Professor Smith is one of the most popular lecturers at Yale and in writing his tone is at once scholarly and accessible. His short essays on some of political philosophy and literature’s most notable authors are filled with revelations, new interpretations, and often a tangential focus that serves to illuminate an overlooked facet of these well-known figures. Each essay is complete by itself, but together they paint a compellingly varied picture of the proponents of modernity and the inevitable backlash against this modernizing effort. Smith affirms that “to be modern means to take affairs into our own hands, to achieve through our unaided efforts what in the past had been consigned to the province of wish, prayer, or even the endless cycle of history.” It was not only purposeful, but universal and progressing ever-forward (in the manner of the Whig theory of history). Thus, there was even a sense of inevitability to the whole modernity project. “The Counter-Enlightenment, by contrast, insisted on the variety of distinct national cultures, conceived as organic bodies that develop according to their own internal principles, or what Montesquieu referred to as “the general spirit of a nation” that shapes its distinctive laws, customs, and institutions.” Modernity went beyond the 18th century Enlightenment to encompass the bourgeois ethos, democracy, science, positivism, historicism, and universalism, while pushing aside, if not entirely dismissing, revelation, custom, and particularity.
While Smith views Machiavelli as the first modern thinker, he finds Descartes proposition, “not to believe too firmly anything of which I had been persuaded only by example and custom” best encapsulated the spirit of modernity. Smith goes on to expound the difference between the mode of Cartesian philosophy compared to that of the pre-moderns, “His question seems to be not the ancient one “Which way of life is best?” but the existential one “What should I do with my life?”” For Descartes it is a personal project: one of self-mastery. Virtue is dependent on the will alone and his prime virtue is generosity. “Generosity consists in the power over the passions of hatred, fear, anger, and envy because such emotions show an unworthy dependence on the opinion of others.” In a knock on the Stoics, Descartes reveals, “the defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions…. I cannot hope to approach truth except by departing from the paths they have followed. That is why I shall be obliged to write just as if I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me.”
What Descartes did for philosophy in general Hobbes did in modernizing political philosophy. His social contract firmly rested on natural law. Despite contemporary claims, he was not an atheist. Far from it. He just wanted to make the spiritual authority subservient to the temporal authority. His project was not separation of Church and State, but Church in service of the State. “Hobbes instrumentalized religion, depriving it of the power of truth and revelation, and turning it entirely into a thing of human making.” Hobbes himself wrote, “seeing there are no signs nor fruit of religion but in man only, there is no cause to doubt that the seed of religion is also only in man.” For Hobbes both reason and revelation had their place, but where faith was personal, force was political. Man must have “the ability to live with uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Carl Schmitt would later write, “Hobbes’ leviathan, a combination of god and man, animal and machine, is the mortal god who brings to man peace and security.” At the same time, Hobbes put unprecedented emphasis on the natural rights of each individual, as opposed to his natural duties and obligations. This was not the aristocratic ethic of chivalry and immortality, but a modern bourgeois middling morality, which sought peace, at any price, through mutual fear and distrust. Hobbes has been called the first political Epicurean for, like Lucretius, he believed in the primacy of fear, particularly the fear of death, but he then gave it his own particular political solution. “It is the continual edginess, restlessness, and unease that would become the hallmark not so much of human nature as of modernity. Hobbes’s new morality is essentially bourgeois morality, the morality of striving, self-making, and independence without even the surviving remnant of Descartes’s Stoic self-sufficiency. It is the antithesis of the ethic of glory, honor, and magnanimity celebrated by the ancients. Not the desire for fame but the continuous desire to escape fear becomes the primary goad to action.”
Spinoza also took this modern tact of trying to separate faith and reason, instead of trying to reconcile them. Like Hobbes, his distrust for the clergy made him want to place religion under the temporal authority, instead of separating Church and State. There would be outward religion, but only inward conscience, which no man could legislate. He sought a state religion in order to limit, define, and restrict it.
Benjamin Franklin was perhaps the most famous example of how Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic first took hold and was idealized in colonial America. In Franklin’s mind, “the earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling.” Franklin was also a practical man- like Bacon before him, he favored empiricism over dogmatism. And like Hume, he believed reason should be a slave to the passions, “so convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has a mind to do.”
Kant is arguably the first modern liberal. He was thoroughly internationalist- stressing the global nature of politics, beyond the interests of the nation-state, as well as its moral dimensions. He believed in the ever-advancing nature of morality, both rights and duties, leading to progressively higher levels of humanity itself. His primal right was “the right to be treated with equal concern and respect.” His categorical imperative stressed “the duty to perform the action [that] has no end other than the fulfillment of the duty itself…. Only if my action- or the principle informing my action- can be universalized so that it applies to anyone in similar circumstances can an action be said to conform to the moral law…. The formula for this universalization of the law demands only one thing, that we treat people as ends and never as means.” For Kant this was a moral and not a political or religious imperative. “Kant made clear that a good will is entirely the work of the individual. No one can coerce a good will, suggesting a strict separation between the moral realm and the legal realm.” Kant meant what he said about ends and means, “let justice prevail though the world may perish.”
Hegel’s greatest contribution to the project of modernity was pointing out the distinction between civil society and the State. Civil society was not a place to inculcate the virtues for politics, but was to remain apart from it. Hegel, presaging Elinor Ostrom, saw multiple layers of society which the individual inhabited simultaneously, “the concrete person who, as a particular person, as a totality of needs and a mixture of natural necessity and arbitrariness, is his own end, is one principle of civil society…. Civil society is the [stage of] differences between the family and the state…. The creation of civil society belongs to the modern world, which for the first time allows all determinations of the Idea to attain their rights…. In civil society each individual is his own end, and all else means nothing to him…. The right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction, or to put it differently, the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point in the difference between antiquity and the modern age.” Hegel also sees this respect for individuality as a unique gift of Christian revelation. “Whole continents, Africa and the East have never had this Idea and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even the Stoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth…. or by strength of character, education, or philosophy…. that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world. According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love, destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God’s mind dwelling in him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom.” Modernity was so powerful because it allowed for the free expression of this individuality. Hegel felt, “the principle of modern states has enormous strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to attain fulfillment in the self-sufficient extreme of personal particularity.” For the first time in history, the highest command of justice was “be a person and respect others as persons.”
Smith does not view modernity’s discontents as totally reactionary. Instead, the flaws of the Enlightenment are corrected by thinkers who wish to mold the world to man as he is, rather than how we might wish him to be. Rousseau would seem to some an odd choice to start this pushback against modernity for anyone only familiar with his Social Contract, which espoused universal values. But Rousseau originally gained fame for his First Discourse, an essay in which he claimed that the arts and sciences had a detrimental effect on the refinement of morals in France. “We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, and painters, [but] we no longer have citizens.” The arts, sciences, and philosophy might be advantageous on the individual level, but it was corrupting for society as a whole. Furthermore, what was good for one society might be poison for another. Universal civilization had replaced individual culture. “Rousseau’s argument is that every society is based on a delicate network of opinions, morals, habits, and customs and that any alteration in one aspect of society is bound to have consequences- often dangerous and unforeseen consequences- in others.” The French philosophes, in their hubris, had lost the particularity of man. Striking back against D’Alembert, Rousseau intoned, “man is one; I admit it! But man modified by religions, governments, laws, customs, prejudices, and climates becomes so different from himself that one ought not to seek among us for what is good for men in general, but only what is good for them in this time or that country.” In fact, Rousseau was the first proponent of the modern nation-state as a natural grouping. “The patriotic spirit is an exclusive spirit which makes us look on everyone but our fellow citizens as strangers, and almost as enemies.”
Tocqueville generally viewed America’s experiment with democracy in a positive light. However, as an outsider he was able to see the defects in its constitutional system, well before they fully emerged a century later. Firstly, he was worried about the tyranny of the majority. He observed, “I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” This was not because of any formal political restrictions, but fear of stepping out of line ending in social exclusion and ostracism. “Under the absolute government of one alone, despotism struck the body crudely, so as to reach the soul, and the soul, escaping from those blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics, tyranny does not proceed in this way; it leaves the body and goes straight for the soul.” Secondly, Tocqueville was not concerned with the enlargement of the State per se, but the rise of the administrative bureaucracy and with it its centralizing spirit. Man would be lulled to sleep and allow the creep of the all-controlling State in without protest, for he would be concerned with more pressing aspects of his life. “The pursuit of interest was deemed to exercise a tranquilizing effect on society and on human behavior generally. The passions were seen as wild and irrational, while interests were calm, gentle, even placid. A society devoted to moneymaking, as opposed to the aristocratic practices like war, was described by such metaphors as “polishing,” “refining,” and “softening” morals. A society dominated by the pursuit of interest could be counted upon to be less grand, noble, and heroic but more peaceful, prosperous, and secure.” Tocqueville warned that, “the taste for material enjoyments develops…. more rapidly than enlightenment and the habits of freedom…. Preoccupied with the sole care of making a fortune, they no longer perceive the tight bond that unites the particular fortune of each of them to the prosperity of all. There is no need to tear from such citizens the rights they possess; they themselves willingly allow them to escape. The exercise of the political duties appears to them a distressing contretemps that distracts them from their industry.”
Flaubert is Smith’s example of the artist who decries modern morals and retreats into his art. He disdains the common, the average, the modern. George Armstrong Kelly described Flaubert’s ethic as Parnassian liberalism: “It is a fairly unbudging doctrine insofar as it consents or contrives to make this sacrifice honorably, rather than striking bargains with political forces that would control and denature it. On the other hand, it is this obstinacy that makes it suspect and even reprehensible to the democratic mentality. It is suspect not only because it questions the wisdom of popular government, but because it is ‘critical,’ ironical, and elitist- holding at the extreme that, in a world of perverse or prolific ‘truths,’ a world of opinion, faith must be constructed from intelligence, if there is to be faith at all, and that faith must be nimble enough to shift with intelligence.” Flaubert, himself, put his temper more succinctly, “Axiom: Hatred of the Bourgeois is the beginning of all virtue.”
There were some anti-moderns who were outright reactionaries. First among them was Joseph de Maistre, who wished to return France to the regime of throne and alter. He also stressed the particularity of man, “in my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he in unknown to me.” Similarly, Nietzsche derides the “last man” who has traded the ancient virtues of love, creativity, and longing for the comforts of peace, security, and happiness. Heidegger writes of “das Man”, the impersonal “they” or “anyone” who form the anonymous “great mass” in the cities, living inauthentic lives devoid of “Self”. Georges Sorel sees virtue in the non-rational impulse back towards myth. “Myths are not simply forms of false consciousness. Throughout history, myths have given expression to people’s collective aspirations. They start not from the individual but from the group and typically exalt the family, armies, communities, and other traditional modes of association.” Myths “are not descriptions of things but expressions of a will to act.” Carl Schmitt believed that the national myth was the strongest of myths, even stronger than the class myth. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy…. The political enemy need not be morally evil or aesthetically ugly; he need not appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for his nature that he is, in a specifically intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible.”
Unlike these reactionaries, Isaiah Berlin was a liberal through and through. However, he espoused a negative concept of liberty, which meant a freedom from external control, and that was as far as he went. “There is an unbreakable link between the rationalist view that there are moral truths and the desire to educate, coerce, or force other persons to accept them. The doctrine of positive liberty may begin with a desire to be my own master, but it invariably ends with the attempt to impose such doctrines on others.” Berlin found the slippery slope inevitable. “The rationalist argument, with its assumption of the single true solution, has led by steps which, if not logically valid, are historically and psychologically intelligible from an ethical doctrine of individual responsibility and individual self-perfection to an authoritarian State obedient to the directives of an elite of Platonic guardians.” Indeed, he was no universalist, but a pluralist. However, he thoroughly rejected the label of moral relativist, which takes values as incommensurable. Instead, he accepted moral diversity, while also accepting objective modes of judging humanity. “If as I believe the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict- and of tragedy- can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable characteristic of the human condition.”
Leo Strauss struck back against modernity’s twin shibboleths of historicism and positivism. He criticized “a historicism that implied progress without a fixed frame of reference to recognize progress, and a scientism that lost contact with phenomena, proclaimed itself normless, and fell into a dilemma of skepticism and dogmatism.” He did not dispute the great contributions of science and its place in the modern world. What he rejected was positivism’s belief that modern science was the highest, if not the only, form of human knowledge. “Whatever the significance of natural modern science may be, it cannot affect our understanding of what is human in man. To understand man in the light of the whole means for modern natural science to understand man in the light of the sub-human. But in that light man as man is wholly unintelligible. Classical political philosophy viewed man in a different light. It was originated by Socrates. And Socrates was so far from being committed to a specific cosmology that his knowledge was knowledge of ignorance. Knowledge of ignorance is not ignorance. It is knowledge of the elusive character of the truth, of the whole.” Strauss’ life’s mission was not so much to figure out the answers, but to reaffirm the questions that philosophy should answer. He viewed philosophy as a quest for categorical, not particular, knowledge. It was knowing what one did not know, pecking around the edges, finding knowledge’s limits, and to anticipate life's difficulties. "Philosophy as such is nothing but genuine awareness of the problems, i.e., of the fundamental and comprehensive problems. It is impossible to think about these problems without being inclined towards a solution, toward one or the other of the very typical solutions. Yet as long as there is no wisdom, but only quest for wisdom, the evidence for all solutions is necessarily smaller than the evidence of the problems. Therefore the philosopher ceases to be a philosopher at the moment at which the 'subjective certainty' of a solution becomes stronger than his awareness of the problematic character of that solution. At that moment the sectarian is born.” Harking back to Hobbes and Spinoza, Strauss found the most serious challenge to philosophy in divine revelation. Similarly, instead of trying to impossibly reconcile the two, he separated the spheres of reason and revelation into his Athens and Jerusalem- two incompatible modes of morality to judge the economy of human life. “Man cannot live without light, guidance, knowledge; only through knowledge of the good can he find the good that he needs. The fundamental question, therefore, is whether men can acquire that knowledge of the good without which they cannot guide their lives individually or collectively by the unaided efforts of their natural powers, or whether they are dependent for that knowledge on Divine Revelation. No alternative is more fundamental than this: guidance or divine guidance.” Strauss firmly came out for the former, but his life’s work was making the strongest possible case for the latter, before, in the end, refuting it for the yet unsatisfying life of philosophy.
Smith ends his section on modernity’s discontents with two novels, Lampedusa’s The Leopard and Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet. The protagonists in both tales are men who are living in a world that has passed them by. They are firmly men of a bygone age. Don Fabrizio is an aging aristocrat whose family has run out of money and whose nephew has to make a marriage match with a nouveau riche merchant’s daughter in order to prolong the family fortune. His nephew puts the spirit of the times succinctly, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Don Fabrizio understands this, but he also understands he is not the man to do it. He observes, “the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, less still wanting to make, any move toward saving it.” This is not because he does not have the mind for it, indeed he is an amateur mathematician and astronomer of renown. Yet, as for the family business, he treats it with “a kind of contemptuous indifference about matters he considered low.” In the end, Fabrizio finds himself, “swung between the old world and the new. I find myself ill at ease in both.” Bellow’s Sammler is a seventy-year-old Holocaust survivor, who has settled in New York City with his nephew. He had studied at Oxford, spent time with the Bloomsbury Circle, but eventually returned to Poland just in time for Hitler’s invasion. Now in New York, he spends his days wandering the streets deep in contemplation. Sammler states, “I think I am an Oriental. I am content to sit here on the West Side, and watch, and admire these gorgeous Faustian departures for the other worlds.” Later, Bellow puts this criticism of Bernard Shaw into his mouth, “poor boys have become rich and powerful. Dickens, rich. Shaw, also. He boasted that reading Karl Marx made a man out of him. I don’t know about that, but Marxism for the great public made him a millionaire. If you wrote for an elite like Proust, you did not become rich, but if your theme was social justice and your ideas were radical you were rewarded by wealth, fame, and influence.” Perhaps, that is an appropriately succinct critique of the democratic age of modernity. The shift to modernity has been a transition from the age of the hero to the age of the mass man. Instead of boldness, we have average. Smith is not one to wholeheartedly agree with all this pessimism. He views modernity as “not a problem to be overcome but a challenge to be met.” His view was that these critics’ “task was to discover the deeper resources built up within Western tradition- the aristocratic Middle Ages for Tocqueville, German romanticism for Berlin, Greek philosophy for Strauss- by which to augment the Enlightenment and provide materials that could better sustain the theory and practice of liberal democracy.” These discontents did not want to tear down the edifice of modernity, but in their very critiques to buttress its walls to make modernity’s case all the stronger, placed on firmer ground.
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