A Student’s Guide to Political Philosophy

INSTEAD OF RETURNING to nature in the classical sense, modern thinkers turned to history. In history you learn facts; you don’t study natures. A fact is how things have turned out; nature is about how things have to be. Plato and Aristotle thought that facts come and go, but nature remains; nature is what should be studied. It was Machiavelli who first put fact to the fore, in his idea of the effectual truth. A fact is something that cannot be disputed. You must adjust to facts; they don’t adjust to you. Facts speak for themselves. The same is not quite true of nature, and the difference is that the nature of a thing is often not easy to see and so seems to be a matter of opinion. You can see, for example, that you have lost a battle, but whether you deserve to lose is arguable, and from the standpoint of the fact, useless. Machiavelli’s embrace of fact laid the basis for the nineteenth century’s turn to history. Both fact and history have the nonpartisan advantage always sought by modernity: they cannot be argued with. Yet somehow, despite the assurance of all the experts that argument is pointless, we continue to argue. G. W. F. Hegel (1770– 1831) distinguished mere fact from history, or from what he called World History. He was the master of the philosophy of history. Rather than let fact silence reason, he tried to infuse reason into fact; he saw the “march of Reason” in the facts of World History. World History, he tried to show, developed in “dialectical” stages until the Rational State was perfected—which by good chance (so I say) turned out to be the very state of Prussia in which Hegel was living. Here was the end (in the sense of the completion) of history: a state without parties in which there is nothing fundamental left to dispute. Yet as soon as the rational state was announced, everybody—Marx and Nietzsche in the forefront—scrambled to dispute it. Even as Hegel was writing, Tocqueville reproved the sort of democratic history that subjects human events to impersonal forces over which men have no control and that levels mankind to a herd of impotent individuals.

Peaceable liberal democracies, for whom wars over religion are now inconceivable, still have parties—the liberals and conservatives we know so well. Actually, we would know them better if we studied John Stuart Mill (1806– 1873) and Edmund Burke (1729–1797), the political philosophers who explain each the best. Make sure you read both Mill and Burke, not just the one you like. Mill argues for liberty and also for progress toward liberty. His difficulty is that progress requires enlightenment and the gradual defeat of prejudice—whereas liberty requires openness to all opinions, including prejudiced ones. What should a good liberal do for a conservative, teach him to think better or let him be as he is? Here is a conundrum always present to liberals.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) was born in a small town near Leipzig, the grandson of two Lutheran pastors. As a Gymnasium student, he became an enthusiastic follower of the Romantic composer Richard Wagner. At university, Nietzsche studied classical philology and quickly established an academic reputation. His philosophical interest was sparked when he happened upon a copy of Schopenhauer in a bookstore. Then, at the age of 24, he was offered a university chair in classical philology at Basel. For the next thirteen years, he worked as a conscientious professor in this provincial city. His books met with mixed reviews. Always in poor health, suffering from migraines, he resigned from Basel in 1879. For the next ten years he led an irregular life, traveling incessantly across south-central Europe and writing his major philosophical works. Finally, in 1889 he experienced a mental breakdown, from which he never recovered. He spent his remaining years as an invalid in the care of his mother and sister.

Then what about conservatives, are they better off? Burke opposed the French Revolution because it attempted to remake society according to a rational plan instead of letting it grow, spontaneously or by prudent adjustment, into a more convenient arrangement. Burke opposed that revolution as soon as he got word of it, and he correctly—amazingly—foresaw that it would lead to terror (Robespierre) and dictatorship (Napoleon). Still, when these things have occurred, what is a good conservative to do? Should he try to go back to the Old Regime before the revolution, which would be a disturbing counter-revolution, or should he adjust to the new status quo, in which case he compromises his conservative principle? This state of indecision between going back and going slow is the characteristic dilemma of the conservative, visible in every issue today. I leave it to you to decide which party is better, or which is worse (most partisans begin from what they don’t like). You may conclude that the argument doesn’t matter, but please don’t suppose you can make it go away.

THIS IS NOT the only possible guide to political philosophy. I could have given it a theme different from that of partisanship, and of course there are several (but not many) interpretations of the nature and history of political philosophy. This guide is not intended for other professors, so it is not equipped with footnotes. I have written it to tell you what I really think (up to a point), but that is less important than the fact that it contains some of the most valuable information there is.