Professor Steven Smith:
Anyway, today, the last class,
I had on the syllabus, I think it was called
globalization and political theory or something to that
effect and I guess since writing that I've changed the theme of
this final lecture a bit and I want to talk about defending
politics or in defense of politics.
And I'll try to explain what I mean by that as kind of a wrap
up and exhortation for this last class.
In 1962, an English political scientist and journalist by the
name of Bernard Crick wrote a short and very polemical and
influential little book called In Defense of Politics,
and by politics Crick meant a distinctive type of human
activity where conflicts of interests among groups are
adjudicated by discussion, persuasion and debate rather
than by force or by fraud. A political society,
as Crick understood it, is one where individuals and
groups played by certain agreed upon rules that will determine
how conflicts of interests are to be decided.
Crick called this little book--very lively and still
definitely worth reading--he called his book In Defense of
Politics because he regarded the proper understanding of
politics as being distorted by certain currents of thought and
practice in his own day among which were for example the
highly ideological style of politics found for example in
the Soviet Union and its client state,
the kinds of nationalist politics emerging in the
developing world, and even in some aspects of the
conservative politics of contemporary Britain of his time
where that meant a kind of unreflective deference to
customs and tradition. I think today it's important to
try to reprise Crick's plea for a defense of politics although
in a slightly different way. Politics again,
as Crick understood it, is something that takes place
within a certain territorially defined unit called a "state."
This may seem almost too obvious to bear repeating.
For centuries what is called the res publica has been
regarded as the proper locus of the citizens' loyalty.
It was thought to be the task of political philosophy or
political science in its original sense to teach or to
give reasons for the love of one's own country.
Classical political philosophy regarded patriotism as an
ennobling sentiment. Consider just a few of the
following passages that I asked Justin to put on the board from
Cicero, from Burke, from Machiavelli,
from Rousseau, and from Lincoln,
writers from the ancient and the modern world from many
different countries and times. All make important expressions,
some more extreme than others like Machiavelli's--what else
would one expect from an extremist like Machiavelli's--to
simpler and more dignified statements like that of Burke or
Lincoln but anyway, all expressing the view that
politics has something to do with providing reasons for the
love of country. Today, however,
the idea of patriotism, at least among philosophers,
seems to have fallen upon hard times.
This isn't to say that patriotism, as a phenomenon of
political life, is likely to disappear.
To the contrary. Go drive 20 miles or so outside
of any urban area and one is likely to see flags being waved,
bumper stickers on cars proclaiming the driver's love of
country, country music stations playing music that tells us to
support our troops and keep driving our SUVs,
all signs of American patriotism to be sure.
But the issue seems quite different in universities and in
educated circles, you might say,
where patriotism has come to appear to be a morally
questionable phenomenon. Tell someone at any Ivy League
university that you are interested in patriotism and you
will be treated as if you have just expressed a kind of
interest in child pornography. Raise the issue and one is
likely to hear very quickly repeated Samuel Johnson's famous
barb that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel or you
might even hear, if the person's read a little
bit more, E.M. Forster's famous statement that
if he had to choose whether to betray his friend or his country
that he, Forster, wished he had the
courage to betray his country. Forster, the famous English
novelist, author of Howards End and other important
books, Forster presents the choice
between friendship over country, of private over public goods,
as a kind of tragic and even noble decision that one has to
make. But Forster,
in some respect, has given us,
I would suggest, a false dilemma.
Loyalty is a moral habit just as betrayal is a moral vice.
People who practice one are less likely to indulge in the
other. Consider the following example.
A few years after Forster made his statement at Cambridge,
I believe, three young Cambridge undergraduates in the
1930s by the names of Kim Philby,
Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess,
I don't know if those are names that are familiar to people here
any longer but they were very, very famous names at one point,
they chose to betray their own country.
That is to say they acted for many years as Soviet agents and
for years passed on vital secrets,
English secrets, to Moscow, as they all ascended
up the ladder of British intelligence services until they
were finally exposed in the 1950s.
And it was not long after they were exposed and they had all
fled to Moscow that they began to betray one another.
Loyalty it seems, like betrayal,
is not a bus that one can simply get off at will.
Rather, people who betray others in one area of life are
likely to do so as well in others.
So Forster has given us a false choice between choosing
friendship over country or country over friendship and as
with most matters, I think it probably makes
greater sense to examine the problem through the lenses of
Aristotle who tells us everything we need to know about
most questions. In the Nicomachean
Ethic, Aristotle taught us that all virtues,
that is to say, all excellences of mind and
heart, are best understood as a mean along a continuum of excess
and deficiency. It is a matter of finding a
balance, the proper balance, between extremes.
So it might be useful to regard patriotism in this light.
If patriotism is a virtue, and I ask the question "if it
is," it would be important to see it as a midpoint between two
contending extremes, two contending vices.
What are these vices, you might say,
that obscure from us the meaning of--the proper meaning
of the political today? On one side,
you could say, the excess of patriotism is a
kind of nationalistic zeal that holds absolute attachment to
one's country and one's way of life as unconditionally good.
This is the kind of loyalty expressed in sentiments like,
"My country right or wrong," but was given powerful
expression, perhaps the most powerful expression,
in a short book- another short book in this case by a German
legal philosopher of the early twentieth century named Carl
Schmitt. Carl Schmitt wrote a short book
called The Concept of the Political in 1921 and here
Schmitt drew extensively on Hobbes but rather to defend a
view of the political, but rather than tying the state
of war, Hobbes' state of war, to a pre-political state of
nature, Schmitt saw war and also which
includes the preparation for war, as the inescapable
condition of human life, of political life.
Man, he believed, is the dangerous animal because
we can kill one another and individuals,
and more importantly groups of individuals, stand to one
another in a virtually continual state of conflict and war.
Schmitt believed Hobbes was right in many crucial respects
but where he fell down was in believing that the social
contract could create a sovereign state that would put
an end to war. Quite the contrary, he thought.
The inescapable political fact is therefore the distinction
between what he called friend and enemy,
those who are with us and those who are against us.
To misunderstand that distinction, distinction that
goes all the way back to Polemarchus' view in the
Republic, where he talks about justice
being doing good to friends and harm to enemies but might
obviously go on much deeper or further than that.
For Schmitt, that distinction was central to
what he called the political. The political,
he says, and he uses that word as a noun, we tend to think of
political largely in its adjectival form,
but in Germany you can often use it as a noun as well.
The political, he wrote, is the most intense
and extreme antagonism, becomes that much more
political the closer it approaches to the extreme point,
that of the friend, enemy grouping,
he says. Friend and enemy are the
inescapable categories through which we experience what he
calls the political. Life consists of that
fundamental distinction. Athens and Sparta,
Red Sox and Yankees, Harvard and Yale--These are
fundamental groupings, enemies, friends and enemies.
All humanitarian appeals, he believed,
appeals to the concept of human rights,
to free trade or so on, all of these are,
as it were, attempts to avoid the fundamental fact of conflict
and the need for a politics of group solidarity.
The politics of the future, he hoped, would be determined
by those who have the courage to recognize this fundamental
distinction and to act upon it. At the other end,
however, of the continuum of excess and deficiency,
the defect, you might say,
of patriotism comes to light as a kind of today what we might
call transpolitical cosmopolitanism.
Present day cosmopolitanism is, to a very large degree,
a product of another German philosopher named Immanuel Kant
writing at the end of the eighteenth century.
Kant stressed, on the other hand,
that our moral duties and obligations respect no national
or political or other kinds of parochial boundaries,
whatever boundaries such as race, class, ethnicity,
political loyalty, and the like.
On this view, on Kant's view,
that is, we owe no greater moral obligations to fellow
citizens than to any other human beings on the face of the
planet. Citizenship--if I can use
language that is not exactly Kant's own, but is largely sort
of identified with a kind of Kantian move in
philosophy--citizenship is simply an arbitrary fact
conferred on individuals through the accident of birth.
But since birthright citizenship is an artifact of
what you might call a pure sort of genetic lottery,
there are no moral or special obligations attached to it.
The Kantian emphasis on universality,
that is to say that there is a moral law that can be
universalized and held to be true for all human beings,
stressed for Kant that we are all parts of what he called a
kingdom of ends, a universal kingdom of ends
where every individual is due equal moral value and respect
because simply of their humanity alone.
That idea of a cosmopolitan ethic of humanity,
Kant believed, could only be realized in a
republican form of government, today what we might call a
democracy, or, to speak more precisely,
what Kant believed it could only hold true in a
confederation of republics overseen or ruled by
international law. Kant was perhaps,
I don't know if he was the first, but he gave the first,
he gave the most powerful early expression to the idea of a
league of nations, a league of nations that would
put an end to war altogether between states for the sake of
achieving what he called perpetual peace,
the title of a famous essay of his.
Hobbes and Locke, he believed,
were wrong in attributing sovereignty, absolute
sovereignty, to the individual nation state.
For Kant, the state, the individual state,
is merely a kind of developmental stage along the
path to a world republic, a world republic of states
organized around the idea of international law and peace.
Only in, he believed, a league of republics would
peace among the nations finally be realized and would
individuals be able to treat one another as ends rather than
means. If you want just some
indication of how influential Kant's view has been,
you can think that his idea of an international league of
nations came to fruition over a century after his life in
Woodrow Wilson's famous 14 Points issued after the
first world war and elaborated more fully in the United
Nations Declaration of Human Rights of 1948,
all of which bear the unmistakable imprint of Immanuel
Kant. Now, neither of these views,
let me argue, either of these views,
Schmitt's or Kant's, really captures the nature of
the political. Let me start adequately so at
least. Let me start with--return to
Schmitt again. Schmitt's view is rooted,
I believe, in a very important human truth, namely,
the world is a dangerous, in fact, very dangerous place,
like in many ways Hobbes or Machiavelli,
Schmitt takes the extreme situation, that is to say,
the situation of war and mobilization for war,
and turns it into the norm, turns it into the normal
situation. An extreme situation is one
where the very survival, in fact, the very independence
of a society, is at stake and for Schmitt
every situation is potentially a life and death struggle against
a kind of existential enemy where one must decide to choose
up sides between friends and enemy.
Politics, for him, is a kind of endless struggle
for power guided by national self-interest alone.
And yet, it would seem to me, a politics of unremitting war
and preparation for war would be, have to be,
self-defeating even in Schmitt's own terms.
For example, why should the struggle between
friend and enemy be exclusively what we might call an interstate
rivalry? Wouldn't competition between
individuals and groups just as easily become a feature of
domestic politics as well? Why is war something that takes
place exclusively between states rather than within them,
as the logic of bitter rivalry and competition and friend and
enemy cuts all the way down, so to speak?
The logic of Schmitt's argument, at least as I
understand it, points not only to war between
states but ongoing civil war and civil conflicts within states,
between rival groups expressing their own desire for power and
their own loyalty to their individual groups.
The result of this logic of conflict, it seems to me,
would be the negation of politics,
that is to say the destruction of the sovereign state as the
locus of political power. Why should, again,
the choice of friend and enemy be a choice between states
rather than individuals. But let me then turn to Kant's
view, cosmopolitanism, because if the effect of
Schmitt's distinction between friend and enemy is to make
politics identical with war, the effect of Kantian
cosmopolitanism is to confuse politics with morality.
Kant and his present day followers wish to transcend the
sovereign state and replace it with known international rules
of justice. If Schmitt believed that man is
the dangerous animal, Kant believed man is simply the
rule following animal. But Kant's desire,
it seems to me, to transcend the state with a
kind of international forum, is both naive and
anti-political. If Hobbes was right when he
said that covenants without the sword are but words,
the question is who will enforce these international
norms of justice? Kant's conception of a kind of
global justice is to wish a world without states,
a world without boundaries, a world, in short,
without politics. International bodies like the
United Nations have been notoriously ineffective in
curbing or restraining the aggressive behavior of states
and international courts of justice like that in the Hague
have been highly selective in what they choose to condemn.
It would seem that reliance on such bodies would have the
further disadvantage of uprooting people from their
traditions, from their local arrangements
that most people find as a source of reverence or awe.
There seems to be little room for reverence for the sacred,
in the cosmopolitan ideal. The logic of this view,
the logic of Kant's view for perpetual peace,
necessarily leads to a world state, world government.
Even Kant admitted that a world state would be what he called a
soulless despotism. He was opposed to the idea of a
world state, but the logic of his argument leads him
inescapably in that view, in that vein.
The idea underlying perpetual peace is that human life as
such, human life independent that is of the kind of life one
leads, is an absolute good. Such an idea,
I think, can only lead in the long run to moral decay,
that is to say, to a kind of inability or
unwillingness to dedicate one's life to ideals,
to the relatively few things that give life wholeness and
meaning. The cosmopolitan state would
be--the world state would be the home of what Nietzsche called
the last man, a world where nothing really
matters, where there is nothing really of importance left to do,
a world of entertainments, a world of fun,
a world void of moral seriousness.
So these two extremes, nationalism and
cosmopolitanism, are today the two doctrines or
tendencies that tend to obscure the true nature of the
political. Each of these extremes contains
at best a part of the truth, a partial truth.
The nationalist is surely correct in some respect,
to see that politics is always a matter of the particular,
particular states, particular nations,
particular peoples and traditions.
For the nationalist, the particular stands for
something infinitely higher and more noble than the cosmopolitan
or the universal. We enter the world as members
of a particular family, in a particular neighborhood,
in a particular state, in a particular part of the
country and so on. We are a composite of
particularities and these attachments, these
particularities, are not something extraneous or
accidental to our identities. They are what make us who we
are. The demand that we give up our
particular identities and assume a kind of cosmopolitan point of
view would be the same thing to ask us,
at least those who are native English speakers,
to give up speaking English and adopt Esperanto,
the artificial false language. I would ask,
who was the Shakespeare or Milton of Esperanto?
In other words, everything great derives from
something rooted and particular. This is the morality of what
you might call common ties. But there is also some truth on
the cosmopolitan side, on the other hand.
Are we simply determined or condemned by the accident of
birth to live by the traditions of the particular nation in
which we happen to have been born?
Doesn't this deny what seems to be highest in us,
that is to say our capacity for choice,
to detach ourselves from our surroundings,
to determine for ourselves how we will live and who we will be?
This idea of choice, of being able to choose for
oneself, is, I think, at the bottom of our experience
of human dignity. We experience our moral worth
as human beings through our ability to choose how we will
live, with whom to live, and under what conditions.
This kind of ideal, this cosmopolitan ethic,
has the virtue of allowing us to stand outside of our
particular situation and view ourselves from,
what you might call, the standpoint of the
disinterested spectator, from a higher or more general
point of view. And clearly,
such a morality gives us a kind of critical distance or vantage
point on how we can judge ourselves and our society.
From this point of view, our local and particular
attachment to family, friends, fellow citizens,
again carries no overwhelming moral weight.
We must view them as we would view anyone or anything else,
disinterestedly, objectively,
and this one might call the morality of cosmopolitanism.
Each of these ethics, the ethic of communal ties,
the ethic of cosmopolitan individualism,
express, again, an important piece of the truth
of politics although neither is alone complete in itself.
How to combine them or what should we do?
In many respects, I think these two ethics,
these two forms of ethos,
are very much combined already in the American regime and how
the American way of life should be properly understood.
Consider the following. American regime is the first
truly modern nation, that is to say,
a nation founded upon the principles of modern philosophy.
Our founding document, the Charter of American
Liberties, the Declaration of
Independence, is dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal. It is fair to say that the
American regime requires more than loyalty,
that is to say it requires understanding,
it requires understanding of that founding principle or that
proposition, and the various texts and debates in which that
proposition was later articulated as well as the range
of responses and alternatives to it.
To believe for example, as you all now know,
to believe that "all men are created equal and endowed with
unalienable rights" requires us to consider the opposite
proposition contained in books like Plato's Republic or
Aristotle's Politics that believe that human beings are
not equal and that the best regime is one governed by a
philosophical aristocracy. So to consider our regime means
in some ways to consider it in the light of these universal
alternatives. But ours is also a regime that
contains elements of both the universal and the particular.
Again, the American regime is one founded on what Jefferson
called "a self-evident truth," the truth that there are
certain unalienable rights, that these principles are not
simply true for Americans but believed to be good for all
human beings, always and everywhere.
Consider Tom Paine in The Rights of Man where Paine
writes, "The independence of America was accompanied by a
revolution in the principles and practice of government,
government founded on a moral theory," he says,
"on the indefeasible hereditary rights of man that is now
revolving from west to east." In other words,
far from suggesting a traditional form of communal
morality, American politics,
as Paine suggests there, requires a commitment to the
highest, most universal moral principles.
That seems to be the cosmopolitan dimension upon
which the very nature of the American regime rests.
But the question does not end there.
The principles of Jefferson and Paine once again did not arise
sui generis. Anyone knows Jefferson's
principles about equality and rights have their profound
source in the philosophy of John Locke and particularly in his
Second Treatise of Government.
Recall that Locke occupies a central moment in the
development of the modern state and his new idea of a kind of
industrious and rational citizen.
Locke's philosophy emerged not only in conversation with the
other great founders of modernity like Machiavelli and
Hobbes but, in some important sense,
it emerged in opposition to the tradition of the classical
republic whose greatest representatives were Plato,
Aristotle, Cicero, and Polybius.
It would seem then, in other words,
to be an American citizen in the fullest sense of the term
requires an immersion in the philosophical tradition because
only in America, of all the countries in the
world I believe, does the philosophical
tradition remain most deeply and truly alive.
And yet at the same time, the American regime requires an
understanding and appreciation not only for a set of abstract
philosophical ideas and debates but for a constitution,
its history and a distinctive way of life.
A regime is obviously more than a catalog of philosophical
doctrines and abstract propositions but is embedded
within a particular set of moral,
legal, political, constitutional practices that
give it color and distinguish it from all others.
A proper understanding of the particular regime requires
today, or requires at any time, an immersion in history,
not only philosophy but in history, and I mean by history
not social history, economic history or even
cultural history, but history in the proper sense
of the term, that is political history.
Political history presupposes the centrality of politics,
of how the constitution of any society and its most fundamental
laws shape the character and choices of its citizen body.
Political history concerns the struggle of individuals and
groups for power. It concerns the political uses
of power or, maybe to speak a little more clearly,
of the two great ends to which power can be put,
namely freedom and empire. Political philosophy is related
to political history. In fact, political history or
political philosophy presuppose one another in the same way or
in the same relation of the universal to the particular.
While the political philosopher studies the principles,
the underlying principles of the regime,
the political historian examines the way those
principles have been applied in practice.
While the philosopher is concerned with the best regime,
the regime that is best according to unchanging
principles, the historian is concerned with
what is best for a particular people at a particular time and
place, Athenians, Frenchmen,
Americans and so on. And this is what the greatest
political historians, Thucydides, Theodor Mommsen,
Lord Macaulay, Henry Adams,
this is what they have done. They have examined how
different regimes, both express but also depart
from fundamental principles. When Adams, for example,
examines in painstaking detail the acquisition of the Louisiana
Territory under the Jefferson administration,
he does so always against the backdrop of Jeffersonian ideals
about democracy and limited government.
But that leads us to the final question that I want to end
with, is the proper understanding and appreciation
of the political is not something we inherit but
obviously something we must be taught.
Like anything that must be taught, it requires teachers.
But where are such teachers to be found at least today?
It would seem only very rarely in universities and rarer still
in departments of history, political science or economics.
Excuse my polemic. Modern professors of history,
for example, often appear to teach
everything but a proper respect for tradition.
One would get the impression from many classes that America
alone among the nations of the world is responsible for racism,
homophobia, the despoliation of the planet and every other moral
evil that one can imagine. In my own field,
political science, that once designated the skill
or art possessed by the most excellent statesmen or
politician, civic education has been
replaced by something called "game theory" that regards
politics as a marketplace where individual preferences are
formed and utilities are maximized.
Rather than teaching students to think of themselves as
citizens as these members--individuals did,
the new political science treats us as something called
rational actors who exercise our preferences,
but the question is, what should we have a
preference for, how should rational choice be
exercised? On these questions,
that is to say the most fundamental questions,
our political science is sadly silent.
It has nothing to offer and nothing to say.
By reducing all politics to choice and all choice to
preference, the new political science is forced to accord
legitimacy to every preference however vile,
base or indecent it may be. That kind of value neutrality
towards preferences is akin to the philosophic disposition that
we know as nihilism, that is to say the belief that
our deepest principles and convictions are nothing more
than blind preferences. So the purpose of political
science is not to stand above or outside the political community
as an entomologist observing the ant behavior but rather to serve
as a civic-minded arbiter and guardian of disputes in order to
restore peace and stability to conflict ridden situations.
We are in danger today of losing touch with those
questions and those insights that are the original motivation
for understanding politics. In place of these questions has
arisen a kind of narrow-minded focus on methodology often at
the expense of the life and death issues that make up the
substance of the political. So I end with this question.
Where should the study of political science be now?
You have sat through 13 weeks of an introductory course.
Where do you go from here? To ask a question posed
brilliantly by Karl Marx, he asked, "Who will educate the
educators?" the best question he ever asked.
How can we begin a comprehensive reeducation of
today's political science? The only answer and the best
answer I can give you today is simply to read old books.
These are our best teachers in a world where real teachers are
in short supply. In addition to what you have
read here, I would include front and center in your future
reading books like Plato's Laws,
Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, and Montesquieu's
incomparable Spirit of the Laws,
and of course, The Federalist Papers.
To read these books in the spirit in which they were
written is to acquire an education in political
responsibility. This, of course,
or these should be supplemented by a study of the deeds and
writings of the most important American statesmen from
Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln through Wilson
and Roosevelt. And these, in turn,
should be supported by the study of our leading
jurisprudential thinkers from Marshall, Holmes,
Brandeis, and Frankfurter. And finally,
this should be completed by an examination of the most
important statesmen and leaders from world history from around
the world, from Pericles to Churchill.
Once you have completed those readings, once you have done
that, and I would say only when you have done that,
can you say that you are living up to the highest offices of a
Yale student aptly summarized on the memorial gate outside of
Branford College which says, "For God, For Country,
and For Yale." Thank you for your time and
patience over this semester and good luck to you in the future.
