Political Solutions

An illusion of the Claremont worldview is that theories of politics shape actual politics. Claremont theorists typically assert that tragic errors of understanding were made in the early and mid-20th century. That was when Progressives and other ideologues sold our leaders on a far larger national regime than the American Founders ever imagined. Supposedly, that error must be reversed in order to confine government to its proper sphere. The recent symposium in which Charles Kesler and his critics debated “national conservatism” took for granted that views on such issues could shape the actual practice of our regime (“National Conservatism and Its Discontents,” Spring 2024).

But that is an illusion. The American regime is indeed in crisis, but the reasons have little to do with long-ago errors of theoretical understanding. In actual policymaking inside the beltway, the most pressing issue is not what any theorist says but how the nation can stop running budget deficits of over a trillion dollars a year, lest it go bankrupt. The danger arises chiefly from Medicare and Medicaid, the huge health entitlements, the vast costs of which no one ever anticipated when they were first enacted in 1965. Their demands now outpace the entire GDP. No philosopher speaks seriously to this issue.

Another dilemma is race. When the nation legislated equal opportunity for blacks in 1964, no one ever imagined that these rights would morph into far-reaching preferences for all minorities and women. White men are now discriminated against in academia and the entire nonprofit world the way blacks used to be. They have been abandoned by the establishment. That is why they are voting for Donald Trump.

Claremont would have our regime revert to its original principles. But to do that is impossible. The founders took for granted a self-reliant psychology. Most Americans of that era descended from Europe, and this was the mentality they brought with them. Most people, it was assumed, were able and willing to advance their own lives, with only limited demands on government. But we cannot assume this today. For much of the population, dependency in many forms is now routine. The Constitution sets no limit on those demands, nor does it impose a balanced budget. No limit on spending can now be set except on Wall Street—when and if investors refuse any longer to buy federal debt.

Civil rights, similarly, assumed a self-reliant psychology: blacks would advance themselves much as whites had done, once guaranteed equal rights. And some did, but since the 1960s the collapse of the black family has caused far greater social problems for blacks and for other minorities than among whites. Yet legislators cannot respond because so-called antiracists have forbidden all realistic discussion of black problems. Blacks now rule over whites, unchallenged by any theorist.

Health and racial privileges have become unchallengeable claims to rights. Who would dare question the demands of the elderly in hospitals or of slavery’s heirs? But all solutions require speaking of obligations, and no political theorist I know is willing to do so. Politicians, too, are afraid to speak.

Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, showed the limits of theory. He spent decades developing an unmatched understanding of the slavery problem. But for solutions theory was impotent. So, he finally called for political action—and ultimately for war. The philosopher became a warrior. Only this made him a statesman. When I hear political theorists talking as seriously about our problems as he did, I will pay them more attention.

Lawrence M. Mead

New York University

New York, NY

Charles R. Kesler replies:

Professor Mead is frustrated, indignant even, with the CRB, for its indulgence in what he calls illusions “of the Claremont worldview.” Chief among these is “that theories of politics shape actual politics.” We would be foolish indeed if the editors believed that only theories of politics shape actual politics. But who has ever doubted that among the things that influence political life, ideas about politics should count? Even Mead is not foolish enough to make that argument, as his examples show.

He has two examples, which he recycles. The first is entitlement spending. “In actual policymaking inside the beltway,” he claims, “the most pressing issue is not what any theorist says but how the nation can stop running budget deficits of over a trillion dollars a year.” In the sequel, he attributes the crisis to a permanent, or at any rate long-lasting, change in the American character. “The founders,” he argues, “took for granted a self-reliant psychology. Most Americans of that era descended from Europe, and this was the mentality they brought with them.” But “[f]or much of the population, dependency in many forms is now routine…. No limit on spending can now be set except on Wall Street—when and if investors refuse any longer to buy federal debt.”

That Mead looks for wisdom from “actual” policymakers inside the beltway and from Wall Street suggests how desperate he is. Today’s American people and their elected representatives do think that Medicare and Medicaid, for example, are somehow requirements of social justice as well as normal cures for the social insecurity of modern life. They didn’t use to think that way, as Mead admits. He attributes the change to the effects of immigration, that is, to the diminution in the percentage of Americans born in or descended from “Europe,” by which he means Northern Europe. He contends that America’s “mentality” changed as its ethnic and racial composition did, as its capacity for self-reliance declined.

No doubt there is some truth to that. But it is a larger truth that the WASPs who first set the predominant model of American political and cultural life changed their own minds about its principles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They were suspicious of the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe and from Asia. They didn’t change American politics in order to accommodate the newcomers’ mentality. The WASPs became Progressives (speaking very broadly) in order to keep up with the very latest in WASP social science, and to mold the immigrants, and existing citizens, in its image, which they thought would produce peace, unity, and justice.

The great generation of Progressive statesmen represented by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were not merely studying textbooks of political science, to be sure. They were grappling with actual political problems with myriad causes, including industrialization, urbanization, and of course immigration. They changed their political ideas mostly because they thought the times demanded it. Actual politics shaped their changed ideas; but no one would deny, either, that the new ideas changed their expectations of politics, including the necessity of the welfare state and entitlement rights.

Which brings me to Professor Mead’s second example: civil rights and race. Civil rights, too, he argues, “assumed a self-reliant psychology,” an expectation that did not survive “the collapse of the black family.” Yet “legislators cannot respond,” he explains, “because…antiracists have forbidden all realistic discussion of black problems.” When the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, “no one ever imagined that these rights [for blacks] would morph into far-reaching preferences for all minorities and women.”

Actually, quite a few people—many of them “theorists” and conservative lawyers and intellectuals—feared that something very like that would happen. Perhaps Mead’s argument is really that people should take their theorists more seriously rather than less…at least if the so-called theorists are wise rather than visionary or imprudent. Here at the CRB we devote a great deal of attention to the distinction between wise and foolish theorists. Mead’s letter shuns that distinction in favor of emphasizing “the limits of theory,” simply.

His concluding example of those limits is Abraham Lincoln, whom he credits with “decades developing an unmatched understanding of the slavery problem.” But “for solutions theory was impotent.” Only political action—war—says Mead, made Lincoln “a statesman.” Well, yes. But any fool can go to war. Even our critic seems to hint that there might have been a relation between understanding the slavery problem and dealing with it prudently. To that extent, “our greatest president,” as he calls Lincoln, has something to teach us not only about the limits of theory but also about the limits of politics.

Role of the Rich

George Gilder badly misrepresents my book As Gods Among Men: A History of the Rich in the West and its message by criticizing it alongside Ingrid Robeyns’s Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth (“You Did Build That,” Spring 2024). Mine is not a “limitarian” argument in any meaningful sense. The closest I come to addressing limitarian views is reporting what the French philosopher Nicolas Oresme wrote in the 14th century when commenting on Aristotle’s Politics: in a democratic city, the super-rich would in practice rise above the others, acting “as gods among men” and preventing the institutions from functioning as they are supposed to. Consequently, counseled Aristotle, the super-rich should be banished from the city, or as an alternative, argued Oresme, super-wealth should be prevented from arising, for example, by establishing a cap on inheritances. Neither Oresme nor Aristotle considered democracy the best possible form of government; they were simply stating that if we really want to live in a democracy, then extreme wealth inequality can reasonably be expected to lead to troubles. The fact that scholars like Thomas Piketty are making similar statements today means, first and foremost, that in the cultural tradition of the West the involvement of the super-rich in politics has always been seen as problematic.

But As Gods Among Men is not a book against the rich; instead, it is about them. Gilder is correct that I define the rich as those having fortunes at least ten times the median wealth in a society, but I do this only to define my object of analysis (I also employ alternative definitions). Gilder’s statement that I would believe that “[s]uch fortunes…corrupt economic and political systems, spreading poverty in their wake” is simply false; his criticism of my presumed views on climate change and the A.I. boom is actually funny, as I never mention either topic in the book. As a historian, it is my job to analyze the past, which I try to do in as balanced and objective a way as I can. Based on the historical evidence for various Western societies across a millennium, I argue that the position of the rich in the West is much more fragile than we are used to thinking: the rich, as I put it, “are like the pearl in the oyster: shiny indeed, and produced by the living body of the oyster, but at the same time somewhat extraneous to the organism.” The West has always viewed the very rich with wariness (more or less according to the time and place), struggling to find them a specific social role. For medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas, rich commoners were simply greedy sinners and had no place in a well-organized Christian society. But a couple of centuries later, Renaissance humanists like Poggio Bracciolini identified a role for the rich to play in society: as “private barns of money” into which governments could tap in times of dire need, such as during wars, famines, and epidemics. The rich, then, were expected to convert their private wealth into a public benefit by helping their communities during crises, providing loans (willingly or not), or paying ad hoc taxes. And they did it, for many centuries, fulfilling their side of a social contract that, in return, gave them more legitimacy than they had previously.

There is obviously much more nuance to this story, for which one really has to read the book, but I’ll jump straight to one of my conclusions: if, in Western history, crises gave the rich the opportunity to demonstrate their social usefulness, this did not happen during the COVID-19 pandemic, just as it didn’t during the previous Great Recession, generating the risk that the rich, and especially the super-rich, will come to be collectively considered, at best, free riders and, at worst, profiteers. By no longer fulfilling their public function, the rich of today are making their position in society unclear, and this might also lead to trouble: repeatedly and systematically across history, when the rich have been perceived to be insensitive to the plight of the common people, society has become unstable, leading to riots, open revolts, sometimes even revolution, and frequently to acts of outright violence against the wealthy. Each of us might have a different view about what we should properly ask of the rich, but none of us should want this violent outcome.

Guido Alfani

Bocconi University

Milan, Italy

George Gilder replies:

I thank Guido Alfani for his interesting letter and panoramic history. Alfani’s work is far more sophisticated and scholarly than Ingrid Robeyns’s screed. I happily acknowledge that he is too scrupulous a scholar to join Robeyns in citing climate change as an effect of wealth or any other human behavior. But Alfani’s book fails to distinguish between wealth in the context of booming population growth and longevity extension over the last two centuries, and the riches of the Medicis, for example, during times of relative economic stagnation and pervasive poverty. I suggested that William Nordhaus’s concept of time prices enables valid comparisons between different eras. Their use could have given Alfani’s facile comparisons an objective gauge.

The boom in artificial intelligence is an example of modern technological advance that Alfani fails to address in his book. Such breakthroughs render many of his observations on the rich of the past irrelevant to an age of “superabundance,” as documented by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley in their prize-winning book of that title. In general, modern wealth is invested rather than consumed conspicuously. In my view, most of the so-called “charities” of the modern wealthy represent conspicuous consumption while their investments constitute their contributions to the world.

A Modern Aristotle?

I am writing to express my gratitude to Nathan Pinkoski for his thoughtful questions about Aristotle’s Discovery of the Human: Piety and Politics in the “Nicomachean Ethics” and his sympathetic exposition of the book’s thesis (“Approaching the Divine,” Spring 2024). I would also like to clarify several points. In many ways my approach is Straussian, for I accept that there are fundamental problems that transcend historical times and places, that we should study an author in order to learn from him, and that close reading of texts helps to bring an author’s intent to light. All these are central to Leo Strauss’s efforts to “recover classical political philosophy.” Also, the Straussian themes that Pinkoski identifies—ancients and moderns, reason and revelation, thought and action, philosophy and politics—underlie my book.

I was surprised, however, by Pinkoski’s argument that my book is “haunted by modernity” and that “modern or even hypermodern assumptions” have crept into my analysis. For example, I emphasize that action and production are essential to Aristotle’s discovery of the human. Pinkoski refers to my contention that contemplation (theoria) is “not merely for its own sake,” but “serves other ends,” including political reform. The issue here is not whether this position is a modern one, however, but whether my argument about Aristotle’s position is persuasive. If it is, then the position is not modern rather than Aristotelian. Only a radical historicist could deny that Aristotle might give what became a modern truism a place in his own thinking. Aristotle does, after all, include prudence, which directs action, and art (production) among the human capacities he discusses, and claims that choice (prohairesis), which follows deliberation about what is to be done, is the principle of the human.

In any case, I hardly reduce Aristotle’s view of philosophy to simple instrumentality. If contemplation or theoretical activity is not only good for its own sake, it is good for its own sake. Precisely because it is so, I argue, it is able to give human beings, who are subject to the fluctuations of time and place, a timeless experience that, however brief, serves as evidence that the divine exists and that there is something divine in us that allows us an imperfect access to divinity. This is true as well of the beautiful or the noble, the end of ethical virtue. So too Aristotle describes pleasure as “something whole and complete,” an activity (energeia), in contrast to motion with beginnings and ends outside itself. And the statesman’s activity, that architectonic art that is its practitioner’s good, by definition serves the good of others. Aristotle’s analysis in each case is neither the simple teleological view often attributed to him nor very “modern” at all, both positions that bypass or deny Aristotle’s “discovery of the human.”

Pinkoski claims that although my interpretation of Aristotle “dissolves tragedies and tensions,” it also gives rise to the emancipation of technology that is in tension with the humble gratitude that I attribute to Aristotelian piety. But I never claim that Aristotle thought he could overcome tragedy by dissolving tensions—a thought that does ring modern bells. It is precisely because tensions remain, including that between technological progress and moral limit (witness Aristotle’s ambiguous treatment of Hippodamus in Book II of the Politics), that virtue and prudence are needed to steer human life away from both hubris and degradation. Piety holds us back, just as it holds us up. Thus Pinkoski is on the right track when he observes that “[p]iety may save Nichols from total submission to the standard of production.” By the same token, so would Aristotle’s discovery of the human, and his full and rich elaboration in the Ethics of what that means. Prudence, which reflects Aristotle’s own political deeds in writing the Ethics and the Politics, bears the heavy burden of dealing with the tensions that arise in human life and therein lies the hope that humanity will at times prevail over tragedy.

Nor do I suppose that “universal education” will take care of the problems that arise from the emancipation of technology, any more than I suppose that prudence can be reduced to a set of rules universally applied. Pinkoski is correct in a way that I take the side of “universal education,” at least in the sense that I accept Aristotle’s view that all human beings possess reason or speech and that their capacities require cultivation by families, political communities, teachers, and friends. If so, it is impossible that anyone appeals to universal education and leaves it at that, as Pinkoski suggests that I do. A mere appeal to universal education that “leaves it at that,” without an inquiry like Aristotle’s Ethics to guide it, is without content, and without any substantial relation to the human good. Thus, in the last section of the Ethics, Aristotle shows us the difficulties in “universal” education when he turns his attention to politics, to the advantages and disadvantages of private and public education, and to the limits of any political system in legislating human excellence.

In the complex human world of Aristotle’s Ethics, in which speech about the just, the beautiful, and the good remains imprecise, moral ambiguity remains. As I say with respect to the tensions that a statesman faces, Aristotle “does not resolve the problem. He underscores the difficulty.” Pinkoski writes that in contrast to some Straussian, especially Platonic, interpretations of classical thought, I tend to “soften” tensions. But it is also the case that by separating the philosopher too radically from political life, one allows him to escape the tensions humans face, as Pinkoski’s description of this position implies—the philosopher is “a man apart, removed from the daily fracas of life as a political animal.” It is the man apart who faces no moral ambiguity. If tensions such as that between philosophy and politics are reproduced at all levels of human life, as I argue, if the philosopher also serves others, and the statesman theorizes about the human good, then “moral ambiguity” remains for both. That does not mean that there is no moral clarity: for Aristotle cannibalism and incest are impious, and life is holy. Strauss may have emphasized the tensions, but he was also able to judge the clear superiority of liberal democracy to its 20th-century antagonists. But, after all, Strauss was not “a man apart,” at least in the sense of the solitary philosopher. Strauss’s turn to the ancients was impelled, he insisted, by the crisis of our times, the crisis of the West. He too may have been “haunted by modernity,” as perhaps we all should be.

I am grateful to Nathan Pinkoski for helping to keep this conversation alive.

Mary P. Nichols

West Eaton, NY

Nathan Pinkoski replies:

Professor Nichols’s letter, like her book, is a tour de force. Let me offer one further compliment and one friendly criticism.

Nichols rightly notes the dangers that stem from “separating the philosopher too radically from political life.” Her book is a gentle but decisive critique of readings of the ancients that turn the classical philosopher into Rousseau’s solitary wanderer. She’s able to achieve this because of her sympathy and appreciation for political and moral phenomena as such, and for the importance of friendship. These are key Aristotelian themes, and Nichols provides an elegant account of their importance that retrieves the communal vitality of antiquity from the asocial sterility of modernity.

Nichols offers a hopeful aspiration that we can overcome tragedy, but this might require more attention to some ancient problems. Sometimes she skirts over these. For example, she suggests that a moderate cult of Dionysus could exist in the city, holding out the hope of a harmonious political and social coexistence with the followers of Bacchus. But as I understand Euripides’ Bacchae, we don’t get to choose the nature of the gods. We must know them as they are, not how we want them to be. In the play, Pentheus’s refusal to know Dionysus as such, as if he could only accept gods who conform to the mores of the city, creates the tragic dynamic that leads to his destruction. Because of his lack of moderation and unwillingness to worship the gods as such, he lost the chance to have Dionysus as an ally (see Bacchae, 1340-43; cf. 1150-52).

If we take our bearings from this tragedy, the immoderate desire of many people to tame the gods according to the standards of the city (to judge them by the bounds of mere reason) is a grievous error. We should grasp the great tensions between men and the divine. We must know the gods as they are, even if that disrupts the mores of the city or the demands of independent rationalism. This prevents easy, harmonious solutions. But if I’m inclined to emphasize tragedy, Nichols is inclined to emphasize comedy. That’s not in itself an error. As a very different, very modern thinker (Woody Allen) puts it at the end of one of his films: “Look, you have to have a little faith in people.”

Frappez la Masse

Some time ago, in response to a citation I made in the CRB crediting Napoleon with the maxim “Frappez la masse et tout le reste vient par surcroît” (“The Heart of the Matter,” Fall 2022), an anonymous correspondent—as part of a massive, many-paged, anonymous critique—wrote that Napoleon said no such thing. I would have had to write a book to counter the whole of his diatribe, and didn’t. But I did seek to find the Napoleonic maxim, and didn’t. That is, until just recently, even if imprecisely. I took the quote from a letter Winston Churchill wrote to General Claude Auchinleck on October 30, 1941, but was unable to find it attributed to Napoleon in the books I consulted, and, more definitively, via Google.fr, so I gave up.

Until, that is, I happened upon Souvenirs Militaires by Lieutenant General Baron Berthezène, published in Paris in 1855. The baron quoted Napoleon as having said, “Il y a en Europe beaucoup de bons généraux, mais ils voient trop de choses a la fois; mois, je n’en vois qu’une, ce sont les masses; je tâche de les détruire, bien sur que les accessoires tomberont ensuite d’eux-mêmes.” Liberally translated: “There are in Europe many good generals, but they see too many things at once. I see but one, the mass; I try to destroy it. Of course the rest will follow of their own accord.” Perhaps the way Churchill put it was the way it was put to him, in paraphrase, during his long, multi-war experience in France, by one of his many French interlocutors who had read the account above. In substance, it is the same. If only Churchill were here to clarify. One way or another, it is a powerful statement.

Mark Helprin

Charlottesville, VA