“Institutions have Consequences” is a great new essay by my friend James Patterson over at Law & Liberty. He shares the wisdom of his teacher at UVA, Jim Ceaser, an old PoMoCon alumnus writer whose book on parties & presidential selection I use in class. Reading Ceaser has enriched my thinking. (Incidentally, I had the opportunity to attend a weekend-long seminar on ideas & American Political Development with Dr. Ceaser—fascinating stuff1).
Given my own education at UD & then at Claremont, I am prone to the mistake James warns against here. I know that I too often prize the beautiful, brilliant, but only partially true speech over the boring, complicated, but sound empirical analysis (perhaps the Greeks would call that “erotic” thinking?2).
So James’s point is well taken—a blind spot for me & many others today is that we just talk in terms of general ideas, as Tocqueville said. But here is my objection for James: Tocqueville's speech against general ideas was false. Who but nominalists well beyond the sphere of common sense could believe this self-defeating sentence?
General ideas do not attest to the strength of human intelligence, but rather its insufficiency, because there are no beings in nature exactly alike: No identical facts, no rules indiscriminately applicable in the same manner to several objects at once.
If we interpret Tocqueville to be critiquing ideology—well, then it's true. But the normal way to interpret Tocqueville's speech, as a skeptical rejection of universal concepts like “natural rights,” is too general a skepticism. Of course universals & concepts exist; &, pace Tocqueville, natural rights exist.
Here's something my teachers at Claremont taught me that I would say to James with regard to practical politics: Speeches that contain no reference or connection to justice will always fall flat in our democratic politics. & that is because of what human beings are, the only animals who can talk about justice (as Aristotle said). The most powerful thing in American politics in every generation has been that sheet anchor, the general ideas of justice captured in the Declaration of Independence. For some reason, Tocqueville doesn't acknowledge that empirical fact.
Discussions of economic statistics & the facts about institutions which American Political Development can teach us are severely lacking these days—but sound discussions of the the most important ideas of justice are too, unfortunately. Those ideas REALLY matter.
I tried to figure out the classic Ideas-Institutions-Regimes question after attending the seminar. I of course did not figure it out, but here’s what I came up with (and never published). The best article I cite is this one:
Lieberman, Robert. 2002. “Ideas, Institutions, & Political Order: Explaining Political Change,” American Political Science Review 96. pp. 697-712.
Parallel to Tocqueville’s discussion of different cultures' embrace or lack of embrace of general ideas [French too much, English not enough] we might also read Nietzsche’s discussion in Beyond Good & Evil of the same cultures.
J. Patterson is really on a roll these days!
CJ, could you mail me the notes you took after the weekend-long seminar? I'd be much obliged-