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政治學 – 開欄文
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相對於社會學和心理學，我對政治學的興趣開始得比較晚。一方面從14、15歲開始，我主要想了解的問題在倫理學；另一方面，我和大多數人一樣，性向上急功近利；對政治學的興趣始於軍事學。
大學一年級前後我讀了徐訏先生的《回到個人主義與自由主義》，印象深刻。35歲以前，我在聖荷西大學附近舊書攤上，買了常常被其他學者介紹和引用的《君王論》和《政府論》，但大概都只讀了1/4或1/3。不過，馬克思的《政治經濟學批判》我倒是讀得非常仔細，此書也構成我對政治的基本理解。當然，之後偶而也會涉獵一些政治學方面的書籍，但為數不多。
在2002年以前，除了以上四本經典名著之外，我對政治/政治學的了解，大部分來自新聞報導和報紙/期刊上的政治評論。2001年我退休以後開使在網上漫遊；由於在不同論壇上經常和其他網友就政治理論與實際議題進行討論，我不時有「書到用時方恨少」的感慨。於是我開始花較多時間閱讀「政治學」領域的書籍。
我對「政治」的「定義」以及對「民主政治」的詮釋，都是根據以往30多年對政治實務的觀察，以及這段時間對政治理論的領悟，綜合兩者而形成。
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真共和與假民主 - J. Hankins
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這篇文章是本欄上一篇的簡略版。這兩篇評論的主旨和本欄2024/10/12以及2024/10/04兩篇貼文相近；對民主制度、共和制度、與美國憲法這三個議題有興趣的朋友，可以把它們合起來看。
Real Republics and Fake Democracies
James Hankins, 09/24/24
Americans have forgotten what the Founders knew about popular government.
In an essay recently published in The Free Press, the political commentator Martin Gurri made a nicely arch response to the fashionable hand-wringing about supposed threats to “our democracy.”
I come with good news. We can’t lose our democracy because we never had one. Our system is called “representative government.” It enjoys brief spasms of democratic involvement—elections, trials by jury—but by and large it glories in being densely and opaquely mediated, and many of its operations are patently undemocratic—appointed judges, for example, or the Electoral College. This is a feature, not a bug, of the system. By making sure the right hand of power seldom knows what the left hand is doing, the Framers sought to prevent various flavors of tyranny—including, in James Madison’s words, “an unjust combination of the majority.”
I suppose it was to avoid the appearance of partisanship that Gurri called our political regime “representative government” rather than using the name the Founders used, that is, a republic. This was no doubt a prudent choice of words on his part. So shallow is knowledge of history among our politicians, journalists, and the political nation in general that most would struggle to describe the difference between a republic and a ham sandwich. Heedless of capitalization, they would inevitably associate it with the name of one of our political parties, whose structure is no more republican than the Democratic Party’s organs are democratic. Or they might think of the Staatsname of other current republics like the Democratic Republic of North Korea, or the Islamic Republic of Iran. These associations would also be unenlightening. So “representative government” was no doubt Gurri’s best choice, but it is far from adequate as a description of how the Founders intended the country to govern itself.
(略去)
So what understandings of the term “republic” might they have gleaned from their reading?
First of all they would be aware, like Gurri, that a republic is not a democracy. (This is not as obvious as it seems: (以下略去)
When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean in the second century BC, the historian Polybius explained the growth of their power largely in terms of their (unwritten) constitution, which he recognized as a form of mixed regime. (以下略去) According to Cicero, Rome’s basic constitutional principles had been laid down by one of the early kings, Servius Tullius. Servius had established the bedrock principle that political power should be proportionate to a man’s income and his contribution to Rome’s military power. Poorer citizens could participate in assemblies but decision-making power was kept in the hands of the most influential citizens. The censors, a magistracy responsible (among other things) for deciding which citizens could belong to the Senate, judged them fit for membership not only on the basis of their moral rectitude, but also on their income. A man without sufficient income to support himself and his family comfortably without engaging in trade or a paid profession was ineligible.
Post-classical Athenians, by contrast, continued to call their city-state a democracy even after all the real power came to be exercised behind the scenes by wealthy oligarchs. The great authority on Hellenistic Greece, Peter Green, once wittily remarked that Athenians came to see democracy as a privilege best restricted to the upper classes. Modern parallels spring to mind. The Romans for their part were not in the least embarrassed about the preponderant power of the wealthy in their system. It was a feature, not a bug. But in Rome, the possession of wealth and preponderant power imposed upon the great the responsibility to put themselves and their treasure at the service of the republic. It was assumed that the wealthy would also be the best educated, the most likely to have experience in civil and military affairs, and, as persons of long residence in Rome, the most loyal and public-spirited.
If we began again to use the correct historical term for our regime—a republic—we might be able at least to have an honest discussion about who holds power in the American system.
In the middle republic (third and second centuries BC), the principle of merit was added to the Servian constitution: distinguished service to the state was also to be a source of dignitas or merited status. Thus “new men” like Cicero could be taken into the ruling elite on the basis of outstanding abilities and contributions to the republic’s welfare, the salus reipublicae. To prevent the powerful from oppressing the common people a new magistracy was invented, the tribunate, consisting of ten tribunes of the plebs. The existence of this magistracy led to the emergence of populist politics at the end of the second century BC, but Rome never became a democracy. Roman populism ultimately brought Julius Caesar and Augustus to power, over the opposition of the Senate. Rome’s populists were almost always led by nobles who were more devoted to acquiring power for themselves than serving the interests of the common people.
Cicero in his dialogue On the Commonwealth (54–51 BC) praised the old republic for favoring the best men or “optimates,” observing “the principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth, that the greatest number should not have the greatest power” (ne plurimum valeant plurimi). Rome should never be a democracy; that would be too dangerous for ordered liberty, which was guaranteed by law, not popular power.
In a democracy, Cicero believed, sensible public deliberation was impossible. In one of his speeches, Cicero mocked Greek democracies for their foolish practice of herding large numbers of ordinary citizens into amphitheaters and allowing them to shout at each other. The Romans, more sensibly, conducted deliberation in the Senate, among educated men with experience of government. The Senate proposed legislation and the people in their assemblies had the right to vote on the Senate’s proposals, up or down. This practice, that the wise should deliberate and propose, the people approve, was the normal procedure used by most European republics in the centuries before the founding of our American republic. It was recommended, among others, by James Harrington, a seventeenth-century British authority on republics widely read in America.
By establishing a House of Representatives to conduct its own deliberation and to propose all legislation involving taxation (a principle now apparently forgotten in Washington, DC), the Founders were attempting to rebalance the republican tradition they inherited in a popular direction, so that the interests of the wealthy could never prevail over those of the people. Nevertheless, they continued to uphold the view that the presumably wiser and better-educated men in the Senate—Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy”—should prevail in matters of foreign policy and the oversight of the other branches of government. The aristocratic element was also, originally, meant to prevail in the choice of the president, although the Electoral College was soon corrupted by party politics, at which point it lost its deliberative and most of its decision-making power.
But were history’s only democracies to be found in classical Greece? No. When Mr. Gibbon’s history began to be read in the early republic, Americans were given access to another concept of democracy, different from that associated with classical Athens, one that might be called honorary democracy or, less politely, fake democracy. This concept might remind us of the way the term is used by certain of our contemporaries.
Gibbon famously regarded the second-century AD, the period between the reigns of the emperors Domitian and Commodus, as “the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous.” The text upon which the great historian hung this judgment (to which, as an upholder of constitutional monarchy, he was predisposed) was an oration entitled An Encomium of Rome (ca. 154–55), written by Aelius Aristides.
Aristides, the most prominent Greek intellectual of his day, heaped praise on Rome as the greatest empire the world had ever known. It managed to combine unquestioned authority regulated by law with a free citizenry, and its government was not handed over to foreign princes but was administered by fair and disinterested citizen-officials, capable of ruling and being ruled in turn, as in the best days of classical Greece. For Aristides, the Roman empire was more like a city-state on a vast scale than a traditional despotism. Yet its courts of appeal, administered by Roman governors, were an improvement on city-state justice, and they treated everyone equally, no matter what their status. This was an achievement unprecedented in human history, and a great proof of Rome’s genius for government. Virtuous rule had made the empire flourish as no human government had ever done before. By widely extending citizen rights, the empire vastly increased the pool of talent upon which it could draw.
Aristides could think of no greater praise than to say that the Roman empire was like a democracy over all the earth, under a single best magistrate and bringer of cosmic order. The Roman system, he wrote, is the final state of mankind: “no other way of life is left”—it was the end of history, as it were. No longer does any city wish to revolt from it and to rule itself, and the Romans have made even the memory of war fade by doing away permanently with local struggles for preeminence. The whole world has become a garden with gleaming cities enjoying a perpetual festival of blessings from the emperor and the gods.
This, of course, is flattery under a mask of high-flown rhetoric, decorated with concepts from political philosophy. It didn’t matter that Aristides’s use of the word “democracy”—and he was by no means the only imperial subject who used the word in this sense—matched no known democratic regime in history and had nothing to do with political power in the hands of the people. It was just a word that had positive connotations in Greek; it would sound nice to his listeners and flatter them. Aristides was a professional orator-entertainer who went about the Greek world giving speeches before audiences educated to appreciate the fine art of eloquence. In this instance, Aristides was speaking before the imperial court, and he knew what to say to win their approval.
As far as I know, the founding generation never discussed Aristides’ faux democracy. They were serious men who understood the history of political regimes. But perhaps the time to revive Aristides’ concept has now come. Modern politicos who talk glibly of “our democracy” might be asked to explain to the rest of us just what they think democracy is. Is it just a nice-sounding word used to flatter themselves and their political allies, or do they support putting real power in the hands of popular assemblies on the basis of equality? If neither of those alternatives seems palatable, perhaps they might avail themselves of the correct adjective to describe our constitution: republican.
Martin Gurri is right: we are not a democracy. We are a republic, and that is no bad thing. Republics come in several flavors, aristocratic, popular, and mixed. Not all of them are militaristic and dominated by warlords and the wealthy, as the late Roman republic was. In late medieval and early modern times, most republics preferred trade and industry to making war. Even so, some of these commercial republics lasted a very long time, like Venice, which endured for 1,100 years, or Lucca, which lasted for almost 650 years. (Both were crushed by Napoleon.) If modern advocates for “our democracy” fancy themselves lovers of the people, they might appreciate the fact that our republic at its founding was already weighted towards the popular more than previous early modern republics had been. The Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution made it still more so. If we began again to use the correct historical term for our regime we might be able at least to have an honest discussion about who holds power in the American system, and whether they deserve to do so, instead of playing make-believe with terms that conceal more than they reveal.
James Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. His most recent books are Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy.
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共和制和做為倫理準則的民主制 -- James Hankins
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韓金斯教授這篇演講文長了一些(1)，雖然一處有內在衝突，另一處似乎近於「認知障礙」；但是總體而言，還算有料。它至少能幫助我們了解所謂「民主制度」的缺點。
另一方面，該文也讓一些開口閉口「西方民主」的人士了解：西方人(至少某些西方學者)自己非常了解「西方民主」有那些所謂的缺點；不像此處某些「政治學者」只會拿「西方民主」一詞當「稻草人」，但是對「西方民主」到底有什麼缺點，卻說不出個所以然。
我會盡量找時間提出拙見，略做討論。
套用一個流行詞(請參見此欄開欄文的附註8)，我開個玩笑：
那些替中共當局擦脂抹粉的「援嘴」們，如果多讀過幾本書，就不會拿「西方民主」說嘴，直接把當下中國政權稱之為：「有『中國特色』的共和制」就更夠力了。
附註：
1. 韓金斯教授正文中提及他的另一篇文章。該文只有此演講一半字數，而且內容大致相同，我會刪節重複同時不是重點部份後刊出。不想讀長篇大論的網友，可以稍等一會兒。
索引：
contrive：謀劃，策劃，設計
dignitarian thinking：人格尊嚴論
eo ipso：「僅以此而論」
Federalist Papers, The：聯邦論者說帖
ineradicable：無法根除的；根深蒂固的
magistrates, Greek：古希臘的行政/司法長官；有資格出任者(貴族、地主、…)，經考核後以抽籤方式選出；請見超連結
magistrate, Roman：古羅馬官職，請見超連結
Marshall, John：曾任聯邦最高法院首席大法官
parlous condition：危險狀況，破落狀況
plebs：平民，老百姓
salus reipublicae：此處：國家利益，國家前途；國家安全
sui iuris：獨立自主
tribunate：tribune為古羅馬官職，10個tribune構成一個tribunate。
Whig：英國政黨(1678 -- 1859)
Republics and the Ethical Ideal of Democracy
Both sides accuse the other of being a threat to democracy. But what does that really mean?
James Hankins, 11/08/24
Editor’s note: This is an edited version of a talk given to the John Marshall Program at Boston College on November 4, 2024.
Let me begin by thanking David DiPasquale for the kind invitation to cross the Charles River and address the John Marshall Program (JMP) here at Boston College and Dallas Terry for helping with the arrangements. When we settled on the date I was working with the professional/academic part of my brain and somehow tuned out the fact that the lecture would take place on the day before the election. The staff of JMP had read an essay I wrote for Law & Liberty about the historical uses of the terms “republic” and “democracy.” They asked me to speak on that subject, but relate it to the timelier theme of elections. I agreed, stipulating that I didn’t want to make a partisan speech but give a historical reflection. However, now that the moment has come to put my ideas into words, I’m not finding it easy to evade the charge of partisanship. We are experiencing a moment of particularly strong passion in our already passionate political life, being literally on the eve of what people are saying is the most important election of our lifetimes. (Let me reassure the younger people in the room that this has been said of every election in my lifetime of nearly seven decades.)
My problem is not just trying to speak on a historical subject at a moment when my audience will be hypersensitive to the partisan implications of my remarks. Election season is a moment when civic-minded people are focused on the present and the future. To bring up the past, especially the remote past I’m going to talk about, appears as an annoying distraction from our most important concerns as a nation. For me personally, it’s also a challenge to speak about history in a moment when the shallowness of Americans’ historical knowledge, and the consequent poverty of our public discourse, have become blindingly obvious. Simple-minded traditionalists like myself have the idea that before elections we should be engaging in some kind of democratic deliberation, discussing the merits of the candidate’s policy proposals, for example. Instead, public discourse has degenerated into an ignorant exercise in name-calling. One side calls the other fascist, the other side calls their opponents communist.
Both claims are hysterical and historically illiterate, and the fact that they are taken seriously at all by anyone is a condemnation of American civic education as well as the absence of deliberation in our public life. Most serious democratic thinkers, from the fifth century BC sophist Protagoras onwards, have believed that participation in the public life of a democracy via deliberation was itself an educational experience for all citizens, and one necessary to the flourishing of democracy. Instead, public deliberation is being led by people who throw around terms of whose meaning they are invincibly ignorant, terms like “republican” and “democratic.” To my mind, it’s like going to an academic conference on biology organized and conducted by people who don’t understand the meaning of the terms botany, zoology, micro-organism, or cell structure.
A disturbing feature of the present moment in our public life is that both sides are accusing the other of being a threat to democracy. People who hold that the events of January 6, 2020, can be plausibly described as the worst insurrection since the Civil War identify the Republican candidate as the chief source of this threat. The wealthiest man in the world shouts back through his megaphone on “X” that the real threat to democracy comes from people who accuse the Republican nominee of endangering democracy. Both parties in the US now take the position that “it’s only democracy when we win.”
No wonder that the latest Georgetown Institute of Politics and Public Service Battleground Civility Poll shows that an alarming number of Americans across party lines believe that the democratic system of government is under threat, although for very different reasons. The poll, conducted by a consortium of Republican and Democratic pollsters, found that 81 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that democracy in America is currently under threat, and 72 percent agreed with that statement strongly. Americans disagree about the source of the threat, however. The forces in America identified as very serious threats to democracy include MAGA Republicans (49 percent, 34 percent extremely serious), major news organizations (47 percent, 24 percent extremely serious), and social media (43 percent, 23 percent extremely serious).
Americans have an almost religious belief that we are a democracy and that democracy is precious to us. On the right, it is said that our personal freedoms depend on democracy, while the left emphasizes that our goodness as a people is threatened by a breakdown in democracy. Everybody has an opinion about this subject, myself included. But a much smaller number seem to have a clear understanding of what democracy is.
Many people, especially foreigners, seem surprised to learn that the US Constitution outlines a form of government that is not democratic, but republican. Many Americans have only a vague conceptions of what a republic is. I remember a student—and a Harvard history major!—writing on an exam I gave some years ago that “republic is just an old name for democracy.” In fact, the thinkers who most shaped the US Constitution, John Adams and James Madison, had a horror of the democratic form of government, which they understood from their reading of history to be a proven failure, leading inevitably and quickly to violence, anarchy, and ultimately tyranny. As John Adams wrote in a letter to John Taylor in 1814, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Even Jefferson, the Founder most confident in the power of the people to govern themselves, thought direct democracy could only be exercised at the local level, and that the principle of self-government would have to be diluted by the device of representation—a republican device—if it were to operate over large areas. Late in life, Jefferson admitted in a letter to William Charles Jarvis (1820) that the American system of a government, consisting as it did of three distinct and independent branches, would not be able to resist judicial oligarchies abusing their powers on partisan impulses unless the people were to step in to prevent that outcome, using their “wholesome discretion.” But they would lack such discretion absent a serious program of civic education, which in that period, before the founding of the public school system in the 1840s, did not exist.
Of course, democracy is not only a form of government, that is, a particular kind of regime or constitution. A democratic regime, as it was understood in antiquity, is like the one used in Athens in the fifth century BC: a form of government, in other words, in which the people govern themselves via councils and assemblies, random selection of magistrates by lot, and juries consisting of hundreds of jurors to prevent bribery and the undue influence of the wealthy on the judicial process. Democracy as it exists in America is better understood, not as a regime, but as an ethical ideal, one that has grown and developed since the Reformation into a way of life and thought built around three concepts: popular sovereignty, personal autonomy, and equality. This characterization of democracy and its fundamental concepts come from what I believe is the best book ever written on the history of democracy as an ethical ideal, namely my colleague James Kloppenberg’s book Towards Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (Oxford 2016). As Kloppenberg notes, democracy as an ethical ideal is unthinkable without the influence of Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity.
So for the balance of this talk, I aim, first, to explain why the United States Constitution does not outline a democratic regime but a republic, and why the Founders thought a republican regime could channel the popular will without suffering from the bad design of the democratic regimes they knew from history. Second, I will discuss democracy as an ethical ideal and way of life, and argue that the aspirations of Americans to be a democratic society, which emerged strongly after the American Revolution, are failing to be realized. I will leave it up to you to decide for yourselves which party or parties in America are most responsible for that failure.
First, let me put a bit more meat on the bones of my claim that the American system of government is republican (lowercase R!), not democratic (lowercase D!). The reason why the Founders did not want a democratic system of government is that, unlike modern Americans, they knew something about Western history and particularly British history. Anyone who has read The Federalist Papers or the private correspondence of the Founders will be aware of just how deep their knowledge was. John Adams was already exciting Americans in 1774 with the thought that their generation could play the role of the ancient Greek legislators Lycurgus and Solon, or the Roman king Servius Tullius, who established Rome’s Servian constitution. In 1776 he wrote in a famous letter known as Thoughts on Government.
You and I, my dear Friend, have been sent into life, at a time when the greatest law-givers of antiquity would have wished to have lived. How few of the human race have ever enjoyed an opportunity of making an election of government more than of air, soil, or climate, for themselves or their children. When, before the present epoch, had three millions of people full power and a fair opportunity to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive?
The Founders were bookish people, and they turned for inspiration as much to history as to political theorists such as Aristotle, Locke, Algernon Sidney, and Montesquieu. Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731, which became effectively the Library of Congress during that assembly’s long residence in the city, was well-stocked with histories. The shelves of John Adams’ library, the largest in colonial America, were also loaded with works of history. His writings, like those of Jefferson and Madison, teem with references to the republics of past times: to the ancient Romans above all, but also to the medieval Italian republics, to the Venetian, Swiss, and Dutch republics, and above all, to the English Commonwealth of the seventeenth century. (Note that the word “commonwealth” is just an English translation of the Latin respublica).
Human beings have an ineradicable inclination to evil as well as to good, which is why we need the constraints of a republican regime.
Some of the Founders read Latin, Greek, and French as well as English. They read Thucydides (often in Hobbes’ translation), Livy, Sallust, Cicero, and Tacitus; they read Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans in Sir Thomas North’s translation; they read Polybius in the translation of James Hampton (in whose pages they could learn about the federal republics of ancient Greece); they read Edward Mortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of Ancient Republics; of the Italians, they read Leonardo Bruni’s History of the Florentine People, Guicciardini’s History of Italy, and Machiavelli’s History of Florence; they read John Jacob Mascou’s History of the Ancient Germans; they read David Hume’s six-volume History of England and Obadiah Hulme’s Historical Essay on the English Constitution. As soon as each volume of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire left the presses, between 1775 and 1788, copies flew across the Atlantic and were eagerly consumed by Americans. Americans had good reason to be interested in the collapse of states in those years, when the new Confederation in North America was being torn apart by its weak central institutions.
So what understandings of the term “republic” might they have gleaned from their reading? First of all, they would be aware that a republic is not a democracy. The Founders knew what a democracy was and had no interest in giving America a democratic constitution. They knew their history. The historical experience of classical Athens was taken by nearly all the historians the Founders knew to prove that a democratic constitution was doomed to failure.
Already in the fourth century BC, it was widely believed by Greek thinkers that both pure democracy (Athens) and pure oligarchy (Sparta) were failed forms of government. The great political theorists of the fourth century BC—Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates, and Xenophon—had all proposed various fixes for the defects of democracy. The most influential of these was Aristotle’s “mixed” regime, where elements of democracy and oligarchy were balanced against each other to produce stability. Later, Polybius and other writers in the Aristotelian tradition added a monarchical principle for added stability. Aristotle called his mixed regime politeia.
When Aristotle’s Politics was translated into Latin around 1436/37 by the Florentine historian Leonardo Bruni, politeia became respublica. Bruni’s translation was the most popular Latin version for centuries. The 1597 Geneva edition was in John Adams’ library. (Adams also possessed the 1776 edition of the Politics in the English translation of William Ellis, first printed in 1597, where the constitution named politeia was translated, unhelpfully, as “state.”)
When the Romans conquered the Mediterranean in the second century BC, the historian Polybius explained the growth of their power largely in terms of their (unwritten) constitution, which he recognized as a form of mixed regime. The Romans were proud of their republic even in the dark decades of civil war during the first century BC, blaming Rome’s ㄠ condition on the moral defects of powerful warlords rather than on any weaknesses in her constitution. According to Cicero, Rome’s basic constitutional principles had been laid down by one of the early kings, Servius Tullius. Servius had established the bedrock principle that political power should be proportionate to a man’s income and his contribution to Rome’s military power. Poorer citizens could participate in assemblies but decision-making power was kept in the hands of the most influential citizens. The censors, a magistracy responsible (among other things) for deciding which citizens could belong to the Senate, judged them fit for membership not only on the basis of their moral rectitude, but also on their income. A man without sufficient income to support himself and his family comfortably without engaging in trade or a paid profession was ineligible.
Post-classical Athenians, by contrast, continued to call their city-state a democracy even after all the real power came to be exercised behind the scenes by wealthy oligarchs. As the great authority on Hellenistic Greece, Peter Green, once wittily remarked, Athenians came to see democracy as a privilege best restricted to the upper classes. Modern parallels spring to mind. The Romans for their part were not in the least embarrassed about the preponderant power of the wealthy in their system. It was a feature, not a bug. But in Rome, the possession of wealth and preponderant power imposed upon the great the responsibility to put themselves and their treasure at the service of the republic. It was assumed that the wealthy would also be the best educated, the most likely to have experience in civil and military affairs, and, as persons of long residence in Rome, the most loyal and public-spirited.
In the middle republic (third to second centuries BC), the principle of merit was added to the Servian constitution: distinguished service to the state was also to be a source of dignitas or merited status. Thus, “new men” like Cicero could be taken into the ruling elite on the basis of outstanding abilities and contributions to the republic’s welfare, the salus reipublicae. To prevent the powerful from oppressing the common people, a new magistracy was invented, the tribunate, consisting of ten tribunes of the plebs. The existence of this magistracy led to the emergence of populist politics at the end of the second century BC, but Rome never became a democracy. Roman populism ultimately brought Julius Caesar and Augustus to power, over the opposition of the Senate. Rome’s populists were almost always led by nobles who were more devoted to acquiring power for themselves than serving the interests of the common people.
Cicero, in his dialogue On the Commonwealth (54/51 BC), praised the old republic for favoring the best men or “optimates,” observing “the principle which ought always to be adhered to in the commonwealth, that the greatest number should not have the greatest power” (ne plurimum valeant plurimi). Rome should never be a democracy; that would be too dangerous for ordered liberty, which was guaranteed by law, not popular power.
In a democracy, Cicero believed, sensible public deliberation was impossible. In one of his speeches, Cicero mocked Greek democracies for their foolish practice of herding large numbers of ordinary citizens into amphitheaters and allowing them to shout at each other. The Romans, more sensibly, conducted deliberation in the Senate, among educated men with experience of government. The Senate proposed legislation and the people in their assemblies had the right to vote on the Senate’s proposals, up or down. This practice, that the wise should deliberate and propose, the people approve, was the normal procedure used by most European republics in the centuries before the founding of our American republic. It was recommended by many of the Whig writers—among them The Commonwealth of Oceana by James Harrington—that were widely read in America.
By establishing a House of Representatives to conduct its own deliberation and to propose all legislation involving taxation (a principle now apparently forgotten in Washington, DC), the Founders were attempting to rebalance the republican tradition they inherited in a popular direction, so that the interests of the wealthy could never prevail over those of the people. Nevertheless, they continued to uphold the view that the presumably wiser and better-educated men in the Senate—Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy”—should prevail in matters of foreign policy and in the oversight of the other branches of government. The aristocratic element was also, originally, meant to prevail in the choice of the president, through the Electoral College. The Electoral College was supposed to deliberate about the election results and exercise its discretion, but it very quickly, within a decade of the Constitution’s adoption, was corrupted by party politics. At this point, it lost its deliberative and decision-making power.
All that being said, most of the Founders were much more optimistic than the tradition they inherited about the possibility that ordinary citizens could engage in democratic deliberation. What this shows, I believe—and here I am again following Jim Kloppenberg as well as Gordon Wood’s classic work, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992)—is that the founding generation and the generations that followed were imbued with the democratic spirit. I mean here the ethical ideal of democracy, as distinct from the political regime. As an ethical ideal, democracy will always be aspirational. Like other ethical ideals, the frailty of human nature means that we will always fall short in our efforts to realize it. Human beings have an ineradicable inclination to evil as well as to good, which is why we need the constraints of a republican regime.
As analyzed by Kloppenberg, the democratic ideal has three main elements: popular sovereignty, individual autonomy, and equality. Popular sovereignty means that the ultimate authority in the state is the people, and that the form of government, whether constitutional monarchy, aristocratic republic, or popular republic, should reflect its will. Members of this John Madison Program will recognize this as Rousseau’s view in The Social Contract, who posited that the sovereign will of the people could be invested in a regime at the moment, historical or notional, when the social contract was formed. After that moment of authorization, the regime established by the contract did not need to seek continuous and regular authorization from the people for its subsequent acts. In the democratic republics that emerged in the nineteenth century, however—modeled to a large extent on the American republic—the popular will had to be expressed continuously through representatives, duly constrained by law and the enumerated powers given to the legislature by the Constitution. Thus, in the American republic, popular sovereignty implies both participation—being open to citizen participation at all levels and in all branches of government—and representation, the authorization of persons who can then represent the will of citizens in the legislature. As the democratic spirit has spread, any barriers to political participation based on race, sex, or property qualifications have been torn down. At the same time, it is widely recognized that popular sovereignty needs constitutional limits to protect individual rights, the common good, and civil peace and stability.
If people do not have confidence that elections are honest and that the courts are non-political, then there can be no democracy.
The gradual removal of barriers to participation has come from the second element identified by Kloppenberg as part of the ethical ideal of democracy: individual autonomy. This means self-rule, being sui iuris as the Romans would say, not being treated or acting as subject to another, but free to choose ends for oneself. In America and Europe, the impetus behind the modern commitment to autonomy came most powerfully from the struggle against slavery and unfree labor. Autonomy combines both positive and negative freedom, the freedom to rule oneself and specific freedoms from constraints imposed by the public power—civil rights, in other words. Autonomy means that all adult citizens should have the capacity to shape their own lives, within the standards set by law, tradition, and custom. All citizens should also be able to participate on an equal basis in shaping those standards, and revising them when necessary. Liberal pluralism is a valuable thing in a country as diverse as ours, but ideally, it should be based on explicit democratic authorization, not imposed by the courts. This is especially the case when advocates of pluralism seek to change settled ways of life, above all those affecting the family and religion. When judges impose pluralism (as Jefferson noted in the letter of 1816 referred to earlier), the people are likely to become estranged from the legal elites who take it upon themselves to dictate social norms.
This brings us to the third element in the democratic ethic: equality. Equality means, minimally, equality of political rights and equality before the law. These were ancient ideals, associated, respectively, with Greece and Rome. In addition, Aristotle recognized that great inequality of incomes was destabilizing and counseled, as a maxim of practical wisdom, as distinct from a principle of justice, that legislators should act to prevent too much inequality in a state.
Modern ideals of equality descend from the idea of innate human equality, a principle first enunciated by the Greek church father Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century AD. He based the principle of human equality on the individual possession of reason, on being formed in the image and likeness of God, and on the New Testament injunction to treat others, even the poorest and weakest of human beings, as though they were Christ. The republican political tradition was impregnated with these notions via radical Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The modern democratic ethic represents a secularization of these ideas. The weightiest defender of human dignity in its secularized form was Immanuel Kant, whose moral philosophy has been a major source of much later dignitarian thinking.
It is not the exclusive role of governments, of course, to support the democratic ethical ideal; like any other set of ethical beliefs, they need all the sources of reinforcement they can get, including parental teaching, civic education, religious institutions, professional norms, and community standards. Nevertheless, if we want our republic to have a democratic spirit, we need to recognize the ethical preconditions of a democratic way of life, and governments must do what they can to support those norms, or at least not get in their way. Allowing elections to take place is a necessary condition, but hardly a sufficient one.
For the sake of discussion, let me give a short list of three things I believe governments must do to foster the ethical ideal of democracy—what we might also call the democratic way of life or the democratic spirit. There are other preconditions of democratic civil life, but these seem to be the most pressing at the moment.
First, in order to support healthy forms of pluralism and autonomy, democratic states need to foster a particular kind of sociability. They must be committed to allowing fundamental differences between and among the people to persist, including religious differences. Safeguards should exist, at least in the form of peer pressure or common norms, to prevent political parties from demonizing each other. Single political parties should not be allowed to monopolize the public square in which support may be sought from the people. They should also not be allowed to monopolize public education. The government needs to foster a commitment to tolerance. It cannot allow itself to be taken over by utopian fanatics determined to impose their beliefs on their fellow citizens. Governments and public institutions need to encourage a spirit of live and let live, a spirit of reciprocity, and not try to impose a fixed unitary conception of the good life. They need to support a kind of sociability, in short, which allows people of very different beliefs to live and work together with an attitude of mutual respect. This, to me, is far more important to democracy than preserving what is called “diversity” by departments of Human Resources, diversity based only on arbitrary definitions of group identity.
This sort of sociability is much harder to maintain around election time, of course, but I submit that it has been some time, well over two decades, since the spirit of democratic sociability has prevailed in the councils of our government.
Secondly, states must also promote genuine democratic deliberation, and not only among elected representatives in constitutional assemblies. They must also, as much as possible, include the people as a whole in democratic deliberation, promote rational persuasion, and prevent the use of force or fraud in determining the outcomes of political choices. They should be wary of declaring states of emergency, as these are historically the antechamber to tyranny. As an example of what should not be done, I would mention the health dictatorships established during the Covid panic. These curtailed our liberties in the most dramatic fashion, and we the people had little to say about it. Democracy almost completely disappeared at just the moment when the state had assumed unprecedented dictatorial power over us. Most of the time these dictatorships were legal in the sense of operating under legislative authority, but that authority was originally designed to last for short periods, not for many months and years. Not allowing proper democratic deliberation in legislatures by the people’s representative about issues that affected everyone’s lives and livelihoods has done much to undermine the idea that our republic is an expression of the will of the people. It caused the hypertrophy of conspiratorial thinking, always a sign of a lack of transparency or the use of deceit in decision-making.
Finally, for the democratic spirit to flourish, governments have to foster an ethic of impartiality among those who are the umpires of democratic deliberation, namely, those who run the electoral system and the courts. The law cannot be politicized or weaponized by one party against another. If people do not have confidence that elections are honest and that the courts are non-political, then there can be no democracy. This principle of impartiality of course is an ethical derivative of the Roman republican conception of the rule of law, a civil law derived from natural law and standing above politics. It is apparently difficult for many people to understand that they cannot oppose persons they take to be demagogues by corrupting the legal system. This only makes the law itself into a demagogue. It should be a primary goal of public education to teach young citizens what the rule of law means, its history, and its successes and failures. This means the young need to be taught Western history, beginning with Roman history.
The ancient Romans saw clearly the need for an impartial and non-partisan legal system. Cicero’s solution to the problems of demagoguery and warlordism in his time was to limit popular self-rule through the rule of law and to prevent political abuse of the law by placing its interpretation in the hands of the wise, a relatively new class of legal experts known as jurisconsults. Roman civil law, which had begun to coalesce as a system of rules for settling court cases in the second century BC, had by Cicero’s time assumed the character of an autonomous source of right, set above social and political competition, to which appeal might be made by all Roman citizens on a basis of equality. In a famous speech, In Defense of Aulus Caecina, Cicero maintained that it was this autonomy of law, its superiority to politics, that made it the “incorruptible guarantor” of civil rights. It created “the bonds of social welfare and life” and had therefore to be “uniform among all and identical for everyone.”
The strong separation of legal processes—in principle at least—from the corruptions of politics became a bedrock principle of Western legal thought. It was reformulated and strengthened in the eighteenth century as the principle of an independent judiciary. For the Romans, the separation of law from politics was what made a man free: it protected him and his property from more powerful figures in the state and their political projects. As Cicero put it, using a dramatic paradox, “the magistrates are ministers of the law, the judges are its interpreters, and we are thus all slaves to the law so that we can be free.” Roman citizens were subject to the law, not to persons; and if they became subject to persons, they were eo ipso slaves or dependents, not sui iuris, directly under law. For this system to work, lawyers had to see themselves as representatives of the law, not of political parties, demagogues, warlords, or any particular interest. It was their solemn obligation and sacred duty to uphold the law and justice, and to put its integrity before any private interest. The requirement that a judge should be impartial and never align himself with a political party, as this group will know, was a bedrock principle of our first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall.
I submit that in all these respects, America is failing to uphold the ethical ideal of democracy, and we are actually falling away from that ideal, becoming less democratic, rather than simply failing to make progress. What are the causes of this deplorable situation and what should be done about it I leave open to discussion.
James Hankins is a professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Writer at Law & Liberty. His most recent books are Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy and Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy.
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許多研究社會科學或人文科學的學者，常常因為有意無意的使用「擬人化」的論述方式，把思考方向或思考結果搞得不合邏輯(1)。(也許這樣大眾才比較容易上當)。我在這裏提供各位20字真言：
「意識無意識，國家無需要，社會無公義，制度不打壓」。
只有「人」才有意識，才有需要，才會假公義之名，滿足私利，才會設計制度來打壓其他的「人」(也就是你和我)。下次你再聽到有人說：「國家需要如何、如何」時，你可以將它翻譯成：「我(說話者)需要如何、如何」。如果你也剛好「需要」如此這般，那你們正好相見歡。如果你並不「需要」如此這般，你大可不必因為她拿「國家」當「我」的代名詞，就幫著她數鈔票。
同樣的，有些人喜歡說：「制度就是如此」。如果你覺得這個「制度」在打壓或剝削你，你要了解︰
打壓或剝削你的不是這個「制度」，是設計這個制度的「人」或「一群人」；以及披著「制度」這張虎皮，或扯著「制度」這張大旗的「人」或「一群人」，在打壓或剝削你。
除非此「人」是白痴，我敢打賭，99%的情況下，他們做這樣設計，一定有私人的目的。(例如打壓或剝削你、我)。他們這樣做，並沒有，也不需要任何「權利」或「正當性」，只要他們掌握權力就可以了。你大可不必因為他們拿「國家」(社會、憲政、法律等亦同)當冠詞或當「我」的代名詞，就幫著他們數鈔票。你可以選擇在這個「制度」外生活，你也可以選擇顛覆、打破、或重新設計它(2)。
後記：
以上摘錄自我在2002年的舊作。我同意「國家觀念」有它一定的功能，但在今天，它已如上述，被濫用到成為貪贓枉法或巧取豪奪的「理由」和「正當性」。在陳某手上，「台獨建國」和「入聯公投」就是這麼玩的。馬先生的「返聯公投」一樣是玩弄「國家觀念」來欺騙老百姓的手法。
可惡和可恨的是，政客們在美國人面前卻坦承自己這種公然欺騙的下三濫行為；更可惡和可恨的是，一些掛著學術羊頭的三客流(該欄2024/07/07 附註1)，跳出來替這些下三濫政客擦屁股，還振振有詞的拿什麼「知識論」、「方法論」替自己這種不堪聞問的勾當抹粉。讀書人無恥起來，還真的是叫人感到無法無天。 -- 2011
由於我評論2024諾貝爾經濟學獎三位得主的「研究成果」會引用以上這幾段文字，但又一時找不到它在本城市的位置，所以重登一次。同時略做修改和增加超連接。 -- 11/2024
附註︰
1. 其他的例子如：哲學家常將歷史、自然、意識等概念「擬人化」，造成許多思考過程上的混淆。如「歷史的法則」、「大自然的反撲」、和「意識的意向性」等。如果改成以下的說法，能避免許多思路上的混淆：「人類活動的法則」、「大自然的變化」、和「一個人思考的意向性」。
2. 這段話只是就理論而言。實際上，一個人通常會考慮行為的後果是否符合他/她生活的目的。如果一個人選擇用暴力來反抗制度，他/她必須面對利用這個制度的人的反撲。我不是在鼓吹以暴制暴，我只是申論它的「正當性」。
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美國憲法與聯邦最高法院 ---- Nicholas Reed Langen
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這篇文章評論齊墨林斯基教授《沒有一個歷久不衰的民主制度》一書。美國憲法和聯邦最高法院都是政治學熱門議題，本欄上一篇也以批評該書開局，故轉登於此。以後再做評論。
America’s Broken Constitution
Nicholas Reed Langen, 10/11/24
While many argue that America’s founding document must be completely overhauled, reforming the Supreme Court may well be sufficient. And with the Electoral College and the Senate politically off-limits, bringing the Court into the twenty-first century may have to suffice.
LONDON – Calling the United States a democracy has become a bit of a stretch. Even the country’s (and the world’s) most feted democratic event is an illusion of popular will. Owing to the Electoral College, most Americans’ votes for president are ultimately irrelevant. The outcome depends not on the collective desire of the American people, but rather on the whims of a tiny sliver of voters in a few counties in a few states.
Legislative elections are little better, thanks to the distortive effects of gerrymandering, whereby partisan officials draw Dalí-esque electoral districts to benefit their own party. It is a case of politicians choosing their voters, with the skill of the cartographer more important than the wants of the people.
The upshot is that presidents often do not command the confidence of most of the country, and legislators are more interested in pandering to their base than serving the country’s interests. If there was a credible, independent check on these two branches of government, it could keep America on its constitutional rails and prevent politicians from veering off toward autocracy or mob rule. But there is not, because the US constitution is guarded by a Supreme Court whose current members not only embrace political partisanship, but wallow in it.
No longer do some justices even pretend to be calling “balls and strikes,” as Chief Justice John Roberts famously put it at his confirmation hearing 19 years ago. In the big cases that truly matter, justices ultimately will cleave to their sectarian identities, using politics, rather than the law, as their guide. Although they will cite the text of the Constitution and pay lip service to fundamental judicial principles, these references are there not to ground the decision but to conceal the politics.
A Constitution for Another Time
In No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley Law School, concludes that the only solution to America’s constitutional predicament is to start over. If America is to remain a democracy, he argues, tinkering with the system – whether by judicial fiat or constitutional amendment – may not be enough. Only by going back to the beginning might it be possible to undo the fundamental flaws at the core of America’s constitutional order.
Chemerinsky wants us to recognize that no one setting out to establish a democratic political system today would draft anything like the US founding charter. Even if you take the constitution as it was after the Civil War – when slavery finally lost its legal protection, and the franchise had been expanded beyond property-owning men – you would have a fundamentally dysfunctional document. You would have a constitution that valorizes free speech at the cost of true speech, elevates gun ownership above almost everything else, and disproportionately weights the views of citizens who live in states that are more prairie and mountain than city and town.
As Chemerinsky puts it, “the Southern and Midwestern states that have disproportionate power in the Electoral College are red [Republican], while the states with the largest underrepresented urban populations are blue [Democratic].” Couple these structural forces with the country’s changing demographics and you “may make misfire elections much more common.” Wyoming, with a population of 581,000, has the same number of senators as California, with its population of 39 million. Of course, those who cite this statistic often ignore its counterpart: Texas (31 million) has the same number of senators as tiny Rhode Island (1.1 million).
There were good reasons for many of these oddities at the beginning. But that was two and a half centuries ago. Writing at a time when political systems were vulnerable either to tyranny or mob rule, America’s founders were seeking to chart a new course. But they did not assume that they were drafting a document to stand for all time. There was no expectation that what worked in 1787 would work in 2024. On the contrary, the drafters ensured that the constitution could be amended, so that it could grow and develop as the country did. They were crafting “political compromises on all issues,” not declaiming holy writ for the ages.
Missing the Mark
Chemerinsky offers various proposals to update and fix the system, ultimately concluding that America needs a new constitution. His first priority is to abolish or reform the Electoral College. But even if this was done, it would not fundamentally alter the constitutional and political landscape. For all of its absurdities, and for all the attention it gets every four years, the Electoral College has returned a president who lost the popular vote on only two occasions since the nineteenth century, when it did so three times.
Yes, those two occasions include two of the last six presidential elections, in 2000 and 2016, both resulting in a Republican victory, and the same could happen again this year. But fixating on the Electoral College ignores the elephant in the room: America is divided down the middle between red and blue. Though the Electoral College benefits Republican presidential candidates, the popular vote would benefit Democrats. The Electoral College nudges the dial for president toward the red, and the popular vote would nudge it toward the blue. On this basis alone, the Republican Party will never permit a reform.
Chemerinsky’s second key reform concerns the Senate, where he thinks representation should be reallocated to reflect demography rather than geography. Chemerinsky acknowledges that an equal distribution of senators among the states was “essential to creating the Constitution,” even if it made “the Senate significantly undemocratic from the start.” But it is not clear that it has become less essential, even if the imbalance is “far more disturbing today as the disparity in population … has grown enormously over time.” Parity in the Senate recognizes the contribution of each sovereign state to the American project. Reallocating senators based on population would undermine this. The 50 states may be equal, but some would be more equal than others.
Moreover, Chemerinsky’s solution would elevate America’s urban centers (which lean blue) at the cost of rural districts (which lean red), again raising the question of why a collection of states that cannot agree on even moderate reforms would ever come together to overhaul the entire system. Republicans are fully aware that they benefit from a status quo that rewards geography over demography.
Acknowledging this, Chemerinsky points out that major reforms of America’s political order have always necessarily come during periods of great division, and often at great cost. Most obviously, it took a civil war to abolish slavery. But if an attempted coup and a violent insurrection at the Capitol were not enough to convince Republicans of the need for change, it is unclear what would.
Purblind Justice
Fortunately, there is a more straightforward potential solution. All of the fundamental flaws that Chemerinsky identifies are reparable by the courts, with the exception of senatorial representation and the Electoral College. Gerrymandering, campaign finance, free speech, and other issues can all – and have been – brought before the judiciary. Ever since Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court’s authority to settle otherwise divisive constitutional matters has been substantial, if not unquestioned.
Since diving headfirst into the thicket of constitutional conundrums at the dawn of the republic, the Court has never retreated. At various points in time, it has affirmed the constitutionality of slavery, upheld gerrymandering, awarded corporations the same right to free speech as citizens, and forbidden states from regulating banks, guns, and health care. It has proven willing to recognize constitutional rights and to take them away. As Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw, every political question in America eventually becomes a judicial one.
But the Supreme Court’s authority per se is not a concern. Though some commentators may bemoan the fact that an unelected body wields such power, the role of the judiciary is a core feature of liberal democracy. It is a vital safeguard to keep the state from going down the path of autocracy or mob rule. But it absolutely is concerning that the Supreme Court has become more of a political body than a judicial one.
True, the Court has never been free of politics and factionalism. Marbury was written by Chief Justice John Marshall, who had served as President John Adams’s Secretary of State before his appointment to the bench. But even if Marshall’s judgment was colored by extrajudicial factors, it ultimately stood on its own two feet. By contrast, later Supreme Court benches have been less adept at casting their political decisions as judicial ones.
Until this century, the most obvious period of apparent politicization was the 1897-1937 Lochner era, which culminated in the clashes between the Court and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Five of the Court’s nine justices were vehemently opposed to the New Deal and sought to smother it in its crib. Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, a former Republican presidential candidate, consistently joined with the conservative “Four Horsemen” on the Court to strike down flagship policies like the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, as well as the Roosevelt administration’s attempts to regulate coal mining and agriculture. Each measure was deemed to lie beyond the constitutional competence of Congress or the White House.
The ostensible intellectual basis for this evisceration of government policy was the Four Horsemen’s commitment to “originalism.” Insisting that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed at the moment of its ratification, they claimed they were obliged to interpret its text accordingly. Never mind that the founders expressly repudiated this approach. The problem with originalism is not only that it is inconsistent with original intent; it is that it is inconsistent with reality.
As any competent historian would point out, it is impossible to know exactly what historical figures were thinking when they arrived at major decisions. The best that historians can do is offer interpretations or inferences based on the evidence. Unlike Supreme Court justices, they do not presume that their hypotheses should be used to ground contemporary law and policies that affect hundreds of millions of people.
Yet originalism – or at least its bastard child, “textualism” – persists. Under the guiding hand of the late Antonin Scalia and his acolyte, Clarence Thomas, it became the Court’s most prominent judicial philosophy in recent decades. As Elena Kagan, appointed by President Barack Obama, told the Senate in her confirmation hearing: “We are all originalists now.”
Fight Fire with Water
In the 1930s, Roosevelt prevailed by beating the Four Horsemen at their own political game. Discussing Supreme Court reform during one of his nationally broadcast “fireside chats,” he asked how the Court could be made to “resume its high task of building anew on the Constitution ‘a system of living law.’” The solution, he proposed, was to add a new justice for every sitting justice over the age of 70. In practice, this would have meant adding six new justices to the bench immediately.
Roosevelt’s “court-packing” scheme made no progress; but nor did he need it to. With the idea of reform wafting through Washington, the next piece of New Deal legislation to come before the court was duly upheld. The New Deal was constitutional after all.
US President Joe Biden tried to play a similar hand with the reforms he proposed this summer. But like Roosevelt, his proposed reforms would have maintained the Court’s status as a political body first, and a legal one second. For example, introducing term limits and a binding code of ethics might rein in the Court, but it would not alter the politically charged appointment process or the political character of the Court.
Chemerinsky makes the same mistake. He is correct to note that today’s Court has degraded American democracy with decisions like Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), which allowed corporations to “spend unlimited sums” on elections. But in echoing the proposal for judicial term limits, he assumes that judges are “largely insulated from majoritarian politics,” when in fact they are political partisans from the outset. Term limits might address absurdities like the fact that Thomas has been on the Court since some of the lawyers who appear before him were born. But they would not change the fact that Thomas is an unapologetic partisan who will be succeeded by yet another one.
The real challenge for America is to move to a system where judicial decisions are handed down not by “Democratic judges” or “Republican judges,” but just by judges. For Supreme Court justices to be more than “politicians in robes,” the appointment process would need to be completely overhauled.
America the Exceptional
No other country leaves the selection of top judicial officials wholly to the executive and legislative branches. For example, in the United Kingdom, the Lord Chancellor recommends a candidate to the prime minister, but only after a judicial-appointments commission has completed its due diligence. When a spot on the bench opens up, judges (and senior lawyers) who meet the criteria are invited to apply, and some are short-listed for interviews before a panel of senior judges and lawyers. The Lord Chancellor is the sole partisan voice. After interviewing multiple candidates, the panel makes its recommendation to the government. While the prime minister may reject the nominee, this never happens.
The UK’s appointment process does not ensure that judges are immune from criticism and accusations of political bias; but it does ensure that such blows rarely land. When the UK Supreme Court challenged elements of the government’s strategy to withdraw the country from the European Union, the right-wing media tried to smear the presiding judges as “enemies of the people.” But unlike in the US, where such litigation would have spiraled into a political fracas, these attacks were soon forgotten. The Supreme Court issued its ruling, the government complied, and the UK left the EU in a constitutional fashion.
Much the same goes for other leading liberal democracies, including Canada, Germany, and France. While there may be varying degrees of political involvement in each system, it is always contained, and the judges remain above the partisan fray.
A non-partisan US Supreme Court would bring a politically dispassionate gaze to bear on issues like gerrymandering, abortion, gun rights, or future challenges to an election result. It also could restore some of the credibility it has lost in recent decades. Previously one of the most respected institutions in American politics, with approval ratings above 60%, its decisions were generally respected. Under Roberts’s stewardship, however, it has become an institution unworthy of respect and unable to command it. According to the Pew Research Center, a mere 47% of Americans approve of it – a near-historic low. Such findings suggest that even some Trump supporters are skeptical of their pet court.
Chemerinsky argues that the whole constitution needs uprooting, and maybe it does. But reforming the Supreme Court may well be sufficient. And with the Electoral College and the Senate off-limits, bringing the Court into the twenty-first century may have to suffice.
Erwin Chemerinsky, No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, Liveright, 2024.
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「『美國的民主政治』研討會」介紹 -- Roger Kimball
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金博先生這篇文章介紹「『美國的民主政治』研討會」。他的主旨在批評美國左翼人士的觀點；可以視為一種「狗咬狗」行為。我轉載金博先生大作的原因在於：該文討論到「民主政治」一些內在「困境」，以及由它們衍生的流弊。
為了幫助大家閱讀，我做了分節的編輯工作，並加上子標題。對美國政情沒什麼興趣的朋友可以略去第0、1、6等三節。願意進一步了解「民主政治」的朋友，則不妨仔細玩味第2、3、4、5各節。
做為文、藝評論家，金博先生顯然有舞文弄墨的癖好，我只得花點時間做些註解；希望小有幫助。
索引：
ad hoc：特別的，專門的，為了特定需要的
Alinsky, Saul：
apostrophize：apostrophe為「所有格」符號；此「動詞」形式指「加上『所有格』符號」；除了看得出諷刺意味外，我並不很清楚金博先生此處的「用法」。
assiduously：勤勉地，不懈地，周到地，用盡吃奶的力氣地
chaperon：監護，監護者，貴族或富家社會中陪伴未婚少女出現在公共場所的年長女伴
circumscribing：限制，限定，約束，畫界線，
co-opt：推舉…爲新成員，強行拉進，吸收，拉攏，籠絡，據為己有，借用(別人的觀點)；此處：收編
coda：結尾，尾聲；此處：跋
de Tocqueville, Alexis：法國學者、外交官，以《美國的民主政治》一書聞名
dhimmitude：順民
diktats：強加於失敗方的法律、處罰、或處分；強制命令
dysfunctional失衡的，不正常的，機能障礙的，無法運作的
Electoral College：選舉人團
epithet：表示特徵的修飾詞；(褒貶人時使用的)渾名，綽號，稱號
ergo：所以；笛卡爾的名句：Cogito, ergo sum (「我思，『故』我在」)
extralegal：非法定的，無法源的
eulogistic：(原指悼詞中)稱頌的，頌揚的，贊美的；此處為諷刺意，相當於我常常說的：「擦脂抹粉」(見此字後作者接著用的 ”advertising”)
franchise：此處：公民權，選舉權；公民，選民
genuflect：(尤指進出天主教教堂時)下跪，跪拜；引申為：跪拜，屈服，卑躬屈膝
Lewis, C. S.：
Madison, James：
nomenklatura：(共產黨術語)指經過篩選可出任黨職或地方官員者的名單；相當於共產黨文宣中的的「無產階級先鋒隊」；引申為：掌權集團，權力核心，新階級
nota bene：請務必注意下面說的
ochlocracy：暴民政治
Potter, Stephen：
quaint：別緻的，(尤指)古雅的(觀點、信仰或行為方式)，奇怪的，不合邏輯的，過時的，老式的，古早味的
Quod erat demonstrandum：證明完畢，簡寫為QED
remonstrate： 抗議，反對，進諫，告誡，表達異議
secession：從國家或團體中分離出去，另行建立一個獨立國家或新的團體。
The Narrative：主流論述，流行思潮；請參見「大論述」(我有時將此概念譯為「鬼話」、「神話」)
The New Criterion：《新標準》，一份有保守主義傾向的文學/藝術評論雜誌；請參考The New Criterion -- Bias and Credibility；金博先生為該刊主編兼發行人。
the Swamp：請參見：Swamp
visceral：內臟的；此處：出自內心深處的
Democracy in America: an introduction
Roger Kimball, October 2024
On the trouble with democracy in America.
Editors’ note: “Democracy in America: a symposium” examines the status of popular sovereignty in the United States today, nearly two centuries after the seminal work of the political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville. Other participants include Victor Davis Hanson, Daniel J. Mahoney, James Piereson & Glenn Ellmers.
Almost all the rulers who have tried to destroy freedom have at first attempted to preserve its forms. This has been seen from Augustus down to our own day.
— Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856)
0. 前言
Democracy in America: what is it? Whatever it is, we know that it is under siege. Barely a moment goes by these days without tocsins sounding about various threats to “our democracy” (I’ll come back to that plural possessive below). It used to be that the biggest, baddest threat to “our democracy” was Donald Trump (I’ll come back to that, too). Then a curious thing happened. Trump still gets prominent billing, ex officio, as it were, but when it comes to “threats to our democracy,” he seems to have been overshadowed somewhat by a curious new threat: the Constitution.
How can that be, you ask? Isn’t the Constitution of the United States, in addition to being our founding document and the arbiter of what is lawful and what isn’t, the fundamental guarantor of “our democracy”? That was yesterday. Today, if you are truly up-to-date, you know that the Constitution, while venerable, is basically at odds with democracy. “We Had to Force the Constitution to Accommodate Democracy, and It Shows,” reads one headline in The New York Times. “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” reads another. “The U.S. Lacks What Every Democracy Needs,” reads a third, whose column goes on to lament “the high cost of living with an old Constitution.”
1. 左派對美國憲法的批判
The fact that the U.S. Constitution is—by far—the world’s longest-serving constitution used to be a point of pride. Now, for some activists, that longevity is an embarrassment as well as an affront. The New York Times may have long since abandoned its pretensions to bringing its readers the news, preferring instead to batten them on whatever The Narrative demands. But, considered as a barometer of the vacillating pressures of left-wing political fashion, the paper has grown ever more sensitive. The culmination of its campaign against the Constitution came on August 31 with a column by Jennifer Szalai entitled “The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” According to Szalai, the answer is Yes. “One of the biggest threats to America’s politics,” we read in its subtitle, “might be the country’s founding document.” Really?
It wasn’t so long ago that organs like the Times complained that Donald Trump was “a menace to the Constitution.” (Another headline from the Times: “maga Turns Against the Constitution.”) But the new memo blames the Constitution for giving us Trump. Hence the new hotness is the contention that “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.” The Constitution allowed Donald Trump to become president. Ergo the Constitution is “dysfunctional.” Quod erat demonstrandum.
Szalai leans heavily in her column on the left-wing law professor Erwin Chemerinsky and his new book No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States. 1 It is almost too good to be true, but it is true that Chemerinsky is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Accordingly, there is no left-wing piety—about women, blacks, immigrants, January 6, Donald Trump, Republicans, and many other things—to which he neglects to genuflect or remonstrate, as the case requires. He even gives the thoroughly discredited Russia-collusion hoax another go-around and argues that, in the age of the internet, “false speech poses a serious threat to democracy.” And who gets to decide what counts as “false speech,” Professor?
Chemerinsky’s basic argument is that the Constitution, inadequate in 1787 when it was first adopted, has totally outlived whatever dubious usefulness it once had. He lavishes special animus on the Electoral College (which makes it possible for a candidate to win the popular vote but lose the election), the provision of two senators for every state, regardless of its size or population, and the Supreme Court, which also, he says, “undermines democracy” because it’s too independent and life tenure insulates justices from public opinion. (Wasn’t that precisely what the framers had in mind with Article III?) In conclusion, Chemerinsky predicts, “the time will come when Americans will realize that the Constitution itself is endangering democracy and they will start thinking of replacing it.” And if that doesn’t work, he says, there is always secession. Most legal scholars believe that the 1869 decision Texas v. White declared secession unconstitutional. But that doesn’t faze Chemerinsky: he disputes the common reading of the decision and argues that, regardless, secession can mean many things and can take a variety of forms.
Chemerinsky begins the brief coda to his book with the declaration: “Our government is broken and our democracy is at grave risk.” Again, what is that “democracy” of which he speaks? When Benjamin Franklin, emerging from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was asked what sort of government he and his colleagues had forged, he famously said “A republic, if you can keep it.” A republic, nota bene, not a democracy. The difference is critical.
2. 「民主制度」及其流弊 -- 1
As Victor Davis Hanson notes below in his essay on “Our Athenian American Democracy,” “republics inevitably face an innate and radically democratizing opposition, which always seeks,” via “court edicts, referenda, or internal coups,” to “alter ‘mixed’ constitutions and restore the unchecked power of the people, or at least of its often-tyrannical leaders and institutional advocates.”
Among the many reasons that it is difficult to keep a republic going is the constant pressure to transform one party into the party of the regime. This indeed was the primary reason that the founders were suspicious of political parties. They worried that the growth of political parties would lead to what they called “faction,” and faction was a standing invitation to corruption. It works like this: A portion of the voting populace is in effect co-opted by politicians who promise and deliver favors in exchange for votes, which fosters a culture of corruption. You scratch my back and I bequeath you the legislative apparatus of the state, till bankruptcy do us part, and maybe not even then. This is the origin of “the Swamp.”
Originally, as Hanson also notes, “democracy” meant rule by “the demos,” the people. But as George Orwell pointed out in his novel Animal Farm, there is a moral or political entropy at work in human affairs that, unchecked, regularly perverts “the people” into “some people.” All animals are equal, you see, but some are more equal than others. As an aside, it is worth mentioning that the prevalence of this degeneration in the human heart is one reason that most political theorists, from Plato and Aristotle on down, have been profoundly suspicious of “pure,” direct, unchaperoned democracy. Aristotle thought it the worst form of government, leading almost inevitably to ochlocracy, or mob rule. James Madison, in Federalist 10, warned that throughout history most democracies have been as “short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” “Theoretic politicians,” he wrote—and it would be hard to find a more contemptuous deployment of the word “theoretic”—may have advocated democracy, but that is only because of their dangerous and utopian ignorance of human nature. It was not at all clear, Madison thought, that democracy was a reliable custodian of liberty.
Nevertheless, nearly everyone wants to associate himself with the word “democracy.” Totalitarian regimes like to describe themselves as the “Democratic Republic” of wherever. Conservatives champion the advantages of “democratic capitalism.” Central planners of all stripes eagerly deploy programs advertised as enhancing or extending “democracy.” Columnists for The New York Times and Berkeley law professors attack the Constitution because it stands in the way of certain democratic impulses. “Democracy,” in short, is a eulogistic word, what the practical philosopher Stephen Potter in another context apostrophized as an “OK word.” And it is worth noting, as Potter would have been quick to remind us, that the people pronouncing those eulogies delight in advertising themselves as, and are generally accepted as, “OK people.” Indeed, the class element and the element of moral approbation—of what some sage has summarized as “virtue signaling”—are key.
3. 聯邦論者的「『民主制度』護欄」
It was part of Madison’s genius, supported by Alexander Hamilton and the other founders, to have forged a species of popular rule that carefully modulated the passions of the masses in such a way that protected individual liberty in the face of the imperatives of democracy. Hence the Electoral College, which is a primary mechanism for preserving federalism. Hence, too, two senators to every state: why should Wyoming, say, be swamped by the ethos of California? Such expedients are not bugs but features of a dispensation whose aim is to preserve a canvas for individual liberty. You may have noticed that the loudest voices among Democrats chanting about “our democracy” aren’t much interested in preserving individual liberty. They’re interested instead in the acquisition and retention of power, on the one hand, and the exercise of social control, on the other.
There is a sense, then, in which Chemerinsky and like-minded critics are right about the Constitution being “antidemocratic.” It is antidemocratic in the sense that it is pro-republic. Which is to say that the Constitution is primarily about circumscribing the coercive power of the government. As Madison famously put it in Federalist 51, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” The limits on federal power set forth in the Constitution make it a bulwark against many sorts of abuse, including that most constant temptation of democracies, the tyranny of the majority.
To some extent, “democracy” is a positive but empty epithet. When Chemerinsky complains that the Constitution is “antidemocratic,” the democracy he has in mind is not the same democracy that Ronald Reagan invoked when he observed that “democracy is less a system of government than it is a system to keep government limited, unintrusive: a system,” Reagan continued, “of constraints on power to keep politics and government secondary to the important things in life, the true sources of value found only in family and faith.”
Whether what Reagan says is true of democracy itself is something that we might, with Tocqueville, and with sadness, want to question. Too often democracy has been prey to deformations that encourage rather than retard the growth of government, as Daniel J. Mahoney demonstrates in his essay below. That indeed was part of what the founders had to conjure with as they combed through the graveyard of history’s failed democracies in their efforts to frame a more robust and long-lasting system of government.
Can anyone read what Madison said about the Constitution delegating to the federal government only powers that are “few and defined” without a smile? How quaint it all sounds to our ears. And what do we make of the observation, from Federalist 57, that the people would never tolerate a law that was “not obligatory on the legislature, as well as on the people”?
4. 「民主制度」的內在困境
Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in the Congress. But for many decades now, Congress has been assiduously avoiding that duty. As the political philosopher James Burnham noted back in the 1940s in The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World, laws in the United States were, even then, increasingly being made not by Congress, but by an alphabet soup of executive-branch agencies. And note that Burnham wrote decades before the advent of such monstrosities as the epa, hud, the cfpb, the Department of Education, and the rest of the administrative agglomeration that governs us in the United States today. More and more, we are ruled not by laws but by ad hoc diktats emanating from semiautonomous and largely unaccountable quasi-governmental bureaucracies, many of which meet in secret but whose proclamations have the force, though not the legitimacy, of law.
Indeed, Americans today find their lives directed by a jumble of agencies far removed from the legislature and staffed by bureaucrats who make and enforce a vast network of rules that govern nearly every aspect of our lives. Who defines the scope of those rules? It is difficult to say. This is the puzzle that James Piereson underscores below in “The Washington octopus.”
What is “discrimination” under the Civil Rights Act? What is the definition of “clean air” or “pollution” under the Clean Air Act? How do we define “sex discrimination” under Title IX—indeed, how do we define “sex” or “gender”? How do we define “ballot access” under the Voting Rights Act? What is the definition of “transparency” under the mandate of the Securities Exchange Commission (sec)? The laws as passed by Congress do not answer these questions in any detail. As a consequence, civil servants have latitude to define those terms, and to issue regulations that follow from them, with little oversight from Congress. Laws may be congressional in origin, but they are now mostly administrative or bureaucratic in content.
We have entered the vertiginous realm of the “administrative state,” what Glenn Ellmers below calls the “nonconsensual rule of America’s managerial class.”
One of the most disturbing features of this phenomenon was exposed by Philip Hamburger in his work on the history and evolution of the administrative state. As Hamburger notes, the expansion of the franchise in the early twentieth century went hand in hand with the growth of administrative, that is to say, extralegal, power. For the people in charge, equality of voting rights was one thing. They could live with that. But the tendency of newly enfranchised groups—the “bitter clingers” and “deplorables” of yore—to reject progressive initiatives was something else again. That was unacceptable.
5. 「民主制度」及其流弊 -- 2
In 2016, Donald Trump was elected in a free, open, and democratic election. But the nomenklatura screamed that his election was illegitimate, a challenge to democracy, because—why? Because the wrong person won. That was Trump’s tort: he was a threat to “our democracy” because he won, because people voted for him.
Woodrow Wilson, a standard-bearer for an earlier incarnation of the progressive juggernaut, epitomized this elitist spirit. “The bulk of mankind,” he noted sadly, “is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.” What to do? The solution was to shift real power out of elected bodies and into the hands of the right sort of people, enlightened people, progressive people, people, that is to say, like Woodrow Wilson. Therefore, Wilson welcomed the advent of administrative power as a counterweight to encroaching democratization. And thus it was, as Hamburger points out, that we have seen a transfer of legislative power to the “knowledge class,” the managerial elite—the “new ruling class” that James Burnham anatomized.
A closer look at the so-called knowledge class shows that what it knows best is how to preserve and extend its own privileges. Its activities are swaddled in do-gooder rhetoric about serving the public, promoting democracy, looking after “the environment,” helping the disadvantaged, fighting racism, and similar performative kindnesses. But what they chiefly excel at is consolidating and extending their own power.
Who staffs this new elite? That, too, is a difficult question to answer. Elsewhere, I have called the governing entity “The Committee.” I do not know exactly who populates it. Vivek Ramaswamy touched on the sponginess of the situation when he noted that with Kamala Harris, Republicans are “not running against a candidate. We’re running against a system. They require a candidate they can control, which means having original ideas is a disqualification.” But who is “they”? Exactly who, for example, told Joe Biden that he had to go, the voters be damned? Whoever it was, you can be sure that they’re on The Committee.
C. S. Lewis touched on the broader psychological or moral dimension of this phenomenon in a lecture called “The Inner Ring.” In every social organization, Lewis wrote, there exist two hierarchies. One is an official and public hierarchy. The other is covert. The names of its members are “not printed anywhere.”
Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it. . . . It is not easy, even at a given moment, to say who is inside and who is outside. Some people are obviously in and some are obviously out, but there are always several on the borderline.
6. 結論
Many commentators have noted the profoundly undemocratic maneuver with which The Committee erased Joe Biden and installed Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential nominee. After all, nearly fifteen million people voted for Joe Biden in the Democratic primary. He won, hands down, because those who inhabit the Inner Ring of The Committee made certain that other candidates—including Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—were shunted to one side. They had done the same thing to Bernie Sanders years before. All, of course, in the name of “democracy.”
Which brings me to the distinction between “democracy” and “our democracy.” The latter poaches on the authority and prestige of the former. But what it really means is “their oligarchy,” “their prerogative.” As I have noted elsewhere, honestly parsed, the phrase “our democracy” means “rule by Democrats.” Accordingly, to such questions as “Was the election fair?,” what you first need to know in order to answer is, “Who won?” If it was the Democrats, then the election was fair. If the Democrats lost, then the election was stolen.
There are further things worth bearing in mind as we contemplate the political distempers of the times. One concerns the hardening of the Left. Barack Obama’s victory in 2008, followed by the incomprehensible victory of Donald Trump, has radicalized and emboldened the Left.
Today, the Left says things they would hitherto only have thought and does things that they would hitherto only have said. It used to be that there was a certain latitude accorded to opposing views. That’s all over now. What we see is the triumph not just of political correctness but also of visceral intolerance that nurtures a “by-any-means-necessary” attitude. Every issue is an existential emergency for which the Left’s shock troops are willing to go to the wall. Every loss demands that people scream at the sky. We win or we threaten to burn everything down. At least since Trump’s victory, the dominant attitude has been that only the Left is allowed to win. Any conservative victory is by definition illegitimate, a blow to “our democracy.”
It seems to me that conservatism has three main choices. One is outright surrender. One is the dhimmitude of the well-pressed but housebroken Right that exchanges its pampered place on the plantation for political irrelevance. The third choice is the perhaps paradoxical option of what we might call Alinskyite conservatism, after the canny left-wing activist Saul Alinsky. This option eschews the quietism of surrender for the activism of what Donald Trump calls “winning.”
How is this to be accomplished? As Piereson suggests below, one major goal must be to downgrade the place of Washington, the city as well as the spirit it entails, in the metabolism of American political life. Piereson is quite correct—it is an important insight—that notwithstanding its overwhelmingly Democratic coloration, the capital has developed into a kind of “political party in its own right.” Its triumph stands behind the real threat to the republic bequeathed to us by the founders. That threat is not the Constitution but subservience to the faceless managerial elite that exercises the real power in our society. Legitimacy is draining out of our governing institutions at an alarming rate. Stanching that debilitating flow requires that we redirect our attention away from the greedy puppet show in Washington to the true source of legitimacy, which is with the people.
1. No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States, by Erwin Chemerinsky; Liveright, 240 pages, $29.99
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest books include The Critical Temper: Interventions from The New Criterion at 40 (Encounter Books) and Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter Books).
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柏拉圖的5種政府形式 -- Dave Roos
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What Are Plato’s 5 Forms of Government?
In Plato's 'Republic,' the ancient Greek philosopher lays out five different forms of government, ranging from ideal to oppressive.
Dave Roos, 09/05/24
Plato’s Republic is one of the foundational texts of Western philosophy and political thought. Written as a lively dialogue between Socrates and, among others, Plato’s brothers, the Republic offers a sweeping examination of “justice” and how it might be achieved—or not achieved—politically.
For most of the book, Plato presents the philosophical arguments for the highest form of government: an aristocracy ruled by wise and virtuous philosophers. Whether or not such an “idealized” state could ever exist in practice is an open question. The Republic wasn’t meant to be a historical examination of existing forms of government, but a philosophical discussion of pros and cons of different hypothetical political “regimes.”
“For Plato, the purpose of government is to advance human excellence and advance human virtue,” says Mark Blitz, a professor of political philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in California. “Ultimately for Plato, the ‘best’ form of government turns out to be the rule of philosophers. But the fundamental questions of the Republic are: What is justice? And what are the limits of justice politically?”
Those limitations are on full display in Book VIII of the Republic, in which Socrates discusses the inferior forms of government ranked in descending order: oligarchy, timocracy, democracy and tyranny.
1. Aristocracy (貴族政體)
In Greek, the word “aristocracy” literally means “the rule of the best.” For Plato, an aristocracy wasn’t a society ruled by a wealthy class of elites or nobles—as we might think of it today—but a society led by its greatest citizens. Socrates describes these rulers as “the best philosophers and the bravest warriors” who are dedicated to the common good.
“‘Philosophy’ in Ancient Greece wasn’t the narrow academic discipline that we treat it as now,” says Blitz. “Philosophy meant the full study of human things, including mathematics, the natural sciences and politics.”
The philosopher-rulers of Plato’s ideal state would be selected from childhood for their moral character and physical talents. Promising candidates would be educated and trained in the superiority of reason and the bridling of passions. The best among these philosophers would rule together as wise and benevolent kings.
To avoid temptation and corruption, Plato’s philosopher rulers wouldn’t receive any income or be able to own private property. They would share everything in common with their fellow guardians—even their wives and children would be held in common.
For Plato, a society ruled by philosophers exercising the highest moral, ethical and political judgment would provide the greatest chance for its citizens to experience true justice, happiness and peace.
But Plato must have also known that such a government was “if not literally impossible, at least extraordinarily unlikely,” says Blitz, author of Plato’s Political Philosophy. “What Plato meant by a true philosopher—you can probably count on two hands and two feet the number that have ever lived! You’re talking about Aristotle, Locke, Hegel… In a single generation, you may not have any of these extraordinary figures, let alone a few of them.”
Because Plato recognized that a true philosophical aristocracy—if achievable—would be short-lived, he used Book VIII of the Republic to describe lesser forms of government.
2. Timocracy (財閥政體)
Each of the lesser “regimes,” to Plato, was dominated by a different type of human character (or character flaw). A timocracy is a society ruled by those who love honor above all else. Blitz says that ancient Sparta is a useful (if imperfect) example of a timocracy. It was a society “devoted to war and the honor of the warrior” rather than to full excellence.
In the Republic, when Socrates is asked to describe the character of those who are attracted to a timocracy, he says, “[H]e is a lover of power and a lover of honor; claiming to be a ruler, not because he is eloquent, or on any ground of that sort, but because he is a soldier and has performed feats of arms; he is also a lover of gymnastic exercises and of the chase.”
Plato talks a lot about the “soul” in the Republic. The body, Plato explains, is merely an instrument for the immortal soul, which can be “corrupted by vice and purified by virtue.” The soul of a true philosopher, therefore, is dominated by reason. The soul of the timocrat is dominated by “spiritedness” (thumos in Greek), what Blitz describes as “the seat of anger, pride and love of honor.”
There’s nothing “wrong” with loving honor, says Blitz, “it’s just insufficient. It’s not the full devotion to reason,” which Plato holds as the highest condition of the soul. A timocracy, while inferior to an aristocracy, is at least focused on the common good. That can’t be said for the next regime, the oligarchy.
3. Oligarchy (寡頭政體)
One of the most dangerous aspects of a timocracy, for Plato, was how quickly it could degrade into an oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the love of honor is replaced with a selfish and insatiable love of money.
In the Republic, Socrates describes an oligarchy as, “A government resting on a valuation of property, in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it…[where] one, seeing another grow rich, seeks to rival him, and thus the great mass of the citizens become lovers of money…and so they grow richer and richer, and the more they think of making a fortune the less they think of virtue…and in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state, virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.”
Plato understood the irresistible draw of money and its corrupting influence on rulers. That’s why, in his perfect society, the philosopher-kings would be paid only in food and shelter, and not allowed to own or accumulate property. When wealth and property are prized above all else, power is concentrated in the hands of a privileged few who will stop at nothing to acquire more.
For Plato, economic growth and economic expansion weren’t political concerns like they are in capitalist democracies today.
“In general, Plato would have looked askance at the whole project of economic growth and human accumulation,” says Blitz.
4. Democracy (民主政體)
Plato didn’t celebrate “freedom,” “liberty” and “equality” as requirements for a just society. In fact, Plato’s major gripe with democracy was that it resulted in an “excess of liberty.”
For Plato, one of the challenges of the human condition was to choose between “necessary” and “unnecessary” desires. In an aristocracy, that’s not a problem because the philosopher-rulers will use their superior abilities to desire only those things that result in the common good. Even timocrats and oligarchs will channel their energy toward certain “necessary,” if inferior desires: honor and wealth.
The problem with a true democracy—and Plato knew the original Athenian version, warts and all—was that the government operated at the whim of individual desires, which in many cases were “unnecessary” and at odds with the greater good.
“There’s freedom in a democracy, but that freedom is not directed,” says Blitz. “It’s open to any kind of desire, which can lead to a kind of lowering or degrading of society.”
That’s why Plato wasn’t a big fan of “equality,” either. In his mind, not every citizen was cut out for a leadership role. Decisions affecting broader society should be left in the hands of the “best” among them. That wasn’t confined to a certain class or family line, but determined by talent and training.
In the Republic, Plato places democracy below oligarchy, because he sees it as the natural step following a revolution. When the poor grow tired of injustice, they will overthrow the oligarchs and use the tools of democracy to “deprive the rich of their estates and distribute them among the people,” says Socrates.
It is this same populist “mob” mentality, in Plato’s reasoning, that allows for the rise of the tyrant.
5. Tyranny (獨夫政體)
How does the tyrant come to power? By masquerading as the “protector” of the people.
“The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness,” says Socrates in the Republic. “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.”
Once the tyrant gains the support of the mob, he turns against his enemies and critics, using the courts to execute or banish them. The tyrant constantly stirs up wars to rally his supporters against a foreign enemy and distract them from the fact that their lives aren’t improving. Once the people realize they’ve given the tyrant too much power, it’s too late. Their lives are fully in his control.
The tyrant, in Plato’s political view, is the alter ego of the philosopher. Where the philosopher is only concerned with the common good, the tyrant only cares about himself and his inner circle. Where the philosopher is in control of his “unnecessary” desires, the tyrant shows no restraint whatsoever.
“Plato’s argument in the Republic is that the tyrant is the most unjust and least happy, and that the philosopher is the most just soul and therefore the happiest,” says Blitz.
Dave Roos is a journalist and podcaster based in the U.S. and Mexico. He's the co-host of Biblical Time Machine, a history podcast, and a writer for the popular podcast Stuff You Should Know. Learn more at daveroos.com.
Citation Information：
Article Title：What Are Plato’s 5 Forms of Government?
Author：Dave Roos
Website Name：HISTORY
URL：https://www.history.com/news/what-are-platos-5-forms-of-government
Date Accessed：September 13, 2024
Publisher：A&E Television Networks
Last Updated：September 5, 2024
Original Published Date：September 5, 2024
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本文於 修改第 1 次
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公平、自由、和不應如何做學問
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0. 前言
我想瓦爾頓教授大作的重點在介紹康德的「權利中心論」(本欄上一篇)；她指出羅爾斯和婁澤克兩位理論的不足，來襯托或彰顯康德理論的優越。羅爾斯在台灣應該蠻受歡迎；我也沒有讀完整本《公平論》；我就不多說他(1)。本城市在2011刊登過關於婁澤克和他思想的討論。有興趣的朋友可以參考。
我對康德的思想沒有熟悉到可以置喙的地步；以下只就「公平」、「自由」、和「做學問」這三個議題略抒己見。
1. 公平
我曾說過，「權利」不是「天賦」的；它是爭來的，搶來的，某些人甚至要用生命換的。「公平」不是「權利」，它也並不具有任何「應然性」或「高貴性」。換句話說，如果一個人覺得社會待他/她「不公平」，通常此人只能「喊冤」、「告狀」、「抬棺材」、「丟雞蛋」、和「拉白布條」等等。如果困難不得解決，他/她可以繼之以「丟炸彈」、「上梁山泊」、或「冒充耶穌的兄弟」之類。當然，他/她也可以摸摸鼻子或跳樓、臥軌。
一般而言，「公平」不過是維持社會穩定運作的一個概念或參數。我們可以把它看成是測量一個社會「穩定度」的指標：
一個社會的「公平性」越高，這個社會的「穩定度」也就越高。反之，一個「公平性」低的社會，將經常處於紛爭、衝突的狀況，最後導致動亂、內戰、或崩潰。
如果以上的分析有幾分道理，我建議：
「政府」的「功能」或「責任」之一，是維持，以及盡可能提高社會的「公平性」。
我這個理論應該比康德繞來繞去的論述淺顯易懂；根據它推論出來的政策，也會比根據康德說法推論出來的政策，更具「可行性」，也能更有效解決社會的不穩定狀況。
上述觀點我以前表達過很多次，只是呈現方式有所不同。請參考《探討民主政治》一文。
2. 自由
2.1 自由的本質
拙作《重新檢視「個人主義」和「自由主義」》一文中，已經把我所了解的「自由」說得很清楚。以下特別強調其中兩點：
1) 「『自由』行為」不得打擾到他人，更不得侵犯他人的權利和利益。否則，它們不得稱為「『自由』行為」，而應該叫做「『吃人夠夠』行為」。
2) 「公平性」蘊含：保障每一個社會成員具有行使最基本「『自由』行為」的能力。
至於「打擾」、「侵犯」、「權利」、「利益」、「保障」、「能力」、和「最基本「『自由』行為」等詞彙指示些什麼，由每個社會的成員們自行協商決定。
2.2 自由的「羊頭性」
許多人臉皮薄，不好意思明目張膽的維護自己擁有的「特權」(2)；於是拿「自由」來當做護身符。其伎倆是：號稱自己在維護「公民『自由』權」(3)。但是，這些人口中的「自由」，指的其實是你、我眼中的「特權」。
3. 「自由」和「公平」有衝突？
如果看官們同意以上1、2兩節的看法，不但不會認為「公平」和「自由」之間有衝突；反而會跟我一樣，認為兩者相輔相成：
「自由」是爭取「公平」的武器；「公平」是維護「自由」的機制。
許多人往往因為思路有盲點，或思考時不自覺的歪七扭八打著轉，以至於搞不清楚一對相關的概念。例如「自由」和「平等」；又如「自由」和「民主」等等。我對它們做過一些釐清和分析的工作；前者請見此欄，後者請讀此文；並敬請指正。
4. 學者們思路混亂的源頭
我在第1節中用「繞來繞去」一詞形容康德的論述，並無不敬之意；只是單純表達我的讀後感。學者們或許想把自己思想的來龍去派說得清楚、精緻一些；或許想增加自己主張的說服性；或許只不過想掉掉書袋；總之，其結果往往成為：學者們把簡單事務變複雜了。在這個過程中，一不小心，他/門的思路也變混亂了。第3節觸及的議題則是此傾向的兩個特例。
根據拙作《「政治」答客問》一文的淺見，我歸納出三個研究社會科學的要點(4)。
1) 「人生活的目的在求生存下去，和生活得舒適」；「生存下去」和「生活得舒適」都需要資源；所以，追求資源或一般人說的「貪婪」，實際上是每個人「生活」下去的「自然反應」或「正常行為」。
2) 「任何一個地區(或社會)的(任何)資源都不夠當地人的需求」(5)；從而，「巧取豪奪」和「坑矇拐騙」即使不是每個人的「自然反應」或「正常行為」，事實上它們都在許多人的「行為選項範圍」之內。
3) 以上兩段話中的「每個人」，嚴格的說，在統計上可能只包括任何社會中95%左右的人；從而，即使不是「每個人」都如此這般，以上兩段話所描述的情況，涵蓋了政府官員、教授教員、和尚牧師、男女老幼等各行各業的人士。
我不是說，任何社會中95%左右的人是「壞人」；我說的是，正如「重賞之下必有勇夫」；在「厚利當前」時刻，社會中95%左右的人都有貪贓枉法、偷雞摸狗、男盜女娼的傾向。
面對和接受以上所描述的現實，我們才能有效的設計出：
一套維持社會穩定運作的制度和機制；也才能落實「公平」、「自由」、和「權利」這些概念。
不肯面對和接受這個現實，再多幾個九彎十八拐的理論，也不過是為了混飯吃而製造論文乃至於廢紙。
5. 結論
社會科學的理論要解決「人」的問題。要解決「人」的問題，就必須面對一個個活生生，需要吃、喝、拉、撒、和炒飯的「人」。
「人」不是抽象的概念，不是籃球高手；不是幕後木偶；也的確不是工具。但只要有機會和權力，他/她在95%左右的場合下，會把另一個「人」當工具來增加自己的資源以及存活機會。
附註：
1. 我讀過兩、三本介紹/批評《公平論》的書，如阿樂杭卓教授的《羅爾斯「公平」概念的侷限》，他認為羅爾斯的「正義即公平」理論矛盾(或推論漏洞)百出。
2. 這些「特權」可能來自：祖上靠騎馬打仗發家的，如歐洲各國貴族後裔；老子是幹走私的，如甘迺迪家族；老子是幹革命的，如薄熙來、習近平。
3. 婁澤克是「公民自由權論」的大師；請見瓦爾頓教授大作和本文第0節中的超連結。本城市2013-2014刊登了幾篇討論教宗方濟針對全球經濟狀況所做宣示的文章；該欄開欄文、2013/12/16貼文、和2014/02/01貼文討論到此一思想。亦請參考此文。
4. 前幾天整理舊作時，無意間看到2005年我和兩位網友討論社會科學「方法論」的文章。其中一位以英文賜教，我也以英文回應。對此議題有興趣的朋友，請前往此欄瀏覽(該欄共有4頁)。
5. 拙作《交換價值和資源分配》對此觀點有更細緻的分析。
本文於 修改第 4 次
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羅爾斯和婁澤克：公平或自由？ -- Helga Varden
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這篇文章點出兩個重要的概念：公平和自由。雖然我並不熟悉康德、羅爾斯、和婁澤克的著作；但對他們三位的思想算得上略有所知。我會略為討論瓦爾頓教授的大作；也很想聽聽各位對「公平」和「自由」的看法。
Rawls vs Nozick: Justice or Freedom?
The answer depends on what kind of freedom you want
Helga Varden, 06/06/24
Whether we want justice or freedom is the central political question behind all our political disputes – we have Rawls and Nozick to thank for this. In modern politics, the left is associated with seeking justice: we find this in ideas of equality and social justice. The right, on the other hand, is associated with the protection of a libertarian notion of freedom. We must move beyond this divide, argues Helga Varden. Some freedoms are worth fighting for more than others, and some freedoms cannot be pursued by everyone until we undo the existing injustice present in the system. – Editor’s Notes
In the 1960s, Harvard University made two hires that would greatly impact the direction of political theory for the next several decades, namely John Rawls (1962) and Robert Nozick (1969). Prior to their philosophical works in the following decade, political theory in the English-speaking world was dominated by consequentialism or utilitarianism – theories that view justice in terms of the consequences of one’s conduct on happiness, the good, or utility in the world. After their interventions, this was most certainly no longer true; discussions of individuals’ rights, freedom and equality were now centerstage.
The most systematic political thinker of the two was Rawls, and in 1971, he published A Theory of Justice, which aimed to challenge the current state of affairs in political theory and, indeed, revolutionized political theory. Simplified, Rawls proposed that when we think about the most basic questions of justice, like the basic principles of our constitution, to do it well, a certain thought experiment is useful:
Like the blindfolded Lady Justice, imagine that you and your fellow citizens, cloaked in a veil of ignorance and seeking to protect and ensure a set of primary goods that you all need to live well, are discussing the question of which principles should govern your basic public legal and political institutions. The veil of ignorance makes it impossible for each of you to know facts about yourself that track bias and oppression (such as your class, your sex, your race, your talents and abilities, religion etc.) and also exactly what your conception of the good or happy life is. The set of primary goods, instead, is assumed to include both natural goods like intelligence, imagination, and health and social goods like rights, liberties, income and wealth, and social bases of self-respect that you all want and need to do well regardless of what kind of life you find meaningful. If we deliberate well, under these conditions, Rawls proposed, we will be able to identify principles that should negotiate our interactions in a way that is fair to each citizen viewed as free and equal; hence Rawls calls his position “justice as fairness.”
Rawls proposes that when we deliberate in this space – which he calls “the original position” – we will end up concluding that two principles of justice – the principles of justice as fairness – should ground our public legal and political institutions. The first principle states, simplified, that each person has fundamental, indefeasible rights to an adequate set of basic liberties that is consistent with the same set for each and all. The second principle concerns social and economic inequalities, and it has two parts:
(i) the principle of opportunity, according to which public offices and positions must be open to all; and
(ii) the difference principle, according to which these inequalities can only be justified insofar as they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society.
He also proposed that our deep intuitions of justice neither permit us to let considerations of the second principle override the first nor considerations of the difference principle to override those of the principle of opportunity. Rawls, in short, proposed that only societies that are based on these principles, so understood, can justify any claim that the basic structure of their public legal and political institutions is consistent with treating its citizens as free and equal.
Nozick was deeply unconvinced and worried by Rawls’s theory, and just three years later – lightning speed in academia – he published Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), which claimed that Rawls’s theory does not secure each person’s freedom and equality through principles of justice as fairness. Nozick argued that Rawls’s justice as fairness is actually a theory that is profoundly unfair on those who work hard and do well; indeed, Nozick thinks, it is a theory that makes freedom impossible and enslavement a reality. Nozick is especially critical of the difference principle. He argued that if we let the difference principle structure our legal and political institutions, then we end up with a society in which individuals do not have equal rights to be free.
Nozick illustrates this logic by invoking the famous American basketball player Wilt Chamberlain. Imagine, he writes, that many people want to come to see Chamberlain play, and they are willing, and thus freely choose to pay money to do so. As a result, Chamberlain becomes quite rich quite fast. The problem, according to Nozick, is that the difference principle is inconsistent with this wealth accumulating to Chamberlain – a wealth that is the result of Chamberlain working hard to realize his talents and the free choices of paying individuals – because the difference principle seemingly requires a transfer of (some of) this wealth from Chamberlain to those who are the least advantaged in society (through taxation). Hence, Nozick argues, Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness is inconsistent with any exercise of liberty because free choices will always upset patterns of economic distribution. Put another way, Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness requires a certain end-result theory of economic justice to be maintained – that economic inequalities always benefit the worst off – but this is inconsistent with liberty because liberty is fundamentally open-ended in terms of end-results. You can’t have it both ways in your theory; you have to choose either freedom or certain end-results. In this way, Nozick’s critique was also that although Rawls wanted to present a theory that is not consequentialist, he in fact ended up with one that is.
From the 1970s, political theory in the English-speaking world was no longer the same: the theories of Rawls and Nozick have since been critically engaged or developed from all theoretical directions. Among the very many works that have utilized the theories of Rawls or Nozick, three especially have been significant in broadening the horizons of the philosophical tradition to encompass feminist philosophy, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of disability: Susan Okin Moller’s Justice Gender and the Family (1989), Charles Mills The Racial Contract (1997), and Eva Kittay Love’s Labor (1999).
Importantly too, of course, in the United States – where these two thinkers lived – Rawls’s liberalism fit well with the kind of left-leaning political thinking dominant in the Democratic Party in the late 1900s, while Nozick’s libertarianism appeals to the sort of right-wing political thinking found in the Republican Part of the same time period. Hence too, for better or for worse, discussions around these two political thinkers often also channeled much party-political sentiment into these academic discussions in the US.
Finally, these discussions – crucial as they were to igniting post-consequentialist or post-utilitarian political theory in the English-speaking world – are actually rooted in older philosophical discussions. And since scholars around the world are celebrating Immanuel Kant’s 300th birthday this year – with birthday parties, conferences, special publications, and all the other things academics do to celebrate such events – and both Rawls and Nozick viewed themselves as presenting Kant-inspired theories, focusing on this Kant connection seems appropriate.
Most of us know about Kant indirectly in that his thinking about human dignity, freedom, natural science, and religion has revolutionized our world to that point that when we invoke our “common sense” on these topics, we often (unwittingly) draw on Kant’s ideas. In the 1970s, when Rawls and Nozick were writing and publishing their theories, it was Kant’s works on ethics – especially on freedom and dignity – that inspired most political thinkers, including Rawls and Nozick.
As was common at the time, therefore, Rawls and Nozick didn’t engage with what is now known as Kant’s main legal and political writing, a work called the “Doctrine of Right,” which we find in Kant’s The Metaphysics of Morals. One reason consequentialism was so influential before Rawls and Nozick was correspondingly the peculiar historical fact that this work of Kant had received so little scholarly attention. This, however, changed towards the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s. As Rawls revised and developed his theory of justice as fairness – in books like Political Liberalism (1993) and The Law of Peoples (1993) – Kant scholars now engaged with both Rawls and Nozick by using the critical tools given us by Kant himself in addition to presenting their own, new Kantian theories of justice based on Kant’s “Doctrine of Right.” These new theories were fundamentally grounded in Kant’s works and often claim to keep what is good in Rawls or Nozick and move beyond them – some also with the help of other neglected works (of Kant and others).
To make their case, some Kantians argue that although more philosophically sophisticated than Nozick’s account in many regards and being a more consistent freedom theory, Kant defends a position theoretically very close to the libertarian one Nozick defends. The most influential book of this kind is Sharon B. Byrd and Joachim Hruschka’s Kant’s Doctrine of Right: A Commentary.
Others disagree, arguing in ways that are philosophically much closer to Rawls. For instance, Paul Guyer in Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness (2000) argues that Kant’s own position is in fact philosophically very similar to Rawls. Others think this is going too far and argue that though the positions are complementary or philosophically similar in several important regards, Kant’s argument is much more complex than Rawls’s, since Kant gives us important theories we cannot find in Rawls. The most influential book of this kind is Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy (2009). For example, Kantians of this stripe (including me) maintain that Kant himself provides a theory of the kinds of liberties all human beings should have – what Rawls’s first principle more vaguely characterizes as an adequate set of liberties – such as freedom of thought and the right to bodily integrity, to private property, to contract, and to start a family. In addition, for these Kantians, Kant gives us philosophical resources that enable us to understand why poverty is a systemic problem that the state (and not private individuals) has the right and duty of justice to assume responsibility for. Kant can explain why the state must ensure that all citizens have legal access to means at all times, including why citizens’ exercise of freedom cannot be made dependent on charity or on someone wanting to hire them. More generally, Kant can explain why the state must assume a monopoly on coercion and responsibility for the economy, the financial system, and legal movement across land.
Not only does Kant have the resources to answer Nozick’s criticisms, but, in my view, he does not appeal to the kinds of arguments Nozick finds objectionable in Rawls. Indeed, some of the ingeniousness of Kant’s theory in the “Doctrine of Right” is that he can show that if you argue consistently from the foundation of each person’s right to freedom – understood as a right not to be enslaved – you cannot end up with Nozick’s libertarianism. Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” can also show us why Nozick’s famous Wilt Chamberlain argument doesn’t get off the ground. In Nozick’s example, Chamberlain’s contract gives him 25 cents per $1 of the entrance fees of those paying to see him play. The problem is that once we introduce money – dollars and cents – and professional basketball teams, it is no longer philosophically plausible only to appeal to what Chamberlain and his fans do. We must now explain how freedom is possible within an economic system on which we are all dependent, one that also requires a financial system enabled by the state through legislation, the issuing and controlling of legal tender (including money), and the positing, applying, and enforcing laws governing businesses (including professional basketball teams). We need an explanation, in other words, of how freedom is possible once our exercise of it is systemically dependent. What we need and what Nozick doesn’t and cannot (given his theoretical parameters) provide (while Kant can) is an account of systemic (in)justice.
Finally, as might be expected from the above, many Kantians have been and are working with philosophical resources found in other neglected Kant texts to help us overcome Kant’s own sexism, racism, heterosexism, ablism, etc., including as we find them in his “Doctrine of Right,” views contrary to his principled theory of justice as freedom. In fact, in my view, some of the most exciting contemporary philosophy – what we might call the “philosophy of the isms” -- is happening exactly here.
To illustrate the spirit of some of this work, consider again Rawls’s veil of ignorance or Nozick’s Chamberlain example. We may reasonably point out that in understanding the complex questions of justice surrounding Chamberlain, we cannot avoid the glaringly obvious fact that Chamberlain was a Black man who lived in the US, where playing professional basketball within the parameters of the NBA was one of the very few opportunities available to young Black men of his generation. Hence, there is something troublesome about choosing an actual Black player (without even noting this fact) and then arguing as if (or that) the most fundamental questions of justice facing this person at this historical time in the US is whether or not he is taxed for his income to benefit the worst off in society. After all, it seems fair to say, one of the most basic problems of justice facing Chamberlain (and any other actual basketball player, however racialized) at this time was the fact of racism (in the US generally and in professional NBA basketball). And this is a question that Nozick never mentions or takes on, since in an ideal, just world – hence as a matter of ideal theory – this problem would not exist and in this world, the biggest danger to freedom would be redistributive taxation measures. The problem is not that Nozick doesn’t have an in principle argument against Rawls; the problem is that these ideal theories of justice seem unable to capture important aspects of actual and particular cases of serious injustice. In a spirit similar to Moller Okin, Mills and Kittay, many so-called non-ideal philosophers of the isms today focus some of their criticism exactly on this type of issue. They emphasize that we don’t live in the ideal world and our theories are not minimally satisfying if they cannot also help us think better about, and act better in our ever so real, messy non-ideal realities.
In addition, notice too that reasoning behind Rawls’s veil of ignorance is insufficient to address the way in which our reasoning is easily skewed and distorted when we live in worlds characterized by systemic forces of racism, sexism, heterosexism, ablism, etc. For example, here we might point to other facts Nozick fails to mention: Chamberlain is also known for his inability to handle important complexities concerning his racialized or gendered identity. Such failures and blind spots are common among those who are able to break glass ceilings, and they are important to understand if we are to adequately characterize the problems of systemic injustice of our times. And neither Rawls’s nor Nozick’s theories can help us there.
Understanding basic questions of justice, including in relation to Chamberlain, then, is much more complicated than reasoning behind the veil of ignorance – which blinds us to phenomena tracking the history of race and gender – or the question of whether or not the income from his professional basketball games should be taxed so as to assist those who find themselves in the most disadvantaged societal positions. And, some of us argue, that although Kant-the-man wasn’t able to do this, his philosophical system – especially in dialogue with the world of neglected freedom thinkers of the past – gives us resources with which we can theorize these aspects of justice better. Rawls and Nozick were, in other words, crucial to helping us yet again take up and develop further philosophical resources left behind by those who went before us, thereby also honoring their efforts to strive to leave the world a little better, a little freer than we found it.
Helga Varden is a Norwegian-American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Gender and Women Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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本文於 修改第 1 次
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戰爭、謠言、和地緣政治邏輯 - Srdja Trifkovic
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崔夫柯維克教授是《年代記事》月刊的「外交事務」主編；該雜誌同仁的立場是古早保守主義。
崔夫柯維克教授可說是「現實主義的現實主義者」或「冷血現實主義者」；這一點跟我的立場幾乎雷同。他批評美國國際政策部份相當到位；讓非親美派人士讀起來覺得很爽。但我對該文某些觀點，如俄烏戰爭部份，不能苟同。值得我花點時間來駁斥，請稍等幾天。
索引：
decrepit：破舊的，老朽的，年久失修的，破爛不堪的
duopoly：雙佔 (相對於獨佔，monopoly)
Washington Beltway：環繞華盛頓特區的二級高速公路；此處指美國政府或華盛頓(美國首都)政治圈。
Wars, Rumors, and Geopolitical Logic
SRDJA TRIFKOVIC, 05/03/24
The world faces the danger of a major war. To grasp the magnitude of that threat, it is necessary to go beyond the trajectory of news from Ukraine. It is also necessary on the one hand to seek a balanced appreciation of the variable factor of human will in the management of international crises, and the immutable factors of geographic reality on the other.
The decision in Washington to expand NATO and weaponize Ukraine against Russia was an act of human will; so was the decision in Moscow to respond to this challenge with military force. The permanence of Ukraine’s geographic position, on the other hand, makes this challenge an existential issue for Russia, no less than the control over the Jordan river valley and the Golan Heights is an existential issue for Israel, and the control over its coastal seas is an existential issue for China. A state striving for security can change segments of its space by building Great Walls and Maginot Lines, but it is inseparably bound to the physical framework of its existence: to the location of its land, its position, shape, and size, its resources, and its borders.
Unlike mountain ranges and rivers, however, borders are not fixed realities that separate sovereignties and legal authorities. They are military-political arrangements subject to change depending on power relations. There is nothing sacred or permanent about them. They have been shifting for centuries in favor of the stronger and at the expense of the weaker, regardless of legal or moral claims. The future border between Ukraine and Russia, or between Israel and its Arab neighbors, not to mention China’s maritime frontier, will not be decided at a conference table. They will be decided by the realities created on the ground by force and threat of force.
Of course, the new borders will also be challenged in the fullness of time. Their durability primarily will depend on the raw might of the winners, and on the consensus of their decision-makers to defend the new status quo. In the drama of international politics, power has always been based on strength and will. Territory and physical space has always been the ultimate currency in that cruel and dangerous business.
Most Russians, Jews, and Chinese have finally come to understand that there is no “right” or “wrong” side of history. In the 20th century, all three have paid dearly for this progressivist fallacy—the belief in history as an independent agent that will lead humanity to a better world. This belief engenders megalomaniac visions and leads to horrors of the Gulag, the Holocaust, and the Great March Forward. This fatal misconception is alive and well inside the Washington Beltway, however.
That misconception of history having “sides” also explains why a war with Russia in the near future, or with China at some later stage this century, is a distinct possibility. It rests on the narcissistic assertion of American exceptionalism, the claim that “our values” are universal (transgenderism included). Closely related is the claim, as was once asserted by Madeleine Albright, that “if we have to use force, it is because we are America, the indispensable nation; we stand tall, we see further into the future than others.” Such insanity facilitates dehumanizing and killing designated foes: in Serbia in 1999, in Iraq in 2003, in Libya and Syria soon thereafter.
The corollary of this “vision” is that a world which fails to accept America’s exceptionalism, indispensability, and farsightedness does not deserve to exist. It is therefore not only possible but mandatory to keep upping the ante: moderation is weakness, and restraint is cowardice. Such an approach to politics among nations treats the factor of space as irrelevant, since America is guided by an abstract concept of national interest. In other words, “our values” will continue to define “who we are” in the context of “rules based international order.”
Contrary to this collective psychosis, most other states think in traditional terms and base their calculus on real, visible, and tangible spaces. The bigger the country, the more resilient it is, as the historical experience of Russia shows. Instead of the conqueror swallowing the territory and gaining strength from it, the territory repeatedly swallowed the conqueror and exhausted his strength.
This has not changed even in the nuclear age. It is precisely in the nuclear era—as both Russians and Chinese have come to understand—that a great power needs a great territory to deploy its production potential and military effectiveness over as wide a space as possible. The grand strategy of both powers is based on survival, security, and economic strengthening. It may evolve depending on specific circumstances, but it still stems from a set of basic assumptions which would be recognized by the great statesmen of the past, from Caesar to Churchill.
In Washington, by contrast, for the past 30 years we have had an ongoing deviation from the accumulated experiences of previous generations. As the examples of Kings Philip II and Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler show, putting ideology before geopolitics in formulating grand strategy—or simply allowing personal grandomania to override reason—is a sure path to failure.
The United States seems determined to follow this path. America’s near-complete diplomatic isolation over Israel’s actions in Gaza is unprecedented and just one example of a deeper malaise. Its continuation of the proxy war in Ukraine regardless of cost and risk, and despite the catastrophic military situation on the ground, is reminiscent of the failed powers of yore trusting in willpower to trump reality.
It is not just the matter of Ukraine today or Taiwan tomorrow. Rejection of geopolitical reality is pervasive in the current administration as it refuses to see the spontaneous aspiration of the international system towards polycentricity. This tendency has been present from the beginning of the decline of the Roman Empire until today. Europe in the classical era of the balance of power—from the end of the Thirty Years War to the outbreak of the Great War—functioned according to the matrix woven in Renaissance Italy. It proved effective in suppressing challengers aspiring to a hegemonic order, from Louis XIV to Hitler.
The system collapsed with the two-stage suicide of the West between 1914 and 1945, the bipolarity of the Cold War, and America’s “unipolar moment” after the implosion of the USSR. Unipolarity proved to be an atypical and unnatural moment in history. Despite the hegemonic rhetoric, laden with ideological platitudes, the spatial dimension of rivalries in specific geographical locations is impossible to overlook. Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan all belong to the Rimland that surrounds the Heartland. The geopolitical map has changed faster over the past hundred-odd years than in any previous period, but the dynamics of spatially determined conflicts among the key players are constant.
For nearly half a century after World War II, the world rested on a relatively stable bipolar model. Both superpowers tacitly accepted the existence of rival spheres of interest, which was seen in the marked restraint of the U.S. during the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The geopolitical game was played out in the disputed areas of the Third World (the Middle East, Indochina, Africa, Central America), but the rules of the game rested on a relatively rational calculation of the costs and benefits of foreign policies. Client wars remained localized. The implicit rationality of both sides made possible the de-escalation of occasional crises (Berlin 1949, Korea 1950, Cuba 1962) that threatened disaster.
The world is becoming multipolar again, but the U.S. is not yet ready to accept that fact. The situation has no historical precedent: a hegemonic power has temporarily achieved monopolar dominance of the system and is now resisting its return to the normal state of multipolarity. From the Congress of Vienna until 1914, international relations were dominated by a stable model of balanced multipolarity. It provided Europe and the world with 99 years of relative peace and prosperity. Would-be hegemons faced coalitions ready to make any sacrifice to defeat them, regardless of ideological differences.
Today, Russia and China also have potential causes of mutual conflict, but their differences are minor compared to the challenge of suppressing a hegemon that does not know its measure. We have seen a bizarre reversal of roles. The Soviet Union was a revolutionary force, a disruptor in the name of ideologically defined utopian objectives. It was opposed during the Cold War by an America practicing containment in defense of the status quo.
Today, by contrast, the United States has become the bearer of revolutionary dynamism with global ambitions, in the name of postmodern ideological norms. It is resisted by an informal but increasingly assertive coalition of weaker forces, such as the rapidly expanding BRICS nations, that strive to reaffirm the essentially conservative principles of national interest, identity, and state sovereignty. They stand up against the American variant of the old Soviet doctrine of limited sovereignty, which today goes by the name of “rules based international order.”
The new, American emanation of that legally and morally unsustainable concept does not have a geographically limited domain, unlike the Soviet model that only applied to the countries within the socialist camp. Sooner or later, it will result in the creation of a counter-coalition like those that successfully opposed other would-be hegemons, from Xerxes to Hitler. The big question remains whether, and at what cost to themselves and the rest of the world, this fact will be understood by the neoconservative-neoliberal duopoly in Washington.
Declining powers tend to make risky and destabilizing moves, as shown by the example of Philip II sending the Armada against England in 1588, or Austria-Hungary annexing Bosnia in 1908. America seems ready to follow suit on a much grander scale over Ukraine. Much of Europe—culturally and morally decrepit—seems ready to follow obediently. The story cannot end well unless there is a belated outbreak of sanity in the collective West.
Today’s international relations are conditioned by geopolitical considerations which override ideology. There is no value system—especially not the monstrosity of wokedom espoused by the U.S.—capable of changing the aspiration of major powers (Russia, China) or regional ones (Israel) to increase their security by expanding control over spaces, resources, and access routes.
The essence of spatial competition does not change; only the essential pressure points do. It is in the American interest for the U.S. policy making elite to understand that this will be true until the end of history, which will come about only when the world passes from time into eternity.
Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of Chronicles, is the author of The Sword of the Prophet and Defeating Jihad.
本文於 修改第 2 次
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評介當下四個全球政略學派 -- Gabriel Elefteriu
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俄勒弗特瑞悠先生是英國政略學家，立場應該屬於「中間偏右」；對英國全球戰略政策曾有過建樹。但從下文看來，他大概不再是主流派。
這篇文章的內容相當有營養，文筆也很犀利，看得出作者有兩把刷子；值得細讀玩味。另請參考此欄2023/12/16和2023/12/17兩篇貼文。
附註：
ab initio：自始，從開始以來
aberrations：脫離常規，反常現象，異常行為
appeasement：姑息政策，綏靖政策；緩和，討好
Applebaum-type：應該指Anne Applebaum
bleeding-heart：老好人，爛好人
contortion：扭曲，被扭曲(或歪曲)的事物；抽筋
Dughin, Alexandr：普丁麾下極右派政治哲學家
hew：堅持，固守
Kallas, Kaja：愛沙尼亞現任總理
Mearsheimer, John：美國著名國際關係學家
Mosley, Oswald：英國納粹黨領袖(已故)
power：實力
primacy：主導地位，宰制地位，宰制能力
retrenchment：此處指在國際霸權鬥爭中「轉進」(「撤退」是也)；縮編，緊縮開支，裁減工人
starry-eyed：天真的，過分樂觀的，不切實際的
Whitehall：此處指英國政府及其官僚系統
Where do you fit in? Today’s four schools of thought on strategic policy: Post-Modern Globalists, the Multipolarity School, the Eurasianist School, and the Classical Primacy School
Gabriel Elefteriu, 04/11/24
The Western conversation on statecraft and defence in our times appears to have reached new peaks of strife, cacophony and sheer multiplicity and divergence of views even on basic tenets and assumptions of policy. Modern democratic societies traditionally possessed of free speech have never been short of strong debates and varied opinions on the big questions regarding the most advisable course of action in international affairs.
But in the past – even the recent past – these exchanges, for all their sharpness, were anchored in a greater corpus of shared beliefs.
One of these beliefs that has informed the worldview of generations of statesmen and foreign policy experts has been the Western ascendancy in the world system, and the fact that this was a good thing. Today there are disagreements on both – and much more.
The reasons for this intellectual fragmentation are not difficult to discern. It is an incontrovertible fact that the West, which has dominated global affairs for hundreds of years, is now experiencing an unprecedented challenge to its collective power and standing, primarily from the rise of China.
This is happening at the same time as a certain dysfunction in the Western mind – brought on by the postmodern intellectual development, in different guises, of the Marxist infection that began in the 19th century – has now metastasized across our governing classes and cultural elites.
Today’s foreign policy debate thus has to take place in the context of a highly destabilising mix of unprecedented external systemic pressure and internal loss of coherence and inversion of values – which is striking deeper than ever, at the very roots of Western civilisation and philosophical traditions.
No wonder there is confusion even on fundamental ideas such as what constitutes “realism”, with every faction under the sun seemingly trying to appropriate the label for themselves, from ultra-isolationists to the most aggressive hawks.
But stronger and increasingly clearly delineated intellectual positions are also coming into sharper focus. In this respect, the debates over the Ukraine war and over how the US should deal with the China challenge are serving to separate some of the conceptual waters.
We can arguably distinguish four schools of thought when it comes to the political-intellectual “camps” that are fighting over the West’s strategic policy today.
These are but broad categories that group people and perspectives by what they have most in common; as such, they are not exclusive and the views and positions of some figures may spill over across other factions. But this classification may help bring some understanding to the debates of our times.
1. The Postmodern Globalist School This school represents the incumbent elite that, by and large, populates Western foreign policy and defence establishments. In their ranks are found the high priests of the US and European “strategic community”, often holding tenured professorships, running the biggest and most influential think tanks, or enjoying a post-retirement career from high level official government jobs as consultants, authors or all-round “sages”.
They are the “rules-based international order” and “liberal democracy” stalwarts who pontificate on the “moral” aspects of this or that policy, virtue-signal about “human rights” and inveigh against “tyrants” and “illiberal democracy” such as that supposedly overseen by Viktor Orban in Hungary.
This is the Davos and Munich Security Conference crowd, aligned to all the pieties and nonsensical policies of our times, from Net Zero to EU’s integrationist agenda (with its end point, the United States of Europe).
They also form the backbone of the “transatlantic community”, but, as with almost everything else – and unlike the generation before them – they’ve made an idol out of NATO and of most of the other key tenets of their worldview, which they worship uncritically with religious fervour.
This explains the unhinged fury they unleash upon those, like Trump or the erstwhile Brexiteers, who threaten to slaughter their sacred cows: such acts are seen not as merely foolish mistakes (which could be a topic of reasoned debate) but as impieties that are beyond discussion ab initio.
Like all schools of thought, Postmodern Globalism includes sub-groups and factions that sometimes cross over in interesting ways. The Neocons – from Cheney to Rumsfeld and Bolton – notorious for their disastrous post-9/11 adventurism, readiness to bomb other peoples, and ideological commitment to democratising the whole world, if possible, at the point of a gun, are only the most prominent example.
But the biggest and most nefarious faction – which, unlike the relatively niche neoconservatives, has actually marched through all the institutions during the “unipolar” era – are the mainstream Liberal Internationalists. Unlike the cynical, “red in tooth and claw”-Neocons, the bleeding-heart Liberals are motivated by the rule of law and Biblical levels of self-righteousness that can be equally ferocious when it comes to the use of force in the cause of so-called “justice”.
For all their faults, the Postmodern Globalists fundamentally believe in a world system set to Western standards, in which “the West” – however loosely defined – remains the dominant organising force.
As with all postmodernists who reject reality for “ideology” and “constructed” aberrations, they’ve become lost in their own hypocrisy. They are sympathetic to Third World calls for “reparations” for colonial-era “sins”, and push for high foreign aid spending, but instinctively they are convinced this is the way to shore up the West’s – and their own – position in the world. There are also genuine cases, among them, of true believers in things like aid spending for its own sake and out of a desire to “help others” (with other people’s money, of course).
2. The Multipolarity School. In an earlier age this would have been called “the balance-of-power” school. But today’s notion of Multipolarity – or Poly-centrism as it is often known primarily in Russia – carries much more meaning, across multiple dimensions, than the “mere” Realpolitik outlook associated with a Bismarck-type approach to foreign affairs or with the original pragmatism of the balance of power construct negotiated by the likes of Castlereagh and Metternich at Vienna in 1815.
Today’s Multipolarists hold to a few core, shared tenets: from (Western) declinism to the inexorable – and even welcome – rise of China. Many of them are also deeply impressed by new anti-West formats like BRICS and tend to accept theories about at least the existence if not the superiority of the so-called “civilisational states” like, supposedly, Russia and China.
Multipolarists have a hefty dose of scorn for the current state of the West and are starry-eyed about its enemies and their “achievements” – even if they cannot always bring themselves to praise the likes of Beijing publicly.
There are two main sub-schools or branches of Multipolarity thinking. Engagement Multipolarists are essentially demoralised, defeatist Postmodern Globalists. They are a hybrid or “transition” sub-school of foreign policy thinking that is currently rising through the ranks in Western establishments, challenging the Postmodern Globalist ascendancy.
It holds to the old “rules based international order” doctrine – at least declaratively – but at the same time it advises engaging with China and other rivals or unsavoury partners on pragmatic grounds.
Not necessarily admirers of the West’s rivals, Engagement Multipolarists are nonetheless willing to compromise some of their principles and “make room at the table” for the autocracies, on account of the latter’s supposed power as well as the “justice” of their “demands”. On Ukraine, they mostly hew to the Postmodern Globalist NATO consensus.
The rising star of this branch of Multipolarity is best observed in the UK, where the Government’s 2023 Integrated Review Refresh (Britain’s highest strategic document) was explicit that we have “definitively” transitioned to a “multipolar world”.
It further noted – in complete opposition to the Biden doctrine – that “today’s international system cannot simply be reduced to ‘democracy versus autocracy’”, a statement that overturns the main Postmodern Globalist tenet. At the same time, though, Britain remains a pillar of the “free world” with all its liberal-internationalist trappings, institutions and so on.
But in a British context the struggle between the two factions – the incumbent Postmodern Globalist establishment and the rising Engagement Multipolarists – can be seen clearly in the vicious Whitehall “wars” over decisions like banning Huawei from Britain’s 5G network, which are precisely over engagement with Beijing.
The second distinctive branch of the Multipolar school are the Bloc Multipolarists.
Like the others, they fundamentally believe that the West has definitively lost its position of primacy in the world, but they come to different conclusions as to what is to be done. Instead of engagement, they believe in its opposite:
drawing sharper distinctions with our rivals and dividing the world into “spheres of influence” or blocs. These are often the Mearsheimer-type “realists” who expound on the necessity of pushing Ukraine into a “negotiated” peace with Russia.
They think in terms of “grand bargains” with our systemic rivals and in the possibility of long-term co-existence of very different geopolitical alignments and sub-systems on the same planet – an old dream that goes back to the early Cold War, or indeed to the Fascist and Imperial Japanese visions for how the world should be run.
Interestingly, this has also endured as one of the core ideas behind the EU, whose raison d’etre is to create a continental bloc that can “compete” with the others in Asia and America. It is precisely for this reason why a fascist like Oswald Mosley became such a strong champion of a European union.
All types of Multipolarists masquerade as “realists”. Listen to them and you will hear endless reasons why the West can’t do this or that, why it has to compromise with its rivals to various degrees, and why various forms of retrenchment – at the expense of erstwhile allies – represent good strategy “in the national interest”.
Indeed, a splinter group of the Bloc Multipolarists – the so-called “Isolationists” – positively reject the concept of primacy and foreign entanglements in the first place.
All this, again, comes from a fundamentally defeatist mindset: these are people who have convinced themselves that “China is the future” – or versions thereof – and that the West is doomed. Unlike the Eurasianists, however, Multipolarists do not like the results of their analysis.
3. The Eurasianist School. The name of this school references the concept most closely associated with Alexandr Dughin, one of Putin’s court intellectuals. Stripped down of all the extra nonsense, the core Eurasianist belief is that the degenerate West, overrun by godless progressive liberalism is in terminal decline in every sense: culturally and socially, but also economically and – in the longer term – militarily as well. In this reading of world affairs, the future belongs to the “family-values”, Church-inspired ultra-conservatism – and the “normality” that it will restore to Christendom – all coupled with the stupendous technological and manufacturing power of China.
No matter that the Chinese Communists are by history, culture and by Marxist-Leninist definition not just non-Christian but full-on atheists: they compensate, in Eurasianist eyes, through their fervour against that most hated of Western ideas, individualism, and the notion of personal choice – not to mention democracy.
Tightly entwined with all this is the other great “Eurasianist virtue” that both China and Russia share: a working model of vigorous authoritarianism that operates through a strong State and is able to get things done.
This heady mix of virile political-military power, performative “traditionalism”, intense anti-individualism, and monumental achievement (in China’s case) works wonders on increasingly significant sections of Western societies and political parties, particularly – but not only – on the far Right.
Many of the older forms of Leftwing politics also make soft targets for this kind of propaganda, especially when it comes to the classic Left-wing critiques of “individualism”, Western/American “imperialism” – including the “neoliberal economics” associated with degenerate Capitalism – but also the in-built socialist appreciation for the power of the State in the service of the “people”.
In Western foreign policy discourse, Eurasianism translates into anti-NATO, anti-American, anti-EU, anti-Ukraine, pro-“peace” and anti-“globalist” positions. Eurasianists will readily recite the familiar Kremlin-style charge sheet against the West, starting with Kosovo, Iraq and Libya, continuing with “NATO’s aggressive expansion”, and, of course denouncing the supremacy of the dollar, Western sanctions policy and so on.
The conceptual meeting point of all those of a Eurasianist persuasion in foreign policy is the doctrine of non-intervention, long cherished by every autocrat past and present. This is where Eurasianists come closest to the more extreme, isolationist versions of Bloc Multipolarists.
4. The Classical Primacy School. The Primacists are conservative realists who essentially take their cue from “the greatest generation” of statesmen and strategists: the conquerors of the Second World War and the creators of the post-war world order – from Eisenhower, Marshall, Truman and Acheson to Churchill, Bevin or Ismay and many others – with its international institutions and security system grounded in American military power and informed by a sober understanding o what war means. For all these same reasons, Primacists are often dismissed as out of touch with today’s “realities”, intellectual relics from a bygone age.
Essentially the Primacists are old-school Machiavellians who care about mantenere lo Stato, a phrase which in today’s globalised world we may adapt as maintaining the status quo. They are proud of the historical achievements of the West and believe that the postwar world order has worked well in the interests of Western peoples – and that the first priority is to try to maintain and shore it up.
Unlike the Multipolarists, Primacists are not declinists: while acknowledging the West’s problems they are not ready to throw in the towel. They retain an optimistic view of what the Western alliance, led by America, can still achieve – if it gets its act together.
They differ from the Postmodern Globalists too, in that the Primacist view of the world is based on power, not on constructivist notions like “rules-based international order”. They are realists in the Kissingerian (rather than Bismarckian, or Realpolitik) mould, which is to say they hold to a form of higher realism that prioritises the role of power over morals not from an inherent amorality but because they understand that without victory in the geopolitical competition no defence of liberal principles is possible at all.
The Primacist prescription for strategic policy centres on old-school military competition, and even roll-back: restoring the West’s military capacity, and strengthening its political-military alliances, in order to secure or recover strategic positions around the globe in order to contain and balance-out the power of the new Axis of Russia, Iran and China.
They are fundamentally optimistic about the West’s underlying resources and ability to reform and bounce back from its current low ebb, and they tend to believe that adversaries like China and Russia have more and deeper problems of their own than commonly acknowledged.
Classical Primacy, as its name implies, rests atop the classical tradition of what today we call “strategic thinking”, going back to Thucydides. It draws on the body of knowledge about the conduct of war – the quintessential issue in relations between independent polities – as revealed by historical experience.
In other words, it precedes the multiplicity of “international relations theories” and the reams of “intellectual” contortions about foreign policy produced from the 20th century onwards with the academic mainstreaming of these subjects. It also operates not with “values” – another innovation of modern politics – but with “principles”.
Classical Primacy reflects the true, natural or common-sense realism of statecraft throughout the ages – well summarised by Machiavelli in The Prince – which, quite sensibly, holds that being first in the pecking order of your surrounding “system” is the best position, and that achieving and maintaining that status is a matter of (military) powe coupled with cunning, self-serving diplomacy – including useful alliances and other means of influence.
So there isn’t much room, under the banner of this School, with its rich heritage, for significantly distinct sub-currents or branches; but two dispositions or flavours of Classical Primacy may be usefully noted as applied to the context of our times.
The first is Reactionary Primacy, now a vanishingly-small faction which is essentially driven by an imperial mindset and that concentrates the more hardcore-radical and intransigent energies and perspectives found amongst Classical Primacists.
The Reactionaries of this school are adamant that we need to double down on the postwar paradigm of Western power, American exceptionalism and a US-led “free world”, while driving hard reforms at home and ditching all distinctively liberal-internationalist prescriptions.
The second grouping comprises the Transactional Primacists who likewise subscribe to all the headline beliefs of Classical Primacy – especially the vital, bottom-line need for a strong America as the prime mover and ordering power in the world – but are more flexible on the methods for achieving that bottom-line. As shown in these pages, Donald Trump is a representative of this sub-category – as is, by and large, Elbridge Colby.
Transactional Primacists take perhaps a too honest view of the problems with Western power, thus running the risk of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. They are willing to reprioritise foreign policy goals and to acknowledge that not all aspects of the status quo can be saved in the first instance – hence the retrenchment calls from figures like Colby for the US to switch focus from Europe to Asia, which are wrongly read as a form of American “retreat”.
Transactional Primacists are therefore ready to leave room for détente and tactical adjustment of the international system by negotiation with the autocracies – but, crucially, from a position of strength. This essentially harks back to the Kissingerian conception of détente – and especially its de facto successful implementation under Reagan – recently re-articulated in a typically expert fashion by Niall Ferguson.
The struggle for influence
Naturally, all these foreign policy schools of thought correspond or are connected to political movements. Their influence over the actual policy direction of key Western powers – and, eventually, the West as a collective of free and open nations – is
The Postmodern Globalists still rule across most of the West, but the Liberal Internationalist elite is now on the backfoot, squeezed between the “second coming” of Applebaum-type Neocon hawks (and their European equivalents, like Kaja Kallas) on the back of the Ukraine war, and the rise of the Engagement Policycentrists who are driven by China’s growing power.
The Eurasianists are currently confined to the far Right fringes of the European political community and to some of the true-isolationist groupings in the United States.
Theirs might look like a hopeless cause, but a more correct analogy is with the completely marginal position occupied by the Bolsheviks right up to 1917. A war that went the wrong way for the Imperial establishment of the time and a political revolution run by incompetents suddenly opened the way for a shock Bolshevik takeover at lightning speed. So the Eurasianists should not be dismissed as a false problem.
In their turn, Reactionary Primacists look to be the weakest grouping. They are fighting a rearguard political-cultural battle against both postmodern liberal extremism and the radical, populist backlash – while their foreign policy solutions involve such high levels of military spending and economic re-orientation of Western states as to be practically unfeasible except in a revolutionary situation.
Nonetheless, they are closest to the mark, at least in theory, in terms of what needs to be done; and their arguments can help stiffen up others who reject the notion of inevitable Western decline.
But the most interesting and also important intellectual battle over foreign policy in this period is that between the Bloc Polycentrists and the Transactional Primacists.
Both claim a “realist” reading of the global balance of power, recognising that the West is in decline. But the former believe it’s irreversible and want to save what they can from the Western position through appeasement dressed up as “accommodation”, while the latter believe it’s still all to play for and have a hardnosed recovery agenda centred on re-building our strength and confronting our adversaries.
Who will win this Game of (foreign policy) Camps is no mere academic question: the outcome will determine the West’s future.
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