Samuel Johnson defines the natural power of government in his pamplet of 1775 entitled "Taxation No Tyranny" as follows:
"In sovereignty there are no gradations. There may be limited royalty, there may be limited consulship; but there can be no limited government. There must, in every society, be some power or other, from which there is no appeal, which admits no restrictions, which pervades the whole mass of the community, regulates and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures, extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself from
question or control, and bounded only by physical necessity.
"By this power, wherever it subsists, all legislation and jurisdiction is animated and maintained. From this all legal rights are emanations, which, whether equitably or not, may be legally recalled. It is not infallible, for it may do wrong; but it is irresistible, for it can be resisted only by rebellion, by an act which makes it questionable, what shall be thenceforward the supreme power."
He is denying the Lockean concept of "limited government." He is not endorsing a doctrine of divine right. He is asserting a doctrine on the nature of government.
In the casual conversation below, it becomes clear that his principle of sovereignty rests on an opinion or consensus which gives government its power. This consensus is a form of passive consent inherent in the inherited culture of a nation, buttressed at any given moment by the specific popularity that a regime may then enjoy, but relying ultimately on deeper sources of loyalty and good will and hence able to survive moments of unpopularity. Revolts do happen. Passive consent turns, momentarily, to active rebellion. Then the disease is healed. But the nature of government is not altered. One political arrangement dies and another one takes its place. Sovereignty is unchanged and undiminished, since it is either a whole or else nonexistent. It is restored with a different face. Government is still unlimited.
Boswell records the following conversation from 31 March 1772 between Johnson and Sir Adam Fergus(s)on, (1733-1813) baronet, member of parliament for Ayrshire, and author of An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).
-------------------------------------------------------
JOHNSON. "...I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual. Sir, the danger of the abuse of power is nothing to a private man. What Frenchman is prevented from passing his life as he pleases?"
SIR ADAM. "But, sir, in the British constitution it is surely of importance to keep up a spirit in the people, so as to preserve a balance against the crown."
JOHNSON. "Sir, I perceive you are a vile whig. Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the crown? The crown has not power enough. When I say that all governments are alike, I consider that in no government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head. There is a remedy in human nature against tyranny, that will keep us safe under every form of government. Had not the people of France thought themselves honoured in sharing in the brilliant actions of Louis XIV, they would not have endured him; and we may say the same of the King of Prussia's people."
-------------------------------------
So the Americans may indeed rebel. What Johnson disputes is their pretext for the rebellion, a principle of limited government which has been violated, according to their claim. If their rebellion succeeded, then the government erected in the place of the colonial administration would be a new sovereign.
Johnson's view of sovereignty, though briefly articulated, agrees completely with that of Joseph de Maistre. It has nothing to do with Carl Schmitt, who was a modern existentialist seeking a rationalization for totalitarianism, in which the consent of the governed whether passive or expressed is of no relevance. Schmitt claims Maistre as his ideological ancestor much the way that a nouveau riche buys an old portrait at auction and hangs it on his own wall and tells people it's his grandsire. The gentlemen who call themselves "paleoconservatives" hold Schmitt in affection at the same time that they nurse hatred for the American federal government. It appears that they prefer smaller, ethnically pure totalitarian states.
There are other principles for protecting economic and civil freedoms. The foremost of these is subsidiarity, which means allowing the functions of government to be exercised at the lowest practical level, since people know their own affairs, and their character is ennobled by taking responsibility. Subsidiarity means that it is necessary and moral for government at the higher level not to regulate whatever can be regulated at a lower level. The implementation of such a principle depends on consensus and discipline and carefully cultivated habit, just as any Whig constitution built on "limited powers" and "checks and balances" does—which is to say, any constitution sprung against itself like an over-engineered mousetrap. This over-engineered mousetrap is premised on low expectations of human nature: it treats men like mice. In time the citizens sink to the level of those expectations.
The founding fathers, as is often said, believed that virtue was necessary in the citizenry for democracy to work. In other words, virtue was the precondition of democracy, not necessarily its outcome. In their conception, democracy's purpose was to prevent abuses of power, to make sure people were left alone to live their lives and make themselves rich. Not much more than that. The discipline of making a democracy work would only breed in them a habit of following rules. It would not make them saints. Can government do anything better for human character? This was the question implicit in the title of George Will's forgotten book, Statecraft as Soulcraft.
My argument on the Tory-Whig divide and the analogy to American intellectual conservative factions is not made with any completeness in the 1,300-word review-of-a-review below. The point, to be made is that something is missing from American intellectual conservatism, and that it was already missing in 1983, if not in 1955—and the thing missing is the wholeness of a view of man and political existence. The point is that half of a natural cultural dyad was sliced away when a new republic was founded by a divorce from the mother country. Nor was this "other half" , which continued to subsist in England, in good health there. The spirit of Toryism has had its ups and downs in British politics and culture ever since, yet I make no claim that the mentality I describe has anything much to do with the modern politics of a David Cameron.
Samuel Johnson LLD (1709-1784), political journalist and pamphleteer, critic of the American rebels.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Retrospect: The Occasion of the Piece
The difference between traditionalist conservatives and libertarian conservatives in America today is not simply analogous to the difference between eighteenth-century British Tories and Whigs. It may be identical.
I have excavated the old piece of literary-political journalism below, from The American Spectator, as a curiosity. One sees therein a young American conservative, during the Age of Reagan, criticizing the ideological fetish of "limited government" and citing Samuel Johnson as an authority on sovereignty.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), known as "Dr. Johnson," because of his honorary degrees from Oxford and Trinity College Dublin, was the author of the English Dictionary, an important early editor of Shakespeare's plays, a biographer of English poets, and a neoclassical poet himself. The fact that today I must explain who he was is further evidence of the decline of literary culture. In another age, Anglophones regularly read the long, almost novelistic biography of him by James Boswell; and people who learned to love Johnson from that biography often went on to read his "moral essays" from The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer.
Johnson was the friend of politicians, a parliamentary reporter and also a ghost-writer for the law lectures of Sir Robert Chambers, Blackstone's immediate successor as Vinerian Professor of Common Law at Oxford. In sum, Johnson possessed all the intellectual preparation as well as practical observation to make him a political thinker of some stature. Unfortunately, he only wrote a few political pamphlets and did not compile a treatise against Hobbes and Locke. A good dissertation could be written on Johnson's Toryism as an outgrowth of his understanding of the English civil wars and the emergence of the Whig and Tory factions. In the early 1980's I wanted to write such a dissertation but received no meaningful encouragement. The standard work in those days on Johnson's politics was a book by Donald Greene, a liberal who wanted Johnson also to appear a liberal. Sentimentality is not a sound basis for critical study.
For most of the eighteenth century, Britain had virtual one-party rule. The Tories were disorganized and politically irrelevant minor country squires. The Whigs were factionalized but in force. In America the people persecuted as "Tories" were for the most part Whigs loyal to the Crown. The American rebels were anti-monarchical British Whigs in spirit, and in attitude they ran the gamut of British Whig mentalities, from classical republicans to proto-Jacobins to millenialist sectarians. The unfair treatment that was dished out to the Whig colonist by the Whig imperialist thus had a Whig at either end. And Johnson's defense of empire against the colonists was thus less than comforting to the imperial regime.
Johnson's few political writings are entertaining to read. In the pamphlet on America, "Taxation No Tyranny," he charges the colonial rebels with hypocrisy on a number of points: they are slave-owners who cry for liberty, and they are advocates of religious freedom whose paranoia is aroused by the British emancipation of Catholics in Quebec via the Quebec Act of 1774. He suggests that the rebels seek to seduce the Québécois into a rebel alliance with the ultimate aim of suppressing their religion when independence has been achieved. Though he has defended the empire against the American colonists, he is critical of the cost of empire in his perennially relevant "Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands." In "The False Alarm," he mocks the absurdity of British country elections where the semi-literate who, knowing nothing of the issues, participate because it gratifies their vanity to show that they are able to write their own names.
In my youth I maintained that there was enough substance in Johnson's political utterances from which to know his Toryism as a coherent worldview, and to know it as an alternative or corrective to the Whiggism of Burke. Famously, Russell Kirk had used Burke as a means of defining an American conservatism that was a coherent worldview and not merely a rear-guard movement for the protection of private interest against American liberalism. Of course Kirk loved both writers; their "conservatisms" are highly compatible; and Kirk liked calling himself an American Tory. There were indeed different modes of Whiggism in Burke's time, and Burke was a "right-wing" Whig. The fact is that Burke's critique of the French revolution led ultimately to the refounding of the Tory Party. While the American Whigs who fomented the colonial revolt of 1776 varied so widely in attitude, most tended to be less Burkean and more Lockean, albeit that the conservatism of the conservative founding fathers has been under-reported. Reaganite conservatism was likewise less Burkean and more Lockean. It was my little literary-journalistic project to use Johnson as an authority and a symbol to promote a swing in the other direction. It was a strategy for dealing with people who resisted theory but could at least think in terms of a mythical history.
The occasion for this literary sally was a hatchet job by a minor conservative journalist named Sobran on a major one named Will. Who they were ultimately does not matter. The book under review, called Statecraft as Soulcraft, whatever its true merit, ultimately does not matter. One of the issues at stake was the Reaganite project of downsizing the welfare state. Today, with the onset of socialized medicine, the question of what to do about the welfare state has never been more crucial. Most memorably, Johnson said that " A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." This is a proposition worth qualifying and defining until it makes sense and leaves the realm of pure sentiment behind. The first thing to do is to juxtapose it with that line from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Are they my poor?" While the radical Whiggism which is called libertarianism today merely says, "that if any would not work, neither should he eat." Johnson thought he knew who the poor were, as an English class; and indeed he had been among the poor as well as the rich. Today the question of the "decent provision" is a question of who is entitled to that provision—in an immigrant nation where any number of the world's poor could decide to cross the borders in order to take the share being offered. The question for a politician is never a question of truth but rather how do I win the next election? And can I turn the poor into the basis of a permanent electoral majority?
Would it be worth the trouble to investigate the basis of Will's affection for the welfare state in the 1980's? Probably not.
My attack on American conservatives for being oblivious to the natural principle of sovereignty was and is an attack on the concept of a "propositional" republic that exempts itself from the laws of nature (despite the lip-service to "nature and nature's God" in the famous founding document). Locke was a very poor spokesman for nature in any form. Whatever care the poor are owed by decency, whatever care it is prudent to accord them for the sake of political stability, American conservatives wanted to use the proposition as an escape clause to evade all responsibility for them. But people do not like having their founding myths questioned.
I shall not reread Statecraft As Soulcraft in order to rediscover what I liked so much about it in those days. From my piece, I can tell that Will was replicating one side of an inter-Straussian debate between Thomas Pangle and the disciples of Harry Jaffa. The Pangle side argued that the American founders fell short of the standards of Plato and Aristotle for a regime that promoted excellence—hence the reference to James Madison and the reliance upon factionalism to weaken government. The Jaffites (such as Charles Kesler) would rise in high dudgeon to defend the American founding myth and to decry the Pangle critique for characterizing the founders' mentality or motivations as "base." It would, in fact, be a waste of time to reread anything by Will when one could be investing the time in the works of Leo Strauss himself. Or of Plato. Or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.
Whether George Will should be called a "philosopher" or not, he did possess a PhD in political philosophy and he did present himself in Statecraft as Soulcraft as a lover of wisdom and virtue.
Will got his start with Buckley at National Review and found his way from there to a prosperous career in national network punditry. Many of the Buckley school found it difficult to cheer his success. For one thing, it was clear that he was tailoring his conservatism in order to patch himself into the great tapestry of the liberal media: for example, demurring from the Republican attempt to downsize both the budget and the welfare state, he declared that "America is undertaxed." For another thing, it might be that he broke promises on the way to his success. I do not know. I only remember National Review's publisher, the schismatic Anglican attorney William Rusher declaring that Will "stepped on our face."
Will's self-definition as an American "Tory" was not original. It had already been done (with conviction) by Russell Kirk. In Will's case, however, it was part of a complex of imagery erected as a hedge against a "hard right" identity, including baseball and stained glass windows. The result, one might say, was a sentimental version of conservatism for someone who wanted to be loved by liberals. I have generally thought of Will not as a "Reagan conservative" but as a "Nancy Reagan conservative." The conservatism of Will, Nancy, and George H. W. Bush was a conservatism averse to political risks. One could take Statecraft As Soulcraft as Will's attempt to give some philosophical substance to his position.
The mild controversy over Will's self-definition gave me an opportunity to bring my critique of American conservatism into the open. Little was accomplished, however, beyond isolating myself by making clear that I was not interested in petty quarrels. At the time of this article, Will was especially hated for having intervened against the appointment of the pro-Confederate history professor Melvin E. Bradford as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Anything favorable said about Will was construed as another slap in Bradford's face.
Sobran thought he knew something about Dr. Johnson. It does not matter in the end who Joseph Sobran was—merely someone raised up in Buckley's stable of writers to perpetuate the "cool conservatism" of National Review beyond the first generation. Sobran departed from the program as he fell in with a political sect that has defined itself as "paleoconservative" in contradistinction to the Irving Kristol neo-conservatives. The mental mischief at work in this sect manifested itself as an irritation with the Jewishness of the neo-conservatives and a resentment of their success in taking over Republican policy and journalism. Like the perennial professional presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, Sobran questioned the legitimacy of America's support for the state of Israel and spiced the question with a flavor of conspiracy theory. Over time the spice became intolerably heavy, and Buckley had to fire Sobran in 1993. Then he fell in completely with the people who seek loop-holes in the American constitution that would allow for state secession or nullification, as well as those who deny the Nazi intention to exterminate the Jews by questioning the effectiveness of the extermination and the authenticity of the numbers. A sentimental regard for the Confederacy does not always coincide with a soft spot for the Third Reich, but the coincidence happens frequently in the sect to which I refer. Contrary to what liberal propagandists say, not all conservatism is based on paranoia, but the mentality of this political sect is. There is no speaking to its members. It would be a mistake to perpetuate their memory by mentioning their names or the names of their cranky little journals.
I think that people should find this an amusing piece of satirical writing. I did not understand yet the level of Sobran's degeneration, something not amusing at all.
I have excavated the old piece of literary-political journalism below, from The American Spectator, as a curiosity. One sees therein a young American conservative, during the Age of Reagan, criticizing the ideological fetish of "limited government" and citing Samuel Johnson as an authority on sovereignty.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), known as "Dr. Johnson," because of his honorary degrees from Oxford and Trinity College Dublin, was the author of the English Dictionary, an important early editor of Shakespeare's plays, a biographer of English poets, and a neoclassical poet himself. The fact that today I must explain who he was is further evidence of the decline of literary culture. In another age, Anglophones regularly read the long, almost novelistic biography of him by James Boswell; and people who learned to love Johnson from that biography often went on to read his "moral essays" from The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer.
Johnson was the friend of politicians, a parliamentary reporter and also a ghost-writer for the law lectures of Sir Robert Chambers, Blackstone's immediate successor as Vinerian Professor of Common Law at Oxford. In sum, Johnson possessed all the intellectual preparation as well as practical observation to make him a political thinker of some stature. Unfortunately, he only wrote a few political pamphlets and did not compile a treatise against Hobbes and Locke. A good dissertation could be written on Johnson's Toryism as an outgrowth of his understanding of the English civil wars and the emergence of the Whig and Tory factions. In the early 1980's I wanted to write such a dissertation but received no meaningful encouragement. The standard work in those days on Johnson's politics was a book by Donald Greene, a liberal who wanted Johnson also to appear a liberal. Sentimentality is not a sound basis for critical study.
For most of the eighteenth century, Britain had virtual one-party rule. The Tories were disorganized and politically irrelevant minor country squires. The Whigs were factionalized but in force. In America the people persecuted as "Tories" were for the most part Whigs loyal to the Crown. The American rebels were anti-monarchical British Whigs in spirit, and in attitude they ran the gamut of British Whig mentalities, from classical republicans to proto-Jacobins to millenialist sectarians. The unfair treatment that was dished out to the Whig colonist by the Whig imperialist thus had a Whig at either end. And Johnson's defense of empire against the colonists was thus less than comforting to the imperial regime.
Johnson's few political writings are entertaining to read. In the pamphlet on America, "Taxation No Tyranny," he charges the colonial rebels with hypocrisy on a number of points: they are slave-owners who cry for liberty, and they are advocates of religious freedom whose paranoia is aroused by the British emancipation of Catholics in Quebec via the Quebec Act of 1774. He suggests that the rebels seek to seduce the Québécois into a rebel alliance with the ultimate aim of suppressing their religion when independence has been achieved. Though he has defended the empire against the American colonists, he is critical of the cost of empire in his perennially relevant "Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands." In "The False Alarm," he mocks the absurdity of British country elections where the semi-literate who, knowing nothing of the issues, participate because it gratifies their vanity to show that they are able to write their own names.
In my youth I maintained that there was enough substance in Johnson's political utterances from which to know his Toryism as a coherent worldview, and to know it as an alternative or corrective to the Whiggism of Burke. Famously, Russell Kirk had used Burke as a means of defining an American conservatism that was a coherent worldview and not merely a rear-guard movement for the protection of private interest against American liberalism. Of course Kirk loved both writers; their "conservatisms" are highly compatible; and Kirk liked calling himself an American Tory. There were indeed different modes of Whiggism in Burke's time, and Burke was a "right-wing" Whig. The fact is that Burke's critique of the French revolution led ultimately to the refounding of the Tory Party. While the American Whigs who fomented the colonial revolt of 1776 varied so widely in attitude, most tended to be less Burkean and more Lockean, albeit that the conservatism of the conservative founding fathers has been under-reported. Reaganite conservatism was likewise less Burkean and more Lockean. It was my little literary-journalistic project to use Johnson as an authority and a symbol to promote a swing in the other direction. It was a strategy for dealing with people who resisted theory but could at least think in terms of a mythical history.
The occasion for this literary sally was a hatchet job by a minor conservative journalist named Sobran on a major one named Will. Who they were ultimately does not matter. The book under review, called Statecraft as Soulcraft, whatever its true merit, ultimately does not matter. One of the issues at stake was the Reaganite project of downsizing the welfare state. Today, with the onset of socialized medicine, the question of what to do about the welfare state has never been more crucial. Most memorably, Johnson said that " A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." This is a proposition worth qualifying and defining until it makes sense and leaves the realm of pure sentiment behind. The first thing to do is to juxtapose it with that line from Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Are they my poor?" While the radical Whiggism which is called libertarianism today merely says, "that if any would not work, neither should he eat." Johnson thought he knew who the poor were, as an English class; and indeed he had been among the poor as well as the rich. Today the question of the "decent provision" is a question of who is entitled to that provision—in an immigrant nation where any number of the world's poor could decide to cross the borders in order to take the share being offered. The question for a politician is never a question of truth but rather how do I win the next election? And can I turn the poor into the basis of a permanent electoral majority?
Would it be worth the trouble to investigate the basis of Will's affection for the welfare state in the 1980's? Probably not.
My attack on American conservatives for being oblivious to the natural principle of sovereignty was and is an attack on the concept of a "propositional" republic that exempts itself from the laws of nature (despite the lip-service to "nature and nature's God" in the famous founding document). Locke was a very poor spokesman for nature in any form. Whatever care the poor are owed by decency, whatever care it is prudent to accord them for the sake of political stability, American conservatives wanted to use the proposition as an escape clause to evade all responsibility for them. But people do not like having their founding myths questioned.
I shall not reread Statecraft As Soulcraft in order to rediscover what I liked so much about it in those days. From my piece, I can tell that Will was replicating one side of an inter-Straussian debate between Thomas Pangle and the disciples of Harry Jaffa. The Pangle side argued that the American founders fell short of the standards of Plato and Aristotle for a regime that promoted excellence—hence the reference to James Madison and the reliance upon factionalism to weaken government. The Jaffites (such as Charles Kesler) would rise in high dudgeon to defend the American founding myth and to decry the Pangle critique for characterizing the founders' mentality or motivations as "base." It would, in fact, be a waste of time to reread anything by Will when one could be investing the time in the works of Leo Strauss himself. Or of Plato. Or Clarendon's History of the Rebellion.
Whether George Will should be called a "philosopher" or not, he did possess a PhD in political philosophy and he did present himself in Statecraft as Soulcraft as a lover of wisdom and virtue.
Will got his start with Buckley at National Review and found his way from there to a prosperous career in national network punditry. Many of the Buckley school found it difficult to cheer his success. For one thing, it was clear that he was tailoring his conservatism in order to patch himself into the great tapestry of the liberal media: for example, demurring from the Republican attempt to downsize both the budget and the welfare state, he declared that "America is undertaxed." For another thing, it might be that he broke promises on the way to his success. I do not know. I only remember National Review's publisher, the schismatic Anglican attorney William Rusher declaring that Will "stepped on our face."
Will's self-definition as an American "Tory" was not original. It had already been done (with conviction) by Russell Kirk. In Will's case, however, it was part of a complex of imagery erected as a hedge against a "hard right" identity, including baseball and stained glass windows. The result, one might say, was a sentimental version of conservatism for someone who wanted to be loved by liberals. I have generally thought of Will not as a "Reagan conservative" but as a "Nancy Reagan conservative." The conservatism of Will, Nancy, and George H. W. Bush was a conservatism averse to political risks. One could take Statecraft As Soulcraft as Will's attempt to give some philosophical substance to his position.
The mild controversy over Will's self-definition gave me an opportunity to bring my critique of American conservatism into the open. Little was accomplished, however, beyond isolating myself by making clear that I was not interested in petty quarrels. At the time of this article, Will was especially hated for having intervened against the appointment of the pro-Confederate history professor Melvin E. Bradford as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Anything favorable said about Will was construed as another slap in Bradford's face.
Sobran thought he knew something about Dr. Johnson. It does not matter in the end who Joseph Sobran was—merely someone raised up in Buckley's stable of writers to perpetuate the "cool conservatism" of National Review beyond the first generation. Sobran departed from the program as he fell in with a political sect that has defined itself as "paleoconservative" in contradistinction to the Irving Kristol neo-conservatives. The mental mischief at work in this sect manifested itself as an irritation with the Jewishness of the neo-conservatives and a resentment of their success in taking over Republican policy and journalism. Like the perennial professional presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, Sobran questioned the legitimacy of America's support for the state of Israel and spiced the question with a flavor of conspiracy theory. Over time the spice became intolerably heavy, and Buckley had to fire Sobran in 1993. Then he fell in completely with the people who seek loop-holes in the American constitution that would allow for state secession or nullification, as well as those who deny the Nazi intention to exterminate the Jews by questioning the effectiveness of the extermination and the authenticity of the numbers. A sentimental regard for the Confederacy does not always coincide with a soft spot for the Third Reich, but the coincidence happens frequently in the sect to which I refer. Contrary to what liberal propagandists say, not all conservatism is based on paranoia, but the mentality of this political sect is. There is no speaking to its members. It would be a mistake to perpetuate their memory by mentioning their names or the names of their cranky little journals.
I think that people should find this an amusing piece of satirical writing. I did not understand yet the level of Sobran's degeneration, something not amusing at all.
From The American Spectator, December 1983
"George Will: An Exchange," under the heading of "Special Correspondence."
A reply to Joseph Sobran's attack on George Will in the October issue of The American Spectator. With reference to Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft. December 1983, Vol. 16. No. 12, pp. 45-46. Copyright 1983 by the Alternative Educational Foundation.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As a polemicist wielding his axe against sentimental humanitarian cant, Mr. Joseph Sobran has been useful to conservatism. But Dr. George Will, a journalist who is also a philosopher, redefining conservatism and staking a claim for legitimate humanitarianism in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has blunted Mr. Sobran's axe with nice distinctions. Enraged that this former academic should render his role as executioner superfluous, Mr. Sobran has hurled his blade at the neck of Dr. Will.
How sad and miserable it is for conservatism and for Mr. Sobran himself that he should so easily find access to print only to gratify his meanness. Of course he has much cause to envy Dr. Will: a popular newspaper column, a Pulitzer Prize, riches, fame, and favor with the President even without slavish submission to Republican ideology. Then again, Mr. Sobran's persistence may also be the rage before the dying of the light: the relevance of his position is expiring before his eyes. It belonged to conservatism's half-century of opposition and rhetorical irresponsibility, which Dr. Will has described as "cranky and recriminatory." Moreover the vindictiveness of this conservative enforcer bodes ill for anyone hoping to make a serious contribution to public philosophy through conservative journalism; and it shows how "intellectual conservatism" is suffering from hardening of the arteries, impervious to new ideas, repeating itself, and getting downright nasty.
Dr. Will has associated himself with the name of a faction strange to American ears, Toryism. But, in all truth, it is a simple matter to perceive Mr. Sobran as a Whig—I will not say a vile Whig, though Whiggery is what it is.
No matter what Eliot said of the futility of following an antique drum, the names of some factions retain an eternal significance, especially when enshrined in great literary texts. But Johnson defined only Whiggism as a faction; the Tories represented the national interest. Whiggery, as one of Yeats's seven sages defined it, is
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye.
Mr. Sobran may recoil in surprise at the suggestion that he holds levelling doctrines; but in rejecting Dr. Will's critique of American conservatism, he rejects the attack on philosophies and systems that would reduce man to the predictable level of his worst and ignore the possible level of his best. Whiggery envies excellence, and two centuries of it will accomplish the same as a decade of Jacobinism: the destruction of natural aristocracy. In defending the Madisonian calculus of conflicting factions, Mr. Sobran chooses the regime of mediocrity over the regime of excellence. Naturally, the man who denies excellence proceeds to call the advocate of excellence a humbug; whereas Samuel Johnson recommended that, if a man denies the existence of virtue, we should count our spoons, Sobran suggests that, if a man exhorts us to virtue, we should look to his mistress.
Whigs have always been uncomfortable with appeals to principle; themselves a faction, they have always depended for their support upon fragile coalitions of factions, whose politics, severally or in concert, would not bear examination. Johnson considered the "notion of liberty" as cried up continually by the Whigs irrelevant to the private lives of most Englishmen, serving only to "amuse" them and to "keep off the tedium vitae." During the American Revolution, "Tories" were Loyalists. The Whigs were composed of the heretical zealots of religious persecution in New England and the would-be squires of the South who fancied themselves gentlemen even though the tillers of their estates were not tenants but slaves. Johnson, in his pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, pointed to the Americans' hypocrisy in opposing the British toleration of Popery in Quebec, and then asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" As a twentieth-century Whig, Mr. Sobran would have the pseudo-philosophical pretexts of an impious eighteenth-century colonial rebellion strangle our political discourse and prevent it from attaining the level of genuine political philosophy.
And who were the American rebels but transplanted English Whigs? Republicans all, the Old Whigs of ancient families traditionally jealous of royal power looked back fondly on Athens and Rome; the stock-jobbers and shopkeepers of the self-made middle class, who outnumbered the Old Whigs, idolized modern Venice's empire of avarice; the religious enthusiasts desired a messianic regime of the elect. Jonathan Swift characterized them as "an odd mixture of mankind taking in every heterodox professor either in religion or government"—a good description also of the menagerie gathered under the Neo-Whig banner of "Fusionism" for which Sobran speaks: libertarians, strict constructionists, Jaffite Straussians, sleazy literary modernists, romantic individualists, democratic theists, Southern Agrarians, gold-bugs. Perhaps each enthusiast possesses some small portion of the truth, but the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. At the bottom of the pile, the Toryism of American Tories is supposed to lie suffocated while economic Muggletonians and the Sweet Singers of Rothbard run wild. If the Tories begin to make noises about the moral use of power, they are to be shouted down with cries of "Statism!" If they say a word in behalf of welfare, they are to be ostracized as crypto-liberals.
Of all the conservative crankinesses that Sobran holds to in defiance of Tory Will, the most ridiculous is the myth of "limited government." As Johnson says,
In sovereignty there are no gradations. There
may be limited royalty, there may be limited
consulship; but there can be no limited gov-
ernment. There must in every society be some
power or other from which there is no appeal,
which admits no restrictions, which pervades
the whole mass of the community, regulates
and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or
repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures,
extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself
from question or control, and bounded only
by physical necessity.
This is not totalitarianism, but nature; and nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum of power. This is the idea of sovereignty, an elementary principle of political science stated years in advance of Count de Maistre by a moralist who did not wear a mask, a political philosopher who had been a parliamentary correspondent for years and who ghostwrote the law lectures of Blackstone's successor at Oxford, a shrewd observer of humanity whose works Mr. Sobran has read with less frequency, or with less understanding, than he pretends.
Dr. Will's crime of crimes, nevertheless, is to defend welfare. As Mrs. Thrale recalled, "severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson's opinion, an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon Whiggism." As he said himself, "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." Of course he knew that poverty is a relative condition; but this defender of the pyramid of social subordination, who knew it from the bottom, and who had studied envy as a moral problem, knew also that class envy is a political problem.
I submit that, for better or worse, one of the formulae of Republican demagogy is to arouse the middle class's resentment of the welfare class, leading to an emotional justification for the belief that welfare should be abolished. Dr. Will has asked serious questions without providing answers, and that may be his worst offense of all: he has not provided the defenders of conservative orthodoxy with quite enough evidence to damn him. Will's ultimate purpose is philosophical. As I read his book, it only aspires to build bridges for political conversation. If it is only building bridges for the greater glory of Dr. Will, we shall have to wait and see.
Mr. Sobran seems to score a minor debating point by quoting Burke's Thoughts On Scarcity. I am not so sure he is entitled to that point. But if he wants Burke so badly, then let him have Burke. Burke was a Whig.
—T. John Jamieson
Joseph Sobran replies:
[After first addressing the criticism of one Professor Robinson]
. . . In blackening my character and insulting my intelligence, Mr. Jamieson is on firmer ground. I regret that he has chosen to pass so lightly over my total contempt for the poor, but I suppose that we must make some allowance for limitations of space. Alas, he ruins a perfectly good ad hominem attack by trying to construct a rational argument with a little help from Dr. Johnson. As it happens, he has managed to select one of the few specious passages in Johnson's writings. On Johnson and the theory of sovereignty, see C.S. Lewis's introduction, "New Learning and New Ignorance," in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Defending the welfare state—even on conservative premises—is one thing, and I don't mind that. A sneering dismissal of vast stretches of conservative thought is something else again. Having said this, I should add that I remain a George Will fan six days a week. No question, I'd like to have his success; but I'd rather have his gifts. [end]
A reply to Joseph Sobran's attack on George Will in the October issue of The American Spectator. With reference to Will's Statecraft as Soulcraft. December 1983, Vol. 16. No. 12, pp. 45-46. Copyright 1983 by the Alternative Educational Foundation.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As a polemicist wielding his axe against sentimental humanitarian cant, Mr. Joseph Sobran has been useful to conservatism. But Dr. George Will, a journalist who is also a philosopher, redefining conservatism and staking a claim for legitimate humanitarianism in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has blunted Mr. Sobran's axe with nice distinctions. Enraged that this former academic should render his role as executioner superfluous, Mr. Sobran has hurled his blade at the neck of Dr. Will.
How sad and miserable it is for conservatism and for Mr. Sobran himself that he should so easily find access to print only to gratify his meanness. Of course he has much cause to envy Dr. Will: a popular newspaper column, a Pulitzer Prize, riches, fame, and favor with the President even without slavish submission to Republican ideology. Then again, Mr. Sobran's persistence may also be the rage before the dying of the light: the relevance of his position is expiring before his eyes. It belonged to conservatism's half-century of opposition and rhetorical irresponsibility, which Dr. Will has described as "cranky and recriminatory." Moreover the vindictiveness of this conservative enforcer bodes ill for anyone hoping to make a serious contribution to public philosophy through conservative journalism; and it shows how "intellectual conservatism" is suffering from hardening of the arteries, impervious to new ideas, repeating itself, and getting downright nasty.
Dr. Will has associated himself with the name of a faction strange to American ears, Toryism. But, in all truth, it is a simple matter to perceive Mr. Sobran as a Whig—I will not say a vile Whig, though Whiggery is what it is.
No matter what Eliot said of the futility of following an antique drum, the names of some factions retain an eternal significance, especially when enshrined in great literary texts. But Johnson defined only Whiggism as a faction; the Tories represented the national interest. Whiggery, as one of Yeats's seven sages defined it, is
A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind
That never looked out of the eye of a saint
Or out of a drunkard's eye.
Mr. Sobran may recoil in surprise at the suggestion that he holds levelling doctrines; but in rejecting Dr. Will's critique of American conservatism, he rejects the attack on philosophies and systems that would reduce man to the predictable level of his worst and ignore the possible level of his best. Whiggery envies excellence, and two centuries of it will accomplish the same as a decade of Jacobinism: the destruction of natural aristocracy. In defending the Madisonian calculus of conflicting factions, Mr. Sobran chooses the regime of mediocrity over the regime of excellence. Naturally, the man who denies excellence proceeds to call the advocate of excellence a humbug; whereas Samuel Johnson recommended that, if a man denies the existence of virtue, we should count our spoons, Sobran suggests that, if a man exhorts us to virtue, we should look to his mistress.
Whigs have always been uncomfortable with appeals to principle; themselves a faction, they have always depended for their support upon fragile coalitions of factions, whose politics, severally or in concert, would not bear examination. Johnson considered the "notion of liberty" as cried up continually by the Whigs irrelevant to the private lives of most Englishmen, serving only to "amuse" them and to "keep off the tedium vitae." During the American Revolution, "Tories" were Loyalists. The Whigs were composed of the heretical zealots of religious persecution in New England and the would-be squires of the South who fancied themselves gentlemen even though the tillers of their estates were not tenants but slaves. Johnson, in his pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny, pointed to the Americans' hypocrisy in opposing the British toleration of Popery in Quebec, and then asked, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?" As a twentieth-century Whig, Mr. Sobran would have the pseudo-philosophical pretexts of an impious eighteenth-century colonial rebellion strangle our political discourse and prevent it from attaining the level of genuine political philosophy.
And who were the American rebels but transplanted English Whigs? Republicans all, the Old Whigs of ancient families traditionally jealous of royal power looked back fondly on Athens and Rome; the stock-jobbers and shopkeepers of the self-made middle class, who outnumbered the Old Whigs, idolized modern Venice's empire of avarice; the religious enthusiasts desired a messianic regime of the elect. Jonathan Swift characterized them as "an odd mixture of mankind taking in every heterodox professor either in religion or government"—a good description also of the menagerie gathered under the Neo-Whig banner of "Fusionism" for which Sobran speaks: libertarians, strict constructionists, Jaffite Straussians, sleazy literary modernists, romantic individualists, democratic theists, Southern Agrarians, gold-bugs. Perhaps each enthusiast possesses some small portion of the truth, but the sum of the parts does not equal the whole. At the bottom of the pile, the Toryism of American Tories is supposed to lie suffocated while economic Muggletonians and the Sweet Singers of Rothbard run wild. If the Tories begin to make noises about the moral use of power, they are to be shouted down with cries of "Statism!" If they say a word in behalf of welfare, they are to be ostracized as crypto-liberals.
Of all the conservative crankinesses that Sobran holds to in defiance of Tory Will, the most ridiculous is the myth of "limited government." As Johnson says,
In sovereignty there are no gradations. There
may be limited royalty, there may be limited
consulship; but there can be no limited gov-
ernment. There must in every society be some
power or other from which there is no appeal,
which admits no restrictions, which pervades
the whole mass of the community, regulates
and adjusts all subordination, enacts laws or
repeals them, erects or annuls judicatures,
extends or contracts privileges, exempt itself
from question or control, and bounded only
by physical necessity.
This is not totalitarianism, but nature; and nature abhors a vacuum, especially a vacuum of power. This is the idea of sovereignty, an elementary principle of political science stated years in advance of Count de Maistre by a moralist who did not wear a mask, a political philosopher who had been a parliamentary correspondent for years and who ghostwrote the law lectures of Blackstone's successor at Oxford, a shrewd observer of humanity whose works Mr. Sobran has read with less frequency, or with less understanding, than he pretends.
Dr. Will's crime of crimes, nevertheless, is to defend welfare. As Mrs. Thrale recalled, "severity towards the poor was, in Dr. Johnson's opinion, an undoubted and constant attendant or consequence upon Whiggism." As he said himself, "a decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization." Of course he knew that poverty is a relative condition; but this defender of the pyramid of social subordination, who knew it from the bottom, and who had studied envy as a moral problem, knew also that class envy is a political problem.
I submit that, for better or worse, one of the formulae of Republican demagogy is to arouse the middle class's resentment of the welfare class, leading to an emotional justification for the belief that welfare should be abolished. Dr. Will has asked serious questions without providing answers, and that may be his worst offense of all: he has not provided the defenders of conservative orthodoxy with quite enough evidence to damn him. Will's ultimate purpose is philosophical. As I read his book, it only aspires to build bridges for political conversation. If it is only building bridges for the greater glory of Dr. Will, we shall have to wait and see.
Mr. Sobran seems to score a minor debating point by quoting Burke's Thoughts On Scarcity. I am not so sure he is entitled to that point. But if he wants Burke so badly, then let him have Burke. Burke was a Whig.
—T. John Jamieson
Joseph Sobran replies:
[After first addressing the criticism of one Professor Robinson]
. . . In blackening my character and insulting my intelligence, Mr. Jamieson is on firmer ground. I regret that he has chosen to pass so lightly over my total contempt for the poor, but I suppose that we must make some allowance for limitations of space. Alas, he ruins a perfectly good ad hominem attack by trying to construct a rational argument with a little help from Dr. Johnson. As it happens, he has managed to select one of the few specious passages in Johnson's writings. On Johnson and the theory of sovereignty, see C.S. Lewis's introduction, "New Learning and New Ignorance," in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Defending the welfare state—even on conservative premises—is one thing, and I don't mind that. A sneering dismissal of vast stretches of conservative thought is something else again. Having said this, I should add that I remain a George Will fan six days a week. No question, I'd like to have his success; but I'd rather have his gifts. [end]
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