A Parade of Philosopher-Statesmen
Mahoney on Cicero, Burke, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Churchill, De Gaulle, and Havel
Over at Public Discourse, our Flagg Taylor has a review of the new book by Daniel Mahoney, The Statesman as Thinker: Portraits of Greatness, Courage, and Moderation. The men I list in the subtitle are the primary examples of this statesmanship, with a chapter dedicated to each. Here’s a taste of Taylor’s review:
The antidote to…false realism is an “openness to the judicious mix of realism and moral aspiration that informed the classical political philosophies of Aristotle and Cicero.” …Mahoney…engage[s] with another contemporary scholar of statesmanship, Robert Faulkner, who sought to rehabilitate “honorable ambition” in his 2007 book The Case for Greatness. Mahoney follows Faulkner in emphasizing the importance of Aristotle’s virtue of magnanimity—or greatness of soul—and then supplements this analysis with his own invocation of Cicero’s work On Duties.
That Faulkner book is a very fine one, I can report. It looks at 1) Aristotle’s account of the great-souled man, 2) the case of Alcibiades, 3) Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, and 4) John Marshall’s writings on George Washington. It also explains how the moderns Bacon and Hobbes attempted to effect a rejection of the idea the of honorable ambition, and how some later attempts to revive the idea, such as in Nietzsche and Arendt, mainly served to distort it.
Highly recommended. But returning to Taylor on Mahoney:
Mahoney ultimately differs from Faulkner in finding Aristotelian greatness of soul an insufficient foundation for statesmanship. As Mahoney puts it, “The philanthropy of the [Aristotelian] ‘great-souled man’ is qualified by his refusal to acknowledge his debts to others, and his quest for self-sufficiency is ultimately in deep tension with a generous appreciation of moral limits and what one owes one’s country.” These shortcomings of Aristotle’s great-souled man are the reason Mahoney must turn to Cicero’s honorable statesman, who is guided by duty and the “honestum” (the fine, the noble, the honorable). [Mahoney] …goes so far as to suggest that “Cicero, more than Plato and Aristotle, provides the most substantial and elevated argument for the inherent choice-worthiness of the life of the thoughtful and reflective statesman who combines greatness of soul with moderation and self-control.”
Taylor praises the book highly, and having read the opening chapters, and the ones on Alexis de Tocqueville and Václav Havel, I agree. It is ideal for a reader familiar with a couple of the figures covered, who would like guidance for studying the others.
In what follows, I’ll say a few words about the chapter on Tocqueville, a good deal about the idea of “the statesman as thinker,” and just a bit about De Gaulle and the idea of the Christian Statesman. I hope in another post to offer a couple of notes about Mahoney’s brief discussions of Cicero. The last of the images here, BTW, was put together by Law & Liberty, for a symposium they did on the book.
The Tocqueville Chapter
Each chapter provides an account of how the featured statesman fits with Mahoney’s organizing themes, and then an exploration of several books, often fairly recent ones, either recent editions of works written by the statesman himself, or biographies and studies of him. Mahoney assumes the reader already knows the basics about the most famous accomplishments, be they political or literary, of each figure. For example, with Havel, he does not spend much time on the events of 1989, and with Tocqueville, he does not give us yet another summary account of the importance of Democracy in America. That allows him to move swiftly in each chapter—all of them quick reads—and to display lesser-known aspects of each of these great men.
In Tocqueville’s case, Mahoney gives us three main sketches: 1) a glimpse of his character and life through the biographies of Hugh Brogan and Joseph Epstein, 2) a look at the least-read of his three main books, Recollections, which is his view of the Revolution of 1848, and 3) a preemptive defense against any Woke cancel campaign against him (most likely to be tried on “post-colonial” grounds), a defense that highlights his actions, speeches, and writings against slavery, particularly in a collection of his letters regarding American politics in the 1840s and 50s.
We should note that Mahoney has another book (2010), The Conservative Foundations of the Liberal Order, with a chapter on Tocqueville. That one is not focused on his character and self-understanding as a political actor, but upon how we ought to analyze his political theory, especially with respect to its relation to conservativism and capital-L Liberalism.
The newer chapter is masterfully done—my only complaint is that Mahoney is too polite about Hugh Brogan’s failure to understand Tocqueville’s key theoretical arguments in Democracy in America, a failure that comes with all the dismissive arrogance that only a British scholar who as done pioneering research work on the subject at hand, but who has remained firmly encased in the typical liberal prejudices of his academic set, could bring to it. In fact, it’s worse than that: Brogan’s hostility to aspects of Tocqueville’s thought at times approaches near-libelous territory.1
Oh, and for the very best treatment of what the Recollections reveals about the tensions between Tocqueville’s philosophic and political sides, see the best book on Tocqueville simply, Peter Augustine Lawler’s The Restless Mind (1993), which to Rowman & Littlefield’s everlasting shame, remains out-of-print!
Statesmen-Thinkers
Mahoney introduces his new chapter on Tocqueville by remarking that
In contradistinction to many other figures discussed in this book, we might more accurately call Tocqueville “the thinker as statesman” and not the other way around.
That’s quite right. (In a brief discussion of him in his 1996 book on De Gaulle, Mahoney even said that Tocqueville is the “greatest philosopher of democracy.”)
This brings us to the conceptual tension that I have highlighted with my title’s reference to philosopher-statesmen. Loose application of the “philosopher” tag like that is a no-no among Strauss-influenced scholars. Mahoney thus resorts to the less-charged term “thinker,” and here is how he describes his overall subject:
The book brings together two principle themes and emphases: the study of genuinely reflective and even philosophically minded statesmen who embodied magnanimity, greatness of soul—marked by moderation, a public-spirited concern for the public good, and genuine depth of soul—with an analysis and articulation of the cardinal virtues that animate this rare combination of magnanimity and moderation.
“Philosophically-minded!” An elegant and likely necessary skirting of the tension here—once you start grouping thinkers together, you’re going to offend someone if you wind up counting a Churchill or a Havel as a “philosopher,” even though you find it unavoidable to count a Burke or a Tocqueville as one. Note also that even the most determined Straussian guardians of the “Big P” designation would have to admit that with figures like Lincoln or Churchill, it takes philosophic study to fully grasp the importance of their speeches and deeds.
In any case, Mahoney doesn’t regard most statesmen as rising to the level of statesmen-thinkers. He mentions Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and calls them “the two greatest statesmen in the Anglo-American world…[and ones of] “unimpeachable character,”2 praising them especially for their understanding of communism, but adds
Neither were statesmen-thinkers in the elevated and capacious sense I have explored in this book. Nor were they precisely “great-souled” in the classical meaning of the term. …they were inspired “conviction” politicians who were dedicated to good, even noble, principles and ideas.
I suppose he would say the same about many of the statesmen we meet in the pages of Plutarch, or in modern histories. Some would be “great-souled” without being “conviction politicians,” some would be the reverse, and some would be neither. But very few would be statesmen-thinkers.
Ways of Life, and Thoughts Thereupon
Mahoney ends his book, however, with a recognition of some of the other admirable ways of life:
Cicero was indisputably right that magnanimity tempered by moderation—noble statesmanship informed by liberal learning, applied political philosophy, and high prudence—is among the best ways of life available to human beings (along with the life of contemplative reflection, the dedication of one’s life to reflective and prayerful service to God, and the writing of literature open to moral realism and the appreciation of the grandeur and misery of the human soul).
I once taught a Western-Civ Great Books course that featured works by Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Augustine. This was at an all-male college, and so I devised the following “ways of life” schema as a way to navigate the course.
The Hero
The Poet
The Philosopher
The Statesman/Gentleman
The Family Man
The Democratic Man
The Man of God
(“Family Man” was my way of suggesting the goodness of an upright American-dream-pursuing guy the students at this college would be familiar with; the “Democratic Man” was my way of pointing back to Plato’s presentation of the change-loving pleasure-seeker in the Republic, a model they would know just as well. My linking of the Gentleman to the Statesman sought to make conceptual room for the guy who readies himself for political service, in part via liberal education, but who might wind-up having no opportunities for such service at a grand level.)
You can see that in the standards implied by Mahoney’s quote—which is only about admirable models of life—the Family Man would be too ordinary, the Democratic Man would be excluded as vice-ridden, and in modern times, I guess, the Hero would be out also, mainly for practical reasons. So Mahoney’s admirable lives, then, are the virtuous Statesman, the virtuous Philosopher, the virtuous Man of God, and the virtuous Poet.3 Comparing what Mahoney says about his a.) statesman-thinkers, his b.) good “conviction” statesman like Reagan, his c.) less impressive statesmen even down to the virtue-neglecting (but situation-understanding) Trump, and d.) his examples of greatness-besotted statesmanship-gone-awry, such as Napoleon, and perhaps adding in what I say about the liberally-educated but under-utilized gentleman, one can see that there are different grades of “statesman-status,” and that tyrants simply leave the class altogether.
All this brings out an odd thought, however: doesn’t the statesmen-thinker appear to be a mix of the philosopher and the statesman? And if so, can it really work to use him as Mahoney does, as the model of statesmanship? Why not try to use the more conventional or “intuitive” statesman as the core example, such as a Nestor, a Themistocles, or a Cincinnatus? And if such a model can’t satisfy us, if the prudence followed by the real statesman must logically lead-to and be grounded-in correct political philosophy, so that even a figure as amazing as Xenophon’s Cyrus proves a “hollow” model for statesmanship due to his neglect of that philosophy/virtue, and if the only real philosopher is a Socratic one who of necessity is a political-philosopher in some manner, then maybe my coupling “philosopher” and “statesman” isn’t so crazy. Unless Cicero and Tocqueville were wrong to say things like, “…each man should account to society for his thoughts, as well as for his physical energy…When one sees one’s fellow in danger, one’s duty is to go to their aid,”4 and wrong because of things like the disheartening portrait of what happens to the oligarchic man’s father—a civic-minded man—in Republic book VIII, or because of all that Strauss and Bloom say against the philosopher’s obligation to serve the city, it seems the distinction melts away—it simply becomes a matter of what one can do in a given situation. The philosopher will be the statesman whenever his help is called for and could be helpful, and the statesman the philosopher whenever the paths to effective political service are blocked. That’s why, in part, Mahoney’s use of Cicero will be worth looking at in another post.
The Christian Statesman
It also points to the question of the Christian Statesman, and why a highlight of this book for many readers will likely be the chapter on Charles De Gaulle. I regard Mahoney’s book on De Gaulle as his most beautiful book, even though his first book on Solzhenitsyn has to be regarded as his most important one, given that latter man’s greater stature5 and the paucity of philosophic work on his achievement prior to Mahoney’s.
It is the most beautiful of his books not mainly because it takes more time to tell the story and develop the arguments than his others, although it does do that, but because it is able to present De Gaulle’s understanding of statesmanship, and of the “man of character” at the heart of it, in a way that takes us beyond Aristotelian magnanimity, well-beyond the errors of Machiavelli and Nietzsche, and into considerations of how Christianity might inform the best understanding.
The man of character “abuses no one and shows himself to be a good Prince.” He is not Nietzsche’s Caesar with the soul of Christ, an impossible contradiction formulated by Christianity’s most eloquent enemy. But he is something like “Caesar reshaped by Christianity,” as an associate of De Gaulle put it. …He combines a sense of the distinction and hierarchy of human types, a recognition of the dynamic tensions between the many and the great. But he does not distort that hierarchy or radicalize that tension to the point of precluding the existence of a common humanity or a political world where the virtues of great-souledness and the natures and needs of the people sustain a network of mutual obligations. (56)
Something of the flavor of that quote from Mahoney’s De Gaulle book is present throughout the introductory chapters of The Statesman as Thinker, which is why I expect readers will find its De Gaulle chapter particularly interesting.
Pg. 266: “Unfortunately he [Toc.] frequently seems to think that his business is to compare ‘democracy’ with “aristocracy’, and defines neither term…(it is a great pity that Tocqueville was not prepared to use the word ‘oligarchy’ systematically).” A key passage, because Brogan there betrays his refusal to learn from Tocqueville’s unique categories—and yes, with work, they can be defined—“democratic social state” and “aristocratic social state,” which are the key to the entire work, and whose comparison plays a role in nearly half its chapters. He also claims Tocqueville is an “elitist,” (275) that his careful long chapter on the three races in America is “tainted with what we must call racism,”(273) and that, like some caricature out of Moliere, “the only point which concerns Tocqueville in the education of women is the need to keep them virgins until they marry and keep them from committing adultery afterwards.”(364) That last slander is baldly contradicted by the chapters in question. And so we have this paradox—a book whose claim to our attention is a careful research into various aspects of Tocqueville’s life and career, one proud to offer up details at every turn, many unknown to previous biographers, but obviously, our trusting these depends on our trusting the author, which is impossible after encountering the two chapters which analyze Democracy in America. These chapters, especially the one on the second volume, show us that he misunderstands Tocqueville on not just a few issues, but on central ones, and that he has a habit of steamrolling over subtleties in the text to find just what his prejudice leads him to expect. Brogan’s extensive knowledge of the French political scene of the time means he is able to deliver a few points of criticism that could be developed further by a fair analyst of Tocqueville’s thought, yes. And sure, we can find passages of high praise from him all right, but the balance of evidence indicates that Brogan doesn’t “get” Tocqueville, and overall, doesn’t like him. We thus cannot entirely trust Brogan as his biographer, having witnessed his many injustices to him as his reader.
In marked contrast to Trump, who while basically a man who lives in a moral “chaos” of his own making, Mahoney does praise for other qualities, including that of wanting to recognize greatness in the face of “a culture of repudiation,” as illustrated by his important Mount Rushmore speech during the shameful summer of ‘20.
It’s nearly the same list, with one or two telling differences, as that offered by English professor Mark Edmundson’s interesting Self and Soul: A Defense of Ideals. His four “soul-ideals” there, posed against a personal-advantage-focused modern “self,” are the hero, the saint, the philosopher, and the [Blake-like] poet.
Tocqueville to Kergolay, Nov 11, 1833. Boesche collection of Tocqueville letters. Cc. Cicero, On Duties, I, ix, 28.
Solzhenitsyn is a fine example of the Poet-as-Thinker, and perhaps, since he is the only literary man who ever overthrew an empire, we should regard him as our only example of the Poet-Thinker-Statesman. Still, he never held public office, which would seem to be a requirement for the “Statesman” tag.
Really good stuff, Carl. It sounds like the perfect audience for Mahoney's book is the Postmodern Conservative audience. We owe it to Mahoney to read this book, I think.
That section on Tocqueville to preempt a woke cancellation of him is a brilliant idea. I visited a museum devoted to Sam Houston this past week and learned something interesting I would like to look into: apparently Tocqueville met Houston during his trip. According to the museum, Tocqueville apparently considered Houston to be a simple backwoods politician, but apparently Tocqueville learned insights about about the Native Americans from him