Catholic Virtues,
American Virtues
This conference was one of a series being sponsored by the Faith & Reason Institute as part of its program on "Catholics and the American Public Square," which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia.
Political and Social Questions
Liberalism and the Dilemmas of Virtue[1]
I.
For some time
now, the conviction has been growing among both politicians and
professors that the fate of liberal democracy in America is bound
up with the quality of citizens' character. President
George W. Bush campaigned as a compassionate conservative, who
would also restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office. Current
events make it hard to remember that in 1992, chastened by twelve
years of Republican domination of the executive branch, Bill
Clinton sought to set a new tone for his Party. Clinton ran
for President as a New Democrat, a Democrat devoted not only to
the protection of individual rights and the promotion of the
social and economic bases of equality but also to the principle
of personal responsibility. Clinton drew inspiration from
the ideas of William Galston, a professor of political science
and fellow member of the Democratic Leadership Council. Galston's
academic writings expounded "liberal virtues" and
defended the propriety of a liberal state that fosters qualities
of mind and character that form good citizens and decent men and
women.
On the other
side of the aisle, former Reagan Secretary of Education William
Bennett made it to the top of the New York Times Best
Sellers List in 1994 with A Book of Virtues, a collection
of poems and short tales intended for the moral education of the
young. Bennett's (and former Vice President Quayle's)
former Chief of Staff, William Kristol, now Editor and Publisher
of The Weekly Standard, had long argued for the importance
to American politics of a "sociology of virtue." Kristol,
who, like Galston had been trained as a political theorist,
envisaged a systematic study of the various intermediate or
voluntary associations within civil society that foster qualities
of character that enable citizens to fulfill the day-to-day
demands of maintaining a liberal democracy.
As Galston's and
Kristol's common academic backgrounds suggests, the rediscovery
of virtue by leading Democrats and Republicans coincided with a
renaissance in virtue studies in the universities. One now
finds not only liberals but also communitarians and deliberative
democrats who have begun to direct their attention to questions
about virtue and what can be done in a liberal democracy to
cultivate it. Feminist thinkers champion an ethics of care
that stresses the virtues of compassion and connectedness and
Aristotelians and natural law theorists have been arguing their
traditional positions with a renewed vigor and self-confidence.
Virtue thus has attracted the attention of leading figures inside
and outside the academy.
Despite the groundswell of enthusiasm for the study and practice of virtue, the mere mention of the term still causes acute discomfort for many. To some it evokes a prudish nineteenth century Victorian morality that equates virtue with the chastity of women. For others virtue conjures up musty metaphysical doctrines associated with Aristotle and Aquinas. For others still virtue is inseparable from the chauvinistic and martial ethic central to the civic republican tradition. Some are anxious that public discussion of virtue threatens the liberal principle of separation of church and state by introducing inherently religious and unavoidably divisive notions into the public sphere. And finally there are those who regard the very idea of virtue as an oppressive tool that stultifies experiments in self-creation by imposing on human affairs a degrading conformity. Although all such considerations are not equally compelling, the collective force of these one-dimensional characterizations weighs heavily against virtue's reputation.
Curiously, then,
in current debates about the condition of liberal democracy in
America one hears both an enthusiasm for and an aversion to
virtue. And, interestingly, both the enthusiasm and
the aversion derive support from the liberal tradition.
The aversion to
virtue is more familiar. It has roots in familiar liberal
principles: limited government, respect for individual choice,
and belief in the equality of human beings. Each citizen,
it is affirmed, is the best judge of what is good for him or her;
and government's job is to protect each citizen's right to frame
his or her own choices about how to live while avoiding the use
of state power to favor particular choices or specific forms of
life. From this perspective, the very idea of a set of
virtues that constitute a decent or good life can be seen as a
menacing limit to individual choice, and can raise the specter of
an over-earnest government eager to legislate morals.
Liberalism's
enthusiasm for virtue has been less well-documented. The
enthusiasm springs from the understanding that liberty, as a way
of life, is an achievement. And this achievement has
certain preconditions. It demands of individuals specific
virtues, or to speak less formally, certain qualities of mind and
character--such as reflective judgment, sympathetic imagination,
self-restraint, the ability to cooperate, and toleration--that do
not arise spontaneously but require training and cultivation.
Liberalism's enthusiasm for virtue also has roots in the liberal
state's need for citizens of a certain sort, citizens who can
effectively and fairly administer liberalism's characteristic
political institutions, who can keep government within limits,
who can exercise their rights in a manner respectful of others
and in harmony with the common good, and who can sustain the
voluntary associations that compose civil society. From
this perspective, it is easy to get carried away. Forgetting
liberal scruples about the use of coercive state force,
overeager, over earnest, overconfident government takes matters
into its own hands in order to foster all the virtues thought
necessary to enjoy individual liberty and sustain democratic
self-government.
The aversion to
and enthusiasm for virtue represent two opposing tendencies that
arise within liberalism. Each tendency, isolated from the
other, reflects a distorted image of the liberal spirit and,
because of what it fails to take into account regarding
government and human nature, generates cramped and rigid
prescriptions for political life. The more thoughtful forms
of liberalism contain both tendencies and from them weave a more
supple perspective. This is not to say that any
understanding of liberalism can neatly tie together all loose
ends and firmly settle virtue's status. But the liberal
tradition itself suggests a way, or a certain disposition of
mind, to deal with the unsettled status of virtue it has
bequeathed to contemporary thought. On reflection, it seems
that the liberal mean between the extremes of aversion to and
enthusiasm for virtue consists in a certain restraint in
connection to virtue.
The structure of
liberal thought itself guarantees that virtue will be an enduring
problem for liberalism, a problem that can neither be resolved
neatly by theory, nor fixed once and for all by skillful
institutional design or good laws. Every attempt to deny or
resolve the problem of virtue within liberalism suppresses an
important dimension of the liberal spirit and deprives liberal
practice of flexibility and strength. To submit to the
common temptation to slide toward one of the extremes is, in the
effort to understand the place of virtue in liberalism, as it is
in so many other undertakings, really a reflection of
intellectual lethargy. Strange as it may sound, a certain
ambivalence in regard to virtue is a mark in the liberal spirit
of sobriety and vitality.
This ambivalence
can be captured in four theses about virtue and the liberal
tradition. First, the logic of liberalism implies, and the
makers of modern liberalism openly declare, that citizens must
possess a range of basic virtues in order to sustain a regime
resting on the fundamental premise of liberalism, the natural
freedom and equality of all human beings. Second,
historically, liberalism has placed primary responsibility for
cultivating those virtues on which it depends in non-political or
extra-liberal institutions such as the family, a demanding form
of private education, and the voluntary associations of civil
society. Third, the tendency within--but not peculiar
to--liberalism to take its principles, in practice, to an extreme
weakens of these non-political and extra-liberal sources of the
virtues necessary to liberalism's preservation. And fourth,
making liberalism work today requires either the renewal of these
old sources for the cultivation of the necessary virtues or the
creation of new ones.
Oddly, some of
liberalism's proponents have made common cause with its critics
to insist on a fatal or at least bitter antagonism between
liberalism and virtue.[2] But
this is a serious mistake, one that prevents liberalism from
recognizing the conditions that preserve it. Contrary to
much conventional wisdom, the liberal tradition not only makes
room for virtue but shows that the exercise of virtue is
indispensable to a political regime seeking to establish equality
and protect freedom. Of course I do not mean to say that it
is a simple matter to protect or promote virtue in a liberal
society; nor do I wish to deny that peculiar features of liberal
thought may put the integrity of virtue at risk.[3]
Rather, what I wish to suggest is that one can begin to grasp the
genuine complexity of the matter and start to see the real risk
by appreciating the rich and illuminating set of opinions
advanced by the makers of modern liberalism about the dependence
of freedom and equality on virtue.
II.
Let me know
offer somewhat more precise but still preliminary definitions of
the two admittedly contentious terms at the core of my analysis.
First, what is
liberalism? I shall follow Judith Shklar in understanding
liberalism as a political doctrine the primary goal of which is
"to secure the political conditions that are necessary for
the exercise of personal freedom."[4]
I add to Shklar's definition what she left implicit, namely, that
the exercise of personal freedom is a right that liberalism seeks
to extend equally to all. To establish and secure the
personal freedom of all, the liberal tradition has elaborated a
characteristic set of practices and institutions including
toleration, liberty of thought and discussion, representation,
and the separation of governmental powers. John Locke,
Immanuel Kant, and John Stuart Mill are among the liberal
tradition's leading spokesman. But many others--including
Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, the authors of The Federalist,
Montesquieu and Tocqueville--shared its fundamental premise and
in various ways elucidated its strengths and weaknesses.
Second, what is
virtue? Virtue, as I understand it, has always been an
important part of the liberal tradition.[5]
By virtue I mean a functional excellence. Virtues on this
view, which has its roots in the political philosophy of
Aristotle, are qualities of mind and character that not only are
exercised in the pursuit of man's highest end or human
excellence, but also in the achievement of intermediate and
lesser ends, ends, for instance, such as the responsibilities of
citizenship, cooperation for mutual advantage, and the
preservation of political life.[6] On
examination, one discovers that it is common for the makers of
modern liberalism to expound a catalogue of virtues, to
distinguish the end or ends which the virtues serve, and to
specify the means by which virtue is to be fostered in political
society. This is true even where the very idea of human
excellence is not only put in question but plainly repudiated.
III.
To appreciate
the role that virtue can play for a liberal sensibility it is
useful to take a brief glance liberalism's patron saint, John
Stuart Mill. Mill argued that moral improvement or virtue,
grounded in the "permanent interests of man as a progressive
being,"[7]was both a
precondition for and an aim of good government.[8]
In On Liberty (1859) Mill celebrates individual liberty,
and especially the liberty of thought and discussion, for the
service it renders to the formation of strong, energetic, and
upright individuals.[9] Individuality,
for Mill, is not a quality human beings are born with, but a
moral standard for judging the quality of the lives men and women
lead.[10] Mills'
models of human excellence in On Liberty are not people
who do whatever they please. Rather his models are
extraordinary individuals--Mill discusses Socrates, Jesus, and
the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius--who are pleased to perfect the
highest faculties and abilities.
Human excellence
understood as individuality depends on a rigorous
education--study of the classics, history, politics, philosophy,
religion, science, and literature--and a stern self-discipline.
It culminates in a free and complete mind. The free and
complete mind is skeptical, rational, self-critical, solicitous
of the needs of the heart, and capable of seeing not only what is
foolish and false in inherited beliefs and practices but also of
discerning what is rational in custom and tradition and in need
of preservation.[11] The
liberal spirit is, accordingly, characterized by
"many-sidededness," a notion Mill borrowed from Goethe
and a virtue he associated with Socrates.[12]
Mill did not
think that the primary source in modern democracies of the virtue
that liberty depended on--or the virtue that it made
possible--would come from politics. This was not because he
underestimated the importance of self-government or denied that
law can play some role in making men moral. Rather (and in
disagreement with today's communitarian theorists and
participatory democrats) politics could not be the chief source
of virtue in the modern age because of a peculiar feature of the
modern life. "Citizenship" as Mill observed
in The Subjection of Women (1869), "fills only a
small place in modern life, and does not come near the daily
habits or inmost sentiments."[13]
Like Tocqueville, about whom he wrote with perception and
admiration,[14] Mill saw
associational life as rescuing individuals from the isolation and
self-absorption fostered by modern democracy and the commercial
spirit. Voluntary associations teach habits of cooperation
and instill an enlightened concern for the public good.[15]
But the most
important institution, according to Mill, in preparing
individuals for the rigors of liberty in the age of modern
democracy was the family, or more accurately the family reformed
in accordance with the fundamental premise of liberalism, the
natural freedom and equality of all human beings. In The
Subjection of Women, Mill argued that the family as it was
still constituted by law was "a school of despotism in which
the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely
nourished."[16] But
he also insisted that "the family, justly constituted,"
that is a family based on the legal equality of men and women,
"would be the real school of the virtues of freedom."[17]
The State too
had its role in fostering virtue. Active involvement of the
State was necessary to correct the neglect of "one of the
most sacred duties of parents," that of providing one's
child with "an education fitting him to perform his part
well in life towards others and towards himself."[18] It was "almost a
self-evident axiom, that the State should require the education,
up to a certain standard, of every human being who is born its
citizen."[19] Parents
who failed to cultivate the moral and intellectual capacities of
their child committed a "moral crime" that obliged the
State to step in.[20] Mill
did not want the State itself to be in the business of providing
a universal education: he feared intractable controversies about
the content of the curriculum. And in the event of
agreement, he feared a uniform education that cultivated nothing
so much as uniformity of opinion. But he did want the State
to enforce a universal standard of education through the
administration of public examinations. Parents would be
held legally responsible for ensuring that their children
acquired a certain minimum of general knowledge. Payments
from the State would be provided to parents who could not
otherwise afford basic education for their children. In
addition, the State would provide certification through
examination in the higher branches of knowledge. To prevent
the State from improperly influencing the formation of opinion,
such examinations--in particular in the fields of morality,
politics, and religion--would be confined to facts and the
opinions on great intellectual controversies that had been held
rather than to the truth or falsity of those opinions.[21]
Citizenship
could not be the main source of virtue, but, in Mill's view, it
nevertheless played a vital role. In Considerations on
Representative Government (1861), his most systematic
treatise on politics, Mill argued that virtue is a standard for
judging actual regimes;[22] that
the regime that in practice best takes advantage of and promotes
virtue is popular government;[23] and that
in a popular government suitable to modern conditions,
representative institutions must be fashioned so as to bring to
the fore individuals outstanding in terms of moral stature and
intellectual competence, while increasing the supply of virtue
among the multitude of citizens.[24]
Mill discerned
in modern democracy a destructive tendency: the leveling of
difference and the promotion of a uniform mediocrity. To
combat it, he proposed three institutional devices:
proportional representation, plural voting, and publicity in
voting. The intended benefit of proportional representation
was to help secure a voice in government for a very particular
minority, one that tends to be neglected, Mill thought, in free
elections: "the minority of instructed minds."[25] Plural voting, while respecting
the just demand of popular government that all equally be given
the opportunity to participate in government, gives the more
competent more votes in order to respect the need in government
for individuals of enlarged and refined capacities.[26] And publicity in voting, Mill
argued, would promote a certain kind of civic virtue. It
would do this by compelling voters to justify their choice to
others; or, at least, facing the possibility of having to justify
their choice to others, voters would be impelled, in casting
their ballot, to look beyond private advantage to considerations
of the public good.[27]
There are
obvious and perhaps even decisive practical objections to Mill's
proposals. But they should not be allowed to obscure the
key supposition underlying Mill's ideas for institutional reform
of popular government: democratic institutions should be designed
with an eye to the fact that in modern democracies virtue is
always necessary and, because of democracy's destructive
tendencies, frequently in short supply.
IV.
How we have
for so long managed to neglect or downplay the deep connection
between virtue and liberalism? The complexity of the puzzle
is compounded when one considers that the connection lies right
before our eyes. One sees the connection not only in the
texts of the makers of modern liberalism but also in the demands
of the everyday experience, both public and private, of citizens
in liberal democracies?
The answer goes
to the heart of the liberal predicament. The classic
liberal tradition is neither silent about nor indifferent to the
connection between virtue and politics. Yet leading liberal
principles do set in motion a destabilizing conceptual dynamic.
This conceptual dynamic all too easily does induce silence about
virtue and all too readily does encourage indifference to
questions about its cultivation. Whether it denies a
greatest good (Hobbes), or views decisions about religious belief
and worship as entirely between God and the individual (Locke),
or understands morality in terms of universal forms of reason
devoid of empirical content (Kant), or makes individual choice
the touchstone of excellence (Mill), liberal ideas about human
nature, morality, and metaphysics work to shift focus away from a
determinate set of excellences of character, moral and
intellectual virtues that define a good human being. Moreover,
liberal ideas about individual rights and human equality
concentrate attention on restraining government from legislating
morals, or more recently on expanding of government in the name
of protecting the conditions of choice. This occurs at the
expense of concern for what government legitimately may do in its
circumscribed sphere with its restricted means to promote (or
restrain itself from discouraging) the specific virtues necessary
to society's preservation.
Although set in
motion by liberal principles themselves, the neglect of virtue to
which liberalism is prone is neither inevitable nor irreversible.
It is, however, fueled by two conceptual confusions that must be
cleared up if the process of neglect is to be arrested. First,
the rejection of the idea of a set of virtues defining human
perfection must not be confused with the repudiation of the very
idea of virtue. Instead, following Aristotle's lead--rather
than the polemically charged distortions of Aristotle adduced and
criticized by early modern thinkers and uncritically embraced by
many contemporary scholars--virtue should be allowed to refer to
qualities of mind and character of all sorts, not only to the
most refined and elevated sort. This broader and more
flexible view of virtue has several advantages: it is in harmony
with ordinary experience, it brings into better focus familiar
features of political life, and it calls attention to neglected
features and otherwise baffling aspects of the liberal tradition.
I hasten to add that the view of virtue that I am recommending by
no means excludes the idea of a greatest good or ultimate
perfection. And it needs to be acknowledged that insofar as
the link between the lesser virtues, which are exercised as a
means to various ends, and the higher virtues or the virtues of
human excellence, which are exercised for their own sake is
severed, virtue threatens to become a mercenary undertaking.
Second, the good
liberal reasons for limiting government's role in supporting and
supervising particular visions of human excellence has mistakenly
come to be seen as prohibiting any role to government in
equipping citizens with the qualities of mind and character they
need to live together in peace and prosperity. On the one hand,
it needs to be better understood that the affirmation that there
is a greatest good for human beings does not entail (nor of
course does it preclude the possibility) that it is government's
business to promote the virtues that support it. On the
other hand, the denial of a greatest good does not imply that
there are not virtues that government ought to promote. Limited
government is not the same as neutral government, and neutrality
in government actions is impossible, as Mill in effect observed
more than a century ago in On Liberty in his discussion of
taxing intoxicants to promote "the best interests of the
agent," because all government action imposes costs and
benefits.[28] The
principle of limited government does not require that government
be bound and gagged: liberalism not only imposes limits on
government but also limits the limitations on government. Owing
to the variability of human circumstance, sudden emergencies, and
the changing threats to freedom and equality, the principles for
limiting government cannot specify in advance and for all
situations the precise nature and extent of reasonable limits.
The liberal
principles that shift focus away from human perfection and
discourage government from engaging in the formation of citizens'
character do not entail that formation of character is a matter
of complete indifference to liberal regimes or a matter from
which they must altogether abstain. There is a consensus in
the classic liberal tradition, however, that the virtues
necessary to sustain liberal political orders are to be
principally sought in extraliberal and nongovernmental sources.
Hobbes, who is not part of this consensus and is at most a
protoliberal, relies for the support of virtue in his subjects
upon an absolute sovereign made virtuous by the interests
attached to his office. The sovereign does this both by
maintaining a system of civil laws, which makes practicing the
moral virtues reasonable, and by supervising church doctrine and
regulating the university curriculum, which sustains the correct
opinion that peace is reasonable and good. Locke counts on
the family, unprompted and uninstructed by government, to provide
a rigorous education whose goal is the formation of rational
individuals capable of flourishing in a free and commercial
society. Kant thought that the necessity of virtue could be
deduced from reason alone and appealed to the beneficence of the
laws of nature at work in history as a principal source for the
fostering of natural human capacities and the instilling of the
qualities of mind and character that support liberal republics.
And Mill argued that the good character necessary for popular
government was fostered by associational life, limited
participation in representative institutions, and a private
education rooted in a demanding curriculum that was carried out
by a reformed egalitarian family but whose basic or minimum
requirements were governed by state-imposed criteria.
Times however
have changed. Liberalism today no longer has easy access to
the beliefs, practices, and institutions from which the makers of
modern liberalism could once confidently draw to sustain virtue.
Whether for the purpose of promoting virtue, or indeed for any
other purpose, Hobbes's absolute sovereign is anathema. With
more than half of all new marriages expected to end in divorce,
nearly 30% of all births occurring to unwed mothers, and
single-parent families becoming increasingly common, the family
as Locke understood it cannot readily serve, as Locke thought it
must, as a steady reservoir of the necessary virtues. Widespread
skepticism about reason has cast doubt on Kant's appeal to
reason's universal and necessary structure as well as on his
trust in nature's rational purpose working itself out in the
progressive and morally improving movement of history. And
the prolonged attack on classical learning in the universities,
the changing character of civil society, government's remoteness
from the lives of most people in liberal democracies today, and
the breakdown of the family have seriously weakened the sources
that Mill thought could foster the virtues appropriate to the
demands of a life of liberty.
Liberalism
itself, it must be acknowledged, bears no small responsibility
for the stiff challenge it now faces. For the institution
or actualization of liberal principles works to weaken the
extraliberal or nongovernmental sources of virtue in liberal
orders. No liberal can be sad to see Hobbes's sovereign
diminished and disarmed by the liberal expansion of individual
rights and the enlargement and fortification of limitations
imposed on the use of governmental power. Yet the
actualization of liberal principles does not always so clearly
advance the long term achievement of liberal purposes. Locke's
family depends on the confident exercise of parental authority.
But it is weakened by the liberal antipathy, which Locke's
philosophy encourages, to traditional authority, the tendency to
make private conscience and subjective desire authoritative for
individual conduct, and indeed by Locke's own reinterpretation of
children's duties to parents in terms of a calculus of costs and
benefits. Spurred on by the Kantian injunction to question
all authorities, Kant's own conception of universal reason gets
subject to skeptical criticism as Kant's successors turn to
questioning the authority of reason itself. Mill's vision
of a demanding education in philosophy, literature, and history
given by parents to their children, combined with vigorous
participation by adults in local affairs and representative
government grows increasingly rare. One of the causes, of
course, is the exercise of the Millian freedom to choose as
people choose less demanding forms of education, private life
over public affairs, and parents' interests over those of
children. Thus, the very actualization of liberal
principles and exercise of liberal virtues can wither
liberalism's roots and erode the soil on which liberal principles
and virtues rely for their nourishment.
The anxious
predicament in which liberalism finds itself today, a predicament
in which liberalism has become the victim of its own successes
and instigator of its own excesses, by no means reflects an
infirmity exclusive to liberalism. Indeed, liberalism's
predicament may very well embody an infirmity common to all
regimes. So much is implied by the apparently conflicting
but actually complementary observations that Plato and Aristotle
make about the fundamental relation between virtue and the
regime.
In the Politics,
Aristotle maintains that human excellence has basically the same
look everywhere, but the dispositions and obligations of
citizenship differ from regime to regime Politics
(1276b15-1277b30). One tendency common to the different
regime is to produce citizens in its own image. Oligarchic
regimes based on the principle of wealth tend to produce
oligarchic citizens imbued with characteristics relative to
oligarchies; democratic regimes devoted to the freedom and
equality of all citizens tend to produce democratic citizens with
qualities of mind and character relative to democracy. From
Aristotle's view, it follows that liberal regimes grounded in the
natural freedom and equality of all human beings tend to produce
liberal citizens with dispositions relative to liberalism.
Like Aristotle
in the Politics, Plato's Socrates in the Republic
associates a particular character type with each kind of regime.
But whereas Aristotle initially focuses on how regimes produce
citizens in their own image, Socrates' account of regime change
emphasizes how regimes produce a type of citizen at odds with the
regime and directly responsible for the regime's downfall (Republic
543a-576d). Oligarchic attachment to wealth produces
citizens with a set of vices that hasten the slide into
democracy. And democratic love for freedom and equality
encourages character traits that open the door wide to tyranny.
From Socrates' point of view, it would follow that liberalism
produces citizens who prove the undoing of liberal regimes.
And so Aristotle and Plato could seem to disagree fundamentally.
They advance views that equally affirm an intimate relation
between character and the regime, but appear to come to
diametrically opposed conclusions about the success of regimes in
reproducing themselves through their influence on the formation
of citizens' character.
In spite of the
appearances of contradiction between the Aristotelian observation
that regimes generally produce citizens in their own mold and the
Platonic argument that regimes typically form citizens with
traits that undermine the regime's principles and cause its
destruction, Aristotle and Plato's Socrates are in fact in
fundamental agreement about the basic relation between virtue and
the regime. Indeed, in a discussion of the causes that
preserve and destroy regimes in Book V of the Politics,
Aristotle illuminates the principle of reconciliation. And
Aristotle illustrates the principle of reconciliation by making a
Platonic point about the centrality of education to politics.
The key is to understand that it is by counteracting through
education the tendency to produce citizens in their own mold that
regimes can avoid planting in citizens the seeds of the regimes'
own destruction:
the
greatest of all the things that have been mentioned with a view
to making regimes lasting--though it is now slighted by all--is
education relative to the regimes. For there is no benefit
in the most beneficial laws, even when these have been approved
by all those engaging in politics, if they are not going to be
habituated and educated in the regime--if the laws are popular,
in a popular spirit, if oligarchic, in an oligarchic spirit.
If lack of self-control exists in the case of an individual, it
exists also in the case of a city. But to be educated
relative to the regime is not to do the things that oligarchs or
those who want democracy enjoy, but rather the things by which
the former will be able to run an oligarchy and the latter to
have a regime that is run democratically. (Politics
1310a12-17)
Distinguishing
between the pleasant and the necessary, Aristotle argues that
whereas citizens naturally develop likes and dislikes typical of
the regime under which they live, it is only through deliberate
effort--through discipline and education--that regimes can
produce citizens with habits and qualities necessary for the
regime's preservation. One task of education then is to
form citizens who in some measure oppose the regime's mold.
Political education or education relative to the regime is
typically an urgent matter because generally regimes more readily
and distinctly imprint citizens with the regime's characteristic
vices than with the virtues necessary to its preservation.
Indeed, exactly
as Socrates had argued in the Republic (555b-566a),
Aristotle goes on to assert in the continuation of the passage
just quoted that oligarchies decline by producing citizens who
adore luxury too well. Similarly, democracies perish by
forming citizens who love to an extreme the freedom to do as one
pleases. Education relative to the regime, which Aristotle
argued is the greatest preserver of regimes, must in significant
measure cut against the dominant tendency of the regime, which is
to form citizens with immoderate enthusiasm for its guiding
principle.[29] For
the guiding principle ceases to be an effective guide if it is
allowed to become the regime's sole guide. Effective
governance of oligarchies, for example, requires citizens who
look beyond wealth and property to questions of honor and also to
the claims of freedom and equality. And stability in
democracies depends on citizens who can discipline the democratic
inclination to do as one pleases so as to defer immediate
gratification in the interest of longer term benefits.
Democracies also depend on citizens who can resist the democratic
tendency to extend the idea of equality to absolutely all spheres
of life in defiance of the legitimate claims of merit and human
excellence.
What is true of
oligarchies and democracies in their pure form is true as well of
liberalism and mixed regimes such as liberal democracy. One
cannot fault the makers of modern liberalism for having failed to
see the necessity of virtue for the preservation of freedom and
order. For they saw it with an impressive clarity superior,
in many cases, to that of present day liberals. The
liberalism they made, however, has been left vulnerable. In
particular, the makers of modern liberalism seem to have
underestimated the vulnerability of liberalism's extraliberal and
nongovernmental foundations to the actualization of the liberal
regime and the triumph of the liberal spirit. As a result
the makers of modern liberalism failed to provide adequately for
the sustenance of the virtues necessary to liberalism's
preservation. Thus they have bequeathed a crucial task to
future liberal theory. The task is to determine how to
sustain the virtues necessary to the preservation of liberalism
in a manner consistent with liberalism's fundamental premise--the
natural freedom and equality of all-and in harmony with liberal
scruples about limited government, but in social and political
circumstances very different from those in which modern
liberalism was made.
Notes
[1] These remarks are based on my book, Virtue and the
Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999).
[2]
[3] For works that illuminate the problem of virtue by
examining the spirit and intellectual framework of liberal
modernity see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making
of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1989); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed.
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, 1984); and Leo
Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1950).
[4] "The Liberalism of Fear," in Liberalism
and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
[5] For a summary, by a leading revisionist, of recent
revisionist scholarship that has stressed liberalism's dependence
on virtue see William Galston, "Liberal Virtues and the
Formation of Civic Character,"in Seedbeds of Virtue,
ed. Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn (New York: Madison
Books, 1995), pp. 37-39.
[6] In the Ethics Aristotle is largely
concerned with "human virtue" or "virtue of the
soul," that is, the qualities of mind and character that
conduce to human excellence. See, for example, Nicomachean
Ethics 1102a5-26. But in the Politics he pays
more attention to the virtues or qualities that support lesser
ends, undertakings, and responsibilities, lesser but not
unimportant ends such as physical health, managing the household,
and citizenship. See, for example, Politics
1260a1-25, 1276b15-1278b5.
[7] On Liberty, in Essays on Politics
and Society, ed. J. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1977), Chap. 1, p. 224.
[8] For an overview of the centrality of virtue
in Mill's life and thought see Bernard Semmel, John Stuart
Mill and the Pursuit of Virtue (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1984).
[9] On Liberty, Chap. 2, esp. pp. 231-232, 241-248,
257-258.
[10] On Liberty, Chap. 3, esp. pp. 261-264.
[11] On Liberty, Chap. 2, pp. 252-257. See also
"Bentham"and "Coleridge" in Essays on
Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. J. Robson (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1969).
[12] On Liberty, Chap. 2, p. 252; Autobiography
in Autobiography and Literary Essays, ed. J. Robson and J.
Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), Chap. 5,
p. 171.
[13] The Subjection of Women, in Essays on
Equality, Law, and Education, ed. J. Robson (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1984), Chap. 2, pp. 294-295.
[14] See "Tocqueville on Democracy in America, vol.
I," and "Tocqueville on Democracy in America, vol.
II," in Essays on Politics and Society.
[15] On Liberty, Chap. 5, pp. 305-306.
[16] The Subjection of Women, Chap. 2, p. 295.
[17] The Subjection of Women, Chap. 2, p. 295. See
also "Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St.
Andrews," in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education,
p. 248.
[18] On Liberty, Chap. 5, p. 301.
[19] On Liberty, Chap. 5, p. 301.
[20] On Liberty, Chap. 5, pp. 301-302.
[21] On Liberty, Chap. 5, pp. 302-305.
[22] Considerations on Representative Government, in Essays
on Politics and Society, Chap. 2, pp. 385-386, 390-392.
[23] Representative Government, Chap. 3, pp. 403-404,
406-412.
[24] Representative Government, Chap. 2, p. 392.
[25] Representative Government, Chap. 7, pp. 455-460.
[26] Representative Government, Chap.8, pp. 474-475.
[27] Representative Government, Chap. 10, pp.
488-491.
[28] On Liberty, in Essays on Politics and Society,
ed. J. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), Chap.
V, pp. 297-299. Too often neutrality and toleration are
confused. But in contrast to the principle of neutrality
which, at least in the case of government action, demands a
non-judgmental stance that is impossible to attain, toleration
implies a distinction between what we admire and that with which
we are obliged to live.
[29] In the Rhetoric Aristotle observes that in
theory democracies can take their principle to an extreme either
by extending it too widely or by applying it too narrowly. Rhetoric
1360a.
Peter Berkowitz is Associate Professor of Law at George Mason University in Virginia. He has written two books, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard U.P., 1995) and Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton U.P., 1999).
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