Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Thursday, February 25, 2021

The King as Magician: Montesquieu on Louis XIV

The King of France is the most powerful ruler in Europe.  He has no goldmines like the king of Spain, his neighbour, but his riches are greater, because he extracts them from his subject’s vanity, which is more inexhaustible than mines.  He has been known to undertake or sustain major wars with no other funds but what he gets from selling honorific titles, and by a miracle of human vanity, his troops are paid, his fortress supplied, and his fleets equipped.

Moreover, this king is a great magician. He exerts authority even over the minds of his subjects; he makes them think what he wants.  If there are only a million crowns in the exchequer, and he needs two million, all he has to do is persuade them that one crown is worth two, and they believe it.  If he is involved in a difficult war, without any money, all he has to do is get into their heads that a piece of paper will do for money, and they are immediately convinced of it.  He even succeeds in making them believe that he can cure them of all sorts of diseases by touching them, such is the force and power he has over their minds.[1]

Montesquieu, Persian Letters (1721)

 



[1] Montesquieu, Persian Letters, tr. C.J. Betts (Toronto: Penguin, 1973), pp. 72,73.  Letter 24.

  

Saturday, February 20, 2021

It Is What It Is: The New Determinism

One of the most common expressions we find today is the phrase: “It is what it is”.  Perhaps a trivial statement reflecting our mundane lives, its prevalence reveals, however, a deeper sense of fatalism, or better yet, determinism, brought to the fore by the likes of Trump, and, of course, Covid-19.  It could also be considered a coping mechanism as ordinary people grapple with institutions, political drama, economic forces, tech giants, globalism – and (dis)ease beyond their control.  The sense of being ‘determined’ by outside forces has also contributed to the rise of widespread conspiracy theories, as people look to some sort of an explanation – or someone to blame - for their apparent powerlessness, the simpler the solution is the better, hence the more true it is to their thinking.

Trump’s motto “Make America Great Again” - and the populist nationalism he engendered – is at once an attempt to reassert authority (with Biden’s election it is considered an effort to subvert it) and an implicit acknowledgement that ‘special people’, that is (the ‘white’) family and race, epitomize the character and destiny of the United States of America.  However, it was the French nationalist Maurice Barrès who put it more precisely over a century ago when he announced: “Nationalism is the acceptance of a determinism”.[1]  Feeding into Barres’ anti-Dreyfusard formula are the theories of Gobineau, known as ‘the father of racism’, and Darwin’s Evolution of the Species (1859) which, when applied to society, appeared to justify class conflict – from above and below, as it was also an inspiration for Marx.[2] 

In other words, that species of ‘science’ which emerged in the second half of Europe’s nineteenth century – and which persists to this day – is essential to our understanding of determinism here.  Racism in its multiple forms and Herbert Spencer’s Darwinian phrase “the struggle for life” are notions which permeate many susceptible minds.  Put another way: it is not so much that Trump rejects science; it is rather a question of which so-called ‘science’ he accepts. Loosely-speaking there are, in effect, two distinct – and opposing - phases in the history of science prior to Einstein. One belongs to the Newtonian harmony of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, and is of daring criticism, self-determinism, and of social and political improvement – in other words, the “science of freedom” as Peter Gay puts it.[3] This form of science came to legitimate democracy.

The other phase is ‘the science of determinism’ which finds its antecedents in Auguste Comte’s positivism (which sought out the observable) but more pointedly in Darwinian disharmony, as well as its Bismarckian equivalent in the politics of Realism.[4]  With the exception of Marx’s ideology, this variety of science underpins reactionary thinking.  A good example in historical writing is Hippolyte Taine’s conservative re-interpretation of the French Revolution following the Paris Commune, whose work elucidates Trump – up until the attack on Capitol Hill (whereupon darker figures from the twentieth century become more representative).

Looking back on history, if the reader permits us to skip over the intervening ‘revolt against reason’ of the fin-de-siècle, the ‘science of determinism’ prepared minds for what was yet to come: the anti-individualism of full-scale industrial battle experience in the First World War.  Driven by the metaphor of the machine, muddied but uniformed soldiers went ‘over the top’ to meet their fate in a barrage of mechanized gun fire while trying to evade explosives, poison gas, and the eventual tank.  These men found ‘community’ at the Western Front on either side of the trenches. Sometimes they even found it in the midst of No Man’s Land, hence the term: ‘live and let live’. If soldiers did not die en masse, or alone on barbed wire, they emerged from war de-individuated, matériel for the Beer Hall Putsch and philosophical innovations of Heidegger (a meteorologist in war who predicted winds for gassing the enemy).[5] 

In the end, the First World War resulted in almost 20 million casualties, about half of which were soldiers, the other half being civilians.  A further 20 million were wounded.  To add to this human misery the conclusion of conflict brought with it at least 50 million deaths in the form of the Spanish Flu – largely forgotten until our own pandemic beginning in Wuhan in 2020, which at time of writing is the source of almost 2.5 million deaths world-wide.

Small wonder that people a century ago, or more, did not start saying “It is what it is”.  Instead they turned to the charm of the “bundle” (from the Italian fascio or Latin: fascis) - in other words, Fascism.  Fathead Trump might have conspired his way out of American ‘politics’ but Marine Le Pen – heir to the France’s National Front  (and Maurice Barrès) - is now considered a real threat to centrist Emmanuel Macron, while a host of other authoritarian pretenders continue to stoke the fires of prejudice and populism across the globe.  Does any of this not sound inevitably familiar?

 



[1] Maurice Barrès, Scènes et Doctrines du Nationalisme (Paris: Félix Juven, 1902 [Elibron Classics Reprint, 2007]), p. 8.

[2] See Michael Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology. The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970).

[3] “The Science of Freedom” is the subtitle to the second volume of Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (W.W. Norton & Co., 1969).

[4]The science of determinism’ is my phrase.

[5] Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wiittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy, tr. Shaun Whiteside (New York: Penguin, 2020), p. 45.

Monday, February 15, 2021

Dr Fauci wins $1 million Israeli prize for ‘defending science’ – in perspective

Medicine had been intimately linked to the scientific revolution – which was at bottom a philosophical revolution – from the beginning; the pioneers of the revolution saw themselves as physicians to a sick civilization.[1]

Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, Vol II (1969)



[1] Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation/The Science of Freedom (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1969), p. 13. 

Saturday, February 13, 2021

Aristotle on Acquittal and the GOP cult of Trump

But we must remember that good laws, if they are not obeyed, do not constitute good government.[1]

The mere establishment of a democracy is not the only or the principal business of the legislator, or of those who wish to create a state, for any state, however badly constituted, may last one, two, or three days; a far greater difficulty is the preservation of it.  The legislator should therefore endeavor to have a firm foundation according to the principles already laid down concerning the preservation and destruction of states; he should guard against the destructive elements, and should make laws, whether written or unwritten, which contain all the preservation of states.[2]

The conclusion is evident: that governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.[3]

Aristotle, Politics, circa 350 BC

 



[1] Aristotle, Politics, tr. Benjamin Jowett in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon, intro. C.D.C. Reeve (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), p. 1217 [Book IV, Chapter 8].  See also Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, ed. and tr. Annabel Brett (Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 69,70 [Discourse 1, Chapter, Section 6].  Unfortunately not all of Marsilius’s references to Aristotle here match up with the translator’s references to Aristotle. Hence I am unable to locate in Politics the statement: “There is no profit if sentences are passed about what is just, but these are not carried through.”  Marsilius finished The Defender of the Peace in the year 1324.

[2] Aristotle, Politics in Ibid., pp. 1270,1271 [Book  IV, Chapter 5]

[3] Ibid., p. 1185 [Book III, Chapter 6]


The Importance of the Magna Carta to Trump’s Impeachment Process

On the whole, the charter contains little that is absolutely new.  It is restorative. [King] John in these last years has been breaking the law; therefore the law must be defined and set in writing.  In several instances we can prove that the rule that is laid down is one that was observed during the early part of his reign.  In the main the reforms of Henry II’s day are accepted and are made a basis for the treaty …. Even in the most famous words of the charter we may detect a feudal claim which will only cease to be dangerous when in course of time men have distorted their meaning: - a man is entitled to the judgement of his peers; the king’s justices are no peers for earls or barons.  Foreign merchants may freely come and go; they may dwell here and buy and sell; yes, but all cities and boroughs are to enjoy all the franchises and free customs, and often enough in the coming centuries they will assert that their dearest franchise is that of excluding or oppressing the foreigner.  And yet, with all its faults, this document becomes and rightly becomes a sacred text, the nearest approach to an irrepealable 'fundamental statute' that England has ever had.  In age after age a confirmation of it will be demanded and granted as a remedy for those oppressions from which the realm is suffering, and this when some of its clauses, at least in their original meaning, have become hopelessly antiquated.  For in brief it means this, that the king is and shall be below the law.[1]

Pollock & Maitland, The History of English Law (1895)

 



[1] Frederick Pollock and F.W. Maitland, The History of English Law, 2nd ed., Reissued, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 172, 173.

Saturday, February 6, 2021

The failure to confront antisemitism: an historical example

Last year the manager of the lectures came hastening to me.  “I am come,” he said “to propose to you a subject of which the announcement will fill the hall.  You will see what returns there will be!”

I trembled, for when he put forward a question of returns I was sure that he was going to speak to me of a book of disrepute.  I was mistaken in my apprehensions.  M. Drumont had just published his second book against the Jews.  It was this book that he begged me to have put upon the posters.  “As good luck has it,” he said “you have lent a hand to the Jewish cause in the papers.  They will all come in the evening.”

“If I should accept,” I said to him, “there would certainly be in the hall, besides the five hundred Israelites of whom you speak, four or five persons, my followers of old, in whose esteem I should be lowered, and who would perhaps never come to see me again.  They would rightly think that a pamphlet by M. Drumont was not literature.  I was not acquainted with them.  I only know their faces; they are my conscience.”

“But you can say just what you please.”

I understand it thus, indeed, but I have accustomed the public to expect only lessons in literature from me.  They will take it very ill if, in order to attract people and gain a little more money, I should throw myself into polemics.

And I refused.[1]

Originally published in 1892 as Souvenirs d’âge mur, the above excerpt from Francisque Sarcey’s Recollections of Middle Life refers to two books by the notorious French anti-Semite, Édouard Drumont, La France juive (1886) an Testament d’un antisemite (1891), works which appeared before the Dreyfus Affair fixated and transformed the nation. 

Sarcey was France’s most prominent drama critic in the last half of the nineteenth century, with writings appearing in periodicals such as Le Figaro,  Le Dix-neuvieme Siecle, and (from 1867 until his death in 1899) Le Temps, the newspaper of record.  He was also a public intellectual giving Thursday lectures at the Boulevard Des Capucines over many years, some of which is recounted in his Recollections. Sarcey belonged to the famous agrégé of 1848 at the Ecole Normale Supérieure which included historian Hippolyte Taine and author Edmond About, his lifelong friend beginning as classmates at the Lycée Charlemagne, and with whom he founded Le Dix-neuvième Siècle in 1872.  Another contemporary was Lucien Prévost-Paradol, who committed suicide in 1870 – at the time of the Franco-Prussian War when Paris was also besieged – while residing in Washington, DC as Emperor Napoleon III’s ambassador to the USA. 

Combatting anti-semitism at the earliest opportunity would have been the right thing to do, both in moral terms and from an historical point of view, assuming it was done effectively.[2] Sarcey’s failure is indicative of established liberalism’s dilemma when confronting fanaticism, and of classical culture’s problematic penchant for politeness and restraint– when the opposing tendency was not so. Inadequate to the task, Sarcey by his inaction thus contributed to the rise of proto-Fascism in France which emerged in the aftermath of the Dreyfus Affair.


[1] Francisque Sarcey, Recollections of Middle Life, tr. Elisabeth Luther Cary (London: William Heinemann [Scholar Select Reprint], 1893, pp. 295,296.

[2] For further context see the more dogmatic (and a generation younger) Ferdinand Brunetière’s article, ”La France juive d’Édouard Drumont”, first published in May 1886 in the Revue des Deux Mondes. He writes that he has “no taste at all” for Jews but concedes: “Our tastes are one thing, our ideas are, or should be, another”. In other words, he demonstrates the ambiguous notion of rational tolerance but in his final sentence concludes with an appeal to humanity (quoting Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice): “hath not a Jew hands, organs, senses, affections, passions.”  (The text of ”La France juive d’Édouard Drumont” is available as a reprint from Amazon and as an ebook). See also: Antoine Compagnon, Connaissez-vous Brunetière: enquête sur un antidreyfusard et ses amis (Paris: Seuil, 1997), pp. 38-48.  Also: Grégoire Kauffmann, Edouard Drumont (Paris: Perrin, 2008), and Ernest Renan, On the Nation and the ‘Jewish People‘, tr. Shlomo Sand (London: Verso, 2010).