The Spirit of Liberalism [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674431379, 9780674431362

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THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM

THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr.

H A R V A R D UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England 1978

Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Mansfield, Harvey Claflin, 1932The spirit of liberalism. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Liberalism. I. Title. JC571.M3285 320.5Ί 78-7809 ISBN 0-674-83312-0

CONTENTS

Preface

vii

1

Liberal Democracy as a Mixed Regime

1

2

Defending Liberalism

16

3

Disguised Liberalism

28

4

Liberalism in Moderation

52

5

T h e Right of Revolution

72

6

Cucumber Liberalism

89

Notes

117

Index

127

PREFACE

This book has been written in defense of liberalism by a friend of liberalism. Consisting of essays published over the last six years, it was provoked partly by the deliberate provocations of the New Left but even more by the failure of liberals to defend themselves. It was easy enough to recognize the tricks of confrontation politics, to become accustomed to the merry speech of the confronters and to learn to shrug them off; but to watch liberals wilt and flounder under the insults and attacks of the New Left was matter for wonder as well as indignation. I consider the cause of this liberal failure to be in liberalism as it has developed and not in institutions or events. It was neither indulgent universities nor a morally dubious war but the liberals' own inner uncertainty that caused them such anxiety and left them so diminished in spirit. From having been the aggressive doctrine of vigorous, spirited men, liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism, which in time degenerates further into a habitual or involuntary tremor even when the threat is removed. Who today is called a liberal for strength and confidence in defense of liberty? It should have been no surprise, although of course it was, that the liberals were taken so easily by the New Left. Liberals had had their most powerful cannons mounted in fixed emplacements so that they could shoot only toward the Right. Suddenly an attack came from the Left: some prominent liberals were killed outright; others were captured, and then tortured in the modern manner, brainwashed, and compelled to give speeches praising their enemies. While liberal leaders were misbehaving in this

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way, most ordinary liberals lacked even the elementary sullen uncooperativeness which is the least one expects of prisoners of war. Now that the New Left has subsided, moreover, liberalism has not recovered. On the contrary, the spectrum of respectable, intellectual opinion has in important respects shifted to the Left, and as former zealots of the New Left have settled into bourgeois comfort and well-paid jobs, they have been forced to sacrifice fewer of their former opinions than they had feared and others had hoped. They are allowed to retain without reproach their pure belief in egalitarianism while benefiting from certain positions now available to them, soon available to all, wearing the appearance of exemptions, to be sure, but necessary for the period of transition to full and equal freedom for each and all. These former zealots are also allowed to continue their inconsistent promotion of sexual liberation and of women's liberation without a calling to account. They are further permitted to teach without contradiction their opinion that anti-communism is illiberal and in particular to propagate the canard that anti-communism after World War II was chiefly inspired by Joseph McCarthyism. This opinion has had its effect: the hard-won lessons of a whole generation of anti-Communist liberals have been dissipated as Americans have once again been provided with an exhibition of silly enthusiasm for a Communist regime, this time the People's Republic of China. It almost seems that any Communist regime indicating a willingness to accept the adulation of liberal intellectuals and businessmen will have it, either for ideological purity or for practical moderation, depending on its current phase. Indeed, it has proved possible simultaneously to approve of China for the one and the Soviet Union for the other. Above all, the old New Left has not abandoned the doctrine of self. On the contrary, that doctrine has proved its usefulness in versatility. Whereas a few years ago it was the fashion to project the self outwards by speaking out in protest, thus shocking the bourgeoisie, the erstwhile conscience-mongers have become trend setters, working with the system and going "into" this or that. Self-expression can have its moments of introversion, if not of introspection, as well as bursts of demonstration. But such introversion is as far from healthy, liberal self-interest as were the protests designed to outrage liberals. Going "into" something is not the

Preface

ix

pursuit of an interest in which a free man takes pride as he makes himself independent; it is absorption in a diversion from the responsible work of supporting oneself and one's family. "Working within the system" means using it for illiberal ends and to prevent the system from working as a whole. In sum, the New Left has behaved more quietly but its mood is not penitent; and liberals have been so grateful for the change in behavior that they do not perceive, much less quarrel with, the illiberal opinions that persist. If all this sounds intolerant, then the reader has caught my tone rather than taken my point. The liberal practice of toleration requires a distinction between the tolerable and the suitable, because a liberal ought not to like everything he should tolerate. He should like only what accords with liberalism, as opposed to what is illiberal, for liberalism is a distinct doctrine with followers, friends, and enemies like other doctrines. One distinctive feature of liberalism is the practice of toleration toward enemies as the principal part of a policy to persuade or isolate them. But the practice of toleration does not compel the liberal to become a mere agreeable fellow, much less an indiscriminate lover of all mankind and all nature. The "wishy-washy liberal" is a corruption of liberalism, as anyone may see by trying to imagine that name applied to John Locke or Thomas Jefferson. To be tolerant in his actions the liberal must be ready to be intolerant in tone. Although he may have the better arguments, arguments do not speak on their own. Liberal arguments require spokesmen, and if liberals do not defend liberalism, hardly anyone else will and no one will do so effectively. To defend liberalism, liberals must be critical of the enemies they tolerate and speak up against them. The true liberal speaks up; he does not speak out. Speaking up implies a period of watching or listening to what one disagrees with, followed by a surge of indignation and a persuasive rendition of one's opinion. Speaking out is an impulse, soon a routine, of self-expression regardless of what others have done or said and heedless of the means to persuade them. Of course a liberal, no more than anyone, cannot persuade when speaking in an angry tone, but neither can a liberal persuade without a firm sense of the difference between the liberalism he is persuading to and the illiberalism he is persuading from. This firm sense must control his judgment as to

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when he can persuade and when he cannot. No one can persuade who thinks he can always persuade, for his rhetorical concessions made to persuade are soon transformed by his eagerness and confidence into real concessions of his own and finally into surrender of his position. It is characteristic of liberalism in its present troubles to be more suspicious of friends than enemies. Friends, that is, political friends in a common alliance, imply enemies; and liberals who do not wish to have enemies cannot abide friends. So when I call myself a friend of liberalism, as distinct from a liberal, I know that I come under suspicion of being an enemy of liberalism, but in my case without any claim to friendly treatment. To be a friend of liberalism sounds like something less than a "commitment," to use another illiberal word that liberals today have uncritically adopted. In particular, it would appear to be conservatism of a cowardly, insinuating sort. This is what must appear to those whose horizon is constituted by the dispute between liberalism and conservatism, or to liberals who would regard William F. Buckley, say, as a chief enemy. I will leave it to the reader to decide whether the tone of these essays is so dangerously soft and sweet as to be insinuating. He may well conclude that I am defending liberalism in no other way than by attacking liberals. But to support my sincerity I will ask him to distinguish the modern conservatism that accompanies liberalism from the classical conservatism that preceded liberalism. Modern conservatism was born in rebellion against liberalism, but because of the conditions of its birth it has settled into the comfortable, relative status of liberalism's weak sister, nagging at the vices of its elder brother and at the same time absorbing fraternal hostility and serving as the butt of funny jokes. The modern conservative, like Edmund Burke, does not object to the "real rights of man"; but unlike Burke, he does not know what he shares with liberalism. He therefore does not appreciate what is needed to enliven liberalism in a time when liberals are too dispirited rather than too rambunctious. Classical conservatism, in contrast, does not derive from liberalism; liberalism is derived from it. Liberalism was born in revolt against the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, rejecting its highmindedness as giving opportunity to tyranny but accepting its

Preface

xi

public-spirited character against the temptations of high- and low-minded hedonism. In the early versions of Hohbes and Locke liberalism represents an attempt to be public-spirited without being high-minded. The later fate of this attempt, degenerating to today's cool cucumber liberalism, which is neither publicspirited nor high-minded but very broad-minded, suggests that liberals might do better to borrow from the classical tradition than to try to come to terms with modern conservatism. It would be surprising if modern conservatism did not share some of the defects of present-day liberalism, and besides that, most liberals cling to their hostility for their weaker, more benign enemy and would sooner —well, not die, but surrender their liberalism than give over hating conservatives. In the classical tradition, however, liberals would learn more about themselves for knowing what they lack because of what was once rejected in the name of liberty and now is needed in defense of liberty: a certain spirit in the soul of a human being that gives him the pride to defend his humanity· Five of these chapters have been published before in journals that could be described in gratitude or with irony as discerning. The most recent, "Cucumber Liberalism," appears here for the first time. Two others, "Disguised Liberalism" and "Liberalism in Moderation," are inflated book reviews. I make no apology for being concerned with the books of liberals, for their books are more interesting as well as more successful than their policies. Their books announce or at any rate prefigure their policies. In recent years liberal policies have lost their specifically liberal identity as liberals have borrowed from the radicals for such remedies as Affirmative Action and from the conservatives for law and order and fiscal restraint. The need for much borrowing could have been anticipated in the failure of liberals to sustain an argument for liberalism in their books. When they could not define themselves against the New Left despite many helpful, suggestive epithets from the New Left, they were bound to absorb policies they did not know how to reject; and it was predictable that some liberals, in reaction, would risk if not relish association with conservatives by adopting some of their policies. I have let stand two statements that I would not make now. One paragraph at the beginning of "Defending Liberalism,"

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expressing my admiration for Richard Nixon's political skill, was written at the peak of Nixon's achievement, which was of course followed by a rapid, headlong descent. Let that be a monument to my prescience. I have had to give up the hope that Nixon's career could supply valuable lessons to liberals. Second, there is apparent contradiction between the conclusion of "Disguised Liberalism," where it is denied that liberalism is on the point of expiring, and the conclusion of "Cucumber Liberalism," where it is said that liberalism is in trouble. Theodore Lowi might be excused for supposing that I reserve to myself alone the right to announce "the end of liberalism." Actually, I would deny that right only to a radical proposing to substitute a perverted, disguised liberalism for the liberalism that liberals ought to defend. This liberalism is worth defending and we cannot know that it has come to an end. Cambridge, Massachusetts March, 1977

THE SPIRIT OF LIBERALISM

1 Liberal Democracy as a Mixed Regime

I N THE election of 1972 the coalition of which the Democratic party is composed came unstuck as its voters divided into enthusiasts for McGovern or against Nixon and supporters of Wallace and Nixon. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the coalition dissolved further or that it parted temporarily, but my interest is not so much in the history of parties as in what this event reveals about the character of liberal democracy as a regime. It reveals that this regime is a mixture, usually made in a party coalition, of liberals and democrats. The "liberals" are, of course, the McGovern enthusiasts in our example, but not only they, as we shall see. Such liberals might be called "opinion leaders" or identified by class or group, but I will define them as men of ambition who have enough demonstrable talent to think themselves capable of being outstanding in some way. Their ambition is usually moderate and varied, but it is real; and it is very important to them not to do merely what others do, to think what others think, or to be what others are. The "democrats," the ordinary voters (including most McGovern voters), are otherwise. They want what passes for a competence, no less than what most people have but no more; and they want this with security, more for the sake of their dignity (their "standard" of living) than for any level of comfort, and more against injustice than against loss. They prefer a quiet, private life, and

This chapter was originally published in The Alternative: An American tator (now The American Spectator), 8.9 (June-July 1975), 8-12.

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The Spirit of Liberalism

are satisfied with the praise and esteem of their friends. Last but not least, the democrats are many and the liberals are relatively few. Now since our regime is often called a liberal democracy, and liberal democracy is a regime that takes pride in diversity, why should it be necessary to discover that liberal democracy is a mixture of liberals and democrats? The answer is that the liberals resist being defined as I have defined them. They want to think of themselves as democrats, as I defined them. This resistance, I will try to show, lies at the root of the troubles of liberal democracy today, including those of liberal Democrats in the 1972 election, because liberal democracy is so mixed as to conceal intentionally the ambitions of liberals. To see why and how this was done, we must consider the classical source of the mixed regime in Aristotle's political science, out of which, and against which, liberal democracy was conceived. According to Aristotle, almost all modern, civilized regimes are democracies or oligarchies. They may be defined as the rule of the many and of the few; in fact, since it happens that the poor are many and the rich few (questionable in contemporary America), they are the rule of the poor and of the rich. The difference between the poor and the rich is highly visible to all, including the poor and the rich, and it is perhaps most impressive to ordinary men or "democrats" who judge life by the level of security and comfort. This difference is perhaps also the first observation of a traveller in a foreign land: "how do people live here?" means "how well do they live?" which means "how well-off are they?" Yet Aristotle's classification of these regimes by the number who rule is significant of their similarity: both the poor and the rich (as such), and hence their regimes, are concerned above all with wealth; and a regime of the "have-nots" does not differ in quality from a regime of the "haves." We know that any share of wealth can be expressed as a quantity of money to make it comparable with other wealth; so when wealth is the end of politics, citizens are comparable and countable as quantity. Democracies constituted as rule of the poor —that is, most democracies of which we have experience—are in a sense indistinguishable from oligarchies. As the poor seek to become rich, they behave as the rich do: they expropriate the expropriators, and fall into faction

Liberal Democracy as a Mixed Regime

3

and conflict. For wealth considered as pure quantity—as an end in itself rather than as a means to a certain quality of life—is an unstable principle. One never knows how much is enough either for comfort and security or for dignity of life. The security (not to mention comfort) of a mortal body seems to be an ideal (if we may call it that) impossible of realization, and quantified dignity measured in money is perfectly relative to the indignity of other men and therefore intensely competitive. Indeed, what is the dignity of having more money as opposed to more of anything else? What can be the value of having more unless we know more what? This question applies to poor and rich alike, since we need to know what the rich do with their money and what the poor would do with theirs. It is not enough to answer for the poor that they would like to survive; their right to life implies a certain quality in human life. Mere quantity offers no basis for a human right to survive, for there are other species more numerous than ours with more mouths to feed and other species less numerous than ours which are more in danger of extinction. Both ants and eagles are more needy than the human poor. But even in our ecological concern, we are concerned for the survival of species, not for mere number but for the number of a certain species or kind or what. The certain quality of human life is not so easily defined as is that of other species. When we look at the human community we do not see the uniform qualities of ants and eagles; rather, we see first of all a difference between rich and poor which appears to lead nowhere—into a meaningless dispute over quantity, not toward a definition of quality. This indetermination of humanity — our inability to see easily what we are—obliges us to make claims as to what we are in some less visible respect to which all men do not obviously measure up. These are claims as to what we ought to be. Such claims are almost inevitably partisan because they begin from a quality each of us thinks he has and proceed to generalize or absolutize this quality as the human quality. Thus the establishment of human dignity involves us in the promotion of some humans over others, one individual over others, one party over others, one country over others. In our day atomic weapons have made human beings an endangered species, but in no way have they helped define a human being. So the diverse claims by which men assert them-

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selves to be human continue to cause political conflict in our day as in Aristotle's. It does not seem possible either to reduce political conflict without defining human dignity, or to define human dignity without risking political conflict. Contrary to B.F. Skinner's point of view, the problem of security and the problem of dignity arise together and cannot be solved separately. Therefore, when Aristotle puts together a mixed regime of the rich and the poor, he seeks a standard by which to mix them, an understanding of the human good or virtue. The rich and the poor must be defined according to this standard in order that they be mixed, because as mere quantities of wealth or human bodies they can attempt to solve political disputes only by outcounting their opponents or preponderating over them. But since it is never clear what they are counting, the result of the count is always open to dispute and will be disputed. Because of their failure to appreciate quality, the rich and the poor cannot find out what they are in the course of disputing each other, although it is true that when they face each other, certain qualities typical of the rich and poor are called forth. These qualities are tautness in the rich, as they find they are few and must defend themselves against the poor, and softness in the poor, as they seek to embrace everyone in order to deny privileges to the few. At this point one can speak of oligarchical and democratic qualities. More precisely, however, one must speak of the formal character of qualities, which are "oligarchic" insofar as they define themselves against others and "democratic" by the willingness of matter to receive them. We are reminded of the forms and the potentiality of matter in Aristotle's less political treatises, but we are also reminded of the liberals and democrats in liberal democracy: liberals exhibit outstanding qualities and democrats receive them with enthusiasm, tolerance, or disgust. Evidently the quality of the mixed regime is not established until the oligarchical and the democratic contributions are brought together, and we still do not know what they contribute to. Someone is needed to help the partisans move toward the quality that is the standard of their mix, someone who has knowledge of human virtue. The dialectic of party conflict does not move toward resolution on its own. Without a helping hand, parties win and lose in defense or pursuit of wealth.

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5

The difficulty is that the standard of human dignity and political sovereignty is not visible. Aristotle says that "it is not so easy to see beauty of soul as beauty of body" (Politics 1245b 39). We may take this for a considerable understatement, but we cannot overlook the fact that he says beauty of soul can be seen. This is Aristotle's task in constructing the mixed regime: to find a standard which makes invisible virtue visible so that men can see beauty of soul. Invisible virtue is the intellectual virtue that most men, including most rulers, cannot recognize or appreciate. Such virtue cannot be the basis of political agreement in the situation, which of course continues today because it is the unchangeable human condition, where the vast majority of mankind is quite satisfied with its share of wisdom, each with his own. Against this majority intellectual virtue cannot even defend itself, much less instruct others. Or perhaps it could defend itself by instructing others. To do so, the man of intellectual virtue or the man who seeks it, the philosopher, would have to become a political scientist for his own sake as well as for the benefit of the community. He would have to make his virtue political and to make politics receptive to his virtue. He would aid the democratic and oligarchical parties to define themselves in accordance with a standard that improves and mixes their qualities while elevating them above the concern for mere wealth. The political scientist aids the parties, and neither neglects them nor rules them. He must not neglect them because they cannot fashion their own mixed regime unaided, and he does not rule them because he cannot. If the mixed regime is made to a standard of human virtue, then it cannot merely mix democracy and oligarchy as they are found. This would be a mixed regime in which both poor and rich rule, sharing the offices but not ceasing to be or to consider themselves poor and rich. Although together, poor and rich would remain intact in a sort of democracy. Not the many but all would rule, as accords with the claim of democracy to be the rule of all, that is, both few and many. But this regime would surely degenerate into an unmixed partisan regime at the first opportunity for poor or rich to impose itself on the other, and it would not have any basis but common concern for wealth. Another mixed regime would mix poor and rich by splitting the difference between them, as when a small quantity of wealth above the

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lowest poverty defines a citizen. As the first mixed regime is a sort of democracy this is a sort of oligarchy with a property qualification, but low enough to include many democrats. It is based not on what is common to both extremes but on what is between them; it presupposes or calls for the existence of a middle class between the poor and the rich. This mixed regime is then an improvement on the first because it begins to overcome the most visible difference in a society: the middle class is visibly neither poor nor rich. Yet the middle class as such is not essentially superior to the poor and the rich; it would be like the poor if necessary and like the rich if possible. Lacking a quality of its own, it has difficulty in defending itself from the claims of the extremes, and when one extreme asserts itself the middle class regime, too, easily degenerates into a partisan regime. A third mixed regime to transcend the poor and the rich is needed. To construct such a regime the political scientist must satisfy two contrary requirements in what will maintain the regime. For attracting the partisans to the regime, it is necessary that both democracy and oligarchy be visible to them so that they can find something to like; but for maintaining the regime, no part of it should desire any other regime. The problem is that attracting the partisans does not diminish but rather increases their desire for democracy or oligarchy unmixed. How can they be weaned away from the very taste by which they are attracted? Aristotle's solution is in the ordering of the regime. The political scientist takes the democratic mode of lot and the oligarchical or aristocratic mode of choice and combines them in the various offices to make an order. The democratic and oligarchic modes are there to appeal to the partisans, but they have been formalized in accordance with the qualities of democracy and oligarchy so that they contribute to a whole. The democratic quality of "open to all" and the oligarchical quality of "reserved for the few" are preserved and in view, but arranged in a visible order reflecting the intention of the legislator. The visible order implies the existence of an invisible order in the soul of the legislator, since bodies in an order may be taken to imply soul. The American government, for example, is not a mere haphazard combination of diverse parts but a certain order of institutions from which we could infer an intention of the Founders even if we did not have

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ample evidence that one (or more than one) exists. When Aristotle discusses the distribution of the three parts of regimes in Book IV of the Politics, he separates them as activities of the soul or of the rational soul: deliberating, judging, and the ruling that connects them. Each part of the regime is then shown to have many possible orderings with different degrees of democracy and oligarchy so that the whole regime in its intricacy can vary to show the legislator's intention visibly and with easy discrimination. Democracy and oligarchy are mixed and transcended by transforming them into qualities of the soul, while the soul of the legislator is made visible in the order of democratic and oligarchical institutions. The partisans would be led from their initial allegiance to the modes by which they were attracted to an appreciation of the ordering of the whole, and thus to participation in the legislator's bipartisan intention. The partisans may well resist this invitation. It is no part of Aristotle's political science to underestimate the resistance men offer to proposals made for their own good. On the contrary, it could be said that he develops the standard for the mixed regime from this very resistance. Men resist having their own good imposed on them out of a sense that no other can have the concern for preserving one's body that will equal the interest of its resident. One's body even resents instructions from one's own soul, as we know. This spirited resistance of the body against the tyranny of the soul, even or especially against beneficial tyranny, is itself an activity or part of the soul. It serves to defend the body but it also transcends mere preservation of the body when, for example, a man dies in his own self-defense. In politics, such spirit can be understood as the basis for the democratic claim of freedom. The many democrats are poor, but since poverty is a mere lack, they cannot advance a claim to rule because they are poor. Poverty is nothing to be proud of. The democrats claim rule because they represent the claim of the body against the soul yet made within the soul. When the democrats advance the claim of freedom, they assert that all free bodies are equal and transform individual selfishness into good-natured democratic openness. But when freedom is exercised in choice, oligarchical exclusion comes into use, for after the choice what is chosen must be defended against what is re-

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jected and indiscriminate democratic openness cannot be sustained. At the same time oligarchical choice can be directed to the legislation of better qualities than the defense of wealth (for wealth when defended can be considered a quality). The freedom of man is specified in qualities visible in the habits of a people living under a legislated regime, and just as the order of a regime implies the intention of a legislator, the visible habits of a people imply the existence of a certain moral virtue in their souls. Moral virtue can be inferred, and also produced, from the very resistance men offer to their own good, because that resistance presupposes a special dignity in the matter or quantity of human beings. Moral virtue is not exactly a virtue of the soul; it is the habit of using the body as if the body had a soul. Therefore, it is most easily inferred, and beauty of the soul is most visible, in the noblest deeds. For making virtue visible, Aristotle relies on the splendor of moral virtue. Political peace and stability in the mixed regime are built on what can be seen in or inferred from the deeds of the noblest political men. They must be trained to appreciate the worth of politics, and the city has to be persuaded to accept them and to be inspired by them as was Amphipolis by its sacrifices for (or to) the Spartan Brasidas (Nicomachean Ethics 1134b 24). This mixed regime when fully developed is nothing less than aristocracy, and rare if not impossible. Every lesser mixed regime depends on its possibility and reflects some of its shine. Yet beyond the visible mixed regime is the invisible mixed regime. Democracy and oligarchy can be mixed only in the soul of the best man which is out of public view but concerned for the public good; compared to this soul, all visible arrangements are more or less mediocre and merely attempt where he succeeds. Invisible virtue is made visible in Aristotle's mixed regime, but the standard of the mix remains the best soul. The modern mixed regime of liberal democracy is very different from this one, indeed conceived against this one. Its basis is democracy, not aristocracy, yet strangely it begins from democracy and proceeds to aristocracy, like Aristotle's. The modern mix is based on the equality of man, for all are said to be equal in an original state of nature. No man is naturally the ruler of any other; and in society all live as they please with rights that secure their liberty. Having followed Aristotle's reasoning, we might

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wonder how it is possible to maintain the dignity of the human over the nonhuman if some men are not considered natural rulers over others. But this was precisely the intention of the founders or proto-founders of liberal democracy, John Locke and his friends. They desired passionately to defend the dignity of man, which they saw endangered by the enslavement of men to priests and priestly education. To counter this menace, their defense of human dignity took the form of a denial of the superiority of soul, because it was soul and its invisible virtue which gave the priests their handle with which to manipulate men. They accepted the equality of man because it was a necessary consequence of the primacy of body, and they left human dignity at human liberty out of the same necessity. Another consequence is that the democratic and oligarchical parties are transformed into democrats and liberals as described above. Since man's freedom must be kept from implying the superiority of soul, the democrats who were asserters of freedom according to Aristotle must be restrained from making the characteristic claim by which they transcend mere quantity. Their resistance is now understood as malleable matter, and the democrats become the unassertive, "apathetic" many. They are now the beneficiaries rather than the asserters of freedom; in exchange for their standard of dignity they are promised and given a rise in their standard of living. Democracy, now known as "pure democracy," yields to liberal democracy in which the party conflict is no longer between democrats and oligarchs but within the oligarchs or liberals. The liberals, the ambitious men, are now the sole asserters of freedom. Freedom for them means just what it means to the people, which is living as you please; but since it pleases them to excel in some way, the consequence of liberty for all is unequal honors and wealth for the few. The principle of equality results in equal liberty, justifying inequality for the few who are able to take better advantage of equal liberty. Yet although these profiteers of equal opportunity have a good thing for themselves, their self-assertion is for the benefit of the democrats rather than against them. They use soul or reason in defense of body, not to flaunt their superior qualities; so in effect they assert not only their own dignity but human dignity in general. And because they are allowed to use soul in defense of body, they are

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The Spirit of Liberalism,

not expected to use body as if it were soul, in the way of moral virtue. Their qualities are impressed on the inert class, the "opinion followers," in some degree, but the difference in ambition remains. The democrats approve or tolerate ambition; the liberals have it. This difference is not overcome in the mix of honors and benefits characteristic of liberal democracy. There are two principal rights in a liberal democracy and two kinds of liberals to exploit them. The first is the right of acquiring private property. It is justified for the common good, but—or and —the few best acquisitors profit most. The opportunities of free enterprise awaken the desires of talented men, but also engage their competitiveness. Their ambition for political honors is turned at least partly to what is called "success" in economic matters. To be "successful" is to compete not only to make money, but for the sake of competing—to win, to overcome "a challenge." Those in our day who drop out of competitive acquisition do not call it a hog trough but call it a "rat race," and this despite the fact according to them that the Establishment is run by pigs. In Locke's more stately language, the "quarrelsome and contentious" are diverted from politics to the making of money, where yet much of their political ambition can be satisfied. This is good for them and others, for the result as we have seen is to "increase the common stock of mankind." Liberalism recognizes the need of some men to aspire to more than they need, and channels this need for excess into the common benefit. Let the contentious engage in the bloodless killing of commerce. Their success may at worst bankrupt their rivals, and it helps the people, the democrats. The rich are allowed to remain rich, rather encouraged to become even richer, if they turn to a private life in a privatized society. Their ostentation is more or less confined to certain "exclusive" neighborhoods and country clubs; it is not directly political and not obvious in the halls of power. The rich do not rule as rich, although they surely exert influence. The poor in the meantime live a more comfortable life and do not have to feel envious of a class that visibly rules because it is rich. The other right is the right of free speech, which we also find in Locke's political philosophy. This right is justified as for the common good in the doctrine that the government has no business caring for souls. We are thus informed that the common good is

Liberal Democracy

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Regime

11

to be found in caring for the body, but it is also implied that the common good so defined needs to be continually defended against attempts to define it as something more. Such attempts, as we have seen in Aristotle's political science, arise naturally from the partisan assertions and counter-assertions of the democrats and oligarchs to be found in every regime. Accordingly, the right of free speech at the beginning was asserted from a polemical stance against religion and soul-caring. Although it took the form of a universal openness to speech whatever its content or source, free speech was brought forth with intent to oppose and exclude the speech characteristic of priests and their scholarly clerks. In both respects, the right of free speech was a typical partisan assertion. Its early asserters in the seventeenth century opposed but could not drive out offensive soul-speech because of the endemic human susceptibility to it, and so even today, when fire-breathing votaries of religion are sometimes indistinguishable from flaming liberals, there is need of a group that will defend the doctrine supporting free speech. It is evident that the doctrine that the government has no business caring for souls protects both the democratic principle of living as you please and the liberal-democratic right of acquiring private property. Living as you please is surer with the body that is surely yours, even if temporarily (and as to mortality, perhaps science will find a cure for it), than with a soul that may be someone else's or no one's or yours on condition of good behavior. And the right of acquiring private property must be protected against limitations whose source is concern for the soul of a greedy man, though not against limitations whose purpose and effect are to "increase the common stock of mankind" and to ensure that the bodies of the poor are fed, preserved, and made fit and comfortable. Liberalism is necessarily laissez-faire with regard to the soul but not with regard to the body, and old-fashioned laissez-faire liberals opposed the "social legislation" of interventionist liberals on behalf of the bodies of the poor mainly because it feared the effect on their souls: with coddled bodies the poor would forget to live as they please and begin asking the government to care for their souls. This fear has been countered with the thought that unless their bodies are made comfortable, the poor will ask the government to care for their souls. Yet when all this has been said to prove that the right of free

12

The Spirit of Liberalism

speech is for the common good, one must still ask the question we are accustomed to ask about the right of free enterprise: who profits most? T h e answer, obviously, is those who speak the best. Just as under free enterprise the best money makers profit the most, so under free speech the best speakers earn the highest reputation if not the most money—though frequently they get both. These speakers run the gamut from poets, philosophers, and scientists to the big thinkers and polished artistes at the bottom of the media; in sum, we know them as intellectuals. Intellectuals have much more freedom in liberal democracy than in the ancient democracies, and as is the case with the businessmen, we may suppose that this is allowed with respect for the ambition and pugnacity which they might otherwise waste in hostility for the vulgar and anti-democratic scheming. There is something of honorable ambition in the name "intellectual" as compared to "philosopher" — lover of wisdom—which is not altogether effaced in the Marxian formula "worker of the brain." Patrick Henry's ringing cry "Give me liberty or give me death!" has been restated with routine bravado in the slogan "publish or perish" but without softening the firm impression that the intellectual of our day is still full of fight and eager for the highest prizes of scholarly controversy. This, then, is another group with a stake in the privatized life of liberal society whose privileges are justified as for the common benefit, or at least as having "redeeming social value." Again, although this group exerts influence, its ostentation is not directly political. In America today it thrives in the universities and in the media, two institutions which may be said to converge in the domain of public television. It is not oppressive mastery to be confronted with the opportunity of watching public television. These two groups, businessmen and intellectuals, are the "liberals" of liberal democracy. They make use of another group of liberals, the politicians. For liberal democracy does not mix without the work of skilled politicians who must build alliances and persuade both other liberals and democrats to see and to act in accordance with their interests. The unpolitical or less political liberals make use of politicians to ally with the people, that is, with the democrats or with different groups of democrats. At present businessmen are concentrated in the Republican party, while intellectuals flock to the Democratic party. In obedience to the

Liberal Democracy as a Mixed

Regime

13

fundamental democracy of the modern mixed regime, these two groups of unequals seek to advance their claims under the banner of equality. Each of them is very complacent about its own inequality, but constantly accusing the other of being anti-democratic. Businessmen live with easy conscience in fine houses, drive expensive cars, and hold important offices of management while complaining of high-sounding ignorance from pretending upstarts ("effete intellectual snobs") who have never met a payroll and/or do not know what it is to work. Intellectuals, for their part, take for granted their ability to publish their undying thoughts in indelible ink, to be quoted in the media, and to receive the adulation of the young; but they despise know-nothing businessmen who have never taught a class and/or do not know what it is to study. They say that America suffers terribly from economic inequality and some of them are socialists; but they propose to nationalize only the means of producing economic articles, never the means of artistic or intellectual expression, and they have an ultimate, existential concern for the well-being of the copyright law. Thus, both kinds of liberals are induced by their political alliances, which are determined by the fundamental mixing principle of liberal democracy, to deny that they are in any way remarkable. To show or perhaps to feel their loyalty in the alliance, they blame others for elitism but do not admit it of themselves. Early liberal philosophers and statesmen like Locke and the authors of The Federalist carefully worked out the new mixed regime. They specified the rights and duties of liberals in regard to democrats while making it clear that the unequal qualities of men are in the service of the more fundamental equality of man. They have made the benefits of this regime visible to the democrats, who remain generally loyal to it; but it may be doubted whether they succeeded in making the benefits visible to the liberals. Now we have theories of pluralist liberalism which almost suppose that liberal society is an automatic system of interest groups that nearly does away with the political problem of mixing liberals and democrats. In these theories it is as if the liberals were just collectivities of democrats having therefore no duties to the democrats. Liberals do not govern society because

14

The Spirit of Liberalism

society does not need to be governed; there is no noblesse, so no requirement that noblesse oblige. Such theories have been criticized in recent years by the radicals. The radicals ask why it is that in liberal democracy liberals happen to come out on top? It must be that they govern from behind the scenes in an Establishment, a network of indirect and informal government which cleverly ensures their dominance. The Establishment must be exposed and "all power to the people." But the "people" in the radicals' slogan contains their own ambitious selves eager for honor and power. The radicals are "liberals" too, and they fall to their own critique of liberalism. If they are now in eclipse, it is partly because no Establishment in liberal society has appeared with such boring frequency as that of the radical movement. The problem in liberal democracy is in the liberals, not the democrats. The liberals have forgotten they are liberals, and now believe they are democrats. It is not that they are virtuous men wishing to maintain a prudent obscurity before the unremarkable many; the liberals have been more democratic in their demands than the democrats and thus have become invisible to themselves. Out of embarrassment the younger and even some of the older liberals dress and behave in such a way that no one could accuse them, on superficial acquaintance, of being gentlemen. They do not see how they profit more from equal rights, and so they take their own inequality for granted. They do not see that they as liberals must contribute to the whole, but instead they use their unequal status to destroy tolerance for unequal status. They speak as if the whole were not a mix but merely democratic, and as if it could be created by the verbal exertions of partisan extremism. Tocqueville expressed his fear that American democracy would suffer from "individualism," by which he meant the danger that former aristocrats in a democracy would sulk and live privately in apathy. Today the two wings of our liberal aristocrats reveal an active hostility to each other and at the least an inadequate comprehension of liberal democracy as a mixed regime. It may be that they lost sight of themselves at the time when the intellectuals came under the influence of romanticism and Marxism and, to put it mildly, lost their sense of community with businessmen, then dubbed the bourgeoisie. Whatever the cause,

Liberal Democracy as a Mixed Regime

15

the groups that Locke joined were put asunder. Now they have taken refuge with the many and have justified their own privileges by attacking others'. In liberal democracy, the mixing principle does not make virtue visible. Liberal democracy therefore has a dual advantage over the ancient mixed regime of a more democratic appearance and a more oligarchical reality. The result should please both parties, but the trouble is that liberal oligarchs have been taken in by the appearance more than the democrats. They are allowing or urging liberal democracy to be transformed into an extreme democracy to which men who wish to excel cannot contribute and in which they cannot live without increasing frustration, self-delusion, and hypocrisy. I do not propose a return to Aristotle's moral splendor, or to the exemplary arrogance of the British aristocracy, but to the wisdom of that liberal democrat Thomas Jefferson, who frankly spoke of democracy's need for natural aristocrats—though to be sure in a private letter. The success of the mixed regime of liberal democracy depends on a recognition that it ή a mixed regime, and that although liberals can contribute to democracy, they cannot become democrats and should not try.

2

Defending Liberalism

L Y N D O N JOHNSON'S death on the day before the peace settlement in Vietnam was announced gave Richard Nixon the opportunity, while making the announcement, of vindicating Johnson against his critics. It was a chance befitting the course of events, for Nixon's policy has rescued Johnson's, and with it Johnson's supporters, the liberal Democrats whom he inherited. Now they need not abase themselves before radical critics of the war or before liberal defectors who claimed to be "right from the first." Those who had the wisdom or dignity to go "all the way with LBJ"—in many cases further than LBJ himself went—can now return to being liberals as distinguished from radicals or radicalliberals. But they must do so with the appalling recognition that Richard Nixon made it possible. This obligation is not cancelled by Watergate; it is only made more painful. Why do liberals have so much trouble defending themselves? Liberalism as an "ism" implies a body of doctrine, a more or less consistent whole more or less closed to doctrines inconsistent with itself. But it is evident that liberalism, if it is a whole, is a whole that is afraid to be a whole — and therefore has difficulty in rousing partisans to its defense. To defend oneself it is necessary to recognize the enemy, and thus to have defined oneself against the enemy. Liberals, however, are tolerant, and to show their tolerance they favor a large and various society in which all groups,

This chapter was originally published in The Alternative, 5-8.

7.7 (April 1974),

Defending

Liberalism

17

even enemies, are encouraged to take an interest. Liberal society is a society of interest groups, with the consequence that there is no interest group for liberalism. Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which might seem to be such a group, defends not liberals but the enemies of liberalism, in the spirit (though not the letter) of the maxim attributed to Voltaire that "I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it." To a degree, this lack of spirit on the part of liberals is merely silly complacency, but to a greater degree, it reveals the nature of liberalism as originally propounded. Let us turn from the "liberalism" of today's partisan rhetoric, which is opposed to "conservatism" and "radicalism," to the liberalism of America's founders which comprises all three positions or parts of them. The best explanation of that liberalism is to be found in the papers of The Federalist, and in No. 10 (written by James Madison) we find clear and authoritative thoughts on liberal society as a whole and partisanship within it. The problem of a free society, according to Federalist No. 10, is the control of faction, for in the free society produced by a popular government, the question immediately arises of what to do about those citizens who abuse freedom to the detriment of others or of society as a whole. When combined, such citizens are defined by the author as a faction, which is a number of citizens, whether a minority or a majority, actuated by passion or interest against the rights of others or "the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Two methods of cure are proposed for factions: removing the causes and controlling the effects. Of the first cure, there are again two methods: abolishing liberty, which is immediately dismissed as a remedy worse than the disease, and "giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests." This method of curing factions is also rejected, but with reasoning that reveals the fundamental difficulty liberalism has in defending itself. Madison argues simply and cogently: "As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves." To this

18

The Spirit of

Liberalism

he adds "the diversity in the faculties of men, from which the rights of property originate" as an insuperable obstacle to uniform interests. Protection of these faculties is the first object of government, and since diverse faculties produce different degrees and kinds of property—and property influences opinions—society will be divided into different interests and parties. "The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man," Madison concludes. These causes, to repeat, are self-love and diverse faculties, and they come together in property. Although men zealously dispute over different opinions on religion or government, or attach themselves to ambitious or exciting men, "the most common and durable source of factions" has been property in its different degrees and kinds. Because of human nature, then, society has no sameness of opinion, passion, or interest; and liberal society is managed by a government whose principles and practices change and respect the character and strength of human nature. "Modern legislation"—for the necessity of bowing to human nature so understood has only recently been discovered—"involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government." Federalist No. 10 goes on to show how government can control the effects of faction, especially majority faction. Majority faction is more difficult to control in a popular government than minority faction, because majority faction looks like the republican principle of majority rule, whereas minority faction must work against the genius of republican government. Majority faction may be controlled by delegating government to representatives and by extending the sphere of society to "take in a greater variety of parties and interests." A majority faction, Madison says, must be obstructed by preventing the existence of the same passion or interest in the majority, which is the purpose of delegating government to "fit characters" meeting apart from the majority; and majority faction can be prevented from concerting together in the extended sphere of a large republic taking in a variety of parties and interests. Thus we see that the sameness which was said to be impossible to produce without destroying liberty must indeed be prevented from coming into existence and operation, in order to secure liberty. In a large republic it is less probable that a majority will have "a

Defending

Liberalism

19

common motive to invade the rights of other citizens," but this is because citizens are less likely to have a common motive at all. Or, they have a similar motive, each working at the interest, especially the property interest, which will best prevent the creation of a common motive. Apparently, the latent cure for faction, as well as the latent causes, is sown in the nature of man. From this argument it becomes evident that liberalism has a reasonable fear of being or becoming a whole. Liberal society not only thrives on variety, but requires it for survival; and its sameness is distributive rather than collective. As we saw, Madison defines the whole endangered by faction as "the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Yet it remains true that liberalism must defend itself as a whole, and hence collectively. Self-interest or group interests, being divided from each other, cannot supply either the motive or the instrument of self-defense, since self-defense is not effectual except when all defend themselves together and spiritedly. Adding interests to make an "aggregate" is successful when the purpose is to add to one's interests, but when under attack, one may leave the aggregate rather than defend it. Now it is to liberals so circumstanced, divided in interest and united only in tolerance, feeling guilty when defending themselves against nonliberals and feeling uneasy when they do not, that radicalism makes its appeal. Radicalism offers a view of liberal society as a whole which may be grasped and then defended as the true liberalism against the confused so-called liberals. Radicalism will supply both the whole and the partisanship that liberalism needs. Radicalism supplies an understanding of the whole to liberalism by its analysis of liberal society as a whole, epitomized in the phrase of Herbert Marcuse, "repressive tolerance." 1 Among liberals, the phrase has currency as the name of a conservative policy mistakenly followed by some liberals today, for which a policy of greater permissiveness could readily be substituted. But that is not what Marcuse meant, and that is not what radicalism asks or requires of liberals. "Repressive tolerance" exposes to liberals the unheard-of fact that in a liberal society liberals somehow come out on top. They do not rule the society but they administer it, using permissive tolerance as the means of dissipating nonliberal opposition. Nonliberals are first allowed the opportunity of purg-

20

The Spirit of Liberalism

ing their partisan humors and then offered the temptation of developing an interest in public talk and private gain. This administered tolerance lacks the ceremony of a formal embrace and the warmth of an informal hug, but to call it "repressive" would seem to be an act of aggression following from downright revulsion. But such is not the case; there is admiration in the phrase. Tolerance need not be rejected because it can be made militant — that is, subversive and liberating. Liberal tolerance once had organized religion for its enemy, and liberal philosophers like Milton and Locke made it clear that liberal tolerance was not for the intolerant, not for the clerics who would not tolerate liberalism. Thus "repressive tolerance," despite its cloying hospitality and its bland disclaimers today, had a partisan bite when first brought forth. "Ecraser l'infamel" said the same Voltaire who is quoted otherwise by the ACLU. Radicalism has attempted to recover this original aggressiveness for itself and for the purpose or with the effect of attracting liberals, not with blandishments but with a shocking reminder to make them believe that contemporary radicals are the original liberals revived. Liberals can feel their own community and learn to assert it in self-defense by recalling that liberalism was a revolutionary doctrine, and by turning from the system of liberty now established to liberalism in its phase of liberation. Despite their accusations against liberals, radicals present themselves as friendly to liberals, or rather the more consistent (because original) liberals. They do this, to be sure, not by direct appeal to liberal philosophers and statesmen, but with the apparently liberal doctrine of the liberated self. Inspired with this doctrine, the liberal can know himself and defend himself against the enemies of the radicals. But are these his enemies? The answer depends on whether "the liberated self' is indeed a liberal or a wholesome doctrine. To profess the "liberated self," radicals do not make a frontal attack on liberal politics, or on the American Constitution. They do advocate "power to the people," claiming that under liberalism the people suffer from a sense of powerlessness. But this complaint sounds very different from Madison's political concern for factions adverse to the rights of others and to the interests of the community. Evidently, it represents or constitutes the expression

Defending

Liberalism

21

of the unliberated self in the act of liberating itself. According to radicalism, tolerance is possible altogether without limitations on the activities of the self. "Repressive tolerance" having the purpose or effect of keeping liberal society liberal is no longer necessary, and the liberal pretension of allowing men to live as they like can now be realized. The reason tolerance can now be unlimited and become liberating is that the "struggle for existence" no longer need continue. It is this struggle, according to radicalism, which turns men against each other and forces men to calculate means of overcoming other men and to conspire in secret against them. Since society—liberal capitalist society, it will be admitted—now produces an abundance sufficient to make the "struggle for existence" seem a dramatic phrase for a forgotten condition, the necessity of struggle has been eliminated, and the excuse for repression has been made obsolete. The competitive struggle still carried on in this fat society has lost any connection to need, and men go through the paces of enterprise and employment pretending that their lives depend on success, while knowing that they do not. Only unnecessary repression maintains these silly and harmful habits based on self-delusion and self-repression. It is now possible for reason to cease its calculating, conspiratorial promotion of selfinterest and come out into the open. Society can be ruled by reason, as was the hope of liberal tolerance; but contrary to the fears of liberals, reason can rule society without politics. Not only does reason not rule in the guise of a ruling opinion supposedly unreasonable; this would be, or run the risk of becoming, the majority faction that Madison sought to avoid. But also, the indirect administration of various interests by involving "the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government" can be foregone. The activities of the self can become "expression," an outward release of energy over the fallen constraints of embarrassment, respect, and awe. Liberal tolerance itself is raised to the radical extremes of excitation, provocation, and shock. Precisely because we can be confident that reason can rule society without government, we need no longer stop or even hesitate at the supposed boundaries of unreason. Precisely because no justification exists for self-defense against rivals and enemies, we can loose our anger at the restraints, justifiably called "repres-

22

The Spirit of Liberalism

sion," which remain. Free society is overdue, and we can begin to live it now. We can be liberated from the administered system of liberty by acting as if we were already liberated. A difference does exist between hard and soft radicals as to the necessity of a transition, the former asserting that the experience of alienation builds militancy, and the latter wondering why not now? But the possibility of "now" unites them with the belief that, in principle at least, the future can be seized and lived in the present. On the way to being liberated is liberation. As compared to Federalist No. 10, then, radicalism sees no problem in the connection between reason and self-love. Its premise is that selfishness is caused by the struggle for existence. This struggle forces men apart by making them aware of their separate bodies and responsive to separate and competing needs. But when each belly is satisfied, the self is apparently liberated from concern with its own separate body and becomes capable of acting as if it shared a common body with other members of the class, the society, or mankind. Individual pleasures remain, including the pleasures of separate bodies interacting, but they are a matter of choice among delights because no individual pleasure subtracts from another, either for oneself or for others. Chance made us with separate bodies only so that we could have fun rubbing them against each other. Liberalism is not against fun, but it does not hold this opinion. Clearly the danger of faction refers to the struggle for superfluities. Different property interests arise from diverse faculties as applied to self-love, not from a scramble to supply one's needs. "Self-love" seems to be a name for ambition understood generally as one's competitive sense or spirit of self-defense. It is associated with an appetite but it cannot be satisfied with any goods but those which are by their nature scarce, such as honors. Even if each body were satisfied in its separate appetites, it is implied, a man with self-love would be angry if his separateness were not recognized with appropriate distinctions of respect and prestige. The psychology of The Federalist is of course much less visible than its politics —the reverse of radicalism — but it seems to propose that the angry passions of self-love be contained with the principle of self-interest. Self-interest allows for the differences demanded by men's self-love, and so does not presume that the

Defending

Liberalism,

23

satisfied self is ready to amalgamate with others in a common body; but at the same time it turns ambition to the bourgeois desire for property, away from the pseudoaristocratic love of victory and command. To encourage the desire for property allows something to ambition, but different degrees and kinds of property translate success into terms in which one man's victory is not so clearly another man's defeat as in politics. Self-interest is thus more open to persuasion on behalf of "the permanent and aggregate interests of the community" than is political ambition, because unlike ambition, self-interest can be calculated as if men shared a common body (as we have seen): what is good for me can be good for you. In the persuasion of interests, reason is the instrument and free speech its guaranteed right. This is not to say that liberalism supports free speech for the sole purpose of uniting men in societies by persuading them to their self-interest; it also has the nobler purpose of uniting mankind by inspiring the advance of science. So reason promotes the interest of society and that of mankind in the separate vocations of politicians on the one hand, and scientists and intellectuals on the other. Yet these kinds of vocations are connected by their interest in a whole, and the American founders followed both. In the liberal system, self-love is calculated as self-interest, and reason stands for the interest of the whole. The business of liberal politicians is to connect them. To do this they must be acquainted with both the low and the high in human nature and must have a sense of how the one can be raised and the other lowered to make (so far as possible) a community of free men. This means that in making the connection between self-love and reason they must never forget the difference. For self-love is as adamant in its defensiveness as reason is unbending and high-minded. Under liberal constitutionalism, therefore, political institutions have the double function of stating differences and bringing about agreement. When those institutions work well, they bring about agreement by consent and through persuasion; but they begin with the need to gain consent from men who have the right to withhold it. The resulting agreement is typically by majority vote rather than unanimous, and by a coalition that mixes interest and principle rather than by either interest or principle alone. Agreement so at-

24

The Spirit of Liberalism

tained gives liberal society its own sense of being a whole while recognizing, tolerating, or even purging its partisan humors. Such an agreement holds better than a mere aggregate of interests because it is tested by opposition while it is made, and men stick to positions they have defined in partisan dispute. Liberal politics solves the problem of reason and self-love, when it does, by solving it again and again, not once and for all. Liberal institutions are an aid to this continuing solution, no doubt an indispensable aid, but they do not guarantee a solution merely by being instituted. On the contrary, they work by recreating and then resolving the problem for whose solution they were originally instituted. If liberal institutions could guarantee a solution, men would be such that liberal institutions would not be needed. This remark returns us to contemporary radicalism because we are reminded of its indifference to liberal political institutions and of its hostility to the difficult process of gaining consent. What is the difference between liberal self-interest and radical self-expression? We see immediately that the notion of self-expression combines free speech and self-interest not by connecting them but by equating them: self-expression is the free expression of one's self-interest. But to make free speech and self-interest identical, it is necessary to change them. Since the liberated self does not respect the necessary separateness of human beings in their separate bodies, its self-interest is appetite only, with no recognition of human defensiveness and anger. The consequence is not the redirection of ambition to property and the taming of anger by appetite, as with liberalism, but the redirection of anger. Radicals take umbrage not at those individuals with whom they may compete, but at the system of competition as a whole. They are angry at anger, and therefore more angry than the angry—because those who compete in the "rat race" of liberal society cannot win merely by getting angry, but those who believe they care nothing for success have no reason to restrain their anger. Indeed they understand their anger as reason, and therefore free speech not as persuasion but as giving vent to indignation. For radicals self-interest is all appetite in theory, and in practice all anger; free speech is all reason in theory, and in practice all anger. In both cases the practice is the consequence of the theory.

Defending Liberalism,

25

Self-expression is now becoming accepted in the practice of liberal society; partly by the process of administered tolerance that radicals describe, partly by simple inattention from the liberals. Recently the Supreme Court has accepted in some degree the self-expression of burning the flag or a draft card as instances of "free speech," although burning is not speaking and the purpose was not to persuade but to "demonstrate" and to "protest." It is as if the right of free speech were the right to be angry in public. The right of conscience is also used as the right to make a public spectacle by radicals who would have a hard job defining "conscience" as anything more than angry opinion. But the most expressive demonstrativeness has been saved for the matter of sex. Sex is an appetite, but an uncalculated appetite, hence available for use by anger (also uncalculated) as in obscenity, for example. In some demonstrations radicals have used obscenity as a kind of gesture in defiance of liberal society. Still, angry self-expression about sex is most visible today in the so-called movement (not interest group) of women's liberation. Speaking about women's liberation is not easy because it is natural to take the part of one's own gender. Indeed, to expect this is the beginning of wisdom on the subject, as opposed to that vestigial gentlemanliness which opens doors for angry women and acquiesces in everything they demand. This movement is based on the opinion that no feeling or activity is essentially feminine; those feelings and activities which have been considered feminine up to now have merely been imposed on women. There is a feminine body but not a feminine self, because the self (as we have seen) has the power of overcoming the separateness of bodies, including the sexual distinction. The self, indeed, would best reveal its power when it liberates itself from the weakness of female body — a weakness that must have some basis in fact if all the oppression hitherto has been male rather than female. Women's liberation is liberation by women, but also from womanhood. It is an assertion, but of what? It cannot assert the rights of the womanhood from which it is trying to escape, and to claim the rights of manliness would be joining the class of oppressors and admitting that they were right. It must be that manliness is not essentially male, as indicated in the asserted fact that independence in the very crude sense of capacity for sexual satisfac-

26

The Spirit of Liberalism

tion by oneself is possible for a woman as well as for a man. The self-expression of women's liberation is an assertion of manliness liberated from the male body, and to demonstrate one's liberation from both female and male, it would be necessary to engage (not indulge: it would be a duty) in sexual activity, precisely where men and women have been imprisoned most in their sexual roles. At this point of culmination, women's liberation borrows not only from adolescent masculinity but also, surreptitiously and with outward signs of abhorrence, from the movement of sexual liberation, to get unisex and polymorphous perversity. Still, doubts linger. Who will mind the home? asked Aristotle of a similar proposal (for a different purpose) made by a friend of his. And does not unisex bear a resemblance to masculine sex, after all, in its selfishness as well as in its independence? Men mistreat women when they consider women "sexual objects" in the sense of means to another's pleasure, but men achieve what tenderness and fidelity they are capable of when they consider women as sexual objects in the sense of ends to whose happiness one may be devoted. Thus unisex is not even masculine sex in the better sense. It is the expression of power without object, not appetite at all, but a generalized anger in defense of an impossible, inhuman common body. Old-fashioned feminism promoted the feminine, instead of denying it. Liberalism gave a courtly welcome to feminism, and with reason, because feminism was based on the sexual distinction and recognized the separateness of human beings. With less reason, liberals now give nervous hospitality to the varieties of radical self-expression. To be sure, liberal hospitality in the system of administered tolerance tends to transform expression into speech and interest. Obscenity takes the verbal form of pornography so that it can have "redeeming social value," and women's liberation is placated with quotas. But the system of administered tolerance does not work by itself in any context of opinions or with any cast of characters. Contrary to the radical analysis, liberal society requires successful politics in which competent politicians act imaginatively and speak skillfully to produce a ruling majority. Liberals today are not likely to take this requirement for granted, for they sense quite correctly that their leaders have been outgeneraled by Richard Nixon.

Defending

Liberalism

27

To support able politicians, certain fundamental opinions hostile to the radical doctrine of self-expression are also required. As we have seen, politics is recognized as important only if the connection between reason and self-love is understood as a problem for men. With this understanding, which does not have to be sophisticated in most, a liberal citizen will found his opinions on the separateness of human beings, and accept that there are others outside himself who have rights and to whom he has duties. He will regard the making of a whole community not as a matter of course, but as requiring care in construction and preservation. If he is reflective, he—or she—will wonder why the separateness of human beings is unchangeable and what this implies about the power of human beings. The radical doctrine of self-expression, implying the facile, though destructive, creation of a common body of human beings, stands in plain opposition to these opinions. That doctrine is drawn from Marx and Nietzsche, Marx supplying its wish to make man whole again and Nietzsche furnishing the partisan bite of willful mastery. I have not attempted to examine the doctrine here, but only to show some of its consequences and its hostility to liberalism. On the way we have seen that liberalism does after all have an understanding of itself as a whole in the work of liberal politics. As for partisan spirit, one may suggest a moderate, retrospective anger at the angry, as it is rather late for a liberal backlash against their radical enemies.

3

Disguised Liberalism

T H E O D O R E LOWI has written a book, The End of Liberalism, 1 which deserves to be read carefully, and because it is timely, will probably be read widely. It is timely as another radical critique of liberalism, summing up and adding to the troubles of that doctrine in politics and political science with a sprightly style that shows every good humor but offers no mercy. Its merit, however, is to approach a radical critique of liberalism in the sense of a clear understanding. Lowi sees contemporary liberalism as the use of disguised power for forgotten moral purposes and "the end of liberalism" in a new, overtly moral "juridical democracy." This "juridical democracy" proves to be less interesting than the critique of liberalism that is supposed to validate it; indeed, the critique works as well on the author's proposed "public philosophy" as on his intended target. We shall consider first Lowi's critique, next his own proposal, and last, liberalism in the longer perspective of political philosophy, from which we see in the present more danger to liberty than to liberalism. Lowi devotes nine of the ten chapters in his book to his critical analysis of contemporary liberalism in America. In them he argues comprehensively that liberalism has lost sight of the need to coerce and the duty to be moral. Its blindness is not just a blink or

This chapter was originally published in Public Policy, 18.5 (Fall 1970), 605628. It was answered by Theodore J. Lowi in "A Reply to Mansfield," ibid., 19.1 (Winter 1971), 207-211. It is reprinted here by permission ofjohn Wiley & Sons, Inc. © 1970.

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a wink but a general and settled incompetence. Lowi considers areas of policy outside the latest concerns —agriculture, commerce, and labor—and an instrument of policy not recently in public discussion, administration, as well as the more sensitive hurts or bellyaches of today in the cities—housing, welfare, and education; and to complete the picture, he also takes up foreign policy. Everywhere the defect is the same, except in foreign policy, which nicely complements the defect of domestic policy. Liberals, the men who run the country and hold "the new public philosophy," fail to take "unsentimental decisions about how to employ coercion" (p. 85) and thus give out their problems, which are the country's problems, to be solved by those groups who are held or claim to be most vitally affected by the problem. Liberals have developed the use of power disguised by delegation to such groups so far that it can no longer be considered merely their favorite tactic. In the indiscriminate use of delegation, in the permission given by governing liberals to "interest groups" not only to administer the laws that apply to them but also to make the rules and even to formulate the problems, it is clear that the liberal tactic has become the soul of liberalism, or rather that liberalism has lost its soul, its sense of direction. It has surrendered its reforming purpose to the interests of society as presently constituted. It has become profoundly conservative, though unconsciously so, for liberals today are so far from constituting a power elite that they are fearful of exercising power and (one may add to Lowi's analysis) ashamed of being an elite, in sum, incapable of conspiracy. Liberalism has become "interestgroup liberalism," the practice and doctrine of self-government by a "self' that has forgotten the need for government and believes in the reality only of its parts. As for the practice, Lowi speaks especially of "the new feudalism" in agriculture, by which he means the self-regulation that began with the Federal Extension Service and that flourished under the New Deal. Instead of working to a plan of what ought to be done in agriculture as a whole, the Extension Service offers the services that interest groups (in this case the American Farm Bureau Federation particularly) say farmers want and that committees of Congress, organized mostly by interests, agree they should have. Lowi has found ten such separate and autonomous

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The Spirit of Liberalism

triangles of central agency, local interests, and congressional committees in agriculture today. Where oligopoly does not exist, as in agriculture, it must be created; where it does exist, it need only be endorsed. Such is the practice of two other "clientele agencies," the Departments of Commerce and Labor. Lowi admits that the two agencies have had this special character from their birth before the New Deal, but he argues that their special character has been made the ruling tendency of government by the New Deal and even more by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. His example of this tendency is the war on poverty (Chapter 8), in which the poor have been organized to fight poverty by being organized. The intent of this operation, one might say in elaboration of Lowi, was apparently to treat the poor as another interest group, to be urged into existence by the sponsorship of its loudest and least acquiescent spokesmen. Thus has interest-group liberalism moved unconsciously from endorsing interests based on some qualification that contributes to the common good to establishing groups whose "interest" is merely a need. A farm program to make farmers rich makes sense, if not wisdom; but a poverty program to establish and then abolish the poor makes sense only to those few spokesmen who become very rich in money or prestige by their poverty. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson treated the poor like an estate of the realm, rather than as they were in the thirties, "the human exhaust of capitalism "(p. 243), or as they are today, according to Lowi, the victims of injustice. Their confusion of intent between abolishing and organizing the poor has in practice merely reinforced the status quo, for example fragmentation in New York and machine dominance in Chicago. In liberal doctrine liberal practice finds its justification or "apology" (p. 313). This "doctrine" is not a philosophic teaching but "the public philosophy," that is, the dominant opinions of our day as shown in the policies of government and the political science of what might be called, agreeably to all concerned, the unphilosophical side of the profession. Lowi's objection to the apologetic political science of interest-group liberalism is moral rather than philosophic; and so his theme is the errant axioms of liberal practice rather than the theoretical roots. He wishes to recover "an independent and critical political science" and thinks that this can be done by moral objection alone. The moral man

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confronts a choice more than or rather than the chosen, and so the moral as such is at a distance from present practice or the Establishment. Lowi's political science is free to choose differently from the present "public philosophy" and consequently free to think differently. Its freedom comes from choosing differently, not from thinking differently. Thus political science that feels obliged to apologize cannot be independent and critical, just as a government that cannot plan for reform must surrender to its interest groups. This conclusion would seem to overlook the possibility of apologizing because something better is unattainable and finding one's independence in thinking or understanding. Speaking from within the unphilosophical side of the profession, Lowi reproaches that side for its neglect of morality; and to make the reproach sting, he calls such neglect conservatism (pp. 90, 244). He does not consider whether neglect of morality might be studious, unlike the unthinking policies of liberals in government—a deliberate, willful resistance to moral judgment justified by an opinion about facts and values which he ought to confront and refute (p. 313). He signals "a need to break the thirty-year moratorium on consideration of first premises that has characterized modern political science" (pp. ix, 47, 55), but it must be said that he has only lifted, and not violated, the ban. Lowi contrasts the new public philosophy of liberalism with the old public philosophy of capitalism, for he believes the crucial change in recent American politics was accomplished thirty years ago (in 1937), in the Roosevelt revolution that decided that "in a democracy there can be no effective limit to the scope of governmental power." This first premise, then established against the fear of the state that capitalist ideology had made dominant, does not need to be reconsidered now. Perhaps he makes this remark more with intent against revived anarchism on the left than against surviving laissez-faire purists on the right. At any rate he wants to work from this principle as established, because it makes obsolete the usual distinction between liberals and conservatives that has confused public discussion since the time of the New Deal. This battle of the New Deal has been won. We are all liberals in this sense. It is time now to see how conservative the New Deal was in the use of unlimited power, in its delegation of power to interest groups. Lowi is so concerned to make this point that he passes up the opportunity to compare interest-group liberalism

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with precapitalist or preindustrial liberalism, especially the eighteenth-century liberalism (and radicalism) that was responsible for the American constitution. He knows of course that interestgroup liberalism has a source in Madison's political science, and he prefers Madison's definition of "faction" to the contemporary understanding of "interest group" because it has a moral element (a faction is "adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community," quoted, p. 296). But he does not make an analysis, and so he does not make clear to what extent his "juridical democracy" returns to or departs from the principles of the framers of the Constitution. This analysis would be important for judging the practical as well as the moral and theoretical soundness of his proposal. With such an analysis, he would have risked only imputation of deference to an earlier revolution which might have been called forth from the bullhorns of the advocates of revolution in our day. When Americans adopted the new public philosophy, they accepted positive government, but they did not understand the necessity and the requirements of planning. Planning is necessary because society does not operate automatically to desired ends as if by an invisible hand, in the way that capitalist ideology supposed the free market could order itself. In rediscovering the importance of the many groups in a free society, liberal political science avoided the inevitability of Marxist class conflict and the automaticity of capitalist individual competition and thus seemed to open the way for rational planning by government in administration. "Rationality applied to social control is administration" (p. 27), for only by administration can men be brought to live together when the complexity of modern technology divides them and forces them apart. Because of its pluralism, liberal political science seemed capable of understanding the necessity of administration, as opposed to capitalism and Marxism, and indeed it called attention to the importance of private administration by groups. But in regard to public administration it succumbed to the myth of the automatic society and concluded that government is merely a process, an epiphenomenon of the reality of groups. Thus New Deal delegation of power to interest groups was enshrined in the political science of Robert Dahl and David Truman, two living, smiling political scientists who for their

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prominence have suffered through many tests of their good humor. Lowi's account of administration is unclear. He criticizes the liberal political science for believing in an automatic society, and yet gives it credit for seeing that administration is more than responsive to changes in society. According to liberal political science as Lowi sees it, administration is bargaining, a kind of imperfect competition where the bargainers have "market power," yet apparently self-regulative because the political scientists do not see the role of "separate government" (p. 48) nor do they appreciate the need for it. Lowi understands government as planning and hence as separate: regulative, reforming, and coercive. Government is above society and the politics of society. Yet he also assumes that modern, democratic government is representative, which means that it comes out of society (pp. 95, 290). What lifts government above society is "democratic formalisms" (p. 291), that is, laws with clear standards of administration and coercive sanctions as opposed to informal bargaining that accommodates injustice and leads to disrespect for the law (p. 149). But the "formalisms" must somehow be m a d e representative by consent if government is to remain representative; and so they seem to rest on the whim or prejudice of an electorate, surely on the informal reality of an appeal to the people. At times Lowi seems to reach out tentatively for the Aristotelian notion of the regime (politeia) that forms society, but because of his unexplained acceptance of representative government, he never grasps it. He attacks Dahl for supposing that government is mostly peaceful adjustment; Dahl fails to notice the vast category of administration, where men adjust peacefully because coercion in the form of law remains discreetly but immediately in the background (p. 52). Yet in Lowi's view consent or at least unprotesting assent seems to be behind coercion, so that government would seem after all to be mostly a peaceful adjustment by which people bargain with their liberty for security. This system of interest-group liberalism and its public philosophy have brought us now to a crisis in public authority, "the spectacular paradox" of a constitution almost totally democratized and its government increasingly felt to be illegitimate (p. 68). Our rulers, the liberals, have parceled out parts of problems

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The Spirit of Liberalism

that belong together to competing groups to solve as those groups think fit or according to their bargaining power. The liberals do not consult the interest of society as a whole. They see problems in parts, which is to say that they refuse to see problems. From this mistake come a failure of realism and a failure of idealism. Liberals are unrealistic because they pretend it is unnecessary to coerce in the interest of the whole, and unidealistic because they cannot coerce for a moral end. Our government must find the nerve to coerce by restoring its "formalisms" so that it can consider problems as a whole, that is, morally. Coercion, formalism, morality are the central incapacities of interest-group liberalism. Of these, the key is formalism, for the formalism of democracy somehow assures that the interest of the whole is consulted, therefore that moral questions are raised and answered, and finally that coercion is undertaken overtly and unsentimentally. By "formalisms" Lowi means, as we have seen, laws with clear standards for administrators and judges. Together he could have called them "legality" if he had wished to emphasize the strong "law and order" component of his thinking. But like President Nixon, Lowi is a "law and order with justice" man, and he adopts the name "juridical democracy" to describe his proposed public philosophy. democracy does not hide either its power or its intention. It is overtly moral and it is unafraid of weeping, wailing, and teeth-gnashing among its "terror-stricken" (p. 281) opponents. But what is the morality of juridical democracy? Lowi, in a book attacking liberals for not raising moral questions, raises none himself and offers no moral arguments. He only makes moral assertions, from which it appears that moral means equality or democracy. It is as if morality were a thing whose significance would be known once its absence was appreciated, like beer forgotten on a picnic. Lowi does give the principal moral conclusion of juridical democracy in America now, a verdict against residents of suburbs. His book culminates or concludes in an attack on residents of suburbs, and of suburbs, on Chicago suburbs (p. 277), and of Chicago suburbs, on Kenilworth, the home as he says of Senator Charles Percy (pp. 197, 277, 278, 281). Whatever this means, the

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suburb in general is "an instrument by which the periphery can exploit the center." It is "a parasite," Lowi specifies, "whose residents can enjoy the benefits of scale and specialization without sharing in the attendant costs" (p. 197). These parasites, he believes, are responsible for the outstanding ill in America today, the inferior adjustment of the Negro to life in the city, as compared to previous classes of immigrants. One might explain this inferiority of adjustment by the racial inferiority of the Negro, but this possibility "we must reject —at least until every other possible explanation is exhausted" (p. 195) —apparently for reasons of humanity or patriotism. A second possibility is that the urban Negro likes his life of "disorder, destruction, protest, burning, pillaging, narcotics, numbers, gang warfare and rule by extortion"; to think otherwise is middle-class parochialism, and to act otherwise is middle-class tyranny. Lowi prudently rejects this possibility for reasons of common sense and moves to the third explanation, which he prefers. In the 1930s, he says, suburban city fathers acquired and used legal powers to erect political barriers to the development of the central city. As the suburbs gained political independence of the city, they became havens for escapers, rather than merely well-to-do neighborhoods, and the residents of suburbs were enabled to avoid making a contribution to the city's old function of educating immigrants and other "flotsam and jetsam of industrial society." To rediscover the whole, or the public, we must recapture the suburbs for the city. In the United States there are national citizenship and state citizenship, one's public character as created by the Constitution and its grant of power to each state; but there is no city citizenship (p. 273). To remake city citizenship and to recover its vital function of education, we must use federal power to put pressure on the states through grants-in-aid and tax rebates, and then the states must destroy the corporate cities within them who are their legal creatures. Metropolitan regional organization will not suffice, for the legal fiction of home rule would survive and continue to foster selfish unconcern for the problems of the city. Today the states can best destroy the corporate city and remake the city through public education, by busing Negro schoolchildren. It would be massive busing, for each school district in the entire metropolitan area, perhaps even each school, would

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have the same percentage of blacks. This measure would remove an important incentive to escape the city and a valuable attraction in the hideout, says Lowi more delicately than I (p. 280). This, then, is what juridical democracy means for us today. It would be unfair to say that Lowi has written a three -hundred page statement to demand busing and called it The End of Liberalism. Lowi does not seem to have any idea of what kind of democrat his democracy should encourage or create. More specifically, what kind of man should an American Negro and an American suburbanite be, besides not being a dope fiend or a parasite? If the city teaches citizenship, what does and what should it teach? Lowi proposes a great enlargement of modest busing experiments now or recently in effect. He wants to send very many black children to the suburbs as an indirect method of improving their status from freed men to free men. But why not do it directly? Why is this method of putting the education of black children into the hands of suburbanites, or if there will be entirely new school districts, into the hands of an interest group of professional educators or agitators —and this without any guidelines or principles to serve as the source of guidelines, not to mention clear standards—why is this any different from delegating farmers' problems to the American Farm Bureau? The effect of this proposal, should it succeed against the wishes of the terror-stricken parasites, would not be hard to predict: the present competition of trends would continue. I mean the competition between the propensity of the Negro to become middle class when he gets the chance and the propensity of the white middle-class suburbanites, especially the young ones, to adopt some of those ways of the Negro which derive from his former status as slave —a slouchy posture, a shuffling gait, shiftless habits, gaudy attire, throbbing music, and the various addictions. 2 At present, the latter propensity is ahead, and I believe Lowi's proposal, by destroying what remains of the isolation and virtue of middle-class youth, would greatly accelerate its progress and increase its lead. For this reason, and also because the punishment would fit the crime, it might be better to send white children into the ghettos. In sum, after it is decided who teaches whom, the result would be a subtle endorsement of the status quo, with bargaining advantage given

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Liberalism

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by law to one propensity or the other. It would be another solution by disguised government delegated to private parties, in which no one raises the moral question of what ought to be done. If it is moral to restrict the privileges of suburbanites, why is it moral to retain them at all? Why stop with busing? Why not make people live in the suburb or central city by lot and then change periodically? This idea is not new either in theory or in practice, and we ought to know whether to adopt it or advocate it or hope for it. What we need is a moral argument, if not a numerical measure, that will say which equal persons will receive equal treatment and that will balance contribution and need. Equipped with this argument and informed by a closer look at circumstances, we could judge whether suburbs should exist as well as whether they should have legal autonomy. Lowi uses Henry George's idea of unearned increment against the sanctity of suburban real estate values, and he says in italics: "The private profit from public facilities must be calculated in social terms" (p. 281). But to be complete, this kind of calculation must also consider the social profit in private terms. For example, what does society owe to Henry George? Does not Theodore Lowi at least owe him a rent for his idea of unearned increment? More generally, what does the American people owe for the contribution to society made by the managerial, professional, and creative talent of those who live in the suburbs? We would be justified in despising this talent altogether for its money-grubbing, its power-seeking, or its aesthetic vanities only if we were willing to dispense with its products. As things are, and in the absence of a general accounting between society and Henry George or Theodore Lowi or the University of Chicago, it cannot be assumed that society is underpaid. Early liberalism, the liberalism of Hobbes and Locke, assumed that a free society could not survive and prosper without a liberal aristocracy of talented men. This aristocracy would be acceptable to a society based on the natural equality of men if it were rewarded according to its social contribution. This could be done in a way all would understand if the aristocracy were based on the principle of equality of opportunity, rather than noble family, even though the ordinary m a n is as effectually excluded from the suburbs or whatever by lack of talent as by inferior

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The Spirit of Liberalism

birth. The fact of aristocracy is less evident, and its ascendancy less odious, when individuals from all classes can rise and when all classes profit from their rise. In this disguise of aristocracy it is important that the talented (in effect, the successful) be paid in money, a universal coin, rather than in privileges that obviously set men off from each other. As regards suburbs, it could be said that differences between rich and poor would still be irritating if they lived cheek by jowl, with slums in the back yards of the mansions. Suburbs at a distance from slums keep the rich and the poor from living in fear and envy, while the poor take the comfort they clearly do take from the possibility that some part of this luxury may one day belong to them or to their children or to one of their children. This reasoning is not a noble defense, but the society to be defended is not noble but large and free, with freedom for artists and intellectuals as well as for bankers and corporation executives.When freedom means freedom of choice, it must be expected that most people will choose to have products that require and support an "aristocracy," often including some unsavory characters, always including some whose talents do not redeem their mediocre qualities. Lowi seems to want this kind of free society, but he is unwilling to swallow the unsentimental analysis that must serve as an "apology" for it. He does not face the necessity of social aristocracy in our liberal society and hence does not appreciate the necessity of disguising it in our liberal democracy. Instead he argues for a free society of equals making their own morality by making their own laws and holding their administrators to account. The latter are an elite with great powers, Lowi observes, but they seem to be confined to the higher echelons of government, where they can be "peacefully cashiered" (pp. 187, 304). It is a picture that reminds one of Rousseau in his political mood and that requires a small and homogeneous society which does not resemble contemporary America in the least. The connection between law and morality is the most refreshing of Lowi's themes. For him, the law is the great sustainer rather than the enemy of morality, which itself is principally a matter of public character rather than the private conscience. Lowi is not for doing your own thing either individually

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or in your interest group. While strong for the civil rights of the Negro, Lowi is dead against black separatism. Legal support for it would be as evil as was legal prohibition of integration (p. 279). But still, despite his speaking of "public character," in this opinion he sees morality as the elimination of privilege, not as the promotion of character. For he does not say what the character of an American should be, into which the Negro is to be integrated. If law is an instrument of morality, there should be some nonlegal moral ends or virtues that the law wishes to promote. What are they? From this standpoint it is not enough for the law, or its proponents, to say that its end is the achievement of a society in which integration is totally illegal and the law is absolutely obeyed. This would reduce the law to fiat, although (or still worse) to a universal fiat, since the "public character" of society would be merely the result of universalizing its private character. This private character, the individual citizen, would have no other specification than that he was capable of being universalized, or that he could be adjusted to integration with other individual citizens having the same noble qualification. Seeing this point, Lowi criticizes liberalism for having "the mentality of a world of universalized ticket-fixing: Destroy privilege by universalizing it" (p. 292). But if it is as wrong to fix tickets for everybody as for a few, a prioriformality cannot be the rule of justice (p. 290) and formalism cannot be its only, unfailing instrument. Since Lowi has decided that suburban living is an unjust privilege, he would have to show how busing black children to the suburbs differs from universalized ticket-fixing. When law is used as an instrument of morality in the way Lowi uses it, the use is not fundamentally illiberal; it is fundamentally liberal. It is the reassertion of absolute sovereignty for its original liberal purpose. Early liberalism considered men to be natural equals or created equal; and so all government had to be by consent. At the same time, government was seen to be very necessary because some men, claiming natural superiority or divine election, will try to lord it over their equals. A society of natural equals, then, needs government of unlimited scope, that is, an enormous inequality of political power, in order to protect its equality. This equality, of course, is natural, not social: The very equality which keeps me from governing you enables you to use

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your freedom to become a better author or businessman than I if your talents are better, unless by doing so you interfere too much with my freedom. Modern or liberal equality leads primarily to freedom and consequently to government, but government is no less absolute for being consequential or instrumental to freedom. Liberal government must first gather all power to itself so as to be sure that all citizens understand the meaning of natural equality, and then, after this assertion, relax, in a mood often called conservative, and license individuals in their groups to pursue happiness as they see it, consistently with such pursuit by others. Hobbes was the author of the doctrines of absolute sovereignty and of pluralism both, and of the former in order to be author of the latter. What Lowi presents as the inconsistency of interest-group liberalism—first gathering power, then releasing it by delegation — is not an inconsistency but the planned strategy of modern liberalism. Before liberalism can tolerate a plural society of groups, it must first be rid of illiberal groups. The original illiberal group was the Church, a group that claimed divine appointment to govern or to interfere in government; and that group had to be opposed and tamed by an assertion of absolute sovereignty that could reach into its sanctuaries, which had previously enjoyed legal exemptions and protections. Just as Lowi's juridical democracy seems to be the liberalism he criticizes, so his attack on the suburbs resembles nothing so much as the anticlericalism that has always been the soul or animus of liberalism. But whether suburbanites are truly the priests of our day, condemning the vanities of the age while living off the fat of the land, may be left to the judgment of those who are willing to compare them with radicals in the streets, middlemen in the media, and professors in universities. Lowi's contribution is to remind interest-group liberalism of the danger of illiberal groups, which for reasons of humanitarian optimism and misguided scientific positivism it had taken lightly. In thinking this the time to assert sovereignty, Lowi advances the idea of administration rather than representation. Representation in the formulation of policy, and the increasing democracy of representation, he takes for granted; he wants to stress that laws enacted democratically need to be "implemented abso-

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lutely" or "carried to absolute finality" (p. 271). It is interestgroup liberalism that tries to administer "by spreading a sense of representation" (p. 95). Yet administration, a modern invention as Lowi says, is so far from being essentially opposed to representation as to require it and further it. Lowi says that "the function of representation" is "to bring the democratic spirit into some kind of psychological balance with the harsh reality of the coerciveness of government" (p. 95). It is characteristic of the modern "democratic spirit," one should add, not to wish to govern (as the poor might wish to govern the rich) but to wish not to be governed. This must be added because for most men government is not such a harsh reality when they are governing someone else; why could not the poor make government a harsh reality for the rich? This "democratic spirit" is really a representative spirit arising from the natural equality of men. Since in modern democracy all are included in the demos, the democrats govern themselves, not the rich. Lacking the satisfaction of governing others, they need some "psychological balance with the harsh reality of the coerciveness of government." In plainer language, they need a disguise for the harsh reality. "Administration" in the modern sense is part of the disguise which as a whole we call representation. Lowi indicates as much when, in speaking of administration, he refers to internalized coercion that "can be called legitimate" because it is "well enough accepted to go unnoticed" (p. 52). "Administration" is distinct from "legislation" in a way that makes it possible for policy to seem nonpartisan. Government seems harsh not so much because it is coercive as when the coercion seems partisan and from a party not your own. Coercion can be "internalized" and go unnoticed or be accepted if it begins with an act of consent, necessarily partisan, and concludes in the particular command of a nonpartisan rule of law. When you are coerced by the law, it is very consoling to be told that you made the law by participating in an election; and it is more convincing to hear, on the contrary but in addition, that the law is being applied without reference to yourself. By the system of representation the law says to the citizen: You are coercing yourself and besides, if that is not enough, nobody is coercing you in particular and therefore nobody in particular is coercing you. In modern representative government we

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notice both party government and nonpartisan administration. It required an unprecedented frankness to admit that government is partisan and a complementary pretense to deny that it is so in administration. This nonpartisan administration requires, according to Lowi, an administrative class, which in the United States is weak and fragmented and needs to be stregthened, as well as a Supreme Court above partisan politics, which operates to Lowi's satisfaction. Juridical democracy, in order to be representative, needs undemocratic institutions, suburbs of the central city so to speak. Even democracy is government, the government of whoever the majority may be, and government must be hidden by means of such institutions. The effect and, I suppose, the intention of Lowi's "juridical" is to qualify his "democracy." It would be a courtesy and an enlightenment to his fellow intellectuals not to hide this fact from them. This comprehensive book has a single chapter on foreign policy entitled "Making Democracy Safe for the World: On Fighting the Next War." The implication that liberalism has made democracy too aggressive is reduced to the charge that American foreign policy since World War II has been consistently oversold, exaggerating the Communist threat and promising too much in remedy. Lowi believes the cause is an inflated presidency created by a series of liberal presidents. They have tried to compensate for the lack of formal authority in American government by blowing up international crises so that they can take crisis actions that will bring them the authority they cannot get formally. The charge is unproven and the explanation fanciful. Lowi might have developed the subtitle of this chapter, which suggests a doubt of the liberal propensity to hope for a society without coercion and peace with a capital Ρ or perpetual peace. He excuses the peace marchers who seem more guilty of this fault than the presidents. He asks that we read all of Locke's Second Treatise so that we appreciate "the separation of the 'federative power,' by which Locke means, 'what is to be done in reference to foreigners' " (p. 187). This quotation points rather to Locke's refusal to adopt liberal internationalism than to formal limitations on the presidency. In paragraph 148 of the Second Treatise one finds Locke's declaration that though the federative power is concep-

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tually distinct from the executive, they belong together in practice. In sum, Lowi has not presented a political science that is "independent and critical" of the reigning liberalism of our day. Nor does he attempt to be independent and critical of "the revolution of our time" (p. 272), though he takes no party position. If we wish to think independently and critically about both, we should look in the history of liberal political philosophy for the reason of Lowi's most interesting point: to see why liberalism is compelled to disguise its use of power. In this compulsion can be found the two permanent, contrary tendencies of liberalism, the realism characteristic of contemporary "interest-group liberalism" and the idealism of the reaction against it. T H E POLITICAL philosophy of liberalism began with Machiavelli, though Machiavelli was not the founder of liberalism. He was the first to teach that m a n was born a needy being, not merely in having needs but in being unprovided in his most essential needs, having no advantages and receiving no inheritances except what he received or gets from other men. Man has received no gifts from God or from nature—only the need or perhaps the promise of gifts. Being needy and naked, and living in an unwelcoming environment, m a n must acquire the goods to supply his needs, and he must keep on acquiring. God and nature have not even done him the favor of indicating how much is enough, or if they have, it is not clear that this indication is in the interest of man. Man must "acquire the world"; he must take it away from God or nature. In this acquisition other men are both an aid and a hindrance. A m a n cannot acquire successfully without the cooperation of other men, but he also cannot acquire unless he does it single-mindedly, that is, unless he looses —or rather, perfects — his capacity of self-promotion. When men cooperate for acquisition, they cooperate as long as it is useful for each; their common object has no chance of becoming a mutual goal.

So men do cooperate with one another, but since they cooperate for acquisition, they cooperate for advancement, which means self-advancement. All advancement is ultimately if not immediately at someone else's expense, and so acquisition means acquisition from other men. For Machiavelli, acquisition is chiefly

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political, with the understanding that the goal of politics is mastery and mastery in the simple sense by "one alone." It is not chiefly economic, with the hope that the energies of mastery can be diverted to the never-ending diminution of scarcity. Government is the necessary instrument and the highest goal of acquisition; and if government means mastery, it could also be called, as we do, with an eye more to the receiving end, oppression. Government is oppression, open or disguised. But will it not of necessity be primarily disguised? Since no power is secure unless it is expanding, and no expansion can occur without taking from someone else, government is under the necessity of disguising its intentions. It must use fraud. It must use the winning smile or the bland disclaimer because, behind them, the intention must always be hostile. If the intention did not have to be hostile, then it could be shown openly. It might be thought that an established power, having risen with fraud, could then afford to forget its past, stand on principle, and avow its intention. But no power can afford to do so, though many former powers thought they could, for power is not secure or "established" unless it is expanding. The strong must excel the weak in fraud, or else they will not be strong for long. To be strong means to be strong in fraud. Machiavelli, to repeat, was not opposed to cooperation and trust. He once said: never ask for a man's weapon, saying "I want to kill you with it." Just ask for the weapon, and when you have it you can do your will. In cruder words: never break your trust until it has been built up to the point where it is profitable to do so. Now this argument, which has been very much compressed from the graceful presentation and deep penetration of Machiavelli's writings, was taken up and transformed by Thomas Hobbes, who was, I think, the founder of liberalism. He began as did Machiavelli with man in a state of neediness, and he called this condition the state of nature. In the state of nature all men are equal or roughly equal if judged by the standard to which any man, at his discretion, can appeal —their ability to kill each other. All men being equal in the ability to kill, none has power over another by nature or by virtue of his superior natural endowments; and so all have an equal right to life, a natural right of self-preservation. But since all have an equal right to life and a pressing need to secure their lives, the state of nature is the war of all against all.

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N o government is possible there because you cannot trust the other fellow to lay down his weapon if you lay down yours. T r u s t , a n d thence government, become possible by the authorization of a c o m m o n power over us all. H o b b e s calls him our representative, the artificial person who acts for us a n d ensures that everyone keeps his promises. T h e sovereign representative is created by a promise of all to obey, which enables him to secure, while limiting, the liberty of all. Justice, the central virtue for Hobbes, is keeping promises, a n d this justice replaces Machiavelli's understanding of f r a u d as the basis of government. T o m a k e a very realistic beginning has always been the great supposed a d v a n t a g e of liberalism. N o one c a n say that Hobbes's state of nature is a G a r d e n of Eden, a n d yet when correctly understood it shows how m e n c a n trust one another on a purely h u m a n basis without reference to something above or beyond m a n . It seems to show how we can control ourselves. W e do it by consent. Government is by consent, each m a n transferring the power to secure his absolute natural right to life to the sovereign representative, a n d receiving in return a qualified civil right to live in freedom a n d security. T h e principle of legitimacy (to use a contemporary term) is one's own. T h e question of legitimacy is not, is this government good? It is, did you authorize it? If it is your government, if the government represents you, then you have no right of complaint a b o u t what it does. T o authorize the government a n d then refuse to obey it would be going back on your word, a kind of self-contradiction, which is the essence of injustice. T h u s the typical issue in liberal politics is over the legitimacy or the representativeness of the government, not over its goodness. Questions of goodness are likely to be restated as questions of legitimacy. If the government does something wrong or suffers a misfortune, the typical solution proposed is to m a k e it m o r e representative or (as is also said today) to restructure it. T h e proposal m a y be to c h a n g e the size of the legislature or the method of electing the president, or in foreign affairs to adopt a policy of self-determination, or (for Lowi) to restructure the school districts of the central city and the suburbs. A r g u m e n t over such proposals, after the principle of consent has been established, has contributed to the success of liberal politics, for if government

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ever became perfectly representative to everyone's satisfaction, we might see just how necessary oppression is for us. We might see ourselves as the beasts Hobbes says we are in the state of nature. Government seems not to be coercion because it is government by consent and especially when we can argue about the meaning or the application of consent. Imagine a perfect blend of black, white, and every other kind of power; then we might have to face the reality of power and of ourselves. We might become aware of that to which we must consent and begin to wonder about the very principle of consent. This is not an immediate danger. It might seem reasonable that liberal political philosophy, having established the principle of government by consent, would go on to consider what good policies the people should consent to. But in practice (as I believe was intended), the principle of consent has shown a remarkable capacity to become preoccupied with itself. Liberal politics seem to have been chiefly the politics of consent, in which the issue has been the meaning of consent or the method of representation. Conservatives, reactionaries, and radicals become involved in the same issue and thus testify unwillingly or unconsciously to its power. The reason this issue is paramount in liberal politics can be seen in the right of consent. Consent is not merely expedient for governments, but it is the right of the governed. To assert this right it is necessary to abstract from the policies of government, in which governments show what they think to be expedient. In consequence, the people's attention is diverted from the worth of policy to its formulation, from the uses of power to its legitimation by consent. Liberal politics consists in the assertion and the reassertion of this right, because the purpose of liberal politics, as of any politics for its supporters, is to enable liberals to show that they are liberals, even while claiming to have discovered the end of liberalism. The liberal diversion from the uses of power is related to the following fragment of Machiavellian fraud, taken from the original: "Wounds and other injuries that a man voluntarily inflicts on himself, by choice, are much less painful than those inflicted by others." This is the liberal principle of consent without its characteristic system, universality and morality. Modern youth reacts in disgust against this realism, against justice based on self-interest that looks to an accommodation of

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the power struggle by the methods of consent or bargaining. There must be no more merely mechanical solutions, they say. We must ask what is right ideally and proceed to it without fear, favor, or compromise. We must be idealistic as opposed to realistic. It would be sophisticated and wrong to deny that such idealism derives from the moral philosophy of Kant. Kant carefully meant something splendid and difficult when he referred to his position as "idealism" (or "critical idealism"), in shocking contrast to the shoddy, loose idealism of our day. Yet the latter is derived from the former. Kant invented what he called a priori morality in reaction against the realism of early liberalism. A prion morality is prior to experience, which means, not based on consideration of any facts that might seem morally relevant. It is not based on the facts of human behavior in the state of nature, as was Hobbes's (now dubbed) "empirical" morality. Not considering the facts, a priori morality does not surrender to them; it does not excuse immorality even if it seems to be required by our environment or promoted by our nature. Therefore it is both pure and powerful to a degree unmatched by any previous morality: pure, because uncontaminated by expediency, and powerful, because unhindered by the doubts that arise from considering expediency. To achieve a priori morality you must not look at any facts about yourself or your situation. Above all, you must not consider yourself as a human being but as a rational being. More precisely, you must consider yourself as a rational being who is not necessarily human, who does not necessarily have a human body; for it is the belief that the rational being needs the human body which is the source of all the concessions to selfishness that characterize empirical, so-called morality. When you separate rational being from human being, you become capable of the "categorical imperative" of acting as if the maxim of your action could be a universal rule applicable everywhere to all rational beings. Kant did not break with the liberal principle of consent. By means of a priori morality he put man beyond the reach of God or nature, except for what man could posit for himself. He kept the principle of consent because his formula made it the duty of all, rather than the privilege of the few gentlemen, to be moral. But a priori morality has the political implication that govern-

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ment by consent of human beings becomes government of rational beings. This apparently remote theoretical distinction makes a crucial difference in practice. Whereas a government must actually get the consent of a human being, who has actually to pull a lever in a voting machine, it can assume the consent of a rational being. Rational beings are all alike, and one or a few can serve for all. The difference was used by certain thinkers and nonthinkers after Kant who did not believe in rational beings, but who wished to be able to assume, rather than get, the consent of the people. This is the idealist theory; what is the program for action? How can the idealist proceed against the "political moralists," those who conform morality to political necessities? The answer is confrontation politics, the idea of which is stated in Kant's essay on perpetual peace. Kant says there: let us force the political moralists, the power brokers, to confess that they rest on might, not right. Let us make them use force to defend themselves, and their attachment to power and vested interests will be manifest. At the same time, the very presence of those who have no secrets because they have no attachments and who publicize their aim of perpetual peace because it is a universal aim will confound the political moralists, for it will show that moral men can ignore their supposed necessities and sacrifice their interests. In this confrontation (Kant does not use the word, but his essay has the effect) the legitimacy of government collapses because it loses its disguise. It is revealed to be the government of an immoral few (Kant expects it will be few) who merely want to defend their lives and their property by an immoral use of prudence. Prudence is immoral for the idealist because the rational being has nothing to defend. He does not live in a human body, much less in a suburb. In confrontation politics Kant's rational being has been replaced today by Nietzsche's willing being, but the hostility to prudence and self-preservation remains. While consent was designed to legitimize the greatest use of force, the least use is now taken to cause the loss of legitimacy. The reason is that the idealists, a universal being whether rational or willing, carries all idealism in himself. Instead of gathering consent by counting noses, the idealist speaks for all idealism; and therefore he speaks out. Any consideration for the sensibilities of live, empirical human beings

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would constitute an immoral and irrational concession to expediency. In judging Kant's idealism and the idealism of the will or activism that is prevalent today, we note that the confrontation remains a diversion like the liberal diversion. It is a diversion from the sense of the proposal or "demands" to the bad conscience of the power holders, which being liberals they are bound to have. They may be impressed by the implicit argument on the character of morality. Forgetting that it is easy for the young to be idealistic, they may praise them for their spirit of sacrifice. Or more typically, the liberal power holders will see the challenge of morality as a problem of consent, and bewail the emergence of a communication gap. But one can wonder about these rational or willing beings, the idealists. It is easy for the young to be idealistic since they have no vested interests, no wives, no children, no property. They do have incomes, however. Nothing is more impressive about American youth than the fact that they have incomes. And where there is income, there is property. Among the young property used to give rise, with little prompting by their elders, to what were known as "expectations," which with some instruction were supposed to encourage sobriety and prudence. Today society guarantees expectations for most, and the young can spend themselves in forcing it to extend the guarantee to all so that all can be as free as they. Still there is property, however disguised as belonging to "society." Behind every income stands one's own; that was Machiavelli's point. If the income is not economic, it is psychic: the joy of righteousness, of condemnation and—the open secret of idealism —of mastery. The fraud or diversion of idealism is its formalism, which could be defined in politics as the promotion of form without regard to matter. For human beings, matter is the human body that is ineluctably one's own. Idealism pretends to ignore one's own and in fact universalizes it, as in Lowi's example of universal ticket-fix ing. The result is a regime in which idealists somehow, unintentionally and reluctantly, would receive the biggest prize of all; they would rule. And, in order to rule, they would have to descend to realism. This hardly surprising result would be very appropriate to conclude any political reasoning but an idealist's. It seems, then, that despite the weaknesses of liberalism, despite the

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present discomfiture of the "white liberal," we are not at the end of it and have not seen the last of him. True to its nature, liberalism engenders itself in the disguise of opposition to itself; the idealist is a disguised realist. Liberalism in one or several of its forms or perversions will last as long as the opposition to it does not question the Machiavellian premise that all government is essentially oppression. The premise has been questioned, not by idealists but by the ancient writers who constitute the true alternative to liberalism. Failing a revival of their thought, which would require a radical questioning of all modernity, one who wishes to understand liberalism from without can use its two tendencies, moralistic and mundane, according to the times. In present circumstances the moralistic tendency of liberalism would seem to be the greater danger. If liberalism does not seem on the point of expiring, liberty in the mundane sense of consent is in jeopardy. To understand this danger, one would have to take up the development within idealism from Kant to Nietzsche and existentialism, or from rational to activist idealism. A review of Lowi's book is not the place for this inquiry because Lowi, to his honor, favors a somewhat archaic pre-New Deal, Middle-American "progressivism" over the more fashionable West Coast university and New York literary activism. Yet it is remarkable that he does not consider the problem of gaining consent for his program of juridical democracy. How will he build and keep the majority behind it? Since he wishes to take advantage of the lawabidingness (pp. 247, 269) of the "terror-stricken" minority opposed to it, how will he protect their rights? Lowi might reply that he wants to give effect to consent in democratic majorities by isolating administration from consent. His book is devoted to the advocacy of formalism in administration, as opposed to the mechanical solutions of interest-group liberalism that mix execution with gaining consent. He could be reminded that nothing is more mechanical than a moralistic formalism, which could be compared to majority tyranny without the majority. Lowi's particular proposals for abolishing the legal autonomy of suburbs, busing Negro children, promoting an administrative class, and requiring the regulatory agencies to adopt more formal practices are more liberal, or more conservative, or more reasonable than his advocacy of "a legitimate revolution" (p. 270) would let appear. But

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they can become revolutionary in the illegitimate sense if they are put forward in revolutionary rhetoric with a spirit of moral intransigency. Disguised liberalism is no substitute for moderation, and reasonable proposals, to be reasonable, must be reasonably proposed.

4 Liberalism in Moderation

Ν O ONE is more ridiculous than an angry professor. He stamps his foot and bites his tongue as he tries to articulate his wrathful words, and when they are said, they may somehow suit either his office or his anger but never both. In love, a professor cuts a more acceptable figure, as the legion of former students, now faculty wives, must testify; for his characteristic didactic manner is closer to wheedling than to scolding. Punitive anger needs a lathering of preacher's froth to be tolerable (it is never graceful), because punishing is the defense of someone or some group with pretensions to knowledge, by contrast to the one who studies to learn and does not yet know what to defend. It might seem, then, and it has been said, that a professor should be dispassionate because as professor, he has no values to defend. This position, however, would deny any virtue to the activity of learning and leave the professor defenseless as a professor. It would also deprive him of the benefits of his learning as a citizen, as a human being, or in whichever role he may be allowed to hold and defend values. The professor would therefore be compelled to live a double life of perfect unconcern and unrestrained anger, consistent only in irresponsibility. T o avoid this, it has been the part of wise men, when showing their faces to the world, to practice and exhort others to practice the virtue of moderation, as best reflecting both their lack of pretension and their pride in seeking knowledge. Moderation is the political virThis chapter was originally published under the title "Sound Advice from Yale," in Polity, 5.1 (Fall 1972), 95-111.

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tue according to wisdom, even more than justice; for wisdom knows its own ignorance, and recognizes that perfect justice is not humanly possible. The two books under review1 argue in their separate ways for moderation. Charles Reich's The Greening of America promises, on the very cover, a revolution that "will not require violence to succeed, and [that] cannot be successfully resisted by violence." Robert Dahl's After the Revolution? has a photograph of these triumphant, nonviolent revolutionaries on its cover, and it contains a refutation of the revolutionary claim that "primary" or radical democracy is possible and desirable. To be sure, when one opens the covers to read the books, important differences can be seen immediately. Reich can promise a nonviolent revolution because he thinks the revolution is cultural and can remain so. The government will not have to be overthrown, we are assured, and the theme of his work is the well-advertised "Consciousness HI." Dahl, on the other hand, is determinedly political and says nothing of consciousness. In tone he is reasonable, open-minded and dignified, avoiding useless blame of the revolutionary young, yet refusing to say what they want to hear. But Reich is not ashamed to praise the philosophy in homemade peanut butter and unwashed blue jeans, and he complains of such injustices as "unnecessary brutality at a university" (p. 135) with the practiced amplification of a virtuoso contemporary advocate who has sat at the feet of the rock singers, our recognized masters in the art of whining. Whereas Dahl has written an admirable book, a model of thoughtful political science responding to a crisis, Reich's production deserves the scorn of his profession and of his "high-class university" (as he calls it) for its sustained, calculated vulgarity. Yet they have a common addressee in what has come to be known as the "moderate" student (and in Reich's case, his parents), the liberal bemused by radical revolution. In examining their books we have an opportunity to reconsider what moderation requires in our politics. as I said, is the theme of Reich's book. He defines it as "not a set of opinions, information, or values, but a total configuration in any given individual, which makes up his whole perception of reality, his whole world view" (p. 13). With his conCONSCIOUSNESS,

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sciousness, an individual perceives reality as a whole, and in this whole the integrity of his self is reflected, or rather, created. Consciousness is not only perception but creation of reality, to the point that the only reality is the self (p. 140). Everything outside the self can be brought inside it by the power of the self to "create a reality," also called a "fiction" (p. 19). In consciousness the Active power of the self makes all otherness its own, overcoming its "alienation," its service and deference to things outside itself. The power to perceive becomes the power to create as the self becomes aware that the limits apparently imposed on its power by outside reality are in fact self-imposed. In retrospect the self-control which was once esteemed and taught because desires were thought to be unattainable or attainable only with patience and hard work now appears as self-repression, a surrender of the self to a fictive outside reality which was nothing but itself in alienation. Yet the limits on the self are real enough while they seem real, for their seeming real is necessary to the process of reaction by which the self becomes aware that reality is only the self. The self's power to create then returns to its power to perceive or become aware of itself, and we are left with a question full of practical implication. Is there anything we must recognize or be aware of, or are we free to think or create as we like? Reich gives the impression that we are free to create what we like, but in order to support the freedom of the self to create he has to ground it in what is popularly known as the "creative" self, which he celebrates as Consciousness m. Anyone can see the silly conformism in the behavior of those who talk up creativity; for all the forced urgency in their efforts to create, they succeed in nothing more than being "creative." No matter how hard they try, they cannot escape being something. Reich speaks of consciousness both as a creation and as "an adaptation to new realities" (pp. 20-21); so he is at least dimly aware that creating must somehow be understood as adapting. But instead of asking why one must be "creative" in order to create, he prefers not to raise a doubt. He traces consciousness to the self, which sounds very individual, and yet says it is "in substantial degree (but not necessarily entirely) socially determined" (p. 14). Reich does not explain how creativity can be socially determined, or why it is that the creative self is most visible in a crowd of creative people fol-

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lowing the latest fashion. One could begin to learn the limits of creativity by reasoning from the obvious conformism of creative people—that is, by observing the phenomenon of imitation, and by considering its connection to "adaptation to new realities" and hence to "reality." Reich is writing to urge the old to imitate the young, and the alienated to imitate the liberated, but he does not reflect on what it means to imitate. Instead, we are given his picture of the liberation of the self by three stages of consciousness, i, n, and in. These stages take their plausibility f r o m the r e s e m b l a n c e they b e a r to early liberalism —now conservatism, New Deal l i b e r a l i s m , a n d radicalism. Reich's creative kink in this familiar progression can be found in the numerical labels, for the purpose of calling conservatism, liberalism, and radicalism, i, 11, and HI is to attack liberalism without attacking liberals, indeed while appealing to them. In Reich's strategy new names with the specious neutrality of numbers (by which one thing leads to another) will help liberals see Consciousness HI as the extension of Consciousness N. Consciousness 11 is not liberalism, says Reich, because liberalism was never given a fair trial in America (p. 60). But now under Consciousness in, the community of the liberated, it can be put into practice without the elements of coercion and domination which disgraced the postwar era of Consciousness u. Consciousness ii was not guilty of the acquisitive self-repression and the ugly moral fault-finding of its predecessor, Consciousness i, but its devotees have constructed a furtive, suburban meritocracy in which they live oppressed by their own supine acquiescence in the less frequently challenged moral and social proprieties. These proprieties, which allow every new possibility to be explored only up to a point, force the Consciousness II people to play roles rather than live creatively. Reich exposes the shallow insincerity of a young liberal couple having the typical interests of the educated middle class. Each interest of theirs puts a limit on every other interest, so that they do many things in many compartments but lack a sense of their life as a whole. They go skiing, but "there is a limit to the commitment" (p. 87) unlike that of the "ski bum," whose superiority is not that he skis better than they, because he is a professional, but that he skis with greater abandon or at any rate neglect of other things. Reich does not counsel that this couple reflect on

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their life and seek a principle to give it order and meaning as a whole; rather, they should open themselves to experience in the sense of "letting go," which means letting things happen to them (p. 89). Experience becomes a whole not by reasoned ordering but by ignoring every role but one for the time being or for "each moment" (pp. 167-168, 242). When liberated from every inhibition and thought but the ski bum's, one's role can be dubbed a "life-style" (p. 395). Charles Reich in his bell-bottoms, for example, is a guru, not a role player. Or one might say that a life-style is a far-out role, because experience understood in this way is in fact an extreme rather than a whole. In the liberation of "letting go" we recognize again the paradoxical truth that creating is adapting to reality, which in turn is surrendering to chance encounters and following the drift of chance events. For Reich, in contrast to some others of similar views, experience does not require encounter with other men in class conflict to achieve the desired wholeness. True, the "Corporate State"—Reich's unflattering name for the New Deal's "Big Government"—tries to cut men into parts and keep their roles separate by enforcing a false hierarchy; but it has not succeeded. The culture of Consciousness HI by its very existence proves the Corporate State irrelevant, and violence to overthrow it unnecessary. The bourgeoisie will abdicate! It has already almost done so. The Corporate State should be left to collapse by itself, provoked but not revived by the smiling contempt of the cool revolutionaries. Thus the new liberated community can be born unforced and without original sin, in order that "the fury and rebellion of youth" (p. 140) may subside in encounters of love with its former oppressors. Consciousness m is a profound change of Consciousness ii, but Reich presents it as the liberation of liberalism, liberalism without inhibitions or "hang-ups." He appeals to the generosity of liberals by engaging their desire for consistency (p. 237). His promise of nonviolence is reassurance that the change which is inevitable is also only logical (if not dialectical). While remaining silent about the ends of the radicals, Reich asserts that confrontation politics will not work (pp. 313, 320, 372). Still, the tension remains in this book, or since tension is impossible without tightness, the contrast can be felt between the great new prospect of utter life-enhancement and the extreme relaxation by

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which we are told we can achieve it. We have reason to suspect something wrong in both the prospect and the promise—but what? It would be easy to object that no one will work in the new culture: so Reich anticipated that objection. Consciousness in is not lazy (p. 388); it does not regard work as evil; it merely rejects "the present employment relationship." Indeed Reich does not rail against the jerk who invented work, like a bum of the old school. Although he dislikes businessmen, the reason is not that they work hard but that they use their work to dominate others: they compete. In place of competition (the "rat race," p. 302) Reich relays to us Marcuse's invaluable suggestion that "work of many kinds can be made an erotic experience, or a play experience" (p. 404). Play, however, means fiddling self-absorption or inward, communal preoccupation; it emphatically does not mean athletic competition. Yet Reich cannot dismiss the young athlete as quickly as he can the Republican businessman; the example of youth in its characteristic love of victory nags at him, and he yearns for the "conversion" of varsity athletes (p. 240) to the new partisanship not for underdogs but for "losers" (p. 276). His enemy is not so much work as the part of the soul that Plato called thymos or spirit, which is responsible for such varied passions as hostility, anger, competitiveness, and honorable striving. When Reich promises nonviolent revolution, it is chiefly because he desires a revolution against violence in all its manifestations, those ordinarily considered healthy as well as the unhealthy. Violence is a rejection of something, and one cannot be "open to all experience" unless one overcomes the spirit of rejection in the self. "Experience" is free only when one acts for the moment, not choosing and therefore not rejecting; it cannot be free if it is open to the experience of anger. There is to be no "letting go" with hostility (p. 319). It is in view of this unargued principle that Reich's book could be called a statement for moderation. How is anger to be rejected? It is to be expressed or sublimated in "the feeling of power." This phrase does not occur in the book, and Reich deplores the "ego trip or power trip" preferred by the careerists of Consciousness n (p. 257). But he says and repeats that the "first crucial fact" of our situation is "the feeling of powerlessness"onthepartoftheself(pp. 8, 381), and when the self has

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been recovered by being liberated, it must then resume its "feeling of power." As one would expect, this feeling is concentrated in the body; most of the new experience is letting things happen to the body, "one of the essential parts of the self." But the self, we note, is not identical to the body; that would be too confining. The self must surely be superior to the claims of masculinity and of its provocative correlate femininity (p. 254), which remind us too directly of the claim of thymos. The solution is in the power of the self to transcend the limits of the body by making conventions or "choosing a life-style." It is here that the professor comes into his own with his power of intellectualizing. Of course, he does not merely ski on weekends like the role player, but he also excels the ski bum in creating a life-style by his amazing inventiveness in relevant topics to be studied (pp. 410-411). The history of skiing, the geography of resorts, the consequences of slush — these are Only a few products of his uncanny power of musing and masterful sense of relevance. With his academic imagination he can make an extreme (hence a whole) of any conventional role, except for the more familiar extremes of political ambition, desire for money, sexual passion, and intellectual inquiry (p. 404). These excesses are too closely related to natural desires that all human beings feel and have always felt, and so they do not satisfy that feeling of power which is lust for creativity. To make new conventions it is obviously necessary to break the old ones, but it is also necessary not to break them in the old ways, which reflected the power of human nature and would now hamper the power of the self. Professorial reason is advantageous, if not essential, to making life-styles, and Reich seems to oppose reason only when it is allied with thymos in choosing, rejecting, and dividing experience. When it comes to blowing the mind, the use of drugs cannot hold a candle to college lectures or dining-hall conversation (p. 281). Reich notes, significantly, that the universities have led the way in nonviolent revolution; he describes the new consciousness as "wisdom," and its community is said to be "devoted to the search for wisdom." He adds optimistically that "wisdom is the one commodity that is unlimited in supply" (pp. 416-417). This apparently means not only that wisdom is not diminished by being shared, but also that a vast reservoir of latent wisdom, untapped

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in industrial society, exists in the average man. When liberated, the average man may be as smart as "the oldtime peasant" (p. 407), and both will be able to study up the history of skiing and otherwise indulge their "non-material values." Reich, however, might find it more of a challenge to talk out a life-style of dishwashing (see p. 403). The power of the self to make consciousness, when let free or set loose, develops a "sense of self' in everything previously seen as "alienated" or outside the self. Reich praises rock music for being "capable of an almost limitless range of experience" (p. 263): that is what he wants. The new generation loves nature, to be sure; but "nature is them" (p. 284). Nature has been internalized as Consciousness HI; so the return to nature, "the Greening of America," is a return to internalized nature, conquered nature. For Reich's little project is one presumptuous adjunct of the grander enterprise of modern science and technology, under way for several centuries, to conquer nature for man. It is no surprise to find him accepting the machine without the least show of bad conscience and to hear him echoing the pathetic boast that the machine "can be made the servant of man" (p. 378). What that means, of course, is that nature can be made the servant of man, as it is nature, human and nonhuman, that keeps us from using machines as we would like. Reich seems to admit that such restraint is not altogether repressive when he says that the man of Consciousness HI will not "violate his basic values" by killing or raping just to try the experience (p. 279; see p. 126). But he would have a hard job justifying this exception to the sovereignty of the self, as he himself indicates. At one point he sides with Bonnie and Clyde because they were outsiders or losers, forgetting that they were killers (p. 276); and elsewhere he extols the writings of Eldridge Cleaver with only a sneaking allusion to his being a rapist (p. 311). Yet Reich's most revealing admission concerns a lesser matter. In the course of a chapter on the recovery of self for those "beyond youth"—oldsters, senior citizens—he remarks that the new life-styles do not require "skin-tight pants for those who cannot expect to regain the slimness of youth" (p. 300). He admits then that the body ages and that the self must accept this fact. If the self wears loose pants, however, it accepts some covering falsifica-

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tion as necessary to its dignity; it accepts that dignity is not fidelity to the body; it accepts that the self should not be totally liberated. Reich dresses these admissions in the lie that youth is not chronological age (p. 321), a whopper borrowed from Consciousness ii. The ground of his nonviolent revolution, or revolution against violence, is the possibility of intellectualizing the body's satisfactions. The self arises out of the body desiring experience indiscriminately, but to enjoy experience as a whole it must rise above the indignant defensiveness of the body which causes it to reject certain experience with shame. The self must extend its capacity for experience with intellectual projects which, by happy chance, give both opportunity to professors, who might be excluded from a paradise of exquisite bodily sensations, and hope to the old, who can be as young as they think they are in every regard but the one that counts. And still the new culture cannot do away with shame for middle-age bulge! The desire to dominate nature and to subject it to the self— thereby, among other things, to regain the slimness of youth —is the anger of modern man. Like the notable philosophers of modernity, who first aroused this anger, Reich tries not to control it but to redirect it. Modern man's anger at his outrageous situation is turned to constructive purpose in the erotic work of the self, making nature its own with an ever-increasing appetite of love. There is a hidden connection between this erotic work, as conceived by the contemporary Nietzschean Marxists for whom Reich is a publicity agent, and bourgeois acquisitiveness. For both the bourgeois and the post-proletarian, life is made a whole by undiscriminating desire, by the feeling of power; and the difference is that the work of reason has changed from calculation to musing. Erotic work shares with anger a freedom from necessity, a boundlessness; for as the angry man does not strictly need his revenge, the loving self does not need the products of its work. Erotic work is indistinguishable from leisurely occupation. The self does not work for the sake of leisure; it works for what it does not need precisely to display its own power, somewhat like the suburban vegetable gardener. The self works for the sake of its sense of self, and for this purpose it needs unnecessary things in order to prevent itself from getting angry and at the same time to

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express its anger at the limits on itself. Thus liberation of the self produces a kind of moderation in the sense of control on anger, but without the training of moderation or the effort of its ugly sister, continence. There is no holding in, no postponement, no self-control in this cool love. Nor is there shame: Consciousness HI is nonviolent because it cannot be shocked, not even by violations of "the basic values." Reich's book contains no obscenities, not because of his selfrestraint but because he has no shame. In his conception you never have to control anger because you never have to express it; it is disguised from you by the feeling of power. But so disguised, is anger any the less anger? To bolster his promise of nonviolent revolution, Reich is not above threatening "a real explosion in America" (p. 317) should nonviolence not succeed. When the self is open to all experience, it finds more rather than less to be angry at, for every hindrance is raised to a frustration, and then to an outrage. Young people living under the delusive "sense of self" have no way to restrain their anger when they cannot even recognize it for anger; they fall under the manipulation of corrupters like Reich who tell them that their anger is justified because it is identical with love. True moderation, as distinct from nonviolence, can begin to grow when one recognizes that the body gets in the way of the soul. Anger generated for self-defense can be controlled by shame only if one allows himself to see that there is something to be controlled. It is neither possible nor desirable, not even for a professor, to do away with anger as if we were immortal beings or bodiless selves above it all, having no stake in the human condition. The pretense of lacking indignation is equivalent to a claim of immortality, supportable in an individual of monumental indifference; but for a society of men imbued with a sense of self it is a false claim which would have to be sustained with dire punishment. Those who live in Consciousness in conceal their anger from themselves. They cannot be liberated because they do not know the limits of liberation. R O B E R T D A H L ' S book is a "Yale Fastback." This designates a book containing "information that must reach readers as quickly as possible" (I am quoting the Yale University Press Promotion Department); and the information being conveyed is a better un-

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demanding of the word "revolution." Without a better understanding of this "in-word" we are in danger of submitting to a radical democratization of American government, not so much bad in itself as distracting from the things that need to be done. Dahl does not begin his argument by attempting to frighten his readers with perils they cannot see until they have been persuaded of his argument. Since the call for revolution is a demand for greater democracy, we must understand democracy if we are to understand revolution, and thus we are compelled "to reconsider the foundations of authority" (p. 7). Dahl then devotes his book to accomplishing this task of political philosophy, as it is generally defined. He moves from the unclarity of a word used in political discourse to the greater clarity of a thoughtful reconsideration with the aid of Plato and Rousseau, and he does this altogether without embarrassment (for it cannot be unknowingly) at having crossed the boundary between empirical political science and political philosophy and thus finding himself, so to speak, in the ladies' room. It may be merely that he who writes a Fastback has no time for the fact-value distinction, which is by itself a valuable realization, but I prefer to think that Dahl, one of the original capi of the behavioral syndicate in political science, intends to set a more general example. For he teaches the lesson by example and with typical good humor shows himself quite free of any morally vindictive desire to lecture those backward colleagues who have not yet been reconverted to the reading of Plato and Rousseau. After the Revolution? has the subtitle Authority in a Good Society to indicate gently that democratic revolutionaries would have to reconstruct authority after their revolution has succeeded in establishing the good society. Since they cannot simply abolish authority, they are obliged to show that their authority is better founded than present authority or some other possible authority; they are obliged to follow Dahl's argument. But by the same token they also cannot deny the relevance of his argument to their own interest, and Dahl, with admirable control, makes his reasoning amenable to any of them who are amenable to reason, as well as to the "moderate" liberals. His first chapter discusses the three criteria for authority which support democracy. The second chapter presents the varieties of democratic authority to be found

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in modern representative democracy, renamed "polyarchy" by Dahl with regard to the varieties. In the third chapter he applies his principles to three problems publicized by the radicals: persistent inequality, corporate irresponsibility, and remote, impersonal government. Dahl's three criteria for "valid and rightful" authority are personal choice, competence, and economy. We will consider them in turn with the same object of finding out how Dahl understands moderation. The criterion of personal choice requires that all decisions either conform to my personal choice or be acceptable to me as the price of living with others exacted by "my nature as a social being" (p. 8). "Personal choice" leads immediately to a doctrine of accepting the choices of others and swallowing bitter pills, because one must allow the equal claim of others to make their choices. If one does not, one must become a dictator ruling by naked coercion, which is impossible, and so a brainwasher ruling by a royal lie, a public truth distinct from my own "esoteric truth." The difficulty with this solution is in keeping the people from discovering the discrepancy between the two truths (p. 10). Dahl does not say that men are in truth politically equal; he supports the principle of political equality by referring to the consequences of not adopting it. "I cannot satisfactorily gain my own ends unless I allow others an opportunity to pursue their ends on an equal basis" (p. 12). This ground is not only "egocentric," as Dahl admits, but also insufficient, because it raises the suspicion that political equality is nothing but a public "truth," or a popular lie told to "gain my own ends." If it is a lie, it has at least the advantage of being relatively immune from discovery, since most people do not readily discover truths which are not in their interest to discover. Dahl sensibly puts off the question to another occasion when he will have time to give us the esoteric truth that cannot be conveyed or divulged to readers of Fastbacks. Given political equality, we are driven inexorably first to majority rule and then to "consensus" or at least "mutual guarantees" protecting minimal freedoms and the self from interference by a majority. Here is the "self" again: "Whatever you regard as a part of the most precious essence of the self—your self—is a matter you are likely to deny any government the right to invade, no matter how 'democratic' it may be" (p. 16). Your self is yours be-

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cause whatever you regard as its most precious essence is its most precious essence; it is the essence of yourness and hence the essence of preciousness—unless that honor belongs to you and not to your self. The self cherishes or contains "my most deeply cherished values" (p. 27), values, that is, by virtue of being cherished, and the more valuable the more deeply cherished. This relativistic self is in tension with the "rational self-interest" that Dahl says is the ground for political equality (p. 12), not to mention the "man" capable of reasoning for whom "the rights of man" were formerly derived. My "self' is free to be reasonable or not, as opposed to the "man" described in the Declaration of Independence; and to display its freedom, my self is, of course, more likely to be unreasonable than not. Dahl remarks on the change in the consensus on sexual practices in recent years to give more scope to "autonomous decisions," and he could have remarked on the shift of liberal opinion from support of free speech to free expression generally. Free speech is required to make rational selfinterest effective, because men must often be shown their interest by discussion and in books like Dahl's, but free expression has no necessary connection to rationality and depends on a doctrine of the self. Dahl does not attach any significance in his argument to the change from Consciousness ι and n to Consciousness HI, which has prompted his argument. Yet he cannot be indifferent to the celebration of what he calls "yesterday's existentialism" (p. 80) in today's culture. Dahl draws the second criterion for valid authority from general acceptance of the claim of competence. Since it is possible to go to hell in a hand-basket by personal choice, it might seem that these two criteria are totally at odds. In what proves to be the central contention of the book, Dahl argues they are not. The criterion of competence depends on that of personal choice when you choose to place yourself under the authority of someone more competent, say a pilot, physician, or judge (examples taken from the original Greek). When you choose not to believe in the superior competence of another, however, you cannot be compelled to believe in it, as Galileo could not be compelled to abjure the heresy of believing that the earth moves without a mutter to the contrary. Dahl agrees that the two criteria often collide in the specific case, and concludes that the criterion of competence

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means decisions yielding what I would want if I were competent. He fears we may think he has rather slickly shown how to get the best of both worlds (p. 33), but the reconciliation of the two criteria is not too slick. It is true that we all want to have what we would want if we were competent, and also that we must believe in the competence of the authority we accept for its competence. But we are not made competent by wanting to be so, and the competent are neither more nor less competent for our belief in their competence. In themselves the two criteria do not depend on each other in the least, though they are not "totally at odds" because they do not exclude each other. Some kind of mix, perhaps even an "optimum mix" (p. 39), is possible because, as Dahl shows, nobody is indifferent to either. But nobody would need a mix if he were not obliged to be concerned with both by their distinctness. Galileo's mutter is often taken as an event in the long battle of reason against authority; for when reason asserts its competence against anybody's personal choice, it seems to make a claim against authority as such, not merely another authoritative claim. Dahl says further that the criterion of competence is not in itself anti-democratic, since one may judge that "on the whole the ordinary man is more competent than anyone else to decide when and how much he shall intervene on decisions he feels are important to him" (p. 35). By this, however, it is not meant that the ordinary man is more competent than anyone else; rather, he is "on the whole" more competent in his own concerns, not to decide, but to decide to intervene on decisions. Why should it matter, if only competence is in question, what the ordinary man feels to be important? Clearly the criterion of competence has been circumscribed by or compelled into dependence on the criterion of personal choice and thus made to seem democratic. Dahl's better position is that representative democracy joins the aristocratic principle of representation to the democratic principle of equality (p. 41), but he understands representation as for "economy" rather than for competence. His argument uses the fact that every authority rests on both choice and competence to imply that competence can on the whole be assumed to exist. It prevents him from confronting the doctrine of the self with the criterion of competence or with the idea of rational self-interest. One may

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agree with his general belief in the ordinary man's competence and still wish to emphasize the need for leadership to inform, not corrupt, that competence. The two criteria of personal choice and competence would seem to suffice, once it is admitted that both are necessary. The competent must be chosen and the choosers must be competent. Yet Dahl introduces a third criterion of economy, by which we calculate how to use the scarce resources of time and effort to best advantage. "Economy" or "rationality" or "efficiency" asks us to consider the cost of one activity in terms of the most rewarding alternative activity we cannot do when we do that activity. Dahl applies the criterion to politics, and presents it as the principle (perhaps unacknowledged) of representative democracy. He says it explains why the Athenians had councils as well as an assembly and why the New England town meeting needs a board of selectmen: people have decided it is too costly in terms of their other desires to participate in politics. But this decision could be explained by the other two criteria, either as the deference of the incompetent or as the unwillingness of the competent. Competence, it would seem, does not need to be taught efficiency by an outside expert, and personal choice does not care for it or him. If one must choose rationally, why not competently? We have not yet found the reason why "economy" is needed. We can seek that reason in the transformation of representative democracy implied by tracing it to the criterion of economy. From being a mixture of choice and competence, so that some are elected for their competence by the choice of a majority of the people, representative democracy becomes a mixture of those who do and those who do not enjoy politics. The criterion of economy then becomes a justification for those who do not enjoy politics, regardless of their competence. More than defending nonparticipation, "economy" becomes the equivalent of an argument against participation. In reckoning the costs of participating in politics (pp. 46-47), Dahl seems to operate on the basis of a distinction between deciding and doing, such that time spent in deciding is pure cost (see pp. 50, 68-69). He illustrates his preference for a representative constitution with the example of university life, where a professor interested in teaching and research cares little for making decisions. The criteria of personal choice and competence are thus understood to favor the private life over

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the public: where is the man who by both competence and choice seeks a public life and thereby an arena of graver decisions than are made at a university? Dahl describes him as "an avid amateur musician" (p. 46) or as "a frantic activist who would rather politic than eat" (p. 47), that is, in terms of private appetite rather than public spirit or ambition. The former sounds like a suburban housewife, and the latter like a Utopian with a scheme for abolishing politics—two characters often allied in the strange politics of our day. Neither sounds at all like a politician. Harry Truman and Richard Nixon are more than amateur musicians and something other than frantic activists. The criterion of economy has the effect of deprecating ambition by not accounting for it; it serves as the argument for moderation which we miss in the moderate argument of this eminently moderate man. With its preference for the private life and reference to the university, "economy" bears a curious resemblance to the philosopher's reluctance to enter politics, but it lacks his conscious recognition of the danger, as well as the necessity, of political men. It finds the optimum mix of choice and competence by depreciating those who enter politics with both competence and choice combined, for such men are the true targets of this third, apparently unnecessary, criterion. Of course Dahl takes aim immediately on the activists, but he cannot hit them without shooting at the political men. Political men enter public life to satisfy love of honor and love of victory, desires that cannot be easily or fully satisfied in private life. Such men retire to private life always with a sense of loss that cannot be explained as a drop to the next most rewarding activity on the scale, for example writing one's memoirs. The criterion of economy tries to stretch far enough to include these men, but to do so it has to make public life just another private life for those who happen to enjoy it. To understand political men, however, one must appreciate their rejection of private joys and the qualitative distinction between public and private which their rejection implies. Their desire to be first means that they are not satisfied with being second; so the cost of winning cannot be measured by the value of the most lucrative occupation for a loser. This calculation would not even show how much a man risks to win. When the object is to win, winners take all and risk everything. Ambition is misunderstood when it is made continuous with

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private appetite by modern psychology and called "power" or "ego" or even "erotic work." Dahl says the criterion of economy "seems never to have found a prominent place in classical political theory . . ." (p. 55), but interpreted as an attempt to calculate the costs of ambition, it has been a theme of all political theory. In the American tradition one thinks of Federalist No. 51 ("ambition must be made to counteract ambition"), Jefferson's letter of October 28, 1813, to John Adams on the natural aristoi, and Lincoln's speech on "The Perpetuation of our Political Institutions," concerning those whose paramount object is distinction. In a representative democracy these men must be held down, but they also must be allowed some scope for striving. On a Saturday afternoon they will not be found listening to opera on the radio or working in a study or even taking some recreation outdoors (p. 45). More likely, they will be found at a football game, making more friends and incidentally enjoying the spectacle of a kindred activity which also cannot be understood by the criterion of economy, nor, for that matter, by the similar enterprise known as game theory. In the second chapter Dahl takes up "varieties of democratic authority" to show that a modern people allegedly ruled by democracy is in fact ruled by several kinds of democracy or even nondemocracy, which he calls "polyarchy." Modern polyarchy is opposed to the "primary democracy," itself qualified, which is appropriate to the ancient polis, for a whole nation or nations governed democratically must arrange various jurisdictions and many forms in a complex unity. In this opposition Dahl's deprecation of public spirit is again operative. He apparently prefers polyarchy because it is suited to a large people and an extensive territory rather than a small population and confined territory even though they are suited to democracy. At least he does not lament the necessities which make the latter alternative impossible today, and unjustly accuses Rousseau, who did lament them, of being "more content than he should be with answers that have nothing but history to make them acceptable" (p. 84). Rousseau should have embraced representative democracy and the political parties which, Dahl says, it makes inevitable (on this point Dahl ignores a substantial body of professional opinion to the contrary). Thus accepting history, Rousseau could have

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avoided for his plan the fate of primary democracy in Greece, which was "condemned . . . to inevitable extinction" (p. 79). So the extinction of a regime is not inevitable! One should not read too much into one expression for which Dahl could have said "brief duration." But it is striking that a writer who makes much of the scarcity of time should hold forth the implied promise of a deathless polyarchy for mankind (cf. p. 166). One may wonder what is gained by calling representative democracy "polyarchy" (p. 78). The full answer would have to be sought in Dahl's other books, but in this one something seems to be lost in the substitution. "Representative democracy" announces a qualified democracy; "polyarchy" is Greek for rule shared by many, implying confusion, and here it suggests an equivocation. Whereas a qualified democracy is essentially democratic, polyarchy does not name any whole and permits the question of the predominant character of the regime to be dropped, or as Dahl says euphemistically, kept open (p. 78). Thus the question of its ethos or consciousness is never raised. In speaking of "the varieties of democratic authority" Dahl never shows under which idea the varieties can live together as a whole, for it is manifestly not sufficient to leave them divided as varieties. For example, he refers to the American egalitarian ethos as existing side-by-side with tolerance for inequalities (p. 110), but it would be necessary to show how that tolerance can be made consistent with the democratic ethos, given the need for a mixture of choice and competence. To do this, Dahl would have to admit that competence is an essentially aristocratic criterion which democracy needs to combine with its most democratic parts in order to make a viable whole. He could then use "polyarchy" to mean not the kinds of democracy, but the mixed regime. As presented, however, "polyarchy" conceals both the need for a democratic ethos and the need for nondemocratic qualifications of democracy. "Committee democracy" is not a kind of democracy, as Dahl calls it; it is an oligarchical mode of rule used to make democratic assemblies work well. So is "representative democracy"; for Aristotle is obviously correct in describing election as an aristocratic practice in contrast to the democratic practice of lot. Jefferson was a great democrat, yet he once explained that the people "being unquali-

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fied for the management of affairs requiring intelligence above the common level, yet competent judges of human character," choose representatives (letter of April 24, 1816). He could justify aristocratic parts of a democratic regime with a clear democratic conscience, as well as perceptive insight, because he was willing to consider a regime as a whole. He did not, therefore, have to understand representative democracy as the personal choice of a nation of time-conscious polyarchs. Representative democracy, because it is a whole, needs an ethos or consciousness accommodating competence to choice, held by those who choose, the people. From Reich, who ignores politics, and from Dahl, who ignores consciousness, it is necessary to reconstruct the relation between politics and consciousness. In any society the ruling ethos is the ethos of the rulers; so argument over what should be the ruling ethos (as in Reich's book) is necessarily argument over who should rule. But the primacy of ruling does not mean that the rulers can adopt any chance ethos with perfect safety to themselves. A democracy, especially a large one, must make a place for the competent in its ethos or else it will fail to understand its own needs and will fall victim either to incompetence or to frustrated ambition or to both. It must recognize and yet moderate the ambition of its political men, for it cannot have moderate politics without having moderate men to promote the cause of moderation. Dahl, speaking to moderate the revolutionary democracy of the young, gives no argument why the moderates should enter politics or even consider themselves citizens. His criterion of economy rather suggests that they should not, for the habit of calculating the cost of political participation does not accord with the spirit of public service. The political science of which Dahl is an outstanding exponent could be called institutional political science because it relies on institutions rather than men to explain politics. Relying on institutions does not mean designing a government "on the assumption that people will not always be virtuous" (p. 137); in that sense no reasonable man has failed to rely on institutions. Rather, it means assuming that this weakness will not matter. Now, the institutions of this political science in its latest version are informal rather than formal, and it speaks of system and process rather than the constitutional powers. But for

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all its apparent informality (which is merely the result of overriding the distinction between public and private), it never reaches the men who actually rule the polyarchy, and it even lacks the healthy concern of old-fashioned liberal constitutionalism, with all its legalism, for checking the power of ambitious men. Reich's effusions cannot be said to offer a challenge, but they do present a problem. To solve it, political science will have to abandon not only the belief that virtue is not its concern but also the faith that institutions can guarantee the effect of virtue without virtue itself. Dahl closes with a reference to the procedure of "thought and rational discussion" (p. 166). We have seen enough in recent years to know that the influence of reason depends on the presence of moderation and is not guaranteed by the existence of free institutions.

5

The Right of Revolution

S O M E W H E R E amidst the uneasy self-congratulation of the American Bicentennial there ought to be concern for the right of revolution — that principle by which and on which this country was founded. How does it stand today? It has, first of all, nearly disappeared as a subject of political discourse in America. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed both the right of revolution for all peoples and the independence of one particular people. Their independence led to the formation of a republic owing its birth to that universal right. But instead of defending both the principle and its application, Americans today are falling back on the defensive. They divide themselves into liberals and conservatives, each conceding one point and clinging to the other: conservatives cling to the established republic and do not maintain the right of revolution by which it was established; liberals maintain that right but interpret it as meaning endless social change, even though this may eventually erode or destroy the republic thus established. One side cannot explain how the revolution began; the other cannot explain why it was ended. But for both, "the right of revolution" appears embarrassingly naive and rhetorical, an awkward enthusiasm of youth best wrapped in quotation marks and put away in an attic trunk. A more mature people, they say, must submit to the necessity either of clinging to what it has or of exchanging what it has for something new.

In the two most sophisticated recent restatements of liberal

This chapter was originally published in Daedalus

(Fall 1976), pp. 151-162.

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democratic political philosophy, the right of revolution does not appear at all. John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, allows for civil disobedience, once a liberal regime has been established, and for "just war" by any country in its own defense, but he does not provide a right of revolution by which the regime could be established according to the principles he lays down. To ensure impartiality, he asks prospective citizens of his constitutional democracy deliberately to draw a "veil of ignorance" over their eyes, so that they see only what is just for them to see. Lacking knowledge of their particular circumstances and interests, such citizens could have no grievances of their own against the previous regime and, if they have a right to revolt against it (which is not said), they are required as a matter of impartial justice to forget the occasion for which they might have exercised that right. 1 Similarly, prospective citizens in the libertarian scheme of Robert Nozick (the second of the two liberal restatements) are said to "back into the state," led (or pushed?) by an invisible hand to an end they did not intend. 2 They do not gather in common deliberation to overthrow with collective force a government that oppresses them and to institute one that secures their rights. Of course, both Rawls and Nozick set out to supply hypothetical "constructs" for a free society, not plans for constructing one. But that is precisely the point: men could not together use these constructs to establish a free society. Rather, each dispassionate individual would have to be led into free society by a contrived necessity which all would calculate simultaneously. Historians, too, seem to have no use for the right of revolution. Some of them have dismissed it as propaganda, but a more recent and more sophisticated view—that of Bernard Bailyn—deprecates it as ideology. Bailyn admits—or rather asserts —that Americans once sincerely believed such a right existed and that they acted on that belief. But because such a right did not, and could not, exist, the American revolutionaries did not really know what they were doing. The explanation of their conduct given in the Declaration is as far from the truth as if it were propaganda. They were not choosing to control their destiny, as they said and believed: they were caught up more or less unwittingly in what Bailyn calls "the logic of rebellion." 3 Almost everyone admires the men who made the American

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Revolution. But the sum of the current opinion of philosophers, historians, and those of us infected by them is to distrust their principles for their naivete. A right of revolution implies that one has the choice of exercising it or not: hence a belief in the power of men to choose, and to govern themselves by their own choice. 4 T o our age, this belief appears as a kind of bravado that may be patronized but deserves to be despised. Or do we perhaps fear the naivete of the American Revolutionaries more than we despise it? In either case, to understand the right of revolution, one must try to recover from it the element of choice which is neglected by both left and right and suppressed by educated opinion. T o do this, I propose to look at choice and necessity in the Declaration, to consider the later submergence of choice in conservatism and in Marxism, and then to reach back for a more original view in a classical source, the political science of Aristotle. begins with a statement of revolutionary necessity, but not of the kind usually heard today: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary [my emphasis] for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . . " All peoples are entitled by the laws of nature and of nature's God to a "separate and equal station" with other peoples, but only now has this one people found it necessary to "assume," or, to speak less confidently, to claim its equal station. This recognition has come about "in the course o f ' certain events, and not out of "historical necessity," as we might say. Although the American people has been a colonial people, there is no reproach to the British for being imperialist, no analysis of the relationship between colonial and imperialist peoples, and no conclusion that colonial peoples must necessarily revolt against the oppression of imperialism. Instead, one people has decided to dissolve its political ties with another, which in happier days it had consented to maintain. It has always existed as a people, and while dependent, it has had a right to independence. But it has not held this right merely by virtue of being a people with a certain common culture or language. T H E DECLARATION

The Declaration does not maintain that there is a right of national "self-determination" — that merely because peoples have been thrown together in a common destiny they deserve to be in-

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dependent as if all peoples were fated to be so. Although most or all nations may have been formed by accident, their right to independence does not rest on inadvertence, but on the right of consent to government. This they hold not as a people but as individuals. It is not because peoples are diverse that they have the right of independence, but because all men as individuals are created equal. Because all men are equal, they hold unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For nobody can reasonably yield or alienate these fundamental rights to his equal, or justly ask his equal to alienate them to him. Although these rights are unalienable, they are not by that token secure: government is needed to secure them. When men are held to be equal, they compete with one another even more than when they are held to be unequal. When their rights are held to be unalienable, they are more difficult to limit and to make consistent with each other than they would be if they could be sold or given away. T o secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, but to be consistent with unalienable rights, governments must derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Only after establishing the need for government by consent of the governed does the Declaration state the right of revolution: "Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government." The case for the independence of "one people" from another rests on the right of revolution that "the people" have against their own government, whenever that government becomes destructive of the rights it was instituted to secure; the narrower case of a colonial people is therefore decided by the broader right of all peoples. This broader right presupposes a condition of men as equal individuals, as they were before they became members of a people, or as they are apart from being members of a people —the so-called "state of nature" set forth in the political philosophy of John Locke. The Declaration, then, is not a document of nationalism arguing for the necessity of revolution in giving expression to national aspirations. According to the Declaration, free government, not nationalism, is both the ground for and the result of the right of revolution. No people or nation has the right to revolt against another people or against its own government if its object

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is to institute a government not resting on consent. Nor has it a right to revolt on behalf of another people or nation and to conduct a war of liberation for that people without obtaining its consent. Although the Declaration proclaims a universal right and offers "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind," it is as little a document of internationalism as of nationalism. Each people is to make its own revolution and to institute its own free government. Yet, while requiring that a people must institute a government and, in doing so, agree not to abandon its power of consent—for even choice has its necessities — the Declaration gives further scope to human choice by not specifying the form of government the people must institute. They have the right "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." No doubt Thomas Jefferson and others were ready with sound counsel for a free people on precisely what form of government would best ensure their safety and happiness, and no doubt the people would be well advised to accept some of this counsel, and would reject some of it at their peril. The people should certainly avoid instituting a government that would be likely to repeat the "injuries and usurpations" that the Declaration accused George III of perpetrating. They should, for example, institute a government giving the people "the Right of representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only." But to have a choice means, in any case, that one is free to choose considerately, not capriciously. The choice left open to a free people by the Declaration is nothing less than the most comprehensive choice that men can have or presume to have: how to govern themselves for their mutual safety and happiness. Such a choice is not merely between this and that; it requires a foundation and leads to the founding of a government that secures future choice, probably by elections. The choice of government is a matter for deliberation which must be put off until the Declaration is no longer needed and can no longer suffice. The choice of founding a government, when it is exercised deliberately by a people, lends dignity to that right of consent which men have as individuals and which they may exercise at their discretion.

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When may the right of revolution be exercised? "Prudence," the Declaration says, " . . . will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes." And happily the disposition of mankind accords with this general reluctance that arises from prudence; "mankind," the Declaration continues, "are more disposed to suffer, while evils are suffer able, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." But, in the present case, despite the "patient sufferance" of the American people, a "long train of abuses and usurpations" makes revolution a "necessity," and the Declaration repeats this judgment of "necessity" both before and after listing the abuses. When revolution becomes a necessity, the "right" of revolution becomes a "duty," as the Declaration says; and the choice of exercising that right, as I shall explain, should be understood as a judgment. The abuses and usurpations described constitute "a long train" because "pursuing invariably the same object, [they] evince a design to reduce [the American people] under absolute Despotism." "The direct object" of George III was "the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Serious historians today do not concur in the judgment of the Declaration that George III and his ministers were aiming at an absolute despotism or absolute tyranny over the American people; 6 the common judgment today is that they were simply bumblers. If they had any scheme at all, it was certainly less ambitious than tyranny. The American revolutionaries "overreacted," and, in 1976, Americans are celebrating the Bicentennial of a successful overreaction. Some historians even agree with the British and with the American Tories of the time that the Revolution was stirred up and the Declaration was made quite unnecessarily (or at least not out of the stated necessity) by a squad of agitators and hotheads. As noted above, Bailyn has argued more moderately that the American revolutionaries understood their situation in terms of an ideology of conspiracy taken from the opposition "country party" in eighteenth-century England. 6 In the rhetoric of that party, it was customary to claim that a conspiracy of ministers acting in a pattern of deceit and corruption was bent on overthrowing the constitution and destroying the people's liberty. By adopting this language, the American revolutionaries became in a way as much the victims of

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their propaganda as was the British government. The Revolution came about, as Edmund Burke had predicted, after an escalation of mutual distrust. It was not the result of a choice. If any choice was made, it was that of the British government in not attempting Burke's suggested policy of reconciliation. To answer a question about the causes of the Revolution would require a historical study beyond my capacity. But to encourage such a study, a more adequate interpretation of the right of revolution than that of an imported conspiratorial delusion can at least be proposed. To do so, we shall need to consider the theories of John Locke, for not only did the fundamental rights proclaimed in the Declaration come from Locke, but also the reasoning as to when the right of revolution may be exercised to secure them. Locke does not explicitly declare a right of revolution, as the Declaration does; he speaks rather, with his usual sly caution, of an "Appeal to Heaven" against the abuse of legislative or prerogative power. By this he clearly does not mean patience and prayer, because, he says, men must judge whether they have a "just cause" to make their "Appeal to Heaven," and, to decide this, they must consider whether their government endangers their lives, "God and Nature never allowing a man so to abandon himself, as to neglect his own preservation," (Second Treatise, 168).

It is a strange appeal to heaven in which a just cause consists of one's own preservation, and Locke himself must have thought it could easily be confused with, or could easily amount to, a right of revolution because he next considers whether "this lays a perpetual foundation for Disorder." It does not, he says, because the appeal "operates not, till the Inconvenience is so great, that the Majority feel it, and are weary of it, and find a necessity to have it amended" (168). The people have a "slowness and aversion . . . to quit their old Constitutions" (223); they will pass over "great mistakes" by their rulers and "many wrong and inconvenient laws" (225). "But if a long train of abuses, prevarications and Artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the People" (225), or if "the general course and tendency of things cannot but give them strong suspicions of the evil intention of their Governors" (230), then they will rouse themselves and seek an opportunity to revolt.

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Locke wants to justify revolution without encouraging revolutionaries. He would like to prevent the mischief that "a busie head or turbulent spirit" (230) can do, and so he asserts that whoever overturns a just government is guilty of the greatest crime of which m a n is capable. Perhaps that is why he calls the right of revolution an appeal to heaven, and, instead of claiming the title of revolutionary for himself, he throws the accusation of rebellion back onto lawless rulers. For him, as for the Declaration, the choice of exercising that right is limited to a condition of necessity felt by the majority for some time. When will that necessity be felt? Locke uses expressions similar to those in the Declaration: when there is a "long train of abuses" (225), "a long train of actings" (210), and "strong suspicions of the evil intention of their Governors" (230). Particular injustices and isolated cases of oppression are not enough (Locke turns a cold shoulder to these); just as in the Declaration, abuses must constitute a pattern of tyranny, of "endeavors to get and exercise an Arbitrary Power over their People" (230). What constitutes this pattern, and who discerns it and calls it to the attention of the people? Locke does not say; he sometimes leaves the impression, indeed, that each individual will decide independently, without guidance from others (210). But he also indicates that the "Body of the People" will follow their leaders (208, 223). We can readily assign the task of constituting the pattern to the "true Representatives of the People" (222), or "opposers" of unlawful authority (218), that is, to the revolutionary leaders of the people, the very kind of men who composed and signed the Declaration. 7 Mankind is patient and long suffering, sometimes too much so. Patience may make people submissive and incline them to accept those "great mistakes" that rulers make as if they were accidents or decrees of a higher Power. They need leaders to show them that the pattern is there and to impute an intention behind the "mistakes" (218); they must be roused to make an appeal to heaven, or else they will rest docile under the judgment of heaven. It may even be necessary, one might suggest, to exaggerate the evidence of evil intent when there are only "strong suspicions" to go by (230) and not yet a "visible design" (225). In America, for example, George III could either have stumbled into a tyranny

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which was not at first intended, or he could have been bent on such a course from the start. But the last moment is usually not the best moment to revolt against tyranny, and to warn against well-meaning or careless blunderers may not suffice to sound an alarm. The people must be made to see oppression before they feel it; the necessity of the last moment must be substituted by the opportunity of the best moment when revolution can succeed. It becomes necessary to anticipate necessity, to extrapolate from ambiguous signs, and to read intent into mistake. Intent is the vital point, because men will not "rouse themselves" until they consider themselves victims of tyranny rather than of error or accident. Exercising the right of revolution becomes necessary when one is faced with hostile intent; one choice becomes necessary to answer another. While at first the choice of revolution was limited to those situations where it appeared to be necessary, now we find that the necessity must be seen before it actually exists. The "conspiracy theory," it appears, has now become essential for the prudent exercise of the right of revolution: it might therefore make more sense to explain the ideology of conspiracy by the American Revolution, rather than the other way round. The choice of revolution should be considered a judgment of impending necessity. It is neither fated nor entirely free, but it is made according to a standard (self-preservation) which must be applied in circumstances that are open to dispute. It is the judgment about a previous choice of government preparatory to a new choice of government. For Locke, this judgment upon an unlawful government seems equivalent to the judging of a man in the state of nature or the state of war, when he "judges" the hostile design of an enemy to "get [him] into [the enemy's] Power without [his] consent" (17).8 But, in society, the individual has the aid of his leaders in making judgments. That most of mankind is slow to anger makes it safe to allow the right of revolution, but it also creates a difficulty: what happens when men are too patient and will not exercise the right at all? It is then that impatient men serve their purpose, and employment is provided for the "busie head or turbulent spirit." At the end of the Declaration, it is not the American people, but their representatives, who "mutually pledge to each other our

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Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor." These men were so far from a passive acceptance of necessity that they put a stake on their choice. If it sounds strange to call them impatient, busy, or turbulent, let us take them at their own estimate and call them "honorable." Their honor is represented by the spirit of risk and sacrifice that lends nobility to revolution in a just cause. In a letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson made his famous remark that "a little rebellion now and then is a good thing . . . a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." 9 But in the Declaration, with the whole world watching the American experiment, he takes the occasion more seriously and presents the revolution as an honorable choice, the choicest of choices, rather than as a regular laxative of quick tempers prescribed by an unconcerned physician. Only if the revolution is just can it be honorable, because only then is it more than selfinterest that prompts an impatient man to become a revolutionary. For him, risk is amusing and sacrifice is gain; and unless risk and sacrifice are well chosen for the common benefit, his honor is nothing but his own quirk. In addition, only if the revolution is honorable can it be just. Honorable men who have "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" cannot but "declare the causes which impel them," as the Declaration says. We have seen that they must read necessity before it arrives and impute an intent before it is fully formed. There would seem to be a danger of cynical manipulation in this. But in identifying the "long train of abuses," they assume responsibility for the declared causes and pretexts of the revolution as the causes that move them. Their "conspiracy ideology" is a public accusation replete with "facts . . . submitted to a candid world" which may be disputed if they are disputable (as they are likely to be). 10 They do not let confusion ripen and maneuver for position so that they can seize power from those who have been responsible for it, as did the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Jefferson's Machiavellian wisecrack was directed at Shay's Rebellion in Massachusetts, a small affair easily condescended to. But if taken seriously, his statement demeans the Revolution he made and for which he accepted responsibility. When we consider the risk of choosing to exercise the right of revolution, we are reminded of the need to defend this choice. Since the right of revolution is based on the individual's rights to

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life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and since these rights must be secured by a government resting on consent, revolution is a change of government. Americans, however, could not institute a new government without dissolving the political ties that had connected them to the British people under the king; therefore, the right of revolution became for them the right to independence. But every people must have begun with the need to assert this right against other peoples. Only with such an assertion could they have claimed the "separate and equal station" among the powers of the earth to which they are entitled. One must not forget that the Declaration of Independence was a statement of reasons for going to war. A people makes itself independent when it chooses, and it holds to its choice when it defends its independence by defending the government it has chosen against external and internal enemies. To be frightened out of one's choice is not choosing: the revolution must be secured, if not brought to a stop, by the defense of the new government; otherwise the meaning and the dignity of choosing to revolt are lost. The right of revolution cannot be reduced to a rage for overturning anything established, or to a complaisant acceptance of whatever "social change" may bring. When revolution is a right it must be a choice. But today revolution has been more typically presented as a necessity, and the right of revolution has been denied either because revolution must never be chosen or because it cannot help but be chosen. The first position is argued by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Near the beginning of that work he disputes the claim of an English "Revolution Society" that the people of England had a right to choose their own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to frame a new government for themselves. In denying this right, Burke makes no reference to the American Revolution; instead he advances the English Revolution of 1688 as the true model and places the French Revolution in contrast. But no right to choose one's own governors was claimed in the Revolution of 1688. Rather, the rights and liberties of the subject were declared, and the succession of the crown settled. To make that Revolution, Englishmen did not abstract themselves even from the particular line of royal succession, much less from the monarchy itself. They merely specified

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the succession, and Burke says that their acceptance of William "was not properly a choice; . . . it was an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken." 11 The Revolution of 1688 was, therefore, not a founding, nor did it lead to one, according to Burke. Neither state nor society was dissolved, but the constitution was repaired by regenerating the deficient parts through the sound parts, by specifying a Protestant succession through an act of the legislature and with the support of the principal nobles and bishops. The principle of hereditary succession was maintained even as its direction was somewhat altered, and this was done particularly to avoid the act of electing the king, which would have been the choice of "the organic moleculae of a disbanded people." 12 Even this change was not made to punish misconduct, for misconduct is a matter of opinion; it was done to correct a breach in the original contract between king and people out of "a grave and overruling necessity."19 In this view, revolution was not a right of the people to be exercised when they were persuaded revolution was necessary; it was a necessity that became evident to their leaders, "those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous bitter potion to a distempered state." 14 The English Revolution in Burke's presentation was thus very far from the hope and exhilaration of the American one. He mentions those who have "the love of honorable danger in a generous cause," but he affirms that, in any case, revolution "will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good." The causes of such a revolution will not be announced in a Declaration designed to prove to the world that they are not "light and transient causes"; on the contrary, they will be covered over "with a politic, well-wrought veil."15 Burke expands on "the idea of inheritance" that is to replace the right of revolution. Our political system, he says, works "after the pattern of nature"; it is in "symmetry with the order of the world." 16 He describes it as "a permanent body composed of transitory parts," and he compares it to the whole of the human race, which at any given time is never old, or middle-aged, or young, but always the same, while it moves through decay, fall, rise, and progress. In this "philosophic analogy," the constitution is likened to a body—the human race—which has no form. It is not

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likened to an individual human body with a form, as certain medieval thinkers conceived it. The analogy is generic rather than organic, and Burke expressly dismisses the idea of organic molecules. T o avoid dissolving the constitution into molecules, he excludes the notion of form. Now since the form of the constitution, as of the human body, would be evident in the order of the parts, Burke does not prescribe any particular order of parts as required for a constitution. The parts of a constitution are remarkable for their variety and for the complexity of their relations, but not for their order. Their order varies over time as they rise or fall and as each part may need to be repaired. These repairs are not made with reference to a comprehensive plan. As the constitution lacks a form and is not made by a founding, it cannot be the product of a choice. One cannot choose the cast of a permanent body, surely not the body of the human race or some other race. With the idea of inheritance, Burke says, "our liberty becomes a noble freedom." 17 It has a long descent and an impressive pedigree, although not from founding fathers. We "have chosen our nature rather than our speculations," he claims, and thereby dissociates human freedom from speculative reason as well as from choice. Variety remains, and so men can choose among and between things; but there is no choice of the whole by which men govern themselves. One objection to Burke's thought, and one that has often been raised, is that he has no response to the fact of revolution, that he cannot accommodate a break in the inheritance that constitutes society. He can accommodate such a break as a tremendous accident or a decree of Providence, 18 but not as a human choice. Consquently, while one may both admire Burke and salute the Declaration of Independence, one cannot claim that they are consistent with each other. T O D A Y , however, Burke is no longer the principal antagonist of the right of revolution. That title belongs, strangely enough, to Marxism. Marxism has several sources, the most immediate — perhaps the most important —of them being the movement known as Idealism. Idealism had as its aim the rescuing of human choice from the weight of historical and empirical considerations, such as those in Burke's thought. One branch of Idealism at-

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tempted to make our choices independent of circumstances, but the other branch, more influential in Marxism, sought to find a guarantee for h u m a n choice and freedom in the very historical necessity that seemed to endanger them. This paradoxical solution was so far refined in Marxism that revolution was transformed from a right to be exercised by choice when circumstances made it necessary into a historical necessity that introduced "pure" freedom. T h e revolution that no man can choose to deny or affirm will establish the Communist society or pure freedom in which "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." This society is so free from necessity that it is difficult to know what it will be like, but apparently people will be able to choose different occupations on different days, or even on the same day, as fancy strikes them. Since each can develop freely with all, there is no need for individual rights, which are of course, rights of one h u m a n being against other human beings. Although freedom is assured to an extent never before seen and barely imaginable, individual choice can scarcely be said to exist, because individual choice implies individuals separate from one another and equipped with different interests. But if each can develop freely with all and no one even looks over another's shoulder, much less sneezes in his face, it must be as if h u m a n beings no longer had separate bodies with the dreadful capacity of introducing a division of labor. Further, although freedom is not, properly speaking, individual, it is also not comprehensive, because the comprehensiveness of Communist society has been guaranteed by historical necessity irrespective of h u m a n choice. 19 As there is no need for individual rights, so there is no need for a government to secure them. Communists do not revolt against one government in order to found another, not to mention to found one deriving its just powers from consent. As there is no founding of communism, there can be no comprehensive choice in which free will and necessity are reconciled and free men can acquire a part of what they want at the cost of putting up with something they do not want. Such a choice would be an intolerable and unnecessary compromise with necessity. The only problem lies in the transition from necessity to freedom. Men cannot go from intolerable necessity to pure free-

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dom by choice, because choice as we know it must always compromise with necessity. Above all, men do not found a constitutional form of government for this purpose: this would imply a permanent compromise with the limitations of human nature. Instead, the transition is accomplished by a government fittingly called the dictatorship of the proletariat, because it is temporary, designed to meet an emergency, and free of moral or political inhibitions. Under this regime, constitutional guarantees are suspended until the moment when they are no longer necessary; all is necessity until freedom is perfect. Meanwhile, in certain quarters of the world, the emergency has lasted a long time. Despite the grave political differences to which the Declaration, Burke, and Marxism have given rise, they have something in common which has become dubious to us, namely, their optimism. Marxism, with its belief that all conflicts dividing human beings will soon be overcome, displays the most, and the most obvious, optimism. But Burke, too, held the optimistic belief that the constitution of a people had a sort of guarantee of prosperity or survival by "philosophic analogy" with nature so long as it was not too much disturbed by speculative reasoners. In the Declaration, we also find a confidence, no longer possible to share, in the belief that, though human divisions cannot be overcome, human rights can be made reliably secure. To proclaim a general or categorical right of revolution implies that the right will generally be used for good, that it will keep governments in wholesome fear more than it will provide an opportunity for vindictive revolutionaries. Locke reflects this happy faith when he says that if any mischief should come from his doctrine, "it is not to be charged upon him who defends his own right, but on him, that invades his Neighbors" (228). This is well and good if the oppressor can be surely identified and quickly put down, but what if free men grow weary of defending their own right? Then the doctrine can be seized, modified, and used by their enemies to confuse them. We note again that Locke himself, in contrast to the Declaration, did not expressly affirm the right of revolution. Such optimism is not tenable now. It is no longer easy to suppose that necessity is the guarantor, or even the friend, of choice and freedom. When we do, we expect too much from revolution

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or social change; and if we expect too much, we then fall into the habit of tolerating and even praising whatever happens, and we fail to do what we can or might do. There may be no solution for this fundamental fault in the right of revolution, but before so concluding, we should investigate the discussion of revolution in the fifth book of Aristotle's Politics. Aristotle does not affirm the right of revolution; he merely says that revolutions happen, and have two causes. One cause is universal and necessary; it is the imperfection of all existing regimes in failing to attain justice. This cause would seem to justify revolution, but in fact it discourages it, because it tells us that the result of revolution will be little better, no better, or even worse than the status quo. The other cause comprises the many particular accidents that are the usual pretexts for precipitating revolution, all of which involve honor.* 0 Aristotle does not affirm the right of revolution, then, because for him the universal and necessary cause of revolution is not encouraging. On the contrary, necessity in general teaches men that they should not revolt and that political action offers no cure for the admitted injustices of all regimes. Virtuous men are few; thus, in order to throw the rascals out, they must ally themselves with other rascals. After such an alliance, one is not apt to notice much improvement. But is it possible for virtuous men to ally with honorable men — less philosophical beings, who resent the injustices done to them and are eager to act? Honorable men do not need or desire a categorical right of revolution because they disdain the help of necessity or the optimism which that right implies. They do not need a guarantee of success; therefore, they are more reliable when success is in doubt. Solzhenitsyn, among others, describes the behavior of Marxist revolutionaries when they are imprisoned by their own party; these once formidable men cringe before terrors they had so lightly imposed upon others, fawn before their captors, and babble false confessions to their condemners. They lack, he says, an "individual point of view," by which he means a sense of honor.*1 To recapture the meaning of the American Revolution, it might be well to take a cue from the last sentence of the Declaration, where the American revolutionaries gave a mutual pledge of their honor, and to rely more on honor and less on necessity as

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support for revolution. Honor is surely no panacea. No reasonable man would endorse every revolution that began with an irritation that can be called dishonorable. To free men, honorable men may sometimes seem to be more trouble than they are worth. But honorable men are not without some check to their pride. The last sentence of the Declaration also says they act "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence," since they have already appealed to "the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of [their] intentions." Providence is not merely more powerful than men, as is historical necessity, but also above them. And if easily irritated upstarts fail to take the hint from the Supreme Judge, then the natural conservatism of the people will leave them to cry in the wilderness—just as the people will be roused from indifference by an appeal to their honor coming from honorable men. If the American liberal democracy now established as the eventual result of the Declaration of Independence is still worth conserving, it must be because, if given the opportunity, Americans would choose it again. To support this choice, should it be reasonable, something sounder than the false assurance that we must of necessity be on the winning side is needed. For this we might take note once more that, according to the Declaration, human nature has both a liberal side in the spirit of honorable revolt and a conservative side in sober prudence. To accept this view, one must also accept the possibility that the Declaration contains an analysis of choice and necessity to support its assertion of a choice.

6 Cucumber Liberalism

W H E R E are liberals today? Those called liberals in today's politics have been silent for over a decade now, that is, silent on their own behalf. When they have spoken, they have spoken in unison or harmony with democrats advancing the claims of democracy; they have not put forward undemocratic, much less antidemocratic, claims for themselves. Liberals mostly welcomed the demands for participatory democracy that came from the Left in the late 1960s, and when they resisted, it was in practice more than on principle. They did not produce a forthright defense of nonparticipatory democracy managed by liberals. What came forth most notably was Robert Dahl's "polyarchy," but that was presumably manned and womaned by polyarchs, not by liberals. 1 And the recent populism which is an echo of participatory democracy (and therefore seems to come confusingly from both Left and Right) has not been scrutinized, much less opposed, by liberals for its antiliberal potentiality. Nothing is said openly about the tyranny of the majority and one might have to go back as far as Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism. in American Life, published in 1963, to find a liberal book with that danger as its theme. 2 Those who have called attention to that danger more recently have been labeled "conservatives" and forced to style themselves "neo-conservatives." Since liberals still exist and can be assumed to have the use of all their faculties, one may suppose that they are in hiding. They remain inconspicuous not out of fear or shyness but by choice and design. In swelling the voices of democrats, they have decided to stay within the majority and therefore have chosen not to accuse it of tyranny even as a possibility, still less as a propensity. At the

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same time, the liberals' unwillingness to call attention to themselves as liberals suggests that they are aware of the potential hostility of democrats. In no recent liberal book is this intention clearer than in John Rawls' A Theory of Justice. Rawls' book has been praised as comparable to the writings of John Stuart Mill by Robert Nozick, an admiring critic. 3 If one actually compares it to Mill's On Liberty, however, as Nozick does not do, the outstanding difference is that whereas Mill is preoccupied with the tyranny of the majority or of "society," Rawls is not. Nor is Nozick's criticism of Rawls. 4 Mill proposes a liberal society formed, but not ruled, by energetic, individual characters of "disinterested benevolence" as the main cure for majority tyranny. In this chapter I shall compare Rawls' and Nozick's liberalism without liberals with Mill's liberalism of disinterested liberals in an attempt to cast new light on these well-studied men from a more frankly political outlook than is usually assumed. My question will be, how is the rule of liberals in a liberal society to be secured? If we want to know where liberals are today, we must ask, whence this cool, cucumber liberalism that calmly ignores the interests of liberals? JOHN RAWLS takes as his beginning point an "intuitive notion," which he calls the "original position." 5 Admittedly his intuition was prompted by the notion of the "state of nature" that was invented by Hobbes and developed by Locke. T h e "original position" is a condition of individualism in which the parties are assumed not to take an interest in one another's interests but only in themselves. 6 T h e y therefore have rights against others that governments are instituted to protect; and with that premise and" this conclusion, Rawls' theory of justice can reasonably be considered to be a version of liberalism. He does not, however, present it as liberalism, for he apparently does not think it necessary to describe the development and current state of liberalism, take responsibility for its problems, and take account of its enemies. His arguments are calm and his tone is pacific, and though he has an opponent, the opponent is called "utilitarianism." "Utilitarianism" is defined broadly 7 to mean any principle by which individual rights might be abridged or sacrificed without the consent

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of the individual or without the assumed consent of a representative individual. But in practice "utilitarianism" is the principle or system of certain philosophy professors on friendly terms with Rawls who also believe in the protection of individual rights but think that the protection of such rights requires their abridgment or sacrifice in the name of the common good, which is assumed to be utility. The issue between utilitarianism and the "contract view" (Rawls' own) is whether individual rights have to be disciplined by some notion of the good external to them or can be made viable through internal consistency as one right is compared with others. The issue is not between the good of the many and the rights of the few. The existence of individual rights is undoubted on both sides, and so, for the most part, is the goodness of the welfare state. Neither side is aroused by the danger of majority tyranny, and Rawls, as we shall see, directs his theory to the promotion of the "least advantaged." Absorbed in this amiable contest with fellow professors and fellow liberals, Rawls presents the difference between utilitarianism and the "contract view" as the fundamental alternative in the construction of a theory of justice. In his theoretical concern to prevent the institution of any principle other than individual rights that might restrict individual rights, Rawls is led to take a peculiar view of one's self-interest. Since he recognizes that it might be in one's self-interest, narrowly defined, to combine against an individual or a minority, he proposes that in the original position no one be allowed to know who he is, even and precisely while calculating his self-interest. With this device, the "veil of ignorance," the calculation of each individual will be appropriately impartial and hence just. The veil of ignorance keeps individuals separate and incapable of combining in a common interest that could be elevated above an individual interest. Individuals are required to calculate the self-interest of no particular individual in order to prevent them from calculating the common interest of individuals. They are not permitted to see a possible coincidence between their private interest and that of others, even if this common interest is shared equally; and yet they are not asked to forsake self-interest in service to a higher cause. The original position is "purely hypothetical" not only in the

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sense that it need not have existed but also in the sense that it compels an effort of self-forgetfulness to achieve the necessary abstract impartiality: a hypothetical self-interest. Rawls says that the original position "enables us to envision our objective from afar," 8 that is, at a distance from one's own particular interest. But when one's interest is seen or "envisioned" from so far, it seems that only the kind of unserious interest we take in playing a game (say, blind man's buff, with rules of scientific groping) would induce us to join together in a contract to form society. For Locke, by contrast, the "state of nature" was and is an actual state in which the true nature of men is revealed. Each is shown to have a right or a duty to preserve himself and others, which can best be effected together, by consenting to government and forming civil society. However powerful or weak the right or duty to preserve others may be by itself, it is in everyone's interest to secure his rights in life, liberty, and property by consenting to be governed. To learn one's interest (since it must be learned) one must be made aware of the state of nature, a notion which is counter-intuitive or unconventional or even unnatural because it tells men, contrary to tradition and reason, that they are fundamentally unsociable. Having learned their fundamental nature, men are enlightened as to their rights; and so far from donning a veil of ignorance that might make them afraid of the ghosts that lurk in the dark (for Rawls has not considered how this veil might be misused to mislead the people), they are supplied with a sure and (roughly) true standard by which to judge their government. 9 They are to be fearful for their own bodies and not to play with fancies that might lead them to be fearful for their souls. Rawls' playful "original position" is not meant to reopen bygone possibilities of Christian or classical soulfulness (nor is it meant to express an erotic preference), but his vagueness in defining the "self" 10 and his squeamish aversion to healthy selfishness leave a handle to modern priests that earlier, more watchful liberals would not have provided. The people's real interest must be shown to them, but their hypothetical interest can be told to them. Moreover, in the Lockean conception (somewhat modernized for this occasion), some men see more than security when enlightened as to their rights; they see opportunity. Since equal rights mean equal opportunity, the quicker and the more talented sniff

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profit for themselves in the formal principle of equality. Being more enlightened than most men, they have a greater stake in the system of liberty; and it would be quite reasonable to call them liberals, since they are the principal beneficiaries of liberty. Liberals may be divided into businessmen, who profit from equal opportunity in acquiring property, and intellectuals, who profit from equal opportunity in free speech and in acquiring useful knowledge. Liberals are the principal beneficiaries of liberty, but they are also the principal benefactors of a free society, though not out of liberality. It appears that property cannot be acquired by some unless it is increased and made secure for all; and the same may be said for useful knowledge. Property and useful knowledge constitute effectual wholes that force men to join together in society and bind them once joined, for no single share, however great, has much value in the hands or mind of a single individual. One cannot defend one's own property without defending Property, nor enjoy one's knowledge without promoting Knowledge. To have an "interest", then, is more than to have a need or a desire; it is to have a definite individual stake in a whole. It is to have a duty as well as a right." Thus when Rawls speaks of self-interested persons in the original position, he illicitly imports into that condition the things such persons have an interest in, as well as presupposing the social network in which property and useful knowledge are acquired. He takes for granted the advance from the needs and desires of naked men to the interests of social men, which means that he takes acquisition for granted and thus fails to take account of the interests of the principal acquisitors, the liberals. In particular, he discounts the risk of acquisition and the seemingly excessive desire of risk-takers for more than enough. Disgusted with the comfortable, he is neglectful of the restless. The "maximin" principle, 12 which is to govern persons in the original position, could not have prompted anyone to take full, risky advantage of an opportunity; and society would have been impoverished by the cost of insuring men who do not desire insurance. If in fact Rawls had faced the problem of acquisition, he would have had to pay heavily for the cost of acquiring maximinally the goods he distributes maximinally, and the few would have received a hefty rent for the risk-taking propensity that cost them nothing. 13 As he

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has it, the few are well paid, but only because they disobey the maximin principle, and society is therefore immensely wealthier than Rawls can explain. For Locke, however, the traditional political distinction between the few and the many is maintained, though somewhat concealed by the formality of equal rights. The few contribute their enterprise (the supply side), the many contribute their support (the demand side); and the few receive security for their acquisitions while the many receive the benefits of a rising standard of living. Thus, though the distinction between the few and the many is recognized, the few are not permitted to exploit solely for their private advantage the inequality that equal opportunity gives to unequal talents and temper. Once society is formed, it has its own "fundamental natural law," which is its own preservation; and therefore no one can have a right that would destroy society. In society rights are justified not as preserving every individual but as preserving the public good, that is, as preserving as many individuals in that society as possible. When the preservation of society replaces the preservation of every individual, the result is a correction of the bare formality in Locke's system that gives equal, or rather, unequal, opportunity to the few. By constituting the weight of society, the many or the majority are protected as society is preserved; and the more emphatic, more realistic features of Lockean politics —the necessity of execution, the retention of prerogative, the supremacy of the legislative power, in sum, the absoluteness of political power —should be understood as democratically inclined. 14 Locke's system combines the two things which Rawls separates and considers to be the fundamental alternative: rights and utilitarianism. Rights are for everyone, but especially for the few liberals; the public good includes everyone, but especially the many democrats, including those whom Rawls calls "least advantaged." What Rawls believes to be merely a matter of argument Locke considers to be also a political difference. Locke limits the dominance of the liberals as carefully and unobstrusively as he promotes their interests. 15 Nonetheless, Rawls has a principle which he hopes will do the work of a "utilitarian" public good in protecting the many against the few, not with safeguards for the many but rather by

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abolishing or tending to abolish differences between the many and the few. This is the "difference principle." It is his distinctive political principle because within the bounds of liberalism, yet without relying on soft unprincipled compassion, the difference principle focuses the energies of liberals on the "least advantaged" and allocates benefits to them. The principle states that no one else can gain unless they gain. The "least advantaged" are defined more by what they lack than by their interests, much less by their virtue. 16 They are sunk in their needs, unable even to speak on their own behalf and to advance the claims that would make them a class. For what can the "least advantaged" say to recommend themselves? If they boast of their potentiality for human life, they are asserting, and therefore admitting, an advantage. No, it is better for them to keep mum and collect their patronage, lest they be forced to count their blessings and to become patrons themselves of the least advantaged. But in our envy of these mumbling drones (for, being human, they would say something, at least to express their ingratitude), we should not overlook the gain for the patrons. Since the least advantaged are presumably a minority and in any case cannot be identified with the traditional "many" claiming to rule as democrats, both the many and the few are included among "the more advantaged." Consequently the dispute between them is diminished and even transformed into a friendly rivalry as to who can give the most to the least advantaged by getting more for themselves. Politics becomes less disputatious as it is directed from claims to needs, and the secret dream of liberalism (even of Lockean liberalism) to do away with politics altogether edges closer to the realization promised in Marxist communism. Or is it rather the case that Rawls' difference principle is itself a political principle, a ruling principle that must be imposed on liberal society? Rawls signifies that the difference principle remains within the bounds of liberalism by asserting that it is the second of two principles, the first being liberty. The principle of liberty is that "each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others." 17 Liberty is equal liberty; but will equal liberty be enough for everyone to live freely, that is, securely? Again in contrast to Locke, Rawls takes for granted the acquisition of sufficient goods so that equal liberty

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obtains at a level of abundance rather than penury and misery. 18 His "original position" is a condition of ease and choice, with all the comforts of home; he does not mention the "great inconveniences," the "fears and continual dangers" of Locke's state of nature. 19 Yet Rawls sees that this equal liberty yields inequality in effect, hence the distinction and the dispute between the few and the many. Equality of opportunity can then be corrected to fair equality of opportunity, which takes away all advantages of class and forces the children of the rich to become rich on their own. This is the equality of opportunity to be found in Plato's Republic, more exacting than our usual equality of opportunity, which merely permits the poor to become rich, except that in Rawls' system the rich are not educated to virtue. 20 It still leaves the distinction between the few and the many insofar as that distinction arises from "natural assets" of talent and temper. Rawls' difference principle is mainly directed against the advantage of having such natural assets. It has the ambitious purpose of doing away with the distinction between the few and the many by nullifying the "natural chance" that some have greater natural assets than most. He replaces even "fair" equality of opportunity, which he calls a "liberal" principle, with "democratic equality." 21 That conception "nullifies the accidents of natural endowment" as well as "the contingencies of social circumstance," because from a moral standpoint, according to Rawls, both "seem equally arbitrary." 22 Thus, what was intended or posited or hypothesized in the original position is realized in society by the operation of the difference principle. Although Rawls does not propose to "eliminate" unequal natural endowments, he looks forward to a eugenics that would generate a society of "the greatest equal talent," 23 and he does propose to "nullify" natural inequalities in society. This "nullifying" might include the violation of equal opportunity by the imposition of quotas for the least advantaged, though Rawls does not pronounce his "considered judgment" on this particular point. More important, however, we are compelled to notice a foreign presence, something masterful and probably Germanic, in Rawls' version of English contract theory. Rawls cannot accept Locke unadulterated, because Locke's theory is too selfish and uncompassionate to the least advantaged.

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He therefore posits an original position to replace the unalterable selfishness of men in Locke's state of nature, as if supposing that men could choose to live like rational beings above the selfish needs of human beings. But then the trouble is that any system too lofty for selfishness is also too lofty for compassion; and if Rawls cannot accept Locke's selfishness, he cannot abide Kant's stern moralism. So it must be something of each and in between: a social contract of selfish individuals (not assumed to be selfish, but in effect selfish) to prevent uncompassionate moralism and the difference principle to "nullify" (aufheben) uncompassionate selfishness. When "persons" posit themselves in the original position, they assume a "veil of ignorance" of facts that might compel them to be selfish. But if these facts are merely arbitrary differences that can and ought to be nullified in society, why is "the veil of ignorance" not properly called "the abstraction of reason"? Because that would be too much Kant. And if there are facts about human nature to know (Rawls calls them "primary goods") as well as facts to be ignorant of, why is the "original position" not properly called "the state of nature"? Because that would be too much Locke. 24 The difference principle uses inequality to do away with inequality because, Rawls says, no one deserves his natural endowments any more than his social position.' 5 Setting aside the question whether Lincoln or someone else deserves to be Lincoln, 26 cannot Rawls imagine how it might be in the interest of the human race to have superior and inferior individuals? How is individualism secure without variety, and what else is variety but unequal qualities in different individuals? If individuals are to have their own "sense of their own worth," they must find something in which they excel and in which they take pride.*7 Even liberalism would not have advanced so far if liberals had not considered themselves superior to reactionaries. And while a sense of superiority is necessary to striving for progress, a sense of inferiority is necessary to moderation, modesty, and the avoidance of envy.28 No one can be moderate who thinks himself the best man that ever lived, even if everyone else thinks himself the same. Rawls has it that "in the public forum each person is treated with the respect due to a sovereign equal"; 29 but apart from easily

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imagined difficulties of etiquette, a sovereign is jealous of his equal because a sovereign is unequal. Rawls is not a Marxist, but his assertion that individual natural endowments are arbitrary from a moral standpoint leaves us with the impression that man is essentially or by nature a species being, 30 and only accidentally and arbitrarily an individual. In attempting to nullify the distinction between the few and the many, he comes close to nullifying the differences among individuals. He certainly believes that the worst injustice is that some individuals are better than others, not that some are worse than others. Rawls' two principles of justice, equal liberty and the difference principle, correspond to the original position and the subsequent condition, respectively. Equal liberty is posited in the original position, or to create the original position; but in order to make equal liberty actual, the difference principle must extend it to the least advantaged so that all enjoy it with assurance. When Rawls speaks of the primacy of liberty, he refers to the original character of the original position in which men are without government; he refers to the fact (according to him) that men, being naturally equal, have no natural principle by which they can rule one another and are therefore originally or naturally free. But this liberty is merely posited (Locke said it was exposed to great inconveniences). T o make liberty actual for all, equality must be enforced. Equality as the principle of no rule must be transformed into equality as a ruling principle and all the apparatus of the state, including soldiers and tax collectors, brought into service as the instrument of its rule. Inequality of wealth as well as of power must also be used, with the sole proviso that it aid the least advantaged. Since all inequality is now held to be conventional, any inequality can be just. And since no one deserves his natural endowments any more than his social position, no one with natural endowments will be preferred because of them over those who merely have social position. Michelangelo is no more deserving of stone and canvas than a gangster's worthless son of his patrimony, unless Michelangelo brings more to the least advantaged." But that is hardly likely. The least advantaged will be more properly concerned with the "primary goods," to them the needs of the

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body; 32 and their bodies will gain more from the dissolute habits of the gangster's son than from Michelangelo's artistry. Besides, though all human beings belong to the least advantaged because they have bodies and therefore vulgar tastes, many of them, sad to say, indulge in uncompelled, gratuitous vulgarity. Let Rawls try to convince them of the value of fine things like public television after he has told them that their gain is the sole criterion and that, for the purpose of just allocation, no activity is better than any other and pushpin is as good as poetry. 33 Rawls, of course, does not believe that pushpin is as good as poetry, and he resists the thought that so low a notion could be consistent with "a sense of justice." But how will he prevent it? He is not a "representative person" for the least advantaged. Given the existence of vulgarity, the difference principle can be, and likely will be, used to realize the slogan of vulgar utilitarianism. Despite our first impression that Rawls is perfectly happy with democracy and unconcerned with the danger of tyranny of the majority, his theory of justice is directed against majority tyranny of a kind. He is concerned about majority tyranny not over the few best, not of democrats over liberals, but of a majority of the more advantaged, including both democrats and liberals, over the least advantaged. At one point in the development of American liberalism the representative least advantaged man might have been called "the forgotten man." Rawls, forgetting all others, makes the forgotten man the focus of his theory of justice. Through the difference principle he uses the majority to promote the interests of the least advantaged. The intention is to assure the primacy of liberty, of equality without rule; the effect is to make equality a ruling principle and to impose the tastes and the opinions of the least advantaged on the whole. For as Rawls is compelled to acknowledge, 34 society is not an "all" of disparate individuals; it is a whole with a certain character deriving from the character of those who rule it. Even a liberal society (which claims to be characterless) has the character of liberals, or in Rawls' case, the character of those whom liberals invite to rule. Liberals have always understood themselves as guardians of others' rule (though never of philosophers' rule, for liberals are philosophers themselves); but Rawls makes them

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guardians of the least advantaged. It might seem that it is better to be guardian of the least advantaged ("doing one's part" as Rawls puts it), 35 than least advantaged, but this does not reckon with the fact that when the least advantaged rule, they are no longer least advantaged. Or do the least advantaged rule? It appears rather that they consent to be ruled by liberals who rule them from their viewpoint as well as for their benefit. Or do the least advantaged even consent to be ruled? Kant's modification of Locke's social contract theory has the political consequence of relaxing the requirements of seeking the consent of the governed, for when human beings are abstracted as rational beings positing universal laws for themselves, any rational being can consent for all and the standard for legitimate government becomes what a rational being could consent to. Similarly with Rawls' theory, though as usual less rigorously, "representative persons holding the various social positions" have their interests calculated for them as a substitute for asking their opinion, and the standard for just institutions becomes what a representative man would consent to. 36 For example, when liberty of conscience is to be limited, one must do so with "evidence and ways of reasoning acceptable to all" such that "everyone can accept" the limitations." So even in a matter of vital interest to the representative intellectual, Rawls does not quite specify that limitations must be set with the consent of all. Even in his own interest, Rawls substitutes a representative reasoning for his own consent; indeed, he specifies that the reasoning must be kept simple so that no group can gain a privileged place with arcane arguments. Such is his confidence, not only that the interest of the least advantaged can safely replace the common good, not only that the least advantaged have no interest against that of the liberal few, but also that liberals can explain themselves to the least advantaged. Perhaps they could do so on the basis of their honesty if not his arguments, were it not for competition from those least advantaged in conscience who are always ready to exploit the vulgarity of the least advantaged in property. Rawls' theory attempts above all to protect the least advantaged in property, but it leaves their protectors unprotected. 38 Indeed, it transforms them. Rawls' theory transforms liberals from

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an enterprising few, ambitious for profit and discovery, into cucumber liberals actually secure in their stations but pretending to be anxious lest they fall into poverty. Such liberals are so undemanding for themselves that they would be incapable of producing benefits for others, yet so calculating on behalf of the least advantaged that they would have no cause for pitying them. When liberals look at liberal society from the viewpoint of the least advantaged, they see neither themselves nor the least advantaged but rather a confusion of the two. LIBERALS, or at least their commercial branch, might seem to have better protection in the libertarian scheme of Robert Nozick. Nozick admires Rawls' theory because it is a beautiful whole or because, being a whole, it is beautiful. 39 He does not admire it because it would help the least advantaged. On the contrary, he rejects the difference principle as an imposition of outrageous terms of cooperation by the worse endowed on the better endowed. 40 The difference principle would then seem to be a partisan principle, and Rawls' theory, resting on a partisan principle, would seem to be a spurious whole and its beauty merely cosmetic. For a whole theory (that is, a theory of the whole) that covers over partisan differences, or worse, inflates the claim of one party, is either a boast or a joke. But Rawls is a modest man to the extent that one can be modest without being a joking man. Nozick should therefore choose between the ground for his admiration and his criticism of Rawls. He should choose between his love of beautiful theories that are beautiful because their principles fit and their arguments cohere, and his dislike of societies that would be built at the direction of beautiful theories.

This choice can perhaps be avoided if Nozick can construct a beautiful theory to justify a lack of pattern in society, and this is what he attempts to do. Disgusted with partisan principles and bad patterns, he rejects all "patterned principles" in the evaluation of society. Since "distributive justice" serves as an excuse for maldistribution, let it be done away with and replaced by justice in acquisition, whatever the pattern that results from acquisition, with an afterthought of compensation or rectificatory justice for those who are hurt by someone else's acquisition. Nozick excuses himself from a full explanation of "justice in acquisition" 41 (or

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should it be called "acquisitive justice" producing "well-gotten gains"?), but it seems to consist in some version of Locke's labor theory of value: something is yours if you earned or produced it rather than stole it. Justice in acquisition is a "historical principle" as opposed to a "structural" one. 42 It takes us back to the first acquisition and compels us to ask whether that was earned or stolen. Locke assumes that the earth was given to men in common and that when it was acquired as private property, no one was hurt by the acquisition; but Locke also shows he is aware of Hobbes' dictum that "there is scarce a commonwealth in the world, whose beginnings can in conscience be justified." 43 For Nozick to seek justice in acquisition rather than in distribution is an altogether unpromising venture from uncertain to certain disappointment. It is to substitute an original grab for an original position and then to pass it on by "justice in transfer" to succeeding generations. The result is more likely to subvert the present distribution of goods than to uphold it, somewhat as the notion of original sin taints all later attempts at human justice. Nozick tries to fight off this result by concentrating on justice in transfer and ignoring the original grab, 4 4 but he will find very little justice in acquisition and hence very little to transfer to us. On his reasoning we would be forced to give the country back to the Indians even if they now owned most of it. 45 In rejecting the use of a "patterned principle" by which to govern the distribution of goods in society, Nozick is attempting to separate acquisition from distribution and thus to prevent the mode by which society is begun from ruling the order in which society is maintained. A similar attempt was made by Hume and Burke. In order to restrain the dangerous passion for distributive, that is, redistributive, that is, punitive justice, they denied the social contract any contemporary relevance; dubbing it the "original contract," they banished it into time out of memory and put their political trust in custom, history, and prescription. This course, which lays stress on the necessities of human life and results in conservatism, is not open to the libertarian Nozick. He wants to emphasize choice, except in politics where men might choose to rule other men; so he reverses the disposition of Adam

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Smith and puts choice in economics and the Invisible Hand in politics.46 A just acquisition, however, means a just distribution. If justice is sought in acquisition and when found, transferred to us here and now, society will be dominated by just acquisitors and the spirit of just acquisitiveness will go abroad in the land. The first choice to acquire property will be remembered because it was a choice and because the principle is choice, and that choice will continue to be made and will govern other, subordinate choices to be made. "Justice in acquisition" will necessarily be a "patterned principle," justifying and promoting just acquisition, or perhaps just acquisition. Human acquisition can be just because men, more naked than other animals, need to acquire goods that nature and God have not provided them. In this need they are equal, and justice in acquisition must somehow respect their equality so that each human being is protected in the right to acquire. Such protection is available in the right of consent; Locke defined property as that which cannot be taken from someone without his consent.47 The patterned principle of justice in acquisition, therefore, is equal rights. It is not equal acquisition because with equal acquisition men might not produce enough to satisfy their needs; and besides, equal acquisition does not respect an individual choice to produce more or less and this or that. To preserve choice, men must have equal rights leading to unequal acquisitions. Why do men have equal rights? Nozick begins to supply the argument for equality, which he rightly says is lacking in Rawls' theory, but then he gives it up and leaves it at a "claim." The "root idea" of equal rights is "the fact of our separate existences." 48 This does not suffice, Nozick recognizes; other animals have separate existences and we human beings do not accord them equal rights. We may not even respect their separate existences: when we eat pigs, we eat "pork." 49 What requires us to respect the fact of separate existences in human beings and not in pigs? Nozick inflates this fact to proclaim that human beings are "distinct individuals each with his own life to lead." 50 Why does each pig not have his own life to lead? Rawls would say that pigs are not "moral persons," lacking as

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they do a conception of the good and a sense of justice. 51 But to be a moral person so defined it is not clear that a separate existence is necessary. On the contrary, it seems to be a distinct disadvantage to someone trying to be good and just to have to lead his own life, as it were, on the side. Rawls and Nozick are both aware that to supply the ground for equal rights and thus to prove the superiority of equal rights to "utilitarianism" (which is according to both the correct view of the fundamental alternative), they must establish the difference between human beings and other animals. But neither tries very hard and neither succeeds. Rawls is too high; he cannot work his way down from "moral persons" to human animals. Nozick is too low; he cannot work his way up from separate existences to human individuality." Both are greatly in need of an acquaintance with the part of the human soul that Plato called thymos, the specifically human spirit of defensiveness that makes us want to distinguish ourselves from other human beings and from other animals. 53 This spirit is responsible for our wish not to be ordered around by others, hence for our desire for freedom in the low sense of recalcitrance, but it is also responsible for our wish to order others around, in order to show our superiority. Our political, even our tyrannical, desires seem to have the same source as our desire for freedom, as becomes clear to anyone with experience in the difficulty of maintaining free political life. In Nozick's framework for Utopias "no one will choose to be a queen bee." 54 It would be better to arrange the devices of liberal constitutionalism so that no one is able to be a queen bee. Some few will surely choose to be a queen bee if they can, because that is their nature. The rest of us would be too poor and spiritless to resist them if we were not infected with their desire and did not share something of their nature. Failing to appreciate their nature, Nozick protects the libertarians of his libertarian society as little as he protects the rest of us against them. B Y CONTRAST to Rawls and Nozick, Mill's On Liberty has the tyranny of the majority for its central or even sole concern. It is an essay on liberty rather than a book on justice. Mill scarcely mentions justice; he speaks only once of "principles of justice and policy" when they concur with liberty. 55 He seems to sense or to have acted on the belief that justice and liberty are hardly com-

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patible, as opposed to Rawls and Nozick who in their different ways make liberty the first principle of justice. Instead of a sense of justice, Mill intends to promote a strong and energetic individuality in liberal society, moderated and propagated by "disinterested benevolence." When Mill considers a more political supplement to this uncomplicated virtue (if benevolence is a virtue), he brings out "the rough process" of party struggle, not rules of justice agreed to with an abstract calculation. 56 I will put aside the question recently raised by Gertrude Himmelfarb whether On Liberty is typical of "the other Mill," for example, the Mill who discussed justice in his essay, Utilitarianism. 67 As she remarks, the Mill of On Liberty has been more influential than the other Mill. That influence, moreover, could have preserved some of the less libertarian, more political insights in Mill's other writings if at least the tension in On Liberty between liberty and society had been maintained. But Mill's influence has been precisely to relax that tension and thereby to dissipate his concern for the tyranny of the majority. Mill's solution for that problem, it will be argued, has prevented our recognition of it and not so much because he exaggerated the possibilities of individuality as because in counterbalancing and diffusing individuality, he relied on disinterested benevolence. For the notion of "disinterested benevolence" is the proximate source of the propensity of liberals today to defer their own interest and to fail to defend liberalism. To show this, I propose a quick tour through Mill's essay. Mill begins his introductory chapter by putting aside the philosophical question of free will in favor of civil or social liberty as the subject of his essay. The philosophical question must be irrelevant or perhaps it must be kept irrelevant to civil liberty. 58 Civil liberty is an old problem in a new form that "requires a different and more fundamental treatment." 59 In previous ages liberty for the ruled had to be secured against the tyranny of rulers, and this was done by the recognition of rights and by the institution of constitutional checks. But then it occurred to men that the rulers could be made identical with the ruled by making the ruling power emanate from the periodic choice of the ruled. At this point limitation of the ruling power no longer seemed so necessary. But with the growth and prosperity of the American repub-

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lie, it began to be perceived (by Tocqueville) that when the people are said to rule, in fact "the most numerous or the most active part of the people" rules. 60 Or, putting the parts together, one may suppose that the most active part of the people rules with the force of the most numerous part, producing "the tyranny of the majority." Mill himself puts quotation marks around this phrase to indicate that the new form of the problem is known. This tyranny, when exercised by society and not merely by public authority, is known to be profounder than other tyrannies because it penetrates into the details of life, leaving fewer means of escape than political tyrannies. Through social pressure, tyranny of the majority enslaves the soul itself, the root or essence of individuality and hence of freedom. Mill, then, will supply the solution to this recognized problem. His solution is both the answer to the "practical question" of where to draw the line of legitimate social interference with individual liberty and the "more fundamental treatment" he had promised. He allows that rules of law and opinion are necessary to restrain others. In the past, such rules have been drawn from personal preferences generalized to a class of men and supported by custom and by reason endorsing custom: in sum, the rules have been determined by the likings and dislikings of society. Those "in advance of society" have not questioned the principle that society's likings and dislikings should be the source of its rules; they have merely tried to educate society to like better things and dislike bad things. Even in regard to religious belief, toleration has been achieved through practical indifference rather than by the arguments of the great writers who have asserted the right of free conscience. 61 Mill, therefore, asserts a principle which is opposed not only to the customary and contradictory likings of societies but also to the principle of merely improving those likings. His is "the very simple principle . . . entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control . . . that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection." 68 Power can be exercised only to prevent harm to others, not for an individual's own good, whether physical or moral. One should consider this rule as Mill conceived it: not pri-

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marily for its success in formulating the principle of the liberal society we all believe in, but rather in contrast to all previous practice in which the likings of society determine its rules. This is a rule against the principle of all previous rules in the matter. It is simple but it is difficult to apply, for as Mill admits, it is contrary to human nature. The principle of all previous rules has been supported by "the disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others." But Mill's rule requires that "a strong barrier of moral conviction" be erected against "some of the best and . . . some of the worst feelings incident to human nature," presumably benevolent as well as punitive feelings. 63 Mill does not find human nature to be on his side, and it is for this reason perhaps that he refuses to defend the free will of humans against the necessitarian laws of nonhuman nature—in the philosophical question that he set aside at the beginning. Too much protest against necessary, natural laws might give encouragement to too much rambunctious human legislation. With this recognition or decision, Mill separates his defense of liberty from those of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, both of whom believed that the doctrine of philosophical necessity was indeed a practical danger to free men and, according to Tocqueville, a vicious support of majority tyranny. 64 Mill also forgoes participation in the Rousseau ean and romantic revulsion65 against modern science that has fixed a polemical version of humanism in the soul of the modern liberal. One may ask whether Mill has erected a strong barrier against his own best feelings. It is mischief and tyranny to impose one's own opinion as a rule of conduct on others, but Mill writes this essay to assert a principle that applies to others. His principle is a paradox: a rule whose aim is to check or repress the human inclination to make rules. He himself merely seeks to persuade others to this rule, but would a society based on this rule not impose it on its members? Mill's argument seems to be that ruling is doing good to others according to one's own likings. Ruling is therefore tyrannical66 either because one is biased away from others' good by one's own likings or because doing good to others is an insult to their freedom, or both. Ruling can be prevented or checked by a self-denying ordinance of each individual that he

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not attempt to do good to a second party. He may prevent the second party from doing harm to third parties; but doing good is not the aim, nor is it the warrant of an action that Mill revealingly calls "interference." For him government is so little paternal that it is confined, as it were, to staying the hand of one child before it can hit another. Such interference will probably not be biased by one's own likings because it is directed toward frustrating actions of the second party harmful to others and is not immediately concerned with his likings and dislikings.67 Interference does not have to be motivated solely by a sense of impartiality. It is easier to restrain one's own desire to rule by restraining others than by restraining oneself; so the self-denying ordinance operates through the power of legitimate interference, and society, though limited in its jurisdiction, is through its own and through state coercion satisfactorily punitive for liberals who will want retribution against illiberal reprobates. Besides, although interference will amount to a reproof or a curtailment, it leaves the corrected individual—fuming, perhaps, but free of another's rule, sovereign "over himself, over his own body and mind." 68 Thus, it is not for the good of others that they be ruled for their own good, because their good will be determined tyrannically by society's likings and dislikings; but society's likings and dislikings will be restrained when they are confined to preventing harm as distinguished from doing good. Everyone rules himself, it would seem, and no one is allowed to rule others. The rest of On Liberty is devoted to maintaining this untenable distinction. For if one can govern oneself, why not others? And if one cannot govern others, how can he govern himself? In a well-known reservation, Mill remarks that of course he is speaking only of mature men and women in civilization, "a period long since reached in all nations with whom we need here concern ourselves." To govern oneself one must "have attained the capacity of being guided to [one's] own improvement by conviction or persuasion." 69 But Mill resists the implication that the capacity of being guided by conviction or persuasion includes the capacity of ruling others, unless they are barbarians, for whom despotism is a legitimate mode of government provided that it is exercised for their improvement. Yet if barbarians can be ruled so as to become civilized, they must have the capacity to be civilized by na-

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ture, without having to "attain" that capacity. And if those who are civilized may misuse their capacity to impose a majority tyranny, then having the capacity does not guarantee the attainment of civilization; and Mill cannot say that having the capacity of being guided by conviction or persuasion lifts one above the need to be ruled. Barbarians are not beyond the reach of improvement by government, but the civilized are not above it. Mill offers no reason why the civilized must not be ruled, if barbarians can be ruled, or why barbarians may be ruled if the civilized cannot be. In view of the evident benefit of government to barbarians in this respect, how can one confine the capacity for ruling to ruling oneself? Mill's answer is in the second chapter, "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion," where he attempts to show that to rule others is to assume one's own infallibility. His argument approaches this conclusion from the question of free speech. Mill says that "all silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility." 70 All silencing of discussion includes the silencing that any government enforces when ruling. Even a free government, encouraging discussion, must eventually pass a law or take a formal action after which it is possible only to complain and not to discuss or deliberate. When governing others, one can listen to them patiently but not endlessly and one cannot weigh their claim to speak truth with eagerness ever alert. Mill is interested in free speech not for the sake of "free expression" (though he would have permitted it) but rather for the sake of the truth; and he wishes to elevate free politics to the serious consideration of claims to truth in order to replace concern for claims to rule. Opinions may be true, false, or partly true. If an opinion is true, the society that suppresses it has wrongly assumed its own infallibility. If the opinion is false, then society should listen nonetheless, lest it become complacent. For it is not enough to refrain from suppressing opinion; society must listen to it and keep its mind open to criticism. Mill discusses Christianity under both possibilities as if it were the outstanding example of persecuting falsehood and of complacent truth as well. Mill's evident hostility to Christianity, together with his equally evident unwillingness to admit it, raises a doubt whether he is fully open to its claim to truth."

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In fact, the arguments of On Liberty have become something of a dead dogma themselves, promoting religious indifference at the expense of serious religion and atheism. Liberals today, relaxing in the assumption of their fallibility, have forgotten the objection against Jesus Freaks and other cultists that earlier liberals, not so sure of their fallibility, would have been ready to offer. 78 It is boring to listen to opinions claiming to be true if one assumes one's own incapacity to judge that claim. Assuming one's own incapacity to judge truth is today's dead, dogmatic version of assuming one's fallibility. Mill's argument about infallibility was intended to jog the complacent, especially the complacent middle class certain of the opinions with which it rules society.7S But is has actually established a new complacency among liberals, certain that their own self-proclaimed fallibility can have no ill effects. In contrast to Rawls and Nozick, Mill provides a use for the spiritedness in men and in particular a role for spirited men. They are to defend their opinions and, if possible, to be "in advance of society" in setting them forth. One must not merely hold opinions passively, limply, complacently; one must hold them against objections and with energy and courage. 74 In order to keep the spirited element in men from being used to rule other men, Mill engages it in argumentative self-defense, in self-definition against others or against "society," and in the development of one's own individuality. Returning to the third, in-between sort of opinion which is partly true, partly false, we see Mill in his realistic mood, recommending not quiet contemplation of the truth but "the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners." 75 The hostile banners are those of the party of order and the party of progress, each partly true but one-sided; and since most people are one-sided in their thinking, competition will open their closed minds. At least "there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides."76 Party government seems to be intended by Mill as a substitute for government, which in practice will always be the government of one party. One may wonder whether, in his society, the party of progress will not have a permanent advantage for being closer to his definition of utility, that is, "grounded on the permanent interests of man as

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a progressive being." 77 Surely the party of order is happier with the calm and custom that Mill would like to disrupt with party government. Moreover, one may ask the same question about infallibility as about ruling, for in ruling others one assumes his own infallibility. Then in ruling oneself, one also assumes his own infallibility. One might become self-righteous, impervious to argument, contemptuous of challenge — just the sort of person Mill wants to discourage. And if one may be infallible about himself, why not in regard to others?78 Mill does not give sufficient weight to the need to make assumptions, in effect an assumption of infallibility, in order to act or even to live.79 Getting up in the morning requires an assumption that life is worth living, and who can be sure of that? Mill would like men to keep their minds open and to defend unpopular opinions. But there is a tension, if not an incompatibility, between listening and defending. While propagating his views, the heretic cannot pause to doubt them; and while listening in judgment, the citizen cannot practice moral courage. 80 Although Mill's arguments for free speech give scope to the spirited element in men, they do not allow for the necessary hardening and closing of the mind when it is on the defensive. It was obvious to Mill that the danger in his day was lazy thinking rather than zealous intolerance, social tyranny over the soul rather than political oppression. 81 But he did not fully appreciate that to overcome laziness, he must tolerate something of the spirit of intolerance. How else but with a shield of certitude could one man of one opinion stand against all mankind minus one of a contrary opinion? 82 Mill attempts to provide this shield, or a substitute for it, in his teaching on individuality in the third chapter of On Liberty, which is the heart of the essay and the most considerable contrast with Rawls' theory of justice. For Mill goes to some lengths to justify and protect the individuality of individuals who in Rawls' theory have no greater definition than respect for one another's sense of justice. Individuality is "one of the elements of wellbeing" (what is well-being and what are its other elements?). It is shown when men act on their opinions, which they do "at their own risk and peril" as distinct from the immunity they deserve when expressing them. In things which do not primarily concern

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others, "individuality should assert itself." Individuality begins as the mere assertion of "individual spontaneity," but that is justified for what it can lead to, "the highest and most harmonious development of [a man's] powers to a complete and consistent whole" (Mill, quoting von Humboldt). 83 Individuality is justified by the possibility of the best individual. The best individual is of course taught by society; he gathers up previous human experience appreciatively, but critically. Then using all his faculties, and conforming his interpretation of experience to his own character, he chooses a plan of life by himself and for himself. A plan of life could evidently be chosen only once, we may note; thereafter one would have to hold to that choice with something less than an open mind. We may also note the optimism of choosing a plan of life by comparison to "the pursuit of happiness," surely a more reasonable goal in this turbulent century. For what was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's plan of life? But Mill, in contrast to Rawls, does not rest content with an average "plan of life"; nor does he suppose that one's character is nothing more than one's plan of life. 84 To choose a plan of life one must have lots of energy85 and one must use it in "pagan self-assertion" as well as in "Christian selfdenial." This is the "Greek ideal of self-development" in Mill's understanding. The best individual has public spirit, perhaps even ambition; but he does not seek to rule others. Rather he seeks to initiate "wise and noble things" by persuading others and serving them as a moral exemplar. 86 As a man of character he has a strong character, and since a strong character is very much one's own, the best individual is known by his originality in contrast to the mediocrity around him. Mill will not countenance " 'hero-worship,' which applauds the strong man of genius for forcibly seizing on the government of the world and making it do his bidding in spite of itself." But he insists that the strong man of genius have "freedom to point out the way." 87 (Mill forgets to say a way.) Because such an individual will be original, society will have to learn to tolerate him; and to tolerate originality, it must learn to tolerate mere nonconformity or eccentricity. Mill could have pointed out that the eccentric is a person of sharp tone and pungent opinions, at war with convention and in love with his

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own ways, a character of some perversity who would not be seen dead showing an open mind. 88 In the translation of thought to society some mixture of unreason is inevitable. After eccentricity in this translation comes diversity, for mere diversity of taste, in which nothing is desired strongly, is less worthy, Mill would hope less respectable, than eccentricity. But the justification for diversity in society, as for eccentricity, is drawn from the originality of genius. Mill is aware that diversity of taste is compatible with a dull uniformity of inclination, even with "the despotism of custom," 89 and it must be enlivened with examples of originality. At the same time, the best individual must be made to recognize that his well-being and his influence depend on a society that respects individuality as it can recognize individuality, in the modes of eccentricity and diversity. With Locke, and against Rawls, Mill did not attempt to do away with the distinction between the few and the many. 90 Instead, he combined their partly diverging tendencies and conceived a liberal society in which dull diversity would be enriched with the originality of the best individual — so as to dignify individual spontaneity—and in which individuality would be diluted in the diversity of "the general average of mankind" 91 —so that the best individual could not claim to rule others on the basis of his resplendent individuality. The latter point is developed in chapter 4 of On Liberty. Mill says: "If the claims of individuality are ever to be asserted, the time is now." 92 But how can those claims be asserted without making a ruler of the best individual, or on the contrary, without leaving him in selfish isolation? Mill approaches this question from the rightful limit of individual sovereignty, which is "the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested." He denies, however, that this is a doctrine of selfish indifference, as it might seem to be. Human beings should be concerned about the well-being of one another; indeed, "there is need of a great increase of disinterested exertion to promote the good of others." In such "disinterested benevolence" the accent is on disinterested, for it is very wrong to attribute "to all mankind a vested interest in each other's moral, intellectual, and even physical perfection, to be defined by each claimant according to his own standard." Individuality is for the

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good of mankind, but it is not for the good of mankind that each person be held accountable to his fellow creatures for his own self-development.93 One must ask, nonetheless, what does define individuality. If individuality is not definable by the good of mankind, because each claimant will define that good according to his own standard, then it will be defined in practice as mere diversity, as nothing in itself but merely different from what others do. 94 Mill characteristically speaks sometimes of the good and the true, sometimes of the spontaneous and the diverse. His combination of these contraries characteristically separates one's own interest from the good of mankind, while maintaining that the separation is for the good of mankind. The result has been to leave liberals divided between advancing their own self-development and acting for the good of mankind. They can work for their own interests and for the interests of others, but not for both together ruling on behalf of liberal principles. Thus they can defend their interests narrowly defined (for example, with indispensable tax deductions and with comfortable command posts in the war on poverty) and they can advance liberal causes so that progress has now gone much further than anyone ever thought possible—but they cannot defend liberalism as a political doctrine uniting their interest with the good of others. In our day liberals and liberal causes have prospered, but liberalism is in trouble.

Notes Index

Notes

2. Defending

Liberalism

1. Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance," in Robert Paul Wolff, ed., A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965). 3. Disguised

Liberalism

1. Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority (New York: Norton, 1969). 2. There are other, better ways of a slave: his patience, endurance, and capacity for enjoyment; but these do not appeal to our modern liberal youth. 4. Liberalism in Moderation 1. Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam Books, 1971); Robert A. Dahl, After the Revolution* (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970). 3. The Right of Revolution 1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 12-15, 19, 22, 110, 115, 196. 2. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), pp. 7, 10-25, 108-110. 3. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), chap. 4 and p. 158. See also Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. ix. 4. According to Federalist No. 1 (by Hamilton) it was left to the American people to decide whether men could establish good government by "reflection and choice" rather than by "accident and force." Perhaps this opportunity was reserved to them because, as Jefferson said, Americans had exercised their

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natural right of "departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has left them." A Summary View of the Rights of British America: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. J. P. Boyd, 19 vols, to date (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950-74), I, 121. 5. The causes set forth by the Declaration, Carl Becker says, are not those "a careful student of history would supply," The Declaration of Independence, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 6. 6. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, pp. 155-159. 7. See also Second Treatise, 242. Perhaps the author of "this Doctrine" (226), a prudent man like Ulysses (228), deserves to be counted as a revolutionary even if he avoids the title. 8. Second Treatise, 13, 16, 17, 19, 21, 87, 91. Note that Locke refers to the example of Jephtha making an appeal to Heaven in discussing the state of war (21), the beginning of political societies (109), the right of the conquered (176), and the dissolution of government (241). I am indebted to Nathan Tarcov here for generously sharing with me his knowledge of Locke. See also Martin Seliger, The Liberal Politics of John Locke (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968), chap. 10. 9. Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, January 30, 1787. 10. See Thomas Hutchinson's point-by-point refutation, Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia, ed. Malcolm Freiberg, Old South Pamphlets, no. 227 (Boston, 1958; first published in 1776). 11. Edmund Burke, Works, 8 vols. (Bohn Library edition, London, 1855), II, 292 (italics in the original). See Locke, Second Treatise, 223. 12. Edmund Burke, Works, II, 296. 13. Ibid., p. 301. 14. Ibid., p. 304. 15. Ibid., p. 293. 16. Ibid., p. 307. 17. Ibid., p. 308. 18. See the last paragraph of Thoughts on French Affairs, ibid., III, 392393. 19. I consider the revolutionary will of Maoism and similar movements within Marxism to be zeal in the furtherance of historical necessity, not choice. 20. Even causes involving gain are effectively matters of honor, because those seeking gain are comparing themselves with others; Aristotle, Politics 1302a, 32-35. 21. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), I, 414; see also II, 322-352. Michael Walzer, Obligations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), chap. 9: "Political Solidarity and Personal Honor." At the end of Walzer's excellent discussion it remains unclear whether in his opinion Marxist communism denies "personal honor" in principle or merely occasionally stifles it in practice. 6. Cucumber

Liberalism

1. Robert Dahl, After the Revolution? (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970).

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2. Or is the merit of that book somewhat reduced by Hofstadter's statement in 1965 that the "paranoid style" in America has been "the preferred style only of minority movements" (The Paranoid Style in American Politics, New York: Knopf, 1965, p. 7)? 3. Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 183. 4. For Rawls, see his discussion of majority rule in A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), pp. 224, 228-234, 354362, 450. Note that Rawls' concern is for justifying or legitimizing limitations on majority rule rather than for the reported dangers of unlimited majority rule (p. 229); and his stand-offish indulgence of Mill's argument for plural voting reflects his confidence in the persuadability of the majority rather than a fear of its tyranny (pp. 233-234). He is aware that an angry majority can violate liberty, but when he thinks he has shown that his theory cannot justify this, he is satisfied (pp. 356n, 450). Nozick comes close to a forthright concern for tyranny of the majority in chapter 10 of his book, on envy; see esp. pp. 229, 245-246, 250. But then he supposes that the ruling majority will always be the top (that is, richest) 51 percent, in which case the envy of the poorer would easily be defeated; see pp. 274-275. Nozick's reasoning there overlooks the fact that rich, poor, and middle class are lumpish aggregates, or parts of a whole. 5. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 22. For an anticipation of Rawls' original position see Montesquieu, Spirit of the Lauis, XV, 9; cf. I, 2. 6. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 13; cf. p. 522. 7. Ibid., sec. 4. 8. Ibid., p. 22. See Benjamin R. Barber, "Justifying Justice: Problems of Psychology, Measurement and Politics in Rawls," American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 664. 9. Brian Barry shows clearly in The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 92-96, that Rawls' original position is a state of obfuscation, not of enlightenment. Barry gains a hearing for his devastating criticisms of Rawls with his praise of Rawls (pp. ix-x); or should we say rather that he gains a hearing for this praise with his devastating criticisms? 10. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 84, 554, 560-566. The self is prior to the ends it chooses (p. 560), or, on the contrary, the self is realized in its activities (p. 565). According to the former, the interest of the self is merely in expressing itself, since the self as such is complete; according to the latter, the self is incomplete and self-interest is in completing the self. This contradiction results from the fact that Rawls wants the self to have an "inclusive" end but not a "dominant" end so that the self can choose without rejecting. But then there is no guide for choice (such as self-preservation or freedom) and self-interest becomes indeterminate. Rawls has men assume an "original position," but why should they unless it is their "state of nature" (see p. 513)? 11. As accords with Locke's usage, Two Treatises of Government, II, 6, 11, 128-129: Locke says "rights" or "duty" or "power" but not "interest." 12. The maximin principle says "avoid the worst." Rawls has been criticized for his conservative attitude to risk most effectively by political scientists who have an eye for the nature of political men. See Barber, "Justifying Justice," p.

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666; the common-sense game theorist John C. Harsanyi, "Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? A Critique of Rawls' Theory," American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 596, 605; Douglas Rae, "Maximin Justice and an Alternating Principle of General Advantage," American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), 636, 688, commenting indignantly on Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 154. See also David Lyons, "The Nature and Soundness of Contract and Coherence Arguments," in Reading Rawls, N. Daniels, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, c. 1975), p. 162, and R. M. Hare, "Rawls' Theory of Justice," Reading Rawls, p. 106. (See Aristotle, Politics 1284a 15-17, and note 39 above.) Consider Rawls' assurance that "heroism and self-sacrifice" are "supererogatory" to a theory of justice (p. 117). 13. Barry, The Liberal Theory of justice, p. 160, therefore wants to make Rawls' theory more egalitarian: take away that rent from the risk-taking few ("those able and willing to strive," Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 66) and give it to the security-loving many, whose propensity also costs them nothing. Perhaps a few determined guards will be needed to handle this risky transfer. 14. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, 98, 134, 139, 159, 171. 15. It is wrong and unfair to Locke to point out his promotion of liberal interests, as if exposing the bourgeois truth of liberal principles, without also taking note of the democratic truth of those principles. It may well be that Locke was involved in the replacement of "aristocracy" by the bourgeoisie, advancing the "industrious and rational" over the "quarrelsome and contentious"; but this was to be by an alliance with the democrats. Too many liberals have weakly acquiesced in the Marxist critique of Locke. See especially Two Treatises of Government, II, 41, 94. 16. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 98, actually offers two definitions of "least advantaged" which emphasize "least" over "advantaged." If he admitted that the least advantaged were nonetheless advantaged as human beings, he would have to infer that men should get what they deserve (see pp. 310-315). But he would rather deny that the least advantaged are more deserving than argue that the most advantaged are less deserving. 17. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 60, 250, 302. 18. The difficulty is aggravated by the fact that savings are needed to improve the prospects of the least advantaged in future generations; ibid., pp. 284-293. But Rawls' concern is for "meaningful work" (p. 290) rather than survival, although he admits that liberty may not be prior to wealth in a poor society (p. 542). On the "threshold" where liberty becomes prior, see Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, chaps. 7, 8. 19. Locke, Two Treatises, II, 13, 123. 20. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 311. 21. Ibid., pp. 73-74. 22. Ibid., pp. 15, 75. 23. Ibid., p. 108. 24. See Barber, "JustifyingJustice," pp. 673-674; and Allan Bloom, "Justice: John Rawls vs. The Tradition of Political Philosophy," American Political Science Review, 69 (1975), pp. 651-653.

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25. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 103-104. 26. If natural assets are the result of a lottery, one person has them as fairly as anyone; the situation resembles a democratic lottery of offices in which all are equal and some favored by chance. 27. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 440-442. 28. Ibid., pp. 471, 512, 530. 29. Ibid., p. 536; but see p. 518 for Rawls' rejection of the sovereignty of conscience. 30. Ibid., pp. 209n, 281, 524n. On p. 272 Rawls implies, contrary to this, that differences in earnings would be required for a free society regardless of the difference principle: individuals will insist on them; but see p. 179. See also Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 226n. 31. Rawls says that "those who have greater private means" should not be permitted "to control the course of public debate" (p. 225). But since natural endowments such as wisdom and eloquence are no less "private means" than wealth, Adlai Stevenson would have deserved his political influence as little as did Nixon's friend, the Spray Can King (see pp. 232-233). 32. In this they will respectfully differ from John Rawls, who includes soulful or selfish things like liberty and self-respect among primary goods. Rawls' "thin theory" of the good is designed to state the goods all persons will want while leaving them free to choose. It is too fat because self-respect may not be as "primary" as food, and it is too thin because it offers no guide to choice as distinct from whim. 33. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 326-327, 332; Bloom, "Justice," p. 655; Barry, The Liberal Theory of Justice, pp. 22-23. 34. "The special advantages a person receives . . . are to be governed by the difference principle" (pp. 506-507). Thus persons are to be governed by the difference principle; that is, they are to be governed by persons who are governed by the difference principle. 35. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 471. 36. Ibid., pp. 64, 103, 209, 222, 249-250, 257, 311, 335-336, 515, 582. Natural duties apply without our consent (pp. 114-117) because one would have agreed to them. But it could be said that one would have agreed because they are appropriate for equal individuals; and if individuals are equal, so are their opinions, however irrational; hence the actual consent of each is required. I am grateful to John Gibbons for clarifying his thinking on this point. Cf. Τ. M. Scanlon, "Rawls' Theory of Justice," in Reading Rawls, p. 203. 37. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 213; see Barry, The Liberal Theory ofJustice, p. 38. 38. In particular, the universities of a liberal society, which receive only an instrumental justification insofar as they advance "the long-term interests of the least advantaged" (p. 332). 39. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 183, 230. 40. Ibid., p. 195. Nozick imagines two speeches by the better endowed and the worse endowed (who, it turns out, are endowed with the power of speech), each demanding as much as possible in order to cooperate with the other; and

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he asks Rawls what the difference is. The difference might be that the worse endowed deserve more and the better endowed less with reference to a certain whole for which the worse endowed, being human, are sufficiently endowed. With this reference the two parties or their spokesmen might continue in a dialogue and possibly reach an understanding. But this is not Rawls' answer; it is Aristotle's. Aristotle, Politics 1280a 3-8, 1284b 8-13. 41. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 150, 174-182, 187, 225, 287290. 42. Ibid., pp. 152-160, 199-203. If justice is a historical principle, actual as opposed to would-be consent is a vital distinction for Nozick as opposed to Rawls. But then Nozick should have studied actual men and steered clear of the rational actor and amusing hypothetical examples (see p. 200). In fact his book contains no history and many patterns. 43. Locke, Two Treatises, II, 25, 26, 33, 99, 101, 103 (end), 107, 110, 112, 115, 162, 175, 176, 186, 211; Hobbes, Leviathan, "Review and Conclusion." 44. "Any set of holdings that emerges from a legitimate process . . . is just." Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 207; cf. p. 225. See Machiavelli, Discourses on Ltvy, I 37 (end). 45. Perhaps the Indians are owed little or nothing for their "untransformed raw materials"; Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 177. Locke, whose opinion on Indians differed from that of the rational actor Marlon Brando, considered that land could become private property only if it was improved so as to remove man "from the penury of his Condition" ( T w o Treatises, II, 26, 30, 32, 45). Nozick's discussion of "justice in acquisition" is lacking both in moral indignation and in recognition of necessity. See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, J. P. Mayer ed. (New York, 1969), vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 10, p. 339. 46. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 18, 22. 47. Locke, Two Treatises, II, 32, 138, 193. 48. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 33. 49. Not Nozick; because of his extravagant fear (or extravagant disgust) of cannibalism, he declares himself a vegetarian; ibid., p. 38. 50. Ibid., p. 34. 51. Rawls, A Theory ofJustice, pp. 504-505. 52. Rawls attempts to lower himself with the opinion that moral personality is a potentiality "ordinarily realized in due course" (p. 505), and Nozick attempts to raise himself with the suggestion that rationality is not morally arbitrary (Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 227). 53. Plato, Republic, 375a-e, 411a-e, 439e-441c, 553c-e, Statesman, 262a; see Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 239, 239-240n, 297, 325. 54. Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia, p. 306; cf. p. 272. 55. J. S. Mill, On Liberty, David Spitz, ed. (New York, 1975), p. 77. Mill uses the word "just" only seven times, mostly in regard to punishment, twice in limiting the rule of society, never in justifying it. 56. Ibid., pp. 46-50. Party is not a salient topic in either Rawls or Nozick as

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123

they argue against the misguided Utilitarian party among professors of philosophy. 57. Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism (New York: Knopf, 1974), introduction and chap. 12. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, (New York: Dutton, 1901), chap. 5, where justice, for having its source in conformity to law and for giving rise to claims on others, is contrasted to "beneficence" (p. 75). Mill says that justice is "a class of moral rules . . . of more absolute obligation than any other rules for the guidance of life" (pp. 88-89). 58. Mill perhaps thought the philosophical question confusing to civil liberty because the philosophical doctrine of necessity, while truer than that of free will, is in practice misinterpreted to yield fatalism; and the doctrine of free will, though less solid, has "fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of selfculture." Mill believes that the necessitarian doctrine is not truly fatalist, for human actions are never "ruled by any one motive with . . . absolute sway" and so not irresistibly determined. Within men as among them, lack of rule is the safeguard of liberty. Mill, A System of Logic, 2 vols. (London, 1875), II, 425, 429. Tocqueville praises Mill's distinction between necessity and fatalism, Letter to Mill, Oct. 27, 1843, Oeuvres complites, J. P. Mayer ed., 13 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), VI, 345. See note 64 below. See also An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (New York, 1889), p. 591n, where Mill ridicules the notion that mankind would come to a woeful condition if the belief in "so-called Necessity" became general. 59. Mill, On Liberty, p. 3. 60. Ibid., p. 5; The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849-1873, Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley eds., vols. XIV-XVII of Collected Works (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1972), II, Letter 340; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 19. 61. Thomas Jefferson averred that "difference of opinion is advantageous in religion," Notes on the State of Virginia, W. Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955), p. 160; Mill says that it is advantageous in everything. But see the reservation in favor of religion over agnosticism in Later Letters, II, Letter 404; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 52. 62. Mill, On Liberty, pp. 10-11. 63. Ibid., p. 15; Richard B. Friedman, "A New Exploration of Mill's Essay On Liberty," Political Studies, 14 (1965), 299. 64. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, I, 1, 3; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. II, pt. 1, chaps. 7, 20. 65. Mill, On Liberty, pp. 45-46. 66. Ibid., p. 4; James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, R . J . White, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 58-66. 67. In chapter 4 Mill distinguishes between self-regarding and other-regarding actions. The much-discussed difficulties of this distinction do not destroy it; C. L. Ten, "Mill on Self-Regarding Actions," in Spitz, ed., On Liberty, p. 240; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, p. 58. Cf. the distinction between

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Notes to Pages

108-113

immanent and transient actions in Marsilius of Padua, Defender of the Peace, 1.5.4, II.8.3. 68. Mill, On Liberty, p. 11. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., p. 18. 71. Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1963), p. xiii; Mill, Later Letters, Letter 404; Stephen, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, p. 58. 72. See Mill on the Mormons, On Liberty, p. 86; Hilail Gildin, "Mill's On Liberty," i n j . Cropsey, ed., Ancients and Moderns (New York: Basic Books, 1964), p. 289. 73. Mill, On Liberty, pp. 31, 81; Clark W. Bouton, "John Stuart Mill: On Liberty and History," Western Political (Quarterly, 18 (1965), 572. Cf. Graeme Duncan, Marx and Mill: Two Views of Social Conflict and Social Harmony (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1973), pp. 217, 223 and chap. 8. 74. Mill, On Liberty, p. 35. On Liberty is loaded with terms of contention, beginning with the "one very simple principle," which it is Mill's object to "assert." 75. Ibid., p. 46. 76. Ibid., p. 50. 77. Ibid., pp. 12, 66. 78. Assuming infallibility is not "feeling sure of a doctrine" but undertaking to decide for others; ibid., p. 24. This unclear distinction shows that Mill's argument against assuming infallibility is directed against ruling. 79. Ibid., pp. 19-21, 39-40. 80. Ibid., p. 32. 81. Ibid., p. 6. 82. Ibid., p. 18. 83. Ibid., pp. 53-54. 84. Ibid., p. 58; Rawls, A Theory offustice, pp. 408, 418, 432. 85. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (New York, 1874), pp. 68-75; Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism, pp. 62-63. 86. Mill, On Liberty, p. 63. In the epigraph to On Liberty, Mill quotes Humboldt on "the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity." Not the best or the highest development but the "richest diversity": Such riches are the different human excellences as separated in different individuals, not found together in one individual, the philosopher. Yet to speak of "riches" one must assume that the diverse excellences add up. 87. Mill, On Liberty, p. 63. 88. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 84. John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of fohn Stuart Mill (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 206. 89. Mill, On Liberty, p. 66. 90. " . . . that miscellaneous collection of a few wise and many foolish individuals, called the public," ibid., p. 21; see pp. 57-58, 62, 69. Friedman, "A New Exploration," pp. 301-304.

Notes to Pages 113-114

125

91. Ibid., p. 65. 92. Ibid., p. 69. 93. Ibid., pp. 71, 84, 73. 94. Joseph Hamburger, "Mill and Tocqueville on Liberty," in James and John Stuart Mill, Papers of the Centenary Conference, John M. Robson and M. Laine, eds. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1976), p. 123.

Index

Acquisition, 43-44, 60, 93; justice in, 101103. See also Property Administration, 29, 32-33, 40-42, 50 Alliance, 12, 87. See also Faction; Party Ambition, 14, 70, 112; in liberal democracy, 1, 2, 9, 10, 12; a n d property, 10, 23, 24; as self-love, 22-23; political, 23, 58; and private appetite, 67-68 American Civil Liberties Union, 17, 20 Anger, 21, 24, 57, 60-61. Seealso Spirit Appetite, 24-25, 67-68 Aristocracy, 6, 65, 69; and mixed regime, 8; and democracy, 14, 15, 37-38 Aristotle, 15, 26, 33, 74, 120nl2, 122n40; on mixed regime, 2, 4-8, 9, 11; on revolution, 87 Authority, 62-65 Bailyn, Bernard, 73, 77 Barbarians, 108-109 Benevolence, disinterested, 105, 113 Body, 3, 7, 9, 49, 83-84, 85; and virtue, 8 47-48, 61; and need, 11, 22, 92, 98-99; and self, 58, 59-61 Bolsheviks, 82 Brando, Marlon, 122n45 Brasidas, 8 Burke, E d m u n d , 78, 82-84, 86, 102 Busing, 35-37, 39, 45 Businessmen, 13, 14, 93. Seealso Liberals; Property; Rich Capitalism, 31, 32 Chance, 56 Choice, 7, 8, 22, 31, 38, 46, 57, 63, 69-70,

78, 81-82, 84-85, 102-103, 105, 112; and rights, 74, 77, 79, 103; of governm e n t , 76, 80, 84; a n d necessity, 86 Christianity, 109. Seealso Priests; Religion Claim, 3, 5, 95, 103 Clerics, 20 Coalition, 1, 23. Seealso Faction; Party Coercion, 34, 41, 55, 63 Compassion, 97 Competence, 64-66, 69-70 C o n f r o n t a t i o n , 48-49, 56 Conscience, 100, 106 Consent, 45, 90-91, 100; and persuasion, 23; a n d radicalism, 24; a n d representation, 33; a n d coercion, 41; gove r n m e n t resting on, 45-46, 75, 76, 82, 92; right of, 45, 75-76; in Kant, 47-48; and realism, 47; and liberty, 50; and Communist society, 85; and right to acquire, 103 Conservatism, 29, 31, 40, 55; and revolution, 72, 74; of the people, 88; and social contract, 102 Conspiracy, 29, 77, 80 Courage, 110, 111 Creativity, 54, 55 Dahl, Robert, 32, 33, 53, 61-71, 89 Declaration of Independence, 64, 72-82, 83, 86-88 Deliberation, 7, 76 Democrats, 2, 11; in liberal democracy, 1, 9, 12, 13; and liberals, 4, 89, 90, 94, 99 Democracy, 41, 62; liberal, 1-15; extreme, 15; representative, 65-66, 68-70; partici-

Index

128 patory, 89 Dignity, 1, 3, 4, 9, 60 Duty, 13, 77, 93 Eccentricity, 112-113 Economy, criterion of, 66-67, 70 Education, 35-36, 96 Elite, 29, 38 Equality, 9, 13, 34, 63-64, 93, 98, 103; and body, 7, 9; and mixed regime, 8, 65; natural, 3 7 , 3 9 - 4 0 , 4 1 , 4 4 Faction, 17-19, 22, 32. See also Interest groups; Party Federalist, 13, 17-19, 68, 117n4. See also Madison, James Form, 4, 83-84 Formalism, 34, 39. See also Law Founding, 76, 83, 84, 85 Fraud, 4 4 - 4 6 , 4 9 Freedom, 7, 8, 9, 31, 38, 40, 45, 54, 85, 104; of speech, 10-12, 23-25, 64, 93, 109, 111; of expression, 25, 64, 109; and necessity, 60, 85; and reason, 64, 84 Galileo, 64-65 George, Henry, 37 Hamilton, Alexander, 117n4 Henry, Patrick, 12 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, 105 Hobbes, Thomas, 37, 40, 44-46, 47, 90, 102 Hofstadter, Richard, 89 Honor, 67, 81, 87-88 Hume, David, 102 Idealism, 34, 43, 46-47; philosophic, 47-50, 84-85. See also Kant, Immanuel Ignorance, 53, 91-92, 97 Independence, 72, 74, 75 Indians, 102, 122n45 Individuality, 105-106, 110-114 Inequality, 9, 13-14, 39, 63, 69, 94, 98 Infallibility, 109-111 Inheritance, 83-84 Institutions, 23-24, 70-71, 104 Intellectuals, 12-14, 23, 38, 42, 93, 100 Intention, 9, 34, 44, 78-79, 81, 90; of legislator, 6-8

Interest groups, 13, 17, 29, 31, 36, 39, 40, 50 Interference, with individual, 108 Jacobins, 81 Jefferson, 15, 68, 69-70, 76, 81, 117n4, 123n61 Johnson, Lyndon, 16, 30 Judgment: as activity of soul, 7; and choice, 77; of impending necessity, 80 Justice, 45, 73, 90, 91, 104-105; and selfinterest, 46; and moderation, 53; and honor, 81; and revolution, 81, 87; in acquisition, 101-103 Kant, Immanuel, 47-50, 97, 100 Kennedy, John F., 30 Law, 33, 41; and morality, 38-39 Least advantaged, 94-95 Legitimacy, 45, 48 Liberals; and ambition, 1-2, 4; and freedom, 9; two kinds of, 10-12; and liberal democracy, 13-14, 114; and revolution, 72; as beneficiaries of liberty, 93 Liberty, 18, 38, 98; and rights, 8, 17; and human dignity, 9; as consent,50; beneficiaries of, 93; Mill's concern with 104-105 Lincoln, Abraham, 68, 97 Locke, John, 10, 15, 100, 102, 120nl5; and liberal democracy, 13, 37; and toleration, 20; and executive power, 4243; on state of nature, 75, 90, 92, 96, 98; on revolution,78-80, 86, 118n7; on few and many, 94, 113; on selfishness, 96-97; on property, 102, 103 Lowi, Theodore, 28-43, 45, 49, 50 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 43-44, 122n44; and fraud, 45-46; and one's own, 49; and oppression, 50 Madison, James, 81; on faction, 17-23, 32 Maoism, 118nl9 Marcuse, Herbert, 19-20 Marsilius of Padua, 123n67 Marx, Karl: on intellectuals, 12; and self-expression, 27 Marxism, 14, 95, 98; and choice, 74; and right of revolution, 84-86, 87, 118n9

Index

129

M i c h e l a n g e l o , 98-99

Priests, 9, 11, 40, 92

M i d d l e class, 36, 55, 110; a n d m i x e d

Progress, 110, 114

regime, 6 Mill, J o h n S t u a r t , 90, 104-114 Milton, J o h n , 20 Mixed r e g i m e , 1-15

P r o p e r t y ; right to, 10-11, 93; a n d f a c t i o n ,

M o d e r a t i o n , 51, 57, 61, 63, 67, 97; a n d virtue, 52-53, 61, 70-71 M o n t e s q u i e u , 107, 119n5 Morality, 31, 34, 49; a n d law, 38-39; a n d consent, 46; K a n t o n , 47-48

18-19; a n d passions, 22-24, 49 P r u d e n c e : idealism a n d , 48, 49; a n d revolution, 77, 80, 88 R a d i c a l i s m , 14, 19-20, 24, 28, 55 R a w l s . J o h n , 90-101; a n d right of revolution, 73; on equality, 103-104; a n d Mill, 110, 111, 112, 113 Realism: liberalism a n d , 34, 43, 45, 46-47;

N a t i o n a l i s m , 75-76 N a t u r e , 74, 86; h u m a n d o m i n a t i o n of, 5960; a n d choice, 86, 107; state of, 90, 92, 96 Necessity, 9, 43, 73, 102; a n d revolution, 74-86; a n d h o n o r , 87-88; philosophic d o c t r i n e of, 105, 107, 123n58 Negroes, 35, 36, 39 New Deal, 29, 30, 31, 32, 55, 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 48, 50 N i x o n , R i c h a r d , 1, 16, 26, 34, 67, 121n31 Nozick, R o b e r t , 73, 90, 101-104, 110 Obscenity, 25-26 O l i g a r c h y , 2, 5, 6, 7, 11 O p i n i o n , 18, 21, 106-107, 109 Oppression, 46, 74, 112; g o v e r n m e n t as, 44, 50; a n d revolution, 79-80 O p t i m i s m , 86-87, 112 O r d e r , 6-7; in B u r k e , 84; p a r t y of 110-111 Originality, 112-113

a n d idealism, 47-48, 49; of Mill, 110 Reason, 23, 24, 84; a n d a n g e r , 24, 59; a n d a u t h o r i t y , 64; a n d m o d e r a t i o n , 71 Reich, Charles, 55-61, 70, 71 Religion, 11, 18, 20. See also Priests R e p r e s e n t a t i o n , 65-70; a n d a d m i n istration, 40-42; in H o b b e s , 45; a n d consent, 46; a n d revolution, 79, 8 0 - 8 1 Responsibility, 81, 90 Revolution, 72-88; nonviolent, 53, 57, 58, 60-61

Rich, 3, 38; in m i x e d r e g i m e , 4, 10. See also Businessmen; P r o p e r t y Rights, 85, 86, 90, 91, 105; of self-preservation, 3, 44, 45; in liberal d e m o c r a c y , 10, 13, 92; of consent, 45-46, 75-76; of revolution, 72-88; of n a t i o n a l s e l f - d e t e r m i n a t i o n , 74-75; to life, liberty, p u r s u i t of happiness, 75, 81-82, 92; to i n d e p e n d e n c e , 75, 82; a n d duty, 77, 93; equality of, 94, 103. See also Freed o m of speech Rousseau, J e a n - J a c q u e s , 38, 62, 68-69

Party; in liberal d e m o c r a c y , 9, 12, 17-18, 19; D a h l o n , 68; Mill o n , 105, 111 Persuasion, 23, 107, 108-109, 112, 119n4 Philosopher, 5, 12, 53. See also Political philosophy P l a n n i n g , 32-33 Plato, 57, 62, 96, 104 Political philosophy, 43, 62, 73, 75 Political science, 5, 30-31, 32, 33, 43, 53; a n d political philosophy, 62; a n d institutions, 70-71; of Aristotle, 74 Politicians, 12, 27 Polyarchy, see D e m o c r a c y , representative P o o r , 3, 30, 38; in m i x e d r e g i m e , 4 , 7 , 1 0 , 11. See also Least a d v a n t a g e d

Security, 1, 33, 45, 92, 94; a n d dignity, 4 Self: l i b e r a t i o n of, 20, 21, 24, 55-56; f e m i n i n e , 25; a n d consciousness, 54; a n d power, 57; a n d values, 63-64; R a w l s o n , 92,119nl0 Self-control, 54 Self-expression, 24, 25, 26 Self-interest, 22, 23, 46; a n d reason, 21, 65; a n d revolutionary leadership, 81; in Rawls, 91-93, 1 1 9 n l 0 ; of liberals, 114 Selfishness, 7, 96-97 Self-love, 22, 23, 24, 27 Self-preservation, 78, 80 S h a m e , 60-61

Index

130 Skinner, Β. F., 4 Smith, Adam, 102-103 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 87, 112 Soul, 57, 92; virtue and, 5, 8, 61; of legislator, 6-7; and liberalism, 9-10; of liberalism, 29, 40; social tyranny over, 101,106 Sovereignty, 39-40, 59, 113 Spirit, 17, 57, 104, 111; and claim to freedom, 7; turbulent, 79-80; public, 67, 70, 112; in Mill, 110-111 Spray Can King, 121n31 Suburbs, 34-37, 38, 39, 45 Thymos, 57, 58, 104. See also Spirit Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14, 106, 107, 122n45, 123n58 Toleration, 19, 106; and inequality, 14, 69; of intolerance, 16, 111; repressive,

19-21; of originality, 112 Truman, David, 32 Truman, Harry, 67 Tyranny: of soul, 7; and right of revolution, 77, 79, 80; of the majority, 50, 8991, 99, 104-109, 119n4; social, 106, 111 Utilitarianism, 90-91, 94, 99, 104 Violence, 56-57 Virtue: and mixed regime, 4-5, 71, 95, 96; intellectual, 5 , 9 ; moral, 8, 10 Voltaire, 17, 20 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 112 Wealth, 2, 3, 8. See also Property; Rich Wisdom, 52-53, 58 Women, liberation of, 25-26