CHAPTER 12
The great tradition of political philosophy regarded patriotism as an ennobling sentiment. It was often thought to be the task of political philosophy to teach or to give reasons for the love of country. Consider just a few of the following thoughts from different writers in different historical periods:
Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And being for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (first century B.C.E.).1
Cicero: “Why am I speaking of Greek examples? Somehow our own give me more pleasure” (44 B.C.E.).2
Machiavelli: “I love my country [mia patria] more than my soul” (1527).3
Rousseau: “Whenever I meditate upon government, I always find new reasons to love my own country” (1762).4
Burke: “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely” (1790).5
Lincoln: “He [Henry Clay] loved his country partly because it was his own country, but mostly because it was a free country” (1852).6
Today the idea of patriotism has fallen on hard times, at least among philosophers. This is not to say that patriotism is on the verge of disappearance. It is only in educated circles that patriotism has come to appear as morally questionable. Patriotism is widely taken to be a kind of primitive, atavistic sentiment that demonstrates an unenlightened preference for what is one’s own and for one’s own ways at the expense of a more universal or enlightened point of view. Furthermore, patriotism is frequently tied to other sentiments, like nationalism and chauvinism, that are said to reveal an aggressive, militaristic attitude. These go hand in hand with a desire to dominate other people or at least to proclaim the superiority of one’s own ways at the expense of others. Notice the squeamishness that many people felt after 9/11 with the public demonstrations of flag waving and other patriotic displays.
Raise the issue of patriotism on a college campus and one is likely to hear Samuel Johnson’s barb “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.”7 Or one might hear E. M. Forster’s wish that if he had to betray either his country or his friend, he would hope to have the courage to betray his country.8 Forster presents the choice of friendship over country, of private over public goods, as a tragic, even a noble, decision. But this way of posing the problem is false. Loyalty is a moral virtue, just as betrayal is a moral vice. People who practice one are less likely to indulge the other. No doubt influenced by thoughts like these, three young Cambridge undergraduates in the 1930s—Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, and Guy Burgess—chose to betray their country. They became Soviet agents and for years passed on vital secrets to Moscow as they ascended the ladder of the British intelligence services, until they were finally exposed in the 1950s and ’60s. Before long the three began to betray one another. Loyalty, like betrayal, is not a bus that one can get off at will. People who betray in one area of life are more likely to do so in others.
A better way to think about patriotism would be to follow Aristotle. In the Politics he famously posed the question whether a good citizen is the same as a good human being. Can we be loyal members of a particular city, nation, or state and at the same time fulfill our larger moral obligations to humanity? Is there a conflict between a commitment to intellectual inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, wherever that might lead, and the offices of citizenship that require loyalty to a particular set of institutions and beliefs? In short, is patriotism a virtue, and, if so, what kind of virtue is it?9
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism
Following Aristotle, the best way of thinking about any virtue is as a mean point along a continuum of excess and deficiency. “Virtue or excellence,” he writes, “is a characteristic involving choice that consists in observing the mean relative to us, a mean which is defined by a rational principle such as a man of practical wisdom would use to determine it.”10 The mean, as he understands it, is not a quantitative measure but something closer to the fitting or the appropriate, knowing the right thing to do in particular situations. It might be useful to think of patriotism in this light. If patriotism is a virtue requiring deliberation over competing choices, it must be located at a midpoint between two contending vices—between an excess and a deficiency. What might these look like?
The excess of patriotism would be a kind of partisan zeal that holds absolute attachment to one’s own way of life—one’s country, one’s cause, one’s nation—as unconditionally good. This is the kind of loyalty expressed in sentiments like “my country right or wrong” and that once-popular bumper sticker urging, “My country: love it or leave it.” The most lethal expression of this attitude was given by the German legal philosopher Carl Schmitt in his short and incendiary 1927 book, The Concept of the Political.11 Schmitt drew extensively on Thomas Hobbes, but rather than tying the state of war to a prepolitical state of nature, Schmitt viewed war—and the constant preparation for war—as the inescapable condition of political life. Man, Schmitt says, is the dangerous animal because he can kill; individuals, then, are always in a state of virtual war with one another, or at least of constant preparation for war.
Schmitt believed Hobbes had concluded correctly that war is the natural condition of human beings; he thought Hobbes was wrong, however, to believe that the social contract could create a sovereign that could put an end to war. There is no way of putting an end to war, and therefore the inescapable political fact is the distinction between friend and enemy—those who are with us and those who are against us. Rather than putting an end to war, the social contract intensifies it—creating a new grouping of friends who then owe one another their loyalty, drawing yet another line of distinction by which all others may be classified as enemies. “The political,” Schmitt wrote, “is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping.”12 All humanitarian appeals to human rights or free trade or democracy are attempts to evade the fundamental fact of conflict and the need for a politics of group solidarity, to stand with others on our side. For Schmitt, only partisanship and war are real; consensus and peace are phony. The politics of the future will be determined by those who have the courage to recognize this fact and act upon it.
At the other end of the continuum, the deficiency of patriotism involves a kind of transpolitical cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan idea runs deep within the Western tradition. It was very much present in Plato’s Apology of Socrates, where the first political philosopher was accused of treason for not believing in the gods of the city and for corrupting the young. But ancient cosmopolitanism was given its canonical expression by the Stoics, who lived in the first and second centuries C.E. Their doctrine of world citizenship came of age at a time when Rome exerted a kind of global hegemony, and its universal empire was seen as having replaced the smaller parochial political units like the free city-state. To be sure, the Stoics were a small philosophical sect and never believed for an instant that their austere teachings about moral autonomy and independence could become a recipe for humanity as a whole. The task of becoming a citizen of the world is no easy business. It requires a kind of abstraction from the comfort and security of the familiar.
Present-day cosmopolitanism has been shaped decisively by another German thinker: Immanuel Kant. Kant stressed that our moral duties and obligations respect no national boundaries or other parochial attachments such as race, class, and ethnicity. In this view, we owe no greater moral obligations to fellow citizens than to any other human beings on the planet. Citizenship is an arbitrary fact, generally conferred through the accident of birth. And since birthright citizenship is an artifact of the genetic lottery, there are no moral obligations attached to it. The Kantian emphasis on universality—that a moral law is one that holds for all human beings, however situated—stresses that we are all members of a “kingdom of ends,” one where every individual is due equal moral value and respect simply by virtue of reason and humanity alone.
The idea of a cosmopolitan ethic of humanity, Kant thought, could be realized only in a republican form of government or, more precisely, in a confederation of republics overseen by international law. In his pathbreaking essay “Perpetual Peace,” Kant proposed a league of nations to put an end to war between states for the sake of achieving a perpetual peace. Only by eliminating the threat of war would it be possible to remove obstacles to the full and free recognition of human rights. Kant thought that Hobbes and Locke were wrong in attributing sovereignty to the individual nation-state; for him, the state was a mere developmental stage along the path to a world republic of states organized around the idea of peace. Only in a league of republics would the prophet Isaiah’s dream of peace among the nations finally be realized. Kant’s plans for an international league of states eventually came to fruition more than a century after his death, in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, in the creation of the United Nations, and in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.13
Kant’s belief in the pacific nature of republican government was based on a combination of blindness and optimism. He was blind to the historical record of republics, which has been anything but peaceful. Sparta, Athens, Rome, and Florence were armed camps that celebrated martial vigor and war. Montesquieu famously compared the harshness and moral asceticism of the ancient republics to life under a medieval monastic order.14 No doubt, however, Kant was thinking of the modern commercial republic, where trade and commerce serve as a surrogate for war. Kant hoped, as we all do, that increased commerce and communication between people would dampen the flames of nationalist, religious, and other enthusiasms, but even here the record has been spotty at best. Increase of acquaintance does not necessarily improve feeling. Most of the wars of the twentieth century would not have been possible had not the nations of all sides received the full support of their respective populations. This became especially clear during World War I, when the socialist workers chose to go with their own countries. Kant dramatically underestimated the pull of nationalism, a vital power in both the past and the present.
The Good European
Neither Schmitt’s view nor Kant’s view—neither the excess nor the deficiency of politics—captures the specificity of patriotism. Schmitt’s view is, to be sure, rooted in an important truth: the world is a dangerous place. Like Machiavelli and Hobbes, Schmitt takes the extreme situation—the situation of war or of mobilization for war—and turns it into the normal situation. An extreme situation is one in which the very survival, the very independence, of society is at stake. It is an existential condition. For Schmitt, every situation is potentially a life-and-death situation in which one must choose between friends and enemies. Politics, in this account, is an endless struggle for power guided exclusively by national interest. And yet a politics of unremitting war would have to be self-defeating even in Schmitt’s own terms. Why should war be something that takes place only between states and not within them, as the logic of bitter rivalry and partisanship cuts all the way down into our domestic affairs? The logic of Schmitt’s argument points not only to wars between states but also to ongoing civil wars or civil conflicts between rival groups within states. The result of such a logic of conflict would, ironically, be the negation of politics—the destruction of the regime as the locus of organized political power.
If the effect of Schmitt’s distinction between friend and enemy is to reduce politics to war, the effect of Kantian cosmopolitanism is to confuse politics with morality. Kant and his followers (like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas) have been eager to transcend the sovereign state and replace it with international rules of justice. If for Schmitt man is the dangerous animal, for Kant man is the rule-following animal. But the Kantian desire to transcend the state with an international forum of jurists is naïve and antipolitical. If, as Hobbes said, “covenants without the sword are but words,” who will enforce these international norms of justice? The Kantian ideal of global justice yearns for a world without states, a world without national boundaries, a world, in short, without patriotism or politics. International bodies like the United Nations have been notoriously ineffective in curbing or restraining aggressive behavior. International courts like that at The Hague are often quick to condemn but slow to act in bringing criminals to justice, and may do so in selective and arbitrary ways. Cosmopolitans may feel themselves attached to such global causes as Green Peace and Amnesty International but never to their own country. When America or any other nation fails the test of living up to the impossibly high moral standards that such groups set, the result is a morbidly self-hating form of disillusionment that can often lead to nihilistic fits of rage and contempt.15
The question is to what degree cosmopolitanism is compatible with the patriotic sentiment. Does it require the abolition of the state or the creation of some form of world government? Even Kant admitted that a world state would be a “soulless despotism.”16 It is worth remembering that the twentieth century—perhaps the most violent in world history—saw the passing away of another kind of cosmopolitanism that promised the “withering away of the state.”17 I refer, of course, to Marxian communism, which similarly regarded classes, ethnicities, nationalism, and the like as doomed to be replaced by a universal classless society. The idea underlying the cosmopolitan ideal is that life itself, regardless of the kind of life one leads, is the highest and most absolute good. Such an ideal can lead only to moral decay, an inability or unwillingness to dedicate one’s life to ideals, to the relatively few things that matter and that give life wholeness and meaning. The cosmopolitan state would be a world where nothing really matters, where there is nothing left worth struggling for—a world of entertainment, of fun, of shopping, a world void of moral seriousness.18 It is perhaps no coincidence that the television show Sex and the City popularized a drink by the name of—you guessed it—the Cosmopolitan.
Too often, of course, the new cosmopolitanism is not cosmopolitan at all but a specifically culture-bound idea expressing the values of one part—and maybe only a very small part—of humanity. It seems to run contrary to the virtually universal experience of humankind. The idea of the citizen of the world is often aloof and detached, as if staring down on human affairs from a distant planet. Although its defenders are quick to present it as something heroic, cosmopolitanism seems to lack passion and intensity. It is a peculiarly austere and loveless disposition. The world citizen is, above all, “cool,” that is, someone who embodies the common features of humanity and not any individual nation, tribe, or state. Cool is above all an aesthetic pose, one of increasingly postnational appeal as embodied in dress, cuisine, language, and shopping. While cool originally grew out of the African American experience—think of Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool—it has increasingly become mainstream, moving from the outside to the inside.
The embodiment of cool is Rick Blaine, the character played by Humphrey Bogart in the great film Casablanca. At the beginning of the film we learn that Rick was previously a committed partisan; he ran guns to Ethiopia and fought for the loyalists in Spain, but has since dropped out and now runs the most popular bar and casino (Rick’s Café Américain) in the cosmopolitan city of Casablanca. Here his friend Louis Renault, the corrupt prefect of police, warns him not to interfere with the efforts of the Germans to detain Victor Laszlo, a famous anti-Nazi agitator. In order to recoup losses from his roulette wheel, Rick bets Louis ten thousand francs that Laszlo will escape. Rick’s coolness is expressed in the following bit of dialogue when he is being interrogated by a Nazi officer:
MAJOR STRASSER: | Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, unofficially of course. |
RICK: | Make it official if you like. |
MAJOR STRASSER: | What is your nationality? |
RICK: | I’m a drunkard. |
CAPTAIN RENAULT: | And that makes Rick a citizen of the world.19 |
Of course, by the end of the film we discover that Rick has always been a romantic and idealist at heart. He drops his aloof demeanor and helps Laszlo and his great love, Ilsa Lund, escape. Laszlo’s last words to Rick as he prepares to board the flight for Lisbon are revealing: “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.”
The model for contemporary cosmopolitanism is often drawn from Europe, where the European Union is taken by many to represent a new type of “transnational” citizenship. This development was brilliantly predicted more than a century ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, who described the emergence of a new phenomenon, the “good European,” who would be someone beyond nationalities and even beyond politics: “The Europeans are becoming more similar to each other; they become more and more detached from the conditions in which races originate that are tied to some climate or class; they become increasingly independent of any determinate milieu that would like to inscribe itself for centuries in body and soul with the same demands. Thus an essentially supra-national and nomadic type of man is gradually coming up, a type that possesses, physiologically speaking, a maximum of the art and power of adaptation as its typical distinction.”20
Nietzsche’s description of this nomadic individual, essentially adaptive to new and changing environments with no ties to place, has certainly come to pass in the contemporary European world, with its common currency, open borders, and increasingly stateless existence. Such a vision is notably different from an older conservative model of l’Europe des parties, a Europe characterized by political diversity and rooted in particular nation-states with their distinct and healthily competing traditions. This older perspective is apt to look askance on a single union of states made possible only by certain economic, scientific, and technological developments. The new cosmopolitanism with its indifference to all traditions, especially religion, entails not only a soft version of the Marxian dream of a world in which politics has withered away; it would also have to be coupled with Max Weber’s fear of a world governed by narrow-minded specialists and technocrats, a world of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”21
Nationalism and cosmopolitanism are today often thought of as the only two political options available to us, but in fact they both tend to obscure the true nature of patriotism. Each contains at best a part of the truth. The nationalist is correct to see that politics is a matter of the particular—particular states, particular nations, particular peoples and traditions. For the nationalist, the particular—this people, this culture, this state—stands for something higher, more noble, than the cosmopolitan idea. Everything great derives from something rooted and particular. We enter the world as members of a particular family, in a particular neighborhood, in a particular state, in a particular part of the country. Each of us is a composite of particularities. These attachments are not something extraneous to our identities; they make us who we are. The demand that we give up our particular identities and assume a new and artificial cosmopolitan identity would be like asking us to stop speaking our native languages and embrace Esperanto. Who is the Shakespeare of Esperanto?22
The fact is, we learn to care about others by caring about those who are closest to us. Cosmopolitan internationalism has the disadvantage of uprooting people from their traditions and from the local arrangements that most people find worthy of reverence. There seems to be little room for a sense of awe or for the sacred in the cosmopolitan ideal. The ancient historian Herodotus tells the following story about the Persians: “Most of all they held in honor themselves, then those who dwell next to themselves, and then those next to them, and so on, so there is a progression in honor in relation to the distance. This is because they think themselves to be the best of mankind in everything and that others have a hold on virtue in proportion to their nearness; those that live furthest away are the most base.”23
What Herodotus attributes to the Persians is closer to the universal experience of all humankind. We care about those things that are closest to us and have weaker ties of attachment to things the farther away they seem to our moral dispositions and sympathies. Herodotus did not write this to condemn Persian parochialism. To the contrary. We live in a series of concentric circles in which those who dwell with us are held in high esteem. This is the core belief, the basic disposition, underlying patriotism. It indicates that patriotism—love of one’s own—is not a sign of narrow-mindedness or bigotry, it is the near-universal experience of all peoples. Patriotism is not necessarily a mark of prejudice or insularity but can be generous and ennobling, open to all people who share a common set of beliefs, values, and way of life.
But there is truth also on the cosmopolitan side. Are we condemned by the accident of birth to live by the traditions of the particular nation into which we happen to be born? Doesn’t this deny what is highest in us: our capacity for choice, to detach ourselves from our surroundings, to determine for ourselves how we will live and who we will be? This idea of choice is at the core of our experience of human dignity. We often experience our moral worth through our ability to choose how we will live, with whom, and under what conditions. This kind of cosmopolitan ethic has the virtue of allowing us to stand imaginatively outside of our particular situation and to view ourselves from a universal point of view, from the standpoint of a disinterested spectator. Clearly such critical distance can help us to judge ourselves and our societies. We must view them as we would view anyone else—neutrally, objectively, disinterestedly. This is the morality of cosmopolitanism, and while it cannot stand alone, it does have some virtues to recommend it.
“Tact of the Heart”
Each of these components—let us call them the national and the cosmopolitan ideals—has a certain place in a properly constituted patriotism. Consider, for instance, the case of the American regime. In one respect, America is the first truly modern nation—a nation founded upon the principles of modern philosophy. Our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, is dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The principle of equality is the foundation for certain rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. From this it is said to follow that all legitimate government is based upon the consent of the governed, and when government fails to protect our rights it may be overturned and begun anew. These principles were (and are) said to hold true not for Americans alone but for all human beings always and everywhere. Far from suggesting a traditional form of customary morality, American patriotism requires a commitment to the highest, most universal moral principles. A cosmopolitan dimension is built into the very nature of American patriotism.
At the same time, American patriotism requires more than devotion to a set of formal principles. It consists of the entire way of life—that mix of moral and religious practices, habits, customs, and sentiments—that makes a people who they are. The regime is in Aristotle’s sense an ethos, a distinctive character that nurtures distinctive human types. The ethos describes the tone of a regime, what it finds most worthy of admiration, what it looks up to. Thus when Tocqueville studied the American regime in Democracy in America, he started first with our formal political institutions as enumerated in the Constitution (the separation of powers, the division between state and federal authority, and so on) but then went on to look at such informal practices as American manners and morals, our tendency to form small civic associations, our religious life, as well as our peculiar defensiveness and tendency to bombastic moralism. It was this last quality that led Tocqueville to complain that there was “nothing more irritating in the habits of life than this irritable patriotism of the Americans.”24
Ours is a patriotism that contains elements of both moral universalism and a robust commitment to a specific way of life. It is not just a way of knowing but also a manner of feeling. Patriotism is a moral sentiment, or what Tocqueville called a “habit of the heart.”25 This is all a way of saying that patriotism requires an understanding and appreciation of not only a set of abstract ideas but also a particular history and tradition. To love one’s country well is to love something particular. I may admire France’s language, its food, its countryside, and its culture, but I cannot love France the way a Frenchman does. I can never feel the way a French person feels when he or she hears the “Marseillaise.” We love best what is our own. This is what I think Burke meant when he said that the British constitution and way of life are “an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers and to be transmitted to posterity.”26
Patriotism, then, is a particular species of love. But love of what? How can one feel love or gratitude to millions of people one cannot even know? This issue was at the core of the debate between Gershom Scholem and Hannah Arendt over the publication of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem.27 In covering the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker magazine, Arendt had submitted the Israeli tribunal and even the testimony of eyewitnesses to withering criticism. Scholem could not but regard this degree of detachment as a betrayal, expressed as it was at a time when the wounds of the Holocaust (he always preferred to call it the Catastrophe) were still fresh. Under the circumstances, he wondered, would it not have been proper to show a little more sympathy? To this Arendt loftily replied that she could not love an abstraction like a people, only individual persons. It was here that Scholem accused her of lacking Ahavat Yisrael or a proper love of the Jewish people, her own people. “In you, dear Hannah, as in so many intellectuals who come from the German Left, I find little trace of this,” he wrote. “In circumstances such as these, would there not have been a place for what I can only describe with that modest German word—Herzenstakt [tact of the heart]?”28
There is no good idea that cannot be abused, and this is especially true of patriotism. Patriotism seems to bring out both the best and the worst in people. If critics on the left have routinely disparaged any display of patriotism as tantamount to warmongering and nationalistic chauvinism, bullies on the right have been quick to depict any questioning of America as somehow un-American and therefore not patriotic. America is, I believe, the only country in the world where there are words like “Americanization” and “un-American.” To the best of my knowledge, there are no words in any European language to denote similar phenomena. But if patriotism can be harsh and punitive, it can also be elevating and ennobling. American patriotism at its best is not just indoctrination but also a form of moral education in the virtues of civility, law-abidingness, respect for others, responsibility, love of honor, courage, loyalty, and leadership.
Political Education
Patriotism is not just a moral but also an intellectual virtue. The proper love of country is not something we inherit, it must be taught. Man may be the political animal, but this does not mean that politics is encoded in our DNA. Politics is an art and, like all arts, it must be taught. But teaching requires teachers, and where are the teachers of this art to be found?
Not, it appears, in departments of history, political science, or economics. Modern professors of history often appear to teach everything but a proper respect for their political tradition. One often gets the impression that America alone among the nations of the world is responsible for racism, homophobia, and the despoliation of the planet. In my own field of political science—the field that once designated the skill or art possessed by the statesman and citizen—civic education has been replaced by something called “game theory,” which regards politics merely as a marketplace in which individual preferences are formed and utilities maximized. Rather than teaching students to think of themselves as citizens, the new political science treats us as “rational actors” who exist simply to exercise preferences. But what should we have a preference for? How should choice be exercised? On these most fundamental questions, our political science is silent. It has nothing to offer. By reducing all politics to choice and all choices to preferences, the new political science is forced to accord legitimacy to every preference—however vile, base, or indecent—that an individual or group may express. In such a nihilistic view, there is no room for political judgment.
But the very possibility of politics assumes the primacy of political judgment. By judgment I mean the art of practical reason as practiced by members of a jury, a political assembly, or a civic association, anywhere deliberation takes place. Politics is a practical art in precisely the manner intended by Aristotle. It is oriented not only toward knowledge but also toward action, where action involves deliberation, foresight, and prudence. Political judgment entails know-how or savvy of the kind exhibited by the statesman. It is both an intellectual and a moral quality. It requires knowledge of political facts, but it is not essentially empirical.
Political judgment should be distinguished from technical know-how—the kind of expertise required for administrative work. But it also needs to be distinguished from theoretical knowledge—the search for universal laws governing human behavior. Political judgment, by contrast, is knowledge of the fitting or the appropriate, requiring an attention to the nuances or particularities of a situation. Such knowledge will always be provisional; it will be true only for the most part and will always admit of exceptions. The person who possesses this kind of knowledge will have that special quality of insight or discrimination that distinguishes him or her from persons of a purely theoretical or speculative cast of mind.
The faculty of judgment is something that requires experience. Judgment is not simply a technique that can be learned by heart, repeated by rote, and applied mechanically. It is something akin to the capacity to learn a language; it is not just a matter of memorizing grammar and syntax but requires immersion in the language itself. It entails a capacity for synthesis rather than analysis. It is not necessarily a matter of having more information or access to a larger body of facts. Rather, it requires the ability to see something before others do, to know what to do and when to do it. It is the ability to adapt to new and often unforeseen situations, in order to keep the ship of state afloat.
Winston Churchill best described this capacity for political judgment in his classic essay “Consistency in Politics.” I will only say that it is one of the greatest political essays in the English language. Churchill argues there that there are two kinds of consistency. One connotes absolute commitment to a rule or principle (never lie, never cheat, and so on). But consistency in politics is more complicated. It involves knowing how to adapt principles to changing circumstances and to adjust them as the situation warrants. This may sound like opportunism or flip-flopping, but it amounts in fact to the oldest of all policies: keeping the ship on an even keel. Listen to Churchill on this theme:
A distinction should be drawn between two kinds of political inconsistency. First, a statesman in contact with the moving current of events and anxious to keep the ship on an even keel and steer a steady course may lean all his weight now on one side and now on the other. His arguments in each case when contrasted can be shown to be not only very different in character, but contradictory in spirit and opposite in direction; yet his object will throughout have remained the same. His resolves, his wishes, his outlook may have been unchanged; his methods may be verbally irreconcilable. We cannot call this inconsistency. In fact it may be claimed to be the truest consistency.29
Churchill’s point is that the world of moral and political experience is too complex to be reduced to a single rule or principle, whether this be Thomas Aquinas’s natural law, Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or the Utilitarian’s principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Just as there is no single wine that goes equally well with all foods, so there is no single moral rule that can be used for all cases. The principle of practical judgment should be thought of not as an inflexible moral imperative but as a rule of thumb, that is, a useful but nevertheless inexact standard that will have to be continually modified to fit the circumstances. In each new case the standard will be determined by the person best capable of capturing the nuance, color, or texture of the particular situation.
Much of modern-day political science has neglected the role of political judgment precisely because it appears too “subjective” and resists or stands outside the realm of quantification. In place of the faculty of judgment, our political science has stressed a narrow-minded focus on “methodology”—often at the expense of the life-and-death issues that make up the substance of politics. This attempt to turn the study of politics into a science like physics, or into social sciences like economics or psychology, is to lose sight of its original purpose. The purpose of political science is not to stand above or outside the political community, like an entomologist observing ant behavior, but to serve as a civic-minded guardian of disputes in order to restore peace and stability to conflict-ridden situations.
So what should the study of political science be now? To ask a question once posed by Karl Marx: Who will educate the educators? How can we reintroduce the art of political judgment, and who is equipped to do so? The best answer is through the study of old books, often very old ones. These are our best teachers in a world where real teachers are in short supply. In addition to the works covered in this book, let me mention works like Plato’s Laws, Tacitus’s Annals, Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and the Federalist Papers. To read these books in the spirit in which they were written is to acquire an education in political responsibility.
But the works of our greatest political philosophers need to be supplemented by the works of our most astute psychological novelists. A great novel contains instances of moral reasoning, persuasion, and deliberation equal to the theories of the greatest philosophers; the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Henry James, and Jane Austen are only the most obvious. A dozen pages of Austen’s Persuasion will teach more about the delicate art of judgment than a shelf full of contemporary books claiming to study conflict resolution. These in turn should be supplemented by the deeds and writings of the most important statesmen from around the world, from Pericles, Bismarck, and Disraeli to Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Churchill, and Mandela. Their works are a virtual education in how to negotiate affairs in times of crisis.
Once you have read these works—and only when you have done that—can you say that you are living up to the highest offices of a Yale student summarized on Memorial Gate at Branford College: “For God, for Country, and for Yale.”30