. On the Republic, 1.54–55. On the Republic, 2.12–15. On the Republic, 2.31. On the Republic, 3.18 Ibid. 3.14. See Malcom Schofield, “Cicero on Imperialism and the Soul,” in Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, edited by Richard Seaford, John Wilkins, and Matthew Wright (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 107–124. On the Republic, 3.26. Scipio, for example, quite clearly notes the smallness of Rome compared to the whole earth and especially compared to the cosmos. Whether Cicero meant to draw our attention to this disagreement between Scipio and Laelius is unclear. Ibid. 1.27. Ibid. 6.24–29.

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41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49

Ibid. 1.18. Ibid. 1. 38, 70. Ibid. 1.38. On the Laws, 1.37. Ibid. 1.39 According to Plutarch, Carneades spurred Cato the Elder to propose that philosophy be banished from Rome so that Roman youth would be faithful to their parents. In Tusculan Disputations, 5.11, Cicero says that his own philosophic method is the same as Carneades. Ibid. 1.53. Tusculan Disputations, 1.8, 2.5, 4.7, 47. Ibid. 5.1; relieving others of deception is described as curing spiritual pathologies at 3.6. On the Republic, 6.33. It would be useful to compare Scipio’s voluntary return to a decaying Rome to his refusal to become the teacher of his friends and compare both to Cicero’s discussion of the practical and philosophical life at the beginning of the book.

Bibliography Alonso, Fernando Llano. “Cosmopolitanism and Natural Law in Cicero,” in The Threads of Natural Law, edited by Francisco Jose Contreras, 27–36. New York, NY: Springer, 2012. Atkins, Jed. Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Boucher, David. The Limits of International Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Finibus. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Amicitia. Translated by W.A. Falconer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J.E. King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. De Inventione. Translated by H.M. Hubbell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On the Republic and On the Laws. Translated by D. Fott. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. On Duties. Translated by B.P. Newton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. Hawley, Michael. “The Protectorate of the World: The Problem of Just Hegemony in Roman Thought,” POLIS: The Journal for Greek and Roman Political Thought 37 (2020): 44–77. Manent, Pierre. The Metamorphosis of the City. Translated by M. LePain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Nicgorksi, Walter. “Nationalism and Transnationalism in Cicero,” History of European Ideas 16, no. 4–6 (1993): 785–791. Nicgorksi, Walter. Cicero’s Skepticism and His Recovery of Political Philosophy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Nielsen, Kai. “Cosmopolitanism,” South African Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 4 (2013): 273–288. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2019.

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Pangle, Thomas. “Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero’s Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 31, no. 2 (1998): 235–262. Schofield, Malcom. The Stoic Idea of the City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Schofield, Malcom. “Cicero on Imperialism and the Soul,” in Selfhood and the Soul: Essays on Ancient Thought and Literature in Honour of Christopher Gill, edited by Richard Seaford, John Wilkins, and Matthew Wright, 107–124. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. Voeglin, Eric. The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Woolf, Raphael. Cicero: Philosophy of a Roman Skeptic. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015.

PART II

Modern Birth and Life of the Nation-State

3 DEFINING THE LAW OF NATIONS Revisions of Cicero’s ius gentium in Suárez, Grotius, and Burke Michael R. Gonzalez

Since its Ciceronian articulation, the law of nations’ (ius gentium) professed function has been to promote peace by facilitating a community (res publica) of separate polities.1 Yet, this function is in tension with the exigencies of statecraft, and even Cicero is compelled to qualify the principle that agreements must be kept (pacta sunt servanda).2 The law of nations is, therefore, more often in direct tension with prudence than is civil law.3 Consequently, statesmen who perceive the need for a law of nations generally are compelled to support it by accentuating its kinship to natural or divine law, rendering it exceptionally prone to elision with a universal order. This trajectory originates in Cicero’s political theology4 and was baptized by Christian legal thought before modern political atheism dissolved the consensus necessary to support such elevated claims about the law of nations. The modern project originally rests on the disclosure that political life f luctuates too much to be understood according to a higher legal authority.5 Law is possible only through human sovereignty, which imposes order on reality by overcoming the perceived limits of nature, God, or chance.6 This assertion jeopardizes the authoritative basis for any law over or among nations (to say nothing of civil law); it, therefore, became necessary in modernity to discover or articulate new foundations for a law of nations, if such law was to continue carrying out its Ciceronian function. The arguments of Francisco Suárez, Hugo Grotius, and Edmund Burke typify three attempts at rearticulating the law of nations. To be sure, other noteworthy authors also worked on the problem of the law of nations (ius gentium), yet the arguments of Suárez, Grotius, and Burke exemplify three fundamental alternatives. All three authors advocate an informal legal order in international politics; however, Suárez’s case is significantly more restrained than that of Grotius or Burke. Grotius asserts the possibility of discerning objectively right laws of nations through reason alone, and Burke identifies human custom as the sole sure

34 Michael R. Gonzalez

basis for right international order. In contrast, Suárez maintains the distinction between law and morality, not looking to derive moral certainty from either reason or custom. Assessing the similarities and differences among these authors discloses the tension between nature, custom, and the divine as foundations for international law. It also establishes how Suárez’s misgivings about the law of nations’ objective moral quality enable him to give a more coherent account of it as an institution. To the extent that independent polities can form a society, Suárez recognizes that it must be merely a quasi-community dependent on limited conventions. He, therefore, salvages the law of nations by restoring it as a properly legal concept, bringing it down from the heights to which Cicero and the Scholastics elevated it.

The law of nations’ Roman and Christian origins The ius gentium emerges from two sources in Roman thought: one juridical, the other philosophic. Roman law applies the term “law of nations” (ius gentium) to legal precepts guiding cases with conf lict of laws.7 In this sense, the law of nations is a unique, positive legal corpus made necessary by the preservation of subsidiary laws and local institutions under Roman rule (imperium). Yet, the first significant and extant use of the term is in Cicero’s De Officiis, in which he introduces it as the order of natural human society, ref lected in the positive legal customs of various peoples, proceeding from divine providence, and serving to limit acquisitive foreign policy.8 Shortly after this marathonic argument, he cites Hercules—a nearly divine beneficiary of mankind—as exemplifying the life according to nature and the law of nations.9 Cicero’s presentation of the law of nations mirrors his treatment of war in an important respect: both the law of nations and war should aim at securing peace without injustice.10 He emphasizes peaceful relations among individuals or states as a benefit to humanity, not as a source of justice pro se among nations. The strength of this argument seems largely rhetorical, providing an avenue for limiting those ambitions that can lead even a virtuous republic to unnecessary expansion.11 Cicero seems fully aware that reason is not so easily reduced to law as his glowing presentation of the law of nations indicates at first blush—exigencies in political life and international relations require circumspect prudence. Only the gods and their most ardent (or misguided) followers intransigently adhere to the maxim that agreements always must be kept (pacta sunt servanda).12 At the same time, he recognizes the utility of the law of nations for moderating policy and for preserving the possibility of international cooperation after conf lict. In short, Cicero presents the law of nations as a concept helpful for regulating foreign policy and relations in the ordinary case. The extraordinary case demands latitude from a legal outlook; however, the extraordinary does not in itself remove the necessity of limited legal frameworks and institutions in the ordinary case, even for foreign relations.13 The Digest of Justinian preserves both the juridical and the philosophic (or rhetorical) sense of the law of nations. On one hand, it records Ulpian explicitly

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distinguishing the law of nations (ius gentium) from natural right (ius naturale).14 On the other hand, it also presents Gaius’s more Ciceronian sense of the law of nations as the equivalent of a natural order.15 Christian authors (especially Gratian) restate Gaius’s elision in reference to the Christian God’s natural law (lex naturalis).16 Following the tradition of Gaius and Gratian, Aquinas traces the ius gentium to natural right reason. Yet, in accord with Isidore of Seville (and Ulpian), Aquinas also attempts to formalize the distinction between the law of nations (ius gentium) and natural right (ius naturale), arguing that the first considers matters of convention while the second considers things absolutely. Aquinas, therefore, renders the law of nations a loose form of customary law based in natural reason but distinct from the natural order.17 This preserves the conventional juridical teaching that ius rests on natural reason,18 but it evades the problem that Ulpian raises regarding manifestly unnatural institutions sanctioned by the law of nations.19 Later Scholastics further develop the Thomistic position. Most notably, Vitoria argues that, while the law of nations accords with man’s divinely ordained need for law (a need knowable through right reason), the positive laws of peoples remain distinctly human in origin and, therefore, are fallible in character.20 Despite distancing the law of nations further from natural law, Vitoria perpetuates the claim that natural reason imparts binding authority (not just legitimacy) to the law of nations. Consequently, the law of nations inherited from Rome and modified by Christianity continues to require serious clarification 21—especially in light of modernity’s challenge to divine and natural authority.

Suárez: The law of nations as consensus Defining the law of nations is not Suárez’s primary task in On Laws and God the Lawgiver (De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore), yet his explication of the term endures as his most inf luential contribution to political thought. Like Vitoria, Suárez argues that the human authority to legislate derives from God and that human legislation bears the force of law through human agency, not particular providence. The divine establishes natural standards for human law, but God’s laws remain properly his, and the laws of men properly theirs. Yet, while Aquinas and Vitoria present rationality as the source of law’s binding authority,22 Suárez locates law’s authority in the legislator’s intention.23 The legislator’s will must be “just and upright,”24 but it is nevertheless the legislator’s will per se that distinguishes law from counsel. Some argue that this claim places Suárez in the voluntarist tradition,25 and it is true that Suárez accepts certain arguments from voluntarists. Yet Suárez never wholly departs from the “law-as-reason” (lex ratio) tradition—he never claims that “oughtness is without foundation in reality” and that “law is will, pure will without any foundation in reality, without foundation in the essential nature of things.”26 Reason, through prudence, outlines just and right precepts, but the legislator must intend for a precept to oblige (and must communicate this intention) in order for a precept to become law. In making this

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argument, Suárez notes the need to moderate “certain modern Thomists [aliqui moderni thomistae]”27 who assert that the dictates of practical reason oblige categorically as law. Suárez responds that even a precept of counsel is a dictate of practical reason unless given the force of law by a proper authority (divine or human). To be sure, Suárez seems to doubt that modern Thomism ref lects Aquinas’s true position, but he admits that Aquinas’s teaching requires clarification or emendation.28 Turning to the law of nations, Suárez critiques the opinion of Roman jurists and modern Thomists that “the precepts of the ius gentium [law of nations] are characterized by an intrinsic necessity, and that this system differs from the natural law [only] in that the latter is revealed without ref lection … while the precepts of the ius gentium are deduced by means of many and comparatively intricate inferences.”29 Echoing Ulpian, Suárez observes that many institutions sanctioned by the law of nations do not derive from nature, and, therefore, one must distinguish the law of nations from natural and divine order. Suárez argues that the precepts of the law of nations are introduced by the free will and consent of mankind, whether we refer to the whole human community or to the major portion thereof; consequently, they cannot be said to be written upon the hearts of men by the Author of Nature; and therefore they are a part of the human, and not of the natural law.30 In form, the law of nations may resemble universal natural law, but, in content, it remains merely conventional, deriving the force of law from human consensus and international deliberation. Its source is human agency, in the human exercise of prudence and in an international community’s intention to organize itself accordingly. In summary, the precepts of the law of nations do not “follow as a manifest conclusion [from natural principles] but rather by an inference less certain, so that they are dependent upon the intervention of human free will [arbitrium humanum] and of moral expediency [commoditas moralis] rather than that of necessity.”31 While the law of nations may ref lect certain common, prudential claims, it cannot bind absolutely. Its precepts remain largely arbitrary and fitted for circumstances—timely, as opposed to timeless. All law requires prudent application of universal claims, and the law of nations more than any other institution of legal (or quasi legal) form is characterized by prudence rather than the universal.32 To be sure, Suárez would contend that the law of nations enshrines certain fundamental tenets of objective moral worth; however, the form those tenets take is never itself morally objective. Like the separation of mankind into nations and kingdoms, the source of the law of nations is in human agreement, agency, and even accident, not in a divine or natural emergent order.33 Suárez echoes Aquinas (though without Aquinas’s reliance on natural reason) in arguing that the law of nations develops over time as a customary institution. States individually constitute “complete communities,” but no state is simply

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self-sufficient. Recognition of this fact leads states to develop a quasi-society to regulate relations for the sake of benefitting themselves (and perhaps also, at times, for “some moral necessity or need”).34 Suárez’s law of nations, therefore, harmonizes with the possibility of natural law, but it does not derive its obliging force from precepts discerned in nature. Just as common laws that emerge within a state entail no ordinary mode of positive amendment (or even establishment), rules of interaction among states gain authority through usage over time. To defy these conventions indicates a threat to the status quo—not necessarily an injustice per se. Any subsequent enforcement of the law of nations would have to come from states themselves; and just as the law of nations ref lects an imperfect order, its enforcement likewise entails both justice and injustice.35 Because the law of nations ref lects human wilfulness rather than natural order, its regulation of diplomacy, war, commerce, freedom of movement, and slavery is tinged with tolerated evils.36 Any sense of justice enshrined in the law of nations is therefore bound to be imperfect. “Moral expediency” bends all human law to accord with circumstance, and the law of nations is especially bent. While Suárez upholds the unity of humanity in a common society, he maintains that concern for this unity must bend to limits set among perfect communities (communitates perfectae). Any society among nations stops far short of the political community’s completeness.37 In comparison with these complete communities, the international community remains incomplete, and any law established at the level of this incomplete community cannot touch individuals and households within polities.38 The Suárezian law of nations is therefore a law kept by nations and for nations. Because its precepts depend on the consent of particular nations, these precepts are even limited by regional constituency—a profound divergence from the cosmopolitanism of Cicero, Gaius, and Gratian. “That which is held among some peoples to be ius gentium [the law of nations], may elsewhere and without fault fail to be observed.”39 To be sure, Suárez condemns those nations as “barbaric” that refuse to extend hospitality to non-threatening strangers, to admit messengers of peace, or to employ restrictions in warfare. Yet, the law of nations’ actual precepts remain tied to particular agreements among particular nations. Customary usage derives from real interactions, and two nations that have never interacted are unlikely to observe the same conventions among themselves, even if the conventions enshrined by their respective international orders share fundamental principles.

Grotius: The law of nations and modern rationalism Unlike Suárez, Grotius did set out to codify comprehensively “the law which mediates between different countries, or between their rulers (whether that law stems from nature itself or from custom and tacit agreement).”40 His more fundamental concern in On the Law of War and Peace (De Iure Belli ac Pacis), though, is with shoring up justice. That is to say, Grotius takes up the law of nations while engaging in a dispute about the rational coherence of justice.41

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Having accepted the challenge of classical and Christian authors (but especially the Skeptic Carneades) that nature does not distinguish wrong from right clearly for humanity,42 Grotius sets out to formulate (or reformulate) a science that can derive right (ius) with certainty and legal precision from nature. Demonstrating natural justice would buttress and clarify an objectively right law of nations; at the same time, presenting a consistent and rational law of nations would provide the strongest evidence for clearly perceivable natural justice beyond particular communities. Accordingly, Grotius introduces his enterprise with a dubious reference to Cicero, claiming that “the master science is the one which deals with alliances, agreements and bargains between peoples, kings, and foreign nations.”43 Grotius goes on to cite a passage from Euripides’s Helen in which Helen of Troy rebukes an Egyptian diviner for attending to providence without merely rational knowledge of justice.44 For Grotius, the defence of the law of nations is therefore bound up with the defence of justice. While Suárez was content to separate the law of nations from nature, Grotius attempts to develop the law of nations as proof of a natural just order, discernible by unassisted reason in accord with long-term interest and human sociability.45 Grotius argues that a man may choose to act as a wolf among men, but, in doing so, he cannot escape the consequences of betraying his rational nature. Nature embodies a rational principle (ratio) that legislates and executes punishment against transgressors. Contrary to other modern authors who sought to found political life on the basis of self-interest and acquisitiveness, Grotius defends the proposition that human beings are naturally inclined to society and that this inclination proceeds “from some extrinsic principle of intelligence.”46 Man alone, according to Grotius, is capable of discerning this “internal principle, which is associated with qualities belonging not to all animals but to human nature alone.”47 Like the modern Thomists whom Suárez critiques, Grotius argues that man can derive certain and just laws (iura) from knowledge of nature. Rational nature alone is the source of natural law, which prescribes standards knowable by all human beings and perceivable in customary institutions such as the law of nations. These standards do not enable distributive justice based on judgments of intrinsic merit, but they do provide a solid natural and legal basis for property and contracts.48 Significantly, Grotius maintains that knowledge of natural right suffices to indicate natural law without knowledge of a lawgiver over nature—that is to say, Grotius’s doctrine of natural right (ius naturale) and the law of nations (ius gentium) discloses a conviction that nature enables practical reason to discern justice in the order of things without the divine.49 Grotius thus attempts to support what had been a theological claim (that the rational principle in creation ref lects divine legislation) with rationalistic arguments.50 For the sake of establishing moral and legal clarity about relations among individuals or communities, Grotius sidesteps the need for theology and theodicy. To be sure, Grotius piously qualifies his claim by stating that natural law derives from intrinsic principles of a human being and perhaps also from the will of God.51

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Yet, this disclaimer falls short of negating his famous statement that the divine is superf luous for knowledge of natural law.52 By locating the source of law’s binding authority in reason alone, Grotius attempts to salvage natural law as a foundation for a universally binding law of nations. If the dictates of reason bind as law regardless of any lawgiver’s intention, then the law of nations can become the kind of universal law previously attributed solely to divine law. As a theologian, Suárez is willing to consider the “law” in nature as something originating in a divine lawgiver’s intention, quite apart from the sort of lawfulness characterizing the law of nations. This leaves the law of nations in a humbler but sounder position, the product of human consensus rather than divine mandate or natural order. By contrast, Grotius attempts to preserve the loftier sense of the law of nations but supported by reason alone. In preserving the independent agencies of God and man, Suárez maintains a legitimate avenue for discussing the law of nations and the natural law separately, the one as properly human and the other as necessarily divine. Grotius might have judged this assessment of the law of nations too near Carneades’s conventionalism, but Suárez does not claim that justice originates in human convention. Rather, Suárez acknowledges that human reason alone does not suffice for discerning binding moral laws. To be sure, Suárez agrees with Grotius that some precepts are self-evident to natural reason, which may explain the general solidarity of laws of nations across regions and circumstances. Yet, this observation does not justify a purely natural law basis for the law of nations in Suárez’s thought, as it must in Grotius’s account.

Burke: The law of nations and the sanctity of precedent Whereas Grotius makes reason the source of objective right in the law of nations, Burke locates the grounds for right international order in the historical and local development of precedent.53 Certainly, Burke does not ascribe absolute moral truth to every traditional and customary convention. Nevertheless, he considers tradition, not right reason, the one reliable means for discerning moral truth, short of divine revelation—and even then, the divine order is best understood in accord with home-bred and prescriptive customs.54 Human beings receive guidance from natural and divine right solely through “entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to posterity; as an estate specially belonging to the people of this kingdom without any reference whatever to any other more general or prior right.”55 Paradoxically, while right is transcendent according to Burke, knowledge of it is always circumscribed by traditional context.56 Burke may not ascribe the same degree of surety to custom that Grotius ascribes to right reason, but he certainly is convinced that custom encompasses all that mankind can (in the present) know with any degree of surety about what is right. Consequently, while Suárez considers custom imperfect but useful, Burke judges precedent the sole source of clear guidance. To be sure, Burke’s claim is not that of Carneades—that justice is no more than what conventions

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prescribe. Rather, it is that genuine justice and right can be known only through the medium of conventional precedent. This position effectively commits Burke to the same problem that Grotius faces: while Grotius seeks to ground the existing law of nations in objective moral right through reason, Burke attempts to ground the justice of existing order in tradition. Strangely, modern rationalism and traditionalism result in the same quandary: “How can the objective moral authority of divine law be imported into human institutions without deference to revelation and theology?” In contrast, Suárez considers the ways of God to be mysterious and human affairs to be morally uncertain.57 He would find it naïve to attempt discerning anything like a scrutable providence in nature, right reason, or human tradition (even the tradition of a political arrangement like Christendom). Although Burke shares Suárez’s appreciation for the human origins of the law of nations, Burke locates the grounding for this law not in consensus but in the wisdom of the process through which the law emerges. That is to say, Burke vests the historical process of transmission with objective value.58 The most important problem with regicides is that they call into question the inherent wisdom of the inheritance process.59 To preserve the sanctity of inheritance, Burke does not admit questioning of the inherited order on the basis of any transcendent claims. And, as G.K. Chesterton (an unlikely critic) identifies, this position constitutes a serious break with classical and Christian thought: [Burke] did not attack the Robespierre doctrine with the old medieval doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robespierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it with the modern argument of scientific relativity; in short, the argument of evolution. He suggested that humanity was everywhere molded by or fitted to its environment and institutions; in fact, that each people practically got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the tyrant it ought to have … There you have the essential atheist.60 To be sure, Burke does not lack principles, but he derives his principles from circumstance rather than adapt them to circumstance.61 He does not follow Machiavelli in dispensing with “what should be done” for the sake of “what is done.”62 Rather, he attempts to combine the two, locating the should in the is, the ethical in practical deeds and events that transpire (in contrast with a “city in speech” or “City of God” that never can be realized fully in practice because of chance or sin).63 Burke’s principles depend on there being a process through which local tradition discerns or produces them. While there is a natural law in Burke’s rhetoric (the precepts of which are not merely conventional),64 Burke is clear that “the rules and definitions of prudence can rarely be exact; never universal.”65 In short, Burke accepts the exigencies of circumspect statecraft but tries to make them a source of moral certainty through tradition: there is no “extraordinary” case if all cases are made morally comprehensible by emergent human customs and institutions (that is, if the development of local traditions

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embodies something like particular providence).66 By contrast, for Suárez there is no process in the world of action that necessarily produces good, true, or just precepts. On the contrary, theology and philosophy must often look with disappointed eyes at the City of Man. Unlike Hegel, Burke does not go so far as to consecrate History as God’s Providence itself; however, Burke does entertain an almost Hegelian faith that good and just results emerge through institutions such as the law of nations.67

Conclusion Unlike Grotius or Burke, Suárez’s presentation of the law of nations does not adhere strictly to the rhetorical Ciceronian claims about its objective rightness. Like Augustine, Suárez does not equate human law with what is just as such.68 To be sure, Suárez argues that the law of nations loosely ref lects certain basic natural inclinations established in man by God; however, Suárez does not attempt to argue that right reason or “tried and true” precedent vindicates the law of nations as a just legal corpus. At the same time, he maintains the possibility of judging the law of nations according to higher standards of nature or the divine. In this way, he preserves the original, Ciceronian utility of the law of nations but with clearer boundaries set between the law and the universal—that is to say, without accepting altogether the implications of Cicero’s glowing presentation. While the law of nations remains a problematic concept, Suárez provides it with a more solid foundation, securing its function in international relations and foreign policy despite modernity’s challenge to law among nations.69

Notes 1 Cicero, De Officiis, The Loeb Classic Library 30 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), III.23. Regarding the need to restrain foreign policy, consider Aristotle, Politics, 1324b6-8. See also, Carnes Lord, “Aristotle,” in History of Political Philosophy, 3rd ed. (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 151; and, Thomas L. Pangle and Peter J. Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 41–46, 64. 2 Cicero, De Officiis, I.32. Strikingly, Cicero presents promises made by (and, presumably, to) the divine as singularly problematic. Cf. Plato, Republic, 330d–331d; and Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, Bk. II, §21. See also, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 68–69. 3 Cf. Aristotle, Politics, 1287a29–31; Cicero, De Officiis, I.11; and Machiavelli, The Prince, Ch. XVIII. 4 Cicero, De Officiis, III.23. 5 Strauss, 177–80. 6 See, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1965), 168–76. On the role of civil theology for foreign policy, see, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 46. 7 Barry Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991), 58. 8 Cicero, De Officiis, III.21, 23. See Note 15 below.

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9 Cicero, III.25. While Hercules exemplifies adherence to a divine or divine-like order (an image that accords with Cicero’s presentation of the law of nations [ius gentium]), the modern replacement, Faustus, uses technology (or magic) to benefit humanity by extending human sovereignty over nature and chance. 10 Cicero, De Officiis, I.34–35. See also, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 64–67. 11 Cf. Thucydides, III.42–48. See also, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 22–23, 41–46. 12 Cicero, De Officiis, I.31–32. See Note 2 above. 13 Even Machiavelli, after describing the frangibility of treaties, claims that “in cases in which there is urgent danger, some stability will be found more in republics than in princes” (Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov [Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998], I.59). On account of their legal constitutions, republics are less decisive but more stable, and, therefore, are less likely to break treaties, even in the extraordinary case. Machiavelli likewise recognizes the political recklessness of normalizing exceptions to lawful order, especially in republics (Machiavelli, I.34.3). That is to say, the necessity of bending laws does not imply that setting a precedent for exceptions is politically salutary—the necessities of the extraordinary case do not obviate the necessities of the ordinary. See also, Anthony D’Amato, “International Law from a Machiavellian Perspective,” in The Realist Tradition and Contemporary International Relations, ed. W. David Clinton (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007). 14 Alan Watson (trans.), The Digest of Justinian, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 1.1.1, 4. Ulpian’s distinction comes in the context of discussing slavery—a case exemplary of the enduring conf lict between the law of nations (ius gentium) and natural right (ius naturale). For a more recent instance of this enduring problem, consider the opinion delivered by Chief Justice John Marshall in The Antelope, 23 U.S. 66 (United States Supreme Court 1825). 15 Watson, The Digest of Justinian, 1:1.1.9. The referenced passage from Gaius’s Institutes contains the earliest extant juridical reference to both the ius gentium and the ius naturale (Nicholas, An Introduction to Roman Law, 56). The lack of earlier sources seems due to Justinian’s mandate making the original texts from which the Digest drew nonjusticiable (Nicholas, 35). Despite the difficulties of identifying the cited authors’ original intentions, the contrast between passages from them in the Digest provides evidence for a pre-Justinian conf lict over the ius gentium and ius naturale. 16 Heinrich Rommen, The Natural Law, trans. Thomas R. Hanley, O.S.B. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 35. On the intermingling of Stoic and Christian thought, see V. Cauchy and M. Spanneut, “Stoicism,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia (Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003). On Gratian, see, Kenneth Pennington, “Lex Naturalis and Ius Naturale,” The Jurist: Studies in Church Law and Ministry 68, no. 2 (2008): 570–1. 17 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, IIa IIae Q57 Art. 3. 18 Pennington, “Lex Naturalis and Ius Naturale,” 572. 19 On Aquinas’s distortion of Aristotle’s teaching regarding slavery (ST II–II Q57 Art. 3 ad 3), see Ernest Fortin, “Thomas Aquinas as Political Thinker,” in Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church, ed. Michael P. Foley, vol. 4, Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 98. On the Scholastic achievement in defining the ius gentium, see, Rommen, The Natural Law, 61. 20 Francisco Vitoria, Political Writings, trans. Jeremy Lawrance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 40. See also, Frederick Copleston, S.J., Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, vol. 3, A History of Philosophy (New York, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1993), 350. 21 To their credit, the late scholastics understood the importance of keeping human, natural, and divine authority distinct—unlike their critic, Sir Robert Filmer.

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22 Aquinas, Political Writings, 82–3 [ST Ia IIae Q91 Art. 4 resp]. 23 Francisco Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” in Selections from Three Works, ed. Thomas Pink, trans. Gwladys L. Williams et al., Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2015), 81. 24 Suárez, 81. 25 Notably, John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011), 45–48. For a more accurate assessment of Suárez and the various positions on ius in Scholasticism, see Ernest Fortin, “On the Presumed Medieval Origins of Individual Rights,” in Classical Christianity and the Political Order, ed. Brian J. Benestad, vol. 2, Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). 26 Rommen, The Natural Law, 52. 27 Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” 381. 28 E.g. Suárez uses Thomas’s claim that “law is nothing but a certain dictate of practical reason in the ruler who governs a perfect community” (Aquinas, Political Writings, 84 [ST Ia IIae Q91 Art. 1 resp.]) to typify the position that legislating is an act of the intellect. Later, Suárez explicates Thomas’s fuller definition of law as “a certain ordinance of reason for the common good, made and promulgated by him who has care of the community” (Aquinas, 82–83 [ST Ia IIae Q90 Art. 4 resp.]) to imply that law must be more than a dictate of reason. 29 Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” 381. 30 Suárez, 382. 31 Suárez, 384. 32 Consider John Jay’s definition of a treaty as “only another name for a bargain”— albeit a bargain with legal form necessarily understood as binding on both parties (The Federalist, ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan, The Gideon Edition [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001], No. 64, p. 336). Cf. U.S. Const. Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl 10 and Art. VI, Cl. 2. 33 Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” 387. 34 Suárez, 403. 35 Presumably, nothing in the ius gentium would prevent a state from exercising strong inf luence over fellow nations. 36 Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” 408. On slavery, see Notes 14 and 19 above. 37 Suárez, 387. 38 Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 306. In this respect, the ius gentium differs profoundly from modern human rights. 39 Suárez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” 395. 40 Hugo Grotius, “Prolegomena to the First Edition of De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” in The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, trans. Jean Barbeyrac, vol. 3 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1745. 41 Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 163. 42 Grotius, “Prolegomena,” 1746-7. 43 Grotius, 1745. Barbeyrac notes that this reference to Cicero seems out of context. 44 Grotius, 1745. 45 Martin Wight presents Suárez as an exemplary “Grotian”; however, the passage Wight cites as evidence stops short of a significant qualification that distinguishes Suárez from Grotius (Martin Wight, The Three Traditions [New York, NY: Holmes & Meier, 1992], 22). 46 Grotius, “Prolegomena,” 1747. See also, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 162. 47 Grotius, “Prolegomena,” 1747. 48 Grotius, 1748. 49 See, Rommen, The Natural Law, 57. 50 In contrast, consider Cicero, De Legibus, I.VI.18–I.VII.21.

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51 Grotius, “Prolegomena,” 1748–49. 52 Grotius, 1748. In a footnote to the Barbeyrac edition, Grotius also cites St. John Chrysostom: “When I speak of Nature, I mean God; for he is the Author of Nature.” In Grotius’s usage, the reverse also seems to be the case—when Grotius speaks of “God” in reference to ius, “nature” may be substituted. Grotius describes God’s “great and eternal rewards” (Grotius, 1748) and judgement as reserved “for when we are dead” (Grotius, 1751). If God’s rewards and punishments come only in the next life, while the consequences of not following the natural ius are apparent in this life, then God may create nature, but he does not legislate through it (Grotius, 1749). In contrast, consider Augustine, De Civitate Dei, I.8 and XIX.13. 53 The role of precedent in Burke’s thought hinges on its embodiment of “inbred sentiments,” such as the fear of God and the fear of kings who are also “natural” affectations (Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. Francis Canavan, vol. 2 [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999], 181). 54 Russell Kirk, “Burke and Natural Rights,” The Review of Politics 13, no. 4 (October 1951): 442. Cf. James F. Davidson, “Natural Law and International Law in Edmund Burke,” The Review of Politics 21, no. 3 ( July 1959): 483–94: esp. 486. In contrast, consider Michael P. Foley, “The Paradox of Christian Tradition,” in Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays in Honor of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A., ed. Michael P. Foley and Douglas Kries (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), esp. 9–10, 12. 55 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 121. Emphasis in original. 56 Burke, 121. 57 Cf. Nietzsche’s assessment of Hegel’s notion of History as “God’s sojourn on earth” (Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R.J. Hollingdale [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 104). To be sure, Burke’s process remains “local and accidental,” whereas Hegel’s process is “Historical” (See, Strauss, Natural Right and History, 314). Consider also, G. K. Chesterton, “The Judgment of Dr. Johnson,” in Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, ed. Denis J. Conlon, vol. 11 (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), 282; and Strauss, Natural Right and History, 310. 58 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, sec. 39. 59 Burke argues that the concern of mankind is, principally, with preservation of the current order (Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace, in Select Works of Edmund Burke, ed. Francis Canavan, vol. 3 [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999], 86). C.f. Henry Kissinger, A World Restored (Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1957), 192–93. 60 G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994), 179. 61 Alberto R. Coll, “Prudence and Foreign Policy,” in Might and Right After the Cold War, ed. Michael Cromartie (Washington, D.C: The Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993), 21. 62 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 61. 63 Consider, Coll, “Prudence and Foreign Policy,” 21. 64 See, Strauss, Natural Right and History, 295, 299; and, Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 314, fn. 57. 65 Quoted in Pangle and Ahrensdorf, Justice Among Nations, 278–79, fn. 33. Emphasis added. 66 Strauss, Natural Right and History, 317. 67 See also, Strauss, 314–21. 68 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, XIX.21. On Augustine’s avoidance of the term “law of nations (ius gentium) (and therefore, his avoidance of the problems attached to the ius gentium since Cicero’s articulation of it), see Ernest Fortin, “The City of God,” in Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church, ed. Michael P. Foley, vol. 4, Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

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69 It is worth noting that, while the term “compelling law” (ius cogens) (denoting peremptory norms in international law) has more or less eclipsed the law of nations (ius gentium), the terms are not simply equivalent. While the ius cogens consists in particular legal principles that can override treaties (Peter Malanczuk and Michael Barton Akehurst, Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law, 7th rev. ed. [London, UK: Routledge, 1997], 56–58), the ius gentium includes (and depends chief ly on) treaties and international institutions—not just legal maxims or accepted norms. The predominance of the prior term seems originally due to its perceived utility for the Soviet Union’s foreign policy; its enduring predominance seems to result from the lack of consensus among states in current international relations.

Bibliography Aquinas, T. Political Writings. Translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Burke, E. Letters on a Regicide Peace. In Select Works of Edmund Burke. Edited by F. Canavan. Vol. 3. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999. Burke, E. Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Select Works of Edmund Burke. Edited by F. Canavan. Vol. 2. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999. Cauchy, V., and M. Spanneut. “Stoicism.” In New Catholic Encyclopedia. Edited by Thomas Carson and Joann Cerrito, 535–539. 2nd ed. Vol. 13. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale, 2003. Chesterton, G. K. “The Judgment of Dr. Johnson.” In Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton. Edited by D. J. Conlon, 233–296. Vol. 11. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1989. Chesterton, G. K. What’s Wrong with the World. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1994. Cicero. De Officiis. Loeb Classic Library 30. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Coll, A. R. “Prudence and Foreign Policy.” In Might and Right After the Cold War. Edited by M. Cromartie, 3–28. Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993. Copleston, S. J. F. Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. Vol. 3. A History of Philosophy. New York, NY: Doubleday, and Company, Inc., 1993. D’Amato, A. “International Law from a Machiavellian Perspective.” In The Realist Tradition and Contemporary International Relations. Edited by W. D. Clinton, 82–95. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007. Davidson, J. F. “Natural Law and International Law in Edmund Burke.” The Review of Politics 21, no. 3 ( July 1959): 483–494. Finnis, J. Natural Law and Natural Rights. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011. Foley, M. P. “The Paradox of Christian Tradition.” In Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach: Essays in Honor of Ernest L. Fortin, A.A. Edited by M. P. Foley and D. Kries, 3–15. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Fortin, E. “On the Presumed Medieval Origins of Individual Rights.” In Classical Christianity and the Political Order. Edited by B. J. Benestad, 243–264. Vol. 2. Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Fortin, E. “The City of God.” In Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church. Edited by M. P. Foley, 71–82. Vol. 4. Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007. Fortin, E. “Thomas Aquinas as Political Thinker.” In Ever Ancient, Ever New: Ruminations on the City, the Soul, and the Church. Edited by M. P. Foley, 93–102. Vol. 4. Ernest L. Fortin: Collected Essays. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

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Grotius, H. “Prolegomena to the First Edition of De Jure Belli ac Pacis.” In The Rights of War and Peace. Edited by R. Tuck. Translated by J. Barbeyrac, 1741–1762. Vol. 3. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005. Hamilton, A., J. Jay, and J. Madison. The Federalist. Edited by G. W. Carey and J. McClellan. The Gideon Edition. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001. Höpf l, H. Jesuit Political Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kirk, R.. “Burke and Natural Rights.” The Review of Politics 13, no. 4 (October 1951): 441–456. Kissinger, H. A World Restored. Boston, MA: Houghton Miff lin, 1957. Lord, C. “Aristotle.” In History of Political Philosophy. Edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. 3rd ed., 118–154. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Machiavelli, N. Discourses on Livy. Translated by H. C Mansfield and N. Tarcov. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Machiavelli, N. The Prince. Translated by H. C. Mansfield. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Malanczuk, P., and M. Barton Akehurst. Akehurst’s Modern Introduction to International Law. 7th rev. ed. London: Routledge, 1997. Mansfield, H. C. “Edmund Burke.” In History of Political Philosophy. Edited by J. Cropsey and L. Strauss. 3rd ed., 687–709. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Marshall, J. The Antelope, 23 U.S. 66 (United States Supreme Court 1825). Nicholas, B. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991. Nietzsche, F. “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” In Untimely Meditations. Edited by D. Breazeale. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale, 57–124. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pangle, T. L., and P. J. Ahrensdorf. Justice Among Nations. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999. Pennington, K. “Lex Naturalis and Ius Naturale.” The Jurist: Studies in Church Law and Ministry 68, no. 2 (2008): 569–591. Rommen, H. The Natural Law. Translated by T. R. Hanley, O.S.B. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998. Strauss, L. Natural Right and History. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Suárez, F. “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver.” In Selections from Three Works. Edited by T. Pink. Translated by G. L. Williams, A. Brown, J. Waldron, and H. Davis, S.J. 1054. Natural Law and Enlightenment Classics. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2015. Vitoria, F. Political Writings. Translated by J. Lawrance. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Watson, A. (trans.). The Digest of Justinian. Vol. 1. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Wight, M. The Three Traditions. New York, NY: Holmes & Meier, 1992.

4 THE CREATION OF MAN Linguistic reformation and the necessity of the state in the work of Thomas Hobbes Emma Planinc

Hobbes’s theory of language is integral to both his scientific method and his civil science.1 His claim in Leviathan that truth is an attribute only of the right ordering of names and the settling of significations (Leviathan, I.iv, 16)2 also renders the laws of nature foundational to the link between his scientific method and his political science. As the reasonable conclusions by which man is able to determine the conditions and terms through which he may define the terms of peaceful living, the laws of nature are seen as the bridge between the uncertainty of the state of nature and the truly ordered definitions of the state. A.P. Martinich has written, for example, that Hobbes is committed to making his political philosophy scientific, and believes that being scientific means being like geometry, and being like geometry means that a science consists of definitions and what those definitions entail, and what those definitions entail is a matter of reason.3 Hobbes’s project is, on this reading, one of demonstrating to mankind the very necessity of an absolute power—demanded both by science and their own reason and fulfilled through an applied settling of definition and order in the state. In science, according to Hobbes, we must seek true definitions and from those definitions seek to construct syllogisms that conclude in true propositions so that we may construct a deductive system of certain propositions “whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable” (Leviathan, I.v, 24)—a task Hobbes considers himself to have accomplished in Leviathan. The laws of nature, which Hobbes also calls “the eternal law of God” (II.xxv i, 189), are thus often read as necessary consequences of reason that exist for, and can be derived by, all men universally and eternally. However, Hobbes speaks of the laws of nature using a number of more “disputable” terms and assertions,

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complicating this picture of the laws. He claims they are precepts or general rules of reason (I.xiv, 80); they are suggested by reason as convenient articles of peace (I.xiii, 78); that they oblige only to “a desire and endeavour” (I.xv, 100); they are “qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience” (I.xxvi, 174, my emphasis); and that these dictates of reason men use to call by the name of laws, but improperly; for they are but conclusions or theorems concerning what conduceth to the conservation and defense of themselves, whereas law, properly, is the word of him that by right hath command over others. (I.xv, 100) Much ink has been spilled on sorting out the obligations that these laws, precepts, or suggestions place on human beings in Hobbes’s political theory, without much consensus about the nature of the laws.4 There are, nevertheless, two indisputable assertions one can make about Hobbes’s laws of nature: firstly, these laws are not civil laws, and secondly, the laws of nature are without inf luence “if there be no power erected” (I.xvii, 106). Hobbes claims that civil and natural law are not different kinds but different parts of the same law “whereof one part (being written) is called civil, the other (unwritten) natural” (II.xxvi, 175). The law of nature and the civil law “contain each other,” though the laws of nature are not properly laws, but qualities that dispose men to peace and obedience. When a commonwealth is once settled, then are they actually laws, and not before, as being then the commands of the commonwealth, and therefore also civil laws. (II.xxvi, 174) Hobbes writes that the interpretation of all laws depends on the sovereign authority. The legislator is he, Hobbes argues, “not by whose authority the laws were first made, but by whose authority they now continue to be laws” (II.xxvi, 175). In the case of determining what is just and unjust, for example, Hobbes writes: where there is no commonwealth, there nothing is unjust. So that the nature of justice consisteth in keeping of valid covenants; but the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power sufficient to compel men to keep them. (I.xv, 89) The third law of nature that men perform their covenants made is the “fountain and original of justice” (I.xv, 89); yet, Hobbes is very clear that before this law of nature, or “before the names of just and unjust can have a place, there must be some coercive power” to ensure that the law is civilly instituted and protected (I.xv, 89). Despite being described as universally binding, the laws of nature are thus somehow also conditionally dependent on other things, including the presence of a sovereign power. The purpose of this chapter is to take this conditionality of

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the laws seriously and to its most extreme conclusion or foundation. I will argue that the laws of nature can be seen as in one way eternal and universally obligatory, but, in another very important way, the laws themselves are also always conditional, or contingent, on the state already being in existence. This radically unsettles the grounds of Hobbes’s political theory, which seemingly relies on the laws of nature—derived or discovered by each man’s reason—to carry human beings forward from a state of anarchy to a state of peace. My re-intepretation of the laws of nature comes from reading Leviathan along with Hobbes’s scientific work De Corpore, which he was writing conterminously.5 Examining these two works together allows for the exploration of what kind of conclusion, or proposition of reason, the laws are meant to be.6 Here, I arrive at an interpretation of the laws of nature as hypotheses or contingent propositions, which strengthens a reading of Hobbes as a serious proponent of the radical artificiality and necessity of the state. In De Corpore, Hobbes writes that hypotheses rest on prudential knowledge and, like contingent propositions, do not conclude anything universally; they are merely conjectural possibilities—though they may be more or less true—that are always capable of revision if a contrary effect is observed. Unlike categorically true statements, hypotheses and contingent propositions do not involve necessary truth and, thus, cannot—if this is in fact what the laws of nature are—oblige in any necessary way. Seen as hypotheses, the laws of nature, therefore, express only what could bring about peace if the covenant is made and serve only to produce or generate the possibility of a covenant. In what I will call “propositional reformation,” only once the covenant has taken place are these natural hypotheses, expressed as hypothetical propositions, transformed into—and understood as—reasonable and universal laws, after they are actualized and secured through the authority and command of the sovereign.7 The laws of nature are necessary only once they are made necessary by the presence of a sovereign authority (i.e., once their conditions have been fulfilled). Indeed, this is the very induction that Hobbes sees as justifying the state ex post facto. This is not, however, the same justification of the state that exists in the reading of the laws of nature as prescriptions of reason in which the necessarily true laws of nature are “carried forward” from the state of nature, necessitating the state proper. Rather, in reading the laws through De Corpore, it becomes evident that Hobbes is arguing that necessary truth is possible only in the state and never in the state of nature—even in the form of “laws.” Linguistic meaning, truth and the state are inextricably intertwined for Hobbes. Necessary truth, which depends on the linguistic containment of a predicate in a subject is, like the state, an artificial or imposed relationship: “It is true,” Hobbes writes, “that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both those names on the same thing” (De Corpore, III.8). The resemblance of the creation of the Body Politique to “the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation” (Leviathan, Intro, 4) is then the artificial creation of all possibilities of certainty and only because it is a creation

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ex nihilo out of a condition that demands no necessary connections between men. Reading Leviathan through De Corpore reveals that natural law and, more radically, reasonable man himself is possible or made true only in and through the existence of the state. Man is not by nature a political animal, but man, for Hobbes, is made by politics. And the natural law—that universal suggestion of our reason—can be eternally and necessarily true for man only once its conditions are already fulfilled in a state.

Prudence, science, and the problem of the laws of nature In this section, I will provide a brief exegesis of Hobbes’s theory of language, examining why the uncertainty of signification in the state of nature presents some serious problems for the “universality” of the laws of nature. Beginning in Part I of Leviathan, Hobbes distinguishes the nature of man from beast through the distinction of prudential from linguistic knowledge. Prudence is that skill that allows one to presume future effects from the experience of past events, and both man and beast can be prudent (Leviathan, I.iii, 14). “Signs” are present not only in linguistic relationships but also in prudential knowledge: a sign is the event antecedent of the consequent, and contrarily, the consequent of the antecedent, when the like consequences have been observed before; the oftener they have been observed, the less uncertain is the sign. And therefore he that has most experience ... is the most prudent. (I.iii, 14) The process by which this catalogue is put to use in choice of future effects is called deliberation—when we scan through our prudential catalogue and our experiential knowledge allows us to weigh the successes of previous voluntary actions. Deliberation ends, Hobbes claims, when the “last appetite in deliberating” is decided, and the “liberty of doing or omitting” ceases with an act of the will; and here, too, “beasts also deliberate” (I.vi, 33). Although man and beast share prudence and deliberation, there are faculties proper to man only that “are acquired and increased by study and industry … and proceed all from the invention of words and speech” (I.iii, 15). Hobbes claims that there are two uses of speech. The first is speech whereby “men register their thoughts, [and] recall them when they are past,” and the second is speech in which men “also declare them one to another for mutual utility.” The use of the former is “the registering of consequences of our thoughts, which being apt to slip out of our memory and put us to a new labour, may be recalled by such words as they were marked by.” This involves marks or notes of remembrance. The use of the latter is when many use the same words to signify (by their connexion and order) one to another, what they conceive or think of each matter, and also what

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they desire, fear, or have any passion for. And for this use they are called signs.” (I.iv, 16–17) In his more expansive account of language in De Corpore, Hobbes writes that it is necessary “that there be certain signs, by which what one man finds out may be manifested and made known to others” (De Corpore, II.2, my emphasis).8 Certain signs are words used in propositions: a proposition is a speech consisting of two names copulated, by which he that speaketh signifies he conceives the latter name to be the name of the same thing whereof the former is the name … For example, this speech, man is a living creature.” (III.1) In the proposition man is a living creature, man is the antecedent (or subject) and living creature the consequent (or predicate). A definition is “a proposition, whose predicate resolves the subject” (VI.14). Certain signs are, therefore, those words that may be used as signifiers of definitions (to say man is, in fact, to say man is a living creature). Unlike prudential natural signs (in which you can only infer that the consequent will follow the antecedent), arbitrary signs—signifiers—allow for fully necessary truth: B (living creature) will always follow from A (man). The complication of this hard division between prudential and linguistic knowledge in the state of nature is that Hobbes claims that reason—which is not “as sense and memory, born with us, nor gotten by experience, as prudence is, but attained by industry” (Leviathan, I.v, 25)—is not possible in the natural condition, for “in such a condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain” (I.xiii, 76). If there can be no certainty of reason in the state of nature, how, then, can the laws of nature, which Hobbes calls precepts of reason (I.xiv), certainly and necessarily lead man out of the natural state and into the state proper? Here, Hobbes’s distinction between marks and signs is essential, which I claim can also be mapped onto a distinction between private and public reasoning.9 Hobbes writes in Leviathan that reason is nothing but reckoning (that is, adding and subtracting) of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them when we reckon by ourselves, and signifying, when we demonstrate or approve our reckonings to other men. (I.v, 23) Private reason makes it possible to be a deductive philosopher alone. Hobbes writes, “a man may be a philosopher alone by himself, without any master; Adam had this capacity. But to teach, that is, to demonstrate, supposes two at least, and syllogistical speech” (De Corpore I.VI). We may “demonstrate” or “reckon” universal names and propositions to ourselves; however,

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because all men be not alike affected with the same thing, nor the same man at all times, [names] are in the common discourse of men of inconstant signification. For seeing all names are imposed to signify our conceptions, and all our affections are but conceptions, when we conceive the same things differently, we can hardly avoid different naming of them. (Leviathan I.iv, 21) Similarly, Hobbes writes, “no one man’s reason, nor the reason of any one number of men, makes … certainty” (I.v, 23)—for man, signs are “uncertain, when only some particular events answer to his pretence” (I.v, 27). In the state of nature, then, even though a single man could be confident in his demonstrations, syllogisms, and propositions, infallible (certain and shared) signs seem impossible. Hobbes’s own description of the state of war discounts the possibility of consensus or certainty insofar as men are not only restricted to inconstant signification or naming but may also use this uncertainty to deceive (II.xvii).10 Hobbes’s theory of man’s reasoning in the state of nature is much closer to prudential knowledge than it is to linguistic knowledge, for prudence—and uncertain signification—is bound to the manner in which one’s knowledge pertains to one’s own experience of world. Although man is elevated above beasts because of his capacity for things that are “acquired and increased by study and industry … and proceed all from the invention of words and speech” (I.iii, 15), it is not clear that this is of any use in establishing that one ought certainly to follow or be obliged by any “law” that is derived while in the state of nature, for any law could simply answer to one’s own pretence or subjective experience of the world. The fact, therefore, that every man thinks his conclusions are necessarily true makes it so that no man’s conclusions are necessarily true, and, thus, it is very difficult to assume a) that all men would derive the same laws of nature as a consequence of reason and b) that there could exist a necessary and certain consensus about the rational content of those laws.11 This presents a problem for the stability of Hobbes’s whole political system, for he claims that “there can be no certainty of the last conclusion without a certainty of all those affirmations and negations on which it was grounded and inferred” (I.v, 23). Without confidence in the first assertion—the laws of nature—there can be no confidence in any of the assertions that follow, including the stability of the state. The missing ingredient thus far is, of course, Hobbes’s claim that the institution of the commonwealth and of obedience to law is contingent on the presence of a coercive power. The laws of nature and the covenant are without inf luence “if there be no power erected” (I.xvii,106): where there is no commonwealth, there nothing is unjust. So that the nature of justice consisteth in keeping of valid covenants; but the validity of covenants begins not but with the constitution of a civil power sufficient to compel men to keep them. (I.xv, 89)

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Not only, then, are the laws of nature problematic insofar as one man’s certainty may conf lict with another’s, but the laws of nature are not in fact necessarily true until the sovereign power is already in place. This is hardly the deductive system of true propositions “whose conclusions have thereby been made indisputable” (I.v, 24) promised us by Hobbes. This seems, rather, to be a squared circle that does not in any way establish the conditions upon which men may renounce their right according to the laws of nature for the sake of peaceful and commodious living. Above all, it seems that Hobbes’s theory of language is going to do no work in establishing a logical connection between the laws of nature and the state. This is where Hobbes’s account of what I call “propositional reformation” in De Corpore is essential to understanding his political science in Leviathan. Hobbes’s theory of propositional logic in De Corpore allows for a reading of the laws of nature as (1) conclusions of reason—or hypotheses—that are certain subjectively and (2) contingent hypothetical propositions when they are considered in common because they are not yet objectively certain without the presence of a sovereign, coercive power. The applicability of De Corpore to Leviathan will require an exegesis of the ways in which Hobbes suggests propositions can be reformulated to ref lect either contingent or necessary truths. Because Hobbes claims that propositions can be “equipollent” to one another without altering their content (or truth-value), the laws of nature are in one way eternal and unaltered in the passage from the state of nature to the state proper. In a more fundamental way, however, the only way in which the laws of nature can be said to be obligatory at all is when they are necessary: the laws of nature are certain subjectively (privately) only if they are certain objectively (in the state).

Propositional reformation in De Corpore In the description of propositional language in De Corpore, Hobbes distinguishes between necessary and contingent and categorical and hypothetical propositions, all of which can be true, and only some of which can be necessary and true. Firstly, propositions are distinguished between “necessary, that is, necessarily true; and true, but not necessarily, which they call contingent” (De Corpore, III.10). In a necessary proposition, the predicate is either equivalent to the subject or part of an equivalent name, which makes the proposition true at all times (e.g., man is a living creature); in a contingent proposition, though the compounded name or names “should happen to be true always,” it cannot be shown to be so necessarily (e.g., every crow is black) (III.10). Secondly, a categorical proposition “is that which is simply or absolutely pronounced” (e.g., every man is a living creature), while a hypothetical proposition “is that which is pronounced conditionally” (e.g., if any thing be a man, the same is also a living creature) (III.11). The necessary, categorical proposition is a universal proposition comprised of universal names. A universal name involves “many things severally taken” (II.9).

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For the universal name man, for example, there are compounded parts: living creature, animated, and rational, and the name man cannot be understood without the understanding of its compounded parts. A universal proposition is thus “that whose subject is affected with the sign of a universal name, as every man is a living creature” (III.5). If a proposition is universal and true, it is a definition (VI.14), and a man who seeks precise truth, Hobbes claims, must order his words according to the settled significations of definitions (Leviathan, I.iv); he must, therefore, seek definitions that are universal, true, necessary, simple and categorical. Hobbes writes, “seeing every proposition may be, and uses to be, pronounced and written in many forms … whensoever [one] meets[s] with any obscure proposition, [one] ought to reduce it to its most simple and categorical form” (De Corpore, III.12). This reduction must take place via an equipollent proposition, or a proposition that is equivalent to and “may be reduced to one and the same categorical proposition” (III.12). That which is categorical and necessary, Hobbes writes, is equipollent to its hypothetical answering; for example, “as this categorical, a right-lined triangle has its three angles equal to two right angles, to this hypothetical, if any figure be a right-lined triangle, the three angles of it are equal to two right angles” (III.13). These categorical and hypothetical propositions signify the same and are both true, for “whensoever an hypothetical proposition is true, the categorical answering it, is not only true, but also necessary” (III.11). That is, if the hypothetical true proposition can be transformed into the form “___is___” (a categorical, simple form), then it is necessary. Man is a living creature is an example of a definition because its predicate resolves its subject necessarily and universally—man must always contain in its name the predicate living creature.12 In contrast, Hobbes’s example of the contingent, categorical proposition—every crow is black—“may perhaps be true now, but false hereafter” (III.10) because the word black is not part of a compounded name equivalent to crow. Thus, while every crow is black may be true, it cannot be said to be so necessarily; that is, it cannot be said to be universal and true at all times. Hobbes claims that although contingent propositions can be true, they cannot be equipollent, either in the categorical or hypothetical form, to necessary, categorical statements. Contingent propositions concern prudential knowledge: worldly experience that is “given us immediately by nature” (I.2). If the contingent proposition is prudential, it is also what Hobbes later calls a hypothesis. Hypotheses, Hobbes claims, are made use of “in single and particular, not universal propositions” (XXV.1). The singular proposition is that whose subject is a singular name, as Socrates is a philosopher, and the particular is that whose subject is affected with the sign of a particular name, as some man is learned. Hypotheses are not universal propositions because they are conjectures about the cause and generation of certain effects, and they are conjectures from observed particular effects. For example, one could say that it has often or always been observed that lightning precedes thunder; therefore, one hypothesizes that lightning precedes

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thunder. Hypotheses do not, Hobbes writes, “impose upon us any necessity of constituting theorems; their use being only, though not without such general propositions as have been already demonstrated, to show us the possibility of some production or generation” (XXV.1). Hypotheses, like contingent propositions, do not conclude anything universally because they are merely conjectural possibilities (though they may be more or less true) that are always capable of revision if a contrary effect is observed. It is clear, however, that the exclusion of the equipollence of contingent and categorical propositions does not preclude the possibility of a relationship between contingent-categorical and necessary-categorical propositions. In accounting for the development of the syllogism “every man is a living creature, every creature is a living body, therefore, every man is a body,” Hobbes writes: When this syllogism is made, man is a living creature, a living creature is a body, therefore, man is a body, the mind conceives first an image of a man speaking or discoursing, and remembers that that, which so appears, is called man; then it has an image of the same man moving, and remembers that that, which appears so, is called living creature; thirdly, it conceives an image of the same man, as filling some place or space, and remembers that what appears so is called body; and lastly, when it remembers that that thing, which was extended, and moved and spake, was one and the same thing, it concludes that the three names, man, living creature, and body, are names of the same thing. (IV.8) The process articulated by Hobbes involves a number of elements: the recalling of memories of our experiences and empirical knowledge, the relationship of these experiences to universal names, the relationship of these universal names to universal propositions, and, finally, the relationship and truth of these universal propositions to one another in the form of a syllogism. Hobbes’s demonstration of the syllogism above can therefore be written in three ways: Categorical Contingent Man is a living creature. A living creature is a body. Therefore, Man is a body. Categorical Necessary Man is a living creature. A living creature is a body. Therefore, Man is a body. [equipollent to]

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Hypothetical Necessary If any thing be a man, the same is also a living creature. If any thing be a living creature, the same is a body. Therefore, If any thing be a man, the same is body. The contingent formulation of the syllogism communicates the aspects of Hobbes’s demonstration that involve hypotheses and observations of sense experience (recalling having seen a man, etc.), and the necessary formulations of the syllogism involve the application of universal names to these observations. Despite being identical in form, Hobbes maintains that the categorical contingent and the categorical necessary propositions are not equipollent. The denial of this particular equipollence in Hobbes’s theory of language is strange. Why, for example, is it that man is a living creature is a necessary, universal proposition and not the crow is black? It is either that one maintains that one will see a crow that is not black, or it is that the consequent, black, is not part of a compounded name equivalent to the name crow in the same way as man is compounded of living creature and body (and is, thus, universal). Hobbes admits that the latter, however, is an artificial relation dependent on the choice of universal and compounded names: “this may be deduced, that the first truths were arbitrarily made by those that first of all imposed names on things, or received them from the imposition on others. For it is true (for example) that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both those names on the same thing” (III.8). Similarly, Hobbes writes in his Objections to Descartes’ Second Meditation that reasoning is about the designations of things that we draw any conclusions, that is, whether or not we in fact join the names of things in accordance with some convention that we have arbitrarily established regarding the meanings of these terms.13 We may thus conclude that because the categorical contingent hypothesis is not equipollent to the categorical necessary statement, one can say that the universal names in the latter have no relation to the contingent, empirical truths of the former. The contingent and necessary propositions are mutually exclusive forms of propositions: the necessary categorical proposition man is a living creature is necessary, despite the fact that the contingent, categorical proposition is also a true and valid conclusion; the necessity of the necessary proposition is, therefore, the product only of the arbitrary artifice of linguistic relationships. If, however, the containment of a subject in a predicate is a matter of arbitrary necessity, then the hypothetical proposition’s equipollence to a necessary categorical proposition is also arbitrary. The reasoning goes as follows: the universal name man contains living, rational, and body; therefore, any hypothetical proposition in which a predicate involving this universal name contains its subject is true; therefore, the true categorical answering of this hypothetical proposition

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is necessary. Let us say, to use another example, that the universal name earth contains flat. The hypothetical, true proposition, if it is the earth, then it is flat, has as its categorical answering the necessary, true proposition: the earth is flat. Through empirical observation combined with scientific study, the hypothesis was generated that the earth is round (categorical, contingent). Once proven and demonstrated beyond doubt, the hypothesis, the earth is round, modified the universal name earth to contain round instead of flat. This means that the hypothetical proposition, if it is the earth, then it is flat, that was once held to be true and equipollently necessary to its categorical (and universal) partner, the earth is flat, is now false and that the contingent hypothesis, the earth is round, is now categorically, necessarily true. The hypothetical proposition if it is the earth, then it is flat is now contingent, false and removed from the catalogue of universal, necessary propositions whose predicates contain their subjects. This means that hypothetical propositions can be either true or false, and relating to contingency or necessity, dependent on the arbitrary allocation of universal names in a particular language. This explains, perhaps, Hobbes’s claim that “philosophers may in most things reason more solidly by hypothetical than categorical propositions” (III.11). The applications of this propositional reformulation to Hobbes’s political science should be emerging. If, in the state of nature, there is the possibility that man will not concede to adopt the same conclusions as his fellow man, or continue to acknowledge them if the conclusion is shared, private man’s conclusions in the state of nature can only be seen as propositions or conclusions whose certainty are conditional on both experience and an agreement on terms, which involves the compliance of all men covenanting and the enforcement of the sovereign power. When these two conditions are fulfilled, then the laws of nature are made objectively and necessarily prescriptive in the state. Hobbes’s goal of a science “whose conclusions have … been made indisputable” (Leviathan, I.v, 24) is accomplished only in civil science and, as is demonstrated below, only through the proper equipollence, in the covenant, of the hypothetical to the necessary laws of nature guaranteed by the institution of an absolute authority: a) Man can conclude with certainty using his own reason that the theorems or laws of his reason will conduce to peace and are most beneficial to his selfpreservation. In this sense, the laws of nature are subjectively prescriptive or imperative: I conclude that “Every man ought to endeavour peace.” b) Man can suggest to other men that these are indeed certain and infallible conclusions, and men can agree about the conclusions’ certainty, making it appear that these conclusions are now objectively certain. c) However, because there is no assurance that a man will keep his word in the state of nature, one has to wonder whether these conclusions are objectively certain and do oblige men to obey their prescriptions. d) Man must recognize in the state of nature that there is no assurance that “men will perform their covenants made” if there is no enforcement of

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compliance (Leviathan, I.xv, 89): I am certain that “Every man ought to endeavour peace,” and my neighbour claims to be certain of the same, but I cannot be certain that he will act in accordance with those things necessary for peace at all times. e) Thus, there must be “some coercive power to compel men equally” (Leviathan, I.xv, 89) and to ensure that those laws that are conducive to peace are objectively obeyed and upheld: In order for there to be peace, every man must be certain that “Every man ought to endeavour peace,” and this is only possible if such a maxim is enforced. f ) There is no guarantee that the conclusions of which I am certain will generate peace unless all men conclude and comply to the same. Thus, the subjectively imperative conclusion “Every man ought to endeavour peace” is modified to include conditions upon which my subjective certainty depends. For example, the first law of nature, “that every man ought to endeavour peace” (Leviathan, I.xiv, 80), the second law of nature, “that a man be willing, when others are so too, … to lay down his right to all things” (Leviathan, I.xiv, 80), and the third law of nature “that men perform their covenants made” (Leviathan, I.xv, 89), must be formally considered as hypothetical propositions: “If I endeavour to seek peace for the sake of my own preservation, and if other men are willing to do the same, then I agree to lay down my right to all things and keep my covenant.”14 g) Thus, because my certainty is dependent on the compliance of other men, my certainty is not objectively certain until the conditions of peace, and of my conclusions, are met. This suggests that the laws of nature are (1) conclusions of reason that are certain subjectively and (2) hypothetical propositions, based upon contingent fact, when they are considered in common because they are not yet objectively certain or necessary.15 Though private man in the state of nature thinks he has deduced a universal syllogism that is necessarily true, he must acknowledge, once he interacts with others, that his conclusion is not certainly necessary. Significations and conclusions are uncertain in the state of nature because, without consensus or assurance, signs are not infallible but answer only to the particular events of each man’s pretence. The theorems that, in the state of nature, are hypothetical and conditional upon the compliance of all men to the covenant, are, however, in the state made reasonable definitions because their conditions have been fulfilled. The laws of nature are, therefore, rules or theorems of reason only insofar as they can transform from (true) precepts or hypotheses of private reasoning, to (true) hypothetical propositions of reasoning in common, and, finally, into (true and necessary) categorical and objective precepts in the state. In the covenant, man is thus the artificer of his own security and the creator of conditions that allow for necessarily certain and enforceable laws and truths. The question remains, of course, concerning the work this propositional equipollence, or reformation, is meant to be doing. Those who, like Pettit,

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acknowledge the prudential, or contingent, nature of the laws in the state of nature invest their efforts in explaining the forward directionality of the laws; that is, despite the contingency of natural or prudential reasoning, the attempt is made to account for how one is to reason oneself out of the natural condition. Hobbes’s emphasis is, however, clearly in the reverse direction: the laws of nature are objectively true in the state, which necessitates their equipollence to the hypothetical reasonings of the state of nature, which are, in turn, founded on contingencies (or particularities) requiring conditions for their fulfilment or compliance.16 The laws of nature are true in all times and places—that is, universally true—only once they are true in a state. Man can only be seen as capable of reasoning himself into a state from the position of being in one already. Put otherwise, shared hypotheticals can only necessarily be shared when they have been universalized. The laws of nature can exist and be induced as universal laws or commandments only once the state already exists.

The necessary linguistic foundation of the state Hobbes introduces Leviathan claiming that the artificial man called a commonwealth is reliant on the “pacts and covenants by which the parts of this body politic were at first made, set together, and united, [and they] resemble that fiat, or the let us make man, pronounced by God in the creation” (Leviathan, Intro, 4). Similarly, in the Epistle Dedicatory to De Corpore, he writes that the philosophic “method must resemble that of the creation” (De Corpore, Epis.). In Leviathan, this creation is that of the commonwealth “which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended” (Leviathan, Intro, 3). The artificial man is erected so that “by study and industry” man may increase his own stability of living (I.iii, 14): beginning from the first definitions of the state, predictable and reliable conditions exist for man to live and exercise his reason and understanding. The success of a state is, therefore, in its artifice. The commonwealth must construct for itself a system of necessarily true propositions that best help men to preserve themselves for an extended period of time.17 This is not only a concern of political security. Hobbes claims in De Corpore that the utility of philosophy, or science, is in the chief commodities of which man is capable: arts, architecture, calculating celestial motions, etc., “but the utility of moral and civil philosophy is to be estimated, not so much by the commodities we have by knowing these sciences, but the calamities we receive from not knowing them” (De Corpore, I.7). The calamity of not knowing civil science is, in sum, disorder. Without peace and without the settling of the first laws or definitions of an ordered state there can be no commodity or science. A condition of unsettled signification and differentiated reason—the state of natural man—is lacking in industry and the conditions under which man may accumulate objective, reasonable knowledge.18 The analogue between Hobbes’s theory of language and his theory of politics is glaring and frightening. The solution to

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the disorder of the natural condition is submission to an absolute sovereign who is the source of the conditions of possibility for all accumulations of objective definition precisely because artifice is the only source of necessary truth. Just as the laws of nature are guaranteed and made necessary only once they are made so with the birth of artifice, so too is language itself made necessary (and, thus, useful for human life) only through artifice: “it is true (for example) that man is a living creature, but it is for this reason, that it pleased men to impose both those names on the same thing” (III.8). Indeed, it pleases Hobbes greatly to impose a completely new definition of man in Leviathan—not natural or a “living creature,” but entirely artificial. More radical than the justification of the state, then, an analysis of Hobbes’s propositional science reveals not only the simultaneous genesis and fulfilment of political authority but the genesis and definition of man himself. The laws of nature serve to remind men that these same laws exist only because the state exists; without the state to enforce compliance, there could be no necessary conclusion that one would live peacefully as opposed to fearfully. All of the commodities of human life, up to the highest activities of philosophizing, are contingent on the very same institution.19 The “let us make man” that is pronounced in Leviathan is not only the creation of the artificial man of the state but, simultaneously, the creation of man himself as a properly linguistic and rational creature. Without artifice and enforced necessary connections, men would be subject to crippling and erratic futures and conclusions. Like beasts, we would exist only with uncertain experiential or prudential knowledge, unsettled signification and unnecessary truths. It is because of the artificial man—the state—that man is possible at all. Man thus creates himself or, more properly, owes his creation to the force that makes all things necessary through necessitating obedience and compliance. The indisputable conclusions about which Hobbes speaks both begin and end in the state: necessary connection is created ex nihilo from a condition that demands no necessary connections between men. The remaining question is how this has in fact solved the problem of the laws of nature at all. Because they are true necessarily only in the state, how is this ex nihilo emergence of the sovereign by institution even possible except by some inexplicable “big bang”? There has been much work done on the role of rhetoric in Hobbes’s thought,20 and one possible solution is to postulate that the exit from the state of nature requires a very convincing founder. This is probable and entirely consistent with the analysis provided above21 and does not detract from the fact that necessary truth is only possible once the state has been instituted nor from the assertion that this truth is artificial and, fundamentally, arbitrary.22 More essentially, what this analysis suggests is that Hobbes is compelling men to, in all cases, choose the state.23 Matthias Kiesselback has argued that Hobbes’s later works “can be seen as exploring quite new ways of inviting us to ‘enjoy [our] present state … rather than go to war’ … Asking us to recognize the rationality inherent in the legislation of our actual commonwealth.”24 Further than even Kiesselback goes in his argument, the Hobbes presented here is one

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who compels men to recognize that their very existence as stable and properly rational creatures—their existence as men and not beasts—is entirely dependent on the artifice of the state. One could hardly expect, however, that Hobbes would have anticipated that each man of the commonwealth would read his account of propositional logic and derive this conclusion. As Teresa M. Bejan has argued, Hobbes imagined that his texts would replace the work of the scholastics in the universities and, although “the vast majority of citizens would not attend university[,] … like many of his contemporaries Hobbes thought the safety and well-being of the commonwealth required universal civic education.”25 Drawing also on Kinch Hoekstra, Bejan argues that Hobbes employed many different forms of teaching the same politically beneficial content, extending to the rephrasing of the natural and moral laws as the Ten Commandments.26 The power of Hobbes’s “memorable metaphoric images”27 has also been emphasized by Christopher McClure and by Robin Douglass, who writes that the fictions presented by Hobbes, including that of the state of nature, lead to the conclusion that “in thinking of themselves as if they have covenanted to generate the commonwealth, individuals really do consent to give up their right of governing themselves to the sovereign. At this stage reality and fiction become one.”28 The potential power of these images—thinking also, of course, of the image of the great Leviathan depicted in the frontispiece—rests essentially on Hobbes’s confidence that the state is built purely on artifice. Hobbes demonstrates through Leviathan and De Corpore that the connection between the laws of nature and the state has nothing to do with nature at all. In fact, the eradication of contingency and uncertainty is dependent on the ability of language and politics to establish that your peace and commodious living—your existence as a rational and linguistic creature—is entirely reliant on the beneficial artificiality of the political sphere. If you can convince the populace that the state is the guarantor of natural law, then you will have squared Hobbes’s circle: you will have tautologically made the sovereign necessary simply because he is necessity itself.

Notes 1 Because Hobbes asserts in his scientific method that truth is propositional, many commentators have also likened Hobbes’s work to modern semantic or analytic theories of truth . R.M Martin likens Hobbes’s work to Tarski, Carnap, Frege, Russell and Zermelo: R. M. Martin, “On the Semantics of Hobbes,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 14 No. 2 (1953): 205–211, 208–209; Martin Bertman compares him to Tarski, Carnap and Wittgenstein: Martin A. Bertman, “Semantics and Political Theory in Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies I (1988): 134–143, 139–141; Willem R. de Jong relates Hobbes to Tarski and Frege: Willem R. de Jong, “Did Hobbes Have a Semantic Theory of Truth?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990): 65–88, 64; and W. P. Grundy claims that Hobbes’s ideas came to fuller expression in the work of Quine, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Derrida, Rorty and Kripke: W.P. Grundy, “No Letters: Hobbes and the 20th-Century Philosophy of Language,” Philosophy of the Social Sciences (2008): 486–512, 486.

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2 Citations to primary sources will be in the following forms: Leviathan (Leviathan, Part.Chapter, page number) from: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Hackett Publishing Inc, 1994); De Corpore (De Corpore, Chapter.Paragraph Number) from: Thomas Hobbes, De Corpore [Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body], in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Vol. 1., ed. Sir William Molesworth, Bart. (London: John Bohn, 1839); Elements of Law (Elements, Chapter. Paragraph Number) from: Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J.C.A Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 3 A. P. Martinich, “Reason and Reciprocity in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy: On Sharon Lloyd’s: Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes,” Hobbes Studies 23 (2010): 158–169, 162. 4 See, to name only a few, Philip Pettit, Made With Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008) and Michael Oakeshott, Hobbes on Civil Association (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975); David Gauthier, “Hobbes’s Social Contract,” in Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes, ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1988): 125–152 and The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); D.D. Raphael, “Obligations and Rights in Hobbes,” Philosophy Vol. 37 No. 142 (1962): 345–352; A.E. Taylor, “The Ethical Doctrine of Thomas Hobbes,” Philosophy Vol. 13 No. 52 (1938): 406–424; Howard Warrender, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957); and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5 That Hobbes was writing De Corpore while writing Leviathan suggests that it is warranted to pay close attention to the relationship between the two works. Jeffrey Collins and Quentin Skinner both demonstrate that Hobbes was working on the two texts conterminously: Jeffrey Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 118; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Volume III. Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 19. 6 De Corpore is often cited and discussed, but without the application of what I will call Hobbes’s “propositional reformation” to the laws of nature in his political work. See discussions of De Corpore in, for example: Terence Ball, “Hobbes’s Linguistic Turn,” Polity Vol. 17 No. 4 (1985): 739–760; Willem R. de Jong, “Semantic Turn,” and “Hobbes’s Logic: Language and Scientific Method.” History and Philosophy of Logic 7:2 (1986): 123–142; Pettit, Made With Words; William Sacksteder, “Some Ways of Doing Language Philosophy: Nominalism, Hobbes and the Linguistic Turn,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1981): 459–485; Richard A. Talaska, “Analytic and Synthetic Method According to Hobbes,” Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 26, No. 2 (1988): 207–237; Håkan Törnebohm, “A Study in Hobbes’ Theory of Denotation and Truth,” Theoria, 64 (1960); and Frederick G. Whelan, “Language and Its Abuses in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy,” The American Political Science Review Vol. 75 (1981): 59–75. 7 For those readers who maintain an objection here founded in Hobbes’s claim that the laws of nature are the laws of God written, as it were, on men’s hearts, I point to a passage in which Hobbes claims that even Adam’s pre-sinning eternal life was conditional on the commandments of God; that is, the eternal law made explicit: “Another general error is from the misinterpretation of the words eternal life, everlasting death, and the second death. For though we read plainly in Holy Scripture that God created Adam in an estate of living for ever, [this] was conditional, that is to say, if he disobeyed not His commandment” (Leviathan, IV.xliv, 418). 8 Willem R. de Jong argues that according to Hobbes’s own arguments, although “all science is an enterprise dependent on speech,” in principle, “scientific knowledge should already be attainable by the use of names as marks”: “Hobbes’s Logic,” 124, 131. This will be addressed further on in the chapter. 9 de Jong grounds this dualism as an inheritance of traditional linguistic philosophy, which, he claims, renders Hobbes’s linguistic theory one with “serious shortcomings”.

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He incorporates “the doctrine of oratio mentalis (thinking, mental reasoning) and orato vocalis (speech) as [the] model was adopted in traditional philosophy”: “Semantic Turn,” 88. While I agree that this distinction is preserved in Hobbes’s thought, I will argue that this is essential to understanding the profound uncertainty of the state of nature and is not at all a shortcoming. For more on deceptive ideological war in the state of nature, see Arash Abizadeh, “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory,” American Political Science Review 105.2 (2011): 298–315. Richard Tuck has argued, nevertheless, that if you do not oblige yourself to the law of nature, you are committing a “logical error,” for they tell us what we ought to do or what we are obliged to do if we are “thinking rationally.” Richard Tuck, Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 72, 73. Michael Oakeshott and Philip Pettit offer a more prudentially oriented account of the laws of nature. Oakeshott claims that the laws of nature “are fruitless until they are transformed from mere theorems into maxims of human conduct and from maxims into laws” (Civil Association, 37), while Pettit writes that the laws of nature are “requirements dictated by sensible selfconcern,” which become rules, or theorems, of reason “only for creatures who have terms in which to spell out axiomatic notions like those of self-preservation, contract and obligation” (Made With Words, 105, 46). In all cases, there remains, however, a disjuncture between the laws obliging man in foro interno by virtue of his rational conclusions (whether logically prescriptive or prudentially founded) and the laws being prescriptive for all men in the state of nature, thereby leading to the commonwealth. I will unpack this disjuncture in a manner that is, of the three, closest to Philip Pettit’s account. Hobbes does not stick to this definition in Leviathan, in which he offers a second, artificial definition of man. This is essential to both his theories of language and of politics and will be discussed in the conclusion. My thanks to Taylor Putnam for our conversations about this “discrepancy” about man in Hobbes’s work. Rene Descartes, Meditations, Objections and Replies, trans. Roger Ariew (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2006), 104. It is extremely interesting, it should be noted, that the hypothetical formulation of the laws of nature parallels Hobbes’s description of the language of deliberation: “deliberation is expressed subjunctively, which is a speech proper to signify suppositions, with their consequences, as if this be done, then this will follow, and differs not from the language of reasoning, saving that reasoning is in general words, but deliberation for the most part is of particulars” (Leviathan, I.vi, 34). In this sense, the imperative command of the will ref lects the hypothetical suggestion of man’s reasoning when he wills the covenant. It is possible that this reading of the laws of nature draws a middling position in a debate between Sharon Lloyd and A.P. Martinich: Martinich, “Reason and Reciprocity”; Sharon Lloyd, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Martinich praises Lloyd’s “reciprocity theorem” in which the laws of nature are derived from a reciprocal (yet rational) theory of mutual justification (158); however, Martinich argues that the laws are derived from a Principle of Reason in which any rational agent must be able to derive submission to an absolute authority (163). As Nicholas Dungey has aptly demonstrated, Hobbes’s “materialism and theory of language [demonstrates that] the possibility that individuals will reason together about the best way out of the state of nature appears unlikely.” Nicholas Dungey, “Thomas Hobbes’s Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics,” The Review of Politics 70.2 (2008): 190–220, 219. Dungey disagrees with Martinich’s “assumption” that human beings in Hobbes’s system will be able to counteract all that works against the potential for their reaching a consensus or consenting to a covenant. Dungey wonders where we are to turn given the difficulties presented by Hobbes’s materialism. My contention is that we have always been looking in the wrong direction.

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17 In his meticulous account of reference in Hobbes’s philosophy of language, Arash Abizadeh claims that it is a “mistake to assume that Hobbes completely eschewed a conventionalist theory of truth. No matter how implausible such a theory of truth might be, much of what Hobbes did write seems to presuppose precisely such a theory.” Arash Abizadeh, “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language,” Philosophers’ Imprint 15.22 (2015): 1–17, 14–15. Abizadeh has also developed a much fuller account of Hobbes’s propositional logic and theory of language in his book: Arash Abizadeh, Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Also see Raia Prokhovnik, “Hobbes’s Artifice as Social Construction,” Hobbes Studies 18 (2005): 74–94. Prokhovnik claims, as I do, that the “political dimension”—in its radical artificiality—is a necessary condition for social or individual identities (93). For a recent counterargument to the conventionalist position, see Marcus P. Adams, “Hobbes, Definitions, and Simplest Conceptions,” Hobbes Studies 27.1 (2014): 35–60. 18 Terence Ball writes: “there can be no science, Hobbes insists, where there is no safety, and conversely, no lasting security without the aid of science, rightly understood and applied” (“Hobbes’s Linguistic Turn,” 755). 19 This is echoing Dorothea Krook’s assertion that “social order itself (Hobbes declares) is indissolubly linked with linguistic order; and it is therefore one of the main tasks of the sovereign to fix the meanings of all disputed terms.” Dorothea Krook, “Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth,” The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy Vol. XXXI No. 116 (1956): 3–22, 20. While it is certainly the case that the sovereign will bind men’s tongues when it comes to sources or terms of disagreement, Krook’s argument does not go as far as my own analysis in grounding the epistemological possibility of linguistic order in the state necessarily. 20 For a recent example, see Daniel Skinner, “Political Theory beyond the RhetoricReason Divide: Hobbes, Semantic Indeterminacy, and Political Order,” The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 561–580; and see Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric. 21 Hobbes’s account of the possible origin or founding of language, in fact, emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the assignment or acceptance of names: “the first man imposed names on just a few animals … these names, having been accepted, were handed down from fathers to sons.” Thomas Hobbes, On Man, in Man and Citizen, trans. Charles T. Wood, T.S.K. Scott-Craig and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), X.2. We know, of course, that Hobbes is highly critical of the manner in which others assigned names to things, and it is his task to correct these faulty inheritances. This correction of “inheritance” is echoed in the first pages of John Locke’s Second Treatise. 22 As Daniel Skinner notes in “Beyond the Rhetoric-Reason Divide,” the claim that Hobbes solved the problem of semantic indeterminacy is misplaced. It is precisely the acknowledgment of the fundamental semantic indeterminacy of human language that allows for the artificial creation of the state. Hobbes is a master rhetorician, and it is precisely this creative strategy—given the artifice of language and the state—that makes his theory of political stability possible. 23 This squares nicely with Hobbes’s assertion that sovereignty by acquisition is identical to sovereignty by institution. 24 Matthias Kiesselback, “Hobbes’s Struggle with Contractual Obligation. On the Status of the Laws of Nature in Hobbes’s Work,” Hobbes Studies 23 (2010): 105–123, 123. 25 Teresa M. Bejan, “Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Education,” Oxford Review of Education 36.5 (2010): 607–626, 617. 26 Bejan, “Teaching the Leviathan,” 618; Kinch Hoekstra, “The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes),” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106.1 (2006): 25–62. See also Tracy B. Strong: Hobbes’s “desire for Leviathan to become the standard text for all is remarkably similar to the status that the printed Scripture had for Protestantism. In Leviathan, Hobbes wrote a civil philosophical Scripture that compliments natural philosophical doctrine and parallels what God did in making the world for us.”

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Tracy B. Strong, “How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes,” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 128–159, 159. 27 Bejan, “Teaching the Leviathan,” 618. 28 Robin Douglass, “The Body Politic ‘Is a Fictitious Body,’” Hobbes Studies 27 (2014): 126–147, 145. Christopher McClure, “Hell and Anxiety in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 1–27.

Bibliography Abizadeh, Arash. “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory.” American Political Science Review 105.2 (2011): 298–315. Abizadeh, Arash. “The Absence of Reference in Hobbes’s Philosophy of Language.” Philosophers’ Imprint 15.22 (2015): 1–17. Abizadeh, Arash. Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Adams, Marcus P. “Hobbes, Definitions, and Simplest Conceptions.” Hobbes Studies 27.1 (2014): 35–60. Ball, Terence. “Hobbes’s Linguistic Turn.” Polity 17.4 (1985): 739–760. Bejan, Teresa M. “Teaching the Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Education.” Oxford Review of Education 36.5 (2010): 607–626. Bertman, Martin A. “Semantics and Political Theory in Hobbes.” Hobbes Studies I (1988): 134–144. Collins, Jeffrey. The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Descartes, Rene. Meditations, Objections and Replies. Trans. Roger Ariew (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2006). Douglass, Robin. “The Body Politic ‘Is a Fictitious Body.’” Hobbes Studies 27 (2014): 126–147. Dungey, Nicholas. “Thomas Hobbes’s Materialism, Language, and the Possibility of Politics.” The Review of Politics 70.2 (2008): 190–220. Gauthier, David. “Hobbes’s Social Contract.” In Perspectives on Thomas Hobbes. Ed. G.A.J. Rogers and Alan Ryan (Oxford: Clarenden Press, 1988): 125–152. Gauthier, David. The Logic of Leviathan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969). Grundy, W.P. “No Letters: Hobbes and the 20th-Century Philosophy of Language.” Philosophy of the Social Sciences 38.4 (2008): 486–512. Hobbes, Thomas. De Corpore [Elements of Philosophy. The First Section, Concerning Body]. In The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Vol. 1. Ed. Sir William Molesworth, Bart (London: John Bohn, 1839). Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Ed. J.C.A Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Ed. Edwin Curley (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1994). Hobbes, Thomas. On Man. In Man and Citizen. Trans. Charles T. Wood, T.S.K. ScottCraig and Bernard Gert (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998). Hoekstra, Kinch. “The End of Philosophy (The Case of Hobbes).” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106.1 (2006): 25–62. de Jong, Willem R. “Did Hobbes Have a Semantic Theory of Truth?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990): 65–88. de Jong, Willem R. “Hobbes’s Logic: Language and Scientific Method.” History and Philosophy of Logic 7.2 (1986): 123–142.

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Kiesselback, Matthias. “Hobbes’s Struggle with Contractual Obligation. On the Status of the Laws of Nature in Hobbes’s Work.” Hobbes Studies 23 (2010): 105–123. Krook, Dorothea. “Thomas Hobbes’s Doctrine of Meaning and Truth.” The Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy XXXI.116 (1956): 3–22. Lloyd, Sharon. Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Martin, R. M. “On the Semantics of Hobbes.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14.2 (1953): 205–211. Martinich, A. P. “Reason and Reciprocity in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy: On Sharon Lloyd’s: Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.” Hobbes Studies 23 (2010): 158–169. McClure, Christopher. “Hell and Anxiety in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 1–27. Oakeshott, Michael. Hobbes on Civil Association (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975). Pettit, Philip. Made With Words (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Prokhovnik, Raia. “Hobbes’s Artifice as Social Construction.” Hobbes Studies 18 (2005): 74–94. Raphael, D. D. “Obligations and Rights in Hobbes.” Philosophy 37.142 (1962): 345–352. Sacksteder, William. “Some Ways of Doing Language Philosophy: Nominalism, Hobbes and the Linguistic Turn.” Review of Metaphysics 34.3 (1981): 459–485. Skinner, Daniel. “Political Theory beyond the Rhetoric-Reason Divide: Hobbes, Semantic Indeterminacy, and Political Order.” The Review of Politics 73 (2011): 561–580. Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics: Volume III. Hobbes and Civil Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Strong, Tracy B. “How to Write Scripture: Words, Authority, and Politics in Thomas Hobbes.” Critical Inquiry 20.1 (1993): 128–159, 159. Talaska, Richard A. “Analytic and Synthetic Method According to Hobbes.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26.2 (1988): 207–237. Taylor, A. E. “The Ethical Doctrine of Thomas Hobbes.” Philosophy 13.52 (1938): 406–424. Törnebohm, Håkan. “A Study in Hobbes’ Theory of Denotation and Truth.” Theoria 64 (1960): 53–67. Tuck, Richard. Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Warrender, Howard. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). Whelan, Frederick G. “Language and Its Abuses in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy.” American Political Science Review 75 (1981): 59–75.

5 NATION AGAINST EMPIRE J.G. Fichte on economic and cultural nationalism Jeffrey Church

Is nationalism desirable or necessary in a liberal regime? Political theorists have long debated this question, which has taken on new urgency in the era of the nationalist movements spreading across Europe and the United States. Cosmopolitan critics of nationalism point to its anti-democratic tendency to exclude minority groups not part of the national majority, its mythic narrative of identity, and its illiberal tendency to violate minorities’ rights in service to the national cause.1 In response, some theorists have defended a form of liberal or civic nationalism, in which national identity is not determined by ethnicity but by liberal principles or values so that membership is open to all.2 Liberal nationalists argue that cosmopolitanism fails to cultivate the needed capacities and loyalties on the part of citizens to carry out liberal goals, such as supporting a generous welfare state or pursuing perpetual peace. In general, for liberal nationalists, the nation-state is still the best means toward cosmopolitan ends. In this chapter, I aim to deepen the liberal nationalist argument through a reexamination of J.G. Fichte’s nationalist theory. There are two issues missing in contemporary liberal nationalism, omissions that could be remedied through attention to Fichte’s thought. First, contemporary liberal nationalists do not address the relationship between liberalism and empire—which has garnered quite a bit of scholarly attention recently3 —and how nationalism could exacerbate or help to address this problem. On Fichte’s view, I argue, nationalism serves to check the modern political impulse toward empire. Second, contemporary theorists bracket the question of the good life in theorizing national identity.4 Yet, without a vision of the good life to support nationalism, it is not clear where the motivational resources for nationalism come from.5 This is especially a problem because, as we will see below, Fichte regards our age as one of selfishness in which we turn away from common causes, sapping the motivational resources for collective purposes. In Fichte’s view, nationalism requires a foundation in

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liberal perfectionism and that nationalism has value because it best fosters an autonomous human life. This chapter also aims to contribute to the literature on Fichte’s thought. Most contemporary scholars understand Fichte to be a liberal nationalist of some variety, in contrast to the earlier interpretation of Fichte as inaugurating the path to a chauvinistic, ethnic German nationalism.6 However, Fichte’s nationalism is not all of one piece—he defends economic nationalism in The Closed Commercial State and a cultural nationalism in Addresses to the German Nation. There have been several good studies of each work, but few scholars have sought to understand what unifies them.7 I argue below that the two forms of nationalism are both responses to the endless expansion or multiplication of desires in the modern world: economic self-sufficiency aims to curb political and economic ambition for empire among modern states, while a national culture seeks to confer structure and purpose on the multitudinous aggregate of selfish material desires in modern society.

Modernity’s problems Like many other German thinkers of this period, Fichte’s analysis was heavily indebted to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially the critique of modernity found in the Discourse on Inequality and Rousseau’s republicanism as found in The Social Contract. As is well-known, the Discourse on Inequality recounts a speculative history of humanity in which human beings begin in a state of animalistic independence and innocence. As civilization develops, we become ever more dependent on one another, both for our material needs but also for our growing artificial desire for recognition from our fellows. We begin then to create rank orders among us in order to maintain our status over other individuals, though our desires, nevertheless, continue to grow, and we become ever more dissatisfied as civilization advances. Ultimately, the modern individual, “forever active, sweats, bustles about, constantly frets to seek ever more laborious tasks: he works to death, he even runs toward it in order to be in a position to live.”8 In his Characteristics of the Present Age, Fichte offers a more elaborate version of Rousseau’s story. Like Rousseau, Fichte conceives of human beings as beginning in a state of animalistic innocence, the first stage of human history. Like Rousseau, Fichte also holds that human beings are distinct from other animals in possessing freedom, as we are capable of “liberation from the compulsive power of instinct.”9 Human freedom, in Fichte’s view, is not merely “formal freedom” in which our actions are determined by our arbitrary choice. Our freedom, the preeminent feature of our subjectivity, also aims at “material freedom” in which we take as our comprehensive purpose in life the achievement of a selfdetermined existence.10 For Fichte, the initial way in which human beings seek material freedom is by dominating others, achieving independence by subjecting others to their will, and putting “themselves in the room and place of the race.”11

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This longing on the part of freedom to dominate others gives rise to a reaction on the part of the dominated: they seek liberation from “external ruling authority.” This liberation from authority extends not only to the visible, physical rule of tyrants, but all authority, visible and invisible, coercive and ideological, such that this third age ushers in an epoch of “absolute indifference towards all truth, and of entire and unrestrained licentiousness.”12 Unlike Kant, Fichte does not look to a faculty of reason to check our sensuous natures. Fichte eschews Kant’s faculty psychology as insufficiently critical because it does not take into account the genesis of reason out of freedom.13 As a result, Fichte holds that the problems of the modern age are self-generated, that is, not the result of our wayward natural instincts leading us astray but, rather, the consequence of the activity of our own freedom. Fichte sees two major problems resulting from the use of our freedom in modernity. First, in politics, Fichte argues that the tendency of our freedom to dominate others is unlimited in nature. In his rather Hobbesian account of original right in the Foundations of Natural Right, he holds that all have original right to the efficacious use of freedom.14 However, in the state of nature, we are the only legitimate judge of the extent of this use as well as the violations upon our freedom.15 As such, Fichte argues, “original right is infinite.”16 There is no limit to what we can rightfully claim as our original right.17 Indeed, if “one were to say to the other, ‘don’t do that, it disrupts my freedom,’ why shouldn’t the other answer him by saying, ‘and refraining from doing so disrupts mine.’”18 Like Hobbes, Fichte holds that the rights of each are unlimited in the state of nature, yet, unlike Hobbes, he bases the infinite claim to right on our desire for an autonomous life rather than on material self-preservation. The consequence of the infinite claim of freedom is, as Fichte develops the point in The Closed Commercial State, that powerful states extend their economic and political empire endlessly across the earth. In his dedicatory letter to the work, Fichte argues that “free trade” appears universally beneficial, but, in fact, “Europe has a great advantage in trade over the remaining parts of the world” and so uses this advantage for the “common exploitation of the rest of the world,” including the creation of colonies and fostering of a slave trade.19 Each state seeks empire, and the result is an “unceasing war of all against all, of buyers and sellers.”20 The only seeming alternative to constant war, then, seems to be the domination of all by one. Yet, both war and peace under a despot render freedom impossible. Freedom’s infinite pursuit of autonomy results in its own destruction. The second problem of freedom in modernity appears in society. We use our freedom not only to dominate others politically, that is, through physical coercion, but also socially. That is, we desire to be recognized as higher or more important than other human beings. Already in his early work, the Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgments about the French Revolution, Fichte understands the aristocratic classes as engaged in a form of social and legal domination. Yet, the result of this domination is that our desire for recognition grows and

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grows. As more luxuries are produced, whose aim is to indicate status, our needs for these luxuries grow as well, and, indeed, it is the universal lot not to be able to satisfy all these needs to the extent that each desires. You have a modern household appliance, but you still lack a picture gallery. Maybe you get one, then you will only lack a chamber of antiquities.21 As our imagination expands for what could confer status on us, our desires grow as well. Meanwhile, our material ability to acquire these luxuries remains limited. As a result, Fichte holds, the aristocratic class attempts to squeeze ever more resources out of the lower classes, with the specious justification that their greater needs demand greater tributes from their vassals. “When the way of life among the nations was simpler,” peoples could relate harmoniously. “But now that needs have grown greater,” our relationships have “turned into the most screaming injustice, a source of great misery.”22 Individuals become ever more dissatisfied, and society becomes ever more divided. Freedom in society then impels us toward “selfishness.”23 No one cares for the community, as individuals instinctually did in the innocent condition of humanity. Thus, the “bonds” between the individual and the “whole” have been “broken so completely that the individual no longer retained any interest in the whole at all.” Any kind of appeal to “love of glory and national honor” are regarded as “misleading chimeras,” ways that authorities can dupe the populace into sacrificing themselves for dubious purposes.24 Yet, as this selfishness works its way into the souls of leaders as well, the “security” of the whole is at stake.25 Selfishness “annihilates” itself, as a selfish people is unable to take collective action against an empire that threatens it.26 In sum, then, Fichte identifies two related problems that result from unchecked freedom in modernity. In the pre-modern world, there existed immediate instinctual bonds that united human beings together, or forms of external authority, such as religion, that could restrain and guide our freedom. Yet in the modern world, with our liberation from instinct and from external authority, freedom leads us to dominate others in the form of a political empire, and it leads us to dominate others in the form of material and social status. For Fichte, modern life has not yet produced anything that can restrain these tendencies, and the main innovations of modern economic and political life—“free trade” of commercial society and the modern state apparatus— exacerbate these tendencies. For Fichte, the solution is not to turn back the clock to pre-modern forms of external authority. Yet at the same time, the abstract liberal theories of Locke, Kant, and others, who root individual property rights in merited acquisition, also do not restrain these tendencies but, in fact, serve the interest of the wealthy and powerful, “the large landholders, or the nobility,” who deploy claims of natural right to shore up their massive fortunes.27 It is no wonder, then, that Fichte advocates for the “creation of an

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entirely new order of things” to propel us out of the third, selfish epoch of humanity. 28

Economic nationalism against empire It is a commonplace argument among the followers of Adam Smith or David Hume that free trade is mutually beneficial and that economic nationalism— the closing of borders to trade or the imposition of tariffs on imports—is selfdestructive. Fichte’s The Closed Commercial State is sometimes dismissed with the assumption that he did not understand or appreciate this argument. While I do not attempt in this chapter to defend Fichte’s economic analysis, it is evident that he does indeed appreciate the “positive sum” gains that accrue from trade. Indeed, Fichte approves of the development of modern civilization broadly understood, with our growing power over nature to determine our own human fate. Much of this power comes from the “great unitary commercial state” of Europe.29 In the early modern period, Fichte argues, the “unity of Christian Europe” made possible a system of free trade.30 Although “everything was in a state of anarchy,” this was a “simple way of life and limited needs of men,” and Christian religion regulated and guided trade interactions.31 For Fichte, however, trade requires some structure to regulate it. For example, the “free trade” of Christian Europe only appeared free. It was, in fact, regulated by the laws and morals of the Christian religion. As that religion begins to recede in its binding power and the different states begin to divide and separate in their interest, trade becomes less fair and collaborative and, indeed, becomes exploitative. Merchants, labour, and consumers each seek to maximize their profits and do so by acquiring a monopoly in the market or using the power of the state to regulate the market for their advantage or, finally, by “lower[ing] the quality of the goods” bought or sold.32 Fichte agrees with Smith and Hume that the open modern commercial society produces great wealth, but he disagrees with them in his argument that this wealth accrues to different parties very unequally. In Book 2, Chapter 4 of The Closed Commercial State (CCS), Fichte argues that states exist in a trade equilibrium with one another rarely—more frequently there are some who gain at the expense of others and other poorer nations that are exploited. However, Fichte seems to take extreme measures. He advocates the complete closure of commercial society. Members of one state would be prohibited from trading with members of another state, and trade among states could only be possible through their respective governments. Why does he advocate this economic nationalism? As scholars have argued, Fichte advocates for the closure of commercial society because it paradoxically promotes peace among nations.33 The open commercial society is a form of “anarchy,”34 an economic war of all against all. To overcome this war, states must retreat into themselves and become self-sufficient, thereby having no reason to prey on other states. Ultimately, then, “once this system has become universal,” then “eternal peace” will be “established among the different peoples.”35

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This account is correct, but it does not show how economic nationalism addresses the deeper problem about freedom’s infinite longing for empire discussed above. For Fichte, freedom’s infinite longing cannot be satisfied through submission to a natural law, God, or some other external authority. Freedom can only constrain itself. To do so, human beings create states, which determine the rightful boundaries between mine and thine. We then freely submit ourselves to this state, still reserving our popular sovereignty to replace this government if it oversteps its authority.36 This act of self-subjection is at once a moment of freedom, as Rousseau argued in The Social Contract, because each participant in the state is at once sovereign over the law and subject to it.37 The political community of equals, then, provides the conditions in which individuals can remain free while also finding a check on their freedom. This account, however, only gets us so far. States grounded in popular sovereignty can still be empires, and popular sovereignty alone does not entail economic nationalism or even material freedom. The crucial feature of Fichte’s political thought to add here is his claim that states are organic in nature. In the Foundations of National Right, Fichte argues that modern conceptions of the state envision it as an “ideal aggregation of individuals,” the result of a social contract that brings together in an uneasy alliance separate individuals from the state of nature. Instead, Fichte marries an Aristotelian conception of the state to a liberal regime. According to the organic, Aristotelian view of the state, “each part can be what it is only within this organic unity, and outside such unity, the part would not exist at all.”38 Outside of the state, as we saw above, “human beings would experience only passing gratification,” while within the state, human beings become “citizens” in which we have “various things to do and leave undone, not for his own sake, but for the sake of others,” and, indeed, “his highest needs are satisfied by the actions of others, without any contribution from himself.”39 Each member of the state preserves and promotes the whole and is thereby preserved and promoted reciprocally by others. For Fichte, this strong account of citizenship is still compatible with private property rights and a sphere of freedom for individuals, as he indicates in his break from Rousseau’s totalizing social contract.40 The organic nature of the state means that it is self-sufficient. The organic state takes as its end freedom, namely, the freedom of its members, and it does not rely on anything outside itself to satisfy this end, such as the contributions of other states. In this way, the organic state realizes material freedom, which Fichte identifies as our highest purpose or vocation. As soon as the state trades with other nations, it becomes dependent on them, loses its freedom and distinctiveness, and vainly pursues endlessly expanding desires for luxury and empire. The closure of its commerce with others means that it places the goal of freedom first, as the overarching goal of the community—a goal that then orders, guides, and limits our otherwise infinite material desires. Accordingly, the closure of commercial relation arrests our desire for endless expansion, cutting off the desire for empire at its roots.41 In sum, then, economic nationalism promotes the organic

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self-sufficiency of the state, which in turn guarantees perpetual peace. Fichte, in this sense, disagrees with Kant’s own argument that modern commercial society tends toward peace.42 Economic nationalism, then, addresses the problem of rich states oppressing poor states in international relations. Yet, Fichte also argues that it addresses the same problem domestically, namely, of rich citizens oppressing poor ones. One of Fichte’s main targets in Book 1 of CCS is the Lockean view of property rights, which accords individuals “an exclusive right to a determinate free activity,” even in the state of nature.43 As we saw above, Fichte holds that this Lockean view provides ideological support for rich landholders who can maintain exclusive control over their property, even in the face of widespread poverty. On this Lockean view, private property is a “fence” not only against the predations of fellow citizens but also against the state. Rather than conceiving of political society as an organic whole, the state is an aggregate of individuals, each separated from one another by exclusive property rights. The problem with the Lockean view, for Fichte, is that it comes into conf lict with our basic right to life. Rich landholders can fence off their property while poor day-labourers starve. In Fichte’s view, then, property rights must be rethought based on the primary right to life because “the purpose of all human activity is to be able to live.”44 Yet, living is not simply breathing on Fichte’s view, as life for humanity is active and striving, so what it means to live is to “live as pleasantly as possible” as well as to be able to guide one’s life according to one’s arbitrary will as much as possible.45 This is not to suggest that everyone should be equal in living pleasurably or freely. Rather, it means that there is some basic minimum accorded to every individual in virtue of their humanity—a minimum right to living pleasurably and with some free scope of activity. Fichte’s approach to property, then, is to reject the Lockean understanding of property invested in things or “objects.”46 Rather, our property is primarily lodged in our “free activity” or that we have the “exclusive right to a free act.”47 Fichte lodges property rights in activity in part because of his philosophy of subjectivity, which conceives of the I in terms of activity rather than substance.48 By giving individuals a right to their activity, it means that no individuals have exclusive rights to objects. The right to activity, particularly free activity in support of a pleasant life, takes primacy over the right to objects. Of course, as we saw above, every individual claims a right to unlimited free activity, which means that all rights conf lict in the state of nature. Accordingly, Fichte defends the closure of the commercial state in order to establish justice among individuals’ interactions. The state has to limit commercial activity with foreigners because it cannot establish a framework of justice with foreigners—it has no juridical authority over non-members, and so the “great commercial society” is one big state of nature. In addition, the state has to establish the boundaries between mine and thine. Yet, these boundaries, these property rights, are always provisional because the state must take, as its overriding function, the protection of the rights of everyone in their free activity toward

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a pleasant life. Fichte develops a very baroque, indeed even feudal, guild structure with state-controlled prices in order to provide such guarantees. Much closer to contemporary liberal approaches is his argument that it is up to the culture or “nation” to determine what counts as sufficient “pleasantness” in a life and what is a life not worth living.49 Nations will differ about the standards for a pleasant, free life, and, thus, they will also differ about the means to achieve this free life. We need not take Fichte’s economic prescriptions for universal dogma, following his own suggestion that nations constitute organic, self-sufficient wholes that differ both in their ends and their means for achieving those ends. Economic nationalism, in sum, is necessary to set a standard for minimum welfare in society as well as to ensure that welfare is maintained throughout the state.

Cultural nationalism against selfshness Fichte sharply distinguishes political right from morality, and, as we will see, he distinguishes two forms of nationalism: a political-economic form and a moralcultural form. One of the main distinctions between right and morality is that the norms of right are coercive—in an established political order, the state possesses the legitimate authority to enforce right. The state does not have legitimate authority to enforce morality. Fichte, like Kant, argues that morality must be done for the right reasons—out of individual freedom—not because the state forced me to do so. Economic nationalism is based on right, that the state has the legitimate power to restrict commerce with foreigners and regulate domestic commerce in order to achieve the end of right, namely, perpetual peace in international affairs, and a free sphere of efficacious living domestically. By contrast, the cultural nationalism we find in Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation is much more well-known but also misunderstood as also a political project. This cultural nationalism is based on our moral vocation and, thereby, is a form of community bound together not based on coercions but on a free commitment to our moral end. Accordingly, the purpose of Fichte’s cultural nationalism has less to do with our relationship with others, and more to do with improving our inner moral character. The beginnings of Fichte’s view of cultural nationalism appear in his lectures on the scholar’s vocation of 1794. In that work, Fichte describes the vocation of humanity to be the perfection of the moral character of humanity. The perfection of morality consists in the achievement of the material freedom for all, a condition in which our empirical character and our environment are brought “into harmony with the pure form of the I.”50 Of course, to achieve this end of humanity takes a great deal of effort over many generations of human history. In order to ensure that the moral effort of humanity is not lost from generation to generation, we must create a community, called “culture,” which is devoted to “suppressing and eradicating” those inclinations contrary to morality and “awakening our reason” to humanity’s end.51 Culture is, then, “the ultimate and highest means to [humanity’s] final goal: complete harmony with himself.”52

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Fichte insists that the cultural community is distinct from the “state,” which is only “a means for establishing a perfect society,” and, “like all those human institutions which are mere means, the state aims at abolishing itself.”53 The state is characterized by coercive authority, while culture is characterized by “free interaction.”54 The state is necessary for such free interaction to be possible, but, ultimately, when our moral character has advanced far enough, coercion may cease, and culture can continue alone. By the time Fichte writes the Addresses to the German Nation, however, in 1807–8, he comes to appreciate more the obstacles to achieving the unity of culture. The predatory empire of France looms over Germany, but more importantly, for Fichte, we live in an age of selfishness, in which individuals act based on calculations of self-interest. Culture requires common feeling and interest, which the modern age is destroying. As such, Fichte argues, we must “cultivate a completely new self,” one not responsive primarily to material self-interest but to the “spiritual motive of moral approval and disapproval.”55 To achieve this new self, Fichte advocates a “new education” that draws on the existing national character and seeks to “form the Germans into a totality that in all its individual parts is driven and animated by the same single interest.”56 As in his economic nationalism, so too in his cultural nationalism, Fichte conceives of the nation in organic terms, which eschews the aggregation of self-interested individuals and instead posits individuals as integral parts of a whole. Indeed, Fichte’s form of education seeks to overcome specifically the class difference that divides every society and prevents it from possessing an organic unity—this new education “becomes not the education of a particular class but simply of the nation as such” in the “cultivation of an ardent pleasure in what is right.”57 In other words, Fichte’s cultural nationalism is not for the sake of “honor and national glory,” which he repudiates in the first address as mere “empty phantoms.”58 Indeed, Fichte proceeds to excoriate the imperial tendencies of modern states and cultures59 and lauds German culture for retaining its “particularity” while also “recognizing, granting, and permitting other peoples their own particularity also.”60 This rejection of nationalistic chauvinism is possible because the end of nationalism is not national aggrandizement but, rather, national submission to a cosmopolitan project of humanity’s liberation, an “empire of spirit and reason,” to “annihilate completely the crude physical force that rules the world.”61 What is of value in German culture is not its contingent history and linguistic features but the way in which its contingent history and language helps it advance morally. As a moral exemplar for other nations, German national culture can ennoble its own members and other cultures around it. In this way, Fichte rejects any kind of ethnic nationalism in which nations are bound together by descent. Instead, they are bound together by an ascent toward our collective moral ideal.62 All individuals can be part of any culture, then, on this view. Moreover, all cultures can recognize all other cultures because there are many roads that lead to human liberation—not everyone could or should

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adopt Germany’s path but, rather, should follow the thread immanent to their own circumstances and orientation. Nor is Fichte’s nationalism primarily political in nature. Indeed, Fichte continues to denigrate the state in comparison with culture—the “people and fatherland far exceed the state.” The state is “only a means, a condition, a framework for what love of fatherland really desires: that the eternal and the divine may f lourish in the world and never cease to become ever more pure, perfect, and excellent.” Accordingly, for Fichte, culture should guide the state not the other way around: “love of fatherland must govern the state itself, as altogether the supreme, final and independent authority.”63 Culture directs the state to protect the “internal peace” for the sake of culture because freedom is the soil in which the higher culture can germinate; a legislation that keeps its eye on the latter will allow the former the widest possible scope, even at the risk that a lesser degree of uniform peace and order may result and government become a little more difficult and arduous.64 Accordingly, Fichte does not envision the state coercing belief in culture or forcing professions of faith—to the contrary, the state must foster a liberal society in which individuals are free to adhere to (or reject) culture. Only under these free conditions can human beings truly deserve moral approbation for freely taking up the work of culture. At the same time, politics does play a role in carrying out the national education Fichte envisions. Yet, the national education itself, Fichte insists, is based on new educational principles that follow from human beings as fundamentally free. The old model of education treated human beings as passive vehicles for the state’s will. The new education seeks to liberate individuals to act for themselves. This education reveals that “many men have remained children throughout their lives,” enthralled to the pursuit of esteem or material pleasure.65 This education promotes freedom of thought because, under these conditions, pupils cannot evade their moral conscience but must confront it. Education clears away the obstacles to the rule of reason and fosters those skills within the pupils in which they can follow their reason to moral perfection. This is an education to selfsufficiency not to subservience.66 At the same time, Fichte argues that to achieve this individual self-sufficiency, pupils must be educated in a school that is in “total isolation from the adult world” and provides for all its needs, including food.67 Pupils, thereby, learn independence by supporting themselves and take on a larger communal self-consciousness by being part of a community that secures these needs and fosters their moral education. Each school would, thereby, become an organically self-sufficient community. At the same time, the school system would conceive of itself as part of the organic whole that is the national culture. In so doing, the education system inculcates the national culture in the character of citizens so that the fundamental aim of their character ceases to be material self-interest and, instead, becomes

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the moral mission to liberate humanity. This general moral mission must be lodged in the nation, for Fichte, rather than in abstract principles because human beings’ selfishness cannot be transformed by abstract principle. Abstract principle does not motivate us enough, but, rather, as he suggests with the example of the French who adopt this method of appeal to abstraction, human beings use abstract principle as an ideological cover to mask their pursuit of self-interest. By cloaking their selfishness in principle, the French can more effectively pursue their self-interested aims. By contrast, Fichte argues that modern human beings need to reach deeply back into their national past to discover what has spiritually moved them and build on this spiritual inheritance: your forefathers unite with these addresses and adjure you. Imagine that in my voice are mingled the voices of your ancestors from the grey and distant past, who with their own bodies stemmed the tide of Roman world domination, who won with their own blood the independence of those mountains, plains and streams which under your charge have become the spoils of strangers. They call out to you: represent us, pass on our memory as honorably and blamelessly to future ages as it has come down to you, and as you have gloried in it and in your descent from us!68 Thus, in the case of the Germans, Fichte appeals to the national history of noble heroism to elevate the moral striving of contemporary Germans. More wellknown is, of course, his appeal to the vivifying nature of the German language, which is connected to fundamental drives in a way that Romance languages are abstracted from such fundamental drives. However, Fichtean cultural nationalism need not rely on such controversial claims about language in order to discern something ennobling about one’s own culture.

Liberal nationalism and the vocation of humanity For Fichte, the vocation of humanity is to liberate itself from dependence on nature and on others and to realize freedom for all. Much of Fichte’s corpus consists in discerning the means to achieve this vocation. I have argued in this chapter that nationalism, for Fichte, is one crucial means. One important reason in favour of nationalism is that it represents a collective instantiation of freedom as self-sufficiency that he hopes all humanity can achieve. The kind of organic wholeness characteristic of a nation unifies both his economic and his cultural nationalism. However, as we have seen, there is an important difference between the two types of nationalism: his economic nationalism requires political coercion, while cultural nationalism eschews it and is fostered through a civic education instead. Liberal nationalists can learn a few lessons from Fichte. First of all, the distinction between coercive and non-coercive nationalism is a useful one and not employed in the literature. It is useful because liberalism and nationalism are

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difficult to combine in one package—the individual freedom and limited government as hallmarks of the liberal tradition do not mesh well with nationalistic loyalty. Yet for Fichte, part of the path to that loyalty lies in education, not in coercion. In the case of coercive nationalism, this coercion is justified as a means to prevent greater, unjust coercion in the future—in the form of liberal empires that will develop unless they are hemmed in by their own nationalistic self-sufficiency. Second, liberal nationalists could attend more to the tendency of liberalism toward empire. One of the main worries about nationalism in recent years has been its tendency toward illiberalism against its own members—foisting a national identity on those who do not adhere to it. Liberal nationalists have done a nice job in responding to this charge by allying nationalism with multiculturalism.69 However, they tend to overlook the worry about illiberalism toward other nations—the tendency in liberalism to expand its power militarily, economically, and culturally over the entire earth. Indeed, nationalism may exacerbate this tendency in liberalism by giving members a greater motivation to share their liberalism with the world. Fichte’s theory of nationalism addresses this worry directly, seeing in national self-sufficiency the correction against empire. At the same time, Fichte argues, with contemporary liberal nationalists, that nationalism serves an important role in motivating support for universal welfare among citizens. Finally, for Fichte, the project of nationalism survives because it is built on the foundation of a vision of the good life: our human vocation to freedom. It is this cosmopolitan moral outlook that ensures the self-limitation on the part of nations and that elevates the character of the citizenry. Contemporary liberal nationalists tend to bracket the question of the good life and, thereby, avoid the concerns about modern selfishness and the need for moral development. Without anchoring nationalism on this vision of the good, Fichte would worry, it could end up betraying the moral ideals it was created for. Contemporary liberal nationalists, in other words, build national loyalty on shaky foundations. Fichte provides a model of a more secure liberal nationalism.

Abbreviations AGN CCS CPA FNR GA LVS

Addresses to the German Nation, in Fichte 2008 The Closed Commercial State, in Fichte 2012 Characteristics of the Present Age, in Fichte 1977 Foundations of Natural Right, in Fichte 2000 Gesamtausgabe Lectures on the Vocation of the Scholar, in Fichte 1988

Notes 1 Barry 1999, Abizadeh 2004 2 Miller 1995, Tamir 1993

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3 Pitts 2005, Morefield 2005 4 Tamir (1993) works from within a Rawlsian framework, and so like Rawls is primarily concerned with the right over the good. Rawls’ argument is that we can bracket questions about the good life because the different worldviews in a liberal society can affirm the principles of justice as part of an overlapping consensus, so that the principles of justice fit like a “module” into each worldview. Presumably, then, a Rawlsian could hold that the nation could be affirmed by different worldviews through a similar overlapping consensus. However, the idea of the nation is not “freestanding” in the same way that the principles of liberal justice are. Moreover, it is not clear that the many worldviews in a liberal regime today, especially the U.S., would in fact affirm nationalism as a guiding principle. As such, it is crucial to investigate liberal perfectionist resources for nationalism. 5 Miller (1995) argues that national identity satisfies a deep need for belonging. However, there are many communities and hence sources of belonging in a liberal regime. What the liberal nationalist needs is an account of why nationalism in particular satisfies our fundamental needs. Fichte, I suggest, provides such an account. 6 For an exception, however, see Abizadeh 2005. 7 On CCS, see especially Nakhimovsky 2011. On AGN, see Velkley (forthcoming) and the essays collected in Breazeale and Rockmore 2016. 8 Rousseau 2012, 116 9 CPA 7 10 On the distinction between formal and material freedom, see Neuhouser 1990, Kosch 2018, Wood 2016. 11 CPA 8 12 CPA 9 13 On Fichte’s departure from Kantian faculty psychology, see Breazeale 2013. 14 FNR 103 15 FNR 88 16 FNR 109 17 CCS 92 18 FNR 110 19 CCS 85 20 CCS 145 21 GA I/1.320 22 CCS 145 23 AGN 13 24 AGN 16 25 AGN 14 26 AGN 15 27 CCS 130 28 AGN 15 29 CCS 139 30 CCS 140 31 CCS 141 32 CCS 146. For more on Fichte’s economic theory, see Nakhimovsky 2011. 33 Nakhimovsky 2011 34 CCS 141 35 CCS 199 36 FNR 152f 37 FNR 179 38 FNR 181 39 FNR 181 40 FNR 177n 41 In book 3 of CCS, Fichte offers several fanciful suggestions on how to transition from free trade to economic nationalism, including the introduction of a national currency

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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 67 68 69

and the attempt on the part of each nation to provide the luxuries its citizens are dependent upon from other nations. See Fichte’s (2001) review of Kant’s Perpetual Peace. CCS 130 CCS 93 CCS 93 CCS 130 CCS 93 see, e.g. FNR 3 CCS 104 LSV 149 LSV 149 LSV 149 LSV 156 LSV 157 AGN 16–17 AGN 19 AGN 19 AGN 20 AGN 171–172 AGN 175 AGN 194 Contra Abizadeh 2005. AGN 105 AGN 105–106 AGN 132 AGN 137 AGN 136 AGN 193 e.g. Kymlicka 2001

Works Cited Abizadeh, Arash. 2004. Historical Truth, National Myths, and Liberal Democracy: On the Coherence of Liberal Nationalism. Journal of Political Philosophy. Vol. 12, No. 3, 291–313. Abizadeh, Arash. 2005. Was Fichte an Ethnic Nationalist? On Cultural Nationalism and Its Double. History of Political Thought. Vol. 26, No. 2, 334–359. Barry, Brian. 1999. Statism and Nationalism: A Cosmopolitan Critique. Nomos. Vol. 41, 12–66. Breazeale, Daniel. 2013. Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte’s Early Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Breazeale, Daniel and Tom Rockmore, eds. 2016. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation Reconsidered. SUNY Press. Fichte, J.G. 1977. Characteristics of the Present Age. Trans. Daniel Robinson. University Publications of America. Fichte, J.G. 1988. Early Philosophical Writings. Trans. Daniel Breazeale. Cornell University Press. Fichte, J.G. 2000. Foundations of Natural Right. Trans. Michael Baur. Cambridge University Press. Fichte, J.G. 2001. Review of Kant’s Perpetual Peace. Trans. Daniel Breazeale. The Philosophical Forum. Vol. 32, No. 4, 311–321.

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Fichte, J.G. 2008. Addresses to the German Nation. Trans. Gregory Moore. Cambridge University Press. Fichte, J.G. 2012. The Closed Commercial State. Trans. Anthony Curtis Adler. SUNY Press. Kosch, Michelle. 2018. Fichte’s Ethics. Oxford University Press. Kymlicka, Will. 2001. Politics in the Vernacular: Nationalism, Multiculturalism, and Citizenship. Oxford University Press. Miller, David. 1995. On Nationality. Clarendon Press. Morefield, Jeanne. 2005. Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire. Princeton University Press. Nakhimovsky, Isaac. 2011. The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from Rousseau to Fichte. Princeton University Press. Neuhouser, Frederick. 1990. Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity. Cambridge University Press. Pitts, Jennifer. 2005. A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France. Princeton University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2012. The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. John T. Scott. University of Chicago Press. Tamir, Yael. 1993. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton University Press. Velkley, Richard. Forthcoming. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation. Kant on Progress. Wood, Allen. 2016. Fichte’s Ethical Thought. Oxford University Press.

6 CREATING SOVEREIGNTY Religious authority, the social contract and the need for political friendship Karen Taliaferro

Introduction In a letter to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius Augustus dated 494 AD, Pope Gelasius articulated what has come to be known as the “two swords” doctrine, or the notion that sacred authority (auctoritas sacrata) and political powers (regalis potestas) are distinct—and that the sacred one is “more weighty.”1 Today, while religion in the West has retained soft power, it no longer holds a “sword,” or auctoritas, at least not formally; the dual system of authority that Gelasius described is, today, replaced by a unified, secular state sovereignty.2 This historical shift in the loci of authority has had incalculable effects on Western politics and life, though many such effects are already appreciated. One of its lesser-acknowledged effects is the focus of this chapter. I argue that in removing religious authority, the social contract rendered all things political, forcing all human affairs to align along what I term below the “horizontal axis” of political authority, often to the detriment of its citizens. This has led to polarization and animosity among modern democrats, leaving us with few resources with which to uphold the common good. Few resources, that is, except political and civic friendship. My argument runs as follows: authority in the West, at least since the conversion of Constantine, historically occurred along two axes, a vertical one between humans and God—religious authority—and a horizontal one among people (including between rulers and other people)—political authority. It is commonly known that social contract traditions largely eliminated the vertical axis of religious authority from political and social life. What is typically ignored, however, is that this removal of religious authority also radically altered the nature of the political authority it left behind, transforming it in both number and nature. Previously, political authority was one of two authorities vying for power; after the social contract, political authority became a solitary state sovereignty.

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The unity of this sovereign, however, is somewhat chimerical, for it sits atop a society of purportedly equal citizens who hold fractured opinions, interests, and ideas of the good, escalating stakes in politics and fuelling polarization. Religious authority, for better or for worse, served to bind society together in a manner that politics is ill equipped to do. With the removal of formal religious authority, politics became the only ultimate authority—and, therefore, the sovereign one—left standing in the modern state. The effects of this transformation of authorities into a single sovereign are perhaps only being felt to their full extent today, when everything from public health to pop culture to sports figures is divided along political lines. More and more, it is apparent that Western societies need something else to join together what the social contract, in contorting all of human life into a political beast, has rent asunder. Still, it is clear that there is no turning back; both the achievements of the social contract and liberalism, as well as the epistemic commitments of modern man, make it impossible and perhaps undesirable to reinsert formal religious authority into contemporary Western societies. I, therefore, turn not to calls for a renewed integralist society but to an ancient ideal of political friendship, as mediated to modernity through Alexis de Tocqueville, to help restore the strained social fabric of Western modernity.

From two swords to the social contract In suggesting that the West’s history is one of two authorities, I should stress that these “two swords” historically mixed and overlapped in jurisdiction. It is clear, for instance, that the Church had authority over matters otherwise considered to be civil, such as family law, and it certainly had a strong economic and landed interest in the political sphere. Likewise, kings were crowned by bishops, revealing a form of authority that derived ultimately from God. Even with these fuzzy lines, though, the sovereignty of the Church was clearly independent, not derivative; while the emperor might have disagreed with the Pope that the latter’s power was “more weighty,” he would not have denied that the pope held real authority over the people. Likewise, though the king was said to rule by God’s right, he did not need to consult a bishop for every royal decree. What, then, changed—and why? Without intending a monocausal theory of church–state history, the impact of the Reformation is difficult to overstate. At the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, 13 years after Luther’s 95 theses sparked the Protestant Reformation, the Reformers presented Emperor Charles V with their statement of faith, known as the Augsburg Confession. A casual read of the Confession seems to reiterate unambiguously the principle of two swords; Article 28 declares that “since the power of the Church grants eternal things, and is exercised only by the ministry of the Word, it does not interfere with civil government; no more than the art of singing interferes with civil government.”3 Likewise, “If bishops have any power of the sword, that power they have, not as bishops, by

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the commission of the Gospel, but by human law having received it of kings and emperors for the civil administration of what is theirs. This, however, is another office than the ministry of the Gospel.”4 Again, these statements do affirm the notion that there are “two swords” that rule this world. Still, it is noteworthy that the Reformers, in fact, drew a stricter separation than did Pope Gelasius. As suggested above, the Church, while keeping its “sword” distinct from that of the emperor, could not have been said to have had no inherent authority in civil matters. For instance, in regulating marriage—a power granted to it not by virtue of “having received it of kings and emperors” but by virtue of marriage’s status as a sacrament—the Church effectively regulated rulers’ lines of succession throughout Christendom, not to mention forced the breakup of tribes by forbidding consanguinity.5 The Church also possessed its own fighting men—the Knights Templar being among the more famous—whose rights to participate in war were chartered by the Church itself. So, this was a Church that could hardly be said not to “interfere with civil government.” The Augsburg Confession, then, while affirming the two-swords doctrine, also made clear that those jurisdictions would henceforth overlap less in authority than they had prior to the Reformation. In short, the Reformation not only split the institution that held religious authority, but it also put into motion the events that would complete the split between religious and political authorities. The century following the Diet of Augsburg would make that split manifest. By the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, negotiated to end the European wars of religion, dual authority still existed, but it required consolidation: “Cuius regio, euius religio”—the prince’s religion would be the religion of the state; God’s authority would overlap with the political authority of the new political creation, the state. This marks a critical juncture in the story of the two axes of authority. One must ask whether the very messiness of the less clearly delineated “two swords” system somehow, perhaps paradoxically, in fact better preserved the distinction. For in moving the two swords away from each other, they logically came to compete directly, rather than co-exist as they had, however uneasily. If a house divided cannot stand, then erecting the protoJeffersonian “wall of separation” between sacred and political powers, as the Augsburg Confession asserts, may have ensured that one power alone could remain standing. Again, I do not mean to advance a theory of history in which the Reformation caused all things; this same story could be told through a number of lenses that would take more serious stock of the burgeoning Renaissance, the inf luence of the spread of Islam (and the Ottoman Empire), the importance of the printing press, etc. What is important for present purposes is that for whatever combination of reasons, the clear demarcation between, as well as affirmation of, the “two swords”—what I am terming the “two axes of authority”—reached a tipping point at Westphalia.

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Consolidating and pluralizing: The innovation of the social contract The death knell to the vertical axis of religious authority, however, was not Westphalia but the social contract. Through the social contract, political authority came no longer to lie with the prince but with the people’s will; the people became sovereignty itself. But the many people, unlike the singular prince, have many consciences, many systems of belief, even many religions, so the religious axis of authority must be laid aside—even if only in order to pluralize it—and the unitary political axis granted pride of place.6 The break from the Westphalian religious settlement (viz., cuius regio, eius religio) that the social contract traditions represent was far more radical than many realize. For if state sovereignty was conceived at Westphalia as a coincidence of the political and religious axes of authority, simply removing the vertical, religious axis—an act implied by the social contract, which vests authority in the horizontal, political relationships among citizens and disregards the vertical, religious one—changed the nature of the state itself. It is the religious element that gives a universal and transcendent dimension to the particularized and immanent political axis of authority. Without the religious axis, it becomes unclear to citizens why, beyond self-preservation, expediency or the will of the majority, political authority ought to be respected, for there is no ultimate moral weight behind it.7 In other words, the social contract ensconces the will of the implicated human beings; it decidedly does not grant equal (or usually any) independent authority to a vertical axis. That is, the social contract exists among the people to form and legitimize the horizontal axis of political authority; it contains no substitute for the will, commandments or revelation of God that would have provided the moral heft to the subjects of the Holy Roman Empire nor even to the parties at Westphalia. In doing so, it not only removes one axis of authority (the religious one), but it also transforms the remaining vertical, human, political axis from one of authority to one of sovereignty, as we see below.

Which social contract? Not every social contract theory is created equally; among the three principal social contract pioneers—Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau—differences are both significant and salient to my argument. With varied reasons and apparent motives, both Hobbes and Rousseau make the move I am describing; that is, they unequivocally place the origin of sovereignty in the people and deny the existence or validity of a vertical axis of authority. For Hobbes, the “command of the commonwealth,” which is mediated through the sovereign, is and must be taken to be “the will of God”; in fact, “all subjects are bound to obey that for divine law which is declared to be so by the laws of the commonwealth.”8 The sovereign also ordains and prescribes the mode for public worship (which,

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for Hobbes, must be uniform in form and content).9 Even in the oft-neglected Part III of Leviathan, “Of a Christian Commonwealth,” Hobbes concludes that “there is on earth no such universal Church as all Christians are bound to obey”; rather, each individual Christian is and must be “subject to that commonwealth whereof he is himself a member, and consequently cannot be subject to the commands of any other person.”10 For Hobbes, there is decidedly but one sword. I treat Locke below, for he may diverge from my narrative. Rousseau, though, follows Hobbes in the sense that he was wholly uninterested in pretending that the vertical axis of authority had any role in the commonwealth. To Rousseau, it was vital that the general will, the exercise of which is the same thing as sovereignty, be indivisible; it must ref lect the will of the people and nothing more.11 His chapter in Of the Social Contract on civil religion makes explicit Rousseau’s judgement of the two powers: “this dual power has resulted in a perpetual conf lict of jurisdiction which has made any good polity impossible in Christian States, and no one has ever succeeded in settling the question of which of the two, the master or the priest, one is obliged to obey.”12 All questions that would, in such a system, have been decided by the vertical axis of authority must now be remanded to the priests of a purely immanent, civil religion: “There is therefore a purely civil profession of faith the articles of which it is up to the Sovereign to fix … without which it is impossible to be either a good Citizen or a loyal subject.”13 The same processes that determine civil laws must now also determine civil religion. While areas of concern might vary—property rights, say, from codes of morality—the authority comes from the same, immanent force along the horizontal axis of sovereignty. Despite their radically different roles for established religion, then, both Hobbes and Rousseau agree that whatever institutionalized religious authority can or cannot do—its legitimacy obtained exclusively through the social contract—it is derivative of human authority. In a real way, this reiterates the Reformers’ point in the Augsburg Confessions quoted above: “If bishops have any power of the sword, that power they have, not as bishops, by the commission of the Gospel, but by human law”; the only difference is that that human law no longer proceeds from “kings and emperors” but from the will of the people. At the risk of belabouring the point, this is a radical departure from the position of Gelasius, for whom divine authority exists regardless of whether humans so agree. Does Locke also eliminate the vertical axis of authority? Chapter VIII of the Second Treatise on Government declares quite plainly that a political society, which is founded on nothing but “the consent of every individual,” has “Power to Act … only by the will and determination of the majority.”14 Without rehearsing here Locke’s well-known arguments, it is nevertheless worth stressing that in Locke’s political society, “every Man … puts himself under an Obligation to every one of that Society, to submit to the determination of the majority, and to be concluded by it; or else this original Compact … would signifie nothing.”15 In this sense,

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Locke is the classic social contractarian, and the vertical axis of authority has disappeared from view. Locke’s Christianity, however, as well as his copious use of scriptural justifications throughout his political writings, may complicate matters. To Greg Forster, Locke’s social compact16 theory (and, indeed, his larger corpus) presents “an ecumenical religious philosophy of liberalism,” that is, an approach to politics built on “the premise that the political freedom and equality of mankind is divinely ordained—that it is the will of a divine power that all human beings be treated politically as free and equal.”17 This is an intriguing prospect: political authority is, indeed, the sole recognizable sovereignty for human affairs—for Forster’s Locke, there is no room for coercion in religious matters, so the vertical axis of authority does disappear—but this is only the case because an ecumenical God has so willed. To Locke, this latter premise is wholly rational, perhaps even the political-rational premise par excellence. But all of this, as Forster rightly notes, relies on acceptance of Locke’s fundamental epistemology (as outlined most notably in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding), the relevant portions of which Forster summarizes as follows: [Locke’s] bedrock premise is that a divine power exists in the universe … [and] that this divine power has a will regarding our actions, that it has communicated this will to use through some means, and that it enforces its will with rewards and punishments after death.18 These are themselves rational premises that are, in Forster’s view, acceptable to human beings as such, for “these premises are common not only to every religious group in Locke’s England, but to virtually all religious groups everywhere”—at least through natural law, if not revelation itself.19 Therefore, while it is clear that, for Locke, all political authority derives from the people, it is less clear—and rather controversial—whether that authority can be considered legitimate if the vertical axis of authority is removed. In other words, absent God (and perhaps specifically the Christian God), does Locke’s theory still work? Forster’s interpretation makes the strongest plausible case I know of that Locke’s political theory gets around the problem I outline in this chapter, namely, that the social contract tradition collapses the vertical axis of religious authority and the horizontal axis of political authority into a unified sovereignty that wrongly renders political that which is meant to be beyond, or even prior to, politics. Forster’s Lockean solution is to preserve the vertical axis in and through the horizontal axis; God retains His sovereignty through the people’s will. Still, it is difficult to see that Locke’s social contract does achieve this. Locke’s theory, in grounding authority in the people while attempting to retain divine authority, must do one of two things. First, it might simply succumb to the problem I have outlined, viz., channelling all religious authority through the political

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authority of the people, which denies religion the authority it claims for itself.20 Alternatively, it might retain divine authority, as Forster claims. But if it does manage to do so, then there remains the problem of the divisiveness of religion, for to leave the vertical axis of religious sovereignty requires that, at some point, that particular religion be named. This would have been less of a problem in Locke’s day; even the bloody history of European Catholicism and Protestantism revolved around differing interpretations of the same revelation. But Locke did not yet know of today’s religious pluralism, combined with today’s globalization and digital communication, all of which serve to bring together a cacophony of religious voices, beliefs and practices. Nor could rationality serve as a unifying substitute. Forster’s Locke assumes that his rationality is universal (see Forster p. 33), and that may, indeed, be true in an ontological sense (i.e., there exists, ontologically speaking, a universal epistemology). But politically speaking, this is untenable; views on the compatibility of revelation and reason are as varied as religions themselves, and to base the social contract on Lockean epistemology, which posits a natural law accessible to all people and acceptable to all religions, is by no means self-evidently feasible.

The social contract and the democratic age There is evidence that early Americans understood the social contract in the way I am describing, i.e., in which the horizontal axis of human authority substitutes for the God-man vertical axis of authority. In his 1645 “Little Speech on Liberty,” Massachusetts colony Governor John Winthrop explicitly linked what he termed “civil or federal” liberty21—which characterizes the horizontal axis—with “moral” liberty, or that which subsists in the “covenant between God and man”—the vertical axis. That is, there is but one kind of freedom “in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves”; this moral-civic/federal liberty is the “same kind of liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.”22 In other words, this society, formed to an extent beyond any other in history on the idea of a social compact or covenant, collapsed the vertical and horizontal axes of authority into one. Though it would be foolish to dispute the strongly religious character of this authority, what is important is that there was no longer any hint of a two-swords notion of dual authority. While secularization was surely far from Winthrop’s mind, it is, nevertheless, easy to see how that singular bond, a horizontal one among men based on the vertical one found in the Bible, could, by virtue of the nature of the social contract, eventually morph into a merely horizonal one, for the will of the people is manifest by a vote, whereas the will of God is often inscrutable. Similarly, while the founders of the United States would later invoke “nature’s God” to justify the colonies’ initial break with Great Britain, the Constitution would lack any further reference to transcendent sources of obligation or authority.23

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Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America makes my point clearer: in recounting what he calls the “ridiculous and tyrannical laws” of Puritan morality, which did everything from banning tobacco to threatening death to anyone caught practicing a religion other than Puritanism, Tocqueville stresses that these laws “were not imposed from outside—they were voted by the free agreement of all the interested parties themselves.”24 Puritan New England, which considered itself a City on a Hill, a people belonging to God, nevertheless relied on its social compact made among humans to acknowledge the authority of God. The upshot of all of this is that structurally, a social contract tradition simply cannot maintain the transcendent element of religious authority in the polity in the same way as a society with “two swords”; indeed, one might even speculate that it was precisely for this reason that the Puritans’ laws enforcing Christianity had to be so harsh. In this sense, secularism is something of a by-product of democracy. Lest my argument be mistaken, it is by no means clear that the dual-axis, dual-authority scenario is better than the solitary, horizontal, political sovereignty. It certainly was not to Tocqueville, who saw the formal alignment of state and church as disastrous for the church as well as politically foolish.25 But it is crucial to notice that, with the dominance of the social contract traditions in the West, a vital social function previously provided by religion was displaced. This is evident in the oft-lamented rancour of contemporary Western politics, which are showing the durability of religious fervour even though they long ago renounced the vertical axis of meaningful religious authority. Rising nationalism on the right, for instance, may be a response to the hollowing of religious sovereignty, a doubling-down on political borders and authority but with the infusion of religious fervour. The inverse could be said of the contemporary left. Progressive citizens, in calling for “global community” and “social justice” seek to transcend political authority with a vertically oriented moral authority. In both cases, however, citizens are attempting to recover the dual nature of authority by infusing the political realm with quasi-religious sentiment, whether nationalism on the right or progressivism on the left.26 Neither substitute seems likely to succeed if Tocqueville’s analysis of religion and democracy is correct. Both nationalism and social justice are ultimately political concepts, horizontally oriented tools that cannot supply the vertical orientation that human life needs. In Pierre Manent’s words, democratic men need “knowledge or opinion of the Whole that includes them and lies beyond”—something that makes democratic man look upward and not only across. Alas, “the immense majority of men cannot form such an opinion out of the resources of their own reason,” so democratic man must “receive it on the basis of authority, as a religious dogma.” 27 Still, Tocqueville understood that modern democracy, f lowing from consent of the people, could not enforce official religions. What, then, can orient democratic man to that which “lies beyond” himself ?

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Political friendship The Tocquevillean response to this may be a form of the ancient ideal of political friendship; a pagan ideal, some might say, for a neo-pagan world. Aristotle featured friendship prominently in both his Nicomachean Ethics and Politics, and his teacher Plato placed the action of politics not principally in deliberative assemblies but in the face-to-face conversations between Socrates and his pupils. Tocqueville’s version of civic and political friendship is uniquely suited to provide a lifeline to the modern democrat. Volume II Part 2 of Democracy in America addresses, in part, the inherent link between democracy and individualism as contrasted with the durability of fixed roles in an aristocratic age. While “people living in an aristocratic age are almost always closely involved with something outside themselves,” in a democratic age, because everybody is free and at least ostensibly equal, there are no fixed positions from which citizens can be said to be linked to anyone or, indeed, anything else. Each one is a wanderer, totally free and both unencumbered by and unable to benefit from the stability of the aristocratic world that came before him. “All a man’s interests,” in a democratic age, are, therefore, “limited to those near himself.”28 Democratic men, Tocqueville writes—the sovereigns of their social contract societies—“owe no man anything and hardly expect anything from anybody. They form the habit of thinking of themselves in isolation and imagine that their whole destiny is in their hands.”29 This is a recipe for the self-destruction of democracy and self-government, and some see such decadence in contemporary America. Many blame the decline of religion for turning citizens in on themselves; this chapter has, in part, joined that chorus by pointing out that, when the vertical axis of religious authority is removed, all matters become political matters, and democratic politics, unbounded by fixed roles or stable duties owed to one’s fellow citizen, become toxic. Yet, even as Tocqueville agreed that religion was essential for democracy, it was not only to religion but to associations that he turned to ward off the potential maladies of individualism. These associations were variegated; they were not only political but “a thousand different types—religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute.”30 What they did have in common was that they were initiated by the citizens themselves—cooperative institutions that both required and fostered “habits of acting together in the affairs of daily life.” These associations accomplished a “vast multitude” of the mundane activities of democratic life; without them, according to Tocqueville, democratic “civilization itself would be in peril.”31 Why were these associations so effective at keeping American democracy af loat, especially given the rather bleak picture Tocqueville had just painted in his earlier comments on individualism’s inevitable place in democracy? Because, in some of the book’s most famous words, “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”32 Political and civic friendship, in other words, both make possible and are the fruit of voluntary associations in a democracy. They are what step in for the

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transcendence of religion when religious authority has vanished from society, as it did through the social contract, for they provide the means by which man is drawn out of himself to see beyond his own interests—a role previously assigned to the divine. Without such friendships and the associations that f low from and support them, “the tasks of government must … perpetually increase”—politics must take over everything—and democracies “would soon fall back into barbarism.”33 This is because, to Tocqueville, democratic man is weak and isolated; he can only attain what he needs in life either through combining with others through civic and political friendship or else turn to an ever more powerful state.34

Conclusion I am writing this chapter in the wake of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, an election often attributed in news commentary with deciding the fate of the republic—and this just four years after the “Flight 93 Election” of 2016.35 The unprecedented power of the modern state and consequent unfathomably high stakes of politics has come about in part as an unintended consequence of the social contract: in removing the vertical axis of religious sovereignty and placing all authority in the hands of the people, the social contract forever changed the horizontal axis of political sovereignty. Politics must now take on the “more weighty” tasks of human life, forcing all issues to align along its singular cleavage. In such democratic societies, in which citizens are not tethered to each other but are endlessly free, purportedly equal and essentially alienated, only the political and civic friendship that draws people out of themselves to cooperate with and, one hopes, truly to know and appreciate, if not love, their neighbours, can at once counter and support our strained politics and social life.

Notes 1 The pertinent text reads, “There are two [powers], august Emperor, by which this world is chief ly ruled, namely, the sacred authority (auctoritas sacrata) of the priests and the royal power (regalis potestas). Of these, that of the priests is weightier, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment. You are also aware, most clement son, that while you are permitted honorably to rule over human kind, yet in divine matters you bend your neck devotedly to the bishops and await from them the means of your salvation.” Letter of Pope Gelasius I to Anastasius Augustus (494), Trans. John S. Ott, Portland State University, from Andreas Thiel, ed., Epistolae Romanorum pontificum genuinae et quae ad eos scriptae sunt a S. Hilaro usque ad Pelagium II., vol. 1 (Brunsberg: Eduard Peter, 1867), Letter no. 12, pp. 349–58. http://www.web.pdx.edu/~ott/Gelasius/. 2 To be clear, this does not mean that societies themselves are necessarily secular, though that has also become a nearly uniform trend in the West, especially given the rise of the “nones,” or non-religiously affiliated citizens, in America. Rather, the state structure itself, even when formally affiliated with a church (as in the United Kingdom and several Scandinavian countries), functions according to a secular logic. 3 “Itaque cum potestas ecclesiastica concedat res aeternas et tantum exerceatur per ministerium verbi, non impedit politicam administrationem, sicut ars canendi nihil impedit politicam

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administrationem.” I use the translation in the Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the English version of which is found at https://ww w.bookofconcord.org/pdf/TrigBOC.pdf The Latin text is from the parallel LatinGerman version of the Augsburg Confession at http://www.irt-ggmbh.de/downlo ads/calatdt.pdf. “Si quam habent episcopi potestatem gladii, hanc non habent episcopi mandato evangelii, sed iure humano, donatam a regibus et imperatoribus ad administrationem civilem suorum bonorum. Haec interim alia functio est quam ministerium evangelii”; this is also from Article XXVIII. This latter point concerning tribal disintegration is not my own but Joseph Henrich’s, as told by Judith Shulevitz in her review of Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). See Shulevitz, “A New Theory of Western Civilization,” The Atlantic, October 2020 issue, pp. 92–5. I should note that my argument concerns only the West. While I cannot speak intelligently on most of the world, I can say that the social contract tradition has also made inroads in Islamic societies across the globe; it has done so, however, in such a way that the vertical axis has not been shattered in the way it was in the West. But that discussion is for another time. This statement needs some defence. The social contract surely imports a fair amount of moral substance; in placing the individual at its heart, it assumes a moral judgement about the dignity of the individual person over and above that of tribes or other groups or affiliations. This is but one example of the social contract’s implicit morality; there are many more. What I mean by stating that there is “no moral weight” behind the social contract, however, is the following: The social contract ultimately binds human wills together; it does not claim any greater-than-human authority. Even if it vests authority in something higher than humans (e.g., scripture, God’s will), it does so on the consent of humans. A possible rejoinder to this is that reason itself is the transcendent element of the social contract tradition. There is certainly some truth to this, but that reason is instrumental rather than a ref lection of something divine or transcendent. The Hobbesian social contract, for instance, is a ref lection only of fear and might; reason is largely absent except in its instrumental form. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed., Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 188 (Part II, Chapter xxvi). Id., 242 (Part II, Chapter xxxi, paragraph 37). Id., 316 (Part III, Chapter xxxix, paragraph 5). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Of the Social Contract, in Victor Gourevitch, ed., The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For the relationship between sovereignty and general will, see Book II, Chapter 1 (p. 57): “I say, then, that sovereignty, since it is nothing but the exercise of the general will…”; on its indivisibility and ref lection of the will of the people, see Book II, Chapter 2 (p. 58). Id., 145 (Book IV, Chapter 8). Id., 150. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 331–2. Id., 332, emphases original. In conversation, Forster pointed out that “compact” and “contract” are not synonymous terms for Locke, nor, of course, in common usage—a contract can be dissolved at will, but a compact relies on the authorization of something beyond the parties to (what would otherwise be) a contract. Greg Forster, John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27. Forster, Moral Consensus, 31.

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19 Forster, Moral Consensus, 31. Forster notes Locke’s heavy reliance on natural law, but he does acknowledge the vital importance, for Locke, of backing that natural law with revelation: “without revelation cannot know that this ‘natural law’ is in fact a law—that is, an obligatory rule laid down by an authoritative lawgiver” (p. 29). 20 NB: Channelling religious authority through political authority is importantly distinct from channelling religious authority through human authority. Even Pope Gelasius would not have denied that human agents are necessary in organized religion; in fact, what I am calling a “vertical axis” of religious sovereignty would necessarily be mediated through a human institution (whether a pope, ecumenical council, board of presbyters, etc.). 21 Civil/federal liberty is understood as distinguished against “natural liberty,” i.e., that which is “common to man with beasts and other creatures.” 22 Emphasis added. The full quotation reads: “The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions amongst men themselves.” John Winthrop, “Little Speech on Liberty,” in Bruce Frohnen, American Republic: Primary Sources (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 35. 23 This is importantly distinguishable from transcendent claims, such as claims about the inherent equality and rights of every man. To make a claim of transcendent truth, that is, is not the same thing as naming the source of its transcendence, as would previous religiously grounded states have done. 24 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by J.P. Mayer, trans. by George Lawrence (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), 43. 25 See Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, Vol. I, Part II, Chapter 9, p. 294ff. Tocqueville wrote that religion gave man room for his imagination and hopes to “satisfy his heart”; to “rely on the artificial strength of laws and the support of the material powers that direct society” is a devil’s bargain, for it means that religion will be “burdened with some of the animosity roused against them [i.e., the rulers]” (296–7). Nor did such a move, which “sacrifices the future for the present” vis-à-vis religion, aid “political powers … [which] have no other guarantee of their permanence beyond the opinions of a generation” (297). In other words, religion can only succeed if it relies on “the sentiments which are the consolation of every aff liction,” and the state cannot by attaching itself to religion, win for itself the permanence that faith seems to promise. 26 I am hardly the first to observe that in recent decades, political causes, from racial equality to climate change to globalization, have taken on religious undertones. Racially based chattel slavery is referred to as America’s “original sin” of which Americans must “repent,” climate change has been termed a “sin of omission,” and political progressives increasingly advocate their causes with religious fervour, sometimes even borrowing ritual and even antiphonic chants. (See, e.g., Annette Gordon-Reed’s Foreign Affairs essay of early 2018, “America’s Original Sin,” https://www.foreignaffair s.com/articles/united-states/2017-12-12/americas-original-sin. See also John Ashton, “Climate Change: Our Sin of Omission,” https://www.theguardian.com/comment isfree/2013/mar/19/climate-change-sin-of-omission, 3/19/2013; See, e.g., Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The Church of Grievance,” https://www.nationalreview.com /magazine/2018/05/14/victim-mentality-identity-politics-dominate-modern-left/, 4/26/2018; and Joshua Mitchell, “Dead Conservative Memes Can’t Defeat the Identity Politics Clerisy,” https://americanmind.org/essays/dead-conservative-memes-cant -defeat-the-identity-politics-clerisy/, 6/6/2019), in which Mitchell writes, “America has not lost its religion. America has relocated its religion to the realm of politics.” 27 Manent, Nature of Democracy, 86–7. 28 Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 507. 29 Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 508. 30 Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 513.

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Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 513–4. Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 515. Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 515. Tocqueville and Mayer, Democracy in America, 514–5. See Michael Anton, “The Flight 93 Election,” Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2016. https://claremontreviewof books.com/digital/the-f light-93-election/

References Anton, Michael. “The Flight 93 Election.” Claremont Review of Books, Sept 5, 2016. https ://claremontreviewof books.com/digital/the-f light-93-election/. Ashton, John. “Climate Change: Our Sin of Omission,” The Guardian, March 19, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/19/climate-change-sin-of -omission. Confessio Augustana Das Augsburgische Bekenntnis (1530) Lateinischer Text: Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (1930). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, S. 52–135. http://www.irt-ggmbh.de/downloads/calatdt.pdf. Dougherty, Michael Brendan. “The Church of Grievance,” National Review, May 14, 2018. https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/05/14/victim-mentality-id entity-politics-dominate-modern-left/. Forster, Greg. John Locke’s Politics of Moral Consensus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Gelasius. Letter of Pope Gelasius I to Anastasius Augustus. Translated by John S. Ott. http:// www.web.pdx.edu/~ott/Gelasius/. Gordon-Reed, Annette. “America’s Original Sin.” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2018. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-12-12/americas-o riginal-sin. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Translated by John Waggoner. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996. Mitchell, Joshua. “Dead Conservative Memes Can’t Defeat the Identity Politics Clerisy.” American Mind, Jun 6, 2019. https://americanmind.org/essays/dead-conservativememes-cant-defeat-the-identity-politics-clerisy/. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Other Later Political Writings.” In Of the Social Contract, edited by Victor Gourevitch, 39–152. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Shulevitz, Judith. “A New Theory of Western Civilization.” Review of Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous. Atlantic, October 2020, pp. 92–95. de Tocqueville, Alexis. Democracy in America. Edited by J.P. Mayer. Translated by George Lawrence. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Evangelical Lutheran Synod, 1917. https://www.bookofconcord.org/pdf/TrigBOC.pdf Winthrop, John. “Little Speech on Liberty.” In American Republic: Primary Sources, edited by Bruce Frohnen, 55–59. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002.

PART III

The Postmodern Challenge to Nationalism and State Sovereignty

7 NIETZSCHE AGAINST THE SOVEREIGN INDIVIDUAL IN THE SECOND ESSAY OF THE GENEALOGY Matthew D. Dinan

The Preface of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals provides the origin story for this book about origins—a genealogy of his turn to genealogy. It begins with a familiar complaint: “[w]e are unknown [unbenkannt] to ourselves, we [knowers!] [Erkennenden].”1 Nietzsche and his fellows are hardly alone in this deficiency, yet one thing that sets them apart is the self-confidence with which “Enlightened” individuals believe themselves to know: “our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are” (15, emphasis in the original). “We,” Nietzsche observes, are “honey-gatherers of the spirit” concerned with mediating experience into knowledge. We are worker bees concerned with “bringing something home” and with “producing” knowledge—presumably doing so with the same fervid intensity as a real bee scouring a summer bloom. We work away without stopping to consider what queen we serve. The comparison of the intellectuals of his day to worker bees seems less than complimentary, but, interestingly, it seems to have its origin in a thinker less known for polemics than Nietzsche: Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, he writes that “[w]hoever still finds this plan obscure … may consider that it simply is not necessary for everyone to study metaphysics,” while suggesting that anyone who intends to make metaphysical propositions must nevertheless first address his work.2 Nevertheless, people will continue to comment on philosophical matters, even, and especially, where they do not understand them, as “everybody, who with respect to all other sciences observes a wary silence, speaks masterfully, and boldly passes judgment in questions of metaphysics.”3 Kant concludes with a line from Virgil’s Georgics: “[i]gnavum, fucos, pecus a praesepibus arcent” (“They protect the hives from the drones, an idle bunch”).4 Kant seems to suggest that his own obscurity helps insulate the “hive” of knowledge against the idle drones—against those who fail to attend to metaphysical questions with due rigor and care. Nietzsche, who will similarly dwell on his own obscurity at the end of his Preface, transforms

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Kant’s busy metaphysical worker bee into something more questionable. Indeed, for Nietzsche, we now zealously work away in Kant’s preferred scientific mode without giving much thought to what we are doing. The pursuit of scientific knowledge abstracts from the meaning and purpose of the pursuit. The threat posed by the drones seems the least of our problems. Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant in his Preface becomes more explicit, as Nietzsche describes a youthful scruple—“uninvited” “irresistible,” almost like Socrates’s little voice, his daimōnion—against morality. This scruple, which Nietzsche also calls his “a priori,” inspires his “first philosophical effort,” in which he gives “honor to God” by making Him “the father of evil” (17). Nietzsche’s a priori does not precipitate another Copernican revolution in philosophy, as God remains a fixed point: God is an evil God, but God all the same. Nietzsche recognizes this problem and asks: [w]as that what my “a priori” demanded of me? That new immoral, or at least unmoralistic ‘a priori’ and the alas! so anti-Kantian, enigmatic “categorical imperative” which spoke through it and to which I have since listened more and more closely, and not merely listened? (17) But how precisely is On the Genealogy of Morals an example of Nietzsche’s “anti-Kantian, enigmatic ‘categorical imperative’”? In one way, it very obviously shows the “anti-Kantian” orientation of Nietzsche’s thought by denying the rational basis of anti-egoist morality and by casting it as an expression of the self-interest of certain factions in history. However, this chapter argues that Nietzsche’s engagement with Kant in Genealogy is deeper than the difference between a groundwork and a genealogy. Specifically, I argue that Kant’s notion of moral autonomy—what Nietzsche calls the “sovereign individual”—is the subject of the second essay’s critique. The sovereign individual is the peculiar species of self-punishment that emerges from Kantian liberalism, differing only in content from the older ideas of guilt and bad conscience that it is meant to replace. The problem with the sovereign individual is not found in the particular moral commitments that Kantian liberals prefer so much as in the categorical and imperative character of the way they impose these commitments upon themselves. Nietzsche’s aim is thus to expose and alter the modern subject’s tyrannical mode of relating the self to itself. For Nietzsche, the attempt to move beyond the modern nation state—and to think beyond sovereignty—is doomed to fail if it does not reckon with the Leviathan within, or with what we might call the logic of sovereignty. This chapter opens with a brief discussion of the centrality of rational autonomy to Kantian morality in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. It then analyzes the opening sections of the second essay, showing how Nietzsche draws our attention to the striking effects of autonomy on the subjects who abide by Kant’s moral theory. In the third section, it develops the connection between the sovereign individual of the opening sections with the story that Nietzsche tells

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about the development of political sovereignty in the body of his essay. Finally, I conclude this chapter with a brief consideration of how Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereign individual and sovereign logic complicates the idea that Kantian cosmopolitanism can offer a straightforward alternative to the moral horizon of the sovereign nationstate.

Groundwork for the genealogy of morals Scholars do not usually connect the description of the sovereign individual from the beginning of the second essay of On the Genealogy of Morals with Nietzsche’s subsequent tale about the origins of guilt and bad conscience. This is strange. According to Owen, Nietzsche’s goal in the essay is to make fewer of us “wantons” and to create “sovereign individuality” as a part of the coming of the overman.5 Glossing the idea that the sovereign individual attempts complete control over future time as “the promise-making animal,” Owen explains that Nietzsche praises the modern subject, who can claim “a degree of prudence in their commitment-making activity” (99). This improbable view is shared by prominent Nietzsche scholars such as Warren, Ansell-Pearson, White, and, surprisingly, Honig.6 On this reading, Nietzsche is friendly to liberal democracy and bullish on the Kantian substitution of the categorical imperative for the Christian notion of guilt. On such a reading, the “anti-Kantian categorical imperative” from the Genealogy’s preface must be ignored or forgotten; Nietzsche’s project is consequently domesticated—safe for seminars and textbooks. Following Hatab and Acampora, I think this is mistaken.7 As Hatab observes, “the sovereign individual names the modern ideal of rational autonomy, which is something Nietzsche critiques as a vestige of slave morality.”8 Indeed, both Acampora and Hatab point to the Kantian provenance of the concept of modern rational autonomy, but do not expand their arguments beyond this observation. In what follows, I make this connection and explore its implications. Before doing so, it will be useful to review the specific elements of Kant’s moral theory to which Nietzsche so strenuously objects. The third formulation of the categorical imperative in the Groundwork appears to repeat many, if not all, of the elements of the first. The “formula of universal law” is simple and forceful in its articulation of how one determines the moral duties that f low from the predicates of practical reason in Section I: “[a]ct only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”9 Whereas, in his statement of the second formula—“the formula of humanity”—Kant follows the same procedure of showing its consistency with four universal duties as he does in the first, by the time he reaches the third formula, he cuts right to the chase. The so-called “formula of autonomy” emphasizes neither the universality nor the rationality of a moral law but focusses instead on its provenance in the autonomous will: “all maxims are to be repudiated that are inconsistent with the will’s own giving of universal law. Hence the will is not merely subject to the law but subject to it in such a way

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that it must be viewed also as giving the law to itself.”10 The disinterestedness of the first version of the categorical imperative opens it to the criticism that its rationality is too abstract: why, after all, should I obey reason if it is not my own? Obedience to reason as a detached, objective principle might not differ much from an ethics of divine command, or a theory of natural law. In either such case, my subjectivity defers to a being outside of itself, which, according to Kant, it could know only phenomenally. The formula of autonomy, therefore, establishes the subjective participation of the good will in the categorical imperative to be as important as its rationality. If we want to be moral, we must live by our own lights. The promise of the categorical imperative is that it at once unleashes and tames moral self-rule; it is enlightened and intrepid, but also safe. We have a responsibility to be autonomous, and we show our autonomy by taking on responsibility. As in Kant’s formulation in the Groundwork, we show our autonomy precisely through our capacity for moral responsibility.11 Indeed, responsibility is the prestige concept in the moral and political vocabulary of modern liberal democracy. To be charged with “irresponsibility” is an accusation as serious as was vice in times past. So, when Nietzsche opens the second essay of Genealogy by inquiring about the origin of the “animal with the right to make promises,” or rather, the animal “capable of promising” (to jettison some of Kaufmann’s infelicitous translation)12 he is not only firmly in Kantian territory but also accessing a basic form of modern liberal thought.13 Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual,” who takes the place of the “animal capable of promising,” is one who has achieved self-conscious mastery over both the world and herself. She is, of course, “autonomous” and is able to set a law for herself: she is held responsible for her own word without recourse to any outside standard. She has the “privilege of responsibility, the consciousness of this rare freedom” (60). Responsibility seems to be a privilege, not a burden, because the sovereign individual is aware of her power to make and fulfill commitments. Absent natural consequences or God’s judgment, morality seems, therefore, not only possible, but liberating. The sovereign individual’s apparent autonomy is impressive; “quivering in every muscle” in delighted awareness of her self-sufficiency, she is “emancipated … the master of a free will” (59). The sovereign individual casts this free will imperially over the future with her promises, guaranteeing a specific chain of causes and effects. In making a promise, one not only limits oneself, but vouches to move heaven and earth, as it were, to make it happen—opposing “strange new things, circumstances, … acts of will” (58). If one is as good as one’s word, one’s good becomes making sure that one’s word becomes actuality. What seems like a tame self-limitation is, in fact, the guarantee of a relentless conquest, of the world and of the self, to become “calculable, regular, necessary” (58, italics in the original). So, what do we call the sovereign individual’s awareness of their superiority over those who cannot make promises? Their domination of future time—of fate? “The answer is beyond doubt: the sovereign [individual] calls it … conscience … the right to affirm oneself ” (60). For a Kantian, Nietzsche

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suggests, conscience is nothing more than self-assertion; a clean conscience is self-justified self-assertion. But Nietzsche also points out that “autonomous and moral are mutually exclusive.” Any system of morality requires submitting oneself to an outside standard. What, then, does it mean if that standard is self-fashioned or self-policed? Like the Hobbesian sovereign, the sovereign individual makes and enforces the law.14 Whereas, for Hobbes, humans create the Leviathan to enforce the terms of the social contract—the self is, here, the guarantor of morality. You must make a social contract with yourself as sovereign and subject or, as we shall see, as creditor and debtor. In a way, the Kantian gesture is already present in the natural right to enter into contracts in Hobbes’s state of nature; whatever “inconveniences” aff lict the state of nature, one can, nevertheless, calculate self-interest and assume responsibility for failing to fulfill the contract.15 Nietzsche seems to suggest that Kant’s insistence on autonomy in effect splits the self into two contracting parties. The self relates itself to itself as do the sovereign and the citizens. So, if Nietzsche identifies something inconsistently “supramoral” in Kant, it is because the self is in a constant struggle with itself.16 And, indeed, the third derivation of the categorical imperative is as much about willfulness as it is goodness or rationality. The responsible subject is thus bold in her self-limitation—as mighty and imperious as that “Mortal God” of Hobbesian theory—except now the “proud” being humbled is oneself.17 Nietzsche thereby suggests that beneath the sober demeanor of the modern, responsible subject hides a ferocious will to power. We can, thereby, see that the sovereign individual internalizes the machinery of the sovereign state. As Nietzsche observes in one of his arch and powerful parentheses, the love of cruelty he will identify in the second essay remains a barbarous atavism in modern philosophy: “(Even in good old Kant: the categorical imperative smells of cruelty)” (65). As a form of unf linching self-mastery, the categorical imperative has a whiff of something nasty because it retains both the seriousness of older systems of morality and the intensity of modern philosophy, while having the nerve to call itself autonomous and free. The categorical imperative, and the mode of moral reasoning that it represents, is, furthermore, in deep continuity with the traditional understanding of the conscience—being its “latest fruit” and not an alternative to it. When Nietzsche’s essay then pivots to explain the emergence of guilt and bad conscience, he is not describing an alternative to a salutary “sovereign individual,” he is showing us how we have become what we are and why there is work to be done, even after Kant. If Nietzsche is motivated by an anti-Kantian version of the categorical imperative, then the Nietzschean categorical imperative seems to be aimed at exposing cruelty.18

The spectacle of sovereignty The bulk of the second essay unfolds the spectacular economy of guilt and punishment that emerges from the moralization of the debtor–creditor relationship.

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Nietzsche traces the belief in an equivalence between an injury received and retributory pain from the original contractual relationship between creditor and debtor. The promise to repay was previously underwritten by the substitution of something dear for what was lost but, “above all,” that the creditor could inf lict “every sort of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor” (64). This is not arithmetical justice but the substitution of loss for pleasure. Such pleasure is psychologically complex; it is not only the pleasure that comes from the cruelty of violation but from the “psychic sensation” of experiencing the “right of the master.” What is more, in this interaction between creditor and debtor, humans begin assessing their value in relationship to one another. The business of valuing emerges in every sense from the original economic relationship. We enjoy this morbid transaction, Nietzsche avers, because human beings are the cruel animal. Thoroughly in the territory of early modern thinkers—who considered us rather more diffident than cruel—Nietzsche then provides a basically Hobbesian account of the origin of justice, describing justice as something that emerges as “good will among parties of approximately equal power to come to terms with one another, to reach an understanding by means of a settlement” (71).19 So, too, does the conjunction of the creditor–debtor relationship and the delight in cruelty generate the idea of sovereignty in the political community: “[o]ne lives in a community, one enjoys the advantages of a community … one dwells protected … from certain hostilities” (71). What happens when the pledge to obey the community is broken? “The community, the disappointed creditor, will get what repayment it can, one may depend upon that” (71). The lawbreaker, Nietzsche observes, is “above all a breaker”—the fact of the transgression matters much more than the moral offense of a given crime. The “disappointed creditor” is predictably brutal, leading “the community to throw the debtor into the savage and outlaw state against which he has heretofore been protected.” This cruelty is then celebrated in the manner of a war victory, as justice is preserved (72). Nietzsche’s celebrated ruminations on punishment similarly dwell on its arbitrary cruelty; its inability to bring about the desired pang of conscience in the criminal and its paradoxical reproductions of the same acts—deceit, violence, theft—as the tools of the good conscience (82). Because one is primarily “a breaker” it is the violation itself and not the particular nature of the acts that warrants punishment; otherwise, the magistrates would be forced to punish themselves. Nietzsche, thus, unearths the cruelty of modern institutions of justice from their inception to their present-day instantiations.20 This perverse situation came about because of the precipitous, forced, and—it must be said— partially mysterious institution of peace and political society. Nietzsche says that because humans became unable to externalize their desire for cruelty and domination they were forced to “turn inwards.” The “soul” and “subjectivity” emerge through the “internalization” of our natural instincts, which are denied outward expression. The inhibited individual still feels the old pre-political instincts for freedom and cruelty but, unable to discharge them, becomes tortured. One attempts to tame them, and, in this way, “this fool, this

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yearning and desperate prisoner became the inventor of ‘bad conscience’” (85). Unable to punish anyone else, we instead rend the self, dividing ourselves against ourselves, bringing about “man’s suffering of man, of himself ” (85).21 Bad conscience is the spectacle of cruelty turned against itself: a self-torturing misunderstanding on the part of the suffering individual. The simplicity of the human being becomes typhonic, complex. The formlessness of the human animal is made to suffer a cruelty that is almost artistic—so much so that Nietzsche’s description of the phenomenon is itself poetic: this delight in imposing a form upon oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material and in burning a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a No into it, this uncanny, dreadfully joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer out of joy in making suffer. (87) With this momentous achievement of subjectivity, the human being becomes infinitely more interesting. But because the festive, spectacular character of cruelty is now swallowed up in introspection, humanity must once again look outwards, projecting the guilty debt for existence back onto the ancestors (89), the gods, God, and eventually “the Christian God … the maximum god attained so far” (90). The Christian doctrine of redemption—in which God becomes both creditor and debtor—“afforded temporary relief for tormented humanity,” but the apprehension of God as “the ultimate antithesis of [our] own ineluctable animal instincts,” carrying with it the threat of eternal punishment and guilt, is too strong (92). Thus, through its deification of the creditor–debtor relationship, the will of humanity forces itself to “infect and poison the fundamental ground of things with the problem of punishment and guilt” (93). The emergence of subjectivity culminates in nihilism. Although Nietzsche f loats the idea that a “definitive victory of atheism” might free human beings from guilty indebtedness, instead, the relation has become moralized, which is to say, it has become transfigured into Kantian liberalism and the like. 22 Nietzsche gnomically remarks that the moralization of duty and guilt aims to “preclude, pessimistically, once and for all, the prospect of a final discharge” to aim, the concepts of guilt and duty back upon the debtor herself. This will cause it to “eat away” at individuals—“irredeemable guilt and irredeemable penance”—until the individual will be forced to reinvent something like Christian salvation. The pre-history of the sovereign individual—to tie the end of Nietzsche’s essay back to the beginning—is consequently “soaked in blood thoroughly, and for a long time” (65). If we return to the notion of the animal capable of promising, can we not see the act of making a promise is to punish oneself in advance? Nietzsche recasts the responsible subject as a being who punishes himself before he ever commits a wrong; a promise means initiating a prolonged process of self-torture. The sovereign individual becomes indebted to himself: he is a rapacious creditor. It is a sort of preliminary guilt. The “ground of existence” has, therefore, indeed, been

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spoiled with the logic of guilt and punishment. What is more, inasmuch as it indulges our desire for dominating the other and the self, we perversely enjoy this brand of suffering. Autonomous moral responsibility is self-indulgence of the desire for cruelty. The rhetorical force of Nietzsche’s essay is, therefore, such that, by its conclusion, the idea of the conscience becomes unconscionable. Nietzsche turns the conscience against itself as we are made to feel guilty over the very fact that we feel guilt. He, thus, makes us feel complicit in— or, rather, responsible for— the problems of the sovereign, responsible individual. We sovereign individuals, Nietzsche suggests, “burn a ‘No’ into ourselves” with a “secret self-ravishment.” This is not simply the province of Christian scrupulousness but an effect of the intensity of a guilt that can never experience redemption nor even more than momentary release. What if one’s desire to do good is now revealed as rooted in the desire for cruelty exercised against oneself? A conscience thus compromised becomes an unreliable guide to right and wrong—it becomes, like the natural right tradition before it: a blunt instrument. Nietzsche’s irresponsible crusade against the idea of responsibility has the very humane goal of ending our “conscience vivisection and self-torture.” How friendly the world is, he says, once we “let ourselves go” like all the other beings (95). Nietzsche’s point is not that the human desire for cruelty needs to be discharged or expressed; for better or worse, the development of subjectivity described in the second essay cannot be easily reversed or overturned. Instead, we need to let go of the desire for control and autonomy—in our institutions and in our relationships to others and ourselves—and stop viewing ourselves as sovereign. This means that Nietzsche wants to move beyond the cruelty inherent in the Kantian understanding of moral autonomy. But how?23

Against the sovereign self The end of the second essay seems, at first blush, inconclusive. If the point is that the sovereign individual must be overcome, it is uncertain what precisely might replace it.24 Understandably, Nietzsche foresees the difficulty in a campaign against both the sovereign individual and moral responsibility because such a campaign will be forced to position itself against the seeming best of us: the sovereign individuals. Moreover, such a move punctures the ethical self-understanding of most modern humans: “[w]hat gives greater offense, what separates one more fundamentally, than to reveal something of the severity and respect with which one treats oneself?” (95). Nietzsche toys with the idea of tying the bad conscience to our unnatural inclinations—to “all those aspirations to the beyond”—but is concerned we lack the strength to make this work. However, the more serious problem with this option is that a simple reversal of the movement he describes in the second essay has already been attempted in modernity’s moralizations of the problem of guilt and bad conscience, which has precipitated the nihilism he opposes. We do not want to be liberated from ourselves.

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And it is this issue of liberation that is perhaps most apposite. Each essay in Genealogy focusses on ways we have attempted to provide a foundation for morality: the good, the conscience, and traditional metaphysics. Nietzsche is at pains to show that whatever their revolutionary intent, modern philosophy, modern political theory, and modern natural science all fail to extricate themselves from traditional ways of determining these grounds. In the first essay of Genealogy, Nietzsche’s treatment of the development of the concepts of good and evil is, thereby, made to look evil, and in the third essay, the decadent, totalizing intellectual character of the ascetic ideal is juxtaposed with its apparent defence of asceticism. In the second essay, conscience is shown to have its origins in cruelty and to perpetuate the same. By questioning the certainty with which each of these foundations for morality might be espoused, Nietzsche challenges their claims to a kind of sovereignty. If the substance of the second essay is to free us from conceiving of ourselves as sovereign individuals, Genealogy as a whole aims to demonstrate how we might justify this letting-go intellectually. Moreover, inasmuch as the three essays intersect with one another in the dubious genealogies they construct, they destabilize the conceit that the world of spirit speaks with one voice. Finally, the towering figure standing at the center of these issues of modern metaphysics, political theory, and natural science is clearly Kant. To return to Nietzsche’s opening image of the beehive: if modern thinkers are drones, the identity of the queen bee is not for a second in doubt. In dethroning Kant, Nietzsche sees the possibility of a mode of inquiry that might evade the logic of sovereignty.25 So, what is Nietzsche’s “anti-Kantian categorical imperative” mentioned in the Preface of Genealogy? Returning to the analysis of the second essay, the problem with the sovereign individual and Kant’s particular way of doing moral and political theory is not that it rejects arbitrary cruelty. Nietzsche does not necessarily object to any of the particular duties or laws that are relentlessly produced by the machinery of the categorical imperative. Rather, he focusses on this sort of a moral life as cruel to oneself. It is cruel because the self must relate to itself as the sovereign; it seems to be liberated but is tied to itself in unending selff lagellation. It also produces individuals who are aware of the rare privilege of self-rule, whose advocacy for reason, equality, and freedom places them in a class above those who break their word. But the pride comes at the immense psychic burden of a relentless guilt that is without redemption. This brand of nihilism is, upon ref lection, guaranteed by the fact that the moral laws one uses to legislate oneself are categorical and imperative. We suffer from modern autonomy’s unrelenting intensity: the self-imposed imperative of self-rule. Just as Kant emphasizes the necessity of autonomy in his third derivation of the categorical imperative, Nietzsche links that same emphasis to the genealogy of cruelty and the creditor–debtor relationship. In puncturing the “severity and respect” with which we treat ourselves, Nietzschean immorality is not so much unethical as it is an attempt to give us permission to relax and recognize the limitations of our sovereignty. Having attempted, with the help of thinkers like Kant, to root

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out tyranny in institutional life, we must gather the strength to pursue it within ourselves. This is related to Nietzsche’s performative rhetorical struggles at the end of the second essay. He laments the lack of the courage and strength required to overcome bad conscience—to reclaim existence, or, rather, to “bring home the redemption of this reality” (96). Instead, he tells of the coming of another, “[t]his man of the future,” for whom it might be possible. The orientation toward the future is not accidental, as it is precisely the coming to be of a future not willed by sovereign individuals that is sought. Against the regularity, domesticity, and predictability of the sovereign individual—who would control future time through the promise—Nietzsche calls for someone who will allow the future to come to be. Thus, his admission: “[a]t this point it behooves me only to be silent.” Nietzsche’s silence will allow the coming of one “heavier with a future,” Zarathustra.26 The sovereign individual, we could say, is heavy with the past and the present and must, therefore, impose them upon the future. Nietzsche must remain silent, now, because unlike the sovereign individual, he must be content with chance and ambiguity. To be “heavier with future” is ultimately to live much more lightly. In current debates about sovereignty, the choice is almost always framed as one between Kantian cosmopolitans, who view national sovereignty as arbitrary and morally unjustifiable, and nationalists, who want to preserve the nation state and, thus, authentic political community.27 One implication of Nietzsche’s work in the second essay of Genealogy is to show that this is a false choice because, insofar as cosmopolitans—the Kantian sovereign individuals—retain a conception of the self as sovereign, the logic remains unchanged, even as practical consequences appear very different. A sovereign state creates a border with an absolute outside. Just as any violation of the law is punished because it is a violation, so is any threat to sovereignty punished not on its merits but because it threatens the absolute character of sovereignty itself. We might say the same about the sovereign individual, who is not only harsh with himself but refuses most claims of community which might limit his sovereign individuality. The self, then, becomes the measure against which all potential claims are adjudicated, and any threat to that autonomy is considered unethical. The sovereign individual, moreover, reinscribes what we might call “sovereign logic” onto the character of the debate: the nationalist enemies are often treated with the same cold furor of the migrant or criminal on the “wrong” side of the authority of the state. Kantian cosmopolitanism is not an alternative to the logic of sovereignty; rather, it reinterprets and radicalizes it. Nietzsche’s critique of the sovereign individual, thereby, aims to implicate the good, modern autonomous individual in the very cruelty these individuals despise. The goal is to make Kantian rigor itself questionable, to breach the borders of the sovereign individual. At the end of the essay Nietzsche, therefore, wonders aloud whether he is knocking an old ideal down or propping up a new one. In the case of sovereignty—at the level of the state and of the

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individual—it is perhaps enough to knock it down, as sovereignty is defined by its inability to abide competition or make exceptions. This might be a way to begin to question Kant’s historical teleology, too, to allow for a future that is not sketched out already in an ineluctable plan for perpetual peace.28 While, in a sense, extreme critiques of subjectivity such as Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Derrida’s Rogues are the heirs of Nietzsche’s argument thus understood, we may also interpret his provocation as an invitation to bring the status of the self or the soul as a central concern for political theory. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, AntiClimacus, for instance, explores the self “as a relation that relates itself to itself ”; what Nietzsche diagnoses as the nihilistic self-assertion of the sovereign individual, Anti-Climacus calls despair.29 In Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates cannot decide whether his self is monstrously complex or “simple and divine.”30 Both of these texts offer accounts of the self or the soul that question its sovereign individuality. Thus, if we are serious about considering political forms beyond the nation state, Nietzsche points us in the direction of imagining—or even recovering—a cheerful understanding of a self who is not sovereign, a self willing to relinquish sovereign individuality, to refuse a tyrannical relation of the self to the self and, thus, to become open to a future it has not ordained.

Notes 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989): 15. My modification. All parenthetical citations in this chapter refer to this text. Is it an accident that Kant’s name is practically in the first word of Genealogy? 2 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, ed. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 16. 3 Kant, Prolegomena, 14. 4 Kant, Prolegomena, 15. 5 David Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Montreal & Kingston: McGillQueens University Press, 2007): 98–9. 6 Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988); Keith Ansell-Pearson, “Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge to Political Theory?” Radical Philosophy 54 (Spring 1990), 10–18; Richard White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Bonnie Honig, Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993): 47–9. 7 Lawrence J. Hatab, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Christa Davis Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II.2” in Acampora, ed., Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays (Lanham: Lexington Books): pp 147-161. 8 Hatab, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 76. Hatab provides a series of compelling reasons for the prevalence of the misreading of the sovereign individual, also connecting the concept with Kant, see pages 78–82. 9 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 31. 10 Kant, Groundwork, 39. 11 As Hatab similarly observes, such autonomous self-rule is the entire goal of Enlightenment in Kant’s famous “An Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’” in Political Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

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12 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” 148–150. 13 Acampora, “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity,” 158. 14 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994). 15 Hobbes, Leviathan, 83–84. 16 To extend the Hobbesian analogy, if the self is in a relation with itself like the sovereign to the citizens, perhaps it remains in the state of nature with itself, and so “this also is consequent: that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place” (Hobbes, Leviathan, 78). 17 Hobbes, Leviathan, 109. 18 Note that Nietzsche’s “anti-Kantian” categorical imperative is almost derived in the form of an ad hominem. Morally speaking, it seems to matter who says what and why. 19 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 109–110. 20 For a thorough and interesting comparison of Nietzsche’s Second Essay with Michel Foucault’s inf luential analysis of the carceral system, see James Miller, “Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty,” Political Theory 18.3 (August 1990): 470–491. 21 In a different context, Hatab references Nietzsche’s comment in Human, All Too Human that the self is a “Dividuum,” and not an Individuum. See Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): 42; cited in Hatab, Nietzsche’s Genealogy, 78. 22 See, for instance, Kant’s “Conjectures on the Beginnings of World History,” in Kant: Political Writings, 221–234. 23 I thus disagree with the salutary presentation of cruelty in Nietzsche in Miller, “Carnivals of Atrocity,” 486–8. 24 This is the interpretive advantage of the scholars adduced above who see the sovereign individual as the improbable answer to the problem of the bad conscience. 25 Zamosc makes a compelling case for the Kantian sovereign individual as a moment on the way to a truer Nietzschean account of responsibility. My interpretation views sovereignty, for reasons explained below, as a significant part of the problem, and related to the very logic of the ascetic ideal. See Zamosc, “The Relation between Sovereignty and Guilt in Nietzsche’s Genealogy” European Journal of Philosophy 20.1 (2011): 107–142. 26 This is the direction in which Jacques Derrida orients his reading of the second essay, which interestingly criticizes the death penalty on its absolute negation of the future. For Derrida, the death penalty exposes the very logic of the creditor–debtor relationship as such in its nihilistic cancellation of future time. Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, Volume I. Trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 27 See, e.g., on the first Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: WW Norton and Company, 2007), and on the second, Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State. Trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 28 Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, 93–131. 29 Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980). 30 Plato, Phaedrus. Trans. James Nichols (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1996): 230a–b.

Bibliography Acampora, Christa Davis. “On Sovereignty and Overhumanity: Why It Matters How We Read Nietzsche’s Genealogy II.2.” In Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals: Critical Essays, 147–161. Edited by Christa Davis Acampora. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2006.

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Ansell-Pearson, Keith. “Nietzsche: A Radical Challenge to Political Theory?” Radical Philosophy 54 (Spring 1990): 10–18. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: WW Norton and Company, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. The Death Penalty, Volume I. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Hatab, Lawrence. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994. Honig, Bonnie. Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Political Writings. Edited by H.S. Reiss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Edited by Gary Hatfield. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Manent, Pierre. A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State. Translated by Marc A LePain. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Miller, James. “Carnivals of Atrocity: Foucault, Nietzsche, Cruelty.” Political Theory 18, 3 (August 1990): 470–491. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On The Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Owen, David. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2007. Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by James H. Nichols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Warren, Mark. Nietzsche and Political Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. White, Richard. Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Zamosc, Gabriel. “The Relation Between Sovereignty and Guilty in Nietzsche’s Genealogy.” European Journal of Philosophy 20, 1 (2011): 107–142.

8 WHAT IS A PEOPLE? Mark Blitz

One impulse for today’s discussions of topics such as “polis, nation and global community” is the resurgence of populism. Concerns about populism and celebrations of it both have in mind a view of what a “people” is. This opinion is usually hazy, or it is partisan and rhetorical, a cudgel with which to beat opponents or a lure to attract followers. My intention is to clarify the meaning of “people” intellectually and then to indicate how rule by or attention to the people can and cannot be salutary politically.

The everyday uses of people Let me begin with various everyday uses of “people.” We, the people. You, the people. It’s time to take action, people. Not many people voted this year. Very few people came to the game. More and more people are going to museums. Fewer and fewer people are attending concerts. The people’s choice awards. “People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.” “Ordinary People.” Popular music. Popular entertainment. She is very popular. “People will say we’re in love.” The German, American, French, and Japanese people. Peopling the continent. People say things are bad now, but the worst will soon be over. People say that it is especially warm this year. These are my people. These are my folks. Folk heroes. Folk music. Average people. These ordinary uses are ref lected in, or ref lect, more precise understanding. “People” means, first, the ordinary, average, and usual, or the majority. Here, we can oppose the people to the elite (or to the wealthy or trained few), as when we differentiate popular culture from refined or classical music and art, or when we distinguish popular from refined or elegant taste, or when we distinguish popular from scientific understanding. But, there is a sense in which all or almost all, including the elites, belong to the people in this average sense because popular

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culture and views are so ubiquitous or folk heroes so widely admired. To say that people and popular, understood as ordinary or average, differs from elite, refined, and specialized need not ignore how pervasive the popular may be or the way that even the elite may enjoy or be inf luenced by it. Indeed, popular or “vulgar” speech is both pervasive (the “vulgate”) and often crass or gross as opposed to precise and refined. The second, related, use of people names or designates one’s group. My people or my “folks” are my relatives or friends, or aides and assistants. “The” people are the ordinary, usual, or steady, grouped as the majority: the voters, the country’s population, or its sound population. The German, American, or French people are all of us, or all of us as voting, fighting, or similarly affected by some difficulty or success. The people in this sense is, thus, also all of us as different from “them” or the others, not necessarily in every trait, but in the relevant ones. To people or populate a place, moreover, is to bring men and women to it—people as distinguished from plants or animals.1 “People” can be broad enough to include all humans. So, a people in this meaning comprises our group, and differentiates “us” from others, from “them,” in terms of a general or average characteristic that is usually political (this people), familial, or cultural (for example, English folk art or music, or the French soul). We can then differentiate a “people” (or what is popular) as sharing something average, ordinary, or numerically dominant from what is elite, refined, or aristocratic, even within that characteristic. We find the third sense of people in phrases such as “people say,” “people want,” or “people don’t do that.” People here means a general or pervasive view, opinion, feeling, or practice, sometimes vague or implicit. It can refer to one’s immediate group (even an elite one) or to the general population or culture and its manners and mores. It, therefore, varies as opinions and feelings change. It governs or is supposed to govern one’s actions, choices, and prospects. In general, then, “people,” a people, and popular have in mind something general, ordinary, average, difficult to escape, and pervasive, even within a refined group.

The people vs. the elites We can clarify these views if we turn more directly to our current political understanding. The heart of this understanding is to distinguish the people from the elite(s). Here, the people are the many vs. the few, the ordinary vs. the entitled, the hard-working vs. the privileged, the poor vs. the rich, the majority vs. the minority. Although the widespread use of the term elite is modern and began to be popularized in the twentieth century, the distinction itself, or elements of it, is classic or, indeed, permanent, and it is emphasized by Plato and Aristotle.2 Its classic or permanent status means that it should be unsurprising to see its resurgence today. For us, however, the people are not only distinguished from the wealthy, as is central in Aristotle’s distinction of democrats from oligarchs. For the “few” now and historically take other forms: the educated vs. the

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ignorant, the free vs. the slaves, the (ethnically) pure vs. the impure, the priests vs. the f lock (the believers). Moreover, there are two additional current concerns or facts that affect people’s views of the elite. One is that today’s elites seem to many to be untouchable, unapproachable, distant, and even permanent in their status, and all of one piece, whatever their various qualities and professions. Classic oligarchies, however, are subject to democratic revolution, fear it, and are short-lived. Today’s elite of experts, corporate tycoons who are grounded in technological discovery, and cultural and media gatekeepers, seems impervious to revolution, controls access to its elite status, and wittingly or unwittingly promotes views of fairness, equality, and identity that solidify its own privilege and standing. Our elites seem more to resemble priesthoods and feudal or imperial “aristocrats” than they do fragile oligarchs. Their dominance may be overstated and helplessness in its face may seem overwrought. For, they remain subject to law and, therefore, to democratic politics. Yet, they seem increasingly to many to control this politics and to limit alternatives to their views and their power. Today’s elites also appear to be more and more global or separated from loyalty or devotion to a particular country or place. The universality or generality of priesthoods, of science and expertise, and of commerce seem to have overwhelmed patriotism, and the people, unlike these elites, are patriotic. Such internationalism is not altogether new.3 But, the dominance of our scientific, cultural, and global economic elites as opposed to classic oligarchs, and the helplessness seemingly experienced by many in its face (as opposed to the constant threat of revolution), is a salient or differentiating feature today in what remains the classic split between the few and the many. Still another feature that distinguishes today’s view of the few vs. the many from the classical understanding is our opinion that sovereignty of the people based on equal natural rights is the one legitimate form of government. The link between modern democracy and equal rights and opportunity, and the sense that today’s elites deny equal liberty and opportunity by seeking to freeze themselves into place economically, by judging others on the basis of identity not merit, and by punishing speech of which they disapprove, leads to the “populist” concern that we are replacing popular or democratic government based on equal rights with an emerging oligarchy even more restrictive and impervious to change than oligarchies of old. The sovereignty of the people, as distinguished from the classical rule of the many, is based on a modern understanding that, in time, is grounded on equal rights and limited government.4 One might say that many today fear that the sovereignty of the people is being replaced by the sovereignty of the few, or, indeed, by their rule.5

Our people Concerns about patriotism as opposed to universalism help us to clarify the second major element in our understanding of the people.6 Here, we distinguish “us,” our people, my people, from others: Athenians from Spartans, the English

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from the French, the Americans from the Germans. We make this distinction even if the form of government is the same—American liberal democracy differs from British liberal democracy. This is the view of one’s people that is connected to patriotism and nationalism, not the people vs. the elite, but our people, elite or common.7 Let me discuss this further. Aristotle distinguishes the form of a city from its people and territory, its matter.8 The form is central but does not simply determine how just or excellent a city is or can be. The form’s centrality, however, means that democratic Athens differs substantially from oligarchic Athens. The city’s inhabitants, nonetheless, may or should be friendly or like-minded concerning acquiring or protecting resources or even about who should rule. Security, or defending freedom from enslavement, and property, binds the citizens and would be citizens. This like-mindedness may but need not be connected to its citizenry or population’s having a common nationality, and some nations are more suited for the best regime than are others. But, Aristotle describes national characteristics in common terms, and the form, also described in common terms, directs or is superior to the material. The number and rank of regimes and the qualities and virtues of soul and body that they shape do not change essentially with time and place, although they are more often found among some than among others.9 This is not to deny a certain friendliness among, say, all oligarchs or democrats or the splits among oligarchs and democrats within a city or the firmer binding that exists among those who agree about who should rule.10 It is to suggest, however, that the commonality of the city, its common friendship or friendliness, grounded on freedom and utility, outweighs, especially in war, the commonality among those with similar characteristics but based in different places. There is a togetherness between a city’s people, its demos, and its elite or few, especially if the people are not a mob or the elite extremely oligarchic: Athenians are not Spartans. But, Athenians also differ among themselves in virtue and in opinions about justice, and both the few and the people, the demos, share characteristics across cities, through commerce, poetry, and gods. Common beliefs, common commercial utility, and common practices, such as ransoming prisoners, exist among cities. One might suggest that the more a city tries to be its own simply, the less generally educated it will be.11 A second view of the people as us, as unifying, is visible in the varieties of nationalism that began in the eighteenth century. Countries are to be based on national self-determination, and nations, or peoples, have unique or determining characteristics that are grounded or ref lected in race, religion, language, territory, tradition, and culture. Their political communities, their countries, are not an amalgam of form and matter but, rather, should properly ref lect the national or “popular,” say, the Germanic, characteristics from which they stem, and this oneness preexists or is more fundamental than the division into form and material. Patriotism or nationalism, therefore, should hardly be questioned. Whatever divisions or resentments exist among the few and the many, their common or, indeed, excessive devotion to the community should be clear. “Elites” risk

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themselves in war. The people is our people or us—we Germans, English, or Americans. We see versions of these views at least from Herder, Rousseau, and Fichte through Nietzsche, and in some sense, as we will see, in Heidegger. In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation of 1807–8, for example, the people is understood to be formed fundamentally by language, and the Germans retain a directness or simplicity that differs from the Latin or partially Latinized countries, or even the other Teutons. Connected to this, as Fichte sees it, is Luther’s emergence. The people is more basic than the state, moreover, whose function is connected to security and commerce: the people is central in seeking spiritual and moral freedom, understood largely in Kant’s terms, and the people requires or is buttressed by proper education. It is beyond, or unifies, the demos and the aristocrats. One might say, therefore, that while, for Fichte, the Germans are distinctive, their goal or direction is general or universal. In further discussion in the nineteenth century, however, the separateness of nations and the importance of political nationalism is sharpened further.12

Heidegger Heidegger’s discussion differs from these earlier statements because of his ontological focus and concern. But, it leads to a view of the people that has or is aligned with concrete political implications, most visibly in the first few years of Nazism. The full or complete unity of a people and its state, as Heidegger discusses it, appears as the most extreme or radical version of a nationalism or patriotism that is historically, traditionally, and geographically rooted. For Heidegger himself, this view is not an extreme version of the recent past but a radical departure because he attempts to base his view on nothing of our animality or even rationality in the usual sense but on our Dasein, that is, our existence and characteristics as open to being, as he understands it. Perhaps, after the German homeland is united (by “leader” in a a single state), he could attempt to assimilate his arguments to a less violent competition among, say, some European nations, the French and German, for example. Still, the illiberal political and intellectual effects, indeed, the vicious results of Heidegger’s opinions and their connection to Nazism, are always visible in much of what he says. As we are arguing, however, his view of the people is not the central or only populism. Heidegger’s understanding of the people and its connection to our heritage, destiny, resoluteness, and authenticity, is first discussed in Being and Time. These phenomena belong to our authentic rather than to our ordinary freeing of possibilities. Neither our authentic nor inauthentic understanding is simply individual. “If everything ‘good’ is a heritage, and the character of ‘goodness’ lies in making authentic existence possible, then the handing down of a heritage constitutes itself in resoluteness.”13

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If fateful Dasein … exists essentially in being with others its historizing is a co-historizing and is determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historizing of the community, of a people … Our [individual] fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and struggling does the power of destiny become free. Dasein’s fateful destiny in and with its “generation” goes to make up the full authentic historizing of Dasein. A people is, thus, not a mere agglomeration, an everyday public context, or the home of the “they-self ” that, ordinarily, implicitly sets our possibilities. Rather, it is the authentic ground or version of these, a community that has a destiny that guides individual fates—all such fates and not only those of the many as opposed to the few. The importance of a people in this fundamental sense becomes especially visible in Heidegger’s teaching in 1933–1935; he was rector of his university in Freiburg during some of this time and visibly supported the Nazis.14 The state’s being rests on “the political being of the human beings who as a people support the state …” When a people commits “to its fate as a people it decides for a state.” The state is a people’s being; it is not truly a general concept equally applicable to different peoples. “Every state … grows within a political tradition.” “The people wills the state as its way to be a people,” and the state’s constitution expresses or actualizes this. Indeed, each of us takes “upon himself the struggles and responsibility for his people,” and our commitment to the state’s order is expressed in “the relations of human beings in ruling and serving each other.” When the “leader and the led” bind themselves “to one fate,” all forces are dedicated to the people, and “the existence of the superiority of the leader sinks into the being, the soul, of the people.” This is not the ruler’s mastery or popular sovereignty but a coincidence of wills achieved through the leader’s “persuasion.” Being and Time’s brief mention of the people left unclear its range and extent. This later seminar (and those from the same period) gives us more clarity. A people is connected but not limited to a particular land or soil, and land differs from an animal’s environment or neutral space. A people’s “sole ideal” is not attachment to some soil: it also needs to “work outwards into a wider expanse.” The homeland needs to become expansive and move to its “authentic way of being,” a state. Indeed, every people has its own space: nomads are not only nomadic because of desolate wastelands but also often leave wastelands “where they have found … cultivated lands.” Germans outside the Reich’s borders lack this state although they have a German homeland, so they lack authenticity. Indeed, the nature of a space “is revealed” differently to different peoples: “our German space” would not be revealed to Slavs in the same way and “to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all.” The “specific people in its historical being” is decisive.

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One can see that, in this understanding, the people are both exclusive and dominant in what they include and that the state, as the people’s being, is linked to them intrinsically. It is not as if any people could have any state, that the state has a proper or just form whatever the people (even if it cannot reach this form), or that all peoples have certain similar characteristics. Those that cannot or will not have states, moreover, are lacking. It is evident enough from this account that Heidegger’s view of Semitic “nomads” accords with the Nazis’ denigration of Jews. It is also evident how his view of the dominance of a people for those included in it, and the co-responding will of ruler and rule and the ruler’s overall persuasiveness accord with the illiberalism that characterizes Heidegger’s politics from beginning to end. The people so totally encapsulates the separate realms of thought and action that relationships among those engaged in similar activities and professions in different places and times are narrowed or closed: the conditions that allow critical distance are distorted or disappear. One is swept up in a movement from which one cannot become distant and is committed fully to it as one who “bears responsibility for his people” or, in time, as one who acquiesces passively.

Locke Heidegger’s extreme view of the people is connected to, although it is not identical to, what we see in much nationalism. Let us now contrast these opinions with the “people” as we see it in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, or the U.S. Constitution’s “We the People.” Here, a people is self-forming and is the proper origin of government. It is largely a compound of individuals and has general or universal goals, not ones exclusive to it ethnically. It is not oriented to a particular tradition and is not formed or justified traditionally or territorially. The people chooses its form of government (and particular governments), which represents it through majorities that are grounded on equal individual rights. The consent of the people is central to the government’s legitimacy: the people comprises everyone.15 Let us develop this view by examining Locke more carefully. His central statement is in #89 of the Second Treatise.16 Where-ever therefore any number of men are so united into one society as to quit every one his Executive Power of the Law of Nature, and to resign it to the publick, there and there only is a Political or Civil Society. And this is done where-ever any number of men, in the State of Nature, enter into Society to make one People, one Body Politick under one Supreme Government, or else when any one joyns himself to, and incorporates with any Government already made. A people, thus, is any number of men that incorporates into one body politic. Nothing is said of tradition or ethnicity as the substance of such a body. Indeed,

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why men should incorporate themselves is common to us all: to protect our lives, fortunes, and property—an identity of goals among all human beings that, however, are difficult to reach because we are each naturally our own executive, equal to the others, free to choose for ourselves, quick to discover enmity from others, and limited in our satisfaction by essentially worthless nature.17 In #111 Locke mentions a “Golden Age” when there was no stretching Prerogative on the one side to oppress the People, nor consequently on the other any Dispute about Priviledge to lessen or restrain the Power of the Magistrate; and so no contest betwixt Rulers and People about Governours or Government. In #137 he elaborates on this thought: government “ought to be exercised by established and promulgated Laws: that both the people may know their Duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the Law and the Rulers kept within their due bounds.” In this sense, the people is distinguished from the rulers but not from each other. The people is all of us, incorporated (here) as the proper ground of government. The people is the authority not the few wealthy, educated, royal, or priestly. The law-making power, moreover, cannot rightly be transferred by the legislative to others because it is “but a delegated Power from the People …” “The People alone can appoint the form of commonwealth,” and this form is appointed by “constituting the legislative” and the hands that hold it. “The people” cannot “be bound by any laws but such as are Enacted by those, whom they have chosen, and authorized to make laws for them.” The legislative’s power derives “from the People by a positive voluntary grant and Institution” that is to make laws not legislatures.18 It is the people’s voluntary choice and constituting, not habit, tradition, or privileges of birth, that are the source of Government seen as explicitly instituted for a reason or group of reasons not as a series of practices and hierarchies that have existed time out of mind. Indeed, where the executive uses force on the people “without authority and contrary to the Trust put in him” to hinder the legislative from meeting and acting, he puts himself in a state of war with the people. Moreover, his power to abolish and dismiss the legislative is only a “Fiduciary Trust placed in him for the safety of the people.” But, why should this power exist at all? “Part of the Legislative consists of Representatives chosen by the people,” and this representation may become very unequal: “things of the world are in so constant a Flux, that nothing remains long in the same State. Thus People, Riches, Trade, Power change their station.” So, a town in ruins with only a name remaining may send as many representatives to the legislative assembly “as a whole county numerous in people and powerful in riches.” The legislative’s constitution, indeed, depends “wholly on the people.” But, “the people having no power to act when the government stands, is there no remedy” for misrepresentation? We can deal with this issue if the executive who has the power of convoking the legislature

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regulates the number of its members not by custom but by “true reason,” following the rule “salus populi suprema lex,” and recognizing that a part of the people has a right to representation in proportion to the “assistance which it offers to the publick.” The people’s “interest as well as intention” is to have a fair and equal representation. That is, representation is grounded in the people not in distinct groups or parts.19 In this sense, people means population or numbers (within a constituted commonwealth) and, again, it is the people as a whole, without distinction, who are the government’s authoritative ground, properly divided for representation for actual law-making. The place of riches is indicated, not oligarchy, however, but the importance of property or of protecting the “rational and industrious few” who expand value. “The tendency to injure or oppress the People, and to set up one part, or Party, with a distinction from, and an unequal subjection of the rest” “is what makes an Inroad upon Government.” What is central is to advantage the society and people in general: it is the will and act of society when the people “chuse their Representatives upon just and undeniably equal measures suitable to the original Frame of Government,” remembering that our original state is one of “perfect Freedom” to order our actions “within the bounds of the Law of Nature” and one of equality wherein all power and jurisdiction are reciprocal. The equality of the people as the authoritative source of government is grounded on their equal rights, their naturally individual and equal freedom and rule. Any number may choose to place itself under law, that is, to consent with others to incorporate into a body politic, a people. Men being … by Nature, all free, equal and independent, no one can be put out of this Estate, and subjected to the Political Power of another, without his own Consent. The only way whereby anyone devests himself of his Natural Liberty … is by agreeing with other Men to joyn and unite into a Community, for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living one amongst another, in a secure Enjoyment of their Properties, and a greater Security against any that are not of it … When any number of Men have so consented to make one Community or Government, they are thereby presently incorporated, and make one Body Politick wherein the Majority have a Right to act and conclude the rest.20 Indeed, if “Conquerors and Conquered never incorporate into one People, under the same laws and Freedom,” “ a lawful conqueror has purely despotical power.” “For the end why People entered into Society, being to be preserved one intire, free, independent Society, to be governed by its own Laws; this is lost whenever they are given up into the power of another.”21 All this does not mean that Locke ignores nations. He mentions American nations in his discussion of property in the Second Treatise, the variety of nations and languages in the First Treatise, and the Chinese and other nations in his criticism in the First Treatise of Robert Filmer. People can mean all of us, or all these

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nations. The central point is that whatever the national differences, legitimate, proper, government is not grounded in them. Thus, through looking back far as Records give us any account of Peopling the world, and the History of Nations, we commonly find the Government to be in one hand, yet it destroys not that, which I affirm, (viz.) that the beginning of Politick Society depends upon the consent of individuals, to joyn into and make one society, who when they are thus incorporated might set up what form of Government they thought fit. The people, as incorporated, is the true body of civil society and is the rational ground of government, not the nation, to the degree it differs from the people.22 Moreover, the people share certain politically relevant characteristics presumably everywhere: they are slow to act or to overthrow their institutions, even when these are occasionally, or more than occasionally, abusive. Still, the fundamental authority rests with them.23 Indeed, the general characteristics of the people, and the goals they all intend government to serve, are elements of Locke’s sometimes treating the people as “mankind” generally. Different groups or numbers incorporate, but their goals and characteristics, at least those on which government should be based, are similar or, indeed, identical. The end of government is the good of Mankind, and which is best for Mankind, that the people should be always expos’d to the boundless will of Tyranny, or that the Rulers should be sometimes to be opposed … when they grow exorbitant in the use of their Power, and imploy it for the destruction and not the preservation of the People?24 The significance and reasonableness of Locke’s view is evident from his arguments and the ways in which it has formed the ground for liberal democracies such as ours. His discussion is based on a view of the “people” that involves the many as distinguished from the few, not as distinct parties, however, but one in which equality is based on rights and the desires for life, liberty, and property are held by each of us. Governments should attempt to secure these rights and try to protect the unequal effort and knowledge that can lead to a growth in property and a general expansion of value.25 One might, nonetheless, raise several questions about Locke’s argument, both in relation to the topics we are discussing and more broadly. One might claim, for example, that Locke’s discussion points in the direction of a global state and, therefore, ignores or dissolves the virtues connected to patriotism, the love and defence of this people and country. After all, would not a legal regime and representatives who won the consent of all human beings and governed them all be safer and more peaceful than the variety of states and commonwealths whose existence Locke grants in his discussions of conquest and of the federative, or foreign affairs, power? Locke’s argument, however, concerns

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not only preservation but comfort as well, and not only securing one’s property but also the conditions that allow value and property to be expanded and protected. His argument also involves establishing the conditions for equal consent and fair representation and limits to the possibility of tyranny. To establish the advantages of a global regime, one would need to show that it diminished the possibility of tyranny, expanded the possibilities for securing one’s rights and property, and increased the possibility for the growth of value (and, therefore, of comfort and preservation) through rational and responsible industriousness. This would be difficult to do, given both reason and our experience of global tyrannies and feckless international organizations. Separate communities are more likely to achieve Lockean ends. Citizens have also proved capable of defending these communities, despite claims that concerns with individual preservation would leave them defenceless. For, it is not individual preservation alone that concerns them, but also securing their rights, property, and families—and not only these but also the principles of equal liberty and the constitutional and other practices that we establish. The defence of one’s country need not be a defence only of a particular people in the traditional or historical sense. Love and preservation of one’s own is not alien to, indeed, it is justified by reason itself.26 One might then worry that, however reasonable common concern is, some of the conditions that sustain it are weakened by our form of popular government, grounded as it is on individual rights. Freedom requires that we cultivate patriotism, loyalty, pride, friendship and love, and virtues such as courage and responsibility. But, attention to individual liberty and, especially, our current understanding of liberty fails to sustain or, indeed, dissolves these conditions. Indeed, one might question whether Locke’s view of the people is sufficient to sustain just government domestically and human excellence and happiness generally. For, must not one teach and explore the proper uses of one’s freedom beyond Locke’s principles themselves and clarify the liberal democratic reasons (such as those I just brief ly sketched) why freedom and its excellent use require and encourage patriotic attention to separate self-governing communities? Our understanding of these issues involves grasping the substance of the principles of equal rights—of Locke’s argument, of the Declaration of Independence, of the Constitution—and, also, seeing the primarily classical limits to these principles. This concerns both their status when we properly understood them and the often inadequate ways we comprehend them today. Our contemporary understanding is a matter both of their true meaning and of our current education.27 Education involves elevation to what is excellent and permanent and, in this light, recognizing the meaning, resilience, and confines of our starting points here and now. In any event, understanding and protecting liberty, excellence, and the phenomena that ground them does not require the simple political authority of some few, and certainly not the authority of today’s presumed elites, over the “people” seen as the many or the dominance of a people seen in national or ethnic exclusivity. There remains no political order that is superior in practice

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to liberal democracy based on natural rights and popular consent, as long as we govern it prudently and understand its necessary limits.

Notes 1 Consider this charge against George III, from the Declaration of Independence. “He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.” 2 See the works of Mosca and Pareto, for example Mosca’s The Ruling Class (1896), and of various political scientists and sociologists, notably C. Wright Mills, whose The Power Elite was first published in 1956. 3 Consider Plato and Aristotle’s discussions of commerce and of traveling sophists in works such as the Statesman, Laws and Politics. 4 We will discuss this below in our examination of John Locke. 5 Whereas the classical rule of the few meant that oligarchic governments shaped laws and practices to enhance a way of life based on justice seen as inequality in terms of wealth, the modern sovereignty of the people is grounded on securing equal rights and on satisfying the desires for preservation and comfort. Such equality covers all, i.e., the few as well as the many, the rich as well as the poor. Governments are then understood as limited means to those ends. This is not to say, however, that assertions of popular sovereignty in modern times may not share significant elements of or, indeed, be or pretend to be directed by the opinion that the many should rule, that is, that all laws and practices should be governed by the opinion that justice means equal distribution of all things in all respects, not merely a securing of equal rights that may justly lead to unequal results. As we indicated, the classical split between few and many is a permanent feature of political life. (In a more narrow sense, early efforts to assert the sovereignty or co-sovereignty of the few or of the people is a claim of, say, the Commons against the king.) 6 As recently as the First World War, and to a large degree throughout the Cold War, the similarities among global elites was often secondary to their patriotism or nationalism (and not only to their view of justice, although connected to this.) 7 Current “populism” covers both “us” as the many vs. the elite, and “us” as Americans, vs. say, the Russians. 8 See Aristotle’s Politics, for example, Book 3, Chapter 3 and Book 7, Chapter 4, and the connection between the city and friendship that he discusses in Ethics, for example, Book 8, Chapters 1 and 9 and Book 9, Chapter 6. 9 See Politics, Book 7, Chapter 7. 10 See, for example, Politics Book 8, Chapter 4, Thucydides’s discussion of the Peloponnesian War, and Plato’s Statesman. 11 Consider Sparta, and Plato’s discussion of it in his Greater Hippias. 12 Consider the works of later authors such as Heinrich Treitschke. 13 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, originally published in German in 1927, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). This and the following quotation are from paragraph #74. 14 See the discussion in Mark Blitz Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and the Possibility of Political Philosophy, with a new afterword (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2017), originally published by Cornell University Press, 1981. The quotations that follow are from Martin Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 1933–1934, translated and edited by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), first published in German in 2009. 15 This understanding of a people and its relation to government is grounded on a different understanding of the relationship between one and many, or individual and common, and on a different sense of “will” and the will of the people than what is

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present in the connection between nationalism and the people that we have just discussed. To the degree to which the identity politics that is current in much modern thinking differs from American pluralism, it is grounded in this historicist–nationalistic standpoint. All quotations in this section are from John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. See among other paragraphs numbers 4, 36, and 103. #141. Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from numbers 155–158, and number 4. Consider also the points made about this issue in the Declaration of Independence. Number 95. Numbers 108, 217. Number 106. See also numbers 26, 96, 104, 164, 230. See number 223 and 241–243. Number 229 See for Locke’s overall argument not only his Two Treatises of Government but also his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Consider the discussion in Mark Blitz, Reason and Politics (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.) Education and culture, properly understood, are alternative and perhaps superior ways to understand what Heidegger has in mind with the pervasiveness of the public, people, and “they-self.”

Bibliography Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle. 1984. Politics. Trans. Carnes Lord. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Blitz, Mark. 2017. Heidegger’s “Being and Time” and the Possibility of Political Philosophy, with a new afterword. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin. 2013. Nature, History, State, 1933–1934. Ed. and Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. London: Bloomsbury. Locke, John, 1960. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

PART IV

Contemporary Challenges to Global Citizenship

9 ROOTEDNESS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE TWENTYFIRST CENTURY Luma Simms

Introduction Historically, the condition known as national identity—that is, the characteristics that make one nation different from another and creates solidarity between a people, such that they can be called a people—is attachment to several elements: common history, a sense of place, land, culture, language, religion, traditions, civilizational memory, the shape of the institutions particular to that nation, and more often than not, blood—that is, ancestry. This does not mean that a people must meet every single condition to be called a people, but they must have enough of these attachments to make them distinguishable as a group, from other groups. Unity over a form of government on its own—that is a “social contract,” or as John Jay put it in Federalist Number 2, “attach[ment] to the same principles of government”1—has not historically been a defining element of national identity in itself. More often it is the other elements of shared identity that allow a people to form, submit to—or endure—their government. But is attachment to the same principles of government on its own enough to hold people together? Is it enough to form a people? Does unity over a form of government rise to what we have hitherto defined as national identity? Could it be that we can have different languages, different religions, different values, different ideas of what is right and wrong, what is good or bad for society, and still be a nation as long as we are attached to the same principles of government? And does this way of looking at identity not imply that the intellect and an assent to an idea takes precedence over every other element of human attachment. That is, that ideas—rationality—are superior to all other qualities of the human person? Is the faculty of reason all that is required to hold a people together—is it all that is required to be a nation? If the answer is affirmative, then what of those people

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within that society whose reason is impaired? This chapter raises and answers some of these questions.

Identity crisis Recent populist movements in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere in the West indicate, at the very least, a discontent with the status quo style of governing. They are discontent with their politicians answering “yes” to the question I just raised when they sense in their very lives that that is not enough. At the heart of this national and international disquiet is an existential homelessness; people do not know what and who they are, to whom and where they belong—this is an identity crisis, singularly as in people themselves are having an identity crisis, and collectively the peoples are in an identity crisis. Although my argument applies just as well to an individual identity crisis, here, I want to focus on national identity and rootedness; there are those who want to erase them and those who long to reespouse them. National identity eroded in conjunction with the democratic society growing and supplanting the elements of the traditional society. That is, as nations grew more into their democratic ideals, they shed traditional and historic ways of how mankind has understood himself and his place in society. Alexis de Tocqueville in his magnum opus, Democracy in America spends the majority of Volume 2 demonstrating the differences between the democratic society and what he calls the aristocratic society, what I am here calling the traditional society. We will trace what has increased and what has decreased in democratic societies according to Tocqueville’s predictions. We will see that the weakening and supplanting of the traditional society by late-stage democratic society deteriorated the elements that constitute national identity (and individual identity as well) and caused the rootlessness prevalent around the world today. What has increased is atomization driven by an increase in individualism (these in turn have increased mobility and a restive spirit); we have also seen an increase in what Tocqueville calls extreme equality—what today we call radical egalitarianism, as well as unlimited liberty. These work in unison against rootedness and identity. They do so because as atomization, individualism, radical egalitarianism, and unlimited liberty—the characteristics of late-stage democracy—increase, they decrease characteristics of the traditional society, such as strong and meaningful hierarchical structures in the institutions of the society; loyalty and obligation; unchosen relationships; parental authority and the value of the family; common customs and culture; attachment to physical geographical places; and the value of, and attachments to religious institutions. It is these elements of the traditional society that contribute to rootedness and identity; as they erode, so too does rootedness and identity. In much of the Western world, they have already crumbled. In traditional societies people are linked by the metaphysical bonds of love, honour, loyalty, and obligation—that is, unchosen bonds come before chosen

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bonds; people depend on one another. Roles are expected and respected: husband, wife, mother, father, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, teacher, priest, Rabbi, and so on. These are all unchosen organic relationships; they check individual choice and self-centeredness, and, in a traditional society, they engender loyalty and obligations. Villages, towns, cities, and countries were also unchosen relationships that engendered devotion, loyalty, and obligation to the people of that place. St. Thomas Aquinas writes, Man becomes a debtor to other men in various ways, … [to God, in the first place] for He is supremely excellent, and is for us the first principle of being and government. On the second place, the principles of our being and government are our parents and our country, that have given us birth and nourishment. Consequently man is debtor chief ly to his parents and his country, after God. Wherefore just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship to one’s parents and one’s country. The worship due to our parents includes the worship given to all our kindred, since our kinfolk are those who descend from the same parents, according to [Aristotle] (Ethic. viii, 12). The worship given to our country includes homage to all our fellow-citizens and to all the friends of our country. Therefore piety extends chief ly to these.2 Because of this loyalty and obligation—offered sometimes not out of personal choice but out of duty to something and someone outside the self—the people of this society tend to resist mobility, or, at the very least, they are not so easily given to it. They settle in, or near, the place where they were raised. Extending their roots, they give the next generation a deeper sense of who they are and to whom and where they belong. Because of reliance and connection, the people are bound to each other—they are conscious of their ancestors and descendants. A sense of duty permeates this society, manifesting itself in the decisions the people make, where very few can afford to think and live primarily for their own benefit or chase after their selfinterest. They sacrifice their desires and, yes, sometimes their happiness, “for beings who no longer exist or who do not yet exist.”3 In a traditional society, “a man almost always knows his ancestors and respects them; he believes he already perceives his great-grandsons and he loves them.”4 That kind of vision affects a man’s actions in the moment. In a traditional society, people are bound, as if by a chain, but democracy breaks the chain, delinking all from all. Because of the tight bonds in traditional societies, men are attached and obliged to a variety of people and institutions outside of themselves, turning them outward toward others and toward the society around them. By focussing on others, these conditions can make man forget himself. Contra the democratic man, who is unhabituated to living checked by forces outside himself, be they human or divine. In this society, man does not forget

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himself but, rather, by excessive egotism, makes himself unmoored, isolated, and lonely—untether from his past, and (barring some personal choices) unconcerned for his progeny. Tocqueville tells us that, “amidst the continual movement that reigns in the heart of a democratic society, the bond that unites generations is relaxed or broken; each man easily loses track of the ideas of his ancestors or scarcely worries about them.”5

Equality and individualism The untethering of kinsman bonds in a democratic society happens for several reasons, but Tocqueville tells us that there are two primary driving engines that debase the value of family ties and make it easier to loosen family bonds, as well as bonds between the citizens of a society: Equality and Individualism. Equality makes each man look to himself, to believe only in himself. While individualism makes a man seek his own wellbeing, his feelings are centred on himself. These of course are ultimately driven by an unchecked democratic spirit that sets the locus of authority to decide what is true or not true, in the individual human person, rather than an authority outside the self. Thus, the locus of all authority rests in the self. Contrasting individualism with plain old selfishness, Tocqueville writes that “Individualism is a recent expression arising from a new idea. Our fathers knew only selfishness … Individualism proceeds from an erroneous judgment rather than a depraved sentiment. It has its source in the defects of the mind.”6 Selfishness is an old vice that runs through all societies; it is an exaggerated love of self that drives man to prefer himself over everything and anybody else. This becomes a moral-social problem leading men to loneliness. Individualism is new on the scene, so to speak. It has its origins in democracy and, therefore, is political in nature, leading to the isolation of citizens. Tocqueville writes that “individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues; but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed in selfishness.” 7 Why is that? It is because democracy is not a fixed system of government but an evolving way of looking at the world. Its principles may, at first glance, look fixed, one may even bullet point them: equality before the law; the rule of law; individual freedom; civil rights and liberties, and so on. But beneath this is a view of the human person as autonomous, and equal to all: equality and individualism. And these are not static elements—they evolve over time; it can mature or degenerate. Because democracy is based on the individual, it will evolve as the individual’s appetites evolve unless checked by a human and/or divine force outside itself. In democracy, that check—that boundary—is religion and family, which guide man’s appetites and duties. Once the boundaries of religion and family are breached, there is no stop—man’s fallen appetitive nature will drive him to feed his appetites—for the appetite of man, there is never an “enough.” He has freedom and he wants more of it; he has equality and he wants more of it.

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These elements feed on each other and move forward, but they do not progress linearly—they are a double helix. As individualism feeds the desire for equality, that equality in turn asks for more freedom, and they continue in this way. They spiral and grow; as they grow, they reduce the checks on them, this continues to happen until they break free—unbound. Secularization theories abound, but what is secularization but the evolution of democracy? The theories of secularization, its origins and progress, are, to my mind, only another name for what I am identifying as the evolution of democracy. These two qualities—individualism and extreme equality—in combination, become toxic to family, religion, and the entire society. The primary driver against hierarchy, differentiation, and exclusion—three crucial elements of strong institutions—is the insatiable desire for equality. Tocqueville discusses the ardent love for equality in democratic societies and points out that it is even greater than the love for freedom. Here is an extended quote from Tocqueville: Democratic peoples love equality at all times … they press the passion they feel for it to delirium. This happens at the moment when the old social hierarchy, long threatened, is finally destroyed after a last internecine struggle, and the barriers that separated citizens are finally overturned. Then men rush at equality as at a conquest, and they become attached to it as to a precious good someone wants to rob them of. The passion for equality penetrates all parts of the human heart; there it spreads and fills it entirely. Do not say to men that in giving themselves over so blindly to an exclusive passion, they compromise their dearest interests; they are deaf. Do not show them that freedom escapes from their hands while they are looking elsewhere; they are blind, or rather they perceive only one good in the whole universe worth longing for.8 Driven by this insatiable desire for equality, coupled with unchecked individualism, democratic man destroys the very associations he needs in order to form his identity and to understand himself and the world around him. All these forces are working against one another. People are isolated and disengaged; their soul has needs and craves formation, but the very presuppositions they live under work against the very institutions that could give these souls what they need. “This sort of equality,” Simone Weil wrote, “if allowed full play by itself, can make social life f luid to the point of decomposing it.”9 Attachment to the land is yet another element the democratic society has decreased; this also f lows from individualism, as it inspires a restive spirit that only mobility can satiate. Tocqueville reminds us that: “In aristocratic peoples, families remain in the same state for centuries, and often in the same place.”10 Why? Because traditional societies value rootedness, they are historically minded and remember that the human person f lourishes when he is known, knows who he is, and knows to whom and where he belongs. “Know thyself ” was inscribed

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on the portal of the temple of Apollo in Delphi, but it seems to Tocqueville that that is something Americans did not do well. The American spirit is so restive that physically, spiritually, and intellectually it cannot be still enough to understand itself. In the United States, a man carefully builds a dwelling in which to pass his declining years, and he sells it while the roof is being laid; he plants a garden and he rents it out just as he was going to taste its fruits; he clears a field and he leaves to others the care of harvesting its crops. He embraces a profession and quits it. He settles in a place from which he departs soon after so as to take his changing desires elsewhere … And when toward the end of a year filled with work some leisure still remains to him, he carries his restive curiosity here and there within the vast limits of the United States. He will thus go five hundred leagues in a few days in order better to distract himself from his happiness … This spectacle is, however, as old as the world; what is new is to see a whole people show it.11 Why did this happen to a whole people? After observing the American people, he gives us several reasons: the Americans had a great appetite for material enjoyments, their heart was bent on “goods of this world,” they are always hustling, and fear and agitation makes them change their plans. They cannot be at peace nor can they be satisfied. This sets up the overall cultural climate of the land. He writes, if a social state in which law or custom no longer keeps anyone in his place is joined to the taste for material well-being, this too greatly excites further restiveness of spirit: one will then see men change course continuously for fear of missing the shortest road that would lead them to happiness.12 Ilya Somin, in his book, Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, encourages this very mindset, as he champions foot voting, by which he means the ability to change one’s course of action in order to better pursue material wellbeing. In his view, man is a rational being; his actions are based on individual choice guided by reason alone; man’s judgements must be independent and free from any compulsion; if and when he acts and collaborates with others, it must be purely from his choice; he must live by his own achievements for his own happiness and self-interest; he has no moral duty to others. As such, man must have the political freedom to follow his self-interest to achieve his happiness. Moreover, in Somin’s view, man has no moral duty to stay and build up his country of origin. Somin’s Randian objectivism is the logical end of the democratic man chasing his appetites, unchecked by family or religion. Tocqueville saw this and forewarned us of our doom if we did not hold on to some of the elements of traditional society—namely, attachment to people and place, valuing family and religion, commitment to institutions and a willingness to submit to meaningful

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hierarchical structures, keeping traditions, staying put and building something that lasts, remembering our ancestors, and thinking about our posterity. Many in the modern world turn up their noses at the idea of attachment to land or an obligation to stay in a place and close to family; we do so because we discount the need of the human soul for geographic roots. And we have so reduced the idea of national identity to fascist ideology, that we can no longer see clearly all the elements a human person needs to live harmoniously in this world.

Rootedness The link, the tether between the elements that constitute identity, and identity, as such, is rootedness. And, yet, modern man boasts that he has transcended the need for roots. But, we have not, as we see from the disquiet of people throughout the West. According to Simone Weil To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul … Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.13 I see rootedness as something due to every human being as part of their human dignity. Without it, man is cut off from the very elements that make him who he is—his identity. What is rootedness? Rootedness—think now of the roots that shoot out from a plant and embed themselves into the soil; they multiply to such a degree that there comes a point where it is difficult to distinguish between the multiplicity of roots and the soil. When a plant is plucked up and replanted, often roots are left behind, and the plant may or may not grow well in the new soil. Hence, rootedness is the combination of bonds (like all those roots that plunge themselves into the soil and grow and multiply) that attach the person to his or her environment: family, religion, culture, language, physical land, and heritage. There are other elements, as well, such as music and dance, which we usually set under the rubric of culture. In our modern arrogance, we have forgotten that the variety of soils are not always interchangeable—there is a fittingness. Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and others lamented the mass uprootedness due to war during the early part of the twentieth century. Exacerbated by globalization, the disease of uprootedness is in a malignant state across our world today in the twenty-first century. Echoing Tocqueville, Weil writes that “there are two poisons at work spreading this disease:”14 the first is money. “[M]oney destroys human roots where it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive.”15 Recall Tocqueville’s warning about man attaching himself to the goods of this world. Tocqueville says that it is this very desire for gain, for

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material well-being, that “must be considered as the first source of this secret restiveness revealed in the actions of Americans and of the inconstancy of which they give daily examples.”16 When we combine a heart bent on the goods of this world, the primacy of the individual, and a social structure that makes it easy for the individual to get up and move, we arrive at an acute state of the disease of uprootedness. Simone Weil mentions a second poison spreading the disease of uprootedness: modern education. She sees in modern education a stif ling and restrictive culture of education, “inf luenced by technical science, very strongly tinged with pragmatism, extremely broken up by specialization, entirely deprived of both contact with this world and, at the same time, of any window opening on to the world beyond.”17 In short, it is an education untethered from the metaphysical. This kind of education fills the student with facts but severs him from his surroundings—thereby uprooting him. Weil also addresses the way the disease of uprootedness affects the working class, she writes: Although they have remained geographically stationary, they have been morally uprooted, banished and then reinstated, as it were on sufferance, in the form of industrial brawn. Unemployment, is of course, an uprootedness raised to the second power … There is something woefully wrong with the health of a social system, when a peasant tills the soil with the feeling that if he is a peasant, it is because he wasn’t intelligent enough to become a schoolteacher.18 Without knowing it, Chris Arnade, in his book, Dignity, echoes Simone Weil— not just echoes, but f leshes out Weil’s ideas. In Dignity, Arnade distinguishes between two types of Americans: “back row” and “front row.” Front row Americans are fully democratized. As a group, they use “education to leave their hometowns.” They gather credentials, build resumes, and establish careers. Most important, they are mobile. They have moved frequently and are willing to do so again for the right opportunity. In front row America, “staying put was seen as failure,” he writes, In their minds, staying put is a mistake. If you stay, you limit your career, you limit your wealth, and you limit your intellectual growth. They also don’t fully understand the value of place because like religion, it is hard to measure. What is the value of staying near the family that raised you or in the valley where you were born?19 Back row Americans, on the other hand, exemplify what is left of traditional society in the United States. They are people with a strong commitment to their roots—their towns, their families, and their religion. Even though the factories they worked for moved their manufacturing overseas and the educated and

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well-to-do from their towns moved to prosperous cities, they have stayed. Their communities have been hollowed out, but they do not want to abandon them; they feel a moral duty to stay and try the best they can to rebuild. While the front row looks down on them, effectively saying, “just move,” they have a strong sense of place and attachment to their home and community. As a result, they find themselves left behind by the front row, literally and figuratively. While it is true that some in the back row cannot afford, financially, to leave for a job elsewhere, it is also true that many cannot afford to leave in a different sense—that is, they feel that by uprooting themselves from their homes, they would be unable to survive existentially. “To be uprooted,” Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others.”20 That place includes but is not limited to geography. But by virtue of roots, Simone Weil writes, we have “real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.”21 Losing the elements of the traditional society—common history, place, culture, language, religion, traditions, civilizational memory, and institutions—results not only in the breakdown of our political and social institutions, but also in the uprootedness of an entire people. The elements I laid out above provide the very conditions for this participation; without them, a human person is deprived of participating in the life of the community. Uprootedness is that deprivation. Tocqueville believed, and I am convinced, that only religion and family, as institutions, and as elements of the traditional society, could make democracy sustainable. In the encyclical Centesimus Annus, Pope John Paul II wrote this: Authentic democracy is possible only in a State ruled by law and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person … Nowadays there is a tendency to claim that agnosticism and skeptical relativism are the philosophy and the basic attitude which corresponds to democratic forms of political life … It must be observed in this regard that if there is no ultimate truth to guide and direct political activity, then ideas and convictions can easily be manipulated for reasons of power. As history demonstrates, a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism.22 The spirit of democracy, unchecked by religious and familial loyalty and obligation, isolates, unmoors, and uproots a people. Men of democratic society— unbounded by elements of traditional society, atomized, and lonely—feel themselves to be superf luous and fall to melancholy and madness. In this latestage democracy, man’s ability to act as a citizen breaks down, and “the man will get the better of the citizen.”23 Having arrived at this state of isolation, loneliness, uprootedness, and superf luousness—the four essential conditions of totalitarianism according to Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism—too fatigued to rule

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themselves, men will ask to be ruled. Hannah Arendt writes, “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”24

National identity Given the above analysis, how can we rebuild national identity in the twentyfirst century? Since the severing of ties within the spheres discussed above are now complete, it will be difficult to return to what we have historically known as national identity. Furthermore, knowing that much of the current upheaval in the West is a result of a deformed anthropology—that is, people have lost a true understanding of what it means to be a human person—and that this is coupled with the often deliberate erosion of personal and national identity out of an exaggerated fear of nationalism and on the account of diversity and tolerance, can national identity be reestablished? If so, how can it be done? There is a two-pronged solution. One is aimed at the rehumanization of Western people. The second is to reestablish a local and national identity with a view of how nations themselves have changed since the Second World War. The first step in the second endeavour is to correct the old understanding of nationalism. This means arresting the rise of a radicalized right—undermining it by giving society a healthy and true vision of national identity. It also means marginalizing the Left and their call to erase all distinct identities in the name of tolerance and diversity. It calls for a healthy and temperate understanding of a nation, teaching the importance of a good patriotism. The world of the twenty-first century must be rehumanized. This can be done by resurrecting the humanities in the universities. The humanities are concerned with the questions each society asks: what is the human person? What is a just society, and how can we build it? What is justice, and how do we pursue it? What is happiness, and how do we pursue it? And other perennial questions. Moreover, we must communicate to the society at large the value of these questions and the pursuit to answer them. The family must return to its primacy within society, and all efforts to strengthen the family should be supported. Faithful religious practice must be encouraged. This starts within families and their respective religious institutions. In other words, there must be an attempt to deliberately reattach these broken bonds. High and low culture in every nation must make space for their thinkers and writers to tell the stories of their people. They should not be censored and accused of bigotry and racism. The uniqueness of each nation’s culture, cuisine, music, theatre, and other arts, should be encouraged and subsidized. Nations must resist the siren call for open borders—a policy that leaves countries vulnerable to plunder by the rich and powerful, creating fertile soil for neocolonialism. It destroys the particularity of cultures and traditions. It exploits,

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draining brains and economies. It disperses and dissolves family and kin. It dehumanizes, reducing the human person to an economic unit. Borders should be distinct and respected. Local and national traditions, holidays, and all forms of culture should be resurrected, respected, taught, and practiced—not rejected and belittled. It is inhuman to despise who you are, what you are, and from whence you were born. One of the criticisms levelled against national identity is that it is natalist, racist, discriminating, and intolerant. That the love of land and desire for rootedness are at best provincial, at worse “blood and soil bigotry.” Yet, another criticism is that a strong national identity prevents nations from helping the mass of displaced people around the world. Aid for the displaced and refugees of the world must be taken seriously, as we do have obligation. However, we must resist the go-to solutions of what it means to help these people. New and creative ways should be developed to help the displaced masses, ways that do not undermine the responsibility of nations to take care of their own citizens. There are options that have been neglected; namely, actively working—through incentives, diplomatic, and humanitarian efforts—to stabilize countries from which many people are escaping. Advocating and emphasizing the right to stay, which is just as important, if not more important than the right to move, as it protects rootedness. These methods will help the West fulfil its humanitarian obligation to help the homeless masses of the world. Most importantly, the rulers of Western nations must resist the temptation to encourage regime change and to meddle in the affairs of other nations. Western nations must resist westernizing and fashioning non-Western countries in their image. Europe and England must not yield to the United States or capitulate to its pressure for joint action against other nations, especially non-Western nations. They must resist the attempts of the United States to pull them into wars. Finally, the people of the United States have a duty to remove from power all their rulers who use “national interest” as an excuse to wage war on other nations. Next, how can we have national identities where so many Western nations have become highly pluralistic? The first is to not allow immigrant groups to create a parallel system of jurisdiction and laws; this creates the potential of a nation within a nation. Freedom to practice religion and enjoy their respective traditions is reasonable, with the understanding that all of this should be done while respecting the laws of their adopted country and that their responsibility in their adopted country must be discharged. As difficult as assimilation and integration can be for non-Western people living in Western nations, they still have a duty to understand the culture and government of their adopted country and live within it with respect. In fact, this is the difficulty of the immigration issue today—that is, most immigrants come from traditional societies. Upon arrival they are asked to assimilate to a late-stage democracy. It should be no surprise that they recoil from doing so. Here is a compromise that I believe both sides can accept: immigrants need not become fully acculturated, in order to live as good

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citizens in their adoptive countries. They do not need to like the ways of their adoptive country, but they must respect them nonetheless.

Conclusion We see that national identity receded and the disease of uprootedness spread as the traditional society was supplanted by the democratic society. This uprootedness was driven by an increase in the following elements of the democratic society: atomization driven by individualism, extreme equality, and unlimited liberty. This has happened in direct relation to the decrease in the following elements of the traditional society: hierarchical structures in the institutions of the society, loyalty and obligations, unchosen relationships and their value, parental authority and the value of the family, common customs and culture, attachment to physical geographical places, and the value of and attachments to religious institutions. So, the increase in one drives the decrease in the other, and the decrease of the elements of the traditional society further increases the elements of the democratic society. How do we get national identity back in the twentyfirst century? By getting rootedness back. And how do we get rootedness back? By thickening the elements of the traditional society that work against isolation and loneliness. Every fight for identity, personal or national, is a push against the forces of totalitarianism. The goal is not so that we can return to some bygone age. Tocqueville wrote that the “democratic revolution … is an irresistible fact against which it would be neither desirable nor wise to struggle.”25 The goal, instead, is to get a more moderate mix of the two—one better suited for the wellbeing of the human person.

Notes 1 John Jay, Federalist No. 2, The Federalist Papers (New York, Signet Classic: 2003), 32. 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Secunda Secundae (Lander, The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine: 2012), 81. 3 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America translation Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: 2002), 483. 4 Ibid., 483. 5 Ibid., 403. 6 Ibid., 482. 7 Ibid., 483. 8 Ibid., 481. 9 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (New York, Routledge Classics: 2002), 17. 10 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America translation Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: 2002), 483. 11 Ibid., 512. 12 Ibid., 512. 13 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (New York, Routledge Classics: 2002), 43. 14 Ibid., 44.

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15 Ibid., 44. 16 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America translation Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press: 2002), 512. 17 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (New York, Routledge Classics: 2002), 45. 18 Ibid., 45-47. 19 Chris Arnade, Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America (New York, Sentinel: 2019), 152. 20 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Harcourt, Inc.: 1985), 475. 21 Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind (New York, Routledge Classics: 2002), 43. 22 Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, (Boston, Pauline Books & Media: 1991), 67. 23 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York, Dover: 2005), 140. 24 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Harcourt, Inc.: 1985), 478. 25 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America translation Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press).

Bibliography Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae Secunda Secundae. Vol. 2. Lander: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine. 2012. Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Classics. 2006. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt. 1985. Arendt, Hannah. “We Refugees.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, ed. Marc Robinson. Boston: Harvest Books (Harcourt, Brace, and Company). 1996. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2011. Arnade, Chris. Dignity: Seeking Respect In Back Row America. New York: Sentinel. 2019. Auden, W.H. The Age of Anxiety. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2011. Bottum, Joseph. An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America. New York: Image. 2014. Dougherty, Michael Brendan. My Father Left Me Ireland: An American Son’s Search For Home. New York: Sentinel. 2019. Eberstadt, Mary. How The West Really Lost God. Pennsylvania: Templeton Press. 2013. Jay, John. Federalist No. 2. The Federalist Papers. New York: Signet Classic. 2003. Manent, Pierre. Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy. Trans. John Waggoner. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 1996. Maritain, Jacques. Man and the State. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. 1998. Mitchell, Joshua. Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas In A Democratic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Nisbet, Robert. The Quest for Community. Delaware: ISI Books. 2014. Pope John Paul II. Centesimus Annus. Boston: Pauline Books & Media. 1991. Pope John Paul II. Fides et Ratio. Boston: Pauline Books and Media. 1998. Pope Pius XII. Exsul Familia Nazarethana.1952. Somin, Ilya. Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. St. John de Crèvecoeur, Hector J. Letters from an American Farmer. New York: Dover. 2005.

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Tocqueville de, Alexis. Democracy in America. Trans. Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop. Chicago: University of Chicago. 2002. Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. New York: Routledge Classics. 2002. Wisse, Ruth R. The Schlemiel As Modern Hero. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1971: 2002, 400.

10 HONOR, CYNICISM, AND LIBERAL EDUCATION1 Timothy W. Burns

Honors colleges and academic honors for excellence continue to exist in American colleges and universities, which has prompted me to make honor the subject of this brief chapter. It addresses honor’s place in liberal education, and a deep, if unacknowledged, threat to our students’ sense of honor and to the liberal education they come to our colleges and universities to obtain—a threat that I will call cynicism. I will first sketch a common sense understanding of honor and how this is ref lected in the classical presentation of honor and political life. I will then explain how this understanding was overthrown through the work of modern political philosophers, especially Thomas Hobbes, and how that overthrow has yielded a cynicism that one finds in our modern liberal democracies, a cynicism that threatens both liberal education and citizenship in our liberal regime. I close with a ref lection on a possible way out of this cynicism.

I What is the common sense understanding of honor, then? It is still recognizable in the granting of academic honors at graduation, the offers of membership in honor societies, the awarding of prizes for literature, science, and the arts, and honors civil and military for outstanding performance of duty. Honor is not a “good” that one covets, but a public recognition, bestowed upon one by others, as a confirmation of worth, a confirmation of the high or unusual respect due to someone, a confirmation of the public esteem that one has earned for excellence or for acting honorably, for putting the honorable thing above mere personal advantage or manifesting an estimable skill. Honor is something you earn, by acting honorably. And it is also something you can lose, by acting dishonorably or shamefully.

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Odds are, however, that most citizens and students have rarely thought of their lives as something that ought to be directed by honor. Honor is a word that is not used very much today. I will not say that it is moribund, but it does not have an immediate or deep tug on hearts. It sounds a bit archaic; it is even possible that when one hears the word honor, the speaker is attempting to put it in sneer quotes, inviting us to treat it with contempt. This is strange. For acting honorably is something that was once asked routinely of human beings. Those of former times and places would be quite puzzled by our ironic distance on honor. For much of human history, in fact, honor formed the very heart of the political, civic life of human beings. Consider, for example, this statement of the Roman Senator Decimus Brutus to Cassius, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: What is it you would impart to me? If it be aught for the general good, Set honor in one eye and death i’ th’ other, And I will look on both indifferently; For let the gods so speed me as I love The name of honor more than I fear death. (I.ii.84–89) Brutus would rather die than do anything dishonorable, so much so, that even his opponent, Marc Antony, who in a powerful and clever speech had managed to call Brutus’s honor into question, nonetheless says of Brutus upon his death, “This was the noblest Roman of them all” (V.v.68). Shakespeare provides us evidence of still another important component of premodern understanding of political life and honor in his tragedy of Macbeth, wherein the future Scottish king Malcolm lists for Macduff the “king-becoming graces” As justice, verity, temp’rance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude. When Malcolm declares that he has none of these virtues, but instead vices that would “pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,” he asks Macduff if he is fit to govern. “Fit to govern?” replies Macduff. “No, not to live.” (Macbeth IV.3.91–103). As we can see from this exchange, ruling offices, political offices were themselves considered to be honors to be bestowed on the most deserving or virtuous. Still, Shakespeare is a playwright; perhaps his art deceives us about pre-modern political life and honor. So, let us turn to the classic exposition of honor given by that ancient hard-headed empiricist, Aristotle. When discussing in the first book of his Ethics what the human good is, Aristotle makes a rather striking statement about honor:

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On the basis of the lives they lead, the many and crudest seem to suppose, not unreasonably, that the good and happiness are pleasure. And thus they cherish the life of enjoyment. For the especially prominent ways of life are three: the one just mentioned, the political, and, third, the contemplative. Now, in choosing a life of fatted cattle, the many appear altogether slavish … The refined and active, on the other hand, choose honor, for this is pretty much the end of the political life.2 Honor is the goal of political life. If you find that claim somewhat puzzling, wait until you hear what follows: “Further, people seem to pursue honor so that they may be convinced that they themselves are good; at any rate, they seek to be honored by the prudent, among those to whom they are known, and for their virtue. It is clear, then, that in the case of these people at least, virtue is superior” (1095b29–31). Political life appears to pursue honor only incidentally, and virtue, in reality. Honor is a confirmation of worth, and worth is shown through virtue. So, Aristotle can say of political life, as he does in the third book of his Politics, that “the political partnership must be regarded … as being for the sake of noble actions, not for the sake of [mere] living together” and that citizens honor with political offices precisely those who perform noble actions (Politics 1281a2–3, 29). But—hold on a minute. Was Aristotle hopelessly naïve? How in the world could he and other classical writers possibly think that political life is about honors bestowed on the virtuous? Did it never occur to them that human beings pursue not virtue but their own advantage—that they are power-seekers? Is it not sufficient to recall the words that Dinesh D’Sousa delivered in the fall of 2010, when he said that his listeners were still babies if they believed that anyone bears burdens or sacrifices for anything, like the survival and success of liberty? That they belonged in a nursery if they thought nations acted for anything but their self-interest? Why in the world should we take Aristotle’s apparently hopelessly naïve ancient account of honor and political life seriously? If the ancient account is indeed naïve, then there is no reason to take it seriously, any more than we would the lisping words of little children. What I would like to suggest is that classical political philosophers were not at all naïve in their account of honor and political life––that they had, in fact, every reason to think that it is those who readily, cynically brush it aside, who are naïve. For classical political philosophers were keenly aware of, and took it upon themselves to refute, an alternative understanding of honor, virtue, and political life: the understanding of the sophists. Even the words that I just quoted, from Aristotle’s Politics, are directed against the sophist Lycophron, who had argued that our life together is the result of nothing more than a social contract, an agreement that we all make not to harm one another so that we can the better pursue our own individual advantage. More broadly, sophists and sophistically trained rhetoricians taught that justice is for suckers, that might makes right. Here are the words of Thrasymachus, speaking in Plato’s Republic: “Now listen,” he said. “I say that the just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (Republic 338c1).

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And when Socrates demonstrates that rulers, however strong, need to care for the ruled, we are given the following exchange: “Thrasymachus, instead of answering, said, ‘Tell me, Socrates, do you have a wet nurse? … Because you know she neglects your sniveling nose and doesn’t give it the wiping you need, since it’s her fault you do not even recognize sheep or shepherd.’” “‘Because of what, in particular?’” I said. “‘Because you suppose shepherds or cowherds consider the good of the sheep or the cows and fatten them and take care of them looking to something other than their masters’ good and their own … you are unaware that justice and the just are really someone else’s good, the advantage of the man who is stronger and rules, and a personal injury to the man who obeys and serves.’”3 I will not go through the argument by which Socrates defeats Thrasymachus. I wish merely to note here the extraordinary thing that happens when Thrasymachus is defeated, as Socrates reports it: “And then I saw what I had not yet seen before—Thrasymachus blushing … when we had come to complete agreement about justice being virtue and wisdom, and injustice both vice and lack of learning.”4 What the blush tells Socrates, and us, is that there continues to be a deep attachment to honor in this cynical rhetorician. For all of his attack on justice and honor, Thrasymachus continues to think that there are deserving and undeserving, noble and shameful, just and unjust, and his life is, accordingly, lived in a deep confusion. He does not know what he is talking about. Nor was this abiding attachment of the cynical to honor something peculiar to the sophists and sophistically trained rhetoricians or something noticed only by classical political philosophers. One may say that it is even a major theme of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. The poem’s subject, Odysseus, was, Homer makes clear from the start, a wily man, even a consummate liar, who wished to save his own life and showed at times a remarkable selfishness or concern for his own advantage. Nonetheless, even he rejected the beautiful goddess Calypso’s offer of unaging immortality with her (V. 136; VII 257), as the poem shows us, because he proved to long not simply for his own immortal happiness but for an immortal happiness of which he had proven himself worthy; he’d rather die (I. 59) than be in a world without the possibility of such worth or honorableness, a world in which only those who subordinate their self-interest to honor or duty are held worthy of immortality.5 Nor was it only the poets who concurred with political philosophers in seeing a deep confusion present in the minds of cynics. Consider, for example, the chilling lines against honor and justice that Thucydides, the first political historian,

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has the Athenians deliver against the Melians’ proclaimed hope in divine justice, in his famous Melian dialogue: “We opine with respect to the divine, and with respect to human beings we know clearly, that on account of an unremitting necessity of nature, where one is stronger, he rules. And neither laying down this law ourselves, nor being the first to be guided by it, but taking it as it is and will forever be when we have left it behind, we submit to it, knowing that you and others, should you become as powerful as we, would do the same. And so concerning the divine, we have reason not to fear that we shall be disadvantaged.”6 But a moment later, the Athenians show that they are quite irritated to hear the Melians say that the Spartans will come to their aid. The Spartans, they point out, ever act for their own interest while talking of justice; the Spartans hold whatever pleases them to be noble, and whatever favours their interest to be just; they do not run the risks that go with the just and the noble.7 The implication of this disparagement of Sparta is that the Athenians do run such risks––risks, that is, that are not necessary and that are noble because they entail a contempt for a fully calculated course of safe, self-interested action. The Athenians are irritated at the Melians’ assumption that the calculating Spartans could ever truly act honorably, as the Athenians believe themselves to do. Now, it was not only this deep confusion in cynical human beings that was noticed by the ancients. Of much greater moment, the ancients saw that this confusion acted as a kind of shield or force field against any genuine liberal education or self-knowledge. Nowhere does this come out more clearly than in a dialogue of Plato called Alcibiades I. There, Socrates approaches a young man of outstanding political promise, whom he had long had an interest in speaking with, just as the young man is about to enter political life. And Socrates causes this ambitious young man to admit that he does not really know what justice is. But, when Socrates argues that it would be madness for someone in that condition to enter political life, here is what our promising young man replies: “I would suppose, Socrates, that the Athenians and the other Greeks rarely deliberate as to which things are more just or more unjust; for they believe such things are evident, and so they let these matters go and consider which things will be advantageous to those practicing them. For just and advantageous things are not, I suppose, the same, but many have profited from committing great injustices, and I suppose there are others who performed just acts that were not to their advantage.”8 Because what is just and what is advantageous are as different as they can possibly be, one can forget about justice and concentrate on advantage, according to this youth. Now a little later in the same dialogue, the youth agrees that all just

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things are noble (115a8–9), and that noble things are sometimes disadvantageous or harmful to oneself. Then Socrates asks if the youth considers courage noble, and he agrees that it is. He further claims that courage is so good a thing, despite the fact that rescuing a wounded or dead comrade from the battlefield could lead to wounds and death of oneself, that, as he says, “I wouldn’t choose to live if I were a coward” (115b–d). So, as in the case of Thrasymachus, Odysseus, and the Athenians at Melos, the easy-going cynicism of this young man proves to hide an abiding attachment to the noble and to justice. This particular case was, however, most revealing for Socrates, and hence for us. For as Plato delicately shows, the youth in question, Alcibiades, had adopted cynicism, or lack of seriousness about justice, precisely to hide from himself an examination of what it is, fearing the consequence for himself of such an examination. Repeatedly in the dialogue, a very peculiar thing happens. Socrates must stop Alcibiades from saying, upon agreement, “yes, yes, sure Socrates, that is what you say,” (112e1–113c, 114e1) or “according to your argument” (129b5). In the end, Socrates quietly gives up on this talented young man. That is, Alcibiades was prevented from benefiting from perhaps the world’s greatest teacher because he guarded himself from that teacher’s probing questions by means of his cynicism, by his easy-going claim that we are all just out for our advantage, and by his inability to take seriously the attachment to justice and honor that was in fact moving him and that stemmed, in turn, from his very deepest concerns: his awareness of his own mortality. So, Alcibiades was never able to learn from Socrates what, as he sensed, he needed to learn if he were to understand anything about himself and his world.9

II Still, if Socrates and Aristotle were confronted by such cynicism, not only in Alcibiades but in the sophists, what does the cynicism of the sophists of the ancient world have to do with our situation today and with liberal education? It has everything to do with our situation, for the following reason. A version of the sophists’ social contract understanding of justice, and the cynicism that goes with and underlies that understanding, is, in fact, what much of our political life is founded upon, quite deliberately. The writings of modern political philosophers eventually brought into being the political world that we inhabit; their arguments undergird and inform our political order, still dominate our thinking, and have helped to make us cynical. A full demonstration of this would require a careful examination of some key texts of these modern political philosophers, beginning with Machiavelli and going on to his student, Francis Bacon, and Bacon’s sometime secretary, Thomas Hobbes, and then to that great student of Hobbes, John Locke. These texts can provide a fuller realization of how we got here and of how we might, through the study of old books, begin to find our way to some clarity about our situation. In the interest of space, I will limit myself to a brief encapsulation of what those writings could show us.

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We live in a democracy, but it is a peculiar kind of democracy. It is a liberal democracy. By that I do not mean to draw a distinction between liberal and conservative. I use the term liberal in an older, European sense. Liberal democracy is a type of political regime whose foundation extends back only to the middle of the seventeenth century. It is called liberal democracy because it aims to leave those who live under it free (liber) to do as they wish. That is, it deliberately abstains from giving its citizens any direction about the best way of life or the honorable life. For example, while pre-modern or pre-liberal democracies had public religion and demanded pious devotion to the gods or God (Socrates, for example, was put to death in the Athenian democracy of 399 B.C. on the charge of impiety and corruption of youth), liberal democracy forbids the establishment of religion. Government in liberal democracy confines itself to securing life and freedom from others; it leaves us alone to pursue happiness as each of us sees fit, rather than guiding us in accord with a common opinion about what a good or honorable life is. It is meant to provide a freedom from, not a freedom for. It, thus, brings into being a huge private realm in which we are free to live as we wish. It brings into being a new distinction between the state, on one hand, and society, on the other. Most of our lives are taken up with activities in society, that vast web of private relations, rather than in public service, office, or official duties. And the foundation of this new kind of regime in which we live is a new understanding of justice, an understanding that we have known since childhood: individual rights. The older understanding of justice, which rarely used the word “right” in the plural, entailed a devotion to a common good and honored service to the common good as a just desert. Rights, on the other hand, are essentially selfish, justified claims that we make against one another. They do not promote common reasoning and common action but entail a demand that you be left alone. Government is conceived of as a means of securing the rights of individuals so that we can live in peace and comfort. It is easy, I hope, to notice a major difference between the older political life, which, at its best, aimed at honor and life led according to individual rights. Honor calls one to a high end, to a noble life; it demands sacrifice, and the deeds it inspires provoke admiration in those who witness them. Rights, on the other hand, encourage an indifference to questions of noble and base, high and low; “individual rights,” to repeat, would have us leave one another alone to do as we wish. When we accept the notion of individual rights, we are encouraged to treat claims about what is honorable, about how we should all be leading our lives, as merely personal, indeed, as dubious, ungrounded, and perhaps imperialistic. We elevate individual choice over devotion to any alleged common good or noble service. One sometimes hears, to be sure, that rights entail responsibilities or duties to others—and this is true—but the responsibilities that come with rights are always contingent and derivative: I will respect your rights if you respect mine; I will leave you alone if you leave me alone. The duties that come with rights are, in truth, no more than long-range calculations of interest. So, when we use the idiom of rights, when we speak of justice in terms of rights, as we have

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since Thomas Hobbes taught us to do so, we put the autonomous individual first. When rights are primary and duties secondary, the individual’s freedom from any common or high moral purpose becomes paramount, and responsibilities become only those things that we all agree to, or construct, in order to remain safe and secure from one another. And because of this, rights, as we like to say, are inalienable; unlike honor, you do not earn them, and you cannot give them up or lose them. There are obviously great public advantages to this rights-based understanding of justice. It tends, however, to produce a large private sphere of anonymous individuals pursuing material goods and entertaining themselves with distractions of the mind and body. More importantly, for our purposes today, behind and informing a rights-based politics is the same cynicism that we saw in the ancient sophists. Let me try to bring that out for you. I mentioned that the doctrine of “inalienable natural rights” first appears in a work by Thomas Hobbes, called Leviathan (in 1651). It is no accident that, in the same work and before introducing the doctrine of rights, Hobbes gives us the first disquisition on “power” in the history of political philosophy; he is the first to claim that all human relations are power relations. As we have seen, it was not always so. The reason why is clear from the opening sentence of Hobbes’s chapter on power: “the power of a man,” Hobbes says, “is his present means to attain some future apparent good.”10 Former political philosophers had not spoken of power in the way Hobbes does because of that last part of Hobbes’s formulation, i.e., the good, for which power is a mere means. The ends, the determination of which ends are best for us, was primary, and the determination of the appropriate means to those ends was secondary. If the end of life, for example, is being in first place in the WWF, or appearing on Howard Stern’s show, the means to this end will obviously differ from the means to the life of the citizen, the philosopher, the priest, etc. Power was, therefore, formerly considered to be for a particular this or that, not something one could talk about wholesale, as Hobbes taught us to do, or as something homogeneous. But, if there is no good by which one can judge the means, then power itself becomes primary and homogeneous, like money. You never know what you might want, so get as much means to anything as possible, in whatever form you can: money, friends, reputation, etc. Similarly, as Hobbes argues, a free market of buyers determines the price of goods; there is no just price, no true worth of anything. So, it is no surprise that (in Chapter 11 of Leviathan) Hobbes argues that there is indeed no finis ultimus, no summum bonum, or highest good for human beings. After one desire is satisfied, another takes its place; life is a leaky sieve, with a constant need to be refilled; there is always another desire around the bend. Hence, as Hobbes says, “I put in the first place for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”11 It is on this basis that Hobbes lays out the kind of political life that I sketched a moment ago, that is, rights-based political life. Political life must take its direction, not from any (allegedly arbitrary) opinions of what the best life is for human

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beings, but from a consideration of what we can all agree on: the worst thing, the summum malum or greatest evil: death. Fear of violent death is the foundation of that new, rights-based justice with which we are all so familiar. The argument runs like this. We all have a compelling fear of violent death; we cannot help having it. If we cannot help it, we cannot be blamed for what it compels us to do, for justice does not ask the impossible. Therefore, we have a right to life, and to everything that we are compelled to do in order to secure ourselves. And because this compelling fear of death is not something we can give up, or alienate from ourselves, our right to life is an inalienable right. Because none of us can safely secure this right on our own, we make a deal, form a social contract; I will restrict my liberty to all things, and you restrict yours. We lay down our natural right to all things in order to get “rights,” i.e., leftover claims that we can all agree to. The duties or obligations that we have to one another are, then, simply what we see as necessary to obtain as much as possible of whatever we desire. The final cause or end for which human beings set up the state, Hobbes argues, is “the foresight of their own preservation, and a more contented life thereby.”12 The great task of rights-based politics is to make human beings indifferent to the truth about the various and contradictory opinions that they have heard since kindergarten: to have human beings agree to disagree, to eliminate from political life those competing opinions of human beings about good and bad, just and unjust, honorable and base, eminent and common, which the ancients had claimed were at the heart of a genuine political life.

III This, then, is our situation: we live in a world transformed by political philosophers whose teachings are, in some important respects, not different from the teachings of the ancient sophists. It is hardly surprising, then, that we find ourselves not only blessed with material abundance and with individual liberty, but also awash in cynicism. We tend to take for granted, for example, that politics is all about “power;” our newsstands are filled with books on power and how to get it, and our analyses of human actions are often couched in terms of “power.” We see voice-overs of speeches by news anchors who would have us not hear what our elected leaders are saying because the news anchors are anxious to tell us what advantage our elected leaders are trying to get out of their noble-sounding speeches. And we give in to a tendency to blame “the system;” we give ourselves over to an unreasonable suspicion of noble service and devotion to the common good. Such cynicism is there in spades on the libertarian right. As Marx noticed, the bourgeoisie is ever ripping away the veils of all claims to worth or desert, disclosing naked self-interest and the cash nexus.13 But the left is not safe from cynicism either; it simply takes there a special form. We see it, indeed, even in Marx, who too easily sees self-interest in all who do not possess the alleged true consciousness, and who dismisses his opponents’ ideas as merely the ideological product of the bourgeois modes of production.14 Those on the left arrogate to

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themselves a superior consciousness and exempt themselves, thereby, not only from rational debate, but from the findings of the cynicism that they employ on everyone else. If what Socrates shows us in the case of Alcibiades is true, there is a deep need to liberate ourselves from this cynicism if we are to make any genuine headway in our liberal education. And, as Alcibiades made some small progress when he confessed to admiring courage or valor, perhaps, we, too, might begin to liberate ourselves from our cynicism if we consider and ref lect on an honor accorded in the American military: the Medal of Honor. It is the highest award for valor in action against an enemy force that can be bestowed on an individual serving in the armed services of the United States. It is generally presented to its recipient by the president in the name of Congress. The award is untainted by the ugliness of racism: There have been 87 African-American MOH recipients, 41 HispanicAmerican recipients, 22 native American recipients. And the honor is no mere empty convention. An indication that it transcends even conventional military rank is shown by something that we civilians might have some difficulty noticing. Members of the armed forces typically salute one another by rank: the person of lower rank initiates the salute and is saluted in turn by the person of higher rank. Not in this case. For while nothing in American military manuals requires it, by tradition, all other military personnel—even the highest ranking—initiate the salute. That is, by custom, a general salutes a private if the private has received the Medal of Honor. But what is it about valor that should cause high-ranking officers to bow in this way to its possessor, to honor its possessor? We might better understand it from an account provided to us by former Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Paul Kelley. Back in 1982, General Kelly visited critically injured marines in an Air Force hospital after the invasion of Grenada. He wrote of a soldier he met there, a young marine with more tubes going in and out of his body than I have ever seen in one body. He couldn’t see very well. He reached up and grabbed my four stars, just to make sure I was who I said I was. He held my hand with a firm grip. He was making signals, and we realized he wanted to tell me something. We put a pad of paper in his hand––and he wrote “Semper Fi” [shorthand for the motto of the Marine Corps––“Semper Fidelis,” meaning “ever faithful”].15 That we are moved by that story––as I hope you are––tells us that we, too, continue to have a sense of honor, to admire devotion precisely when it requires sacrifice, or is not manifestly advantageous. We need to remind ourselves of that, and we need to remind ourselves that a debunking cynicism is appropriate only with base things. It is helpful, in this regard, to remember that there are two classes of human beings who are, respectively, above and below merely cynical or propagandistic, manipulative appeals to honor: the blockhead, and the genuinely

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honorable. And when college professors would induce students to take pleasure in their own sly knowingness and tell them, cynically, that their vote does not really count, that they are naïve if they don’t realize that all politics is simply about power or all about interests, that “the real world” is all about whose ox is being gored, or that they are naïve if they hold themselves to honorable, high standards––if professors should do that, then students should steel their nerve and ask that professor: “tell me, how do you explain your own activity? On what grounds do you exempt yourself from your own cynical analysis? Or perhaps you do not exempt yourself. Perhaps you freely admit that you are out for your own advantage? Do you, then, plagiarize scholarly work when you think you can get away with it? Or do you comport yourself honorably? Do you recognize unbending limits to the pursuit of your self-interest? If not, why in the world should I trust anything you say?” And if their professor cannot answer these questions, the students should drop the class, leave him to his parched desert of cold vulgarity and find more thoughtful, less confused professors who know, as C.S. Lewis says, that “a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”16 But more importantly, we need to begin to take our sense of honor seriously, to have a certain intellectual probity or honesty in this regard––to acknowledge that we feel it and to allow our deeds to be directed by it. Yet, if, as I have argued, we have been raised in a political order whose doctrine of justice tends to promote cynicism, what place can honor really have in our lives? Where are we to look, in our liberal political order, for the support that honor requires? Or should we devote ourselves to another political order, one more supportive of honor?

IV In an effort to find our bearings, it may be helpful to take another, final look at the argument for the doctrine of inalienable natural rights that has been bequeathed to us. As we have seen, the argument wishes to secure the primacy of inalienable, self-regarding claims and, thereby, reduce all duties (or “natural laws”) to subsequent, prudential rules of reason that show individuals the best means of securing those claims. It rests on the assertion that whatever steps are deemed necessary by individuals, in dangerous circumstances, for their preservation are not only “generally allowed” but “ought to be allowed.” Here, we need to pause and ref lect for a moment. This “ought” is an appeal to justice; it can have no meaning without an appeal to a perceived, pre-existing moral law, one that obliges us to serve a common good, a law that, in normal circumstances, forbids many voluntary acts, such as murder and theft, that (in the words of Hobbes) would “augment” our “dominion.” This appeal is at odds with the first part of the argument, rendering it incoherent. The argument states, on one hand, that we are compelled to seek our own interest, by a permanent necessity—so permanent that it justifies “inalienable” selfish claims—even as it makes, on the other, a quiet or surreptitious appeal to an obligatory law that presumes our freedom

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from such necessity, a freedom and a duty to act for the common good, limiting and sacrificing our own good in accord with it.17 But the argument’s incoherent or self-contradictory nature, paradoxically, offers some ground for hope of a renewed sense of honor within our liberal regime. That hope is visible in Leo Strauss’s extended ref lection on Isaiah Berlin’s case for the “negative freedom” secured by the liberal doctrine of rights, or the (permissive) “freedom to live as one prefers” that, as I indicated above, is at the heart of the morality of modern Western democracies. Strauss notes in Berlin’s argument a version of the contradiction I’ve just spelled out: Berlin’s case for “freedom from,” he points out, simultaneously declares the non-existence of any and all moral absolutes that would guide one to a “freedom for,” and claims that there is a morally absolute right to be left alone.18 As an aspect of this very incoherence, however, the liberal democratic doctrine of rights preserves within it, and must preserve, an older, common sense moral reasoning, the moral reasoning that takes honor as its guide. Strauss points out that Berlin knows, concerning the mere “negative freedom,” that “even in the modern Western world it is cherished by some individuals rather than by large masses; there is no necessary connection between negative freedom and democracy.”19 That is, most citizens in liberal democracies continue to be moved by a positive notion of freedom and, hence, of excellence and the honor we bestow on excellence. They continue to respond to appeals to honor, greatness, and sacred duty and all that those appeals imply. Far from closing us off to such appeals, the doctrine of rights, with its implicit appeal to moral law, actually depends on them. We, thus, begin to discern within liberal democracy’s doctrine of rights the necessarily abiding character of the pre-modern, common sense moral reasoning, the reasoning that elicits devotion to honor and to the virtues that honor confirms, and even the full f lowering of honorable devotion in the speeches and deeds of its best, most honorable citizens. The great freedom that liberal democracy’s doctrine of rights provides depends on this older moral reasoning; such reasoning is ever present, in crude or refined forms, in the private lives of citizens, within their own nations, and its cultivation leads directly to everyday honoring of admirable deeds. For the very freedom within the cultural, subpolitical, or private sphere of liberal democracy provides the opportunity not only for degraded forms of life but also for honorable ones, lives open to the call of honor and closed not only to tyranny but also to the depravations brought on when license displaces liberty. Liberal education can help to found a community of human beings, within each nation, who heed that call. But as we have seen, to do so, liberal education must guard itself against cynicism, of the right and of the left. It must resist the cynical subordination of liberal education to the market—to the notion that students attend college to pile up credits and internships and get a degree so that they can get a good job and make money—or its subordination to the cynicism of the left’s historicism—away from students’ sense of personal responsibility and toward an aggrieved hostility

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to “the system” thrown up by History and its benighted actors. The end of education is neither a job nor a woefully ignorant activism that replaces thought with cardboard cutouts of our fellow humans allegedly acting from within a false consciousness or a mis-constructed view of the march of History. The end must be a liberal education—one that becomes a free human being, a liber, rather than a slave. The end is an education that becomes a human being who, as Frederick Douglass has made poignantly clear in his Narrative, will have on its account sufficient character and judgement to rule himself or herself within a nation of like-minded human beings so that one is trustworthy and not in need, as slaves were once held (and forced) to be, of being watched over and reminded of the fearful consequence of doing what a master forbids. It is an education of human beings, rich or poor, who would be trustworthy and free. It is choice-worthy as a high or noble common enterprise that can fulfil a student’s human potential— however useful it might be for other things. For this reason, to think of liberal education as a means and not an end is like encouraging someone to study violin so that he or she could have limber fingers. And—to continue this simile––what conductor of an orchestra would wish to have to check to see if its members were only pretending that they were playing music, rather than guiding them to playing well? But to take advantage of the opportunity that liberal education offers to our future citizens, we need, all of us, to stop being ashamed of our sense of honor, to stop worrying that it is not cool; we need to take it seriously. Only then will we really be able to begin the task of liberal education, of submitting our opinions and beliefs to the scrutiny of reason. Liberal education can then even be something more estimable than the examples of military honor and bravery that I cited above. A liberal education is unlikely, to be sure, to see any fitting monuments raised on its behalf by a grateful nation. But it is, nonetheless, more estimable, as even the deeds of the bravest and most honored soldiers will tell us, if we listen to them. Soldiers who fight bravely do not, after all, wish for more war; they seek victory and that means they must seek an end to war: peace. There must, then, be a peaceful activity for which they fight and sacrifice––an end or purpose to which even and precisely as soldiers they are bound to look up and to admire, a peacetime life that is more admirable than soldiering, however brave and however clarifying it is of what honor entails. And what is that life? It cannot be money-making. We may congratulate those who acquire wealth; we do not admire them unless they become generous philanthropists and prudently give the money away. What, then, is that peaceful activity to which we look up, and that should and sometimes does direct and order all of our other activities, civic and private? It is the life of the mind, a life of ref lection, a life that begins with liberal education. Nothing is more admirable, more honorable, than a humane life of thought and of thoughtful action. And nothing could be more shameful than squandering the opportunity one has been given, by the efforts of so many, to lead that life while one can and to act on the basis of it when we are called, as we always are, to do so.

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Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as the Skidmore College Honors Forum John Ramsey Lecture, February 16, 2007. 2 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1095b19–24. Translated by Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 3 Plato, Republic 343a3–c6, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968). 4 Ibid, 350d2–4. 5 For a fuller examination of this theme, see the excellent short article by David Bolotin, “The Concerns of Odysseus: An Introduction to the Odyssey.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 17.1 (Fall, 1989). 6 Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 5.105. 7 Ibid, 105.3, 107, 109. 8 Plato, Alcibiades I, 113d1–8, translated by Carnes Lord, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, Thomas L. Pangle, editor (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 9 See Christopher Bruell, On the Socratic Education (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 19–38. On the authenticity of the Platonic authorship of this dialogue, see Thomas Pangle, The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), “Editor’s Introduction,” 1–20. Consider also the sense that the dialogue helps to make of the speech of Alcibiades in the Symposium (212d–222b). 10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley, ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), 10.1 (p. 50). 11 Leviathan, Curley ed., XI.1-2 (pp. 57-58). 12 Ibid., 17.1 (p. 106). 13 See Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Part I: “Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” 14 Ibid. 15 Quoted by Ronald Reagan in “Address to the Nation on Events in Lebanon and Grenada,” Oct. 27, 1983. Accessed at: https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/s peech/address-nation-events-lebanon-and-grenada. 16 The Abolition of Man, Chapter 1, “Men Without Chests.” 17 See Hobbes, Leviathan, 13.4 with 18.3, and De Cive, 1.8–1.9. The moral character of this right is not established or claimed by (the more consistent) Spinoza, who makes right coextensive with power. See Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, ch. 16, and Political Treatise 2.4, and see his correspondence with Jarig Jelles, December 14, 1673 (ep. 50): “With regard to political theory, the difference between Hobbes and myself, which is the subject of your inquiry, consists in this, that I always preserve the natural right in its entirety, and I hold that the sovereign power in a State has right over a subject only in proportion to the excess of its power over that of a subject. This is always the case in a state of nature.” Spinoza, Complete Works, Michael Morgan, ed., Samuel Shirley, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002), 891-92. 18 “‘Relativism,’” Chapter 7 of Relativism and the Study of Man, Helmet Schoeck and James W. Wiggins, editors (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1961), 135–57. 19 “‘Relativism,’” 136.

Works Cited Aristotle. 2011. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bolotin, David. 1989. “The Concerns of Odysseus: An Introduction to the Odyssey.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 17.1. Bruell, Christopher. 1999. On the Socratic Education. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Hobbes, Thomas. 1983. De Cive, the English version. Edited by Howard Warrender. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, Thomas, 1994. Leviathan. Edited by Edwin Curley. Indianapolis: Hackett. Lewis, C.S. 1947. The Abolition of Man. New York: Macmillan. Marx, Karl. 1978. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Edited by Robert Tucker, The Marx-Engles Reader, 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Pangle, Thomas. 1987. “Editor’s Introduction.” The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Plato. 1968. Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books. Plato. 1987. Alcibiades I. Translated by Carnes Lord, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, Edited by Thomas L. Pangle. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Spinoza, Benedict. 1951. The Theological Political Treatise and The Political Treatise. Translated by Robert Harvey Monro Elwes. Dover. Spinoza, Benedict. 1955. On the Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics and Correspondence. Translated by Robert Harvey Monro Elwes. Dover Shakespeare, William. 1973. “Julius Caesar.” The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Miff lin. Shakespeare, William. 1973. “Macbeth.” The Riverside Shakespeare. New York: Houghton Miff lin. Thucydides. 1942. Historiae. Edited. by Henry Stuart Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

11 LOVING ONE’S OWN Pathway to justice or retrograde tribalism? Leah Bradshaw

I begin this chapter with a discussion of George Grant, a Canadian political thinker with whom few outside the borders of Canada are familiar, but who was a towering figure in Canadian political thought throughout the period from 1965 to 1985. Most students in political science departments in Canada in these two decades had some familiarity with the works of George Grant, usually with his widely successful, polemical, and, frankly, cult-like little book Lament for a Nation.1 A lot of this short book is preoccupied with disentangling the debacle of John Diefenbaker’s tenure as Canada’s Prime Minister. Diefenbaker was a Western Canadian, a populist, by all accounts (including Grant’s) rather bumbling and unsophisticated, and deeply antipathetic to the inf luence of the United States on Canadian policy. Diefenbaker came to power on a huge majority, and, within 5 years, his party and his particular brand of nationalism was soundly defeated. What Diefenbaker is most remembered for in political circles is his stand against placing nuclear warheads by the United States on Canadian soil. Diefenbaker’s defence of Canadian sovereignty, at the height of the Cuban missile crisis and in the midst of the Cold War, was interpreted by many as an act of disloyalty and bad faith. George Grant defends Diefenbaker strenuously in his Lament for a Nation. “Diefenbaker was accused of anti-Americanism, but he was surely being honest to his own past when he said that he thought of his policies as being pro-Canadian, not anti-American.”2 What exactly were Diefenbaker’s “pro-Canadian” sentiments? Grant identifies them as rooted in “a profound—if romantic—sense of historical continuity.”3 There was a vague loyalty to the Britishness of Canadian institutions. “The Britishness of Canada,” according to Grant, was more than economic. It was a tradition that stood in firm opposition to the Jeffersonian liberalism so dominant in the United States. By its

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nature this conservatism was not philosophically explicit, although it had shaped our institutions and had penetrated into the lives of generations of Canadians.4 Canadian nationalism, for Grant, meant a greater trust of the public good, a kind of collective responsibility that was categorically distinct from the state protection of individual freedoms or rights. “In our early expansions,” Grant claimed, this conservative nationalism expressed itself in the use of public control in the political and economic spheres. Our opening of the West differed from that of the United States, in that the law of the central government was used more extensively, and less reliance was placed on the free settler. Until recently, Canadians have been much more willing to use governmental control over economic life to protect the public good against private freedom.5 Order, restraint, and public good: these are the three things that Grant comes back to again and again as the core commitments of Canadian nationalism. While Grant explicitly connects these commitments to British conservatism, there is also a sense in which Grant’s affirmations of the public good lend themselves to being embraced by those on the left. And, indeed, Lament for a Nation became a kind of “little red book” for the nationalist, anti-American, socialist voices of the 1960s. Grant’s endearment to the left in the 1960s in Canada is probably best captured in a series of televised exchanges that Grant had with Gad Horowitz. As Arthur Davis and Henry Roper characterize Horowitz, he was a figure of the left who had become prominent in Canadian academic and political circles because of his ideas on Canadian identity. Horowitz declared Grant to be “the prime example of the Canadian phenomenon of the ‘red tory’” at the “highest level,” a “philosopher who combines elements of socialism and toryism so thoroughly integrated that it is impossible to say that he is a proponent of either one or the other.”6 In one of these exchanges, Grant is upfront about his socialist leanings. When Horowitz asks Grant how he would build a society that is better than that in the United States, Grant answers: I would say that you have to move towards something like a socialist society in which the public good takes precedence over the individual right to be free … What I mean is a society in which the public good is much more emphasized against the rights of people to make money than it is now in the United States or in present-day Canada. I have no hesitation about that.7 The label red tory is one that stuck to George Grant, and, to this day, the term survives in Canada as a depiction of someone who embodies both conservative (in the British tradition) and socialist predilections. Personally, I think the

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phrase is still very useful in capturing how the Canadian electorate can swing from support for a Conservative party to the New Democratic Party and back again (as we saw recently in the province of Alberta). This is a pattern that we do not see south of the border, where people tend to stay with party alliances. But Grant himself did not like the assignation. In conversation with George Grant, David Cayley asked Grant what he thought of being called a red tory, and Grant replied: “it’s not a term I like very much … but you know, if one goes into the public world, anybody can call you anything, and I think quite rightly. I’m not trying to stop them.”8 When Cayley prods Grant further, asking if Grant’s antipathy to this label was because Grant’s concerns were always “related more to national survival than to some a priori ideological position,” Grant responds: “of course.”9 If we take Grant at his word, the ideological poles of conservative and socialist meant far less to him that the matter of national identity. To preserve a national identity, Grant was pretty clear that you need to maintain the triad of “goods” that were mentioned earlier: order, restraint, and a sense of the public good. These goods could be at least partially sustained by conservative or socialist policies, but they emphatically could not be sustained by liberal ones. Our next task, then, is to look more closely at why Grant had so much disdain for liberalism. In Lament for a Nation, Grant makes it clear that his book is a lament for something lost, not a call to action for preservation. Many of his readers, Horowitz among them, did not read the book this way and regarded the book as a manifesto for resistance to American empire and capitalism. But Grant thought this was a losing battle. He did not think the nation of Canada could withstand the forces of what he called “continentalism.” To the continentalists, he wrote, “democracy has not been interpreted solely in a political sense, but has been identified with social equality, contractual human relations, and the society open to all men, regardless of race or creed or class.”10 Continentalism, he claimed, requires that nationalisms be overcome … In moving to larger units of government, we are moving in the direction of world order. If Canadians refuse this, they are standing back from the vital job of building a peaceful world. After the horrors that nationalistic wars have inf licted on this century, how can one have sympathy for nationalism?11 “Continentalism,” for Grant, was inseparable from the conviction that we are living in an age of progress, and he often iterated how difficult it is to argue with progress: Has it not been in the age of progress that disease and overwork, hunger and poverty, have been drastically reduced? Those who criticize our age must at the same time contemplate pain, infant mortality, crop failures in isolated areas, and the sixteen-hour day.12

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At the same time, though, Grant urged that we must think simultaneously about “the increasing outbreaks of impersonal ferocity, the banality of existence in technological society, the pursuit of expansion as an end in itself.” Grant feared that the interference in nature, human and otherwise, by technological means, could, in fact, mean that man in his excessive pride was in danger of corrupting his very being. “It is feasible to wonder whether modern assumptions may be basically inhuman.”13 The theme of interconnectedness among liberalism, progress, and technology was one that pre-occupied Grant long after he wrote Lament for a Nation and is expanded in a series of essays collected into published volumes: Technology and Empire, English Speaking Justice, and Technology and Justice. In English-Speaking Justice, Grant examines the foundations of liberalism in the English-speaking tradition and expresses his concerns that what was most noble in that tradition has been corroded by the impetus toward progress and technological mastery. “Liberalism in its generic form,” Grant writes, “is surely something that all decent men accept as good—‘conservatives’ included.”14 Grant identifies an essential element of English-speaking justice that he regards as the noble core of liberalism: the institutions of the English-speaking world at their best have been much more than a justification of progress in the mastery of human and nonhuman nature. They have affirmed that any regime to be called good, and any progress to be called good, must include liberty and consent.15 However, the general tenor of this book is that liberalism thus defined does not have the strength, or the solidity of foundation, to resist its erosion by the more powerful impetus of technological advance. According to Grant, it is in the heartlands of the English-speaking empire that the more fundamental facts appear which put into question the mutual interdependence of technological and liberal reason. The chief of these facts is that the development of technology is now increasingly directed toward the mastery of human beings … technology organizes a system which requires a massive apparatus of artisans concerned with the control of human beings. Such work as behavior modification, population control by abortion and genetic engineering are extreme examples.16 The drive toward technological advance and its connection to progress is, by definition, according to Grant, a universal directive, and one that eclipses any parochial loyalties to one’s people or place. These universal directives are bolstered by the liberal language of rights, insofar as that language is strictly contractual, international, and non-specific. Grant’s friend and colleague Louis Greenspan wrote of English-Speaking Justice that “one of the primary dramas of ideas throughout the book is the tension between the growth of technology

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and a liberalism for which contractualism is becoming more and more central.” Greenspan defines contractualism as “a system of relations between calculating self-interested individuals” and, he notes wryly, that, “in such a conception, the basic loyalties to the state, loyalties that would make one ready to die for one’s country, seem as inappropriate as the readiness to die for McDonald’s hamburgers.”17 Greenspan’s summary of Grant on the unravelling of liberalism helps us to see how starkly Grant contrasted liberalism with the kind of conservatism (red toryism?) that underscored Grant’s lament for Canada. Liberalism, as it has become entangled with the commitment to progress and married to technology, abandons the three things that Grant thought were essential to a healthy national narrative: order, restraint, and a sense of the public good. Now, I want to turn back to Grant’s defence of the “love of one’s own” as the wellspring of political virtue. We have established that, while Grant embraced some elements of what we would term broadly conservatism and socialism, Grant himself rejected these labels. He regarded them as ideological, and he was not a man interested in attaching himself to abstract ideological concepts. But he consistently came back to this notion of the “love of one’s own.” Liberalism has failed us, Grant thought, for a number of reasons, but at the heart of the matter is Grant’s conviction that human beings do not become good or even better by attaching themselves to ideas, such as individual right. They become good, or better, by being habituated in communities of belonging. Whatever Grant may have maintained about his Lament for a Nation, specifically his consistent claims that this was not a call to action for a cause already lost, and despite his somewhat ambivalent stance toward the achievements of progress under liberalism, he never stopped coming back to his defence of the love of one’s own. In an essay titled “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” Grant wrote: man is by nature a political animal and to know that citizenship is an impossibility is to be cut off from one of the highest forms of life. To retreat from loyalty to one’s own has the exhilaration of rebellion, but rebellion cannot be the basis for a whole life … Nothing written here implies that the increasingly difficult job of preserving what is left of Canadian sovereignty is not worth the efforts of practical men.”18 This last statement might seem to contradict the resignation that Grant professed in Lament for a Nation, but I think we have to consider that, for Grant, “loyalty to one’s own” is a basic human inclination and, furthermore, as he indicated, an inclination that is directly connected to one of the ”highest forms of life.” “Love of one’s own” was, for Grant, the foundation for genuine politics. At the end of Lament for a Nation, Grant declares: “I must dissociate myself from a common philosophic assumption. I do not identify necessity and goodness.” The assimilation of Canada into the broader imperatives of progress, technological integration, and universal norms did not, for Grant, make these things good. “A discussion of Canada’s goodness must be separated from a discussion of its necessity.”19 In the

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remainder of the chapter, I want to give a schematic of what George Grant meant by “love of one’s own” and how he saw this as an intrinsic good and consider whether the way he understood this can actually provide a meaningful bulwark against the forces of technology and progress that he so derided. In Lament for a Nation, Grant professed great admiration for the FrenchCanadians and their “deeply rooted culture.” “The French Canadians had entered Confederation not to protect the rights of the individual but the rights of a nation.”20 Clearly, this French-Canadian nationalism stood alongside, and not necessarily in tandem, with the British legacy that Grant admired. The two original peoples, French and Catholic, British and Protestant, united precariously in their desire not to be part of the great Republic [the United States]; but their reasons were quite different. This union was precarious partly because the preponderant classes of British stock were determined that the Canadian nation should support the international policies of the British Empire, whereas the French were either indifferent or hostile to these policies.21 For Grant, one of the great failures of Diefenbaker’s regime was his inability, or unwillingness, to cultivate the support of Quebec. The most bewildering aspect of Diefenbaker’s nationalism was his failure to find effective French-Canadian colleagues. The keystone of a Canadian nation is the French fact; the slightest knowledge of history makes this platitudinous. English-speaking Canadians who desire the survival of their nation have to cooperate with those who seek the continuance of FrancoAmerican civilization. The failure of Diefenbaker to act on this maxim was his most tragic mistake.22 Much has transpired in Quebec and in Canada as a whole since Grant penned these words, and there is a lot one can say about whether “Franco-American civilization” has been able to resist the forces of what Grant termed “continentalism.” Quebec remains a distinct society within Confederation, but the distinctiveness of it is complex and controversial. It is not my task in this chapter to investigate the changes in Quebec but, rather, to look at what it was in the French-Canadians that Grant identified as good and to connect those thoughts to Grant’s greater allegiance to the principle of “loving one’s own.” Grant is vague on the exact parameters of French-Canadian solidarity, but, obviously, for him, this solidarity owed much originally to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church. To Catholics, Grant wrote, whatever their level of “sophistication,” “virtue must be prior to freedom.” They will therefore build a society in which the right of the common good restrains the freedom of the individual. Quebec was not a society that

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would come to terms with the political philosophy of Thomas Jefferson or the New England capitalists.23 At the time that Grant was writing Lament for a Nation, Quebec was undergoing what we call the “quiet revolution,” moving from a Catholic, largely homogenous rural society to a more modern liberal, urban, and cosmopolitan one. Grant recognized that “to run a modern economy, men must be trained in the new technology over human and non-human nature. Such training cannot be reconciled with French Canadian classical education.”24 Grant understood that French Canadian nationalism was being transformed by the forces of modernization and secularism, but he still hung onto the localism of Quebec as a bright spot in the Canadian story. Again, in conversation with Horowitz, Grant proclaimed: “there is in human nature a need to be rooted, but this doesn’t say that technological society cannot destroy human nature, and can’t destroy the need.”25 Business corporations as well as universities, Grant tells Horowitz, make of us cosmopolitan free-f loating agents. The more advanced you get in technical skill in society, the more and more mobile you become. You are less rooted in a place and this seems to me to destroy the possibility of nationhood, because nations originally were institutions that grew up from a kind of love, not only of a particular place, but of the continuity of that place.26 Grant’s emphasis here seems to be simply on rootedness and belonging as a good in itself and something that is required in order to ascend to a “higher” virtue than merely the self-interest that he identified with contractual liberalism. Janet Ajzenstat, a student of Grant and an accomplished political theorist, remarked that “Grant aroused our passion for Canada. He will be remembered for teaching us to love Canada.”27 Grant, Ajzenstat recounts, would remind his students that no particular end can adequately incarnate the good, the love of which is man’s highest end. But he would also ask whether we can ever come to know and to love what is good except in something that is our own—our family, our friends, our part of the world, our traditions.28 Grant’s attachment to “love of one’s own” is best captured in his exchange with David Cayley. There might be much in one’s own that isn’t intrinsically lovable, and much in it that is intrinsically lovable, but I think it’s a good start for nearly all people … Nationalism, or I suppose patriotism might be a better word, is a love of one’s own … I think that justice appears first for people in their own. People who are savagely bitter about their own, but love universal justice are often, to me, dangerous people.29

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Canada now is a country of great diversity. Waves of immigration to Canada from non-English and non-French origin have produced a country that looks much different from Canada’s founding and much different from the Canada that Grant knew. In a recent article in The New York Times, Omer Aziz commented on the national euphoria over the Toronto Raptors basketball team. What Aziz, and many others, noted is that the fan base for the Raptors crosses all cultures, all races, all Canadians. “Minorities are now a majority in Toronto,” Aziz writes. “In a few decades, the country itself will be majority brown. And on the streets of Toronto [celebrating Raptors victory in the Eastern Conference], we saw the future of the West … the multicultural mixing of peoples will continue, as will the art and beauty of basketball championships that come from this diversity.”30 Multiculturalism is not just a demographic phenomenon in Canada, it is enshrined and protected constitutionally. Section 27 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states: “This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation of and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.” The multicultural mixing of peoples is clearly a very different political landscape from the kind of nationalism whose eclipse was lamented by Grant. It may be that a multicultural citizenship requires that we sever citizenship from any sentimental attachment to “one’s own.” Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos writes movingly about his father in an essay on “Citizenship Against the Nation.” Triadafilopoulos is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and the son of a Greek immigrant who worked “seven days a week for long hours—a family unfriendly pace familiar to many immigrants.” “For my father,” Triadafilopoulos writes, “citizenship was about equality under the law, exercise of rights and the fulfilment of obligations … Yet the idea that he was Canadian in anything more than a legal sense struck him as weird.” Triadafilopoulos takes away from this a lesson for a multicultural Canada. [T]o insist that prospective members of a political community also take on a new national identity in order to earn the status of citizens would have struck [my father] as unnecessary. One could love being a citizen of Canada and fufill one’s obligations as a citizen without necessarily identifying with or “loving” Canada.31 He concludes in remarking that most states do not lack for nationalist sentiment. If anything, they possess an unnecessary surplus. Moving toward a vision of the state as a neutral provider of security, services and political rights may be the best way of liberating citizenship from the nation and diminishing the inf luence of nationalists on our politics.32 Triadafilopoulos’s thoughts on citizenship in present-day Canada stand as a challenge to Grant. If our society is increasingly made up of people who come

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from diverse backgrounds and cultures, how can we expect that these newly arrived citizens will “love” Canada as their own? But there is a real sense in which Triadafilopoulos’s defence of citizenship on the terms of “security, services and political rights” leads us beyond the nation state to a much more global understanding of securing these ends. Joseph Carens, whose book The Ethics of Immigration, won the prestigious American Political Science Association award for the best book in 2013, argues that if our fundamental commitments in Western democracies are to “freedom, equality of opportunity and equality”—all universal, liberal goals—then “what justice really requires is open borders, the free movement of people around the world.” Carens challenges that “discretionary control over immigration is incompatible with fundamental democratic principles.”33 Justice “requires open borders.”34 This view of justice accompanies the emphasis on human rights, rights that transcend any national or cultural specificity. “To advance a claim in the name of human rights is to say that people are morally entitled to be treated (or not treated) in a certain way, regardless of the cultural commitments of the society where they live.”35 Arash Abizideh make a comparable argument regarding open borders, and he is forceful in his rejection of any kind of nationalist protectionism.36 Like Carens and Triadafilopoulos, Abizideh contends that citizenship should be connected to the provision for liberal ends, and he dismisses any claims on the part of nationalists for loyalties to what he terms “pre-political” associations. “It is the distinctive feature of cultural-nationalist doctrines,” he writes, “that they suppose that the exercise of political power is legitimate only to the extent that it is an expression of, or conforms to, the prepolitical culture of a nation.”37 Behind every claim to a “cultural nation,” according to Abizideh, “lurks an ethnos eager to coerce its next of kin with a warm and rather constricting embrace.”38 For Abizideh, there is no such thing as a nationalism that is not in the end exclusionary, inward-looking, and xenophobic. For him, nationalisms of any colour are antipathetic to the moral imperatives of liberal democratic order. Abizideh is a professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, and his are fighting words in Quebec. As Peter Russell has written in his recent book, Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests, Quebec has never accepted the multicultural vision of Canada, despite the affirmation of this vision in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. “Quebec’s alternative to multiculturalism is ‘interculturalism’. Interculturalism accepts the value of ethnic diversity but with the condition that minority ethnic groups must integrate into the French culture of the host nation.”39 The central point, Russell emphasizes, is that the francophone majority in Quebec demands to be recognized not as a cultural minority in Canada, but as a political entity—a political nation with governmental powers whose overriding mission is and always has been the survival of its distinctive society.40

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But Abizadeh raises an uncomfortable question regarding this distinctiveness. What exactly is it in the contemporary context, and is it a coercive ethnos? Very recently, the Quebec government passed legislation in the provincial parliament to ban religious insignia from public spaces in an effort to promote what it claims is a secular society. To get this legislation through, the Quebec government had to invoke the notwithstanding clause to suspend the freedom of religion that is protected in the Canadian Charter.41 The model for this legislation is laicite in France. But there are many critics who claim that this is a policy specifically targeted at the Muslim population in Montreal. Reading the open borders advocates, one cannot help but ref lect that these theorists work from a premiss that Grant had emphasized decades earlier. Liberalism, at its conceptual core, is antithetical to particularity, to national solidarity, and to the defence of “one’s own.” If we begin with a commitment to individual rights, individual autonomy, and freedom as the highest goods, then we have little ground for defending nationalism or closed borders. Carens and Abizideh take the high ground of liberal discourse, and their appeal is to the moral foundations of liberalism with its affirmation of rights and dignity for all. They do not, however, even touch upon the deeper questions that Grant raises about the corrosion of liberalism by the forces of progress and technology. Echoing Grant’s concerns, David Tabachnick writes that somewhere along the line we began to relinquish the deeply rooted and intellectual capacities that allow us to regulate and understand the role of technology in our lives. In the modern world, we have consented to this constriction of human thought and action into the narrow confines of technical thinking in exchange for the satisfaction of our appetites and alleviation of our aversions. And despite our reservations, we are still willing to make this exchange because we have lost our connection to a higher sense of purpose that once animated our search for the good life and happiness.42 If liberalism does indeed slide into the technological morass that both Grant and Tabachnick claim it does, can the “love of one’s own” steer us back in the right direction toward a “higher sense of purpose”? I think it is doubtful. For one thing, we in the West live in a political and moral universe that is dominated by the imperatives of individual rights. Faced as we are with massive numbers of displaced peoples, hungering for a safe home in a law- and rights-based society, can any of us make a reasonable claim for drawing the wagons around our own? Given the diversity of my own country, I find it impossible to defend Canadian nationalism on any “pre-political” grounds, as Abizadeh calls them. A second, major objection to the “love of one’s own” as the basis of good politics, can be made on the grounds that love of one’s own has never been a sufficient foundation for justice. When one thinks of a thinker in the Western tradition, whose prescriptions for political justice adhere to a sense of bounded community, one thinks of Aristotle. Aristotle opens Politics with his famous statement that

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“man is by nature a political being,” and by that he means that human beings are fitted by nature to live in communities that are governed by law, structured to achieve happiness as far as possible for citizens, and to nurture a kind of friendship among members. The friendship among members of a political community comes from living together and sharing a common purpose. Friendship among members of a polis, Aristotle insists, is not like a “shared belief ” because strangers can share similar beliefs or principles. A city can be said to be in concord when “the [citizens] agree about what is advantageous, make the same decisions, and act on their common resolutions.”43 While living together, being habituated in the ways of the polis, and being committed to the common good are all elements of good politics for Aristotle, these things do not arise from “love of one’s own” in the sense of an uncritical loyalty to one’s ethnos, or what we might now call culture, or even a shared history. The polis is prior conceptually to the kinship ties of family or tribe. The aspirations of the polis, which include an attendance to law and to virtue, ought to be definitive for the kind of friendship that binds the community. Kinship ties, family structures, and shared histories all contribute to the solidarity that underlies the political community, but they cannot, on their own, forge the kind of justice that Aristotle thought was the heart of the polis. Grant obviously cherishes much of what we read in the legacy of Aristotle. As he remarked, to be barred or excluded from meaningful citizenship is to be cut off from one of the highest purposes of human beings. We know what Grant thought of liberalism and its destructive descent into the imperatives of progress and technology. Grant thought that people who are cut off from a deep sense of belonging experience a deficit. For Grant, all good things—order, restraint, a sense of the public good—begin with the attachment to and care for one’s own. Striving for justice for Grant is an ascent from the particular to the universal and not the other way around. Unrootedness, displacement, and lack of belonging were for Grant experiences of impoverishment and desolation not emancipation. But it is hard to see how the attachment to one’s own, in the absence of a higher narrative about purpose and virtue, can be a prescription for the recovery of meaningful politics. I do not see any real possibility in the contemporary West for any “higher” narrative for politics that can displace the universal norms of liberalism.44 It may not be possible in the contemporary context to build any higher narrative that can displace the language of individual right and autonomy. Grant himself was a Christian, and even Christianity tells a story of universality and transcendence of “one’s own.” It may be that “love of one’s own” in the contemporary West is necessarily xenophobic and fearful because it withdraws from the moral compass of liberalism and globalization but, seemingly, without the capability to replace that compass with anything else. Grant does not help us to overcome this dissonance, but he helps us understand why it persists. The liberal democratic, technological, and progressive paradigm is the ruling one of our age, but our understandings of justice within that paradigm are neglectful of some very basic human inclinations. For many, the love of one’s own, for better or for worse, is a powerful quest.

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Notes 1 George Grant, Lament for a Nation (Montreal and Kingston: Mc Gill-Queen’s Press, 1978; first published 1965). 2 Lament, 34. 3 Lament, 13. 4 Lament, 34. 5 Lament, 70. 6 Arthur Davis and Henry Roper, Introduction to “Two Televised Conversations Between George Grant and Gad Horowitz,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 7 and 14, 1966. Text reprinted in Arthur Davis and Henry Roper, eds., Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 3: 1960–1969 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005) 431. 7 Collected Works, Volume 3, 442. 8 David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation (Toronto, House of Anansi Press), 104 9 Cayley, George Grant in Conversation,104. 10 Lament, 89. 11 Lament, 89. 12 Lament, 92 13 Lament, 94. 14 George Grant, English-Speaking Justice”, (Toronto, House of Anansi Press, 1985; first published 1974) 4 15 English-Speaking Justice,5. 16 English-Speaking Justice, 9. 17 Louis Greenspan, “The Unravelling of Liberalism,” Arthur Davis ed., George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 210, 18 George Grant, “Canadian Fate and Imperialism,” Technology and Empire (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969) 77. The claim that “man is by nature a political animal” of course comes from Aristotle, and I will return to this association at the conclusion of the chapter. 19 Lament, 87. 20 Lament, 22. 21 Lament, 23. 22 Lament, 20–21. 23 Lament, 75. 24 Lament, 78. 25 “Two Televised Conversations Between George Grant and Gad Horowitz”, 439 26 “Two Televised Conversations Between George Grant and Gad Horowitz,” 439–440. 27 Cited in Donald Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007) 82. 28 Donald Forbes, George Grant: A Guide to His Thought, 83. 29 David Cayley, George Grant in Conversation, 102–103. 30 Omer Aziz, “Canada Learns to Swagger,” The New York Times (Sunday, June 16, 2019), 3. 31 Triadafilos Truadafilopoulos, “Citizenship Against the Nation,” David Tabachnick and Leah Bradshaw, eds., Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies (Lanham: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017) 57–58 32 Triadafilopoulos, “Citizenship Against the Nation,” 65. 33 Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 15 34 The Ethics of Immigration 10. 35 Carens, Ethics of Immigration, 308. 36 Abizadeh writes: “[A] right to unilaterally control (and close) borders is incompatible with liberal and democratic reasons for the existence of borders.” “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders,” Political Theory (36:1, February, 2008), 54.

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37 Arash Abizideh, “On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy and the Boundary Problem,” American Political Science Review (106:4, 2012), 868. 38 Abizideh, On the Demos and Its Kin, 873. 39 Peter Russell, Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017) 345 40 Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests,345. 41 Quebec’s Bill 21, which invoked the notwithstanding clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to ban the wearing of religious symbols by anyone who works in the public sector came into effect in June 2019. As of November 2020, the legality of this bill is before the courts. Court challenges are invoking a separate section of the Charter (section 28) that protects sexual equality and are arguing that Bill 21 specifically targets female teachers who wear a head covering to teach in public schools. 42 David Tabachnick, The Great Reversal: How We Let Technology Take Hold of the Planet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) 114. 43 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs, trans. (Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2002) 1167a25. 44 One narrative conspicuously missing from this chapter is that of Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Grant had almost nothing to say about Canada’s first peoples, and from everything Grant wrote, it seems that he accepted the “two nations warring within the bosom of a single state” story of Canada (a phrase coined by one of Canada’s great fiction writers, Hugh McLennan). The place of Canada’s Indigenous peoples in Canada’s story has gained a major profile in recent years, really beginning with the patriation of the Constitution in the 1980s and the explicit recognition in that document of the validity of Canada’s pre-Confederation treaties with Indigenous nations. We are struggling in Canada to reconcile the desires of many Indigenous peoples to retain or recover their identities in the liberal firmament that otherwise dominates Canada’s moral and economic compass. Bob Joseph’s 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act (Indigenous Relations Press: 2018) chronicles the abhorrent treatment Indigenous peoples suffered historically under the British and Canadian governments. In an appendix, Joseph reproduces in full the 94 Calls to Action contained in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2015), a report that came out of 6 years of testimony and hearings regarding the residential schools policy. Call #42 urges the “federal, provincial and territorial governments to commit to the recognition and implementation of Aboriginal justice systems in a manner consistent with the Treaty and Aboriginal rights of Aboriginal peoples” (141). The general tenor of the report is a call for recognition of the distinctiveness of Aboriginal peoples in Canada, including reform of the education and legal systems to include this distinctiveness as parallel to, not subsumed under, the broader educational and legal mandates of our liberal, contractual society. One has to admire these efforts to embolden and preserve an Indigenous way of life, but at the same time, assessing these efforts through the lens of George Grant, I have to ask: what are the real chances of this effort succeeding? In another section of the Report (Call #92), the authors ask for assurance that “Aboriginal peoples have equitable access to jobs, training and opportunities in the corporate sector” (160) As Grant remarked to Horowitz, the more highly educated you become, and the more integrated you are into the corporate, capitalist culture, the more detached you necessarily become from any roots of belonging. Success in this world requires that you become “continentalist.”

Bibliography Abizideh, Arash. “Democratic Theory and Border Coercion: No Right to Unilaterally Control Your Own Borders.” Political Theory 36:1, 2008.

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Abizideh, Arash. “On the Demos and Its Kin: Nationalism, Democracy and the Boundary Problem.” American Political Science Review 106:4, 2012. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Sachs, Joe trans. Newburyport: Focus Publishing, 2002. Aziz, Omer. “Canada Learns to Swagger.” The New York Times. June 16, 2019. Carens, Joseph. The Ethics of Immigration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Cayley, David. George Grant in Conversation. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995. Davis, Arthur, and Roper, Henry. Introduction to “Two Televised Conversations Between George Grant and Gad Horowitz,” Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, February 7 and 14, 1966. Text reprinted in Davis, Arthur, and Roper, Henry eds. Collected Works of George Grant, Volume 3: 1960–1969. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. Forbes, Donald. George Grant: A Guide to His Thought. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Grant, George. English-Speaking Justice. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1985; first published 1974. Grant, George. Lament for a Nation. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1978; first published 1965. Grant, George. Technology and Empire. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1969. Greenspan, Louis. “The Unravelling of Liberalism.” Davis, Arthur ed. George Grant and the Subversion of Modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996. Joseph, Bob. 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act. British Columbia: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018. Russell, Peter. Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos. “Citizenship Against the Nation.” Tabachnick, David and Bradshaw, Leah eds. Citizenship and Multiculturalism in Western Liberal Democracies. Lanham: Lexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017.

12 PIERRE MANENT ON THE NATION, HUMANITY, AND POLITICS AS THE GREAT MEDIATION Trevor Shelley1

[O]ne cannot live politically in an undefined way. —Manent, A World Beyond Politics?

Introduction Tocqueville exposes the psychological connection between democracy and humanity—that is, between the democratic revolution and the emergence of universal humanity—as more than a vague idea or ideal.2 For Tocqueville, the very nature of democracy is to lay bare universal human nature, which is part of its ambivalence. Pierre Manent thoroughly draws out the political consequences of Tocqueville’s insight—that is, how democratic universalism undermines the capacity for action and the conditions of self-government.3 Taking Tocqueville as his (and our) point of departure, one is tempted to say that Manent sees not differently but further than Tocqueville.4 Despite being a keen observer of the many forms and formalities of aristocratic life and an astute defender of remnant democratic forms,5 Tocqueville does not thematize the form that first made modern democracy possible, namely, the nation.6 Yet, the very universalizing logic of democracy that Tocqueville diagnosed has now turned back upon its generative form. If François Furet believed Tocqueville explored “all the consequences of the concept of democracy,” Manent argues that Tocqueville largely took the nation for granted.7 However, insofar as Tocqueville lumps the ancient cities and republics under an undifferentiated “aristocracy” he relegates them to an incommensurate “humanity” now past and gone. Tocqueville, thereby, minimizes access to the generative form of politics itself, which is a prerequisite for fully appreciating and, thus, accounting for the nation.8 Manent extends Tocqueville’s analysis of the democratic threat to political life to demonstrate the implications of its universalist logic and does so by returning to the beginning of political life to appreciate the gravity of the present stakes.

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The creeping formlessness of modern democratic life is fully revealed through attention to the possibilities begat by the original political form and the development of succeeding ones. Manent’s account is an investigation into “those modes of human association that no science has taken as its specific object but whose succession orders the movement of European history.”9 So much is what Manent calls “political physics,” which addresses the size and dynamics or movement, as well as the nature, of political bodies in which any regime is found. This approach does not displace the study of regimes—it is “perhaps just as important as the constitutional question”—but, to date, has been less thoroughly examined.10 Each and every configuration of regime and body as much promote as limit human possibilities for thought and action. And yet, as Manent underlines, “The only possible principle— the only possible cause—of the movement of human history is man himself, who strives to order his humanity by governing himself.”11 This fundamental motivation of human beings has been particularly active in the West—activated and realized in a series of unique political forms that make up what Manent refers to as “the Western dynamic.” Notwithstanding his erstwhile attention to “the modern difference,” Manent’s science of political forms broadens and deepens the horizon; he qualifies, one might say, the ancient and modern debate. Manent does not construct a philosophy of history to draw out “moments or aspects of a process,” for he argues that each political form has its own proper “genesis.” Indeed, “they exist by themselves and from one to the other there is not continuity but rupture.”12 Nevertheless, the West’s underlying dynamism springs from “the only possible principle” manifesting itself through multiple “metamorphoses” of the originating political experience—that is, initiated by the city that made self-government possible at all. Manent’s account, therefore, begins with a premise that his investigation demonstrates: “one cannot live politically in an undefined way.”13 To live politically is to live with structure and order, which emerges from an arrangement that unites the few with the many through a mutual bond, which may not be equal or even symmetrical, but draws all into the debate over who rules. In acknowledging and recognizing one another, the different parts together give shape or form to a shared life, the latter of which, over time, takes on greater articulation and definition. Thus, Manent adapts Aristotle’s claim regarding the architectonic role of both the political community and of the science of politics. For he writes, politics holds together the diverse aspects of human life, individual as well as social. To be sure, a political regime is always partial, and always repressive in some measure, but it is a certain way of holding together the diverse aspects of human life. Politics allows the diverse experiences to communicate with one another, obliges them to communicate according to the form and the regime. That is why politics is the great mediation or the mediation of mediations. It prevents any experience from claiming absolute validity; it prevents any experience from saturating the social arena and the individual consciousness; it requires any experience to coexist and to communicate with the other experiences. In this way, politics is the guardian of the wealth and complexity of human life.14

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In this essay, I elaborate on Manent’s understanding of politics as “the great mediation or the mediation of mediations” by discussing his ambifocal political gaze—toward emergent humanity (i.e., our purported political exit and the “antipolitical or humanitarian temptation”)15 and back to the city (i.e., to our political beginnings and articulation of the human need to “put words and deeds together in common”).16 The significance of the nation is better appreciated as the only political form presently available for Western peoples to mediate “the diverse aspects of human life” and, thereby, approximate the commonness of the city while giving concrete form to universal humanity. Between the city and humanity, the nation is a metamorphosis of the first distinctly political form and a bulwark against the move toward formlessness. Manent’s political defence of the nation, as undergirded by the inescapable problem of mediation, offers an incisive way to think about the limits of human unity, the challenges of political homogeneity and globalization, and the modes in which particular peoples express their common humanity.17 Because of Tocqueville’s importance for Manent and for our political present, further discussion of the earlier Frenchman is first necessary.

The effectual truth of democracy: “Le semblable” When considering democratic poetry, Tocqueville elaborates on what one is inclined to call a discovery of the modern imagination. He writes, not only do members of the same nation become alike; nations themselves are assimilated, and in the eye of the spectator all together form nothing more than a vast democracy of which each citizen is a people. That puts the shape of the human race in broad daylight for the first time.18 Thus, in the imagination of democratic peoples, “the shape” of humanity is now seen. That which is similar overrides the particular differences so that “all” can now be held to be one “people.” Tocqueville’s chapter on poetry is found in a part devoted to democracy’s inf luence on “intellectual movement in the United States,” which suggests that what the imagination comes to see affects the democratic intellect in a significant way. This first sight of “the shape of the human race” is fodder for many a later idea. In fact, under democracy, a certain logic is at work, which Tocqueville refers to as “le sentiment du semblable,” a sense of similitude, or feeling of likeness—not quite the same thing as equality, but certainly its product.19 It is, as Manent describes it, “ultimately something moral, a human disposition,” in which “each never ceases wanting to identify himself with the other and the other with the self.”20 Indeed, it might be called the effectual truth of democracy: “The more homogeneous society is, the stronger the desire for homogeneity. One could say that henceforth the true sovereign is democracy itself or equality itself, the likeness among citizens and, beyond that,

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among men.”21 Democratic similitude is a mixture of both idea and sentiment that is self-affirming and universalizing. In a later discussion of “mores,” Tocqueville elaborates on similitude when he writes, “Variety is disappearing from within the human species; the same manner of acting, thinking, and feeling is found in all the corners of the world.”22 For Tocqueville, this is a consequence of the greater degree to which peoples interact, trade, and communicate with one another, both within and beyond national boundaries. But what we now call “globalization” has deeper significance than material exchange and benefit. For as things such as castes or classes, professions and families, and other distinctive markers of individuals and peoples become less significant domestically while borders of countries and cultures likewise diminish in importance, “men diverge further and further from particular ideas and sentiments … and … arrive at what depends more nearly on the constitution of man, which is everywhere the same. They thus become alike even though they have not imitated each other.”23 Whether consciously or not democratic peoples express—or manifest—the universal and uniform “constitution of man.” Tocqueville, as Manent argues, reveals the nature of democracy, which reveals in turn the nature of man. Thus, “the more society democratizes, the more it is modeled on what is universally human.”24 This becomes especially acute when Tocqueville turns to examine honour, which offers a direct window into what a given people or collectivity praise and blame. The more open a community is, the more universal its aspirations; however, the more its sense of honour is generalized. The logical conclusion of the generalization of honour is its loss. Tocqueville speculates that if all “races” and “peoples” eventually intermingled and mixed so that everyone had “the same interests and the same needs,” and none was distinguished from any others “by any characteristic feature,” one would have to conclude that convention would have no place. The natural “constitution of man” would alone be manifest. All of the world’s people could be seen “in the same light,” which is to say the “shape of humanity” seen by the imagination becomes the dominant perspective. In other words: the general needs of humanity that conscience reveals to each man would be the common measure. Then one would no longer encounter in this world any but simple and general notions of good and evil, to which ideas of praise or of blame would be attached by a natural and necessary bond.25 Summarizing these thoughts in “a single formula,” Tocqueville writes that “it is the dissimilarities and inequalities of men that have created honor; it is weakened insofar as these differences are effaced, and it should disappear with them.”26 Remarking on Tocqueville’s discussion of honour, Manent writes, “as one passes from an aristocratic society to a democratic one, honor in generalizing itself becomes at the same time truer and less active.”27 As a fundamental

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motive for action, honour requires distinctions and distinctiveness—the very opposite of similitude—so the general or generalized truth of honour presents itself as a political problem, as exemplified by today’s ruling opinion that global unity is the highest if not sole legitimate aspiration. The relationship and tension between philosophical or moral truth of a universal kind and the diminished capacity for particular or political action is one of the great themes of Manent’s work.28

Toward formlessness: Individualism and universalism In gathering the threads together, a word about individualism is in order. The overwhelming tendency of democratic peoples to retreat within is by no means at odds with the logic of le semblable.29 There may appear to be a “paradoxical necessity,” given that democratic individuals need be reminded that they belong to a community when the general sentiment is one of human resemblance, as well as when things such as mildness or compassion toward others have never been stronger.30 However, the matter is resolved when we see that both individualism and humanitarianism are equally an effect of the apparent truth of resemblance. The radical particularism of an individual’s retreat into his or her own heart and the radical universalism of each individual identifying with the whole of humanity both follow from the same democratic logic. To recall, democratic similitude operates at the very core of human self-understanding—that is, at the level of morality and morals. And this similitude not only universalizes or creates uniformity, but it simplifies through its process of generalization. When conscience is emptied of everything but a single “common measure,” and a notion of good and evil is sufficiently abstract as to be pleasing to all, the very springs of human action are unwound. Uniformity, equated to global friendship, has been the great aspiration of many thinkers since the eighteenth century and is dear to elite opinion today. Yet, because of a generalized sense of honour and due to reductive simplicity, at the moment of apparent, unmediated unity, democracy reveals its inexorable separation and individuation: it reduces individuals to the isolated interiority of their own hearts, for there is nothing to hold them together and nothing to initiate or move them. The human race may have “a shape,” but it lacks a body and, therefore, has no operative principle. As Manent writes, democratic convention and the social project of democracy detach the different human experiences that, until then, bound them to one man’s power over another. Now the “old” experiences, such as art, literature, love, and religion, attain an unprecedented purity, a truly “ineffable” one, since no “common sense” or “common world” any longer makes them communicate among themselves or allows men to communicate among themselves concerning them. This is precisely the “new experience” democracy brings.31

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The quest for universal unity proves elusive, as the very forms of genuine community retreat in the process. Democracy’s disassociation and separation of the different activities and spheres of experience is tantamount to formlessness. Each perspective and “lifestyle” is immediate to and for itself, but none relate to or share in others. Life is less lived among than alongside others, as lines of communication become severed through personalization and specialization. Without overarching mediation between the spheres of life, individuals are left to express, even adulate, their solitary selves. Thus, we find the refining of personal homunculi without any effort or medium to shape and mould souls or selves for something common.32 While it is certainly true that some continue to seek political office and public recognition, this is often done through exposing the intimacy of their own hearts (i.e., in the manner of feelings and emotions, revealing what is unique to their selves) to signal they are immediately accessible. Thus, representatives make themselves attractive by expressing universal humanity free of contingency and forms (i.e., as individuals able to feel the feelings of others and make their own felt).33 All of this finds expression in a new “discourse” rightly labelled “rights talk.”34 Some of course argue that community is based upon “communication.” While human association and human speech are certainly related, Manent argues their relationship is not symmetrical. “It is not speech that produces the community, but the community that produces and maintains speech.”35 To be sure, there is a range of different kinds of speech and so too of communities, but Manent underlines that, all speech finds its first site and primary meaning in the political association, in the city. If human life takes place between prose and poetry, between the prose of the useful and the poetry of the noble and great, it is held together by the mediation of the just, which is the proper work of politics. The political community holds the entire register of speech together and makes it resound, and real communication is necessarily based upon this harmonic scale.36 Much of today’s speech, however, is in search of a non-existent community and is, therefore, opaque and disorienting—inspiring for some, perhaps, but ineffectual. The discourse of universal human rights hints at a city—or cosmopolis—in speech, for it does not have a “site” in the world. But this is beside the point, for the language of human rights is not, in fact, an associating or associational discourse. In speaking of man as “the being with rights,” one is speaking of an individual independent of all historical contingencies and necessities of location in both space and time; such a being is, therefore, abstracted from association with others. The point of departure is one of autonomy or independence, even as “the very notion of rights presupposes society and relation because the very definition of right is to organize society and the relations among its members.”

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Thus, “there is a kind of contradiction between the idea of human rights in the very idea of right.”37 Recalling Tocqueville’s speculative claim about a “common measure” or “simple and general notions of good and evil,” Manent argues this is no longer subjunctive; rather, it is a ruling opinion with great effect. For, “human action no longer has any legitimacy for us” and is only intelligible today if “subsumed under a universal rule of law or right or some universal ethical principle.”38 Action is only encouraged and accountable if it is an “application or instance of the universal rights of human beings.”39 The expression “universal rights” gives the impression of breadth and openness but is, in effect, a constriction of the range of action that saps citizens and statesmen of motivation and perspective. Moreover, it delegitimizes and rejects any who stand athwart such global proclamations. Thus, there is more “discourse” on justice than “the mediation of the just,” for without a community, properly speaking, the “register of speech” regarding universal human rights does not hang together. It ultimately amounts, in other words, to “assertion over reason-giving.”40 And such assertions increasingly manifest in transnational courts, international tribunals, or various quasijudicial bodies, say, in Luxembourg City, Strasbourg, The Hague, and elsewhere, rather than in national legislatures or representative bodies.41 We find ourselves in the following situation: “The only humanly significant realities, the only ones which are entitled to incontestable rights, are the individual on the one hand and humanity on the other; between these two, strictly speaking, there is nothing of worth.”42 The space between these two extremes, where common life and action takes place, atrophies along with any sense of proportion and limits, as the desire of individuals for security and comfort nevertheless grows. Strikingly, Manent notes, our immobility is, in fact, celebrated: “We put our faith in the postulate that a certain inaction, or a certain abstention, is at the origin of the greatest goods.”43 In the absence of genuine words and deeds, it is little wonder that today’s battles over symbols or signals or gestures in public life takes on the intensity it does. What is more, when practical political reasoning within a political form is displaced by a general rule, political power is transferred to unelected, administrative, and technocratic transnational bureaucracies and treaty organizations, from which one can only conclude that the universal trumps the democratic. Rather than rally “to do some great new thing” the order of the day is “to refuse unanimously and irrevocably to hear the question: ‘What is to be done?’”44 Indeed, the move toward a kratos without a demos, or what Manent has dubbed a “pure democracy,” starts to be seen for what it is:45 a deprivation of any appreciation for the common good, for citizens to deliberate about it, and for communities to mediate collective differences. Is it any wonder that so-called “populists” are revolting and expressing their frustrations, if inchoately? Absent a proper political framework, there is no opportunity for “new cross-class settlements” to mitigate the emergent class war Michael Lind and others have advocated; few means to challenge what Joel Kotkin refers to as the coming “neo-feudalism”

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that threatens the f lourishing and prosperity of “the global middle class”; little chance of reversing the “decadence” and dwindled self-confidence that Ross Douthat ably analyses; and less likelihood of peoples grasping that “key geopolitical questions” are “not simply questions of power” but “equally questions of perception and willpower”—that is, of knowing why, when, and how to act.46 For Manent, thinking through the mediating role of the nation is also necessary to address the situation in France with recent waves of migration and the interaction of heterogeneous peoples, not least as found in the “Islamic challenge.”47 A renewed understanding of the preconditions for action and self-government rests on appreciating the forms of politics past and present.

The metamorphoses of forms: Mediating mediations Across Manent’s oeuvre, one finds the elements of his outlining a history of political forms. There is nothing inevitable, he argues, about the development of the national form, and the first civic form was itself a somewhat surprising occurrence, the history of which he traces most fully in his work, Metamorphoses of the City. And just as every human or political possibility contains its opposite, so disappointment and limitations are “inseparable from every political form.”48 Indeed, one of the profound facts of political life and history “is the way in which a political form appears first as the instrument for resolving a problem and then becomes an obstacle to this solution.”49 Insofar as history is constituted by the activity of peoples endeavouring to bring political form to their life so as to govern themselves well, the struggle to keep forms and institutions from turning back upon themselves and their members is incessant. As Leo Strauss once said, All political action aims at either preservation or change. When desiring to preserve, we wish to prevent a change for the worse; when desiring to change, we wish to bring about something better. All political action is then guided by some thought of better or worse.50 However, for there to be political action at all, there must be a framework—a space or sphere for action. It is possible to contemplate past actions or imagine future ones, as well as to theoretically consider or debate the guiding principles of the good and the bad, the just and the unjust, or the noble and ignoble, but for action to occur at all certain, real and concrete preconditions are necessary. This requires accepting while responding to “the constraints of our political condition.”51 And among the constraints are the degree to which separations can be mediated, and unity or the universal may be realized. We cannot retrace here at length Manent’s illuminating discussion of the series of forms in the West. Suffice it to say that he elaborates on the three natures of the ancient city—as the tragic, philosophic, and political, consistent with the three meanings of nature as birth, finality, and movement, respectively—and contrasts the city with its polar opposite form, the empire. The city, as the first

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political form, was a cadre for action of a concentrated and coordinated kind, or what has been called a “field of activity,” that emerged through a “radical transformation” contrary to any and all preceding civilization, where political action came to be “occupied conjointly by the rulers and the ruled.”52 But its very dynamism made it unstable, through constant warfare, both without and within. In contrast to the city in its surveyable size and self-sufficiency, one finds the empire, which stretches nearly without limit and consists of the most extended human arrangement in potentially (at least imaginatively) including all of humanity. Rather than liberty, but in place of war, empire offers peace and private right, or the protection of life and property. Thus, the vector of ancient development broadly rested on “the interplay” between these two political forms. In competition or war with one another, as well as through passage from one to the other, these two alternatives exhaust what was then available. So much did not, however, go on indefinitely. And this seemingly obvious but significant fact is what drives Manent’s ref lections further, as he inquires into the reformation of Europe’s political structure. Crucial to the metamorphosis of the original pagan dynamic was the emergence of the Christian dispensation that proposed yet a new arrangement in the Church, which complicated and intensified the original interplay. As a form, the Church combined extension or largesse in size with concentration or depth in membership. Inclusive of universal humanity while asking for commitment and sacrifice in the mode of a particular city, the Church posed a novel alternative that confused human loyalties and obligations. Its effect was to reorient Europeans by giving them a new perspective on human association; however, without ever being able to altogether govern them politically.53 Thus, instead of just the two competing forms of city and empire, an incompatibility across three forms emerged, and the “theological-political problem” gave rise to a series of challenges—even a temporary impasse—from which Europe sought to emancipate itself. Significant here is that the nation was something of a compromise form, born from the competing loyalties of Europeans toward their earthly political association of city or empire—which were themselves at odds—and their membership in the heavenly city embodied in the universal church. But, for Manent, this more than simply a post-Westphalian result. The process of moving beyond this impasse was initiated by monarchy, or the various kingdoms of Europe, that, instead of ultimately being absorbed into the Church’s fold, eventually incorporated the sacrality of the Church in order to subordinate the latter to what became the national constitution and the nation’s representatives. But as Manent underlines, this required continuous activity, or action— energy of a new kind—insofar as the king was never able to grasp and hold what is holy or sacred to Christianity. Nevertheless, in repeatedly attempting to seize elusive holiness, the king united a political body distinct from the Church—a body as much demarcated from the universal Church and the heavenly city as different from the pagan cities and empires of the past. The Christian king, on the one hand, satisfied the Church by endorsing God’s law

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and encouraging the Christian forming of his subjects, and on the other hand, extended his power within his realm—a power that unified the people and drew them toward consciousness of the nation and their membership within it. Thus, “Monarchy broke the natural rhythm of political history in Europe, and only in Europe.”54 And so the nation was born of an “unprecedented political and religious project” that sought “ceaselessly to combine the pride of the citizen, or more generally of the acting human being, and the humility of the Christian.”55 Alongside this history of political forms, Manent also accounts for “the major stages on the gradient of increasing universality” that since the eighteenth century, “sums up for us the only possible meaning of human history.” For, “What is intelligible for us is the general or universal. History appears as intelligible to the extent that within it progress toward the universal is taking place.” And he elaborates on “the four great spiritual determinations of Western humanity,” as found in the Jewish law, Greek philosophy, Christianity, and modern democracy. Each begat greater universality at the cost of enacting new separations.56 The Israelites were a light unto the nations but distinct from the others in being elect; Socrates was a citizen of the world, but philosophers are demarcated from the many by the theoretical life; the Church as a universal community is nonetheless constituted by a separation between the city of God and the earthly city. Manent does not, therefore, set out to endorse the progressive conviction but illustrate that with each extension of universality, there was nevertheless a new element produced: “every progress in generality requires a new human association as the framework of a novel human operation.” “The modern political movement,” however, “can be understood as an effort to overcome the Christian separation, to bring about a universality that is at last truly and effectively universal.”57 But this then begs the question of just what the association or framework is for this most universal of universals, as well as what operation its form may initiate or produce. What is more, there are multiple competing—and ideological—definitions of who or what constitutes humanity, for despite its apparent universality, the notion has an “undetermined character.”58 This is to skirt over Manent’s subtle accounting of these issues to raise the seemingly obvious but very highly problematic question, “What then does humanity do?” For, “if united humanity has nothing to do, then it does not exist or it no longer exists.”59 The most general universal appears then to be little more than the fellow feeling Tocqueville analysed as inherent to democracy. Manent’s work demonstrates that humanity is not only incapable of producing a new human association but also actually works as a solvent on previous forms and spiritual determinations—the very contents of life and the forms in and through which they emerged and were mediated. In retracing past efforts of people to bring political definition to their lives, Manent reveals the inescapability of mediation and need for it no less in a universal age. He, therefore, encourages us to mind our nations anew as we seek to govern well and be well governed while making the universal concrete in particular forms, for “every modern nation is a confession or a proposition of humanity.”60

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Notes 1 The author thanks Ann Ward, Daniel Mahoney, and Eno Trimçev for helpful comments on a previous draft. 2 If Tocqueville is the greatest diagnostician of this parallel movement, Auguste Comte could be said to be its greatest advocate—the thinker whom Raymond Aron and Pierre Manent both referred to as “the sociologist of human and social unity.” See, Daniel J. Mahoney, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (New York: Encounter Books, 2018), 7–8ff. 3 “[Tocqueville] is the thinker who best illuminates the modern condition insofar as this condition relates directly to our political and social regime.” Manent, Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Bénédicte Delorme-Montini, trans. Ralph C. Hancock (South Bend: St. Augustine Press, 2015), 94–95. 4 The phrase is a modified version of Tocqueville’s own statement regarding the parties of his day. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 15. All future references to this work will be by volume, part, chapter, and page number, e.g., II.3.1, 535. In 1990, Manent wrote, “I do not wish to show Tocqueville mistaken or lacking, nor do I desire ‘to complete’ or ‘to perfect’ him.” He is, however, cautious about Tocqueville’s historicism. Manent, “Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply: Some Remarks on an Equivocation in Tocqueville’s Thought,” in Modern Liberty and its Discontents, eds., Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 70. However, by 2010, Manent admits to the limits of Tocqueville, see Metamorphoses of the City: On the Western Dynamic, trans., Marc Lepain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 13–14, and Seeing Things Politically, 94–106. 5 For discussion of Tocqueville on forms, see, Harvey Mansfield, Tocqueville, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 37–56; “The Forms and Formalities of Liberty,” The Public Interest 70 (1983): 121–131. 6 For Tocqueville on the nation, see, Françoise Mélonio, “Nations et Nationalisme,” La Revue Tocqueville/The Tocqueville Review 26, 1 (2005): 337–56; and “L’idée de Nation et Idée de Démocratie Chez Tocqueville.” Littérature et Nation 7 (1991): 5–24; Ewa Atanassow, “Patriotism in Democracy: What We Can Learn from Tocqueville,” in Tocquevillian Ideas: Contemporary European Perspectives, eds. Zbigniew Rau and Marek Tracz-Tryniecki (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 39–58. Tocqueville defends patriotism and pride in one’s country rather than provide a philosophical account of the nation, per se. 7 François Furet, “The Intellectual Origins of Tocqueville’s Thought,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 7 (1985–1986): 122. “Tocqueville did not seriously envisage the substantial transformation, much less the disappearance, of this particular political form [i.e., the nation].” Manent, Democracy without Nations? The Fate of Self-Government in Europe, trans., Paul Seaton (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2007), 15. 8 In the closing pages of Democracy in America, in the chapter, “General View of the Subject” (II.4.8, 675) Tocqueville refers to “two distinct humanities” that are ultimately “not comparable”—despite having compared democracy and aristocracy endlessly throughout the work. The democratic revolution, he elsewhere observes, resembles “nothing” like anything that precedes it (II.4.8, 673); after all, his “new political science” is for a world “altogether new” (Intro, 7 [emphasis added]). 9 Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, 19. 10 Ibid., 128. 11 Ibid., 303. See, Jean-Vincent Holeindre, “Quelle science politique?” La Politique et l’Âme: Autour de Pierre Manent, eds. Giulio De Ligio, Jean-Vincent Holeindre, and Daniel J. Mahoney (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014), 36–37. 12 Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, 105.

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13 Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, trans., Marc LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 44. 14 Ibid., 201–202 (emphasis added). 15 Ibid., 202; cf. Manent, “La tentation humanitaire,” Géopolitique 68 ( January 2000). 16 The phrase is Aristotle’s, and Manent invokes it frequently. See, A World Beyond Politics?, 67, 96; Democracy without Nations?, 30. 17 Manent’s science is akin to what Paul Rahe calls the “ancient students of political affairs” for whom “the articulation of humanity into nations and political communities is of greater fundamental importance and deserves more careful study than its articulation into economic and social classes.” Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern. I: The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 10. Rahe masterfully demonstrates the shortcomings of the “sociologically orientated historians of antiquity,” insofar as the modern disciples of Hobbes “systematically depreciate the love of one’s own and the desire for honor as human motives” and, consequently, “neglect or understate the central importance of civil religion, national culture, and public opinion in general” (240). 18 Democracy in America, II.1.17, 461 (emphasis added). 19 Tocqueville also speaks of “la notion générale du semblable,” which at II.II.2, 483, he says is otherwise obscure in aristocratic times. 20 Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 36; Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans., John Waggoner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996), 49 et passim. 21 Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 37; cf., “Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply,” 69. 22 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.3. 17, 588. 23 Ibid. 24 Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 71. 25 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.3.18, 599 (emphasis added). 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid., 72. 28 To some extent, the problem has to do with the “popularization or diffusion” of hard-won “philosophical or scientific knowledge” that makes people ripe for tyranny; or the breeding of complacency among peoples by taking away the “trouble of thinking and the pain of living” that makes “mild despotism” possible. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny, 178; DA II.4.5, 663. Manent’s approach is distinguished by a focus on the significance of, and conditions for, action. 29 Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, 70. 30 Manent, “Democratic Man, Aristocratic Man, and Man Simply,” 72. 31 Ibid., 75. 32 Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (New York: Harper Collins, 2017), 67 et passim. 33 Thus, public figures profess their many particular “identities” (i.e., racial, sexual, ethnical, etc.) while they identify their one general “profession” (i.e., humanitarianism, or compassion for all of humanity). Such invocations of identities and professions of care are made without consideration of political consequence or gravity—that is, they are void of concern with what was once called the common good or even national interest illustrating that identity politics and globalism are logically bound to one another as well as mutually reinforcing. 34 Mary Ann Glendon discusses a “new form of rights talk” that amounts to a “change in our habits of thought and speech,” which “promote[s] mere assertion over reasongiving” and precludes the possibility for “a grammar of cooperative living.” Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991), 14. It is, in other words, a language of formlessness and willfulness. 35 Manent, Democracy without Nations?, 29. 36 Ibid. 37 Manent, Seeing Things Politically, 90–91; cf. Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), xvi.

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38 Manent, Democracy without Nations?, 41. So much amounts to a new form of imperialism of law and morality. Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 171–196. 39 Manent, Democracy without Nations?, 41. 40 Glendon, Rights Talk, 17. The bodiless (or community-less) world where universal human rights discourse circles about is mirrored by the asocial rights talk found domestically, which promote an “image of the rights-bearer as a radically autonomous individual” alongside “neglect of the social dimensions of human personhood.” Ibid., 109. See also, Jeremy A. Rabkin, Law Without Nations? Why Constitutional Government Requires Sovereign States, esp. Ch. 7 “The Human Rights Crusade.” 41 Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 171–185. 42 Manent, “Populist Demagogy and the Fanaticism of the Center,” American Affairs, 1, 2 (Summer 2017): 12–13. 43 Manent, Natural Law and Human Rights, 116. 44 Ibid., 117. 45 Manent, Democracy without Nations?, 7ff. 46 Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020); Joel Kotkin, The Coming Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2020); Ross Douthat, Decadence: How We Become the Victims of Our Own Success (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020); Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 164. 47 Manent, Beyond Radical Secularism: How France and the Christian West Should Respond to the Islamic Challenge (South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2016). 48 Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 199. 49 Ibid., 198. 50 Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 10. 51 Manent, A World Beyond Politics?, 206. 52 Heinrich Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. David McLintock (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 17–20. 53 Manent, Democracy without Nations?, 96; cf. An Intellectual History, 4. 54 Manent, Intellectual History, 8. “The vector of Europe’s political history is the victory of the monarchy in the proper sense of the term.” Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, 222. 55 Manent, Beyond Radical Secularism, 64. 56 Manent, Metamorphoses of the City, 295–97, and all of Part III “Empire, Church, Nation.” 57 Ibid., 298. 58 “But what does the human association or humanity as an association mean? Whom does it encompass? Everybody, of course. But what does everybody mean? Everybody living? But by what right are those who are dead cut off from humanity? By what right are the unborn cut off from humanity? And of the living, are not most in effect invisible to us? In short, humanity as universal association is in one sense just as invisible as the invisible Church.” Ibid., 298–99. 59 Ibid., 300. 60 Ibid., 324.

Bibliography Ewa Atanassow, “Patriotism in Democracy: What We Can Learn from Tocqueville,” in Tocquevillian Ideas: Contemporary European Perspectives, eds. Zbigniew Rau and Marek Tracz-Tryniecki (Lanham: University Press of America, 2014), 39–58. Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Ross Douthat, Decadence: How We Become the Victims of our Own Success (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020).

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François Furet, “The Intellectual Origins of Tocqueville’s Thought,” The Tocqueville Review/La Revue Tocqueville 7 (1985–1986): 121–140. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991). Jean-Vincent Holeindre, “Quelle Science Politique?” in La Politique et l’Âme: Autour de Pierre Manent des, eds. Giulio De Ligio, Jean-Vincent Holeindre, and Daniel J. Mahoney (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2014), 35–50. Joel Kotkin, The Coming Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class (New York: Encounter Books, 2020). Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal (New York: Harper Collins, 2017). Michael Lind, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite (New York: Penguin Random House, 2020). Daniel J. Mahoney, The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity (New York: Encounter Books, 2018). Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. John Waggoner (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996). Pierre Manent, Modern Liberty and its Discontents, eds. Daniel J. Mahoney and Paul Seaton (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Pierre Manent, “La tentation humanitaire,” Géopolitique 68 ( January 2000), 6–9. Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, trans. Marc LePain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

INDEX

Abizadeh, Arash xvi–xvii, 64n17, 162–63, 165n36 Aboriginal peoples 166n44 absolute monarchy 10–12 actors 6 Adam 62n7 Addresses to the German Nation (Fichte) 74–75, 114 advantage, cynicism related to 143–44, 148–49 against sovereign self: bad conscience in 104, 106, 108n24; conscience in 104–6, 108n24; future in 106, 108n26; liberation in 104–5; logic of sovereignty in 105, 108n25 agreements must be kept (pacta sunt servanda) 33 Ajzenstat, Janet 160 Alcibiades 144, 148 Alcibiades I (Plato) 143–44 America see United States Anastasius Augustus (emperor) 82 Anderson, Benedict xiv animals 7, 68, 158, 165n18 Anti-Climacus 107 anti-Kantian 98, 108n18 Apollo 129–30 a priori 98 Aquinas, Thomas (saint) 35, 37 arbitrium humanum (human free will) 36 Arendt, Hannah 133–34 argument 149–50

aristocracy 9–10, 168, 178n8 Aristotle xiii, xvii, 113, 121n3, 121n8, 165n18; on friendship 3–4, 90; on honor 140–41; Manent and 169, 170, 179n16; Politics of xiv, 3, 141, 163–64; on virtue 11–12; see also citizenship and polis Arnade, Chris 132 Aron, Raymond 178n2 associations 90–91, 177, 180n58 atheism 40, 103 attachment 125, 132–33 Atticus 17 Augsburg Confession 84, 86 Augustine (saint) 22, 41, 44n68 authority xviii, 82–83, 85, 91nn1–2, 92nn6–7 Aziz, Omer 161 bad conscience 102–3, 104, 106, 108n24 Ball, Terence 64n18 Barbeyrac, Jean 43n43, 44n52 beautiful (kalos) 8 bees analogy 97–98 Being and Time (Heidegger) 114, 115 Bejan, Teresa M. 61 Berlin, Isaiah 150 biology 5, 6, 13nn30–31 borders xvi–xvii, 134–35, 162 Brexit Referendum xv Brutus, Decimus 140 Burke, Edmund 33–34, 39, 41, 44n53, 44n59; process of 44n57

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Index

Canada 166n44; Britishness of 154–55; see also Grant, George Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 166n41 Carens, Joseph xvi, xvii, 162 Carneades 24, 28n45, 39–40 categorical imperative 98 Catholics 159–60 Cato, Marcus 19, 27n20, 27n25 Cato the Elder 28n45 Cayley, David 156, 160 Centesimus Annus ( John Paul II) 133 Characteristics of the Present Age (Fichte) 68 Charles V (emperor) 83 Charondas 7 Chesterton, G.K. 40 Christianity 35, 38, 42n16, 71, 89, 159–60, 164; Manent on 176–77 Chrysostom, St. John 44n52 Cicero, Marcus Tullius xvii–xviii, 25, 28n45; Burke and 33–34, 39–41, 44n53, 44n57, 44n59; on foreign relations 34; Grotius and 33–34, 37–39, 44n52; justice and Roman Empire 21–23; law and wisdom of 17–20; law of nations' Roman and Christian origins of 34–35; love and piety of 20–21; NATO related to 16; Scipio and 28n38; Stoicism of 16–17, 26n2; Suárez and 33–34, 35–37, 41, 43n28, 43n45; on Ulpian 34–35, 42n14; unipolar moment related to 16; on virtue 27n24; see also law of nations citizen: biology and 5, 6, 13nn30–31; definitions of 4–5, 13n11; democracy related to 4; participation of 3, 5, 13n11; regime and 5–6 citizenship xvii, xix, 3, 13, 72, 161–62; see also philosophic foundations of citizenship citizenship and polis 3; absolute monarchy and honour in 10–13; citizen in 4–6; family in 6–8; regime in 8–10 citizen-soldiers 10, 14n44 city 175–76 civic nationalism 67 civic republicanism xvi civil/federal liberty 93nn21–22 civil law 48 civil science 57–58 civil society 119 classical rule of the few 121n5 The Closed Commercial State (Fichte) 69, 71 coercive nationalism 77–78 Cold War 121n6, 154

communication 172–73 Community 118 compelling law (ius cogens) 45n69 Comte, Auguste 178n2 confirmation 139 conscience 102–6, 108n24 Constantine (emperor) 82 continentalism 157 contract 92n16; see also social contract contractualism 157–58 contractual liberalism 160 Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s Judgments about the French Revolution (Fichte) 69 cosmopolitan bond 27n25 cosmopolitanism xvi, 17, 106 Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents (Ward, L.) xiv–xv covenants 48 cruelty 101, 102–4, 108n23 cultural climate 130 cultural nationalism 77 cultural nationalism against selfishness: culture in 74–75, 76; education in 75, 76–77; enforcement in 74; freedom in 76; language in 77; morality in 74, 75–76; moral mission in 76–77; selfishness in 75; self-sufficiency in 76; spiritual inheritance in 77; state in 75 customs 19 cynicism 139, 142, 146; advantage related to 143–44, 148–49; of the left 147–48, 150–51 Dante 26n3 Dasein 114–15 Davis, Arthur 155 death 7–8, 13n30, 146–47 death penalty 108n26 deception 25, 28n48 Declaration of Independence 120, 121n1 De Corpore (Hobbes) xviii, 49, 62nn5–6 De Corpore propositional reformation 62n6; categorical in 54, 55, 56; civil science in 57–58; contingent in 54, 55, 56, 59; definitions in 54, 63n12; deliberation in 57–58, 63n14; hypotheses in 54–55, 56–57; hypothetical propositions in 53, 54, 56–58, 63nn14–15; necessary and contingent in 53, 55; necessary in 53, 56; propositions in 53; reason in 57–58, 64nn15–16; syllogisms in 55–56; true or false in 57; universal proposition in 53–54, 56

Index

De finibus (Cato) 27n20 De Iure Belli ac Pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) (Grotius) 37 De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore (On Laws and God the Lawgiver) (Suárez) 35 deliberation 50, 57–58, 63n14 democracy 145; citizen related to 4; individualism and 128–29 democracy and aristocracy 168, 178n8 Democracy in America (Tocqueville) 89–90, 126, 178n8 democracy's truth 179n28; honour in 171–72; imagination in 170; similitude in 170–72, 179n19 De Officiis (Cicero) 34 Derrida, Jacques 108n26 Descartes, R. 56 desire 131–32, 146 Diefenbaker, John 154 Digest of Justinian 34–35 Dignity (Arnade) 132 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau) 68 divine 17–18, 42n9, 143 Douglass, Frederick 151 Douglass, Robin 61 Douthat, Ross 175 Driven From Home xvi D’Sousa, Dinesh 141 dualism 51, 62n9 Dungey, Nicholas 64n16 duty, sense of 127 economic nationalism 77–78 economic nationalism against empire: Christian regulation in 71; citizenship in 72; free trade in 71; infinite freedom in 72–73; justice in 73–74; organic state in 72–73, 79n41; peace among nations in 71–72; popular sovereignty in 72; property rights in 73; right to life in 73; self-subjection in 72; standards in 74 education 75, 76–77, 120, 122n27, 132–33; liberal 139, 143, 144–45, 150–51 empire 21–23, 176; see also economic nationalism against empire empire of wisdom 23–25 English-Speaking Justice (Greenspan) 157–58 entailed inheritance 39 equality 68, 118, 121n5, 129, 166n41 equality and individualism 128–31 equal rights 112, 120–21 equipollence 55, 56, 57, 58–59

185

Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke) 87 Ethics (Aristotle) 140–41 The Ethics of Immigration (Carens) xvi Euripides 38 everyday uses of people 110–11, 121n1 executive, of people 117–18 families 20–21, 127, 134, 164; citizenship and 6–8; death in 7–8, 13n30; polis from 6–7; soul in 8, 13n31 Faustus 42n9 Federalist Number 2 ( Jay) 125 Fichte, J.G. 114; on cultural nationalism against selfishness 74–77; on economic nationalism against empire 71–74; on liberal nationalism and the vocation of humanity 77–78; on modernity's problems 68–71; on nationalism 67–68, 79nn4–5 First World War 121n6 foot voting 130–31 formula of autonomy 99 formula of humanity 99 Forster, Greg 87–88, 92n16, 93n19 Foundations of Natural Right (Fichte) 69, 72 Frede, Dorothea 13n31 freedom xiii, 3, 70, 76, 120, 145, 150; in economic nationalism against empire 72–73; in modernity's problems 68–69 Free to Move (Somin) 130–31 free trade capitalism xiii–xiv free trade to economic nationalism 79n41 free will 36 French Canadians 159–61 friendship xvii, 3–4, 9, 23, 90–91; in individualism and universalism 172; togetherness of 113 Furet, François 168 Gaius 42n15 Gelasius (pope) 82, 84, 86, 93n20 Genealogy see On the Genealogy of Morals genuine wisdom 17 George III (king) 121n1 Georgics (Virgil) 97 German nationalism 68, 74–76, 113 Germans 77, 114, 115 Glendon, Mary Ann 179n34, 180n40 global citizenship xix, 3, 13 global elites 121n6 globalism and cosmopolitanism xvi global state 119–20 God (god) 19, 35, 40, 49, 62n7, 98, 127; nature as 38–39, 44n52

186

Index

Golden Age 117 Grant, George xiii–xiv, xix–xx; Aristotle related to 163–64; basketball team and 161; on belonging 158; citizenship and 161–62; on conservative nationalism 155; on continentalism 157, 159; on Diefenbaker 154–55, 159; on freedom 3; on French Canadians 159–61; on interconnectedness 157; the left with 155; on liberalism 157–58; multiculturalism related to 161–63; red tory related to 155–56; on technology 157–58; Triadafilopoulos and 161–62 Greenspan, Louis 157–58 Grotius, Hugo 33–34, 37–39, 44n52 groundwork for genealogy of morals: anti-Kantian in 99, 101, 108n18; formula of autonomy in 99; Hatab on 99, 107n8; moral responsibility in 100, 107n11; self with itself in 101, 108n16; will in 99–100 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant) 98 guilt 103–4 Hatab, Lawrence J. 99, 107n8, 107n11 Hegel, Georg 41, 44n57 Heidegger, Martin: Dasein of 114–15; on education and culture 122n27; Nazism and 114–16; on people as space 115; on people as state 115–16 Hercules 34, 42n9 Hesiod 7 highest law and prudence 26n9 history (History, historicity) 21, 150–51, 168, 169, 178n4 Hobbes, Thomas xviii, 62nn5–6, 69, 101, 102, 108n16, 152n17; on Body Politique 49–50; on covenants 48; De Corpore propositional reformation of 53–59; on laws of nature 47–48; on necessary linguistic foundation of state 59–61; on propositional reformation 49; prudence, science and laws of nature of 50–53; on rights 145–47; scientific method of 47, 61n1; social contract type of 85–86, 92n7; on sovereign power 48–49; state linguistic foundation of 59–61 Hobbesian social contract 92n7 homeless 135 Homer 142 honor (honour) xix, 13n11, 148–49, 151; in absolute monarchy 10–13; Aristotle on 140–41; confirmation of 139; in

democracy's truth 171–72; distance on 140; Melian dialogue on 142–43; Plato on 141–42; problem of 10–13; Shakespeare on 140; understanding of 139; virtues and 141, 142; worthy of 142; see also cynicism Horowitz, Gad 155, 156, 160, 166n44 Human, All Too Human (Nietzsche) 108n21 human association 177, 180n58 human beings, animals compared to 7, 68 human free will (arbitrium humanum) 36 humanity 20, 77–78, 99 human rights xvi–xvii, 43n38, 173–74 identities 173, 179n33; see also national identity identity crisis: Aquinas on 127; duty in 127; egotism in 127–28; in national identity 126–28; Tocqueville on 126 identity politics 121n15 illiberalism 116 immigration issues xvi, 135–36 imperialism xiii inalienable natural rights 146–47, 149–50, 152n17 indifference 147 Indigenous peoples 166n44 individualism 90, 126, 130–31, 136; democracy and 128–29; Tocqueville on 128, 171 individualism and universalism: communication in 172–73; friendship in 172; human rights in 173–74; identities and professions in 173, 179n33; neo-feudalism in 174–75; paradox of 172; rights talk of 173, 179n34; universal rights in 174, 180n38, 180n40 individual rights 145 ingratitude 27n30 inheritance 40 ius (right) 38, 145–46, 173 ius cogens (compelling law) 45n69 ius gentium see law of nations ius naturale (natural right) 34–36, 38, 42nn14–15, 146–47 Jay, John 43n32, 125 John Paul II (pope) 133 de Jong, Willem R. 62n9 Joseph, Bob 166n44 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 140 justice xvii, 9, 89, 93n26, 141, 148; in absolute monarchy 10–12; borders related to 162; Cicero on 21–23;

Index

death related to 146–47; in economic nationalism against empire 73–74; Hobbes on 145–46; law and 17–18, 19; piety as 27n30; Socrates on 143–44; in spectacle of sovereignty 102; Thucydides on 142–43; virtue and 24 Justinian 42n14 kalos (beautiful, noble) 8 Kant, Immanuel xix, 73, 97, 114 Kelley, Paul 148 Kellow, Geoffrey C. xv–xvi Kierkegaard, Søren 107 Kiesselback, Matthias 60–61 Knights Templar 84 knowledge 19, 97 Kotkin, Joel 174–75 Krook, Dorothea 64n19 Laelius 22–23, 27n24, 28n38 Lament for a Nation (Grant) xv, 154 language 20, 77, 159–61; Hobbes on 50–53; speech 7, 88, 93nn21–22 law and wisdom 17–20 law-as-reason (lex ratio) 26n9, 35 law of nations (ius gentium) 33, 38–41; as consensus 35–37, 43nn35–36, 45n69; natural right compared to 34–35, 42n14 laws 11, 23, 24, 26n9, 117; definition of 43n28; justice and 17–18, 19 laws of nature xviii, 18, 37, 47–48; see also prudence, science and laws of nature Leddy, Neven xv–xvi legislature, from people 117–18 Leviathan xviii, 49, 62n5, 146; see also Hobbes, Thomas Lewis, C.S. 149 lex ratio (law-as-reason) 26n9, 35 liberal democracy 145 liberal education 139, 143, 144–45, 150–51 liberalism 116, 157–58, 160 liberal nationalism xviii, 67–68, 77–78 liberty 93nn21–22; see also freedom “Little Speech on Liberty” (Winthrop) 88, 93nn21–22 Lloyd, Sharon 64n15 Locke, John 73; education and 120; equal rights principle 120–21; on freedom 120; on nations 118–19; on protection 116–17; reason of 119; separate communities and 119–20; social contract type of 86–88, 92n16, 93nn19–20; on what is a people? 116–21, 121n15

187

love and piety 20–21 loving one's own xix–xx; see also Grant, George Macbeth (Shakespeare) 140 McClure, Christopher 61 Manent, Pierre xx, 16, 89, 168, 171, 179n28; Aristotle and 169, 170, 179n16; on individualism and universalism 172–75, 179nn33–34, 180n38, 180n40; on mediating mediations 175–77, 180n58; science of 170, 179n17; see also Tocqueville, Alexis de Mansfield, H.C. 44n62 Marcus 17–19, 23, 24 marks 50–51, 62n9 marriage regulation 84 Martinich, A.P. 47, 64nn15–16 Marx, Karl xiii, 147 Medal of Honor 148 mediating mediations 177, 180n58; city in 175–76; political forms in 175; preservation or change in 175 mediation 169–70 Melian dialogue 142–43 Metamorphoses of the City (Manent) 175 metaphysics 97–98 military alliances 8–9 military virtue 14n44 Miller, James 79n5 Mills, C. Wright 121n2 modern democrats 82 modern education 132–33 modernity's problems: animals and 68; domination as 69–70; freedom in 68–69; infinite claim of freedom in 69, 70; luxuries as 70; restraint and 70–71; Rousseau and 68; selfishness as 70–71 moral 170; see also groundwork for genealogy of morals morality 74, 75–76 moral mission 76–77 multiculturalism 78, 161–63 nation 168, 176–77, 178nn6–7; see also specific topics national identity xix, 67, 79nn4–5; attachment in 125; borders in 134–35; criticisms against 135; cultural climate in 130; definition of 125; equality and individualism in 128–31; family in 134; identity crisis in 126–28; immigration issues and 135–36; modern education in 132–33; a people in 125; reason

188

Index

in 125–26; rehumanization in 134; rootedness in 129, 131–34, 136 nationalism xiii, 77–78, 134, 154, 160; Fichte on 67–68, 79nn4–5; of our people 113–14; see also specific topics nationalists and globalists 16 nations 118–19; see also specific topics NATO see North Atlantic Treaty Organization natural law 87, 93n19, 149 natural liberty 93n21 natural right (ius naturale) 34–36, 38, 42nn14–15, 146–47 nature 3–4, 20, 25; God as 38–39, 44n52; see also laws of nature Nazism 114–16 necessary linguistic foundation of state 64n18, 64n21, 64n23; Scripture in 61, 64n26; social order in 60, 64n19; truth in 59–60, 64n17 negative freedom 150 Niccolò Machiavelli 40, 42n13 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle) xiv Nietzsche, Friedrich xviii–xix; antiKantian from 98, 108n18; bee analogy and 97–98; categorical imperative of 98; sovereign individual of 98; against sovereign self 104–7, 108nn24–26; spectacle of sovereignty of 101–4, 108n21, 108n23; see also groundwork for genealogy of morals nihilism 103 noble (kalos) 8 non-coercive nationalism 77–78 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 16 notes of remembrance 50–51 Oakeshott, Michael 63n11 The Odyssey (Homer) 142 oligarchy 10, 121n5 On Civic Republicanism xv–xvi On Laws and God the Lawgiver (De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore) (Suárez) 35 On the Genealogy of Morals (Genealogy) Nietzsche) 97 On the Law of War and Peace (De Iure Belli ac Pacis) (Grotius) 37 On the Laws (Cicero) 17, 25 On the Republic 19–25 oratory 19 ordinary uses of people 110–11 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt) 133–34 ostracism 11, 12, 14n62

our people: nationalism of 113–14; patriotism of 112–13, 121n6; populism of 113, 121n7 Owen, David 99 pacta sunt servanda (agreements must be kept) 33 Pangle, Thomas L. 14n63, 17 partnerships 7 patriotism 27n25, 112–13, 121n6 peace 37, 59, 64n18, 71–72, 151 Peace of Westphalia (1648) 84–85 people as space 115 people as state 115–16 peoples 112–14, 125, 166n44; executive of 117–18; legislature from 117–18; will of 121n15; see also what is a people? people vs. elites: classic status in 111–12, 121n2; equal rights of 112; internationalism of 112; sovereignty of 112, 121n5; see also everyday uses of people Pettit, Philip 58–59, 63n11 Phaedrus (Plato) 107 philosopher-king 24 philosophic foundations of citizenship xvi–xx; freedom as xiii; free trade capitalism in xiii–xiv; global community in xiv; globalization in xiii–xiv; Grant on xiii–xiv; nationalists on xiv; social contract on xiv; Ward, L., on xiv–xv philosophy 17, 24–25 Philus 22 piety 26, 27n30 Plato 107, 121n3, 141–44 pleasure 18 Plutarch 28n45 polis 5, 8–13, 164; in antiquity xvii; citizen of 3; exclusivity of 3–4; from families 6–7; as global community 7 politeia (polity) 9–10 political age 90–91 political animal 158, 165n18 political authority xviii political friendship 90–91 political physics 169 political theology 33 politics 24–25, 121n15 Politics (Aristotle) xiv, 3, 141, 163–64 populism xix, 110, 112, 121n7, 126 power 48–49, 146 prepolitical state 27n23 presidential election, U.S. (2020) 91 profit 9

Index

profoundest philosophy 17 Prokhovnik, Raia 64n17 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant) 97 promises 41n2 propositional reformation 49, 53 protection 116–17 providential order 17–18 prudence 19, 22, 24 prudence, science and laws of nature: definition in 51; deliberation in 50; dualism in 51, 62n9; laws of nature in 52–53, 63n11; marks in 50–51, 62n9; notes of remembrance in 50–51; propositional reformation in 53; reason in 51–52; signs in 50–51, 62nn8–9; theory of language in 50–53; war in 52 public worship 85–86 Puritanism 89 Quebec 159–60, 162–63, 166n41 Quintus 17–18, 24 racism 148 Rahe, Paul 179n17 rational principle (ratio) 38 Rawls, John 79n4 reason 7, 18, 27n23, 36, 39, 92n7, 119; in de Corpore propositional reformation 57–58, 64nn15–16; law-as- 26n9, 35; in national identity 125–26; in prudence, science and laws of nature 51–52 redemption 103 red tory 155–56 Reformation 84 regimes 21, 169; aristocracy in 9–10; citizen and 5–6; in citizenship and polis 8–10; citizen-soldiers in 10, 14n44; definition of 8; friendship in 9; generational changes of 6; justice in 9; military alliances in 8–9; oligarchy in 10; profit in 9; trade agreements in 8–9 relationships 101–2, 103, 127 religion 61, 89, 93n26; see also Christianity religious pluralism 88 representation, of people 117–18 reproduction 7 republic: family related to 21; nature of 20 Republic (Plato) 141–42 revelation 88; natural law related to 87, 93n19 right (ius) 38, 145–47, 173

189

rights 73, 145–47, 166n41; equal 112, 120–21; inalienable natural 146–47, 149–50, 152n17; universal 174, 180n38, 180n40; see also human rights Robert Filmer. 42n21 Rome 27n38, 28n45; distension of 16; Stoicism of 16–17 rootedness 129, 131–34, 136 Roper, Henry 155 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 68, 72; social contract type of 85, 87, 92n11 rule 121n5; of justice 22 Russell, Peter 162–63 Samaras, Thanassis 13n11, 14n44 Scholastics 35, 42n21 Scipio 20–22, 28n38, 28n49 script 6 Scripture 61, 64n26 Second Treatise of Government (Locke) 85, 116 secularization 129 self 101–4, 108n21; see also against sovereign self self-confidence 97 selfishness 70–71, 74–77, 128 self-subjection 72 self-sufficiency 76 sexual equality 166n41 Shakespeare, William 140 signs 50–51, 62nn8–9 sin 93n26 Skinner, Daniel 64n22 slavery 7, 93n26, 151 social contract xiv, 92n7, 125; see also two swords to social contract The Social Contract (Rousseau) 68, 72 social contract and democratic age: Tocqueville on 89, 93n25; transcendent claims in 88, 93n23 social contract innovation 85, 92nn6–7 social contract types: of Hobbes 85–86, 92n7; of Locke 86–88, 92n16, 93nn19–20; of Rousseau 85, 87, 92n11 social justice 89, 93n26 social order 60, 64n19 Socrates 98, 107, 142–45 soldiers 148, 151 Somin, Ilya 130–31 soul 8, 13n31 sovereign individual/bad conscience 108n24 sovereignty 48–49, 72, 87, 98, 112, 121n5; see also against sovereign self; Taliaferro, Karen

190

Index

spectacle of sovereignty: cruelty in 101, 102–4, 108n23; debtor–creditor relationship in 101–2, 103; justice in 102; redemption in 103; self in 102–4, 108n21 speech 7, 88, 93nn21–22 Spinoza, Benedict 152n17 state 27n23, 75; see also specific topics state linguistic foundation 59–61 Stoicism 16–17, 26n2 Strauss, Leo 150, 175, 179n28 Suárez, Francisco 33–34, 35–37, 41, 43n28, 43n45 subjectivity 103 Tabachnick, David 163 Taliaferro, Karen 82; on political friendship 90–91; on social contract and democratic age 88–89, 93n23, 93n25; on social contract innovation 85, 92nn6–7; on social contract types 85–88, 92n7, 92n11, 92n16, 93nn19–20; on two swords to social contract 83–84, 91nn1–4 Tamir, Yael 79n4 teachers 18 Ten Commandments 61 Themistocles 27n24 theological-political problem 176 theory of language 50–53 Thomas (saint) 35–36, 43n28 Thrasymachus 141–42, 144 Thucydides 142–43 Tocqueville, Alexis de 89–91, 93n25; on democracy and aristocracy 168, 178n8; on democracy's truth 170–72, 179n19, 179n28; discernment of 168, 178nn2–3; historicity of 168, 178n4; on nation 168, 178nn6–7; on national identity 126–28, 130–32 totalitarianism 133–34 trade agreements 8–9 traditional societies 126–27, 136 transcendent claims 88, 93n23 treaties 16, 43n32, 45n69 Triadafilopoulos, Triadafilos 161–62 Trump, Donald xiv–xv

truth 25, 59–60, 61n1, 64n17; see also democracy's truth Tuck, Richard 63n11 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero) 25, 28n45 two swords to social contract: Augsburg Confession in 83–84, 91nn3–4; religious and political authority in 82–83, 91nn1–2 tyranny 6, 105–6, 119, 120, 150, 179n28 Ulpian 34–36, 42n14 unipolar moment 16 United States (U.S.) 16, 90–91, 121n15 universal 177; see also individualism and universalism universal proposition 53–54, 56 universal rights 174, 180n38, 180n40 U.S. see United States “us” as many vs. elite 121n7 Virgil 97 virtues 14n44, 18, 21, 24, 27nn24–25; Aristotle on 11–12; honor and 141, 142 Vitoria, Francisco 35 Waldron, Jeremy 14n62 Ward, Lee xiv wars 22, 37, 52, 121n6, 135, 154 Weil, Simone 131–33 the West 92n6 the Western dynamic 169 what is a people?: everyday uses of people 110–11, 121n1; Heidegger on 114–16; Locke on 116–21, 121n15; our people in 112–14, 121nn6–7; people vs. elites in 111–12, 121n2, 121n5 Wight, Martin 43n45 will 36, 99–100, 121n15 Winthrop, John 88, 93nn21–22 wisdom 17–20, 22–25, 27n20 women 7, 84, 166n41 worker bees 97–98 working class 132 Zamosc, Gabriel 108n25 Zarathustra 106