Through bitter experience, Solzhenitsyn arrived at this firm conclusion: The communist regime and ideology were in decisive respects at odds with the deepest wellsprings of human nature and with the moral norms that constitute a free and decent society. How can one attain liberty worthy of human beings when private property is summarily abolished or dramatically curtailed, the traditional family is assaulted and its prerogatives radically circumscribed, religion is cruelly persecuted, and humane national loyalty and traditions are replaced by an abstract and coercive utopianism based on contempt for the cultural and civilizational inheritance? Contrary to legend, communism was never good “in theory” as so many are wont to say today (including almost all the students I have taught in recent years). The theory itself demands this violence against human nature since communism’s four “abolitions,” that of property, the family (bourgeois or otherwise), religion, and the nation, are profoundly at odds with the nature and needs of human beings and the very structure of social and political reality.  

But the truly dramatic implosion of European communism between 1989 and 1991 has not led to the “end of History”(far from it) or even the cessation of ideological politics. New forms of ideological mendacity have risen in the place of the totalitarian Lie precisely because that Lie has never been truly and widely understood or repudiated. This essay will trace the movement from ideological mendacity in its classic totalitarian form to the new forms of ideological despotism that today threaten Western liberty, the search for truth, and the integrity of human souls. As I will show, the two forms of the Lie are by no means unrelated.

Solzhenitsyn on the Ideological Lie

As Solzhenitsyn himself testified in one of the most profound and soul-shaking books of the twentieth century, the three-volume Gulag Archipelago, the great ideological Lie “gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and justification.” “Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him,” he famously observed. In their guilt and moral derangement, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth still bowed before the requirements of conscience and literally went mad as a result of their crimes.

But totalitarian ideology negates conscience and dismisses the moral law of which it is a reflection as an antiquated justification for class oppression, a tool of the forces of “privilege” and oppression (rhetoric that again has become all too familiar). In this grotesque transvaluation of values, whatever promotes world-transforming revolution is necessary and good, and whatever stands in its way is by definition retrograde and evil. The age-old distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, is replaced by the morally corrupting distinction between “progress” and “reaction.” The movement of History is hardly coextensive with moral progress. Moreover, what is right and wrong does not fundamentally change from epoch to epoch or from culture to culture. The old is not necessarily antiquated and the “new” need not entail a moral advance. Surely, the tragedies of the twentieth century ought to have taught us to question the ideology of inevitable “historical progress” and to reaffirm the need to respect the elementary distinction between right and wrong at the heart of all authentic moral and political judgment.

Progressive ideologies closer to home draw on the same mix of moral nihilism and rage at the limits inherent in human nature, our society, and even the very structure of reality. Their rage reveals a crude division of the world that localizes evil in a specific (and an utterly dispensable) group of class, race, or gender oppressors, as well as unrelieved contempt for old verities, traditions, and points of view. At Bard College, we have recently seen three student activists, contemporary “Red Guards,” charged by its administration to “decolonize” the college library of books that are ideologically suspect. Such exercises in the groves of the academy are no longer exceptional or unexpected. Orwellian book-banning in the name of “progress”! This is blatant authoritarianism dressed up as anti-racism and moral preening. No progress there.

As Solzhenitsyn has indisputably established, the ideological Lie deceives at a very fundamental level. Those who perceive themselves as “innocent victims,” bereft of sin and any capacity for wrongdoing, or as agents of historical “progress,” become puffed up with hubris and feel themselves to be infallible. They become oppressors with little or no sense of limits or moral restraint. In Albert Camus’s memorable words, we must instead aim to be “neither victims nor executioners.” That is the path of moral sanity and political decency recommended by both the Christian Solzhenitsyn and the unbelieving Camus.

The Great Imperative to “Live Not By Lies!”

On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested in Moscow, February 12, 1974—and the day before he was forcibly exiled to the West (first to West Germany, then by choice to Switzerland, then to settle down to eighteen productive years of writing in scenic Vermont)—he issued a truly dramatic proposal to his compatriots through samizdat, or underground self-publishing, and in hurried translation in the Washington Post. That pungent and memorable text, “Live Not by Lies!,” since expertly retranslated,  was a clarion call for his fellow citizens to recover civic pride and self-respect even in the absence of a regime of political and civil liberty. Solzhenitsyn argues that nothing but bloodshed, tyranny, and tragedy could result from the revolutionary illusions of “conceited youths who sought, through terror, blood uprising, and civil war, to make the country just and content.” Solzhenitsyn at once rejects “the vileness of means” that “begets” the “vileness of the result” (and the other way around). “For violence has nothing to cover itself with but lies, and lies can only persist through violence.” The twin pillars of ideological despotism—violence and lies—must be rejected at their very source along with the utopian illusions that inspire them. Drugged with ideology, and with the cruel impatience that marks those inspired by utopian illusions, the path of violence and lies leads an entire people off the cliff, like the demoniac Gadarene swine so vividly described in the Gospel of Luke (Luke 8:26-39). Another truly humane path forward must be found.

Solzhenitsyn finds the path to liberation through a self-conscious decision by sturdy, self-respecting souls not to participate in lies: “Personal non-participation in lies!” as he strikingly puts it in the imperative (Václav Havel would reformulate this imperative as “living in truth” in his well-known 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless,” an essay where he favorably cites Solzhenitsyn no less than four times). Of course, no one is morally obliged to scream the truth at the top of his lungs in the public square. But persons of integrity must not knowingly reinforce the web of totalitarian mendacity. Men and women of good will must not denounce coworkers or neighbors who are charged with self-evident lies by a lawless state just as we must resist a cruelly censorious cancel culture and the intoxication of brutal Twitter mobs. This path of non-participation in lies will entail sacrifices, perhaps the loss of jobs or children barred from promising careers, but not the inevitable internment in prison or camp characteristic of the Stalin (and even Lenin) years in the Soviet Union. When Solzhenitsyn wrote his searing manifesto in 1974, the edifice of ideological mendacity was already “flaking,” as he put it, and would soon be exposed for the whole world to see. The situation demanded a judicious combination of personal steadfastness, spiritual integrity, and civic courage.

Courage but not necessarily martyrdom (Solzhenitsyn recognized that most human beings are not naturally courageous and that “dissent” in post-Stalinist forms of Soviet-style communism entailed fewer risks than in the Lenin and Stalin years of classic totalitarianism). If the camp of those who refused to live by lies was multiplied to include thousands, even tens of thousands, then Solzhenitsyn and other Russians “will not recognize our country!” But if Solzhenitsyn’s compatriots instead choose the path of passivity, acquiescence, and the habitual assent to grotesque lies, then they would indeed reveal themselves to be “worthless, hopeless,” and deserving of “scorn.” Quoting Russia’s national poet Pushkin, Solzhenitsyn devastatingly adds:

Why offer herds their liberation?
…………………………………………….
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

Speaking to Us in a New Situation

What, one might ask, does Solzhenitsyn’s noble appeal to spiritual integrity and civic pride have to say to us in the United States, an ostensibly free country faced by the growing specter of woke despotism? To be sure, ours is a new and different situation even if parallels can be readily drawn. We do not live under the yoke of totalitarianism. Yet, a generation ago, a political scientist such as myself could readily and rightly declare that the United States was a country largely free of extremist ideological politics and parties and with no intelligentsia to speak of. A radicalized intelligentsia was instead typical of countries like France and Russia where a large part of the intellectual class assented to moral nihilism and revolutionary politics represented by 1793 and 1917, respectively. This once striking feature of American exceptionalism is, alas, no more. Our intelligentsia (including radical academics, professional activists, journalists who repudiate old norms of fairness and objectivity, myriad woke-minded persons in the high tech sector, the whole industry dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” and advocates of socialism and even communism in “progressive” circles) more and more resembles the intellectual class in Russia between 1860 and 1917, one dedicated at the same time to nihilism, ideological fanaticism, and contempt for patriotism and customary morality. In both cases, a culture of repudiation, as the late Roger Scruton calls it, replaces moderation, common sense, and gratitude for our received inheritance.

Having grievously failed to come to terms with the Lie at the foundation of communist totalitarianism, to pass on its lessons to the next generations, we are now reliving the ideological madness that gave rise to unrelieved human tragedy in the first place. We risk restoring a world of victims and executioners, the very world Camus and Solzhenitsyn so powerfully warned against. Weren’t the kulaks (the allegedly prosperous peasants) in the Soviet Union and the Jews in the Nazi orbit persecuted, harassed, and killed (and in the Nazi case industrially exterminated) far more for who they were than for anything any member of those suspect classes and races had done? Wasn’t the bourgeoisie targeted for being “privileged” as if industriousness and success were always or usually a product of villainy and exploitation, an illusion or lie if there ever was one? Is the obsession with race, class, and gender in every level of education, in almost all cultural institutions, in journalism, in corporate America, and sports different in principle from the old totalitarian and ideological obsession with race and class enemies?

I think not.

As importantly, how can the dignity of every person under God’s creation thrive or even survive if we continue to think and act in such a grossly divisive manner? One is led to ask: Have we learned nothing from the political tragedies of the twentieth century? Where is the sobriety, the moral realism, that alone can give rise to mutual respect, free and decent politics, and realistic and durable change within a framework of critical respect for our country’s admirable achievements? The fevered politics of purity and perfection are in every respect an enemy of the good, of mutual respect, and a shared liberty under the rule of law. If we don’t recognize this elementary truth, and soon, we shall surely lose our civilizational soul and perhaps our freedoms, too.

Reasons for Hope

But there remain considerable reasons for hope. An independent liberal such as Bari Weiss, driven out of the New York Times at the beginning of the woke ascendancy in the summer of 2020, has self-consciously taken up Solzhenitsyn’s challenge to “Live Not by Lies!”—citing his 1974 essay as an inspiration on more than a few occasions. In a striking essay in the November 2021 issue of Commentary, Weiss highlights the intimate connection in our new situation between courage and “the unqualified rejection of lies.” In the spirit of Solzhenitsyn, she impressively outlines the categorical imperative underlying the rejection of woke despotism as all forms of ideological despotism: “Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob,” on Twitter or elsewhere. She gives multiple inspiring examples of Americans—professors, teachers, lawyers, parents—who are doing precisely that with courage and moral integrity. Inspired by Solzhenitsyn, Weiss has a sturdy confidence that in the right circumstances “courage can be contagious.”

In his book Live Not By Lies, published in 2020, the Orthodox Christian and conservative culture critic Rod Dreher draws wisely on Solzhenitsyn’s appeal to civic courage and spiritual integrity with special emphasis on the threat to religious liberty and traditional morality posed by the woke revolutionaries. His thoughtful and provocative book has sold over 150,000 copies despite a de facto media embargo by the likes of the New York Times.

Then there is the equally inspiring story of the musician Winston Marshall of the world-famous band Mumford and Sons widely reported by the British press in the spring of 2021. Under immense pressure from a censorious Twitter mob for retweeting an account of brutal, Antifa violence in Portland, Oregon, he quit the band but refused to back off or apologize for perfectly honorable convictions. He did not want his band to feel permanent pressure from a mob whose ferociousness refused to give way. Inspired by the peroration of Solzhenitsyn’s “Live Not By Lies!,” a text that fortified his will and gave him encouragement and strength, Marshall remained true to his convictions. Between the mob and his “sense of integrity,” he chose his conscience. This is civic courage that inspires and reinvigorates the soul.

This is yet another example of how Solzhenitsyn’s great injunction to “Live Not by lies!” continues to speak to men and women of good will in an era threatened by a new and insidious version of the ideological Lie. We do not want to overstate. Since free institutions are not yet moribund in the United States, one would like to believe that this counter-revolution that Solzhenitsyn has helped instigate has more than a fighting chance at succeeding. Let us do our best to make this reasonable hope come true. But short of ultimate success, what matters first and foremost is maintaining the integrity of our souls.

The Choice and Challenge Before Us

As I have argued elsewhere, following the Czech Catholic dissident Václav Benda, the categorical rejection of the ideological lie is the precondition for the next crucial step of civic salvation; building a “parallel polis,” a series of parallel institutions that reject the hate-filled lies at the heart of every tyrannical and ideological project that has deformed the late modern world. Only institutions that self-consciously reject woke assumptions in the name of truth and liberty are likely to maintain their integrity and autonomy. The building and sustaining of such institutions is more and more in evidence and must be supported by all people of good will. But one must begin at the beginning—the personal decision not to live by lies. From that wise and liberating decision, all else will flow.

All that is asked of us is to display moral integrity and a modicum of civic spirit. If we reject this path, we surely deserve the scorn owed Pushkin’s passive and contemptuous herd of cattle who are all too content with their enslavement. The choice—so momentous with consequence—is truly ours.

The post The Persistence of the Lie appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a symposium on vindicating a prudent politics within the GOP.

At a moment when our cultural and political elites either celebrated violence, mayhem, and lawlessness in the name of social justice, or remained silent as statues toppled and the great symbols of the Republic came under assault, that most imperfect of political leaders—Donald J. Trump—spoke truth at Mount Rushmore (July 3, 2020) when he proclaimed: “No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart. Can’t happen. No person who remains quiet at the destruction of this resplendent heritage can possibly lead us to a better future.” And he added that “the radical ideology of attacking our country…would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of repression, domination, and vengeance. They want to silence us but we will not be silenced.” Those words remain true, perhaps even truer, after the lamentable events of January 6, 2021, rightly and unequivocally condemned by all responsible conservatives.

Trump did not deliberately incite violence, an example of the “Big Lie” that the Left likes to invoke in prepackaged unison. But his erratic behavior after November 3, 2020, and his failure to raise genuine questions of electoral integrity in a responsible way (I have in mind massive changes to the electoral laws, ballot harvesting, unprecedented levels of mail-in voting, corrupt Democratic urban machines) played a significant role in the unfolding of our civic tragedy. The unreasonable pressure Trump put on his loyal and honorable Vice President served no good purpose, and Trump’s initial hesitancy to unequivocally condemn the violence on January 6, 2021 (that condemnation came hours later) revealed a failure of character and leadership. If much of the Left is remarkably selective in its condemnation of violence, principled conservatives are obliged to condemn lawlessness in all its forms.

But the Left’s response has been unprecedented, vengeful, and openly and aggressively authoritarian. Leftist violence (even on Inauguration Day in Denver, Portland, and Seattle) has been passed over in silence. The left-liberal commentariat now sees “sedition” and “insurrection” everywhere, failing to make any distinction between a few hundred kooks and law-abiding supporters of President Trump (or conservatives more broadly). Social media companies have become engines of political and intellectual repression, silencing imagined “enemies of the people” (a dreadful and evil Leninist appellation President Trump should have never used, even in jest). Well-known journalists openly advocate shutting down Fox News and any media outlets that challenge progressive pieties. And the very same people who favored “dismantling” police departments, attacking our civic inheritance, and who confused rampant urban violence with “mostly peaceful protests” now claim to be the authoritarian enforcers of “unity” and “democratic norms.”

There is something surreal and Orwellian (to use that unavoidable word here) about this politically-enforced amnesia. Journalists and politicians who pedaled the risible “Russian hoax,” accusing the former president of being a Russian agent at worst, or a “colluder” at best, now announce that they will tolerate no “false narratives.” These progressivist demagogues who are no liberals (free-speech liberalism appears to be moribund, if not outright dead), have used the events of January 6, 2021 to promote intellectual and political conformity and to create the rudiments of a left-wing national security state. That is where we are, and it will do no good to think, as some conservative journalists do at old and once venerable magazines, that all would be well if Mr. Trump was driven from the face of the earth. Anti-Trump ire is a poor substitute for a genuinely conservative politics of prudence.

Nor are ritualistic denunciations of populism and nationalism particularly helpful at this moment in time. Populism is clearly not enough, neither for the country nor for its own ambitions. Statesmanship matters and statesmanship at its best informs and elevates the residual good sense, or common sense, of the American people. And it requires character, too. We are long past the time when we can count on “a silent majority” uncorrupted by moral nihilism and the regnant academic and intellectual “culture of repudiation” to save the country. Still, as the late Irving Kristol never stopped reminding us, the old Platonic critique of democracy and democratic man (in five or six marvelous pages of Book 8 of Plato’s Republic) has been in decisive respects inverted. It is less the people’s passions that threaten democracy but an elite that is far from refined, restrained, or aristocratic. Our credentialed class continually flirts with theories that subvert common life—from doctrinaire egalitarianism in its various forms to “gender theory” and an identity politics that has contempt for common humanity—because they judge people guilty for who they are and not what they have done. In the not-so-distant past, many of the same people apologized for murderous Communist regimes.

In contrast, many ordinary people are still proud to be patriots, and some remain stalwart people of faith. But the culture of repudiation and the above-mentioned fashionable ideological “theories” are reshaping the culture, and the education of young people from kindergarten through graduate school. In response, populism needs to be informed by statesmanship and a more attentive regard to the constitution of 1787. As Aristotle, Burke, the Founders, Tocqueville, and Lincoln have all taught us in their different ways, the human will, whether of the one, the few, or the many, is an insufficient foundation for justice, the rule of law and self-government. A prudent, constitutional populism, defending the country against those who define democracy as the repudiation of our civic and civilizational inheritance, is the only way forward.  

But that will demand not only thoughtful intellectual venues like Law and Liberty, the sponsor of this symposium, but new universities open to liberal learning and resistant to the destruction of what T.S. Eliot famously called the “Permanent Things.” Without cultural and spiritual renewal, there cannot be a revival of true statesmanship, constitutionalism, and the self-command central to the arts of republican self-government. But that renewal is also impossible without a decent and reasonably free political order. For example, there cannot be a reasonable chance for a “Benedict Option” to succeed unless our political order remains open to authentic religious liberty and non-relativistic understandings of human freedom. There is no escape from politics, and the imperatives of political reason. There is no running for the sacred hills.

The late Roger Scruton is extremely helpful in showing prudent and principled conservatives (and old-fashioned liberal constitutionalists) all the obstacles that we confront. We on the conservative-liberal side understand that every civic order is also a moral order, one that inculcates and defends “existing norms and customs.” In one of his last books, Conservatism: An Invitation to the Great Tradition, Scruton argued that on the Left “it is the negative that inspires.” Left-liberals no longer believe in discursive reason but reduce every argument and action to the unholy trinity of race, class, and gender (however, class is on the wane at the present moment, it seems). The Left has ready-made “isms” and “phobias” (racism, xenophobia, homophobia, sexism, and now transphobia) to conveniently target conservatives—or people of good sense more broadly—and “to dismiss every aspect of our cultural capital.” The Left increasingly identifies freedom with permissive egalitarianism, and cultural and moral relativism. They are unforgiving and see oppression and domination in decent if imperfect traditions, institutions, and cultural practices.

A truly prudent conservatism must face this cultural assault soberly, intelligently, but firmly. What the great French social scientist Dominique Schnapper calls “extreme democracy,” a democracy that rejects, repudiates, cancels, and above all shows no gratitude to our forebears is no democracy at all. It is its self-destructive “corruption,” to use the language of the great French liberal political philosopher Montesquieu. It is a faux moderation, a “false reptile prudence,” to quote Edmund Burke, that calls on true conservatives and conservative-minded liberals to accommodate themselves to a democracy that subverts its essential moral and civic preconditions. It is the path of perdition, based on a false and pernicious understanding of democracy.

In a brilliant recent piece on “Trump and the Failure of the Expert Class” in the Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim convincingly argues that the illiberal Left will always accuse conservatives and classical liberals of “carrying out an ‘assault on democracy’.” As Swaim observes, for the Left “democracy” no longer means self-government, or the will of the people as reflected in the electoral process, but rather “progressive policy aims,” including efforts at ever more egalitarian and redistributionist social policies. Swaim is undoubtedly right. But the cause of this appropriation of a meta-political understanding of “democracy” runs much deeper. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss already saw in the 1950s, “modern progress,” the secular faith most evident in advanced intellectual circles, has long ago replaced the old and venerable distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, with an insidious distinction between “progress” and “reaction.” This distinction was carried out to murderous extremes by almost all Communist regimes in the 20th century. When activists appeal to “the right side of history” they are by implication damning those who hold on to the old and noble distinctions between good and evil, right and wrong, nobility and baseness. Democracy, so understood, so radicalized, thus becomes an instrument of authoritarian, even totalitarian coercion and domination. There is more than a whiff of the old Russian nihilism, and the cruelties of 1917, in a progressive ideology that has lost touch with the old sense of modesty, humility and limits that in different ways informed the meeting place of the Christian religion and true liberal democratic politics.

As prudent and principled conservatives move forward in these troubled waters, we must remain thoughtful and spirited defenders of what Roger Scruton has called “humane national loyalty.” As Pierre Manent has pointed out on many occasions, the nation is the indispensable political form that gives life—and limits—to the exercise of democratic consent. It is the frame or body for democratic self-government. But notice that neither Scruton nor Manent—our two most thoughtful philosophical defenders of the self-governing nation—use the idiom of “nationalism.” When one speaks of nationalism, one is already off to a bad start. The word has come to denote, for better or worse (I think worse), a pathology, a series of excesses. Regardless, thoughtful conservatives must remain defenders of the nation, of territorial democracy, as the type of home or belonging appropriate to a free society conscious of its intrinsic links to those who came before us, and those who will surely follow us. To put it simply, to reject the nation as political form, is to reject the framework that gives life to democracy.

Democratic patriotism is thus never reducible to an abstract attachment to rights or to some universalist liberal political philosophy. Men and women fight and die, or risk their lives for free countries, not for a universalism or cosmopolitanism that is far too abstract to be concrete or real. Populist nationalism needs the best conservative political thought to make these essential, humane, and salutary distinctions. And as the thoughtful liberal-centrist political theorist Steven B. Smith points out in his very fine new book, Reclaiming Patriotism in the Age of Extremes, “Cosmopolitanism has become the new civil religion of the intelligentsia—in Raymond Aron’s words, the ‘opium of the intellectuals’.” It is an ideology, not a civic creed that can hold a free people together, or point the way to a humane future.  

Populism and nationalism in their inchoate forms are clearly not enough. But they are a beginning, albeit an imperfect one. They need tutoring from wise, sound old wisdom. The task of recovering the art of prudent conservativism largely lies ahead of us. But we should not confuse that task with settling for a faux moderation that ignores the power of the totalitarian temptation in elite circles, and in that pernicious vehicle of “cancelling” we call social media. But as we confront the grave crisis before us, a systematic attempt to cancel and criminalize conservative wisdom, and all the traditional moral contents of life, we must not despair. We can be hopeful (in the long run at least) because we are defending the goods of life, the concrete and the real, against the angry forces of negation. And that gives us a dialectical advantage of some enduring significance and magnitude.

The post No Escape from Politics—or Patriotism appeared first on Law & Liberty.

Two dates stand out in the history of contemporary France, 1940 and 1968. I have previously written for Law & Liberty about the “May events” of 1968 that combined a “revolutionary psychodrama,” in the fitting words of Raymond Aron, of middle-class students posturing at militant revolution, committed to a broadly “subversive” cultural project to emancipate the individual from bourgeois decorum, traditional moral constraints, respect for authoritative institutions from the army to the university, and a decent respect for the achievements of French and European civilization. That legacy has largely been institutionalized, and is inseparable from the “culture of repudiation,” the debilitating Western self-hatred of which the late Roger Scruton has so forcefully spoken. The late Michel Foucault, an ubiquitous presence in all our humanities departments, perfectly embodied the spirit of 1968 in his willful refusal to acknowledge the all-important distinction between authority and “domination,” and in his deeply perverse identification of freedom with contempt for law and self-restraint. 

Let us return to 1940, a date that represents both national humiliation at the hands of the Nazi invader, and the liberating act of General Charles de Gaulle in refusing to accept that France’s defeat in the Battle of France entailed a final and definitive victory for a Nazi imperium. In the spring of 1940, France had the largest army in the world and was the bedrock of Western self-defense. Germany’s crushing defeat and conquest of France was thus a shock to everyone involved. That France capitulated to Hitler’s regime in just six weeks after the beginning of armed conflict on May 10, 1940, was nothing less than a traumatizing event for the French people, for its governing elites, and for how the world would henceforth judge the spirit and capacities of the French nation. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, wrote off France after its rapid defeat and its surrender to the German invader. For him, France was finished, and irrevocably so. The American president showed far more sympathy and forbearance for the increasingly collaborationist regime at Vichy (headed by Maréchal Pétain), than he did for the noble and honorable efforts of de Gaulle and his “Free French” movement. Roosevelt could see in de Gaulle only an aspiring despot. He was equally blind to the fact that a French resistance headed by de Gaulle was infinitely preferable to one spearheaded by the French Communist party. Roosevelt preferred a liberated North Africa in the hands of the Vichyite Admiral François Darlan, and later supported the weak and visionless General Henri Giraud against de Gaulle, even though de Gaulle clearly commanded the support of the full range of the French Resistance. Such blindness on Roosevelt’s part is unthinkable without the trauma occasioned by the precipitous collapse of the French army, and French democracy, in May-June 1940. But nothing excuses the American president’s increasingly willful refusal to see things as they were, a refusal that deeply harmed Franco-American relations for two generations or more. 

Men Matter More than Technology

What were the principal sources, or causes, of the French calamity? In the English historian Julian Jackson’s thoughtful, informative, and competent account in The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, a serious effort is made to put the death throes of the French Third Republic in some perspective. Jackson argues, for example, that the English political elite was deeply corrupt in its own ways, and had supported appeasement of the Nazi regime, partly out of cowardice, and partly because the appeasers preferred to deal with an anti-Bolshevik Nazi Germany rather than attempt a defensive alliance with a Soviet Union they (rightly) abhorred. Because of this, the majority in Churchill’s own party still distrusted him for months after he became Prime Minister of Great Britain on May 10, 1940.

Jackson also argues that France had made serious progress in rearming by the time the Second World War broke out in September 1939. In some sense, Jackson argues, France was “ready for war,” at least in terms of the requisite number of tanks and guns. Jackson acknowledges the eloquence and forcefulness of Charles de Gaulle’s critique (in his 1934 book Vers l’armée de métier, published in English in 1941 as Army of the Future) of an outmoded approach to national defense that left all initiative to the enemy, hid behind the series of defensive fortifications known as the Maginot Line, and that gave France little or no ability to strike the enemy if and when war broke out. France massively, and unwisely, over-relied on short-term conscripts and reservists. The French had better tanks than the Germans but could only conceive them as supports of infantry. But despite de Gaulle’s discernment, Jackson faults him for combining a “prescient” technical argument for the use of tank formations in a dynamic and offensive manner, with “the politically sensitive issue of the professional army.”

But de Gaulle’s argument was never an essentially “technical” one. In Vers l’armée de métier the French military intellectual was calling for nothing less than a renewal of France and her army. The old republican and revolutionary dogmas, the ideological reliance on civilian armed forces at all costs, were inadequate to confronting the needs of the time or the immense danger posed by Berlin after Hitler’s ascendance to power in January 1933. This was indeed a moment “that changed everything,” as we are too keen to say today. Jackson faults de Gaulle for having written a book “suffused with a romantic and almost mystical celebration of the military vocation and the role it could play in national regeneration.” “This,” he adds, “was not the best way to win converts.” 

Something more than a technical solution was needed to address the grave moral and political crisis facing France. Pacifism was rampant on the Left. And the Right, which had largely supported Président du conseil Raymond Poincairé’s hardline policies towards Germany in the 1920s, now increasingly supported active efforts to accommodate a revolutionary regime under Hitler that could not be appeased. The best witnesses of that period—de Gaulle, the liberal conservative philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron, the distinguished historian Marc Bloch—all testify to the spirit of palpable decadence and decline that permeated the atmosphere of public life in France during the 1930s.

De Gaulle’s efforts were thus necessarily more radical and fundamental than the prosaic technical efforts that Jackson is more comfortable with. France needed a statesman with Churchillian resolve, and de Gaulle thought he had found one in the center-right statesman Paul Reynaud, who took up de Gaulle’s calls for military reform and political renewal in the years between 1935 and 1940. In Vers l’armée de métier, de Gaulle suggested that military renewal demanded a warrior-statesman with the vision and fortitude of great men of the past such as Louvois or Carnot. France needed a “national recasting,” military reform coupled with a renewal of statesmanship, and the firmest rejection of pacifist illusions. Against those who combined “anti-Fascism” with a call for the laying down of arms, de Gaulle reminded his contemporaries that “the sword is the axis of the world, and greatness is not divisible.”

Despite his less visionary approach to the crisis of the French political order, Jackson fully acknowledges that France had for all intents and purposes become a pacifist nation on the eve of the Second World War. He points out the pertinent facts: 1.3 million Frenchmen had died during the Great War of 1914-1918, and “over 1 million survivors had been left as invalids.” “There were over 600,000 widows and over 750,000 orphans.” In addition, the bodies of 300,000 soldiers “had never been found or identified.” Memorials to the dead could be found in every French village, town, and city. A pacifist reaction to such bloodletting, and such losses, was surely to be expected. But pacifism soon took on a disturbing ideological cast.

In socialist and left-wing circles patriotism was often mocked, and many intellectuals “subscribed to a philosophical rejection of war in any circumstances.” The novelist Jean Giono wrote an influential book, Refus d’obéissance, which “advocated desertion if war broke out.” The newspaper of the teachers’ union argued for “rather servitude than war.” As Jackson points out, one of the most influential and famous pacifists was Émile Chartier, better known by his pen name Alain. A teacher of philosophy at the famous Parisian lycée Henri IV, Alain urged citizens to resist “les pouvoirs,” to oppose the efforts of legitimately constituted authorities. This fashionable antipolitical moralism was hardly helpful in preparing France to come to terms with the deadly menace posed by the totalitarianism and aggressive militarism of Hitler and the National Socialists. 

The Virtues of a Free People

In his passionate memoir about the defeat and betrayal of France in May-June 1940, Strange Defeat, the historian March Bloch, a man of the decent and moderate Left, lamented such blind pacifism and the concomitant dismissal of the legitimacy and dignity of patriotism and national loyalty. A secularized French Jew, Bloch fought courageously in both World Wars. He was a patriot deeply committed to the French nation and to the ideals of French republicanism. He was an honorable man who was untouched by the decadence of the time or the siren song of pacifism. Another witness to the decadence of a French Republic seemingly incapable of political and military renewal was the aforementioned Raymond Aron, perhaps the greatest French political thinker of the 20th century.

In his Memoirs, Aron was particularly critical of French “anti-fascist intellectuals” who saw fascism everywhere, dividing the nation while incoherently supporting a foreign policy of peace at any price (the same strange syndrome of anti-fascist rhetoric and pacifist policy could also be found in left-wing intellectual and political circles in Britain). In response to the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, a manifesto of influential anti-fascist intellectuals called for the “return of the Third Reich to the League of Nations.” These were “only words, words, words,” as Aron strikingly put it, words that served to conceal a quiet accommodation to Hitler’s agenda for a Nazified Europe. Aron argued that to detest fascism and war, while doing nothing to stand up to Hitler’s lupine imperialism, was both morally incoherent and a recipe for disaster. These were “minds… operating in the void.” They had succumbed to a literary politics, devoid of a minimum of properly political reflection and any coherent and sustainable notion of political responsibility. 

In an address on “Democratic States and Totalitarian States” delivered on June 2,1939 to the French Philosophical Society, Aron called for the restoration of virtues necessary for any self-respecting political order, including a free one: heroism, sacrifice for the common good, a willingness to work and not just to insist on one’s rights. These virtues must be accepted voluntarily by those who care for the survival of liberal civilization. They cease to be virtues when they are imposed forcibly by a totalitarian state dedicated to nefarious ends. But Aron argued insistently before a group of mainly pacifist or semi-pacifist intellectuals that one must accept those means that are necessary and efficacious in fighting the totalitarian threat: “one can only resist arms with arms.” Aron believed that English and French pacifists could not be more wrong when they argued that introducing obligatory military service (as the English had recently done), “made the democracies complicit in a totalitarianism of their own.” Aron believed that it was “truly stupid” to argue that in the act of resisting totalitarian evil, “one had lost the reasons for resisting.” This antipolitical moralism was a poor substitute for the political responsibility that de Gaulle, Aron, and Bloch all represented, and defended, in their distinctive ways. 

French soldiers fought courageously and honorably during the devastating but short-lived Battle of France. So many good men, and countless civilians, perished in defense of their cherished country. But in the months and years leading up to the Battle of France the armed forces remained committed to a policy of inertia, to a thoughtless acceptance of the status quo. They were in essential respects committed to fighting the last war. De Gaulle made one last effort to break through this fog of incomprehension. On January 26, 1940, during the so-called phony war, he wrote a powerfully worded and argued “Memorandum” on the military and political state of France that he sent to eighty influential figures in the Government, the High Command, and the governing class. He argued passionately that “military immobility” did not answer to the nature of the present military realities and the larger facts on the ground. He lauded the revolution in warfare brought about by “the internal combustion engine” which now “endows modern means of destruction with such force, speed, and range that the present conflict will be marked, sooner or later, by movements, surprises, break-through and pursuits the scale and rapidity of which will infinitely exceed those of the most lightning events of the past…Let us make no mistake about it!” In his War Memoirs, de Gaulle notes that his Memorandum, this eloquent plea for France to face pressing realities, and to recognize the deluge that was about to overrun the country, “produced no shock.” But some lightly mechanized divisions were coming into formation and de Gaulle would head one, with some momentary successes, near Abbeville at the end of May in an effort to stave off the German invaders. 

France’s rapid military defeat (Paris would fall on June 14, 1940, a little over a month after the Battle of France had begun) was a direct result of this failure to adjust to the requirements of warfare in the age of the internal combustion engine, as de Gaulle had put it. In his famous “Appel” of June 18th, 1940, his call to continued resistance and the founding moment of La France libre, the Free French movement, de Gaulle reminded everyone who was listening (probably a small audience at that precise moment) that the Government of France that had just entered into negotiations with the Nazi authorities had been “overwhelmed by enemy mechanized forces, both on the ground and air.” These were, as de Gaulle pointed out, self-inflicted wounds: “it was the German tanks, planes, and tactics that provided the element of surprise which brought our leaders to their present plight.”

A reading of Churchill’s and de Gaulle’s respective War Memoirs suggests that the rot went significantly deeper than this. General Maxime Weygand, the head of the French armed forces, was already contemplating defeat and a possible armistice in the early days of June 1940. He could imagine continuing the fight only if Britain committed to engaging the whole of the Royal Air Force’s resources on the continent. This was surely untenable since Churchill was obliged to both continue the fight in France, honoring his alliance with France, while saving some precious resources for a Battle of Britain that was surely about to begin. Churchill admired the fighting spirit of Premier Paul Reynaud and tried to buoy his prospects on June 16th, 1940 with a Declaration of Union between Great Britain and France that was also promoted and supported by de Gaulle (the future Free French leader had joined Reynaud’s cabinet on the 5th of June, 1940). Churchill’s account of the bitterly hostile response of Weygand and Marshall Pétain to this remarkable offer is quite revealing: in the French Cabinet meeting they mocked the idea of a “fusion with a corpse” since they were absolutely convinced that Britain was finished, too. They were quintessentially false realists from the beginning to the end of the drama. 

The Morality of a Shipwreck

In the riveting first chapters of his Mémoires de Guerre, de Gaulle brilliantly captures the atmosphere of defeatism and moral and political corruption that dominated the highest French military and political circles. Pétain mistook France’s defeat in the Battle of France with something on par with her earlier defeat during the Franco-German War of 1870-1871. He saw no substantial difference between Bismarck’s Germany and Hitler’s, and he thought France would live to fight another day. Churchill suggests that at heart Pétain was always a defeatist. But de Gaulle believes that a younger Pétain would have hesitated “to don the purple in the midst of national surrender.” But in de Gaulle’s inimitable words: “Old age is a shipwreck. That we might be spared nothing, the old age of Marshal Pétain was to identify with the shipwreck of France.” Memorable words, indeed.

France was hit by a perfect storm consisting of defeatism, immobility of mind and policy, and utter blindness to the nature of the enemy. Pacifism on the Left, defeatism among too many on the Right, and a paucity of good men deeply committed to the cause of liberty, human dignity, and national honor. Paul Reynaud might have played the role of Churchill (and de Gaulle) if the State was in “running order.” He was a man of courage, intelligence, and undeniable patriotism. He actively encouraged those who wanted to continue the fight for France’s liberty and honor, first and foremost de Gaulle, as well as Georges Mandel, Clemenceau’s old assistant, who embodied much of the patriotic spirit of the old Tiger. But Reynaud did not have the strength to resist the rising tide of defeatism in a cabinet where some preferred to become a German province rather than continue the fight with Britain and Churchill. Reynaud was burnt out, fatigued, and not a little despondent (and his plotting mistress had undoubted pro-German sympathies). The legal authorities in France were left to choose the path of dishonor, suing for a peace that made the remnant of France a “prince-esclave,” as the great Père Gaston Fessard wrote in writings justifying the rejection of the legal government of France in the name of a truly “legitimate” one such as de Gaulle’s. A legitimate political order must be free and truly sovereign, he argued, and not a slave of a totalitarian and nihilistic foreign power. It was that conviction, at once moral and political, that largely animated those who joined the ranks of Free France. 

The French defeatists on the Right, and pacifists on the Left, shared one great conviction: they both thought the war was essentially over. Britain would soon surrender and France would accommodate herself, however unpleasantly, to the New World Order announced by German arms and Nazi propaganda. But de Gaulle and Churchill both appreciated a deeper truth: The Battle of France, even the forthcoming Battle of Britain, were mere episodes in a much larger struggle. Unlike the military and political denizens of defeat, they pledged themselves to “never surrender” and were willing to continue the fight from their respective empires if necessary. As de Gaulle put it in his famous Appeal, they could both look forward to help from the “immense industrial resources of the United States” and to a “world war,” a larger frame of space and time as Pierre Manent once put it, that would correct the egregious errors of men like Weygand and Pétain.

De Gaulle’s radio “Appeal” of June 18, 1940 was thus an appeal to both realism and honor, as was Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech of the same day. And both great statesmen knew exactly what would follow if the Nazis were met by shameless accommodation rather than honorable resistance. What they offered humanity, according to Paul Reynaud, was the “Middle Ages without mercy.” A strikingly apt formulation. But Churchill said it even better on June 18, 1940 in the aforementioned “Finest Hour” speech. Remarking that the Battle of France was now over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin, Churchill suggested that a failure of will on the part of free peoples would lead to the “whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, [sinking] into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” Those were precisely the stakes as both statesmen fully appreciated.

Through their noble actions, Churchill and de Gaulle vindicated the struggle of free peoples and resisted the alleged inevitability of a new totalitarian despotism. The path of courage and noble resistance turned out to be the path of the most reasonable realism, of supreme civic good sense. That is one fundamental lesson from 1940, and the fall of France, that should not be forgotten. What Churchill and de Gaulle represented, especially in those crucial days and months in the spring and summer of 1940, is a decisive example of noble character and prescient leadership the contemporary culture of repudiation chooses to ignore. 

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James F. Pontuso’s wonderfully clear, accessible, and provocative book challenges one of the orthodoxies of our time. It has become conventional wisdom that virtue—the fundamental distinction between right and wrong, good and evil—has no support in human nature or in the order of things.

In Nature’s Virtue, the Charles Patterson Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at Hampden-Sydney College (a friend and a longtime intellectual sparring partner) argues that virtue has largely lost its luster. The Left identifies it with dogmatism and unjustified privilege; libertarians too often confuse it with an assault on individual freedom; postmodernists ridicule it for its “binary distinctions” and allegedly heavy-handed moral appeals; and deconstructionists see it as no more than “linguistic and social constructions” that justify the oppression of the weak by the strong. Feminists predictably identify virtue with male domination and the omnipresent threat of patriarchy.

As this brief recapitulation suggests, a good deal of angry moralism informs the academic and political assault on “nature’s virtue.” When virtue and morality are severed from their grounding in nature and reason, untethered moralism and political fanaticism are unleashed in the academy and the public square. We soon inhabit a Manichean social world where victims and victimizers are too readily identified by ideologues of all stripes. Nature’s virtue is thus a necessary antidote to both limitless moralism and limitless relativism, two threats to human self-understanding that increasingly converge in profoundly toxic ways. This is one pressing reason to take Pontuso’s book seriously.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel

His tone, in contrast to many today on the Left and the Right, is measured. He does not come bearing a club. His approach might be said to be phenomenological in the non-technical sense of the term. It allows the common-sense surface of things, the un-theorized world of ordinary experience, to reveal its myriad riches to the human mind and soul. In previous books, Pontuso had studied the thought and action of the Russian and Czech “dissidents” and writers Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel, two courageous anti-totalitarian titans who fought ideological lies in the name of “living in truth” (a truth dismissed as pure pretense by the likes of postmodernist philosopher Richard Rorty). Each man embodied the ancient virtue of courage while appealing to moderation, conscience, and the inchoate human sense that the primordial distinctions between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are available to human reason and experience if we but open ourselves up to them.

In his fight against totalitarian brutality and mendacity, Solzhenitsyn appealed to the drama of good and evil in each human soul as the starting point for personal reflection and moral and political action. Never endorsing collectivism or authoritarianism, he eloquently called for “voluntary self-limitation” and for repentance on the part of all those who had accommodated themselves to totalitarian oppression and lies. For Solzhenitsyn, the life of conscience and personal responsibility ultimately pointed to the Almighty—to a providential God who intimated a spiritual and metaphysical grounding for our ability to distinguish right from wrong. But the great Russian writer began with the concrete experience of good and evil in the human heart, not with theoretical or philosophical abstractions. He thus provided a powerful experiential witness to nature’s virtue, to the phenomena as they come to sight for conscientious and morally serious human beings.

Havel, less obviously theistic, nonetheless acknowledged that “we are observed ‘from Above’” and that the “Memory of Being” forgets nothing—thereby buttressing the “higher responsibility” to which human beings are called. Solzhenitsyn and Havel begin with good and evil as they are experienced in the human heart and in common life. Their personal experiences, so richly conveyed in their art and prose, provide an indispensable starting point for Pontuso’s own recovery of the virtue to which nature beckons us.

The author does not take the next step toward a theistic affirmation of the transcendent and supernatural support for nature’s virtue. But he certainly respects that step. His phenomenological approach should be welcomed by all those who reject the destructive siren calls of moral relativism and ideological fanaticism. Even St. Thomas argued that in some sense nature was more fundamental than grace, since without nature, God’s grace could not do its work. The recovery of the natural order of things is necessary for all (believers and unbelievers alike) who wish to overcome the intellectual and moral chaos of our time and preserve human liberty.

James Q. Wilson and Philippa Foot

Pontuso draws on the recovery of the common-sense view of morality found in thinkers such as the American political scientist James Q. Wilson and the British analytical philosopher Philippa Foot. Both Wilson and Foot show how widespread, and natural, goodness is. Relativists need to come to terms with the reassuring fact that good behavior and virtue are much more widespread than generally recognized. As Pontuso teasingly remarks, “Most people do not abuse their parents, beat their children, steal from their local grocery store, wantonly destroy public property, or kick their pets.” Evil is palpably real but goodness—natural goodness, nature’s virtue—is much more ubiquitous than we sometimes acknowledge.

The book is excellent at laying out the multiple ways in which moral relativists, even as they deny the existence of virtue, presuppose it. For example, most political and economic libertarians reject the idea of “ultimate truth” and place all their hopes in the “spontaneous order” of freely acting and “autonomous” moral agents. They are distrustful of tradition (F.A. Hayek was an exception in this regard) and generally see the full array of inherited social obligations as hampering human freedom. This ignores that the citizens and economic actors who come to the market, or interact with other human beings in other ways, are people who have been, as Pontuso says, “habituated by law, habit, custom, and the traditions of civil society.” These moral inheritances, made possible by nature’s virtue, “mitigate truly selfish, self-centered behavior.”  Pontuso is clear: “Libertarian principles depend on virtue,” on habits and actions that are seen as “proper and good.”

Human beings are not naturally relativistic. One’s sense of self is almost always informed by sociality, generosity, and a deeply ingrained sense that many human actions—murder, criminality, cruelty, torture, a failure to help those in desperate trouble—are wrong and violate human dignity, rightly understood. A market economy and a civil society under law could not sustain themselves for very long if unabashed relativism and crude selfishness became the order of the day. As Edmund Burke famously observed in his Reflections, such human beings who show blatant disregard for moral obligations can only be governed by the gallows. Pontuso pays respect to libertarian ideals even as he shows that they are finally dependent on a much more capacious understanding of human nature and human motives.

The Antifoundationalists

One of the strengths of Nature’s Virtue is the way it forthrightly confronts the philosophical current that goes by the name of “antifoundationalism.” Leo Strauss once observed that one of the preeminent practical tasks of authentic political philosophy was to protect sound practice against bad theory. Pontuso does exactly that, and does it very well. To his credit, he takes seriously the argument of theoretical extremists such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger that “God is dead”—that there is no natural or divine support for the human good or human aspirations.

Be it noted that the grandfather and father of postfoundationalism, respectively, were not vulgar relativists: Nietzsche defended “excellence and distinction” and Heidegger brilliantly saw that “no one dies for mere values.” But their projects were incoherent in the end, since Nietzsche reduced all the decent virtues (Aristotle’s moderation and Solzhenitsyn’s self-limitation included) to a repulsive “slave morality.” For his part, Heidegger historicized and relativized even the Being which was above and beyond all other beings. All goods become temporal and thus ephemeral. These two self-proclaimed critics of nihilism gave rise, in vulgarized form, to the “dictatorship of relativism” that now corrodes the very possibility of serious thought and action. They paradoxically reinforce the vulgarity and relativism of the “last man” they so despised.

In some ways, Pontuso is fairer to Nietzsche and Heidegger than he is to natural law theorists and to the moral philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Like many students of Strauss, he identifies the natural law with a priori dogmatism and denies its ultimate compatibility with political and moral prudence. Natural law thinking does indeed argue that there are some intrinsically evil acts. But it is simply not the case that natural law has no place for “complexity and diversity.” The idea of conscience, which arose in a Christian context but certainly has “natural” and “phenomenological” roots, applies the moral law to the most concrete of circumstances. It goes to far to say that the natural law, rightly understood, has no room for “the latitude of statesmanship,” as Strauss rather dogmatically claimed in his most famous book, Natural Right and History (1953).

Rescuing Kant from the Kantians

As for Kant, Pontuso rightly faults him for privileging “the good will” over all practical political or moral considerations. Contra Kant, the search for happiness need not be at odds with fidelity to the moral law. Kant was wrong to associate morality with utter selflessness, “a standard,” as Pontuso points out, “of almost inhuman detachment in which the actions of a moral person cannot result in personal benefit in any way—even in the hope of a final reward in the afterlife.” This moral understanding is too austere, too cut off from the natural human desire to combine happiness with a virtuous life. Yet Pontuso admits that Kant elevated our contemporary understanding of human dignity and human rights even if many soi-disant Kantians today identify moral autonomy with indiscriminate relativism.

Perhaps Abraham Lincoln revealed the highest moral possibilities of Kantian moral philosophy when he said, in a private note written to himself in 1858, “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master.” This was Lincoln’s high-minded definition of democracy, and it owed something to what we might call a Kantian intuition of the proper place of duty in the moral life. But Pontuso’s conclusion is doubtless right: The classics, particularly Aristotle, reveal a better way when they show that self-mastery is a means to both virtue and happiness—to a whole, honorable, and self-respecting life. Virtue will lose its hold on men’s souls if it makes unnatural demands.

This book helpfully shows us that we must begin at the beginning, taking seriously the “moral evaluations [that] are intrinsic to consciousness.” Near its end, the author quotes a memorable formulation from Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 essay “Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations”: “Even without a religious foundation,” all people, “even the most extreme economic materialists,” make judgments about “our spiritual values: noble, base, courageous, cowardly, hypocritical, false, cruel, magnanimous, just, and unjust . . . since they remain human beings.”

That is the operative point, “since they remain human beings.”

The lesson is clear: Making judgments, and even fine-tuned moral evaluations, is a preeminently human activity. Solzhenitsyn added that this ability both to evaluate and comprehend morality and the full range of the virtues began when the “human race broke away from the animal world through thought and reason.” The conclusion is not hard to draw: Relativism betrays the most precious acquisition of human beings.

Nature’s Virtue is a thoughtful and subtle book that calls on us to renew our confidence in our powers of thought, evaluation, and moral judgment. These natural moral judgments are not arbitrary and are, Pontuso suggests, the ultimate “foundation of nature’s virtue.” He stops short of suggesting that nature commands or that it issues “laws.” In this he departs decisively from the tradition of natural law. But nature does “beckon” us, to use the author’s word. Nature conveys an invitation to live thoughtfully and decently if we so choose. It respects human freedom but gently calls on us to exercise that freedom in a way that does justice to our vocation as rational and moral actors.

This conclusion, as modest as it is firm, gives renewed voice to a moral world that has been obfuscated, if not silenced, by dogmatism and relativism of every kind. James Pontuso has written a most welcome book, indeed.

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It is now 200 years since Karl Marx was born. Especially as self-described socialists gain attention, it is once again time for a reckoning on the Marxism of Marx. Marx famously spoke in 1848 of a specter haunting Europe—the “specter of Communism.” All the powers in the world, he noted, had entered into a “holy alliance” to “exorcise” the presence of communism from the European and world stage. At the same time, Marx announced the death knell of the political and economic order he unilaterally called “capitalism.” In the guise of a merely “scientific” analysis, he denounced this order for dehumanizing human beings and for leading to the comprehensive “pauperization” of the vast proletarian underbelly of modern industrial society. Today, we are more likely to pronounce the death of Marxism than of the liberal capitalist order that gave rise to Marx’s fear and loathing.

Ingeniously combining pseudo-science and moral indignation, Marx limned a vision of a post-historical and post-political order without contradictions or conflict, one that would achieve unprecedented prosperity and a new horizon marked by “human emancipation.” This would be the realization and triumph of something Marx mysteriously called “species-being.” A prophet of historical inevitability, Marx was also a committed “voluntarist” who welcomed revolutionary eruptions where they occurred. His occasional preference for armed putsches against the “class enemy” is apparent in his enthusiasm for the French revolutionary commune of 1871. It is evident as well in his flirtation with the idea that communist revolution could begin in Russia, even if it didn’t meet all the official Marxist preconditions of industrial development necessary for socialist revolution (on this, see his and Engels’ 1882 preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto). [1]

Emancipating the World

Economist, prophet of capitalism’s doom and an inevitable and blissful communist future, and revolutionary agitator par excellence, Marx hated the world as it was. His goal was “revolution”—not merely political revolution or “political emancipation,” but a wholesale change in the order of things: the aforementioned “human emancipation.” For the German ideologist, there was no human nature or “natural order of things” that needed to be respected even as one worked to promote humane and salutary change. It is a mistake to apply categories such as “eternal justice” to Marx’s political reflection. As he put it in 1845 in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point however is to change it.” This comes from the young Marx but it remained a profound sentiment of his until his death in 1883. Marx was not an advocate of reform, however radical. He did not work for “social justice” like a good humanitarian. Instead, he advocated something like “metaphysical rebellion” against the human condition. His humanism—and historicism—were distinctively inhumane and entailed something like a “gnostic” revolt against reality. Eric Voegelin and Alain Besançon have demonstrated as much and they have yet to be refuted convincingly.

For those looking for a humane alternative to the consumer society, and to the excesses of “late capitalism,” Marx does not in any way challenge the established view that the modern project ought to culminate in the thoroughgoing “conquest of nature.” He praised capitalist globalization as its most noble and desirable feature and had no quarrel with a materialist cornucopia as the final goal of human existence (even if the young Marx—the one attractive to the New Left—sometimes prefers “being” to“having”). In his early years, Marx sometimes preferred “authenticity” to material prosperity. But that is not the conclusion of mature Marxism.

Rousseau, for all his other faults, provides a much more humane and convincing alternative to the pathologies of commercial society. His thought retained some real connections with the classical emphasis on self-restraint and the incompatibility of “luxury” with republican virtue. Nor can Marx’s thought provide a philosophical grounding for calls for social equity and the promotion of a genuinely civic common good. Marx was not the first philosopher or political economist to speak of “class struggle.” Aristotle, Madison, and Guizot knew of the phenomenon well before Marx. They, unlike Marx, tried to moderate—and calibrate—class struggle in the name of justice and the common good. These indispensable categories have no place whatsoever in the political economy or political philosophy of Marx. Marx thus cannot provide the intellectual foundations of a decent, moderate, or responsible Left in our democratic societies. To suggest otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking and the worst kind of philosophical and historical revisionism.

Some, like the distinguished Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, think Marx became relevant again, in fact, ever more relevant, after the fall of European communism. On this account, the Marxism of Marx no longer has to carry the noose of Soviet communism around its neck. The Soviet tragedy is thus consigned to the past and questions about Marx’s (partial) responsibility for the tragedies of the 20th century can be safely ignored. Marx thus becomes a cipher or symbol for any and all reservations about capitalist modernity. This leads to absurdities in MacIntyre’s own thought: Marx, the scourge of “the idiocy of village life,” somehow justifies the conservative communitarianism to be found in isolated Icelandic and Irish fishing villages! Marx, a thoroughgoing modernist and cosmopolitan, would be appalled.

Marx himself spoke of the necessary unity of theory and practice and promoted class struggle, violent revolution, and the leap from historical “necessity” to revolutionary “freedom” wherever he could. He did not promote the bloodless academic theory that Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek call “the idea of communism,” even as they write half-ironic encomiums to liberating terror under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao (they seem particularly obsessed with the “glories” of the Cultural Revolution, that Maoist descent into reckless murder, mayhem, and cultural destruction). Marxism has become the last refuge for assorted fools, frauds, and scoundrels, and apologists for totalitarianism in the academy.

Unlike the neo-communists, MacIntyre to his credit takes moral virtue seriously and thus refuses to justify the unjustifiable. His indulgence towards Marx is consequently all the more mysterious, perhaps a residue of the anti-bourgeois ire that inspired him as a young Marxist theorist and activist. Anti-bourgeois ire can unite the Stalinist activist and the communitarian romantic without relativizing or identifying the two stances. None of this is to suggest that we must rest content with a “market ideology” that announces soulless globalization as our fate. Non-Marxists might learn to rediscover the “political” in political economy even if in a distinctly non-Marxist way.

At the same time, MacIntyre’s ahistorical appropriation of Marx evades the necessary task of assigning responsibility for the ravages of Marxist-Leninism in the 20th century.

What Naturally Follows from Revolution

It will not do, as the admirable Polish philosopher Lezsek Kolakowski argued more than once, to rest content with the claim that Marx would have been appalled by the gulag archipelago, or Leninist-Stalinist-Maoist repression, or Stalin’s “cult of personality.” [2] That’s probably true, even if Marx’s powerful invective mocked “formal freedoms” and endorsed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” as a necessary step on the way toward that vagary he called “human emancipation” under which the state would somehow mysteriously “wither away.” The great French anti-communist social and political thinker Raymond Aron was fascinated with the “Marxism of Marx” and thought that Marx was in certain moments an economist of real talent and “rich and subtle” insights. But, as Aron argued, it was Marx’s transparently “false ideas” that left their terrible mark on the 20th century: His doctrine of “surplus value” encouraged nationalization of even small businesses and trades as well as the illusion that one could eliminate markets and the “economic realm” altogether (see for example Lenin’s “War Communism”). Both Aron and Kolakowski understood that the search for total unity, “species-being,” or a society without conflict, led inexorably to unprecedented tyranny. Political liberty and the “formal” or “constitutional” freedoms had a dignity that Marx never began truly to appreciate. As Aron argued in the conclusion of his Mémoires (1983), as an “economist-prophet” Marx was a “putative ancestor of Marxist-Leninism,” and thus a “cursed sophist who holds his part of responsibility in the horrors of the twentieth century.” This fact cannot be denied or ignored without turning a willfully blind eye to the darkest realities of the 20th century.

In The Soviet Tragedy (1994), the remarkable Russianist Martin Malia has persuasively demonstrated the essential connection between the Marxism of Marx and the murderous totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. “Maximalist socialism” of the Leninist-Stalinist variety finds powerful support in the “four abolitions” unapologetically put forward in the second part of The Communist Manifesto (1848): the abolition of private property, the abolition of the traditional family, the abolition of religion, and the abolition of countries and nations. How does one abolish these “moral contents of life” without an unprecedented project of tyranny, terror, and centralization? And how does one expect a “revolutionary state,” fully endorsed by Marx, to somehow “wither away”? In his Letter to the Soviet Leaders (1974), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn correctly diagnosed Marx with “sheer ignorance of human nature.” Of course, Marx and Engels wryly suggested that bourgeois capitalism was already “abolishing” these traditional contents of human life and communism would simply consign them more quickly to the grave. But Malia’s central point holds: Communism, from Petrograd to the South China Seas, entailed an unremitting war on what Marx himself called the “material and spiritual elements of life.” The post-communist utopia is a chimera, deeply at odds with human nature, a vision of the future that is literally unthinkable. Leninist-Stalinism is the effectual truth of the Marxism of Marx whether Marx intended it or not. It is at a minimum one legitimate and even predictable outcome of the Marxist project.

Eric Voegelin perhaps went too far when he called Marx an “intellectual swindler” in his polemical and provocative Science, Politics, and Gnosticism (1959). In that work, Voegelin accused Marx, with some justification, of refusing to allow certain questions to even be asked. What would Voegelin make of the passage in the second part of the Manifesto where Marx shamelessly declares that “the charges against Communism from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious attention”? Can we call such an unrelieved dogmatist a philosopher open to the truth of things? We have here a portent of the nationalization of the mind that would be the fate of human beings under actual socialism. The essential human questions asked by religion and philosophy were banned by the ideocratic state. Marx bears a heavy responsibility for the closure to the life of reason that marked every communist society in the 20th century. As we see, multiple roads lead from the Marxism of Marx to the tragedies of the 20th century.

Questions Foreclosed

Can we still learn from Marx? Of course we can, despite everything. In a 1984 essay called “Totalitarianism and the Problem of Political Representation,” the French political philosopher Pierre Manent, no Marxist of any stripe, shows how Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” (1843) continues to illuminate the dynamics of a liberal order (we of course have nothing to learn from Marx’s violent invective in that piece against Judaism as a form of “hucksterism”). As Manent shows, Marx brilliantly demonstrates the diminutio capitis that the “contents of life” undergo in a liberal society. The modern representative state exists to protect rights: As Manent paraphrases Marx, “in order for there to be religious freedom, there has to be religion, to have economic liberty,” there must be private property and a market economy.

The liberal capitalist order thus presupposes property, family, religion, knowledge and so forth. But it only fully recognizes individuals with their rights. A conservative or conservative liberal can draw from Marx a most unMarxian conclusion: the goods of life must not be unduly eroded if the liberal order is to have meaningful “contents of life” that it can truly protect and “represent.” Of course, Marx’s path is not that of liberal conservatism: he wants to replace the partial “political emancipation” promoted by liberal capitalism with a wholly untenable “human emancipation.” Marx thus radicalizes and makes even more troubling the spiritual quandary of a liberal society. Marx continues to merit attentive reading leavened by alertness to the dogmatism, revolutionary impatience, and the quest for “metaphysical rebellion” that ultimately make his thought dangerous and untenable. But we do not want to imitate Marx in closing off these questions prematurely. Every student of politics and political philosophy must spend time with Marx, even if only to learn what to avoid.

[1] Robert C. Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader (W.W. Norton, 1972)remains the most accessible and comprehensive collection of these writings.

[2] Leszek Kolakowski, “The Marxist Roots of Stalinism” (1977), The Great Lie: Classic and Recent Reappraisals of Ideology and Totalitarianism, edited by F. Flagg Taylor IV (ISI Books, 2011), pp. 156-176.

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On September 12, 1848, Alexis de Tocqueville delivered a brief but remarkably penetrating speech before the French Constituent Assembly entitled the “Speech on the Right to Work.”  As we sometimes forget, Tocqueville was an active statesman as well as a political thinker of the first rank. He was a soul torn by the conflicting demands of thought and action. He had not worked to bring about the revolution of February 1848—in his view France had seen far too many revolutionary upheavals in the sixty years since the original French Revolution of 1789. But he did everything within his power to work for the establishment of a moderate constitutional republic in France in the tumultuous months that followed the February Revolution. He describes his political activities during this period in his thrilling Souvenirs or Recollections of the February Revolution, a book not published until 1893. In that work, he discusses the revolution itself, the chaotic June Days where radicalized Parisian workers confronted the National Guard, his time as a member of the French constitutional commission charged with writing a constitution for the new republic, as well as his tenure as French Foreign Minister under the presidency of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, whose despotic propensities he ultimately opposed.

The issue of the “right to work” arose during the debates about the crafting of a constitution for the Second French Republic. There were some on the French constitutional commission who favored a government-guaranteed “right to work.” They were acutely aware of worker discontent and of the widespread belief that the revolution needed to address the “social question,” the sources of poverty and misery in modern society. The final version of the constitution of the Second Republic spoke more modestly of the state’s obligation to help the unemployed and poor within the limits of its resources. It did not define the precise nature of that obligation. As historians such as Seymour Drescher and Sharon Watkins have pointed out, Tocqueville had been instrumental in the revision of the language of the constitution to drop the word “right” (droit) and to replace it with a more circumscribed expression of the state’s obligation to the unemployed and the destitute. There were some on the republican and socialist Left who wanted to see the restoration of an explicit guarantee of “the right to work.” Tocqueville spoke to the assembly on September 12, 1848 after the deputy Mathieu of Drôme had introduced an amendment to the Constitution that specified “the right of all citizens to education, work, and assistance.” Mathieu was no socialist but Tocqueville was convinced that the French deputy’s proposal was informed by a socialist “logic” that he did not fully appreciate. It is that logic, so fatal to liberty and human dignity, that Tocqueville addresses in his memorable “Speech on the Right to Work.”

Tocqueville’s “Speech on the Right to Work” is both an eloquent political intervention and a statement of his deepest principles.* Those principles can be described as “Christian democratic” in juxtaposition to both socialism and to a libertarian or laissez-faire position that denies that the state has any obligation “to expand, consecrate, and regularize public charity.” What Tocqueville opposes is an absolute “right to work,” one whose “fatal logic” makes the state the “sole owner of everything” or at a minimum “the great and sole organizer of everything.” Tocqueville thus begins by making a firm distinction between “public charity,” which he supports, and “socialism,” which he adamantly opposes.  He insists that “the question of socialism” must be forthrightly confronted by the advocates of the February Revolution. It is incumbent for France to know “whether the February Revolution is or is not a socialist revolution.” Tocqueville’s speech of September 12, 1848 aims to explain the difference between socialism and the principles of a political and social order that are both Christian and democratic.  The constitutional commission of which Tocqueville was a member aimed “to impose on the state a more extensive and more sacred duty that that which had been imposed until now” but it did not aim to “generate anything other than public charity.” Socialism has its own distinctive “physiognomy,” its defining characteristics, which Tocqueville goes on to discuss in an early section of his speech. Those features are profoundly at odds with both liberty and human greatness as Tocqueville understood them. They point in a very different direction than the moderate republic that he had committed himself to after the February revolution of 1848. As Tocqueville presents it, socialism is the shadow that haunts and deforms both French republicanism and modern liberty.

Tocqueville turns to a discussion of the principal characteristics of all those systems “which bear the name of socialism.” To begin with, all of them make an “energetic, continuous, immoderate appeal to the material passions of men.” They speak of “rehabilitating the flesh” (in the manner of the Saint-Simonians) and of securing “unlimited consumption for everybody.” They appeal to the basest instincts of human beings and thus have little to say about the great feelings and virtues that underlie great deeds. Tocqueville has contempt for the theoretical and practical materialism that defines the major socialist movements.

The second characteristic of all the schools of socialism is their “continuous” attack, sometimes direct, sometimes indirect, on the “very principles of private property.” At its most radical socialism aims to abolish property (one should remember that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously stated in the second part of The Communist Manifesto that Communism could be summarized in a single sentence: the abolition of private property.) Even in its more moderate forms, socialism does everything to “transform it, diminish it, constrain it, and make of it something else than the private property that we know and that we have known since the beginning of time.” Tocqueville belongs to a long tradition of political and philosophical reflection that affirms that there can be no political liberty or human dignity without respect for the institution of private property. Property makes possible both personal independence and self-reliance. The right to property is integrally connected to the human pride and desire for independence (not to be confused with a debilitating atomistic individualism) that is at the heart of liberty.

A constitutionally guaranteed “right to work” that made the state the “master,” “tutor” and “teacher” of each individual not only would reflect “a deep distrust of liberty, of human reason…for the human condition” but it would in fact entail “a new form of servitude.” (Hayek notes at the beginning of The Road to Serfdom that the title of his book was inspired by Tocqueville’s 1848 speech.) Tocqueville insists that “a profound scorn for the individual in his own right” is another characteristic of socialists “of every color, of every school.” Socialism entails “a continuous, diverse, incessant attempt to mutilate, to curtail, and to constrain human freedom in every possible way.” The reader will notice strong affinities between Tocqueville’s portrait of the new servitude promoted by socialism and his earlier critique of “mild” or tutelary despotism in the penultimate chapter of volume II of Democracy in America. Both entail the infantilization of human beings, and aim to keep them in “perpetual childhood.” The socialist state, like the schoolmaster state before it, must above all protect human beings from the consequences of their own actions. For Tocqueville, socialists have an insufficient confidence in the independence and judgment of ordinary people. It claims to be a doctrine of reason and enlightenment, but socialists deeply distrust the reason and capacity for enlightenment of individual human beings. They believe that they are really only free when they are under the tutelage of a protective state.

After this powerful delineation of the principal characteristics of the major socialist currents in the modern world, Tocqueville moves on to a discussion of the relationship between the French Revolution and the socialism that claimed to perfect the February Revolution. No doubt Tocqueville could have emphasized affinities between the French Revolution and a socialism that claimed to complete its work. But he instead contrasts the heroism and nobility that informed the spirit of 1789 with the theoretical and practical materialism of the socialists. “The terrible and glorious origin of our modern history” as he calls it had nothing to do with base appeals to the material needs of human beings. The French Revolution appealed to glory, love of country, virtue, disinterestedness, in a word to those “great feelings” that make possible great deeds. And while acknowledging that the French Revolution “waged a cruel and energetic war against some property owners” (my emphasis) he insisted that it “always respected and honored” the “principle of private property itself.”

In a rhetorical tour de force, he emphasizes the affinities between the French old regime and the mania of socialists to control and regulate the economy. Both believed that “wisdom resides in the state alone,” that its subjects are too “weak and infirm” to govern themselves. Tocqueville even quotes a Robespierre speech from 1793 where the French revolutionary leader warns against the “old obsession of wanting to govern too much” and where he advocated returning to the liberty of the individual “everything that has been illegitimately taken away from him.” Tocqueville no doubt abhorred everything that Robespierre represented. His appeal to the most “revolutionary” period of the French Revolution is at the service of a broader point: the French revolutionaries did not aim to create a “society of bees and beavers” on the model of the regimented utopia put forward by various socialist theoreticians. Their genius and heroism is a direct rebuke to the petty and paltry materialism that is the final goal of socialist doctrine. Tocqueville refuses to allow the socialists to co-opt the spirit of the revolution, even the revolutionary legacy of Robespierre himself.

In the next part of his speech, Tocqueville emphasizes the fundamental difference between democracy and socialism. Here he turns from the French Revolution to America, the theme of his greatest work of political reflection, Democracy in America. Just as socialism claims to be the legitimate development of the French Revolution, so it claims to be “the legitimate development of democracy.” Tocqueville argues that the American “republics” are a direct rebuke to this claim. The United States of America, “the only democracy that exists today in the world,” is the country where socialist doctrines have “the least currency.” Tocqueville wittily suggests that French socialists go to America to find these things out for themselves, although he adds that it is not in their interest to do so. They would soon find themselves without an audience or would convert to American republicanism and would thus leave the world of socialism long behind.

Tocqueville draws a theoretical conclusion: “democracy and socialism are not linked to each other… They are contradictory things.” He can imagine an omnipotent government that has been given an aura of legitimacy through democratic election. But democracy and socialism ultimately point in opposite directions. Socialism now stands for the “equality in servitude” that Tocqueville had so eloquently denounced throughout Democracy in America.  Tocqueville draws out this contrast in a soaring passage:

Democracy extends the sphere of individual independence, socialism restricts it. Democracy gives the greatest possible value to every man, socialism turns every man into an agent, an instrument, a number. Democracy and socialism are linked by only one word, equality; but note the difference: democracy wants equality in liberty, and socialism wants equality through constraint and servitude.

It should be noted that here Tocqueville adopts a moral and political definition of democracy that makes support for liberty and human dignity prerequisites of authentic democracy. Democracy and socialism are two manifestations of the social state of equality but their fundamental assumptions about human nature and society, their understandings of liberty, and their conceptions of the good life are so antagonistic, that it is impossible simply to place them in the same species of society without distorting the nature of political phenomena.

Tocqueville insists that the February Revolution must be a political and not a “social” revolution as many of the slogans and placards from that era claimed it should be. What he means by this is that it must not aim to transform or overturn the constituent laws of society. Tocqueville proceeds to spend some time analyzing the program of “Gracchus” Babeuf, the founder of the “Conspiracy of Equals” and the “grandfather of all modern socialists.” The centerpiece of Babeuf’s project was the abolition of individual property although Tocqueville emphasizes the fact that he was perfectly willing to pursue that goal gradually and through indirection, through promoting laws and policies that aimed to crowd out property ownership.  But every major socialist theoretician and movement shared Babeuf’s ultimate goal, the abolition of private property.  For Tocqueville, that goal was both impossible and undesirable and profoundly at odds with a society of free and responsible individuals.

Tocqueville next turns to a discussion of the causes of the February Revolution. He reminds his listeners of the now famous speech he gave before the Chamber of Deputies on January 27, 1848 in which he announced that the “winds” of revolution were rising and that France was sitting on top of a revolutionary volcano (Tocqueville tells us in his Souvenirs that he thought he was exaggerating at the time although he turned out to be keenly prophetic). Tocqueville goes on to criticize the narrow, oligarchic character of the Orleanist monarchy that ruled France from 1830 to 1848.  It was a regime where “all rights; all powers; all influences; all honors, political life in its entirety, was confined within an extremely narrow class.”

The “legal country” of 200,000 property owners and voters was cut off from the country at large. The “people,” so called, were deprived of responsible leadership and increasingly succumbed to the influences of “ineffectual utopians” and “dangerous demagogues.” Tocqueville is second to none in criticizing these utopians and demagogues. But the primary responsibility for this situation lies in a political order that was too narrow and exclusive. As Tocqueville describes it in his Souvenirs, political life more or less disappeared from France with the government resembling a “trading company” more than a polity where free citizens deliberated about great and substantial concerns. For all his doubts about revolution, Tocqueville supported the broad goal of the February revolution, the establishment of a more “democratic” political and social order in France.

Tocqueville wants the February Revolution to be the revolution that ends by completing what is positive in the French revolutionary heritage (he is acutely aware of what is negative in that heritage). The February Revolution must have a “clear, precise, and perceptible meaning.” It “must be Christian and democratic, but it must not be socialist.” These words summarize his entire thought, he tells his audience at the end of the speech. It must aim to bring the people into the body politic without establishing new forms of domination and dependence. Once again, Tocqueville appeals to the example of the original French Revolution. It “did not have the ridiculous pretension of creating a social power which would directly produce each citizen’s fortune, well-being and ease of life.” It did not aim to “substitute the highly questionable wisdom of governments for the practical and self-interested wisdom of the governed.” It aimed to bring “enlightenment” and “liberty” to citizens, not the degrading paternalism of a tutelary state.

It should be noted that Tocqueville opposed not only the socialists but those deputies on the right or extreme right who opposed any government provision for the unemployed and the poor. They assumed that misère was simply part of the order of things. But Tocqueville insists that the French Revolution had rightly introduced “charity into politics.” In Tocqueville’s eloquent formulation, “it conceived a broader, more general and higher idea than previously held of the obligations of the state toward the poor, toward those citizens who suffered.” (Given the confiscation of church property this was also a practical necessity since under the Old Regime the church had principal responsibility for the care of the poor.) But once again he aims for a middle way between the tutelary state and public indifference to the poor.

The state must not aim to substitute its “foresight and wisdom” for “the wisdom and foresight of the individual.” Instead, it must prudently and “efficiently” use the resources at its disposal to “aid those who, after having exhausted all their own resources, would be reduced to poverty if the state did not hold out its hand.” It should be clear that for all his concerns about the dangers of tutelary despotism and the socialist subversion of democracy, Tocqueville did not oppose the welfare state per se, at least in a modest and self-limiting form. Within bounds, it was a legitimate application of Christianity to politics. But support for modest welfare measures should not mean that the state has a carte blanche “to replace individual foresight, thrift, and individual honesty.” It is not, Tocqueville insists, the job of the state to save men from themselves.

Tocqueville’s vision for a newly republican France was “Christian and democratic” and expressly opposed to socialism. Without unduly concentrating on labels, one can legitimately conclude that his “Christian democratic” vision repudiated both libertarianism and collectivism. We misread his powerful and still relevant warning against the tutelary state if we confuse it with an absolute opposition to centralized government within its own sphere or to government provision for the poor. As always, Tocqueville remains faithful to the juste milieu. His “Speech on the Right to Work” reveals that the moral and political alternatives are not exhausted by the socialist confiscation of human liberty or by the ‘utopia’ of an ultra-minimalist state.

• Listen to this podcast with Daniel Mahoney that discusses Tocqueville’s crucial insights in Democracy in America.

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