The Statesman as Thinker

Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation

Daniel J. Mahoney

• Publisher: Encounter Books
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781641772426
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

The Statesman as Thinker addresses the role of the thoughtful statesman in sustaining free and lawful political communities. It aims to restore fundamental distinctions—between the noble statesman, the run-of-the mill politician, and the despot who subverts freedom and civilization—that have largely been lost in contemporary political thought and discourse. Reducing politics to the mere "struggle for power, " to a barely concealed cynicism and nihilism, tells us little about the true nature of political life.This book provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of, and reflections on, a series of statesmen who struggled to preserve civilized freedom during times of crisis: Solon overcoming insidious class conflict in ancient Athens; Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric and statesmanship to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar's encroaching despotism; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny and ideological fanaticism in revolutionary France; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to the evil of chattel slavery; Churchill eloquently defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism with all his might; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; Havel fighting Communist totalitarianism through artful and courageous dissidence before 1989, and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace until his retirement in 2005. There are also collateral treatments of Washington, Pyotr Stolypin (the last great leader of Russia before the revolutions of 1917), Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Nelson Mandela.This book explores the writing and rhetoric of statesman who were also political thinkers of the first order—particularly Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel. It attempts to make sense of the mixture of magnanimity (greatness of soul, as Aristotle called it) and moderation or self-restraint that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.

1 STATESMANSHIP AS HUMAN EXCELLENCE

The founding fathers of modern republicanism had no qualms about appealing to the crucial role of the “founder” or “legislator” in establishing and sustaining free and lawful political communities. The American founders, for example, read their Cicero and Plutarch and were no doubt inspired by the accounts of political nobility found in the pages of both immensely influential thinkers and writers. Their own noble deeds partake of classical greatness of soul as much as the purported “realism” of distinctively modern political thought. But it is undoubtedly the case that they aimed to establish political institutions where “power checked power,” institutions that would make political greatness less necessary if not superfluous. Is this one reason why the study of statesmanship has fallen on hard times? Were they too successful?

Perhaps statesmanship of the noblest and truest kind has always been associated with crises of one sort or another: Solon addressing civil strife and class conflict in Athens in the sixth century BC; Pericles steering a middle path between imperial grandeur and prudent restraint in resisting the expansion of the Athenian Empire at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War; Cicero using all the arts of rhetoric and statesmanship in an ultimately failed attempt to save the remnants of Roman republicanism from the threat of Caesarian despotism; Burke eloquently warning defenders of ordered liberty against the proto-totalitarianism of Jacobin France; Washington leading the American people to their rightful station among the peoples of the earth and governing the new republic with an austere republican dignity; Lincoln preserving the Union and putting an end to the evil of chattel slavery at the same time; Churchill eloquently and firmly defending liberty and law and all the achievements of the “English-speaking peoples” against the dreadful barbarism of Nazism. Such statesmanship is, always and everywhere, a rare political achievement and an equally infrequent if admirable manifestation of the highest possibilities of the human soul.

Classical authors were right to understand such statesmanship as an elevated standard against which all political action can be judged. The thoughtful or reflective statesman exercises what the contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent calls “commanding practical reason,” not arbitrary power or a plan to satisfy the lowest impulses of his soul. Every political community needs such commanding practical reason, an authoritative exercise of judgment and foresight at the service of the common good. But the doctrinaire egalitarianism and relativism that many today confuse with democracy do not readily allow for such qualitative differences to be acknowledged and affirmed.

Elementary distinctions “natural” to political life—the distinctions between authority and authoritarianism, reason and will, nobility and baseness, domination and the mutual accountability inherent in free political life—are effaced in the name of a terrible simplification. Arguments about “the advantageous and the just,” as Aristotle so memorably put it in the opening chapters of his Politics, are summarily reduced to mere struggles for “power.” This effacement of politics as a moral science goes hand in hand with a toxic egalitarian moralism that feels free to repudiate our civilized inheritance and to judge all thought and action in the light of the overlapping determinisms of “race, class, and gender.” In truth, there can be no authentic political sphere, no veritable “public space,” when thought and action are reduced to cruel and inexpiable struggles for power and domination. And whatever the antinomian left claims, the messianic struggle for “justice” will lead only to mayhem, violence, and tyranny if the goods of life are said to have no foundation in the human soul or the natural order of things. One cannot promote justice on the “willful” premises of Machiavellian (and Nietzschean) modernity. If one begins with nihilistic premises, if one reduces every argument to a pretense for domination and exploitation, one necessarily ends with the self-enslavement of man. A barely concealed nihilism cannot provide a foundation for common humanity, the civic common good, or mutual respect and accountability. In the end, it can only negate our civilized inheritance despite the perfectionist or utopian veneer that invariably accompanies it.

True and False Realism

Modern political philosophy and modern social science thus veer incoherently between false realism and an idealism that acknowledges no constraints on the power of the human will to remake human nature and society. Through sinuous but logical paths, modern realism gives way to a totalitarian assault on the very “givenness” of the human condition, an assault on human nature itself and on all the virtues that define the well-ordered soul. What is needed is a return to true realism, to a moral conception of politics that is fully realistic but that also acknowledges that the good, the search for legitimate authority or even the best regime, the exercise of the practical virtues—courage, moderation, prudence, and justice—are as real as, and certainly more ennobling and humanizing than, the reckless and groundless pursuit of power as an end in itself. As the French anti-totalitarian political thinker Raymond Aron wrote in his 1965 book, Democracy and Totalitarianism, Machiavellian “realism,” in both its original and vulgarized forms, is imbued with a hidden or unacknowledged “metaphysic” that dogmatically reduces the philosophy, ideas, and justifications at the heart of real politics to an underlying will to power that alone is said to really move the souls of men. In this view, “The merits of a political formula do not lie in its worth or its truth, but in its usefulness. Ideas are merely weapons, methods of combat used by men engaged in the battle; but in battle the only goal is to win.”

Aron wryly observes that “to decree that man is a futile plaything of his passions is no less philosophical than to give a meaning to human existence.” Aron essentially endorses a phenomenological approach to the study of political things, one that does not assume without critical examination that the “essence of politics” can be found in an undifferentiated “struggle for power.” A truly phenomenological approach to the study of politics and statecraft rejects both cynicism and dogmatism, according to Aron. Unlike the “false realists” who are “obsessed by the struggle for power,” the true realist does not neglect another aspect of reality: “the search for legitimate power, for recognized authority, for the best regime.” Such a student of politics fully appreciates the rough and tumble of political life, but he or she doesn’t reduce it simplistically and dogmatically to an all-encompassing struggle for power. In Democracy and Totalitarianism, Aron gets to the heart of the matter:

Men have never thought of politics as exclusively defined by the struggle for power. Anyone who does not see that there is a “struggle for power” element is naïve; anyone who sees nothing but this aspect is a false realist. The reality that we study is a human one. Part of this human reality is the question relating to the legitimacy of authority.

Aron’s own study of political sociology, of comparative political regimes and ideologies, ultimately owes more to Montesquieu and Tocqueville, or to Aristotle, than to the power politics advocated in distinctive but complementary ways by both Machiavelli, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, and Max Weber, at the beginning of the twentieth (even if Aron was a serious and sometimes sympathetic student and scholar of both thinkers).

Let us now turn to the Roman statesman and political philosopher Cicero, whose thoughts and deeds provide much ballast for a morally serious and authentically realistic political science that avoids the twin temptations of dogmatism and cynicism and that remains firmly attentive to the virtues and goods that give life to free and decent politics. Cicero’s moral realism provides an ample and accurate account of the motives at the heart of true statesmanship; the false realism that dominates modern or “Machiavellian” political science can only explain away what decent men and women cannot help but admire. What is needed today is not a return to classical politics per se but an openness to the judicious mix of realism and moral aspiration that informed the classical political philosophies of Aristotle and Cicero in particular. Unlike Plato, whose paramount theme was the superiority of the theoretical life, Aristotle and Cicero saw in states-manship informed by political philosophy the highest practical human way of life, at once good for the soul and good for the city. They are philosophical partisans of statesmanship and political nobility par excellence.

Cicero’s Model of the Magnanimous Statesman

The recovery of the dignity of the political vocation, of the distinction between the arbitrary exercise of power and honorable ambition that serves the common good, depends upon the restoration of distinctions that have been obfuscated by modern political philosophy and modern social science. As Cicero noted in the first book of On Duties (written in 44 BC, shortly before his death at the hands of Mark Antony), certain philosophers destroy the moral grounds of statesmanship by undermining the intrinsic link between the highest goods for human beings and the exercise of the moral and intellectual virtues. If vulgar pleasure or shameless self-seeking or even a more high-minded identification of philosophy with refined pleasure becomes the great desideratum, there is no reason for a citizen, statesman, or human being to “cultivate friendship, justice, or liberality.” Power and pleasure become the exclusive ends and means of human and political life, and the distinction between the honorable statesman and the rapacious tyrant is eliminated in one fell swoop. This is one reason why Cicero despised the Epicureans, whose reduction of the good to the pleasant encouraged an abdication of moral and political responsibility on the part of the one, the few, and the many. If a thinker or leader—or citizen for that matter—identifies pain as “the greatest ill” and pleasure as “the greatest good,” he has no reason to be brave or courageous or to make sacrifices for his country.

As Mary Ann Glendon has well put it, Cicero was that rare political man who combined “the noble sort of ambition with … intense attraction to the eros of the mind.” He was at once a statesman and a moral and political philosopher even if he generally turned to writing his philosophical works when his “political fortunes were at a low ebb.” His writings defend both the indispensability of philosophical reflection and the greatness of spirit inherent in noble statesmanship. He sometimes suggested that the life of the statesman informed by philosophy and right reason was the highest vocation open to human beings. However, “The Dream of Scipio,” at the end of Cicero’s Republic, with its reminder of the ultimate insignificance of human things from the perspective of the cosmos as a whole, seems to point in a rather different direction. In any case, Cicero, more than Plato and Aristotle, provides the most substantial and elevated argument for the inherent choice-worthiness of the life of the thoughtful and reflective statesman who combines greatness of soul with moderation and self-control. Cicero’s beau ideal of a statesman is opposed to all narrow partisanship, which sunders the unity of the political community and, in extremis, can lead to civil war and to self-seeking at the expense of the common good.

The true statesman for Cicero embodies in the depths of his soul what tradition calls the cardinal virtues—courage, temperance, prudence, justice—as well as a commitment to political liberty or self-government and a principled and passionate opposition to the negation of civilized life that is tyranny in its various forms. Cicero’s statesman as thinker prefers peace to war, magnanimity to peevish resentment, clemency to the perpetual aggravation of the hatreds and divisions that destroy the moral integrity of the civic community. But if he prefers peace to war—domestic courage to martial courage, as Cicero calls it—if he appreciates that in the best circumstances arms should “yield to the toga,” he is no pacifist or advocate of peace at any price. Themistocles, who saved Athens against Xerxes and the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, is rightly esteemed. But Solon, who gave Athens decent laws that safeguarded the rights and prerogatives of both the rich and the poor, the few and the many, “must be judged no less superb than the former.” “Honorable conduct” reflects strength of spirit far more than strength of body, a cultivation of “urbane affairs” over “martial ones.” In a republic in the process of being transformed into an empire, in a political culture that valued military prowess and heroism above all, Cicero reminded his readers that war was never an end in itself but an instrument to be used prudently and justly, if at all possible, to safeguard the achievements of a free and civilized political order. To rashly turn to battle, to unthinkingly prefer war to peace, “befits a certain savagery and is similar to brutes.”

Still, Cicero reminds us, “when circumstance and necessity demand, we must physically fight it out to the end, preferring death to slavery and disgrace.” An honorable statesman, “a truly magnanimous and courageous man,” should prefer “affability” and “high-mindedness” to “useless and hateful peevishness.” But Cicero acknowledged that “gentleness and clemency must be commended only as far as severity may also be employed for the sake of the commonwealth.” Cicero’s honorable statesman is equally distant from the amoral self-assertion of the Nietzschean “Over-man,” contemptuous as he is of his inferiors and from the deep aversion to the legitimate exercise of authority by the contemporary humanitarian. His standard is the “honestum”—the fine, the noble, the honorable—at the service of civilized liberty. He resists the siren calls of both hardness—tyranny, cruelty, and an immoral power politics—and softness, which is tenderness, compassion, or generosity bereft of any deep understanding of human nature or of the “inventiveness of wickedness,” as Edmund Burke once so suggestively called it.

Half-classical modern democratic statesmen such as Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill embodied important aspects of this Ciceronian ideal. Their examples both vivify and illustrate this ideal and reveal it to be an enduring model of humane and tough-minded statecraft. They lived in an era strikingly different from Cicero’s. In the first half of the twentieth century, modern technology and totalitarian ideologies made total war a real possibility, while creature comforts and a democratic ideology at the service of enlightenment, progress, and cosmopolitanism made pacifism a much more powerful temptation. Christianity had undoubtedly softened mores, quite significantly in the long run, even if it strengthened sectarian animosities during the wars of religion. A debilitating relativism that accompanied modern thought weakened the clear-cut distinctions between civilization and barbarism, freedom and totalitarianism. As Churchill noted in The Gathering Storm, the first volume of The Second World War, democracies had a difficult time cultivating and sustaining a coherent policy or strategy for even a relatively modest period of time. So, in a late modern world tempted by passivity, pacifism, and humanitarian illusions, the Ciceronian statesman must spend as much time warning against pacifist illusions as in reminding warrior republics of the ultimate superiority of the urbane virtues to military courage. The ideal remains the same: greatness tethered to measure, action informed by high prudence (as opposed to mere calculation), the moral virtues at the service of the civic common good, action informed by prudent reflection and a coherent vision of the well-ordered soul. But the emphases may differ as the arts of prudence are applied to sometimes dramatically different circumstances.

Napoleon: Greatness without Moderation

De Gaulle famously remarked in The Edge of the Sword, his 1932 book on military and political leadership, that no statesman worth his salt is inspired by a vision of “evangelical perfection.” The Sermon on the Mount cannot provide practical guidance for a statesman imbued with a sense of personal and political honor and committed to the defense of one’s homeland and the civilized patrimony of the West. And yet de Gaul...