Posted on 12/24/2001 11:15:18 AM PST by cornelis
I must give a superficial and popular account of the most daring and far-reaching project ever conceived by man, of what d'Alembert called "the conspiracy" of Enlightenment. It was an attempt to alter completely the character of political life on the one hand, and intellectual life on the other. But above all it was an attempt to alter the relationship between the two, and it is that relationship which is the privileged perspective of thoughtful men.Enter Machiavelli
The image of the transformation is projected by Machiavelli, who appears on the scene almost as a beggar, a suppliant, humbly beseeching a glorious prince to look down upon him with favor. This was the permanent relation of wisdom and power as understood by the old philosophers. But in a sudden shift, Machiavelli still covertly but with expectations of perfect openness in the future, himself becomes the prince. He plots means for the wise to seize the levers of power and actualize the dream of philosophers becoming kings, a dream as old as political philosophy itself. But precisely for Plato it was only a dream, ad dreams must give way before reality. The fact that the dream is a dream meant that philosophers in the real world have to make their plans accordingly, lower their expectations, and keep their distance from the powers Machiavelli and his followers revered all that, and it is in this dispensation which we still live
The scramble for happiness
To begin from the political side, the new political science can be understood to be a great humanitarian endeavor. For all the nobility of ancient political science, it offered no way to realize its high goals. Human beings still suffered from as many ills as they always had. Practically, it offered only endurance or resignation. What men need is peace, stability, law, order, and relief from poverty and disease. The ancients talked only about virtue and not about well-being. That in itself is perhaps harmless, but the moderns contended that the concentration on virtue contradicts the concern for well-being. Aristotle admitted that "equipment" as well as virtue is necessary for happiness, but he said nothing about how that equipment is acquired. A careful examination of the acquisition of equipment reveals that virtue impedes that acquisition. Liberality, for example, presupposes money and not caring for it overmuch. But one must care for it to get it. Moreover, spending money exhausts it, so that liberality makes the need for acquisitiveness greater than it would have been without the virtue. Liberality both discourages and encourages acquisitiveness, putting man in contradiction with himself. This virtue is too weak to overcome selfishness, but is powerful enough to prevent certain positive effects which selfishness might cause. The miser is not likely to need to steal. And his quest for profit can, properly channeled, produce benefits for others. In the old system he is given a bad conscience and a bad name. But it would seem that nature is not kind to man, if the two elements of happiness--virtue and equipment--are at tension with one another. Equipment is surely necessary, so why not experiment with doing without virtue? If a substitute for virtue can be found, the inner conflict that renders man's life so hard could be resolved.
The new good: the natural rights of passion
This is what Machiavelli means when he says that men ought to do as they ought to do but ought to do as they do do . . . He puts this with outrageous clarity when he says men are never all good or all bad, implying that since they cannot be all good (for self-love is an inextinguishable part of us) they ought to be all bad. In this way alone can they overcome their dividedness. But if the distinction between good and bad in man is suppressed, then the badness, the standard for determining the bad, is also suppressed. In short, if the passions remain while the virtues which govern them disappear, the passions have unrestricted rights, by nature. They can be judged only in terms of their desirable or undesirable social effects. The is how the despised usurer is miraculously transformed into the respected banker. The new political scientists decided to abandon the pedantic and fruitless practice of inveighing against the passions and to become instead their accomplice for the sake of effectiveness. Instead of asking men to think of the common good, which they were unlikely to do, they told them to think of themselves, which they were strongly inclined to do, and to transform loyalty, patriotism, and justice into calculations of benefit. After Prince XVI the theoretical foundations of commercial society have been laid, just as the new argument for democracy is well begun in IX. There Machiavelli removes the moral basis of aristocratic rule by denying that aristocrats are any less concerned about money than are oligarchies.
Equality begins in modern thought in the assertion that there is no politically relevant public spiritedness. Men are all equally selfish. Men's concern for their preservation and their comfort an, if the waters are not muddied by extrinsic considerations, be motors for the production of prosperity. The passions, instructed by the philosophers as to their true meaning and end, will suffice; and the collaboration of the philosophers with the passions results in the formula of commercial society, enlightened self-interest. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself. At most they talked bout the pursuit of happiness. No longer was the concern for the rare perfection of man; the focus became our common vulnerability and suffering. Politics came to be the care of the body, and the soul slipped away.
The new vision of man and politics was never taken by its founders to be splendid. Naked man, gripped by fear or industriously laboring to provide the wherewithal for survival, is not an apt subject for poetry. They self-consciously chose low but solid ground. Civil societies dedicated to the end of self-preservation cannot be expected to provide fertile soil for the heroic or the inspired. They do not require or encourage the noble. What rules and sets the standards of respectability and emulation is not virtue or wisdom. The recognition of the humdrum and prosaic character of life was intended to play a central rule in the success of real politics. And the understanding of human nature which makes this whole project feasible, if believed in, clearly forms a world in which the higher motives have no place. One who holds the "economic" view of man cannot consistently believe in the dignity of man or in the special status of art and science. The success of the enterprise depends precisely on this simplification of man. And I there is a solution to the human problems, there is no tragedy. There was no expectation that, after the bodily needs are taken care of, man would have a spiritual renaissance--and this for two reason: (1) men will always be mortal, which means that there can be no end to the desire for immortality and to the quest for means to achieve it; and (2) the premise of the whole undertaking is that man's natural primary concern is preservation and prosperity; the regimes founded on nature take man as he is naturally and will make him ever more natural. If his motives were to change, the machinery that makes modern government work would collapse.
The new virtue enslaves
The historicism, romanticism, and idealism that built on the Enlightenment foundations were, from the point of view of the originators of modern political philosophy--building castles in the air, dreaming that the classical good and noble would emerge out of modern utility and selfishness, Plato's ideas out of Descartes' extension. The first discipline modernity's originators impose upon themselves was that of self-restraint, learning to live with vulgarity. Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be.
Science, then, became active; and its motto was "give us your tired, your poor. . . . " But the benefactors, too, had a motive. by their usefulness to mankind at large they expected to get gratitude and, thereby, a freedom hitherto unavailable to them. Gratitude, according to Machiavelli's analysis, is an effective motive when there is hope of future benefaction, not when there is only memory of past benefaction. Gratitude is, in other words, ultimately a function of fear. Power, present and future, and the opinion thereof, is the only guarantee of men's goodwill. Men previously did not have the opinion that science is powerful, or was it. To have a secure position in civil society, science both had to be productive of power and appear to be so. Innovations in politics and medicine, patently useful to men, were to be the signs of science's special status as a powerful benefactor warring against men's darkest fears of death and destitution.
Are you telling me that to Augustine the two Cities do not coexist in the same human mind, or that Augustine would not acknowledge the presence of daily economic activity which is neither saintly or murderous?
...the most characteristic thing about contemporary politics is their rationalist inspiration . . . The rationalist faith in the sovereignty of technique is the presupposition both of the notion that some over-all scheme of mechanized control is possible . . . if Rationalism now reigns almost unopposed, the question which concerns us is, What are the circumstances that promote this state of affairs?the answer to this question is that the politics of Rationalism are the politics of the politically inexperienced, and that the outstanding characteristic of European politics [we can add the U.S.]--that of the new ruler, of the new ruling class, and of the new political society--to say nothing of the incursion of a new sex, lately provided by Mr. Shaw. How appropriate rationalist politics are to the man who, not brought up or educated to their exercise, finds himself in a position to exert political iniative and authority, requires no emphasis. His need of it is so great that he will have no incentive to be sceptical about the possibility of a magic technique of politics which will remove the handicap of his lack of political education [why does this remind me of FR?]. The offer of such a technique will seem to him the offer of salvation itself; to be told that the necessary knowledge is to be found, compete and self-contained, in a book, and to be told that this knowledge is of a sort that can be learned by heart quickly and applied mechanically, will seem, like salvation, something almost too good to be true. And yet it was this, or something near enough to be mistaken for it, which he uderstood Bacon and Descartes to be offering him. For, though neither of these writers ventures upon the detailed application of his method to politics, the intimations of rationalist politics are present in both, qualified ony by a scepticism which could easily be ignored. Nor had he to wait for Bacon and Descartes (to wait, that is, for a general doctrine of Rationalism); the first of these needy adventurers into the field of politics was provided for on his appearance a century earlier by Machiavelli.
It has been said that the project of Machiavelli was to expound the science of politics, but this, I think, misses the significant point. A science, we have seen, is concrete knowledge and consequently neither its conclusions or the means by which they were reached, can ever, as a whole, be written down in a book . . . .
with the new ruler, who brought to his task oly the qualities which had enabled him to gain political power and who learnt nothing easily but the vices of his office, the caprice de prince, the position was different. Lacking education (except in the habits of ambition), and requiring some short-cut to the appearance of education, he required a book. But he required a book of a certain sort; he needed a crib: his inexperience prevented him from tackling the affairs of State unseen. Now, the character a crib is that its author must have an educated man's knowledge of the language, that he must prostitute his genius (if he has any) as a translator, and that it is powerless to save the ignorant reader from all possibility of mistake. The project of Machiavelli was, then, to provide a crib to politics, a political training in default of a political education, a technique for a ruler who had not tradition. He supplied a demand of his time. . . the new ruler was more interesting because he was far more likely than the educated hereditary ruler to get himself into a tricky situation and to need the help of advice . . .
Probably not in the sense you're thinking of. Of course both you and I know cities don't exist in the mind. They are real places worthy of capital nouns.
For Augustine, it was Rome. This fact alone shows how difficult it will be to compare Augustine with Locke. For Rome aspired to build its glory on the ancient virtues. By the time Locke comes around, there is no such kind of city. Gratia ad Machiavelliam. Virtue will no longer be the foundation of the City of Man. Its new foundations will no longer be the summum bonum, but the summum malum. And the philosopher-kings--princes, if you will--are free to prostitute themselves for the adulations of the masses.
How Augustine, belonging the City of God, could live in a City of Man called Rome is answered in his classic treatise: The City of God The answer comprises 25 books with ample diversions. A short-cut to the answer can be found in St. Paul. There, as for Augustine, the king and ruler is named Christ, the source of justice. There really is no other justice for Augustine. So we might say that while the two cities are not existing in the same mind, they do exist in the same universe, but only for a while. The two cities are vastly different: the one temporal, the other eternal. This distinction falls away for the intellectual figures who pass for giants in the modern age. Most of the time the temporal is fused with the eternal, as perhaps it did for the Stoic, who identified city with universe. It is not a coincidence that the Enlightenment was enamored with the stoics and the skeptics. It is not a coincidence this would culminate with Hegel in the universalization of Reason, the human god that deifies everything it thinks of.
As for political history and history in general, I quote Gilson: the "philosophies of history which developed after St. Augustine have been so many attempts to resolve, with the light of natural reason alone, a problem which was first posed by faith alone and which cannot be resolved without the faith." The excerpts from Oakshott and Bloom, both attest to the new orientation of what is hailed as the last man. By shifting the rank and order of importance, the identity of human nature became less than it was, and more of a half-man committed to ever more gratitude in commerce.
By the same token, Locke doesn't really contradict Augustine, does he? Jesus spoke to His disciples but He also spoke to a legionnaire. To the latter, His advice was, kind of, Lockean: do your work, don't cheat, don't bully.
I'm just reading along on this thread, as usual, and enjoying it.
BTW, I know you already have many sources, but have you ever taken a good look at the web site (a long page of links) called Primary Source Documents ? If not, I think you'll like it.
. . . and more. As you say: "free us from having to only use greek classics" But those are your words, and expresses quite a different sentiment than Descartes. Here's Descartes. "je quittai entierement l'etude des lettres." Which is to say he thumbed his nose at it. This is the beginning of violence.
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