Thomas
L. Pangle. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The
Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke
(University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1988), 334 pp., Ł17.96, ISBN 0 226 64540
1 (boards).
Reviewed
by William B. Allen*
To reflect on the question of America, and how we should understand America, we might well begin by just admitting that Professor Pangle is correct: it is indeed true that the key chord of modernity is America. He may, however, be incorrect in his understanding of what America means as the key chord of modernity. By key chord I mean that modernity opens and ends on that chord. We need to place in context what it is about America that has presented the problem that Professor Pangle struggles with, unsuccessfully, in his work.
Starting with
the title itself, assuming the title to mean that the Spirit of Modern
Republicanism is America, then it is sufficient. If, on the other hand, it means that America is assimilated to a
broader standard, then it is insufficient.
I believe that Professor Pangle takes it in the latter sense, and there
resides the difficulty.
Instead of the
correct identification of America as central to modernity, Pangle imagines that
a certain tension exists, whether between perfect gentlemanliness and the so-called
parts of virtue or between virtue and happiness. This tension derives broadly from the rejection of classical
republicanism by modern political philosophy.
This book purports to demonstrate that one is entitled to make just such
a leap from classical to modern political philosophy.
Pangle claims
that America stands on the shoulders of John Locke, and not merely John Locke
as one in a series of thinkers or legislators but in the particulars of his
theory as regards its relationship to classical republicanism. Now that theory, of course, stands on the shoulders
of Machiavelli. I, on the other hand,
have tried at length (elsewhere) to introduce the notion that the American
presentation of the cause of nature (which is how I prefer to think of it) is a
presentation which is indeed conversant with modern principles but not
imprisoned by them.
I’ve made that
argument on two grounds. First, the
Americans usually read more widely than is attributed to them – even by this
book, which seeks to give them credit for wide reading. Secondly, the Americans were human. The latter argument is more difficult to
sustain in the presence of discussions which imagine that it is the same thing
to engage in philosophy as it is to hold conversations about other people’s
conversations. To remind us that the
Americans were humans is otherwise not extraordinary, since we are nothing more
ourselves, and the task which they measured up to, but which we have far less
frequently measured up to since that time, was precisely to remember themselves
as human and therefore to confront the teachings of philosophy always with at
least one healthy dose of skepticism – namely, whatever the principles seemed
to call for, must it not always be the case that human nature will prevail?
The American
founders use principles that go beyond mere habituation and that challenge
their fellows as well as those who come afterwards to articulate their accomplishment
not as a step in the history of philosophy but as a self-conscious
interpretation of nature and human nature in particular.
Something that
puts this in a stronger perspective may be derived from a sideways glace at a
related phenomenon. Arguments about the
founding – particularly the argument that the founding is base – commonly begin
by regarding the founders as wise and virtuous, while concluding that their
descendents are mean and miserable.
Professor Pangle’s account is no different in that respect.
This particular
presentation of the founding – the notion of a democracy low but solid – is a
criticism however veiled, for it denies to America and its founders any claim
of nobility or of excellence. In the
attempt to build a tension between nobility and excellence, on the one hand (I
think that is what Pangle means by “pride”), and justice, on the other, we see
why we are forced into making that choice.
It is a view which maintains not only that the founders expected little
from men in general but that they so contrived matters as never to allow for
anything. They never allowed for, let
alone demanded, virtue.
Now I suggest
that this flies in the face of the evidence, but the evidence is a very long
story. Nevertheless, the story has been
told. The materials are available;
there are enough people now writing and speaking about these things who make
them accessible, if not patently clear.
So much is this so that I must, parenthetically, remark that it begins
to be rather vexing that there would be anyone left who would bother, on the
basis of shabby scholarship, to impose upon our good nature and our patience
rather than submit to this long story.
The story is too
long to tell in this review. But an
apostrophe will at least afford opportunity to judge how far virtue was excluded
from the founding. When we speak of
virtue in the American founding, it is not sufficient to speak of instances or
quotations that cite attitudes towards virtue as instrumental in preserving the
stability of the regime. That is part
of the discussion; equally important, however, is to recognize the founding
itself as an accomplishment in virtue.
True, the
framers read Locke, Hobbes, Smith, Hume, Hutcheson, among others. But they had no less available Aristotle’s Politics. We find in 1792, for example, in Madison’s “Notes
on the Foundations of Government,” a recourse to Aristotle that calls into
question any simple-minded view of the texts upon which Madison relied.
The Aristotelian
Gillies offered trenchant criticism of the modern views on the origins of
politics. Writing in the aftermath of
the American and French revolutions, in a new introduction to the Politics,
Gillies defended Aristotle against what he called “the cunning,” cowardly
principles of Hobbes and Manderville, as well as the “benevolent moral
affections espoused by Hutchison and Shaftesbury.” (The youthful Alexander Hamilton was no less harsh on Hobbes in
the revolutionary tract, “The Farmer Refuted.”) Aristotle rather built on the foundation, according to Gillies,
that “both society and government are as congenial to the nature of man as it is
for a plant to fix its roots in the earth, to extend its branches, and to
scatter its seeds.” Now, I trace the
significance of this argument to the fact that, for the critics of the framing,
Aristotle is the singular source of the supposed antithesis to a base
America. My argument is based on the
notion that Plato, if he says anything at all, rather criticizes the ancient
city. Aristotle, though, defended the
city, the actual city whose end was supposedly virtue. Plato, on the other hand, never approaches
an account of an actual city, save through the mouths of the Hobbeses of the
ancient world. Gillies rejected both
Locke’s social contract and, while accepting in principle the inalienable right
to be self-governed, the egalitarian freight of the new inalienable right to be
fairly represented (as it had already come to be interpreted by the end of
eighteenth century). Locke’s mistake, according
to Gillies, was to settle for the hypothetical argument of a state of nature,
rather than to follow up this implication of Aristotle’s teaching on a “system”
of civil society. “In this system will
be found not the arbitrary assertion of universal sovereignty but the
articulation of the idea of a common good.
The good of the community will more surely defend the expedient of
giving to the people at large a control in the government.” That is the key passage, the one in which
Gillies joins the ideas of Madison (Federalist 63, for example). He seems to mean that one can justify the
claims of self-government politically expressed without justifying a notion of
egalitarian democracy. That seems to
be, in large measure, what is accomplished in The Federalist Papers.
In making this
argument, The Federalist asserts that something that Professor Pangle
denies in this book – namely, that self-government is not one among the many ends
of the modern polity. Rather, it is the
end which comprehends all the particular ends that are described in the course
of that politics. When one examines,
for example, liberty, in Professor Pangle’s view, one observes the end of
liberty, the end of self-government, the end of prosperity, etc. But as one analyses Federalist essays
One to Nine, one discovers a fairly radical theory about the connection between
republicanism, peace and prosperity – a theory that is counter-intuitive, which
is to say that it reversed the usual order in which we view those things.
We usually
consider that we wish for peace in order to enjoy prosperity – to give a
shorthand version. That process is
reversed in the Federalist Papers.
They offer an elaborate argument by which we discover that prosperity guarantees
peace far more certainly than peace guarantees prosperity. If one designs one’s way of life
appropriately – one’s constitutionalism, if you will – certain consequences
flow from that constitutionalism. Thus
it is possible to argue that the American regime is the best regime, in a context
in which it is possible to reproduce claims of specific excellence both in
terms of the design and of the consequences that are present at the founding
itself. Those claims all turn on the
question of whether this notion of self-government is indeed correct.
In Professor
Pangle’s account, finally, one of the keys to the difficulty of interpreting
America is that we meet with tension in the categories of the virtues and also
a supposed tension between the objective of knowledge on the one hand, and
self-government on the other. What
Professor Pangle seems not fully to have conceived is the sense in which
self-government as a goal derives from the classical discovery of the end of virtue
(even if you consider virtue to be knowledge, in that Platonic or Socratic formulation).
To the extent
that self-government or self-control becomes almost a symbolic accomplishment –
a condition, necessary if not sufficient, for the attainment of ultimate virtue
– one can take it as a point to be aimed at wholly apart from dealing with the
question of one’s readiness or capacity for the contemplative life. The vita active from that point of
view is not a life in opposition to the life of contemplation, but is at least
a life or stage of life on the way to the life of contemplation. The capacity to develop moderation, if that
is to be identified as the vita active (which one may doubt), the
capacity to attain that self-control, now expressed as the ideal of
self-government, does exist in a tension with other claims of authority to
rule. Without having to pursue claims
beyond the immediate claim of self-government, one then finds that it is
possible, as the American Founders did, to focus on the requirements of
self-government itself.
The theory is
that one can take no steps beyond the demonstration in the attempt to vindicate
the claims of humanity. Now, if that is
true, it will then further be the case that all of the particular claims of the
American Constitution – claims in defense of self-government – are in fact not
claims about political processes, not claims about a collective right to self
determination or any other similar corruption of the meaning of self-government
but in fact are specific claims about the capacity for virtue on the part of humanity
at large. This means far greater
numbers of people than Professor Pangle, at least, admits into the inner circle
of either perfect gentlemanliness or readiness for the contemplative life.
Professor Pangle
essentially believes that mankind only lives in tribes. Therefore, he sees the American and the
modern experience as debasing, depreciating, because it makes the life of the
tribe tenuous without opening any other vista.
Well, it is true that modernity liberates men from the tribe; but it is
not true that it does so without further vistas. The question of America remains precisely the question of whether
the hopes, the ambitions of the founding can be vindicated. That is perhaps for us to say, though it is
probably well to remind ourselves that none of us, nor any human beings, will
ever speak finally in these matters.