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.
 
