A Genealogy Of Political Culture

Michael E Brint

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429722332
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política cultural

In this lively and witty history of the study of political culture, Michael Brint examines the differences between the French sociological tradition from Montesquieu to Tocqueville; the German tradition of cultural philosophy from Kant to Weber; and the American scientific or behavioral tradition from Almond and Verba forward. Enlisting his own tra

Part One
Playing the Other: The French Sociological Tradition

1 Montesquieu: Entre Betes ET Dieux

Like Aristotle before him and Hegel after him, Montesquieu was one of the great synthetic thinkers of the Western tradition. His mind was calibrated to see formal principles of symmetry and the position of mediation and balance such symmetry seemed to allow. Part of this sense of balance undoubtedly reflects a kind of Aristotelian sensibility. Indeed, Montesquieu is often portrayed as a person of considerable character in the best Aristotelian sense of the word. He is said to have possessed that distinct quality of prudence, deliberation, considered judgment, and moderation that Aristotle emphasized in his doctrine of virtue. More to the point, however, he followed a number of Aristotle's political and philosophical teachings.

He drew, for instance, from Aristotle's concept of natural kinds. In Book Delta of Metaphysics, Aristotle defined nature (physis) as that which contains the source of movement within itself.¹ His concentration on the inner vitality or animating principle of natural things hinged on the belief that each species of life developed and grew from its own inner potential to its actual, final end or form. For Aristotle, the end (telos) of a species determined its definition as a natural kind.

Aristotle applied this biological model to politics. He defined different political regimes (which he considered natural kinds) as purposive wholes (entelechies), each possessing a different inner structure and animating principle. In important respects, Montesquieu followed Aristotle on this point. Like Aristotle, he believed that the science of politics was fundamentally concerned with the origin, development, and degeneration of political regimes as purposive wholes or forms of life. He also stressed, like Aristotle, the fact that different political regimes were appropriate to different moral and political circumstances. Hence, in The Spirit of the Laws (De l'esprit des lois), Montesquieu analyzed the development, animating principle, and appropriate conditions associated with three natural kinds or forms of government: monarchical, despotic, and republican (both democratic and aristocratic).

Unlike Aristotle, however, Montesquieu was not content to classify political regimes on the basis of their constitutional structure alone. Rather, he distinguished political institutions through what he called la condition sociale. Here, Montesquieu's political thought takes a distinctly modern turn. Indeed, Montesquieu's distinction between the social and political conditions of a nation's complex form of life had a profound impact on later studies of political culture. "Recognizing the depth of his insight," for example, G.W.F. Hegel claimed that Montesquieu had articulated the inner development of the modern state in terms of "the particular national character of a people, its historical development, and the whole complex of both its social and political relations."² In contrast, Hegel argued, "the ancient division of constitutions into monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy was based upon the notion of a still undivided unity, a unity which had not yet come to its inner differentiation and internal organization."³

In a celebrated passage in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu articulated the central tenets of his own approach. "Many things govern human beings," he wrote, "climate, religion, laws, the maxims of government, examples of things past, customs, manners; and from the composition of these a general spirit is produced."⁴ Along with the physical environment, he claimed, the social condition created the limits within which a political regime could be institutionally enforced. For Montesquieu, the social condition referred not only to a polity's social structure, but to les moeurs, the habits, customs, expectations, and traditions of its people.

In treating both the social condition and les moeurs, Montesquieu argued that each type of regime possesses its own particular inner structure, an inner dynamic principle or force, which makes it function and operate as it does. "There is this difference between the nature of a government and its principle: its nature is that which makes it what it is, and its principle, that which makes it act. Hie one is its particular structure, the other the human passions that set it in motion."⁵ These principles or impelling forces of social action, give a regime its effective character.

Although this animating principle owes a great deal to the Aristotelian doctrine of nature, Montesquieu was also inspired by a number of principles of philosophical mechanics developed during the seventeenth-century. Instead of using the biological metaphor commonly employed by Aristotle, for instance, he often spoke of the principles of regimes in distinctly mechanistic terms. Employing the language of seventeenth-century physics, he claimed that the social world, like the physical world, is composed of complex forces that attract and repel each other. He described the principles of different regimes within this world of complex forces as those "springs of action" that allow the mechanism of government to properly operate and function.⁶

The spring of action that drives republican governments is said to be virtue in democracies and moderation in aristocracies; in monarchies, it is called honor; and in despotic regimes, this dynamic principle is defined as fear. It is no mere coincidence, when one considers Montesquieu's sense of formal symmetry and mediation, that he placed the French monarchy between the virtue of ancient republicanism, on the one hand, and the fear of despot rule, on the other. Although the virtue of the ancients could no longer be institutionally enforced given the sociological conditions that dominated the modern age, he believed, the possibility of despotism was only too real. In this respect, France was poised entre bêtes et Dieux: between the lost virtue of the ancients and the growing threats of despotism.

In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu defined the nature of despotic government as consisting in the sovereign power of "one alone who, without law and without rule, draws everything along by his will and his caprices."⁷ Deeply alarmed by the development of any institutional concentration of power subject to the caprice of a single individual, be it king or pope, Montesquieu criticized both sides of the traditional "two-swords controversy," the contest waged in the High Middle Ages between the supremacy of ecclesiastical and secular authority. Seven centuries later, he tells us, this controversy was still very much alive in France. On one side, it took shape in an ultramontane position. On the other side, it took the form of the doctrine of the divine right of kings.

Based on this divine right, the legitimacy of absolute state power was said to be indelibly linked to the hereditary lineage of the king. Against this doctrine, Montesquieu stressed the contingent cultural factors within which monarchies could be institutionally supported. In this way, he fundamentally reframed the issue of legitimacy. No longer an eternal and divine right, the king's power was now subject to the contingencies of history, culture, climate, and opinion. The reason for Montesquieu's radical, if not subversive, thought on this subject stemmed from his fear that traditional forms of justification could legitimate the capricious will and absolute power of a despot. To exemplify this fear, Montesquieu looked to the East. "In Persia," he tells us, "when the king has condemned someone, no one may speak to him further about it or ask for mercy. If he were drunken or out of his mind, the decree would have to be carried out just the same."⁸

When considering the other side of the two-swords controversy, Montesquieu also criticized the ultramontane position that God bestowed supremacy on papal authority. Once again, he feared that this position could legitimize despotic power. In describing the capricious will of Pope Clement X, he once again turned to the despotic practices of the East.

It is said that a certain pope, upon his election, overcome by his incapacities, made infinite difficulties at the beginning of his reign. Finally, he agreed to turn all matters of administration over to his nephew. The pope was overwhelmed and said, "I never would have believed that it could be so easy." It is the same for princes of the East. From that prison where eunuchs have enfeebled their hearts and their spirit and have left their masters ignorant of even their own estate, these princes are put on the throne, where they are stunned at first. But when they have appointed a vizier, when in their seraglio they have given themselves up to the most brutal passions, when in the midst of a battered court they have followed their most foolish caprices, they would never have believed that it could be so easy.⁹

As suggested by these examples, Montesquieu consistently linked despotism to the political culture of the East. In this respect, he appears to illustrate Edward Said's definition of European orientalism as "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in European Western experience. The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe," Said tells us, it is also "one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other."¹⁰ As Other, he goes on to explain, the Orient has helped to define Europe and the West. In large measure, it has also been a construction of the West. In this way, Said contends, the "Occident" has both defined itself in terms of the "mysterious" (and ultimately "inferior") East and, at the same time, constructed this Other in terms of which it has defined itself.

In both Persian Letters (Lettres persanes) and The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu may no doubt be faulted for partaking in what Said calls the discursive practice of orientalism as "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."¹¹ For Montesquieu, the authority of the West is established precisely by the alleged superiority of its culture, national character, and political regime.

Yet, unlike Said's critical depiction of orientalism, Montesquieu's Other is not always linked to a dynamic of identity and alterity, an understanding of the Other as tainted in contrast to the purity of one's own self-conception. In fact, Montesquieu often inverted this dynamic for its dramatic and critical effect. In Persian Letters, for example, playing the Other afforded Montesquieu the role of an outsider in French society.¹² From this perspective, he used his protagonists to satirize a dazzling number of French habits, manners, and cultural practices. He criticized the relationship between the king and the pope; the professions of lawyers, priests, monks, doctors, casuists, tax farmers, and judges; the vanity of French high society, its newsmongers, literary critics, conversationalists, and intellectuals; and the French preoccupation with sex, gambling, wit, and fashion. Of the latter, to take just one example, Rica, one of Montesquieu's Persian visitors to the West, writes of his astonishment to find that in his conversations with the French, "they cheerfully avow that other nations are wiser, provided you agree that they are better dressed."¹³

Employing the perspective of the Other, Montesquieu's satirical views on French culture were used as a form of critical self-reflection. In a similar respect, his association between the East and despotism played an elemental role in his critical assessment of France. Regarding this association, it is hardly surprising that Montesquieu's "despotic-Eastern-Other" reflects a Western construction of the Orient typical of his time. But, that having been admitted, it is crucial to further ask what Montesquieu's construction of Persia tells us about his understanding of the threat of despotism in France.

For instance, playing the Other in Persian Letters, Montesquieu invidiously compared the reign of Louis XIV to that of a Sultan. "The King of France is old," the character Usbek writes to his fellow countryman, Ibben.

There are no examples in our history of a monarch who has reigned for such a l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE PLAYING THE OTHER: THE FRENCH SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION
• PART TWO CULTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS: THE TRADITION OF CULTURAL PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY
• PART THREE THE AMERICAN SCIENCE OF POLITICAL CULTURE AND THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index