The politics of our time is the politics of the crisis of liberalism. I would like to suggest that at the foundation of the crisis of liberalism lies a crisis of sovereignty. Authority, as we shall see, is divided among institutions that are losing their hold on the sovereignty of citizens through a continuous process of erosion. The English philosopher James Harrington divided sovereignty into two central components: dominion and authority. We shall return to this distinction. For reasons of time, in this lecture I will focus on the component of authority within sovereignty. I will begin, then, by rehearsing some familiar points concerning the crisis of liberalism, and proceed to propose a model of civic sovereignty inspired by the republican tradition.
Patrick Deneen, in his successful book Why Liberalism Failed, describes a pincer movement that characterized the politics of recent decades in the United States: admirers of the free market brought about the dissolution of traditional communities and basic social functions, while admirers of state intervention enlarged the state so that it might perform functions that once belonged to civil society. The inevitable result of this dynamic was the growth of the bureaucratic apparatus throughout the Western states. Deneen’s book, however, joins a series of analyses of the political crisis afflicting Western countries. The general thesis emerging from the literature on populism and technocracy is that the traditional mechanisms of mediation—above all the parties and the “little platoons,” to quote Burke—have given way to bureaucrats and populists. The citizen is left naked before the bureaucratic power of the state and before the psychological pressure exerted by politicians in the national theater.
It has been said of Deneen that his analysis rests almost entirely on a false nostalgia for the past, and indeed there may be something to this. Nevertheless, his analysis, and those of others, reflects a prejudice concerning the nature of the citizenship that has been taken from us, and thereby blocks the path toward genuine solutions to the manifest crisis in which Western states find themselves. The prejudice, as we shall see, consists in a rather specific position concerning what constitutes the authority of citizens in liberal politics. I would like to argue that the root of the crisis of liberalism lies precisely in the particular forms of authority upon which contemporary political liberalism relies when it seeks to characterize the sovereignty of citizens.
The first part of this conception is decisionism. Decisionism is the view according to which the fundamental activity of the human being, insofar as he is a political creature, consists in deciding among options already available in advance. On this view, what characterizes sovereignty is our capacity to decide between alternatives concerning which no form of knowledge can possess authority over the choice. What we might call values-based politics.
The second part of this conception is that what characterizes human activity is knowledge concerning matters of procedure. Procedural matters implicitly encourage the view that there exists a form of knowledge whose authority derives from the neutrality of procedural effectiveness. It is easy to see how these two conceptions combine into a basic picture confronting the contemporary citizen. On the one hand, the educated stratum produces more and more domains of knowledge—chief among them the various management sciences and social sciences—which in turn claim more and more authority for themselves. On the other hand, various politicians extol their ability to conduct the orchestra of Leviathan by means of the capacity to decide precisely where no procedural knowledge capable of governing public affairs can exist. At bottom, then, MacIntyre’s critique in After Virtue, which in effect returns the modern crisis to territory already conceptualized and exemplified by Max Weber, still holds.
Yet the more fundamental question—what alternative stands before us—has still not received an answer. Even if “virtue ethics” in philosophy has produced several impressive works, its political expression remains obscure, caught between nostalgia and prior political commitments. Yet Israel is not bereft: the tradition of Western political philosophy, as well as the realities of Israel today, offer an opening for a renewal of the standing of the citizen. We shall now turn to the conceptual proposal that may, I believe, restore a certain model of civic authority and help us escape the trap of the crisis of liberalism.
To understand this solution in depth, we must return to the work of the historian John Pocock and to his conception—which unfortunately has found few continuators—that the origins of modern analyses of alienation lie not in one critical theory or another, but in the fundamental relationship between the citizen and his property. Pocock succeeded in showing that the common root of modern critiques, both in Marxist circles and in libertarian ones, in fact goes back to a tradition he called “neo-Harringtonian,” after John Harrington, the political philosopher who wrote the first comprehensive critique of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan.
At the foundation of the neo-Harringtonian critique lies the insight that citizenship is first and foremost a form of office, and that in order to fulfill it properly we require certain preconditions that are eroded, on the one hand, by the free market and, on the other, by the power of the state. If we wish to analyze the crisis of our time in a manner that is politically fruitful, we must therefore try to understand anew the roots of the analyses that our tradition fashioned for our political ethos. And to do so, if we take Pocock’s advice, we must return to Harrington.
In Harrington’s “Preliminaries” to his magnum opus Oceana, there are in fact three illustrations that will help us rethink the role of the citizen and the role of the public intellectual. But before turning to Harrington, we must first issue a warning that emerges from Pocock’s thought concerning a certain tendency in contemporary political philosophy.
Humanistic political philosophy rightly tended to discuss the question of what constitutes a successful citizen. The idea was that a good polity would be composed of citizens possessing what is called virtue, or men of excellence. The political question focused to a considerable extent on which institutions could educate the citizen to become virtuous. With Madison’s intervention in The Federalist, however, a new paradigm arose, one that we can identify retrospectively as one of the roots of political liberalism in its broad contemporary sense. In Federalist No. 51, Madison famously argued that the role of institutions is not to educate toward virtue, but rather to harness selfishness, or ambition, to the service of the whole. In The Federalist—for example, in No. 57—we still find a republican emphasis on institutions attempting to place men of excellence at their head.
Over time, however, as we can see with our own eyes, the emphasis on institutions as regulators gained primacy. While there is no doubt that the American institutions constructed on this principle succeeded for a long time in vindicating this thesis, it seems to me that classical humanistic thought has enjoyed a revival in our own time, as it has become evident that, although political institutions remain standing, the corruption of virtue has begun to make itself felt even within the most sophisticated political institutions known to us.
There is therefore no avoiding a return to the basic question: what constitutes a citizen who himself cares for the good of the whole? How does the private citizen, with his apparently selfish inclinations, succeed in rising above his private interest toward the general interest? The question, then, is not how to choose between technocracy and populism, but how we are to cultivate a civic elite that will care for the general interest. The institutional question will remain secondary. We must move from a discussion of institutions as regulators to a discussion of institutions as educators.
It is precisely at this point that Harrington offers us a complex argument for political authority of a particular kind through three illustrations. The first illustration, and perhaps the least familiar, concerns the question of what exactly the desired civic activity is: what does it mean to rise above private interest toward the general interest?
The example Harrington gives is that of a dish placed in the middle of the table from which everyone present is expected to eat. The dish, as it is understood here, is the res publica, public property. We must create citizens who, just as they would not lunge for the largest piece of meat merely because it happens to be closer to them, will likewise refrain from doing so when public property is at stake in its broadest sense. Thinkers such as Erasmus and Harrington call the virtue that makes this possible “manners.”
Yet unlike our contemporary conception of manners, what connects the dinner table with the public forum in this case is much more than table manners alone. In our own context, the thinker who maintained that the inherent connection between conduct in private encounters and conduct in the public sphere requires a certain form of decorum was Jabotinsky, when he wrote about the Betar principle of hadar.
This level is important for our understanding, because at its foundation lies the recognition that what is at stake here—unlike the classical citizen-soldier—is a quality that is, in the precise sense, social, and that allows people who are relatively independent of one another to cooperate. But how are such citizens to be produced? Here I suggest that we should read Harrington as proposing that the first function of institutions is to channel private interest toward the public interest. Yet thinking in this way about the authority of institutions presupposes, as we shall see, a necessary foundation: a form of knowledge that requires cultivation. From such a public, as we shall see, a natural aristocracy may emerge.
The second illustration that must be discussed in connection with Harrington’s argument for natural aristocracy seeks to explain what exactly is meant by a natural aristocracy. Harrington argued that if we take a group of twenty people, six of them will be the people whom the others are likely to look to in order to lead a common deliberation concerning their common good. According to him, human nature operates in such a way that it naturally divides citizens into those whose qualities enable such deliberation and those who are capable of understanding that deliberation.
According to Harrington, this is the natural foundation of the institution of the Roman Senate, and it is no accident that those who serve in that institution, beyond possessing great property, are the wise. At this point he even quotes Deuteronomy 1:13: “Choose for yourselves wise, understanding, and knowledgeable men from among your tribes, and I will set them over you.”
What is interesting about Harrington is that, unlike later readings of his philosophy, and especially, as noted, American readings, he appears to think that there is an anthropological or providential basis to the way people behave when gathered together. For our purposes, the important question is from what sort of gathering this aristocracy arises, and, far more importantly, to what sort of gathering it addresses its words.
In any case, we now arrive at the most famous illustration, the third illustration. In this illustration Harrington in effect analyzes the relationship between the majority—the fourteen people—and the minority engaged in deliberation, a relationship that makes it possible for an association of people with private interests to rise toward the public interest.
Here we encounter his famous example of distributive justice—although Harrington is plainly thinking of justice in a much broader sense, namely the justice involved in dividing roles in common deliberation and decision-making—through the example of two girls. According to him, simple justice is embodied in the practice familiar to any pair of girls when they have to eat a single cake: one girl cuts the cake, and the other chooses the piece she wants.
The immediate translation Harrington makes from this division to an institutional division reflecting the natural division within society may strike us today as almost hasty, yet the fundamental truth underlying his distinction remains valid. He holds that the deliberative body, the senate, should propose laws, and the popular house should reject or accept them.
Harrington’s implicit assumption that there is a natural or divine foundation for this social arrangement need not blind us to the fact that a basic sociological truth is involved. In every society, the natural talent of a minority for deliberation makes it possible to confront complex problems. His innovation is that we must notice that this minority speaks to its particular audience, to the rest of the society in question, rather than to its own interest. It offers its wares to the judgment of those who serve.
We thus arrive at my own proposal: a neo-Harringtonian reading of civic service. Property performs three central functions in Harrington, and these protect citizens from alienation—corruption, in the language of classical republicanism—or, in the more dramatic case, from violence within the state.
First, property keeps citizens relatively independent of plundering the public treasury or of the favors of various patrons. Second—and this is a motif found both in socialist thought and in liberal thought right up to the beginning of the twentieth century—property “teaches” a person to take responsibility and independently cultivate what he possesses. In the public sphere, where the “property” involved is far more complex and far larger, there is a need for people who know how to take care of things in their personal lives. Third, property gives people “something to lose,” and therefore makes them more cautious in their public lives. Thus, for example, in the mid-nineteenth century there was a convention, shared even by liberals such as John Stuart Mill, according to which people dependent on poor relief should not be entitled to vote.
In any event, I would like to propose service as a contemporary alternative—not only in the sense of the shared defense of the homeland, but also in its pedagogical role—on the way toward a thicker concept of citizenship, beyond that of a subject possessing various rights. In other words: what is the authority that the citizen must appropriate for himself?
Military service, which is paradigmatic for our purposes, takes years out of a person’s life in Israel. Let us take, for example, a role that until quite recently it was customary in our parts to disparage—though not in the pre-military academies—the role of the female observation soldiers.
These observation soldiers are eighteen-year-old girls who, after training, are given concrete responsibility: this section of the fence, from here to here, is your responsibility. In effect, each of them is entrusted with a part of the res publica and told: you are responsible for this. The work may be excruciatingly boring, but the responsibility, as we have learned to recognize, is heavy.
Beyond this, the observation soldier learns to operate within an organization belonging to the state, with all its virtues and especially all its shortcomings. She understands better, and not merely in theory, what the limits of power are and how an enormous bureaucratic body operates. A kind of living version of Catch-22. The observation soldier also places her life at risk.
It will be very difficult to deceive such a person, for example, with all sorts of implausible scenarios involving betrayal and conspiracy theories, which flourish precisely when the state is viewed as an external object. Her judgment, whether she realizes it or not, is reshaped not only in relation to the army and its limitations, but also in relation to the state. Furthermore, in the likely scenario in which this woman does not yet possess independent property of her own, service effectively makes her a trustee of public property for a limited period of time and, somewhat like the homo novus of the eighteenth century, teaches her what responsibility is.
Harrington divides the concept of sovereignty into two parts, only one of which—authority—receives attention in this lecture, for reasons of time. Every sovereignty is composed of relations of dominion and of authority.
We have seen, then, that the independence acquired by the observation soldier over the course of her service is not material independence—although the force of material independence has by no means disappeared—but independence of judgment, or, to formulate it more precisely, independence of practical wisdom. We can therefore map our solution, in general terms, as one that addresses authority in our time, but not relations of dominion in their classical sense within the republican tradition.
By participating within the system, the observation soldier: (a) places herself at a certain degree of risk; (b) becomes less dependent on either “alienated intellectuals” or “establishment intellectuals,” who tell different stories but are equally detached from the system; and (c) undergoes initiation into a concrete public institution.
Beyond this, we must return to the lessons we learned from Harrington. This is by no means a matter of “theoretical knowledge” that she acquires, nor is it training in decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Service may include these as well, but that is not the central point.
As a future participant in public debate, the virtue of her participation is not necessarily expressed in particular judgments that she will tend to adopt. It is first and foremost a type of activity whose relative virtue becomes apparent in the future interaction between her and her fellows. In other words, the claim concerns the potential inherent in a public deliberation in which most participants, or at least the leading participants, have undergone a similar process that transforms them into a civic elite.
To explain this, we must think briefly about the fundamental distinction drawn by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle between “knowing that” and “knowing how.” In brief, a person may know in theory how to drive perfectly while in practice having no driving experience whatsoever. Such a person knows many things “that” are true about driving, but we would not say that he knows how to drive. Knowing how to drive is a matter of “knowing how.”
Ryle in fact regarded the activity of theoretical deliberation itself not as a case of “knowing that,” but as a form of “knowing how.” We will not enter into his arguments on the subject. For our purposes, the example of driving teaches us a great deal.
Citizenship is a matter of life and death. Our thin conception of citizenship, according to which it is enough to be born in the State of Israel or to satisfy some regulation similar to that found in most modern nation-states, endangers Israel. We are, to some extent, behaving like people who entrust the process of decision-making to people who know how to be citizens only in theory; who know how to “drive” only in theory. I think the “road” of our state is beginning to look more and more like that.
Ryle teaches us one other important thing for our purposes: the practical knowledge accumulated in this manner is not a collection of behavioral dispositions. One can perhaps train a person to run toward danger, but one cannot train him into courage. One can train only daring. Courage requires an ongoing process of self-education concerning the question of which dispositions are to be applied in which situations.
When it comes specifically to intellectual virtues—the capacity to formulate, present, and persuade—these too are forms of “knowing how,” and they arise naturally in every society.
We have arrived, then, at the social “senate” we seek: the serving intellectuals. Put simply, citizens who have performed meaningful public service may engage in sustained deliberation among themselves.
Meaningful public service is in effect any form of service that succeeds in preserving most, if not all, of the functions we observed in the case of the observation soldier, even if it is not specifically military. So long as the reference point of the intellectuals is people possessing a similar independence in relation to the system, their common deliberation does not deteriorate into various forms of alienation from the state, whether as an oppressive object or as a divine object.
What distinguishes the leaders of the discussion, those six people we spoke of earlier, is a quality that tends wrongly to be attributed only to institutionalized intellectuals: the capacity to deliberate, weigh, and formulate the options facing the state.
Intellectuals of this kind—who are incomparably more numerous than the class called the intelligentsia—do not require an academic chair or one diploma or another. They grow naturally in relation to the society of those who serve, just as they grow in every society.
There may be other justifications for the independence of universities and research that are not directly connected to the public good. The serving intellectual, by contrast, is, in Harrington’s words, a natural product—of nature or of Providence.
At this point it is important to add a clarification regarding the nature of the knowledge acquired here and the conditions under which it may function at its best.
This is not knowledge acquired through the adoption of a neutral standpoint, as political liberalism seeks to promote and as bureaucracy tends by the very nature of its occupation to adopt. It is knowledge that derives its authority from shared experience in the common enterprise of the state.
Furthermore, this is not “personal” knowledge. An individual who has served may be inclined toward conspiracy theories, alienation, or utopianism. The claim is that insofar as the reference point of the discussion is a community composed for the most part of people who have served, alienated claims of this kind carry less weight within public deliberation.
This deliberative process confers authority upon the common practical knowledge accumulated in this way. Such knowledge is becoming a rare commodity in Israel today. The authority of shared knowledge of this kind is the alternative both to authority deriving from the capacity to decide, on the one hand, and to authority resting on theoretical knowledge, on the other.
The aspiration is, of course, to expand the community of those who serve to encompass the public as a whole. Yet we should not conceal the possible institutional implications of this distinction if it turns out that such an aspiration is not politically realistic.
We must protect public discourse in Israel. We need to think, then, not only about the fact that most of today’s first-grade pupils in Israel will not serve in the IDF in the future, and about the consequences of this for security, but also about its consequences for the character of public discourse. It seems to me that the roots of the erosion can already be seen today.
I can understand how attractive this sounds when everything works as intended, that is, when this serving elite remains impartial and objective, while the rest of the public retains full autonomy and legitimacy for their actions. But I cannot think of any period in history when such an arrangement has endured for any meaningful length of time.