Machiavelli & Montesquieu on the philosophy of freedom
Harvey Mansfield's late or last thoughts on our political troubles
So one of the subjects we keep getting back to on PoMoCon is Machiavelli, his influence on modern thought in politics & science, the power & the danger of his arguments, & why we are returning to him rather than forgetting about him. Our politics is really ugly, but also hysterical; Machiavelli says many ugly things, but at least he’s not hysterical!
Here’s the preeminent scholar of Machiavelli in the world, Harvey Mansfield. It’s a dubious distinction for America—he’s the greatest, but is this excellence any good? It’s at least helpful in two ways.
First, we need urgently to understand how we ended up with elites we cannot seem to replace, which is called Progress, & yet drives everyone mad; the party of the elites is mad that it faces recalcitrant populations & is considering destroying any remaining forms of political activity—the party forming against the elites is mad that even winning elections turns to ashes in their mouths, so people who are treated as worse than criminals are considering destroying the little left of civil friendship or comity. The blood around the heart is boiling. Harsh words promise harsher deeds. But we are not in fact doing anything. This is the most obvious fact about our lives & accordingly the most ignored, out of shame, but not only shame—after all, one cause of shame is ignorance, & we’re beginning to realize we don’t know why can’t seem to get anything done. We’re in a predicament we have to think our way out of before we can get out of it. It’s not just a problem, it’s a puzzle. However willful opposition to the process of modernization has been—the process of replacing people with institutions & institutions with robots—so far it’s either proved irrelevant or it has ended up furthering rather than stopping the movement: We are still in the process of transforming politics into administration, replacing people with expert elites & the masses they condition, incentivize, & protect from fake news… Mansfield understands this problem better than most, because he doesn’t assume it’s some kind of mistake or, on the other hand, fate. It’s at the very least possible to understand what’s going on, because since Machiavelli there have been philosophers trying to explain & at the same time persuade their readers to achieve greatness by modernizing. The attempt throughout was to replace the priests as an authority over politics, indeed over life, while avoiding their weaknesses, which came from boasting—priests after all, have to talk publicly in their adornments, whereas writers speak to you privately, in your head, you might say, & anonymously.
Incidentally, the study of political philosophy—& we have no student of political philosophy as impressive as Mansfield—could also clear up much of the mad theorizing that goes on in our times. Mansfield is daring in a way, in his contempt for what intellectuals say these days, to say nothing of the partisans & celebrities parroting the intellectuals; in another way, however, he’s humble, since he doesn’t despise old books in the name of urgency or the self-importance of our times. You can hardly do better than to read his commentaries on modern philosophy, if you want some modest wisdom; but if you don’t want to read him, he will not annoy you by public boasting or institutional compulsion. This is human freedom & it depends on respect for political freedom; it is the opposite of the arrogance which people who believe in Progress share with the people who don’t—they don’t think they could learn from Machiavelli, either what Progress needs, if it is to work, or how to stop it…
Secondly, Mansfield takes politics seriously—it’s not merely something we’re waking up to now, when hope in the future has largely evaporated. Neither the sudden transformations partisans wish for nor the continuity ordinary people are looking for are possible. But to know what’s possible would require a willingness to accept the political situation we find ourselves in. That comprises on the one hand what we may call inertia, borrowing our language from physics, as all modern politics does; & on the other hand, a terrible anger which finds its own confirmation both in partisan oppositions & in the failure or rather absence of attempts to soothe it. The desire for retaliation is gradually being revealed as the defining human characteristic. Both these sides deserve attention, but from the point of view of action, the worst thing you can do to an angry man, to show him no respect by ignoring him, is the most necessary, if we are to find a way out of our crisis.
This is where Montesquieu comes in—the second part of the conversation with Mansfield concerns him. Montesquieu is a proud follower of Machiavelli, but also dissents on two very important things which make his analysis of modern & ancient politics the best available to us. First, unlike Machiavelli’s encouragement of shocking deeds which conceals more shocking thoughts, Montesquieu’s interest in restoring our self-respect makes him the only reasonable modern theorist of “the state of nature.” We cannot say that our nature is “red in tooth & claw.” We are judges of our wellbeing & inasmuch as our judgment is errant, Montesquieu shows that, politically, we must err on the side of an overabundance of caution or of public reassurance, according to the demands of the situation. The confidence of the public is the public safety, not the other way around. This alone must be the object of political action, or else all tactical decision or action will prove as confused by success as by failure. Montesquieu ultimately sides with the British Empire over the Roman Empire, because the peaceful life of commerce is preferable to war commanded by cowards, a hellish situation where any show of human pride evokes an authoritative, institutional slaughter.
Montesquieu is the philosopher of human pride & freedom, his The Spirit Of The Laws is the only work of political philosophy that aims to teach a decent political science which is reconciled to the incredible variety of human arrangements, & therefore to the inexhaustible causes of war. It’s politics for our times—we cannot avoid knowing there are other regimes beyond our own, so we must prefer, protect, & improve our own in light of the alternatives, without turning our dangers into disasters. Mansfield shows his willingness to bestow on ordinary people, through a modest education, a desire for freedom & the belief that we can compass the human situation in our minds, so that in the variety of ways of life we see this one human thing, the growing desire to be masters of ourselves. No one aspires to slavery; no service can be dignified if it corrupts our reasonableness. Even when circumstances are unfavorable, human genius works out some arrangement to improve the morality of the people, in preparation for better circumstances. It’s true, human genius often fails—the arrangements by which we act & come to know ourselves can become corrupted—but by reexamining them in the light cast by Montesquieu, we learn again that human nature is not self-destructive cruelty. No writer has treated the various laws that various peoples respect with such respect, which is perhaps why the American Founders admired Montesquieu as they did. Since the arrogance of liberal institutional power has been broken & that power is failing, this more modest attempt to understand human freedom should be embraced for the sake of acting to restore our self-respect.