Radical Enlightenment and French Revolution

These five portraits and one bust (of Voltaire) are from the cover of Jonathan I. Israel, The Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790, the third and culminating volume of Israel's encyclopedic study of Enlightenment thought. An earlier cast of characters graced his second volume, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670-1752, which I liked so much I put on the banner of this blog. The figures above, from left to right, are Baruch Spinoza, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, Immanuel Kant, François-Marie Arouet (Voltaire), and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Spinoza is the presiding spirit of Israel's recovery of Enlightenment values, and the author shows in extraordinary detail the influence that Spinoza and controversies over Spinozism had for more than a hundred years after his death in 1674. In the eighteenth century, Israel's main squeeze is Denis Diderot, the humane and kindly gent below. (Article length: 2300 words)

The best introduction to Israel's thought on the Enlightenment is his A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, 2010), a short and accessible survey. Radical Enlightenment, holds Israel,

is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process. Its chief maxim is that all men have the same basic needs, rights, and status irrespective of what they believe or what religious, economic, or ethnic group they belong to, and that consequently all ought to be treated alike, on the basis of equity, whether black or white, male or female, religious or nonreligious, and that all deserve to have their personal interests and aspirations equally respected by law and government. Its universalism lies in its claim that all men have the same right to pursue happiness in their own way, and think and say whatever they see fit, and no one, including those who convince others they are divinely chosen to be their masters, rulers, or spiritual guides, is justified in denying or hindering others in the enjoyment of rights that pertain to all men and women equally. (vii-viii)

Israel proposes two contemporary implications of the acceptance of Radical Enlightenment thought; one is a sweeping rejection of the “modish multiculturalism infused with postmodernism that swept Western universities and local government in the 1980s and 1990s.” We give up a lot in deeming “all traditions and sets of values more or less equally valid” and in surrendering the claim to superiority over other value systems. Israel laments the belief that “to attribute universal validity and superiority over other cultural traditions to core values forged in the Western Enlightenment smacks, whatever its pretensions to rational cogency, of Eurocentrism, elitism, and lack of basic respect for the ‘other.’” (xiii-xiv) On the contrary, he argues: the system of ideas embodied in the Radical Enlightenment, in today's Russia, Asia, and Africa, has “become the chief hope and inspiration of numerous besieged and harassed humanists, egalitarians, and defenders of human rights, who, often against great odds, heroically champion basic human freedom and dignity, including that of women, minorities, homosexuals, and religious apostates, in the face of the resurgent forms of bigotry, oppression, and prejudice that in much of the world today appear inexorably to be extending their grip.” (xi)

* * *

Israel’s evocation of a set of values at once triumphant and under siege might plausibly be seen as extending also to foreign policy, to which he devotes one of seven chapters in A Revolution of the Mind. He describes the objectives of the Radical Enlightenment in terms closely resembling Daniel Deudney's republican security theory, with an emphasis on republicanizing states internally and then binding them in union.

To find the path to universal peace, Diderot, d'Holbach, and their disciples extended the Spinozist idea of the moral ties binding each individual to the next in a just society on the basis of reciprocity to international relations. Every nation has moral obligations to its neighbors, including those weaker than itself, a lesson mankind finds very difficult to adopt. It was essential that international relations no less than government, manners, and religion should be fundamentally reformed in accordance with natural laws. The "general will" of a particular society, in Diderot and d'Holbach, obliges every citizen to allow the others security and tranquility and to fulfill his obligations toward them, punishing violators and tying the hands of those who behave in an antisocial manner. This concept of "general will," that of Diderot and d'Holbach extending (contrary to that of Rousseau) to the law of the "grand society" of the nations of the world, presupposed the universality of the new secular morality of citizenship and equality.

Rousseau's "general will," by contrast—infused by his proto-nationalist commitment, preference for small, self-sufficient republics, and positive dislike of cosmopolitanism and internationalism—was of little help in this regard. It was only the "general will" of the Radical Enlightenment that urged all states to uphold justice, tranquility, and good faith in the interest of everyone. Of course, there existed as yet no authority capable of dissuading or preventing princes and peoples from carrying out aggression and behaving unjustly toward one another. Princes and nations formed a kind of super society but yet one, unfortunately, without any head, without any fixed principles, and without laws. Hence, it was unsurprising that men continue to suffer the atrocious consequences of war and anarchy. With the spread of democratic republics, though, the position would rapidly improve. By creating an international tribunal of the powers, these writers proposed, a court of the nations, true moral principles, genuine order, and law could replace the unrestricted rivalry and unchecked greed of overweening imperial monarchies and ambitious princes. Kant agreed with this but not that it is necessary to eliminate monarchy and aristocracy and adopt representative democracy universally to achieve it.

Hence, to bring about world peace, held the radical philosophes, a double process is required—a shift toward democratic republicanism within nations, on the one hand, and, on the other, a convergence of the interest of peoples in the form of an international general assembly with agreed rules for resolving disputes. Just as aggression and warlike traditions inevitably feed the trend toward tyranny and hereditary monarchy, so conversely the shift toward representation, consultation, and formal democracy will feed the appetite for peace and stability, the things genuinely in the true interest of everyone. Warlike peoples exalt the need for swift, secret decision making, disciplined action, and absence of dissent from undertakings decided on. Thus, bellicose and aggressive propensities predispose society to autocracy, tyranny, suppression of dissent, and loss of individual freedom. (149-51)

* * *

One of Israel's boldest claims is that the French Revolution cannot be explained without detailed attention to the ideas of Radical Enlightenment developed in the twenty to thirty years before 1789. He castigates a generation of historians for their neglect of this crucial intellectual ferment, led by French thinkers and carried on by Dutch publishing houses, but bubbling up everywhere. "The prevailing view about the French Revolution not being caused by books and ideas in the first place may be very widely influential but it is also, on the basis of the detailed evidence, totally indefensible. Indeed, without referring to Radical Enlightenment nothing about the French Revolution makes the slightest sense or can even begin to be provisionally explained." (224)

Taking the story up to the Revolution leads inexorably to the key question of the responsibility of the French revolutionaries for the conflagration that subsequently enveloped Europe from 1792 to 1815. Israel castigates the spokesmen of the moderate Enlightenment for lacking "any political strategy that could conceivably produce the kind of structural changes capable of transforming the existing order so as to diminish the likelihood of war." (129) On questions of domestic order, the moderate Enlightenment mainstream--including such figures as David Hume, Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Frederick the Great, Benjamin Franklin, Montesquieu, Turgot, and Voltaire--is seen by Israel as "inherently antidemocratic, anti-egalitarian, and reluctant to concede a full toleration." (236) On the conduct of international relations, he believes, the moderate Enlightenment posed no direct challenge to the dubious ways of the ancien regime, with its fixation on reason of state. 

I think that view is mistaken, or at least overdrawn. Thomas Paine is one of Israel's chief representatives of the new diplomacy, and Paine's influence was felt strongly in setting forth the ideological presuppositions and objectives of American foreign policy. Much closer to the levers of power, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin also embodied many of the aspirations that Israel identifies with the Radical Enlightenment. Even John Adams, a keen skeptic of the philosophes who filled volumes detailing their mistaken ways, could share the aspiration of Jefferson and his friends for a coming age of peace and prosperity. "America will grow with astonishing Rapidity,” wrote Adams early in the war for independence, “and England France and every other Nation in Europe will be the better for her prosperity. Peace which is her dear Delight will be her Wealth and Glory."[1]

Madison developed an analysis of war in Europe that differed little from that of the radical philosophes, insisting on the need to establish representative republics as a precondition of reforming its war system. (See his "Universal Peace" of 1792). His fear of a raging war system in the Americas was a key reason for his dedicated work to establish a workable federal constitution at home. On all these questions of war and peace--focused on the great question of how to establish a federative system among the American republics that would represent an alternative to and improvement on the European system--the American founders ran circles around European visionaries like Kant and Diderot. They actually had some promising material with which to work.[2]

The conflict between radical and moderate Enlightenment to which Israel points, to be sure, was real enough. Adam Ferguson, a good representative of the conservative or moderate Enlightenment, supported Britain's war against the American colonies in 1775 (giving one of the great justifications for Parliament's decision to repress the rebellion). Voltaire was a chum with Frederick the Great, and both of them looked askance at projects to reform the conduct of international relations. Israel eloquently describes how Herder was disgusted with Frederick the Great and his court, deeply resenting "a monarch who boasted of Enlightenment and vaunted reason and rejection of superstition, but who actually did more than any other of his contemporaries to plunge Europe almost constantly into war and bloodshed. Indeed, he thought the wrong kind of Enlightenment can be even more pernicious than obscurantism and plain barbarism. 'The universal dress of philosophy and love of mankind,' he wrote, 'can be made to disguise persecutions--violations of the true, personal freedom of men and countries, citizens and peoples--such as Cesare Borgia himself could only dream of." (125-26)

Israel does not seem troubled by one great fact: the radical diagnosis of Europe's ills did not present a straightforward road to peace. Quite the contrary, it would seem to have led inexorably to the call to liberate Europe from its war-producing monarchies and aristocracies--a call which France, in the throes of revolution, dutifully produced in 1792. On November 19, 1792, the French Convention promulgated a decree that offered fraternity and assistance to all peoples wishing to regain their liberty, and followed on December 15 with a further measure that "was a masterly combination of universalist ideology and nationalist raison d'etat." [3] It provided for the destruction of the old regime in conquered lands but did not overlook the need to commander local resources to feed France's armies.

Israel is intent on blaming Robespierre and the "Rousseauist tendency" he represented for the plunge of the Revolution into terror and darkness from early 1793 to mid-1794, when Robespierre's vicious rule was terminated by the guillotine. The Jacobins denounced the spokesmen of the Radical Enlightenment and went after their heads--Condorcet and Paine among the victims, the latter barely escaping with his life--but Robespierre had opposed the call to universal war and revolution in Europe launched by the Girondists, with Brissot de Warville as their spokesman. Whereas Brissot had claimed that "We cannot be calm until Europe, all Europe, is in flames," Robespierre sensibly observed that "Liberty cannot be founded  by the use of foreign force." [4] The importance of those decrees can scarcely be overstated; James Madison would later recall, in 1823, that "the British Government thought a war of more than 20 years called for against France by an edict, subsequently disavowed, which assumed the policy of propagating changes of Government in other Countries." [5] Israel does not pay these consequences the heed that they deserve. Having, as it were, set Europe aflame (by his endorsement of the radical diagnosis), he just closes up the historical shop. 

Update, 3/5/14: I spoke too soon. Israel has not closed up shop but continues his series with a new volume covering the period from 1789-94: Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre. I am very curious to read of how he treats the war question. Here is the main argument from the publisher:

Revolutionary Ideas demonstrates that the Revolution was really three different revolutions vying for supremacy—a conflict between constitutional monarchists such as Lafayette who advocated moderate Enlightenment ideas; democratic republicans allied to Tom Paine who fought for Radical Enlightenment ideas; and authoritarian populists, such as Robespierre, who violently rejected key Enlightenment ideas and should ultimately be seen as Counter-Enlightenment figures. The book tells how the fierce rivalry between these groups shaped the course of the Revolution, from the Declaration of Rights, through liberal monarchism and democratic republicanism, to the Terror and the Post-Thermidor reaction. . . The French Revolution stands once again as a culmination of the emancipatory and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That it ended in the Terror represented a betrayal of those ideas—not their fulfillment.

 

The cover illustration is The Tennis Court Oath, June 20, 1789 (1791) by Jacques Louis David (1748-1825).

---

[1] John Adams to James Warren, Adams Papers, 6: 348.
[2] See my Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (2003).
[3] T.C.W. Blanning, The Origins of the French Revolutionary Wars (Longman, 1986), 137-38
[4] Quoted in Blanning, p. 138.

[5] James Madison to Richard Rush, July 22, 1823, Letters of Madison, III, 330-31.

Seven Basic Values

If we are to find a basis for mutual understanding among the world’s nations, the identification of what belongs to us all, irrespective of national proclivities, is a necessary and welcome undertaking. Is such a thing possible? John Finnis, a Catholic philosopher who has taught at Oxford and Notre Dame, thinks so; many years ago (in 1980), he attempted such an enumeration in his powerful work, Natural Law and Natural Rights. (Article Length: 1000 words)

All human societies show a concern for the value of human life; in all, self-preservation is generally accepted as a proper motive for action, and in none is the killing of other human beings permitted without some fairly definite justification. All human societies regard the procreation of a new human life as in itself a good thing unless there are special circumstances. No human society fails to restrict sexual activity; in all societies there is some prohibition of incest, some opposition to boundless promiscuity and to rape, some favour for stability and permanence in sexual relations. All human societies display a concern for truth, through education of the young in matters not only practical (e.g. avoidance of dangers) but also speculative or theoretical (e.g. religion). Human beings, who can survive infancy only by nurture, live in or on the margins of some society which invariably extends beyond the nuclear family, and all societies display a favour for the values of cooperation, of common over individual good, of obligation between individuals, and of justice within groups. All know friendship. All have some conception of meum and tuum, title or property, and of reciprocity. All value play, serious and formalized, or relaxed and recreational. All treat the bodies of dead members of the group in some traditional and ritual fashion different from their procedures for rubbish disposal. All display a concern for powers or principles which are to be respected as suprahuman; in one form or another, religion is universal.

The following abridges and summarizes Finnis’s explanation of the seven basic values:

1. Life

A first basic value, corresponding to the drive for self-preservation, is the value of life. Signifies here every aspect of the vitality which puts a human being in good shape for self-determination: bodily (including cerebral) health, freedom from injury.

2. Knowledge

Curiosity is the name for the desire we have when, just for the sake of knowing, we want to find out about something. E.g. What happened on the night of the murder? How does this clock work? What did she mean by that? It would be good to find out. Knowledge is a good thing to have (and not merely for its utility). In explaining, to oneself and others, what one is up to, one finds oneself able and ready to refer to finding out, knowledge, truth as sufficient explanations of the point of one’s activity, project or commitment. Ignorance and muddle are to be avoided, simply as such.

Some clarifications: to see knowledge as a basic form of good doesn’t mean that every true proposition is equally worth investigating, or that the truth about various things would be equally valuable for every person, nor that it necessarily has priority for the reader or writer at this moment, or that it is the only form of good or the supreme form of good; yet still, it is an intrinsic good—i.e. desirable for its own sake.

3. Play

Inclined to be overlooked by certain sorts of moralists, play is a large and irreducible element in human culture. Each one of us can see the point of engaging in performances which have no point beyond the performance itself, enjoyed for its own sake.

4. Aesthetic experience

Many forms of play, such as dance or song or football, are the matrix or occasion of aesthetic experience. But beauty is not an indispensable element of play. Moreover, beautiful form can be found and enjoyed in nature. Aesthetic experience, unlike play, need not involve an action of one’s own; what is sought after and valued for its own sake may simply be the beautiful form “outside” one, and the “inner” experience of appreciation of its beauty.

5. Sociability (friendship). In its weakest form, this is realized by a minimum of peace and harmony amongst men, and which ranges through the forms of human community to its strongest form in the flowering of full friendship. Friendship involves acting for the sake of one’s friend’s purposes, one’s friends well-being. To be in a relationship of friendship with at least one other person is a fundamental form of good, is it not?

6. Practical reasonableness

It is a basic good to be able to bring one’s own intelligence to bear effectively (in practical reasoning that issues in action) on the problems of choosing one’s actions and life-style and shaping one’s own character.  This value is complex, involving freedom and reason, integrity and authenticity.

7. Religion

Relationship of individual to cosmos; sense of a higher order, making human freedom subordinate to something which makes that human freedom, human intelligence, and human mastery possible.

Besides these seven values, there are countless objectives and forms of good. Courage, generosity, moderation, gentleness are not themselves basic values, but are ways (not means, but modes) of pursuing the basic values.  There are many inclinations and urges that do not correspond to or support any basic value: for example, the inclination to take more than one’s share, or the urge to gratuitous cruelty.  But these urges, whatever their relative power, do not stand to something self-evidently good as the urge to self-preservation stands to the self-evident good of human life.

* * *

Notes the entry on Finnis at Wikipedia: Stephen Buckle sees “Finnis’s requirement that practical reason requires ‘respect for every basic value in every act’ as intended both to rule out consequentialism in ethics and also to support the moral viewpoint of the Catholic Church on a range of contentious issues.” Be that as it may, do not these seven basic values afford a basis for reaffirming our common humanity? Why is it significant to be able to do that?   

The Enlightenment Project

The Enlightenment Project has been a handy term of abuse over the last generation, with a number of authors declaiming against its malign influence. If civilizations fall, as Hegel observed, by a morbid intensification of their own first principles, it made sense, especially to pessimists, to identify the first principles of a contemporary world seen as tending toward dystopia. In successive works from the mid-1990s on, John Gray identified the culprit as the Enlightenment Project. It had led to various dead ends. But the meaning of the project was never especially clear in Gray’s rendition, and anyone familiar with the eighteenth century’s vast outpouring of speculation must question the possibility of rendering it by short-hand expressions. Historians of political thought cast a wary eye upon the term, more impressed by its ability to mislead than enlighten. J.G.A. Pocock, for example, distinguishes between various national enlightenments, avoiding anything resembling a mega (or is it meta?) historical project, while Sankar Muthu uses it simply as a synonym for political thought in the long eighteenth century (1689-1815). Jonathan Israel’s conception of the Enlightenment is probably closest to what Gray had in mind—call it the Radical Enlightenment Project—but Israel's distinction between a radical and moderate enlightenment relegates many of the most impressive thinkers—Smith, Hume, Montesquieu, the American founders, to say nothing of Gibbon and Voltaire—into the less progressive camp. And yet one cannot have a proper Enlightenment get-together, much less a common enterprise, without them. (Article length: 1900 words)

Most historians of thought would quarrel with Gray’s point of departure, but an especially pertinent and refreshing critique of Gray’s line of analysis is Sankar Muthu’s Enlightenment Against Empire (Princeton University Press, 2003). Though the Enlightenment Project is today identified with imperialism, Muthu shows that a host of impressive eighteenth century thinkers developed a profound critique of European empire, anticipating many of the very objections now raised against "The Project."

* * *

The idea that 'the Enlightenment' or an 'Enlightenment project' can be identified and that contemporary moral and political thought should seek either to defend or subvert this project are prevalent assumptions that steer scholars away from more productive engagements with the manifold variety of Enlightenment-era philosophical arguments about cross-cultural moral judgements and international justice. With regard to empire and questions about cultural diversity, the most relevant aspects of Enlightenment moral, social, and political thought, as commonly conceived, are its commitments to (1) an ahistorical and universalist agenda that eschews any interest in, or at the very least gives little value to, the particularities of human life and cultural difference; and (2) a civilizing and imperializing mission (both in the literal and metaphorical senses of the term 'imperialize'), which uses a doctrine of progress to justify the subjugation of (among others) non-European peoples. . . . The persistent identification of eighteenth-century thought with the complex set of evolving social, economic, and political practices, beliefs, and institutions that are gathered under the banner of `modernity'—and the nearly unanimous agreement that 'the Enlightenment' championed universal values in a manner that was, rightly or wrongly, at the expense of a number of particular identities, beliefs, and practice—have either distorted or hidden from view a number of innovative arguments about cultural difference, humanity, and imperial politics in the Enlightenment era. . . .

Alasdair Maclntyre argues that "[i]t was a central aspiration of the Enlightenment. . . . to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places". In this view, the most damning feature of `the Enlightenment' consists of its failure to appreciate the plural and diverse forms of human life.' This emphasis on cultural diversity and moral pluralism, the idea that we must begin to take such particularities seriously in any cogent moral and political philosophy by viewing them as integral and meaningful to human life, is often presented, then, as an indictment of modern thinking or as a repudiation of either modernity as such or, more specifically, of 'the Enlightenment project'. (260-61)

Muthu argues that the anti-imperialist political philosophies of Denis Diderot (1713¬84), Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744¬1803) “cast doubt upon the accuracy and the helpfulness of the philosophical and historical categories by which eighteenth-century political thought is usually interpreted.” 

These thinkers are not usually grouped together; indeed, they could be viewed as fundamentally antithetical, as representing some of the contrasting ideal-types of eighteenth-century political thought: atheistic materialism, enlightened rationalism, and romantic nationalism. To begin with, such labels grossly distort their actual philosophies. Moreover, as I will argue, viewing these thinkers through the lens of debates about international relations that concerned them deeply, in particular those about the relationship between the European and non-European worlds, brings out the remarkable extent to which their political theories, though obviously unique to be sure, are nonetheless cut from the same cloth.  Diderot's immense philosophical influence in this period with regard to questions of imperialism explains in part the shared intellectual disposition about the immorality of empire and the related philosophical ideas upon which this disposition often rested: theories of human nature; conceptualizations of human diversity; and the relationship between universal moral and political norms, on the one hand, and a commitment to moral incommensurability, on the other. (2)

This denunciation of empire by eighteenth century thinkers is very different from the morally impassioned accounts, best represented by Las Casas, which indicted the gross abuses of Spanish imperial power in the Americas but which still accepted the imperial mission itself. Whereas imperial rule in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries “was widely endorsed even by the most zealous critics of the violence perpetrated by Europeans in the New World,” in the late eighteenth century a more radical critique arises.

Truly anti-imperialist political philosophy emerges in the late eighteenth century among a broad array of thinkers from different intellectual and national contexts. A significant group of European political thinkers rejected imperialism outright as unworkable, dangerous, or immoral—for economic reasons of free trade, as a result of principles of self-determination or cultural integrity, due to concerns about the effects of imperial politics upon domestic political institutions and practices, or out of contempt over the ironic spectacle of ostensibly civilized nations engaging in despotism, corruption, and lawlessness abroad. In confronting the steadily expanding commercial and political power of European states and imperial trading companies over the non-European world, the diverse group of thinkers who assailed the injustices and countered the dominant justifications of European imperialism include Jeremy Bentham, Condorcet, Diderot, Herder, Kant, and Adam Smith.  Moreover, such denunciations of what Herder liked to call "the grand European sponging enterprise" were complemented by more specific attacks upon European imperial or quasi-imperial activities in particular regions. Along these lines, the most notable efforts are Edmund Burke's legislative attempts to curtail and to regulate the activities of the East India Company and his lengthy, zealous prosecution of the impeachment of Warren Hastings, a senior East India Company official and the Governor-General of Bengal.  Burke argued that the British had failed to respect the sovereignty of local Indian powers, and had accordingly enriched themselves through illegal and unjust means, contributing not one iota, in his view, to the well-being of Indians themselves. In making such arguments, Burke was not a lone voice in the wilderness; rather, he raised concerns that were shared by a number of his contemporaries, a fact that has been neglected even by incisive scholars who have studied the connections between modern political theory and empire.' Of course, such anti-imperialist political thinkers fought an uphill battle, for defences of European imperial rule were still prevalent; the Enlightenment era is unique not because of the absence of imperialist arguments, but rather due to the presence of spirited attacks upon the foundations of empire. (4)

Prevalent accounts of what is called 'the Enlightenment' or 'the Enlightenment project' make a series of generalizations that very often egregiously misrepresent, blur, or hide from view entire strands of thought, some of which (were it not for the distorting lenses through which they are viewed) might have been understood to be nuanced and intellectually productive contributions not only to the debates of the long eighteenth century, but also to a range of still debated principles, intellectual tendencies, and institutions. Other strands may not make such positive contributions, but may instead provide us with a more sophisticated intellectual genealogy of problematic tendencies or arguments. The term 'Enlightenment' itself, of course, may still serve a useful function in contemplating eighteenth-century political thought, for there was a sense among many of the most perceptive thinkers of the eighteenth century that they were contemplating social and political affairs in a manner that was historically and philosophically distinctive, and in a way that constituted (at least in part) a break from some of their predecessors. It may be, then, that a set of background social and political conditions, and perhaps even a kind of intellectual temperament, could be plausibly identified, one that could orient us toward productively studying some set of the political and philosophical debates in the eighteenth century. (263)

* * *

There are no American voices in Muthu's account, though it would seem that Americans had a thing or two to say about empire in the late eighteenth century. Adam Smith is mentioned but his views are not explored by Mutha in this work; however, they support his larger argument. In his Wealth of Nations. Smith looked forward to the day when the injustices of the Europeans toward the non-European world would pass, and he forecast greater equality among the different quarters of the globe. Such a multipolar system, brought about by the communication of knowledge that accompanied economic interdependence, would produce “that equality of courage and force” that could alone compel independent nations to respect one another’s rights.   

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great: but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen. What benefits, or what misfortunes to mankind may hereafter result from those great events, no human wisdom can foresee. By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another's wants, to increase one another's enjoyments, and to encourage one another's industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial. To the natives however, both of the East and West Indies, all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned. These misfortunes, however, seem to have arisen rather from accident than from any thing in the nature of those events themselves. At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries. Hereafter, perhaps, the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another. But nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it.

Wealth of Nations, Book IV, vii. c.80, p. 626; hat tip to Gavin Kennedy, who excerpts this passage from Smith, and asks: “Did Adam Smith Uncharacteristically Predict the Course of Globalisation?”

* * *

The cover art for Muthu's handsome book is The Course of Empire: Destruction, by Thomas Cole, ca. 1836. Collection of the New York Historical Society.

 

Seven Subversive Currents

The New York Times reports on a memo, “Document No. 9,” that has circulated in China, bearing the “unmistakable imprimatur of Xi Jinping, China’s new top leader.” It identifies “seven subversive currents coursing through Chinese society” that, unless arrested, could lead party leaders to lose their grip:

* * *

The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting “universal values” of human rights, Western-inspired notions of media independence and civic participation, ardently pro-market “neo-liberalism,” and “nihilist” criticisms of the party’s traumatic past.

Even as Mr. Xi has sought to prepare some reforms to expose China’s economy to stronger market forces, he has undertaken a “mass line” campaign to enforce party authority that goes beyond the party’s periodic calls for discipline. The internal warnings to cadres show that Mr. Xi’s confident public face has been accompanied by fears that the party is vulnerable to an economic slowdown, public anger about corruption and challenges from liberals impatient for political change.

“Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” says Document No. 9, the number given to it by the central party office that issued it in April. It has not been openly published, but a version was shown to The New York Times and was verified by four sources close to senior officials, including an editor with a party newspaper.

Opponents of one-party rule, it says, “have stirred up trouble about disclosing officials’ assets, using the Internet to fight corruption, media controls and other sensitive topics, to provoke discontent with the party and government.”

The warnings were not idle. Since the circular was issued, party-run publications and Web sites have vehemently denounced constitutionalism and civil society, notions that were not considered off limits in recent years. Officials have intensified efforts to block access to critical views on the Internet. Two prominent rights advocates have been detained in the past few weeks, in what their supporters have called a blow to the “rights defense movement,” which was already beleaguered under Mr. Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao.

Mr. Xi’s hard line has disappointed Chinese liberals, some of whom once hailed his rise to power as an opportunity to push for political change after a long period of stagnation. Instead, Mr. Xi has signaled a shift to a more conservative, traditional leftist stance with his “rectification” campaign to ensure discipline and conspicuous attempts to defend the legacy of Mao Zedong. That has included a visit to a historic site where Mao undertook one of his own attempts to remake the ruling party in the 1950s. . . .

 “Promotion of Western constitutional democracy is an attempt to negate the party’s leadership,” Cheng Xinping, a deputy head of propaganda for Hengyang, a city in Hunan, told a gathering of mining industry officials. Human rights advocates, he continued, want “ultimately to form a force for political confrontation.” . . .

Condemnations of constitutional government have prompted dismayed opposition from liberal intellectuals and even some moderate-minded former officials. The campaign has also exhilarated leftist defenders of party orthodoxy, many of whom pointedly oppose the sort of market reforms that Mr. Xi and Prime Minister Li Keqiang have said are needed.

The consequent rifts are unusually open, and they could widen and bog down Mr. Xi, said Xiao Gongqin, a professor of history at Shanghai Normal University who is also a prominent proponent of gradual, party-guided reform.

“Now the leftists feel very excited and elated, while the liberals feel very discouraged and discontented,” said Professor Xiao, who said he was generally sympathetic to Mr. Xi’s aims. “The ramifications are very serious, because this seriously hurts the broad middle class and moderate reformers — entrepreneurs and intellectuals. It’s possible that this situation will get out of control, and that won’t help the political stability that the central leadership stresses.”

The pressures that prompted the party’s ideological counteroffensive spilled onto the streets of Guangzhou, a city in southern China, early this year. Staff members at the Southern Weekend newspaper there protested after a propaganda official rewrote an editorial celebrating constitutionalism — the idea that state and party power should be subject to a supreme law that prevents abuses and protects citizens’ rights.

The confrontation at the newspaper and campaign demanding that officials disclose their wealth alarmed leaders and helped galvanize them into issuing Document No. 9, said Professor Xiao, the historian. Indeed, senior central propaganda officials met to discuss the newspaper protest, among other issues, and called it a plot to subvert the party, according to a speech on a party Web site of Lianyungang, a port city in eastern China.

“Western anti-China forces led by the United States have joined in one after the other, and colluded with dissidents within the country to make slanderous attacks on us in the name of so-called press freedom and constitutional democracy,” said Zhang Guangdong, a propaganda official in Lianyungang, citing the conclusions from the meeting of central propaganda officials. “They are trying to break through our political system, and this was a classic example,” he said of the newspaper protest. . . .

Since the document was issued, the campaign for ideological orthodoxy has prompted a torrent of commentary and articles in party-run periodicals. Many of them have invoked Maoist talk of class war rarely seen in official publications in recent years. Some have said that constitutionalism and similar ideas were tools of Western subversion that helped topple the former Soviet Union — and that a similar threat faces China.

“Constitutionalism belongs only to capitalism,” said one commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily. Constitutionalism “is a weapon for information and psychological warfare used by the magnates of American monopoly capitalism and their proxies in China to subvert China’s socialist system,” said another commentary in the paper. . . .

* * *

Chris Buckley, “China Takes Aim at Western Ideas,” New York Times, August 19, 2013

Forefathers for Humanitarian Intervention

Gary Bass’s Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf, 2008) is an outstanding work, really a model of how to bring long forgotten conflicts to life and, without fudging the record, offering important lessons for contemporary predicaments. The subject, broadly, is European humanitarian intervention in three separate 19^th century episodes, in Greece (the 1820s), Syria (1860) and Bulgaria (1875-78). Each entailed high-stakes diplomacy among the European Concert, responding to Turkish atrocities that shocked British opinion and produced fervent advocates for intervention, with Lord Byron for Greece and William Gladstone for Bulgaria leading the most famous of these campaigns.  

About four fifths of this thick book (at some 500 pages) consists of a deft history of these events,  but the narrative is enveloped by introductory and concluding essays that discuss the broader problem of intervention and offer direct comparisons with the contemporary period. Herein you will find just about every argument that can be made about humanitarian intervention, pro and con. Bass’s sympathies are clearly with the interventionists. He is at pains to distinguish humanitarian from imperial aims, no less a problem today than in the nineteenth century, and he is insistent that the duty of intervention cannot be escaped. But he gives the other side of the argument, and is not afraid to show the atrocitarians in a somewhat dubious light.

For the diplomatic historian, this is as much a case study in the modalities of multilateralism—what, back then, was termed the Concert of Europe—as of the dilemmas of humanitarian intervention, but it is, for either purpose, compulsively readable. Who knew that Dostoevsky was a towering public figure urging Russia to war in the name of pan-Slavism in the Bulgarian crisis? That Gladstone the humanitarian sputtered with unholy fire regarding the worthlessness of the Muslims?  

These excerpts give the tenor of Bass’s overall approach to humanitarian intervention: (1131 words)

* * * 

If new identities can form within borders, they can surely form outside of borders, too. The same kinds of processes that generated national identity could create some kind of solidarity with foreigners, as well. This solidarity might not be as strong as that within a country, but it could nevertheless come to play an important role in international politics. (27) 

The humanitarian interventions of the nineteenth century can be seen as, at the least, the froth of that era's cresting wave of nationalism. This was a century of great xenophobia, but there were other more hopeful currents, too. In other words, the same forces of modernity that forged a sense of common British political identity between impoverished Welsh villagers and London aristocrats, or between French citizens in metropolitan Paris and slowly integrating Lorraine, could also create a weaker but still politically important sense of solidarity with foreigners facing massacre. Just as the growth of national consciousness relies on knowing about the lives of other members of the national community living far away, the growth of humanitarian concern for foreigners relies on knowing about the lives of foreigners. So the causes of humanitarian intervention lie with the latter stages of the parallel marches of political liberalization and of mass media technology. (27-28)

This is not to say that publics will always demand humanitarianism, nor that governments will always accede. The fact that liberal ideology mandates sympathies for all suffering humanity hardly means that state policy will follow. The free press can miss or botch the story; the elites and mass public can fail to react to the stories; and the government can decide it would rather face the repercussions at home than take a misstep in its foreign policy. As Gladstone wrote, "Indignation is froth, except as it leads to action." But liberal states are torn between national and international considerations, between self-protection and solidarity—and in that clash lies much of the basic political drama of this book. (29)

The problem with realism is it does a better job of identifying [the] problem than of solving it. Yes, if it were really true that a humanitarian intervention would cause a vastly larger war, or embitter the rest of the world against the intervening state, then the mission probably would not be worth it. But conservatives sometimes give up too easily. Instead, this book will look for ways to manage the practice of humanitarian intervention. The diplomatic challenge is to prove benevolent motivations, with firm and credible commitments not to turn an ostensibly humanitarian mission into imperial aggrandizement. This book will show that, in the nineteenth century, diplomats had some impressively successful ways of doing just that: using a combination of multilateralism, self-restraint, and treaties as tools to reassure other states about the good motivations behind a humanitarian mission. The leaders of that century were remarkably skilled at convincing rival states of their nonthreatening motives—even in a century of rampant imperialism. Just as it is irresponsible for liberals to hold justice so far above peace that they spark major wars, it is unconscionable for realists to hold peace so far above justice that they overlook ways to make it possible to save innocent lives.

This book is about the nineteenth century, as an imperfect way to better understand our own current predicament. The politics of human rights have a long and tangled history, and the dilemmas faced by today's human rights advocates are often reflections of those faced by like-minded people who have long since turned to dust. Tsarist manipulation of Russian panSlavist public sentiments would be totally familiar to Vladimir Putin; Benjamin Disraeli, digging in his heels against public calls for protection of human rights in Bulgaria, sounded fully as exasperated as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger struggling to create the United States' alignment with China.

The image of humanitarian intervention as an untested novelty is wrong. There were some more or less humanitarian interventions waged outside of Europe this century: India's war against Pakistani brutality in Bangladesh, and Tanzania's ouster of Idi Amin's junta in Uganda. To this roster, along with Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Ituri Province in Congo, this book means to add the nineteenth-century European experience of humanitarian intervention. As John Stuart Mill wrote, considering bloody civil wars in general and of Greece in particular: "It seems now to be an admitted doctrine" that outside powers "are warranted in demanding that the contest shall cease, and a reconciliation take place on equitable terms of compromise.

Intervention of this description has been repeatedly practised during the present generation, with such general approval, that its legitimacy may be considered to have passed into a maxim of what is called international law." Far from being radical innovators in Bosnia after 1995 and in Kosovo, Clinton and Albright were walking in the footsteps of Canning, Gladstone, James Madison, and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as the moral tradition of Lord Byron and Victor Hugo.

This book is not just about a tradition of humanitarian interventionism, but also about a tradition of honorable and principled opposition to such adventurism. Sometimes the politicians who do not want to save oppressed foreigners are callous or willfully ignorant, but not always. Lord Castlereagh and Disraeli were fixated on maintaining the peace of Europe, and were convinced that this would sometimes unfortunately mean the subjugation of smaller peoples. It is no comfort to the victims that they seem to have been quite sincere in this belief, but it does put them in a different category from more current Western leaders who ignored slaughters overseas for rather less lofty reasons. Castlereagh stayed out of the Balkans because he valued peace more than justice, and John Quincy Adams stayed out of the Balkans because a weak United States could only endanger itself; Clinton stayed out of the Balkans until 1995 without any such excuse.

Nor is this book a celebration of interventionism—and still less of imperialism. There are terrifying hazards involved in meddling in other peoples' conflicts. Outsiders are often lethally ignorant of local politics and cultures, as in Vietnam and Iraq; and foreign meddling can exacerbate local tensions. Ostensible humanitarianism can all too easily shade into bigotry, or can be based on ignorant or biased information. It can be manipulated to fit a country's imperialistic or expansionist designs, or it can bring big powers lurching into a major war. The atrocitarians were not always pure of heart, and they were often reckless and blind to the potentially devastating consequences of their activism. But all of these flaws are also why the atrocitarians are worth understanding: a better grasp of previous efforts at taming and routinizing the practice of humanitarian intervention should contribute to a more humble, sober version of the practice in the future. (40-42) 

* * * 

It is questionable, as Bass seems to claim, that the humanitarian interventions of the past generation have been greeted with such widespread approval as to now constitute a rule of customary international law. UN approval of the “responsibility to protect” is conditioned on action being undertaken under the auspices of the UN Security Council, and does not offer a blanket right to any state to undertake such interventions by itself. How far such illegal interventions are “legitimate” is an interesting and vital question, which we have to answer these days about every six months, but it is important to be clear on the legal rule. 

Be these criticisms as they may, Freedom’s Battle is a great book that any student of international relations will enjoy reading, and that students considering papers on the subject should start with.

Questions about Human Rights

In his "Human Rights and the American Tradition," Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. recalls the old American debate about reforming the world by intervention or example. He cites John Quincy Adam’s famous 1821 July 4^th address as the locus classicus of the traditional view exhorting non-intervention, where Adams warned that to become the champion and vindicator “of the freedom and independence of all” would insensibly change America’s maxims “from liberty to force.”

As the 19^th century advanced, many began to agitate for a more forward policy, especially in the furor aroused by the crushing of Hungarian  independence by Russia in 1849. Schlesinger depicts the debate that arose after the Hungarian leader Louis Kossuth came to the United States urging American support for the independence of his country, and dwells especially on the speech of John Parker Hale, who warned that to erect the Senate of the United States into a “high court of indignation,” fulminating against the crimes of European monarchies, would be absurd when the greater injustice of slavery lay closer to home. I deal with this debate in my own Union, Nation, or Empire, and will not recapitulate it here, but instead wish to highlight the set of questions that Schlesinger draws from it.  

Is the point of foreign policy to discharge moral indignation or to produce real changes in a real world? May quiet diplomacy not be more effective than public denunciation? Must not the United States, when it invokes human rights, apply the principle across the board and not just to small and weak countries? May not intervention on behalf of human rights jeopardize other national interests and increase the danger of war? By what authority do we interfere in the internal affairs of foreign countries? Should all nations be expected to embrace the American conception of human rights? Does not the habit of passing judgment on foreign states nourish national self-righteousness? Should not a human rights crusade begin at home?

Given the vast changes in the condition of America and the world since 1850, it is pretty extraordinary that all these questions remain quite relevant today.We bobble around in, but cannot really escape, the circle of reasoning and the set of predicaments these questions disclose.

Religion and the Origins of Human Rights

In his “Human Rights and the American Tradition,” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. gave a classic analysis of the role that the concept of human rights has played in American history. Let us look at its opening theme: the equation between equality and human rights—“roughly the idea that all individuals are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness on this earth.” Schlesinger discounts the role of “the so called Judeo-Christian tradition” in promoting the appreciation of such rights:  

In fact the great religious ages were notable for their indifference to human rights in the contemporary sense—not only for their acquiescence in poverty, inequality, and oppression, but for their enthusiastic justification of slavery, persecution, torture and genocide. 

Christianity assigned to human misery an honored and indispensable role in the drama of salvation. The trials visited on mankind in this world were conceived as ordained by the Almighty in order to test sinful mortals. From the religious perspective, nothing that took place on earth mattered in comparison to what must take place hereafter. The world was but an inn, so what difference could it make if the food was poor or the innkeeper a brute? . . .

No doubt the idea of natural rights has classical antecedents, among, for example, the Stoics. But humanitarianism—the notion that natural rights have immediate, concrete and universal application—is a product of the last four centuries. Tocqueville persuasively attributed the humanitarian ethic to the rise of the idea of equality. In aristocratic societies, he wrote, those in the upper caste hardly believed that their inferiors “belong to the same race.” When medieval chroniclers “relate the tragic end of a noble, their grief flows apace; whereas they tell you at a breath and without wincing of massacres and tortures inflicted on the common sort of people.” . . . 

Equality thus bred “sympathy, which Dr. Johnson defined as “the consciousness that we have the same nature with the sufferer, that we are in danger of the same distresses.” This was a novel thought, and the cult of sympathy made it increasingly difficult to dismiss the less fortunate as creatures of some other race. The upper caste and the churches began at last to attend to the condition of the enslaved, the poor, and the mad. It was the age of equality that saw the decline of religious persecution, the abolition of torture and of public executions, the emancipation of the slaves.

It would be unfair to leave it at that, for Protestant Christianity might fairly be seen as contributing to a more humane code of war. So did the American physician Benjamin Rush conclude in 1792, in his essay “On Punishing Murder by Death.” Rush attributed the "material change for the better" in the world over the “last two hundred years” to “the influence of Christianity upon the hearts of men” (while adding that this influence was “unacknowledged” by common opinion). Six changes were especially notable:  

“lst. In rescuing women and children from being the objects of the desolutions of war in common with men. 2dly. In preventing the destruction of captives taken in battle, in cold blood.  3dly. In protecting the peaceable husbandman from sharing in the carnage of war. 4thly. In producing an exchange of prisoners, instead of dooming them to perpetual slavery. 5thly. In avoiding the invasion or destruction, in certain cases, of private property. 6thly. In declaring all wars to be unlawful but such as are purely defensive.”  Rush, Selected Writings, 51.

Consider, too, the reflections of John Adams in the course of the American Revolution contrasting the barbarous code of antiquity with the "divine excellence" of Christian doctrines. Throughout “the whole Roman History,” wrote Adams in 1777,

revenge was esteemed a generous, and an heroic passion. Nothing was too good for a Friend or too bad for an Enemy. Hatred and Malice, without Limits, against an Enemy, was indulged, was justified, and no Cruelty was thought unwarrantable. Our Saviour taught the Immorality of Revenge, and the moral Duty of forgiving Injuries, and even the Duty of loving Enemies. Nothing can shew the amiable, the moral, and divine Excellency of these Christian Doctrines in a stronger Point of Light, than the Characters and Conduct of Marius and Sylla, Cæsar, Pompey, Anthony and Augustus, among innumerable others.

Many so-called Christians today are more likely to embrace Roman virtus and glory than the Christian doctrines that Adams or Rush set forth. Too bad that so many of its friends, and so many of its enemies, do not see this point. 

* * *

Schlesinger’s piece first appeared in Foreign Affairs in 1977 and was revised and expanded for his outstanding collection of essays, The Cycles of American History (Boston, 1986).

Notes on the Arab Uprising

From the New York Times:

Much of the generation in their 40s and 50s tried to effect change, but first accepted the empty promises of the rulers that change was coming. When it did not, many grew politically apathetic.

The protests are a fire alarm that the promises are not going to work anymore, said Sawsan al-Shaer, a Bahraini columnist. But governments that have stuck around for 20 to 40 years are slow to realize that, she said.

“Now the sons are coming, the new generation, and they are saying, ‘I don’t care that my father agreed with you — I am asking for more, and I am asking for something else,’ ” Ms. Shaer said.

Most rulers have surrounded themselves with a tight coterie of advisers and security officers for so long that they believe the advice that just a few young people are knocking around outside and will tire in good time, she said, even after the fall of the presidents in Tunisia and Egypt.

“The rulers don’t realize there is a new generation who want a better job, who want to ask what is happening, where did you spend the money?” Ms. Shaer said. “My father did not ask. I want to ask.”

The growing population throughout the 3,175-mile zone from Tehran to Tangier, Morocco, has changed too much, analysts believe, for the old systems to work.

“There is a contradiction between educating a lot of your population and creating a white-collar middle class and then ruling with an iron hand,” said Juan R. Cole, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Michigan.

The continued eruptions present a particular challenge to the United States. It is caught between broadly supporting democracy in the region and tolerating the stability guaranteed by despots, analysts said. In addition, its ability to influence events is particularly limited with foes like Iran.

President Obama’s administration was accused of waffling on Egypt, trying to please the protesters while not really pushing President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of the United States, to leave. It faces a similar dilemma in Bahrain, a crucial base for the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

“For decades, the U.S. sort of prioritized stability over democracy because of oil and Israel,” said Marwan Muasher, a former foreign minister of Jordan who is the head of the Middle East program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The current policy is not sustainable,” he said, but changing it toward so many countries at once will be neither easy nor quick.