"Is this really anything like what Socrates said?"

"Is Socrates guilty or innocent of the charges?"

"What are the motives of his accusers?"

"Why is Socrates so undiplomatic?"

We shall go through the work very quickly, without even my usual summaries, looking primarily at the kinds of arguments he uses to defend his own philosophy.  Then we can use that as a base for looking at one or two other early dialogues, perhaps one middle dialogue, and then on to the Seventh Letter.

I'll keep my remarks in this post, adding on to them on a regular basis, until it disappears from the main page, in which case I'll put up a Part II.

Then let us begin with Socrates' powerfully ironic introductory remarks.  Don't expect the briliant oratorical performance my accusers have warned you about.  This is just plain old Socrates with the simple language of the market place.  He is an Athenian Rick Perry, without cue cards or teleprompter, though, in the interest of full disclosure, he does have the most brilliant speechwriter who ever put words in his master's mouth.

The "Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking" introduction is the most ancient of wheezes, and it is designed to encourage the jury to let down their guard.  Later on, Aristotle will speak of the different kinds of appeals an orator can make, for example, the rational appeal (based obviously on reason and logic), the emotional appeal, which aims at swaying the subrational emotions of an audience, and the ethical appeal, which is not an appeal to moral principles but tries to use the character of the speaker as a tool.  If he is none to be a man of violent temper, he might say something about his bluff honesty, incapable of telling or suffering a lie.  The character Socrates/Plato sketches is of a plain man of the streets, unfairly accused of monstrous things, a guy like you and me, someone to have a beer and shoot the breeze with.  It's an excellent start and hits the right note.  "Me, an intellectual?  Not on your life!"

Rather than defend himself from the beginning against the accusers' actual charges, Socrates says he will first take up the old tittle-tattle against him.  This, too, is very effective, because he assumes quite rightly that the jurors have formed a negative impression of him.  Since childhood, everyone has heard tell of:

"one Socrates, a wise man, who speculated about the heaven above, and searched into the earth beneath, and made the worse appear the better cause. These are the accusers whom I dread; for they are the circulators of this rumor, and their hearers are too apt to fancy that speculators of this sort do not believe in the gods."

Here, Socrates is claiming not to belong to either category of intellectuals who might plausibly be accused of atheism or impiety:  1) The Ionian "physicists" (from Thales to Anaxagoras) who sought natural explanations for the universe and 2) Sophists who taught people to argue successfully in court or at the assembly, and "make the weaker/inferior  cause defeat the stronger/superior cause.  What he is disclaiming is any affinity with either Anaxagoras, the impious mentor of Pericles, or Protagoras and Gorgias.

In order to distinguish himself from the Sophists, he says he does not take money for his teaching.  Is that, really, a crucial distinction?  In the popular mind, perhaps it was, but like the Sophists, Socrates undermined conventional views of religion, morality, and politics.  Naturally, Socrates would claim--and I think quite rightly--that he was attempting to find a higher and purer foundation for both than was offered by conventional cults and Homeric mythology.

A juror might retort, however, that purity of motives and refusal to take money are not the issue.  What if Socrates took away traditional morality from his students and failed to inculcate the higher morality and religion?  If the result was Jack the Ripper, doesn't he bear some responsibility?  This, too, then is a question to ponder.  How far does an intellectual's responsibility for his students go?

To be continued . . .

In Greenblatt's fairy tale, Lucretius was a bold original thinker who jettisoned the traditional view that the world and its people were created by a loving god.  In depicting a universe made up of randomly associated atoms within a void, the atheist/secularist poet liberated his readers from both creatio ex nihilo and from the terrors of superstition.  Naturally, Lucretius' poem  had a huge impact—"once a widespread text"—but his work, because it conflicted with Christian cosmology,  eventually disappeared until it was rediscovered and copied by Poggio Bracciolini,  a very poor young man whose good handwriting got him a job as Papal secretary.  Poggio was so unhappy in Rome that he went out looking for manuscripts and found Lucretius.  Passing from hand to hand, De rerum natura goes on to influence Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Jefferson.

With all this dramatic excitement, it is small wonder that Robert Krulwich could not keep from giggling in his glee.   A few facts might sober him up.

1) The creation of the universe by a loving god is not the teaching of pagan philosophers who, for the most part, believed the universe had always existed and then was shaped by one or another forces or processes.

2) Lucretius was not a bold original thinker but a poet who versified the teachings of Epicurus, the founder of a major school of philosophy.  There is some academic discussion about other influences on the poet, particularly from the poet-philosopher Empedocles, but Lucretius was not an original  philosopher.  It is worth noting that the Epicureans were more doctrinaire than other schools and did not permit the members to depart much from the teachings of the founder.  Lucretius' contemporary Philodemus was more original, not only in writing verse, as Lucretius did, but in taking up subjects like literary theory despite the master's injunction to avoid culture like the plague.

3) Epicurus was not primarily a natural but a moral philosopher.  He borrowed his materialist physics from the atomists (Democritus and Leucippus).  For him great the moral objective  was to lead a life without worry and anxiety, devoting one's self  to pleasure and avoiding pain.  The terrors of religion and superstition, since they were a source of anxiety, had to be eliminated, which could only be done if one accepted a universe in which the gods played no part in human life and where all was determined by the motions of atoms.  Although he probably was some kind of atheist, Epicurus and his students did not preach atheism,  probably out of a desire to avoid public blame.  Interestingly, Epicurus (and Lucretius) were not especially interested in science for its own sake:  Any explanation was acceptable so long as it eliminated the gods.  This is bad-faith atheism on a grand scale, and Greenblatt, who is obviously infatuated with falsehood, is right to embrace it.

4) Lucretius was an important but not dominant figure in Latin literature.  He clearly influenced Vergil and St. Jerome refers to him as having been driven mad by a love potion.  Though the story is probably nonsense, it would reflect unease with Lucretius' glaring misogyny.  I wonder how Greenblatt will explain that to his feminist colleagues.  There is no need to explain his disappearance.  His contemporary Catullus., too, survived in a small number of mss., and Catullus' equally important contemporaries are gone.  Consider what we know of Greek tragedy.  There were at least five major tragic writers and at least three great writers of Attic Old Comedy.  We have about 10% of the corpus of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and none of Ion and other notable writers.  In Old Comedy we  have only one out of three, Aristophanes, and only a selection of his plays.  For Aristotle, we have only the lectures he delivered to his students and none of his public work, for Plato we have the opposite problem.  The writings that did survive tend to be those that were used in school, and there is no need for a special explanation for the disappearance of Lucretius or for large sections of Livy.

4) Poggio liked to claim poverty—it made his success all the brighter—but his father did manage to procure him an excellent classical education in Florence, and it was his beautiful Latin stye and knowledge of Greek (certainly as much as his hand)  that endeared him to the papacy.  He needed no special impetus to go out searching for mss.  It was the great obsession of Petrarch and all his disciples.

5) While Montaigne was certainly fortified by Lucretius' secularist contempt for religion, his significance lay more in the realm of literature: The rediscovery of a lost masterpiece  was an event that brought joy to lovers of classical antiquity—every educated person down to WW II.

In short, Greenblatt's secularist  morality play is exactly what one expects from an English major who decides to dabble in fields that require actual knowledge rather than the verbal agility expected of literary interpreters who make it up as they go along.   If one brief interview can be as hilarious as this, then his book The Swerve (Norton Publishing) promises to be a laugh-riot.

Shame on Norton for publishing such a book, shame on Harvard for hiring  Greenblatt, and shame on NPR for not employing a single person with the knowledge once expected of an ordinary schoolboy.

To anticipate some of my conclusions, I shall put my cards on the table by listing  some of the hallmarks of the liberal tradition—a tradition, I hasten to add, to which most conservatives have belonged.    In The Morality of Everyday Life,  I took up—and, I believe, successfully rebutted—three important and interrelated liberal assumptions, which can be summarized as rationality, objectivity, and universality.

Rationality

In liberal ethical and political theories,  it is assumed though rarely stated that rationality can be applied to human questions much as it is applied to mathematics or physics.  Although Descartes was far from being the first to act on this assumption—the fallacy goes back at least to Socrates and Plato—his relentless insistence on rationality makes him one of the most important founders of the liberal tradition.    By necessity, liberals must be either religious skeptics or at least suspicious of any revelation or tradition that might take precedence over reason,

Objectivity

Liberals also assume that mere relationships have little or no bearing on questions of moral or political responsibility.  We are supposed to view our own position from the third person, as it were, as if we were a distant observer or an extraterrestrial being or an impartial spectator.  Such an assumption means, to take an example from Kant, that a mother's love for her children is not moral, because it is neither rational nor objective.

Universality

All rational and objective moral and political decisions must be applied universally, either uniformly to all human individuals (as in all humans have a right to life and property) or to all persons in similar circumstances.  A mother's love, thus,  must also be non-moral because it cannot be applied to the entire human race or to all children.  Following this reasoning, some Catholic women—not the most balanced, certainly—have offered to "adopt" discarded embryos which they would have implanted in their own wombs.

Moral and Political Actors:  The Individual and the State

While pre-liberal thinkers conceived of what has been called the corporate nature of man, liberals tend to reduce all forms of community and association to individuals.  If they are anarchists, liberals are content with individualism, but if they concede the need for some corporate existence, they tend to invest the State and only the state with authority.  Villages, parishes, provinces, traditional corporations—all, though their existence may be tolerated—must bow to the state, because it is the state that protects the rights and/or satisfies the needs of the Individual.

Sentimental Anti-Christianity

But there are other significant tendencies in the liberal tradition.  It is not only the elevation of rationality that makes them generally hostile or at least indifferent to Christianity.  The godfathers of liberalism—the Renaissance humanists and neo-Platonists—were generally opposed to the Christian traditions that developed in the Medieval period, which they characterized—whether or not they used the term Dark Ages—as an age of superstition and barbarism.  They were nostalgic in elevating classical antiquity—which they misunderstood as an age of religious skepticism—to the heights of human achievement but also progressive in expecting to equal or surpass the ancients.  The famous quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns can be seen, then, as a family feud among liberals.

Yet, while rejecting (overtly or not) Christianity, they naively accepted many Christian ideals—particularly brotherhood and philanthropy. One would have thought they would have quickly understood that questions of social justice could be as easily dispensed with as Confession or the Mass, but few were as bold as Hobbes or Nietzsche in regarding power as an ultimate principle or even summum bonum.

Human Dignity

Whether individualistic or statist, many liberals (until the rise of environmentalism) have liked to speak of the dignity of man, who is elevated to something like a god.  This tendency is exemplified by Pico della Mirandola in his famous oration.  What is often overlooked or deliberately omitted is Pico's contempt for Christianity and his pursuit of the dangerous magic of demons that live beyond the planetary spheres.  If Pico and the alchemists are read carefully, one begins to understand the modern obsession with space exploration, cloning, and the creation of life.  If man is truly to become a god, he must display the power and attributes of the Christian God, while refuting, at the same time, the claim that God was unique in creating life on earth.

The Human Blank Slate

Finally, although this list could certainly go on for many pages, the tendencies toward rationality and away from tradition encouraged many liberals to simplify human nature and to by sympathetic to Locke's theory that the human mind, far from being conditioned by either biology or Aristotelian categories, is really a blank slate on which the progressive reformer is free to write anything he likes, whether the message is communism or free love.  Naturally, when the blank slate gets in the way of some strange hypothesis—Freud's libidinism or the homosexualist argument that they cannot help being born the way they are—they cheerfully ignore it.

It took several centuries for liberalism to reach its culmination in people like Godwin and Mill and Mises, and along the way many liberals were contaminated by such illiberal concerns as Christian faith (Acton), the supreme cultural value of  the classics (JS Mill),  an appreciation of tradition (Sir Henry Sumner Maine) or national community (Lecky and T.H. Green), or a sense of horror at the immoral conclusions to which the movement was tending (Fitzjames Stephen), and while I shall note some of these wholesome aberrations and speak in defense of their sanity, I do not wish to lose sight of the objective, which is to describe and categorize the beast we can call Homo liberalis.

To avoid turning this into an exercise in intellectual history--a more tedious exercise I cannot imagine--let us turn immediately to Bernard Mandeville, a bold and original mind who put squarely on the table the "virtue of selfishness" centuries before that dreadful female created her cult of delusional Untermenschen.

If readers are up to it, this could restart and refocus an old conversation in a less polemical vein.  My intention is to show the extent to which liberalism reflects certain decent aspirations of Western Christendom, but ultimately creates a movement that undermines and destroys the foundations.  Mandeville's Fable of the Bees is as good as any place to start.

Born in the small town of Charmes in Lorraine, he attended a lycée in nearby Nancy, the locale for one of his most influential books (Les déracinés).  In Paris he became, though the combination is somewhat paradoxical, a Romantic individualist, a socialist, and increasingly a nationalist.  Eventually, it was the nationalism that triumphed, though of a peculiar sort, rooted in the soil of Lorraine.  Lorraine, especially in the East along the Rhine, was very much a frontier zone between France and Germany, but it also gave birth to Jeanne d'Arc, the embodiment of the French nation.  Barrès was very alive to this paradox, and, much as South Texans are among the most passionately American people in the United States, Lorrainers could be more self-consciously French than the inhabitants of more secure regions.  Tragically, large parts of Lorraine were surrendered to the Germans in 1870, at the end of Louis Napoleon's ill-advised war.  Barrès was eight years old.

The author's Lorraine, then, was occupied territory undergoing its own kind of Reconstruction, as the German Empire did its best to Germanize the population.  Barrès, ardent Lorrainer and ardent French nationalist, beat the drum emphatically for the bloody and costly revenge known as the First World War.  Colette Baudoche, published in 1908, is both a fine work of fiction and a magnificent piece of nationalist and regionalist propaganda.

I picked up this book from my modest French collection over the weekend for the sole purpose of practicing the language.  While I admire Barrès for Les déracinés (the uprooted), a novel that takes up the evil effects of cosmopolitanism on intelligent young men from Nancy, and La colline inspirée, a reflective essay on the significance of landscape and geography for human culture, I did not expect to be more than mildly interested in this novel.  Instead, I could hardly put it down and set aside a new Wodehouse book (The Girl on the Boat) I was looking forward to reading in my hammock as my patient wife labored in her garden.

Colette Baudoche, which is quite short,  is available online.  By the time I get into the book, some form of our forum should be operating.

The novel is set in Metz in the early 20th century.  Colette and her grandmother occupy one floor of a respectable house.  The conquest of Metz, the death of Colette's father, and the departure of most of their relatives have left them impoverished but  respectable.  Neither has much use for Germans, and the grandmother has bitter memories of the conquest and humiliation imposed by the people they call, alternately, Prussians and Schwobs.   The two ladies keep body and soul together by making dresses, a task that keeps them occupied a good twelve hours a day.  To make ends meet--and to scrape together a small dowry for Colette--Mme Baudoche has decided to rent out the nicer half of their apartment, but months have passed and there are no takers.  Ironically, they do get a tenant, a young German teacher from Koenisburg.

Dr. Asmus is part German stereotype--a giant with big hands with crude manners and clumsy sentimentality--and part Romantic idealists.  Unlike too many of his colleagues, he looks forward to the opportunity of improving his French.  While he stolidly insists upon the superiority of Germans in nearly every respect, he cannot help admiring the neatness of the French, their cheerfully mocking spirit, their sense of beauty.  The subject of the novel is his growing love of all things French, including, naturally young Colette.

But I did not select this novel for the love story.  What is most interesting is Barrès celebration of Lorraine (and France) and his portrayal of a decent German whose reading of Goethe and other great German writers has rendered capable of appreciating it.  I'll briefly take up the three scenes in which Asmus confronts the subtle elegance of free Nancy, appreciates the faded beauties of a village under German occupation, and a witnesses a memorial service for the French soldiers killed in resisting the Germans.  Before that, however, there is Barrès' own philosophy to consider.

Barrès regards Metz less like a provincial town and more like a city-state with its own civic identity.  In my next Chronicles piece I had intended to take this up but ran out of space.  Near the beginning he comments:

"The Messins (people of Metz, pronounced Mess in French) before the war, all soldiers or relatives of soldiers, lived in daily contacts with the agricultural region.  The rentiers had their farms there, the merchants their buyers, and the most modest family family dreamed of a country house where each autumn they would go to supervise the grape harvest.  All that produced an atmosphere very proper to the conservatijon of the old French type.  Who has not known, reflected on this city, perhaps does not know the value of a civilization formed in the habits of agriculture and war."

I think Southerners, especially, can appreciate this.

In the course of this brief tale, the somewhat comical Asmus becomes more and more infatuated with the decency of French culture, the restraint, the light-heart, the cleanliness.  Spending the day in Nancy, he is enchanted with the Place Stanislas, named, I can only imagine, for Louis XV's Polish father-in-law who was given Lorraine to rule before it was incorporated into France.  As he falls in love with France, Asmus naturally is falling for Colette, whom he cannot help mentally contrasting with the philosophically serious Brunhilde he left behind.  In the beginning he reads her pretentious letters to the French ladies and proudly shows off the scarf she has knitted from her own hair.

I He rejects the interpretation that the FR was the culmination of a conspiracy to destroy Christianity and/or the Catholic Church;

II He sees the FR as a continuation of the Ancien Régime's centralization of France and thinks that centralization weakened and undermined all local administration, making it impossible for local communities to govern themselves;

III He regards egalitarian democracy as a rabid force which, if left unchecked by any principles of merit, protection of property, or regard for liberty, will become tyrannical.  He is thus a moderate democratic republican and thinks that basically classical liberal principles can be used to tame the beast.

In the next week or two, I am happy to give my views and am putting out a call for your opinions.

Early Wodehouse

A few months ago I decided I would look into some rather early Wodehouse to see how he developed.

I read, in no orderly sequence, Mike and Psmith, Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Picadilly Jim, Damsel in Distress,  and The Coming of Bill. They were all delightful, but the first two contain so much cricket that I began to study the rules of the game.  The earlier novels are conventional in form,  less brilliantly plotted, and only occasionally marked by the dotty brilliance one comes to expect.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed them enormously.  Psmith Journalist is the most unusual, since it comes close to being an edgy crime thriller set in New York and based on the exploits of a real gang.  In the latter three, however, the future master is already showing his hand.  There is a reason why many of the best English writers of the last century adored Wodehouse, and these earlier works show the milieu that produced such a man.  Psmith in the City, in fact, gives us a glimpse of PGW's early days working in a bank.

In case you are one of those  philistines who think Wodehouse is of inferior brain for writing light fiction, I recommend the earliest work on this list, Mike and Psmith, a lighthearted school memoir.  Wodehouse already shows a settled world view, which might be described as a cross between Jorrocks and Machiavelli.  Like Trollope, who gave himself away a bit only in the earlier works like The Warden,  Wodehouse is too clever to show his hand, ordinarily, but in this early story, Psmith (the P is silent as in psychology) asks his new pal Mike, if he minds being addressed as comrade.  "I've just become a socialist.  It's a great scheme.  You ought to be one.  You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it."  The story was first published in 1909, eight years before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, and nearly 50 years before the slightly ex-Communist Milovan Djilas made a similar point in The New Class.  As our drab world goes from brown to black, at least we have the art of earlier generations to cheer us up, Mozart and Hayden, WS Gilbert and PG Wodehouse.

29 March 2011

The Origins of Freemasonry, by David Stevenson.  Cambridge University Press,  1988.

Most of what has been published about the origins of Freemasonry is either reckless myth-making or outright lies.  The nonsense concocted by Masonic "writers" is bad enough, but somewhat worse are the paranoid fantasies of the anti-Masonic conspiracy theorists, whose scholarship and honesty is slightly lower than Dan Brown's.  David Stevenson was a sober, sometimes pedantically dull Professor of Scottish History at St. Andrews.  In The Origins of Freemasonry, Stevenson traces the transformation of masonic guilds in Scotland from the typical late Medieval craft association to the semi-occult band of enlightened brothers whose illuminist descendants in Paris's Grand Orient Lodge would hatch the French Revolution.

What became Freemasonry was originally nothing more sinister than a set of craft guilds to promote the interests of stone-masons, builders, and architects.  Unlike the guilds of doctors and goldsmiths, the Masonic guilds could not be merely local, because masons travelled all over Europe and spent years or even decades on big jobs like cathedrals, palaces, and fortifications.  Their lodges were in fact the cabins in which they had to live on the job site, and their emphasis on benevolence and brotherhood was essential to workers from different towns, regions, and even countries, who needed to work together for extended periods of time.

By the later Middle Ages, most craft guilds developed sets of rituals and myths and adopted symbols to strengthen the solidarity of members. Inevitably, they turned to antiquity, both to the Bible and to the pagan traditions.  Physicians invoked patronage of the divine Aesclepius and Apollo as well as the human Hippocrates.  The Masons had a rich body of myth to turn to: the builders of Solomon's temple, and the exaltation of the architect as mathematician provided by the Augustan architect and engineer, Vitruvius.

Stevenson is weakest on Renaissance intellectual history, where he relies heavily on the important but sometimes misleading accounts of Frances Yates, who sometimes seems to write as if she were an apologist for the neopagans.  It was at the beginning of the Renaissance when Vitruvius'  book on architecture was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini in 1410.  Poggio was the disciple of Petrarch and one of the earliest Florentine humanists. (Born in Terranuova near Arezzo).

Poggio represents the more benign aspect of Renaissance humanism, whose goals were the rediscovery and elucidation of ancient works, the restoration of classical Latin, and the acquisition of Greek, but another agenda was being pursued by his contemporaries like Ficino, Pico and their more radical disciples, and that is, the recovery of the perennial wisdom or perennial theology found in Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus, Egyptian mysteries (Iamblichus and Hermes Trismegistus), and the so-called Chaldean oracles.  Interestingly enough, the two traditions collided in the 17th century, when the French Protestant humanist, Isaac Casaubon, proved that the writings of Hermes were not an ancient predecessor of Plato and Moses and the NT, but a fake concocted in late antiquity by someone who had read Greek philosophy, and the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.

In Scotland, where the Masonic guilds came under the supervision of  royal officials, the new Hermetic learning was incorporated into the Masonic propaganda.  The intentions were harmless enough, and since many architects were gentleman amateurs, their membership in the lodges made masonry so respectable and even fashion that gentlemen of all sorts began to be accepted as non-operative members, who wanted to enjoy the good fellowship of the brotherhood. The Masonic principles of friendship and brotherhood were very popular in the 16t and 17th century, as people grew weary of religious strife between Catholics and Protestants.  The Reformation also influenced the development of Scottish Masonry in another, profounder manner.  Calvinism, in eliminating the rituals and pageantry of Christianity, had punched a great hole into the lives of ordinary people.  If they could not have costumes and ceremonies in their churches, they could develop them in the lodges, and what was more fitting than all the mumbo-jumbo of occultism?

Masonry went in a number of directions.   The Stuart pretenders to the English throne, for example, used the lodges to recruit followers and plot their counter-revolution.  By the middle of the 17th century, many  lodges had accepted the Egyptian mythology and hermetic ideology, along with a rationalist insistence upon the universality of religious principles--always a sign of de-Christianization.  Ironically, it was probably the Jacobites who introduced Freemasonry into France after the Glorious Revolution.  But that is another story.

In his first and vitally important chapter, Tocqueville says that true aristocracies impose their system of values on a nation, but in France the nobles permitted the philosophes to impose their ideology not only on the education of the young but also even onto the edicts of the regime which began to speak of human rights.

The intellectual conflict in the 18th century was between the Church, whose traditions upheld the faith, and a superficial philosophy that disdained both faith and tradition.  Fortunately, the ghastly revolution, he argues, had sobered up the French.  What AT failed to understand is that the progress of revolution often takes a step backward before taking two steps forward.  While public atheism was no longer fashionable in his day, Catholic piety remained on the fringe in French life, and it stayed there throughout the 20th century down to today.

While the philosophes often prated about liberty, their real dream was of equality and unity.  "Not only did they loathe certain privileges, diversity itself was odious."  By diversity, obviously, AT did not mean multi-culturalism and pandering to racial minorities, but the existence of social and cultural distinctions.   These distinctions, which were the cause of the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of the regime, were part of the odious legacy of feudalism, which the philosophes and the economists (early classical liberals) wanted to eliminate.  (By the way,  from the beginning the economists/liberals/libertarians showed themselves the enemies of society and civilization.)

The past was wrong, they said, and even such things as inherited land boundaries were objects of suspicion.  The task of the economists, as they saw it, was to seize power in the state and use it to reshape society and human nature itself.  This power did not derive from God or the king.  "It did not have ties to tradition; it was impersonal; no longer called the king but the state, no longer the inheritance of one family but the result of and representative of all.  The rights of each citizen had to yield to the will of all."

AT dwells at some length on The Code of Nature written, supposedly, by one Morelly, which may well have been a pseudonym.  The Code anticipates Proudhon and Marx in its treatment of property.  Combined with the economists's theories, Morelly's fantasy is a recipe for the total state.  But the philosophes, as critical as they were of the Ancien Regime, were enthusiastic about state power, and Voltaire rejoiced when the parlements were eliminated, precisely because they served as a barrier to total power.

Laws, customs, traditions, religion, and social distinction—all were to be dissolved by the unitary power of the state, acting on rational principles for the good of all.

AT argues quite persuasively (in chapter 4) that the reign of Louis XVI was a time of rapidly increasing prosperity.   While taxes and laws were often quite unequitable, they were ameliorated in their application.  The rising public debt, partly the result of France's support for the American Revolution, affected only a few people, the rich who held government bonds or whose business depended upon government support.  They, the members of the upper business class, can usually be counted on to resist change and prop up the regime on whose stability they so much depend.  In this case, however, it was the business classes who demanded immediate reforms that amounted to revolution.

To be continued

Since all human institutions are corrupt, and since corruption can be traced to complexity, it follows that simplification of society will eliminate corruption.  AT is right in his analysis, though it is sometimes difficult to comprehend how such naïve twaddle could have made any headway whatsoever.  Some of the philosophes' boldness and success, AT attributes to the fact that intellectuals could not participate in politics.  Being without influence and experience, they were free to spin theories which other people without experience were happy to accept.

No one could challenge the nonsense, because the aristocracy was no longer a real aristocracy either in the moral or the sociological sense.  An aristocracy, as AT (anticipating Mosca) argues, imposes its values and world view on the classes that hope to emulate its betters, but in the Ancien Régime the aristocrats allowed the philosophes to form the character of  their children, much as American businessmen allow their own children's minds to be ruined by Ivy League professors and their disciples who teach in prep schools.

To be continued

AT lays his groundwork carefully.  He wants to show that the Revolution started in France, not because it was either more despotic or more impoverished, but precisely because there were so many land-owning peasants on whom the burden of taxes fell, causing them to hate the privileges of the aristocracy, who no longer were permitted to discharge their duties as responsible local magnates.  Local aristocrats no longer had administrative duties, he says, which were assumed by royal officials from the bourgeoisie.

Widespread property ownership began before and not as a result of the FR; indeed, he argues, it was a cause of the resentments that made it possible for the radicals to stage their coup in Paris.  "The French peasant had become a landowner, on the one hand, and, on the other, had completely freed himself from the dominances of his lord."  Thus he was acutely aware of aristocratic privileges.

In chapter two, he shows to what extent the centralization of the regime had replaced the old feudal political structures and paved the way for the FR's program of centralization.

By the 18th century, the powers to tax, maintain order, and provide public services were no longer vested in the historic municipalities that had secured charters in the later Middle Ages, but in royal officers appointed by the King and his ministers.  Even the needs of the poor had been centralized: "No one now had the legal duty of bothering with the poor in the countryside,  The central government had taken the foolhardy step of alone providing for their needs."

Tocqueville does concede that for a time "municipal freedom in France survived feudalism."  However, the royal government gained control over municipal offices and repeatedly sold them either to individuals or, for a fee, regranted municipal liberties only to reacquire and resell them.  In other words, it  was a fund-raising scam.

AT makes a general conclusion: "Almost every ruler who has destroyed freedom sought at first to keep its outward form.  This has been evident from Augustus down to the present day."  This general law is perhaps truer of the USA, where the genus of suckers known as conservatives is forever blathering about the Constitution, deluded by the pious references of the ruling class to that discarded document that all we need to make it morning again in America is to join Glen Beck in upholding a document that he of all people does not understand.  Augustus, to his credit, was trying to restore republican virtue and a measure of civil liberties to a society that had been destroyed by greed, class envy, and civil war.  What excuse the Americans have I cannot imagine.

Thus in the 18th century, certain outward forms of town government were maintained, but the reality was a network of tiny oligarchies that controlled local life under the authority of royal government.  Country parishes and towns did have opportunities and forums at which the people could blow off steam.  Thus, "When one compares this empty show of liberty with the genuine powerlessness which accompanied it, you, on a small scale, already see how the most absolute of governments can co-exist with some of the most extreme features of democracy, to such an extent that to this oppression is added the absurdity of being blind to its presence."

Anyone for tea?

(In II.4) One means of centralizing authority, used by the old regime but very familiar to us, was the transfer of judicial responsibility from traditional courts to a system of administrative law.  One effect of this transformation was to turn political contests into struggles over administrative control.  The administrators' thirst for power is almost always boundless, as is their contempt for the ability of ordinary people to run their own lives.  (II.6).  "What already typified French administration was the violent hatred it felt against all those nobles and middle-class citizens who wished to run their own affairs beyond the reach of teh government.  It was unnerved by the smallest independent body which appeared to want to come into being without its support.  The most modest free association. whatever its aims,was irksome to the authorities, which sanctioned only those they had set up arbitrarily and had control over."

One could cite countless examples.  Let one suffice.  The current belief, held fanatically by virtually everyone in government, that parents cannot be trusted to rear their own children or make decisions about their schooling.  The ideal solution, of course, is universal government schooling, but failing that private schools have to be licensed, regulated, and controlled, and independent-minded parents must be subjected to friendly visits from objective-minded experts who only have the child's best interests at heart.

Once again, I have to remind you all, that the Ancien Regime, while it interfered in the political process and regulated economic affairs, did not stick its nose into private life.  Even so, it used the technique, so familiar to us, of encouraging a bogus public "freedom of expression" to encourage the delusion that people free to discuss stupid ideas have the reality of political liberty.  "Since Frenchmen must always be allowed the sop of a little flexibility, to console them for their enslavement, the government allowed them to discuss very freely all kin of general and abstract theories in matters of religion, philosophy, ethics, and even politics.  It was quite willing to tolerate attacks against the fundamental principles upon which society then rested and even arguments about God  Himself, provided that is most menial agents were not the subject of their ramblings."

Today, of course, attacks on God and society are the principles on which the regime rests, but it is quite comfortable in tolerating the pseudo-opposition of talkshow hosts and websites so long as they do not get in the way of business.  When someone does, say Julian Assange, he finds himself the target of malicious prosecution.

More to come . . .