Liberty or Equality

NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

On the early horror for the republican form of government cf. John C. Miller, Origins of the American Revolution (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), p. 499.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

Among other authors who have stressed the distinction between democracy and liberty cf. G. Frh. v. Hertling, Recht, Staat und Gesellschaft (Kempten and Munich: Josef Kösel, 1907), p. 146; Adalbert Stifter, “Der Staat II.” in Constitutionelle Donauzeitung, No. 18 reprinted in Politisches Vermächtnis (Vienna: Klassiker der Staatskunst, Braumüller, 1950). Among American sources Everett Dean Martin’s Liberty (New York: Norton, 1930) has perhaps the greatest value (cf. especially p. 126). The author, a Congregationalist minister and writer, was a critically gifted thinker of keen insight.

“It has been said that the best leaders are those with ordinary opinions and extraordinary abilities, those who hold the opinion of the generation in which they live, uphold it with such vitality, perceive it with such executive insight, that they can walk at the front and show the paths by which the things generally purposed can be accomplished.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

Some politicians are Republican, some Democratic
And their feud is dramatic.
But except for the name
They are indentically the same,

and see also the remark of President Eliot of Harvard, as quoted by Henry James, Charles W. Eliot (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1930), II, 230.

The spiritual pitfalls of “popular sovereignty” can be gathered from Napoleon’s cynical declaration: “Voudrait-on rétablir la souveraineté du peuple? Eh bien, dans ce cas, je me fais peuple; car je prétends être toujours là on se trouve la souveraineté.” (See Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe, ed. Levaillant, II, 481.)

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR

Yet how different were the views of Gouverneur Morris, to whom monarchy appeared to be one of the soundest forms of government. He wrote to Robert Walsh in 1811: “History, the parent of political science, had told them [the framers of America’s Constitution] that it was almost as vain to expect permanency from democracy as to construct a palace on the surface of the sea.”—In Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris with Selections of His Correspondence (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1832), III, 263. On the person and views of Morris cf. Daniel Walther, Gouverneur Morris, témoin de deux révolutions (Lausanne: Imprimerie Merinat, 1932).

Of considerable importance for the whole subject matter (i.e., monarchy and Christianity) is Erik Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem (Leipzig: Jakob Hegner, 1935), which moves in categories different from those we have adopted. Peterson decidedly rejects the notion of a Christian “political theology.”

Also there can be, too, a certain antagonism and rivalry between family and state. Cf. Wilhelm Stekel (an ex-Freudian), Sadism and Masochism: a Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty (New York: Horace Liveright, 1929), II, 69. A brilliant essay on democracy as a “fraternal” and anti-patriarchal, non-theistic and anti-familistic movement has been written by Jean Lacroix, “Paternité et démocratie,” Esprit, XV, No. 133 (May, 1947), especially pp. 748–50.—Also incorporated in J. Lacroix, Force et faiblesse de la famille (Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1948).

E. Faguet similarly demonstrated his knowledge of the incompatibility between democracy and the family spirit (Le culte de l’incompétence, pp. 141–43), and Geoffrey Gorer used the absence of a strong patriarchal tradition in the United States as the guiding idea in his book The American People (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948).

Pascal has written with deep insight on the relation between love and reason, delineating their common ground; cf. his “Discours sur les passions d’amour,” part of “Un fragment inédit de Pascal,” ed. Victor Cousin, Revue des deux mondes, Nouvelle série, XIII (1843), Sept. 15, p. 1005.

In unguarded moments Jefferson even slipped into the jargon of anti-popular reactionaries—as, for instance, when he used the expression “the swinish multitudes”; cf. his letter to Mann Page, August 30, 1795, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed Paul Leicester Ford (New York: Putnam, 1896), II, 24. Still, it should not be forgotten that American Left-wing organizations featured Jefferson very widely and that the American Communists held their meetings frequently under huge Jefferson portraits. The Jefferson-cult reached during World War II its climax. Lord Acton pointed out that Jefferson “subverted with his doctrines the republicanism of America, and consequently the Republic itself.” Cf. his “Political Causes of the American Republic,” in Acton, Op. cit., pp. 212–13. Still, in the Washington Edition of Jefferson’s Works we find only a single friendly reference to democracy, in a letter written to Dupont de Nemours in 1816 (Vol. VI, p. 589, Ford Edition, Vol. X, p. 22).

Yet a genuine patriarchal mentality is almost inseparable from clemency. Montesquieu even insisted that clemency is the main characteristic which distinguishes a monarchy from a republic: cf. De l’esprit des lois, Book VI, Chapter xxi.

Treitschke was convinced that the Roman Cæsarate never became a genuine monarchy (Politik, pp. 196–97). Metternich saw in the Roman emperors nothing but “early Bonapartists” (Aus Metternichs nachgelassenen Papieren, III, 236–37).

The observation of Evelyn Waugh, that “many American prelates speak as though they believed that representative majority government were of divine institution,” can, under the circumstances, not be brushed aside as entirely irrelevant. (See his article “The American Epoch in the Catholic Church,” Life, International Edition, VII, No. 8 [Oct. 10, 1949], pp. 55–63). Obviously there must be a connection between this fact and his insinuation that “the lay American Catholic insists more emphatically on his ‘Americanism’ than do Protestants or atheists of, perhaps, longer American ancestry.” The latter remark has also been made by Dean Sperry of Harvard in Religion in America. One sees what havoc has perhaps been wrought with the universal accusation against the Catholic that he is not sufficiently provincial-minded, i.e., “patriotic.”

On the influence of thinkers and philosophers on monarchs cf. J. S. Mill, “On Representative Government,” in Utilitarianism, Liberty and Representative Government (London: J. M. Dent, 1926), p. 184.

Calvin himself was no democrat, but through the dialectics of his theology he has laid the foundations of democracy more effectively than Luther who, as a Reformer, was less radical than his colleague in Geneva.

Obviously the “generosity” of Francis Joseph was morally permissible only in a non-democratic, basically liberal world with a fair amount of self-government, where a transfer of sovereignty does not imply a complete change in our way of life or methodical extermination of all dissenters.

How well disciplined soldiers were, and how humanely they behaved even as late as the mid-nineteenth century, may be seen in the little book Zwei Monate preussisch (Brünn: Redaktion der “Neuigkeiten,” 1866). The Abbé Raynal, on the other hand, wrote with great insight in spite of his republican convictions as long as 170 years ago: “Peace and security are necessary to the monarchies; the republics need restlessness and menace of an enemy.”—Cf. his Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce dans les Indes (Geneva: J. L. Pellet, 1780), IX, 381. And it is worth noting that no less than fifteen Presidents of the United States out of thirty-two had had officer’s rank, or had seen active service in either the Army or the Navy of the United States. Nor is it the picture of the President of the Swiss Confederation which adorns public buildings in the Helvetic Republic, but always the General of the last mobilization period.

Republican systems often develop a cold statism which in turn provokes the cry for the pseudo-patriarchal leader. Such was also the view of Simone Weil in her L’Enracinement (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), p. 120.

We only hope that it is not necessary to deal with the old nihilistic argument of the democratists maintaining that expert knowledge is “worthless” since there are so many expert opinions on one and the same subject. One can only hope that the defenders of the democratic myth will find out some day that a medical expert sitting in council with three others is a very different matter from a naïve, if well-meaning layman facing three doctors furiously contradicting each other. Even if the former has to listen to three divergent views he still might be able to co-ordinate these opinions or, at least, to extract some positive knowledge from them; yet the layman faced by the bitterly quarrelling physicians is lost since he has no knowledge to evaluate their views. All he can do is either to “fall” for one of the opinions, to make a fatal cocktail out of them or thoroughly confused by the lack of unanimity give up the reasoning process and to rely on his own “hunches” or “intuitions”—à la Hitler and Roosevelt.

On the inferior intellectual qualities of the big majorities cf. Dr. Arthur de Greeff, as cited by Emmanuel Mounier, Traité du caractère (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1947), p. 640.

Already Isocrates knew very well that a monarch might be poorly equipped by nature in an intellectual way, but that such shortcomings would easily be compensated by experience of long duration. Cf. Isocrates, “Nicocles or the Cyprians,” in Isocrates, I, 86. Nor is the realization of the liberal essence of monarchy something new. We find it eloquently expressed in Seneca’s “De beneficiis”; see Seneca’s Moral Essays (London: Heinemann, 1935 [“Loeb Classical Library”]), III, Part 2, xx, 2.

The original mentality of Fascism can well be gleaned from Achille Pasini’s Impero unico (Milan: Berlutti, 1924). Pasini dedicated this book to Mussolini, and explained that Fascism had so far refrained from abolishing the three liberal institutions, the Crown, the Senate and the Chamber—but that these institutions “will have to go.” By 1944 this programme had been carried out to the letter.

A NOTE ON THE PROBLEM OF AUTHORITY

St. Thomas who is frequently cited as a defender of popular sovereignty has nevertheless insisted that political disorder “arises from the fact that somebody seizes power without the praeeminentia intellectus.” A leading Italian scholar has logically used this as an argument against a very prevalent thesis. Cf. A. Passerin d’Entrèves, Aquinas: Selected Political Writings, transl. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1948), pp. xvi–xvii.

This is roughly the situation characterized by Luigi Taparelli, S.J., as the fatti anteriorti, fatti non liberi. Cf. Opera del P. Luigi Taparelli. Saggio teoretico di dritto naturale appoggiato sul fatto (2a ediz. Livornese; Livorno: Vincenzo Mansi, 1851), Paragraph 551, Chapter 9, Part 2. If we understand Taparelli correctly—his style is not conducive to clarity—the essence of his theory of the origin of authority is not very far from ours. (Paragraphs 663–667, pp. 232–34.) His breach with Suarez is by no means complete (vide paragraphs 484–485) yet he certainly ranks among the most original Jesuitic political theorists of all ages.