Jean Bethke Elshtain

Politics, Ethics, and Society

Debra Erickson, Michael Le Chevallier, Debra Erickson, Michael Le Chevallier

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268103088
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941–2013) was a noted ethicist, political philosopher, and public intellectual. Her four decades of scholarship defy easy categorization: she wrote both seminal works of theory and occasional pieces for the popular press, and she was variously viewed as radical and conservative, feminist and traditionalist, anti-war and pro-interventionist. Jean Bethke Elshtain: Politics, Ethics, and Society is the first attempt to evaluate Elshtain's entire published body of work and to give shape to a wide-ranging scholarly career, with an eye to her work's ongoing relevance. This collection of essays brings together scholars and public intellectuals from across the spectrum of disciplines in which Elshtain wrote. The volume is organized around four themes, which identify the central concerns that shaped Elshtain's thought: (1) the nature of politics; (2) politics and religion; (3) international relations and just war; and (4) the end(s) of political life. The essays have been chosen not only for the expertise of each contributor as it bears on Elshtain's work but also for their interpretive and analytic scope. This volume introduces readers to the work of a key contemporary thinker, using Elshtain's writing as a lens through which to reflect on central political and scholarly debates of the last few decades. Jean Bethke Elshtain will be of great interest to specialists researching Elshtain and to scholars of multiple disciplines, particularly political theory, international relations, and religion.

Contributors: Debra Erickson Sulai, Michael Le Chevallier, Robin W. Lovin, William A. Galston, Arlene W. Saxonhouse, Don Browning, Peter Berkowitz, Nancy J. Hirschmann, Michael Kessler, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Nigel Biggar, Gilbert Meilaender, Eric Gregory, Daniel Philpott, Marc LiVecche, Nicholas Rengger, John D. Carlson, Chris Brown, Michael Walzer, James Turner Johnson, Erik Owens, Francis Fukuyama, Carl Gershman, and Patrick J. Deneen.

PART I

THE POLITICAL QUESTION

Introduction

Robin W. Lovin

Ours is a culture fascinated by human identity and aspirations. “Who are we?” is a question posed by evolutionary biologists, op-ed columnists, social psychologists, and cultural historians. Jean Elshtain believed that it is also the first question of politics. In her book with that title, published in 2000, she argued that human nature sets the limits for any effort to build an enduring system of government and society.

Asking basic questions about human nature is not an easy way to approach politics, nor is it particularly popular today. We prefer to think about who we are in terms of an almost infinite range of individual possibilities, or perhaps as a question to be answered by a group identity framed by ethnicity, gender, race, or class. We ask, “Who are we?,” to set ourselves apart. We use the question to identify our claims, rather than to acknowledge our limits.

Yet the two ways of asking the question, personal and political, are closely connected. Jean Elshtain understood that, and her work as a whole may be seen as an effort to overcome the tension between self-interest and social commitment, between individual rights and natural limitations, between an assertion of identity and openness to communication. The chapters in this part view her work in that light, and each makes its own contribution to the broader understanding of politics that she developed in her work and encouraged among her colleagues and students.

In chapter 4, Peter Berkowitz locates Elshtain’s political thought in the tradition of Edmund Burke, but he also interprets Burke in a way that reflects Elshtain’s emphasis on the importance of restraint and balance in political claims, both between individuals and between citizens and their government. Burke as he appears here is not simply an apologist for tradition. No political system could survive on that alone. Tradition conserves a natural liberty, and liberty creates a space for reform. Elshtain would no doubt add that liberty is not the only thing that is natural, for all the attention that it received from the American revolutionaries, whom Burke supported, and from the French revolutionaries, whom he despised. The questions of democracy and rights that preoccupied the end of the eighteenth century, like the questions of human rights that were central to the twentieth, only make sense if we remember that the autonomous, individual subject of rights is also the product of a history and a family, a person with a gender and body.

Don Browning’s life and work offered his own interpretation of this embodied selfhood, moving dialogically between theology and developmental psychology to establish a rich account of how we become persons and of how persons should be treated in the familial and social settings where they live. In chapter 3, written toward the end of his own long and distinguished career, Browning relates that developmental perspective to Elshtain’s understanding of politics, a multidimensional, “thick” account of justice that relates to “concrete human needs in actual historical contexts.” For Browning, it makes sense to locate this way of thinking in the natural law tradition that grows in Western law and Christian theology through the Augustinian account of human nature, which is also important to Elshtain’s politics.

It is, of course, difficult to rely too much on human nature in contemporary political thought, and not just because the tradition on which Browning draws is closely connected with Christian theology. It is one of the leading ideas of recent political thought that “public reason” must proceed from premises that all participants can share. Although the idea may have originated in an earlier struggle for religious toleration, the contemporary formulations increasingly exclude all concepts drawn from a “thick” conception of human nature, giving the impression that questions about public security and economic efficiency are the primary issues open to discussion in any debate about public policy. Those who want to be taken seriously in the public forum will address the issues in terms of security and efficiency, whereas the use of other sorts of argument will be seen as questionable, or as a kind of rhetorical flourish.

This change affects all moral claims, not just those that might be put forward on specifically theological grounds. If security and efficiency set the terms for public reasoning, then “Who are we?” is not a public question. We are free to aspire to whatever we wish, but we should not expect it to make a difference in politics.

Paradoxically, however, this effort to open the field of public discussion by eliminating sectarian or particularistic appeals has had the effect of polarizing the discussion and alienating people from politics. We no longer see politics as an answer to the question, “Who are we?,” because there is not enough of ourselves left in the discussion to make the answer interesting. In chapter 5, Nancy Hirschmann documents this disillusionment with our public life, drawing both on contemporary disability activism and on John Stuart Mill’s “religion of humanity” for models in which an informed self-understanding can shape political claims and choices. Hirschmann in the end offers only a “slim sliver of hope” for our “democracy on trial,” embodied in a set of very practical changes that might enable those who are currently excluded from public discussion to participate more fully. But she suggests that treating their participation as important might help us better understand why it is important, for everyone.

This leads us from the problems of human nature and public reason to more general questions about the relationship of public discussion and personal identity in a modern, pluralistic society. John Stuart Mill might have hoped for an educated elite whose “religion of humanity” would determine the common good, but our sensibilities and experience require more general political participation in which people speak for themselves. Browning points out that Elshtain’s thought from the beginning related self-awareness to the experience of dialogue. Rather than being prepared for politics by an education that is prior to it, she suggested that we learn the skills of dialogue and the answers to our questions about ourselves in the political process. This is an idea developed in different ways by Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, but, as Browning notes, Elshtain introduced it into North American political thinking before their theories were widely known.

It is appropriate, then, that two essays in this part focus specifically on Elshtain’s interpretations of texts and her ideas about language. In chapter 1, William Galston poses the problem of how the loyalties and identities forged in family life can adapt to the more flexible relationships required in politics. He then provides an answer drawn from Elshtain’s reading of Antigone. The result is a political pluralism that resists “any simple hierarchical ordering among spheres of human life.” Human nature and political obligation as represented in the classic dialogue between Antigone and Creon interact to produce a situation in which loyalties are necessarily divided and tragic conflicts are always possible. But this dialogue is also the setting for human freedom and responsibility.

In chapter 2, Arlene Saxonhouse continues the hermeneutical study with a close reading of Public Man, Private Woman, a text that has become a classic of contemporary political thought. In Saxonhouse’s essay, we have an interpretation of the argument that mirrors the interaction of nature and politics in Elshtain’s thought. Our embodied selves limit our possibilities, but they also allow us to enter into dialogues that free us from our immediate environment and form communities in which we can become more than nature makes us. In the same way, Saxonhouse proposes, the theories that shape and constrain our thinking also make it possible for us to enter into dialogues that can change our thinking and ourselves. Saxonhouse writes, “Just as Elshtain insisted that we ourselves are not abstract individuals sprung to life like those Hobbesian mushrooms on the forest floor, she recognized that the theories with which we grapple and the conceptual frameworks within which we work must be set into the historical context of the traditions of Western political thought. She appreciated that we must grasp and draw on the theories of those who have informed our own thinking.”

The dialogue of politics, the rich interaction between identity and otherness, thus makes possible a public discussion far wider in scope than the thin theories of public reason would suggest. It is important to recover this concept of the political question at a time when many people have concluded that politics is no concern of theirs and that the public forum simply cannot accommodate the goods that are most important to them. That is politically dangerous, because it implies that human goods are not part of an ordered reality to which we are all related, but are instead created by communities of like-minded people who define themselves and their goods in opposition to the others who cannot share our goods because they are not us. To lure such people back into arguments about a rich variety of public goods that reflects the range of their real aspirations risks conflict and tragedy, but it is a risk worth running, because it is the only way to find out who we are.

CHAPTER ONE

BECOMING JEAN ELSHTAIN

Exploring the Intersections of Social Feminism and Civic Life

William A. Galston

INTRODUCTION

Jean Elshtain’s Public Man, Private Woman (PMPW) is painted on a grand canvass. It ranges over the entire Western tradition of political philosophy, and it fearlessly engages with the range of feminist theories that burst into public view in the 1970s. In this book, we see a thinker fighting to open a space for her own voice.

In many respects, Elshtain succeeded. But the critical dimension of her book was more fully realized than was her own affirmative stance. A sign of this: Public Man, Private Woman has an extensive index, but two names are conspicuous by their absence—Antigone and Jane Addams, figures central to the “social feminism” for which she was to become so well and controversially known.

Here I will integrate some themes from Public Man, Private Woman with key writings (see abbreviations list at the end of the chapter) that link its initial publication in 1981 to the afterword penned and appended a decade later. During this period, Elshtain propounded a distinctive style of doing political theory, fleshed out the substance of her own approach, and defended her understanding of the family while linking it to social feminism and to a revisionist account of the public/private distinction. These are the topics on which I will focus. My principal aim is descriptive-reconstructive; I want to do my best to get Elshtain’s argument right and to state it clearly. Toward the end, however, I will raise a concern that might have impelled her to reflect a bit more on one of the major aspects of her thesis if time had permitted, which sadly it did not.

DOING POLITICAL THEORY

Elshtain’s point of departure in Public Man, Private Woman is deceptively simple, though hardly uncontroversial. Critique, though essential, is not enough. Theorists who wish to make a legitimate claim on our attention must also offer a coherent vision of a livable future (PMPW, 298). The reason is this: critique untethered from affirmative proposals may generate discontent with what exists, but with no guarantee that anything better is feasible. At best this discontent is impotent, fostering cynicism and withdrawal. At worst, it breeds rage against the current order, and the spirit of abstract negation that disfigures so many revolutionary movements.¹

In discharging this responsibility, it is not enough to give one’s imagination (or fantasies) free rein. To offer serious alternatives, theorists must engage with reality, plumbing its possibilities and its limits. This engagement lies at the core of political theory as a vocation. Theory at its best is strongly reformist, but not utopian; Elshtain chides some first-wave feminists (she appears to have in mind writers such as Ti-Grace Atkinson, Susan Brownmiller, Mary Daly, and Shulamith Firestone) for burdening women with “implausible visions of a future perfect world, the realization of which would require a total disconnection between the world we live in and the world they fantasize about” (PMPW, 358).

Although political theory need not, and often should not, leave the world unchanged, it mus...