How to Think Politically

by James Bernard Murphy

  What caused the Revolution? Tocqueville journeyed to the United States to seek American answers (and solutions) to French questions. Just as the key to American democracy is found in local government, so too is the key to the French Revolution. Under medieval and early modern feudalism, peasants provided labour and taxes to local nobles in return for being governed by them. But, by the eighteenth century, peasants found themselves being governed by functionaries from Paris – yet still being taxed to support their useless local nobles, many of whom had decamped to Versailles. This absurdity could not last, and indeed did not. The events of 1789 were merely the violent culmination of a quiet political, economic and social revolution that had already transformed local French life. By studying local government, Tocqueville discerned the hidden secrets of both American and French politics.

  It always makes sense to look at local government, says Tocqueville, because the habits of the heart, which are the basis of all politics, are formed by people’s everyday experiences. For most, concepts such as democracy or constitutionalism are vague abstractions, and places such as Washington DC or Paris are like foreign lands. Americans acquired their democratic habits not from schools or books but from serving on parish councils, town committees and local juries. Civic virtues are a set of habits acquired from co-operating with one’s neighbours, learning to tolerate differences and reaching solutions to common problems. According to Tocqueville, Americans first organized townships, then states and, finally, the national government. What this means is that Americans instinctively think of all levels of government by analogy to their familiar towns. Tocqueville would have agreed with G. K. Chesterton that democracy is like blowing one’s nose: even if done badly, one should do it for oneself.

  Although Tocqueville was a passionate advocate for the virtues of local government, this does not imply that he was a supporter of states’ rights. According to him, state governments were almost as remote from everyday life as the national government. Tocqueville endorsed the Federalist or Hamiltonian (named after Alexander Hamilton) interpretation of the US Constitution, defending a strong national government; he rejected the Republican or Jeffersonian defence of state sovereignty. Tocqueville, with his usual prescience, worried that the power of the states to ignore the mandates of the national government threatened the survival of the Union, as indeed it did during the later Civil War. Tocqueville comments that he frequently heard Americans denounce the tyranny of the national government – without any plausible evidence. Indeed, according to Tocqueville, the state governments were in fact the primary threat to liberty.

  A burning French question, for which Tocqueville sought an American answer, was the relation of Christianity to politics. The Catholic Church in France had for centuries allied itself with the monarchy. As a consequence, when the monarchy was pulled down in 1792, the Church was buried in the ruins. After the Revolution, both the French right and left largely agreed on one axiom: Catholicism is royalist and anti-democratic; democratic equality and liberty are secular, non-Christian ideals. Tocqueville was never more passionate or resolute than in his insistence, to the contrary, that modern democracy is a Christian ideal and that Jesus came to earth to proclaim the equality of every human being. This was also a burning personal question for Tocqueville, who lost his Catholic faith but not his love for Christianity.

  Ancient democracy, says Tocqueville, was based on slavery, class privilege and patriarchy. Even Plato and Aristotle explicitly endorsed radical human inequality. The ideals of universal human equality, rights and liberty were the gift of Christianity. He chided Christian theologians and preachers for not developing a Christian ethics of citizenship. Royalists, monarchists, democrats, socialists and anarchists alike were all convinced that Christianity was fundamentally opposed to modern democracy. Tocqueville, anticipating Nietzsche, argued that Christianity, whatever its current institutional corruption, is actually the origin of our democratic ideals. More importantly still, said Tocqueville, Christianity is necessary for the survival of democratic civic virtues.

  While visiting the United States, Tocqueville was struck by two things: first, the separation of church and state (even though, at the time of his visit, several American states still had established churches); second, that despite this separation – or rather, because of it – the Christian religion was ‘the foremost of American political institutions’. How could a private religion be the foremost of political institutions? We must remember that politics stems from ‘habits of the heart’ and Americans were shaped more profoundly by their churches than by any other institution. Among the Puritans who settled New England, for example, all ministers were elected by their congregations; even Catholic bishops in America were originally elected by their priests. American churches, in short, were democratic even before American governments. Without religion, said Tocqueville, Americans would become utterly absorbed in selfish individualism, especially the quest for material wealth. The habits of the heart, formed not so much by Christian teaching as by participation in Christian communities, were what led Americans to civic virtues. Social scientists today, inspired by Tocqueville, have indeed discovered a strong relationship between church attendance (in whatever religion) and many measures of civic virtue.

  The longer Tocqueville studied American democracy, the more pessimistic he became. The most fundamental source of his pessimism centred upon the relations among blacks, Indians and whites. Like all enlightened French liberals, Tocqueville was horrified by American slavery – not only by the appalling degradation of the slaves but also by the corruption of the masters. He argued that slavery dishonoured labour, making southern whites lazy, ignorant and proud. While sailing down the Ohio River, Tocqueville claimed that the farms on the free Ohio side were orderly and industrious compared with the slovenly shambles on the slave-holding Kentucky side of the river. Ancient slavery, he observed, bound the body but not the mind; American racial slavery, by contrast, degraded both the body and the mind of the slave, who thought of himself as naturally inferior. The crimes against blacks, said Tocqueville, cried out for vengeance; he saw race war in the US as more likely than peaceful co-existence.

  Arriving in the US just after the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Tocqueville saw no future for American Indians apart from extermination by the relentlessly greedy and violent white settlers. He said that the proud Indian warriors, who preferred death to servitude, reminded him of his own noble ancestors, who were of the military aristocracy. Nothing reveals more about Tocqueville’s own aristocratic character than his deep admiration for the courage and stoicism of American Indian warriors in the face of total destruction.

  Democratic culture, said Tocqueville, is thoroughly practical, materialistic and empirical. That is why, he added, Americans excel in the development of new technologies – so long as they are profitable in the short term. Common sense would seem to dictate that a pragmatic American culture requires a pragmatic and vocational American schooling – and, indeed, American schooling has generally been robustly practical. As usual, Tocqueville rejected the common sense of his contemporaries and insisted that what pragmatic American democrats really needed was a useless aristocratic schooling in classical languages and literature, philosophy, fine arts and music. Schools should aim to ennoble democratic culture by enticing students to raise their hearts and minds to the love of pure truth, noble moral ideals and sheer beauty. Without such an education, democracy would sink into a narrow vocationalism – ultimately undermining the progress of the arts and sciences so cherished by Americans. Yes, practical, can-do Americans need above all to study ballet.

  Today, there is widespread dismay about the perceived lack of civic virtue in advanced democracies. Because real political power is now located in distant national capitols or even in international organizations, most citizens have become mere spectators – and politics itself a sorry spectacle of vulgar tribal conflict amid cynical self-dealing. As a consequence, many citizens in America and in Europe are looking
to their schools to teach the civic virtue so lacking in public life. Can civic virtue be taught in schools? Tocqueville thought not: ‘Local institutions are to liberty what elementary schools are to knowledge; they bring it within the reach of the people’. The virtues of political liberty must be learned by active participation in local churches, organizations and governments. Civic virtues are ultimately habits of the heart, not lessons of the mind. But if our local institutions have been hollowed out by internet consumerism and political centralization, where might citizens acquire the right habits of the heart?

  20

  John Stuart Mill: The Individualist

  For 35 years (over half his life) John Stuart Mill worked as a civil servant in the London headquarters of the British East India Company, a private venture with a royal charter that administered British trade in the Far East and effectively ruled India. When he retired from the company, he held the senior post of Examiner that his father, James Mill, had held before him. Needless to say, neither Mill ever set foot in the country they helped to administer from London for so many decades. Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that either of them ever actually met an Indian. Although a liberal democrat and a self-styled ‘radical’, Mill believed despotism ‘a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians’, which included the native population of India, in his view. In that he was a man of his times. He believed that all people are inherently able to ascend to the level of ‘civilization’, as Britain had, more or less. (Mill, who is buried in France, was that most unnatural of beings, an English Francophile.) Although he had no time for the biological theories of race that were becoming increasingly popular across Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century, Mill was sure that different societies sit on different rungs of the ladder of human progress, and that ‘backward states of society’ should not enjoy the kinds of individual freedoms and democratic rights typically found in the most ‘advanced’ states until they have reached the same high level of development. He hoped and expected most peoples to reach this stage of advancement eventually, although he never believed that it would be easy or inevitable in any case. Despotism is legitimate only if it is enlightened, and in the progressive interests of those over whom it is wielded, a position Mill shared with Karl Marx, who wrote that ‘England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and then laying the material foundations of Western society in Asia.’

  If Mill was a man of his times on matters of colonialism, he was well ahead of them in other ways. He was the greatest nineteenth-century theorist and advocate of women’s equality – a very unpopular position at the time that made him many enemies in Victorian Britain. He was the first politician in the United Kingdom to include extending the vote to women on a political platform when he ran for Parliament, where he campaigned for women’s suffrage. As a Member of Parliament (for just three years) Mill presented the first mass women’s suffrage petition to the House of Commons and proposed an amendment to include women in the 1867 Reform Bill that extended voting rights for most propertied men. (The bill passed, but his amendment was defeated.) It was not for another half a century that Britain was ready for such change. He wrote a pioneering feminist book, On the Subjection of Women, which sets out the case for treating women and men equally in all respects. In it, Mill argues that the exclusion of women from public life and the professions is ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’. In this, and in many other ways, he was strongly influenced by his wife, Harriett Taylor, the author of an influential essay on ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’. In his Autobiography, Mill describes his personal and intellectual debt to her as ‘almost infinite’ and claims that all of his published writings were ‘joint productions’ with his wife, even though her name appears on none of them. Even Mill’s feminism had its limits, it seems.

  Mill’s greatest legacy is not his long career as an imperial civil servant or his short career as a politician. He is remembered now for his writings, foremost of which is his essay On Liberty (1859), perhaps the most famous and influential defence of individual freedom ever written. It was the work he was most proud of and correctly predicted would ‘survive longer than anything else that I have written’.

  What most concerned Mill in his own time was the ‘tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling’ over exceptional individuals, a concern he shared with other nineteenth-century liberals such as his friend Alexis de Tocqueville, who worried above all about threats to freedom from social pressure and conformity. Mill was convinced that the rise of mass society risked crushing individuality and smothering dissent, the consequence of which would be to slow or even stop human advancement, which depends on the free expression of ideas and ‘experiments in living’.

  Politically, Mill was a classical liberal who believed that the best means to promote human wellbeing is a general policy of allowing the greatest possible scope for individual liberty consistent with the liberty of others. Ethically, he was a utilitarian, like his father. Indeed, he called it his ‘religion’. Unlike most liberals, the Mills rejected any doctrine of natural rights. As we have seen, John Locke was the founder of Anglo-American liberalism who declared that every person was born possessing a natural right to life, liberty and property; Thomas Jefferson famously endorsed Lockean natural rights in the American Declaration of Independence. Mill set himself the challenge of defending individual liberty and equality of the sexes without recourse to any doctrine of natural rights to freedom or equality or, like Paine, by invoking God. The foundation of his defence ultimately lies in the utility of those causes, their capacity to promote human wellbeing, something strictly forbidden by Kant, who called such an approach the ‘euthanasia of all morality’.

  According to Mill, if each of us is left free to pursue our ‘own good in our own way’, we are more likely to find the truth, and the truth is the best way to improve overall human wellbeing in the long run. Society should be configured to allow ‘persons of genius’ (male and female) the widest freedom to expand their minds, express their ideas and permit the free development of their individuality. It is only in such an atmosphere that exceptional individual talents can flourish and drive progress, dragging the whole of society with them on an upward march to civilization. Mill was keenly aware of just how rare and difficult it is to sustain the conditions in which genius can thrive. He thought that our mental powers are like muscles that weaken unless they are used regularly and vigorously. Censorship inhibits the exercise of our critical, deliberative faculties, which easily become flabby and dull. Instead, a climate should be fostered in which we are ‘forever stimulating each other to increased exercise of their higher faculties’ through open debate and the free exchange of ideas and opinions.

  Like Kant, Mill strongly opposed paternalism – forcing people to do things for their own good – which amounts to treating adults like children. Instead, he favoured a policy of laissez-faire, leaving people alone to find the form of life that suits each person in their own unique way. This precept applies only to those who are in the ‘maturity of their faculties’, which does not include children or ‘barbarians’. Paternalism is appropriate for the latter, and only until they become civilized adults capable of choosing for themselves, anticipating the consequences of their actions and accepting responsibility for them. Otherwise, individuals should be left alone, provided they leave others alone.

  Since humans are fallible creatures, according to Mill, we are easily prone to error in our beliefs. It is therefore crucial to allow opinions to be expressed openly so that, in the uninhibited clash of ideas, beliefs can be tested to see how they hold up under scrutiny. Mill did not naïvely assume that the truth would necessarily prevail in this contest, but he believed it far more likely that truth would emerge under such conditions than when beliefs were dogmatically shielded from examination and criticism. Anyone is potentially wrong, so no beliefs should be treated as sacrosanct and
placed beyond doubt. Human progress depends on the freedom to criticize and question. This was the main lesson and inspiration that Mill drew from the life and death of Socrates, whom he revered as a symbol of the heroic free-thinker standing up to the tyranny of the majority, for which he paid the ultimate price.

  Mill was no anarchist. Like Kant, he favoured freedom within limits that must sometimes be enforced by the state. People should be free to exercise their liberty only up to the point where they cause harm to others. The only purpose, he declares in On Liberty, ‘for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others’. As an opponent of paternalism, Mill did not believe that the state should act to prevent adults from harming themselves. So, our laws requiring the wearing of seat belts, for example, should have no place in a liberal state as Mill conceived of it. It is better to leave people to make mistakes and learn from them than to intervene to prevent self-harm.

  Mill was a democrat who voted for the extension of the franchise in 1867 when he was a Member of Parliament. At the same time, he shared his friend Tocqueville’s anxieties about the dominance of the poorly educated majority over the well-educated few. Therefore, he advocated a system of ‘plural voting’ in which every adult who could read, write and do basic arithmetic would get at least one vote, but those with a better education and possessing ‘mental superiority’ would get more votes, ‘as a counterpoise to the numerical weight of the least educated class’. It was very common in the nineteenth century to find support for such schemes, to limit what many saw as the brute power of democratic majorities. Like most liberals, Mill was a nervous democrat, and no populist. He wished to elevate the electorate as well as expand it. As a liberal who valued individual freedom, he saw the danger that the majority poses to minorities, and proposed his system of weighting votes as a means of balancing quantity with quality, as he saw it. He also favoured representative, not direct, democracy, and agreed with Burke’s case for elected representatives to be trustees of their constituents rather than their delegates. In his Autobiography, Mill recounts that he bluntly told local supporters who had asked him to stand for Parliament that, ‘if elected, I could not undertake to give any of my time and labour to their local interests’. He even planned to remain in France during the election campaign, although he eventually gave in to pressure to face the voters. He boasted during the campaign that he had written in a pamphlet that the working classes are ‘generally liars’, a statement that made its way on to a placard used in the election, which he won, to his astonishment, although he stopped just short of demanding a recount when he was unexpectedly and improbably declared the winner.